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1995 Flashback: Every One Of Your Favorite MC's Drops By For The Final Episode of Yo! MTV Raps

Today's post was inspired by my friend Paul Walker, who yelled at me to write more about hip-hop. To all of you, I present this, what I believe holds up as easily the greatest musical moment on MTV (and I will argue this to the death). A wonderful send-off for the beloved Yo! MTV Raps, this huge cypher session represents a bygone era of hip-hop, which during 1995 was still hitting numerous artistic peaks, a couple years before the infamous "shiny-suit" era would predict a rather dire downturn in the genre's creative fortunes. One need look no further than the lineup in these videos as evidence that hip-hop was rather unbreakable. A special nod goes to the choice of the Pete Rock remix to Das EFX's "Real Hip-Hop" to serve as the backdrop to the majority of the session, surely one of PR's very best productions; the swirling beat is such a perfect fit for the rappers that it's no wonder they keep it going and going and going.

I was still an awkward, sullen adolescent in 1995, but it's stuff like this that makes me miss those days pretty heavily sometimes:

Taking Over Your TV, Pt 1: The Seeds, Rip Rig & Panic, Wolf Eyes, and Christian Marclay

The late Sky Saxon and The Seeds stop by this now-forgotten sitcom entitled The Mothers-In-Law to deliver a particularly...errrmmm...."gassy" performance. Tolerate the awful jokes, come for the enthusiastic miming of one of the best garage jams of the era, and stay for Saxon's brilliantly eccentric presence.

The Young Ones' anarchic, hypnagogic alternate-reality probably makes the most sense as a televised platform for an obscure post-Pop Group project, but it's still pretty wild to see the lost dance classic "You're My Kind Of Climate" performed live (for real) on the tele. Neneh Cherry, who sang on the studio version, is absent, but Andrea Oliver does just fine. Also, this band needs a reissue campaign, stat.

A wonderfully deviant studio-performance on local San Diego music show Fox Rox from Wolf Eyes, subverting the expectation of doing one of their "hits" (e.g. "Stabbed In The Face") by executing a dynamic, sprawling version of one of their more abstract soundscapes (the first "Dead Hills" piece from their EP of the same name, in this case). Considering a lot of the M.O.R. indie acts that appear to have made up the brunt of the performances during its run, this Wolf Eyes excursion, as evidenced by the mind-numbingly moronic YouTube comments that accompany this video, must have caused a channeling of the Stravinsky riots in a few suburban homes.

With smooth-jazz snore David Sanborn as host and piss-lager stalwart Michelob as sponsor, Night Music sounds less than promising, but the show managed to accumulate a solid slab of visionary performances from the likes of Sun Ra, The Residents, Diamanda Galas, John Zorn, Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Ambitious Lovers, and others. Here's one of my favorites from the show, certainly one of the more challenging for its network TV audience: Christian Marclay abusing vinyl as only he can.

A Detour Into A Peculiar Head-Space With The Muppets

I'm going to detour today into some eccentric territory with the Muppets during their early gestation, beginning with this pleasingly outre clip of Kermit and Harry The Hipster (when the term meant something; Harry without debate puts these Brooklyn kids to shame) pontificating on the practice of allowing one's inner dialog to transpire visually. Harry really takes the concept to its furthest and most extravagant end here as he crafts a rather bugged-out slice of improvizational jazz scatting that eventually snowballs so intensely that his visualized music takes total control of all negative space. Remember, be careful when you improvise, kids:

Going out into an even more penetrating head space is this Tonight Show clip circa 1974 where Jim Henson and Frank Oz abandon the cuddly aspects of their craft so that they can give themselves over to this distinctly dark psychedelic piece regarding one abstraction's cluttered tour through his mind. This clever and omonious interpretation of one's mental process gets into fantastically vanguard territory with an almost proto-Altered States furbish. At least Kermit is there after the commercial break to play clean-up, placating any unsettle viewers with "It's Not Easy Bein' Green" lest the audience be left to ponder the much-too-agitating inquiry they had just witnessed:

Chasing this more philosophical venture, I leave you with Kermit on Sam & Friends (the source of the first video as well) jauntily miming this absurdist little folk number, a performance followed by more headway into slick jazz as he and Harry make best of their need to gratify the show's sponsor by delivering a inanely hep little number about bacon and sausage, which may actually ring as a little discomforting given the frog's relationship with a certain sow:

A brief look at Current 93 live in the 1980's

David Tibet's Current 93 project carries forth one of those dauntingly prolific and richly dense discographies that took me until recently to start to crack, and although he has probably become most synonymous with helping pioneer the pastoral groundings of the neo-folk movement, Tibet began his project immersed in an aura of abrasion and cacophony. Dogs Blood Rising from 1984 was one of the first records of his that I latched onto, with the cold-sweat nightmare it evokes hinting at a sort-of cross between a humorless Nurse With Wound fed through the trajectory of early SPK at its most dirge-y. The NWW comparison makes obvious sense given Tibet's close musical partnership with Steven Stapleton, and one can perhaps deduce that the divergent paths Stapleton and Tibet would take their respective projects in were birthed from a similar starting point. Current 93 during their "noise" period seems still oft-underrated, and if one needs reminder of Tibet's power as a performer right out of the gate, this extremely intense live performance from 1984 should provide more than enough evidence:

On the other ends of Tibet's spectrum lays this late period video of the song "Happy Birthday" from the Looney Runes LP, with this performance melding a more accessibly melodic undercurrent of folky post-punk into something nevertheless confrontational and unsettling thanks to Tibet's impassioned performance. Although superficially miles away from Tibet's initial works, one can perhaps more easily draw a distinct line between the two periods with careful attention:

Heathen Earth in gestation

My personal favorite Throbbing Gristle LP has always been Heathen Earth. To me, it's perhaps the most robust documentation of the band in their prime, the album working on the novel concept of a live-to-tape in-studio performance attended by a small group of spectators. So in a sense, this album blurs the often all-too-distinct barrier separating a band as a studio entity and as live performers. Being that the uncertainty and fluctuation of live improvisation was an absolute necessity in TG's aesthetic, this concept of live performance-via-studio setting suited the quartet splendidly, with the band turning in a immensely vigorous performance with the pristine fidelity that such an environment naturally warranted.  Some variations on prior studio material appear (the second track borrowed the instrumental motif from 20 Jazz Funk Great's "Six Six Sixties" while the fifth track does the same with the single b-side "Something Came Over Me"; according to P-Orridge, the sixth piece was "Still Walking," but in a completely alien form from what appeared on Jazz Funk), but overall the album has its own distinct development and aura, beautifully moving between the mechanized dirges and modulated electronic soundscapes that the foursome excelled at. The performance was filmed and released on VHS many eons ago, and thankfully, it's been preserved by some kind soul on YouTube. A must-see for any fan of the group, and also of definite interest to casual spectators. Some imagery in these vids may be NSFW:

 

Early Kraftwerk Live

During Kraftwerk's initial inception, the group in hindsight operated in a more, for lack of a better word, "traditional" school of Krautrock exploration, one that due to it's often under-referenced influence (at least in comparison to the more universally celebrated strides they made with 1974's Autobahn and onward) makes for what I'm sure is a point of intense fascination for many fans of the group. Frustratingly, the band themselves have very sporadically acknowledged the merits of the first three records that Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider released under the Kraftwerk name. These early video clips, as one should expect, exhibit a wonderfully bold collective that had a distinctly malleable identity, weaving a sound that functions with audible strength between the distinctive traits that would form the basis of their many contemporaries and descendants, from Kluster's ominous and atonal improvisations, to the more traditional psych-rock elements that cropped up in some of Faust's early output, to Neu!'s more serene divergences into proto-ambiance, to Agitation Free's use of international and fusion influences to inform a consistently transfixing groove. I've heard that Kraftwerk have hinted that a box of their first three LP's (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, and Ralf und Florian) may at some point see the light of day, and I'm sure I'm only one of many who hopes such a vague promise might come to pass. Below, some excellent footage of Kraftwerk's early years:

Polish Garage Nuggets Via Breakout

Forgive my ignorance connoisseurs of international psych-rock and historians of Polish music if I come across as ill-informed in this post about the band Breakout. I came across these folks, here led by the vocals of oft-member Mira Kubasinska, a little while back while searching for videos of the strangely-alluring-and-near-cornball-but-somehow-not lounge-jazz/doo-wop foursome from Poland, the Novi Singers. To make a short post shorter, I was instantly enamored with Breakout's "Poszlabym Za Toba," and true to its vivid constitution of everything great about late 60's heavy-psych/garage, I've gotten a good share of ecstatic feedback whenever I've decided to DJ this one out. The bass-drum groove has just the proper amount of funky sophistication tempered with a perfectly subtle smattering of raunch and clamor that really gets boiling once the guitar riff comes in. The flute interlude is the frosting on the cake, seeming initially like it may kill the momentum, but proving instead to be an effortlessly effective detour that really heightens the tension created as the refrain comes back in. "Gdybyś Kochał Hej" rides a similar groove, with this thick, fuzzy garage-pop masterpiece perhaps being a little more ebulant, while the sax-driven hints of Stax soul that pepper "Na Drugim Brzegu Tęcz?" suggest my favorite paradox of simultaneously "loose" and "tight" musicianship.

Sadly, I can only find scant information on the band in English, though their Wikipedia page suggests that "they were arguably the first group to play blues rock in Poland" and thus eventually ran afoul of social conservatives in the country who felt threatened by the band's embracing of Western ideology (however vague all of that might come across in their music). Their Discogs page similarly offers scant detail, but at least offers what seems to be a rather comprehensive run-down of their proper releases. Some of the later material I was able to find from Breakout traverses into more pedestrian or overly slick territory, but these early nuggets below stand unshakable in their steadfast ferocity. Anyone who can offer additional insight in this band, please feel free to offer up whatever information you've got. Enjoy:

Seeking out Peach Of Immortality

Having a few months back procured an elusive copy of Peach Of Immortality sole "proper" album as it were, the sardonically titled Talking Heads '77, I have been fascinated and transfixed by the motivations of Tom Smith (instigator and mastermind of the ingenious To Live And Shave In L.A.) regarding his second band (following the similarly elusive Boat Of), particularly how distinct an entity POI appear to be from Smith's idiosyncratic and singular work in TLASILA. Myself having been converted years back to TLASILA by their opus The Wigmaker In Eighteenth Century Williamsburg, as demented and ecstatic a listening experience as one is privy to come by (seriously, there's no turning back after experiencing this behemoth), I've always been intrigued when coming by mention of POI's under-documented existence.

While having operated in various forms of membership throughout the bulk of the 80's, the POI on the aforementioned TH77 LP from 1985 is at first notice much more restrained and studied that one might be used to from Smith, this prospect being especially arresting when one takes into account the splatter-punk-noise collages of TLASILA's 90's output (i.e. Vedder Vedder Bedwetter and "Helen Butte" Vs. Masonna Pussy Badsmell). On this particular recording, Smith and his collaborators (guitarist Jared Hendrickson and cellist Rogelio Maxwell) weave in and out of each other's aural space with distinct patience but concurrently with enough spontaneous unrest as to make for sessions that stand as anything but passive. A couple years ago, the Dead C joked that they were "The AMM Of Punk Rock" on their Future Artists LP, and I almost feel that moniker would make logical sense with POI, especially relating Smith's spasmodic tape abuse in this project which compares distinctly with the radio manipulation on AMMMusic.

As befitting the elusive nature of the 80's avant underground, POI recorded a plethora of material intended for releases that dishearteningly never saw the light of day. Here's hoping Smith or another passionate soul revisits these down the line. In the meantime, the glory of YouTube has some vintage footage of the crew in action:

The TH77-era configuration live on Arlington, VA public access, 1985:

A more "aggro" configuration performing at the D.C. institution 9:30 Club in 1987:

Just To Get A Rep? The Growing Pains of 6 Future Hip-Hop Stars (Pt. 1)

The late 80's and early 90's represented a period of both relentless creativity and intense change in the world of hip-hop. The genre was hitting what many fans see as its peak, a declaration that can be backed up by that era's advances in both production, namely a greater sophistication in terms of sampling, and MC'ing, with Rakim in particular ushering in a game-changing complexity and dexterity sadly missing from much of today's landscape. Alongside such rapid transformation and innovation, there of course appeared a good share of trends, some good, some over-hyped, some completely misguided. A lot of rappers struggled to find footing in some of these new fads, often clumsily taking blunt stabs in desperate attempts to either prolong their cache or for new artists, orchestrate their big break. And yes, respected crews weren't immune to these growing pains or blind chases for relevance; as you'll see here, lots of personal favorites of hip-hop geeks like myself had their share of shaky false-starts and confusing identity crises. So here is the first in what may be a small series: classic rap acts who first came out of the gate riding on images that fall on the complete opposite spectrum of what they would eventually become celebrated for.

 

Onyx - Ah, And We Do It Like This (1990)

Hearing the boys in Onyx, who's hyper-aggressive, speed-freaking, throat-lacerating nihilism in the early 90's proved equal parts harrowing and cartoonish, attempt what comes across as a sort-of half-hearted Leaders Of The New School impersonation on their debut single is quite unexpected, if not downright confusing. Sure, Sticky Fingaz had yet to enter the picture for this 12", with his darkly humorous, gonzo-grit providing the crew with their memorably rugged shtick, and maybe he slipped some weird shit in the rest of the boys' blunts when he joined up with them, maybe accounting for the complete change of face when Bacdafucup dropped (I remember hearing the guys were all psychedelics when that LP was recorded, though as tracks like "Throw Ya Gunz" can attest, "Incense And Peppermints" this was not). Regardless, "Do It Like This" just feels awkward for a crew that hadn't even hinted at the fury to come. It's probably best this one was left off the resume.

 

 

 

DMX - Born Loser (1993)

Before DMX became the late-period-Phil Spector of the rap world (an unstable recluse given to increasingly frequent bouts of bizarre behavior including animal abuse and federal-agent-impersonation) he attempted this forgotten single for Ruffhouse/Columbia in which he sounds startlingly reserved. "Loser" essentially offers nothing much more than a rather self-pitying dissection of everything going wrong in his karmic space or in essence, all the turmoil that causes him to exist as a self-proclaimed "born loser." At least there's a happy ending by the coda, although his whole "hey, now I have a record contract!" celebration that accounts for this change of heart would in hindsight ring as somewhat premature since this cut ended up collecting more dust than it did dough. Those trademark rabid-barks were still waaaay down the line.

 

Prince Rakeem (RZA) - "Deadly Venoms" (1991) 

The Genius (GZA) - "Words From The Genius (Remix)" (1991)

While the RZA and GZA's pre-Wu endeavors are at this point familiar to even the Clan's most casual of followers, most of the lore surrounding this period seems to focus solely on the two falling victim to various record industry trappings in the form of the sort-of embarrassing cross-over pandering (most notoriously the GZA's "Come Do Me," an attempt at New Jack Swing loverman swagger best left erased from everyone's memory) that was ubiquitous at the dawn of the 90's. What most people don't speak of is how there were some definite gems in this brief period of noticeable growing pains. Sure, "Deadly Venoms," a b-side to RZA's maligned "Ooh, We Love You Rakeem" 12", is a little too smooth coming from the man who would soon become synonymous with a certain uber-gritty, no-fidelity production charm, but it's a rare little keeper, while his remix for the GZA's title track for his early 90's Cold Chillin' LP has the charm of early Large Professor with hints of his own emerging production prowess, not to mention a certain "watch your step kid" hook we'd all know by heart soon enough.

3 more MCs below the fold...

In Praise of Sissy Spacek

I've been pretty oblivious this year as to which albums I've acquired were actually released since January. And although I'll probably have massive brain shutdowns if I dare try to piece together a best of list by years' end, I am relieved to say that I have found what is thus far my personal favorite record of '11 thus far,  that being the Dash LP by John Wiese's enigmatic and inscrutable Sissy Spacek project.

I'm pretty sure this one came out on a tape last year on Wiese's own vanity label, but fuck it, this one excels in its freshly-cut vinyl edition, in all its ridiculously-short-grooved, spasms-at-45-RPM glory. This here album is a wondrous aural beating to behold, just 9 minutes of traumatizing noise-punk-mindfuck desolation. This one will break your brain, hurt your insides, and shatter all the tiny little pieces of bone and cartilage in your ear canals. No lie! Possibly the most invigorating statement under the Spacek banner since the self-titled CD from 2001 or the early electro-grindcore wretches.

 

Featuring input from righthand Spacek man Corydon Ronnau, Jazkamer's bald super-genius Lasse Marhaug and Will Stangeland from Silver Daggers. Listen to the whole damn thing here:

 

 

And because discussing Spacek warrants even more celebration of this collective's gifted diversity, here's a much appreciated and incredibly apt tribute to the inestimably influential GX Jupitter-Larsen from their fantastic 2008 release The French Record called "Really Into The Haters." This is the pure sound of a deliriously slow crackle of debris and refuse churning into the ether, building admirably on Jupitter-Larsen's innovations:

 

 

And finally, 30 seconds of wanton guitar obliteration during their 2007 No Fun Fest appearance. I had the pleasure of sitting on the side of the stage for this one; almost kept what was left of the guitar as a perverse souvenir: