The Books

Eddie Floyd, “Don’t Tell Your Mama (Where You’ve Been)”

We Love Song Titles (With Parentheticals)!

The Books, “Smells Like Content”

Can I engage in some old-fart bloviating? Of course I can, nobody else has the password to this site so nobody can stop me! The labeling of all videos as just “content” is really unfortunate. It signals a commodification of creative work that only serves the massive aggregators that control what we see, and yet people have willingly adopted the nomenclature. And lumping together criticism, reviews, buying guides, how-tos, and everything else together as just a homogonized slurry doesn’t even help viewers find what they want. I hate it!

The Beatles, “Birthday”

Stupid Beatles! It’s not my birthday! Or this blog’s birthday, which is a day off of mine! I can’t put them in charge of anything.

christian fitness, “all ghosts to medicine counter four”

When you make really elaborate song or album names, it can easily tip over into pretension or tweeness. Andrew Falkous does a really good job with it, though. I mean, this album is called Love Letters In The Age of Steam. That’s really good!

They Might Be Giants, “Let Me Tell You About My Operation”

I always enjoy the manic stuff when they really roll it out. A nice performance from Marty Beller on the drums here.

DJ Muggs & Roc Marciano, “White Dirt”

DJ Muggs was always the best part of Cypress Hill, and it’s nice to hear him working with Roc Marciano on Kaos, which is a solid pairing. Marciano does good work, and Muggs rolls out a bunch of his signature claustrophobic sounds on the album.

Songs!

Scarface, “In Between Us”

Scarface is one of the elder statesmen of rap, having gotten his start with the Geto Boys, who terrified the hell out of mainstream white America back in the day. After leaving them and going solo, he’s had a long string of solid records, sometimes rising above that level and making something great. He’s also someone who has had the respect of everybody in hip-hop, bridging even the east coast/west coast beef when that was going on. This song comes from The Fix, one of my favorites of his.

Six songs today!

Xzibit, “Carry The Weight”

Before he was on MTV, before he became a meme, Xzibit was a hardcore rapper, which sometimes kind of seems like it’s forgotten. His debut album, featuring production by E-Swift and Muggs among others, is a strong piece of work. Xzibit is a solid rapper, and his storytelling is very good here. It’s not essential, but it’s a good album that seems mostly forgotten at this point.

It’s D-Day! Let’s listen to music!

Samiam, “You Looking At Me”

Bay Area pop-punk that was part of that lively scene, best known for producing Green Day. At their best, during the Billy/Clumsy/You Are Freaking Me Out peak, they wrote great anthem-like songs that were just flat out fun to listen to. This is a song from their first album, before they were really fully polished, but you can hear their later potential.