Fabolous//You Be Killin' Em

I'm not sure how this one slipped through the OSS cracks, but this song was IT right around when I was leaving NYC. I first heard it while driving to a gig at Party Xpo in Bushwick with Karl and Patrice. Everyone knows that the only station to listen to when driving to shows is Hot 97. I suppose I'll have to find a West Coast replacement soon.

The second the song came on we were fucking entranced. Oh, that glorious synth line. Oh, that incredible flow. Oh, that hilarious line about shoe-i-cide. Oh, Fabolous, be still my heart. You truly are fabolous.

From that tender moment, this song became a staple at basement dance parties and divey bars with those shitty digital jukeboxes. People flocked to dance to it at the final 50/50 show. I also unabashedly still listen to it when I get homesick for NYC.

Let me note here that even a cursory read of the lyrics reveals a number of things I find generally deplorable ie. this is not a feminist-friendly anti-capitalist rhyme, if you know what I'm saying. Still, let's just try to let that be what it is and love it for how catchy and clever certain lines are. OK?

Fabolous aka John David Jackson was born in the late 70s in Brooklyn. In addition to being a rapper, he now also has his own clothing like called Rich Yung Society. In case you're wondering where you can score some Fabolous swag... I mean, hey, who wouldn't want that necklace?



You Be Killin' Em.mp3

Looking good has its sacrifices:
Chilly weather bring four figure jacket prices.
Her body nice, face dime.
Give me that iPhone 4, Face Time.

Kreayshawn//Gucci Gucci

OK, dudes--you have to forgive me. This is a TOTAL guilty pleasure situation, but I just can't get the sample from this song out of my head. One big room! Full of bad bitches!

I will freely admit that I am having some difficultly fully getting my head around Oakland rapper/phenomenon/thing Kreayshawn, although I do have plenty of speculative hypotheses. One thing I know for sure is that there's almost nothing I could say that this video couldn't. Thus:



Gucci Gucci.mp3

Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada:
Basic bitches wear that shit, so I don't even bother.

Micky Dolenz//Beverly Hills

I can't thank my good pal Tash enough for introducing me to this amazing set of comps, LA Burnout and LA Burnout 2. I've become completely addicted to these catchy, somewhat forgotten odes to the city of angels.

These jams are teaching me that I might have gotten it wrong. When I first got here, I was convinced that LA had no soul. Now I think that LA does in fact have a soul. It may be a sleazy, washed-out, drug-addled, sun-baked soul, but it's a soul, nonetheless. I also find it amusing that the songs on these comps fall into two major categories:

1. I love LA. It's so pretty and sunny. I left New York City, which is a mean town, and came here to live in a canyon. Ohhh, flowers.
2. I hate LA. It's a moral cesspit filled with fake people. And an earthquake is going to destroy us all any minute now.

There's also a little bit of overlap, if you can believe it. Of course, I tend to fall more into the second camp, although I tend to fall into the second camp in general. Maybe that's why I can't stop playing this particular song. Who ever thought I'd like a Monkey? Clearly, Dolenz was the coolest Monkey. He played Arrow in the stage production Harry Nilsson's The Point! in London. WHAT?! I didn't even know there WAS a stage production. I wish someone would bring that back.

ANYway, love it or hate it, LA has inspired some awesome jams. Coming back from a weekend trip to Mpls yesterday, I realized something had changed about how I viewed the city. As the plane touched down in LAX, I actually felt relieved. It might not ever be home, but it is where I live right now, sleazy soul and all.

Unrelated: The Slums of Beverly Hills is an awesome movie.



Beverly Hills.mp3

Plastic food and paper people,
Crooked doctors hawking pills,
Living in the slums of Beverly Hills,
Living in the slums of Beverly Hills.

The Beach Boys//Fun, Fun, Fun

A situation came up tonight that reminded me of this song. In fact, it's probably a bad sign that there are a few ongoing situations in the general vicinity of my life that correlate well to this song. Of course, it would be incriminating for me to tell you who "daddy" is (hint: not my dad) and what the "Thunderbird" is, but I will say that in at least one of the aforementioned scenarios, I may be referring to an actual car.

Is it just me or does, "Your dad took your car away? It's ok. I'll take care of you now..." feel closely related to the ownership/dependancy that transfers from father to son-in-law in traditional ideas about marriage? I'm not even going to touch the extreme patriarchal subcontext of this song with a ten foot pole of post-wave feminist criticism . It was a different time. But let's just say this: girl was not going to work and save her money so she could buy her own T-bird. Girl was just gonna let Boyfriend drive her around and take her out to burgers. Unrelated Sidenote: I imagine them to be In 'N' Out Burgers. Thoughts?

Apparently this song was based on a true story. From Wikipedia:

The song was written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love about Shirley England, the daughter of the owner of radio station KNAK in Salt Lake City, Utah (not to be confused with the call letters now assigned to a station in Delta, Utah) where she worked as a teenager. She borrowed her father's Ford Thunderbird to go study at the library. Instead of driving to the library, she ended up at a hamburger stand. When her father found out, he took the car away. The next day she was at the radio station complaining about it to the staff while The Beach Boys were visiting and they were inspired to write this song.

On a lighter note, I think this may actually be one of my favorite Beach Boys songs. That killer Chuck Berry homage riff at the beginning. Makes me want to surf on a golden wave of rock n roll.



Fun, Fun, Fun.mp3

Well, the girls can't stand her,
cause she walks and looks and drives like an ace, now.
She makes the Indy 500 look like a Roman chariot race, now.
A lot of guys try to catch her, but she leads them on a wild goose chase, now.
And she'll have fun, fun, fun til her daddy takes the T-bird away.

Joy Zipper//Check Out My New Jesus

OK, so I know I'm a few days late on this...ok...a week and a half. But I really wanted to post this song in honor of Easter. Because I think we all deserve a new Jesus at least once a year, regardless of our religious upbringings/beliefs.

As a person of Catholic and Jewish lineage, I have the maximum amount of guilt humanly possible encoded into my DNA. This is why one year I gave up guilt for lent. This year though, much like this Jesus post, I totally messed up my give-up-something-for-lent timing. Anika and I are currently not eating processed sugar, which is proving to be...let's just say...rough.

Seriously, did you know that there's sugar in EVERYTHING? I mean everything. Yogurt? Sugar. Tomato sauce? Sugar. All breakfast cereals besides Shredded Wheat? Sugar.

Back to Jesus, this song is about...well...it's about getting a new Jesus. Joy Zipper is a sweet little couple band from The Island. I guess someone compared their songs to a candy apple with a razor blade inside, which seems about right to me. Actually, most of my favorite music falls into this variety, or something like it. If it's not a candy apple/razor blade then it's a something else with a something else inside. Catch my drift?

Anyway, now I've waited so long to post this that another holiday has eclipsed the holiday about which I've been writing. Thanks, Cinco De Mayo. I hope you have fun drinking Coronas and eating Churros, two things I can't have due to obvious sugar content.



Check Out My New Jesus.mp3

Check out my new Jesus.
He talks and he walks if you want him to.
Nevermind the thorns.
They're only there to confuse you.

Eureka Birds//That Mountain is a Volcano

This is not a Monday, it's a volcano: Monday Mail
What is Monday Mail?

Yesterday's news provided one of those moments. You know, the kind where you used to call up your friends, but now you just watch your FB/Twitter feeds for clever things people are posting online? There were links to Al-Jazeera live feeds, NYT articles, Family Guy clips, Star Wars references, declarations of general anxiety about killing anyone for any reason, even an Obama macro that featured the kind of badassness that we haven't seen since the 2008 Election. I, myself, posted this:
"So this is like that part in Lost when the alternate reality rejoins the actual reality?"
Nobody liked it. Actually, one severely awesome Sarah G. liked it. But nobody else. Thanks, Sarah, for saving my FB pride.

I'm not going to go into the cliche that is, "let's think back to 10 years ago and reprocess," because the fact of the matter is, just cause we killed some guy doesn't mean we can close the Pandora's box that is terrorism. It also doesn't mean we can undue the mortgage crisis or the credit crisis or the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War or the Japanese nuclear disaster or Katrina or any of the other dozens of truly shitty things that have happened between 2001 and 2000now. There are still people signing up to be Scientologists and dedicating their lives to actualizing The Singularity. What's done is done and the world is weird. I still feel like we're in a particularly precarious place both culturally and environmentally.

A few months ago, Justin, a member of Eureka Birds, sent me a new EP along with a shoutout:

Even though we're from Baltimore, we recorded the whole thing with production help from Tyler of Margot and the Nuclear so and so's out in Indiana.

This particular song, which describes various ways the world might end (volcanoes, rogue waves, earthquakes, tornadoes, environmental disaster) reminds us that we probably won't know what's going on when the big one blows. So let's all celebrate that we managed to find and kill OBL before the 10 year anniversary of 9-11 (though we still haven't managed to rebuild WTC)...then, let's not forget that some guy hiding out in a million dollar house in the suburbs of Islamabad isn't our only problem.



That Mountain is a Volcano.mp3

Maybe we'll never see it coming.