"This man, who invented a musical genre and grooved so hard and for so long, is not yet in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. The Dave Clark Five, however, are comfortably settled in the shrine. Argument enough to burn that motherfucker down to the Lake Erie waterline." —David Simon reacts strongly to the death of Chuck Brown, the "Godfather of Go-Go," who died of pneumonia yesterday at the age of 75. An institution in Washington D.C., known best known for live performances that treated funk and partying like spiritual ritual, Brown had his biggest national hit with 1976's "Bustin' Loose"—the beat from which would [...]
I eat a lot of Questionable Things, with gravy on ’em and stuff, so I thought I maybe should find some ways to improve my diet, and to that end, I have been eating a lot of those “Energy Bar” CLIF® bar things lately, in order to be Healthy, you know? I mean, it’s like this, I thought instead of a greasy baconeggandcheese every morning from the place on the corner, I would instead enjoy CLIF® bar at my desk (along with two giant glasses of water, which is also Healthy, but mostly because otherwise a goddamn CLIF® bar will choke you out because they are so compacted with [...]
For real, keeping up with Big Boi has been a challenge of late. When he's not giving us previews from his new, official product coming out next month, he's going straight samizdat with the Andre 3000 collabos that Jive records won't allow anyone to pay actual money for. Lost in the general haze of sturm und purp, though, was this weird little question that got my music-geek dander up. When "General Patton" hit, 72 internet news cycles ago, initial writeups gave credit for that fat chorus-and-orchestra sample to… an opera "by Georg Solti"? The conductor? Who never actually wrote any music? No. That didn't [...]
New York singer, saxophonist and band leader Jimmy Castor died yesterday of as-yet-unknown causes. The very funky Castor took Frankie Lymon's place in the doo-wop group The Teenagers in 1957 (when he was not yet a teenager). And he went on to solo success with "Hey, Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You," which has been sampled a lot, notably on the Beastie Boys' "Hold It Now, Hit It," and which also seems, pretty clearly, to have been source material for Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard." Castor had his biggest success in the early '70s, with his group The Jimmy Castor Bunch. Samples [...]
Oh, excellent! The beloved golden-era rap duo Nice & Smooth have filmed a video for their 1989 classic, "No Delayin'," which samples Prince's "Starfish and Coffee," and Big Daddy Kane's "Ain't No Half Steppin'." Big Daddy shows up in the new clip. Prince, surprisingly, does not. No matter, though, this song is so great, there's no way it could ever be anything but right on time.
"The word 'nautilus' comes from the Greek for boat. When the first shells arrived in Renaissance Europe, collectors were stunned: They saw the perfect spirals as reflecting the larger order of the universe. Later on, Victorian homes displayed them as curios. In his famous 1858 poem 'The Chambered Nautilus,' Oliver Wendell Holmes admired 'the silent toil' that produced the 'lustrous coil.' And in 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,' Jules Verne created a watertight submarine of many compartments and christened it the Nautilus." —While we marvel today at how stupid we are for ridding the world of its most amazing species because we like to wear their bodies [...]
As much as I love LCD Soundsystem, as sure I am that their final live performance, just announced to take place on April 2nd, will be totally awesome, I'm not sure I can get myself to attend a concert with a dress code. (I know I'm being curmudgeonly here—and a Madison Garden full of everyone wearing only black and white will make for great video and photographs. But still. I'm old!) Nevertheless, the event is even more exciting in that the recently reformed art-disco-rock band Liquid Liquid will be opening the show. It's perfect.
