Plenty of times I try to quit, but I keep coming back to it
When I am down, I am turning back to it
Life’s still a bitch, and I still have to deal with it
A fine romance with no kisses, well, just accept it
You can do anything when you put your mind to it
A job is a job, don’t put your whole life into it.
Young Buck responds to “The Taped Conversation.” The heat is on.
Lil Wayne drops “A Millie” remix to celebrate his album went platinum. Oh shit, did he said “homo Jay?”
NPR profiles John Coltrane:
Toward the end of the 1950s, Coltrane again teamed with Davis, contributing to classic albums like Milestones and Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album in history. Davis was investigating modal jazz when Coltrane rejoined the group. While the trumpeter was exploring a more minimalist approach to music, Coltrane seemed locked into playing as many notes as possible. Coltrane’s long, feverish solos became the pillars of his legacy; jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the phrase “sheets of sound” to describe Coltrane’s playing during this period.
Check out the program here.
Young Buck gets sentimental on “My Whole Life” while the Clipse is still hustling on “Fast Life.”
A worth-visiting collection of sites with great use of typography.
The Undergraduate site for GWSB has been revived with fresh, young and vibrant colors.
Is there a particular moment in the past that could never escape your mind? Hopefully when I write it down I could move on. I am not sure how long ago it was, but I could remember it like yesterday.
Samantha was about three or four. I took her to a mall and she walked right into the arcade. She pointed to a motorcycle racing game that actually had an emulated motorcycle. I picked her up and put her on the bike. In a split second, the bike moved to a side caused her to fell off. It wasn’t that high, but she might have hit her head or something.
I was terrified. She got up, ran out the arcade and cried with anger. I went after her, but she pointed at me and screamed, “Go away!” I was speechless, hurt and at the same time wanted to break that fucking game up. How could I explain to a little girl what just happen? I completely lost her trust.
She continued to walk upstairs and ordered me to stay behind. Of course, I couldn’t let her go by herself. I followed her and tried to calm her down. I couldn’t remember what I said or what I did, but she suddenly ran toward me and hugged me. I picked her up, held her in my arms and said sorry. Somehow she understood, nodded her head, and stopped crying. I was almost in tears. She still trusted her careless uncle.
I don’t think she still remembers that moment, but it has stuck in my head forever. Although she is growing up mighty fast, she still is, and will always be, a sweet little angel inside my heart.
Cecil Taylor’s Silent Tongues is a mind-boggling masterpiece. His piano solos are delirious yet delicious, chaotic yet hypnotic. He has an amazing sense of rhythmic structure and his percussive attacks are simply crazy. (Imagine playing the drums on a piano.) His angularity and virtuosity are unexplainable. You just have to experience the album yourself. I am on my third spin and still getting high off his frenzied sounds.
If Lil Wayne is not the best rapper alive like he claims himself to be, he is definitely the most eccentric one. On his new album, Tha Cater III, Weezy (his nickname) doesn’t flow the same way twice. Sometimes he lands ahead of the beat and other times he rides behind. His raspy voice falls, rises and distorts (courtesy of Auto-Tune) as he spits in streams of conscious, in which he invites listeners to swallow his words and taste his thoughts, but if they are too nasty, spit them back at him.
Most of the time, he lets his drugs do the talking. On the bizarre opener, “3 Peat,” he raps all over the place from shooting grandmother to kidnapping the baby to Viagra to Adam Sandler to ESPN to sex. Sometimes his intoxicating, surrealistic style comes off brilliant. On “Dr. Carter,” for example, Weezy rhymed over a groovy jazz-inflected beat describing his cure for hip-hop: “As I put the light down his throat / I can only see flow / His blood’s starting to flow / His lungs starting to grow.”
Among a handful of guest appearances, Jay-Z is a perfect match even though their styles are completely opposite. On “Mr. Carter,” one can hear that both are virtuoso of flow. The different is that while Weezy is letting loose, Jiggaman is in total control. It’s quite rare to see Jay-Z shares his heir with another: “Young Carter go farther, go further, go harder. Is that not why we came? And if not, then why bother?”
Even with a bunch of radio-friendly misses like “Got Money,” “Comfortable” and “Lollipop,” Tha Cater III is a strong work. “Tie My Hands” is a chilling track about Hurricane Katrina, and the album-closer “Don’tGetIt” is a fantastic sample off Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” in which he rambling about jail and Al Sharpton.