50 Million Ways
A blast from my past, MG! the Visionary, apparently still makes music… and great music at that. The other day, I was online looking for new music, and I thought this incredible emcee (every now and then, I still pop in his late 90’s Uprok Records release, “Transparemcee” and his skills always astound and amaze me). It dawned on me that he probably still made music and that I should search for him. His website appearred to be down, so I was ready to give up, but then I had a sudden thought to check on Myspace because everyone and their dog is on Myspace nowadays… sure enough, MG! was there and so were 4 downloadable tracks that I had never heard.
So, the obvious next step was to download and listen, which I did. I found that MG! is still amazing and since his “Transparemcee” days, he has added more sounds and flavors to his repetoire. Of the four downloads I found that day, there was a great reggae tune, an R&B joint, and two hip-hop tracks reminiscent of the style that I fell in love with when I first heard him.
Today’s song of the day is “50 Mill”, a hip-hop song for fans of indy and underground rap. Since I rediscovered MG! he has put new songs up on Myspace and this one is gone, but I see it’s still available for download on his Purevolume page. MG! looks to be returning with a new full length soon, so go get a taste to see if you dig the sound and foresight of the Visionary. My guess is that you will.
Click here…
it’s really not necessary to say anything else….
Jewish reggae rocks the synagogue
Matisyahu most definitely deserves to score a “Song of the Day” with “King Without a Crown”, a solid reggae tune with spiritual themes much like the reggae greats, but from a much different and, perhaps, unlikely source.
If you aren’t already familiar with Matisyahu, he grew up a young Jewish boy named Matthew Miller in West Chester, PA and then Berkeley, CA. Like many young Jewish kids, he rejected his teachings at Hebrew school and went a different route. But something called him back to his faith late in high school. By this time, he was a hippie who was really into reggae music and playing bongos. With a few trips, including a specifically spiritual one to Israel, Matthew truly discovered his relationship with God and deepened his faith.
The story can then be summarized by saying, he went to college, studied music, wrote a play, and transformed from Matthew into Matisyahu. He became a Hasid and got very into the Hasidic practice of song worship. Along with his love for reggae music and Bob Marley, his Hasidic faith led to the music that now graces my XM radio dial.
With his own fresh sound, Matisyahu is spreading the word of God through music, much like other reggae greats before him… but this time it’s not black Rastas singing of Jah, it’s a Jewish white boy from the Philly suburbs singing to Yahweh.
Wesley Willis’s “Merry Christmas”
If you don’t know who Wesley Willis was, then you are missing out. Think of him as a bigger, fatter, crazier ODB, but in the punk rock scene. After firing his band, The Wesley Willis Fiasco, he went on to record songs on his Casio keyboard. Here is are the lyrics to his Christmas classic:
Christmas is a fun time
It is a fun time every December
It is also a joy month
I like this holiday a lotMerry Christmas
Christmas is a fun time to get gifts
People stay home for the holidays
They spend time with their children
That’s what it is all aboutMerry Christmas
Christmas makes people feel right at home
Christmas gives me harmonization
Christmas is Jesus Christ’s birthday
That’s what it is all about in the mixMerry Christmas
Allstate, you’re in good hands
Click here for a fun flash video of the song.
Ding! Fries are Done!
I am unsure how many of our readers live in the Philadelphia area, however, those who do undoubtedly know whom Preston and Steve are. Their radio show is rated #1 in Philadelphia among the young adult population. During the holiday season for the past two years, they have been playing a hilarious take on “Carol of the Bells” entitled “Ding! Fries are Done”. This year they introduced an extended remix to us, the listeners.
Like Preston, one of the two major personalities of the show, I can no longer hear the tune without singing these words along… “Would you like an apple pie with that?” continually runs through my head. After you download this song, and you MUST, go here and watch a flash video complete with lyrics to sing along. You will not be disappointed unless you have NO sense of humor.
Preston and Steve’s daily radio show is available via podcasting, as well as on WMMR.com via live internet streaming. If you do not live in the Philadelphia area, hop on that and see why they are the BEST show in Philly. If you do live in the area and don’t listen, just tune your dial to 93.3 between 6:00 am and 10:00 am and you won’t be sorry. Fuck Howard, Preston and Steve are the new kings of media in my book. Rage on!
‘Street Fighting Man’ by Rage Against the Machine
- Renegades
- Rage fails to be born in time for the revolution, and we get stuck with B-sides. This is the epitome of breakup collection. The Rolling Stones got Street Fighting Man right on the first try.
- Buy it at Amazon
There are few better ways to be gently guided back to the world of the waking than a song that starts off with guitars that sound like sirens. Well, maybe there are a few, especially when the source of the music is crappy little speakers in the next room, but that’s not really the point.
Street Fighting Man isn’t the best song off an album that’s certainly not Rage’s best or most cohesive work. It is, however another great experiment from a band whose sound is arguably just one grand experiment. “Renegades” is pretty much exactly that: the stuff that didn’t make it onto the albums. Live stuff, B-sides, experimental stuff, stuff that’s not very good — you get a little bit of each musical renegade on this CD.
The idea of politics is music goes back centuries, but Rage famously took it a step further — making most of their work overtly political and usually listenable. Rage’s cover of the Rolling Stones classic, however, probably sounded better on paper. Tom Morello’s guitar siren sounds more like a weird techno beat than anything that could actually get listeners rioting in the streets. It’s hardly background music to a revolution.
While their sound may always be distinctive, and Rage definitely makes the song their own, it just doesn’t come close to waking up the revolutionary in me, as evidenced by the fact that I fell back asleep while it was playing and had to go back and listen to it again. Look, I even got out of bed in time to catch the end of The Thanksgiving Song on Tuesday.
Mick Jagger knew there was no place for a revolution in the streets even in turbulent 1967, so since he couldn’t kill the king, he settled for singing in a rock ‘n’ roll band. To Zack de la Rocha, every song is a chance for a revolution. Street Fighting Man isn’t really a revolution as a song, and it was probably about three and a half decades too late to cause one among apathetic Gen-Xers. Maybe he’d have better luck today.
‘Wu-Gambinos’ by Raekwon
- Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
- Deceptively simple beats hold you down while members of the Wu-Tang give you a merciless lyrical beating.
- We're going to run out of stars, but this one gets the cinco.
- Get it cheap at Amazon
It takes talent to turn a simple beat into something. Long before he was scoring films for Quentin Tarantino, the RZA was turning simple beats into works of art. Speed it up, add a few more layers of production, and you’d have something that might be considered a good starting point for one of today’s rappers. The key, and ostensibly the entire point of a simple beat, is that it must complement the lyrics. It’s not what he puts in, but what he leaves out that make the beats right for this song and the whole album, “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.”
That’s what you get with “Wu-Gambinos.” The beat is an integral part of the song, separate of the vocals, but equal. Without the story to tell on top of it, RZA’s beat would seem empty. Without the beat, the track’s lyrics would tell a different story.
Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, RZA, all Master Killer each tell their own tales of what it takes to make it as kingpin. Every member of the clan on the track is impressive, but listen for RZA’s verse to make your head spin.
“Wu-Gambinos” is the kind of song that you can sit back and listen to while knocking back a few 40s, but you’ll probably find yourself trying to analyze the lyrics and take in the story. The rough beats say “sit back and relax,” but the raps say “you’re going to drive yourself nuts if you don’t Google the lyrics.”
Luckily there’s plenty of time for both.
Adam Sandler - ‘The Thanksgiving Song’
- They're All Gonna Laugh At You!
- Old school Sandler will take you back to the days of when you thought SNL was funny, even though it usually already wasn't.
- Listen on iTunes
- Buy it at Amazon
Yeah, I agree that it’s a little suspicious that a Thanksgiving song — the only Thanksgiving Song — comes up as the song of the day just two weeks before Thanksgiving, and on the second day I do this. But that’s the breaks. It’s random.
Everybody knows this one, and even if it barely qualifies as a song, you know you knew every word the Monday after you first saw Adam Sandler sing it on Saturday Night Live. Sandler first performed the song on Nov. 20, 1992, and the album came out in time for Thanksgiving 1993, when he reprised it as Bruce Springsteen.
The Thanksgiving Song certainly isn’t the best Sandler bit, but it’s certainly not the most annoying either. If you used to watch SNL as much as I did in junior high and high school, or if you used to listen to this album as much as my friends and I did around the same time, it’s hard not to get a little smile out of this tune.
Les Savy Fav - ‘No Sleeves’
- Inches
- Tightly knit collection of new school punk by Les Savy Fav with absolutely bizarre interludes and a surprising degree of polish.
- Buy it at insound!
This is a little bit of an experiment.
For months, I’ve had iTunes set to wake me up to a completely random song. I’ve got about 18,000 songs to choose from, and there’s certainly a lot of crap mixed in with all of the decent stuff. More often than not, however, I’ll find that iTunes is better at picking songs to wake to completely at random than I am when I’m trying to find something good.
I was already up at 5:50 today when iTunes kicked into gear, but I wasn’t let down today. “Inches” is a bit of fun new-punk from an album that’s more of the same. The song leads in with a heavy yet simple bass line that flows through the track. The soaring guitars give it almost a U2-like quality, without ever running the risk of being mistaken for U2.
The New York band’s sound is overwhelmingly punk without ever sounding sloppy. Sure, Sid Vicious would probably be spinning in his grave if he could hear this, but in today’s world of tight production, even indy labels can’t seem to let an album slip out the door without a certain degree of polish. Not that this is a bad thing; in fact it’s great. That extra bit of shine is what makes this such a listenable album. It’s light, yet punk — the kind of music that radio executives should be drooling over, but thankfully, for the sake of music fans, aren’t.
