ugh…i hate stumbling across news late. and it took comments on a youtube track to even discover that nujabes, aka jun seba, was killed in a car accident at the end of february. sad face. nujabes was a japanese hip hop producer…probably best known in the west for his soundtrack for samurai champloo. i really dug his super-chill jazz-infused hip hop tracks. here’s to you, nujabes.
i’m including his most excellent nujabes remix of the clammbon track “folklore“…
super fascinating look into the origins of one of the most sampled drum loops ever. this is all news to me…had no idea whatsoever they’re pretty much all sampled from one b-side from 1969. yay for new trivia!
originally from the cracked article “6 inventors who got jack shit for changing the modern world“
in this day and age, theres no such thing as a secret, especially if theyre free concerts. with u2.
there was (supposedly) a secret u2 concert to be held in the fulton ferry park yesterday, to promote their new record and for some mtv special. for those of us that happened to work just down the street from the concert, we were like “score!” so come monday afternoon, i met up with janelle and her crew to head to what i had then just noticed to be a line that wrapped from the park down plymouth, over to washington, and right up to the front of my building. thats like, awesome. janelle mentioned that she had seen the line start forming as early as 1ish. those bastards. we felt particularly special however because we had (free) super-duper-special advance e-tickets…but apparently so did a couple hundred people in front of us. well whatev, im patient. i can wait. i even had the blessing of my art director to check out u2, so long as i finished the work that had to be done (i ran back to the office once to finish something). so we’re waiting for a while…noticing how disorganized the line was, and how hundreds of people were probably cutting the line. by 3:30ish the line was still at a crawl, and a last-minute work-related task came up…so i bailed. janelle and her crew stayed in line, and i trotted back to my office. bollocks to the concert…*shrug*
EPILOGUE
u2 did show up eventually, and whilst playing on the back of a flatbed (for a new video apparently). their set was supposedly coo. 45 minutes or so of old and new material…argh. as i was leaving work, i ran into the tail-end of the masses of people coming out of the concert and heading towards the subway. ball-lickers, all of you.
ADDENDUM
news articles from people that were at the concert. the ny times has a particularly rockin’ pic of the crowd with the brooklyn bridge as a backdrop.
> u2 rocks nyc (via cnn)
> word of a free concert (via ny times)
heres a nice example of how NOT to use the rockin’ transformers in a commercial. via #!/usr/bin/girl, this half-coo commercial featuring a transforming citroen…that dances. while this can indeed be a rockin’ thing (b-boy soundwave for example), having the transformer prance around like a fruity hybrid of disco-jiving saturday night fever john travolta and moonwalker-era michael jackson looks all kinds of wrong. like really wrong. still worth a look tho, if only to see what the upcoming transformers movie could potentially look like…sans disco-jive.
ADDENDUM
well this explains alot. thanks to fonz for pointing out that it was justin timberlakes choreographer marty kudelka who was mo-cap’d for the dancing. hello fruitiness.
> transforming…and dancing citroen (via #!/usr/bin/girl)
> hello, my dancing sucks (via fonz)
gorgeous and yet oddly quirky and weird flash video for radioheads classic creep…in acoustics. from monkeehub and low morale. its all about the pablo honey yo…
> monkeehub presents creep (via solarch)
word yo, soundwave b-boy stance. technically this videos been out for a while, but i just got it the other day from flatgreg. and technically i was going to post it yesterday. but i fig that its already a bit late as it is, so whats one more day? soundwave was the original resident dj of the decepticons. check him and his little bitch rumble breakdance yo. they should crank out another one with soundwave in a b-boy battle with the autobot blaster.
> soundwave b-boy sound system (via flatgreg)
new fucked up shit yo…the tokyo plastic music box.
> tokyo plastic music box (via dik)
> tokyo plastic drum machine
for blenders may issue, they teamed up with vh1 and composed a list of the 50 worst songs ever…and i think its a load of cock and balls. they cite the 1985 song “we built this city (on rock and roll)” by starship as the worst song ever. while its not something id necessarily rock to, i wouldnt really call it the worst song ever. and its catchy too. while maybe one odd song on their list could be forgiven for subjectivity, the list goes on to list wang chungs “everybody have fun tonight” (!?!), bobby mcferrins “dont worry be happy” (asstards!), billy joels “we didnt start the fire“, simon & garfunkel’s “the sounds of silence“, and the beatles’ “ob-la-di, ob-la-da“. wtf.
the songs on the list were purportedly “selected for their melodies, others “are wretchedly performed” and “quite a few don’t make sense whatsoever…” youre kidding…so wheres britney spears? color me bad? any hair band from the 80s and 90s? limp bizkits entire body of work (tho they did cite “rollin’“). theres a signficant number of songs much worse than the likes of starship and simon & garfunkel. so while everybodys entitled to their personal musical opinions, i think theyre still a bunch of wanks. wang chung rocks yo.
> 50 worst songs ever (via cnn)
some freaky shit for ya…the tokyo plastic drum machine via bo-ra. its fascinating, disturbing, and grotesque all at the same time! be sure to go thru the whole thing…not just the walking monster box. i just wrote “walking monster box”…awesome.
hmm…ok, i need a bit of a m3ntal break. ive been running thru our website redesign this entire week, and im fairly certain now that staring at code/flash all day slowly catalyzes your brain into a squishy paste chemically not unlike chocolate pudding. ive also been bored with my playlist, so…lifting an idea from actually crazy, i opened up all my mp3’s, randomized the playlist, and im listing the first ten songs that come up, no matter how embarassing they are….
01. squeeze – tempted
02. daft punk – electronic funk
03. cowboy bebop – space lion
04. si*se – cuando (king britt dub mix)
05. up, bustle, and out – emerald alley
06. utada hikaru – fly me to the moon
07. danger mouse – justify my thug (the grey album)
08. ltj bukem – atlantis
09. l’arc~en~ciel – drivers high
10. splashdown – lost frontier