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Stretch & Bobbito on MF Doom

Stretch & Bobbito's tribute to MF DOOM is well worth a listen. Many of Doom's collaborators—famous, infamous and unfamous—call in and tell stories about his incredible career.

Doom's first freestyle from Stretch & Bobbito's legendary KCR show is included, about an hour and three minutes in. (But please listen to the whole thing!)

There's some incredible detail in the stories that I hadn't heard before - and I've followed his career very closely, going back to MF Doom's first 12" (Hey/Dead Bent/Gas Drawls) on Fondle 'Em records. Bobbito wonders if not only did Doom make his debut on the Gas Face, but that he actually came up with the idea of the Gas Face!!? And much of MF Doom's subsequent albums were recorded & mastered in Stretch's apartment. Stretch remembers: "He was always creating."

The End of an Awful Year

Rest in peace to MF DOOM.

At my age, it’s supposed to be over for me. So I had to treat it as though it were over… ‘If I didn’t have a career, what would I do?’ I would try to learn.”

Good interview with NO I.D.

Michael Jackson's "Beat It" is My New Jam

Michael Stipe on Animated Gifs

Fifteen-year old David Jacobs and Thirty Six-year old David Jacobs have the same crush, Michael Stipe:

Bullett Media: The most buzzed topic—what comes up when you Google your tumblr—is the brief cock shot in that art video you posted of your getting dressed. What was your reaction to the internet’s focus on your penis almost exclusively?

Michael Stipe: That was the same year, 2009. Again, it’s exactly like MichaelStipe.com—I took a bunch of still images and put them together and created a moving film that again, loops on itself. I mean, I guess, there was a little more chatter about it than I expected. I looked at it as an art piece. Of course I knew that people might freeze frame, but if people want to look at my penis, I don’t have a problem with that. [Laughs.] It raises a kind of more interesting question, which is where we are right now in terms of what the still image has become. We’re at this very fascinating moment in the history of photography and representation, where the still image is disappearing and becoming something very different, that is, a moving image that we will now be able to freeze frame. That’s what gifs represent in a primitive way. If Susan Sontag were alive, or Marshall McLuhan, they’d have a lot to say about where we are, and where this is all going. Over 100 years the photograph went from being this amazing thing that seemed impossible, to being something that was positive proof of an event occuring; and then we realized images could be manipulated to the point that now, with new technologies, everything is manipulatable and the still image is beginning to—like many other things, with the advent of digital and existing technologies—disappear. Our idea of what a still image is has now becoming very different. It’s almost like a scene in Blade Runner where they zoom in on a certain part of a photograph or, I think there’s another scene, where we’re looking at a still image and it moves slightly. Now I’m starting to sound like a science fiction geek…

BM: Science fiction geeks are great. It’s interesting too because a lot of the flat images we are looking at are on a screen which has a dynamism to it.

MS: Yeah, backlit, and you are in control as to how you interact with it. When you go to one of those pages that are largely gifs and you’re looking at, say, 80 images with each of them moving, how does your mind and your eye and your memory regard those single images? Are they to be seen as a still image that happens to be moving? How does a 12 year old, who is younger than the technology that we’re talking about, and has lived with it their entire life, view that? That’s what we’re talking about.

Roy Stanfield asked me for some DC/Dischord music recommendations. I realized I am in danger of breaking my "if you tell a story or have a conversation twice you should have blogged it" rule, so here they are.

Dischord's "20 Years" album features some exciting music, but I've never talked to a non-Dischord fan who loves it. I was too close to some of the music to give fair recommendations. Most people consider the earlier albums the "classics," but I tend to love the ones that fell when I was 14-17 years of age, often the second or third wave of an artists' work (either by band or style). For instance, I don't have the same emotional attachment to Lungfish or Shudder to Think records that other people do.

But here's the list I recommended for Roy: Slant 6 - Soda Pop*Rip Off, Jawbox - For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Teen Idles - Minor Disturbance, Rites Of Spring - End on End, Nation Of Ulysses - 13 Point Program to Destroy America, Fugazi - In On The Kill Taker, and Hoover - Lurid Traversal of Rte. 7.

Lauryn Hill

Just caught the bartender shazamming a lauryn hill song. Cannot make this up.

— David Jacobs (@djacobs) May 17, 2012

For whatever reason¹, Lauryn Hill has come up in a bunch of different contexts in recent conversation. In the scenario above, the bartender in question offered the following: "I knew it was Lauryn Hill, but I want to remember to listen to the song again later." And I think I buy that. Even If it was a lie, that was a pretty great one to come up with on the spot.

I've also recommended Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine episode about some fans' tortured relationship with Lauryn Hill a few times recently. Here it is, for easy reference!

¹Actually I know the reason, because her albums were amazing, and great albums tend to echo over years and emerge from your subconscious when you don't expect it.

In the beginning of his eulogy for MCA, Respect To The End, a high-school aged Questlove comes upon the Beastie's tour bus on his lunch hour. He approaches Mike D and Hurricane, and after a brief encounter walks away having learned "there is nothing in the world a straight up music geek could ever say to an artist that will knock that artist off their feet the same way that artist knocks us off our feet when we hear their music. as hard as we try to return the favor, we just better off with giving them dap and keeping it moving."

Pretty great.

#RIPMCA

In the fall of 1994 at Oberlin College, I started the first chapter of Students for a Free Tibet. I had previously interned at the Internation Campaign for Tibet, and I went on to intern at Milerapa (the foundation Yauch co-founded) and through this work I had a fairly strong connection to Adam Yauch for a year or so. Yauch came to Oberlin to speak my sophomore year (here's a brief mention in an old alumni magazine blurb). I drove a lot of famous musicians and speakers to & from the Cleveland airport over my college career, but I literally lost my head driving Adam Yauch down 480 back to Oberlin. The rented minivan we were driving was swerving in traffic so much that Adam reached from the back seat and put his hands on my shoulders: "It's OK! Drive man, drive!"

He hung out in my dorm room and played my heroin-addicted roommate's guitar. He gave a well-attended talk that evening, kept appropriately short in deference to the Tibetan activists and musicians that headlined the bill. I was cynical about his involvement in the Free Tibet movement before I met him — but that was completely misguided. He was an extremely humble & generous person, who literally gave all he could to the Free Tibet movement. It's a sad coincidence that my last blog post, two weeks ago, was in anticipation of the Beastie Boys continuing their career with only a passing reference to Adam's health. Even knowing a little bit about his health I assumed he would be back on stage given enough time, anything else was unimaginable. I usually don't get affected when celebrities pass away, but this one has really got me choked up.

The Roots are the Grateful Dead of Hip Hop

Finn sent me to Big Ghost's "Best of" blog post for 2011¹. It's a fun read, and features exciting music. One comment stuck out:

The Roots is basically the Rolling Stones of hip hop b.

Sometime in 2003 I predicted in conversation with my friend Angela that either the Beastie Boys or the Roots would enjoy long careers as the Grateful Dead of hip hop… basically that they would tour forever, coming out with new but not earth-shattering records every few years. Their music would stay great and fresh enough to keep the interest of older fans while evolving to attract younger ones. I still love the Beasties, but because of health problems and other projects they've just been less prolific than the Roots. And there's nothing wrong with that, they could actually still take five or six more years off and come back as the Rolling Stones of hip hop. That title is vacant because the Roots are officially the Grateful Dead of hip hop, until we revisit the topic in nine years.

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¹ Finn recommends I clarify that this is not really Ghostface Killah's blog.