Much of the music I upload onto my blog I also add to my YouTube account and indeed a lot of music I don’t blog ends up there too. In many ways it’s a little simpler and less time consuming uploading music to YouTube and the feedback is better too. So subscribe to my YouTube channel or just keep visiting (the link is always up there on the top right) for a busier experience.
Loving Kid Koala and Dynomite D’s The Slew album, the best rock meets hip hop I’ve heard in a very long time. Download is (legally) free too. Double vinyl and CD for cashola.
The cash-in on the twentieth anniversary of the Beastie Boys sophomore classic may have happened six months ago but the proper anniversary was last month and what better way to celebrate (a little late), on a gorgeous sunny late August evening, than with Funk Factory’s peerless ‘Rien Ne Va Plus’.
‘Rien Ne Va Plus’ provides the bulk of ‘Car Thief‘, one of the stand out cuts on the album. Huge pieces are flawlessly blended with the Jackson 5’s cover of Funkadelic’s ‘I’ll Bet You’, heavily transformed (the scratch and the transmutation) Trouble Funk bomb-drop synth and cut up tire screech. It’s everything that the lawless late Eighties sampling boom was about and along with the intelligent and humorous lyrics it was, and is, everything made/makes ‘Paul’s Boutique’ great.
I won’t bore you with much of a history of the track other than it was written by Bernard Kafka and originally recorded by his vocal group the Novi Singers. He later formed Funk Factory with Michal Urbaniak (another Polish jazz musician) and they recorded one self-titled album including their impressive updating of ‘Rien Ne Vas Plus’ turning it into a jazz funk classic.
I’ll blame it on the Summer, those beautiful British Summers of ash grey clouds, torrential downpours and the ocassional hot sunny blue sky day (we’re having one of these today….it’s too hot….I can’t take it). Anyway my blog has been neglected once again so it’s time for catch up. A few brief links for h’ors d’ouvres and plenty more to come.
‘Funky Cold Medina’ and ‘Wild Thing’ are the same song
Radio 4 (yes, Radio 4) bring together Steinski, the 45 King, Tuff City owner Aaron Fuchs, Coldcut (who list all the samples from their classic ‘Paid In Full’ remix), Keb Darge, dealer Harold Moores, Idris Muhammad, B George, Bob Stanley and Johan Kugelberg for a documentary on beat digging and record collecting.
From my own tape archives this is an appearance of two of hip hops most important DJs on Tim Westwoods then relatively new Radio 1 Rap Show (he moved over from Capital Radio a year earlier). Kool Herc and Jazzy Jay play classic breaks, funk, soul and old school hip hip cuts. Westwood also interviews and there’s a brief Stick-E & The Hoods (remember them?) interlude in there too.
Giving a hip hop producer some money to buy records and then filming the beat they make is not the most original of ideas but it still fascinates the hell out of me. Here anticon’s Jel and Odd Nosdam spend $40 on records and even play the resulting track out in an unlikely looking bar.
