Category: Recommended

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Steve Lacy’s Demo

Steve Lacy, guitarist for the Internet (one of my favorite new bands), released this little ‘demo’ at the beginning of the year and I just found it. It sounds fucking great and we get to hear a distinct style from someone we’ve only really heard collaborating in a group. And this truly is a one man demo. Lacy recorded vocals and instruments through his iPhone, drum patterns on Ableton, and mixed it himself. The music being made by young, new artists is extraordinary, encapsulating influences from early 2000’s hip-hop to old school soul and funk, and the ways in which they’re doing it are even more impressive. I’m late to the party but I’m glad I found it.

I found this in an interview with the group on Pharrell’s Beats show. I only wish they released the entire interviews, there’s a lot of great guests on there.

P.S. Spotify’s running a sale until the end of the year, $100 for a year of premium as opposed to $10 monthly, so you’d save $20. Check it out if you’re interested.

 

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My Year in Music 2017

This year’s new albums never quite grabbed me like the new releases in ’16 did (Frank, Solange, Chance, Schoolboy, Kanye), but there were certainly some gems. And in that void of new music, I ended up going back and exploring a ton of different music from all over the place, which was really fun and enlightening. Check out my favorite albums of the year, new and old, and the top songs I listened to in 2017, below.

2017

First of all, you can check out the top songs I listened to this year here. Now let’s get to the albums.

Kendrick Lamar – DAMN.

SZA – Ctrl

Do I really need to write about these two albums? Probably the two best albums of the year, both coming from Top Dawg Entertainment. Two of my favorite albums that came out last year were also from TDE. They know what they fuck they’re doing.

Tyler, the Creator – Flower Boy

I liked Odd Future and Tyler when they were first coming out and I was in college. I liked the brash punkness of it mixed with some Jackass vibes. But besides helping usher Frank Ocean into the world, I kind of lost track of them. After hearing Tyler’s production on Blonde. (Skyline To), and then one of his new singles off the album (911/Mr. Lonely), I added it to check out. And I only really got around to it about a month ago, but I’ve been playing it ever since. There’s some great features on this album and both 911 and Where This Flower Blooms feature Frank. I went back and listened to the albums I missed by him and I’ve loved his progression away from abrasive punk to more beautiful, vulnerable music, culminating with this album.

Thundercat – Drunk

JAMS! Soft rock R&B is maybe the best way to describe it? I don’t even think it’s describable though. He’s singing about Dragonball Z, Michael McDonald, the plague of social media, and much more, all in catchy, up-beat grooves. Thundercat is the man and yet another connection to TDE: he played bass and helped produce Kendrick’s last 3 albums.

Steven Universe OST

I fell in love with Steven Universe this year, and have already talked about the show. The show is so good, in part, because of how phenomenal, catchy, and emotionally moving the songs are. The soundtrack came out this year and it’s always a joy to listen to, especially if I need a pick me up.

Honorable Mentions

Jay-Z 4:44

Vince Staples – Big Fish

I love Jay-Z and Vince Staples, and liked their new albums a lot, but after playing them each for a week or two, I promptly forgot about them until I started putting this list together. So while I’m happy they released new music (especially Jay-Z putting something out that good for the first time in awhile) I  have to leave them as honorable mentions.

Pre-2017

I pay $10 a month for Spotify, and it’s probably the best money I spend. I love being able to find basically any song or album and queuing it up to check out. I did that a lot this year, adding a ton of albums I’d never listened to. I watched a lot of What’s in My Bag and Crate Diggers towards the end of this year too. What’s in My Bag opened up a ton of obscure recommendations from some of my favorite artists, while Crate Diggers dove into the process of sampling and making beats, which opened me up to all the old funk and soul records they used. These are all albums I discovered or re-discovered this year and played the hell out of.

Nirvana – Unplugged

Loved this when I first heard it as a teenager, love it now.

Kamasi Washington – The Epic

Epic is right. Out of this world jazz, pulling from all sorts of different influences. Hard to describe this one, but I’m pretty sure it’s a masterpiece.

Blackalicious – Blazing Arrow

Banging rap, sick samples. Never heard it before and it blew my mind.

Blondie – Parallel Lines & Autoamerican

I have both of these on vinyl and wanted to revisit them after seeing Blondie’s early influence and appreciation of the emerging hip hop scene in Hip Hop Family Tree. Both are great.

Brian Eno – Apollo

Beautiful ambient music, to relax to, to write to, to clean the house to, and more.

Common – Be

One of Kanye’s best produced albums, and Common’s best album.

Isaiah Rashad – The Sun’s Tirade

I missed this in 2016 but played the hell out of it this year. Another great rap record from last year, and another TDE production!

Noname – Telefone

This one I did enjoy in 2016, but continued to listen to this year and enjoyed it even more.

The Internet – Ego Death

What a great fucking band, that plays real instruments, yet can seamlessly transform their sound into hip hop beats with their instruments. This was one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Their other album Feel Good is awesome too.

Marvin Gaye – Here, My Dear

I’d always heard this was maybe Marvin’s best, and after listening to it again this year it really hit me. Beautiful, raw, honest. And sounds so damn good.

Steely Dan- Can’t Buy a Thrill

JAMS! Every single song on this album is a soft rock masterpiece. I have this on vinyl and played it a lot. Steely Dan’s also been sampled a lot by hip hop, from De La Soul to Kanye. Speaking of samples…

Gangstarr – Daily Operation

Skull Snaps – Skull Snaps

Ohio Players – Pleasure

After watching Crate Diggers, I was going back and forth between a lot of old rap and then the older funk records they pulled samples from. DJ Premier is obviously a legend, but I never really listened to Daily Operation. Both the beats and the lyrics from Guru blew me away. The next two are some of the most sampled records of all time and for good reason. Pleasure was a perfect introductions to the Ohio Players. Skull Snaps bangs, if the name didn’t tell you already.

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Keep your ears open, and if you think I’d dig something based on this list, let me know!

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Recommended: Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor

Hip Hop Family Tree is an extraordinarily ambitious comic book series made even more impressive by the fact that it’s made entirely by one man, cartoonist Ed Piskor. He writes, draws, colors and formats the whole damn thing. The series is a deep dive into the history of hip hop starting in the 70’s and is currently up to the mid 80’s, presented in a beautifully old school style in a large format book, much bigger than most comics today. It’s fascinating how he’s able to weave through so many different characters and places to really tell the history of how hip hop began in an incredibly engaging, fun way. I found it to be such a refreshing way to learn deeply about a topic while still being entertained by all the smaller stories and details  throughout each panel.

The early days of hip hop are littered with stories of creativity, failure, community, hustling, getting ripped off, and creating your own path. Through these journeys we see the origins of the MC’s who one day reign supreme, like Run DMC, Chuck D, Dr. Dre, LL Cool J, and KRS-One, while also giving lots of love to the early founders like Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and Afrika Bambaataa, just to name a few. My favorite parts so far were the slow beginnings of Def Jam, following the Beastie Boys as a teenage punk band, Rick Rubin as a spoiled college kid obsessively interested in both punk and the emerging hip hop scene, and a lisping, drug-fueled Russell Simmons managing many of the early stars of the day (every panel with him is hilarious).

Ed fuses his love of comic books and hip hop with flair and a precise attention to detail. Young legends are introduced by their real names first so you might not know who they are, or who they go on to become, as they develop into the best MC’s of their generation. It has the same feel as a young Scott Summers (Cyclops) or Jean Grey struggling with their newfound powers in the early days of the X-Men. Which is a great sign considering his next project is yet another massively ambitious, historically sweeping project: X-Men Grand Design.

I first heard about Ed when that project was announced earlier this year and I picked up Hip Hop Family Tree to check out his work, and because of my interest in both comics and hip hop. Needless to say I was pretty floored. He’s doing something very similar with Grand Design, taking decades of X-Men comics and retelling it in his own unique way. I am so fucking stoked for it, and the first one’s dropping at the end of next month. But until then, check out Hip Hop Family Tree if any of this sounded appealing, and click through to peep some dope panels. 

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Take a Hike! The Healing Power of Nature

Here’s an excellent essay by Rebecca Lawton on the Healing Power of Nature, both in the spiritual sense, and  in the scientific evidence based sense.

As you may know, the Post Bros love nature: hiking, climbing, mountains, rivers, trees, fresh air. Anytime I’m able to be out in nature, surrounded by it, even if only for a few hours, I feel better. I feel restored. This essay explains, through personal experiences and science, the very real healing power nature has, from Iraq war veterans and river guides, to the Japanese government in the 1980’s, and even Russian scientists in the 1920’s. I love when what I feel to be true is backed up and explained by science. And there’s a whole lot of that here, with evidence showing that time spent in nature can:

reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, prevent and reduce depression and anxiety, reduce blood pressure, reduce inflammation, reduce cardiovascular disease, reduce migraines, boost immune function, enhance autonomic control of heart rate and blood pressure, help us recover from heightened stress, help maintain a healthy microbiome of essential skin and gut bacteria, protect against heart disease, obesity and diabetes, along with anti-cancer and anti-viral effects.

Y’know, just to name a few. So go take a hike (or ‘forest bath’) sometime soon. I’ll be trying to get out there as much as I can before winter really sets in, so reach out if you’re interested in a little day hike. 
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In Praise of the Cartoon

Four of my favorite TV shows currently running are “silly cartoons”. But behind their apparent silliness is some of the deepest, most complex, emotionally, philosophically powerful art I’ve seen on television, up there with any prestige drama you could name.

The first two both feature alcoholic, narcissistic anti-heroes struggling to fix their lives, or at worst, reveling in their own filth. And it’s not Don Draper sexy-filthy either. One’s a reckless, constantly belching, grandfather mad-scientist who’s known as the smartest being in the multiverse. The other is a washed up actor who also happens to be a horse. I’m speaking of Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman of course. Rick and Morty has a cult like following and is given heaps of praise, deservedly so, but I’m honestly not sure if many people watch BoJack, probably because it’s an even harder sell. Both shows are hilarious and billed as animated comedies. But both shows also routinely remind us of the meaningless of life and the existential dread that seeps into our everyday lives and actions. Rick and Morty is certainly nihilistic, while BoJack painfully depicts what it is to be human (or horseman), struggling to try to fix ourselves when we’re already so far gone. BoJack’s most recent fourth season featured one of the most harrowing psychodramas I’ve seen in just 30 minutes, as we watch BoJack try to right his life while cutting back to the absolute horror-show of his mother’s upbringing, threading the trauma through the generations. Our trauma may be our parent’s fault, but we’re reminded that they were also traumatized as children, in even more brutal a fashion than we may have been. In the most recent episode of Rick and Morty, Rick once again espouses the meaningless of life to his daughter Beth, as she comes to realize how alike she is to her monster of a father. These seemingly silly cartoons actually grapple with the darkness we all live through, in even more creative, poignant ways than some of the best cable dramas of the last 15 years.

While those two shows are absolutely aimed at and are primarily made for adults, the next two are absolutely not, which makes them even more impressive and profound.

I’m speaking of Adventure Time and Steven Universe. Each show follows a young boy as he comes of age, trying to be the best person they can be, defending their homes from evil, facing off against aliens and cosmic entities right alongside the constant challenges adolescence throws at us. Both air on Cartoon Network (not Adult Swim) and both certainly started out as just kids’ cartoons, and can still definitely be enjoyed by kids. But as they’ve progressed, they’ve both managed to confront similar themes: the struggles of growing up, recognizing how trauma shapes us and can morph into evil, and the forces we can use to fight it, including empathy, compassion and sometimes force.

I’m lucky enough to have had my brother Sean basically force me to watch these. While I’d heard of both, and thought they looked cool and interesting, I doubt I would have ever really invested the time to give them a proper viewing. There are usually anywhere from 30 to 50 episodes in a season, but episodes of both shows are only 11 minutes long. The emotional power, the depth of narrative, the laughs that are packed into just 11 minutes is truly astounding and I still have trouble wrapping my head around how they pull it off. I could write whole essays on each of these shows, but I’ll try to just pitch what I find so enthralling about each.

Adventure Time has one of the deepest mythologies and world building I’ve ever seen in any form of storytelling. It’s set on Earth, roughly a thousand years after a nuclear explosion wiped out (almost) all of humanity. Now all sorts of messed up creatures, including slime princesses, candy people, and an evil entity named the Lich roam the Earth. And Finn the Human does his best to answer the call of adventure and protect his community from harm, and when he’s not busy doing that, he’s playing around with his best-friend/dog/shape-shifter Jake and trying to find love. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking and has some of the weirdest, off-beat little moments of strange beauty and melancholy sprinkled throughout each episode.

Steven Universe, as Sean pitches is it, can be described as “3 lesbian aliens raising a half- human, half-alien boy”. Steven Universe was created by Rebecca Sugar, formerly a writer on Adventure Time, and the composer of the best songs done on that show. She brings her gift for music (and more) to Steven Universe. The way she ties songs into the emotional arc of the story is sublime. This show primarily focuses on the power, transcendence and toxicity relationships can bring into our lives. What also makes this show so beautiful to me is how Steven deals with people (and aliens), whether they’re friend or foe. Apparent threats, who state their malicious intent, are usually turned by Steven into allies. Not through manipulation or force, but with empathy and kindness. He asks them questions and his charm and compassion shines through. This is another show that deals deeply with trauma and how that trauma infects our entire worldview. Yet grand speeches, demands, and threats are never how you actually change a person. You change them by your own example, by asking questions, and listening with an open mind to the answers.

I’ve teared up more times than I can count while watching episodes of Adventure Time and Steven Universe, and I wonder how they are able to get to me in such deep ways, in such short amounts of time. I know it’s because of the strong emotional depth they explore with each character and the long standing narrative arcs they continue to return to. But why are they so god damn affecting? Pixar movies certainly deserve a mention here, as they’re the prime example of complex animated storytelling pulling at your heartstrings. I still remember seeing Toy Story in theaters, absolutely crushed when Woody and Buzz just miss getting on the moving van. Or, of course, the first 15 minutes of Up. For some reason, I think it’s easier for us to let our guard down and empathize when we’re watching animation. Whether it’s a child, an alcoholic grandpa, or a narcissistic horseman, as we watch them struggle, overcome, and struggle again, through joy and pain, victory and defeat, the story is removed just enough from reality that we allow ourselves to become fully absorbed by it. As we grow older we may scoff at the idea of sitting down to watch a cartoon to be moved, but it may be the best thing we could do to maintain that relationship with our inner-child, to maintain a sense of awe and curiosity towards the world. And it only takes 11 to 22 minutes an episode to get that shot of wonder, joy, and catharsis we so rarely get elsewhere.

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Recommended: Life Itself and My Favorite Thing is Monsters

Today I’m recommending two different pieces of art born from Chicago.

Life Itself

By the time this documentary of Roger Ebert is made, he is in his last year on Earth and struggling to stay. By the time it’s released, he is gone.

Cancer in his jaw necessitates its removal. He’s robbed of his ability to speak. He can’t eat or drink. He types out what he wants to say and a robotic voice speaks. And he is still hilarious, and warm and open. He is courageous in the face of failing health and then death.

After losing his voice he turns his attention to writing on his blog and sharing his regrets, passions, and memories from his long, fascinating life.

But this documentary isn’t just about his fight at the end, or just about his movie criticism. It is a portrait of his entire life and all that he learned and shared. His struggles and joy. It’s a beautiful movie and it’s available on Netflix.

“We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We’re kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”  – Roger Ebert

My Favorite Thing is Monsters

This a gorgeous, gripping, emotional graphic novel like I’ve never read before. Taking place in Chicago at the end of the 1960’s, My Favorite Thing is Monsters is 10-year-old Karen Reyes’ graphic diary. Every page is drawn as if it was in a notebook, yet it’s done in exquisite detail, with beautiful drawings of monsters, classical paintings, and human beings. Karen is obsessed with B-movie monsters, her struggling family, and figuring out who murdered her upstairs neighbor, Holocaust survivor Anka. I was floored by this book not just because of the story, but because I found myself lost looking at one page at a time, absorbed in all the details. Emil Ferris wrote and illustrated the entire book. It is a tremendous piece of art.

Click through to check out some sample pages.

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Recommended: American Tabloid by James Ellroy

I read American Tabloid at the very end of last year, and I’m still constantly thinking about it. It was that good (and right up my alley, interest wise). It follows three men intertwined with the FBI and the Mob leading up to the Bay of Pigs and JFK’s assassination. I struggled to put it down and finished it in something like 9 days. If you like crime stories, spy stories, and the seedy underbelly of U.S. history (especially the 1960’s, like me) you will love this book. His writing style is quick and brutal, like a knife to the gut. I’m starting the second novel in the Underworld USA trilogy (badass, right?) today, and as you can tell, I’m excited.

James Ellroy calls himself the greatest crime writer to ever do it, and somehow I don’t shake my head in disgust at his ego. I just nod. He’s probably right.

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Recommended: The Spy Novels of Trevanian

Trevanian’s protagonists all fit the same mold. They’re geniuses, masters of many fields, and they disdain basically everyone around them. James Bond, but somehow even more of a dick. Former assassins who just want to be left alone to their specific interests (gardening, mountaineering, art collecting, lovemaking) yet each time are leveraged into doing “one-last-job” for whichever faceless monolithic espionage unit comes calling this time.

And yes, the author is Trevanian, one word, one badass pseudonym. Glancing at his Wikipedia page perfectly describes him: “the only writer of airport paperbacks to be compared to Zola, Ian Fleming, Poe and Chaucer.” The novels are pulpy and the writing fits well with his protagonists: witty, cynical, and to the point.

I’ve read two of his spy novels and I’m in the middle of my third. The first was Shibumi, which was straight down my fucking strike zone . Here’s a bit from Amazon’s summary: “Hel survived the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world’s most artful lover and its most accomplished—and well-paid—assassin. Hel is a genius, a mystic, and a master of language and culture, and his secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection known only as shibumi.” This is probably my favorite of the three, but just slightly over the next one.

The second, The Eiger Sanction is incredibly similar, but with enough of a twist to keep it fresh.

This time our genius playboy spy is “an art professor, a mountain climber, and a mercenary, performing assassinations (i.e., sanctions) for money to augment his black-market art collection”. I’m now reading the follow-up, The Loo Sanction, which isn’t as good as the first two, but is still thoroughly entertaining. The Sanctions are designed more as direct spoofs of Agent 007, but are damn fun in their own right.

If you’re into the spy genre at all, I think you’ll dig Trevanian.