mala fama!


Tokyo Sex Destruction "Don't Make Me Try Your Love" - Here's a question you'll probably never find yourself asking: What if James Brown had been Spanish? And what if, after several years of blowing up the world with soul and funk, Brown decided to radically change tack and start up a band using members of The Sonics and The MC5? Yeah, right? What if? See, I told you, it's a question you'd just never, ever ask, not in a million years, even. And yet, here, in this song, you receive a glimmer of an answer to that unaskable question that might just shake your world, if only for the space of a few minutes. Boot it up, rock out, and then really get grooving at that awesome break when the soul claps start. Okay now...well, love is everywhere, love is in the air...love is in my heart, and love is in my hair! [Buy this directly from BCore Records, one of Spain's better indie labels]

Cesaria Evora "Angola (Bateau Ivre Rework by Pepe Bradock)" - So if there were ever an idea for a remix project that is both excellent (because its source material is so, so magnificent) and yet frightening (because it could be screwed up so, so easily) this is it. Luckily, the folks behind Club Sodade had their wits all about them when they put it together, because overall it's not just good, it's positively transcendent. In this collection, the famed singer of Cape Verde moma (a style of music that combines West African percussion with Portuguese fados) has her songs lovingly remixed by a variety of esteemed electronic music producers, including Carl Craig, Osunlade, 4 Hero, and Francois K, and most of them work. But while I appreciated some of the techno and house versions of her songs, the pieces that really spoke to me were those that treated Evora and her fellow musicians with a sense of soft reverence, like this mix by Pepe Bradock. For the most part Evora's voice--which often seems to sing and weep at the same time--is left untouched, but the backing instrumentation gradually melts as she sings and at times viscerally ripples around her. It makes chills go up my spine, it does. [Buy it here]

Bonzo Goes To Washington "5 Minutes" - Okay, let me just put my cards on the table and tell you right now that one of my earliest memories of fiercely political conviction was disgust over Reagan's election in 1980, back when I was in 5th grade. And this disgust only increased over the ensuing eight years. To this day I feel he was just a real bastard of a president, for a wide range of reasons. And yet...and this is the gutpunch revelation if you ever needed one...in comparison to the Chimp in Chief currently in charge, he was actually quite moderate, responsible, and even liberal. Don't believe me? Check out today's Krugman column, or this piece from the Washington Monthly.

In any case, "5 Minutes" is a song you didn't hear on the corporate radio stations back then...and you most certainly won't be hearing it on them now. So I thought I'd bring it to you direct, for, you know, old time's sake and all that rubbish. It was largely the creation of Jerry Harrison (of the Talking Heads and The Tom Tom Club) and Bootsy Collins; I've also heard that Bill Laswell contributed to some degree. While its treatment of Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" radio address faux pas seems kind of tinkertoy right now (especially if you heard the numerous takes on Howard Dean's infamous rooooaaaar last winter) "5 Minutes" made a revolutionary statement in its time. And it did it while rocking an easy-cool bubblegum funk no-wave groove. Delicious.

Sorry for the quality of the vinyl transfer, by the way. You can always buy the record through GEMM and hear it all fresh and clean.

And hey, fellow mp3 bloggers, as long as this is National Reagan Remembrance Week, why don't you join the party and post your hoary old Reagan protest songs if you've got 'em? (Or celebration songs, if you're so inclined. Doesn't matter to me.)

Barcelona's graf display was blow-my-mind amazing. I don't know what those kids are on over there (cafe con leche x 20 per day + psilocybin?), but whatever it is, we need it over here, because they pretty much kick the collective asses of the graf writers in San Francisco. Of course, they seem to be granted a few things our street artists aren't: namely, a certain limited amount of freedom to paint*, and the foreknowledge that many of the spots they target won't get buffed over in a fortnight. The result: amazing, incredible works of street art that reach far past the typical hip-hop style tags, throw-ups and wildstyle pieces I typically see around my home town. It's just incredible. As you wander through certain parts of the city, you come across pictures of mutant spacecreatures, gigantic punk-politik anti-capitalist murals, stacks of cartoon telephones, photorealistic portraits, perverse collections of catwomen and homicidal nurses...and it just goes on and on and on. And then on top of that there's a seemingly inexhaustible supply of stencil art and paste-ups.

At the start of our visit, the first graf I found were fairly good examples of your typical wildstyle pieces. I dutifully took shots of them. Then I started encountering the truly fantastic stuff and before long I found myself cheerfully deleting the wildstyle pics to make way for the pieces I encountered. Goodbye tired old art, hello mindbending new art. Such is the way of natural selection, I guess.

I won't fake you, though: my appreciation of this stuff was shaken a bit by quakes of cognitive dissonance. Most of the best graf was found in the narrow, winding streets of Barcelona's "old city" districts like Bari Gotic, Ciutat Vella, and La Ribera--which means that they're sometimes painting on ancient masonry that often dates back to medieval times. It seems like there's something faintly blasphemous about that...but on the other hand there's literally so much paintwork going on that it almost seems like it's an ingrained aspect of the culture of those neighborhoods.

In any case I quickly became addicted to finding and photographing as much of this stuff as I could--sometimes to my potential detriment, as I sometimes found myself wandering down dark alleys into rather dicey neighborhoods.** But no harm came to either me or my camera, and I ended up coming back to the US with a nice fat stack of great pics to bump up the color and verve of this site--enough to keep me going the entire summer if I want. So get ready!

*A few writers we happened to talk to told us that painting graffiti was officially illegal in Spain, but as far as we could tell the laws weren't enforced that tightly in specific areas. My guess is that cops just don't bother with graf writers in the narrow back alleys of Barcelona's "old city" or at construction sites--but if you tried to paint in one of the wealthier parts of town, your ass would be toast right quick.
**The buildings and passageways of one of these dodgy areas were thickly decorated with stencils that said "WARNING: THIEVES!," with a graphic of a stickman figure snatching a bag from another stickman. These stencils tended to be accompanied by another stencil that said "PELIGRO: RACISTA!" with a graphic of a stickman cop kicking a stickman neighborhood resident in the ass.