Tom Breihan writes about Adam Yauch.

I know this is the most obvious answer, but I think Aja is my faverit Steely Dan album. At one time that would have been perennial crowd-pleaser Can’t Buy A Thrill. Later on when I got deeper into the groop it would have been Katy Lied or even Pretzel Logic, for which I entertained a perverse love at one time. My fondness for Katy Lied goes back to hearing “Black Friday” and “Daddy Don’t Live In That New York City No More” at my uncle’s house. I’d heard those tunes before but their badassedness really sunk in for me that day. I used to sing “Doctor Wu” nonstop too. Folks I know seem to prefer Gaucho these days. That LP was once my least favorite SD, but I’ve come around on it and have come to appreciate that it’s one of those discs that takes a minute to seep into you. Anyway, Aja’s the one I want to talk about. Here are a few of the reasons why it’s still my favorite:

How my dad had a pristine vinyl copy (I think it was the Mobile Fidelity version, but I don’t remember for sure) and how my big brother and I, fried on C-grade pot one afternoon with the house to ourselves, spun it and jammed to that endless interplanetary journey of an instrumental section in the song “Aja”.

How I realized the “tied to the mast” line in “Home at Last” was an allusion (having in whatever grade just learned the meaning of that word) to the Odyssey (and secretly thinking I was pretty smart for noticing).

How I studied the übercool “Deacon Blues” lyric…a mirage, an illusion, a dream…a still, glassy ocean with nothing underneath its surface…for a moment you think you can see thru it then those many colourd clouds come together again, obscuring what lies behind them, but light still passes thru it, like a stained glass window.

How it contains seven songs, the perfect number, in exactly the right sequence—the only possible one—an hermetic whole, not a cycle, not a circle, but an arc, starting and ending at zero, silence, as Hawking, in his bestseller, once described the universe—starting from nothing, a single particle, space expanding, then: contracting, reversing, the universe’s end a mirror image of its beginning, a big crunch, back to zero ((tho today cosmologists seem to favor infinite expansion)); a flash of lightning in the dark of night: darkness – brilliance – (an endless moment later:) darkness again; a journey from here to there, though there is just here again—Nirvana and Samsara are one: the Buddha was right here the whole time.

How Michael McDonald’s voice blends with the synth in “Peg”—I can’t tell what’s human and what’s synthetic…which statement, tho it might seem rather facile, could be a metaphor or a cynic dokee or an analog or a digital or something for the entire album.

How I Realized rather late what a jam “Josie” is.

How KNS sampled that little bass turn in “Black Cow” for Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz’ “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” and how I just found out that Doom sampld a diffrent element of it (that dreamy lilting keyboard part) on “Gas Drawls” (tho I’m currently tripping on how he sampled “Poetry” (still one of my favorite tracks ever)).

KRS•ONE did a fake patois
Miss Cleo got a fake patois
Even Jay-Z did a fake patois
Bad Brains had a fake patois
My man Snow had a fake patois
Even Jim Carrey fuck with the patois
So you know he come through with the fake patois

History of Rap III…

Part 1 Part 2

@Dallas_Penn (Internets Celebrity):

Internets! HipHop existed before crack cocaine. Freebase didn’t make HipHop what it was. The gov’t ending school breakfast in the Bronx did. [1]

The U.S. gov’t left the poor and disenfranchised areas of our country to rot while promoting the development of suburbs and exurbs #HipHop [2]

The poor Bronx and Bklyn kids would tell their aspirational stories and the kids living in the suburbs could drive to mall to buy the album [3]

@rilgood Disenfranchisement is monetary and social neglect. Not having textbooks, not repairing broken watermains, systemic withdrawl [4]

Without kids in the suburbs consuming these albums, experiencing the ghetto safari tour from safety of their homes there would be no HipHop [5]

If was just gonna be some brown kids banging pots and pans with NO commercial viability there would be no HipHop, just pots and pans [6]

I’m talking about all suburban kids who have been influenced by HipHop… Dela Soul, Doppelgangaz, Das Racist take HipHop to another level [7]

Kids in the Bronx aspired to have hot running water in the winter, kids from Freeport, NY (Public Enemy) aspired to have a Black president [8]

The aspirations are a bit different because of the living conditions but HipHop encouraged the consumer to project a greater self. Until… [9]

All that aspiration was a bit too unifying also. HipHop (rap) adopted the nihilism of getting rich, or more exactly, dying while trying [10]

Let’s never act like HipHop was always preachy and didactic because it wasn’t, but the corporate $$$ skewed the art to the consumers [11]

The folks who would get turned onto rap and the folks who would look to create new music were all bent to a specific type of content [12]

But I suppose since this is America everything has to fall down to corp $$$ at some point. Our elected leaders certainly did so why not rap? [13]

Internets! I apologize for my rant about rap. Im just sick of the nostalgia over crack cocaine as if there were something redeeming about it [14]

I spent the better half of my life abusing drugs and even profiteering from those that abused that shit too. There’s nothing heroic in that [15]

All this nostalgic crack cocaine romance is gonna have some people I fux with take the plunge and I don’t know if they will make it back [16]

History of Rap II

Jay Smooth Eulogizes “The Quintessential Hip Hop Hook Man”

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