Marvin’s Room (Shlohmo’s thru tha floor remix) – Drake by shlohmoA question I hear frequently asked about Toronto based Hiphop/RnB rapper/singer/child actor Drake in the press is why his new music is so depressing sounding and what does he have to be unhappy about? He’s young, rich and famous! He’s got a seemingly endless supply of adoring fans, pretty women, drugs, alcohol, money and a venue for his artistic expression to talk about his feelings. Hot97 is his psychotherapy couch.
When he sings:
‘Cups of the XO
Bitches in my old phone
I should call one and go home
I’ve been in this club too long
The woman that I would try
Is happy with a good guy
But I’ve been drinking so much
That I’ma call her anyway and say
“F-ck that nigga that you love so bad
I know you still think about the times we had”
I say “f-ck that nigga that you think you found
And since you picked up I know he’s not around”
(Are you drunk right now?)
I’m just sayin’, you could do better
Tell me have you heard that lately?
I’m just sayin’ you could do better
And I’ll start hatin’, only if you make me’
Drake strikes me as being honest here. Even though he has all of the above material and ego-enhancing things that many of us want, he is still not happy. When artists are honest and speak about what’s really happening with them instead of repeating tropes that seem like the ‘industry standard’ (I’m balling! I’m awesome! I’m getting money!) it adds a richness of meaning, the texture of personal reality. The current vogue for sipping XO (aka sizzurp, purple drank, or cough syrup made with promethazine and codeine) popularized by many rap/rnb artists including recently Drake and The Weeknd seems to support this pretty well. Codeine is an opiate, the same active ingredient found in heroin. It’s a central nervous system depressant that makes you sleepy and dulls pain when used when you’re sick. If consumed when you’re healthy it pushes pleasure buttons in your brain and feels great. Taking codeine also kills you. If you slow your central nervous system down enough you’ll just stop breathing. RIP DJ Screw and Pimp C. My question is: how much must you be suffering to make this glamourous lifestyle choice? Scientific research has pointed to links between the way we experience physical and psychic pain, like the pain of depression, including the fact that depression sufferers seem to have more acute physical pain. As far as I can tell people who are happy and fulfilled don’t need to constantly take large amounts of central nervous system depressants like codeine and alcohol.
Where does this pain come from? For many of us who are artists or musicians we, secretly or not, spend a certain amount of time thinking about why so-and-so got their name put above ours on a flier, or got a better review or record deal or fee for their show or more views on YouTube. Why are they more loved than us? It feels unfair and can be demoralizing. This is because our feeling of self-worth is connected to our rapidly fluctuating ego. One moment we just had a great gig, review, bit of feedback from a fan and are flying. The next moment something goes badly or we notice someone else doing better and suddenly we are dissatisfied with our own success that seemed great a minute ago. I feel that whether they admit it or not many, many people who are perceived as successful suffer from these same feelings. In fact I think that many people who believe that material and ego success will make them happy, then achieve it and realize that they’re still not happy are actually in a tougher spot than those who are still striving. If you are still trying to get there you can at least believe that once you get rich and famous you’ll leave your current unhappiness behind. Once you get there and realize you are STILL unhappy and that a change in external factors isn’t going to solve it that must be pretty difficult to deal with. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe come to mind.
I recently read a book by the Dalai Lama called ‘How To Practice’ about ways to a meaningful and happy life. For those unfamiliar with him here is a person who absolutely radiates satisfaction, kindness and deep happiness. This is in spite of the fact that he is a leader of a nation in exile who have undergone brutal cultural genocide at the hands of the People’s Republic of China including torture, mass murder and attempts to undermine and eradicate the Tibetan Buddhist faith which the Dalai Lama is a senior figure in. A key distinction he makes which I found to be very helpful in thinking about these issues is the distinction between Pleasure and Happiness. Pleasure is the result of a state change: from sobriety to drunkenness, hunger to satiety, arousal to orgasm, feeling un-appreciated to feeling admired, and so on. We experience a momentary burst of pleasure which can be pretty awesome. What tells us that these things are not intrinsic sources of happiness is that we cannot continue to experience them indefinitely. Drink too much and throw up, smoke too much pot and get nervous and paranoid, eat too much and get a stomach ache, receive so much fan adulation that you can’t walk down the street and consequently feel isolated and lonely. All of these, while resulting in transitional pleasures which feel great when they happen, do not satisfy our inner desires for things like meaning in life, a long term feeling of satisfaction or freedom from the roller coaster of egotism.
The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Buddhist prescription for these things is instead of constantly looking at ourselves and trying to scratch our own itches for more fame, food, drugs or money to look outward and look at who we can help, how we can be more caring, how we can contribute to others happiness and lessen their suffering. In a word: compassion. If you’ve ever experimented with compassion you’ll find that it provides a much less fleeting and much longer lasting feeling of happiness, even if sometimes in the immediate moment the act itself is not directly pleasurable. For me the major experience I’ve had in this department is being a father to two young boys. Even though at times it is not easy and can feel like a terrifying and overwhelming vortex of poopy diapers, extreme and prolonged sleep deprivation, yelling, crying and trips to the emergency room there is nothing I have done in my life which has given me more deep and lasting happiness. Counter-intuitive though it may seem the realest happiness I’ve found is in sacrifice, giving freely of myself and serving others. It doesn’t fluctuate, increase or decrease based on external factors or go away when I scratch the itch. In fact, the more I scratch the more it deepens, expands and the richer and more satisfying it becomes.
I am not holding myself up as an example here for admiration. Loving your children is a bare minimum necessary act for any human being. In order to feel like I’m actually doing something that is a net gain for humanity and to deepen my compassionate practice I need, and plan, to do more than that. I’m only speaking from my own, limited direct experience to convey my point. It’s possible to be happy, but it doesn’t come from consuming anything or from stroking the ego.
cross-posted from my personal blog at mattshadetek.com
]]>Katey Red‘s very FIRST music video “Where Da Melph At”
In the spirit of pride week and Gay Bajo?!
Shout to Diego for the heads up & all the visuals!
New Orleans thank you!
Not really a lot of commentary about this besides the fact that I just listened to it like 19 times in a row. This is, how you say, my shit. Sweet and low rnb en espanol by World Hood out of Sacramento with Peligrosa crew’s own Sonora coming in hard body on the remix. Big tune, and it’s downloadable via the soundcloud page, so get to it.
World Hood/Estrella Sanchez – Indigenous 808 (sonora remix) by SONORA
Here’s the video for the original, which is also very nice:
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To cure post-holiday blues, smoke Christmas trees or listen to the new album from Hype Williams, Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, And Start Getting Reel on repeat – or just do both to further enhance that collapsing feeling as you watch people (including hard working class people) waste money and resources. Like a bouquet of xmas flowers on fire, the album is an absolute mess; a slow-burning, swirling, hallucinatory fantasy, a wicked affair involving Ms. Helen Folasade Adu.
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New mix by Canadian DJ/producer Adam Rawdman containing a bunch of recent favorites from Dubbel Dutch and Mr Fox to Nguzunguzu and Jamie Woon, as remixed by Ramadanman, and a heap of refixes from Rawdman himself.
Games, “Strawberry Skies” from That We Can Play (Hippos In Tanks) 2010
I never got around to posting “Everything Is Working,” the first track I heard from Games earlier this year/in late-Spring if I can clearly recall. If you were at a party where I played/”DJ” or listened to Rupture’s Mudd Up radio show on WFMU over the Summer – specifically episodes I guest-hosted/filled-in for Jace, you probably heard that track and me going on about how effortless, charming, and amazing it sounds. Needless to say, I was looking forward to hearing more. During the wait for their mini-album That We Can Play, which is out now on Hippos In Tanks, Games (Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never and Joel Ford of Tiger City – two producers currently based in Brooklyn – one of whom we’ve been listening to all year!) released a series of fantastic screwed-retro mixes/mix tapes, steeped in 80s synth-pop-mystic and nostalgia (taking forgotten, obscure songs from the 80s, slowing them down, and in that process transforming them into murky, cinematic, dreamscapes). You can grab those mix tapes over at their Tumblr WAY SLOWER. Some of the characteristics (dreamy, woozy, etc.) are found on those mix tapes bleed into the five tracks on That We Can Play, especially on the opening track “Strawberry Skies,” with excellent vocal contribution from Laurel Halo, whose “Something I Never Had” we’ve played out/and on Mudd Up too, .
]]>Ramadanman refixes Jamie Woon‘s latest single “Night Air.”
Props to Blackdown/Martin Clark.
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Dutty Artz Radio tonight! Check the Ustream channel 7pm. Turrbotax resident DJs Contakt and Mayster are joining us.
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Baths – Lovely Bloodflow
Cerulean (anticon., 2010)
The latest release from anticon., debut album by Baths is in heavy rotation this week. It has some extremely lovely moments – worth checking – also worth spending money on, if you all are still into that.
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Alright, Spring is here & Miss Badu has blessed us with yet another extremely good album. I’ve returned to it already a few times this week — New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh). At first, I was unsatisfied (I had that same feeling when I heard Worldwide Underground, as if the project was unfinished/not completely realized) but for New Amerykah Part Two, with each listen, something magnificent is revealed –subtle, satiric undertones buried in samples, live instrumentation, and that voice – raw emotional honesty (+ sometimes turbulence.) I’ve said it before, if you think Erykah Badu’s music is only serious/militant/political/etc. — which it obviously is — you’re missing the point. She’s more playful, more humorous than she’s often credited for, and this album has some of the most amusing moments in R&B you’ll hear this year.
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SUPERFRONT‘s “Architecture Mixtape” series launches tomorrow – Thursday, April 1st – at Studio X, with our own DJ /rupture sharing hosting duties with MITCH McEWEN, Founder and Director of SUPERFRONT – presenting recent exhibits curated in both SUPERFRONT’s Los Angeles and Brooklyn galleries. The audience will be invited to participate in a public program that integrates music and community organizing into the production of architectural discourse. Catalog publications and the DJ /rupture-produced soundtrack will be on display.
Superfront “Architecture Mixtape” has four sections – w/ Matt Shadetek dropping all all kinds of dutty dancehall wickedness, and Mosholu Park delivers more recent, ferocious, dancehall explosives, DJ /rupture blurs sublime dancehall riddims he acquired in Brooklyn over the years, and Taliesin’s section is heavy on the R&B side and it’s terrifically good fun!
Free and open to the public
RSVP: gdb210[at]columbia[dot]edu
Studio-X
180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
1 train to Houston Street
A few days ago, I found a CDR compilation labeled Super Hits of Nigeria in the ungoogleable/bootleg section of my CD-DVD collection. It was a gift from my cousin who bought it in the streets of Freetown sometime last year. The opening track from the comp is “Yori Yori”– a massive pan-Nigerian/pan-African (global) hit in 2009 by the duo Bracket. This tune was large from Lagos to Nairobi, Freetown to London, even nightclubs in Guangzhou were unsafe from the contagious tune (Guangzhou has the largest population of Africans in China.) I saw a video for the tune in early ’09 while watching Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) in northern Virginia. Boima also mentioned it over at Ghetto Bassquake.
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Timaya, who appears on at least 6 tracks on the compilation also had a great year in ’09. I saw a few of his videos on NTA – epic, conscious Nigerian rap grooves. Here are two more tracks -
J Martins feat. Timaya, P-Square, Banky W., etc. – Good Or Bad (Owey)
“Heavy As Stone” by Mark Pritchard
from Elephant Dub / Heavy As Stone “12 – it’s a real no-brainer!
These are not not normal times. We are in the midst of another major winter storm in Brooklyn, NY (and our neighboring east coast cities and towns are witnessing/feeling the wrath of Old Man Winter.) Mala’s Deep Medi Musik released this superb 12″ from Mark Pritchard a few days ago. Side A is probably more apt for the weather (wet and heavy snow + smouldering xtra-subs = murky funk for dead bodies) but I’ve decided go with the flip because it melds many beautiful things together easily and well! It’s also warm – Tell the people of earth to be strong / You’re as heavy as stone / You are never alone…
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Happy Valentine’s Day to all! Yes, we’re also suckers for classic American soul/R&B, especially the ones from the heartland. Keep love in your heart.
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