“This shit special!!!!!!!!” DJ Khaled bellows in his reverb-twisted voice on the intro to “Hip Hop”, a track off his sixth album. After several verses, when the track is winding down, Khaled says it again. If, somehow, the listener had forgotten that the shit was special, Khaled is there to remind us that this shit, indeed, special. Between contributing this grammatically incorrect but still somehow appropriate line, Khaled’s contributions to the track are hard to pin down. He doesn’t rap on the track; that’s handled by hall-of-famers Nas and Scarface, each doing a somber take on Common’s hip-hop-as-a-woman motif. Nor does Khaled produce the beat for the song; the beat was produced by young fruity-loops virtuoso Lex Lugar. There’s even some token old-school scratching. Was that Khaled on the Serato? Nope. That’s DJ Premier, also a hall of famer. Khaled’s only clearly manifest contribution to the song is saying “This shit special,” twice. And that’s what makes him kind of awesome (emphasis on the “kind of”).
Tag Archives: music
People with jobs I want: DJ Khaled, curator of rap radio bangers
On going to rap shows by yourself
Last night, I wandered down to see Action Bronson at the Independent in San Francisco by myself. It’s maybe the third or fourth time in the last year I’ve gone to see a hip-hop show by myself, and I’ve found that as long I show up at the right time, 5-10 minutes before the headliner starts, and don’t feel let myself self-conscious about flying solo, I can really enjoy myself. In my teens/twenties, going to see music wasn’t about seeing music, it was about having a night out on the town with friends, drinking, carousing, trying to sneak backstage to meet the artist, getting all kinds of high and trying/failing to hit on girls.
Nowadays, however, I drink plenty enough as it is. And most of my friends, aren’t into the same music as I am, so I’d be dragging people who weren’t interested, thinking that one live show could convert them into rap (or experimental electro or vintage soul or Belle & Sebastian) fans. I remember once, in college, taking my friend Tom, to a rap show across the border in Burlington, Vermont, two hours away. As we drove home, after four hours of various 2001-era underground rappers yelling at the audience to put their hands up and demanding to know who was getting high, Tom said, “Well, that should do it. I have seen all the live hip-hop I will need to for my whole life.” To be fair, at this age, I wouldn’t sit through four hours of that kind of show, either. I don’t care how high you are. It’s fucking boring. Especially, I assume, by yourself.
Am I too old to get into the Beatles?
As kids come of age, and get into music, there are all kinds of different paths they take to define their palette as music listeners. Some are influenced by their parents’ musical tastes, which provide the foundation for their nascent musical development. Others follow the lead a cool older sibling, who feed their musical appetites with cassette singles of whatever cool older siblings were listening to that week. Unfortunately, my parents only listened to NPR and my older brother had a pretty severe learning disability, so I was on my fucking own. And as such, I had a weird musical upbringing on my way to becoming a genuine music nerd.
I don’t know when or where it happened, but somehow it got into my head that cool kids didn’t listen to the music all the other kids listened to. I remember in second grade, when everyone my age was getting in MC Hammer and Kris Kross, I was getting into my Soul II Soul cassette, a band which I had learned about from their cover of The Little Mermaid’s “Kiss the Girl” on the Disney’s Simply Mad About the Mouse music video collection. “This shit is so underground,” I thought to myself. The impulse, thoughout my life, has led me to be incredibly insular and nerdy about music. I can’t honestly say if that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s the way it is.
Rapping adulthood: a Q&A with rapper/producer K.Flay
Rapper/singer/producer/adult K.Flay has been garnering a modicum of buzz in Bay Area since graduating from Stanford, but she first really caught our ear with the release of last year’s I Stopped Caring in ’96. The project was an eclectic mix of electro-rap bangers about growing up and individuality, with a small dose of existential despair mixed in. If yr an adult were an FM-radio station in an alternate universe, this banger would have been on HEAVY rotation all last summer (also, our yearly summer jam concert festival would be called “The Big Chill”). Flay has stayed busy, releasing a new EP a few months ago, dropping remix after remix and touring religiously. Luckily, she was able to find a hot minute to answer some of our questions about growing up and making music.
yr an adult: A lot of the subject matter of a lot of your songs seems to be about growing up, (which is obviously what made you of interest to a site about facing adulthood) – why do you think your own emerging adulthood is a theme your interested in?
K.Flay: Mainly because I feel like we’re living in a time in which it’s easy not to grow up. People are incredibly preoccupied with preserving youth, both in a physical sense & a conceptual one. iI’s kind of insane when you think about it.
Quote of the day
You’re just not as hip as you were, and it’s always bothered me when I see aging rock stars who don’t embrace that fully and try to be young and hip. You see some wrinkled-up old rocker with tattoos all over him; he’s not fooling anybody, you know, he’s like an old fart. When I’m an old fart, I want to really embrace it. To me, that’s punk rock, and it’s all about punk rock in the end.
Aaron Freeman, aka “Dean Wean” of Ween, in a very frank interview with the AV Club, about being in recovery, his new solo album and getting older. This, I believe, is the first quote of the day that’s from an interview that took place from a recover clinic. Bonus!
#THINGRECAP Vice/Intel’s Creators Project in San Francisco
The Creators Project was a thing that happened in San Francisco over the weekend.
Ok. More specifically, it was one of a handful of international branded “experiences”, produced by Vice’s marketing wing on behalf of Intel, who, I believe, make robots. The mission of the Creator’s Project is ostensibly to “celebrate art and technology”, but more specifically, it’s to make 18-34 year olds associate Intel with hip artists, musicians and technologists. To achieve this goal, Vice has also built Intel a videowebsiteseries that apparently 25 million people have looked at once and then not looked at ever again. (This is all from the press release)
Why it might be time to start listening to political rap again
I was drinking at a friends house last weekend, and, being millenials, instead of just putting on an album, someone pulled out the laptop-projector combo and we played my very well curated vhx.tv rap video playlist. We stood around drinking, sometimes paying attention to the screen and enjoying the antics of Azealia Banks and Odd Future and Fat Joe, et al. Then, Yasiin Bey’s (née Mos Def) remake of “N**gas in Paris”, “N**gas in Poorest” came on and everyone stopped in their tracks to watch it.
The video, embedded above, sent a message to us that, Oh yeah. All the songs we like now are about how great it would to be rich, and none of them are about how fucked up we are for thinking that. Once the next Rick Ross video came on, we went back to our prior positions, but the situation got me thinking that, even though I like fun, dumb music, I (and I think many of the people I know) wold also appreciate some music that reflects and affects reality.
Should you go to Coachella?
If you’re like me, and have been before, the answer is probably no. Here’s my rationale:
- Coachella costs a TON of money just for the tickets, not to mention food, drinks, travel out there. ATM fees will be like, $40 alone.
- You either have to camp, with a bunch of teenagers and Australian/European backpackers, OR you have to get a condo or hotel, which, unless you’re spending a ton to be walking distance to the polo grounds, you have to drive to.
- Coachella traffic, either on the 10, or just to get in or out of the parking lot, is the worst thing ever.
- There’s a ton of great bands, but very few are great bands to see while sweating your balls off at 4 pm in the scorching sun. Most of the music you’ll see will be to just check it off the list, like “I’ve never seen Bjork before. I guess I’ll go check it out while I wait for the next thing”.
However, if my curmudgeon-ism hasn’t dissuaded you, there’s this site, Should I go Coachella, which will give you a quiz to see whether you should go based on the music. But trust me, you shouldn’t.
Photo credit: Flickr user gleggers, used under cc license