I Shit Music

There was a time in my youth when I was straight-up addicted to Mountain Dew. The destruction of a 6-pack was an easy afternoon affair, and when they made the genius and frightening move to introduce the wide-mouth can to the soda universe in the mid-90s, shit got  out of control. The first can was like a primer – it wouldn’t even touch my mouth. It’d just kind of rapidly coat my throat in preparation for the subsequent can that I would take a solid 90 seconds to savor. Thus it was right around this time when my teenage hippie mind decided this shit was no fucking good for me. It was also right around the time when the rumors began to circulate about Yellow-5 making you sterile… or impotent… or doing something shitty to your penis – I can’t really remember. Anyway, despite not having touched the stuff in nearly 20 years, I still hold a fondness for the natural absurdity of the product itself. Thus, I’ve been quite intrigued by the past week’s news of two different musical spokespersons being fired from the Dew’s ad campaigns.

Here’s the thing: MTN DEW brings to mind off-the-wall, zany shit. So they try to get some zany motherfuckers to hype the stuff. You’re not gonna get the dudes from Bon Iver to promote the Dew, you’re gonna get some nutso jack-off like Lil Wayne. But if you’re the Dew, you should have been prepared for Weezy to drop the occasional line causally referencing a lynching victim from the 50′s as he just did with a horrid line about Emmett Till. Thus the Dew just dropped him. As a side note, as somebody who keeps getting hospitalized for near-fatal seizures, maybe chugging Mountain Dew isn’t the best idea for Weezy anyway.

So what other nutso rappers could the Dew go to – well how about Tyler the Creator? He sarcastically raps about rape and murder on a casual basis – sure he’d be great at bringing in the kids. But whoops, Tyler’s latest directed commercial for the Dew was deemed overly racist and was pulled down. It featured a goat standing in a police lineup with some black fellas, and in my opinion wasn’t really racist. The problem was it just wasn’t funny. Either way – that’s two strikes in about 4 days for the Dew, and perhaps it’s time they rethought their promotional attack. That is, unless this was all some intentional move to use random controversy to put their name in some unexpected places. That’s obviously quite potentially true, but I think they’d be better of showing some hyper-teens chugging the liquid sunshine. You know, Bieber that shit out or something. Or even better, just have this fake-ad by Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney play on a loop somewhere all day.

50-41 – http://www.ishitmusic.com/?p=122

40-31 – http://www.ishitmusic.com/?p=124
 

30) Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
- Of all the young kids that Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox has obviously influenced, no one has been able to define their own voice as much as this youngen from Boise. Floating vocals are strengthened by big bass kicks and an incredible ear for uncluttered melodies. Trevor Powers sounds like the kid from the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are recording an album in his basement 10 year later – incredibly warm and caring, comfortably alone, and with echoes of Karen O ringing in his ears.

29) Broken Bells – Meyrin Fields EP
- Danger Mouse can bring anybody up a few notches on the bad-ass ladder, and James Mercer should forever be in his debt. There’s just something so much ballsier about these tunes than anything The Shins ever put out. There may only be 4 tunes on this EP, but they’re just as dope as those on the debut LP. This is the kind of music that makes you feel like you’re James Bond stealth attacking an evil-madman’s Icelandic lair while an enormous joint hangs off your lip.

28)  War on Drugs – Slave Ambient
- Finally somebody brought a taste of dream-pop into a successful cohesion with that classic Americana feel. Once fronted by Kurt Vile, a whole new lineup seems to have ignited this band into an amazing album that falls somewhere between the land cohabitated by Dire Straits and My Bloody Valentine. Adam Grunduciel has some amazing ideas on here – the kind that make you want to start your own shoegaze band all over again.

27)  Death Cab for Cutie – Codes and Keys
- Death Cab makes killer albums, that’s all there is to it. They may always be the great bridge between middle-aged hipsters and tween-age girls, but once you let go of all preconceptions they can totally take control of your heart. There’s no direct radio hit on Codes and Keys, and that’s a good thing. If you’ve spent any time with the classic Transatlanticismi¸ this is in many ways its’ sister album. Incredible drum lines shape the entire album, much in the same way that Jason McGerr helped mold the songs on Transatlanticism, his first album with the band. And portending his breakup from Zooey Deschanel, it’s quite obvious that Ben Gibbard writes way better songs when his heart is a little broken.

26) Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for My Halo
- I’m sure they let you smoke butts in heaven, and Kurt Vile couldn’t have been more right on then crafting this image for his music. These solo, acoustic tunes are drifty and dreamy, but at the same time they make me want to drink shitty beer. The imagery and flow to the tunes make em’ sound like an old Sonic Youth album stripped down to its’ most naked form. First listen is casual, and then it may consume you.

25)  The Flaming Lips – Gummy Song Skull EP (and) Lips w/ Neon Indian
- Wayne Coyne and cohorts have been a friggin’ psych-rock factory the past year or so. It seems like they released a new EP every month, so I had to include 2 here on my list. The tracks contained inside a 7 pound human skull made of gummy sound like a Phish soundcheck where everybody’s trying out a new synthesizer. And of all the collabortations they keep releasing, nothing was more natural than these 4 tracks with Neon Indian.  Somehow eerie and uplifting at the same time.

24) The New Mastersounds – Breaks From the Border
- When this English four-piece announced they would be including vocals on their new album, my reaction was “Well, say goodbye to one of the tightest funk acts you’ve ever seen.” But lo and behold, something magical happened – instead of being sonic peers to 1997-era Medeski and Scofield, they became the only band that could ever live up to the heritage of The Meters. Soul, speed, and perfection – you can picture the Neville Borthers cranking this album in their homes.

23) Grouplove – Never Trust a Happy Song
- My favorite pop-rock band in quite some time. It is insanely tough to write this music without sounding like complete tools, but they mix the ideal parts of melody, fun, and rock to make an amazingly perfect pop album. So much groovier and more interesting than Edward Sharpe or any of the other quasi-popular indie-pops band out there today. I crank this record when I’m home by myself.

22) Tyler the Creator – Goblin
- I haven’t had music make me feel this way since the 2^nd Eminem album came out. Inappropriate “F” words flow freely, plenty of murder, and the most innovative beats on the scene today. This is America, and we are legally allowed to be as politically-incorrect as we want to be. You gotta respect a kid who is definitely not afraid to have FoxNews blame him for all our problems. I love this shit.

21)  Cloud Nothings – Cloud Nothings
- Dylan Baldi has already released his 2012 album which finds his sound progressing in unfathomably fast ways, but this eponymous disc is his primary statement of purpose. The finest in today’s neo-punk scene – these songs are fast, hard, and yet full of incredible melodies. If the kid likes a line, he’ll repeat it just to the point where you’re ready to bash your head against the wall, and that’s a huge part of the reason why I dig this album so much.

Two new tracks I’m co-mingulating with today in the hip-hop underground overview scene. The first, I suppose isn’t all that new, but it is a new video with Odd Future’s Tyler the Creator on a cut with The Game. I guess this was on Game’s new album, but he seems to have hung low in the non-chalent rap-fan scene as of late. Like everybody, he’s trying to hop on the Odd Future train, and he does it with so-so results. He comes off as an aging lyricist doing a sub-par Eminem impersonation, and then he totally gets owned by Tyler’s verse. The kid has a humble swagger to his flow that is the true magic to his songs – he makes scary shit seem like a joke, and hard as everyone else may try, their impersonations sound hokey. Plus he highlights in his verse how Game is doing that exact same thing basically and follows with the un-arugable line: “My crew is running shit like we have full-cleat Adidas getting chased by polices on a full-bred cheetah.” Either way, the video is fun and scary, and watch the young gun at the top of his form.

Next is the new track form Heems of Das Racist, whose solo mix-tape Nehru Jackets is supposed to be coming out in a couple weeks. Along the same lines of an underground rap-scene becoming the hip-lean for the big-boys, Heems too is a master of mocking his notoriety. Bringing it back to the mid-90′s with the track “Alien Gonzales,” (hence the photo) this track feels like more of the Das Racist I fell in love with that I feel got squeezed out a bit on this year’s formal release. I guess the desirable feeling is the massive notion of how much he doesn’t give a fuck, and that creates his best moments. Such as on this track when he momentarily debates the pronunciaton of Danny Zuko. Stream it here: http://nehrujackets.tumblr.com/post/14506755410/produced-by-mike-finito-nehrujackets

OFWGKTA – Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All – If you ask me, I’ve kinda been waiting for something like these guys to come around for more than a hot minute. The young L.A. crew is composed of anywhere from 11 to a purported 70 members, but is essentially focused around the leader, Tyler, The Creator. His homeboy Hodgy Beats seems to be a key member and definite live co-lead man, but after that I get lost in folks like Domo Genesis, Frank Ocean, and Earl Sweatshit << god, I love that fucking name. That’s my new favorite MC name…well, actually it’s gonna fall second to that bro Lacudis who shows up on some of those Das Racist tracks. Anybody that gets their name from the term the Borg used when they integrated Captain Picard into one of their own collective – yeah that guy’s wicked cool with me.

            Anyway, Odd Future are all about embracing this kind of twisted, dark humor-laden rap – it’s like the old RZA project Gravediggaz with some resonance even of Eminem at his finest moments of tongue-in-cheek evil. It’s definitely pretty fucked-up shit, but I can’t help but really fall in love with it. There’s something about a bunch of 20 year olds from L.A. that make you feel uncomfortable and are all about pushing shit as far as anybody can these days. Lots of gore, violence, suicide – you know, all the crap that makes Tipper Gore secretly climax while she admonishes it in public. And they’re fairly into embracing the wild side as well – hell they’re fucking kids… but in the past 2 weeks Tyler has been arrested for public indecency, a riot broke out at Newbury Comics in Boston, Earl has been discovered in some foreign youth rehab lockdown, and the band justifiably punched a few members of their audience after bottles were thrown at their heads in Detroit. But the rest of the show was reportedly fantastic as was the slamming set they threw down at Coachella a couple weeks back. Kids are no fuckin’ joke. The beats are dope though – scary, simplistic freaky side of RZAesque. Check out this killer (literally) track from Tyler below. Definitely not for everybody, but it’s fun on a sunny day. www.oddfuture.com