TAN

• 2011-11-19

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  bye bye blackbird, miles davis

• 2011-07-22

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  Everything Happens to Me, Chet Baker

  I make a date for golf, you can bet your life it rains
  I try to give a party, the guy upstairs complains
  I guess I’ll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains
  Everything happens to me

  I wish there were more of these sad, droopy dog songs in hip hop. Kanye getting stood up in the rain, and a cab drives through a puddle and splashes him. drat! am I just missing these? Seems we go from slavery, civil rights Angry to Power/HAM with little drat! in-between (well, except for pointed problems-with-girls stuff).

  “Everything I Am” is kind of close to the sound I’m thinking. But would need a little more of that subtle algonquin round table wit, or something. what’s the closest thing to a sinatra or chet baker aesthetic in hip hop?

• 2011-05-20

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  So in one of my scripts I have a female character whose parents died and left her as sole proprietor of a Ghetto Chinese Spot. And she has to give up on her burgeoning modeling career to hold down the restaurant and support the family. She’s sort of like a manic pixie dream girl, functionally, story-wise, but with a twist of ghetto General Tso’s in terms of character. I like the aspirational betwixt-socio-classes assimilated space she occupies (embraces!). 

  The girl is a HUGE Wes Montgomery fan, and her GCS plays STRICTLY Wes Montgomery and nothing else. It’s also very quirkily decorated. And in the scene where Manic Bi-Polar Ghetto Chinese Girl from the Real World discovers, announces, that the rising tide of emotions she feels for the main male character will afford them no lovesurfing anytime soon (does that make sense? they like each other but can’t make it happen), this song, Too Late Now, is the one I hope makes the soundtrack. so wistful! Wes has Wistful on LOCKDOWN!!

  The Olivia Wilde talking magazine cover makes me think how awesome it would be if technology could allow scripts/screenplays to play audio in the appropriate parts. I mean, music is such a big part of good cinematic storytelling. And in some ways it’s cheating a little bit, but in some ways it’s just the power of music to communicate what no actor or dialogue can. Sometimes music writes the scene. Wes is strumming the exposition here. If you listen to this song, and feel it, then you can probably write the “Parting Ways in the Ghetto Chinese Spot” scene as well as I could.  

• 2010-07-13

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  It Had To Be You, Billie Holiday

  (It had to be me to finish writing this book today; back to play Internet soon!)

• 2010-07-08

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  Minha Galera, Manu Chao

  Manu Chao makes brilliant, all-purpose, assimilated music; he wins every day and thrice on (what’s today?) Thursday:

  Assimilated Objective #1: He’s an itunes(or whatever) chameleon that blends in seamlessly with a ‘just chilling’, or party vibe. 

  Assimilated Objective #2: the mix of language and musical influences (French, Spanish, English, Portugese singing; with Rock, Reggae, Latin and Punk rhythms) projects that multicultural James Bond Casanova vibe everyone, I’m, YOU’RE going for. Maybe like if Vampire Weekend and Che Guevara had a baby? and the baby was cool/mature enough to have a ‘vibe’? I guess that would be too trendy/popular for our purposes, but still … maybe if we had that baby before the internet? 

  Assimilated Objective #3: And, from what I can understand, he mostly sings about love, freedom, and marijuana…. and, y’know, like who doesn’t get all warm and bothered by worldly cosmopolitan-sophisticate smoke-weed-make-love-every-day songs??? 

• 2010-07-01

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  “Young and Foolish”, by Bill Evans.

  When you Youngs (of any age!) wake up one day from uneasy dreams, only to find yourself changed overnight into a monstrous Grown Up (at any age!), you go on ahead and blow the dust off this one for a spin on the ol’ iVictrola and see if you don’t get a little something foolish in your eye. Ok, hush now….

• 2010-06-04

  I mean, Bill Evans’s ”Peace Piece” might very well be the perfect grown-folks-get-it-on-too song to play after a date, or for a significant other, after a date. And so it’s cool the internet offers up an effective tutorial on how to learn to play it. Good thinking, internet. Smooth moves to come…

• 2010-05-27

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  Been listening to a lot of “Live” albums recently in search of inspiration for a “Live” hip hop mixtape. Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison is pretty awesome (i think this would be the album to give a hip hop head looking squinty-eyed at Cash or country music in general). this is the song “Busted” from that show. 

  I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard this song in more commercials and ads over the past year or so as part of the ‘Soundtrack to the Recession’. 

• 2010-05-22

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  Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Wes Montgomery. Has to be one of the best named songs in the history of the universe. I’ve been on a Wes Montgomery kick of late; he’s a popular go-to for hip hop samples old and new (research), and it’s also just good music (recreation).

  I prefer this smooth instrumental weekend-chill recording, but Sinatra’s lyrical version helps one hold hands with the sweet-quirk essence of the title, “there were questions but my heart knew all the answers, and perhaps a few things more”…. 

• 2010-05-21

  Norman Mailer was most definitely a rapper. The Naked and the Dead is his street album; his Reasonable Doubt or Illmatic. That’s forever cred. But in my opinion what really gave Mailer that swagger was his willingness to take it off the books into the streets ANY TIME YOU WANT. ARE YOU READY TO APOLOGIZE???

  Nas is supposed to be hardcore rapper. Tough. How come he didn’t stab his wife Kelis with a ballpoint pen then? You think quick-bic Norman would let any woman walk off with his Pulitzer paper? You do no want it with NoMal! 

  KRS-One once famously threw PM Dawn off the stage. Mailer was this type. Aggressive, hostile ego. violent alpha-intellectual. And what distinguishes their brand of bombast for the better is the egotism is not rooted in capitalism. It’s art, culture, country. If Mailer was in his prime now, rapping, he might not be rich or lavished with awards, but there would definitely be some bloggers with black eyes. Some of these fools hurting my sense of intellectual pollution. 

• 2010-05-16

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  Horny Toad. two minutes of nice ipod candy from Prince. The sensibility of this feels very Platonic Ideal of Lady Gaga to me; I’d love to see her with a few more Horny Toads under her belt, maybe like “Brown Eyes” but punchier and dirtier.  We know Prince was a Big Serious Genius artist, but back in the days he subverted so much of that for the sake of a short, simple flourish of pop that didn’t think much at all. He compartmentalized, where Gaga seems to be trying to get operas on the radio.