You Are Listening to Los Angeles

My new favorite website. Ambient synth music from soundcloud is juxtaposed with the LAPD police scanner. It’s like the seedy underbelly counterpart to sunny California new age optimism.

Shady’s rapping is a welcome change of pace (literally, if you make it about halfway through the tape) from the recent solo Squadda offerings available. Meanwhile Squadda’s production is top notch as usual, but he really ups the ante with the most massive dubby bass I’ve heard from an American musician in a longtime. I had to crank down the EQ when I played this on my stereo to avoid blowing out the speakers.

What really stands out here is the similar sort of promise that dubstep offered before everyone in the U.K. got bored and started doing “funky” — creating emotionally deep music coming from a post-rave experience. Squadda’s production features all sorts of odes and nods to rave music, like the pitch-shifted, looped vocals, the stabby synth riffs, and the general feel of music that is very much fueled by ecstasy (which also had a huge impact on shoegazer, another sort of critical aesthetic point of reference). It’s hardly surprising you would see these sorts of shared cultural experience come out of Bay Area rap; when it seemed like hyphy might break out into the mainstream one of the strategies pursued was to change songs about thizzing to songs about drinking beer, or whatever. It all ends up reaffirming that line by Jean Baudrillard in America about how anything that Europeans are capable of imagining is going to inevitably show up in California.

Also, of somewhat related interest, although I have a basic familiarity with Jerkin’ and the culture that it entails for over a year now thanks to the internet, it was only this month that I actually personally witnessed a black teenager in skinny jeans. I sometimes like to think about how science fiction was once the stuff people would write about concerning the future, but these days science fiction mostly consists of stuff going on in the present, but perhaps we will soon be entering a phase where science fiction is the stuff that we are writing about from the past that we are only now fully aware of.

Last night I was at an excellent show at Mighty that started out with some fresh cumbia jams from the always excellent Bersa Disco, and then The Very Best – a collaboration between Radioclit & Esau Mwamwaya. One thing worth pointing out was the video projector at the space was projecting images of safari animals.

(Man, that clip has such a corny Paul Simon vibe)

The juxtaposition of this signifier of Africa with their forward-thinking, very contemporary music makes an obvious enough statement, and you can understand an artist wanting to make this point in the U.S. where the idea of Africa is still very obscure to our minds.

All of which is to say it is great meeting different kinds of people. Allow me to introduce myself by way of sharing music:

Trip on Highway 1

As the title suggests, this song was inspired by California’s stunning coastal highway route. It really is as beautiful as everyone says it is. I remember California being described as a collision/amalgamation of islands, and that is why the landscape here is diverse and ecstatic. I think that is a very beautiful metaphor for something, but for what I cannot yet say exactly.