The fight for diverse and conscious voices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0ytoUuO-qvg

A nice video summarizing a recent court case against Katy Perry, another in a long string of frankly godawful abuses of copyright in music. Take an ignorant judge, an easily confused jury, a compliant "expert" witness to befuddle said judge and jury, and lawyers unscrupulous enough to prioritize their payout over general good sense and you get... well, the American legal system.

But I digress. What you get is a string of increasingly bad court decisions that stretch back at least as far as when hip-hop started making money in, like, the 1980s. Only they've gotten significantly worse in the past decade with farther-reaching decisions. The video maker calls out the expert witness for, effectively, lying - which he did - and props back to "Moments in Love" by Art of Noise.

A fitting way to close out, so here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux3u31SAeEM

It's been a while since I posted any music so I've got a bucket of open tabs. What follows is a sampling of the most awesome stuff in a while.

http://soundcloud.com/kleptones/a-night-at-the-hip-hopera
This is an hour and eighteen minutes of concentrated AWESOME. It's a huge flashback to things that were popular - and being remixed - in 2004 when the set was put together. There's a heavy helping of 90s and 80s favorites and some of the best hip-hop from the first part of the decade. The Kleptones have been brilliant for longer than I realized.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/divide-kreate-tarzan-gurls.html
There's this notion of a "summer song" that's hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. Generally it's up-tempo, not too fast, and just bouncy enough you won't get in trouble blaring it out speakers next to your beach towel. Here Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) give us one such tune by mashing up Katy Perry's "California Gurls" with Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". Katy Perry's tune was already listed on Billboard's "Songs of the Summer" chart (http://www.mtv.com/videos/katy-perry/527631/california-gurls.jhtml) and what Divide & Kreate has done is keep the essential female vocal from Perry and laid it over the electronica and boy-band backing sounds of Baltimora's one-hit wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0n9Dv6XnY).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/dj-fresh-gold-dust.html
Also in the summer-sound category, but in a very different way, is DJ Fresh's "Gold Dust." Where the first one was very white and beach, this one is black and inner-city playground. You absolutely MUST watch the video for this - it features some of the most amazing double-dutch I've seen in a long time. How Fresh (http://www.myspace.com/freshbadcompany) who is himself a white boy from the UK, managed to put this together is beyond me.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/superiddol-superman-simon-iddol.html
At last something new from Simon Iddol himself. Well, it's not precisely new - all the tracks in this mix are ones I've heard before. Iddol and a friend who DJs as Superman put this five-track sampler together as a promo for their July shows. It's a blast!

http://www.rhythmscholar.com/
Once upon a time the legendary Fatboy Slim teamed up with Christopher Walken to make a video for "Weapon of Choice." The video showed off Walken's dancing skills - he's no Fred Astaire but he was pretty damned good. Recently someone pointed me to a remix not just of the song, but of the accompanying video. The video was done by someone calling himself gfxdave99 (http://www.youtube.com/user/gfxdave99) to match a mix of the song done by Rhythm Scholar - a Chicago-area DJ. Well, if you're looking at the Scholar's page in another tab (as you should be) you can see he's got six different mixes of just this one tune. All the mixes are good, provided you don't object strenuously to scratch-dub.

And below that, my kind of music heaven. A dozen funky mixes of old favorites. Everything from Tom Tom Club to (gods help us) Billy Squier, with side trips into The Fixx, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Queen. The mix style tends to be somewhat similar from mix to mix - scratch/stutter, some beat-shifting, lots of sampling, and some very clever layering. Plus phat horns and funky extra bonus bits.

I particularly fell in love with his Art of Noise remix. I'm a long-time AoN fan(*) to begin with, and nobody remixes AoN. They've remixed themselves several times, but their sound is generally too odd and experimental for most folk. Rhythm Scholar does an amazing job blending together at least 8 different AoN tunes that I could identify, sampling stuff from their very early days to more recent pieces.

(*) Back in the days when music came on things called "records" that were made of "vinyl" I used to be an impoverished college student. Which meant I couldn't afford new records. I used to ride my bike down to Philly two or three times a month and pick over the really cheap offerings in the used record stores down there. The place was on South Street, near Zipperhead, back when that part of town was punk and slightly edgy, which it most certainly is not these days. I once saw Siouxsie and the Banshees doing promo songs from the back of a stripped down flatbed trailer truck down there. But I digress...

Anyway, one of those days I'm pawing through the bins and I realize that there's something different playing from the store's speakers. It's nohow like the usual 80s pop. It's kind of oddly clashing... and it appears to feature chainsaws. But it's got a beat. Ah yes, that beat. I abandon any of my usual youthful pretense of being hip and hurry up to the counter. What the heck is that? It's The Art of Noise, "Beatbox" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyGdk23KNU). The clerk, who doesn't have to pretend to be hip, motions me to be quiet and just listen. Which I do. And then I buy out every AoN record he has in the store, undergrad student budget be damned.

Once upon a time, record stores had clerks who Knew Things. Their jobs let them listen to music all day long and pass judgment on the good, the bad, and the things that were so good everyone ought to know about them but nobody did. When I blog about music I feel like I'm paying back a little of what I got from people like that unnamed clerk in that South Street record store.