Fader

There are very few artists who can put out a new video for a five or six year old song and get us to post it. Ariel Pink is one of them. "Gray Sunset" is a song off The Doldrums, an album which Ariel explained as "really weird in the sense that I don't know of anything—historically speaking—that is predicated on a generation of mistakes that led the course to a final product," in Issue 27 of The FADER, and we gotta say that it still sounds as strange and mistakenly great as the first time we heard it. The video was shot and edited by Travis Peterson in LA last week on a 1983 Sony tube video camera and debuts Ariel's new androgynous look which oddly looks like a genetic splicing of a couple people in this office.

How did we never post any of these videos before? They are all actually fairly old, but for whatever reason amid all our TTA gushing we've only posted a live version of "First Class Riot," where you can't really see anything except maybe some shots of a guy in a cape. Here's the real video, which makes us appreciate that dolphins are really weird if you think about it and also What the hell we saw The Tough Alliance live and it was one of the most epic concert performances we have seen and this video is the closest we've seen to anything capturing that. Check out a bunch of old TTA videos that we've been watching for a million years that we never posted. more...

See, this is what we miss most about Dipset. We don't even have to explain what's going on here. Coogi cardigans and Swag Splashes. Pure entertainment. Courtesy of SmackTube via Smarten Up Nas.

Did you know we put Love is All on our cover? (Issue 37!) We gotta be honest and say that they never really took off like we clearly hoped, but they did gain a cult following (especially among FADER-staffers. "Busy Doing Nothing" is our shit on Saturday mornings when it's raining and cold but we still want to wake up and not feel like we are wrapped in like seven blankets of gauze). Annnyyyyywayyy, We thought the band fell off the face of the earth for a minute, but it turns out they didn't! After a date in DC, they're hitting New York for a show at Cake Shop on June 12th, then hopping on over to Philly for a night before coming back to NY on the 14th for a show at the Market Hotel. Both New York shows will be stifling hot, but we'll be there regardless because we love Love Is All. Check out a video of them performing for Hand Held Shows outside with a really loud keyboard above.

We can pretty safely file this one in the Things We Should Have Paid More Attention To folder (thanks to Daniel Arnold for making sure we didn't overlook this one any longer), because Pepi Ginsberg is making some excellent Joni Mitchell-esque piano folk that also sounds like Dr Dog with a female singer. That's probably not even a coincidence considering they are on the same label and have done songs (including this one) together. Seriously though, this is music for summer morning subway rides to work and walks in the park, both things that we plan on doing constantly. Happy Times dudes!

There are very few, if any, labels as committed to bizarre rap tangents than Stones Throw, but this new dude James Pants is something else. It's almost like they don't want to sell any records and yet they do because their oddities are just genius enough to be worth blowing a couple cheeseburgers on. Pants barely makes songs at all, just weird synth journeys that are probably kind of frightening to listen to if you're not in a stable mindstate. "Cosmic Rapp" (above) is the shyest electro ever, "Ka$h" is like Timberlake if he grew up in an orphanage and this "I Ain't Trippin" remix makes $hort Dog sound like a grandnana with a broken keyboard.


Download: Too $hort, "I Ain't Trippin (James Pants Remix)"

Bonus Cut: James Pants, "Ka$h" (from Stones Throw)

No one in grime bothers with pirate radio sets anymore, which is maybe the reason why the scene has been so boring and lacking life this year. So, just as the music press were penning another round of obituaries and preparing to make way for a new electro-influenced, chart friendly replacement, along come Boy Better Know and friends with a stupendously good studio set (the next best thing to a radio set) to bring back all the naysayers. It's got classic old beats, amazing new beats by people like Rude Kid, excitement, brand new bars, energy, Jammer screaming and making retarded noises—everything that is good about grime. I don't see why MCs continue to put out rushed mixtapes, when they could much more easily bang these sets out with all the best new beats and their best bars and sell them as downloads. They'd be a lot better quality and probably sell a lot more too.

Download: Boy Better Know, Microphone Champion
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DJ Mr Singh has been throwing parties at Django's in Atlanta for a hot minute now, helping import Washington DC go-go music to the A by pairing the likes of Killer Mike and Sleepy Brown with live go-go bands. We even sponsored one. Y'know, because we are regional pop culture fetishists. And LOVERS OF MUSIC. This Friday (5/9), Singh continues his hot streak of pairing FADER faves with cranking live percussion by inviting the unbreakable DG Yola to take the stage backed by the XO Band. How ill is their congo-ed out version of "Ain't Gon Let Up" from the rehearsal sesh?!? Flyer after the jump. more...

Okay, you can't make two songs that are totally different and call them the same thing, Vybz. Even George Foreman named his kids George 1, 2, 3, etc. and those things were separated by time. Your two songs named the same thing came out at the same time. It doesn't make any sense. It leads to total praise anarchy. Because if we go, Hey Vybz, we love your song "Money Fi Spend" and you're like Thanks, Fader. Yeah, that song "Money Fi Spend" is one of my best works, you're not only not getting a real appraisal of your work but you're robbing yourself of the sense of pride in completing a piece of art. Man, these songs are both awesome.

Exhibit A: "Money Fi Spend"
Exhibit B: "Money Fi Spend"

Update from Contributing Editor and Ghetto Palms columnist Edwin 'Stats' Houghton:

"Welcome to Jamrock."

When TVT Records shut down this year, our honest first response was But what about Dude N Nem? For the Dude dudes to get signed by what was a leftfield-but-focused label gave us hope that their album would get a great push and much deserved attention (And maybe what? Ying Yang-level commercial success?). So now that that deal's done, we're left to monitoring YouTube for random fan videos of hidden Dude N Nem gems like "Get Away!" (above) with cut-up footage of bootleg Godzilla. And then there's "Believe", which after last night, Obama fans can do a little more, but doesn't do much to make us believe in the reality of a Dude N Nem album anytime soon. Steve Gottlieb, holler at us, and we will sell that joint out of our bike baskets.

Nelly's comeback clip has been kicking around for a month or two, but we just saw it laaaaaaaate last night on cable and it gave us nightmares. Since this video first aired, Nelly has released a fake hyphy song and Fergie has leaked (wocka wocka!) the theme to that despicable Sex And The City movie, yet neither of those scale the same heights of bummeritude as Polow Da Don DJing in the first fifteen seconds. It's not the pretend scratching (everybody does it), or even the product placement for Dr Dre's headphone line (can't knock team spirit), it's the simple fact that "Party People" forces us to imagine being in a club where Da Don is hypothetically DJing. And. That. Sucks. Have you ever SEEN a famous music person commandeer the decks in real life? Shit's about as fun as tooth surgery. Jermaine Dupri (or Lil Jon or Pete Wentz or Nick Cannon-Carey), somewhere in Las Vegas where they have waterfalls in the bathroom, cueing up "Sweet Child O Mine" on an iPod, times infinity. It's an incontrovertibly true fact of truth! But Polow! You make songs we actually want to hear when we go out! You're better than this! Yet our hero is doomed to one day break our hearts (he wears rhinestoned tattoo shirts, it's more or less predestined), and we have the Band-Aid faced St Lunatic to thank for such a sad 5am realization. Where was sweet, sweet Tylenol PM when we needed her most?!?

The last time we had an in-depth look at Ol' Dirty Bastard's life, it was the VH1 special about what he was doing after being released from jail. He was subdued and seemed depressed and was working on a still not technically released album. Apparently ODB's brother has been working on a documentary about his life, interviewing everyone from Ghostface to the most third string of third string Wu affiliates. It remains to be seen how well-made this thing actually is, but any insight into the weirdest dude in rap is always welcome.

It is warm outside and it is Cinco de Mayo so we are imagining how dope it would be to kick it with Kardi and Akon on an island (or a beach or wherever) during the making of this video. We would sit with them in some sun chairs and drink Margaritas and then we would go to the carnival and get our pictures taken on fake covers of magazines, like they do with the video chick in this joint. Only instead of King magazine, we would all be on the cover of Monocle together and we'd have an in-depth discussion about the socioeconomics of Indonesia and how it affects the global dollmaking market, as seen through the lens of free-trade textiles post-NAFTA, as influenced by the US sanctions on Cuba. Then we would have a dance off.

Remember those weird double-jointed robot legs in the pumps and bootie shorts from "Rockit"? And how they made the two robot dudes in the chair pop hydraulic boners? We're not saying Chromeo stole any ideas here, but we are saying there are weird pumped and bootie-shorted legs in this video and dudes's privates are largely hidden from view. SUSPECT.

Goobers stay making music video dedications to Barack these days, so though we usually watch once and move on to more important matters (watching the candidates), we had to put this one up since it's by Taz of Sa-Ra and has cameos from half the people we've put in the magazine in the last 5 years. Okay maybe not that many but A LOT. It also is claimed to be Taz's first solo single and kinda sounds like an A-Trak/Crookers remix of "Today Was A Good Day."

Last week we gave you the song, and this morning we've got the video (from OnSmash) which is sorta like Cliffs Notes for The Harder They Come.

In this video, Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent plays 'Wolves" in the back of a black cab while wearing a weird hat. Most of the time you can't see the details of his face because it's so bright outside. There are a lot of things we liked about Phosphorescent's Pride, and one of them was dude's ability to make the most melancholy songs ever. At this point we've seen and heard a bunch of different permutations of the track, but it is most awesome in videos like this where the extreme intimacy of the song is paired with a bunch of oblivious people walking around outside. Also dude inspired us all to grow beards last winter (even the ladies!)

At first when we saw the post entitled Spinning Studio on Kanye West's blog, we were SO excited, because finally, we thought, he has "gone there" and posted footage of his personal gym! But... no. Alas, we will have to wait to see 'Ye's Swedish design stairmasters and anime-influenced row machines though because this video is actually, literally, a "spinning studio." Gnarls Barkley bumps while the studio slowly rotates, like one of those fancy "anniversary date" restaurants in second-tier US cities (or the bar where Clooney and Lopez get their sexual tension on in Out of Sight) and we get to see what Kanye's face looks like when he is on the computer: Pensive Contemplation. There's a part where the angle shifts and the computer is facing us like it's on an altar. Then it switches back to the spinning studio / Kanye-computer shot. At 1:49, an ominous guy spins into the background; he looks exactly like a cross between Zoo TV era sunglasses Bono, and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Richard Lewis. The camera slowly spins dramatically, while Kanye types away unsuspectingly on his computer, and it stops being funny and starts being fucking scary. WHO IS THAT GUY? We have seen enough episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents to know he is standing there, patiently waiting as the studio turns, preparing to pounce when he's exactly behind young Kanye. BUT THE VIDEO FADES OUT BEFORE THE CLIMAX. Will this intruder be allowed to attack our hero? Will Kanye West pull out some futuristic architectural lazer sound gun and audio-stun Bono Lewis before he can knock 'Ye out and steal his MacBook Air, his Top Secret drum sounds, and his LiveJournal password? STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO OF THIS DRAMATIC FILM, only viewable on Lifetime.