Books on Crates

October 23rd sees the release of Books on Tape, the LP I have been working on for the last two years or so with MC Laduma Nguyuza, the other half of the hip-hop fantasy football team we call STINK TANK. Thus far on Can You Dig It? I have written primarily about my experiences digging and the thoughts that it provokes. I have tried not to use it to promote any of the music that I make from what I dig up, largely in an attempt to discourage biters. In this case, however, I decided it was my moral obligation (and hopefully also some good publicity) to post a playlist of some of the original tracks I used to put together this album. Secrecy regarding one's influences is a Hip Hop tradition as old as the genre itself, but as most of the cooler heads in the game today have noted, we insist on the tree at the expense of the forest. I hope in sharing this that my fellow beatmakers might find some inspiration in it, perhaps learn something from it. Regardless of who owns the copyrights, marketing licenses and controlling shares, Hip Hop is publicly held and employee owned and operated. We feed it, we define it, we decide whether it lives or dies. The burden of educating each other and inspiring each other is on us. The government won't do it, the TV won't do it, the fucking radio certainly won't do it. Can you dig it?
Books on Crates

The Future Was Yesterday

A week or two ago I was in Madison's West Side Savers looking for a new futon mattress. Finding one relatively quickly, I noticed that the furniture section had an unusually large amount of cool, vintage stuff including a huge deco vanity on sale for $40. I wasn't really in the market for an enormous vanity, but I started to get that hum in my gut, a sort of vinyl spidey-sense, that told me that something serious was nearby. The beauty of a thrift store is that it is never the same place from one week to another; one day its dented aluminum bunk beds, the next its antique armoirs. This usually applies to vinyl as well. The Savers crates are the same old Herb Alpert/Mantovani/Harry Belafonte bullshit you can find anywhere. But I quickly flipped through what they had, only to have my own shit flipped.



101 Strings is a concept that was created by record mogul David L. Miller around 1958. This also happened to be the same year that the first stereo record was released by a label calling itself Audio Fidelity. Soon the record industry would go absolutely goofy over stereo, putting out "High Fidelity Test Records" that, because of their bizarre and dramatic panning effects, were meant to be used to show off your hi-fi set. These records usually drew their songlist from a pool of popular standards. I can't tell you how many different versions of Autumn Leaves I have, but its a shitload. All of these records had some sort of gimmick (a bunch of zithers, maybe, or perhaps a Chinese Tree Bell!), and Miller decided his gimmick was going to be 101 Strings (the orchestra usually consisted of about 124 members, but who's counting?). This proved quite a versatile template; 24 101 Strings albums were put out in 1958 alone.



And most of them suck pretty bad. When it comes down to it, there's not much of a difference between 101 Strings and 51 Strings, even if they are being rapidly panned back and forth. But sometimes the zeitgeist of a certain time and place can be reflected in odd ways, providing the kind of ironic hip-meets-square-and-they-both-get-drunk thing that the kids are all about these days. The youtube video of Karl Rove rapping at the White House Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner last year would be a great example, if it weren't so obscenely pathetic.



In the 1960s of course, it was Psychedelia, not Hip Hop, that was turning our precious children into drug-addicted sex-maniacs. So what did Miller do? He did the same thing the executives at McDonalds are doing today: he jumped head-first onto the band-wagon. The result was Astro Sounds from the Year 2000, one of the most blatant attempts to cash in on pop-culture I've ever spent fifty cents on. That's right people, fifty cents. After years of spending ten bucks on records that totally suck except for the first 15 seconds of song three on Side A, I caught a lucky break. Of course, this has done nothing to improve my life. All the best samples have been used, its been reissued with a better audio master both on CD and vinyl, and the cover, though well-preserved, is far from mint. But in a world where producers use last.fm to dig for samples and load the MP3s they get off Limewire into Fruity Loops or whatever, actually going out there and digging for records seems more and more like some ninja shit. Or some Mountain Man shit. I've felt for a long while that the real value behind things like graffiti, DJing, rapping, even skateboarding, is that they comprise a pretty decent post-apocalyptic survival training regimen. When Armageddon arrives, it will be the graff-writers who will know how to communicate secretly in plain sight. The skaters will be the only ones with balls enough to explore the treacherous urban jungle of fallen buildings. And the diggers, we will be the ones with the instincts to seek out the stockpiles of food, clothing and weapons, and we will be the ones with the patience to dig through it all to find the best shit. Everyone else will just flameout. Can you dig it?

101 Strings Orchestra - Flameout

'Hip,' uh, how do you say...'Hop'

The St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on Williamson Street has one of the most extensive wax collections of any of the general-purpose second-hand stores in Madison. Their selection isn't nearly as good as some of the other dig-spots - the turnover is slow and there is a lot of polka - but all in all it isn't a bad place to kill twenty bucks and a rainy afternoon. But I was shocked to discover, a few months ago, that this particular St. Vinny's holds 75% of all the wax that comes in for one annual three day event, the St. Vinny's Vintage Vinyl Sale, easily the best dig in Madison. The sale happens in a cramped, bare cement basement that is somehow both dusty and damp, and the opening day includes a cover charge. This is kind of like charging cover to a crackhouse: vaguely unfair but certainly not a deterrent. And if you walk inside on opening night you can watch a hundred vinyl geeks literally stampede through the crooked doorframe, grabbing entire boxes of records to huddle over in the corners, eying each other suspiciously over hunched shoulders and whispering to themselves like, well, crackheads.

And this is some good shit.

But the early bird doesn't always get the worm, and apparently St. Vinnie's gets a fuck-ton of records during the year because fresh meat comes down periodically during the three days of wax madness, and you know what? They probably put all the bullshit out first. And so I found myself all but alone in a dim, stanky basement the day after opening night, getting to know a French brunette named Mireille Mathieu.



Frivolous, bohemian, melodramatic. The music of Mireille Mathieu is what everyone expects a French woman to be. And like all stereotypes, the exaggerated Frenchiness of French pop music from the 60s makes for a gleeful boom-bap reinterpretation.

Of course, I am not the first one to figure this one out. That punch landed before I even had a chance.



But the Mireille Mathieu records I picked up at St. Vinny's are representative of an aspect of digging you could call the Six Degrees of David Axelrod. Axelrod was an arranger and producer for Capitol Records in the 1960s, working with artists like David McCallum and Lou Rawls. His album The Edge, a compendium of his work at Capitol from 1966 to 1970, contains the source material for Dr. Dre's The Next Episode and the piano riff from DJ Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World, as well as breaks and interludes that are now part of the common vocabulary of hip hop music.

Capitol also released several of Mireille Mathieu's albums to the US. Her 1967 album, apparently titled Made in France although that name appears nowhere on the album, stands alongside most of The Edge in the intangible way that connects The Next Episode and What's the Difference, the same subtle aura that tells you that Bob James and Airto belong on CTI. Sometimes one entity, be it Capitol Records or Dr. Dre or Queensbridge or the South, achieves a gravity similar to that of a forming star, pulling in elements and fusing them into something cohesive and creative. I suppose that's what a DJ is, as well. Bruce Lee said that the highest style is no style, which is to say the absolute transcendence of style, the ability to take at will from one's surroundings and create unity. So take two parts French arrogance, 2 parts 1960s David Axelrod, and a dash of Bruce, and make a mothafuckin' beat.

These'll help get you started.

Julien Clerq - La Californie

Jacques Brel - Le Dernier Repas

As a sad addendum to this post, St. Vincent de Paul was also the last place I saw Madison legend Robert Hicks, aka Cosmo, a few weeks before he passed on March 31st. He will be missed.

Ivory Soul

The relationship between black soul music and the hip hop aesthetic is deep and wide, and for those with a stratified, fatalistic view of music history this is pretty much taken for granted. 50s Rock & Roll naturally led to 60s R&B which naturally led to 70s funk and soul which naturally led to hip hop. However, as hip hop critic Jeff Chang has argued, hip hop and its aesthetic are the product of a very specific coincidence of certain people in time and space. Take it back far enough, and hip hop can be reduced to the actions of maybe fifty individuals in a specific part of New York City, and regardless of how pervasive the music may seem today, without people like Kool Herc, Busy Bee, Grandmaster DXT etc., hip hop as we know it would have never come about. In his book Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop, ethnomusicologist-cum-hip-hop aficionado Joseph G. Schloss explores the origins of the soul aesthetic in hip hop beats, putting forth what can be called the Sesame Street Theory. Many of the would-be producers of the late 80s and early 90s were children of the 70s, and like most American children then and since, they watched Sesame Street. And Sesame Street in the 70s was a great fucking show.



It was also a show defined by its funky, happy, black soul-inspired soundtrack and its multi-racial cast. In Schloss' view, its walking distance from Sesame Street to the Good Life Café, and from Check 1-2 back to 1 2 3 4 5 - 6 7 8 9 10 - 11 12.

Regardless of whether or not Schloss is "right," soul music is the fossil fuel of hip hop. But we've hit peak production. By the time Dilated Peoples started rocking, we had already over-exploited our American Soul reserves. These days, the blogosphere has pretty much leveled the digging playing field to the point where producers who don't know the difference between a 45 and a 78 now have access to the most esoteric CTI and Philly International "wax." Unless you are someone like Kanye West who can just pick something off the radio and clear the sample with a phone call, even if its something that came out last year, it is far more difficult to stay soulful and still be fresh.

In solving this dilemma, we should look to the Jackson brothers. But no, not those Jackson brothers. Otis and Mike Jackson, aka Madlib and Oh No, have released albums in the last few months which display what can only be described as Loop-Digger Imperialism. The most recent installment in the Beat Konducta series, a sort of Encyclopedia Madlibica, is a tribute to the music of India's film industry. Meanwhile, younger brother Oh No's arguably better effort, Dr. No's Oxperiment is, as his Myspace puts it, "an audio tour of Turkish, Lebanese, Greek and Italian Psych-Funk." Apparently in the 1960s and 70s, Americans weren't the only ones with groove and soul.

In fact, when one looks at the influence of hip-hop music in musical traditions globally it isn't difficult to imagine a world, 40 years ago perhaps, where musicians in Europe, Africa and the Middle East interpreted their musical heritage via American Soul and R&B, which was comparably popular at the time. It should logically follow that in exotic and obscure lands the world over, like untapped oil fields under an unsuspecting Persian Kingdom, are stacks of unheard loops, American Soul set to tabla and sitar.

As much as I like this oil metaphor, my own contribution as a Loop-Digger Imperialist has to do with a different country raped by Europeans for a valuable resource: the Ivory Coast. About a year ago I picked up Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 from Gozi-Riya in Madison.



Released in 1976 on the Antilles label, Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 is basically the greatest hits of the Societé Ivoirienne du Disque, a long-dead record label based in Abidjan, the capitol of The Republic of the Ivory Coast. Even after its alleged independence from France in 1960, The Republic of the Ivory Coast was inundated with French coffee and cocoa traders (i.e., the sons of failed slave traders) even throughout the 70s. Large, cosmopolitan cities like Abidjan became cultural Meccas for West Africans, and the Societé Ivoirienne du Disque is one of the results. This combination of oppression, creativity and opportunity could just as easily describe Detroit or Muscle Shoals, and indeed the Societé was a contemporary of Gordy's Motown and Stewart & Axton's Stax.

And all historical trivia aside, Assalam Aleikoum Africa: Vol. 1 - from the Osibisa-esque title track to the Hendrix tribute - is primo.

Assalam Aleikoum Africa - Francis Kingsley & Emitais

I am, however, a Jealous Digger, and so that's all you'll get from me. I'm not going to zip the whole album up and send it out to be pillaged by the hip-hop world's French coffee traders. Can you dig it?

In Memory of Helen P.

I was at the Madcity Music Exchange in Madison, WI, about a week ago digging in the crates. I had come for something specific, but finding it gone from the shelf, I started flipping through the shoeboxes of R&B 45s at the back. The turnaround on 45s at Madcity is pretty slow, and after several boxes of the same Love Unlimited and 5th Dimension singles I was about to cut myself off when I saw a box of sleeveless 45s I didn't recognize. Usually I don't fuck with loose 45s because they've obviously been stacked in someone's garage for three decades and sound like shit. But when I started going through this box I was shocked to find several original pressings of Stax, Hot Wax, and Soul Train singles, tucked away like little weed nuggets in your pocket. They were in pretty bad shape, but at a buck each I snatched them up. What struck me when I got home is that most of them had the same name, "Helen P.", ball-pointed on to their labels. I started to think what type of person this decidedly un-funky name might have belonged to, and the journey that these records must have taken from the plant to my crate.

At some point they had been in mint condition, probably when Helen was in college in the late sixties. She'd probably taken good care of them; good taste is usually accompanied by an understanding of value. But, as all things do when they age, these records got began to wear down under un-replaced styli and other vinyl hazards.

But these records were pretty gnarly. The entire left channel was gone on many of them, and it was obvious that Helen's dancin' days had ended at some point (1982? 1986?), and her record collection had gone into storage. It was probably during this point that most of the real damage had occurred. Helen P.'s awesome collection of 60s and 70s funk and soul 45s had been laid to rest. Until recently, when apparently something separated Helen from her 45s. Thinking about the boxes of CDs and LPs that are still at my parents house after four years of college, which will probably remain there until they move out, I came to a conclusion as morbid as it was certain: Helen P. was dead. The last four or five years have seen a renaissance in digital music technology that is slowly killing the record collector. Twenty minutes on the internet can yield what a year of careful digging used to, and as a result we seem to be losing the personal connection with the music we choose to listen to. When your i-pod gets ganked or your computer crashes and you "lose all your music," its no big deal. Another few months of Limewire and you are back where you were, plus the new Kanye album or whatever. But a collection of vinyl is different. The image of a dedicated DJ slowly sinking under the weight of his own wax is one that has stayed with me, and as said DJ will surely tell you, the more cumbersome a collection of vinyl becomes the more difficult it is to prune it. And so I am certain that Helen P. died quietly and with dignity late in 2007, and her funk-less nieces and nephews dragged her old 45s to the Madcity Music Exchange.

I was looking at stuff through a microscope a few months ago when I came to a somewhat disturbing realization. There is hair on everything. Every penny, every Cheez-It, every 45 record has little pieces of hair and skin all over it. This is why your mother tells you not to put things in your mouth. The relevance of this little epiphany is that although I paid for those 45s and they are now in my home, Helen is worn deep into every groove. In fact, my crates of wax are a genetic index of everyone who as ever owned or listened to the records they contain. My wax, and by extension my beats, are a bottleneck through which the experience of hundreds of people is forced. This is, as far as I am concerned, as close to the heart of Hip Hop as I am going to get as a white man born in the mid-80s. Hip Hop music has never been an avenue for self-promotion so much as it has been a medium for self-realization, and realization of the self is the culmination of realization of the world around us. We as a culture have an obligation to reinterpret what our elders have left behind. The beat in them is gone, but their selves remain, ground into the grooves of wax.