Fluxblog 547: the golden age of NYC rap
Plus: Fievel Is Glauque in concert and new songs by Chanpan, Casablanca Drivers, and Animal Collective
This week’s playlist is NYC STATE OF RAP 1991-1995, a retrospective featuring 5 hours of classics from the golden age of New York City-area hip-hop. This includes music by The Notorious B.I.G., Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, Mobb Deep, Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, Pete Rock, Black Moon, Smif-N-Wessun, Jeru the Damaja, Brand Nubian, Fugees, Onyx, Public Enemy, Big L, and more. This will be very nostalgic for people of a certain age, but I hope also educational and/or very listenable for anyone else.
🎤 Spotify
💿 Apple
📼 YouTube
I’m not sure if this matters to anyone besides me but I realized I somehow screwed up the issue numbers for the previous 5 issues. We’re back to the correct numbering now! Those issues are retroactively 542, 543, 544, 545, and 546.
Oh, also, did you know that if you switch to a paid subscription to this newsletter you’ll get a special freeform radio podcast that I host every month? I feel like I don’t mention this enough, but there is indeed a perk to upgrading to paid, beyond my gratitude.
Remind Me It’s A Trap
Chanpan “Luigi’s Mansione”
You probably wouldn’t need the hint in the title to get that this breakbeat lounge song is a tribute to Luigi Mangione. The lyrics don’t mention him by name but it’s obviously about him, and presents him as a persecuted folk hero: “Maybe the hero has fallen / but strength arises in us / one feat of valor and courage / igniting the rage in our heart.” The music is fairly chill and jazzy despite the twitchy beats, but Grace Dumdaw sings her lyrics like someone who’s been broken by cynicism and low expectations but is starting to feel some slight bit of hope.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Casabalanca Drivers “No Mercy”
The first 48 seconds of “No Mercy” are very smooth, with minimal chiming guitar and a low-key seductive vocal gliding over an elegantly rumbling bass line. The song could’ve stayed in that mode the entire time and it’d be a good time. But no, Casablanca Drivers had to take it further. They had to drop that INSTRUMENTAL BREAK. A keyboard riff that sounds sorta like a heavily treated marimba. A beat and a boom so ruthlessly effective it’d make Justice jealous. It’s an incredible chunk of music that practically demands to be remixed or sampled into something more specifically built for a dance floor, but it also slips so comfortably between these more sexy and atmospheric verse sections. I’m not sure if this song should work, but they make it all so sleek and seamless.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Love Is Never One Thing
Animal Collective “Love on the Big Screen”
I’ve noticed that as the Animal Collective guys get older they’ve become more generous about releasing catchy little songs. They’ve always had catchy little songs, but there’s a lot of phases where they’re clearly more interested in more experimental, less structured, and sometimes totally non-melodic music. Maybe they’re less interested in that these days, or perhaps they’ve just become more self-assured as songwriters. I think it’s mostly that they’ve figured out how to have it both ways over the past 10 years. If they’re doing a pop song, they’re never doing it any sort of normal way. It’s always a bit off-kilter, always unusual musical choices, always a little subversive. They’ve fully become who they’ve always been.
“Love on the Big Screen” has the bones of a bashed-out psychedelic garage rock song, but the actual arrangement is much more along the lines of the lo-fi home recordings of R. Stevie Moore or The Cleaners from Venus. (Also worth noting that it starts with the same drum machine loop as The Fiery Furnaces’ “Benton Harbor Blues.”) It’s immediately catchy in a radio jingle sort of way, but even with one of the biggest call-and-response vocal hooks of their 25+ year career, the music feels deliberately untethered and disorienting.
I like what Avey Tare is doing with the lyrics in this one. The premise is big and bold and obvious – love on the big screen isn’t like love in real life – but they push a few steps beyond simply stating a cliched notion. As with a lot of Animal Collective songs before it, it’s a meditation on the practical aspects of love. The lyrics seesaw between grand philosophical statements and expressions of uncertainty. The point being, love contains a lot of contradictions that can’t be flattened into a simple narrative, or a single song. And it’s different for everyone! We can try to capture some of it, but it’s always just a few facets at a time.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
LIVE LIVE LIVE
I saw Fievel Is Glauque play an intimate show at Night Club 101 in Manhattan, which used to be the old Pyramid Club. They played a lot of unreleased material and I can tell you right now – this next album they have coming up is going to be excellent, and I think a little more accessible and less twitchy than the past few records.
LINKS LINKS LINKS
🌟 Molly Mary O’Brien wrote an extremely smart and funny essay arguing in favor of the “loathed yet popular” singer Benson Boone for GQ. This is probably the best piece of writing I’ve read in a big mainstream publication in a while.
🇺🇸 Nicole Tremaglio wrote an excellent essay on Nicstalgia about how pop stars including Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Beyoncé wearing American flag imagery has shifted through different stages of irony over the past 25 years.
🌏 You can now read an archive of the full run of Arthur Magazine, from 2002 through 2014, as PDFs.
That GQ article is pure gold