“Kala Djula” is from Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate‘s forthcoming album Ali and Toumani, which will be released in February 2010. Their previous collaboration In the Heart of the Moon is one of our favorite albums of the decade. Ali Farka Toure passed away in 2006, and left us an incredible amount of beautiful music.
[via pitchfork tv]
Jay Electronica – Swagger Jackson’s Revenge
Regardless who you vote for
If the mind don’t grow, and the poverty lines don’t go
But the dope keep coming, and the TV keeps flashing images of a sports car
Then you’re bound for a coke war
The meek get clowned by the coke law
The sheep get drown in the folklore
Then lured to sleep by Tom Brokaw
What a pity?
The hope on the politician’s tongue never ever trickles down to the city.
This track is from a compilation/mixtape floating around titled ElectroChemicals, containing exclusive songs and rare materials previously available only as radio-rips or web/myspace-rips from Jay Electronica – a brilliant voice in hip hop (in music and poetry in general) who is going to set drop an album in 2010. This cut has a great Michael Jackson speech in the intro— from an interview in which The King sounded defiant, and saying there’s a conspiracy in the US; it is suspicious that his album is number one all around the world, except in America where he is facing all kinds of legal and financial woes.
Rupture is off-the-grid tonight, still in Mexico, where this weekend he performed alongside Adrian Sherwood, Mungo’s Hi-Fi, and various local DJs and bands at the Mictlan Dub Festival. I’m holding things down tonight 7-8PM on Mudd Up! radio on WFMU 91.1 fm in NYC. It’s cold and rainy (just miserable weather here) in NYC, tune in, throw in comments, questions, get involved, heat up. Again, tonight @ 7PM.
Subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast if you want downloadable versions: 
, 
Mudd Up! RSS.
For those outside our FM broadcast range, WFMU offers live streaming and even has its own free iPhone app!
Here’s something I’ll be dropping at some point tonight –
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Clipse_Ft_Yo Gotti-Showin_ Out _Prod_ .mp3][youtube width=”525″ height=”410″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYt4fp3TYQg&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
The beautiful piece of music accompanying that uncomfortable (grotesque, disturbing and great!) video art is “Hotel Freund” from a remarkable new album, Alphabet 1968 from Black To Comm, a project by Hamburg-based Marc Richter. Listen closely to the “esoteric psychedelia” cunningly arranged pieces- hear the sound of children playing as giant rabbits look down from hilltops, intense and sinister.
[unrelated/reference points: The Food of the Gods Night of the Lepus & “let your love come down in the midnight hour.”]
Head over to FACT magazine for an exclusive King Midas mix – FACT Mix 103 – King Midas Sound – available as direct-download for three weeks only. Full tracklist + interview.
Cauto dropped an exclusive mix, plus an interview for Mr Gasparov‘s new blog – look there for the tracklist + info.
Big up Culture System for the heads up.
[Freshjive Hope Is Fading Fast t shirt | The World’s Got Problems]
G-Side – So Wonderful feat. Chrystal Carr, G-Mane, and SupaKing
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/G-Side-Whos_Hood.mp3]G-Side – Who’s Hood feat. Yelawolf
G-Side‘s latest effort the Huntsville International project was liberated last week, leaked in its entirety and contained some extremely solid moments for those of us who are still into rap music! Slowmotion Soundz, ST 2 Lettaz and Clova, Block Beattaz, and the various producers and guest artists offer strong, and even exceptional performances. ST 2 Lettaz and Clova delivered moving verses on “So Wonderful,” “In The Rain,” and “This Is Life.” On “So Wonderful,” ST raps about difficult times, not just the current recession– more specifically, the lack of assistance, the extra huddle, and debt young folks incurred while making their way through college, the double-digit unemployment figures and lack of opportunity in black and brown communities, which predates the current financial crisis. ST also echoes the words of Young Jeezy and P. Dukes (my president is black, but we’re still in the same mess– Obama administration maintaining continuity. By the way, P. Dukes made my favorite recession rap jam with “Make Me A Way,” and I regret not including it on the podcast.) Clova is on-point also, with an interesting mix of low-key, sharp darts grounded in realism, at times interrupted with “next-level”-swag-so-advance raps (and oftentimes, he’s incredible with those lines.)
Yelawolf offered a crucial performance on “Who’s Hood,” delivering a dense, rapid-fire verse about Cadillacs, pit-fights, and nightlife in the Bible Belt (he sounds like a young Big Boi or something! last week we heard him channeling Bob Dylan for Juelz Santana.) Other highlights here include the solo track by ST “This Is Life,” which I heard in August when Traps N Trunks unleashed the Huntsville Alabama: Rochet City mixtape/compilation and the defiant and unforgettable “In The Rain” featuring Bentley. “This Is Life” and “In The Rain” are those outstanding rap songs you hear every now and again, and they stay with you– emotionally raw and honest lyrics delivered by a smart, ambitious/hungry rappers. In the era of free music —sounds now move faster than the speed of contex– we are bombarded with ephemeral songs and disposable mixtapes. G-Side is offering music with lasting quality. The majority of tracks on their previous two album, Starshipz and Rocketz and Sumthin 2 Hate have held up well, withstanding countless listens and every now and then certain sounds warranting repeated listening. The Huntsville International project has that– freshness, durability, rap music for 2010 and beyond.
Juelz Santana f/ Yelawolf – Mixing Up The Medicine
Juelz Santana and Yelawolf echoing/channeling Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. If the rest of Born To Lose, Built To Win (his much-delayed third album– push-backs and title-changes) sound anything like “Mixing Up The Medicine” then it’ll be a decent album, but I doubt that after hearing that awful radio single/standard club number featuring Chris Brown.
Pill f/ Freddie Gibbs – Run Up To Me
Pill continues leaking out great materials from 4175:The Refill which drops sometime this week — check The Educated Villains. He once again link up with Freddie Gibbs, and each time these two get together, the result is great.
[vimeo width=”500″ height=”400″]http://www.vimeo.com/7593084[/vimeo]
Directed and animated by Sara Taigher – in 3 minutes, she offers a perfect accompaniment/visual narrative to the music and short story you’ll find in the CD packaging. Solar Life Raft BBC/Amazon 5-star review.
“…the five-letter English word tribe. The Western media’s analysis of events in Africa reveals the word as the main obstacle in the way of a meaningful illumination of dynamics in modern Africa. Tribe—with its clearly pejorative connotation of the primitive and the premodern—is contrasted with nation, which connotes a more positive sense of arrival at the modern. Every African community is a tribe, and every African a tribesman. We can see the absurdity of the current usages, where thirty million Yorubas are referred to as a tribe, but four million Danes as a nation. A group of 250,000 Icelanders constitutes a nation, while 10 million Ibos make up a tribe. And yet, what’s commonly described as a tribe, when looked at through objective lenses, fulfills all the criteria of shared history, geography, economic life, language, and culture that are used to define a nation. These critical attributes are clearly social and historical, not biological.
Nonetheless, to the analysts, tribe is like a genetic stamp on every African character, explaining his every utterance and action, particularly vis-à -vis other African communities. Using the same template of Tribe X versus Tribe Y, print and electronic media and even progressive thinkers simply look at the ethnic origins of the leading actors in a conflict and immediately place them in the category of X or Y. So, whatever the crisis, in whatever part of Africa, in whatever time period, the analysts arrive at one explanation: it is all because of the traditional enmity between Tribe X and Tribe Y. It is like looking at John McCain, seeing that he was born in Panama; then looking at Barack Obama, seeing that he was born in Hawaii; and then concluding that their political differences are due to the places of their birth or that their differences are rooted in an assumed traditional enmity between Panamanians and Hawaiians.” – NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o
from the current issue Transition magazine
UPDATE: Contest over!
Alright, we’re giving away a pair of tickets to One Step Beyond. We’re going to keep this simple and straightforward; the first person to email family [at] duttyartz.com with the correct answer to the following question wins a pair of ticket to the show; What was the first joint-release from DJ Rupture and Matt Shadetek/Team Shadetek?
You must also include “One Step Beyond Ticket Giveway” in the subject line.
– more info below –
The FADER Presents
ONE STEP BEYOND at the American Museum of Natural History
Friday, November 13, 2009
DJ /Rupture
Matt Shadetek Feat. Jahdan Blakkamoore
Maluca
Sonido Martines
9pm – 1am
$25- Price includes admission to the Space Show and a free return visit to the Museum.
Buy tickets in advance at http://www.amnh.org/rose/specials/
The Rose Center for Earth and Space
Enter on 79th Street at Central Park West
Must be 21. ID Required
The FADER Presents
ONE STEP BEYOND at the American Museum of Natural History
Friday, November 13, 2009
DJ /Rupture
Matt Shadetek Feat. Jahdan Blakkamoore
Maluca
Sonido Martines
9pm – 1am
$25- Price includes admission to the Space Show and a free return visit to the Museum.
Buy tickets in advance at amnh.org/osb
The Rose Center for Earth and Space
Enter on 79th Street at Central Park West
Must be 21. ID Required
Ahmed Janka Nabay gets mentioned in a New York Times CMJ rundown;
There was also an African apparition: Janka Nabay from Sierra Leone, wearing a straw skirt and singing and dancing to recorded tracks of what he said was a 500-year-old tradition called bubu music. The tracks were modern, and the beat, fast and skeletal and driven by bell taps, was unstoppable, demanding wider dissemination.
[audio:http://www.strawvsgold.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/janka3-introduces-true-music-bubu-music_.m4v]listen to more audio from an interview Janka did with Straw vs Gold several months back.
Geeshie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues
American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 – 1939)
I discovered Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues” while reading a piece from Best Music Writing 2009 anthology – John Jerimiah Sullivan’s Unknown Bards (the blues becomes transparent about itself.)Â Sullivan detailed the rigorous, painstaking process of seeking, restoring, and analyzing forgotten American treasures/some of the oldest/rarest (country-blues) recordings on earth. Sullivan dedicated a great amount of time and attention to Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” giving a deep and thoughtful analysis of the lyrics and singing with help from Pre-War Revenants curator/’American fingerstyle guitarist’ John Fahey.
“Last Kind Words Blues” is about a ghost-lover. When Wiley says “kind” -as in, “The last kind words I heard my daddy say” – she doesn’t mean it like we do; she doesn’t mean nice; she means the word in its older sense of natural (with the implication that everything her “daddy” says afterward is unnatural, is preternatural.) Southern idiom has retained that usage, in phrases involving the world “kindly,” as in “I thank you kindly,” which – and the OED bears this out – represent a clinging vestige of the primary, archaic meaning:[…]
Not many ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Geeshie Wiley. Three of the six songs she and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest contry-blue performances ever etched into shellac,, and one of them, “Last Kind Words Blues” is an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle.
***
What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me.
I believe I’ll see ya,
After I cross the deep blue sea.
Washington Phillips – Denomination Blues Part 1
In the late 1920s, gospel music performer Washington Phillips recorded 16 songs. The songs featured Phillips’ voice and an home-made instrument, — some argued not a Dolceola, but a common fretless zither (possibly both of the Phonoharps in the photo above.)Â The instrument(s) add an ethereal effect to Phillips’ voice (on first listen, I thought I was hearing the voice of a woman, a trace of Nina Simone.) Earlier this year, Dust-to-Digital, a record company based in Atlanta, Georgia released Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music (1924 – 1940) and Photography (1890 – 1950) – a 96-page hardbound book containing amazing historic images and an incredible 25-track CD of songs and sermons. It’s available everywhere.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If6i59NUfkk[/youtube]