Beck is of course the guy who had an early (and bilingual) hit with the rap/song Loser back in 1992, and then went on to record the magnificent Odelay, which had music critics frothing. Real people liked it too.

While you wait to hear Rich's interview with Beck, here's a quick Blog's Eye View of some recent Beck moments to mull over:

re: Beck in recent performance:

"It's not like there's a radio station around here that plays his kind of music. Heck, Beck's a genre unto himself, a swampy blues swilling, hip-hop swaggering, retro-loving, edgy rock tinkering kind of a guy. He's made eight major label albums over the past 14 years and not a one of them sounds alike." -Pullen My Blog

re: the 10th anniversary re-release ofOdelay:

"One of the most inventive and eclectic figures to emerge from the '90s alternative revolution, Beck was the epitome of postmodern chic in an era obsessed with junk culture."
- Vinyl Rules

re: Beck's latest recording, Modern Guilt:

"Mining genres like psych-rock, electronica, and folk, Modern Guilt finds our hero paranoid and afraid of the changing world around him. Beck and Danger Mouse explore the dichotomy between upbeat music and despondent lyrics about the changing political climate, the environment, and a sense of impending doom to perfection."
-Grooveshark

In June, Paul McCartney offered up new material from the Fireman when he made Electric Arguments' mellow, psychedelic "Lifelong Passion" available to those who donated a minimum of to help raise money for Adopt-A-Minefield. To recap: The Fireman, his collaboration with Youth (producer, guy from Killing Joke), released a pair of ambient, electro-based records in the '90s, Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest followed by Rushes. The aforementioned third collection Electric Arguments is out next month. Judging from the second available album track "Nothing Too Much Just Out Of Sight," Paul and Youth are ditching the ambient for a bluesier, in-the-red Comets On Fire/Howlin Rain sound. It's supposedly a rant against his ex, Heather Mills.

I never expected to be write a single sentence about Letters To Cleo (I kinda confused them with Sixpence None The Richer, who I also never expected to...), but the band is back and back in the day, some people liked them (e.g. those horny Sally Struthers fans Beavis & Butthead). This also proves that any band who ever recorded a song is bound to reunite in 2008 (hurry up Wreckx-N-Effect, only a few months until '09). Letters, who formed in the early '90s, are best known for Aurora Gory Alice's "Here & Now," Wholesale Meats And Fish's "Awake," and their performance in 10 Things I Hate About You, wherein they did covers of "Cruel To Be Kind" and "I Want You To Want Me." Anyhow, their first show in eight years takes place 11/8 at The Roxy in Los Angeles, followed by December dates in New York and their Boston birthplace. It's four original members (including recent Mylie Cyrus tour mate, vocalist Kay Hanley) along with a new bassist. We have two old hits and something live to refresh your memory while you look at the dates.

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This is the first Killing Joke t-shirt I ever owned.  Bought in the early 90s in Chicago at the Alley.  I was on a kick again because of the recent release of Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions.  I wouldn't be surprised if Atkins had something to do with the printing of this actual shirt.  Anyway.  This shirt has gotten pretty thin over the years.  It is probably my least favorite now because it is a poor design/print.  But back then this was the only shirt you could find.  There was no eBay.  Their popularity was drifting and they were in a state of inactivity.

Day 2......Pandemonium

Q: What were your lives like growing up in New Orleans?

Rah Al Milio: We grew up in the real New Orleans. Every day was hell, that bitch is a jungle, it’s a third world country inside of America. It’s hard. We were just trying to survive. I’m totally from the hood and I never thought we’d make it to LA. Cats in New Orleans think about LA as though it were fake and don’t exist. We were so stuck in our own shit out there, we didn’t experience anything. We had to find other diversions to keep us out of trouble, mostly music and sports. Our moms made us join a band when we were 11 or 12 to stay out of trouble. Then Katrina happened and we figured we might as well just do it and move to LA. So we did.

Q: How did you guys go about getting a deal?

Krispy Kream: Mike Caren at Atlantic was the first one who tried to sign us in 2005. We’d already been around for a long time at that point. The fact that people come around and call us “hipster rap” still pisses me off, because we’d already been down for a minute. We did a deal with Atlantic, we had a publishing deal for a while, but we were shopping a record deal because we didn’t want to do business with Atlantic.

Q: Why not?

KK: We didn’t like the way they were handling things over there. We were briefly managed by Matthew Knowles. Beyonce’s dad. He tried to get us our own little imprint so we could put out our stuff on Interscope. He was still up at Sanctuary at the time, but that shit didn’t work out.

Q: Why?

KK: They did some shit that I can’t really talk about. But in the process, Shady Records was calling us the whole time. They were like come to New York, yo we wanna’ sign you to Shady. But we didn’t want to sign to Shady, we said we wanted a manager. Paul Rosenberg and Dart Parker came on to manage us. At first, they wanted to shop us to Jive, but then they concluded that they could get us a better deal at Interscope because Jimmy [Iovine] wanted us. They were like, ‘you ought to be on Interscope.’ We’re like, ‘alright, we’ll take a meeting with him.’ So we did and he asked us what we wanted and we said, ‘we only want creative control.’ He said, ‘that’s it?’ We said, ‘yeah, we don’t want anyone to fuck with us.’

Q: What’d your A&R think of that?

KK: 3H was the A&R. He was like, ‘I don’t want to be involved, if you want creative control, I just want you to turn in that crack.’ So we got the deal. Jimmy said ‘y’all gonna be where hip hop is at for the next five years.’ That’s what it was. Boom, we record the album, get a crib in the hills, parties, drugs, all kind of drugs, drugs with an explanation mark. Girls, hookers, strippers, all of em, all of it, it went down. I can talk about some entertainers that got their dick sucked on my coach. It’s the real deal over here, we was livin’ like Slash and Axl Rose up in ‘87. We were the first ones, for all the people that call this hipster rap…we were the first ones…the first ones…the first with a major label deal… we are the reason that these labels started looking at people like this. Ask Steve Aoki, ask anyone who was there before they had 17 year old kids in skinny jeans showing up the club. We were dressing like this when everybody was rocking backpacks, and college ra shit. We were the first ones to experiment with electronic shit…the first ones.

Rah: It got to a point because motherfuckers was getting it misunderstood, like we came in out of the blue or hopped into a scene. The scene was formed around us. We were the first of that stuff that people call hipster shit, not U-N-I. Fuck, we opened Cinespace for hip-hop, there was no hip hop in there, just electronic shit, dance music in there, maybe Spank Rock, no real hip-hop.

Q: How did you get involved with the Tuesday night Cinespace scene?

Rah: We had a relationship with Steve Aoki and plus, we listen to dance music. We go to dance clubs. These motherfuckers don’t understand any of that shit. They’re latching onto a scene. You hear “Bang Bang,” that’s a small token of what’s on the album. Every song is different than the next; this isn’t no hipster rap bullshit. It’s not just about flat out rapping on shit. The album’s about everything, the song writing, the production, everything. If we couldn’t play instruments and shit, maybe we’d do some rinky-dink beats, chop up some samples and shit, but at the end of the day to put us in a category with certain dudes is absurd.

Q: That’s just what music writers do. They have to invent genres. They do it at parties. It’s weird.

Rah: Who wants to be in a genre? Genres are for pussies. They’re for people who don’t have enough balls to do their own shit and so they latch onto these mini-genres and think that’s it’s going to be a movement…a moving train. We stay away from that shit, I don’t want to sound like anyone else, I don’t want to be in a category with anybody else. That’s not me being cocky, that’s me being real. I just don’t want to be in anyone’s category. That’s not knocking anybody, just that genre shit, yo, fuck that. Cats are wearing backpacks and American Apparel. I’m like fuck that shit. I was doing that shit way before you were supposed to do that. Motherfuckers was tripping, the execs were tripping, they kept on trying to put us into categories, they were like, “oh, they’re like Pharrell, they’re skaters.” I was like I don’t wear skate shit, I don’t skate. They didn’t know what to name it. But we was already in this scene, then to call someone a hipster, we were like what is that?

Krispy: I’ve been doing that for a long time. When Steve was still trying to get put on, Dim Mak wanted us to do an EP with them.

Q: How’d you get hooked up with Steve Aoki in the first place?

KK: We met him through AM, who was managed by Paul and Dart. Steve is cool as fuck and he always had banging chicks with him. We was supposed to be on Dim Mak at first. People don’t know that shit, Things didn’t work out because Interscope wouldn’t allow it. This was back in ‘04.

Q: What do you think about your label situation at Interscope? Has it been a positive experience or the typical major label bullshit?

KK: The labels aren’t expecting triple platinum anymore. We plan on just touring constantly and getting money that way. That’s where the money is…on tour. In the late 90’s no one toured, now people love to see live hip hop.

Rah: We think of ourselves as being in a similar situation to The Strokes. They were in at the beginning of their trend and at first, people were calling them ‘retro bands’ and being like ‘they sound like they came from the 70s.’ Then they came in with the “garage rock” labeling. Shit, we’ve been bumping TV on the Radio since their first EP. We’re not some posers trying to latch on. We know these people, we’ve been doing this shit.

Q: You guys don’t have any guest appearances on your album, which seems almost strange in contemporary hip-hop? Are you guys instinctively opposed to collaborations?

KK: Well, Jay Electronica’s going to be on the next album. He comes from a good hood in New Orleans but he understands where we come from. Real hip-hop dudes respect us. We’re some of the few dudes those guys respect.

Q: I know you guys have talked about playing your own instruments. Which ones do you specifically play?

KK: A lot of our songs have guitar and bass which we play, but we can play everything. We tweak the synthesizers… so much crazy shit. On the album, a lot of the time it sounds like there are two people playing at once…that’s because there is.

Rah: We’re real musicians, our model is the Dust Brothers. You could never pick out what they were doing, whether they were sampling or doing it live, you couldn’t tell.

KK: And of course, we’re heavily inspired by the Rza.

Q: Did you go to specialized music school?

Rah: We know how to read and write music. Our mom put us in band to keep us out of trouble and in those marching bands they make you learn how to write and read music. You can’t make that shit up, We got into jazz band that did that. We always had side bands though and have gigs on the side. New Orleans is a city like that.

Q: What about mixtapes. Is there a reason why you guys never released one?

Rah: We don’t do mixtapes. All the great albums had like 13 tracks. We don’t whore ourselves out like that. We just show cleavage. It’s a wonder that people buy their albums. I love the anticipation of the album. People just stand not being out there at all times. We love being mystery.

[Some random muffled inaudible talk…..tape recorder clears in time for …]

KK: And fuck Mark Ronson.

Q: He’s one of those dudes who it’s just painful to praise. But I do begrudgingly admit that he’s a good producer.

KK: Whatever, he’s just one of those dudes that never got in a scuffle. We’ll knock that dude out.

Rah: The problem with hip-hop is is that no one is inspiring anyone. No one’s switching it up and inspiring somebody. Everybody treats it like a job. We got into so it wouldn’t seem like a job. No one’s doing anything refreshing…they’re not talking about nothing. There’s trash out right now. I listen to mostly old stuff. I didn’t realize until maybe 2006 how dope some of that shit really was. Like ‘93 till Infinity.’ I always liked that, but that shit was so ill. Some of those Domino beats were crazy.

Q: It seems if you actively dislike things today, people just label you a “hater.”

Rah: We appreciate when writers call out shit that sucks. I love being a hater. We need more haters. People need to speak their mind. Tell the truth.

KK: Hip hop is so PC. Or worse, there’s just fake beef. Fake fools with guns but no one’s saying anything and everyone’s leaning on each other. I’m looking at Game and I like Game and I know he don’t like Jay, so he’s going to talk about it. We need more dudes like that. If I don’t like a dude, I’m going to talk about it. That shit is missing in hip-hop. Look, I listen to all the Biggie records. I don’t think he’s the greatest though and I’ll say it. He was great but he wasn’t the best in my mind. I used to think Biggie was better than Pac, but I switched a few years ago. Big would say fly shit just to say ill shit.

Q: Yeah, but then he’d throw in a “Sky’s the Limit” or “I’ve Got a Story to Tell.”

KK: I dunno, but I could barely separate that shit lyrically from the Lox at the time. At the end of the day, Wu Tang is our favorite group ever. But as I get older I see a lot of them wasn’t talking about shit.

Q: Yeah, but a lot of them were. Have you read the Wu-Tang Manual?

Both: Of course, we love it.

KK: We’ll punch people in the face for talking shit about Wu-Tang.

Rah: At the end of the day, when you’re young you just want to hear the flyest, illest shit, that’s how it is. You know what I mean. I love MF Doom actually, even though he kind of bit GZA a little bit. Those concept albums are cool though.

KK: If we featured somebody, it’d be different. If we were going to feature a Jay, we’d bring him back to the street level, not him talking about G4’s. That’s just what the Knux do, That’s the problem, the hip hop game is so pop when they feature people, it’s so corporate, no one’s even in the same studio, no one talks about concepts because it doesn’t matter, it’s like product placements in movies.

Rah: We want to make hip-hop more gritty, like that early Wu shit.

Q: I remember reading somewhere that you guys were big Gravediggaz fans.

Rah: That’s a great album. Of course, their earlier shit was ill but that’s where our mind was at the time. We swayed from what we were into, used to be heavy into Killah Priest and on some traveling to the stars type shit.

Q: The Wu JV was probably the best JV of all time. I just had a post last week about how dope Killarmy were?

Rah: They were dope. I didn’t care much for Sunz of Man though.

KK: No one puts on dope cats anymore.

Q: When was the last time you saw anything like the Juice Crew or the Hit Squad or the Def Squad. And Diplomats don’t really count. Meanwhile, Def Jam won’t stop sending me albums from Blood Raw, Jeezy’s weed carrier.

Rah: It’s the south man. I can explain this to you. It’s just the South. Not all those dudes are this but a lot of them are and they don’t respect the music. They really don’t care where it goes. It’s about money.

Q: But they have swagger. What else do you need?

Rah: Someone needs to retire that shit. It’s like ‘jiggy.’ That shit’s played out.

KK: We’re trying to do us to the furthest extent. We don’t care about our haters. Our haters aren’t going to buy our album. Middle America is disconnected from everything and we’ll probably find some real listeners out there. They don’t follow new trends as much, or new fashion, they’ll just buy the records because they think it sounds good.

Rah: All these rappers would do better stuff if everyone came from their heart. If they did, you’d hear all kinds of shit, not just a few motherfuckers doing interesting things, I hope that we inspire people.

Q: So what are your favorite spots in LA?

A: 101 Café, Swingers on 3^rd, Bossa Nova…we love that place, they even made a racist comment once but we still go. We used to go out to Cinespace a lot but know we hang out more downtown, warehouse parties. One Sunset used to be hot and we’d go there a lot. In general, we don’t fuck with places if we have to wait in line.

Q: What about the future? What are you guys working on now?

Rah: We’re already working on the second album. It’s different and it reflects where our minds are at now. We’re already plotting the next approach.

Video:

The Knux-”Bang Bang”

The Knux “Cappucino”

Download:
MP3: The Knux-”Hard Day’s Night”
MP3: The Knux-”Bang! Bang!”
MP3: The Knux-”Cappucino”
MP3: The Knux-”Cappucino Remix”

I first got wind of Tom Vek through my buddy (and now fellow blogger) Elhaam. She sent me a StarTime sampler that had ‘CC (You Set The Fire In Me)’ on it. My interest was piqued, and I noticed there was quite a buzz building around the Londoner. Not only because of his catchy tunes, but because he was such an accomplished multi-instrumentalist (he played most every instrument on his debut record himself).

Then we had two great remixes by Paul Epworth - a.k.a. Phones - for ‘Aint Saying My Goodbyes’ and ‘Nothing But Green Lights’ (that latter of which I still have on 12-inch green vinyl) that solidified his popularity on dancefloors the world around. His debut was subsequently hailed by the likes of Pitchfork, URB and Blender, which is a motley crew of critics if ever I saw one.

So nearly 4 years on, where’s he been?

Working on the follow-up to We Have Sound, apparently. At least according to his official website - Tom himself hasn’t said so much as a peep about it. He was also in the - from what I can tell - short-lived Naked Babes with Devonte of Test Icicles fame. Naked Babes never seemed to have much by the way of output, and their Myspace hasn’t been logged into since Dec of ‘06. So in this instance, I don’t have a very definitive answer for ‘Whatever Happened To’ Tom Vek, other than he’s holed up somewhere working on new material and someday we’ll hopefully hear that material. In the meantime, here are some classics from the recent past to keep you going.

MP3: Tom Vek - Ain’t Saying My Goodbyes
MP3: Tom Vek - Nothing But Green Lights (Phones Madchester 90’s Mix)

- Sean

Spectral Mornings fares much better by comparison. In my opinion it was with this third album that Steve Hackett finally found his own identity as a solo artist. As a guitarist he had, of course, found his own distinctive style several years earlier with Genesis, but it was first with Spectral Mornings he found his identity as a writer, singer and band leader. In that sense Spectral Mornings was the first true Hackett solo album.

It was, for example, with this album that Hackett began blending influences from world music into his brand of rock. The Red Flower Of Tachai Blooms Everywhere is a Japanese influenced piece played on a Koto, a traditional Japanese instrument.

The opener Every Day and the closing title track are both great. Indeed, two of the best songs Steve Hackett ever wrote. Too bad not everything in between them is as good. Virgin And The Gypsy is good, but nothing that blows me away.

Clocks (The Angel Of Mons) is an experimental guitar piece with a very strong presence of percussion instruments. Hackett had not been so experimental before, at least not with the confidence he seems to have here.

Lost Time In Cordoba is a very typical Hackett classical guitar piece with some wind instrument also present. Not one of his better but it seems that every one of his albums needs to have one or two of these.

Hackett’s previous (and several of his later) albums are inconsistent and disjointed. Having several different vocalists, and not being able to fuse the many different styles of music into a coherent whole. Spectral Mornings comes much closer to a unified whole. But it is far from perfect. I don’t understand why Steve always has to put songs like The Ballad Of The Decomposing Man on his albums, what is the point? Is it supposed to be humour? Also the vocal part of Tigermoth seems out of place and brings this album down.

Steve Hackett would go on to make some better albums later on, in the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s, but Spectral Mornings defined him as a solo artist. However, despite some very good moments, the overall quality of the compositions is not strong enough for a four star rating.

Very good, but still non-essential.

by SouthSideoftheSky


HACKETT, STEVE Music Online:
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