In which our humble host answers questions submitted from the gallery. It’s a long one, friends, but it took almost three years to get here. Let’s go!

I met Annie Wong when I started work at the bookstore, shortly after arriving in Toronto. I doubt she remembers it, but she was actually the first person I met in the company; I asked her where to go for my group interview. We didn’t really become anything resembling friends until long after we stopped working together, building a relationship of mutual respect over instant messaging programs, as you do. She writes poems and makes art, some of which I chronicled here.

What do you think makes PFG distinctive from other blogs?

Oh, lord, I don’t know. What makes me distinctive from other people? I do think over the years as the site shifted away from being a somewhat generic chronicle of a guy trying to be a writer into what it is now, it’s become more reflective of who I am as a person. So I think the blend of hip-hop/books and literature/ tech/lowbrow art/occasional pro wrestling nerdery that dominates most posts makes for a unique mixture, but I don’t know that it has a very wide appeal.

I do struggle a lot with the notion of writing to appeal to some sort of “market,” catering to what they might want and just doing what I want and letting an audience find me. So much writing advice says to just do what you do, try to do it well, and the people will find you, but it’s still not something I’m totally comfortable with.

How do you decide what to write about?

I only write when I feel like I have something worth saying, which is really no better than writing when the spirit moves. It’s a step above useless. Try as I might, I just can’t bring myself to revert back to the “and then I did this and then I did that,” school of bloggage, as discussed in last week’s entry.

Sometimes it’s easy enough, I’ve seen a cool movie or gone to a concert or read a great book or discovered a great song I didn’t know existed or there’s a story in the news cycle that’s pertinent to my interests. It’s when I have to actually seek out something to write about that I stumble, because…because I don’t know. I think I’ll bore people, maybe. People who are so enthralled by what I think about a forgotten rap track from 1997 [laughs].

Where did the idea for PFG come from?

You mean the title or the blog itself?

Both!

When I started the thing, I’d just come off maintaining a blog for the student newspaper in Windsor, a job I did for two years, twice a day Monday-Friday. Some link-farming, some longform commentary on local issues and campus controversies, stuff like that [some of my better moments can be found on the Works page under "Best of the Blog"]. The job ended up getting downsized after I moved to Toronto, rightly so. Maybe it was working in the bookstore, being surrounded by novels, maybe it was two years of “journalistic” content creation, but I really wanted to reconnect with fiction writing. I had the age of 33 circled in my mind as a deadline for some reason, I think I read it was when Murakami finished his first novel. So the initial idea was to chart my attempts to get published anywhere, or at least finish something by the age of 33.

I blew that deadline, obviously. I wonder if I always knew I would. But instead of getting published I got…this, instead. Would I’ve stuck with this if I’d been more focused on fiction writing? Probably not. So there’s a give and take there. Even though the site’s original intent may have been obscured by the endless nostalgia for 90’s hip-hop, that original motivating factor is still there.

The title, that came from that rarest of things, an actual moment of inspiration. A “brushing your teeth at two in the morning,” type of moment. Those are dangerous, you know? They make you think that you can get by as a writer that way. But yeah, Poetry for Gravediggers was just this phrase that popped into my head while I was brushing my teeth, thought it might make a good name for a story collection or something. It stayed scrawled on a white board for over a year before I decided to use it as the blog title.

It’s funny, though, apparently in Marxism the rising class is considered the “gravedigger,” of the ruling class. If this whole endeavor is at its heart supposed to chart my attempts to get over, I think there’s a nice congruence there.

Also, top Google result for that phrase. No quotes, even! Thank you very much.

***

Caitlin MacKinnon is a coworker in the bookstore, studying English and Marketing at Ryerson University with ambitions to work as an editor. She is probably the only person who has made an effort to know me. She’s also been one of the strongest supporters of my writing since she first read it, which actually gets through to my awkward embarrassed humility, since we weren’t friends for long beforehand, so she never had to spare my feelings. We try to grab brunch once a month if we can. It’s her turn to pay.

What initially motivated you to write a personal cultural review style of blog? Or a blog in general?

The idea to blog in general was kind of a no-brainer once the means to do so became available. If I’m remembering this right, back in ’97-’98 I was thinking of putting a zine out as a sort of vanity project [called GOOFSMACK, it had an amazing logo drawn by my best friend]. Then I got turned on to this website called OpenDiary, one of the earliest social blogging sites [and the first to allow comments, I think]. I kind of forgot about the zine and tried to spend a few days a week putting entries up on there. Even then I think it was a means to get back to writing poetry after I stopped going to university. Mostly I treated it as the name implied, recounting what I’d done, talking about my friends, the usual things a twentysomething in a small town working at a gas station would do.

Have the reasons for writing PFG changed?

Definitely. The original subhead of the site read “Jordan Ferguson’s Ongoing Struggles and Failures,” because the idea was to chronicle the ongoing attempts to get published and work on my fiction. I suppose that reason’s never changed, you could argue things have been one long struggle and failure since then.

Over the last 10 years how has your blogging developed?

I read an article I don’t know where about the trend in Web 3.0 or whatever we’re in now towards authenticity. In the early days of the Web we all had handles and nicknames, nobody used their real names. The first sign of online intimacy was when you learned someone’s real name.

Now for whatever reason, the narcissism of youth, advances in online security, populist content creation, people want their real names associated with their online activities, and I’ve been no different. PFG is the first online venture I’ve attempted that didn’t use a pseudonym, even though I used the same pseudonym for everything I did online pre-2004. I figure now if I’m going to do the work, I want the recognition for myself, good or bad.

Oddly enough, as I’ve said a lot lately, while I pulled back the curtain on my name, I clouded over my personal life in my blogging. I might relate an anecdote from my life now and then, but I don’t relate the minutiae of my everyday, something I used to do a lot in older blogs, musing about girls and people I knew, et cetera.

I also think I’ve gotten better at writing in this medium. My efforts before J-school are horrifying compared to the sort of work I’ve done since.

Is there anything you would have done differently?

I wish I made more of an effort on promotion. I think I’m kind of at a saturation point with people I know. Something goes up on Twitter and Facebook when a new entry goes live, but I need to start engaging with the other bloggy types in the city, I think, try to connect with that community more. I also think I blew it by using obtuse tags on my entries. Sure, I think it’s funny to use a tag like “Namedropping for Googlejuice,” or “Confused White People,” but it makes search engine optimization impossible and only makes it harder for new readers to find the place. But at this point I feel like that horse is out of the barn, so I need to make the best of it now.

Around the time I realized the original mandate wasn’t sustainable, I started thinking about this idea of myself as brand, spreading the PFG name to other media [podcasts, videos, etc]. I still have this great logo I don’t make use of enough that I sometimes consider making stickers of or making a stencil of it and tagging up some garbage cans. Then I panic about how pathetic I would look if one of the beautiful people saw my sweet logo and actually came to the site to see what’s here. I can’t fulfill the promise of that design [laughs].

Is your initial Mission Statement still something you try and look to or has it been abandoned for greater and grander things?

I think the Mission Statement was the greater, grander thing, ha! I don’t know exactly where it is, but I know there’s an entry probably somewhere in 2010 where I admitted if I only blogged about how a blog about writing by a guy who didn’t write anything wasn’t exactly scintillating reading, so I’d need to vary the content up a bit. The Mission Statement is always in the back of my head, but I know if I adhere too closely to it, the gaps between entries will grow ever wider.

Which blogs have brought about the most responses?

If I had to pick a moment where the site started getting a bit of traction, at least where people I knew started reading on a regular basis or even found out it existed in the first place, it was when I did the Song-a-Day meme in 2010. That seemed to resonate with people for some reason.

But the one crazy moment was when I wrote an appreciation of the graphic novel series Phonogram. Not only did the book’s writer link to the post on Twitter, he emailed me personally to thank me for it, and to tell me about a scene that got cut from the book relating to a critical observation I’d made about it. That was pretty awesome. and while that Kieron Gillen has no recollection who the hell I am, I’ll never forget that short, two paragraph email he sent me.

And @jordan_ferguson writes about music, magic and Phonogram. Strong stuff: http://tinyurl.com/34fytv5—
Kieron Gillen (@kierongillen) May 27, 2010

Which blogs have been the most controversial?

I don’t know that any entries on PFG have been controversial, per se, at least not like the hate mail I used to get sometimes when I ran the blog for the University of Windsor. Certainly the one that caused me the most grief wasn’t even a proper entry, it was a brief note announcing I’d cleaned up some of the links to my work on the menu, giving each story/poem/article it’s own page instead of linking to a PDF, drawing renewed attention to things that had already been sitting there for over a year. Someone I know read something she saw herself in, and we had a huge fight over it. Like, a “throat raw from screaming,” sort of fight. She was furious with me for writing about her, even though it wasn’t her; it was a character with certain similarities. I was furious with her for trying to make me feel bad about one of the few things I’d written and finished.

Even telling the story, I’m somewhat fearful the whole thing could fire off again, which is murder for a writer, because it really amounts to self-censorship, and I’ve always been a believer that all writing should be fearless. If you think it gives to the story, it should be used.

What do you do with negative or positive feedback?

It depends. If it’s just someone needing to troll and call me a fat asshole no woman would ever love, I’m old enough and been at this long enough I can file that in the appropriate circular bin. Positive I tend to shrug off, but that’s been true with me since time immemorial. I still don’t know why that is. Catholic upbringing, maybe.

Do you find that feedback changes what and how you write?

If it’s constructive, I try to remember it going forward. I’m pretty stubborn [as you know], especially when it comes to my writing, but I think I can acknowledge when I’m in the wrong and make appropriate corrections when needed. There are many people who would likely disagree.

Are you ever at a loss for subject matter and what do you do? (Besides harassing your friends for topics.)

At a loss for subject matter is pretty close to my natural state [laughs]. When I don’t have one, I don’t write. Which is a problem, because only hacks write when inspiration hits.

Is it a bad thing to leave blogging for too long? Or does a break sometimes help recharge the creative battery or give you perspective?

It depends if you want to be recognized for it. The key to having a successful blog has always been regularly posting in a consistent voice. Readers need to know what to expect from you, and even if you veer outside their expectations, it should still read like you.

When I was doing the blog for the paper back home, it felt like the worst sometimes because I was on the hook for at least two entries a day, usually a link-farm in the morning and either a commentary or something lulzy later in the afternoon. That’s a lot of content for one dude to churn out on a regular basis. and I’m not about to sit here and say everything that went up was golden.

Ultimately, I do think it’s a bad thing to leave it alone for too long. The proof is in the pudding, I can see it in my stats. When entries are regular, more views. The longer I go without posting, the views go down by the day.

Which bloggers do you most admire?

That’s an amazing question. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever given it much thought. Neil Gaiman’s blog was one of the first “famous” people blogs I started reading; he was a guy who just seemed to understand the medium from out the gate [and I still never know how he gets the time or energy…I feel like if I could watch his workday from start to finish once I would have the Rosetta stone on how to do this whole thing]. I always liked a guy named Graeme McMillan who used to run a site I miss to this day called Fanboy Rampage that skewered the worst parts of comic creators and fans.

If there’s anyone working today I really admire though, who is still primarily a blogger in what I consider a blogger to be, it’s Jay Smooth at Ill Doctrine. There’s nothing worse than drafting a blog on any subject and then finding out Jay Smooth made a video about the same subject, because not only will he say everything you were going to, he’ll be sharper, smarter and funnier when he says it.

Look at that shit. Dude just summed what I’m always battling with in three minutes. And he knew it five years ago!

Do you feel that blogging has changed writing? Including journalism, fiction, etc.

Definitely. As I was thinking about your last question I started and stopped about five times thinking, ‘Well, is that guy a journalist or a writer?’ Does Grantland count as a blog? Is The Millions a news site?

The lines are still hard and fast in the traditional media channels, as they should be. But in many places on the Net, the tone has become much more personal, laid back, casual, snarky at worst.

I don’t think it’s become as apparent in fiction, with a few exceptions, usually authors that make me want to birth kittens from my ass like Tao Lin, with his constant mentions of G-Chat conversations and such [I honestly didn’t know that many people used G-Chat until I read some of his work]. I think blogging has changed the publishing industry, how many writers have managed to spin one good blog idea into a book deal, whether that’s some sad little collection of photos spun out of a Tumblr or a memoir that expands on what someone already wrote about on their blog?

What I notice more often is how Twitter changes how I write. I’ve probably been more thoughtful about editing something down to 140 characters than I’ve been about any sentence in a short story ever.

What are your views on breakfast food?

I’m for it, at any time of day. Eggs Benedict, side of bacon, bottomless cup of coffee.

***

Nicole Bryant is an educator, theatre director and the love of my life. She’s also seen more of my writing than anyone else on this earth and is the one who dubbed me “The Hip-Hop Chuck Klosterman of the North.” So if it catches on, she gets a cut.

Where is your favourite place to write?

Anywhere my two dozen requirements can be met [laughs]. I need to leave the house, I know that much. It’s probably the only thing I do when I want/need to be around people. I don’t like to do it by myself. This may be another of the many things I have to get over. So currently, favourite place to write is the middle table in the big window of the first floor of the local Starbucks. The high school kids never socialize in that part of the building, they always go upstairs, and every table in that row is near a power outlet.

What is your biggest regret?

There’s probably a tie for the top spot: when I was flipping through that book you got me for Christmas, I opened it randomly to a piece on “writer-proofing your life,” including shutting the door on loved ones and lowering your standards [as in, the sink full of dirty dishes will wait]. I have never been able to do either of those things. It’s like even though getting my act together on this is all I want to do, I worry about what you might think if you came home and found me clacking away with last night’s dinner dishes in the sink. The fact that I left them there as I left today to finish this is a victory in itself.

That I allow fear to rule so much of what I do, what I’ve allowed it to cost me, take from me. That I allow it to consistently piss on the faith so many people have always had in me. And that I still don’t know how to overcome it.

Do you think you will ever be a successful writer?

Is Skyrim still in the house?

Depends what one means by successful. Publish a novel that gets sold to Hollywood producers? I don’t think so. Get the freelance hustle going, turning out little stories here and there to support myself? At that level, maybe not. Do I think I could get my name known in some circles and get some creative work published….anywhere? Could I fulfill the promise of what this stupid blog was supposed to be about in the first place?

Yes. I do. Even now, I still do.

Why do you like Macs so damn much? Did you have a man crush on Steve Jobs? Who do you have a man crush on?

Umm, because they’re awesome. I can acknowledge that part of my appreciation for them is based on hype and the status they convey, but I also find them the easiest to use. They do the things I want to do in a way that’s intuitive and deceptively powerful. And they’re sooo so pretty.

You know I struggled with how much the thing was going to cost me, but all it took was one unnecessary McAffee window popping up on your laptop to confirm that I could not deal with CTRL+ALT+DEL’ing my way through unnecessary processes that booted up without my knowledge.

I certainly had no mancrush on Steve Jobs, I was well aware of the saltier parts of his personality, his thievery and his litigious nature. Who do I have a mancrush on? I used to always say Harrison Ford, but the guy still wears an earring at his age.

It’s such a cliché to say Clooney, but as he’s entering his late phase I find him even more charming and charismatic than he was during the ‘Oceans’ period.

Favourite song of 1994?

At the time, probably this:

As of now, this:

What would you make with two empty toilet paper rolls, a roll of masking tape, ten straws, three cotton balls, and a full box of kleenex?

The best damn Fleshlight you ever saw!

***

Finally, a bonus question from my old college classmate Melissa Pulleyblank, who has managed to turn a job at McDonald’s into something that’s bought her a house. Unbelievable.

Why the interest in junk in the trunk? most women think it’s awful, most men would find cellulite icky and yet you find it awesome. Please explain.

I honestly can’t figure out when the switch from boob to ass man happened with me, but it was definitely sometime in the last seven to ten years. You know what it is? Yes, there’s appeal in the…curvatures, but for me it’s all about the walk. Maybe the bum is just okay but if the walk is mean? It’s a wrap.

One time over a civilized dinner an acquaintance and I had a ‘boobs v. ass’ discussion and he made an insightful observation I hadn’t considered before: when you see some great boobs, as a man, your brain doesn’t immediately go to a sex place, you can appreciate it for what it is. But when you see a great ass, the appreciation usually comes from a compulsion to do something to it. It’s a passive v. active thing. You see the boobs and say, ‘Damn, those some nice boobs!”; you see a gorgeous ass and you say, ‘Damn, if I get my hands on that I’ma…” and so on. As the bard said, “When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get sprung.”

Thanks to Annie, Caitlin, Nicole and Melissa. Maybe we’ll try this again come entry 500. I’ll try to have done something worth asking about by then.

Serious blogger is thinking serious thoughts.

As mentioned a few days ago, my life has been dramatically changed by the purchase of a shiny new Macbook Pro laptop over the holidays.  The addition of the precious has improved my blogging/writing life in ways you cannot imagine [case in point: that sentence took 15 seconds to type, as opposed to the hiccupy minute and a half it could have taken on my previous G4 iBook].  Not only do I now have contemporary content creation software at my disposal, I have a machine that can actually use it effectively.  Which leaves me in a dilly of a pickle.

I’ve been blogging off and on for over a decade. I’ve OpenDiary’d, DeadJournaled, LiveJournaled, Blogger’d and WordPressed. If I had to divvy up how much of my collected blog output has been worth a damn, and how much has been the self-centered blathering of a guy who thinks his experience makes him unique, and should be forced onto the world through the anguished clacks of his keyboards, it’s probably still a disappointing 30/70 split.  You can imagine my horror when I discovered that most of these blogs are still floating out there in the Internet ether, bemoaning all the women who wouldn’t love me or fights with my parents while I lived at home.  I had my finger on the delete-trigger for a moment, but couldn’t bring myself to erase anything I’d actually “finished,” immature though it might be.

Point being, since  the post-LJ days [say, 2006 onward] I’ve backed away from the “here’s what I’ve been doing in my awesome life,” mode of blogging so many of the young and blonde have cornered in the last five years or so.  I admit I try to build a certain cult of personality on PFG [as all blogs do], but I also try to keep said cult centred on how I see the narrowly focused aspects of the culture I talk about here, and not exposing all my foibles and rare drunken nights of debauchery, complete with an entire photostream of the night’s events.

BUT.  I now live in a world where, still about three years behind the curve, I have technologies  that allow me to engage with the world of the Internets in the fashions of the day. Now I can record videos of me rambling in poorly constructed meandering sentences about the issues of the day and upload them to YouTube instantly.  My last laptop didn’t have any YouTube functionality because it didn’t know YouTube existed then.  I can take a million photos with my phone and upload them wirelessly to any number of sharing services, or transfer them to my laptop via Dropbox.  I could aspire to be one of the beautiful people, but that has no interest to me anymore, and it was only recently that fact crystallized for me.  But to understand why, we gotta go back.

I don’t know why I was sitting at my office desk a couple of weeks ago thinking about Emily Gould.  Rather, I didn’t know I was thinking of her at the time, I was trying to remember the name of the woman who wrote that memoir with her own flower tattoo on the cover that someone likened to a contemporary Bell Jar [the someone was Curtis Sittenfeld, and she should be ashamed of herself].  I vaguely remembered the author had a web series where she cooked with authors, so I pulled Gould’s name from that and Googled her to get the name of the book.

Emily Gould and "Richard Yates" author Tao Lin preparing a raw salad. Or, hell on earth. You decide.

Googling Emily Gould’s name is a tumble down a rabbit hole of self involvement that just seems to loop back around on itself ad infinitum.  Gould writes about herself and people write about Gould writing about herself so they can criticize Gould for writing about herself, creating this grotesque uroboros of self-importance all the way around, as the feedback loop of criticism and self-justification goes on and on  and onnnn. She’s the poster child for online overexposure, both its benefits and detriments.  The former Gawker editor parlayed talking about herself into a navel gazing cottage industry, even scoring herself the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in the process, happy to trot herself as the cautionary tale for what can go wrong when you treat the internet as a movie about your life and  your friends, lovers and coworkers as supporting characters who have the nerve to get mad when you publicly expose them to the judgment of strangers.

Now look, I’m not trying to join in the perennial flaying of Gould, which has been going on for almost five years and evolved into amateur sport in some online circles.  I’ve read only enough of her work to know I don’t really wish to engage with it any further [and for the record, I tend to feel that way about most contemporary memoirists regardless of gender, before anyone tries to lob the 'you wouldn't say that if it was a man!' card. I found the article by Gould's ex about his time with her equally irritating].  But if the goal of something like the Times piece was to be a warning [and I'm  not entirely convinced it was], it certainly did the job.  I certainly didn’t need Gould’s experiences to remind me that the internet does not exist to serve my vanity, but it did serve to confirm my earlier inclination that the purchase of some new gadgets is not an open invitation to find myself fascinating again.  

So no, while blogging will be easier with the new machine, there will be no sizeable uptick in content for content’s sake.  My drunken revelries will not be chronicled, there will be no JPG underwear dance parties, I will not add a definite article or adjective to my name.  Because on the one hand, I like to think I keep my fucking mouth shut unless I have something to say [while feeling like I have a fair bit to say about everything], and on the other, frankly I’m too cool for you internet, you don’t deserve to have all of me.

But I’m in a giving mood, and the 200th instalment of Poetry for Gravediggers is upon us, so I wanted to do something special to commemorate it.  So for once, I’m actually willing to entertain the idea of personal content, and have opened myself up to be “interviewed” by some people I know and respect and think could ask interesting questions.  If on the off chance you’re a reader and want to know something, ask away through the typical  channels, and I’ll answer it. 

Almost three years I’ve been with this, and only 200 entries.  Such cruel mathematics that is.

The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

I imagine hardly any people will read this book, and that’s tragic.  Non-fiction books by novelists are always kind of a hard sell to people other than completists, academics and nerds like me, and I’ve never really understood that.  If you love what an author has to say about people who don’t exist, shouldn’t you love what they say about people who do even more? Lethem’s first collection of non-fiction, the slim essay collection The Disappointment Artist, solidified my love for him more than any novel he’s ever written, an all-nighter with the smartest stoner on campus discussing topics from the John Wayne movie The Searchers to the late-period comics work of Jack Kirby, to his father’s painting career; his essay on seeing Star Wars 21 times in 1977 is one of the best things I’ve read by anyone, anywhere.  The book blends cultural scholarship with narrative non-fiction in a way that 97% of bloggers working today wish they could emulate.

The Ecstasy of Influence works the same lane, but augments it a bit.  Titled after a controversial essay Lethem wrote for Harper’s in 2007 celebrating plagiarism and demonizing copyright and intellectual property [and revealed in the footnotes to have been reconstructed wholesale from the words and ideas of other people], the book is heavily modeled on one of Lethem’s favourites, Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself.  Like that book, TEOI reprints a large body of Lethem’s journalism and non-fiction on subjects as diverse as 9/11, James Brown and life as a used bookstore clerk, strung together with original pieces and commentaries.  Lethem might reprint an essay he wrote about his well-documented admiration for Philip K. Dick, going so far as to move near his house in California, then follow that piece up with a new piece on how Dick would likely have hated him had the two ever met, rounded out with a previously-unpublished early short story to illustrate just how much Dick’s work influenced him.  It’s a meandering, comprehensive book perfect for dipping in and out of, but when taken as a whole, shines as one of the best I read this year.

The Minstrel Show by Little Brother

Last autumn a friend of mine at the store told me with excitement that she was volunteering for Manifesto, a weeklong urban music and art festival here in Toronto.  Being a tiny Jewish girl and dyed-in-the-wool Glee fan, I found it an odd bit of extracurricular activity, but I’ll support anyone who wants to spread the love [it is the Brooklyn way, after all]. So as the festival drew near, she asked me if I could get a mix together of all of the artists who would be performing at the marquee concert, a free show in Toronto’s Dundas Square featuring Rakim, Kid Capri, Blu & Exile, Phonte & 9th Wonder and more.  Like a fool, I said yes, and started looking into some of the acts I was unfamiliar with. One of them as Little Brother, the group 9th and Phonte were a part of with Rapper Big Pooh.  I’d heard of them in my travels, but when they were putting out most of their work I was kneedeep in the band and trying to smother my hip-hop self into a little corner of my soul and wasn’t following the music that closely.  So rediscovering their second studio album last summer was a revelation.

A concept album based around the fictitious Minstrel Show [the greatest colored show on Earth!] and hosted by Chris Hardwick of Nerdist fame [it's really him, him and 9th both confirmed that for me on Twitter], the album gives over an hour of stellar soul-sampling beats, guest appearances from DJ Jazzy Jeff and Elzhi, and features the soulful stylings of Percy Miracles, in a parody of R.Kelly/Ronald Isley-style ballads so hysterically good it actually gets legitimately caught in your head.  With its ‘Caught you cheatin, you was creepin, to the windows to the walls, skeet-skeetin‘ chorus, it probably predicted contemporary R&B in 2011 way better than they’re probably comfortable with.   A crazy good album I will preach on to anyone and everyone.

Djay for Mac OSX

Even as far back as my university days, I wanted to be a DJ, hosting a freeform show in the late hours of a random weeknight.  Going back to childhood, listening to Jazzy Jeff’s instrumental tracks over and over again on cassette, breaking down the rhythms in my head, something about the sound of a scratch just captured my soul.  Never learning how to fully do it properly is one of the great regrets of my life [and something The Lady was kind enough to help me try to correct with a 2-hour session at a local DJ school she bought me on Groupon].   I’ve futzed about with virtual DJ software before, something I could make use of without a MIDI controller, and of any I tried, Djay is the slickest.

Djay takes every mp3 in your iTunes library and analyzes it by key and BPM, allowing you to check at a glance which songs will best flow next in a set.  Scratch controls are pretty impossible on a trackpad, but super responsive nonetheless, and latency issues are nonexistent on my machine, but I can’t speak to what anyone else’s experience might be like.  Numerous effects and tools alongside one touch recording capabilities could make for a much more interesting podcasting experience for me in the coming year. I imagine there are professionals out there who despise software like this for making it easy for twerps like me to clumsily beatmatch by looking at a screen instead of knowing the ins and outs of a song, but I’m not trying to throw sets together yet.  I just want to learn the workings of the art, and for the cost, Djay is a perfect way for beginners to dip their toes in with a crazy robust feature set without being intimidating.

And it has a foghorn button.  What more do you need?

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, this will not be a surpirse.  Imagine my horror when I realized last night I’d devoted seventy-six hours to this thing, and am still nowhere near done.  Not even close.  Haven’t even started Dark Brotherhood, barely touched the main storyline in weeks.  It’s why no writing gets done on wide open days off.  Because you don’t play Skyrim for an hour.  You play it for an afternoon or you don’t bother.  Because Skyrim has this way of  making riding your horse along a cobblestone path, discovering new locations or picking goddamn flowers the greatest gaming experience you’ve ever had. I know there are some people who’ve explored the game on my recommendation who aren’t really feeling the expansiveness, the lack of direction, not knowing what to do.  And yes, it’s glitchy as hell, I’ve had the dragons flying backwards, and had the dreaded framerate-slowdown last night as a pack of Falmer tore me to pieces. 

But, and I’m not the first person to say this, when I’m not playing it, I think about the damn thing.  I gleefully bask in the meme vocabulary that has emerged surrounding the game.  The soundtrack accompanies most writing sessions I’ve had in the past few weeks.  This game has stayed with me in ways no other game has since maybe my early Final Fantasy VII days when I would write Vincent Valentine fanfics in my head as I fell asleep.

Shut. Your mouths. Sharpshooter who can turn into a wolfman?  You know he was the best character.

That’s how this game gets into my head.  I put off marrying my character until last night, because I couldn’t decide who would be best suited to my Lv30 Khajiit spellsword.  These are fictional. characters. I don’t do this anymore! I’m not one of those people!  But I played a lot of great video games this year and they’re still amazing [I'm talking to you, Arkham City], and Skyrim Dragon Shouted its way into my heart in ways no game before it has.

Watch the Throne at The Air Canada Centre

It was going to be a ridiculous show, of that there was no doubt. The question was, How ridiculous?  Toronto may not have gotten the 10+ performances of N’s in Paris, but when two of the greatest rap artists ever do a show together, there’s no way it can be bad.  So maybe I didn’t need to hear ’99 Problems’ again, and maybe Kanye paid a woeful lack of attention to anything pre-Graduation, but those complaints are so outweighed by what was good about the show they fly off the fricking scale.

What I found amazing, as I digested the show after the fact, is how despite being one of the biggest solo artists in the world, and definitely the richest rapper, Jay-Z still exudes this aura like a laid back guy from Brooklyn.  Like even for a guy who’s been so calculated in every career move he’s made, and has seen most of those moves pay off, he still can’t believe he gets to do what he does for a living.  And that’s so frigging charismatic it’s disgusting.  By the end of the show, for who knows what reasons, Jay grabbed a dude’s CD from the crowd, signed it, grabbed Kanye as he was leaving and had him sign it too, then handed it back to the guy in the crowd.  Unbelievable.

It was an expensive evening, I certainly won’t argue that, and many people would question if it was worth it, but for an opportunity to not just see Kanye for the first time, but Jay for the second?  Yeah, I can live with the cost.

WTF with Marc Maron

Lock the gates.

The first time I was in therapy [long story], my therapist commented at one point that she wondered why I didn’t go into comedy, since she thought I was entertaining as hell.  This was at the end of our sessions when we were running out of things to talk about so I would just riff about stuff, otherwise I might have had a problem with the chuckles she was getting from our time together.

I never did explore doing stand-up [for all the same bullshit reasons I never explore doing anything] but looking back, I shouldn’t be surprised by her suggestion.  While I was never a diehard comedy nerd, I grew up on more than most other kids my age, memorizing and acting out old Cosby routines on my parents’ records, watching brick-wall backdrop episodes of Evening at the Improv, etc. That love has always been there.

Marc Maron’s WTF podcast was my revelation of 2011.  I’d heard some scuttlebutt about it here and there, but I don’t like to listen to too many podcasts since they eat up all my commute time and I like to use that to read when I can.  But when Maron showed up on the one podcast I do listen to religiously [the Slate Culture Gabfest, which you should all listen to religiously as well] I was amazed not only by him but by some of the audio clips they played while interviewing him.  I looked into some of the back catalogue and blazed through probably 30 episodes in a week.  Current icons like Louis C.K., Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Judd Apatow, Amy Poelher, up and comers like Donald Glover and Hannibal Buress; a quarter century career has provided Maron with the rep and the rolodex to call these people, and his surprising skill as an interviewer gets each episode at least 400,000 downloads a week.  It’s at the point where you ain’t shit as a comedian if you haven’t done the show at least once.

But for me, what I’ve taken away from listening to the shows is that my old therapist was right, I should have explored stand-up apparently, because these people are all as fucked up as I am in most of the same ways.  Maron himself deftly sums up and expresses all of the petty jealousies and insecurities I’ve carried and carry with me.  Conan O’Brien of all people summed up my entire childhood by commenting off-handedly that growing up Catholic, you live a large chunk of your life being told that something with you is fundamentally wrong, and you need to ask God’s forgiveness for it, all the time.  That’s a hell of a sky to part while walking up Spadina Avenue on a Thursday afternoon.  I almost broke down in tears on the goddamn street.  Maron and his guests so frequently hit the tuning fork on the bum notes of my life, and the show’s become a sort of informal therapy in itself, reminding me that there are people out there struggling with the same bullshit I am, trying to shake the pains of the past and make their way forward in the world.  And, God willing, have some laughs while they’re at it.

Network Situational Comedies

When I started watching Modern Family after hearing numerous good things about it, I made the [not exactly astute] observation that the show wasn’t exactly doing anything new, but it did it very well.  The plots all riffed on the typical sitcom tropes, usually based around some miscommunication or misunderstanding, but the writing is sharper and the actors more charismatic.  Maybe it’s the competition from cable, but it feels like in the last three years have brought us a golden age for 24-minute network-TV comedies:  Modern Family, Cougar Town, Up All Night, Happy Endings and New Girl have all surprised me with how funny they are, sometimes in spite of themselves [I'm looking at you, Happy Endings].  There’s nothing subversive about them, they’re not Louie, there’s no grand statement they’re trying to make, they’re just funny.  Of course, I could just be getting stupider in my old age, making mediocrity shine with a brightness it would have previously lacked.  It’s a distinct possibility.

13.3″ 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro

Excessive? That depends.

The next post on PFG will discuss in greater length what this device means for me, and what I hope it will mean for the site, but there’s no denying how much it has already changed how I do things.  I worked and scrimped and saved and put aside every bit of spare cash I could for the better part of eight months, to the point where I could upgrade from my old PowerPC G4 iBook and didn’t even have to buy refurbished off the website, I was able to buy a new machine, fresh in the box.  I was uneasy about spending the money, even after I had it.  I haven’t spent that much money on myself in one shot since college tuition [though, you know, in $3.00 or more increments buying comic books, way, way more....oh God].  But now that the damage is done, I don’t know how I managed so long.  It had gotten to a point where I couldn’t even type or scroll without lag and blogging a simple 500-word entry could take two hours if I wanted to include images.

And it’s MINE.  I’ve made do on shared devices or hand-me-downs for over a decade, and I don’t want to make it sound like I’m ungrateful to the friends and family who have helped over the years [first-world problems], but to have this laptop, which is mine, that I have made look like I want it to look, and runs the programs I want and even has all my music on it, and I’ve already exceeded the hard drive capacity of my old model while barely putting a dent in this one.  No computer lasts forever, but to have a new machine for the first time in my life that’s mine and mine alone is pretty amazing.  Almost the sort of thing that can fool you into thinking you finally have to tools to make this year the year you follow through on some of those ideas.  We shall see, friends.

We shall see.

Nope, as far as music produced in 2011, I was in a non-stop hip-hop state of mind, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Some rock and indie might have nudged their way into the party under other circumstances [Foster the People, The Black Keys], but like I said last year, that isn’t music I want to listen to.  That’s music where, if I hear it on the radio on a drive to see a movie, that’s cool.  But I’m not running home to buy it on iTunes.  These songs, I did.  So let’s go, in no particular order.

Danny Brown – XXX
Few artists had a better year than Danny Brown. With his toothless grin, new wave haircut and a voice that sounds like a goose caught by the throat, his Fool’s Gold debut mixtape set the internets afire with its vulnerability, humour [a whole song dedicated to his cunnilingus skills? Really, son?] and pure rappity rappin skills.  The XXX in the title has nothing to do with pornography, instead referring to the rapper’s age, his disbelief he survived his addictions long enough to make it this far, and his despair and confusion over what to do next, served over a beat that slaps the snares in the face and shakes the guitars by the shoulders.

Drake f/ Rick Ross – Lord Knows
In my world, there are few things better than the moment when Just Blaze yells his name at the start of a track.  It’s the starting pistol letting you know that some shit is about to go. down. But the last place I expected to hear it was on Drake’s “Take Care.”  Truthfully, the song is like a Skynnrd fan at a Bon Iver concert, a thunderstorm of boom-bap in the syrupy seas of bass and synth that permeates the rest of the album.  But shouts to Aubrey for knowing a good thing when he hears it, because it’s probably the beat of Just’s already stellar career.  The choir, the live drums, good lawd tell me that don’t make you want to start some shit?  I dare you.

Special commendation to Ricky Rozay, I finally relinquish my hesitation to appreciate his merits after his authenticity scandal in 2010.  He kept his head down, and put out music so good you had no choice but to get behind him.  That line about being the “only fat n***a in the sauna with Jews” won my heart.

Tyler, The Creator – Yonkers
While the OFWGKTA hype first started hitting me in 2010 when Earl’s mixtape started showing up on best-of lists, it wasn’t until crew leader Tyler’s debut, major-label release and video hit the internet that I understood why the kids were so enthralled.  When it hit, I said, “The lyrics are frequently hilarious and the beat is the hardest, most terrifying thing I’ve heard in years.” It’s an assessment I stand by. Odd Future may not have set the world on fire like some people predicted they would, but that was probably too much to ask.  They shouldn’t set the world on fire, really, I shouldn’t even know who they are, they should stay as that group that the kids keep to themselves and bump in their bedrooms to freak out their parents.  Every generation needs one, and this song [and video] accomplished that better than most.

Random Axe f/ Roc Marciano – Chewbacca
The beautiful thing about hip-hop at this point is that the old man genre has become a boutique niche of its own.  If the Lil B’s and Waka Flockas of the world get you down, you can always count on some old cats out of New York to keep putting out the boom-bap like 1994 never left.  Random Axe, a collab between producer Black Milk and rappers Guilty Simpson and Sean Price is nothing fancy, nothing groundbreaking, just a reminder that what some of the grumpy rap nerds think hip-hop is, is still alive and well.

Pusha T f/ Tyler, The Creator – Trouble on my Mind

Tyler’s second appearance on the list is the first collaboration he did after Yonkers blew him up.  It was a bold move for Pusha to give him the co-sign:  he’d come off a starmaking turn on Kanye’s ‘Runaway,’ and was set to blow as a solo star.  So what does he do for his coming out party?  Bridge the gap between the old heads and the kids.  At once reaffirming his status with the youth and giving the kid a co-sign from the larger hip-hop community, Pusha locked his place as one of the most important rappers working today.  Plus, he just looks like he’s having damn fun in that video.

Common – Sweet
Common is ANGRY.  I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the rule in rap seems to be, you can act or sing or experiment or get emotional, but you have come back every few years and remind the people who you are.  I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying it’s how it be.  Common is clearly dealing with this issue, and holy shit did he come with it on this song.  Produced by his original mentor No I.D., Rashid wants to put the world on notice that just because he’s starring in some show on AMC or hosting BET’s best videos of the year doesn’t mean he won’t eat a rapper’s ass, and anyone who thinks he’s out the game should recondiser before stepping. Not a diss against anyone, just a classic display of rap bravado by one of the best to ever do it.

Madlib & Freddie Gibbs – Deep
If you can’t get another Madvillain record, this is probably the next best thing,  a surprise collab between two of the most universally beloved rap artists making music today.  The initial “MadGibbs” EP was sold at a few shows in California late last year and only had two vocal songs on it.  While both songs are incredible, I ultimately go with this one, since a song with a soul sample always trumps a song without one for me.  Freddie kicks that southern-fried double-time flow I didn’t hear nearly enough of this year.  Here’s hoping for a full length in 2012.

Kendrick Lamar – A.D.H.D.
I was woefully late to the Kendrick Lamar party, having first encountered him on Drake’s album I’m ashamed to say, because his mixtape ‘Section.80′ is incredible, and this is the song that gets everyone’s attention when they first hear it.  It occurs to me that so many artists this year seem to be reactions to the age of excess espoused by their predecessors in the blingy jiggy era…there’s no fulfillment in the boozing and drugging and strip clubs, they keep at hoping it leaves them with some sort of meaning, but it never does, and how much more alone that leaves you feeling.  It’s not a message that will have a long shelf life, but for this year it was revolutionary, at least in hip-hop. It doesn’t hurt that the beat is incredible, either.

Elzhi – It Ain’t Hard to Tell
It should be blasphemy. It shouldn’t work on any level. Remake Illmatic?  Son, is you crazy?! But the project works for two reasons:  one, Elzhi knows if he’s even going to try to attempt this, he better rap his ass off, and he’s got the skills to do it; two, using Will Sessions as  a backup band to turn the classic instrumentals we all know and love into something new but familiar.  The whole Elmatic project is worth your time, but this track is the standout, just as it was on the original.

Drake – Look What You’ve Done
Drake – Marvin’s Room
I know, I know.  But really, the whole album could end up here, with few exceptions.  It’s hard enough for me to limit it to these three.  Look What You’ve Done, a love song to his mother, uncle and grandmother has the distinct honour of being possibly the first song to sample a Youtube video, an impromptu performance by the late Static Major of Smoke E. Digglera’s ‘If U Scared, Say U Scared‘ [I'm not making these names up, I swear]. Those piano chords just kill me. That sample selection is indicative as much as anything on the album of the influence Aaliyah and other late-90s Timbaland inspired R&B has on the album.  As far as Marvin’s Room goes, I don’t think I need to say anything else about it that I haven’t already said:  No one in rap today would ever have the balls to put out a song like that. Whether that was a good decision on his part or not is up for debate, but respect the audacity to do it in the first place.

Frank Ocean – Novacane
If 2011 taught us anything, it was a reminder again that the traditional label model of releasing music is dead in the water.  Frank Ocean was signed to Def Jam and couldn’t get them to release any of the music he was working on.  So he put up a mixtape on his Tumblr unannounced and crashed the internet.  A bidding war started to percolate, imagine everyone’s surprise, including Def Jam’s, when they realized they’d already signed him?  A lot of people talked  about the rebirth of R&B this year, primarily attributed to the emergence of The Weeknd [who adopted a similar label-free, drop music for free on internet unannounced model], but I have to admit, I sometimes find Abel’s voice a little grating after too long. Frank just feels a little more grown to me, there’s more living in his voice to me, despite the drug soaked haze that permeates most Weeknd tracks.   I doubt Def Jam will have any idea what to do with him, which doesn’t bode well for his 2012.  If they just let loose the reigns and let him go, just imagine what he could do.

J. Cole – Work Out
J. Cole was on this last year, and I predicted that he could own 2011.  I don’t know that he succeeded, but he made a hell of an effort.  A buzzy thud of a bass, a bugged out Kanye-sample, a Paula Abdul hook [say what?] made for one of the most pleasant earworms of the year.  The kid probably has the brightest future of any rapper in the game right now.

DJ Khaled f/ Drake, Rick Ross and Lil Wayne – I’m On One
This is a DJ Khaled song like I’m the lead designer on Skyrim: just cause I play the shit don’t mean I made it.   With all these Drake songs I’m really not celebrating Drake as much as I’m celebrating his producer.  Noah ’40′ Shebib had the year of his life and joined the beatmaking elite because his sound became signature.  When you first heard ‘I’m On One,’ you knew it was a 40 beat.  Just like you know that ‘woof!’ is Rick Ross and the sound of the lighter means Weezy’s verse is starting.  This song got overplayed to hell this year but there’s a reason for that: it was the best song that came out this year, save for one.

But seriously, Khaled, what the hell do you do?!

Jay-Z and Kanye West: N***as in Paris
I hated this song when the album came out.  Seriously.  Hated it.  Thought it was the dumbest shit I’d ever heard, and certainly wasn’t better than Otis, or That’s My Bitch.

Then the shows started.  We heard about three times. I got four times when I saw them in Toronto.  The next night in Detroit they did it seven.  Chicago got ten.  And by the sheer force of their wills, they made me love this song.  I started to appreciate the sheer absurdity of it, how it simultaneously gave the world at least four catchphrases in one shot and sampled a damn Will Ferrell movie!  Not even one of the funny ones! Seriously, how many Netflix queue adds do you think ‘Blades of Glory’ got after this song hit?  Didn’t hurt that once you get over that silly little synth hook the beat punches you in the face like you stole from it.

So that’s the list for the year!  When you gather them all in one place, it was better than I thought it was.  For anyone’s listening pleasure, I took the liberty of putting together a Spotify playlist for your enjoyment [but only if your enjoyment is based outside of Canada, sorry countrymen. There are backdoors, if interested]. Not all songs could be included [though adding one of the lame karaoke versions of Jay and Kanye was tempting], but I did what I could.  Mainly, I just wanted to experiment with the service, since I spent most of sickly New Year’s Eve getting it to work.

And that’s how my 2011 shook out musically.  How was yours? Did I miss anything essential whilst silo’d off in the world of the hippity-hop?  Let me know in the comments.

You can smell the benzine.

I’ve been thinking all this week about 2011, what it meant to the culture, to me personally. The answers don’t come easily.

2011 was, for your humble host, simultaneously the best and worst year. Professionally, I started writing for other outlets, made some tiny moves in my career doing new work I’m good at and care about, made a little more money, started RadioPFG and PFGX [updates may have been irregular, but hey, it was started]. By year’s end proper I should have a laptop that will actually take huge swaths out of the work making these things requires. [I love Ol' Wheezy but there are cell phones with faster processors by now]. There really isn’t a whole lot to complain about on that side of the equation.

Personally, 2011 was….less good. I danced and sang and laughed and read good books and listened to good music and actually saw a doctor for once and got a driver’s permit.  I also fought viciously with family, went months without speaking to people I love the most and neglected my most important relationships to the breaking points. Even after losing so much, I can’t tell you that I know how to fix any of it, or if I even can. Many months of this year felt like living in a Drake song, syrupy bass and echoey falsetto bludgeoning me into a numbed and dazed stupor.

But I’m trying, friends. I’m trying to figure it out. I’m a slow and scared and stupid man who usually learns what I need to far later than acceptable, and pushed far too many people I love away when I should have been honest with them. But I’m trying. Just wait for me, please. I’ll make you so impatient and frustrated, but I’ll never let you down, I promise you that.

Of course I went Khajiit. Don't act so surprised.

I spend half my time fudging with inventory. I spend the other half in load screens.  The combat is like fighting Jell-O, nothing seems to connect despite the sound of the clanging swords.  The notorious glitches are frequent: I’ve fallen through walls and witnessed the mythical backwards flying dragon.  It’s a glorified to-do list.

It is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. And I can’t stop playing it. And I’m  not the only one.

While never averse to RPG’s, I learned after a brief dalliance with Fallout3 that the specific brand of game put forth by Bethesda Softworks are the sort I no longer have the right lifestyle to accommodate.  Some early reviews boasted 300-hour experiences, and I just don’t have that sort of time anymore.  

Sixteen hours in, it would appear I do.

So what the hell is it about this game? There are all the aforementioned strikes against it, and forget about the story, I only know what’s happening 20% of the time [Empire? Stormcloaks? Uhhhhh...] so why can’t I stop?  Why is writing this entry about Skyrim making me angry because it makes me want to stop writing to go play Skyrim.

If I have a gun to my head, I would probably settle on “immersion.”  While Skyrim has the same open-world, sandboxy gameplay I love about Grand Theft Auto (IV in particular), GTA lacks any sort of character skill progression or first person perspective.  In both games, you’re never beholden to perform the tasks the game demands, but you will run out of things to do in Liberty City and go back to the main story line.  I went four days in Skyrim without going anywhere near the primary narrative. Even when I did decide to go to High Hrothgar or whatever the hell it is, I ended up meandering into mill towns and military camps, picking up some quick gold clearing out a dungeon or two. I just adore the world Bethesda’s created.  The first time I saw the aurora borealis over the fields surrounding Winterun my jaw actually dropped. The first time a dragon unexpectedly thundered overhead I panicked and hid behind a rock [actually an effective strategy it turned out].  I also enjoy the absence of Fallout’s karma system.  The few hours I spent with that game, I didn’t enjoy constantly being reminded that the game was watching and ticking off everything I did, always placing weights on the scale of judgment.  If my intent was to be a good person, one point of negative karma could undo hours of play.  With Skyrim, the decision to steal, pickpocket or murder innocents is purely up to your own moral code.  And, interestingly enough, as with Red Dead Redemption, it’s never occurred to me to start tossing fireballs at shopkeepers.

There’s also the matter of character creation.  I know this is standard practice in any RPG worth a damn, but it’s a feature I haven’t had the opportunity to tool around with in a very long time.  I feel an ownership and connection over that ball of fur pictured above that I haven’t experienced in a game in a very long time.  I anguish over every decision I make for him, every skill to build, the type of game I’m going to play [one-handed brawler].   I might have enjoyed tooling around Liberty City with Niko Bellic, but when Iloru Sachiel [a name I agonized over, even consulting a fantasy name generator] runs around Skyrim, it feels like me, because I control how he looks, how he fights, his abilities, what he wears.  When I take Lydia my ‘housecarl’ [pictured above, think medieval personal assistant] out with me, I constantly check on her safety during battles.  I even get bummed when I have to kill other Khajiit, because I don’t like killing my “own kind.” And I am fully aware of what a pitifully geeky thing that is to even say, let alone praise.

It actually wasn’t my idea to get the game.  For the first time in history, The Lady bought a video game she wanted to play. And we are already playing two different games: she’s playing as a Nord woman with a preference for two-handed weapons.  She’s done different quests than I have. If we swapped notes after a week, we’d probably find we had very unique experiences.  When you take into account the numerous class builds you can make [I'm already thinking Highborn Warmage my next go around], you start to realize just how much is hiding under the hood of this game.

I acknowledge this is all very surfacey praise, and anyone who’s played the previous game Oblivion or even World of Warcraft figured these things out years ago, but it speaks to Skyrim’s overall success if it can win over players like The Lady and I back to its snowy bluffs hour after hour. After hour. Why am I still talking to you?

Oh, you know, here and there.  Don’t mistake a lack of presence here for a lack of writing, that’s actually how the bulk of my weeks go lately.  If you want to read ‘em, feel free:

FOR CHAPTERS/INDIGO:

A lot of stuff, actually, mostly intro’s to pieces about cookbooks and such, but I did get to run on a piece looking at the recent Hardcover commemorating the 25th Anniversary of Def Jam Records, so that was fun.  All my recent pieces for them are collected here.

FOR 22 PAGES:

I seem to be moving to a monthly schedule with my articles for the University of Toronto’s Comics Appreciation site.  When I’m on fire, you might see a piece there every couple of weeks. This time out, we went a month.  Such is life.  The latest piece looks at comics icon Frank Miller and what his recent comments about the Occupy Wall Street Protests say about him.

So that’s where I be.  My Twitter usually finds me prattling on about one thing or another pretty much daily if it feels like I’m falling off here [which I will occasionally, let's be honest]. But I’m also learning to make better use of scheduling blogs, instead of tossing a bucket of content up during the weekends when less people are around, I can schedule that content to go up throughout the week. Such are the marvels of the times we live in.

If you’re new here, thanks for stopping by. If you’re a regular, I hope you realize how much I appreciate that.  I don’t thank y’all enough.

Why so serious?

While indie rock seems to have morphed into post-millennial adult contemporary and electronic music, while vibrant and exciting in many ways, is still the province of the very young, hip-hop is still a generational game.  The folks my age who are still wilding out over the new Wilco album can still find things to appreciate about Grizzly Bear or Dirty Projectors or Hey Rosetta [are y'all still on them?].  The folks my age are barely paying attention to Deadmau5 and Skrillex.  But the folks my age who like hip-hop still know who the young bucks on the come up, are, because they need to know who to shake their head at.  Folks younger than me are going bananas over Nicki Minaj, folks my age are thinking Lil Kim already worked that lane, folks older than me are thinking MC Lyte could body both of them.

See though, the folks my age are people who didn’t always have hip-hop, so when they see the kids who never knew what life without hip-hop was like dougie-ing and getting silly or whatever the hell they’re doing this year, they sometimes take it personally, an affront to the ‘real hip-hop.’  The popular argument around hip-hop  blogs lately is that rap is music for the kids in the streets [Chuck D of Public Enemy didn't want to MC when he was 24, because he thought he too old], and you can’t ignore artists like Lil B or OFWGKTA or even Soulja Boy, because that’s what the kids are feeling.  Not the streets, the kids. Two different things.  But that’s a topic for another post.

I mention all of this because I’ve concluded that Drake is probably the last rap artist popular with the kids that I will be able to derive any personal enjoyment from.  His sophomore effort came out a couple weeks ago, and while it won’t take my ‘Album of the Year’ crown [is that even possible anymore?] I will say it’s one of the weirdest, most complicated rap albums I’ve heard since Kanye’s last effort.  

Musically, it’s a Drake record.  If you’re familiar with his style, or that of frequent collaborator Noah ’40′ Shebib, you know what you’ll find [though one of the samples appears to have come from a YouTube recording, which is probably a revolutionary advance of the sampling game]: electronic snares, syrupy basslines, reverb out the ass, the overall sense that they recorded the whole thing underwater. Even the opener ‘Over My Dead Body’ echoes the first track on Thank Me later, with the quartet of melancholic piano chords and female vocalist accompaniment [this time downgrading from Alicia Keys to Canadian songstress Chantel Kreviazuk(?!)]

Coincidentally, as with Thank Me Later, the opener’s my favourite song on the album. 

Guest spots from Just Blaze and Rick Ross [who collaborate to make the most typically 'Hip-Hop' record on the album], Toronto wunderkind The Weeknd, up and comer Kendrick Lamar, a harmonica solo from Stevie Wonder, a rare appearance from Andre 3000 [who, in like ninety seconds delivers the most insightful and elegant analysis of the emotional economy of strip clubs I've ever heard] combine to make a beautiful mess of an record owing more to the RnB of the 90′s more than any rap artist [indeed, Aaliyah's name comes up more than a couple times on the album].

Thematically, Take Care riffs on the usual tropes of rap stardom in ways I’ve never seen.  If the first album worked the typical ‘coming to terms with fame’ story so many rappers blather on about, this album is unique in the sense that it addresses the schism between the famous and the people around them.  From what I’ve read about the album, the recording of it marked the longest extended period Drake spent in his hometown of Toronto since his rocket launched in 2009. And in doing so, he learned that lesson that only people who get out of their city can understand:  you can go home again, but don’t expect people to  stay in the same place while you’re gone.  Which is one side of the album’s thematic coin.  The other is a little more complicated, and what makes the album exceptional.

When I’m working at the store, a lot of my younger female coworkers in their early 20s sometimes latch onto me for advice on the boys in their life, usually along the ‘he broke up with me, now he keeps calling me or drunk texting me, what the hell?’  And I tell them the one truth I know about men, the one truth I’ve been guilty of myself and see repeated again and again, and it’s the notion Drake struggles with throughout his album.

When a man has a woman, even once, even if he lets her go, he always thinks he can have her again.

You can have that one for free, ladies. There’s a whole truckload of gender politics in that statement, I agree, but we’re only talking about how this refers to Mr. Graham. 

Drake obsesses about the women he left on this album.  The loves he lost in the pursuit of his career haunt every corner  like those little girls in Japanese horror movies, standing with their hair in their face watching the proceedings.  He pleads for them to freeze in place, not to move on with their lives.  His mistake, and he knows this, is thinking that he can back pocket them, keep them under glass he can break in case of emergency. Nowhere is laid out with startling clarity on the album’s most intense and divisive track, ‘Marvin’s Room.’

Starting with the tired, slurry phone call with the unnamed woman, to his admission that he knows the girl he wants is happy with “a good guy” but he’s too drunk to give a shit and calls her anyway, telling her to forget her man and come over to his apartment.  The coda suggests, against her better judgment, she does, only to end up vomiting in the bathroom as her friend drops an N-bomb in a room full of black dudes.

When have you heard anything like that before?!  I’ve seen some discussion online that the song is the “International Player Hater’s Anthem,” a song celebrating the bitter losers who try to get back with their exes once they’ve moved on.  Anyone who comes to that conclusion is missing the point. ‘Marvin’s Room’ is so compelling because even as he’s singing it, Drake knows he’s full of shit, and he’s not afraid to put that on record for the world to hear.  He’s just saying she could do better, but he doesn’t really believe it: “I think I’m addicted to naked pictures and thinking talking ’bout bitches that we almost had….but shit it’s all good.”  No, it ain’t. And he knows it.

To anyone who wants to sneer at Drake’s ‘softness’ on that song, or throughout Take Care, I would reply that if hip-hop values the real as its primary currency:  when’s it been realer than that, motherfuckers?

It’s not a perfect album, by any means.  The preponderance of the word ‘bitches’ all over the place is troubling from someone who’s supposed to love women as much as Drake does [the title of this post is an actual lyric]. There are fluffy throwaway songs I skip through just as there are on any rap album [BIRDMAN. STOP RAPPING], but the ones that stand out stand out as some of the more fascinating music I’ve heard this year.

Download These: ‘Over My Dead Body’, ‘Marvin’s Room’, ‘Underground Kings’, ‘Lord Knows’,'The Real Her’, ‘Look What You’ve Done’.

Is it true?  Could I really be wrapping this celebration of all things Tribe without devoting any time to Midnight Marauders?  Their masterpiece!  Their most fully realized work! The album I’ve cited numerous times as my favourite!

Well….yeah.

Midnight Marauders is an undeniable classic, there is no doubt of this. But it’s a classic because it perfected an idea.  You can argue that there’s nothing new on MM, it’s just the moment the execution was perfect from wall to wall. Midnight Marauders is the PhD Dissertation after the Master’s Thesis of The Low End Theory.  In fact, nothing on MM explored any new territory, even the name had emerged before the album did.  Which brings us to our final examination.

This song first appeared on the 1992 rarities collection Revised Quest for the Seasoned Traveler, but didn’t hit a lot of people’s radars until it showed up on a bonus disc packaged with the group’s final album in 1998.  

What fascinates me most about the song is its aggression.  The confines of hip-hop’s traditional views of what defines the masculine is something rappers continue to rub up against, [Drake addressed it in a recent Complex cover story, B.O.B. came harder than anyone would have expected when Odd Future dissed him last winter, Common still flexes like has something to prove]. It’s de rigeur in hip-hop that you can show your sensitive side, as long as you make sure to puff your chest out once in a while to show potential haters you’re not to be trifled with.  Such was the hard lesson groups like Tribe and De La had to learn when they dropped their debuts in the late 80′s wearing tie-dye and dashikis. On the one hand, they were celebrated for their creativity, yet on the other, well, NWA and Ice Cube were out at the same time.  De La took it the hardest, so much they ‘killed’ themselves on their second album.  Tribe might have started wearing jerseys and Starter hats, but judging by this record we’re looking at, they still felt they had to prove something to someone.

While titled as a ‘re-recording’ of their ‘Low End’ single ‘Jazz (We Got)’, the two songs could not be more different.  The original is a mellow, meditative journey composed of traditional jazz samples [a first for rap], the remix is a street banger from the moment that industrial sounding drum loop comes in and Q-Tip let’s out a self-satisfied ‘whooooo!‘ as Ali Shaheed scratches his ass off over a sample of a primal ‘Yeah!’

Those drums and that ‘yeah’ are lifted from a song called ‘Long Red’ by the band Mountain, they of ‘Mississippi Queen’ fame. 

While Eric B and Rakim and EPMD got to the drum break before Tribe [indeed, the first 20 seconds of this recording is probably the most versatile hip-hop sample since Funky Drummer], Q-Tip once again displays his genius by finding something in it that creates a completely different mood.  That first second or two, something resonates in the mics, or feedbacks to create that metallic whine that coats the recording.  It’s gone in an instant, within the first two seconds, but Tip’s ear can spot the best part of the song, and that’s what he flipped.  Every beat in the Re-Recording comes from those first two seconds.  You hope they had an MPC at that point, cause if they didn’t, looping that by hand would have been murder.  The other samples, the horn break from Sly and the Family Stone’s ‘Sing a Simple Song’ and the keys buried seven minutes into Freddie Hubbard’s ‘Suite Sioux’ provide the requisite jazz component but get buried under the weight of that machine-gun beat.

Lyrically, the song is unlike anything else Tribe had done previously, in the sense that it’s straight battle.  Here’s Tip:

I refuse to catch an ‘L’ in a battle
Cause yo, I got the jazz, and I’ll whup a rapper’s ass
into little next to nothing, test me if I’m fronting.

Phife of course brings his usual street swag, coming in hard from the outset:

No need for introductions cause you know who I be.
[The Phife Dawg] Yep, the one who loves to slaughter MCs.

Those first two lines might be my favourite in Tribe’s whole catalogue, because I think it shows Tip and Phife at their most unified.  After delivering the hook, Tip introduces his partner with an excited, ‘Come on, Phife!’  It’s a moment of complete confidence in his partner’s abilities, Tip knows Phife’s in his element and has doesn’t doubt for a second that mic’s about to get torn to bits.  And even after Phife claims who needs no introduction, it’s Tip who drops that drawly, ‘The Phife Daaaaawg’, playing a rare role of support.  Look, I know the two of them have had numerous moments of stellar wordplay over the years, usually on equal footing, or more commonly with Phife playing support to Tip.  Those first lines in the second verse are the only time I’ve ever felt Tip really sat back and marveled at the talents of his partner.  There’s a moment after Phife asserts he’ll crack a sucker MC in the jaw, you hear Tip whistle in one of those, ‘damn, son!’ moments.

That’s why I love the song so much, it’s not about each of them asserting they’re the best as individuals but as a group. Two stellar verses by the MCs, followed by the most scratching I think Ali Shaheed’s ever done on a Tribe record: he chews that ‘Yeah!’ up to euphoric levels, inciting the listener to shout it out with them.

To my mind, though, the best moment of the song might not even exist.  During the chorus, as Tip asks ‘Who got the jazz?’ he clearly says ‘We got the jazz,’ but there are certain moments where, to my ear, it sounds like he says, ‘You got the jazz,’ shifting the ‘we’ of the title from not just including the band, but the listener as well, a way of acknowledging that we understood what they were doing, and welcoming us to walk with them for as long as those instinctive travels along the paths of rhythm would last.

As it turned out, we reached that destination long before we were ready, but they say the journey’s the thing.

You could very possibly make the argument that no two MCs are more universally acclaimed than Mos Def and Talib Kweli. Certainly no two MCs are more beloved by white people, judging by the makeup of the crowd in attendance at Toronto’s Kool Haus last night.

My attendance at the show was very last minute, and thrown into question when news broke of a shooting outside the venue the night before. But it takes more than that to dissuade fans of the real hip-hop, and Mos and Talib did not disappoint.

Rap shows can always be a bit of a crap shoot.  Will the act try to shoehorn in a live band, will they just rap over a laptop piped through the PA, a mixture of the two?  All three options can yield transcendent and lackluster results.  Blackstar opted for a straight DJ setup, which lead to the sound being a little muddy at times, and the two MCs had frequent requests for the soundman, but the laidback, confident energy they brought to the stage captivated the hundreds in attendance.

Since releasing their debut full length in 1998, Mos Def and Talib Kweli have grown into two of the most confident and professional rappers working today, and that professionalism both helps and hinders.  The two-hour performance moved a quick clip and never sagged, the song selection was a perfect mix of old and new, solo and collaborative, but it did feel at times like the proceedings were a little over rehearsed.  There wasn’t much by way of banter or spontaneity, aside from some typical rap show crowd interaction.  But really, were any of us there for the unexpected, or did we want this rare tandem appearance from both of them to give us the songs we loved without any cute tricks?

And the songs we loved came fast and furious, starting with ‘Fix Up,’ from the much rumoured new BlackStar album, through crowd favourites like Definition and Respiration, to beloved solo joints from each member like Get By and Never Been in Love from Talib, or History, Supermagic and Umi Says from Mos.  Whatever your preference, each member had you covered.

But if I had one perfect moment, even if it too wasn’t spontaneous, it was the show’s conclusion: after officially closing the show with Umi Says, the DJ dropped ‘WildLife’ from the New Tony Williams Lifetime [a song my real Canuck hip-hop heads will recognize as the sample from Halifax crew Universal Soul's 'Way Back in the Day'] and Mos just wilded out for the next six minutes.  Dancing, air guitaring, air drumming, spinning, smiling, feeling the music so deeply you couldn’t help but feel what he was feeling.  I’d seen footage of him doing it in Seattle the week before, but to be that close to him in the crowd and see the joy on his face, listening to a song he’s heard hundreds of times before, was really a beautiful moment.

Check out their performance of the Reflection Eternal classic ‘The Blast’ below. I apologize for the sideways footage during the first half, but I rarely use my phone for much, so I had no idea itwouldn’t correct the perspective automatically.  This technology befuddles us old folks.