Music Molly

music for saying "whaazzzuppp" (megamix 9)

Here's a new megamix, with anti-skip protection.

A reminder to hit up the MAILBAG - email me (ienjoymusicblog@gmail.com) with what you're listening to these days, musical memories, anything you think would be ripe for the blogging.

wazzup mashup at the open streets

There's a program in L.A. called CicLAvia that shuts down streets so that bikers, skaters, walkers, etc. can spend the day roaming around in a car-free environment. I went with my friends Betsy and Amber and Amber's daughter and we had a lovely afternoon walking around Hollywood and Koreatown. A lot of people were biking with powerful Bluetooth speakers attached to their rigs, and the music was uniformly pretty great (lots of disco). At a crosswalk, a guy rode up behind us blaring something I'd never heard before: the background music was "U Can't Touch This" by M.C. Hammer, but it was overlaid with a vocal sample of the guys in the old Budweiser Super Bowl ad going whhaaaazzzuuuup. Went home and searched those keywords and came up with "Wassuup!" by UK electronic duo Da Muttz (aka Shaft, Skeewiff, Al & El...). They have a whole album from 2001 called Da Album, I'll be exploring that soon.

Side note, that Budweiser commercial was perceived as a little dumb at the time but in retrospect I find its warmth and slice-of-life intimacy to be very beautiful. The director, Charles Stone III, went on to direct one of my favorite movies of all time, Drumline. ONE BAND. ONE SOUND.

We took a break from walking at a coffee shop called Coffee Signal and I got a weird muffin that tasted of nothing in particular, but their couch was comfy and they had a good logo.

Sinners really is that good

Speaking of good movies with music themes, I liked Sinners so much after seeing it in a regular format that I saw it again a couple days later in IMAX. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen, but it engages with music (+ cultural heritage, cultural inspiration vs. vampirism) in a way that I haven't quite seen in movies before.

Altogether it was the most I have thought about blues music in some time. Its theme of white folks' misunderstanding of the blues at best, and thievery/vandalism of it at worst, reminded me of Chuck Klosterman writing about Robert Johnson in Killing Yourself to Live: "We immediately tried to listen to [Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings] only to realize that (a) the box set includes two takes of almost every song, sequenced back-to-back, and (b) even the songs that are technically different sounded identical to all the others. I like blues-based rock, but I hate the fucking blues; it was more fun to play Let It Bleed and look at Johnson’s photograph on the front of the box. He certainly had a stellar hat." Miles Caton was astonishing in this movie, by the way, and the Ludwig Göransson score was pleasantly deranged.

Exploring the Skrillectic

Can't recommend enough Ock Sportello's recent blogged synthesis of aesthetics: Skrillex music, Harmony Korine movies, and smoke shops. I also loved the new Skrillex album, or perhaps you could call it a megamix, though it left me wondering about whether the concussive production and brainrot-adjacent vocal ejaculations were sanding down my cranium in a 'good bong hit' kind of way, or a 'bad bong hit' kind of way. The Never Hungover post was a good processing tool. There are a couple drops on F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 that made me think of Justin Bieber talking about Skrillex's beats on a New York Times video: "The sounds that are used are not cheap...they're very expensive-sounding sounds."

A note on smoke shops: when I lived in New York, where by the early 2020s there was seemingly a smoke shop on every commercial block of the city, selling energy drinks and blurred-line-legal weed and always named something like MAGICAL CLOUDZ or DR. DAB'S WEEDMERGENCY ROOM, I developed a habit of smoke shop window shopping. I was looking for the perfect Rick & Morty bong. Every smoke shop had a Rick & Morty smoking device in the window, but none were perfect. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I'd know when I saw it. I guess I'm still hoping I find one eventually.

this one is okay, I like the yellow and the "Get Schwifty" heads but I don't like the image of Rick as being stressed. not the headspace I want for weeds...

AUS!Funkt rewires the damage

A rec from my husband—Montréal band AUS!Funkt has a new album out called Rewire The Damage and it's a banger. Dance punk! Dance punk! Dance punk!!!!! They end their album with an "Extended Austere Club Mix" of their song "Seconds Minutes Hours Weeks" and god I wish I could go to an extended, austere club to enjoy it properly.

Biz Sherbert celebrates music fashion

I grew up at the intersection of fashion magazines and fashion blogs (down the street from the intersection of art and technology). My favorite element of both types of publications was always street style: girl-on-the-street interviews, "real girl" style reportage. Recently I had a photo from The Strokes subreddit (ha) pop up on my feed—Juliet Joslin, former Strokes assistant manager / former spouse of Julian Casablancas, featured in Elle Girl—and was like ahhhhhhhh. I'm over social video as a format for fashion inspiration. Nothing removes yr aura faster than speaking to a camera about your look. The still photo paired with a textual excerpt of an interview is what we need. This preserves the glamour, this creates essential mystique upon which you can project your own desires.

Which leads me to Biz Sherbert, who co-hosts a wonderful podcast called Nymphet Alumni, and has lately been writing a fashion newsletter called American Style. Her recent post about what people were wearing at a Deftones concert in Atlanta made me all misty. I loved reading about the person wearing three different Temu belts, and the girl wearing mostly Spirit Halloween.

My first ever unsupervised concert was Deftones: November 24, 2003. Thursday and Thrice were also on the bill, but Thrice had dropped out—I think it was because they had booked a last-minute late night talk show performance. I had just turned fourteen the previous week. I went to the show at Memorial Auditorium with my friend Ruby, wearing my bright red middle school junior varsity basketball sweatshirt ("go Panthers"), because I don't even think I owned any black clothing then. Everyone at the show wore black and I felt like I stood out like a red fire hydrant. So seeing that Deftones still draws young women, probably more than ever before, melted my heart.

concert photoshop? / Lana Del Reggae

Holiday Kirk, the CEO of nü-metal, threw a killer party a few weeks ago in sunny Los Angeles. The motif was Cyberpunk 2077, which is a video game I have never played but whose theme and visuals I respect. Neon, synthwave, things of this nature. Holiday DJ'd, as did John "Johnny Health" Famiglietti from Health, a band that has contributed music to the game in the past.

I took a photo of Holiday DJing on my trusty point-and-shoot camera. And I tried something different with its post-production. There was an iPhone held aloft in the shot, near the left side of the stage, and I went in Photoshop and clone-stamped it out of existence. It looked distracting and now not so much. What do you think? Chat...am I going too far? Tried it again with a photo I took in the Yuma tent...pleasant? Uncanny?? Neutral??? Sometimes I think phones would be more tolerable in society if you didn't see them light up so brightly...such distracting rectangles.

On the ride home from Holiday's party, my Uber driver was playing "A&W" by Lana Del Rey, one of the best songs of the 2020s. I complimented his taste and asked if he had chosen the Lana or was using an algorithm that surfaced her automatically. He said it was his own doing, and that he liked listening to Lana on his chill L.A. night drives. He told me to look up Lana Del Rey reggae renditions on YouTube...one of the more Southern California recommendations I've come across in my time here...

I listened to music because I saw people saying it was good

It's good to follow / be friends with / hover around people who have good taste in music. Here's some music I listened to because I saw other people talking about it. Call it "I Enjoy Music: Eavesdropping."

I listened to the London record label Wisdom Teeth's Pattern Gardening because Jackie posted it and said "Friendship RESTORED with tech house." I listened to jasmine.4.t's album You Are The Morning because I saw Jael Holzman from Ekko Astral posting about her. I listened to (untitled) halo's EP headbanger because Ash posted about them on his Substack (their SXSW venue was too full for him to catch their set...). I listened to Dirty Beaches' 2013 double album Drifters/Love Is The Devil because the band Extra Small recommended it on Perfectly Imperfect: "This album is so unique and uncompromising, and yet still so pleasurable and beautiful at the same time."

And while we're here, let's go out on some past I Enjoy Music featurees with new(ish) stuff out:

AVI, last seen talking Rush documentaries and Logic's quick sampler in Three Music Thingz, has an album out called Passes:

Baby Grendel, last seen praising desperation and chemicals in Three Music Thingz, released an EP called Hatch(l)ling:

Perpetual Stu, last seen adding Bilmuri and Samia to his Blueprint Playlist, has a single out called "You Gotta Stay Alive:

and Superdestroyer, last seen talking Sega Genesis synths in Three Music Thingz, announced his eighth studio album, Hell is real and all your friends are here. It's out 5/15 and the first single is called "sOhio":