(Click the video above to launch the playlist or check out the individual tracks below!)

TRACKLIST:
“Turkey Lurkey Time” from the musical Promises Promises
The Coon Creek Girls “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?”
Mika Miko “Turkey Sandwich”
Susan Christie “I Love Onions”
Rick James & Ike Turner “Love Gravy”
Dee Dee Sharp “Mashed Potato”
Joe Tex “Yum Yum”
Domino “Sweet Potato Pie”
The Newbeats “Bread and Butter”
Animal Collective “Green Beans”
The Coral “Song Of The Corn”
Parliament Funkadelic “Do That Stuff”
Julia Lee “The Spinach Song”
Laughing Gravy “Vegetables”
Louis Jordan & The Tympany Five “Beans and Cornbread”
Kimya Dawson “The Beer Song”
Dennis Brown “Lips Of Wine”
Jay and the Techniques “Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie”
Nancy Sinatra “Sugar Town”
Warrant “Cherry Pie”
Candypants “Dishy”
Isaac Hayes “Chocolate Salty Balls”

…Then prepare for Leftovers.

Magic Kids shares the idle thoughts that distracted them while performing at FYF Fest 2010.

The Pity Party shares its recommendations for Youtube documentary learning. We’ve linked you to Part One of each of these educational rock and roll films full of essential knowledge. Putting grunge, krautrock, punk, reggae, and planetary politics on the same page offers a bit of insight on where this band gets its juice and hormone-free milk.

And we decided to put The Pity Party in a Can (see above).

The Pity Party’s Top 5:

1. Kurt and Courtney
(abut how Courtney killed Kurt)

2. CRASS: There Is No Authority But Yourself
(about true class-transcendent iconoclasm, communal farming, and punk rock)

3. Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany
(NEU! Faust! Amon Duul! Kraftwerk! Can! And you thought YOU were experimental…)

4. The Story of Jamaican Music (BBC Four)
(about the cultural roots of ska, rocksteady, dub, dancehall, and reggae as told by the original players in their enviable dialects)

5. The Warning (Frontline)
(about this whistle-blower lady Brooksley Born who fought futilely in the 1990s for some kind of market regulation and vigilance in order to avoid—well—the situation we find ourselves in now…)

Catch The Pity Party at Spaceland on May 21.

Remember 12 months ago, when YouTube, negotiating music rates with European royalty collectors, yanked official music videos from its site in the UK and Germany?

By the summer, YouTube had forced the UK’s PRS For Music to halve its on-demand music stream rate, leading to YouTube’s reinstatement. But, in Germany, the GEMA society’s rates have remained high – and negotiations have now broken down… [Read More]

(Watch: director Dave Markey discusses and shows deleted scenes from his documentary The Reinactors, available now in a limited edition DVD package from We Got Power Films)

The Reinactors is nearly over, it’s after midnight, and I am on the verge of sobbing. A prepubescent girl with a keyboard on the curb of Hollywood Boulevard is singing the saddest version of “Hotel California” I have ever heard, and behind her, El Capitan’s dazzling marquee illuminates the faces of Freddy Krueger, Shrek, and Captain Jack Sparrow as they watch and listen.  Someone in this crowd will definitely want a souvenir of his or her trip to Hollywood, a photo with a bona-fide movie character.  Maybe there’s even a casting director out there, a talent scout looking for the next Hollywood superstar (or a body double for Johnny Depp).

David Markey’s latest documentary isn’t about Sonic Youth or Nirvana; it’s about the shabbily costumed “ambassadors of Hollywood” you see every time cruel fate shoves you near Hollywood and Highland.  And not even Courtney Love in The Year Punk Broke will prepare you for the desperate fame-seeking hunger in the eyes of The Reinactors’ skinny Superman, or the crazy-eyed Marilyn Monroe who claims to have slept with him, or the shockingly realistic (and white) Michael Jackson, or the weird demon-man with wings and fangs and cat’s eyes who seems to adore a character in his own mind, even if that character is hard to explain to tourists who just want to meet Charlie Chaplin or Minnie Mouse.

These actors playing actors have bought into the true American dream of fame, and they want it bad.  They love any camera, and for Markey’s lens, they gush, they affect accents, and they tell personal details about themselves and each other that are by turns desperate and poignant.  While Markey treats their stories with sympathy, these costumed buskers never let you forget just how sick they are, and not only with the mental health and addiction problems you’d expect.  You’ll see and hear about diabetes and prison beatings, maced faces and missing teeth in this movie—it’s hard to be in lock-up when you’re dressed like Batman!  Yet there is also a Dickensian sense of pride, camaraderie, and even love amongst these outcasts.  If you work in movies or aspire to, you may just recognize your own career struggles played out here in gruesome miniature—and for you musicians, especially those of you who draw less of a crowd with your own music than with your all-female Misfits tribute band, who’s to say these ambitious actors are more deluded than you?   

It’s a rare movie that feels both like a funny clip from YouTube and like a Mike Leigh film, yet The Reinactors manages to mesh the two in a way that is horrifyingly, hilariously bleak.  Prepare to cry, but also prepare to watch Superman smoke pot and talk shit about black people.  If Hollywood has its own branch of Hell, this would be it, and the damned sculpt their brimstone out of celluloid dreams.

-Dan Collins

Music videos from Sony and Universal on YouTube have more advertising sold against them than any other group, according to analysis from TubeMogul.

This is why Sony, Universal, and YouTube are teaming up to launch Vevo, the big web music video site, December 8th. According to TubeMogul, 3.94% of YouTube’s daily views come from the two labels. [Read More]

Download: Mary Anne Hobbs vs. Gaslamp Killer – Low End Theory Podcast No. 7

(from the Low End Theory Podcast Series from Low End Theory)

Mary Anne Hobbs does for electronica on her BBC Radio 1 show what John Peel did for everything, and for years now she has been delivering L.A.’s best beatmakers to the world. When she first came to L.A. as a girl, she wore a glitter bikini and drove a motorcycle to Hollywood bars to drink with Megadeth, but tonight she’ll be doing a special DJ set at Low End Theory. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

You’ve been such a good friend to Los Angeles music on the BBC.
Mary Anne Hobbs: Well, your city—you’ve got it going on in such a big and serious fashion right now. Los Angeles is without question the most exciting city on the planet. I could feel this incredible sense of momentum building—even an ocean away. I kept hearing about this club, Low End Theory—it was echoing in every corner of my brain. I thought, ‘This club is calling my name right now, so I’m going to have to check it out.’ And that’s where I hatched the plan—in a filthy dirty northern rain in Manchester in an underground car park with Gaslamp Killer, just before Christmas last year. It was without question the most inspiriational trip that I’ve made in years. Those types of clubs are absolutely crucial in terms of providing a home and providing a space that people can gravitate towards and share their ideas and share their dreams. It’s been very important in terms of the whole dub step scene expanding. I think from the second I met Daddy Kev, you can tell he’s a godfather beyond a shadow of a doubt.
You said you can’t categorize an artist like Flying Lotus musically—do you think you can categorize any of the L.A. beatmakers philosophically?
Mary Anne Hobbs: I think for me Lotus is absolutely key. He’s right at the forefront and he is literally building a new sonic causeway brick by brick every day out into the ether. I think in a way you need those types of figureheads—people like Lotus, people who are so brave creatively and fearless in the way they forge these new pathways. Because they lead by example. I always look at Lotus and I think he is like the Hendrix of his generation. What Hendrix did with a guitar, Lotus is doing with electronic instruments. I’ll tell you a good story. The first time I ever saw him he played at a little club on the east end of London called Cargo. I was hanging out with people at Warp and they said, ‘You’re gonna love Steve—you’ve got to meet him after the show.’ He blew my mind so completely when I saw him perform that I literally could not form a sentence at the end of the night and I had to leave the building.
Do you remember what you said to him was when you finally recovered?
Mary Anne Hobbs: I didn’t meet him face to face until Sonar Festival 2008. The first exchange was this incredible bear hug between us because we had so much dialogue online. We developed this incredible friendship. In the aftermath of the Cargo show he asked for an email address and we began to chat backwards and forwards—we did a whole heap more work on the BBC show and then I asked if he would come and play Sonar in 2008. It’s a strange scenario with these virtual relationships that you have because you build incredible bonds that blossom creatively and yet often you might not meet people for years. It’s freaky because you think, ‘I know this person intimately and yet I’ve never shook his hand.’ That’s another reason why clubs like Low End Theory are so crucially important. In my case—and I’m sure it applies to many people—you spend almost your entire life in a virtual world. You live online. Almost every interaction is an electronic exchange. In spite of the fact that I have thousands of friends all over the world, in human terms you are extremely isolated because you do so much in a virtual environment. Even a show is virtual—it pops up in the ether and then it’s gone. So these places that you gravitate towards as kindred spirits—as human souls—to exchange energy and ideas and feel the frequencies of the music in a real tangible physical environment—it’s so important that these places exist! Even more so in 2009! So for me places like Low End Theory and Forward and Sonar in London where everybody gravitates toward each other to exchange those human emotions and to dance and sweat and sing and shout and explore their dreams—they are such important places.
Your new Wild Angels comp is named after an Alice Coltrane reference—do you think there’s a connection between her music or the music of someone like Pharoah Sanders and what’s happening in L.A. now?
Mary Anne Hobbs: That came from an expression that I used in the West Coast Rocks radio documentary that I did as a consequence of that trip I took in January to L.A. and San Francisco. I went to play Alice Coltrane and then I played a Lotus track afterwards which was called ‘Auntie’s Harp.’ It’s a tribute to his aunt. He’s got the beautiful arpeggios in it. I guess Lotus is a product of many different influences but Alice Coltrane—his great aunt—is a significant influence, I feel. A lot of the younger artists he nurtured are now featured on Wild Angels—people like Teebs and Take and Mono/Poly are all his boys and he nurtures them like his great aunt nurtured him, and you hear them traveling the generations. She is a seminal musician. It’s interesting how everyone talks about John Coltrane but actually Alice is absolutely mindblowing. I wanted to work backwards and show that particular reference point. Obviously so much of the new West Coast sound is represented on the record, but you can hear it echoing down the generations. I wish I would have had an opportunity to meet her—it would have been such an honor.
You’ve said that you want to make sure your own radio show exists without prejudice and boundaries.
Mary Anne Hobbs: The way that I see the show in my mind’s eye is like a bridge—it’s like a crazy old rope bridge that hangs across a crevasse in the jungle, and on one side are the world’s most fearless producers and on the other side are the hungriest audience that you could possibly imagine. And what the show does is bring those two groups of people together. There are no prejudices and everybody is welcome. I think at this point in the history of the whole of humanity it seems crazy to be setting up boundaries. That’s how I want it to be—as simple as that. There is now so much online that your choice is infinite. You can listen for the rest of time. I think there is more of a demand for somebody who will do what I do, which is sit there for ten hours a day everyday listening to every conceivable music that comes in and also seeking all the time—at some time you have to draw a line in that sand and say, ‘OK, this is a show—this is what we are going to do this week.’ But I think hopefully people trust me now. They know that I’ll do the work and I’ll do it consistently and they come back to me.
Do you think the artists you play feel the same way about music?
Mary Anne Hobbs: I guess my greatest hero in radio terms was always John Peel. His show would endlessly surprise and delight. Every week was like a Pandora’s box of chaos. You never knew what was around the next corner with Peel. And I think to a degree what was interesting when you listened to Peel was that you would probably only really love about one in three or four records, but you knew that everybody else who was listening would have the same ratio but the records would be different. So I might like record number one and number four and somebody else will love three and seven and everybody would have a different one they thought was incredible. But also with Peel as well you would think, ‘This isn’t necessarily something I would seek out and buy for my record collection but just to hear it—what the hell is this?’ From extreme European death metal to the craziest scratchy old 78 from one of the original blues men to something that he picked up from a tribe in Africa—it could be anything with Peel. Whether or not it was to your own personal taste was almost irrelevant. It was one of those shows that you wanted to hear because you wanted to experience the sounds. It wasn’t a question of him informing a perfect record collection but it was more like an adventure in sound. He was a broad person who knew no boundaries whatsoever and he responded in the same way. He was one of my teachers. I think everybody responds to music emotionally, ultimately. It doesn’t really matter what genre or tempo a piece of music is—it’s twisted into the DNA somehow and it either touches you at the very core or it may be an interesting artifact but it doesn’t move you in the same way. It was Peel’s spirit of adventure in sound that always informed me as a child. I loved it because you would just ride the rapids with him every single week and you had no idea what he was going to do next. He would go to Fabric which is one of the biggest dance clubs and play death metal records just for a laugh. I don’t think there’ll be another John Peel in this life or the next, but that sense of adventure and ambition and that quest that he was on just inspired me so much. And that’s how I feel about music.
You once said one of the most dangerous mistakes you could make would be to underestimate the intelligence of your audience. Do you think that’s why big labels and old media are dying?
Mary Anne Hobbs: That’s a really interesting question. It’s up to every generation to decide their own fate and this is why I do what I do. There’s no point sitting around moaning with your thumb up your ass. If you don’t enjoy what’s out there, go there yourself and try to make a difference. That’s what I’m trying to do with the show. What’s interesting in terms of what’s happening in the UK is that TV used to be the most powerful of all mediums, and now an entire generation of people almost completely disregard it. They are reverting back to listening to pirate radio and they are reverting back to watching YouTube and filming their own films and getting involved—the dubstep scene is a fantastic example of that. An entire scene has become a global thing without any patronage from the broader music industry because nobody wants to go with that shit anymore and everybody wants to be the master of their own destiny. It’s been proven now that it can happen. It’s a really exciting time. This is another thing with Peel—he was part of a different generation but he was an amazing example of how to tread a different pathway. He showed you that there is another way—you don’t have to follow the rest of the sheep, you can build your own pathway. I think what you’re saying is absolutely true. The dumbing down of the media giants’ output will be the death of them because they massively underestimate the audience. You can see now how the drift is happening with this generation. They are just completely disinterested with old school media establishments and they want to do it for themselves.
Is part of this because old big labels stopped caring about the long term and only wanted to get quick next-big-things?
Mary Anne Hobbs: I think that’s really true. In terms of most artists’ lifespans—when they signed a record deal with an old school traditional company—it was only ever meant to be a few years, wasn’t it? Like three albums tops, and beyond that people were always searching for something new. I think now longevity is the key. People want an entire career—they want to be in this game for a lifetime. Record companies in the U.K. are just like loan sharks, really—they hand you a few thousand bucks in advance but 24 hours later they are banging your door down saying, ‘Where is my hit single? I need this money back tenfold!’ They interfere with the tracklisting of the album—they say, ‘There aren’t enough singles on there and we’re gonna call in a whole heap of remixes that you don’t like to make sure we can spin records in the direction of the big DJs!’ You don’t have any control over the artwork or marketing. But if you define yourself online—say who you are and what you stand for—that’s really valuable. The days of Mercedes Benzes and Rolex watches and all that—I think they realize those days are long gone, or certainly you are not going to get them over night. But something like dubstep is like a new blueprint to how a scene can operate globally without any patronage at all from the music industry and continue to grow at an incredible pace. This is what I’m experiencing more and more. People aren’t thinking, ‘This is a teenage crush that I have on music—I’m going to do it for a few years and then I’m gonna become a doctor.’ People want to do this for life—it’s their calling and they want to make it work. But it’s like Darwinism—you have to adapt to survive.
Do you know the painter Joan Miro at all? He said the more true you are to yourself as an individual, the more universal your appeal will be.
Mary Anne Hobbs: I completely agree. For me, the artists that will really make it in the long term are people who come with a completely unique sound. We’re all a product of our influences—that’s what it is to be human. We absorb and process the things that we love. But the idea is to put a unique spin on that. John Peel taught me a number of very valuable lessons but my show does not sound anything like his. The principles that underlay are from him but the show is unique and individual. It’s a really valid point in terms of what I look for on my show—totally elemental pieces of music with their own identity that you would gravitate towards over and above everything else. What’s interesting is that people build up a body of work you can identify without knowing the artist. You can say ‘that’s Lotus’ and the music actually has a direct correlation with that person’s character.
What do you think is most special about what is happening in L.A. right now?
Mary Anne Hobbs: If I had to sum it up in word, it would be freedom. When I attend a club like Low End Theory or I watch an artist like Lotus play, I just see people tearing up the rules and it’s so liberating for me to watch this. I see Lotus play live and I watch that boy screw every conceivable sound into a live set—it doesn’t matter what genre it is! If he thinks that sound belongs in his set on a particular night and the stars are in the right formation, he’s going to find a way to screw it in there. In the U.K., it’s very interesting because we come from a culture where beat matching is very important, other than old school Jamaican dancehall DJs who are pretty much the only people who get away with stopping and starting records. In the U.K. you need a seamless flow of music and you’re not considered a DJ until you can do that. It’s so liberating for me to watch the way that Lotus and Gaslamp and all these people actually construct what they do on the stage. To watch artists play and deliver a set with that degree of freedom in their soul is absolutely incredible—it’s just a complete revelation for me and culturally its totally separate from what you can do in the U.K. It is so liberating because it means that your boundaries are limitless. I’m trying to absorb something of that freedom and distill it and reapply it to what I do because I love that energy and spirit—I haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet.
What were your own years in L.A like?
Mary Anne Hobbs: Oh, it was absolutely incredible. I was 21 years old and I lived in West Hollywood about a block and a half away from Barney’s Beanery and I had a lovely Yamaha motorcycle and I used to ride around in my bikini—I used to hang out at the Rainbow all the time.
Did you have an American flag bikini?
Mary Anne Hobbs: No—it was kind of a navy blue glittery one. These were the days when I would go see Guns ‘n’ Roses play at the Troubadour before they were signed. I was a fully paid up rock chick. Jane’s Addiction used to—before they were signed—play shows in downtown in these really sweaty warehouse raves and I rememer Perry Farrell coming out on stage in all his crazy dreadlocks. He used to wear this red rubber corset back in the day—it was fantastic. I used to hang out on Venice Beach when it was ghetto. I was writing for a music paper in the U.K. called Sounds and so I was interviewing everyone from Guns ‘n’ Roses to David Lee Roth.
Was he as David Lee Roth as you hoped he would be?
Mary Anne Hobbs: Absolutely. Motley Crue—I went on the ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ tour with Motley Crue and Tommy Lee had a very serious conversation with me about the possibility of building a roller coaster around the edge of every venue so he could do his drum solo on a roller coaster. He would tool around in a little roller coaster doing his drum solo. At that point Motley Crue—I’ve never seen so many groupies in my entire life. Their manager used to grade them in what he called ‘dog kennels.’ There was probably something like 300 groupies backstage every night and they would grade them into the amazingly pretty girls and there would be a room of sexual freaks and mother-daughter combos who would do whatever. I’d never seen so many women all sitting on six different passes, five of which were the wrong pass—I don’t know how they went about acquiring those passes. I would dread to think! The tour manager said to me, ‘Do you have any idea the number of road crew that we’ve got working on this tour? These girls are just for the crew—they’ve got absolutely no idea that they will never ever meet the band.’ The shed that I lived in was what they called in L.A. a pool house, so it was a room with a shower in it. I remember every time it rained I had to get all the pans out because the water would just pour through the roof. I used to hang out at a bar called the Firefly which doesn’t exist anymore—it was on Hollywood and Vine. They used to light the bar every night with lighter fuel. Lots of the metal bands like Megadeth and stuff used to hang out in there. You would hop up on the bar and you would talk to some incredible character—it was like being in Pulp Fiction, so yeah—I loved it. Have you seen that movie The Decline of Western Civilization?
Part 2? Is that what it was like?
Mary Anne Hobbs: Slightly earlier than that was made, but I liked a lot of the thrash—it was thrash metal and hair metal in L.A. back then, so David Lee Roth, Jane’s Addiction, Motley Crue, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Megadeth. Metallica could play to a thousand people and them and Megadeth were considered completely avant garde at that point. And Jane’s Addiction too. I just had heard so much about L.A. and on a whim I sold everything that I owned and I bought a one way ticket and I had 600 dollars in my back pocket and I thought, ‘Let me just see how far I can get.’
What’s the most profound thing David Lee Roth ever said to you?
Mary Anne Hobbs: Let me see if I can think of some advice. I remember the best story about David Lee Roth. When he first released Eat ‘Em and Smile, another member of his entourage that I knew very well said to me that every morning the first thing that Dave would ever do before he left his bedroom was see his accountant. This guy would show up at Dave’s house—full suit on, everything—and he would visit Dave in his bedroom. For years and years everybody thought this suited briefcased-up guy was the accountant. Many years later it came out that David Lee Roth was all but bald and this guy was actually his hairdresser—he’d come in every morning and sew in some fresh extensions so that Dave could come out with his hand grenade blond bomb of hair and nobody would ever know any different. So that is probably the best life advice there—whatever you’re lacking, first thing in the morning have a guy with a suitcase come and bring him in as your accountant.

MARY ANNE HOBBS WITH FLYING LOTUS AND NOSAJ THING PLUS ALL LOW END THEORY RESIDENTS ON WED., SEPT. 23, AT LOW END THEORY AT THE AIRLINER, 2419 N. BROADWAY, LOS ANGELES. 10PM / $10 / 18+. LOWENDTHEORYCLUB.COM. MARY ANNE HOBBS’ WILD ANGELS IS OUT NOW ON PLANET MU. VISIT MARY ANNE HOBBS AT BBC.CO.UK/RADIO1/MARYANNEHOBBS OR AT MYSPACE.COM/MARYANNEHOBBS.

Download: Themselves theFREEhoudini Mixtape

Themselves is producer Jel and rapper Doseone, who detach themselves from the Anticon hive mind to release their own ultra-fractalized riffs on hip-hop and experimental music. Their newest CrownsDown is built on the same frame as Nas and Gang Starr and to fit alongside Doseone’s side gig teaching kids how to rap. This interview by Matt Dupree.

What are you doing right now?
Doseone: Right now I’m working on this thing with Alan Moore. He’s got a book called Unearthing and [Andy Broder of] Fog and I are creating the score. We’re working on that—Andy’s coming out in a couple days. I’m going to have him on my couch. It’s going to be great. Unearthing is very striking and engrossing‚it’s two hours long so it’s not like working on a song. You don’t get to press play at the end of the day and say ‘I’m done with recording! Terrific!’
How exactly does one score an Alan Moore story?
Well, yeah—you’ll have to listen to it. We had a lot of ideas initially but It’s still taking shape. It’s completely different than making a rap record, so it’s been nice to have something else to concentrate on. But I still want to keep its scheme secret for a bit…
When you’re working on Unearthing, do you have to listen to Alan Moore’s voice over and over and over again?
Yes. For days and days and days and hours and hours. It’s like—to be honest, the writing is so dense and deep that it takes a lot of time to digest. The passages just blur past me until like the twentieth time, then they click into my comprehension of them.
Do you ever get any feelings of inadequacy as an artist—like ‘how could I work on something at that high level?’
I don’t know—fuck that. I read Watchmen. That shit got me through puberty. I think that anyone with something that’s formative for them, if they’re not an aesthetic retard, has a way of interpreting it. Alan’s shit worked its way into some of my poems and it affected the way I wrote the Subtle trilogy. So I think I’m man enough to step up and amp up. That’s like a Themselves thing—part of the rap aesthetic. You gotta step up to that shit. If I can wrap my head around it, I’m sure I can make something that sounds cool to go underneath it, and I’m honored to do so.
I’ve heard that you based the new album CrownsDown on Nas’ Illmatic and Gang Starr’s Hard To Earn.
They’re pretty much our template. The way those albums are structured—this album is very familiar to them. The songs, the interludes—not a bar is wasted. Then with each song itself, we greatly observe the records we consider to be classics—what it is that makes them timeless, like what the tendencies of their songs are. There’s a ‘style’ song, a ‘back in the day’ song, a ‘don’t fuck with my DJ’ song, so we did that—our way. There’s a lot of what we consider to be ‘classic rap beats’ and then the rest of it’s an honest-to-goodness Themselves record.
Would it be fair to say that of all your various projects, Themselves lies closest to you as an artist?
Subtle is all written with the epic of Hour Hero Yes in mind, so I’m just a conduit. And 13 & God—I’m speaking for 6 grown-ass men. Themselves is the one where I don’t gotta worry about what I’m gonna say—I’m speaking for myself, clearly. And since it’s been a while, I’ve got a lot of years of built-up writing to edit and project—there’s no like 86-bar over-emo ‘I can’t get out of my head’ verse.
So you’ve had time to figure out what you want to say.
Yeah. And I’ve got my first class teaching freestyle tomorrow at YMR, and that’s really got me back into it. It’s interesting—back when I was doing the cLOUDDEAD records I used to go out on the street and look for like a piece of paper with a word on it that struck me and I’d be like, ‘Uh, that’s it! I’m gonna make a song about this.’ But now I’m going out and teaching kids how to freestyle, and that aligns me. And at the same time Jeff [Logan, a.k.a. Jel, the other half of Themselves] and I were like, ‘We gotta write this rap record.’ So instead of it being more like this confusion on paper being worked out in song, it’s sort of a return to where we started and our strengths. It’s kind of a natural circuit. I got away from it ten years ago because rhyme and rap felt like such a restrictive way of getting ideas across—I didn’t feel I could say what I wanted to say. But our return to its angles and aesthetic have been very natural and healthy for us.
Have you been getting back into battling at all?
Kind of. With the kids I teach, it’s tricky. Some of the kids want to battle and it’s cute—some of them are even getting it pretty well—but you don’t really want that negative energy, you know? You don’t want it to be confrontational yet in many ways rap is about killing it… As Themselves, we invited some challengers on the last tour and it wasn’t all bad. Okay, there were a couple of guys who obviously weren’t ready for it and that was—that was kind of embarrassing. I’m going to do it again on this west coast tour if we can get organized. It’s kind of a fun thing to organize just logistically—it can be difficult with the driving and imminent traffic jams of touring. I was also going to do Skribble Jam but they cancelled it this year. But I will do something that results in rapper-eating this year for sure.
Canceled Skribble Jam? They must’ve been afraid of you.
Yeeeeaah. There was one kid who I could tell was a fan—that was awkward. He had kind of a tentative nature that I’ve had—like when I had to battle [legendary Freestyle Fellowship member] P.E.A.C.E., I’m like, ‘Uh, this sucks.’ So there was another guy—he reminded me of me when I was like sixteen, just trying to fight and not really rap, you know?
Is it weird seeing all your old battles come back to life on YouTube?
It’s pretty funny, man. You put ‘Dose’ in there and it’s like the first thing that comes up. I’d really like to battle again. I have a different perspective on it all. You know, back then I didn’t really know what I wanted out of it. I didn’t perceive what it means, clearly. It’s very much a certain type of rapping, those battles, and I was getting in there as rapper against rapper and I didn’t really have a place there. And then I was in there against like P.E.A.C.E.—whose songs I’ve memorized and whose music was formative to me—that’s how I had to meet dudes. That being said, there are certain rappers I would love to step to in cold blood, but I don’t know. It’s a fine line. I don’t think I’ll ever have a taste for serving somebody who I appreciate. That’s not my style. Because it’s kinda like—you got to have no remorse when you battle. You can’t walk that line—you have to cross it.
So it’s not something you think you could do amiably?
There’s just some people, who I appreciate, who I really can’t pretend to pull a knife on. I mean, eventually, when I get drunk I’ll probably… One time I battled in Portland—at our hotel at the Doug Fir—and there was this women’s roller derby team and they were all there and I started servin’ them shit-faced. After I was done with one, they’d walk away and the next one would step up smiling like, ‘Okay, serve me!’
Is it hard to translate that vicious style when you’re teaching your kids to battle?
No—when I’m teaching the kids I just try to be open. If they’re keeping it mellow, then I keep it mellow. And when they get into it, I sort of approach it like, ‘You know, back in the day, rappers…’ It’s all about showing them how to do it—there’s no exercise. It’s an interesting thing, freestyle. To a certain extent you got it or you don’t, but that’s not entirely the case. Most people can improve just by gradually forgetting where they’re at. So that’s not what I focus on. Every time I come into the classroom it’s like—I don’t know—other lessons come first. The kids barely raise their voices. So you know—I teach them to project, and how to pick their rap names.
Is that a tough lesson? Choosing a rap name?
Yeah—I got fucking stuck with this thing I was writing on my notebooks and on bus stops. My fucking tag name when I was sixteen or whatever. I didn’t really get to pick mine. Some of the kids get to come up with something dope. Some of them are good, and some of them are fucking hysterical. I appreciate all forms of rap names. One time in Europe we saw this guy whose name was Scarhead. Like the European Scarface. ‘Scarhead, comin’ atcha…’
Is it strange to hear non-English Europeans rapping in English?
Oh, I love that shit, dude. That shit gives me a boner. Have you ever heard of Johnny Bass? He’s like the Swedish Sage Francis. Well he’s nothing like Sage—he’s just uber-emotive, you know? And whenever he says it, he goes ‘Johnny BASSSS!’ Like the Chuck D octave drop on bass. And he does songs about his mom. Jeff and I love that shit. There’s something about slang being worded improperly that’s fucking the bee’s knees.
I know when you worked with the Notwist it was their stripped-down approach to English that enticed you, right?
Yeah, but that’s a whole other chord. This is more the genre of music being made with that accent and the amount of words per square inch are what makes it humorous, let alone the content. Whereas with Markus [Acher, of the Notwist], he’s got a great ear for words and content and poetic phrasing. I’m not trying to diss Johnny Bass—he’s got his ear, but it’s not the same. There’s something perfect about the way Markus picks out words and leaves certain words out that aren’t really necessary—that are just subject, predicate, a bunch of transitions or whatever. It has taken me years to unlearn English, in the manner that came naturally to Markus as an outsider to our language.
We talked in 2005 at the El Rey and you said that you were still going to do Subtle and Themselves as well as a new 13 & God record. Since you’ve done both Subtle and Themselves records, when can we expect new 13 & God?
We record in January, and it’ll probably be out next fall. Fall 2010.
I heard it was going to be moving toward the style of the song ‘Superman On Ice.’
We’re going to be doing like some Enya shit. No, we’re going to do it more like a band. The songs we got to at the end and the songs we were playing live were fucking really nasty. So we’re going to jam—eww, the ‘J’ word!—as a band in California this time with Dax [Pierson] because he can’t go to Germany. So we’re gonna do it and all record together, and then do a big edit and completion in Munich like we did last time, with some time in between so I can work on my vocals. I do all my best vocal stuff over time. I write a lot of cadences to the beat so that’ll be the last part of 13 & God to put down. We’ll have like 8 songs, and there’ll be 25 parts I have to come up with. I like having it hit me all of a sudden what I want to do here or there. It keeps me interested. I don’t like doing one song at a time in between long breaks.
I’m glad you mentioned Dax—he just won his lawsuit [against Ford Motors after his car accident] a couple months ago.
Yes, he did.
Has the money changed him?
Yeah—ha! He’s always swimming in fucking gold. No, of course not. I saw him the day it happened and he looked shell-shocked. It’s just a whole other world. He needs that money. He requires personal attendants on a daily basis, and moreover a healthy cushion to fall back on no matter what, so hopefully that money will help calm his nerves and eventually allow him some freedoms. I think though at the moment, he is just overwhelmed by his new tax bracket. In my opinion, this world couldn’t have put millions into better hands.
If it allows him to continue with his music, then so much the better.
Of course. It’s kind of the pinky-toe concern out of everything else he has to worry about, but it’s definitely the thing that’s closest to his heart in many ways. His fervor and ability to make music is just as strong as it always was.
The stuff he’s been putting up on Facebook has been amazing.
Oh, Facebook! I don’t know shit about that. My little sister is 15 and that’s it for her: Facebook! Kids today! I used to be on the corner battle rapping!
I don’t think they’ve made a Facebook equivalent of battling.
You know what I was tripping on was that computer battling. It’s really dead at this point but that shit was classic. These people would type-battle. I can’t even comprehend it. Like stenographers. Aggressive stenographers.
In ten years, that’ll be it.
Yeah, like some of the punks, who are really authentic, will be doing that.
‘YOUR RHYMES ARE OLD. YOU CAN’T STEP TO THIS.’‘
LOL.’

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Filmed by Joshua Gibson at the Friends of Friends show at the Echoplex Thursday—thanks to Lazy Brow for the tip!