James Brown Tribute

Well, I played 3 1/2 hours of James Brown songs, productions, covers, imitations, and samples tonight at St. Ex. What I liked most about it were the following two discoveries:

1. One can listen to almost 4 hours of James Brown's music and not get bored, at all. It's not just me that felt this way. (And, to be honest, I've listened to a lot more than 4 hours of JB in the past two days.) More than one person came up to me afterwards and said that they had thought listening to that much JB would get old, quick, but were happy to be proven wrong. People were just as into it when I ended as when I began. The thing is: his music has incredible range. There are fast songs, noisy songs, slow songs, mellow songs and mellow sections of songs, and all different sorts of funk. If you just played songs with the Popcorn beat/bassline, or the Hot Pants beat/guitar, it would get old quick, but if you switch it up, it's amazing how much people are able to get into it and stay into it. And they like the long songs the best. 9 minutes into the long version of "Super Bad", I was sad, and the people dancing were sad, that it ended.

2. People like the songs with James Brown himself singing on them the most. His voice is so damn expressive, it's hard not to compare it to a magnet. The moment he starts singing, people take notice and are drawn to it. The most popular songs without JB singing were Bobby Byrd's "I Know You Got Soul" and Lyn Collins's "Think".

My saddest moment: people were not into my attempts to illustrate JB's influence by playing songs that sample him. I played "Pass the Peas" and then Eric B. and Rakim's "I Ain't No Joke", which features the main horn line from "Pass the Peas", and people were noticeably disinterested in the Eric B. and Rakim. Later I played "The Grunt" (which was a big hit with the crowd, actually) and then Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause", which uses the intro horn line from "The Grunt" extensively, and the dancefloor almost completely emptied. I would like to blame this on DC's lack of culture, but it might have just been bad judgment on my part. As usual, I expect far too much of my audience in thinking that they would understand my intentions. One dude (the Sharp Dressed Man, actually), who complimented me on playing the Public Enemy, hadn't even noticed that it featured a rather prominent use of "The Grunt". Oh, well.

Bonus points: I every 45 minutes or so, I would play one of the intros to my many live James Brown recordings, where the announcer lists JB's hits and the band punctuates his announcements with horn blasts.

At the very end, I played an outro from a live JB recording I have, in which JB personally thanks his audience and says good night.

Throughout I played the two bootleg video tapes I have of JB performances from the late 60's and early 70's on the TV on the wall.

The biggest hit of the night: Maceo playing "Tighen Up" from the "Live in Dallas '68" CD (it's also on the "Soul Pride Instrumentals" two disc comp.). It's long and people got more and more into it as it went on. It was a partial floor-filler. (It was crowded anyway, but not everyone standing was dancing.)

A fitting tribute to the Godfather, if I may say so myself.

RIP JB

In case you haven't heard, James Brown died today. I'm going to DJ a James Brown tribute tomorrow night at St. Ex, so I'm going to make a list of my favorite James Brown songs and productions. If you have any suggestions, please post them in the comments.

L.A. Movies

Here's my list of movies about Los Angeles. Please let me know if I'm forgetting anything.

Annie Hall
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Big Lebowski
The Big Sleep
Blade Runner
Boogie Nights
Boyz in the Hood
Chinatown
Collateral
A Day Without a Mexican
The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization
Double Indemnity
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Friday
Heat
Jackie Brown
Kid Stays in the Picture
LA Confidential
LA Story
Less Than Zero
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Magnolia
Mayor of Sunset Strip
Mildred Pierce
Mulholland Drive
Murder My Sweet
The Player
Punch Drunk Love
Short Cuts
Singin’ in the Rain
Slums of Beverly Hills
A Star is Born
Sunset Boulevard
Swingers
They Live
Training Day
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
What Price Hollywood?

The Concept of California

My mix of songs about California, as it currently looks. Please suggest any songs that you think I should add.

Disappointment

It's too bad that there's nothing paradoxical about this.

The Internet

So it's midnight Friday night and I'm sitting at the computer listening to a YouTube video of my favorite DJ, Muro, and the scene I'm listening to in the YouTube video is about 1,000 times cooler than the scene at the holiday party I just left, a party organized by my condo association and held at a local seafood restaurant. There, the "DJ" was playing Jamiroquai and people were singing along. But there's two simple facts that are glaringly obvious to me right now:

(1) I'd rather be having a conversation at the seafood restaurant with Jamiroquai in the background than sitting here at the computer posting to my blog with Muro playing in the background.

(2) As cool as it is that I'm able to sit here listening to Muro DJ at some bar in Tokyo, it's really not comparable to actually being at a bar in Tokyo listening to Muro DJ live.

Dr. Francis Collins

I went to a lunchtime talk today by Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Among other things, he argued that scientists who've claimed that science is incompatible with religious belief are partly to blame for the striking number of Americans who do not believe in evolution. As he put it,

"Intelligent Design is the rebellious love-child of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett."

I think PJ would've loved to have been there.

1855

I was just sitting here wondering when Europeans first found out about gorillas. I had a vague idea it was sometime in the mid-19th century, but I was unsure because that just seems so recent. It would mean that Thomas Jefferson never had a gorilla thought, for instance. So I asked the internet. And it turns out I was right. The amazing thing is that it was so easy to find out.

Worst Sentence?

Here's the worst sentence in Academic English that I've read lately. It's the first sentence in a paragraph (i.e., it's not summarizing something he's said before).

"For a human characteristic, such as empathy, that is so pervasive, develops so early in life (e.g., Hoffman 1975; Zahn-Waxler and Radke-Yarrow 1990), and shows such important neural and physiological correlates (e.g., Adolphs et al. 1994; Rimm-Kaufman & Kagan 1996; Decety and Chaminade 2003) as well as a genetic substrate (Plomin et al. 1993), it would be strange indeed if no evolutionary continuity existed with other mammals."

-Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 24

Has anyone seen anything worse lately?

Sounds Like Jimmie Rodgers

When I go to Hennessy + Ingalls and see that there's a new book on themed environments, I'm happy but not surprised to find that I'm not alone in being interested in the extent to which we now live, work, and play in spaces that aim to make us feel as if we're somewhere else. But when I accidentally find out that there's a four CD box set called "Sounds Like Jimmie Rodgers" ... well, I'm happy but amazed. I mean, I don't know how many times I've searched allmusic, amazon, google, etc., for artists who were influenced by or covered the songs of Jimmie Rodgers. But I never--I mean never--thought to simply write "sounds like Jimmie Rodgers" into any search engine. Because I never thought someone (else) would put together a box set of artists who sound like Jimmie Rodgers and release it under that title. Maybe the world's not such a lonely place after all.

Philosophy and Backgammon

From an online interview with Hugh Mellor:

Cogito: One of your passions is the theatre, and I believe that you still act. Is there any connection between that passion and your commitment to philosophy?

Mellor: Only that they are both things that I feel quite passionately about and want to pursue as long as I can. The only moral I would draw from this is that it's probably bad for people to treat philosophy as an all consuming vocation, to which they should devote their whole lives. I think it's healthy from time to time to get right away from a subject with the pretensions that philosophy rightly has. That makes you see and think about the world in a way that's fresh and independent of your philosophical ways of seeing and thinking. So the theatre is for me, perhaps, what backgammon was for Hume.