Am I slowly catching up, or falling further behind? I dunno, but I do need to make a better effort to be way more concise until I'm back on schedule.



MP3 Legendary K.O. - "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"
I expressed my utter disgust with the government's incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina as best I could back in early september, but this reworking of Kanye West's "Gold Digger" was much, much better than anything I could come up with. What I said back on September 11th:

While these Bush / Katrina-related tracks are nothing new, as Boing Boing picked up on the Kanye remix last week & it was picked up by Soul Sides and just about every other blog out there, I figured I'd do the same in case somebody managed to miss out on them. Since its initial posting on FWMJ, the response has been substantially positive to The Legendary K.O.'s (aka the Houston TX-based K-OTIX crew) impressive reworking of "Goldigger", the latest single off Kanye West's acclaimed new album Late Registration. The striking new lyrics take on the role of people caught up in the disaster, a refreshingly point-of-view admist possibly less nuanced "Bush-bashing" used by other artists, as K-OTIX's Micah Nickerson explains, "I had really wanted to write about this in the first-person, as someone stuck in New Orleans and left by this administration to basically fend for myself, but was having trouble putting the emotions I felt into words. When I heard Kanye during the benefit, the rest as they say was history."

MP3 Legendary K.O. - "GWB Doesn't Care About Black People (radio edit)"
For those who prefer not to hear any questionable language, here you go.



MP3 M.I.A. - "10 Dollar"
I've been waiting all year for an album to top M.I.A.'s f**king awesome debut LP, Arular, in my estimation. And while there have been plenty of good, possibly great records dropped this year, it remains atop my list.

Here's what I said back in February:

Yes, yes, yes. I too have happily jumped on the M.I.A. bandwagon. Genre-hopping Sri Lankan-born Londoner Maya Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.) has become a favorite of Fluxblog (who has posted about her on four separate occasions), Catchdubs & much of the bloggerati over the past year, and her proper debut LP Arular is finally dropping stateside on February 22. And it's freakin' great.

[...]

This gal is gonna be freakin' huge.

While Maya may not have blown up as big I as I had hoped, she still had a monstrous year. While I missed her fall Mpls gig, I did catch her with James Murphy & LCD Soundsystem, as well as DJ Diplo at Hipsterfest Midwest in Chicago & it was an absolute blast. While it's tough to pick a favorite off Arular, I went with "10 Dollar", orignally posted by Music For Robots in early February. Maya's lyrics here may be about teenage prostitution, but this track knocks me around with its frenzied beats & anthemic hooks, tossing me around by the balls. I still sing along on "I surrenda!" every single time.

ETA: City Pages music columnist Dylan Hicks also rates Arular as his #1 album of 2005 (though the rest of his list doesn't exactly jibe with mine). He distills M.I.A.'s incessant genre-hopping in his year-end cover story:

There's nothing inherently admirable about amalgamation, but Arular does arrive at some sort of cosmopolitan with its crossfaded mix of grime, dancehall, Missy and Timbaland, baile funk, vintage video-game soundtracks, righteous populism, dirty sex rhymes, silly terrorism chic, and hiccupping whoops. Or maybe it was just a very nearly perfect British pop album.

BTW: Look who else is on MySpace. And I never use the dang thing.



DISC ONE
Track 01: The Constantines - "Draw Us Lines"
Track 02: Spoon - "The Beast & Dragon, Adored"
Track 03: The Russian Futurists - "Our Pen's Out of Ink"
Track 04: Broken Social Scene - "7/4 (Shoreline)"
Track 05: Bunky - "Chuy"
Track 06: The New Pornographers - "The Bleeding Heart Show"
Track 07: Stars - "Ageless Beauty"
Track 08: Danger Doom f/Cee-Lo - "Benzie Box"



I made some alterations to the blogroll, fwiw. Didja notice?

This entry was posted by mr gilbert at 12/12/2005 05:45:00 PM.