Dystopian Road Mix Vol. 1: Kansas City to Eastern Michigan

Editor's Note: If you've read anything at all on this blog, it should already be abundantly clear that I am a big ol' geek. As such, one of my favorite things to do whenever I take a road trip is listen to music by artists from the cities I'm passing through. Now, as it happens, today I will be driving from my current home in Kansas City, Missouri to my parents' house in Port Huron, Michigan; and next month, I'll be taking a second trip from Port Huron to my future home in the Washington, D.C. area. So I figured, since I like making mixes, and since this blog is just a giant vanity project anyway, why not turn my music-geek road trip game into a recurring feature?

I'm calling the feature Dystopian Road Mix. Similar to the previously-introduced Dystopian Dance Mix, it will be a Spotify playlist accompanied by my trademark reams of text. There will be two differences, though (other than the obvious travelogue conceit): first, no 80-minute time limit; and second, instead of track-by-track commentary, I'll be grouping the music selections together based on geography (don't worry, though, I'll still write a shit-ton--in fact, I'm pretty sure ). I'm honestly not sure how frequently this feature will recur. As mentioned above, there will definitely be another installment next month; after that, though, it's up in the air. Maybe I'll only make future installments when I'm actually traveling somewhere; maybe I'll revisit trips I've taken in the past; maybe I'll invent imaginary road trips. It all depends on how much time I have on my hands, basically. But in the meantime, please enjoy my guided musical tour through the Midwest; and, as I'm sure I left more than a few notable artists out, feel free to share whatever I've missed in the comments! - Z.H.

Grity Boi: 2 Chainz Gets (Sort of) Serious on FREEBASE

From the "Trap Back" video; © 2 Chainz

Does 2 Chainz take 2 Chainz seriously?

My critical faculties have been wrestling with this question since 2012, when I first heard his solo debut album Based on a T.R.U. Story. For the record, I like 2 Chainz. I'm well aware of his shortcomings--this is, after all, the guy whose 2012 freestyle Funkmaster Flex recently called out as the worst ever on his show--but I also think he's (usually) a far cleverer lyricist than his critics give him credit for. He plows the obsessive furrows of contemporary mainstream hip-hop--namely dope peddling, conspicuous consumption, and "big booty hoes"--with a dirty-limerick wit and class-clown exuberance that, for me at least, overcomes the monotony of those well-worn themes; this might say more about my sophomoric sense of humor than it does about the Artist Formerly Known as Tity Boi, but I can't think of another modern-day rapper who makes me laugh out loud as often as he does. So yeah, I like 2 Chainz. But take him seriously? Hell, like I said--I'm not even sure 2 Chainz takes 2 Chainz seriously.

A few recent events, though, have led me to suspect that there might be more to 2 Chainz than meets the eye of even a confessed apologist like myself. First, there was the performance I caught from his 2 G.O.O.D. 2 Be T.R.U. tour this February at the Midland Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. The show was a multimedia sensory overload, with three video screens onstage blaring specially-created imagery to accompany the songs. Some of that imagery, of course, was exactly what you'd expect from a 2 Chainz show: the literally larger-than-life rumpshakers for "Twerk Season"; the extended (and ludicrous) acrobatic sex scene starring Mr. Chainz himself (in silhouette, mercifully) that introduced "Used 2"; the hood-Michael Bay action theatrics of "Riot." But then there was the montage that opened the set, interspersing narration by Chainz with footage of monumental figures from not only hip-hop, but also sports, film, even politics: from Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa to--I shit you not--Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was absurdly hyperbolic,of course, but also unexpected enough to make me sit up and take notice; this was the kind of self-conscious grandstanding one would expect from 2 Chainz' label boss and sometimes collaborator Kanye West, not from the man Pitchfork recently described as "rap's court jester of the moment." Here was the reigning figurehead for boneheaded Atlanta trap-rap, explicitly writing himself into hip-hop history, Black history, and American history all at once.

Dystopian Dance Mix Vol. 1: It's a Mother('s Day Mix)

Stolen from somebody's Pinterest, but I'm willing to bet this is Public Domain

Editor's Note: Way back in the distant past of my early twenties, I co-ran a pop culture blog similar to this one called the Modern Pea Pod. It was a great experience overall: I got some modicum of exposure for my writing, interviewed people like rock'n'roll pioneer Wanda Jackson and Kid Congo Powers of the Gun Club, and built up a backlog of content that I can now exploit for Throwback Thursdays when I'm too busy and/or lazy to write something new for this blog. Probably my favorite thing about the whole project, though, was our monthly Mixtape: an actual blueprint for making an actual, two-sided, 90-minute cassette tape of songs around a particular theme, complete with timecodes. It was, like most other things related to the Modern Pea Pod, a ludicrously anachronistic and overly complicated exercise (I'm pretty sure we were the only blog ever to advertise via black-and-white flyer, too). But it was also a lot of fun, and a chance to write about music that we loved but that wasn't necessarily "relevant" for a traditional review.

So, in my ongoing effort to strip the Pea Pod's corpse of every last bit of its salvageable flesh (ew), I'm pleased to introduce the spiritual successor to the Modern Pea Pod Mixtape: the Dystopian Dance Mix. The main difference this time around is that it's not meant to be a cassette tape, because this is 2014 and I'm not an insane person. Instead, we're taking advantage of real live 21st century technology and making the playlists streamable via Spotify. My one concession to the old anachronistic format is that each playlist will come in under 80 minutes, the idea being that you could burn it to a CD if you were so inclined (and if you owned all of the music, of course). I plan on getting these playlists out every month or so; the themes for the first two months are a little clichéd and predictable (Mother's Day and Father's Day for May and June, who'da thunk), but you can look forward to more inspired entries after I've gotten warmed up. So here it is, folks: my gift to all the mothers and motherfuckers out there reading this. Enjoy! - Z.H.

Dear Elitists: Shakespeare Was More Hip-Hop Culture Than High Culture

Image Public Domain; crude adornments by me via Snoopify

This week, an infographic by designer and data scientist Matt Daniels has been making the rounds, ranking the number of unique words used by various hip-hop artists compared to the plays of William Shakespeare, as well as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It's a fun little study that doesn't claim to do much other than quantify and contextualize the vocabularies of significant rappers alongside two titans of the Western literary canon. This did not, however, prevent it from raising the hackles of Internet elitists (see, I'm not calling them racists) on the comments section and Facebook post for The Atlantic's blog discussing the piece. Apparently, the plebeian likes of Ghostface Killah and Kool Keith--both of whom, I should add, have apparently employed more unique words than the Bard--don't deserve to be placed anywhere near the lofty heights of Shakespeare, who after all invented human nature as we know it.

I know, I know, getting mad at Internet commenters for being hateful and pretentious is like shaking one's fist at the wind for blowing--and, to be fair, I will note that the comments on the Atlantic blog proper are a lot more well-reasoned and generous than the ones on social media (yeah, go figure). But there's something disheartening about seeing this evidence of hip-hop's lack of acceptance in mainstream intellectual culture in 2014, especially from a readership of mainly college-educated liberals who would otherwise be all too proud of their open-mindedness and highly cultivated, eclectic tastes. And it's disheartening especially because, when one looks past the cultural baggage, Shakespeare has a whole hell of a lot more in common with hip-hop culture than he has with "high culture."

Somethin 'Bout the Things U Do: We on 1 by DJ Rashad, 1979-2014

Image stolen from Beantown Boogiedown

It's a sad but unavoidable fact that any discussion of We on 1, the new EP by Chicago DJ Rashad Harden, will inevitably be overshadowed by his tragic death last weekend at the age of 34. But this won't be another eulogy--not least because I'm hardly qualified to write one. I'm no expert on Rashad, nor on footwork, the house-derived street dance music he is widely credited with innovating. But I did think his breakout album, Double Cup, was one of the best records I heard last year; and I think We on 1 stands as further proof of a talent that will be sorely missed.

Throwback Thursday: The Pixies Reunion on Film

From loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies; © MVD Visual

Editor's Note: This week has been a busy one on the academic front, so I've been lax in updating the ol' blog. But this week also saw the release of the first album by legendary alternative rock band the Pixies since 1991's Trompe le Monde, so fortunately I was able to dig up just the thing for Throwback Thursday. I wrote this piece in 2006, when new material was still emerging from the Pixies' first reunion in 2004. Incidentally, I caught them on that tour, at the State Theater in Detroit, and it was fantastic. Also, that was ten years ago. Jesus Christ, I'm old. Anyway, here's my Pixies review. It's very mid-2000s, both in its somewhat snarky tone and in its reference to, Good Lord, MySpace. But what do you do. I'll probably be back next week with a review of the new Pixies record. Probably. In the meantime, enjoy! - Z.H.

In an era when mystery was almost as important to the development of a great alternative rock act as guitar or drums, the Pixies were quite possibly the most mysterious of them all. Armed with inscrutable lyrics about Surrealist cinema and Nimrod's Sons, an arty visual aesthetic that precluded group photos on the album covers, and a stage presence that boiled down to standing stock still and playing as viscerally as possible, they were a truly enigmatic force, more like a coven of obscure European avant-gardists than a mere Bostonian rock band. Even today, elements of their all-too-brief epoch remain shrouded in mystery: things like the precise motivations behind their breakup in 1992, or the much-whispered-about sexual tension between bassist Kim Deal and lead songwriter/vocalist Charles "Black Francis" Thompson. There's still a sense that we'll never really get to know the Pixies, and if anything, that makes them all the more enticing.

It also goes a long way toward explaining why their reunion in 2004 came as such a surprise: engimas don't get back together for sold-out world tours, they don't conduct extensive interviews, and they certainly don't release upwards of half a dozen CDs and videos within a two-year period to document their return to the concert stage. But the Pixies did. And so you'll have to excuse my kneejerk reaction to the first couple minutes of their new DVD, Live at the Paradise in Boston, which is something along the lines of, "This is the most surreal thing I've ever fucking seen." There they are, the mythical Pixies, in all their glory, playing what might be their last intimate club date as a band together. And what do they do? Stroll onstage, shuffle around a little bit, and then tear into… "La La Love You?"