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Co. Fee

I just heard something I really like.

I like boom bap hip hop the best, and I mean straight beats, not the soul stagger that Donuts sent around the world. That's why it took me a little bit to warm up to the sounds of the new beat scene that has a de facto world HQ in LA. Believe me, I am plenty warm now. But I heard something today that would have given the old me an instant y'know-one-of-those.

Co. Fee just dropped his album Easy Listening on My Hollow Drum, and it's a series of straight, hard beats. The sounds have texture, likening them to the Oizo-esque sounds of Flying Lotus and many others, but the loops are un0-shuffled. Straight, really hard beats. That's refreshing as fuck.

Spark Plug by Co. Fee

I Want a Damn Nexus One

I hate Apple, but it's pretty often these days that I wish I didn't. It's hard to talk trash when the guys on the other side, my side, put out shit and call it custard. I've been eating it for years and it just keeps getting worse.

It seems that in the rush to get competing products out, Apple's opponents play the hare, blasting through development and skimming through testing to get their product on market to battle the sleek, white gear from the future that has everyone enthralled. Apparently they didn't learn from the response to Vista and just plopped out Windows 7, which I have had a few issues with.

I had an HP running Vista which crashed a year ago, promptly replaced by a Dell running Vista that crashed around Christmas. I replaced that piece of shit with a Gateway loaded with Windows 7, on which one of the keys popped off within 48 hours. I traded that in for a new HP, on which Windows 7 wasn't running properly. I traded that one in for one of the same, and that's the computer from which I am now writing.

If I'm going to argue against Apple, I need something to argue for. I still believe that Apple products widen the gap between technology consumers and a widespread understanding of consumer technology, but not understanding the products you use doesn't seem so bad if they work really, really well. If Microsoft took the amount of time Apple does with testing, maybe there would be an option for proponents of open source.

It's also a matter of marketing. The iPhone wasn't released until Apple was sure that it was the sickest phone to ever come to market that that it would take at least a couple of generations before other cell phones could catch up. Google had an innovation that further improved on the iPhone model (Android) and they released it initially on a piece of hardware that looked like a cheap plastic pharmacy toy cell phone. That was followed by the MyTouch, for which the commercials featuring Phil Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg were far from appealing. Now, they release the Nexus One phone. It's amazing and I want one, but did you see how it was presented? Stammering, stuttering nerds that hardly seem like marketing execs bumbling around a small stage with this amazing piece of gear, making it look less amazing.



In this way, companies like Google and Microsoft are just handing it to Apple. Apple sees that no one else in the fragmented world of groundbreaking new technology is stepping up to take the lead, so they did. For the iPhone, marketing was essential to building a large user community that would then yield a large number of apps. Can Google pull that off with the Nexus One? Sure, there are a lot of Google fans out there, but those folks have been using Google products for free up until now. Will they pay more than 500 dollars for that company's first major piece of hardware?

LIVE - Tues Nov. 10 @ The Khyber

I'm playing a show next week with Super Galactic Expansive, featuring MC Amagine, my old partner from Cold Hands Collective and producer KiloWatts, who is ridiculous. It's going off at The Khyber by 2nd and Market in Philly.

It's an atypical rap show, and I'll be rapping atypically as always with tracks that I wrote over a four year period starting with the education of Blame the Kid in Philadelphia and ending with my academic stint in Tokyo at the end of 2005. Here's the basic setlist.




Remainder - (2003) -
"I'm like a Stepping Razor, inhale your rhymes like vapor, breathe 'em back as flames and spit out the remainder, I'm dangerous"

Traveling - (2004) -
"I don't speak, and I never say greetings, and I never let never cut on my seven day weekends"

Basement Light - (2002~2004) -
"You bungle flows and mumble tumble fall flat, I'm king of the jungle and you're elephant crap"

Terror Blame - (2005) -
"This thing that I swing with, the sting of a linguist, say 'Fuck the King's English!' and still sound distinguished"

Lessons from the Dead - (2005) -
"I rise out the grave, like an undead sage, flowing page after page of rhymes from the medieval age"

Gray Matter Flims - (2003) -
"Beware of dog, monster, and werewolf"

Under Raps - (2005)
"I vomit the atomic mass, solid, liquid, gas, kingdom, phylum, class, single violent clash, silent math"

I'll also be jumping on for my collabo with Super Galactic Expansive entitled Movement of Sound.

Maybe you haven't heard of JJ Cale. I have and I took a Wu Tang sword style to his body of work.

It's completely my fault.

I'd swear on my life that it wasn't me if only you couldn't see through my lies; how my features flinch as my eyes dart from side to side during the milisecond silences between my utterly false words. An inconspicuous gulp. An unseen flaring of the nostrils. But no. I won't put either of us through it. Clearly, this has the Kid written all over it. Blame the Kid, I urge you, and do it with vigor.