Your Daily Awesome

The Blue Ribbon Glee Club is a punk rock choir from Chicago. Here they are performing “Where is My Mind.”

Fugazi “Waiting Room” (mp3)

If Awesome Tapes from Africa simply collected these cassette covers from Ghana, Kenya, Mali, and beyond, it would be worth a mention for that alone. But the blog actually posts all of the music as downloadable mp3s, creating an invaluable crash course on contemporary sounds from the most musically rich place on the planet. Happy listening.

“In the Forties and Fifties, Spike Jones used to regularly demolish pop music. Listening to this wonderfulness makes me wish we had more of this kind of creative irreverance. Yes, there’s the Weird Al song parodists, but Spike & Co. had a sonic assault - they didn’t parody lyrics so much as they rearranged the music for maximum anarchic effect. What song can’t be improved upon by dropping in silly sound effects?”

Link

Readers already familiar with Timbaland’s work and legacy should just go ahead and click here and let the fun begin.

But if you’ve missed the whole Timbaland phenomenon, it’s your lucky day. Widely considered the preeminent hiphop producer of the past decade, Tim’ rewrote the rules for how hiphop should sound by incorporating elements of drum n’ bass into his syncopated, heavily synthesized sound. Although a lot of people will disagree with this, I think his musical voice found its perfect, cohesive whole on Justin Timberlake’s last album, which is a sonic wonder.

But now somebody has performed a huge service and compiled “A Brief History of Timbaland Beats,” five CDs worth of music that the Virginia native produced. It’s all available for free download, so get it while the getting’s good. This is an incredible resource and a major boost to anybody’s ipod. Prepare to have your ears blown.

Sorry for the blog outage earlier this afternoon. It was something totally out of my hands that had me pulling my hair out. So I’m going to take this time to unwind with the best rock band in America, the Hold Steady, who were recently on NPR’s “The Bryant Park Project.” (Follow the link for cool backstage and concert video.)

Someone slipped me a copy of the upcoming Animal Collective CD last week, but I haven’t given it more than a cursory listen, seeing as how I’m still catching up on Panda Bear’s solo record. But the Fader singled out a new track, “Peacebone,” that I absolutely can’t quit listening to. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you bypass the 30 second Black Dice-y, squiggling intro, but just be sure not to bail on the song before the magic juice starts flowing. Behold the Collective’s catchiest song to date!

Maybe it’s my undying affection for this song, but the lullaby version of “One” is pretty beautiful.

See also: Lullaby Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, the Cure, and U2.

via Music for Maniacs

Rapunzel’s Delight is the strangest website you’ll see all day. It’s an old school “web community” devoted to “all things long and beautiful hair.” From “special tricks to untangling locks,” to historic photos of women with hair to their ankles, to an online store that sells—what else—combs, conditioners, and dryers, Rapunzel’s Delight is a peek into an entire subculture that you probably never even imagined existed.

(My very favorite part: The very first question under the Hair Facts section: “What is hair?”)

If you’re jonesing for some Use Your Illusion-era GnR today, here’s a BBC documentary about the band and the photographer who took some of their most famous images.

via Metafilter

The new M.I.A. album, Kala, doesn’t officially come out until August 21, but this seems to have happened, and now I have a copy. I’m really digging it so far: It’s not Arular v.2 , which is a nice surpise. The beats come super hard, as in this track, “Hussel,” (MP3 REMOVED)which features Afrikan Boy.

*also, catch M.I.A. and Low Budget on yesterday’s edition of Morning Becomes Eclectic

UPDATE
I feel like I’ve finally arrived as a blogger, as I’ve received a cease & desist from M.I.A.’s people requesting that the “Hussel” mp3 be removed. They suggested replacing it with a few other songs, all of which can be found at her myspace, but I’ll take a pass. Read the whole letter (which, admittedly, isn’t that dickish) in the comments. And remember kids, Piracy Funds Terrorism.

Next month, master cellist Erik Friendlander will release Block Ice and Propane, a solo album of compositions inspired by the summer-long roadtrips he and his family used to take with his father, photographer Lee Friedlander. “What is an American sound, what does that even mean?”, he wondered in the New York Times. “So I started checking out American music. But I realized that a lot of what I have in my brain about America is from these trips, seeing national parks and small towns and diners and parades — everything my father wanted to cover.”

I first saw Peter Beste’s photos of Norwegian black metal artists in Stop Smiling magazine a few years ago and noted with some curiosity that he was a Houston photographer I had never heard of (having been active in the Houston photo scene for a number of years). Then today a coworker sent me to his website to check out his photos of Houston’s (primarily southside) rap community, which I had never seen before. Far removed from the MTV-ready images of Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and Chamillionaire that we see in glossy magazines that profile Houston’s rap artists, Beste’s pics of Z-Ro, K Rino, ESG, and the like, show the gritty reality of an underground scene thriving in an impovershed community with tons of dramatic style to spare.

(thx James)

The University of South Carolina’s Center for Southern African American Music is an astounding resource of audio, video, and print ephemera of black music from the first half of the twentieth century. Prison and gospel songs, jazz and blues standard, and even some traditional Gullah music are in the audio section, while the smaller video selection has an incredible video of a 1929 river baptism as well as a performance by the Jenkins Orphanage Band from Charleston a year earlier. Be prepared to spend some time here.
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