Tag: music

Musical note: Tubas and Tijuana Techno

After reading this post on Freeform FM, I downloaded the mp3s from Drum & Tuba and the Tijuana Sessions and loved them. I then did what you’re supposed to and clicked through to Amazon and bought both CDs.

Wow! I’m now a big-time fan of Drum & Tuba. They’re math-rock with brass and loads of fun. Plus they cover a Minutemen song on that record and that’s the door to my heart. It’s sort of like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band getting all post-whatever and bumpy and having complex funky rhythms. Try it, you’ll like it.

I didn’t expect to like the Tijuana Techno stuff as much as I did. It has that banda sound that drives everyone nuts in Southern California but with cool smashed up rhythms and other styles layered on top. It feels like a good direction for Latin music, like something Mexican college kids would groove to.

Both recommended; visit the FM link above and sample and/or click through to Amazon if you’re interested.

teen maenad mall rampage flashback

In 1997 I had a very close call. I was living in Kansas City at the time. I went to the mall to get something you get at malls like underwear or light bulbs, and when I came out of a store I noticed lots of security guys and roadies, and something being set up that looked like a big stage. I asked what was going on and they said that current teen sensation “Hanson” was playing. I fled, and noticed as I peeled out of the parking lot that there was a mass of > 1000 teenagers being held in a sort of feeding pen in one corner of the parking lot about to be loosed into the mall. It would have been as bad as this disaster, I bet. I would have been turned into Chick Fil-A in moments.

The hardest horking man in show business

switchstatement posted a link to this rappin’ Blue Blockers sunglass ad (mp3), and I immediately recognized the artist. It’s Dr. Geek.

In my Dark Ages when I was a 20-something yuffie with no reason to live, I rode the bus in Los Angeles. For ten years. It did not improve my disposition. I frequently had to take the Wilshire or Santa Monica buses across town, which is agonizing. They move at a crawl through heavy traffic, and going 10 miles takes two hours or more. At rush hour they’re packed with the poor, the drunk, the young, the old, the multiply convicted felons, and all of the 100% disabled insane people. All of us got to share each other’s vivid personalities, differing cultural sensitivities, and rich evocative aromas.

Dr. Geek was a regular on my trips from the Westside to Downtown. He was a very large man with an expansive manner, and he’d spent the day in the heat singing so his body’s natural glow was evident to all the senses. He often wore one of those huge foam cowboy hats you see at county fairs, and carried the tool of his trade: a gigantic boom box that seemed to have sharpened corners and weighed about 400 pounds, or half the good Doctor’s mass.

He would lurch onto the bus, boombox blaring, and announce to the world that “DR. GEEK IS IN!” Pushing backwards, not with malice but with an infectious joie de vivre, he’d get to about the middle of the bus and yell out again “IT’S DR. GEEK!”

For the next two or more hours, the Doctor was in session. We all got some free raps (he’d offer to customize without the usual fee), and if no one was up for it, he’d lay some rhymes out for us, freestyle. Sometimes he’d use the boombox and other times it was just an a cappella hip hop cornucopia.

The first time, it was a blast. The second time, it was a smaller blast. The third time, it sucked, especially since he kept backing into me with his wall-like back while he was caught up in the passion of yelling “I’M THE ORIGINAL/DR. GEEK/AIN’T NO ONE ELSE ON/VENICE BEACH” or something similar.

It was nice to see that he has a website and isn’t dead. At the time I wanted him to go away and die, but now I’m happy that the Doctor is still living large.