catch me if you can, but you can’t/my fun summer redux.
*if I already used this picture, it’s because I can’t find the one where dose y jel are eating burgers. they look way more rakish and vampire slaying these days. perfect go-along with my spy look these days…. ATP 2K7 subtle X subtitle*
Since there has been so much blogworthy stuff happening recently, I kind of went into fact finding overload these past few weeks. The whole “people of dubious nationalities and backgrounds doing asinine shit worldwide” count is at an all time high and between Lebron James playing “guess what locker room I’m taking a shit in next year?” and Steve Jobs dropping chrome lemons in the form of new iPhones and iPlacebos the world over, I am turned the fuck out. I had to go to Paris yesterday for a show with themselves™ and it was pretty sick. Compared with the Hamburg show that was essentially the same line-up on friday, this must have been a party to those dudes. Let me recap and give you a speck of history on the last 72 or so hours….
I left to Hamburg at 2 something in the afternoon and due to being lovestruck and lovesick, I neglected to plan ahead and print out my train reservation. I normally buy tickets at the box office and go thru a whole convoluted process that ends with me having my reservations in my hand on the train, so I must have really had my nose all open over wifey recently to not think it mattered. I got to the train office and spoke extremely limited english to a woman at the information center. She said something to the effect that my passport and credit card would be enough to board this train. I (being a lame fool) believed her and didn’t think nor care to press the matter further with 10 minutes before departure. After boarding the train and riding it for a while, the ticket person let me know that regardless of what was told to me, I needed to have a printed version of my reservation to ride the train any further. I showed her the reservation on my computer, my passport and credit card for ID purposes and all that got me was kicked off at the next stop with a 2.5 hour delay to Hamburg. To properly grasp where I was in west coast U.S. standards, I was basically riding the train from L.A. to San Fran (a high speed connection with no stops) and I got kicked off in Bakersfield or even Gorman. These places share like topography with Wittenberg, Germany and all three are basically as arid as Mars. I was instructed to get off here and get a proper print out of my reservation, thus enabling me to connect to the next train. I get out to 95º degree heat (35º for you celsius folk) and look around to what could have been a suburban graveyard. there was no payphone (my phone was dead and I couldn’t call the promoter to tell him what was going down) at the station but there WAS a welcoming committee consisting of an older woman and a young lady. they both wore matching “Wilkomen en Wittenberg” shirts but the young lady had a large heat transfer of a picture of a cup of coffee on hers for what could be individuality. I say this because there were no refreshments to be seen. They were very helpful in attempting to show me how to get to the city center to use the payphone, but I was scared to venture too far from the station for a number of subtle but obvious reasons. I camped out at the inferno and re-did my set for the show that night since I figured I had no chance in doing a soundcheck. I finally get to Hamburg and walk over to the venue (I have been there more than twice) just in time to run into the promoter Thomas, Dose and Jel. They had just came from a BBQ and after whimpering like a little hoe, I was driven back to the BBQ to eat some chicken and sausages. This goes down and then I get rolled back to the spot for a small soundcheck and kick it time with the homies. We clown around and drink lots of beers (we each got 15 drink tickets for the night) and I start off the set with a disclaimer about my broken teeth and how they could potentially affect my performance. After minimal problem and max rippage, the themselves™ dudes take the stage and basically shut the hoe down for 2 hours. I sold merch for them and drank tall white beers all night. We got some weed and smoked on that later on while I get told about how Thomas’s (the promoter) girlfriend (whose birthday it was, hence the parkside BBQ) threw a lemon onstage and hit Jel in the head during the set. Dose wasn’t too stoked from that and while Dose and Jel attest to the homegirl crying lots afterward, Thomas portrayed Dose as a raving demon who was too on one to listen to reason. Both Jel and myself thought that the lemon was funny. Fuck it, that is comedy for you. I wake up insanely hung over and make myself puke so I can actually continue with my day. This was a black letter day for transportation in Hamburg due to something that will be heretofore known as “Dad Rave 2010” until I figure out how to spell the name correctly. It is basically a city wide rave where 100,000+ people all dress up in what looks like haz-mat camo made of sponge and styrofoam. I have to mention that none of these people are under the age of 36 and they were all stone drunk by 2:30PM. Oh yeah, they danced to a designated 30 songs.
I get back to Berlin around 7PM and realized that the further east I go, the more intrepid the city gets. Some spots around town look like the last city councilman for that section of town was a 3 legged dog named Monstro. I make my way to wifey’s, do some revisions on the set, go to dinner and sleep. Sunday is pretty ragged since I had to mob out monday morn, so the two will bleed together. I stay up all night re-writing and recording this song for Dam Funk in the bathroom and I was done with the mix at about 5:30AM. I had to bounce at 6AM, so I was pretty out of it when I left the house with no change for public transit. I solid snaked my way to the airport and after a semi-uneventful ride saturated with no sleep, get into Paris and it’s most hood airport: Paris Orly. After 2 hours and change, I finally get hooked up with my ride into town. This happened to be a brand new benz and a man in a suit. I told him to drive slow when we got in the city so I could look at all the folks flossing on the street and hope that they can see my facial expression. It read “this is my monday, your life sucks, eat a dick” and I was trying to make it resonate in 456 point helvetica letters in all caps across my forehead for the years of going out there and feeling like Huckleberry Finn AND Nigger Jim by basically everybody not living in the Bastille or named Anais, Sandy, Fred, J.B., Matthieu, Albane, Sax or Tido. I get to the hotel and sleep like a dead man for 3 hours. After that, it’s to the venue where I meet up with the dudes again and we do american shit until 8PM. This consisted of hanging out in a pack drinking and talking loud about doing obnoxious shit to “foreigners” while on road. After really hanging with these dudes, I came to the conclusion that these clearly are some crev dudes. Jel has grown into someone resembling one of the X-Men while in street clothes and Dose is just walking around the town dressed in a nightgown and a conical hat with the letters DGAF embroidered on the front in brown baby calf fur. These dudes are motherfucking savages. Dose was on a all night mission to holler at ladyfriends, get money and throw the stage manager in the river. He did 2 of the 3 and I have no idea what their plot is today. I was pretty stoked because I got an early start to my day and even got to the airport 2 hours early……. To find out that the plane was inexplicably 5 hours delayed. Sick as fuck. Seeing that the airport is nowhere near the city or it’s center, I figured that I would just camp out at the airport for the 7 hours I was on deck and get some extra Z’s in the basement that is known as the check-in counter. I gotta give props to the Easyjet company for their hospitality that consisted of 2 vouchers worth a combined amount of 9.00. I was way juiced until I figured out that you can only use these vouchers at a concession stand specially deployed for this very purpose. For 4.50, you could cop a bag of chips that usually costs 1.00 and a can of soda or bottle of water that would probably retail for 1.00, if not .65 somewhere else. When my girl had a 14 hour layover on a overnight train, she caused such a stir that she was quoted in the damned newspaper and got her money back on the trip. Add this to all the fashion flight victims (everyone dresses up when they go to the airport and you feel like it’s a fashion show during the special olympics) and you too will be amazed and astounded over the last couple days. I also got hit up for 3 different rental scams on craigslist, all by people from West Africa. Those dudes are smart as fuck, I don’t know anyone doing intercontinental rental check scams.
On some music shit, all sorts of dudes are doing it right now. Wiley just dropped 11 zips filled with songs for whoever wants them and the grime loving community has been going fucking bonkers. There’s a lot of heat on here and I’m very sure he could have made a couple of compilations and sold them for some more money. When you give a fuck about your fans and you have a large fanbase, little things like that don’t go unnoticed. In other communities, people hate on free music because they feel like it isn’t worth listening to if it isn’t available thru a million retailers with a price tag. Blame record labels and people with money for that one, motherfuckers are racing to services like Soundcloud and Bandcamp trying to share their work with you. Now that people are making iPhone/iPad apps with these streaming programs in mind, it’s pretty impossible to not be up on this music at this point. There’s almost too much to share simply because there’s no filter on quality! All the A&R’s are reading Beatport charts and blogs to find out the new dudes, all the bangers are right under their noses…..
…And if ANYONE is a rapping freemason, it’s RICK ROSS. Not the O.G. crack smuggler (maybe him too, but really…) but the warden turnt rapper. If you listen to the song “Free Mason” then you will hear him kick more than one jewel for you to let shine in your memory museum. While Jigga is on there denying that he is initiated, he’s been dropping coy hints since at least the black album came out. Listen to that one singing sample saying something about Lucifer, The Morning Star on it and imagine me saying I told you so. However, The Albert Anastasia EP is an outlandishly posh name for a project that is actually LP length. I think he is singlehandedly bringing back the ‘little bit of gold’ style back to the hood in the form of about 46 chains around his neck. I haven’t been that entertained since I saw the dude from BET rocking 6 herringbone necklaces one day. I thought that was nuts, I must be a square like him. I mean, damn……
On the song with Kool G Rap, he said:
“all black armored cars-/I call em’ amistad/-my masonic lodge is second nation under god”
(What else can I say besides masonic lodges were only threats back-back when they hid knowledge from others who would just fuck it off. After the alexandrian library thing popped off, they were basically esoteric social clubs that didn’t allow women to join. Once we got around to 1717, the lodges started to resemble different sorts of ‘who’s who’ lists that featured all sorts of luminaries throughout history. Now that the combined intellectual property of the world is a pack of Newports and some Puma sweats, why wouldn’t one of the less insidious lodges get taken over by a bunch of nouveau riche rappers that are too old and too famous to be in street gangs? There HAS to be some good reason why some of these dudes still have careers, you can’t suck that many dicks in Hollywood, NYC and wherever else. Being a mason makes more sense everyday…)
On the song MC Hammer, my favorite line of probably all time is:
`”credit card scams -that was for the faggots/-motherfuck windowshopping boy, I gotta have it..”
I don’t even know what that line means, the shit is just belligerently asinine and niggerish. I love this shit like you love to look at an infection that has been wrapped up for too long……. Hail Rick Ross, uh… most worshipful something, something?
