2023 Q1 (part 2)
De La Soul - This Is a Recording 4 Living in a Fulltime ERA (E.R.A.)
Temps feat. Quelle Chris, Xenia Rubinos, NNAMDÏ, Shamir) - no, no
Lady Aicha and Pisko Cranes Original Fulu Mziki of Kinshasa - Tsakula
Selda Bağcan - Yürüyorum Dikenlerin Üstünde
Don Couto + Karen y Los Remedios - Cumbia Espectro
Click on individual songs to link to Bandcamp, where you can easily buy merch or just give the artists some $$$
The sudden availability of De La Soul’s catalog on streaming platforms has precipitated some moments of deep nostalgia - and I know it’s not just been me. In addition to the blizzard of activity online, the commonality of this across other people my age was confirmed on a recent trip to Indianapolis, where a cassette version of 3 Feet High and Rising was being hawked right at the register of Indy CD and Vinyl. “I have the original version of this at home,” I told the unimpressed cashier. That tape means so much to me. In 1989 was in 8th grade and really just starting to find the music that was “mine.” That summer before high school, I visited my first girlfriend where she had moved with her family in the Upper Peninsula. It was a weird and sometimes fun visit, but one of the main things I remember is sitting on the beach down the hill from their house listening to this on my walkman over and over, trying to figure out what “touche et le le pou” means, and loving every second of this unlikely record. Rap music had been in my ears for a year or two, both the popular version that was starting to break into radio and things that were not so “pop,” like Public Enemy. But 3 Feet High and Rising was the first rap record that felt like it was made for me. Some of that was the often-called out lack of anger. I didn’t have any issue with anger in rap music, Fear of Black Planet was in heavy rotation, but I had learned enough by 8th grade to understand that their anger, however righteous and exciting, was not and could never be mine. Until 3 Feet High, rap music was never exactly “for” me - it didn’t reflect my sensibility, my way of experiencing the world. But this - this was different. It felt native to my world in a way no other rap had. I fact, it may have felt native to my world in a way no other music had, period. It’s such a treat to be able to drop in on it now so easily and feel like it has really stood up over time. Aside from a view dated ticks in the rapping, I think this track sounds like it could have been made earlier this year.
Have you ever heard anything quite like Anna Wise’s “Body Dawn” before? The experience of repeated listens to it is kind of like the first couple weeks of falling in love with a new person - you know (you think?) you love them, but there’s a constant stream of new information about them, new ways of understanding them that come at you with every encounter. And each new understanding is its own higher plateau that makes you wonder if the previous plateaus (the previous versions of love) were even really love. Could you really have loved them as much before as you do now without the full picture you have now? Every listen not only reveals something new, but reveals another level of intricacy and beauty to the internal logic, the underlying vision, that ties all the disparate parts together. It’s so weird! But so wonderful, so brazenly itself. Listen to it a couple more times, you’ll see.