Today’s column is a guest piece by Sarah Prensky-Pomeranz, a writer and Boston-based social worker who tore her ACL seven months ago in an adult league soccer game. She continues to rehab daily, and as you’ll read below, is finally back on her way to full recovery:

Today, I jumped for the first time in seven months.

Ever since I tore my ACL on November 6th, 2011, my feet haven’t lifted off the ground. Until today.

Until today, I slushed through puddles. I walked down bus steps one at a time and accepted that I couldn’t reach anything slightly beyond my fingertips.

When I received exciting news, I hopped in an up-and-down frenzy on one leg as if I’d stubbed my toe instead of learning that I had been awarded a Fulbright grant. All I wanted to do was spring off the ground with both legs and soar.

Because I couldn’t jump, I spilled a smoothie on my head. I ate scrambled eggs off of a yogurt lid and allowed a Boston basement centipede to squiggle over my sandaled foot.

Because I couldn’t jump, I only could use the toaster when my roommate was home. I wiped up spilled pesto with a beach towel and merely wiggled my shoulders when a Tupac imposter sang “Thugz Mansion”.

My feet fused to the ground.

So today, when my physical therapist told me I could finally jump, I froze. I couldn’t comprehend what she was saying. The letters, “J-U-M-P” floated ethereally in front of me and I squinted my eyes against their brightness. “Jump over this line of tape,” my therapist said.

My brain synapses stopped firing. My will and my body refused to speak to each other. I just waited. As if jumping off the ground would happen to me. As if that natural bend and spring would just…go. And still I waited.

I could get sappily metaphorical here and say that I wasn’t waiting to physically jump. That the identity crisis in my knee (a piece of my hamstring was now underneath my knee cap!) wasn’t just happening in my knee. That I wasn’t scared to take a literal leap. That the only thing holding me back from jumping was myself.

And yes, as I faced my physical therapist in an awkward half-squat, it was about me. To jump was everything. To jump was finally loving this city. To jump was proudly yelling to the world that I only have four friends in Boston. To jump was another day closer to my move to Africa. To jump was to make a statement to no one but myself.

And so I jumped over that taped line. Twice.

The post To Jump: Life After ACL Surgery appeared first on The Faster Times.

R. Kelly – the sage who brought us Ignition, The World’s Greatest and I Believe I Can Fly – has wrote 32 new chapters to his exquisite, genre-defining Hip Hopera, Trapped in the Closet. But sadly, he cannot find funding to film what is sure to be a masterpiece.

As everyone knows, R. Kelly is a genius. And as everyone also knows, sequels are always better than the original. So tell me then: why are the studios not leaping at this lucrative opportunity that sits before them on a golden platter?

I’ll tell you why: the Hollywood elite fear what R. Kelly’s new genre will mean for the motion picture industry.

Who would ever again go see a regular film when given the chance to watch non-stop action over a soulful beat? Who would ever pay to see Ryan Gosling grin sheepishly on screen when they could instead witness Mr. Kelly’s charming, yet funky, impression of an overweight, white woman from the south?

I’ll tell you who: no one.

And Hollywood knows this, which is why Mr. Kelly has struggled to find the funding he, and all other art enthusiasts, so desperately need.

But, people of the world, I say we make 2012 a year of revolution, a year that begins where 2011 left off. I say we throw off the shackles that have let Hollywood force feed us flicks like New Year’s Eve and Jack and Jill year after year. I say that we, the 99%, let our voices roar: Let’s all chip in and make the last 32 chapters of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet a reality.

This is about more than the heroic saga of Sylvester and Tron. This is about more than extramarital affairs and midgets under sinks. This is about more than finally learning what is in that mysterious package.

No, Trapped in the Closet is about everything and nothing, which means it’s about as close as we can get to understanding this crazy thing called life. For when the muse whispered this tangled tale in Mr. Kelly’s ear, there were tremors across the world and everything changed. And until we see where this R. Kellian tragedy ends, we will never know how to put it all back together again.

So, if the elite are so hardheaded that they will not fund this film, we really should ask ourselves why. Perhaps these final 32 chapters will open our eyes to something we’ve been blind to for ages. If Hollywood is going to keep that truth from us, I say it is time for us to go out and take it.

Fellow humans, please join me in giving a little to Mr. Kelly; surely we’ll get a lot more in return. For this Hip Hopera will be a symbol of the power of the 99% – it will reassert the notion that majority rules. It will demonstrate that great art holds real power and that censorship is truly a thing of the past. And best of all, we the people will be the patrons of the great masterpiece of our era, a piece that will spur the long-awaited R. Kellian Renaissance.

So while this may look like nothing more than a 2-hour-long R. Kelly music video, goddamn, don’t it smell a lot like freedom.

The post R. Kelly and the State of Freedom in America appeared first on The Faster Times.

I live with three guys from the Detroit area, so the fact that Nickelback played the Lions Thanksgiving day halftime show was treated like a catastrophe in my house. And even three weeks after the Lions lost to the Packers on Turkey Day, the miserable choice for a halftime performer still boils my blood.

Detroit is home to some of the greatest music ever played; it is the Motown capital and true Detroiters would have absolutely loved to see Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder or Gladys Knight perform at the half. But even another halftime performance by Kid Rock would have been more than fine with every Lions fan I’ve spoken to.

Instead, the Lions chose Nickelback, a Canadian band better suited for a performance at a 12-year-old girl’s slumber party than a football game. The Lions are relevant for the first time in over a decade; they actually have a shot of making the playoffs, which is absolutely astounding if you’ve followed the NFL at all since Barry Sanders’ retirement.

But the franchise may have burned their newfound relevance in one day when they chose to represent their brand during their biggest game of the year like this.

Bu there is a little silver lining to the whole Nickelback debacle: Mayer Hawthorne, a true Michigander, broadcasted an alternative halftime show from his parents’ basement that should make ever Detroiter proud.

It was this performance that first exposed me to this odd and intriguing new star. Hawthorne, born Andrew Mayer Cohen, is whiter and Jewisher than most – I, an incredibly white Jew, am an expert on the topic – but he’s still funky as hell. And he’s putting out music that no one has recorded in the last 30 years.

Hawthorne, a soulful Ann Arbor native, raised 40 miles and 40 years from his Motown contemporaries, hit the mainstream with his 2009 debut album A Strange Arrangement. He sings, produces and plays the instruments on his tracks; his voice is not legendary, but he pulls off a legit falsetto. And his arrangement and general steez (read: style with ease) more than makeup for slightly-lacking pipes.

Hawthorne has shied away from the “retro-soul” label and his new album, How Do You Do, combines the Motown sound with other unexpected influences, like late Sixties California pop and J Dilla. And there is even the novelty of a duet with Snoop Dogg on the track “Can’t Stop.”

But Hawthorne is at his best when he’s playing true-blue Detroit soul and my favorite song on the new album, “A Long Time,” an ode to the Motor City, is just that.

So if you want to stuff the stocking with some soulful jams, look no further than Mayer Hawthorne’s debut album A Strange Arrangement. And if you feel that your loved one’s been extra good this year, get them How Do You Do as well.

The post Merry-Making Music: Mayer Hawthorne’s A Strange Arrangement appeared first on The Faster Times.

There were a few aspects of the film that were specifically troubling (Armie Hammer’s old person makeup is really awful, as is his old man acting – I can only explain it as the senior citizen shuffle), but the real failing is a consistent flaw in almost all biopics. A great film should stand on its own; viewers shouldn’t be expected to study the portrayed protagonist before entering the theater.

Let’s look at Lawrence of Arabia as an example (however unfair the measuring bar). When I saw that film, I was a 19-year-old, born 65 years after T.E. Lawrence’s death, with some knowledge of the English role in the Middle East and absolutely no knowledge of the man himself. But it hardly mattered; I was enthralled throughout.

And that’s where newer biopics get it wrong. The first priority of any film should be to tell a great story; films should not be crafted like Wikipedia entries.

J. Edgar attempts to cover the entirety of a nearly 65-year career; trading story arc and character development for faux-celebrity sightings. The film seems most interested in giving history buffs a thrill; anyone well-versed in FBI history will love the winking references to Hoover’s surveillance of Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, as well as some really “fun” Kennedy accents. However, if you have not studied that history, then the second half of the film is pretty useless – unless you get a good laugh from some bad makeup.

There is a great story to be told there; either about the paranoia of an old man with too much power or the rise of an antisocial young man with too much ambition. But as this film proved, you can’t tell both tales. Great biopics succeed because they pick a small window of time and use it as a parable for a life; most biopics fail because they try to capture history with a panoramic lens.

So please, do not see bad biopics, because as long as they keep making money, Hollywood will keep putting them out. Save some cash this weekend, get cozy on a couch, and throw in Dirty Harry.

Let’s try our best to remember Mr. Eastwood when he still was kicking ass and taking names; and let’s hope that Hollywood will leave J. Edgar out of the biographical film they’ll eventually make about his life.

The post J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood and the Fatal Flaws of Biopics appeared first on The Faster Times.

The protagonist of the story is a shaggy fellow named Nathaniel Markman, long-bearded with tangled hair. He’s a soft-spoken fiddler from Missouri whose eyes lock on yours during conversation and close when his bow slides across violin strings.

As we talked – beside the swimming pool at a summer camp right outside Yosemite National Park – Markman told me one of his first memories. He was four-years-old, sitting on a bed with his parents as they flipped through the newspaper.

“They read ‘violin lessons for anyone interested’ and they asked me right then, ‘Nathaniel, do you want violin lessons?’ And I remember jumping up and screaming, ‘Yeah, I do!’ But they could have said anything, they could have said tuba or anything and I would have said yes.”

But he chose violin, or perhaps violin chose him, based on your understanding of metaphysics.

Fourteen years and thousands of violin lessons later, the bright-eyed fiddler from Missouri began to travel, first to Israel on the Birthright program and then around Europe.

“I was looking at the list of all the people on my program going to Israel and they were all Californians,” Markman said. “At the time I thought, ‘I wonder if I’ll be in California some day.”

On the trip to Israel, Markman met Danny Jolles, who eventually introduced him to a band named Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Today the band is mainstream, but in October 2009, when Jolles sent Markman the Youtube clip of Edward Sharpe on the NPR Tiny Desk series, their first album Up from Below had been released just three months earlier.

“They were this nice little band and they had this casual way of performing that seemed very improv,” Markman said. “I just liked the vibe, the feeling that I got from the music.”

Markman was living in a co-op in St. Louis at the time, finishing up his last semester at Washington University. He fell in love with the group, which is rare for him, and sent the video around to all his friends. Soon, Edward Sharpe was a favorite at the co-op.

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The basement of Markman’s co-op was split in two – half was used as a kitchen and eating area and the other half was for performances. Markman’s job in the house was music coordinator; he was tasked with finding touring bands to play a set at the house and with hosting the open mic opener for the weekly show.

One night, he and some friends put a group together and performed at the open mic before the visiting band went on. They played a cover of “Home” and “40 Day Dream,” two Edward Sharpe songs.

“I remember thinking at the time, if I were to play with one band, I would play with Edward Sharpe,” he said. “But it just kind of spilled out and I didn’t think much of it.”

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The next week, Markman finished up finals and graduated. He’d been in school all his life. He had an urge to roam for a while.

So he packed up his minivan with instruments and drove out to California. He would try and make a life for himself, playing his own music.

One by one, his friends began moving out to the Bay Area. A group of them started to record together and to play on a corner for tips.

Their lives were the lives of many aspiring musicians – recording and busking on the street – until February 2010 when one friend saw that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes were playing in Oakland on Markman’s birthday. It seemed miraculous that the band Markman had so adored just a few months earlier would be playing in his city on that day. He felt he had to be there.

So on his birthday, his friends gathered and went to the show, which was sold out except the 200 tickets the venue was keeping at the door.

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When Markman gets excited, his eye contact intensifies and his voice rises – it’s nearly impossible not to be infected by his giddiness and his delight is stoked by your response.

As he talked about the night of his birthday, a story that I’m sure he’d told hundreds of times before, I felt eager and nervous.

The story he had been telling me was well-crafted, every detail was relevant. And yet, the way he told it, it felt as if he were as anxious as I was to hear what would come next.

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There was already a long line by the time Markman and his friends arrived at the Bimbo 365 Club in Oakland, so they went back to the car and grabbed their instruments. They began to perform as they waited in line.

“While we were playing, the band walked by and we were like, ‘Oh, it’s them,’” he said. “They gave us an eye but they didn’t really notice. They just kept going to get ready.”

Markman and his buddies continued to play as the line slowly crept toward the ticket window. Luck was on their side that night; they were within the first 200 people and all were able to buy tickets.

The group returned to the car to put their instruments away, elated that they’d get to see the show. But as they were loading up the trunk, one of Markman’s friends had an idea that would prove fateful:

“Someone suggested, what if I brought my violin into the music venue?” Markman said. “And then someone else was like, yeah, if you don’t bring your violin, you’re never going to play with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.”

Most people would scoff at such a statement, but Markman is a man who lives by that kind of logic. He grabbed the violin and the group moved toward the door.

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At the turnstile, the security guard told Markman that he couldn’t bring an instrument into the show. He felt defeated and was ready to return to the car.

But luckily, it was his birthday; his friend wouldn’t have it and took the violin from Markman. Markman walked by the security guard, showing him his empty hands. His friend snuck the violin in behind him.

The group slid their way up to the tenth row and Markman began to tune his fiddle as the warm-up band played. When Edward Sharpe came on, it felt like a dream; it was Markman’s birthday and he was with his best friends, watching the band he’d fallen in love with months before.

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Near the end of the set, Alexander Ebert, the band’s lead singer, began to whistle the first few bars of “Home”.

“One of my friends put me on his shoulders and I was air-bowing in the audience,” Markman said, “and I got a finger from Alexander the singer to come up to the stage and play something.”

Markman was shocked by the gesture, but the crowd began pushing him toward the stage. He was in a daze: it was his birthday and he was being crowd-surfed toward the band he’d dreamt of playing with for months.

When he stepped on stage and began to play, the band quickly understood that he was not just an average fan. They extended the song to allow Markman to take a solo.

“There weren’t enough mics so Alexander was grabbing mics from different members of the band,” Markman said. “He held three up to the violin so people could hear it.”

A moment like this does not come along twice; for 99% of the population, it doesn’t even come along once. But Markman was the perfect man for the moment; and he grabbed it.

“The way I perform, the more nervous I am, the more comes out of me as a violinist,” he said. “I completely let go and just gave everything I had – It was exhilarating, it was definitely the most people I’d ever played in front of.”

When he left the stage, amid glad-handing and cheers, he thought his miraculous night was over. He thought he’d had the greatest birthday he could ever have imagined and that was okay with him; Markman is not an unreasonable man.

“But that wasn’t the end,” he said.

After the show, his group of friends saw Edward Sharpe packing up their instruments, getting ready to go down to Santa Cruz. Jolles, the friend who had exposed Markman to the band months before, had an idea: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes had been nice enough to play for them, so they should go play a concert of their own for the band.

“So we all got our instruments and played them a few of our own songs while they were packing up,” Markman said. “They were like, you guys should come and open for us. This was the week that all my friends had graduated and moved west – we were all together. There were six of us and we were all free – I think we were gonna go on a trip anyway that week – so we just got our stuff together, called up a couple more friends, and headed south.”

Markman’s group opened for the opener in Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara, touring with the band they’d waited in line to see just days earlier. And the shows were sold-out, so the venue was already three-quarters full when they started playing.

“We’d just stand in the audience, have everyone circle around us and play acoustic sets. We played Klezmere music and a lot of jam stuff and the fans came out and were dancing, going crazy – the energy was very camp-like; very raw and not staged at all,” he said. “And once we were done opening, I’d just go up onstage with Edward Sharpe and play with them.”

After the Santa Barbara show, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes was set to go to Australia. Markman and his buddies weren’t about to follow them halfway across the world on a whim. But they parted ways with a promise:

“They said, if we are ever back in California, we want you to come and play with us.”

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Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes made good on their word and called Markman when they returned.

He met them in the Midwest for a tour, playing Milwaukee, Bonnaroo and Markman’s alma mater, Washington University.

After the tour, Markman came to work at Camp Tawonga, the summer camp in Yosemite, which could have meant the end of the dream. But instead, as fate would have it, Edward Sharpe played a few festivals in the area over the summer and always made sure to shoot him an email to see if he could join them.

So while most counselors would go and hang out by the river on their days off, Markman would hop in a car and go play Outside Lands or the High Sierra Festival.

“At Outside Lands, we went backstage to huddle up and when we came back on there was the biggest sea of people, beyond the gates all the way onto the hill on the other side,” he said. “I remember walking on and almost fainting.”

After summer ended, he returned to Oakland and played with the band at the Fillmore in San Francisco and down in San Diego.

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Now if this story were a movie, it would end with one of those performances. We’d see Markman, on a spotlighted stage, fiddle raised and eyes closed, before a mass of awestruck fans. The song would end, the curtain would fall and the screen would turn to black.

But this is real life and Markman is still only 24-years-old. So I asked him what happens next.

“The last I played with them was right before Tawonga began this summer and then I stopped contacting them,” he said. “It was just becoming really distracting to be a part of them. I was always checking my email – when is the next thing, when am I gonna play? I just wanted to be here.”

Markman was fully there all summer, lifeguarding and gardening in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. The biggest performances of the summer for the fiddler – whose camp name is Asparagus Toes – were Tawonga’s weekly Shabbat services.

But now the summer is over; Markman and his friends are back living in Oakland. He still loves to reminisce about his time touring with Edward Sharpe, but he is far from stuck in the past. He wants to farm. He wants to be an educator. And he wants to play with a band of his own.

“If I really put my heart into one thing and it is just music, I’m pretty sure the Universe will provide – it will come together,” he said.

And after meeting Markman, it’s hard to argue with that logic. He’s a resonating force on the fiddle; simultaneously melodic and morose. But also, he’s seems to fit well in nature. I truly believe that the unkempt and unassuming fiddler from Missouri is the type of man the Universe will protect.

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Markman has played with the Wildbirds and Little Owl, while continuing to write his own music since touring with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Here are two of his favorite tracks that he has recorded on this year:

The Wildbirds: “This Is Our Town”

“We recorded this album as a live session one night when I was home last fall (Milwaukee is where my parents recently moved). I went over to Hugh’s house for a pumpkin and hard cider party which set the stage for an awesome live recording.”

This Is Our Town

Little Owl: “Black on White”

“I spent a lot of wonderful sunny time in Santa Barbara recording and performing with these friends of mine. The songs are written by Yoni Berk; a lot of potential here.”

Black on White

The post An Improbable Tale of Fate and a Missouri Fiddler appeared first on The Faster Times.

Thomas Jefferson had illegitimate children with a slave, Bill Clinton received felatio from Christine O’Donnell (I mean, Monica Lewinsky), and FDR was famous for drinking straight from milk cartons and farting in elevators.

We need to admit once and for all that great men are rarely good men.

But if not for the media outpour that allowed Kent Starr’s outlandish impeachment attempt on Clinton, none of these moral transgressions would have had any effect on the politician’s efficacy in office.

Anthony Weiner seems like a real sleaze-ball. Shock me, shock me.

By definition, to run for office, one must believe: 1) they are wise enough to make decisions that affect the lives of a whole hell of a lot of strangers and, 2) that they are pragmatic enough to actually get these things done. Clearly, any and every politician is going to be cocky as hell and awful to be around.

But it takes ruthlessness and delusional self-esteem to be a great politician. We need to stop duping ourselves into thinking that the men and women — don’t worry Ms. Bachmann, I didn’t forget about you — that we elect to lead us are moral human beings. As long we place politicians on pedestals, we will be let down.

So, I want to say congratulations to Rep. Weiner; I’m proud of you for admitting your slimy antics while still refusing to give up your seat in the House. I only wish that you had come clean right away.

Don’t beat around the bush about your twitter creeping; the American people have excused far worse things. Do something great in your next year in office — write a revolutionary call to arms or balance the budget — and I promise that by the time the frigid New York winter comes around, Weiner-gate will shrink away.

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But clearly, Rep. Weiner still has some things to learn. A savvier politician would have called Mr. Chuck Berry up to help nip this scandal in the bud.

We cannot expect our politicians to be role models, but at least there are still some times that we can look up to our favorite musicians.

John Lennon famously said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.”

I say, “If you’re trying to give sexting another name, why don’t you just go ahead and call it Anthony Weiner.”

The post You Got To Be Cocky To Be On Top; So What If Weiner’s A Dick? appeared first on The Faster Times.

Even as I write this, I can hear a collective sigh of not really giving a fuck rising from the reader. But, as a self-proclaimed literary snob — a man who is captivated by the Quixotic qualities in Madame Bovary — it’s embarrassing to me to have given up half way through one of the classics.

When I told my brother Max, he was less than pleased, but explained that the problem was that I had tried to read it during the summer.

“You fool!” he exclaimed, “Dostoevsky must be read in the wintertime.”

I laughed at first, but as I thought it over, the comment made more and more sense. The environment in which you perceive art affects your feelings toward the piece. “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” should be listened to on highways; “Going to California” sounds best on mountaintops in Yosemite.

Clearly, the beach is just no place for an existential crisis.

So as summer approaches, I write to alert you of an album that will mesh perfectly with lazing in the sun: Taj Mahal’s Satisfied ‘N Tickled Too.

Taj Mahal began as a traditional blues man, but by the early 70’s, he had begun to mix in a World Music flair to his style.

Satisfied ‘N Tickled Too came out in 1976 and has been attacked critically. But while sitting on a front porch on a sunny day in July, I guarantee that the album will tickle the soul.

The two best tracks on the album are the title track and the oft-covered “Ain’t Nobody’s Business.”

On “Satisfied ‘N Tickled Too”, Taj Mahal imbues the Mississippi John Hurt track with an island/reggae feel.

The fact that Taj Mahal credits Hurt on his album provides an interesting take on what it means to cover a song — in many ways, besides the term “satisfied ‘n tickled too,” what Taj Mahal borrows most from the original was the emotional response the music evokes in the listener.

It’s hard to think of a better blues song to listen to in the summertime; as Hurt explained, “This is a satisfied blues.”

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” written in the 1920s by Porter Grangier and sung by Bessie Smith, has been covered by any and everyone (Billie Holiday, Hank Williams Jr., John Mayer and Eric Clapton to name a few).

It has also been adopted by Presidential Candidate Ron Paul as his official domestic policy.

In 1949, Jimmy Witherspoon’s version reached number one on the R&B charts and the BB King, Etta James, Chaka Khan and Gladys Knight live rendition has enough star power to melt faces.

My favorite version would have to be Otis Spann and Peter Green (of the group Fleetwood Mac) — an incredible slowed-down and ultra-bluesy take on the track.

But beer in hand under the noonday sun, won’t you please just give me some Taj Mahal.

The post A Satisfied Blues: Taj Mahal’s “Satisfied ‘N Tickled Too” appeared first on The Faster Times.

However, on the night when the military killed a truly unabashed villain, Osama Bin Laden, I’d like to share my favorite ballad about our country.

Cash, one of the finest storytellers of the last half century, creates a rugged old man in a dusty old town and uses him to tell the history of war in America. The music is basic, the lyrics are spoken rather than sung, but because of Cash’s legendary voice and unequaled “steez” (“style with ease”), Ragged Old Flag is a timeless track.

Enjoy Mr. Cash and his wonderful retelling of American history. Say what you want about America, but the cowboy ballad is hard to argue against: Ragged Old Flag

The post I Don’t Like to Brag, but We’re Kinda Proud of That Ragged Old Flag appeared first on The Faster Times.

He’s spent hours crafting and tinkering with his original tracks — experimenting with samples, effects and things I won’t claim to understand — and the work has definitely paid off.

During the lunch, we talked about his style, his influences, and the fact that the Beatles never learned to read music. And finally, I asked him to let the readers in on his favorite song:

Joey Bien-Kahn: If you had to define it, how you would explain your sound?

Jeremy Shapiro: I guess I would say that I don’t have any one particular sound. Since I started making music I’ve moved through so many different kinds of sounds — from kind of a strange sort of rock to hip hop to rock/hip hop and lots of electronic music. I guess I’ve kind of settled on a style of hip hop inspired electronic music with a lot of influence from sampling artists like Cut Chemist, The Books and Bonobo.

JBK: You’ve already named a few, but tell me which DJs you try and emulate?

JS: Besides those three, I would say Four Tet — they are not so much hip hop based, but they’re great. I’d call them classical electronic musicians; they play with all of the classic techniques used by John Cage back in the ‘50s and ‘60s when electronic music was first starting — looping and wave scanning and all sorts of strange things. But Bonobo and Cut Chemist — just the way that they are able to take a sample and completely make it their own and turn it into new music is pretty amazing. It’s something that I try to incorporate — not nearly as successfully as they do — but I try to mix electronic techniques with techniques of sampling.

JBK: I feel obliged to ask this: Beatles or Stones?

JS: I’m going to act like this is a hard decision, but definitely the Beatles.

JBK: Tell me your favorite album.

JS: I’ve got to answer this question by saying what my current favorite album is. That’s too hard of a question. I’m going to go with what I’ve been instinctively turning on almost every time I’ve flipped the power switch on my speakers these past couple of weeks/months: Metaphorical Music by Nujabes.

JBK: What is one thing the public misunderstands about Disk Jockeying?

JS: For the most part, I think people think that when a DJ goes up on stage, they just press play and act cool. I mean, that definitely happens, but no one likes the music that comes out of that, so it is not very successful. All the really good DJs are really active in their sets and have some parts lined up that they queue and sample and fuck with on the fly. If you listen to a DJ’s album, it’s never the same in their live performance. They are always changing it and making it different, more interesting, and I think that is something that people don’t realize.

JBK: What is one song that we should know and that we should love?

JS: “Kong” by Bonobo. You will just feel amazing while you listen to it. It’s — god — he just samples lots of live instruments and vocals and brings them together in a way where you just…………..Just listen to it.

Check out some more of Shapiro’s music at his website.

The post Backstage with…Ded Pixl appeared first on The Faster Times.

Last September, I went to Burning Man and relished in any hip hop I could find, but I didn’t hear much rap at the festival. Unarguably, underground musical trends are going electric.

I’m only 21 years old and never thought my taste in hip hop would make me feel old, but it is becoming clear that the days of Pete Rock and the Wu-Tang Clan are gone, perhaps forever.

Now, I understand that everyone has different taste in music and I won’t be the neighbor who bangs on your door and tells you to turn down that hellish oscillator. But last Wednesday, at the Jack Beats concert in Santa Cruz, I heard something that set my blood boiling.

Admittedly, I was enjoying myself, despite hoards of local high school children sweating profusely, wearing bright colors and mouthing pacifiers. My friends and I danced to the catchy beats and the stage lighting and go-go dancers made it quite an event.

But at one point, as I was beginning to drown in the synthesized robotic drum drudgery, the beat cut out and the DJ played a short segment from “Gimme Shelter.” As expected, everyone cheered for the Rolling Stones reference and then returned to their slow-motioned grinding.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sampling and I love the Rolling Stones, but what Jack Beats did was cheating. The art of the sample has been under attack for as long as it has existed and simply playing 15 seconds of a song during a DJ set is nothing but a disservice to every other disc jockey on the planet.

True sampling is like auditory alchemy – a great DJ can mix one part funk, two parts jazz and a hint of 1940s show tune and create something fully new and fully his own. Sure he has borrowed from other recordings, but he has not stolen a thing.

The king of sampling, and arguably the greatest DJ of all time, is none other than DJ Premier, one half of the legendary rap group Gang Starr, and the producer of classic hits by Nas, Jay-Z, Notorious BIG, and many others.

Like most other DJs, Premier usually employs funk and soul samples in his beats, but on the track “Represent” on Nas’ debut album Illmatic, Premier dug deep into his record collection and found the most unlikely of samples.

Borrowing from a Lee Erwin song off the soundtrack of Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924), Premier creates a canvas on which Nas paints a striking scene of the street life in New York City. In a way, “The Thief of Bagdad” is the Machu Picchu of samples – and like Hiram Bingham had done with the lost city 80 years before, Premier searched long and hard to bring the forgotten song to a new generation.

Yet perhaps the comparison sells Premier short. Bingham found something that the Incas had built and simply redisplayed it in its original, somewhat weathered form. But Premier grabbed something ancient and forgotten and refurbished it to the point where it was grander and more astounding than ever.

Premier’s borrowed segment comes 55 seconds into a Lee Erwin song that is to hip hop what Larry the Cable Guy is to political humor. For Premier to even locate the original track and then to have the ear to decipher the 10 second segment which could be used in a beat demonstrates exceptional talent and obsessive commitment to his craft – two qualities that almost all great artists share.

Which finally brings me back to my sweaty Wednesday night in Santa Cruz.

The “Gimme Shelter” sample is the antithesis to Premier’s masterpiece. Not only is the segment not weaved into the original song, but locating the Rolling Stones’ song took almost no effort.

Turn on any classic rock station and listen for a few hours and “Gimme Shelter” will be played. Listen to the radio for years and you will never hear “The Thief of Bagdad.”

And I’m not calling Jack Beats lazy or unimaginative – I just believe they used a fully different criteria in choosing samples than Premier. While Premier (and many of the other classic 1990s DJs) strove to find segments of old funk and soul to merge into his own original track, Jack Beats used “Gimme Shelter” to contrast with their sound.

Electronica is meant to be danced to, so using “Gimme Shelter” as a drum break allows the wet, hot mob a chance to breathe and cheer at something it recognizes.

For Premier and the mid-90s DJs, part of the goal was finding an unused and unlikely song to sample. But for Jack Beats, the sample was chosen specifically so it could be easily recognized.

And I agree that it feels to good to catch a musical reference. But sampling should be about more than giving a technicolored 17-year-old the chance to impress his date with classic rock knowledge.

Hip hop’s hey day was undoubtedly in the early to mid-1990s when Jay-Z, Biggy, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Tribe Called Quest were releasing their finest work. And behind the hip hop boom was a collection of DJs committed to creating an innovative sound by scouring old records for the perfect samples.

Believe me, I don’t want to sound old and nostalgic. But with copyright laws, big bad record companies and the obsessive premium our country sets on originality, the sun may have set on the hip hop sample.

But even if we must now refer to the greatest hip hop DJs in the past tense, no one has the right to muddy what they created. So please, before you put a sample in your track, ask yourself: what would Premier do?

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