Just a bunch of hip hop and shit to start out the show, and then we wind it up at the end. uknowhowwedo*.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwJUUlymMco
Definitely feeling the Led Zeppelin remix track as well, although I have to admit feeling a bit guilty for playing it — Not a lot of big rock groups played on the Fat Beat Diet over the years. If Underworld brings me back to my university years, then Led Zeppelin brings me back to high school because they were pretty huge among the kids there, even if by then their music was already decades old. The Souleance edit adds so much funk to already soulful track.
I’d sort of forgotten that Biz Markie gets all Meow Mix in the middle of Def Fresh Crew (at the 29:30 mark in the show), but it seems fortuitous as it lets me mention the ridiculousness of the Meow The Jewels project which blew past its kickstarter goal this week. As part of Run the Jewels‘ second album release, the group consisting of El-P and Killer Mike were offering special packages for those willing to spring a bit of extra cash for the album. These were meant to be joke packages, but someone decided to call their bluff, and they, being the awesome dudes they are, ran with it. All the money will go to the families of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.
For me, I saw it as an opportunity to possibly do something good in the stupidest way possible.
El-P, via Entertainment Weekly. That EW article also sports the brilliant headline, “El-P has one explanation for ‘Meow the Jewels’ album: ‘Marijuana’ “.
Oh man.
Anyways, back to last week’s show. Pretty decent selection of music, and a couple of maybe over-eager mixes. I’m loving the mellow vibes at the beginning of the show, but the hip hop middle and dance-y end is fun times too. Enjoy!
This week, I was more than happy to welcome local producer/DJ Fatrok to the Fat Beat Diet to let him have a go at selecting and mixing tracks for the show. Aside from being one the nicest, most humble dudes I know, Fatrok also has great taste in music which is abundantly clear in the mix he laid down. It was great spending an hour talking music and dj’ing with him. Hope you enjoy it as well.
Spent a bit of the show celebrating the life of Joe Sample, who sadly passed away last week.
After that, some nice downtempo goodies before dropping a pair of tracks off of Illmatic. Not that I ever need any excuses to play tracks off of Illmatic, but a documentary on the album called Time is Illmatic is playing here in town as part of the Calgary International Film Fest.
I managed to catch it this week, along with 3/4s of Calgary’s hip hop community, which was a total blast. If you’re a fan of hip hop and/or Nas, I highly recommend it. The movie definitely helped me discover why this album resonated so much with me when I first heard it.
After that, we wind it up and get you ready for some dance floor action with some breaks and house, even managing to fit in another Joe Sample track from his years with The Crusaders. Then we dropped into some Baltimore club, a newer track from Mighty Mark and DJ AngelBaby, and then some 10yr old Baltimore club classics. This style is so raw and unapologetically for-the-dancefloor, and that’s what I enjoy about it: A simple break beat, an 808 kick, and a quickly looped vocal sample: boom! done. I know it’s not quite that simple, and there’s some subtlety there if you listen for it, but the songs are generally very pure in their intent.
I’ve played Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Feat Dam-Funk’s Baby a few times before – that track just slays me. It’s actually a cover of a track originally from Donnie & Joe Emerson, an album which has some truly so bad it’s good cover art. The song was also recently revisited by Hyperdub recording artists Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland.
Then we slowly wind it up through some Mr Scruff joints and then some funk gems before getting into Jamie XX’s latest, a nostalgia-tinged hommage to a rave scene of days gone by. I love the feel of this one. A few more nice funk and house tracks to end it off.
I’m ‘borrowing’ this picture from http://www.rbmaradio.com/shows/masters-at-work-live-at-103-harriet–2
Got into listening to some Masters at Work um, at work. Caught some of their Boiler Room sets and it got me reminiscing about their older work. Back when you had to pick through racks and racks of records for songs, and you couldn’t just preview them with a click of a mouse, the MAW remix imprint was a sure sign that you were getting some quality music on that there 12″. Sure, sometimes a lot of their stuff sounded same same, but you were guaranteed a very high caliber remix.
So that’s what we started off with before moving through more recent house before once again slowing it down towards the end of the show. That Redinho track, tho…
