South By Southwest 2009

CollecT Respect Anna Check

Rapper Blu wants to be like the Monk
By Chris Ziegler

At his second show at South By Southwest, they were begging Blu to play – five or six jocky guys who’d run in worried they would miss him, reassured first by the tiny crowd and then by the fact that Blu was right there, stretched out to about his full six-four in a folding chair and talking to girls about Herbie Hancock. Just over a week before, news that Blu – the independent MC born Johnson Barnes who started rapping after he broke his ankle playing varsity basketball in the South Bay – was independent no longer had bloomed into the Internet; after three albums on two local indie labels (plus ancillary mixtapes and a fusillade of guest appearances) Blu had signed to Sire/Warner, once home of Richard Hell and the Ramones. (In fact, according to Blu’s manager, punk-period Sire head Seymour Stein was personally excited about his new hip-hop signing.) The next time Blu would come to SXSW, he could be officially famous – but to these guys, he already was.

Then, at his fourth show at SXSW, they were clapping and cheering because he was playing plenty, backed as he was before with his signature DJ Exile, who produced Below the Heavens – arguably Blu’s most famous album to date, though it was never released on vinyl and currently trades for about $150 on Amazon – with Blu when Blu was 19 tip-toeing into 20. “I been OG’in it since Adam called Eve a bitch,” he rapped, a track from last year’s Johnson & Jonson album with producer Mainframe, and then he grinned: “No offense!” Girls in hippie drapes and headbands bounced on every chorus and sang along; Blu cupped the mic and smiled wide as the crowd fed his own words (correctly) back to him; let’s hear it, he’d say between songs, for the people here who love their jobs. And he heard it – hoots and hollers in a waterfall from the balcony, from people who love what he does, too.

“I’m just glad it’s 2009,” he’d say later, recovering from a five-day fever that kept him off the booze but couldn’t keep him from a quick visit to McDonald’s. “Everything is just evolving. Everyone is open to something new nowadays. It’s a great time to step out and do something different.”

“He’s not one to do the norm, really,” says Exile later, back from his own exhausting trip to Texas. “Everything he’s put out always sounded different – he’s being honest; he’s not holding back. The way music is going, the record companies are starting to catch on that you can’t stick to formulas and make money. They know they have to take chances. It’s like burning down the forest – when it grows back, it grows back fresh and brighter.”

Below the Heavens was Blu’s de facto debut – as the seeker, the moralist, the everykid who told one interviewer that Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.” changed his life. The CD (released in 2007 but recorded around 2003) blew out of print after snowballing reviews responding to Blu’s fearless sincerity – songs about his father taking him to lose his virginity, about pregnancy scares with girlfriends, about stress and depression and uncertainty, delivered without melodrama or self-pity or anything but matter-of-fact clarity.

So this was the way a lot of people first heard Blu: “I left the office got a phone and called my partner Jack,” he rapped on “Dancing in the Rain,” “and I asked him, ‘Remind me why I’m rappin’?’ And right before he answered I remembered my passion in the past/When I was scribbling in my tablet/To box out my mom and dad scrapping/To help me when my grandmother passed/Plus the many times I was homeless/And the times when I was broke/And the music made a way when I was hopeless … and he told me not to ask him again ’cause I know.”

“I picked up Below the Heavens and thought it was amazing,” says Naim Ali, one of Blu’s two A&R reps at Sire/Warner and one of the architects of Blu’s major-label deal. “He’s definitely an artist with a point of view – with a very, very deep vocabulary – and his delivery is amazing. He raps about things people are going through – things that young dudes are dealing with every day.”

But the follow-up to Below the Heavens – recorded around the same time, but not released with real backing until last year – was a week-long session with hard-charging Detroit rapper/producer Ta’Raach called C.R.A.C., shot through with shouted lines like, “It’s not crack – it’s crass, bitch!” and swagger songs about craft, respect, and simple fucking around; Ta’Raach’s hilariously corrosive “Cotton” boiling against the charming “Buy Me Lunch” and “Respect,” with Blu in fiery form: “I believe for the respect/Not from these fucks who cut the checks but from the vets/That got something to make/So go gossip and play … we deserve more … .”

And the follow-up to C.R.A.C. was Johnson & Jonson, produced by Sound in Color cofounder Mainframe and dripping with vintage soul and R&B – “Lookin’ out the window catchin’ endo from my dad’s blunt/Dreamin’ about the ho’s you get when rollin’ with big dogs/The killers/I never seen ’em mad once … damn I wanna be like those guys/The negros/The menace to society/Public enemies … .”

Each release a different face for the same man – it’s what you might find in the work of a great actor and it’s what you might call growing up in public. The whiplash transitions might have helped keep Blu a best-kept-secret for five years – but, he says, they also taught him he could do anything. “To not stay in one box,” he says now. “To not just be a conscious rapper or a shit-talking rapper. To just sing if I want to!”

So six months from now Blu’s first solo major-label album will be out. He’s planning for something different. He’s been harvesting – hovering over the MySpace page of soon-to-sign Long Beach indie band Avi Buffalo, profiled last week in City Beat. He’s wondering about reaching out to bohemian producer Daedalus. He’s hoping to get the rappers from Pacific Division to sing, and all the female singers he knows (Georgia Anne Muldrow? Niki Randa?) to rap. A project with visionary L.A. producer Flying Lotus is already in the works. (“I’m thinking of making a huge Los Angeles record – of making it with everyone in L.A.!”)

Black folk music, he calls it – “A little guitar, a little singing, a little tambourine, a little cha-cha!” He just started listening to Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – “I wanna get my Animal Collective on!” he laughs, though they’re not local. “I wanna make four or five albums and then pick one – I’m trying to come out like Superman!

“I’m like a vintage artist!” he says. “Like, behind on the times a little bit – because I wanna get a dose of everything, season it up and put my own twist on it and put it out!”

And as he talks about where he hopes his first major-label release will take him, you can hear the smile over the phone: “I wanna be like Thelonious Monk – I wanna be like the Monk!”

Beyond Matthew McConaughey

Rainbow Arabia do it on a Casio
By Daiana Feuer

Beyond the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel in Austin, Texas, past Matthew McConaughey speaking in a foreign language to a passing baby wearing a diaper, Tiffany and Danny Preston of local guitar-and-electronics duo Rainbow Arabia lean against a marble column, wearing shorts and tank tops with the seams beneath their underarms slightly damp with sweat. The scene looks like the opener to an adventure film, with McConaughey as the adversary, and the hubby-wife musical duo set to take on a trans-continental quest for justice. Imagine that they have to lug all their equipment everywhere they go, and as the couple zeros in on their target in a crowded bazaar in Morocco or Mali, Tiffany remarks, “At times like these, I’m always saying, we need to get a laptop.”

“Or roadies,” Danny would chuckle, before zapping McConaughey in the back of the head with a laser triggered by playing an ancient Arabic polyrhythm.

“Like the old days in San Francisco,” Tiffany says, retrieving a rare blue gem from the defeated enemy’s back pocket. “All the metal bands had roadies. No one was getting paid. But there were all these roadies. Kids would just love to do it.”

Mrs. Preston grew up on speed metal – wearing Slayer shirts and memorizing Master of Puppets – but she attributes her predilection for note-driven guitar to Richard Lloyd from Television’s angular playing. One day, Danny – who at the time played in Future Pigeon – bought a special Casio keyboard, equipped with microtonal scales and Middle Eastern beats. Attached to Tiffany’s gothic vocals and yelps, their first jam eventually transformed into “Let Them Dance,” the biggest hit off their 2008 EP The Basta. Tiffany explains: “We listen to all this Sublime Frequencies and acoustic stuff but try to make an electronic version. You might say, ‘But that’s a thumb piano,’ and I would say, ‘I know, but we do it on a Casio that sounds like a thumb piano.’ That’s what makes our sound. Doing electronic music but folky, world stuff.”

At first, the Arabic touch was confrontational. She continues: “We’re taking a sound of a topic that people are uncomfortable with. Now I don’t feel like it’s that crazy of a topic any more. A year and a half ago it was – but now it’s OK, you can wear a burqa.”

Their next release – also an EP – journeys off into African sounds, but also into dancehall and tropical music. Expect a slower, head-nodding live experience. Set to release this summer with a new round of colorful creatures illustrating the album, Rainbow Arabia teamed up with producer Butchy Fuego, the electronic-minded mix master behind These Are Powers’ and Hecuba’s newest creations. Bringing on Fuego has proven exciting. When Tiffany gets frustrated in the studio, he reads her tarot cards.

“Butchy can do anything on the drums, and he’s really into doing things different,” Danny says. “We’re a little more simple. We let him go off on certain things and he took our beats to a whole new level – that’s his forte, the beats.”

As a final note, the band’s excited about a music video for “Omar K” they’re premiering in the next few weeks. Tiffany plays a werewolf robbing a supermarket where Danny is store manager. Bottles will shatter and someone gets locked in a deli case. The image might be a bit different, but that’s just Tiffany wearing a beard. Danny insists the message remains the same: “If you’ve got the opportunity to dance, you got to dance.”

The Happy Hollows Hit the Big Time

To be in Austin now that Silver Lake is there
By Ron Garmon

The dense silence coming from the normally scrappy local indie rock scene this time of year is noticeable and, thankfully, temporary. Every year, South by Southwest, the music festival/industry conference held annually in Austin, draws more and more of our admittedly overpopulated local scene, wreaking untold devastation on local club listings, as the rest of us settle in for a few days of pre-recorded boredom. They’ll all be back next week, back in the thick of a local scene that – the way Charles Mahoney of the Happy Hollows tells it, they never left at all.

“It’s better than last year,” he says. “We’ve played some more shows and staying in like this apartment commune place for free, and we’re hanging out here with some other bands from L.A. Blank Blue from Long Beach is here; the Pity Party is here, we just came back from tour with them. We’re playing with Silversun Pickups tomorrow afternoon.”

Down the list he runs, with the cast now cavorting in Texas sounding like the lower reaches of the bill at Sunset Junction: “We played at a party with Gliss,” he says. “Long Beach is here, with Crystal Antlers, the Fling and Free Moral Agents. The Henry Clay People, Busdriver, they’re here. Abe Vigoda. The Silver Lake bloggers and all that crew is doin’ their online updates.”

“It’s kind of a madhouse sometimes,” he says. “I feel it’s more about the industry. There’s all this talk about the health of the industry and blogs and stuff, and the actual bands and the music are not of primary importance, even at the shows.”

But for the Happy Hollows, recipients of an enviable deal with artist-friendly Nettwerk, the hey-man-hear-our-shit pressure is off. One of the most distinctive new acts to come out of the protean Silver Lake scene, this trio takes the heavy urban psychedelia that is this minute’s sound and hammers it into odd shapes and pop-art whirligigs. At a time when Abe Vigoda’s edgy Muzak has the town by both lobes and the future promises some über-slick hybrid of Giorgio Moroder and Paul McCartney rising to world domination any day now, the trio moves the dominant vibe in a more rockist direction. Raucous and tight-cornered from their earliest EPs, the band has since perfected an admirable tension, with Sarah Negahdari’s vocals at ferocious odds with her guitar’s overamped Rick Nielsen jangle.

Mahoney and drummer Chris Hernandez supply the wobbly floor beneath the lead’s Romper Room antics, lending a rubbery bounce that moves a crowd better than anything else in the Silver Lake/Echo Park hi-art axis

these days.

“Definitely since our early EPs, we’ve become more experimental,” Mahoney says. “We’ve been venturing out into strange territory. Songs with no chords or with unrelated sections. We try to branch out, but we’re still doing those off-kilter pop songs. Sometimes it’s all from wherever Sarah channels the songs from. Math-y, experimental, or just a good pop song, it tends to come from her.

“We’re putting out an EP, Mooncuts, sometime in May, with an album in the next six months or so. We just recorded seven more songs in February to match the dozen or so we’ve recorded over the past year. While we’ve been figuring out the business end of music, we’ve been writing and recording a lot.”

The Hollows will perform this Sunday at the KSCR Art and Music Fest this Sunday at USC’s Founder’s Park with Avi Buffalo, Mika Miko and Crystal Antlers, and play a benefit for KXLU at the Regent on April 11 with Meho Plaza, Devon Williams and more. The subject of indie radio is a dear one to Mahoney – “Imagine having a college station that’s really a college station!” he marvels. “No format, just some guy babbling and spinning music!”

Prayer of Death

The Entrance Band and the world unknown
By Matthew Fleischer

Guy Blakeslee doesn’t go to the Deep South much these days. The last time the Entrance Band frontman toured there was four years ago, when he was run off the stage by angry rednecks in Oxford, Mississippi.

“The Ol’ Miss football game had just gotten out,” Blakeslee remembers. “There were a ton of jocks and fratboys in the audience. People were calling me ‘Jesus’ and ‘faggot’ before I even got on the stage.

“I was pissed, so when I got up there I asked everyone to raise their hands if they voted for President Bush. The whole crowd pretty much started cheering. Then I went right into my song ‘Vote With a Bullet’ – which was basically about shooting Bush in the fucking teeth.

“The next thing I knew I saw a crowd of people coming after me and I ran out the back door.”

The Entrance band just got back from playing South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Blakeslee and fellow bandmates Paz Lenchantin (also known for her bass playing in A Perfect Circle) and Derek James survived without incident.

“I still like to be political,” Blakeslee says, “but I’m a little more subtle in the way I go about things now.

“I don’t like basing my stance on being against something. People will only start considering new ideas if they’re challenged with something they haven’t heard before.”

The Entrance Band’s last album was 2006’s blues-inspired Prayer of Death on Tee Pee, which found the band exploring the edge of post-Hendrix and -MC5 rock ’n’ roll on bracing songs like “Grim Reaper Blues,” still a staple in the Entrance Band’s live set. There and elsewhere, the band explored the notion of embracing one’s mortality – in finding power through powerlessness – a lesson that has proved particularly prescient for those now caught in the death spiral of the American empire.

Expect similar provocation from the Entrance Band’s long-awaited new album, which Blakeslee says will be out by late summer on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label.

“When you’re in a successful rock band,” he says, “you’re basically standing on top of a huge soapbox. It really doesn’t make sense not to take advantage of that and try to comment on the world we’re living.”

So in the post-Bush world, after eight years of redneck rule, which narrative of American fortune can we expect Entrance to explore? Will the new album embrace the spirit of renewal that sprung up in the immediate Obama electoral aftermath, or the sense of inevitable decay that has since taken its place in recent months?

“After the election I had friends who told me that everything had changed now that Obama was president,” says Blakeslee. “I didn’t really believe that, but I didn’t want to rain on everyone’s parade either.”

But if what Nietzsche said is true, that great art can only happen inside a civilization in decline, that bodes well for the future of the American music scene, after nearly 20 years of self-indulgent decadence since the end of the crack epidemic.

“People around the world have been disgusted by what’s gone on in America in the past eight years,” says Blakeslee. “But I’ve toured in Europe, and while they hate us over there, at the same time they’ve been looking to us for answers. They’re hoping our desperation will lead to greatness.”