I wanted to make a delve into music journalism today by explaining the virtues and important of the Pharcyde’s 1995 album Labcabincalifornia, after having my annual rediscovery of it last night. I was going to explain how it was the hip hop album that proved my theory to my friend Pat that there is hip hop for everyone, winning over his usually stoically trance like taste with its combination of jazzy beats and stoney tripnotic lyricism. This would then lead into several paragraphs about my overall theory that it is impossible to entirely hate a whole genre of music as there will usually be at least one artist within that genre that somehow transforms or liberates the musical class with a personal twist or experiment. I used to profess how much I hated country and western, until, at far too late an age, I heard Johnny Cash and then even later the brilliant Josh Rouse’s album Nashville. This has led to several other purchases of similar things and I now fully take it back. I would still totally throw a brick at Garth Brooks though. I have done the same with a lot of others too, easily dismissing pop, death metal and various others until proved wrong time and time again. Already you are probably gripped now. Excited about the dramatic change in today’s blog from nonsensical brain splurges to actual journalism. Now here’s where I let you down. I just found a flat and have to do stuff, so that blog is no longer going to happen.
Instead, while I would like to be rejoicing about no longer being a littlest hobo or endlessly high fiving Tom, Nat and Matt, about the possibilities of us all getting onesis and roaming the house like very comfortable animals, I have to do all the boring stuff. Here goes an afternoon wanting to write material for tonight’s Fat Tuesday but instead trying to persuade my parents that I will pay my rent every month so of course it’ll be perfectly safe being my guarantor (guarantor – the most reliable of minotaurs), and somehow making sure that my accountant doesn’t just say ‘he can barely live on what he earns’ when they call him about my wages. Then there is the logistics of what furniture is needed where, who we will make stand in the ‘grief hole’ cupboard in the living room for wring doings first and what exactly we need to do to get banned from our new local across the road.
So no music chat from me. Instead I’ve written a small list of things to do involving packing for tomorrow’s three day excursion to the Emerald Isle, not screwing up living in what will be a bloody lovely place to live, and writing material that isn’t the above minotaur/guarantor gag. Just imagine how exciting this blog could be. Imagine it. You could have walked away with a whole new notion on music that would expand your brain and make you hunt through audio archives for notes, bridges and crescendos you’d never heard before. Or like Nat, you could just say you still hate all music and I will class you as dead inside. But that won’t happen, so instead, watch one of my fave music vids, directed by Spike Jonze no less, of one of my fave tracks from Labcabincalifornia and rest in the knowledge that I know and can rap 98% of all the words to this:
I will try and blog from Galway over the next few days but I also may not. In this blog’s absence I suggest you just give up on life for the 2 minutes it would usually take you to read it and bang your head against whatever hard surface is nearest till it returns.
