Tuesday, December 25, 2007

THE BLOW HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH KURTIS BLOW (BUT PRESS ME AND I'LL FIND SOMETHING)


When fucking around online (which, as you probably know, I do a lot of), I have a hard time deciding whether to hunt for music or read blogs. "Ah," you say, "you should just go to music blogs." Yeah, thanks, I'm on to them. The one thing about music blogs is that most of them write about musical facts, which is great if you want facts. I'd rather read descriptions of how the music felt, and maybe the writers' personal history with the music in question, especially with odd tangents thrown in there.
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"I pulled up to a traffic light and there was a cop giving a guy a ticket in the parking lane. I was blasting "Ace of Spades" really loud and the cop, with his back toward me, started nodding his head. He slowly turned towards me and, with the pulled over driver's vision blocked by his body, the cop flashed the devil horns, with this weird 'you should have seen me back in the day' grin. (Devil horns, or metal horns, or whatever you call it. You know, the non-Hang Loose horns. I swear, metal heads invented the first-finger-instead-of-the-thumb version of the horns just to prove that they were capable of doing the version that was the biggest pain in the ass.)"
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When a music blog writes bullshit like that, that I can read. Meandering. And if the blog in question is written by a musician (as opposed to an MP3 blog) that's okay too. It's like getting to know the musician rather than someone who listens to the musician. Not better necessarily, just a different person writing.
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In the case of Khaela Maricich (aka The Blow), I had already heard her music, and had recently added The Blow to my "further listening" list. Tonight I happened by her blog, That Touch Me Feeling, and it had me listening to her music in a whole different light. Her last post (a few months old) has a video of one of her songs, "Hey Boy", being interviewed. The song is portrayed by a hand with a party hat on...well, you just have to see it. I found it really funny. She writes about her mom too. I love that shit.
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Her second latest post is a letter to her own blog. Like the other post, it was imaginative.
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And the post before that starts with, "Today was the day to seriously get down to business, and that meant standing in my underwear next to the front door, making a nest out of the twigs from my dead ficus tree." She goes on to write about the ficus dying "with only the attention of the large appliances," and her fear of moving into a new apartment.
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It was good stuff. Too bad though, that these are old posts and it appears the blog is now dormant. But it did send me in search of "further listening."
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Khaela Maricich's blog That Touch Me Feeling
Khaela Maricich entry at Wikipedia
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BONUS! Kurtis Blow: When I was looking for The Blow mp3s, I ran across an mp3 of The Breaks by Kurtis Blow. The bass and the overall groove of it have always floored me. I could do with an instrumental version.
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