Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Digging Through the Past: Cutout Bins

In part of fueling my recent Nine Inch Nails obsession, I suddenly felt compelled to go backwards tonight looking for my copies of The Downward Spiral and Further Down the Spiral. This involved opening up some taped cardboard boxes and rifling through many spindles containing hundreds and hundreds of cds, storebought, burned, blank and otherwise.

It was a strange blast through the past. I found Downward but not Further; however, in its stead were a great many strange relics that I wasn't quite sure what to do with. Some I decided to rip to computer--Prefuse 73, One Word Extinguisher** Detroit Cobras, Baby; U2, Achtung Baby, Allman Brothers, 2nd Set (seriously)--and others I could only laugh about. Some of the laughers I also ripped to my computer (AK1200, Lock & Roll????***), but the rest... man. Whoa.

Included among these were my copies of the "classic" Roni Size '97 album New Forms, a jungle album heralded upon release as part of music's great future... and over time one which revealed itself to be an amazing 120 minute snooZZzzzzer. I remember buying this immediately after it came out, having read Rolling Stone's 3.5 star review telling me that it was as good as everyone had been saying. And for my young and inexposed '97 ears, it was: it was fucking amazing. Yeah, it was a little long, and yeah, Onalee's vocals wore on me a bit, and yeah, a lot of it sorta seemed like boring jazz.... but I think there was something immensely exciting, promising and powerful about jungle in the late 90s that electrified the music due to its sheer newness. Now, of course, we are old, and tired of jungle and its jazzy ways, and you can find New Forms in more cutout bins than just about anything besides Last Splash.

Post-script

**-- I thought of this album a few weeks ago because for whatever reason I decided to rip the Mr. Lif album I, Phantom to my laptop and was reminded of the fact that my second favorite track from this album is, for reasons I can't quite explain, "Huevos with Rani and Jeff", 1:15 track with Mr. Lif rapping. I can't really stand up for this shit but I can't seem to sit down for it either.

***--The AK1200 remix of Cleveland Lounge's "Drowning" was sent to me on a TAPE by an internet penpal from Atlanta in May 1999 (which I received the day before the post-Columbine Heritage High School shootings, which took place at the school she went to--Amy, where are you now?) and which I listened to more than perhaps any other song between 1999 and 2001, putting it on countless mixes, sending to friends, and loving it to fucking pieces. (There were many remixes of this song and two AK1200 mixes in particular were the best, the first featured on the AK1200 album Fully Automatic--"Dave Aude Drum and Space mix" and the second featured on 12"s and just called "AK1200 mix"). And then there's Lock and Roll, the album referenced above, which has a great drum n' bass remix of the classic Tribe track "1nce Again" that showed that hiphop worked perfectly with jungle about a year before Outkast made waves with "B.O.B"

god!!!

Some tunes:

Tribe/AK1200, "1nce Again (Twister mix)"

Roni Size, "Digital"

Prefuse 73, "Huevos with Jeff and Rani (f. Mr. Lif)"

Cleveland Lounge, "Drowning (AK1200 Dave Aude Drum and Space mix)"

And finally, video for the original "Drowning", which is not as cool but features this silly dancing: