Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Fucking hell, Bush makes me so damned angry. I tried to watch some of his press conference last night with my roommate, but I wouldn't shut up, kept yelling at the television, livid over Bush's parade of lies and bullshit. So Brian asked me to leave, since he wanted to hear the Prez "make a fool of himself" (as he put it). I went up to my room, where I put on the only music I possibly could, DJ/rupture's Minesweeper Suite (Tigerbeat6).
I needed to counteract Bush's falsehoods and rah-rah flagwaving, so I needed Arabic music, which is featured plentily on Minesweeper Suite. I've talked before about the brilliance of rupture's turntable techniques, but what really both brings me down and cranks me further up is the source material he uses, and how he utilizes it. Melding Arabian tunes with machine-gun beats and political protest hip-hop (cf. Dead Prez), this Suite sounds like a war. Ever near the mix's end, where rupture drops in "Killing Me Softly With His Song," feels like protest music. Recontextualized this way - especially underpinned by Timbaland's stunning "Are You That Somebody" instrumental, especially that cooing baby, who takes on an eerie note here - I'm reminded of the Middle East, of the kids in Iraq growing up under a U.S. occupation no one save the Bush/Rove cabal asked for, of 12-year-old Palestinian boys being pushed into the service of Hamas as suicide bombers. Damned right the personal is political, and vice-versa. And DJ/rupture fucking gets it. On Minesweeper Suite, the DJ sounds like a soothsayer, a truth speaker, a fortune teller, and architect. He's helping draw the new 21st-century road maps - will we be smart enough to follow them?
I needed to counteract Bush's falsehoods and rah-rah flagwaving, so I needed Arabic music, which is featured plentily on Minesweeper Suite. I've talked before about the brilliance of rupture's turntable techniques, but what really both brings me down and cranks me further up is the source material he uses, and how he utilizes it. Melding Arabian tunes with machine-gun beats and political protest hip-hop (cf. Dead Prez), this Suite sounds like a war. Ever near the mix's end, where rupture drops in "Killing Me Softly With His Song," feels like protest music. Recontextualized this way - especially underpinned by Timbaland's stunning "Are You That Somebody" instrumental, especially that cooing baby, who takes on an eerie note here - I'm reminded of the Middle East, of the kids in Iraq growing up under a U.S. occupation no one save the Bush/Rove cabal asked for, of 12-year-old Palestinian boys being pushed into the service of Hamas as suicide bombers. Damned right the personal is political, and vice-versa. And DJ/rupture fucking gets it. On Minesweeper Suite, the DJ sounds like a soothsayer, a truth speaker, a fortune teller, and architect. He's helping draw the new 21st-century road maps - will we be smart enough to follow them?
# posted by Thomas : 4:25 AM
