Mos Def and Mahler, Josh? How about Claude Debussy and Rakim? The first place I tried was here, and I was fooled for a second, but it’s a car gadgets site. I wonder which Russolo would have preferred?[…]

MOS DEF – “Mr. Nigga” (from the album Black on Both Sides)
At least partly, an indictment of what seems to me (in the midst of the white-bread breadbasket of America) to be those – black specifically but hold that thought &#82[…]

The sort-of-debate between me and Robin that’s characterised today’s nylpm springs in part from Simon Reynolds’ Fave Records of 1999.[…]

MOS DEF – “Ms. Fat Booty” (MP3)
CHRIS MORRIS – “Motherbanger” (Flexidisc, given away with Select June 1992)
KOOL KEITH – “Intro” (from the album Black Elvis/Lost In Space)
Mos Def is kind of like […]

BUTTERFLY CHILD – Drunk on Beauty (MP3)
This is the very essence of luxuriant. I vaguely remember Joe Cassidy being hailed (especially by David Hemingway, one of the great lost Melody Maker writers) as one of those epic, expansive lush pop gen[…]

SUPER HUMAN POWERS – Intellectual Extra Terrestrials (MP3)
I know I’ve talked at length about their “West Evil Rhymes” (and rightly so, a mutation of Geography and Time even Momus might have dismissed as absurd, incongrous an[…]

If you skim over the market boosterism at the end, this old article from Reason magazine is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in pop, irony, elitism, fake-fakeness, etc., themes not entirely absent from Freaky Trigger recently.[…]

YOROKU SAKI – Tech-Scientific (Alpha Version) / Goodtimes (Demo Version) (MP3s)
Maybe it was the reference to the predictions in George Orwell’s 1984, and their historical presience, that attracted me first (but then it almost inevitably […]

Rock & Roll is Dead quoth dreadful article on local US paper’s website. Boo hoo. What the article is saying is that the thing called ‘rock and roll’ which used to sell a lot of records (and hence make rock writers’ lives […]

Let me be the first to state the obvious: that is the worst title for a pop single ever. It brings to mind crapping-toddler birthday card designs in its tumourous cuteness, and when you imagine it sung you imagine it accompanied by a winsome giggle-g[…]