Back with some funk and soul for the fall. Just made this mix below with some stuff I’ve been spinning over the last few months (including these guys). The full tracklist, along with links to listen and download, are after the jump.

Download link
Listen on 8tracks
“Backed up Against the Wall” — 3 Pieces, Vibes of Truth
“Oba, La Vem Ela” — Jorge Ben, Force Bruta
“See Line Woman” — Nina Simone, Greatest Hits
“Do It, Fluid” — Blackbyrds, The Blackbyrds
“Respect Yourself” — Staple Singers, Greatest Hits
“Use Me” — Bill Withers, Still Bill
“Jump” — Aretha Franklin, Sparkle
“Lovin’ Man” — Eugene McDanials, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse
“Getting it On” — Dennis Coffey, Evolution
“Niki Hokey” — Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul
“Sing a Simple Song” — Temptations & Diana Ross & The Supremes, Together
“Think (About It) — Lyn Collins, Think (About It)
“I Need a Dollar” — Aloe Blacc, Good Things
“Woman’s Love Rights” — Laura Lee, Woman’s Love Rights
“Heavy Love Affair” — Marvin Gaye, In Our Lifetime
“What About Me” — Chic, Risque
“Give the People What They Want” — O’Jays, Survival
“Cameosis” — Cameo, Cameosis
“Oboso” — Manu Dibango, Soul Makossa
“Von Recomecar” — Gal Costa, Tropicalia
“California Dreamin’” — Eddie Hazel, Game, Dames & Guitar Thangs

This photo by Miguel Ramirez is used under a Creative Commons license.

It’s been a tough year for campaign advertisements, and money’s corroding influence on democracy has become crystal clear. The debate has focused on the Democrat’s forthcoming fall from grace. You know it’s a tough year when candidates are running ads against the incumbent Speaker of the House, mocking her liberal Bay Area ways. It’s an historically tough year when those ads are being run by another Democrat.

It’s the increase in dirty donations, a result of the Citizens United decision, and the endless attack ads being run by shadowy 501(c)4 organizations, right? The current season of political advertising, where seeing back-to-back scare ads from rival candidates isn’t a rarity and media companies are raking it in, may seem like part of the continuing escalation of partisan bickering. But a recent On the Media episode made a strong argument that truly corrupt political advertising came of age a long time ago.

In 1934, novelist and socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California as a Democrat, and the thought of the progressive writer attaining state office drove business interests mad. They attacked him like locusts — newspaper editors ran editorials against him, consultants coordinated ad strategy and Hollywood studios not only helped produce callous attack ads, they actually docked a day of employee pay and donated it to Sinclair’s opponent.

Sinclair’s Campaign and historically accurate harmonica

Though Sinclair, who had lost running as a Socialist for legislative office before, won 879,000 votes, he was still soundly defeated and
and his platform, Ending Poverty in California (EPIC), never came to pass. The stakes — a wildly popular progressive writer running for office in the New Deal era, in Tom Joad country, no less — created the first modern political campaign and the subsequent dependence on outside cash and influence. Some things never change.

Mobile music applications have come of age over the last few years. In the recent past, the conversation was mostly about streaming services such as Pandora and that app on the iPhone commercial that allows you to avoid feeling embarrassed when you can’t name that tune. I’ve tried many variations on music discovery or streaming apps, including the visually rich Ghostly International Discovery, and see it as a logical extension of cloud computing and the desire to grab music fans increasingly fragmented attention.

But the release of the iPad, a rush for more tablet-style devices and increasingly more powerful smartphones means mobile music creation will be just as accessible and democratized. Billboard recently hosted its first Music App Summit in San Francisco earlier this month, and the focus was squarely on branded interactivity, from the Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app (a combination tuner/teacher/metronome) to the I Am T-Pain app by Smule, a company that has had amazing success with its Glee Karaoke and Magic Piano app (according to a recent press release, the Magic Piano app has been played for 23.2 years of time by users). It’s always refreshing to see creative success stories involving big brands in music, since the major labels have demonstrated the folly of a mistrustful and myopic view of technology.

I’m more interested in the music creation category, which was won by MorphWiz, a synth program created by Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess which made $40,000 in its first month. I haven’t tried that out yet, but I’ve recently become obsessed with the Reactable Mobile app, another new entry to the app world. The interface — which was developed by a research team at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona — is a table that activates a variety of different modular synthesizer elements, including sound sources, oscillators, sequencers and filters, placed on its surface. Users can position these elements, colored plastic shaped corresponding to their function, to interact with each other to build unique rhythms and sounds, a process that lets users discover their own visual vocabulary while creating. Bjork, no stranger to forward-thinking electronics and sharp visual presentation, utilized Reactable on tour a few years ago.

The app basically shrinks that table onto your phone or iPad; even on a phone, there’s plenty of room to modify and rearrange. You can save tracks and import samples, and it makes for a good crash course on synthesizers, despite the $9.99 price tag. I’ve interviewed some artists in the past who have modular synth set-ups, and after a few hours of playing with this app, I can see why they can radically expand your music vocabulary and overwhelm you with choices. All those options made me feel simultaneously adrift and excited, convinced I could make some brilliant, Warp-worthy synth line if I only tweaked the LFO just right (not surprisingly, that has not happened yet). I can see Reactable being a big part of my train trips to work.

The potential for mobile devices to expand access to composition, recast music notation and create interactive performances has barely been scratched. But in the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see fans a little more engaged with their iPhones during the morning commute.

That delightful image is, of course, a parody of the famous cover of Herb Alpert’s 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. I didn’t realize the extent to which that dairy product-derived fantasy had been mocked until I saw a display at a nearby bar of numerous cover parodies, Sauerkraut, Wurst and Other Delights, Spaghetti Sauce & Other Delights and countless other food-based scenarios that are probably a fetish to someone. In honor of that display, here’s a gallery of some great cover art parodies, satires and homages:

Booker T & The MG’s, “McLemore Avenue” (Stax: 1970)
The famous Stax house band re-staged the Beatles’ Abbey Road pose in Memphis, strutting across the street near their recording studio.

Cex “Being Ridden” (Temporary Residence: 2003)
The Baltimore art ingenue plays up Bowie’s “Heroes” cover. The instrumental version of the album had the same cover minus a strip of duct tape over the singer’s mouth.

Dillinger Four “First Avenue Live” (LSD Records: 2005)

A tribute to the legendary First Avenue venue in Minneapolis and the Bad Brains 1982 hardcore classic, “First Avenue Live” is the live recording of a Dillinger Four show that was supposed to also include the Bad Brains, who canceled. The band actually played the answering machine message Bad Brains singer H.R. left for the venue, and the repeatedly call him up between songs.

Pulp “Bad Cover Version” (Island: 2002)

A single from the Britpop band’s album “We Love Life” that was released in 2002, it shows a childhood photo of Pulp guitarist Mark Webber posing in front of the iconic scene of Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” album cover.

Consequence “A Tribe Called Quence 1995-2004″ (Mixtape: 2005)

Kanye protege Consequence aped the famous Tribe cover for “Midnight Marauders,”though he didn’t go all out with the red and green paint, opting for what looks like a Christmas Coogi sweater. You can see new mugshots on the mixtape cover, including Common, Kanye and Questlove, in the upper left corner of the cover.

Mothers of Invention, “We’re Only In It For the Money” (Verve/Bizarre: 1968)

Artists Cal Schenkel created a parody of Peter Blake’s “Sgt. Pepper” cover, fitting considering the album’s skewering of ’60s culture.

Clash, “London Calling” (CBS: 1979)

The image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass while on tour in the U.S. was turned into an homage of a classic Elvis cover by graphic designer Ray Lowry.

Smith Westerns, “Smith Westerns” (HoZac: 2009)

Chicago garage-punks literally flipped Nirvana’s iconic cover and cut it up with a painting of the Virgin Mary. One of the band members told an interviewer that, hey, if they get sued for the art appropriation, at least they’d get to meet Courtney Love.

Boris, “Akuma no Uta” (Diwphalanx, 2003)

Japanese stoner-sludge metal mavens created a visual call-out to ’70s folk rocker Nick Drake on their fifth album. Both albums were nearly the same length (39 minutes), but it’s pretty easy to determine which is heavier (the Boris title translates to “the Devil’s Song”).

1. There is a footloose, dance-happy Thom Yorke hiding behind the gloom. He should play more shows.

2. Flea is the Steve Martin of bass guitar (that isn’t conversely true — Steve Martin isn’t the Flea of banjo)

3. Mauro Refosco is one in a long-line of hyperactive percussionists. I still can’t explain the Dr. Seussian drum tower-thing he was playing, but that’s besides the point.

4. If you’re selling $40 T-shirts, they better be providing a sustainable economic model to indigenous tribes and be made via a process that removes carbon from the atmosphere, Or, you know, glow in the dark….

Jason Gross, editor of Perfect Sound Forever, taped parts of a Q&A Withers participated in after a screening of the new film in New York. One clip featuring Withers discussing the Ali-Foreman fight, is below. The rest can be found here.

A frequent, tired cliche about music writers is that many of them are failed musicians who wish they had the lyrical and musical skills of the artists they support/pan. I imagine there is some truth in that. But I am certain that most music writers would sell their soul for the lyrical gifts and creativity of someone like Dave Tompkins, whose new book is a testament to his gifts as a writer and interviewer. A wide-ranging look at the invention and introduction of the vocoder and the imprint it has left on modern music, How to Wreck a Nice Beach (repeat it a few times) is history, mythology and cultural studies all in one, a mixtape of electro freaks, the Man Machine and Bell Lab geeks that blows minds and bass bins.

Tompkins’ writing, confident and endearing, wraps around itself and hits like the flow of a powerful rapper; it’s reverential, referential, personal and inscrutable all at the same time. He pulls together the sprawling story of the vocoder’s origins in WWII covert communications then boxes in on a telling detail so good it should be fiction, like how a rapper named Silver Fox keeps his mic in a zip-up shaving kit and has to “let the vampire out the coffin and go for blood.” So much is said that you want to dig until there’s dirt under your fingernails to understand all the references and multiple levels of discourse. He possesses the crazy logic and narrative skill to encapsulate Donnie Wahlberg, Ray Bradbury and Afrika Bambaataa (all interviewed for the book) in the same story.

While weaving together disparate strands of modern music, Tompkins talks about a lot of tracks. Here’s a short playlist of some of the artists he talks about:

1. Fearless 4, “F4000″
Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Jonzun Crew, “Pack Jam”
Click here to view the embedded video.

3. Zapp, “I Wanna Be Your Man”
Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Neil Young, “Transformer Man”
Click here to view the embedded video.

5. Egyptian Lover, “Lover, Lover”
Click here to view the embedded video.

A well-developed Iraqi character

The polls closed yesterday in Iraq, and as expected, insurgent attacks disrupted some voting:

“Everyone went,” Maliq Bedawi, 45, who works at Baghdad International Airport, said as he waved his purple-stained finger. He stood outside the rubble of an apartment building that was struck and destroyed by what the police said was a Katyusha rocket. “They were defiant about what happened. Even people who didn’t want to vote before, they went after this rocket.”

Iraqis, he went on, “are not afraid of bombs anymore.”

from Explosions Hit Baghdad as Iraqis Vote in Pivotal Election

Over the last month, I’ve overdosed on movies, books and television shows about Iraq. I finally saw The Hurt Locker and The Messenger, spent a some long Saturday afternoons finishing up Generation Kill, and went through the VICE book on Acrassicauda, the Iraqi metal band that literally survived a war zone to continue as a band. Myriad perspectives are presented, at least from the left side of the political dial: frustrated and indifferent Marines caught in the Catch-22 of a bureaucracy that really decides who lives and dies; bomb squad cowboys tweaked on adrenaline and warped from heatstroke; a war hero confronting combat stress with anonymous next of kin; and metalheads in exile. And outside of the hallowed pages of a VICE publication, the Iraqi characters are either non-existent, misunderstood and barely engaged, or hazy others palming a phone (that could be a detonator).

That’s not a criticism of these films or miniseries; they weren’t about the Iraqi side of the story. But that’s not a perspective, even when we do swing our lens or focus on that conflict, that gets much play. As much as the quote from that article speaks to bravery, I also sense some kind of resignation from years of senseless violence and uncertainty that the “liberators” can barely begin to comprehend. Lots of media outlets are carrying stories of cautious optimism about the election, and the electorate in the US, if they can pull themselves from the health care battle or the economy or Afghanistan, would love to move on from Iraq and just claim a draw. If people are willing to walk through bombed out streets to vote, Iraq certainly is proving itself capable of sorting out its issues and making it’s own way. But it feels hollow that after seven years of battles and blood and reconstruction, the links between the countries are so tenuous. Sure, I’m talking in great generalities, and I haven’t exactly made any amazing effort to understand the country. But no politician or general or writer has really made the case either. Leave it to the metalheads, I guess.

When I arrived at Old Town School of Folk music to see Booker T. last night, I was trying hard to temper my expectations with the reality of diminished returns. Sitting down and seeing his boxy wooden organ set up on the left end of the stage was thrilling, but it also made me wary that I’d come just to hear take a victory lap accompanied by “Green Onions.” By the time the opener, clichéd blues guitarist Eric Bibb, concluded an hour-long opening set overloaded with bland sentiment and antiquated-wordplay-as-authenticity lyrics — no sir, you’re not working as hard as John Henry, you’re playing for the public radio set — I was a bit worried. Would it be a genuinely good performance, or just passable renditions of famous songs?

I’m not sure exactly when it hit me: maybe three songs in, when I got the chills hearing “Green Onions” live, or when he got up, strapped on a white guitar and started strumming and singing tracks like “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.” But Booker T. hadn’t lost more than half a step, if that, despite being past retirement age, and genuinely seemed to be having fun. His voice was smooth and quiet but poignant, not prone to pushing the higher register and just gruff enough. Sure, he did the hits (including “Hip Hug-Her” and “Hang ‘Em High”) and made some brief Stax references. But he was smiling and enjoying being a part of an ensemble, sitting back and laying down strong, sweeping organ chords, which formed a solid frame against which the guitarists could take extended solos. The drummer even warmed up to a mic and rapped (not nearly as bad as I originally expected). I haven’t been keeping track of his recent work and need to spend more time with the new Potato Hole album, but he exceeded my expectations, laying down grooves with impressive efficiency. And how often do you get to sit back and watch a Stax originator roll through his amazing discography? As his Twitter profile says, he is a “Musician ~ Songwriter ~ Father ~ Husband ~ Chiller.”

“In My Room: Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig”
For those of you who had “Ezra owns a pair of boat shoes” in the betting pool, this will pay off big time. Though, bonus points that he kept a painting he made as a teenager inspired by Kraftwerk.
Via Spin

“The Death of Uncool”
Brian Eno’s article is about the benefits of a culture devoid of stylistic barriers, not a defense of his work with Coldplay.
Via Prospect Magazine

“Where’s There’s a Hit, There’s a Writ: Plagiarism in Electronic Music”
An in-depth look at the fine line between borrowing and stealing samples.
Via Resident Advisor