21 | June | 2015

El-P Father’s Day Megamixxx

Today is Father’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than by running down 11 songs by a musician who epitomizes pretty much everything that fatherhood is not about: El-P. So here we go, a Father’s Day El-P Megamixxx for you all to listen to with your beloved father and/or progeny. Enjoy!

1. Fantastic Damage. Title song off of El-P’s first album, and a great way to get started. I love the scratching that happens at the beginning of this track and El-P’s pitch-perfect ad libbing “shut up.” Sets the tone for what’s to come.

2. The Full Retard. This is pretty much what El-P is about. Just screwing around, saying the most outlandish things possible, and totally mocking the balanced/healthy lifestyle in the most egregious ways imaginable. Don’t miss the video.

3. Flyentology. Per Rap Genius, “the whole song is about turning to God, after a life of disbelief, when a plane is about to crash.” Maaaaybe—if so, it’s a consummately El-P gesture. For sure El-P is at his worst here, and this song has got one of the best hooks I’ve ever heard.

4. Dear Sirs. El-P made this track back in those glorious days when torture-loving war criminals occupied the White House and we were all going to turn the Middle East into a subsidiary of Haliburton. This whole song is basically El-P saying all of the impossible things that will happen before he ever shoots a gun in a war for George W. Bush.

5. Tougher Colder Killer. And speaking of war, this is probably my favorite El-P joint ever. The first verse is just fire, El-P rapping in the voice of a veteran who has come back from war and seen the truth: no matter how bad you think you are, there’s a tougher colder killer out there who will destroy you. (You’re welcome to try and interpret just what that “tougher colder killer” is.) Killer Mike and Despot kill their guest spots here.

6. Stepfather Factory. One of the greatest concept tracks in the history of hip hop. El-P raps in the voice of a entrepreneur who has decided to manufacture mechanical stepfathers. Of course, this decision has very personal roots that El-P investigates for us . . .

7. The Overly Dramatic Truth. El-P shows his softer side, rapping about a relationship that just wouldn’t work.

8. Tasmanian Pain Coaster. Starts with a fantastic interlude from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Also includes one of the best El-P hooks ever: “this is the sound of what you don’t know killing you / this is the sound of what you don’t believe still true / this is the sound of what you don’t want still in you.”

9. For My Upstairs Neighbor (Mum’s the Word). Just try to get El-P to turn stool pigeon and this is what happens . . .

10. T.O.J. Another love joint from El-P. Apparently he’s got a lot of women in his past that he just can’t let go of, undoubtedly adding to the massive pain of being El-P and making for some good music.

11. $4 Vic/Nothing But You+Me (FTL). A great way to end, one of those extra-long, extra-obscure tracks that El-P tends to end his albums with. You can think about this one for days.

June 21, 2015 0 comment

Final Poems Poetry

#finalpoem from Trish Aherne

written by CCM-Entropy

#finalpoems / [?]

The Sound is the Thing

I’m off to the realm of pure experience! What I’ve left and what I have departed from is as small as a cookie—a sizeable drum. Drum me off to my arrival and in Illyria they’ll say:

This is the country of your experience you will know it by its sound.

Tonight I saw Camille Claudel. There is a scene in the movie that is the most intense spiritual impasse, which could and could not be an impasse and must be one.

I am so sad.

I am appreciating I am not crazy (that I am not in some way worse than in prison). And was Claudel very proud??

Yesterday I missed class! Amelia said she—the teacher—didn’t even notice. But alas I arrived too late and sat in a Barnes and Noble reading an article about Matana Roberts instead of listening to a lecture on William James.

I decided to listen from a far.

You were going to let me sit in on your class on Pure Experience but I have decided to do some investigative work, in the stead of that place where I was supposed to be.

I gather you teach a class so that we can listen to the sound.

The night before the last class I crouched down in a row of Barnes and Noble over “Experience”—it went under me, under my hips on the carpeted ground. I felt, as I was hovering above it, like I was singing in a round.

Everything began, for me, because of invisibility.

Sometimes I feel that it would be necessary to write as if it were impossible, like the transmutation of sound.

That’s because of the spiritual necessity you spoke of, of altering neuronal pathways.

I see Roberts as exploring this possibility, through history, poetry and sound.

I cannot afford to traffic in any sign, Olson said, than the one.

Emerson said he believed that it would not be necessary to be in the same place at the same time for his friend to feel the effects.

Everything I get I get from a magazine, from Barnes and Noble

My solitude pains me but it is not as unsettling as sound.

Have you read a book? I care about it. I speak clumsily but am unsettled, that much is clear.

Caring is not like hurting. What I’ve gotten and should remember in the middle of pictures of dead authors and nameless other people on the wall.

Roberts says: If it wasn’t for these things happening. What would have happened to me?

But who is it that I cannot see but intuit.

I live in the Starbucks. I take off my shoe and drink from the bloody shoe. Through lunacy I examine a religious experience. Up close I disturb myself.

I am not comforted by sound as I am comforted by Starbucks but know, as the cookie was known or knew, before it disappeared, I mean broke down, this pure experience—where—in the realm of a giant’s bum like the play by Nathaniel Mellors, an actor’s sound through Peach Blossom:

Peach Blossom Pool is deep,
            A thousand change, so they say…
            …But it’s nowhere as deep as the love
            you show me, just to see me off so

Trish Aherne is a visual artist and fiction writer living in San Francisco. Aherne lives with her cat, Mouse, and roommate of 7 years. “Saint Margaret in the Belly” is a part of a story collection Trish is working on centered on the theme of saints.

June 21, 2015 0 comment