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Hollywood Floss, Part 2
Playlist:
- Grand Reopening Feat. Hash Brown by Hollywood Floss
- Yeah But I Can Rhyme Though by Homeboy Sandman
- Wicked by Ice Cube
- Who You Know by Hollywood Floss
- Trust Me I’m Aware Feat. DJ Addikt by Premonition
- Spiderman On Vitamins by Jesse Abraham
- Dream Killer by Hollywood Floss
- Don’t Taze Me by Jesse Abraham
- Here Comes The Judge by Pigmeat Markham
- Can I Get A Soul Clap by GW Theodore
- Yoga by Spills Music
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
We post deep ass shit.
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The Holy Trinity
A friend of mine once asked what we do, and the second the word “punk” escaped from my mouth, her face twitched. She suggested that we find a better word to describe our ways because “punk” doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, and some people will be turned off right up front if we call ourselves that. I get where she’s coming from, and she’s not wrong, but I also think that kind of defeats the point of everything. Instead, we broke down our punk into a new Holy Trinity of definitions and explanations because one word can’t account for the different levels in usage. Plus, it’s rare that people understand what the hell we do anyway, but hopefully this new angle of perception will help us to resonate with some folks.
1. Homecore: It’s your roots. These roots grow from memories of where you’ve been and the dream of where you want to be. It’s the context you used to connect the dots and to relate when people come from the same place you once were. Therefore, some start moving in the same direction, for better and worse. The real experience feels like getting punched in the throat, but the word means more than the pain left by a fading memory or the dream you just lost. Long story short, there’s more magic in the process than you might believe, after the growing pains.
2. Hardcore: It’s doing what you want in the moment. It’s fueled by homecore, heartcore, hormones, and it blows people away, especially those who didn’t know there was a word before seeing the scene go down. Obviously, it gets overused in one scene or another until some punk hits rock bottom looking for it.
3. Heartcore: It’s showing people what matters by relating their experiences to what’s going on in your head. True believers do experience homecore as a reality check, but they’re often alone, and they end up with a shared intention. Heartcore is a pre-meditated creation of community, and it’s forgiving the ones who follow for taking the foundation for granted. They bring life back into focus and believe in hardcore enough to create.
<3 Fo and Britny Rose
Playlist:
- Little Room by The White Stripes (White Blood Cells)
- Lithium by Nirvana (Nevermind)
- Love/Hate by Better Blowtorch (Are You Man Enough?)
- Bellies Are Full by Portugal. The Man (Church Mouth)
- Exhausted Love by Eyedea & Abilities (E&A)
- Nothing Stopping by B L A C K I E (Spred Luv)
- Mrs. Butterworth by Nirvana (With The Lights Out)
- W.T.P. by Eminem (Recovery)
- Years Ago by Al-Thawra (Edifice)
- Ice Cream Socialism by Underculture (Ice Cream Socialism)
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Spills & Jesse Abraham
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Mic Skills
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Psalm One
One of the good things about being a woman in the music business is that there aren’t many of us. The mainstream is deceiving. We can and do move between scenes and crews, and we keep a pulse on underground and mainstream music without question. I guess you have to make the most of not having a context in any certain sense.
I’ve learned not to focus on the negative, that women have sometimes been pigeon-holed into a male-driven fantasy as pop stars, but to embrace a more ambiguous, amorphous role than the one presented by impossible beauty standards and frustrating industry norms. I’ve learned to love all that’s a little crazy and to nurture it instead. Sometimes it’s lonely, but we found out that we’re not alone, and from time to time, we run into other artists living the same through their music.
Psalm One is one of those artists - a traveler, a rapper, and the first ever female addition to Rhymesayers. She’s an exception to the rule, and she’s open to getting a little crazy too. According to her lyrics, she may go nuts, but at least she also makes amazing gravy! Such is being a Woman At Work, as her newest EP is called, in the music industry. You make the best of what you’ve got, and you move on when your metaphorical gravy isn’t enough.
As humble as she is in talking with us about her story, it’s obvious how overqualified she is for the likes of The Sindicate, but it’s that ambition in her that makes us crazy too. It’s not always about the game, the men, or the business culture. It’s kinda impossible to top something like Psalm One’s 500 Bars unless you have both talent and the drive to match. In other words, girl has some serious gravy, and I hope you enjoy the interview, playlist, and general indie underground greatness below.
Oh and don’t forget to follow @PsalmOne on Twitter. -
Al-Thawra
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Stono
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Originally, I wrote this story for a Riot Grrrl zine. The idea wasn’t mine exactly but came from a tweeter who heard about a Taqwacore zine I helped write and put together. I’m posting the next chapter for the rest of the crew but the lurkers out there can jump in too. Why not.
When I was in high school, my senior year English teacher assigned us an identity project. The details are hazy now, but every student had to make a mix CD, design cover art, and play a song for a radio show we recorded live in class on the day it was due. I went home to start the damn thing and somehow got the idea to chop up images from the CDs that had been lying around while I was busy growing up, Mariah Carey, TLC, the Smashing Pumpkins, and the like. I scrambled the whole lot of them into some kind of mess and glued it all together by hand. This was the first collage I made, a process that eventually consumed anything lying around the house. With time the concept stayed the same but the ideas that inspire collages changed. They range from Fight Club and the Beastie Boys to Nirvana and SLC Punk and aren’t limited to movies or music. When Obama was elected, I felt like politicking and made a whole set from campaign photos and paired it with protest coverage from the civil rights era.
Back in high school though, the only reason I started a collage was because it looked cool. I tore through magazines while my mother, the veteran journalist, sat upstairs reviewing piles of newspapers. I’d sit in the basement with the glossy pages, ripping whole spreads out and cutting them apart into shapes and figures that were later pieced together again with a theme. They became apparent once I moved out, mostly in college studying politics and the four years since then working and blogging. Now that I’ve perfected my craft, I basically do the same project we did in high school every week for a radio show a friend and I host in Madison. We interview artists and write about hip-hop and punk. I spent this first night in the creative chaos alone though and finished only hours before deadline after a long night at Kinkos, just trying to “make it work,” as Tim Gunn says when the designers are strapped for time to finish a runway challenge.
The playlist had songs like “32 Flavors” by Alana Davis, an Ani Difranco rip-off, to “Wind” by Cat Stevens. I really can’t remember the whole playlist but it was pretty absurd. If you weren’t me back then and didn’t know where my head was at, the decisions wouldn’t have made much sense. Maybe it looked awesome but the idea didn’t translate at school. I went into class that day expecting a pat on the back for my living, breathing Frankenstein creation. Bad call. I ended up with a C and the teacher lecturing me on how badly I didn’t understand the assignment for some reason or another, and I still don’t remember why. Maybe I just never figured it out. Who cares. I had poured my heart and soul into that piece and was livid at the time and not ashamed to show it. I was about to throw the project away when an artist in the class asked to keep it. Her name was Eve and in her honor, it’s kinda fitting to call this my genesis.
The ongoing beef between me and this teacher had wasn’t exactly ontological warfare or anything but at eighteen did feel like the end of the world. There’s some truth to calling the situation something that extreme even now, even if things have chilled out, and even if everything could be blamed on hormones. It all happened and that’s how I experienced it. I wasn’t sure back then and still not sure now why an essay on Invisible Man was the next project she chose to shit all over and fail me. She ended up accusing me of plagiarism because my writing was too good to be mine, which burned, and she was surprised it would make me freak out.
The truth is I hadn’t read a single chapter of the book but it was second semester senior year. I doubt half the class read it either. What mattered is I knew the story and sat through discussions in class long enough to care. The weird thing is the thought didn’t cross my mind or hers that the book was made up by the author from instinct, experience, and personal truth too. She was just ticked off by me at that point, I guess, and had a reason to question the essay’s integrity. Like I said, she dropped an F on the desk before class and watched me suck in a tear fest for a while before asking me to leave the classroom. I haven’t felt emboldened like that since being a teen, crying like a war widow in the principal’s office and ended up getting out of the class for the semester.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Actually, not quite but the most creative time in my life happened years later after college when I got comfortable in my own thinking space, especially when I started blogging about religion for the university. I could write about anything in the world, as long as it fit in with the project and shared positive news related to Islam, which is an awesome idea in theory but lacked focus. I had to work with the tension between my experiences and a whole world of people who actually followed the religion or grew up around people who did. Every bias, any stale belief, and each new idea was tested that year and blogging the whole messy process is how I got here, writing this.
My mom watches me on Twitter and Facebook in the same way I watched reality TV shows but thinks of what she sees more like the Jersey Shore than a Project Runway, chuckling at how earnest our solid rejection of her media is and how fluid we are about expression online. ”We’ll end up in a place we didn’t expect,” she wrote on my Facebook wall one time I was ranting about new media, indie creativity, and other things us kids have to figure it all out. Well, here I am, unsure of what Riot Grrrl really means to anyone else but believing in women working together and helping each other figure out a way to make a common ground between punk and feminism. I wasn’t sure where to find a space not defined by race or background and open to change and new experiences but knew if I didn’t, we’d make one together. The jury’s still out on where it is besides online and Madison, Wisconsin but they’re out there.
We’re all a bunch of assholes, trying too hard to win when we’re not competing for much. Everyone ends up in the same place anyway. I hope people share their own stories however they want - collaging, making music, writing poetry, and just generally living life to the fullest. Personal, political, religious, or ridiculous questions about identity aren’t always focused, and luckily, punk isn’t either and can be a more creative space than school to play with ideas. Be a fucking punk and figure it out on your own. You’ll be in good company.
My bad on any typos. It’s a first draft, well not really, but please just pretend. Thanks, you guys.
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Propaganda Anonymous
Prop Anon is a rapper? an MC? a punk? Call him what you will, I’m dubbing him a musician from New York just to be safe. He’s a bit of a one-man wolf pack, but his honorable ideals and hardcore perseverance fill any leftover voids. I met Prop just shy of a year ago when he, Sarmust, and The Kominas rolled through Wisco during the 2009 TaqwaTour.
As usual, Fo and I might have gotten too excited when we decided to pull another all-nighter and drive to Chicago to see the guys play another show the night before they arrived in Madison. We didn’t care. This was the first time I met any Taqx face to face or had been at a punk house outside of Subvert City, and Fo had only met The Kominas during a brief weekend trip to New York. It was worth it.
From my perspective, this show kind of marks the official beginning of our owning our worlds, even though Taqwacore became a thing a few years earlier, and the bands had been already been creating for many years before that. Maybe this was just the moment that I got sparked. Nevermind the logic, I nostalgically remember the dirty, duck-to-walk basement where rhythm is added to the white noise of a PA system and it doesn’t even matter because the energy is what makes the show. Then there were the three roaring hookahs upstairs amidst cans of Tecate sitting on thrift store furniture. The front door remained wide open as the strangest mix of people crossed in and out for smoking huddles, and then the flashers rolled by as cops tried to kill the party.
Someone was responsible enough to talk them out of it. Yeah, this was where Al-Thawra used to live. Post show, 3AM in the morning, the boys are exhausted from touring and being broke, and the guys insisted upon finding some real Chai somewhere in the city. Basically, they were having a diva moment in their own way and we went along for the ride. A few in the group, Prop included, decided to hang back at the house, probably to de-punk-scent themselves or something.
Fo and I proceeded to pile a bunch of dirty, sleepy Taqx into the backseat of her Honda Accord and drive all the way to other side of Chicago to the only restaurant still open and qualified to serve Chai. Thanks to the Apple gods for directing us to that one. After a couple samosas and a few cigarettes we made it back to the night’s headquarters. There wasn’t enough plush material to make crash pads for everyone, so we offered up the three legally open seats left in the car to anyone who wanted to catch a ride back to Madison a few hours earlier.
We had better beds, hot and cleaner showers, and the promise of a decent breakfast, so Prop, Shahj (guitar, The Kominas), and Faith (The Fashion Coordinator on tour) jumped in. The car ride back was a moment of clear serenity complete with a freakin’ sunrise. We hit Madison, around 8AM, dropped the three of them off to pass out in peace, and Fo and I proceeded to find a resting place ourselves until we realized that we have this super power that doesn’t require us to sleep when Taqx are in town.
Fast forward through the boys’ badass show at The Frequency where you could actually comprehend the music but only at the cost of some of the punk magic. One of these days everyone will see that we have a solution to that problem, especially after the release of Al-Thawra’s new disc, Edifice. Ladies, gentlemen, and any combination thereof, as we return from that side note, we’re now entering into the sub-underground Pop Sensation studio where I watched Prop and The Kominas collab on a song that they created before my eyes. Despite all of the music and musicians that surround my life, I had never seen where it’s born. I watched Prop strangle words onto the page for hours that night, and seeing it happen start to finish filled me with an intense creativity that I hadn’t previously felt. All in all the process took about 18 hours, and in the end, A Dog Called Akhira is one of my favorites.
As the weekend came to an end, the boys left for the unknown out West, and those of us remaining grudgingly forced ourselves back into reality with day jobs and empty bank accounts. We didn’t hear much from Prop over the next year. He doesn’t seem to have separation anxiety from the internet like we won’t admit to. We were hearing rumors that he was about to drop a new album, so we figured it was about time we checked in. Turns out he’s been doing his thing this whole time, and Squat The Condos is the newest hard evidence that Prop, like most of us weird kids, has restless heart syndrome. Check out some of Prop’s new material and the rest of the conversation below.
<3 Britny Rose
Playlist:
- Role Model by Eminem
- Nammo Tasso by Prop Anon
- Consciousness Is The Key by Prop Anon
- War Stomp by Prop Anon
- A Dog Called Akhira by The Kominas and Prop Anon
- Who’s That? Brooown! by Das Racist
- Modern Man’s Hustle by Atmosphere
- Chicken and Meat by Das Racist
- Tell The Truth by Immortal Technique
- P.H.A.T.W.A. by The Narcycist
- You Oughta Know
