Let The Good TImes Roll: New DOOM?, New Organized Konfusion?, RJD2 Live

As I predicted, it's incredibly difficult for me to motivate myself to write while I'm here. There's ALWAYS work you can be doing, people you should be seeing, and I'm not allowing myself to get less than 7 hours of sleep a night on weeknights, and most college sophmores are not really the most thoughtful bunch on weekends. But there'll be a slew of interesting concerts coming up (GZA is performing Liquid Swords in Philly tomorrow), and I'll be starting my radio show in about a week and a half, so hopefully I'll be more inspired. Give me suggestions as to formats/ideas/themes for a show if you have any interesting ones, please!

Wow, this is a real shocker. A new DOOM (apparently he dropped the MF) album in six weeks with Dilla and Danger Mouse production? I'm a little skeptical about whether this will be a legit release with all original material, but I still can't help but be a little excited. I find the whole live-show impostor situation to be just as fucked as most people, his status as a "villain" notwithstanding, but at least this doesn't mean the dude is sick and that other people are just running around with his mask. The chances of Madvillainy 2 and/or Swift and Changeable coming out have also gone up from about 1 to 2 percent, as DOOM is at least showing us that he's still interested in recording.

Also just discovered today that Prince Po and Pharoahe Monch have recorded a new (as of now unreleased) track that may lead to a new Organized Konfusion album, which would be one of the greatest things I could ever hope for. I was listening to The Equinox before the end of summer, and even though people tend to shit on it, I don't think they really fell off from Stress (production just got a little more stale). This should be ill.

In other random news, RJD2 came to my school this past Saturday and opened for Broken Social Scene for this semester's "Large Scale Event." Even though generic indie rock is the usual order at Olde Club, our regular music venue (last year we only had The Last Emperor; this semester, there is NO hip-hop billed), the LSE's have been surprisingly good. The Roots were the LSE performers my first semester, and they were absolutely dopeilltastic. I even got to speak to Black Thought and shake his hand, and I spent the rest of the night running around campus throwing little girls into foliage out of sheer excitement.

Now, I didn't react to RJD2 in quite the same way, but he was also damn awesome. He surprisingly wasn't crouched over a laptop (not just mashup guys, but even Afrika Bambaataa was using a Mac when I saw him this summer), but actually had crates of vinyl with him that he played over four turntables. No microphone or acoustic guitar to be seen in his vicinity, thankfully. There was also a screen behind him where all of these weird, kinda corny but still really cool video clips were playing as he was spinning records from The Transporter, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Matrix, and even that old 80s orders-of-magnitude movie that every person who has taken high school physics has seen (the one with the guy and girl sleeping at the picnic). Stuff like that usually comes off as gimmicky, but I mention it because I think it really contributed to the performative aspect of the show and the sense that RJD2 wasn't taking himself too seriously.

So the show basically consisted of him recreating his tracks on Deadringer and Since We Last Spoke. But there was a bit of an improvisitory element to the show too, though, as he had some pad-keyboard device that allowed him to play drums over his instrumentals. He also had a good feel for when the crowd was beginning to fade away, throwing on "The Horror" and "Good Times Roll Pt. 2" to get everyone, and I mean everyone, really hype again. I've been saying that live DJ sets should be brought here for a long time, especially considering the amount of okayish mashup artists that've come through, and hopefully people will begin to see the light.

Anyway, I didn't stay for Broken Social Scene because I wasn't too thrilled by what I'd heard prior to the show, although I kinda regret that decision now. The two minutes of their show I heard (I returned for my umbrella) were really good, but I was about to embark on a misadventure involving high friends and Wendy's, so...