Fader

Project Runway is probably one of the most epic reality shows on television, mostly because it has all the right ingredients: drama by the bucket load, crazy sleepless bitches, bad haircuts, badder attitude and a panel of steely-balled judges. But good fashion, as far as we're concerned, has never been one of them. Basically, Project R has about as much to do with style as America's next top model has to do with supermodeldom. Like zilcho at all. Hark back a few and you might remember Zulema Griffin, a feisty contestant from season two (as she tells it she was "misrepresented"). There are few Zulema pieces on the show really worthy of any note, although we do vaguely remember a wrap dress in there somewhere that was half decent. But in a recent unrelated YouTube session, we stumbled on Zulema's fall '08 video quite randomly, a genuinely delightful and quietly clever piece of work.

First off, there's nothing more amazingly impractical and awesome than an all-white collection for fall—the big ruffled coat might be a tad dramatic for our taste but those white cropped pants and Victorian blouse have Indian summer picnic written all over them. Oh, and the hats! The hats!! The video stars a trio of black bodystockinged models stumbling around New York, like some fashion version of Toy Story, where all the storefront mannequins come to life and tiptoe around Manhattan while the rest of the city sleeps. Turn down the sound completely (sorry Talib!) second time around and it feels like the silent fashion movie playing right now in our minds that we've always wanted to star in.

We just listened to this Cuban-Baltimorean dude's Why Is The Bear Billowing? album in the office and were hoping that the song we'd be able to give to y'all would be this one, the last one on the album, because it's the one with all the handclaps and sounds most like how we'd like to feel right now, which is "happy." We are now actually feeling happy and are willing to give a large bit of credit for that to Lesser Gonzales Alvarez, who not only makes very sweet acoustic folk but happiness-inducing works of art with his own two hands.


Download: Lesser Gonzales Alvarez, "Mostly A Friend"

Tonight on the Let Out, our weekly East Village Radio show (made possible by Dewars) we have our Canadian Fool's Gold pals and featured F2 artists Jokers of the Scene coming through to make us dance really hard outside of the closet-sized EVR studio in the rain. Also, it is FADER editor Julianne Shepherd's birthday, so if you know how, hit her up! Listen to eastvillageradio.com from 6-8 EST, and if you miss it, you can always grab the podcast afterwards.

So you know we've loved No Age since they were born basically—our first mention of them on this blog coming way back in February of 2007, then a weird one-off profile on the label that first put out their singles Teenage Teardrops, then a Gen F in FADER 44, then a full-fledged feature in FADER 48, a million blog posts, FADER shows, and finally the coup de grâce… a hat. Yep, No Age designed a New Era fitted for us (don't worry we'll be giving some away soon), and we were so stoked on it that we threw a party the day before they unleased the Pitchfork 9.whatever-scoring Nouns upon the world. And here is a somewhat crappy video of the dudes playing a song from that album, "Here Should Be My Home", in full technicolor SCHNIPPERVISION.

In honor of a certain FADER editor with the initials JES, we are putting up the best rap song from 2008 that samples Jodeci and has two dudes she bro'd with in Texas this year. It's from Bun's II Trill, which comes out next Tuesday, it features a song-stealing verse from Banner, MJG rapping like he is a deflating balloon, and an 8-Ball verse that is disappointing because it is actually just a list of his friends, but other than that, great song dudes!


Download: Bun B f. Rick Ross, David Banner & 8-Ball & MJG, "You're Everything"

We profiled dancehall producer Stephen "di genius" McGregor back in Issue 48 in our Beat Construction section, detailing his rise from son of Freddie to teenage riddim killer, and even projecting that his relationship with Sean Paul might launch him into the big time. SP is on McGregor's new "Work Out" riddim, but it's Assassin who really gets it with his "Money" version. Read the story after the jump and head over to McGregor's MySpace to get the equally new "Overcome" before we put it up here and freak out some more over Mavado.


Download: Assassin, "Money" (Work Out Riddim) more...

We've been looking for another excuse to hear Vito Acconci deliver at "textural architecture" speech. And to see David Grubbs jam solo and to win a photo of Terry Richardson's outie bellybutton. There is also a puppet show. Why not? What better excuse for a plethora of bizarre than to benefit little Myat Moondog Haggart, whose young life has been plagued by brain problems. Full flyer with lineup is after the jump, stop by on Sunday if you can. more...

It may have been a couple dozen issues since we put Josh Homme on the cover of this magazine but we continue to jam Queens whenever we decide to lift weights (coffee cups), drive hella fast (the F train) or cruise babes (shop for pants). In fact, if it weren't for the beautiful 55-degree rain in New York City right now, we would totally bounce down to sunny Atlanta for QOTSA's headlining slot at the Southern Comfort Music Experience at Centennial Park tomorrow. It's first one this year, and the next one, June 28th in Denver, is Gnarls Barkley, with more headliners and events to be announced later.

Apparently "The Baltimore Zoo" is the last song to be leaked before the release of Darkroom Productions' Hamsterdam album. We're kind of bummed because that means we have to wait for the album to hear more of this stuff, considering every track we've heard puts us on to new rappers that we should probably be paying more attention to than we already do. This time around it's The Ministry—rugged and approaching the vivid imagery of early Wu-Tang while still retaining Darkroom's signature drums that sound like a dude is banging on barrels in an alley. Update: literally as we were writing this, Darkroom sent over "G For Life" by Bmore mainstay Mullyman and BK's Maino, a bonus cut that will not be on the album, but is no less quality.


Download: Darkroom Productions f. The Ministry,"The Baltimore Zoo"


Download: Maino & Mullyman, "G For Life"

The frenzy over Suge Knight's Debo moment on TMZ somehow managed to get us on a home listening Cali kick. Starting with Death Row perennials, moving on to soundtracks for gangsta flicks we shouldn't have been watching were too young to appreciate at the time...but when it was time to dig into deep cuts and slept-on jams, the task proved easier said than done. For such a fertile period in music, there's nowhere near the amount of DJ tributes or blog-strospectives you see all the time for comparatively obscure Bay Area 12" records or NYC cassette mixes. We want our secret history of g-funk, dammit, and we're not about to start buying yellowed copies of Rap Pages on eBay! PHUKK! Fortunately, Dubcnn came through with the final half of their two part interview with Kokane, sideman on Westside rap records for almost three decades (not to mention his own psych-y releases on Ruthless). The Q&A is packed with anecdotes about everything from the real roots of the Dre vs Eazy feud, how Outkast and the Dungeon Family were huge Above The Law fans, and even a cameo from Lil Half Dead (who also pops up in F26!). Suffice it to say, it's a perfect Friday afternoon geek-out, even if you weren't looking at NWA YouTubes all week.

Yesterday we posted about Helen Storey's Wonderland, a fashion project involving water-soluble materials with a video consisting of a lot of dyes floating in water. And today White Williams came out with a video of of him wearing fashionable clothes and dyes floating water. Coincidence??? Actually probably, but whatever, have you guys read Gladwell's article in the New Yorker? Good ideas float around everywhere.

One of the benefits of actually paying attention to the things we post on this blog is finding new favorites buried deep in mixtapes or compilations. One such case is the free Ghostly Swim comp we put up at the end of April which way, way down on it's tracklist, has a song called "Wait A Minute" by Osborne. Now, "Wait A Minute" is not that favorite, BUT, us being us, we went and found some other shit that is. "Outta Sight" is a song from a small place called Bananatown and we are going to be living there all day today. "There" is where we will be sleeping because it is mad comfy. And tomorrow morning we will be having brunch with the rest of Osborne's album, which you can listen to here, and if you like it and happen to live in Los Angeles, Osborne is doing an in-store at TTL LA on Saturday with Michna and FLYamSAM.


Download: Osborne, "Outta Sight"


Download: Osborne, "There"

FADER contributing editor and DJ Eddie Stats hooked up an excellent mix of the other artists featured in our Aaliyah icon issue. From Bassline's rumbling thump to Lykke Li's Swedish pop stomp and back around to El Guincho's electronic drum circle throwdowns, it's all here, along with musical selections from the Gen F backbone of the issue, including Chip tha Ripper, War on Drugs, Jeremy Jay and a bunch of others.

Download the FADER 54 mix as an mp3 (right click, save as)
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Check the tracklist after jump. more...

Helen Storey’s career as a designer began at Valentino 25 years ago and has landed in the chemist’s lab. In a series of projects emphasizing the importance of sustainability, she has created a dissolvable water bottle, a purifying pillow and in her latest collaboration with chemistry professor Tony Ryan, she has created a line of dresses that are soluble in water. In their exhibit Wonderland, intricately sewn dresses are hung from a small crane and slowly dipped into large fishbowls, creating a silky rainbow effect upon contact and eventually dissolving into a clear sludge. The exhibition, which premiered in London in February, will reopen in Sheffield for all you lucky Brits from June 18th to July 13th and is imagined by Ryan as a way of “stimulating the public conscience in visual and dramatic ways, and empowering people to dream about alternative ways of consuming.” For a video interview with Storey and Ryan, go to SHOWStudio.

How is it that we ride past Grand Army Plaza like 19 times every day and NEVER get to be in a rap video? How is that even possible?! Whatever. Get the mp3 of this song here if you like rappers who are too good to have us in their videos.

It's going to take us long time and many foot massages to forgive Kanye for making us wait nearly three hours last night for his performance at G-Shock's 25th anniversary party. By the time he'd parked the helicopter (for real), taken his seat in the pod-chair and surrounded himself with a troop of bare-chested fembots, the whole thing had drifted into one long and extremely weird Dionysian hallucination. Between the boobs, the lazer show and the armchair raps it's even difficult to tell whether the man on stage was actually Kanye West and not some weird anti-ye hologram or maybe a mis-programmed android here to destroy the planet. Thankfully by the second verse of "Flashing Lights" all was forgiven, the universe was saved, we were on planet Kanye drinking kryptonite cocktails and everything was going to be OK. more...

Anyone in New York City who's ever told someone "I had the weirdest night ever last night" and it did not end with "with Andrew WK" is a total liar. However, they, and you, have the chance to redeem them and yourselves tonight at the New Museum as former FADER EIC Alex Wagner's Get Weird series blazes on with a AWK performance on solo grand piano. IN. THE. ROUND. It's like Ancient Greece for people who usually end up puking at the end of the night. Get your tickets here or at the door and prepare for a night of insomniac hallucinations!

The reason we're most excited to hear Kid Cudi's mixtape and/or album is precisely because of the spaced-out hippie rap of "Day N Night" as well as the mixtape cut (WITH HARPSICHORD) that ends this video. What's next, a song about riding a dragon to find a scroll? JUST KIDDING! Sort of, we'd actually be really into that, especially if there was a video where Cudi rode the dragon from Eureka's Castle to the moon and the moon had visible strings attached to it. Whoa, did we just conceive of a Kid Cudi puppet show? Don't steal our ideas. Check FADER 54 for a Gen F on Kid Cudi and check Fool's Gold for more info on the mixtape, which might be released at the end of the month unless they want to hold off and do our puppet movie first.

It's been said before, but T.I. being stuck in his house and actually writing verses has done wonders for him after a mediocre period. On "Ain't I" Young LA and Tip calmly swing through their verses, and considering that T.I. is rapping about his "situation," we weren't exactly expecting calmness. Also, Young Dro references the macarena while bulldozing through the track. But that's why we like him, Dro sounds like he is rapping New Journalism on every song, his lyrics are a continuous sentence of breathless "ands," constantly sounding excited. Side note: The other day we found a burned copy of King in the office and we put it on the stereo, it started skipping three tracks in but we totally forgot how epic that album was.


Download: Young LA f. Young Dro & T.I., "Ain't I" Remix