Issue 45
Sometimes, like little tiny gold coins or drizzle, good music falls from the sky and into our laps. We were all having a sort of humdrum early '07, plaintively listening to Konvicted b-sides and, like, "12:51," when the sky turned grey and a whole gripload of really good music started raining from the heavens. We're not saying we weren't all jazzhands and smiles, collecting the tunes in buckets, but it was overwhelming. Which brings me to the subject matter of Issue 45: The Just Another Issue Filled with Amazing Jams, No Big Deal Issue. Legions of heartbreakers and the heartbroken have been following Smog genius Bill Callahan as he's woven his spell of song over the last 20 years. We were curious to see what would happen when we put the man's new album, Woke on a Whaleheart, on ye olde hi fi and it was weird because all of us started holding hands immediately, searching for grace in the unseen. Actually. Obviously, we put him on the cover.
For the last couple months we'd been alternately throwing some D's and throwing some cheese, listening to Mobile's young gun rapper Rich Boy and his cache of remixes when it dawned on us that it was time to shine the light on his (and several other artists') Not So Secret Weapon: producer Polow Da Don. Polow's been crafting heatrocks for everyone from Fergie to Ludacris to the Pussycat Dolls to (gasp!) R Kells himself and we're pretty damn near convinced that he'll be a household name ohhhh, sometime around yesterday-which is [cough] why you'll also find him gracing our back cover. And in the frenzy that resulted from this monsoon season of new music, we also dipped into the maniacal rock frenzy that is ATL's Black Lips, the one-drop rastafari thesis of Jamaica's Gyptian (serious times!), Animal Collective's Panda Bear and his new set of blissed-out good vibes and the growling, vicious return of Mobb Deep's Prodigy. Folks, when I say it's raining I mean It. Is. Coming. Down. Out. There. Bring an umbrella, pull on the galoshes, put the cat indoors. What's an April shower when you've got us?
ALEX WAGNER
Cover 1: Bill Callahan
The Rising
"If the audience is all rooting for you, it can be too easy. They're going to laugh at all your stupid jokes just because they like your music."
Cover 2: Polow Da Don
It Don't Stop
"I've become the main guy, that means producers are following me. Eventually what that means is real music comes back, because what I do is real music."
Feature 1: Panda Bear
The Love Movement
"I thought, What do I think is cool? Stuff like a guy walking an old lady across the street, I think that's cool. Good deeds—and doing good stuff for yourself and for other people, as cheesy as it sounds."
Feature 2: Gyptian
One Drop Pop
"R Kelly bad too! R Kelly come like he's a reggae artist. Yah mon, R Kelly mighty, mon. Mighty, mighty brother...him an Brian McKnight. Bad singer."
Feature 3: Black Lips
Res-Erection
"We ended up singing Lynyrd Skynyrd with the cops and stuff, joking around. They had to take us to jail because the mushrooms were a felony. But we made them laugh—we played Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who was gonna take the charge."
Feature 4: Prodigy
Hard Times
"The clip for 'Mac 10 Handle' features a sweat-drenched Prodigy in a filthy apartment, swigging liquor and wiping fingerprints off bullets. He swings knives at demonic hallucinations in the mirror, rapping I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles, high on drugs."
Feature 5: Portraits From Kabul
Blink Of An Eye
"It might have been his, this house, the one that every night he ringed with nine landmines for protection. Every morning he dug them up again. But one morning, not thinking, he dug up only eight."
+ GEN F:
DG Yola / Dion / David Vandervelde / Munga Honorable / Turf Talk / Wild Beasts / Bunji Garlin
+ FASHION:
Sway
+ VINYL ARCHEOLOGY:
Finger Waves
The Timeless, Boundary-less Lullabies of the Steel Guitar
