Emcee Esher presents, 2007: The Top 50 Albums as told by Max Slobodin

January 05, 2008

Every year since i was in 8th grade, the musicologist Max Slobodin has personally handed me a list of the top 50 albums of the year, meticulously compiled, analyzed, recompiled, shortlisted, recompiled, and finalized. This process normally takes my good friend all year, and he is a prime example of one of our generation with his finger right on the pulse.

Lately it's been tough to find good, new music; which is ridiculous! The internet has opened so many arteries of possibility to the discovery of new tunes, it's insane that i haven't heard half of the records on his list.

And this is the short list! What follows is an interview with Max detailing how he sifts through the years releases and comes up with the list.

EmceEsher: so can you tell me a little bit about the rankings and how you came to them?

Max: i do what i usually do... i keep a list of albums that ive listened to that i like, even marginally... i never know if one will grow on me.... the list grows and grows.. until its the end of the year then i take that longlist (recently about 200+ lps), and narrow them down to the 51 album shortlist to be included in the top 50 (50 ranked + 1 honorable mention), i then usually settle on the Honorable Mention, and draft potential albums for the top 10.... and i relisten to a lot of albums

EE: it's like...work!

M: for the list in general, its really abstract, the ranking process... its more in groups of 5... its like.. really.. how the fuck can you tell what is a 34 or a 33? its basically what sounds good... but obviously, the higher on the list is the more i think of an album and the more the music spoke

EE: that's what i figured, i mean you have pharoahe next to battles, but both albums are incredible and uncomparable, that's why i like your lists though, because you keep all of the genres together and allow them to meld.

M: yeah, but although i do think sometimes "do i have some hip hop in here?" or women artists or whatever... i can care less as long as its good

EE: so do you think you edit your lists for "fairness" to all genres?

M: not particularly... i mean... im open to most everything as i'm listening to, discovering stuff during the year.... but art isn't affirmative action... i'm not going to list something just because its brand x.. so i guess the fairness comes from being open to stuff... but then again i do have my biases

EE: i'm surprised radiohead wasn't number one, and Bjork is pretty low too what's the deal?

M: i did have it at number one originally... but i didn't feel it was a bold enough statement... usually my number ones have been bold statements of taste and aesthetics (03- notwist, 04- tv on the radio, 05- wilderness).. granted, i fucking love the album... but a RH fanatic like me... its like taking the easy way out.. and yeah, while i immensely enjoyed Volta.. its not really her best work.. or does it carry the experimentation of Medulla, but i prefered other albums over that this year.. and Volta suffered as a result

EE: So how did the ravonettes end up at number 1 this year?

M: that album is like neon golden in that respect... both of those number ones engulfed you in a sound... whereas stuff like tvotr and wilderness took you by the throat.. you know? its kind of a pattern in my number ones:

01 - amnesiac - sound
02 - turn on the bright lights - throat
03 - neon golden - sound
04 - desperate youth - sound
05 - wilderness - throat
06 - cookie mountain - throat
07 - lust lust lust - sound

EE: That's quite an abstract way of looking at it, but i guess categorizing music by anything other than subjective mood

M: yeah, but then it gets much more complicated, like lets take Boards Of Canada... perfect for both and this also gets into another question... like... when you want to listen to music.. but you don't know what you want to listen to... how do you decide between nick drake, agalloch, justice, or spoon

EE: and does music inform your mood or the other way around?

M: right.. the whole high fidelity cliche

So, now that you know how the list came to be, without further ado, here it is!

THE HONORABLE MENTION kt tunstall - drastic fantastic

50 lcd soundsystem - sound of silver
49 blackfield - II
48 patrick wolf - the magic position
47 vhs or beta - bring on the comets
46 soft - gone faded
45 black dice - load blown
44 raccoo-oo-oon - behold secret kingdom
43 we are wolves - total magique
42 liars - liars
41 animal collective - strawberry jam
40 kenna - make sure they see my face
39 menomena - friend and foe
38 rjd2 - the third hand
37 feist - the reminder
36 duran duran - red carpet massacre
35 jose gonzales - in our nature
34 blonde redhead - 23
33 apparat - walls
32 electrelane - no shouts, no calls
31 spoon - ga ga ga ga ga
30 hard-fi - once upon a time in the west
29 sophie ellis-bextor - trip the light fantastic
28 chromatics - night drive
27 el-p - i'll sleep when you're dead
26 dot allison - exaltation of larks
25 marnie stern - in advance of the broken arm
24 the field - from here we go sublime
23 watchers - vampire driver
22 bjork - volta
21 klaxons - myths of the near future
20 justice - Ü
19 deerhoof - friend opportunity
18 amon tobin - foley room
17 pj harvey - white chalk
16 pharoahe monch - desire
15 battles - mirrored
14 handsome furs - plague park
13 the national - boxer
12 m.i.a. - kala
11 burial - untrue
10 strategy - future rock
09 cocorosie - the adventures of ghosthorse and stillborn
08 the besnard lakes - the dark horse
07 grinderman - grinderman
06 arp - in light
05 interpol - our love to admire
04 radiohead - in rainbows
03 prinzhorn dance school - prinzhorn dance school
02 yeasayer - all hour cymbals
01 the raveonettes - lust lust lust

HERE'S THE TOP 50 PLAYLIST!!! GO NUTS!!!

Notes: Dot Allison's new record isn't on IMEEM yet, so in it's place is a Massive Attack song she's featured on, Watchers' "Vampire Driver" Not available

also, check out Max's awesome blog and last.fm page

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Local Boulder Emcee: Professor Meat

December 08, 2007

Professor Meat started rhyming by text messaging his brother rhyming couplets, like:

When i'm in the club i be flirtin with dancers and i eat more pussy than some cervical cancer

The first rhyme he ever spit live was:

kids eat shit but they still pretend though, they 8-bit like old school nintendo.

Professor Meat began his career in 2003 in Champagne, Illinois. It's a funny story: he moved to champagne, not knowing anyone there, so he took to the streets to meet people. He heard some cats talking about hip-hop, and he had been freestyling himself, so on the campus of Champagne Urbana at the University of Illinois, he met a rapper by the name of Al iteration who invited Professor to a cipher that night. They were all warming up, getting ready to spit, and they put him on the spot with the words any novice emcee fears the most, "go first". Four cats stood in a circle spitting to industry instrumentals (like mixtapes), and Meat killed the cipher. After that summer, he moved back to Jersey and started a 9-5er at Best Buy, but his mind was never on the job, he was stuck in freestyle mode. Some Best Buy lines:

Most Eager Artist Today, hardest to slay, emcees like newports i smoke a carton a day

My pilots stay bombin' like shock and awe, i rock it raw, fuck with me and catch tetanus, i lock your jaw

At this point, his little brother Dank was rhyming with some eastside bloods, and Meat got down on ciphers constantly to develop his skills further. During that period, he had his first secret freestyle session with GDP out in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot in West Orange, NJ. They drove around in his dad's truck spittin rhymes and elevating. This went through the winter of '05, and in February '06 he moved to Portland, Oregon to start his creative writing career, where he wrote a novella. He hit the ground running with hip-hop there, his first day there he overheard kids freestyling and he just jumped in and traded verses. They were Graf writers, as is Meat, so they went bombing, still spittin, and he caught the bug. He got hooked up with Randolf McTools from hip hop anonymous, just a loose affiliation of emcees, producers, djs, just to hook everyone up with rhymes and beats. Tools introduced Meat to Cheef at BS Productions, where Meat laced his first tracks. Meat met this homeless dude named Brooklyn, who supported himself by burning cds and selling them on the street. They went around together spittin and trying to sell Brook's CDs, and developed his skills more and more. He recorded an untitled, unreleased demo with Cheef, which never saw the light of day, but he kept the beats which are now on his EP "Write Truth on the Walls". Flash forward to October '06, Meat moved back to Jersey and that's when he really decided to start running with it. He had been seeing what GDP and his middleschool friend C-minus had been up to on a Jersey label called Division East. Around the beginning of December he was working in a secure fileroom on Wall Street, for a firm called Bowne, he was the only one in there, and filing is bullshit, so he spent most of the day writing rhymes (and catching tags during lunch breaks). He had money to afford studio time, for a flat fee of $1,000 he got studio time and all the beats he needed from J-Stamps, 100dbs, and C-Minus.

He recorded 9-10 rough cuts, did some edits, went back in the studio in January '07 and recorded the full-length EP "Write Truth on the Walls". He wanted to rock shows, GDP put him on a few Division East shows, he rocked with NoGoodsCrew, Tame One, Shape, GDP, Bully Mouth; and most of the North Jersey underground scene. He rocked open mics in New Brunswick (by Rutgers University, where this humble writer went to school) and was addicted to the shit. He tried to sell CDs at these shows, and it wasn't going well ("i think I sold one copy total, to a drunk girl"). He had a really shitty day in the fileroom one day and simultaneously applied to Wizard Magazine and Naropa University. He got the job at Wizard quickly, and brought C-Minus with him to work in the warehouse, during which he laced Viddy Dat, Blue Lie, Hip Hop Anonymous; basically a lot of tracks which are coming on the new full length (Working Title: The Bizarre Adventures of Professor Meat, slated for release by Spring '08)

This brings us up to speed, Meat quit Wizard and moved to Boulder to studying Writing & Poetics at Naropa. He found himself in the same situation as he was in Champagne, but this time he had a few copies of his EP with him, so he hit the streets to sell his burns. So he sold everything he had on him the first day, then burned some more the next day, and before he knew it he was selling 15 copies a day making around $75 a day on weekends, and during the week it varied. One night he was out rhyming and there were two other cats out there he's never seen before selling CDs too. Ya-B and Scope based out of Chicago stood across from the split rocks on Pearl Street and dropped everything they had on each other. They became quite close quite quickly, and ended up crashing with Meat for a week. Selling CDs on the street, Meat met producers, radio DJs, other emcees, and this humble writer. Scope, Ya-B and Meat freestyled on The Eclipse Show on KGNU, which stepped up Meat's game and gave him the impetus to apply himself fully to the rap game.

EmceEsher: Where do you get your rhymes from, what's your inspiration for writing lyrics?

Meat: I love language, i love hearing the way words interact, basically i just love clever lyricism; that's the whole Professor side of things.

EmceEsher: So what's with the name Professor Meat then?

Meat: I first got the nickname Meat when i first arrived in Illinois, the friend i drove out there with slipped on my real name and accidentally called me Meat, and that just stuck really well. I started studying the Supreme Alphabet, decoding the meaning in my own name. Mathematics Encode All Truths, Most Eager Artist Today, Making Emcees Ananlyze Themselves, Marijuana Elevates All Things, Mushroom Eating is Therapy, Meat Evil Always Triumph &c.

EmceEsher: So what's the next step for Professor Meat

Meat: The next step? Trying to integrate myself more in Boulder, rocking shows from the laundry room to Naropa, Headlining at the Roxy in Denver, and it's always been well recieved. There's a community of hip-hop artists here, but it's still a matter of paying dues, they don't know my pedigree out here yet, but there's plenty of room out here for cats to come up. I come home and rock for 300 people in NYC, and then come back to Boulder and play for 10 people, which is kind of frustrating.

EmceEsher: When do you hit the studio for the new album?

Meat: The album is about 40% done, when I go home for Christmas break I'm gonna get most of the album down, I hooked up with DOODZIEK (dutch for 'dead sick') from Holland, and he gave me a bunch of the beats that'll be on the new record. I'm also a novelist, I'm writing a voodoo-laced noir police thriller meets stoner-zombie apocalypse with a sci-fi twist.

EmceEsher: From our conversations, I've learned you're heavily concerned with the government, conspiracy theories and philosophy.

Meat: Where to begin? I guess i first got concerned post 9/11 when the patriot act was passed, back in the day i used to hack computers, and personal liberty has always been a concern of mine. I was in Manhattan that day, and that stayed etched in my mind; they took this tragedy and then took our freedoms because of it. Conspiracy theories interested me in my hacking years, i had seen some Alex Jones docs, and i'm academically trained to be a social scientist, so i'm a skeptic in all dimensions. I was skeptically receptive to the ideas, but it started making sense to me on a fundamental level. When the Skull & Bones thing happened with Bush and Kerry, and Greg Palist's theories caught my attention. I was reading Chomsky at that time and things like that, but i was just generally trying to educate myself, and more than that, learning very quickly that i couldn't trust the official story, because there are always ulterior motives.

i met Meat on Pearl Street one night when my roomates and i were waiting for this kid Paul to show up so they could start a comedy group. Paul never ended up at the Sundown, but Meat came up to us rocking a New Jersey fitted hat and asked if we listened to hip-hop. i responded with an emphatic "YES" and we traded verses for about an hour, going through each of our catalogs until i completely ran out of rhymes. we went back to his apartment to watch conspiracy theory videos from the likes of Alex Jones who you might remember from the film "Waking Life" (he's the dude with the bullhorn car who drives around trying to "wake people up" to what's going on in their government) we had a good time and stayed up until 4am. These days, you can catch me and Meat on Pearl Street hocking CDs, the kid is a wizard, and he raps to eat, you can check out full tracks at www.myspace.com/profmeat

support local hip-hop fools.

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Bomb le Music Industry!

October 27, 2007

Bomb the Music Industry is the latest project from Jeff Rosenstock, former frontman of the ska band Arrogant Sons of Bitches. Jeff and a rotating cast of musicians (some from ASOB, Mustard Plug, and Rick Johnson, to name a few) tour playing songs he writes and records, normally on a computer-studio and a booth in his bathroom. The new record, Get Warmer, actually came out on Asian Man records, but all three of their previous releases were never pressed. That’s right, this band just GIVES THEIR MUSIC AWAY!!! THE FUTURE!!! Right before I moved to Boulder, they played a show on D-Day in the attic of the Philadelphia Trocadero, an AWESOME place to see a show if you’re ever on the east coast. They don’t sell merch, but they’ll spraypaint any shirt you bring them with a logo stencil they cut with an x-acto knife. They don’t charge to play, but they accept donations for food and gas. Basically, fuck Radiohead, these guys were doing it way before. I got to talk with Jeff and John of BTMI! after they played here in Boulder last week at club 156 (in the UMC, next to the bowling alley), here’s what we got: We started talking about smoking, and Jeff told me he had a bad cough two weeks ago, and now has been going through hot and cold flashes like he’s got menopause. They just got in from SLC, and they’re heading off to Lincoln Nebraska tomorrow. They thought Montana was worse to drive through than Nebraska, I still beg to differ.

"When Lewis and Clark got to Colorado, they were like 'This shit is gold'”. - Jeff Rosenstock

EmceeEsher: So you heard about Radiohead’s newest album, and how it’s being released, BTMI has put every record out free for download on the internet, and doesn’t sell merchandise, instead you spraypaint t-shirts and give everything away for free, asking merely for donations.

Jeff: NO, GO ON!

EE: Okay, so you heard, do you care?

Jeff: No, i mean, it’s a little weird to be historically and culturally irrelevant from now on, but it’s nice that we were culturally relevant for like, a year or two, you can’t ask too much John: It’s not like it was our idea to put music on the internet Jeff: Yeah, like Brian Jonestown did it for free, so like, you know, fuck it, whatever man, we didn’t know about it, so fuck it, wave of the future

EE: So, you finally pressed records.

Jeff: Well, we don’t, Mike [Asian Man Records] does. I didn’t think we’d get signed, so i asked, and he said yeah, not like it mattered cause we were still gonna put all our shit out for free, but he said he’d do it, so i said shit yeah.

EE: And this is the first album that you recorded in a real studio right? Not your bathroom on your Macintosh

Jeff: “Studio” is a really subjective term, we had more real equipment this time, the drums were recorded in a real studio, I’ll give you that, but everything else was recorded in a warehouse in Georgia, Joel Hatstat has a bunch of expensive stuff, we get along well and he makes other bands i like sound good so yeah. We didn’t pay him much or anything, and it’s not like we went in there and said “Yeah this is a real deal thing, we’re making a record for Asian Man” We were making a record and somewhere in the middle i asked Mike if he’d do it, and he said yeah. One thing really doesn’t have much to do with the other, but we still have yet to record in a real studio, which is a shame, but fuck it, because doing it ourselves is easier. You get to take your time, me and Joel stayed up every night for a month til 2AM, woke up at 8, worked, then recorded, then worked again, practiced with Pegasuses. It wasn’t like “well if you need another four hours we’re gonna need another hundred bucks” BTMI is never ever ever gonna be able to work in an environment like that, cause we have too many fucking parts.

EE: And the other three records you just did yourself?

Jeff: I just recorded our half of a split all by myself except from the drum tracks, and we had someone real master it and it came out kind of bad. We couldn’t have done [Get Warmer] without Joel, but it was more like a friendship thing

EE: Who does the art for your records?

Jeff: This one was supposed to be a comic book but it didn’t work out, and i’m psyched that we have a CD so i could do the cover art. That’s the one thing about not having merch that sucks.

John: This stencil (which they use to make shirts for fans) has a BOMB in it, and when we were in Canada the stencil said “Bomb le Music Industry”

Jeff: There’s only so much you can do when you’re not very good at using an xact-o knife

EE: How many times did you play Showerbeers tonight?

John: Like, 6?

Jeff: Yeah, we didn’t play it on tour yet, so now we’re stackin em up.

Showerbeers is a 52 second song about drinking beer in the shower. Apparently they hadn’t played it on tour yet, so they felt it necessary to play the song 6 times to extend the show. It worked! After the fourth time you’d think it’d get old, but there’s really nothing like gang-chanting “THE ONLY REASON I TAKE A SHOWER IS SO I CAN DRINK A SHOWERBEER!!!”