I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TECH N9NE featuring KRIZZ KALIKO-Tiny Desk Concert  #780 (August 29, 2018).

I am constantly amazed at how many rappers this show has on that I have never heard of even though they’ve been around for decades.  I’m not really a rap follower, but you’d think I’d at least have heard of them.  Tech N9ne has 20 albums out and he’s got a number 9 in his name.  I’d think I’d have heard of him at least.

During a career nearly three decades in the making, Tech N9ne has dodged the fickle rap industry while surfing his own wave, stylistically and professionally. The Kansas City native has been a beast for years now, a musical misfit who laid a track record of underground success and struggle before building his own independent empire with Strange Music.

Especially since he is awesome.  He and Krizz Kaliko performed the best rap Tiny Desk Concert I’ve seen. [“Together, they’ve carved out an unorthodox niche: chopper-style speed rap that often plumbs dark, emotional depths”].  The band is awesome.  The two of them are awesome and they have a great rapport with each other and the audience.

Their playful banter between songs personifies that creative connection, as Krizz delivers backing vocals and guest verses from the soul. Backed by a guitar, drums and bass for their Tiny Desk, the trio brought out the rock-tinged hues of such definitive Tech N9ne songs as “Dysfunctional,” “Aw Yeah? (interVENTion)” – dedicated to his mother who died from lupus in 2014 – and “Fragile,” originally assisted by Kendrick Lamar, Mayday and Kendall Morgan.

I also love both of their deliveries which is often fast (yet comprehensible) with excellent inflection to really let the words flow (is that “chopper-style speed rap”?).  It’s a great fun set (with some great metal-inspired guitars).  These start off with the first song, “Dysfunctional.”  There’s inspired lyrics, there’s funny lyrics.  I particularly enjoy this couplet

[They both rap] Listen they call me genius, I run the show
[Then Tech N9ne demurs shyly so Krizz can sing, with emotion] Women on my penis…. it’s wonderful

Krizz sings the chorus with a great heavy metal riff.  He also takes lead on the second verse with Tech N9ne supporting him.

After the song Tech N9ne says, Oh yea, the boy can sing.  He can rap too.
Krizz: I learned it from him.  he taught me something like this: “Dommmmmm inae.” which is a lead into

“Aw Yeah? (interVENTion)” this song has some great lyrics, powerful and political with a very cool Middle-Eastern-ish guitar riff running through it

They gotta suffer the penalty cause of our education
Nobody wanna say nothing but I gotta call it abomination
Pissed off thinkin’ what this cost
What these babies blood drippin’ for?
So I say in Latin, listen Lord!
Audire DOMINE! (Audire DOMINE)
Only way people are gonna be able to kill off a demon is
Pick up a gun and be ready to put it between him
My nigga be screamin’
Audire DOMINE! (Audire domine)

Who the hell a brother gonna trust when it’s always dishonor
Hate me like Obama
And I ain’t even gotta run and askin’ you the question: God what about my
Mama!

Tech N9ne asks for a moment, says he’s shaky.  Krizz explains: he lost his mom on my son’s birthday.  She’s been sick all of his life.  That’s a super emotional song

Tech N9ne segues: “That’s why I’m so “Fragile.”  This song is also excellent with some rapid fire delivery.  I also love hoe exposed he is:

Amateur writer dissin’
He’s a beginner and hopes for your demise, folks some may despise
Never do try to listen
It’s real, I’m mad
Clueless when you scribble on your pad
How you gonna criticize with a chisel on your nads sizzling your ad
You don’t really get why I’m so pissed? Understand this (Understand this)
I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit, yes I’m Fragile

To close the set, Tech and Krizz performed “Speedom (Worldwide Choppers 2),” a song inspired by folk rocker Richie Havens’ original classic “Freedom.” They laugh over Krizz’ excellent Richie Havens’ delivery.  It’s an excellent conclusion to a fantastic Tiny Desk.

Now off to investigate these guys some more.

[READ: August 31, 2017] “The Metal Bowl”

Miranda July writes strangely personal (but who knows if they are actually personal) and introspective pieces that are often overtly sad graphically sexual.  But she’s also not all that vulgar, even in a story about amateur porn.

It even made me laugh as the story begins.

He cupped the two halves of my tush and spoke directly to them.  “Run away with me, girls,” he whispered. She doesn’t understand our love.”

Then the narrator confesses that she is less fun than her own butt.  She is a stone, unmoving.  And not just during sex.  She finds “the whole experience–life–gratuitously slow and drawn out. ….  If I’m a workaholic, it’s only because I hate work so much that I’m trying to finish it, all of it, once and for all.”

Despite the narrator’s stoniness, she has devotional love for her husband:  “Sometime my love for him is so intense that I want to crawl inside his body.”

Their son trotted in and remarked that the sheet was all bloody.  The boy says “you said your period was coming and you were right.”  She notes, “this new generation of men has been taught (by me) to feel exited about the menstrual cycle.  When she realizes that there are older bloody stains, some over a decade old, she decides it’s time to replace the fitted sheet.

Her husband offers to buy them, but she says there’s only one place that sells Cariloha brand California king sheets individually.

What is it?
Macy’s?
Nope
Amazon?
Definitely No.
Bedding is an unregulated corner of Amazon, where companies charge radically different prices for the same bad sheets.  You can’t even get nicer sheets by paying more—money has no meaning there.  And don’t bother typing in words like “Egyptian cotton” or “thread count”—you’re just offering them more precise ways to bamboozle you.  Get up, find your keys and your purse, and go outside.  I hate it as much as anyone, but sometimes you just have to.

She hates to go to the mall.  She parks on the street so as to thwart the plans of the mall designers.  She sees a man take a picture of the map with his phone and thinks that that is smart.  She recognizes him–movie star?  Certainly.  They seem to be walking in the same direction and that’s when she thinks that he recognizes her as well.

From what?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, she assumes it’s from the amateur porn video that she made when she needed the money.  The flashback to her doing this is wonderful–we learn about her life as a younger woman–17 years earlier.  We see the man she was dating and why she decided to do something for money.  The title comes from this scene as well: they provided her with objects to “use” during the film: a turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl.  What could the bowl have been for?

She was waiting for a costume or something.  But, nope they just started shooting. She was embarrassed by the clothes she wore and made a signal to stop rolling while she got undressed.  They didn’t stop and that signal was something a few people motioned at her when they realized where they’d seen her: a young man, a married man and a lesbian.  She began watching herself and imagining how those people saw her and it made her very excited,

She then showed all future boyfriends the video as well.  But she never showed her husband, Alex.

She comes out of the fantasy when the man says he knows her because they are neighbors.  She is s a little disappointed because she realizes that she is too old now to be recognized by the video and also because she doesn’t like to talk to the neighbors.

The following weekend, the men went camping and she stayed home to work.  There was an earthquake.  She ran outside just as the neighbor did.  They knew better than to go inside, so they stayed outside, looking at the sky, embracing the night, the circumstance and each other (not sexually).  They spoke of all manner of things and fell asleep together (his wife was away at a conference).

When Alex and Adam got home she told them about the earthquake but not the neighbor.  She kept that to herself and fantasized about that intimacy.

Then later in the week, as Alex and the narrator were heading out they noticed the neighbor and his wife on blankets.  Alex made a connection and the narrator had some explaining to do.  The ending is quite interesting and a little twisted.  Loving and emotional and yet kind of vulgar too.

And we finally learn what the bowl is for.