Hollywood Bowldowzer - Part 2

Last night I posted part 1, explaining the history of Flying Lotus. Here's the rest of the story...

Fast forward to present day. Flying Lotus’ follow-up to Cosmogramma, his new album Until The Quiet Comes, is highly anticipated and he is invited to play the Hollywood Bowl, opened in 1922 and perhaps the most historic venue in his home Los Angeles, opening for Animal Collective, one of the most acclaimed bands of the past decade. Typically, when Flylo performs live, he simply controls all of his songs and samples from a mixer – there are no instruments being played live. Looking through the Hollywood Bowl’s last 5 years of performances, I don’t believe that a solo DJ has EVER played the Hollywood Bowl. Again, Flying Lotus is breaking new ground. But he had a choice to make – how was he going to set up his DJ show for an 18,000 person venue, probably the biggest crowd he’s ever played for.

The choice he made can maybe only be described as ballsy. Set up in its lonesome on stage was a barely-translucent white screen. All of his equipment was set up behind the screen, and the audience never saw him until he came out for his (spoiler alert!) standing ovation. Projected on the screen was a customized video light show, with different designs corresponding to each song he played and their movements programmed to respond to his live improvisation. In essence, his visual performance was the light show and the light show alone. It seemed as if he was saying, “it’s not about me, it’s about the music (which the light show was dictated by), and the experience (which the light show created).” And yet, because of the screen’s utter so slight translucency, we could barely see a shadow that was Flying Lotus’s outcropping, a subtle reminder that, after all, the music and the experience were created by a person.

But ah, I haven’t told you about the music yet have I? Before the show, my friends and I were picnicking outside the Hollywood Bowl as we always do, making sure to save some wine to bring inside (which seems to be allowed solely at the Hollywood Bowl). A question was posed that turned into a fifteen minute conversation: What is Flylo going to play tonight? Those of us who had seen him before threw out possible scenarios – maybe he wouldn’t play his typical bass heavy set given the circumstances; he’s playing at a huge venue (who’s average crowd is typically much older than smaller LA venues) and opening for Animal Collective (who’s fans you wouldn’t expect to be “bass-heads”). Maybe his new album is more orchestral and less bass-oriented, as against the odds as that may seem. Maybe he would just do his thing, blow everyone’s faces off, and not give a fuck. No one knew.

Well, he answered all of these questions very quickly. After playing a brief cut of John Coltrane sax, dedicating the set to him, and thanking everyone for coming, Flylo proceeded to play one of the hardest bass-heavy beats shows I’ve ever seen. Who knew the Hollywood Bowl had such an incredible sound system? Midway through the first song, my friends and I were taking bets on how long the 50-something women sitting next to us would stay (to their credit, they stayed for the whole show). He played almost all of his new album (which can now be streamed online via NPR) and some classics from his earlier library. A couple of songs in, he spoke to the timid crowd saying, “You can get up and dance if you want to…” Immediately, at least a quarter of the crowd stood up and almost everyone was dancing by the end of his set. That’s EIGHTEEN THOUSAND people at THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL on their feet, getting down to the newest and freshest LA Beats. I always thought I’d see the day, but not so soon. I don’t even need to speculate on this one – I know that the Hollywood Bowl has never seen a show like that.

To me, this show was, in typical Flying Lotus fashion, utterly ground breaking. It brought the concept and the culture of LA Beats to a whole new level: it’s no longer just an underground thing. It’s now a real thing, a thing that has a chance of piercing the general consciousness we know as “the mainstream.” And it’s a thing that has a face, the face of Steve Ellison, a 28 year old man from Winnetka, Los Angeles.

The day after the show, Ellison tweeted from his @flyinglotus moniker: “Hope u guys like ‘until the quiet comes’ I feel like I did my best to tell you my story, honestly”

I don’t know about you, but with a story like this, I can’t wait to hear the next chapter...

As a release party for his new album, Flying Lotus and the rest of the Low End Theory crew will be playing at The Boiler Room next Tuesday, joined by special guest and neo-soul legend Erykah Badu DJing under the   moniker "DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown." The event is invitation only but can be streamed live at http://boilerroom.tv/live/.

Hollywood Bowldowzer - Part 1

This weekend, I had the pleasure of going to the Hollywood Bowl for a show headlined by one of my absolute favorite bands Animal Collective. But while their show was amazing, it’s not the indie-psych-rock outfit that’s the inspiration for this post. Instead, this post is about Flying Lotus, who opened the show and, according to pretty much everyone in attendance, proceeded to steal the show from the veteran headliners.

Steve Ellison, also known as Flying Lotus, is a Los Angeles native, multi-genre producer, and arguably the leader of the Beats movement. Great-nephew of jazz pianist Alice Coltrane (who was married to jazz legend John Coltrane), Flylo, as he is known by fans, first gained popularity as the producer of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim “bumps” – the 10-15 second beats they would play in their pre-show interludes. But his mark was truly made on the independent music scene with his 2010 album Cosmogramma. The album received unanimous critical acclaim, with music blog sputnikmusic.com predicting Flying Lotus to be “the next big visionary” of electronic music and PopMatters comparing him to rock kings Radiohead saying, “Flying Lotus, much like Yorke, Greenwood & Co., has made a definitive summary of a decade's worth of advances in electronic music, a release that transcends genre and deserves to become a glorified phenomena by those who experience it.”

The album transcended genre because it was unlike anything before it – it combined elements of jazz, funk, hip-hop, techno, and even rock. But beneath all of these influences was one common thread – the beats. Take a song like Nose Art (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqNFkQmmbcQ) – it begins as an orchestral dream with drums layered on top, until the 26 second mark, where he throws in a vocal sample saying “we’ll talk about a place with our beat…but no one believes it exists.” And then the beat drops, a dramatic bass line that owns the other elements of the song. And at 1:01, for a mere three seconds, Flylo reveals that bass upon which his song is centered, cutting all audio tracks except the sound of oscillating electronic bass. Listen to this whole album and I can guarantee you’ll agree – you've never heard anything like this before.

But before all of the hype and popularity that his groundbreaking album brought him, Flying Lotus was in an exclusive group of producers who founded Low End Theory, a weekly Beats club in Lincoln Heights. In its six year lifespan, Low End Theory has become somewhat of a Los Angeles institution. The show is still held in The Airliner, its original tiny home (the indoor stage/music area only holds about 150 people, while the back patio holds many more), is still age 18+, and still costs a mere ten dollars, with no advanced tickets ever sold. But unlike the club’s early days, the line to enter now forms an hour before the doors open and wraps around the block by the time they do - it can take multiple hours to get in. What are people waiting for? Well, each week three or four guest DJs are announced and appear, with additional sets from Flylo’s co-founders like The Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer (I swear that’s what he calls himself) and DJ Nobody. I have been to Low End over ten times but had only heard of the performers before going two or three times - whether you have heard of them or not, every single week amazing underground DJs from all over the world show up and throw down unbelievable sets. And the crowd, made up of locals between 18 and 30, who have waited in a painful line to get in, goes nuts, always willing to dance their asses off. But in addition to these weekly announced guest, Low End Theory attracts unannounced special guest appearances from the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (who is featured on Flying Lotus albums) and UK soul-bass protégé James Blake. And since Flying Lotus’ explosion in hype and popularity, he can now only play his own show as a secret guest, lest the line be around the block by 8pm... 

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To hear the rest of the story and find out what happened at the Hollywood Bowl, check back for part 2 of this post later this week!

What are beats?

Nope, they’re not those stylish yet exorbitantly overpriced headphones you’re wearing. But they are what you should be listening to in your Dre-adphones.

Since this blog is focused around the LA Beats scene, I thought I should write a post laying some general foundation by explaining the music and the scene for those slightly less informed. So what are beats? Most of you probably think of a beat as a song’s percussion or rhythm, and that’s not wrong – at it’s most basic level, a beat is just that, any type of percussion in a song. But when speaking of Beats (capital B) as a musical genre, a beat is much more than simply the drums underneath a song.

In the Beats world, the beat IS the song. The concept was bred in hip hop– as rap developed as a genre and electronic production became more prominent, there became a stark distinction between the rapping (or vocal verses) and the music underneath the rap, often including samples from older music. No longer was the rapper the sole artist – instead, the rapping and the music production were often done by two (or many more) different people.  That’s not to say that this was always the case; indeed, in many cases rappers are also producers who create their own beats. But increasingly, the two arts were being separated, both in terms of creation but also consumption. Rap songs slowly became more and more judged and defined by their beats, almost as if the rapping was mere icing to the beat’s cake.

This set the stage for hip-hop DJs, who are the real fathers of the beats scene. Pioneered by legends like Grandmaster Flash, these DJs began mixing beats from multiple songs live, creating their own samples manually from vinyl records on the spot (sometimes rehearsed, others totally on the fly).

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiP7RwIpdqI&feature=related

A short self-serving digression: Wikipedia informs me that Grandmaster Flash supposedly invented the first crossfader (necessary to mix between two record turntables) with parts he found in a junkyard in the Bronx. Damn that’s cool. I actually saw Grandmaster Flash perform in Hong Kong while studying abroad there, and let me tell you, the man has still got it.

In the hip-hop DJ arena, the beat was king – a DJ’s ultimate goals were to a) find the coolest (ideally unknown) beats to demonstrate supreme musical knowledge and awareness and b) to mix those beats to create new, more interesting and more inventive beats. DJs began recording their mixes and releasing them as stand-alone music.

But, as you can see by that video’s quality and Grandmaster’s Eddie Murphy-esque style, DJing (and therein, beat-making) has been around for a long time. So why has the Beat scene just taken off? One critical step: the explosion of electronic music. In the past decade, electronic music genres like House and Dubstep have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in the US. It was this critical step that made it possible for Beat music to become popular (although it still hasn’t breached the ever-elusive “mainstream”).

Beats music is all electronically produced. It’s rap beats meets dubstep. That is, it combines the drum-driven nature of rap beats with the extremely bass-driven nature of dubstep. And we’re talking deep, deep bass. It’s also intended to be played LOUD. Like your-body-is-vibrating-from-the-insanely-deep-and-insanely-loud-bass LOUD. Like dubstep, it’s allure is largely physical. It’s visceral music that isn’t necessarily made to make you think. It’s made to make you go “UGGHHHH” because you’ve never heard anything so filthy in your life. Filthy, that’s how a Beats beat is supposed to be. It hits hard and it’s impossible to ignore. It’s not easy listening.

That being said, Beats are also very groove-oriented and made to meant you dance. In fact, when the right beat gets played, you won’t be able to help but dance. That is, if you’re able to find the groove amidst the walls of bass. It’s not an easy thing to do, and most people wouldn’t want to do it upon first hearing the music. At first you might be turned off – the music is really intense. But that’s why it’s amazing. It’s amazing because it is so bassy, so loud, and hits you so hard. It’s amazing because you’ve never heard music that makes you feel this way before and it’s a totally crazy feeling. And if you let the music take you and dance as hard as the music suggests, scream as loud as your body feels it needs to, that feeling of crazy will turn into a feeling of euphoria. And that phenomenon, that feeling, is why this blog exists.

Some beats for your listening pleasure:

Cushion by Samiyam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwnWFmAaQ2c

Mercy (by Kanye West) remixed by Salva and RL Grime:  http://soundcloud.com/salva/mercy-rl-grime-salva-rmx

araabMUZIK producing beats live on an MPC (will explain what this means later): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qKtyPQ0bJ4

Where the ladies at?

When you hear “grunge,” what comes to mind? To me, grunge is all about the movement’s leaders (Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, for example) and their general attitude of “not giving a _____ (insert expletive here).” It was an aggressive, angry, and masculine attitude. But what is my perspective based on? Because I was born in 1990, and thus just a child as grunge gained mainstream popularity in the early 90’s, I never had direct exposure to the movement. Instead, my perceptions of what “grunge” is, means, and represents are totally created and determined by the media’s representation of the movement: everything from MTV specials, Rolling Stone articles, and The Simpson’s episodes have influenced my views of the grunge movement. But are those views correct?

As I found out while reading Catherine Strong’s article Grunge, Riot Grrrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture, my understanding of the grunge movement is missing the fundamental elements of gender-neutrality and women’s role in the movement. And yet, it seems that my ignorance about the importance of gender in the grunge movement is reflected by individuals who experienced the movement first hand; many of Strong’s interviewees (who were alive and active in the grunge movement) also perceived of grunge as a particularly masculine movement and had largely forgotten about women’s influence.

This article has sparked my interest in women’s role in music culture, both in general and specifically in LA. Ultimately, I agree with Strong’s assessment that it is exponentially more difficult for women to be considered “serious” musicians, as they are quickly made into sex objects and classified as girlish “pop stars” by the media. Take Katy Perry for example – after beginning her career as a Christian Rock singer, she tried to break into the mainstream market as an Alanis Morissette “girl-rocker” type. But after failing in this role for years, she was forced to abandon her artistic direction to become a “pop star,” breaking into popular consciousness with I Kissed A Girl, a song with clear sexual implications. From that point on, she continued to sing nothing but catchy (and usually sexual) hooks over electronic dance/houce music, and she became the first female artist with five number-one singles on one album (Michael Jackson is the only other person with this accolade).  Historically, however, there are many women who have had mainstream success as “serious” musicians –Morissette, for example. But ultimately, it seems as if stereotypes have indeed persisted, with many more men than women achieving this goal.

Does the same reign true in the LA Beats scene? Unfortunately, the beats scene is extremely male-dominated, as I only know of one female producer (Tokimonsta). I assume this is a result of the scene’s hip hop influence, as hip-hop is historically extremely male-dominated. Oddly, however, the demographics of the beats scene don’t match hip-hop: hip-hop is dominated specifically by African American men, while the beats scene is predominantly comprised of white men. While I have no evidence to support this, I believe this is a result of more stereotyping: because it is generally not accepted for white men to rap, beat-production allows them to participate artistically in an environment that is dominated by black men.

Different genres and movement of music have different influences, and as such would be expected to have different demographics. But Strong’s article, more than anything else, raised the question: how much those demographics are a result of the media’s perception of a genre rather than the genre’s influences itself?

Two women who I incredibly respect (and am incredibly in love with) are Merrill Garbus and Annie Clark, lead singers of the bands tUnE-yArDs and St. Vincent respectively. They have individually risen to the top of the indie-rock world and are considered by many as the de facto leaders of women in the field. In a conversation earlier this year, the two rock stars discuss the question: “What’s it like to be a woman in music?” Clark’s response, if optimistic, is also poignant. “The only difference…” she says, “…is that you get asked ‘what’s it like being a woman in music?’” And Garbus? “Why are we talking about gender when men don’t get asked, ‘what’s it like to be a man in music?’”

And yet, here we are.

The LA Beatnik

When I stepped through the doors of the Echoplex, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. As always, the room was shaking with bass that could be heard from blocks away. But what stood out was not the music’s volume or even the music itself; it was the packed crowed of twenty-somethings going ape-shit as Salva played his remix of Kayne West’s Mercy. The show’s headliner was the LA-native beat producer Shlomo, but it was hard to imagine how he would follow the set by Salva, also an Angelino, which relentlessly brought the house down for a solid hour. Still, Shlomo held his own, offering his spin on the hip-hop and dubstep influenced genre that is known simply as “beats.” This was easily the best of the three beats shows I had been to that week, and a standout show of the entire summer; moreover, it was a show that defined the “L.A. Beats” scene in many ways, from the crowd, the intensity, and, of course, the music; and ironically, it was in anticipation for this show that my brother and I were comparing the L.A. Beats scene to Seattle’s 90’s grunge scene.

As a lifelong music fan, I was excited to get a taste of LA’s music scene when I moved here for school in 2009. I instantly fell in love and, with nightly shows for less than ten dollars, began to dedicate much of my free time to seeing live music. I quickly found, however, that the styles of music I was most interested in and knowledgeable about, indie or alternative rock, were becoming less and less prevalent, quickly being replaced by electronic music which was rapidly gaining mainstream (if only “college mainstream”) popularity. While I was skeptical to adopt techno, dubstep, and house music into my musical lexicon, I didn’t have much of a choice: not only were DJ shows taking over the best local venues, they stood out as much more energetic and fun shows. At a rock show, I would be one of the few crowd members head-bopping and dancing to the music. At an electronic show, however, most of the crowd was there to dance. Thus, slowly but surely, electronic music shows became, if not the norm, a more than viable alternative to rock shows.

When I first heard dubstep, I made a prediction: the way to make this style of music popular for the mainstream audience, I hypothesized, was to put the ridiculously bass-heavy beats under rap verses. I am proud to consider myself prophetic, as this is the basic concept behind the “beats” style of music which has burgeoned in popularity over the past two years, with weekly beats clubs and nightly shows springing up all over LA. What’s more, the scene is getting national attention, reputation, and praise. When I made my predicition, however, I didn’t know that clubs like Low End Theory, a weekly dubstep and beats club founded by five resident DJ/producers including the now-famous Flying Lotus, had been already throwing rap verses on top of dubstep beats for years.

But it’s not simply the music I intend to discuss and analyze in this blog; rather, it’s the culture surrounding this scene that I am interested in. Why is LA the particular hotbed for this genre and this scene? How does it interact with and relate to other music scenes in LA? Who are the leaders of the scene, what are their influences, and what are they influencing? How does this music scene compare to historical musical movements like the 90’s grunge, and what will help it reach or prevent it from reaching mainstream success? As someone who attends multiple live shows per week, these are questions that are always on my mind and that I hope to hash
out in this blog.

I have decided to name my blog The LA Beatnik. It serves three meanings: establishing myself as someone who will be able to deliver the latest “beats” (news) about the LA music scene, telling the subject of my blog, and suggesting an importance of the LA Beat scene by relating it to the Beat generation of the 50’s.