Although we realize that gluttony is one of the Seven Sins for a very good reason, we can’t help but be fascinated by the sport of competitive eating. We previously marveled at the gustatory prowess of Juris “Doctor Bigtime” Shibayama, a Tennessee orthopedist who can put away T-bones like nobody’s business. Today our adulatory gaze […]
Tags:Badlands Booker·competitive eating·famine·gluttony·hip-hop·Juris Shibayama·music
We’ve literally got less than 24 hours ’til the Now the Hell Will Start screenplay draft is due, so once again, no time for deep afternoon thoughts. Instead, take a mental load off and enjoy an unfortunately attired Debbie Harry doing “Call Me” with a bunch of super-funky Muppets. The extraordinarily brief, theremin-like synth solo […]
Tags:Debbie Harry·Muppets·music
We know you’re sick of hearing this excuse, but we’re seriously slammed on the screenplay today; hoping to get a complete rough draft done by end-of-day Friday, so the weekend can be all about Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna be lazy right this second and just post a great video of yore—the public-access-style promo for […]
Tags:East Flatbush Project·hip-hop·music·prisons·Sergio Leone
We’re suffering from a major, extremely ill-timed case of writer’s block today, and have thus been relegated to listening to the above song on repeat in order to reboot our creative powers. We’re actually far more familiar with the Ashe Bhosle version, which sounds a touch more ethereal to our amateur ears. But this’ll do […]
Tags:Ashe Bhosle·Bollywood·music
That’s a wrap for the work week, as we look forward to a weekend full of goat roasting and screenplayin’. What might you have missed if your Microkhan-ing was sporadic these last few days? So much good stuff, dear reader, so much good stuff. We’re talking hilariously frivolous lawsuits against your humble narrators, the launch […]
Tags:hip-hop·housekeeping·music
Perhaps Randy “Macho Man” Savage didn’t have quite the acting career of some of his fellow ’80s wrestlers (see: “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Sgt. Slaughter), but you can’t fault the man’s instinct for licensing only the hottest fashion. When we came across the jacket above, via the somewhat NSFW THEM THANGS, we knew we had no […]
With less than two week to go ’til the screenplay’s due, the rest of the afternoon’s gonna be all about tweaking dialogue. But Microkhan will leave you with a special treat: Chubb Rock, a man whose girth is rivaled only by his underratedness. Apologies for the five second commercial at the beginning of the clip; […]
Tags:Chubb Rock·hip-hop·music
With our compadre Ta-Nehisi thinking deep thoughts and WEFUNK providing our daily soundtrack, hip-hop’s been on Microkhan’s brain all week—yes, even more so than usual. And the question we’ve been asking ourselves is what, exactly, separates the wheat from the chaff in the land of lyricism? Is it pure mastery of metaphor? Yeats-like poetic timing? […]
We’re so far behind on the screenplay it ain’t even funny, so we need to jet early today and focus on revising Act Three’s supremely clunky dialogue. We’re thus gonna leave you with a somewhat oddball NtHWS Extra: The promotional trailer for Madlib’s absolutely essential Beat Konducta in India. Yeah, it may seem like a […]
Tags:India·Madlib·music·Now the Hell Will Start·NtHWS Extras Month
We’ve long been looking for an excuse to shout-out Fresh Produce, an eclectic podcast that airs semi-regularly from “an undisclosed location in South London.” Thankfully, their latest show gave us a killer hook: The strange career of Jamaican rocksteady legend Phyllis Dillon. As recounted by Fresh Produce co-host Daddy Like, who spun Dillon’s fantastic “Don’t […]
Breaking early today to head downtown and catch a screening of Adam. (Thanks, James.) In my absence, enjoy the above slice o’ lyrical genius from MF Doom (or, as he now prefers to be called, DOOM). Any rapper who knows his Star Trek minutiae is worthy of only the highest praise.
The great downside of music’s move toward digitization is the end of liner notes, the record industry’s equivalent of YouTube’s “Related Videos” feature. Microkhan fondly recalls discovering Donny Hathaway via the notes from The Chronic; half the hooks on that album were copped from the great-and-troubled legend of Chicago soul. Nowadays, alas, you have to […]
Microkhan’s under super-intense pressure to crank on the screenplay this afternoon, so I’m jetting a bit early today. See y’all in the a.m.—or, if the blogging pull is just too much, later tonight after Microkhan Jr.’s been deposited into Slumberland. In the meantime, enjoy the vintage Ken Ishii video above, a staple of MTV’s late, […]
Tags:housekeeping·Ken Ishii·MTV·music·techno
I’m off to screenplay for the rest of the afternoon, so I’ll leave y’all with a classic from the Wu-Tang Golden Era. The video is just average shakes up until the part where Ghostface dons the bathrobe. From that point forward, it’s all gravy. (Question: Why are bathrobes generally verboten outside the home? Who will […]
Tags:Ghostface·hip-hop·music·Pete Rock·Raekwon the Chef·Wu-Tang
The whole senatorial brouhaha in Minnesota has nothing on the ongoing mayoral battle in Terre Haute, Indiana. The loser in the city’s 2007 election is still contesting his defeat, on some seriously esoteric grounds: Burke v. Bennett pits former Mayor Kevin Burke against current Mayor Duke Bennett, who won the 2007 election by 110 votes […]
The Jones Girls were by no means a great group. They too often veered into easy-listening terrain, and committed a cardinal music-biz sin by partnering with Lou Rawls (so famously slammed by The Pharcyde many moons ago). But the Girls also produced a song responsible for one of the greatest hip-hop samples of all time: […]
Tags:hip-hop·music·Royal Flush·Smif-n-Wessun·The Jones Girls·The Pharcyde
Microkhan’s off to the (ugh) dentist, so that’s a wrap for today. But to make up for the bummer nature of the suicide post, we’ll leave you with a sonic treat: “Sally Got a One-Track Mind” by Diamond D & The Psychotic Neurotics, an underrated gem from hip-hop’s Golden Age. Okay, granted, the lyrics aren’t […]
My 13-month-old son and I just spent an exceedingly pleasant evening listening to WEFUNK Show 555, a chronicle of Paisley Park‘s Golden Age creations. If you have even a passing interest in the genius/megalomania of Prince, the show is highly, highly recommended—not just for the killer music, but also for the fascinating trivia provided by […]
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but it took a tip from a Zurich-based pal to get me into The Rub’s History of Hip-Hop series. I mean, these Rub folks live less than an hour away from my Atlah headquarters. They should be part of the cultural air I breathe. But, oh no, it […]
It’s frightening to think how many hours I’ve spent listening to WEFUNK Radio over the past seven or eight years. I’ve doubtless heard every archived show at least twice, and several of them close to a dozen times. (Neophytes should start out with Show 170.) WEFUNK, broadcasting weekly from Montreal’s famous
Thanks to the magic of Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” option, I recently became reacquainted with The A-Team, a childhood TV favorite. To say that I was underwhelmed would be an understatement—funny how the 1980s juvenile mind was unable to discern the campiness of network action shows. A makeshift cannon that shoots out lettuce, and is integral […]
I was watching a rerun of Six Feet Under last night, and caught a throwaway factoid that had slipped from my mind: Chimps are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. My first thought upon hearing this, of course, was, “Well, where does that leave the poor monkeys on the primate scale?” […]
Tags:Daddy Like·India·music·primates
Back in the late ’90s, I got really into a band called Golden, featuring members of Trans Am as well as a young, pre-Mars Volta Jon Theodore. I last caught them at a Mercury Lounge show some ten years ago; I distinctly remember getting whapped in the face by a meathead’s twirling t-shirt. Since then, […]
Tags:Benga·Extra Golden·Kenya·music
…celebs missing fingers. The Tony Iommi story is one of my favorites, since the sausage-factory accident helped contribute to his trademark sludgy sound. (To compensate for his altered anatomy, Iommi detuned his guitar three half-steps down.) Didn’t realize that Boris Yeltsin had been careless with a grenade, though.
Muzak Holdings, the company responsible for turning the reprehensible “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” into part of the cultural canon, has filed for Chapter 11. Too many of its retail clients have gone belly up in recent months, plus satellite radio was chipping away at its milquetoast market. The news brought to mind this […]
