Scrobble Scribble #4: Stones Throw 101 Mix CD by Peanut Butter Wolf

To coincide with the camera task I have to do for this week's DIGC101 class and continuing the Hip Hop music, I bring you the "Stones Throw 101 Mix CD" by Peanut Butter Wolf - the record label's head. I just bought this, and 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields, and the picture to the left is a picture of the box from my phone. For those who don't know, Stones Throw is home to some of underground/indie Hip Hop's finest with my personal, current favourites being Madlib, J Dilla (and their duo Jaylib), Percee P, Oh No, Koushik and James Pants (who actually isn't featured on this mix). Madlib, J Dilla and Oh No are 1st, 2nd and 20th in my top 50 most listened artists (and actually, Madlib and Dilla have more entries as well under Jaylib, Madvillain, Quasimoto and Jay Dee in the top 50). Oh, and I have MF DOOM at 28 - but I don't know if he's officially with the Stones Throw label.

And can I indefinitely say -- Dilla and Stones Throw changed my life. I did discover Dilla after his untimely death, a few days after the release of his masterpiece Donuts. That album is definitely one of my personal favourites no doubt, and once I discovered it I started going back through Dilla's catalogue. Of course, this led me to rediscover his work with A Tribe Called Quest, The Roots which I already owned but didn't know he produced. Beyond that, he opened me up to the amazing talent on the Stones Throw label (and in my personal opinion, he has led to some sort of renassiance in Hip Hop with so many tributes still dedicated to him more than two years after his passing and trust me there are so many more). Of course through Stones Throw, you get Madlib who also goes by the aliases of Yesterdays New Quintet, DJ Rels, Quasimoto (which all have their own musical styles) AS well as being part of many groups formed under Stones Throw. Trust me on this if you don't know, Madlib's solo discography is exhaustive in itself with the exclusion of the production he has done for others.

And this is just a taste of the oddness of the Stones Throw catalogue that, in itself, is an abstract label of any musical genre. Where, say, you might have the straight Hip Hop sound of MED, you get the weird new-wave disco of James Pants, the psychadelic groove of The Heliocentrics and the oddly slow but human breakbeat of Koushik. They're a very eclectic record label that also owns Now-Again and Soul Cal records which re-release old funk and soul classics.

Their eclecticism works however as a cohesive whole, as so made poignantly clear by Peanut Butter Wolf in this mix CD. Their all very short snippets of songs made by artists on the label but dammit if it doesn't feel perfect - just the right amount of music for a mix. For example - you get the abstract Accordion by Madvillain followed by the jazzy Little Girl by Yesterdays New Quintet. It's a more than competent mix in giving you an idea about the sound of Stones Throw or what you have missed out on if you can't get a grasp on the whole catalogue - I'm definitely hearing some new things on here. Besides, with 42 tracks deep you really can't lose.

May I also add that STH101 totally owns STH102 - that was only a DVD (released after STH101). I bought that before this one and in comparison, not only do you get a DVD with STH101 but yeah get this sweet ass mix that I've been playing since I got home from the city.

Out of all the Hip Hop songs on here, I choose to give you Space Slut by Funkaho which is a lot more like dance music. Don't say I don't give you a mix of all different types of stuff here on Scrobble Scribbler.

Funkaho - Space Slut



Scrobble Scribbler uses Last.FM and Last.FM's "Audioscrobbler" software. However, Scrobble Scribbler is not employed by Last.FM and thus views expressed by its author are not those of Last.FM. Join Last.fm here

BONUS:

The history of Stones Throw - Peanut Butter Wolf

And next post...

"69 Love Songs" - by The Magnetic Fields (if I can chose 1 song...)

Week 8 of DIGC101

More on blogging this week and we coupled up to find some of the popular bloggers out there in the blogosphere. Technorati is probably your best friend in such a case, as you try to learn about the authority attribute that Technorati gives to measure blogs. I still haven't quite figured it out but i'm sure an exploration on Wikipedia would turn for some results. But as Chris and David seem to point out its not so much how many people read a blog as how many people link each other in a sort of virtual mafia of its chosen topic. I'm not big on American political election blogs so I didn't know too much but if we were to do something like Hip Hop music, I could easily tell you which ones (and when I briefly looked over them, most didn't have blogrolls).

On to more interesting things; I watched my first episode of South Park in a while and it was awesome. It was an episode which opened with Mr. Garrison talking about how kids get high, and explain a way where kids take cat piss. Lol funny stuff, Trey and Matt pick it up and sensationalise it by getting FOX news to blow it out of proportion so that police confiscate all cats in people's homes. Haha, Kenny's delusions were hilarious (and a tribute to a movie Heavy Metal, which I hope I will watch some day in the future).

To finish things off, here's a clip of Kanye West performing a new song Love Lockdown at the VMAs.

Belated post for last week: Crosstown Traffic

I was going to post this on my own personal blog that I host with Windows Live Spaces but it refused to connect for some reason so I abandoned the post. But it is interesting, from guest lecturer Katie's own personal experience with getting fired over blogging, that had me interested in the exposure of myself online. It was particularly well-timed with the recent post I did with the death of my friend, Alex (which I blogged about before).

When I quite briefly combed through some of the older entries on my own blog, some of it to me makes me cringe but I would not (and will not) take it down because it was me at the time - and deleting seems to be unfair because I put the effort in to write about it in the first place. However, I wonder if anything I have written could be used against me in the future? It is surely something I have just now worried about.

I think it would be a good idea to have posts that you can publish on your blog but only you can see, while other posts you can post for everyone to see (I believe LiveJournal has such a function). Because if you look at my recent post on my personal blog for example, and then look down a few posts you can see that such a space is merely a sort of scribble pad for whatever I am feeling. Now, that doesn't matter to me but if people are going to be reading my blog they might not feel as comfortable with some of the things I said (is it within context, in other words). So to me, I am coming to a realization of the aethstics of a blog. When Katie said she wanted to make another blog (on the few that she already upkeeps) it seemed like a ridiculous idea to me but I am coming to understand that for the sake of herself - and a potential audience - what's private and what's public still exists in impression management.

2 new videos

This was the group project - Life@UOW - for DIGC101.

This was my own movie that a friend and I made in IPT last year for the HSC. It has a weird title I can't pronounce.

I'm about to start our DIGC101 class. Bye.