DudeAsInCool

PLAYLIST The Best Rapper No One Knows By KELEFA SANNEH Published: July 25, 2004 DEVIN THE DUDE Unbeknownst to just about everyone, this Houston rapper recently released one of the summer's best and breeziest albums, "To tha X-treme" (Rap-A-Lot). In a world that knew how to appreciate a self-deprecating hip-hop stoner equipped with a sharp wit, woozy beats and a flow that puts the daze in lackadaisical — in that gentle world, the release of a new Devin album would be cause for a feeding frenzy at the record shops. Unfortunately, Devin remains a cult hero, but he's a reliable one: on the new album, he fends off suspicious girlfriends ("Who? When? Why?" he stonewalls) and suspicious cops ("I'm just sippin' coffee," he croons) without breaking a sweat. And then there's "Briarpatch," a surreal hip-hop version of a Bre'r Rabbit tale: as nursery school keyboards tinkle in the background, he mumbles, "You can carve me/ Tie me up and starve me/ Put me on the grill, still nothing can harm me/ Like the briarpatch." THE BRONX This Los Angeles band knows that punk rockers no longer seem quite as intimidating as they once did — compared to rappers, punks seem positively quaint. So in "They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)," the great new video directed by Mike Piscitelli, a punk-rock song gets a hip-hop makeover. A black man in a big coat and a do-rag swaggers through Los Angeles streets, lip-synching the snarled words and occasionally pushing passers-by out of the way. It's a sophisticated commentary on race and music, as well as an audacious new form of blackface. Find it at www.ferretstyle.com/withoutmercy, and for the full effect, watch it twice — the first time with the sound turned off. CHRISTINA MILIAN This Cuban-American singer and actress (she recently starred in "Love Don't Cost a Thing") has already scored hits overseas, and she has a breakthrough American hit with "Dip It Low," one of the summer's most popular songs. But Ms. Milian's new album, "It's About Time" (Island Def Jam), includes an even better song, "I Need More," on which she breathes a serpentine melody over a beat that consists of jagged snippets: some guitar chugging, a few handclaps, a couple of strategically placed beeps and, in the chorus, an unexpected nose-diving bass line. Ms. Milian's consonants snap as hard as the beat, and she spits out her kiss-off line — "It'll be a cold day in hell before you see your girl shed another tear, boy you better hear me" — so fast you almost miss it. KILLSWITCH ENGAGE This brawny Massachusetts metal band recently released "The End of Heartache" (Roadrunner/Island Def Jam), with the group's new singer, Howard Jones. The staticky guitar riffs and angular rhythms hint at hard-swinging syncopation beneath the screaming chaos, and Mr. Jones knows when to switch off his guttural roar and unleash great, sobbing melody, vowing, "It won't be long, we'll meet again." Perhaps without meaning to, this seemingly fearsome band has made one of the year's best emo albums. TRAX RECORDS This pioneering Chicago house label (recently reborn as Casablanca Trax) has been flooding the market with reissues this summer, starting with an invaluable (but messy) three-disc compilation, "Trax Records: The 20th Anniversary Collection," which brings together many of the mid- and late-1980's singles that gave birth to modern dance music. Classics like Adonis's "No Way Back" and Mr. Fingers' "Washing Machine" sound as startling and as exuberant as ever, distilling all the joy of disco into stark drum-machine beats. A dreamier, more seductive compilation, "Acid Classics," focuses on the squelchy subgenre known as acid house, starting with Phuture's jaw-dropping 12-minute fantasia "Acid Trax," from 1987 — it still sounds decades ahead of the 1990's British rave scene it inspired. A third compilation, "Queer Trax," celebrates the culture that created and sustained this revolutionary music: it evokes a sweaty night out at a black and Latino gay nightclub in the late 1980's. NELLY At www.nelly.net, you can hear his incendiary new single, "Flap Your Wings," which has a brain-rattling Neptunes beat and — best of all — no tune whatsoever. Nelly barks out dance commands ("Drop down and get your eagle on, girl"), the Neptunes supply some ascending chromatic scales, then the beat takes over again. M.I.A. A Sri Lanka-raised, London-based rapper with a pair of devastating dancehall-influenced singles to her credit. Her debut, "Galang" (hear it at www.miauk.com), had a monstrous mechanical beat topped with playful party chants and a magnificent surprise — some wordless singing — near the end. On her new single, "Sunshowers" (watch the video at www.xlrecordings.com), she updates the avant-disco classic by adding some slick, tongue-twisting rhymes and a frenzied beat. XL Records plans to release her debut album in January, which seems like a long time to wait. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/music/25PLAY.html

This one looks kind of interesting: 'Harold and Kumar': A Dumb Stoner Comedy for a New American Century By A.O. SCOTT Published: July 25, 2004 THE plot of "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," succinctly summarized in the movie's title, consists of an amusing, anarchic grab-bag of road-picture mishaps and low-comedy gags. Many of the comic elements are predictable (dumb stoners doing dumb, stoned things, sexual come-ons and gross-outs of various kinds) while others are less so, like the part when Neil Patrick Harris, playing himself, starts licking the headrests on a Honda. But a clever bait-and-switch early in the film signals its sly subversive intentions. Its director is Danny Leiner, who made "Dude, Where's My Car?," and he seems at first to pick up more or less where that movie, or any of its illustrious predecessors going back to"Porky's," left off. An ex-frat boy type, with a roomy office in a New York high-rise, is finishing up his work week. His pal, immediately recognizable as the wilder half of a classic buddy-movie pair, shows up proposing a fun-filled weekend of babes, booze and bong hits. But what about that big report due on Monday? No problem: just dump it on the Korean guy in the far cubicle. Our hero is free to pursue the carefree debauchery that is his birthright. Except, of course, that the pale-skinned frat boy type is not the hero at all. He and his friend (who happen to be played by the screenwriters, Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz) are walk-on doofuses who pretty much walk out of the movie, leaving it in the hands of that unassuming Korean guy, Harold. He turns out to be the more uptight half of a classic buddy-movie pair — the wilder half is his roommate, a South Asian former pre-med named Kumar — intent on claiming their own share of carefree debauchery. In the process, they pretty much revolutionize the slacker-stoner-comedy genre. Well, perhaps that's a bit grandiose, given that what Harold and Kumar really want to do, after a few Friday night tokes, is satisfy a powerful case of the munchies, an urge that leads them deep into the wilds of New Jersey and lands them in all kinds of trouble. But the movie's apparently simple shifts of racial and generational emphasis — replacing the traditional white (or, in recent variants, black) teenagers or undergraduates with Asian-Americans in their post-college years — at once upend the conventions of youth-oriented goofball comedy and revitalize them. "Harold and Kumar" is as delightfully stupid as "Friday" or "Road Trip" or "Wet Hot American Summer," but it is also one of the few recent comedies that persuasively, and intelligently, engage the social realities of contemporary multicultural America. Read the full review here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/movies/25SCOT.html

We're Gonna Party Like It's 1986 By JEFFREY ROTTER Published: July 25, 2004 The beginning of "Don't Go (Girls and Boys)," the latest video from the Canadian singer-songwriter Fefe Dobson, viewers might ask themselves what decade it is. As the camera breezes along West 23rd Street, borne aloft on a popping synth-drum beat, it enters an apartment, where Ms. Dobson is perched on a bed with a young man. The setting is a Big 80's tableau — Ms. Dobson dons a pair of red new wave sunglasses, sneers like Adam Ant and jerks her head to the beat as if she's working herself up to an old-fashioned flashdance. Her hair is a neatly disheveled wig reminiscent of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" shag. Then the anachronisms creep in — Ms. Dobson removes a pair of earbuds and passes her MP3 player to her boyfriend. No, this is not 1986. In fact, 1986 was the year Ms. Dobson was born. Seventeen years later, the singer released an eponymous album and cast her lot with other sweetly irate rock acts like Avril Lavigne and Lillix. On her latest single, Ms. Dobson has ditched the guitars and downloaded a synthesizer melody straight out of the brain of the robotic pop innovator Gary Numan (it appears that she's borrowed parts of his wardrobe as well). The video for "Don't Go" was directed by Rainbows & Vampires, a trio of Los Angeles video artists who received recognition for creating Yoko Ono's inventive "Walking on Thin Ice" last year — a surprisingly moving black-and-white cartoon about a girl and a rabbit. The threesome's visual style balances live action with animated text and floating collage elements. As the directors toggle between cartoon and reality in "Don't Go," Rainbows & Vampires gives a contemporary spin to the punk, new wave and early hip-hop aesthetics of the 80's. You can read the rest of the video critique here in the NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/arts/tel...ion/25ROTT.html

Here's an update: Web Phone Service May Have It All, Except Many Users By KEN BELSON Published: July 25, 2004 TWO years ago, Allen Tsong had just about had enough. Tired of paying $50 a month for a local phone line fromVerizon that he rarely used, he canceled the service and ordered a voice-over-Internet phone from Vonage, a start-up that entered the market two years ago. He has never looked back. To start his service, Mr. Tsong, who lives in Brooklyn, attached an ordinary phone to a paperback-sized adapter that can send his calls over high-speed Internet connections. The biggest draw was the price: Mr. Tsong spends $15 a month for 500 minutes of calls anywhere in the United States or Canada, and speaks to family and colleagues in China for pennies a minute. "Why shell out 40 to 50 bucks a month for a regular phone line?'' he asked, adding that he had installed another Internet phone in his Brooklyn office. "At first, my wife was skeptical, but as long as she can pick it up and get a dial tone, she'll use it." Mr. Tsong enjoys many of its other features, too. He can check voice mail on the Web, keep his number when he travels and forward calls to a cellphone or other line. In moving to the new phones, Mr. Tsong has joined a growing band of residential and business customers who want to free themselves from an old telecommunications order often marked by high taxes and lukewarm customer service - an old order that crumbled a bit more last week when AT&T announced that it was easing out of the traditional consumer phone business. And Verizon, the biggest of the Baby Bells, said that it would roll out Internet service nationally, a recognition that its traditional network is fast being eclipsed. Once the province of techno-nerds, the new phones are going mainstream as a variety of companies, from start-ups like Vonage to more traditional companies, like the Bells andCablevision, introduce services. These companies can charge less for Internet phone services because the calls, sent as data packets, typically avoid the switching fees that make up the bulk of the cost of an ordinary call. The flood of new offerings, though, has made it harder for consumers to distinguish between core needs, like price and voice quality, and all of the bells and whistles. But with a bit of searching and skepticism, you can cut your bill in half without sacrificing much of the reliability and quality of traditional phones. First things first: to use a voice-over-Internet phone, you need a broadband connection, which typically costs $25 to $50 a month. That sounds like a lot, until you consider that you also get a reliable Internet connection that is 25 times as fast as dial-up service. Most cable and phone companies now sell broadband connections, but phone companies often require you to keep a regular line to get a high-speed Internet line. That makes an Internet phone superfluous, unless you want two lines. Some companies, like Qwest, offer stand-alone broadband connections for $49.99 a month; others charge less for broadband lines if you keep your phone line. Companies like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision also offer high-speed data lines and voice-over-Internet phones with their programming, allowing consumers to bundle the three services at a reduced price. Once a broadband line is in place, you are ready to compare Internet phone plans. As Mr. Tsong knows, price is the big selling point. Most providers offer scaled plans: the more minutes, the higher the monthly fee. Some, like CallVantage from AT&T, offer one price - $34.99, but with introductory specials - for unlimited domestic minutes, with no extra taxes. Dialing internationally costs more because carriers have to pay their overseas counterparts to connect the calls. But rates are still lower than for ordinary long-distance service. In a Vonage plan, a call to London costs 3 cents a minute; Tokyo costs a penny more. One way to start comparing prices is to visit sites that list links to various voice-over-Internet providers. The sites include www.easycall.net/broadband-phone.shtml and www.cryptosavvy.com/voice_over_internet_protocol.htm. If cost were the only factor, more consumers would have ditched their old phones already. Instead, only 300,000 or so have signed up, because most consumers remain hesitant about the quality of Internet calls. As little as a year ago, those fears were valid. Many consumers, including Mr. Tsong, complained about hiccups in their conversations; these can occur when calls, as they are broken into packets of data, are momentarily lost while traveling over the Internet. Sometimes, calls go dead. tter software and Internet connections have reduced these problems, but the same axiom holds: Internet calls are only as good as the lines that connect them. If your broadband connection is reliable, the quality of your calls should be, too. There is an ancillary concern: the quality of the network your provider uses to connect the call. Cable companies and long-distance companies like AT&T and Covad, a national broadband service provider, run their own networks, so voice calls are less likely to break up. By comparison, Vonage uses five different networks to connect its calls, raising the likelihood of interruptions. Still, the gaps among various Internet providers are narrowing, to the point that fewer and fewer consumers can detect the difference between traditional and Internet phone service. "Consumers shouldn't believe the reports that the quality isn't as good as plain old telephone service," said Ford Cavallari, senior vice president of the broadband and media practice at Adventis, a telecommunications consultant in Boston. Mr. Cavallari, who uses an Internet phone, is smitten with the features. Like most other users, he was able to keep his old number or choose a new area code from anywhere in the country. The advantages are clear. When Mr. Cavallari visits San Francisco, he plugs his adapter into a broadband line and gets a dial tone from Boston. Friends calling him on ordinary lines in the Boston area are charged only for a local call, even though he is 3,000 miles away. Like many business travelers, Mr. Cavallari uses a Web site to track every call he makes. He can also listen to his voice mail on the Web, because the calls are stored like any other computer audio file. Like any emerging technology, though, voice-over-Internet has plenty of wrinkles. The biggest concern is losing service if there is a blackout. Some companies sell battery packs to keep modems going. Consumers like Stephen Caccam, a Vonage subscriber in New Canaan, Conn., also complain about the time needed to transfer existing phone numbers to new Internet providers. The process should take a few hours, but Mr. Caccam spent weeks trying to sort it out. In the interim, Vonage gave him a temporary number, but not all his friends and relatives knew about it. AND some services do not allow you to send faxes with a voice-over-Internet line. That can be particularly inconvenient for small businesses. Perhaps the most hazardous variable is the inability of emergency services to automatically track callers who dial 911. When callers sign up for a phone plan, they can register their location with emergency services. Lawmakers are trying to hammer out regulations for these and other issues, and could eventually start taxing Internet lines like traditional phones. Do not expect higher prices anytime soon, though. Lawmakers are unlikely to act before next year. And that means voice-over-Internet phones, while still not a perfect substitute for plain old phone lines, remain a good deal for many consumers. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/business...ml?pagewanted=2

:rotfl:

Gotta link to their website, the album, or some cover tunes, or that pic of Umma?

Yep, happy to report that our great city council has there priorities straight. Silly string, that festive plastic goo, is making a mess at our city's great celebrations and making it difficult for our sewer rats! *** L.A. considers banning silly string Associated Press Jul. 23, 2004 09:33 AM LOS ANGELES - Silly string's days may be numbered in Los Angeles. The City Council is set to consider an ordinance Friday that would ban the substance from use in public places. One councilman says banning silly string is needed to clean up the streets of Hollywood and other areas where it is often used during Halloween and New Year's parties. He says the aerosol-powered spray string can clog sewers. http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/...tring23-ON.html

BS15 was one of our earliest members, and although he hasnt been around here lately, we wish him well Happy Birthday, Man!!! :frog: :frog: :frog: :frog: :frog:

:rotfl:

Ah...hmmm - Umman, the American Dude with a Mercedes doesnt miss a thing

That and I dont drive it slower than the speed limit or lurk around to see the sights :)

I bet there are no signs or regulations about Skateboarders on the autobahn 'cause probably no one ever thought to make them. Good for the skateboarder, Im sick of cars t hinking they have the right of way over pedestrians...

Hey - I have a vintage bourgoie mercedes...

One of your fans beat you to the punch: http://www.beatking.com/forums/index.php?s...he+audiopocracy Welcome to Beatking :strumma:

http://www.nbc5.com/irresistible/3457080/d...382&dppid=65193

When's the housewarming, Umma. Let us know in advance so we can reserve some airline tickets Also, what is the law regarding agricultural goods if anyone decides to bring some bananas? My day improved considerably - all of a sudden my tennis game has come alive...I demolished the competition :bigsmile:

Sounds cool...

Congrats :frog: :frog: :frog:

The day started out kind of slow. First I had to deal with some electricians who shut down the power for an hour unexpectedly. Then after helping load what looked like his office from the back of a truck, had to drive a roommate to the car rental place so he could return it, and then I had to take him to a a car dealer where he pickup his new volvo. And then there was the gardener and the garbage man. In short, I did absolutely no work this am that was of any help to me... :reallymad: As a result, I plan on making up for it this weekend in fun of some sort - tennis, etc

:good job:

Gabriel Young

Me thinks mom is the one with the sick mind... gimme a break.

Me senses a cultural and generational gap between Nate and the Dirty South contingent

Never had those, but I have had Spanish Omelettes with bananas...hmmm.

I love ribs. I just picked out some traditional stuff to get this thread started. I forgot to add desserts, so Umma, will you can serve something up!