Thursday, November 5, 2015

Song of the Day #221 - DJ Rashad - She a Go

She put it on her tongue and I ask her how it feel


Alright we gotta break this Newsomism, even if it's just for a bit. In all honesty, my claim that I was listening to Divers 24/7 ever since it was released was a slight exaggeration. Like, if I really did that, it would start to lose the distinction of "this is the greatest thing I've ever heard" for "this is the only thing I've ever heard", which would be a fine thing to experience but is maybe does some disservice to the music. So I gotta contrast it a little.

Lately that's seen me start getting into footwork/juke, which provides a pretty powerful contrast to Divers. My progress into the genre has been slow, really only scratching the surface, and sticking with established classics like the work of the late great DJ Rashad and the legendary innovator R.P. Boo. It's a genre where every song has the potential for elements so addictive that your progression through an album or discography can be indefinitely stalled through fiendish repetition.

On this one, it's the repeatedly sampled "OG Cali Kush", which is just so viscerally addictive to say and hear and imagine. The way you first hear it in a complete sentence - "Smoking on that OG Cali Kush straight kill" - that's shifted into the register of the next repetition of that verse, it's so immediately enthralling... and then the repetitions, each shifted in pitch - a footwork classic - is so catchy in a way that I don't know if I can ever hope to explain. I sing along with it, compulsively, which manages to cancel out the inherent coolness of listening to this sort of music and doing basically anything.

Like don't you feel a little badass listening to this? Granted, it's usually soundtracking me looking at useless things on the internet, but it lends them a sort of... exclusivity? Drive? Like I'll be browsing through, geez, I dunno... uhh, right now a thread on /v/ about EGM, something just completely inane, but somehow through listening to music like this, the fact that I understand everything in the thread becomes "elite" instead of "pathetic", the discourse becomes "underground" instead of "irrelevant"... even my efficient use of the computer feels "masterful" instead of "degenerate". Do you get that? No? This just seems doubly pathetic? Oh. Okay.

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