Fed Up With Your Job

 

Let's kick start the defection with our dearest Ted Joans by following this link.

I wrote that I would watch it and eventually did, thanks to Tubi TV (if you are like me - almost penniless - although Tubi is owned by the Fox Corporation, it's entirely free... and while you're there also check out Scared of Revolution with Umar Bin Hassan).

Speaking of documentaries, have you seen Soundtrack to a Coup d’État? Our friend Gabriela Trujillo wrote a review about it in En attendant Nadeau. If you didn't know, this online magazine started in 2016 when former collaborators of La Quinzaine littéraire (a bi-monthly where surrealists such as José Pierre, Jean Schuster or Gérard Legrand contributed many articles to following the fractioning of the parisian surrealist group in 1969) decided to build a platform to "promote free and independent critical discourse on current intellectual publications and to address the world and society through reviews of works in literature and the humanities".

The title is a mixture of Beckett's En attendant Godot and Maurice Nadeau, co-founder of La Quinzaine in 1966. The late Alain Joubert was a frequent contributor until his death related to COVID-19.

Do you remember that for Expo 67 the public relations director received an offer from the vice-president of marketing at Macy's to exhibit a large mock-up display of the future fair's site at their store in New York City? And why is there a fandom page for this?

Bezos salad tossing yachts during the parade.

Sweetback's Baadasssss has been enjoying himself ever since.

This is Place Roy in Montréal. It used to be the location of the Phonothèque, a place where you could borrow CDs, cassette tapes and vinyl records. In French, a library is a bibliothèque. A librairie is a bookshop (we don't say a boutique or a magasin de livres... a shop, that's reserved for clothes or whatever). Let these be singular lessons for you today. This exterior installation was done by the sculptor Michel Goulet, the same guy who built the set for Gauvreau's Le vampire et la nymphomane and for other plays from Théâtre UBU.

I didn't go very often to the Phonotèque but that's where I got my first BYG Actuel albums from (the Affinity reissues, mostly). Probably my favorite album I ever borrowed there was this next one by Henry Threadgill. It was produced by Bill Laswell and released on his Axiom label.

If I may suggest something: Play this quite loud.

(This is the album's opener, titled Little Pocket Size Demons)

The content of la Phonothèque can now be found at Grande Bibliothèque de BAnQ in downtown Montréal. In the spring of 2007, Belinda suggested we go visit it and subscribe (the bibliothèque was pretty much two years old at that point). It was the last snow of the season and I stepped on a perfectly smooth surface of ice covered by the falling snow and shattered my ankle. I had to get an operation so that the surgeon could screw my ankle back in place. I have three screws in my skeleton.

Not even a week after the cast was removed, I attended Julie Favreau's 8 personnages engagés pour peupler scénario de drame psychologique at Centre Clark. On our way back home that evening, Belinda broke up with me. We were coming back from a bar we all went to afterward, where I discussed quite a lot with the lovely Aseman.

This is from another CD I bought from the time when Belinda was still working at L'Échange. This one was co-produced by Threadgill himself with Bill Laswell, released on Columbia Records in 1995. Just pay attention to the song's lyrics.

Henry Threadgill was an original member of the Experimental Band (precursor to the AACM). He performed at the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago.

The CD booklet is pretty fun. This is a poem accompanying the song you've just heard.

Branford Marsalis had just released his Buckshot LeFonque album alongside DJ Premier and was about to become a creative consultant and producer at Columbia Records, signing David S. Ware for the label. These are genuine rarities for such a major record label, and I just wanted to mention them. Of course that type of deal didn't last for long.

Once again with Matthew Shipp and William Parker but this time with Susie Ibarra on drums.

Oh, well...

When I joined Belinda in Paris, she had asked me to bring her a bunch of CDs and to buy a battery for her Discman. I actually went to look for it but it was very expensive, plus I woke up and thought these don't come pre-charged. It's that thing, you know. Electricity sockets are different in America than they are in Europe. I gave her my Discman and brought hers back with me. On the flight back, with no functioning Discman at my disposal, I watched Batman Begins. No idea that such a film had come out or how big that Christopher Nolan trilogy was going to get.

For some reasons, instead of CDs I decided to burn her a CD with a bunch of different songs, including this one:

David S. Ware had previously recorded it on a Beaver Harris album.

For some reason, Owl Records released two versions of that album the exact same year. The catalog number for the record above is OWL 009 but the version I owned is OWL 09 with a variant album cover. The whole album was recorded in one day, at Daniel Pascaud's Studio in Paris on May 26, 1977. That's how it's usually done with jazz. No need to linger in a recording studio for weeks or months at a time. Find musicians who can play and get busy. We have no budget.

(Hey, just let me geek out for a second)

Arriving in Paris, I didn't know there was a Dada Retrospective currently held at the Centre Pompidou. So I visited that. For my birthday, Belinda had bought tickets for a play based on texts by Antonin Artaud and we saw another one based on texts by Erik Satie. So much surrealism-related things took place during that 4 weeks spent in Paris.

And Belinda bought Blonde Redhead's Misery Is a Butterfly in Paris while I was there with her. This song both makes me think of relationships I've had with some women since relocating in Saint-Hyacinthe (the content of this music video in particular.. regarding my asexuality and all of that) and it also makes me think of the relationship between Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell (the content of the song's lyrics).

This is an unofficial music video realized by the fun youtube channel Virgil Pink.

Take a moment to listen to it again, with a better sound quality and read the lyrics along as well and tell me if you get it.

 

Have a few more looks at other pages from the album's booklet:

Hans Bellmer's doll.

Maurice Henry's Mannequin at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

And this remake of Magritte's Je ne vois pas la femme... from La Révolution Surréaliste.

Anyway, if you can find them, I very much recommend the following documentaries:

And watch these:

As a teenager, my friends and I watched some of the movies by Mario Van Peebles. Starting with his directorial debut...

... and Panther.

The theme song for Panther was so fucking good. I wish there was a properly mastered official version available but this is a good compilation combining various sources.

We loved female rappers. A friend of mine had Da Brat's first album Funkdafied. Another one had this Queen Latifah album. A genuine bop.

I had this one, and I can't understand why there's not an official version for this.

(For reference, Yo-Yo mentions being down with Da Lench Mob, and that was Ice Cube's crew of which she was a member. It's not about being fine with lynch mobs.)

Speaking of Cleopatra, not a rapper but Patra was... Well, it was Patra. You know... Sure, I may be asexual but I'm not blind.

MC Lyte was pretty much fire when necessary.

Ever since Madonna signed her to her Maverick record label I have been a big fan of Me'Shell. I have several of her CDs.

We were not listening to TLC, Aaliyah and all of the singers but sometimes I enjoy revisiting some stuff and you wonder what happened to some of them. Members of Queen Latifah's Flavor Unit, Zhané only released two albums.

It's been a while since I last listened to this, too. Treach (Naughty by Nature), Chip Fu (Fu-Schnickens), Freddie Foxxx, Heavy D (Heavy D & The Boyz), D-Nice (Boogie Down Productions) and mutha***king Dres (Black Sheep).

 

With the Flavor Unit, Queen Latifah was taking some distance from the Native Tongues, although many of them were invited to contribute. So let's have a few hits from that collective.

(I don't fully enjoy this newly remasterd vido - some more AI shit - but I just wanted to highlight that the young man at the 1m34s mark is Dres' cousin Chi Ali, and I'll just say that life's events didn't go out too well for him...)

This one is from the second album De La Soul Is Dead but the thing is that it took ages for them to get their albums released on streaming platforms, and when it finally happened in 2023 Trugoy passed away a few weeks later. They made this music video in 2024 as a tribute despite the song being first released in 1991.

According to the information provided, this video officially premiered on youtube in April 2023. Trugoy died in February. Another one with the beautiful Vinia Mojica.

Do you want lyrics?

Hey, I haven't listened to this in decades. Let me have some fun.

Phife Dawg passed away in 2016.

Before ending up in that stupid Macy's parade, Busta Rhymes was a leader of the new school.

So, Queen Latifah (and Monie Love) was a member of that collective in the early days.

Regarding Prince Paul, he produced many of the songs we have just heard, and just before Wu-Tang Clan released their first album, RZA and him had this project, with Frukwan (a former teammate of Prince Paul in the group Stetsasonic) and Poetic.

Mario Van Peebles directed 5 episodes of the Wu-Tang: An American Saga series.

To those who didn't witness it at the time, it's difficult to properly explain what happened when that Wu-Tang Clan album came out back in 1993.

Like I wrote previously on this blog, GZA and RZA are 5 Percenters. Many of the rappers we've listened to at the time were Muslims. Just like this next one.

This should suffice to prepare you for his next album.

Don't ask me how I managed to find both these albums. Divine Styler is a genuine deep cut in the world of hip-hop. The man has only 407 subscribers on youtube. This is one of the least noisy and experimental cuts from that album. Try a track like Mystic Sheep Drink Electric Tea if you feel like getting somewhere further beyond.

Divine Styler originally came out of Ice-T's Rhyme Syndicate.

Ice-T in the early days...

South Central... Compton...  On this next album the music production is just superb, the production and arrangements are by CMW's DJ Slip and Unknown, turntable trickery by DJ Mike T and DJ Slip, with Unknown on drums programming, sampling and other instruments. No other hip-hop album sounds like this one and is a treat in every aspects.

Gaffling is slang for mistreatment by the 1-Time (being harassed by the police, if you need it spelled out).

As mentioned, here's Da Lench Mob. Ice Cube's old crew from back in the day after he left N.W.A. and fully began that acting career.

Another rapper from Los Angeles very few might know about. It just moved from Nicaragua at the time of that song to Venezuela right now.

Another muslim rapper I really much enjoyed. Aside from this one, I made copies of their other albums borrowed from my friends. We basically were a group of 4 lending our albums to each others and making copies when needed, even going as far as photocopying the inserts. Remember when you could go to the corner store and make photocopies for 15¢ each?

Since we are now in New York apparently of course we need some Big Daddy Kane.

So Dolemite was...

The more you learn...

Classic New York fast rapping.

Sometimes you had a dude like Redman dropping one of the most insane and rhythmically complex flow on his very first recording session. He appears third on this song and I still don't know how he did it. And this album is another strong contender for best sounding music production, done by EPMD themselves.

EPMD are Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith (LL Cool J's cousin).

Of course I bought his first album as soon as I was able to. I don't know what happened to it though, it just vanished at some point. Someone took it.

EPMD's crew Def Squad included Redman, K-Solo, Keith Murray... and these dudes.

They were something else. And dead serious, too.

(You can't help but smile at Erick Sermon sampling himself on that one... "Snapping necks for some live effects"...)

I could continue on and on, but perhaps it should be alright to just end this rap music survey with Public Enemy. I had this VHS. It wasn't a copy either. One of my friends sold it to me, cardboard slip case and everything. Featured in this is the tour for their second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Public Enemy had just released the theme song for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. That Fight the Power music video is included as well as all those they've shot for It Takes A Nation...

Then came the next album, Fear of A Black Planet. So if you would kindly follow me, I haven't watched any of these for several decades.

(Yep, you are not crazy. That was a young Samuel L. Jackson in the beginning of the video.)

The video for Burn Hollywood Burn is already featured elsewhere on this blog so we move on to the next album: Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black.

You can say it now F.D Signifier, the main actress in the video we just watched is Regina King. That same year she also had a small role in Boyz n the Hood alongside Ice Cube, and two years later she will play in another John Singleton movie alongside Tupac and Janet Jackson, a movie featuring not only some of Maya Angelou's poetry but featuring the poet herself during the cookout scene. As for the music video, it had a scene inspired by the police beating on Rodney King while that John Singleton movie showed what happened when the officers were acquitted. All these burnt buildings in Los Angeles... Personally, I'll say that Singleton's third movie was vastly better, and Regina King was once again in it, alongside Ice Cube and Busta Rhymes kicking some neo-nazi asses before Michael Rapaport lost his mind once again.

The album ended on this weird remake of Bring the noise with the heavy metal band Anthrax.

Another of my friends had Greatest Misses, an album of remixes of older songs plus this new one.

Nice remix of a song from It Takes A Nation... with that Kool & The Gang opening sample.

Speaking of remakes, just like Living Colour did a This Is The Life 2020 version, PE did a Fight the Power 2020.

As for their subsequent albums, I think I have only listened to Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age twice. I had borrowed it from a kid at school. This is the first time I watch this music video. And I haven't much kept up with PE since. Otherwise, all the rap songs we've just listened to (unless mentioned), I owned the original albums on cassette tapes. Most of them I still do have with me, but I've said previously on this blog how I don't currently own a tape deck and haven't listened to this music very much since the 1990s. It was certainly more than nice to revisit this and hopefully it was instructive and enjoyable for you (if you've never been much of a hip-hop head).

It's funny but the last time I dated anyone was in January 2009. Her parents were from Haiti and she was a geek, playing online video games and all that. I was entirely new to this and was fully oblivious to that whole geek culture. She was telling me about this movie coming out soon, based on a graphic novel (I didn't know what that was... What do you mean by graphic? Graphic as in sexually explicit?). She wanted us to go see it. That movie was Zack Snyder's Watchmen. For my part, I was more interested in going to watch Milk.

Ten years after the movie, a Watchmen TV series came out and I have to say that I was impressed by it. Of course, the terminally geek hated it but goddamn that show was worth the watch, man. And just guess who had the leading role in it?

Like I mentioned before, I was starting to explore other music genres, and it's not because of Patra but I became very interested in reggae when I was about 15 years old.

A girl from school had this documentary on VHS (slip case and all). 

The documentary basically came out at the same time the Songs of Freedom box set was released. Island Records also released this single at the same time with an accompanying music video. The single was in fact a 1992 remix by Ingmar Kiang and Trevor Wyatt sounding nothing like the music Bob Marley ever released during his lifetime. That version slaps nonetheless, and I unknowingly had a t-shirt with that single's cover (very likely a counterfeit, it was missing the Iron Lion Zion inscription under Bob's name but otherwise it was the same, pastel-colored background and all).

The box set had the original version from 1974. The song was previously unreleased but very much had the same type of sound found on the Natty Dread album.

I just want to take some time here and write something about my Leblanc cousins. They are three brothers and they exclusively listened to heavy metal music, too. One of them was a drummer and was in a punk rock band for a while (they even released an album). When we were teenagers, they used to make fun of Carlton Barrett's drum intros, claiming they were all the same.

My cousins were also very much into TOOL. Remember their first music video (pretty much a mockery of the Brothers Quay's aesthetic)? Let's be petty since two can play at that game. I'll admit that Bob Marley's use of methaphor, metonymy and everything else is not very much developed, that his lyrics are quite literal. But what a great poetic gift does this Tool band offer, guys. What is this song about besides some mystical endless and unsolvable angst? It feels good to know you can always rely on despondency to cradle you... Unless you get sober, pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start somehow toiling away out of cluelessness (the song is not particularly clear about the means). Or perhaps, let's rather apply some more good ol' first degree logic: Drum intros are always the root cause of social turmoil... Let's get rid of them and problems solved. Right?

Natty Dread was Bob Marley's first album without his former Wailers partners Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh. Once again, without knowing, I had bought The Wailers first album Catch A Fire. This was their first international release, previous ones having been a few compilations but mostly singles for the local jamaican market or UK exports.

That Catch A Fire purchase was a cassette tape found in a retail bin at that shitty record store inside the shopping center in Saint-Hyacinthe (that store is long gone and there's currently none replacing it). It was another counterfeit release, made up of a basic blank J-card besides for a random close-up photograph of Bob Marley's face and the song titles. The album had no particular title itself, just a generic Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was missing the album's closer Midnight Ravers. Time for revenge: We have it here, coupled with its dub version found on the B-Side as originally released on Bob Marley's own Tuff Gong label in 1972.

At some point, another girl from school lent us this other, older documentary from 10 years prior, released a few months after Bob's death.

And around that same period, I saw that this other documentary would be broadcast on TV, so I obviously VHSed it.

After the break up with Belinda, now with an internet access and nothing much to do, this is probably the first video I've ever downloaded.

 

As I also mentioned, I had started to read quite a lot instead of strictly listening to songs. I went through all the cultural free press I could get my hands on once we arrived in Montréal, where I very much remember reading about this upcoming PBS documentary at the time. 

So, if you ever feel like me: Let Fury Have The Hour.

******

During their American tour last September, Stereolab released two 7" singles exclusively available at concerts. Instead of concluding their latest album we have been exploring since June last year, I will include these new songs first. I can't quite clearly hear the lyrics enough to provide them here, and the attempts uploaded online on numerous websites are genuine rubbish. Idiots just went by ear and came up with lyrics that don't make any fucking sense whatsoever.

According to them, this is supposed to be the second verse:

Changing what heaven has of what radical is the next level
Ascension may flow sad
The cellular end might just come to be all
Unity conscious head
Wise to our truth of pre-dimension

One of these singles has been made available for store or online purchase with the second one due out next month on February 13th.

Addendum for March 4, 2026:

I wrote to Martin Pike, Stereolab's manager (at Associated London Management) and he basically told me the lyrics will be made available at some point. I guess that means whenever the Groop releases a new compilation of non-album material, a future volume of their Switched On series. Surely a fun, short and polite answer to my request but it means that this could take a while, so we will have to continue using the idiotic lyrics for the time being. 

I'm not joking, these same insane lyrics have been uploaded in Genius, even in Spotify and in many other websites. C'est à se tordre de rire: Eat food to the fabric of tears... Whaaat?! The word you were looking for was Heedful to the fabric of tears or at the very beginning of the song, Heedful of fabric's origin, not eat food or Be full. Never start deciphering lyrics on an empty stomach seems to be the recommendation here. Anyway, such goofiness needs to be preserved in case this ever gets fixed and proper lyrics are added.  So, here we go... and... Got 'em !!