John Book, whom I've "known" for several years, beginning with the In/Flux mailing list, for fans of DJ Shadow, which initially dissected all of his creations to to list all the songs sampled. (There's a website that catalogs all of the songs that Shadow samples in his creations, but the URL changes from week to week. Contact me if you want to know where it currently is, as I know how to figure out what it is.) Since DJ Shadow's output was fairly limited, and still is, the mailing list talked about music in general, and it was through John Book that I discovered bands like Soulive and Ozomatli. John Book's weblog is required reading for those interested at all in hip-hop: he'd be the biggest consumer of music I've heard of (he regularly goes to thrift stores to buy old records), but he has also produced several albums as Crut.
Last night he published [archive.org link] a review of Common's Be, a digital copy of which I purchased based on my love for his Like Water for Chocolate, which has "Nag Champa (Afrodisiac For the World)", quite possibly the sexiest hip-hop beat ever (the homophobic line "It's rumors of gay MC's / just don't come around me wit it / you still rockin hickies, don't let me find out he did it" is kind of a downer though), and One Day It'll All Make Sense, a vinyl copy I have locked in the archives—i.e. my parents' attic—this sentence being already too long, requiring me to mercifully end it with a period. John also reviews Nikka Costa's can'tneverdidnothin', giving it the music reviewer's equivalent of the geek's +1, after my already having heard her archived set on KEXP.
That's not the part of his set of reviews that made my eyes wide open: “Next week, Universal Records will be releasing a Deluxe Edition of one of the best albums released in the 1990’s, period. It is DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, and it comes out as 2CD set, with the second disc containing remixes, along with previously unreleased demos and alternate takes. While the album doesn’t celebrate its proper 10th anniversary until next year, it is an album that continues to be talked about, debated, ridiculed, praised, blasted, and set as an example, especially when it comes to sample-based music. It is very much a hip-hop album, but not in the way most people are accustomed to. If you’ve been curious about it, but hesitated in picking it up, you can pick up the new version next week Tuesday.”
I've been looking for an excuse to buy the album again, as the old excuse, that it was scratched from abuse after playing many hundreds of times, Endtroducing... being my favourite album of all time, was no longer valid after copying the album to my laptop. A pretty common ploy to get people to buy the same album over again is to re-release it as a double album. It already worked on me.
