Νοσταλγία | Nostalgia

On Wednesday, March 28, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio spun favorite tracks from the Pathé 100 Hong Kong + Shanghai series, early Jamaican mento and R&B, Greek garage and laïka, Krautrock from Brain Records, 70s mor lam from Soi 48, and nascent hip-hop from the U.S.A.

Listen to the show now in the archives

Bodega Hop: Latin Hip-Hop, Rap + Reggaeton | Bodega Pop 15

Listen to the first track


Listen to the next track


Listen to track 8

Just reupped the 24-song mix here.

Before I moved into my new apartment last month and discovered the little Mexican bodega off Broadway near Steinway from whence the CDs on which I found many of these tracks were plucked, this mix wouldn't have been possible. Was that sentence grammatically correct? It's late; I can't tell. More importantly, I don't care.

I do care about my regular visitors and I'm well aware just how much I've neglected the Bodega shelves since the big move. So this insanely great ear-curling collection goes out to all of you, with the promise of much more to come.

Revolution Rap: Arabic Hip-Hop | Bodega Pop 12

 
Listen to "Ramallah Underground" 

 
Listen to "Beit" 

 
Listen to "I'm Not Your Prisoner"

 
Listen to "As Salam 3alikum"

 
Listen to "Talakat" 

Just reupped the 24-track album here.

Hyperbolic as it may sound, Arabic rap and hip-hop has had a significant place in the series of uprisings that have swept across North Africa and the Middle East since December 2010. Considering that what we in the west sometimes like to call the "Arab Spring" is predominantly a youth movement, it makes sense. 

Despite the not-coincidentally alliterative title of this mix, not every track I've chosen to include has a relationship to the "revolution," as it were. (Lebanese rapper Rayess Bek's "3al 2anoune 3al2anine," for instance, was recorded a decade ago.) But all of the tracks are, in some way, shape or form "revolutionary" -- for their content, their sound, their innovation. Nearly half of the tracks feature a female artist. 

Here's the moment where I'm tempted to make reference to my country's seemingly inexorable movement toward war in Syria, relating that to this music (and, by association, the people who made it) ... but there really is no real relationship and, frankly, I don't know, exactly, what to say. We tend -- as a culture, a country, a political player on the world's stage -- to speak too often for others. We need to learn how to listen.

Vietrap: Vietnamese Rap & Hip Hop | Bodega Pop 11

Just reupped the 21-track Bodega Pop exclusive album here.


Listen to "Chi Pheo"


Listen to "Hello Moto"


Listen to "Hai Vi Sao"


Listen to "Ca Va Luoi Bieng"


Listen to "Oi Nguoi Dep"

In the middle of a pleasant if innocuous conversation with the woman behind the counter of the cavernous Vietnamese media store on Argyle Street right off the Red Line in Chicago, I suddenly remembered to ask, "Oh, um, do you have any Vietnamese rap music?"

Her brow furrowed. "Have you heard any Vietnamese rap music?" she asked. I couldn't quite get the hidden meaning here, which I assumed was either: (a) because it doesn't exist, you poor delusionally optimistic white liberal type person; or (b) because I think it's going to induce projectile vomiting in you.

It turned out she meant (b) and just assumed that I would hate what the Vietnamese--Vietnamese-Americans, I believe--are doing with the genre.

Wrong.

* * *

TRACK LIST

Chi Pheo | Mr.Dee & The Bells

Hello Moto | Tien Dat   

Hai Vi Sao | May Trang  

Ca Va Luoi Bieng | F5                     

Du Lich Cung Toi | Mr.Dee & The Bells                                     

Tinh Khong Phai | F 5                                     

Love Music | Mr.Dee & The Bells                                             

Huynh De Tuong Tan | Tien Dat                  

Cha Vang Nang | Tan Quoc                                         

Con Gai | Tien Dat                          

Giao Thong | Mr.Dee & The Bells                                             

Hoc Tro | Unknown                                       

Oi Nguoi Dep | Mr.Dee & The Bells                                         

Tet Viet Nam | Cao Dang Hieu                                   

Ghe Khung | Phong Le                 

Trong Com | 5 Dong Ke                                

Vui Len Ban Oi | Tien Dat                                             

Mai Mai Ben Em | Phong Bot                                     

Mot Ngay Khong Co Em | Vpop

Mr. Viet Rapper | Phong Le

Trong Com 2 | Mr.Dee & The Bells

Various Artists | Punk Islam

One of the all-time most popular Bodega Pop DLs, reupped a second time here.


 

Tracks:

1. Suicide Bomb the GAP | The Kominas

2. Thaleo Vi Chumero | Noble Drew

3. Hey Hey Hey Guantanamo Bay | Secret Trial 5

4. War Crimes | Diacritical

5. Gaza- Choking on the Smoke of Dreams | Al-Thawra

6. Sharia Law In The USA | The Kominas

7. I like you | The Fatsumas

8. Teri Assi Ki Tassi | Dead Bhuttos

9. Rumi Was A Homo | The Kominas

10. Ignorance | Diacritical

11. Years Ago | Edifice Al-Thawra

12. I Want A Handjob | The Kominas

13. Dirty Looks | The Fatsumas

14. The Exile of Hope | Al-Thawra

I haven't been so excited about music coming (mostly) out of the USA in a long, long time. The bands in this 14-song compilation share at least two things: they're punk and--whether practicing or lapsed, straight or queer, sober or stoned--Muslim. They're also writing some of the funniest, most outrageous and, without question, politically savviest lyrics in English (and Urdu and Punjabi) since The Clash. 


Musically, they're all over the map, drawing from 70s punk, 80s rap, ska, rock, bhangra, Bollywood, metal, noise, folk, disco, etc.--the sum total of which almost convinces me this might be the missing LP between London Calling and Sandinista!. 

I put this compilation together after watching Omar Majeed's documentary, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, which I highly recommend. The moment the DVD ended, I started hunting around online for songs, the result of which, pared down to this blogger's personal favorites, you can now listen to yourself.

BODEGA POP LIVE ON WFMU's GTDR TONIGHT

TONIGHT from 7-10 PM ET, Bodega Pop Live is pulling out all the stops to offer an egregiously thrilling three-hour hip-hop tour through Brazil, Cambodia, Egypt, Hong Kong, Israel, Lebanon, Nigeria, Panama, Senegal, Vietnam ... and beyond. 

LISTEN in and check out the PLAYLIST 

Oh, and by the way ...

This super-awesome CD, Rap Around the World, lovingly hand-compiled by your favorite bodega proprietor, can be yours by pledging $75 or more to support WFMU / Give the Drummer Radio during their annual marathon. 

PLEDGE NOW

READ MORE ABOUT THE CD 

RAP AROUND THE WORLD | LIVE WFMU WEDS

This Wednesday from 7-10 PM, Bodega Pop Live is pulling out all the stops to offer y'all three insanely glorious hours of the most awesome international hip hop you've ever heard. 

Bookmark the page! And, while you're there, why not make a pledge to keep WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio on the air?

10 Best Albums of 2013

Merry Christmas, everyone. With a mere week to go until the ball drops in Times Square, listeners all over the globe have been compiling their Best Of lists for the year. For the Bodega, 2013 was a complex but often exciting time to be paying attention to international music. In early March our superfriend Carol hipped us to a program at BAM that would change our lives: Mic Check: Hip-Hop from North Africa and the Middle East. Later in the month, the Bodega returned the favor, taking her to see pioneering Palestinian rap group DAM at Drom on New York’s lower east side.

As more of our regular CD-findin’ haunts in the city dried up, new doors were opened, including two previously undiscovered stores selling Czech and Latin music, allowing us to exponentially grow our stock of both, literally overnight. For more recent music, there’s the endless rabbit hole that is Bandcamp. In fact, most of our 2013 faves came from this revolutionary end-run around the terminally ill Music-Industry-As-Such.

Above all, our fellow music bloggers kept their little rooms on the Internet warm even when the sun wasn’t shining anywhere else. Special Big Love to stalwarts Awesome Tapes from Africa, Jenny Is in a Bad Mood (Japan), Jewish Morocco, Jugo Rock Forever (former Yugoslavia), Madrotter Treasure Hunt (Indonesia), Monrakplengthai (Thailand), Moroccan Tape Stash, Music from the Third Floor (India), My Passion for Ethiopian Music, and Turkish Psychedelic Music 2, to say nothing of fellow eclecticists Flash Strap, Ghost Capital, Global Groove, Inconstant Sol, Kadao Ton Kao, Music for Maniacs, Snap Crackle & Pop, and Terminal Escape — to name but a few of the dozens whose offerings fill our hours and ears.

Two great but seemingly dead blogs got new life this year: Brain Goreng (Indonesia) and Voodoo Vault (Japan), though whether either will keep up the good fight into 2014 is anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, Interstellar Medium | Foreign Lavish Sounds stormed onto the scene to raise the bar unconscionably high and show us just how awesome a music blog can really be. We’re humbled, shamed even, but genuinely grateful for their existence.

2013 was a year of personal triumph for the Bodega: We not only published some of our least egregious nonfiction to date (in Burning Ambulance, Indiewire, LA Review of Books and Roads & Kingdoms), we received the ultimate worldly acknowledgement of our humble efforts in poetry: Inclusion in a Norton anthology. 

But there were setbacks. In April, our then-host, Divshare, kicked us out of the file-sharing playground, citing multiple complaints about our *cough* copyright infringement *cough*. Tail between our legs, we hooked up with ADrive and began to restock the shelves, offering customers a new feature: The Bodega Pop Comp (see “hot comps” in the sidebar to the right).  

Then, in May, Super DJ, creator and director of WFMU’s Give the Drummer Radio stream, and music blog supporter extraordinaire, Doug Schulkind asked if we’d like to bring the bodega to WFMU in the form of a weekly broadcast. Our ego said yes, yes, oh god let us, yes. Our ego has never been the brightest bulb in the tulip patch, but he tends to get away with pretty much whatever he wants.

So, every Wednesday evening from 7-10pm ET, starting on January 15, we’ll be hosting Bodega Pop Live on the aforementioned stream. Shout outs are due to several fabulous people—in addition to Doug, of course—who helped make this happen: Brandon Downing, Andrew Maxwell, Andrei Molotiu, Sianne Ngai, Mel Nichols, and above all, Carol “Craftypants” McMahon, who donated a Macbook we desperately needed to do the actual streaming. 

Still awake? Hello? Awrighty, let’s move on to the sole reason you’re even here tonight: Bodega Pop’s Top 10 Albums of 2013 …

DAM
Dabke on the Moon ($8.99)
December 15, 2012
As we intimated earlier, middle eastern and north African hip-hop reigned supreme in our ears this year, including this album, technically released last year, but for all intents and purposes not readily available until 2013. It wasn’t the first album we’d heard by the pioneering Palestinian rappers, but it was easily the best of their work to date. The album blasts off with the unlikely-sounding rocker “Street Poetry” and doesn’t let up, kicking out jam after jam all the way through the anthemic “I Fell in Love with a Jew” and final deep groove of “Handcuff Them War Criminals.” If I was Christgau (“Christmas with Christgau” has a nice ring to it, eh?) I know three very talented young men who’d be getting a big ol’ A+ in their stocking.

The Girl
UR Sensation ($8.99)
January 9, 2013 (planned December 19, 2012)
I almost can’t breathe when I think about the awesomeness that is Aiha Higurashi. Her first band, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her, was easily the best rock group of the Aughts, and with every subsequent project Aiha has shown us a new or at least slightly different side of herself.  The Girl, who released their second album this year, brings it back home to the stripped-down, noirish rock Aiha first explored with SSKHKH—but the sound is grittier, more disconcerting. Our sole complaint? Try setting up a Google alert for “The Girl.” 

Various Artists
Spanish New Wave, The Golden Age (6 Vols.) (Free)
January 20, 2013
See, I told you music bloggers were awesome this year. Compiled by Sebi and Jose Kortozirkuito for free download on Boozetunes, this six-volume set of post-punk music from Spain is everything the bodega dreams of: A vast, and vastly entertaining panorama of pop from a faraway time and place, lovingly introduced with a smart and relevant preface. 

Various Artists
Khat Thaleth (Free)
January 22, 2013
Goodness gracious: The year really started out with a bang, didn’t it? This late-January Arabic hip-hop compilation, released two days after the awesome comp above, is pretty much the coolest international rap collection we can think of since 1988’s Brazilian overview Hip Hop Cultura de Rua. And the download is gratis on Bandcamp. Yep, you heard us: Free.

Satanicpornocultshop
Picaresque ($10)
February 2013
The Japanese sound-collage trio put out seven albums and EPs in 2013, which makes them among the most prolific groups of … dare-we-say all time? A perennial favorite here, the shop’s funked-up February release had the bodega rawkin out on the 7 train as we rode it in to work every morning. 

Various Artists
Harafin So - Bollywood Inspired Film Music from Hausa Nigeria ($5)
April 23, 2013
Holy crap, but Christopher Kirkley’s label is amazing. 2013 was a stellar year for Sahelsounds, beginning with a January release of the second volume of Music from Saharan Cell Phones. This Bollywood-inspired, auto-tuned Nigerian pop was a real revelation to us, having had no prior idea that such a thing even existed. 

Nisennenmondai
N (iTunes store, $9.99)
July 2, 2013
OMG I love these women, who put out what was easily my favorite music video of the year. (Don't stop watching before the 3:20 mark, seriously.) A must-have for all fans of the N-group and for any lover of the industrial / instrumental / experimental wing of J-rock. 

MWR
Because I’m an Arab (Free, if link works)
August 14, 2013
A publicist for this Palestinian rap trio sent me word of this album—a retrospective of the band’s brief but thrilling career-to-date. Hailing from Gaza, these guys are as sonically rich as they are politics-forward. I’m not sure if the Dropbox link I’ve provided is going to work for you — but I have no earthly idea how else to get a hold of this album, let alone pay for it. (If you know, send the info/link our way.)

P.K.14
1984 ($8)
September 13, 2013
The fifth album by one of Beijing’s oldest post-punk bands, formed all the way back in 2001. (It must be liberating having such a short music history.) Though they’ve mellowed slightly with age, they’re still awesome—in fact, even more so this decade than last. You can listen to the whole album on Bandcamp for free … so go listen to it, not to me.

Various Artists
Sounds and Colors: Brazil ($11.43)
November 25, 2013
I have heard the future, and it sounds an awful lot like the República Federativa do Brasil. Seriously, this record is fabuloso. Also, this label looks like it’s gearing up to give Sahelsounds a run for its money. Blaspheme? No, blashphe-you. Get over to their Bandcamp page and start digging around — and don’t miss out on their earlier “name your price” collections. You won’t be disappointed.

Joey Boy | Thailand Rap Hit

Reupped because it's just that good, here.

First posted in April 2010, days after I launched this blog. It's no exaggeration to say that this is precisely the sort of thing I opened Bodega Pop's doors to share with the larger world.

I had no idea what this was when I posted it. A poet friend of mine in Singapore hipped me to the artist's identity thusly: "Joey Boy is superstar." I got to work searching YouTube.


as well as Filetram and other file-sharing search engines. Over time, I put together Joey Boy's entire catalog. Which I listened to obsessively.

Having done that, I feel totally comfortable grabbing everyone who walks into the Bodega by the sleeve, sitting each of you down in one of my metal folding "guest" chairs and yammering breathlessly about JB's pop genius.

That said, I totally don't have time to do that, today. I'm due up in Saratoga Springs to oversee a print job for my work and I've been commissioned to write a piece about New York, bodegas and international music ... by August 22nd.

Given that, here's a short bio, followed by what I originally wrote about this CD three years ago:

Born Apisit Opsasaimlikit in 1975, Joey Boy began his career in the 1990s, recording his first hit, "Fun, Fun, Fun" (see video above) with Canadian reggae artist, Snow, in 1995.

Found last year in a Vietnamese CD/Video store on Argyle Street in Chicago--this is quite honestly one of the most bizarrely satisfying purchases of a musical nature I have ever made.

First, let's take a look at "what's up" on the cover. Note that "Rap" is in quotes on the back. As it should be. I have never heard rap like this. I'm fairly certain that, unless you have already heard Thailand's Joey Boy, you probably have never heard rap like this either.

Well, so what is it, then? I'll go out on a limb and just say that it's quite likely the single most carnivalesque melange of rubbery cartoon-y dance-y hip-hoppy trippy-y influences from around the world ever burned into polycarbonate plastic. It is simultaneously the flarfiest and rockin'est thing I have ever heard. I have quickly grown to love it almost as much as life itself. Could any language be less suited to rap than Thai, the most soft-spoken-deferential-un-pissed-off-sounding language on the planet?

But why is that woman in the sunglasses on the cover pointing to her nose like that?

Siamese Ghetto | Siamese Ghetto

Freshly reupped here.


[Originally published June 30, 2012. The NY Times piece never materialized.] Last night after work I met up with a writer who is interested in developing a story around music blogging and/or bodega digging in New York. He lives in Woodside, a couple of neighborhoods to the south east of me, and we decided to meet at Thailand's Center Point (63-19 39th Ave). I'd never eaten there and was told that they sold CDs. Given that my other sources for Thai CDs have all dried up, I showed up 15 minutes early so I could dig through the goods. (Plus, it would give the writer an opportunity to see the obsessed music collector in his element, forehead sweating, hands shaking, fingers slowly becoming black from the grime-and-soot-covered cellophane CD & VCD wrappers.)


We had a great time over dinner; for one thing, the writer brought along a six-pack of Brooklyn Summer Ale, which we quickly sucked down between entrees, each hotter than the last. (The entrees, not the ales.) When at last a dish arrived that neither one of us was able to take more than two or three bites of, it was so intensely spicy, we settled the bill and I went back through the CD stacks looking for something interesting. Given that everything was half-off ("CDs no longer sell," the waitress working the register told me, a fact underscored by my once-again blackened fingertips), I was admittedly a bit liberal what with the purchasing.


Once outside, we both noticed, on the next block and across the street from Sripraphai, a smallish Thai grocery store. I gave my dinner companion a quizzical look and we marched over to check out the goods. And there, in the glass casing beneath the register, I spotted the CD above.


I know nothing about Siamese Ghetto, other than that this CD appears to be their one-and-only full-length album and that they sound a bit like Thai hip-hop superstar Joey Boy, but with some of the playful, satiric energy of Hong Kong's Fama. 


Whether or not the article works out, I owe my near-neighbor in Woodside a thank you for a wonderful night of beer, ridiculously spicy food (which I'm paying for at the moment, if that's not TMI), great conversation ... and for leading me to this utterly fabulous album that you, in your gentle but persistent wisdom, dear reader, will have no doubt finished downloading by the time this sentence is complete.

Divided Kingdom Republic | 2 albums

Get both albums here.

Nothing in English seems to exist about this rather radical Zimbabwean hip-hop group that emerged in the mid-aughts, not even in Eric Charry's Hip Hop Africa, but they've long been a favorite here at the old Bodega (we featured them in our soon-to-be expanded and revamped Rap Around the World comp).

Give em a listen?

 

DAM | Dabke on the Moon

Listen to "Street Poetry"

 
Listen to "Been around the World"

 
Listen to "Mama, I Fell in Love with a Jew" 

Pick it up here. 

 "... but if you wanna make tough love, too/ for a change can I be the one to handcuff you?"

Founded in 1999, Palestine's first hip-hop band DAM (Mahmoud Jreri and brothers Suhell and Tamer Nafar) have recorded 100+ singles and released two albums, the first of which you can pick up here. 

My friend Carol & I saw them last Sunday at Drom in Manhattan, which is where I picked up this, their second album. So exhausted I can't write more about the show, but be advised that they are so, so worth going to see if they wind up performing in your town.

Deeb | The Cold Peace

 
Listen to "موعود" 

 
Listen to "السلام البارد"

Get it all here.

I really want to write about the extraordinary performance I saw last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) by four hip-hop artists from north Africa and the Middle East: Amkoullel (Mali), El General (Tunisia), Shadia Mansour (UK, Palestine) and Deeb (Egypt), whose 2012 album The Cold Peace I picked up at a panel discussion by the artists two days before the event.

Unfortunately, I'm sort of under the gun to put the lid on two pieces I was commissioned to write, like, months ago, but have been unable finish for a number of reasons, not least of which being my generally diminishing interest in the subjects (season 3 of Breaking Bad and a book of essays on mostly American popular music, if you must know).

Other than that brief moment above, I'm not going to sit here and gripe about the lack of paying venues for writing on the subjects that genuinely matter to me and will, instead, offer you this insanely delicious album by a man at the forefront of Egypt's burgeoning rap + hip-hop scene. And point you to an interview with him, here.

Shadia Mansour | Palestinian Hip-Hop

Listen to "Al Keffiyeh"


Listen to "As Salam 3alikum"


Listen to "Kollon 3endon Dababaat"

Get all 16 trax here.


I was sitting on the F train home one evening many years ago when a voice cut through the mild din of the sparsely crowded subway car: "There's a comic book about Palestine?" 

I looked up from what I was reading (issue #4 of Joe Sacco's Palestine) to see a young Arabic man in his 20s or perhaps early 30s carefully studying the cover with a look of what I immediately registered as excitement on his face.

"Uh, yeah," I said, holding the issue out for him. "Want to take a look?"

I don't remember much of the conversation that followed, other than that the young man seemed impressed and genuinely tickled as he thumbed through the Sacco. He might have asked me where I got it and, if so, I probably explained that he could pick it up in any comic book store. 


What surprises me now, more than a decade later, is not that someone said something to me about the comic, but that the conversation was positive, upbeat. This was, after all, the F train (I lived in Brooklyn at the time), which winds its way down through a couple of East European Jewish/Hasidic/Israeli neighborhoods on its way to Coney Island. While I don't pretend to know anyone's political leanings, least of all a whole group of people's, I admit that, the few times I read Palestine on that train, a part of me always worried that doing so might lead to an altercation of some kind -- or, at the very least, a disapproving look. So far as I know, however, It never did.

Shadia Mansour was born to Christian Palestinians in London in 1985. She began singing in Palestinian protest rallies as a child and, on trips to Palestine to visit relatives, became involved with musicians there, including D.A.M. Now sometimes referred to as The First Lady of Arabic Hip-Hop, Mansour has launched what she calls a "musical intifada against the occupation of Palestine, conservatism and the oppression of women."

She has occasionally sparked controversy; her lyrics can be angry and unapologetic, in the vein of Public Enemy (Chuck D is reportedly a fan): 

Now these dogs are starting to wear it as a trend
No matter how they design it, no matter how they change its color
The keffiyeh is Arab, and it will stay Arab
The scarf, they want it
Our intellect, they want it
Our dignity, they want it
Everything that’s ours, they want it
We won’t be silent, we won’t allow it
It suits them to steal something that ain’t theirs and claim that it is

I had never heard of her until a month ago or so, when my friend Carol alerted me to this upcoming concert at Brooklyn's BAM. Yes, we're going and, yes, there's a good chance I'll write up something about it for some venue somewhere. Until then, here's a selection of her songs (and guest appearances) I found on the web -- despite her growing fame over the last few years, she remains unsigned to any label.

Tuấn Anh | Rau Dắng Mọc Sau Hè

 

Listen to "Rap: Vo chong lam bieng"

Get it all here.

Greetings from Beervana! Forgive my absence these last several days, but I'm on the road for the next couple of weeks, currently in Portland, Oregon, where dear friends have been shuttling me from one Southeast Asian media store to the next. I was not aware of this before, but the City of Roses has quite a significant population of people from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam--and I've been grabbing up music from each of these places to restock the shelves of the old bodega.

I will not be posting too much while on the road, mainly because I lack a scanner. However, in cases where I'm able to find images of the covers online, I'll do my best to keep this humble blog active during the holidays.

I found today's offering by Tuấn Anh at a wee Vietnamese media store nestled in Fubonn Shopping Center off SE 82nd Ave, in what is more or less Bridgetown's current Chinatown. I know nothing about Anh other than that he's got a Facebook page and is apparently very popular among the Vietnamese living in this area. The rap song above (one of two on this album) is a duet with Family Love member Christian Le; most of the songs on this CD are not, however, rap, despite the groovy drop-out white letters on the pink field in the bottom right-hand area of the cover.

That's it for now--I've got a hot date with the biggest bookstore in the continental United States, where I'm hoping to flesh out the International Music section of my modest book collection.

Various Artists | Le Hip Hop

Listen to Lady Laistee's "Un peu de respect"

Get the whole thing here.

If artists--and by "artists" I mean innovators, people who invent shit, not people who simply "make art" for a living--had the same rights as corporations, there would have been no global hip-hop movement. In fact, most popular music around the world simply wouldn't exist. And, to add insult to injury, I'd have sued your ass for that flarf experiment your teacher forced you to do last semester in Creative Writing 101 (assuming Tristan Tzara's descendants didn't beat me to it).

So, there you'd be, broke from my (or Tzara's descendants) having sued you for every last dime you'd ever earned, and you'd have, like, nothing to listen to but, I dunno, some ancient recording by whoever was able to win the lawsuit over the invention of the blues. I mean, assuming Bach's descendants didn't sue him or her over the use of the I, IV, V, I chord progression. Which is an insane assumption not to make, because of course they'd have sued. So, actually, you'd be broke and listening to Bach.

Where am I going with this? Well, if you listened to the sample above, you can probably guess, right? I mean, she may be a lady and all, but just what is Laistee really giving us here? And why is it "le" hip hop and not just straight-up hip hop? Or, for that matter, how is this anything but some French chick karaoke-rapping over the single most identifiable moment in American R&B history: Aretha Franklin completely laying claim to Otis Redding's "Respect."

Okay, but wait. Listen to it again, and then I'll tell you what I really, really, really, really love about that track. First of all, how many of you think "Otis Redding" when you think of the song "Respect"? Raise your hands. No, come on, put your hands down and stop bullshitting me. You think Aretha. We all do. I personally have heard the Otis Redding version hundreds of times (he was a superhero to me for several years in the 1980s), maybe even more times than Aretha's version, and I still think Aretha.

Why? What did she add to Otis Redding's version, anyway? An extremely expressive voice? Is Otis any less expressive? No. What Aretha added was (a) "R-e-s-p-e-c-t, find out what it means to me" and (b) "sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me ..."--in other words, a level of playground-level taunt and faddish slang that the original didn't have. (When I hear "sock it to me," I think of the single most dated comedy show to have ever run on American television: "Laugh-In.")  And yet ... it totally rawqs, even today. 

What does Lady Laistee bring to the R-e-s-p-e-c-Table? (Sorry, it was there.) Born Aline in 1972 in Guadaloupe, an Island in the Caribbean that is legally still France, Lady Laistee, also known as The Tarantula, grew up in  France métropolitaine, France's fancypants way of saying "the mainland." Her first album, Black Mama, which included a song in tribute to her murdered brother and the Paris suburbs, was released in 1999; her second, Hip Hop Therapy, which includes a slightly rougher version of "Respect," came out in 2002. The next year--when she was just 31 years old--she had a stroke and spent the next year or so rehabilitating. She released a third album, Second Souffle (Second Wind) in 2005. 

But none of that really has to do with why I love Laistee's track--although it does help me to, uh, respect her. Why do I love this track so much? Well, for one thing, every song--and I mean every single song ever written and recorded--has a shelf life. I don't mean a cultural shelf life, although that's also the case, sure. I mean with any particular listener. You know what I mean? Maybe you can spin The Beatles' "Hey Jude" like 1,273 times before you just can't hear it again. And James Brown's "Hot Pants" 987 times. And those numbers differ depending on the song and the listener. Right?

So, "Respect" has, like--it's got to have, for most listeners, one of the longest spin-lives of any song ever recorded. I couldn't even ballpark the number of times I've heard it. But, yeah, there was a point there that I reached when, like, both the Otis and the Aretha versions--I couldn't hear them anymore. I could be in a room with them playing, but I wasn't listening. I couldn't listen. Not that it was painful or I hated it now or something. I literally physically couldn't listen to it. That part of me didn't work anymore. Because, whatever it is that pop music does to our bodies (something akin to what the alien in "Alien" does, but far less destructive, if no less invasive), it's like the threads are being worn or stripped down with use. And at some point, if you listen to something that one time too many, the grooves have completely vanished.

And that, my friend, is where I was at with "Respect," before I heard Lady Laistee's version, which opens this 2004 French rap compilation I found at a Russian or Ukrainian CD store on 108 Street in Corona late last summer. 

And that, too, is why artists should never, ever behave like corporations, should never keep someone from ripping off their shit. Because, I don't care what it is that they're ripping off--a guitar lick, an idea for an art movement, a particular film-editing grammar, a genre of music--it's only through someone else's use of it that it continues, in any real way, to stay alive.