big-boned and fey

My COLLEAGUE IN ADVENTURE calls RJD2 “commercial music”; last night, homeboy was selling manta rays and jellyfish, screening The Blue Planet behind his four-turntable/MPC feast. Fish schools beckoned with Latin American psych (the “Istanbul” song being the best). The sub-woofers sat waist high and I pressed my hips to them, rave-casualty style, in order to feel it, but there wasn’t enough. He keeps his beats private and lets melody softly inflate to rhythms. That is the part for the adverts, but I’d be more likely to charge a hammerhead shark if RJ let us in on the low end.
During Diverse’s set, a white girl with a permanent wave hollered, “I LOVE UUUU!” Diverse flustered, laughed and stammered. He is already the most humble (too?) emcee ever; after every song (often campfire singalongs, he does all the hits—“I love/soul music” “Hip-HOP/HIP/hop,”—but omits my fave, “all the ladies say OOWWW/OWWW!”)
(Diverse, wanting for diction)
After every song, Diverse 1. thanks us 2. tells us who he is 3. says if we are feeling him, it might be kind of cool maybe if we bought some merch—that is if we are feeling him, you know. But to the “I LOVE U” permanent wave girl, Diverse coos, “Come visit me at the merch table.” And I thought how, as per The Nation interview, Toni Morrison purposely used the word “love” only ONCE in her new book—towards the end, after her characters had earned the right to use it—in an attempt to revalue the word “LOVE,” to reassign it with appropriate gravity. It felt right to me in that context—but then again, LOVE is never one thing and I don’t think it should be either. So anyway, I’m glad Diverse got some much-needed validation from the white lady with the permanent wave.
Like, in Joanna Newsom’s “Bridges and Balloons” she sings “O my love” in the hook and makes the Love in question sound a parakeet, a WHOLE chirpy thing that deserves the simple definition of That Word. We debated Joanna Newsom at Colin & Carson’s inaugural summer BBQ. Unsurprisingly, Colin (a man who makes a living writing sea shantys) LOVEs her. I do, too, love a helium-ballooned Mad Hattie carting harps and unicorns. And when I say Mad Hattie I mean Neil Gaiman’s Mad Hattie, a gal who lost her heart and wanders, seeking it over spaces and times. She’s like, 437 years old or something, but childlike and scratchy. And big-boned and fey.
Chad disdained her off-keyness and normally I’m Game Uptyte ‘bout shifting pitch but this is what I like about her; she makes the harp’s timbre less dainty.
A Grand Don’t Come For Free, and neither does this Lifesavas verse: “The Streets? The Streets can go to hell; I want freedom. The Streets is watchin’ the idiot box and Cops reruns.”
Lifesavas guest-performed new Libretto single, “Volume”—Jumbo’s hottest production, a little grime in the soulfunk cause Libretto’s from Portland but really, he’s from Watts. He told me he can’t get inspired here, that he has to see a movie and read three books before he can write some lyrics. Tell me about it, stud. It can be a docile place, Portland. Again, I repeat ye olde fable imparted to me by Jessica, via her tour manager: “Portland is the place where ambition goes to die.”
I must also point out that Jumbo was rocking this suede-jacket/leather top-hat look w/JUMBO belt buckle, and while it is true I wrote-him-in on the ballot for Portland’s Sexiest Manhunk” in the Portland Mercury’s 2001 Sex Survey, well— Maybe it is cliché, but a sole gold tooth and dapper trousers make the ladies go “OWWWW!”