Music and drugs have a long and intertwining history. Certain artists have their poisons and certain poisons have their artists. Fans too, poisons don’t miss them either. (Managers, promoters, bookers, and label reps, let’s not forget they do drugs too.) We as music makers and fans snort, smoke, shoot, chug, and inject, for many reasons.

Enhancement of the senses to intensify creative process? Check. Enhancement of the senses to intensify audible and visual experience? Check. R. Kelly says, “I believe I can fly” and we do too. Or if you’re from the South, you want drugs because you like how it feels going fast.

Eddy Grant rocks down to Electric Avenue then does what? He takes it highya. Sadly, ginseng and guarana don’t stack up. I mean, there you are on Electric Avenue, somehow a cup of ginseng tea doesn’t work.

Drugs get ugly real quick. Some of the nastiest and dumbest:

The Speedball: intravenous use of heroin or morphine and cocaine.
Crank: cheap form of meth that is usually snorted.
Lith: lithium taken from batteries, comes in a paste, usually smoked.
LSD/Mushroom/Ecstasy combo: college students in Georgia call it “The Larry”.
Freon: the shit in refrigerators and air conditioners.
Yard of Beer: three feet of liquid beer.

Which gets you the highest?

Photos after the jump...

...but I've spent the past 24 hours listening to nothing but Rubber Soul and I can attest unequivocally and for all time that it is 30 times better than this album and 16 times better than this album.

That is all.

Climb a mountain (what mountain?)
Swim a sea (what sea?)
See what I mean? (no?)
I don`t know but I don`t want to get too deep

Let's do it! Let's "get too deep." What is happening in this passage? The response to the rapper is that he sees a mountain and a sea, but this is the wrong response. It's not a matter of seeing a mountain and sea, but doing something on the mountain and in sea: in the first he is climbing; in the second he is swimming. So, when he says: "See what I mean?," this meaning has to do with doing something and not the thing that something is being done to. Deeper yet, this doing is not done in the world of objects but in the very opposite: a state of mind. Climbing, here, is an idea of climbing; swimming, an idea of swimming. And so what the rapper wants the other singers to grasp is the idea (or universal concept) of these activities. In conclusion, the rapper in the lovely (even heavenly) post-black elegance tune is a Platonist.

Also, is the Roots album Things Fall Apart based on Achebe's novel? Not sure. I've only heard it once.

That's all I could think of, then and now. There must be more. I'm missing something obvious, I can feel it. A little help ... anyone?

(Deep-ish thoughts below....)

Cosby commented on James Brown’s Black Caesar album saying:

It’s amazing, especially considering it is built of so-called JB 'filler' material (“The Boss” is a disposable b-side? Whoa.)

And "The Payback" was rejected by the makers of the movie “Hell Up in Harlem” for being not funky enough.

Thank you, Cosby. It goes to show that you can learn something new about James Brown every day. Like that some people back in the day didn’t think he was funky enough. That’s like saying water isn’t wet.

But it's the first thing I thought of when I woke up this morning—especially the image around 1:18 with the little Ugandan girl disappearing into herself as she dances.

I think it means I'm about to have a stroke.

THE MORTGAGE and housing market crisis has ensnared a lot of household names across the nation.

Now we can add a Seattle music icon to the list.

Jazz vocalist great Ernestine Anderson, who lives in the Central District, is in danger of losing her home, which is in foreclosure proceedings.

Friends and supporters citywide are trying to raise $45,000 by a June 30 deadline to prevent the 79-year-old woman's six-bedroom family home from being auctioned.

A scratchy recording of Baa Baa Black Sheep and a truncated version of In the Mood are thought to be the oldest known recordings of computer generated music.

The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of "Baby", the forerunner of all modern computers.

The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.

The core of this article is music to my ears:

...Massive Attack operated as a loosely defined production base, using various collaborators to help them complete their ideas. As the three founding members recalled around the time of their second album Protection (1994), they might get the recording engineer to fine-tune a synth sound by telling him: "Like, a bit more phwaah, please."

Del Naja, now 43 and the group's principal presence, also surprised fans by referring to Massive Attack at the time of the last album, 100th Window (2003), not as a band, but as a brand. By then, he was the only working member, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles having left shortly after Mezzanine (1998) and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, 48, taking extended paternity leave.

But while Massive Attack's portfolio may be slim and the exact contributions of the group-members difficult to pinpoint, their work remains impressive, with two all-time classic albums in Blue Lines (1991) and Protection and a visual identity that has always looked the part...

Yet, if Massive Attack once lacked muso-credibility, who now cares? In a world of "virtual" bands such as Gorillaz, co-founded by Del Naja's friend Damon Albarn, Massive's moody mix of music and visuals fits in as perfectly postmodern... [I]t's perhaps useful to regard Massive Attack as curators first and creators second. This, of course, makes their new role particularly appropriate. With Meltdown, they get the chance to curate on a scale previously undreamed of. Their wide-ranging programme (they're the festival's 15th incumbents) also hangs together unusually well.

Not curators first and creators second, but curators from first to last. The main members of Massive Attack are not musicians but selectors. And we can not (must not) see selectors as the same as musicians. Bands can stage a performance, brands can do nothing of the sort. So far apart are the two that a whole new way of thinking and critiquing selectors has to completely break with the way we think about and critique musicians.

Let's close these quick thoughts with one of the oddest videos ever made:

Whether Paul Allen has been a die-hard fan of KCMU over the years--as all involved in the partnership want us to believe--it's obvious where his interest lies: the technology. KEXP has just been handed the resources to transform Seattle's tiny, beloved non-commercial radio station into an international player in Internet broadcasting. Make no mistake: radio is a dying art; the Internet is the future; and whether KEXP continues to serve Seattle's local music community or not, it will soon be international in terms of listenership.

Thanks to Liz!

Some drummers take this cymbalism too far. They feel the need to cover their kit with an inordinate amount of bronze, brass, and copper. They mount up so many cymbals, there’s no way they can use them all.

At some point, it becomes symbolic. The more cymbals, the tougher the drummer.

Carl Jung says the symbol is a thing that represents another. The dove means peace. It’s the external, or lower expression of the higher truth which is symbolized, and is a means of communicating realities which might otherwise be obscured by the limitations of language.

But fuck that. Sometimes you need that fourth crash cymbal, and it’s not because you’re insecure.

When you are Neil Peart and your drum set is half a mile wide, you need cymbals all over. When you’re playing on the right side of the kit, it’s impossible to hit that crash cymbal to your left. See?

"Starts with a shove and ends with a shovel."

This is number two:

"Feeling closer to God in a tight situation."

This is three:

"I'm creepin'. And I'm creepin'. And I'm creeeeeepin'."

In college, my partner had a mixtape known as The Hour of Power Mix. It was an hour-long tape with 60-second snippets of popular songs. The idea is that listeners were to drink a shot of beer at the beginning of every song. After an hour you’ve ingested 60 shots, or roughly 5 cans of beer. While this particular mixtape certainly didn’t have the same romantic connotations as the mixes that are frequently celebrated in blogs or Promise Ring songs, it definitely fulfilled its role as a rite of passage. I can only assume that thousands of college students out there had Hour of Power mixtapes.

But for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to make an Hour of Power mp3 playlist on my computer. It doesn’t appear to be possible without downloading recording software or sitting by iTunes to skip ahead to another song every 60 seconds. The future is truly a cold, dead place. I want my dual tape deck back.