Frenchy’s Fracas

I came across BBC News’ excellent photo reportage of a part of the world I never knew existed: the African communities that have been living in India for hundreds of years.. Very interesting, you take in the info and go: “Silly me, of course!”. But you never ever thought of it - nice discovery.
More links:

• Kamat’s Potpourri: Indians of African Origin
• Habshis and Siddis - Africans and African descendants in South Asia
• The African Diaspora of the Indian Sub-continent

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Another thing I came across on the Web (thru the great and x-salted One, called Warren Ellis).

A first for me: American Network TV attacking G-Dubya for all his failures and general lack of brain juice. First we saw Horny Bill Clinton chewing a piece off of Fox Networks TV a coupla days ago. And now we get a ten minute editorial that tears Bush a new hole, wow..
Thing is: it’s the mirror image of what Fox does - a very biased rant about the stupidity and incompetence of the current president and all groveling praise for the former president. There’s no difference, but networks are lacking of any real balanced journalism and integrity.
Reactions on the Web of the pro-Bush boyz-n-girlz are scathing and the weird thing is: they accuse MSNBC of the foul deeds that they praise Fox Networks for when that network attacks the liberals. Funny, funny yet silly, silly rabbits..
Some links:

• the youtube vid, read the comments..
• Olbermann’s Special Comment: Are YOURS the actions of a true American?
• Some people on the Bush side of politics - Olbermann: Bush Administration ‘A New Type of Fascism’
• A Cyberalert from mrc.org (’Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996′ - bwahahahah!)

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General Description
Artist/Band: The Pharcyde
Album Title: Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
Year: 1992

The title says it all!!
 
How I Got Into This Music
Hmmm.. 1992, do you know how phar back that is?!? Come on, give me a break.. Okayokay.. Round that time I guess I was into De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest and a very faithful viewer of the YO! MTV Raps program. I’m almost sure it was there that I first heard and saw these guys. It’s been almost 15 years (ouch!) but still I got some of those songs in my head. Just the different approach and style was so unbelievably refreshing! It still is fresh if you listen to it in ten years, trust me..

Review at Answers.com || Google Search: Reviews of Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde || Album credits at Artistdirect.com

Tracks that got my attention:
Oh Shit
West Coast mixed with The Bomb Squad? Can’t really describe the sound.. But the vocals and the lyrics - funny and sharp. Wicked sample of either Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy

It’s Jigaboo Time (Skit)
Jigaboo - excellent skit!

4 Better or 4 Worse
Damn! I remember listening to the lyrics of this track - hilarious, and the phone call.. scary too! Obsessive stalker humor?

I’m That Type of Nigga
Great intro, after that it’s a very typical 90’s chant-along type of song

If I Were President (Skit)
I guess these guys were one of the first to put a piano sound at the foreground, listen to the skits on this album

Soul Flower (Remix)
Still prefer the version they had on the Heavy Rhyme Experience, Volume 1 album of The Brand New Heavies - ohwell, a great groove is a great groove..

On the DL
Wow.. The lyrics.. just the lyrics.. I mean, The Lyrics!! All about stuff you don’t tell to others easily, on the downlow.. It’s been done before, you know? Being bad-ass and all that, but here? It’s different, more intense and with a very different take on Confessional Rap..
His story’s soundin’ sad like the movie Ben
But um, anyway I’m just protectin’ my shit
‘Cause if it wasn’t me he’s killin’ then my moms mighta got it
It’s on the downlow don’t tell nobody I killed him all right?

Officer
Heheh.. This one’s so inside joke material.. The song is a parody of an epic track by Public Enemy called Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos. A very, very intense song (check out the link for more).
And these guys? They use it for their slaphappy song about getting caught by the cops for driving without a license. Now, in those times, that was almost blasphemy! Very funny blasphemy

Ya Mama
Read the lyrics, heheh.. Just do it!
Ya moma is so fat (how fat is she?)
Ya mama is so big and fat that she can get busy
with twenty-two burritos, but times are rough
I seen her in the back of Taco Bell with handcuffs

and also:
We drove into the drive-in and she didn’t have to pay
because we dressed her up to look just like a Chevrolet

So, maybe it ain’t your type of humor, but here’s some more info on the dozens (your mama jokes)

Passin’ Me By
Oh, wow.. One of my all-time favorite tracks, seriously.
I like the theme: choosing to let the girl to pass you by or not being able to prevent her from passing you by. Love versus Wisdom. Heart versus Brains. Protecting Yourself From Harm versus Naked Vulnerability. Topics include:

• Puppy love for some teacher
• Semi-fatal attraction
  I’m shootin for her heart, got my finger on the trigger
  She could be my broad, and I could be her (nigga)
• Waiting for her to dump her man
  She was kind of like a star, thinking I was like a fan
• Unrequited love letter
  Now there she goes again, the dopest Ethiopian
  And now the world around me be gets movin in slow motion
  when-ever she happens to walk by - why does the apple of my eye
  overlook and disregard my feelings no matter how much I try?
  
  And if I was your man then I would be true
  The only lying I would do is in the bed with you
  Then I signed sincerely the one who loves you dearly, PS love me tender
  The letter came back three days later: Return to Sender
  Damn!
  

And that’s just the lyrics.. The vocals? The first part seems like almost 15 seconds of rap without a pause to breathe.. The last part by rapper Fatlip is like a scat-singing combo when he starts to write his letter. Un-fucking-believable! Nobody ever used that style in a rap before.. Damn!
Not done yet! HellNo! There’s the music: like I said earlier in my review of Nightmares On Wax, I was totally, mega-crazed about those soft keyboards on the background. Later, much later I found out that it was a sample of Quincy Jones’ rendition of Summer In The City (screw Joe Cocker, Q’s version is almost as good as The Lovin’ Spoonful’s original). Okay.. I’m done.. Where’s my tea?

Otha Fish
Nice band-aid for the heartbreaks of the previous track. Again, that style of rapping was different, a kind of scat-singing.

Quinten’s On His Way
Weird and funny..

Pack The Pipe
A crude yet effective way of discussing one of the biggest social problems of that time: crack cocaine.

Return Of The B-Boy
Heheheh! Delicious!! Great samples (from a track of Prince’s Madhouse Project), loops and hooks. Just love the little tributes to LL Cool J and Kurtis Blow

Conclusion
I knew I would get carried away reviewing this album..
Still one of the most innovative and intelligent (rap) albums of all time: it’s party music, it’s serious music, it’s funny music, some tracks are still fresh. And.. I kinda remembered where I got this album from: thanks Hieronymus Fox!

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General Description
Artist/Band: Jazzanova
Album Title: In Between
Year: 2002

Electronic, Warm and Grooooovaaay..
 
How I Got Into This Music
Can’t remember.. Damn, it’s the old age and all that apfelkorn all those years, heh..
Ehm.. Yep, must be around the time of my Discovery Of New Music in 2001: heard Groove Armada and Zero 7 for the first time that year. Jazzanova are one of those great additions to that list.

Review at Answers.com || Google Search: Reviews of In Between || Concert dates

Tracks that got my attention:
L.O.V.E. (and you and I)
Damn.. Still breaks me into little pieces. Just love (no friggin’ pun intended) the whole setup: that sample (almost sure it’s Andy Williams) and those gazillion different beats! On a later album they even produced a track with just those beats on it - incredible experience..

No Use ft. Clara Hill
Nice song, sometimes a bit too slow, but on a lazy summer afternoon? Perfect laidbackness

The One-Tet ft Capital A
Funky, groovy, jazzy and some quality raps

Fade Out
Nice dramatic interlude

Hanazono
Starts out nice, but gets a bit messy afterwards, but.. Production value is very good

Mwela, Mwela (Here I Am) ft Valerie Etienne
Other way around, intro’s not so great, but I just keep waiting for those incredibly beautiful and powerful vocals to start and then.. it’s heaven!

Keep Falling ft. Ursula Rucker
Great, haunting vocals and lyrics

Cyclic
Love this interlude, just the whole contrast of darkness and light, setting up the next track

Another New Day
Excellent track for traveling!

Place In Between
Meh.. Not impressed

Soon ft Vikter Duplaix
Great voice, soulful and classy

Dance the Dance ft Doug Hammond
Oooooooooooooooo… One of the best tracks on this album: it’s soundscapes, incredible vocals, breaks, beats, instruments and production

Sub-Atlantic
Meh..

Glow And Glare
80’s dance and soul instrumental - weirdly nice. Especially like the build-up

E-Ovation
Funny

Takes You Back ft Desney Bailey
Large variety of pleasant beats and great vocals, also heavy on the retro

Wasted Time ft Vikter Duplaix
Perfect mood ballad i.e. a Shut The Curtains And Let’s Get Nasty ™ classic!

Conclusion
Funny thing this band.. The music isn’t always easy or dancable, sometimes even a bit annoying. But 85% of the time you get great audiophonics combined with soundscapes, moodlands and everything you need to chill, relax, travel, sleep, dream and make love to. Great album! Saw that they’re performing in Amsterdam at the end of this month - time to check them out..

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tWas quite a busy night I spent reading and discussing on the intarwub thingy about what’s been happening with bitacle dot org. Here’s what happened:

1. Found jogy’s post (in Dutch) two days ago about a weird trackback that lead to the bitacle site. It showed jogy’s content as hybrid feed posts with accompanying Google Ads. This was a point of great anger for jogy, who understandably felt robbed and exploited, because people were using personal content of others without consent and generating money from it
2. Started sniffing about on the Net and it amazed me how small the number of posts was concerning this site’s behaviour: almost no complaints..
3. Another thing was that some of some bloggers posted that they were getting more traffic thru bitacle, and of course they were happy about it
4. The next day I started encountering more discontent posts of bloggers who made the same discovery jogy did and the tempers were getting quite a bit foul: people were checking publicly available info about this site and posted the name and phone number of the registrant of the bitacle domain
5. I kept discovering articles of very discontent bloggers (1, 2, 3) and saw that bitacle was in the top ten of searchwords at technorati
6. As posted earlier, I also came across stories about spam bloggers (or sploggers, if they were cool, they’d be called splogrs ;)) - baddies scraping rss feeds for profit. And that subject is being discussed quite a bit on the web too. Along with subjects like copyright, Creative Commons and of course the different methods to combat this evil
7. As the hours passed I saw more bloggers posting about taking actions against bitacle, there’s a site just for that cause that’s just been set up

How to deal with sploggers? Here’re some links to some informative posts on this:

• Quick Online Tips: How to Complain and Report Spam Blogger Blogs
• Lorelle On Wordpress: How To Spot a Splog

But can you really deal with sploggers? Some interesting opinions:

• Problogger: Should Sites Republish Blog’s Content?
• Why hunting sploggers is a waste of energy
• BloggingPoet: The Great Bitacle Debacle

Now, during the nightly hours of this endeavor I kept wondering about a coupla things:

• Was this intentional stupidity or theft? The amount of effort put in bitacle and some positive reactions of some content bloggers/readers really made me wonder. I’m not saying that using other people’s content to make money is an okay thing, but with bitacle it’s a bit confusing: no splogger would be that stupid to send trackbacks of content they’ve just stole, would they?
• Still, the bitacle organisation is a stupid one: they didn’t provide enough info about their business setup. Hold on, they might have done that but their English info site is like the attendee list for Congress for the session on political ethics: nada. Speaking of nada, their Spanish site does have a bit more info, but even that doesn’t explain a lot. And what they do tell you is, should you have any problems with their using of your rss feed, that you should turn off the feed: ouch!
• The emotions surrounding this s(h)ituation are understandable, but the mob mentality scares the living $#it out of me. It’s how things are done on the web, I know. I even suggested to some bloggers to create “negative momentum” by posting about this bitacle thing. I think that bitacle should get their asses off their lazy couch and start answering the questions of some very, very concerned and pissed off bloggers. If this momentum thingy helps, that’s fine. But accusing someone of theft? Posting name and phone numbers? Naaahh.. just not my style of exposing injustice - this is never a holy cause (and yes, I keep choosing my words very friggin’ carefully)
• Some people countered the whole indignant reaction stuff about theft and copyright with quite a good argument: if you don’t like people using your content to make money out of it, why do we allow Google, Yahoo and others to do just the same? I’ve argued that this comparison isn’t totally fair because of the difference in business models, but still.. People don’t mind the exposure on Google, probably because it’s that part of recognition and identification bloggers appreciate of search engines (and.. some of those bloggers choose to use that to generate their own money through Google Ads). I’m not sure what to think of this part of the discussion..
• What happens afterwards? Here’s an example of this can evolve into a standstill, but it’s a serious and interesting read

Now what?

• Well, part of the problem is with SEO’s offering money for context related ads. Probably.. So, maybe addressing those parties would be nice
• One option bloggers could use is to shorten their rss feeds. Depending on the blog software you’re using, it could be done and I’ll be doing that for sure. I know that I’m gonna try out the Wordpress plugin called Better Feed that helps me achieve that and adds some nice extras. Also saw that Feedburner has this Summary option.
• Another option is to disable the feeds, but that’s something I can’t really imagine myself doing. Btw: I saw a site that offers feed processing for sites that don’t even have syndication - ponyfish dot com. I’m not saying this is a potential problem (hell, no) but it’s an example of how things develop on the net: one person’s useful and trustworthy tool for browsing can become another one’s inspiration for foul deeds.
• Negative momentum: confront the bitacle people with questions and demand they change their policy - the more people who do this and post about it, the better. BUT: give the guys a chance to explain themselves and fix their mistake - there’s nothing more pathetic than a lynch mob after the hanging’s been done, especially if they start wondering if they got the right guy for the right crime and performed the right punishment.
• Another tech-solution (a poor one at best): ban the IP or the whole ISP - not quite as drastic as a lynching, but, you know.. still quite a step to take

People are really concerned about their content being stolen or misused and that’s a concern I share. But for the ten years I’ve been on the routed road of internet, I’ve learned a coupla things:

• People will continue to make money off of you (or your content)
• There is no limit to the creativeness of people to create and/or solve a problem: once this phenomenon has been dealt with another spam/hoax/phishing/rhubarb thingy will be roaming the web
• My content is not unique neither a cure for cancer - it is always part of a conflict caused by posting personal content on a shared and reasonably public environment - so I do not expect my content to be sacred or protected from evil-doers
• I still hate cheats getting away with their evil deeds

I’m kinda done with this topic though I will continue to follow any new developments. Off to set up a better syndication and then afterwards, blog about some of my favorite things

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So.. This Justice Cabinet Minister drops this little H-bomb of a statement:
It has to be possible for Islamic law to be introduced in the Netherlands if it was the will of the majority.

Now, I’m not going to speculate on the correctness, be it political or something else, of that suggestion. I’m also not seriously gonna comment on the implications of the statement. I’ll also be ignoring the reactions at the social and political spectrum in this little country, where I live, the Netherlands.
But I’m sure as hell gonna have fun with the consequences of this country democratically choosing to implement the shari‘a:

All Christian days of celebration will be disposed of, and this will lead to the next point

The southern Catholic provinces of Brabant and Zuid-Limburg will secede from Holland, because their annual carnival will be outlawed

The other provinces will unite in a civil war against the aforementioned provinces purely out of jealousy (this was already the case before the Shari’a implementation, but who cares?)

The Frysian province will secede just because they’ve always wanted to (and good luck to them coz the rest of the country never wanted those lingual terrorists anyway)

People will rebel against the whole Ramadan thing although the net effect will probably be a whole country losing quite some weight and living a bit more healthier, albeit temporarily

All prints, coinage, stamps, stating the trusting of God will of course have to change

I’m getting bored..

Most importantly:
Read about the Shari’a, read about the democratic and parliamentary processes and rules in this country. Talk to the many different people about their implementation of the Islamic faith, take a day of and go visit a mosque (still on my to do list) and let the people there tell you about their religion. Do not assume the worst, just because you’re part of a very large and ignorant herd.
Islam to me isn’t a problem, it just gets under my skin because it’s the one religion that has been predominately in my face these last coupla years: in the news, on the streets, where ever. I’d be just as annoyed if Catholicism would make a great big comeback and I’d have to deal with their religion every other week.
I don’t like religion in general, just as I don’t like people in general. I don’t have a problem with someone else’s personal beliefs and I’ll respect them as long as it isn’t a matter of telling me how to live my life because of something someone said or wrote a bloody long time ago.
The only exception of course is the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster . Now that’s a religion I can really dig

People in Holland on all levels should really, really take a chill pill and wait for the next European Football Championship or the newest episode of the Big Brother TV program.

[insert deity of choice] bless you all..

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