I’ve always loved odd time signatures, since starting out playing the drums when I was 12 years old.
Ten years ago, very few rappers were even attempting 3/4 rhymes (usually more like 6/8), let alone anything as weird as 5/4 or 7/8. To this day, although three and six have become less exotic, still no-one does the crazy stuff. People don’t even make beats on that tip unless they’re DJ Shadow, and even DJ Shadow’s not DJ Shadow anymore.
I mention ten years ago because that’s when I made this song – “Cinqo de Mayo” – chopping samples into a 5/4 beat and doing my damnedest to rhyme smoothly over it.
Backburner, as a teeming mass of individuals, has been poking Bandcamp.com with a stick lately, to see how it may suit our various needs. After maybe slurping down some free music from the likes of Del the Funky Homosapien, D-Sisive and that new group Blueprint & Illogic started, a few of us put have some jams up on there, experimentally. Perhaps you’d like to check them out!
For one thing, the new single “Lost Souls” by The Extremities has been premiered on that site… stream it below or download it for free thanks to our good friends at 5 1/4 Records.
Then also? You know that Jesse Dangerously song from 2006, “Heart Of A Girl?” It never came out on an album, except for being featured as part of a downloadable compilation called Rhyme Torrents V, but it’s great and it’s produced by Toronto’s Savilion and maybe you would like to always have it to listen to? Well, here it is, to stream or download (or both!):
Oh yeah, also – the title has been altered to a backronym, in the manner of Common’s “I Used To Love H.E.R.” Can you guess what a “G.I.R.L.” is? Hint: maybe Jesse D is a Gangster In Real Life?
The other thing we’ve put up on Bandcamp so far is both sides from The Imaginary Friends 2004 7″ single, “The ImF Ride” b/w “Even Exist (As In, ‘We Don’t…’)” As a bonus, the download includes the instrumental for each song! This one’s set up a little differently – you can, of course, stream it for free to your heart’s content, but if you wish to download the tracks individually or as a package, you have the opportunity to set your own price and purchase them through PayPal!
It just seemed like kind of a shame that so many heads without turntables weren’t able to experience these classic avant garde raps by Jesse Dangerously, Thesis Sahib and MC Frank Deluxe, so now let’s toast the sorry demise of the Technics SL-1200 (can it really be true?) by making these exclusive, vinyl only tracks just a little bit less special.
So, dear Backburner.ca regulars, how do you like these apples? Is there anything else you’d like to see or hear from us? What do you think of the Backburner Bandcamp experience?
I never thought of that as being something that was going to happen, certainly not back when I was nineteen.
What I did do when I was nineteen is write a song about someone else turning thirty, and how that person might feel about certain things in his life.
In retrospect, I think there’s a lot that’s immature about this song, even though I wrote it with the best of intentions, trying to inspire listeners to not be such homophobic jerks. In my ham-fisted way, I worry that I may have only made homophobia worse. I don’t know, really.
Think of it as juvenilia, something that I wish I had done better or not at all but I was a kid and I thought it was important so there it is.
It’s called “A Single, Gay Male On His Thirtieth Birthday.”
I hope you can enjoy it at all, through all the wincing at my lack of subtlety or sensitivity!
Love,
Jesse D at 30
p.s. I used to rap this song into the faces of haters at shows. I hoped it would wither their masculinity by comparison. I like to think it did, a little.
The Burners been real busy lately, most of the crew just got back off tour. After a ton of successfull shows everyone is settled back into their respective cities finishing their verses for the upcoming BackBurner crew album. More on the crew album at a later date, for now, time to share some live audio from the tour.
Check out some live audio treats courtesy of Beatmason and the Vault studios….
BACKBURNER LIVE AT THE SEAHORSE IN HALIFAX (25 mins)
(2 ToolShed songs, 2 WordBurglar songs, Possecut and a whole lotta KARG)
The Verbals came to Backburner from St. John’s, Newfoundland, one by one. First, MC Frank Deluxe crossed the water to study, then Johnny Hardcore followed to make his fortune as a rap star, then Man Alive descended to pillage the mainland, and Lo-Fi… well, he moved out west and married his yoga instructor, so perhaps he had the last laugh on us all.
The Verbals were a force to be reckoned with in Halifax hip-hop. Johnny Hardcore was performing frequently on bills with Backburner posse-mates Jesse Dangerously, Jay Bizzy and occasionally fellow Verbal MC Frank Deluxe in support of his lifetime-in-the-making, self-titled debut album. John used to blow the speakers out at the Khyber Club using only his gravelly voice (you could watch them glow inside when he cupped the mic). He also is the only one in the crew who ever put out an album at all. Continue reading »
If you’d rather just stay right here on this page, why not bump this scrappy mix he put together for you last summer? Jesse donned the familiar guise of Bad DJ Budget Cuts to mix every track but one (the Canadian one) from gorgeous vinyl. It’s only about twenty minutes long. Go on!
In this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, a profile of Jesse Dangerously written by Fateema Sayani appeared to encourage Ottawans to attend his gig opening for Nomadic Massive tonight at Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Click the photograph to read the full text of the interview!
What’s not included in the article is the fact that when Jesse mentioned the Fu-Schnickens, Ms. Sayani launched into Poc-Fu’s verse from “True Fuschnick!” She got as far as Rock and roll, rock and roll / what up with hip-hop, reggae? Let’s kick some SOUL! / I’m a brave man like Captain Caveman, unga bunga, yapple dapple…
I recorded a song about two years ago with a shadowy figure known as Creepy Finger. The song’s muse was actor Reginald VelJohnson, known as the smart cop in Die Hard and the bumbling patriarch (also a cop) on the TV sitcom Family Matters. As these things go, Urkel was originally a foil for him and he became a foil for Urkel.
So yeah I was thrown in a kidnapper van and tortured until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I agreed to record a verse for the song. I’m so far now from whatever I was thinking when I wrote it that I can’t even tell if it’s all on time. I kind of think there was a looping problem in the original beat that I tried to compensate for and it got fixed after? I don’t know, maybe I just elected to use a really weird flow on purpose – I was pretty groggy from the thumb screws.
Anyway, I mention this instead of continuing to suppress the memory because the evidence of my forced captivity has now emerged on the internet:
Creepy Finger on MySpace – The first track is called either “Reginald VelJohnson” or “C-Ballz” depending on what you believe, and features one of the most off-kilter but weirdly on-point rhymes of my career. Key plot developments from Family Matters are referenced so that everyone can relate to the real-life and relatable laffs.
Listening to it again, I feel like I owe Ginzu3 an apology for biting and mangling some of his styles. I hope he doesn’t notice. Don’t tell him.
Today, I turned thirty.
