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Kathleen Hanna recommended Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy in Music (curated)

"That's what I'd listen to on Bikini Kill tours. I'd put on my Walkman with my Fear Of A Black Planet cassette and I would go running and listen to it. I felt like they were making this really accessible music full of political ideas that were often very personal and sometimes very broad and I was like, "I want to make music like this, that you want to listen to because it sounds so great, but when you dig into the lyrics they're also smart and sometimes funny and very tongue in cheek." That's what I wanted to make so I'd just listen to it all the time. When I was running it was such good music to listen to because the beats are so awesome. It was a massive influence to Le Tigre. Not that we did hip-hop but I wanted to do songs that sounded good. Public Enemy made me okay with having higher production values. You can still be extremely political and radical and say what you want but do it in a way that just sounds great. First you notice how great it sounds and then, as you keep listening to it, you go, "Wait, what's this about? They mention this book, they mention Marcus Garvey, I want to go find out about that!"

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Kudos

Frank Black recommended The Good, The Bad and The Queen by The Good, The Bad and The Queen in Music (curated)

The Good, The Bad and The Queen by The Good, The Bad and The Queen

2007 | Alternative, Pop, Rock

(0 Ratings)

Album Favorite

"I never really listened to Blur much or many of the other Damon Albarn projects, but I was on tour and kept running into Dangermouse. He was on tour and we were playing a lot of the same festivals. He may even have given me a copy of this record. I remember being in Adelaide in this lonely hotel, drinking a bottle of red wine alone at sunset and listening to this record and being completely mesmerised by it. I love the whole thing. I love Dangermouse’s glitchy, hip-hop Beatles production ideas. It’s just a really great recipe: the whole thing. I spoke to him about making that record but I almost don’t want to know what it involved because it’s so magical to me. I’m totally into Paul Simonon’s bass playing. Even though it’s not a reggae record, courtesy of him it has some of that kind of soul. And Tony Allen’s drumming is wonderful. It almost sounds like military drums. It’s very angular. It doesn’t swing. It sounds like ‘Let’s attack, let’s attack.' At the heart of this record, you have really simple rock & roll performances, but the production brings a lot more detail to it. I’ve worked pretty briefly with Dangermouse on something in the past. I enjoy his personality a lot and I’d sure as hell like to work on a record with him one day."

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Kudos

Gruff Rhys recommended Now by Kim Jung-Mi in Music (curated)

Now by Kim Jung-Mi

(0 Ratings)

Album Favorite

"When we were talking earlier about a record accidentally affecting a whole community of musicians in a particular town, this is a record which came out on the same South Korean label that reissued the Erkin Koray album. I don't understand the lyrics so I just enjoy the emotion. I think she's a really popular singer in Korea but I've no idea if the lyrics are mediocre or profound! But anyway, I was playing some records in the market in Cardiff with DJ Esther and Don Leisure - whose album Shaboo came out in 2018 and is really great, instrumental sampled hip-hop - and they were both playing this Kim Jun Mi album! I was like 'I know this one' and we had a chat about the album. Later that week, I was having a cup of tea outside a café and a fellow musician, Carwyn from Colorama, stopped to tell me he was walking through the market the other day - he was probably buying veg or something - and heard this track and started describing it to me and it was clearly Kim Jung-Mi. I like the idea of four people in a loose musical community just turned on randomly through geographical reasons by a record that might influence them. It's a community generating a unique cultural identity through chance happenings."

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Kudos