Homegrown Blends Release Party - 10/22/06

Last night the Homegrown Blends release party at the Kava Lounge opened a portal into a counterculture nightlife. I had known the guys throwing it for some time, and was stoked to find a custom digital airbrushed invite to their first organized gig. It also so happened that there was terrible air quality in Los Angeles that week, it was a haze malaise, some hellish stagnant well. I had to get out, go hide out for a day somewhere a little more real than LA. San Diego's the place to be for just that sort of thing, and driving down was a bit of a dimensional warp, if you will. It had been congestion free, nothing but open road and endless sky, but somewhere around Camp Pendleton and the Dolly Parton monument, a strange fey fog drifted in from the sea. Traffic clogged, and I was compartmentalized into self-reflection. I decided that the best thing for me, really, was to go get extraordinarily faded with my boys and help build a breakout party for new artists.

There was a point after sound check when we all decided that it could go either way. There was a brief warm-up, hinting at a lack of prior practice - a good thing for chaos, which is critical in all good parties. But the beats already seemed golden improvised experimental trip hop, components building on each other. And as I said, I had seen these guys do their shit before, albeit in a helter-skelter manner, and reasoned that at the very least I would get good and drunk listening to dope turntablism. Sitting back at the bar, polishing off my third organic beer, I knew I’d probably get in some drunken philosophizing, while I was at it.

Sipping sake on a lounge couch, I watched seekers hungry for solid tunes trickle, flow, flood through the front door. By 10:30 there bar was packed; the party was a hit. Who knew? I mean, sure, the demand was there, the demand is always there. Underground scenes feed off people's need for new art, but to be both art and popular is difficult in these days of corporate-made artificiality. Yet this scene was truly both: as the well-dressed and restless lined up outside, hungry for beats, the painter Romali sublimated bass into an abstract acrylic (?) - laden ode to the all-seeing eye (or all hearing ear, perhaps? This was when he wasn't scratching, of course). Either way, the people were there because they were drawn, trajectorizing along invisible information-age bonds. In other words, if the tracks had been lame, the party would have shared that fate.

Instead the very concept of lameness ceased to exist within the Kava Lounge; dope ass old school wove through new beats. It was probably the first time I was ever sorry I didn't know more about hip-hop, hadn't followed that culture as much as I had others. Watching Homegrown Blends, I was reminded of old Picklz videos as they fed off of each other, syncopated drum machine bleats accentuating whining scratchtasticness. As each member of Homegrown Blends took the stage, loops fed revolutions that piqued the beats with hues of melody. And 'cause the track selection was dope, something in it for everyone, every song truthful, honest hip-hop, the effects morphed through each other, creating layers of sound that grabbed one's sense of space, making everything closer to the center. At some point those in the audience realized that we were in for a show to remember. It was all over everyone's face, the vibe was solid.

Later, in the weeks following the party, my philosophical curiosities were still unsatisfied--I couldn’t help but wonder whether ancient symbols mapping human evolution would encapsulate what I witnessed over the course of the evening. Taoist wisdom has always appealed to my sense of connective synchronicity, so I peered through the printing of the I Ching sitting atop my bookshelf, flipping pages in search of the hexagram symbolically representing that precise moment in the unraveling path of the artistic maverick when success is first tasted. After all, what use is a divination system without the capacity to capture any concept of human cyclical progression? As Jung wrote of it, asking himself his own question from the sage’s perspective, “Don’t you see how useful the I Ching is in making you project your hitherto unrealized thoughts into its abstruse symbolism?” If nothing else, I reasoned, the search for this hexagram might help sate my curiosity to explain the phenomenon of “blowin’ up” from the psychological perspective of the masses crowding this small bar in the industrial outskirts beyond Gas Lamp.

Eons ago in ancient China, millennia before the Ming Dynasty integrated the Great Wall, sages compiled the I Ching in the misty beginnings of recorded history. Attributed to a number of contributing authors including Confucius, the I Ching is a system of the exponential evolution of broken and unbroken lines, capturing the essential changing duality of a world filtered through the perspective of mortal, subjective beings. 64 (i.e. 2^6) hexagrams shift the linear order of these broken and unbroken lines, and every hexagram is constructed from two primary trigrams, one sitting atop the other, defining the symbolism of the push or change, the central meaning of the hexagram. The progression of hexagrams, then, exhibits multiple dimensions of action and reaction, chaos and order, failure and success, destruction and creation. Feudal warlords would have their sages consult ‘the oracle,’ as the I Ching is known, to ascertain how the vicissitudes of government and war might shift in their favor.

Wandering from hexagram to hexagram, a few caught my eye as having the potential to encapsulate the first success of the artist, but upon further examination, symbol 35, Chin, or “Progress” hinted at the mysterious subtleties hinting at these truths of development. Chin manifests as the trigram Li, or “Fire,” atop the trigram Kun, or “Earth.” This arrangement invokes the image of the sun rising above horizon silhouettes at dawn, spreading fingers of warmth across shadows. The judgment of Chin, as translated in Wilhelm’s Third Edition, reads:

Progress. The powerful prince

Is honored with horses in large numbers

In a single day he is granted audience three times

That is, a warrior rallies his fellow lords around the cause of their sovereign king, who rewards the warrior with access to power. Wilhelm observes that such warrior sages have the foresight to use whatever power granted not for their own selfish gain, but for the purposes of their leader. This may sound obscure and esoteric, and the feudal badlands and Confucian moralities of the Chou dynasty may seem like a different world from today’s Southern California underground, but perhaps ancient wisdom can illuminate lessons about the rise of talent and the evolution of underground art.

Taking massive liberties with my amateur analysis of this millennia-old mysticism, it seemed to me that the lines of waiting hip-hop aficionados trailing out the front door did signal some sort of progress. Their gathering implied a basic shift in the ordinary musical fare so often played, mundane and lacking, at clubs throughout the nation. Homegrown Blends had a commitment to transcending the oversimplified sluggish beats and base lyrics of Top 40 sludge with a shiny novel sound influenced by the great unsung DJs and MCs of the last three decades. Perhaps this hexagram Chin hints at how Homegrown Blends and the other artists at the release party, as leaders and evolvers of music, called to the hungry masses, attracting their gravity to rally around beats with poetic depth beyond bling and ‘hos.

Snapping some infinite imaginary rubber band back in time, as DJ Jo Ill's fifteen-minute extemporaneous techno-optic wordless flow fatefully receded, the first vocal act climbed the short dais and grabbed their microphones. Leadership Crew was wicked. Four vocals acting synergistically, their lyrics rhythmic and contemporary, they were humans beyond borders, opening inward doors. And with Jo Ill as their DJ, they rocked the fuckin' house. It was all ad-libbed, the beats behind the interweaving vocals; there were sloppy transitions, but hey, that’s what makes a live show honest. So here you go: Jo Ill was the cornerstone, driving the music, expanding the beats and progressing the flows. After 35 minutes of rapping messages of global awareness, Leadership left me wanting more, which I suppose is the mark of potential.

When Son of Ran and Cypheroptics took the mics in front of DJ Virus, these were no kids starting out on stage at their first packed gig. They were seasoned veterans - you could see their egos in their eyes. Which was initially irritating from Son of Ran, since his shirt displayed a KKK emblem without him realizing it (at least, I hope he didn't realize it. I'm not sure the Klan would envision Son of Ran a fellow knight). Then again, he earned a certain right to egocentricity over the course of the next forty-five minutes. His flows were smooth, the cadence of his voice shifting, syncopating which the beats, trading off with Cypheroptics. If Son of Ran focused his rhymes on a harsh examination of identity and success in a modern urban jungle, Cypheroptics verbally scaled spiritual rungs towards new planes of truth. The crowd was gripped, feeding off rhymes, bobbing their heads, waving their arms. Virus stole the show, though, when juggling ol' Missy with deep off-tempo beats. There was no repetition in the auditory Jacob’s ladder that self-assembled underneath his magic fingers. Syncopations caromed between each other building and halting, shunting and jarring and shifting until...suffice to say, it was sicker than Dahmer on ipecac.

Still, as Homegrown Blends took the stage again and spun beats closing out the night, Jo Ill was the name of the early hour. His scratching was unmatched; it was an alient tongue, sparking off phonemes indecipherable by human ears. One had to shift one's perspective at just precisely the right angle in order to hear its tripped-out words of wisdom, playfull and biting, transforming the steady drum machine beat of DJ Pauze into some sick solved equation evaluating reality from beyond. His technical proficiency enabled him to go solo, build hip hop layers with the other 'Blends, and work behind vocalists, evolving their rhymes into music. As the last few stragglers met up at Taco Fiesta, a tiny added benefit of San Diego, we paused briefly between bites of delicious carne asada and looked back to the crazy party that had burned itself into our memory banks. For me at least, it was an illuminating lesson that hard work and good karma can help an artist achieve a dream, and that dreams are better achieved in the company of friends.

One unsolved question in my mind is the identity of ‘the leader,’ the sovereign king bequeathing power and duty to the warrior sage for leading the masses into a new era. One could argue this leader was the headliner, Son of Ran, and on some existential level, all the headlining artists of future blow-out shows, whose audiences Homegrown Blends will depend on to reach for the next level.

But while this explanation is logical, I prefer another perspective. Perhaps the sovereign granting access to Homegrown Blends is “Hip-Hop with-a-capital-H” itself, an amorphous genre deity existing in the minds of music lovers everywhere. If so, the bar is set high, accentuating a need for iconographic underground artists who can invoke genuine inspiration. For those willing to rise to the challenge, the remaining poetic visions of the hexagram Chin suggest many keys to overcome obstacles and taste the massive success of Kaui – hexagram 43, “breakthrough.” Distilling these keys down refines a lesson both simple and timeless: by remaining true to the spiritual center of their music, by aspiring to ascend to a higher plane of hip-hop and by bringing beats that shift perceptions and move souls, Homegrown Blends may continue to enjoy the light of progress.

On the evolution of subcultures - 9/15/06

After attending last night’s 2006 Burning Man Decompression Party, a friend asked me how similar I thought the festivities were to the peak of the rave scene. You have to understand, the larger posse remarked all night on the similarities, and the afterparty, a sick little shindig in some loft off downtown was straight-up time travel back to 1996 or so. The techno had regressed in its evolution, had climbed another iteration of some upward spiral path. The tracks blended into each other, syncopation left to a minimum. The crowd dug it. There was some booty-shakin’, I don’t have to tell you. But anyway, I digress...

So there I was, eating chorizo and pondering the ol’ ‘compare and contrast’ third grade assignment in my mind. What intrigued me most was that for every similarity, I found another difference. Or, not so much a difference per se, but truly an evolution, a paradigm shift in underground culture. And the first example I could think of to support this sudden theory got down, for me, to the bottom of the whole underground phenomenon to begin with. Organization.

There are likely those out there who know far more than I about the politics and economics of rave promoting in the late 1990s. But it always seemed to me, on the “demand side,” that because of the embedded competition in capitalistic party promotion, competing parties were thrown that all took advantage of the culture. That is to say, the culture was there, it had developed independently, and as the parties got bigger, the market demanded more, and enterprising personas rose to fill an unmet need. So no one party ever formed the backbone of the culture, it was a powerfully amorphous spiritual trend across location and time. But the Burning Man phenomenon is different. One party to rule them all, one party to find them. Yes, well, you know how the rest of that goes. And yet that after-party, the remnants, the folk on the fringe, was the same as the ghost party memories in my mind…

But again I chase my tail. So: the differences first. Burning Man is a phenomenon all on its own. Oh, the scene was influenced by several subcultures, rave culture being but one, but the experience of Burning Man has elevated the culture to something more, or at least something different. Something shifted to involve an element of pilgrimage, of inner faith. Plus, the rules are different, out there on the playa, and people return to their lives a little more sure that every perception is subjective, that rules are of our own creation, and that the world is as malleable as molten gold.

So the costumes, for one, are a bit crazier, as if every event were truly Halloween, to be gone all out for. Though, I must admit, having never personally been to Burning Man as of this moment, I will not A) say that I can comment on the extent of costumes nor B) compare the costumes to the rave scene. But I will say that when, driving around, trying to find parking, one friend said to another, ‘any moment now you’ll see a bunch of people dressed up as freaks, and you just follow them,’ or some such comment, I smiled as I thought back to The Magician, written well before my recent acquaintance with the decades-old Burning Man tradition…

Another difference: no friggin’ drum n’ bass. Let me caveat the following rant by reiterating that I thought the Decompression Party was bad ass, a massive eerily reminiscent of old times and a beautiful wonderland world, a portal into an ancient and future realm opened in the center of a sprawling megalopolis. Never had I been to a party of that size with the downtown skyline glass as my constant silicon backdrop, silent bridges and condemned avenues supporting jumbotrons, turntables and art cars, and a party populous as friendly, rockin’ and beautiful as any scene before it. Still, no scene is perfect, and for all the sweet industrial techno and throwback house that was played, not a one DJ pulled out the funky Jungle.

I don’t know if Junglism is supposed to be perceived as raver business, or some off-beat slanted path running at crooked angles to the whole shebang. But I do know that deep, dark Jungle is some of the freak-damn hottest sickest shit around. And, I don’t mind telling you, it broke me lil’ heart not finding just the smallest art car with some DJ breaking out some new synchopations…

…Rambling and ranting aside, the similarities before I just get fed up with trying to define the indefinable by compartmentalizing two independent phenomena, or perhaps even one overriding gestalt…

The similarities between rave culture and Burning Man are the similarities between all underground cultures, and, if I were a bit more metaphysical, the similarities connecting all perceptual reality. 'Radical self-reliance, radical self-determination, radical self-expression.' In the raver days it was always ‘peace, love, unity, respect.’ The two credos sound different to the ear, they emanate superficial differences in my mind. But in my soul I know it all stems from the same place. Inside the core, beyond our egos, our primal need to evolve drives those who are aware, who have shaken the burdens of their conditioning to reveal the sky abyss of choice. And why not? The rave scene peaked and valleyed, and though it seems resuscitated recently by the renewed interest in underground parties, this new life seems in large part due to Burning Man, which is, in all fairness, the new hotness. Which makes my heart warm, if honesty is what you require, because if the key to evolution is that the same undercurrent forces manifest structural changes over time, then no subculture ever dies. As long as future generations delve into themselves, beyond any stale realities imposed upon them by sinister forces, then we might wonder at some distant future in which that mystic tolerant underground pervades all human interaction...

Ramblings - 8/31/06

I just want to warn you, before you read to far, that this is where I get to ramble. All the structure helix bullshit went into the book, the philosophies trimmed and tidy, the sentences nice and short. But ultimately, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg pyramid, so a longer explanation of the philosophies expounded is really in order, in my own head, in order to put this whole thing to bed. Don’t be surprised if it’s science that warps into weird mysticism whenever my poetry tangles. See, there, I rambled already…