Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots

Would anybody notice tonight if rock ‘em sock ‘em robots took the place of Dick Cheney and John Edwards? I suspect the debate might be more interesting.

VH1’s pushing hip hop nostalgia for the next couple of weeks which makes me wish I hadn’t sold my thrift store copy of Steven Hager’s Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti for 20 bucks back in 1997 to Chad at Kid Robot. You better be taking care of that book. I’ve got a birthday coming up next month so maybe somebody will be nice and get me a copy of Style Wars to replace my bootleg VHS version. I’m not a fan of current hip hop, but I used to blast Public Enemy right alongside Black Flag. I still vividly remember when and where I purchased It Takes A Nation Of Millions: I was visiting Memphis with my mother and aunt in 1988 when they decided to go to Fraser and see if some old department store was still around. It anchored a strip mall that had a small record shop. I split to go to it. A little kid was breaking on the sidewalk to some loud rap record. I walked in and the owner said hello and then he told me where the rock and roll was located. I wanted to know where the rap albums were and once he showed me it came down to either Public Enemy or Run-DMC’s “Tougher Than Leather”. I think I made the right choice. What was really cool was that after I bought the album, the owner’s teenaged daughter came out and talked to me for awhile. I guess she thought I was a fairly hip white boy or something. Thanks to old school hip hop I was exposed to samples of some incredible music. When I worked at Phonoluxe Records in Nashville I tracked down many of the tunes that provided the foundation that hip hop was built upon. I still come upon jewels like the JB’s 45 “The Grunt” when I visit yard sales and flea markets, but if I really get to wanting to hear the real flavor of something I may have never heard I check out Dusty Groove's latest offerings. If you don’t want to buy online you always visit Grimey’s. They have a great selection of music across a wide spectrum and Mike’s a hell of a good guy, but his prices usually keep me from buying much.

If you need some guidance on the latest indie rock releases but not a lot of time, try 75orless.com. I dig their format.

I watched Waking Life over the weekend and it reminded me that its animated star, Wiley Wiggins, has a great website that’s worth spending some of your time. His blog is interesting and I really like all of the great links to other sites. If his name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you’re remembering him as part of the cast (he played Mitch Kramer) of another tremendous Linklater film, Dazed and Confused. I’d wanted to see Waking Life for years and it didn’t disappoint. I liked the animation which was appropriate for a subject like dreaming. I thought it was similar to Linklater’s Slacker in the beginning due to the randomness of the characters and their philosophical narratives, but the accumulation of information by the end made the film stand out on its own, The nature of the information was intense; an examination of the universe and our place in the scheme of things. The concept of lucid dreaming was one of its themes and I found this place on the web: The lucidity institute. The reason I could relate was because I feel like I have very near lucid dreams. Another person’s dreams are a boring topic so I won’t go in depth about it. I will say that I visited Denver in my dreams last night (the surrounding mountains were incredible) and I’ve never been west of the Mississippi River in real life. The best site about Waking Life I’ve found is this one.......

Now to start a weekly feature here at Soulfish Stew: Wally’s Band of the Week.
This week I’m going with homeboys, The Shazam. If you dig the Who, if you couldn’t get enough of Cheap Trick during the late 70’s, if you think the Move were the most underrated British band of the 60’s, then get yourself to their website as fast as your fingers can click. They take all of those elements and combine it with their own original ideas to come up with the headiest rock and roll brew in all of the USA. One of the best things about the Shazam is that they are fans of rock and roll, and not the kind of fan that treats the music with kid gloves. They assault the music the same they use to assault the dollar record bins at Phonoluxe.