Music

Ghostface is coming. I listened to the Brown Tape to review it asGhostface's new album. My feeling was this is dope, but I didn't follow the plotline of this or any other storytelling record.

The Adrian Younge album had a plotline where Ghost is fighting the Deluca Crime Family. Whatever the case, I was into the album because Adrian Younge makes music that sounds like what the RZA samples. Come to find out the Brown Tape is a rerelease of a Remix album Apollo Brown did in 2013 of the Adrian Young record. The Brown Tape is not as textured and more raw Hip Hop. Ghostface is never wack.

I even loved Ghost's R & B album “Wizard of Poetry.” Some didn't.

I think the validation for Wizard of Poetry can be found with Tyler, The Creator's Flowerboy record.

Ghostface is playing Columbus so expect to get all you joints from Ironman, Supreme Clientelle, and the Wu-Tang Albums.

Matt Monta has long been one of Columbus’ best musicians and writers. On April 27, 2018 he will be releasing “Restless Disposition,” his long-awaited follow up to his excellent 2015 album “Where you Find Love.” The Free Press’ Ed Forman sat down with Matt to discuss the new disc, life as a full time musician, and political influence on music. 

FP: It’s been about 2 ½ years since your last album, “Where You Find Love.” What have you been up to in the meantime?

"Look out, mama, there's a white boat coming down the river" ~ from Neil Young's "Powderfinger"

Damned little makes me happier than riding a bicycle – except maybe a motorcycle. For our purposes today, though, it's the human-powered invention usually attributed to a 19th century French man who was allergic to horses(hit).

I pedal, I thrive. Rhythmic grooves arrive. I bob my head in time as my legs go to the Derby, pumping energy through chain to wheels barely more mechanical than a chariot. Good lawd, I loves you, Porgy!

And when I'm feeling good, I want to the whole neighborhood to hear it.

Thus I break out in song. Lately, Powderfinger.

I lustily howl the quoted opening line--then forget virtually every other word except

Red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing from a following verse where the father advises the rebel son bravery isn't everything. Then – no kidding – I go into Rod Stewart's Maggie May

You made a first-class fool out of me
I'm as blind as a fool can be
oh Maggie I wish I'd never seen your fa-oh-ace

They call that a mash-up, I believe.

Ready Player Oneis based somewhere in Columbus, Ohio during the year 2045 and is directed by Steven Spielberg.

Steven Spielberg began his career directing Rod Serling's “Night Gallery,” a late 60's-Early 70's show after Twilight Zone. Night Gallery is actually more unsettling than Twilight Zone. I feel like Spielberg's films like Gremlins and Back the Future figured out how to tweak Rod Serling's surreal, and supernatural feel into mainstream family accessible blockbusters. Spielberg directed the Twilight Zone movie in 1983.g the life and enduring legacy of

What does Columbus, Ohio look like in 2045? Somewhere between watching video games at your friend's house, the industrialized graffiti coated districts near the East River in Williamsburg, the junk yard near Frank Road and a nightclub. Essentially Ready Player One is Night Gallery meets Avatar. Ready Player One is a Major Motion Picture being shown around Columbus Movie Theaters

My Lazy Earth Day Future

As a child, John Lyon, also known as Southside Johnny, believed Billie Holiday would come into his room at night and sing him lullabies. The front man of Asbury Jukes remembers hearing bars of “Strange Fruit” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” wafting into his room and serenading him to sleep.

“When I was baby, we had no heat upstairs, so my parents would leave the doors open so the heat would come through,” Lyon said in a telephone interview from New Jersey. “My parents would come home and put on Billie Holliday.

“I always loved her voice. When you heard Billie’s voice, you knew everything was going to be all right.”

Lyon and Jukes saxophone player John Isley recently completed the side project, “Detour Ahead: The Music of Billie Holiday” before embarking on a jam-packed tour with the Jukes this March. The New Jersey band begin their tour in Northfield, Ohio on March 2 and perform March 9 at the Southern Theatre (21 E. Main Street in downtown Columbus. The Jukes swing through Sweden and Norway toward the end of the month, and then conclude the month’s leg with a March 29 show in Clearwater, Fla.

I have to admit the moment that California Rapper Nipsy Hussle dropped his new “Victory Lap” I thought maybe I should roll up to the strip club, and get myself a lap dance during one of the days the dances are only 10 dollars.

Normally, I end up chatting with strippers saying, “I'm an artist-writer. This is part of my process. Don’t get me wrong. I like naked ladies. But I'm in the midst of studying a performance art piece.”

Nipsy Hussle would think what I just wrote doesn't fully address or consider the point of strip clubs. My point is that Nipsy Hussle’s new album is the first proper gangsta rap album since we've been burdened with our current president who seems to be a real killjoy.

Maybe not the first since the new regime, but still gangsta Nip gives us a little some-some we’ve been hesitant to embrace. Don't get me wrong. Nipsy isn't a fool. He and YG made “Fuck Donald Trump,” which was an anthem that got them maced by the police during the video shoot for YG's last record.

Victory Lap’s big single, “Rap N***as” is unabashed Above the Law, as in “Black Superman” meets “Broken Language.” 

If I were to give a Damn the Witch Siren a Rorschach test to enable my intro paragraph description; I might show them clips of Lady Gaga, a drag queen dancing, Grimes, and Tracy and the Plastics.

According to their social media: they are witch rock. Left to my devices they would end up either covering the Tucker Carlson “Eyes of Newt Conversation,” talking about Kendrick Lamar's “Damn” Album,  Aaron Hall and their current home Marion's haunted tourist sites.

However, people don't do interviews just so I can have conversations; they do interviews so humans can find their music.

Damn The Witch Siren has a new album called “Red Magic” which is having a release party at the Spacebar February 10th, and a subsequent tour. We discussed “Red Magic,” iTunes rejecting their initial album cover, the impact of participating in the boycott of R. Kelly's Fashion Meets Music Festival, and Z-Wolf's dad.

What is “Red Magic?”

December turned out to be a rough month for me in terms of getting out to see some shows. I guess I just picked up the holiday laziness. So on Christmas Eve I found myself looking through the archives of albums that local acts have asked me to review to see if I had missed anything interesting. The pickings were slim -- a couple of mediocre punk albums, a jam band live recording (god help us), and a well-financed folk-country disc which had a nasty habit of referencing whippoorwills. There was also a pretty decent metal demo, but I worry that reviewing demos would make me seem desperate.

So I was all set to write up a lame “songs to retire in 2018” column when I came across Dumb Country Noise, a three or so year old recording by the absurdist rockabilly/country act the Hellroys. Oh hell, I thought, I remember this. I also remembered that I had told these guys I was going to review this three years ago and totally spaced on it. So with my apologies, here is the review three years too late. I sincerely hope you are still together (your website seems current) and that you haven’t released eight other albums in the meantime.

Decide if you’re the Party of Caligula or Brewster's Millions.

Vladamir Putin: Reread the Communist Manifesto, and stop bribing Republican politicians who cut social programs and taking measures to create greater class disparities in hopes of collapsing our economy. Oh wait; I get what you’re doing.

Pedophiles: Barely Legal Magazine is not child porn for a reason. Follow this logic.

The Constitution: Campaign finance reform. Pass 28th Amendment to overturn Citizen's United which was a Supreme Court ruling that allowed corporations to pump money into elections in a manner that corrupts the process into not working for American citizens’ best interests. This would also make shopping easier.

Humans: Don’t fall for false equivalencies or weird name games. At best they can be non-logic-based coincidences utilized for further exploration. Like most languages, they should be viewed as attempts to communicate instead of truths.

Can a record collection have a soul and does it reveal the man who owned it?

In my time on earth as a music dealer, I've bought a number of record collections from those who’ve passed and whom I’ve know sometimes quite well.

Which isn't to say you've got to die for me to buy your records. I buy shamelessly from the living and the dead – a real bone collector like the medieval days. Remember that scene in Monty Python's “Life of Brian” where there was a not-quite-un-living person in the hereafter cart? But we're talking records here, not cadavers.

On a number of occasions in my decades buying and selling on High Street a particularly fine collection would come in--vinyl, compact disc, cassettes even – after I purchased I’d lament what a shame it was going to be to bust up such a sweetly assembled, beautifully woven, tasteful palette of music. Years if not decades in the purchasing and appreciating and absorption went into it. The man (I'm assuming) went for depth in sidemen like I have never seen: Art Tatum, whom I’ve never liked, showed up in at least a dozen titles.