I was making a thumb drive with videos for my cars and kinda went down an old school rabbit hole. I remember when we had groundbreaking sounds, lyrical feats, and French hip hop was a thing. Remember Luck of Lucien? That’s this dude:
AKA Lucien Revolucien.
But hip hop kinds fell victim to its own success. I know, because I grew up through the revolution. Hip hop won the war against against old values and just became the BGM. My daughter saw me flipping through YouTube videos and lamenting the current near-absence of female rappers. She said, “Well, there sure isn’t any Lauryn Hill.”
Sad to hear about Gucci, but happy to hear he’s been dealing with it and has someone to lean on. I’ve been listening to Trap House 5 every day since I heard, and it’s got that hungry from-the-gutter vibe.
My pal T brought his 80 year old uncle to Thailand for an end of the year trip and we hung out for a week. It was his first trip on an airplane for 30 years, and everyone had a great time with him. I’ve been putting together a series of Shorts with the highlights.
We walked by after dinner, Taro knew the owner and the band. He unslung his travel guitar and immediately hopped in. Music ensued. I posted a much longer vid as a livestream on FB: T jamming at Kalanbatu on Khao San Road
I expect there will be a future of AI-generated John Lennon creations in the not-so-distant future, but for now, this will do… Is this the last song to be released with his real voice?
Back in 2006, I became a bit obsessed with a video I found on this newly-purchased video sharing (or was it video dating?) site called YouTube. It was a 2-minute ad shot in Hong Kong for Nintendo featuring a catchy tune with enchanting vocals called Hatsukoi by Mayumi Kojima (小島麻由美). I blogged about it back then, and looking at the comments, it actually led to a meetup in real life that led all the way to Thailand (where are you, bro?).
That video has disappeared and reappeared (only on YT) several times over the years, always in [potato x potato] resolution, and I’ve tried to keep the post for it updated with a live embed… So it was to my great surprise to find an HD link for it today, after I’d updated the low-res version on my blog post, of course.
Those notes she hits in the chorus (after the lululala) still really do it for me, which is sadly not something I can say for all of the music I used to love – I listened to a lot of it way too much and I can’t even sit through a whole song most of the time now.
I’ll paste the JP lyrics to Hatsukoi by Mayumi Kojima below, because most Japanese lyric sites still employ anti-copy technologies from the early 90’s, which are very annoying.
