- while listening to the radio - "What are these youngsters listening to?"
- while watching tv - "Why does everything have to be so violent?"
- while sitting in a movie theater - "What happened to ambiguity?"
While the tender days of my youth seep out of the garbage bag of my life, I wonder if things have diminished in quality and craftsmanship, or have I outgrown the slobbery, hypnotic whirl of my teenage days where everything was new and all the experiences were mine to experience, and all the lessons mine to learn anew?
Let's take music for example. Back in the day when I started my love affair with hip-hop I started to realize that for me, the beauty of this genre was in the music. The rhymes were definitely a part of the picture, but the groups I listened to had a common thread; warm, wooden,
Now with the advent of in-home music production that can actually compete with major artists, (yet only in competent hands, any yahoo can put loops together!) and the "I need it now and I can actually have it now" mentality, music and it's accompanying memory making ingredients have seemed to lose their luster.
All of these wonderings and wanderings were abated when I heard QKnox's "Meet Mr. Q" - a collection of no less than 30+ homemade beat blankets to warm this cold and lonely heart of a disinterested music snob.
With "Mr. Q" I see the progression of music stretching in both directions; historic and futuristic. With his latest offering, QKnox asks the listener to engage in a temporal freeze frame. A timeless landscape that is created from the limestone of some old and new soul and jazz records, shaped by the hands of the present to craft a gift to the future. In another way it seems QKnox takes ancient relics, crushes them into a powder and forges new metals and alloys with which he builds a new and fantastic world.
QKnox gives a tip of the hat to his musical heros while maintaining a stance that is completely his own. "Meet Mr. Q" takes me back to those smoked out cars of my younger days when the music made the magic happen. This is a treat to listen to and it's an album that can be delved into again and again, as new twists and turns are available from each successive listen. Keep your ears out for Captain Jean Luc Picard. He's all over this!!
As we continue to try to scrape what goodness we can from the crusty innards of life, it's nice to know that someone is walking behind us, picking up the scraps that we forgot, and giving them back to us in shiny new packages that make us remember when things were right in the world and we took time to appreciate.
Favorite Tracks -
Find a New Way - Something about this is yum.
Call Me Up - genius Chromeo reimagining
http://qknoxbeats.bandcamp.com/album/meet-mr-q
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