From the desk of Nat Friedman
27 Jul 2000

Fellow Ravers,

An issue has recently come to the forefront of our culture which I would like to discuss, if you can spare a moment of your synthetically inebriated lives to consider the thoughts of another rave-goer. That issue is: excessively baggy pants.

Rave boys and rave girls, these pants are an embarrassment to us and everything we stand for (phat beats and plur). They are not only aesthetically displeasing, they decry of ill-made decisions and mistakes yet to come. Not to mention the risk of bodily harm a rave-person takes on! I need not speak of the hazards of passing through revolving doors with superfluously large slacks trailing behind, catching, face slamming to glass, blood, screams.. funeral ill-attended by large-slacked and slack-jawed mourners… a monstrous scene.

And then there is the mountainous cost of the cloth which goes into these tremendous trousers. Bolt upon bolt of denim, meticulously cut and sewn by sore-fingered bleary-eyed eight-year-old Malaysians, who themselves are clad in the most meager hodge-podge garments, hewn together from whatever refuse happened to catch in the drainage tracts that week, yearning for something more substantial. An entire Malaysian orphanage could be clothed using the material from just one raver pant leg (numerous pockets and zippers included).

And yet we, the children of electronica — the harbingers of a new generation of music, culture and thought! — we continue with this life of undeserved pantaloonial excess. Hazardous and humiliating slackitude, all paid for by dad’s platinum card. Why, Levi Strauss would turn in his grave if he knew that modern dungarees bore a more striking resemblance to the ship’s sails from whence the fabric which powered his empire was originally taken than to the garments that launched his career.

Webster’s dictionary defines “pant” as:

pant, n., 1. an outer garment covering each leg separately and
usually extending from the waist to the ankle — usually used in
plural 2. plural, chiefly British: men’s underpants 3. plural:
PANTIE 4. with one’s pants down: in an embarrassing position (as
of being unprepared to act).

People of the rave, I ask you not to get caught with *your* pants down. Save us all the mortification of these unnecessarily baggy leggings, save yourselves from their dangers, and let’s all save our money for the pacifiers, glow sticks and bottled water by which we define ourselves and our place in the universe.

Ecstatically yours,
Nat Friedman aka “Lieutenant Flibbity Gibbits”

“Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.”

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Daniel Tiger is grey today because I believe that it is fair-use for an artist to build on work from the past. We used to have a culture in this country of using the past to build the future, a culture that has scared big business since the beginning and is increasingly being legally attacked. We must fight against this.

Late last year an artist named DJ Danger Mouse created an album, using the A Capella version of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, and samples taken from The Beatles’ White Album, and made a new piece of work called The Grey Album. The project has been fairly widely praised, and, from personal experience, it’s fucking great. EMI, who own the copyright to the Beatles original recordings (Michael Jackson owns the actual publishing rights), sent a cease-and-desist letter to Danger Mouse claiming that he was infringing on their intellectual property and demanding that he stop all distribution of the album. A few sites posted MP3’s of the album and were sent letters from EMI as well.

In response, music activist group Downhill Battle, have organized Grey Tuesday, a day where various sites will either host the album in its entirety or turn grey in support, or both. Daniel Tiger can’t afford to host the files directly, but you can find any number of sites that are.

For more on my take on fair-use and copyright laws check out this presentation given by Lawrence Lessig, who was one of the lawyers as part of the Eldred v. Ashcroft case against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

In the middle of August he came into town
As dry as a bone from the sun beating down
He walked past the tables out back to the sink
He said he was broke, but he’d kill for a drink

Young Janice the waitress she cut him some pie
She said it’s to die for and laughed in his eyes
He looked back at Janice and liked what he saw
Soon they were leaving out through the back door

The customers sat there the coffee grew cold
Young Janice was missing the owner was told
At supper that evening a posse had formed
They searched the Clinch Mountain ‘til way after dawn

The hound dogs they tracked ‘em way up to the fork
Of North Holston River on Mendota shores
They found his torn britches and Janice’s dress
And it looked like something had chewed on the rest

What happened, what happened? The people all cried
We don’t know what happened the sheriff replied
There’s pieces of people all over the place
So many you can’t tell a leg from a face

Now maybe a bear caught the lovers alone
Or some jealous sweetheart it never was known
Never a clue there was a never a trace
A Clinch Mountain mystery told to this day

- Written by: Dixie & Tom T. Hall
- Performed by: The Larry Stephenson Band

My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends- It gives a lovely light!

- from ‘Fist Fig’ (1920)

This album is amazing. It’s dark, it’s powerful, it’s fucking brilliant. I originally picked it up cause I had heard ‘Family Affair’ and was blown away by it, and after listening to the whole album I was amazed. Sly and the Family Stone were one of the greatest bands of the original Funk generation, and the fact that they are almost unknown today is just ridiculous.

This album, along with their other works, helped to create and recreate Funk. Sly, with George Clinton and James Brown, is one of the pioneers of modern Funk and this album shows a darker side of it then you have often heard before or after. The whole album is muddy, mixed, crazy, intense, and utterly genius. Sly sounds tortured, which he basically was, this album was made right before he fell into his Coke addiction, and he never really came back. He was also just fucking angry, angry with the death of the Civil Rights Movement, angry with the racism of America, angry with everything really. The optimism of their early albums is almost nowhere to be found. Out of all his anger, and addiction, he made a statement that stands today as one of the most impressive, and intense albums ever made. You have to hear this, it’s that simple.

Every time I tell some one that I love James Taylor, and get nothing but an odd stare in response, I wonder if anyone has ever really listened to the albums that make him great. This album, along with ‘Gorilla’, and ‘Sweet Baby James’, is an amazing record that if you haven’t heard you really should listen to. Anyone remotely interested in the history of music should hear this album for sure. It is a definite statement about the attitudes and ideas of a generation, reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, and unsure where to go next.

The whole record is one of those albums that just blow me away. I don’t really understand how this collection of songs came to be together, only that everything fits, everything works, and I’m just glad they did. I love pretty much all the songs, but ‘Riding on a Railroad’, ‘Soldiers’, ‘Mud Slide Slim’, and ‘Machine Gun Kelly’ are my own favourites. If you like Folk music, or you just want to hear something amazing, this album fucking rocks. A lot of Taylor’s later stuff is very weak, but I can still put this album on and be blown away by it.

1972’s Tangerine, recorded for the Prestige label while Gordon was still living in Europe, is one of the finest Bop albums from the period, and still a great record to hear. Gordon, who had relocated to Copenhagen a decade earlier, seeking commercial and artistic success, visited the United States often, to record with Rudy Van Gelder, probably Jazz’s most popular recording engineer. On this album he plays with Thad Jones, Hank Jones, Stanley Clarke, Louis Hayes, Cedar Walton, Buster Williams, Billy Higgins, and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.

The album is very much in his own Bop tradition, and it shows throughout all 5 songs on the album. The first, ‘Tangerine’, is definitely one of my favourite Jazz recordings of all time. It has a very catchy hook, great solos, and features Flugelhornist Thad Jones. Of the other tracks, ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ is probably my favourite, but they are all really good. Some of the songs have a very Sonny Rollins feel to me, which is definitely a good thing. If you have already heard Miles, and Coltrane, Monk, and Mingus, pick this one up to hear some, slightly less well known, but amazing Jazz.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard anything off this album before. Ok, now lower your hand if the only songs you can remember are the huge hits like ‘Tennessee’ or ‘Mr. Wendal’. Now lower your hand if you don’t remember what any of the songs were actually about. Anyone left? This is where I was at until recently. I owned the album a long time ago, when I was 11 or so, and my memory of it wasn’t real good. Listening to it at this point, I noticed how political, and really amazingly radical it was for it’s time. As a kid I didn’t pick up on a lot of the messages and it’s pretty awesome to see how much they were really saying, and how little I understood it.

Songs like ‘People Everyday’, ‘Mr. Wendal’, ‘Fishin’ 4 Religion’, ‘Give a Man a Fish’, and ‘Tennessee’ are powerful statements that address issues not just from 1992 when the album came out, but from today as well. Anyone who likes modern political Hip-Hop should pick this one up to hear one of the places it came from.