Holy Ghost! is my new all-day music obsession at work, so I thought it’d be worthwhile to share the joy. For the past few weeks, I’ve found myself propelling through the day with a few favorite tracks full of electronic-pop-dancing goodness, but my all-time #1 hit is “Dance a Little Closer” (closely followed by “Do it Again”). The catchy tune is jam-packed with rhythmic beats, a super great chorus, and general awesomeness. The lyrics are great too – extolling the virtues of living out youth with hands-up-head-back excitement and carefree-ness. It’ll pick up your Tuesday. Give it a listen.
Rockstar always seem to have a few moments in every game that is paired with an awesome music sequence. So far in GTA, that sequence involves one of the characters that you play smoking a whole lotta weed and then hallucinating. The hallucination includes you flying over the city of Los Santos (LA) in a psychedelic trippy haze to this tune. The C90s are a London duo with an obvious love for that French electro sound from the late 00’s. The track is a loose and perfect approximation of the overall feeling you get in the game and it’s breezy synth lines and chilled melodies will have you wanting to go out and just chill. Check this track out.
It’s October, yet it’s 20+ degrees outside. This means you want to listen to summer tunes. This little track from Austin’s La Vega will help you get into some late summer vibes. It sounds like something from the 60’s, which automatically qualifies it for a summer track. I wonder why is that?
My sister and her work spouse are acronym SMEs (subject matter experts). Some examples include:
JFA – Just Fell Asleep, as in ‘I’ve spent the past hour churning this organic homemade ice cream and it’s still the consistency of soup. JFA. I’mma go buy an ice cream snickers.”
BGCM – Big Green Check Mark, as in “This farmer’s market has free samples? BGCM.”
and my personal favorite:
JVOM – Just vomited, as in “He spent an hour recounting every mile of his triathlon. JVOM JFA.” (Double points for double usage).
However, a new usage of JVOM has come into being with the recent discovery of Toussaint Morrison, a hip-hop artist out of the Midwest. After seeing this video, the consensus is that a person might JVOM after experiencing something so incredibly adorable:
After over-indulging in the extreme dosage of “holy crap that’s adorable” of Toussaint Morrison’s “Can’t Relive the Party” I checked out his bandcamp and found that he’s more than just a pretty face and golden pipes – the man a) oozes creativity and b) has a story to tell. A winning combination for an artist.
His most recent album, Fast Times at Trillmont High, tell the story of Juice, a tutor at a fictional high school in the midwest, giving a tour to Ms. Day, a visiting teacher from a school in South Korea. According to his Facebook, the album was inspired when Morrison was hired on to teach spoken word poetry at a high school in Minneapolis. To publicize, he went classroom to classroom performing rap and spoken word poetry about the class, racial disparity, drop-out rates, and stratification in Minneapolis, which led to huge student enrollment, and a dismissal the next day.
While this might seem like a hugely depressing subject matter for an album, Morrison incorporates it well – forming likable characters, a comprehensive story-line, and even creating stories within stories in the album. True to his roots as a spoken word poet, listening to Fast Times at Trillmont High is more akin to listening to live lit or a radio serial back in the day than listening to an album. And while he does focus on racial and social disparity in this fictional high school, he also keeps it light with stories of swim-offs, prom and hulking out. On top of breaking genre barriers and bringing forth delicate issues of race and gender and social status in a meaningful way, Morrison is just a plain old talented musician, merging hip-hop, soul, R&B and indie rock into some super catchy tracks. Give it a listen:
