Funky beats, sax and divas

Two of my peers, Pierre Schaeffer and Wiley

I have made a funky house remix of "Panty, Bras, Coke and Cameras" by Durrty Goodz. Hope you like it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Full story over on thefader.com.

PS: DJs/bloggers/A&Rs/Liberal Democrat MPs who want a 320 kbps MP3, holla at ya boy (that's me).

"My president is black, my Lambo is blue"

My friend Sara was overflowing with music-related Obama puns (some more tenuous than others) on my Facebook page the other day so I thought I'd steal them for here and see if anyone can do any better. Here's what she came up with:

Shola Obama
Baracka Som Sistema
White House Banton
Head of States and Heartbreak

Come up with some more and win a minimum of four years' supply of hope and about four minutes' worth of e-props.

Sniffle, sniffle

The chorus gets me every time.

Panty, Bras, Coke and Cameras

This week's Fader blog column is up.

Btw, imagine how completely insane you'd go if you were forced to listen to this chorus on loop and look at my new logo for an hour – while on acid.

Readers who are freaked out by trippy shit, look away now

Wrap your eyeballs around my new logo, by Henry McCausland.

In praise of Coolio on Celebrity Big Brother

I wrote this thing in which I expounded my love of Coolio for the Guardian TV blog a week ago but unfortunately it only went up on Friday – the day after Channel 4 screened the episode in which he started getting aggressive and tediously petty with some of the laydeez. Owing to this, the piece makes me look like I'm a deranged misogynist – which isn't (entirely) true.

I'm thinking I should've got that guy up there to give me some pointers beforehand. I'll know for next time ...

Happy, contented and fulfilled

My first column of 2009 for thefader.com is up. Read here.

Benazir Bhutto rap tribute

I'm not sure if that's some Jon E Cash-style square wave bass or just heavy feedback that comes in after about 52 seconds.

(Stolen from Vice)

The biggest funky tune right now

Peeps have been telling me about this "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" funky tune for a while. I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what they meant until I did a search on the interweb today and found it. It's had 1.5 million YouTube hits, wouldn't you know. Who can argue with figures like that? The evidence is plain to see – this one is, as RWD magazine would say, "about to blow". You know where you heard it first.

Ugandan dancehall and the Ghetto Republic of Uganja

This week's Scene and Heard for the Guardian music blog is on the Ugandan dancehall scene and the breakaway republic that dancehall collective Fire Base Crew has formed in a slum in the country's capital, Kampala. Below are some words regarding this topic by VBS.TV's Santiago Stelley, who recently filmed a documentary about Fire Base.

When we went to Uganda we weren’t really planning on looking into the music scene at all, but from the minute we landed in Kampala we started hearing dancehall everywhere we went. And we love dancehall – a little over a year ago we shot a ton of dancehall artists for the Vice Kills Jamaica series and we had also followed up in New York with Beenie Man and other artists who weren’t on the island during our visit. Anyway, I knew that dancehall was supposed to be pretty popular in sub-Saharan Africa, but I certainly didn’t expect anything on the scale we encountered.

Our first days in Kamapala we kept seeing and hearing these trucks blasting dancehall as they drove around the neighbourhoods selling CDs, so at some point we started asking our Ugandan fixer about the local artists. He was the first person to tell us about the Fire Base Crew, but he also told us about the complex politics of the local dancehall scene.

In Uganda, the dancehall world plays an interesting role in day-to-day politics and governance. At first, the idea of a dancehall crew having its own president, vice president, ministers etc seemed kind of silly to us, but in reality Fire Base do play an active role in local politics.