Blame it on the juice

Blame it on the juice

"late night sex/so wet and so tight..."


kc quilty's been doing a fair amount of recording with Carlos (of Ava Luna down at his Coney Island "recording studio". I say "recording studio" because it's actually the basement of a Korean church. It's somewhat roach infested with low ceilings and it's frequently freezing cold down there in almost any weather. All signs point it it sounding like crap and yet, it's a magical place. Carlos has been doing a lot of awesome sounding stuff down there with pretty much zero dollars worth of equipment. He's got a Mackie PA thing and some decent speakers, a bunch of cruddy vocal mics, and some old German thing called Das Kompressor or soemthing. Casiorossi, Ava Luna, and kc quilty have all been down there among others, check their respective myspace pages, or songs on the Crust Never Sleeps page) for examples.

This isn't just a self promotional post though, I have a point I'm getting around to here. Basically, Carlos is usually generous enough to drive us to and/or from Coney Island because it's a helluva long trip and we're usually recording in the middle of the night. The last few time's we've ridden with him, he's had Hot 97 on the radio, which I have no bones with. In mid-2009, Hot 97 is a tutorial in auto-tune, Melodyne, and synth strings. It's awesome. A lot of the songs sound similar though because they're all run through the same plugins on the same settings I think. And oh god, they play the SAME TWO SONGS over and over.

One of those songs is Jamie Foxx's Blame It (On The Alcohol). First of all, kudos to Jamie for putting out a song with parenthesis. I LOVE parenthesis songs. Second of all, kudos to Jamie for putting out the best/worst song ever. Just listen:



That's T-Pain on the chorus. And Jamie on the verse. Can you hear the difference? It's a pretty medicore song until it hits the chorus with it's stuttering a-a-a-a-a-a effect. I have no idea how/if he does this live. The craziest thing is, Jamie Foxx can actually sing. Why is he bathed in autotune? I'm repulsed and obsessed at the same time.

The other Hot 97-on-the-way-to-Coney-Island song that I keep hearing is "Whatever You Like" by T.I. It would have been cooler if he had called it "(You Can Have) Whatever You Like", but I'll forgive him because it's actually a pretty good song. The chorus vocals are really behind the beat--it's probably the only song I hear on Hot 97 that made me think of Billie Holiday. I mean, it's no "Strange Fruit", but I think it works for Avenue X at 3 AM.