Slothrust - Cubicle

Put On Dog

Jay Reatard | Oh It's Such A Shame

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

High Visceral - Psychedelic Porn Crumpets

'Mind Is On My Mind (featuring Samuel T. Herring)' is taken from the new album, Welcome Back To Milk by Du Blonde (the new project from Beth Jeans Houghton) out now on Mute. Get the album here: http://po.st/DuBlondeStore / Digital - http://po.st/DuBlondeDigital / CD - http://po.st/DuBlondeCD / LP - http://po.st/DuBlondeLP

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24 Jul 2015 - THIRSK/ DEER SHED FESTIVAL / po.st/DuBlondeDeerShedFest
4/5/6 Sep 2015 - LARMER TREE GARDENS/ END OF THE ROAD FESTIVAL / po.st/DuBlondeEOTR

Du Blonde - Mind Is On My Mind (featuring Samuel T. Herring)

Prod. by peril
Lyrics by me
Vocals by me
Mix and master by me

Lyrics:

Kiss me, kiss me
Heart stimulation
While I'm near -
life is you
Love reservation

Hiss please
Hiss in my ears
Scratch me with your hands
The pain release is awful
But you got to take care of me

This pain is new
Lost in confusion
Hands are shaking
I'm not my usual self

Last night didn't know about you
Now I'm frightened
Cuz i cant live without u

Here I'm right here
You've never seen me crying
God strikes with lightning
From the blood-stained sky

In my head in my head
I feel alive I feel alive again
But you don't have to pretend

Jay Reatard | Oh It's Such A Shame

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