What I Listened To This Week 2025-01-24
Music is really going to get me through this year. I can feel it. Can you?
The new releases just keep coming. Musicians and DJs dropping new shit like the world’s about to end or something. Meanwhile, it’s the one’s who have been around the longest who remind us why they’ve been around the longest.
The Newest and New-ish
Zentronix - Music for the Apocalypse Imminent
Zentronix is the online moniker of writer (and scholar, organizer, DJ) Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and other books, including the forthcoming Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America. Real heads also know him as DJ Zen, co-founder of the Solesides Collective. Like me, he recently kicked his Substack newsletter back into gear after a hiatus and dropped this mix on that day when we celebrated MLK’s life and legacy, the old president became the new president, and the richest man in the world did that gross, goofy salute but wouldn’t stand on business. Frenetic, high-BPM most of the way through before abruptly mellowing out into some kind of fatigued optimism—this was the perfect soundtrack for that weird day.
De La Soul feat. Choklate - Bigger
It’s been dope seeing Choklate, a fixture of the 2000s-2010s Seattle hip-hop and R&B scene (now based in LA), featured on songs with some certified legends recently. Last year, it was with Moby, and just this past week, an unreleased De La Soul loosie surfaces, with everyone sounding as good as they ever did. It was recorded during the 2004 sessions that resulted in The Grind Date, though it didn’t make the album. This def sounds like the mid 00s version of Chok, and it turns out the connection this album has to Seattle goes deeper than the two Jake One-produced songs, including the album’s legendary finale. For a song that’s older than streaming platforms itself, this one sounds refreshingly fresh.
Cymande - Chasing An Empty Dream
Nearly all things that get slapped with the label “timeless” just aren’t. Especially music. Sure, some songs and albums have longevity. But they’re still of a particular era. So I’ll avoid the pretense of calling Cymande’s music, whether it was released in the early 1970s or now, “timeless,” as tempting as it is. “Chasing An Empty Dream,” the lead single off Renascence, their first album in 40 (!!!) years, doesn’t just sound impossibly both like an early 70s song and something made yesterday, it feels spacetime-transcendent.
A large part of this is owed to the fact that, in the time gap between this song and their last album, the British band’s unique blend of music traditions of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora with soul and funk lived many more lives as breakbeats and samples for hip-hop artists. That they not only lived to witness this, but returned to form after 40 years apart, is a remarkable story that bookends not just their career, but perhaps an entire cultural era.
Ebo Taylor, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad - Ebo Taylor JID 022 (Jazz Is Dead)
One of the dope things about working radio in the 2020s is getting the plug on albums early, when only parts of the forthcoming album are currently available. Legally, that is. That’s the case with this album, the Ghanian legend Ebo Taylor’s first in seven years, dropping at age 90.
This record is warm. Funk, psychedelia, and jazz across generations and continents. Two songs, “Obra Akyedzi” and “Obi Do Woa (If Someone Loves You)” are available to stream now. The whole thing drops on the 31st. Between listening to this record and Cymande’s Renascence (which also drops on the 31st), it feels like the upper limits of how youthful one can sound when nearing the century mark is being tested now more than ever.
Damon Locks - Click
I appreciate spoken word poetry on the stage, and I hold in high regard music-poetry legends like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron on one end and Leonard Cohen on the other. But tbh I’m usually underwhelmed by most spoken word poetry set to music.
This is a rare track that cleared the high bar for me. Played this track off Chicago multidisciplinary artist Damon Locks’s new album, List of Demands, on the radio on filling in on the KEXP Overnight slot this week. At first, it was the instrumental that kept my attention, but as the song continued, I was drawn by the actual writing and delivery. Not doing too much, not saying much that stuck as quotable but saying just enough, with enough intrigue, to get me to shut my own brain off and absorb it all. Not sure if a Nihilistic Saul Williams vibe is what mans was going for (“List of Demands” is literally the title of a Saul Williams song), but I dug it. Something I’d mostly bump on solitary drives and walks.
Busta Rhymes feat. YG Marley - Treasure and Gold
The closing track of Busta Bus’s new EP, Dragon Season… The Awakening. While his peers put out music in the past year largely returning to their 90s roots, doing what’s familiar. Or, pivoting to something else completely, Busta finds a happy medium, sounding both like the Busta we’ve always known but also presenting himself in a slightly different way, fully Patois’d out. No surprise, though. Since the beginning, he’d switch his flow from song to song, his intensity from bar to bar, perhaps solidifying the spot of being the most dynamically ranged rapper not named DMX, unmatched by any rapper alive.