So we WERE able to make it to All Points West on Sunday and it was a sweaty, music-filled, muddy time. But first we had to wait all morning/afternoon for the torrential downpours to end and let the powers-that-be decide that the weather would hold out long enough to open the doors. There were many conflicting twitter reports and the All Points website was very infrequently updated but finally we decided to brave the crowds and the mud. On the way in we heard the Silversun Pickups and We Are Scientists but the first band that we got to see up close was Elbow. They rocked it on the mellow tip (they sound amazingly clean and sharp live) and geared us up for a walk to the Bullet Stage for a rollicking Black Keys show.
Gloomy skies @ All Points West on Sunday
One thing that must be said about this whole All Points West festival experience: being forced to drink $7 beers in a “beer garden”/animal-pen-filled-with-mud is not a good or sustainable model. Get it together APW, this is rock and roll festival, idiots!
So for a little while I got caught up in looking for something to eat while Melissa explored the VIP area, and then Coldplay starting raining down some anthems, covering “Fight for your Right” along the way in a nice Beastie Boys tribute, which was a fitting bookend of sorts to Jay-Z’s cover of “No Sleep Til Brooklyn” on Friday evening.
Coldplay w/ crazy laser beams @ All Points West 2009
Just a little while later, we wandered over to check out MGMT, who was playing on the Bullet Stage across the way, and actually got a couple of decent videos of them performing.
MGMT – Pieces of What (live @ All Points West 2009):
MGMT – Weekend Wars (live @ All Points West 2009):
On the way home, some of us were covered with mud, but only on our shoes/pants/legs/hair/outside parts. Not in our hearts. God Bless America!
-ev2bk
East Village to Brooklyn 
Jam(s) of the Day – Mapping Social Networks and Technology in the Rap Game
Yesterday a friend of mine out in San Francisco sent me a link to this song called “Hit Me On Twitter” by Mistah F.A.B., and it sent me off on a train of thought about the use of various social networking sites in recent rap jams. Even more broadly, it made me start to think about all of the songs that heavily feature some new, cool, technology in the chorus. Does this sort of usage cause a rise or decline in popularity of the social network/technology? Or does it only occur once the social network/technology has reached a certain societal saturation level? I honestly think that it might be possible to reconstruct the evolution of technology, and the popularity of that technoolgy within the culture, by “reading” rap songs.
I’m sure that this has already been contemplated by various stoned white dudes over the years, and I’m not about to try to get into it on a Thesis Paper level of research or detail, but here’s a couple of examples (in text or video) of what I’m getting at, starting with pagers, just to get the conversation started:
Big L – Lyric from “Ebonics”:
“Hit me on the hip means page me”
Lil Scrappy & G’$ Up – Cell Phone Watch:
J-Shin ft. T-Pain – Send Me an Email:
(Anyone who watches A Shot At Love on MTV will notice the Tila Tequila cameo in there)
Brandon T. Jackson ft. T-Pain (?) – What’s Yo Myspace:
(haha I love the part where he starts naming hot celebrity females that he wants to become friends with on Myspace: “Lindsay Lohan, put me in your Top 8!”…also this always comes up as T-Pain, but that just doesn’t sound right to me. Dude ALREADY has a song about emails… one is enough)
Mistah F.A.B. – Hit Me On Twitter:
And honestly, I compiled that list just off the top of the dome. I think this needs to be explored further. Someone want to call up Marcyliena Morgan at Harvard and get her on the case? I smell a best-seller here.
Know any other songs that would fit the bill? Then post it in the comments, already!
-Drew
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Tagged as Jam of the Day, mistah f.a.b., rap, social networks, T-Pain, technology