Whoever’s making commercials for Bacardi is a genius.  I usually don’t even drink rum, but this new commercial certainly has me thirsty for a mojito.  The music is by “Matt and Kim”, the song is called “Daylight”.  They’re on Green Label Sound (who seem to be some sort of musical offspring of PepsiCo/Mountain Dew – and also have some sort of relationship to an artist I’ve heard of before – Flosstradamus). Matt and Kim have an official website too!  You can download an honest to goodness MP3 of the song from the label’s site.  And finally there’s full access to a video of the commercial on YouTube!  Unbelievable, I guess after all those years of having to search out your favorite commercial’s songs, lyrics, videos, etc. are over and done with.  Now all this media is at our fingertips and I’m pretty sure the folks running the show at the companies that come up with the commercials, that make the products and that create the music … finally get it!  Thank you social media!

Here are the lyrics for anybody who’s trying to decypher the words:

(more…)

Musically, I am more of a sponge than an explorer. My brother Konstantin actively searches for music because of his DJ habit/hobby. I on the other hand like to surround myself with people who know all about music and soak up their expertise by engaging in good conversation during good times (usually lubricated by good spirits – the kind you imbibe and the kind you have when you’re surrounded by good people). In any case, be mindful of the long preamble – I usually ramble on this long only when something profound is about to be said.

My friend Sunshine (she’s basically a walking encyclopedia of music) recommended I take a look at a website called Theta States. The conversation arrived at this particular junction because we were discussing the music of Atmosphere – by far my favorite band. Theta States is the website of a DJ called CPI, who Sunshine introduced to on the premise that she mixes Atmosphere tracks in her hip-hop DJ mixes. Now I’m hooked, CPI is like water for my sponge. I can’t help but soak up everything she mixes or talks about and enjoy it without a second thought.

She puts out a somewhat-weekly musical blog via her Facebook page which includes new releases she comes across. At this point I’ve been eating up these blog compilations right out of her hand, and highly recommend them if you’re not into the mass-market top 10/40/100 Billboard kind of material. In fact, to pass the time between her blog releases, I’ve started going through her blog archives (which may or may not be up at the moment – her website went down recently and is still being restored). I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself once I’m done listening to all the DJ mixes on her page and with the complete blog archives.

The catch-phrase / witty title of her website is “bedroom music for bedroom people”. Don’t dismiss it as sleepy though, her hip-hop mixes which include quite a bit of underground hip-hop goodness are intelligent, absolutely brilliant works of art. She even sprinkles all that intelligent hip-hop goodness with some spoken word. Basically she plays stuff that gives the genre a good name – poetry set to music.

Finally, if you’ve got any sense of humor at all, you’ll love the way she writes about music in her blog. She reminds me of my buddy Josh who is a writer good enough to melt the hearts of Rolling Stone execs, but uses his skills for good – not evil (Rolling Stone being the mass-market leader-of-the-pack it is nowadays). So if you don’t mind the fact that she’s Canadian, you better hop over to Theta States, and then on to her Facebook page. I highly recommend a 4-part hip-hop mix called “City Hearts Aimed Skyward”. Its 4+ hours of the best music for background listening during work, intelligent conversation and the kind of good times with good people I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. Go, get to it, click click click.

I first saw Tony Hawk Underground 2 at E3 this spring. Needless to say, the visuals greatly impressed me, it just seemed like a definite hit. I mean, in what other game can you skate around as a fatso in tidy-whiteys? The game is coming out tomorrow (October 5th) and is probably going to break all kinds of records for sales, its been getting advertised all over the place. One thing that’s super impressive to me is the soundtrack, which includes one of my all-time favorite bands – Atmosphere. That’s right, their single off of 7’s Travels – “Trying to find a balance” is on there. I’m really glad to see them making inroads and getting placement for their music, its freakin’ awesome. Besides Atmosphere there’s Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, The Living End, and tons of other great bands. Unbelievable, Activision really scored with this lineup. Here’s the full list of music on the THUG2 soundtrack:

(more…)

I’ve been watching FUSE more than usual lately – simply because they are the only decent music you can get on TV nowadays. In any case, they’re playing a lot of commercials for Sunkist orange soda. And the music (their website plays it) is just too groovy to resist researching further.

After a quick google search, found out that its a song by Blackalicious from their album NIA. Its called Reanimation, and let me tell you, this is one funky pick-me-up hip-hop song. The lyrics are choice as well. Go check it out on the Sunkist Soda website – click on Sunkist TV to view the commercial I’m talking about.

The lyrics follow..

(more…)

A while ago FUSE posted a link to a Flash animation entitled Maiyahi (in the FUSE What the F*ck section – highly recommended, go to their site and click on the menu option Timekillas and then on What the F*ck). Needless to say this resulted in numerous replays of said Flash animation, to everybody learning the song, etc, etc. For a while I thought the song was in Japanese, but apparently its actually in Romanian. Here are the lyrics to Dragostea Din Tei by Haiducii (or here without translation. I’m pretty sure the MP3 is floating around on file sharing networks, just search for that or some permutation of “nu ma, nu ma iei” or “ma-ia-hii” or something like that. Of course, not to be outdone, other people made their own renditions of the song. Here’s an especially bizzare animation. In terms of absurdity, this last one is up there with the Star Wars kid, but not quite as funny.

Update: O-Zone CD on Amazon.fr, apparently not available from the US Amazon site. And a Lego video for the song has surfaced. Truly bizzare, and I’m amazed that somebody would spend that much time doing frame-by-frame animation with Legos for ANY song. (via Anticlown Daily)

Update 2: Ok, just for sake of completeness, here’s the real video and their official site under Universal Germany and a Romanian official site and a fansite. Apparently the Lego version is pretty close to the way the real video looks, who would’ve figured. Except the real video is basically a flashback to the era of boyband videos – ouch, maybe that’s still popular over in Europe.

And here are the lyrics:

(more…)