This is a weird one.

Held up by collectors for its scarcity and uniform approach to funk and soul music, Cleveland’s Hot Chocolate didn’t make it big. And neither did its front-man and guitarist, Lou Ragland – although he did tour with the Ink Spots for a short time during the eighties.

Hearing the self titled album – its only one – from Hot Chocoloate its curious that the same landscape gave birth to S.O.U.L. as well as a handful of relatively important punk groups. None of these acts share a tremendously apparent sound. But an artist, and we’ll assume that musicians count as artists, is charged with rendering his or her time and place in whatever medium is chosen. The difference between Hot Chocolate and S.O.U.L. is minimal – but those punk bands?

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Hearing folks like Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan spit out couplets as well composed as they are well performed has informed that last fifty years worth of musicians and writers. Getting to the middle of any matter was somehow reduced to a pair of lines, sometimes flowery in nature, but sometimes simple and cinematic. Looking out a back to onto a vast sprawl of emptiness hasn’t ever sounded good unless sung by one of these two folks.

So, over the last half century, the fact that people (imitators or not) have approximated the sound of each one of these folks isn’t a tremendous surprise. And certainly, a good portion of the time, recreating either Cooke or Dylan’s sound wasn’t on purpose. These two men have simply changed American music.

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Extricating the gangster influence from hip hop isn’t going to happen. And even if someone proclaimed that that was a goal, it’d be a futile one. It’s a part of the music. So, despite various button down types decrying improper imagery and glorification of a questionable lifestyle, it’ll continue on as before. But honestly, that’s probably good for the music.

When Prodigy and Havoc were eighteen years old in 1993, the duo released the first record in a career weighted down with albums. Juvenile Hell, though, isn’t considered the group’s highlight. And that’s true. The duo’s next album The Infamous is solid, start to finish. And sure, it retains the tough guy image that Prod and Havoc posited on its first album. It’s an amazingly consistent disc. Complaining just doesn’t make sense.

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Most folks who read – for real, not just in passing, every once in a great while – probably don’t start a book and not finish it. If that does occur, some catastrophe could only explain the inability to complete a nominally easy task. So, my not finishing The Magic Mountain, since it was interrupted by some emergency, can only be explained by my lack of focus, or the boring nature of the book. That latter seems right, though.

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Bands today might believe themselves to possess the same sort of disregard for convention that acts back in the sixties had, but that’s really not the case. If you head out to pretty much any live performance, each act on the bill is going to sound kinda like the one that follows. To a certain extent, that’s to sate the crowd, but no scene can flourish if bands mining disparate territories are kept from co-mingling. None of that means any one group is going to move deftly between genre tropes, but live scenarios go a long way to tipping off players as to what’s acceptable and what’s not.

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The title of Exile’s latest long player is at once a throw back to early days as well as a proclamation of new fangled music distribution.

Named Radio AM/FM it’d be easy to simply understand the Los Angeles based producer to be commenting on the state of radio – past and present. The medium at one point worked as a child’s imagination, spitting out song after song by unseen performers. Anyone could be behind those notes, those harmonies and progressions. And with the expansion of FM radio in the seventies, there should have been an even greater wealth of music to discover. Of course, radio’s wound up being nothing but nonsense. And really, who wants to hear a pre-determined playlist, re-spun every few hours.

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"Every week it's mystery meat..." He's right. Everything's an unknown. But as DOOM so effortlessly displays, his talent isn't obscured by anything other than his mask. Any emcee who can fit the word 'halal' and then talk about skipping bail deserves a quick listen.

With just the catalogs of Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and Eddie Lang making up the truly unique early guitarists in the jazz idiom, exposure to other players sitting in the same general style is always welcome. Of course, a bit further on down the line, the genre gifted listeners with Wes Montgomery, George Benson and Grant Green – each function in relation to pop musics a bit differently. And while guitar jazz continues to morph into new, unexpected branches, looking back at a few earlier players should go along way towards expanding perceptions of what the progression of styles actually sounded like.

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If you grew up listening to or watching media springing from Great Britain, you already know what the word ‘tosser’ denotes. If not, google it and find out why the title to his movie is amusing in more than one way. It’ll be worth the time, guaranteed.

Rock Paper Scissors: The Way Of The Tosser did the rounds at festivals a few years back and was able to garner a bit of positive press, even if the interwebs haven’t always cast an enthusiastic vote. But with a feature as peculiar as this one, there’s good reason why a spate of normals didn’t quite get the whole thing.

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Hearing Columbus dudes get air time around the turn of the millennium was truly amazing. It’d been the better part of a decade since Bone, Thugs ‘n Harmony did anything that folks paid attention to outside of Cleveland. And Columbus hadn’t exactly been churning out hits in the ensuing times. So, for MHz to gain a bit of momentum, RJD2 to get a record deal with a prestigious label, Copywrite head in the same direction and Camu Tao as well was all kind of inspiring. And while the expansion of the internet has been touted as giving random people the belief that their work, of whatever variety, to be heard. For me, it was this stuff. I hadn’t ever even entertained the notion of working out hip hop stuff (I still don’t), but in my life time there hadn’t ever been any sort of spotlight shined on the state I hailed from.

Along with all of this, illogic and Blueprint were kicking around. Heady times.

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