The Darklord Cometh

Last night we got the once-in-a-couple-of-yeartime privilege of seeing Schaffer the Darklord. When I first moved to Portland from Iowa, one of my lifelines to home that I brought with me was a crappy second-or-third generation cassette dub of Syphillis Bill, the immortal Iowa City porn-hop supergroup. Their raw, but insanely clever tales of intercine fictional Iowa gang warfare and explicit male on male/male on female/anybody on whatever sexx raps were on microwave rotation in me and Gabe's first real apartment out here-I remember subjecting an entire vanload of people to the tape on my first trip out to the coast. Schaffer is someone I could see having his life story made into a motion picture someday, I have run into him since Iowa a number of times both as an MC and as a drummer in fucked-up noise bands, and after I fortuitously tracked him down on myspace and heard his new-style jamz. I was impressed both by his flow, which was great to begin with, but obviously had been honed over the years, as well as his incredibly unique choice of topic material (cloning himself to use as a sextoy, how much cat people love their cats, an ode to Craig's List, among others) Gabe saw him perform a short set in New York a few weeks back, and we were stoked to see him throw down for real. Opening act Coolzey was in tandem with another Iowa Citian whose name I cannot recall, but they were a solid tandem, and set the table nicely for STD to pull the tablecloth on some muthafuckas. And pull it he did. His opening number was a brilliant homage to Snoop's "Murder was the Case" that undercut cliches about how he should act as an MC left and right, and refusing to pander to standard Hip-Hop cliches-everybody wave your hands in the air, etc. His only gear was a throwback wireless mic and his trusty li'l STD box which had his jams in it, during the back and forth dialog between the devil and Schaeffer, he stuck the mike into the box to give the devil his say. There was a Terry Gross shout-out among a billion other things. "Cat People" was an incredible jam that just displayed dazzling MC skills but all told within the context of how cute cats are in general, and particularly to their owners. This probably sounds a little "enh", but you had to be there-the beat was jammin', and Mark is the man to pull this type of thing off-he clearly loves his cat. I was going to go through and list everything that stood out, but I'll just say that what I really liked about all of it was that it was serious, but differently serious. STD managed to blend enough humor, pointed commentary, and real skills that you just didn't know what was coming next. Also, "Attack of the Clone Fuckers" showed Mark can still fall back on sex rhymes better than almost anyone. I wanted to slip something in here about his amazing stage presence, but I guess I already sound like enough of a mancrushed blogstalker so I'll just say it was a great show and next time he goes everybody better be there...

and the rivers ran blue with their blood...

I would love to know how this made it out of committee-UNICEF's new advertising campaign is a fairly graphic portrayal of the smurf's village being carpet-bombed. Not sure if this was typical Gargemel Oppression or part of the Smurf's ongoing ethnic strife with the Snorks. It's working. We are getting a lot of reactions and people are logging on to our Web site," UNICEF Belgium spokesman Philippe Henon said Tuesday. Granted, they're probably for the most part stoned college kids looking for a new desktop image, but tprecedentent has been set-children's TV shows are fair game-which would explains Nickelodeon's 2 new Belgian TV series "Belle mauls Sebastian" and "SpongeBob MacheteFace"