worst song of the year. 2008.

you might immediately think, “oh, it’s paul, he’ll pick something from soulja boy’s library”. 

and then, you’re wrong. while i do admit his songs are garbage, i do think that there is one song the annoyed the crap out of me so much this year.

and the winner is: JASON MRAZ – “I’m Yours”

i’m going to tell everyone first, I AM A JASON MRAZ FAN. i absolutely love his music. and i have been a supporter of his since the live at java joe’s cd. if you want to hear his best album, go pick that one up. 

but i have never wanted to smash a ukulele so much in my life because of that song. the song originally came out in 2007, and i liked it. it was a very cool catchy song at the time. then 2008 came around and the song spread like wildfire. one cover song after another, after another, after another. then the whole thing starts to annoy the crap out of you. as soon as i hear the first 3 notes to that song, i either change the song, turn off the radio, or close your internet window. today i went on blogtv and i looked at a person who was singing and she did i’m yours. it bugged me. so i went on youtube based off curiosity to see how many people did the song as well. and i shit you not it says about 53,200. seriously wtf. thats not even his best song. 

i love cover songs, but yo, 53,000 people singing the same song. there 479 of you youtubers that did 1000 things by jason, and about 300 who did after an afternoon. theres something about being popular that bugs me, wether its from life or even if its from music. people always let more meaningful and beautiful things slip through the cracks. people need to stop making cover songs on youtube because it’s a popular song right now, and start making original or cover songs of something that really means something. don’t sing a cover song because some other person did it, sing a cover song to show a part of you.

one of my favorite cover songs of all time is fiona apple’s across the universe, originally done by the beatles. why? because it’s her own take of a song that she loved. it had a slower tempo, and its production from jon brion is awesome. another one is janita’s enjoy the silence. why? the same reason, they took a song that they loved, and did it in their style. i respect that, and i respect bands like me first and the gimmie gimmies. they do cover songs on their way. 

there is so much music out there in the world that people don’t recognize that i hate it. and i totally understand that it’s all in selective hearing, but people just need to realize that there is a lot out there if you carefully listen. really. 

be bold. do a bill withers song. do a carole king song. do something else. please.

im good.

to first talk about last night, it would have to start from monday afternoon. i got an email from 1iota.com saying that kanye west is going to perform on the jimmy kimmel show for tomorrow. and as soon as i get that email, i jumped on it and got me 3 tickets for it. though i’m not a big love lockdown fan, i still wanted to see kanyeeze in action. so i sent out messages to people who would want to go, and it ended up as me kristian and justice. it was kinda weird that they did it at the very last minute. but anyways, im cousin scott also went too, and to be honest, it was a very good thing he decided to go also.

so the next day rolled by, i got to kristian’s pad at 4 and went out to pick justice up at this apartment in l.a. damn the 405 freeway. i hates it. we decided to take side streets to hollywood and highland to make things faster. i, being the planner that i am, was hoping to get there by 5:30. it didnt happen. ha. we made it to the parking structure about 6:30. i get a call from scott saying he’s already in line. and i couldn’t find him. so i searched the line for him and found him on the other side of the corner. we were currently at the end of the line before i found scott. and it was at least 30 – 40 people between us. so we of course go to his spot. and so we chilled and waited in line until they started letting people in. 7:20 was rolling by until we started to get moving in the line. when we got through to the entrance the guy who was checking off names and tickets decided to count off the last 20 people in line would get in, and everyone else would stay out. so it was a good thing that my cousin was there. and im not sure if any one else has gone to a taping but you have to watch the whole show before the performer does his set. so we waited and found a good spot on the right side of the stage. real close, maybe 4 or 5 people back. so it was finally time to hear the 808 beat.

 

mr. west

the beat drops.      

boom boom . boom. boom.       boom boom. boom. boom. 

like i said earlier, im not a big fan of this song, cause i really would like to hear kanye rapping. but you know what? hearing it live was something else. he brought with him the asian tribal daft punk style drummers with him, and it was pretty dope to hear them with him.

“something something, i forgot the lyrics, on the jimmy kimmel show”. then pow, kanye stops the song because he fucked up. so, in a taping of a show he messed up and we as the audience has to reenact our excitement of kanye west coming out again. 

“ladies and gentlemen, KAN-YE WEST!” (fake OMG screaming and hundreds of roc signs get thrown up)

 

the beat drops.      

boom boom . boom. boom.       boom boom. boom. boom. 

so he gets done with the first verse and chorus then.

“hold on, hold on, are we on live tv? i fucked up”

so guess what, we had to do it over again. i could see why he messed up this time around. it looked as if they started his song before he was ready. and he had to jump in to try and get back into the beat. but it didn’t work. so after a minute break, we tried it again.

 

“ladies and gentlemen, KAN-YE WEST!” (more fake OMG screaming and  less roc signs get thrown up)

 

the beat drops.      

boom boom . boom. boom.       boom boom. boom. boom. 

so this time around he gets it done. and yeah it was dope. he finished the jimmy kimmel show with the good life. what was really good about this version was that he incorporated those drummers in it. the whole sequence towards the lead up of the song was pretty epic. it was like a longer remix of the song. he later had this extremely long breakdown of the song where it was just the drummers and him doing the chorus which i thought was real cool. he did it again and said “one more time!”, but later did the chorus like another three times. but cool none the less. he later did a few cuts off graduation and then finished it off with his verse from put on acappela style. so all in all it was short, but good show. 

 

juice and scott

 

it finished about 9 o clock and we got hungry and we decided to go get something to eat so we wouldnt have to deal with the traffic of people getting out. we looked around and found hooters! i mean it. we went to hooters. and as we were walking in, there was a sign on the door, “2009 hooters girl calendar signing”. and we went in and saw the “best of the best” hooters girls, or so they say. we ordered our food and one of the calendar girls asked if we wanted to buy a calendar and get it autographed and get a picture with them. we all looked around and said, sure, why not. 

 

kristian

so as we were eating the girl came back to us saying that they were ready. and so we put the food on pause and headed towards the ladies and kristian got the calendar and they started signing. then they got all the girls in the room and asked if we can all take a picture with them as a group. they were all kind enough to do so. it was a weird picture moment, cause when we did there were 3 cameras that were taking pictures of us. 1 camera guy was the official hooters guy, and 2 people were just random people. and i dont know why other people would want our picture. but whatever.

 

the roc is in the building.

we finished dinner and got the check, and we looked at it, and they didn’t charge the calendar on there. we payed the bill and we didn’t say shit about it. we slowly made our way out and we just got a free hooters calendar and a picture with the girls. could it get any better? 

so we parted from my cousin after dinner and headed back to justice’s place. and we kicked it for a while before we decided to leave. and as we headed out of justice’s place i get into kristians car and he had a paper in his hand. and i was like oh shit. he gets in and he shows me a ticket. he blocked the sidewalk when he parked at his place. it was so stupid! who walks around at 12:30 at night?! 

well to say it was a good night, it was, before we got a ticket. 

 

 

the beat drops.      

boom boom . boom. boom.       boom boom. boom. boom.

the consensus thinks….

that shortification is legal. we don’t have any legal documents like certain chinese gymnast. so i conducted an opinion survey, on whether or not shortification is legal. so far the vote count is 5 – legal
3 – jailbait , and 1 – i don’t know. in this lovely world of democracy, everyone gets to vote, and because of these numbers, she by consensus is legal.

awesome. go subscribe.

elephants

“if the elephants have past lives yet are destined to always remember. it’s no wonder how they scream like you an i. they must have some temper” – rachael yamagata

sorry for being out of the loop on the blog, for those who even check my blog out. but i’ve been busy and i’ve gone through my up and downs lately. i could have blogged about how my dodgers are in the NLCS but are down 2-0 to the phils. and i also got to meet old school dodger legend bill russell. but aside from that nothing much has gone down. but i am going to blog about one thing in particular; the rachael yamagata show i went to last night.

the day started off slow, had some time to kill cause the borders show started at 7pm. i, being unwise about it, decided to leave at 5:30. which is almost uncharacteristic for me, i usually leave early for these things. unlike the last rachael yamagata show i went to at amoeba, i remembered to bring my camera. last time i forgot it in my car when i went to scotts, and you know how close i was to rachael? right in front of her, with only a sidekick vga camera, pathetic. but this time i remembered to bring it with me. i also picked up my copy of her new double album, “elephants… teeth sinking into heart”, and so should you (if not depressed). just like her other album and ep, it is a bit on the emo side, but damn it hurts so good. 

so as i get stuck in traffic, it approaches the 7pm start time. i get off on hollywood blvd. and head towards vine like the directions told me, and i dont see it! so of course i had to turn back, i made a couple turns and ended up by amoeba and i look to my left and POW its on my left side. so the directions on the website were wrong. and it cost me a few minutes. so i park in the parking structure close to amoeba and look at my watch and see that its about 7:15, and so i start olympic power walking to borders. i get in, and all i hear is silence, i see the “come see rachael yamagata live!” poster, but i couldn’t find where it was at. but as im walking through i hear a round of applause, and thought i should follow the noise, and surely enough i saw rachael at the top of the steps of borders starting her next song.

 

rachael performing at borders

 it was a semi packed house, i think there were more people at the amoeba show, but i didn’t care. i only got to catch a couple songs. from what i heard was that she only did 5 songs and nothing from the happenstance and from ep. i did record the first song i saw, which was “faster”. its being uploaded to the youchoob as we speak. and ill put it on here when its done:

she was dope, though i would have love to hear “be your love” again, i was fine with the new stuff so when i re-listen to it i’ll like it even more. so after the mini-show was over a small line started so she could sign autographs. i was pretty psyched about it, rachael yamagata is pretty awesome, but she doesn’t get the publicity as she deserves. so i had to wait for maybe 20 minutes before i got to her, they had to speed up the line a bit because she had another show to do with ingrid michaelson so she had to leave, but wanted to sign an autograph for everyone in the house. and she was cool enough to take a photo. =)

 

you're the reason why.

anyways, go buy her album and go buy all her other albums! there’s nothing wrong with a little depressing music, especially since its something that’s real. but if you were to get an album, get happenstance, currently its a 5 star album in my ipod. so go out there and support good music.

fpac. 2008.

 

san pedro.

hey people. i went to fpac this weekend with a couple friends just to chill cause we really didn’t have anything else to do on that saturday. so we took a drive down to san pedro instead. for those of you who don’t know what fpac is, it is the festival of philippine art & culture. i have been to one of these since tyrone lue was a laker. weird fact on whhy i remember it, because my family and i went to his autograph signing before we went to fpac. so it had to have been at least 5 years old. so anyways, i mainly wanted to go because of a couple of the headliners, ms christine “happyslip” gambito and ms camile velasco. more on them in a bit. but before we hit up fpac, we had to do some stuff at frank and sons, i wish i was strapped with cash cause i could have spent a lot on there. but anyways on to fpac.

 

thai food at a filipino event. good thing there are long lines.

so me steve and paolo finally get there. there was a little parking situation where there were signs put up saying you should park on 22nd street. but it was further out than 37th street. that was wayyyy too far, so we looked for parking at the event, and found one sorta fast, in an illegal type way. everyone seemed to be parking along the coast and curb of the road. signs were clearly posted no parking and no stopping, but hundred of people disregarded the signs. so by the time we get there, we hadn’t eaten yet. and it was already 1:30. we headed straight to the food stands, we look and the filipino food had a long ass line. so we decided to eat at the thai bbq stand. and thats where i found my cousin scott, he also was celebrating his 24th birthday. happy birthday again. anyways, while we were inching closer to the cashier, i decided to go in line for smoothies at another stand. and there was this girl there that looked familiar, but i just couldnt lay my finger on it. until that night when i found out it was paola’s sister. its a crazy small world. and so as we were bringing our food to the benches was pass by the bakitwhy.com booth. i look to my right…….. it was christine! so i get to the bench get a little antsy and then eat eat eat eat. i finished eating and then headed out to see her. 

 

i got her digits.

i had a cameraman and a videographer with me to capture this event. and yes, i youtubed it. first question i usually get is, why did i let her sign my powerbook. it is because the very first video i saw of hers was her mac beautiful video. thanks sister. in it she sings about her powerbook, and i find out that we have the exact same one. a 12″ g4 powerbook. and shes a mac user as well, and when i watch this video, i like the part where i ask her if she could sign it and everyone just goes “wooowwwwww”. that was pretty cool, but here it is:

yep. you cant really beat that. or can you? so after my happyslip moment, we finally got to go around the place, check the sights and sounds of what fpac had to offer. they had many booths there on clothes and stuff. they had some good designs and some ghetto ones too. and so while making the rounds on the grounds (it rhymed) we got back to the main stage….

 

guy in the blue! its Travis Kraft !!!!!!

you need to press play on that. i really wanted to meet him too. he was selling his dvd there on how to cook filipino food. i bet its pure comedy too. oh well.

 

korean friendship bell.

since i haven’t been to san pedro in ages we decided to get out of the place for a bit and check out the korean friendship bell at the top of the hill. it seemed like an awkward place to put a korean bell, but after checking out the view, it felt like a good place to have the bell at. i just remembered that they did a scene in hamlet 2 here. its the part where his wife is doing a photoshoot. go watch the movie too. but yeah, we chilled there for a while, and came back down as soon as we heard camile starting to sing. we barely caught the last parts of it and as soon as she finished, she went to her booth in where she was going to sign autographs and such.

 

yesssur. its camile.

oh man was she awesome, ill go straight into the video this time:

this absolutely made my day. when she said she knows me, you could see myself smiling for days on in.  pause at :38. =) and its like that every time i watch it.  she does explain how she knew me, but for those not wanting to watch it, she watched one of my video responses from her first video. in it i say whuttup and that i support her and the camiletv crew. and for her to remember just a kid with a youtube account, it truly meant a lot. and i would have to say it was better than happyslip. but i love them both. we left during happyslip’s speech just so we dont run into the heavy traffic on the way out. after that, we went to some halloween stores and ate some yoshinoyas .. lol at yoshinoyas. but that was about it. my crazy day. im going to save this document, sign off, and then look at my powerbook. =) . my powerbook says ” i hope you do wonderful things on the wonderful machine.” i thank her for writing that, now i have to live up to it, which i can’t and won’t let her down. and now, im going to go to sleep. 

 

oh yeah, the vmas really sucked hard. i have so many issues on it in which i will blog on it in another episode. blah. peeeeeeace out people.

sellout.

this is the most awkward thing i have ever seen in any election thus far.

senator john mccain attacked barack obama for having a celebrity status, but i find it funny that he got endorsed by daddy yankee. for those who dont know who he is, he is a reggaeton artist, ok at best. i’ve honestly never liked him and his music, just ask the old school media people, we hate reggaeton.

mccain really looks desperate to get endorsements from anyone famous. this is a real bad look for both parties. mccain had no clue who his special guest was that he read it off a cue card. and its a bad look for daddy yankee, cause when youre from the hood, you can be voting republican. its totally against what the “struggle” is about. from what they were saying is that daddy yankee tried to endorse obama, but we all know what happened with luda. so daddy yankee went to mccain. what a fucking flip flop. and we all know hes doing this cause he probably has an album coming out just to get some free camera time.

mccain is too old, and his team who accepted his endorsement is way out of the loop. to think that daddy yankee is going to help him is dumb. if you go to youtube and all the blogs, people with puerto rican decent are ashamed of what daddy yankee did. its sad. really.

sunday august 24.

 

the band that everyone should know.

today was an interesting day.

we should start by saying that the usa men’s team won the gold medal, as said in the previous blog. and since im talking about today, it sure counts as being today. i ended up falling asleep close to 4 o’clock, then getting up at 10 to get ready to go to church. i think it was a new priest, cause i don’t remember this guy. but he was kinda dull. i could see it when i looked over to my right to see my mom waking up my dad in service. haha. my head was doing the same from last nights sleep. as the mass was coming to an end the priest says there are some community announcements.  so one guy comes up talking about this new church magazine. he starts to read an article in the magazine, and it just so happened to be a suicide note. it started off, “dear mom and dad, by the time you are reading this, i am already dead….”. it was safe to say that everyone in the audience had the “wtf? look” on their face. o_0 . and he kept reading it, it was kinda sad. i just thought it was weird as hell to be talking about that at the end of mass, i think it was wrong timing on his behalf.

ok, after that, ate lunch and went to the soon to be new looking montclair mall. right now it looks like shit, but they’re changing all or most of it. from the railings to the column supports and walkways. i guess they needed it to compete with fancy outdoor malls. there’s even a coach store, now they only need to re-open prime sports.  ok, so i went to the mall cause my sister needed to get her hair did. i went along cause i probably wouldn’t have done anything if i didn’t go. but i picked up an art magazine and headed back home.

i still felt tired and sleepy, but i got a call from alex asking me if im going to his show tonight, and i said sure, especially since i got in for free. and so i headed back to the same area i was just at. all day the heat was getting to me, and when i got to biacci’s bar, my head was starting to kind of hurt. and after another dope set by kidnapping the city ( go get their album ((plug plug)) , my head was getting to me. it might have been a mix of everything that was going on through the day, lack of sleep, hunger, heat.. i dunno. but i went back into my car to rest a bit. didn’t really want to drive with a bad headache. so i chilled and eventually napped in my car. woke up feeling a bit better but decided to call it an early night. 

i got to see the ending of the olympics. and it was great, except for those female gymnast from china. grrrrr too young! but yeah… end of the night was just me uploading pictures from ktc’s show. please support them, for i support good music. you should too.

i am 8-bit sunday.

if you guys haven’t heard about the i am 8 bit art show thats going on, it’s an art show based on 80′s & 90′s video games. so if you’re an 80′s baby like i am, you should definitely go check it out. its located at the world of wonder gallery, i forgot the address but it’s on hollywood blvd, and right next too skooby’s hot dogs. me, steve, paolo and his brother john, we out to hollywood to go to the show and then we saw this:

 

CLOSED !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the world of wonder gallery was CLOSED! wtf! they just opened on thursday, and were closed on the weekend. that was sad. we could see some of the art through the bars, but we couldn’t get inside. i have some pictures of some of the art that was on the outside windows, but i feel like you should go and check the art out yourself. there were some real big pieces too, like the toy figure of blanka, and one cool looking toy grenade of pac-man. and so we were bummed out. 

we walked around hollywood for a minute, and realized there really isn’t that much going on there. we turned back around and i figured since we were here we might as well go a couple streets down to sunset and visit my favorite place in the world.

 

ahh .. amoeba.

yes indeed, amoeba records. god how i love that place. we went all around the building, like we should. and if you haven’t gone yet, you really need to. its one of the best locations in so cal. anyways, i usually go to the vinyls sections in amoeba, particularly the clearance hip hop bins. you’ll usually find me there create digging hip hop or soul. this time i walked away with just 15 bucks worth of vinyl, i had to cop the limited press of portishead’d machine gun.

 

i love portishead.

and i picked up some other rocafella shit. usually you can always find memphis, beans and free in the 50 cent isle. which i clearly don’t mind, so i picked some of that up. but my friend paolo might have got the pickup of the day. he got tiny toon adventure’s season 1 vol.1 on dvd. after our short trip to LA we went back to paolo’s ate some food and watched some tiny toons. yeah, that show is still dope. brought back lots of memories too. 

i am going back to i am 8 bit some time this week, for sure, cause the show is there only til september 7th. i will re do this blog when i get to go inside tis time around. and other info for people who want to go, it’s from 12 pm – 7 pm monday – friday. =) peace!