Having recent finished with my final schoolwork of the semester–but knowing full well that I still have quite a bit on my “to do” list–I decided that it was high time to fool around with this Muxtape thing that Bobby recently wrote about.

One’s immediate thought come summertime (broadly speaking, not in the actual first-day-of-the-season sense) is to go 80s and cheese it up: Miami Vice, designer drinks, Lionel Richie binges, awkward leisure clothes, the works.  Since Bobby beat me to the line on the 80s thing with his Muxtape–and has a much more in-depth knowledge of that decade and its various genres, to boot–I decided to “go with what I know.”

What I’ve come to dig over the last two years, to varying levels of intensity and in various combinations of artists, is that internet-age genre that obsessives call “rare groove.”  The mythology of the pioneering DJs of the 1990s and their “crate diggin’” has seeped into regular listening habits, mine included.  While said DJs combined “new” music out of the old, one unintentional side effect of their efforts was the tendency for people to revisit the original music that they pulled out of obscurity.  To paraphrase Afrika Bambaataa, its all about “looking for the perfect beat.”  Much of the music pulled for 80s and 90s hip-hop was 1960s jazz funk and 1970s soul.  My Muxtape, therefore, is a kind of send-up to this whole process.  It combines some of those original-era grooves with some examples of the newer stuff that was directly influenced by what came 30 years before.  Expect lots of breakbeats, booty-shakin’, some glitch and scratching, some funky covers, lots of latin elements, and a balance between “rare and deep” and “familiar but different.”  Muxtapes are simple and fun to make (I sound like an advertisement), though it is not recommended to upload via a crappy wireless connection like I did.

Without further ado, welcome to summer and my sampler for the soundtrack of your life.  Named “Raiders of the Lost Beat,” it nods to the past and present, even anticipating the new Indiana Jones film in the process (though expect that soundtrack to be a LOT different than the one proposed here).

Raiders of the Lost Beat (”When the bomb’s activated and mutilated the legs and arms…”)

You may recall the name “J” as a Virtual Fools writer who contributed a few years back. J is IDKMYBFF from college and though we live several states apart we still talk games every chance we get. So it’s no surprise that the day after the Grand Theft Auto IV launch hits we’re sharing our initial impressions. We’ve both only been able to put a few hours into it, but those first few hours make a huge difference. When J IMed me this morning to give me his little review, I decided I needed to share it with the world because it’s so succinct:

IM from J:
so here is my experience with gta4
it was somewhat unexpected
I imagined it was going to be like discovering an amazing new restaurant
but it was more like discovering that my favorite restaurant, that closed years ago, had suddenly reopened
and sure, they had repainted the walls, picked up some new furniture, but it was still the same stellar food I had come to love before
in short, I was surprised at just how “GTA” the game was
and not at all in a bad way

Truer words have never been spoken. Nor typed into Gchat.