nblinks

My Saturday late-morning tradition: browsing the new releases at the British dance record store Tunes.co.uk. The selection's good -- a little electronic- and house-heavy, perhaps, but with nice nerdy-but-hip-hop and international releases (West African funk, for instance, or some long-sought-after examples of great-sounding rap in Portuguese). The best part is their RealAudio samples usually run to three or four minutes, rather than the 30 second standard at iTunes or Amazon.

Today's listening included The Pharcyde's sweet "Passin' Me By, with its ur-cool background loop (here I define ur-cool as anything Ira Glass has used as a background track for a This American Life story), and clever, diverse rhymes on the going-after-but-not-getting-the-wrong-girl theme. Where else in hip-hop do you hear an MC say something so self-effacing as "Damn I wish I wasn't such a wimp"?