Hip hop DIY: Safety instructions with Coolio

When carrying out DIY tasks, please ensure you follow these safety instructions with Coolio. Especially when near walls. You can never be too careful. Right, Coolio? Coolio? Jeez, someone get an ambulance.

Images: Gevmag.com, Cali-market.com, AAP, Popdust.com, screenshot, Artinbase.info, Thefivecount.com, Allhiphop.com, Reuters, screenshot. Please comment for attribution changes.

Further Fats: The world's first and only messenger of exploding lungs(a different kind of DIY)

Live performances in February

I've added a couple of live appearances to this site. Click yourself here if you want to see - in real life - my flesh, my bone, and my ornamental puppy Barry. The live appearances are:

- A talent contest and cabaret night;
- A London-based open mic night visiting Manchester.

I'll keep my gigs updated on that page, just for you, dear netloafer. Come see me. I do a strange mixture of literature and comedy.

By the way, I lied about the puppy. And, if I'm honest, the bone. I do have visible flesh though, I think.

A little Novation motivation for my creation stimulation (ignore the cats)

I bought a new thing. It's a MIDI controller. You plug it into your DAW and, wait, hold on, this reminds me of a Twitter conversation I had with Benjamin Judge.

So I got a thing. It's a Novation LaunchKey Mini and it's super cute. You can see it in the photograph above. Ignore the cats. They were a present off chums in Scotland. The cats, that is. Beautiful, aren't they? They're like real cats but not real.

I've not released anything as Hounds of Hulme since 2012 apart from as backing audio on Fractions. It doesn't mean I'm not constantly banging out mad choons of varying low quality; it's kind of a necessary creative splurge that keeps my brain ticking.

This little beauty (ignore the cats) will make that low-quality banging just that little bit more fun.

Further Fats: Because / a melon / only slightly: birthday thoughts (2012)

Where did dubstep go?

Where did dubstep go?

Not so long ago, it wobbled up from the underground to the broadsheets via that bizarre Britney Spears middle eight on Britney's Hold It Against Me. We stopped calling Burial dubstep and bowed down to our low-end oscillating masters.

Where did it go? Skrillex hasn't had a hit for a year. All people make now is doom-laden ambient music, UK garage, drum ‘n’ bass and fey folk pop pap. Seriously. Physics says nothing disappears: dubstep’s atoms have to be somewhere.

Has it become Lionel Blair? Has it become the latent sexual energy in Chas & Dave’s performances?

If you know where dubstep has gone, please get in touch. Your information will be treated with confidence and given to the one extra Romanian that’s entered the UK. Send a postcard to Big Questions of 2014, Fat Roland Towers, Evil Lair, Lionel Blair Mews, Manchester, UK.

Further Fats: "There is little in the party manifestos about whether dubstep is dead..." (2010)

"Apart from Dizzee Rascal and the Script, of course..."

There was a BBC News website article the other day about how digital has boosted sales of video and music. In short, the picture is as follows: there are more million-selling singles, there are fewer million-selling albums. And streaming is king.

However, I was more drawn to the comments underneath the article...

"Digital in the long term will lead to a communist utopia.”

“1D, Skyfall and The Hobbit- is the whole of Britain stuck in permanent childhood? What were the figures for porn?”

"For me, music ended in 1979 - apart from Dizzee Rascal and the Script, of course.”

“It is a great signal that we are now starting to understand ourselves to know of how we grow ourselves together.”

“Sting and Jimmy Nail will rescue the music business.” 

(This originally appeared on my Twitter feed. You can follow me here if you have nothing better to do / if the restraining order has expired.)

Story: And This Is My Mother

In the fog of Christmas, my writing chum David Hartley kindly posted a story of mine called And This Is My Mother on his advent bog Merry Gentlemen.

It was a rather harsh story where I was cruel to the characters and there wasn’t much redemption. Which is what I feel about Christmas. It astonishes me how a season filled with lights and glitter can feel so dark. Anyhoo, you can read the story by clicking on the big 22 here.

I wanted to convey the theme of disappointment in as surreal a way as possible, yet using a recognisable festive occurrence: visiting a partner’s parents at Christmas.

Sometimes there are things that come easily in a story. They tend to be images. (I should warn you of spoilers at this point so read the story first.) In this case:

someone scrunching their face into screwed-up paper;

his intensely annoying childishness;

the subversion of Christmas things (crushing a bauble, punching carol singers);

his “making it snow” moment happening ‘off-camera’;

her feeling of existential angst while driving;

and finally, the reveal in the hut, which was the first thing I came up with when writing the story.

My next story? Something about a hangover, I think. That sense of losing who you are and everything being terrible. A bit like Christmas.

Fractions 6: "Interestag"

I do this thing called Fractions. Small fragments of video. Not a lot of sense. I'll probably get locked up. Nurse, pass the lotion.

Here is the latest one. It's getting a bit frivolous, so the next one I do is bound to be deep and meaningful.

See the rest of the Fractions videos on the Fractions page of this site or on my Vimeo site.

5 pop music predictions for 2014

JUSTIN BIEBER WILL NOT ONLY RETIRE, HE WILL GROW OLD AND DIE.

Justin Bieber will age before our eyes. He will bulk up some more before his muscles reduce to fat and then massive wrinkles. He will take up golf but it will wreck his feeble, wrinkled physique. He will have a reunion tour with himself but abandon it on doctor’s orders. He will die with Usher at his side.

THERE WILL BE A NUMBER ONE SINGLE SO EYE-WATERINGLY SEXIST, A PERMANENT SCHISM WILL DEVELOP BETWEEN CONFIDENT, SEXUALLY-ACTIVE YOUNG MEN AND REPRESSED, PAUNCHY LIBERALS.

The usual schism stuff. Arch looks at award ceremonies. Passive-aggressive lyric / Guardian article wars. Mud-wrestling. That kind of thing.

HARRY STYLES WILL SET UP HIS OWN CULT.

Harry Styles (pictured) will see Twitter feeds like Harry My Cat Died and Bad Harry Art. He will see an opportunity. After a series of top-level meetings with the Scientologists, which is a church and not a cult, he will buy the Scientology movement, which is a church and not a cult, and change the name of the Scientology movement, which is a church and not a cult, into The Styleologists. He will change it into a cult, because it is definitely a church, by changing absolutely nothing else whatsoever.

NEW APHEX TWIN ALBUM.

Ha ha. Only joking. In fact, what will happen is that Daft Punk will sell another million records with an Aphex Twin covers album. For the titles, they will take existing Aphex Twin titles and stick 'Get Lucky' on the end. For example, Donkey Rhubarb Get Lucky, Halibut Acid Get Lucky, and

N
∆Mᵢ⁻¹=−α ∑ Dᵢ[η][ ∑ Fjᵢ[η−1]+Fextᵢ [η⁻¹]]
η=1 j∈C{ᵢ}
Get Lucky.

The music will be produced with similar care and attention. It will feature the return of Basshunter, Robert Miles, DJ Caspar and two members of Fleetwood Mac.

COUNTRY AND WESTERN WILL GO DUBSTEP.

Country and western music will thereby obtain widespread respect and support in Europe for the first time ever. A broadsheet journalist will coin the term ‘Dubstep Country & Western’, while the NME journo who thought of ‘C**t-step’, complete with asterisks, but didn’t get it into print in time will be fired and then thrown into a skip.

What are your pop predictions for 2014? Why not write them on a piece of paper and show them to a child?