Suzu Fresco

Slimkid3 and Fatlip

See also:
*Our review of the Pharcyde at the Roxy, 5/23/12
*J-Swift Made Big Hits 
With the Pharcyde 
Before Tragedy and Drugs 
Nearly Took Him Down
*Top 20 Greatest L.A. Rap Albums Of All Time: The Complete List

To fully appreciate the impact of The Pharcyde's "Ya Mama," you had to be in a junior high lunchroom in the spring of 1993. It was mama manna from the heavens nourishing the impressionable youth with disses for days. Two decades later, the lines still detonate. Things ya mama had: a peg leg with a kickstand, an afro with a chin strip, Play-Doh teeth, the wings and teeth of an African bat, hair on her tongue, and a 99-cent sign on her back (while walking down Sunset).

Currently touched up for 20th-anniversary reissue treatment, the album from which the song sprang, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, was a rap gateway drug, a powerfully psychedelic expansion. After all, earlier this year, the group's producer J-Swift told me that the name came after a mushroom binge while watching Oliver Stone's The Doors.

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Courtesy of the artist

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

Sick Jacken sees the gas mask wherever he goes. That's the iconic emblem of Psycho Realm, the underground rap familia that he and his brother, Gustavo "Big Duke" Gonzalez, founded in the late 1980s as adolescents on the streets of Pico-Union. Since the mask was first used in the album artwork for Psycho Realm's eponymous 1997 debut, Jacken has spotted it on the streets of L.A. barrios, at his daughter's elementary school graduation, even in his parents' ancestral hometown of Mazatlan, Mexico. Its ubiquity is testament to the group's ability to transmute its experiences into sagas of the streets of any hood with shared social concerns and sense of struggle.

"We went on a tour of Mexico, and when I walked up the hill to my dad's old house, the first thing I saw was a kid waiting on the steps for his grandma," Jacken, who was born Joaquin Gonzalez, says at his three-room studio compound/tattoo parlor in an industrial park in Santa Fe Springs. "He walked over to me and says in Spanish, 'Can I show you something?' Then he picked up his pant leg and showed me the Psycho Realm tattoo."
Adorned with a 1930s gangster fedora, the logo is based on a photo by noted local photographer Estevan Oriol. To Psycho Realm fans, it's not merely a cool ghoulish image, it's a flag of undying allegiance.

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Jennie Warren

Serengeti

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

See also:
*Anticon MC Serengeti: The Quirkiest, Deepest Rapper
*Free Download: Serengeti's "Tracks"

Serengeti is wisecracking at Rex's Batting Cages in Inglewood, while hacking at 90 mph heaters. The Chicago-raised, Mount Washington-based rapper is riffing on a character in his raps, the 45-year-old, Ditka-mustached Super Fan Kenny Dennis, who writes hymns to Windy City baseball legends Andre Dawson and Ozzie Guillen. Depending on your interpretation, Dennis is either eternally optimistic or mildly delusional.

"Kenny would ask the attendant to crank the speed to 110 or 120 mph," Serengeti notes. Released this month on Anticon, his latest album, The Kenny Dennis EP, weaves an alternative history of the Steve Bartman Incident, the fan-interference fiasco that may have cost the long-suffering Chicago Cubs a spot in the 2003 World Series. Dennis is perhaps the lone Windy City denizen to believe Bartman deserves to be let off the hook. Instead, he raps that everyone from ex-Cubs Eric Karros and Damon Berryhill to team management deserves equal blame.

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Courtesy Kutmah

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

You can't sort 30 years of life in 30 seconds. But that's what confronted Kutmah on the morning of May 5, 2010. Except that he didn't know it at the time. So when he asked the immigration authorities if he could bring his sunglasses to block the sour light of 6 a.m., they snickered that he wouldn't need them where he was going. Then they ushered the artist-DJ-producer out of his idyllic L.A. life and into a grim holding facility in New Mexico.

It's been almost two years since Kutmah was deported, and those who know him sustain a quiet vigil. Born in Brighton, England, Justin McNulty came to Los Angeles when he was 12; here he attended high school and established a reputation as a vital underground artist.

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Timothy Norris

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

Two years ago, Grant Korgan woke up in an intensive care unit in the Sierra Nevada with a broken back and no feeling below his stomach. A snowmobile jump had gone awry and doctors told the mechanical engineer and outdoorsman he'd never walk again. He rejected that prognosis.

Nanette Gonzales

Korgan's rehabilitation was immediate, intense and fueled by the Glitch Mob, the local electronic crew whose dubstep, glitch-hop and IDM helped popularize those genres throughout North America. Before his accident, the Mob's up-tempo beats and concussive bass had enhanced Korgan's marathon kayaking and snowmobile treks, which often started from his home bases in Palo Alto and Incline Village, Nev.

But after his injury, the Glitch Mob's compositions gained a profound resonance, particularly after one of Korgan's close friends wrote the group about his situation. When he returned home from the hospital, there was a care package of signed Glitch Mob drumsticks and T-shirts, plus their 2010 LP, Drink the Sea. It soon served as a constant companion on his grueling six- to eight-hour daily workouts.

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Nanette Gonzales

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

"I'm blaming you if I puke later."

"Fine. But admit it in the story," Hanni El Khatib replies, passing a vodka and soda that I didn't order.

We've been mixing poisonous color combinations of liquor for the last 60 minutes: margaritas, beers, Jägermeister, five-hour ENERGY shots. It's not even 9 p.m. on the last night of SXSW and I'm unsure whether to pledge a fraternity or a Brit-pop band. Khatib has completed a quintet of showcases, and downtown Austin is currently chaos out of order. But flux has been the norm for Khatib since he decamped to L.A. from San Francisco two years ago.

Switching cities, leaving a job and touring twice with Florence and the Machine should theoretically crease the nerves. But Khatib, 30, is immune to signs of extreme stress. Rather than slow him, his nascent stardom has spurred productivity. While his music fuses punk, garage rock, '50s pop and blues, it remains primitive and blood basic. His songs are dedicated to those hit by a train, or shot. They embody an acronym a wise lush once told me: KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

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Nanette Gonzales

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

See also: Our review of Wu-Tang Clan's January 21, 2012 show at Club Nokia

The Wu-Tang Clan once said if we picked up their double album, Wu-Tang Forever, we wouldn't have to go to summer school. It was a flawless sales pitch, but my high school guidance counselor disagreed. Yet a decade and a half later at USC's Stauffer Lecture Hall, 40 physics students are watching the GZA wax philosophical about the importance of chess, kung fu and sharpening one's sword.

Such is the speed with which rebels can become respectable -- especially when they contribute something as enduring as the GZA's 1995 Liquid Swords, a record still revered by both diehards and dilettantes.

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Ana Coto

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

Sometimes you see a YouTube video and your only response is, "Who the fuck is that?"
That's what happened when I first saw Meg Myers' "Monster." For one thing, Myers barely blinks. Instead, she staggers backward in a nightgown, an antique Fiona Apple starring in a remake of Village of the Damned. She howls raw anguish. Sample lyrics include, "I've got to kill you, my love." It is as gangsta as a 110-pound girl can get.

When I meet 25-year-old Meg Myers at LA Mill in Silver Lake, she stays in character, talking about her pet rats and sipping a beer at 11:45 a.m. She admits she had fruit for breakfast rather than the blood and grits that the video would insinuate.

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Nanette Gonzales

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

The plan was simple. Head to Venice Beach, sample the mixtapes hawked by the hucksters hovering near the paddle tennis courts, pick one rapper to profile for this column and avoid the Kama Kosmic Krusader, the Rollerblading guitar freak in the white turban. (You've seen him, trust.)

The boardwalk might be the last spot in L.A. County where MCs still shill the old-fashioned way: by guilt-tripping you at levels that could shame a Hasidic grandmother.

After all, it's been a half-decade since digital warehouse Datpiff and FBI pressure quelled physical mixtape distribution. Long gone are the days when I lied to my mom to take the Big Blue Bus to Venice to cop DJ Rectangle mixes and miscellaneous bootleg paraphernalia. What's left are stalwarts ignorant of the Internet, those doggedly determined to stalk fame and fortune amidst the tourists, gawkers and connoisseurs of Bob Marley T-shirts.

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Nanette Gonzales

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.]

See also: Top 5 L.A. Garage Rock Bands

Not everything needs to sound like the future. Not everyone wants to dwell in the present. In fact, some aim to absolve themselves of allegiance to any era at all.

See Tim Presley, the psychedelic and hermitic songwriter behind White Fence, who has holed up in his Echo Park apartment and recorded roughly 200 jams over the last two years, which strive to soak up the spirit of the late Arthur Lee, frontman for the iconic 1960s L.A. band Love.

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