Bay, foreground, and Meechy: Toughness Training

​See also:
*"Niggas in Paris": Jay-Z and Kanye Will Perform It 13 Times When They're Here. Seriously.
*There's a 5-Year-Old Girl Who Looks Like Adele on My Sons' YMCA Basketball Team. I Hate Her

The conversation eventually became about music, and maybe that was the intended point anyway, but it started out about Toughness Training.

Toughness Training is a series of games the boys and I made up. They're a lot like normal kid games, except way the fuck less boring. Most of them involve a ball, and all of them involve being (or becoming) tough (or, at the very least, what is traditionally accepted as "being tough").

There's one game called Loose Ball. It's pretty simple. We play it in the master bedroom. The boys stand with one hand on the wall farthest from the bed. I take a ball, throw it on the bed, shout, "LOOSE BALL," and then they run and dive after it. Whoever gets the ball wins.

More >>

My son Bay, point guard

​See also: Mama, I Don't Want To Die! My Four-Year-Old Identifies With Freddie Mercury

There's this 5-year-old girl that I know. Her name is A. And she's the fucking worst.

I know her because Bay and Meechy, my twin 4-year-old sons, are on the same YMCA basketball team as her. The boys play basketball and t-ball and soccer and are in Tae Kwon Do and blah, blah, blah. One time, Bay intentionally crashed his head into a wall after putting on a bicycle helmet because he "wanted to see if it would work." Another time, Meechy took all of the food that he could reach out of the refrigerator and put it in the bathtub while I was asleep during sentry duty. So we try to keep them busy.

There are ten kids on this basketball team. Six of them were recently on the same soccer team together. (The Soccer Six, as they're known by no one but me). Having spent two months standing near each other on a soccer field, they are all reasonably comfortable with one another and interact well. The four new kids that were added at the beginning of basketball are tolerated, but not especially liked.

The team:

More >>

​I have twin 4-year-old sons. They have normal names, but I mostly call them Bay and Meechy. I tried to explain to them how they earned those nicknames once. It took a good three minutes (the names' origins are vaguely associated to The Wire and the Black Mafia Family, naturally). As soon as I was done, Meechy, completely stonefaced, asked me if robots poop. "Of course robots poop," I told him. "Where do you think we get screws and bolts from?"

He just looked at his feet and smiled.

Being a father is just about the best job on the planet. Sons make accidental kings out of ordinary men. Right now, everything I do is groundbreaking and superheroic, even though everything I do is lame and ordinary. I did that thing where you walk behind a couch and pretend like you're going down stairs. That shit was comedy gold to them. Pretending to pull your own thumb off? I invented that. Rhyming "cat" with "hat"? Yep, Daddy was the first.

More >>

Kristofferson San Pablo

​In the late aughts, the safe money was on L.A.-via-Palmdale trio Pac Div. They seemed poised to lead the burgeoning "New West" movement -- the pre-Odd Future crop of young rappers seeking to reclaim hip-hop for the Left Coast. They were the group everyone from industry suits to bloggers to party people could agree on.

In 2008, Universal Motown president Sylvia Rhone signed the act -- consisting of brothers Like and Mibbs and high school friend BeYoung -- to a roster that included Lil Wayne and Stevie Wonder. The next summer Pac Div released a slickly lyrical mixtape with beats for booming systems called Church League Champions, three tracks from which were in rotation on MTV Jams.

More >>

Emily Shur

​See also: Ximena Sariñana: An Indie-Pop Star In Mexico, Anonymous In L.A.

Last week we told you about Mexican indie-pop star Ximena Sariñana, who just embarked on her first American headlining tour as part of her U.S. crossover attempt.

Ahead of her Wednesday appearance on KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic," here are some of our favorite outtakes from the afternoon we spent with Sariñana hanging out in her new home of Studio City. Topics include first heartbreak, being a homebody and that time she got lost on Mulholland going to Dave Sitek's house.

On working with album producer, TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek:
"I'm a huge TV On The Radio fan. I wish I could write like them. The first time I met him I was so nervous because I arrived half an hour late -- I got lost because my GPA broke. I was wandering around Mulholland Drive, almost crying, like 'Shit shit shit!' And then I got to his place and he immediately made me feel so comfortable. He's very like 'Let's drink some coffee, let's eat amazing food!' A great producer can bring out the best from you without even letting you notice, and Dave was a lot like that. I think the best lyrics are the ones I wrote with David. It was immediate camaraderie. We became really good friends."

More >>

Brass

Speak

​It's an August afternoon in Hollywood, and the shaggy-bearded rapper Speak is snacking on mac 'n' cheese in a recording studio at Atlantic Records.

He doesn't seem like he belongs here. For starters, he's wearing beach bum attire: sun-bleached peach board shorts and Sperry Top-Siders.

Though he came up as a rapper, he's been moonlighting recently as a ghostwriter, working on songs for acts such as No Doubt and rappers like Plies. But he's just been told that the song he wrote for the aforementioned MC isn't edgy enough -- a verdict he refutes loudly.

He knows he can come across as an opinionated prick (his words), but he also knows he's valued: After all, he co-wrote Kreayshawn's massive hit "Gucci Gucci" almost a year ago, and has collaborated on many more of her tracks, including her only other release so far, "Rich Whores."

More >>

Brandon Turner

​Everlast's new album, Songs of the Ungrateful Living, which is out today, sounds like the kind of record a good ol' boy might play in Alabama while sittin' on the porch and sippin' beer. The former house of Pain frontman is in working-class-hero mode, singing in a gravel-road bass about fooling around with his woman and barely gettin' by over boot stomps and jangly guitars. The bluesy, whiskey-soaked album features fiddles and country over- tones, but according to Everlast, it's hip-hop nonetheless.

"I think that's one of the biggest misunderstandings about me," he says, sipping from a glass bottle of Coke in the Studio City motel room he converted to a studio about a year ago. "Everything I do is hip-hop. I don't care if it sounds like a country ballad; if I'm doing it, it's hip-hop." Just as he's used soul and rock samples for his rap music, for example, he's culled rap bits to incorporate into this new work.

More >>

Vex Ruffin

​A correction was issued for this post. Please see the bottom of the piece.

Most aspiring music artists who hope to get noticed nowadays have similar, tired routines. They post their songs for free, spam the usual social networks, and then sit back and wait for Jimmy Iovine to call.

Yet L.A.-based artist Vex Ruffin took a different route. The hip-hop-producer-turned-singer actually mailed in his demo CD to Stones Throw Records, with a stamp on it and everything! He somehow got label boss Peanut Butter Wolf to listen to the thing, and recently signed with them. The first fruit is his The Crash Course EP, which reflects his childhood taste, ie '80s new wave goth and rambunctious Ruff Ryders rap. The EP was released on September 20th; a full-length is due next year.

So he's a success! And you can be too. Below are five tips from Ruffin on submitting a demo tape and actually getting signed.

More >>

​See also: Top Five Greatest Female Rock Bands From L.A.

The author of Kurt Cobain bio Never Fade Away Dave Thompson just released Bad Reputation: The Unauthorized Biography of Joan Jett. The book claims to tell her complete and uncensored story, from her days as a 14-year-old berated by Runaways producer Kim Fowley to her solo career and work with the Blackhearts.

Though it contains more about her music than her personal life, there are a number of passages that really reveal Jett's character. Here are four revelations from the work.

More >>

Trevor Treynor

​Sunshine men go dark and sky rappers eventually touch cement, but Freestyle Fellowship swore that they would never fall the fuck off. That was the promise of 1991, the pre-riot boiling point when their first hand-hawked collection of songs, To Whom It May Concern, crushed cassette decks across Los Angeles. At the time, the epicenter of the West Coast alternative movement was The Good Life, a liquor-less Cedar St. tavern in Leimert Park known for its legendary open mic night where abstractions became expressionist.

The quartet constructed a brilliant civilization underground, but seemed to be perennially returning from a trip to outer space. These were the astral jazz-cracked geniuses of sherm-strafed South Central, rapping with caged bird cadences about sleeping on park benches, biblical books, and gangsta rap carpetbaggers. Myka 9, Aceyalone, and Self Jupiter had been friends since grammar school, while the fourth member P.E.A.C.E. joined them in 10th grade. By then, everyone knew Microphone Mike (Myka 9's first alias) as the adolescent prince of KDAY, bagging on would-be rivals every morning on the radio with Bobby Jimmy and the Critters.

More >>