Starting next Monday, May 23: "Rome, Italian Style," a new block on A Fistful of Soundtracks

Rome, the intriguing Danger Mouse/Daniele Luppi/Jack White/Norah Jones tribute to '60s and '70s Italian film music that Capitol released this week, has inspired me to start a new hour-long block on A Fistful of Soundtracks. "Rome, Italian Style" will stream both film score-inspired tracks like Luppi's tunes from Rome and An Italian Story and covers of '60s and '70s film and TV themes. The mission statement of the block is basically "how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret film and TV music."

"Rome, Italian Style" airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am.

Here's one of the covers that will be part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist. It's "La Pantera Mambo," a 2004 cover of the Pink Panther theme by the Colombian band La-33:

Asians not playing violin

(Photo source: SFGate)

Because it's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, here are five recordings from my laptop's various playlists that are all by Asian American musicians who don't play the Tiger Mom-enforced violin.

The Morning Benders, "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)"
I first took notice of this terrific little timpani-driven cut about relationship disagreements during Sklarbro Country, of all shows. Good lookin' out, St. Louis Sklardinals. My only beef with "Cold War" is that it's way too short.



The Morning Benders, "Cold War (Star Slinger Remix)"
This dope remix Kanye-ifies Morning Benders frontman Christopher Chu's voice and is part of the Bay Area band's Japan Echo EP release to aid Japanese disaster relief.



The CounterParts, Appetizer EP
It's cool to see T-Know's hip-hop career take off. I knew T-Know briefly when we were UCSC students.

The Skyflakes, "sci-fi as lit."
This is a pretty clever Star Trek-inspired song. The Fil-Am indie rock band's "sci-fi as lit." refers to events from the Next Generation episode "Tapestry," in which Q grants Picard his wish to go back in time and change a pivotal moment from his days as a vert-around-the-gills Starfleet Academy cadet. You don't have to be a Trekkie to dig "sci-fi as lit." because unlike the music of Trek-inspired novelty bands like No Kill I and Warp 11, the track never mentions any Trek characters by name, so it could refer to anyone who's ever wanted to redo a key moment in their past--something everyone can identify with.

Blue Scholars, "John DeLorean"
Another Pinoy musician expresses an obsession with time travel. This track, which contains Back to the Future references (hence the title "John DeLorean"), arose from a discussion Blue Scholars beatmaker Sabzi once had with Scholars MC Geo in which they wondered, "If you could have just one super power, what would it be?" Geo picked time travel because with that ability, "you actually have the capacity to secure any other super power you wanted. For example, if you wanted to fly, you could just travel to a future time where personal flying technology was developed and bring it back."

Has Geo ever considered writing sci-fi or superhero comics as a second career? What Geo said about powers in the "John DeLorean" single download's liner notes had 10 times more clarity and sense than the writing in last Friday's Smallville series finally.

I think of the late David Mills whenever I hear "Wikka Wrap"

From left to right: At a panel for his 2003 NBC creation Kingpin, David Mills was joined by his Kingpin actors Angela Alvarado Rosa, Brian "Most Likely Flashing Back to a Black-and-White Clip of Beaver Cleaver Sleeping in Class" Benben and Shay Roundtree.

Tonight is the second-season premiere of HBO's Treme, the last TV show that journalist-turned-scriptwriter David Mills wrote for before his untimely death last year. I was a fan of Mills' TV writing since his Homicide: Life on the Street period, and in the pre-Twitter days before showrunners like Community's Dan Harmon and Leverage's John Rogers have embraced the Internet and frequently tweet back their shows' vocal fans, Mills was one of the few writers from TV who didn't treat the online community like a bug stuck to his shoe and interacted with viewers of his TV work on Usenet and his blog Undercover Black Man. As one could see from Mills' blogroll, he voraciously read other blogs, including my own. Because of the lack of responses to most of my blog posts, I've sometimes considered abandoning this blog or shutting it down, but then I'd remember that Mills used to read my blog, and that would make me reconsider.

A few days before Treme's Easter night season premiere, I was searching through my closet full of stacks of backup audio and data CDs to recover iTunes song downloads I lost when my PC went kaput in 2009, and I unearthed the 1981 British single "Wikka Wrap" by The Evasions. I downloaded "Wikka Wrap" on iTunes right after Mills wrote a brief post about the chune for Undercover Black Man. I always liked that Tom Browne and Chic-referencing song (which I was first exposed to via Coolio's "1, 2, 3, 4"), but I had a difficult time trying to locate it online because I never knew what the artist name and song title were--until those two items were ID'd by Mills, who loved music (particularly P-Funk) as much as the massive amounts of TV he grew up ingesting. I thanked Mills in the comments section. It was the only time we ever spoke to each other.

It's funny how I used to imagine the lead "vocalist" during "Wikka Wrap" to be a Tony Sinclair-esque black guy (but as Mills pointed out, the "Wikka" chap was actually composer Graham de Wilde doing a parody of a not-exactly-black British TV personality named Alan Whicker) because it ties into mistaken racial identity, a subject the African American blogger observed with humor, whether in his "Misidentified Black Person of the Week" posts or his blog's name, an in-joke about how because of his light skin (and maybe also because of his sometimes--*bleh*--right-leaning posts), he would often be perceived as white or Mexican.

So after the passing of this brilliant Wire and Treme writer who departed too soon, whenever I hear "Wikka Wrap," I always think of Mills and that little comments section exchange we had over this British R&B track we both dug.

Five rap jams where the rappers drop malapropistic pop culture references that make them sound like John Witherspoon when he referred to "Public Enema" during House Party

One of my favorite lines in the original House Party was John Witherspoon's Granddad from The Boondocks-esque neighbor character complaining about the titular party blasting the music of "Public Enema." On a similar note, my favorite line in Zack and Miri Make a Porno is "Han Solo ain't never had no sex with Princess Leia in the Star War" because instead of Star Wars, Craig Robinson calls it "the Star War," as if the fictional conflict were the Civil War or the Vietnam War.

The "Public Enema" and "Star War" lines remind me of an article I read in a hip-hop magazine once. The article listed moments when rappers dropped malapropistic pop culture references or flubbed up celebrities' names. When they flub up the pop culture references like in the following five tracks, rappers suddenly sound old and out-of-it like that Witherspoon character from House Party (the Beastie Boys have been in the game for a while, but hopefully, they won't sound too out-of-it on their promising-sounding new album Hot Sauce Committee Part Two).

Thanks to "I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho)" by Pitbull, I'm in the mood for renting a film by "Albert Hitchcock."

1. "My Weezy" by Lil Wayne
Like Mojo Nixon during "Elvis Is Everywhere" and Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn, Wayne calls Star Trek's Vulcan hero "Dr. Spock" (a la baby care expert Dr. Benjamin Spock) instead of Mr. Spock.

2. "Oh Word?" by the Beastie Boys
"This is not a fantasy, I'm not Mr. O'Roarke." Wow, I didn't know the racially ambiguous but Latin-ish Mr. Roarke was really an Irish bloke all along.

3. "Shazam" by the Beastie Boys
Mike D misidentifies Fred Sanford's dead wife Elizabeth as "Weezy."

4. "Flip Flop Rock" by Big Boi featuring Killer Mike & Jay-Z
Big Boi refers to Penelope Cruz as "Penelope Ann Cruz," while Killer Mike admires the authority of "Commander Picard."

5. "Blindfold Me" by Kelis and her then-husband Nas
Nas probably meant "Mickey Rourke in 9 1/2 Weeks," but for some reason, it came out as "Gonna surprise you like Hugh Grant in 8 1/2 Weeks." Confusing the works of softcore porn producer Zalman King with the oeuvre of Chris Columbus, the family-friendly director of Nine Months, Home Alone and I Love You, Beth Cooper, is a common mistake in hip-hop. The other day on the street, I overheard a freestyle battle where one MC insulted the other to the beat of Drake's "Over" with "Got a text from your girl saying she wanna ride my penis/Like Hayden Panettiere in Delta of Venus."

Empire Records live-tweet recap (because today is Record Store Day)

(Photo source: Matt Ranzetta)

During the week Record Store Day 2010 took place, I live-tweeted Empire Records, which is set at a record store and seems to resurface on cable at least once every week. The movie is at its best when it pokes fun at washed-up soap stars/pop singers and sticks to being a relaxed comedy about working at a record store. At its worst, Empire Records is like a lousy and overdramatic Canadian teen soap that wouldn't look out of place on TeenNick.

Today is Record Store Day 2011, so I'm reposting my tweets about Empire Records.

(If you're not reading this on Record Store Day, this live-tweet recap can function as textual commentary that you can refer to while Empire Records is playing on TV. Sometimes, a certain movie I like will resurface on TV, and I want to see what someone else wrote about the movie, so I'll open an article or Wikipedia entry or IMDb trivia page about the movie that I had saved onto my laptop.)

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Frigging Rex Manning Day. In a few minutes, I'm live-tweeting the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition DVD, which came out in 2003.
12:05 PM

I'm a few minutes late. I'm on SuperStation TBS time.
12:06 PM

The Warner logo means the #EmpireRecords: Remix! Special Fan Edition live-tweet starts now. Why live-tweet a DVD that dropped 7 years ago?
12:09 PM

#EmpireRecords has things in it I like (particularly some of the songs and the fake Rex Manning music) and things I can't stand.
12:10 PM

The things I can't stand during #EmpireRecords (or as I like to call the film, Car Wash for alt-rockers) make it worthy of a live-tweet.
12:10 PM

When I started writing the webcomic The Palace, which is set at an indie theater, I told myself I must avoid the cliches of #EmpireRecords.
12:11 PM

The movie is an example of fun premise/sloppy execution (all that shit happens to the staffers in one day?).
12:11 PM

The movie flings dramatic crises at you with all the precision of a chimp flinging his poop at zoo-goers.
12:11 PM

This is the kind of movie where dunking a teen's head in the sink will make her diet pill addiction magically disappear.
12:13 PM