I <3 U So

There are some things that I just love. And when I say I love I mean like I extra-extra full on go blind L.O.V.E. love with a capital <3 complete with funny little cupid arrows through it. What do I love? Well there’s a lot of things. I could run down the laundry list of the things that I just absolutely am nutso about, but here are just a few. For example:

I love olives.

I love baseball. Particularly, I love my Philadelphia Phillies, win or lose.

I love the entire Addams Family series. Raul Julia as Gomez is suave as it comes.

And I love the music by the French electronic duo Cassius.

 I got hip to them under the guise Cassius back when the first big wave of French electronic music had already been a couple years old, but actually I never realized until recently that I was a fan of their work under the pseudonym La Funk Mob. This is back in my acid-jazz adoring, baggy houndstooth print trouser and floppy apple jack wearing, “everything sounds better with a flute on top” loving halcyon days of youth in the early 90s. But when I was a tad bit older and a quite a bit more in touch with my soul, the dance music that Cassius was making struck a particular chord with me. It was fun a playful but not trite. It was funky and moving but it was also somewhat very emotional to me. I don’t know why I was able to tap into the particular emotion of the right combination of samples and synthesizers and patterns from various drum machines. The “soul in the machine” per se…

One of the things that I find most interesting in the way that modern day hip-hop has progressed with sound is with the way it has incorporated modern day dance music. Two of the songs off of the Kanye West & Jay-Z “Watch The Throne” album really serve as perfect examples of this trend as it stands in 2011. The two are the “Dubstep Run Through A Carwash In East Texas” sounding “Who Gon’ Stop Me” and “Why I Love You,” both produced by the legendary yet somewhat unheralded in the mainstream genius Mike Dean.

 

It’s just so refreshing to hear these two worlds collide in the way that it does. And also refreshing to hear Cassius “I <3 U SO” re-envisioned in this way. This is one of my favorite songs, and it brings up such deep emotion for me. Why, I’ll never know. But nonetheless, I love you so. And why I love you, I’ll never know…

Cassius “I <3 U SO” (Ed Banger, 2010)

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