Arts Desk » Cornel West Theory

End-Of-The-Week Music News, Free Stuff Edition

Jonathan L. Fischer — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:18:32 +0000

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven’t, well, there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking as well as a free shuttle from Union Station. Wale performs in the space tonight at 7 p.m., with DJs Stereofaith, Reed Rothchild, and Chris Burns spinning from 4 p.m. Tomorrow night belongs to Dan Deacon, The Creepers, and Nouveau Riche DJs; the music starts at 8 p.m. And MGMT is headlining an 8 p.m. show Sunday night following DJ sets by DJ CA$$IDY and Dave Nada. To get tickets to this last concert, however, you have to test drive a Kia first, which you can do all weekend, if that’s your thing.

And Future, Army Of Me (in an acoustic iteration), Laughing Man, and The Mighty Heard are all performing outdoors at the H Street Festival on Saturday, all along H Street NE. Brightest Young Things is also hosting a free party that night in the Rock & Roll Hotel’s upstairs bar. Baller.

Dischord Records is now distributing releases by Windian Records, a new label started by The Points drummer Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson. The band’s new Beat In Hell 7″, whose 6-minute B-side is about four times longer than every other Points song, is available now.

This is a few days old: Dischord and DeSoto Records are rereleasing Jawbox’s 1994 career highpoint For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and they’ve included a few bonus tracks from the very rare Savory+3 EP. The remastered album drops Nov. 23.

The Velodrome dance/not-dance party is back from summer vaycay this weekend.

Local way-beyond-left-field hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory has a release show at Liv next Friday for its new album, Second Rome, and apparently the eminent Princeton African American Studies professor and group namesake will be there.

Image courtesy of Dan Deacon’s MySpace page.

Sockets Summer Mix Vol. 2

Aaron Leitko — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:34:43 +0000

The weather may be cooling off, but Sockets isn’t quite ready to pack up the shorts and deflate the beach balls. The label recently posted this mixtape–which includes songs by Food For Animals, BLDGS, and Edie Sedgwick–in the hopes of stretching the summer season out for a few more weeks.

Here’s the tracklist:

1. “Love Showers” – The Dirty Church
2. “Tomorrow” – Buildings
3. “Would You Kill?” – The Cornel West Theory
4. “Fifty Seven” – Andrew Black
5. “Dope” (Ricky Rabbit Remix) – Food For Animals
6. “Preproduct” – Aaron Thompson
7. “Wilderness” – Roses They Won’t Hurt You
8. “Doubting Thomas” (Sockets Mix) – Edie Sedgwick
9. “1000 Miles” – Metropolitan

New Cornel West Theory Mp3

Aaron Leitko — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:18:28 +0000

Twinkling rhodes piano. Ambient computer noise. A lightly funky acoustic guitar loop. If you were under the impression that The Cornel West Theory was all about fire and brimstone—a safe assumption, given the ski masks and angry vibes depicted in this video–, well, they can also take it down a notch. “An Angel For You,” a track that the band’s label, Sockets, just posted on its blog, is sort of hiphop nytol. In a good way, though. After all, it’s summer, and there’s no harm in invoking the ghost of Marvin Gaye.

Sockets Summer Mix

Aaron Leitko — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:01:24 +0000

So far, summer is having a little trouble getting started. So far all we’ve gotten is a lot of rain, no Screen On The Green, and no Fort Reno schedule. But please, let this free summer mixtape, compiled by local label Sockets, be a salve to your bruised expectations. There are exclusive cuts by Maximillion Dunbar (Food For Animals rapper and Future Times label boss), Hume (recently back in DC after traveling through India), and Cornel West Theory, who have been M.I.A. since ‘06, or maybe I’m just out of the loop.

Tracklist:

1. Loveloop – Maxmillion Dunbar
2. Prophetic Suicide – the Cornel West Theory
3. Wise Light Born – Hume
4. Sleep In – Big Gold Belt
5. Tired – The Fly Girlz
6. Olds Achieva Care Bear – Framed Mistake
7. Come on the Deathbed – Chris Grier