Sach O would have totally hit that back in the 60’s. When it comes to pop music idolatry and indie cred name-dropping, composer Burt Bacharach, lyricist Hal David and singer Dionne Warwick are simultaneously too conservative and too radical to get theirs. They didn’t rock the pop world like The Beatles, waste-away in an acid […]

Sach O something-something-something Muhammad Ali. Lyrics. In this dance about architecture, lyrics are the proverbial Tango on a Gehry. For every genre with an expressly coded form of lyricism (say, Hip-Hop) you get two where it’s impossible make an objective statement. Is Jim Morison’s poetry art or the ramblings of an overblown 60’s acidhead? Depends […]

Sach O rides like a Samurai Fuck a cliché–Marseillais rapper, Shurik’n’s 1998 solo release, “Ou Je Vis” (Translation: Where I live), is poetic autobiography. While that’s like describing rap as “the hood CNN”, Shu’s rhymes about French rap’s second city actually fulfil their aspirations. Marrying an investigative scope to vivid descriptions of personal struggle and […]

SACH O SACH O Sach O sach o IS IN EFFECT EFFECT Effect effect The received wisdom is that Dub is first and foremost a technological and chemical achievement. Years before professional remixing and electronic music, Jamaican producers took crude equipment and created a revolution out of reverb, bass and collie weed, setting the stage […]

Sach O ate fries with mayo and two burritos while researching this story. In the mad dash towards Tropicalia, Hindi-Pop, Afrobeat, and every other hastily discovered internet-approved form of non-Anglo pop music, there hasn’t been much room for humor. Seriousness begets authenticity, authenticity begets that warm fuzzy feeling of self-importance in a record nerd and […]

Sach O dedicates this one to his lil brother chilling in Jamaica When the time of judgment comes to pass, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell better hope that Jah’s into Pop music and not hardcore Roots. All of his accomplishments in promoting Jamaican music aside, his Mango subsidiary’s tempering of Reggae’s revolutionary aesthetic through dubious […]

Sach O wrote this one coming down off Codeine. Bands that hit a zeitgeist are fucked one way or another. Hang on to your once-cool style and you look like a dinosaur, switch it up and you disappoint your fan base. Primal Scream’s response to the changing tides following their era-defining psychedelic masterpiece Screamadelica has […]

Sach O lost all the music on his iPod in a freak accident. This is the first thing he got back. French rap is a harder sell than Canto-Pop. I don’t blame heads really: in an art form where lyrics are prized, a language barrier is the ultimate deal-breaker. No matter how bangin the beat […]

Sach O only slept with your mother cuz she’s dirty. Good writing and complex writing aren’t one and the same, a notion conveniently ignored by white indie rappers, college educated singer-songwriters and pretentious-ass music bloggers with little to say and the lingering desire to make their college education seem like it was worth the money. […]

Sach O kicks it P.L.O. style, buddha monks with the owls.  At first glance, you’d think there couldn’t be a more politically inconvenient time to bump Baader Meinhof. A conceptual album by Auteurs front man Luke Haines; the record is essentially a first person account of a radical leftist student group of the same name […]