Listening to music with Jake The Rapper

Jake the Rapper by Katja Oortman

Jake the Rapper – photo: Katja Oortman

Jake The Rapper is the oh-so-lovely, larger-than-large, tattooed, bearded character you’ve no doubt seen if you went to Villa or Bar25, where he was a resident DJ and part of the extended family. Despite the descriptor “The Rapper” in his name, Jake primarily loves to play house music, and he is one of Berlin’s finest Techno DJs.

We asked Jake the Rapper about music by Lady Gaga, Richard Wagner, Curtis Mayfield and Seeed.

Curtis Mayfield – Little Child Running Wild

Oooh yeah. Curtis Mayfield is one of my all time favorites. I’ve been trying to make a decent house edit of “Superfly” for years now. I work at it awhile, the house beat I put on it inevitably makes it all clunky and sucks the funk out, I give up. A year or two later I repeat the whole process.

I can’t think of any good house remixes of Curtis. They’re usually way too cheesy. One of the problems with sampling anything off that album is that you don’t realize that there are crazy bongos over *every second* of it until you start looping part of it. Everywhere. bongos. Crazy. Unloopable. At least with my weak skills. Which is a shame because these are some of the funkiest, most danceable basslines ever.

Seeed – Waterpumpee

Can I answer a YouTube video with another YouTube video? I think this says it all:

That’s not to say I don’t like what Peter Fox is doing now. Some of it is amazing. But it’s in his own language in his own accent, which I find much more convincing.

Although he’s had so many hits on the radio recently, and whereas one of them is lyrically brilliant in and of itself, listening to a bunch of them in a row makes them all start to sound a little samey. It’s like the first time you hear it you’re like, “Holy shit! How can he write lyrics like that?”, and the fourth song you’re more like, “Oh, I see how he does it. Huh.”

Lady Gaga feat. Beyoncé -Telephone

If you appreciate Michael Jackson and Madonna, ya gotta love Lady Gaga. She’s annoying like a loose tooth you had as a kid, that you loved to wiggle but that wouldn’t come out.

I love videos with long story intros. I remember way back in the eighties, our favorite video was “Thriller”. The 14 minute version. That was back when MTV was all music all the time, and a break from it was welcome. Ah, how things change.

And another thing nice about the eighties was that we didn’t appreciate at the time was the embarrassingly dorky personalities of most of the pop stars then. They were real people. They were so real it was sometimes painful to watch. It wasn’t until the industry learned how to sanitize and dehumanize every artist to the point where they had no discernible human qualities (eg: Britney Spears, Beyonce, etc.) that we started to miss our dorky human heroes.

So it’s refreshing when someone has the guts to come into the limelight and be less than perfect. like Gaga. You kind of wish there was a button on your Playstation somehow connected to her costume that would make her punch herself, but that’s part of her charm.

Oh yeah, musically it’s just as atrocious as all the other shit I hear on the radio now, but does that really matter these days? Who’s listening to the music? No one, apparently or they’d stop all these crimes against my ears. But maybe I’m just old.

Richard Wagner – Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond (aus: “Die Walküre”)

I’m not a big Wagner fan. He’s very dated, if you ask me. It might have seemed cool at the time, it sounds kinda cheesy now.

As far as German composers go, I find Beethoven to be much more universal and timeless. My favorite of all time is symphony no. 7, 2nd movement.

Although if I were to pick a song to compare to your Wagner video, it would have to be this version of “Ode to Joy”.

Jake The Rapper & Channel X – I Love The Couch, Baby (Oliver Koletzki Remix)

Haha, yeah, that’s me. What can I say? I’m glad there’s a YouTube video that actually mentions my name now. There wasn’t for the longest time. Anyway, I wish we’d actually made a real video for the song! That would have been cool. But we didn’t, so there isn’t, so there you go.

www.jakelovesyou.com

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Jens

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