Weekend Warm-Up No. 18: Soundtracking
–Words & list by Kevin Madert
Film scores and original soundtracks are ideal pump-up fodder – hell, these are pieces of music designed to evoke specific emotional responses to whatever visual media they’re attached to. Sure, it’s not all that difficult to get excited when Russell Crowe enters the Roman Colosseum, or Andy Dufresne escapes from Shawshank Prison. But musical accompaniment ensures even out-of-the-loop viewers understand what they’re supposed to feel; even if it’s an unconscious response, those epic crescendos and frantic notes get the blood pumping and the heart racing all the same.
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Weekend Warm-Up No. 17: Dreamscape Edition
–Words & list by Mike Hogan
It’s getting close now, BADASS Raves’ Dreamscape Festival is less than a week away, and that means it’s time to start getting hyped up for a weekend of good music, good friends, and pool parties. So while it is the weekend, and that’s certainly something to celebrate on it’s own, I’m choosing to more or less take it easy this weekend in preparation for an absolutely huge weekend looming ahead of me. And considering the fact that this time next week, you all will (hopefully) be getting down at Dreamscape Festival instead of sitting in front of your computer, I figured there was no time like the present to start getting excited. So to get your weekend, and indeed your Dreamscape Festival started off on the right foot, this week’s Weekend Warm-Up features some of the hardest hitting headliners that you can find at Dreamscape.
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Weekend Warm-Up No. 16: Hip-Hop’s Golden Age
–Words & list by Kevin Madert
After developing quickly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hip-hop hit what most music historians consider its pinnacle in the middle of the decade. With honed, intelligent lyricism, complex interior rhyme schemes, innovative production styles, and a steady diversification of subject material, hip-hop saw itself expand in explosive fashion. In Rolling Stone‘s accurate assessment, “it seemed that every new single reinvented the genre,” during the Golden Age, which persisted well into the 1990s.
This week’s warm-up is just as much a history lesson as a tool for the fabrication and proliferation of psychitude. You’ll hear intricate narratives detailing everything from the struggles of black youth in America (“Temperature’s Rising”) to the minutiae of everyday life (“The Jam”), not to mention the occasional chest-thumping soliloquy (“The Rep Grows Bigga,” “Gz & Hustlas”).
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Weekend Warm-Up No. 15: Metalcore Edition
–Words and list by Mike Hogan
I’ve been on a bit of a roll with metalcore this week (you can blame August Burns Red for that one). It’s seen me revisiting the genre, and listening to some of my favorite albums, whether old and new. As we prepare to begin our weekend, I figure there’s no better way to get pumped than some good ol’ breakdowns and ridiculous guitar work.
So here are 10 tracks that’ll get any circle pit started, almost all from bands that you can go out and see live right now. Enjoy, and as always let us know what you think; we’d love to hear what songs you would have chosen for this playlist!
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Weekend Warm-Up No. 14: Mixed Bag #2
–Words & list by Kevin Madert
Sometimes it’s good to take a step back and remember getting amped up doesn’t require a specific genre or style. Snoop Dogg, Jack Beats, Tipper, and Goldfish all know plenty about the topic – even if they have different ideas about how one gets there. Now, I’ll stop talking so you can start listening.
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Weekend Warm-Up No. 13: We Love The ’90s
–Words and list by Kevin Madert
Perhaps no decade in the last half-century is as nostalgized and obsessed over than the 1990s. Sure, we still enjoy many things from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, but the ’90s possess some inexplicable, unquantifiable hold over us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the decade’s contributions to the world of music. For me, that made constructing this playlist a hell of a task, so I made an executive decision. Rather than pick ten upbeat tunes to encapsulate my relationship with the entire decade, I picked the first ten tracks of what in my mind is a much larger list – one you’ll see more of if you continue tuning in for our Warm-Ups.
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