Our plans for a quiet Friday evening were hijacked by a group of crazed indie fans (including a and b) who forced us to drink cheap pink cava on Old Compton Street before dragging us off to a basement to listen to painfully nostalgic and occasionally nostalgically painful (is there really any need for anyone to play a Cast in 2007?) records and drink too much, unfortunately we had to leave early as we had Saturday morning chores to do South of the river.

Strangely going to clubs and gigs sometimes has the effect of making me want to listen to completely different music, as chance would have it this inevitable reaction coincided with Woebot pointing the way to this 4.5 hour long mix of 90s hip-hop. Which is bloody great. The amount of energy and drive in the music and in Flex’s enthusiasm for it (he uses explosions as punctuation; full-stops and commas) is truly amazing. It’s all vinyl too so you get records jumping and crazy raw and fresh feeling to the whole affair (like eating a particularly funky grapefruit).

It’s kind of interesting the way hip-hop history is told in re-used samples and quoted lyrics and in mixes like this, a properly oral/ performance tradition in contrast to rock, and particularly punk’s, obsession with written self documentation, fanzines, the idea of important rock critics, it’s all about cannon, specific moments when bands did specific things with hip-hop it’s all about texture, the whole culture in the mix, constantly retold and re-interprested (of course it wasn’t always thus, early hip-hop was interprested with rock’s rules, the act of creation myths and venerated individuals). Or maybe I’m just talking crap. Anyway, 90’s hip hop is my favourite era, and this mix is a great argument for it being the true golden age of the genre.

We finished the weekend (after 2 days of record of record breaking meat eating) with a double bill of the wire (2_5 and 2_6) which turned out to be a pretty depressing end to the weekend with D’s story arc coming to a dramatic close. Not that it wasn’t good, it was as good as The Wire ever is (i.e. the best thing on tele™), the high point was Omar finally getting his day in court and being totally amazing. One of the highlights of the whole thing so far, a perfect mix of fuck you sartorial grace, and devil may care romantic anti-hero. Suck on thet Levy!