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Subject: "some new Thundercat" Previous topic | Next topic
Numba_33
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Wed Jan-15-20 09:55 PM

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"some new Thundercat"


  

          

A new single : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT-5echU7S8

A new album: https://thundercat.bandcamp.com/album/it-is-what-it-is

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

  

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Topic Outline
Subject Author Message Date ID
and I already put the Day 1 Dollars down
Jan 16th 2020
1
Dragonball durag (music link inside RS swipe)
Feb 17th 2020
2
lyrics of the year
Feb 17th 2020
3
I fuck with him so heavy...
Feb 18th 2020
4
one of the most hilarious songs I've heard given what it sounds like
Feb 19th 2020
5
Long live Thundercat and Zach Fox
Feb 28th 2020
7
RE: Long live Thundercat and Zach Fox
Mar 29th 2020
9
JUST discovered this song thanks to Spice Adams
May 21st 2020
14
If you have the time
May 29th 2020
15
i'm late AF, but i LOVE this song.
Sep 09th 2020
16
I've been wearing out "Black Qualls."
Feb 24th 2020
6
Thundercat - NY Times (swipe)
Mar 28th 2020
8
1st listen, solid.
Apr 03rd 2020
10
Really enjoyed the album it's a quick listen
Apr 03rd 2020
11
its good
Apr 03rd 2020
12
The sole track I dislike
Apr 03rd 2020
13

Dr Claw
Member since Jun 25th 2003
132212 posts
Thu Jan-16-20 10:15 AM

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1. "and I already put the Day 1 Dollars down"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

and got the merch.

The wait for 4/3 is going to be really long.

  

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c71
Member since Jan 15th 2008
13927 posts
Mon Feb-17-20 07:13 PM

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2. "Dragonball durag (music link inside RS swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/thundercat-dragonball-durag-single-953385/

HOME
MUSIC
MUSIC NEWS

FEBRUARY 17, 2020 1:02PM ET

Hear Thundercat’s New Disco-Tinged Track, ‘Dragonball Durag’
Track is the second single off upcoming album It Is What It Is

Thundercat professes his love for Dragon Ball Z and durags in the hilarious “Dragonball Durag.” The song comes off Thundercat’s upcoming album It Is What It Is, out April 3rd via Brainfeeder.
“I feel kind of fly standing next to you,” he sings, over a walloping bass line. “Baby girl, how do I look in my durag?” The disco track flourishes as a saxophone comes bursting in, while Thundercat continues his search for love: “Do you like me in my new whip? Watch me go zoom, zoom.”

“I have a Dragon Ball tattoo,” the bassist said in a statement. “It runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball is life.” He also commented on his durag: “There are two types of people in the world, the guy with the durag and the guy who doesn’t know what a durag is. The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on…it does something, it changes you. If you have one in the wardrobe, think about wearing it tonight, and it may pop off because you never know what’s going to happen.”

The musician spoke to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about the track. “Some people like to change the name because if they write something, where the track started as compared to where it finished, it doesn’t hold the same story based on how it travels,” he says of the title. But I like the idea of your first instinct being the right one.”

“Dragonball Durag” follows last month’s “Black Qualls,” which featured Steve Lacy and Steve Arrington. Thundercat will embark on a spring tour in support of It Is What It Is beginning on February 28th. He’ll play two consecutive nights at New York’s Webster Hall in March before the tour wraps up in Atlanta on April 2nd.

  

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Nabs
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Mon Feb-17-20 08:20 PM

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3. "lyrics of the year"
In response to Reply # 2


  

          

  

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CherNic
Member since Aug 18th 2005
37156 posts
Tue Feb-18-20 09:18 AM

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4. "I fuck with him so heavy..."
In response to Reply # 2


  

          

Might have to see him when he comes here in a couple months

  

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Dr Claw
Member since Jun 25th 2003
132212 posts
Wed Feb-19-20 10:18 AM

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5. "one of the most hilarious songs I've heard given what it sounds like"
In response to Reply # 2


  

          

those lyrics.... LMAO

  

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Numba_33
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19311 posts
Fri Feb-28-20 08:53 AM

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7. "Long live Thundercat and Zach Fox"
In response to Reply # 2


  

          

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ormQQG2UhtQ

I can't get enough of this video. I hope this blows up just as much music videos can blow up these days. Pitch perfect video to match the silliness of the song.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

  

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jimaveli
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6586 posts
Sun Mar-29-20 10:24 AM

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9. "RE: Long live Thundercat and Zach Fox"
In response to Reply # 7


  

          

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ormQQG2UhtQ
>
>I can't get enough of this video. I hope this blows up just as
>much music videos can blow up these days. Pitch perfect video
>to match the silliness of the song.

Yes. Beautiful video. There’s gotta be like 50 funny things. I watched it at least once daily for a week. And I’d always say I wasn’t gonna laugh anymore. I never made it past the moonwalk on grass. And then, that change in ol girl’s facial expression ties the whole thing together...makes it all worth it every time.

Simply, I adore this video. I tried to push it onto anyone who I thought would appreciate it.

  

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Adwhizz
Member since Nov 12th 2003
40918 posts
Thu May-21-20 06:46 PM

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14. "JUST discovered this song thanks to Spice Adams"
In response to Reply # 2


  

          

This shit is like my track of the year

Did Hannibal Burress co-write this shit? I know they hang out

R.I.P. Loud But Wrong Guy
Dec 29th 2009 - Dec 17th 2017

  

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Numba_33
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Fri May-29-20 11:18 AM

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15. "If you have the time"
In response to Reply # 14


  

          

>Did Hannibal Burress co-write this shit? I know they hang out

check out his twitter account to see the brand of humor he has. It's pretty out there.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

  

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poetx
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58856 posts
Wed Sep-09-20 07:58 PM

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16. "i'm late AF, but i LOVE this song. "
In response to Reply # 2


  

          


peace & blessings,

x.

www.twitter.com/poetx

=========================================
I'm an advocate for working smarter, not harder. If you just
focus on working hard you end up making someone else rich and
not having much to show for it. (c) mad

  

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The Wordsmith
Member since Aug 13th 2002
17070 posts
Mon Feb-24-20 11:48 AM

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6. "I've been wearing out "Black Qualls.""
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

As a matter of fact, I kept repeating it on my way home around an hour ago. I'm looking forward to the album.


Since 1976

  

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c71
Member since Jan 15th 2008
13927 posts
Sat Mar-28-20 09:49 PM

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8. "Thundercat - NY Times (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/arts/music/thundercat-it-is-what-it-is.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Music

He’d Always Been Thundercat, Whether He Knew It or Not
The bassist and singer Stephen Bruner invites listeners into his eccentric world. His new album, “It Is What It Is,” is a vivid portrait of living with uncertainty and grief.


The bassist and singer Thundercat’s latest album, “It Is What It Is,” is a meditation on living with loss partly inspired by the death of the musician’s friend Mac Miller.

By Alex Pappademas

March 25, 2020

OAKLAND, Calif. — In a few hours, Stephen Bruner, the singer and bassist professionally known as Thundercat, had a sold-out show to play at the Fox Theater, a former 1920s movie palace on Telegraph Avenue. Somewhere inside the Fox, there was a dressing room with his name on it. But Bruner’s plan for the afternoon was to stay on the bus, where he feels at home.

“I’m a road dog,” Bruner said, then corrected himself. “Cat. Road cat.”

He was half-prone on a couch in the bus’s back corner, in skinny black jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming, in bumper-stickerish terms, his love of a particular excretory function; his nails were painted eggplant purple. A screen near the bus’s ceiling displayed a game of Mario Kart, on pause. Every so often, to keep from losing his place in the game, Bruner would stretch out a silver-socked toe and wake the console from sleep mode by nudging the stick of his controller, which lay at the far end of the couch, next to an Aldi shopping bag overflowing with crumpled laundry, including a silver Lurex cargo vest designed by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton.

Anything else he could have needed in this moment was close at hand — water, plastic-sleeved X-Men comics, a reference book on an obscure genus of Pokémon, or a Pikachu-shaped backpack with a miniature Pikachu hanging from the zipper and a Pikachu-yellow sweatshirt inside.


Bruner, 35, cheerfully acknowledges never having put aside his childhood obsessions. Instead, he’s become the kind of artist who invites listeners into a private and eccentric world. Since 2011, he’s made four solo albums, always in collaboration with the Los Angeles producer Steven Ellison, better known as Flying Lotus. (The latest, “It Is What It Is,” is out April 3.) His catalog posits an alternate universe where smooth ’70s FM stalwarts like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald (who both appeared on his third album, “Drunk,” in 2018) stand shoulder to shoulder with jazz icons like John Coltrane and the Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius — and where music built on those juxtapositions somehow resonates as pop.

McDonald, who got his big break as a backup singer on Steely Dan’s “Katy Lied,” suggests that Bruner is pulling off something similar to what Walter Becker and Donald Fagen accomplished with their band decades ago. “From the ’70s to the ’80s, those guys were Top 40 radio darlings,” McDonald said. “And I’m going, How did that happen? Their songs are so strange, and so sophisticated. It just goes to show you — there’s that audience out there, that’s waiting for something really good.”

On record, Bruner’s songs split the difference between thumping pop-funk, emotive swells of melody and jazz fusion’s heady cosmic undertow. Live at the Fox that March night, he and his touring band — the keyboardist Dennis Hamm and the drummer Justin Brown — would surrender to that undertow, turning once-concise tunes into pretexts for extended, stormy jams. But they also played “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II),” a song about Bruner’s cat, with most of the audience providing meow-along backup vocals on the hook. No matter how interstellar Bruner’s music gets, his goofy sense of humor always anchors it in the day-to-day.

“He’s the coolest bass player that ever walked the Earth, period, point blank,” said the singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, who’s featured on one of the new album’s singles, “Black Qualls.”

Lacy, 21, said that Bruner and Ellison “are the reason I’m doing this — they just opened my mind up to all the possibilities in music. Even though my music sounds nothing like theirs — they inspired me to try.”


Bruner grew up in Compton and other regions of Los Angeles. His mother, Pam Bruner, plays flute and percussion. His father, Ronald Bruner Sr., is a drummer who’s played and recorded with Diana Ross, Gladys Knight and the Temptations. Bruner remembers accompanying him to performances as a child and dozing off during his father’s drum solos.

At Locke High School in Watts, Bruner played in the Multi-School Jazz Band, run by a music teacher named Reggie Andrews. Andrews, who taught at Locke on and off for 40 years, is probably best known for co-writing the Dazz Band’s immortal “Let It Whip.” In the course of his tenure at Locke, he nurtured artists like Patrice Rushen, Tyrese Gibson, members of the Pharcyde, the jazz drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. — Bruner’s older brother — and Bruner himself, who refers to Andrews as his “second dad.”

Through Andrews and the Jazz Band, Bruner reconnected with a tenor saxophonist named Kamasi Washington, who’d grown up in nearby Inglewood but attended Alexander Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles. Washington and Bruner had met as children, when their fathers played together in what Washington called a “gospel-fusion band.”

“Stephen was always who he is, way before it was cool to be that way,” Washington said. “He’s always been a completely unique individual. I’ll never forget, we had a gig one time, and we were supposed to wear all black. I came to pick him up, and he was like, ‘Man, I don’t think I have any black pants.’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to have a pair of black pants.’ He went in his closet. Purple, green, orange, canary yellow, but no black.”

Bruner’s parents were strict about curfews, but being musicians, they saw Washington as a positive influence, Bruner said. “They didn’t have to worry if we were out trolling and being idiots,” Bruner said. “They almost didn’t have to worry about chicks — because we were nerds.”


Although they were underage — and Bruner is four years younger than Washington — they’d sneak into jazz clubs and other concert venues, first as spectators and then as performers. Eventually Washington acquired a 1982 Ford Mustang; the hatchback didn’t close, and parts of the interior were held together with duct tape. But it allowed Bruner, Washington and their compatriots to play anywhere in Los Angeles that would have them.

“It was insanely horrible,” Bruner said. “Sardine can. It was hilarious — we’d try to fit all my brother’s drums and my bass amp in this two-seater.”

Between gigs, Bruner, Washington and a small circle of like-minded young jazz musicians would jam in Washington’s father’s Leimert Park garage, which became known as “The Shack.” Bruner, Washington and the fellow Locke alum Terrace Martin — along with Flying Lotus — would one day contribute extensively to Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” on which Bruner’s bass is often as prominent a lead instrument as Lamar’s vocals.

By the early 2000s Bruner was touring the world as a sideman, first as a member of what he called “a little German-signed multicultural pop group” called No Curfew, which released one album on Polydor in 2001; the following year, Bruner joined the L.A. thrash-punk stalwarts Suicidal Tendencies, where his breakneck-speed bass playing was put to better use.

Not every employer whose road band Bruner passed through was interested in the full Thundercat experience. Snoop Dogg — whose nickname for the fresh-faced Bruner was “Baby Bass”— once cut short a Bruner bass solo during a show, grumbling, “Ain’t nobody tell you to play all that.”

“Raphael Saadiq once told me, ‘Man, play the record,’” Bruner said, laughing. “Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. Play the record.”


It was good advice to give a bass player; Bruner said he didn’t begin to think of himself as something more than that until the mid-2000s. He became close to the hip-hop production unit Sa-Ra Creative Partners; at their Silver Lake studio/clubhouse, he’d meet artists like Ty Dolla Sign and J Dilla, as well as Erykah Badu, who took him on tour.

“Erykah was the one that genuinely cultivated me as an artist,” Bruner said, gathering his bleached dreads into a Gucci hair clip. “She taught me what it means to be Thundercat, and what that entailed for me as an artist. More than playing bass in her band — she would hold my hand through stuff. She would make me stand out in front and sing with her.”

Badu may have given Bruner the courage to step forward as a frontman, but according to Ellison, he’d always been Thundercat, whether he knew it or not.

“He was always the craziest-dressed person in the room,” Ellison said. “That ain’t nothing new. Somewhere in there was a latent superstar.”

“All I ever wanted to be was funky and funny. That’s it,” Bruner said. He never imagined he’d be a lead vocalist, let alone the kind of artist who processes painful experiences in song. But like his 2013 album “Apocalypse” — informed by the drug-related death of a close friend, the jazz pianist Austin Peralta — “It Is What It Is” finds Bruner once again working through personal loss. It’s funky and funny, but its funk and fun feel more hard-won than ever — the title, Bruner said, refers less to resignation than to acceptance.


In September 2018, the rapper Mac Miller died of an accidental drug overdose. “That was my ace, my best friend,” Bruner said. His voice became quiet; the bus’s air conditioning seemed suddenly loud.

Miller’s death was the first of a string of difficult losses and transitions, Bruner said. He was in a serious relationship — “I was on the edge of getting married”— which went south not long after Miller died. There was also the death of the rapper Nipsey Hussle, who was shot and killed in South Los Angeles, not far from where Bruner’s family lives.

But it’s Miller who haunts “It Is What It Is,” which begins with a song about being metaphorically lost in space and ends with Bruner calling out “Hey, Mac” into the void.

“It’s like, he’s not really here anymore,” Bruner said. “He’s not going to pull up and park wrong in front of my spot, get a ticket and show up and knock at the door.” (That was Miller’s signature parking style, Bruner said: “He’d just park on the wrong side of the street, and get out of the car and some girl would faint.”)

Miller, Bruner said, was the person in his life “who I would call when stuff got weird. Talk to Mac.” After he died, Bruner said, he found it difficult to write music, or even to pick up a video-game controller. He quit drinking for a while.

“I had to sit with it,” he said. “I had to let the pain in. I had to cry, a lot.”

Then he made “It Is What It Is,” an album that’s ultimately less about overcoming uncertainty, fear, decay and heartbreak as it is about learning to live with those things as constants — conditions of staying alive. It’s the kind of cultural product that will inevitably feel eerily right-on-time when it drops amid the chaos unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. On March 12, almost a week after the Oakland show, Bruner tweeted the title phrase; the following day, he canceled the remaining dates of his North American tour.

“I think the existential dread set in when Mac disappeared,” Bruner said. “Things became a bit realer to me. I was faced with a choice — to either follow suit or figure it out. And I guess this is me trying to figure it out.”

  

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LeroyBumpkin
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Fri Apr-03-20 09:07 AM

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10. "1st listen, solid."
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

I like Louis Cole, not love.
I copped his debut album and haven't revisited it since.
But I like these two collaborating.

https://digife.com

  

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las raises
Member since Aug 31st 2002
14981 posts
Fri Apr-03-20 09:54 AM

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11. "Really enjoyed the album it's a quick listen"
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-----------------------------------------------------------------

  

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mista k5
Member since Feb 01st 2006
16404 posts
Fri Apr-03-20 10:20 AM

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12. "its good"
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im wondering if it just hasnt clicked with me yet and i dont fully get it. i dont seem to enjoy his solo stuff as much as others seem to. the music is cool, i think i mostly dont enjoy his voice. it really works on some songs but not on others.

overall i think its a 4/5 we will see on repeat listens.

  

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Numba_33
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19311 posts
Fri Apr-03-20 07:22 PM

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13. "The sole track I dislike"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

is the one with Lil B and Ty Dolla as I'm not a fan of either of them.

Pretty short album overall, but the replay value is pretty high.

I dunno how realistic this is since he appears to favor his singing, but I wish future Thundercat albums featured more instrumental tracks, in particular more jazz like tracks where the musicians can 'improvise' or so solo type work. The brief moments where that occured It Is What It Is were the highlights of the album to me.

"Sean sparks like John Starks, nah, Sean ball like John Wall" - Rest In Power Forever Sean Price.

  

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