TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010 MUSIC QUICK SPINS


Freddie Gibbs STR8 KILLA NO FILLA


Rust Belt MC Freddie Gibbs is a rapper’s rapper


— a deathly serious street-hop sage with little interest in freestyling or hanging out with Weezy. He comes with an impressive pedigree that includes years spent hustling and scraping on the streets of Gary, Ind., even robbing trains (freight trains, not the Amtrak kind), and a major label deal that went south. Thanks to two stellar mix-tape releases, Gibbs has become an underground sensation beloved by hip-hop fans and indie rockers alike. Even more impressive, he’s done so during a time when gangsta rap has mostly fallen out of favor. Gibbs has yet to deliver an official full-length disc, but after years of false starts he’s finally delivered a knockout one-two punch, releasing a 21-track, mind-bogglingly good mix tape, “Str8 Killa No Filla,” and an official debut EP, “Str8 Killa,” containing most of the mix tape’s best tracks. In any form, “Killa” justifies the hype. Gibbs is an


agile rapper, fluent in double-time, rapid-fire wordplay, and a not-half-bad singer besides. His longing for the days of early ’90s hip-hop is palpable throughout, especially on “Rock Bottom,” a wrenching, New Depression-era collaboration with Bun B. At his worst, which still isn’t that bad, Gibbs seems less interested in being the savior of 2010 hip-hop than in being the second coming of 2Pac, a comparison that “Killa” encourages stylistically and narratively. Even the tracks that feel tossed off (like the


clackety “Oil Money,” an EP-only track featuring Dan Auerbach) are memorable, often great, meaning Gibbs is the rare underground/blog sensation who lives up to his advance billing, and “No Filla” the rare mix tape that almost lives up to its title.


— Allison Stewart Recommended tracks: “Yo Canto,” “On Main Street,” “Twenty-Seven Spanishes” Recommended tracks: “Oil Money,” “Rock Bottom,” “The Ghetto”


Los Lobos is scheduled to perform at the Birchmere on Sunday.


PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SUSANA SANCHEZ-YOUNG/ THE WASHINGTON POST


for aesthetics, not for mind alter- ation.


I-dosing: Hit or miss?


music from C1


On I-Doser, the digital drugs — purchased by downloading free software and clicking on individ- ual tracks — are represented through stock art. “Acid” is a blurred face; “Heroin” is a Fiona Apple look-alike chewing on her own hair. For $3.95 users can download


“Astral,” which claims to aid in out-of-body experiences; for $3 they can buy “Extend,” which sup- posedly prolongs sexual encoun- ters. (But what’s the point if both partners are wearing noise-can- celing headphones?) I-doses are anywhere from five


to 30 minutes long. Press play and what you hear might sound like a wind tunnel, or mating whales, or Yanni. The effects are made possible,


purportedly, through “binaural beats,” where a tone of one fre- quency is played into the right ear and a slightly different frequency is played into the left. Believers say these beats synchronize brain waves, replicating the experience of being high on anything from al- cohol to true love. Binaural beats have been used as a meditation aid for decades. I- Doser’s biggest contribution ap- pears to be the dark names — the way it implies that their products are dangerous, baby, dangerous. The founder is Nick Ashton, who looks like a sullen underwear model in his Facebook profile pic- ture, who said he would answer questions about I-Doser via e- mail and who — when presented with such questions as “What is


your background?” and “Do you have a degree in a science?” — stopped responding to e-mails and voice mails. In the site’s FAQs, employees are identified, vaguely, as “under- ground musicians and tonal ex- perts.”


Ambiguity, however, does not


prevent customers from sharing their favorite trips in the “user ex- periences” section of the site. Alcohol: “I laughed after touch-


ing my lip and then I talked and my voice was in three-part har- mony.” Lucid Dream: “I washed ashore on an island and found a bunch of dead bodies.” First Love: “I had these images


in my head of being kissed and nibbled by Na’vi,” the 10-foot-tall blue aliens from “Avatar.” “It was absolutely amazing.” Riiight. Jamie Therrien is only 13 years old, but he’s an I-Doser veteran. He learned about binaural beats from YouTube and spent time re- searching other people’s experi- ences before trying it. Now he i- doses every few weeks, zoning out in front of his computer in Mas- sachusetts, and offering tips to newcomers on the message boards. “The hallucinogenic ones are the weakest,” he says, expertly, but the sedatives and calming doses are pretty effective. Once, when he got in a fight with his brother, he downloaded a pick-me-up called “Quick Happy” and almost immediately felt less angry. People who fear digital drugs


“are sort of right to be concerned, because pretty much anything with ‘drugs’ in it, you should be concerned about,” he says. “But


it’s a lot less mystical than you might think. They’re just stim- ulating different parts of the brain. . . . I’ve never seen anyone go from I-Doser to the real thing.” Jamie’s mother, Kim Hastings, knows about i-dosing and isn’t overly concerned. “If he’s found something safe that makes him calm and happy, that’s great,” she says. Also, she says in the conspir- atorial voice of a parent who sees no harm in Santa Claus, “I don’t think he’s actually getting high.”


Looking into the science Are any users actually getting


high? Labeling an MP3 “cocaine” is alarming, but you could call popcorn “cocaine,” too, and that wouldn’t mean consumers could grind it up and snort it for a buzz. For guidance, we turn to Daniel


Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal who stud- ies music’s effects on the brain. In preparation for the morning telephone interview, Levitin con- fesses, he spent the preceding eve- ning i-dosing on a dozen or so dif- ferent tracks from several Web sites. “As far as I know, I have not gone crazy,” Levitin says. “I am not hung over. I am not on an opium high.” In fact, Levitin says, “the idea


that these binaural beats would cause states that would mimic drugs is without scientific foun- dation. There’s just no mecha- nism that would make that work.” Binaural beats are a real thing, in the sense that they exist. In fact, we hear sounds like them all the time — like the wahwahwah of a guitar that’s slightly out of tune. Musicians often use binau- ral beats to interesting effect — there’s a whole minimalist genre called “drone music” — but that’s


Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University led a study looking into the effects of binau- ral beats, measuring the brain- wave activity of people listening to certain frequencies. “There was no increase at all,” says Helane Wahbeh, who conducted the re- search. Asecond OHSU study did show some long-term benefits, subjec- tively speaking. People who lis- tened to binaural beats every day reported feeling less anxious and having an improved quality of life. “But maybe that was just sitting for an hour” — having some reg- ular downtime, Wahbeh says. For a plugged-in modern human, the most powerful sensation that bin- aural beats might replicate is the sensation of doing nothing. “The other kernel of truth in all of this is that music does have the ability to alter our moods,” Levitin says. It is, after all, why most of us listen to it. Our neural chemistry is soothed or uplifted by music the same way that it’s affected by looking at puppies or sunsets. Our brains are in constant dialogue with our surroundings, and not just when high. That, and it’s difficult to esti-


mate the power of suggestion and a really great placebo.


A meditation aid A binaural believer could argue


that Levitin and Wahbeh, scien- tists that they are, might lack the openness to allow their brains to be taken on a magical mystery tour. For another expert opinion on


whether sites such as I-Doser can replicate illegal substances, we call Carl Harvey. Harvey is a Brit who runs BinauralBeats- Geek.com, sampling beats as if they are fine wines. He favors ones from brands such as Holo- sync and the Unexplainable Store, and he uses them as calming aids. “It’s effectively like meditation, right?” Harvey says. “It allows your brain to slow down.” There is a strong community of users like Harvey, who view bin- aural beats more like yoga class than Amsterdam’s red-light dis- trict. They say that binaural beats can help them reach alternate brain-wave levels of alpha, beta and theta. When Harvey is informed that I-Doser is claiming these medita- tion aids can be used as narcotic substitutes, he is doubtful — and agrees to use his trained senses to evaluate the effectiveness of two of i-Doser’s bestsellers. Forty-five minutes later, he sends a disappointing e-mail. In short, they’re duds. “Basically, the cocaine one was


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just a standard binaural beats program — and it wasn’t even a particularly good one,” writes Harvey. “It was a bit of a waste of time.” The marijuana was “slightly more interesting than the co- caine, and I did feel myself experi- encing a bit of a ‘cloudy head’ as I started to doze off a bit.” Harvey says that he would rec- ommend it to anyone looking for a pleasant afternoon nap, but “it’s not really gonna get kids ‘high.’ ” Writes one commenter on You-


Tube in response to an i-dosing video: “Kids these days are dumb- er than when I was dumb. I was at least smart enough to really get high instead of dorking around and making myself look like a [twerp] on YouTube.”


Sample selection But enough theoretical ques-


tioning. It is time for some im- mersion research, sampling some of I-Doser’s wackiest tobacky with our own ears. Over a 24-hour period, nine


Washington Post reporters and friends sampled five different digital drugs from I-Doser.com. Four felt nothing. One said that “alcohol” made him feel more mellow. One said that “caffeine” made her feel slightly refreshed. One described her “ecstasy” ex- perience as “private.” One described his “opium” ex- perience like “a vacuum cleaner going through the brain, leaving everything spotless.” And one, another “ecstasy” lis-


tener, spent 20 minutes with the soundtrack before saying, “Can I stop now? . . . I think that’s enough. I feel like I’m about to be transported by aliens. This is the secret way to do alien loboto- mies.”


Whoa. hessem@washpost.com


VIDEO ON THE WEB Monica Hesse details the phenomenon


known as i-dosing in a video at washingtonpost.com/style.


MIKE BLAKE/ REUTERS


Los Lobos TIN CAN TRUST


Los Lobos’s first album of new material in four years marks a return to the group’s


rough-and-ready roots. Recorded in a small studio in a rundown section of Los Angeles, the music is lean and gutbucket, much as it was some 30 years ago when, as the title of the group’s 1978 LP put it, it was “just another band from East L.A.” Latin accents abound, especially on the set-closing “Twenty-Seven Spanishes,” a mythopoeic account of Spain’s conquest of Mexico, but also on the tradition-steeped “Yo Canto,” a cumbia, and “Mujer Ingrata,” a norteno. The lyrics tend to be more impressionistic than


narrative, and typically concerned with hard-pressed but resilient men and women scuffling on society’s margins. “Trying hard to believe there’s something more than me / Something outside myself that wants me to be free,” sings César Rosas, echoed by mournful organ and guitar fills, in “All My Bridges Burning,” a searching ballad written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. The album also includes a bluesy cover of the Dead’s “West L.A. Fadeaway” featuring tortuous guitar solos and noirish overtones. Much of the music here is blues-based, from the rumbling upright bass of “I’ll Burn It Down” (with Susan Tedeschi on background vocals) to the roiling undertow of “On Main Street,” the latter reminiscent of Cream’s arrangement of Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign.” The playing is intuitive and fluid throughout, revealing just the sort of command that comes when a group of committed musicians have been anticipating one another’s moves for decades.


— Bill Friskics-Warren Recommended tracks:


“I’ve Endured,” “High on a Mountain,” “Tear Down the Fences”


KLMNO


S


THE CLASSICAL BEAT Post critic Anne Midgette offers her take on the classical music world at voices. washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat.


C3


CLICK TRACK For more pop music news, reviews and features, visit ClickTrack, The Post’s pop music blog at blog.washingtonpost.com/ clicktrack.


SINGLES FILE


A weekly playlist for the listener with a one-track mind


RAtheMC: “Intoxicated” The DMV rapper previews the rollicking first single from her upcoming official debut, “Heart of a Cham- pion.”


Goatsnake: “Knucklebuster”


Ola Belle Reed RISING SUN MELODIES


As a performer, bandleader and humanitarian, Reed, who died in 2002, was a role model for generations of bluegrass musicians, and not only women. Her songs have been recorded by the likes of the Del McCoury Band and the Louvin Brothers. And with her brother and her husband, she opened New River Ranch, a country music park near Rising Sun, Md., where, from 1951 into the ’60s, everyone from Hank Williams to Bill Monroe and the Carter Family appeared. All of which is to say nothing of Reed’s forceful clawhammer banjo playing and keening voice, both of them the epitome of the Appalachian mountains in which she grew up. This set, which includes 11 tracks from two


late-’70s albums for Folkways and eight previously unreleased recordings from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, is as good as primer on her music as any. Several of Reed’s best-known songs are here, including “High on a Mountain” and “I’ve Endured.” Written on the occasion of her 50th birthday, “I’ve Endured” appears in two versions, the second a barely contained live performance, with her husband and son on guitar, that makes persistence amid adversity less an act of determination than an out-and-out triumph. Reed’s resilient spirit, informed by the poverty


that she and her family knew during the Depression, courses through the album, whether in the justice-minded “Tear Down the Fences” or in “I Believe in the Old-Time Way,” a gospel number she learned from an old Charlie Moore LP. — Bill Friskics-Warren


Beloved by stoners and sludge aficionados, the L.A. doom-metal supergroup (containing members of Sunn O))) and Scream) released two influential full- length discs before disbanding in 2001. Those discs have lately been reissued on vinyl, along with this blissfully weird rarity.


Paleo: “World’s Smallest Violin” The itinerant singer-songwriter fashions one of the season’s unlikeliest stunners.


The Electronic Anthology Project: “Eels” In which Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch and Brett Nel- son rework some of BTS’s signature tracks as ’80s electro-dance numbers, including this otherwise pretty faithful reinvention of “Else.”


Lil Wayne and Hall & Oates: “Lollipop Dreams” The new “(500) Days of Weezy” mix tape is pretty much what it advertises: the movie’s soundtrack, creatively smooshed together with Lil Wayne joints. It’s downloadable, though if 500 days of Lil Wayne seems like an awful lot to commit to, it’s streama- ble, too.


— Allison Stewart


MR. MASH-UP: Lil Wayne.


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