Leonard Smalls

To be fair, the "rap" above is by some deeply untalented people, who seem to labour under the misapprehension that attempting rhythmic spoken word to convey a message requires little more than a mouth and a serious lack of clue. There's quite a lot of relatively decent musicians who are fiercely vegan - e.g. KRS-1, RZA of WuTang, all of Blink 182, Rob Zombie of White Zombie - and make music about it. And despite being a rabid meat-eater myself, it doesn't bother me a bit - in fact the singer in our band is vegan (but doesn't crow about it at all) and was part of the late 90s straight edge hardcore scene... Meanwhile, here's some jazz:

I've scrapped my original idea of a Cars/Groove is in the Heart mashup as my attempts at vocals were uniformly terrible... But I've fiddled with a live desk recording from a recent gig of our cover of Penetration's "Don't Dictate", which also has a hint of "Word Up" just for fun! Drums were a bit distorted so I added phaser and hoped, meanwhile everything else is as was, bar a bit of extra reverb on the vox and a light smattering of Ozone 9 and Neutron just to make it sound a bit less duff...

I think you'll find there isn't 😁 As the great Chuck Brown said "If it ain't funky don't ya know we can't use it now!"

Original's a cracker... Careful with them lyrics though! Then there's Bootsy, making Silent Night into the funkiest thing ever (check the "Pass The Peas" chorus!)

If you want to try the more esoteric and heavier end of dub, try Bill Laswell's Dub Chamber series. Or Mad Professor's Dub Me Crazy...

I think you'd be able to give it a darned good go... After all, if you're involved in a cheese-fest you might as well get out the Limburger and Harzer as opposed to the mild cheddar!

Excellent! It could perhaps have coped with a serious slap-fest on the last chorus!

Northern Soul Madness...

Some loud and dirty rock'n'roll...

He can definitely play! However, the only evidence of an actual groove that didn't sound like a machine gun (and machine guns are most certainly not groovy, man!) was when he slowed down a bit at the end... But then I'm more of a fan of yer aksherl grooves, more Stubblefield than Lombardo...

That's micro-tonal, i.e. all the other frequencies that aren't actual notes. See David Fiucynszki and his ilk. So, say your A above middle C is 440 Hz, G# will be 421.67Hz. In micro-tonal music you can also use (if you can find 'em!) all the frequencies between those 2... Micro-composition is specifically, short pieces - such as those premiered in the Indianapolis Micro-composition Challenge, which hoped to subvert traditional classical music by producing only "short" compositions. Though their idea of short isn't quite the same as Napalm Death think it is!

Nice, but a bit weird, to get a Mr Bungle/John Zorn inclusion! Excellent player and bands, but not quite Stanley Clarke... I suspect some collusion from fans!

Early 1979 rap, featuring the Sugarhill house band including Doug Wimbish on bass...

Personally, I'm a thumb and 3 fingers man... Thumb for both plucking and slapping, fingers either popping or doubledy-tripledy-do-ing. And it's always either right by or actually on the neck. Being polite I don't use my little finger - it's always pushed out with a slight bend, like a posh lady drinking a cup of tea. Folks often say I have a slightly weird playing style...

Depends entirely on what "drivel"! If it's ill-thought out slogans with little or no new content or with no level of thought, fair enough. If it's something that makes you think, I'm quite happy to hear it, whether I agree with it or not. Frinstance, our singer always does a little anti-hunting spiel - it invariably goes down well even though we've been playing quite a lot of gigs locally, which is proper hang 'em shoot 'em fish 'em country. But then all our songs are a bit (a lot!) political, or at least about some sort of issue as that's what our singer writes lyrics about. Me? I'm easy either way on that as I'm only there as eye candy...

Indeed... After all, all human interactions are politics! I remember back in the 80s when Queen were vilified for playing Sun City at the height of apartheid, the England Cricket team also got grief for similar. And the justification was "keep politics out of music/sport"; but what that failed to take account of was the fact that they gave tacit approval to the SA Govt's policy. So not only were they condoning extreme racism, they were getting a nice bit of bunce for the privilege. What's the saying? "All it takes for evil to succeed is for a good man to say nothing" (or words to that effect)

Mellow and funky!

To be fair, I've not seen much hatred of him here... Some folks aren't fans, and say so, others are, and they also say so. Though it appears that the fans tend more toward the "oooh Adam you're so tight and rich and I want to have your babies" than the not-fans tend toward Hatey McClaytonHateFace... It seems that some minor criticism, or not really liking The Clayton is interpreted as full-blown hatred!

Funnily enough, this is my experience of U2 as well - I saw them in 1980 on the Boy tour as well (in Liverpool). Guitar was great, singer charismatic, band sounded fine but rhythm section-wise, nowt to write home about (especially as I'd seen ID and the Blockheads the week before). Next time ('83) I saw them The Edge was still good, rhythm section competent but nowt compared to Bauhaus, Simple Minds or Kid Creole who'd played at Leeds Uni not long before. However, Bono had discovered Messiah Mode; he clambered onto a scaffold and held forth for ages in quite an annoying way. Since then I haven't really bothered with 'em.

Excellently shouty punk rap... Expect some bad language!

Funky as! Slightly raunchy vid, but unusually for rap, there's a guitar solo!

I love a good bass solo - more notes the better! Though I prefer ones where the drums keep going, and perhaps guitars and keys do a rhythmic stab on the one or wherever... I tend not to do many at all, probably because most of our band's songs are built from a number of busy bass riffs so there's only so much our poor audience should be burdened with. However, the 3 I do are a 16 bar intro, with melodic bass playing the actual song melody in reverse with guitar feedback and cymbals slowly joining in, a 4 bar with lots of notes slappy groove that's a pre-amble to a crazy chromatic guitar solo in a You've Got Foetus On Your Breath style (!), and a fast chromatic run down the fretboard based on roots and 7ths lasting 2 bars.

Breaking 2 strings at once is quite a feat!

Got one of these coming soon, and this is the feature I'm looking forward to most: