A menacing string B-line kicks in as a budget camera shot pans around a shabby street in London’s East End. Viewers prepare themselves for the kind of gritty, voyeuristic journey around a UK hood that is synonymous with grime and then… blam! A 5′ 6″ dreadlocked super hero–resplendent in a purple, black, and green homemade one-piece, facemask and cape–ricochets into the shot, Karate Kid-style.

Leaping on top of phone boxes and cars, the half-comic/half-frightening character barks, “It’s the Merkle Man/Never gonna fix that Urkel man/Continue to circle man/All for the green and purple man.” Who is this Lil’ Jon-like figure, rhyming about sitcom nerd Steve Urkel, chucking boys in business suits out of phone booths, and carting big girls around East London on the back of his four-wheeler?

The man behind the Merkle mask is Jammer, formerly the official producer of the N.A.S.T.Y. crew and currently the figurehead of pioneering grime label Jah Mek The World Productions. Known for blood-curdling, future-industrial basslines favored by top MCs like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and D Double E, Jammer’s MC alter ego is a hilarious twist on the grime cliché of a screwface producer sitting in a graffiti-blasted basement. “It definitely took people by surprise,” laughs Jammer.

In a scene where hard-earned reputations are shattered with a single clash or potent diss track, stepping out as Merkle Man took balls of steel. “I put the suit on, looked in the mirror, and thought, ‘Shit, am I gonna walk down the street like this? Once I’m outside there’s no turning back. There’s 40 mans watching and I’m filming outside Leytonstone Underground Station,'” recalls Jammer. “I knew it was all or nothing.”

Whistle While You Merk
Jammer pulled a Pharrell and stepped out from the anonymity of producing at his 21st birthday bash (he’s now 23), where he MCed alongside friend Dizzee Rascal. After contributing to sessions held at his home studio, he was encouraged by MCs to take up the mic seriously. Littering his flow with fiercely delivered yet amusing self-penned catch phrases (neckle, seckle, meckle, merkle) and highlighting on his own posse-cut productions like “Saw It Coming,” “Slew Dem,” and “Joy Ride,” he catapulted into the MC elite.

Like The Neptunes’ big man, it’s not so much Jammer’s rhyme skills people have bought into but his enigmatic character. Ricocheting around stages like the Energizer bunny on speed, Jammer’s manic aura is infectious. Live PAs of Merkle Man see crowds breaking into fervent moshing. Jammer’s unbilled performance of the track at a recent Kano showcase sent the crowd into a riot even after the fifth rewind. Not one of Kano’s lyrics got the same reaction.

So what exactly does all of Jammer’s vernacular mean? “[The word] ‘merk’ has been in the grime scene since day one. If you ‘merk’ someone, you’ve killed them in a clash or dissed them in a lyric,” explains Jammer. “‘Merkle Man’ is a funny way of saying I can merk anyone in the scene.” And neckle? “Neckle means anything that’s good. Seckle means ‘chillout.’ And meckle I use instead of mental. Everyone’s tired of hearing the same old shit. That’s why the whole nekkle thing caught on so quickly.”

Power Bars
Jammer (Jahmek Power) was born to Rastafarian parents in Leytonstone, East London; he works in a basement studio in the house he grew up in. The home has an industrious, lively energy. Posters of Bob Marley share space with family photographs, one of which shows the eldest of his four sisters graduating from law school. The kitchen bursts with his younger sister’s friends practicing dance routines as his mother cooks, seemingly unhindered. His father, a reggae soundsystem operator and musician, keeps a watchful eye over Jahsiya, Jammer’s three-year-old son, as he scoots about humming the basslines of “Daddy’s songs.”

Jammer has music in his blood. At 12, he was getting bookings to DJ reggae, dancehall, and jungle with his friend Supa D; by 14, he was commanding his own soundsystem, Demolition. His first experience of UK garage was his older sister playing him Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown tapes. “Coming from a reggae background I thought, ‘What’s this funny music? This is swag,'” he says of the initially house-and-R&B-driven two-step sound. A few years later, during the So Solid Crew-dominated era, Jammer worked at the distribution company Essentials, and was impressed by the amount of vinyl that homegrown talent was shifting. “Mans was moving 6,000 copies in a week,” he says. “I knew from then making tunes was the only way forward.”

Three years later, in 2002, Jammer merged the bass-heavy fundamentals of reggae with the double-time structure of garage to become one of the founding fathers of grime. “It’s the dirt down your fingernails,” he says, describing the sound. “The residue in the bath. I’ve never liked the term as it’s everything bad–but, at the end of the day, the music’s grimy and that’s why it’s stuck.” He takes a pull on a spliff, then reflects with confidence, “Whatever you want to call it, in 10 years time it’s gonna be as big as hip-hop. Just remember, it was me and Wiley that started it.”

Jah Mek Extra: Mizz Beats
Meet 19-year-old grime producer Mizz Beats.

Mizz Beats is the jewel in Jah Mek The World’s otherwise male-dominated crown. Working with the label since she was 17, the 19-year-old producer (born Iman Yanee) connected with Jammer through an unlikely incident in the Leytonstone post office.

“I was standing in line when these two guys came in trying to sell the Lord Of The Decks, [a grime DVD documentary]. They asked me if I wanted to buy one and when I told them I didn’t have enough money they gave me it. One of the guys turned out to be rapper DM. We exchanged numbers and when we hooked up I played him a CD with 20 of my tracks. He took me to Jammer, played him the CD, and I’ve been working with him since.”

A hip-hop and R&B producer by trade–”I was into hip-hop before I could talk properly,” she claims–Mizz Beats was, oddly, never a fan of grime. “I couldn’t get into it. It was watching Lord Of The Decks that made me realize it was good because it represented our own way of living.”

Thanks to her unique blending of hip-hop and R&B with grime sentiments (double-time rhythms, stark instrumentation)–and Jammer’s endorsement–Mizz Beats has experienced a meteoric rise to prominence. “I did the ‘Signal’ tune with D Double E and everything went mad,” she says. “I’ve only just started but I’ve done tracks on Dizzee’s LP, Estelle’s LP, Lady Sovereign’s LP, and I’ve got some big things lined up with US artists next year. I’d like to think it was all down to my music but I’m sure it helps being a woman in such a male-dominated genre.”

San Francisco writer/DJ Oliver Wang has always had his taste-making hands in every pot on the stove–from contributing to NPR and Vibe to maintaining blogs for MSN, Napster, and his own critically vaunted Soul Sides audioblog–so it was only a matter of time before he got into the compilation-curating game. Wang culled down a list of 50 dust-covered soul gems to arrive at the 14 beautiful slabs on his first compilation, Soul Sides Volume One. Here he tells XLR8R about some of the jams that made the cut–and one that got away.

More on Oliver Wang

Charles May and Annette May Thomas “Keep My Baby Warm”
“I originally found this on 45 at Rooky Ricardo’s in San Francisco and was just blown away by how beautifully the song blended gospel, soul, and funk. It took me years to track down the album.”

Erma Franklin “Piece of My Heart”
“It kills me that so many people think Erma covered Janis Joplin when it’s the other way around. Erma never had the fame her sister Aretha enjoyed, and it’s a bitter truth that Joplin blew this song up better than Erma [but] I’m glad we got it on here so we could set the record straight.”

Linda Lyndell “What A Man”
“An old friend, Georges Sulmers, was spinning in a small bar in Brooklyn and threw this song on. I recognized it from the Salt ‘N’ Pepa remake but was instantly charmed by the original. I recently had a chance to interview Lyndell–despite a 25-year hiatus, she is now back making music.”

Al Green “Strong as Death (Sweet as Love)”
“This 7-inch-only song was recorded right before Green’s ‘Belle’ era and it’s one of the most amazing tracks from his years at Hi. So soulful it’s searing but, for whatever reason, it never made any album. We were ready to put this on the comp but it turned out to be too expensive.”

“It wasn’t love at first sight, musically,” says Brezel Göring of his first forays into music-making with girlfriend and Stereo Total co-conspirator Françoise Cactus. Eventually, the pair struck upon a way to combine Göring’s background in the Neue Deutsche Welle (“German New Wave”) scene with Cactus’ love for French chansons and ’60s garage rock. In 1995, they released their debut, Oh Ah! (Bungalow), and over the course of five more albums cemented a signature sound: minimal and cute electro-pop backdrops topped by knowingly naive lyrics about horror films and bunnies and Holiday Inns (sung by Cactus in heavily-accented English, Japanese, German, and many other languages, including her native French). With an EP, Discotheque, just released on Disko-B and KRS reissuing My Melody (1998) and Jukebox Alarm (1999), we caught up with the duo at home in Berlin.

XLR8R: What has been the biggest change for you as a band since My Melody and Jukebox Alarm came out?

Françoise: At this time, there were two other people in the band. Now it’s just the two of us. It’s much easier and it has changed everything, even the music. It made it more simple and more minimal. [I was really influenced by] this band in the ’80s in France called Rita Mitsouko. There were just two of them–a man and a woman–and they were also a couple. I think it’s nice. Anyway, I have always loved minimal music. You can see that on our cover version of Hot Chocolate “Heaven’s in the Backseat of My Cadillac” (from Jukebox Alarm). It’s not funky at all! It’s almost nothing. I think that My Melody and Jukebox Alarm are not as well produced as Musique Automatique; the sound is sometimes a bit more scratchy and rough. I like sounds that are wild… but still not scratching my ears.

You two are very influenced by ’60s French music. Who is your favorite artist?

Brezel: Always, [we] come back to Serge Gainsbourg. He had a very psychological way of writing songs. They’re not just good pop tunes with good instrumentation or good melodies; his lyrics also have a double meaning–something really intelligent or really dirty but really funny at the same time. Also, he used jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and even psychedelic stuff and reggae and put it all in this chanson context. [I like] this way of using music–taking it out of its context and putting it in another–and this is something I like to do myself.

What are you working on right now?

Brezel: We are doing a musical about Patty Hearst [in April]; Gina D’Orio from Cobra Killer is going to play Patty. In Germany, [we just released] a record with six new songs, Discotheque. There’s one song that goes “I hate everybody in the discotheque/I don’t like pills/I don’t like coke/I don’t like the stroboscope.” Also, did you hear about this life-sized puppet Françoise made out of wool? It’s called Woolita. She showed it in a group exhibition last year and… there was this scandal because this puppet looked so fleshy. There’s a little book about the scandal and the tabloid yellow press [published by Martin Schmitz Verlag] and [it comes with] a record we made where the puppet is singing.

Somewhere out there, Etta James and Iggy Pop are scratching their heads and asking, “How in Christ’s name does The Gossip come up with this shit?” This Portland-by-way-of-Arkansas three-piece crushes their garage rock crescendo with more soul than BET and more angst than a pack of small-town teenagers. The band’s latest offering, Standing in the Way of Control, is a potent blend of R&B and spasmodic rock that’s got asses bouncing and bodies crashing from coast to coast. Lead singer Beth Ditto explains it all while hanging curtain rods.

How did you hook up with Kill Rock Stars?
I was 18 and we just moved from Arkansas. I didn’t know shit about Kill Rock Stars. I literally thought that they were a tape label out of a bedroom. We started playing house parties, and Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney saw us, and Calvin Johnson from K Records saw us and asked for our 7″. Then Carrie was like ‘You should go on tour with us.’ So we put out the 7″ with K, did a six-week tour, and right before we left to go on our tour with Sleater-Kinney, they were like ‘How do you guys feel about putting out a full length?’ And I was like, ‘OK.’ That’s how we got stuck with them.

How does it feel to play bigger venues as opposed to house parties and basement shows?
I miss little shows because I really hate business. I like money, but I hate business. I like energy. If we play a show [in a big venue], and there’s 30 kids, that’s a shitload of kids. That’s like half of my graduating class. It just feels weird because you’re in a huge venue and you’re being treated all weird. But if you’re in a basement, it just makes sense. I always find that I’m at my best–I perform better, I sound better, I feel more comfortable–when I’m at a show with 30 people. It’s just more fun. I miss basement shows a lot.

Do you feel the spirit of punk is still alive and well?
I am a punk who makes music and I feel like I’m in a punk band. I think the spirit of The Gossip is very punk. It comes from a raw place.

Your new record definitely reflects that raw place.
When the record was made it was all about encouragement. This major label wanted our record, but we were doing it with Kill Rock Stars. We were like ‘We’re going to do it the way we can and make it as big as we can and spread this message, and make a living off of it’–which is capitalist, but necessary. What else am I going to do? Work at McDonald’s?

At a time when Germany was literally rebuilding itself from the ground up, artists in Cologne (both visual and musical) flourished, giving birth to a new post-war culture. In fact, the revolution was in full swing from San Francisco to Europe. While students rioted on campuses around the globe, experimental electronic music spread boundlessly in cities everywhere. A pupil of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, pianist Irmin Schmidt was at the eye of the storm, channeling all manner of sounds and politics, and assembling what would become the band most synonymous with the Krautrock sound: Can.

From his residence near Avignon, France, Schmidt is still susceptible to the whims of electronic technology. Our telephone conversation is briefly interrupted as the cycles of nuclear power shipped out to his countryside home encounter a delay and cut the phone line temporarily. In keeping with Schmidt’s Cagean philosophy, it turns out that our interview, too, is subject to the indeterminacy of its environment.

XLR8R: Set the scene for us in Cologne in 1968.

Irmin Schmidt: Cologne was a very lively place at that time. It was the center of electronic music in Germany: Stockhausen had founded his electronic music studio in the radio station WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk); the orchestras all performed works by Stockhausen and Boulez; and there was also quite a lively jazz scene. In fact, [Can’s] Jaki Liebezeit was the drummer in a jazz orchestra when we found him.

How about politically? What was going on?

Lots of things happened politically. I was not very active in politics, though. My main action was quitting classical conducting and composing, and founding a rock group, which was, in a way, also a political statement. For a classical musician with a decent career as a pianist, conductor, and composer, [to throw] that away to found a totally crazy group seemed a fairly insane act of waste.

So why did you do it?

I was rather unsatisfied with the state of contemporary music at that time in this circle…because it was very dogmatic. It claimed to be the only way to be contemporary, to be new. On the other hand, I thought of ‘new’ in terms of Western culture, comparing what Western jazz artists did to re-contextualize boring instruments like the saxophone with what Stockhausen was doing. [Jazz] was at least as new a cultural phenomenon as Stockhausen was for me.

So what did you think of electronic music when you first heard it and brought it into Can’s sound?

In the beginning, I hated synthesizers. I found them quite boring, so I invented my own. What was very important was that I wanted to create electronic sounds spontaneously on the stage without long preparations.

Was this always thought of as a problem with electronic instrumentation, that there was too much programming or not enough human emotion involved?

I don’t ever think that electronic music should replace our rich instrumental possibilities. It’s most interesting when the two are combined with each other… I don’t really understand the argument of human or inhuman. When people have a drum machine and try to make it a little bit imperfect to sound human, I find that quite strange. All electronic instruments are human creations, so what’s inhuman about it?

When you went through the process of re-mastering these discs for reissue, what was your main goal?

We wanted to go back to the originals because the existing CDs, which were mastered in the ’80s, were always too contaminated by this euphoric belief in the new early ’80s technology. There were all kinds of effects, which one thought could improve the sound. Actually, what happened was that it got worse…

We very carefully de-noised [the original tapes], so that nothing of the sound was changed. We loved that the environment was part of the music. We left the windows open. If somebody came in and started talking, we still recorded. it was a very Cagean idea. And when we put it on CD, like the origianal tape sounded, we came to realize that what we really wanted now actually sounds very modern.

In battle footage from his new DVD, Sunglasses is a Must (Audio Research, $17.98), 15-year-old turntable prodigy A-Trak ends a routine by lip-synching the cocky line “What do you have that could possibly beat me?” It was as legitimate a challenge then–when he was winning the 1997 DMC Championships–as it is now for the Kanye West-tour-supporting 23-year-old DJ. The DVD–a compilation of quirky home videos, dizzying turntable routines, and A-Trak’s wry narration from his personal “study”–shows the Montreal native coming of age. But, true to his Jewish heritage, A-Trak (Alain Macklovitch) really became a man at his bar mitzvah (in fact, he used the money he received that day to buy his first pair of turntables). XLR8R asked him to compile the right tunes for making Jewish kids crunk.

Chi-Ali “Age Ain’t Nothin’ But a #”
“I think he was really young when he made this, like 13 years old. It’s all about young guys hooking up with young girls, so you should definitely play this at a bar mitzvah.”

Kris Kross “Jump,” or something by Mobb Deep
“You have to keep playing the young artists. Also, Mobb Deep’s debut album was called Juvenile Hell.”

Non-Phixion “The C.I.A. is Trying to Kill Me”
“This group is full of hardcore, militant rappers that are Jewish. They would definitely offend an aunt or two since they make hardcore rap and don’t sing in Hebrew or anything. But maybe some activist uncle would like it.”

Puff Daddy “It’s All About the Benjamins (Original Bootleg Version)”
One of the original lines in this song, which is censored in the official version, is ‘stack chips like Hebrews.’ It talks about Jews, so you have to put it in there.”

Black Market Militia “Paintbrush”
“This group includes Tragedy Khadafi, a Queensbridge rapper and black Israelite. I’m not sure what that means, but he talks about Solomon and drops this Hebrew prayer in another song.”

Anything by the Beastie Boys
“This just goes without saying. You must have them on the list.”