I love when I keep seeing a name around of someone who’s doing cool shit around town, and when I finally do a google search to see who the person is, they’ve got a GlitterGuts picture somewhere on their site. It’s a bit of an ego stroke, but it’s also kind of bad ass to see that, even when it feels like I’m doing a lot of the same thing, I’m still meeting the people who are getting it done and bringing the new shit to the scene, even if I don’t know it.  It happened before with (awesome street artist/dj/rapper) Tewz and (awesome video artist/photographer/ noise[?] musician) Ipaghost and it just happened with (awesome blogger/rapper/artist) Jams Dean.

I’d previously only seen Jams Dean’s work on Cream Team, where he posts the Analog Blog, a hand drawn review of his experiences with bands, concerts and parties., when I started hearing about this song he put out called “Chicago Girls”. The song is kind of like a cross between Atmosphere’s “Like Today” with LMFAO’s “I’m In Miami Trick” (or, for the regional variant, Naledge’s “I’m in Chicago Bitch“), a love song to the girls of Logan Square that namechecks everything people on the internet complain about when they bitch about hipsters (American Apparel, fixed gear bikes) and nods to Debonair Social Club and Kid Sister. The song really blew up when Jams Deen dropped a chillwave mashup that mixed “Chicago Girls” with The XX’s “Heart Skipped a Beat“.

You can listen to both versions of “Chicago Girls” and download Jams Dean’s new mixtape The Criterion Collection from his myspace

I don’t know how to describe Jaja without sounding like a really lame straight dude and a hackneyed writer. Cliched terms like “diva” and “fabulous” come to mind. Not that they’re entirely false. Back before the landlord clamped down on the Myour House, you could find Jaja holdin it down there almost every weekend, rocking glitter paint, tutus and a thick entourage. Jaja’s first single “Plastic Barbie” popped up on Ratcatchers a month or two ago, but it could’ve dropped twenty years ago. It’s very late-80s/early-90s radio hip house (think C+C Music Factory) but a bit more profane, and with a 21st century electro-influenced backbeat. It’s a pretty rudimentary recording but it’s a lot of fun.

[audio:Plastic Barbie.mp3]

You can download “Plastic Barbie” from Soundcloud