Fresh off the heels of that hip hop homage to the San Gabriel Valley the other day comes this rap version of Jonathan Gold’s 99 Essential Restaurants in Los Angeles.
The Neil Diamond songs that won’t ease up no matter how thoroughly your soul dies, the Evinrude outboard sign, the rum-happy bartender — at least they aren’t playing Jimmy Buffet, is all I’m saying. Son of a Gun is a place of teriyaki salmon collars that you brandish like machetes, of greyhounds, of peel-and-eat shrimp.
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Famous Food Writer Eulogizes Nate Dogg
Nate Dogg was laid to rest over the weekend, and yesterday L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold penned a moving tribute to him on West Coast Sound:
It has become easy to forget about Nate Dogg - identifying the dozens of songs he enhanced is the rap enthusiast’s equivalent of a jazzbo’s listing Kid Ory solos on Louis Armstrong sides - but his crooning was as vital to the early ’90s as Biggie’s lisp or Cobain’s howl, a sound affixed to America’s pop consciousness like a natty prison tattoo. I knew he had suffered a couple of debilitating strokes over the last few years, and had chatted with him a dozen or so times when I covered hip-hop in the 1990s, but I wasn’t quite expecting to be quite so affected by the news of his passing last week at the age of 41 - more than I had been by Tupac’s death, actually. The voice that had floated above G-funk beats like a tendril of fresh cigarette smoke, had also floated through our lives.
The best food writers I know have all gotten into it by accident…Colman Andrews edited a jazz magazine. Robert Sietsema played bass in a new-wave band… I wrote about opera and new music. If you are meant to do this thing, this thing kind of finds you.
