My House is an Uptown center for learning, where I teach Music Journalism to elementary-aged kids. Since beginning back in September, my experimental curriculum has evolved (or devolved, dependent on your musical ideology) into teaching the kids how producers make rap music, and how to program my drum machines—a skill they blaze A’s in. Their first writing assignment however—to be published here in OffBeat sometime this year—was a bundle of local record reviews. I coached the kids to judge New Orleans’ music (no problem at all) but then also describe it—I couldn’t wait to hear them rip Better Than Ezra! But I was dismayed when they unanimously panned rapper MC Trachiotomy’s brilliantly ill 2000 release With Love From Tahiti: “It’s poo,” one child wrote.

“But why?” I asked. “Tell me why?”

“Because it sound like poo.”

“You don’t find it at least interesting? Maybe in an ugly or creepy way?” I pressed. “It definitely is rap music right? But like, underwater, with the lyrics popping up for air at intervals.” (interval is one of their Musical Spelling Bee words).

The kids finally managed to describe With Love… in clever turns-of-phrase such as: “It sound like a crackhead,” “It sound like he’s catching a stroke,” “…like someone getting murdered,” “…like he floating in the toilet,” “…like he really don’t care,” “It’s indescribable in a bad way.”

But actually, Trachiotomy himself—a.k.a. Jay Poggi—gives an honest autobiographical description of his rap style: “It’s not really rap. MC Trachiotomy is the old guy at the end of the bar, chain-smoking from the hole in his throat, telling you a story, but then after a couple hundred Jameson’s you’re only hearing half of it and he’s kind of losing track of why he’s telling you, or who he might even be talking to.” But Trach also drools his Louis Armstrong-on-sleeping-pills delivery—one of Poggi’s several flows—on behalf of romance: “It’s the voice of someone who knows you better than you know yourself, and you’re lying there together all knocked out, kicking the dogs off the bed, pillow-mumbling—it’s like goo-goo gaga, it’s a love thing.”

Between that description and the kids’ music journalism, much more needn’t be said. Though I will add that despite the humor Trachiotomy’s name and persona suggest, a moody murk coats With Love… so that the album’s warped linguistics and found-sound beats-and-loops can be appreciated seriously, if need be.

TRACHIO’S COHORTS

One of many characters Poggi met during a five-year stint in local fucked-up legends Crash Worship, Tony “El Tonios” Barton has flowed in the opposite direction from Trachio during their two-year musical partnership. “I’m more of a note bender than a fretter,” Poggi admits, whereas Tony is the kind of all-around ripping guitarist you can tell locked himself in his room as a kid, learning to play his record collection for unhealthy hours-on-end. As a youngun, El Tonios mastered catalogs by Black Oak Arkansas, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Journey, Boston, Santana, Van Halen. “After that stage I quit concentrating on the technical part and got into writing songs,” recalls Barton. While writing and touring with punk-zydeco band the Virgin Urchins and playing in local R&B act the Special Men, Tony also purchased a Fostex 16-track digital recorder and, strictly out of necessity (rather than electronic curiosity), fell into the world of drum machines.

By now Tony has filled the Fostex with over 60 completed songs and half as many “experiments” ranging in flavors from clean picked Mexicali instrumentals, to Southern-fried screaming-metal, to of course off-center hip-hop collaborations with Poggi—some featuring Tony’s own surprisingly good raps. Regardless of the direction, El Tonios (also an artist at World Class Tattoo) lends Poggi’s blurry musical vision a more solid, commanding beat and presence. “There will be more songs than rap collages,” Poggi claims of the duo’s upcoming album T-n-T (Sensei Sound). “The lyrics are actually audible and have, you know, structure.”

T-n-T are sometimes, to their benefit, backed on stage by “sultry” female rapper Sweet T, who’s throwing a party to celebrate the release of her Sensei Sound debut solo album Friday, February 4 at The Spellcaster Lodge. This party will also feature Sweet T’s dancers the Tasty Hotz, plus Tearjerkers (from Memphis) and one-man-band El Paso Hot Button.

TRACHIO’S MARDI GRAS

Beyond bringing us music, Poggi is also one of the few, the proud, who produce our Carnival floats every year. Six seasons ago (our lives are measured out in Carnival seasons…), Poggi started out painting Chaos and Momus floats. Today (or tonight, rather) he’s at the Hermes den, active in almost every aspect of creating 2005’s Greek Mythology theme. Showing me around the warehouse between towering red minotaurs and giant angry gods throwing giant lightning-bolts (being inside a parade warehouse in the center of ten floats facing each other, is far more effecting than a parade), Poggi throws out facts about yellow-fever carcasses piled high on wooden float carriages, about taking the hardware off wooden wheels and sending them to Mandeville to get trued by the only guy who can. He gripes mildly about how, after the big party, the floats are put away wet and left in storage for a three-month break before, “We come back in and clean the stale beer cans and pissbuckets off and start all over again.”

Pointing out a float he himself built, then stretched with canvas, then completely painted, Poggi explains, “It’s contract work. You get paid to complete a job and it’s up to you how fast. One of the few jobs where you’re rewarded for being fast. Fuck the hourly wage…” Float building is, in many ways, ideal work for artists: “You make your own hours; if I want to come in at 5 p.m. and work till 2 a.m. We learn all these new techniques all the time and get paid to use someone else’s materials to paint on huge canvases we could never afford to stretch for ourselves. Each parade-goer only sees a float for an average of eight seconds,” Poggi quotes the famous stat. “And that’s with stuff flying at their face. Still I like being part of history, on the D.L.”

MC Trachiotomy’s Planet of the Dreamers Mardi Gras bash will implode Saturday night, February 5 on the corner of Desire and Chartres, featuring As Is Jazz Band, the heavy complex stoner rock of Austin’s Tia Carrera, eternally-funny one-trick-pony Imagine The Band, Strangebone’s giant portable EZ Organ, my favorite local…musical thing Ratty Scurvics’ Singularity, a trapeze act and MORE! All proceeds benefit Charity Hospital’s Emergency room—which frees me to admit that I’m playing at this party too.

MORE PLAYING FAVORITES

Here’s what some of my other friends and favorite alternative music acts are planning round the Gras: Bipolaroid will open for the Early Day Miners & Chris Brokaw (ex-Codeine) at the Circle Bar, Wednesday, February 2.

Paradise Vendors will simultaneously sooth and rock the Big Top Gallery, February 7, opening for Davis after the Bacchus Parade, $5 includes food.

Lundi Gras at One Eyed Jacks with Quintron, Buttons and metal band Wickid Finger, whose singer, Medicine Wolf lives on an Indian reservation in Arizona and is being flown in for the show, where he will be backed by DJ Stevo on drums, Julien of the Detonations on guitar and Quintron playing bass.

Majestic electro-acoustic jam-band Triple Delight plays Saturday, February 5 at Alley Katz, Sunday, February 6 at Dragon’s Den, and Monday, February 7 at Hookah Café.

There was also rumor Testeverde would play at the Circle Bar. It will be sickening if they do not. They have to! Why wouldn’t they? I would be there. More on Testeverde next month, along with Eldhon Arhnold.