Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 07:34 AM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 7:34 AM · 60°F, 78% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7

🎧 Track of the Day

Tonight’s pick is Blooom & Duskee’s “LOCKDOWN,” fresh off UKF Drum & Bass, and it is exactly as subtle as a title like “LOCKDOWN” suggests, which is to say: not at all. This is jungle-adjacent, bass-driven chaos built for a room full of strangers vibrating at the same frequency, with vocals that sound like someone texting their group chat mid-rave — “you know when you feel choked,” “let the fire fly,” the whole thing reads like a diary entry from inside a subwoofer. Lyrically it’s doing that classic DnB thing where every line is a flex wrapped in a confession: “I need ounces and acres,” “washed the sins of failure,” “party in the jungle, bad behavior.” Nobody’s going to accuse Blooom & Duskee of overthinking the lyric sheet, and that is precisely the point — this track isn’t asking you to analyze it, it’s asking you to lose your goddamn mind on a dance floor at 174 BPM.

If you’ve got a commute, a workout, or just a deep personal need to feel like the main character in a Mad Max fight scene, “LOCKDOWN” is doing the job of a triple espresso with none of the jitters. Press play, lock the door, and let the bassline make every decision for you tonight.

Thin news day on the music beat, Little Mister — like, “I had to turn one lyrics video into a whole section” thin — but what’s here is good, and I managed to keep the finance bros out of it. Barely. Somebody’s algorithm decided a Robinhood founder talking about a three-billion-dollar GameStop collateral call belongs in my music folder, which it does not, so djvlad gets a polite nod and a door closing behind it. Everything else today involves instruments, or at least a smoker full of brisket, which in rock and roll terms is the same thing.

Records, Artists & Music History

The real meat today — pun fully intended, we’ll get to actual meat in a minute — is Rick Beato sitting down with Bernie Taupin, the other half of music’s longest-running arranged marriage that somehow nobody’s ever gotten divorced from: Taupin writes the words, Elton John writes the music, and fifty-plus years later they’re still cashing the same joint checking account.

Taupin’s talking about his own solo record here, which he and whoever he made it with apparently landed on calling “atmospheric folk” — a genre name so vague it could describe a guy strumming on a porch or a Pink Floyd tribute band that got lost on the way to the gig — before admitting it really just blends into Americana. Fair enough. More interesting is the editing call he made: a song called “That Was Me” got cut from the tracklist because, in his words, it sounded “a little too English, a little too British” and didn’t fit the record’s flow. He programmed the album’s sequencing himself, and his rule was blunt — leave people wanting more. That’s a lyricist’s instinct dressed up as a curator’s discipline, and it’s the kind of ruthlessness that separates guys who write “Rocket Man” from guys who write liner notes nobody reads.

Here’s the part that explains fifty years of hits, though: Beato asks what’s still British about a man who’s lived in America for over half a century, and Taupin draws a blank. No soccer interest whatsoever — he’s “a complete baseball freak,” loves football, loves sport in general, and spent ten years on the cutting circuit after buying a ranch and raising horses. He says it himself: Elton always wanted to be a cowboy, and Taupin went and became one. That’s not a trivia nugget, that’s the whole songwriting partnership in one sentence — the guy writing lyrics about tiny dancers and yellow brick roads has spent a decade of his actual life on a horse in a saddle, not in a recording booth. You want to know why “Rocket Man” still sounds like it means something fifty years later? It’s because the guy who wrote it went and lived an actual American life instead of just borrowing one for a verse. Tao Te Ching, chapter 64: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” — Taupin’s thousand miles apparently involved a lot of cattle.

Live Sessions & Festival Season

Dave Grohl just told KROQ he’s bringing Foo Fighters back to headline Almost Acoustic Christmas, on that infamous rotating stage that — direct quote from the KROQ crew — “has given so many rock stars vertigo over the years.” Love that the venue’s main architectural feature is a decades-long warning label. Mae govannen, Dave — that’s Sindarin, Tolkien’s everyday Elvish for “well met,” the greeting you give a friend who’s walked back through the gate — except the password at this particular gate apparently isn’t “mellon,” it’s “free barbecue.”

Because here’s the actual story: the KROQ hosts jokingly ask Grohl to fire up his smoker in the parking lot after the show, and the man doesn’t even blink — says he’ll bring the cooker out and “blast some barbecue for sure.” Then casually mentions he’s already smoking for roughly five thousand people this weekend for Hope United, a charity he apparently cooks for regularly, unprompted, because that’s just a thing Dave Grohl does now between arena tours. Nobody asked a Grammy-winning drummer-turned-frontman to personally run catering for a charity event. He’s doing it anyway, like some rock-and-roll version of the nanny screaming off the rooftop in The Omen — it’s all for you, Damien, except Damien is five thousand strangers and a tray of bacon-wrapped hot dogs. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #69 says you could afford your ship without your government if it weren’t for your government — Grohl can clearly afford the brisket; I just have a feeling the IRS is getting a cut of that smoker too.

Buried in the middle of that segment, someone on-air drops an aside about finally “accepting that Klein Alley is legitimate,” with zero follow-up context, which is the audio equivalent of a text that says “we need to talk” and then nothing else for three hours. I’ve got nothing more for you there. Moving on, because apparently we all have to.

Drum & Bass and the Club World

UKF dropped a new one from Blooom & Duskee called “Lockdown,” and I’ll be straight with you — the transcript I’ve got is basically pure lyric sheet, no interview, no behind-the-scenes, nothing about the drop itself. So this is short, because padding it out with made-up chart numbers would be lying to your face, and that’s not the gig.

What’s there, though, has the right DNA: rave-as-religion lyricism, all “stepping in the night of boroughs,” “party in the jungle, bad behavior,” “my roots say I’m a raver.” That’s not accidental phrasing — “jungle” and “roots” are the duo explicitly pointing back at drum & bass’s own bloodline, the genre name-checking its own ancestors mid-verse like a rapper shouting out the block he grew up on. Lang Belta, the Belter creole from The Expanse, has a word for your own crew: beltalowda — “us.” That’s basically what this track’s doing lyrically, drawing a hard line between the ravers who were there from the jungle days and everybody else. Can’t tell you much about the production, the drop, or the low end, because the sources didn’t give me ears, only words. Next time, UKF, send me the track and not just the transcript.

Reaction Culture & The Craft

Key of Geebz put up an “old composer reaction” to a band called Father of Peace and their song “The Chaos,” and this is the kind of content I actually enjoy covering, because it’s a trained ear reacting in real time instead of a press release pretending to be one. The reactor’s first instinct, within what sounds like seconds, is System of a Down — the vocal delivery, the “strange plastic boy” lyric, the barked, theatrical phrasing. He says it straight: “giving me System of the Down vibes, no?” And honestly, Ecclesiastes 1:9 called this one a few thousand years early — “there is no new thing under the sun.” Every generation thinks it invented the chaotic nu-metal yelp, and every generation gets a classically-trained guy on YouTube pointing out the lineage within the first thirty seconds.

What’s worth noting, though, is what he keeps circling back to past the comparison: the drummer. He flags the siren effect dropping into the mix as “badass,” calls out the drumming specifically as serious “skill set,” and keeps coming back to it even as the track loops. That’s reaction culture doing its actual job — not just slotting a new band into “sounds like,” but pointing at the one player in the room doing something technically real underneath the noise. He also notes what look like solar panels in the video’s visuals, which, sure, I’ll take his word on the mise-en-scène since I wasn’t exactly handed a screengrab. Either way: a “badass track,” his words, repeated twice for emphasis, which from an old composer is basically a five-star review wearing a lab coat.

The Rest

That’s the whole crop today — a legacy lyricist explaining fifty years of hits with a story about horses, a drummer-turned-frontman volunteering himself into charity barbecue duty nobody made him do, two producers reminding drum & bass it has roots, and a reaction channel proving the kids reinvented a sound a band already perfected twenty-plus years ago. Thin news day, sure, but every story in it had an actual person doing an actual thing, which beats a lot of days where I’m stretching three press releases into a trend piece. Go listen to something. Running the lights, pretending I don’t enjoy this part of the job.

Deeper Cuts

A Transcript Full of Lyrics, Missing Everything Else

Let’s go back to that UKF clip, because the thing I didn’t tell you earlier is almost funnier than the lyrics themselves: the transcript opens with what sounds like studio chatter that nobody bothered to cut. “Yo bro, I know that it’s late bro. I’m just walking in there now. This is the moment man.” That’s not a lyric — that’s somebody walking into a session, half mid-sentence, caught on tape before the actual track even starts. Mando’a has a phrase for stuff that isn’t a joke, isn’t posturing, is just flatly true — ori’haat, “it’s the truth” — and ori’haat, that intro is exactly as unpolished as it sounds, because UKF handed me a transcript with zero context, zero drop info, and apparently zero editing of the room-tone banter before the beat kicks in.

Once the actual verse lands, there’s more texture than I had room for the first time around. “Refresh and restore like a diver” and “been defining stars amongst the players” are the kind of lines that sound like they were written to be chanted over a bassline rather than read on a page — vague enough to mean anything, specific enough to sound like it means something. And “I need ounces and acres” is a genuinely odd flex for a drum & bass vocal — not grams, not square footage, a weird hybrid unit that splits the difference between a drug reference and a land deed. For a track this short on information, that one line is doing more worldbuilding than the rest of the lyric sheet combined.

Here’s the part that matters for anyone who still buys vinyl or chases DnB promos: a UKF upload normally comes bundled with drop details, a premiere framing, something for a collector to hang a tag on. This one is just words on a page, no production notes, no mix breakdown, nothing about the low end — which for a genre built almost on what the low end is doing is like reviewing a steak by reading the menu description. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #139 says “wives serve; brother inherit” — the Ferengi inheritance law where the one doing the unglamorous work doesn’t get the title. Swap “wives” for “featured vocalist” and “brother” for “the producer duo,” and you’ve got the entire credit structure of half the drum & bass features ever uploaded: somebody wrote “party in the jungle, bad behavior,” and Blooom & Duskee get top billing. That’s not a knock on the duo — that’s just how the genre’s paperwork has always worked.

The Reaction Video Nobody Fast-Forwards

Key of Geebz’s transcript has a detail I skipped past the first time that’s worth dragging back out: the loop markers. The auto-transcription tags two separate stretches — [loop x17] and [loop x180] — meaning the chorus and the back half of “The Chaos” just repeat on the page, over and over, while the reactor says almost nothing. That’s not a transcription bug. That’s the actual shape of reaction content: the song plays nearly uninterrupted, and the “reaction” is a handful of real-time asides dropped into a much longer silence. Dragon Ball Z has a scouter for exactly this kind of absurd escalating number — a device that reads a power level and announces “it’s over 9000!” when the dial breaks — and a transcript logging a chorus repeating 180 times is basically Nova’s scouter going off on a YouTube loop counter instead of a villain’s energy signature.

What’s worth your time inside those loops is narrow but real. The reactor isolates “let the sirens go off” as “badass,” calls the drum work “some skill set right there,” and keeps circling back to it even as the same sixteen bars cycle past him for the eleventh time. He also tosses off “it looks like solar panels back there, I’m not too sure” about the video’s visuals — a guess, hedged, delivered with the confidence of a guy who knows he’s there for the ears, not the production design. That’s the whole appeal of an “old composer reaction” format in one transcript: you’re not paying for exhaustive color commentary, you’re paying for a trained ear flagging the one real technical thing happening under a wall of distorted vocals, and being honest when he’s just guessing about the rest. If you’re the kind of listener who skips straight to the comments to find out “is this actually good or just loud,” channels like this one are doing your triage for you — at the cost of watching a man watch the same chorus 180 times so you don’t have to.

Sequencing Is Dying, Bernie Taupin Isn’t Having It

One more pass at the Beato conversation, because the detail that deserves more room isn’t the horses, it’s the editing. Taupin didn’t just cut “That Was Me” because it felt too British — he cut it because he programmed the whole album’s running order himself and decided the song broke the flow. “I always believe in leave people wanting more,” he says, which from most people would be a throwaway line and from a guy who’s spent fifty years structuring other people’s emotional arcs across a tracklist is closer to a mission statement.

That’s a dying skill, and it matters more to record collectors than it does to a streaming playlist. Entish, the language Tolkien gave his tree-shepherds, is built around the principle of don’t be hasty — every sentence takes forever because rushing a decision is treated as a moral failure. Sequencing an album is the Entish approach to music: you don’t just pick the best twelve songs, you decide what order makes the back half of the record and leave the thirteenth one in a drawer, even if it’s good, because good isn’t the same as necessary. Streaming trained a generation of listeners to treat tracklists as a formality and playlists as the real unit of listening — shuffle, skip, repeat whatever the algorithm decided you wanted. Taupin, deep into a career nobody would blame him for phasing out of, is still doing the unglamorous, unpaid work of deciding what a side B is supposed to feel like. If you’re a collector who still cares whether a record has a shape, that’s the detail to file away next to the horses.

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