6 posts tagged “hiphop”

[...] The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. "The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security," the adviser said. "They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them." (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull's-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.) [...]

[...] The mini-fad for referencing turn-of-the-'90s hip-hop may just be an accident; the samples Pretty Ricky, Lloyd and Musiq Soulchild employ have been mined by other artists, including Nelly and Ini Kamoze.

But by vocalizing these hooks instead of just interpolating them, the younger artists claim a legacy. Lloyd and the members of Pretty Ricky were barely in grade school when Salt-N-Pepa and PM Dawn were at their peak; Musiq probably admired De La Soul as a teen. This music echoes forth like a favorite children's story, a hint of a more innocent, if not simpler, time.

Perhaps the pumped-up Lotharios of today want a break from all the bump and grind, and dream of eroticism as a realm that celebrates not just performance, but as Prince Paul said, bodies of all kinds.

"The talk turns suggestive," Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times

[...] During her '90s crusade against rap's habit of degrading women, the late black activist C. Dolores Tucker certainly had few allies within the hip-hop community, or even among young black women. Backed by folks like conservative Republican William Bennett, Tucker was vilified within rap circles.

In retrospect, "many of us weren't listening," says Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting, a professor at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book "Pimps Up, Ho's Down: Hip-Hop's Hold On Young Black Women."

"She was onto something, but most of us said, 'They're not calling me a bitch, they're not talking about me, they're talking about THOSE women.' But then it became clear that, you know what? Those women can be any women." [...]

"Has rap music hit a wall?" Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Associated Press

[...] Local hip-hop artists Boots Riley from the Coup and rapper and producer Kirby Dominant express reservations about hip-hop university classes. "One time, someone came up to me, and said, 'I know so-and-so, they're a professor at Harvard, they're a big fan of your work,' " Riley says in a phone interview. "But that doesn't impress me more than any other people feeling that way. I don't need to be validated by academia because that presupposes that academia is a pure endeavor and not guided by market forces, which is not the case.

"Anthropology, for instance, was all about studying the natives so they could figure out how to control them. Again, the natives are being studied."

Dominant, a UC Berkeley alumnus who actually attended the much-publicized class on Shakur in the late '90s, says that he finds value in hip-hop studies, provided they take the long view. "With hip-hop and all black music, you can't talk about the art separate from a lot of other things," he says. "You can't talk about hip-hop as an art form without talking about the people, the economics, how and why it was made. You have to be pretty thorough." [...]

"Academic hip-hop? Yes, yes, y'all" Reyhan Harmanci, San Francisco Chronicle

[...] When the band hits its first notes and the room begins to ride the music, a kind of metamorphosis occurs, a sort of transmutation of the air of expectation in this Midlands crowd. They've been relieved of the first layer of their disbelief that James Brown has really come to Gateshead: At the very least, James Brown's Sound has arrived. After the band's long overture, Danny Ray, every impeccable tiny inch of him, pops onstage. He says, "Now comes Star Time!" and the roof comes off. Under Danny Ray's instruction, the crowd rises to its feet and begins to chant its hero's name.

When James Brown is awarded to them the people of Gateshead are the happiest people on Earth, and I am one of them. Never mind that I now know to watch for the rock-paper-scissors hand signals, I am nevertheless swept up in the deliverance of James Brown to his audience. The Sun God has strode across a new threshold, the alien visitor has unveiled himself to another gathering of humans. I see, too, how James Brown's presence animates his family: Keith, fingers moving automatically on frets, smiling helplessly when James Brown calls out his name. Fred Thomas bopping on a platform with his white beard, an abiding sentinel of funk. Hollie, the invisible man, now stepping up for a trumpet solo. Damon, who during Tommie Rae's rendition of "Hold On, I'm A-Comin' " can be heard to slip a reference to "Lady Marmalade" into his guitar solo.

The show builds to the slow showstopper, "It's A Man's Man's Man's World." The moment when James Brown's voice breaks across those horn riffs is one of the greatest in pop music, and the crowd, already in a fever, further erupts. When they cap the ballad by starting "Sex Machine" it is a climax on top of a climax. The crowd screams in joy when James Brown dances even a little (and these days, it is mostly a little). Perhaps, I think, we are all in his family. We want him to be happy. We want him alive. When the James Brown Show comes to your town -- when it comes to Gateshead, U.K., today, as when it came to the Apollo Theater in 1961, as when it came to Atlanta or Oklahoma City or Indianapolis anytime, life has admitted its potential to be astounding, if only for as long as the Show lasts. Now that James Brown is old, we want this to go on occurring for as long as possible. We almost don't wish to allow ourselves to think this, but the James Brown Show is a precious thing that may someday vanish from the Earth.

Now James Brown has paused the Show for a monologue about love. He points into the balconies to the left and right of him. "I love you and you and you up there," he says. "Almost as much as I love myself." He asks the audience to do the corniest thing: to turn and tell the person on your left that you love him. Because it is James Brown who asks, the audience obliges. While he is demonstrating the turn to the left, turning expressively in what is nearly a curtsy to Hollie and the other horns, James Brown spots me there, standing in the wings. The smile he gives me is as natural as that one he gave Fred Wesley, it is nothing like the grin of a statue, and if it is to be my own last moment with James Brown, it is a fine one. I feel good.

I had a feeling I'd want to return to this year's very best writing about music, but not like this, not this way.

[...] In The Games Black Girls Play, Gaunt argues that cheers -- songs and seemingly nonsensical chants performed in conjunction with handclaps and foot stomps -- offer entertainment for black girls across the country, but they also play a more important role. They teach young girls aspects of "musical blackness," placing them socially in step with black tradition. The book examines black girls' forays into popular culture -- whether unconscious or deliberate -- and what their invisibility says about hip hop, musicality in the black community, and when and where girls enter the annals of music history.

At first it seems like a stretch to claim that the way girls play has influenced a commercial behemoth like hip hop. But have you heard Nelly's "Country Grammar"? Its sing-song chorus was sampled from black girls' games, and Gaunt suggests that the song gained popularity in part because it was immediately recognizable to black audiences. Gaunt emphasizes that male rappers like Nelly use such games as material, but female rappers do not -- an assessment that's blurry and not as convincing as her other arguments; it doesn't help that the aspiring female rappers Gaunt interviews about why this might be don't offer illuminating explanations.

And lest anyone think girls have been passive creators of sampling fodder for boys, over time girls have appropriated snippets of New Edition's "Candy Girl" and the Jackson 5's version of "Rockin' Robin" for their own rhythmic use in games, which underscores the reciprocal and often unexamined relationship between black girls and popular music. When Gaunt traces the origins of traditional games like "Miss Mary Mack" by fusing academic prose with vividly rendered memories, her journey is refreshing, if sometimes daunting in its technicality. [...]

That's the middle of "Playing for Keeps," a Joshunda Saunders review that C. shot my way a day or two after I saw this Yahoo Buzz Log post last week.

What albums are in heavy rotation for you right now?

My PodUtil-fu is still weak, so for right now?

• Gnarls Barkley's "St. Elsewhere"
• Sound Advice's "Gnarls Biggie"
• Jose Gonzalez's "Veneer"
• Dert's "Sometimes I Rhyme Slow" (thanks for the heads-up, Gwen)
• Scritti Politti's "White Bread Black Beer" (Ben gave me trigger nerve)
• DJ GYNGYVYTUS' "skeet spirit: a crunk tribute to radiohead" *