8 posts tagged “pop”
[...] 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
Audio: Share one of your favorite songs from 2006.
MH: I'm not. I'm really not. I know I have patterns and I've always
tried hard to avoid them. There are definitely certain things in my
music, if I'm looking back, "Well, that was a period where I was
experimenting with a certain kind of chord structure or a certain kind
of sound." I've tried really hard, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you
what that sound, what that tangible sound of "me" is. I think rhythm
is, when you talk about rhythmic sensibility, quite perceptive in that
I like to have at least one thing that is at least common or familiar
to the audience. Other than rhythm, the only thing I could say is that
I take a great deal of pride in every single sound I use. I'm always
making sure that I'm not using a pre-set or something that everyone
else has done. I try to be original in every piece of music I do, and
of course I probably fail every time.
Pitchfork: Let me ask you-- that moment in "Something Isn't Right" where he sings, "Do you re-mem-ber?" First time I heard that it reminded me of "September" by Earth Wind & Fire. I was sitting with my wife and I asked her, Do you think that's a direct reference to that song, or is it just a few notes that sound similar?
MH: There is a very slight reference there. It's a reference to the 11th of September because that's what the Earth Wind & Fire tune was called. I almost had it "Do you remember? The 11th of September?" But there was no way I could possibly put that in.
Pitchfork: So that's the kind of reference you're talking about, where you embed those kinds of things in the music.
MH: Exactly. And the record's full of them in different places. It's kind of like, trying to use every weapon in your arsenal to point people in a certain direction.[...] Time changes when you listen to Steve's music. It is, or rather was, so unorthodox, that the pulse and rate of breathing, thinking, and being, changes. It's like someone invented an alternative way of keeping time. A more human way - reflective of the ominous pain inherent in modernity and the future - whatever it may hold for us. So debased and insulted by the abomination that is the modern pop single, humans have forgotten how to actually listen to music - music that shows us something other than which clothes to buy, or how much to spend on that Sweet Sixteen Party, or which ride to pimp. Steve shows us that there is a different way. Would that we could all listen to him. [...]
Sam Gustin, Huffington Post, "Steve Reich Rocks New York"
[...] If lyric poetry is, as Czech novelist Milan Kundera recently wrote, "the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and the desire to make it heard," surely the pop song is the highest incarnation of all-consuming love and its fundamental need to be shared. [...]
Marc Hogan, Pitchfork, "Peter Bjorn and John, Writer's Block"
- Goodbye My Lover, James Blunt.
- Angels, Robbie Williams
- I've Had the Time of My Life, Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
- Wind Beneath My Wings, Bette Midler
- Pie Jesu, Requiem
- Candle in the Wind, Elton John
- With or Without You, U2
- Tears from Heaven, Eric Clapton
- Every Breath You Take, The Police
- Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers
Frequently covered favourites, including the traditional song Danny Boy and Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door, were among the top 20.
Other somewhat surprising entries on the list included the rollicking rock track I'll Sleep When I am Dead by Bon Jovi and Fame (I Want to Live Forever), the Oscar-winning theme to the 1980 movie and subsequent TV series Fame.
... and a solar-powered recharger, and I b'leeve I'm good to go.
[...] 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.
There are boxes and boxes of paper and newspaper and receipts and CDs in my room. They can't stay there forever, but they certainly can't stay in the storage unit about a block away from us. I am hopeful that somewhere in there, perhaps in the three green regulation Government Printing Office ledgers, are lists of some of the AT40 lists I used to keep. It's a hope against hope. I have much clearer memories of legal pads snuck out of my mom's home office and pencils honed on the sharpener in the kitchen. When I stayed home and listened to Casey Kasem, I couldn't have imagined the Internet, much less music blogs, Last.fm or Pandora.
- Now that I have the sense not to, I can run for president.
- I'm mo longer lumped in with that highly-sought-after 18- to 34-year-old male demographic.
- No. 1 song when I turned 18, almost half a life ago? In the U.S., "Good Thing" by the Fine Young Cannibals; in the UK, "Back To Life (How Ever Do You Want Me)" by Soul II Soul featuring Caron Wheeler.
- No. 1 songs today? Hot 100: "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland; Hot Latin: Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" featuring Wyclef; Hot R&B/Hip-Hop: Yung Joc's "It's Goin' Down"; Hot Ringtones: Koji Kondo's "Super Mario Brothers Theme"; Hot Country: Kenny Chesney's "Summertime"; Adult Contemporary: Daniel Powter's "Bad Day"; Modern Rock and Mainstream Rock: Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" (I've only heard three of these seven songs. I must be getting old or something.)
Too many ditties make me go bop. The question implies listening to said song for a while: time-tested, bad-mood-approved. This week's top-of-mind is Terence Blanchard's "Mo' Better Blues," with the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" or Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now (Wait Until Tonight)" as close seconds.
I've also been crushing on the corn-syrupy sweetness of Corinne Bailey Rae's "Put Your Records On."
