Genius Rap

If you were born in the 1980s, your first exposure to Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" was most likely the sample in the infectious Mariah Carey hit, "Fantasy". Some time in college when I was taking more of an interest in the evolution and development of hip hop music, I learned that "Genius" had links to rap even when it was first put out by the Tom Tom Club in the early 80s. Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were the rhythm section for Talking Heads. If you watch Stop Making Sense, you can even see Chris Frantz doing some proto-rapping while drumming on the song. He keeps mentioning James Brown. It's pretty funny.

I had never heard the two original rap songs based on "Genius of Love" until reading about them in Dan Charnas's new book The Big Payback. One is from Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde called "Genius Rap". It predates the second reinterpretation, "It's Nasty (Genius of Love)" from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I love how these early rap songs, first of all, are SO long, and the entirety of the tracks would get played on the radio. It's also interesting that producers hired studio musicians to rerecord exact replicas of these disco/funk songs rather than just looping a recording of the original track. I'm not sure why they chose to do that, since they still gave a percentage to the original artists (in the case of "Genius," it was something like 10 cents for every record sold).

As a side note, did you know the original creative force and producer behind "Rapper's Delight" was Sylvia Robinson? How many female producers are there today in any genre, let alone in hip hop? Pretty interesting backstory.

Clarence Clemons

RIP

Cruisin Classics '03 - '10

I posted a month ago about why I like to listen to music loud. Looking back, this seems a terribly mundane topic to write about. It's also a shame because I could have boiled down the four paragraphs of my rationale into two words: Lame Drivers. I am listening to Crusin Classics '03 - '10, a collection of their songs over the bulk of a decade from Providence, RI and then New York. Singer/guitarist Jason Sigal is a DJ at WFMU and, in the years I've known him, has been a big disseminator of garagey, noisy power pop. (One of my first exposures to Guided by Voices was watching him perform in a GBV cover band wearing an oversized Celine Dion T.) According to lamedrivers.com...

In our youth, Lame Drivers were courted by a larger record label who thought we sounded like Bruce Springsteen and The Clash. Young Lame Drivers were also compared to a “dirty mix of Replacements/Stooges-influenced pop”, “like a young Replacements or Guided By Voices“, “like the Buzzcocks getting a reacharound from the Descendents,” “rock hard in Jesus & Mary Chain fashion”. More recently, Lame Drivers one Lame Drivers song was compared to Pell Mell and their music was described as “filled with hooks, it’s got a punk influence, power-pop influence, indie rock, psychedelic, all my favorite rock elements“.

Lucky for us all, we can buy or download Cruisin Classics and listen to 27 awesome tracks and trace the evolution of one of my favorite bands. Do yourself a favor and take a listen. "Superbomb" packs chaos, tight riffs, and something about pork tenderloins (?) into only 1:04. "Last Call for Violence" is something like an anthem. "Lemme Get Those #s Down" is a standout from the early days and was a fan favorite of ours back in Providence. Their sound now as a three-piece is leaner. Check the December 2010 performance below.

By the way, Jason, If I wrote that "Little Child" channeled Thin Lizzy and "Train of Thought" was like a rough-and-tumble Kinks (Arthur era), would you add me to your site? Except I guess Thin Lizzy would never write something as cool as this: "And on the bright side/ we're really docile/ we're really flexible / And in our downtime / we lose our eyesight / playin around with primitive fire tools." Fuck yea.

Briefly, Like Six Words (2)

Impending

apocalypse

never

sounded

so

good!

TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light (2011)

*Post written and submitted by Claire Harlan Orsi in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Chrissy Murderbot

I was standing near a fire pit last night with some nice, drunk guys here in Chicago. They started talking about their friend Chrissy Murderbot, a DJ who will be playing at Pitchfork this year. They had one of his mixtapes playing and I liked what I was hearing. Then they told me that Chrissy Murderbot had this project where he did a mixtape each week for a year. I thought, Cool. So here's a Year of Mixtapes, in case you want to take a listen. Enjoy.

Hot Sauce Committee Part 2

Listen to this album as soon as you can. Beastie Boys come through again.

The Fall

My favorite moment on Gorillaz' Demon Days (2005) occurs between 2:00 and 2:10 of "Dirty Harry." The track announces the arrival of Bootie Brown's verse with a crescendoing, gritty shriek-- something between a plummeting helicopter and a cartoon growl. The dramatic entrance is akin to deep jump off a verbal diving board: the momentum carries Brown through an unforgettable verse, buoyed by stop-and-start drum glitches in all the right places. It is rare thing to always look forward to a specific part of a song, and for that five or ten seconds to still not let you down after years of listening. Even though Brown's verse ranges into unforgivably "on the nose" diatribe ("The war is over, so says the speaker / with the flight suit on / Maybe to him I'm just a pawn / so he can advance"), he and the band make up for it with the rollicking, propulsive music.

I guess this is what I had always appreciated about Gorillaz. From song to song, and, in many cases, within a single track, the music tends to announce itself through sudden changes of tone and sound. "Feel Good Inc" maintains a hip hop feel featuring another throwback set of MCs, but it has that nice acoustic interlude with a beautiful Daman Albarn melody. The title track ends a dark and foreboding album with a cinematic uplift. Flash forward to Plastic Beach (2010), and the reverberated voices of Mos Def and Bobbie Womack on "Stylo" precede the futuristic commercial jingle of "Superfast Jellyfish". Later we return to Albarn's gift for melody with "On Melancholy Hill", a gorgeous sing-song dance track. Plastic Beach is not even that good an album. But, still, you can tell that Gorillaz (that is, Albarn) still has that diverse sense of style that keeps an album interesting from front to back.

The Fall, on the other hand, stays static from beginning to end. The effect of the spare drum loops and tidbits of melody is that one wonders if Albarn were intentionally trying to be as minimal as possible. He might explain this decision as valuing the creation of a sparse and subtle mood over complex songcraft. The context that the album was recorded on the road and that each song represents a different city or region of the U.S. even adds to the mood argument. And I'm into that. I like mood. I like Brian Eno. But the mood on this album isn't particularly interesting, and it isn't particularly moody. What's more, I am going out on a limb here and saying that some of these tracks are so not-interesting that parts of them will be used as background fodder for TV commercials within one year from this post-date. They will be "Revolving Doors" (before the melody enters) and "Detroit" (the part with the Moog melody).

The album is being hyped as the first album to be recorded entirely on an iPad. This has apparently given Albarn a good excuse to take a break from making frenetic, far-reaching music. It's funny, because I just got an iPad and this was the first album I happened to listen to on it. I had just started to wonder how the iPad might become a seamless part of my life, considering whether it might be something I used so effortlessly that I forgot it was even there. It could be on while I'm eating breakfast, I might pay attention to it for a minute, then tune it out, depending on whether it crosses my mind as an enjoyable thing to do. The Fall strikes me the same way. It's nice. I like the ambience. It even has another awesome Bobbie Womack track. But I could probably have it on for the length of an entire meal and only notice it a handful of times.