The Infinite Album
Release a traditional 13-track cd? No thanks, says Beck. Instead, he serves up a collection of songs, remixes, and videos that fans can piece together any way they want.
Beck: The album should reflect the
technology."
Wired
8.23.06- Answer the following: You heard Beck's last album, Guero, (a) online as an unfinished mix that was leaked in late 2004; (b) as the official 2005 Interscope CD release, which contained most of the tracks on the leaked version plus a few new songs; (c) as the deluxe CD/DVD edition, complete with seven bonus tracks, a surround sound mix, and interactive video art to accompany every song; (d) in one of the many unauthorized fan mashups floating around the Net; (e) not as Guero at all, but as Guerolito, a commercially released companion piece featuring remixes by Diplo, Adrock, and Boards of Canada.
Whatever your answer – and, yes, you can choose more than one – Guero represented a new way to think about the album. Because there was no album, no static list of 13 songs. Instead, there was a project that drew on Beck's Latin leanings and the Dust Brothers' eclectic production to create a portrait of the artist circa 2003-2005 (a Guero Cycle, if you will). Such is the future of the album, as envisioned by Beck; it's something to be heard, seen, and reconstituted by artist and audience alike. As the Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper's almost four decades ago, Beck has expanded the range and potential of the form.
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A Brief History of Pimpology in Hip Hop
enlarge [+]In an alternate
universe, Snoop is
pimpin' Paris
right now.
East Bay Express (Oakland, Ca.)
8.10.06- You don't have to look very hard to find the connection between contemporary rap and Cecil Brown's new novel I, Stagolee, published this month by Berkeley's North Atlantic Books. Even before the table of contents, an excerpt from the 1930s traditional folksong "The Ballad of Stagolee" makes it perfectly clear where rap's roots lie: Stagolee was a good pimp, everybody did love/The whores and pimps swore by him/By the stars above.
That's right: Before hip-hop was even conceived — before Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, or 50 Cent — Stagolee was big pimpin,' baby.
All the elements of pimp/playa/hustler rap existed in the African-American oral tradition a century ago, though some aspects of the game have changed. It hasn't always been hard out here for a pimp, as the Oscar-winning Three 6 Mafia has claimed. Pimping was once "respectable in places like St. Louis, where it was legal for ten to fifteen years," says Brown, an academic and former Express contributor.
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Is West Coast Rap Obsolete?
by Kam
Hip Hop News
8.10.06- (This article first appeared in SOHH.com Its an interesting read where LA Hip Hop artist Kam brings up the problem of Hip Hop media silencing certain types of voices.)
Kam burst on the hip-hop scene in 1991 with the track, "Every Single Weekend," from the "Boyz In The Hood Soundtrack." Shortly after, he connected with Ice Cube and put out his debut album "Neva Again" (1993). Kam later parted ways with Cube and released "Made In America" in 1995 and "Kamnesia" last year. His new album, "The Self", will be out this summer.
Since I left the rap scene, I have noticed that rap has become the most compromised art in the Black community. America is calling for a "War on Terrorism." There is a definite war going on. But there is a continued war on the poor, the ill, the disenfranchised, the women, and the Black Man. But I what I am asking us to observe-is the continued War on West Coast Rap. Because West Coast Rappers point out the various urban plagues and constrictions mentioned.
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Kurtis Blow Presents: The History Of Rap, Vol. 1: The Genesis By Curtis Blow
by Kurtis Blow
2.09.06- In the early 1970s a musical genre was born in the crime-ridden neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Gifted teenagers with plenty of imagination but little cash began to forge a new style from spare parts. Hip-hop, as it was then known, was a product of pure streetwise ingenuity; extracting rhythms and melodies from existing records and mixing them up with searing poetry chronicling life in the 'hood, hip-hop spilled out of the ghetto.
From the housing projects hip-hop poured onto the streets and subways, taking root in Bronx clubs like the Savoy Manor Ballroom, Ecstasy Garage, Club 371, The Disco Fever, and the T-Connection. From there it spread downtown to the Renaissance Ballroom, Hotel Diplomat, the Roxy, and The Fun House. It migrated to Los Angeles, where a whole West Coast hip-hop scene developed, sporting its own musical idiosyncrasies, its own wild style.
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Is Scarface Done With Rap?
My Homies, Part 2 -
not bad for a
compilation.
Village Voice
8.10.06- VH-1 runs a lot of irritating shit: James Blunt videos, Flavor of Love, El Chupacabra beating the Boegy Bunch in The World Series of Pop Culture. But the network hit rock bottom a few years ago during one of those smarmy one-hit wonder countdowns, when they inexplicably shoved the Geto Boys in with EMF and the guy who sang "Kung Fu Fighting," basically the rap equivalent of including Radiohead on the countdown because they never had a radio hit that rivaled "Creep."
The Geto Boys are one of the most important groups in rap history. They were the first Southern group to be taken seriously all over the country, and they introduced a meditative style of introspective, depressive gangsta rap, which makes them indirectly responsible for some of the best music being made today (I really need to write an entry about Restless, the fucking magnificent new Trae album). They also have one of the most fascinating stories in rap, an epic saga of controversy and jealousy and reconciliation and attempted suicide.
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The Bjork-Barney Enigma Machine
by Randy Kennedy
New York Times
4.08.06- Staring out a wall of windows into a foggy Reykjavik afternoon, Bjork searched for an image to describe a man with whom she had just spent a year making a movie and composing a two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack, the longest and perhaps most ambitious musical project of her career.
She had been in Iceland for several days, so the English language was hitting her at odd angles, but she finally found the word she was looking for.
"He's a bit of a submarine," she said, and grinned.
It was an apt description, not only because the man in question — Matthew Barney, the artist and filmmaker and Bjork's boyfriend for almost six years — operates at a kind of deep-sea level, silently (he dreads talking about his work) dredging up fantastical and sometimes fearsome creatures from the dark ocean bed of human consciousness.
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A Tribe Called Quest
from Wikipedia
1.20.06- A Tribe Called Quest was an influential rap group of the 1990s, originally formed in Queens, New York City in 1988. The group is comprised of Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad. A fourth member, Jarobi, was with the group for the first album, but parted ways with the group after.
Q-Tip and Phife had grown up together in Queens, and met Muhammad in high school. The group's name was coined by The Jungle Brothers, whose members attended the same school. Soon after, the group began performing live and recording on a local label. The group became a part of the Native Tongues family, a Hip Hop artist collective also consisting of the groups Jungle Brothers, De La Soul and Black Sheep.
Read More. . .
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