Today's Janet Jackson's 46th birthday, so I'm taking that excuse to post this song that everyone's heard a million times but that I've nonetheless been obsessing about recently. Have you listened to this song lately? Like, really listened to it, not just took it for granted as the pop wallpaper that megahits can become over time? It's worth it.
Today, M.I.A. announced on Twitter that her bangin', raucous "Bad Girls" was spawning remixes featuring contemporary female rapper heavyweights Missy Elliott, Azealia Banks and Rye Rye. If it turns out that they're all on the same track (and not separate remixes), that "Bad Girls" remix will be the equivalent of this remix of Brandy's debut single, which featured the bigs of the female rap world in 1994. (In 1997, Lil' Kim went for the same effect by drafting Missy, Left Eye, Da Brat and — haha — Angie Martinez for the "Not Tonight" remix.) For as much of an event as gathering titans together to flip a Brandy track (way before her vehicular death debacle), what I admire about the "I Wanna Be Down" remix is how laid back it is. There's a matter-of-factness about women coming together for the sake of hip-hop that we're just getting back to, almost 20 years later.
Speaking of male R&B crooners, here's something more sleazy than soulful from Usher's forthcoming, inanely named album Looking 4 Myself. Despite the tactile production of satisfying synth smears, tough thwacks and insistent ticking, the track kind of falls apart when Ursh flips out of his longing falsetto to a whining lechery. This comes after the underwhelming release of the by-the-numbers house of Usher's "Scream" — here's hoping that Looking's first single, the lovely, Diplo-produced "Climax" is, isn't in fact its climax.
Neneh Cherry broke through with the rapping/singing hybrid "Buffalo Stance," a dance song without much low end that turned interjections into hooks ("Gigolo, sucka!") and included an amazingly melodramatic spoken-word breakdown ("The wind in my face, the sound in my ears / Water from my eyes, and you on my mind..."). That song is positively straightforward next to this, a sideways take on Madvillain's "Accordion." Cherry's sung/spoken/rapped/screeched vocals make MF Doom sound quaint in comparison, as they dip in and between the constraints of bars and loop back to zero in (seemingly randomly) on a few of Doom's lines to invent a refrain. The mounting jazz cacophony behind only adds to the chaos. This may not be one that yields repeat listens (who knows how it'll come off when Neneh Cherry & the Thing's collaborative full-length, The Cherry Thing arrives next month), but it's something to experience at least once, this avant answer to the renewed pop cultural interest of women in hip-hop. Neneh Cherry hasn't released an album in 16 years, and she couldn't have chosen a better time to come back.
Whitney Houston's husband of 14 years and the presumed downfall of her career, Bobby "King of R&B" Brown, appeared on this morning's episode of Today in his first televised interview since her death. It was a pretty standard and fairly respectable recap of their tumultuous relationship, and he said nice things like, "God probably just needed her for the choir up there in heaven" in reference to her untimely passing.
Today, the Philadelphia-bred Santigold released her excellent sophomore album, Master of My Make-Believe. The collection of low-key anthems genre-hops like Madonna at her most informed and tasteful. You hear bits of punk, rave, dubstep, as well as some Knife-derived spookiness, some rapping that sounds inspired by Peaches and some drum programming that rips off/pays homage to Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill." The whole thing is sprinkled with a dubbish, reggae sensibility. Master goes to so many different places in such a brief period of time (11 tracks in less than 40 minutes) while remaining so user-friendly that it feels like it's holding up Gwen Stefani's 2004 album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. as an ideal. That release was a major player in converting the event pop album into a style-juggling, wide-cast sonic net — an ingenious strategy to cater to the then-burgeoning iTunes market. Why make a coherent statement when you can be all things to all people?
The theme of this video (which premiered today) just happens to be the theme of its singer's career: Rihanna is pretty. That is it. You need know nothing else to get Rihanna. Her beauty is as responsible for her success as any of her other natural gifts and those bestowed upon her by her producers, writers and managers. (Credit where it's due: despite terrible career/life decisions, her I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude is refreshing, if not fueled by the self-assurance that can result from massive fame.) "Where Have You Been" is a shoutier, uglier version of "We Found Love" from her underwhelming Talk That Talk album. Not like that'll stop it from being utterly massive! Your summer may sound something like this, like it or not.
Last night, hard-up R&B diva Brandy Norwood was profiled on VH1's Behind the Music. The episode spent a lot of time discussing the 2007 car crash that she maybe caused on a Los Angeles freeway. (It resulted in the death of a mother of two.) Calling it a "blur," Brandy didn't recount the incident (instead, police reports stating that she slammed into a car while driving 65 mph were cited). She spoke vaguely: "I was driving home and it happened." Also: "Regardless if it was my fault or it was not my fault, I was involved in something that cost someone their life. Whoever fault it was, I was in it." More curiously: "A murderer is someone who premeditates it. I didn't wake up that day to be involved in a fatal car crash. I didn't plan for that." Uh, OK? So...what now?
Ten years ago today, the world lost TLC's Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes. She lived a crazy life—the "crazy" of her band's sophomore album, CrazySexyCool, referred to her—and died a crazy death. (If you can stomach it, the moments leading up to her fatal car crash are above, excerpted from the VH1 documentary The Last Days of Left Eye, which chronicled 27 days she spent in Honduras before her death.) Left Eye died exactly eight months after 22-year-old Aaliyah and for a period, it felt like the world of R&B was collapsing. The ‘90s had ended two years earlier, but where R&B is concerned, April 25, 2002 is the day they definitively died.
For another Record Store Day release, British singer-songwriter Victoria Christina Hesketh (Little Boots) teamed up with historic Chicago house label Trax to release the 12" for "Every Night I Say a Prayer." She wrote this one with Hercules & Love Affair's Andy Butler and it's better than anything on his group's sophomore dud Blue Songs. (It's also better than pretty much everything on Little Boots' own spotty debut, 2009's Hands.) The housey original version of "Every Night" incorporates a sort of cleaned-up old-school Chicago aesthetic (dig the claps), but Tensnake's posh freestyle rerub is the vinyl's real winner. You can never go wrong with clinking 808s and pretty female vocals. Fact.
Yesterday, Brian McKnight, responsible for lite '90s R&B hits like "One Last Cry," "Back at One" and "Love Is" (with Vanessa Williams), posted a song on his YouTube to serve as a preview for his then-upcoming "adult mixtape." The chorus went: "Let me show you how your pussy works / Betcha didn't know that it could squirt / I have lots of things to show you / If you're ready to learn." That he sang this in his signature squeaky clean croon on top of easy listening keyboards made the irony that much more hilarious. People were outraged.
The Flaming Lips' Record Store Day full-length, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, is a subversive take on the nature of musical collaborations in 2012. Instead of exploiting famous friends like Ke$ha, Bon Iver and Coldplay's Chris Martin for the sake of chart-friendliness (as is standard practice in the industry), the Lips push their poppy friends into noisy, borderline inaccessible territory (and collaborators like Lightning Bolt, Neon Indian, Yoko Ono and Nick Cave are pushed into even more experimental territory than usual). It's a stunning album that's not lacking in tunes, but that doesn't want to make them easy for listeners, either.
Today would have been the 61st birthday of one of the finest voices that ever blessed the Earth. Luther Vandross died almost seven years ago, and he is still sorely missed, especially when you consider the sad state of the commercial R&B male crooner (R. Kelly and Usher are about the only ones who can really sing and sell). Let's remember him by listening to his defiant disco (released a full two years after the Disco Demolition Rally supposedly destroyed the genre) and by staring at a bunch of New Yorkers' crotches. Miss ya, big guy.
In what seems like a bid to pander to the taste of fans of so-called PBR&B (a relatively recent strain of R&B that for whatever reason resonates with an indie audience that doesn't normally listen to the genre), the grunge-inventing, Shins-delivering, Postal Service-spawning indie label Sub Pop has released a bona fide R&B album. The craziest thing about it is that it doesn't sound like it's pandering at all. THEESatisfaction's Awe Naturale floats in a cloud that suggests Erykah Badu at her most blunted or Odd Future's The Internet with actual melodies and sonic variety. It's jazz, it's hip-hop, it's Earth, Wind & Fire, it's cerebral, it's banging. Critic, memoirist of the hip-hop stars and filmmaker dream hampton directed the video for "QueenS," which does a really good job of evoking what it feels like to walk through a New York apartment.
L.A.-based leftfield soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow's collaboration album with beat genius Madlib, Seeds, is so fucking good. It's a collection of terrific songs that are well said, well sung and often anchored by boom-bap breaks. (Why don't more contemporary R&B singers work with vintage-sounding break beats? It's such an easy trick and the result is a terrific unclogging of the block waveforms we've come to accept.) "Best Love" intersects disco and hip-hop, injecting both inherently political, increasingly depoliticized genres with a message...about pacifism and building wells in India. Whatever, it's good.
Sand boobs. What a fun gal.
No one seems to know why the Mary J. Blige Burger King commercial above has been scrubbed from the internet. We spoke with someone who worked on it (he didn't know). We reached out to Burger King for a comment and have yet to hear back.
Keith Olbermann is a talented television man. He's agile with words. He's whip-smart, an often penetrating thinker, and seems able to strike the perfect on-air balance between smoldering outrage and smirking "What are we doing here, folks?" acknowledgment of some of television's absurdities. Still. If you are a TV executive who hires this man, you are a fucking idiot.
Back in July, Mariah Carey made an insane two-hour live appearance on the Home Shopping Network, which I distilled down to the most entertaining four minutes. So when I found out that Carey would kick off another round of HSN hawking early this morning, I couldn't help but tune in (and not just because she challenged Gawker to do so).
The second worst part of flying (after having to take your shoes off at security) is that everyone dresses like slobs. Not Vogue scarecrow-in-chief Anna Wintour. She changed twice for a six-hour flight from New York to L.A. yesterday and even got special treatment at the airport.
