This has been floating around for a while, the Sudanese-born musician Ahmed Gallab (Sinkane) just played a slew of CMJ shows, his impossibly terrific debut Mars is out tomorrow on DFA and this particular track is the best theme for a '70s blaxploitation movie that never was that I've ever heard.
"I always try to write songs so that they could be read on lots of different levels, so you could appreciate them superficially and then if you go deeper you could see something else," Madonna told British TV's Jonathan Ross in 1992, promoting her Erotica album and Sex book. This was the puffing of a now frequently bared chest or maybe autofellatio from a woman who had recently told Vanity Fair, "I think I have a dick in my brain."
Remember how "Trapped in the Closet" ended five years ago? Me neither. I barely remember what happened at all, but whatever, it's back — on Nov. 23, IFC will broadcast a bunch of new chapters. R. Kelly has released the first of the new batch, Chapter 23, in advance. I know that the series quickly unraveled into goofiness, revealing itself as intentional camp instead of the more engaging ambiguous strain of the sensibility. It went from "Is it or isn't it?" to, "Oh...it is" way too fast.
The most exciting recent musical development in R&B has less to do with its beat than what's floating above it. The synth-led humidity the genre has absorbed via the likes of Frank Ocean, Drake (and his producer, Noah "40" Shebib), the Weeknd, and Miguel is shaping the commercial genre before our ears in a way that hasn't happened since Timbaland revolutionized it by making it skitter during the last half of the ‘90s. Mood music actually sounds moody again.
The concept of Matmos' The Ganzfeld EP, on which "Very Large Green Triangles" appears, is complicated. This is from its press release:
Adele's "Someone Like You" is No. 22 on the Co-operative Funeralcare's chart of songs played at funerals, according to NME. Who knows how scientific the polling of "the UK's leading funeral director" is, but this does point to the fact that at least more than one person has selected a song whose narrator describes her object of affection as ultimately replaceable to play in tribute to the deceased.
Like all good art, the lyrics to Depeche Mode songs such as "Master and Servant" and "Strangelove" leave room for interpretation. In the small minds of young homophobes, most interpretations erred on the side of man-on-man dungeon sex sessions filled with drugs, oils and punishment. In "Strangelove," lead vocalist Dave Gahan sang: "strange highs and strange lows. Strangelove, that's how our love goes. …Pain. Will you return it?" In "Master and Servant" he sang about a new game that's a lot like life, a "play between the sheets. With you on top and me underneath, forget all about equality." The latter song only fed rumors that the band was gay by featuring a cracking whip sound as part of the beat.
This Prince/Roger Troutman salute from two people who are steadily leaving the shadows of their former group associations has been circulating for about a week, but it's finally commercially available. Everyone is doing their job really well on it!
Backstage at this year's Electric Zoo festival, which took place Labor Day weekend on New York's Randall's Island, I had one of the least pretentious discussions about music with a person who makes it for a living that I've ever experienced. The Berlin-based producer/DJ/label owner Alex Ridha (aka Boys Noize) had just played a 75-minute set to kids who wore day-glo T-shirts and Halloween costumes, kids who'd like flock to the main stage to hear Skrillex after Ridha's in-tent set. With Skrillex's selection reverberating off the wood-paneled walls of Ridha's trailer, the 30-year-old told me about "Reality," a track he'd worked on for a year, struggling "to make it sound not busy, even though it is busy."
What starts out as typically snotty swiping really ignites by the 4:20 mark (how perfect) when Bay Area rappers Plane Jane and Iamsu! speed up the pace in their lyrical battle of the sexes and instead of verses, start trading bars rapidly back-and-forth. "Like Me" hearkens back to female-male duets like Yo-Yo and Ice Cube's "The Bonnie and Clyde Theme" and MC Lyte and Positive K's "I'm Not Havin' It" (and Positive K's "I Got a Man," in which he rapped with his pitched-up female alter ego). Why don't people do this anymore? At a time when the amount of musical collaborations is at an all-time high, on-record interaction is a rarity. It's strange to hear a woman and man who sound actually engaged with each other rapping together.
A highlight of the upcoming DJ-Kicks mix (out Nov. 13) by New York dance-music revivalists Hercules and Love Affair, "Release Me," finds Hercules mastermind Andy Butler binging on a variety of retro sources in an otherwise '90s-house focused context. Says Butler of his new track and its vougishly dispassionate singer:
Christina Aguilera just tweeted the cover upcoming, hilariously named seventh studio album Lotus. She's never given an indication that she has any taste at all (right down to the gratuitous, gaudy vocal running), but it seems like she's at least now owning her tastelessness? She's growing before our eyes. Good for her.
This week, two relics of ‘90s alternaculture are openly revisiting their pasts with what are essentially reissues of their earlier work. Tori Amos has released Gold Dust, a collection of 14 (or 15, depending on which version you have) songs from her back catalog that she's rerecorded with the Metropole Orchestra. Meanwhile, Tim Burton has converted his pre-Pee Wee's Big Adventure short film Frankenweenie into a full-length stop-motion feature. It's out Friday.
Based on numbers alone, you could look at Solange Knowles as this era's answer to La Toya Jackson (although even La Toya went Top 40 on the U.S. R&B singles chart a few times). She is the decidedly less successful sibling of a musical icon (Beyoncé, duh), although the desperation that tainted her earlier work (even her relatively respected sophomore album Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams) has by now evaporated.
