Tim's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread

that's a young looking dude -- "work them" is kind of the fucking shit, jesus

i found a new metric of quality in 2010 that's based on how long it takes me, if at all, to close out a youtube to download a HQ mp3

hahahaha yes

FTR "Lay It Down" isn't as good as "Yo (Excuse Me Miss)" but then Chris 2010 isn't Chris 2005 so what am I gonna do.

In general I'd be hesitant to say that he's the male Cassie precisely because I have doubts about his range emotionally, my favourite Cassie tunes are either colder or warmer than anything I've heard Lloyd do.

OTOH the context in which Lex uses it above strikes me as spot on, particularly in terms of parlaying limited vocals into a strength.

why people gotta hate on 'riding solo' all the time, do you all not like the idea of an alternate universe where lil boosie is an r&b star or something.

agree with jordan for the most part re 'lay it down' (up until he brings 'sex therapy' into it, idk what that's all about) although that underwritten quality works quite well on the radio where it basically turns into some drunken shanty. however where i have a choice in the matter i usually give my ears a rest and and turn it down so i can put on fabolous & lloyd's 'real playa like' from 2007 instead - you should all do the same, cos shit is real.

i realize at the outset the possible hypocrisy of criticizing "lay it down" for being underwritten while going on to praise robin thicke's "sex therapy" -- which of course interpolates "it's my party" for it's hook -- but i really do think that "sex therapy" is a much better version of "lay it down" -- you get the same effect from the drums, but i think that "sex therapy" is more... sufficiently languid -- the whole song feels like a release to me, from production (massage parlor synths, twinkling keys, guitar squiggles) from vocals (thicke is a much better high voiced vocalist, obv) where there's something very pinched & stuffy to me about "lay it down"

― BIG SANTA aka the sleighdriver (J0rdan S.), Sunday, December 26, 2010 4:56 AM (11 hours ago)

good post

do not really get the "underwritten" point though - are you talking about the hook? or the verses? chorus is pretty irresistable and i really love the energy of the verses ("tell your friends you ain't going out tonight / imma get that shimmy on and work that body right) - like i think tim says it's earnest in a sort-of-corny but still totally endearing way. he really rides the beat well too, especially when he picks it up in the second half of each verse. & if you do not f/w the yodeling at the end then you are totally fucking up imo

best part of the song is the end:

so i can work it, work it,
WORK IT, WORK IT
*yodels*

awesome post btw tim

*irresistible

yeesh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq--g4zIuNA

Erykah Badu's 'Gone Baby Don't Be Long' is my favorite song on the album, the one that actually has me feeling the astral funk thing she tries to promote, the other songs I've heard don't rub me the right way.

Might be the slap bass... I've got some sort of innate aversion to it.

why people gotta hate on 'riding solo' all the time, do you all not like the idea of an alternate universe where lil boosie is an r&b star or something.

I think I just prefer an alternate universe where "Bottom to the Top" is a hit, I don't know that I want that vibe transmuted into R&B - or rather, I don't think I want that if the outcome is "Ridin' Solo". Really though it's just the grain of Deroolo's voice and the repetition of the title that gets to me.

"In My Head" was decent. "What If" (at least with attendant video clip) kinda moves me, but I'm always a fuxx for chart R&B that could be played at a funeral.

i don't think i can cosign any positivity towards desrouleaux. it's like that taio cruz song that j0rdan likes, just because it's there and on the radio all the time doesn't mean it has to be called a good pop song.

it's a good tune in search of a bearable singer

Chris Sorbello - So Lonely (Hook & Sling Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXJo434FTxM

The rise of the Guetta-style R&B/dance crossover hasn't substantially changed the sound of metro-gay/suburban-straight (for the two are in fact effectively the same for the purposes of this conversation) clubs, it's just meant that instead of opting for a Freemasons or Thunderpussy remix of an R&B hit the DJ can play the original (the bigger effect, which I might talk about later, has been on commercial radio). It has helped, however, to further divorce these environments from dance music culture, a process which has been ongoing for the past 10 years by my reckoning (perhaps longer: 2000 was when I could start going to clubs). In the gay world, proper clubs or club nights still exist but these feel increasingly the preserve of an ecstasy and crystal meth consuming sub-set. I've continued to use the tripartite breakdown of queer/camp/homo to describe club nights where you're likely to hear either Hercules & Love Affair, Rihanna or a hard house update of Guru Josh. None of these sub-sets is gonna disappear anytime soon, and indeed they remain in a state of constant cross-hybridisation - one of my favourite nights out this year was at an event playing a queer/homo cross of Nitzer Ebb and Adonis and very hard latterday electro-house. Still, camp is probably at its highest ebb in some time, enjoying the extent to which its signature sound now dominates the charts as well.

In this not so brave new world, I suspect what is most likely to suffer is the stuff that codes camp but in more of a thoroughgoing dance music manner, though perhaps the magnetic influence of whatever is successful means that the homo clubs formerly playing hard house et. al. will come around. If so they ought to play this, one of the tracks I've surprised myself by returning to regularly all year. Chris Sorbello is some local chick with a thin, barely there voice that would have stood her in better stead during the highpoint of trance-pop's second coming, but now means she is obliged to join the dots between that and Annie. Even if this is done out of obligation, it works, the frailty of her voice necessitating a delicacy and precision in the song's construction so as to avoid stomping all over her. This stands in stark contrast with most-Guetta pop which - also in part because it's designed for the radio - can rely on the instant-recognition-factor and (usually) belting power of the star vocalist to rise above the clomping, harshly buzzing sledgehammer production. The original of "So Lonely" (best heard in its Club Mix form) is fine perky electro-pop, all shivery arpeggios and whizzing, whirring sound effects and slashing, magisterial synth chords, splitting the difference between house-pop's unsubtle sensuality and trance-pop's bloodless austerity in a manner that an uncountable many have tried but almost always failed to master.

Hook'n'Sling used to be most crude of the crude club remixers, but as with many in their belated-electro-house generation (formerly peddling a club form of the Guetta sound avant la lettre) they have moved on to a kind of belated electro-minimal sound, navigating a space between Benny Benassi and Booka Shade circa 2005; the result is probably the most expansive form of what passes for commercial dance in 2010. I love the restlessness of their remix of "So Lonely", which offers half a dozen takes on the original's wispy melancholy: pulsing, ominous bass; fragile synth chords; stirring strings; insistent minor key arpeggios; a ridiculous accelerating snare-drum breakdown (over a cheesy looped "Say! Say! Say!"); a sudden sideways swerve into a "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of These)" homage (which really shouldn't work at this stage); and then a bringing together of all of these elements in an oddly dreamy finale.

Although discreet moments of the track surprise, Hook'n'Sling's approach in general is so familiar that there is no way that it could be considered "surprising"; it's purely functionalist, an application of what the remixers do best to what the song's original incarnation will accommodate. And yet its functionalism is in service of an emotional and emotive product: if "So Lonely" isn't exactly tears on the dancefloor material, than at least its propulsiveness and its dreaminess converge in a space that is as reflective as it is energetic, inviting a kind of retreating into oneself, a focus on physical response as a kind of insulation from sadness. Populist club music can do this in a way that Guetta-pop struggles with, because Guetta-pop (like most chart pop) is music as dialogue, songs of love and desire and celebration from the singer to you, from you to your friends or your next pick-up. "So Lonely" exists in dance music's realm of the one and the many: in the middle of a crowded dancefloor and utterly alone.

deej likes this

Shawnna ft. T-Pain - Nappy Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSGIK-eZKBw

I think I am still recovering from the shock of hearing Shawnna's "R.P.M." a horribly belated two years ago. Shawnna's double-time flow when it's on is on, its percussive precision matching the beat with an adhesive closeness that is thrilling just to listen to - to the point that it takes me ages even to pay attention to what it is she's actually saying (see also "Shake Dat Shit". Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "R.P.M." was that Shawnna was even able to go toe to toe with Twista, who it goes without saying is the master of this sort of thing.

Twista isn't on "Nappy Boys" (T-Pain fills in serviceably I guess), but he's loomed large over my 2010 listening generally, not just through his own tracks like "The Heat", but through his clear influence on Yelawolf and also, I suspect, Nicki Minaj. I'm not sure if Nicki is also taking her cues from Shawnna, or if (conversely) Shawnna, watching and envying Nicki's rise, has decided she needs to remind everyone of her own mastery of double-time. Whatever, I love "Nappy Boys": its fanfare-laden arrangement, its ominously graceful beat, but most of all Shawnna's voice, filling every second of the track with increasingly complex, rhythmic, oddly accented rhymes whose content is less important than the sheer joy of its rising urgency and absurdity in tandem with the creeping apocalyptic tension of the arrangement. Though I am frequently snagged on lines like "now they wanna try me like I ain't illuminati", they're not really the point of this song. Shawnna prefers familiar monosyllabic words that she can flex against the beat like bats - bang bang skeet skeet bling bling my ring - and then delight at the resulting collisions.

In the battle between form and content for hearts and minds, form usually loses out: note how quickly the hype around Lil' Wayne became less about his flow and more about the funny words he was using; his own quality took a nosedive when he appeared to accept that explanation of his success. Shawnna, likewise, probably will continue to slip beneath the crossover radar (certainly relative to Nicki) at least in part because her charm is less about her words and more about the way she uses them, the sheer presence of her voice even when she's not in double-time mode. Lex often talks about Ciara singing songs like she dances (and credit to Lex for putting me onto "Nappy Boys" in the first place) and Shawnna here makes me think of a dancer, wowing not with each move in itself but with the control and exactingness of its execution: like, the way she seems to come in one beat to early on her first verse, until you realise this slight stance askew from the beat was what she intended all along. Even the way she increasingly leans on a long-vowel possibly-British nasal accent as the tune progresses is not done with the (content-aimed) persona-swapping dazzle of Nicki but rather as a kind of diagonal twist on her movements, like driving up onto the sidewall of a lane in a car-race arcade game. It would be easy to say that she's the one biting Nicki in this regard - and maybe she is - but even if that's the case she takes that idea and makes it completely her own.

tim you might really like the twista album actually -- some really unconventional stuff on it

nice analysis of rap style too

Yeah the Twista album is definitely on my must-hear list.

On a related note, I've maxed out my bandwidth for the month so I won't be able to add links for the last few to the facebook group until after new years I expect.

note how quickly the hype around Lil' Wayne became less about his flow and more about the funny words he was using; his own quality took a nosedive when he appeared to accept that explanation of his success.

otm (& sad, it was always about "his flow")

great post/great song! was so disappointed we heard nothing else from shawnna this year - there was that kerfuffle about her leaving disturbing tha peace (luda's battle of the sexes album was originally meant to be a collab between him and her) and getting signed to nappy boy instead. then this, then nothing. not that i was 100% convinced that signing with t-pain was a good move for her.

I think I am still recovering from the shock of hearing Shawnna's "R.P.M." a horribly belated two years ago

secret best song of 00s

if someone who managed to nab the deadboy one before it got taken down wants to webmail me a copy i would be much obliged btw

Drake - Find Your Love (Drew Austin Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdRFqYopBRI

http://www.sendspace.com/file/m0qdl6

The second Drake remix to make its way onto the list, this time in bumping, paranoid UK Funky style. I actually heard this version of "Find Your Love" before the original, with the result that the latter sounded unnaturally leaden and defeated by comparison, as if it was in fact playing at the wrong speed, Drake's dragging "hey, hey, hey" refrain feeling like a hook he's too lethargic to care about before he's even gotten it out of his mouth. Drew Austin gets that Drake's droney, android-like voice is actually perfect for pitching up to house tempos, because while this mitigates somewhat his low-functioning house robot vibe, it simultaneously turns what's left into a kind of twitchy inhumanity, the nasal smoothness of a single-minded and obsessive replicant whose delusions are encased in cast-iron logic.

The first words, "I'm more than just an option / refuse to be forgotten", already a vaguely creepy opening salvo in an ostensible love song, take on a darker complexion over the remix's spartan kicks, snares and claps, reminding me of the Terminator 2 scene where the T-1000 is blown to pieces, then melts and reforms. The looped vocals spill over each other slightly, resembling the ravings of a maniac, or perhaps more the frying synapses of a pre-programmed cyborg. Still, if Drake is falling apart here he holds into his solitary goal with sufficient certainty to remain dangerous: "I better find your loving / I better find your heart" no longer just a declaration but a threat.

Apart from robots, this tune puts me in mind of people I've met on crystal meth, in its bluntness and single-mindedness and nervousness and naked desire. Or it reminds me of lusting after someone on the dancefloor only to watch them hook up with someone else. In the case of either comparison, the key is the way the tune stands in on a precipice where sexual need becomes destructive, where one's inability to find satisfaction casts a pall over everything, your quarry's refusal to acquiesce becoming an affront that cannot be allowed to stand. "It's more than just a mission / You hear but you don't listen," Drake complains, and you know that whatever happens he has no intention of going home empty-handed.

Austin's skeletal arrangement is taut, even rigid, stuttering snares and artificial hand claps lashing Drake's vocal like whipcracks. The tune bounces on its snares, but the groove generates its power from the friction of this syncopation against the strict lines of the kickdrum, summoning up memories of Adamski's punishing "Killer", the vaguely industrial counter-rhythms smashing themselves against the implacable 4X4 beat. Here that tension is regulated masterfully, but so simply, through the addition and substraction of a ticking hi-hat, which quite perversely seems to ramp up the tension whether appearing or disappearing, summoning either pulse-racing urgency or a stark, unsettling isolation.

Mario Basanov - Up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcBucjAoIA

Between early 2008 and mid 2010 the level of my attention to regular house fell off a cliff. This was mostly due to uk funky buying up all the real estate in my brain, but in part also due to the way in which so much house seemed to beat a hasty retreat away from the ravey, cheesy but satisfying stabs at mind-altering expansiveness that was minimal's legacy, and into a straight retread of familiar deep house tropes, only more, er, minimal than before - if not exactly the worst of all possible worlds, then certainly among the less interesting of familiar ones.

I've gotten back into house quite dramatically in the past six months. Is the change in the music or in me? My temptation is to suggest the following scenario: two or three years ago the music was between two stools, still possessed of an auteur-like seriousness (if not minimal then pious US alter ish) but reluctant to engage in the kind of showy theatrics that might justify it. Now, the music simply has nothing to do with minimal anymore (or at least very little), is equally free of the need to worship before the US masters as some kind of oppositional gesture, and consequently is free to divest itself of that seriousness and approach the task of being regular straight up house with a much more playful streak - of course, this still means a lot of US house aping, but with a great deal more pleasure than before. In particular, it feels like those elements of the deep house scene into edits and other forms of pop revivalism have experienced a kind of feedback loop simpatico with the disco edits scene, such that the two seem increasingly to resemble one another and even start to merge at some points - certainly a lot of the house I've responded to this year has been on the slow side, and it seems like everyone makes (their name with) edits.

This is all kind of bullshit though, in the sense that if you knew where to look this entire development was already occurring in a full-on sense throughout this whole period - look no further than the work of The Revenge and Linkwood. And it's not like it's even that far divorced from Moodymann or a whole bunch of moodymenn. So why does it feel different now? Perhaps there's been a tipping point I've missed or (more likely) perhaps there's been a tipping point in me, a moment when this trend had gathered enough momentum while my focus was elsewhere that I could switch my gaze back and pretend that something new was happening (critics do this all the time btw). And also, maybe I've recharged my batteries enough to find radically uneventful house records fun again. Which is why I've spent so much time listening to people like Soul Clap, Nicolas Jaar, Art Department, Maceo Plex, No Regular Play et. al. Records like these have been floating around all along, I'm just in the right frame of mind for them now. Having said that, the strong undercurrent of 80s R&B influences in 2010 deep house certainly doesn't hurt (and for a nice sampler you could do a lot worse than start with Soul Clap's free EP of R&B edits).

None of which has a great deal to do with Mario Basanov's "Up", which even more than any of the aforementioned material really could have come out in 2001 or 2004 or 2007 as easily as now. Indeed five years ago this tune would have been called Julien Jabre's "Swimming Places": endlessly rising, effortlessly building piano-based anthem-house, eerie background atmospherics, no more layers or even notes than are absolutely necessary to smash the dancefloor - though that said the interplay between the one-note piano riff, the descending synth chords and ascending bassline is excellent. The entire purpose of this music is not to wow you with craft but rather to evoke a kind of empty but aching nostalgia for a moment that you may not have lived or even be in a position to imagine, and I increasingly suspect that for tunes to attain this specific vibe they need to be somewhat timeless themselves. Not in the boring rock critic sense, but in the sense of dance music which carefully evades as far as is possible the kind of timeliness that is so much dance music's appeal. The tune's sonic biases - organic and retro but not so ostentatiously as to timestamp it, delicately constructed but by no means a riot of detail - may be very 2010, but as an idea "Up" could exist in any number of styles; you could easily imagine a "neo-trance" version of this in about 2006. No matter what the co-ordinates of style and technique, obviousness will find its way to the surface.

Through all the tidal drifts back and forth characteristic of all but the most determinedly single-minded of house scenes, tunes like "Up" act as a kind of glue, like, "whatever else we might think, surely we can all agree on this." More than that though, it serves as a reminder of dance music's function above and beyond (or rather, through) the affectations of fashion, its communicability of feeling that arrives formal and empty - all the better for you to fill it yourself. It's a vibe I'd been ignoring for a while now, and it's nice to be reminded of it.

My backlog of these is getting a bit daunting, will try to correct this over the next few days.

Also can't recommend highly enough Soul Clap's podcast for Resident Advisor last year - similar in feel to those awesomely supine Peter Visti mixes from way back when.

xpost -- It's all good, sir. I need to catch up with this all properly myself!

TNT - Running

One of the nice things about dancehall is that indie-discourse (in the broadest sense - what Frank Kogan used to call PBSification) is happy either to take it or leave it well alone, there's few if any attempts to create or search for a cornier or more respectable version of it (where such attempts do exist, they're outsider stuff like The Bug or Rhythm & Sound which can happily exist in its own universe). The closest you get is maybe non-"slack" stuff targeted at older nostalgists and college types, this year's model probably being the Damian Marley/Nas album, though even there we're talking a dancehall equivalent of missing De La Soul rather than, say, critics losing their shit over Kanye changing the face of rap. The key distinction is that critics - even those with no business doing so - will always imply that they have some kind of stake in the development of the entire genre of hip hop or dance music or etc, such that what they praise and condemn is a microcosm of what they praise or condemn in the style generally, each endorsement secretly a polemic. Whereas critics don't feel this way about dancehall by and large, in part because they usually don't care enough and in part because they correctly sense that dancehall really does not give a fuck what they think.

A side-effect of this is that it's difficult to understand the place of unexpected one-offs in dancehall, to feel out the various sides of the kinds of debates that will automatically spring up when Kanye samples King Crimson or whatever. Things can become more defined if the argument can be framed in ad hominem terms, but that leads away from a consideration of genre in itself: M.I.A.'s early dancehall rips were rarely considered in terms of how well they functioned as dancehall, because M.I.A.'s own public image and backstory caused them to be considered as a whole 'nother thing by friend and foe alike. But ad hominem critiques rarely interest me, and at any rate I'm not very good at them.

You could probably set one up for TNT, the dancehall girl-group of Tifa, Natalie Storm and Timberlee, their hypercolour cut'n'paste visual aesthetic and sexually lascivious badgirl personas making them beneficiaries and victims of, if not Pitchforkification, then certainly Faderification, belonging to some kind of international cadre of dayglo urbanites updating new wave funky freshness for our more beat conscious era. Or something like that. This kind of narrative works more in terms of peripheral details - album covers, lines of patronage, a willingness to dabble in house and UK funky and so on - than in the actual performances and characters of the girls themselves, which are squarely within the Lady Saw/Ce'cile continuum. But it's enough to make TNT sightly liminal figures, a point of communication between the inside of dancehall and its outside. It makes them perfect candidates to produce a song like "Running" and make it work, but it's also made me feel more trepidation about wheeling out the praise (especially in a year when I heard only a sprinkling of dancehall) than I might otherwise.

I got over that though: all the time I've been musing on the success or otherwise of "Running" I've also kept returning to it, which is the bigger point. On the a-side is the more typical, feverish "Hot Gyal", all clacky Timbaland-circa-2001 percussion and vamping insouciance. "Running" is rather more inscrutable, a solemn pagan hymn sung with an unexpected and mysterious (because what has inspired it?) reverence. I suspect it's about vampires: "I see the sun come up and out, I'm slowly walking in its light, and it's killing me." Or it's a song about vampires that's secretly about something else, but if so I can't follow the lines of metaphorical extension far enough to guess what its true target is. TNT make "Running" work by not leaning too hard on the theatrics; in fact the tune is filled with moments of odd gentleness and reserve, a lazy "da da da da da da da da" hook, low-pitched and barely-there choruses which evoke a kind of stunned exhaustion, the muted close-harmony vocals blurring the line between one presence and many.

It's the song that really grabs me, but the arrangement is pretty great too, its whumping bass throb and heavy kickdrum suggesting techno (and in particular the Timo Maas remix of "Doom's Night") emanating from an underground bunker somewhere in the distance, all sound muted and fogged over like you've covered your ears to listen to your own pulse. I like to think that if the song is about vampire suicide then the music is designed to simulate the painful throb of other people's blood in the singers' ears, a music which blanks out the external world as it pulses with the wrongness of dawn's arrival. It's the music which makes "Running" feel ostentatiously eclectic, but the tune never comes across as ham-fisted, perhaps because its surround-sound reactor hum feels so disconnected from any kind of modish genre affectation that might actually serve some arguable crossover purpose; and, even more, because the unity of sound and song is so claustrophobically complete that it's like both emerged spontaneously and without human intervention, let alone deliberation. In this sense "Running" is a true one-off, a tune that actually doesn't mean anything, has no stake in any discussion outside of itself, and exists purely for its own unguessable purposes: "the night is dying, and my heart can hear it's crying, I ignore it's agony, and it's slowly killing me..." Intoxicating stuff.

Don't actually have a youtube for this but you can hear it at the bottom of this short hype piece as (lol) The Fader:

http://www.thefader.com/2010/12/08/premiere-tnt-running-dj-ayres-remix-mp3/

Nicki Minaj - Catch Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrlcnGTK4qU

Lex's line on Pink Friday is correct: take out the weak tracks, sub in the six "bonus tracks" plus eliminated first single "Massive Attack" and you have a pretty great album, one which actually captures a lot of what makes Nicki such a fun and compelling listening experience. There's a lot of ironies about Pink Friday, one being that an artist whose primary attraction is her lack of a single character (the way her flow, with its multitude of accents, unexpected references, even the hashtag raps, seems constantly to flit away from any attempt to say exactly who she is - though I could probably do without any more faux-Brit accents) makes the mistake of trying to promote a sympathetic unitary persona who you should feel for. Which is like Nicki missing her own point: at her best Nicki would (or at least should) be oblivious to or contemptuous of your sympathy.

As it is, much of Pink Friday, in its desire to please anyone and everyone including those who might be weirded out by Nicki's typical style, betrays a certain lack of self-confidence, both a lack in Nicki and a lack in mainstream hip hop generally. Nicki pulling the underperforming, voodooist first single "Massive Attack" from the record entirely and replacing it with emo jams designed to appeal to "Your Love" fans is a smaller, less obvious symptom of the malaise that results in B.O.B. collaborating with Rivers fucking Cuomo. This is not something that is true of hip hop generally by any stretch (in fact I listened to and loved more rap in the past year than in the previous five), but it's concerning that mainstream hip hop, once defined by its omnivorous appetite for chewing up outside material and turning it into fuel, now so regularly adopts a position of subservience towards the current bennetton rainbow of eclectic-but-pasty pop music.

Of course this leads us to the next (predictable) irony, that a rapper who thrives on rapping over productions as unpredictable, dense and schizophrenic as her raps are should choose so many arrangements that sound like any other monolithic 2010 rap-powerballadry ish, mostly centered around a single obvious sample (e.g. "Your Love" sampling the backing vocals from Annie Lennox's "No More I Love Yous"). I don't mind this so much actually, if only because it reminds me vaguely of Lil Kim's The Notorious K.I.M. (the weaker parts admittedly, but then Nicki's tracks are more ruthlessly catchy too), but it seems, again, like a massive case of point-missing. Especially given every single one of the bonus tracks witnesses Nicki getting herself entirely and precisely. Which is not, I should hasten to add, to say that I want every Nicki tune to be some kind of ostentatious display of her own aggressive weirdness a la "Massive Attack"; in fact some of my favourite past Nicki moments have been when she gets all emo and reflective, like "Keys Under Palm Trees" from the Beam Me Up, Scotty mixtape. So what's the distinction then?

"Catch Me" offers one answer: a relentless machinic Carribean beat and amusical synth squeals provide a deliberately spartan setting for Nicki's tale of a failed affair, her voice typically firing off with, if not notable speed, then certainly a kind of inevitable velocity, like a rock tumbling down a hill. Nicki here offers a character that is believably her while not simplifying or negating her past personae, the talkative neurotic charismatic dominant lover who suddenly finds herself at the end of someone else's tether, unable to achieve resolution through the power of words alone but unable to stop trying anyway. Perhaps though what we're hearing is Nicki's imaginary conversation with her ex, which is really a conversation with herself: "You wanted it oh so bad to prove points / but your game always makes me lost points / and your game always makes me concur / and maybe I should have never taken you from her" is the kind of obsessive rehearsal of argument-points and counter-points that feels very real and familiar (sadly the line straight after this is a bit LOL strained).

The rock always hits bottom though, each wordy verse giving way to the more simple confession, "I have given my all / funny how you could always make small / I have given my all / catch me", itself leading into first a depressive whispered bridge, then one of Nicki's morose little-girl-lost vocal choruses, which work precisely because she ain't a great singer, but only in this specific way, like something she's pushed into by her neurosis and against her better judgment, rather than a tic she can build her career around.

"Catch Me" falls neatly into the time-honoured "ambushed by unexpected emotion" category, in a manner that reminds me pretty heavily of many of my favourite hard-hitting but corny emotive dancehall anthems like Wayne Wonder's "Everyday" (especially since both rock spooky choral backing vocals). This makes sense in part because of the general rule that Nicki works better the closer she drifts towards a dancehall sensibility, and more specifically because Nicki like so much dancehall can deal best with emotion by framing it as the wasteland beyond and around the excess, as the fear of the comedown (physical, emotional, romantic) when the drugs and the alcohol and the lust run out. On "Everyday" this is a sensation only, Wayne extolling the high roller lifestyle while his vocals and the arrangement give shape to the yawning chasm of emptiness he pretends to strut across. "Catch Me" faces the wasteland squarely, but from the vantage point of the border or threshold, the point where all her flash and energy and enthusiasm become aware of their own possible extinction. Rather than pretend they don't exist, it creates a sense of something being at stake for all those other Nickis - those brash, bold, ballsy Nickis of "Muny" and "Did It On 'Em" and "Blow Your Mind" - by creating a wounded persona at their core.

Bonus vibes - Wayne Wonder's 2004 classic "Everyday":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDROv9KpGD4

it's concerning that mainstream hip hop, once defined by its omnivorous appetite for chewing up outside material and turning it into fuel, now so regularly adopts a position of subservience towards the current bennetton rainbow of eclectic-but-pasty pop music.

perfect

"catch me"! love that one. the cavernous, yawning beat really magnifies everything you describe tim.

deal best with emotion by framing it as the wasteland beyond and around the excess, as the fear of the comedown (physical, emotional, romantic) when the drugs and the alcohol and the lust run out

amazing

Never heard the TNT track but it sounds like it's going to be fantastic.

These have links on the facebook equiv btw.

goddamn "nappy boy" is so amazing

BANG BANG SKEET SKEET

The Detroit Experiment - Think Twice (Henrik Schwarz Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhgpsRSNKjU&feature=related

Henrik Schwarz is one of those rare producers who remains captivating without ever really growing as an artist. It's not that he simply repeats himself - there are artists who've spent their entire career fruitfully ploughing a narrower furrow than Schwarz will regularly explore over the course of one track, and his tracks rarely blur into one another. Rather, it's that everything he does feels like it's part of some constellation of ideas he's been carrying around with him for a good five or six years now: interweaving house, techno, jazz, funk and afrobeat, and always obsessing over how the rendezvous between dance music on the one hand and everything else on the other can seem as organic and unforced and right-feeling as possible. Schwarz tracks can (still) surprise, but less out of a sense of unprecedented newness (in fairness, not a standard we demand of many people in dance music these days), and more simply shock at the perfection of the articulation, and his pretty much unrivaled capacity to weave his favourite elements into still-exciting baroque extravaganzas.

By Schwarz standards, his remix of The Detroit Experiment's house classic "Think Twice" is... if not his most straightforward work, than certainly one of his more literal efforts, spelling out the cunning of his aesthetic in a manner that allows the listener to make sense of his approach generally. The tune opens with a kickdrum and dominating, asymmetrical piano riffs - not from the original track - whose time signature I haven't had sufficient focus to actually determine, quickly joined by slashing two-note cello bass, swelling background strings, tambourine percussion and then finally a loose trumpet solo. At last, it seems, an element from the original tune, except as far as I can tell the trumpet solo in Schwarz's remix is entirely different to The Detroit Experiment's original. Which may be just as well, because the trumpet's wanderings are so well-suited to the insistent, driving piano riff that it's impossible to imagine either existing in isolation from the other.

So much of Henrik's skill goes into not merely blending dance and non-dance motifs, but also thinking about how the latter can mimic and stand in for the former, giving you all the satisfactions of a typical dance record despite his ornate eclecticism. In this regard he is a consummate dance producer even when he's not deploying kick drums and riffs. This is one reason why he's such a great live performer and has made his career out of playing live (to the point of releasing two live albums but no studio albums): his tunes aren't really songful (though they're often built around songs) and they aren't really tracky (though they're often minimalist and repetitive and groove-oriented and focused on production trickery). Rather, they're all about the build, the gradual accumulation of elements like the disparate parts of a puzzle finding one another and fusing together.

On "Think Twice" this means that about three minutes in the trumpet suddenly starts playing along with the descending piano riffs, and shortly afterwards gorgeous tribal percussion arrives, and it's like, "and I thought I was enjoying this before?" Shortly afterwards a dirty synth bassline starts playing along underneath the piano riffs, and then as if some wire has been tripped the track goes insane - more kick drums, hyperactive synth riffs (again mirroring the piano), and the most euphoria-inducing handclaps I've heard this year. Far from the seeming looseness of its beginnings, at this point the track is so tightly wound, so rigidly locked into its groove that it seems as monstrously controlling as any trance record, and all built around that same piano riff whose time signature I still haven't bothered to work out. The trumpet arrives again for another solo, but in a context where the entire track has turned into a peaktime anthem, it's just one more voice in the mix. Only now, when all of this has occurred, does a melody nicked from the original "Think Twice" suddenly emerge out of the swelter.

When I saw Schwarz play live the other night, this was maybe the absolute pinnacle of the evening, and I could swear it went on for twice as long as it does here (in the best possible sense), an intoxicating interweaving of ideas that you could dance to forever because you'd never tire of following their looping lines and curls and knots around each other. Again, this is a microcosm for Schwarz generally: he can continue to coast on these endless iterations of his craft because his tunes are so effortlessly beautiful, so effortlessly anthemic that they achieve a perversely eternal functionalism, as welcome in any context as "Strings of Life" (which, come to think of it, is perhaps a good reference point for this tune). Perverse, because on the surface Schwarz's love of stylistic frippery should seem to doom him to datedness sooner or later. He evades this fate by making trumpets and cellos come on as fundamental building blocks fully as much as 303s and 808s.

thanking u for this

sounding very some dude right now bro xp

― lyrics is weak ... like clock radio similes (deej), Sunday, December 26, 2010 3:53 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

you should've waited for me to post about the drums first

― BIG SANTA aka the sleighdriver (J0rdan S.), Sunday, December 26, 2010 4:57 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

gotta say i love that the shorthand zing about me has become "oh he cares more about the SOUND of things than the identity politics behind the music, how quaint, how precious"

lol -- that was a shorthand zing about you posting about drums. that's really it.

yeah but deej's was more "lol caring about the minutiae of songwriting and vocal performance"

every thread now, guys?

responding to a weeks old zing = nagl

hadn't looked at the thread in a while. wasn't trying to start something, was just joking around.

O_O that henrik schwarz remix is incredible. i need to hear this in a club right now.

yeah, it's astonishing. i guess this is related to the stuff he was doing w/ Bugge Wesseltoft, like that time they played Red Bull Academy/RFH?

yeah - looking at the bio for the detroit experiment itself, it seems to be a collaborative project along similar lines, though far jazzier? i had never heard the original "think twice" either (it's pretty great itself, then the henrik schwarz remix followed and blew my mind)

further to the ramadanman "work them" post upthread, here is kid sister rapping over it and acquitting herself rather well

cant here this at work but is the detroit exp's version a cover or edit of the donald byrd song?