D'Angelo - Black Messiah (2014)

I suppose I'm in that teeny tiny minority that cherishes Xgau reviews even when I'm in full disagreement with him, which I'm not in this case.

yeah even after 14 years there are stretches of voodoo that i always love listening to but that i can't strictly recall how they go ever. after a month with black messiah that's not the case at all

i'm with lex on this

If anything's gonna make my 2015 it'll be "Prayer."

"Babies Making Babies" is post-murk Sly. I prefer Fresh to TARGO myself.

Me too, though I grew up with the European CD mix of Fresh, which feels a little murkier than the original mix.

I love the vocals on this album, though, these infinitely multi-tracked clusters of vocal fragments that sound like gossamer. Like sometimes they're so diffuse they're barely there (but still definitely there), and sometimes they blossom so strong, like on Another Life, which is currently my favourite song. I've been listening to the album a lot in my car over the break, and I keep looking up to the stereo on the dashboard to see what track is currently playing, because they're mostly still numbers and not titles to me, and for me that's a good sign - that with regular play individiual songs are slowly revealing themselves from the greater whole.

Sasha Frere-Jones

lex otm upthread

all of these new songs have very distinct vocal bits/melodies/arrangements that are sticking with me

sfj seems pretty otm
basically still playing this on a daily basis
playing it now

pre-ordered the vinyl, right now it's 17.99 on sale at amazon, scheduled for feb 10

ooooh full live set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34S8mat51KQ&feature=youtu.be

(duo)

wait nevermind, not duo!

I suppose I'm in that teeny tiny minority that cherishes Xgau reviews even when I'm in full disagreement with him, which I'm not in this case.

― RAP GAME SHANI DAVIS (Raymond Cummings), Saturday, January 3, 2015 2:33 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^

Who is his bassist? I assume Pino is booked up with the Who.

dude from the Roots

the mad swing in the drums on ain't that easy, ain't that easy

highlights from that Afropunk set:

-theremin solo

-the way they play the unison lick in the middle of the solo on 'She's Always in My Hair', haha

What happened to the white dude who played bass in the Roots?

Wait, was he a white dude? I could have sworn. So many former Roots.

solo career apparently?
http://www.okayplayer.com/news/mark-kelley-joins-the-roots-farewell-to-owen-biddle.html

that's Angelo Moore on theremin!

wtf?!

!

opening w Miss Lucifer's Love awww

not a song here stands as tall as “Family Affair,” “Just Like a Baby,” or “You Caught Me Smilin’.”

maybe... sure... but this is the point where i want to say "you've had 45 years to listen to 'there's a riot goin' on' and less than a month to listen to this one."

Digression - SFJ concludes his review by talking about the "unsettling lack of response" from musicians to Ferguson and Garner. I've seen this claim elsewhere but I've found a bunch of tweets and songs by big names over the past couple of months. I don't get this claim that rappers have been silent.

there's a black hole of politically conscious/interested musicians in the last 10 years. More proof everything has got more corporate, more control, less thinking.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic

Ratuki is living proof of the less thinking bit so... he must be right.

music critics voicing their political concerns by asking why more musicians aren't voicing their political concerns always seems like an echo chamber of concern trolling irrelevance to me

Go on then Swift fans, name me 5, no, 3, obviously politically or socially conscious rappers out in the last 10 years. Just 3. Then in rnb, Then name me 3 popular artists in any genre.

I'm rooting for you.

They're not allowed through, or not popular anymore. People want to hear that shit less and less. They just want weed songs. In the 80s 90s rap music was defined by it's socially conscious artist. KRS, NWA, P.E, Mos, Talib, Wu, Kast, Pac, Roots, Nas. They just don't exist anymore.

"NWA, Wu, Kast, Pac, Nas"

if these are socially concious (not saying they aren't) then Boosie certainly is.

david banner, killer mike...

son, boosie came out 98 lol. Putting Boosie general lyrics content in with Kast Wu and Nas is just funny though. "if they are..." :D

got 99 problems but a tanuki ain't one

since when was dangelo a rapper?

first 4 tracks on b.m got well over a million plays so far on Spotify, the rest hovering around just under a million. I'm guessing that's quite good.

xp I don't know about concern trolling - I'm sure the concern is genuine - but is strikes me that if you want rappers to step up then you should recognise those that do (eg Killer Mike, Kendrick, J Cole, The Game, TI) rather than ignoring them and perpetuating the myth that there's no politics in hip hop anymore.

I think its pretty fair to say somebody is concern trolling if they make the complaint whilst ignoring the rappers you mention.

Just search 'Mike Brown tribute' on youtube.

it feels like this very overworn trope, that pop music right now is apolitical in a way it never used to be, is one of the worst iterations of the old-ppl moan of "it was all better in my day". no one who makes that complaint is ever actually interested in current political music or, usually, current music at all

(SFJ using it is baffling because surely he KNOWS it's not true)

lex OTM. I feel that some people want to believe there's no politics in music anymore, as if that would prove something about young people today, so they ignore what's out there. I had someone moaning about this to me on Twitter yesterday and their example of a representatively apolitical modern band was One Direction.

Of course the Bay City Rollers were famed as Scotland's answer to the MC5.

i think this convo needs to include modern conscious soul/R&B artists rather than rappers but anyway, people have been complaining that rap isnt political enough as long as ive been into it (they said this in the 90s that it wasnt political enough like it was in the late 80s.. im sure in the 80s they said it wasnt as political as back when stevie and marvin gaye were making their great albums, etc etc)

i guess it's partly the old-person narrowing of their cultural sphere so that they can literally only name a handful of young artists, and those artists get held up as encapsulating an entire generation, but it's still embarrassing to see. but people who say that are less interested in political music and more about shoring up their generation's qualities. a few years ago someone was moaning at length about how no young artists were addressing the economic crisis, i linked him to the first pistol annies album, and he wasn't remotely interested in it.

also these moaning types tend to be the sort who refuse to acknowledge music as political unless it beats them over the head with it RATM style

It's why I tend to use the phrase "explicitly political" because once you start claiming that any music is devoid of politics you're in a tangle.