listen to something now

CrowleyHead said:

I'm gonna respond to all the dancehall tomorrow but I'm hurt Barty didn't take up the challenge either.

;_;

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this one?

first thing i get is a vague sense of nostalgia (in the larger cultural sense rather than a personal one). that's from the chord progression.

those quick filtered bits nab like the barbs on barbed wire. they nick the skin.

the 2step drums come in which is then a more personal nostalgia trigger, being little in the late 90's.

the vocal melody; this whole song feels constructed on these intangible nostalgia triggers. all memories not significant enough to remember distinctly are being evoked. the guitar, the sax; i've heard them all before, but can't clearly remember where.

feels like a school disco.

something very satisfying about the rap over the drums. feels slick. makes me head tick tock left and right.

that girls aloud guitar adds to the nicking feeling.

the drums drop out during the middle 8; there was a tension in my body that just dropped out of me. a heavy weight falling to the floor.

the weird vocal science bit; a girl looking like a digitally constructed blueprint. a face made out of a neon grid. physiologically feels like gasping for air.

it's over.

thirdform:

luka

Lukazade fancy giving this a go?

CrowleyHead said:

I'm gonna respond to all the dancehall tomorrow but I'm hurt Barty didn't take up the challenge either.

;_;

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"we were on a break"

thirdform said:

empress?

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Um... well.

0:00- Those plucks sound like fish on the deck of a boat flapping about on a deck of a boat.

0:50- That bass bit sounds like driving through a tunnel late at night. Like the reflection of lights gliding over the windscreen one after the other.

1:15- I could imagine a wicked witch cackling like that maniacally in a children's cartoon.

3:23- It's very suspenseful. It feels like when you're ascending up a rollercoaster slowly and there's a knot in your stomach just waiting for it to drop.

version?

luka

luka said:

SI DO THIS ONE

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it sounds so long long ago

the chirpy backing, the nursery rhyming - impossibly antiquated, like listening to "Whole Lotta Shakin'" or "Tutti Frutti" in 1979, the year of "Transmission" or "Damaged Goods"

the amiable vibe

the feel of it does make you think of love handles wobbling and shimmying cellulite but i don't if that's just triggered by the name of the group and the sight of them

it's not the kind of rap that really engaged me when rap first engaged me - that was more things like Schoolly D or LL Cool J - more tyrannical and stripped-down sounding

i do like that human beatbox bit though

padraig (u.s.) said:

2 for blissblogger, one nuum

one early glamtinuum rock out

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the first one isn't displaying for some reason

this is the pre-Bowie Mott, about which four albums I say in the book "there is no earthly reason why anyone today would listen to Brain Capers etc"

they had a reputation as a smokin' live band, but judging by that clip, you really had to be there, in the thick of the, er, hot jam.

thought it might be the muddy live sound, but the recorded version is just as much of a brown slurry

there's others that do that sort of boogie hard-rock raunch'n'roll thing better - Free for starters, James Gang, Guess Who, Steppenwolf

i suppose it's a good riff - and it does blaze out nicely in the home stretch

still, overall, a group 300 percent improved by the Bowie touch

i wish you had picked "Violence", on the album after the one that Bowie actually produced, but by which point Hunter had assimilated Bowie-ism - starker production, shorter songs, arrangement cleverness, a bit of camp to the singing etc

big knob blissblog:


more generally we need a comprehensive explanation of your attitude to canonical 90's rap. your opinion is in such stark contrast to the rest of humanity that it warrants detailed examination.

CrowleyHead said:

I'm gonna respond to all the dancehall tomorrow

;_;

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it's crowley's lunch all over again.

I, Blasphemer

sadmanbarty said:

big knob blissblog:


more generally we need a comprehensive explanation of your attitude to canonical 90's rap. your opinion is in such stark contrast to the rest of humanity that it warrants detailed examination.

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ah that's funny because a few weeks ago - i think there was a thread discussing that era on here, and i was also starting to read that Will Ashon book on the Wu Tang debut album - i pulled together a Spotify playlist called something like Nineties Rap Highly Rated that I Never Quite Got Into

so it was all the Mobb Deep stuff, and Nas, and I don't know what else - Black Moon, Notorious BIG, Gang Starr, Quest, Pharcyde, Pete Rock, EPMD,

however I only got so far into playing the list (it was like 732 songs long) before I had to turn it off

inspired by the Ashon book I specifically listened to Enter the Wu-Tang for the first time in an eon, and in all honesty, it just sounded a bit... tatty. i did really like some of the later Wu offshoot bits but overall felt that the RZA thing of a cool beat plus a moody sample, cycling over and over and over again, to be a little bit of a formula and a limited one. i mean, it's designed as a backdrop for the MCs so in that sense it functions - it's a heroic mise-en-scene - doomy, tense, baleful, whatever - for the sagas they relate - if the music was more interesting and active, then it would detract from the words and the flows and the personalities... in a sense, it couldn't be as changeful or fractured or attention-grabbing as what the junglists were doing, given that they were freed up by doing near-instrumental music

i can't really hear this East Coast hardcore stuff differently from I how I heard that kind of thing at the time

with that Mobb Deep tune, as I'm listening I'm thinking "so you really are just going to run that breakbeat in a loop all the way through?"

i mean, it does snap nicely, with tasty bit of reverb around the snare crack, but...

if you heard things like that at the same time as you were hearing "Terminator" / Enforcers 3 and 4 / Omni / DJ Hype etc, and then followed through into the Droppin Science 12 inches, Paralllel Universe, Roni Size, "Dred Bass" etc, everything in that 92-95 moment... it can't help but sound really plodding.

even the use of the sample (again, nice choice - tasty, vibey) is linear and pedestrian compared to what was going on with a certain hip hop descended mutant in the UK at exactly the same time

i would compare that track to something like this


i'm not even sure that's the killer-est mix of the tune, but WOW! streets ahead of US rap on the beats and sonix and atmosphere level. and they're not even a major figure or force within jungle.

you should bear in mind (in re. Nas's or Prodigy's or Method Man's stature as street poets) that A/ relative to other rock critics, i'm much less interested in lyrics and B/ in mid-90s i was at my absolute least interested in lyrics EVER. so all of that bypassed me really.

i'll tell you who i did like in rap through that period - Cypress Hill, those first two albums ... the Dre and Snoop stuff... early OutKast... Onyx really just for one single.. a few others i'm probably blanking on... those Naughty By Nature hits...

in all honesty i would rather listen to "Jump Around" than any of the hardcore East Coast groups

of course i did also really love and revere Tricky, for the music and for the lyrics in equal measure - and the personality of Tricky himself, which seemed really aberrant, the cross-dressing, the fact that his roots were in postpunk and artpop as much as reggae and hip hop... a Goldie figure in some ways

but with Maxinquaye especially you had the melody element with Martina, the more interesting sampladelic weave of textures than any of those rap producers in the US i think

and then there's a whole UK culture/politics/'narcotic generation' aspect to it that was very compelling to me

So Tricky was my Nas, maybe

(another thing to bear in mind - although living in the States much of that time - i was very very much on a patriotic "Britain is running tings" trip at that time - i really did think that on multiple fronts the UK was smashing the competition - jungle, trip hop, the early post-rock, the early IDM type things - and specifically racing way ahead of the USA.

i was saying to luke the other week that i felt that you had two proverbial 'hats' you wore as a listener; the rock one and the dance one. the only rap you champion, you do so through a dance lens (or even a rock lens every now and then). tricky, timbaland, schooly d, migos... is that fair?

can you get into this by way of todd edwards?

sadmanbarty said:

it's crowley's lunch all over again.

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I HAD WORK BARTI.

The Capleton is honestly my first time with him in a while. Was never a big one for me and my friends (youngstage millenials, Vybz was the peak of humanity etc. etc. and our Dancehall knowledge was affected by whatever crossed over to Hot 97). Honestly would've presumed Luka would've been the one who'd have recommended this because he has a thing about Deep Masculine voices as do a lot of this site at times. Heard the riddim in a mix Eden actually made not too long ago and it has a nice switch between the bass throb and the flangey sort of sample that feels like ringing and the edges of bowls or something. Which works great because then you have Capleton's raspy smoked out bark dead in the center.

Ironically, the Aidonia is a heck of a lot more Kartelish than I expect with him. It's got that sort of... carnival, carousel sound to it in contrast? It's a trot, and Aidonia's bellowing and post-Kartel noises of excess kind of help make the sexual antics sound exactly as playful. That's the thing that a lot of dancehall does that works great, making sex not feel like it's slick but also a bit stupid and foolish, in a cute way. It's funny, I can't think of an adorable masculine energy in a lot of things outside of dancehall that doesn't end up getting inherently viewed as either teenage or gay.

Both are good as well so