A classic Timbo and Nas track to set off your week right..
Nas f/ Timbaland & Skillz, "To My"
Where's Waldo, hipster edition
Since 2005, the French home of acts like Digitalism and Hot Chip, Kitsune Maison, has been dropping the dopest electronic music compilations you can find anywhere. Kitsune Maison Vol. 6 isn't just the best of the series, but it's also the first available on iTunes so you don't have to pay some Frenchman a couple stacks to ship you that fiya.
Lo Fi Fink "Want U"
Pnau "With You Forever"
Beni "My Love Sees You"
Okayy, I'm Reloaded!!It's 1998. Monica Lewinksy has the most famous head game in history. Metal Gear Solid is the hottest shit on the block. And the King of New York is gone.When Biggie died in late '97, it was hard to imagine anyone taking his spot. But Jay didn't just pick up where BIG left off, he took it to a level nobody could have imagined. In less than a decade, he went from hustler to international CEO, from rapping to running the rap game and the most famous record label in its history. And as dope as Reasonable Doubt is, it all started with 'In My Lifetime Vol. 1', Jay's first album after Biggie's death, and the most slept on album in his career.Vol. 1 made Jay into the rapper that took over the world. It was the album that established his mainstream, commercial style- a complete 180 from the underground sound of Reasonable Doubt.
"City is Mine"
Michael Rapaport cameo!!"A Million And One"
"Streets is Watching"
"Sunshine"
"Friend or Foe '98"
Unbelievable acting in this video's intro..."Yo we got a problem. They back. Yeah, them cats is back yo!"
Scarface is one of the best to ever do it. Whether with the Geto Boys or solo, he's put out some of the most consistently dope music not just from the south but anywhere.
Face just dropped his retirement album, Emeritus, and it's as good as anything he's put out in a long time. Cop that disc, because if there's one thing you can count on in today's world, its rappers keeping their word about future career plans.
Scarface, "High Note" (Explicit)
"My Block"
"Girl U Know"
and a classic...
"Mind Playin Tricks '94"
The best "Love Lockdown" remix you didn't hear.
Dave Edwards, "Love Lockdown" Remix:
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The Science of Music...
For the past 8 months or so, unless you've been living under a rock, you've been hearing a song on pretty much constant loop about some girl on girl action. Whether or not Katy Perry actually kissed said girl and liked it, I do not pretend to know. But I do know why the song grew on you, why you probably didn't like it at first but later spent a dollar on iTunes just to hear it when you wanted, and why every time you're in the club you actually expect girls to start going at it when the song drops. It's the science of music.
If you take a close listen to "I Kissed A Girl," you'll notice something sounds very different about it than other pop songs from the past 5 years or so. It's the drumbeat. When Timbaland made his comeback in 2006 with the slew of hits he had for Nelly Furtado, JT, and others, he brought four on the floor back to pop and hip-hop. Four on the floor is where every beat has a kick- you've heard it a million times before in almost all dance/house/trance music, and more recently in Timbaland's "Way I Are"- try counting 1-2-3-4 to any of these songs and you'll hear the repetitive, thumping kick every beat.
Four on the floor is great, but it gets tiresome after a while, as does any music predicated around glowsticks and Ibiza. Pretty soon after Timbo brought it back, every producer and his mom was making beats with the same 4/4 drums. So Katy Perry's producer did something different. He gave her track what you can call a 12/8 beat. The terminology isn't important, so don't let it confuse you. All it means is that Katy Perry's track has a certain triplet timing to it- if you count the beats, instead of going 1-2-3-4, they make you want to count "a-trip-ah-let" for each beat. There's a rolling feel to the beat that makes it extremely catchy. One of the tricks to successful music is that it doesn't let the listener get bored. But really successful music walks a very thin line- it's new and catchy, but it stays within the range of what people know from previous music they've heard and isn't too far out there. Dr. Luke, who produced the track for Perry, knows this very well.
As you might have noticed, the music industry is based upon one business principle: ride it 'til the wheels fall off. When someone finds a formula that works, it is copied by anyone and everyone. That's why after Katy Perry exploded on the charts, a whole bunch of new songs had a very similar drumbeat. Christina Aguilera's "Keeps Gettin' Better," Pink's "So What," and most recently, Britney Spears' "Womanizer" all have a derivative of Perry's 12/8 hit. And you'll be hearing a lot more of it until your boy drops something brand new in the 09.
It's the coolest part of my job, and why I think record producing is one of the most powerful jobs you can have. A skilled producer can make you want to dance, want to cry, or just throw a 'bo in the club. It may just seem like a hot track to you, but somewhere in a studio at 5AM a year earlier, a record producer made you feel that way before you even knew it.
"I Kissed a Girl"
"So What"
"Womanizer"
Producers, listen up...
Being a long time user of Apple's Logic Pro for producing, I never thought I'd be writing this in a blog post. Digidesign was the evil empire, the company who made you buy a bogus audio interface you didn't need or want just to use Pro Tools to painstakingly correct all the places where your vocalist messed up on her 183rd take.
They may still be the evil empire of the audio world, as you still need an Mbox or better just to touch Pro Tools. But if Pro Tools was a hell of a drug, as Jay said, PT8 looks like mainline crack, acid, and xanax all at once. They finally got their MIDI together, and they've followed Apple's lead in giving us producers thousands of royalty-free loops to put in our sequencer and then sell to superstars for 90k a track. All I know is if you're gonna drop 300 on a (m)box, it might as well be one that lets you make Love in The Club...
First post!!!
The Ray-Ban and tophat game is real serious!!
As great as Dr.Dre and them are, and as much as I'll talk about them in later posts, it's only fitting for my first blog post that we look instead at two producers who most people have never heard of, but who changed the game for everyone: Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. If you've ever wondered how Janet Jackson became such a cultural icon in the 80's and early 90's, they are your answer. And if you've ever wondered who aside from Teddy Riley was instrumental in creating the sound of late 80's Pop/R&B, which gave birth to the careers of Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and many others, it's them. On top of it all they made rocking Ray Bans and 2 piece suits to the studio hot before your favorite producer ever touched a keyboard.
Like all great producers past and present, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis created a new sound from tools everyone had but hadn't used right. They blended samples with industrial sound effects, triplet hi hats with new jack swing, and had the dopest vocal production in the 80's, period.
If you've never listened to Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation', do yourself a favor and peep the links below. They'll take you straight back to '88 when George Bush was prez, the Giants won the Super Bowl, and the stock market was tanking. Some things don't change, and classic music never does.
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