This video for Cee Lo’s new song arrived in my inbox via an email from an address labelled “FU”, which makes far more sense when you listen to the song. You should do this at high volume, but possibly using headphones as it contains, and indeed revolves around, mouth naughties.
It’s pretty bladdy brilliant, and continues Ceelo’s ability to marry infectious, upbeat soul stylings with utter lyrical misery. On this occasion however, with his Xbox/Atari metaphors, it’s hard to take him too seriously. Listen once and be hooked.
I’d never had the stomach for R&B until the mid-90s. I couldn’t be doing with all that “ooh baby” nonsense, see. But as my taste matured (that is, extended beyond Oasis), American R&B suddenly became something very different to the syrupy nonsense churned out since the heyday of New Jack (and Jill) Swing.
While it seems ridiculous to be getting all nostalgic about an era that only really ended four or five years ago, it’s worth revisiting what any right-thinking fan genuinely believes was a golden age for pop music.
Timbaland, Missy Elliott, The Neptunes, Dr Dre and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, among other producers, suddenly seemed to be in monthly battles to see who could create the snappiest, poppingest, hookiest snatch of “urban” music to hit daytime radio. Who won? Well, can you guess, readers? ‘TWAS US, DA LISNUZ.
Not that Hype Williams, silly chops. Everysod who’s seen a music videogram knows who he be.
This Hype Williams are a duo, from what I’ve been able to glean from infinitely moreup to dateberks than I. They’re spearheading a new movement known as Mongfug*, which is all about slightly queasy Jam-style disquiet putting the creeps up otherwise quite accessible little emissions.
They were part of the The Guardian/SoundCloud thing yesterday, which was designed either to “turn you on” to good new music or “make you feel” “hopelessly” “out of” “touch”.
Now, before you go hoping for anything nostril-shittingly original, you should know this number - called “The Throning” - samplifies Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo” (I wonder what Glamma Kid‘s up to now?). But Hype Williams change it from - well, you know what Sade’s about (notwithstanding recent rebranding efforts) - into something a bit more like… sweet aural influenza?
Since I moved flat, my new Brazilian/Portugesian neighbours have been a regular source of - how shall I put this - “vibrancy”. Mainly this entails the kind of screaming matches, door-slamming and apparent furniture-throwing that has me pondering my moral duty.
Luckily my morals often tend to lose out to my sense of Not Wanting Any Trouble-ness - you might recognise it as cowardice - and so I haven’t called any authorities yet.
The other notable thing about the neighbs is that one or other or both of them appears to be obsessed with Tupac.
Somewhere there are some Findus Crispy Pancakes burning their arses off - and it’s all because Mum’s too busy teaching the kids how to “make it look like hip-hop” while wearing a goalkeeper’s jersey. MUUUU-UUUUM!
I don’t think the i-Jammer - or indeed the E-Bumper - is available in the UK yet. But I will jam the jizzle of anyone who tries to beat me to the front of the queue when they go on sale.
Fans of The Apples In Stereo’s earlier garage-jangle pop masterpieces (e.bloody.g., “Seems So”) might not have imagined there would ever be a sun-snogged patch of ELO’s picnic area where the band could be seen flinging a frisbee around and sipping cold ones with The Feeling.
But such is the vision their more recent stuff brings to mind, thanks to a 70s sensibility which, thankfully, does nothing to diminish the melodies which main chap Robert Schneider apparently produces more easily than you do saliva.
New album Travellers In Space And Time beams down several such tunelets. Get your listening tackle round “Told You Once”, f’rinstance:
The bonniest tune you’ve heard about nabbing someone’s girlfriend in a while, I’ll wager. While there will be lots of folk who have never hoid the thing, there will be many others who recognise it from a computer-based music simulation experience called Rock Band.
There’s something tantalizingly confusing in hearing music that doesn’t appear to belong to any recognised genre, and I found myself experiencing such beweirderment listening to Lorn‘s album Nothing Else.
Lorn probably won’t appear on a summer mixtape anytime soon. His oeuvre contains elements of dubstep, electronica and the kind of seductively woozy instrumental nausea Ratatat tend to favour. I don’t know how or where you’d dance to it, aside from performing some kind of lobotomised swaying in a very dark, very claustrophobic cave.
He employs the kind of basslines that people on SoundCloud tend to comment on with missives of the “SICK!”, or “HEAVEEE!” or “I JUST PUKED UP ALL MY KETAMINE AND IT FEELS LUSH” variety. Which is not to say he doesn’t have his accessible moments - “Cherry Moon”, embedded below, wouldn’t sound out of place over the credits of a Michael Mann “flick”.
So what it is, yeah, is I moved flat, yeah, and lost internet, yeah, and then when I got internet back the server broke, yeah, and then my laptop broke, yeah, and then the one I got to replace it broke, yeah, and then the World Cup was on, yeah…
But now all these things are out of the way, and all I have to worry about are the disasters yet to come. Marvluss.
So if you’re one of the three people who read this thing on a semi-regular basis, hello, back now.
To celebremate, let’s enjoy a spot of Aloe Blacc. This song is called “I Need A Dollar”*, it soundtracks some TV show or other in “the States”, and if you don’t like its hard-luck-uplifty charm you deserve to have your ears confiscated by whoever it is who’s in charge of doing that.
*There’s a chance erryone on the globe has loved and got bored of this song already, but I wouldnae ken because I’ve been “out of the loop” of late. Anyway, if you come here looking for the very latest “leaks” yooz kind of in the wrong yard. Lovely to see you, though.
Posted by
admin on
Tuesday July 13th, 2010 at
8:14 pm
There are plenty of World Cup albums and playlists knocking about, all with the same old nonsense with which you get bombarded every four years. I like a bit of “Vindaloo” as much as the next psychopath, but there are other countries, cultures and musics out there worth sampling before that unavoidable moment when you start necking the fizzy violence juice and screaming at foreigns on TV.
So I made an unnecessarily lengthy playlist that would serve the hellishly noble purpose of supplying listeners with music they probably haven’t heard before, but which they might (hopefully) actually enjoy listening to. It has little if anything to do with football (one New Order track notwithstanding), and has music from every nation playing at the World Cup Finals in South Africa in 2010.
Er, the North Korean one’s right at the end. Never mind human rights, those guys are playing catch-up big time when it comes to choonz.
From South Africa’s version of electro – kwaito – to Swiss art-pop, to Greek hip-hop, to Ivorian soul, to Slovenian trance… Oh dear. I’m not doing a very good job of selling this, am I? But look, I’ve listened to all of these tracks, and think they each have something to recommend them beyond Eurovision-style LOLZ. So I hope you will too.
