I have to admit some hypocrisy: I can’t stand Neil Young’s voice, but I hate when people complain about Bob’s voice, and I despise when people complain about Conor Oberst’s voice. This having been said, you’d have to be crazy not to admit that there’s a certain nasal quality there. I think it’s a matter of whether you find it interesting or not.
For example, the next installation, “Bach to the Future,” will take an in-depth look at classical music and why it’s worthwhile listening to in the twenty-first century.
Mumford & Sons are, of course, known to the public as an immensely popular, Bible-thumping, British rock band, gone native in America. But there’s more to it than that: they’re actually the most visible representative of a thriving folk revival scene spanning two continents, headed up by artists like Dawes in America, Basia Bulat in Canada, and Johnny Flynn in the UK. Recently the band has curated its spectacular Gentlemen of the Road festivals featuring these and other artists.
Not that there’s anything at all wrong with Fall Out Boy. Their 2003 album Take This To Your Grave is, literally, one of the best albums ever recorded. This having been said, their bassist, Pete Wentz, is infantile and just reeks of celebrity. Naturally, they appeal to teeny boppers of all stripes. More on this band when I write about emo.
These are not empty words. In 2003, I was pretty active on the Rolling Stone forums under the handle CASH_WAS_A_GREAT_MAN. Yes, that was back before you could use dots in usernames. Yes, Johnny Cash had just died. And boy, was I a noob.
At the time, I thought Bruce Springsteen was shitty (witness the extent of my noobery). And I flamed Boss fans on the regular. One day, after asserting that The White Stripes' De Stijl was a better folk album than Nebraska (it is excellent, but neither a folk album, nor is it particularly better than Nebraska), I was flamed into oblivion.
But, I might point out, I also had a quote featured on the front page of the site, that “The White Stripes will be synonymous with the 2000s as The Who are with the ‘60s.” I stand by that comment, and had it not been for that, I might have given up on trolling people altogether. Pffft.
I still get flamed on RG, especially by people who resent the way that I rack up astronomical amounts of IQ on certain albums by accepting and integrating 90% of the comments, as if this were a) easy or b) something unavailable for them to do if they wanted to.
Haters gon' hate.
Bob Marley (1945-1981) is a name you already know: the father of reggae (and of 4:20). His 1976 album Exodus was a major gear-shift for world music and rock music, introducing millions of new listeners to concepts they’d never been acquainted with before: Rastafarian takes on Judeo-Christian concepts like God, the messiah, and, of course, the exodus from Egypt, which had previously been used to express ideas about freedom from slavery by the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr.
For Rastafarians, who find their messiah in a contemporary political figure, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I (1930-1974), spirituality is necessarily political. Marley’s politics found their clearest, most game-changing expression on Exodus.
If you don’t wanna be a noob, then don’t make the mistake of hearing “dubstep” and thinking “Skrillex.” There’s nothing wrong with Skrillex, but most of his music is, technically, electro-house. Furthermore, dubstep has its roots in very old Jamaican music styles like ska and dub reggae, and came into its own in late-‘90s England. Dubstep doesn’t need to have obnoxious wobbles; most true dubstep is defined by deep, rich bass.
Since “EDM” is “electronic dance music,” then “post-dubstep UK EDM” would be recent British electronic dance music with an emphasis on deep bass. A great example would be SBTRKT, whose vocalist, Sampha, recently got Drake’s attention and featured on a song on Nothing Was The Same.
The Velvet Underground, who in their best incarnation were active from 1964 to 1973 and came out of the same harsh cultural climate that The Last Poets did, were the fathers of indie rock. Their phenomenal 1967 debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico, was ostensibly produced by Andy Warhol, and featured the brilliant, dark lyrics of frontman Lou Reed, who died last month. Reed was the first major artist in rock to deal with subjects like drug use, S&M, and prostitution: in other words, laying the groundwork for the grittiness of hip-hop, too.
Don’t take my word for it: A Tribe Called Quest’s seminal single “Can I Kick It”? features a prominent sample of Reed’s solo jam “Walk on the Wild Side.”
This is a name all rap listeners should know. Clive Campbell, a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc (born 1955), was a Jamaican-born NYC DJ who invented the breakbeat, isolating the instrumental portion of hard soul records by artists like James Brown in order to focus on the beat, and using a fader to switch between two synched-up tracks: in essence, the hip-hop instrumental traces back to Herc. To call him the father of hip-hop is not an exaggeration.
An important distinction: whereas the genesis of the hip-hop instrumental dates back to Herc and NYC, the origins of MCing are far more diverse and go back farther, to styles of Caribbean, Trinidadian, and Jamaican music like dub poetry and and extempo calypso. The first artist that we might consider “hip-hop” were The Last Poets, formed in NYC (where else?) in the late 1960s. More on them when I do a volume on hip-hop.
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