Missy Elliot is one of the most futuristic electronic adventurers out there, especially in her collaborations with Timbaland. Yet her stuff is as hot and soulful as music gets. How does she do it?
Continue reading “Put my thang down, flip it and reverse it”
Meet the most fascinating and problematic pop star of the moment, Antoine Dodson.
If you’re a follower of internet memes, you know the story by now. If not: Antoine, his sister Kelly and her daughter were asleep in their apartment in the Lincoln Park housing project in Huntsville, Alabama. An intruder broke in and sexually assaulted Kelly before Antoine chased him off. The family complained to the housing project authorities, who were unmoved. So on July 28, 2010, the Dodsons took their story to the local news. Continue reading “The complicated case of Antoine Dodson”
Two things happened this week in my life as a Michael Jackson fan. First, Spike Lee threw an awesome birthday party for MJ in Prospect Park for the second year in a row. I hope he does it every year. Snoop came and did a set, and so did Warren G. I had a lot of fun.
I’m continuing my tour through hip-hop’s most classic breakbeats with “Ashley’s Roachclip” by the Soul Searchers. The drum break at 3:36 is one of those hip-hop workhorses, like “Impeach The President” and “The Funky Drummer” and “Apache.” It seems like it’s always been there.
The Soul Searchers were led by guitarist Chuck Brown, known in Washington DC music circles as “The Godfather of Go-go.” Go-go is a regional flavor of funk using a heavy swing feel and a lot of happening syncopation in the kick drum pattern. Early in my funk connoisseurship, I would have used the go-go beat as the definition of funk. The beat in “Ashley’s Roachclip” isn’t actually very typical of go-go since it uses straight eighth notes. You can hear a more typical one on Chuck Brown’s official web site.
If I had to pick a single track to explain to an alien or time traveler what hip-hop is and why I love it, I think I’d pick “Nas Is Like.”
Nas has a great flow full of powerful imagery, but what truly sets this track apart for me is DJ Premier’s production. It’s a complex web of samples and scratches that tie together so seamlessly as to be much greater than the sum of their parts. A lot of the samples are from other songs by Nas himself.
Here’s a diagram of all the samples, click to see it bigger:
Here’s a graphic I did for Spork Media explaining how an ideal social media setup for a restaurant. Click through for a detailed explanation. 
Who doesn’t love flowcharts?
In 1988, a pair of British acid house DJs named Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords, or The KLF, had an improbable number one hit with “Doctorin’ The Tardis.”
The track isn’t so much a song as it is an early mashup. Just about everything in it is a sample or quote. Here are the sources:
I follow science news the way normal dudes follow sports. If you’re geekily inclined like me, you may have heard that the particle physics people are getting closer to producing the Higgs boson. You may have wondered what that is exactly, and why you should care. The science press has nicknamed the Higgs “the God particle,” which is poetic but doesn’t move me any closer to understanding. Here’s my best effort to wrap my head around the idea — maybe you’ll find it helpful, or at least entertaining. If you’re a real scientist and want to clarify or correct anything I’m saying here, please jump in on the comments.
There’s a commercial on TV right now featuring a bunch of CGI hamsters that reacquainted me with this Black Sheep classic. I knew the song better as the one that goes, “You can get with this or you can get with that.” Thank god for Google, otherwise I wouldn’t know anything about anything.
This is exactly the kind of golden age hip-hop song I love, a party-friendly beat and lyrics delivered with enough pissed off attitude to give it some bite. Dres and Mista Lawnge, I salute you.
I’m pretty sure that “Need You Tonight” by INXS was the last song I fell in love with through commercial radio. I would never have admitted it, and I couldn’t have articulated why, but oh yes, in middle school this track hit me exactly where I lived. It still sounds as fresh today as it did back in the eighties.
I resisted liking the song because of what I imagined it representing. I mean, watch this video with the sound off, these guys look like incredible douchebags. As a teenager I was very invested in the idea of purity in music, and INXS was the exact opposite of pure. The band was and is a capitalist venture above all else. I hadn’t yet learned that commercial music can be incredibly good, and that pure artistry is no guarantee against awfulness.
