The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Including the first-ever time a cover has made me uncomfortable. You've been warned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06GirlWalk-t.html?_r=3
Last week I pointed to Girlwalk the attempt to make an album-length free dance video. Unbeknownst to me, the New York Times found it a week earlier. Paul Tough is more taken with the dancer than I am, but it's still a cool review.

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Skull_Tape/track/Whip_My_Hair_Drowning_In_BloodWillow_Smith_Cover
I've been holding onto this one for a while. It's a good tune, but it makes me squirm. I realize that - at the core - mash-up is appropriation. It's the taking of something, and use of it in another context. Lots of artists are very much into and encouraging of remixes and mash-ups; others are vehemently opposed. What we have here is an appropriation that makes me twitch. Skull Tape is covering/remixing Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair." Let me put it another way: an adult white man is appropriating the music of a ten-year-old black girl. Can you see why I might get a little skeeved? It's also, frankly, an odd transposition. Black hair, particularly black womens' hair, has a political charge that caucasian hair lacks. Hell, nobody thinks twice about long-haired rockers. Head-bang much? So who cares if a white guy is singing about whipping his hair around?

On the one hand, to be covered is to be a real musician; you don't cover songs by nobodies. On another hand, Willow Smith is not your average child - not even your average child musician. She may be a black girl, but she's no more the typical black girl than Bill Cosby is the typical black middle-aged man. On the Nth hand (I've lost track of hands here) white musicians have been ripping off black artists for, approximately, ever. And frankly, so have black musicians. Dozens of rappers and hip-hoppers got their starts taking riffs or even whole tracks from Motown and funk artists who went uncredited for far too long. None of this makes it any easier to sort out how I feel about this particular track, but maybe writing some of it out will help me, or help you.

http://dorothysurrenders.blogspot.com/2011/03/pitch-imperfect.html
http://vimeo.com/18729177
I'm forever indebted to MizA for pointing me at Dorothy Surrenders, a blog by a lesbian, mostly for people who like looking at pretty women. Her tag line is "Why let the boys have all the fun?" and she's a major pop-culture sponge. Occasionally, though, she dips into serious territory. For example, I got my pointer to Rebecca Drysdale's awesome "It Gets Better" video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTQNwMxqM3E&feature=player_embedded) from Dorothy.

In particular, she shares my serious dislike of the overuse of Autotune both to make mediocre singers sound passable, and most horribly to mangle the output of singers who have actual great voices. My mini-rant about Clare Maguire, for example. Here, Snarker points out something I've tried to show in the videos I link to - if you can catch a live performance of someone you can get a much better idea of what they really sound like. The Vimeo of Jessie J that she links to is raw and damn, that girl can sing. As much as I like modern electronic music, with its digital wizardry, you need talent in there somewhere or you get garbage in, garbage out.

OK, enough with the stuff about music. Here are some things you can just listen to...

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Sub_Swara/track/Speak_My_Language_feat_Dead_Prez
It's been too long since I heard some relatively pure American drum thunder. If you've known me for long enough you'll remember how much I loved Concussion Ensemble. Sub Swara (http://subswara.com/) remind me a little of that, though it has way more electronica and modern influences. No vocals, no pretense at a verse and chorus structure - just serious bass thunder. And then you get some straight-up rap that I'm sure won't be to most of your tastes but that's OK, too.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/03/illegal-sunday-smash-r-u-gonna-be-my-t-v.html
Smash, a UK masher, has taken one of the classic bits of a classic movie (Brad and Janet's first scene with Frank in "Rocky Horror") and put it over the classic rocking of Jet. This one is pure fun.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/03/jamie-woon-lady-luck-the-video.html
Jamie Woon is finally going to put out an album, yay! I wasn't particularly impressed with his previous single but this one is much better. It's got a high snappy energy that makes me think of some of the better male crooners of the 1950s (Daddy-o!) that mixes extremely well with his silky vocals. It's a great contrast/complement to "Night Moves" and makes me think he won't just be a one-hit wonder.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/03/she-wants-revenge-take-the-world.html
She Wants Revenge (http://www.shewantsrevenge.com/) haven't had a new album in over three years, and their dark energy has been sorely missed. This isn't really new music - it's a remix EP - but it's awesome. It's got some of the best elements of goth mixed with electronica and, frankly, raw sexiness. Yum. Now if they'd just get on with making some real new music...

This one is a set of four things different from the usual modern dance/electronica I tend to blog about most often.

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/Dirty_Vegas/track/Electric_Love_Runaway_Remix
If you remember Dirty Vegas (http://myspace.com/dirtyvegas) at all you probably remember them from a track called "Days Go By" from about eight years ago. The song was used in a TV commercial and won a Grammy in 2003. The video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4427678202491591769#) presented a haunting and sad wrapper for the tune. Near as I can tell the group vanished after that. They broke up in 2005 and are back now. This tune, "Electric Love" retains some of the haunted and moody electronic feel that made them famous but with a more subdued and ambient vibe.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/12/jamie-woon-blue-truth.html
Speaking of moody, Jamie Woon (http://www.jamiewoon.com/) had a smash with his Night Air. This follow-up doesn't reach that level but still gives you enough dub bass to feel the slow tempos thrumming through your bones. I didn't like this one as much on first go, but that was probably because I was comparing it too much to Night Air. Taken on its own, it's not a bad track, even if it gets a bit ponderous at times.

http://vimeo.com/17799236
There was a time when rock and roll was four guys who wore suits, and Edwyn Collins (http://www.edwyncollins.com/) gives us an homage to those times with his "Do It Again" which features not only Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy from Franz Ferdinand, but that old guy on the drums? That's Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols! This is a tune that could almost have been lifted directly from the late 50s or early 60s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0PWukxRV8U
I got this one from, of all places, the BBC. They had an interview with Israeli singer Idan Raichel, of the eponymous Idan Raichel Project (http://www.idanraichelproject.com/en). A moody dreadlocked youngster on the surface, his interview went into depth on how he's attempting to blend the various musical influences that he has grown up with - Western classical to Israeli traditional to a massive selection of African influences from places like Ghana and Senegal and Tanzania and of course the Arabic music of Israel's neighbors. The project includes people from many of these communities and their songwriting is a collaboration that would make the U.N. proud. There are a lot of related videos on the YouTube page and if you like this one you can get a good sample of their sounds, though you either need to speak Hebrew or trust the translations to get the lyrics.