There’s a tendency for classical music aficionados to assume that composers are always and only themselves: Beethoven always Beethoven, Brahms always Brahms, Ives always Ives. The reality is that those composers, like all worthwhile artists, have gone through a more or less extended journey to escape from their models and to find a voice, to discover who they are. Part of the process of discovering who you are is finding why you are: What you want to say, why you’re an artist in the first place.
Based in Chicago, Sound Opinions is hosted by Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, two of the finest and best-recognized pop music writers in the nation. In addition, they are the top music critics and dedicated competitors at Chicago’s two daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times (Jim) and the Chicago Tribune (Greg).
Every week, Sound Opinions fires up smart and spirited discussions about a wide range of popular music, from cutting-edge underground rock and hip-hop, to classic rock, R&B, electronica, worldbeat, or just about any other genre you can name.
Jim and Greg save you the time of that pesky listening process, by boiling down their reviews to three easy to use phrases: Buy It!, Burn It! or Trash It!.
Best album I heard for the first time this year:Donny Hathaway Live (thanks Matt!)
Best 2008 Release: Randy Newman, “Hearts and Angels” (which makes me feel old) and/or Girl Talk, “Feed the Animals”. The new Beck album is growing on me and Erykah Badu’s “New Amerykah” is really soulful and smart.
Biggest 2008 Disappointment: Herbie Hancock’s “Joni Letters”. Get back in the game Herbie.
I think I like: Deerhunter’s new one. But I can do without the experimental electronic nonsense.
Best live show: Okkerville River at Postbanhof am Ostbanhoh (Berlin)
Not since the advent of swing jazz in the 1930s has an American music exploded across the world with such overwhelming force. Not since the Beatles invaded America and Elvis packed up his blue suede shoes has a music crashed against the world with such outrage. This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has ripped popular music from its moorings in every society it has permeated. In Brazil, rap rivals samba in popularity. In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall. In France it has been blamed, unfairly, for the worst civil unrest that country has seen in decades.
Its structure is unique, complex, and at times bewildering. Whatever music it eats becomes part of its vocabulary, and as the commercial world falls into place behind it to gobble up the powerful slop in its wake, it metamorphoses into the Next Big Thing. It is a music that defies definition, yet defines our collective societies in immeasurable ways. To many of my generation, despite all attempts to exploit it, belittle it, numb it, classify it, and analyze it, hip-hop remains an enigma, a clarion call, a cry of “I am” from the youth of the world. We’d be wise, I suppose, to start paying attention.
In the 22 October 2007 edition of “The New Yorker”, Sasha Frere-Jones offers some perspective on the failure of modern music. Read A Paler Shade of White and please post a comment using the link below.
The band was formed by two former members of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention: songwriter and guitarist Lowell George, who also provided vocals and slide guitar and Roy Estrada on bass guitar. The name of the band came from a comment made by Mothers’ drummer Jimmy Carl Black about the diminutive size of Lowell’s feet.
There are two legends about the genesis of Little Feat. One has it that George showed Frank Zappa his song Willin, and that Zappa fired him from The Mothers, because he felt that George was too talented to merely be a member of his band, and told him he ought to go away and form his own. The second version says that Zappa fired him because Willin contains drug references (“weed, whites and wine”).
I got turned on to these cats in high school by cat with whom I worked out at Odyssey Fitness in BG. If nothing else, find a copy of Waiting for Columbus and dig in as it might be the best live rock and roll album ever recorded.
I hadn’t listened to them in a while but rekindled my appreciation as a result of an interaction with the father of one of my students. Thus, I present a Little Feat video.
Erika, Ben, Kili, Bart and I saw young smokin’ Blue Note piano cat Robert Glasper in Plaza Reial last night (his drummer Damion Reid is simply ridiculous…find every album this guy plays on and buy it) Read about Glasper here
Beck is something of a musical chameleon — he’s been called a cracked folkie, a hip-hop joker, a sonic innovator, even a pop star. His latest CD, The Information, finds him in all these guises, and more.The 15-song collection is his most difficult descent into narcotic funk and psychedelic rock. And it may well be a classic.