The Gay/Not Gay/Definitely Gay Lyrics of George Michael

Dear America of 1985: This man is NOT gay. Not at all. Pay no attention to the multitude of clues you are being bombarded with. This guy wants nothing more than to sell records and sleep with chicks. Love, Sony Records.


[*author's note: Props to Jphive, my good friend who is the genesis of this post. Also, there was so much picture-evidence for this topic that I had to create a "George Michael" folder to manage them all. Seriously.]

Georgios Panayiotou. George Michael.


Trivia tidbit: GM also dabbled in Colonel Harlan Sanders fetishism for a bit in 1985.

We all know the story of little Georgios, no need for me to rehash it for you. It breaks down like this: little Greek kid with a huge voice goes to England and gains HUGE success with his schoolmate in a band with an onomatopoeia for a name, dumps that no-talent schoolmate into obscurity, goes solo and has more MASSIVE success world-wide, decides he wants to be a serious artist, stops appearing in videos and has a protracted legal war with his label, then gets arrested for waving his willy at an undercover cop, comes out of the closet, and then seems to make a career out of getting arrested.


The road to fame is paved with community service.

Now don't get me wrong - I love George Michael. I'm not afraid to say it, either. Yes, I own all three WHAM! albums on vinyl. Yes, I have copies of Faith and Listen Without Prejudice, too. I think he is one of the best singers out there; he has an amazing voice. In fact, I would agree with my old friend Matt Sterling and dub him "King of the (Alive) Gay Singers."


Sorry, GM, this guy still holds the title of "King of the Gay Singers." And not just because he already had the cape, sceptre, and crown.

Are all his songs great? No (ever heard "Too Funky"?...terrible). But did he have some massively popular and catchy hits?
Hell yes.

Can you deny the greatness of "Careless Whisper"? "Wake Me Up (Before You Go-Go)"? "Father Figure"? what about that duet with Elton John? And did you ever hear his cover of "Somebody to Love"?

The guy had 8 #1 singles in America, as well as 7 #1s in the UK...sold 20 million copies of his first solo record, Faith, as well as 10 million copies of the title single! This guy was a hit machine in the 1980s. I think in 1987 or 1988 he had 3 singles still in the top ten at the same time! Couple that with his successes in WHAM! and you've got a very serious money-maker on your hands.


The double entendres are free, however.

But all this seems to be largely forgotten about GM because of a little legal trouble he had back in 1998 (not to mention all his subsequent legal trouble - lay off the sticky-icky, George). Seems he engaged in a little "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" tit-for-tat (but not really, in this case, is it?) with an undercover LA policeman at a public park/gay hook-up locale. His ensuing arrest made world-wide headlines as now it was clear that one of the the premiere global sex-symbols of the 1980s was batting for the other team. America and Britain were shocked!


Shocked, I tell you.

I mean, you have to understand just how big of a star GM was. From WHAM! to his first solo album, he was everywhere. You couldn't turn on MTV without seeing this guy. And they made sure to sell him to all those hungry teen girls with disposable income the best they could.


Hot pink long-sleeve Tshirt: not gay, as long as you wear it with neon yellow fingerless gloves.

With WHAM!, he and buddy Andrew Ridgeley were popular enough to sell about 20 million albums, have a farewell tour that concluded at Wembley stadium (which was 8 hours long and attended by 73,000 people), and were the first western pop stars to do a concert in communist China. Yeah, WHAM! was the diplomatic unit (no pun intended) sent to extend the hand of goodwill to China in 1985!


Banana-yellow jacket and matching pants (with fringe on each) without a shirt: not gay in the least, as long as your silent partner also wears a get-up that's mono-chromatic and a primary color.

As a solo artist, Faith was HUGE! He made a video for every damn single, each single was catchy and a hit, and he even scored some controversy points with all that "I Want Your Sex" business (but it turns out he didn't want "your" sex, he wanted "that guy over there's" sex).


Suspenders, a high-waisted belt, and an Amish-looking hat: definitely not gay. It was just popular for men to dress like "Downtown" Julie Brown in 1987.

And yet...looking back, did he leave us some clues as to which way he swung? Was it really all so shocking in hindsight (no pun intended, but see what I did there)?


Mesh shirts: not gay as long as they're tucked into your jeans. Without a belt.

To wit:

"Freedom '90."

Here's a song that was released on GM's second solo album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. Still waiting for Volume 2, actually, but see what GM did there? He was so tired of all the success and money and fame from his first solo album (the multi-platinum Faith, which scored him an endless supply of cocaine, cash, and women, I'm sure) that he wanted to do what all artists do: show the world that they are "serious" about *insert art form here* and focus on that. They want to make sure their audience knows they're mature artists, not just money-grubbing fame-whores. And they want their same audience to come along with them (i.e. keep buying all their albums because they're artistic, not because they want money) for their "journey". Can you please just listen to my music, without prejudice!? So, GM does this and is actually pretty successful with it. Listen Without Prejudice made it all the way to #2 in America, stopped only by this man:


If you dress ridiculous enough, you will be #1 in America.

And, GM did it without ever appearing in his own videos. This was the heyday of MTV, people, so that's a big deal. MTV was literally making pop-stars via videos from 1983 until probably 1996 when they stopped showing videos and replaced them with reality television (and now they're making stars out of those attention whores...this is how a person named "Snookie" can be famous without irony). But GM, who plastered his unshaven face and tight-jeaned ass on everything possible in 1987 and 1988 to promote Faith,


Feathered hair and state-trooper shades: not gay at all. As long as you wear a leather jacket over your wife-beater.

decided to forego all that "promotional" hoopla on Listen and just sing the songs. Often, he would use super-models as the actors in his videos, helping foster a relationship between pop music and fashion that seemed to be something people cared about in the 90s.


An unholy alliance, to be sure.

This brings us to "Freedom '90" and its hidden/not-so-hidden lyrics. The video was the first to use super models instead of the pop star, and was directed by David Fincher, who would later bring you "Vogue", "Janie's Got a Gun", and Fight Club.



All this is fine and good, but it's the lyrics we're concerned with here:

Heaven knows I was just a young boy
Didn't know what I wanted to be I was every little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy
And I guess it was enough for me
To win the race? A prettier face!
Brand new clothes and a big fat place On your rock and roll TV
But today the way I play the game is not the same
No way
Think I'm gonna get myself happy

Ok, that's not too obvious. Just a guy singing about his boyhood dream of being a little bit famous, being popular, and getting on TV. Cautionary tale though in the last couple lines..."today the way I play the game is not the same"...what could he mean?

But then we get to the pre-chorus bit:

I think there's something you should know
I think it's time I told you so
There's something deep inside of me
There's someone else I've got to be
Take back your picture in a frame
Take back your singing in the rain
I just hope you understand
Sometimes the clothes do not make the man


These clothes certainly don't make the man...I mean, a lot of people wear sleeveless Ts and bright white shorts that are cut to show off maximum thigh, right? Wham!, indeed.

Oh. I see. Yeah, that's not really veiled at all, is it? People actually thought this was just about GM being a "serious artist" and not "just a pop star" or about him wanting out of his record contract. Sure.

And then the chorus:

All we have to do now
Is take these lies and make them true somehow
All we have to see Is that I don't belong to you
And you don't belong to me

Pretty clear.

In all, knowing what we now know about GM, it makes the song better. He was able to craft a kick-ass pop song (I mean, you can't deny how great the song is) that also had a cathartic element that worked on 3 levels. 1) his opposition to his own fame, a theme that is rampant in music industry whores; 2) his need to get out of his contract with Sony; and then 3) the actual matter of his hidden sexuality, that could have been the catalyst for all the self-loathing and self-promotion in the first place!
It's pretty brilliant, in a way.

Now if only Tom Cruise or Christian Bale had a recording career...


Impossible.

New post certain to come before the end of 2010!

Dear readers,
You are the few. The proud. The loyal.

And for that, I will be writing a new post to debut before the end of this calendar year.
Thank you for being so patient...or at least making me think that you're checking back in to BossBlog everyday just to see if there may be a new post. I know that is not true, of course, but my narcissism can't conceive it any other way.

So, if you have any suggestions on the subject matter, leave it in the comments. I've got two I'm kicking around:

1) George Michael's hidden lyrics; and/or

2) the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling and how that could potentially affect the incorporation of the Second Amendment to the corporate world.

I know that second one sounds drab, but it could be surprisingly hilarious, while informative.

See you soon.

Is this Swedish girl from the Future? Pt. II

Funny, she doesn't look like a Japanese robot. Because, seriously, Japan has singing robots.

So, after a long (like, very long) absence, I have returned to satisfy the 10 or so of you out there who have been patiently awaiting our follow-up to the "Is this Swedish girl from the Future?" post from almost a month ago.

In our last blog, we explored the first part of my two-part thesis to explain the Swedish musical phenom known only as "Robyn". Recall that the first prong of my thesis was that Robyn was a musical genius, akin to WC Handy or Little Richard. Further recall that this prong was thoroughly and quickly debunked when it was revealed that it was not Robyn who was the musical genius after all, but her songwriter, Max Martin.

Crestfallen, we dive into prong two of the two-prong thesis: that, in the alternative, Robyn is from the future.

Now, I know this is yet another incendiary thing to say. Surely Robyn cannot be from the future, for time travel has not been invented, right? And if it was invented, surely it was not invented by the Swedish, as they spend their time inventing safe automobiles and expensive-yet-cheap furniture for young professionals to covet.


"Use the giant screwdriver on the giant screw and hold a map in front of your upset tummy while putting together this miserable furniture." - IKEA instructions for the Bjarnum.

Or, no, only the Japanese are from the future, because that's the only logical explanation as to why they would produce such weird toys, literature, and anime?


I mean, seriously, this is weird, right?

The reason I'm positing that Robyn is from the future is because after she had moderate success as the proto-Britney Spears, she went on to have (probably) less-than-moderate success being the progenitor of another pop singer: Fergie from the (hopelessly embarrassing) Black Eyed Peas.


U-g-l-y, Fergie has no alibi.

Now, wait a minute, you say. How can this Swedish chick be both the forerunner or Brit-Brit and the forerunner of meth-faced Fergie? There hasn't been that much talent in one person since at least Michelangelo!


At least not since this Michelangelo...

But yes, I do believe Robyn was the talented forerunner of the talentless Stacy Ann "Fergie" Ferguson. And here is the song that helps me prove it:

Robyn - Konichiwa Bitches.mp3

That's Konichiwa Bitches, from Robyn's 2005 self-titled album. For those scoring at home, Robyn also speaks Japanese (or at least knows the same amount of conversational Japanese as I do), which helps lend some credibility to the whole future hypothesis a little more, don't you think?
Also, check out this creepy video with a sock-monkey playing drums while she inhabits a 2D cut-out world reminiscent of a Tex Avery/Pee-Wee's Playhouse acid trip:



But back to the music, doesn't that song sound a whole lot like a little hit Little Miss Devil's Dust had in 2006, Fergalicious?

	Fergie - Fergalicious .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

I know the songs are not EXACTLY the same...but just like in our Britney/Robyn comparison, I think there are strikingly similar elements in the delivery of the lyrics and some of the melodic content. Not literal copying here, but copying of the "essence" of Robyn, which I think lends credence to Robyn's talent outshining the talent (or lack thereof) of Stacy Ann "Hillbilly Crack" Ferguson.

Now, this time around we don't have the songwriting link between the two works (will.i.am wrote Fergalicious, while Robyn and Klas Ahlund wrote Konichiwa Bitches. Actually, there were ELEVEN writers listed for Fergalicious. Yeah, ELEVEN. I guess it's really difficult to come up with lines like: "My body stays vicious/I be up in the gym just workin' on my fitness" or to rhyme "I'm tryin' to tell" with "clientele"), so it's not a Max Martin-type thing. Further, we don't have the connection of working with the same producers at subsequent times, either (as Britney Spears worked in Sweden with the same team that had worked with Robyn). So, without any other evidence, I think it's pretty obvious: Robyn brought back her musical genius from the future.

Or, said another way, Robyn was simply born too early. The world wasn't ready for the slow-rhyme-talking and disinterested style of Robyn in 2005. Perhaps it was the inclusion of the Japanese word that people didn't respond to? Perhaps it was the "Bitches" in the title, as the world was maybe a much more conservative place in 2005 than it was in 2006?


Glenn Beck didn't get on TV until 2006, so there was no one in the country to compare Hitler to everything while using "air" "quotes" in 2005.

Probably not. I think it's just another case of poor Robyn getting passed up, in the right place, but a little bit early.

Or...maybe they're just both rip offs of this (start at the :29 second mark):

Supersonic.mp3

That's JJ Fad's Supersonic, from 1988. I definitely spent some time roller skating to this jam back at Doyle-Ryder.


Uh...yeah, something like that.

Turns out Arabian Prince (a former member of NWA, no less, which proves that gangster rap was not nearly as threatening as white people would have you believe) wrote and produced this song. He eventually sued will.i.am for the striking similarity to Supersonic. Looks like he won, or at least settled, too, as 3 of those 11 writers on Fergalicious are the writers credited on Supersonic.


Arabian Prince is the guy you don't recognize over there on the far right.

So, perhaps my second prong of a well-crafted thesis has also been disproved: it wasn't that Robyn was some Swedish angel from the future coming back in time to give us a glimpse of the music Americans would spend their dispensable incomes on; it wasn't that Robyn was only a conduit for the fame and fortune achieved by a Crank Skank and a man who uses lower-case letters and punctuation in his own moniker in order to appear ironic or artistically wisened (Fergie and will.i.am, respectively); it wasn't that Robyn really got screwed over for being too talented, either.


"Scante" Ferguson and Billy "i.am.william" Adams, Jr.

It was that they both probably had old copies of the same JJ Fad record.


Stockholm was rotten with copies of this record in 1989.

Not nearly as groundbreaking or sexy a proposition, if you ask me.

Celebrity Death Text, #5

This one came today from my brother, Nate, as a response to my own. He definitely one-upped me regarding Harold Gould, the actor who played 'Kid Twist' in The Sting:



"Stung."

Nice work, Nate.

Is this Swedish girl from the future?

Robin Carlsson - the Swedish Marty McFly?

Anyone out there heard of Robyn? If you were graduating from high school and watching a lot of MTV back in 1997 like I was, then you've answered "yes" to the preceding question.
Robyn is the Nordic pop-princess that brought us such hits as, "Do You Know (What It Takes)", "Show Me Love", and "Konichiwa Bitches" (to which we will return).
I remember seeing the video for "Do You Know (What It Takes)" on MTV (at a time when they still showed music videos) and really liked it. I mean, I was admittedly a music snob back in high school, with music snob friends, so for me to admit this was pretty difficult to do. I think that I had earlier admitted that I did, in fact, like Duran Duran - and this was a breakthrough that allowed me to publicly approve of Robyn in the summer of 1997. I liked Robyn so much, in fact, that I purchased the CD-single of the song, "Do You Know"...perhaps it was because I thought it was funny, perhaps it was because I really liked songs with parentheticals, or perhaps I really did enjoy the new sounding pop of this Robyn with a 'y'. Either way, I was pretty happy with my purchase (and now-defunct Tower Records was happy for me to have their overpriced CD).

Fast forward to 1999. I'm living in San Jose, CA now, working at Warehouse Music and am introduced to a new pop-princess, American style: Britney Spears. I'm sure we don't need to go over this, but, Britney Spears was the high school girl that couldn't really sing but looked great in her 'not-yet-barely-legal' Catholic schoolgirl uniform dance video that took over pop music for a few years (500,000 copies sold of her debut single in one day) because she preyed on statutory rape fantasies and the dispensable income of young people aged 13-21 (these two phenomena are not related).


"These are the furry epaulets that will change music...forever!" - Britney Spears

As you recall, her debut single, "...Baby One More Time", was a monster. The video was everywhere, it was played all the time, and the whole country now had a female analogue to their fascination with the Backstreet Boys and N*Sync. Perfect.

I heard "...Baby One More Time", but I wasn't struck with Britney's bad singing, I was struck by the overwhelming similarity to a one-named Swede who was pretty much forgotten by now: Robyn.

Listen to the two side by side, and you've got pretty much the same song. All the way down to the vocal stylings of Ms. Carlsson (who can sort of sing) and the vocal impressions of Britney Spears (who cannot), the two songs are strikingly similar (to use copyright infringement parlance) to me. Maybe not the same exact melody or chord progression, but the style is certainly the same, right on down to those eighth-note synth parts and the ultra-clean harmonies (well balanced, to boot).

Compare for yourself (we can wait 9 minutes):

Baby One More Time.mp3

01 Do You Know (What It Takes).mp3

I was upset by this. No one remembered poor Robyn, with her bleached blonde anime bangs from 1997; everyone wanted Britney Spears to save pop music, to bring back its youthful glee (largely absent since the over-exposure of David Cassidy, et al.), and to rake in millions of dollars. All Britney did was steal Robyn's style and put a youthful face on it. No justice.

So this leads me to the first prong of my thesis: Robyn was a musical visionary, and Britney Spears is akin to Elvis Presley.

That sounds incendiary, I know, to equate Louisana/Mickey Mouse Club trash with Mississippi/Memphis/gospel music trash 'The King', but think about how similar the situation is: Robyn puts out her album in the US, it does ok (maybe that's an understatement, it did go platinum), but she is largely forgotten. Britney comes along 2 years later, does pretty much the same thing but puts her plaid skirt and pigtails on it and it's a sensation (like, 14 times platinum). Just like Elvis stealing rock n' roll (whether he stole that from Little Richard is for another time). Right place, right time. Sorry Robyn.


The possibility of an NSFW up-skirt shot surely contributed to at least 1 million of those sales.

Well, it turns out that Robyn and Britney's striking similarities may not have been due to musical prolepsis/Britney Spears-being-like-Elvis after all. I did a little research on the matter (not that you're surprised by this), and found that the link between Robyn and Brit-Brit is actually this man:


Max Martin - a Swedish musical badass that is always getting chased by sharks.

Max Martin is a Swedish music producer/writer that has pretty much written most of the popular songs from the end of the 90s and on into today (a quick resume? "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"; "Since U Been Gone"; "California Gurls" to name a few). I mean, really, you look at the guys resume and you can't really believe he was involved in so many hits! He's like Lionel Richie, but Swedish! He did a lot of work with American pop acts (Britney, Backstreet Boys, and Kelly Clarkson, to name a few), but he started with hometown artists like Robyn. That's right...this guy wrote "Do You Know (What It Takes)" a couple years before he wrote it again for Britney, this time as "...Baby One More Time". Lightning strikes twice, I guess.

As a side note, although Martin did write many of Britney's best songs ("...Baby One More Time", "If You Seek Amy", and "3" *a fantastically underrated song, I might add*), he did not write her best work, which is obviously (and undisputed-ly) "Toxic".


Thanks to two ridiculously-named producers (Bloodshy and Avant) we have this masterpiece of synth-pop and surf guitar.

Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3


With the first prong of my thesis so thoroughly disproved, we'll put that aside and continue forward into the second part of this post and prong two of thesis:

Robyn must be from the future.


With our limited research, we believe this to be the most likely means of travel for Robyn.

...to be continued in Part 2!

Sample Example, pt. 2

I'm sure you've all seen this strange, but effective KIA commercial:


Who wouldn't take their sock monkey to a club with them? And a robot doing the robot is just perfectly post-modern.

The music used in that commercial is "How Ya Like Me Now?" by The Heavy. Who is "The Heavy" you ask? I have no idea, but I bet they're British - because British bands use samples of American music to make American-sounding music, right? (see, e.g. EMF, Big Audio Dynamite, Stereo MCs).


Different kind of 'British sampling'.

The reason C-Murder is bringing this to your attention is because of the too, too funky sample used in the song.


...or as they say in Italy, "Tutto funky!"

That sample is, "Let A Woman Be A Woman - Let A Man Be A Man" from 1969 by Dyke and The Blazers.

Let a Woman Be a Woman.mp3

Fantastic, isn't it? I think my favorite part (other than the break), is the dialog:

DYKE: "hey fellas!"
THE BLAZERS: "Yeah!"
DYKE: "Ya'll see anything wrong with Sally's walk?"
THE BLAZERS: "Naw!"
DYKE: "All right then...tell me 'bout it...hah!"

According to the little info available on the intehnets, three guys from Buffalo were in a band called The Blazers that backed up the "before-they-were-riding-on-a-Love-Train" O'Jays (also from Buffalo). Those three (Arlester "Dyke" Christian - bass, Alvester "Pig" Jacobs - guitar, and JV "No Nickname" Hunt - saxophone) were stranded in Phoenix after the O'Jays couldn't afford to get them back to Buffalo. As a result, the three hired an organist, a bassist (so Dyke switched to vocals), a drummer, and another saxophone player. They became Dyke and The Blazers and a made a big impact on the local Phoenix soul scene.


Any band with a guy named "Arlester" and another guy named "Alvester" has to be pretty good...

Dyke and The Blazers were well on their way to being a heavy-hitting soul/funk outfit of the 60s and 70s. Their first record, "Funky Broadway" (the one Wilson "Wicked" Pickett covered and scored a #1 hit with), is often thought to be the first time the word "funk" was used as the title to a record. From this, Dyke was makin' bank (since he was the writer), while his band was making about $100 a show. The rest of The Blazers eventually quit on Dyke, but it didn't matter because he started working with the guys that would become the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (you know them from "Express Yourself")...and got even funkier.

The reason you may not have heard of Dyke and The Blazers by name, though, and the reason they didn't get famous, was because Dyke was shot and killed in an altercation in 1971, just a few short years after he got the band going in the right direction. A tragic end to a short climb. I personally think they would have been huge, since Dyke sounded a lot like Otis Redding (another tragic story of a life cut too short, too soon), and the band was as good as The JBs and Booker T. & the MGs over at Stax.

What you hear in "Let A Woman Be A Woman" are those Watts 103rd St. guys. In particular, you hear the funkiness of James Gadson, a sorely underrated, yet supremely funky drummer.


James Gadson - with a wig like that...this guy means business.

James Gadson went on to be the drummer for Bill Withers, played on "Dancin' Machine", "I Will Survive", "Love Hangover", and countless other amazing funky soul tracks. And this guy is STILL working today!

Since we're talking about the greatness and obscurity of Dyke and The Blazers, allow me to share a couple other great tracks:

The Wobble.mp3 - This tune is just a great slice of funk. According to what I can find, this may be Dyke's third drummer, Wardell "Baby Wayne" Peterson, coming after James Gadson.

Runaway People.mp3 - This one is about, as the title indicates, people that runaway. Not sure if this was a big problem in the late 60s, but it was on Dyke's mind. My favorite part is probably the break, which was sampled here by Mr. Tracy Marrow (doing business as Ice-T) on "Microphone Contract" from his 1991 classic, "OG - Original Gangster":


You won't find a better use of the phrase, "You better be a good bullet-ducker".

So, in short, check out these tracks, in fact, if you Right-Click them, you can save them (FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY). Just doing my part to share great music with the masses.
I would also recommend picking up "So Sharp!", a collection of their hits.



Until next time...

Serendipity or Plagiarism? You decide.

Not to be confused with this "Serendipity", which everyone has decided is crap.


Driving home today, I heard the following on the radio.



That's Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun In The Summertime" from 1969. A fantastic song for a summer day like today. Hearing Sly Stone is usually a great experience and I highly recommend it.

As I was listening to the chorus, the encyclopedia of pop music in my head was cross referenced to the volume "L":



That's Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" from 1979's In Through the Out Door. Strikingly similar? You betcha...and I can guarantee those English blokes had heard a Sly record or two by the late 1970s.

As the Family Stone continued another volume of my inner encyclopedia of pop music was brought down from the shelf...Volume "G":



That's Genesis' "Misunderstanding" from 1980's Duke. No hiding here...more English blokes, led by a drummer (Phil Collins), taking liberally from an English band with a pretty damn famous English drummer (John Bonham of Led Zeppelin), who took liberally from a pretty damn famous American band (and really, who made a career out of 'taking liberally' from anyone and everyone who wrote a song and didn't become famous for it). I think serendipity might be out on this one.

Then there's this piece to the puzzle:



That's Toto's "Hold the Line" from 1979's Toto. As far as it fitting into the lineage (before Genesis), here's what Toto's famous drummer (Jeff Porcaro) had to say:

That was me trying to play like Sly Stone's original drummer, Greg Errico, who played drums on "Hot Fun In The Summertime." The hi-hat is doing triplets, the snare drum is playing 2 and 4 backbeats, and the bass drum is on 1 and the & of 2. That 8th note on the second beat is an 8th-note triplet feel, pushed. When we did the tune, I said, "Gee, this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly groove." The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach - from Modern Drummer Magazine, 1988

So, I can further guarantee that Genesis knew of Toto (since they were a band made up of very famous, very employed session players that got together to lay down all-too-perfect music of their own), and just ripped them off too.

Nothing against Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks, mind you, I like "Invisible Touch" as much as the next guy...I'm just hoping Sly got his props.

-C Murder

Allen Toussaint - Louie.mp3
KPM - FUNKY FANFARE.mp3

Reverse Deconstruction and the Importance of Hip-Hop

Jacques Derrida - the father of deconstructionism, is probably not interested in how I apply it to Hip-Hop.

As the title indicates, Hip-Hop is a very important art-form for most of us that came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the first truly 'new' form of music in some time for America, and it came with an entire cultural artistry (in graffiti, b-boying, and DJing) that was particularly American. That it was thought to be a 'fad' (much in the way rock n' roll was deemed a fad) is further evidence that it was something 'new', though it could be technically classified as 100% derivative. I distinctly remember watching Run DMC and Aerosmith perform on the MTV Music Awards back in '85 or '86, and my father saying, "What is this? This won't be around for long." Such was the feeling for this new art form.


Some things in hip-hop were a fad, thankfully.

With that argument firmly in place, and the notion that there can be something new even when largely derivative, I bring you a tale of how I learned a ton about important music, that up to that time was probably going to be forgotten by my generation, and especially my generation that also happened to be white kids.

To wit: Hip Hop DJs take 4 - 8 bar loops from 2 copies of the same record and turn them into songs. Thanks to Kool Herc and his progeny (Grandmaster Flash, Jazzy Jay, et al.),


DJ Kool Herc - he invented the technique of using two copies of the same record to extend the break. As a result, Lil' Wayne and Rick Ross have an outlet to make music.

this "merry go round" effect turned a DJ into an instrumentalist, a technique of dancing into an alternative for gang fights, and an MC into a party-rocker and cultural historian.
[Author's note: For a better history of how all this fits together, I recommend Can't Stop, Won't Stop by Jeff Chang, as I cannot begin to tell the tale as well or in this limited space.]


He may be no Howard Zinn, but Flav's a cultural historian nonetheless.

After this technique of looping parts of other songs to make new songs caught on (deconstruction here we come), a new piece of equipment made it all the more easier...the sampler.
With the sampler, DJs cum producers could now loop their favorite parts of James Brown's music (it was all JB back then) and make records. A new appreciation for old records then came from this, as one can only loop "Funky Drummer" about 100 times before people start catching on, so crate digging became a new art form in itself.


Clyde Stubblefield - JB's Funky Drummer. Progenitor of the funkiest 8 bars of modern music.

This is where we get to me...growing up listening to these hip-hop inventions, starting to play drums myself, I got very interested in these songs. In particular, when I bought my first 'rap tape', I would pour over the liner notes to see where these guys got their ideas. I kept coming across the same thing:

"Contains a sample of ..."

I think I had some vague notion that these records were made from other records (I knew James Brown when I heard it, even at 10 years old), but I had never heard of these people: George Clinton, Pee Wee Ellis, Fred Wesley, Parliament, Funkadelic, Parliament-Funkadelic, Bob James, David Axelrod, The Winstons, etc. I had a desire to hear the songs that these rap records were sampling, where the impetus for this new music was coming from, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard.
As a result, I did some digging of my own...I remember purchasing "The Bomb: Parliament's Greatest Hits" on cassette at Camelot Music in, like, 1991. From that point on I was a different person. I didn't know anything about the craziness of P-Funk (as there was no internet to look that stuff up on), but I knew they made some great music that I wanted to hear more of, since it contributed to the music I was currently listening to. Imagine if a 7th grader told you they really liked Parliament and Public Enemy. That was me.


Typical, yet somewhat tame, cover art for Parliament-Funkadelic. Should a 7th-grader know what this is?

So this sort of "reverse deconstruction" continued...if I heard a new song that I liked, I knew it probably came from somewhere else, so I would try my best to track that down. I was taking a Hip-Hop song that had deconstructed a number of other songs into 4 bar loops, and reversing the process to find out where this "new" song originated. As a result, I learned a lot about funk and soul music in America, and really a lot about producers and DJs in Hip-Hop, given that these records were in their collections. I also gained an appreciation for the ingenuity involved in the production of these songs. They would take the drums from one break, the bass line from another song, the melody from another, and put it together to make a new work altogether. Some people don't see the art in this, or they think that it's easy, but I have the utmost respect for it - imagine the intimate knowledge these folks have with the music out there. It's staggering.
Once the internet showed up, and Napster (shout out to the 90s indeed...) this task was much easier. Also, DJs were getting deeper in their own digging, and the art form was pushed further. (see DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing..." and "Private Press" for some great examples of this).

So what does that have to do with today's post? A little "sample example" of my own:


Ghostface Killah - Shakey Dog (from Fishscale)

First of all, this song kicks ass. Second, it is largely "I Can Sing a Rainbow/Love is Blue" by Johnny Johnson. Now I had never heard this particularly hard-hitting piece of soul music, but it came from here, and didn't start out all that hard-hitting:


Vicky Leandros (performing as "Vicky") - the first recording of "L'Amour est Bleu"

After that gem, it was covered by Paul Mauriat, a French orchestra leader and "easy listening specialist". His version was wildly popular and actually hit number 1 in America, still remaining the only French artist to do so (sorry, Daft Punk).



Although Vicky also recorded an English language version, when you search "Love is Blue" on Youtube, you'll invariably get this Al Martino version. As you can see, it takes liberally from the Mauriat arrangement...


Al Martino - Love is Blue...this is the guy that played Johnny Fontane in The Godfather:


"There's too much goddamn harpsichord in that song!" - Vito Corleone to Johnny Fontane

Now, the "I Can Sing a Rainbow Part" doesn't come in until "Love is Blue" starts getting covered by soul acts...according to wikipedia (forgive me), "Rainbow" is a children's song by Arthur Hamilton used to teach children their colors (though not all colors are represented). Thanks, wikipedia.
Here's a terrible version of it:



So, let's put these two together, eh? I mean, they both deal with colors, they both seem to be in the same key, how ironic?
This is where it starts to hit a little harder...The Dells put the two together and made it a much more lamentable and heart-aching sort of number...and it broke into the top 30 in 1969.



Then we get to Johnny Johnson's version from 1970, arguably the best and by far the hardest. I mean, you can just hear the pain and suffering in ol' JJ's voice. Further, it's as if all the musicians are feeling it, too, as it just sounds SO aggressive! Then there's the note that Johnson holds out for 25 counts towards the end of the song. Shit.



So, Johnny keeps some of all the elements in the chronology: Vicky and Mauriat's acoustic guitar; but axes others: the Mauriat harpsichord, sings better than that kid songs bullshit, and does the Dells one better in terms of darkening up the tone of the song and really making it about heartache and loss. This is more of a re-construction than de-construction, but in the hands of Ghostface Killah, the de-construction is completed into a new song.

A Hilarious Celebrity Death Text I Received...

I received this celebrity death-text recently:


"Gary Coleman's casket - it already has his name on it."

Amazing. Big ups to Jennifer Sutch, knocking it out of the park on her first celebrity death-text!