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!