Video – Lauryn Hill With Toure

September 2, 2010

Yesterday, I recapped Toure’s interview with Lauryn Hill on Fuse’s The Hip Hop Shop. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you can do so on our blog.

Or, you can just watch the video below. You’ll need to go to 6:30 on the player to see the exact start of the interview. If not, you can watch Toure talk to Busta Rhymes and the RZA first. Or, I’ve added the link to Daily Motion which will pop you right to the start of the Lauryn interview.

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Click to watch on Daily Motion.

Lauryn Hill Is Ready To Record Again

September 2, 2010

To many people, Lauryn Hill is one of music’s biggest mysteries. She was on top of the world and just walked away. There were stories of her private life that may have changed your viewpoint about who she was. But really, the question was why. Why did she walk away from music when she was at the top of her game?

In 2003, journalist Toure filled in some of the story for us with his memorable Rolling Stone article. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s a must-read.

On Wednesday’s Fuse show The Hip Hop Shop, Toure had his chance to interview L-Boogie. She was performing over the weekend at Rock The Bells alongside The Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, and Snoop Dog. She finally had some answers for us.

Some of the reason she left had to do with her children. She wanted them to have normalcy and privacy and real childhoods. But she herself wanted out of public scrutiny and wanted freedom and needed to be able to reclaim her individuality. She also said that she’s ready to express herself again.

But this quote might have summed it all up best:

You have to live life so you have something substantial to share, or it’s kind of pointless.

She seemed at peace and no, she didn’t seem crazy. I jokingly tweeted Toure to ask him if he was able to look her in her eyes and call her by her first name. That was a recent story about her behavior. He didn’t answer me, but he answered someone else that there was none of that going on.

He did ask her what everyone wanted to know. Would we be able to hear a new album? She was a little indecisive at first. She promised new recordings, but wasn’t sure about a new album. But she also implied that maybe there was also a new album on the way as well.

Here’s a short clip of her performing at Rock The Bells:

Photo of Lauryn Hill shared via Wikipedia through the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Big in the UK: Cooking the Charts with They Might Be Giants

August 23, 2010

This is the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t happen here. I just don’t think Americans take their pop charts quite as personally or as democratically as they do in the U.K. Earlier this summer, a brand of kid’s shoes put out an ad featuring “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, the 1990 major label debut single by They Might Be Giants. The duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have, since they started recording original songs onto a standard answering machine in the early 80s, become the godfathers of nerd-rock, and now that their original fans (like me) are pushing middle age with mortgages and children, the band have found renewed success recording four albums of “children’s music”, and performing alternate shows for grown-ups and kids on tour. The idea of sticking TMBG’s loving ode to the nightlight into an ad for kids’ shoes might’ve been genius if it weren’t so self-evidently perfect.

I don’t know how it’s working out for Clark Shoes, but it seems to be doing well for They Might Be Giants. The song re-entered the British Top 100 pop songs late last month. Of course, songs featured in popular ads often get enjoy a run on the pop charts here as well – just as Sara Bareilles, Yael Naim, or Phoenix – but those successes seem more like happy accidents. In the case of “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, a strange populist cause – okay, a facebook group – has formed around keeping the song on the charts and trying to advance it to the top spot. That said, after four weeks, the song has only gone so far as #70 (on the chart dated 8/21; the song falls back to #72 on the 8/28 chart).

But that’s not to say it couldn’t eventually succeed. This isn’t the first instance of the Brits attempting to cook their pop charts. See also: Buckley v. Burke. In 2008, after Alexandra Burke won the TV talent show The X-Factor, a campaign by apostles of the tragic 90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley attempted to thwart Burke’s cover of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” from making its predicted number one debut over that year’s Christmas sales week by urging fans to download Buckley’s own version of the song.

The campaign failed, but just barely. Buckley’s song charted at #2 behind Burke’s. Still, the TMBG song, while it may linger on the chart for as long as the ad airs, probably won’t reach those sorts of heights. For one thing, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” isn’t being pitted against another version of itself, or even another song. Moreover the Alexandra Burke debut was a one-off event sales week; it was also a holiday week, and it’s a holiday week that The X-Factor has annually co-opted for just this eventful purpose. So Buckley v. Burke was framed as the classic battle over artistic legitimacy between a tragic rock icon and a freshly minted “mass-produced” pop idol for the very soul of the pop chart.

As a fan of both Burke and Buckley (although, when it comes to “Hallelujah”, count me in with Team John Cale), I, frankly, prefer not having to choose sides. They Might Be Giants‘ Elektra debut record Flood was essentially the first record of 1990, and “Birdhouse In Your Soul” was instant classic that still makes me giddy and giggly every time I hear it – even more so now that I’ve got two kids singing along with me.

Here’s the original video from 1990:

Cee-lo Green’s “What Part of Forever”, or Why I’m as Happy as a Little Girl About the New Twilight Saga Movie

August 18, 2010

I’m no fan of Stephenie Meyer’s books, or the movies they’re based off of. I’m not really into vampires and werewolves. But I get as woo-hoo excited as a TRL teenage fangirl every time a new Twilight movie comes out. It’s not because of Robert Pattinson’s gravity defying hairdo or Taylor Lautner’s sculpted abdomen and dark, forbidding gaze. (Truth be told, I had to look them both up on Google just now to make sure I had their names right.) It’s about the soundtracks. The soundtracks to these movies are amazing!

Like John Hughes’s movies in the 80s, the Twilight movies draw their music from a collection of artists that could conceivably appeal to a pretty broad audience, but at the same time, are still mostly championed by the alterna-kids and that endangered species known as the record store employee. In the 80s, that meant bands like Oingo Boingo, Madness, Spandau Ballet, Nick Heyward, the Dream Academy, the Thompson Twins, Paul Young, Wang Chung, and Simple Minds – few of whom scored more than a couple of hits, but whose legacies have largely survived the reflexive 80s hating. A lot of these artists’ songs are more celebrated now than they were back when they were (almost) “popular”.

Though each of the Twilight movies’ scores so far have been written by different composers, the aesthetic of the soundtracks has been remarkably consistent, and consistently thrilling. The British band Muse (who basically sound like Radiohead, only un-evolved since 1995) have appeared on all three Twilight Saga soundtracks so far, but each album features an increasingly diverse roster of the artsy cool. Though the first soundtrack trafficked more in mainstream modern rock artists like Paramore, Linkin Park, and (oh yeah) Perry Farrell, the second two have gotten more daring, bringing fairly well-known indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie, Metric and Thom Yorke, together with folks like Swedish pop chanteuse Lykke Li, rapper Lupe Fiasco and the British band Fanfarlo.

But the Twilight Saga soundtracks do John Hughes one better. Where Hughes’ movies often licensed existing songs for the group’s catalogs (Simple Minds “Don’t You Forget About Me” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science” being the big exceptions – Psychedelic Furs re-recorded a song they’d released years earlier for the title song of Pretty In Pink), the songs that appear on the Twilight Saga soundtracks are most often originals written and recorded specifically for the soundtracks. You won’t find Editors’ gorgeous piano ballad “No Sound But the Wind” from New Moon on the band’s new studio record (In This Light and On This Evening) which came out right around the same time. And the thing is, “No Sound But the Wind” wouldn’t have worked on the Editors’ album anyway – not just because it’s miles better than even the best parts of In This Light (this is, sadly, true) – but because it truly belongs with the rest of the songs from New Moon. More than anything else, these records are special because they sound like they were actually conceived as unified albums – not just a cross-promotional collection of songs by Today’s Hottest Stars, all K-Tel style; and the songs are quality – not just out-takes or throwaways – and they’re bound together not just by the subtextual narrative of the movie, but with a common sense of atmosphere and evocation.

The latest Twilight Saga soundtrack, for Eclipse, has already delivered videos for songs by Muse and Metric. One of the latest is by Cee-Lo Green, the former Goodie Mob rapper turned retro-funk freak solo artist before teaming up with producer Danger Mouse to form Gnarls Barkley (whose 2007 debut hit “Crazy” essentially became the first pop standard of the 21st Century). On “What Part of Forever”, he sheds much of his signature flamboyance – in fact, he sheds his hip-hop persona altogether – singing a lyric about making life-altering choices over chiming guitars, a rhythm that rolls like stage-coach wheels, and a melody straight out of the sunny California folk-pop sound of the late 60s – a beautiful song for late summer.

Awesome Free Download: The Baseball Project “Broadside Ballads”

August 17, 2010

D’ya like baseball? D’ya like story songs? How about story songs about baseball? How about story songs about baseball written by a supergroup of alterna-cool elder statesmen including the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn, drummer Linda Pitmon, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5 and, well, a zillion other side projects. These four got together last year and formed a band that specializes in baseball songs. They call their band – duh – The Baseball Project and they released their debut full-length album Vol. One: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails in 2009. While they’re working on Volume Two (due out next year), they’ve partnered with ESPN’s The Life this summer to provide running baseball commentary in song. And those songs – six of ‘em so far – are being made available for free dowload at the Baseball Project’s label home, the always awesome Yep Roc Records. No small feat: these songs have actually given me a reason to care about baseball this year.

I mean, seriously, with the exception of my sons’ little league games and the occasional excursion to Warner Park to watch the Madison Mallards play (and eat a few brats), I like stories and movies about baseball a lot more than I like baseball itself. I never miss a chance to watch Major League II when it comes on the TV. But when the guys in the Baseball Project start singing about “Lima Time”, the references are pretty much lost on me in the same way that that punchline in Modern Family about Diana Ross’s RCA period was mostly lost on the majority of the network prime time viewing audience. But it doesn’t matter that much: the band plays a handsome variety of laid back folk rock – think The Traveling Wilburys at a Miller Park tailgate party – that sounds great even when I don’t know the relevant background of the song’s lyrics.

Moreover, songs like “Phenom”, in which a 21-year-old ponders his ability to live up to his own hype – “Man of the hour, and that’s 400 percent of your 15 minutes of fame, and they say that I’m the most in the Washington Post… I just want to stick around for a while” – resonate outside of the sport they pay tribute to on an allegorial/metaphorical level. I love the relentless (and hopeless) optimism of “Cubs 2010″, the jangly, swinging, Woodie Guthie-ish singalong of “30 Doc”. And I’ve never been to or even cared about a baseball season opening day, but I can, nevertheless relate to the sense of excitement and expectation of “All Future and No Past” – Before a game is played! Before an out is made! – especially when the song sounds like They Might Be Giants fronting the Byrds on a Bob Dylan cover.

First Listen (and Free Download): The Thermals “I Don’t Believe You”

August 17, 2010

Portland indie-rockers The Thermals are known for writing nerdy, two-and-half-minute punk songs with an off-handedly topical point of view. You could call their most recent albums concept records, but that’s just a fancy way of saying they’ve been relatively thematically coherent. Last year’s, Now We Can See dealt with morality, mortality and science while their 2006 record The Blood, The Body, The Machine was a more narrative affair on the intersection of organized religion, governmental authority and personal agency.

The group, led by singer-songwriter Hutch Harris, is getting ready to issue their fifth album next month. The album’s called Personal Life, and this time around, their focus is on love and relationships, the things that make relationships great, and the things that destroy them. It’s a direction hinted by the song “Separate” (issued earlier this year as one side of a split single with the Cribs), although lyrics like “separate I’m amazed I ever gave away all I held so dear” are ambiguous enough that they could just as easily be a pointed repudiation of political bipartisanship as they might be the post-break-up musings of a freshly single free-thinker.

“I Don’t Believe You” is the lead single from Personal Life, and it’s an immediately lovable bit of candidly dismissive, singalong power-pop, even if it can’t match last year’s “Now We Can See” in either recklessly energetic dorkery or googly-eyed catchiness. Click below to hear the song for yourself. In addition to releasing the song as a good old-fashioned 45 (with a download card that includes two bonus videos), the band’s label Kill Rock Stars is currently offering the song for free download at their site. (Thank you Kill Rock Stars. You’re awesome.)

The Thermals – I Don’t Believe You by killrockstars

Big in Europe (Actually Big Everywhere Except Here): Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP “We No Speak Americano”

August 16, 2010

Back when I was in high school, there was this British dj collective called Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers who scored a Top 20 hit called “Swing the Mood” by basically taking a bunch of hits from the 40s and 50s – incongruously matching the Glenn Miller Band with the Everly Brothers, among others – and mashing them all together into a single track fit for school dances and wedding receptions. Urgh. For awhile there, “Swing the Mood” was inescapable although thankfully it never reached the achieved the sort of cultural saturation the “Macarena” would half a decade later.

Now, storming charts all across Europe – around the world, in fact – is the Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool (named for a Tarantino quote) who teamed up with producer DCUP for a single called “We No Speak Americano”, which is essentially a 21st century house music puree of a 1956 performance by Italian pop singer Renato Carosone called “Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano”. In addition to going Top 10 in the duo’s home country and New Zealand, “We No Speak Americano” has so far topped the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, and, yes, Romania. Congressional Republicans may have much of the country convinced that the single greatest threat to the American way of life is creeping socialism. I beg to differ. Creeping socialism has nothing on the creeping ubiquity of this song – little more than a musical gimmick writ large, albeit one with an adorably silly (and expertly executed) “silent movie” video.

And if you’re curious, here’s some pretty awesome video of Renato Carosone’s original. I could totally party with these guys!

First Look: Phil Collins “Heat Wave”

August 11, 2010

Phil Collins has posted a video for his take on the 1963 Martha and the Vandellas classic “Heat Wave”. It’s from Going Back, his forthcoming collection of Motown and other 60s pop and soul covers which finds him backed by a very large band which includes former members of Motown’s iconic house band the Funk Brothers, a couple of longtime Genesis associates, and a herd of back-up singers, who all appear to be having a blast. Collins’s love for Motown is no secret. Collins was still considered mainly an album rock guy best known for his work with Genesis (who hadn’t gone completely pop yet) and for the moody atmospherics of “In the Air Tonight” when his 1982 cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” gave him his first solo top 10 hit. That song played a pivotal role in establishing Collins as the pop superstar he would become by mid-decade with his No Jacket Required album and he’d later return to the Motown sound with his original song “Two Hearts” from the movie Buster, which ending up topping the charts in early 1989.

Phil Collins “Heat Wave” (2010)

Phil Collins “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1982)

Phil Collins “Two Hearts” (1988)

First Look: Miranda Lambert “Only Prettier”

August 9, 2010

Election season is ramping up and many commentators are pointing to 2010 as a pivotal year for women in politics, what with Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Sharron Angle and Carly Fiorina, and that one from South Carolina that was accused of having an affair but couldn’t possibly have had an affair because she’s, like, totally married and stuff and her husband is totally hot. Haters just be jealous. Miranda Lambert is taking notice with the fourth single off her latest album Revolution. As a former Nashville Star finalist (she placed third in the show’s debut season), Lambert has certainly experienced her fair share of the vicissitudes of the Amer’can voting public. “Only Prettier” is a gloriously old-school country rocker, a stomping celebration of catty girl politics loaded up with adorably venomous one-liners and winking, semi-sincere appeals to hatchet burial, echoing the same promises politicians trot out every election season – “oh, let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines.” Oh yes, let’s do. And let’s spike the punch while we’re at it. The song’s perfectly complimentary video finds Lambert and her band on stage playing at a 50s era high school prom where two rival cliques – the debutantes and the bad girls, both played by the same quartet of actresses led by Lambert herself – go head to head (under a gymnasium arc d’ballon) in a battle for social supremacy. And as it turns out, they’re all just two sides of the same coin.

Travellers in Space and Time: New Videos by Broken Bells, The Apples in stereo, and Robbie Williams

August 6, 2010

Comic Con may be over for this year, but that doesn’t mean the geek joy needs to end. Witness these three new videos, all dealing with space and time travel. One’s a bit of science fiction in the classic “allegory for the world we live in” sense featuring a performance by the kind of uber-hottie actress that could inspire a veritable library of fan fiction. There’s a nerdy goof on parallel realities (err- “alternate space-time continua”) starring a former child star (who also happens to be the band’s label boss). And finally, a mournful ballad that reads like an elegy for the decline of the U.S. space program (or maybe the decline of the singer’s solo career).

First up is the latest by Broken Bells, “The Ghost Inside”. It’s the second single from the self-titled debut of this partnership between producer Danger Mouse (fresh off his success with Cee-Lo in Gnarls Barkley) and The Shins’ James Mercer. The video features Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks in a genuinely wonderful performance as a woman who, quite literally, sells her body in her desperate pursuit of interplanetary luxury.

“The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells

Elijah Wood was 12 years old and on the verge of indie-film stardom when the Colorado band The Apples In stereo, an eccentric indie-pop sextet centered around singer-songwriter (and fervent Brian Wilson acolyte) Robert Schneider, released their debut seven-inch “Tidal Wave”. Now the 29-year-old actor has his own record label (Simian Records), and the first act he signed was The Apples In stereo. Both actor and band have come a long way in the last two decades. This latest video finds the band, which started out making wildly colorful, but overly precious psychedelic pop (think Harpers Bizarre), embracing an impossibly cheesy retro synth-pop sound on their latest album Travellers in Space and Time. To promote the record, the band teamed up with Greg Kilpatrick to produce the album’s first video “Dance Floor” along with an adorable 5 minute companion short film starring Wood (as a middle school science-and-gym teacher and host of “Exploring the Universe”) and Schneider (as a scientist who can turn a cucumber into a drum machine). You can watch it at stepthroughtheportal.com. It’s true that Schneider’s baby-voiced delivery is utterly at odds with his bald-bearded-bellied appearance. The incongruities are off-putting at first, but the song is an absolute winner that should endear itself to anyone who ever loved DEVO. Even better: The band is offering the song for free download. Click below to get your own copy!

“Dance Floor” by The Apples In Stereo

Finally, we have “Morning Sun”, the latest from 36-year-old British boy band veteran Robbie Williams, whose impressive latest album Reality Killed the Video Star finds the singer contemplating celebrity culture and his own role in it with thoughtfulness, uncharacteristic humility, and a mordant sense of humor. The video is a simple and elegantly photographed depiction of Williams’s astronautical journey from the earth’s outer atmosphere to the outer reaches of the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, flirting with his own spectacular destruction, before parachuting back down to earth. All as if to say that like space travel, like celebrity itself, is journey as fascinating as it is isolating. And what does one even do with oneself after space?

Though in the ten years since his song “Millennium” became his first U.S. hit, Williams has been ignored by American audiences and radio programmers, he’s enjoyed continued success overseas. But lately, even British and European audiences are feeling underwhelmed by Williams, which is sad since his latest record may actually be his best yet. And it may be his last solo record for a while. Following the release of a greatest hits set, he’s just recently re-united with Take That, the boy band he left in 1994. The other four members of Take That reunited after a 10 year hiatus in 2005 and have enjoyed even greater success in their second incarnation than they acheived during their early 90s heyday (which culminated in their 1995 U.S. Top 10 hit “Back for Good”).

“Morning Sun” by Robbie Williams

Robbie Williams – Morning Sun
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