DudeAsInCool

Miles Davis - The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions BEN RATLIFF MILES DAVIS: 'THE COMPLETE JACK JOHNSON SESSIONS' (Columbia Legacy, five CD's, $69.98) Miles Davis was fascinated by Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone and searching for his own way to rock when he made "A Tribute to Jack Johnson" in 1970. His main strategy was to set up unswerving bass and drum foundations below volatile, aggressive, even vicious guitar and trumpet, sometimes adding unearthly keyboard sounds. Davis had his musicians vamp though one-chord shuffles, 12-bar blues and three-chord rock until the music began to seethe and snap. Then his producer, Teo Macero, cut and pasted the two long tracks of the original album, which complete the fifth disc. There's some wheel-spinning in this lengthy set. But the sessions reveal how grooves evolved from metronomic to funky, and they compel new admiration for the resourceful drumming of Billy Cobham and Jack DeJohnette and for John McLaughlin, who kept finding new ways to make his guitar slink around the rhythm or claw and shriek right through it. JON PARELES -NY Times

Hip-Hop Review: Jay-Z Raps on the Fly Like a Man Set to Die November 27, 2003 By KELEFA SANNEH Tupac Shakur was shot to death in 1996, but it didn't much hurt his career: he is revered now more than ever, lionized in the new documentary "Resurrection." The Notorious B.I.G. was killed in 1997, but no hip-hop club night or radio show is complete without one of his songs. And 50 Cent reminds everyone how he cheated death: an assassination attempt left him with an appealingly slurred voice and a great back story. Compared with hip-hop heroes like these, Jay-Z has a significant handicap: he's alive and well. He is also one of the shrewdest rappers of all time and one of the most creative, so he found a clever way to overcome this liability: he decided to stage his own death, or at least disappearance. Jay-Z has been threatening to retire for years, and this month he released "The Black Album" (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam) as his last will and testament, or so he claims. And at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night he said goodbye with an extraordinary concert that was both moving and festive: a memorial service disguised as a block party. Jay-Z's rapping served as a homily, which was interrupted by secular (and often sexual) hymns from R. Kelly and Mary J. Blige, as well as Beyoncé, whose relationship with Jay-Z seems to go well beyond duets. Each of the three performed a brief set, but the wound-up crowd was really satisfied only when Jay-Z was onstage. He did some songs with a sharp backing band (anchored by the Roots' drummer Questlove) and others with a D.J. Either way, Jay-Z's delivery was typically sharp, and except for one glitch (the speakers cut out for most of "Frontin'," a duet with Pharrell Williams from the Neptunes), this was about as smooth and as strong a hip-hop concert as anyone has ever managed. The party started with a Garden-variety tribute: a basketball jersey bearing Jay-Z's number (1 of course) was raised to the rafters. And then, for more than two and a half hours, Jay-Z delivered his own homily, ripping through dozens of tracks from his relatively brief but astonishingly productive career. In verses from his first album, "Reasonable Doubt," from 1996, Jay-Z came across as a jaded hustler, world-weary from the start. During "Dead Presidents II," he vowed to avenge a friend's death, clear-eyed and unapologetic: "Murder is a tough thing to digest/It's a slow process/And I ain't got nothing but time." Much of Jay-Z's music has been tinged with nostalgia for these early years. And in "Hovi Baby," from last year, he delivered a couplet that sounded like an epitaph: "Seven straight summers, critics might not admit it/But nobody in rap did it quite like I did it." "The Black Album" was meant to be a career capstone, but it's a disappointment: a bit short on wit and agility and a bit long on solemnity and speechifying. Still, the new songs sounded great on Tuesday, in part because they were interspersed with more buoyant singles from previous albums. One of the best "Black Album" tracks is "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," with a synthetic beat by Timbaland that seems to play backward. He allowed himself a smile as he rhymed, "You gotta pardon Jay/For selling out the Garden in a day." Nearly every rap concert these days includes a tribute to the dead: not just Shakur and B.I.G. but Jam Master Jay, Lisa Lopes, Big Pun, Aaliyah and others. Jay-Z went one step further, bringing out Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, and B.I.G.'s mother, Voletta Wallace, both of whom were presented with checks for the foundations that they run in memory of their sons. But the night ended with the loved one all alone, performing "December 4th," which lays out a mythified version of his life, from birth to drug-dealing to rapping. The song - and the concert - finished with a defiant (but also beseeching) final couplet: "If you can't respect that, your whole perspective is wack/Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black." With that, the stage darkened and Jay-Z disappeared; as exhausted fans filed out, some of them seemed as if they missed their hero already. Jay-Z should enjoy his retirement; he's certainly earned it. He claims to be "in heavy, heavy negotiations" to move the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn. But let's hope basketball doesn't monopolize too much of his afterlife. After all, he has a resurrection to plan. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/arts/mus...1d840915f7e728f

How to Be a Pop Star Using the Missy Method November 30, 2003 By KELEFA SANNEH When Missy Elliott released "Supa Dupa Fly," in 1997, it seemed like a fluke: an unskinny woman from an unhip state (Virginia) sang and rapped and giggled and whispered her way through an hour of space-age hip-hop and R & B. Six years later, Ms. Elliott has become a franchise: an idiosyncratic star who also happens to be one of hip-hop's most reliable hitmakers. After stumbling slightly with "Da Real World," in 1999, she has released three dazzling CD's in the last three years; the third, "This Is Not a Test!" (Elektra), came out on Tuesday. Peers praise her and critics adore her. And no cultural history of this (as yet unnamed) decade would be complete if it didn't include at least two of her hits, "Get Ur Freak On" and "Work It." Yet it's easy to avoid taking Ms. Elliott seriously. She's not a virtuoso. She doesn't make grand statements. Her concerts are nothing special. She doesn't seem tormented by her fame. She never broods, at least not publicly. In short, she doesn't behave the way a serious pop musician is supposed to. Ms. Elliott, 32, is a new kind of pop star, and her counterintuitive approach is looking more and more like the new conventional wisdom - a deceptively simple five-point program that might be called the Missy Method. STEP 1: GET HELP Forget about the do-it-yourself mythology of rock 'n' roll: pop stars are by definition collaborators, and no one collaborates as well as Ms. Elliott. When she was still in high school, she befriended the brilliant producer Timbaland, and they made "Supa Dupa Fly" as a producer-songwriter team: he composed avant-garde electronic beats, pairing glassy synthesizer beds with jittery stutter-step rhythms, and she found ways to turn them into songs, adding playful choruses, lazy raps and giddy nonverbal interjections that echoed the sounds on the tracks. "This Is Not a Test!" finds the Missy-Timbaland partnership stronger than ever. Some of the tracks clatter: "Pump It Up" wittily recreates the rattling sound of a huge bass line coming through a weak car stereo. And some of them bump: on "Let Me Fix My Weave," he gives Ms. Elliott a two-note bass line to play with, then adds precisely four notes of flute. And Ms. Elliott is emerging as a great producer herself: on "Dats What I'm Talkin About," she lays down a languid, woozy thump, then invites R. Kelly to come over and dish out delirious falsetto. Elsewhere, Nelly, Monica and Mary J. Blige show up, but this doesn't feel like stunt casting - it feels more like a group celebration. STEP 2: GET INTO THE GROOVES Albums are overrated. Maybe the music industry is just figuring that out, but Ms. Elliott has known it for years. Her CD's sound more like mixtapes - there's no real theme or story line, just an astonishing series of beats and jokes and hooks. She thinks small, not big, delighting in the details: sounds, beats, grooves. She raps a lot on this album, but what's just as memorable is the way she multitracks her voice to create an ever-changing backdrop of breaths and sighs and mumblings. That said, "This Is Not a Test!" doesn't hit quite as hard as her 2002 album, "Under Construction," in part because this one takes a minute to warm up: the first two tracks are defiantly melody-free, and they might have worked better nearer the middle. But just about everything sounds like a potential hit: it's no small compliment to say that listening to this CD is a bit like listening to the radio. STEP 3: GET NASTY Whoever said you couldn't build a first-rate career on dirty jokes? Like a lot of female stars, Ms. Elliott sees a link between independence and sexual assertiveness. But she's also self-possessed enough to send up her own come-hither posturing. "I'm Really Hot" sounds as if it's going to be a seduction song, but it turns out to be a rapper's boast, although she does find time to flaunt what she's got: "Jiggle, jiggle, jangle/ Watch how my gluteus dangle." She also seems more interested in satisfying her own appetites than in whetting other people's. She makes this abundantly clear during "Toyz," an exuberant (and, fittingly, self-produced) disco track about a woman who makes the happy discovery that her boyfriend is obsolete. STEP 4: GET RIPPED OFF After "Supa Dupa Fly," Ms. Elliott and Timbaland found that their herky-jerky style was showing up all over the place. At first, they got angry: on "Beat Biters," from Ms. Elliott's second album, they made it clear that they didn't consider imitation to be a form of flattery. But imitation soon gave way to more inventive forms of theft: "Get Ur Freak On," in particular, lived on in an endless series of unauthorized remixes from around the world. People felt emboldened to treat Ms. Elliott's songs as open-source musical code, making their own adjustments and modifications. By now, Ms. Elliott has learned to embrace the rip-off artists. The new album's lead single, "Pass That Dutch," is one of those melody-free tracks near the beginning. It's not much more than a hard beat, some frantic hand claps and a one-note bass line that sounds like someone hitting a buzzer. In short, this is a track that's just begging to be tinkered with; it won't really be finished until D.J.'s and producers have built their own songs on top of it. And it seems that Ms. Elliott has co-opted at least one of her flatterers. A few months after "Get Ur Freak On," the reggae screamer Elephant Man released a song based on a suspiciously similar beat, with a chorus that went: "Bring the war on! Bring the war on!" Elephant Man makes a memorable appearance on the new album, adding a piratical verse to a song called, "Keep It Movin." STEP 5: GET OVER YOURSELF The fifth and final step is also the hardest. Most hip-hop performers get increasingly disenchanted with the hip-hop mainstream as they get older. Eminem retreated into his own petulant world, André 3000 from OutKast took a sharp left turn toward jazz and funk and Jay-Z says he's about to quit. But while Ms. Elliott has always been an eccentric, she never lets her confidence harden into self-righteousness. On "Wake Up," she sends a friendly message to everyone living a lifestyle that might be described as small pimpin': "And your rims don't spin? It's alright/ Gotta wear them jeans again? It's alright." Then she cheerfully lets Jay-Z butt in and brag about his "thousand-dollar shirt," which only makes her own message come through more clearly. As usual, she ends her album with a gospel track, then returns with Ms. Blige for a final send-off. Ms. Elliott delivers a brief homily: "We accept the name `thug,' like that's fly/ See how they covered our eyes?" But then she does what rappers never do: she stops short, announces, "I'm done talking," and hands the microphone to Ms. Blige, who sings the final notes (a brief R & B version of "Rapper's Delight") while Ms. Elliott heads offstage - already plotting, no doubt, for next year. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/arts/mus...8547f5ada5b3aac

lol, she probably would. hey, if he bought it, he couldnt have downloaded it at the time-you're absolutely right - its his!

After he shot the man in cold blood? I think it should be returned to Yoko Ono and locked up.

Jim is great--he doesn't pretend to have all the answers--he just believes that the questions need to be researched further. I have no doubt Oswald was involved. But I think Tippit might have been as well. And there seemed to be alot of military and fbi officials around... I think the assassination had all to do with the mob and the cubans. There is an article currently featured on salon that basically says the same thing. In terms of the RFK, a friend of mine's uncle, who wrote speeches for RFK, told me he was run out of town by some thugs, days after the RFK murder. A student at the UCLA Film School, who was working on A Making of the President for PBS, and was there that night at the Ambassador, had his footage stolen from UCLA. And then there were the interrogators of the witnesses--former CIA officials--who harassed the witnesses when they told something other than the party line--I can find the documentary that theyre featured in if you are interested in. And finally, there were more bullets found in the wall, than it was possible to be in Sirhans gun. I have no idea who was behind the assassination--but even the coroner testified that the fatal shot did not come from Sirhan--this is because the fatal shot came from behind, not in front.

LOL.

Stevie Ray Vaughan can fiddle that guitar.. Rainbow--I have a very raw bootleg of the Stone's C*ckSucker Blues..speaking of collectors stuff--any takers? But yeah, Red House is pretty impressive stuff.. In fact, the new album that is going to be released (see new releases section on this site) includes: The Hendrix classic “Red House,” one of Hendrix’s most forthright excursions into electric blues, will get two treatments on the disc: John Lee Hooker performs on a version recorded before his death in June 2001, and Prince checks in with a rendition (titled “Purple House” for the occasion).

Thanx, dude!

I assume Sir Elton would do the score? Yellow Brick Road...

Take that shit back to russia - circa stalin era - like 1945. No kid is gonna play this game

Don't you love the age we live in? Nothing is sacred anymore... :)

He cant see it yet. He may reply in the WelcomeMods thread And how come his post on the Japanese raiding pirateds didnt work? Any ideas?

Hey guys, Mr. Jip still cannot see the Moderator's Corner.

Yes, very cool. And I liked the message!

Are you a Mississsippi dude?

Method77, which one these tracks did you like? Track Listings 1. Radar ? Car 2. Al-pha X - First Transmission 3. Christophe Goze feat. Nelio - Keep on 4. Jah Wobble - Hayati 5. Us Conductors - Under Palms (Bar de Lune Original Mix) 6. Sound Simulator - Kanun 7. Al-pha X - Mad K 8. Radar - Arabiant 9. Christophe Goze - Ja Vidi 10. Radar - Your Song 11. Al-pha X - Hojar 12. US Conductors - The Unveiling 13. Al-pha X - Mi Corazon (Smokers Mix) 14. Radar ? Distance >just testing

Hey Method77, what is a 'customized member title'? :)

lol, blasphemy! you realize mr. jip that rainbow is a crackshot with a rifle. I'd lay how if i was you - this is sacred territory :)

For new listeners, what would you say stood out in this album--what new musical inroads were they making at the time? Was the Yes album out yet--these bands sort of treading similar territory, werent they?

So, for the new people out there, what would you have them listen to from Queen's repetoire, that stlill holds up today?

At the time, there music was quite progressive. Not sure how Elton John would complment their sound. I think Rainbow is right--without their front man, they could never be Queen again.

Welcome aboard guys!

Nice post - these songs are well worth nothing.

LOL. Now for you folks out there, Rainbow is the resident expert on all things to do with Queen. I thought this little snipped of gossip would get his blood going this am.