Category: Music

The original beat and lyrics from Fat Joe’s Represent album.

The DJ Premier’s version. That is all.

I mean it’s just so vastly superior in every way, yet it’s exactly the same lyrics, the same voice track. But the work in the intro –always does much more than what you think-, the perfect blue tone provided by Primo’s mad sample surgeon skills,  the groove from the beat, mixed with Fat Joe’s voice… I don’t know, all of sudden the shit is definitely not a joke anymore.

Somehow –oh wait, maybe it’s because I’m producing music too- but somehow it’s not great to see that the dude talking or the girl singing gets all the credit while the one building the sonic landscape actually IS the true craftsman/craftswoman pumping blood in a song. Always.

For real.

So Ping is bad. Shocker!

I’m taking an example with Sean. Sean is a friend and when he’s writing stuff on his blog about philosophy of life or feelings about behaviors, I pretty much agree 100% every time to what he says. Because reading about core values like how you see Life or how to take advantage of it, I feel respectful and ready to help or do whatever it is with someone I respect like Sean.

We’re connected through multiple social networks.

We both love music so much that we’ve been deeply involved in it, him from running an indie rock label to designing covers, me creating all my music by myself and self-publishing it since 10 years. We don’t listen to the same music at all. AT ALL.

Our musical tastes are irrelevant in the connected world and I find that amazing looking at how close I feel from his brain you know? And it happens with a lot of friends.

Music doesn’t say anything about who you are now. It says something about what you’ve been through, which is something secondary in friendship and social networks. What you needed as a soundtrack for your Life says quite a lot because in relation on where you were and when, it shows in what spirit you were and music is almost the only thing that can track your mood and feelings. But even if you shared it or that you’re sharing the current one with someone doesn’t mean you value the same things, buy the same stuff etc. Companies can’t use that to market anything, barely some music.

If a friend is recommending some music in a genre I’m not familiar with, I will trust him more than any algorithm or other automatic process. And the more people like music, the less they need recommendation from a software, they have friends and are actively and precisely searching by themselves.

I think it’s really misleading because music is a very personal thing so exposing it should make us able to find some people “like us” where companies could invest on that. But relationship is more than just sharing a spirit/mood for a moment. I believe we all go through the entire palette in our lives, at different moment and with different bands and sounds, but it’s the same: love, rebellion, independence, hedonism, experiment… It’s just something human, we all share that.

So filtering people through this huge common denominator that is music is saying pretty much nothing about people, even if you do it well (last.fm). So if like Ping you’re also doing it wrong…  Just die, merci.

The Dust Brothers.

I was reading this interview of brother E.Z. Mike in Waxpoetic and couldn’t stop but think that Funk is so central and yet so not understood.

E.Z. Mike did with King Gizmo the insanely funky and acclaimed Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique, Beck’s Odelay and Fight Club soundtrack among others.

Question:

Waxpoetic: “I’ve run into a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds who really dig the Fight Club soundtrack. Along with the movie, it’s really become a cult classic as an instrumental record. Do you feel that record now?”

E.Z. Mike: […] To me, the funk is the core of everything I do. To me, the thing I focus on is the bass and the beat. To me, that’s the driving force of music at least [the music] I want to hear. So I always start there; that’s the foundation. The cool thing is, with funk as the foundation I mean, it’s incredible how versatile the funk is: you can throw anything on top of it and it works. […]

That’s why as a music producer from the 2000s I did start to dig funk in its original flavor from the 70s to 80s instead of wanting to buy the exact same sample machine of some famous hip-hop producer or stuff like that.

People may think that I appreciate and love funk and soul music just for the black side of it but that’s not my first argument. The argument is musical: funk is the foundation of almost all the music of the last decades. It evolved to hip-hop – like it or not, it’s the most international music ever, it’s everywhere-, it gave soundtracks that funkyness, it is the base of house music, JPop etc. It almost gave birth to reggae too (the US RnB and jazz were the biggest influences on Jamaïca well-known music).

The versatility of production on funk records is seriously quite unmatched. There is no music with that wide choice of how the record sounds, from heavy bass to heavy horns to heavy guitar saturated or not, heavy keyboards, synthetizers, to heavy beats with all the gradient between them all together. It’s truly amazing.

Picture of the funk. Keywords: Sun, urban, dirty, searching, exciting, cool.

So when listening to Paul’s Boutique or whatever in the 90s sample music I was always really frustrated to only have a fragment, a loop, two bars of it. I wanted all the funk and nothing but the root, the original. I was always thinking “there must be a lot more that this breakbeat which is brilliant but I want to listen to more. Btw who the fuck is Bob James???”.

There is so much to learn about music and its effectiveness with funk:

“Funk utilized the same extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths. However, unlike bebop jazz, with its complex, rapid-fire chord changes, funk virtually abandoned chord changes, creating static single chord vamps with little harmonic movement, but with a complex and driving rhythmic feel.

The chords used in funk songs typically imply a dorian or mixolydian mode, as opposed to the major or natural minor tonalities of most popular music. Melodic content was derived by mixing these modes with the blues scale.”

I mean funk is simply a lighter and rhythm based jazz music. It’s like it tends to be the most efficient way to make you wanna move physically or “active in your head” using music knowledge from bebop which is one of the most expressive and complex music ever created. That’s why it works so well, body and soul at the same time. It comes from there.

And yet funk is either consider as gimmicky, soul-less (compared to rock like U2 maybe, but it’s less boring) or meaning dancefloor and bottom bell pants.

It’s way more than that. You should dig more my friend.

Trent Reznor did write a post on what to do to sell music today with the net, the clouds and all.

“Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.”

I’m glad I realized that years ago. That’s why I have always been giving my music on high quality compressed files with a rss feed (the so called podcast system). If I search my music on the net, a lot of Chinese websites appear and are giving my music away too. Maybe they get some money from ads but I’m happy to see dozens, hundreds of download of MY stuff.

He continues and this is where it gets interesting:

“Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special – make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan.”

Beastie Boys do that with the help of Topspin. Vinyls, digipack CDs, t-shirts you name it.

But I always find that it lacks something, from a consumer and technology point of view: multichannel. Listening to music when it blasts from the four corner of your room is amazing, no question about that. I’m doing it since years now and everytime I get back to plain old school stereo, it’s just sad. I know I do sound and music and for a lot o people it’s not worth it, as HD video is not really impressive for me. But still very enjoyable. Same thing!

So why bands and music producers around the world are not playing this high-end card, releasing multichannel remixed albums (not on physical support of course, because it’s really expensive whether it’s DVD-A or SACD)? Why not trying to break through with innovation and technology? A lot of artists in history did just that, technology has made some albums timeless: Pink Floyd, MJ, The Beatles, Genesis, Herbie Hancock etc all used that to go further and make money. Better sound, sounds you have never heard before, not just more convenient or gimmicky stuff like we do today (mp3s, ringtones, autotune).

I’m only listening to stereo files converted to 6 channels dolby digital on-the-fly (thanks Auzentech) and yet it’s way better than 2 channels. So immersive. So 3D. So not FLAT.

Opportunities to go further in sound and audio experience are tremendous! While the video industry pushes hard to have consumers going HD or even UHD, in the audio industry it’s simply a mess, thanks to patents (yeah Dolby/DTS I’m looking at you) and music labels totally deaf to what is going on. They can’t learn: the biggest success ever in the AudioVideo industry is the DVD Video, when everybody was behind ONE format. DVD Audio vs SACD? Everybody lose. HD-DVD vs BR? Everybody lose. The DVD Video is the less DRM’ed of them all and guess what? It’s the most successful physical support ever. I don’t expect those industries to understand the value of multichannel sound files, offering some real standards (speakers connection, file format) and how it’s the future of music.

I know, the AudioVideo hardware industry doesn’t want to go physical support-less because it would kill a big eco-system of retailers, players sellers, distribution deals etc. As a consumer/producer, I totally don’t care, I want what is possible today. Now.

Today you have some devices letting you to stream music around your house, we experience multichannel audio since Fantasia in 1940 (!!), we have cheap multichannel sound cards and speakers systems, why bands are still selling digital download of 2channels MP3s saying it’s top-notch and complaining about piracy? Get consumers something really better that what you find on p2p, push them to get legal by using innovation! In the digital format there’s more than just mp3s or FLACs files.

People doing music should think about getting noticed and expand their future. As respectful as I am for Vinyl junkies, it’s not going anywhere in this massive digital world and it’s not affordable for artists beginning their career when multichannel audio is possible with a little budget, even if it’s a lot of work (3 times more speakers). We only need more standards and less bullshit. In the audio world it’s a curse. A very slow one.

Allez un peu de zouze quoi.

Donc la loi bidule et tout ce tintamarre, ça m’saoule. Il y avait un truc à faire pour que ça n’arrive pas; non pas ne pas voter, mais ne pas valider les offres légales de merde, toujours basées sur l’ancien système extrèmement compliqué et bancal, pas du tout légitime au vu du tout numérique mais quand même glorifié par tous les magasins online (ils ne devraient prendre aucun artiste ayant un contrat avec un éditeur). C’est à cause d’elles que les majors ont pu s’appuyer et chuchoter très fort dans l’oreille du pouvoir “s’il y a des offres légales alors les vilains pirates, serrez les tous !!”.

Tout ça c’est de la merde. Les amoureux de musique s’en contrecognent ils download, goûtent et achètent plus de musique qu’aucune génération ne l’a fait, malgré l’accroissement du divertissement. Bien sur les majors et labels touchent moins mais on s’en fout, la musique va bien, la musique est partout.

Donc je vous offre une petite compilation de saison pour fêter tout ça. Before Summertime.. Parfaite douceur et bande-son du mois qui nous réchauffe et nous donne le sourire. A deguster à volume moyen en chillant au soleil.

Soul Jazz Funk Bossa, rare groovy tunes, nothing more. By David “Big Foot” Quazar.

Playlist (47mn 21s):

Weldon Irvine – Sister Sanctified 1972

Eddie Russ – Zaius 1976

Max B – Possession 1978

Chriss Joss – Drink Me Hot 2004

Tosca – Wonderful 2003

Daniel R – Mi Casa 2002

Baz – Never Ending Story 2002

John Beltran – Dia Brioso 2004

Patricia Marx – Burning Luv 2004

Synthesis – Feeling 1976

Fabiano Orchestra – Pointe Des Châteaux 1980

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tdcnwad2emk

Enjoy!

Urban Dance Squad Alienated, album Persona Nongrata 1994

J’ai un souvenir énorme rattaché à ce morceau: un tour de vélo en seine et marne, un walkman à K7 avec un EQ trois bandes sur les oreilles fonçant à la cabine téléphonique du village suivant pour appeller mon amoureuse. Même que j’avais prévu des pièces de dix balles au cas où la cabine ne prenait pas les cartes à puces.

Quand l’album tombait sur cette piste je sais pas… Je ne comprenais pas vraiment l’anglais à l’époque mais “alienated” c’est facile à capter quand même, je me sentais concerné (la guitare torturée et la rythmique lourde sont fantastiques) sans vraiment savoir pourquoi. Le feeling.

Extrait des paroles (name dropping ftw):

Humans so shady, man it amazes me
How I can’t lose my cool and snipe like wesley
Especially when testing me, god I might stun ‘em
Got somethin’ in common, then I run from ‘em
Alienated, alienated,
People got me wrong man, a millionated
So complicated, so frustrated,
Wish I got faded, alienated

But I got to keep my head up.