“Before Spotify solved the problem with music forever, esoteric taste was a measure of commitment. When every band was more or less difficult to hear by virtue of its distance from a major label, what you liked was a rough indicator of the resources you had invested in music. If you liked the New York City squat-punk band Choking Victim, it was a sign you had flipped through enough records and endured enough party conversations to hear about Choking Victim. The bands you listened to conveyed not just the particular elements of culture you liked but also how much you cared about culture itself.”
Tag Archives: music
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Ready to Die turns 20 on Saturday, and even at a moment when hip-hop is particularly taken with such milestones, this is (fittingly) an enormous one. Ready to Die is not the greatest rap album ever made, and probably isn’t even the greatest rap album made in 1994—it sags at times with superfluous skits, some of its production touches have aged awkwardly (congrats to that whistling synth hook on “Big Poppa” for owing 20 years’ worth of royalties to The Chronic), and Sean Combs’ somnambulant hype-man routine only grows more irritating with time.
But it is quite possibly the most important, if only for the reason that its maker transformed the music like no rapper before or since. Biggie Smalls didn’t alter the hip-hop landscape so much as crater it, leaving behind an unfillable void and an unhealable wound. The Notorious B.I.G. is the greatest rapper who ever lived in the same way that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived: Some people may argue but they are usually Luddite classicists, incorrigible homers, or hipster contrarians. Seventeen years after his murder at the age of 24, he is of a piece with Miles, Dylan, the Beatles, Aretha, artists whose influence is so immense it ascends into a sort of fundamental sonic iconography, the never-ending soundtrack to everything. A world without KRS-One or Ice Cube or Jay Z would be unimaginably impoverished, but a world without Biggie Smalls is simply unimaginable.
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“These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?
This doesn’t happen with other genres. There’s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There’s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn’t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion.”
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While concert soloists are commonly expected to perform from memory, it is very rare for a chamber ensemble to do so. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Kolisch Quartet built a reputation on performances free of sheet music, a high-wire act few ensembles have copied. For a group to perform without printed music requires both thorough preparation and absolute trust among players. “Everyone needs to know in advance not just their own part, but everybody else’s as well,” Mr. Sirota said.
Yet today more string quartets are taking up the challenge, part of a generation for whom independence from the printed page is only part of a wider search for depth and freedom of musical expression. In 2010 the Parker Quartet gave a run of Haydn performances by heart. Last November the JACK Quartet performed a work by Georg Friedrich Haas in complete darkness.
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It is a staggering sum for a fiddle: Its $45 million base price is more than enough to have saved both New York City Opera, which has folded, and the San Diego Opera, which is also closing because of money woes, or to buy several hundred top-of-the-line concert-quality grand pianos. And it underscores the way collectors have driven up the price of rare instruments in recent decades, with inflation far outpacing, say, musicians’ wages.
Violas are sometimes thought of as the unloved stepsisters of violins — rarely in the spotlight, played by fewer famous virtuosos, with less music composed specially for them. But it is precisely their status as second-class citizens that has made this viola so valuable: While there are roughly 600 violins made by Antonio Stradivari, only around 10 of his violas are known to have survived intact. That makes this instrument, the “Macdonald” viola, rare indeed.
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“The virtues of simplicity are many, and also too easily dismissed. In hip-hop especially, where complexity is too often equated with progress, the straightforward can get a bad rap. And yet it’s music like this, distilled down to first principles, that moves the genre, and gives it many of its signature moments.”
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There’s an argument to be made that T-Pain should have just stopped using Auto-Tune and figured out some other way to stand out—that, sometimes, it’s worth listening to the haters. But what has made T-Pain most resentful since his fall from the top was seeing certain artists use Auto-Tune and not get criticized; rather, they were celebrated as innovators in a way that T-Pain never was. Chief among these were Kanye West, who employed Auto-Tune to great acclaim on his 2008 album, “808s and Heartbreaks,” and, more recently, the Atlanta-based rapper/singer Future, whose use of Auto-Tune has won him the adoration of critics as well as incredible success on the charts.
In an interview this past January with Vladimir Lyubovny, a d.j. whose popular YouTube channel VladTV is sort of like rap’s “Larry King Live,” T-Pain talked about being brought in as a consultant during the recording of “808s and Heartbreaks.” At one point during the session, Kanye wrote a song about how dumb all of T-Pain’s ideas were. He then proceeded, T-Pain said, to make “everybody in the studio join in with him to sing, like, ‘T-Pain’s shit is weak.’ ” In the same interview, T-Pain recalled encountering Future’s brother at a Thanksgiving fundraiser and telling him he was eager to collaborate with Future. But instead of offering to pass on the message, the guy looked at T-Pain and said to him, “My brother would never fucking work with you. Fuck you and everything you stand for.”
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You can watch a video from 2006, Pharrell guesting on BET’s Rap City, promoting his solo record, achieving peak Pharrell-ness in the form of bejeweled nerd-icon: On the show he freestyles for a while and then fumbles in his pocket, finally pulling out a Rubik’s Cube, covered in diamonds on all six sides. He holds it out to the camera. It rotates and gleams in the light.
Just a quick aside here, about the diamond-covered Rubik’s Cube: It was so great when Pharrell had the diamond-covered Rubik’s Cube. Over lunch in Hollywood, I ask if he still has it, and he says yes, but these days it doesn’t come out much. “I don’t wear big, crazy stuff” anymore, he says.
What do you think about it now? Does it make you feel awesome, that you had a diamond Rubik’s Cube?
“No, I was out of my mind. It was ridiculous. But that’s how caught up I was.” You can leave it to your son. “Here’s a diamond Rubik’s Cube. This is your inheritance.”
He gives me a skeptical look. “No, hopefully his inheritance is a great education and a positive outlook on life,” he says. Then he stands up to walk across the street and get a cupcake.
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“Consensus generally favors Andre over Big Boi. This is a fatal misunderstanding of their partnership. If Andre steered more than half the journey on the first two records, Big Boi caught up by Aquemini. His flow is as liquid and low to the ground as a busted fire hydrant. Several hooks, including “Rosa Parks”, belong to him. If Andre is the interstellar satellite, Big Boi is the spy on the streets. The wildest indulgences have checks and balances. You need Big Boi to have Andre. The poet and the player was the tagline; the truth is that you never knew who was who.”
shaun james bockert 