Showing posts with label lil wayne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lil wayne. Show all posts
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Microcosmic Adventures in La-La Land
How big of a deal is Beyonce Knowles? A really fucking big deal. Sure, you could cite her success with Destiny's Child or her stellar solo debut in 2003 (remember 'Crazy in Love,' 'Me, Myself and I,' and even 'Daddy'?), but for the sake of this post, I'm going to stay fairly recent and focus exclusively on Sasha Fierce—namely, 'Sweet Dreams.'
Dedicated readers of Muzjiks know my stance on mashups. In general, I consider them the lowest form of music, except in cases where the artist takes two or more original pieces of pop music and fuses them to create an entirely new song that challenges our ear to decide whether the original is the predominant version in our mind any longer. Such is the case for The White Panda's 'Stuntin' Like My Energy' and the majority of Girl Talk's output (case in point: 'Here's the Thing'). However, 'Sweet Dreams' has gone above and beyond the mashup treatment, something that just about every top 40 hit of the past four decades has gotten at this point. That is, 'Sweet Dreams' has been sampled, covered, and altogether transformed several times over.
Allow me a brief digression: dubstep godfather Burial has taken such universally recognizable songs as Christina Aguilera's 'Beautiful,' Destiny's Child's 'Emotion,' and Massive Attack's (of House fame) 'Teardop' and completely reworked them into brooding, experiencing-the-inception-of-the-apocalypse-in-the-dark-alley-next-to-a-British-club soundscapes. It is this relative of the mashup culture which I'd argue is the primary progressive force in popular music today—not only is it cognizant and respectful of the past, but it simultaneously pushes pop forward.
Jigga's got the hottest chick in the game wearing his chain, and her 'Sweet Dreams' received the aforementioned Burial-esque treatment. From psych-rockers (and Jaguar promoters) The Big Pink to dubstep behemoth Kingdom to the Great Weezy F, 'Sweet Dreams' has transcended the scope and reach that one could ever imagine a single three-and-a-half-minute song achieving. The Big Pink covered it and made it an atmospheric, drugged-out, introspective anthem of angst and waking-up-the-next-morning-with-the-taste-of-vomit-in-your-mouth-and-a-wholly-unfulfilling-cluelessness-of-who's-asleep-next-to-you. Kingdom offers a glimpse of what happened the night before in the club when that sweet dream hadn't yet morphed into the beautiful nightmare it would become. And Weezy—well, he and heiress to the throne/rapper equivalent of Beyonce Nicki Minaj just command 'Sweet Dreams' and have their way with it on No Ceilings.
Beyonce Knowles' 'Sweet Dreams': a microcosm of where pop is and where it's headed...
The Big Pink: Sweet Dreams (cover) [alt]
Kingdom: Fogs [alt]
Lil Wayne (ft. Nicki Minaj): Sweet Dreams [alt]
EDIT 9/4: It's Beyonce's birthday today. She turns 29. Totally didn't plan that! Weird.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
MuzjiksRx (8.31): Second Hit
Disclaimer: Muzjiks neither condones nor partakes in the consumption of illegal substances. However, Muzjiks also wishes to cater to the widest spectrum of music listeners possible, and it's undeniable that marijuana culture is a sizable part of genres spanning from hip hop to reggae to psychedelic rock and beyond. Enjoy the following tunes responsibly.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
What the game's been missing
I was having a conversation with an old friend of Muzjiks, the Color Commentator, about how unbelievable it is that Lil Wayne was able to do what he did with The Carter III. Despite the pirating of the internet leak, the general migration away from physical formats toward digital, the proliferation of music blogs that provide easy access to mp3s for even the most computer illiterate, and all the other socioeconomic factors contributing to the death of the CD, Mr. Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. sold one million copies in the first week. That's simply unheard of nowadays. Could you imagine if—all other things being equal in terms of public music taste—Weezy dropped C3 in the '90s? There's no doubt in my mind that we'd be talking about it in the same context as Thriller and Dark Side of the Moon in terms of album sales.
Even so, like any album with that kind of sales success, C3 was timely, full of genius singles, but ultimately just a downright solid album from start to finish. Case and point: play just about any song off of that release at a party—even non-singles like "3 Peat," "Phone Home," or "Let the Beat Build"—and I promise you that over 95% of people will know the lyrics. That's why you don't see artists like Soulja Boy or Jay Sean selling records like Wayne. Sure, they'll go platinum, but they won't reach the stratospheric heights that Wayne did because, when it comes down to it, the collective ears of the public still want an album.
Another illustrative example: If you had a pulse in 2004, you knew J-Kwon's "Tipsy." The song was massive—you'd hear it four times just flipping through radio stations on any given car ride. Now, just for shits and giggles, check out this tracklist to the album on which "Tipsy" appeared. I dare you to tell me truthfully that you've heard of any other song on there. Although J-Kwon has been relegated to the mashup treatment and one-hit-wonder status, in the summer of 2004, he was it. No one bigger in the music biz than this fake ID-toting rapper who experienced a meteoric rise to fame. How many albums did he sell, you ask? 1.6 million to date.
Arguably the crowning achievement of C3 is the unrelenting "A Milli." It's gotten remixed after mashuped after freestyled over the past two years, but few ever recapture the song's original charm. However, with the virtuosic Flying Lotus on the boards, a helium-saturated Weezy is introduced to a fumbling beat that's kept from collapsing on itself by spitfire rhymes alone. You almost think that if Wayne stops rapping, somehow the whole track will devolve into cacophony. And the best part? The masterful FlyLo tests it out, dissolving the beat entirely at the 1:31 mark. The listener wonders whether the Best Rapper Alive has failed, whether he was unable to keep all the instrumental plates spinning, but then, at 1:43, he cobbles the beat back together with a triumphant "You ain't got shit." Did you really think Dr. Carter was going to lose a patient?
Lil Wayne: A Milli (Flying Lotus Remix) [alt]
