6 posts tagged “hip hop”

There's a lot of interesting things in this video on the hip hop scene in Virginia, featuring Timbaland and Clipse and some other acts, but a standout to me was Chad Hugo from the Neptunes talking about being influenced by seeing Stevie Wonder with a Synclavier sampling synth on the Cosby show in the 80s. That part starts right about 5:00 in:

In the clip, Chad's being interviewed by Kenna, whom you know from Malcolm Gladwell using him as an example of failure in the beginning of Blink. Aw.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Naturally, I had to go to YouTube and find the video of Stevie. YouTube didn't let me down; The clip is amusing, not least because holy shit could you get away with some cheesy stuff on TV 20 years ago.

YouTube - Stevie and his Synclavier on the Cosby Show (1986)

And then finally, the reason the story resonated with me in the first place -- it's one memory of Sesame Street that stuck with me vividly to this very day. Herbie Hancock pulling virtually the same stunt on Sesame Street, around the same time or maybe a few years earlier. (It also introduced Tatiana Ali, later of The Fresh Prince.)

YouTube - Herbie Hancock Demonstrates the Fairlight on Sesame Street

For my (zero dollars) money, Jay Smooth is the best video blogger on the web. Witness the launch of Ill Doctrine. LOLCats? Check. Ze Frank name-check? Check? Credible rapping? Check? Actual editing? Check. Sooo good.

Ever run for office?  (School, club, organization, politics, etc.)  Did you get elected?

I ran for a buncha different things when I was in school. I don't remember if I just ran or was actually elected to student council when I was in middle school, but that year our class elected a special ed kid to student council as a joke that (I felt, at least) was largely at his expense. I found that whole episode so disturbing and typical that I never ran for any of our class offices again.

Gavel

But! I did participate pretty actively in the Model Legislature program run by the YMCA. It's different than the (better-known, I think) Model U.N. program that a lot of schools do, though I participated in that as well. In Model Legislature, we played the role of legislators for our state, so kids from all over Pennsylvania, where I grew up, all came to Harrisburg and we even got to sit in the actual seats of the state capitol. There were a lot of really good kids in the program, and it was one of my favorite experiences from high school, but I'll just share the anecdotes you would all appreciate.

• My sophomore year of high school, the Model Legislature program introduced lobbyists for the first time. I immediately signed up to be one, representing women's issues. (Seriously!) Yes, I was the first influence-peddling, silver-tongued perverter of the democratic process in the history of that state's august faux-legislative body. And I did it for the chicks.
• At the end of my junior year, I ran for Governor, a term I would have served as a senior if I had won. I think there were four or five serious candidates, including one guy whom I was friends with (I forget his name; it's been 15 years) who was actually the son of a real-life state legislator. He and I both lost (my performance in the final debate was unimpressive, since I'd almost completely lost my voice campaigning) but my friend Hans was the Editor-in-Chief of the Model Newspaper, which oversaw the elections, and I think he told me I placed third or fourth. NOT LAST! :)
• Since I wasn't Governor, I was eligible to run for a different office my senior year. That time, I killed. I ran for Speaker of the House against four or five other candidates. Instead of a debate, we each had a few minutes to present the case for our candidacies, and for the closing line of my speech, I stepped from behind the podium I was standing at and said, "and my final qualification is that I'm not just wearing purple pants, I'm purple on the inside." I won in a landslide.
• There were a lot of weird scheduling problems that year, so I ended up having to kill time in the actual chambers of the Pennsylvania Capitol in front of a few hundred high school kids all in formal dress, growing increasingly restless. I had a gavel, which was largely ineffective, but being way up high on the speaker's podium made it really easy to command everyone's attention. So, during the course of the long weekend, I carried out the duties of my office by singing my acapella rendition of the introduction to Whitney Houston's cover of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman", having the congressional pages deliver notes to my girlfriend, and having everyone wave their hands in the air while chanting "Hip hop hooray, hoooo, heeeey, hoooo" because Naughty By Nature was very popular back then.

I'm pretty sure nobody's elected me to anything since then.

Every time I think there's no new ground for hip hop to cover, I find something new. The most recent amazing YouTube find is Stephanie Rosenthal, a figure skater who did her short routine to Herbie Hancock's "Rockit". The commentary sucks, but she's clearly someone who's just grown up as a hip hop fan, and that's awesome to see in such a, um... staid sport.

White girl from Salt Lake City getting down, at least as much as the sport allows. Nice.

Herbie's still doing his thing, too, of course. There's a recent live version of Rockit that's not too bad, but I can't find it through Vox's search. All this showed up while I was trying to find Herbie's performance of Rockit at the Grammies, which blew my mind as a kid. Instead, I got a horrible, horrible "synthesizer medley" from the '85 Grammies that I thought I'd somehow forgotten about. Then I remembered I had been in India during the Grammies that year, and so I missed... this:

Jason linked to a great Ben McGrath story in the New Yorker, but I was bit bothered by some of the flippantly dismissive stuff in the article. The piece is about Gravy getting shot in front of Hot 97, and about how the carpenters who own the Hot 97 building are fussing about it, even though they're mobbed up gangstas themselves.

But the parts that got me were the en-passant disses, like the description of Kevin Liles.

Two weeks had passed since the big night, and Gravy and I were sitting in a spacious thirty-second-floor office in Rockefeller Center belonging to Kevin Liles, the executive vice-president of the Warner Music Group. (Liles co-wrote the Milli Vanilli song “Girl You Know It’s True.”)

Okay, yeah, Liles co-wrote GYKIT. But the thing is, (1) that's a great song! It's just tainted by the Milli Vanilli association, and (2) Liles has done a *shitload* more than just writing that song. A quick glance at his biography yields stuff like "From an unpaid internship in 1991, Liles soared though the ranks to become President of Def Jam Music Group in 1998 at the tender age of 30." and he wrote a book on how the hip hop generation can succeed.

Now, to those who think I focus too much on race, I'm throwin' ya a bone: I don't think this is due to racism. I think it's due to lazy writing and a willingness to go for the easy joke at someone's expense. But how deeply can McGrath be living in hip hop culture if he writes an article about Hot 97, rappers getting shot, pointless beef, and Brooklyn, but misses the fact that the head of the carpenter's Local 20 is named Christopher Wallace?

Now that's the easy joke he should have gone for.

As the Jay-Z of blogging, I feel obligated to share this HP commercial featuring the Jay-Z of hip hop.

Especially because I'm really enjoying Deja Vu, the latest single featuring Jay's lady Beyonce. No, not that one.