Monday, September 9, 2024

Drake

People tell me that Drake has had a bad year

Here's me having a go from eight years ago.


DRAKE – RAP’S MVP

The Guardian, April 28  2016

by Simon Reynolds

If there’s a single word that describes Drake, probably it would be diffuse It’s a catch-all that captures the way his tracks seep out the radio like glistening vapour and conveys also the slippery drift of his voice back-and-forth between rapping and singing.  “Diffuse” fits Drake’s indistinct aura too: half-black and half-Jewish, he’s the all-pervading master of an American street art who’ll nonetheless always be an outsider on account of his Canadian nationality and middle class upbringing.  Drake’s vagueness carries through to his unfixed lyrics: endless celebrations of his own success and stature that are almost always creased with unease and ambivalence, plus his patent brand of not-quite-love songs that combine suppurating sensitivity and emotional evasiveness.

Take his inescapable megahit of 2015 “Hotline Bling”, whose woozy lilt and hang-dog sensuality walked such a fine line (like everything Drake’s done) between addictive and annoying.  What would you even call the emotion in this song? Drake pines for a former sexual arrangement that seems to have been at best undefined; he expresses mild distress that the girl appears to be flourishing in his absence, or at least going out partying a lot.  As pop romance goes, it’s not exactly “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)”. It’s not even “One In A Million” by Aaliyah, the Nineties R&B princess whose minimalist R&B was such an influence on Drake and his principal producer Noah “40” Shebib.

As determined as he is indeterminate, Drake has diffused himself all across the rap ‘n’ R&B radioscape this past half-decade, maintaining ubiquity not just with the steady stream of his own hit singles but with innumerable “feat.” appearances in other people’s songs, ranging from superstars like Rihanna to rising MCs like ILoveMakonnen to the ghost of Aaliyah herself. Last year’s collaborations with Future - “Where Ya At” and “Jumpman” – have remained staples of US urban radio deep into 2016.

Drake’s success at spreading his sound and self far and wide owes much to his actor-ly adaptability and seeming desire to be everything to everybody. He’ll swagger baleful and paranoid on a moody, bare-bones track like “Energy”. He’ll quiet-storm it on moist ‘n’ misty ballads like “Marvin’s Room”. He’ll put out a boppy ditty not a million miles from Justin Bieber’s recent “tropical house” hits with his new single “One Dance”, which samples an old track by UK funky diva Kyla. 

But the diffusion of Drake also has something to do with the way he has defused hip hop, uncoupled it from the explosive content once at the core of the genre.  Raised primarily in an affluent Toronto suburb, a successful TV actor in his teens, Drake shrewdly avoids street realities like crime as song topics. (Whenever he’s got even close to this subject matter – referencing lawyers and the prison commissary on “Where Ya At,” claiming to have “Started From the Bottom” - it’s been jarring and unconvincing).  But nor is Drake a conscious rapper. As a mix-race Canadian, he probably feels it’s not his place to comment on American racial conflicts: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, the sort of issues an MC like Kendrick Lamar can address and is driven to address.

Drake has plenty of company in rap when it comes to being resolutely apolitical. Still, even the most party-hard, commodity-fetishising gangsta rappers have still communicated some sense of the social backdrop that explains their feral drive for success and all its spoils. Jay-Z, DMX, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, T.I., Future – always there’s been somewhere in the back of their music an idea of overcoming: the rap game was usually chosen as an alternative to destructive (to others and ultimately to yourself) outlaw ways of making money and making a name. That didn’t make the tyrannical postures and gruesome threats, the callous sexism and name-brands flaunting, any less ugly, or even justify it, exactly. But it at least provided a context. Gangsta rap wasn’t about The Struggle, but it had struggle in it. 

Drake’s innovation as a rapper is that the only adversity he’s ever really claimed to have faced is the adversity of fame itself. It is virtually his only subject. Even the not-really-love songs are part of this, since they stem from the fracturing of relationships that comes about when someone is constantly travelling and constantly tempted.  In “Doing It Wrong” Drake croons ruefully about how “we live in a generation of not being in love and not being together”. And apparently millennials do find the lyrics of Drake’s softer songs -  which have the pleading, needy tone ‘n’ texture of R&B ballads but are resolutely irresolute and emotionally non-committal - highly relatable.

Right from the start, with his 2009 breakthrough mix-tape So Far Gone, Drake was writing about the problems caused by celebrity.  Whether this was an act of imaginative anticipation, or because he been  pre-famed through playing disabled basketball star Jimmy Brooks in the popular teensoap Degrassi: The Next Generation, it’s hard to say. But on songs like “The Calm” Drake was already moaning about feeling over-stretched and cut-off:   “to keep everybody happy I think I would need a clone.... feeling so distant from everyone I’ve known....  all my first dates are interrupted by my fame”. 

Drake has repeated the same themes, the same mood (bi-polar oscillation between triumph and torment) across his subsequent albums Thank Me LaterTake Care, his masterwork Nothing Was the Same, and If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. He will almost certainly return to those themes and that mood on his imminent Views From the 6.  Authenticity matters as much for Drake as for any rapper, and authenticity means writing about what you know. Fame is pretty much all Drake knows.

It’s a tribute to his powers of invention, his strange and grotesque genius, that Drake has so far managed to find so many compelling variations on such a restricted set of themes :  the dream that turns out not be not as dreamy as you’d expected;   feeling alone even in the midst of an entourage and a wild party; plaints, already fairly familiar in rap, about how money changes everything and creates mo’ problems than its absence. Haters and gold-diggers were long established in rap as inevitable accoutrements of fame about which you could whinge-boast (hip hop’s equivalent of the humble-brag).  But Drake went the next step and talked about the hollow-inside feeling that came with conquering the throne and acquiring all the trophies. As he croons in “All Me”, “Got everything, I got everything/ I cannot complain, I cannot” – but still, still, he complains: about feeing empty, feeling numb.  Picking up on pointers left by Kanye West on 808s & Heartbreak but pushing further ahead, Drake made having a spiritual void into rap’s new status symbol. Morose and maudlin became the mark of mega-stardom, not Maybach and Margiela.

From the Clipse to T.I., the trap was rap’s reigning metaphor during the first decade of the 21st Century, a reference to the place where drugs are sold but also the idea of that life as a dead-end (along with the related idea of luring and enslaving the clientele, mostly members of the dealer’s own race, class, community). In Drake’s decade, the 2010’s, fame itself – the escape-route alternative to crime pursued by gangsta rappers – has become a trap of its own. The godfathers of gangsta, NWA talked about “reality rap”; Drake’s self-invented genre is unreality rap, or perhaps hyper-reality rap.  Both the mise-en-scene and the topics of his songs – penthouse suites, after-show parties , VIP rooms,  award shows, inter-celebrity dating, internet gossip, the proliferation of the public self as an image and a meme – are remote from the life-world most of us inhabit. We gawp at it from the outside.  Drake’s art is all about achieving access to this hyper-real world – a realm of front, rumour, bravado, optics, public relations – and then bemoaning how unreal it feels to live inside it.  As spun by 40 and Drake’s other producers like Boi-1da, the glittering insubstantiality of the music – which resembles Harold Budd, Aphex Twin, Radiohead circa Kid A as much as Timbaland, the Weeknd or DJ Mustard – is the perfect aural match for the mirrored maze of modern celebreality.  The airless sound evokes the sealed vacuum of loneliness-at-the-top.

Drake’s ascendance happened so instantly it felt effortless, achieved without struggle, almost to the point of seeming unearned.  In “Thank Me Now”, Drake rapped about how he “can relate to kids going straight to the league” - a reference to high-school players so talented they skip the stage of playing college basketball and go straight to the NBA. In the same song, Drake declares “damn, I swear sports and music are so synonymous.” 

Drake does love his sports analogies and allusions. “30 for 30 Freestyle,” from the Future collaboration What A Time To Be Alive, is named after a celebrated ESPN series of sports documentaries.  Drake even framed his feud with Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill using baseball and basketball references. He named “Back To Back,” the second of his counter-attack tracks, after the Toronto Blue Jays’s serial defeats of the Philadelphia Phillies in 1993, and namechecked the basketball consultant / power-broker William Wesley in the song’s second line.

The rise of Drake shows that rap has become a merit-based system that works just like sports. The old metrics of credibility and authority – based around where you came from, your experience, “the strength of street knowledge” as NWA put it, as well as around technique and chutzpah– no longer counted as much as sheer proficiency:  the skill with which an MC could manipulate the tropes of a genre that is codified almost to the point of having rules.  Like sports, rap has become a self-perpetuating and enclosed system in which star players and rival teams compete for the pole position and for superior stats. We follow rap like we follow sports: as excited onlookers thrilling vicariously to the clashes, the victories, the glory.  It’s got nothing to do with real life.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Todd versus Todd (versus Todd)

The Todd Terry Trilogy: Past, Present & Future

Loudhouse Records / INgrooves

emusic (from the Rave Dozen)

Although it was Chicago acid house that ignited the firestorm of rave culture in the UK, British rave music would ultimately be influenced more by the sounds coming out New York during the late Eighties. The Northern “bleep” style associated with Unique 3 and Warp acts like Sweet Exorcist and LFO owed a massive amount to the New York post-electro label Cutting and its acts like Nitro Deluxe, whose “Let’s Get Brutal” pioneered a style of bass-heavy and skeletally minimalist house music. And the breakbeat-driven hardcore rave style was hugely influenced by Todd Terry’s mental merger of house and hip hop. 

Remote in sound and spirit from the house styles we usually associate with New York (i.e. the soulful, lushly produced garage of labels like Strictly Rhythm and Nu Groove), Terry’s music was brash and street-raw, a fast-money music of uncleared samples, phat bass, and kickin’ beats. Just as Terry’s hybrid sound was vital impurist, so his insanely prolific output (the “various artists” on this overview are all him operating under different aliases) was fueled by an impure mixture of mercenary and artistic impulses. The muddy motivations proved to be fertile soil though, because even when recycling his own most successful riffs, he invariably reworked them and made them even deranged. Terry’s production of the Jungle Brothers’ “I’ll House You” basically super-imposed the group’s hip-housy rapping over his own Royal House track “Can You Party”, which had been a monster UK hit in the acid house-crazed summer of 1988. But he’d already versioned that track once before as the incredible “Party People”, a sort of drastic dub of “Can You Feel It” that turned reverbed after-traces of piano and vocal hubbub into a juddering pulse-riff. The effect is at once slammin’ and ethereal, like the air itself is wracked and palsied with disco fever. On this track and other early Terry tunes, the production has a curious cavernous, clanking quality, making you feel like you’re in a bunker-like space full of sound-reflections and muffled noise. Whether deliberate or a by-product of lo-fi studio conditions, the effect of playing them in a club must have been to double the “in the club” feel.

With this thrifty trackmaster (“I’m not a writer of songs, they’re too much trouble”, he once said) you don’t get any of the preciousness associated with, say, the Detroit techno auteurs. Terry wants to rock the party and he wants to get paid in full; his avant-gardism is almost a byproduct of the drive to catch listeners ears with crazy-making effects. Where your average New York producer would coat Dinosaur L’s mutant disco classic and Paradise Garage anthem “Go Bang” in an aspic of veneration, Terry eviscerated its nagging vocal riff for use in his own “Bango”. 

There are too many classics on this comprehensive anthology to list, but one deserves special mention: Black Riot’s “A Day in the Life”, its nagging techno motif and “fee-eee-eel it” sample-riff essentially making it the first UK hardcore track.


TODD EDWARDS remixes of ST GERMAIN's "Alabama Blues"
(from Faves of the 1990s )

New Jersey garage's great renegade, Todd Edwards developed a technique of 
cross-hatching extremely brief snatches of vocals (blissful hiccups, gasps,
moans, splinters of yearning and smears of melisma) along with little bursts of
guitar, horns, and other instruments, all from old soul, funk and blues records.
Using sometimes as many as 60 micro-samples (some of his early tracks were
released under the name The Sample Choir), he weaves these fragments into
melodic-percussive honeycombs that are so burstingly rapturous they're almost
painful to your ears. That bittersweet quality may also have something to do
with a curious microtonal quality to his tracks, where the dense web of samples
often seem slightly sharp in pitch or semitonally smeared. At any rate,
Edwards's compelling blend of organic and mechanistic, "songful" and "tracky",
was hugely inspirational to the burgeoning speed garage and 2-step scene in
Britain, where house music has always been more involved with sampling and
digital FX than its American deep house precursors. My pleasure in Todd's
records was only enhanced by finding out that he was deeply influenced by Enya's
use of sampling and digital technology to multitrack her own voice into densely
layered, feathery-sounding tapestries of harmony. Enya!.


TODD RUNDGREN
blink-and-you'll-miss it reference in Nuggets box set review, Spin 1998

the ear-dazzling  flare of Nazz's "Open My Eyes" 


 Bonus Rundgren bitchery



More on Todd Edwards

Sunday, July 28, 2024

RIP Martin Phillipps







I interviewed Martin once  - early '87 I think (the piece is below). He was probably the quietest interviewee I ever had. Most likely I'd not met a New Zealander before, so would have been unaware of the way they take deadpan dryness even further than the Australians. This, though, was something else, beyond nationality. How, one wonders, did such a shy, subdued, self-effacing character manage to leverage himself onto a stage and perform - in, like, public! So much of the gravity and privacy of the Chills sound seems to emanate directly from Martin's personality.

In that sense, The Chills were possibly the ultimate indiepop group - its oxymoronic essence, the embodiment of its predoomed dream that one day the meek would inherit the earth, somehow displace all the pathological attention-seekers and egomaniac exhibitionists from the pop charts.  











































































































Some latterday work  - this song has a "meek shall inherit" theme, with a funny twist.





Via Andrew Parker, a documentary about The Chills made in their prime

Via Matt M in comments, a much later doc about The Chills and Martin Phillipps, dealing with his struggles with drugs and consequent health problems


A 1982 report on the Dunedin scene includes The Chills