TIMBALAND
Tim's Bio – Life from da Bassment
Spin, January 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Maybe you've heard of the Jamaican tradition of "version" albums: a dozen or so tracks all built on top of the same bass-and-drum undercarriage. Different songs, different dubs, same riddim. Timbaland isn't quite so frugal with his creativity, but Tim's Bio does pretty much consist of 18 variations on that beat. For the last 18 months, Timbaland's convulsive kinesthetic — double-time kicks, crisp snares, spasmodic flurries of hi-hat — has dominated the R&B soundscape. So what's immediately striking about Bio is its failure to probe a fresh new direction.
But perhaps this complaint misses the point. Ever since it lost the "-'n'roll," rock has had a problem with repetition: Albums and shows are supposed to have dynamics, pacing, contrast, demonstrations of versatility; at a certain point more is always less. But in dance music, more is...more; repetition accumulates intensity, creates and sustains that crucial intangible known as "vibe." Black dance scenes (and their white mutations) work according to the principle Amiri Baraka dubbed "changing same": minute variations on the same building blocks (jungle's "Amen" breakbeat, Miami bass's sub-woofer-quaking 808 boom, dancehall's "pepper-seed" rhythm, and so forth). Mercenary copyists and opportunistic cloners play their part, too. For when a certain sound is doin' it the audience can't get enough of the good stuff. If you're in it, the slight tweaks and twists to the reigning formula have enormous impact whereas the uninvolved outsider hears only monolithic monotony.
That said, Timbaland really does need to come up with a new cyberfunk matrix. His frequent complaints about "beat-biters" are rich when Tim's Bio verges so frequently on self-plagiarism. Likewise the lyrics: Where last year's album with Magoo was thematically impoverished, this one's destitute, reaching its self-reflexive nadir with 'Here We Come' — a song based around the Spider Man theme. What does catch the ear is all the stuff interwoven around the basic grid-groove: the scurrying infestation of percussive detail, the digitally warped goblin vocals, the Afro-Dada grotesquerie of keyboard licks and sample squiggles, the onomatopoeic bass-talk.
The viral spread of ideas in dance culture works to erode the auteur theory, our ingrained impulse to fixate on originators. Timbaland's twitchy hypersyncopation was widely attributed to a drum'n'bass influence, something steadfastly denied by Tim and Missy. Now you can hear that imagined compliment being repaid by the children of jungle, in the form of the two-step garage style that currently rules London. Dropping the four-to-the-floor house pulse and "versioning" Timbaland's falter-funk kick, producers like Ramsey & Fen, KMA, and Dreem Teem are basically making smoov R&B filtered through a post-Ecstasy sensorium. Call it lover's jungle, strictly for the ladies' massive: midtempop bump'n'-grind, sped-up and succulent cyborg-diva vocals, a playa-pleasing patina of deluxe production. With the next phase of beat science being researched and developed in England, the "bumpy pressure" is really on for Timbaland, if he doesn't want to go the way of ex-pioneers like Jam & Lewis. The dance floor has no brand loyalty.
KING AND QUEEN OF THE BEATS: Timbaland and Missy Elliott
published as "Partners in the Engine Room of Rap"
director's cut, New York Times, August 1st 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Although history tends to focus on glamorous vocalists and
visionary songwriters with something to say,
black pop's evolution is as much
about changes in rhythm and production. From the house sounds of Motown and Philadelphia International to the
Chic Organisation's streamlined disco style and George Clinton's mini-empire of
funk bands, it's a history made not by
sacred cow artists but by session musicians and backroom technicians: musicians,
producers, engineers, and, not least, their machines.
Typically,
an up and coming producer taps some
unforeseen potential in the latest technology and, for a couple of years, rewrites the rules of rhythm. In the mid-Eighties, Janet Jackson's
producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis drafted a new blueprint for dance pop,
using drum machine beats and synthesized basslines to build angular, abrasive grooves. By the end of that
decade, producer Teddy Riley installed a new paradigm, marrying R&B's mellifluous
melodies with hip hop's aggressive beats and sampled loops to create the style
known variously as new jack swing or swingbeat.
In the last
two years, Timbaland and Missy Elliott have reigned as unchallenged king and
queen of the beats. Producing and
writing for a stable of proteges that includes Aaliyah, Ginuwine, Nicole,
Total, and Playa, they have scored a run
of hugely successful smash singles on
both the R&B and pop charts. Ms Elliott has also written hits for artists
like Brandy, Mariah Carey, SWV, and Whitney Houston, and can reportedly demand
$100, 000 per song. Ruling producers have hitherto tended to remain behind the
scenes (Jam & Lewis) or subsume themselves in a band identity (Teddy Riley now operates as part of the
harmony group Blackstreet). But Timbaland and Missy Elliott have pushed
themselves forward as stars. Timbaland released a collaboration with rapper
Magoo called Welcome To Our World in 1997 and a solo album proper late last
year; Ms Elliott has just released her second album Da Real World, the sequel
to 1997's platinum selling, Grammy-nominated Supa Dupa Fly.
The real
testament to Timbaland and Elliott's hegemony, though, is the massive influence
they've had on other R&B and rap artists. If imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery, the duo ought to be feeling pretty good about themselves.
Instead, they seem rather embattled. Only a few minutes into Da Real
World, Elliott is lambasting all the producers who have copied Timbaland's distinctive
jittery beats and stop-start grooves: "beat biter, dope style taker... you
just an imitator, stealing our beats like you're the one who made them."
That style really came together on Aaliyah's
late 1996 hit "One In A Million," which was written by Elliott, produced by
Timbaland, and typifies their collaborations
in the way the beat is as hooky as the melody. . A ballad built around a push-me-pull-you
groove, the song introduced many of Timbaland's trademark tricks: syncopated bass drums stuttering in triple
time spasms, irregular flurries of hi-hats, and skittery snares. As with
earlier rhythmic innovations, from Seventies funk to Nineties jungle, the
Timbaland sound practically enforces a new kind of dancing, full of twitches,
jerks and tics. You can see it in Missy Elliott's videos like "Beep Me
911" and the current "She's A Bitch," where the choregraphy
resembles a kind of geometrically precise epilepsy and sometimes recalls the
body-popping style of Eighties breakdancing.
Alongside
their massive influence on American R&B, Timbaland's twitchy beats have
caught the ear of British electronica artists. On their new album Surrender,
The Chemical Brothers sampled a vocal hook from Nicole & Missy Elliott's's
"Make It Hot" for their track "Music: Reponse",
transforming the sexual come-on of "I got whatcha want/I got whatcha
need" into a DJ's boast. In London, a whole scene and sound has emerged
called two-step, based around the merger of Timbaland's hyper-syncopated drums
with jungle's booming bass and house's succulent synth licks. The respect that
Timbaland and Missy Elliott have received in the electronica field shows that
although the duo are classified as R&B, their skills at digitally
manipulating rhythms and creating eerie sounds make them among the most
accomplished and innovative electronic artists on the planet. Indeed, critics
have long suggested that Timbaland's assymetrical grooves owe something to
jungle; Timbaland has denied this, but does give the nod to electronic artists
like Prodigy, Tricky, and Bjork, whom he's sampled a couple of times.
Like techno
artists, Timbaland and Elliott are obsessed with the future. They are
determined that their records sound avant-garde and futuristic, and they're infatuated with
special effects laden science fiction movies like The Matrix. The title of Ms
Elliott's new album comes from a pivotal line of dialogue in The Matrix:
"welcome to the real world".
Both Missy's music and her Hype Williams produced videos
have a hallucinatory quality. Supa Dupa Fly is a shapeshifting phantasmagoria
of sampled sound, where unlikely sources (baby's gurgles, birdsong, insect-like
chitters, horse whinnies, and dog barks) are transformed into polyrhythmic
devices. Listen closely, and beats turn out to be made from gasps or giggles, and a bassline is molded
from the human voice. It's headphone
R&B, and like electronica, it's most inventive on the level of rhythm and
texture, rather than songcraft. "Hook on songs are more major than verses.
People hardly remember verses,"
Elliot told rap magazine The Source. For the most part, Elliott's vocal
hooks are delivered in a style midway between singing and rapping, and
generally work percussively as much as melodically. She specialises in devising
complex vocal arrangements which interlock with the rhythm tracks like cogs.
Timbaland and Elliott also pepper their tracks with tiny, almost subliminal
vocal riffs--onomatopeic noises and nonsense chants, half-spoken ad libs--which add to the
rhythmic density of the music.
Da Real
World arrives at a critical moment for the Elliot/Timbaland dynasty, when the duo's influence remains endemic but their own
momentum shows signs of flagging. They've maintained their profile in 1999 with
Elliot penning the R&B smash "Where My Girls At?" for diva trio
702 and Timbaland producing Ginuwine's second album and the hit track
"Jigga What?" for rapper Jay-Z.
But Timbaland's solo album was generally received as a disappointment,
and some wonder if his production skills peaked with last year's astonishing
Aaliyah hit "Are You That Somebody?."
It's an abiding dilemma for pop innovators. Do you repeat what was so
successful before at the risk of adding your own self-plagiarism to the melee
of clones and copyists? Or do you struggle for self-reinvention at the risk of
alienating your audience? This quandary has undone many artists in the past.
Synth-pop pioneers Kraftwerk, for instance, became paralysed by the enormity of
their own influence and the challenge of staying ahead of the state-of-art.
Da Real
World sees Elliott and Timbaland
struggling to come up with fresh twists to their formula. Sonically, Da Real World marks a shift to a
harsher sound that Timbaland has called "real dark, real ghetto". The
new style includes bombastic quasi-orchestral riffs, booming sub-bass, and
stiff, angular beats and booming sub-bass, all of which sometimes recall Curtis Mantronik's late Eighties productions
for T. La Rock and Mantronix in the late
Eighties, but is more likely a nod to the current popularity of New Orleans bounce, an electro-influenced
style of rap. Persona-wise, Elliot has
swapped the playfulness of Supa Dupa
Fly for a pugnacious "street"
attitude and a dramatically increased level of profanity. Abandoning Supa's kooky surrealism and free
associational lyrics, Elliott has penned
a series of tough-talking songs: "You Don't Know" threatens a girl
who's trying to steal her man, "All 'N My Grill" reprimands a
deadbeat live-in lover who won't pay his
way, and "Hot Boyz" is a hormone-crazed paean to sexy roughnecks who
tote machine guns, flex Platinum Visa cards and drive expensive jeeps. The
harder, ghettocentric sound and lyrics smack somewhat of a calculated attempt
at repositioning Elliot in a market where "real-ness" is back in
favor thanks to rappers like DMX and Jay-Z.
Coming from
a debut artist, Da Real World would be garlanded with acclaim. But given the
expectation that Missy and Timbaland would rewrite the rules of R&B again,
the album is anti-climactic. Da Real World peaked at #10 on the pop charts and
rapidly slid to #22. Furthermore, Missy Elliot's audience seem unconvinced or,
worse, alienated by her image tweak. The first single off the album,
"She's A Bitch"--a strained and tuneless attempt to project bad
attitude, with a baleful monochrome video markedlly different to the
polychromatic psychedelia of the earlier promos--only reached #30 on the R&B charts. For an artist of
Missy Elliott's stature and track record, that's a flop.
But then
the rap and R&B marketplace is cruel even by pop standards; brand loyalty
barely exists, artists are only as hot as their latest track. So are Missy and
Timbaland going to go the way of other ex-pioneers, like Jam & Lewis?
Elliott has her own major label funded imprint Gold Mind and a long line of
proteges waiting in the wings. Timbaland might want to consider a strategic
retreat from the spotlight in order to concentrate on crafting tunes for his
proven hitmakers Ginuwine and Aaliyah, and to R&D some new gimmicks (he's
talked about creating beats built from the sound of a stylus skipping on a
scratched record). Perhaps the greatest solace for the duo is that there's no
powerhouse producer threatening to usurp their throne. (Although there might
have been a hint of anxiety when Timbaland recently gave his seal of approval
to a young pretender: Swizz Beats, who's crafted beats for Jay-Z and for his
own outfit Ruff Ryders). At the moment,
there's an interregnum in R&B--everyone's waiting for the new king of the
beats to take over.
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