Before Lauryn Hill… Diana Ross & The Supremes “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” No subtext; I just like the song
Category: just dope
“I shed a lot of stuff, a lot of unnecessary weight in the last three or four years. I left a lot of old luggage behind, and when I did, the blessings just started pouring on me, and the light in my spirit started to lift again.” -Whitney, Ebony, October 2009
With a voice that gives you chills and makes her whole face sweat, Whitney Houston is one of the greatest balladeers in the history of music, missteps and all. She’ll be on Oprah’s season premiere on Sept. 14 & 15 in a two-part interview. The new songs are cool, but these are some jewels.
“Greatest Love Of All”
“Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)”
“Where Do Broken Hearts Go?”
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -Maya Angelou
“Fresher than a pillow with a mint on it”
There is a rapper (from Canada) named Drake, and if you’ve heard his mixtape So Far Gone, I’m aware you either love him or you don’t. Yet I’ve noticed that an overwhelming number of women versus men claim the former, not solely for his smooth looks and insanely groomed eyebrows but for the emotions he conveys through his singing and rhyming. He does both well. The mixtape is all about feelings—ex-girlfriend, relationship, loneliness—and we all know how much guys (pre)tend to recoil from such mushy stuff as that. Drake is savvy to this, when he says: “When my album drop, bitches’ll buy it for the picture and niggas’ll buy it too and claim they got it for they sista.”
On first listen, most people notice initially that much of the material is 808s & Heartbreak territory, and I’ve heard Drake defined as a cocky new age combo of Lil Wayne and Kanye West, which sounds about right. He’s one of the first new rappers really built from that mold, evolving from both of those MCs’ risk-taking screw-convention template. Hip-hop fans who weren’t willing to accept the emofied version of Ye are most likely turned off by Drake, as are those more into hardcore lyricism and/or thug posturing, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Clearly, Drake isn’t a lyricist and he’s quite subscribed to the type of simplistic flow Kanye has somehow made satisfactory. Still, there’s the fact of believing what he raps about. He sounds like he means these things and is not just trying to sound like he does.
Hardcore hip-hop heads—some call them “purists”—as well as those ubiquitous fulltime haters instantly and vehemently refute anything that doesn’t appear distinctly “hip-hop” and Drake falls into that category: for example, I’ll just refer you to his song based on the “Let’s call the whole thing off” tune and his stint on a show my little brothers possibly watch, Degrassi. Either way, dude’s been on repeat in a lot of my friends’ iPods. A few posts back, I linked his song “Little Bit,” which he jacked from this chick I should’ve been listening to, Lykke Li. Few other favorites: “Successful,” “Best I Ever Had,” “November 18.” I’ve been listening to him, just late with the review. Honestly, I was thinking of where I could write about it for money lol.
Download, alright…
Sometimes I feel
like I don’t belong anywhere
and it’s gonna take so long
for me to get somewhere
sometimes I feel so heavy hearted
but I can’t explain, cause I’m so guarded
but that’s a lonely road to travel
and a heavy load to bear
I really like this album
This is so dope. Wired Magazine (one of my favorites) is doing a blog of sorts detailing the creation of one of their stories (!) a profile on Charlie Kaufman for their November issue. They’re basically going through the entire process of how a feature gets into a magazine…from the idea stage to the final copy. Pitching the idea to shaping the story to the assignment letter to submitting a rough draft:
Filing a rough draft always makes me a little queasy, and this one was no exception. I always feel the urge to write a note to my editor explaining the choices I made, stuff to look out for, etc., but usually am able to resist — really, the editor should be coming to this blind, like any reader would. But for the sake of transparency, and if you’ll pardon a little (more) self-indulgence, here are a few of the elements that gave me the most trouble as I tried to write this thing:
!
I minored in English & American Literature in college, which meant there was an ishload of reading to be done (I took an entire course on August Wilson’s plays). Among the books I fell in love with was Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. It’s a story I wish I could have told, the type of story I would write. Young, Black Pecola Breedlove wants blond hair and blue eyes (the bluest eyes) ’cause she thinks it’ll make her pretty. Not just that. Possessing these physical qualities associated with beauty, she thinks, will erase all the mental and emotional ugliness she’s seen. It’s about identity and the things that make you wish to change yours, the things people say and do that stay with you. The people that make you question your own self and the power in all that. The writing is incredible. I’d like to get to a place like that.
This is the excerpt from Amazon that describes Pecola’s family:
“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question…. And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.”
Point is, New York Magazine informed me today that in November Toni Morrison is coming out with her ninth novel. A Mercy. A story about slavery that doesn’t focus on the race issue. Or rather, chooses not to see it as an issue. And I was just wondering if that’s possible. like if that’s just talking about the situation while avoiding the conversation. Ms. Morrison is one of those authors who brings incredible perspective to complex issues. But, with this, she says:
“I really wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race. Whether they were black or white was less important than what they owned and what their power was.”
I’d like to agree with this possession-over-race theory…but obviously it’s not so cut and dry. I remember a discussion in one of my English classes. We wondered, if it just so happened that Black people were the ones with power and Whites ended up as slaves, would everything as it is now be reversed? Were the color lines drawn out of pure greed and desire for ownership? Either way, I’m intrigued. I’ll be reading. What Toni says at the end of the NY Mag article is great:
Yet none of this is to say that Morrison thinks race has run its course as an American topic (even if Obama wins). “Crude and crass as most of it is and, really, uninformed as almost all of it is, the discourse about race is important,” she says. “But the real conversation should take place among white people. They should talk to each other about that. Not with me. I can’t be the doctor and the patient.”
(minus the taco meat)The guy whose CD insert lyrics kept me engrossed like my favorite novel…my “About Me” inspiration…had the nerve to thoroughly excite anyone with an XX chromosome (and some XYs) by announcing a fall tour. After a six-year stage hiatus. And still no release date for that coveted Black Summer’s Night. I liked him better with the fro, but still…be still.
“Get To Know Ya” …They be tryna bring you flowers, you prefer your roses blue/Brothers were tryna get in your trousers, I was just tryna get into you
“Fortunate” …Never had room service all night…
“Let’s Not Play the Game” …Don’t even say stuff you know that ain’t true
“Luxury: Cococure” …Took my icy freeze and thawed the cold
He said he didn’t know if this was right. If we were right. He had to leave to make sure. But I knew he wasn’t coming back. It was a mutual thing…the we’re-not-right thing. We’d become comfortable. But the decision, that was his. I had only threatened. So he said we both should leave to make sure. I agreed. All I could say was, “It’s like that Donell Jones song, right?”
“Where I Wanna Be”
I’m not saying I’m gone, but I
have to find what life is like…
(Photograph: Sam Jones)
Rolling Stone’s new Robert Downey Jr. cover story is prit-ty good. But I usually hate when feature stories lede off with a restaurant scene. sometimes it’s not the writer’s fault. publicists just need to be more creative. grant us something more. Like many, I’ve only recently become infatuated with Robert Downey Jr., not just as an actor but as a person. Well, the person he gives us, anyway. I love his words (Enmeshment. Codependent neuroses. Grift) and the complexity of his sentences. Peep…
“I’m between two phases right now, pre-Iron Man and post-Iron Man, and the transition can be tricky,” he says, shifting and smoking. “It used to be, I’d drive onto a studio lot, and the guard was like, ‘Less Than Zero dude, I loved Chaplin!’ Now it’s, ‘Iron Man!’ It’s not an algorithm anymore. It’s a fixed number. Things have been zeroed out; it’s the beginning of something. But right now, it’s still a void, and we tend to think of the void as an abyss or a vacuum with nothing there. In fact, it’s a new road, and what you should do on this new road is close for repairs — close right away, because that old vehicle is not going to work on that new road. I mean, if the cosmos is a loving, healing thing that also spins real fast and erupts and does violent stuff, and if there really is some kind of order to the whole thing, then everything that’s led up to this moment has to be part of it, or the math doesn’t work. But in this transition phase, I really am trying to live as much like a lizard as I can. Hot, rock, sun, fly, tongue.”
But this Robert Downey Jr. feature from the March 2007 issue of Esquire… one of my favorite celebrity profiles I’ve ever read. The first time I read this piece I was so absolutely confused and lost in his words (“I’m gonna smoke a Camel non-filter in my sustainable T-shirt.”) It’s impossible to read quickly. And so it forced me to slow down. Even then, I missed some things. And thats whats so dope about it to me.
“Start in tight, Downey’s puss full frame, like so: his creased Valentine of a face has some puff and scarification on it, some overtorqued, Dakar Rally, desert-of-the-soul mileage, but he’s still hustling, still shape-shifting, still a man’s man and a ladies’ man, still a wanking matinee idol, liquid-brown boyish-shy eyes a-wobble, warm voice twanging from hoarse Jew’s-harp burble to wheezing, pennywhistle laugh in a fingersnap. Words–thousands upon thousands of words–burst yawping from him, seemingly unfiltered and unbidden, overflowing an instrumental self whose sole means of control is a steady-Eddie self-surrender, hugging shores of work, Wing Chun kung fu, and love. Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey’s ripe and ready for his close-up“
The Quiet One by Scott Raab
Am I the only person who loves this song and video? Janet looks all types of insane (like, of the Joker variety). And both her and Michael coming together with this us-against-the-world vision, I thought was cool. The video exemplifies the type of insanity people go through sometimes. When they can’t do anything else but scream. I remember when the video first premiered. It turned out to be the most expensive music video ever made. I’m not sure if that’s still the case. I loved the dance breakdown. I think I memorized it. This ish is weird. But iconic to me. (Photo collage by me)
[Michael]
Tired of injustice
Tired of the schemes
Life is disgusting
So what does it mean
They kicking me down
I got to get up
As jacked as it sounds
The whole system sucks
[Janet]
Peak in the shadow
Come into the light
If you tell me I’m wrong
Then you better prove you’re right
You’re sellin’ out souls but I
I care about mine
I’ve got to get stronger
And I won’t give up the fight
