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joemuggs · 2 years

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Chimes of Freedom

Three years ago I did an oral history of Orbital's "Chime" for MOJO. This is it...

Paul Hartnoll: From the age of 13 I was in school bands and local bands in Sevenoaks, usually playing guitar. Then when I was 16 and my brother was 20, about ‘84, ‘85, we started getting drum machines and what have you together. We were listening to electro, hi-NRG, Tackhead, Cabaret Voltaire, Chakk, Severed Heads. We’d turn up at local discos with a Front-242 or Dead Or Alive record, or a bunch of electro 12”s, and pester the DJ to play them. Then, when house came along in ‘86, ‘87 – the stuff like (The House Master Boyz’) House Nation and (Nitro Deluxe’s) This Brutal House - we immediately thought, Great! This is like electro and hi-NRG together!

Phil Hartnoll: I was doing an apprenticeship, so I had a bit of money, and any spare cash I’d spend on synths. I never had aspiration, I just wanted to know what synthesiser sounds were. Paul was much more driven, he wanted to be in a band. We gradually got tapes together, we’d give them to a few people, then Paul found this guy Jazzy M.

Jazzy M: My show was called The Jacking Zone, and it was the first ever proper house show on London airwaves. The stuff was already coming in from Chicago, but I wanted to hear if people could make it here in the UK - so on my radio show, I asked, Are you making music? Come and bring it to me!, bold as brass. So (Paul’s pirate DJ friend-of-a-friend) Jack Man Jay brought me this tape. It’s wondrous to think back that I had no other information but ‘Paul from Kent.’

Paul: I went up to see Jazzy in this record shop in Croydon, My Price I think; it was quite terrifying, really, because he was like a John the Baptist of house music, such an evangelist, a real character. He ran around the shop collecting all these 12”s, then went, ‘What you do is brilliant, but it’s too fast, and you need to copy these records.’ I said, I haven't got any money. He just looked at me like this was an abstract concept, and went, ‘Money? Nah, you can have them. Copy those, come back when you need some more.’ He became my mentor right up to the time when I finally gave him Chime.

Phil: The way Paul wrote Chime was very impulsive and instinctive, that non-thinking-about-it creative vibe is really captured there. Normally he’s much more the musician, the nerdy one who’ll sit down and work things out, where I’m just a Tasmanian devil - Wurrrrgh, press that, what’s this do? - so actually it was funny for him to do such an unconscious, unconsidered kind of track.

Paul: I was just trying out a way of recording where I did it all live to the four-track, without worrying about mucking about and syncing different tracks. I started about four in the afternoon, I think it was a Wednesday, a couple of hours before I went to the pub. I guess I was trying to do something a bit Detroit techno, but really, I just took some random samples from my dad’s easy listening records, put in the ‘dum dum dum du-du-dum’ bass at the beginning, job done. Right at the end I thought, What’s that weird sound? and it was the descending string bit. Sounds OK, I’ll put that in… and that was literally it.

Phil: His mates were sitting on the sofa hassling him to finish it as he did the live recording to tape! I’ll be honest, Chime never floated my boat massively because that sort of Salsa-ey rhythm didn’t really sit right with me, but I realised it really stuck out as quirky and weird, which is why it worked for us and helped as break through. And it really did go mad.

JM: He brought it into me at Vinyl Zone at the weekend, the shop was packed with DJs, I put the tape on and the whole place went spare – ‘I want it! I want it!’, thinking it was a new 12”. I was really cheeky, like, Ha ha, no you can’t have it, it’s not released! Right that minute, I went, I’m having this. I’d been working on setting up the Oh’Zone label so it felt like perfect timing, spiritual almost.

Paul: Jazzy told me to go home and re-record it, but with an extra bit at the end where it all comes back in – ‘and do it on a metal tape as well.’ I spent £3.25 on a cassette to record it on, the most expensive one I’d ever bought, and I was thinking, It’d better bloody be worth it.

JM: I’ve still got that tape, it’s a TDK MA90 with just ‘CHIME’ written on it. The brilliant thing is, that’s what we mastered the vinyl off - 12, 13 minutes whatever it is, no edits, nothing, just straight on to the Oh’Zone 12" (released in December 1989). And that was my label launched! 1,000 copies, then another 3,000, it kept getting bigger. I even played it out off the cassette too, before the vinyl. I remember it was Clink Street or one of those really grubby underground raves. The whole place went absolutely crackers. Johnny Walker was DJing there too, he worked at Polydor which was in the same building as Tong - so that’s how he got to know about it.

Pete Tong: Soon as I heard it, I had to sign it. I did the deal with Jazzy on the track, then rolled it into a bigger deal with the boys - because I knew I wanted a longer-term thing for them with (London records dance imprint) FFRR. It was a bit of a seminal moment for British homegrown electronic music; before them we had DJs going into studios with the help of engineers – S’Express, Bomb The Bass, M/A/R/R/S - learning how to make records cut-and-paste style. Then the next big wave was the talent doing everything themselves: The Prodigy, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield. And Orbital really set the tone for that.

Helen Mead: My first thought on getting the record was, Wait, this isn’t The Orb! And second - and this is how trendy everything had become - I thought, Oh they’re supposed to be named after orbital raves? God that’s so over. But with their live shows, they started something else. At the time I had such a battle to make people realise that there could be any link between dance music and live music, whereas I knew they interlinked.

Paul: We’d only played one show before, as The Hartnoll Brothers, amazingly supporting a local Kent go-go band. But a friend of ours (Johnny Delafons) drummed for the Shamen, and we ended up meeting them (Orbital played their first gig supporting The Shamen at the Islington Town & Country Club 2, February 1990)

Mixmaster Morris: Doing the Synergy tour with The Shamen was their first proper live gig. I took them out to buy sequencers to make it easier to do the live sets, and the first time I ever heard them play was their first soundcheck. Everything was moving so fast in 1990, and I’ll always associate Chime with that. It was in the charts as we were touring, so it just got more and more popular, everyone got more and more crazy. The Shamen weren’t in the charts at that point, they didn’t have a hit ‘til 91, so Orbital got bigger than everyone else on the tour. They were still only getting £10-15 a night like the rest of us, mind.

Phil: When we did Chime on Top of the Pops (on March 22, 1990), we were a square peg in a round hole. We were so awkward standing there trying to mime - we thought we were being all clever having everything unplugged. Ugh, it was pretty painful. We had a big argument with them asking why we couldn’t play live, but at the end of the day you can’t refuse Top of the Pops! Then of course we had Snap! on afterwards doing, “I Got The Power!” and they just showed us up even more.

Paul: Between us, 808 State, The Shamen and their mates, it really felt like the beginning of something, of people deciding they didn’t like the old nightclub regime and wanted something new. From there we got involved with (crusty tribal rave promoters) the Megadog lot. It was very word of mouth, it was really about being evangelical for this culture. Very different to all the Sunrise and Energy raves which we’d play - they were run by blaggers who were only in it for the money, and they would run things very shoddily.

PT: They were very much in tune with the free parties, the traveller mentality, the DIY mentality. And they presented themselves as a band from the start. Them, The Shamen, The KLF, I think they showed the way. To this day, I tell producers starting out, If you want to be seen as a band, you’ve got to act like it, not just another DJ making a record.

Phil: Playing it live was where the magic came in for me. It was so simple, just a few samples, the 303 - which was my little baby to mess around with - and couple of other analogue synths, it was really easy to jam it out. You can hear how much we’d go off on one with it on Son Of Chime (released on the Live At The Brain album, 1990). Sometime around this we went up to Liverpool, that guy James Barton who started Cream asked us to do a private do for him and his mates, about 100 people. As soon as we’d played it, they’d go, Play Chime again, play Chime again! We must’ve played it for half an hour, maybe more.

MM: They played Synergy shows all through 1990, and we were doing underground parties at the same time - the whole point of those was to do an all-night party with no DJs, only live electronic music. A classic one was at a rehearsal studio in Willesden - maybe 1,000, 1,500 people, well overcrowded - which kickstarted (touring Megadog rave event) the MIDI Circus and was a precursor to Experimental Sound Field in Glastonbury in 1992, where Underworld, Orbital and everyone played for the whole weekend.

HM: It was probably 1993 before people realised how big this whole scene had become: that’s when you had Aphex Twin, Sabres of Paradise, Leftfield, all coming through. So Chime was big, but I don’t think anyone knew how big it was all about to get.

Paul: I could never get sick of hearing Chime. Aside from just being proud of it, it’s given me my entire life of doing music. How could I ever not get a thrill from that?

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taehyungfirst · 3 months

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🙌🏼 Yes on BBC Live Lounge. Lately I’m obsessed with this jazz singer named Yebba (no doubt I’m late to the game) and I love her voice because you FEEL something and it is exactly how Layover makes me feel. I want festivals and jazz venues for Taehyung - especially in NY, Chicago, Las Vegas, LA, Paris, London and Tokyo. I think his duets with women are HEAVEN. Honestly, he could take all of his music show stages and costumes from Layover and tour.

I want another Jinny’s Kitchen and some sort of drama/thriller. Remember when he said to IU that he wanted to do something like The End of the Fucking World and then the premise of the Fri(end)s MV was similar in feeling…I want him to explore more of that….let’s put Squid Game on the list. I want a major motion picture.

I do also want fashion. I want him to create a capsule collection and a line of unisex leather bags. Put him in expensive clothes and jewels all day long. I want him to do something with Tannie again. More interviews - I want that Apple interview for him. Golf - would be super relaxing. More of his vlogs. I want him to host a talk show.

Like, let the man do whatever it is he wants. I agree with anon, let him have the freedom to do everything he wants!

Hii! You’re not late to the game because I didn’t know about her either, I will check her music out right after posting this.

I just love how all the things you mentioned are the things Taehyung loves to do, he has such a clear identity you can never go wrong with him. Yes to jazz performance, yes to actor gigs, yes to golfing sessions and Taetae vlogs.

Let the man see the northern lights, let him make another jazzy album and let him perform in his fav european cities with his pretty outfits.

#can’t wait for 2025 ughhh #ask #taehyung

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redrobin-detective · 3 years

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From a young age, Jack Fenton wanted a life of adventure and excitement. Working on his family’s quiet farm in the middle of nowhere never sat right with him. Late one night, he sees something he can’t explain in the woods which sparks a lifelong passion for the supernatural. He worked day and night at various odd jobs once he was old enough in order to save up money for school. Pa and him had a huge row when he saw how much money Jack had saved over the years. That money could’ve bought new equipment, could have put food in his sisters’ mouths. But Jack held fast, he loved his family but he needed to find his own way and he wouldn’t find it here. As soon as he got his acceptance letter for his college of choice, he left the farm and never looked back.

Rooming with Vlad Masters was a struggle at first but his roommate’s intense desire to prove Jack wrong about ghosts eventually sparked a friendly continuing argument which just became friendly in general. Jack was too loud, too enthusiastic for everyone else, almost always the biggest and broadest guy in the room. Jack first met Maddie during college orientation, or rather he met her bountiful bushy red hair 3 rows up that his eyes kept wandering to. He met her properly when they got into an intense discussion of the use of the supernatural in fiction during literature class. Girls had never registered for Jack before, always seemed less interesting than his research. But Maddie, she like a revelation in and of herself. They continued their debate after class, into the dining hall where Vlad somehow got roped in. They exchanged phone numbers and continued their theories long into the night. They never really stopped.

Maddie was like the campfires Pa used to make when he was young. She was small and contained but with an all-encompassing energy that warmed everyone around her. He finally met his match with her, her enthusiasm encouraged his and vice versa. Her mind thought differently from Jack but in a complementary way, he did his best thinking when she was there to bounce ideas off of. As close as he and Vlad were, sometimes the whole world disappeared when Maddie was around. Vlad proclaimed his desire to date Maddie on a couple of occasions, asking Jack to back him up. Jack never knew how to answer, it should be okay as long as the two of them were happy and he and Maddie could stay friends. But he couldn’t just ignore that chemistry he felt when Jack’s eyes met hers.

Vlad’s accident occurred not long afterwards, he was stuck in the hospital and forced to drop out of school their last semester. The guilt ate away at Jack but Maddie made things better. He danced with her for their last college dance, kissed her for the first time as they threw their caps into the air for graduation. Being with her was like being whole for the first time in his life. When he got down on his knee and asked her to be his lab partner for life, it was the best thing he’d ever done. They had something of a shotgun wedding, neither of them had two nickels to rub together both coming from poor families and a load of student debt. Jack couldn’t afford to rent a suit so he wore his hazmat suit, figuring Mads would get a kick out of it. When she walked down the aisle with her lab goggles on, he knew he’d found the one.

They moved to Amity Park, a peaceful but still bustling suburb an hour outside Chicago. In their research, they’d discovered several anomalies in and around the area that suggested it was a hot bed of paranormal activity. They bought a house and worked on making it their own. Maddie initially hadn’t wanted children, wanting to focus more on their work. Jack, however, had come from a big family and had wanted kids even when he’d been a kid. Many long discussions and time to settle and soon they had a beautiful daughter. He asked to name her Jasmine. His mother had loved the smell and kept it around the house growing up, even years later, the scent calmed him. Looking at the precious girl in his arms, he knew that she would be his new home.

Danny had been a little bit of a surprise. Him and Mads were content with their chatty, precocious daughter. They hadn’t even discussed having a second when they found out she was pregnant several months in. She hadn’t been symptomatic, Maddie fretted the rest of the pregnancy, worried she’s inadvertently harmed their child by exposing herself to chemicals. But everything turned out alright, Danny was born just fine, if a solid pound smaller than Jasmine. While Jazzy had wailed and wailed, Danny was a quiet baby, instead choosing to look around with wide, curious eyes. When he gripped Jack’s finger and brought it into his little mouth, Jack was smitten.

He loved being a scientist, a husband, but Jack especially loved being a father. Maddie said he never quite grew out of being a kid and he agreed with her. The sound of his daughters delighted screams as he ran around the house with her on his shoulders. The beaming smile Danny gave when Jack held him up high so he could be closer to the night sky. He loved his work, an obsession he was more than willing to admit, but his heart truly lied with his family. Jack could have lived an eternity in those early days when his children looked up at him like he could do no wrong. Of course, it wouldn’t last. Children grew up, socialized and learned that ghost hunting wasn’t the cool, legitimate profession they’d believed. His kids loved them but there was a separation that hadn’t existed before, a disconnect of a passionate farm boy searching for the unknown to modern kids who didn’t understand what it meant to to crave understanding.

Maddie was the one who shopped the idea of working on the portal again. Jack had been skeptical at first, it had been his dream but after what happened with Vlad and with the kids still living in the house... But Vlad was fine now, on his way to being a millionaire the last Jack heard and his thirst for knowledge couldn’t be quenched. It took years to draw up the schematics and begin building. The process was slow, made slower by Maddie going back to school for her second degree in psychics, by losses of funding, taking shady government contracts to put food on the table. When he saw the sad, hungry looks on his kids’ faces when they had discount TV dinners, he finally understood his father’s anger over Jack selfishly hoarding money for college. But years of blood, sweat and tears saw the fruition of their dreams completed.

The portal hadn’t worked right away to his immense disappointment only to miraculous start up when him and Maddie weren’t looking. Danny started acting sick immediately after, enough to scare the hell out of Jack. Visions of Vlad’s ecto-scarred face and the sounds of him vomiting up blood and ectoplasm haunted him. Not his Danny, not his sweet boy. But Danny recovered and things seemingly went back to normal. They say hindsight is 20/20 but Jack will curse himself until the day he died for not seeing the signs until it was spelled out for him. He knew Maddie and him were unconventional but he tried to foster love and trust in their home. The idea that his son didn’t think he could come to them for the dramatic changes the portal had done to him, that he was scared of them. Jack wept heartily at the thought of how he’d failed, that he’d been the sort of prejudiced, uninterested father like his Pa had been.

So he’d gotten down on his knees, making himself smaller and less threatening to his boy - he was so tall now, when had that happened - and asked for another chance. Danny, always too kind for his own good, forgave them. He said it before Jack believed he meant it but it was the biggest relief he’d ever felt in his life to have the opportunity to make things right. It was hard, erasing decades of biases. To not jump when Danny acted a bit too ghostly, to not to correct him when his boy made some comment on ghosts that Jack disagreed with. But he listened and he learned and even though his heart was already fit to burst, he found more love in his heart for his son. His son, who carried a heavy burden with dignity and grown into twice the man Jack was when he hadn’t been looking. Jazz too was paving her own way forward with the same zeal and intelligence that Jack admired so in Maddie.

His wife, his friend, his lab partner for life stood by his side as their children left home to change the world. When he was young, Jack dreamed of excitement, of never-ending exploration and fearsome battles. He got all of that, and more, but he also found something else. Jack found people who loved him for all his eccentricities, who he felt free to be as loud as silly as he desired. He raised two beautiful children who he loved more every day and who he knew loved in return. He wished he could tell his younger self that while excitement put hair on your chest, his Ma and Pa had been right in that family was something worth investing in. Jack Fenton made staggering advancements to the field of ectology over the years but his greatest accomplishment, should you ask him, would be living his best life with the woman of his dreams and their children.

#I've been drinking Love Jack Fenton juice the last few days #idk i just think he's neat #canon overeggaerates (as it does with most of its characters for comedy) but underneath he's a good dude #I feel like I blacked out and came to with this written #I have been typing for 40 minutes straight #I should probably put this blathering bs under a readmore #what the hell is this? is it a fic? a headcanon?#Jack Fenton is a good man and I will fight anyone who says otherwise

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unpopularwiththepopulace · 3 years

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Here Lies Jenny: Bebe Neuwirth’s under-remembered masterpiece?

While Bebe Neuwirth is often remembered foremost for her presence in worlds like Chicago, Cheers or Fosse, there’s another piece in the tapestry of her work that brings many notable threads together and is equally significant to her.

Here Lies Jenny is the somewhat under-discussed piece of theatre that in fact has connections to all three of these aforementioned things, because of the people she worked herself on creating it with, and deserves to be brought up with slightly more comparable frequency.

A moment then to explore some of the history of this elusive but important show.

Here Lies Jenny, recalled as a “surprise off Broadway hit”, opened at the Zipper Theatre in downtown Manhattan in May 2004 and ran there for five months.

The show was an interpretive revue of the music of German composer, Kurt Weill, born out of an idea Bebe had herself. It was shaped by collaboration with close friends – with its initial genesis assisted by Leslie Stifelman (the show’s pianist, who she’d worked with on Chicago), direction by Roger Rees (who she’d long known and worked with since their time on Cheers together), and choreography by Ann Reinking (who was Bebe’s closest dance companion in the Fosse universe).

Set in a dark and shadowy looking barroom, the piece followed Bebe as the central, amorphous female figure named ‘Jenny’, supported by three male cast members and a pianist, through an evening of carefully selected Weill songs. Alongside Bebe and Leslie on stage were Gregory Butler and Shawn Emamjomeh, as two rough denizens of the bar, and Ed Dixon as the general proprietor.

There was no linear storyline to the show and no spoken dialogue, but Bebe described how the evening unfolded “in a very logical and emotional, fulfilling way.” All of the songs presented “[described] the interaction between these five people there, that make it necessary to sing the next song.” Rather than taking a group of songs by a particular composer and imposing a narrative on them, the songs were interwoven together to create an “impressionistic and realistic painting of this person’s life.”

To give a summary of the show’s arc, Jenny initially descends the wire staircase into the bar, with little more than a frightened expression and a small bag of wordly possessions. Accosted by the two forceful patrons, she’s flattened down both physically and emotionally. The men depart and return throughout, and the emotional core of the piece fluctuates from song to song as each number evokes a different picture and interpretation of a circumstance or feeling. As reviewers put it, “she’s sometimes bold, sometimes reticent, until she leaves…with what seems like a modicum of self-possession and hope,” and “climbs that long staircase on her way into the world again.”

The idea for creating Here Lies Jenny came out of Bebe’s own desire to put together a piece of theatre and an evening of performance of her own. It was a notion intensified by growing external interest, or as she recalled, “people have always said to me ‘Do a show, do a show, do a one woman show!’”

But for a while the form the piece would take was unclear. Bebe knew she “didn’t want to do a revue”, and she didn’t want “the usual cabaret thing… [or] ‘Bebe and Her Boys.’”

“I generally hate one women shows,” she would remark, “unless it’s Elaine Stritch or Chita Rivera or, you know, Patti LuPone.”

According to Bebe, she’s “much more comfortable as a character doing something. I'm not comfortable just being myself and singing in front of people.”

On and off for around two and a half years then, Bebe had been considering how to approach this matter while putting together some music, predominantly that of Kurt Weill, with musician, conductor and friend from Chicago, Leslie Stifelman.

Leslie suggested bringing in a director, so Bebe turned to Roger Rees – a person she regards as “not just a great actor,” but also “a fantastic director”, with a “very interesting creative mind.” Showing Roger the songs, he “realised that they all described women, or aspects of women, or different times in women’s lives.”

Roger thought it would be interesting then to combine all of these varied sentiments and have them channelled through one specific woman, in one specific location, to present a complex but diversely applicable tapestry centred around the emotional interiority of one tangible female force.

The show is “fragmented, prismatic…less narrative than poetic,” according to Roger. It’s not prescriptive. Rather, it evokes strong feelings and allows the audience to interpret them into their own individual and personal narrative for this woman. It poses questions and provokes thoughts. Who is this woman? Why is she here? Why is she here now? Is that a child? Or is that just a wish for a child? What did she have in this life before we meet her and what has she now lost?

It is indeed an unusual entity, and atypical from other more standard revues, cabaret acts, or works of theatre. A “self-described Japanophile”, Bebe explained how it played in the “Japanese aesthetic concept known as wabi sabi.” Of this she would elaborate, “There’s no direct translation, but it’s about the beauty of things as they age, embracing what’s painful in life as well as what’s joyful.”

It is certainly a piece that contains beauty as well as pain, which itself is a complexity and dichotomy often ascribed to Kurt Weill’s music.

When initially finding and working on songs for what was to become Here Lies Jenny, Bebe noticed being drawn to the work of one composer most strongly.

Like Bernadette Peters talking about how she gravitates to selecting Stephen Sondheim’s material for her concerts, Bebe would say simply, “all of the music that I loved the most was Kurt Weill music.”

A revue in 1991 called Cabaret Verboten (also with Roger Rees), that sought to recreate a Weimar Republic cabaret and re-conjure some of the decadence of pre-Nazi Germany, increased Bebe’s exposure to Kurt Weill’s music and was where she “first became captivated by the composer”. Building on this strong connection and deep appreciation in the years since then, Bebe would assert of his music, “it resonates for me.”

“Neuwirth knows Weill’s music isn’t for everyone,” one reviewer wrote, “but she won’t apologize for it.” She sees its capacity to be “appreciated on many different levels,” and has described it on varying occasions as “unflinchingly honest”, “very fulfilling to perform”, not just “arch and angular and Germanic…[as] many people think”, but as having “great lyricism and tenderness”.

Bebe feels a strong affinity for Weill’s music in part because of its “ability to convey the truth completely and fearlessly and without artifice”. For example, “If you're talking about heartbreak, [his music] goes to the absolute nth degree of what that really means. The way he shows that is with fearless lyrics and the bravery to make the music as beautiful as it can be.”

“Maybe the way I appreciate it speaks to the kind of person I am,” she would say. “I’m very bright but not an intellectual. I like things in a visceral, passionate and spiritual way.” And to Bebe, Weill’s music certainly provides that – which was why devising this show was of such importance and significance to her.

Bebe said also that “the show offers the broad range of Weill's songwriting talents.” This is indeed a truism, with the work of no fewer than ten different lyrists being showcased across the nearly two dozen songs during the evening, including Berthold Brecht, Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner, Langston Hughes, and Ogden Nash.

The different styles and languages of Kurt Weill’s music mirror Weill’s own history and geographic progression through the world. Born in Germany, “Weill, a Jew, had to flee the Nazis at the height of his popularity. He fled to France and then to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1943.”

His songs reflect the world in which he was living. For instance, ‘The Bilbao Song’ is a tale of sometimes gleeful, sometimes regretful nostalgia and comes from a collaboration with Berthold Brecht in German. It is performed here only in English through the use of “Michael Feingold's now-accepted translation”. The Brechtian-ism is a feature of this production as a whole that was remarked on at the time, being appraised there was “more than a dash of an alienation effect at play,” with material being sung for example behind grilled windows or facing away from the audience.

His French material is alternately reflective of the musical identity Weill tried to devise while having to reinvent himself from scratch in France. Bebe performs one of these French numbers here, entitled ‘Je ne t'aime pas’, which has its own poetic lyricism, and indeed mournful significance, given the translation of the title as ‘I don’t love you’.

Alternately, jazzy, Broadway glamour is comparatively evident in some songs like ‘The Saga of Jenny’ from musicals that arose in America on the Great White Way out of the era of Golden Age of the American musical in the ‘40s to the 60’s.

This show was ambitious then, in its mission of exploring a wide range of the composer’s musical contributions across multiple decades, countries, styles of music, and lyrical collaborations.

Beyond his own musicals, Kurt Weill’s music has been notably seen elsewhere on Broadway or in the theatre world via interpretations such as songs in concerts with Betty Buckley, Patti LuPone, Ute Lemper; or full stage productions with Donna Murphy as Lotte Lenya in Hal Prince’s 2007 Lovemusik; or Lenya’s recordings herself.

Much of Kurt Weill’s legacy lives on through his wife, Lotte Lenya, who was seen as his “chief interpreter… [and] largely responsible for reviving interest in the composer” after his death.

Like Lotte with her “whisky baritone”, Bebe is able to convey meaningful interpretations of Weill’s music through her vocal richness and skilled acting choices, carefully controlling factors like timing, pronunciation and syllabic stress.

An example. Bebe does the most satisfying version of ‘The Bilbao Song’ I have heard. There’s a line in this song that states: “Four guys from ‘frisco came with sacks of gold dust,” in which the last portion of the phrase is repeated a further two times. Bebe emphasises the third “SACKS, of gold dust?!” in the dramatic manner stylised through my punctuation in attempts at recreating its phonology, which contrasts against the two previous readings. This gives the line a salient narrative purpose. It conveys not just an observation, but a tale of surprise and incredulity – who on earth would walk into a bar carrying entire sacks of gold dust?

It may be seemingly just one small detail, but it has a large impact. Other versions that intonate all three repetitions of this line the same miss this engaging variation and feel flat in comparison.

This song would justly so later become a staple of her concert material – along with others like ‘Surabaya Johnny’ and ‘Susan’s Dream’.

But there is unfamiliar territory traversed in Here Lies Jenny too. The rendition of Ogden Nash’s lyrics with ‘I'm a Stranger Here Myself’ is ‘new’ – and it’s exquisite, in its melodic, lilting and playful but darkly seductive swirling sentiment.

Another notable number in need of individual mention would be ‘The Saga of Jenny’. There are two Kurt Weill songs most strongly associated with the ‘Jenny’ moniker – this, and the also well-known ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera, which Bebe had done a production of in 1999. The latter was trialled in early versions of the show but ultimately didn’t “serve the piece as well as other…moments could,” so was taken out. Fortunately, Bebe would later work it into her concerts.

The former made it in, and provides the exciting opportunity to get to hear Bebe’s take on this song as made well-known by a number of respected performers. ‘The Saga of Jenny’ appeared initially in Weill & Gershwin’s collaboration for the musical Lady in the Dark in 1941, starring Gertrude Lawrence. The song has since gone through innumerable reiterations, such as via Ginger Rogers in the 1944 film adaptation of the same name; Julie Andrews’ big-production performance in the Gertrude Lawrence biopic Star! in 1968; and other high-profile concert performances like via Ruthie Henshall, Christine Ebersole, Lynn Redgrave and Ute Lemper; along with Lotte Lenya’s own recordings.

Further extending the song’s life was ‘The Saga of Lenny’ – a version devised with new lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, performed by Lauren Bacall for Leonard Bernstein’s 70th Birthday in 1988. All of these are on YouTube and I would testify are worth a watch.

In this show, Bebe performs the number with the bravado of a war-time songbird. She strides around with an old-school 1940s microphone back and forth across the stage as she progresses through the song’s distinct chronological sections, grounding the show centrally back to its identifying moniker and characterising an eponymous, engaging and multiply varied ‘Jenny’.

When not bound to microphones, Here Lies Jenny also involved the use of Ann Reinking’s “minimal but inventive” choreography to create striking visual images. Though perhaps not resembling the fast-paced, razzle-dazzle of Chicago, these patterns of movement are at times no less impactful. Bebe is dragged fluidly across a countertop, rolled sinuously down pairs of legs, centred in a dark tango (that one review likened as a potential metaphor for a ménage à trois), or spun backwards upside down onto Emamjomeh’s shoulder in the air – to name a few notable moments.

Not a dance show by any strict sense, all of these demands are nonetheless physically taxing. This is a matter of importance given the timing of the show.

What Bebe had long deemed a “peculiar” hip from her early twenties, begun causing notable pain when it “went from peculiar to downright bad in 2001” during Fosse on Broadway. It was recorded the “pain continued during [this] high-concept Kurt Weill revue” in 2004, such that performing this manner of movement in the show can have been no trivial feat. The next three years brought subsequent arthroscopic surgery for cartilage removal, and then total hip replacement.

That being considered, the show was able to run in the highly demanding manner it did for five months straight because of Ann Reinking’s assiduously crafted choreography.

The Zipper Theatre was the “funky downtown Manhattan space” that housed the show for that time. The timing of the production and the nature of the theatre played integral parts in the piece’s characterisation.

Roger took Bebe to see the theatre when they were devising the show, and to Bebe, it felt right. “There is this creative gesture that we are making and the gesture is completed if it’s in this place.” Not in some new, shiny theatre; but here, with a darkness and sense of history that created an evocative mood similar to the tone of the whole show “as soon as you walked into the building.” This was aided by the show beginning at 11pm each night – “absolutely an artistic choice” – given that what “happens between these five people, happens very late at night”, in a shadowy time of day filled by darkness and secrets.

Here Lies Jenny ended its run in New York in October 2004. But this did not mark the end of the piece. Bebe and her troupe took the show to San Francisco in the Spring the following year – after a seven month interim that included filming thirteen episodes of Law and Order: Trial by Jury, the aforementioned hip cartilage removal, and subsequent recovery.

The show was not deemed flawless by everyone who reviewed it. Some thought it too dark or wished for less abstraction and ambiguity. But as one article would conclude, “Faults aside, it’s hard not to recommend a show devoted to Kurt Weill,” ultimately providing a “unique and polished evening at the theatre.”

Roger Rees would reflect on the show, “Weill & Neuwirth work so well together” because Bebe’s “high standard of performance” means she is able to “delve deeply and go on forever” into material he likened to being as complex as Shakespeare.

It “demands a great deal from a performer, and she is equal to it,” Roger said. “She’s very deep in herself. There’s nothing made up about [her], which is a rare and beautiful thing. The match between performer and material is exquisite.”

This would likely mean a lot to Bebe, as the show itself meant a lot to Bebe. And still does several years later. She would cite it in 2012 as the “role she wish[ed] more people had seen”, as to her, it “was a beautiful, unusual piece of theatre”. Altogether, it was something ineffable and “bigger than the sum of its parts”.

“It’s something I've wanted to do, and I did instigate it,” she said, of putting the show together. But that’s not to say it was easy to helm matters. “For me to be in charge, makes me very uncomfortable.”

That the show got made at all then Bebe would recognise as “a testament to how deeply I love the material and how inspired it makes me.” Her trust in people like Leslie, Annie and Roger enabled the creation of such a project from the ground up that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. Thus, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Sondheim, it was the combination of both personal drive, and also the shared collaboration of four people who all “love each other very much” that ultimately ‘made a hat where there never was a hat.’

It was even further an important show to her, because it was “a very private thing.” She’d describe Jenny as a very physical and emotional role – “the most personal of anything I've done.”

It clearly holds a special place in Bebe’s own heart. Undoubtedly, it would be poignant to revisit again. As we look to the near future of theatre with shows that could feasibly be staged as events start coming back, in tandem with the publicly expressed desire of people wanting to see Bebe back on stage again, this pre-existing, modestly-sized, inventive piece would be no bad suggestion.

How about a Here Lies Jenny reprise when theatre returns?

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anarcho-occultism · 4 years

Text

WandaVision but Wanda was a musical theater nerd... I spent too much time thinking about this.

Episode 1-Operatic a la 19th century musicals or period pieces set in this timeframe. Think something out of Gilbert and Sullivan or Phantom of the Opera. May take cues from some period piece shows like Sweeney Todd or Les Miserables

Episode 2-Kinda jazzy, 1920’s/1930’s style. Humor is Cole Porter-esque, fashion is Gatsby-tier. Probably references Chicago or Guys and Dolls a lot too

Episode 3-1950’s/1960’s set shows. Things are a bit more rockin’, probably heavily references Grease, West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie and Hairspray

Episode 4-This one takes cues from Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here is where things become a bit more obviously off (as befitting horror-comedy musicals as a genre). The music seems 1970’s/1980’s but the vibes are still 50’s/60’s B Movie

Episode 5-Jump to the 1980’s/1990’s. Songs are more like the ones in Rent, Assassins or Into the Woods then your typical showtunes-longer, more complex, etc. Maybe some Wicked references even though it’s a bit on the nose.

Episode 6-This episode is just a Hamilton rip-off

Episode 7-This one is non-Hamilton 21st century musicals—Be More Chill, Dear Evan Hansen, In the Heights and so on. Maybe throw in some Team Starkid shout-outs if you wanna

As for Agatha’s villain song:

🎵 *Agatha, Oh Agatha, there's no one quite like Agatha

She's broken each and every rule, for her they are anathema

Her powers of levitation would make the best witch stare

And when you reach her basement your kids're no longer there!*🎵

#musical #musical theater #wandavision #hamilton #cats musical #agatha harkness #little shop of horrors #grease #hairspray #phantom of the opera #broadway

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therappundit · 4 years

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Best of the 1st Half: 2020′s Best Rap Projects (*so far*)...

“I’ve had, the halftime of my life...!”

*record scratch*

2020, WHAT THE F**K. 😳

Ohhh what a first half it has been. If 2020 ended today, it would still be one of the most historic years in a century...and NOT in a pleasant way. Years from now 2020 will be studied for the long-term damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential breaking point (hopefully??) of this country’s ignorance to systematic racism and the need for a complete overhaul of our police departments, and of course, whatever the hell comes from the November Presidential election....and, not to mention whatever additional ‘tbd’ chaos rings in the second half of ‘20 that we haven’t even heard about yet!? These are trying times, folks.

My whole life, I have tried to use humor and entertainment to help me with processing high levels of stress and anxiety. This year, that process has felt more daunting than usual. I am writing less and less, and often find Twitter to be too dark of a place for me to navigate. It’s anything but a fulfilling “escape”. Still, I am constantly inspired by all of the new music that fills my headspace during life’s precious little moments, and it really keeps me grounded in the day to day.

At the end of 2019, I wrote the below in one of my posts. It took me back to a special feeling that I had, at a moment when the future seemed more like an opportunity, rather than a worrisome question mark. I’m going to work towards finding that place again, and I wanted to re-share this because it speaks to how the love of any art can be a healthy reminder of what we have to be thankful for in our daily lives:

“Regardless of how you feel about this list, I hope that you visit (or re-visit) any one of these pieces of strong work and find the same level of enjoyment that I did. I loved so much rap music this year and I could not be more excited about what the future holds. On a personal note, in 2019 I found myself even more in love with my wife, feeling luckier than I have in a long time, more satisfied with my hobbies and passions, and above all else, more in awe of my child (and anyone that ever raised a child) than ever before. I became a father for the first time in 2019, so as my baby daughter continues to fill my heart, I am beginning to wonder what she will think of her father’s love for this art form that has brought him so much joy over the years…I suppose time will tell.”

This list is long, because I think the talent that went into these projects is worth your time (and I put a lot of thought into creating this list as well...I do not work in the industry or know anyone that does, and I do not have any real platform - I just do this because I love the music).

If you are an artist on this list, I want to thank you, because you helped me stay positive and focused on a brighter future that I hope will soon come to us all...because everyone has been through something this year, and we deserve better. So salute to you and many, many others. 🙏🙏🙏

- THE Rap Pundit

The “Rules” for my list of the Best Projects of Q1-Q2 2020:

- the album/mixtape/EP/project/whatever you want to call it had to be released this year, by June 26, 2020

- the project must have at least 6 songs

- these rankings are a combination of my own personal preference, my take on overall quality of the project (whether it speaks deeply to my sensibilities or not), and how the final product compares to other work from the artists’ peers that occupy the same lane/‘sub-genre’ of rap music

So here we go 👀...

1. The Price of Tea in China by Boldy James and The Alchemist

Sometimes the greatest albums are not the most ambitious or flashy, they are remembered based off the strength of artistic chemistry and execution. Basketball fans know the beauty of a perfectly timed chest pass to a teammate streaking towards the basket can be more impressive than a behind the back pass that’s simply done for the sake of showing everyone that you can do a fancy pass. Staying with that theme, The Price of Tea in China is The Alchemist doing his best John Stockton impression, serving to Boldy James’ Karl Malone, and by album’s end you realize that Boldy scored a quiet 40 points while making this rap shit look like an easy lay-up.

TPOTIC finds Boldy sprinkling every ounce of his Detroit seasoning into Al’s pot to yield one of the most Mobb Deep-esque collaboration albums since Mobb Deep was dropping albums. In turn, this project is not only Boldy’s greatest work, but it serves as a re-introduction of a veteran MC that is suddenly more relevant than ever. Much like what Freddie Gibbs and Madlib did with 2019′s Bandana, this project is a great lesson on what MC and Producer chemistry can sound like when both parties are 100% on the same page when it comes to message, tone, and aesthetic goals.

It would make sense that Boldy James would fall into the Griselda fold, because much like Westside Gunn, Conway The Machine and Benny The Butcher, he comes from a city with a rich rap music scene that still struggles to reach the level of exposure that the NYCs, L.A.’s, Chicago's and Atlanta’s have basked in for so long. He writes from a place of “been there, done that”, showing a rich attention to detail that separates his street tales from that of his peers in the same way someone telling a story second or third hand can’t match the level of detail that an eye witness has saved in the memory bank. Boldy has survived both real world and music business challenges to rise from the ashes of “hey whatever happened to so & so, he was about to blow” conversations to reach a new peak in his mid-30′s. He deserved this suite of incredible Alchemist soundscapes (Al is deep in his bag here, delivering some of his most low-key impressive instrumentals in years), and like his super-producer buddy, Boldy is looking down at us from atop an already prolific 2020 at its’ midpoint.

I’m not sure anyone can match the chemistry that Prodigy and Mobb Deep had with The Alchemist, but in 2020, The Price of Tea in China delivers some of the most brutally subdued, occasionally humorous, stripped down rap records since P was throwing TV’s at us like he had nothing left to lose. If The Price of Tea in China isn’t holding the championship at year’s end, it still deserves to be mentioned as an impressive work by one of the strongest title-worthy unions running the pick and roll in the genre today.

2. Àdá Irin by Navy Blue

Okay let’s be honest: the “sub-genre” that is often referred to as lo-fi rap music (whether you consider it an actual lane or not, I know you know what I’m talking about...which I suppose proves its’ existence, right?), is beginning to suffer from the same affliction that all other sub-genres tend to suffer from once the word is out that this is “the thing” that the kids find trendy right now. A lot of folks in this lane sound *exactly* the same to the average listener. I’m not even the average listener, and I often feel that way. The irony that comes with being part of the sound that’s supposed to be bucking the mainstream clone machine turning into a mini-clone machine itself, means that the window is in danger of closing to avoid over-saturation of the artists that are already thriving between the gravelly, whisper-welcoming walls of Soundcloud URLs and Bandcamp EPs being slid to their heady fanbase with zero promotion. So with that all being said...why give Navy Blue a chance?

Navy Blue lacks the name recognition of many of his peers (for now), but he has now been thriving in the lo-fi pocket for some time as both a MC and producer, a young artist that’s closely connected to the lane’s most famous figureheads (Earl Sweatshirt, and to some extent, Mach-Hommy), as well as less heralded trailblazers like MIKE and the whole sLUms collective. Sure you can check out Navy’s Soundcloud page to get a taste of his work, but with this Àdá Irin album, we don’t just hear raw snippets of a freshly discovered unsigned talent. With this album we hear Navy as a self-assured solo artist, capable of sharing an inspirational song with the likes of Ka and sounding like every bit of the veteran next to the iconic soft-spoken lyricist. This is a very, very impressive debut full length album that showcases the best that the (sub)genre has to offer: some experimentation, jazzy loops, the diary-like intimacy of words that sit like dust on an old basement book shelf, and the raw emotions that come from working through love, pain and loss in real time. In 2020 there may be nothing completely new under the sun, but it’s the aesthetic choices that Navy Blue makes with every verse and every instrumental that make Àdá Irin feel like a perfect balance of beauty and sadness. If you want to dip a toe in this water but you’re not sure you can get into the mumblecore-ish world of MIKE, MAVI, Medhane or Earl’s work from the past two years, this Navy Blue album might actually be the perfect intro.

3. A Written Testimony by Jay Electronica (featuring JAY-Z)

Not a lot of positive breaking news in 2020...but when Jay Electronica surprised Twitter with a few cryptic Tweets back in February, implying that he was dropping an album (and Jay-Z would likely be involved), the rap game was set ablaze with excitement, skepticism, disbelief, and hope (albeit with some measured caution there as well).

This is something that fans, and arguably the entire rap world, had been clamoring for for a decade, many long since moving on believing that Jay Elec’s debut album had gone the way of Detox, sharing “1a & 1b” status as the most eagerly anticipated projects none of us seriously expected to hear.

Then it dropped....and then it went. In a Twitter-run rap world, quality is too often measured by how long a piece of art stays within the “trending” mix, as opposed to...well, whether or not it’s actually good! The truth is, A Written Testimony is not just good, it’s very, very good, and while it’s not the “Illmatic 2″ that some may have been expecting, realistically it’s superior to what I imagined a new project from such a reclusive artist would sound like in 2020. If you at least try to table the expectations laid out when “Exhibit C” came out in 2009...I think you will find a project (it’s up to you whether or not you want to count this a “solo debut” or not, but at this point, it’s new Jay Electronica - can we just leave it at that??) stacked with memorable moments, quotable gems throughout, stellar production (this is one of the best produced projects of 2020 by far, not sure how/why this piece of the puzzle would receive anything less than acclaim), and some moments of questionable preaching made more palatable by a strong overall voice and package.

Jay Electronica raps with conviction throughout, and while the project feels brief, it lasts long enough to be more than a quick feeling, even if many feel that it’s not long enough to feel like a full album. If "Exhibit C" was the teaser then this is the redband trailer, flashing enough skill and details to resonate for far longer than its’ duration. Much has been said about the heavy hand of JAY-Z on most of the project’s 7 tracks, but let’s be clear, this is not Watch The Throne 2 (even though at points, it may feel like something along those lines). Yes, in impressive fashion, Hov comes through riding shotgun to show a deeper shade of one of his more complex dimensions, with many of his rhymes begging for dissection with every bar. However, AWT features a JAY-Z that’s rapping through Jay Electronica’s lens, not by any means where 4:44 or Everything Is Love left off. This is definitely a Jay Electronica album. AWT dives in and out of Jay Electronica’s beliefs in broad strokes that appear and disappear rather quickly, but even when certain verses raise more questions than provide answers, every song still has at least a handful of the gripping words that remind us of what made Jay Elec-Hanukkah sound like the chosen one in the first place (his tussle with writer’s block and hesitation to put out any art make for some of the projects most engaging moments).

If A Written Testimony is the last Jay Electronica album we ever here - which I truly hope it is not the case - it is still a memorable piece of work. So if you were one of the folks that moved on from it after the “surprise” of Jay finally dropping a project subsided, I hope you change that stance and revisit it once again.

4. Descendants of Cain by Ka

“Quiet and frigid disposition, growin' up in the cold / Surprised I ain't get high from what I was low enough to behold / Like when Pops shot at the neighbor's shop, put one in his head / He knew how he grew me, threw me the gun, a hundred, and fled / Didn't play, 'fore po' arose dispose of exhibit A / I was raised to age a few years in a day / If not elite, didn't eat if you didn't pray / As much as I heal, had to deal, all my scars are here to stay / Our senseis spent days peddling / Our heroes sold heroin.” - Ka, “Patron Saints”

He makes it seem almost too easy. If the writing wasn't so gripping, you might not even revisit it. Ka’s Descendants of Cain arrived with little fanfare, except for the collective awe of his humble but religiously devoted fan-base. The religious devotion is an important piece here, as Cain adds to Ka’s quietly impressive discography another strong album that leans on classic scribes as inspiration to spin poignant metaphors on Brooklyn street philosophy.

This time, the classic work is the Christian Bible, and Ka being the brilliant MC/poet that he is, seems to have little trouble working with the medium to preach without sounding preachy, and wax familiar-sounding nostalgia over wax that sounds as dusty as it feels fresh, rich, and urgent. Producing much of the album himself, along with a few trusted collaborators, the album’s strength is in its’ density, as each song feels like it requires a pause to unpack every bar...and to be honest, that’s exactly the type of attention this work deserves. If you missed this one in the first half of 2020′s feverish dump of new releases, you need to remedy that immediately.

5. Pray for Paris by Westside Gunn

If The Alchemist is the overall rap music MVP for his many contributions to 2020 thus far, Westside Gunn may deserve at least a few honorable mentions. From becoming the ambassador of Buffalo New York to stepping up as an ambassador of the underground rap resurgence, I don’t think any other rap artist has done more to run with the torch that Roc Marciano has been waving for a damn decade than the Griselda mastermind. If you happened to hear Gunn name-dropping to Peter Rosenberg on Rosenberg’s long-standing Real Late show on Hot 97, you know exactly what I mean. Shouting-out close allies and lesser known peers alike, Gunn’s presence proudly announced the underground movement’s invasion of the highly known New York City radio station. It felt like ECW invading WWE’s Monday Night Raw all over again. Of course Gunn’s voice was met with more ears than usual during that interview, since that appearance came hot off the heels of the release of his much discussed side project turned full-blown album, Pray for Paris.

By now most fervent rap fans know the story behind the album (a project that miraculously arrived to completion while Gunn was suffering from the affects of coronavirus), but for many Pray for Paris is the introduction to the story of Griselda Records and the world that they revel in. If Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher are responsible for the Griselda team’s grittiest street tales, Westside Gunn’s success leans on his ability to blur the line between all-too-real violence and cartoon violence, splattered with elite luxury references and shout-outs for his fellow wrestling addicts. The song titles are merely scattered trains of thoughts that may or may not have anything directly to do with a song’s actual meaning, it’s like naming your child ‘brunch in Williamsburg’ just because it was the last meal you happened to have that day. An audience brought up on Lil Wayne as the God MC may be completely lost at the appeal, but audiences brought up on Wu, DOOM and Sean Price know exactly what vibe Westisde Gunn is going for.

At times Gunn can come across as more of a talent curator than a stand alone MC, so if this is the album that takes Gunn to the next level as a rap star, it would make him the most unselfish rap star to come along in some time. A rapper doesn’t jump on an Alchemist produced track with the likes of Freddie Gibbs and Roc Marciano and expect to leave with anything but the Bronze medal. The same can be said for his chopped and screwed contribution to “Claiborne Kick”, which clearly belongs to Boldy James. That’s not to say that Gunn’s verse is a weak moment on any of the joints on Paris, but the fact that he consistently surrounds himself with high caliber writers confirms that he is well aware that the quality of the final product will be determined by the team involved, not just the artists’ name on the album cover.

For someone that considers himself more of an artist than a rapper, he continues to paint intriguing collages with every album, featuring him at the center of an ever-expanding portrait of MCs, producers, singers, designers, and dancers. Pray for Paris is a typical Griselda project that also happens to sport the potential of something larger than most of their fanbase ever imagined. Yes we get the dark backdrops, elite underground production, and quotables throughout, but we also get a few additional shades, as Gunn dabbles with a “beauty and the beast” dynamic that cleanly pairs his violent imagery with fashionista pomp and circumstance (which no doubt helped draw the likes of Wale and Tyler, the Creator to this project). But t’s all less of a solo album to push a mainstream solo career forward, and much more of a cannonball through the mainstream wall, just to allow some sunlight to shine on his people...and his city, for that matter - because best believe, Paris may be the inspiration behind the project but Buffalo, New York is still with him every step of the way.

6. Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist

A highly enjoyable surprise drop from two-thirds of the potent combination that gave us the fan favorite project that was Fetti (shout-out to Curren$y, though), Alfredo feels like the perfect treat to hold us over during these trying times. It feels rushed, but simultaneously sharp and activated. It has the feeling of a controlled experiment that was slapped together in separate rooms, rather than carefully curated by multiple artists hunched over the same mixer for days on end. Alfredo is more of a display of two power hitters putting on an impressive showing at a Home Run Derby, rather than the collaboration that has been slowly simmering for years...but that’s also part of the fun, because it feels like Al & Fredo (eh?) were just as excited to release it as we all were to hear it.

Neither party is reinventing the wheel here, but if you are going to have a rapper and a producer connect for an album of great rapping over great beats, you would be hard pressed to find a more natural pairing than these two. The Alchemist delivers with samples that channel the speakeasy jazz of an old piano, and Freddie is simply the king of hard-rap soul right now, so he excels on every song. There are moments of darkness, moments of hope, and moments of self reflection (Gibbs is a logical choice to swing haymakers back at cops abusing their power), all delivered by Freddie at a break-neck speed over Al's significantly less urgent production....as if Gibbs frantically spilled his guts to his buddy over the phone while Al was kickin’ back with a joint saying “uh-huh...yup, I hear ya man.” The final result is an effective one, if not a quick teaser of what a lengthier amount of collaboration time between the two might sound like. It should also be said that the guest verses on this album (especially those from Tyler, The Creator and Conway) took this album up a few spots on this ‘best of’ list. Alfredo is easily one of the strongest surprises of 2020.

7. Reasonable Drought by Stove God Cook$ and Roc Marciano

There is a tradition in the rap music biz that newer/younger artists are often shepherded along by more seasoned artists in order to insure that the less experienced artist is blessed with the built-in audience that comes with a co-sign. It doesn’t always work, but typically the initiation comes with a solid musical foundation on a debut project accompanied by a greener MC still finding his/her way. Not the case with Stove God Cook$, he is perhaps the most unexpectedly fresh MC to be cut from classic rap cloth since Griselda & Mach-Hommy began to build cult-like followings.

While Reasonable Drought (and seriously, how bold of a title is that for a debut!?) is blessed by the impressive production and mentorship of underground rap icon Roc Marciano, it truly is the lesser known MC himself that captures the imagination right from the get-go. When I say that in my life time, I cannot recall such a strong debut performance by a MC that I have heard virtually no work from prior to his 2019 emergence, with the help of minimal publicity/ad budget (if any? Cook$ was barely on social media until *after* his album had already been released) on his way to dropping an album with zero features...then you should take my recommendation very seriously. Fresh style, some of the most rewind-worthy quotables in recent memory (an Uncle Buck reference!? Bow down, people), and a new following built exclusively on the word of mouth of equal-minded folks that were blown away by a project many copped on a passing whim... it’s clear that this moment could be the beginning of an amazing, fascinating career.

Similar to Roc Marciano before him, Cook$ possesses a rare flare with his wordplay and delivery that makes even the ugliest tales of coke dealing and disrespectful criminal activity sound like the colorful exploits of a post-Blaxploitation hero. He delivers every bar with the uber-specific word choice of Roc, but the outgoing swag of a Max B. The man that has people that never touched cocaine in their life singing that they’re “smelling like a brick right now”, is smelling like a winner in 2020 and beyond.

8. Battle Scar Decorated by Monday Night & Henny L.O.

Last call to board the Mutant Academy bandwagon!

I have been saying that this deep underground collective of MCs & producers has been low key having a banner year all year long, and scrolling through this list you can see exactly what I mean. Henny L.O. is too good to be slotted as just a battle rapper, while Monday Night is far too strong of a presence to be considered a mere associate of the core Mutant team. When you think of Mutant Academy and their respective affiliated acts, think of them as a gathering of solo artists that happen to make dope rap music together, but all parties involved are capable of standing on their own two. I think that’s what consistently impresses me about their projects...hat, and the lack of filler material.

Along with a deep Rolodex of mostly under-the-radar talent, the hunger and confidence of a thriving Richmond, Viriginia rap scene is present on every track of Battle Scar Decorated. Much like many of my favorite albums of 2020, there is no reinventing of the wheel here, the triumph is in the execution. Monday & Henny tag in and out, each with the confidence that they have spit the best verse on the song before they have even finished. It’s that level of ability combined with a shocking amount of production talent that makes Battle Scar Decorated essential listening to anyone that wants to be reminded of a vibe that hasn’t been in abundance in the underground rap scene since L.A. in the late 90′s. It wouldn’t be fair to talk about how much I enjoyed this project without including the great producers involved, so a big s/o to: Sycho Sid, C.R.I.S.T.E.N, James Couch, Savvy, Heather Grey, and Ewonne.

9. Eastern Medicine, Western Illness by Preservation

Accompanied by a who’s who of underground hip-hop’s finest (Roc Marciano, Mach-Hommy, Your Old Droog, Quelle Chris, Nickelus F, Tree, Navy Blue, Billy Woods, Ka *and more* - I mean seriously!?), Preservation has assembled an impressively cohesive compilation album both sonically and thematically.

Incorporating record samples from his travels in China, Eastern Medicine, Western Illness feels born in simplicity even though it is anything but a casual collection of dope verses over tightly wound production. A quietly gifted producer, Preservation knows how to squeeze the best out of his guests without shouting the results through the speakers, the choices are more subtle but yield a high impact and replay value. Listening to the project feels more like listening to a secret, unreleased project, because it’s hard to believe that this much talent would gift this much high caliber writing to a compilation of songs...although that was not uncommon in the 90′s and early 00′s (ah, I’m showing my old age again). Perhaps that’s a testament to Preservation’s vision, a DJ/producer with a relatively small catalog built on curated quality (see his fantastic 2015 collaboration with Ka on Days With Dr. Yen Lo). Eastern Medicine has enough talent involved that it could have been a worthy listen even if it was just as a hodgepodge of donated loosies, so the fact that the final product is so much more than that makes it an album that warrants a great deal of more attention.

10. The Allegory by Royce Da 5′9″

No accomplished lyricist makes life harder on himself than Royce Da 5′9″. Be it his tendency to cram personal observations and disclosures in and around his punchlines, or experimenting production wise, the Detroit veteran is intent on finding new ways to approach fine wine music, tossing more complex offerings into his catalog over the past few years. Things are no different with The Allegory.

Not only did Royce once again pen an album that speaks to his ability to cope with his own past and present, he inserts himself in the producer chair as well, addressing the trials and tribulations of the increasingly problematic world around him, over backdrops crafted by only his hand a a few trusted peers. The effect is mostly successful, with the production exceeding the expectations of many (myself included), while the writing is at times both thought-provoking and in need of further exploration on Royce’s part. The guest features range from effective to scene stealing (not because Royce ‘s verse is outshined, but there are moments where it seems as if the guest is better suited over Royce’s own production than he is). If you’re Royce Da 5′9″ and you release an album titled The Allegory, no one should expect a simple quick fix of bars over easily digestible instrumentals. The highs come in abundance, and while the lows come in small trip-ups and the occasional skit that the listener probably could have done without, you get the sense that with some editing and further focus of his lofty goals, his sermons could have been sharpened into a more effective analysis of many of his topics (the music business, being black in America, history, conspiracy theories), resulting in an incredible album instead of a very good one. Nevertheless, it is all worth the ride to hear the latest work from one of rap music’s most gifted MC’s from the past decade. If The Allegory isn’t a home-run, it’s at the very least a strong base hit.

Top 50 (all belong in the Top 10-25, but...there’s only 25 spots in the Top 25, soooo):

11. Cold Water by Medhane

12. Shrines by Armand Hammer

13. Bag Talk by yungmorpheus & Pink Siifu

14. Try Again by ovrkast.

15. RTJ4 by Run The Jewels

16. Noise Kandy 4 by Rome Streetz

17. Innocent Country 2 by Quelle Chris

18. Weight of the World by MIKE

19. Sages by Henny L.O. & Ohbliv

20. Milestones by Skyzoo

21. Carpe Noctem by Big Ghost Ltd

22. Lake Water by SeKwence

23. At the End of the Day. by Fly Anakin

24. Sole Food by Deniro Farrar

25. The Oracle 3 by Grafh

26. The Blue Tape by Tree

27. lo&behold by lojii

28. Infinite Wisdom by Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon

29. FULL CIRCLE by Medhane

30. UNLOCKED by Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats

31. The Throwaways by The Opioid Era

32. Anyways by Young Nudy

33. PTSD (Deluxe) by G Herbo

34. Holly Favored by Monday Night & Foisey

35. THE GOAT by Polo G

36. Demon & Mufasa by Yhung T.O. & DaBoii

37. The Face of Jason by ANKHLEJOHN

38. My Turn by Lil Baby

39. No One Mourns the Wicked by Conway & Big Ghost Ltd.

40. Two4one by Jay Worthy

41. Free Drakeo by Drakeo

42. Alone Time by YL

43. Assata by CV$ a.k.a. Con$piracy & Teller Bank$

44. Thug Tear by Big Kashuna O.G. & Monday Night

45. Ways and Means by Rasheed Chappell & 38 Spesh

46. IMMORTALKOMBAT by Al Divino & Estee Nack

47. Young & Turnt 2 by 42 Dugg

48. Sleeper Effect by Sleep Sinatra

49. Juno by Che Noir & 38 Spesh

50. LULU by Conway & The Alchemist

THE REST OF THE BEST (all belong in the Top 50 releases of 2020, but..what can I say, blame 2020 for being such a stacked year for music/events I guess):

Black Schemata by yungmorpheus, The Smartest by Tee Grizzley, Polly by the Powder Keg by Chuck Chan & Pad Scientist, High Off Life by Future, Gotham City Album by Plex Diamonds, Memphis Massacre 2 by Duke Deuce, Poetic Substance by RIM & Vinyl Villain, Styles David: Ghost Your Enthusiasm by Styles P, MF Bloo by Bloo & Spanish Ran, LSD by The Leonard Simpson Duo & Guilty Simpson, Funeral by Lil Wayne, RAW UNKNOWN by Spectacular Diagnostics, Nezzie’s Star by Eddie Kaine, ShrapKnel (self-titled), The Bluest Note by Skyzoo & Dumbo Station, WUNNA by Gunna, Get Money Teach Babies by Heist Life & Spanish Ran, Open Casket by Killer Kane, 6 Rings by Yung Mal, The Beauty of It by Eto, Meet The Woo 2 by Pop Smoke, Fresh Air by UFO Fev & Statik Selektah, Vito by Vince Ash, GRIMM & EViL by GRiMM Doza, RUDEBWOY by CJ Fly, Rocket to Nebula by Killah Priest, EVERYTHING by Kota the Friend, NO Blade of Grass by V Don, Eternal Atake by Lil Uzi Vert, I’m My Brother’s Keeper by Yella Beezy & Trapboy Freddy, Carhartt Champions by Tree Mason, Viral Viral! by Dunbar, Rowhouse Whispers by Ray West & Zilla Rocca, Magneto Was Right #4 by Raz Fresco, DUMP LIFE by Tha God Fahim, Jay NiCE & Left Lane Didon, Burn One, Tap In, Zone Out by Dot Demo, FNTG: From Niggaz to Godz by Squeegie O, PANAGNL4E, Vol. 2 by Los and Nutty, Death 2 All Haterz 2 by Rigz & Symph, Thank You For Using GTL by Drakeo & JoogSzn, Adjust to the Game by Larry June, Martyr’s Prayer by Elcamino & 38 Spesh, BETTER by Deante’ Hitchcock, Attack of the Future Shocked, Flesh Covered, Meatbags of the 85 by $ilkMoney, No Cosign Just Cocaine 3 by Ty Farris, Hear No Equal by Chuuwee, MSYKM by Tsu Surf, Your Birthday’s Cancelled by Iron Wigs, Spring Clean by Curren$y & Fuse, Arctic Plus Degrees (The Sun Don’t Chill Allah) by Planet Asia & DirtyDiggs, Psychological Cheat Sheet by Vic Spencer, Glass 2.0 by Meyhem Lauren & Harry Fraud, Trust the Chain by Planet Asia & 38 Spesh, Director’s Cut (Scene Two) by Ransom & Nicholas Craven, and Son Of A Gun by Key Glock.

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crimsoncityhq · 4 years

Note

mwf 30+? mwfc poc?

regina king, lena hedy, angela davis, zooey deschanel, rosario dawson, rashida jones, kristin wiig, mila kuniz, lupita n'yongo, kerry washington, michelle pfeiffer, angela bassett, cate blanchett, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Jessica Chastain, Cobie Smulders, Dichen Lachman, Ashley Madekwe, Maggie Q, Rachel Weisz, Yael Stone, Lucy Liu, Olivia Wilde, Emmy Rossum, Carla Gugino, Sandra Bullock, Stephanie Beatriz, Melissa Fumero, Reese Witherspoon, danai guirerria, Emily Blunt, Kerry Washington, Lana Parilla, Rebecca Ferguson, Michelle Williams, Elizabeth Hurley, Gina Torres, Connie Britton, Chandra Wilson, Kim Raver, Viola Davis, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Constance Wu, Emma Thompson, Diane Guerrero, Gugu Mbatha- Raw, Helen Mirren, Gabrielle Union, Salma Hayek, Nathalie Emmanuel, Rose Leslie, Winona Ryder, Ming-Na Wen, Melora Hardin, Taraji P Henson, Jazzy Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Goldshifteh Farahani, Aubrey Plaza , Sonoya Mizuno, Emmy Raver, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Thandie Newton, Penelope Cruz, Aja Naomi King, Natalie Dormer,marion cotillard, eva green, Logan Browning, Gemma Arterton, Christian Serratos, Issa Rae, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Wunmi Mosaku, hannah simone, michelle gomez, li jun li, ursula corbero, bianca santos, malese jow, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, berta vazquez, wakeema hollis, & tristan mays,

Bolded names would fit WCs under the cut if you’re interested non!

( sandra oh, cisfemale, 53 ) I hear that DEIJI "DAISY" RAU-BYRNE is looking for their SPOUSE Word on the street is they look like JOHN CHO,LAVERNE COX,IDRIS ELBA,LUCY LIU,JERI RYAN,REESE WITHERSPOON,JAVIER BARDEM, PAUL RUDD, WINONA RYDER, MING-NA WEN, JASON BATEMAN, ADAM SCOTT, MELORA HARDIN, JOSH DUHAMEL,JOHN LIGHT,RACHEL WEISZ,JULIAN MCMAHON, TARAJI P HENSON, WILL YUN LEE, MICHAEL EALY, DAVID LEE MCINNIS,LORNE CARDINAL, ANY FC 45+ PREFand that the last time they saw them wasLAST NIGHT. YOUR CHARACTER HAD ARRIVED IN CHICAGO MONTHS BEFORE DEIJI LANDED WITH THE REST OF THE COUNCIL. TO BE HER EYES, AND BECAUSE SHE HAD MANIPULATED YOUR CHARACTER IN BELIEVING SHE WOULD SIGN THE DIVORCE PAPERS. THEIR RELATIONSHIP HAS BEEN VOLATILE, WORSE WITHIN THE LAST FEW MONTHS SHE HAS BEEN IN CHICAGO. THE COUPLE HAVE 3 KIDS.You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSONFAUX. ( manish dayal, cis male, 37 ) I hear that RAHI KUMAR is looking for their CLOSE/BEST FRIEND. Word on the street is they look like JAZZY JONES, JURNEE SMOLLETT, GOLDSHIFTEH FARAHANI, AUBREY PLAZA, SONOYA MIZUNO, EMMY RAVER, PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE, AGE RANGE 34-37 and that the last time they saw them was THIS WEEK. CHARACTER MUST BE A CIVILIAN, REACH OUT FOR MORE DETAILS. You SHOULD reach out to RAHIKUMAR. ( yahya abdul-mateen ii, cis male, 38 ) I hear that JJ BAPTISTE is looking for their AIDE . Word on the street is they look like MAGGIE Q, DANAI GURIRA, LUPITA NYONG’O, THANDIE NEWTON, PENELOPE CRUZ, and that the last time they saw them was THIS WEEK. PART OF HIS 'CREW’, THIS WOMAN IS LOYAL TO JJ AND DOES HIS DIRTY WORK FOR HIM - UNDER VERY GOOD PAY. You SHOULD reach out to JJBAPTISTE. ( antoinette robertson, cisfemale, 32 ) I hear that SLOAN WASHINGTON is looking for their HEAD OF SECURITY. Word on the street is they look like RICHY WHITTLE, AJA NAOMI KING, CHRIS PINE, NATALIE DORMER OR UTP and that the last time they saw them was [Was recently at the mayor’s office. This person is someone that Sloan trust with her and her families life. They had grown up together in Chicago and kept in contact when she went to go live in Paris. They are the first and currently only person that knows about what happened in Paris. In fact, they were the one that instructed Sloan on how to get rid of the evidence by staging the fire. In her pursuit to dismantle the crime families of Chicago her head of security guard is the person she turns to the most often.] You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSXNBEAU. ( antoinette robertson , cis female, 32 ) I hear that SLOAN WASHINGTONE is looking for their PARIS FRIEND/ FORMER LOVEN. Word on the street is they look like MARION COTILLARD, GABRIELLE UNION, EVA GREEN, NATALIE DORMER and that the last time they saw them was NEARLY SIX YEARS AGO. IN PARIS BEFORE SHE LEFT TO RETURN TO THE STATES. THEY FELL OUT OF CONTACT TWO YEARS AGO AND SLOAN HASN’T HEARD FROM THEM SINCE; EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS MADE THE EFFORT TO LOOK FOR THEM. You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSXNBEAU. ( yahya abdul-mateen ii, cis male, 38 ) I hear that JJ BAPTISTE is looking for their FAUX FOLIE DANCERS/ESCORTS . Word on the street is they look like 25+, ANY GENDER. SUGGESTIONS: LOGAN BROWNING, MANNY MONTANA, TATI GABRIELLE, KEKE PALMER, DAVIKA HOORNE, BRIGHT VACHIRAVIT, GABRIELLE UNION, BARRETT DOSS, ZANE HOLTZ, ELLIOT KNIGHT, ALEXANDRA SHIPP, NATHAN MITCHELL, KIMBERLEY ANNE WALTEMAS, ISSA RAE, JANELLE MONAE, NAOMI SCOTT, CHRISTIAN SERRATOS, PHILIPPA SOO, KATIE LEUNG, GEMMA ARTERTON, SAMARA WEAVING, THANDIE NEWTON, KRISTIN KREUK, MATTEO MARTARI, LESLEY-ANN BRANDT, ALEXANDRA SHIPP, ELODIE YUNG and that the last time they saw them was WHENEVER.(3/4) You SHOULD NOT reach out to JJBAPTISTE. NON SPECIFIC FC’S ( any fc you choose could fit the below WC’s as well)

( lauren cohan, cisfemale, 33) I hear that EDITH COHEN is looking for their SOBER COACH. Word on the street is they look like ANY FC (25+), and the last time they saw them was I HAVE A FEW IDEAS TO BOUNCE AROUND ABOUT THEM. I DON’T PLAN ON THIS BEING A SHIPPY CONNECTION. THIS PERSON WILL HELP BRIDGE HER SOBRIETY SO SHE CAN START TO FLY AGAIN. You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSONFAUX. . ( zendaya, female, 22 ) I hear that DIAMOND WASHINGTON is looking for their PERSONAL ASSISTANT. Word on the street is they look like UTP ANY GENDER, and that the last time they saw them was A DAY AGO, WHEN THEY CAME OVER TO CHECK ON DIAMOND - CHECKING ON HER WAS A NEARLY DAILY THING…IF IT WASN’T FOR HER ASSISTANT, DIAMOND’S LIFE WOULD BE CHAOS. SHE LITERALLY DEPENDS ON THEM FOR EVERYTHING. THEY HAVE BEEN DIAMOND’S PERSONAL ASSISTANT FOR THE PASSED FOUR YEARS, AND THE TWO OF THEM HAVE BECOME EXTREMELY CLOSE. THEY TAKE THEIR JOB SERIOUSLY AND MAKE SURE THAT DIAMOND’S DAILY SCHEDULE IS RUNNING SMOOTHLY. THEY’VE VERY MUCH BECOME LIKE AN OLDER SIBLING / BEST FRIEND TO DIAMOND. THE TWO MEET UP NEARLY DAILY FOR WORK AND NON-WORK RELATED HANGOUTS. OUT OF EVERYONE ELSE IN DIAMOND’S LIFE (EVEN HER FAMILY), HER PA IS THE ONLY ONE THAT REALLY KNOWS OF THE STRUGGLES DIAMOND IS GOING THROUGH, MENTALLY. THIS WC CAN BE ANY GENDER, ANY FC, SO LONG AS THEY’RE 25+ IN AGE You SHOULD NOT / BUT CAN reach out to SILVERNCRIMSON. ( chance perdomo, cismale, 25 ) I hear that AUDRIC NOIRE is looking for their ELDER SIBLING. Word on the street is they look like FC UTP MUST BE POC, and that the last time they saw them was IN A PHOTO WITH HIS FATHER. AUDRIC IS UNAWARE OF HIS FATHER'S SIDE OF THE FAMILY, ANY SIBLINGS ETC, AND HIS FATHER HAS SINCE PASSED. You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSONFAUX. ( yahya abdul-mateen ii, cis male, 38 ) I hear that JJ BAPTISTE is looking for their EMPLOYEE IN HIS DEBT. . Word on the street is they look like MALE AND FEMALE FCS FCS 30+. REACH OUT OR REFER TO EMPLOYEES WC FOR SUGGESTIONS. and that the last time they saw them was LAST WEEK. THE MEGARA TO HIS HADES. THIS CHARACTER MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL WITH JJ SOME TIME AGO — IT CHOULD HAVE BEEN MONEY, OR A FAVOR, WHAT HAVE YOU — BUT THEY COULDN’T AFFORD TO PAY HIM BACK, SO NOW THEY WORK FOR HIM AS A MEANS TO PAY THE DEBT OFF.(0/2) You SHOULD reach out to JJBAPTISTE. ( yahya abdul-mateen ii, cis male, 38 ) I hear that JJ BAPTISTE is looking for their FORMER LOVER, FRIEND, OR WORK PARTNER.. Word on the street is they look like FCS 30 - 40 FOR LOVER, 30-50 FOR OTHER and that the last time they saw them was LONG TIME AGO. THIS PERSON EITHER BETRAYED, CHALLENGED, OR WRONGED JJ IN SOME WAY AND GOT A GLIMPSE OF HIS DARK SIDE, AND JJ DID SOMETHING TO GET BACK AT THEM IN HOPES THEY’D LEARNED THEIR LESSON; THIS COULD BE PLOTTED TO FIT THE WC. You SHOULD reach out to JJBAPTISTE. ( wagner moura, cis male, 47 ) I hear that NICOLAU ‘NICO’ MONTENEGRO DE SÁ is looking for their NON CORRUPT COPS. Word on the street is they look like ANY FC AGED 35+, and that the last time they saw them was YESTERDAY. NICO IS DETERMINED TO END THE GANG VIOLENCE IN CHICAGO, AND FOR THIS, HE’LL NEED A SOLID TEAM - WHO ARE JUST AS COMMITTED AS HE IS. NO NEED TO MESSAGE PRIOR TO APPLYING, BUT WELCOME TO! You SHOULD NOT reach out to MONTENCGRO. ( lucien laviscount, cismale, 29 ) I hear that ZANE WASHINGTON is looking for their EX GIRLFRIEND(S).. Word on the street is they look like FC UTP ( CIS OR TRANS FEMALES AGED 23 - 40 ), and that the last time they saw them was (0/4) SPORADIC DATES. ZANE OFTEN TRAVELED THE WORLD BEFORE HE GOT STUCK TAKING CARE OF THE FUNERAL HOME. HE HAD A HABIT OF BRINGING HIS GIRLFRIEND AT THE TIME WITH HIM TO CHICAGO AND THEN DUMPING HER SOON AFTER. HIS LAST GIRLFRIEND HE WOULD HAVE LAST SEEN ONE MONTH AGO AND WOULD HAVE CAME BACK TO CHICAGO WITH HIM IN 2019 TO RUN THE FUNERAL HOME. THESE CHARACTERS CAN'T BE A CHICAGO NATIVE. ALL OTHER DETAILS ARE UTP. . You SHOULD reach out to CRIMSONFAUX. ( tessa thompson, she/her, 35 ) I hear that LORELAI FAUST is looking for their BAR TENDER EMPLOYEE AT DIRTY HARRY’S. Word on the street is they look like ANY FC, and that the last time they saw them was THEY’RE A NEW EMPLOYEE FOR RECENTLY OPENED DIRTY HARRY’S. THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT LORELAI’S CRIMINAL SIDE VENTURE BELOW THE BAR. You SHOULD NOT reach out to REVELAARE. ( tessa thompson, she/her, 35 ) I hear that LORELAI FAUST is looking for their STAGE TECHNICIAN EMPLOYEE AT DIRTY HARRY’S. Word on the street is they look like ANY FC, and that the last time they saw them was THEY’RE A NEW EMPLOYEE FOR RECENTLY OPENED DIRTY HARRY’S. THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT LORELAI’S CRIMINAL SIDE VENTURE BELOW THE BAR. You SHOULD NOT reach out to REVELAARE.

#appless rp #crime rp #mafia rp #oc rp #town rp #answered #mw

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randomvarious · 4 years

Video

youtube

Casey Hogan - “Under My Skin” Stockholm Mix Sessions 2 by Jesper Dahlbäck 2000 Deep House

***Song starts at 43:59 and ends at 48:08***

From Casey Hogan's Discogs profile, which is kinda lengthy, but provides a good backstory on the guy:

Casey Hogan was born in Miami, Florida. After his father, who by the way is in the Radio business uprooted Casey multiple times, they finally settled in Tennessee after short stays in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Kentucky. Growing up around the radio business was definitely a benefit for Casey. He was exposed to all kinds of music, from Jazz and disco to electro, 80's electronic and everything else under the sun. Although Casey appreciated many of the different styles he was exposed to, the newbeat/industrial sound of the late 80's is definitely what caught his attention. Stuff from Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Level 42, and New Order, is what initially got him started. Not [too] long after that, Casey was also particularly interested in the scratching and hip-hop thing as well as the moody techno sounds coming out of Detroit.

As early as 1991, Casey was making mix-tapes of his favorite tunes for his friends. At the same time Casey also began dabbling in production. He would go down to his father's radio station and work on the multitrack dubbing carts, splicing tape, and editing commercials after school. Not [too] long after in 1992 Casey began performing at both raves and clubs throughout the South and Southeast as a DJ. After building some experience in the studio, in 1994 Casey began to create his own music. He initially started with drum machines. Then he began to build his studio up. At that point Casey decided it was time for even more changes. Although the scene down south was growing, it seemed it would never catch up with the big cities of the north like Detroit, Chicago, or New York. So in the spring of 1996, Casey packed up and moved to NYC. Once he arrived in NYC, Casey began doing sound design/engineering for quite a few multimedia companies doing everything from original scores, to remixes, to edits, to everything else that takes place in a production house. Not too long after this, Casey got a job at the world-renowned vinyl shop Sonic Groove.

The year of 1998 would then see Hogan's first professional release, Precocious Track, as part of a trio called Peak Project. He would then make his solo debut the following year, and in 2000, a track of his called "Under My Skin" would land exclusively on a great deep house mix by Jesper Dahlbäck for the second installment of Turbo Recordings' Stockholm Mix Sessions series.

But here's where it gets just a tad confusing: the year after "Under My Skin" appeared on that Dahlbäck mix, Hogan released a 12-inch by the same name, but none of the tracks on Hogan's 12-inch were called "Under My Skin." And I haven't heard that full 12-inch myself, so, I don't know if Dahlbäck mistitled a track that came off of that 12-inch that hadn't been released yet, or if "Under My Skin" is the actual name of the track and it hasn't appeared anywhere else. 🤷‍♂️ If anyone knows, I'd love to know myself.

So, anyway, this Hogan track is great. Its light and catchy, twinklingly jazzy keyboard lead is definitely both its best and crowning feature. But the song wouldn't really be anything without the thick, aquatic morass that lies beneath it. When people call something "deep house," they mean a track that has a lower BPM than a typical house tune and is also imbued with a chillier affect. And while this track 100% meets that description, this song is also deep house, but by a different definition: it also feels like you're grooving deep at the bottom of the sea.

And that's because of the vast ecosystem of sounds that exist behind those leading keys that top the track off. There's a mix of different percussions, from some reverbed whip-slapping, to hand drumming, to snares, to subtly jingling hi-hats, to kick drums, and there's a slow, humming bassline that murmurs in tandem with a synth melody that sways at the bottom, too. Plus, a bunch more little sounds that are a whole lot more difficult to describe come and go as well. And all of these pieces, both big and small, both prominent and fleeting, coexist harmoniously, complementing each other in order to yield what ultimately becomes this exquisitely deep piece of deep house music.

A tremendous early aughts offering from Casey Hogan.

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fnlrndcllctv · 4 years

Text

Tekken

In our Soundtrack Sunday series, we take a look at the music of fighting games, track by track!

For the fifth instalment, Shaun Eddleston takes a look at the music of 1994’s Tekken…

(For the purpose of this article, only the Arcade version of the game’s soundtrack is being covered).

In 1994, 3D fighting games were still in their infancy. SEGA’s first fighting game experiment in the form of Dark Edge and the boundary-pushing Virtua Fighter had barely been out for a year, and games such as Battle Arena Toshinden were still just around the corner for the next generation of home consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and SEGA Saturn.

Namco wanted in on the action, so enlisted the talents of Virtua Racing & Virtua Fighter game designer Seiichi Ishii to help develop 3D fighting game of their own, based on a hardware demo that was initially developed to show off some fancy new graphics off to investors. What started off as a game called “RAVE WAR” would eventually go on to become not only one of the most successful and longest-running fighting game franchises, but one of the biggest selling video game series of all time; Tekken.

As the technology was still somewhat limited at the time, Tekken’s stages were a simple affair. A seemingly infinite scrolling plane placed in front of some parallax backgrounds to give the impression of depth, each of these fighting arenas required a little bit more oomph to push forward and create a suitable, varied atmosphere in which players could beat each other up.

That’s where the music comes in. As Tekken was such an early entry in the realm of 3D fighters, the soundtrack played a considerably larger role in establishing how the game felt than in later entries.

So, how does the original soundtrack holdup today?

Let’s find out…

The game’s introduction is fairly non-eventful in its 20-second runtime, but it does make good use of the game’s stereo mix by panning left and right to create a more immersive effect, and reminds me a little bit of elements found in the PlayStation startup jingle.

Tekken’s character select music is a loop of what initially appears to be a fuzzy, overdriven funk bassline over a simple drumbeat, but to me personally, there was always something about this version that didn’t sit right with me. Upon listening closer, I think I’ve figured out what it is.

Behind the upbeat bass that is designed to get players pumped up before a fight, there’s two droning chords being played in the background that elicit a very serious, uneasy tone. Its a strange sensation that’s also present in the PlayStation version of the soundtrack (although it’s not as strong, thanks to better quality remixing!)

“Marine Stadium, Japan” is where the soundtrack has the most fun with the stereo mix, creating a dizzying effect by throwing samples at the listener from all directions in the left and right speaker. Once the track gets moving, there’s a call & response going on between many of the tracks separate elements, running a fine line between being a disjointed mess and a brilliantly cohesive piece.

Luckily the rhythm section and background pads do a great job of keeping things in check.

Definitely one of my favourites in the game.

“Chicago, USA” is probably the grittiest track of the OST, and is probably closer to what a lot of the game’s music sounds like in the modern era than the rest of the tracklist.

The fuzzy bass tone of the character select screen makes yet another appearance here, and immediately starts to make each of the “verse” sections feel incredibly busy and muddies the entire mix straight away.

The chorus, although very brief, saves the song in a big way. The soaring keys, accompanied by some fun percussive claps, make this one of the most enjoyable songs that still holds up really well today.

On a related note, the arrange version found in the PlayStation port is flawless.

The most immediate thing I noticed about this track is just how loud and distracting the bass is. It rumbles throughout the majority of the runtime, and almost ruins the whole experience for me, that is until the bass drops out and allows listeners to focus in a bit more on the tracks other elements.

Once you get past the overpowering synth bass, this is actually a really fun track. Utilising samples of traditional Chinese stringed instruments and gong hits, it’s a high energy track that perks up the players fighting in the mountainous stage.

Imagine a hard-hitting techno remix of Chun-Li from Street Fighter II’s music and you’ve got the right idea.

“Angkor Watt, Cambodia” is probably the closest that the game comes to an industrial sound, and I mean that in a literal sense. The drums and bass is accentuated with what sounds like stylised machinery interspersed with synth leads for the whole track. This robotic selection is an odd choice to use for a stage that’s based on the real life Angkor Watt (i.e. a complex of ancient temples in Cambodia, NOT a factory filled with heavy machinery).

The track also ends before it has the chance to build up into anything really interesting, and remains as a bit of a teaser for me.

“Fiji” is unlike anything else in the Tekken soundtrack, and is arguably one of the series’ most iconic pieces of music (it gets revisited a handful of times throughout the franchise’s long history). The track dials things up into party mode, with steel drums and a catchy salsa beat that really makes you feel like you are on holiday on a tropical island, with a bassline that you’d expect to hear in a bustling nightclub.

A true highlight of the soundtrack, and most definitely the biggest earworm of the whole tracklist.

With “Acropolis, Greece”, we steer into something with a much more dramatic mood.

While the drums and bass for most of the song leave a lot to be desired in terms of differentiating themselves from damn near every other song in the soundtrack, its the the chorus that saves the whole composition. Backed up by some choir keys that remind me of Angel Dust-era Faith No More (the best era, by the way!) and some military-style drumming that’s sprinkled throughout, it builds up to something pleasant, even though it doesn’t quite reach the majesty of the location’s namesake.

“Kyoto, Japan” follows in the footsteps of “Sichuan, China”, in that it utilises samples of traditional instruments from the location’s culture.

This is another track that makes great use of the stereo mix, with the instruments constantly in flux from the left to right speaker (and vice versa). The song does feel a little choppier than the rest of the soundtrack in places though, and the constant “un-tiss-un-tiss-un-tiss” drumbeat mixed together with the percussion samples of blocks being hit makes the song sound like something from the Samurai Shodown games if they were all on ecstasy.

“King George Island, Antarctica” is one of the more interesting items on this fighting game menu, as the song is driven forward by something outside of the simple drumbeat and funk bassline. Instead, it’s powered by an ongoing drone sound hidden in the background. While not quite in Sunn O))) territory, it’s something that makes the track feel unique to its peers, even though it largely contains a lot of the same elements as them.

This one took me by surprise.

Most of the runtime of “Venezia, Italy” sees the music simmering away comfortably, then once the chorus hits, it erupts into a slightly operatic, adventurous display of strings and choirs. Not only that, but for the latter half of the brief chorus, the drum beat instantly shifts into a jazzy offbeat section that definitely threw me off in terms of where I was expecting the music to go.

It’s a gamble that ultimately pays off, and it’s one that results in one of the more underrated tracks in the collection.

“Windermere, U.K.” is where the quality of the game’s music takes a hard hit.

Everything in the song sounds like you’re listening to it through a wall, with the individual instruments being drowned out by the overblown bass and frankly dull drum loops, and even then, the synthetic saxophone sections of the song don’t sound very interesting either. It’s a couple of minutes that holds the entire OST back.

At least the Arrange version in the following year’s PlayStation port was an improvement.

From the game’s weakest track, we head straight into one of the best moments in the entire OST.

“Monument Valley, USA” is one of the most ominous, evil-sounding stage themes that you’re likely to encounter in any fighting game. Just over a minute of harsh windy soundscapes, thunderous gongs, grandiose strings and monk chants that feel more like a summoning of an ancient demon than an actual song. It’s such a deviation from the rest of the music in Tekken, almost to the point where it could be from a totally different game altogether.

The PlayStation version of this song is rightfully in my top 10 favourite fighting game tracks of all time.

Tekken’s final credits music is an absolute pleasure to listen to. In just a couple of minutes, it effectively melds together all of the different vibes of each stage in the game without resorting to just clipping them together as a cheap montage.

Besides, it’s just a relief to have something relatively soothing after dealing with the horrid AI of Heihachi as a final boss.

Overall, the soundtrack to the very first Tekken game is pretty far away from people may be used to from the high intensity of the modern entries in the franchise.

Instead of punishing dubstep and songs you’d expect to hear from a harder-edged Dance Dance Revolution game soundtracks (is that even a thing?), the music selection here is much simpler and way more subdued.

Tasked with trying to represent the various locations from around the world, Namco Sounds did an admirable job getting the vibe right for each stage. From the absolute party of “Fiji” and the sports broadcast jingle of “Marine Stadium, Japan” to the gritty club beats of “Chicago, USA” and the windy soundscapes of “Monument Valley, USA”, the Tekken soundtrack is a varied, interesting mix that not only gives each landmark and setting more personality, but also attempts to set the bar for a series that has since become known for its great music.

Now, time to try and get “Fiji” out of my head until Tekken 2’s edition of Soundtrack Sunday…

The soundtrack is available on vinyl here.

Are you a fan of the original Tekken’s music? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

#Tekken #Namco #Soundtrack #1994

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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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I’ve been trying to slow down the pace of my anxious brain, to move it away from the obsessive unsatisfying masturbatory procrastinating of clicking refresh. I want the presence of mind that comes from focused reading, I want to heal the destroyed reward mechanism of my brain. Absent the structure to days that comes with leaving the house, quarantine conditions have exacerbated these problems. I sought out older newspaper strips, because they have a leisurely pace. While no one would actually read a book-length collection a day at a time, in recreation of how they were originally read, the guiding principle that they be taken in as a diversion while doing other things is worth keeping in mind, as it runs opposite to current directives to binge-watch TV shows. Theoretically, having these narratives exist in parallel to the procession of days would be a nice respite from quarantine’s time-warp effect. However, when reading older newspaper strips, especially if you’re paying attention to the news at all, one is frequently jarred by the presence of racial caricatures.

I really try to avoid being someone offended by work that comes from a completely different cultural context. I’m a white dude, and while I don’t want to be quick to forgive anyone’s racism, I also don’t want to be one of those people that rush to condemn things as a way to posit myself as some sort of enlightened authority. Trying to “cancel” someone who’s long dead really only makes you into someone dismissive of history, which only works to one’s detriment.

Still, when the protests against police violence turned to easily-communicated gestures of symbolic speech, and iconoclastic energy was directed against statues of historical colonialists rather than the more immediate threats presented by police cruisers, conservatives defended such statues arguing their historical importance. This argument is extremely disingenuous. We can choose the historical narrative we want to present to ourselves. While the majority of opinions enshrined in law throughout the course of American political history were those slave-owners and genocide-justifiers, there’s nonetheless a vast cultural history it would serve as well to look to and posit as who we are. Every decision made was the result of argument, the losers of the arguments unaccountably brave. Ever since reading Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, I’ve been convinced that if any woman should be preserved on our money, it’s Jeanette Rankin, if only so her story would then be taught in schools. The work of a historian is to make an argument by collecting threads of a narrative out of the collective chaos of ongoing time before it’s all lost to entropy and rot.

Much credit is due to comics historian Bill Blackbeard, who edited the Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics, for what it is now clear is the considerable effort he must’ve made to avoid including too many depictions of racial stereotypes in his survey. He did so because he was arguing for comic strips being an art form, and avoiding the laziness of racial caricature helps that argument be made. He doesn’t bypass them completely: They’re in a Herriman strip, Baron Bean, albeit only for a few panels. They’re also on prominent display in the McKay Little Nemo strips. Maybe they’re somewhere else I didn’t look at too closely, it’s a large book.

But imagine my surprise and mortification when I bought a big collection of Polly And Her Pals Sunday strips and encountered these “mammy” caricatures in the depiction of servants. And then, when I bought a collection of Walt And Skeezix dailies, there it was again. These strips are well-regarded, considered the best of their day, and the comic strip as a whole was regarded as intellectually superior to the comic books that followed. When Gary Groth wrote his introduction to the first issue of Love And Rockets, these strips were the works he cited as the historical apex of the form.

(Apologies may be in order for my not wanting to actually include the relevant imagery of racial caricature here, and this post being all text. I would definitely need to apologize if I did include them though.)

The thing about the racial caricatures is they demonstrate the limitations of their artist’s ambition. The most charitable reading I can afford to give is that the caricatures exist within a larger context where all of the characterizations are burlesques, intended strictly for laughs, and somewhat thin. Gasoline Alley, currently being reprinted as Walt And Skeezix, is meant to evoke some sense of feeling, and while there are some melodramatic plotlines, the bulk of the work it does to accomplish that end is by being low-key and gentle. If you view the strip not as a light comedy historical piece, and admit you are meant to project your feelings onto the white main characters, you kind of have to concede that maybe Frank King didn’t really see black people as human. You know black people read these strips! It ran in a Chicago newspaper. If you lived in Chicago at this time, you would see black people living their lives, which would surely include the buying and reading of newspapers. It seems really weird to then depict black people as dumb and superstitious, even if the depiction of them as working as servants was primarily how the cartoonist would have encountered them in the middle-class milieu he lived in and depicted.

Herriman is a fascinating complicating factor. Because he’s black, and he’s arguably one of the best strip cartoonists of this era, and was respected by his peers. But he was also white-passing, in all likelihood because he knew his racial background would create problems, including with his peers. I think there’s a strong case to be made for the case Ishmael Reed basically implicitly makes with his Mumbo Jumbo dedication: That Herriman is one of the great artists of the twentieth century, and his art is informed by his blackness in the same way that blackness informs the great American art form of jazz. That his identity was denied to his peers doesn’t make his own art any less great, it simply complicates the ways that art works. But if you think of Cliff Sterrett being one of the guys who called Herriman “the Greek” and then drew this comic strip that features these horrible stereotypes, it just hurts your soul.

Sterrett is even I think someone whose work gets called “jazzy,” because there’s a certain modernist verve to it, a visual inventiveness. While the limit to King’s work is in how well-written you can really view it as being when you’re considering the racism, the limit to Sterrett’s is in how well-drawn and actually wild it is, considering that every strip has the same gridded layout, when contrasted against the more inventive architectures of a Feininger page, or Charles Forbell’s Naughty Pete, or a Garrett Price White Boy strip. (I haven’t actually read the White Boy collection. The people who have read it and like it cite how it’s beautifully drawn, and how not-racist it is in the depiction of Native Americans, as being the things that credit it.)

Here’s something: I’m not even reading the strips drawn by conservatives! I’m not reading Chester Gould, or Harold Gray, or Al Capp. Each of these cartoonist is their own weird thing, with effectively different forms of conservatism, who I don’t wish to dismiss. I can get down with some Dick Tracy strips, whatever. To a certain extent, being an adult in dealing with history means seeing the virtues in people you probably disagree with in many ways. But it’s seeing the weird unconscious attitudes of people you would like to genuinely admire that makes you want to throw the whole project in the trash and start anew, because it displays evidence of such a deep taint.

Racism is basically America’s original sin. Comic strips are, along with jazz, the great American art form. It basically follows that you can’t talk about comics in any sort of accurate historic light without talking about racism. (There’s also racial caricature in Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo strips, obviously.) Reading the supplemental essays in these books of reprints, or critical reviews of them, you realize the desire to distance oneself from talking about the racism in the work is similar to how the conservative view of “American exceptionalism” goes hand-in-hand with a refusal to acknowledge the racist premises at the heart of its founding: People arguing for the exceptional quality of these strips are not addressing the elephant in the room, or only address it in the most cursory and hand-waving way imaginable. They are trying to paint a portrait without blemishes, without flaws, and in so doing depict a platonic ideal that does not actually exist.

These strips are not the work of Robert Crumb, where the racist imagery being employed has ostensibly an satirical end. It’s not Huckleberry Finn either, where the use of racial slurs is commonplace to set up a default mindset that then becomes undercut as a common humanity is realized. I’m actually unclear on if you could print such racial slurs in the newspaper at this time, or if it would be avoided as strenuously as any other profanity that couldn’t run in a “family newspaper.” What you see in these strips is the soft racism of paternalistic attitudes in the twentieth century American North laid bare for what it is. The volume I have of Walt And Skeezix collects the strips from 1923 and 1294, the Polly And Her Pals collection collects work from 1928 to 1930. This was an an era where black people could be reliably counted on as Republican voters, in the era before the realignment in politics that came with the Great Depression and the New Deal.

The current ahistorical posturing of Trump’s Republican party has them occasionally downplaying their overt anti-black racism to claim the “party of Lincoln” banner. So these strips are relevant, essentially, for depicting the sort of status quo the Republican party seek a return to, prior to FDR-instituted social programs, where black people exist primarily as servants and their concerns or agency, beyond how they exist in service to liberal white people, who address them from a place of charity, while conservatives would theoretically exist in all-white enclaves, are dismissed. The racism in the world depicted in these strips is inarguable, but the hope exists, in the eyes of conservatives, that liberals will see the way it flatters them, and wave it away as basically acceptable.

The alternative, as ever, would be in Herriman’s Krazy Kat, “the future liberals want,” where race and gender are forever up for debate in an shifting desert landscape. The issue there, of course, is the basically true argument that the strip doesn’t make any sense, and the more-up-for-debate point that the unique language of the strip is the result of repression of identity and internalized self-loathing. It’s also notable that the strip lacked popular appeal but was allowed to continue existing because it won the support of a wealthy benefactor. Maybe one day we’ll all learn to vibe with it, but I don’t really see that happening.

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obtusemedia · 4 years

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Top 25 songs of 2020: Honorable mentions

2020 was not a good year in many respects. But despite the world collapsing around us, there was a shocking amount of great new music.

Some of 2020′s best songs were a good fit for this terrifying year — we’ll get to those ones much, much later in the countdown. But 2020 also gave us gorgeous folk ballads, euphoric dance music and infectiously fun pop and hip-hop that had nothing to do with COVID-19 or any other awful aspects of the year.

Before we get to the proper list, here are 15 nearly-as-good songs that juuuust missed the cut, listed in alphabetical order by the artist’s name.

“Shimmy” by Aminé

Oregon’s most prominent rapper — okay, fine, Oregon’s only prominent rapper — came out of the gates blazing this year with “Shimmy.”

Aminé may have heavily sampled Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s classic “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” on his second album’s leadoff single, but he replaces ODB’s chaotic vibes with a cold, snarling precision. He almost evokes Pusha T in his gleeful takedown of his rivals over the ice-cold beat. Pair this banger with one of the year’s best music videos, and there’s no doubt it would sneak onto this list.

“Dakiti” by Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez

I am all about this nocturnal, new wave-y style of reggaeton. The melody is catchy as hell, yet the production has a sinister, chilly vibe that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Italians Do It Better complication.

Megastar Bad Bunny’s husky vocals and Jhay Cortez’s more nasally voice make for a fun contrast as they trade verses. It’s a winning and charismatic combination!

“Boomer” by Bartees Strange

When you hear the phrase “rap-rock,” you’re likely shuddering at the thought of Limp Bizkit. But that style can work, as promising new artist Bartees Strange — stage name of D.C. alt-rocker Bartees Leon Cox — proves on “Boomer.”

Cox spices up a solid mall-punk banger with some rap verses. And unlike the Fred Dursts of the world, he can actually, you know, rap.

But it’s the song’s explosive chorus, where Cox unleashes his howling vocals over charging guitars, where “Boomer” goes from an interesting song to a great one. If there’s any justice, he’ll be rising up the indie ranks very soon.

“Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers

I think I might be the only music nerd who didn’t adore Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, Punisher. For me, her mix of hushed, mostly-sincere singer-songwriter ballads with snarky lyrics just came off as tonally awkward. Her quips about Scientology and outlet malls in otherwise-sad ballads left a sour note for me.

But Bridgers’ unique songwriting style shines most on the few uptempo songs on Punisher, particularly “Kyoto.” Her goofy non sequiturs fit much better in a driving, anthemic song. And I’m immediately primed to enjoy any tune with a strong resemblance to Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago.”

“Dynamite” by BTS

I’m not sure what it says about me that I didn’t learn to love BTS, the insanely-beloved South Korean boy band, until they finally recorded a song in English.

It’s not that I dislike their earlier, Korean-language stuff — “Boy With Luv” in particular is a banger. And BTS’ English-language lyrics on “Dynamite” don’t really have any meaning (they’re basically just a bunch of random catchphrases jammed together ... but they do sound good).

But there’s something immediate and pristine about “Dynamite” that makes it impossible to not adore. It’s a little too cleanly produced to be on the level of the Bruno Mars hits BTS were clearly aping, but the sense of fun is infectious. At the very least, it’s on equal footing with Taio Cruz’s classic of the same name.

“Comeback” by Carly Rae Jepsen feat. Bleachers

Carly Rae Jepsen can knock out wistful synthpop nuggets like this in her sleep. So can Jack Antonoff, who produced the track and provides some backing vocals.

But just because this isn’t anything new for the duo doesn’t mean the winning formula’s gone stale. “Comeback” is a worthy addition to both of their catalogues.

“Hollywood” by Car Seat Headrest

I can’t, in good conscience, put this song in the top 25. It’s an intentionally abrasive misfire from the Seattle indie rockers, who’ve done much better. Complaining about the vapidness and sleaziness of Hollywood is an overplayed topic, and letting side members of the band rap some of the verses (in goofy voices, no less) was maybe not the best call.

...but at the same time, there’s something to this objectively bad song that I keep returning to. Maybe it’s the embarrassing bluntness of the lyrics. Maybe it’s the forceful guitar riff. Maybe it’s because the aggro, visceral nature of “Hollywood” makes it a perfect workout song. Maybe it’s the goodwill left over from Car Seat Headrest’s last two albums, which were both stone-cold indie rock classics. I’m not sure!

But even though I know it’s not a good enough song to make the proper list, I can’t lie to myself and leave it out of the honorable mentions. It’s a banger in spite of itself.

“24 Hours” by Georgia

"24 Hours” is the best possible version of a left-of-center synthpop club banger.

What makes it great — the pulsating energy, Georgia’s yearning vocals, the “whoo!” vocal samples — are obvious on immediate listen. But perhaps what makes “24 Hours” worthy of this list is its replay factor. It came out in January, and it still sounds great 11 months later.

“1985″ by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist (song starts at 1:35)

We already knew — thanks to his two collaborative albums with Madlib — that Freddie Gibbs’ gruff flow sounds incredible over dusty samples. So why not team up with another producer who does something similar?

“1985″ is a prime example of knowing one’s strengths. The Alchemist’s production is stunningly gorgeous in his typical style, with a soaring guitar solo and a shuffling, dreamy beat. Gibbs pounces on it with the same ferocious street-life verses he’s been spitting for years. I’m glad to see Gibbs has figured out exactly which production sounds best for him to make Tiger King jokes and tell coke-dealing stories.

“Say Something” by Kylie Minogue

Aussie icon Kylie Minogue has been at it for 33 years at this point, reminding us every decade or so exactly why she’s stuck around.

“Say Something” is one of those reminder tracks — a burbling, irresistible, futuristic-yet-retro disco banger. The production is stellar, from the clanging guitar riff to the bouncy synth bass, and Minogue has a winking confidence on the track like she’s been doing this for decades (which, of course, she has). It’s exactly what you want out of a bubblegum pop jam.

“Right Round The Clock” by Sorry

With their very-British boy-girl dueling vocals, new London indie rock outfit Sorry definitely have more of a whiff of The xx. But instead of hyper-minimalist, whispered tunes, “Right Round The Clock” has a thundering, droll swagger that grabs you by the throat when the chorus comes slamming in.

The thumping, piano-based sound of “Clock” has a bit of a jazzy flair, thanks to the flecks of sax that pop in here and there. And Sorry interpolates Tears For Fears’ classic “Mad World” in a gloriously tongue-in-cheek way on the chorus (at the very least, it’s far superior to that awful gloom-and-doom Donnie Darko cover).

“Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” by The Strokes

In a year FILLED with improbable comebacks from ‘00s and ‘90s artists (we’ll get some of to them in the top 25!), The Strokes may have been the least likely. The early ‘00s indie rock standard-bearers had been in sharp decline for nearly 15 years before their new album, The New Abnormal, dropped and the group returned to form.

“Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” is a prime example of The Strokes’ invigorating comeback. It’s a killer new-wave jam that could’ve been been written by The Cars, with its jittery keyboards and impossibly catchy chorus. And of course, The Strokes’ most valuable asset — lead singer Julian Casablancas’ impossibly cool vocals — is here in full force.

It’s not quite Is This It, but “Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” is still The Strokes’ best song in 14 years.

“Spotlight” by Jessie Ware

After a career making increasingly dull ballads, “Spotlight,” and Ware’s new What’s Your Pleasure? album, is a refreshing change of pace into sleek dance-pop.

I don’t know if “classy” has ever been used to describe disco, but that’s the best way to describe “Spotlight.” It’s undoubtably a dancefloor filler, with a funky groove and ‘70s string stabs, but there’s also a stateliness to it. It could fit equally well at Studio 54 as it would at a black-tie affair. I credit Ware with that, using her breathy vocals and charisma to strong effect here.

“Lilacs” by Waxahatchee

Any time you can write a song that sounds like an outtake from Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, I’m on board.

That’s a bit of a reductive way to describe “Lilacs” — Katie Crutchfield’s vocals are much more fiery, for starters. But there’s something nostalgic and welcoming about this southern-fried folk-rock song with oblique lyrics and catchy hooks for days.

“Mood” by 24kGoldn feat. iann dior

Much of this new wave of emo-influenced rap isn’t really my thing. Maybe I’ve grown out of super-angsty and blunt songs about depression? Although I still love Smashing Pumpkins, so maybe that’s not the case. I can’t really answer why I don’t adore Juice WRLD or Lil Peep like so many others seem to.

But “Mood” — an unabashed sell-out, watered-down version of that sound – immediately clicked for me. I know 24kGoldn is trend-riding here, and that this is essentially a wildly shallow pop song. BUT! It’s a really catchy wildly shallow pop song! With bouncy pop-punk production that sounds like trap-ified Blink-182! (okay, it’s much better than that sounds, but you get the point)

I allow myself a guilty pleasure or two on my lists. “Mood” is one of those guilty pleasures this year. As the kids (presumably still?) say, it’s a vibe.

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youngboy-oldmind · 4 years

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ALBUM REVIEW: The Lost Boy

“Try to take a walk up in my shoes/A n**** rapping like I really got something to prove, Cause motherf****er, I do/I climb hills, n***** was sleeping, on Nyquil/ Paint a picture vivid, dawg, on everything, my life's real”

Overall Thoughts

Maryland rapper YBN Cordae plants a solid footprint in the rap game on his debut album The Lost Boy: a 45 minute masterpiece filled with excellent storytelling and production combined with a unique style that proves he’s definitely an up and comer to look out for in years to come.

The Lost Boy was my favorite rap/hip-hop release of 2019. Cordae’s first studio album is contender for one of my favorite debut albums ever. In my opinion, related artists’ (Chance the Rapper, Logic, Bas, J Cole, Kendrick, Amine) debut album’s fall to The Lost Boy. And at 21, his debut releases at an age younger than everyone in that group. To have an excellent project at such a young age is another feat on its own.

One commonality I notice with debut albums is that new artists tend to sound like their biggest influencers; the biggest culprit being Logic. But Cordae stands out with his own style that doesn’t sound too similar to any of his numerous influences. His delivery, word choice, and flow (while not always mind blowing), is not a carbon copy of a rapper from the 90s-00s. Here, Cordae’s sound is his own.

His pen game on this project is consistently above average, but rarely mind blowing. Tracks like “We Gone Make It” and “Thousand Words” exhibit his strongest lyricism. However, Cordae’s story telling abilities are consistently powerful. Tracks like “Bad Idea”, “Thanksgiving”, “Nightmares Are Real”, “Family Matters” all have Cordae illustrating his experiences. He emphasizes his perspective as a young man who’s finding himself through all these experiences. Even his most bragging and banger tracks still feature great humility and storytelling elements, the stand out being “Broke as F***”.

The features on The Lost Boy are all top notch. Cordae includes Chance the Rapper, Ty Dollar $ign, Pusha-T, Anderson .Paak, and Meek Mill, all of whom bring elite verses to their features. It’s even better that the guests don’t completely outshine Cordae. Cordae brings enough weight to each song that its not completely engulfed by the feature. Songs like French Montana’s “No Shopping”, Logic’s “Homicide”, Chance’s “Handsome” all suffer from a feature that outclasses the main artist. But Cordae goes toe to toe with each feature.

I should also mention the two skits, “Sweet Lawd” and “Grandma’s House”. Both are pretty good as far as skits go. I can’t help but assume they were influenced by Kanye West’s “I’ll Fly Away” from The College Dropout, both of which sound very reminiscent to. They display Cordae’s singing abilities and soulful sound. And its touching to hear Cordae’s grandmother on the latter track.

Overall, I can’t really find a weak spot on this project. The runtime, theme/tone, uniqueness, production, and lyricism are all excellent. As far as debut albums go, Cordae made has created one of the best I’ve ever heard.

Album Breakdown

The common theme throughout this project is Cordae’s experiences being young and lost in a chaotic world. I love this theme because it doesn’t limit the scope about his topics. He can make fun tracks, political commentary, and emotional deep cuts while staying tonally consistent.

1. Wintertime

"Wintertime” features a smooth, mellow, jazzy beat; The vibe feels like a instrumental off of J Cole’s 4 Your Eyez Only. Cordae introduces himself, compares where he started to where he’s at now, and discusses some everyday plagues that stress him (anxiety, maintaining success, pressure to appear problem-free) while also aiming for the top and hoping nothing he creates fades away. Great intro.

2. Have Mercy

This next track is lyrically nothing deep or profound, just a banger track with a dope instrumental. The echoy, bassy sound that develops on the last leg of the song is especially great. I also found Cordae’s music video technique interesting. He released two videos, Path A and Path B, that illustrate opposite tones. Path A brings more zainy, flamboyant visuals while Path B is much more dark and eerie. I personally think Path A is the more appropriate for the track. Overall, not a bad banger.

3. Sweet Lawd- Skit

This skit features Cordae singing the hook off “Have Mercy” over a church-like piano. As I mentioned early, strongly reminds me of “I’ll Fly Away” off Kanye West’s The College Dropout. Cordae’s voice is soulful and pleasant to listen to as well. The first gospel-esque track.

4. Bad Idea

Chance the Rapper and Cordae team up to create one of the best songs on the album. They both deliver great verses, Chance’s middle verse being the best. Here they talk about the downsides of Home and the impact those experiences had on them. They borrow the beginning chorus lines “It might not be such a bad idea if I never went home again” from Gil Scott-Herman’s “Home is Where the Hatred Is” and heavily styled like Kanye West’s “My Way Home”. Although Cordae is the main singer on the chorus, he layers his voice to make it sound like an ensemble of singers. A great stylistic choice. And the heavy piano X light strings perfectly end the track. Between the strings at the end, the Kanye West sample, and Chance’s (a huge fan, supporter, and protege of Kanye) involvement, I definitely smell influence from West’s sophomore album Late Registration.

5. Thanksgiving

“Thanksgiving”, the first deep cut on the album, has Cordae introducing a girl to his family during Thanksgiving. However, she’s fake and never stays around, making him question their relationship while remaining hopeful they can maintain it. Cordae demonstrates his powerful storytelling abilities. The overall mellow tone in the production allows his lyrics to fit perfectly in the instrumental; it doesn’t outshine but it doesn’t get over shadowed either.

6. RNP

Anderson .Paak has collaborated with Andre 3000, J. Cole, Rhapsody, Kendrick Lamar, BJ The Chicago Kid, Pusha-T, and Q-Tip, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw Cordae would be collaborating with the talented singer. However, I couldn’t prepare for the amazing back-and-forth chemistry between them. You wouldn’t think when listening to them trade bars that they have a 12 year age difference between them. Also fun fact: J. Cole produced the track.

Both these artists are just having fun over a bouncy beat, talking about the “problems” they’ve experienced being rich. Definitely be favorite fun track so far.

7. Broke As F***

This is tied for my favorite track on the album. Cordae’s lyrics aren’t necessarily the most complex and deep, but he brings such a indescribable energy to his storytelling. He basically tells the story from him being a baby, being in high school appreciating hip hop, where he came from, and where he’s going to go. The great thing here is that its not solely bragging about his possessions. Its a commentary on what he’s GAINED. This adds a touch of humility. And at the end, he comments on how he’s lost, still searching, and doesn’t “really have a lot of answers”, tying into the theme of the album. Perfect.

The spacey instrumental on the chorus, the beat drop after the first line of the first verse, and the beat change midway through makes this one of the best instrumentals on the album. And the ending drums transition to the next song perfectly.

8. Thousand Words

“Thousand Words” has some best verses on the album. Here Cordae talks about the toxicity of social media and how people create false perceptions to hide true pain. While already an intriguing topic, Cordae goes a step further by admitting he’s not holier than thou. He admits everyone lowkey wants to be a little famous, and nobody wants to be “nameless”. I love that. It’s easier to say Instagram and Twitter are toxic (Logic on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). But to admit there is some validity and positivity to social media...very profound for someone so young. My favorite lines are:

“Living in this false reality that's in this picture gallery/ Based on a n***** profile, we guessin' salary/ The lifestyle you advertise was quite strategized/ Make a minimal amount and then we maximize/ These n***** cappin' with lies how they capitalize/ Creating they own perceptions, what a massive facade/ Digital marketing schemes even broader regime/ Live how you want on the internet, who thought of this thing?”

9. Way Back Home

Ty Dollar $ign stands out on the feature, talking about not letting fame and success pull him from reality. Cordae sings the chorus and most of his verse. Admittedly, I wasn’t a fan of Cordae’s parts; It felt underwhelming. But the instrumental and Ty’s verse carry a significant part of the song. I especially loved the high pitched melodic voice that pops in the beat throughout the song. I also love the sci-fi, techy “WORP” effect throughout the instrumental. But ultimately, this felt more like Ty’s song than Cordae’s.

10. Grandma’s House- Skit

Between “Grandma’s House” and “Sweet Lawd”, I prefer this skit. The harmonious vocals that echo Cordae’s grandma’s vocals give off an amazing gospel vibe. The simplistic yet soulful and intimate aura of this skit makes it one of my favorite interlude-skits off any rap album.

11. Been Around

Another mellow song on the project, “Been Around” has Cordae talking about the development of his career and how he’s going to keep moving forward and not let doubters or bad situations slow him down. I like the chorus more than the verses, but overall its not a bad track. It maintains the tone of the album and flexes Cordae’s pen game a little.

12. Nightmares Are Real

This was the most intriguing collaboration on the album. Pusha-T and Cordae have very different sounds and styles; Pusha-T brings much more aggressiveness whereas Cordae is softer. Cordae’s hardest verses don’t compare to Pusha-T’s baseline intensity. Although they don’t demonstrate strong chemistry, they both bring solid verses. Both tell stories of how they started in the rap game, however, Pusha-T’s wordplay and lyricism is a step above Cordae’s. He talks about dealing with selling crack while developing his skills in rapping. Particular set of lines had me shook.

“Asterisk, skipped school, recorded with The Neptunes/ We was makin' high school classics/ Before I took a kilo and I wrapped it, I rapped it/ Around the funeral with the casket/ Coke avalanche, like a landslide/ Only grew my hair this long because my man died/”

I don’t wanna go too far into explaining these lyrics cus genius will do better job. But Pusha-T brings fire to this track. The tone of the instrumental matches Pusha-T’s intensity as well. As solid of a collaboration this is, its not in my top 3 collabs. That goes to show how amazing this project is.

13. Family Matters

"Family Matters” is tied with “Broke as F***” for my favorite song on The Lost Boy. Cordae talks about the stress of witnessing family traumas and difficulties while experiencing his own success. He expresses feelings of guilt and selfishness when his family hides things from him so he can focus on achieving his goals. He talks about abandonment from baby daddies, aunt’s raising kids that aren’t theirs, a cousin in an abusive relationship, a cousin addicted to xanax, and another aunt who’s a prostitute. All of this is happening while he’s worried about “plays and streams”. It’s an interesting sentiment. Is it selfish to focus on yourself when your family has a load of obstacles and difficulties? Every time he succeeds he has to look back at where he came from and be reminded his family does not share his accomplishments. Nearly brought me to tears when I first heard it.

As I already stated, lyrically this is one of Cordae’s top songs. Arin Ray brings a choir on the chorus that sounds amazing, adding to the gospel sound sprinkled throughout the album. And the light violin strings at the end encapsulate the emotional turmoil Cordae expresses.

14. We Gone Make It

Another top track, “We Gone Make It”, features a collab with Meek Mill to make political/social commentary on todays world and encourage others to keep pushing to succeed. Unlike the other three collaborations “Bad Idea”, “Way Back Home”, and “Nightmares are Real”, Meek Mill’s verses are actually equal with Cordae. Although I’m not a huge fan of Mill, he brings in a succinct, powerful 12 bars and a hook so dope he, as Cordae puts it, had to “sing it twice”. Also fun fact: Cordae used a modified version of the first verse on H.E.R’s “Lord is Coming (Remix)”.

Instrumentally, the beat accompanies the message without overshadowing it. The piano melody and vocal chops throughout mix well with the verses. I personally love the piano keys in the final minute. It adds an aura of delicacy to a song with such an intense message.

15. Lost & Found

In the perfect closing track “Lost & Found”, Cordae displays pride, stating “I was lost boy, now I’m found”. Over a bumpy, bassy beat with epic trumpet harmonies, he comments on everything throughout the project. However, now he has assurance he’s not lost nor insecure from his experiences. And he knows things are going up from here. Like the rest of the album, he’s lyrically above average, reflecting on his life while introducing a fun, braggadocios vibe. Kinda like a “the balls in your court” to the rest of the rap game. Loved it.

Final Thoughts

I look forward to Cordae’s next album. This was a near perfect debut solo album. At 21 years old, Cordae displays strong lyricism and production skills. His ability to story-tell and introspect indicate incredible feats in career. The lowest parts of this project are still amazing, and the high points put this project as my favorite of the year. I don’t know how else to say it. The rap game better watch out for this Maryland born “Lost Boy”. If The Lost Boy indicates the trajectory of his future, Cordae will have the crown in no time.

Top 3 Tracks:

1) Family Matters

2) Broke As F***

3) Bad Idea

Overall Grade: A+

#music review #album review #hip hop review #hip hop #cordae

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hoshigomi · 5 years

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Kurenai-ing! a (not) review~

This is NOT a review, but it IS all my thoughts on Kurenai Yuzuru’s first concert as an OG, Kurenai-ing!! in chronological order as they happened in the show. These thoughts are:

Biased

All over the place

Unfiltered

Honest

Every single one of them is loving and positive

Without further ado!

To start off, from the day this was announced, there was absolutely No Way In Hell I was going to miss this show. They found a way to cast all my favorite OGs, somehow including Uzuki Hayate who wasn’t even ever IN Hoshigumi, (save for Airi and Kai, F, but I see Kai like every day). Today was emotionally weird and I felt off heading to the theatre but honestly, before the lights even went down, when BENIKO began her preshow speech over the intercom? Any bad thing that’s ever been in my life just MELTED away.

The evening started off with “紅 in Male Role” which was just her as you’re used her her in otokoyaku mode. The whole cast got introduced. My love, Ichijou Azusa was the first onstage which rocked. Everyone did Killer Rouge. There was something REALLY sweet about seeing like a bunch of people who Were in Killer Rouge vs. a bunch of people who Weren’t In Killer Rouge all slaying it. Watching Toshi do this number made me daydream about a universe where she was in Hoshigumi and also a universe where I’m married to her. This daydream repeated itself multiple times throughout the evening so I’m gonna denote those moments with a (**). Whenever you see (**) know I was thinking about being probably married to Uzuki Hayate. This was the only point in the show in which I was skeptical of the men being there. I don’t LIKE men, period, but I especially don’t need them in my Takarazuka- adjacent material. (They quickly changed my mind in the next bit of the show.) After the men and Beni all dipped offstage, our Lovely Flawless Incredible OGs (Ichijou Azusa, Kisaragi Ren, Uzuki Hayate, Toa Reiya, Katori Reira, and Umesaki Eve, sang Sayonara Minasama (yeah like... the song they play when people retire or when QR is closing or when they need you to Get Out Of The Theatre.) No one could hear it because everyone was busy laughing. Renta was, as expected, completely unhinged, Shiiran was fake crying, it was a disaster because honestly, I don’t know who looked at these women and was like ‘yeah let’s give them free reign of the stage what’s the worst that could happen?’ It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and then, the curtain just straight up went down as if the show ended.

Of course it DIDN’T. NEXT UP?

BENIKO! She’s back in all her long haired leopard print glory, strutting through the audience through the stage- this time waiting for her? two pieces of mancandy (Kominami Ryuhei and Tagoku Tsubasa) at her beck and call in the ??? PALACE OF VERSAILLES, I GUESS? This was, as all Beniko bits, an improv standup show with a more than a touch of drag sensibility. There was some booty shaking, some fake muscle suits on the slender men, and a lot of laughter. I had tears in my eyes and I have NEVER heard a Japanese audience make this much noise. One of the guys made Beni break when he laughed in the middle of his line, causing Beni to buckle over and snort into her water, it was just.. a treat. These men were NOT equipped to handle Beniko- but then, without practice, who is?

When this all ended, there was a BURST of flame on the screen and standing, sihouetted in backlight, was Toshi(**), looking like (**) I dunno like the worlds hottest woman rockstar (**) and if that wasn’t enough (**) then she STARTED SINGING AND YOU GUYS?

WHAT THE FUCK?

I feel like a lot of things that have happened in Takarazuka are unjust, including several Top Star Careers That Never Were, but as of tonight, the TOP OF THAT LIST is that Toshi never MADE IT. Also that like I never made it to her ochakai. There is another world out there where Toshi has been My Person since day one and I am still in her fanclub to this day. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t like searching her name on Twitter as we speak trying to find out what Her OG club deal right now is, not that I need to be in ANOTHER OG club, (long story,), but GOD. Holy hell. Her voice is absolutely TOP notch and she was (**) BELTING out this introductory piece and I don’t think I breathed during the whole thing. It was HARD ROCK (**) you guys. (**) (**) (***********************************************************************************************)

From there we had a Takarazuka Medley (labeled in the program as “紅 in neutral”- sense a theme here?)

The medley featured bits from:

Lucky Star!

Gemini (Beni’s infamous girl/boy number from Etoile)

Bouquet de Takarazuka

Stuck Together from Catch Me If You Can, (featuring Renta as Kai’s part, which, oof, I can not wait for Kai to get to see.)

Estrellas

The theme song from Kamatari

Another World (just the first bars of this backing music got laughs)

Om Shanti Om

the God of Stars prologue (and you guys? I would have NEVER expected it but both me and the lady next to me just started CRYING once Beni kicked in with the 今！始まる！素敵な冒険！ bit. We shared a look and like laughed at ourselves. I did NOT see that coming but... more thoughts on Benigumi later. Just know that Dear Reader, I cried.)

Eclair Brillant

Bolero

A Piece of Courage

A song that the program cites as Quimbara which I actually didn’t recognize but (NSFW BELOW, DON’T LOOK IF YOU’RE UNDERAGE, DON’T LOOK IF YOU’RE HANKYU, DON’T LOOK IF YOU’RE GONNA SLIDE INTO MY DMS ABOUT ME NEEDING TO HONOR THE SUMIRE CODE OR WHATEVER because shut UP we all have DESIRES, MA’AM,) I spent the whole time with my eyes fucking transfixed on Shiiran out of everyone in the cast because between her time on the ground and her time idk standing and flirting and making bedroom eyes and like touching people with the tips of her fingers she was just in general doing some NASTY shit with her mouth and pulling girls around and I don’t know if she was playing aggressor or hard to get (or BOTH???? AT THE SAME TIME????) but she sure was grinding on Umesaki Eve and I guess what I’m trying to say is I could physically not breathe. I could say more about what she was getting up to but for like, frankly, my own dignity in this Starbucks I’m gonna leave that memory where it belongs.... in the confessional booth at church.

The medley ended with Beni doing a song from Mozart (but like, not the Mozart that Hoshigumi just did.)

I can not make this up but the program calls the next section of the show “紅 in the Flashy.”

This is where one of Tokyo’s special guests, Miya Rurika, pops up in the same rockstar style as Toshi(**) and I admit I actually thought she was Renta until the audience lost their shit. Guys, Miya looks BEAUTIFUL right now. Her and Beni both seem to be growing their hair out but right now Miya especially has this gorgeous blonde like wavy thing going on and really? Feminine makeup and honestly I was kind of transfixed by her. She sang her song and then was around forrrrrrr

All the Kurenai 5 material! Kurenai 5 (or 4, minus Tenju Mitsuki who is very much currently Acting In A Takarauka show) took over the next bit of the show was and it was every bit as precious as you’d hope. First of all, the way they play off each other is SURREAL and like nothing has changed between them. While I’m sure stuff HAS CHANGED, the love and the fun they have for and with each other has not. They encored some of their old songs, and you’ll be pleased to know that Tenju Mitsuki was present in cardboard cutout form, pushed around on a tiny wheeled platform by Katori Reira (who may I just add, along with Umesaki Eve, made every song they were in sound like there was a whole troupe worth of musumeyaku onstage. Girl can SING.) Beni turned to sneeze at one point and sneezed directly into Miya’s mic on accident. They also played a video message from Mikkii. It still took a while for the cardboard cutout to stop being funny. My favorite part of this segment was when Beni cracked Renta up and kept giving her shit until she was on the floor laughing and unable to say what she had been trying to say and then Shiiran straight up took the mic out of Renta’s hands and spoke for her. さすが、Shiiran.

The show was winding down at this point, but Beniko made a reappearance (”BENIKO in DELUSION”, according to the program). We transitioned out of that ad lib with a number for the ladies, Reira and Eve. It was boppy and jazzy and idolly and I got the idea into my head somewhere in here that Katori Reira HAS to play either Velma or Roxie in Chicago before either of us die and if I have to personally fund that happening, well, help me find my wallet because I’m off to the bank.

During this Beni changed into... not her otokoyaku clothes again but not BENIKO, just, herself, but girly. (Program calls this: 紅 in Feminine). She does a speech about herself and what she wants out of the future and whether she wants to be called a 女優 (explicitly FEMALE actress) or not post-TKZ, and somewhere in here she had a talk with Utahiroba Jun, another man who is completely and utterly obsessed with her, and rightfully so. He was a guest but didn’t actually perform aside from with EVERYONE in one song.) Beni rounds out the concert in a beautiful dress singing her heart out and I’m truly really touched by how far she’s come and how beautifully she performs.

There were, as there tend to be, like 83746958 encores(**) and people running on and off stage.

This was without a doubt one of the best nights of my life. I laughed until I cried, I straight up Normal Cried, I couldn’t Breathe for my like, unsumire thoughts, I was touched, and I was so so happy. Beni is my all-time favorite top star and probably always will be, and more than a singer or actress or dancer or comedian, Beni I think embodies the title of “entertainer” better than anyone I’ve ever personally had the pleasure to watch onstage or off. Watching her has made ME want to take more risks in performance and in life and to just do my best with everything life throws at me. Tonight she was so much of the Beni we all got to know and love in Takarazuka, but like, unleashed and able to be her truest, funniest, biggest, most loving self. Her ability to talk to the audience and everyone onstage and keep character and keep her humor and balance without missing a beat is unparalleled. I really, truly love this woman, and I am so so so happy I got to see this incredible kickoff of her OG career.

If I think of more, I’ll add it, but for now, as Beni hersef finished off the night by saying: Go your own way!!

#takarazuka #kurenai yuzuru #kurenaiing!!#ichijou azusa #kisaragi ren #uzuki hayate

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darlingsdevil · 5 years

Text

How Time Flies (Arthur Morgan x Reader)

F! Reader

Summary: (WW2 AU) Arthur leaves for the war, and when the letters stop arriving you assume the worst.

Masterlist

A/N: so a few songs inspired this! This oneshot also heavily references my current fic, The Ballads of Rebirth xD, however you don’t have to read it to understand what’s going on, as it is an AU.

The songs that inspired this oneshot: Super Trouper | Most Notably ~ Finale - highly recommend listening to that!

Angst City 😎

•••

Smoke swirled lazily through the air. The vibrations from the bass shook the ground as you were frozen on the stage. You mindlessly sang a jazzy tune, staring directly into the crowd. Time seemed to slow as you watched the ghost. Couples danced and swung to the beat, but the face of a dead man was watching you.

He was unreadable, but seemingly looking directly into your eyes. Those eyes of emerald and sapphire. Ones you hadn’t seen in many years. You said goodbye to those eyes the day he left for that train, while you wept on the platform, he stared straight ahead.

You said goodbye to him all those years again, but it seemed like you would be saying hello once more.

The cheering of the crowd brought you back into the moment. You let go of the mic, signing off for the night. The club would be closing soon. The band set down their instruments, and you stepped away from the stage. He was still there, watching you.

Arthur had died many years ago, or at least been MIA since the beginning of the war, but the war ended months ago, and here he was, at your performance, wearing his olive formal uniform you’d left him in years ago.

Your dress hung to your hips, your usual swagger wasn’t apparent, instead stiff as a board as you walked closer to him.

Every step felt like a thousand memories returning to you, memories you had buried when you stopped receiving his letters.

Then you were in front of him. You were terrified of facing him.

You were both hesitant.

He said your name, quietly over the noise of the dispersing crowd.

You looked at him, tears welling in your eyes.

“I thought you were dead, Arthur.” You told him through hesitance. You felt like a stranger to him. You held your arm tightly against your body.

The crowd seemingly surrounded you, their words overpowering your thoughts.

“I’m sorry.” He mumbled, staring at you like he would never see anything again.

“I didn’t hear from you. I didn’t know if you were alive or you were dead.”

Time slowed again.

Arthur was older now, perhaps even wiser.

He had new scars, and had a steely gaze. War broke him, you could see that within moments.

“I tried to write. I did.”

You wondered what Arthur had seen that made him give up writing. The old Arthur would have written to you no matter what.

You held back your tears, feeling more and more awkward as the silenced thickened.

“It’s okay. It is, Arthur. I’m fine. I stopped waiting.” You said, staring at the floor. You could feel his gaze on you, like he was waiting for you to say something more.

Arthur remained silent.

“Are John and Charles here?” You asked him after a moment, glancing back at him.

The band returned for a final song, luckily you wouldn’t be singing for them. The crowd cheered again, their roar deafening.

Arthur inhaled deeply, shifting his feet.

“No, uh, no they, they were killed.” He struggled to form the words. Your stomach dropped, you liked John and Charles. John left behind an infant, who was surely grown now, and a mourning wife. Charles had his father and his people.

You were selfish. Arthur was risking his life, remembering the death of his best friends and you had stopped waiting for him, stopped looking out the window everyday for him.

“Oh, Arthur. I’m so sorry.” You shook your head.

“It’s fine. Been a long time now.” He said with a weak chuckle.

“When did you get back?”

“Few weeks ago, service finally ended for me. Took me awhile to find you, never expected you to end up here.” He told you, motioning to the club.

When you were with Arthur you lived in a dead end town with one diner and one store, aspiring to be a big shot singer in Los Angeles, dreaming of a record label. But you were in Chicago now, singing at a dingy bar for the low class. Not exactly your dream but you were halfway there already.

You’d no doubt still be in that town had it not been for the war - that town was a death trap, it needed a large change like the war for anything to be different. Fate was funny that way, you’d gotten what you had wanted but lost something along the way.

“Yeah, I like it here. I’m still dreaming of LA, but you know, a lot of things have changed since then.” You shrugged.

“You always did have a pretty voice.”

You blushed. Luckily it was dim in the club, hiding your red cheeks.

“Thank you.” You mumbled in response. Arthur would forever be a flirt, perhaps that was one of the reasons you fell for him all those years ago. He was a farmboy and your parents were teachers at the old highschool, a perfect match it seemed at the time, but then the war came and everything was ripped violently apart. Nothing would ever be the same.

Bullets instead of wedding rings you always thought.

It was silent between you once more, but the hum of the crowd was anything but. You glanced at your watch. Shit. Time seemed to fly by.

“I’m sorry, Arthur, it’s getting really late. I have to be home soon.” You said quickly, looking towards the door.

“I’ll walk you home.” He offered.

You shook your head, struggling to find the proper words.

“I’m sorry, Arthur I am. My fiancé is waiting for me outside.” You were quiet, afraid that he’d react poorly.

Arthur gave you up when his letters stopped arriving, you couldn’t wait forever. You both wrote letters nearly every day, some arrived late so there’d be months in between letters, but then they abruptly stopped, while you wondered if his letters had been lost in the mail. Eventually, you stopped writing too.

Arthur was frozen, his eyes wide.

“Well then,” He cleared his throat.

“I’m glad you’re engaged. I hope he’s treating you well.” Arthur nodded, staring at you once more, giving you a smile. A smile you had seemingly forgotten, that had been blurred over the years.

You met your fiancé in your hometown, he was the son of the owner of the grocery store. You’d stopped there to buy some things and when you went up to the register the man, Lee, claimed you were the most beautiful thing he’d ever set eyes on, and one thing led to another and you were engaged and living in Chicago.

With Arthur you were foolish kids in love. Sneaking out to see each other at night, going to the only diner in town and causing a ruckus, making out in each others bedrooms while your parents slept.

And then the war came and Arthur was drafted, you never heard from him so you found love elsewhere. Perhaps it was a mistake, but it was too late now.

“Thank you, Arthur. I hope you find someone too. I’m sorry for everything, Arthur, I am.”

“Yeah, me too.”

•••

#rdr2 #rdr2 x reader #arthur morgan #arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan x female reader #rdr2 au #rdr2 fanfiction #rdr2 fanfic #red dead redemption 2

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