All things musical

Showing posts with label hip hop. Show all posts

Read- Def Jams from 1986. ‘Licensed to Ill’ by the Beastie Boys (30th Anniversary).

Landing like a loose lunar explosion, MTV was the only channel to view in the eighties, if you wanted to see the latest visual promotional clips on your television screen. This corporate driven commercial music channel served up a high sugar diet of colourful creativity, high rotation hedonism for high school jocks and cutesy cheerleaders. Think Rick Dees top 40 with high impact effects and you got the radio with pictures. With a predominantly white content mantra, MTV steered clear of rap music, offering the raw-edged ‘Yo! MTV Raps’, to any block jams that promised major record label returns.

These segregated sounds were about to receive an almighty brat-attack from a trio of backward cap wearing homeboys from around the way. Discovered by the bearded rock producing guru Rick Rubin and Russel Simmons (Run DMC and LL Cool J), the Beastie Boys eagerly grabbed the microphone after banging heads in the grungy garages of NYC, making punk-rock beer noise.

Rubin brought an edgy guitar riff landscape to the bragging beats and off stage antics of these 3 MCs from the 5 boroughs. Ad-rock, MCA and Mike D bounced rhymes off each other with an ease and brashness that had not been witnessed before, nerdy and naughty with a troublesome attitude.

‘Licensed to Ill’ was their first flight into unknown territory and crashed into the living rooms of America and the world with a long playing disregard to all that had come before. Stealing licks from Led Zepplin, riffs from Creedence Clearwater Revival and vocal samples from Mr Ed, Licensed to Ill was weirdly wonderful. Boasting beer spraying anthems, ‘She’s Crafty’ and ‘New Style’, side one went where nobody had dared to go before. It was time to get ill, with ‘Brass Monkey’ and ‘Girls’ chugging kegs of refreshing raucousness. Rewinding tales of scratching in the saddle, ‘Paul Revere’ took a backwards playing platter on a wild gallop, whilst the eternal party anthem ‘Fight for your Right to Party’ made every listener late for school the next day.

Whether it was the fold out plane crashing album cover, the treacherous turntable trickery of DJ Hurricane or the funky flow of these 3 microphone masters, the Beastie Boys shook up the traditionally super serious hip hop scene with a fresh and filthy version of rhymes from their streets and alleyways of Brooklyn.

‘License to Ill’ was my first ever CD, bought after owning and destroying at least 2 copies of the vinyl version of the album. With downloads and streams of free music flowing out of all devices, my needle never travels too far from the goofy grooves of this raw, rowdy and still really good first album from three decades ago.

Check out the original classic License to Ill ,or get a crash course in the boys' extensive catalogue with Solid Gold Hits.

Dave Tucker

READ: MAKING MUSIC DIGITALLY

No Comments »

Making music digitally....hmmmmm, allot has changed over the years in terms of making music. The options for how one creates a song has quadrupled. You don't necessarily have to rely on others to create music which sounds like a whole band is playing. A little while ago I tried to get my head around making music digitally; laptop-check, midi controller-check, drum pad-check, ableton live-check, but what on earth does this all mean? And how do you even start recording and making music?

This week I talk to Brent 'Parks' Park, the producer and music man alongside Ladi 6, a bit about making music digitally (also Ladi's husband and baby-daddy).

How did you get into making digital music?

I think i first got into it from listening to so much sample based rap music in the 90's. The sampler sound really intrigued me because i was learning to play guitar and hiphop beats weren't as rigid as other forms of programmed-style music of that era like techno and stuff. I think i related to it a bit more because of that. It had the raw sample which made this weird friction between raw live instrumentation within the sample and the stiff machine sequencing.

What is your background in terms of making digital music....are you self taught? If so how did you go about learning the process?

Where I grew up in Christchurch basically no one made the type of raw rap beats that I was interested in. Drum n bass owned our city and I never really related to that. When I moved to Auckland at age 21 I started hanging out with some guys who were much more hip to the

Read: Beat Streets – An old school history lesson

No Comments »

With raucous reality shows at a pervasive premium, it is refreshing and timely that the naughty folks at Netflix have secured a dynamite dose of ‘hip-hopology’ in the funky form of ‘The Get Down’, an adaptation of the early formative years of hip hop in the boogie down Bronx. This humungous history lesson is the master creation of Baz Luhrmann, yes he of epic classics such as ‘Moulin Rouge’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘The Great Gatsby’ and promises to be a colourful cut ’n ’paste mosaic of the music, moves and grandmasters of the day.

So, with my Casio timepiece set to back in the day, I kicked off my Adidas, donned my Kangol cap and popped a personal mixtape into my memory bank of the sounds and music that etched its’ way into my scratched up lined refill from Waiheke Area School, circa 1984.

Grandmaster Flash and his Furious Five took street gangs to the op shop, styling up in fur coats and fat gold chains, with the seminal ‘The Message’, an urban heads up from the crack laden footpaths of NYC. Def jams jingled and jangled care of ladies love cool James (or LL Cool J to those in the know), with Run DMC raising hell on the mic whilst Jam Master Jay transformed cold cuts to order like a beat crazed butcher.

Brat hop became a tag stolen from the bonnets of VW convertibles, as those beers swilling Beastie Boys tapped the bottle of teenage frenzy, taking keg party anthems to the suburban screens of everyday America via MTV. And for those who wanted something to dance to, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, lay down the mat for futuristic funk and unearthly electro, a head spinning mix of German electronica injected with James Brown drum loops.

As an English born beat lover, raised on the average avenues of Avondale, my mid 80s love affair with ghetto blasters, turntables and bedroom beat-masters is a far reaching testament to the raw sentiment, back shed construction and articulate recollections of a walk on the wild side, The fashion, the production and the fanfare came later, predated by a need for expression, escapism and scrapbooking pages and sounds from the time.

Delve into the vaults of our back catalogue and discover some treats of your own.I recommend a few to get you going on the good foot.

Try some Run DMC for starters, or let the Beastie Boys set the root down. A great collection for beginners is Rappers Delight or throw your hands in the air with Anthems.

Dave Tucker

Watch: Billy Ivan - Asking

No Comments »

Watch Billy's latest cool music video "Ask" set on the streets of New York. This is a preview of his new mixtape called "Compilation Tape" due to be released in the New Year. Billy comes from Statten Island and is a hip hop/R 'n 'B/experimental artist and producer and obviously has a message to communicate. This has amazing videography that sits well with the smooth feel and thought provoking lyrics.

Listen: PNC/David Dallas - Kobe & LeBron

No Comments »

Someone once compared basketball to jazz - looking to draw a parallel between the improvisations of each medium. But you'd have a hard job selling that to a lot of latter day fans. With LeBron James and the Miami Heat currently playing in their third straight NBA finals appearance, now is the perfect time to listen to the always excellent PNC and David Dallas on their collaboration Kobe & LeBron (hit play on the widget above courtesy of TheAudience.co.nz).

While we're on the topic, let's take a look at some of basketball's most memorable musical connections. Just as PNC and David Dallas are basketball fans, a lot of basketballers are rap fans, which has sometimes led to pretty amazing results. Check out some of our favourites after the jump.

DLT - Great Mixes

No Comments »

It’s a mystery why DLT only has a handfull of remixes in his resume. He's clearly a man with great taste and knows how to get the best out of what's in front of him.

Those skills are obvious on Great Mixes, DLT’s radical reinterpretation of Supergroove’s Traction. The mini-album was produced in the aftermath of a Supergroove/Joint Force national tour, with DLT chosen by Supergroove to execute the project, (and thank the good lord you were spared the Strawpeople remix with that special underwater trumpet courtesy of Greg Johnson).

The tracks on Great Mixes are often just made up of a skeleton of beats and vocals but still manage to be refined, beautiful and weird, opening up whole new dimensions within the originals. Check out Depth bomb, a demented paring back of You freak me. Gone are the guitar shenanigans of Ben Sciascia and left in it’s place is the bombastic charisma of the beat (and Karl Steven’s screeching harmonica licks).

But Greatest Mixes is not just a refocousing of exisiting material, take Bloody shame, his evisceration of chart topper Can’t get enough. About half-way through, DLT hijacks proceedings. Suddenly Supergroove are ousted and the DJ becomes centre stage with a virtuo performance of scratching and track manipulation.

You can hear that those turntable skills to optimum effect on the Deepgrooves compilation track DLT meets the Projector-Freestyle Dub. Three and a half minutes in he throws down and starts gouging away at Mike Hodgsons sinister dub. Turned up way loud it sounds like DLT’s ripping jagged tracts into time not moving a piece of vinyl back and forth across a turntable. Epic.

At times DLT's treatment will highlight an aspect which is almost hidden in the normal mix of the song. Take the vocals, stripped back, without the funky Supergroove cacophony, the voices are a touching reminder that these are a bunch of teenage boys. Horny eighteen year olds who might just have the world at their feet, still a couple of years away from it all falling to pieces.