So Raphael Saadiq—the man behind behind the beautiful late-sixties-in-the-naughts 2008 album, The Way I See It—is performing his upcoming allegedly late-sixties-in-the-teens album, Stone Rollin', live today at 4 EST. And you can watch it stream here, so do.
For a Saadiq appetizer, you could listen to the single of the upcoming album, which drops on May 11, called "Good Man." Or—and I'd normally put up this one up here—the other single, "Radio." But this song, "Staying in Love," off his last album, has been curling the ends of my lips upward and rocking my head every which way since I first heard it two years ago. And I've been wanting to rep it on here for a bit. So hereyago:
Update: While it doesn't look like you can re-watch the live stream performance, you can check out one of his SXSW shows here at NPR.
(Photo: Tone—there are some other cool ones on that site too.)
Here’s what you hopefully knew about Kutiman: His YouTube music collage project, Thru-You, hadn’t released a new song until yesterday. And if you aren’t hip to what all those words just said, well, here: He constructed the track, “My Favorite Color,” through sampling, editing, tweaking, and looping a bunch’a unrelated YouTube clips. The nucleus of the song is the slithering voice of a young girl, username Tenesa, who wrote a song about her favorite color, green. (Cough-hence the song title-cough.) The lady apparently had no idea she was about to be featured in the viral music master’s latest piece—her YouTube comment on the video sums up to a bunch of repeated vowels, emoticons, and exclamation points. There’s also a shimmering sax solo by username kpikemusic. Check it:
Incredible, right? It’s not his funkiest Thru-You work. For that, check out “The Mother of All Funk Chords” or maybe “I’m New.” There’s nothing nor nobody more innovative in funk’s evolution today. And I mean no disrespect. (But if you want to have that damn chat about copyright issues, take another look at that girl’s comment and then meet me in the playground, by the slide, after the bell rings.)
But here’s what you didn’t know about Kutiman: The Israeli producer released an album, Kutiman, a week ago—not of the Thru-You stuff. And a lot of it flat out gets down with twangin’ guitars, slappy percussion, and that sort of clav that cracks your clavicle from making you just jerk about every which damn way. The production is played up pretty high—there’s no real organic sound; you don’t feel like you’re coughing up smoke in a late night café as you listen, like you might listening to a Mayfield live album. But in these modern times—the hip-hop and mash-up era, which require high production values to make the samples jive—that’s the now and the future of this music’s sound. Embrace it. If you don’t want to, I’ll meet you in the playground, because you need to evolve—you’re being too elementary.
Well, yeah, this blog is mostly devoted to the fresher faces of soul and funk. But it's nice to allot some dap for the originals (and just because Fat Tuesday 's over doesn't mean you should stop living with the Mardi Gras spirit)—especially the ones you may not know of, so: over on NPR there's a good bit on N'awlins legend Dr. John, who still plays gigs in and around the way. Check the piece and him out.
Quickly though: Along with his blues, rock, jazz, and voodoo-inspired albums (if you're into some even-less-mainstream stuff and haven't hipped yourself to his 1968 debut, Gris-Gris, do), the good doctor also made some solid N.O. funk records backed by The Meters. I tried gettin' a good example of his funkier records on the Tube, but the best one available is already in the NPR piece. Though here's one of him playing a Meters tune with the very one-and-onlys—because Lord if you don't know The Meters either, well, you just need to:
Sometimes I worry. Yeah. I do. About the future—all those Disney kids teeny bopping around, giggling toward adulthood with their goddamn pristine teeth. Don’t laugh.
But then an angel descends. A 22-year-old angel, with a voice so warm, so encompassing that you can nuzzle right up in its welcome embrace; she sings with such power, but her right arm only daintily speaks pinches and clasps, as if holding a wand with which she tears down the ugly outside world and resurrects in you a faith you forgot you had.
The angel with the wand, as you already knew, is Adele. She produces a quality of soul singing not found in most human figures today. Sometimes its sprinkled and others glazed with that Southern gospel choiring wholesomeness (despite her London origin). Suckle it up. Songs like the single “Rolling in the Deep,” revive your deadened mind, your eyes, and your ass; throw your nodding head down with some slant or shake it wistfully; put on your stomping boots, then curl your toes. Though you’ll have to strip those boots off for your finest church getup for when she sits you down in a pew on “Take it All” and “One and Only.”
Yeah, you do have to prefix her new album, 21, with “pop-.” And you can skip about a quarter ‘cause the songs just don’t beg her to pull you in tighter. But the rest is pure soul, as she constructs with her angelic powers a realm bound not to notes, but to feeling—not to cleanliness, but rawness. Sometimes a melodic gale scratches up her throat. At other times, she just juts her jaw, locks, and lets soul drizzle over the last syllables of a phrase. You see, she’s an angel not because of her aura or her power, but because she can corral imperfection and make it beautiful; her front-left tooth is chipped.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Darling, Please take me back.
Here's the song that speaks to why I left and why I'm here again — or at least the chorus does:
That's Mayer Hawthorne's "The Ills" off his album from last year, A Strange Arrangement. Oddly enough, two Wednesdays ago, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal dropped articles on Hawthorne. The NYT goes into the entire neo-retro-soul "movement" — I guess some 'd call it that, not sure it's quite tight enough though. In it, Hawthorne says what could easily be this site's manifesto, if it had one:
“I hate it when people say, Let’s take it back to the good old days. Screw that. Smokey Robinson wasn’t saying that when he was making his songs. Run-DMC wasn’t trying to take it back. They were trying to do something new and different, something exciting. I don’t want kids listening to my music thinking it’s for their parents. I want them to feel it’s theirs. I wasn’t even alive when all those soul records were made.”
Claps, Mayer.
Now I'm not going to lie to you: I don't know how much I'll be putting up over the next few weeks. But I'll try. If it doesn't work out though, there's a crowd of modern soul artists in the NYT article that you can spin while I'm away.
The cover of "Let it Be" from the 2007 film, Across the Universe, by Carol Woods & Timothy T. Mitchum breaks the world down. (The scene in the movie does the same with its allusions to the Vietnam War and the 1967 Detroit riot.) Its visceral fragility and catharsis literally — literally — sends chills down the spine. It just — damn, the words shouldn't get in the way. In all possible seriousness, stick with these, of wisdom: just let this song be.
(Photo: screenshot from the film's "Let it Be" scene)
