1) “Jug of Punch,” the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem: I’ve been really into old-school, nostalgia-laden, semi-cheesy Irish music lately for whatever reason. This version is a little slow but I like the more rousing one on my Irish drinking songs album. RIP Liam.
2) “Everything Is Everything,” Lauryn Hill: I was shocked to learn today that many of my fellow music majors were completely unfamiliar with this incredible album. I’ve been listening to it extra since then to atone for their sins.
3) “9 Crimes,” Damien Rice: In keeping with my Irish music kick, but contemporary and not trad this time. It’s been cold and gray here in Philly lately and this song seems to fit the mood perfectly.
4) “An Draighneán Donn,” Doimnic Mac Giolla Bhríde: Also in keeping with my Irish music kick. If you’re not familiar with Irish trad this might sound a little unconventional to you, but it’s well worth a listen, he’s the best Donegal sean-nós singer (and probably a super-distant cousin of mine given that we share a last name and my family’s from Donegal!). I’m obsessed with his album Saol Na Suailce right now.
5) “My Kind of Town,” Frank Sinatra: I’ll let this speak for itself next week or so.
JDub and Nextbookannounce a new partnership. Interesting for young Jews who like Jewish things that aren’t kitschy, and for me given that both of the artists that I’m using as case studies for my thesis have been nurtured by JDub (note, I promise to discuss this at some point–I’ve been spending so much time on the research itself that I don’t ever feel like writing a blog post about it. But blog I must.)
Check out this NYT lookback at how the rules of the music business have changed over the last 10 years (including an amusing story about the author’s first MP3 player, in 1998). It’s a bit strange for me to read things like this, as my (and my peers’, of course) musical coming-of-age has coincided with all these crazy and unprecedented changes. My preschool had a record player, which I used a lot, mostly to listen to Mahalia Jackson and Chubby Checker (!); after that I just rocked out in Suzuki violin training for a while until I developed musical tastes of my own in late elementary school or so. In between, I was at the mercy of adults’ musical picks (from my 4th-grade teacher’s Concrete Blonde albums to my 5th grade teacher’s inexplicable love of 98 Degrees to my parents’ Paul Simon and Motown) and technological knowhow. By the time I figured things out a little bit, iPods were ubiquitous (though I did have a well-loved Discman for quite a while).
The other day, Jon Caramanica of the NYTchecked out the “TiK ToK” singer’s rap credentials, situating her in a lineage of white-girl rappers from Debbie Harry to Peaches to Lady Sov. Caramanica argues that, while Ke$ha is a rapper, she’s also a pop artist, and this has larger implications for how we think about blackness, whiteness, rap and hip hop–namely, that while rap and hip hop as genres and musical practices used to be only “black,” now they are so common, pervasive and popular that people like Ke$ha are redefining them as “white,” too. He places Ke$ha within the burgeoning white-lady-electro-rap trend.
Take a listen to the first bit of the song:
As an aside, I personally think her flow sounds a lot like Fergie’s and wonder why that wasn’t discussed more. Anyway.
I think it’s obvious to anyone that Ke$ha does, in fact, rap during this song. I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a rapper per se (and neither would Latoya Peterson over at Jezebel). Here’s why.
Along with Caramanica, I think it’s pretty clear that rap used to be considered a black-only practice, but is now more culturally acceptable for white people to do (though this is, of course, often contentious). I also agree that “TiK ToK” has quite a lot of rapping in it but is not a “rap song” per se. Why? Because she’s white, she’s female and because it’s being used the way dance-pop songs are used and marketed the way dance-pop songs are marketed.
Latoya Peterson attributes the music business’ classification of Ke$ha as a pop artist as “intentional mis-labeling” that speaks to a larger “fear of [racial] cross-pollination” in musical genres–i.e., hip hop=”black” and pop=”white” and ne’er the twain shall meet. Which is, of course, the way it was quite explicitly for a long time and still is, implicitly.
I don’t think it’s mislabeling, though. Rapping per se does not make one a “rapper.” Just as someone who plays a violin can be a classical violinist, a fiddler, a klezmer, a “trad player,” or what have you depending on the musical scene they’re a part of, someone who raps is not necessarily a rapper. Because Ke$ha, her handlers, and the musical public don’t attribute to her the other qualities that people generally associate with “rappers”–blackness, maleness, urban poverty, flashy stuff–she’s not a rapper.
This shows why genre classifications are pretty useless much of the time, and can often serve to reify nasty ideas about race, gender, class and all the rest. When we define a genre as the exclusive provenance as a particular type of person, and censure those who don’t conform as somehow inauthentic, we run into a whole bunch of problems. The homophobia in hip hop, for example, is connected to constructing that genre as the provenance of macho black misogynist masculinity–which, of course, is not the only type of black masculinity (nor, lots of people would argue, a positive type of black masculinity).
Ke$ha raps, yes. There are also lots of other influences on her song, just as there are on almost every other song, ever. Peterson spotlights the myriad ways in which contemporary musicians have crossed the imaginary and rather silly borders of genre in the past couple years:
It is this environment that allows for Lil’ Wayne to cut a rock track like “Prom Queen,” that gives space to hip-hop violinists like Miri-Ben Ari, Sarina, and Nuttin But Stringz, to allow neo-soul crooners like Van Hunt to sing ballads and then thrash on guitars, and have one of the most downloaded albums of the decade be a mash-up between Jay-Z and the Beatles. We are in a world where the K-pop sensation The Wonder Girls can open for the All-American Jonas Brothers, and where traveling DJs take Baltimore House and Baile Funk all over the globe, while artists like M.I.A, Esthero and Nelly Furtado dabble in any and every genre they please.
Genre can be helpful in certain ways, most notably to record labels and music-store clerks who have to organize things. But given that so many artists so openly acknowledge the diverse influences on their work, and given that the internet and digital media more broadly is giving so many people access to tons of new sounds, why bother forcing people and things into narrow categories?
I’m personally more interested in looking at the many ways in which musicians and listeners are part of multiple communities at the same time, and all of the sources from which they draw inspiration–not policing the boundaries of a small, boring genre box and worrying when things don’t fit neatly inside.
How many amusingly-specific and generally-unflattering ways can you describe yourself off this list? And what does the alarming ease with which it can be mocked say about the pretentiousness that is endemic to indie-rock culture? More thoughts on how this dovetails with our collective quest for the nebulous concept of authenticity in a while, if I have time and/or remember to write it up.
Apparently, according to Fred Phelps (of Westboro Baptist Church/”G-d hates fags” fame), the deity himself hates Lady Gaga. Watch out kids, the “hussy’s pretentious prancing” could lead you into moral ruin. Consider yourselves warned.
This is pretty predictable, given the intense social-conservatism-cum-insanity of Phelps and his followers (who, incidentally, protested at Penn Hillel a few weeks back!). What I find more interesting is his choice of Lady Gaga to hate on, as opposed to other singers.
There are certainly other prominent artists who could conceivably raise his hackles: people like Adam Lambert, who’s unapologetically out and caused a stir in November with his homoerotically-tinged AMA’s performance (good for him!), or perhaps better yet, Katy Perry, who used to be a conservative Christian but now a) kisses girls and likes it, and b) dates skinny guys with long hair (!). Or, you know, any pop artists who have overtly sexual lyrics.
Lady Gaga, however, is adamantly pro-empowered female sexuality, often explicitly assuming sexual control in her videos, evangelizing about masturbation, openly identifying as feminist, and doing a lot to challenge the normative male gaze/crazy amount of cookie-cutter sexualization that young female celebrities (and women, period) have to deal with.
I’m not sure how much her message comes through–I feel like a lot of people put her in the “crazy antics” box and don’t pay much attention after that–but I certainly appreciate what she’s trying to do, which is pretty unique and quite important. And it seems to me that her ideas about female sexual power, more than the fact that she doesn’t often wear much beyond tights below the necessary bits (not that the two aren’t related), is what’s ticking off the good Rev. Phelps.
After a long hiatus while I finished up my semester (my second-last at Penn!) I’m back at eartotheground.
On Sunday, I had the privilege of playing in my synagogue’s klezmer band for the début performance of the Philadelphia sher at our annual Chanukah party. The sher is a traditional Eastern European/Ashkenazi Jewish social dance in 2/4 time for four couples, with an accompanying set of tunes. Eastern European Jews who came to the United States brought it with them, and by the early twentieth century, Philadelphia had its own characteristic sher medley, as did New York and other major cities.
The sher was hugely popular at weddings and other social events and quickly became beloved by the Philadelphia Jewish community and beyond, eventually becoming the preeminent American sher medley. Unfortunately, widespread performance of the sher died out by the 1960s due to the pressures of Israeli music and dance, assimilation and suburbanization. It is kept alive in klezmer circles at events like KlezKamp, but not often performed at everyday parties and events.
Over the last few months, the Simcha Band, Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herrmann and the Religious Life Committee of Kol Tzedek, and I put together a grant application to the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia’s Kehillah of Center City to fund an exciting community-based project built around the sher–and we received $2200 from them for this project and a concurrent prayer leader training program!
Sherri Cohen, the Simcha Band’s trombonist, and I have been taking lessons with the eminent klezmer trumpeter Susan Watts, whose family has deep roots in Philadelphia’s Jewish music scene, and learning the sher. Naomi Segal, a member of Kol Tzedek, re-learned the sher (which she danced as a kid growing up in Philly) and taught it to the congregation on Sunday. People had a great time dancing it and the band (featuring Susan and her mom, fantastic drummer Elaine Hoffman Watts) certainly had a great time playing it.
Right now we’re recruiting volunteers from Kol Tzedek, the Philly Jewish community, and beyond to help with this project. Community members can get involved in any number of ways:
Coming to Kol Tzedek events where we will be performing the sher (TBA here, or if you get in touch with me)
Learning how to perform it with the Simcha Band
Volunteering to learn the dance and teach it to others in the area
Getting involved in the historical and archival research on the sher and on klezmer in Philly that I’ll be conducting beginning next month
Conducting oral interviews about Philly’s Jewish music scene with members of the Philly Jewish community
Designing the final web archive, where we will be storing educational materials, video, audio, sheet music and historical and ethnographic information about the sher
By April, we hope to have:
Published (online and in hard copy) the sher music, recordings, performance notes, video of events at which it was performed, instructional video, and a history/ethnography of the Philadelphia sher.
Performed and taught the Philadelphia sher medley at area Jewish events and simchas, along with a short historical presentation.
Established a foothold for the Philly sher as a meaningful, living, breathing part of Philadelphia Jewish life, and self-sustaining methods for its transmission to future generations of musicians, dancers and partygoers.
There might also be a documentary film somewhere in there, depending on how things go. Stay tuned for the launch of the official Philadelphia Sher Project blog within the next week or so, with photos, video and audio of this year’s Chanukah festivities! Drop me an email or comment here if you want to get involved with this project at any level.
First, what music scholars call “strophic form“–varied verses alternating with the same refrain, or chorus–goes way back, to medieval European folk songs and perhaps even earlier, or in other places (we have no way of knowing precisely because they weren’t usually written down, or written about). Since then, plenty of musical forms, from hymns to yes, pop songs to jams to lots of kinds of folk music to the twelve-bar blues have relied on this form.
Christy’s Minstrels may have popularized the use of vocal harmony on the chorus alternating with solo verses in the contemporary United States, but that’s nothing new in the grand scheme of things–this practice was commonplace in many musical traditions, from West African music to responsorial chant in the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church.
The really original thing about “Rapper’s Delight” was that Sylvia Robinson and the Sugar Hill Gang found a way to get the new musical style of rap to the mainstream. While rap had already been around for a while at this point, people were mostly performing for fun and for parties and other events–it wasn’t considered a business opportunity. Robinson capitalized, not without contention from other folks in the rap scene, on the infectiousness and grassroots popularity of the style and made a hit song, paving the way for people like Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, Diddy, Jay-Z and many other hip-hop entrepreneurs.
“Rapper’s Delight” is a good song, but it’s not that original per se in terms of its form or other aesthetic parameters. It was truly groundbreaking because of what it represented and foreshadowed: hip hop’s potential as a very lucrative sector of the music business.
Here’s a short clip of “Rapper’s Delight” (it’s really closer to 15′):
Also, I think with a little stretching of the standard rules of formal structure, you could consider “I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop and you don’t stop, the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie, to the rhythm of the boogie the beat” a chorus of sorts. Just sayin’.
Dodai over at Jezebel breaks down Lady Gaga’s new video, for the song “Bad Romance,” and it’s pretty amusing. This is why I like Lady Gaga as an entity: you can actually analyze stuff like this, and she probably meant to embed lots of those meanings. Check it out.
My only worry is that 25 years from now, my kids will look back on it the way my friends and I look back on this classically wacky video:
Bonnie Tyler’s not quite as high-concept as La Gaga, unfortunately.
Stereotyping people by their favorite indie bands December 24, 2009
Tags: Flavorwire, indie rock, lists, pretentiousness, stereotypes
Based on this list, I:
How many amusingly-specific and generally-unflattering ways can you describe yourself off this list? And what does the alarming ease with which it can be mocked say about the pretentiousness that is endemic to indie-rock culture? More thoughts on how this dovetails with our collective quest for the nebulous concept of authenticity in a while, if I have time and/or remember to write it up.