Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, Robin Thicke, and Hilarity

Armed only with classroom instruments, Jimmy Fallon, The Roots, and Robin Thicke perform the smash of the summer (that was… ahem… predicted on this blog).

It’s genius, and physically impossible to watch without smiling.

Sometimes (often?) music should just be fun.

The Oscars, The Roots, and a Rescue

The life of first-year parents is far from filled with movies.  Once an easy rainy day recourse, kids turn movies into a special occasion replete with military-grade logistical planning and a financial outlay that leads you to use words like “investment.”  As such, I’m going into Sunday’s Oscars a bit blind.

For my Oscar prep crash course, The Roots come to the rescue.

And, for those of you interested in taking an unfair advantage into your Oscars betting pool, Nate Silver seeks to put some science to the whole gig here.

The Boss’ Social Media Plan

In today’s inherently social music landscape, a metric more important than how many times a song has been replayed is the number of times that it has been reinterpreted.  While replays grow a song’s popularity within a given fan base, reinterpretations branch a song out into an entirely new audiences.  The impact of replays is linear, while reinterpretations are exponential.

I’ve written previously about how the reverberations of reinterpretations helped propel Adele.  And now the same seems to be happening with Bruce Springsteen.

Most notable is this selection from John Legend and The Roots, who are establishing quite a track record of collaborative covers.

Dancing In The Dark, John Legend and The Roots

And a far stranger (and much less musically successful) example comes from a Canadian DJ who thought it might be fun to meld The Boss with the Bawse (Springsteen and Rick Ross).  As with all failed mash-ups, the result is intellectually interesting but ultimately unlistenable once the novelty wears off.  But the very creation of it placed Springsteen on nearly every rap blog of note.

Streets of Philadelphia, Rick Ross v. Bruce Springtseen

The Best and Brightest of 2011: Day Eight

“When I introduce you, I’m gonna say, “This is a friend of mine.” That means you’re a connected guy. Now if I said instead, “this is a friend of ours” that would mean you a made guy. A Capiche?”

As Donnie Brasco might attest, it takes some serious confidence to vouch for artists in the age of the mp3.

It’s easy to tweet away your love for an ephemeral three-minute song.  It’s slightly harder to endorse an album, but anyone can do a background check on forty-five minutes of music.  But it’s another thing entirely to endorse an artist.  You’re saying that the song that they might release in two year’s time when they’re going through their White Album phase is going to rock.  You’re saying that their tweets are always going to be funny, or at least make sense, or at least be funny when sung by Josh Groban.  You’re sticking your neck out.

But I’m quite confident in saying in suggesting that The Roots and Common are friends of ours.

Thirteen albums in, The Roots are still giving lessons on what craftsmanship, intellect, and ambition can mean in hip-hop.  Here’s one over several great tracks off of their most recent album undun, a concept album that is sort of like an episode of The Wire, told musically and in reverse.

I Remember, The Roots

This year also marked a new release from Bill O’Reilly’s favorite rapper/poet, Common.  You’d think if O’Reilly had bothered to have an intern listen to a song like this, he would have chosen a target he could have actually have tackled.

The Believer (feat. John Legend), Common

 

A Defiant Concept

In a move that seems custom designed to flaunt every commercial trend in the music industry, The Roots have announced that their upcoming album will be an “existential retelling” of the short life of Redford Stephens (don’t feel bad, nobody else knows who that is either).

Elaborating on the concept, Questlove said this in a recent interview:

“At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in “Juice”… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?”

“Make My” is the first single to drop, and it is a return to the thickly textured songwriting that is the hallmark of hip hop’s best band (live or otherwise).

Make My (feat. Big K.R.I.T.), The Roots

Fallon, Timberlake, and The Roots Return to Form

An irresistably-likeable walk down memory lane.  A fantastic return to form by Jimmy Fallon, Timberlake, and The Roots Crew.

30 Words of Music, Day 24: New

If you’re looking for the mix of songs to kick off a new job or a new year, here are those that I’m going to use for both tomorrow.

As always, the first song link is to stream, the second is to download.

Let’s do this.

Fix Up, Look Sharp, Dizzee Rascal

The Day, The Roots

Railing, Roni Size

Run This Town, Lil’ Wayne Freestyle

Risk of Change, Holcombe Waller

Power [Remix] (Ft. Jay-Z & Swizz Beatz)

Walking Far From Home, Iron &  Wine

Grown Simba, J. Cole

30 Words of Music, Day 6: Hip-Hop

Infectiously likeable proof of the ubiqutiy of hip-hop in today’s culture, brought to you by Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, and The Roots.  Props to Scotty for the find.

Sorry about the dreadful quality of the youtube clip; blame NBC’s lawyers.  For better sight and sound check out NBC’s site.  See y’all soon.

30 Words of Music, Day 4: feat.

There is one fact, among many, that proves that the designers of the iPod were not much for hip-hop.  Apple’s user interface, while rightly lauded, freezes when faced with four little letters: “feat.”

The marking “feat.” has nothing to do with marking and everything to do with symbolizing the free-flowing collaboration that defines the spirit and the composition of modern music.  If you glance the back of any hip-hop record, I’d guess that at least a third of those songs “feat(ure)” some other artist.  Featuring someone isn’t the sign of some side project, but rather emblematic of the fact that from its early days hip-hop culture has come up with a spirit of dynamic intermingling that sets it clearly apart from its one-band-per-record rock brethren.

A terrific new example of this is the following song, “Hard Times.”  Originally by Baby Huey and the Babysitters (here’s to awesome band names), this track is now performed by John Legend and The Roots– incredibly successful individual artists/bands in their own right.  But wait, there’s more– while John Legend takes lead lyrical duties, it features Black Thought– the vocal lead of The Roots.

Hard Times (Ft. Black Thought), John Legend and The Roots

Got that?  Your iPod won’t.  You see, anytime one artist features another, the iPod is trained to recognize that combination as an entirely new artist– linked only by alphabetic proximity.  Scrolling through the artist tab is to ramble through an endless series of permutations, and to be reminded of the many different ways that cultural perspective shapes all sorts of little experiences.

While we’re on the topic of the iPod-baffling alchemy at the heart of so much great music, here’s one more track off of Wake Up!: the new record from John Legend and The Roots.  It’s the song that John Legend was born to sing,

Summer in Chicago Mix 2010

With back-to-back dinner parties this weekend, I of course had to spend a good chunk of time obsessing about the proper soundtrack for said soirees.  The answer I came up with is the collection presented here: 19 food and family friendly tracks you probably haven’t heard but will want to.

For loyal readers of this blog, this CD will serve as a nostalgic tour through the mellower tracks that have emerged as my favorites over the last year or so.  For the newbies out there, feel free to search the artists’ names on the blog so that you can learn more about them.  And do track down their commercial releases: there’s not a band on here that’s not worth the price of admission.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the track list and the link to the music.