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Steal This Song: Kid Infinity, “Snobs and Hammers”

November 12, 2010 /

This column has made its stance abundantly clear on the growing desire of today’s youth to be famous for the sake of being famous (ahem, Lolene’s “Rich (Fake It Til You Make It)“). It’s a clear ripple effect of reality television, which has turned several people with no discernible talent – other than a willingness to make a spectacle of themselves in front of the camera – into tabloid fodder, as if any of that was a good thing. (It’s not, by the way.)

Enter LA electronic hip hop white boy duo Kid Infinity, who positively skewer this mindset on their hilarious new song “Snobs and Hammers.” The “singer” (he’s really just talking) spends the first verse as the sympathetic friend to someone who’s been criminally passed over for stardom. (“You deserve success. Goddamnit, why hasn’t anyone noticed yet?”) The second verse is from the POV of the girl herself, seething with envy as a younger, prettier version of herself steals the spotlight that she feels is rightfully hers. Thank God not everyone is buying into this whole fame game nonsense. These guys are permanently in our cool book for this one.

Kid Infinity – Snobs and Hammers

Artists, CD Reviews, Downloads, Electronica, Hip Hop, Steal This Song

Quincy Jones: Q – Soul Bossa Nostra

November 11, 2010 /


RIYL: unexpected collaborations, the R&B Top 40, hitting “shuffle”

He’s more of an elder statesman than a hitmaker these days – his last album came out 15 years ago, and his influence has been on the wane since the ’80s – but the term “living legend” may as well have been coined to describe Quincy Jones, and he proves it all over again with the ridiculous number of superstar guests assembled for Q: Soul Bossa Nostra.

Like anyone who’s ever been successful in the music business, Jones isn’t shy about his own accomplishments, and Bossa Nostra functions essentially as an album-length tribute to himself, with modern hip-hop and R&B artists making cameo appearances on a rundown of Q-affiliated classics like “Strawberry Letter 23” (featuring Akon), “You Put a Move on My Heart” (a show-stopping Jennifer Hudson), the “Sanford and Son” theme (walking acronym factory T.I. and B.O.B.), and the title track (Ludacris). Generally speaking, it’s all a lot better than it has any right to be; for one thing, Jones has to have a marvelous sense of humor to invite, say, Talib Kweli to turn “Ironside” into a hip-hop showcase, or ask Snoop Dogg to add his verses to “Get the Funk Out of My Face.” More importantly, most of the artists sound like they have genuine affection for the material, and they produce some genuine highlights, including John Legend’s lovely “Tomorrow,” Mary J. Blige and Q-Tip’s “Betcha Wouldn’t Hurt Me,” and the Wyclef-led “Many Rains Ago (Oluwa).”

Like most compilations, Bossa Nostra has the occasional bald spot; for instance, it’s easy to assume that Jones tucked Amy Winehouse’s disastrous take on “It’s My Party” late in the album because he listened to the tapes long enough to wonder why it sounds like Winehouse lost her teeth on the way to the studio, and not a few listeners will blanch at the notion of T-Pain lending his Auto-Tune croon to a new version of “P.Y.T.” But these are minor complaints, given the overall strength of the rest of the record – and how much quibbling is really necessary when you’re talking about an album that concludes with a rap-a-riffic version of the “Sanford and Son” theme song? It won’t light up the charts the way Quincy did with The Dude in 1981 – or even 1989’s Back on the Block – but it’s a helluva lot of fun, and proof that the living legend hasn’t lost his touch. (Interscope/Qwest 2010)

Quincy Jones MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, R&B

Mt. Desolation: Mt. Desolation

November 11, 2010 /


RIYL: The Thrills, The Pogues, The Lilac Time

If you had asked us what we expected the next move to be from Keane after they released their fourth album Night Train in May of this year, our gut response would have been “lengthy hiatus, followed by announcement of signing with new, smaller label.” Don’t get us wrong, we love the boys from Battle, but the release of Night Train, coming so quickly on the heels of the band’s 2008 album Perfect Symmetry, looked for all intents and purposes like they were trying to fulfill their contractual obligations to Interscope and move on. Consider this: Night Train was designated EP status in their native England. Here, it’s a full-fledged long-player. Hmmm.

Mt_Desolation_01

Keane may very well be going on a lengthy hiatus, but two of its members have already cranked out their first side project, which makes it their third album in two years: Mt. Desolation, a collection of, wait for it, country songs, filtered through their English sensibilities. It’s country in the same way that the Thrills are West Coast pop, but Mt. Desolation is a charming album just the same. Rice-Oxley and Quin don’t have the booming voice of their bandmate Tom Chaplin, but their voices actually suit these songs better, though it would be nice to hear Chaplin take a whack at the Keane-ish “Bitter Pill” somewhere down the road. The album has its share of drinking songs (“My My My”) and shit-kickers (“Annie Ford,” “Platform 7”), and while it’s clear that country music is more of a hobby than a lifestyle for those involved, it’s also clear that these songs come from the heart, making this a more honest country record than most country records. Writing a song that could pass for a B-side to Beck’s Sea Change (“Another Night”) doesn’t hurt, either. This is one side project that we’d like to see grow some legs. (Cherry Tree/Interscope 2010)

Mt. Desolation MySpace page
Click to buy Mt. Desolation from Amazon

Adult Contemporary, Artists, CD Reviews, Country, Folk, Pop

Cee Lo Green: The Lady Killer

November 10, 2010 /

RIYL: Gnarls Barkley, Outkast, Al Green

cee loSay what you will about the record industry in 2010 – but given that this was the year Cee Lo Green scored the biggest hit of his solo career with “Fuck You,” things can’t be all bad, can they?

It made bloggers go crazy, scored Cee Lo guest spots on every talk show from Letterman to Colbert (where he rejiggered the chorus into “Fox News”), and offered a welcome stylistic change of pace from just about anything else that’s popular at the moment, but “Fuck You” is still basically a novelty song; to really take advantage of the buzz it generated, Green needed to give listeners an album full of even better songs – and songs that didn’t leave “Fuck You” sticking out like a sore thumb.

Cee_Lo_Green_01

He’s delivered on both counts with The Lady Killer, a swaggering 14-track set that finds the famously restless Green as focused as he’s ever been – both in terms of music and in terms of clear crossover ambition. Like any other neo-soul artist, Cee Lo knows how to craft a retro vibe without settling for a simple homage, but he’s less reverent about the music than most of his peers, and the result here is a loose song suite that’s as proud of its classic soul DNA as it is excited about splicing it into a flashy modern hybrid.

Green worked with a small army of producers on the album, but it doesn’t sound like the work of a committee; in fact, it almost works as a concept album, introducing Green as a Lothario with a “license to kill” in the tongue-in-cheek intro, then following him as he hits the town (“Bright Lights Bigger City”), finds out he’s been jilted (“Fuck You”), and gets his woo on (“Wildflower”) – all while brushing past soul and R&B touchstones from Motown to ’80s synth funk. It’s the kind of album that makes room for everything – production from the Smeezingtons, a Philip Bailey cameo, a cover of Band of Horses’ “No One’s Gonna Love You” – without sounding chaotic or overstuffed. It’s the work of an artist at the top of his game. Though it isn’t as brazenly eclectic as some of his earlier work, longtime fans shouldn’t mistake The Lady Killer‘s comparatively limited scope for evidence that Green is selling out or slowing down; it’s just the logical next step in his inevitable world domination. (Elektra 2010)

Cee Lo Green MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, R&B, Soul

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