Notorious

I went to the theatre last night to see the Biggie biopic 'Notorious'. I know I could have peeped a bootleg of it like a week ago but as schmaltzy as it sounds I figured if I was gonna watch this flick at all it was going to have to be in a crowd so that the added benefit of the community experience might make up for whatever the film lacks (and I thought it would lack a lot). A part of me wanted to go to a late showing of this in the hood but that same part of me didn't want to get shot in the name of authenticity and as of the New Year I had deleted most of my hood affiliates and tour guides from my phonebook. In reality I still wouldn't feel safe unless me and Clint Eastwood rolled up on the block in his Gran Torino so I don't even know what I was thinking about with that. I actually ended up in a showing in the 'burbs where my friend and I had to show I.D. to signify that we were 'guardians' to some underaged niglets and accompany them into the theatre just so they could see the film. I scoffed at all the extra regulations but, a half hour into the movie I and most of the audience felt like we weren't old enough to be watching what we were watching either. All I'll say is Naturi Naughton was really puttin her all into that role....and that she got some tittays on her. BTW I am not especially opposed to nudity on film but this movie made me realize that there's something really eerie about watching some porno on a big screen in a room full of strangers.

To get the complaints out of the way, its pretty plain that Diddy had his hands on this film a little too much. Almost every profound thing Big says and does in this film was inspired by, or was a suggestion from Puffy (Derek Luke). He, Voletta (Angela Bassett), and Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) appear to have no flaws and I'm sure their live counterparts working behind the scenes with the director had more than a little bit to do with that. However, that's probably for the best because it helps us focus on the main character's performance. Jamal Woolard does a great job as Biggie, encompassing the laidback bravado that we all grew up with as well as the vulnerabilities that we suspected but never really got to see. And despite my complaints about Puff's onscreen fairy godmother status Luke does surprisingly well in translating the fun and obnoxiousness of Sean Combs without channeling too much of the actual Sean Combs. I'm thankful for this because the approximations of Puffy's silly ass dances are amusing but an authentic level of Diddy realism would surely force me from the theatre.

The roles that stole the show were Smith as Faith Evans and Naughton who played a nuanced and interesting Lil' Kim. I heard that Kim wasn't consulted for her portroyal in the film but her story is pretty compelling despite or possibly because of her absence behind the scenes, otherwise she might've gotten the boring saint treatment that the other characters got. Anthony Mackie as Tupac was creating a problem for me and his being cast is one of the films bigger flaws in my opinion. He's a decent actor but he wasn't channeling Pac in a way that made me go 'Oh snap. that's Pac!' which is really what these characters are supposed to do. Not to mention the way minds work, certain actors among certain environments invoke distracting memories. For instance while watching the 2Pac scenes my brain goes: rap movie + Anthonie Mackie = 8 Mile, and now every time he appears on screen I hear 'Now everybody from the 313 get ya motherfckn hands up and follow me!' He wasn't terrible or anything, and when he remembers to bug his eyes out he almost has you fooled but they should've went with an unknown on that one.
The director also decided to go with ambiguity and neutrality with regards to the details of Biggie's death. I agree that for the type of film this is (celebratory rather than expository) that was probably the best decision. But the vagueness of it made for some bizarre dialogue.

Actual Scene
*phone rings*
Biggie: Hello
Caller: Hey Nigga, you gon leave out here with a fuckin toetag on'. We gon fuckin kill you.
Biggie: Yo. who the fuck is this?
Caller: West Coast, nigga!
*dial tone*

What? Really? The 'West Coast' killed Big? Alright, whatever..moving on.

Going into it with generic to low expectations I was pleasantly surprised. It's a good movie. The cast really got into their roles and save a few exceptions it did what it was supposed to do. Tell B.I.G.'s story? Nah. I don't even think that's what it was supposed to do. You don't learn anything about Christopher Wallace that you didn't already know or presume, which in the grand scheme of things isn't all that much. But there's something emotionally satisfying about seeing glimpses of the stories behind the people who made the music you loved because it plays to your nostalgia. They could have included Kim getting an abortion after getting pregnant with Biggies child but who wants to think about depressing shit like that? We wanna recite the lyrics to the songs we can't help but know the lyrics to and feel proud of our generation for supporting an artist even in death to similar levels of iconic prestige that other generations support and mythologize their heroes (Elvis, anyone?). I'll admit that a really interesting biopic would be an authentic one, telling the sides of the story that we haven't heard or haven't heard enough of and cutting away the bullshit but I would rather see that as a documentary than a feature film. This film reminds me of a (possibly imaginary) time when we were young and rap was something you hid from your parents while you obsessed over it with your friends and older siblings. It reminds you of a time when hip hop was something you really cared about, when you were young enough to think all of the era's rap gossip and drama was really important and how you felt when you sadly realized it kind of was. Seeing it in a sold out theatre in a suburb also makes you realize how many people from all kinds of backgrounds cared about all of that stuff the same way you did. It is by no means perfect but when you hear 'Hypnotize' boom through theatre speakers at the final scene of the movie you must admit it did what it was supposed to do. In apreciation, we as an audience greeted the credits with a round of applause for the movie, for hip hop and for B.I.G. and I for one thought that was pretty dope.

There is fiction in the space between...

...the lines on the page, and your memories. Write it down but it doesn't mean, that you're not just tellin' stories." -T.C.


I just heard some of the greatest news today. Tracy Chapman is coming out with an album this November. I absolutely love her. And 'Fast Car' is one of the first songs that made me feel something, and think about how evocative and pretty and complex music and poetry is... even though my mom had to sit me down and explain that it wasn't Gary Coleman singing in the video (I thought little Arnold was too deep).

Look up Marlon. Say Cheese!

Matter of fact, the first time I fell in love was in a fast car scenario and if I hadn't been lucky enough to get dropped off a couple blocks from my house my storyline might have panned out alot like the one in the song. Here's to you Ms. Chapman, I can see why Alice Walker was so sweet on ya. Beautiful soul and songstress. I wanted to close the post with video of the "Making of a Tracy Chapman Song" sketch that aired on In Living Color, however hours of searching have told me the internets are rather unyielding tonight. But, regardless I have to post the classic.



Tracy Chapman- Fast Car

When will the Death Stop?

Most of the time when people ask me what my favorite film is I like to give ambiguous answers. I can't take all of the pressure, got off my back damn it. But in all honesty one of the movies that I could deem a favorite (favorite status determined by my ability to watch it whenever its on, I'm a film snob) would be the movie of all movies, Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon.
This movie was one of those films that came out in the 80's and had finally made their rotation to basic cable by the 90's, just in time for my childhood. These leftover videos from the 80's is what I consider mostly responsible for the reason why a person who was still in diapers for the parts of the eighties they were around for can still remember that era with so much nostalgia. In any case, I have discovered that the films star Sho'Nuff has passed away of pancreatic cancer.

Obama, Wolverine, and the Antichrist

On Sunday night I was all settled in to watch the fake debate (at Saddleback Ranch with Ricky Gervais or whoever) that the news channels had been broadcasting regarding the religious perspectives of McCain and Obama. I caught most of Obama's portion of the forum before I had to interrupt viewing to...sin, I won't get specific. Every time I watch Obama speak I'm holding my breath, its like watching someone on a tight rope, but that's how it always is when you have someone that represents your people addressing hot button concerns. And with all this talk about him being evil the ante is upped because now stupid people think the fate of the souls of the world depends upon it. I was preparing myself to write a post about all of it but I suppose I'll save the fire for next time. Or possibly for a real debate.

However the debate isn't exactly what I wanted to discuss this afternoon. I want to talk about some of the more ignorant and logically tenuous elements of politics. I should begin by saying that the ecosystem of my social environment is fragile. This means that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis have opinions that run somewhere along the spectrum of my own. So this guy I know somehow went and infiltrated that ecosystem and we begin having this pseudo - political conversation. I began with my own factually unfounded (but probably true) accusation that Bush has Illuminati- like influence over the oil industry and can be blamed for these crippling gas prices. No, I don't completely know what I'm talking about and I'll accept that I could be wrong but that's just one of my conspiracy moments, all great thinkers have them.

So then this reggin (word to Stephen Colbert) goes and says that he has a bad feeling about Obama because he just came out of nowhere. I attempt to stop him right there, because "he just came out of nowhere" is almost 98% of the time a preface to the accusation that Barack Obama is the Antichrist, and I think that hearing that kind of craziness come out of the mouth of an educated, young, black male would be too much for me to take. I'm all for open minded discussions and fuckery of sorts though so I let him speak his mind and as I suspected he believes that theres a reasonable possibility that Obama is the Antichrist (this young man also voted for Bush in '04, not based on policy, but on the sketches a Bush impersonator, whom he mistook for the President, does on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.*smh*). I thought he would direct me to several of the youtube videos one might stumble across if one happened to type in obama + antichrist in the search engine. But instead I got a treat. Apparently more support for the argument that Obama's popularity represents the end of days comes from our friends at Marvel and my favorite 90's childhood cartoon of all times: X-Men!



X-Men: The Animated Series -Time Fugitives (Part 2)
The episode synopsis is such that some mysterious techno virus is wiping out humans, everyone thinks its the mutants fault of course, and Cable and Bishop travel back and forth in time to either kill whose responsible and find an antidote, blah blah blah, nerd nerd nerd. The point is at around the 5:50 mark a mysterious leader makes an appearance and he bares a vague resemblance to the light skinneded incumbent, and then before u know it..dun Dun DUNN...Apocalypse is upon us!! I feel like this 'proof' is no stronger than any of the other things that are being thrown around the internets so I toss this into the ring as well. Also who doesn't miss this show! I won't lie, when framed in all this context it gave me the creeps but then i realized I'm not a freakin idiot like my homeboy.

Swing, swing

Nostalgia. When I was growing up it always sounded like a strange word for such a vague emotion, like it was better suited for a brand of coffee or a drug company. Needless to say kids are dumb. But that rambling leads me to this hopefully more coherent one about what I find to be one of the most effective nostalgia inducing genre of music aside from Saturday morning cartoon theme songs: New Jack Swing. What’s that you say? Well, it’s basically the urban music that was churned out in the early nineties. It was that period of time when hip hop and R&B started to become more commercial and music became darker and more sexualized, or should I say “freaky”, since every artist during that period had that in the title of one of their songs or at least the chorus. Artists still do that today from time to time but back then, it wasn’t just “freaky” it was “freeaaakaaayyy” I think the difference is evident. There was a fun, almost haunting, almost poppy edginess to the sound of it that I can recall left me feeling uncomfortable, frightened and excited all at once. No wonder it fit so well into the ‘superhero’ films of my childhood. Lest we forget, there’s no Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Batman without New Jack. Basically this is all coming from a specific place, some random circumstances have been reintroducing this music into my life and the way it seems so familiar yet dated is something that makes it enough of an oddity to be my momentary obsession. So while I was looking for some more information on this topic that apparently only I and this Seth Price guy care about, I came across this article. I decided to share. Yay.

Edit: Here's a link to a comprehensive New Jack Swing site for all the fans that are interested.
Link

Journalistic Approach to New Jack Swing

Seth Price, 2002

Adapted from an article published in Sound Collector Audio Review, 2003

It’s clear that the wound is still fresh, for, if it were otherwise, the ghouls would have arrived long ago, as they did with Northern Soul, Miami Bass, and “electro.” What a time you chose to be born!

The short-lived musical genre known as New Jack Swing is just old enough to be vaguely embarrassing. It hasn’t attained classic status, and may never do so. Why is it that some styles pass directly into legend, while others remain trapped in an awkward limbo?

It’s important to stress that, like most conservative pop, New Jack Swing depended heavily on producer svengalis. When we talk about the eighties, the specter of production control looms over all hit music, dance music, electronic music, beat music. A good example is the Pointer Sisters’ 1983 album Break Out, in which different working units are responsible for each track, and the achievement is that the product is coherent at all, let alone a classic record.

New Jack Swing emerged in the latter half of the decade, its incipient arrival signaled by Bobby Brown’s 1986 split from New Edition, the hit group created by Maurice Starr and Michael Jonzun. The genre reached a high point around 1990 with the international success of Bell Biv Devoe’s single “Poison.” By 1991 it was probably dead of overexposure, as signaled by the release of the film New Jack City, co-scripted by journalist Barry Michael Cooper, a producer of early electro pop under the name “Micronawts”, whom some say coined the term “New Jack Swing” in an article for The Village Voice. The same year saw the release of the Wreckx-n-Effects hit “New Jack Swing,” another possible source of the term. In any case, it seems clear that 1991’s mainstream press frenzy was symptomatic of the genre’s quick slide into irrelevance.

The sound could be described as an admixture of hip hop—at the time roughly produced, which wasn’t surprising, considering that albums were being turned out by nineteen year olds on cheap bedroom sampler kits—and the kind of music on which labels like Motown always depended, popular soul that relied on producers to midwife the product. It was an obvious match, and it still seems surprising that major labels took so long to catch on. In fact, the entire New Jack Swing venture can be seen as a producer’s grab for market share, a way to assimilate an obstreperous but commercially successful youngster into the secure, decades-old structures of popular black music. This sort of music at the time depended on being received as sexy, smooth, Adult. Lacking was anything “edgy,” which was a defining critical term in the 1990s, across media. Adult Urban Contemporary producers decided that, in the interests of survival, they’d better incorporate hip-hop rhythms, samples, and production techniques. If this indeed was some kind of strategy, today’s charts demonstrate its success. Motown itself, through streetwise marketing and production, found new life in the 1990s with prime New Jack Swing acts like Another Bad Creation and Boyz II Men, the latter of which is, according to the RIAA, the most lucrative R&B group in history.

The New Jack style proved tremendously popular, spanning disparate genres and forms. Its influence could be seen in movies like House Party, rap groups like Heavy D or Nice & Smooth, catch-up albums by established stars like Michael Jackson, and fashions such as towering high-top fades, single-suspender overalls, and baseball caps dangling fresh price tags. The style stretched as far as Japan, where artists like Zoo and LL Brother carried the torch. “If you take a band that’s good, you bust it up and sell three times as many records.” This was Devo’s critique of what they saw as rampant in rock ’n’ roll, and New Jack Swing honed the strategy, with popular artists going on to become producers rather than simply solo acts. New Edition gave Michael Bivins experience that he’d use to groom ABC and Boyz II Men: the family seed must be perpetuated. The formula was copied back into hip hop by artists like Dr. Dre and EPMD.

But what is it that makes this music “New Jack Swing”, as opposed to something else, say, “up-tempo R&B”? Distinctions are hard to make, as it’s a style with an as-yet unwritten history. Bell Biv DeVoe suggests a general definition in a liner-note credo describing their own music: “mentally hip hop, smoothed out on the R&B tip with a pop feel appeal to it.” It’s important to note that this definition presents hip-hop as the heart of the sound. After all, one of the premises of New Jack Swing was its “edge”: New Edition was a saccharine boy band, and Bobby Brown, in leaving, wanted to assert a more mature image. It was a strategy adopted by many other performers, including Janet Jackson, not to mention the remaining members of New Edition. The style was most clearly expressed in the particular sound crafted by producers like Teddy Riley, who is acknowledged as master and originator. While Riley’s breakthrough was Keith Sweat’s 1987 LP Make It Last Forever, he really hit his stride a year later with the trio Guy, one of the most influential bands of the period, and he went on to remix or produce literally hundreds of tracks.

For a supposedly street-wise mode, however, the music itself is fairly tame. This is due partly to fat record contracts, which demanded high production values, which meant increasingly professional electronic studios and a clean, airless sound that made no attempt to conceal its digital origin. As with electrofunk, the goal was the crispest highs and the heaviest bass. While in some music’s samples are chinks in the armor through which grit, poor recording, and vinyl-crackle enter, here they were employed as rhythmic punctuation rather than as loops, and were in any case often generated in the studio rather than appropriated. Tracks were actually composed, often by producers with extensive musical training, and synth sounds came straight out of the box, with little of the knob-twiddling that House and Techno brought to electronic music. It was a voracious, synthetic mode, seeking to fold in hard beats and cuts, breathy vocals, chimes and bells, swelling strings, sexual innuendo and declarations of love. Rapping was kept to a minimum, sometimes contained in bridges and breaks, and overshadowed by harmonizing, crooning, wooing. The term “swing” referred to the rhythm, which often employed a combination of straight 8ths, 16^th note shuffles, and 16th-note swing patterns (in Europe, the music was sometimes known as Swingbeat, and this name survives in the Netherlands, which is a stronghold of New Jack Swing fandom, inexplicably).

What are we to make of this movement? It may be that it’s deeply reactionary, but there’s something interesting about the low regard in which it’s now held. You can trace a cyclical pattern: every ten years or so, up rises a dumb, catchy mode that will eventually come to sound like death. “Jungle” or “Drum & Bass” could see its turn come up, for example, although those forms never reached critical levels of popularity, at least in North America. Ultimately, these comparisons are fun but absurd: you might juxtapose white acts like Sudden Impact or New Kids on the Block with the Brothers Gibb, or even with Steely Dan, whose notoriously antiseptic sound has affinities with that of New Jack Swing. If we take a genre that’s even closer to us in time, like Grunge, it’s clear that New Jack Swing’s current shit status doesn’t come simply from the passage of time. Grunge, while quickly co-opted, grew out of an apparently independent community, whereas New Jack Swing was, from the start, large-format, cash-making, eyes-on-the-charts. Giving such control to the technicians yields a sound overly indebted to then-fashionable production tools, whether it was digital reverb in the early eighties, or the auto-tuner today. What is off putting is the pathos of the obsolete product. It made a sacrifice so that we could move on with a clear conscience. Pop cannibalized any useful parts, and ditched the corpse. It seems that music arising from a community dies with some dignity, whereas producers like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have long since moved on to the next sound; surely they haven’t shed a tear for New Jack Swing.