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Pop Rock Nation

Category: People

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  • The Sunday Seven: I Love Girls, Girls, Girls, Girls

    Money Mike has been looking for some volunteers to do their own Sunday Seven column and I raised my hand this week. I’m actually anticipating what’s going to come up because I bet there are going to be songs that pop up that I haven’t heard in forever or songs that are a part of full albums that I may not even like. Since I only buy music from the iTunes store now, my iPod is full of entire albums and thus, stuff that I don’t even really listen to since I’m a big play list guy.

    For those who don’t know, the idea of this column is to take your iPod (or whatever else you use to listen to your music electronically) and put it on shuffle. The next step is to list the first seven songs that come on and list them here.

    Here goes:

    Track 1: The Water Bottle by Bill Cosby

    Aha! The first track isn’t even music. It’s a quick skit by Bill Cosby from his album I Started Out As A Child about children drinking from the water bottle when their parents aren’t home and then leaving just enough in the bottle so they don’t have to refill it. The track is less than a minute long and let’s just say that it’s not his best skit. I have a ton of Cos on my iPod.

    (By the way, I love the fact that on my iPod they actually have “Shuffle” as one of the selections from the main menu. I used to hate having to click a few times to get the shuffle going.)

    Track 2: Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin) by Bruce Springsteen

    I love his post 9/11 album The Rising so much that before every semi-pro baseball game after it came out, I listened to it on the way to the ball park. I’m not sure if Bruce only wants to just be friends or not with the skin to skin reference, but hey, he’s Bruce.

    Track 3: Not Gon’ Cry by Mary J. Blige

    From the soundtrack to the movie Waiting To Exhale, this song captures the feeling of the Angela Bassett character Bernadine Harris (thanks IMDB) perfectly. Yes, I think I’ve seen the movie at least once.

    Through sickness and health ’til death do us part
    Those were the words that we said from our hearts
    So now when you say that you’re leaving me
    I don’t get that part

    Word.

    Track 4: Don’t Cry by Jordan Knight

    A few years ago, Jordan Knight released The Fix which was an EP that I only saw on iTunes. It wasn’t bad. But this wasn’t necessarily one of the better tracks. It’s an uptempo song that features, “Don’t cry mama, shake that mama,” as a part of the hook. And that’s one of the better parts of the song. I won’t tell you about the part of the song where he starts talking about her thong.

    Track 5: Girls, Girls, Girls by Jay-Z

    I love girls, girls, girls, girls, girls I do adore. I love this song for all the one liners. From his most famous album, Blueprint, he raps about all kinds of different girls. It’s a fun track, even if he stereotypes them all.

    I got this ho that after twelve million sold
    Mami’s a narcoleptic, always sleepin’ on Hov’

    Track 6: Just To Be Close To You by the Commodores

    The iTunes program that grabs the album art thinks this is supposed to be on the Jackson 5 The Ultimate Collection album. You know it’s a good day when Lionel just starts talking in his songs. He just lays down a soliloquy at the top in a funny accent before saying that he was a lonely man without direction or purpose and no one to love. Of course, that was before he found the girl who made his jagged edges smooth. I have one word that describes this song. Outrageous!

    Track 7: Little Sister by Elvis Presley

    Remember that Elvis hits album that came out several years back and sold like hot cakes even though anyone and their mother who even liked Elvis just a little bit had almost all the songs? Well, they released a sequel called 2nd To None that didn’t sell as well. This song is on the second album. The song is catchy as hell. Elvis, as the mack daddy of all mack daddies, is singing to the little sister of someone he used to date. He used to pull on this girl’s pig tails. But instead of singing her a love song, he’s scolding her.

    Little sister, don’t you kiss me once or twice
    Then say its very nice and then you run
    Little sister, don’t you do what your big sister done

    Thankfully this isn’t the Sunday Eight or else I would’ve had to write about the WWF version of The Land Of 1,000 Dances where the Iron Sheik says that you have to learn to move like the Sheik. That might’ve been a bit embarrassing. Also, I’m going to lose some street cred by only having one hip hop song on here. Sorry guys, I swear I have a ton.

  • GG’s Top 10 Albums Of 2008

    I will never pretend to be the complete music connoisseur that others on this site are. I like certain styles of music and will continue to buy those styles all year round. I’m the guy who bought LL Cool J’s latest album even though I expected it to be trash (and it was). I will give new artists a chance only if they are suggested to me by people I know and trust. You can say I’m in my own musical bubble. Thus, my top 10 albums are very much in the pop/R&B/hip hop genres and even in those genres, you won’t find any surprises. With that kind of introduction, how can you not want to read this list?

    10. Day26 – Day26

    Diddy’s new New Edition was probably a bit overrated coming out because their musical debut was marketed through the television show Making The Band, but I think they have a chance to succeed as long as Diddy sticks with him. Diddy has shown that he’s willing to drop members of the group like he did in Danity Kane. But I think these guys have the right chemistry necessary in today’s fickle music world. Not to say that they’ll become legendary, but I think they have a chance to make a few more albums. On their debut, they show definite promise. Give me more Co Star, Got Me Going, and Exclusive and I think I’ll continue buying their records.

    9. Kanye West – 808s & Heartbreak

    It’s really a crime that I have to score Kanye’s latest album so low. It’s creative, inventive, emotional, introspective, and he should get credit for stretching his boundaries. But the singing is terrible. The song writing is good in spots though terrible in others. The production is top notch and you won’t catch everything unless you listen closely and with headphones. But I can’t get over the overuse of Auto-tune and simple bad singing.

    8. Brandy – Human

    Though I think she’s naked without the likes of Wanya and Mase around her, I do still like Brandy. With this album she opens up a lot about relationships of yesteryear and there’s a lot that I can relate to, including the song Long Distance. Having been in a long distance relationship myself, she taps into all the emotions you go through when you love someone who doesn’t live close to you. Right Here (Departed) and The Definition are also really good songs.

    7. John Legend – Evolver

    This is one of the few albums that I liked far more when I heard it the first few times than I do now. There’s something about Legend with this third album that slightly bothers me. His last album was near perfect and I guess I expected too much from him. Green Light was a fun single with Andre 3000, but It’s Over with Kanye West was a miss. There is definitely good stuff on this album including Everybody Knows, Cross The Line, and I Love, You Love, but what’s missing from this album is the non-skippability his last album had. I found myself skipping through the album a lot more than most albums on this list. I kept telling myself, “But this is John Legend.” But it didn’t work. I still skipped.

    6. Q-Tip – The Renaissance

    Being a huge fan of A Tribe Called Quest, this album was right up my alley. There’s just something about Tribe. Q-Tip has always been an original kind of MC and you can’t paint him into any corner. Many former hip hop fans came out of the woodwork and just loved this album. And the reason for that? This album is fun. I want you to find a more fun song this year than Move.

    5. Raphael Saadiq – The Way I See It

    When this album came out, Money Mike said that the reason he likes it is because he’s supposed to like it. I feel somewhat the same way. However, it can’t be the only reason I like it. While this album has the old Motown feel all over it, it’s not only for that reason either. I guess I just like the throwback vibe to the simpleness of music. I’m a sucker and a half for a nice slow jam and Oh Girl does it for me.

    “I promise I won’t let you down
    I’m gonna make you so proud
    I’ll keep you here next to mine
    And I’ll be everything you need
    Believe me girl”

    Usher's album - Here I Stand
    Usher’s album – Here I Stand
    4. Usher – Here I Stand

    I spent much of 2008 telling Mike how disappointed I was with Usher’s new album and here it sits at number four on my list. And then I got it. The gaudy dance singles are missing. He’s still on the freaky tip a bit too much for my taste. But what you see is individual growth. You can hear it in Moving Mountains and even in the interlude to his son, Prayer For You Interlude. I think the gem is the hidden track Will Work For Love.

    “Excuse me you two, got love to spare?
    Search my whole heart, ain’t none in there
    Pardon me sister, I’m on my last
    Don’t have no love, that’s OK, God bless”

    3. Robin Thicke – Something Else

    Robin Thicke came out of the box strong with Magic and stayed strong with The Sweetest Love. In a perfect world, Dreamworld would blow up and be a strong single for 2009, but somehow I don’t see that happening. What this album suffers from is too much of the same. You hear the same Thicke for much of the album, which is fine for those who can sit there in the zone with him. Thankfully, I can.

    2. The Roots – Rising Down

    This isn’t anything new. I think the last three Roots albums that were released were either my first or second favorite hip hop album of the year. They are definitely the most consistent hip hop act going and you could argue that they are the most consistent performer in all of music when it comes to quality. Though they missed with Birthday Girl (I still liked it), they hit huge with Rising Up which is probably one of my five favorite songs of the year.

    1. Ne-Yo – Year Of The Gentleman

    I’m sold. I always wondered if he was going to be the type of recording star that he could become or if the fact that he writes a lot of material for others would cause him to never have that one great album. Well, in only his third try, he’s found that great album. It’s one of the best relationship albums I’ve ever heard. He hits on a bunch of different angles in love and loss and love again. There are even two bangers in Closer and the Michael Jackson-esque Nobody to fit around all the love and heartbreak. I keep coming back to this album when I get tired of new music and I imagine it will be in heavy rotation come 2009 as well. In The Way has a special tug on my heart.

    “Baby the world keeps getting in the way
    With you is where I wanna be, but it just won’t let me
    Cause it keeps getting in the way    ”

  • In Memoriam: Freddie Hubbard 1938-2008

    Yesterday, jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died, after suffering a heart attack in November. He was 70 years old. He may never have commanded the sort of adulation reserved for contemporaries like Miles Davis or John Coltrane (who, along with pianist McCoy Tyner and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, was one of Hubbard’s more frequent collaborators), and maybe that’s because for the bulk of his latter-day career, his focus was less on the groundbreaking hard-bop that made him a jazz star to begin with – more on easier-to-digest commercial jazz.

    But while it’s not uncommon for people to speak reverently of records like Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme as the records that introduced them to jazz, Freddie Hubbard was actually my gateway drug to the great jazz records of the 50s and 60s and into the early 70s when it started to converge volcanically with funk. It was a chance meeting really. We were garage sale-ing once Saturday morning about 6 years ago, and at one house, I’d found bins full of records – mostly jazz records that I’d never heard of – that were so lovingly and pristinely kept that even though I’d never heard any of the music, I felt an impulse to rescue them from the grubby, unappreciative hands of my fellow garage sale shoppers. Sadly, even at the ungodly – immoral, even – 50 cent asking price, I couldn’t take them all home with me, and so, I was left judging jazz by the cover art.

    One of the most striking was a record called Straight Life, which came in a lavish, glossy gatefold with collaged photographs of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. It was an obvious pick, and a fortuitous one. I couldn’t wait to hear it, and when I did, it made me greedy for more. I’ll admit that much of jazz still goes over my head, but for whatever appreciation I have for jazz now, I owe Freddie Hubbard, and specifically his “Straight Life” record, big.

    Released in 1970 on the CTI label, Straight Life is as sprawling and busy, as exciting and scary and wonderful, as new and challenging as any metropolis. From the first high trilling notes – a fanfare as iconic as the statue on the cover – the sidelong title track, with its infinitely busy melody and its motoring beats, evokes the freedom, the liberating (and terrifying) hugeness of the city’s boundless possibilities. For this Wisconsin bumpkin, who’d never been to New York City, it was a teleportive experience:

    It’s the sound of constantly moving forward in a crowd of people, the sound of an airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the sound of people walking their dogs in the park, the sound of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 6:30 in the morning, the sound of people laughing while leaving the office for lunch on a Friday. It’s bright neon. Electric. It’s motors idling, and exhaust pipes spewing filth into the sky. It’s assembly lines, and seminars, and spontaneous softball games in the middle of city streets.

    It moves. It hustles. It takes off like an airplane, and as you fly with it, you can see the bustle and the urban boogie-woogie below and you love this flight for showing you something that you never might have seen otherwise: life. Shuffling, dancing, driving, working, moving, moving, and moving below you. The pieces get smaller the higher you go – the people, the cars, the buildings, the land – but the picture gets bigger and bigger until you can no longer tell where the canvas stops. And then as you descend back to the earth, the dots become houses, and the lines become roads, and the ants become cars and trucks chugging along, and that colorful, noisy grid below turns back into a city, and you’re part of it.

    This sound is as tall as a skyscraper, and as funky as three day old trash in a battle-worn dumpster in some back alley.

    The middle track, Weldon Irvine’s “Mr. Clean” is like a working-class kid without a dime to his name, all dressed up in duds you know he can’t afford, and doused with his dad’s Old Spice, ready for a secret night out with his boss’s daughter. The beat is cocky, the horns are tight, and the all-star soloists (Joe Henderson on sax; Herbie Hancock on electric piano; George Benson on guitar) are up to no good (in the best possible way).

    On album-closer “Here’s That Rainy Day”, Hubbard takes the spotlight with a magnificently torchy solo, with only the barest accompaniment from George Benson whose guitar here is like a warm mist on a city street after the bars have closed, but before the alarm clocks have started waking the city out of its night’s slumber. If “Mr. Clean” is getting dolled up for the date, “Rainy Day” is the lonely walk home afterward. Toward the end, Hubbard goes “a capella” and you can almost hear the sound bouncing off the damp, dirty bricks of darkened apartment buildings.

    Coming at a pivotal moment in Hubbard’s career, Straight Life marks the convergence of Hubbard’s more “out there” work of the 60s with the more commercial impulses he would indulge for the next couple of decades, and in that sense, along with the contemporaneous (and somewhat better known) Red Clay, it’s the best of both Hubbards. The sound of Straight Life owes as much to its hard-bop roots as it does to fledgling funkers like Sly & the Family Stone, Kool & the Gang, and Funkadelic, along with the psychedelic blues wrought by Hendrix, Joplin, and Clapton. The sound of “Straight Life” is very much the sound of its time, a riveting encapsulation of the energy of the Nixon-Vietnam era; but that sound is also timeless, as exhilarating and fresh today, and even more poignant post 9-11.

    “Straight Life” is a jazz national anthem, and one of the great unsung masterpieces of jazz. And Freddie Hubbard is one of the great unsung heroes. He’s certainly my hero, and by connecting dots and degrees of separation, he’s led me to other sounds I might not have chanced upon otherwise.
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