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  • Lauryn Hill Is Ready To Record Again

    To many people, Lauryn Hill is one of music’s biggest mysteries. She was on top of the world and just walked away. There were stories of her private life that may have changed your viewpoint about who she was. But really, the question was why. Why did she walk away from music when she was at the top of her game?

    In 2003, journalist Toure filled in some of the story for us with his memorable Rolling Stone article. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s a must-read.

    On Wednesday’s Fuse show The Hip Hop Shop, Toure had his chance to interview L-Boogie. She was performing over the weekend at Rock The Bells alongside The Wu-Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, and Snoop Dog. She finally had some answers for us.

    Some of the reason she left had to do with her children. She wanted them to have normalcy and privacy and real childhoods. But she herself wanted out of public scrutiny and wanted freedom and needed to be able to reclaim her individuality. She also said that she’s ready to express herself again.

    But this quote might have summed it all up best:

    You have to live life so you have something substantial to share, or it’s kind of pointless.

    She seemed at peace and no, she didn’t seem crazy. I jokingly tweeted Toure to ask him if he was able to look her in her eyes and call her by her first name. That was a recent story about her behavior. He didn’t answer me, but he answered someone else that there was none of that going on.

    He did ask her what everyone wanted to know. Would we be able to hear a new album? She was a little indecisive at first. She promised new recordings, but wasn’t sure about a new album. But she also implied that maybe there was also a new album on the way as well.

    Here’s a short clip of her performing at Rock The Bells:

    Photo of Lauryn Hill shared via Wikipedia through the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

  • The Daily Awesome: Radiohead “Let Down” (1997)

    After an artist has been as highly-regarded for as long as Radiohead has been, it’s easy to forget what was so exciting about that artist in the first place. After sneaking out from under future-one-hit-wonder status to usurp the title of World’s Greatest Living Rock Band from U2 in the mid-90s with their albums The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead channeled their renown into crafting two of the strangest, most dissonant and experimental records to ever top the American pop charts – Kid A and Amnesiac.

    In the last decade, with the single ascendant (due to the advent of iTunes and easy piracy), Radiohead have almost single-handedly kept the album relevant as a form. Which is why it was sort of disheartening, if not entirely surprising, to hear Thom Yorke talk about the band moving away from recording albums after the release of 2007’s In Rainbows. 15 years after The Bends, it’s easy to take for granted that Radiohead have been the greatest album band of their time; but it’s even easier to forget that the band first got our attention by just writing some really good songs (“Creep” among them, to my thinking). Tonight, I was taking the long way home from work because I just got a new car – one that I can plug my iPod into! I had it playing on shuffle and when I heard the shimmering opening notes of “Let Down”, I didn’t even recognize it. It was like I was hearing the song – which I had in heavy rotation on my Walkman in the summer of ’97 – for the very first time. The way Yorke sings the verses in gradually expanding ellipses of melody; the way his voice maintains a flatness and distance even as the music behind him grows grander and more urgent; the layers of shimmer and twinkle, delicately plucked arpeggios and folky strumming chords backing up lyrical images of disappointed people “clinging to bottles”. I’m not sure how serious Thom Yorke was about Radiohead focusing entirely on singles – and Radiohead have always been a band that thrive when they’re defying expectations, even the ones they’ve helped to perpetuate – but if, in fact, they never release another album, I have every reason to suspect that they’ll become the Greatest Living Singles Band in the World. Songs like this are why.

  • The Daily Awesome 8/26/10: Shalamar “Dancing in the Sheets” (1984)

    Ever hear a song you’ve known for most of your life and realize that while you may have heard it a zillion times, sung along with it almost as many, you know the words, you even know the guitar solo enough to scat sing along with it while you wail on your air ax – you still have never really realized just how awesome, or, in fact, how dirrrrrrty it was until, say, you’re sitting at your desk on a Thursday morning trying to catch up on two days of e-mail, and it comes up on your iPod. That was my morning. This was the song.

    Though Shalamar, who started out as the studio creation of a Soul Train booking agent, were one of the few disco groups to weather the turn of the 80s, this Top 20 hit from 1984, featured on the soundtrack of Footloose, also marked the beginning of the group’s end. Singer Howard Hewett was the sole remaining original member of group by this time, and soon after, he too would follow former members Jody “Hasta La Vista, Baby” Watley and Jeffrey Daniel out the door to launch a solo career, leaving the group adrift for the rest of the decade before they finally broke up.

    The video finds Hewett dressing up in his favorite Zorro cape to visit the gayest not-gay-bar in the world where he finds keyboardist Delisa Davis holding up a wall and looking slutty. When he makes a move for her though, a table full of mustached mobsters gets all upset, some phony violence ensues – whoah, who’s that guy with the pecs? – but Hewett, Davis and guitarist Micki Free manage to escape unscathed when Free unleashes a guitar solo that entrances and, presumably, pacifies the totally gay un-gay bar’s patrons. The 80s were awesome.