Recently, as in the last day or so, a previously unreleased Lauryn Hill track was leaked and as is usually the case with anything unreleased by an artist of Hill’s stature, the Internet blew up.
Ok, I’m hyperbolizing a bit and I think I just created a new verb. What makes this more intriguing than most leaks is that Hill’s career is as mysterious as a previously unreleased track itself.
After being one of the most revered artists in the late 90s, her career went off the deep end.
There was that infamous unplugged album that she dropped in the early 2000s that showed her in a stage of her life that was much different from the perception of what a brilliant artist should be. She seemed, well, crazy. And she was fine with showing that.
Then there was the supposed Fugees reunion that started and stopped. There was even an iTunes single called Take It Easy that left a lot to be desired. Wyclef and Pras both publicly blamed the situation on Hill and said she was hard to work with and never on time.
But recently, there has been hope for Lauryn fans. She has started performing live here and there and is slated for the Rock The Bells tour. The timing of this unreleased track is interesting simply because it seems that she’s trying to come back into the public eye, even if it’s been in slow motion so far.
This song is probably not necessarily “new”, because supposedly Lauryn has a ton of unreleased material from previous restarts of her career that stopped for whatever reason.
Every couple of weeks, I make a couple of new mix CDs to listen to on my 40-or-so-minute each way commute to work, basically culling my current favorite tracks to create my very own Lorentz-centric Top 40 radio station. Just like any other Top 40 radio station, it’s all about the hits (hits with me, anyway): the playlist is necessarily limited (I can rarely fit more than 20 songs on a CD) and repetitive (the CD ends, it starts over). I love it. It drives my kids nuts. Just the other day, when the latest a-ha single “Butterfly, Butterfly” came on, my oldest (who invariably gravitates to “Take On Me” whenever there’s a karaoke machine nearby) begged me to skip it. I didn’t then, but eventually, I will. And that will be when I know it’s time for a new mix CD.
Lately, my morning commute mix CDs have been filling up with a surprising number of country songs. Now, while I’m certainly not one to dismiss country as a genre – I grew up with Kenny Rogers and the Oak Ridge Boys, and thanks to my Dad, I have a very deep love and respect for Willie Nelson – I’m no aficionado either. And as much as I’d like to say I keep an open mind, I have to admit that I’m more open-minded when we’re talking about Scandinavian dance pop than when we’re talking about guys named Garth and Randy who like to wear cowboy hats. I don’t know if it’s the music that’s changing or if it’s just me, but there’s just a lot of country music out there right now that’s, y’know, really good. And I’m not just talking about hipster-approved alternative country. That’s all fine too, but I’m talking about actual country hits. You know, country songs that are genuinely popular with country audiences, and increasingly with pop-crossover audiences as well.
For instance, Brad Paisley‘s “Water”, the fourth single from his 2009 album American Saturday Night which recently enjoyed a stay at the top of the country charts
Brad Paisley “Water”
What I love about this song – and all of Brad Paisley‘s songs really – is how he never wastes a verse. There’s nothing throwaway about how he builds a story, or in this case, builds a monument to something as almost cheesily simple, common, and universal as water. I mean, how dorky does this idea seem on paper? Hey guys, let’s do a song about how great water is. (While we’re at it, why not a song about how cool it is to see stuff?) But verse by verse, he details his ongoing “love affair with water” with images from snapshots that could be sitting in just about anybody’s photo album – the “inflatable pool full of Dad’s hot air” – until you realize that while he might be stating the obvious, sometimes the obvious thing is the easiest to take for granted, and it needs to be stated. Moreover, the song’s joyous invitation to hop into the car and “drive until the map turns blue” has taken on an unintentional and tragic urgency with news of the BP oil spill and its disgusting political and environmental implications casting a depressing pall over this summer season.
Like Brad Paisley, Georgia’s Zac Brown Band is currently riding on an album that’s destined to be regarded not just as one of the great country albums, but just one of the great albums of its time, period. Although they’ve been sending hits up the country charts and the Billboard Hot 100 since their major label debut The Foundation was released two years ago, it was their amazing 2010 Grammy Awards ceremony performance of their signature hit “Chicken Fried” done as a medley with “America the Beautiful” all dressed up in defiantly ragged harmonies, that established once and for all the force of nature this band is. Although their previous hits have had something of a novelty factor to them, this year they’ve sent two gorgeous ballads up the charts: “Highway 20 Ride”, a heartbreaking post-divorce father-to-son confessional, and “Free”, a song about being young, broke, and in love, and living out on the road – a song feels as big and endless as the road itself, and even gives a musical nod to Van Morrison’s classic “Into the Mystic.” Even as “Free” is still making its way up the Hot 100 (where it entered the Top 40 a couple weeks ago), the album’s sixth single “Different Kind of Fine” – a light-hearted romp celebrating a fine specimen of true country womanhood – has just landed on the country charts. I double-dog dare you not to dig it.
Zac Brown Band “Different Kind of Fine”
With his full beard and trademark knit caps, Zac Brown is one of those guys that’s made country radio playlists safe for guys who don’t wear cowboy hats. North Carolina native singer-songwriter Eric Church is a baseball hat kinda guy with a great voice – a boyish, impish, and immediately lovable tenor that he uses to fine effect on songs about love and how nice it is to be naughty. But for its decidedly un-PC celebration of liquor and death sticks, Church’s latest single “Smoke a Little Smoke” barely even qualifies as country, sounding like cross between a Ry Cooder electric blues and a Collective Soul arena rock anthem circa 1993, with all the requisite post-grunge quiet-loud-quiet dynamics. Country as a genre has proven itself relatively slow to evolve. But with the ongoing popular success of Eric Church (and Zac Brown and Brad Paisley), the fish may, in fact, be growing a small set of legs.
So, in a previous “Big In…” episode, I posted a video by Germany’s currently reigning Idol-equivalent champion Mehrzad Marashi and the same show’s most successful alumnus Mark Medlock, doing a pretty horrible dance song together… on a boat. Not to be outdone is one Jessy Matador, the 27-year-old Zairian-French singer-and-dancer who represented France in this year’s Eurovision song competition with “Allez! Ola! Olé!” and gave the country its best showing in years. (France last won the competition in 1977. The last time it placed as a runner-up was in 1991.) The song may only have placed 12th in the Eurovision competition but it’s currently shaking its ass at the top of the French pop chart, and it’s formed a gigantic conga line all over Europe going Top 20 in Germany, and Top 10 in Belgium, Norway (who as 2009’s Eurovision winners hosted this year’s competition) and Finland (suck on that, Dark Metal). It even nicked the U.S. club charts.
And why not? Its infectious Afro-Carribean beats feel both instantly familiar and alluringly exotic – it’s a song in search of a Bacardi ad campaign, basically. When Jessy Matador calls out “Tout le monde!”, he means, “Everybody!”. But the literal translation of the French is “All the world!” and that applies here too. The song’s got a chorus that blithely defies language barriers by defying language itself. Allez Ola Ole? A two-year-old from Mongolia could sing along to it! The first time I heard this, I just thought it was a goofy song (the video doesn’t help that impression – see about 3:08 in the video for the dorkiest temper tantrum ever) that I figured I’d forget before I had time to close the internet browser. But its infuriatingly simple hooks have proven as relentless as Jaws, and I’ll be damned if I’ve gone a day the last couple weeks without going back to it at least once before heading out on my morning commute.