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  • Happy 39th Birthday Pac

    All Eyez On Me Album Cover
    It’s amazing to me that today, Tupac Shakur would’ve been 39 years old. I can’t fathom that for whatever reason. It seems like just yesterday, the rap star was gunned down in Las Vegas. But what it means is that it happened many years ago, and I’ve aged and he hasn’t. You can only remember him for what you saw of him, and that was a young 20s rebel and one of the biggest rap stars of the mid 90s, Bishop from Juice, or Lucky from Poetic Justice.

    The love is still there, and more so than when he was alive. That’s the definition of a true legend.

    On my Facebook page, I asked a simple question to all of my friends.

    What is your favorite 2Pac song?

    If figured that I would get a handful of responses, but I received responses from 25 different people, including my own dad. Yes, even my dad has a favorite Tupac Shakur song.

    The favorites ranged from his two big early hits, Keep Ya Head Up and I Get Around, his get out of jail record, California Love, songs that came out after he already passed away like Changes, I Wonder If Heaven Got A Ghetto, and Thugz Mansion, and songs that weren’t necessarily singles like Pain and Soon As I Get Home, which was released on the oft-forgotten posthumous release Pac’s Life.

    So what is my favorite Tupac track of all time?

    Well, I’d known about Pac since his first release, 2Pacalypse Now, because of Brenda’s Got A Baby. But I didn’t really latch on to the dude’s music until I Get Around, which was one of the most fun rap songs I’d ever heard. And then after that, Keep Your Head Up, which was his ode to women.

    With both of those singles coming out back-to-back, you saw this immediate portrayal about what made him unique. He was a bi-polar rap star who could talk about groupie love on one song and then respecting women on another. It was near hypocritical, but honest at the same time. He could be down with living a “rock star” life, but at the same time understand where the ills in society are.

    The reason I’m picking I Get Around as my favorite is because it’s the first song I identify with 2Pac. When I think of him, it’s this song and this video, with him running around in some white shorts with no shirt on, that comes to my mind first.



    As my buddy Celmatic always says, “Rest in power.”

    List of all the song choices from my Facebook friends:
    I Get Around (4 times)
    Keep Ya Head Up (3 times)
    California Love (2 times)
    Life Goes On (2 times)
    Thugz Mansion (2 times)
    Run Tha Streetz (2 times)
    I Wonder If Heaven Got A Ghetto (2 times)
    Hit ‘Em Up (2 times)
    Dear Mama
    Soon As I Get Home
    If I Die 2nite
    Changes
    Unconditional Love
    So Many Tears
    How Do You Want It
    Death Around The Corner
    Bury Me A G
    Still Ballin
    What’z Ya Phone #
    Ambitionz Az A Ridah
    Pain

  • Kylie Minogue’s “All the Lovers”: Not Just Another Video With People Taking Their Clothes Off on a City Street

    Though most everywhere else in the world, Kylie Minogue has been a pop icon second only to Madonna for the last 25 years, we here in the U.S. have given her only intermittent attention. Back in the 80s, we appreciated her teenybopper take on the 60s dance hit “The Loco-Motion”, and in 2001, we couldn’t get the la-la-la’s of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” out of our heads, but that’s pretty much it. Kylie’s getting set to release her 11th studio album (her first on the venerable Astralwerks label) – Aphrodite – on July 6. The album is preceded by the single “All the Lovers”, which comes with a video that should prove very, very eye-catching, taking the “city street nudity” theme, introduced by Alanis Morissette back in the 90s and most recently advanced by Matt & Kim and Erykah Badu, to another level altogether.

    Okay, so no one’s getting naked naked in this video, least of all Kylie, who despite being probably more scantily clad than she normally appears in public, remains the most covered. Watch as pedestrians on a bustling city street spontaneously rip their clothes off – spilling their milk, spilling their briefcases, spilling their… marshmallows? – and find the nearest body to make out with. Meanwhile, Kylie rises – all-goddess-of-love-like – as the beautiful gleaming spire at the top of an ever-rising ziggurat of writhing (and occasionally swaying-to-the-chorus) flesh, a glittering tower of carnal indulgence. Oh yes, this video should definitely get Ms. Minogue the undivided attention of the American listening public. Until next year at least.

  • Awesome Song Alert! “Crash Years” by the New Pornographers

    Never mind their naughty, naughty name, the New Pornographers, a veritable herd of super-talented late-thirty/early-fortysomething Vancouverites, have put out five albums of smart, sharply ingratiating pop over the last decade. The New Pornographers aren’t so much a traditional band as they are a sort of indie-rock network whose members – most famous among them singer-songwriters Neko Case and Carl (A.C.) Newman – freely engage in high profile solo projects (Case’s Middle Cyclone was one of the most critically celebrated albums of 2009), or form other groups with each other and other local musicians.

    Their latest album, appropriately titled Together hit stores last month, accompanied by the single “Crash Years” , and if ever the band is to break out of the indie-rock ghetto and score a major hit single on the pop charts, this will be the song to do it. The song is a sweet, summery ode to… well, ruin. Physical ruin. Personal ruin. Societal ruin. Economic ruin. Who knows. Take your pick. The New Pornographers leave us room to choose, and if we’re all so well-adjusted that nothing springs immediately to mind from our personal lives, the evening news has certainly presented us with a nice buffet of creeping dread to resonate with. (Is that oil I smell? Or just dead pelican?) Meanwhile, the band whistles a happy tune (literally) over big, airy guitar strumming, and one of the best instrumental hooks I’ve ever heard. As great as Case’s singing on the track is, it took me about a half dozen listens before I was even paying attention to what she was singing, I was so taken by the pizzicato bass-guitar-cello’s winking, nudging bum-bum-BUM-bump, bum-bum-BUM-bump hook.

    It’s pretty much a recession-era street party of a song, culminating with a promise that “tonight will be an open mic”. Which could mean that tonight’s the night, you get up on a stage and embarrass yourself with recitations of your corny dead-dog poetry. Or it could be an exhortation: Engage! Dance! Sing! Like, democracy, baby! The band have put out a video for the song – one of those choreographed single-shot deals featuring a slow parade of multi-colored Busby Berkeley umbrella dancers performing on what looks like a freshly rained-upon, brick-paved boulevard. It’s clever enough, but sort of a drag. To really see this song in action, check out the band’s performance on the Jimmy Fallon show from last month: