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  • Infatueighties #68: “Self Destruction”

    Get just about every rapper who was someone on one track, lamenting negative images and black-on-black crime. Think you’d be able to put something like that together these days? Not with Young Jeezy-types littering the hip-hop scene. At any rate, this Gold single reads like a who’s who of golden-age hip hop: Doug E. Fresh, Stetsasonic, Heavy D., Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee, MC Lyte (whose verse was written by LL Cool J) and the Stop the Violence Movement’s founder, KRS-ONE.

    Not only was Self Destruction one of the first (and still one of the best) posse cuts in hip-hop history, but it was for a good cause. KRS founded the Stop the Violence movement in response to the senseless death of his Boogie Down Productions partner Scott LaRock, and for a while, it was almost impossible to find a hip-hop album cover without the Stop the Violence logo on the back. Of course, part of what gives hip-hop its’ allure these days IS violence. Ah well, can’t get the glory days back, but at least we’ll always have this video.

  • Is Beyonce’s “Sasha Fierce” Just Another Sasha Farce??

    I want to like Beyonce. Really I do. She’s fantastic looking. She has a fantastic voice. However, over the course of four Destiny’s Child albums and now three solo albums, she’s mostly struck me as the musical equivalent of a ton of pretty wrapping paper with no gift inside. All style and no substance. As a songwriter, she’s not especially insightful, and it doesn’t really seem like she inhabits the songs she sings the same way some less talented but more believable vocalists do. So, to make a long story short, just about every album Beyonce has been a part of has been a case of unfulfilled promise and ultimately a frustrating listening experience.

     

     

     

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  • Friday Throwback – No, No, No (Part II)

    With the release of Beyonce’s latest album, I Am…Sasha Fierce, I tried to remember the first time I really noticed Beyonce. It was in the Wyclef remix to the Destiny’s Child song, No, No, No. Beyonce would’ve roughly been about 17 years old at the time.

    – Just in case you didn’t know, Wyclef wanted you to know that this is the remix.

    – Why are they doing the Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It dance?

    – So this was the foursome version of DC.

    – Is it just me, or does Kelly Rowland look like a skinny Adina Howard with that short hair?

    – You know it’s 1998 when Wyclef mentions the No Limit Soldiers in his verse. Kids today would be like, “Who dey?”

    – “Why you frontin’ when you know you really want it?” Wyclef wants to know this.

    – Though Beyonce was front and center, the rest of the girls got some screen time. So this wasn’t the Beyonce is going to be a solo star push for DC as of yet.