Rap and Hip-Hop

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      E-40, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Too Short Form New Rap Group

      by

      Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too Short — the old school titans in this new supergroup — made their live debut at an event featuring pop stars and TikTok influencers.ATLANTA — Many people have reconnected with old friends and undertaken new projects during the pandemic. On a Friday night in April, in a large, brightly lit room deep in the bowels of Mercedes-Benz stadium in downtown Atlanta, four of them gathered to introduce their new venture to the world.The voluble E-40, who has released more than 25 albums of distinctive, loquacious street rap, gingerly removed his face mask and offered Tycoon cognac, a product of his own spirits company, to the 20 or so others present, including his old friends Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Too Short.“You got a cup?” Ice Cube asked, shooting a withering glance at E-40. “What, you gonna pour it in my hand?” Cube is a bullish figure whose blunt, confrontational bearing has made him an intimidating presence as an M.C., a comic one in films like “Friday” and “21 Jump Street” and the object of occasional good-natured mockery among this cohort.Clear plastic cups were located. E-40 poured the liquor, then dipped his nose into his cup before tossing back a shot.Snoop cackled from behind a black face mask he’d yet to remove. “You made the drink and you’re sniffing it like you’ve got to check it?” he said. “It’s your drink!”E-40 shook his head. “You’re supposed to. It’s the same with wine. Cognac is a grape.” He began to expound on his beverage’s fragrant qualities before Cube cut him off.“Save the commercial until after the photo shoot.”The four rap veterans bantered and bickered — about baby powder, about Ric Flair, about the correct amount of time to microwave shrimp fried rice — the way you’d expect from guys who’ve known each other for 30 years. Despite their long, often intertwined histories, it took a global crisis to clear enough time in their schedules to form the supergroup that Cube christened Mount Westmore, a nod to the members’ stature in rap and their West Coast roots.Clockwise from top left: Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Too Short and E-40, a few decades ago. “We can hang with the youngsters or take you back down memory lane,” Ice Cube said.Top l-r: Brian Rasic/Getty Images; Al Pereira/Getty Images, via, Michael Ochs Archives Bottom l-r: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Toby Canham/Getty ImagesThe four were at the stadium to do their first interview and photo shoot together, followed by a rehearsal and taping of Mount Westmore’s first performance, which was broadcast the next night as part of a pay-per-view package featuring pop stars and TikTok influencers, headlined by a live boxing match between the YouTuber Jake Paul and the retired MMA fighter Ben Askren. (Snoop is an investor in Triller, the social media platform that promoted the event, and a partner in its Fight Club series.)The collaboration initially took root early in the pandemic at E-40’s initiative. By last summer, the four were recording vocals in their home studios and dropping them into a group chat. Although rapping separately deprived them of some creative friction, it allowed everyone to work on their own schedule.“I can’t rap in the daytime,” Snoop said.“And I can’t rap late at night,” Too Short replied.Nonetheless, competition was fierce. “We come from that school of being around dope people that push us,” Snoop explained.Ice Cube nodded. “Working with Dre back in the day, if your verse wasn’t tight, you weren’t getting on the song.”Deep friendships fostered frank dialogue. “One of the earliest conversations was, ‘If something you do is wack, I’m going to tell you,’” said Too Short, who got his start selling tapes of his gleefully lascivious rhymes from the trunk of his car around the Bay Area in the mid-1980s.“What did you say?” Snoop asked, nodding toward Cube then lowering his voice an octave in a spot-on imitation of his friend’s trademark snarl. “‘I ain’t getting on that love song!’” The quartet recorded 50-plus songs, which they plan to spread across multiple releases, with the first planned for later this year.At the photo shoot, Cube suggested playing tracks from the upcoming album. A member of the group’s road crew fiddled with Snoop’s branded Bumpboxx, a digital boombox wrapped with the cover artwork from his classic 1992 debut, “Doggystyle,” but music was not immediately forthcoming. Snoop, tall and lean with long, dark hair that’s graying near his temples, walked over to investigate.“Turn the power off, then back on,” yelled Too Short. “That always fixes that.”E-40 sighed loudly. “Man, am I going to have to do this? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out.”Finally, the Bumpboxx sparked to life, playing Freddie Jackson’s 1986 R&B slow jam “I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love.”“Well, that’s music,” said Cube. “It ain’t the right music, but it’s music.”Attention turned back to the camera. Too Short, who was wearing a colorful Versace T-shirt and dark jeans over his compact frame, had a suggestion. “Let’s make it look like some old New Edition pictures,” he said. “Or like the Temptations, how they line up the four dudes.”Cube balked at profile shots. “I don’t want to show the Volkswagen,” he said, putting his hands on his belly.E-40 turned sideways and twisted his third and fourth fingers to form a “W” with his left hand. “That hurts my fingers though,” he said. “I had surgery on those fingers.”Mount Westmore performing “Big Subwoofer” as part of a pay-per-view  event presented in Atlanta that included a live boxing match.Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for TrillerAging can be a humbling process, but it’s especially fraught in hip-hop. The inevitable march of time has generally been treated as an unforgivable weakness in a culture that often celebrates a particular masculine idea of strength. As a then-26-year-old Compton rapper the Game once put it in a presumed shot at Jay-Z: “You 38 and you still rapping? Ugh.” (The Game is now 41 and reportedly preparing to release a new album this year.) The mid-to-late-30s has long been viewed as retirement age for rappers despite the fact so many qualities required of the job — sharp mind, quick tongue, storytelling acumen, life wisdom — are as likely to be growing as diminishing in middle age.So where does that leave Mount Westmore? At 49, Snoop is, in his words, “the baby of the bunch.” Ice Cube is 51, E-40 is 53 and Too Short is 55.“People have their hangups about it,” said Cube, “but if people love what’s coming out of the speakers, they’ll tolerate some gray hairs.”Snoop noted that the Rolling Stones are in their late 70s, and that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards don’t always seem to get along. “You’ve got that being praised and we’re being questioned,” he said. “We should be praised because we’re in our right mind, we love each other, we’re family men, we’re business men, and we’re Black men. If you look at the Cubes, the Will Smiths, the Jay-Zs, the Puffys, the Snoops, the Dr. Dres, the E-40s, whoever — they all flipped from rap to other businesses to show that if you close that door, we’ve got seven or eight other doors we’ve opened up.”Accordingly, music is only a part of the Mount Westmore plan. There’s talk of brand partnerships with Monster energy drink and the Cash app, a documentary, a scripted movie, podcasts and NFTs. As such, introducing the project during a social media-focused, music-heavy event spotlighting a former star of “Bizaardvark” boxing against a guy who’d never boxed before has a certain kind of insane logic to it.At 1 a.m., the four rappers were onstage, sitting side-by-side on large black thrones a few feet from a boxing ring on the stadium’s main floor. About 75 people gathered around, some working, many others just perched on a catwalk between the ring and a large camera crane, watching. The floor rumbled a little underfoot as the bass from the group’s song “Big Subwoofer” boomed from the sound system.The track, which they plan to release as an NFT, is a bouncy, trunk-rattling party anthem that feels like a not-too-distant-cousin of Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” as well as a pretty precise sum of its parts. The foursome rehearsed the song three times, trading playful verses over the spare, thumping beat, growing more confident and animated with each run through. Then, after Cube gave the group some final instructions — “Shut up and sit down. Let’s do this.” — they performed the song twice more as the cameras rolled. Job done.“We have all kinds of different songs,” said Cube. “We’ve got a mixture of what you always love from us as individuals but also records that show our range. We can hang with the youngsters or take you back down memory lane.”As Too Short had explained while the four friends huddled together after the photo shoot, “The hip-hop spirit doesn’t really age. It’s like a little kid thing you’ve got that’s your spark of life.”“What do we call ourselves?” E-40 asked him.“Old-ass youngsters,” Too Short replied. “That’s what it is.” More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      An Anthem About Hugging Your Friends Again, and 10 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Rostam, Marcellus Juvann, Gogo Penguin and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Frank Turner, ‘The Gathering’Who better than Frank Turner, the punk-intense British folk singer, to underscore the imminent joy of reconnecting with others? Turner is barking on “The Gathering” — which casually features Dom Howard (from Muse, on drums) and an inquisitive guitar solo from Jason Isbell — and fully in pulpit mode: “I’ve been missing the feeling when we close up the gaps between us/It’s better than the best benediction, more bracing than blood lust.” Generally, this sort of earnestness can be wearying (even after a very wearying year-plus of isolation), but Turner succeeds because he sounds like he’s just stomped out of a stuffy meeting to go yell on a street corner, frantic with euphoria. JON CARAMANICALump, ‘Animal’In Lump, which releases an album called “Animal” in July, Laura Marling sets aside her virtuosic acoustic guitar to collaborate with Mike Lindsay, the electronics wizard from the folktronica group Tunng. For the album’s title song, she gives herself terse syllable counts — “All that you want/Is to be heard” — as Lindsay supplies steady pulses and blips. But midway through, the metronomic pulse breaks down and Marling leaves her deadpan monotone to wail, “I need more.” Then she submits once again to the digital grid. JON PARELESKhaira Arby, ‘Ferene’The Malian singer Khaira Arby, who died in 2018, was a clarion vocalist who led an incendiary band, fusing Malian modes and rhythms and combining traditional string instruments — the tehardant and ngoni — with a psychedelic electric-guitar attack. “New York Live,” a newly released recording from her first concert in North America, magnificently captures the spiraling energy of her concerts. Listen to the whole remarkable set, or jump in near the peak with “Ferene,” with its intricate cymbal cross-rhythms, its exultant call-and-response vocals and its bursts of fuzz-toned guitar frenzy. PARELESRostam, ‘From the Back of a Cab’Rostam, formerly of Vampire Weekend, zeros in on the awkward intimacy of a particular moment: the cab ride to the airport, a last bit of togetherness before a strictly defined parting. “I am happy you and I got this hour,” he croons, over a nervous six-beat rhythm and echoey piano chords and guitar tones; the relationship stays tentative, conditional. PARELESRodrigo Amarante, ‘Maré’“Maré” means tide, and in his new single, the Brazilian songwriter Rodrigo Amarante compares destiny to a tidal ebb and flow, singing with a tone of weary acceptance. His music has its own push and pull, with three-against-two rhythms and a tangle of instrumental lines — guitars, percussion, a nasal synthesizer, a horn section, some whistling — that interlock but sound like they might collide at any moment. It sounds charmingly ramshackle; it’s not. PARELESGogo Penguin featuring Cornelius, ‘Kora (Cornelius Remix)’Gogo Penguin looks like a jazz trio — piano, bass and drums — but its music also has plenty in common with the repetition, terse motifs and inexorable evolution of electronica. Its new album, “Gogo Penguin Remixes,” hands over tracks from the 2020 “Gogo Penguin” to electronica wizards like Squarepusher, Machinedrum, 808 State and, on “Kora,” the Japanese producer Cornelius. The original’s pecking, stop-start piano theme hints at the plucking of an African kora; Cornelius extrapolates the implied harmonies of that theme to build a sustained, whooshing, buzzing, superstructure, as if he’s unveiling the tune’s futuristic inner life. PARELESJoe Lovano and Dave Douglas, ‘Life on Earth’The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas recorded the tracks that would become “Other Worlds,” the new album from their quintet, Sound Prints, in January 2020, just weeks ahead of a global shutdown. Most of the tunes on the album were done in just one take, and the band’s natural comfort comes through here. On “Life on Earth,” a swiftly shuffling Douglas tune, the pianist Lawrence Fields plays less and less as the trumpeter’s solo develops, moving from a colorist’s role to that of a jagged percussion instrument. Lovano’s tenor saxophone solo brings a sluice of energy flooding back in, until Fields and the bassist Linda May Han Oh finish off the solo section with briefly suspenseful, dashing statements of their own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarcellus Juvann, ‘Wrong’“Hardheaded,” the fascinating new self-produced EP from the Houston rapper Marcellus Juvann, is full of clever, quirky, urgent and oddball beats. They’re uniformly potent, and a strong match for Juvann’s rapping, which he delivers in a lightly croaky, lightly stumbling, lightly swinging voice that telegraphs confidence and disaffection all at once. CARAMANICATrippie Redd featuring Playboi Carti, ‘Miss the Rage’A fan edit of this track has been making the rounds on TikTok, but this version is different, with a new Playboi Carti verse. Trippie Redd remains underappreciated and committed to SoundCloud rap staccato, and Carti sticks with his mewling yelps, all over a beat that suggests a starship shifting into warp gear. CARAMANICAElohim and Big Freedia, ‘Strut’As if 21st-century life weren’t surveilled enough, the Los Angeles producer and songwriter Elohim has enlisted the New Orleans bounce icon Big Freedia to join her in saying that even a sidewalk is a runway, a place to perform and be judged. The beat is downright perky, even if the message is oppressive. Still, sometimes a sidewalk is just a sidewalk. PARELESCarlos Niño, ‘Ripples, Reflection, Loop’Ambient music is having a moment, fed partly by our urge for peace amid the anxiety of a pandemic, but also by a need for contact with the outside world — for physicality and touch. A lot of the quiet-seeking, time-stretching music that’s coming out from artists like Claire Rousay, Lea Bertucci and Ben Seretan isn’t primarily electronic; it lives up to the “ambient” designation more literally, ensconcing voices or instrumentals in the sounds of the outdoors. The Los Angeles-based percussionist and producer Carlos Niño’s new album, “More Energy Fields, Current,” places him and a small coterie of musician friends inside a wider environment, playing loops and gentle improvisations and long synthesizer chords. On “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” he’s joined by the New Age pioneer Laraaji, the pianist Jamael Dean and the vocalist Sharada, who’s heard from what feels like a distance — and then startlingly, comfortingly up close. RUSSONELLO More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Moneybagg Yo Reaches No. 1 With ‘A Gangsta’s Pain’

      by

      The Memphis rapper’s fourth studio album debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, and Eric Church landed a new LP at No. 4.Hip-hop and country music lead this week’s Billboard album chart, with the Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo notching his first No. 1 album and Eric Church opening in the Top 5.Moneybagg Yo, who has released four studio albums and a slew of mixtapes going back nearly a decade — with many of them reaching the Top 10 — has finally cracked the peak position with “A Gangsta’s Pain,” which features guest spots from Pharrell Williams, Future, Lil Durk and others. “A Gangsta’s Pain” opened with the equivalent of 110,000 sales in the United States, most of which were attributed to 147 million clicks on streaming services, according to MRC Data. (The album also sold 4,000 copies as a full package.) Moneybagg Yo reacted to the news of his achievement on Instagram, saying it “Feel Crazy, I’m Forever Grateful Tho!”“Slime Language 2,” the new project from the Atlanta rapper Young Thug and his label Young Stoner Life, which topped the chart last week, fell to No. 2. “Dangerous: The Double Album,” by the country singer and songwriter Morgan Wallen, which had a 10-week run at No. 1 earlier this year, remains a steady hit, holding at third place in its 16th week out.At No. 4 is the debut of “Soul” by the country star Church — the companion album to “Heart,” which opened at No. 5 last week. According to Billboard, it is the first time an artist has had back-to-back Top 10 debuts since Future’s albums “Future” and “HNDRXX” four years ago. Justin Bieber’s “Justice” dropped one spot to No. 5. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Billie Eilish’s Portrait of Power Abuse, and 11 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Willow featuring Travis Barker, girl in red, DJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Billie Eilish, ‘Your Power’Cozy, pristine, Laurel Canyon-style acoustic guitars accompany Billie Eilish as she whisper-sings “Try not to abuse your power.” Then she proceeds to sketch a creepy, controlling, exploitative and possibly illegal relationship. The quietly damning accusations pile up: “You said she thought she was your age/How dare you?” Meanwhile, in the video that she directed, an anaconda slowly tightens around her. JON PARELESWillow featuring Travis Barker, ‘Transparentsoul’The return of Willow — daughter of Will and Jada — is brisk, breezy pop-punk throbbing with a very particular sort of famous-child agonizing. She lashes out at deceptive former friends (and maybe some current ones, too) who “smile in my face then put your cig out on my back.” JON CARAMANICAgirl in red, ‘Serotonin’Whatever slams, girl in red — the Norwegian songwriter Marie Ulven — can use it. In “Serotonin,” from her new album “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” she sings about trying to stabilize her wildly whipsawing, self-destructive emotions with therapy and medications: “Can’t hide from the corners of my mind/I’m terrified of what’s inside,” she announces. The music veers from punk-pop guitars to EDM crescendos and bass drops, from distorted rapping to ringing choruses, only to crumble as it ends. PARELESDJ Khaled featuring Cardi B, ‘Big Paper’It is perhaps the strongest testament to the A&R savvy of DJ Khaled that on an album filled with glossy cameos from Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Baby, and contemplative elder moments from Nas and Jay-Z, he opts to include the endlessly charismatic and exceedingly famous Cardi B on “Big Paper,” a song that sounds like she’s rapping on an old D.I.T.C. beat. It’s relentless, sharp-tongued and slick: “House with the palm trees for all the times I was shaded.” CARAMANICAQ, ‘If You Care’The power of “If You Care” isn’t in the conventional come-on of lyrics like “If you care you’ll come a little closer.” It’s in the persistent rhythmic displacement, top to bottom: the way beat, bass line, vocals and rhythm guitar each suggest a different downbeat, enforcing disorientation from the bottom up. They only align when the vocals turn to rapping at the end; it had to finish somewhere. PARELESPriscilla Block, ‘Sad Girls Do Sad Things’If you didn’t know better, you’d think the young country singer Priscilla Block was perennially gloomy, the sum of one bad decision after the next. That’s the mood on her impressive debut EP, which is sturdy, shamelessly pop-minded and full of songs about regret like “Sad Girls Do Sad Things”:Don’t get me wrong, I love a beer on a FridayBut lately I’ve been at the bar more than my placeAnother round of shutting it downTwo-for-ones ’til too far goneBlock has a crisp and expressive voice, and she telegraphs anguish well. But this EP skips over the rowdy cheer and randy winks of her breakthrough single, “Thick Thighs.” Which is to say, there’s more to Block’s story than heartbreak. CARAMANICABrye, ‘I’d Rather Be Alone’The teenage pop songwriter and producer Brye Sebring lilts through the wreckage of an overlong relationship in “I’d Rather Be Alone.” Everything is crisp: her diction, her rhymes and the pinging syncopations of an arrangement that builds from single keyboard tones through percussion and handclaps to teasing back-and-forth harmonies. “I doubt you’ll even bother listening to this song,” she notes, one more good reason to break free. PARELESHalf Waif, ‘Swimmer’The drama never stops building in “Swimmer,” from the coming album “Mythopoetics” by Half Waif: the electronics-driven songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett. It’s a song about everlasting love — “they can’t take this away from me,” she vows — that evolves from an anxious rhythmic pulse to a chordal anthem, all larger than life. PARELESChristian McBride, ‘Brouhaha’The eminent bassist Christian McBride has just released “The Q Sessions,” a three-song collection that he recorded in high-definition for Qobuz, an audiophile streaming platform. The EP features three top-flight improvising musicians who, like McBride, tend to play their instruments in hi-def already: the saxophonist Marcus Strickland, the guitarist Mike Stern and the drummer Eric Harland. The group chases McBride’s syncopated bass line through the ever-shifting funk of “Brouhaha,” which he clearly wrote with Stern — and his roots on the frisky 1980s fusion scene — in mind. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOJen Shyu and Jade Tongue, ‘Living’s a Gift — Part 2: Everything for Granted’The singer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu draws on jazz, Asian music and much more. Her new album, “Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses,” reflects on loss, memory and perseverance. It opens with “Living’s a Gift,” a suite of songs using lyrics written by middle schoolers during the pandemic: “We’ve lost our minds, lost our time to shine.” The music is ingenious and resilient; leading her jazzy quintet, Jade Tongue, Shyu multitracks her voice into a frisky, intricately contrapuntal choir, folding together angular phrases as neatly as origami. PARELESBurial, ‘Space Cadet’The elusive English electronic producer Burial has re-emerged yet again, splitting a four-track EP, “Shock Power of Love,” with the producer Blackdown. “Space Cadet” hints at post-pandemic optimism — a brisk club beat, arpeggiators pumping out major chords, voices urging “take me higher” — but Burial shrouds it all in static and echoey murk, letting the beat collapse repeatedly, until the track falls back into emptiness. PARELESSofía Rei, ‘La Otra’As she prepared to make her forthcoming album, “Umbral,” Sofía Rei embarked upon a trek through Chile’s mountainous Elqui Province. She brought a charango and two backpacks full of recording gear; on the trip, she recorded herself playing and singing, as well as the babbling sounds of the natural world around her. The album begins with “La Otra,” out Friday as a single, on which Rei sets a poem by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral to music. Flutes flutter over ricocheting synth bass, a stop-and-start beat and strummed charango, as Rei’s overdubbed voice harmonizes with itself in fierce exclamations, lapping at the sky like a flame. RUSSONELLO More

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Sing-Rap Generation Branches Out

      by

      The No. 1 song in the United States is Polo G’s “Rapstar”; Rod Wave’s recent album “SoulFly” recently debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart; and one of the most in-demand collaborators in hip-hop is Lil Tjay. The current sing-rap generation is thriving, and utilizing a variety of approaches, from saccharine pop to gospel-esque blues.This genre takeover has been in motion for more than a decade now — even though most artists in the current wave operate under the long shadow of YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the arc dates back to Future and Young Thug; and before that, Drake; and before that, Kanye West; and so on.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the many stripes of sing-rap success, and how melody has reshaped hip-hop over the last few years in the work of Polo G, Rod Wave, Lil Tjay and rising artists including NoCap, Rylo Rodriguez, Mooski and Morray.Guest:Alphonse Pierre, Pitchfork staff writer More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘Slime Language 2,’ by Young Thug and Friends, Reaches No. 1

      by

      The compilation featuring the Atlanta rapper and various artists from his Young Stoner Life label bested Taylor Swift for the top spot on Billboard’s album chart.Mixtape, playlist or compilation album — what’s the difference?These days, on streaming services, not much. But whatever you call it, “Slime Language 2,” the new project from the Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s Young Stoner Life label, is No. 1 on the album chart.“Slime Language 2” topped the latest edition of the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 113,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. That total was largely dependent on streams — 143 million of them — while sales of the full album topped out at 6,000 copies.Credited to Young Thug and various artists — many from under Thug’s YSL umbrella — “Slime Language 2” features 23 songs from a mix-and-match collection of Atlanta rappers like Lil Baby, Gunna, Lil Keed, Lil Duke and Unfoonk, plus less local guests like Drake, Big Sean and Lil Uzi Vert. (A week after the album’s release, a deluxe version of the album added eight more tracks for a total of 31.)First-week streams for “Slime Language 2” — the sequel to a compilation released in 2018 — matched Taylor Swift’s total the week before, for her rerecorded version of “Fearless,” which also hit No. 1 with the year’s biggest numbers to date. This week, “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” fell to No. 2 with 57,000 in equivalent sales, down 80 percent.The rest of the Top 5 includes the semi-sidelined country singer Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at No. 3; “Justice” by Justin Bieber, at No. 4; and, in its chart debut, “Heart” by Eric Church, at No. 5. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Shock G, Frontman for Hip-Hop Group Digital Underground, Dies at 57

      by

      The group had a string of hits in the 1990s, including “The Humpty Dance,” and helped introduce a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur.Gregory Edward Jacobs, known as Shock G, the frontman for the influential hip-hop group Digital Underground, was found dead on Thursday at a hotel in Tampa, Fla. He was 57.His death was confirmed by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, which did not provide a cause .Digital Underground had a string of hits in the early 1990s and introduced its audience to a little-known rapper named Tupac Shakur. The group’s name sounded like “a band of outlaws from a cyberpunk novel,” with a sound that “straddles the line between reality and fantasy, between silliness and social commentary,” The New York Times wrote in 1991. “Digital Underground is where Parliament left off,” Shock G said at the time, referring to the groundbreaking George Clinton band.Shock G had been shuttling from his home in Tampa to Northern California in 1987 when the group made a self-released single, “Underwater Rimes.” That helped get the attention of Tommy Boy Records, which released Digital Underground’s first album, “Sex Packets.” It sold a million copies and featured the hit single “The Humpty Dance.”The album stood out for melding funk and jazz riffs on top of catchy drumbeats. And with Shock G’s lanky frame and toothy grin, the group had a visual aesthetic ripe for the dawn of the music video generation. Shock G, who produced music in addition to rapping, was known for spinning different personas, depending on his surroundings. In the video for “The Humpty Dance,” Shock G took on the persona of Humpty Hump, the title character, donning a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with an obviously fake nose, a fur hat and tie. “I’m sick wit dis, straight gangsta mack / But sometimes I get ridiculous,” he raps on the song. “I’ll eat up all your crackers and your licorice / Hey yo fat girl, come here — are ya ticklish?” Part of the hook for the song: “Do the Humpty Hump, come on and do the Humpty Hump.”Shock G can be seen in a similar outfit, both goofy and suave, in the video for the group’s song, “Doowutchyalike,” where he encouraged listeners to let loose and enjoy themselves as a saxophone gently riffs over the beat.Shock G’s most lasting impact on hip-hop and music may have come when the group released the hit “Same Song,” which was Mr. Shakur’s “first vocal appearance on a song,” according to Genius.com. Shock G, who appears first on the song, once again cast himself as the good-time host. “I came for the party to get naughty, get my rocks on / Eat popcorn, watch you move your body to the pop song.”When it was Mr. Shakur’s turn, he quickly unleashed a thoughtful verse about the dangers of success: “Get some fame, people change.”Mr. Shakur had auditioned for Shock G and was hired to be a member of the group’s road crew. He eventually performed and recorded with Digital Underground, appearing on the group’s “This Is an EP Release” (Tommy Boy), and “Sons of the P” (Tommy Boy), which was nominated for a Grammy Award.In 1991, Mr. Shakur started a solo recording career with the album “2Pacalypse Now” (Interscope), which sold half a million copies. It included two modest hits, “Trapped” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song about an unwed teenage mother’s plight. Before the album was released, he also started a career as a movie actor, playing the violent, unpredictable Bishop in the Ernest Dickerson film “Juice.”By 1993, Mr. Shakur was a rising star. Shock G and another Digital Underground member, Money B, appeared on Mr. Shakur’s album, helping create his first major hit, “I Get Around,” a poolside anthem with scantily clad women and a laid-back beat. But now, it was Shock G, sporting an Afro and oversized purple T-shirt, with the message: “Now you can tell from my everyday fits I ain’t rich / So cease and desist with them tricks / I’m just another Black man caught up in the mix / Tryna make a dollar out of 15 cents.”Shock G’s musical instincts were forged by a childhood spent moving around the country. His mother worked as a television producer and his father worked as an executive in computer management. After the couple divorced, “I spent my biggest chunk of time in Tampa but I also lived in New York, Philly and California,” Shock G had told The Times. “I have always been into music and played in bands starting when I was 10 or 11.”His grandmother, Gloria Ali, was a pianist and cabaret singer in Harlem in the 1950s. She taught him how to play “Round Midnight” on the piano. Then, as hip-hop began to gain traction in New York in the late 1970s, Shock G, who was living there at the time, recalled, “All of my friends and I sold our instruments to buy mixers and turntables.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Shock G saw music as expansive, inclusive and experimental. “Funk can be rock, funk can be jazz and funk can be soul,” he told The Times. “Most people have a checklist of what makes a good pop song: it has to be three minutes long, it must have a repeatable chorus and it must have a catchy hook. That’s what makes music stale. We say ‘Do what feels good.’ If you like it for three minutes, then you’ll love it for 30.”Christina Morales More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Verzuz Is One of the Least Toxic Places Online. Here’s Why.

      by

      A musical battle, the hit webcast suggests, is really just a pretext for a party and an occasion to appreciate something.Steve Harvey, the comedian and game-show host, is not prone to understatement, least of all when it comes to bespoke men’s wear. This past Easter Sunday, he appeared on a studio stage wearing a custom satin suit in a violet hue previously unknown to science. Harvey was there to host an episode of the popular webcast Verzuz, a musical competition in which famous artists face off to determine who has the better catalog. The episode was a big one, a showdown of soul legends pitting the Isley Brothers against Earth, Wind & Fire, and Harvey’s words were as loud as his suit: This would be, he announced, “the most epic Verzuz of all time.”Onstage, Ron and Ernie Isley sat facing their counterparts, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Verdine White and Ralph Johnson. It was indeed an unusual matchup. Verzuz battles typically feature artists — rappers, R&B singers, influential producers — who have made their name in the past few decades. But Earth, Wind & Fire’s debut album arrived in stores 50 years ago; the Isley Brothers’ first hit, “Shout,” was released in 1959, when Steve Harvey was a toddler. Now 64, he faced the camera to address younger music fans. “Ask your mama about this here music,” he said. “If you don’t know their music, it’s ’cause you don’t know nothing about music. So sit down and learn.”Pop music has always gone hand in hand with strong opinions and heated debates — including the kinds of generational cleavages that inspire finger-wagging lectures. There are times when fans stake personal identities on their favorite records or genres, or sustain fierce debates over rival artists: Beatles or Stones, Michael Jackson or Prince, Nicki or Cardi. Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it. Verzuz is based on this principle. The title evokes a heavyweight bout, and the episodes unfold like a boxing match: Each round presents a track from each artist, with viewers encouraged to pick the victor on a song-by-song basis.The format has links to feisty musical blood sports: jazz’s cutting contests, Jamaican sound clashes, rap battles. But Verzuz has emerged as the warmest and fuzziest musical phenomenon of the past year, one of the internet’s most reliable suppliers of good vibes. Verzuz began on Instagram Live during the early weeks of the pandemic, with a battle between its co-founders, the hip-hop producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz. That first webcast, which stretched for five hours, was a novelty: an odd combination of a Zoom conference call, a D.J. set and a languid late-night hang. Timbaland played one of his hits (Aaliyah’s “One in a Million”), Swizz Beatz answered with one of his (DMX’s “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem”). The scrolling comments filled with emojis and exclamations (“Timbo range too much for swizz”). The interface was wonky and the sound muddy, but the spectacle — musicians glimpsed through laptop cameras, grooving to their own records — was strange and thrilling, a more intimate encounter than showbiz normally permits. In a world that had ground to a halt, the two producers had hit upon a whole new way to stage a concert.Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results.A year later, Verzuz is somewhat spiffed up. It was recently acquired by TrillerNet, the parent company to a TikTok competitor, and has a sponsorship deal with Cîroc vodka and a partnership with Peloton. Competitors no longer stream in from remote locations on jittery Wi-Fi. But the show retains a gonzo charm, and a sense that unscripted weirdness may erupt at any moment. A battle between the dance-hall titans Beenie Man and Bounty Killer, livestreamed from Jamaica, was interrupted by the local police. (“There are 500,000 people watching us right now from all over the world,” Beenie Man told them. “Do you want to be that guy?”) The R&B star Ashanti was forced to stall when her adversary, Keyshia Cole, ran an hour late. The Wu-Tang Clan rappers Ghostface Killah and Raekwon finished off their battle singing and dancing to old disco hits.This shagginess extends to the competition itself. There’s no formal means of determining a Verzuz winner; victory is in the ear of the beholder. Viewers weigh in on social media, and journalists write recaps. But their judgments are, of course, subjective, maybe even beside the point. A musical battle, Verzuz suggests, is really a pretext for a party and an occasion for art appreciation. This has always been true: From the primeval pop hothouse of Tin Pan Alley, where songwriters vied to churn out hits, to today’s pop charts, dominated by hip-hop producers chasing novel sounds, one-upsmanship is often the motor of innovation, an engine of both musical art and commerce. Great songs, beloved albums, groundbreaking styles — all have resulted from musicians’ drive to outshine their colleagues.Competition is also a driving force in music fandom — for better or, often these days, for worse. Today, pop fandom marinates in online swamps similar to those that breed conspiracy theories and political extremism, with almost comically toxic results: Some super fans organize themselves into “armies” that devote disturbing amounts of energy to the coordinated harassment of anyone seen as speaking ill of their favorite stars.Arguing about music may well be as primal a human endeavor as making it.One of the subtler values of Verzuz is that it models a saner, more joyful, more pleasurable kind of musical advocacy and competition — in which trash is talked lovingly, both doled out and received in good humor. Here, too, there are politics of a different kind. Last summer, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, Verzuz held two “special editions”: a gospel episode titled “The Healing,” featuring the singers Kirk Franklin and Fred Hammond, and a Juneteenth celebration, with Alicia Keys and John Legend. Nearly every artist to appear on Verzuz is Black, and the show makes no concessions to any other audience; non-Black viewers enter its virtual spaces as eavesdroppers on an in-group conversation. The point of these battles is not to choose winners, but to luxuriate in the glories of the Black pop canon, and the community forged by that body of music. The critic Craig Jenkins, writing about a matchup between Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, rendered a pithy verdict that could be applied to the whole Verzuz enterprise: “Blackness won.”That was true again on Easter Sunday. Despite Steve Harvey’s best efforts to stir up intergenerational beef, the webcast was a showcase of musical continuity across the decades. (In the unlikely event that there were viewers unfamiliar with Earth, Wind & Fire or the Isleys, they would surely have recognized many of the songs, which have been copiously sampled and interpolated by hip-hop artists.) The episode ended in the only way it could have: with members of both groups gathered at the front of the stage, dancing and singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s celestial anthem “September,” abandoning all pretense that they were adversaries in musical battle. “Celebrate! Love!” shouted Philip Bailey. “Enjoy! Appreciate!”Source photographs by Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images; Michael Putland/Getty Images.Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Two Wheels Good: The Bicycle on Planet Earth and Elsewhere,” to be published next year. He last wrote about the musical prodigy Jacob Collier. More