fourfour

I wanna feel soft and pretty

Funky Town Grooves recently issued expanded and remastered editions of La Toya Jackson's third and fourth albums, Heart Don't Lie and Imagination. They are really something, to say the least. I reviewed them for MTV Hive. Since the noises that come out of this woman's mouth are often unbelievable, I thought it necessary to collect her best screeches, interjections and declarations in a soundboard. It's below. Turn your speakers down (off, even!) and have fun. (I highly suggest at least listening to the very last file, the last minute of the slow jam "Love Talk." You'll thank me.)

2011 odds and ends (music)

For work this week, Zach Baron and I had a little back-and-forth to sum up the year in music. You can read it here. Zach is a tremendous writer and thinker and a positive motivating force within my writing life. I really think that he makes me better.

Anyway, on a solo and, by my logic, worsened tip, I have a few stray points and elaborations about all this (and also a rant about Facebook) left to share, and so they are below:

Sporadic reader

As before, a sampling of my recent day-job offerings:

Music

Kate Bush 50 Words for Snow review (In my opinion, this is the most overpraised album of the year)

Surkin USA review (Probably my favorite album of the year)

Switch & Andrea Martin "I Still Love You" single review (Probably my favorite track of the year)

Mary J. Blige My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) review (Definitely not my favorite album titled My Life)

Morgan Geist talks Storm Queen's "It Goes On"

Niki & the Dove "The Drummer" single review

A feature on disco revivalism (especially re: Escort)

2011 Christmas album roundup

Movies

Olivia Colman Tyrannosaur interview

The Immortals review

Rating the post-Henson, pre-The Muppets Muppets movies

Dancin' on Air

A few weekends ago, a Philadelphia station aired a four-episode marathon of Dancin' on Air, a teen-oriented dance show that aired from 1981-1987 (it was Dance Party USA's predecessor and then sister show). Before and after commercials during this string of very special reruns, they'd cut to various dancers who kept this show going back in the day. One of them said that this was "the reality show of the '80s." That claim sat alongside ones of them still being recognized, 30 years later, in supermarkets, so I was ready to dismiss it along with those. But the more I thought about it, the more I agreed. Many of the ideals present on Dancin' on Air have become reality show dogma. Already strange-looking people have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves look stranger. No discernible talent is necessary to participate. There's a palpable struggle for camera time that is rewarded by outlandishness. In its polite and simple way, Dancin' on Air predicted our cultural adoration of extreme human behavior.

It was also run really weirdly, although I'm not complaining: pop curios (like Taffy's Italo "I Love My Radio") were featured alongside smash hits. Also, concepts the cut-in dance above certainly introduced layers missing from your standard kids-dancing-in-a-room programming. And who doesn't want to know what turns underage children off?

Starting Over again

This weekend, my review of La Toya Jackson's second memoir, Starting Over, ran in The Daily. I didn't write the headline, so at first I freaked out a little, since much of the book is about her trying to correct misconceptions about her mistakes of the past. But then I thought about it and it's ultimately true: she's not sorry. She voices regret and points a lot of fingers (only on rare occasions at herself), but the weird thing is that she is unapologetic. I don't think she should be (there's nothing wrong with Playboy!), but she acts like she should be? She's pulling a Linda Lovelace and it's weird. I really didn't like Linda Lovelace (her memoir is such a crock of shit!) and I don't want to not like La Toya!

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Starting Over for many of the same reasons that I loved her first book. La Toya Jackson is adorably clueless. There's no recognition, for example, that we have no reason to trust her after she basically admits to deceiving us in her first book (Jack Gordon, her dead scumbag of an ex-husband, was the guiding hand behind the salacious allegations against her family members, supposedly). Who's to say that in 20 years' time, she won't come out with another book that said that Jeffré Phillips and his overemphasized syllable didn't force her to fabricate much of Starting Over?

Anyway, all of the abuse stuff aside (which is awful and harrowing if not gratuitous, as it stretches on for about 150 pages), Starting Over is fun and funny! I recommend it! Just a few more points/lines that I couldn't fit into my review, but still think are worth another chuckle:

Passion, Pit

Just so you know what you're getting into, Pitbull (with the help of Akon) warns that he is not Mr. Right, but he can be Mr. Right Now. I think that is very polite! Here are some things that Mr. Right Now aka Mr. Worldwide will to do you (but, I'm guessing, only if you want):

- Make you his queen
- Love you "endless" [sic]
- Make sure your peach feels peachy
- Steal your heart
- Play night and day
- Unsnap your bra (with his teeth)
- Hit the spot (ding, ding, ding)
- Pop your clutch

Pitbull's sixth full-length, Planet Pit, is the most respectful bit of extended lewdness that I've ever experienced. His sexual prowess is based on how much pleasure he can provoke. After listening to him go on for an hour, I have no sense of this man's penis or even his own preferences because they are, per his on-record character, dependent on the taste of the woman he's inevitably trying to please. The wildest he gets is when he engages in the occasional threesome, but that's ultimately the product of an open mind ("Other girls want my girl, and I think that's cool"). He's so giving that he's practically a bottom. He makes me swoon.

I'm not the target audience for his come-ons, but his voice, the way purrs and then pinches into a scratch, is the sexiest in music today. It's the larynx's answer to squinting eyes. That it might flip into Spanish makes it even sexier. I do not mean to exoticize this Cuban American -- I only mean to say that his calculated seduction hits the spot, ding, ding, ding. (I do realize that his Lothario character could just be playing a character to woo women with counterfeit compassion.) That he surrounds himself with those prone to flights of fancy (Ne-Yo doing some sweet-booty crooning on the lovable "Give Me Everything," Marc Anthony going to freestyle levels of drama on "Rain Over Me," Chris Brown straining while delivering what amounts to a jingle on "International Love") is somewhat like a moderately attractive woman deliberately choosing homely friends -- maybe it's cheap, but the effect only makes him look better.

As a whole, Planet Pit is as ravishing as its star. It's mostly house with some outer genre flourishes (merengue, Beetle Juice among them), but its uncomplicated percussion designs remind me of '08 and '09, when house was just starting to penetrate pop music again, and sounded accordingly naive and tentative (instead of blowing you out with brick waveforms and crunching polyrhythms, as it does now all over Top 40 radio). Save some bongo fluttering, Pit's tracks star the stomp and the beats are as satisfying as really great 25-cent rubber balls you buy at the supermarket. (The sole freestyle oriented track, "Where Do We Go," which was unexpectedly, bizarrely produced by '90s house god Marc Kinchen, is excepted.) As opposed to so many other contemporary pop-house tracks, Pit doesn't belabor club talk (in fact, the only person to set such a scene explicitly is one of the guests on "Took My Love" -- Vein, perhaps?). That he is in the club is inevitable, either because he's been there for a while now or when you're having as great of a time as he is, the world is your club (and he has, per constant reminders, gone global).

Besides, Planet Pit is mostly about private matters, and I love the idea of house music as sex music. It's insistent and at a much more exciting tempo than, say, "You Are My Lady" (not that "You Are My Lady" isn't wonderful however you want to use it). It's also a way of making house more matter-of-fact than the bottle-service propaganda it so often tends to be. You don't have to mention the club to get played in one, and that Pitbull realizes that makes him sound smarter than so many of his contemporaries. Strange but true!

In last week's New York Times review, Jon Caramanica wrote that Planet Pit "suggests the full-fledged arrival of a new strain of hip-house." The thought crossed my mind, as well, although serious hip-house artists like those on DJ International were serious about hip-house and Pitbull is kind of a clown. Yes, his voice is great and many of his lines are impressively dumb clever ("Mami, you the Internet / And I'm lookin' for a download"), but he's having too much fun to settle down (god help you when he does and pukes out the "Airplanes" rip-off "Castle Made of Sand" alongside Kelly Rowland). Often lasting only as long as 8 bars and doing much of his own hyping ("Now go, stop, drop, pause..." he moans on the brilliantly literal "Pause"), he seems more like the best house music guest rapper of all time (my favs are those on "Finally" and "Too Blind to See It"). Or maybe he puts Snap, Black Box, Culture Beat, Captain Hollywood Project, et. al., to shame and emerges as the best Eurohouse rapper of all time. That would, after all, be pretty worldwide of him.

By the way while I'm taking music, my Beyoncé 4 review is up at the Village Voice now, and also I recently did a Q&A with Pete Hammond that was extremely enjoyable to conduct!

"I Wanna Go" video review hakiu

Rock of Love girl hair,
Kelly MacNamara eyes:
Brit's "I Wanna Go"

(OK, that's not much of a review. Nor will this be: I like the video because of the Half-Baked references and because it's not Weekend At Britney's III. If she's propped up, you can barely tell!)

Your pride is NOT her pride

 

My favorite Whitney is defensive Whitney (Nippy has bite!), and so I love this clip from her 1999 MTV All Access special that someone truly wonderful recently put in my hands. In it, John Norris asks her about her performance at New York's pride festivities in 1999 and, in light of the longstanding rumors about Whitney's own sexuality, she immediately differentiates her pride (for being a mother and a wife and a daughter and a sister and a lover and a friend) from gay pride. OK! We get it! You are everything in the world aside from gay, Whitney!

Her tone is otherwise of reciprocal appreciation. The footage of her freaking out on house remixes of "It's Not Right But It's Okay" and "Heartbreak Hotel" in front of a throng of rapturous gays is hilarious. The best supporting performance award goes to her non-supporting belt.

Happy Pride, whatever it is that you're proud of.

The non-art of the radio mix

I recently unearthed some old tapes (and by "some," I mean "hundreds")...and now you have to pay! Kidding. Ignore this all you want. In this post are very specific relics from a very specific childhood: six mixes worth of songs taped off the radio. My obsessive media gathering began as soon as we got a VCR and hasn't really changed since -- I burn shows obsessively in the event that they'll somehow cease existing (not everything goes to iTunes, I'll have you know!). Music's a different story, though -- thank god I no longer have to rely on timing to have in my possession new songs that I may or may not want to listen to recorded until they're officially released! The medium contained in this post is officially extinct.

As opposed to whole listening experiences, these tapes mostly represent cataloging -- I recorded many of these songs as I heard them for the first time, and given the obscurity of much of this junky, poppy house stuff, it was also the last time. I was completely justified in my paranoia of never hearing this stuff again with good reason: not much of it was worth hearing again.

But still, I listen to this stuff and I'm mesmerized -- being exposed to this much dance music as a 14- and 15-year-old kid certainly shaped my current listening. The comparably small proportion of hip-hop I apparently listened to from 1992 to 1993 (when these were made) has remained pretty much constant. That said, when listening to these tapes again after almost 20 years, what hit me the hardest was hearing Grand Puba's "360 Degrees (What Goes Around)" (on Radio 8) -- hearing that joyous, tactile hip-hop coming off tape felt like home to me.

I was also clearly obsessed with Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross' "The Best Things in Life Are Free" (it pops up no fewer than three times), as well as the weekly countdown American Dance Tracks, hosted by the excruciating Downtown Julie Brown (stick around for a bit and you'll hear her assert that she was "gettin' down" with every single artist on her weekly lists). That countdown was particularly great because it allowed me to finally hear so much of the stuff that I'd read the names of when I'd scan the Billboard dance charts (which I would do whenever I could, though I remember as a child only rarely being able to swing the $6 per issue that Billboard charged).

It's funny how much this stuff seemed to matter then and how little it matters now. This used to be my playground, truly.

(Added bonus: My voice can be heard on a few of these, mostly calling in with hot-or-not type of votes for new songs. This happens immediately after the first song on Radio 4.)

Recent music things

It may not seem like it in these parts, but I'm still very actively reviewing albums. Both up this week at the Village Voice: my takes on Kate Bush's Director's Cut and Lady Gaga's Born This Way. True to form, I like Gaga and love Kate (Director's Cut is my favorite album of the year so far -- it's a lot more fascinating than a rehashing of lesser works may seem).

Just for the fun of it, I rank the Director's Cut reworks after the jump...