Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills

Come Away With...ESG

I must sound like a broken record going on about this kind of stuff, but…I must sound like a broken record going on about this kind of stuff. I mean, someone has got to say it. At the moment my musical taste is just so sample-driven. Call me a product of the digital age, I don’t care, but I dig the re-appropriation of sounds – old, new, borrowed and blue. Whatever. Except mash-ups which are 98% lame.

Well, on to today’s history lesson: ESG. The four Scroggins sisters - Deborah (bass, vocals), Marie (congas, vocals), Renee (vocals, guitar), and Valerie (drums) – simply have to be amongst the coolest coolsies of all time (please, please, please ignore what has to one of the most unappealing promo pics ever, above). Back in the late ‘70s, when all were teenagers, their mother (add her to the cool list) bought each of her daughters an instrument to keep ‘em away from the trouble of the South Bronx streets.

Somehow, almost certainly not by design, ESG became flag bearers for post-punk, no wave, hip-hop and house music. According to AllMusic, the group's only aspiration was to play their music – simplistic in structure and heavy on rhythm – and sell lots of records. And despite borrowing heavily from their influences, such James Brown and Motown, when it came to originality, the girls had it goin’ on: figuring people would know when they screwed up a cover, the group decided to write their own songs in order to sidestep audience knowledge of when mistakes were being made. Through a mixture of ignorance and bluster, ESG have been responsible for some of the most dance-able and purely enjoyable music out there. Their full-length debut, Come Away With…ESG (1983), is a classic, but the critical admiration never transferred to commercial success. ESG disbanded shortly after that high-point but reformed, to great surprise, in the early ‘90s.

And yet the monetary reward still wasn’t forthcoming. In their absence, their music had become popular amongst hip-hop artists on the look-out for samples. The likes of TLC, the Wu-Tang Clan, Beastie Boys and J Dilla all made use of ESG rhythms and beats, often uncleared, and the Scroggins were left uncredited and out of pocket. The gals (by now middle-aged mamas) addressed the issue in the coolest of ways: by naming a 1993 12” EP Sample Credits Don't Pay Our Bills.

I don’t really know if I’m helping matters by posting mp3s of their work but I see it is as spreading the good word. I’ll be knocking on your door come Sunday. Anyway, this is a victory for the little guys. Check out a couple of tracks from the band, as well as one from indie-rockers Liars which borrows, uh, liberally from ESG’s ‘UFO’.

ESG – Dance
ESG – UFO
Liars - Tumbling Walls Buried Me In The Debris With ESG

Workinonit!

Sometimes at night, especially when I have things on my mind, I like to set aside time just for listening to music. I lay myself down in a darkened room just before bed and listen through headphones to an album in its entirety. The past few nights I’ve found myself returning to the same two albums: J Dilla’s Donuts, a new purchase that has hit me immediately, and Prefuse 73’s One Word Extinguisher, an album from my collection I’ve neglected for far too long.

The two are linked stylistically, both working as complete works as opposed to collections of disparate songs. I don’t want to go into back-stories too much but it is obvious that these two albums were pieced together with the utmost care. Donuts, particularly, runs like one long song. Now, I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable when it comes to hip-hop – in fact it is the main genre where subserviently I seek recommendations – but these two make a progressive impact that I cannot ignore. Approaching some sort of post-modern urban terrorism, each album relies heavily on samples – vocal snippets, chopped up instruments, glitchy beats – but the heart remains in traditional hip-hop. The results haven’t changed so much as the methods. Much could be said of today’s shorter attention spans but in cases like these we have an intriguing statement for the value of unrest in the digital age.

I’ve been sleeping well, baby. Enough said.

[No, I’m not going to post mp3s because that would do both artists an injustice]

BUY J Dilla - Donuts BUY
BUY Prefuse 73 - One Word Extinguisher BUY

***

In other news I have a couple of reviews up on Mess + Noise.

Double Yr Panda

Hear, hear. As if last week's Panda Bear love-in wasn't enough, I thought I'd direct your eyes to an article I found rather interesting. A few weeks ago, The Guardian in the UK asked Noah Lennox what his favourite piece of technology is, and the answer? Read here or simply read on...

What's your favourite piece of technology?
The Boss SP-303 Sampler.

Is it good for your art?
Most definitely. I had to rethink ways of songwriting because of it - in a good way.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I used it - actually two of them - in Vienna two nights ago to play some music with Dave and Brian from the band.

What additional features would you add if you could?
First off, I'd make them way tougher and more heavily built. I'd also want to upgrade some of the inboard effects a little and I'd improve the time-stretch quality for sure.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years time?
I think it's obsolete already. Boss has a new version out, the SP-404, and the 303s use an already obsolete card technology called SmartMedia.

What one tip would you give to non users?
I'd say give the 303 a try if you're looking for a cheap machine that can do a lot with just a little.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Well, I don't know what a luddite is so I'll go with nerd.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
My iMac 65 cost me about €1,500. I'm not too big on mega expensive or fancy things, really.

Mac or PC?
Mac, but mostly because I'm used to it. I'd get a PC no problem. To be honest, I'm really, really excited about the fact that the next Mac OS will run Windows at native speed.

What song is at the top of your iPod's Top 25 Most Played?
I don't know for sure because I don't have it with me but I'm positive Amazing by George Michael, Tessio by Luomo (the Vocalcity version) and Il Grande Silenzio By Ennio Morricone are way up there somewhere.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I'd really like one of those top-of-the-line, classy coffee-makers because really good coffee is totally worth it for me.

So it seems fair to say that at the heart of the most innovative album of this year laid "obselete" technology. O how fast the world spins!

Pandas in the Wild

Animal Collective 'jamming'

Lately I’ve been listening with great intent to the new Animal Collective album, Strawberry Jam. Not only are they one of my favourite bands but they are also one of the most intriguing acts around today. There’s a tribe-like charm to the band, only strengthened by the knowledge that Panda Bear, Avey Tare, the Geologist, and Deakin have been friends since childhood. This sense of togetherness endears their musical meanderings, no matter how far off the beaten path they tread.

Strawberry Jam, which is only now seeing official release after months of Internet leakage, certainly takes the Collective in brave new directions; in some aspects it is their most conventional effort and yet it could also be classed amongst their most abrasive works. Unlike the band’s two most recent albums, Feels and Sung Tongs, it relies more on ramshackle electronics than abstract folk-interpretations. Among the other most noticeable developments are clearer, more discernable vocals from Avey (aka Dave Portner) and Panda (Noah Lennox), which results in fewer sweeping soundscapes, as instruments are crowded out by a more traditional fronting of voice.

Person Pitch

For me, it makes more sense to consider Strawberry Jam as some sort of progression from Panda Bear’s stunning solo record of earlier this year, Person Pitch - although Avey Tare, as main songwriter, may disagree. One of my favourite albums of 2007, it is a true backward-borrowing, forward-looking masterpiece. It seems many people share my love for it. Befitting the sound-file era it has arrived into, the album was not so much played out but meticulously assembled from disparate digital media. Lennox innately transferred his passion for modern DJ culture into something timeless, culminating in a sound not quite electronic and not quite analogue. It’s been described as a 21st Century Beach Boys album, and the back-story is almost as intriguing as any of Brian Wilson’s escapades. As Lennox asserts, it began with the trawling of the Internet for sound samples:

They’re all off the Internet. Almost all of them, something like 95% I just got from free sound FX sites and things like that. I’m kind of psyched about it being this real digital, internet age sort of album. And at first, I was like, ‘I’m definitely not going to release this on vinyl’. But now lots of people have been asking about it’s vinyl release so we probably will.

(taken from Rosequartz blog)

I can’t help but take inspiration from Person Pitch. The Internet is such a valuable resource for music-making, yet I still find amongst a large proportion of musicians an aversion to computer-generated pieces – as if it flies in the face of rock ‘n’ roll tradition or something. Noah Lennox, however, has shown in his work with Animal Collective that he’s not just some hunched laptop chancer – a stealer of ideas, some would have you – but a truly innocative artist.

Noah Lennox/Panda Bear

Have a listen to a few tracks:

Animal Collective - 'Peacebone'
Panda Bear - 'Comfy in Nautica' (legal mp3s courtesy of Insound)
Panda Bear - 'Bros (edit)' (courtesy of Pitchfork - note: you need to hear the full 11+ minute version)

[Panda Bear's Person Pitch is out now on Paw Tracks/Mistletone]

[Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam is out 17/09/07 on Domino/EMI]

Pull up the people, pull up the poor

I just want to add something in regards to my M.I.A. blog entry below. This forum thread should hopefully clarify a few of the points I've made. I don't know, some of it is still a bit shady - and can we have an interpretor for Diplo? Please?

Tha man, who in other news has done a kickin' mix for Pitchfork, does make a few good (intelligible) points:

• 'Mango Pickle Down River' was only meant to be a mixtape cut from the beginning.
• M.I.A. obviously never went to work with anyone in Australia.
• It was record label Interscope's idea to put the track on the album. "i wasnt into it.. they really like to play up the ethno world poor diaspora bit on this release..."
• The "real crook" in this whole situation might be another super-producer, Timbaland, "cause after down river with a rap had been in the cut as a demo last year.. snoops [dogg's) album had a track that was exactly like it.. beat box and didigeridoo. someone in australia pointed it out to me.."
• M.I.A. never had bad intentions for the project. The royalty splits on the track are apparently 85/15 in Morganics' favour. And finally...
  
• "m.i.a. says dumb stuff in public sometimes tho, gotta love her!"

The track as it appears on Kala:


And the Wilcannia Mob original:


The Internet brings a whole new meaning to the term "collaboration".

“I put people on the map who have never seen a map” – M.I.A. ’20 Dollars’

Sri Lankan-born rapper Maya Arulpragasam, or simply M.I.A., is castigated by some for her eclectic approach to music, which embodies the odd dichotomy of political/fashion statement, but generally it’s A-OK with me. With the recent release of her second album Kala, M.I.A. has continued to ooze Third World appeal while aggressively – albeit sometimes vaguely – addressing issues of racism and inequality. And she can speak, being the daughter of a Tamil activist-turned militant!

It’s all very post-colonial – taking in grime, hip-hop, dance-hall, baile funk, and bad Bollywood to name but a few genres – and, unsurprisingly, polarising. Kala was apparently borne from a world-trip, from which M.I.A. and producer Switch (and a few more names, admittedly) were basically able to appropriate the much-maligned ‘World Music’ label into something rather cool. One track on the album called ‘Mango Pickle Down River’ will resonate particularly with Australian listeners. Didgeridoos? Check. Cute anecdotal rapping from Aboriginal kids? Check. Crackly Keith from Wilcannia Street? No, it couldn’t be?!

But, yes. ‘Mango Pickle Down River’ is in fact a reworking of the Wilcannia Mob’s JJJ-loved ‘Down River’ of a few years ago. And by reworking I mean it’s basically the same song, as originally produced by Aussie Morganics, with some non-sensical M.I.A. vocals thrown into the mix. It’s all rather strange.

Now, as far as I know Morganics passed the track on to M.I.A. and her people (most likely mega-producer Diplo, who had a big hand in her previous album Arular and is involved with the Heaps Decent initiative to assist indigenous and underprivileged Australian musicians). I’m not one to point the finger but, reading overseas reviews, it doesn’t seem as though Morganics and the Wilcannia Mob (a number of whom are now behind bars, I’m told) have been appropriately credited. I could be off the mark but for an artist who has enjoyed serious exposure through affiliation with Third World struggle, it would be shameful if any exploitation has occurred. M.I.A. has had this to say in the past:

“It’s really weird when I did the Big Day Out Tour, in January (2006), we ended up meeting some aboriginal kids in Adelaide, so we took them to my show…and we made them watch The Stooges. I hung out with them all-day long. To me, there’s something about them that reminded me of Sri Lankan people…it was the first time I realised how difficult it is for Aboriginal people in Australia. Even to get them into the Big Day Out after party, me and my brother practically had to get into a fight with people to get them in…just the amount of segregation between black and white Australia is really crazy. I met this guy called Morganics, who’s this white guy (hip-hop producer) who’s a social worker, and he originally made that track as a social work project that he set up in the bushes with these kids who come from a really hard part of Australia. I think two of boys are in now in a juvenile detention centre. It’s really difficult for certain groups in Australia…because I got to see them first hand, this sounded like the most perfect thing I’d ever heard and I really wanted to put it on the map.”
[From Fact Magazine]

Now, hip-hop is all about appropriation – just witness Kanye West’s decrepit take on Daft Punk’s ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ – but it’s different when the subject material is unknown and, quite frankly, there for the taking. Just to clarify, I don’t think M.I.A. would blindly rip-off artists in such a way. I am, however, amazed that of all the international reviews I have read of Kala that none have acknowledged the fact that the song already existed.

It’s all very post-modern to me. In a way it seems as though time and space has shrunk, and what we have now is some sort of global meta-culture. Perhaps M.I.A. is a symbol of these changes. The very next song on Kala quotes the Pixies and samples New Order, so she definitely knows where her bread is buttered (indie-nerds like me FYI!)

Well, she’s touring again soon and I’ll be attending – I wonder if there’s any chance of an onstage reunion?

[M.I.A.'s Kala is out now on XL/Remote Control]