The cats behind Nina Sky (”Move Ya Body”) are unleashing their next move. To refresh your memory, Nina Sky is identical twins Nicole and Natalie Albino. They hooked up with production team the Jettsonz, who then brought in producer Cipha Sounds. The girls (they were only 18) wrote “Move Ya Body” to [...]
“I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver…”
No big surprise. Radio sucks and has for years. Even public radio has gotten narrower in focus and less adventurous, as it has learned to be self-sustaining. So those of us who care have been undeniably gleeful at Eliot Spitzer’s pursuit of Sony on payola charges.
But I think some people are fooling [...]
“The shareef don’t like it…”
Don’t you love it when some musical genre threatens to go mainstream? It’s particularly entertaining when an international musical style is poised to become the next big thing. It happens — look at reggae — but not often. So, along those lines, remember when raï threatened to break out?
At the turn of [...]
Booze and broads and blunts and bitches
Frank Sinatra was not a big fan of the rock ‘n’ roll music. I suspect that, in part, he was threatened by it. He was just making his comeback in the Fifties and then this Elvis kid comes along and you think the bobbysoxers give a crap about Ol’ Blue Eyes? No, [...]
“Are you my Caucasian?”
There are many memorable episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The one where Larry picks up a hooker so he can use the commuter lane to go see a baseball game at Dodger Stadium and then she gives him some marijuana for his father’s glaucoma? That’s a good one. Maybe my favorite, though, [...]
“I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds. “
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was one of the key figures of the bop movement. His most famous composition was the standard “A Night in Tunisia.”
Diz loved to clown and is known as much for his humor as for his playing. He was good at both, but often was criticized for “cutting the fool.” [...]
“Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative…”
I’m a big Orson Welles fan, even though I’ve only seen a handful of the films he directed (Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil among them). I’d never seen The Magnificent Ambersons, because I had always heard that it had been butchered (Read about what happened here). Ambersons was on Turner Classic Movies [...]
“The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.”
“There are a bunch of disaffected people who listen to the cassettes, are influenced by the ideology. It’s sort of ideology that’s holding it together, not some sort of command structure.”
Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, July 21, 2005. Is he talking about Al-Qaeda? Or Tony Robbins?
You might as well play me that summer single…
Two more summer songs. Just to be nice.
First, the P. Funk All-Stars deliver one of those lovely summer songs in the vein of Sly & The Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” “One of Those Summers” is taken from the 1983 album Urban Dancefloor Guerillas, which came as a follow-up to George [...]
One of these mornin’s, you’re goin’ to rise up singin’
The songs of summer — it’s so true. There’s something about certain songs that just mean summer. Over at Soul Sides, they’ve been running lists of summer songs (Check it out here, here, here, and here). Certain songs bring back memories of particular summers. For example, TLC’s “No Scrubs” was the [...]