Just the facts, ma’am. Last night: Erykah Badu at the Palais des Congrès. Awesome… though I’ve seen the analog girl at least seven times live (the last: Jones Beach 2005 w/Jill Scott and Queen Latifah) and it wasn’t my absolute favorite set. But, very New Amerykah heavy, very funky, very 90 minutes late. Went a lil’ something like this.
The six-man band jammed for ten minutes alone before her entrance, doing solos off of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” Chesty backup singers Keisha Renée Williams and Eugenia Bess began chanting “hold on, my people” as Erykah emerged from stage left. With her striking poses at the microphone, the band cranked up “Amerykahn Promise” (derived from the old Roy Ayers Music Project tune, “The American Promise”) and funked out until segueing into “The Healer/Hiphop.” She’d brought out two tuning forks – they make vibrations, no? – and clinked them together at the appropriate moment in the song, but the mic didn’t pick up the space/time continuum rift that one might’ve expected to hear. A few songs later, she brought out an African drum under her arm to bang, bringing in the chant/song “My People.”
I could go song by song, but I’ll put the track listing below. Instead, the highlights. For a few tours now (and this one is officially The Vortex Tour), Erykah has been playing a beat machine onstage that’s sort of like a sophisticated Japanese-engineered version of banging on a lunchroom table to produce hiphop boom-bap beats, but it’s also capable of making space-age atmospheric effects. So at one point, she got the electrofunk beat to Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” going, which the band picked up, and performed “Apple Tree” over it. She similarly merged the music to Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” to the end of Worldwide Underground‘s “I Want You,” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum” in-between “Love of My Life (An Ode to Hiphop)” and “A.D. 2000” from Mama’s Gun. Badu turned her back to the audience at one point and gave drummer Raphael Iglehart what I’m sure was a deadly look for missing his cue.
Other little musical borrowings made the night interesting; the sold-out audience was also treated to James Brown’s “The Payback” at the end of the night, somewhere between “Tyrone” and “Bag Lady.” Same with the beat to “Top Billin’” bringing on “On & On.” And the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” appeared as a petite encore with Common’s “The Light,” and thousands of Parisians waved their cellies in the air from side to side with the house lights down. The only notable Baduizm of the night might’ve been her explanation of vortices, how Paris was located nearby a (presumably spiritual) vortex, and that areas near such vortices produce greater creativity. Knowing Badu, she kept it light considering the language barrier. She jumped into the audience (protected by her security) at one point, cavorting with fans real friendly-like. Then she broke out for the next tour stop in London, leaving us with some prerecorded crunk to dance ourselves out. Now, the track listing:
Before Sunrise is one of my all-time favorite movies. I even worked the film into a short story I published (“Diva Moves” from the Brown Sugar 3 erotica collection) just to maybe turn more people onto it. It’s very European- talky, in fact it’s nothing but talking: an American guy (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl (Julie Delpy) meet on a train going across Europe, and decide to get off in Vienna to discover the city and each other. But when it came out in 1995, the movie’s twentysomething dialogue spoke directly to me; I always played it for new women in my life and learned a lot about them through what their thoughts were about the film.
In Before Sunset, the sequel nine years later, the slacker guy has become a writer (surprise) and does a book reading in Paris at Shakespeare & Co., where he meets up with the girl again. They walk through the city having thirtysomething conversation, stopping at some point at Le Pure Café in the 11th arrondissement for a while. My favorite line is Ethan Hawke’s, describing his stagnant marriage and family life back in the US: “I feel like I’m running a small nursery with someone I used to date.” Director Richard Linklater collaborated on both the original and its sequel. I enjoyed the original better, but I totally look forward to the three of them hopefully doing it again in their 40s. (After Sunrise?)
I’ll write a real essay on the movies one day, the first one being close to my heart and all. But today I rolled by Le Pure Café for the first time for a drink after meeting my wife at work for lunch, and took the picture above. The Before Sunset scene below is a taste of the film at the moment when Hawke and Delpy stroll into the café. Last year I met Julie Delpy completely on the other side of town, at the Hôtel Pont Royal, over drinks for a Mean magazine piece. Read it here.
So N*E*R*D’s back, flaunting all the appropriate characteristics for the ideal postmodern pop-rock band: an effortless mélange of hiphop, rock, and 80s synth music married to an ironic attitude. The description sounds a lot like Gnarls Barkley (a duo likewise hard to characterize), but N*E*R*D predated that group by four years with their first record, In Search Of… (I always thought it was overrated; I only dug on “Rock Star – Poser” and “Lapdance.”) But off the new record Seeing Sounds, the retro-sounding “Windows,” with Motown-like handclaps and “do do do” harmonizing, is the only song that might bring Gnarls Barkley to mind. The rest is far too energetic and futuristic to be anything but pure N*E*R*D. It’s the perfect soundtrack for the jumpy girls with coke joneses playfully satirized on the first single, “Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in the Line for the Bathroom)” – see video below.
Lead singer Pharrell Williams is celebrated mainly for his phenomenal talent as a producer; his distinct touch is all over most of Madonna’s latest, Hard Candy. This makes sense, because his lack of singing ability sometimes makes N*E*R*D harder to appreciate. Poor vocals weigh down certain songs — “Yeah You,” for example — like an anchor; because of his voice, it’s hard to know if he’s seriously seducing or joking around. N*E*R*D’s lyrics are also trite and secondary to the music. “Everyone Nose” takes coke use as its subject (“cut you open and you’re all white,” Pharrell sings… and yo! My last few times in New York, everyone nose f’real; coke is the new weed!), but most of Seeing Sounds deals with hookups and partying.
Beats redeem the album though. The agitated triphop drumming on “Anti Matter,” probably my favorite, complements the song’s New Wave guitars nicely, creating a standout. “Kill Joy” uses the old-school Sugarhill Gang-like rhymes of N*E*R*D’s Shay effectively and, like most of Seeing Sounds, the bridge contrasts the original melody sharply. More than anything else, N*E*R*D continues to be a fly storage room for the more experimental sounds that producer Pharrell Williams can’t hawk elsewhere. Love that shot from Paris-based Citizen K, one of my favorites mags here, of dude with one of France’s greatest actresses, Catherine Deneuve. Hiphop fuckin took over, boy… if only it still had its balls.
It occurs to me that I’ve made a few snarky remarks against reality TV since the début of this blog, so let me turn the tide a little. The late Andy Warhol promised everyone would be famous for 15 minutes like prophesy, and lo and behold, the “reality” beast MTV unleashed in 1992 with The Real World is still on the rampage. It also occurs to me that (like in the last post, f’r example) I may name-drop famous people I’ve met in my travels a bit often. But trust me, I don’t mean to point at these folks like they’re any different from me (or us). Sly Stone said “everybody is a star,” and that’s more my attitude, “we all shine on” and all that.
In that spirit, I wanna turn this post over to comments from you; Webalizer says there’s an average of 1,500 of y’all reading this on a regular. By now, practically everybody knows somebody who’s been on a reality TV show through one degree of separation. Outta curiosity, please just do a quick check-in and sound off about who you know that’s gone there.
Years before Paris, I lived for four months in London, at the tail end of 1995. After a dry two months studying international law (long story) and writing for True magazine, I spotted a beautiful Asian-eyed cutie on the tube over my dog-earred Disappearing Acts. Got off the train and we both did the double-take, but alas, too late. So homegirl Elsa comes to visit England, and we stroll into some British hiphop shop, and at the counter: the Asian-eyed cutie (Indonesian, actually), Mirrah Faye! We hit it off right away, and moved into an apartment together at Tooting Bec for the rest of my time in London. I remember a snowball fight in a field with Mirrah, who, growing up in Venice Beach and Sydney, Australia, had never seen snow before. That’s her in our flat, above.
Three years back, UPN ran R U the Girl, the show where TLC’s T-Boz and Chilli chose a female MC to do a song with. I was already living here and didn’t see the show, but the final round was a battle between rappers O’So Krispie and… Mirrah! Long story short, she’s dropping the mixtape Life Love Music in a quick minute, having rocked The Lair on MTV Australia, hosted the televised afterparty to the MTV Video Music Awards down under and more. And we’re both married now, so quit.
I was walking through SoHo with my homegirl Elsa Mehary on our way to Peasant three summers ago when we passed a series of posters. They were plastered up around downtown Manhattan advertising nothing in particular (rare), and I took a minute to point them out to Elsie. A despondent shot of Marilyn Monroe was centered in the middle of text that read, “THEN IT HIT ME. I’m not going to be famous. I won’t get to be a rock star. I am going to be stuck on the payroll doing work that doesn’t interest me for a very long time.” I could’ve shuddered, that someone (an artist named Marilyn it turns out) went out of his way to imprint this kind of a message on the minds of unsuspecting, superaspirational New Yorkers walking down the street.
I meant to post about the poster months ago but forgot. It came to mind somehow when I found out today that my old-school college acquaintance, the poet Saul Williams, got married four months ago to Girlfriends actress Persia White. (Congrats!) She’s got an album coming out this summer that’s partially produced by Tricky, by the way. I’m not totally sure why my mind is connecting the two yet, but I figured I’d throw it out there.
Not to get all expat snooty, but it’s such an American attitude to live life assuming you’ll be famous one day, or feeling your life has less value when it doesn’t happen. Reality TV and, yeah, even blogs are all part of that fame-game syndrome. In my wide-eyed innocent early twenties (everyone has them), I wanted to become the hiphop James Baldwin, which for me meant 1. publishing books, 2. living in Paris for a while, and 3. getting well-known enough in the hiphop media to where I wouldn’t have to keep introducing myself to Nelson George and Greg Tate every time we met. That all happened eventually; I’m happy. And when I started thinking seriously about marriage, I knew I wanted a wife who didn’t have the faintest idea who Damon Dash was or couldn’t name any of Diddy’s babymamas. Obsessed as I used to be with pop culture, I didn’t want to talk that to death with my mate too, especially in front of our seeds. And I got that. There’s French hiphop lovers of course, but my Christine in particular doesn’t know Lil Wayne from Lil’ Kim (and, great).
Still, I imagine it’s not every day someone you know marries a TV star, depending on what kinds of friends you have, I guess. It’s a good minute to pause and be thankful for what I have, a delayed little Father’s Day moment maybe. Carry on.
Got hip to this recently from my B(ronx)-girl homie Lynne d Johnson: evidently there’s a documentary coming early next year on the rise and fall of Urban Box Office, a/k/a UBO.com. Coming from director John Threat and his MediaThreat production company, First Generation Urban (think that’s the title) investigates the $60,000,000-funded umbrella site started by the late former Motown CEO George Jackson, and how it failed so miserably.
I worked at UBO myself for about two months after leaving Vibe in late 1999; it aimed to be all things urban to all people urban, a multitude of different sites all launched from the central hub of UBO, kinda like Gawker with Fleshbot, Gizmodo, etc. (I did an interview with George Jackson for old Sam Goody’s Request magazine before his untimely death from a stroke at 42. ) UBO went about snapping up any- and everybody who reflected the different audiences they wanted to attract as users, and it seemed that everytime I turned around, someone else I knew had just been hired: Ronin Ro, Tish Benson, Genevieve McCaw. Then they even hired my girlfriend at the time, Dinkinish O’Connor, to deal with fashion at LikePepper.com – a site for sistas run and operated by the original editors of Honey magazine (which at the time was edited by another ex, Asondra R. Hunter… long story).
The dotcom bubble was already sort of bursting circa 1999/2000, but funding was just starting to trickle down to sites targeted to black folks, “urban” or whatever. I was ostensibly editing a NYC city guide section for UBO, with a budget to go eating and drinking at the restaurants and clubs I was expected to write blurbs about. But other players like Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, HBO’s Volume.com and BET.com were poaching from hiphop-gen mags and other African-American sites to take advantage of the urban net wave, and so after about two months, I left to edit BET.com’s music section.
But my girlfriend regaled me with stories about the big UBO blowout launch party under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty out on Liberty Island and other incredibly wasteful shit that eventually led to the site’s downfall after the death of founder Jackson. LikePepper.com never launched, and indeed, most of UBO’s mini-sites didn’t. Peep the documentary trailer below.
In the spirit of the digital revolution, I’ve been raiding my local library for CDs for my computer/iPod. I jumped on the bandwagon relatively late, buying my first MP3 player just in February of last year: a classic white, 80-giga iPod. Before my médiathèque excavations, I had about 25G of music. Now I’ve got 33G and counting. Funny what you can find in the English music section of a French library though; here’s a few:
Ingrid Chavez, May 19 1992 – If you don’t know already, Ingrid Chavez is the whispery voice billed as the Spirit Child introducing Prince’s Lovesexy album from 1988. According to the Prince biography Possessed, she also hooked him up with the bad Ecstasy that made him decide to shelve his infamously funky The Black Album. It’s been said that Chavez slept with Lenny Kravitz and that he promptly stole her breathy poetry-vocal style (and, uh, lyrics) when producing Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” (Which also featured a jacked beat from Public Enemy, and so what exactly was Kravitz’s contribution to the song then?) Anyway, homegirl put an okay album out in 1991 that nobody bought, and I’ve got my hands on it again now; my CD was too scratched for the PC. Standout track: “Hippy Blood”
Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen – Scream all you want about Remy Ma, but this ranks as the all-time best record I’ve ever heard from a female MC, along with Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core and the Lauryn Hill classic. Mark the 45 King produced almost everything here, which makes it strange that he never went on to do much else of note. The sample from Miles Davis’s Tutu for “The Pros” still puts a smile on my face. Standout track: “Mama Gave Birth to the Soul Children” w/De La Soul
Martina Topley-Bird, Quixotic – Notable because this European version and the American version retitled Anything have different track listings, with three songs left off. Martina, of course, is the British former vocal foil and babymama of triphop god Tricky. She just dropped The Blue God produced by Danger Mouse, but nothing on the new joint stands up to “Need One.” Video below in fact, fuck it. Standout track: “Lullaby”
Now that we’re in 2008 and music is free, I encourage everybody within the sound of my voice to get a library card and stock your MP3 players for absolutely no money down. The record business is over; let’s brrrr stick em for what they did to Bo Diddley.
Psyche: I never give up. However… (laugh) one of my Brooklyn homies suggested weeks ago that I’ve got too many projects going on at once, and that maybe I should get around to finishing one of them. True, there’s a lot of plates spinning in the air at chez moi – the book, the comic, the screenplay, etc. – and so maybe some time management is in order; I was already thinking the same thing myself actually. So for all you fellow scribblers out there trying to balance your shit, I feel your pain – this is what I plan to do.
The Masters comic book project is on hold. Although this month I did make the decision that The Masters will be a graphic novel (as opposed to a mini- or ongoing series), I also decided that the plot itself will be written as a short story first, for my eyes only. I’m aware of the specially formatted comic-book scripts that help artists figure out how to illustrate the action, but as a short story writer, I came to the conclusion that even before attempting a script like that, it’s gonna help me map it out if it’s an actual short story to work from. And Superman though I am, I don’t have time this minute to pen a short story. Because…
… The Noir Album book is my main focus this moment. Got feedback from my agent on my sample chapter this month. All’s well, so well she wants another additional chapter so we can sew up more money for this joint from the eventual publisher when it all goes down this summer. If I get in a zone I may even hammer out the first 100 pages, just to end all possible back n’ forth and get things rolling already. Not that I’m impatient. The Noir Album, as a reminder, is a memoir of my years in Paris, with a thesis running throughout about the lives of French black folk.
Yes, there’s a screenplay. Amazon delivered my Final Draft software a few weeks back, and I’m (finally) steadily transcribing my 13-year-old unpublished novel into a movie. Writers are some starving-artist motherfuckers generally, and I’m not real into that. Hollywood is where the bucks are if you do this for a living. Joan Didion, James Baldwin and Dave Eggers all have screenplay credits, yeah, but I know like 10 people personally off the top of my dome who’ve sold scripts, folks like Bönz Malone (Brooklyn Babylon), Scott Poulson-Bryant (Murder on the Soul Train), Cheo Hodari Coker (Notorious), my old law school classmate Brian Koppelman (Ocean’s 13) and more. So my first draft will be done by July. Then: rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
And I’m a daddy, and I’m a husband, and I still owe the occasional freelance piece to somebody. Did I mention some esteemed editor turned down my Tricky pitch yesterday, instead offering me a Prince interview? Well. Balance is key.
I’m a Spielberg fan to death, but hardly an Indiana Jones fan at all. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at 10 years old, Temple of Doom at 13 (when I shoulda been seeing Wild Style) and The Last Crusade at 18, with my parents and/or pops every single time. Raidersgot me excited about my fifth grade social studies class for about two days. I’ll get around to seeing Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sometime next week, but part of me hopes it bombs, considering the weak plot and how Spielberg and George Lucas were apparantly asleep at the wheel.
So forget Indy; if you’re in Paris now into the summertime, the following films are interesting over at the Cinémathèque Française over the next three months:
The Graduate – June 1 Last Tango in Paris – June 19 The Dreamers – June 22 Alphaville – July 7 The Wizard of Oz – July 16 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – July 23 Superman – July 30
Living in France, I missed director Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home that aired on PBS like three years ago. But I’ve been raiding my local médiathèque (read: library) for all kinds of free music to pop into my iPod, and I rented it. Expertly done, it hardly needs my seal of approval anyway.
I write sometimes about the rock albums laying around the house when I grew up, but there were zero Dylan records. Reading Rolling Stone off and on ever since the magazine put the cast of Star Wars on the cover, I got tired of them mentioning Dylan over and over again without really knowing his music, so I went and learned about him sometime in college. I went to Morehouse, and so even though they just named their first white valedictorian, I had no white classmates to help me out; I scored the No Direction Home biography by Robert Shelton (no connection to the doc) and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits when I was 20. Before then, the most I really retained was 1) Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” was really Dylan, and 2) Michael Hutchence tossing lyric cards in INXS’s “I Need You Tonight” video was stolen from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and 3) Dylan once said – probably as a joke – that his favorite songwriter was Smokey Robinson.
The voice can be fingers-on-a-chalkboard tough to get past. The poetry of the lyrics is, like, nth-degree amazing. I still only heard my first full-length Dylan record from start to finish, Highway 61 Revisited, on a train from France to England two years ago, downloaded from LimeWire. Great record; I was in London to speak at the British Film Institute about the 10th anniversary of Tupac’s death and I spent the whole time there with the Dylan record on blast. Tried to get through his poetry book Tarantula too, down in Jamaica at the Calabash International Literary Festival three years back. Couldn’t, but some of it was fun to read after a fat joint, and I’m sure Dylan wrote it in the same state I was in when I lay in a hammock reading it.
I ain’t rock dean Robert Christgau; the world doesn’t another Dylan deconstruction. But I’ll say this. Watching No Direction Home and seeing Dylan morph from a snotnose wannabe Woody Guthrie from Minneapolis to the influential mouthpiece of his times, I was drawn to how comparably vapid 2008 is. Barack Obama (a black presidential candidate with progressive politics) is the only great thing going these days. There’s no King, no X, no Kennedy. Hiphop is a shadow of its former self, there’s no March on Washington-type movement… Not that Dylan ever claimed to be, but who’s the voice of today’s generation? And who’s listening? Everybody just wants to get rich and famous, watch reality TV and get numb/dumb.
Just the facts, ma’am. Last night: Erykah Badu at the Palais des Congrès. Awesome… though I’ve seen the analog girl at least seven times live (the last: Jones Beach 2005 w/Jill Scott and Queen Latifah) and it wasn’t my absolute favorite set. But, very New Amerykah heavy, very funky, very 90 minutes late. Went a lil’ something like this.
