It’s not the New Amerykah Part Two second single we were hoping for (that honor would fall onto the album’s Wings-looping seducer “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long”), but that’s okay: you’d have to be severely deaf not to have some love for official “Window Seat” follow-up “Turn Me Away (Get MuNNY)”, Erykah Badu‘s playfully lightweight update of Sylvia Striplin’s 1981 old-school fave “You Can’t Turn Me Away” (better known to the kids as the sample source to the Junior M.A.F.I.A./ Biggie classic “Get Money”).
Weaving multi-layered Betty Boop-ish chirps in and out the Striplin jam’s familiar rubbery funk and quirky hiccups, Badu sounds like she’s having a ball as she tries on what can be taken as either a prowling gold-digger guise or a satire swipe at artists willing to sell their soul for that almighty dollar (“I look like a model/ I’ll do what I gotta/
To stay in the runnin’/ Cause I want you money”; see…works both ways).
Monica featuring Missy Elliott & Notorious B.I.G. “Everything To Me (Remix)”/ “Blackberry”
While most other mainstream R&B artists are too busy trying to keep the kids’ attention by sounding like malfunctioning robots and wannabe rappers, or awkwardly straining (and usually failing) to inject as much soul as possible in between club-happy house thumps and electro bleeps and bloops, Monica aimed to keep it simple and just saaang on her Missy Elliott co-produced lead Still Standing single “Everything To Me”, a vintage-hugging, Broadway-sized tribute to the “perfect man”.
Though the back-to-basics move has proven successful (the track is currently spending it’s third week atop the R&B/ Hip Hop singles chart, making it Monica’s first #1 in seven years), the song falls a bit on the bland side, mostly making us wish to hear the tune it samples (Deniece Williams similarly theatrical, albeit far more dynamic, ’81 classic “Silly”) more.
Slightly better is the summer jeep jam-styled remix, which again lifts it’s musical foundation from the ’80′s R&B world (this time, Rene & Angela’s “I Love You More”), as well as a completely unnecessary re-heated Notorious BIG verse from the Life After Death number “I Love The Dough” (tie-in for the confused: both songs sample the R&A joint), though we should note that the best song we’ve heard from Monica so far in 2010 was one that didn’t even officially make the album. That would be “Blackberry”, a midtempo cut that brings back the dual joys of both snap & b and Monica’s sassier side as she hits the roof after breaking the code to her man’s titular cell phone and finding out, through texts and voice mails from another chick, that he’s not being on the up-and-up. Oh, the drama.
It usually takes a good month or so for us for a new T-Pain single to make the transition from being just plain dumb to severely addicting (but still dumb), so it makes sense that right about now, after weeks of the Auto-Tune soul-man/ walking spoof’s latest bringing about all kinds of raging “What’s wrong with music today!?!” and “Why his this guy still around?!!” tantrums, we would start coming around to admiring “Reverse Cowgirl”.
Of course, like all the times before when it came to taking a liking to this guy’s solo material, we were drunk and “slow-dancing” (read: dry-humping some chick on the dancefloor) when we reached this epiphany, but admit it: there’s something awe-inspiring about the way T-Pain excels at making the silliest lyrics/ concepts (in this case, a certain sexual position and bleats of “Giddy up girl” and “Yee-haw”) sound SO DAMN DEEP with just a sprinkle of his yearning, “studio-sweetened” vocals.
Plus, we kinda dig the “artsy” moves of it’s video (see it below), where, especially under the influence of things we don’t feel the need to mention, watching T-Pain shake his dreads in slow motion is on par with seeing Avatar in 3-D for the first time.
More surprising than discovering that Next, the late-’90′s/ early-00′s hit R&B boy band who turned a song about getting erections on the dancefloor into a five-week #1 US pop smash, are still together and making music?
Finding out that their recently dropped cover of Michael Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone”, done in the synth-bedazzled Euro-R&B style of the inexplicably currently popular Taio Cruz/ Jay Sean/ Jason DeRulo (we know they’re different artists, but deep in our hearts we think they are all one person), is kinda-sorta not all that bad.
Faith Evans “I Wanna Rock (Snoop Dogg Freestyle Cover)”
The Former First Lady of Bad Boy peaks her head out of hibernation (really, where has Faith been)…with an unfortunate alter-ego tag (“Fizzy”)…to drop some boasting “rhymes” about her flow over a 2009 Snoop instrumental…and then some cat named Deuce Hanna (who?) raps.
Yeah, we don’t know what to say either…but here you go:
Foreign Exchange-affiliated singer-songwriter (and former Erykah Badu vocalist) YahZarah previews her forthcoming fourth album, the enticingly titled The Ballad of Purple Saint James, with “Why Dontcha Call Me No More”, a song that finds her going through the blues over a cheating beau (“Obviously you never had a broken heart/ Or you would’ve known better than to play with someone else’s”).
Don’t think that the song is another one of those depressing slow burners though. In fact, it plays more like a mood-lightener thanks to punk-ish kiss-off dialogue like “I hope you’re happy or whatever/ On second thought…not really” and a boppy, new wave-inspired backing beat that, in our heads, would be featured as the walking-down-the-aisle soundtrack for the wedding of Prince and Janelle Monae.
Newbie girl group, and latest Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins find, Purple Reign position themselves as ones to watch in the two-thousand-and-dime on this R&B twist of Timbaland & Drake’s “Say Something”. Of special note is the acapella intro, in which they both introduce their solid three-part harmonies and give a shout out to the inspiration behind their name with a melodic swipe from Prince’s “Purple Rain”.
Head here to hear the ladies tackle Drake’s “Fear”, Waka Flocka Flame’s “O Let’s Do It” and Young Money’s “Bed Rock”.
Since The xx crept it’s way onto the blogosphere around a year ago, it seems that nary a week has gone by without umpteen DJ’s/ producers/ remixers/ masher-uppers offering their own respective tweakings on the London trio’s entrancingly, ebon-hued indie-pop.
The latest artist to inject his two cents into this ever-popular gig is San Francisco DJ Wait What, who, after becoming intrigued with the idea of hearing the vocals of Notorious BIG’s rags-to-riches classic “Juicy” atop the instrumental of The xx’s “VCR”, was then moved to create an entire mash-up mixtape marrying the two acts.
Not every cut works, an expected result when it comes to projects like these, but The Notorious XX surprisingly ends up more hit than miss, producing more than a handful of genuinely awesome cut-n-paste moments across it’s eleven-track span (whether it’s hearing Romy Croft hesitantly co-sign the mezmerizing powers of Biggie’s mic chops on “Basic Hypnosis” with a clever “I still let you in” cut-in, or having Biggie reflecting on his come-up while “hook-boy” Oliver Sim chimes in “Where would I be/ If this were to go under?/ That’s a risk I’d take” on “Islands Is The Limit”).
Peep the video for project jump-off “Juicy-R”, alongside offerings of two of our favorites, below, or simply pick up the entire album here.
There’s nothing truer than the line “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa”, but is there a real need for yet another tribute project to celebrate the late, great rap icon? More often than not, hip hop heads are left scratching their…well, heads wondering if Biggie would’ve even wanted to share a track with the many rap figures that have aligned themselves to these things in the past. It doesn’t help that since the man didn’t have this endless well of material, we’re forced to hear the same verses chopped up over and over and plopped (a lot of the times, awkwardly) over hot-for-the-moment beats.
That being said, DJ Drama and production team Cookin’ Soul‘s new mixtape, The Notorious BIG Tribute, ends up a satisfying listen, thanks to it’s exciting guest star roster (including Styles P, CL Smooth, Smif N Wessun’s Tek, Grafh, Chaundon) and the clever way original sample sources are re-tweaked, giving a brand new polish to the classic Biggie records we’ve held so dear. Here’s a couple of the collection’s highlights, fronted by two of today’s hottest “fem-cees”, below:
Amanda Diva‘s seamless rap-sung swagger adds a refined glaze to her take on Junior MAFIA’s “Get Money”, flipping the Sylvia Striplin-sampling 1995 hit into a educating message to all the ladies out there who’ve had their once-promising lives hit the toilet at the hands of a beau.
“I’ve seen it happen time and time again/ Women with a plan side-tracked by a man/ Personal life gets trifling/ And just like that, them goals fall flat,” Diva shakes her head in annoyance, later peppering in a lil’ Lil’ Kim shout-out with the matter-of-fact assertion that her feminist stance should in no way be equated to any homosexual reveal (“This flow ain’t sayin’ I’m a lesbo”).
A few tracks later, the always excellent Jean Grae reminds the (sadly still) few that know why she’s “sicker than yo average” with the way she effortlessly cruises through a “Hypnotize” re-vamp, twisting familiar Biggie lines to support her own sharpened braggadocio as the Cookin’ Soul crew finally allow the less-championed, silkier portions of Herb Alpert’s “Rise” a shot in the spotlight.
Still highly-missed rap icon Notorious BIG is paid tribute to yet again on “Letter To B.I.G.”, a recently unearthed cut from Jadakiss (featuring the golden-hued vocals of one-time Mrs. Biggie Smalls, Faith Evans) that sees the LOX member updating his late labelmate to the going-ons since his passing over a decade ago.
An intriguing tune steeped in such intimacy that you feel slightly rude for listening in, Jada’s signature de-animated flow stirs up all kinds of blue feelings inside as he peppers the “letter” with details of the sadly fragmented current status of Junior M.A.F.I.A (“I ain’t heard from Cease in a minute…”) and moving reveals of how BIG’s offspring have turned out (“Teyana so pretty/ CJ turned into Lil’ Biggie/ Just a little lighter, but so witty”), all upon a sleepy R&B backdrop
Probably the most striking portion of his extended verse, though, is when he begins talking of how uninspired the hip hop scene has become since Biggie’s passing: “Game has got cheaper/ And rappers is more commercially successful now, but the heart’s a lot weaker”. Sentiment more than a few of us could agree on.
As nice as it is to get free music, think of how much better your soul would feel if you purchased it the old-fashioned way.
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(MP3 posts are for promotional and/ or previewing purposes only; if any artist or their representation wish to have the links removed, contact me and I will happily comply!)
It’s not the New Amerykah Part Two second single we were hoping for (that honor would fall onto the album’s Wings-looping seducer “Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long”), but that’s okay: you’d have to be severely deaf not to have some love for official “Window Seat” follow-up “Turn Me Away (Get MuNNY)”, Erykah Badu‘s playfully lightweight update of Sylvia Striplin’s 1981 old-school fave “You Can’t Turn Me Away” (better known to the kids as the sample source to the Junior M.A.F.I.A./ Biggie classic “Get Money”). 
There’s nothing truer than the line “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa”, but is there a real need for yet another tribute project to celebrate the late, great rap icon? More often than not, hip hop heads are left scratching their…well, heads wondering if Biggie would’ve even wanted to share a track with the many rap figures that have aligned themselves to these things in the past. It doesn’t help that since the man didn’t have this endless well of material, we’re forced to hear the same verses chopped up over and over and plopped (a lot of the times, awkwardly) over hot-for-the-moment beats.
Still highly-missed rap icon Notorious BIG is paid tribute to yet again on “Letter To B.I.G.”, a recently unearthed cut from Jadakiss (featuring the golden-hued vocals of one-time Mrs. Biggie Smalls, Faith Evans) that sees the LOX member updating his late labelmate to the going-ons since his passing over a decade ago.
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