Music Review: Various Artists, Purple Snow: Forecasting The Minneapolis Sound

By Paul Casey

Purple Snow: Forecasting The Minneapolis Sound collects music from many musical outfits that helped shape the sound of the title. While the title is a nod to the importance of that miniature-sized and prodigiously talented man, the collection assembled by Numero Group has a broader interest. This is a work of love and commitment. It is a history lesson for those who think great artists are created in a vacuum. Everybody who has sat back and had a sob over the genius of Prince, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or Alexander O’Neal and assumed they came out fully formed, should have a listen to this compilation.

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Interview With: Toronto R&B Musician Jhyve, Part One

By Paul Casey

About a month ago, I had a conversation with a talented musician from Toronto. Jamaal Desmond Bowry goes by the name Jhyve and makes modern R&B. He also has a touch for Rap. His latest album, Supermegafutureshit, resulted from a collaboration with producer Soul. The album is an atmospheric thing and another sign of how the genre is regaining its standing with listeners and musicians. Get low, change the tone, push through a whole bunch of compatible influences.

I spoke with Jhyve for about an hour and our conversation covered many things that I feel are important, especially right now. While we discussed Jhyve’s history and how his music has developed, we also got to talk about how R&B has changed over the years and why it is that so many unfairly reduce its ability to address human problems.

Just because you have grown up to believe that one genre is THE STANDARD, it does not mean this is everyone’s experience. Just because Rolling Stone tells you that the only worthwhile R&B is that one Marvin Gaye record they heard at a party that one time, don’t assume this is all the genre has to offer. Not all sex songs are vacant. Some have a lot to say about the human problem. Sex is not all R&B has to be, either. Things are changing, and hopefully soon R&B can encompass all manner of concepts and ideas. What will remain is its fearlessness and passion.

I have tried to present the conversation as close as possible to how it happened. I have edited and cleaned it up to make for a more pleasant reading experience but the meaning and the order of chat are the same. Part Two will be posted on Wednesday, December 4.

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Music Review: Mind & Matter, 1514 Oliver Avenue (Basement)

By Paul Casey

Jimmy Jam is half of one of the most important production teams of the last few decades. As discussed earlier this year, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were probably the most talented people to be connected to Prince. Although both were more than capable of writing, producing, and performing on their own albums, their input on The Time was largely restricted to live shows. Their ability to work outside of Prince’s insecure and restrictive system would lead to their exit from the band and push them to become the hit-making powerhouses of the 1980s and 1990s, leading Janet Jackson to nine number ones.

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Electric Lady (Kiss) Land: Blade Runner and R&B

By Paul Casey

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time to die.”
—Roy Batty in Blade Runner

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An Interview With Tiger Cooke

By Paul Casey

Photo © Tiger Cooke

Tiger (real name Tadhg) Cooke is an Irish musician. He has recorded two studio albums, his most recent being the excellent Fingertips of the Silversmiths from 2010. Cooke has received his fair share of critical notice. The Irish Times called him “eminently likeable, utterly enviable” on the basis of his debut. Hot Press, a long running and popular Irish publication, was equally impressed, handing out some fairly glowing words. More importantly, your pal Muggins here likes it! Cooke has a handle on making music that is lowdown but witty. He is comfortable in the rockier end of the singer-songwriter camp but also willing to account for influences and interests outside of the obvious.

Fingertips of the Silversmiths is the album that pushed me to speak with him and has many of the qualities that I look for with modern singer-songwriters. It has a really nice sound, for one. It is present and hooked in. Cooke’s music avoids that muddled and confused revivalist shot, the one that generally comes with the embarrassing “Hey man we’re taking music back to its roots!” It’s lyrically interesting which always helps. Perhaps most of all, Cooke’s voice has that flavor. Just enough sauce.

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How Wrestling Can Modernize

By Paul Casey

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it.”
—Lloyd Alexander

Daniel Bryan

If you’ve read any of my wrestling based writing over the last couple of years, you know that I believe professional wrestling/sports entertainment is as good as place as any for creativity. I am not a casual fan and have devoted many hours and dollaroos, and on occasion have even attempted to apply a figure-four leg-lock to humans and actually make it hurt (unfortunately impossible to do).

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Why Ben Affleck As Batman Doesn’t Matter

By Paul Casey

Ben Affleck is Batman. Commence some teeth gnashing about how he lacks the essential nature of the character, followed by oppositionist chatter in favor. Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t matter one bit who you cast in this Superman/Batman crossover. You can have Michael Keaton return to play an elderly and run down Frank Miller-style Bruce Wayne, or convince Christian Bale to lose all of his sense and diminish the great work he did with Christopher Nolan. You can give George Clooney another shot unhampered by a bad movie, or you can agree that Michael Fassbender is amazing in everything and just hire him. Superman/Batman remains an inherently bad idea, regardless of how it is executed and there are decades worth of comic books that confirm it.

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Why “Morphine” Is Michael Jackson’s Most Personal Song

By Paul Casey

Blood on the Dance Floor was released in 1997, two years after HIStory. It was marketed, in part, as a remix album, with the subtitle being HIStory in the Mix. It contained five new songs, and would result in videos and the full-on Michael Jackson short film treatment. This seemed slightly confusing at the time. Such a lavish production for something that seemed like a beefed up B-sides collection was odd to younger Paul, especially seeing as nothing quite as involved had been done for the songs on HIStory.

It took a long time to appreciate that the songs on Blood on the Dance Floor were not just a ploy to make the remixes seem like better value, but a unified collection of songs as important as any Michael Jackson would release in the 1990s. Paranoia became a major theme in MJ’s music from Thriller on, and while his fear of the media was well founded, the songs which expressed his fear of the world outside rarely felt connected with the singer’s reality. You would have tracks that would act as a musical retort, full of confidence and bravado that would show Michael at his very best.

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New Millennium R&B: A Listener’s Guide

By Paul Casey

The-Dream

“DJ you know you wrong, enough with the motherfucking dance songs. You gotta slow it down.”
—The-Dream, “Slow It Down”

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Random Rant: No, Being Average Isn’t Worse Than Being Bad

By Paul Casey

If you have been reading music publications for any length of time, you will be familiar with the following:

“Much like the worst direction you can go in is no direction, so is inoffensiveness worse than taking a stand, and thus the boring album is in a way worse than even a terrible album. An album that is full-on awful will always get minimal scores, but an album that is accomplished but boring is going to attract the dreaded three-star review—so often the calling card of the most inessential music of all (if your album is best described as “pleasant” then you’re in serious trouble). A one-star album can’t be boring, because even if the music is godawful, it’s WHY it’s awful that is itself entertaining—a one-star review is inherently entertainment, which is why you’ll always read one when you’re skimming the reviews column. But who the hell wants to read the three-star reviews, particularly as they’re all identical (“IT’S NOT TERRIBLE, BUT IT’S LACKING. IT FALLS SHORT, BUT IS A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION”). And boring as fuck.

The opposite of enjoyment is not disgust; it’s tedium, because in a life so cruelly short, there’s nothing worse than being forgettable. The most disgusting pizza I’ve ever had was the one that accidentally had dish soap in it (SECRET FAMILY RECIPE), yet of all the ones I’ve eaten, it alone has survived the years as an amusing anecdote. It’s the middling three-star stuff you won’t remember. The albums from artists you respect that you’ve had forever but played once (REM are like your parents—you know they’re good, but you never listen to them). A reworking of ratings systems might help, but if we’ve gone this far without rating entertainment based on how entertaining it is, then why start now? The accepted method of rating albums isn’t terrible, of course, it’s just lacking. It falls short, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’d give it . . . 3 stars out of 5, let’s say.”
—”The 5 Worst Kinds of Album Every Music Fan Has Bought,” Cracked

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