What to say about R. Kelly? His latest release is either the most brilliant thing ever or the dumbest. There’s also the possibility that it could be both at the same time. If he goes to prison, please send him with a microphone and pro tools rig.
Love him or hate him, I know you were on the edge of your seat for the past two years. Well wait no more, the ghetto R&B-opera has returned! R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet series is back for its exciting conclusion.
We’ve got the series lined up here for your easy viewing and commenting. Enjoy!
- reads the opening line of Mosaic’s bio. I wish I’d read that before I caught them for the first time at a Grammy party earlier this year. What I heard that night led me to believe that there were also 2 or 3 synthesizers, a drum machine and maybe a CD player backing them up. The performance was so impressive that when someone in the audience told me it was all done with their voices, I caught myself actually peeking behind the backstage drape and lurking by the front of house engineer in disbelief. There just had to be a catch.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
– Alphonse Karr
Is your favorite ‘new’ song, not really that new? No matter how hip, new school or bleeding edge you are, listen to the radio these days and you can’t avoid samples, interpolations and re-works of the classics. Imagine if commercial radio were formatted the way a DJ mix-show might be, playing the originals and the original ‘inspiration’. I experiment with this premise every now and then in my live sets.
DJing has always been an interesting activity for me, a balletic, high-wire tightrope act, balancing the desire for creativity with the public’s desire to dance to the ‘hits’. A pride surrendering, (often) thankless avocation, nearly every club-goer thinks they can do a better job than the DJ. How much better they think they are is often proportional to the ounces of alcohol imbibed.
Increasingly, crowds pressure DJs to spin the 20 to 30 ubiquitous songs being played on commercial radio and TV at the moment. Many people want to hear exactly what they’ve been listening to in the car on the way to the club and will listen to again on their ride home. They want the DJs to not only play the songs, but to play them all back to back and when the DJs played them all through, well, play them all over again.
NYC’s Eli Escobar applies his deft touch to re-editing the Jackson 5 classic, “What You Don’t Know” from the Dancing Machine / Moving Violation album. The result is danger.
what do you think