Tag: music

~ Mark

Never be ashamed of how you live or where you from.
You stack a mill’, ***s will see how far you come.

T.I. – Be Better Than Me. My favorite song on Trap Musik besides Look What I Got. Here’s T.I. on the proper ingredients for success:

Stay down, stay on your grind and yo digits’ll come.
Bottom line? You gotta shine, no matter what you become.
These streets is 40 percent of yo’ mind and 5 percent muscle,
10 struggle, 10 time, and 35 percent hustle.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

my mortifying month

~ Mark

agrammar:

There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.

WhoSampled.com

~ Mark

We’re building the ultimate
database of sampled music, remixes and cover songs. Dig deeper into music by discovering direct links among over 116,000 songs and 44,000 artists, from Hip-Hop and R&B via Electronic Music through to Rock, Pop, Funk, Soul, Jazz and beyond.

I wish I’d known about this site a long, long time ago.

WhoSampled.com

~ Mark

When an artist brings me their work, I treat it like food — like a frozen chicken. Like, I have my stove and I didn’t make the chicken, but I can put the right spices on it, and put my stove at a certain degree.

DJ Drama in an interview with Brandon Soderberg/@notrivia.
~ Mark

There’s no such thing as not playing. Music has rests in it. So you’re on a rest right now, and the music will begin shortly.

Tom Waits. Via austinkleon. Cf. Ralf Hütter of Kraftwerk:

We have to start the concert at 8:00 and we have to stop sometime because the halls are rented for a certain time but the music goes on in your mind before and after you play. It’s really just an agreement you make to stop at a certain time. On record, it goes for 40 minutes because an album has these dimensions. It’s just an agreement. But really the music goes on.

~ Mark

Oh you have a dream? You should pay a lot of money for that dream and maybe at the end of a lot of debt you’ll be better at that dream.

Annie Clark on education at Berklee College of Music. Another take in an earlier interview:

At some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.

I think a lot of people, if they’re not careful, can err on the side of the quantifiable and approach it like an athlete. Run that little bit faster, do that little bit more and think you’re being more successful. But the truth is that a lot of times it’s not necessarily about merely being the best athlete, it’s about attempting a new sport.

~ Mark

Paper Trail: Atlanta | Features | Pitchfork. Nice interview with Kelefa Sanneh about the Atlanta book, and Atlanta, and hiphop.

Another thing that’s interesting about Atlanta is that it’s a real magnet. A lot of the people that define that music aren’t from there; they’re drawn there. Gucci Mane comes from Alabama.Waka Flocka was born in Queens. The amazing producer Lex Luger comes in from Virginia. T-Pain’s from Florida. Even when Lil B launched his own first co-sign post Pack, he goes and hooks up with Soulja Boy. Machine Gun Kelly, from Cleveland, goes to Atlanta and hooks up with Travis Porter. I think one reason why the city has sustained itself so well is that it has welcomed artists from all over the place.

Pitchfork: Yeah, even Ludacris is from Illinois.

KS: Right. There is this industry infrastructure. Maybe it’s because Atlanta is known as a comfortable place to live if you’re African-American and have some money, and people generally enjoy living there. Can it become the Nashville of hip-hop? With Nashville, it’s not even about a Nashville sound anymore. It’s just that if you want to go into country music, that’s where you go. It’s not impossible to imagine that Atlanta can get there.

And also:

Somehow, and this is weird to me, the labels are all still in New York, except for Interscope in L.A. But you see these people get contracts. Living here in New York, I got the feeling that the label people were signing Atlanta artists because they had to, but that there wasn’t much enthusiasm for them within the labels. It’s like the history of hip-hop in miniature because that’s how hip-hop used to be treated by the music industry, like: “I guess we’ll sign them because this is what the kids are doing, but we don’t really get it, and we don’t really want to spend more time on this stuff than we have to.” So, for better or for worse, the Atlanta stuff has been pretty grassroots.

~ Mark

Artists and fans in Atlanta don’t seem to struggle with [getting hung up on one style] so much. They don’t seem to get as hung up on it as people do in New York, which is probably the capital of hip-hop people getting hung up on stuff.

Kelefa Sanneh.

Albums Recommended in “Dirty South”

~ Mark

Ben Westhoff’s Southern hiphop starter kit listed at the end of the book. FYI.

The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are – The 2 Live Crew
We Can’t Be Stopped – Geto Boys
The Fix – Scarface
Diary of the Originator: Chapter 12 – June 27th – DJ Screw
Ridin’ Dirty – UGK
On Top of the World – Eightball & MJG
Most Known Unknown – Three 6 Mafia
Aquemini – OutKast
Soul Food – Goodie Mob
400 Degreez – Juvenile
Ghetto D – Master P
Country Grammar – Nelly
Aaliyah – Aaliyah (Anil Dash approved!)
Under Construction – Missy Elliot
Lord Willin’ – Clipse
Kings of Crunk – Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz
Down with the King – T.I. hosted by DJ Drama
Get Ya Mind Correct – Paul Wall and Chamillionaire
We the Best – DJ Khaled
Souljaboytellem.com – Soulja Boy
Tha Carter III – Lil Wayne
Murder Was the Case – Gucci Mane

Albums Recommended in “Dirty South”

The pretender: Dana Spiotta’s persuasive performances—By Jonathan Dee (Harper’s Magazine)

~ Mark

Part of the fascination rock stars, even those of the wannabe variety, hold for fiction writers must have to do with the degrees of mediation in an artist’s relationship to his or her audience. What would it be like to jump the gap between oneself and the presentation of one’s own art? In live performance the feedback is instant, for better or worse, and the artist’s presence as a conduit for his or her work is a precondition for that work’s existence.

I’ve tagged a lot of things with performance/audience.

The pretender: Dana Spiotta’s persuasive performances—By Jonathan Dee (Harper’s Magazine)

~ Mark

austinkleon:

A page from John Cage’s “Aria”

Cage wanted the piece to be singable by any male or female vocalist, and he wanted them to freely choose 10 different singing styles that could be rapidly alternated. Each style is represented by a different color and the shape of the squiggles indicates the general melodic contour.

Link: Scoring Outside the Lines – NYTimes.com