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Free Association Music Theatre 03
15 years ago
General
It's all about that ephemeral genre called Hip House, that didn't last more than two years in the mainstream from 1989-1992.
It was a mix of two new modes (at the time). You had hip-hop groups passing over the James Brown samples and going right for the harder beats in the clubs, and also techno groups starting to add in rappers. Despite this creeping to a middle ground, the genre didn't exactly find center of mass appeal to either the hip-hop or house demographic base, but produced some notable classics for soccer moms to rock out to at hockey games now.
1. Planet E - KC Flightt (1989). Features a jangly dancing David Byrne in the background, because the song uses the blueprint from the Talking Head's "Once In A Lifetime". Byrne was notably cool about all this at a time when sampling was first getting started while the ethics/legalities of the practice were still hotly debated. See also the film The Brother from Another Planet.
2. The Power - Snap! (1990) Omg this song was inescapable for a time being. Love it for all the Cross Colors gear and the high-top fade hairstyles :) Also, just so you know, this was always unintentionally funny. Nobody I knew ever took his HARDCORE posturing srsly.
3. Anasthasia - T99 (1991) I was a sophomore in college at the time this came out, roommates with this guy named Artis who brought this in and turned his shit up to eleven. It kicked so hard the CD player would skip (they used to do that). It was crazy, none of us had heard orch hits like this before :) DANCING. Technically this track itself isn't Hip-House, but it was the best thing off the album. They were among the first hard techno house groups to use a rapper, here's the obligatory hip-house song, "Maximizor", which itself isn't bad, and has awesome costumes (okay, well at least one).
4. Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) - C+C Music Factory with Freedom Williams. (1990) This was the bookend track to "I've Got the Power". If you weren't hearing that, you were hearing this. I swear to god every five minutes this was playing on MTV, and it's a four minute song. It's strictly by-the-numbers, but I dig the video for the 90's proto-industrial imagery. There is very much a "look" at work here that was sleeker than the 80's and antithetical to the shaggy dog grunge also starting to creep out. Grunge rock won out - mostly because at the end of the day, all that dancing is fucking exhausting. Also, Nirvana.
5. People Are Still Having Sex - La Tour (1991). The HIV/AIDS epidemic had permeated popular culture around this time. I mean, you had groups like TLC singing and dancing with day-glo condoms for eyepatches and medallions in their videos, and this shit was Top 40's mainstream (Let's see Bieber/Gaga do that) ((Incidentally that TLC video "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" is a fine example of the New Jack Swing style of R&B, but that's another journal)). Anyway, anyway... The song "People Are Still Having Sex" originally featured the lyric "This AIDS thing's not working", but this turned out to be controversial and was replaced for radio with "This 'safe' thing's not working". Go figure.
6. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qu5SKraWRs]Doo Doo Brown[/url] - 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog (1991). Hot damn, this was dope, back inna day. I was going to college in Baltimore, which just happened to have it's own particular brand of hip house going on, called "Bmore Club". Because it was local to me at the time, I had no idea it wasn't stuff people listened to across the country(!) So when I went back home to Alabama for the summer and cranked this in the car, the downhome kids in the "motherland" thought I was on crack :B I didn't even care; I wore out my tape and had to get another.
7. Get Up - Technotronic feat. Ya Kid K (1989). I know I should probably list the more known "Pump Up The Jam" but that video has a random model "singing" Ya Kid K's part, and that's just annoying. This is the same time that saw a -lot- of bullshit videos with random people standing in for the actual singers, most famously Martha Wash for C+C Music Factory, who was considered to "obese" to be viable in a music video demanding people dance until they pass out from exhaustion. Also, Milli Vanilli. Anyway, the music was actually kind of anonymous black box stuff. So I suppose it didn't really matter who was doing the "singing". Also, lingering 80's body-consciousness fail.
8. I'm Going Straight To Heaven - MC 900 Ft. Jesus with DJ Zero (1989). I'm pretty sure this doesn' qualify as this was never a mainstream act, but I was rocking his debut album eight days a week when it came out. MC 900 was so ahead of his time (until Beck's Odelay came along and did it all 1000x better). Srsly, y'all need to go cratedigging and pick this up.
k, done, distracted now :)
It was a mix of two new modes (at the time). You had hip-hop groups passing over the James Brown samples and going right for the harder beats in the clubs, and also techno groups starting to add in rappers. Despite this creeping to a middle ground, the genre didn't exactly find center of mass appeal to either the hip-hop or house demographic base, but produced some notable classics for soccer moms to rock out to at hockey games now.
1. Planet E - KC Flightt (1989). Features a jangly dancing David Byrne in the background, because the song uses the blueprint from the Talking Head's "Once In A Lifetime". Byrne was notably cool about all this at a time when sampling was first getting started while the ethics/legalities of the practice were still hotly debated. See also the film The Brother from Another Planet.
2. The Power - Snap! (1990) Omg this song was inescapable for a time being. Love it for all the Cross Colors gear and the high-top fade hairstyles :) Also, just so you know, this was always unintentionally funny. Nobody I knew ever took his HARDCORE posturing srsly.
3. Anasthasia - T99 (1991) I was a sophomore in college at the time this came out, roommates with this guy named Artis who brought this in and turned his shit up to eleven. It kicked so hard the CD player would skip (they used to do that). It was crazy, none of us had heard orch hits like this before :) DANCING. Technically this track itself isn't Hip-House, but it was the best thing off the album. They were among the first hard techno house groups to use a rapper, here's the obligatory hip-house song, "Maximizor", which itself isn't bad, and has awesome costumes (okay, well at least one).
4. Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) - C+C Music Factory with Freedom Williams. (1990) This was the bookend track to "I've Got the Power". If you weren't hearing that, you were hearing this. I swear to god every five minutes this was playing on MTV, and it's a four minute song. It's strictly by-the-numbers, but I dig the video for the 90's proto-industrial imagery. There is very much a "look" at work here that was sleeker than the 80's and antithetical to the shaggy dog grunge also starting to creep out. Grunge rock won out - mostly because at the end of the day, all that dancing is fucking exhausting. Also, Nirvana.
5. People Are Still Having Sex - La Tour (1991). The HIV/AIDS epidemic had permeated popular culture around this time. I mean, you had groups like TLC singing and dancing with day-glo condoms for eyepatches and medallions in their videos, and this shit was Top 40's mainstream (Let's see Bieber/Gaga do that) ((Incidentally that TLC video "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg" is a fine example of the New Jack Swing style of R&B, but that's another journal)). Anyway, anyway... The song "People Are Still Having Sex" originally featured the lyric "This AIDS thing's not working", but this turned out to be controversial and was replaced for radio with "This 'safe' thing's not working". Go figure.
6. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qu5SKraWRs]Doo Doo Brown[/url] - 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog (1991). Hot damn, this was dope, back inna day. I was going to college in Baltimore, which just happened to have it's own particular brand of hip house going on, called "Bmore Club". Because it was local to me at the time, I had no idea it wasn't stuff people listened to across the country(!) So when I went back home to Alabama for the summer and cranked this in the car, the downhome kids in the "motherland" thought I was on crack :B I didn't even care; I wore out my tape and had to get another.
7. Get Up - Technotronic feat. Ya Kid K (1989). I know I should probably list the more known "Pump Up The Jam" but that video has a random model "singing" Ya Kid K's part, and that's just annoying. This is the same time that saw a -lot- of bullshit videos with random people standing in for the actual singers, most famously Martha Wash for C+C Music Factory, who was considered to "obese" to be viable in a music video demanding people dance until they pass out from exhaustion. Also, Milli Vanilli. Anyway, the music was actually kind of anonymous black box stuff. So I suppose it didn't really matter who was doing the "singing". Also, lingering 80's body-consciousness fail.
8. I'm Going Straight To Heaven - MC 900 Ft. Jesus with DJ Zero (1989). I'm pretty sure this doesn' qualify as this was never a mainstream act, but I was rocking his debut album eight days a week when it came out. MC 900 was so ahead of his time (until Beck's Odelay came along and did it all 1000x better). Srsly, y'all need to go cratedigging and pick this up.
k, done, distracted now :)
What's interesting about C+C Music factory was also the Milli Vanilli Scandal ...
What happened is they were sampling tracks of a lady known as Martha Wash. Since she's a big Black woman they felt the need to have another woman dub the part.
It also started making labels put down names of artists that supplied background vocals.
Martha's rendition of Earth Wind and Fire's "Fantasy" is one of my personal faves. I like both songs for different reasons. Woman can belt a tune.
I also liked Ditty by Paperboy
You ever heard Fatima Mansions? You might like them.
I like this grouping of songs both because I've always liked this genre, and because I used to try to convince my friends that music from the late 1980s was in many ways the same music from the early 1990s, and was always met with disbelief, probably due to the way most people think of history as 'decades' with discrete boundaries, even though I think the 6-month music fad cycle hadn't been born yet, at this point in time.
I'm just a squirrel
tryin' to get a nut
to move your butt