Word: bandness
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Dave Chappelle’s Block PartyDirected by Michel GondryRogue Pictures5 starsMidway through “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” some very familiar notes are heard. Slowly, the camera pans out from the stage and reveals Kanye West leading the Central State University marching band in a beautiful performance of “Jesus Walks.” The rendition has all the class, emotion, history and feeling West never could eke out of that soul jam, no matter how many times he filmed the video.And this song is just one of the many, many...
Generally, it’s hard to mistake the Crimson’s music page for the Billboard chart. In the past year we have spent more words on art-house one-time band-of-the-moment Lightning Bolt than on double platinum success Carrie Underwood. What explains this? The snobbery of music writers? The difficulty in getting promo copies of albums from piracy-paranoid major labels? The desire to inform our readership about new and artistically interesting music? Whatever the case, we don’t write much on what’s on the radio. To reverse this...
Lyrically the band is subpar. While there are moments of wit, the songs are largely standard light hip-hop fare: dancing, sex, and of course, self-aggrandizement, without many memorable lines. When they try to shoehorn social consciousness into the album, as in the closer track, “Union,” it’s incongruous and unsuccessful...
Also, it’s hard not to appreciate a band that knows the value of a good horn sample, and this album has plenty, notably opening “My Humps,” an appropriately disco-ish bit on “Disco Club,” and throughout “They Don’t Want Music”—a tribute to adding jazzy musicality to beats. The song might be the Black Eyed Peas’ theme song. They didn’t invent any of the things they do, but they...
...video cuts black-and-white footage of the band, playing in some vague dark space, with images of athletes in motion, also in stark black-and-white. The athletes are shown in rapid-motion superimposed freeze-frames, making a tennis serve into a fan of limbs. Who plays tennis with no net in the dark? It looks pretty neat regardless...