Word: funke
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Unashamedly derivative, Face the Music lifts -- sometimes actually samples -- grooves from 20 years of soul, funk and rap, at different moments aping the likes of Earth, Wind and Fire, James Brown, Bell Biv Devoe and Prince. After a short introduction in which the Kids announce, "We've been away for a while, but we're back," the record gets off to a promising start with You Got the Flavor, which sets silky harmonies to a hip-hop beat before sliding into a bratty rap digression worthy of Wahlberg's younger brother Marky Mark...
...chel-lo). Not the usual stuff of rock stardom. Female rockers have a better shot, convention holds, if they are boy toys with cute, catchy names like . . . Madonna. NdegeOcello spent two years trying to interest record companies in her iconoclastic music, a shotgun marriage of funk, jazz, hip-hop and angry poetry that she calls "brokenhearted revolutionary love songs." Finally, in despair and ready to enroll in barber school, she got a phone call, and a record deal, rom the head of Maverick, who happens to be . . . Madonna...
Their avoidance of so many ordinary tricks of the trade (there are no guitar solos, no violin solos, no funk-style contrapuntal parts, barely even any cymbal hits) is one of the reasons this product of London can nevertheless give any listener a feeling of tremendous horizontal space, of nearly physical limitlessness: the aural space those missing solos, counterpoints, multiple riffs or crowded drumming patterns would occupy is instead left open for the listener to fill...
...replayed as a chanted Glass opera. In a cage, three monkeys grouse at their typewriters, condemned to stay there till one of them pounds out Hamlet. A fellow at a restaurant can never get what he wants unless he orders something else, because he is in a twilight funk called "a Philadelphia." In The Universal Language, Ives' warmest, newest sketch, a woman with a speech impediment enrolls in a course for a jabberwocky tongue that only she and her teacher speak: English is "John Cleese," stammering is "tongue Stoppard...
...Todd Rundgren. In No World Order, the veteran singer and producer (Meat Loaf, Grand Funk Railroad) has created the first do-it-yourself album. Listeners with CD-i players can customize any of the 10 tracks to their tastes. They can change the tempo (between 86 and 132 beats a minute), the mix ("natural," "spacious," "sparse" or "karaoke"), the mood ("bright," "happy," "thoughtful," "sad" or "dark"), even the form ("creative," "standard" or "conservative"). They can hatch new sounds by sampling the 933 snatches of music in the data base. Did you ever want to play the chorus of a favorite...