Word: hip-hop
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Portishead's groundbreaking debut album, Dummy (1994), along with producer-rapper Tricky's Maxinquaye (1995), helped define the nascent genre of trip-hop, an arty European variant of hip-hop characterized by dreamy lyrics and lounging, lulling song structures. Portishead is another stellar work. While Dummy's sound was sweetened with recognizable melodic flavors drawn from R. and B. and gospel, the new album is stranger, more unsettling, more sour. Vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice is distorted on many of the tracks, stretched thin and left floating high and parched over shards of melody and jagged bits of rhythm. One song...
...name, he is, in a John Cougar Mellencamp kind of way, either ready for the remainder bin or ready to get serious. The old Marky was never much of a rapper--do a Nexis search and you will not find the adjective Tupac Shakurish used to describe his bland hip-hop work--but in Hollywood these days, he is giving off heat. Wahlberg's performance in The Basketball Diaries (1995) as a drug-addled Catholic school dropout, opposite the De Niro of his generation, Leonardo DiCaprio, was surprisingly well received. Just last week he had dinner with the actual Robert...
...success: the perpetually hummable tunes of the 19th century waltz king after whom Rieu's orchestra is named. "When I want a melody/ Lilting through the house,/ Then I want a melody/ By Strauss," Ira Gershwin wrote in 1936, and six intervening decades of swing, rock and hip-hop have done nothing to diminish the truth of his words. Handsome fiddlers come and go, but Strauss, it seems, is here to stay...
...that flows easily from one song to the next. It continues the evolution that Carey began on Daydream--away from pure pop toward a keener-edged R.-and-B.- and hip-hop-influenced sound. To help with the transition, Carey hired producer Sean ("Puffy") Combs, who brought a loping, hip-hop beat to Breakdown; rapper-producer Q-Tip, who selected the chugging drum tracks on Honey; and R.-and-B. singers Dru Hill, who trade soulful solos with Carey on The Beautiful Ones...
...sick of the theory jargon, at least you'll have the music to fall back on. Radano says he will incorporate music into his lectures, require listening to tapes and will even include some coverage of the current hip-hop scene. In what other class could you find a textbook with mention of Bobby McFerrin, Peabo Bryson, Boyz II Men and the Pointer Sisters...