2 posts tagged “sasha frere-jones”
The nineteen-year-old singer and pianist Nellie McKay has said repeatedly that she wants to be famous, and she has generated a small bible of press clippings to nudge the process along. It’s a fun read. McKay pushes her politics (peta activist, no friend of Bush, “tired of white people”) and cherry-picks her rich backstory: a peripatetic childhood, spent travelling with her mother, the actress Robin Pappas, between the Poconos; Olympia, Washington; and Harlem in a Volkswagen bus. Her grandfather did time in San Quentin. In school, Nellie ignored her classmates’ musical tastes, wore shoulder pads, and immersed herself in the work of Jo Stafford, Greta Garbo, Doris Day, and Rita Hayworth. After two years at the Manhattan School of Music, she abandoned the conservatory for night clubs, often accompanied by her mother. She relishes using interviews to scare off anyone expecting a biddable camp figure: “I thought all the ’50s rockers were so dirty”; “There’s a side of me that identifies with Aileen Wuornos”; “I’d really like to raise the minimum wage.” She speaks openly about the real-life subject of one of her songs, a conservatory teacher who is both a neighbor in her apartment building and the unwilling object of her obsessive infatuation. It’s impossible to determine how much of all this is genuine and how much is just fireworks. (She cites Bill Clinton’s saxophone performances as a childhood inspiration.)
- Fireworks by Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker, 05.24.04
Jay-Z begins with an apology -- "What you want me to do? I'm sorry. I'm back" -- but he doesn't sound very sorry. He sounds like Jay-Z, confident and slick, the "Mike Jordan of recording" that he claims to be in verse number one. This sangfroid is exactly what made him famous in the first place. As with other powerful figures, Jay-Z's calm is even more conspicuous given the frenetic activity surrounding him, which in this case is a glorious stream of horns and drums created by producer Just Blaze, who samples nineteen-seventies recordings by the Lafayette Afro Rock Band and Johnny Pate that were originally (and legendarily) sampled by Public Enemy and Wreckx-n-Effect. The result is a piece of unexpectedly robust music completely at odds with the thin, bleepy sound of most current hip-hop.
-Sasha Frere-Jones, Pop Notes: Top Down, The New Yorker, 10/30/06
Last.fm says I've listened to the song 9 times in the last week. It's more like 25 spins. It is on repeat constantly in the car.
