Topic: Pandemic Versions
Virtual choirs could not exist if the hardware and software used by the major recording studios in the 1970s had not proliferated. [1] Chris White, who produced Kyle Pederson’s video, owns a home studio that can record up to 48 tracks in remote locations. [2] Ray Turner’s private studio could offer the New Seasons Ministry “pre-recorded, or custom made music” and merge their digital files into a demo recording. [3]
Even more important were the efforts by Steve Job in 2004 to release audio editing software comparable to that available for video files. Apple’s current version of GarageBand includes virtual instruments, including percussion. GarageBand makes it possible for any aspiring musician to create a piece of music in a digital format compatible with YouTube and other video streaming services. [4]
The enforced leisure time created by the COVID-19 pandemic did not lead to more attempts at demo recordings. One may defer one’s desire to learn to play piano, but if one wants to be a professional musician, carpe diem rules. One may never be as good as one is at the moment.
I found at least 60 versions of “Come by Here,” “Needed Time,” or “Kumbaya” were uploaded to YouTube by solo artists between April 2020 and March 2021. [5] The number per month ranged from two in May to seven in April, October, November, January, and February. The course of the pandemic did not seem to affect when people provided digital versions of their music.
The demographic profile was not altered much either. Of the 46 videos that showing artists’ faces, 33 were men, 9 were women, and 4 included both. Of the 37 where race could be discerned, 22 were whites, 14 were African Americans, and 1 had both.
YouTube is useful for publicity, but it provides no monetary return unless a performer has a version on one of the commercial streaming services. Almost none of the new versions of “Kumbaya” or “Come by Here” uploaded to Amazon after 1 April 2020 was by a new artist. Most have several albums already listed.
The leap from YouTube to professional status is less about money than it is about finding ways to attract the interest of viewers who spend their waking times in environments saturated with music offerings. Leo2x chose Instagram ads as his medium of communication. [6] The platform is owned by Facebook, and uses the same advertising program that allows the buyer to set his or her price. [7] The maximum video length is 60 seconds, [8] and that appears to be all Leo2x created.
People scrolling through their Instagram accounts do not stop for a song; they stop if an image is striking. [9] Leo2x created a simple cartoon of a forest with a monkey in a tree on the right, and a striding, male lion on the left. In the center a man-child is wearing a yellow, hooded sweatshirt and yellow shoes. The enlarged head has big eyes and dreadlocks.
I do not know when Leo2x scheduled his advertisements. His video on YouTube was uploaded on 1 July 2020. It now is 3:43 minutes long. The extension mainly was done with repetitions of the original text, with small variations added. The video has a little animation: the monkey and the lion move.
Up to this point he spent very little money, apart from whatever he used to produce the music and drawing. His YouTube notes suggest it also was made available on SoundCloud and Audiomack. Both are free. SoundCloud was founded in Berlin, and may have a European audience. [10] Audiomack seems to have a special connection with Nigeria and other parts of Africa. [11]
The video succeed in attracting interest. People on YouTube asked him to put it on Spotify [12] and Apple Music. [13]
Now is when an artist must invest more money in hopes of reaching some kind of stardom. Each streaming service has its own price structure. A number of companies have followed CD Baby in negotiating fees with the video companies, and then charging users small fees to do the uploads. One of the more popular, DistroKid, charges 19.99 a year. [14]
Payments vary for streaming services: Apple pays .0125 per stream, while Spotify pays .00543. [15] Thus, it would take about 2,000 plays to cover DistroKid’s costs.
When Leo2x placed his animated video on YouTube he already was planning a larger investment. He hired Johnny Rose to create a film. This was during pandemic when regulations limited business activities. Some of the footage appears to have been shot in Puerto Rico. Since it only opened to locals on 11 June 2020, but still was closed to tourists, [16] it may have existed from an earlier project.
The original lyrics are ambivalent. With the repetition of the same lines, it could be the fantasy of an adolescent boy who is unsure of how to interact with women. The perception he is being taunted could occur with every woman he saw.
Popular videos prefer happy endings, and so Rose makes the romance explicit. The same woman appears, and at the end the two join hands and walk away from the camera.
An alternative vision would have intensified the young man’s frustration until he killed some woman. However, the sort of vilification of sex and women that underlies such scenarios is not universal. It results from pressures from particular religious groups. The difference is clear in the Spanish lyrics, which include phrases like “we dance very slow” and “touching your body mommy,” [17] that say what cannot be said in English in the United States.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Leo2x
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: rhythm loop with brushing sound and occasional notes by xylophone and animal sounds
Credits
August 21 video
© 2020 Leo2x. All rights reserved.
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English and Spanish
Basic Form: two verses repeated numerous times, with slight variations
Verse Repetition Pattern: A-A-A1-A-B-A-A-B1-B1-B1-B1-A-A-A2-B-B2-B2-B2-B1 where A is in English and B is in Spanish
Ending: repeats “kumbaya” twice
Unique Features: uses Spanish to make erotic intent explicit without offending English speakers
English
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: all lines rhyme, country/monkeys/taunt me/want me. The one line that does not have that end rhyme has an internal rhyme: lies/eyes
Line Meter: anapest (xxX)
Line Length: usually nine syllables
Theme: boy sees girl who he thinks is teasing him; he believes that means she wants him; word “kumbaya” does not appear
Spanish: the language has different poetic forms, so these terms may not be appropriate
Verse Length: 4 lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: all lines rhyme by alternating lento and cuerpo
Line Meter: trochaic (Xx)
Line Length: variable
Theme: they dance and the touch of her body arouses him; he suggests “if you want we do it very slow”; “kumbaya” introduces the section
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: different tune
Basic Structure: repetition of one rhythmic pattern
Singing Style: spoken with slight arc; the line that refers to drugs is pitched lower; he doubles himself on the word “kumbaya”
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: music for Spanish section is richer than for English
Ending: stops with the last word
Notes on Performance
The song describes the foreign country as one with lions and monkeys. Both are indigenous to Africa, although monkeys live in trees and lions do not live in forests, but grasslands. The allusions to Africa reinforce the legend that “Kumbaya” was brought to the United States from Africa by a missionary. [18]
Leo2x copies the video with a yellow sweatshirt, but the hood is up, and he wears yellow-tinted glasses. He does not attempt to lip synch with the video.
Notes on Movement
In the drawing, Leo2x is standing with his hands behind his back and his feet turned out in second position.
He does a few dance steps in the video, but not many. In one place, he has his upper arms next to his body, with his forearms bent upward. His hands are apart, facing one another, with his fingers spread. He moves both arms to one side in an upward sweep, while closing his hands into loose fists. Otherwise, he is shown walking against a forest backdrop that could have been added later.
The woman mainly poses.
Notes on Audience
The animated version on YouTube was seen 52,792 times as of 20 May 2021, and had 569 comments. The video version was seen 225,687 times and had 706 comments. Audiomack recorded 50,000 streams by 11 August 2020. [19] Spotify reported 425 monthly listeners. [20]
The first video attracted an international audience. One person observed: “70% comment is filled with Indians, even me lol.” [21]
In addition to India, a number of comments were made from people in Nigeria, or in Latin America. [22] Surprisingly, viewers also reported living in places that normally are closed to western media, like Saudi Arabia, [23] Russia, [24] and Kazakhstan. [25]
Audience Perceptions
The Spanish lyrics make clear “kumbaya” refers to a happy time. Vicky Luni told others on YouTube: “This is that one song we’d love to play in the beach at sunset and dance with our partner. Or a long drive! Whatever, this song is like a fresh breeze!” [26]
Dax O made a similar comment: “The beginning got me thinking it was Nigerian afrobeat [two red hearts] then boom some Spanish [H in red circle]. Seriously this dude got a lot of potential to penetrate different cultures. He’s gonna be big if he keeps pushing.” [27]
“Kumbaya” often is associated with marijuana, or other drugs and drinks. Even Leo2x said: “yah i be smoking weed and i be high into the sky.” Arghadeep Sarkar, who saw the second video, commented: “This song hits different when you’re high.” [28]
The motifs merge in comments that allude to the Jim Morrison’s psychedelic rock song “Light My Fire.” [29] Drexx Official said: “Mamacita let me take you outside the country down to Lagos while we vibing to Kumbaya,light up my smoke for more fayah.” [30]
Notes on Performers
The internet provides ways for individuals to remain anonymous while they construct new persona. Leo2x reveals nothing about himself. It is left to the listener to infer he lives someplace where he knows his audience tolerates both English and Spanish being spoken, and that his last name is Ortiz. [31]
One Facebook entry for Leo2x suggests Johnny Rose is his manager. [32] Rose’s given name is Johnny Rosario, and the company address is in West Haven, Connecticut. [33] His Facebook page indicates he was in Puerto Rico in October and December of 2020.
Rose seems to be in contact with other Spanish-language video companies. Leo2x’s second video [34] uses an instrumental track created by DCQ BEATZ, a Columbia-based company that specializes in “tropical beats.” [35] The interface with YouTube was done by SonoSuite. The group in Barcelona, Spain, [36] only handles corporate accounts. [37]
Availability
MP3 File: Leo2x. “Kumbaya.” SourceLid, LLC. Uploaded to Amazon on 21 August 2020.
Video 1: Leo2x. “Kumbaya.” Uploaded to YouTube by Leo2x on 1 July 2020. Animated version.
Video 2: Leo2x. “Kumbaya.” Directed by Johnny Rose. Uploaded to YouTube by Leo2x on 21 August 2020. Film version.
End Notes
1. The use of multiple track recording on Bill Gaither’s 1970 album is discussed in footnote 15 of the post for 17 December 2017.
2. “Chris White.” LinkedIn website. Pederson’s version is described in the post for 27 June 2021.
3. “Virtual Musician.” Marinda Studios website. Turner played keyboards for the Dayton, Ohio, funk rock group Slave. [38] New Seasons Ministry is mentioned in the post for 20 June 2021.
4. Wikipedia. “GarageBand.”
5. This excludes videos uploaded by institutions like schools and churches, ones mentioned in earlier posts, and ones made outside the United States. It probably is an undercount. YouTube’s current search program makes it impossible to get the same results twice with the same key words. In a dynamic situation, statistics are, at best, indicators of patterns, not evidence.
6. Comments on the July 1 YouTube video include one from Sourjo Banerjee who wrote in September: “I thought this was another shitty Instagram and used to skip it every time. But today I let it play and when the chorus came, I got hooked.” In August, Blessed Kioko said I “never thought I would vibe to an Instagram ad song” before adding “love from Kenya.”
7. Margot Whitney. “The Complete Guide to Advertising on Instagram.” Word Stream website, last updated 17 February 2021.
8. Whitney.
9. Whitney.
10. Wikipedia. “SoundCloud.”
11. Wikipedia. “Audiomack.” After Leo2x uploaded his video, Audiomack signed “a music licensing agreement with Warner Music Group, covering the United States, Canada, Jamaica, and five ‘key African territories,’ including Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania.” In August, Michael Bradd wrote on the July 1 YouTube video site:
“(eHope to hear this on Audiomack
Keep the fire burning...Africa recognizes”
12. Daniel Vipin. “Please man, put it on Spotify, it will be worth it, this song will blow up!” Comment added in October 2020 to July 1 YouTube video.
13. Meyal. “Put this song on Apple Music. This is fire.” Comment added in August 2020 to July 1 YouTube video.
14. DistroKid website.
15. Daniel Sanchez. “Streaming Music Royalties are Even Worse Than We Thought — At Least According to This Indie Label.” Digital Music News website, 30 January 2019. Prices may have improved a little since this was written, but it is is still fractions of cents per play.
16. Wikipedia. “COVID-19 Pandemic in Puerto Rico.” On 11 June 2020, the governor, Wanda Vázquez Garced, “announced the reopening of Puerto Rico's sectors except for external tourism, after an 88-day lockdown.”
17. Translations by Google Translate.
18. I discuss this legend in “‘Kumbaya’ and Dramatizations of an Etiological Legend.” Voices 46:26–32:Spring–Summer 2020. It is available on Academia.edu.
19. “Leo2x.ortiz music updated their profile picture.” Facebook, 11 August 2020.
20. “Leo2x.” Spotify website. It features a photograph of a woman wearing a patterned scarf over her head like a mantilla, sari, or Arab khimar.
21. Unofficial +XXXtentacion. Comment added in September 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
22. Examples include:
brim brim. “This song is [two fires and an OK symbol] Respect from Jamaica.” Comment added in September 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
artur. “I’m from Brazil. Great song.” Comment added in September 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
Prod. by Ricky. “respect from Puerto Rico, really dig the vibe, keep doing this typa vibe and you’ll make it trust me.” Comment added in August 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
23. Hamid 19-583. “I m telling u. Your song hit so different that I loved your song. I listened it for two weeks. Keep it bro. Huge respect from Saudi Arabia.” Comment added in September 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
24. naeyouth. “So much love from Russia.” Comment added in August 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
25. James Brayan. “Kazakhstan also like this song jajaj [country’s flag] moy bien brother.” Comment added in August 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
26. Vicky Luni. Comment added in August 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
27. Dax O. Comment added in August 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video.
28. Arghadeep Sarkar. Comment added in October 2020 to the August 21 YouTube video.
29. The Doors. “Light My Fire.” Elektra EK-45615. 1967. 45 rpm. [Discogs entry.]
30. Drexx Official. Comment added in September 2020 to the July 1 YouTube video. Lagos is in Nigeria.
31. His internet addresses for SoundCloud, Instagram, and Facebook refer to leo2x.ortiz. A Facebook entry for 11 August 2020 mentions Leo2x.ortiz music.
32. A Facebook entry refers to “Kumbaya Management: @johnny_rose Email- leoortizmuzik.
33. “John Rosario.” LinkedIn website.
34. Leo2x. “Bandz (My Hoes).” Uploaded to YouTube by SonoSuite on 11 February 2021.
35. “About Us.” DCQ BEATZ website.
36. “Sonosuite.” CrunchBase website.
37. SonoSuite website.
38. “Slave - Stone Jam - 1980. The best ever Funk album ever made?” Electric Soul Show website.
Showing posts with label ~ Rap/Hip Hop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ~ Rap/Hip Hop. Show all posts
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Leo2x - Kumbaya
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Kazam Laflamme - Kumbaya
Topic: Hip Hop
On the west coast of Central Africa, Dennis Rathnaw said electric bands in night clubs in 2006 would start the evening
"with a set of jazz and American pop and soul standards. That was followed invariably by a set of makossa classics, and the night stretched into morning with bikutsi after bikutsi." [1]
For the young, hip hop was
"the defacto soundtrack of Africa in this decade. Even African pop styles such as hiplife in Ghana and coupé décalé in Côte d’Ivoire are incorporating its elements and visual style." [2]
Kazam Laflamme’s 2017 version of "Kumbaya" was a synthesis of all the musical styles he heard in Cameroon’s port city of Douala.
Makossa was the popular music form that developed in Douala and Paris [3] during the years after French independence when the president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, was emphasizing national unification over tribalism. [4] It was supplanted by bikutsi when Paul Biya became president in 1982. [5] He was from the Beti ethnic group that lived in the area of Yaoundé, the capital city. [6]
Bikutsi had a pronounced 6/8 rhythm within a 4/4 structure. [7] Kazam’s percussionists used a deep-toned, hand-played drum on the first beat and a smaller hand-drum on the second and third, with the third more dominant than the second. Following this waltz pattern, a dull thud sounded on the fourth beat.
The dance music evolved from traditional Beti forms that alternated recitations accompanied by harp-like mvets with dances backed by singing and marimba-like balafons. Messi Me Nkonda Martin substituted a guitar for the balafon, [8] then in the 1970s Maurice Elanga added brass and Knondo Si Tony used a synthesizer. [9] They all maintained the "thud" sound that came from the balafon. [10]
Kazam rapped his verses with a strongly punctuated, guttural voice. This "accelerated, savage, and brutal" style had entered bikutsi in 1993 at the Carrosel Club during a prolonged economic depression. [11]
A group sang the chorus that included the word "kumbaya." Kazam and his vocalists probably used Franglais, a pidgin that developed after the former French and English colonies were united in 1961. One of the first musicians to use it in a performance in the 1980s was Lapiro de Mbanga. [12] Kazam occasionally used recognizable English words like "everybody."
What was clear was the use of alliteration and syllabic repetition, especially of open syllables like "la la la," "yah yah yah," and "what I say, what I say, what I say." This chant style probably was borrowed from makossa. Emmanuel Nelle Eyoum repeated "kossa kossa" in the 1950s, [13] and Manu Dibango used "ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" in 1973. [14] He noted people at the time thought his ablaut reduplicative treatment of "makossa" was an imitation of stuttering that debased the music. [15]
The iterative motif was carried over to Kazam’s instrumental ending when, instead of the group singing the "kumbaya" chorus, a thumb piano [16] repeated the four-note drum phrase over and over. At the very end, it was joined by the drums and synthesizer.
Under Biya’s regime, two bikutsi subtypes developed: one political and one erotic. [17] Judging from Kazam’s moniker "the flame," his text may have fallen into latter. Just before the final instrumental interlude a deeper voice used the words "dance so dirty."
However, the name of the record compilation, OneTribuland, suggested the man who recorded Kazam may have had a more political vision. Cameroon was a long country that transversed five ecological zones and 250 linguistic groups. [18] Both bikutsi and Franglais were ways average citizens were unifying themselves that were subversive of the government’s efforts to impose a single bilingual culture
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Kazam Laflamme
Vocal Group: not identified
Instrumental Soloist: thumb piano
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer, brass, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums, shaker
Credits
© Patrick Jerry Cheukuo [19]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: mixture
Pronunciation: kum by YAH
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Literary Devices: alliteration, assonance, syllabic repetition
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AB-AB-AB-CBC where C was an instrumental
Singing Style: verses (A) were chanted; chorus (B) was sung with several notes assigned to occasional syllables. The recording began and ended with distorted voices like bikutsi screams.
Notes on Performance
The song appeared on a compilation put together by OneTribuland Recordz of Douala. [20] The company may have provided the backup singers and musicians.
The album cover design of a circle partially outlined and bisected by bands filled with dots borrowed from the face painting patterns used by a bikutsi group, Les Têtes Brulées. Option Magazine said the motifs came from "traditional Beti ceremonies." [21]
Notes on Performers
Kazam told his Facebook followers he earned an accounting degree in 2014 in Douala. He also wrote his hometown was in a cattle-raising region of Brazil [22] and he since had moved to Paris. He described himself as a singer and rapper. [23]
Nothing more was available on Kazam or the others involved with his recording. Rathnaw and others have commented on the effects of the pervasive corruption in Cameroon where money allocated for any infrastructure project simply disappears and recordings are pirated and royalties non-existent. [24]
Availability
MP3: OneTribuland Compil. 16 June 2017.
End Notes
1. Dennis Michael Rathnaw. "Waiting for Gumbo: Cargo Cults, Media and the Bikutsi of Cameroon." PhD diss. The University of Texas at Austin. December 2009. 144-145.
2. Rathnaw. 77.
3. Wikipedia. "Makossa."
4. Glenn Fowler. "Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon Dies; Ex-Leader Was 65." The New York Times. 2 December 1989. Ahidjo was a Muslim Fulani from the northern part of the country.
5. Jean-Victor Nkolo and Graeme Ewens. "Cameroon." 440-447 in World Music: Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Edited by Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, and Richard Trillo. London: The Rough Guides, 1999. 442.
6. Amber Murrey. "Thoughts on 30 Years of Biya Power in Cameroon." Pambazuka website. 8 November 2012. Biya was from the Bulu subgroup of the Beti. One clan of Beti spoke Ewondo, a Bantu language.
7. Mick Berry and Jason Gianni. The Drummer’s Bible. Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2012 edition. 4.
8. Jean-Marie Ahanda. Interview, 3 April 1996. Cited by Hortense Fuller and Charles Fuller. "A History of Bikutsi Music in Cameroon." African Sounds website.
9. Nkolo. 443.
10. Fuller.
11. Fuller. Quotation on pedalé form from singer Bisso’ Solo. Interview, 23 April 1996.
12. "Lapiro de Mbanga: Protest, Power and Politics." Bakwa Magazine website. 1 June 2014.
13. Wikipedia, Makossa.
14. "Soul Makossa." Soul Makossa. Fiesta 360.047. France. 1972. Michael Jackson quoted the chant on "Wanna Be Startin’ Something." Thriller. Epic QE38112. 30 November 1982. (Discogs entries for albums).
15. Mano Dibango and Danielle Rouard. Three Kilos of Coffee. Translated by Beth G. Raps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Quoted by Ben Zimmer. "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." Language Log website. 26 June 2009.
16. The thumb piano was discussed in the post for 18 October 2017.
17. Bikutsis traditionally were sung by women with lyrics that described their problems and dreams, much like the lullabies mentioned in the posts for 19 January 2018.
18. Wikipedia. "Cameroon."
19. The Mp3 file downloaded from Amazon said Vidal Domo was the composer.
20. Notes for Scoopie Ft Edmondo Titre. "Every Day I Try My Best." Uploaded to YouTube by Scoopie 237 on 21 July 2017.
21. Citation and quotation from Fuller. Ahanda organized Les Têtes Brulées in 1987.
22. Kazam said his hometown was "Congo, Paraiba, Brazil." The first land claim was made in 1830 for a ranch. (Portuguese Wikipedia. "Congo (Paraíba).")
23. "About Kazam Laflamme Laglass." Facebook. He wrote "je suis chanteur puis je rappeur."
24. Rathnaw. The title of his dissertation, gumbo, referred to the local term for tips, bribes, kickbacks, and other payments that fueled the economy.
On the west coast of Central Africa, Dennis Rathnaw said electric bands in night clubs in 2006 would start the evening
"with a set of jazz and American pop and soul standards. That was followed invariably by a set of makossa classics, and the night stretched into morning with bikutsi after bikutsi." [1]
For the young, hip hop was
"the defacto soundtrack of Africa in this decade. Even African pop styles such as hiplife in Ghana and coupé décalé in Côte d’Ivoire are incorporating its elements and visual style." [2]
Kazam Laflamme’s 2017 version of "Kumbaya" was a synthesis of all the musical styles he heard in Cameroon’s port city of Douala.
Makossa was the popular music form that developed in Douala and Paris [3] during the years after French independence when the president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, was emphasizing national unification over tribalism. [4] It was supplanted by bikutsi when Paul Biya became president in 1982. [5] He was from the Beti ethnic group that lived in the area of Yaoundé, the capital city. [6]
Bikutsi had a pronounced 6/8 rhythm within a 4/4 structure. [7] Kazam’s percussionists used a deep-toned, hand-played drum on the first beat and a smaller hand-drum on the second and third, with the third more dominant than the second. Following this waltz pattern, a dull thud sounded on the fourth beat.
The dance music evolved from traditional Beti forms that alternated recitations accompanied by harp-like mvets with dances backed by singing and marimba-like balafons. Messi Me Nkonda Martin substituted a guitar for the balafon, [8] then in the 1970s Maurice Elanga added brass and Knondo Si Tony used a synthesizer. [9] They all maintained the "thud" sound that came from the balafon. [10]
Kazam rapped his verses with a strongly punctuated, guttural voice. This "accelerated, savage, and brutal" style had entered bikutsi in 1993 at the Carrosel Club during a prolonged economic depression. [11]
A group sang the chorus that included the word "kumbaya." Kazam and his vocalists probably used Franglais, a pidgin that developed after the former French and English colonies were united in 1961. One of the first musicians to use it in a performance in the 1980s was Lapiro de Mbanga. [12] Kazam occasionally used recognizable English words like "everybody."
What was clear was the use of alliteration and syllabic repetition, especially of open syllables like "la la la," "yah yah yah," and "what I say, what I say, what I say." This chant style probably was borrowed from makossa. Emmanuel Nelle Eyoum repeated "kossa kossa" in the 1950s, [13] and Manu Dibango used "ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa" in 1973. [14] He noted people at the time thought his ablaut reduplicative treatment of "makossa" was an imitation of stuttering that debased the music. [15]
The iterative motif was carried over to Kazam’s instrumental ending when, instead of the group singing the "kumbaya" chorus, a thumb piano [16] repeated the four-note drum phrase over and over. At the very end, it was joined by the drums and synthesizer.
Under Biya’s regime, two bikutsi subtypes developed: one political and one erotic. [17] Judging from Kazam’s moniker "the flame," his text may have fallen into latter. Just before the final instrumental interlude a deeper voice used the words "dance so dirty."
However, the name of the record compilation, OneTribuland, suggested the man who recorded Kazam may have had a more political vision. Cameroon was a long country that transversed five ecological zones and 250 linguistic groups. [18] Both bikutsi and Franglais were ways average citizens were unifying themselves that were subversive of the government’s efforts to impose a single bilingual culture
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Kazam Laflamme
Vocal Group: not identified
Instrumental Soloist: thumb piano
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer, brass, electric bass
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums, shaker
Credits
© Patrick Jerry Cheukuo [19]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: mixture
Pronunciation: kum by YAH
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Literary Devices: alliteration, assonance, syllabic repetition
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AB-AB-AB-CBC where C was an instrumental
Singing Style: verses (A) were chanted; chorus (B) was sung with several notes assigned to occasional syllables. The recording began and ended with distorted voices like bikutsi screams.
Notes on Performance
The song appeared on a compilation put together by OneTribuland Recordz of Douala. [20] The company may have provided the backup singers and musicians.
The album cover design of a circle partially outlined and bisected by bands filled with dots borrowed from the face painting patterns used by a bikutsi group, Les Têtes Brulées. Option Magazine said the motifs came from "traditional Beti ceremonies." [21]
Notes on Performers
Kazam told his Facebook followers he earned an accounting degree in 2014 in Douala. He also wrote his hometown was in a cattle-raising region of Brazil [22] and he since had moved to Paris. He described himself as a singer and rapper. [23]
Nothing more was available on Kazam or the others involved with his recording. Rathnaw and others have commented on the effects of the pervasive corruption in Cameroon where money allocated for any infrastructure project simply disappears and recordings are pirated and royalties non-existent. [24]
Availability
MP3: OneTribuland Compil. 16 June 2017.
End Notes
1. Dennis Michael Rathnaw. "Waiting for Gumbo: Cargo Cults, Media and the Bikutsi of Cameroon." PhD diss. The University of Texas at Austin. December 2009. 144-145.
2. Rathnaw. 77.
3. Wikipedia. "Makossa."
4. Glenn Fowler. "Ahmadou Ahidjo of Cameroon Dies; Ex-Leader Was 65." The New York Times. 2 December 1989. Ahidjo was a Muslim Fulani from the northern part of the country.
5. Jean-Victor Nkolo and Graeme Ewens. "Cameroon." 440-447 in World Music: Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Edited by Simon Broughton, Mark Ellingham, and Richard Trillo. London: The Rough Guides, 1999. 442.
6. Amber Murrey. "Thoughts on 30 Years of Biya Power in Cameroon." Pambazuka website. 8 November 2012. Biya was from the Bulu subgroup of the Beti. One clan of Beti spoke Ewondo, a Bantu language.
7. Mick Berry and Jason Gianni. The Drummer’s Bible. Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2012 edition. 4.
8. Jean-Marie Ahanda. Interview, 3 April 1996. Cited by Hortense Fuller and Charles Fuller. "A History of Bikutsi Music in Cameroon." African Sounds website.
9. Nkolo. 443.
10. Fuller.
11. Fuller. Quotation on pedalé form from singer Bisso’ Solo. Interview, 23 April 1996.
12. "Lapiro de Mbanga: Protest, Power and Politics." Bakwa Magazine website. 1 June 2014.
13. Wikipedia, Makossa.
14. "Soul Makossa." Soul Makossa. Fiesta 360.047. France. 1972. Michael Jackson quoted the chant on "Wanna Be Startin’ Something." Thriller. Epic QE38112. 30 November 1982. (Discogs entries for albums).
15. Mano Dibango and Danielle Rouard. Three Kilos of Coffee. Translated by Beth G. Raps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Quoted by Ben Zimmer. "Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa." Language Log website. 26 June 2009.
16. The thumb piano was discussed in the post for 18 October 2017.
17. Bikutsis traditionally were sung by women with lyrics that described their problems and dreams, much like the lullabies mentioned in the posts for 19 January 2018.
18. Wikipedia. "Cameroon."
19. The Mp3 file downloaded from Amazon said Vidal Domo was the composer.
20. Notes for Scoopie Ft Edmondo Titre. "Every Day I Try My Best." Uploaded to YouTube by Scoopie 237 on 21 July 2017.
21. Citation and quotation from Fuller. Ahanda organized Les Têtes Brulées in 1987.
22. Kazam said his hometown was "Congo, Paraiba, Brazil." The first land claim was made in 1830 for a ranch. (Portuguese Wikipedia. "Congo (Paraíba).")
23. "About Kazam Laflamme Laglass." Facebook. He wrote "je suis chanteur puis je rappeur."
24. Rathnaw. The title of his dissertation, gumbo, referred to the local term for tips, bribes, kickbacks, and other payments that fueled the economy.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Jose Mc and Juicy Landy - Kumbaya
Topic: Hip Hop
Hip hop developed outside the established channels for music promotion in the United States. DJ Kool Herc said they were too young to enter the disco clubs and gangs terrorized those that did exist in the Bronx, so they created their own venues. [1] Radio stations didn’t play their records,[2] and in fact, no one recorded hip hop until Sylvia Robinson organized the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. Its "Rapper’s Delight" [3] was the first record noticed by Billboard. [4]
Grandmaster Flash made one of the first popular videos for "The Message" in 1982, [5] but MTV didn’t show videos by Black artists until pressured to include Michael’s Jackson’s "Billie Jean" [6] in 1983. Once MTV began playing rap records in the mid-1980s, [7] videos became the medium that spread the genre outside the United States.
In Uganda, nearly 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2009 [8] and the electricity needed for radios and television was scarce or unreliable in rural areas. [9] According to Hendrik Rood, "more than 95 percent of internet connections are made using mobile phones." [10] It’s not even clear if Jose Mc and Juicy Landy’s 2013 version of "Kumbaya" was ever a record rather than a tape made for use in clubs that was turned into a video. [11]
The video had absorbed the aesthetics of MTV. It had two components that were cut into small segments and intermixed in a fast-paced montage. One followed two young men who met some women with whom they flirted, then danced. The other showed Jose and Landy individually singing and together in changing positions.
Like African-American hip hop, "Kumbaya" used drums as the primary accompaniment. Jose and Landy were from Masaka in an area that once was part of the Buganda kingdom. Alfdaniels Mabingo said drum ensembles composed of drums of different sizes and timbres were used in the court and villages. [12] Jose and Landy had drums playing different tones in separate rhythmic patterns.
Many American rappers adopted a verse-chorus refrain with one or several artists chanting the verses. In the latter half of "Kumbaya," Jose and Landy added a native flute [13] to the drums during the verses. They used a synthesizer [14] with the drums in the chorus.
Jose and Landy different from African American rappers, because Landy sang his verses and the chorus, while Jose’s raps were melodic. I don’t know if they were using Swahili or Luganda; the one was an official language for the nation, but the Baganda language was the lingua franca in the capital of Kampala. Jude Ssempuuma said television, radio, and other entertainment forms were "engineered by the Baganda and their performance is in the Luganda language." [15]
The difference between the languages was Luganda was tonal and Swahili was not. The one would have lead to raps that had melodic traits, and might have created an aesthetic preference for musical speech even for chants in Swahili or English.
The word "kumbaya" was heard in the sung chorus:
"Koom-bye-ya
Koom-ba-ya ah baby"
Since the video dramatized courtship rituals, one could assumed the word was used to describe events when men and woman came together to enjoy themselves. One person wrote on YouTube "Kumbaya" was a "NYC song children set." [16] Given the vagaries of Google Translate, this could have meant it was specifically a children’s song brought from the United States, or that it carried connotations of playtime.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jose Mc, Juicy Landy
Vocal Group: not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: flute, synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum ensemble
Credits
"Juicy Landy rose to fame in 2013 with the song Kumbaya, which he composed with Jose MC Da virus in Masaka." [17]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: Bantu
Pronunciation: koom bye ya
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Chorus Length: four lines
Chorus Rhyme Pattern: ABAB (unday-ally-bye ya-baby) [18]
Chorus Line Repetition Pattern: four lines repeated
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: CVCV1C
Singing Style: one syllable to one note. A group joined Landy on the repetitions of the kumbaya chorus.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: drums, flute, and synthesizer were softer than Jose, Landy, or the vocal group.
Notes on Performance
Location: the video was shot outdoors on a dirt road beside a tall stone wall.
Microphones: unlike rappers in this country who always appeared with microphones in videos, none were shown in "Kumbaya."
Clothing: Jose wore tee-shirts with logos and blue slacks. His hair, which was in corn rows, was often covered by a baseball cap. In some sequences, he was wearing oversized glasses. Landy wore a white tee-shirt and jeans. He had short hair and a small chin beard.
The girl who danced with Landy was slender with straight hair. The one with Jose Mc had a normal build and natural hair. Both wore long shirts that covered their shorts and left their legs bare.
Notes on Movement
Jose and Landy adapted many of poses used by African-American rappers. They sat side by side on low bicycles and back to back. In both positions they moved their arms from the elbows. When they were standing, they bent their knees as they talked or sang.
The dancing was similar to the simplified jitterbug we did in junior high in Michigan in the late 1950s. The couples faced each other, held hands, and moved toward each other and back. Sometimes, the girl turned under the upraised arm of the boy. In this video, more intimate steps were suggested by close ups of the couple’s knees and feet.
Notes on Audience
"Kumbaya" was nominated for the Best Southern Region Song for the HiPippo awards in 2013. [19] Landy remembered "the ladies loved that song a lot." [20]
Notes on Performers
Landy was born Frank Walugembe "in Kibinge Village, Masaka District," and went to high school in Kyotera, some 25 miles away. He started writing songs when he was in Kyotera, where he organized entertainment for his classmates. At the time he was interviewed by Brain Mugyenyi, he was 23-years-old and owned a bar in Masaka. [21]
Jose became a solo performer in 2015 [22] using the name Jose MC Da Virus, and had a song nominated for a HiPippo award in 2016. A spokesman for the music promotion group said Jose had "managed to spill a song that is fresh and beautiful, exactly why he probably got nominated by the fans and other stakeholders." [23] A gossip website confirmed he was from Masaka. [24]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by tamjoe7 on 18 July 2013. Other versions were uploaded; one was cropped and edited.
End Notes
1. Davy D. "Interview w/ DJ Kool Herc." His website.
2. Richard Simmons said "Black radio hated rap from the start and there’s still a lot of resistance to it." He attributed their reactions to a preference for songs that fit western musical aesthetics. He thought they saw "assimilation as the best way of becoming successful in a white culture and that means emphasizing things that are white. Rap is a return to black culture, a step back from that assimilation." Quoted by Robert Hilburn. "Rap—The Power and the Controversy." Los Angeles Times. 4 February 1990.
3. Sugarhill Gang. "Rapper’s Delight." Sugar Hill Records SH-542. 1979.
4. Wikipedia. "DJ Kool Herc."
5. For more on "The Message," see the post for 26 March 2018.
6. Michael Jackson. "Billie Jean." Epic A13 3084. 1983.
7. Wikipedia. "MTV."
8. Wikipedia. "Uganda."
9. Alfdaniels Mabingo. "The Drum of the Black Africans." 2012. Revised and translated by Hermelinde Steiner. Face Music website.
10. Hendrik Rood. "Uganda – Mobile Market – Insights, Statistics and Forecasts – BuddeComm – BuddeComm." Stratix Consulting. Citation and quotation from Wikipedia, Uganda.
11. No record details were given on YouTube or in the HiPippo publicity for the song.
12. Mabingo.
13. "Traditional Instruments of the Uganda People." Revised by Hermelinde Steiner, perhaps from Mabingo. Face Music website.
14. It might have been a local instrument, but did not sound like a xylophone or thumb piano.
15. Jude Ssempuuma. "The Emergence of an Indigenous Language as Lingua Franca: The Case of Luganda in Uganda." 119-142 in Postcolonial Linguistic Voices. Edited by Eric A. Anchimbe and Stephen A. Mforteh. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 131.
16. Rahmah Leilah wrote "NYC song abaana beka" on YouTube. September 2017. Google Translate indicated the language was Swahili. Since if did not have a Luganda option, I don’t know if the text was similar in both languages.
17. Brian Mugyenyi. "Bad Management Killed My Music – Landy." 26 August 2017. Sqoop and other websites.
18. This was a transcription of the sounds I heard, not the actual syllables sung by Landy.
19. Mugyenyi. HiPippo awards were given by a social media company of the same name located in Kampala. (Wikipedia. "HiPipo Limited.")
20. Juicy Landy. Quoted by Mugyenyi.
21. Mugyenyi.
22. Mugyenyi.
23. Mohamed Kimbugwe. "HiPipo Music Awards 2016; Best Regional Song Review." HiPippo website. 1 May 2016. The song was "Omukajanga."
24. "Sheilah Don Zella now Bonking JOSE MC DA VIRUS." Ki Gossip website. 5 April 2016.
Hip hop developed outside the established channels for music promotion in the United States. DJ Kool Herc said they were too young to enter the disco clubs and gangs terrorized those that did exist in the Bronx, so they created their own venues. [1] Radio stations didn’t play their records,[2] and in fact, no one recorded hip hop until Sylvia Robinson organized the Sugarhill Gang in 1979. Its "Rapper’s Delight" [3] was the first record noticed by Billboard. [4]
Grandmaster Flash made one of the first popular videos for "The Message" in 1982, [5] but MTV didn’t show videos by Black artists until pressured to include Michael’s Jackson’s "Billie Jean" [6] in 1983. Once MTV began playing rap records in the mid-1980s, [7] videos became the medium that spread the genre outside the United States.
In Uganda, nearly 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2009 [8] and the electricity needed for radios and television was scarce or unreliable in rural areas. [9] According to Hendrik Rood, "more than 95 percent of internet connections are made using mobile phones." [10] It’s not even clear if Jose Mc and Juicy Landy’s 2013 version of "Kumbaya" was ever a record rather than a tape made for use in clubs that was turned into a video. [11]
The video had absorbed the aesthetics of MTV. It had two components that were cut into small segments and intermixed in a fast-paced montage. One followed two young men who met some women with whom they flirted, then danced. The other showed Jose and Landy individually singing and together in changing positions.
Like African-American hip hop, "Kumbaya" used drums as the primary accompaniment. Jose and Landy were from Masaka in an area that once was part of the Buganda kingdom. Alfdaniels Mabingo said drum ensembles composed of drums of different sizes and timbres were used in the court and villages. [12] Jose and Landy had drums playing different tones in separate rhythmic patterns.
Many American rappers adopted a verse-chorus refrain with one or several artists chanting the verses. In the latter half of "Kumbaya," Jose and Landy added a native flute [13] to the drums during the verses. They used a synthesizer [14] with the drums in the chorus.
Jose and Landy different from African American rappers, because Landy sang his verses and the chorus, while Jose’s raps were melodic. I don’t know if they were using Swahili or Luganda; the one was an official language for the nation, but the Baganda language was the lingua franca in the capital of Kampala. Jude Ssempuuma said television, radio, and other entertainment forms were "engineered by the Baganda and their performance is in the Luganda language." [15]
The difference between the languages was Luganda was tonal and Swahili was not. The one would have lead to raps that had melodic traits, and might have created an aesthetic preference for musical speech even for chants in Swahili or English.
The word "kumbaya" was heard in the sung chorus:
"Koom-bye-ya
Koom-ba-ya ah baby"
Since the video dramatized courtship rituals, one could assumed the word was used to describe events when men and woman came together to enjoy themselves. One person wrote on YouTube "Kumbaya" was a "NYC song children set." [16] Given the vagaries of Google Translate, this could have meant it was specifically a children’s song brought from the United States, or that it carried connotations of playtime.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jose Mc, Juicy Landy
Vocal Group: not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: flute, synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum ensemble
Credits
"Juicy Landy rose to fame in 2013 with the song Kumbaya, which he composed with Jose MC Da virus in Masaka." [17]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: Bantu
Pronunciation: koom bye ya
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Chorus Length: four lines
Chorus Rhyme Pattern: ABAB (unday-ally-bye ya-baby) [18]
Chorus Line Repetition Pattern: four lines repeated
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: CVCV1C
Singing Style: one syllable to one note. A group joined Landy on the repetitions of the kumbaya chorus.
Vocal-Instrumental Dynamics: drums, flute, and synthesizer were softer than Jose, Landy, or the vocal group.
Notes on Performance
Location: the video was shot outdoors on a dirt road beside a tall stone wall.
Microphones: unlike rappers in this country who always appeared with microphones in videos, none were shown in "Kumbaya."
Clothing: Jose wore tee-shirts with logos and blue slacks. His hair, which was in corn rows, was often covered by a baseball cap. In some sequences, he was wearing oversized glasses. Landy wore a white tee-shirt and jeans. He had short hair and a small chin beard.
The girl who danced with Landy was slender with straight hair. The one with Jose Mc had a normal build and natural hair. Both wore long shirts that covered their shorts and left their legs bare.
Notes on Movement
Jose and Landy adapted many of poses used by African-American rappers. They sat side by side on low bicycles and back to back. In both positions they moved their arms from the elbows. When they were standing, they bent their knees as they talked or sang.
The dancing was similar to the simplified jitterbug we did in junior high in Michigan in the late 1950s. The couples faced each other, held hands, and moved toward each other and back. Sometimes, the girl turned under the upraised arm of the boy. In this video, more intimate steps were suggested by close ups of the couple’s knees and feet.
Notes on Audience
"Kumbaya" was nominated for the Best Southern Region Song for the HiPippo awards in 2013. [19] Landy remembered "the ladies loved that song a lot." [20]
Notes on Performers
Landy was born Frank Walugembe "in Kibinge Village, Masaka District," and went to high school in Kyotera, some 25 miles away. He started writing songs when he was in Kyotera, where he organized entertainment for his classmates. At the time he was interviewed by Brain Mugyenyi, he was 23-years-old and owned a bar in Masaka. [21]
Jose became a solo performer in 2015 [22] using the name Jose MC Da Virus, and had a song nominated for a HiPippo award in 2016. A spokesman for the music promotion group said Jose had "managed to spill a song that is fresh and beautiful, exactly why he probably got nominated by the fans and other stakeholders." [23] A gossip website confirmed he was from Masaka. [24]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by tamjoe7 on 18 July 2013. Other versions were uploaded; one was cropped and edited.
End Notes
1. Davy D. "Interview w/ DJ Kool Herc." His website.
2. Richard Simmons said "Black radio hated rap from the start and there’s still a lot of resistance to it." He attributed their reactions to a preference for songs that fit western musical aesthetics. He thought they saw "assimilation as the best way of becoming successful in a white culture and that means emphasizing things that are white. Rap is a return to black culture, a step back from that assimilation." Quoted by Robert Hilburn. "Rap—The Power and the Controversy." Los Angeles Times. 4 February 1990.
3. Sugarhill Gang. "Rapper’s Delight." Sugar Hill Records SH-542. 1979.
4. Wikipedia. "DJ Kool Herc."
5. For more on "The Message," see the post for 26 March 2018.
6. Michael Jackson. "Billie Jean." Epic A13 3084. 1983.
7. Wikipedia. "MTV."
8. Wikipedia. "Uganda."
9. Alfdaniels Mabingo. "The Drum of the Black Africans." 2012. Revised and translated by Hermelinde Steiner. Face Music website.
10. Hendrik Rood. "Uganda – Mobile Market – Insights, Statistics and Forecasts – BuddeComm – BuddeComm." Stratix Consulting. Citation and quotation from Wikipedia, Uganda.
11. No record details were given on YouTube or in the HiPippo publicity for the song.
12. Mabingo.
13. "Traditional Instruments of the Uganda People." Revised by Hermelinde Steiner, perhaps from Mabingo. Face Music website.
14. It might have been a local instrument, but did not sound like a xylophone or thumb piano.
15. Jude Ssempuuma. "The Emergence of an Indigenous Language as Lingua Franca: The Case of Luganda in Uganda." 119-142 in Postcolonial Linguistic Voices. Edited by Eric A. Anchimbe and Stephen A. Mforteh. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011. 131.
16. Rahmah Leilah wrote "NYC song abaana beka" on YouTube. September 2017. Google Translate indicated the language was Swahili. Since if did not have a Luganda option, I don’t know if the text was similar in both languages.
17. Brian Mugyenyi. "Bad Management Killed My Music – Landy." 26 August 2017. Sqoop and other websites.
18. This was a transcription of the sounds I heard, not the actual syllables sung by Landy.
19. Mugyenyi. HiPippo awards were given by a social media company of the same name located in Kampala. (Wikipedia. "HiPipo Limited.")
20. Juicy Landy. Quoted by Mugyenyi.
21. Mugyenyi.
22. Mugyenyi.
23. Mohamed Kimbugwe. "HiPipo Music Awards 2016; Best Regional Song Review." HiPippo website. 1 May 2016. The song was "Omukajanga."
24. "Sheilah Don Zella now Bonking JOSE MC DA VIRUS." Ki Gossip website. 5 April 2016.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Lugo - Kumbaya (Jungle Africa Electro Safari)
Topic: Hip Hop
Hip hop emerged in the Bronx section of New York City in the early 1970s when a Jamaican immigrant Americanized his taste to fit that of his audience. Clive Campbell was raised in Kingston’s Trenchtown where he heard music being played in dance halls and on the streets over PA systems. His mother was the first to migrate to attend nursing school. Clive came in 1967, and the rest of the family followed. [1]
He quickly learned the necessity of blending into the neighborhood to avoid the discrimination and violence directed toward immigrants. He listened to radio and sang along with records to change his accent. [2] When critics later commented on the Jamaican roots of hip hop, he responded:
"Jamaican toasting? Naw, naw. No connection there. I couldn’t play reggae in the Bronx. People wouldn’t accept it. The inspiration for rap is James Brown and the album Hustler’s Convention." [3]
Wayne Marshall suggested the migration sharpened Campbell’s already keen interest in music. When his father bought a sound system for a local R&B group, Clive figured out how to connect the components to produce the sounds he’d heard in Jamaica. [4] By then his friends were calling him Herc, short for Hercules, for his prowess on the basketball court. [5]
When he went to dances he noticed which parts of records he and other dancers enjoyed, and also observed the things they disliked about the men playing the music. Dancers preferred the instrumental sections of funk records which had strong beats. DJ Kook Herc’s key innovation was finding a way to extend the intense dance time by changing from one turntable to another when the break ended on one song to the start of the break on another. To cover the short lapse in music, he shouted out to the dancers. [6]
Others, especially Grandmaster Flash, mentioned in the post for 26 March 2018, and Afrika Bambaataa, [7] improved his techniques and replaced his simple calls with extended texts that used rap styles. From there it evolved from dance music into hip hop.
Rappers and others needed repetitive beat patterns for their performances. Men with computer expertise were able to provide them by isolating elements in existing instrumental breaks, reordering them, and repeating them in digital loops. [8] Beginning in 2005, [9] Lugo began releasing albums of Hip Hop Instrumentals that others could licence for sound tracks.
His version of "Kumbaya" opened with conga drums that alternated between two tones. They stopped and a shaker began. When the congas rejoined, they were heard on the four beats of each measure and the shakers consistently played between.
Lugo labeled his version "Jungle." That may been because many associated both "Kumbaya" and hand-played drums with Africa, but it also may have been a reference to jungle music that emerged in London clubs in 1992. [10]
Simon Reynolds said jungle music "upturns Western music’s hierarchy of melody/harmony over rhythm/timbre. In jungle, the rhythm is the melody." [11] Further, it disrupted the steady four loud beats of disco by skipping beats. Thus, Lugo’s congas were able to maintain the rhythm without in fact playing every beat. About half way through the performance, the conga player added a second motif between the main four. Occasionally, a steel-style drum was struck three times on the third beat of the measure.
Lugo’s "Kumbaya" lacked one of the defining traits of jungle music. The tempo was moderate, while the drums in jungle often played 150 beats-per-minute. [12] Reynolds said, the bass line, meantime, was slowed to 70 bpm, [13] and that dancers switched between rhythms. If Lugo included an electric bass, it used a frequency so low, it could not be detected by my computer’s standard built-in speakers. [14]
The other way "Kumbaya" differed from jungle music was it was essentially acoustic. It had a few random sounds that were produced electronically, but it was not electronic music. Wikipedia indicated that when the jungle was introduced into this country, the term often was used as a "synonym for drum and bass," rather than for its English model. [15] That was probably all Lugo wanted to suggest.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: congas, shaker, steel-type drum
Credits
(C) 2006 Edwin Lugo
Notes on Lyrics
There were none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: his own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic
Notes on Performance
Lugo may have created the recording without assistance from others. He claimed to be a "Computer and Audio tec. Geek" who could play congas, bongos, drums, and guitar. He also advised potential casting directors he was a "Hip Hop, Latin and Club Dancer," [16] which implied he would have had a dancer’s understanding of what was required from music.
Notes on Performers
Edwin Lugo’s parents were from Puerto Rico, and his mother was related to Roberto Clemente. His father was a Pentecostal minister, who had him singing in a Bronx church when he was three-years-old. [17] He attended New York’s High School for the Performing Arts in the 1980s, and had his first major professional work in a Paul Simon musical [18] that opened in 1998. [19] He told fans his influences included "prince, Michael jackson, marvin gaye, luther vandross, sam cook, tito puente, quincy jones." [20]
Availability
CD: Hip Hop Instrumentals Vol. 11. 7 November 2005.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 19 April 2015. [21]
End Notes
1. Wayne Marshall. "Kool Herc." 1-26 in Icons of Hip Hop. Edited by Mickey Hess. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007. Reproduced on his website, Wayne and Wax.
2. Marshall.
3. Steven Hager. Hip Hop. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. 45. Quoted by Wikipedia. "DJ Kool Herc." Hustler’s Convention was recorded in 1973 by Lightnin’ Rod (Jalal Mansur Nuriddin) for United Artists Records UA-LA-156-F. (Discogs entry for album).
4. Marshall.
5. Wikipedia, DJ Kool Herc.
6. Marshall.
7. Afrika Bambaataa (Lance Taylor) was noted for using hip hop as a way of diverting gang violence into dance with his Zulu Nation. (Wikipedia. "Afrika Bambaataa.")
8. Simon Reynolds. Energy Flash. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2012 edition. 241.
9. Amazon indicated Lugo’s first volume, titled simply Hip Hop Instrumentals, was released 10 October 2005. Amazon’s release dates must be treated with caution since they often were the most recent reissue dates, not the original ones. Discogs had no entry on Lugo to use for confirmation.
10. Wikipedia. "Jungle music."
11. Reynolds. 242.
12. Benjamin Noys. "Into the Jungle." Popular Music. 14:321-332:1995. 321.
13. Reynolds. 242
14. Reynolds said "sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threshold of hearing" and were felt rather than heard. 243.
15. Wikipedia, Jungle.
16. "Edwin Lugo." Actors Access website.
17. "Edwin Lugo." Model Mayhem website.
18. "LUGO." Facebook.
19. Wikipedia. "The Capeman."
20. Facebook.
21. CDBaby uploaded another song under this title from volume 6 of his Hip Hop Instrumentals; it was different and did not appear on listings of that volume from its website.
Hip hop emerged in the Bronx section of New York City in the early 1970s when a Jamaican immigrant Americanized his taste to fit that of his audience. Clive Campbell was raised in Kingston’s Trenchtown where he heard music being played in dance halls and on the streets over PA systems. His mother was the first to migrate to attend nursing school. Clive came in 1967, and the rest of the family followed. [1]
He quickly learned the necessity of blending into the neighborhood to avoid the discrimination and violence directed toward immigrants. He listened to radio and sang along with records to change his accent. [2] When critics later commented on the Jamaican roots of hip hop, he responded:
"Jamaican toasting? Naw, naw. No connection there. I couldn’t play reggae in the Bronx. People wouldn’t accept it. The inspiration for rap is James Brown and the album Hustler’s Convention." [3]
Wayne Marshall suggested the migration sharpened Campbell’s already keen interest in music. When his father bought a sound system for a local R&B group, Clive figured out how to connect the components to produce the sounds he’d heard in Jamaica. [4] By then his friends were calling him Herc, short for Hercules, for his prowess on the basketball court. [5]
When he went to dances he noticed which parts of records he and other dancers enjoyed, and also observed the things they disliked about the men playing the music. Dancers preferred the instrumental sections of funk records which had strong beats. DJ Kook Herc’s key innovation was finding a way to extend the intense dance time by changing from one turntable to another when the break ended on one song to the start of the break on another. To cover the short lapse in music, he shouted out to the dancers. [6]
Others, especially Grandmaster Flash, mentioned in the post for 26 March 2018, and Afrika Bambaataa, [7] improved his techniques and replaced his simple calls with extended texts that used rap styles. From there it evolved from dance music into hip hop.
Rappers and others needed repetitive beat patterns for their performances. Men with computer expertise were able to provide them by isolating elements in existing instrumental breaks, reordering them, and repeating them in digital loops. [8] Beginning in 2005, [9] Lugo began releasing albums of Hip Hop Instrumentals that others could licence for sound tracks.
His version of "Kumbaya" opened with conga drums that alternated between two tones. They stopped and a shaker began. When the congas rejoined, they were heard on the four beats of each measure and the shakers consistently played between.
Lugo labeled his version "Jungle." That may been because many associated both "Kumbaya" and hand-played drums with Africa, but it also may have been a reference to jungle music that emerged in London clubs in 1992. [10]
Simon Reynolds said jungle music "upturns Western music’s hierarchy of melody/harmony over rhythm/timbre. In jungle, the rhythm is the melody." [11] Further, it disrupted the steady four loud beats of disco by skipping beats. Thus, Lugo’s congas were able to maintain the rhythm without in fact playing every beat. About half way through the performance, the conga player added a second motif between the main four. Occasionally, a steel-style drum was struck three times on the third beat of the measure.
Lugo’s "Kumbaya" lacked one of the defining traits of jungle music. The tempo was moderate, while the drums in jungle often played 150 beats-per-minute. [12] Reynolds said, the bass line, meantime, was slowed to 70 bpm, [13] and that dancers switched between rhythms. If Lugo included an electric bass, it used a frequency so low, it could not be detected by my computer’s standard built-in speakers. [14]
The other way "Kumbaya" differed from jungle music was it was essentially acoustic. It had a few random sounds that were produced electronically, but it was not electronic music. Wikipedia indicated that when the jungle was introduced into this country, the term often was used as a "synonym for drum and bass," rather than for its English model. [15] That was probably all Lugo wanted to suggest.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: none
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: congas, shaker, steel-type drum
Credits
(C) 2006 Edwin Lugo
Notes on Lyrics
There were none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: his own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: strophic
Notes on Performance
Lugo may have created the recording without assistance from others. He claimed to be a "Computer and Audio tec. Geek" who could play congas, bongos, drums, and guitar. He also advised potential casting directors he was a "Hip Hop, Latin and Club Dancer," [16] which implied he would have had a dancer’s understanding of what was required from music.
Notes on Performers
Edwin Lugo’s parents were from Puerto Rico, and his mother was related to Roberto Clemente. His father was a Pentecostal minister, who had him singing in a Bronx church when he was three-years-old. [17] He attended New York’s High School for the Performing Arts in the 1980s, and had his first major professional work in a Paul Simon musical [18] that opened in 1998. [19] He told fans his influences included "prince, Michael jackson, marvin gaye, luther vandross, sam cook, tito puente, quincy jones." [20]
Availability
CD: Hip Hop Instrumentals Vol. 11. 7 November 2005.
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 19 April 2015. [21]
End Notes
1. Wayne Marshall. "Kool Herc." 1-26 in Icons of Hip Hop. Edited by Mickey Hess. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007. Reproduced on his website, Wayne and Wax.
2. Marshall.
3. Steven Hager. Hip Hop. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. 45. Quoted by Wikipedia. "DJ Kool Herc." Hustler’s Convention was recorded in 1973 by Lightnin’ Rod (Jalal Mansur Nuriddin) for United Artists Records UA-LA-156-F. (Discogs entry for album).
4. Marshall.
5. Wikipedia, DJ Kool Herc.
6. Marshall.
7. Afrika Bambaataa (Lance Taylor) was noted for using hip hop as a way of diverting gang violence into dance with his Zulu Nation. (Wikipedia. "Afrika Bambaataa.")
8. Simon Reynolds. Energy Flash. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2012 edition. 241.
9. Amazon indicated Lugo’s first volume, titled simply Hip Hop Instrumentals, was released 10 October 2005. Amazon’s release dates must be treated with caution since they often were the most recent reissue dates, not the original ones. Discogs had no entry on Lugo to use for confirmation.
10. Wikipedia. "Jungle music."
11. Reynolds. 242.
12. Benjamin Noys. "Into the Jungle." Popular Music. 14:321-332:1995. 321.
13. Reynolds. 242
14. Reynolds said "sub-bass frequencies operate almost below the threshold of hearing" and were felt rather than heard. 243.
15. Wikipedia, Jungle.
16. "Edwin Lugo." Actors Access website.
17. "Edwin Lugo." Model Mayhem website.
18. "LUGO." Facebook.
19. Wikipedia. "The Capeman."
20. Facebook.
21. CDBaby uploaded another song under this title from volume 6 of his Hip Hop Instrumentals; it was different and did not appear on listings of that volume from its website.
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Jay McGee - Come By Here
Topic: Rap
Secular rappers usually treated "kumbaya" as a string of syllables with rhythmic potential. The first two I discussed began with strong consonants and rhymed with the traditional representation of German brass bands, "oom-pah." The second two used open syllables that rhymed. A few treated the word or song as a generic symbol without amplification.
African Americans who wanted to use rap to advance evangelical goals tended to use "Come by Here," not "Kumbaya," especially if they had spent their early years in the southeastern United States. Thus, Leon, who came from Miami, used one verse as the chorus in his chanted descriptions of conversion experiences. [1]
Jay McGee was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, [2] and raised in Fayetteville [3] in the state’s sand hills. [4] He began performing in the late 1970s [5] when soul and disco were the primary music forms. Libra Boyd believed his singing style had been influenced by Sam Cooke and Johnnie Taylor, [6] both of whom began in gospel quartets.
In 2001 McGee wrote his own version of "Come by Here" that served the original ritual functions. The four-line verses described people in need and asked the Lord to intervene. While the group sang "come by here Lord" eight times as a chorus, he sang fragments of common verses like "we need you" and "please make some time."
After two repetitions of a verse-and-chorus, McGee changed from stating the reasons the Lord was needed to a more passionate request for His presence. This was similar to the free-form witnessing in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s version in which a woman spoke about her problems. [7] However, McGee followed MC Hollywood’s example and spoke in time to the syncopated drum rhythm. [8] The rapped lines were longer than the sung ones, but still were rhymed couplets.
After the rapped appeal, McGee sang two more verses that described humans in need before changing his pace again. While the chorus continued its role of repeating "come by here," he sang more extended lines asking for a healing that would come from the Lord appearing for "a little while."
This was followed by an instrumental section in which the keyboard took over the melody. Previously, the piano had played broken chords at the ends of lines. The chorus was repeated one more time, with McGee singing "come by here" instead of the improvised appeals used earlier. It grew softer and faded away at the end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jay McGee
Vocal Group: men and women, not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums
Credits
(C) 2003 Beacon Records Inc. [9]
(P) 2003 J. McGee [10]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: strongly reflected the drum beat
Verses: come by here, own
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord, Father (once)
Special Terms: need a healing
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Sung Verse Form
Verse Length: four lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: AABB
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: iambic (xX)
Line Length: ten syllables (pentameter)
Rapped Verse Form
Verse Length: eight lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: rhymed couplets
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: iambic
Line Length: 11 to 16 syllables
Chorus Verse Form:
Verse Length: four lines that repeated "come by here Lord" twice
Line Form: call-response
Line Repetition Pattern: calls sung by McGee were all unique, refrains all the same
Ending: none
Unique Features: variations in verse form
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-1-3
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AABAAB1 where A was sung, B was partly rapped, and B1 was partly instrumental.
Solo Singing Style: some syllables were sung on more than one note as a way to extend syllables rather than as melismatic accents.
Solo-Group Dynamics: McGee began each line, and chorus joined. Chorus sang "come by here" over and over" while he varied how much of the line he sang.
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: drums provided the beat and piano played flourishes at the ends of lines. During the instrumental break, the keyboard played the melody to the same rhythm.
Notes on Performers
McGee was born in 1950. His father was a singer, and he began singing in church when he was four-years-old. He settled in Flint in 1968, then moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1974. [11] He made his first records for a Belgium company, Scorpio Records, then did an album for a Canadian company, Quantum. [12] While he remained unknown in this country, one of his songs, "Another Love in Your Life," was nominated for the Best R&B Song for the Canadian Juno awards. [13]
He moved back to Flint in 2001 and, after he "received Christ Jesus as my Lord and Savior." began producing his own religious records. [14]
Availability
CD: No Walls. Cousin Marie’s Music. 2001. [15]
Reissue: No Walls. Beacon Records, Inc. 3 June 2003. [16]
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 23 June 2015.
End Notes
1. For more on Leon’s version, see post for 30 March 2018.
2. Toby Walker. "Jay W. McGee." Soul Walking website.
3. "About Jay McGee." Facebook.
4. Wikipedia. "Fayetteville, North Carolina."
5. Walker.
6. Libra Boyd. "‘Stand Up!’ - Jay McGee." Gospel Music Fever website. 16 August 2013.
7. For more on version by Evelyn Turrentine-Agee, see post for 6 August 2017.
8. MC Hollywood’s contribution to rap was described in the post for 22 March 2018.
9. Amazon page for "No Walls."
10. YouTube notes.
11. Walker.
12. "Jay W. McGee." Discogs website.
13. "Jay McGee." LinkedIn.
14. LinkedIn.
15. "Jay McGee – No Walls." Discogs website.
16. Amazon and YouTube.
Secular rappers usually treated "kumbaya" as a string of syllables with rhythmic potential. The first two I discussed began with strong consonants and rhymed with the traditional representation of German brass bands, "oom-pah." The second two used open syllables that rhymed. A few treated the word or song as a generic symbol without amplification.
African Americans who wanted to use rap to advance evangelical goals tended to use "Come by Here," not "Kumbaya," especially if they had spent their early years in the southeastern United States. Thus, Leon, who came from Miami, used one verse as the chorus in his chanted descriptions of conversion experiences. [1]
Jay McGee was born in Lumberton, North Carolina, [2] and raised in Fayetteville [3] in the state’s sand hills. [4] He began performing in the late 1970s [5] when soul and disco were the primary music forms. Libra Boyd believed his singing style had been influenced by Sam Cooke and Johnnie Taylor, [6] both of whom began in gospel quartets.
In 2001 McGee wrote his own version of "Come by Here" that served the original ritual functions. The four-line verses described people in need and asked the Lord to intervene. While the group sang "come by here Lord" eight times as a chorus, he sang fragments of common verses like "we need you" and "please make some time."
After two repetitions of a verse-and-chorus, McGee changed from stating the reasons the Lord was needed to a more passionate request for His presence. This was similar to the free-form witnessing in Evelyn Turrentine-Agee’s version in which a woman spoke about her problems. [7] However, McGee followed MC Hollywood’s example and spoke in time to the syncopated drum rhythm. [8] The rapped lines were longer than the sung ones, but still were rhymed couplets.
After the rapped appeal, McGee sang two more verses that described humans in need before changing his pace again. While the chorus continued its role of repeating "come by here," he sang more extended lines asking for a healing that would come from the Lord appearing for "a little while."
This was followed by an instrumental section in which the keyboard took over the melody. Previously, the piano had played broken chords at the ends of lines. The chorus was repeated one more time, with McGee singing "come by here" instead of the improvised appeals used earlier. It grew softer and faded away at the end.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Jay McGee
Vocal Group: men and women, not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: keyboard
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums
Credits
(C) 2003 Beacon Records Inc. [9]
(P) 2003 J. McGee [10]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: strongly reflected the drum beat
Verses: come by here, own
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord, Father (once)
Special Terms: need a healing
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Sung Verse Form
Verse Length: four lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: AABB
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: iambic (xX)
Line Length: ten syllables (pentameter)
Rapped Verse Form
Verse Length: eight lines
Verse Rhyme Pattern: rhymed couplets
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Line Meter: iambic
Line Length: 11 to 16 syllables
Chorus Verse Form:
Verse Length: four lines that repeated "come by here Lord" twice
Line Form: call-response
Line Repetition Pattern: calls sung by McGee were all unique, refrains all the same
Ending: none
Unique Features: variations in verse form
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-3-1-3
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: AABAAB1 where A was sung, B was partly rapped, and B1 was partly instrumental.
Solo Singing Style: some syllables were sung on more than one note as a way to extend syllables rather than as melismatic accents.
Solo-Group Dynamics: McGee began each line, and chorus joined. Chorus sang "come by here" over and over" while he varied how much of the line he sang.
Vocal-Accompaniment Dynamics: drums provided the beat and piano played flourishes at the ends of lines. During the instrumental break, the keyboard played the melody to the same rhythm.
Notes on Performers
McGee was born in 1950. His father was a singer, and he began singing in church when he was four-years-old. He settled in Flint in 1968, then moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1974. [11] He made his first records for a Belgium company, Scorpio Records, then did an album for a Canadian company, Quantum. [12] While he remained unknown in this country, one of his songs, "Another Love in Your Life," was nominated for the Best R&B Song for the Canadian Juno awards. [13]
He moved back to Flint in 2001 and, after he "received Christ Jesus as my Lord and Savior." began producing his own religious records. [14]
Availability
CD: No Walls. Cousin Marie’s Music. 2001. [15]
Reissue: No Walls. Beacon Records, Inc. 3 June 2003. [16]
YouTube: uploaded by CDBaby on 23 June 2015.
End Notes
1. For more on Leon’s version, see post for 30 March 2018.
2. Toby Walker. "Jay W. McGee." Soul Walking website.
3. "About Jay McGee." Facebook.
4. Wikipedia. "Fayetteville, North Carolina."
5. Walker.
6. Libra Boyd. "‘Stand Up!’ - Jay McGee." Gospel Music Fever website. 16 August 2013.
7. For more on version by Evelyn Turrentine-Agee, see post for 6 August 2017.
8. MC Hollywood’s contribution to rap was described in the post for 22 March 2018.
9. Amazon page for "No Walls."
10. YouTube notes.
11. Walker.
12. "Jay W. McGee." Discogs website.
13. "Jay McGee." LinkedIn.
14. LinkedIn.
15. "Jay McGee – No Walls." Discogs website.
16. Amazon and YouTube.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Leon - Come By Here Lord
Topic: Rap
Rap was a style of speaking within a structured format. Despite its associations with Gangsta Rap, the subject matter was varied, but generally restricted to experiences of the rapper and his or her audience.
Leon adapted the style to evangelism in 2006. He described a person ready to kill and one ready to smoke crack using short staccato phrases to advance his narratives. One described a fight
"He hit you so hard
Like he broke your jaw"
that led to the vanquished pulling a gun with
"Balls of sweat
Down your face drippin’"
In the second, a boy stole his mother’s wallet to buy crack from the dead man. In both cases, they were stopped by a voice that told them to put the gun/dope down. This was followed by:
"And fall to your knees
Crying out loud
Lord help me please"
At that point the recording changed from a single male voice chanting slowly against a drum to a group of men singing the "somebody’s praying" verse from "Come by Here" in harmony with the 1-5 melody. The drum continued through the chorus with an Xx beat. In the verse, it had only played a strong beat at the start of the second half of each phrase.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Leon
Vocal Group: men, not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums
Credits
(C) 2006 Barrydrecords
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: strong Xx pattern so, for example, "everybody yelling" became "er by yellin’"
Verses: praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: drug slang
Basic Form: verse-chorus.
Verse Repetition Pattern: chorus repeated twice
Ending: none
Unique Features: used traditional "Come by Here" as chorus
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: ABAB. Leon described the B chorus as "lyrical harmonic loops." [1]
Singing Style: A was chanted; B was sung in harmony
Notes on Performers
Barry Leon Dorsey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1970. He said he was singing with a toy mike when he was two, and "later played the drums in the church and sang in the church choir." In his twenties, he was performing professionally, although he did not specify with whom or what style music. His favorite groups, Run-DMC and Earth, Wind and Fire, suggested he preferred the disco and early rap of his adolescent years. [2]
Instead of providing biographical details, he recast his experiences into a tale of salvation. He wrote:
"I spent many years writing and performing music that was inappropriate. During this time of rebellion, I battled with good and evil over the type of music I wanted to play. One day my soul hit rock bottom and the devil lost the battle." [3]
Availability
CD: Role Model. 23 May 2006.
End Notes
1. CD Baby website for album.
2. Liner notes reprinted by CD Baby.
3. Liner notes.
Rap was a style of speaking within a structured format. Despite its associations with Gangsta Rap, the subject matter was varied, but generally restricted to experiences of the rapper and his or her audience.
Leon adapted the style to evangelism in 2006. He described a person ready to kill and one ready to smoke crack using short staccato phrases to advance his narratives. One described a fight
"He hit you so hard
Like he broke your jaw"
that led to the vanquished pulling a gun with
"Balls of sweat
Down your face drippin’"
In the second, a boy stole his mother’s wallet to buy crack from the dead man. In both cases, they were stopped by a voice that told them to put the gun/dope down. This was followed by:
"And fall to your knees
Crying out loud
Lord help me please"
At that point the recording changed from a single male voice chanting slowly against a drum to a group of men singing the "somebody’s praying" verse from "Come by Here" in harmony with the 1-5 melody. The drum continued through the chorus with an Xx beat. In the verse, it had only played a strong beat at the start of the second half of each phrase.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: Leon
Vocal Group: men, not identified
Instrumental Accompaniment: none
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums
Credits
(C) 2006 Barrydrecords
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: strong Xx pattern so, for example, "everybody yelling" became "er by yellin’"
Verses: praying
Vocabulary
Pronoun: somebody
Term for Deity: Lord
Special Terms: drug slang
Basic Form: verse-chorus.
Verse Repetition Pattern: chorus repeated twice
Ending: none
Unique Features: used traditional "Come by Here" as chorus
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: 1-5
Tempo: slow
Basic Structure: ABAB. Leon described the B chorus as "lyrical harmonic loops." [1]
Singing Style: A was chanted; B was sung in harmony
Notes on Performers
Barry Leon Dorsey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1970. He said he was singing with a toy mike when he was two, and "later played the drums in the church and sang in the church choir." In his twenties, he was performing professionally, although he did not specify with whom or what style music. His favorite groups, Run-DMC and Earth, Wind and Fire, suggested he preferred the disco and early rap of his adolescent years. [2]
Instead of providing biographical details, he recast his experiences into a tale of salvation. He wrote:
"I spent many years writing and performing music that was inappropriate. During this time of rebellion, I battled with good and evil over the type of music I wanted to play. One day my soul hit rock bottom and the devil lost the battle." [3]
Availability
CD: Role Model. 23 May 2006.
End Notes
1. CD Baby website for album.
2. Liner notes reprinted by CD Baby.
3. Liner notes.
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
J-Bo - Kumbaya
Topic: Rap
Rap developed as a verbal form within African-American popular culture, and, after the success of Straight out of Compton in 1988, [1] within the music industry. [2] As previous posts have shown, [3] it evolved from individuals making random comments, to a verse-chorus format that introduced some thematic unity, to Grandmaster Flash’s "The Message," which imposed unity on the verses as well.
Ice-T added narrative techniques in "Cop Killer" in 1992. [4] Instead of describing his own experience, he put himself inside the head of someone like Rodney King, who was beaten by Los Angeles policemen in 1991. When people criticized him for his asocial views, he was able to say
"All I’m doing on this record is playing a character I invented who’s fed up with police abuse. He’s not the average person who just figured out after the Rodney King incident that police brutality exists. This particular character has seen it too long and he loses it and goes on a rampage." [5]
J-Bo took on the persona of a killer in his 2014 version of "Kumbaya." The first-person verses primarily were threats to a woman, interspersed with a chorus that began
"Kumbaya kumbaya
Chop a head on wise
Since somebody died
Kumbaya kumbaya
Now they’re wearing black"
and ended with repetitions of "kumbaya." The second iteration of the chorus added "oh my God, oh my God."
J-Bo clearly enunciated his words in the verses in a deep voice that was accompanied by a synthetic rhythm. A synthesizer was added on the chorus. There the male voice may have been electronically altered, since it was higher, faster, and harder to understand.
The two kumbaya’s were spoken in a monotone with each syllable given the same duration, but a slight emphasis on the last. The second repetition was lower than the first. Perhaps the slightly menacing delivery was the entire meaning of the reference.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: J-Bo
Vocal Group: other voices made occasional comments in the background.
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: electronic
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bi AH
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: God
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: ABABAB
Singing Style: chanted
Notes on Performers
Jeffrey Ray Grigsby grew up in Decatur, Georgia, in the years after the white town had turned Black with the expansion of Atlanta in the 1960s. [6] He and Sean Paul Joseph began performing together when they were in middle school. They began recording as the Youngbloodz in 1999, and had their greatest success with an album produced by Lil Jon [7] in 2003. By then they were known as J-Bo and Sean P. [8]
Sometime after their bus was stopped in 2006 for expired plates and everyone was arrested for possession of marijuana and concealed weapons, the two went their separate ways. The driver was later the one charged, [9] but they were the ones whose reputations were tarnished, not with fans, but with booking agents and record distributers.
Availability
MP3: Only the Strong Survive. 26 November 2014.
End Notes
1. N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton. Ruthless Records SL 57102. 1988. (Discogs’ entry for album)
2. Wikipedia. "N.W.A."
3. See posts for three previous entries posted 22 March 2018, 24 March 2018, and 26 March 2018.
4. Body Count. Body Count. Warner Brothers Records 9 26878-2. 30 March 1992. (Discogs’ entry for album)
5. Ice-T [Tracy Morrow]. Quoted by Chuck Philips. "‘Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining’: A Q & A with Ice-T about rock, race and the ‘Cop Killer’ furor." Los Angeles Times website. 19 July 1992.
6. Wikipedia. "Decatur, Georgia."
7. For more on Lil Jon, see post for 22 March 2018.
8. Wikipedia. "YoungBloodZ."
9. Wikipedia, YoungBloodZ.
Rap developed as a verbal form within African-American popular culture, and, after the success of Straight out of Compton in 1988, [1] within the music industry. [2] As previous posts have shown, [3] it evolved from individuals making random comments, to a verse-chorus format that introduced some thematic unity, to Grandmaster Flash’s "The Message," which imposed unity on the verses as well.
Ice-T added narrative techniques in "Cop Killer" in 1992. [4] Instead of describing his own experience, he put himself inside the head of someone like Rodney King, who was beaten by Los Angeles policemen in 1991. When people criticized him for his asocial views, he was able to say
"All I’m doing on this record is playing a character I invented who’s fed up with police abuse. He’s not the average person who just figured out after the Rodney King incident that police brutality exists. This particular character has seen it too long and he loses it and goes on a rampage." [5]
J-Bo took on the persona of a killer in his 2014 version of "Kumbaya." The first-person verses primarily were threats to a woman, interspersed with a chorus that began
"Kumbaya kumbaya
Chop a head on wise
Since somebody died
Kumbaya kumbaya
Now they’re wearing black"
and ended with repetitions of "kumbaya." The second iteration of the chorus added "oh my God, oh my God."
J-Bo clearly enunciated his words in the verses in a deep voice that was accompanied by a synthetic rhythm. A synthesizer was added on the chorus. There the male voice may have been electronically altered, since it was higher, faster, and harder to understand.
The two kumbaya’s were spoken in a monotone with each syllable given the same duration, but a slight emphasis on the last. The second repetition was lower than the first. Perhaps the slightly menacing delivery was the entire meaning of the reference.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: J-Bo
Vocal Group: other voices made occasional comments in the background.
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: electronic
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: koom bi AH
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: God
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: ABABAB
Singing Style: chanted
Notes on Performers
Jeffrey Ray Grigsby grew up in Decatur, Georgia, in the years after the white town had turned Black with the expansion of Atlanta in the 1960s. [6] He and Sean Paul Joseph began performing together when they were in middle school. They began recording as the Youngbloodz in 1999, and had their greatest success with an album produced by Lil Jon [7] in 2003. By then they were known as J-Bo and Sean P. [8]
Sometime after their bus was stopped in 2006 for expired plates and everyone was arrested for possession of marijuana and concealed weapons, the two went their separate ways. The driver was later the one charged, [9] but they were the ones whose reputations were tarnished, not with fans, but with booking agents and record distributers.
Availability
MP3: Only the Strong Survive. 26 November 2014.
End Notes
1. N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton. Ruthless Records SL 57102. 1988. (Discogs’ entry for album)
2. Wikipedia. "N.W.A."
3. See posts for three previous entries posted 22 March 2018, 24 March 2018, and 26 March 2018.
4. Body Count. Body Count. Warner Brothers Records 9 26878-2. 30 March 1992. (Discogs’ entry for album)
5. Ice-T [Tracy Morrow]. Quoted by Chuck Philips. "‘Arnold Schwarzenegger blew away dozens of cops as the Terminator. But I don't hear anybody complaining’: A Q & A with Ice-T about rock, race and the ‘Cop Killer’ furor." Los Angeles Times website. 19 July 1992.
6. Wikipedia. "Decatur, Georgia."
7. For more on Lil Jon, see post for 22 March 2018.
8. Wikipedia. "YoungBloodZ."
9. Wikipedia, YoungBloodZ.
Monday, March 26, 2018
BrUceBuNgi - Cry Pray Kumbaya
Topic: Rap
Politics was inherent in early rap. As soon as members of Grandmaster Flash went beyond proclaiming their greatness to describing their physical environment on "The Message" in 1982, [1] rap became political to people who did not want to hear accounts of daily experiences from African Americans. While it featured two rappers, the record developed the same theme from two perspectives, with the parts held together by a recurring quatrain.
Bruce Bungi adopted the format in his response to the spate of unpunished police shootings of unarmed Black men in 2016. [2] The video featured photographs, lists of names, stills from videos of police brutality, and leaflet art. The musical accompaniment was limited to drums and a rattle with a woman’s voice vocalizing in the upper register.
He began with the disparity in white’s responses to school massacres and to the killing of individual African Americans:
"King Kong can shoot up a school with oh well
That white boy’s crazy right
We need help
But if I’m shot with my baby the unparallel is unnoticed
I must have been a target
Must have had a gun about to shoot with both my arms"
After describing several fatal contacts of Black men with corrupt policemen, he observed
"Everybody got solutions but no action
I don’t know what to do
That’s why I askin’"
All he knew for sure was the official response, summarized as "cry pray kumbaya" at the very end, was inadequate.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: male voice doubled
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: female voice sang "la la"
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums, rattle
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BAH yah
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: not mentioned
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: free form
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: unvarying accompaniment
Singing Style: chanted with strong cadence
Notes on Performers
Rayshawn Lane was born in 1989, seven years after the release of "The Message." He grew up in the Smurf Village section [3] of Bedford-Stuyvesant at the intersection of Utica Avenue and Fulton Street. [4] He began releasing his own material as Bruce Bungi in 2009. He said his inspirations included "Eminem Jay z and the great notorious big who are also former residents of the Bedford Stuyvesant section in Brooklyn." [5]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by 450BuNgi on 8 July 2016.
End Notes
1. Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five. "The Message." Sugar Hill Records SH-584. 1982. (Discogs entry for album.) Rolling Stone listed it as the most influential of "The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time" on its website.
2. His YouTube notes explained: "ALL THESE SHOOTINGS I KEEP TRYING TO IGNORE BUT I CANT I HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING HAD TO PUT IN A SONG."
3. "BrUce BuNgi." Biography posted by Reverb Nation for "Quiet Storm." Also available on other websites.
4. "NYC neighborhood and street nicknames (Bedford, Medina: building, island, venue)." City-Data website. Entry on Smurf Village posted by Seventh Floor on 22 January 2010.
5. Bungi bio. While Jay-Z was from Bedford-Stuyvesant and The Notorious B. I. G. from the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn that bordered Bed-Stuy, Eminem was raised in Missouri and Detroit according to their entries in Wikipedia.
Politics was inherent in early rap. As soon as members of Grandmaster Flash went beyond proclaiming their greatness to describing their physical environment on "The Message" in 1982, [1] rap became political to people who did not want to hear accounts of daily experiences from African Americans. While it featured two rappers, the record developed the same theme from two perspectives, with the parts held together by a recurring quatrain.
Bruce Bungi adopted the format in his response to the spate of unpunished police shootings of unarmed Black men in 2016. [2] The video featured photographs, lists of names, stills from videos of police brutality, and leaflet art. The musical accompaniment was limited to drums and a rattle with a woman’s voice vocalizing in the upper register.
He began with the disparity in white’s responses to school massacres and to the killing of individual African Americans:
"King Kong can shoot up a school with oh well
That white boy’s crazy right
We need help
But if I’m shot with my baby the unparallel is unnoticed
I must have been a target
Must have had a gun about to shoot with both my arms"
After describing several fatal contacts of Black men with corrupt policemen, he observed
"Everybody got solutions but no action
I don’t know what to do
That’s why I askin’"
All he knew for sure was the official response, summarized as "cry pray kumbaya" at the very end, was inadequate.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: male voice doubled
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: female voice sang "la la"
Rhythm Accompaniment: drums, rattle
Credits
None given
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: kum BAH yah
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: not mentioned
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: free form
Verse Repetition Pattern: none
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: unvarying accompaniment
Singing Style: chanted with strong cadence
Notes on Performers
Rayshawn Lane was born in 1989, seven years after the release of "The Message." He grew up in the Smurf Village section [3] of Bedford-Stuyvesant at the intersection of Utica Avenue and Fulton Street. [4] He began releasing his own material as Bruce Bungi in 2009. He said his inspirations included "Eminem Jay z and the great notorious big who are also former residents of the Bedford Stuyvesant section in Brooklyn." [5]
Availability
YouTube: uploaded by 450BuNgi on 8 July 2016.
End Notes
1. Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five. "The Message." Sugar Hill Records SH-584. 1982. (Discogs entry for album.) Rolling Stone listed it as the most influential of "The 50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs of All Time" on its website.
2. His YouTube notes explained: "ALL THESE SHOOTINGS I KEEP TRYING TO IGNORE BUT I CANT I HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING HAD TO PUT IN A SONG."
3. "BrUce BuNgi." Biography posted by Reverb Nation for "Quiet Storm." Also available on other websites.
4. "NYC neighborhood and street nicknames (Bedford, Medina: building, island, venue)." City-Data website. Entry on Smurf Village posted by Seventh Floor on 22 January 2010.
5. Bungi bio. While Jay-Z was from Bedford-Stuyvesant and The Notorious B. I. G. from the Clinton Hill section of Brooklyn that bordered Bed-Stuy, Eminem was raised in Missouri and Detroit according to their entries in Wikipedia.
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Ether Minded People - Kumbaya
Topic: Rap
Rap began as an African-American genre with roots that penetrated through popular culture into the dozens, an improvisational rhyming game played by adolescents. DJ Hollywood, mentioned in the post for 22 March 2018, remembered their more public manifestations:
"I cannot take nothing away from people like Oscar Brown Jr., Pigmeat Markham, the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, the Watts Prophets, Rudy Ray Moore, I used to listen to all of them." [1]
The dozens provided a shared fame of reference for early fans, before the rap became self-perpetuating. Young men could draw on what they’d done or heard to experiment with the new music form in the late 1970s, and their audiences already had an aesthetic that allowed them to judge skill and appreciate innovation.
More than forty years have passed since Hollywood made his first experiments in rapping. Several generations of young men have come of age since then knowing nothing but rap from their earliest years. Tim Moore, So Nice of Ether Minded People, said he first got interested in rap because his father was a poet who used music to get himself through Vietnam. [2]
Raheem Jaleel, who was a member of the same group in 2016, said when he was five or six his seventeen-year-old uncle was a DJ into hip-hop, break dancing, and spray painting. The house was filled with musicians until his uncle joined the navy when Jaleel was ten or eleven. [3]
Rap became a prism through which all other experiences were seen. "Kumbaya" became just a word with rhythmic properties: any syllable could be stressed without altering its utility.
Ether Minded People’s 2017 version use the verse-chorus format mentioned in the post for 22 March 2018 with three rapped verses that drew on the braggadocio of the dozens ("I don’t never brag or boast/Man I just leave ’em") or used extended rhyme patterns. In one, a word slowly transformed into another as it was pronounced: "say the gifts/I found a glitch inside their prese-dents." In another, one rhyme stream led, by association, into another:
"Out of the smoke, out of the dope
There’s hope for the hood and good
The whole waters the neighborhood"
The chorus repeated "coming in like a kumbaya/with a do my G, my God whatcha talkin’ about?" and ended with "coming in like a kumbaya, kumbaya, kumbaya."
"Whatcha talkin’ about" was an example of the way rap artists digested popular songs and regurgitated them in new forms. It recalled the opening scene in the Broadway musical The Music Man in which a group of salesmen were talking on a train. The changing pace of their speech mirrored the train’s motions as it started and slowed at stations. One salesman periodically introduced the sound of steel wheels on iron rails when he asked: "Whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayataalk." [4]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: at least two men, one with a deeper voice
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum beats
Credits
© 2017 Meant 2 B Made
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: KOOM bah yah
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I, we
Term for Deity: God
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: binary (verse-chorus)
Singing Style: chanted
Instrumental Style: the synthesizer played the down beats, and the drum machine the up beats.
Notes on Performers
Jaleel and Moore formed the group in 2012 in Oceanside, California, with Eric Plascencia. The two African Americans previously had worked together in another group. [5] Jaleel apparently left, and Moore often worked with others, but no third name was permanently associated with Moore and Plascencia in the videos uploaded to YouTube. [6]
Plascencia, who used the name, Ether P, said he first became aware of hip hop when he was about ten years old. [7] He graduated from Oceanside High School in 2009, where he played football. [8] He remembered around 2012, "rhymes just started popping in my head, and I started writing them down." [9] Judging from the YouTube video credits he was the one with knowledge about recording with mechanical music. [10]
Availability
MP3: Gone Ether. 27 July 2017.
End Notes
1. DJ Hollywood [Anthony Holloway]. Quoted by Mark Skillz. "DJ Hollywood: The Original King of New York in 1970s." Cuepoint website. 19 November 2014.
2. So Nice [Tim Moore]. On Chi Bully [Donte Tucker]. "Ether Minded People" segment, My DJ’s Radio Spotlight. Uploaded to Youtube by MYDJs Radio TV on 28 March 2016.
3. Raheem Jaleel. On Chi Bully.
4. Meredith Wilson. "Rock Island." The Music Man. New York: Majestic Theater, 19 December 1957.
5. Jaleel.
6. "The [People]" was performed by So Nice, Ether P, and Ether Child in a video uploaded by Ether Minded People on 4 June 2016. In a video uploaded on 16 October 2016 by Either Minded People, So Nice, Ether P, and Swampstick June performed an untitled rap together.
7. Ether P [Eric Plascencia.] On Chi Bully.
8. "Eric Plascencia." Max Preps website.
9. Ether P.
10. The two videos mentioned in #6 were "Mixed & Recorded by: Eric ‘Ether P.’ Plascencia."
Rap began as an African-American genre with roots that penetrated through popular culture into the dozens, an improvisational rhyming game played by adolescents. DJ Hollywood, mentioned in the post for 22 March 2018, remembered their more public manifestations:
"I cannot take nothing away from people like Oscar Brown Jr., Pigmeat Markham, the Last Poets, Gil Scott Heron, the Watts Prophets, Rudy Ray Moore, I used to listen to all of them." [1]
The dozens provided a shared fame of reference for early fans, before the rap became self-perpetuating. Young men could draw on what they’d done or heard to experiment with the new music form in the late 1970s, and their audiences already had an aesthetic that allowed them to judge skill and appreciate innovation.
More than forty years have passed since Hollywood made his first experiments in rapping. Several generations of young men have come of age since then knowing nothing but rap from their earliest years. Tim Moore, So Nice of Ether Minded People, said he first got interested in rap because his father was a poet who used music to get himself through Vietnam. [2]
Raheem Jaleel, who was a member of the same group in 2016, said when he was five or six his seventeen-year-old uncle was a DJ into hip-hop, break dancing, and spray painting. The house was filled with musicians until his uncle joined the navy when Jaleel was ten or eleven. [3]
Rap became a prism through which all other experiences were seen. "Kumbaya" became just a word with rhythmic properties: any syllable could be stressed without altering its utility.
Ether Minded People’s 2017 version use the verse-chorus format mentioned in the post for 22 March 2018 with three rapped verses that drew on the braggadocio of the dozens ("I don’t never brag or boast/Man I just leave ’em") or used extended rhyme patterns. In one, a word slowly transformed into another as it was pronounced: "say the gifts/I found a glitch inside their prese-dents." In another, one rhyme stream led, by association, into another:
"Out of the smoke, out of the dope
There’s hope for the hood and good
The whole waters the neighborhood"
The chorus repeated "coming in like a kumbaya/with a do my G, my God whatcha talkin’ about?" and ended with "coming in like a kumbaya, kumbaya, kumbaya."
"Whatcha talkin’ about" was an example of the way rap artists digested popular songs and regurgitated them in new forms. It recalled the opening scene in the Broadway musical The Music Man in which a group of salesmen were talking on a train. The changing pace of their speech mirrored the train’s motions as it started and slowed at stations. One salesman periodically introduced the sound of steel wheels on iron rails when he asked: "Whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayataalk." [4]
Performers
Vocal Soloist: at least two men, one with a deeper voice
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: synthesizer
Rhythm Accompaniment: drum beats
Credits
© 2017 Meant 2 B Made
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: KOOM bah yah
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I, we
Term for Deity: God
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: binary (verse-chorus)
Singing Style: chanted
Instrumental Style: the synthesizer played the down beats, and the drum machine the up beats.
Notes on Performers
Jaleel and Moore formed the group in 2012 in Oceanside, California, with Eric Plascencia. The two African Americans previously had worked together in another group. [5] Jaleel apparently left, and Moore often worked with others, but no third name was permanently associated with Moore and Plascencia in the videos uploaded to YouTube. [6]
Plascencia, who used the name, Ether P, said he first became aware of hip hop when he was about ten years old. [7] He graduated from Oceanside High School in 2009, where he played football. [8] He remembered around 2012, "rhymes just started popping in my head, and I started writing them down." [9] Judging from the YouTube video credits he was the one with knowledge about recording with mechanical music. [10]
Availability
MP3: Gone Ether. 27 July 2017.
End Notes
1. DJ Hollywood [Anthony Holloway]. Quoted by Mark Skillz. "DJ Hollywood: The Original King of New York in 1970s." Cuepoint website. 19 November 2014.
2. So Nice [Tim Moore]. On Chi Bully [Donte Tucker]. "Ether Minded People" segment, My DJ’s Radio Spotlight. Uploaded to Youtube by MYDJs Radio TV on 28 March 2016.
3. Raheem Jaleel. On Chi Bully.
4. Meredith Wilson. "Rock Island." The Music Man. New York: Majestic Theater, 19 December 1957.
5. Jaleel.
6. "The [People]" was performed by So Nice, Ether P, and Ether Child in a video uploaded by Ether Minded People on 4 June 2016. In a video uploaded on 16 October 2016 by Either Minded People, So Nice, Ether P, and Swampstick June performed an untitled rap together.
7. Ether P [Eric Plascencia.] On Chi Bully.
8. "Eric Plascencia." Max Preps website.
9. Ether P.
10. The two videos mentioned in #6 were "Mixed & Recorded by: Eric ‘Ether P.’ Plascencia."
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Questa Beat - No Kum Ba Yah
Topic: Rap
The terms rap and hip hop have been used interchangeably although they referred to different aspects of a performance. Rap usually referred to rhymed texts that were chanted, while hip hop might have referred to the music, the performance, or the life style of the artist.
The immediate origins of rap lay in the clubs of New York City during the disco period. Entrepreneurial disk jockeys played their private caches of records, which they often introduced with rhymed couplets. Some also spoke over the instrumental breaks in songs. DJ Hollywood was the first to chant on the beats of records with a conscious use of vocal intonations in 1975. His most significant innovation was repeating lyrics from an Isaac Hayes song during the break in MFSB’s "Love Is the Message." [1]
Early rap lyrics used end rhyme. Then, according to Masta Ace, "Rakim showed us that you could put rhymes within a rhyme, so you put more than one word in a line that rhymed together, so it didn’t have to be just the last word. Now here comes Big Daddy Kane—instead of going three words, he’s going multiple, seven and eight words in a sentence." [2]
In "No Kum Ba Yah" Questa Beat first set a dark mood by saying "I gotta paranoid like Watts," then added "ain’t in the same class as the Columbine." This was followed by short phrases that ended with front line, lunch line, gun line, and drum line.
Later he used initial repetition to repeat "double to cash," "double to work," and "double to burst." From there he bragged "I’m so good I don’t gotta rehearse" and referred to an ancient curse. Both incremental repetition and end rhyme were used in:
"I coulda been a ruler but I never give a inch
I coulda been a leader but I never give a shit"
Rap developed from Hollywood’s interjected rhymes into independent songs. Questa’s fell into the standard verse-chorus format, with a rapped verse that focused on him. The music was electronic. It began with a long sustained tone that ended with the sounds of a missile ready to strike. Then he began rapping against the sustained tone and a muted drum machine.
The line "’til you understand" and the sound of another missile marked the beginning of the chorus. The electronic instrument began playing a melody while Questa chanted:
"All my N**s like hassan
Tell them no kumbaya"
four times, and ended with one final iteration of the first line. The droned resumed with the rap, and ended with a repetition of the chorus.
"Hassan," according to the Urban Dictionary, referred to an awesome man who attracted all the women. [3] "Kumbaya" seems to have been used here as a synonym for hyperbole. However, the references to Armageddon and the missile sounds implied punning references to Saddam Hussein’s war in Iraq and "Kumbaya" as an opposing peace symbol, or, more simply to his opening theme that physical dangers threatened his tranquility. Rap worked best when meanings were fluid.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: male in tenor range
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: electronic sounds
Rhythm Accompaniment: muted drum machine
Credits
© 2017 Questa Beat
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: he used little rhythm in his accompaniment, and thus his voice had to supply both the melody and the rhythm. This meant he had to make a sound on every single beat, even if it was just an interjection or a loud breath.
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: his own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: instrumental drone supported a vocal part
Singing Style: chant
Notes on Performance
Cover: drawing of a young man wearing a black baseball cap with "Danny tha Great" inscribed in white across the front crown.
Notes on Performers
Questa Beat graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011. [4] While the school had the lowest graduation rate in Atlanta, [5] it also had one of the best marching bands. In 2005 its drum line was the best in the city, and won competitions in 2011. [6]
Lil Jon, the first of the Atlanta rappers to emerge in the late 1990s, graduated from Douglass in 1988. [7] In 2010, he released a new album that Billboard described as "a fusion of hip-hop, rock and electro." [8] While Questa may have borrowed the idea of electronic tones from Lil Jon, he may have been discovered the potentials of the word "cash" from a rapper who graduated from Douglass in 2012, the year after him. Lil Fat was responsible for a "viral hit ‘cash me outside’," according to Wikipedia. [9]
Availability
MP3: Till U Understand. 25 March 2017.
YouTube: uploaded by TuneCore on 24 March 2017.
End Notes
1. Mark Skillz. "DJ Hollywood: The Original King of New York in 1970s." Cuepoint website. 19 November 2014. He was born Anthony Holloway.
2. Masta Ace [Duval Clear]. Quoted by Paul Edwards. How to Rap: The Art & Science of the Hip-Hop MC. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009. 105.
3. On 2 May 2008, Xavier Zero said a hussan "usually ends up with all the hot girls.Hussan; is the coolest guy you will ever see." Two years later, on 21 June 2010, YouIsNoob defined a Hussain "as the best type of person around--noble, worthy, respectful, and..... awesomeness." On 18 November 2011, hollieanarray claimed a hasan was "a very good-looking guy," but anti-social because he "a very good-looking guy." However, the "girlsstill give him way too much attention which he pretends turns him off." All from Urban Dictionary website.
4. "About Questa Beat." Facebook.
5. Molly Bloom. "Atlanta’s Douglass High School Gets Another New Principal." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website. 23 March 2016.
6. Wikipedia. "Douglass High School (Atlanta)."
7. Wikipedia, Douglass HS. His name was Jonathan Smith (Wikipedia. "Lil Jon.")
8. Mariel Concepcion. "Old Yeller." Billboard 3 April 2010. 37.
9. Wikipedia, Douglass HS.
The terms rap and hip hop have been used interchangeably although they referred to different aspects of a performance. Rap usually referred to rhymed texts that were chanted, while hip hop might have referred to the music, the performance, or the life style of the artist.
The immediate origins of rap lay in the clubs of New York City during the disco period. Entrepreneurial disk jockeys played their private caches of records, which they often introduced with rhymed couplets. Some also spoke over the instrumental breaks in songs. DJ Hollywood was the first to chant on the beats of records with a conscious use of vocal intonations in 1975. His most significant innovation was repeating lyrics from an Isaac Hayes song during the break in MFSB’s "Love Is the Message." [1]
Early rap lyrics used end rhyme. Then, according to Masta Ace, "Rakim showed us that you could put rhymes within a rhyme, so you put more than one word in a line that rhymed together, so it didn’t have to be just the last word. Now here comes Big Daddy Kane—instead of going three words, he’s going multiple, seven and eight words in a sentence." [2]
In "No Kum Ba Yah" Questa Beat first set a dark mood by saying "I gotta paranoid like Watts," then added "ain’t in the same class as the Columbine." This was followed by short phrases that ended with front line, lunch line, gun line, and drum line.
Later he used initial repetition to repeat "double to cash," "double to work," and "double to burst." From there he bragged "I’m so good I don’t gotta rehearse" and referred to an ancient curse. Both incremental repetition and end rhyme were used in:
"I coulda been a ruler but I never give a inch
I coulda been a leader but I never give a shit"
Rap developed from Hollywood’s interjected rhymes into independent songs. Questa’s fell into the standard verse-chorus format, with a rapped verse that focused on him. The music was electronic. It began with a long sustained tone that ended with the sounds of a missile ready to strike. Then he began rapping against the sustained tone and a muted drum machine.
The line "’til you understand" and the sound of another missile marked the beginning of the chorus. The electronic instrument began playing a melody while Questa chanted:
"All my N**s like hassan
Tell them no kumbaya"
four times, and ended with one final iteration of the first line. The droned resumed with the rap, and ended with a repetition of the chorus.
"Hassan," according to the Urban Dictionary, referred to an awesome man who attracted all the women. [3] "Kumbaya" seems to have been used here as a synonym for hyperbole. However, the references to Armageddon and the missile sounds implied punning references to Saddam Hussein’s war in Iraq and "Kumbaya" as an opposing peace symbol, or, more simply to his opening theme that physical dangers threatened his tranquility. Rap worked best when meanings were fluid.
Performers
Vocal Soloist: male in tenor range
Vocal Group: none
Instrumental Accompaniment: electronic sounds
Rhythm Accompaniment: muted drum machine
Credits
© 2017 Questa Beat
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: he used little rhythm in his accompaniment, and thus his voice had to supply both the melody and the rhythm. This meant he had to make a sound on every single beat, even if it was just an interjection or a loud breath.
Vocabulary
Pronoun: I
Special Terms: street language
Basic Form: verse-chorus
Verse Repetition Pattern: three repetitions of chorus
Ending: none
Notes on Music
Opening Phrase: his own
Tempo: moderate
Basic Structure: instrumental drone supported a vocal part
Singing Style: chant
Notes on Performance
Cover: drawing of a young man wearing a black baseball cap with "Danny tha Great" inscribed in white across the front crown.
Notes on Performers
Questa Beat graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2011. [4] While the school had the lowest graduation rate in Atlanta, [5] it also had one of the best marching bands. In 2005 its drum line was the best in the city, and won competitions in 2011. [6]
Lil Jon, the first of the Atlanta rappers to emerge in the late 1990s, graduated from Douglass in 1988. [7] In 2010, he released a new album that Billboard described as "a fusion of hip-hop, rock and electro." [8] While Questa may have borrowed the idea of electronic tones from Lil Jon, he may have been discovered the potentials of the word "cash" from a rapper who graduated from Douglass in 2012, the year after him. Lil Fat was responsible for a "viral hit ‘cash me outside’," according to Wikipedia. [9]
Availability
MP3: Till U Understand. 25 March 2017.
YouTube: uploaded by TuneCore on 24 March 2017.
End Notes
1. Mark Skillz. "DJ Hollywood: The Original King of New York in 1970s." Cuepoint website. 19 November 2014. He was born Anthony Holloway.
2. Masta Ace [Duval Clear]. Quoted by Paul Edwards. How to Rap: The Art & Science of the Hip-Hop MC. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009. 105.
3. On 2 May 2008, Xavier Zero said a hussan "usually ends up with all the hot girls.Hussan; is the coolest guy you will ever see." Two years later, on 21 June 2010, YouIsNoob defined a Hussain "as the best type of person around--noble, worthy, respectful, and..... awesomeness." On 18 November 2011, hollieanarray claimed a hasan was "a very good-looking guy," but anti-social because he "a very good-looking guy." However, the "girlsstill give him way too much attention which he pretends turns him off." All from Urban Dictionary website.
4. "About Questa Beat." Facebook.
5. Molly Bloom. "Atlanta’s Douglass High School Gets Another New Principal." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website. 23 March 2016.
6. Wikipedia. "Douglass High School (Atlanta)."
7. Wikipedia, Douglass HS. His name was Jonathan Smith (Wikipedia. "Lil Jon.")
8. Mariel Concepcion. "Old Yeller." Billboard 3 April 2010. 37.
9. Wikipedia, Douglass HS.
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