NOVITA’ HJF 2010

Bob Dylan Barred From China, Cancels Some Asian

By Lindsey Lee, Paste Magazine
Bob Dylan was hoping to perform for the first time in mainland China this summer during an Asian tour that also includes stops at a few cities in Japan. But he won’t be able to play in Shanghai, Beijing or anywhere in China, according to The Guardian: Apparently, the Chinese ministry of culture, which has to approve all foreign musical acts before they can perform in China, doesn’t take kindly to Dylan’s former status as a counter-culture icon.

The ministry supposedly started cracking down on performers after Bjork led a chant of “Tibet! Tibet!” during a 2008 concert in Shanghai. Oasis was also refused permission to play in China last summer because of Noel Gallagher’s participation in a Tibet freedom benefit concert during the ‘90s. Because he can’t play in mainland China, Dylan is canceling other dates, including planned shows in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.

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Pitchfork e Erykah Badu

Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh [Motown; 2009]

8.0

Erykah Badu’s a narcissist, but narcissism is her art. The title of her debut album, Baduizm, turned her name into a religion, a concept. On 2008’s New Amerykah: Part One, she sang, “Everything around you see/ The ankhs, the wraps, the plus degrees/ And, yes, even the mysteries– it’s all me.” It’s not that she ignores the world at large, it’s that she invariably draws her observations and opinions back to home base: herself, her family, her experience, her music. She and her boyfriend Jay Electronica took turns tweeting through her third pregnancy. (“I see the head, full of hair” read one Biblically paced message.) She named the baby Mars.

After Baduizm, she kept writing vocal lines and melodies but loosened her song structures to the point that her albums sounded like a series of digressions. The pose she struck on record became increasingly informal. Her final statements became ellipses. The change wasn’t a drop in quality, but a shift in style. Mama’s Gun and Worldwide Underground (from 2000 and 2003, respectively) are albums that, at best, sound like music that was made with no effort and very little planning. And though there’s never any doubt that she’s the center of attention, she started singing like she was off to the side. In its own way, Badu’s music is ambient music: It drifts, ebbs, and flows. The verses don’t have to hang together as long as the mood does.

2008’s New Amerykah Part One was an unusually dark, hard album for her. Instead of the precedent for India.Arie, she was the echo of Sly Stone: fucked-up, long-winded, and overflowing. In her own way, Badu is always protesting something– the way people betray themselves to be accepted by society, the way society forces people to stop being individuals– but New Amerykah was almost like a historical re-enactment of a “protest album”: the government is watching you, America eats its young, etc. The coffeehouse Afrocentrism of Baduizm was wiped out by producers like Madlib and Dilla, whose collage style is as forward-thinking as it is backward-looking.

New Amerykah Two, by comparison, is a return to the kind of music Badu was making in 2003: relaxed, personal funk that scans more like a sketchbook than an album. Considering this album was being promised as soon as Part One came out, I can imagine someone getting pissy at the inclusion of minute-long half-thoughts like “Agitation” and “You Loving Me (Session)”, but… so what? They’re funny, memorable, and most importantly, they’re hers. And her ability to toe the line between sounding effortless and sounding tossed-off is remarkable– it illustrates the big, variable personality she’s always claiming to have. My least favorite song here is actually the one that sounds like she’s really trying: the 10-minute, multi-part “Out My Mind, Just in Time”.

Most of the lyrics here dwell on relationships, which Badu handles with a confidence and informality that most of square-ass, tax-filing society just hasn’t caught up to and probably never will. (“Had two babies, different dudes,” she sang on 2008’s “Me”– “and for them both my love is true.”) Badu wants a window seat and nobody sitting next to her. Badu is fucking your friends and laughs about it. There’s satire, too– “Turn Me Away (Get Munny)”, where she plays a vapid nag who just decided she really, really loves you. There’s a song actually called “Fall in Love (Your Funeral)”. But despite the breadth of attitudes toward love, there’s no angst, which makes it an uplifting experience– it’s like Badu is actually convinced that life goes on.

There’s stuff here that is empty excess– about three minutes of “Love”, for example, or the drowsy instrumental “Incense” (basically a collaboration between Madlib and harpist Kirsten Agnesta). But for the most part I appreciate the ease of the album– it’s really the first time I feel like I’m understanding her, actually. Her art is her life, and her life– like anyone’s– is too messy and varied to contain. Whether or not it’s her responsibility to distill and make sense of it all is beside the point. To invoke Badu logic, Part Two just is what it is– a coherent expression of a big, scattered personality.

— Mike Powell, April 6, 2010

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Per i più danzerini e solo per loro: Zomby Uploads Three New Songs to Soundcloud (Audio).

Qui:

http://soundcloud.com/zomby-r

Zomby has gained a reputation for his frantic old school dance-oriented tunes and for canceling shows—including a huge Brooklyn outdoor concert opening for Animal Collective last summer. But he continues to pump out music, and has uploaded three new tracks to the Soundcloud site.

A couple of these tracks are labeled as “jungle” and it’s not hard to see why—“She Loves Me” continues his fascination with harking back to the early ‘90s genre, while “She Loves Me Not” carries on in a similar vein. “Untitled” is set at a slightly different pace, and just drifts by in a frustratingly short one-minute burst of synthesized beats and deeply buried vocals.

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Alien quasi meglio dei Bastards of Dioniso:-)P

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so de Trento ah bello:-) Fanno tutte le cover der monno ma all’HJF me sembrano un pochetto fuori posto 🙂

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