If The Sky Don’t Have Eyes, Tell Me, Why Does It Cry?

I’ll put some more information about these tracks up a little later on, in the meantime enjoy these new mp3s. I’ll be keeping this batch up til around Friday of this week.

Common (featuring Jill Scott) – “I Am Music” This is taken from Common’s excellent new album Electric Circus. It was very hard to narrow down which song to put up here to just one song – I came very close to picking his collaboration with Laetita Sadier “New Wave”, or the successful attempts at fusing psychedelic rock with hip hop on “Aquarius” or “Electric Wire Hustle Flower”. I ended up choosing “I Am Music”, which rather remarkably integrates Big Band jazz, sci-fi whirrrrrrs, and Common’s rapping; and is probably the catchiest and most accessable number on the LP.

I’m really happy to hear an album like Electric Circus, because normally when hip hop artists make efforts to incorporate rock and roll elements into their music, it seems that even in the best results, rock music is reduced to being little more than loud metal guitars and aggressive drumming. A particularly egregious example would be N.E.R.D.’s “Rock Star”, which is a song that seems to place ironic quotations around every nu-metal guitar crunch and hollered lyric. Now, I don’t have a big problem with irony, and “Rock Star” in particular is a pretty clever piss-take on white corporate rap-metal, but it still seems sort of unfortunate that so many artists seem to think that big dumb metal is the only kind of rock music that mixes well with hip hop MCs.

Electric Circus is a very brave album – many of the songs sound completely unlike any other hip hop that’s gone before it – most certainly there’s nothing else in the world quite like “New Wave”. I only wish that song went so far as to make the music over the verses sound as much like Stereolab as on the Laetitia-sung chorus, but that’s a small complaint considering how gorgeous the layers of keyboards are throughout the song. Electric Circus is a great achievement, but I hope that this is just the beginning, and that more MCs follow Common’s lead and begin to raid indie rock, prog, psych, punk, and krautrock for all they are worth in the future. Because after all, why not?

Wendy Rene – “Bar-B-Q” It may not be barbeque weather in most of the world right now, least of all in New York, where we’re still dealing with all of that Christmas day snow; but it’s always a good time to hear this peppy Stax-Volt gem. Ribs and corn-on-the-cob are optional, of course.

Barbara Acklin – “Just Ain’t No Love” I’ve been listening to this song all the time lately, on repeat for up to 30 minutes at a time. This is pretty much a flawless late 60s r+b tune, about as great as pop music gets as far as I’m concerned.

Soft Cell – “Tainted Dub” As mentioned a few months back, here is the fairly rare dub mix of Soft Cell’s big hit cover of “Tainted Love” and “Where Did Our Love Go?”. Good stuff.