Shooby Lives!

This is fantastic – I just read that Shooby Taylor has been found and was recently interviewed by Irwin Chusid and Ken Freedman on WFMU. They broadcasted some of Shooby’s home recordings too, which is pretty neat.

RR

I have no idea why Nelly put the extra “r” in the title “Hot In Herre”, but I’m fairly sure it’s not a bit of slang that had existed before Nelly released that single. I’m on shaky ground, definitely – if someone wants to educate me about this, by all means, email me. Nevertheless, I’m very confident that Christina Aguilera’s new single “Dirrty” is just cashing in on Nelly’s liberal use of the letter, a way of forcing a connection to a great summer hit. It’s not the only recent hit it’s borrowing from, either. Here’s an excerpt from an article about Aguilera in yesterday’s New York Times:

…”Dirrty”, the collaboration with Redman…If It sounds a bit like the recent Redman hit “Let’s Get Dirty (I Can’t Get In Da Club)”, that’s no coincidence. Ms. Aguilera says she called Rockwilder, who produced “Let’s Get Dirty”, and told him how much she liked the beat. “He made me a track that was very similar,” she said. “I almost thought it was too similar.” Then she decided to play up the similarity: she brought in Redman, who delivered a rap that made reference to “Let’s Get Dirty” — he even recreated the ape sounds he had made on the original track.

Sounds very promising, I think – kinda Boom Selection, a litte bit “appropriationist pop”/”plagiarhythm”. The article also solicits Aguilera’s opinion about Freelance Hellraiser’s “Stroke Of Genius”, and she gives the answer that I was hoping that she would give: “I really, really loved it. I thought it was dope. That should’ve been how I came out with it in the first place.”

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more, spurred on by Martin’s comments, particularly “…the grace period a single can go through before its remade just got a whole lot shorter.” I think Martin is on to the real truth of the matter, though I don’t share his feeling that bootlegs/bastard pop/whatever you want to call it is a ‘fading novelty’. Really, if anything, that the turnover rate in which one song can be appropriated and made into another has accelerated and has been embraced by the mainstream record industry suggests that while the underground phase may be ending, the overground pop cultural phase is only beginning.

It’s interesting, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. None of this will be very clear for a long time, anyway. If the crassness of the pop idol machine and the corporate record industry somehow allows some very progressive ideas about artistic appropriation and genre mutation to thrive, I’m okay with that so long as it results in something worthwhile. I’m optimistic.