hiphop

Robert Glasper Experiment | No One Like You

“For almost a decade, Robert Glasper has been the standard-bearer for jazz music’s fusion with hip-hop, soul, and rock, turning songs like Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and Radiohead’s ‘Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box’ into kinetic electro-funk mashups,” (Pitchfork). “With his Experiment band, Glasper (tends) to leapfrog different genres, making music that’s rooted in jazz and R&B and impossible to peg. ‘My people have given the world so many styles of music,’ Glasper declares at the top of ArtScience (2016), the Experiment’s new album. ‘So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.’

ArtScience follows Black Radio 2, the band’s guest-heavy 2013 LP featuring rappers Common, Snoop Dogg and Lupe Fiasco, and singers Jill Scott and Norah Jones, among many others. On it and the band’s first Black Radio album, the Glasper Experiment mostly stayed in the background, giving room to their guests to shine atop the group’s instrumentals. The formula worked: Black Radio won the 2012 Grammy for Best R&B Album, and ‘Jesus Children’—a Stevie Wonder remake from Black Radio 2, featuring vocalist Lalah Hathaway and actor/poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner—won the 2014 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

For ArtScience, the Experiment keeps things in-house, handling all the vocal work themselves … ArtScience doesn’t play like an R&B or jazz record; it pulls in ’80s funk and ’90s soul without landing any place in particular. For the first time, we get to hear the Experiment let go for a full project, not just on a few songs here and there … ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.”

“No One Like You,” a track from ArtScience, begins in C minor. For its chorus, first heard from 0:36 – 0:53, the tonality shifts to Eb minor before returning to the original key. The two sections continue to alternate throughout the tune.

Lucky Daye | Real Games

Painted by Lucky Daye, a 2019 album release, is ” … a modern twist on traditional soul-funk or ‘Neo-soul.’ (TheModernLifeMag.com). “He grew up in a religious household where secular music was largely prohibited,” (AllMusic). “As a result, he developed his musical abilities by learning melodies through church hymns. After leaving his family’s church as a teenager, he immersed himself in R&B, soul, and funk music, drawing inspiration from artists such as Stevie Wonder, Prince and D’Angelo. Following New Orleans’ devastation by Hurricane Katrina, he relocated to Atlanta, Georgia …

Daye was a 2005 American Idol contestant and “a successful songwriter and background vocalist, with credits as ‘D. Brown’ on tracks by some industry A-listers such as Trey Songz, Ne-Yo, Keith Sweat, Boyz II Men, Mary J. Blige, and many more notable artists.”

The hard-charging funk verses of “Real Games” are built in Bb minor. The choruses, first heard from 0:57 – 1:24, shift to several different Bb major-related modes as they immerse us in a noticeably lighter groove and texture. D’Mile, the track’s co-writer along with Daye, also served as producer for the tune. Daye uses one of his apparently favorite techniques — pitch-shifting his vocal down an octave, sometimes doubled with the original vocal — several times throughout the track.

헤이즈 (Heize) | And July

“Heize is a talented rapper and singer-songwriter from South Korea,” (IMDB). “She’s become one of South Korea’s most successful female solo musicians because of her distinctive sound. She has worked with numerous other musicians; her songs have been well-received both domestically and abroad. Jang Da-hye (her off-stage name) … rose to fame after making her debut in 2014 with the EP Heize and showing up on the second season of the South Korean reality show.

Heize won the 2017 Korean Music Awards for Best Female R&B/Soul Artist. She also won Best OST at the 2017 Melon Music Awards for her song “Round and Round” from the Goblin soundtrack, which she co-wrote with Punch. Her music has also been featured on US television shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Empire. She received a 2018 BET Award nomination for Best International Act.”

Heize’s 2017 track “And July,” featuring a combination of rap and sung melody, is a mix of R+B, funk, and hiphop elements. The track is written in D minor overall, but shifts to Eb major for its noticeably smoother and more lyrical bridge (2:27 – 2:46), featuring lead vocals by collaborator Kwon Hyuk (stage name: Dean) before returning to the original key.

Many thanks to Sri, a longtime MotD reader and first time contributor, for this distinctive submission!

A Tribe Called Quest | Check the Rhime

“If A Tribe Called Quest had stopped with their first album, People’s Instinctive Travels And The Paths Of Rhythm, they’d still be regarded as a seminal hip hop act (BBC) … The laid back style of Q-Tip and Phife Dawg over the jazz sampleology of Ali Shaheed Muhammad, along with the daisy age raps of De La Soul, almost single-handedly defined the alternative rap scene … So when they followed it up with as close to a perfect album, The Low End Theory (1991), their place in history was assured.

Low End… pushed the jazz connection even further with a sparse but not quite minimal selection of grooves built around some exquisitely chosen upright bass samples, and in the case of ‘Verses From The Abstract’ actually utilising the real-time skills of legend Ron Carter … Like its predecessor, it combined humour with insight to show the world that ‘rap’ needn’t be equated with the worst aspects of the American dream. Q-Tip and Phife’s posse flows were, by this point, honed to perfection, with most tracks seeing them bounce off each other like some funked-up game of table tennis … this is another feel-good mix of smart grooves and the wittiest rhymes this side of Noel Coward. Acclaimed as one of the best 100 albums of all time by Rolling Stone, The Low End Theory remains one of hip hop’s defining moments and deserves to be in everyone’s record collection. Probably now more than ever…”

The track opens with an angular, heavily processed sax line that outlines C major and Bb major chords and doesn’t settle easily into any key, but shifts into a much clearer E minor as the first verse starts at 0:28. The two-chord vamp (A/B -> E) that underlies most of the tune is more complex than you might expect: the B bass note hits on beat one, but the A chord is delayed until the “and” of beat 2 and bleeds into the E bass note on beat 1 of the next measure. From 1:49 – 2:08 and again for the outro at 3:28, the C major intro riff returns.

Many thanks to Mark B. for this submission!

Phony Ppl | Why iii Love the Moon

Phony Ppl, a Brooklyn-based band with a neo-soul/hiphop focus, grew out of the school friendship of vocalist Elbie Thrie and keyboardist Aja Grant. “Thrie and Grant met in middle school,” Rolling Stone reports. “’We found out we lived two blocks from each other. It was the first time my parents would let me out of the house by myself, to go to Elbie’s: Oh, he’ll be okay. They’re playing music.‘ … A lot of our influences were us listening to new music that was actually super old music from the Sixties and Seventies.’”

Members of the band delved into music study at Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, the School of Rock, and learning on the fly in musical theatre pit bands. Rolling Stone continues: “’Why iii Love the Moon,’ a hypnotic ballad on Yesterday’s Tomorrow (2015) combining vintage Earth, Wind and Fire with Kaya-style Bob Marley, that began as a voice memo … ‘Aja had the chords; I had the concept. We actually put the first time we played it on the record. That’s what you hear, us testing everything.’ Thrie smiles. ‘We tried to make it sound more shitty. But that’s the original tape.’”

After a dreamy intro, the track starts in earnest in Eb minor at 0:26. From 3:34 – 3:55, a trippy bridge shifts gears and airdrops us into B minor. The casually improvised percussion hints at the the tune’s homegrown origins as a voice memo. At 4:36, we’re suddenly back in Eb for the duration.

Dappy | No Regrets

North London MC/vocalist Dappy, born Costadinos Contostavlos, most prominently worked with the trio N-Dubz before going solo, reports AllMusic. “After several years of plugging away on the pirate radio scene … they went on to score a number one single alongside Tinchy Stryder (‘Number 1’), several MOBO Awards, and three Top 20 albums … “

In 2011, Dappy went on to release his debut solo single, “No Regrets.” The lyrics are about moving on from the past — perhaps not surprising, given the artist’s penchant for controversy in the UK tabloids. Songfacts notes that “the song’s elevation to pole position was the eleventh successive UK #1 by a British artist. This beat the all-time record set between January and July 1963, when there were 10 consecutive chart-toppers by a domestic act.”

Fusing elements of pop and hiphop, the tune shifts up a half-step at 3:14. A complete disappearance of the groove telegraphs the modulation’s arrival.

Fresh Prince: Google Translated

In 2013, Mother Jones magazine asked “what happens when highly trained musicians and actors do Broadway and pop culture with a meta twist?” The answer is CDZA, short for Collective Cadenza. CDZA creates “viral videos starring Juilliard-trained musicians, local rock and jazz artists, Broadway singers, and sketch comedians — done in a single Steadicam shot. ‘Our creative process looks like us sitting in an apartment, saying, this would be funny, this would be cool — and then we begin to divide and conquer.’”

The process for 2013’s “Fresh Prince: Google Translated,” according to Joe Sabia, the group’s lead “conceptor”/director: “’One of our main things is producing videos that also serve as a commentary on American culture. Google Translate is something everyone uses, so we put together a song everyone knows and a device everyone knows.’”

This expanded version of the tune is built on the theme from the wildly popular 1990s sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Featuring a much stronger accompaniment than the original, the entire tune centers around a I minor –> bVII major/I vamp. As the lyrics grow progressively more inane with each pass through Google Translate, the key ascends a half-step at 2:02, 2:27, and 3:09.

Kali Uchis (feat. Bootsy Collins) | After the Storm

Colombian-American R&B/Neo-Soul songstress Kali Uchis released “After the Storm” in 2018. This whimsical track features collaborators Tyler the Creator and funk bassist / vocalist / icon William “Bootsy” Collins.

“The saying ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is a perfect way to describe this new track,” (ListenMag). “A silky smooth bass groove (provided by none other than Bootsy himself) which plays along the bouncing synths, transports you to an era of love, soul, and funk.”

Modulations hit at 1:43, 2:07, as the bridge starts at 2:31, and 3:07.

Beck, Robyn + The Lonely Island | Super Cool (from “Lego Movie 2”)

The closing credit sequence for Lego Movie 2 (2019) has something for everyone, including a smile or two for the parents in the audience for its unapologetic “pro-credits = pro-reading” stance. Beck, Robyn, and The Lonely Island collaborated on this funk/pop/hiphop track. The tune starts in A major, drops a rollercoaster instrumental mini-bridge at 2:28, and lands in B major at 2:32.

Pharrell Williams | Number One

R&B/pop phenom Pharrell Williams is best known for his worldwide smash hit “Happy.” Earlier in his career, he released “Number One,” featuring a somewhat more sane version of Kanye West. The 2006 tune features a lot of descending chromatic bass motion — rather unusual. The intro (through 0:17) is based on a 4-chord vamp built around F# major, but the first verse (0:17 – 0:53) drops down into an F major/E minor vamp (the F major serving as a “sub V” for E minor.) The chorus, starting at 0:53, reverts to the same setup as the intro; subsequent verses and choruses follow suit.