Tag: jazz

Posted in Album of the Month, Music chat

JULY HIP HOP 50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Q-Tip – The Renaissance

Posted on by GuyHornsby
Q-Tip’s The Renaissance

How to feel old? Realise that hip-hop turns 50 and that when it was born you weren’t even (quite) alive. But it feels pretty incredible to be celebrating a genre of music so wide and vast that is just as strong as a pop-cultural touchstone, a movement, a social bedrock and so much more. So we had to try and pick something out ourselves to celebrate it all.

It shouldn’t be any surprise to listeners of the podcast that I am not the biggest hip-hop head of the four of us. In fact if Joey, David and Nolan are all dipping for the line, I’m still sauntering around the home straight. But this doesn’t mean I don’t love it: I adore so many cuts from its five decade history. But while everyone else was getting into Nas, Public Enemy, NWA or KRS-One, my nerdy teenage self was, well, into pop music, indie and guitars. Yes, I saw the odd track on Top of the Pops, and the Chart Show, even the safest on Now albums (though White Lines is gloriously on Now 3, which I have on vinyl at home), but like dance music, it wasn’t until I went to university that this really changed. So for one, I was a late starter, and for another point, for a long time I was a singles man. So many bangers, so much great tracks through the late 90s and into the 2000s, but did I even own an album before the new millennium? No, I did not.

Given we are all choosing our favourite hip-hop album for Episode 34 of the podcast, unlike the other four, narrowing it down to even ten, I was struggling to even pick 10 I owned and knew. We’ve reviewed some brilliant, epochal albums on the blog before: Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly is a modern classic, RTJ’s RTJ4 was the first episode of what would end up as the podcast, 3 years and counting. We’ve covered Rapsody, Mac Miller, Skyzoo, Apollo Brown, Little Simz, Gangstarr, N.E.R.D, Loyle Carner, Tribe…. in fact I’d go as far as saying that this blog and podcast single-handedly got me into hip-hop albums so amen to that!

But picking one that came to me via elsewhere, nominated by someone else, never felt right, however much I loved it (Tribe’s glorious comeback We Got It From Here was a flirtation though). So I had to go back to the slim pickings and actually work out what I liked in the end that was truly ‘mine’. There were some great albums, just not many! I loved Jurassic 5’s J5, a 1998 classic that I still play now. But while it was fine, it wasn’t one that would want me reaching for the repeat button. Of course, by the 90s and 2000s, I owned classics like 3 Feet High, It Takes A Nation Of Millions, Midnight Marauders, and I’d got and loved Beastie Boys long players, but I wanted to pick one I was there from the start with, and in the end, with my love of sample-based, Native Tongues-adjacent rap, it could only be Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, from 2008.

Now, if you asked me what my two favourite hip-hop acts were, it would be easy to answer: De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. They were incredible musicians, they went against the grain of so much hardcore and hood/gangsta hip-hop that didn’t really connect with me. But I remember seeing De La and that departure from what I thought hip-hop was, as they played with samples, conscious lyrics and it changed things for me. Tribe were not far behind. But in 2008, Q-Tip, their beating heart, released his second solo album: The Renaissance. I pretty much fell in love with it at the time. Melodies and hooks? Tick. Samples galore: tick. Q-Tip’s distinctive flow all on his own? Yep. Funk? HELL YEAH. And then some perfectly pitched guests – D’Angelo, Raphael Saadiq, and (even) Norah Jones. BINGO.

That was enough to get me in, but why is it so good? Because whatever others think – and it’s definitely considered a classic – there’s so many reasons to adore this record. For one, it is so optimistic. It arrived after Obama got into the White House – even with a sample of one of his speeches on Shaka – and seemed to evoke so much of what we all hoped would happen (and that really didn’t). Contrast it with the fantastic comeback from Tribe – We Got It From Here in 2016, to see just how far the world had fallen. From the opening bars of Johnny Is Dead, with its cascading guitar chords and that so distinctive flow (‘What good is an ear if a Q-Tip isn’t it it?’, indeed!) breaking into the harmonies in the chorus. It is simply life-affirmingly good. I challenge anyone to listen and not come out of it feeling better.

It just has so much life, energy, positivity and goodness. The bumping Won’t Trade, trading on soul vocals and Gettin’ Up’s sun-drenched vibes (with that great Black Ivory Sample) it just has you nodding and wondering where this album has been all your life. Across 46 minutes (my perfect hip-hop album length, no hour plus stuff, this is just tight and fizzes along) it goes from introspective break-ups (You), funk and soul half-songs (WeFight/WeLove), the Can-sampling ManWomanBoogie’s head-nodding brilliance (giving props to all the great artists along the way), Move’s all-out maximalism sampling the Jackson 5, and slower jams Life Is Better and Believe. Arguably its strongest effect is from the Dance On Glass, (picking up the hypocrisy of the industry, ‘ The people at the label say they want something to repeat / But all my people really want something for the streets’) with its first minute of just pure unaccompanied flow.

For an album that’s 15 years old, it still absolutely pops. There’s so much to enjoy about it, and it’s so musical, some of the tracks almost songs in their own right, even if its’ a guest vocal or sample, and with Tip let loose to do what he wanted. It’s an artist still at their top of their game, and enjoying the freedom of a solo project. It came with a lot of pressure and history, given a decade after his solo debut, Amplified, and label-denied false starts (the jazzy Kamal the Abstract from 2001 was a niche masterpiece for me too), the Renaissance came with a lot of expectation and delivered. It was when Tribe were on hiatus too, so for a creative like Q-Tip, it must’ve been a real release to put something out so good.

Talking about it ten years on, in an interview with the NME, he mused about where he was and what the album meant: “The Renaissance was about dealing with classic colloquialisms about self.…. I wanted the music to have a sound that stood the test of time, it was all about our humanity. It felt like I had re-entered hip hop. At the time I exited, music was vastly different.” In 2008, it was all about Kanye, Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, a world from Tribe’s heyday. But he delved into not just some of the usual subject matter, but Renaissance was a much more personal album that I’d expected: “You” was hard to go through, but easy to recount. It’s much like going through a break up and telling your boy what happened as therapy. That was to one of my ex-girlfriends, actually.” So it had layers beyond the samples, or the flow. And that’s why I still come back to it.

It’s been a total joy to get back into it. I must have rinsed it 20+ times in the last 6 weeks and I could let it go back round again and again. While I struggle to stick with hip-hop albums, this feels so easy. It has so much of everything I love about the genre in it, and it has an infectious positivity and outlook that seems to be in scant supply 15 years later, with so much of hip-hop on a much darker tip than the time of Tribe and De La (not that they didn’t talk about reality, of course). So it’s a ray of sunshine, a classic artefact of the best of hip-hop, a slice of pre-Trump goodness we could all benefit from a listen to.

And that’s why it’s got my vote.

Posted in Album of the Month

October: Michael Kiwanuka – Kiwanuka

Posted on by GuyHornsby

Yes, brothers, it’s a bit late, but my god, it’s worth the wait. What can you say about Michael Kiwanuka that’s not already been said? Let’s get the cliches out of the way first: he harks back to the best soul musicians of the 60s and 70s, be it Bill Withers, The Isley Brothers, Marvin Gaye, with a twinge of the jazz he so adores, but he brings that soul, that classic guitar into the modern age, (with a little help from the talents of Danger Mouse and Inflo) with electronic touches and flourishes. Oh, and I think we forgot that it’s easy listening, middle-class soul that belies a depth and richness, and a self-criticism that shows underneath the wizadry, there’s real doubt, loss and sadness.

Now that’s over with, let’s talk about what goes outside the usual tick-box talking points. Because in Michael Kiwanuka we have an artist that could be set to ascend to the heights of a modern great, at a time when the music he makes feels beautifully out of step with everything else on show: tracks that you expect to crackle with the fizz of vinyl, that don’t adhere to radio-friendly lengths or structures, (yet get picked up by globally renowned TV shows) however simple they may seem at first sight. Yes, you may say he should’ve been born 30 years earlier, but in some ways, that would’ve meant he’d perhaps sunk back into the ‘really good’ with so many legends around him. Truth be told, we’re lucky he’s around now, because that means he stands out, and – for those of us of a certain age – he beautifully espouses the virtues of proper songwriting.

And yet, it could’ve been so different. In many ways Kiwanuka is an anachronism. An immigrant kid, growing up in a white, middle-class suburb in north London, stripped of some of the struggles that peers may have encountered. Growing up immersed in jazz and soul, rather than hip-hop or r’n’b, a skater (but really, not that good), and dropping out of his dream course at the Royal Academy to write some songs, play them in a pub, and see where it went, assuming it’d be respected session musician, and never Glastonbury headliner, and singer-songwriter that spent years both convinced his own voice wasn’t up to the mark, then when fame finally hit, wracked with self-doubt, a self-labelled impostor that walked out of sessions with Kanye and struggled singing songs about the bleak side of love as he was getting married himself.

But to stick with Kiwanuka is an experience that rewards you, continually. Even the breakout Home Again, and the BBC Sound of 2012 – which seems so incredibly long ago – didn’t seem to quite bring him the expected success he’d been talked up for. It wasn’t until Love And Hate, four years later, that the it felt like the world caught up. It debuted at No.1 in the UK, and was an album that improved with every listen, his voice just drifting into gravelly, lovelorn ennui, cloaked in sadness. It was hard enough to listen to sometimes in good days, let alone when you’d gone through a break-up, or suffered loss. Every track dripped with sadness, with subtle, careworn character that settled like winter snow. And when he found his voice as a black man in the modern world, it gave us musical glory.

So where do you go from here? Radical reinvention? Pastiche? In this case, a bit of that, but mostly taking what made you so loved, and adding layers. But as with his own character, it’s not a brash statement, but something enveloped in a sound so pure, rich and powerful, that it reveals itself slowly. And shows that along with musical growth, Kiwanuka is also starting to feel more at home with himself. The first single, You Ain’t The Problem, finds him coming to the realisation that, whatever tribulations and doubt there is, it’s not himself that’s at the centre of it. Hero is self-questioning, with a video that puts his own contradictions at its heart, but doesn’t put the blame at his own door, and throughout the album, there are songs whose first impact is ‘that’s nice’, but as you delve deeper and let the music wash over you, and the lyrics sink in, you get to enjoy the slow-burning, blossoming joy as the album slowly shifts under your feet, and you just want to listen again, and again, and again.

Not everything, it seems has to be accessible and obvious from the off, and so this gentle but powerful anachronism, at odds with a fast-paced, condensed, over-saturated world, is everything it should be: a current classic, a future classic, and one of the albums of the year. Amen, Michael.