JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to A Tribe Called Quest.
Tag: hip hop
Throwback: Black History Month: Public Enemy
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Public Enemy.
Throwback: Black History Month: Queen Latifah
JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month — and pays tribute to Queen Latifah.
New Video: Staten Island’s Elaine Kristal Teams up with Produkt and Herve Alexandre on an Earnest and Soulful New Bop
Elaine Kristal is an emerging Staten Island-born and-based singer/songwriter, who can trace the origins of her music career to her childhood: a young music-loving Elaine Kristal took part in school plays at her elementary school — and she sung in the hallways of her school, wearing a bandana and hoop earrings, inspired by Alicia Keys.
She started performing her own music with one of her best friends, Mikey Fuego at a local open mic. The young, Staten Island-born and-based singer/songwriter quickly began to realize that people were coming to see her perform — and were learning the lyrics to her songs. When the entire place started singing along, Kristal realized she needed to seriously pursue music. “It’s a high I will never forget, and one I want to have for the rest of my life,” she says.
Last year, R&B singer Tank launched the “Can We Talk Challenge” on Tik Tok. The challenge required participants to sing the hook to Tevin Campbell‘s 1993 hit single. Kristal, refused to sit on the sidelines, knowing she could contribute to the challenge while making one of her favorite vocalists proud. Her contribution quickly amassed over 40,000 views with the video being favorited over 400 times.
Naturally, the Staten Island-born and-based vocalist was ecstatic by the positive response she received. Then a Tik Tok user questioned the young, emerging artist’s talent and ability in the comments. She responded swiftly, singing the hook to “Can We Talk” a cappella while pounding her fist on a stage platform. “When I saw the comment my first reaction was “Oh word”, he really went there?” explained Elaine. “I take this VERY serious and my pride couldn’t let it go so I just walked over to this stage located in the studio complex I record in and just started pounding my fist while I sang a cappella.” Kristal continues, “Here I am with limited hours in a day trying to divide my time between recording new music, promoting recently released tracks, and preparing for the release of my new new single ‘Nasty In The Morning’ and now I’m replying to thousands of comments on my page.”
In the past year, the #CanWeTalkChallenge has become a viral sensation with thousands of entries across the world and over 20 million views of the hashtag. The Staten Island-based artist has 250,000 of those views, with over 3,000 comments, 48,000 likes — and has seen a 500% growth in followers on the platform. In fact, she’s in the Top 10 of the challenge, alongside X Factor USA season one winner Melanie Amaro and rapper Joyner Lucas while surpassing established artists like Lil Mama, Anthony Hamilton, 112‘s Q and Bobby Valentino. “2021 was hard for so many people including myself, but there were also many developments that made it tough to see last year end” Kristal says.
Elaine Kristal hopes to build upon the momentum of the #CanWeTalkChallenge. Her latest single “Love Over Living” is a slickly produced, radio and club friendly bop that features a soulful saxophone by Herve Alexandre, looping acoustic guitar and skittering, tweeter and woofer rocking trap beats. The Staten Island-based artist’s easy-going vocals effortlessly glide over a production that nods at Mary J. Blige and Alicia Keys-like hip-hop soul, contemporary pop and trap. Interestingly, underneath the contemporary production is a sweet, old-school love song in which the narrator expresses the age old “us against the world, baby” sentiment. Local emcee and labelmate Produkt contributes a couple of lovestruck verses describes how he feels about his “round-the-way girl,” who keeps it real — and is ride or die. It’s honestly, the sort of earnest love song that you don’t hear that you don’t hear too often these days.
As the emerging artist explains the song offers a simple yet profound message of how the power of love can get us through the darkest moments of our lives.
The recently released video for “Love Over Living” portrays the young Staten Island artist as a down-to-earth, round the way girl. We follow the two artists as they drive around town in a gorgeous, turquoise speedster — notably on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the FDR Drive and the West Side Highway. We also see them stop by a neighborhood bodega.
Throwback: Happy 54th Birthday, LL Cool J!
JOVM celebrates LL Cool J’s 54th birthday.
Throwback: Happy 52nd Birthday, Raekwon!
JOVM celebrates Raekwon’s 52nd birthday.
Throwback: Happy 52nd Birthday, Zack de la Rocha!
As it turns out, the first couple of weeks of this month are rather auspicious in music history: John Paul Jones’ birthday was on the third, Michael Stipe‘s birthday was on the fourth David Bowie‘s […]
Live Footage: Genesis Owusu Performs “Gold Chains” on “Late Show with Stephen Colbert”
2017’s Cardrive EP saw Ghanian-born, Canberra, Australia-based, 20-something artist Genesis Owusu — born Kofi Owusu-Anash — quickly establishing himself as a perpetually restless, genre-blurring chameleon with an ability to conjure powerful and deeply personal storytelling in diverse forms. Cardive EP eventually garnered an ARIA Award nomination for Best R&B/Soul Release and praise from Sir Elton John (!), NME, i-D, mixmag and others. Adding to a growing profile across Australia, Owusu has opened for Dead Prez, Col3trane, Sampa The Great, Cosmo’s Midnight, Noname, Animé, Ruel and others.
Back in 2020, Owusu-Anash released a handful of highly-celebrated singles including the fiery mosh-pit friendly banger “Whip Cracker” and the ARIA Award-nominated smash hit “Don’t Need You,” which quickly became the #1 most played song on triple J radio — and since then has received airplay in the UK on both BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 6 and here in the States on KCRW, KUTX, The Current and Alt98. Those singles prominently appear on Owusu-Anash’s critically applauded full-length debut Smiling With No Teeth.
“Smiling With No Teeth is performing what the world wants to see, even if you don’t have the capacity to do so honestly,” Owusu explains in press notes. “Slathering honey on your demons to make them palatable to people who only want to know if you’re okay, if the answer is yes. That’s the idea, turned into beautiful, youthful, ugly, timeless and strange music.” Each of the album’s 15 tracks can trace their origins back to studio jam sessions with a backing band that features Kirin J. Callinan, Touch Sensitive’s Michael DiFrancesco, World Champion‘s Julian Sudek and the album’s producer Andrew Klippel.
In the lead-up to the album’s release, I wrote about three of Smiling With No Teeth‘s singles:
- “The Other Black Dog,” a mind-bending production that meshed alternative hip-hop, industrial clang, clatter, rattle and stomp, off-kilter stuttering beats and wobbling synth arpeggios that was roomy enough for Owusu-Anash’s breathless, rapid-fire and dense flow. Managing to balance club friendliness with sweaty, mosh pit energy, the song is a full-throttled nosedive into madness that reminds me of the drug and booze fueled chaos of ODB, and the menace of DMX.
- “Gold Chains,” a brooding yet seamless synthesis of old school soul, G Funk and Massive Attack-like trip hop centered around shimmering and atmospheric synths, stuttering boom bap beats, squiggling blasts of guitar and the rising Ghanian-born, Canberra-based artist’s Mos Def/Yasiin Bey-like delivery, alternating between spitting dense and dexterous bars and crooning with an achingly tender falsetto. “‘Gold Chains’ got me thinking about the flaws of being in a profession where, more and more, you have to be the product, rather than just the provider of the product, and public misconceptions about how luxurious that is,” Owusu-Anash explains in press notes. “Lyrically, it set the tone for the rest of the album.”
- “Same Thing,” a jolting and uneasy future funk banger centered around shimmering synth arpeggios, skittering beats, bursts of Nile Rodgers-like guitar, a propulsive bass line and infectious hook serving as a silky bed for Owusu’s alternating dexterous and densely worded bars and soulful crooning. But at its core is an unflinchingly honest — and necessary — view of mental health struggles.
Owusu-Anash capped off an enormous 2021 with the Missing Molars EP, a five-track accompaniment to his critically applauded full-length debut. Recorded during the Smiling With No Teeth sessions, the Missing Molars EP material didn’t make the album — but further continue the soul-baring narrative of his debut. “Missing Molars is an extension of Smiling With No Teeth,” Owusu-Anash explains. “A small collection of tracks from the SWNT sessions that take the already established world-building groundwork of the album, and expand that universe into new and unexplored places. These are all tracks that I felt were special in their own right and needed to be shared. This is music without boundaries.”
Recently, Owusu-Anash made his Stateside, late night TV debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he performed SWNT standout single “Gold Chains” along with his backing band.
Throwback: Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis”
A JOVM annual tradition: Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis.”
Throwback: DMX Performs “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Power 105.1
A JOVM annual tradition: DMX performing “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
New Video: Tonio MC’s Love Letter to Paris’ 13th Arrondissement
Tonio MC is an award-winning Paris-based emcee, who has released two albums, 2017’s Déstresse and 2019’s Bons Vivant, Vol. 1. His highly-anticipated third album Drôle D’Oiseau is slated for a 2022 release.
The album’s third and latest single, the Louis Angeles and Aurilen Falconnet co-produced “A L’Envers” finds the award-winning French emcee reflecting on mad world, gone even madder. Written during pandemic-related lockdowns, there’s a sense of the song’s narrator feeling confined and constrained by forces larger than him that he can’t see, control, or understand.
Tonio MC’s dense yet melodic flow is paired with a spectral, jazz-inspired production featuring brooding horns, a looping acoustic guitar sample and skittering, boom bap. The overall effect is a brooding song clearly inspired by its time that somehow evokes longing for when things felt and seemed somehow easier and carefree.
The recently released video was shot in Paris’ 13th Arrondissement. We follow the award-winning French emcee as he walks desolate streets that would be bustling pre-pandemic. The video is intended as a love note as a love note to a section of his hometown that seems to have disappeared and been forgotten — but its spirit and character still remains.
Throwback: Happy 48th Birthday, Yasiin Bey/Mos Def!
JOVM celebrates Yasiin Bey’s 48th birthday.
New Audio: Rising Production Duo Blue Lab Beats Teams Up with Kofi Stone and Tiana Major9 on a Soulful Meditation on Love
Rising, London-based Jazztronica production duo Blue Lab Beats — producer NK-OK and multi-instrumentalist Mr, DM — had rather humble origins, as bedroom producers, who remixed tracks by the likes of Dua Lipa, Rag ‘N’ Bone Man and others. The duo’s sound quickly morphed to incorporate jazz, soul and hip-hop influences while staying true to their British/London roots. Although they’ve started with very humble origins, the British production duo have also quickly exploded into the national and international scenes: they’ve played Glastonbury — and they’ve opened for the likes of the legendary Roy Ayers and Thundercat. They’ve also contributed a remake of Bobby Henderson‘s Blue Note Records‘ classic “Montara,” which appeared on last year’s Blue Note Re: imagined compilation. And adding to a growing profile, the duo’s work has amassed over 25 million streams to date.
2021 has been a busy year for the rising British production duo: They’ve released a handful of critically applauded singles including “Dat It,” “Blow You Away (Delilah)” and “Sensual Loving,” which have seem them collaborating with the like of Stones Throw Records affiliate Kiefer and Afrobeats star Ghetto Boy. Those three singles will appear on the duo’s forthcoming album, currently slated for an early 2022 release.
But in the meantime, the duo’s latest single “Labels” is centered around a The Midnight Hour meets J. Dilla-like production featuring soaring strings, boom bap beats and a sinuous bass line. The production serves as a lush and mesmerizing bed for thoughtful and lovelorn verses from London-based emcee Kofi Stone that find him questioning the need for labels to define what his romantic relationship is to others. Sometimes, love is just that that — and that’s all it has to be. The song also features a soulful hook by London-based vocalist Tiana Major9.
“Originally ‘Labels’ started out with my chord progression that I was sitting on for about 6 months and then I gave the rough idea to Mr DM for him to have input on.” Blue Lab Beats’ NK-OK explains. “We then built the track from there. Before getting the vocalists we wanted on this song we got Stephen Hussey to arrange the strings and record the string section and when we heard it back it honestly was so crazy to have live strings on our music. For the vocalist we wanted UK talent on this and so we automatically hit up one of our favourites Tiana Major9. We worked with Tiana in her early recording days so we know how amazingly talented she is. Then it was down to Kofi Stone to deliver the Rap and once again when working with him we all thought ‘this guy is incredible!’”
“A lot of the time we over complicate things. Especially at the early stages of a relationship. You don’t always have to rush for a label cus you think that’s the right thing to do,” Tiana Major9 says of her guest spot. “Learn, love then decide.”
“I was going through what I spoke about on the record so it was good to get off my chest,” Kofi Stone adds. “Working with Blue Lab Beats was a great experience. They are two incredibly talented gentlemen. I just love the musicality they bring and I felt right at home in the studio with the guys.”
There are few artists I’ve written about as much as the ridiculously prolific, New York-based producer, DJ, remixer and longtime JOVM mainstay Rhythm Scholar. During this site’s 11+ year history, Rhythm Scholar has firmly cemented a reputation for crafting slickly produced, crowd-pleasing mashups and remixes of classic soul, funk, hip-hop, New Wave and others.
Rhythm Scholar’s remix sees him tackling Slick Rick‘s beloved 80s classic “Children’s Story.” The remix pairs Slick Rick’s cautionary tale of a young boy, who gets seduced into the street life and its inevitable and tragic ending with seemingly Issac Hayes-inspired production featuring twinkling Rhodes, dramatic strings, a psychedelic guitar solo and playful nods at Rob Base and DJ Easy Rock’s “It Takes Two,” LL Cool J and several others. The end result is a gritty, 70s true crime story air — as though Slick Rick had spent his time watching The French Connection, Serpico and others.