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“Long.Live.A $ AP” after 5 years
Long.Live.A $ AP, released exactly five years ago, is an extremely rare example of how a young promising artist managed to sit on two chairs at once. Usually, guys like Rakim are faced with the following problem – the greedy fat A & R of a large label hangs over them, and he already has a clear album structure in his head that should target everyone – boys, girls, backpackers, dandies and ghetto blacks. For each segment of the audience on the album should have its own song, for the most solvent – a single for TV, radio and clubs, the intro should be ambitious, and the outro should be soulful. Naturally, with such initial conditions, the album cannot turn out to be solid and authentic in sound, and in the zero years this formula (by which 90% of the records were released) destroyed a large number of interesting artists who had to play by the rules of their owners. Continue reading
M.I.A. vs. Everybody: how female rap fights the world system
Matangi “Maya” Arulpragasam – a girl born in London in a family of Tamil activists, famous for her daring deeds and remarkable talent. Singer, producer, clipmaker, designer, artist, rapper, loving provocative punches on the topic of the day, and political activist. In addition to the memorable eclectic style of music, in which she combines the motifs of ethnic music of the peoples of the east, hip-hop, electronics, world-class beats and reggae with acute social implications, Maia created a memorable image of a principled and wise girl who is constantly struggling with a ruthless political machine and injustice. Continue reading
Musical performance and its problems
Performance as a special kind of artistic activity does not exist in all arts. In painting,
for example, it is inseparable from creativity: to create a picture is what it means to “fulfill” it. Once, in music, the creation and performance of a piece were not separated from each other: in ancient times, a musician sang or played what he himself composed and improvised.
But the creation of a painter or sculptor is embodied in the material that preserves it for centuries, and the material of music (sound) lives while it sounds. Continue reading
