Category: Noughties

We’ve already talked about the roots of Hip-Hop a couple of times. Throughout the 80ies and 90ies there were mainly two American Hip-Hop scenes: First the East Coast with bands mainly centred in and around New York City, particularly the Bronx, and later on West Coast hip-hop, with groups stemming mainly from Los Angeles. But in the late 90ies a third region began to establish it’s dominance: Southern hip-hop had it’s roots in the five cities of Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Memphis and Miami. An important moment of their rise were the 1995 Source awards. The East Coast – West Coast – feud was felt strongly when André Benjamin of Atlanta-based Outkast took the stage after winning the award for New Artist of The Year and made a statement: “The South got something to say, that’s all I got to say”.

It was the first award for Outkast, but it would not be the last. The group kept delivering sophisticated lyrics and catchy tunes. As in the second single from their acclaimed fourth studio album Stankonia: “Ms. Jackson” is an honest ode to the mother of Benjamin’s partner at the time, Erykah Badu, about the difficulties that may arise having children born out of wedlock. He felt he was being portrayed as a bad father and found it important that his side of the story was heared as well.

Badu’s mother (whose name is not Jackson, but who immediately new the song was about her when she heard it the first time) absolutely loved the song – so much so that she bought herself a “Ms. Jackson” license plate – and so did the general public.

The Technics SL-1200 MK 2 record player was introduced in 1979 as a replacement of the previous model and like it’s predecessor was meant to be a high-quality player for the home market. But it’s complicated design ensured that it was relatively resistant to feedback and dampened vibrations, and it soon became the de-facto standard turntable for both discotheques and radio stations the world over. And when resourceful disc jockey’s figured out that it would continue to spin at the correct speed even when tampered with the technique of scratching was born.

Together with rapping and break-dancing the art became one of the pillars of Hip-Hop, which was rapidly gaining traction and it’s performers started to call themselves “turntablists”, to be distinguished from the standard “disc jockeys”, whose job only is to play and mix records.

Many such turntablists scourged record stores to find rare old vinyl containing wacky, bizarre and outlandish samples for their craft. Such as The Avalanches in Melbourne. They used these to produce “Frontier Psychatrist”, or what a critic called “sheer giddy pleasure of turntablist art”. It was their first commercially successful song and when the video was added, featuring musicians and actors re-enacting the music and voices to the best of their ability, they had already ensured a place in the best videos of the 2000’s shortlist when the decade had only just begun.

Note: As the 1st of August is a holiday in Switzerland where we’re based we will continue our programme on Tuesday the 2nd. Happy weekend everyone.

There are a lot of mysteries modern science has been able to crack. The minds of teenagers is not among them. In my generation, dying at the age of 27 years appeared to be a reasonable goal in life to more of my peers than I was probably aware of. After all, a lot of really great musicians had gone down that road, most notably among them Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

While they were in our parents generation, Kurt Cobain became the newest member of the infamous “27 club” when I was a teenager. And seventeen years later Amy Winehouse would join as well, after a long struggle with alcohol and other drug addictions. Highly talented, actually successful on an international market but still haunted by demons beyond her control she decided to call it a definite day while the world was priming itself for even better music to come.

Of course, the warning signs were all there, even from the beginning: “Back To Black”, which marked her international breakthrough already puts the morbid themes that would stay with her throughout her career into the limelight. Brilliantly so. Please make sure to take signs of depression seriously if you notice any with your peers!