Frank Kogan

Funny beats! Tied to riffs that resolutely don't go anywhere, but don't go away, either. There've been several of these recently, all Brazilian funk, all fluttering around the number 10 spot on my 2023 singles list. Each is a combination of funny peculiar and funny ha-ha, at least to my various and peculiar funny bones.

Not the same funny beat on each, though – these all seem like one-offs, not particularly sounding like each other and probably not even in conversation with one another.

And it's not always the beat itself that's the "funny beat." Sometimes it's the riff, or several riffs that intertwine with the rhythm so as to wave the funny flag on the rhythm's behalf.

Jiraya Uai, MC Tarapi – Hoje Tem Rodeio, Baile De Favela



I've slotted this in my mind as a Dave Moore tip, though it doesn't seem to be on his 2023 playlist. I don't have a name for this track's musical style – Google Translate says "Today there's a rodeo, a favela dance," and perhaps the cowboy hats are meant to signal sertanejo, a rural-identified genre I have no sense of. The music on this seems pretty radical and experimental. What puts this in the funny category is its folkish-countryish tendency, the snaking gtr line and the two (!) harmonica parts (one sucking in and the other blowing out). And to call the guitar "folk" or "country" fails to communicate the psychological sense it has for me: it's the sort of line I'd have sold my kidney to write in 1979 when I was listening hard to Miles Davis's On The Corner and even more to "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose"–era James Brown and trying to twist those into something stranger and more destabilizing, aspiring to create a kind of no wave that wouldn't necessarily be abrasion so much as the feeling when you suddenly go into a roller-coaster drop.

Mary Apelona, MC Boyugo – O Apelão Me Convocou



It's a classic "accordion" part except it's perching like a dazed bird atop a tuba. The two vocalists do a low-affect version of the same thing.

"Classic"? Well, I'm being silly. In suspense movies it's not an accordion but a flute or recorder or piccolo that plays the pretty melody, which is made stereotypically eerie by being thrown off-key against its musical surroundings. In this song, half-a-minute in, the instrument (whatever it is) lands emphatically on a sour note, which recurs often enough that when turned off it's still present, poised to inflict itself again – which it finally does, two minutes in.

(Actually, it's probably a keyboard setting.)

Yuri Redicopa & DJ Bnão – Bebê Tá Solta



Is one of those piano lines that you get in movies that are trying to evoke the 1910s or the 1890s but, as Dave says, used in a compulsively nondevelopmental manner, so, as he also says, it keeps promising to fall into a trot or a basic goofy post-disco no-speak-americano Austral-Romanian Empire* dance, but stops on the brink.

MC 2K, Almir Delas, DJ Samuk – Tropa Do Arranca Pix



Our unexpected beat here is the rockabilly bass. This also has its compulsively nondevelopmental aspects – all the instrumental parts except the drums – but they're not functioning as dance bohemia experimentation but just as regular Brazilian backdrop that allows the vocalists to declaim and grunt and giggle.

( A couple of relevant tracks from 2022 )

As I said above, what I'm gathering here aren't trends or any common beats; rather, they're just part of the variety that the ocean of funk tosses up onto the shore.

( Footnote )

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Remember five years ago we were talking about Japanese freestyle? davidfrazer clues me in to further developments: Fairies "HEY HEY ~Light Me Up~."



The speedbeats and basic pounding rhythm are from '90s Eurobeat, but the doleful melodies are freestyle, so are the hooks (freestyle and Italodisco), not to mention the screeching-brake intro and the "HEY hey hey-hey HEY hey hey-hey HEY— HEY hey hey-hey HEY hey hey-hey HEY" electro-stutters at the start, and the mournful chordings and the "oh oh-oh" vocal riff that come between the brakes and the heys.



[UPDATE: Had a full-length live version embedded above, but YouTube killed it; fortunately, six months down the line, AVEX put forth a full-length dance rehearsal version, which I've embedded in its place.]

Here are some vintage 1980s–early '90s freestyle tracks, to give you an idea what I mean by the term.*

New York:

Cover Girls "Inside Outside"

Judy Torres "Come Into My Arms"

Cynthia "Change On Me"

Lisette Melendez "A Day In My Life (Without You)"

Miami

Debbie Deb "When I Hear Music"

Sequal "It's Not Too Late"

Company B "Fascinated"

*The genre "freestyle" is not to be confused with "freestyle" in hip-hop, which refers to live, improvised or at least off-the-cuff raps.

[UPDATE: David Frazer has now found out that "HEY HEY ~Light Me Up~" is a cover of Vanessa's 1993 Eurobeat track "Hey Hey" (Vanessa likely being Clara Moroni under another name), the Fairies' version not straying far from the original. See David's comment below.

I learn from Wikip that, while the term "Eurobeat" has had many uses, by 1993 it was mainly referring to Italian Italodisco-derived tracks selling almost exclusively to the Japanese market. This song is still definitely, overwhelmingly freestyle, at least on top, with Eurobeat underneath. Of course, Italodisco and freestyle took on each other's characteristics.]

New Crayon Pop.

Advance single "Vroom Vroom"


About perfect: Light splashy Italodisco, a boat ride past small islands. Writer and (I think) lead singer Way adds enough ache to give this a promise of passion, a hint of adventure.

Album teaser, Evolution Vol. 1


First 8 tracks, I guess; 17 are due, 10 all new. Track 2 has interesting promise, as if it's early-mid Sixties girl group morphing into soul, or early Eighties Britain burnishing up that sound so that it glistens. Or something different; it's only several seconds. Track 6 is on a different Sixties borderline, like the Animals grabbing at teen tragedy and creating a venomous adult wail — not that I expect Crayon Pop to get close to venom, or to full slaughterhouse wailing. Probably will just be nice woman dancing into the distance, leaving small pangs of dust to glint in the sunlight.

Title Track Single "Doo Doom Chit"


Track gallops and kicks right out of the gate. So much for my impression from the teaser that it'd go down a tad too easy.* In fact it's so pushy and crowded I'm having trouble disentangling it. The beat seems to be battling the atmospherics, while Crayon Pop prance steadfastly forward. Strong, but I don't know if I know how to hear it.

Anyone want to tell me how you're hearing it?

h/t David Frazer for the alert, and the post title.

*"There's a powerful monomaniacal repetition at 9 seconds in that lasts for two-and-a-half seconds ('Shaky shaky shaky HAH!' or something like that) which potentially upends or punks up the song in a good way. The rest at first listen goes down a tad too easy, though I like the flimsy discarded-cardboard drum-like sound that propels the track."

Question that applies to the past and the present: were there/are there many disco boybands and disco girl groups? Except I'm meaning "boyband" and "girl group" a bit more narrowly than I normally would: I'm thinking of the music dating back to the gospel quartets that went secular and was taken over by teens and doo-wop and then the late '50s/early '60s girl groups and permutated through the Impressions and Motown into the Jackson 5 and New Edition and then into New Jack Swing. I have huge gaps in my knowledge, but my sense is that this type of group vocal singing (as opposed to other types of group vocal singing?) made it into funk and '80s black pop much more than into disco and freestyle and house. Obviously there are vocal groups there, too, many I wish I knew better; but not ones that I'd put into a line that goes from doo-wop to Bell Biv DeVoe and the Backstreet Boys and ilk.

Or am I all wrong? Did that sort of boyband or girl group appear much in disco? I kinda feel the Bee Gees might belong here, though despite hitting huge, they seem a bit apart from everyone else, not quite in any line of development (but notice Infinite sounding like the Bee Gees below). I probably ought to count Trammps and Tavares too.

As for the present, K-pop draws hugely on the Jacksons and New Jack Swing while keeping disco and freestyle in its living language. I'm thinking especially of the work of writing/producing duo SweeTune (Han Jaeho, Kim Seungsoo), for instance with boyband Infinite and girl group Nine Muses.

"Paradise"


( Nine Muses Figaro and Infinite Be Mine )

Posted this on a Freaky Trigger comment thread:

The elephants in the room of popular music, the ones who not only don't get talked about by critics and who (as far as I know) don’t get paid attention to on news or entertainment sites either, but who also get undercounted on Billboard and are mostly excluded from the Brit singles chart and therefore Popular, include what was historically called "easy listening" or "beautiful music," as well as smooth jazz, quiet storm, lite rock, adult contemporary, urban AC, and oldies. Music liked by the audiences [for such genres and formats] will always get undercounted because their listening is less concentrated on specific tracks and less concentrated on recently released ones but also because these audiences are less likely to buy the music directly, whether on a single or an album. They're nonetheless consumers, and presumably respond to what gets advertised on radio and TV (and now on YouTube?).

But I’m guessing these audiences download a lot that in the old days they'd never have purchased in physical form, and that there's been a change in e.g. the way people listen on the job from, in days of yore, hearing a radio station piped into an entire office to, nowadays, listening to their individual iPods and such. I emphasize that these are guesses.

Ref. to "Popular" is to Tom Ewing's project over the last decade of blurbing and shepherding a discussion on every track to hit number 1 on the British singles chart from 1952 to the present — hence also my reference to the Brit singles chart.

The phrase "elephant in the room" usually refers to something that everyone affected by knows is there — a mother's drug addiction, for instance — but that, owing to e.g. family members' desire to sustain their habitual ways of working around the problem and getting through the day without too much pain, no one is willing to talk about. Whereas (1) "adult contemporary" and ilk are only a problem for someone, if there is such a person, who takes all of Anglo-American popular music as a good hunk of their remit and (2) such genres, though big enough, are generally barely attended to by those who don't deliberately tune to the stations, so are in effect invisible, and so discussion is simply not generated rather than being psychologically suppressed.

I myself don't feel a great imperative to try and take the measure of e.g. Jason Mraz and Michael Bublé; they're part of the general environment of the music I do care about, so I'd rather have knowledge than not have knowledge. But the world is full of other relevant stuff, such as the economics and sociology of music, music theory, J-pop, and so forth, that I'm also not paying enough attention to, and that I'm more interested in. So Mraz, Bublé, et al. will continue to get short shrift from me.*

( Actual elephant hiding under the cut )

"Jason Mraz - I'm Yours (Official Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

( Footnotes )

The surprisingly fierce battle for Silly Song Of The Year has a new, unexpected leader: Lee Jung Hyun's "V." People who've been following electronic dance music in Korea from the beginning (i.e., no one who reads this blog) know that Wikipedia has its head heading up buttward in saying that in 1999 Lee introduced techno to Korea and to Asia.* Nonetheless, it is fair to say that she is held in esteem as an actress and singer, at least by our trusty Wikipedian. And she is held in esteem by me as well (who first heard of her last week), as she leaves the wobble and the wash behind for a trot two-step with 1940s razzle-dazzle vocals filtered through a helium balloon. Orange Caramel, are you paying attention.**



Here is where she commenced her assignment as ambassador of techno:



( Credible twerks )

Solbi's "Ottogi," yet another "Lipstick"-like half-trot bridging the silly rhythms of Americano speaklessness and Romanian saxobeats. I missed this when it surfaced last August during the T-ara hysteria. Most notable for 4minute's Jiyoon on the rap:



And a witty Latin house version:

[Video unavailable]

Something amazing has happened this year with Orange Caramel's singing, though I can't put my finger specifically on what. All I've got is adjectives. Last year Orange Caramel had two terrific songs ("Bangkok City" and "Shanghai Romance"), each dragged down a little by vocals that I'd describe as "adequate": going for cuteness but sounding blah, not distinctive, a bit heavy for the material (analogous to how back in 2010 Orange Caramel had been too old for the kiddie clothes they'd been stuffed into). Now this year, on their latest two hits — "My Sweet Devil" in Japan and "Lipstick" in Korea — they're light and alive, just know where they are, zip right onto and dance right off of the lyrics. (See what I mean? Adjectives. Metaphors.) I can't tell if it's the singing itself, or just that they've been given the right songs and arrangements. But the arrangements on "Bangkok City" and "Shanghai Romance" were fine, are what made those two tracks zip along as well as they did.*

"My Sweet Devil" deserves attention on its own, but today I'm talking about "Lipstick," not for the singing per se, but for the rhythm (which of course includes the singing). In my mind, "Lipstick" is the fulcrum, or the apex (or something), of what I'm going to call the Austral-Romanian Empire. I figured this out when, over at the Jukebox, most everyone else was identifying "Lipstick" with "Mr. Saxobeat" and Europop, while I was hearing trot and "We No Speak Americano." Now, however, I'd say that "Lipstick" is drawing on all of those. Not that Orange Caramel have ever played a true trot, but they've been veering towards it, especially on the two "Asian"** singles, "Bangkok City" and "Shanghai Romance." Trots tend to move light and quick, emphasizing the offbeat almost as much as the downbeat, adding embellishments while running right along. In contrast, the Romanian beat sounds more like it's circling in on itself, a clippity-clop to trot's trot. (Or a clip-cloppity. Anyway, busier. It isn't as if there's a specific trot beat, or a specific Romanian rhythm — though maybe there is, and I'm just not perceptive enough to locate it. Maybe you can do a better job.)

( The Austral-Romanian spectrum )

( Dance Mix )



( I Know How To Playlist A Little )

( Footnotes )