Elsewhere…
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- Producer and Mad Decent label honcho Diplo on his pet genre, Brazilian baile funk: Australia has crazy-ass marsupials because it’s an island and they bred themselves into something weird. That’s kind of what happened with baile funk. Miami bass got trapped there and became this strange, hybrid Brazilian thing. But the thing about funk was there wasn’t an industry. For a while they were selling singles, but it was only in Rio. It was done on bootleg CDs. There was no giant hand helping to move it one way or another. It’s just how kids wanted it, as raw as possible. And that’s what’s so interesting about that scene. I’ve never seen it develop like that anywhere else while I’ve been traveling. [Pitchfork]
- Kelefa Sanneh’s latest is an enjoyable profile of Brad Paisley (subscription): Paisley fared better with the follow-up, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” in which a boy pays heartfelt tribute to his mother’s new husband. It built a chorus—“I hope I’m at least half the dad that he didn’t have to be“—that was designed to make remarried mothers cry. The song was a deft and novel articulation of family values, and it was Paisley’s first No. 1 hit. It was also profoundly square, with plaintive piano chords and cozy lyrics about a happy family “crowded ‘round the nursery window,” and the literal-minded music video looked a lot like a commercial for something (maybe a mortgage company, or powdered lemonade). [New Yorker]
- On the excellent blog Gemini Spacecraft, a piece on the origins of rockabillist Glen Glenn: [He] might have continued playing country & western music, instead of cutting some of the greatest sides from the rockabilly era, if not for one thing: Girls! “If you played country, girls might want your autograph,” Glenn has said. “If you did this kind of [rock’n‘roll] music, girls freaked out.”
New York—July 2010