Angel Haze

yeah i think everyone had trepidation over that stuff - which was there from the start - and actually we might have got off lightly (ie, no actual collaboration with jason mraz)

i think with both, i can imagine major labels thinking these artists can ~transcend the rap fanbase (not that that's where they had the biggest support in the first place, i guess) but getting the ways in which that could happen a bit confused - like, thinking you have to be corny/on-trend to appeal to pop fans rather than just carrying on with what actually made them special

and in both cases their lyricism hasn't so much gone away as just been...buried a bit

What kind of audience did the label expect her to have? Serious question. That this (so far) sounds undercooked is a testament to a label's willingness to dilute an artist's personality for the sake of non-existent mainstream attention even in 2014.

This is a dumb point but her name elicits blank stares whenever I mention her to young rap fans, so this project seems doubly depressing.

did the hip-hop community ever really support her though?

yeah i have no idea what her fanbase is

ILM and forty other critics, I'd imagine.

the one time i've seen her live it seemed like a really mixed fanbase, though a really enthusiastic one. lots of lesbians but really not a homogenous group at all. assorted waifs and strays with troubled backgrounds who would have had livejournals ten years ago, maybe.

xp nahhhh look at her twitter followers etc, she does have a proper fanbase, and it's a cultish and devoted one. but it's not one that really screams commercial smashes

That this (so far) sounds undercooked is a testament to a label's willingness to dilute an artist's personality for the sake of non-existent mainstream attention even in 2014.

do you mean the label has diluted her sound? bc i don't know about that, angel's insistence to put the album out in 2013 seems more like this is the kind of music she really wanted to make but her label were more hesitant

like lex i don't want to abandon her just yet because i thought reservation was really, really special but yeah initially i'm disappointed by this, particularly the languid second half

angel has a legit nyc fanbase but it's not trad hiphop fans afaik

not - predominantly - trad hiphop fans i mean

angel haze and yelawolf also share an overemphasis on technical frippery at the behest of musicality

behest totally the wrong word there. what is the word i'm thinking of? I think just "expense."

sorry havent gotten much sleep

Ugh, "Angels and Airwaves" stuck in my head all day. This is one of those albums where the more a song sticks in your head the shittier that song is

On the first song, I thought to myself "who told her 'sad Nicki Minaj' would be the way to go here?"

On the second song, I thought to myself "actually 'sad Nicki Minaj' is working pretty well, I shouldn't prejudge"

Then she started doing a spoken word about how she doesn't connect to things tied to her ethnicity and that people shouldn't expect it to be in her music over tribal chanting and I thought "okay, I'm gonna be late for my dinner reservation if I keep listening to this bullshit" then I died of irony over the word "reservation"

I always thought Nicki Minaj had a terrible sense of humor, but now I understand that any sense of humor is better than no sense of humor

It's funny (ironic) when all the things that people are coming out with to comedy dis a record with are exactly the things that make me think "I should check this out, this is probably a pretty powerful record."

angel haze and yelawolf also share an overemphasis on technical frippery at the behest of musicality

Got a feeling this is basically meaningless even without the word 'behest'.

you would be wrong

angel haze and yelawolf are too concerned w technical pyrotechnics to pay attention to the ways in which that overemphasis on technique obscures interesting musical ideas

You are essentially saying "their musicianship obscures their musicianship" as far as I can tell, which is not particularly edifying

i don't mind that you feel that way deej but the way you phrase it as a gospel truth rather than opinion is a little exhausting and definitively inaccurate.

it's just a sentence, calm down

i'm so calm

i would like more use of the word frippery on ilx tho

i don't mind that you feel that way deej but the way you phrase it as a gospel truth rather than opinion is a little exhausting and definitively inaccurate.

― this harmless group of nerds and the women that love them (forksclovetofu), Monday, 6 January 2014 18:09 (14 minutes ago) Permalink

Does everyone have to add an unnecessary "IMO" or "I think that..." to every post?

You are essentially saying "their musicianship obscures their musicianship" as far as I can tell, which is not particularly edifying

― SHAUN (DJP), Monday, January 6, 2014 11:57 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is not what i am saying. musicality =/= musicianship

when studying jazz, a lot of novice horn players will attempt to fill bars with lots of notes, running through technically complex patterns. They tend not to incorporate ideas like: space. Or concern themselves much with phrasing—why bother with variety when you can impress through speed? etc.

Fair point. (truth be told, I was trolling for a more fleshed-out response)

Does anyone else have an overwhelming urge to sing "YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND, BABY/RIGHT ROUND/WHEN YOU GO DOWN/WHEN YOU GO DOWN, DOWN" over the beginning of "A Tribe Called Red"?

I don't think I'm in a frame of mind to give this a fair listen.

Deej's point makes perfect sense, except that I would say what I loved about each artist's big pre-signing mixtape was the effortless sounding combination of musicality with technical proficiency.

Sometimes the deflating thing about this kind of artist is the gradual realisation that what you thought was absolute mastery was at least in part just really good, fleeting luck.

Azealia Banks burned out as ignominiously too 'cept she didn't make a long statement as beautiful as Reservation.

lol come on now, Azealia Banks was never on Angel Haze's level of substance/talent

"212" was good enough that I couldn't wait for the album

Azealia occasionally offers glimmers of hope - her glastonbury performance last year was pretty terrific, for instance. But 212 was nearly 2.5 years ago, and that + all the vile beefs means most people are now not interested.

when studying jazz, a lot of novice horn players will attempt to fill bars with lots of notes, running through technically complex patterns. They tend not to incorporate ideas like: space. Or concern themselves much with phrasing—why bother with variety when you can impress through speed? etc

All this is just the usual virtuosity/feeling false dichotomy though, a lot of great musicians in eg classical music will have both. Both Angel Haze and Yelawolf clearly understand phrasing, they know how to slow down, the problem with both is that the songwriting went off a cliff between the mixtape and the debut.

technical proficiency is not what makes either album disappointing, indeed it's what partially redeems them

i mean, deej made the same accusation about angel haze and yelawolf BEFORE their albums, ie about their great material, so...i'm disregarding it

the problem with both is that the songwriting went off a cliff between the mixtape and the debut

yeah

Lol at deem edifying us with a jazz 101 lecture

surprised everyone resisted a hemiola zing

"Slowly, we perceive that our task is to learn the proper way of freeing ourselves, to develop technique.... Technique was then, as today, the key to creative freedom"

- Ralph Ellison, Living With Music

the problem with both is that the songwriting went off a cliff between the mixtape and the debut

yeah

― Tim F, Tuesday, January 7, 2014 7:54 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right. so far with this album its not that any artistic direction sort of choice she made is something that in theory shouldn't work, or would in theory make me enjoy the album less. its just that she made these various choices about artistic direction and also it so happens that the album isn't very exciting.

Lol at deem edifying us with a jazz 101 lecture

― ilx snitch (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 7, 2014 7:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I studied jazz for eight years. LOL!!

"Slowly, we perceive that our task is to learn the proper way of freeing ourselves, to develop technique.... Technique was then, as today, the key to creative freedom"

- Ralph Ellison, Living With Music

― ilx snitch (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 7, 2014 8:02 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like plenty of highly technical rappers ... way to completely misinterpret me though

All this is just the usual virtuosity/feeling false dichotomy though, a lot of great musicians in eg classical music will have both. Both Angel Haze and Yelawolf clearly understand phrasing, they know how to slow down, the problem with both is that the songwriting went off a cliff between the mixtape and the debut.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, January 7, 2014 2:49 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see what I said to the other M@tt ... there are plenty of artists who are masters of technique but don't sacrifice clarity and purpose

i wasn't saying you don't know anything about jazz i'm saying you were talking some really cliched basic shit that's been said like 8 zillion times on ILM (ie jazz 101) and acted like you were educating us

in the case of Yelawolf i think he had great phrasing as Matt DC said

deej you were saying this about angel haze before this album came out, so it's obvious you just don't/can't hear what makes her great in the first place

Yes, deej's criticism is fair enough (though I disagree) but it's not relevant to the drop-off from Reservation to this album.

the one "artistic" choice i think maybe she flopped on is trying too hard to be a capital p poet?