Angel Haze

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?

also running all her songs through the Skylar Grey machine

i think we can actually just go ahead and call it the sia machine now

the other thing with this album is that it sounds like it was designed for a live band, even when it's not being played by one. it's loud and in-yr-face and i'm not sure that's the best look over the course of an album for her - so many of her best moments previously have been v much brooding/introverted in terms of delivery

xp the markus dravs machine more like

is this likely to make any dent in the charts at all? feel like she's only going to move kreayshawn-style numbers, but idk

the release last week was only digital (with a CD release to follow in the UK soon and later in the US) -- obviously most of her sales were gonna be digital anyway but that certainly lowers the bar even further

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

― ilx snitch (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, January 7, 2014 9:34 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well it was a one-sentence post without references to jazz but people asked for clarification so i gave it

the word now is that Angel Haze's album will debut at #196 on the Billboard 200 with 857 copies sold. so about a quarter of Kreayshawn's numbers.

welp

haha

damn that's dreadful

"technical frippery" is a maybe too-easy shot to take at a technically skilled rapper u don't like and i understand everyones exasperation there probably are more fruitful ways to talk abt why this sucks, but i don't think matt dc is making a different point or using a less false binary, seems like just swapping the word "musicality" for "songwriting"

Well I think the point is that these things aren't fixed properties, and technical frippery and musicality aren't playing a zero sum game where one always comes at the expense of the other (deej wasn't actually saying that, but it's worth teasing out anyway).

I would recast Deej's point to say that when the strength of material is there it's easy to then be wowed by the technical prowess and take everything else for granted a bit, but when the rest ebbs away it becomes readily apparent that technique alone isn't enough and may not even be the dominant quality that made the artist's prior work so special.

But the above is less about Yelawolf and Angel Haze in and of themselves and more about how we talk about artists like these.

i don't really see that it's all that relevant a point here seeing as no one brought up technical frippery as a criticism except deej, who hasn't provided any examples and who was making the same argument about angel haze when reservation came out

I think the comparison with Yelawolf is relevant and useful, even if I disagree with deej's take on both artists.

yes, but for different reasons than "technical frippery" - more to do with personae that don't fit into the (increasingly narrowing) parameters of rap fandom, but make even less sense when recast as commercially viable major label prospects

xp fine, if you're only interested in criticisms by people who liked reservation

i pretty much am tbh

or at least if you're using the same criticism about new angel haze that you were about old angel haze it doesn't exactly scream insight because this entire discussion is about why the new stuff is worse than the old stuff

ya i get that

i just happen to agree with deej in not liking a lot of the early stuff, too