Musicians need to be told what to listen to, because without the advice of knowledgeable critics such as myself they’ll just revert to endless noodling because they heard a Jerry Garcia side project on the radio the other night (this actually happened to me, not the endless noodling part but hearing Jerry Garcia; the song wasn’t bad until the abhorrent simultaneous solos that sounded like the guitarist was trying to tune up while the drummer kept interrupting a la Nina Simone and Animal on the Muppet show). The album that musicians most need to get influenced by is this Kid606 record, and no I don’t just mean electronic musicians. No one has made such an outright fun album that’s also risktaking in the longest time, and Kid606 brings frantic breakbeats with some often-surprisingly-catchy synth lines. Vocal samples fitting some loose theme come and go along with the accompanying wonderful ruckus. Chances are it won’t make much sense to people without a bunch of knowledge about dance music and/or ragga, but that’s part of its appeal. It REWARDS REPEATED LISTENS not just as new aspects of it come up that one didn’t hear before, but parts of it just make more sense as one listens to more experimental electronic (aka “good”) tunes.
Drummers need to get this so that you can come face-to-face with the evidence of your own irrelevance. None of y’all are ever going to play a funkier drum part than the ones in Think, Funky Drummer, or Amen, and you’re certainly not going to come up with anything as frantic and blow-the-doors-off-because-we’re-raiding-the-place wonderful as what happens when they get chopped up and resequenced by a guy like Kid606 that knows what he’s doing. Oh what’s that, all you can play is the drums and you want to be musically relevant? Too fucking bad because this Venezuelan guy just put together an entire record in addition to those incredible beats.
And to every white musician out there that’s experiencing a wave of success and is part of a fracturing band so you’re about to put together a monolithic hour-plus excursion through genre exercises and solo tracks because you’re in the band’s White Album phase, y’all should take lessons from Kid606 on how to go into different genres. You don’t just play straight-ahead songs in that style that are just songs you wrote, or incorporate some of your ideas into it. Instead, you need to start fucking up the genre until it’s bordering on unrecognizable. Then add more drums.
Oh wait, but none of that is relevant to some of the musicians reading this, maybe because you’re mashup artists trying to fill the void left by the new Girl Talk album being impossibly boring. Sorry once again, but you’re not going to do anything interesting putting two songs right up against one another, since everyone has heard that on NPR’s website for the past four years, but there’s still a lot of room for exploration in taking a bunch of samples and making something completely new with their tiny tiny spliced-together parts until it sounds like a bouncing, hyperactive mess of squelching, snares, and James Brown pitched up until he sounds like a toddler.
People often try to justify boring unfun albums by their experimentation, or cross their arms when people point out that a stupid album that adds nothing new is “fun.” This record should definitively show that those two things aren’t two ends of a spectrum, they can enhance and add to each other until you’re dancing to samples from Looney Tunes.
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