Let Us Remember: Willie Hutch’s “Out There”

 

Listening to “Out There,” off Willie Hutch’s Foxy Brown soundtrack, I was blown away at how psychedelic and strange the arrangement is. Besides some seriously spacey wah-wah guitar and the echo effects on Hutch’s vocals, there is also what sounds like a trumpet run through an Echoplex, a combination that sounds remarkably like an old analog synthesizer. Along with these psychedelic touches come Hutch’s staples, like strings and harps and cooing female vocals.

 

The song’s lyrics (“It’s so sad/Our people won’t respect the ways of one another/But pretty soon they’re gonna find out/They’re gonna have to learn to love one another/Don’t you know/Ain’t you know/You’ll be out there”) are pretty boilerplate Black Power anthem stuff, but the use of echo effects on Hutch’s vocals, along with the aforementioned weirdness, create an idea of “out there” that sounds like both the harsh reality of poverty and life on the street and a total mental breakdown, brought on by drugs or impossible amounts of stress. Hutch wants his people to love one another, not because it would be nice or groovy, but because without a sense of community or purpose, “out there” threatens to destroy them.

 

While Hutch’s classic soundtrack to “The Mack” has come to be associated with “pimpin” music, a close listen to a lot of its songs reveal a far less bad-ass attitude. “I Choose You” isn’t about a girl choosing a pimp, but a man choosing a wife (“You were then when no else would be in my corner/And it’s you that I’ve learned to love and place no one above/So how could I ever thank you except take you home and make you my loving wife?”), something I’m sure most idiot pimps would refer to as “trick” behavior. And “Slick’s Theme” makes explicit that that character is a piece of shit and you should stay away from him. Foxy Brown was probably the first movie that Hutch soundtracked that actually reflected his worldview, with its portrayal of selfish and weak-willed pimps and dealers in cahoots with the government and organized crime to exploit the black community.

 

What sets “Out There” out from countless other empowerment anthems is that it sounds a lot like the bad trip it’s warning against. Unlike in other uplift songs of the 60s and 70s, where respect and love sound like corny signifiers of a naive era, here they sound like the only thing protecting an oppressed people from madness or death.

 

Willie Hutch – Out There

 

Buy It

I Actually Like: 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers’ The Slow Twilight

 

 

Here’s a big question: Is is possible to sample indie rock or indie pop without making hipster rap? Sampling an artist like Cat Power, like producer Douglas Martin AKA Blurry Drones does on the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers album The Slow Twilight, can’t help but result in hipster rap, right? Before that “soulful” snoozefest The Greatest and that second covers album and the diamond commercials, Cat Power was an indie darling and for good reason. If you could appreciate the beauty in a mostly slow and mostly bleak album like Moon Pix, it meant you were a different kind of music fan, one who was more sensitive and discerning than the average person who just buys what they hear on the radio. I certainly felt this way my senior year of high school, when I used to walk around the neighborhood near my high school during study hall, listening to Belle and Sebastian and Cat Power and Elliott Smith and getting off on how cool and different I was.

 

But this is a silly fallacy and we all know it. And yet so much of the excitement revolving around hipster rap (Kanye loves Thom Yorke’s Eraser album! Kid Cudi samples Band of Horses on his mixtapes! Q-Tip did a song with Lykke Li!) seems to promote the idea that liking indie music makes you a cooler, more interesting artist. Do we really need a Pitchfork news item every time a rapper name checks Radiohead? “Hipster rap” needs to be judged on the same standards all rap is judged by, and not given a free pass because it’s wearing horn rim glasses and has Fleet Foxes on its iPod. But by the same token, quality rap music that samples indie rock shouldn’t be penalized because of the stigma associated with “hipster rap.”

 

Which brings me to the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers album. A duo comprised of Philly MC Zilla Rocca and Seattle producer Douglas Martin (who, full disclosure, is a good friend of this blog), the Shadowboxers are a wholly Internet creation, with neither artist ever having met or even talked on the phone (!) to the other. Starting their correspondence through Jeff Weiss’ Passion of the Weiss blog, the two have put together one of the best rap albums of the year and one that happens to include a ton of indie rock and indie pop samples, including flips of The Velvet Underground’s “Black European Death Song,” Espers’ “Dead Queen,” Cat Power’s “He War,” and Elliott Smith’s “A Distorted Reality Is Now a Necessity to Be Free.”

 

Martin isn’t trying to hide the fact that he’s sampling these songs; on “Eric Lindros,” he uses “He War” mostly how you’d expect, sampling the main guitar riff for the verses and using the bridge’s awesome circular guitar line for the chorus (there is also a drone that keeps popping up here and there). But disliking Cat Power or any of the artists sampled shouldn’t hurt your appreciation of this album; I don’t like the Alan Parsons Project (well, “Sirius” is pretty great), but that doesn’t stop me from liking songs that sample them, like Black Milk’s “Losing Out” or Kanye’s “Heartless.” You certainly don’t have to be an Espers fan to appreciate the way Martin turns the band’s dirgey Renaissance Faire psych-folk song “Dead Queen” (complete with Tibetan singing bowls) into the creepy but bumpin’ “Dead Queen” of The Slow Twilight.

 

Besides great beats, what elevates The Slow Twilight above just another rap album you can get for free on the Internet is Zilla Rocca. When two thousand new MCs seem to appear on the scene everyday, it’s extremely difficult to shine, but I know talent when I hear it. Zilla deftly brings you into the world of a college educated, service job working smartass with pop culture punchlines for days and an underlying commitment to making great rap. Able to move from the black helicopter paranoia fantasies of “No Resolutions” to the underground rapper real-talk of “Eric Lindros” to the break-up tales of “Stay Clean” without sounding like three different rappers, Zilla is truly a rapper to be reckoned with. 

 

The Slow Twilight is available for free on June 23rd on Zilla’s Clap Cowards blog–I highly, highly recommend it.

 

The 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers – Eric Lindros

 

Wonderland Drive: “Papaya Year” Remix

Since I’m not done with my post on the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers album (which is amazing, BTW), I thought I’d share my remix of High Places’ “Papaya Year,” as well as the original so you can get a sense of how I altered it.  Among other things, I added drums and a vocal sample from an old 7 inch entitled “Journey Through a Thousand Meditations.” This is the first remix I’ve ever done that I’m actually happy with, though I wish I’d be able to mix it louder without losing fidelity.

 

High Places – Papaya Year 

 

High Places – Papaya Year (Wonderland Drive remix)

The Right Track: Major Lazer’s “Zumbi”

If Andy Milonakis, the ex-MTV2 personality and thirty three year old man-child, has any talent at all, it’s his ability to turn being a jerk with a growth condition into performance art. Throughout his career, one of his favorite things to do has been to deliver dorky, sex obsessed freestyle raps that take numerous bizarre detours, partly because he sucks at freestlying and partly because the fun of the raps comes from mixing horrorcore style lyrical imagery with the mundane and the silly. In his video “Psycho Rap,” Milonakis quickly moves from bragging about having sex with girls to having sex with ducks and skunks and Old Navy fleeces.

 

This is pretty much all he’s doing on Major Lazer’s “Zumbi,”with the added addition of auto-tune and sci-fi ragga beat that mixes 8 bit video game noises and huge bass hits. On first listen, the song can seem pretty offensive. Besides doing a crude impression of Jamaican patois under the guise of being a Jamaican zombie, Milonakis also raps things like “Me a zombie and me don’t like gays/Cus me don’t like the HIV,” a line that’s pretty unforgivable, but also pretty absurd, since it presumes the living dead have immune systems. The fake Jamaican accent is also somewhat explained when we found out he’s a “fake Jamaican” from Kentucky.

 

The song’s video is equally as ridiculous, with shots of Milonakis as zombie taking a break from eating brains to get a Frappucino, shopping at Hot Topic, and pigging out on potato chips in a convenience store.

 

I’ll admit at first I hated “Zumbi,” but something about it stuck with me. Maybe it’s the way the song mixes dancehall DJs over the top threats with a juvenile obsession with zombies or maybe it’s that, of all the songs I’ve heard off the Major Lazer album, it’s the only one that seems to live up to the project’s charmingly B-movie premise.

 

Major Lazer – Zumbi