Crash Course No. 40: Digable Planets, A Short-Lived, but Brilliant Solar System

Vibe of their videos...

Some Basics
“I was basically thinking the music we made was something people could dig, so Digable. I was listening to a lot of George Clinton and Sun Ra, so I was on some space shit, cosmic. I was thinking of each person as a planet, we are all in a solar system, a galaxy and trying to orbit around each other. That was my imagination for those words.”
- Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler

“Digable Planets performed with live musicians and showed audiences that there isn’t any box that hip-hip should fit in. There wasn’t ‘conscious hip-hop’ and ‘gangsta rap.’ The group proved through their music and their style that they could be hardcore b-boys and b-girls, intellectuals, and party people all at the same time.”
- Ericka Blount Danois, okayplayer (2018)

The members of Digable Planets found one another through two different meetings: Butler, who originally hailed from Seattle, met Craig “Doodlebug” Irving while interning at Philadelphia’s Sleeping Bag Records; Irving had met Mariana “Ladybug” Vieira at DC’s Howard University. They all had similar upbringings – all three had parents involved in the Black Liberation movement (Vieira’s from their/her(?) native Brazil) – and, not surprisingly, they all felt the pull of music, whether from obsessing over the radio dial (Ladybug) or raiding their parents’ record collections (Butterfly and Doodlebug). Ladybug found further inspiration from the breakthrough of some famous female rappers of the late 1980s (e.g., Roxanne Shante, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Salt & Pepa (and Spinderella, dammit!).

Officially formed in 1989, the first demos recorded as “Digable Planets” featured only Butler, but he and Irving vibed all right (“once we got cool”), so Butler made his pitch and worked his connections. From Irving:

“He asked me to join him in putting this new group together and after hearing the demos he put together I was hooked. Eventually Ladybug joined the group and Butter through the connects he made while being an intern at Sleeping Bag records, was able to parlay a meeting with Dennis Wheeler, an A&R at an up and coming label called Pendulum and the rest is history!”

History took a few years to start, but they put out work and garnered attention (there’s something about a “Rosie Perez co-sign on In Living Color” in the interview with Vieira, but she leaves it hanging) until Pendulum Records signed them in 1992 and Digable Planets relocated to Brooklyn. They had a good bond early. From Vieira:

Crash-Course, No. 33: Noise & Azealia Banks

Phuket, so someone else uses "Fantasea."

[Ed. - Because I can’t make up my fucking mind about where to go next, I decided to return to the inspiration for my original music project - i.e., learning about the bands/artists in my personal collection. Alphabetically, as it happens.]

Where I Found Her
There was this old site, Too Good for Radio (which doesn’t look terribly active anymore), that used to put out massive monthly playlists. I found it during the dub-step era, which says something about its hit/miss ratio (e.g., much, much more of the latter), but still credit the site for introducing me to artists like Lana Del Rey and, of course, Azealia Banks. That said, the one and only thing I ever downloaded was her debut mixtape, Fantasea. Je regrette rien…

Who She’s For
I would call her club/dance music, but also accept that sells her short. The best description I’ve read so far came from The Guardian’s John Robinson (quoted by Wikipedia), which framed her as “an appealing blend of Missy Elliott and dance-pop.” The same source calls out other genres - e.g., “hardcore hip-hop” and “indie pop” and “dance music” - and maybe that middle genre sounds closest. Banks straddles a lot of genres - and I think that’s her appeal for me.

A Little More
“Yet her willingness to push those buttons is refreshing.”

The day I decided to do a dive into Azealia Banks I pulled up Google news and typed “Azealia Banks” into the search bar. This was the first headline:

Azealia Banks denies rumours she ‘ate her dead cat’ and reveals she has a child’s SKULL

Or at least the text in the url (here's the actual, equally unflattering article). Again, that was the first news item on Banks from a web search on a random goddamn Thursday. The young woman meets her reputation. Related, the following appears in the sub-section of her Wikipedia page under “Controversies”:

Crash-Course No. 29: Jungle Brothers Blazed a Trail

The new album. 2020, y'all!

[Ed. - Another “rewrite,” which is in quotes this time because, the About the Sampler section aside, it’s going up here the same way it did in the original (messy) mega-post. Still leaning toward keeping the “Who They’re For, A Little More,” and “About the Sampler” format…separating the sources too.]

Who They’re For: Hip hop fans with a fondness for originators - e.g., one of the earlier attempts to expand the genre’s musical influences by fusing jazz, hip-hop and house music (hip-house!) - and lovers of both consciousness and fun. They came out about a decade into hip hop’s existence and still opened up one of its most fruitful sub-genres.

A Little More
“So where you had Jungle Brothers brought into the nation by Red Alert, you had Jungle Brothers bringing in Tribe and De La and we rolled out like that. Before that, it was BDP, Ultramagnetic MCs, Nice & Smooth and Mark the 45 King with Markey Fresh and the Violators. Red was mentoring all of us.”

This one starts with the thought experiment: what would it be like to grow up in New York with Kool DJ Red Alert, one of the biggest names in the beating heart of hip hop, as your uncle? The leg up didn’t hurt the Jungle Brothers, but Red Alert only gave them a platform (by playing “Braggin’ & Boastin’” on his Kiss 98.7 radio show), which left Mike G (aka, Michael Small; also the nephew), Afrika Baby Bam (aka, Nathaniel Hall), and DJ Sammy B (Sammy Burwell) with the work of changing what hip hop artists could talk about ahead of them. With musical and performance influences like Stevie Wonder, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire as their North Star, Jungle Brothers built the Native Tongue crew one band and one artist at a time, playing together and touring together, and generally keeping an exhausting pace. They also added musical elements to hip hop beyond the funk, disco and dance breaks and pushed forward Afro-centric themes; the latter wasn’t so unusual - see, Boogie Down Productions - but Jungle Brothers, and Native Tongue as a whole, made it all sound more fun - and funny. Their 1988 release, Straight Out of the Jungle, put them on the map and they expanded it a year later with Done by the Forces of Nature. Their peers passed them - Tribe Called Quest, in particular - and they arguably arrived in the wrong moment, i.e., a couple years before hip hop’s center of gravity shifted to the West Coast, then got swallowed up by the East Coast/West Coast mess. They’re easy to research in that you don’t have to turn over too many stones to find interviews, but they have neither the history nor the drama that gives the “holy shit” moments that make these things easy to write. If I had to name the one thing that kept coming up in most of the sources I read, it’s the recording of “I’ll House You,” and why not? By most accounts, everyone involved but the Jungle Brothers gave that track the side-eye and the producer suggested recording it as a lark, something to fill some time at the end of the album. That song still seems to get a lot of play and I’ll always cherish it for the way Afrika Baby Bam describes the recording process:

The Crash-Course Project Index

Finding Your Feet, a comedy featuring Dolores Umbridge, apparently...

Welcome to this library of…posts about popular music. Unfortunately, I’ll have to start this with an explanation.

At the time I’m posting this little (for now) index, I’ve written a total of 57 posts for this site. 20 of those were devoted to the One Hit No More Project (and here’s the library for that one, which will grow just like this one), which leaves 37 posts about…other things. I changed both topics and formats between those posts, covering just one band/artist here, and building a post a round a playlist with multiple artists there. Call it a long process of finding my feet – which I think I have going into 2020 (also, I make regular claims to have found my feet, but they keep going missing all the same).

In order to lend both this library and posts I intend to write in the future some thematic coherence, I’ve decided to limit this index to posts in which I focused on one band/artist. (And, in accordance with future plans, I will create a separate index for those playlist posts.) About those posts…

While I cover a decent variety of bands/artists, the majority of them come from “indie ______” genres – e.g., “indie rock,” “indie hip hop,” and “indie pop,” with various sub-genres in between. Those will be the same kinds of artists I look into going forward too. At any rate, links to all the posts of this sort that I’ve written so far are linked to down below. As I write more posts going forward, I’ll add them to this post with semi-regularity to keep this library current.

Finally, you’ll see a bunch of different titles below, as well as a discontinued series or two. Going forward, I’ve decided to continue this under the “Crash Course” series, so the numbers will count up from there (and I dropped the hyphen in “Crash-Course”). That’s all, lots to read below - and listen to. Each post includes a short-ish history of the relevant band/artist, as well as links to a bunch of their music. God bless, Youtube, right?

MAME Playlist, May 2019, Week 3: Naming Conventions and Unlikely(?) Careers

Today's theme: unlikely rock.

I had one of those weeks when I up and decided I hadn’t heard no frills, half-conscious “rock” for too long. Then I recalled a band who claimed they were about nothing else. So I went back to reconnect with the band that brought me “Day Stealer.”

Welcome to the third playlist of May 2019.

Music Band

This Nashville trio was one of the first bands Spotify’s Discover Weekly fed me in the 2nd half of 2016. Note the date…

The experience of trying to research this band underlines the importance choosing a good, searchable name. Over half an hour of trying combinations of “music,” “band,” and “Nashville” pulled up scores of Nashville-based bands (and means of booking them), but none of them this Music Band. When I wrote about them for the predecessor site to this one (don’t bother looking; it’s deleted), I could find reviews – both of albums and live performances – and a couple interviews. Their 2016 album, Wake Up Laughing, was probably a year old by then and Music Band had probably done some touring to support it. Anyway, between their name and the passing of three years, I can’t even dig up the names of the dudes in the band…

…they do have a (modest) twitter account and it appears they’re still active, even talking about another album.

If that doesn’t come out, Music Band will have put out just two albums: Wake Up Laughing and 2014’s (EP?), Can I Live. They won’t blow your mind or anything - one review for Wake Up Laughing offers qualified praise (“vocals that aren’t particularly distinctive and compressed production that doesn’t do these songs justice”), while another one just shits all over it/them (“Music Band? Really? It’s like they’re putting so much effort into putting in absolutely no effort.”) – but the song “Green Lights” left a fond enough memory of them that I circled back. And, no, they aren’t original, they aren’t brave, lyrically or musically. They also make no claims to be. As for what they sound like, eh, this gets close enough:

April 2019 MAME Playlist: Mellow ATL, DIY England and Troubled Toronto

So simple, so good.

Welcome to the April 2019 MAME Playlist post, which, in a better world, will be the last whale I produce. (Here’s to hoping future plans come together). I posted a 50-song playlist for the month (there’s more where that came from; username snackyd), and all the songs on that playlist are linked to somewhere down below. I highlight three artists (chosen more or less at random) down below - Faye Webster, Martha (the band, not a person), and Shad – by sharing some stuff about who they are, where they come from and what they do. The rest of the playlist is mostly random. Mostly.

I posted some other write-ups on some other artists earlier this month, and some of the songs by those bands stuck to this month’s playlist. You can read about them in those posts, which I’ve linked to under the names of each band, and I’ll list/link to the songs by each that I held onto for this playlist. Those include: Weyes Blood (mellow, airy indie with gorgeous vocals, “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” “Andromeda,” and “Mirror Forever”); Orange Goblin (metal from the hard rock school mostly, “The Astral Project,” “Magic Carpet,” and “Aquatic Fanatic”); and The Who (you know them, but the story behind Lifehouse is a doozy, “Whiskey Man,” “Pictures of Lily,” “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” “Relay,” “5:15,” and “Slip Kid”).

All right, time to look at this month’s playlist’s featured artists…in which I accidentally go from oldest to youngest.

Faye Webster, [Eponymous]
I think it was last month when Discover Weekly pitched Faye Webster’s “Room Temperature” my way. It’s probably part of the promotional push for Webster’s upcoming album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, and, between that and the still-better, “Kingston,” I have high hopes for that new release. But it’s not out yet (think it said late May, like, May 26), so I’m stuck with her 2017 eponymous album. The one with the understatedly freaking awesome album cover (see above).

Webster comes from Atlanta, Georgia, and a creative family (something I see a lot when researching musicians). Musically, she grew up on old country, but branched out into Atlanta-area local hip hop – specifically, material put out by Awful Records. That branching out eventually lead her to membership in a “rap collective” called PSA, and you hear both influences in her sound. Her choice of instruments that makes her earliest influences stand out more: “No matter what music I end up making I will always use pedal steel... It's in my roots. I love pedal steel.”

One Hit No More, No. 5: Don & Juan, & "What Your Name" & Other People with Better Stories

It's the people around them...

This one’s pretty simple: one guy performed as “Don” (Roland Trone), another as “Juan” (Claude “Sonny” Johnson), and they recorded a gently pining doo wop hit titled, “What’s Your Name.” Apart from Trone’s early death (1982, age 45) and acknowledgement of a later “lesser” hit, “Magic Wand,” there’s not much available about Don & Juan, even on the internet, and there’s even less on the song itself. Johnson would go on to write a few dozen more songs, but the specific story begins and ends with: two guys recorded a good song and it became a big enough “monster hit” for them to achieve icon status in the doo-wop genre.

I poked first around people who worked with Johnson, and then did a little digging into the doo wop genre. I can already turn the page on Trone, sadly, with his untimely death and his partnership with Johnson.

Johnson, on the other hand, started in another doo wop act from New York’s Long Island called The Genies. That group formed in 1956, with Alexander Faison, Fred Jones, Bill Gains, and Roy Hammond (you’ll hear more about that last name) as founding members. They got discovered on a beach instead a street corner - the more typical doo wop origin story - but not much else separated them from the competition. The Genies did record an album, one that included their minor hit, “Who’s That Knockin,’” (cute tune about juggling lovers), but that didn’t happen until Johnson came over from Brooklyn and helped with the songs. Their ride to stardom crested at that, and the best story they left to history happened that one time, when Gains “ran off to Canada with a woman and has never been seen or heard from since.” He made that infamous break the night of The Genies one and only (I believe) show at the famous Apollo Theater.

Roughly three years passed between the end of The Genies run in 1959 and the release of “What’s Your Name?” in 1962. With doo wop big as it was - this coincided with that genre’s last, loud gasp - Don & Juan had to break through a lot of noise in order to be heard. The song, a masterful pairing of sound and content, a sort of musical onomatopoeia for love’s dumbstruck awe, gets credit for that. It doesn’t necessarily stand out beyond that, and that’s true of most of Don & Juan’s work. Like “Magic Wand” - and, for me, most of doo wop. As with The Monotones’ “Book of Love,” Don & Juan’s particular spin on doo wop got them in the spotlight, but it couldn’t keep them there. Pop culture couldn’t eat doo wop forever for one; not even the inventive guitar hooks and atmospheric production on songs like “Pot Luck” and “All That’s Missing Is You” couldn’t buy them more time (those are the best songs Don & Juan put out for me). On the other hand, songs like that prefigured Johnson’s future as a songwriter. The man could adapt.