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”:

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?

The 1st Quarter 2019 Playlust Playlist: My (Weird) Top 75 from the First Three Months of 2019

My joke about a second take back-fired.

[Ed. – I actually held onto a few posts from A Project of Self-Indulgence, the first several artist profiles of 2019 among them. Because the 1st Quarter Playlist that I’m putting up includes a fair number of artists on this list, I thought I’d repost these summaries to give people an intro to the artists they hear on the playlist. Just the good ones, mind you. And, now, without preamble…]

Masego
“Anytime I’ve tried to make this recipe for dopeness, it just doesn’t work.”

That doesn’t so much sum up Masego, the stage-name for the fairly-recently launched Micah Davis, as embody him. He describes his influences – jazz-era legend Cab Calloway and Jamie Foxx, of all people, not to mention Pharrell, and OutKast’s Andre 3000 – while also talking about how much he relies on improvisation when making music. He trips when he tries to too-consciously follow his idols.

Masego is a fairly recent act, someone I found when the Portland Mercury named his Lady Lady as one of their top albums of 2018. Personally, the connection came slowly and through inaction: every time I came close to skipping a song, I’d inevitably counsel myself to give it “just a couple more seconds.” I only noticed I’d stopped saying that when Spotify started playing another artist. Lady Lady is the kind of magnetic, low-upon-first-listen kind of albums, but it’s something I sank into, and without noticing it much. I pulled “Lavish Lullaby,” “Old Age” and “Just A Little” to the playlist and, the more I listen to them, and read up on him, the more all that feels like a toe-hold onto something bigger. Judging by the fact he was scheduled to headline a European/North American tour shortly after this interview, says that The Mercury and me aren’t the only people who can’t quite find the skip button.

Born in Jamaica, raised in Newport News, Virginia, by an entrepreneur and a guy in the U.S Air Force, both of them pastors, Masego comes from Soundcloud, and the internet in general. He calls what he does “TrapHouseJazz” (and…I’ll accept it), and, from one interview to the next – whether in a WAMU 85 Bandwidth.fm interview (source for the quote up top), or one with Billboard (link above) – understanding what that means requires some long-form reading. To give an example, he neither reads nor writes music, but, in a testament to his drive and/or compulsion, he created his own musical notation that he understands well enough to translate for others. Most often, though, he just sits down and lets it happen – and, after that, he invites in more people (something about 100 people being “in TrapHouseJazz”). Call it hyper-, open-source collaboration with all kinds of anyone he can find. The man (age 25) even created an app called Network, in order to enable the kind of collaboration that works for him – and probably people of his generation.