Above photo by Cheyenne Rae
Well it’s been more than a minute since our last Winnipeg Weather Report, but I’m glad to say that during that time the snow has yet to befall our fair city. We have however had a string of knifings, which is apparently the new Winnipeg handshake. Since I’m not here to talk crime, let’s not dwell on the negative and instead turn to some real positivity coming out of Winnipeg.
It’s been twenty years since De La Soul released the seminal 3 Feet High & Rising and the daisy age was in full bloom, but a handful of Winnipeg rap-horticulturalists known as The Lytics are trying to sow seeds of positivity and pick up where the Native Tongues left off. Curiously, this youthful group includes someone who wasn’t even alive in ’89. In fact, Ashy – one of four MCs – just graduated from high school this past year, but he and the rest of the crew (A-Nice, Munga, DJ Action Rick and B-flat) all pay obeisance to the past masters of positive rap.
“I decided to start writing because of Reflection Eternal by Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek,” Munga noted when I sat down with the group. Beatsmith/producer B-flat notes that prior joining the group “they were the Analytics and that got shortened to the Lytics,” and stresses the intellectual approach to writing and rhyming that the MCs all bring to their self-titled debut.
Which is not to say that the album is an entirely serious backpack-rap record – far from it, with party tunes including “Checkin’ On My Pumas” and “Big City Sound Girl” in the mix. The Lytics realize that even Black Star was known to turn a party out. It’s just that their approach avoids the “b*tches and h*’s” that have marred hip-hop for many a year and made the genre a poster-child for misogyny.
The group have blown up big locally since the album’s release and more recently they’ve been showing up on campus station hip-hop Top Ten’s. The quintet have ‘next big thing’ written all over them, but taking the title of one of the album’s finest cuts as a cue, they “Stay Humble.” Taking a cue from their father, they’re constantly challenging themselves to get better – as songwriters, as MCs, as performers – and not rest on their laurels.
You read that right back there. It did say “their father” as three of the Lytics are brothers (B-flat, Ashy and A-Nice), and a fourth (Munga) is a cousin who lives with them. But the genesis of the Lytics wasn’t as straightforward as you might expect when four-fifths of the group are related. As elder brother B-flat tells it, it took some subterfuge on the part of his siblings and cousin before The Lytics (the group and the album) came to be: “I had been making beats on my own for awhile and I left the basement one time too many and I come back and these guys have basically an album put together.”
A-Nice related that he, Munga and Ashy had “started on old Dilla instrumentals, Pete Rock, Premier, stuff like that and for me I just got tired of jacking other beats. The thing is we always wanted his beats but I guess we had to prove ourselves first so we got to the point we basically did it renegade style and went in there and recorded when we could.”
Earning B-flat’s approval and respect was the turning point as the group began to work more collaboratively and the results speak for themselves. The remastered album released earlier this fall is available via the interweb so check out the Lytics pages for more details. In the meantime, “Stay Humble.”
Why, that’s David Byrne, standing in front of a…Ramones museum, in Berlin? Read on for more, but be aware that this picture came from a website and David Byrne has nothing to do with this article.
Black Feelings – S/T (2009, Alien 8)
The debut album from Montréal-based band Black Feelings was released last month, and if you’ve been following this band at all, it’s no doubt an exciting release. If you’ve never heard of them, take note, this is a band worth paying some attention to.
As an indication of their sound, the group’s name works quite well, as they’re playing with some dark stuff. The balance between amazement and fright that (good) psychedelic music often toys with so deftly is maintained here through a near constant sense of dread. It’s a heavy, haunting record, with a lot of indistinct components. There are pounding drums, fuzzed-out synth constantly churning away, ghostly basslines, a little bit of guitar, and chanting vocals that often sound like they’re emanating from somewhere beyond the music, all coming together in a mesmerising amalgam that touches upon numerous sounds and styles. To say it’s simply psychedelic punk or some such thing would be falling short, but, whatever it is, it certainly passed through some serious psych territory on in its way. The record is no more weird or experimental than it needs be, though, and, clocking in around thirty-six minutes, it doesn’t fall into the trap of indulgence.
The tracks switch between ferocity, head-nodding fuzz, and drone quite easily, and the band have a great sound established for themselves. A friend once tried to describe a live performance by this band by saying it sounded like a ufo flying through space, which is probably as good a description of it as you’d get from anyone. They seem to be striving intently toward the unspoken things, allowing the music to be its own explanation, and the eight incantations on this record serve that purpose quite well. In the end, one of the best things that can be said about this record is that it’s only their first.
If you’re interested in more, check out their Aum Shinrikyo Endless Montréal cassette, a longer, freaked-out version of this album’s closing track, now in digital form over at the WFMU archive.
Had it narrowed down this week to two videos related to Friday’s now playing post, but couldn’t decide between them, so, why not both?:
First, The Knife doing their best-known song “Heartbeats.” It’s a live video, with a really nice re-worked version of the song.
And second, the Warren G & Nate Dogg hit “Regulate.” In ‘94, the rhythm was the bass, and the bass was the treble.
Fever Ray – S/T: The solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson, undertaken after The Knife went on hiatus a couple of years ago, isn’t too far removed from what The Knife did, but it has a noticeably different character. Still trying to figure out what that is, exactly. It’s a weird, sort of sleepy record, full of Andersson’s spooky pitch-shifted, intoned vocals and minimal electronic rhythms, but it’s quite welcoming. Cool stuff. Musically compelling and lyrically bizarre, it’s interesting to think that her work (both solo and group) is mainstream popular in Sweden but considered to be arty weirdness in most other places.
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A bunch of old Zapp singles. Super classic stuff from a group that was around a long time and informed whole genres, but who have always remained largely unrecognised outside of the R&B/hip-hop worlds. The group consisted of the Troutman brothers (five in total), but the focal point was frontman Roger Troutman (the group was often billed as Zapp and Roger) and his trademark talkbox keyboard sound. Known for some singles that remain staples to this day, the group popularised an electro/R&B sound that’s never gotten old. Between Zapp and his solo records, Roger became an R&B chart favourite and a collaborator in-demand throughout the eighties, and in the nineties he enjoyed legendary status among hip-hop producers and DJs. The Zapp sound is often credited as a siginifcant inspiration for the California hip-hop sound of the early nineties, and Roger’s appearance on 2 Pac’s “California Love” presented him to a new generation in that very context. In 1999, after a twenty-year career, the original Zapp lineup was brought to a shocking end when Roger was shot and killed by his brother Larry, who, in turn, then killed himself.
