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Archive for the ‘Ty Dolla $ign’ Category

E.L. Doctorow–“A House on the Plains” (New Yorker, June 18 & 25, 2001)

Posted in Coronavirus, E.L. Doctorow, Murder, New Yorker, Quarantine, Sex, Short Story, Skrillex, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Ty Dolla $ign, Violence on November 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TY DOLLA $IGN: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #104 (October 28, 2020).

I didn’t know much about Ty until his previous Tiny Desk Concert, which I kind of liked.

When I saw this one, I still thought he was a rapper.  But he is a full on crooner in this concert.

I was fascinated to see that he was manipulating all of his effects himself–autotune and whatnot-on the box in front of him, which he kept walking around with.  But perhaps the most fascinating thing about this was that Skrillex was there playing with him (they are mates, I gather) and that Skrillex was playing the guitar for the first track.

This is one of those “six songs in 15 minutes” sets.  Each song is more or less a verse and a chorus.  And in between there’s a kind of fun jam.

“Temptations” features Skrillex on guitar.  It’s pretty short and soon enough Skrillex puts down the guitar and they are playing that interim music and starting “Something New.”  This song features a groovy bass line from Joe Cleveland.  I don’t quite know what the lyrics are but they are remarkably vulgar.

“Or Nah” opens with a cool spiky guitar riff from Brandon Chapman who Ty calls “my twin, Baby Dolla $ign).    Up next is “Paranoid” which is without question the worst song I have ever heard.

The lyrics are bad enough

I seen two of my bitches in the club / I know they know about each other / I think these bitches trying to set me up.

What the hell?  And worse than the lyrics is that he does that awful love song crooning, but it’s about he’s crooning about his bitches setting him up.  Oh god, its dreadful.  Although I was amused at the amusign way he introduces his keyboardist.  I gather he changes the lyric to “your bitch smells like Camper” [point to keyboardist].

After the excerpt the band jams out and it’s really good.  The band is tight and really rocks.  There’s some great drumming from Mike Moore and some more wild soloing from Chapman.  This was my favorite part of the set.

Although the sinister bass riff that opens “Ego Death” is pretty cool.  Again the jamming in the middle of the song is great (and the samples that Ty triggers are really fun).

The set ends with “Your Turn.”  Ty picks up the guitar but mostly plays occasional chords.  The song is all guitar and vocals to start with.  Then backing singer Ant Clemons sings a call and response.  By the end of the song he is singing “yee yee yee yee” for some reason.  I was really happy when this set was over.

[READ: November 25, 2020] “A House on the Plains”

I tend to think of E.L. Doctorow as writing kind of formal books.  That’s not based on anything except that he’s been writing for a long time and that some of his books have been turned into movies (and musicals).

So I was surprised at the tone of this story.   And then even more surprised as the plot started to reveal itself.  The story was wonderfully written.  There’s the story that’s not being revealed as well as the part that is.  And both are really engaging.

The story begins in Chicago.  The narrator says that his mama tells him that he has to start calling her Aunt Dora.  Why?  Because when they move, she can’t have other people believing she has a child his age.

The boy, Earle, (who is at least a teenager because he is having sex with a local girl, Winifred) is not happy about leaving Chicago.  Both because of the girl and because Chicago is a cool city and they are planning to move to the middle of nowhere. (more…)

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Richard Yates–“The Canal” (New Yorker, January 15, 2001)

Posted in Coronavirus, Guns, New Yorker, Quarantine, Roddy Richh, Sexism, Short Story, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Ty Dolla $ign, War, World War I on July 11, 2020| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: RODDY RICCH-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #47 (July 8, 2020).

Here’s another rapper I hadn’t heard of, but who is apparently huge.  (Huge enough to have Ty Dolla $ign join him).  The blurb assures us

This was slated to be Roddy Ricch’s summer. He was having the breakout moment that I’ve seen from so many other Compton emcees before him… including the biggest song in the world in “The Box,” which spent 11 weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 and will probably go down as the last pre-COVID club anthem.

Richh raps in front of a fantastic band.  They have a fantastic groove and really jam fantastically.

Backed by the juggernaut musical collective 1500 or Nothin’, this set exhibits the many dimensions of his [suddenly prophetic] debut album title — Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial.

Christopher “Brody” Brown brings a fantastic bass sound throughout the set.  You can hear it right from the first song “Perfect Time” which showcases the band and Richh’s rapping skills.  Richh even plays keys at the end of the song.

It segues perfectly into “Bacc Seat.”  The band tightly and seamlessly shifts gears from that rocker to this slower song.  The song features a cool guitar riff from Charles “Uncle Chucc” Hamilton and a guest appearance from Ty Dolla $ign who sings and plays guitar!

The backing vocalists are great; however, they are not social distancing at all.  Shaunise R. Harris, Garren Edwards, and Tayler L. Green are all shoulder to shoulder back there, which makes Richh’s shirt “that’s an awful lot of cough syrup” seem more ominous than funny.  T

But the band is on fire and there’s some serious drums from Nick Smith at the end of the song.

Gentle keys from Lamar Edwards open “High Fashion.”  Edwards has a few banks of keys getting all kinds of interesting sounds.  Richh says this song is about the type of relationship he like to be in–high fashion: “I like to be fly, like shorties be fly.”

Once again, this song ends with some great drums from Smith and percussionist Larrance Dopson.

Richh is pretty young so it’s surprising to hear him say that he doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet: I don’t like to be bothered” (which jibes with the Anitisocial title).

The final song “War Baby” opens with a quiet, lovely piano. But the song builds to a big jam by the end with some great guitar soloing from Uncle Chucc interspersed with some fantastic drum soloing from both Smith and Dopson.

I’m not all that impressed with what Richh is rapping about–lots of vulgarities so i started tuning out–but the band is fantastic.

[READ: July 8, 2020] “The Canal”

With a title like this I didn’t expect this story to be about World War II.  Although it is set at a party several years later.

Two couple are drinking and talking.  Lew and Betty Miller are bored out of their minds listening to Tom Brace tell yet another war story from his days in Germany.  Tom’s wife Nancy couldn’t have been prouder, listening to him go on and on.

At some point, something that Tom says reminds Betty of something that Lew told her about the way.  She asks if Lew was in the same place as Tom.  Lew says no, although he grudgingly admits that he was in the same area at the same time. (more…)

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Jim McCann, Rodin Esquejo, Adrian Alphona, Sonia Oback–Mind the Gap: Vol 1: Intimate Strangers (2012)

Posted in Death, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Graphic Novel, Hospitals, Huh?, Jim McCann, Mac Miller, NPR/PRI/PBS, Rodin Esquejo, Series, Sonia Oback., Thundercat, Tiny Desk Concert, Ty Dolla $ign, Unfinished series, Violence on August 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK–TY DOLLA $IGN-Tiny Desk Concert #877 [August 8, 2019]

On the year anniversary of Mac Miler’s Tiny Desk performance, Ty Dolla $ign and his band were doing a Tiny Desk Concert.  This is an except from it (the full show is supposed to be uploaded but as of April 2020 it still isn’t).

I don’t know the original at all, but what is interesting to me is the phenomenal guitar work Justus West and the always wonderful Thundercat on bass.

Last week, Ty Dolla $ign visited NPR headquarters to record a fantastic Tiny Desk concert of his own that will air in its entirety soon. But once we wrapped the taping, something special happened: I reminded Ty that he sat at the desk almost a year to the day that his friend, Mac, delivered what would be one of his final performances.

The band paused and huddled. They mulled over a few notes in a matter of seconds then gave me a signal that they were ready. The room was silenced and the cameras started rolling again.

Here’s Ty performing a moving rendition of his 2016 collaboration with Mac, “Cinderella” from Mac’s fourth studio album, The Divine Feminine. Ty’s flanked by two close friends of Mac, Thundercat on bass and Justus West on guitar, both of whom played at the Tiny Desk with the Pittsburgh-born rapper a year ago.

The rest of the band includes Cory Henry and Aliandro Prawl on keys, Mike Moore on drums and Ant Clemons on vocals.  It’s a very moving performance.

[READ: August 2019] Mind the Gap 1

I saw this book in the library and was intrigued by the title and the frankly fantastic/al looking cover image by Rodin Esquejo and Sonia Oback.

I had no idea what the story was about and I was frankly surprised by the plot and the way it was massaged.

The story opens with a woman, Jo, getting a call from her friend Elle, but it quickly gets disconnected.  Jo calls Dane and asks if Elle is with him. She says Elle sounded strange in the call and she was worried.  Soon enough Elle (Ellis) is brought into the hospital unconscious.  The next page we see her floating in an otherworld.  She can’t remember her name but she sees her body in the hospital. (more…)

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