Since we began shooting Common for Embedded, we have built a great relationship with him and his team. They came to us for Make Common’s Day because they knew Current had experience in doing these sort of viewer-created video call outs, and they wanted to take a unique approach to making a video for the song.
It was an opportunity with a big name artist that we couldn’t really pass up. It sort of plays off the VCAM initiatives as well as the Writer in Residence project, but seemed like a perfect way to bring Current’s filmmaker community together with Common to create something special.
From what Common’s team told me, he chose this one because it was overall a different vibe than your typical clichéd rap music video. It had a fun feel to it, and the use of clip art was simple yet effective, as was the way the producers integrated the green screen footage, and gave it a grainy clip art feel.
Watch Common’s pick for his favorite “Make My Day” video here, and tune in tonight just after our Embedded with Common special—so, about 11:30/10:30c—to see it make its TV premiere:
And check out these photos from when we shot the green screen footage:
We’ve got a bunch of Beyond Embedded posts penned by our amazing intern Chanelle for you to backread. Here’s something you could watch while you dig deep to learn more about Silversun Pickups‘ and K’naan’s influences and inspirations: the actual show!
Please enjoy Current Music Presents: Embedded with Silversun Pickups, K’naan and Arcade Fire, as just aired on Current TV. (Hint: we have a really nice full-screen player you can click in the lower right corner.)
Born in 1973, K’naan has talked about being able to remember his birthplace, Mogadishu, Somalia, both in times of relative peace and after civil war began in 1991. As an ongoing conflict, what began as insurrections against the regime of Siad Barre has lead to major devastation. The war has destabilized Somalia and seen the breakdown of its government, now unable to control rebel forces. Still, despite the 300,000–400,000 lives taken as of 2009, many believe the situation hardly gets the kind of attention it deserves from other countries that might be able to help.
Although his family moved to New York and then Canada to escape the conflict, K’naan has stayed very active in regards to Somalia. He first became acquainted with English through hip-hop records by people like Rakim and Nas. His love affair with hip-hop began very young, and eventually K’naan dropped out of school to pursue a career in music. Telling the story of his home is a major reason for why he rhymes, the success of which has helped to spread his words even beyond the musical realm to speaking in morepoliticalforums and even hoping to write an opinion piece for the New York Times.
“The people of Somalia just do not have a voice,” K’naan has said to NPR. “They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.”
UPDATE: Check K’naan’s Tour Stop on Embedded (at 1:01) to hear him talk about where he’s from and championing Somalia.
Hip-hop records and sampling have gone hand-in-hand for years. Where to draw from for good hip-hop beats varies from the popular to the esoteric. For his song “ABC,” K’naan explains that he combined those two elements to create something fresh.
Mulatu Astatke and his Ethopian Quintet released Afro-Latin Soul in the 1960s. He’s famous for really embracing Ethiopia’s musical style and integrating it into all type of projects, and his career has seen him work with a variety of notable jazz artists, including Duke Ellington, after first studying in New York, London, and Boston (as the first African to attended Berklee College of Music). Surprisingly, any association Astatke has with more recent mainstream music and media is still pretty new to this decade. A number of Mulatu’s songs appeared on the soundtrack to the 2005 Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, and K’naan’s music has injected a little of Ethiopian style into hip-hop.
Chubb Rock’s “Treat ‘Em Right” from his album The One exists on the opposite side of the spectrum. It’s a mainstream hip-hop song. The track reached #1 on Billboard’s “Top Rap Singles” chart in 1991, along with two other radio releases from the same album, “The Chubbster” and “Just The Two Of Us.” Unlike Astatke, Chubb Rock didn’t come from an especially musical background. In fact, he claimed that he was a pre-med student at Brown University, but he dropped out to pursue his hip-hop career.
It’s a testament to the idea that something that works for sampling can really comes from anywhere. Different producers and beat-makers have a lot to say about how to sample and choosing which kinds of sounds to sample. One of the bigger hip-hop artists and producers right now, 9th Wonder, sat down with Soul Culture TV to talk about how he works and why he thinks producers don’t always get the credit they might deserve.
When playing Pomona’s The Glass House, the Silversun Pickups talk about creating a set list and the importance of song order on an album versus song order for a show. Setting up the flow is something that many people have even called an art, breaking down the methods and noting which techniques work better than others. Many artists take album and live show sequencing just as seriously, from indie rock acts to hip-hop heavy-hitters like Jay-Z. In addition to his own records, Jay-Z has sequenced albums for other artists, and he believes that the key to achieving the right flow between a collection of songs depends on finding the narrative arc within them.
Translating what’s been recorded to a live show though can be a different story. Sometimes artists do play an album all the way through live, in track order, but more often than that, of course, artists like to mix it up. If an artist also has multiple albums, the challenge becomes intermingling all those works, and as common as that is, it’s not always easy to coordinate.
That’s how people like Tom Jackson have made a living being a “live show producer.” Taylor Swift and others have come to him to learn how to make the most out of live settings by teaching them how to read and feed on audience reaction, and he has tips for up-and-comers:
Then again, if an artist doesn’t want to shell out money to that guy, they could always try the Last.fm approach.
UPDATE: Silversun Pickups try to create the perfect setlist for their performance at The Glass House, on Embedded.
Silversun Pickups were one of the first bands senior producer Alex Simmons shot for Current TV (watch that piece here). Pretty much everyone on our staff loves their music, and a lot of us live in their neighborhood. They anchor a great scene in Silverlake and are the kind of band that makes you proud to live in such an artist-friendly section of Los Angeles, which is a large part of what put them on Alex’s radar years ago:
“Everyone in the band is a big supporter of the local music scene and I see them at Spaceland and The Echo all the time checking out other people’s shows. I think that respect for the under the radar bands is pretty indicative for how hard they work and how little they take all of this—such as a top 10 album—for granted.
We were lucky enough to be with Silversun the day “Swoon” was released. We all knew it was going to be huge, but most of us didn’t realize it would break the top 10 that week. Alex seems to have the best perspective on why the album hit as big as it did (other than just being an amazing collection of songs):
“I distinctly remember the evening this March when I was driving home and first put on an advanced copy of ‘Swoon.’ I think I had been listening too to much “Dark Was the Night” and Grizzly Bear and the first notes of ‘There’s No Secrets This Year’ kicked me in the gut and woke me up. It was just one of those moments when you feel like this is the album I personally needed to hear right at this moment.”
Most of Silversun Pickups’ fans have the same feeling: it’s a personal connection. When we showed up to shoot them at Rasputin Records, their fans lining the sidewalks all echoed similar stories and were eager to tell us about their personal ties to the music.
Alex was equally moved by their stripped down performances. “We shot two acoustic performances with the band, one at KROQ at 7AM and the other on Record Store Day in Berkeley,” he says. “A lot of bands don’t hold up as well when you peel away the effects—but they really do. It’s impressive.”
In the end, the toughest test for an album is whether or not it can survive a work cycle. Working on a music show is a blessing and a curse. You get to listen to music all day, but you can’t always pick what you listen to and you often have to hear the same parts of the same songs thousands of times. For Alex, “Swoon” passed the test. “It’s one of my favorite albums of 2009, and while I normally get really sick of an album after hearing it all the time in edit sessions, I still like this one.”
K’naan
When you meet an artist that came to America from Somalia and let nothing, not even a war-ravaged country and an entire ocean, get in the way of his dreams, you have to respect his drive. But when our producer Manoj Gopinanth looks back on his time with K’naan at Fat Beats Records, he remembers the person more than the story:
“He seemed like a very down to earth individual, soft-spoken and very knowledgeable about hip hop and music in general. I’m guessing his upbringing in Somalia and New York City has humbled him. He also spoke about Mos Def, and how they are great friends and how he has learned a lot from him.
Mos is featured on K’naan’s album Troubadour.
Now stop complaining about your childhood.
UPDATE: Watch the full second episode of Embedded, with Silversun Pickups, K’naan, and Arcade Fire, here on Current.
On his newest album, “The Ecstatic,” Mos Def worked with producer Madlib on a handful of tracks, including “Auditorium.” Madlib has become a well-respected and highly-sought hip-hop producer, working with many of the most prolific names in the genre, from Erykah Badu to Mos Def to De La Soul. He also spends time as an artist, creating new material under a variety of pseudonyms and exploring genres beyond hip-hop.
For instance, in 2001, Madlib started Yesterday’s New Quintet, a jazz-based group consisting of Madlib under his real name, Otis Jackson Jr, and then four fictitious characters. His official first use of the name Madlib came with the release of 2002’s “Blunted In The Bomb Shelter,” but he really found fame in the hip-hop community when he worked with fellow producer J Dilla in 2003 to release “Champion Sounds” and then MF Doom in 2004 on “Madvillain.”
Check out Madlib play around with a beat in the documentary Brasialintime
Considering how big a Doom fan Mos Def is, it’s no real surprise that he’d be moved by Madlib’s work. He draws from mainstream media and the obscure to create beats. The beat for “Auditorium” originated on Madlibs 2007 instrumental album Beat Konducta Vol 3-4: Beat Konducta in India. It’s a track called “Movie Finale,” and Mos also enlists British-American emcee Slick Rick to give the track flavor.
Slick Rick is a hip-hop veteran in his own right, after dropping his first album in 1988 and continuing to appear on tracks along today’s well-known artists like Mos, Chamillionaire, and others. Mos Def’s obsession with Slick Rick goes back more than 10 years, if only judging by the fact that he and Talib Kweli re-imagined “Children’s Story” for Black Star’s album, one of the rapper’s best known singles.
UPDATE: In this Embbeded Outtake, Mos talks about why “Auditorium” is special and why it’s special to him.
We know you’ve been waiting so eagerly for a sneak peek of Current Music Presents: Embedded, and believe me, I’ve been dying to get you one.
Today we went live on MySpace Music with a special clip of Mos Def performing”Auditorium,” live in Japan—plus an extended preview of Embedded you won’t see anywhere else. Check it out, go join our Embedded group to stay in touch with all our updates, and please, let us know what you think!
Our music programming supervisor Manoj Gopinath represented for Team Current at the Common & Friends Benefit this past weekend in LA. Here’s his recap and some (shaky) YouTube clips we found. —SNK
Hip hop’s finest all came out to flex their performance muscles at a great concert this past Saturday at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, CA. The concert, curated by rapper/actor (and friend of Current Music) Common, and supporting his Common Ground Foundation, brought out a diverse group of performers, including himself. The event was organized by Jodie Blum, the executive director of the Common Ground Foundation, and Common gave all the props to her for getting all the artists to come out and perform. I was lucky enough to have a chance to check out the show, which I would rate as one of the best I’ve seen in a while. That’s saying a lot, as I’ve been to a pretty fair amount in the past two years working at Current.
Hosted by KCRW’s Garth Trinidad, a good friend of Common, the show started off with a bang when he introduced hip hop underground royalty De La Soul, who performed a couple of their hits, including “Buddy,” “Stakes is High,” and “Oooh.” One of the early surprises was when a masked MF Doom showed up to drop his verse on “Roc Co.Kane Flow.” I’m not sure most of the skinny-jean wearing hipster crowd knew who he was, but the true hip hop heads in attendance were definitely bobbing their head ferociously.
The man of the night then appeared, as Common came out and rocked with De La Soul, performing a couple of their collabs. Common then took over the stage and went on to perform one his staples of all his live shows lately, “The People,” shouting out President Obama and the new generation of our diverse population. He then segued into a version of “Come Close” set to the live band’s rendition of D’angelo’s “Brown Sugar,” a definite highlight for the ladies in attendance. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, ?uestlove and Black Thought came to the stage to rock the drums and mic, and launched into an impromptu freestyle session with Common, while DJ Dummy—Common’s DJ and the house DJ for the night—was searching for their collab record to throw on. It was a great moment where three amazing artists went off the top to give the crowd what they expected. Real hip hop!
Next up was an unusual guest in the mostly backpack/conscious line-up, none other then ATL’s own Ludacris. You wouldn’t be able to tell by the crowd though, as the energy was definitely lifted a notch when Trinidad brought him out. Luda took us back with his classic hits “Southern Hospitality” and “Move B#$&%.” But the theme of the night was not forgotten, as he thanked Common, who he mentioned as one of his favorite rappers, and thanked hip hop, then fittingly launched into his current collaboration with Nas, “I do it for hip hop.”
And wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Nasir Jones then came out to spit his verse. He then took over the stage, as the band’s keyboard player dropped the inspirational “In the Air Tonight” riff from his hit “One Mic.” Judging from Nas’ performance, his energy level was definitely off the charts, even forgetting some of his lyrics, as the crowd cheered him on. As he performed “The World Is Mine” and “NY State of Mind,” Common played hype man, even helping him out with some of the lyrics, fittingly changing NY to LA on the hook, which the crowd loved. Common even rapped one of Nas’ verses, paying homage to the Queens Bridge legend. The two hip hop icons then joined forces to introduce another surprise guest, one of their personal favorites, none other than the overweight luva himself, Heavy D. Most of the younger crowd probably did not know the history, as the energy digressed a bit, but I myself was taken back to my days in elementary / middle school, a lovely time in my life:), as he performed “The Overweight Lova’s in the House” and “Nuttin’ But Love.” I have to admit, while watching the sound check earlier in the day, and seeing Heavy D run through his set, I was pretty excited, as I’d never seen him live before—so added bonus for me, not so much for the skinny jeans crowd.
Just when you thought the night might be winding down, Common hit the stage again, while DJ Dummy dropped the instrumental for his collaboration with Black Star, “Respiration.” Could it be? Could both Mos Def and Talib Kweli be in the building. Judging from how the night had gone so far, it was pretty much a given. Right on cue, Mos’ melodic voice blared over the PA, launching into his verse… The crowd was at an all time high! When Talib appeared, you knew the night was a special one for hip hop. Mos and Talib each did their respective solo cuts too, “Umi Says” and “Get By,” with the latter getting a crazy response from the crowd. Common even admitted to the crowd that Talib and Mos were last-minute additions, who called him the night before and said they wanted to rock at the show. I was thinking to myself, now that is what hip hop is all about!
This seemed like a perfect avenue to bring another guest in, huh? Common took to the mic to send his apologies from Mr. West, for not being able to make it, as he was trying to stay out of the spotlight, and also took a minute to defend his brother. For a split second, I actually believed him, but as the adrenaline level in the crowd seemed to increase, and Common chanted “the only way to get up from this was to ‘Get em high,’” the instrumental for his collaboration with Kanye and Talib dropped. As Kanye appeared, rapping his verse, the crowd pretty much exploded, and the energy in the Palladium was at an all time high. Kanye might have been taken aback a bit, as he forgot some of his lyrics, but Common and Talib stepped in to back him up.
Kanye then went on to perform “Good Life,” probably the all-time high of the show for the crowd, and “Flashing Lights,” with Mos Def filling in for Dwele’s soulful hook. Common and Talib played his hype men, and did a fine job if I might add. You would think this would be the fitting end to an already amazing show, but just as “Flashing Lights” was coming to a close, a female voice was heard over the speakers—none other than Queen Latifah. Assisting Mos with the hook probably wasn’t a good idea, but in any event, the Queen herself closed out the show, as Common and Kanye backed her up. She ended her set with her classic cut “U.N.I.T.Y.,” a fitting end to an amazing night. Unity was definitely the theme of the whole show, as an eclectic group of performers came out for a great cause. This was definitely 2.5 hours of my life that wasn’t wasted, and I’m sure everyone in attendance would agree with me. Props to Common, Jodie , the Common Ground Foundation, and everyone who supported the show.
+ If you think radio is dead check out this profile of Dublab. The internet radio station has become a thriving haven for music and art. Take a listen at Dublab.com.
