While she has taken her time to develop her sound, it is clear it was time well spent for Willow Smith. Her new track is a nod to the punk genre and more.
As spotted on Rolling Stone, the co-host of Red Table Talks has dropped a new song with an accompanying visual. “Transparent Soul” captures her in an uninhibited space as she stays true to the genre’s energy and attitude.
Additionally, her styling is in alignment with the subculture with black eyeliner and bondage pants in one scene, a grungy white-blue dress with a studded neck collar in the following.
Backed by Blink-182’s drummer Travis Barker, Willow’s lyrics target a male associate who just wasn’t worth her time and attention.
“I knew a boy just like you / He’s a snake just like you / Such a fake just like you / But I can see the truth,” she sings on the chorus.
“I am so grateful for this tune because it was created in such an introspective time [during the first couple months of quarantine],” Willow said in a statement. “It was the song that proved to me that I needed to let go of the insecurities I had about making a project of this genre.”
In an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe earlier this week, Smith detailed how it was to collaborate with Barjer, who she has looked up to musically for years.
“Travis is one of my favorite artists. And it’s so interesting because he is a drummer, but he’s so much more than that,” Smith said. “Being in the studio with him really showed me how multi-dimensional his artistry really is. He literally heard the song once and played it. He was like, ‘Oh, that’s perfect,’ one day and played it perfectly once.”
The Washington, D.C. area and its homegrown musical genre of Go-Go remained largely regional despite some flashes of commercial success by some of the bands from the region. Experience Unlimited scored one of Go-Go’s biggest hits in “Da Butt” just over three decades ago and now, Vinyl Me, Please has a real treat for music lovers with its reissue of the Go-Go and Funk band’s debut LP, Free Yourself.
Free Yourself was released in 1977 on Black Fire Records some 11 years before E.U., as they were widely known in D.C., broke onto the Billboard charts with “Da Butt,” which was released on the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s School Daze. Older fans of Go-Go categorized “Da Butt” as a tamer version of the traditional sound of the music but it gave way to other hits for the band while paving the way for Go-Go’s next generation.
The story of Experience Unlimited’s rise to prominence reveals a little-known fact about Washington, D.C.’s music scene, more specifically in the Rock and Punk music scenes. Many of E.U. band members were into rock music, much like many musically-inclined youths from Chocolate City. The band went from calling themselves The Young Hustlers and renamed the band Experience Unlimited in honor of Jimi Hendrix all while fine-tuning their sound. The story of the band’s rise can be found here.
Vinyl Me, Please’s innovative choices in reissuing classic or unearthed records rewards audiophiles by way of staying true to the original cover art and taking care to deliver only the most solid of products to the listener.
To learn more about Vinyl Me, Please’s reissue of Experience Unlimited’s Free Yourself album, click here. Check out a video trailer below and then head over to the gallery of images.
A new full-length feature documentary on funk icons Sly and The Family Stone is set to be released this year. While no official date has been given, the film will chronicle the funk band’s influence upon popular music and will give an account of Sly Stone’s remarkable fall from grace, in which he struggled with drug addiction and homelessness while pursuing a high-profile lawsuit against his former managers over millions in allegedly unpaid royalties. In a landmark victory, Stone was awarded a $5 million verdict in 2015.
The director of the film, Brady Spensor, told Deadline in an official statement that, “This was [produced] at a time in his life when things were really difficult for Sly. I became his friend at his most down and out, most financially broke, and feel incredibly grateful for Sly’s trust and participation allowing me to document the end of a tragic spiral, then the transition and the outcome of Sly winning a significant lawsuit that may have influenced The Music Modernization Act.”
Sly Stone is one of the greatest musicians in the history of recorded music. Sly and The Family Stone was among the first bands in popular music that was integrated into race and gender. The group would score hits such as “Dance to the Music” (1968) and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” and acclaimed albums such as Stand! and There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
If the debate for the King of R&B is up for grabs, followers of the late great James Brown can rest easy, as his position among the greatest to ever do it, is secure as a Master padlock. Known indelibly as the “Godfather of Soul Music,” Brown’s career covered successive generations that stretched from chitlin circuit pit-stops in the ’60s, through his own Funk era and ultimately, the birth of Hip-Hop. In the Netflix original documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise Of James Brown, the life and times of the oft referred “hardest working man in show business,” is examined fully. Questlove, Chuck D, Nelson George, Greg Tate, and others appear in the doc’.
It is common knowledge that Brown’s influence on Hip-Hop has been acknowledged and celebrated through countless samples – “Funky Drummer” being the most popular – but who knew Brown dipped into the sampling pool himself?
As it turns out, Brown’s saxophonist and bandleader, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, was called into James’ dressing room one night after a thunderous performance in the summer of 1967. Never formally trained to read music, Brown explained to Ellis that he had something in his head he needed to be transformed into song.
“I started putting notations to his grunts,” Ellis remembers with a hearty laugh at the 57:00-mark of the film, “which came out to be the bass line of ‘Cold Sweat.’”
Ellis goes on to explain that he had been listening to Miles Davis’ “So What,” which “popped up” while he was developing the track that would eventually become “Cold Sweat.”
“So I took that [dee dumph] part and repeated it over and over,” Ellis explains. “Then we added a very important guitar part, contrasting all of that – which is funky all by itself.”
An unquestionable masterpiece, “Cold Sweat” has been cited, by some (including in George’s The Death Of Rhythm & Blues) as the first true Funk song for all its moving parts. Aside from Brown’s grunts that laid the groundwork for the beat, the finished track borrowed from his previously-released “I Don’t Care” in 1962. Moreover, it incorporated Brown’s signature screams and solos from Maceo Parker on sax, and Clyde Stubblefield on drums.
“I didn’t write it to be so monumental,” Ellis confesses, “but my Jazz influence was creeping into his R&B, so the combination of the two is where the Funk came from.”
During the late 70s, when Brown was said to be losing a step, his Funk music was hot as ever in the Hip-Hop community and among DJs. Albums like Get On The Good Foot and Sex Machine were in heavy rotation, while “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose” provided breaks that proved to be something of a goldmine. But it was the unlikely “Funky Drummer” that catapulted “Mr. Please Please” to un-chartered territory.
For the record, the actual Funky Drummer was not very fond of the tune. “I hate that song,” the late Clyde Stubblefield affirms in the doc. “We all was so tired and didn’t even want to record. So I started playing just the drum pattern. Brown liked it. We recorded it, and it came out ‘Funky Drummer.’”
#BonusBeat: The trailer for Mr. Dynamite: The Rise Of JamesBrown:
If the debate for the King of R&B is up for grabs, followers of the late great James Brown can rest easy, as his position among the greatest to ever do it, is secure as a Master padlock. Known indelibly as the “Godfather of Soul Music,” Brown’s career covered successive generations that stretched from chitlin circuit pit-stops in the ’60s, through his own Funk era and ultimately, the birth of Hip-Hop. In the Netflix original documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise Of James Brown, the life and times of the oft referred “hardest working man in show business,” is examined fully. Questlove, Chuck D, Nelson George, Greg Tate, and others appear in the doc’.
It is common knowledge that Brown’s influence on Hip-Hop has been acknowledged and celebrated through countless samples – “Funky Drummer” being the most popular – but who knew Brown dipped into the sampling pool himself?
As it turns out, Brown’s saxophonist and bandleader, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, was called into James’ dressing room one night after a thunderous performance in the summer of 1967. Never formally trained to read music, Brown explained to Ellis that he had something in his head he needed to be transformed into song.
“I started putting notations to his grunts,” Ellis remembers with a hearty laugh at the 57:00-mark of the film, “which came out to be the bass line of ‘Cold Sweat.’”
Ellis goes on to explain that he had been listening to Miles Davis’ “So What,” which “popped up” while he was developing the track that would eventually become “Cold Sweat.”
“So I took that [dee dumph] part and repeated it over and over,” Ellis explains. “Then we added a very important guitar part, contrasting all of that – which is funky all by itself.”
An unquestionable masterpiece, “Cold Sweat” has been cited, by some (including in George’s The Death Of Rhythm & Blues) as the first true Funk song for all its moving parts. Aside from Brown’s grunts that laid the groundwork for the beat, the finished track borrowed from his previously-released “I Don’t Care” in 1962. Moreover, it incorporated Brown’s signature screams and solos from Maceo Parker on sax, and Clyde Stubblefield on drums.
“I didn’t write it to be so monumental,” Ellis confesses, “but my Jazz influence was creeping into his R&B, so the combination of the two is where the Funk came from.”
During the late 70s, when Brown was said to be losing a step, his Funk music was hot as ever in the Hip-Hop community and among DJs. Albums like Get On The Good Foot and Sex Machine were in heavy rotation, while “Give It Up Or Turn It Loose” provided breaks that proved to be something of a goldmine. But it was the unlikely “Funky Drummer” that catapulted “Mr. Please Please” to un-chartered territory.
For the record, the actual Funky Drummer was not very fond of the tune. “I hate that song,” the late Clyde Stubblefield affirms in the doc. “We all was so tired and didn’t even want to record. So I started playing just the drum pattern. Brown liked it. We recorded it, and it came out ‘Funky Drummer.’”
