R&B/Hip-Hop
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Normally, when Drake pulls up to a venue the room belongs solely to him for the night. But on Monday (Aug. 21) when the Six God’s It’s All a Blur tour touched down at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, he was more than happy to share the spotlight with the venue’s resident big dog: LeBron James. […]
As Southern California braced for its first tropical storm in 84 years, Salt-N-Pepa’s Cheryl “Salt” James made history as the first female keynoter at the Guild of Music Supervisors’ (GMS) ninth annual State of Music in Media Conference (Aug. 19). Her invigorating speech fittingly kicked off the daylong event at The Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood.
In addition to a suite of panels celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, the conference schedule — a collaboration between GMS and L.A. Film School — was packed with sessions ranging from “Music Clearance 101” and “The Global Craft of Music Supervision: We Are Worldwide!” to “AI and the Art of Music Supervision: Finding Harmony in the Age of Automation” and “The Ethics of Music Supervising Projects That Tell Diverse Stories.” Among the host of industry participants and guests: rap pioneer/Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, Joel C. High of Creative Control Entertainment (a GMS founder and its outgoing president), Stax Records icon/Songwriter Hall of Famer David Porter, Format Entertainment’s Julia Michels, producer Steve Schnur (Star Wars Jedi: Survivor), Singularity Songs founder/president Andre Marsh and Cue the Creatives founder Qiana Conley Akinro.
Lindsay Wolfington and Joel C. High
Khalid Farqharson
Just before the keynote speech, the ongoing challenges facing music supervisors during the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike were addressed by incoming GMS president Lindsay Wolfington and High. Speaking to the attendees, the pair referenced a page in the conference booklet featuring a list of resources for strike-impacted workers. The intro to the page said in part, “Music supervisors do not have a union and the AMPTP and Netflix continue to refuse to recognize a Music Supervisior union. We continue in our fight … and GMS fully supports this mission.”
It was also announced that Heather Guibert is the GMS board’s new vp.
Here are a few more highlights from GMS’ 2023 State of Music in Media Conference:
‘The Showstopper’
Walking onstage to rousing applause, James riffed on a phrase from the Salt-N-Pepa classic “Shoop” (“Here I go, here I go …”) then asked the audience a question. “Can we not call me the keynote speaker?” said a smiling James. “That makes me nervous. I just came here to talk to you.”
And that she did, taking the audience back to her growing up on Motown and jazz in Brooklyn. Then she heard The Sugarhill Gang on the radio in 1979. Before segueing into an impromptu audience rap-along to that group’s “Rapper’s Delight,” James said, “I fell in love even more [with the fledgling genre]. There was something about it that just grabbed me deep in my heart.”
After sharing milestones that the Grammy Award-winning group has achieved during its barrier-breaking 38-year career, starting with 1986 debut single “The Showstopper,” James noted, “I remember the question journalists used to ask in the beginning, ‘Will hip-hop last?’ Now we’re here 50 years later, growing from a novelty genre into a whole entire culture. Hip-hop started a whole movement from fashion, movies, politics and beyond to becoming the music of a generation. I would go so far as to say it’s actually shaping generations.”
Drawing a through line between hip-hop’s evolution and that of music supervision, James concluded her keynote by adding, “I know we all can relate to having good intentions and then possibly becoming jaded in our different vocations or callings. But when something is our calling and it gets hard, we have to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going because this is what we’re called to do.”
The Next 50
“The Global Impact of Hip-Hop: Passing the Torch for the Next 50 Years” was the first in the day’s quartet of sessions dedicated to the genre and the fact — as noted in the conference booklet — that “hip-hop has proven itself to be a soundscape for any genre of music and can be used to tell any story.” Kobalt Music Publishing’s senior vp of global creative Chris Lakey moderated this panel, orchestrating a conversation between artist Igmar Thomas, Peermusic Publishing vp of A&R Tuff Morgan, En Homage artist/producer Camille “Ill Camille” Davis and artist/educator Medusa aka The Gangsta Goddess.
Lakey questioned the panelists on a variety of subjects from their first inkling of hip-hop’s international reach beyond its Bronx birth to trends/hybrid sounds they’re seeing on the horizon. Asked to share some of the hottest areas they’re most excited about in terms of hip-hop’s evolving sound, the panelists shouted out locales such as Ghana, Nigeria, Johannesburg, London, Mexico City and Jamaica. “Every single piece of music that’s out today has undertones of hip-hop,” said Morgan. “It’s influenced every genre at this point.”
Global Impact of Hip Hop
Jay Farber
Medusa and Davis also advocated for more female presence in the hip-hop arena. “I definitely want there to be more reverence for female producers and MCs,” said Davis. “I want more women to experiment with the music. There are women that I revere, the same way that I revere [late hip-hop producer] J Dilla, who are constantly making music but you don’t hear about them. I would like more women to make DJ and MC collectives. I just want more of that energy where we take more ownership, and autonomy over the sound, the brand, the look; you feel us and see us in everything. I want more women in hip-hop to put their flag down.”
Lorrie Boula, Chuck D and Carol Dunn
Jay Farber
Rounding out the day’s quartet of hip-hop sessions: “Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World” featuring Channel Zero.net co-founders Chuck D and Lorrie Boula with Human Worldwide’s Carol Dunn as moderator; “The Origins of Hip-Hop” featuring James, Berklee College of Music’s John Paul McGee, artist/Likwit Radio’s King T, Salamani Music’s Amani “Burt Blackarach” Smith and composer Jae Deal; and “The Golden Age of Hip-Hop: A Cultural Phenomena” with moderator/Moonbaby Media’s Angela “Moonbaby” Jollivette, television host/activist Ananda Lewis, veteran A&R executive Dante Ross, Universal Hip-Hop Museum OM/curator SenYon Kelly, DJESQ’s Paul Stewart and Rich + Tone Productions’ Rich & Tone Talauega.
Close-Up on Daisy Jones
One of the afternoon’s popular offerings was the session spotlighting the hit television series Daisy Jones & the Six, adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel of the same name about a ‘70s band. The session centered on what’s involved in “preparing for successful on-camera performances” as outlined in the conference program. Moderator/music supervisor Amanda Krieg Thomas of Yay Team Inc. was joined by Daisy Jones’ music supervisor Frankie Pine of Whirly Girl Music and Lauren Neustadter, president of film & TV for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company. Among the show’s nine 2023 Emmy Awards nominations are nods for outstanding limited or anthology series, outstanding music supervision and outstanding sound mixing.
Neustadter spoke first about the show’s origin and the challenge of doing on-camera performances. “My husband read the book and created the show. But we had no idea really of how to do a project that was music driven in the way that this is. But we also knew that we had carte blanche from Taylor. She said, ‘I’m excited for you guys to work with experts in the music field to actually bring the soundtrack and the different albums in the book to life on screen.”
So the next move was to bring in showrunner Will Graham. “We chose him for a bunch of reasons,” said Neustadter. “But one of them was he had worked on Mozart in the Jungle, so he knew how to do a show that had a huge music component. And the first person that Will introduced us to was Frankie.”
Picking up the story, Pine said, “The first thing that I did was put together a list of executive music producers that I thought would be right for the time period; to be able to give us that ‘70s vibe, but also not pigeonhole us too much into that world where these songs [can] kind of live outside of the ‘70s. After reading the book, the one thing I wanted … was for this to feel organic and real. I wanted everybody that watched it to think literally in their minds, ‘This band was in the ‘70s? I swear I missed this band.’”
Pine also shared a major lesson from her experience. “The sooner you can get [started] with an on-camera project the better. Because that gives you all kinds of time to curate and work not only on the music but to also take your time in assembling the right music team and giving your actors [enough] time. That really is the key to a successful run.”
Hired in March 2019, Pine initially wanted to spend four months with the actors. Then she and Neustadter received an unexpected extension when their April 2020 shoot start was delayed by the pandemic. So music lessons were done instead over Zoom. In addition to explaining the genesis of the on-camera performances in two show clips that were shown, Pine and Neustadter touched on several other topics such as Pine collaborating in the casting and writing process as well, mic tips and why trust is an important factor.
“What we witnessed was these actors becoming musicians and these musicians becoming a band,” said Neustadter. “It was totally awesome.” She also noted that Pine will be working with Hello Sunshine on two more productions, one of which is Run, Rose, Run. Starring Dolly Parton, the upcoming show is an adaption of the same-titled book by Parton and James Patterson. Parton also released a companion album to the book in 2022.
Music wasn’t part of Jaboukie Young-White‘s plan. “It just kind of happened,” he tells Billboard with a laugh.
The 29-year-old performer spent the last few years carefully building his profile as a comedian, writer, actor and professional Twitter (err, X) troll. Between standup, writing for Big Mouth, working as a correspondent on The Daily Show, getting banned from the social media platform for impersonating CNN and starring in Disney’s Strange World alongside Jake Gyllenhaal and Gabrielle Union, Young-White has seen his star rise immensely over the last five years.
As he tells it, music was a hobby that kept him occupied throughout the pandemic. “I had been making instrumental music since college, and it was mostly something that I kept to myself,” he says. “Fast forward, pandemic hits, and I was working on some animated stuff during that time. I had a vocal setup in my apartment, so I was like, ‘You know what, let me just do this.’”
Three years later, those quarantine sessions have transformed into All Who Can’t Hear Must Feel, the star’s debut album out Friday (August 25) via Interscope. On the expansive project, Young-White (performing under his first name, Jaboukie) hops into the nebulous spaces between genres like industrial hip-hop, bedroom rock and hyperpop to deliver immediately catchy insights on his life and his occasionally intrusive thoughts. And yes, the album is also very funny.
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The album also nearly didn’t happen. Young-White says that he never had any intention of releasing music until he began working on a script for an upcoming animated film inspired by Juice WRLD’s music. When pitching himself to Interscope Films as a writer-director for the project, he was asked if he had any experience with music that he could share.
“I sent a few little songs along, thinking that they were just gonna be like, ‘OK, this man is competent. He can write, he has taste,’” Young-White says. “Then [John Janick] offered me a record deal, and there just wasn’t a good enough reason to for me not to do it. I knew I would regret not doing this”
With a major label’s resources now at his disposal, Young-White could have worked with high-level producers and songwriters to put his first project together. The album does have plenty of assists — Grammy-winners Alex Tumay, Neal Pogue and Mike Bozzi mixed and mastered All Who Can’t Hear, respectively.
But in terms of production and songwriting, Young-White knew that creating an album that felt authentic meant doing it all solo, with the occasional help from his brothers Javaughn and Javeigh. “Because I’m so new to releasing music, if I got in the studio with somebody, I would want to be like, ‘Whatever you want to do is good by me, because you’re so great!’ I needed to put my stake in the ground first before I start inviting more people into the process,” he says.
After a beat, he can’t help but go for the punchline. “Listen, [Jack Antonoff] was so desperate to get in the studio with me,” he says, smirking. “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m so sorry, but it’s a no, Jack.’”
That urge to go for the joke is still present on Young-White’s album, but not in the same way that fans of his comedy would expect. While bars declaring himself a “midwest hoe, churning out magnum opes” on songs like “BBC” certainly land with laughs, All Who Can’t Hear is not a comedy album; it just so happens that hip-hop has always been naturally funny, Young-White says.
“Rappers have been some of my favorite comedians,” he says. “Young Thug is one of the most f–king hilarious surrealist comics alive. Wayne is so funny. There’s a Nicki song on the radio right now [‘Red Ruby Da Sleaze’] where she says ‘I don’t f–k with horses since Christopher Reeves,’ which is insane … for me, it’s not difficult to hold something as being sincere and funny at the same time.”
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Even the album’s title is a play on words — All Who Can’t Hear Must Feel, taken in its most literal sense, states what listeners can expect from the album’s sonics. “I was putting so much weight in the low end of these songs. I wanted you to really, truly feel this, and let it be a physical experience,” he says. “I was just alone in my apartment and my neighbors were probably mad as hell, but I was like, ‘I need to feel something, I gotta dance.’ That was the conversation that I was having with myself — I was trying to wake something up.”
But the phrase is also a Jamaican proverb — Young-White was raised by Jamaican parents in Harvey, Ill. — about learning from consequences after not heeding warnings. With his Saturn return in full effect while penning his album (“You could start and stop with that explanation alone depending on how good your astrological understanding is”), the comic says he couldn’t stop thinking about the oft-cited expression.
“There are so many lessons where no one can tell you what it means; you really do have to experience it for yourself,” he says. “That’s what life is like — you can be given so much advice and be told so many things, but there’s so much that will not be real to you until you feel it.”
One of those lessons Young-White simply had to experience was what it meant to have a career in the music industry. Despite his rapidly-building profile in film and television, he says that trying to figure out how to be a signed recording artist came with a significant learning curve.
Some of the lessons have been more positive than others — Young-White found creative output came much easier to him when writing songs. “I wish I could be as prolific with writing jokes as I was with music — I probably had 40 or 50 songs written for this album,” he says. “You really gotta go up in front of a bunch of audiences to work out a good joke. With songs, so many of them will suck, but every once in a while you hit on something and just say ‘OK, let’s run with this.’”
Other lessons have been harder to explain, like showing up on time to meetings when no one was expecting him to. “There have been people who were like, ‘Wow, you showed up? I didn’t think you would!’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean? We had a meeting, I said I was gonna be here!’” he recalls, laughing. “You feel like such a goody two shoes in music just for being punctual.”
With his lessons learned, Young-White is now confident that a career in music can officially join his growing list of professions in entertainment; he’s already started planning out where he wants to go next. “I did industrial, I did experimental, now I want to do something that’s really pop, catchy, clean and glossy — kind of in the Charlie XCX blueprint,” he says. “Honestly, my ideal pop song kind of sounds like Animal Collective. Structurally and lyrically, it’s like, ‘This is a pop song,’ but then the sounds are absolutely wild, like kitchen appliances fighting each other.”
The rising star is quick to temper his ambitions; he knows that “everything is so a la carte” when it comes to music consumption nowadays, which makes marketing an entire album that much harder. “I know damn well you could be listening to any-the-f–k-thing after you listen to this project,” he says.
But that inherent understanding keeps Young-White’s music — and for that matter, his point of view — as fresh as it is. “Why would I stay in one lane when I can just give you everything right here?”
The sweltering summer concert season sent more than two dozen people to the med tent on Saturday at Snoop Dogg‘s show at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion outside of Houston. According to USA Today, in addition to the 35 people who showed signs of “heat-related illness” who were examined at the venue, another dozen-plus were […]
Drake has long kept his inner circle pretty tight and when it came to the cover art for his upcoming For All the Dogs album he didn’t have to look very far at all. In a truly “awww” moment, the rapper revealed on Monday night (Aug. 21) that his five-year-old son, Adonis, drew the album’s […]
Ciara is standing up to the haters. The “1, 2 Step” singer took to Twitter on Sunday (Aug. 20) to reply to a tweet accusing her of making “TikTok music.” The user is an assistant coach at William & Mary Tribe Women’s Basketball in Virginia, according to her Twitter profile. “And.. ..you’re watching…:) taking time […]
As 50 Cent considers expanding his family, he’s made it abundantly clear who he will not be seeking advice from. In a new Forbes interview with contributor Brian Roberts, the “Many Men” rapper questioned Nick Cannon’s decision to father 12 kids with six different women over the past 12 years, a choice that has garnered […]
Quavo has unleashed the official music video for “Hold Me,” a heartfelt BNYX-helmed track off new solo album Rocket Power that grapples with the intricacies of grief and mourning. In the visual, which he uploaded to YouTube on Saturday (Aug. 19), Quavo shares footage from a memorial for Takeoff in Atlanta. Attendees convene and foster […]
Happy Monday! As we inch towards the end of summer, you can count on this week’s Fresh Picks to keep things hot. From the R&B sounds of Jessie Reyez (with Miguel), Samaria and Dylan Sinclair, to rap bops from 4TUNAT, Larry June and Lil Darius (with Nardo Wick) — we’ve got something for every moment of your week.
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See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
And of course, don’t forget to check out this month’s Fresh Picks (so far) in our Spotify playlist, linked below.
Freshest Find: Jessie Reyez feat. Miguel, “Jeans”
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Jessie Reyez and Miguel “fit better than a pair of jeans.” The two join forces here for a sexy, stripped-back collab about a couple being each others’ better halves. “You fit, like your mama made you just for me, baby/ Stroking making me forget to breathe, baby,” Reyez sings. “Jeans” is the singer-songwriter’s first offering since her sophomore album, 2022’s Yessie. She is gearing up to release her first poetry book, Words of a Goat Princess, in the fall. Meanwhile, Miguel has been rolling out music of his own ahead of his new album, also due this fall.
Samaria, “Tight Rope”
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Samaria’s “Tight Rope” was created from a place of uncertainty for the Bay Area singer-songwriter, who brings listeners on a journey of losing herself, then discovering her self-worth on her own terms. “‘Tight Rope’ was a final plea to make something work at the time that was showing me exactly why it absolutely would never work,” she shares in a press release.
4TUNAT feat. Destroy Lonely, “LOOK AT IT GO”
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4TUNAT proves his synergy with Destroy Lonely on their new track, “LOOK AT IT GO.” “ The Geffen Records newcomer is carving a lane in Atlanta rap’s scene with his glitchy, high-energy SEE YOU SOON EP, on which this collaboration appears.
Dylan Sinclair, “Fly Girl”
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Dylan Sinclair only likes fly girls. While he makes his preferences known, the song marks a sonic expansion for the JUNO-winning artist, who first gave listeners a glimpse into his sound with his 2022 EP, No Longer in the Suburbs. “Keeping this girl ‘round me, I like the way that she talk/ Sending me playlists straight to my phone, she putting me on,” he sings in a soft falsetto.
Lyfe Harris, “Sunkiss”
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“When you’re alone, does the sun kiss you just like me?” asks Lyfe Harris. The Atlanta singer likens his love to the sun’s warmth, delivering an infectious hook and lingering chorus. With “Sunkiss,” Harris captures the essence of intimacy with a bit of a nostalgic touch, as he uses a talk box effect for his vocals.
Larry June & Cardo, “The Good Kind”
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Catch Larry June “looking at the ocean, eating smoothie bowls.” The Bay Area rapper links with Cardo Got Wings for “The Good Kind” — a typical West Coast-feeling track where June raps about riding his bike while maintaining his “street n—a” attitude.
Lil Darius feat. Nardo Wick, “Lamborghini Boys”
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Known for crafting hits for Drake and Travis Scott, Memphis producer Tay Keith connects with Georgia upstart Lil Darius for his new song “Lamborghini Boys,” featuring Nardo Wick. The two rumble through Keith’s trunk-rattling production seamlessly, racing to the finish line with their unmatched wit. “Fine, she lookin’ like GloRilla, eat it like Tianna Trump,” spits Darius. The rapper and producer duo’s forthcoming mixtape, Young & Turnt, drops later this month.
Drake showed off his lightning-quick reflexes during the Bay Area stop of his It’s All a Blur Tour. On Friday (Aug. 18), during his first of two concerts at the Chase Center in San Francisco, the 36-year-old rap superstar effortlessly avoided being struck in the head by a copy of his new poetry book, Titles […]