"there's a difference between KNOWING the path... and FLYING UP the path" - MBF

~~~

LUPE FIASCO: PARIS, TOKYO



~~~

BUSTA RHYMES FINALLY SPEAKS ON THE IZZY RAMIREZ MURDER HE WAS KARMICALLY INVOLVED IN:



~~~

BOB POWER INTERVIEW:

'Bob Power Interview (swipe from www.Brooklynbodega.com)'

Bob Power interviewed exclusively for Brooklyn Bodega by Eavvon O'neal. Intro by Bodega James.

Bob Power is quite possibly the smoothest mad scientist to have ever lived.
The unruly grey coif atop his head, coupled with his obsessive relation with technology and sound, (not to mention that mighty surname) could easily lead to one picturing Bob passing bubbling chemicals from beaker to beaker in a spooky lab somewhere in gothic Germany. But his work behind the boards suggests a different image completely. An auditory image... Clean. Crisp. Lush. Butter... much more conducive to lounging on a velvet couch, than say, laying on a metal slab. The smoothest mad scientist ever.

Your history speaks to both the power of self-discovery in music, as well as approaching it from an academic mindset—what are the benefits of each path? The shortcomings?

BP: The thing about self-discovery is that I like the world of ideas and language and I like to articulate on that.. I think everyone else goes though pretty much the same thing; they just don’t all talk about it as much as I do. To a great degree, much in the record business, or any other, its about finding your own way. People want to find the way to put things together, and to examine how they do what they do, and how they fit into the big picture. We all do this in slightly different ways because we’re all different people.

That’s essential no matter what you do, whether you are in the record business, or a Dairy Farmer. You have to find how you relate to what you do, and the best way to go about that. For me, the academic thing just sort of happened. I ended up with a couple of music degrees. When I first went away to college, I didn’t know what else to do, so I applied to be a music major. Then my distaste for failure, kept me going.

All the academic stuff has been hugely valuable to me. There is a whole part of my career that a lot of people don’t know about- when I do productions, when I do programming when I do arranging, when I play guitar, bass, or keyboards, the skills I learned in school were amazing for that. Not that they taught me exactly how to do those things, but they taught me the language of music. So it’s a little easier to live in that end of things, because I know how to arrange music, how to write music, how to read it, and it just makes it easier to get my hands around that when I need to.

is one of the many things that has helped my career along the way. I think for anyone, particularly in the record business, you can’t - until you reach some wonderful point of arrival, you can’t just do one thing. The trick is to do as many things as you can that all relate to what you really want to do and get paid and learn all at the same time.

What is your creative focus when working on tracks, and what do you feel you most often bring to the table creatively

BP: My focus is always what the artist is about. So that’s really it, while I’m making a record, whether I’m mixing or producing or whatever, I always am coming at it from inside the artists clothes. I get as deeply as I can into what they’re really about and approach everything from there. On the production side, there are certain constants and universal things, particularly structure and form., It doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re doing, you need to pay attention to things like that if you’re making a record. What goes on too long, how can you keep it fresh, how can you keep it from sounding like there’s a formula, which are two sides of the same coin.etc.

In production I focus a lot on song structure, If there’s a great hook, and it doesn’t happen for two minutes, maybe it should also happen in the beginning without sounds like they set out to make a pop record. But again, the focus is always “what’s this artist really about”? If it’s an artist who works with an orchestra, then I approach it from that point of view, if its an artist who is a spoken word unaccompanied, then I approach it from that point of view. What I bring creatively, hopefully, is openness and an understanding that it’s really my job to help the artist realize their vision. I happen to have a lot of resources for that; my musicianship, engineering skills, my peoples skills, my knowledge of the business(not that that is a big deal), but I always try to focus on the point of view of the artist.



“Vibe” means different things to different people - you've stated that it’s everything. What do you consider “vibe”?

BP: : It’s hard to say. Vibe is the thing that makes you listen to it and say, even if you don’t like what the person is doing, “wow that’s interest, not my kind of music, but boy its good” A thesis that I’m working on now is that a performance has to be really compelling no matter what it is. And again it’s the same thing. You can look at Tom Waits and James Brown who are about as far away from each other on the spectrum of performance as you can get, and they are both very compelling in their own ways. And again you listen to them and even if you don’t like what they do, you’re still going to say that person is way “there”. Vibe is the setting that you put that in, and how well you can draw people in. I often make an analogy to film. I used to be really hung up in making facets of recordings be really good and correct and together, and marching to the same drum, but then I realized that that’s mechanics, and you can always do that. How can we get to the point where it’s a difference between making a documentary and a dramatic film? Were not making a documentary, were making film. You have to draw people into the whole world of that song, and the world of that song cannot be made sitting at a desk.

It's one of those things you pray for. It goes along with my philosophy of making records, and everyone who makes records will tell you the same thing, the record starts telling you what to do, instead of you telling the record what to do, and it takes on a life of its own, If the record, A) comes out exactly the way you hear it in your head, then its going to be boring. I’ve done it. Then, B) if it doesn’t start to take on a life of its own, then it just won’t have any spark. So you keep knockin’ at it. It’s really weird, and everyone else will say the same thing. You try to set the table as best you can, but ideally there comes a certain point when you say “wow, this is starting to take on a life of its own, this isn’t what I expected” and its really cool. It sort of sounds like what you expected, but its taken on a new life, and that’s really cool.

Your contributions have helped to establish some of hip hop’s most creative, influential, and frankly illest artists in recent memory - namely Common, The Roots, Ms. Badu, Tribe, De La, and D'Angelo. Is there a principle that binds their success - what can upcoming artists take away from these veterans?

BP: For all the people that everybody knows that I’ve worked with in the hip-hop world, its obvious that their success is because of their amazing creativity, magnetism and compelling performances. A lot of them were genre busters: Tribe, De La, the whole native tongue thing- all of a sudden, hip-hop didn’t have to be about how you were bad, and somebody else was not, nor did it have to be about, the drum machine straight up and down (ta ta ta ta ta ta ta ta biddy-dum ta ta ta ta ta ta ta). Plus it was a place and a time...




People always say to me, why can’t Stevie Wonder make a great album like he used to? It’s the damning part of being an artist. You can’t do the same thing twice because people will call you on it, but you can’t change too much because then people will go “well why don’t you do what I like?” And it’s really the combination of a place and a time. Like, Stevie Wonder, who is undeniable in his greatness, I could play one of his albums for my mother and she would say that she really likes it - and she is not down or funky. It’s about a combination of a time in our lives. When we listen to Stevie or Earth, Wind, F, it all was part of a specific place and time for all of us.Its like when people say, “Oh don’t you miss the way music used to be?” I don’t miss it specifically, and more to the point, the whole world used to be a very different place. And the resonance that music has is because it takes us back to that time and place.

That’s why when the whole Native Tongues thing came out; life was a little bit less hard then. There was more hope then there was now. So with those artists, I think the success of those people is a confluence of those artists and their arcs and troughs of their own creative output and society in general. Every once in a while, those two waves get in sync for and they may keep doing their thing after that, but after a while, they don’t quite sync up. Its obvious when you think about it. There are artists are still doing the same thing that they’ve always done, except hopefully newer and creative, and they just aren’t hitting,. Well - it's just not in sync.

Do you still maintain relationships with artists, outside of the studio?

BP: Absolutely. If I were going to do things purely on a transactional business basis, then I would be in another business. I like making good music with good people, and I enjoy the human element of it. Most of the people that I’ve ever made records with, we may not talk all the time, but I love them dearly for the same reasons I did when we made the record, and I hope that works both ways. You learn something for each other, and then it’s like a friendship. They move on for ten years, and you may not talk to them, but you still hold the same things.

With that said, do you have any clue what's up with the D’Angelo record?

BP: D suffers from the same demons of many great artists—particularly his unwillingness to settle for anything than what he feels is really special or unique or different. I know a lot of artists have completion anxieties. Because then they have sink or swim on what they release. We all have this. We avoid confrontations that we know will result in us being either on the bus or off the bus, because we don’t want to deal with being off mark. Artists are very sensitive people, no matter how many records they sell or how famous they are. That’s an artist—they want to perform and want you to be into their thing.



What do you see as essential elements needed for making good music—from an engineering/recording perspective, and also from a composition perspective?

BP: It’s about having the right gear and knowing what to do with it. Different pieces of recording gear are just like having different guitars or keyboards. They each have a different feel and sound. It’s just about knowing how to use it. It’s like good musicianship: there is no one thing that you can do that will all of a sudden get you there. It’s a combination of a thousand tiny details that don’t make much difference by themselves but together make huge change. I’m out of vogue right now; I love range, not just loud and soft, but the inner dynamics. I love stuff that gets huge like a mountain then all of a sudden everything drops out and you refocus on the artist. I love drama in records.

So what's in the works these days? What can look forward to from you?

BP: Because there is so much less major label work—I get about a tenth of what I used to get—now I’m doing more international work. I mixed a hip-hop concept record for Sam Spiegel that is fucking fantastic. It has Karen O and Rza on the same track. It’s a great record called NASA (North America, South America). I produced Guyora Kats, who is a singer/songwriter but very hard to describe—like Elton John when he was younger, and soulful but not trying to sound like the Righteous Brothers. I’m also working with Andrea Wittgens, an idiosyncratic singer/songwriter, on her EP and now her LP. I’m very lucky in that my karma and path have lead me to point where I get to work with some amazing artists. My website, (www.bobpower.com) will start reflecting that soon...

my music: www.myspace.com/whizkid215

im simply the cat that lay back, i chill and watch you, the silent ninja, intent to injure now i got you, sanity lost so now im found insane, thinkin streets to jeeps, hours days to weeks, i even speak to geeks..

~~~

I THINK I LOVE ALICIA KEYS MORE NOW:

Alicia Keys is taking a political turn, as she explains in a recent interview with Blender magazine that gangsta rap "was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. 'Gangsta rap' didn't exist."

The singer also allegedly has also been reading several Black Panther autobiographies, and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead."

In the interview, which hits newsstands on Tuesday (April 15), Keys also explains that the deaths of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. were the result of the government's actions. The Grammy Award-winner believes that East coast/West coast feud was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing."

The singer, who now intends to write more political songs.now intends to write more political songs, also noted that if black leaders of the past "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself."

www.hiphopdx.com

~~~

I hate tobacco. I love my friends. Tobacco keeps me from my family and friends. I must stop it. Years ago I should have. But today is the next best thing.
I love you and I'm sorry it took me so long to figure myself out.
love, Adhimu

p.s. love is not enough anymore. ACTION too.