Although she never became a mainstream star, people who know dance music know Jocelyn Brown. She was the main vocalist on disco classics by Inner Life, Musique and Change among other acts and her 1984 hit, "Somebody Else's Guy", is as close to timeless as club anthems get.
"I Wish You Would" was her follow-up and is really slept on to me. It also happens to be the name of this blog. The version I've posted is an edit I made that trims the intro and lengthens the vocoder breaks.
People blame auto-tune for a lot of terrible music, but it has achieved at least one remarkable thing-- causing me to voluntarily listen to !ProHoeZak?.
This is remarkable because:
(1) he possesses the single worst name in all rap music (honorable mention: any rapper other than Devin the Dude whose name is formatted "__________ the __________", "___________ tha _________ or ____________ da ___________"),
(3) I am just so damn good at it-- I have a nearly 20-year record of successfully ignoring !ProHoeZak?.
Let me explain....
Before ProHoeZak became ProHoeZak (I'm dispensing with the punctuation, it's just too awful) he was C-Funk and, before that, Cap'n Crunch. He started making records in the 1980s as a member of East Palo Alto's Rated X, who released a pretty decent 1990 LP on Tandem, And Then Came Rated X, and the less good but better-titled Will Rap 4 Sex. Then he went solo as C-Funk, releasing some records on Paris's Scarface label that I never bothered to listen to (the title of his hit, "Lime in Yo Coconut", was enough to put me off) and doing some production for the Conscious Daughters, quickly-falling-off era Public Enemy and others.
So, uh, to fast-forward to now-- in the last few weeks there was a song I'd caught several times on KMEL, either late night or in mix shows. It featured SF rapper San Quinn and a heavily auto-tuned singer who sounds kinda like what Kanye would sound like if he were capable of hitting notes. It's also totally infectious so I started hunting for it but my searches for "San Quinn" + "superman" didn't turn up much until today, when I stumbled across two youtube clips.
Pick your flavor, there's either:
(1) stare at a picture of ProHoeZak:
or
(2) watch advertisement for the Tequila he plugs throughout the song complete with stop-motion marching tequila bottles and busted models:
Me personally, I prefer the latter.
Or you could just listen to and buy the single here.
Oh, and, this is kinda great:
B.o.B.: "Autotune"
The rap adlibs kinda sound like almost every Lil Wayne cameo of the last few months-- i.e., "I'ma mumble some boring, simplistic mess and then punctuate it with some grunts and chuckles and you'll like it".
It's vocoder, right? I don't think it's a talk box.
Shit, I'm tempted to call up Dave Tompkins right now and bug him, but I bet a lot of people do that. I just googled to see if Dave's vocoder book was out yet and found a post on Jeff Chang's blog saying it "will appear in book form early 2005." Hah. I hope the book will have an appendix detailing which records use what; in the meantime, there's a pretty good overview of different robotic voice effects on Wikipedia. For a thoughtful take on the social implications of T-Pain's use of Auto-Tune, I recommend this Slate article.
The Jazzy Jay song I posted is kind of a rip-off of the B+ (b/k/a Spyder-D) song "B-Beat Classic", which itself was a remake of Sesso Mato's "Sessomato". If you don't own "B-Beat Classic", do yourself a favor and buy a download here (and enjoy a Dave Tompkins write-up) or here or here or track down the 12", which was back in print last time I checked. If you don't like the song, we probably can't be friends.
