I Hope My Momma Don't Hear This Song

Electrik Red - We Fuck You (mp3)(buy)

Song of the Year?

Don't know the names of the four women in Electrik Red (myspace), don't know if I'll ever have to learn them.  Weird to say about a record that rubs your face in female empowerment, or maybe not; the recording industry's long history of dudes behind the boards and chicks at the mic can lead to entertaining who-did-what post-coital yanks.  Maybe some day some fan will seek to reclaim ground on behalf of Naomi Allen.  (There, I looked one up.)

For now they'd be another anonymous quartet of R&B hoochies - thankfully not one dominated by a Charlie's Angels hair color casting - if their record didn't pop and scorch with such identity.  That comes courtesy The-Dream, producer du moment, who released the not-as-good-as-this Love vs. Money under his own moniker earlier this year; he co-created of Red's songs, most with writing partner Christopher "Tricky" Stewart.

Which means that "We Fuck You" could be a female-voiced song about feelings of male victimization or some such shit or not.  How to Be a Lady: Volume 1 is mostly about sex (Pt. Deux will probably cover place settings and such), and often sex-as-power, but it provides enough asides - like that point in "W.F.Y." where she starts deciding what you can wear, or that throwaway Michael Jackson Whooo! - and dizzying contradictions that it becomes more than something you'll ride once and leave behind.  It grinds foul-mouthed assertions against tender moments.  It throbs all over the universe; starts in the jungle, spends time south of Saturn, winds up (as apparently all things must) next to Lil' Wayne.  ("Blondie's "One Way Or Another," but R&B and in space" doesn't quite cover it, but that's the line that made me buy the album, so thanks.)  "We Fuck You" makes demands on to infinity, it's a military parade, it's a club, it's a lecture.  And it's all the more interesting because it's an assembled package; it hits that spot where people putting things in other peoples' mouths becomes questionable and exciting.

It's a giant strap-on dildo of a record and I love it.

Betty Davis - Anti Love Song (mp3)(buy)

This is all Betty Davis.

If you hear the words "Betty" and "Davis" together and think Jezebel or Kim Carnes, you're wrong, you're wrong.  If you think, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night," then you're part right.

Bigger than any shadow, Betty Mabry married Miles Davis and wore him the fuck out.  She released a trio of amazing, stupendous, marvelous, exciting, edge-of-galaxy, edge-of-orgasm funk records in the early 70s and then went into seclusion.  If you don't love her, you don't know her.  Soul Sides' Oliver Wang, who wrote the liner notes for the recent deluxe reissue of her first two records (already back out of print, mp3s (1, 2) are available) and who's doing the same for an upcoming pressing of her "lost" fourth album recommended this article and that article.  You should probably just do whatever you can to get the music.  It will throw you down and beat you with a turquoise chain.

"Anti Love Song" - which doesn't need to be anything more than a bassline and Davis' nail-scratch vocals, the rest is distraction - goes from great to Good God as it tears away its self-concern and gets generous.  When it comes to losing control, she's less afraid of losing herself than devouring someone else.  Hot Holy Yowza.

*

Four on the floor.  Um. (via)

*

The Leighton Meester sex tape is empirically, epistemologically real, or something like that.

tags: electrik red  thedream  betty davis  

links: digg this    del.icio.us    reddit