Why Frank Ocean is A Musical Icon By: Jon Savage It was the photo that first hooked me. A young black American stares to the right of the camera. He is both experienced in the art of the pose yet slightly irritated at the photographer's demand an impatience indicated by the hatched cross-lines on his forehead. In his right hand he holds a navy casual jacket - taken off to reveal a simple T-shirt with a hut graphic and colour-fade lettering that states "Psychedelic Life". The blue in the colour wash is echoed by the Air Jordan trainers that protrude from beneath a pair of simple, tapered camo trousers. The look is smart, minimal, highly considered, far away from clichĂŠd bling. This is clearly someone important, stylish, at the top of his game. He exudes a sense of self-worth and self-containment, emphasised by the space around him. In the background there is European formal architecture. To his left, a family passes, wondering who this object of attention is. Others stand and stare: something is happening. Slightly behind him, to his right, a smartly dressed friend or PR smiles in a semi-official way. It's a collision of worlds.
It's early March 2013, and Frank Ocean is attending the Valentino autumn/winter ready-to-wear show at Paris Fashion Week: as he must have known, his carefully thought-out look - topped by the Pam (Perks & Mini) "Psychedelic Life" T-shirt - will shortly be deconstructed by the fashion press. Nine months previously, he has released his first full solo album, Channel Orange, a dizzying fusion of rap, R&B, soul and psychedelia which reached No2 in the US and in the UK where it was the first to enter the Top 20 purely on digital sales.
Just days before the album's release, Frank Ocean posted a statement on his Tumblr in which he addressed "all the rumours going round. Four summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Every day almost... By the time I realised I was in love, it was malignant. It was hopeless. There was no escaping, no negotiating with the feeling. No choice. It was my first love. It changed my life." Speaking to American GQ's Amy Wallace in November 2012, Ocean said, "The night I posted it, I cried like a baby. It was like all the frequency just clicked to a change in my head. All the receptors were now receiving a different signal, and I was happy. There's just some magic in truth and honesty and openness." In the same interview, however, he took pains to disavow any fixed sexuality. "As a writer, as a creator, I'm giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain't got to pry beyond that." Ocean's post dropped a bomb in the rigid, often macho world of hip hop within which, as a member of the Odd Future collective, he had participated for several years. He received nothing but support from Odd Future members like Tyler, The Creator, but the ensuing media furore only exacerbated his tendency towards seclusion and withdrawal. Like many pop artists, he has refused to explicitly identify himself as homosexual or bisexual or heterosexual - a position entirely in keeping with his precise yet elusive aesthetic. By the time this photo was taken, Ocean was one of the hottest properties in music but he was on the point of disappearance. Thoroughly at home with the possibilities of the third wave technological revolution, he was also familiar with its downside. "The internet made fame wack," he posted way back in 2011, "and anonymity cool." Bar a few live dates over the years, he was nearly invisible until 2016, until the release of his second studio album, Blonde. Withdrawal is a time-honoured pop tactic that only favours the very successful and the most alluring. In Ocean's case, it fit his wish not to play the music industry game: previous difficulties with Def Jam Records have put him on the path to digital self-releasing - a practice he has used with his first mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra and his latest album (it's written as Blond on the artwork, but has come to be spelled with an "e"). His wish not to be defined or to be pinned down, allied to his profligate talent, is reminiscent of Prince and, like that inspirational figure, he dictates his terms and defines his time. The second track of Blonde, "Ivy", begins with the briefest of tremolo guitar melodies, before the voice comes in crooning, "I thought that I was dreaming when you said you love me." The rest of the chorus deals with the old duality of love and hate, "I could hate you right now / It's quite alright to hate me now." In the verse, Ocean gets down to the heart of it, "We didn't give a f*** back then / I ain't a kid no more / We'll never be those kids again." "Ivy" is constructed around two contrasting guitar figures: a simple beatless arrangement. The lyric is about memory - of a first love affair, a long-standing friendship now gone - related in a voice that is, at times, sped up to sound younger to fit the theme. "That was my version of collage or bricolage," Ocean told the New York Times' Jon Caramanica last November. "How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves, we know the story, we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid." Like many Ocean songs, "Ivy" is at once direct and ambiguous: it takes you into the feeling but gives little away in terms of situation. The nonlinear approach encourages multiple meanings that reinforce his skill as a lyricist and pop artist. Everything flows into everything else
within this oceanic world, yet it all fits together - right down to Christopher Edwin Breaux's adoption of his nom-de-pop in 2010, five years after the salt water came in on his home town of New Orleans. Blurring is central to Ocean's iconic albums: the blurring of gender - a topic addressed in "Songs For Women"; the blurring of musical forms, most notably contemporary urban with Eighties rock guitar and classic psychedelia; the fusion of old-skool and cutting-edge technology; and the jamming together of several stories within one song (most notably on the Channel Orange centrepiece "Pyramids"). This is complex stuff, quite apart from all the pop-cultural allusions that hurtle at you in the quickfire raps: ranging from Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote to the direct musical quotations from Coldplay, MGMT and The Eagles, to his invocations of iconic performers such as Michael Jackson, John Lennon and Mick Jagger, to the list of dead black Americans in "Nikes", which culminates with a nod to the murdered 17-year-old Trayvon Martin - "That ***** look just like me." Like Drake and D'Angelo, Ocean effortlessly fuses rap and R&B, but his work has an experimental edge. On Channel Orange, for instance, modern synth and drum machine tones provided by Arturia software synthesisers - are run through analogue equipment and then given a dry, yet warm and full sound mix. Blonde uses a new type of audio programme called the Prismizer, which treats the voice somewhat like a vocoder but which adds harmonies across the audio spectrum like a prism disperses light. At the same time, Frank Ocean is known to spend months on his vocals, performing outrageous switches of rhyme and meter, slowing down and speeding up, breaking up words. The voice is another way of expressing a character and telling a story: as he sings on "Novocane", "Every single record, autotunin'/ Zero emotion, muted emotion, pitch corrected, computed emotion." What he's after seems like an experimental novelist's approach: character and situation seen from different angles and points of view, put together with a cinematic eye. The sudden switches are there to make you see things in a new way, to fragment conventional narrative in order to tell the story - despite the apparent alienating effect of the technology - through pure emotion. Just because something's computerised doesn't mean it's not "real". Channel Orange announced a star who made himself less available and then invisible This ambition is all over 2011's Nostalgia, Ultra. Again on "Novocane", Ocean sings, "I'm feelin' like Stanley Kubrick, this is some visionary ****." The opening song takes the yearning guitar figure from Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing" and turns it, thanks to an unusually passionate vocal reminiscent of "Raspberry Beret"-era Prince, into an aching evocation of long-standing friendships. The artwork for Nostalgia, Ultra features a strikingly orange BMW E30 M3, one of the earliest signs of Ocean's car obsession that has been exhibited throughout his work: on his Tumblr, in his video for "Nikes", and throughout his lyrics, where cars are a metaphor for status, situation and life itself - the Lincoln Town Car on "Swim Good", the family Acura Legend on "Nights", the BMW X6 on "Ivy". As he sings on Blonde's "Skyline To": "that's a pretty f***ing fast year flew by / That's a pretty long third gear in this car." If Nostalgia, Ultra has all the first-time exuberance of a talent unleashed, then Ocean's
major-label debut, 2012's Channel Orange, has the pace, variety and depth of a big statement: over an hour's worth of music that includes songs about love, materialism, spirituality and, ultimately, the transience of life. Sounds like a big call but the warm, crisp and occasionally hallucinogenic production, the pacing and the quality of the material make the album speed past. The first full song, "Thinkin Bout You", appears to chart the relationship that Ocean wrote about in his Tumblr post: although the sexuality is never made explicit, the confusion between love, lust and the tricks of memory is perfectly expressed. A brief cover of James Fauntleroy's "Fertilizer" ("I'll take b******* if that's all you got") introduces a sequence of songs that tackle the good life, decadence and addiction within the context of poverty: as guest vocalist Rosie Watson states, "It's the difference between having a home and living on the streets." An echo of Steely Dan's "Showbiz Kids", "Super Rich Kids" begins with a slow jack-hammer beat, travels through a rap by Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt, and ends in tragedy. "Pilot Jones" meshes drug highs with the ecstasy of love, while "Crack Rock", with its percussive chorus, is informed by personal experience: his grandfather would take him to NA and AA meetings, which "totally ingrained this fear of addiction and of anything that could cause me to be addicted". In the album's last third, Ocean goes deeper. He comes out with some zingers on "Bad Religion", another soul-searching song about his same-sex first love: "This unrequited love / To me it's nothing but a one-man cult and cyanide in my styrofoam cup". More to the point, he states, "If it brings me to my knees, it's a bad religion". On "End", he prophesies, "Darker times / they're telling boulder heavy lies / Looks like all we've got is each other / The truth is obsolete". Channel Orange announced a major star who, promptly, made himself less available and then invisible. "I question if I'm built for this game. Or if I'm pushing past the limits of my design," he had written on a Tumblr post and in 2013 he quit the isolation of Los Angeles and moved to London, where he began recording new material in a number of studios, including Abbey Road. At the same time, he bought himself out of his contract with Def Jam and bought back all his master recordings. Control is always the issue for successful pop musicians, and Frank Ocean has proven himself a master of this experiential art. After months of fevered internet speculation, Blonde was previewed by the digital release of Endless, a 45-minute video album that mixes imagery of the singer performing mundane practical tasks in an empty warehouse space with a soundtrack of 18 new songs. A day later came the full album, self-released through Apple Music and iTunes. There was a physical version available for a very limited time, accompanied by a magazine called Boys Don't Cry. In its pages pictures of cars vied with tantalising snippets of Ocean's modus operandi: as one page stated, "In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate... The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour." Indeed, Blonde converts visuals into music. Like David Bowie - who handed Nile Rodgers a picture of Little Richard and said that's what he wanted "Let's Dance" to sound like - Frank Ocean took inspiration from an image. "Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face. A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her
ears. Her eyes seemed clear and calm but not blank, the road behind her seemed the same. I put myself in her seat then I played it all out in my head." Blonde is at once the sound of withdrawal and a deeper engagement - with memory, with psychology, with the state of the world. Unlike the bouncy tunefulness of Nostalgia, Ultra and the widescreen ambition of Channel Orange, the production sounds muted. Many songs are nearly beatless, relying on soft instrumental loops and heavily treated vocals that veer between anguish, anger and tenderness - often within the space of one song. "Sometimes I felt like you weren't hearing enough versions of me within a song," he told Jon Caramanica, "Cos there was a lot of hyperactive thinking. Even though the album is not frenetic, the pace of ideas being thrown out is." The album's first single, "Nikes", bears this out: a torrent of words on the topic of hyper materialism delivered in a multiplicity of voices that veer between bizarrely autotuned, wracked, straight ahead and, in the tender finale, devotional. "Solo" is accompanied by a simple, church organ with weird sound effects reminiscent of The Beach Boys' Smile. Like many of Frank Ocean's lyrics, it shifts from personal memory to strange, apocalyptic visions ("It's hell on earth and the city's on fire"). "Self Control" is sung by three different people - Ocean, Slow Hollows' Austin Feinstein and Swedish rapper Yung Lean to add extra distance to the metaphor of summer's swift passing and the transience of human relationships. Blonde dives deep into the well of memory. As his fame grows, Ocean withdraws further, deep into his own psyche and his past. Sometimes this is turbulent: "Pretty Sweet" has a sound picture that begins in the orchestral climax at the end of The Beatles' "A Day In The Life" - all mad orchestral swirls that segue into hyper speed breakbeats. The album's centrepiece, "Nights", veers between a description of "everyday shit" before it's broken in half by a dissonant guitar solo that leads to his memories of pre-Katrina New Orleans. He is a restless spirit who refuses to be confined, and that's exciting: nobody knows what he's going to do next The bulk of the songs - "White Ferrari", "Siegfried", "Ivy" to name but three - mix gentler music with chaotic, contradictory feelings. "Godspeed" explicitly harks back to his own past: as Ocean has admitted, the songs are "basically a reimagined part of my boyhood. Boys do cry, but I don't think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years. It's surprisingly my favourite part of life so far. Surprising, to me, because the current phase is what I was asking the cosmos for when I was a kid." Blonde has the feeling of someone coming full circle. It's a fascinating mix of revelation and withholding, a sprawl of a record caught between order and chaos, freedom and constriction. The original image of the young woman caught in the seatbelt comes to mind: is it protection or a kind of bondage? Will she escape and will she need to? It comes back to the way that Ocean sees the world: "How much of my life has happened inside of a car? I wonder if the odds are that I'll die in one." While lead single "Nikes" struggled in the charts, Blonde went to No1 in both the US and the UK: clearly the public prefers to hear Ocean on long form. Indeed he now presents a classic pop artist: one who is not afraid to mess with the formula or to change his approach with each record, who is totally at home with the latest technology, one who is in control of his own destiny, who has his own highly stylised and effective fashion sense - and one who is both
content rich and Ocean is simultaneously privileged and embattled. He is one of the pop elite, with collaborators like Pharrell Williams, BeyoncĂŠ, and James Blake, and his fugitive persona is a valid form of engagement with the voracious demands of the new media. R&B in particular has long been the most advanced in terms of music technology and its use, and he takes that to a new level, constructing startling sound pictures that fit his lyrics. He is a restless spirit, who refuses to be confined, and that's exciting: nobody knows what he's going to do next. It seems axiomatic that if you're going to have 21st-century pop music, it should sound like it's being made in the 21st century. It's 2017 not 1967, 1977 or 1987 - a fact that seems to elude so many rock groups. When I listen to Ocean - which I have been obsessively over the last few weeks - I hear a consummate contemporary artist in every sense: one who is immersed in new sonic possibilities, one who is deeply committed to artistic exploration in the most profound sense. Frank Ocean is a true pop star of today: his time is now.
How Hozier Learned to Flirt with the End of the World on Wasteland, Baby! 'Wasteland, Baby!' is the Irish artist's sophomore album Raisa Bruner Mar 1, 2019 1:25 PM PST
When Hozier wrote “Take Me to Church” back in 2013, he wasn’t expecting to have a hit on his hands. But after that song — an explosive piece of soulful rock — got Andrew Hozier-Byrne signed to a record label and blew up online, the Irish singer-songwriter turned into a global star overnight. An album and a tour soon followed, with Hozier racking up over 2 billion streams on Spotify alone and over a billion views of his work on YouTube, putting him in league with established artists like Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran and Adele for play counts.
Now nearly five years later, Hozier is finally releasing his second body of work, Wasteland, Baby! (The exclamation mark is “quite important,” he tells TIME, “to the wry smile” inherent in his work; he tends to blend experiences of devastation and joy.) It’s a worthy follow-up that mixes his particular brand of howling existential pain, whisper-sweet lyricism and uncompromising bluesy musicianship. Standing at well over six feet tall with a mane of unruly
long hair, Hozier makes for an imposing presence onstage. But in person, he is soft-spoken and thoughtful.
TIME sat down with the artist to discuss his connection to the musical traditions of eras past and his path to Wasteland, Baby!, which he wrote over the past few years in his small coastal hometown of Wicklow.
Hozier grew up with a musician father, immersed from boyhood with sounds of previous eras of music. By his early teens, he was singing in a band, ultimately teaching himself to play guitar. “It was a long, slow, painful process,” he laughs now. But it dovetailed with his intense fascination with blues and jazz, which would lead him to the music he makes today. “When you’re a teenager and you have something that is your own — your own fascination, your own little world — that was blues music for me,” he says.
TIME: You have a strong connection with American blues, soul and rock traditions. How did those come into your life?
HOZIER: That was the record collection in the house. I started getting into Robert Johnson and Skip James and Blind Willie Johnson.
Were those genres popular where you grew up, or were you doing your own thing?
I wasn’t exactly popular at the time. In the 90s, the cool kids were listening to Nirvana, because it’s not what your parents are comfortable with you listening to. As a teenager, everyone was into pop. [But] I was hooked on blues music and jazz. I thought it was music for grownups. It was quite immediate and visceral, and it was either lusting or raw in some way. Pop music, I just didn’t vibe with.
What was it about jazz and blues that you connected with?
It excited me more than anything else. There was something quite mystifying about this stuff, because it was hard to get my hands on the records, especially when I was a younger kid with a really poor internet connection. I couldn’t get a train into the city and go to a record store. There was a real sense of distance with this music, which only fed into my craving for it.
So fast forward to your first album, which was a whirlwind experience helped along by virality, and now this one. What’s changed?
There was a huge success with [“Take Me to Church”]. That was so unlikely. Things happened in a way that couldn’t be planned for. I was conscious not to veer off track from what my original ethos was when I wrote that song. I found it very helpful to move back to Ireland, spend a bit of quiet time and approach songwriting in a similar way.
Do you have a favorite story about a song and how it came to life on this record?
I think “Nina Cried Power,” because it was a tricky one to write; I nearly abandoned it so many times. When we got Mavis [Staples] on board — she’s incredible, such an important artist and someone the song is really written for and to that legacy, of artists who spoke and sang about things they thought were vital to sing about. And seeing Booker T. [Jones] play organ; that was an absolute dream.
One other thread that runs through your work is advocacy for different social causes, from LGBTQ issues to homelessness to the importance of protest. Why has that been central to you as an artist?
It’s more central to me as a citizen than it is central to me as an artist. That’s a question of being a citizen as part of a society and having values and standing by them. It’s as simple as that. The citizen gives birth to the artist, as opposed to the other way around. I would resist being considered somebody who’s dabbling in political concepts for the sake of it. I would never do that. The intention is to at least write honestly and write how you experience the world at the moment. And that’s not always roses.
Your songs are often at the intersection of suffering and pleasure, or finding connection. Why has that resonated with you as an artist and a writer?
It’s a tricky one. Either way, the listener always finishes the piece, and the listener is always going to bring their own self to the piece. If the work isn’t heard, if it’s not interpreted, it’s meaningless entirely. Growing up, I was seriously in love with Tom Waits’s work, and he sometimes refers to [these types of songs] as “bad news from a pretty mouth,” offering something terrible in a very beautiful way.
The music video for your single “Movement” stars Sergei Polunin, a famous dancer who memorably starred in a dance video set to “Take Me to Church” as well. How did that collaboration come about?
The music video was directed by a team called Us, based in London. They reached out to Sergei, and we had two days in his schedule. He bounces around the world mores than I do! He very kindly came in for one day of camera rehearsal and a shoot. After his performance in the David LaChappelle video, I think new life was breathed into that song; for people in the dancing community, it opened that door to experience the work differently.
Why the title Wasteland, Baby!?
I had demo-ed a good amount of songs and knew my favorites, what the swimmers were. And “Wasteland, Baby!” seemed to sum up the vibe, whether some of the songs are about enjoying taking part in a cultural wasteland or a moral wasteland. [It has that] sense of doom and gloom — and the weird little grin that they carry.
Mavis Staples and Booker T. Jones are the only featured artists on this album. Are there any others you’d like to work with in future?
I would love to work with Tom Waits. I know that’s predictable of me, but there’s very few living artists I could point to that have influenced me as much.
Why do you think older musical traditions and artists of previous generations are so important to you?
There’s so much music that I have gotten so much out of personally, and found so many universal commonalities with music that was recorded, let’s say, 100 years ago. For people of my generation and younger fans, it’s nice to set up a little breadcrumb trail, to say “check this out.” That’s something I’ve always loved about soul music: there’s examples of it being quite selfreferential. In the album I sometimes characterize the songs as a “taking stock of” — a taking stock of things that have passed, that can be lost, that might be said farewell to, like musical traditions and memories. It’s not all as bleak as that, but partly there’s that nod.
Shoreline Mafia is leading L.A.’s unruly rap renaissance After signing a major label deal, the West Coast group is looking to bring their boisterous brand of rap to the rest of the country. By Paul Thompson Photographer Ben Taylor Ohgeesy can’t shake hands with anybody: No daps, no high-fives. The outside of his right hand is freshly inked with the “100” from a $100 bill, surrounded by some of those ornate flourishes the U.S. Treasury loves. It looks fresh –– which is to say it looks painful. Despite that, the lanky Los Angeles native is in good spirits: just 24 hours earlier, Atlantic Records officially announced that it had signed Ohgeesy’s group, Shoreline Mafia, to a major-label record deal. Today, the crew is hosting a one-day-only pop-up shop to sell merch, sign autographs, and pose in an interminable stream of Snapchat stories. The venue is a small building in a barren industrial block on the East bank of the L.A. River; the glut of fans, most of them young and all of them exuberant, makes it nearly impossible to move. While his groupmates — Fenix, Rob Vicious, and Master Kato — sign everything from merch to Styrofoam to flesh, Ohgeesy notes that his hand at least felt good enough to do the tagging that covers virtually every wall in the space. It was through graffiti, rather than rap, that the bones of Shoreline were grafted into place: Ohgeesy and Fenix, the charter members, met while tagging around East Hollywood, where they were both attending high school. “We was just going stupid,” Ohgeesy says of those years. “I was tagging, skating. I was into crazy-ass shit –– it was fun. Now, I’m not doing nothing unless I get actually paid for it.” In the past half-year or so, Shoreline has emerged as one of the city’s most magnetic acts, a young, diverse addition to L.A.’s most significant stylistic movement since the jerkin craze. Their mixtape, last fall’s ShorelineDoThatShit, is a crisp, minimal introduction. It’s helmed largely by Ron-Ron, the Watts-bred producer who’s been at the forefront of this paranoiac new wave. The group’s collaboration with the producer initially began with a bit of theft. Ron-Ron and his management team discovered Shoreline Mafia when they found the group’s single, “Musty,” which made unauthorized use of one of Ron-Ron’s beats. (Shoreline had also swiped the beat for “Bottle Service,” which would go on to become another local hit.) After playing FaceTime tag and coming to a short stalemate, they not only brokered a peace but developed a remarkable chemistry. “Musty” only features Ohgeesy and Fenix, but works well as a microcosm of the group’s sound. Each rapper burrows deep into the pockets Ron-Ron creates. Their deliveries are tightly wound; they start from a baseline of monotone and spiral out from there, adding wit and verve and sneers where necessary. When Rob and Kato do join the proceedings, they add punch and grit: the former is fluent in many of today’s contemporary flows, and offers something like an L.A. spin on the deliveries that are crowding national rap radio, and — while Ohgeesy is the group’s early breakout star — the Chicago-born Kato, plaintive and fluid on record might be its most interesting vocalist.
Threaded through the tape are clips from a Fox 11 “expose” on the dangers posed by lean in and around L.A. The group, of course, refused to cooperate with the piece, and spliced up portions of the news report to open and close songs, and even to act as a kind of Reaganesque narration. It made for the sort of instant mythmaking that no marketing department could hope to coordinate on its own. But with the help of their managers and a serious push from a major label, Shoreline is positioned to break out as the banner act from L.A.’s new rap renaissance, a youth-led movement that aims to unite the city’s disparate component parts. “I like writing music about my life, but I’m not focused on going solo. This is my family.” — Rob Vicious “I met Eazy-E when I was 13.” This is Tracy Kimbro, whom everyone in L.A. knows as “TK.” TK and Picaso (born Jeremiah Aubert) are business partners in R. Baron, a sort of all-purpose management, marketing, and creative direction firm that has a near-stranglehold on the city’s most exciting talent. The pair splits management duties with Shoreline, with Picaso taking a more hands-on role on the creative side of things while TK concerns himself mainly with the business end. Right now, TK’s talking about his childhood, in Nashville. The sighting came at a skating rink. “This ain’t the Straight Outta Compton Eazy,” TK clarifies. “This is N.W.A. and the Posse Eazy. This is when "Boyz-n-the-Hood" came out, when he had the Jheri curl with the L.A. hat and the goddamn jewelry. The nigga had like a glow, homie, I can’t make this shit up. I saw that glow. It changed my life.” TK is 40-something and skeptical; when young men half his age stop by to say what’s up and brag about the new chains they hope to buy, he counsels them to wait until he can get them quotes from multiple jewelers. But when he talks about those early N.W.A. days, he acknowledges just how powerful the sales pitch was: “Eazy sold me a new California. If the average white person wanted to come out here and surfboard or skateboard––that was the ‘60s image––Eazy changed it. I wanted a low-low. We didn’t have lowriders [in Nashville]. I wanted a lowrider!” Nothing today will reframe L.A. rap in the national mind the way “Straight Outta Compton” or The Chronic did decades ago, but the artists TK and Picaso work with are leading a remarkable new push. Drakeo The Ruler’s Cold Devil, released at the tail end of last year, is one of the most singularly inventive rap records in many years. And 03 Greedo, the brilliant Watts synthesist, has warped and bent many of the aughts’ and 2010s’ most interesting musical threads into his own orbit. But Greedo was recently sentenced to 20 years on drug and gun charges, while Drakeo, and many of his Stinc Team compatriots, are currently locked up in L.A. County Jail, awaiting trial on charges including first-degree attempted murder and multiple counts of conspiracy to commit murder, for which they maintain their innocence. “Coming from the environments that we come from, from Los Angeles, we are walking around with targets on our back,” Picaso will later tell me. While all the variables seem to be lining up to give L.A.'s rising young artists a shot at stardom, there are lingering fears: “I know for a fact they’ve been targeted.” Shoreline’s trajectory, for the moment, is less complicated. While the managers are both energetic and clearly invested in the group, they quickly defer to the young rappers when it
comes to big decisions: each one offers, unprompted, that the Atlantic deal was Ohgeesy’s brainchild. And the group’s rabid fan base –– both Picaso and TK cite how young the crowd at the pop-up shop skews, and how racially diverse it is –– is not engineered, but rather seems to be the product of a grassroots authenticity. “A lot of niggas be sugarcoating, saying shit, talking about shit in rhymes they don’t even do, they don’t even live,” says Master Kato, who is as outgoing and upbeat in person as he can be grim and focused on record. “We don’t even cap. Everything we talk about, all that shit is real. The background noise in the song––that shit real.” Both he and Rob Vicious (Rob met Fenix after the latter changed high schools, and Kato was introduced to Ohgeesy at Rock the Bells) seem confident in the group’s ability to stay together despite the strictures of new, sudden fame. Says Rob: “I like writing music about my life, but I’m not focused on going solo. This is my family. I fuck with these niggas. I love these niggas.” To watch the four of them together is to see four young men, all in their early 20s, already steeling themselves for a long road ahead. They sign autographs and distribute merch with care and focus––they’re still loose, and they’re still having fun, but they very obviously understand that this is a job. Before the summer is over, they’ll be touring overseas and, undoubtedly, have their image beamed into countless phones and computer screens around the world, all while trying to put on for a Los Angeles that’s constantly growing and deteriorating at equal rates and in equal measure. TK notes that Ohgeesy, already one of the city’s most visible Latino rappers, is emblematic of Shoreline’s new status as a convergent point for different parts of L.A.’s hip-hop cultures. “You see the graffiti culture,” he says. “You see black, white, you see Asian, you see Latino.” He looks out one more time over the crowd. “This is L.A.”
Lil Uzi Vert’s ‘New Patek’ Is Extremely Long and Extremely Good Who could be mad at six minutes of octopus references and Naruto raps? By CHARLES HOLMES Lil Uzi Vert Lil Uzi Vert’s latest release, “New Patek,” which dropped late Monday night, is a song devoid of anything resembling traditional pop conventions. It’s an eccentric sidestep for an artist who arguably redefined what a streaming hit could sound like on 2017’s “XO TOUR Llif3.” That song, which reached Number 7 on the Billboard charts, was short and direct, insanely repetitive (bordering on monotonous) and a captivating dissolution of genre boundaries. Here, Uzi bucks all of those trends once again. “New Patek” is nearly six minutes long, an insanely long runtime for a rap song in 2018. It’s filled with rambling verses, each packed with non-sequiturs. The chorus — about watches, women and white diamonds — doesn’t have the immediacy of the hook for “TOUR Llif3.” Here, it’s almost as long as the verses, devoid of melody and solely identified as a chorus because it’s repeated (and repetitive). The end result is as brilliant as it is baffling; listening to “New Patek” feels like you’re watching his synapses connect dots only he can see. Uzi’s omnivorous approach to writing is best encapsulated by, “I am a octopus, I cannot breathe without water/So I put diamonds on my tentacles,” which comes just before transitioning to raps about throwing “up gang signs, Naruto” and piercing his nose like the manga villain, Pain. Lil Uzi Vert is an impressively inventive rap technician. The flow is unwieldy and rarely follows the the parameters of a beat. How he says something is clearly more important than what he’s saying. Everything is a hook, therefore nothing a hook. The song is a sugar rush that never subsides. “New Patek” is likely a precursor to the release of his rumored upcoming project, Eternal Atake. It joins his recent verses on Lil Baby’s “Life Goes On,” Playboi Carti’s “Shoota” and Young Thug’s “Up” in proving your favorite rapper would likely have a hard time keeping up with Vert, and everything he decides to release is worth paying attention to.
Cee Lo Green, an entertainer devoted to theatrical showmanship, has become one of the hardest-working stars in pop. Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Ducking through a crowd of tourists at Rockefeller Center, the singer Cee Lo Green took a breather during rehearsals for NBC’s annual tree-lighting concert on Nov. 30. But between a shopping detour at Swarovski Crystal and last-minute talks with the show’s producer, there wasn’t much time to rest. It’s a pace that Cee Lo, as he is also known, is accustomed to. In the last year, he has won a Grammy Award for a song that became a blockbuster hit despite its unprintable title (officially bowdlerized as “Forget You”), become a celebrity judge on NBC’s talent show “The Voice” and, through a calculated media blitz orchestrated by his managers, broken through as a face of mainstream pop culture after nearly two decades as a cult figure. To sustain his success, Cee Lo has become one of the hardest-working stars in pop. In the days around the tree-lighting schedule he logged about 20,000 miles taping television shows, recording an album and making personal appearances across the United States and in Britain. One day last spring he managed a promotional trifecta, performing in New York in the morning, Alabama in the afternoon and Las Vegas at night. “I’m still just a working-class artist, basically,” Cee Lo said of his schedule, as he waited backstage at Rockefeller Center for some hot tea to soothe his well-traveled vocal cords. Cee Lo — a cannonball-shaped man devoted to the Liberace and Elton John school of showmanship — will earn about $20 million this year. Record sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie, according to Larry Mestel, the chief executive of Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music. The collapse in record sales over the last decade has decimated the bottom line, and a hit song alone is no longer enough to bring in superstar wealth. So even musicians with multiplatinum success have started looking elsewhere for income, especially to increased touring and the kind of commercial deals that result in Miracle Whip product placement in Lady Gaga videos and Taylor Swift’s performing at a JetBlue airport terminal. A look at the numbers shows how the economics of music stardom have changed. Born Thomas Callaway, Cee Lo first struck gold in 2005 as producer and co-writer of the Pussycat Dolls’ hit “Don’t Cha”; the next year Gnarls Barkley, his duo with the producer Danger Mouse, reached No. 1 around the world with “Crazy.” Those hits brought Cee Lo an industry perch but little mainstream name recognition.
The pattern might have continued with his third solo album, “The Lady Killer,” which had a modest opening at No. 9 when released late last year by Elektra. By then, however, “Forget You” had already snowballed from an online novelty hit into a pop culture phenomenon, with Gwyneth Paltrow singing it on “Glee.” “Forget You,” released in August 2010, reached No. 2 and has sold 5.3 million downloads in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, making it the 12th most downloaded track of all time. (By comparison, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” the top song of 2011, has sold 5.7 million.) But today even extraordinary sales numbers like those translate to limited financial success. A chart-topping single could once be counted on to drive big sales of full albums, which bring in greater royalties. But the “unbundling” of albums in the age of iTunes — the loss of album sales at $10 or $15 when consumers can buy a single song for about $1 — has contributed to a 58 percent reduction in album sales since 2000. Despite the success of “Forget You,” “The Lady Killer” has sold only about 450,000 copies in the United States. “How much do you make on five million singles?” Mr. Mestel asked. “It’s not $5 million. Apple takes a piece of it, the record company takes a piece of it, the producer takes a piece of it, and then Cee Lo gets a piece of it as the artist.” A recording contract for an act like Cee Lo would typically offer a net royalty of about 15 percent, according to several music executives. That means that for a $1.29 download from iTunes, after Apple takes its standard 30 percent fee, the artist would be paid 13 or 14 cents; for five million downloads, that amounts to about $650,000. As one of five writers of the song, Cee Lo would also make about $45,000 in publishing royalties on those downloads. That leaves him a long way from the $20 million he is estimated to make this year. So to help establish Cee Lo as a household name, Primary Wave has over the last year arranged a steady series of TV appearances and endorsement deals that trade on the singer’s sense of pageantry, good humor and musical catholicity — his “brand.” The company is made up of many former major-label record executives who have learned to push for unusual marketing strategies. Jeff Straughn, chief executive of the Brand Synergy Group, a partnership with Primary Wave, developed the mini-Elle magazine — featuring actual paid ads — that doubled as the liner notes to Mariah Carey’s last album.