Tag Archives: mtv

The world wants Zaz

February 21, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , ,

MTV Iggy, February 21, 2012

“Je veux.” I want. In this song, which became a huge summer hit in France in 2010, Zaz shares a wishlist that’s anything but materialistic. All she wants is “some love, some joy, some good cheer/It’s not your money that will make me happy,” she sings in French, after turning down jewels, mansions and limousines. “What would I do with all that stuff?” she asks, sauntering in the video through a flea market. That image only underscores the cute-retro Parisian feel that can’t help but attach to the 31-year-old singer. It’s inevitable: Zaz covers Edith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg along with singing originals, and she even used to busk in the Metro and Montmartre, plus she’s kind of bubbly, so the whole gamine thing comes pretty much built in.

But there’s plenty more to Zaz, born Isabelle Geffroy, than that cliché’d image. She’s a thoughtful and energetic woman from a Paris scene where traditional chanson is just one in a brew of influences that includes African, Gypsy, electronica and jazz elements, among others, swirling around in the clubs and taverns of the Latin Quarter or the Halles district. In her own pathway to an entirely unexpected stardom she picked up a lot of those strands, layered them atop a provincial upbringing and came out with this sassy but lucid artistic persona, a little wide-eyed maybe, but far from naïve.

Recently Zaz came through New York City for a few shows, including one at the Globalfest international music showcase, attended by an industry crowd of concert promoters, managers, media and the like. The next day, in her hotel’s lobby lounge, Zaz chatted in French with MTV Iggy’s Siddhartha Mitter about her sudden burst to fame, her troubled early years, and making classic-sounding French songs in 2012.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT MTVIGGY.COM

Cut it up & eat it: the bloody soul of Le Butcherettes

January 10, 2012 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

MTV Iggy, January 10, 2012

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM

 

Anders Trentemøller, Danish Electro Ringmaster

December 7, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

MTV Iggy, December 7, 2011

His American breakout moment came earlier this year when he tore up the 2011 Coachella festival, in a high-intensity electronic set backed by a full live rock band and a visual show that had breathless bloggers and reviewers proclaiming it the festival’s high point. But in Europe Anders Trentemøller has been a figure to contend with on the club scene for quite some time.

Some know him for deep, hard house remixes of the likes of Royksopp’s What Else Is There or his takes on Franz Ferdinand, Moby, Modeselektor and more—sometimes spare and fidgety, sometimes opulent and intense—that have made him one of the continent’s prime remixers. Some know him for his own moody, sparse 2006 album The Last Resort.

Many had their minds blown—whether the 50,000 people in the crowd or many more who’ve watched the video online—by the ultra-high energy and lavish staging, complete with ghostly choreographed armies, wild curtains and glowing parasols, of his “Silver Surfer Ghost Rider Go!” at the 2009 Roskilde festival in his native Denmark.

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Just A Kenyan Band of Superheroes

November 15, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

MTV Iggy, November 15, 2011

It took a superhero to bring Just A Band back from the future.

His name: Makmende. His look: Blaxploitation chic—sharp tan jacket, flared trousers, broad-rimmed shades, Afro pick. His modus operandi: Appears in the streets of Nairobi to beat down miscreants, send robbers fleeing, fight off masked kidnappers, rescue a lady in distress and leave her swooning as he coolly walks away.

These heroics—complete with fabulous comedic touches, like when Makmende swipes his opponent’s necktie and refashions it into a bandanna—unfold to the beat of “Ha He,” a catchy electro-pop delight off 82, the second album by Just A Band. The Nairobi trio are filmmakers, animators and comic-book buffs as well as musicians, and when they gathered some friends to perform in a video for the song, they looked for a fun storyline and came up with Makmende. The name was inspired by an old street-slang term, of obscure origin, to describe foolhardy or adventurous behavior.

What they didn’t expect was that Makmende the superhero would become a cult figure days after the video’s March 2010 YouTube posting. And in so doing, turn Just A Band from an ironically-named, arty purveyor of avant-garde sounds to Nairobi hipsters into something like a national pop sensation.

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Better than Jay-Z, Bigger than Osama: Enter the future of Humble the Poet

October 3, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

MTV Iggy, October 3, 2011

It feels like one of those guaranteed party songs—the fat beat, the epic loop, the perfect wave-your-hands-in-the-air tempo. And it is a party song, no doubt. But pay attention to the lyrics and see the video, or better yet, watch the Humble the Poet perform it onstage, and you’ll know that “Baagi Music,” his 2010 anthem, is a lot more than that.

With its “Go Baagi Baagi! Go Baagi Baagi!” chants, it’s the Toronto MC’s biggest song, whether measured by YouTube clicks or the sheer energy rise in the club when he plays it. And it’s also a statement of defiance and regional pride, and a provocation—sharply crafted and aggressively delivered.

To wit: “Toronto’s my heart, Punjabi n my blood.” And: “I’m not Indian—four knuckles to your eyes, if you call me that again.” And: “F*@k Bollywood—we Punjabi!”

Around this core theme, some ornamentation: The flyness of Punjabi girls. The realness of Punjabi guys. How Punjabis the “home of bhangra and Jay Sean’s mom.” All spit by Humble, a tall, rangy Sikh brother with full beard and turban, hyped and accompanied onstage by his friend—and “Baagi Music” producer—Sikh Knowledge.

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Reggae legend Tiken Jah Fakoly: “The future is in Africa”

September 15, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , , ,

MTV Iggy, September 15, 2011

“It used to be that when people saw you with hair like this, you were considered a lunatic,” says Tiken Jah Fakoly, the reggae artist from Ivory Coast.

Fakoly’s dreads are short and orderly, the kind of look that would pass unnoticed on a Brooklyn street. But he is right: for many years in much of Africa, the figure of the Rastaman—dreadlocked, likely unkempt, possibly high—was assimilated, at least by middle-class society, to that of the sad deranged men you’d see pacing the roadside or darting in traffic in the bustling business districts of cities like Abidjan, Lagos or Accra.

But like his predecessors Alpha Blondy, also from Ivory Coast, or the late Lucky Dube, from South Africa, Fakoly, now 43 and perhaps the leading figure in African reggae today, stuck to his guns. He followed the path inspired by the Rasta revelation he had as a teenager in dusty Odienné, his home town, and made a career, now 10 albums deep, telling truths about corrupt politicians, pointless civil wars, Western economic manipulation, the false promises of immigration and the sadness of exile.

It’s in the vocation of the Rastaman, after all, to shrug off contempt or ignorance by polite society in favor of telling the truth.

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Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever

September 9, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

MTV Iggy, September 9, 2011

There’s a poignant moment on Cannibal Courtship, the fifth album from the Cambodia-inspired, Los Angeles-based Dengue Fever, that encapsulates what is tragic and urgent in the message of this idiosyncratic band who just as often come off light-hearted.

It comes on a track called “Sister In the Radio.” Singing in Khmer against a slow-paced backdrop that sounds a bit like a surf-rock dirge, frontwoman Chhom Nimol tells a story from her childhood—when she was about 9 years old and living, like many Cambodians scattered by the Khmer Rouge genocide and later political conflict, in refugee camps.

“This is my personal song,” Chhom says, in a conversation before the band took the stage recently at Lincoln Center in New York. “When I was a kid I lived in camps in Thailand. My family had fled. I had no idea if my older sister…”

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Hanni El Khatib’s got a hot hot thing

August 4, 2011 By in Articles Tags: ,

MTV Iggy, August 4, 2011

Somewhere on a side street in the vestigial industrial precincts of Manhattan’s Far West side, the rocker Hanni El Khatib interrupts a photo shoot—he was getting portrayed roaming these blocks and checking out the High Line elevated park—and pulls out his camera phone to take a few snaps of his own.

The sight that attracts his interest is a nondescript heap of old car tires, piled up at the edge of an auto repair shop lot. “I just like stuff,” El Khatib explains. “I like piles of s**t, old TVs or electronics. A pile of tires is really cool to me. I don’t know why.”

Clad in black jeans, a blue work shirt with a white undershirt, and a bunch of tattoos visible, El Khatib almost looks the part of a warehouse or parking lot greaser, but not quite. A bit too clean. The beard moderate and trimmed. Most of all, the fresh face with the open, curious look and wide eyes. A 30-year-old manchild checking out random urban materials while rocking a cultivated but sincerely worn style.

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Jazz vocalist Sachal Vasandani: “Catch me, because I need you”

July 13, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , ,

MTV Desi, July 13, 2011

Beautiful songs in the great American tradition that stretches back to Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter or Nat King Cole. A rich, assured voice that distills with equal poise the soothing of romance and the bittersweet anxiety of love lost or imperiled, or the yearning of a compassionate heart trying to make sense of the troubles of the world. In a time when male jazz vocalists have grown rare, it’s all the more impressive to watch the emergence of Sachal Vasandani, who in the course of three albums—the latest, Hi-Fly, came out June 21—has earned abundant praise for the way he mixes the classicism of a true scholar of the music with a singer-songwriter’s more contemporary edge. MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter caught up with the Illinois-raised, Brooklyn-based Vasandani for a conversation about Desi roots, the appeal of jazz vocals, and the art of the song.

Now three albums deep, you’re building an identity as a classic vocalist in the jazz and American songbook tradition. The Sachal Vasandani sound has a very classic, throwback feel. Would you agree?

I understand that moniker. And It’s definitely easy for me to find stuff that I like in older material. What other people—and myself—find in indie music or pop music or underground music, I also find in jazz. That same freshness, that kernel of originality and optimism and darkness, I find that in songs that might have come from a generation ago. Those are the kind of feelings that I try to infuse in whatever material I sing. So I don’t think of myself as a throwback; on the contrary, I think of myself as resuscitating older songs and making them a part of the current lexicon, you know what I mean? That’s my goal.

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MC Ras Ceylon: One love from Sri Lanka to Jamaica

June 6, 2011 By in Articles Tags: , , , ,

MTV Desi, June 6, 2011

“The Gideon Force was the regiment that kicked the fascists out of Ethiopia,” explains Oakland-based MC Ras Ceylon. The force, he says, resisted the Italian incursion against the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie, the emperor sacred to Rastafarians. It inspired the title of the latest mixtape from the reggae and hip hop MC, Gideon.Force Volume 1, with its array of “conscious” guests including stic.man from the militant duo dead prez.

Resistance, liberation, and Rasta are integral to the music of this overtly political MC. And so is Sri Lanka, his family homeland. From Sri Lanka to Jamaica via the Bay Area, the connections are not as far-fetched as one might imagine — at least not as Ras Ceylon, who’s been making music on the underground scene for over a decade, sees it.

MTV Desi’s Siddhartha Mitter caught up with Ras Ceylon for a session on consciousness, politics, and how the Emcee realized he was part of a Desi music movement.

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