American Gangster, Jay-Z: A Music Review

Track Listing:

1. Intro
2. Pray
3. American Dreamin’
4. Hello Brooklyn 2.0
5. No Hook
6. ROC Boys (And the Winner Is)…
7. Sweet
8. I Know
9. Party Life
10. Ignorant Sh*t
11. Say Hello
12. Success
13. Fallin’

14. Blue Magic
15. American Gangster

To follow-up my last post about Hip Hop, I’m providing you with a personal review of the newly release Jay-Z album, American Gangster.

The album opens up with the Intro providing listeners with the meaning and mentality of a gangster. With this understanding the listeners can better understand the songs that follow.

Pray, American Dreamin’, Hello Brooklyn 2.0, No Hook, Say Hello are songs that also provide a setting for the listeners , while also providing them insight to a day in the life of a hustler. Hello Brooklyn gives you a glance at the city through his eyes. This track is hot because he gives Brooklyn attributes of a woman; listeners would think he was talking about a woman how he describes “Brooklyn’s curves”. American Dreamin’ and No Hook provide listeners with the reason why he chose the life that he did. In American Dreamin’ he talks about thinking about going to college, but he can’t focus on that while people are around him starving. The life gangsters live is one of danger, but in Pray, he shows that gangsters need God to. In Pray, he prays to God for strength and protection.

ROC Boys and Party Life provide listeners with a glance of the good life. It shows when the hustlers at his peak; moneys good and how they celebrate in their high times. Fallin’ gives listeners a glimpse of the fall of the gangster if he continues with that lifestyle.

Overall it’s a great album. To get the full affect, one would have to listen to the entire album from start to finish for it’s a project. It’s not an album you would want to flip through; it’s well worth playing all the way through. I recommend this to everyone, especially people who don’t like hip hop. This album is a mirror of many peoples’ lives every day, and to better understand hip hop, it’s purpose, even appreciate it. This album will show you why you don’t have to necessarily like it, but because of its honesty we all have to respect its truth.

Image provided courtesy of CD Universe

The Radiohead Revolution: "In Rainbows" Changes Things

Over the past decade record labels have grown in their ability to control the market, leaving artists with one of two choices: go independent and make very little money because of lack of distribution but maintain creative control over their work, or to go with a large record label like Sony and get large volumes of sales, but still making relatively little money because the label takes up so much of the sales percentage. Radiohead, in our new technological age, has found a new way.

Radiohead is a band that’s been around, for a while, 21 years to be exact. They’re big. They’ve got sway, mainly because they’ve got fans. They’ve had five platinum albums, and four #1 albums in the United Kingdom—and they just put out an album without a label. With this last album, In Rainbows, on October 10th of this year, Radiohead has broken new ground with the music industry, with open-source mediums, and with digital content’s move towards freedom.
I downloaded the album from the site that they put up, for $7.77. You pay whatever you think the album is worth. Interestingly, most artists make less than five bucks an album anyway. So, even though most users downloaded the album for free, Radiohead will probably make as much money through this album as they would've if they had used a record label to distribute In Rainbows. The fact is that record labels make big bucks, while artists, as always, mainly starve. This situation is all complicated by the move towards digital rights management software. DRM is the stuff that’s encoded on your CD so that you can’t burn a copy for your friends. It’s the stuff that got Napster in trouble. It’s the stuff that angered the already angry Lars Ulrich from Metallica about file sharing.

But we’ve moved past all that. We now live in an age of sharing, social networking, and digital community. And Radiohead, the band, knows all of this, so this new album is digital rights management software free, meaning you can copy it however much you want.

Thom Yorke, the singer for Radiohead has always been kind of an anti-establishment kind of guy. But shortly before the band began writing new songs for the album, Yorke told Time, "I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say 'F---- you' to this decaying business model."

image source: Metro.co.uk

The freedom here is not simply related to the lack of cash that most people didn’t pay when “purchasing” the album online. The freedom here is also directly connected with the freedom that an artist claims when bucking the system that controls their art.