the british are gaining: noisettes

american musicians have gotten lazy. most bands, singers and mc's in the u.s. these days follow a proven formula instead of trying to create their own. the music lacks distinction and that's also translated visually. whatever genre the artist falls into, there's a ready-made treatment for their videos: choreography is required for singers, booties are required for mc's and disconnected imagery is required for rock bands. even older american musicians have succumbed to the collaboration album formula that was discovered when carlos santana released supernatural in 1999 (see the most recent works by sam moore and dionne warrick). predictability is boring and mind-numbing, and this country's musical landscape is overcast.

meanwhile, british artists have been studying american music, not cramming with a bunch of "best of" cd's. many of them know the entire body of work that comprises their genre. their hard work has paid off: they're not only doing american music better than americans, they're reinventing it. they are creating sounds that have never been heard and deconstructing american standards, putting their britishness in it while proving that americans don't speak for everybody and it doesn't have to be made in the u.s.a. to be relevant.

the noisettes have been compared to their american counterpart, the yeah yeah yeahs. both bands have scarce instrumentation: noisettes use bass, guitar and drums while yeah yeah yeahs use guitar while the drums double as a bass. both bands are fronted by brown girls with pristine vocals and wide-legged stances: yeah yeah yeahs' karen o straddles the space in her band's music, while noisettes' shingai shoniwa straddles a bass.

rock is a compellable art form, and the noisettes have perfected that more so than the yeah yeah yeahs. the opening songs on both bands' first full length albums prove that. noisettes' "don't give up" on what's the time mr. wolf? pulls you by the neck, but you can clean your kitchen counter to the yeah yeah yeahs' "rich." their opening song for fever to tell should've been "date with the night" but it's the second track. "don't give up" (as album openers should) sets the mood for the entire album, only gaining steam with each track. however, after "rich," you spend the rest of fever to tell drifting in and out of consciousness: "date with the night," "pin" and "maps" work, but the rest of the album flitters about. uncertainty is for rehearsal, not a recording.

in rock, passiveness should only be allowed in ballads. rock ballads spend the entire song fighting with being vulnerable and being hard, a trait well illustrated in yeah yeah yeah's "maps." now that's a tolerable formula that shouldn't be compromised.

man on man action

the male singer duet in pop music is nearly extinct. it was abundant during the 1980’s with great collaborations between singers like kenny loggins and el debarge (“i’ll be there”), michael mcdonald and james ingram (“yah moh b there”), mick jagger and david bowie (“dancing in the street”), rod stewart and ron isley (“this old heart of mine”) and luther vandross and gregory hines (“there’s nothing better than love”).

when the 1990’s arrived, rap grew in popularity and the singer/rapper duet was born. the singer now represents the soft side of masculinity--the feminine side, if you will, while the rapper represents the hard side of masculinity. that pairing has remained even into the 21st century and has a fraternal twin called the rapper/rapper duet. can it get any harder than that? it’s as if two men singing together has become forbidden, making it imperative to get rid of any possibility that two men could be attracted to each other.

that was never really an issue during the 1980’s when rappers stayed to themselves and men sang together without a cloud of homophobia hanging over them. perhaps that suggests the 1980’s in the u.s. was more progressive than the reagan administration that governed most of the decade.

if you look at all these harder groupings, the suggested homoeroticism is rampant. no matter how many half-clad women are in a video, the men they’re playing up to aren’t even paying any attention to them! often, the men are being more affectionate with each other, giving each other dap, getting in a huddle and pushing each other, doing an improvised dance together, or hugging as they greet (this is often displayed in slow motion).

look at the video for timbaland’s “give it to me.” the song features justin timberlake and nelly furtado, but in the video, we see shots of timbaland and timberlake chumming it up backstage (even taking a photo with will.i.am during which timbaland vigorously shakes him) while furtado walks around by herself; timbaland and timberlake on what appears to be a tour bus while furtado does her part from a balcony...by herself; and the most telling is the performance scene during which timbaland and timberlake are never less than a foot away from each other dancing onstage, while furtado is about 10 feet away from them singing the hook and dancing by herself.

men aren’t singing together anymore, and they’re not singing love songs to women the way they used to, but they sure have a lot a love for each other.

we forget about mrs. estefan

gloria estefan was a one-woman latin explosion in u.s. pop music during the 1980’s. her 1985 hit, “conga” (from the appropriately-titled album, primitive love) introduced north america to a sound that was old hat in certain parts of the u.s. and caribbean. the only other latina with consistent pop success during that time was lisa lisa, but she didn’t fuse elements of latin music the way estefan did. lisa lisa was pop/r&b, in huge part because she was produced by full force. estefan was pop without compromising her musical roots, which were also influenced by folk, soft rock, soul and jazz.

i remember seeing a photo of her and celia cruz in an issue of rolling stone when i was 10 years old. a blurb accompanied the picture, basically saying that cruz was estefan’s main influence. i had never heard of cruz until that point, but seeing her and estefan in that photo laughing side by side, let me know how proud estefan was to show cruz off to an audience that didn’t have a clue who she was.

estefan rarely gets credit for this, but she also helped make miami a hotbed of hipness. the city is now often mentioned in the same sentence with l.a. and new york as a place where celebrities buy property and sunbathe. simply calling her band the miami sound machine helped create a new musical curiosity about a city that had mostly been known for its political history.

“rhythm is gonna get you” was unlike anything on the radio when it was released in 1987. it’s the perfect example of how estefan was unashamed to use afro-cuban and indigenous rhythms in what became a huge pop hit for her.

the hits kept coming for estefan clear through the early ‘90s, even her 1993 spanish-language album, mi tierra earned her a grammy.

unfortunately, hers was all but erased from the list of names credited for the so-called latin explosion of the late ‘90s. however, estefan’s prolific and diverse body of work rivals that of madonna, whitney houston and the other singers who were in direct competition with estefan during the ‘80s and whose careers took interesting turns during the ‘90s.