Help I'm Alive — Metric

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoK63Bk7pgw

I won't write an essay here on the topic of gender in music — I'm not nearly well-versed enough, and, frankly, it's been done. I will say that the few female vocalists I do enjoy are generally either Jazz, Trip-Hop, or Rock'n'Roll. There are some genres where I know female vocalists exist, but I don't enjoy them (modern pop, rap, alt-rock, etc). I can probably name only a few female vocalists off the top of my head, actually... Ella Fitzgerald, Blondie, the woman from Fleetwood Mac, Metric (above), The Go! Team...

Oh my god, is that all I can list? I know the names of male singers from named bands (Thom Yorke — Radiohead, etc) but rarely the names of female singers from named bands (... — The Decemberists? I know Colin Meloy.) Oh! Imogen Heap. This still isn't that many.

Doesn't Massive Attack have female vocalists? Guest vocalists. And, uh, Morcheeba, Portishead! All the associated trip-hop acts.

Oh dear.

 

Titanic Vandalism — The Go! Team

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDMGXZL6-f8

I've written before on the idea of genre mixing — a relatively modern idea — and The Go! Team is a wonderful example of that. It's garage rock full of sampling, but there are chants, hip-hop, soundtracks, classical, guitar rock, even Bollywood. In short, every track is a high-energy theme song to some terrible 1980s action movie, and it's fun.

Moreover, the production is lo-fi — so lo-fi that it's often impossible to tell what's been performed by one of the band's three drummers and what's been sampled from an old movie. So is the timbre a nostalgic homage to the 70s, or an actual copy from it? Is sampling a form of homage? I know lots of these tracks contain samples, but at a certain point it doesn't matter, and I think The Go! Team reaches that point. Finding out now that one of the riffs was a sample wouldn't be elucidating, it would be frustrating. Even if it's sampled, it's still original.