Month: October 2004

Judging by the furor surrounding the missteps of the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission, it might seem impossible to get local musicians to agree on anything. Proving that there’s always an exception to the rule, however, the city’s players have recently banded together to honor their own with several worthwhile projects.

Last Monday, producer Willie Mitchell was all smiles when the city unveiled a street sign renaming a stretch of South Lauderdale Street — running from McLemore Avenue to South Parkway — “Willie Mitchell Boulevard.” With the assistance of Phil Trenary (Pinnacle Airlines CEO and chairman of the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission), Mitchell’s family hosted an early-evening street party that featured dozens of politicians (it is election season, isn’t it?), musicians, and other local luminaries. Congressman Harold Ford Jr. emceed the event.

“Uncle Willie will not only live and breathe, but [he will also] work on this street,” Ford said, before Mayor Willie Herenton praised the producer, saying, “Thank God for Willie Mitchell [and] the legacy that will live and live and live on.”

Mitchell was given a key to the city and a proclamation declaring September 20th Willie Mitchell Day. Afterward, EMI Records’ Tom Cartwright presented gold, platinum, and double platinum awards to Mitchell for his work.

“So many things have happened tonight that I’m really dizzy,” the 76-year-old producer said when he finally got a chance to speak. “We made a lot of good records, but I couldn’t have made ’em without the musicians,” he said, nodding to Teenie and Leroy Hodges, Skip Pitts, Jim Spake, and his own stepson, Archie Mitchell, who — along with the Rhodes-Chalmers-Rhodes back-up singers and Al Green — ended the party with a performance of “Let’s Stay Together.”

On Sunday, October 3rd, another group of Memphis musicians — led by FreeWorld bassist Richard Cushing — is hosting a memorial for promoter Doyce Hodum at Overton Park Shell. “I knew Doyce for 19 years. He was the cool big brother I never had. I even met my wife through him,” explains Cushing. “Even though he wasn’t a musician, he loved and supported the local music scene.”

Hodum was last seen alive in Cooper-Young on the night of August 22nd. Early the next morning, his body was discovered in front of his house on North Watkins. He had been shot to death.

“Doyce had an external family — all Memphis musicians,” Cushing says. “None of us had a chance to say goodbye. We found out [about his murder] via the news, which was so shocking. He was such a peaceful, giving person to die in such a violent and unexplained way. It’s haunting me.”

So, as a “labor of love,” Cushing has organized the Doyce Hodum Memorial Jam, which will start at 1 p.m. and is scheduled to run well into the night. Kaleidoscope, Yamagata, The Minivan Blues Band, Herman Green & the Green Machine, The Willie Waldman Project, The Dickinson Family, and FreeWorld are all scheduled to perform.

The event is free, but Cushing promises to pass a bucket for donations. “We’ve already taken care of his headstone through [Recording Academy program] MusiCares, but we want to raise some money for his two kids,” he says. “It seems like the right thing to do.”

Husband-and-wife team Jim and Mary Lindsay Dickinson have joined forces for a CD benefiting the Friends for Our Riverfront group. Save Our Riverfront! features 10 tracks, including Reba Russell‘s incendiary “Gonna Move to Mississippi,” Susan Marshall‘s breathtaking “October Song,” and Sid Selvidge‘s sentimental “Miss the Mississippi and You.” Of course, the Dickinsons’ own family — in the form of a solo offering from Jim, sons Luther and Cody’s North Mississippi Allstars, and Mudboy & the Neutrons — also made hefty contributions.

“It all started last February, when John Pritchard and Hite McLean wrote ‘Save Our View,'” Mary Lindsay Dickinson, the project’s compiler, explains. “Virginia, Hite’s wife [a descendent of John Overton, who originally owned the riverfront property, and president of the Friends group] came to me and asked, ‘Do you suppose we could make a tape?’ We talked to Jack Holder at Sounds Unreel, and he said he’d donate his studio.

“People bent over backward to help,” Mary Lindsay Dickinson says. “All of the artists donated their money and time by giving us their master tapes. Even the man at the manufacturing plant donated part of the printing cost. The fat cats are only interested in making money, but we want to save the land.”

Save Our Riverfront! is available at area stores and via the Dickinsons’ Web site, ZebraRanch.com. •

E-mail: localbeat@memphisflyer.com

Superstars back home and cult artists in the U.S., Mike Skinner (aka The Streets) and his younger colleague Dylan Mills (aka Dizzee Rascal) are the biggest names associated with the makeshift British musical genre generally called grime. Ostensibly a collision between Jamaican dancehall and English rave music, grime is a hip-hop doppelganger even if it isn’t quite the thing itself: Both can be boiled down to rhyming over beats.

The Streets’ 2002 debut, Original Pirate Material, which introduced grime to the U.S., signified as hip-hop by way of Dickens. A pop record of tangible literary value, it was a dense, witty tour of British flat-rat culture whose cheap, homemade beats and often comical viewpoint launched Skinner as one of pop music’s most compelling new voices.

But if Original Pirate Material was akin to a collection of short stories — self-contained explorations of such nightlife subjects as rave culture, late-night diners, and boozy brawls –Skinner’s follow-up, the recently released A Grand Don’t Come for Free, is an attempt at pop album as novel — or audio book.

A linear narrative that snakes through 11 individual songs, A Grand Don’t Come for Free isn’t as suitable for background music as its predecessor, mostly because Skinner’s insistence on getting his story across results in less intrusive music. Save the blaring rock-oriented single “Fit But You Know It,” A Grand Don’t Come For Free relies on a musical mix of soft beats and Casio piano chords for a bare foundation on which Skinner weaves his first-person tale of financial and romantic woes.

The part of the story about missing savings (the “grand” of the title) can be a little hard to follow, but the relationship songs at the core form a sure romantic arc: “Could Well Be In” (meeting), “Blinded by the Lights” (tentative courtship), “Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way” (contentment), “Get Out of My House” (quarrel), “Fit But You Know It” (cheating), “Such a Twit” (regret), “Dry Your Eyes” (break-up).

If this seems a little mundane, well, that’s precisely the point. What’s special about A Grand Don’t Come for Free is the poetry it finds in the nearly real-time depiction of everyday moments. A love song about coming to the realization that you’d rather lie on the couch at your girl’s house watching TV than go boozing with your mates speaks the kind of common truth rarely heard in a pop song. And when it sounds like Smokey Robinson or the Chi-Lites, Valhalla awaits.

Original Pirate Material was a crucial youth-culture album (in Brit terms, kind of a more soulful musical equivalent to Trainspotting). A Grand Don’t Come for Free feels more grown-up, more settled, less connected to the nightlife-oriented musical culture that Skinner once represented.

But if Skinner is sidestepping grime, never mind hip-hop, Dizzee Rascal would like nothing more than to grab the American brass ring. If the teen rapper’s debut, Boy in Da Corner, was the rowdier little brother to Original Pirate Material in its cultural specificity, his follow-up, the newly released Showtime, is a different sort of departure. Dizzee isn’t growing up so much as growing out, embracing hip-hop as a global culture.

Dizzee seems to idolize Jay-Z, whom he’s opened for in England, and he makes it plain on Showtime where his musical allegiances lie (“I’m ain’t into rave/I’m into ‘get paid'”). But the American rapper that this very English MC really evokes is the late Notorious B.I.G. As Biggie did for his Brooklyn, Dizzee makes the East London neighborhood Bow into a place that feels real even if you’ve never been there. In both men, standard-issue hip-hop bluster is balanced by sharp, regretful reportage, the cold-eyed threat of violence informed by a menacing sense of humor and everything made stronger and more purposeful by a foundation of generosity.

On “Things Done Changed,” Biggie rapped, “Back in the day our parents used to take care of us/Look at ’em now, they’re even fuckin’ scared of us.” Just as Biggie used the collective “us” instead of the individualistic “me,” Dizzee Rascal tends to use “we” instead of “I” when talking about the rougher side of life in the Bow. The we-shall-overcome culmination of the record’s frequent underclass exhortations comes on “Get By,” where Dizzee stops in the middle of a street fight: “What’s it all about? I ask myself before I swing/More time I’m beefing over every little thing/Beefing every area, region, or vicinity/My ghetto frame of mind makes me prone to hostility/To my Britons locked up/To my young baby mothers/To each and every creed and color, ghetto sisters and brothers/If you know you’re from the slums keep reppin’ no doubt/Stay ghetto if you must, just remember to get out.”

And getting out is partly what Showtime is about. Boy in Da Corner, recorded when Dizzee was 17-years-old, much of it supposedly done solo on a personal computer, was grounded in a specific place. It was the sound of a kid whose world ended at the end of the block but who knew the landscape intimately. Showtime is an after-the-goldrush album from a kid who’s now shared stages with Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, toured the States, done countless interviews, filmed a video at an Atlanta strip club. It’s a record that’s local and global at the same time. As Dizzee raps at the end of “Dream”: “Big shout to world ’cause I been all around/And when I’m gone I’m always thinking ’bout my hometown/I’m from the LDN, there’s no forgetting that/And the big U.K., I stay reppin’ that.”

Perhaps as a result, Showtime isn’t as lyrically focused song-for-song as Boy in Da Corner, but it might be deeper musically. Grime is music from another world already –percussive, buzzing stuff that sounds alternately like hornets trapped in a soda can or baseballs spinning around in a clothes dryer. But Showtime is more varied and more weird: clanging Asian nods on “Learn,” woozy, syrupy riddims on “Graftin’,” heavy, almost bongo-like beats on “Everywhere.” The lead single, “Stand Up Tall,” is disarming in its utter oddness. Grounded in synthetic beats and a keyboard hook that could be sampled from an Atari 2600 game, the chorus rides on a new-wave rhythm that could be the Thompson Twins or Men at Work before exploding into chaotic turntable scratching. And all of these sonic assaults find a match in Dizzee’s increasingly virtuosic raps. His squawky, cartoonish flow still sounds like the hip-hop equivalent of one of Donald Duck’s nephews, but his vocal confidence has grown considerably on this record.

But as magnificent as Showtime is, one still suspects that Dizzee’s brogue is too thick and his perspective (and, perhaps more importantly, his vernacular) too foreign to cross over to mainstream American hip-hop. A Lil’ Jon production or Ludacris cameo might not even help, though it’d be great to find out. But if Dizzee will never match the commercial heights of his American heroes, hopefully he’ll be content with matching Skinner’s self-prophecy from Original Pirate Material: “Cult classic, not bestseller.”