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Tuesday 22 June 2010

Gonzales 'Take Me to Broadway'


I wouldn't pretend to be remotely in touch with hip-hop these days, now the biggest selling genre of music worldwide. I loved Public Enemy, and had phases of listening to De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Eric B and Rakim, Gang Starr, Run DMC, The Pharcyde- the usual stuff for someone of my age I suppose. Never really got in to the Wu Tang Clan (although I did like Liquid Swords by GZA), which is when I stopped listening to it looking back. Other types of music just got me more, and it seemed to becoming very same-y to me. It also took hip-hip a very short space of time to develop a full set of cliches and rules which everyone had to abide by, which I'm sure wasn't the point when it started. Don Lett's Dread Meets B-Boys Downtown and the like showcased a wide variety of music, something that seemed to get ironed out by the mid-to-late-90s. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm too old, maybe punk, dance, rockabilly and reggae just do more for me. I'm sure there are hip hop fans out there who could make continuing claims for good records being made. Apart from a Company Flow 12" I think this is the last hip hop thing I bought, and I've just noticed this came out back in 2002. I'm not sure it'd count as proper hip hop to the purists but it was a life long B-Boy who first recommended this to me. He might deny it now though.

Chilly Gonzales is a Canadian rapper, MC and electro artist, who also plays classical piano, and has spent some time collaborating with Peaches. He moved to Berlin after a major label flop, signed to Kitty-Yo records, developed a stage persona based on a Jewish vaudeville supervillain, and released Presidential Suite featuring this song, Take Me To Broadway. Gonzales takes the rap bragging style to new heights/depths in this song claiming amongst other things that he has 'an extra testical', that he's 'going to show my chest hair', that he wants to be 'loved and hated in equal amounts' and that 'I love the crowd, I hate the crowd, I constantly constipate the crowd'. Whatever that means. This is fun, bouncy, electro-rap, knowing but dumb, possibly hip hop, possibly not. Whatever it is, it sounds good on a hot day like this.

07 Take Me to Broadway.wma

1 comment:

Dubrobots said...

Brilliant track, and one of the only hip-hop, or at least hip-hop flavoured, tracks that I can be arsed with too.