LIVE ROCK CRITIC NINETEEN: DRAKE Saturday Night Live October 16th 2011
I am highly critical of rap and rap performers. Often the rejoinder is “But they make millions”. I would suggest that if this is the case perhaps you should read a review by a stockbroker or derivative trader.
Saturday Night Live has the new LED room. What a powerful aid to musical performance. Too bad it is rapper Drake. He used to be an actor.
I am highly critical of rap and rap performers. Often the rejoinder is “But they make millions”. I would suggest that if this is the case perhaps you should read a review by a stockbroker or derivative trader.
Saturday Night Live has the new LED room. What a powerful aid to musical performance. Too bad it is rapper Drake. He used to be an actor.
Drake has five musicians who put out the signal and excitement of a 1980’s drum machine. Drakes band started with a segment of fast almost rock. It was a lot like the Bill Mahr theme song. I wonder if it was also pre-recorded.
The unprepossessing voice of Drake chants on quickly, as if talking fast was really special. It is possible that at certain intellectual levels fast speech is challenging and a real achievement to accomplish. Then the pre-recorded auto tune section starts and goes on without even a pretence of lip synching.
Drake you are terrible and you are fake.
Fake Drake has musicians who pose at the musical instruments much of the time. I carefully watched how little the keyboardists touched their keyboards. The “lead” guitarist had an impressive looking Gibson three four five or copy of it which he slashed about and held up vertically as if he was playing the feedback but relatively nothing is happening in the way of guitar sound. Watching closely I can see him strumming one string with one finger. The artistically bankrupt guitar performance reaches a peak of puffery when an extensively sequined V guitar, a Peavey I think, is brought out for the second number to continue weak amateurish irrelevant performance. The band looks like a group of actors.
The LED room shouts “They know real”, so far off the mark! The slogans fly around the LED room and the posing and pre-recorded schlock go on and on. NBC get rid of who ever brings these lousy acts in.
At the end of the first song everybody cheers. Are these orders from or some sort of agreement with management, or is the audience just dumb. Musical performances are not athletic events, you don’t have to cheer for the team SNL audience.
Second song, despite a change of the guitar to the sequined V, it sounds like the same riff to me, over and over. The now slobby and wigged as usual Nicki Minaj waddles about and does a very weak version of her accusatory rap which I had once praised in a review. Now there is less fire less talent and a whole lot more fat. She was quite fat in the past but she is too fat now to pull off the ghetto booty chick, looks like the corn belt.
I make no secret of the fact that I think rap is crap. I have performed a number of times with a rap group. In 1992 I was in London England and I played at a Soho club called the Wag. This club had been there in Soho for more than one hundred years. It was an impressive complex with the music hall on the second floor and lounges and restaurants on other floors. I played harmonica and the ensemble consisted of drums stand up bass keyboard, alto sax, soprano sax, two Irish rappers and a Jamaican rapper. The performance was called Jazz Rap Funk Fusion.
I don’t know a lot about rap but I do think that when I hear it I know crap.
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