SONG OF THE DAY

“The Stoop” — Lit­tle Jackie (The Stoop, S-Curve Records, 2008). Writ­ten by Imani Cop­pola, Mike Mangini and Adam Pallin.

INTERESTING FACTS (from wikipedia)

- The song appears in the 2009 movie The Final Des­ti­na­tion, an episode of 90210 and in New York Goes To Hol­ly­wood when Lit­tle Jackie asked for Tiffany Pollard’s help (New York) to record back­ing vocals.

- Lit­tle Jackie is not a woman [as I had thought] but is an Amer­i­can band con­sist­ing of Imani Cop­pola and Adam Pallin. They derive their band name from the 1989 hit song “Lit­tle Jackie Wants to Be a Star” by Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam. Imani Cop­pola is a singer-songwriter and violinist.

- The Stoop is their stu­dio debut album.

- The New York Times praised the song­writ­ing as “mod­ern and quick-tongued” with “insou­ciant, artic­u­late takes on rela­tion­ships in var­i­ous stages of disaster”.

- Asso­ci­ated Press indi­cated that the music was “con­tem­po­rary and clas­sic”, with a “funky Motown vibe mixed with hip-hop beats.” [Sounds like some­thing I would like, doesn’t it?]

MY TAKE

Again and again, I am grate­ful for Cana­dian radio. This time, it’s CBC Radio 2 (again), there in my hour of need to intro­duce me to some­thing I can’t hear on U.S. chan­nels. Ed Love’s show on WDET is, thank­fully, still around and still intro­duc­ing new jazz artists onto the scene, and the NPR’s cover a lot of new artists and cross-genres, but pretty much every­thing else is genre-bound crap—top 40 crap, the same 30 clas­sic rock songs over and over again, den­tist music a.k.a. easy lis­ten­ing, moldy oldies, and truly unin­spired rap and r’n’b. There’s so much good music out there in all of those gen­res that never makes it to the air, and it frus­trates me. I gave up on radio entirely for about 7 years, with my dad keep­ing me up-to-date on Ed Love and NPR artists, and my Paste mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tion sup­ple­ment­ing nicely. Thank­fully, Cana­dian radio has brought me back to life. I know the music indus­try is out there being amaz­ing and pro­duc­ing incred­i­ble work, but why is KCRW and the like the only place to find it? Does the plethora of Top 40 radio sta­tions really indi­cate what the Amer­i­can peo­ple want to hear? Because if that is true, then I am from now on really sad and disillusioned.

Imani Cop­pola gave up on the music industry’s abil­i­ties too, but is back in the form of Lit­tle Jackie because ” ‘genre-bending acts’ like Gnarls Barkley have enabled her to return to the music indus­try”. It’s a damn shame that the life and times of major stu­dio labels has been dis­as­trous for the past few years, and that peo­ple aren’t buy­ing music any­more, but look where that’s got­ten us: in an era of artis­tic inde­pen­dence. Now artists start their own label if they’re dis­sat­is­fied with the major label sys­tem. Case in point: Ani DiFranco. Sec­ond case in point: Nel­lie McKay, who prints her albums on recy­cled card­board and uses 100% vegan inks. That kind of stuff couldn’t work in a major label-driven music world. These eco­nomic hard­ships of the past decade in music have only made inde­pen­dent labels sprout like crazy. Plus, peo­ple are turn­ing to myspace and youtube to adver­tise and advo­cate for them­selves, and get­ting their songs picked for national com­mer­cial cam­paigns and t.v. sound­tracks where finan­cial suc­cesses start hap­pen­ing. I’d love to see this kind of pro­gres­sion con­tinue, and to see genre-avoiding, neo-sound artists like Lit­tle Jacky hap­pen more and more. Musi­cians can’t all gets rich and famous like Mariah Carey, but in the new sys­tem they can make a liv­ing, earn fans and con­tinue to pro­duce music. And isn’t that the real goal?

VIDEOS OF THE DAY

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