Bring the Noise

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don't cry for me Marj and Tina

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an interview with Maxence Grugier for New Noise magazine, done early in 2013, on the occasion of the publication of the French translation of Bring The Noise 1/ You are one of the few who dared to confront the coexistence of black and white music in the vast ecosystem of musical time. It was not supposed to be easy? The subject can lead a lot of false interpretations isn’t it ? Oh, I wouldn’t say…

FRENCH TRIP FOR THE PUBLICATION OF BRING THE NOISE IN FRANCE

In the last week of March I’ll be in Paris for the publication of Bring the Noise by Au Diable Vauvert, and will be appearing at the Paris Book Fair and doing events at two bookstores. Then the week after that I'll be appearing at the Faber Social in London (April 2), participating in a night of talk and entertainment themed around Vinyl. I’ll be reading from the new updated/expanded edition of…

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a feature package at literary webzine The Nervous Breakdown on me and Bring the Noise , which is out imminently in the US on Soft Skull... elements include excerpts from BtN on the voice in pop music and on crunk , plus an auto-interview about changes in pop criticism during the 25 years since I started doing it and getting paid

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The US edition, with some bonus material added, out next month on Soft Skull.

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The Italian translation of Bring the Noise published by Isbn Edizioni.

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The Italian edition of Bring the Noise is published on October 9th under the title HIP-HOP-ROCK: 1985-2008 and translated by Michele Piumini. More information at the publisher ISBN Edizioni's website . Check out (click-to-enlarge) the striking cover, which is styled -- as with ISBN's Rip It Up translation -- around the book's index. Like the forthcoming German and French editions, the Italian…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #74] KANYE WEST Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella) Uncut , autumn 2005 by Simon Reynolds Last year, Kanye West cut through rap’s standard-issue one-dimensional personae with some refreshing complexity. Neither “conscious” nor a bad-boy chasing bling and bitches, he was a little of both: a hungry soul (“Jesus Walks”) trapped in a body prey to venality (“All Falls…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #72] KANO Home Sweet Home Uncut , late summer 2005 by Simon Reynolds Grime has reached a crossroads. Everyone agrees that this is the year it’s going to blow, but nobody knows for sure how to make that happen. One strategy is for grime to simply be its in-yer-face self. Another involves toning it down just a tad. This is what Kano, one of the scene’s top MCs, does…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #71] LETHAL BIZZLE Against All Oddz Observer Music Monthly , July 17, 2005 by Simon Reynolds Lethal Bizzle has the distinction of scoring grime’s two biggest hits. Last Christmas, his solo debut “Pow” peaked just outside the Top 10, but two years earlier Bizzle and his group More Fire did even better with the number eight smash “Oi!”. In between these highs, though,…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #69] VARIOUS ARTISTS Risky Roadz: Volume 1--Tha Roadz Are Real VARIOUS ARTISTS Run the Road director's cut Village Voice , April 12th, 2005 By Simon Reynolds I’ll cut to the chase: if you can’t find anything to like on Run the Road , you might as well give up on grime. Listen to the five best tracks--Terror Danjah’s “Cock Back,” Riko & Target’s “Chosen One,”…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #68] VARIOUS ARTISTS Run the Road director's cut, Observer Music Monthly , November 14, 2004 by Simon Reynolds Grime is our hip hop, the final coming of a Britrap that’s not merely a pale reflection of the original. Instead it’s a wonky, hall-of-mirrors reflection. To American ears reared on “the real thing”, grime sounds disconcertingly not-right--the halting,…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #67] INFINITE LIVEZ Bush Meat Village Voice , July 6th, 2004 by Simon Reynolds For years the pathos of Brit-rap as a pale and slightly off reflection of the Real Thing was summed up in the name Derek B. He was pretty good, actually. But in the gladiatorial realpolitik of rap more than anywhere, "pretty good" don't cut it. All through the '90s, at regular intervals,…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #65] HIP HOP VERSUS THE ELECTRONICA INVASION Blissblog , March 17, 2004 by Simon Reynolds ... On ILM I said rather metaphysically that dance isn’t generating anthems cos a culture in retreat isn’t going to have much call for rallying cries. The real explanation, though, is more prosaic. The kind of music being made now is made by and made for people who have been in…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #64] GARAGE RAP compilations Village Voice , February 3rd, 2003 plus footnotes from Blissblog, February 05, 2003 by Simon Reynolds So everybody knows about the Streets now, but only as an isolated case: that unprecedented phenomenon, the U.K. rapper who's both excellent and authentically English-sounding. Skinner actually comes from a context, though. It's not that…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #63] THE MOST OVER-RATED SCENES/GENRES OF ALL TIME PART 2: THE MOD/SOULBOY CONTINUUM from Unfaves 2001, Blissout by Simon Reynolds Thoughts prompted by three near-simultaneous irritations: seeing the video for Style Council's "My Ever Changing Moods" on VH1 Classic (Weller and Talbot as Tour De France cyclists); reading Kirk De Giorgio's Invisible Jukebox in the…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #62] CANNIBAL OX Village Voice , October 9th 2001 by Simon Reynolds Rap's a funny business, really. People pay good money to experience as "entertainment" what in real life they'd run a mile from. Bug-eyed sociopaths threatening cruel and unusual deaths, nouveau riche bores droning on about how much they make and the expensive shit they wear... And (let's not forget…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #61] JAY-Z, The Blueprint Uncut , autumn 2001 by Simon Reynolds This is supposed to be Jay-Z's big comeback. Which is odd 'cos he's been "away" a year, and the last album sold a couple of million. Then again, the one before sold more, and the album before that shifted five mill. So the perception was that Jay-Z had fallen off significantly (and bar the…

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Bring the Noise deleted scene #60] AALIYAH, Aaliyah unpublished* review, Village Voice , August 2001 by Simon Reynolds I was going to call myself an Aaliyah fan--after all, she's made two of my all time favorite singles, "One In A Million" and "Are You That Somebody?"--but somehow the idea of an "Aaliyah fan" seems faintly absurd. There's dozens of websites devoted to the singer whose name is…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #58] CEX, live Village Voice , May 2 - 8, 2001 by Simon Reynolds Cex, a/k/a 19-year-old Baltimore-based Rjyan Kidwell, is an infamous figure in the world of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). A recent IDM digest contained an open e-mail to Kidwell and mentor kid606: "Do not bowdlerize our subculture just so you can finally get your goofy looking nerd asses laid." Their…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #56] BREAKBEAT GARAGE a.k.a "Grime Ahoy!" from Unfaves 2000 (written spring 2001) by Simon Reynolds When this flavour of "garage" first started to come through--must have been late 1999, with Deekline--I remember being excited by the way the sultry, swinging R&B-2step flow would be disrupted by this much more raw, stripped down and rhythmically unsupple sound that…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #55] WU-TANG CLAN, The Wu Uncut , January 2001) by Simon Reynolds Wu lynchpin the RZA is almost unique in the pantheon of great hip hop producers for having not-a-lot going on rhythmically. Most of his creativity goes into Wu's trademark cinematic arrangements-- noir strings, moody horn stabs, dank wafts of gloomy ambience--and even these tend to be looped and…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #53] JIMI HENDRIX RECONSIDERED essay contributed to feature package on Hendrix, Uncut , July 2000 by Simon Reynolds Think ‘Hendrix’, and the first image that comes to mind is the onstage Jimi – a sensual inferno of improvisatory creativity, fingertips ablaze; Jimi the aural arsonist, sonically torching the Stars and Stripes; Jimi the Dionysian dandy, the…

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[ Bring the Noise deleted scene #52] PAUL GILROY, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line director's cut, the Village Voice , May 2 2000. by Simon Reynolds It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who took the entire oevure of Yeats, did the pre-computer age equivalent of a word-search, and discovered the matrix of forty or so favorite (that's to say, over-used) words and tropes…