Confirmation

[koganbot]

Our friend Nichol was visiting and in the background I was playing the first Seo Taiji and Boys album and Nichol stopped midsentence and asked, "Who are you playing?" Hearing the ricochet electro beats, she said, "This is freestyle!" The mournful vocals entered as if to confirm this, and she added, "This sounds like the barrio

Comments

[davidfrazer]

For what it's worth, K-Pendium's article on Nan Arayo doesn't say anything about freestyle but does detect new jack swing in the chorus, so perhaps they diagnose new jack swing where you hear freestyle.

[koganbot]

I'd say Jakob diagnoses New Jack Swing in the rhythm from the get-go, but also cites a New Edition-type keyboard line in the chorus; while I detect freestyle in the chorus's vocal melody. So by that account it's freestyle and new jack swing at once. Anyway, I'd say the rhythm is new jack swing starting right at the screeching-brake synth blast 9 seconds in on the album version (all times refer to that version rather than the slightly shorter one in the video I embedded), the sort of blasts that are something of a Teddy Riley signature (Riley being the premier new jack swing producer) - though I don't know enough about the style or its predecessors to really know who else was also using such blasts - as Jakob points out, Run-DMC's "I Like That" has got one, and they pretty obviously derive from James Brown's piercing, short horn blasts. But those blasts are also in freestyle; the Judy Torres track I linked builds to a blast 3 seconds in

[koganbot]

*Honestly, I don't feel I comprehend the various genre and rhythm designations to be confident about that. Teddy Riley has more high snarey sounds and lots of tight short hurdles for his singers to jump over and pitched stops for them to dance around, if those metaphors make sense. (But my favorite Korean track of his, RaNia's "Masquerade", basically just wants to hammer us into submission.)

[koganbot]

Btw, what really makes Seo Taiji's eclecticism stand out as unique isn't the range of styles he packs into his music (Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, DJ Afrika Bambaataa, and Teena Marie are at least as eclectic as he is, to name several who jump right to mind, and anyway whole gobs of the hip-hop and house of the time made a gigantic thing of their eclecticism, some also making a big thing of how disjunctive they were, e.g. M/A/R/R/S "Pump Up The Volume"), but that his secret love seems to be ProgRock. Or, anyway, he actually has a song called "Free Style" on his fourth album, the song having nothing to do with the genre freestyle but sounding like, I don't know, BritProg 1970 but with hip-hop rhythms underneath, and rap, and metal. It's way more accomplished and coherent than "Nan Arayo," but not as good.

[blokulla]

The freestyle influence felt really explicit to me on Romeo's Lovesick, recently. I wonder if Sweetune think of their compositions on those terms? Anyway:

[koganbot]

Yeah. Unlike Taiji's, Romeo's freestyle is in the riffs. Reminds me a bit of "Over and Over" (I'm linking the Pajama Party version, which is brighter and better than the Brenda K. Starr original).

Four years ago (and five months late) I identified a SweeTune Kara track, "Jumping," as freestyle, the riffs quite obviously, but also the vocals. The drums not so much (freestyle tending towards quadruple-timed electro beats and fuckarounds, while this is fairly straightforward dance).

[askbask]

"I Feel You is Park Jin Young′s creation. It is inspired by the freestyle music that came out of the Latin American community in New York in the ′80s, featuring synth instruments and a syncopated base rhythm. "

[koganbot]

Here's the full thing (David already alerted me to the teaser):

I'd say it's more the Madonna end of freestyle than, say, the Lisette Melendez.