Hailing from Chicago, Kids These Days are a seven piece band making some of the most unique music I've heard in a long time. They've got a rapper, a male vocalist/guitar player, a female vocalist/piano player, a bassist, a drummer, a trumpeter, and a tromboner (right?). After putting out an EP and an assortment of singles, Traphouse Rock was released this fall. With production help from Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and appearances at a few major music festivals, KTD has positioned themselves to achieve big time fame in the near future.
It's a rarity in the hip-hop realm for an act to include such a wide variety of musical talent, so Kids These Days have set themselves apart in that respect. As you may know, I absolutely love live band instrumentation paired with rapping. It gives a whole new dimension to hip-hop. In addition, I'm a big fan of seeing who artists are influenced by since it helps to give me an idea of where they are coming from stylistically.
It still fascinates me that a musician can conceive a song in his head, record it, put it on the Internet, and have it flowing through my headphones and into my ears and brain within a few hours these days. I find it just as impressive, though, when artists interpolate others' works into their own and build off of a base sample. It's a lot of fun to listen to a new song and then have your ears perk up when they catch snippets of familiar melodies. Even more so than with cover songs, musical interpolation allows the artist the freedom to use the best parts of one song, and at the same time, to expand it to add their own flare.
I'm almost certainly missing some but Kids These Days reproduced portions of music from Nirvana, Kanye West, The Pixies, 50 Cent, Crucial Conflict, Radiohead, Outkast, The Strokes, and Arcade Fire. I think they did a fantastic job of incorporating these pieces into their own music. The lyrical themes are their own; they talk about what they know. They certainly aren't fakes. For a musician, there aren't many greater joys than emulating and playing the songs of others, but with your own interpretation. It's not stealing when your only intent is to nod your head toward your idols. I'm not expecting future releases to be this heavily sampled, but for a young group still gaining traction, it was probably the best and most fun approach for an initial release and definitely did not disappoint.
Download: Kids These Days - Traphouse Rock
It's a rarity in the hip-hop realm for an act to include such a wide variety of musical talent, so Kids These Days have set themselves apart in that respect. As you may know, I absolutely love live band instrumentation paired with rapping. It gives a whole new dimension to hip-hop. In addition, I'm a big fan of seeing who artists are influenced by since it helps to give me an idea of where they are coming from stylistically.
It still fascinates me that a musician can conceive a song in his head, record it, put it on the Internet, and have it flowing through my headphones and into my ears and brain within a few hours these days. I find it just as impressive, though, when artists interpolate others' works into their own and build off of a base sample. It's a lot of fun to listen to a new song and then have your ears perk up when they catch snippets of familiar melodies. Even more so than with cover songs, musical interpolation allows the artist the freedom to use the best parts of one song, and at the same time, to expand it to add their own flare.
I'm almost certainly missing some but Kids These Days reproduced portions of music from Nirvana, Kanye West, The Pixies, 50 Cent, Crucial Conflict, Radiohead, Outkast, The Strokes, and Arcade Fire. I think they did a fantastic job of incorporating these pieces into their own music. The lyrical themes are their own; they talk about what they know. They certainly aren't fakes. For a musician, there aren't many greater joys than emulating and playing the songs of others, but with your own interpretation. It's not stealing when your only intent is to nod your head toward your idols. I'm not expecting future releases to be this heavily sampled, but for a young group still gaining traction, it was probably the best and most fun approach for an initial release and definitely did not disappoint.
Download: Kids These Days - Traphouse Rock
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