OTIS feat. Otis Reading

I'm a Jay-Z fan. And I begrudgingly a Kanye West fan, can't deny the man's talent. And I am wicked excited to hear Watch the Throne when it drops. I might actually pay money to own it, which in this day and digital age is a hell of a thing to say about almost anything. It better be worth it. But that is not why I'm posting this. This post is about sampling. I am a believer in sampling. Always have been. "Paul's Boutique", "3 Feet High and Rising" and "De la Soul is Dead" all the way through to DJ Spooky, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, etc. But I just listened to OTIS, the new single from Watch the Throne and simply do not know how I feel about someone sampling an entire song, in this case Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding. Otis Redding was great. Great I tell you, a master of soul music. I'm one of those people who think something is wrong with you if you don't like Otis Redding and his peers. So when I hear this song, and the lyrics are tight and complex, and the verbal jousting is on point I get a little disappointed that the production doesn't match up. This song sounds like it's fighting itself. The entire time I listened to it I was thinking Otis Redding. Not Jay-Z. Not Kanye West. And here is where I feel the song fails. It's not like H.A.M. where you kinda recognize bits and pieces of stuff and that brings the song to another level. No. This song distracts because it doesn't challenge when it is supposed to have me head-nodding. I can only hope the rest of the songs on the album stretch it a little bit more, challenge my ear. Go for it. I want to be challenged, make me go digging through my digital crates trying to find that two second clip of music.

Weeds

I started watching Weeds on a lark. It was a free preview of the 4th season. I've never had Showtime but had been hearing that their shows had gotten really good. And indeed they have. created by Jenji Kohan Weeds is initially about a housewife, Nancy Botwin, played with a fascinating wide-eyed shock by Mary-Louise Parker, who's husband dies suddenly (in the first episode no less) and then needs to find a way to support her family. It just so happens that he was also their McMansion development's weed dealer. It's a great conceit and nod to the now classic template perfected by David Lynch in Blue Velvet that all's not right in Suburbia. The initial season reveals that Nancy was living in a world where everything was provided for her. She drives a Prius, but has a perpetual plastic cup in her hand filled with ice coffee. The visual contradiction is hilarious.

I was worried that when she met her husbands connect it would lapse into a stereotypical bit about "urban" vs "suburban but it tread the line quite well. The true treasure ins all of this was Romany Malco who most will remember from his scene stealing turns in The 40-yr old Virgin and Baby Mama. The initial tension between his character and Nancy propels us for 3 seasons of will they or won't they. But there's a caveat. Everyone Nancy has sex with dies, gruesomely and frequently hilariously. So for 3 seasons you are forced to root for them, they do like each other, but we don't want Conrad to die, he's genuinely likable. I won't spoil the show but this gets resolved in an amazing way. The show-runners have a very good grasp of when and where these characters are going unlike some other shows I will write about later like Prison Break.