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Year-End Poll #42: 1991

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Bryan Adams, Color Me Badd, C+C Music Factory, Paula Abdul, Timmy T, EMF, Extreme, Hi-Five, Surface, Amy Grant. End description]

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As I've stated in previous polls, the charts used to be mostly compiled from retail sales (ranging from physical media to sheet music). This data was gathered by Billboard sending out surveys or calling record stores directly. However, in 1991 Billboard began implementing Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems (BDS). The technology first used to compile the country charts in 1990, which helped to give a more accurate picture of listening habits among country music fans. SoundScan and BDS was applied to the Hot 100 and the R&B charts in late 1991. This more objective method of music data collection will be instrumental in more country, hard rock, and rap albums reaching the top of the charts. Of course, there were still gaps in the data, as SoundScan was only able to work with stores with the technology to implement it, so sales from smaller retail venues might not have been tracked as accurately. Billboard has a more detailed article about the program here.

Speaking of rap, there is a moment in the genre's history that I would like to talk about as well. This happened in 1990, but I'm not going to let something trivial like the passage of time get in the way of me rambling about what I want. Miami bass is a subgenre of rap that grew out of (surprise) Miami, Florida. Musically, the sound is known for its heavy bass, electro and dance beat influences, kick drums, and high tempos. But the genre became rather infamous for its sexually explicit lyrics. One of the groups that came under fire for their lyrical content was 2 Live Crew.

In 1989, 2 Live crew released their third album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. A few polls ago, I talked about the creation of the Parental Advisory sticker, where the nature of explicit lyrics was brought all the way to the senate. But apparently, a parental advisory sticker wasn't considered enough for this album. In 1990, the album was ruled as obscene, making it the first album to be legally classified as such. Later that year, the members of 2 Live Crew were arrested for performing it. A record store owner in Florida was even arrested for selling the album to an undercover cop.

As horrible as this was, the news of the arrest made the controversy more of a matter of free speech in the eyes of the public. In 1992, Luke Records v. Navarro reached the Eleventh Circuit where the obscenity ruling was overturned. It's hard to imagine what the music landscape would look like today if that ruling went any other way, and I thought that it was an important moment to talk about as we see the evolution of music on these polls. There is a lot to this case that I couldn't get into, so I'm linking to a short MTV clip and a more detailed article about the arrest.

#billboard poll #billboard music #tumblr poll #1990s #90s music #1991 #bryan adams #color me badd #c+c music factory #paula abdul #timmy t #emf #extreme #hi-five #surface #amy grant

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Aaron Frazer Interview: Implicit to Explicit

Photo by Rosie Cohe

BY JORDAN MAINZER

"The difference between Carole King and Westside Gunn...is a lot shorter than people realize," Aaron Frazer said to contextualize his second solo album Into The Blue (Dead Oceans). Reading that before I listened to the record for the first time had me primed for the unexpected. And while it's not an album that sounds like A$AP Rocky and Jessica Pratt--let alone a legendary folk singer and raw Griselda crew member--Into The Blue does demonstrate the genre-hopping prowess of a versatile singer-songwriter. Frazer, dealing with a breakup and a cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles, looked to his own record collection for comfort. He also returned to the exploratory mindset of his crate-digging past to make an album that captures heartbreak, transitions, ends, and new beginnings in all of their complexity.

Long before he was known as the falsetto singer and drummer of Durand Jones & The Indications, Frazer was a beatmaker, toying around with FL Studio (fka FruityLoops) as a teenager. He went on to study sound engineering at Indiana University, where The Indications were formed. While his records with The Indications as well as his solo debut Introducing..., the latter produced by Dan Auerbach, are clear contemporary takes on old-school soul, Into The Blue reveals Frazer's love for hip-hop. Co-producer Alex Goose (Freddie Gibbs, Madlib, Brockhampton) helped Frazer incorporate samples, from 60s teen pop music to 90's R&B, into his songs. Best, the samples are purposeful and tasteful. Opening track "Thinking Of You" takes the opening line from The Shades' "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town", "Hey...it's him again...uh-oh!" to reintroduce Frazer and establish the modus operandi of Into The Blue. "Lonely nights like this, I still feel your kiss," Frazer sings over a swelling, lovelorn orchestra. "Fly Away" culls from the Hi-Five song of the same name in a coincidental bit of studio magic, where a song Frazer and Jungle's Lydia Kitto had been working on happened to follow the same chord progression as the 90's R&B classic that Goose had filed away for future sampling use.

Of course, for Frazer, sampling is just a more direct callback to the past than his normal, indirect cherry picking of blue-eyed soul. Into The Blue expands his horizons. The title track juxtaposes strings, breakbeats, and country western guitars. "I Don't Wanna Stay" employs a 5-piece string section to enhance the dramatic, cinematic flair of Frazer's storytelling. "Easy To Love", which does interpolate Kenix's disco classic "There's Never Been (No One Like You)", sports a four-on-the-floor drum beat and keyboard sprinkles for a slice of pure funk. And "Payback" takes a base of Northern soul-esque drum fills and handclaps and smothers them with whispered and lurking-to-shouting backing vocals and Nick Waterhouse's blistering guitar.

A few months ago, I spoke with Frazer over the phone. Calling from his apartment in Los Angeles, he discussed both the sonic inspirations and making of Into The Blue. He was also in the process of figuring out how to play the album live. Frazer had done a release show on June 28th, the day the album was released, something that he hadn't done since he was in college. "I forgot how much work goes into finishing an album rollout," Frazer said, "adding in the last little bits before release while also trying to perform not just passably, but well, for the first time in front of an audience who has only heard the record for a maximum of 18 hours." The answer on his current tour, including a stop Sunday at Thalia Hall? A 7-piece band, including Frazer behind the drum kits for a third of the show, switching places with his drummer/singer. It's still a challenge. "[Into The Blue is] a band album, but it's a production album, as well," Frazer said. "There are elements that need to be shifted in a live context...There are more voices on the record than I'm going to have on stage. I'm not going to have the string section. How are you getting to capture that psychedelic moment and dub basement soul in a live setting?"

Find out the answer on Sunday and read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: On Into The Blue, why did you decide to work with a different set of people than those whom you worked with on your first record?

Aaron Frazer: In some ways, it's a whole new set, but in [other] ways, it's a return to my normal workflow. On the strings and horns, those are all my friends from Brooklyn who I've been working with on the Durand Jones & The Indications records since 2018, with American Love Call. It's less that this was a new thing: When you work with Dan Auerbach, and he's in the producer role, you have access to his collaborators. They're legends who have played on cornerstone records of American music. It's amazing. When I do it myself, I like to work with my friends. This was a mix of my friends from New York and new friends that I had made in Los Angeles, which included Lydia Kitto and Joshua Lloyd from Jungle, [as well as] Nick Waterhouse. Also, because I had the opportunity to do whatever I wanted, I was also able to hit up people I had wanted to work with for a long time, like Cold Diamond & Mink.

SILY: You were dealing with material that was a bit more vulnerable than on past records. Was it a blessing to work with your friends, people you could be vulnerable around?

AF: This record is the sound of me navigating and processing the things happening in my life very much in real-time. Definitely, working with friends allows me a certain level of vulnerability. When I wrote "Into the Blue", the day I showed up for that session, I was honestly too bummed out to write anything. Maybe in another session, that wouldn't be okay, or I'd feel some sort of pressure to power through, but because they were my friends, I voiced that. There was no pressure, and we just listened to some records, and the records we were listening to wound up inspiring the original demo of "Into the Blue". So it's definitely a blessing to work with friends.

SILY: What records were you listening to?

AF: We all geek out over records that feel ghostly, so The Ink Spots, for example. "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" is the classic Ink Spots tune people know. Some of the Charlie Parker with Strings album has this big, classic Disney chorus. I don't mean Frozen, more the old school Disney.

SILY: Fluttery instrumentation.

AF: Some Hawaiian stuff has a lot of ghostly qualities. Eventually, we came to Ennio Morricone's stuff, which is very much in the through-line to Into the Blue and a thread throughout this record.

SILY: I wrote down the word "ghostly" the first time I listened to "I Don't Wanna Stay", with the five-piece string section and the backing vocal harmonies. Combined with the themes of the record in general--a dying or dead relationship--it fits. Was that interplay between theme and instrumentation at top of mind when making the record?

AF: Definitely. It felt like I was navigating a haunted house. It kind of feels like for me, this album is the sound of driving across the country, but having flashbacks to the life that I left.

SILY: I'm definitely intrigued by the use of samples, and I imagine working with Alex Goose spurred that. It doesn't seem like that different of an overall approach from what you were doing previously, the same way you might call back to a classic genre or sound. Sampling is just a little more specific.

AF: I grew up making hip-hop instrumentals. I downloaded a free version of FruityLoops, which is now called FL Studio. It now sounds more professional. The first beat I ever made was a loop of the intro of the song "Lullaby of Birdland", this great piano intro. I made it in Windows Movie Maker, which was on the computer. I've always been drawn to samples. At first, it was jazz samples, then soul samples. I started going to Goodwill in the dollar bin to look for stuff to sample when I was in high school. That's when I started to learn all these other types of music, looking for samples. Hip hop and sampling have been there early on in my musical career. The current approach that people know me for with The Indications and my solo stuff is referential, and I think that referencing is its own form of sampling. You sort of approximate rather than go directly to the source. You put your own spin on it. Working with Goose was really cool because not only do we both share an enthusiasm for eclecticism, but hip hop is a genre that brings disparate elements together. That's always who I have been as a music fan and music writer. Allowing hip hop production to be in the driver's seat allows me to bring that eclecticism back to the forefront, to shift the dial one click towards hip hop being explicit instead of implicit in my writing. I don't think it was a big transition for me. I feel like I've been doing it in one form or another my whole life.

SILY: Certain songs, like "Fly Away", seem to be built around the sample, whereas others are more interpolative, or the sample is just thrown in at the beginning. How did your songwriting process come about? Did you start with the sample, or come up with the song and later think, "I could add something in here."?

AF: The beginning of "Thinking of You", that vocal drop, we were just digging through some stuff, and we thought, "That would be so sick," so we just threw it in at the beginning. We didn't construct the song around it. "Fly Away" is an interesting one, because I have the demo, and it's me and Lydia--I have this piano progression that we played--and we wrote the song to the piano progression. When Lydia and I were at Goose's studio, he was flipping through some loops he had. Sometimes, he'll just chop up songs to file them away for future use. He had this Hi-Five loop, and I realized it was the same general chord movement as the song Lydia and I had put together. As he was playing this loop, I started singing this song down that Goose had never heard before, and Lydia was in on the background vocals with me. It was so funny to see Goose's reaction. His jaw dropped. He was like, "What is happening? How have you already written a song to this?" It was a bit of good luck and coincidence that the chord movements could wrap onto each other. It had already been a 90's R&B vibe, it was just divine timing to hit this 90's R&B loop and bring this implicit influence to an explicit place.

SILY: The first time I listened to it, that's exactly what stood out: the sample, yes, but the song sounds like you could hear it on a 90's R&B radio station.

AF: Mary J. Blige in the 90's made her career by taking soul samples and doing this neo soul approach to 70's soul samples. I feel like I inverted the ratio. I'm more inspired by 70's soul, but I applied it to 90's sampling.

SILY: What was your approach to sequencing the record?

AF: Sequencing is so important on a record like this. This is such an eclectic, sprawling record. I'm not doing death metal, or anything--it's all in its zone--but this album is the sound of my record collection. When it comes to food, sometimes the flavors that would work together, if eaten in the wrong order, don't taste good. Music is very much like that. You are a DJ. Two songs that are sick won't connect with people if you don't sequence it correctly. We tinkered around a lot with the--I almost said setlist, but that's kind of how it feels. We're DJs and trying to get that set together to feel good and not give you whiplash stylistically and show the authentic emotional journey I went on from New York to LA, from in a relationship to out of a relationship, from touring like crazy with a band to all of a sudden having a year off.

SILY: I noticed a lot of contrast in texture from one song to another, which is key in both albums and food! That ghostly quality is there throughout Into The Blue, but on a song like "Payback", Nick Waterhouse's guitars are so fuzzy and sharp.

AF: It's brash and bombastic. And then "Perfect Strangers" is the salmon sashimi of the record. It's subtle.

SILY: That one's just you on your guitar with background singers?

AF: There's a little bit of bass, but it's very minimal.

SILY: Are you the type of songwriter who is always writing even when you've just released a new album?

AF: There were maybe two weeks where I was feeling a bit of burnout. came out on June 28th, and on July 2nd, I flew to North Carolina to start working with The Indications on our 4th record, to start recording. That took a lot of caffeine to get me dialed back in. But I'm always hearing sounds where I'm like, "I want to do something like that!" Or little scraps come to me in the shower.

SILY: Are the sounds you're hearing, is that from you actively listening to music?

AF: I love clicking around YouTube until all the sidebar recommendations are 45 labels, and then I'm like, "Now I'm digging in." Instagram is an incredible discovery tool. It's crazy. Spotify's Discover Weekly is really cool. Thankfully, I also have friends who I tell, "Literally send me music any time of day or night." I might not respond if you text me at 2 A.M.--actually, I probably will be still awake--but I love getting recommendations from anywhere and everywhere.

SILY: Some people I talk to, when actively writing music, they really need to shut out all art. It sounds like you're the total opposite. You're a sponge.

AF: Yeah. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson coined "transparent eyeball." You have to see everything and let it pass through you. I will say that while I am a sponge, there's times for soaking in and times for wringing out. There's a bit of a reset period. Before I start wringing out again, I'm definitely in a soaking in period. But with The Indications, I'm having to soak in while finding a corner of my sponge self to wring out.

SILY: You're deft with metaphors! I can tell you're a songwriter.

AF: [laughs]

SILY: Is there anything else about the record I didn't ask about that you want to say?

AF: I feel very proud of the high-brow/low-brow [duality] of this record. "The Fool", the last track of the record, the drums, bass, and guitar are all one iPhone voice memo. It's fun to be at a point in my career where I've done this enough times to be grounded in my compass so I can be like, "Yeah, it's an iPhone voice memo, but it had magic to it, so I used it and tracked on top of it." I hope people listen to the full record. I think it's hard to pick any one song to represent what this album is. I tried to make it a full body of work.

SILY: It's funny that you mention high-brow/low-brow with "The Fool", because you have the low-brow with the iPhone, but in regard to the high-brow, Bryan Ponce's backing vocals remind me of a Greek chorus.

AF: It's exactly supposed to be that!

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