Just Because...: Old School Strikes...

Monday, February 27, 2006

Old School Strikes...

Many of my friends know that I *adore* old school freestyle, dance, and latin hip hop. What can I say, I'm an 80's dance child. I fell in love with Freestyle when I heard Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam's "Can You Feel The Beat". Through the years, I could often be found dancin' around to George Lamond, TKA, Corina, Sweet Sensation, The Cover Girls, etc. and still, to this day, crave the music. What can I say, its in my blood. I often laugh when I hear people tell me that such and such a song is freestyle, but rarely do some of today's current hits have a strong freestyle beat. The only ones that come to mind recently were Missy Elliott with "Lose Control", Ying Yang Twins w/ Pitbull "Shake That" and XScape with "What's Up". I will say Gwen Stefani's track "Crash" is NOT freestyle. It has a few elements, but not enough to make it a freestyle based track. Plus - if you want to scare an A&R guy from a label, tell him that you have a track for him and that it's Freestyle. Watch him run for the hills and stammer while telling you "Thanks but no thanks". The major labels prefer the term, "Dance". They don't want visions of Beat Street or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo *LOL* Anywayz - I digress.. back to the story at hand...

I often hear about new tracks, and was very apprehensive to check out the new J.Lo/LL Cool J song, Control Myself. I'm not really fond of J.Lo's studio vocals, having heard the pre-scrubbed versions of some of her earlier tracks *ouch* but I do love listening to LL. So this morning as I'm getting ready for work I hear this strong old school freestyle beat and, much to my surprise, I see the video for Control Myself on MTV.

Hold Up. Wait a Minute. What. The. ?!?!?!??! The video is what one of my friends would call "the Hotness!" Now, LL Cool J is crazy talented. The man is just amazing. Great actor, fabulous hip hop artist , a tad easy on the eyes (ladies, I know you might agree with me) and he's just so damn humble. Jermaine Dupri produced the track and while he does mostly hip hop & R&B, Jermaine knows his freestyle.

Needless to say I wound up getting a copy of the song today from a friend and I'm in love. Absolute love. I'm a happy, happy girl. This track is in the iPod permanently.

You can check out the video here. If you don't start dancin', I'll be surprised ;)

Posted by Lys :: 10:20 PM :: 0 comments

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Just Because...

Monday, February 27, 2006