chumpy

I just received some follow-up email about this, so it looks like this project is moving forward!

I think there's always been awful popular music, so I don't feel that standards have declined. Also, that Meghan Traynor's song No might not be to your tastes, but in my opinion it's a poor example of declining standards. The production is excellent, she's got a killer soulful bluesy singing voice, and her rapping isn't bad either. It's also got a pretty great hook. These songs aren't written by committee, they're often written by hit record producers. In this case I imagine the bulk of the song was written by her producer, Ricky Reed, who has had 3 platinum singles and a Billboard #1 hit in the past 5 years. You'd be surprised how many pop hits these days are written by middle aged Swedish dudes like Max Martin or Dr. Luke. Not to my tastes either, but that's the music biz.

For me, the 'Song Exploder' podcast is hit and miss. Sometimes artists don't do a really good job explaining their process but in this case Rivers Cuomo from Weezer goes into fantastic detail on how he writes songs. There is some real gold here in terms of pop songwriting technique.

Sonic Youth -- Orange Rolls, Angel's Spit

I do love Asian powered Hip-Hop. Ami Bidrohi! There are places where you try to squeeze too many words into a section, like on "my mind makes a maximum" you can hear some clumsy delivery there. You can also hear spots where you struggle with breath control. I know you want to be able to perform well live, but on a recording I would learn to take advantage of some studio magic. I'm not sure what kind of tools you're using to make your music, but there are a lot of great tricks you can use in a DAW to really polish up your recordings. For example, you can break up the vocal recordings into manageable sections so you can control your breath between takes. Record a bunch of different takes for each section and pick the best one, or even better, cut and paste them together (google vocal comping) to form a composite vocal. More advanced DAW tricks can let you make adjustments to the timing of your vocal parts to make sure your rhymes land exactly on the beats you want them on. I think you could improve things by multi-tracking certain dope words and phrases, like "Sikh on the beat" or "Asian / lyrically amazing". One thing I noticed is that your flow got smoother and better as the song went, like you started a bit cold. By the time you get to 'sugar / mind diabetes' you're really locked in. Anyway, I really enjoyed this track, I thought you had a lot of great lines and rhymes.