In Praise of Minimilism

I saw a thing in Pitchfork today about Jack White teaming up with Allison Mossheart of the Kills to form a new band the Dead Weather. You can stream some songs at their website, and they sound pretty good. I love Mossheart's voice, and the band has a 60s garage sound. White's a freak, but I admire him as an artists, and I loved how he stripped down and minimilised rock with the White Stripes. As things got bigger and shinier and more complicated and produced in the late 90s, he peeled it down to guitar and drums, and used those constraints to force himself to create interesting music that worked with the limited palette. http://www.thedeadweather.com/ The Kills did a similar thing with their guitar/drum machine. The problem with those limitations is you eventually do what you can with them, which explains why the Dead Weather have a more fleshed out sound and fleshed out band.

On a similar note, I heard Beyonce's "Diva" yesterday. It's a pretty horrible song, and the beat is basically Bangladesh doing his "A Milli" beat again. "A Milli" is a pretty amazing beat: it's so minimalist and that the few snare beats that actually come in hit that much harder. It's an example of less is more. It is also basically the same fifteen seconds looped over and over again - the ultimate in lazy beatmaking. It's unfortunate that Bangladesh is trying to do it again with "Diva," because that's the kind of formula that can't work very many times. Especially when "A Milli" was one of the most overplayed songs of '08.

A Milli - Lil Wayne