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defrogSo Malcolm McLaren is gone.
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bedsitter23 has as good a write-up on McLaren’s influence and accomplishments as I could ever write. McLaren’s management skills were often manipulative and ultimately destructive, but no one can deny he knew a good thing when he saw one – New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow, etc – and that he saw the value of punk as a way to make rock exciting and mean something again (even if he frequently destroyed his own bands in the process).
The other interesting thing about him, and something he’s less known for (in the US, anyway) is that when he finally moved on from punk and decided to release his own music, he turned to hip-hop and the idea of sampling for inspiration and was one of the first artists to export it from the US to the UK with Duck Rock.
I wouldn’t say he “got” hip-hop before anyone else who didn’t come up in that scene, but he was probably one of the few that did – which is saying something at a time when most music critics wrote off hip-hop and sampling as a fly-by-night fad for people with no musical talent that would never amount to anything.
Granted, most of McLaren’s solo stuff (hip-hop or otherwise) I can take or leave, compared to the bands he managed. But I do have the two big singles from Duck Rock on my iPod. And I have to say this is my favorite of the two.
Round the outside,
This is dF
bedsitter23 has as good a write-up on McLaren’s influence and accomplishments as I could ever write. McLaren’s management skills were often manipulative and ultimately destructive, but no one can deny he knew a good thing when he saw one – New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Bow Wow Wow, etc – and that he saw the value of punk as a way to make rock exciting and mean something again (even if he frequently destroyed his own bands in the process).The other interesting thing about him, and something he’s less known for (in the US, anyway) is that when he finally moved on from punk and decided to release his own music, he turned to hip-hop and the idea of sampling for inspiration and was one of the first artists to export it from the US to the UK with Duck Rock.
I wouldn’t say he “got” hip-hop before anyone else who didn’t come up in that scene, but he was probably one of the few that did – which is saying something at a time when most music critics wrote off hip-hop and sampling as a fly-by-night fad for people with no musical talent that would never amount to anything.
Granted, most of McLaren’s solo stuff (hip-hop or otherwise) I can take or leave, compared to the bands he managed. But I do have the two big singles from Duck Rock on my iPod. And I have to say this is my favorite of the two.
Round the outside,
This is dF
