“Can we listen to this every day until we have to give it back?”
This is what my five-year-old daughter wanted to know the first time she heard “Suzuki” by June 5 – unmastered, mind you, on a homeburned CD from the group.
The local hip-hop trio (D.T. Brooke HollaDay, Tiffany Foxx) just might have that kind of a monster hit on their hands with “Suzuki.” It’s the kind of light, catchy pop song that lights up five- to fifteen-year-olds – and, therefore, the industry execs desperately to cash in on this market.
Fame ain’t no thing with me, but in case these girls do hit, you might want to come see them tonight (June 5) on the group’s birthday. The party is tonight at Dante’s, as part of Mocha Latte’s weekly party.
Tonight is not the local launch party for the group, though. Their production team, Black on Black/Quit Playing Entertainment, tried that some months ago in the lobby space of a loft Downtown.
It was a flop. The sound system sucked, and the three women in the group – each, in her own way, very hot – did not look right together. Worse, they did not move well together. At all.
They and their production team (which also includes Akon and Bradd Young) are very well loved in the local industry. So, the event was well attended by industry types, but very quietly received, since folks (the American included) like the people so much more than we liked the act that night.
I told them as much, personally. Ever since then, they have been threatening to kidnap me and make me listen to their music on its own terms. That was not necessary (thought it would have been fun!). In the end, it was a down-and-dirty CD handoff on Cherokee Street, from Brooke and D.T., since Tiff was sleeping off a Sex in the City party that must have been too much fun for her.
And, now, my daughter wants to hear it every day! At age five!
So do I, though I will pass on “Suzuki” and brace myself for the ringtone. My same daughter, by the way, runs around singing a children’s version of Jibbs’ “Chain Hang Low,” another song I heard in its infancy and didn’t need to hear ever again, even as I suspected that most of the rest of the world was going to lose its collective mind over it.
“Louie Louie” by Penelope deserved the same fate. It didn’t get it. Why? Hard to say. Making a hit is hard, tricky, expensive work, as June 5th’s production team knows damn well.
Whatever Akon, Guccio and Bradd Young can get done on the deal and promotion side, I’ve still got the music (and I’m not giving it back). I’ll keep listening to it. The homeburn CD I was handed has no titles, but one track has a long, sexy, slow burn that David Bowie (I kept thinking) would really turn onto. It has that global hip quotient that ends up, I don’t know, in foreign car commercials.
And there are some street-smart sister lyrics on this record that will catch folks’ attention and make women fell well represented.
As always, around here. All three of these sisters have flow and, much more elusively and impressively, their voices have real grit and character. This is just as true of Toyy, Ebony Eyez and Nonna of Da Bangazz314. Nobody makes a fuss about this, and they should, but St. Louis hip-hop has a really strong tradition of female MCs. Most of them also sing their own hooks – and do it so well they aught to be able to make a living off of that alone.
As for the stage thing that flopped at the launch party that didn’t launch, I’ll say a little prayer there. I’ll pray that three grown women with a hot record don’t need to be marketed like three teen sluts to get a hearing out there. They may not want to stay “cos – me – tolo – gists” forever, as one verse hilariously points out. But why can’t they go out to the world like the grown, hard-working women they actually are? You know: real?
