The Go! Team’s new release, “Proof of Youth,” is not an album, but a series of sounds that try to become an album, and fail (gloriously). Listening to “Proof of Youth” you are not lifted from your mundane world and given fleeting insight into a universe of beauty. Instead, you witness a band trying to make Music, and failing. The failure is what makes The Go! Team’s music so fun, so honest, and so worth coming back to for this second release.
To understand The Go! Team’s music, you have to first understand its drumming. It is clumsy, loose, and awkward drumming. The drums are too loud and too heavy, and because of this they force themselves to the front of each song, and once there become lost and confused. They try earnestly to keep up with the sounds that swirl around them, to provide a rhythmical anchor for the group despite their own lack of rhythm, but they fail, coming off as sloppy and amateur. In short, they are pathetic imitations of Drums, incompetent, burdened by a human inadequacy that extends beyond the percussion and into the entire album.
(More after the jump)
Last year, the Yale hip-hop scene was defined by the over-the-top lyrics and antics of rap group 108 Tongues, whose song “Fuck Harvard” generated massive backlash across the Ivy League community, leading some to conclude that
hip-hop simply could not be done at Yale. As the new school year begins, however, two members of the class of 2010 are quietly pursuing careers in the hip-hop industry. Ben Ogilvy, of Boston, and Ben Flores, of Idaho, draw from similar artistic influences and have both dealt with the awkward problems that
come with being white middle-class males making music that is deeply rooted in African-American culture. scene&heard sat down with Ogilvy and Flores to discuss their creative processes, the lackluster Yale music scene, and the transition from being a hip-hop fan to being a hip-hop musician.
Scene&Heard: What is Ghost Notes?
Ogilvy: We’re a production team. Basically, we make beats for rappers. We officially began in the summer of 2005, but before then my cousin and I had played music together for a long time. He’s about to finish his masters in piano performance at Wesleyan, and I’ve drummed for jazz and rock combos for most of my life. So far, we’ve made beats for local rappers and some people on the LA underground hip-hop scene. Of Mexican Descent used one of our beats for their song “All Turn Native.” It’s on our MySpace.
S&H: What kind of music do you make?
O: We make hip-hop. We aim for classic-sounding, jazzy, worn-in, gritty hip-hop, and we work only with samples. Only by sampling old records can you get the crackly, old funk sound that we want. Records have their own character and you cannot mimic it. You have to let the things age. Basically, we sit down at a computer and turntables. We go to a stack of records, pick one out, put the needle down until we find something we like, either texturally or melodically, and then we record it into a computer. That’s sampling. Slowly we layer and build-up these sounds into a beat. We make hip-hop from a jazz and soul grounding. We make driving beats. We sample because we want it to sound as if the dust has settled on the records.
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