Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Kano – Rock ‘n’ Roller

Want to make a Guy Ritchie pun, but this is already bad enough…



[Video][Myspace]
[3.90]

Erika Villani: At the risk of sounding like I belong on a porch with Jay-Z, yelling at these damn kids to get off my lawn: Good Lord, does nobody just use their voice anymore? I really can’t tell what Kano would sound like without the Auto-Tune, which is a shame, because with it he’s just a poor man’s Mr Hudson featuring Kanye West.
[1]

Anthony Miccio: Do all roads in grime run to Ibiza?
[4]

Andrew Casillas: I’m sure this sounds better when the club releases foam from the ceiling.
[3]

Michaelangelo Matos: Cf. Planet Patrol’s “I Didn’t Know I Love You (‘Til I Saw You Rock and Roll),” only that one’s a lot less claustrophobic than this is. Comes on at first like it might be gabber, which, while overbearing, would at least be daring. Instead it’s 70 percent hook, 30 percent verse, which isn’t a bad ratio in itself except that the hook is so damn lazy.
[5]

Matt Cibula: Not very convincing as rock and roll but it kinda jumps out of the speakers, dunnit? Reminds me a lot of poor underappreciated Kenna, and of about 300 other housy songs I like.
[7]

Talia Kraines: It’s catchy, but reeks so much of a desperation to crack the top ten that it loses any identity Kano once had.
[5]

Pete Baran: Kano doesn’t so much ape the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll as use the words over and over again in the hope that they hold some sort of magical spirit of musical excitement. Unfortunately, singing down what sounds like a vacuum cleaner pipe BEFORE the autotune gets at it removes the one thing that could have made this rock ‘n’ roll: the sense of a performance.
[3]

Tal Rosenberg: Poor Kano/Where you’ll be, I’ll go/But this song really blows/Please put this behind you.
[2]

Additional Scores

Ian Mathers: [5]
Martin Skidmore: [4]

8 Responses to “Kano – Rock ‘n’ Roller”

  1. While listening to this, I was wondering the exact same thing that Anthony does.

  2. I really can’t tell what Kano would sound like without the Auto-Tune

    Try “P’s and Q’s,” which is excellent.

  3. Thanks, Frank. Also: why the fuck did he do this, if he sounds like that?

  4. Hmmm… “P’s and Q’s” strikes me as fairly monotonous, actually, but this song here (which I’m just now getting around to checking out) is just plain shitty. And maybe even a bigger cliche than the AutoTune is this increasingly stupid idea that being a “rock and roller” means “standing on tables and kicking down chairs” (hey wait, that’s from “West End Girls” isn’t it?? — okay, almost?) Anyway, where the fuck do pop and rap people get this idea that rock’n’rollers are these wild and crazy dudes, when most rock’n’rollers haven’t even presented themselves that was for the past 20 years? It’s like that Pink song about “I got my rock moves.” Am I the only person who winces when he hears lines like that?

  5. …presented themselves that way, I mean. (On the other hand, the Shop Boyz and Nickelback songs about being a “rock star” at least mildly amused me, but these days I’m honestly not even sure what people mean by that phrase anymore. You’d think that when Madison Avenue appropriated it for everything from babies’ clothes on up, actual music people might’ve picked up on how meaningless it is. But nope.)

  6. Probably from the same place that rock people still think hip-hop is what it was in the ’80s and ’90s, Chuck.

  7. I’ve liked most everything I’ve heard of Kano’s except this.

  8. Kano used to have one of the best flows in grime – smooth and suave but still menacing – and “Ps & Qs” is one of my favourite cuts of this decade. His attempts at being commercial have been particularly misguided even by grime’s standards though, even if his last album was pretty decent, and at some point his flow just inexplicably fell off a cliff edge. Can’t say I’m particularly invested in where he goes now.

    More great stuff from back when he was good –

    “What Have You Done?”
    “Boys Luv Girls”
    “Mic Fight”