Berklee Tower Of Power Ensemble performs"Knock Yourself Out"

[JSngry]

[Big Wheel]

That bad? I mean, the vocal backgrounds are pretty cheesy (I suspect this was one of those cases where a student group ends up with 8 more singers than it actually needs and then screws with the arrangements to fit the skewed personnel) but it seemed like the groove was pretty close to where it should be. 99% of college student groups couldn't come this close.

Or is the problem just that affluent white kids shouldn't be trying to copy ToP and that the last two minutes seem uncomfortably Glee-ish?

Edited August 7, 2013 by Big Wheel

[JSngry]

Groove? You hear more than I do... Vocally, it's as stillborn as it can be. Instrumentally, all I hear a clueless phonetic sputtering of at-best "perceived " "high points", like, ok, here's all the STYLE, can we plz has PASS now? And then GIGS? We wear the hats and hit the syncopations, we hz LEARNED THE MUSIC. Now we get LOVE?

I swear to god, Kenny G cops a better groove than this, because at least Kenny G knows what he is saying. These children are just making sounds that they think is what was being said. They are competitively wrong.

People's parents pay for their children to do this? And people get paid to encourage children to do this? To teach children to do this? There are options in life, choices to be made. These people have all made these decisions, and this is what has happened. They all got knocked themselfs out before they even knew where in is.

Kill it. Kill it all. By any means necessary.

In a non-violent way, of course...

[Big Wheel]

People's parents pay for their children to do this? And people get paid to encourage children to do this? To teach children to do this?

Welcome to Berklee, dude!

My initial listen to this was on my crappy laptop speakers and I could barely hear the bass at all. I can hear it now that I'm listening on headphones....there's definitely more air between the bass and drums than I'd like. Like maybe either the bass player is playing a bit behind where he should or the drummer is just driving the car at 125 bpm without really paying any attention to what everyone else is doing, or both. On the other hand...yeah. I have a feeling that students at all but the top 8 or 9 conservatories in the country, if they tried to pull this off, would produce something "not even wrong."

By a weird coincidence the first group picture I found of this band contains the bari player in my high school big band!

edit to add, interesting how even ToP's own version has gotten way faster and somewhat less greasy over time. I listened to the second version first and so didn't even realize that most of the vocal backgrounds in the Berklee version were cribbed straight from the record:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzy1g3VIcXY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9lGMb9DS9A

Edited August 8, 2013 by Big Wheel

[JSngry]

This is, for me, the definitive version.

This is a language being spoken knowingly and fluently and, ultimately. intuitively. Whatever rudimentary phonetics rugurgetations were involved in the learning curve sure didn't get bragged about on YouTube.

[Jim R]

This is, for me, the definitive version.

Too bad they couldn't have stretched out.