The future of pop doesn’t only rest on great singers or musicians or signature-sound producers. It also, sometimes, rests on people who understand opportunity, the movement of taste, fashion, sound, visual style, the way the wind is blowing. They’re not primarily artists or merchants. They’re not necessarily back-room forces — sometimes they are very public — but their roles and strengths remain in flux.
Two of them died last week: ASAP Yams, a.k.a. Steven Rodriguez, at age 26; and Kim Fowley, at age 75.
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Yams was the executive producer and “spirit guide,” as he put it, behind ASAP Mob, the New York rap collective including ASAP Rocky (whose album “Long.Live.ASAP” went to #1 on the Billboard chart in 2012) and ASAP Ferg; partly through his blog and partly through his artists he revived excitement in New York rap, and he did it by looking outside its hardened clichés.
Mr. Fowley was a Los Angeles music-business factotum — producer, publisher, songwriter, unskilled but enthusiastic singer, and Svengali, associated with hundreds of records over a 50-year period that possessed some degree of greatness or energy, including those by the Uptones, the Murmaids, Gene Vincent, Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Modern Lovers, the Germs, the Runaways and Ariel Pink.
Both were connectors and motivators and talent scouts with fast and hungry ears. Neither was dogmatic or sentimental about the aesthetics of any particular kind of music.
On this week’s Popcast, Jon Caramanica and I talk about what these two people — on different coasts, with 50 years difference in age — had in common.
Listen above, download the MP3 or subscribe in iTunes.
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