Author Topic: Nellie McKay  (Read 11690 times)

ggw

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #15 on: February 27, 2004, 05:28:00 pm »
I have the sinking feeling that -- just as with Norah Jones -- we will be subjected to Rhetterford's incessant reminders that he discovered Nellie McKay before anyone else.

Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #16 on: February 27, 2004, 05:35:00 pm »
Not true. I learned about her on the Robbie Fulks' chatboard. The board I go to when I want to learn about new music.
 
    This board is reserved for immature babies whining about how annoying other immature babies are, or far talking about pissing on people's legs.  :p  
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by ggwâ?¢:
  I have the sinking feeling that -- just as with Norah Jones -- we will be subjected to Rhetterford's incessant reminders that he discovered Nellie McKay before anyone else.

ggw

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #17 on: February 27, 2004, 05:40:00 pm »
Quote
Originally posted by Rutherford J. Balls:
  Not true. I learned about her on the Robbie Fulks' chatboard. The board I go to when I want to learn about new music.
 
Yeah.  That Robbie Fulks chatboard is all about new music:
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by Henry Dark:
 I've got a vintage erotica picture book I picked up in Italy of pictures taken back in the early twentieth century of priests fucking nuns. I wonder if they are authentic?
 
Quote
Originally posted by Henry Dark:
 And I've just gotta day...those nuns has some nice hairy packets. No trimming going on back in those days, nosireebob.
 

Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #18 on: February 27, 2004, 05:49:00 pm »
haha.
 
    I said I read it to learn of new music. Never said I actually contribute. I steal the knowledge from there, then post here and paint myself as some sort of musical hipster. You could say it's my own pitchfork, except you're the only only other dork here who has ever bothered to look at that board....that way I don't have to worry about people accusing me of getting all my scoops from something as obvious as pitchfork.

Bags

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #19 on: March 07, 2004, 02:10:00 pm »
Quote
Originally posted by Rutherford J. Balls:
  Well the guy from the Post loved her; and go figure, no April Lavine references.
 
 Nellie McKay: What a Pleasant Surprise
 
 By Joe Heim
 Special to The Washington Post
 Friday, February 27, 2004; Page C02
 
 Let Nellie McKay become a huge star. Let her find fame and fortune and fantabulous success. Because at just 19, this supremely gifted, charming and darkly funny New York oddball has all the makings of the first great singer-songwriter of the young century.
 
 She is like Tori Amos if Amos had a sense of humor, or Ani DiFranco if DiFranco had an ounce of cleverness. So she is nothing like them at all.  
So she was on the Today Show on Friday.  She's like Tori Amos, if Tori Amos were retarded (and I mean that literally; she is so "quirky" and "oddball" she comes off to me as if she has a medical condition).  Awful, awful; I found it painful to watch her -- she has this odd affect and manner.
 
 But what do I know; she was playing Wolf Trap.  'Course, I'm pretty indiscriminate in my taste.

thirsty moore

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #20 on: March 07, 2004, 04:14:00 pm »
I have to mark my territory.  Plus, it makes everyone laugh.  I love the attention.
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by Rutherford J. Balls:
 or far talking about pissing on people's legs.   :p  

Bags

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #21 on: March 16, 2004, 02:25:00 pm »
washingtonpost.com
 For Nellie McKay, Divadom Awaits
 
 By Allison Stewart
 Special to The Washington Post
 Monday, March 15, 2004; Page C01
 
 If 19-year-old rapper, raconteur and piano-playing jazz singer Nellie McKay didn't exist, someone -- a record company executive, probably -- would have had to invent her.
 
 The true details of McKay's improbable life seem beyond invention: Her hardscrabble upbringing in Harlem, culminating in a brief stint as a 10-year-old hostage. Her grandfather, who did time in San Quentin for murder. Her polite feud with Norah Jones (sadly one-sided, since Jones doesn't seem to have heard of McKay). Her triumphant rise to the middle, a tale that equally evokes Horatio Alger and Barry Manilow. To say nothing of her recent debut, the splashy, double-disc "Get Away From Me" (any swipe at Jones's "Come Away With Me" is purely intentional).
 
 McKay's music is a cranky but high-spirited combination of rap, rock, jazz and Tin Pan Alley pop. On "Get Away," she takes on cloning, the Oxygen network, her unrequited crush on David, her next-door neighbor ("David don't you hear me at all / David dear, I'm just down the hall"), rhymes Phil Spector and Hannibal Lecter, insults George W. Bush and generally seems to have a good time.
 
 McKay has already evoked critical comparisons to artists as varied as Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter and Randy Newman, though the most apt review was the one that re-imagined her as a combination of Doris Day and Eminem. With her genteel thrift-store suits, perfect diction and facility for hip-hop, McKay is both willfully anachronistic and utterly modern.
 
 "I wish I belonged in a time where you could wear petticoats and everyone wasn't in jeans and wasn't so vulgar," she says. "There's this kind of 'Sex and the City' syndrome where there's no more romance, it's all just hooking up. Doris Day takes me back to a time when things were much more innocent. But as far as music goes, I'm very interested in being a part of my generation. I don't want to just be a throwback."
 
 In person, McKay (pronounced Mc-EYE) is voluble and friendly. She worries about her appearance on "Live With Regis and Kelly" the next day. (Will they make her chat with them? She hates that.) She's worried about a recent interview in which she discussed her greatest fears. (What if she ever gets a stalker? Why give him ideas?) She is sitting in a coffee shop in Harlem, next door to her apartment and a few short blocks from the site of the childhood mugging nearly a decade ago that served as the inspiration for "Manhattan Avenue," one of the cornerstones of her debut. McKay was getting out of a car when she was attacked by a man wielding a box cutter; he grabbed her, held the weapon to her throat and demanded money from her mother.
 
 "It was a fairly brutal moment," she recalls. "I still can't open a car door without actually getting out. You either open it and get out or you stay in with the doors locked. I was telling my mother I wanted a waffle for dinner, and then there was a guy there. My mother had enough wits about her to throw the dummy wallet at him."
 
 McKay's mother, Robin Pappas, had been an actress in England, appearing in "Chariots of Fire" and other films before moving to America with the newborn Nellie and finding that work had mostly dried up. McKay's maternal grandfather was a violent, bipolar personality who, McKay says, led a "frustrated and harmful life" that culminated in a stint in San Quentin for his participation in a murder. McKay's father is a British director whom she hasn't seen in years; Pappas raised McKay on her own. "We definitely struggled. . . . But kids don't know the difference between a dollar store and Barneys. My mother always provided for me."
 
 Mother and daughter left town soon after the mugging. McKay went to high school in Pennsylvania, learned how to play the piano, sax, xylophone and cello, and returned to New York to briefly attend Manhattan School of Music. Bothered by the school's cliquishness ("I can't tell you how much I abhor being cool"), she dropped out after less than two years.
 
 She began working the tough proving ground of cabarets and gay bars at 17, first playing cover tunes and, eventually, her own material. An interview in a local magazine drew the attention of Columbia Records executives, who signed McKay after a brief bidding war and installed her in the studio with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick in the summer of 2003.
 
 Released last month, "Get Away From Me" (original title: "Black America") is deft and sharp and, in its way, subversive, packed with rapid-fire ruminations on politics, pop culture and romance cloaked in mild hip-hop beats and slight, lovely melodies. McKay has drawn more from her own deep well of influences -- Stephen Sondheim, Bob Dylan, Dinah Shore -- than from the old-school social satirists to whom she is often compared.
 
 "I think it can be hard to listen to satire sometimes," says McKay, who also expresses a fondness for the music of Shakira and Pink. "I have a friend who covers Tom Lehrer in piano bars, and one of the songs he covered was 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.' That kind of put me off Tom Lehrer. I'm still enough of a teenage girl that I like listening to teenage music."
 
 It's the disc's most overt stab at gender politics, "I Wanna Get Married" ("I wanna pack cute little lunches / For my Brady Bunches / Then read Danielle Steel"), that's gotten the most attention. "People think that's a joke, but it really isn't," says McKay. "I long for that kind of . . . 'Bewitched' model. But my post-feminist [side] is very in tune with Alanis Morissette."
 
 On the surface, at least, the disc's numerous jazzy ballads recall Norah Jones more than Morissette, and countless reviews have already positioned McKay as Jones's strange younger sister. "I think they're pretty different, actually," says Nic Harcourt, deejay on the influential Los Angeles radio program "Morning Becomes Eclectic" and an early backer of McKay's. "Nellie's record is a lot more eccentric. I don't know that it's going to find the same audience. She's got more than just the piano-playing-chanteuse thing going on."
 
 Because McKay wants badly to be famous -- insists on it, actually -- she tolerates the comparisons, hoping Jones's success will be the rising tide that lifts all boats. "She seems like a very happy person," says McKay suspiciously. "Her music is less topical than what I'm trying to do. I think that's our greatest difference.
 
 "I really want to reflect the times, where I think her appeal is that she doesn't reflect the times. I'd rather make waves."

ggw

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #22 on: March 16, 2004, 02:27:00 pm »
Does the McHype machine ever end?

Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #23 on: March 17, 2004, 10:36:00 am »
You can participate in an online discussion with Nellie today. Just go to:
 
 http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/04/sp_entertainment_mckay031704.htm
 
 My question:
 
    Yo, Nellie, don't you fear that all of this whoring yourself out to the media will lead to a short career shelf life?
 
 BallCage
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allmy$to930

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #24 on: March 17, 2004, 01:39:00 pm »
Congrats Rhett!
 
 Can't believe they included the question in the chat.

Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #25 on: March 17, 2004, 01:43:00 pm »
Shit, I just sent the question in as a joke. Forgot all about it until I read your post. I'm as surprised as you are.
 
 
 BallCage
 Mindless Balls
 Deep8 Productions
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by allmy$to930:
  Congrats Rhett!
 
 Can't believe they included the question in the chat.

ggw

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #26 on: March 17, 2004, 01:53:00 pm »
A teenage Liza Minelli crossover pop-star who uncovers political intrigue and assassination while traveling around the country doing industry showcases and in-stores.
 
 Get NBC on the horn -- I think I've found a series to replace Friends.

Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #27 on: March 17, 2004, 02:03:00 pm »
Fess up Mankie, did you post this first question>?
 
 The second one could have been posted by any number of Boardies.
 
 BallCage
 Mindless Balls
 Deep8 Productions
 
 Washington, D.C.: Hi, Nelly. Do you feel men should take full legal liability for aborted fetuses, and let women have control over decisions about their own bodies?
 
 Nellie McKay: i'm afraid i don't understand the first part of your question - i do think women should have control over their own bodies - incidentally, my name is spelled Nellie.
 
 _______________________
 
 College Park, Md.: I'm a college student at UMD and the buzz about your new album here is pretty big. I just heard it last night and it struck me as a lot of narcissistic, self-satisfied whining. Are you surprised that people are entertained by this?
 
 Nellie McKay: yes, pleasantly surpised.

mankie

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Re: Nellie McKay
« Reply #28 on: March 22, 2004, 10:58:00 am »
She was on XM live a couple of times last week, not my cuppa tea at all. Her performance reminded of a middle school recital, with sub-par piano playing, bad lyrics and not much range in her voice.
 
 Each to their own though.