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Music From HBO's The Wire:

Though the show's been around for four years now, this seems to be the year that everyone has finally picked up on HBO's The Wire. If you're not watching the show, you should definitely check it out, as it more than justifies the monthly cable bill. The Wire focuses on the interactions between the Baltimore Police Department and the drug dealers in West Baltimore, and the lives of the civilians who get caught in between. There are a bunch of other sites that have analyzed the show itself (including the latest issue of The Fader), but I'm more interested in the music that The Wire features.

The show uses a lot of regional music in each episode, has been the inspiration for the Hamsterdam mixtape ("Hamsterdam" being a reference to a plot point from Season 3) and has a couple of local musicians on the cast. One of the actresses, the nailgun-weilding psychopath Snoop, is even doing commercials for the new Clipse album. I'll be honest, I don't know a whole lot about the Baltimore music scene, so I did a little research and came up with a few tracks for today.

The most notable musician on the cast of The Wire is Anwan "Big G" Glover, who plays Slim Charles, the former enforcer for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale. Glover is a founding member of The Backyard Band, a Go-Go group from Baltimore Washington, DC. From Wikipedia: "Go-go is defined by continuous, complex, heavy rhythm arrangements focused through two motifs performed on multiple congas, tumbadoras, and rototoms, interspersed with timbale and cowbell parts, driven by heavy-footed drumming and punctuated by crowd call-and-response." Here is a Go-Go track from The Backyard Band:

The Backyard Band -- We Don't Give A F..

To hear more from The Backyard Band, check out their MySpace page.

Another type of music that is unique to the region is Baltimore Breaks, or Baltimore Club music. Bmore Club started in the early 90's through the work of Frank Ski. Influenced by the Miami Bass sounds of Luther Campbell's 2 Live Crew, Ski put together uptempo beats (often upwards of 130 BPM) with looped vocal samples from hip hop songs and television shows. The result is something that sounds fairly similar to the juke music we covered earlier on this site. These days, the songs often have rappers spitting verses on top of the beat as well.

Over the past few years, Bmore club has started to spread north. Clubs in North Jersey (Newark, Patterson, East Orange) have been playing the music since the late 90's, with djs such as DJ Tameil helping to promote the music. Hipsters in New York also seem to have picked up on the music.

One of the songs that has helped Bmore Club get some mainstream attention has been Young Leek's Jiggle It. You can download it from Idolator here.

Here's another example of Bmore Club music, from DJ Big Red:

DJ Big Red -- Imma Alkaholik

I'll admit I'm not the biggest fan of the Baltimore music scene and my knowledge about it is fairly limited. If you want to read more about the music, check out Government Names.

To read more about the Wire and the music spotlighted on the show, check out Blake Leyh's (the Music Supervisor for the Wire) blog The Ten Thousand Things.

Thanks to DifferentKitchen for the Clipse video. And shoutout to DronkMunk, where I first saw the link to Ten Thousand.

11/10/2006 1:36:29 AM posted by Fresh