Who’s The Doctor They Told You To Go See?

Long time no see.  Lots of reasons, most of them summarized by “busyness” and “laziness”.  Whatever.

So most general modern music passes me by, I’ll hear stuff and think it’s OK, or even quite like it, but every so often, about once a year probably, there’ll be one tune I’ll hear and I’ll think “that’s the one this year”.  These days, it’s a case of hop onto Google and try and find out more about the band/song/whatever.  Maybe after hearing it for a few weeks I’ll get a bit fed up of it, but it’s the thrill of that first, maybe second, time of hearing it and feeling excited by it.

Earlier in this blog I alluded to being enchanted by LaRoux.  Other ‘instant hits’ have included Gnarls Barkley “Crazy” (the first time I heard that, I could tell it was going to be the biggest record of the year; my four-year-old at the time called it the “black dots song”, in reference to the video), Evanescence “Bring Me To Life”, Paramore “Ignorance” (although that was mostly because of an excellent acoustic performance in Radio One’s Live Lounge which I think I heard first), Electric Six “Danger! High Voltage”.  I can’t remember any more offhand.

But the first (and maybe only) one for this year is Eminem/Dr.Dre/Skylar Grey’s “I Need A Doctor”.  Heard it for the first time last week (although it has been around stateside for a while), and I knew it was the business.  The rap itself is a fairly run-of-the-mill retrospective thing, Dre and Eminem looking back with some bitterness at the past, and the title is a reflection of a line from a previous one, “Forgot About Dre”:

And when your album sales wasn’t doin too good who’s the Doctor they told you to go see?

But I largely lost interest in rap sometime in the early ’90s (I’m well old skool, me), so I’m not much bothered about that part.  It’s the chorus hook that really captures my attention:

I’m about to lose my mind,
You’ve been gone for so long,
I’m running out of time.
I need a doctor, call me a doctor,
I need a doctor, doctor, to bring me back to life.

(Read more: http://www.killerhiphop.com/eminem-i-need-a-doctor-lyrics-dr-dre/)

I’ve always been a sucker for simple couplets and short repeated rhymes.  Trouble Funk were masters of it in their live shows in the mid ’80s, but they inherited a heritage of crowd-play call-and-response from the funk cats of the 60s and 70s.  Gary Clail made a career out of toasting them over Tackhead and Dub Syndicate, although it was Mark Stewart who wrote most of the ones he used.

Back to those songs then, I make two observations.  One, is that almost all of them have a strong female vocal (also counting Gnarls Barkley as Cee Lo Green sounds almost like a girl sometimes!).  It’s Skylar Grey in the case of the Dre song, and you can use Google as well as I can to find out more about her.  I do like a strong female vocal, but I think it just happens to be co-incidence that those are the ones I picked as examples.

The other observation is that the ones I have mentioned are all mainstream tunes.  Anyone looking at my record collection will know that I generally don’t buy commercial things, but have all sorts of obscure stuff (actually, I rarely buy any “new music” these days, it’s mostly retro stuff if at all).  But maybe that’s the thing … the ones I’ve singled out are ones that I’ve heard on the radio and they hit me.  There are equally good things in the obscure depths of my record collection (yes real, heavy vinyl on sturdy shelves), but they aren’t things I’ve passively heard on the radio in general, they are things I have sought out bought because I like the artist or the label or whatever, so the impact is different.  Audio Active’s Electric Bombardment Remix is a slammin’ thing, but I don’t recall hearing it on Radio 1 back in the day …

Finally, back to “I Need A Doctor”; you might also find the Grammys performance on YouTube.  I have mixed feelings about that.  The first part is a performance with Rhianna and Eminem of their “Love The Way You Lie”.  Not too bad a song, but not a great vocal from the R-girl on this occasion.  That song ends, and then it is straight into Skylar’s chorus, and pretty much the whole of the Dre song.  The performance is faithful to the record, and well-executed live, but here are my problems with it (based on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ArnU95eJXM – warning, this is taken from a foreign TV re-broadcast and doesn’t silence what’s left of the slightly naughty words unlike the domestic US broadcast):

1. Poor sound mix; the vocals are rather lost in the music, and you hardly hear Eminem at the start

2. God-awful truncated ending.  Why even bother, when you could complete the chorus and just let the piano repeat and fade …

3. The blend of the two songs could have been so better managed, rather than just ramming them end-on-end next to other.  Maybe the Grammy music director should take notes from The Brits, who have mastered the art of combining two or three songs/artists/performances in various fascinating, and unlikely, ways.  In the case of LTWYL’s ending around 2:50, it would have been so easy to have the second song’s piano playing a simple melody through the last part of R-girl’s vocal), and into Skylar’s opening chorus.

Taken as a performance as a whole, if you aren’t familiar with the Dre song (so you don’t see it coming), then the simple re-appearance of Eminem (who you might have thought was done as R-girl finishes her song) after the opening chorus is magical.  Actually, I find it magical even if you do know its coming.  Reprises are good.  Long live the version and the reprise.  Another post in there, perhaps.

I need a doctor, call me a doctor,
I need a doctor, doctor, to bring me back to life.