No Trivia

No Trivia has moved!

2010-03-18T13:45:00.002-04:00

Hey, if you didn't know, the blog is now at www.No-Trivia.com. Subscribe to this feed: http://no-trivia.com/feed.

It's All In the Details: Comments on Specific Parts of Rap Hits

2010-02-24T23:48:00.001-05:00

One of the byproducts of radio's refusal to play more than say, the same eight songs all day, every day, is that you get to really think about and focus on those few they do play a whole bunch of times. It makes the bad ones suddenly interesting and the already good ones really interesting.

-The bassline of "Lemonade"
Gucci Mane, produced by Bangladesh
Like a lot of his Southern synth-rap producer peers, Bangladesh loves some bass, but until "Lemonade", it was used more as an aggressor, a big booming thing in the background, than a sorta lovely, musical detail. "Lemonade" has got the best bassline in a rap song since the one that tears through the middle of Kanye's "The Glory" a few years back. Is this sampled from somewhere? Is this a session dude? Was this created on a keyboard or MPC or something? Who knows. Listen to the way it wriggles all around the rest of the beat and Gucci's flow, a series of patient, pulsing plucks at the start of the song and getting more focused and squirmy as it goes on, kinda chasing the little kid chorus, and then just doing this like focused, Peter Hook rock-out thing and then, back to patient plucking. Note: the bass is the last sound you hear as "Lemonade" ends.

-The way "Say Something" could be looped forever
Timbaland ft. Drake, produced by Timbaland
Yeah yeah yeah, Timbaland's mostly coasting these days--though he's improved as rapper, sorta channelling Bun B, late Bun B at least, on his verse here--but there's a cool, like, chintzy glory to recent Timbo. He isn't filling his beats with tempo change-ups and batshit production tweaks anymore, he's dropping an Atari melody, one or two flanger-ed out guitars, making it passably dancey, and that's a wrap. The byproduct of this relative half-assness though, is that the beats feel like they're going on forever, like it's this eternal loop of synths and computer squawks that's been looping for hours or maybe just a few minutes. This was true of "Venus vs. Mars" on Blueprint 3 as well. This fucks with your circadian rhythms!

-The weird, flat, Go-Go drums on "Exhibit C"
Jay Electronica, produced by Just Blaze
When Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got" dropped--was that the last single to show up on the radio and mean something?--there was a Vegas sound to it that just didn't make a lot of sense for something produced by Just Blaze. The live or live-sounding drums, almost on some Go-Go, bucket-drumming shit, just didn't you know, knock. Weird how the same type of drums show up on "Exhibit C" and it's one of the best things about the song. This is some of Jay Electronica's best and most traditionalist rapping and along with the soul sample, the whole thing would be kinda "backpacker" if it weren't for the drums. They make it way more interesting and I think it's part of why the song's made its way onto regular radio. It rings real for the old heads but it doesn't thump or plod along to youngsters' ears.

-The open space on "O Let's Do It"
Waka Flocka Flame, produced by L-Don Beatz
A producer's got confidence when he doesn't fill each and every second of a beat with some kind of sound or sample or something. Plenty of beats drop-out for a moment or two, but "O Let's Do It" starts and stops, starts and stops...it gives rappers an infinite number of places to hang their cadences. This is why someone like Wacka Flocka Flame made it a hit (his confessional asides, like "Ever since they killed my nigga Trav, start poppin pills and actin crazy" help too) and why every remix of it sounds awesome. As "dumb" as this beat probably sounds to a lot of people, it's pretty traditionalist, Marley Marl minus the samples. if you listen close, there's even this weird, almost simple record scratching sound that wobbles under the whole thing.

further reading/viewing:
-"Producer Series Mix #1: Shondrae "Bangladesh" Crawford" by Al Shipley
-"Dilla Donuts Month: "Time: Donut of the Heart" by Me & Thaddeus Clark
-Rare Essence "Hey Young World" 8/12/89
-MySpace Page for L-Don Beatz

Boutique Poptimism: Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, & the Taylor Swift Backlash

2010-02-22T22:43:00.002-05:00

The sequence of events that moved Taylor Swift from wildly successful, really interesting pop star, to the kind of pop star that the supposedly more discerning, with-it crowd gets to ponder and write thinkpieces about is pretty strange: She gained everybody's sympathies because Kanye was a dick, only to lose those sympathies when she was given awards by the kind of people that would've given her awards whether Kanye grabbed the mic from her or not.

This response is perhaps best represented in this bizarre kinda insane piece, which Rob Harvilla already zinged properly, but there's still a lot to unpack here. Apparently, Swift's "average"-ness causes a lot of controversy.

Probably because in 2009/2010, being some kind of meta-commenting, bicurious, genre-bouncing, in-quotes superstar, is way more played-out than being a regular-ass person. And that, simply by doing what she does and doing it very well, Swift and the response she elicits, make clear an unfortunate trend that's been floating around for a while now--what I call "Boutique Poptimism".

Namely, that we're past the point where the idea that "hey maybe unabashed pop music kinda rules" is controversial and what's happening is a backwards bending, a regression, where a new bunch of new implicit rules are being laid-out for what constitutes "good" pop from "bad" pop. No surprise, they're ideological. They have a lot to do with what the music "represents" and very little to do with how the music sounds.

Because everyone's aware that dismissing Pop is closed-minded, the response is not to wholly embrace it, to step out of one's comfort zone (one of the many values behind Poptimism), but to find the Pop that already suits ones values and co-sign that. This is particularly apparent in the "Indie" embrace of Lady Gaga and to a lesser extent, someone like Ke$ha. You will hear both of them on your town's hit stations...and at liberals arts school dance parties...and in Urban Outfitters.

These pop musicians are acceptable because of their inauthenticity, because they comment on pop, they aren't just making pop like Swift. Gaga, who clearly took some classes in Postmodern theory but only kinda paid attention, has made herself critic-proof: If you don't like her, you don't "get" her. And with that, a more rarified audience is hooked, beyond such negligible things as monster choruses (but little else, Gaga's songs are like hair metal in that sense) but "big" ideas.

And Ke$ha--well it's mind-blowing that anybody but newly-divorced Moms would like her but the cool kids like her too, because it sorta sounds like Peaches or Uffie or that last Yeah Yeah Yeahs record. She provides the illusion of being open to new sounds, with dashes of electro, an almost rapping style, and edgy topics like drinking too much. Again--these aren't songs about "square" stuff like boys and getting married.

That she has a dollar-sign in her name to be "ironic" and that she swipes from the debauchery of Keith Richards for style points, while using the very similar debauchery of Diddy for a punchline, makes her deeply square and rockist is besides the point. If it's couched in something, anything that appears trangressive, like irony or feminist or postmodern theory, no matter how bastardized, it's acceptable.

This is really fascinating because it's both a rejection of Rockism's absurd demands for authenticity and an embrace of an equally complacent set of values. Ones that don't open up the world of music (and through that, the world at-large) but open them up on one's own terms, providing the illusion of porous borders and expansive taste, without any of the hard stuff involved, like stepping out of one's comfort zone or putting one's self out there.

It takes a Strong Poptimist to enjoy Taylor Swift. One that sees the inherent value of worker-bee skill and talent bouncing up against simple, but sincere expression, who can also see/hear some of the same stuff in Gaga or Ke$ha and appreciate the differences too--Poptimism is not supposed to be the one or the other game Boutique Poptimists like to play.

further reading/viewing:
-"Boutique multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech" by Stanley Fish
-"Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos" by Riese for AutoStraddle
-"So Let's Deal With This "Taylor Swift Is a Feminist's Nightmare" Thing" by Rob Harvilla for Sound of the City
-Lady Gaga & Rob Fusari (thanks to MFastow for the link)
-Review of Music from the O.C: Mix 4 by Rob Mitchum for Pitchfork

Goines Book Club: Dopefiend

2010-02-15T23:31:00.002-05:00

Holloway House's decision to delay publication of Donald Goines' first manuscript Whoreson until after Dopefiend frustrated the just-out-of-prison writer then, but viewing Dopefiend as Goines' debut is ideal when looking at his oeuvre. Whoreson is best viewed like a popular writer's early, usually unpublished works: It's soaked in its influences (Iceberg Slim and presumably, confessional works like Soul on Ice) and is really only of interest for the half-formed ideas that would later come out whole.

The strange thing is, Goines wrote them within a year or so of one another--Whoreson was written in prison, Dopefiend was already outlined by the time of his release—and they were published only a year apart, Dopefiend in 1971, Whoreson (as well as Black Gangster ) in 1972. It's conceivable that Whoreson got caught up in edits and revisions over at Holloway House. Though it was accepted for publication before Goines was even out of jail—the contract is dated October 19,1970—it was probably in no condition to be sent out to the masses.

Dopefiend was typed-up by Goines' sister and as Eddie Allen notes, Goines' sister found “her brother's spelling and sentence structure [to be] quite the horror” (115). And so, early on Goines essentially had two people drastically reworking his books. One book is really good, one book isn't that good. The not-so-good one was edited by Holloway House, the good one was edited by sister first and then, Holloway House. You figure it out.

Authorship is a non-issue when it comes to Goines. Primarily because there's just no specifics out there, no manuscripts, or existing correspondence between Goines and Holloway House. But also because Goines is a means-to-an-end writer, hardly a prose stylist, and the best aspects of his books are apparent in how things occur, in narrative structure and character arcs (or lack thereof) and so, mulling over his syntax—which early on, may not have been his syntax at all—is essentially a waste of time.

Still, there's something fascinating about the discrepancies in quality between Goines' first manuscript and second, and it's an excellent aid in investigating what makes Goines so great. When you take a writer that's not taken seriously very seriously, it's an uphill critical battle, and being able to point out their lesser work helps a lot. Whoreson is basically the kind of reckless pulp many associate with Goines, while Dopefiend is something much more.

In terms of publishing order, it's very possible Holloway House was aware that one book was better than the other and it could explain why Dopefiend came out before Whoreson. Interestingly, a noted author following up a telling, defining debut with an underwhelming sophomore effort puts Goines in the company of many great authors.

It's also worth pointing out that the differences in quality between his first two books hardly mattered to the buying public: The sales figures for Dopefiend were 88,276 books sold and Whoreson, 80,753 books sold, if a letter circa 1972 quoted in Allen's book is to be believed (142).

Dopefiend hits the ground running. There isn't a better introduction to the gritty world of Goines than the first chapter of Dopefiend. It's all right there, starting with drug-dealer Porky and his dogs and quickly moving to the sensory details of a his apartment—the smell of blood, the mix of garbage and bodily fluids on the floor, Jean's pus-filled abscess. It's a gleefully sensationalistic introduction but it also leaves the book nowhere to go, which is a good thing.

Goines will pay-off our more lurid expectations--to paraphrase Chekhov, if you promise dogs that fuck women in the beginning, it better happen by the end of the book—but the ugly details of the next nearly three-hundred pages is essentially more of the same. What'll change is the context, he'll introduce us to these characters, they're all given some kind of backstory and page-by-page their addictions will become both singular and one big lump of dependence.

That the book begins at the bottom introduces the palpable sense of inevitability in every Goines book, but one that's especially notable in Dopefiend because it defies so many of the “story of addiction” narrative conventions. This is perhaps, Dopefiend's most impressive feat: That it takes the same trajectory every drug addict novel and memoir takes (because addiction is predictable) but doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel that way because Goines focuses on a group of characters, who are of varying degrees of addiction. There's Smokey and the many inhabitants of Porky's heroin house, then there's Teddy, an addict well on his way to the bottom, and there's his girlfriend, Terry, an innocent. And there's also all the regular-ass friends and family that suffer from their loved ones' addictions.

The structural brilliance of Dopefiend comes in the way these these differing trajectories all interact. There's no conventional “fall”, there's no inescapable plunge because that's where the book begins. Even Teddy and Terry aren't pure, Teddy's a full-fledged addict at the book's beginning and Terry's imminent addiction will not bring them together, but separate them. Heroin is not fun or cool in Dopefiend.

This point can't be overstated. Joy doesn't exist in Dopefiend and Goines, perhaps because he was so close to the drug he was writing about, hardly even dwells on the awesome euphoria of the drug. Nearly everyone in the book is just trying to not get sick. Nearly every interaction is financial: How much money is needed to stave off sickness, how much something can be sold for once its stolen etc. It adds a strange, in-quotes reality even to every “friendly” relationship in the book.

We understand and accept Porky's motivations for getting Terry strung-out, but every interaction is that cynical. The night after yelling at Terry, Teddy's regret is phrased this way: “He silently cursed the night he had been so high he'd forgotten how nice it was to have the use of Terry's car.” (93). One hundred pages later, Terry is finally brought to hooking and the pregnant Minnie can barely “hide the pleasure she felt”--Terry's good looks would bring in enough money to support both habits (193).

Though it's doubtful that it was Goines' intention, Terry's absurd psychological regression (really, the only problematic thing in the book) at the book's end is especially silly given the insincerity of everybody in the book. The doctor describes Terry's “guilt” for playing a part in the suicide of “a friend” (279), but Goines has spent hundreds of pages calling attention to the double and triple talk and backwards bending motivations behind nearly every interaction. One could stretch it into an example of Terry's innocence, but it seems more like a thread Goines just didn't weave into the rest of the book.

Still, the final scene with Terry, childlike, her parents devastated, nearly succeeds because Goines totally sells it. And he's able to sell it because unlike most drug tales, Goines never sets-up a “square”/”hip” dichotomy. There's a moment, after Terry's fired from her job for stealing, when her mom even “laugh[s] self-consciously at her own ignorance” about drugs and when the truth's revealed, it's rooted in a parental denial (127). This is contrasted by an earlier scene with Teddy's family, who are well-aware that he's, in the words of his sister, “nothing but another dopefiend” (61). These are people with a stake in their children's lives--not clueless, unhip squares.

The other “square” treated not only with respect, but as essentially, the only truthful character in the book, is Terry's ex-schoolmate Billy. Billy's almost too perfect, his dialogue's written like he's from Leave it to Beaver or something (“That sarcasm doesn't become you, Terry. You really have changed in the past few months.”) but his perspective's dead-on and he's revealed to be hip to addiction because of his own brother's descent (76). Given the nature of the book, the established nihilism even this early on, one expects Billy to try to molest Terry or something—instead, he's just disgusted.

Interestingly though, Goines doesn't entirely let the “squares” off-the-hook. Particularly fascinating is the scene late in the book where Teddy's sister has him arrested for stealing her check from the mailman (whose naivete is also exploited) and Teddy's mother gets her to drop the charges. She cries out, with the same “logic” as nearly every mother of an addict/enabler: “Dear God, Jesus. I'd rather see him dead than in here like this. I can't stand it, Jesus. I just can't stand it.” (233). Even here though, there's a kindness to Goines' implication—she's only described as “stubborn”--because we see where she's coming from and because heroin isn't a bad-ass ride or anything, Teddy's immediate tumble back into the routine of drugging is pathetic (233).

There's also a subtle implication of white society throughout Dopefiend as Goines often highlights the small, but notable ways society benefits from the actions of addicts. All the stolen stuff in the book is sold to local businesses or even to one's neighbors for cheap. When Terry begins hooking, both of her johns are whites, the second of which, is a stereotypical nerd who lies about how much money he has in his wallet (202-203). Teddy and Snake's lawyer is an aged, white shlockmeister who tries to hustle them out of an extra two-hundred bucks (213). Porky is jumped as he's delivering his monthly payola to the police and after he's stabbed, one officer asks if the money's there before checking on the wailing bloated dealer (258). Goines continues this in many of his books, as often white people are shown to be particularly brutal and lecherous. Unfortunately, too much has been made of this by critics eager to connected Goines to the deeply politicized black literature of the time.

What is much more revolutionary about Goines' work is his incorporation of a black middle class into a narrative that doesn't need it. That his investigation into social strata doesn't stop at “poor blacks” and “rich whites”. Terry exists not only as the cliched “Good girl” necessary in every harrowing account of addiction, but also as a comment on how inextricably tied, due to institutionalized racism, the black middle-class is to the black under-class and underworld. How it is much more conceivable that Terry could easily meet a Teddy because she is black. This is as much Goines injecting autobiography into his book as all of those ugly details of addiction.

But, these tangent are the byproducts of a focused, non-Romanticized drug narrative. Rather than rope in bigger ideas or over-arching comments on this or that, they leak out of a multi-character addiction tale. Nobody's a symbol and heroin's never turned into a means to some bigger, end. Of all the patterns to pull out of Dopefiend, the one that occurs the most is references to characters' bowels and farting and that's kinda perfect. Early on, the reality that Terry's hanging out with “that dopefiend-ass bitch” Minnie make the constipated-from-addiction Teddy unable to focus on “trying to have a bowel movement” (56). Terry farts at the sight of heroin on page 118, and Porky's associate Dave does the same in the middle of a rather tense drug deal on page 186.

This focus on the body is about as down-to-earth and simple as a writer can get. Though it sounds strange, it's the perfect example of what Dopefiend does so well: Break addiction down to the ugliest, least ideal functions and leave it at that. This ability to turn small details into big ideas while not reducing them to symbols may be specific to Goines and only Goines. Heroin isn't a symbol for anything, as it so often is in other tales of the drug. It isn't a metaphor for innocence lost—Terry and Teddy aren't some urban Adam and Eve—or a way to investigate friendship and it most certainly isn't transgressive or “hip” as it was and continues to be in so many works of art.

SOURCES CITED:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Goines, Donald. Dopefiend. Holloway House: Los Angeles, 2005.

Okay. Finally. Sorry about the delays. Whoreson essay will still go up on Friday, February, 26th. There's plenty here I missed, so feel free to send the conversation in a direction different than my essay's...-b

Locating Goines Pt. 4: Goines & Street Fiction

2010-02-13T23:49:00.001-05:00

Though Goines' desire to write stems solely from reading Iceberg Slim, and Goines' and Slim's names are now mentioned together as the founders of Street Fiction, their work is pretty different. Goines, following Slim, approached crime and the underworld with an unflinching reality that still holds-up in 2010 and combined it with a hard-to-explain, unconditional empathy for the characters. Unlike Chester Himes, who did similar things, the law and order element is all but gone in Slim and Goines' work and that's crucial.

But what Goines left behind, when he took up writing (with Slim in the front of his mind), was Slim's wired subjectivity. Not so much Slim's frequent use of the first person even though that's part of it, but more, Slim's off-the-wall jazzy, slang-filled, kinda impenetrable language. If not for Slim's dirty old man tendencies (he can be just plain lurid), I don't see why his work wouldn't be the mid-point between African-American Literature in the the Harlem Renaissance era and the post-modern era. Slim's a genius with words--Joycean really--and his stories are thick with slang, tangents, and asides that make him part of the writing-about-writing, joy-of-words, style of Modernism whether he knows it or not.

Goines, not so much. He's direct and straight-forward, always. But what Goines saw in Slim's work was a lot of things he'd also seen and experienced put--for the first time as far as Goines was concerned--into a book: Less sentimental, less "square" crime narratives rubbing up against a kinder approach to the criminals. And this made Donald Goines write. He even ended up at publisher Holloway House--the closest to white patronage guys like Slim or Goines could get in the late 60s--because they published Slim's work.

Slim's unrelenting bleakness, a worldview as dark and depressive as any more respectable Modernist must've also grabbed Goines. This too is why Goines is closer in spirit to McKay than DuBois--there's no room for the kind of reformist idealism DuBois suggests in Home to Harlem or any of Goines' novels. Moments of hope, the possibility of change, yes, but it's kinda there, hovering around out of reach, just to further illustrate how fucked things are. Though institutions and institutionalized racism are a significant part of Goines' work, there's always more than a suggestion of free will and choice.

This lack of hope, coupled with a more conventional demand for personal accountability, is what made Goines' work separate from the politicized literature of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, popular at the time. Despite the progressiveness, despite the radical pragmatism, the goal of Black Power in particular, had its roots in the same puritanical ideas of every organized American group. And that kind of hope and idealism just isn't something Goines could hold onto.

Even in Goines' books about the character Kenyatta, a Black Militant out to rid his city and the world of drugs, the character fails. Many like to read this as the ultimate indictment of American racism--that the country would not let change like that happen--but reading through the four books (Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta's Escape, Kenyatta's Last Hit), there's enough milling around to suggest that Goines finds Kenyatta's ideals more than a little bit absurd. That he had a kind of slanted, deeply suspicious take on everybody and everything--shades of Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice. Really, it only makes sense that Goines would not find his work aligned with the political literature of the 60s and 70s, but that doesn't make it any less unfortunate.

Goines though, who rejected and was rejected by Civil Rights and Black Power artists, developed the next wave of African-American Literature: Street Fiction, now Urban Fiction. His disinterest in radicalism, along with an approach much more low-to-the-ground (big ideas are couched in little ideas, never the other way around), allowed Goines to side-step ideology, and ultimately provide his work with something closer to universality. Other people's, other group's ideas never step into the work and derail it from its focus on individuals, their actions, and their surroundings.

On the topic of big ideas, of over-arching statements--you know literary stuff--note that Goines never wrote a conventional autobiography. He has no personal manifesto. No breakdown of his own struggle. He doesn't have his Pimp: the Story of My Life. Goines' Whoreson is more an attempt to mimic Slim's work (almost a work of Juvenilia), and that all his books in one way or another, are autobiographies makes him more like most conventional authors (pulling from life, turning it into fiction that then, resembles life).

A fairly conventional--dare I say, middle-class--sense of morality dominates Goines' works as well. His books aren't these odd, sideways street fables/parables like Slim's books, but novels where what's "right" and "wrong" is actually pretty clear. Though the "street code" is important to the books, Goines' constant introduction of regular, working people and the interruption of a narrator who can't always hide his disgust for the events he's describing, balance the books out. He's adroit at sequencing events in a way that makes the reader understand why a character's doing this or that, but there's not this nihilism in there that suggests it's the only way. There's stability in his books, there's hope, it just isn't always that easy to find.

The hope comes through in the obvious moralizing, but also in his sensitivity to the psychology of his characters. What lots of critics think of as inconsistencies in the book--shifting motivations, sudden kindness, etc.--is just reality. The way people shift or change in the moment, the way they don't make sense, despite the soul-crushing patterns and codes they follow, is what Goines writes about...and all that Goines writes about.

And it's this doesn't-totally-work mixing of lurid, ugly "reality" with fairly conventional morality, with detours into street-code pragmatism that's dominated the Street Fiction market since Goines. Slim is of note for sure, but his connection to what's now categorized as "Urban Fiction" comes down to his early embrace of slang and influencing Goines.

Most Street Fiction though, misreads Goines. There's a kind of pat, wrap-around morality or "everyone gets it in the end" that Goines wisely avoided or truly earned in his books. Go find a sex scene in Goines book and realize how cold and disinteresting it is. Notice how the violence pops-up out of nowhere and is over very quickly. They're in there because the plot needs it, his publishers demanded it, and the audience loves it, but he keeps it moving A lot of contemporary Street Fiction reads more like what a Goines book seems like it'd be like before one actually opens it up and reads it.

This though, speaks more for Goines' rarefied body of work than it does for Street Fiction in the 2000s, which indeed, must conform to today's standards of shock, all the while smuggling in as many tougher doses of reality and insight as possible. All the while of course, under an even more watchful, limiting eye of the publisher, because Street Fiction's big business now. I take what I previously said back--Goines was lucky to write in the early 70s.

Locating Goines Pt. 3: Goines & The Harlem Renaissance

2010-02-12T14:16:00.003-05:00

Street Fiction author Jihad, in an essay called "The Resurrection of Street Fiction" put it bluntly: "Saying street fiction is dead is like saying poverty is non-existent. [Contemporary] Street fiction is the re-emergence of the Harlem renaissance era." (par. 2) If that's the case--and there'd be a case for it if anyone were taking any of the stuff now relegated to the "Urban Fiction" section seriously--then the mid-point between the Street Fiction Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance would be Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. And though Goines' biggest, maybe only influence is Slim, Goines' work most closely resembles Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay, specifically McKay's Home to Harlem.

Home to Harlem tells the story of Jake Brown, a black soldier, who returns from WWI to Harlem, takes up with a prostitute and spends the rest of the novel trying to find her once again--the search sends him on a trip through Harlem's working-class and criminal underbelly. Though much is made of the interaction between McKay's text and white Harlem Renaissance patron Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven--a book that despite its title, was appreciated at the time by Renaissance gatekeepers and was certainly not intended as racist--there are a few more notable texts McKay is messing around with in Home to Harlem: Homer's The Odyssey and W.E.B DuBois' article "The Talented Tenth".

Back to er, Nigger Heaven for a moment. Due to its unfortunate title and an increased sensitivity to whites writing about the black experience, McKay's book is often seen as a "corrective" to Van Vechten's view of Harlem. And that's not far off. But it isn't the big political corrective it's often presented as and more the publication of a sentiment whispered amongst black writers of the time, about one of their most notable patrons: "Man, he got it wrong!". That's to say, the corrective is subtler, more mired in details and specificities. McKay doesn't avoid the chaotic side of Harlem that Van Vechten portrayed, but he does it with little of the weird, kinda racist interest of Van Vechten, but the same contrarian love of working-class wildness.

This is where Goines' similarities to McKay begin. This outsider (McKay was born in Jamaica, he was also Communist and homosexual) who's also an insider portraying a maligned aspect of reality with a sensitivity to detail and character and none of the two problems that usually characterize this kind of work: the condescension or self-justification of the lower-class. Most notably, there's the strange, tangential chapter in Home to Harlem, "He Also Loved", Chapter XVII. In short, it tells the tragic story of a pimp named Jerco, and the overwhelming sadness he felt when one of his whores dies. The theme of the chapter and in a way, the book, is summarized by Ray--the other main character of Home to Harlem--when he tells Jake, "And I have been forced down to the level of pimps and found some of them more human" (244).

It's worth pointing out that none of this stuff I'm discussing is revolutionary, it's recounted in a ton of scholarly texts, but McKay's ability to touch on a sentiment--a sympathy, even empathy with the criminal element, the under privileged and under-discussed--that would define Depression-era Hollywood cinema, the crime genre as a whole to this day, Goines and Slim's work (in a sense, Goines' Street Players is "He Also Loved" stretched to an entire book), all subsequent Street Fiction, and even most hip-hop is fascinating. You see why rappers reference Goines so much. They should probably read McKay just as well.

Unlike Goines though, McKay had a literary movement backing his aggressively trashy, literary bestseller (though it was still maligned by many) and a conscious sense of literary tradition/literary tradition-bucking in there too. Home to Harlem is essentially a parody of Homer's The Odyssey. An ugly, perverse re-telling of the soldier, back from war, trying to find his love, only this time, it's WWI and the soldier returns from fighting for his country to being another "nigger" and his "love" is a whore he shacked-up with his first night back. McKay plays the white literary establishment game--he's interacting with "the canon"--and totally destroying it by flipping all its ideas around.

McKay's use of the canon though, is also in response to W.E.B DuBois' "The Talented Tenth" essay and the assertions that go along with it: That a black elite must form, put its best face forward, that "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." (par. 1). This meant a refusal to celebrate or even really, properly consider works that may encourage or verify stereotypes. Langston Hughes' response to DuBois was an essay called "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain" which politely eschewed DuBois' assertions: "If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too." (par. 14) This debate continues to this day--Tyler Perry, anybody?

In "Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure", C. Liegh McInnis uses Eddie Allen's Low Road as a kind of jumping-off point for an analysis of Goines' worldview. McInnis interestingly, aligns Goines with McKay, though not entirely:

"Goines never completely rejects Du Bois but moreso embraces the notion of Claude McKay in his Home to Harlem that the truth of humanity is found in how people react to and endure the worst of times and themselves. Neither Goines nor Allen suggests that we must celebrate nihilism, but it must be addressed if we are to ever conquer it." (par. 1)

It's important to stress that Home to Harlem stands on its own, free of all this "Talented Tenth" context, the same way the appended context to Goines' work isn't important to reading, but McKay was indeed, consciously and aggressively confounding the things DuBois was talking about.

Goines, as McInnis suggests, is doing something similar but different. There's always some hope or escape in Goines' work. You will always find characters who, in one way or another, could be part of DuBois' "Talented Tenth" and they are often used as really obvious contrasts to the criminal main characters. This I think, has a lot to do with Goines' explicit "choosing" of a life of crime. That's to say, every criminal at one point or another "chooses" that life, but that it becomes more hulking, less like a choice, when not a whole lot of other options surround you. Goines to some extent, had other options.

That said, "the life" pulled Goines in really early and affected him deeply and those characters, events, and experience were all turned into his books. Though there's very little humor or joy in Goines' work, the hope comes through in the obvious moralizing, but also in his sensitivity to the psychology of his characters. What lots of critics think of as inconsistencies in the book--shifting motivations, sudden kindness, etc.--is just reality. Harlem, the working-class, and the underworld, in one way or another, remain symbols in McKay's book. Goines wasn't interested in this kind of thing, presumably not even aware of this rarefied but consequential variation on white supremacy that is "the canon", but it was McKay's rigorous intellectual approach to something anti-intellectual that laid the groundwork for Goines and others' similar works.

SOURCES:
-DuBois, W.E.B. "The Talented Tenth".
-Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist & the Racial Mountain".
-Jihad. "The Resurrection of Street Fiction". The Urban Book Source. January 2009.
-McInnis, C. Liegh. "Donald Goines as an Allegorical Figure". Mississippi Political.
-McKay, Claude. Home to Harlem. Northeastern University Press: Boston. 1987.

Locating Goines Pt. 2: Goines & the Literary Tradition

2010-02-11T11:07:00.003-05:00

Some throat-clearing before, we get down to business with Dopefiend. This project's been slow, my bad. I'm usually obsessive about delivering on "theme" blogs and stuff on time, but real-life got in the way this time around. If you're participating, I hope you've started Whoreson, as I still plan to have the essay/discussion stimulator for that one up by February 26th. Dopefiend discussion on Monday. I promise.-b

On the overall list of tragedies (addiction, jail time, being uh, murdered with his kids in the house) that befell Donald Goines during his way-too-brief life, the lack of support he got for his writing, probably ranks pretty low. This is important to note because too often, critics or just semi-amateur chin-scratching types like myself can get a little too caught up in the creator/artist and forgot about the person behind it all.

Don't forget that Donald Goines was more than his sixteen books, but frankly, that's what mostly "matters" in 2010. He was a troubled guy, who all too often resorted to crime, and wrote a bunch of incredible books that were really influential but percieved as "trashy" then, and are only slightly more respected now. That's a bummer. Tragic from a certain point of view.

Better yet, Urban/Street Fiction--the sub-genre he helped found--is a phenomenon that's still dismissed or laughed-off as a whole, while the critical discussion of Goines' work is relegated to a lot of very boring, kinda out-of-it French scholarship (and no matter how bad my online translator is, these essays are clueless), some decent but marginalized American criticism (which I'll occasionally cite), a terrible book called Donald Writes No More, and Eddie Allen's Low Road, a book that wobbles but never falls down under the weight of being the only actual biography of Goines as well as the only American book to take the writing seriously.

Goines' critical reputation could do a lot worse, but it could and should be better. This though, isn't entirely a bad thing. The continued lack of critical interest, coupled with the unwavering appeal of his books amongst regular-ass people preserves Goines' work in a good weird way. No matter what happens at this point, he'll never fall into this armpit of respectability where so many other pulpy writers' reputations currently reside: Not read by a lot of people, not really canonized, just kinda uh, there. "Cult" in the worst sense of the word.

There are at least a few more decades before Goines' work becomes of only "ethographic" or pop-cultural value--like books by Horatio Alger or Charlotte Temple or something. In twenty years, Goines still won't be part of any canon that matters, but more people will pick up his books than whoever's dominating the bestseller list right now. If that's the case, and I think it is, it's the perfect time to look at Goines' work from something resembling an academic standpoint. No amount of lit-crit nonsense could dessicate Goines' populist appeal and some long-hard looks into his books could only serve them well.

In the first part of this supposed-to-be quick intro to the "Goines Book Club", I tried to nail-down Goines very weird place as a writer. I called his perspective "next to the hood"--neither above it all, nor down in it and self-justifying. In a series of essays over the next few days, I would like to show how Goines is equally out-of-place when it comes to literary traditions; constantly straddling stuff from the past and stuff that hadn't happened quite yet.

Again, hesitant to use the word "tragic" here, but there's something really unfortunate about Goines' five-year (would've been longer had he not died) literary epiphany: It arrived at an inopportune time for grabbing onto any kind of literary or popular fiction zeitgeist. And popular interest and critical respect were indeed, something Goines was after. Writing wasn't a hustle for him anymore than it was for any guy, no matter how many fancy awards they got, who decide to sell their fiction to the public.

Part of positioning Goines into literary history involves, unfortunately, labeling him. Right now, he's "Donald Goines, Street fiction pioneer" and he'll always be that. But it's important to find the ways Goines' work dips into many literary traditions of his time (1950s-1970s) and how he fits into American Literature and African-American Literature overall. Goines the African-American Author, Goines the Sociologist, Goines the Social Realist, Goines the Post-WWII Writer, Goines the Post-Modernist.

Among the many reasons no one's really connected his work to literary tradition before is because it can so easily be combatted with the cynical point that Goines wasn't much of a reader. That he didn't know anything about post-WWII American Literature or even know who the hell say, Claude McKay is. The only author Goines ever cited as an influence was Iceberg Slim--and really, his work only superficially resembles Slim's.

A lot of this cynicism, or this refusal to connect literary dots, comes from those studying Goines' work though. There's a fear in most Goines criticism (again, except Eddie Allen) of being clowned for taking it too seriously, or not going well out of one's way to discuss Goines' foibles, how he's a poor writer (he isn't) or misogynist (most certainly not) or thug with a pen (no fucking way). This has to stop and part of what I want to do is save Goines from these kinds of caveats.

Critics' rather low-rent expectations of the author become clear when even an apparent homage to Chester Himes in Goines' White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief (the main character is named Chester Hines) gets viewed speculatively. Eddie Allen says it would be "an uncanny coincidence" if it weren't "a literary tribute" and goes on to describe Himes and Goines' parallel lives in many ways (middle-class blacks who got into crime and took up writing in jail) but doesn't try to read any intertextual meanings to the homage (152-153). Greg Goode's essay "From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit: The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald Goines", in Melus (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), says "White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief is perhaps a tribute to Chester Himes' prison novel Cast the First Stone." (44) Note that "perhaps"--you'll find qualifiers like that throughout Goode's tentative essay.

Goines never cited Himes' work but then again, there's very few places where a record of Goines speaking-on or citing much of anything exists. With most writers though, this reference would open the doors up for all kinds of inferences and text-to-text analyses and it's surprising that it hasn't. It's also good; precisely what I mean about Goines occupying a good weird place when it comes to criticism. It's important to consider Himes' influence on Goines and not lean on it too heavily.

Personally, this kind of critical connect the author-dots is a little boring and lazy anyway, and what's more important is Goines' stylistic and thematic connections to authors and literary styles, intentional or not. That kind of "in the air" of the decades thing that makes books of the past strangely connected whether they were all reading one another's manuscripts or not.

In short, it doesn't matter if AUTHOR X and AUTHOR Y knew one another or read one another--they were doing similar things during similar times and that can really illuminate the work. With Goines, I'd like to not so much label him as this kind of author or that kind of author, but show how Goines' work very much aligns with specific literary styles...and how it doesn't.

This between a lot of things position is what makes Goines' work interesting and once more, makes him like every great author. How the stuff that makes say, Hemingway a Romantic is as interesting as the stuff that makes him not only a Modernist, but the Modernist. With Goines though, there's a sense of "what if" to this literary tradition stuff because, had he been writing in nearly any other decade but the 1970s, his work would've easily found a more sizable audience and one that could've afforded him a more sustainable living and writing career. No amount of criticism in the world can alter that fact, but more serious criticism of Goines' novels may right that wrong in one way or another. It begins with placing Goines in the American literary timeline, really for the first time.

SOURCES:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Goode, Greg. "From Dopefiend to Kenyatta's Last Hit: The Angry Black Crime Novels of Donald Goines." MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 3, Ethnic Images in Popular Genres and Media (Autumn, 1984), pp. 41-48.

Dilla Donuts Day

2010-02-07T01:31:00.006-05:00

First, picture by the awesome Kelly Connelly. Today is J Dilla's birthday, which means it is also the day, four years ago that Donuts came out. Below are the links to last year's Donuts extravaganza. The concern in talking-up an album like Donuts is sucking it of all its wonder and joy; explaining it, solving it. As far as I can tell, that wasn't the result of "Donuts Month".

I just got home from a friend of mine's DJ set and he dropped Pharcyde's "Runnin" and I use the term "dropped" advisedly--my dude was spinning all vinyl because his hard-drive crashed though he didn't advertise it--and you had a whole room of people mouthing the lyrics or dancing to it like it was just the next song in an night of songs to dance to...everyone digging into the song on their own personal level, but enjoying it together.

Though certain songs on Donuts may still remind me of the same stuff they did last year, and I may envision say, Dallas Penn's video when I hear "Anti-American Graffiti", Dilla's masterpiece remains as vital and weird and ambiguous and endlessly fascinating as it did when it was released.

1. "Outro"
2. "Workinonit"
3. "Waves"
4. "Light My Fire"
5. "The New"
6. "Stop!"
7. "People"
8. "The Diff'rence"
9. "Mash"
10. "Time: The Donut of the Heart"
11. "Glazed"
12. "Airworks"
13. "Lightworks"
14. "Stepson of the Clapper"
15. "Twister (Huh, What?)
16."One Eleven"
17. "Two Can Win"
18. "Don't Cry"
19. "Anti-American Graffiti"
20. "Geek Down"
21. "Thunder"
22. "Gobstopper"
23. "One for Ghost"
24. "Dilla Says Go"
25. "Walkinonit"
26. "The Factory"
27. "U-Love"
28. "Hi."
29. "Bye."
30. "Last Donut of the Night"
31. "Intro"

Village Voice: "On Richard Christy's Fun-Metal Opus Charred Walls of the Damned"

2010-02-02T21:59:00.004-05:00

So, my article on the first great album of 2010--Charred Walls of the Damned's self-titled debut--is in the Village Voice this week. CWOTD is drummer Richard Christy's metal project--you may know Richard Christy as one of the writers on the Howard Stern Show but he's also a metal veteran, having drummed for bands like Iced Earth and Death. Talking to him was a big deal, as I'm a huge Stern fan and just a big fan of his music and stuff. A lot of things we discussed just didn't make it into the article due to word-space, but I especially loved a rant he had about how John Carpenter is his favorite songwriter.

After the interview, he was awesome enough to give me a tour of the Stern show studios which is sort of a dream fulfilled since I was eight years old listening to Stern with my dad. In Richard's office, amongst the metal CDs and porno DVDs was a bunch of Carpenter movie soundtrack LPs. Charred Walls of the Damned came out today. Go get it!"It's early in the year, but Richard Christy has already released two masterpieces. First, there's his epic rearranging of Sarah Palin's audio book—one of many pre-recorded bits he provides for The Howard Stern Show—wherein the comedian turns Going Rogue into Penthouse Forum, cutting and splicing Palin's voice so she's describing an indefatigable orgy that includes, among other things, her inclination to "jerk off a caribou." But don't forget Charred Walls of the Damned, the self-titled debut of his new songs-in-the-key-of-Maiden metal supergroup.

The Stern affiliation often outshines Fort Scott, Kansas's favorite son's nearly 20 years in the heavy-metal scene—including bygone gigs as drummer for death-metal pioneers Death and the concept-album-obsessed Iced Earth, among many others—but Christy is comfortable with that. "I work on the greatest radio show in the world," he exclaims. "I get paid to goof around..."

Locating Goines Pt. 1: "Next to the Hood"

2010-01-31T23:11:00.002-05:00

"In the early days, the best rappers weren’t necessarily from the hood. Run-D.M.C was from Hollis. Eric B and Rakim were from Long Island. They lived next to the hood.”-Chris Rock, Time Magazine (57).

For those familiar with this blog, this quote swiped from Chris Rock comes up a lot. Namely because it's good, smart, and catchy, but also because it touches on issues of “authenticity” and “reality” and all the stuff at the core of nearly every hip-hop discussion, for better and worse.

Rock's quip though, has legs beyond hip-hop because he's speaking on a phenomenon that applies to nearly every, interesting, game-changing, creative type. This sense that they stand inside and outside of their respective surroundings and as a result, inject their art with duel insight--familiar and foreign, sympathetic and critical.

Donald Goines is a “next to the hood” author and what makes his work so fascinating. A Goines novel is far from celebratory, it's not entrenched in the moronic logic of "the life"--the biggest problem with most contemporary Urban fiction--but it isn't above it all either. Goines has an impressive ability to be both, rooted in the realities of whatever experience he's documenting and step outside of it and provide sober commentary on it, without tipping the scales towards "jus' keepin' it real" or projecting some above-it-all morality to the proceedings.

He isn't telling first-person, ghetto fables like Iceberg Slim. He's not making street life literary like Chester Himes. And the black underworld isn't a transgressive symbol as it was for Claude McKay in Home to Harlem (arguably the earliest blueprint for Street/Urban Fiction), Goines is doing a little bit of all those things--those three authors made Goines' work possible, though he only read Slim--and something else entirely.

Goines' work isn't explicitly literary at all--even Slim's work is in part, about wordplay and language--and it's "merit", as more than just a good story, only arrives to those sensitive to the subtleties of the work. The very reason he's very popular is why people don't take his work seriously. You can read it, get your thrills, and close the book, but there's more there too...but there doesn't have to be. There's nothing to "get".

You don't read a Goines novel for the themes because they're kinda obvious, but you do read it for all the characters and asides and details that make that rather obvious theme palpable and new. This is why it's very easy to toss out backhanded compliments to his novels. You'll frame it around surprise--that it's as insightful as it is, that it's so well-structured, etc.--rather than simple, glowing acclaim. This though, is the unfortunate byproduct of being "next to the hood". Rap is decades old and still essentially confounding to most people due to a stance that often hovers between unwitting and cognizant. Hell, last week, Vampire Weekend were at the center of an extensive debate amongst music critics precisely because they're "next to the hood".

If it isn't Goines' rather complex approach to his characters and environment that makes his work so rarefied, it's the Goines legend that paints him as very much of the hood. As a guy killed at his typewriter (he actually was not at his typewriter when he was killed), who lived a life of crime and addiction and for a few years before his death, who spit out some really influential, autobiographical crime fiction. This legend, which helps sell his books and justifies critics' disinterest, ignores his black, middle class upbringing. An upbringing that he rejected very early on by running with the wrong crowd, and an upbringing he escaped when he decided to fake his birth certificate and join the Air Force at just fifteen.

Eddie Allen, Goines' biographer—do check out Allen's book Low Road--offers an interesting piece of psychology on Goines' air force decision: “As [Goines] grew older, his cravings for new experiences and adventures exceeded that which his peers in the gang could provide” (33). This analysis by Allen retains the Goines legend—as somebody of “the hood”--but also as someone beyond it, interested in something else. Robbing and stealing and pimping grew old for Donald pretty quickly and he looked beyond his immediate surroundings for escape. Though he'd return—with a heroin habit he picked up in Korea—the weird, meandering narrative of Goines' life is worth charting out, especially as it applies to his fiction.

Here's a guy who rejected his middle class upbringing for a life of crime, then joined the Air Force when crime got boring, who returned to the states an “adult” kinda spoiled by his weird decisions (making regular jobs an impossibility), who'd wander around in the underworld up to his death, writing remarkable books about that life for a few years until he was mysteriously killed in his home. Though that isn't exactly “bohemian”, a word we love to append to slept-on, underappreciated, and self-destructive artists, it kind of is too--and it's “next to the hood” for sure.

Next Up: Locating Goines Pt. 2: Literary Traditions. A little behind on these posts, my apologies-b

SOURCES:
-Allen Jr, Eddie B. Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines. St Martin's Press: New York, 2004.
-Tyrangiel, Josh. "Why You Can't Ignore Kanye." Time. 29 Aug. 2005: 54-61.

How Big Is Your World? Good Rap from January.

2010-01-28T11:04:00.002-05:00

-Fabo "Put Some Gik On It"

In every corner of whatever tinny, post-Snap beat he's not quite rapping, not quite singing on, Fabo finds enough hooks and memorable melodies for five singles. It's always infectious and really fun, because it's just a guy kinda going off--only Fabo's understanding of "going off" has nothing to do with what's expected in rap music. It's actually out of control and unpredictable. Every song is about being stuffed so full of drugs that you're like, rolling around on the floor and drooling and spazzing out. Fabo goes there. On "Put Some Gik In It", listen to those "agggh!" ad-libs all over the background of the track and how a few times they morph into stunning, wordless crooning--this lurching, sorta harmonizing he's mastered at this point. And despite all the infectious silliness, he's got a genuinely beautiful, emotive voice (makes sense that he references James Brown and the The Temptations on this song instead of other rappers) he just uses it towards a really personal, really goofy, really somber end.

-Yelawolf "Love Is Not Enough"

"What made it come to a stop?/Had to be the money issue." Yelawolf's really wrapped-up in working-class concerns and to exclusively focus on his technical abilities or his deep understanding of tradition or whatever, is a bigger disservice than pumping his raps full of some context. Speaking of context and tradition: From Rick James' "Hollywood", to Triple Six's "Da Summa" and Devin the Dude's "Anythang", and now, "Love Is Not Enough", Yelawolf's tagging along on some sad-sack, Southern rap classics. Unlike those songs though, Yelawolf's still in it, so he employs his elastic rapping style towards the song's confused, drunk off Jack, speeding down the highway emotional chaos. His voice jumps forward in the verses, speeding through all the frustrating details of the relationship ("you began to lie to your parents", the real or imagined college graduate she's now dating) and suddenly slows-up on the hopeless hook. And it is hopeless, because it's beyond world of the forms stuff like "love" or having things in common, it's hard, touchable, but unmoveable things that ended his relationship: stuff like social class and economics.

-Rich Boy ft. Yelawolf "Go Crazy"

Let's just get a whole album of Rich Boy rapping over Jim Jonsin's kinda awesome, kinda stupid beats. At least a mixtape. These Jonsin/Rich Boy team-ups aren't exactly radio-ready or nothing, they're too slow, too murky, and weird--kinda what that group jj thought they were doing to Jonsin's "Lollipop" on their song "Ecstasy". You can't even throw for-the-ladies concession accusations at these songs, they're just these bizarre, slow-burning shit-talk tracks. Rich Boy just kinda combining cool-sounding words and phrases together, digging deep into his Alabama accent and grumbling out some raps. There's also a kinda funny thing when Yelawolf dropkicks into this one, like suddenly there's enthusiasm and energy there, not a kind of simmering disgust with any and everything. As a result, Rich Boy's second verse sounds a little amped by Yela's guest spot.

-Just Blaze "Exhibit GFP"

You get a chance to hear that Just Blaze House music set? He ended his set with this jokey but actually awesome refix of "Exhibit C". Blame Jersey Shore I guess? The set, all the way thorough, is really genius. Almost a cruel joke on his audience, as it starts with a kinda perfunctory run-through of a bunch of his hits and favorites and then suddenly, it shifts into a masterful, dance set and doesn't let-up. And it's a real dance music set, not the never-get-too-crazy kinds that you usually hear at places like Fool's Gold, where it encourages people to sorta dance but not go all-out because going all-out isn't cool. Seriously, at places like this--or your city's low rent, but probably better version--when a chick actually busts-out and dances, unironically, with moves and shit, people get weirded out or get this "hater" attitude. Downloading the set, and having a context for this remix (it was out on the internet in late December) was a great way to begin 2010, like a joyful death knell on the genuinely destructive indie takeover over dance music that happened during the 'aughties.

-Araab Muzik "Death By Electric Shock"

This is audio ripped from the MPC performance of Dipset producer Araab Muzik, which you can watch here. When it was on YouTube, it was labelled "Death By Electric Shock" and that's a cool title so I'm keeping it as that. Free of the very awesome video though, you start to realize how bizarre this song is and it shows that Araab's almost bass-less, treble-filled beats on Crime Pays, Boss of All Bosses 2 and many other places, are not the result of a guy who doesn't know how to mix or is on a budget, but a guy developing a weird, very new aesthetic. The drum and bass in the intro, the DJ Shadow homage, dude is looking at hip-hop from a very expansive and not all that popular right now perspective. His ears are open. If he were British and 12 other twits were doing this to diminishing returns along with him, it'd get covered in magazines. He should do live performances. He could open for Xiu Xiu or something. He could tour with The Knife. He should release an instrumental version of Boss of All Bosses 2.

-No Gang Colors "Killer Season"

Half of No Gang Colors is Joseph of Geek Down but that doesn't matter, no playing favorites here, this is the weirdest, angriest, open-minded extreme music I've heard since Strength & Vision by Slavia. A focused, determined aesthetic fighting with a kitchen-sink approach to genre and expectation. Like all the songs listed above, these releases not only give me hope that something's shifting in how people vomit out their post-iPod/Google Blog Search influences but that all the mash-up, po-mo cleverness, sell-out, genre-hopping is over and we're just gonna have awesome weirdos doing whatever they like--and doing it right. Was this Burzum-y punch of guitar and drums scored to Cam'ron's sideways motivational speech from Killa Season? Like everything on No Gang Colors' EP This Is Your God--the hilarious/sad Mike Tyson sample, a screech of vocals, all the sounds sent into one speaker and then the other, the occasional growl of vocals, a dose of screw music--it feels purposeful, inspired, and assured. Seven songs in eleven minutes assured.

further reading/viewing:
-Billy Madison Clip
-DJ Burnone on Fabo
-Rick James performs "Hollywood" on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
-jj "Ecstasy" track review by Marc Hogan for Pitchfork
-LIVE @ FOOL'S GOLD x LTD HOLIDAY PARTY PT 2: JUST BLAZE
-AraabMuzik (Dipset Producer) [In Studio Performance]
-Go get No Gang Colors' EP This Is Your God
-Sean Murphy (artist)

Goines Book Club & Formspring

2010-01-27T18:09:00.008-05:00

Real updates coming soon...

For now, a few things about the whole "Goines Book Club" jump-off. I started a Formspring account like every other asshole out there, but it's going to be set-up for the Goines book club in the sense that it's a place to toss-out some questions or comments about Goines, his work, and the specific book for the month. Feel free to use it as more something like a message board, as in, you don't have to have a simple question for me. Of course, if you have a simple question about Goines--or hell, even a non-Goines question--you wanna ask me, I'll answer that too.

But really, the main reason for the Formspring is so I can gauge the interest in the book club and what direction to take this whole thing. My issue with Formspring is the same one I have with conventional teaching--the whole, one dude in charge of it all thing--and so, I'd like to at least try to temper my view on his work by providing a place to read what others want to talk/think about in his work.

This weekend, there will be a series of essays introducing Goines and where I think he's coming from. They'll be called "Locating Goines". On Monday, I'll drop an essay on Dopefiend and ideally, some of you will like it or hate and we'll argue about it. Originally, it was just gonna be a Dopefiend essay and then I wanted to do some like, throat-clearing introductory shit, but then I didn't want that to cloud you guys' readings of the book, so I'm dropping it on you last minute, right before we get into Dopefiend.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the Goines Book Club Syllabus.

Pazz & Jop 2009

2010-01-19T21:59:00.005-05:00

So, the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop is up today and as usual, it's fascinating and infuriating and fascinating again when you dig through all the individual ballots and comments and everything. Below's my ballot, tell me the shit I missed or why the stuff I liked sucks and whatever else. That's the point of this poll, right?:

Albums
1. Ryan Leslie, Ryan Leslie
2. G-Side, Huntsville International
3. Maxwell, BLACKsummers'night
4. James Ferraro, Edward Flex Presents: Do You Believe In Hawaii?
5. Wavves, Wavves
6. Diamond District, In the Ruff
7. DJ Quik & Kurupt, BlaQKout
8. Jay-Z, The Blueprint 3
9. Robert Glasper, Double Booked
10. Ryan Leslie, Transition

Singles
1. DJ Class "I'm the Shit"
2. Bat for Lashes, "Daniel"
3. Keri Hilson (ft. Kanye West & Ne-Yo), "Knock You Down"
4. Gucci Mane, "First Day Out"
5. Girls, "Lust For Life"
6. Emynd, "What About Tomorrow"
7. Mariah Carey, "Obsessed"
8. Cam'ron, "My Job"
9. Soulja Boy Tell Em', "Turn My Swag On"
10. Raheem DeVaughn (ft. Ludacris), "Bulletproof"

Was also quoted twice in the section "Michael Jackson and Hip-Hop". On Hip-Hop, not Michael Jackson, who I'm either going to just keep quiet about or write a 10,000 word thesis on the song "Human Nature". No in-betweens there. But yeah, I got to talk about two of my favorite things: Why Kanye is always interesting and great and the awesome ways rap gets smart and mature and how all of y'all are ignoring it...

"Besides Kanye being right—Beyoncé did have the best video—he more quietly outshined Taylor Swift with his verse on Keri Hilson's "Knock You Down," which one-upped Swift's "You Belong With Me" and its high school love histrionics. In Kanye's version, high school binaries are broken down—the class clown gets the prom queen—and then it turns sour anyway. Another awkward, awesome bummer from Mr. West."

"Jay-Z tells you it isn't cool to carry a strap. The Clipse wanna watch Madagascar with their kids. And Internet rap is no longer indulgent day-glo whatever, whatever, but wizened, worker-bee rap from every region. In short, hip-hop finally answers a lot of its critics—it grows up, it actually matures, and not in a "Ludacris goes on Oprah" way—and everyone's favorite rap album of 2009 is a facsimile of a 1995 coke-rap blueprint. OK."

Misreading Rap: Fish Tank & "Life's a Bitch"

2010-01-18T11:58:00.003-05:00

Two things comes up in pretty much every review of Fish Tank, a British film about a troubled fifteen year old girl into "urban dance" and nothing much else (that is, until her mom's new boyfriend shows up): The apparently stellar performance from "non-actor" Kate Jarvis and the use of Nas' "Life's a Bitch" in a poignant scene between mom and daughter.

Whenever rap finds its way into a movie and it's not as either source music or for a cheap laugh, it's something of note, but what's so cool about Fish Tank is how its given a bunch of film critics the chance to riff on the Nas classic. It's a crucial part of the movie, so it's sent critics previously unaware of the song to IMDB to figure out what it is and for most, a chance to throw in a sliver of rap criticism into their movie review. Unfortunately, most are misreading the song. Dana Stevens of Slate called it "unremittingly depressing"--AZ's hook maybe, the song itself, not so much.

The biggest offender though, is Armond White, who lines-up the perceived phoniness of Fish Tank with Nas' own "baby brother impudence". Like most of White's writing in um, the past ten years, his point is brave and valid (let's reconsider Nas' talents), he's just building it all on a base that's flimsy at best. Stevens' descriptions and the many like it can be partially excused by the simplicity word counts often demand, but White's just completely wrong.

The best explanation of the song, in connection with Fish Tank at least, comes from, of all places, Thinking Faith (the online journal for British Jesuits). Aaron Kilkenny-Fletcher begins his review with a quote from AZ's verse and quotes the hook later, but is quick to explain that, "Life's a Bitch" is, "in spite of [the hook], a song of hope and of escape." Exactly.

"Life's a Bitch" though, isn't even that hard to "get" which makes all the misreading all the more frustrating. If there's a common strain in the "Nas kinda sucks" revisionism that's been wandering around in the past bunch of years, it's fueled by the relative simplicity--and therefore, perceived insincerity--of his work. That doesn't make Nas a bad rapper or Illmatic any less of a classic, but there's a "teachability" to Nas' work, that you know, would lend it to short-hand poignance in art films or a pretty mindless book if you peeped that Dyson disaster Born to Use Mics.

There's still plenty of room for complexity in something teachable, and a lot of the power of "Life's a Bitch" comes out of its adherence to structure. Really, "Life's a Bitch" hinges on structure. It's a song built on pieces that complement and contradict one another. AZ's verse and hook are apparently all that many people hear--really, just the hook--and it's easy to see the song as "cynical" or "unremittingly depressing" through that lunkheaded lens, but that ignores the shifting context of that hook, Nas' entire verse, and the joyful coda that is Olu Dara's horn solo.

Really though, AZ's verse isn't even conventionally "depressing", it's beyond "fuck the world" and all that. His verse is not only a celebration of making money, but a quick mini-history lesson on why that's all he believes in ("we were beginners in the hood as Five Percenters/But something must've got in us 'cause all of us turned to sinners") and a clear acknowledgment that indeed, it's a fruitless exercise: "As long as we leavin' thievin' we'll be leavin' with some kind of dough". The depressing part isn't that he desires money but that he knows exactly why he does what he does and has no interest in doing different.

AZ's verse and hook though, are viewed as the contrast or set-up to Nas' significantly more "hopeful" verse, but that's too simple too. There's the same amount of vibrancy and intelligence at work in AZ's verse as Nas', it's just being employed for a different end. Both verses sound good and are perfectly put together pieces of rapping. They are equally persuasive in terms style--they sound awesome but Nas' verse could not exist without AZ's--this is literally true if you read the XXL making of piece--because it's through AZ's acknowledgement of just how fucked things are, that Nas can come to his 20th birthday epiphany. That oft-quoted, "That buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto" comes from a guy who's spent a lot of bucks on bottles, you know?

When the hook returns after Nas' verse--again, all about structure here and how structure highlights meaning--it's nearly "ironic" because Nas has just rejected it or at least, found a way to not believe that "life's a bitch and then you die". This is the inverse of most songwriting wherein the "happy" chorus is undermined by the verses or a sad chorus is sung happily--there's a real give and take going on here. Then it's punctuated by Olu Dara's horn solo which is happy, but hardly glorious.

And "hardly glorious" is precisely the kind of minor victory joy director Andrea Arnold's at least trying to employ in Fish Tank: That good-bad, good enough, tension of the song transported into her film. Not sure where it falls in the white people/black music poignance meter--The Big Chill and Motown as a "1", Schooly D in the Bad Lieutenant as a "10"--but there's an attempt to wisely engage with the song's tensions, which is more than what a lot of critics are doing.

further reading/viewing:
-"Automatic Pity for the People" by Armond White of New York Press
-Fish Tank by Dana Stevens for Slate
-Fish Tank by Aaron Kilkenny-Fletcher for Thinking Faith
-XXL's Making of Illmatic
-"Deconstructing Illmatic" by Dan Love for Oh Word

No Trivia Book Club: The Year of Goines.

2009-12-30T04:51:00.011-05:00

So, I thought about putting up a kind of obnoxious message about how the "New Year's resolution" for everybody reading and writing about rap on the internets should be some attempt to at least like, foster discussion?

And then it seemed wiser to create something or another that might facilitate discussion instead of simply demanding it.

The result is gonna be a book club. All during the upcoming year, I'm going to read every novel by "street fiction" originator Donald Goines and at the end of each month (ideally, the final week day of whatever month it is), post some kind of fairly in-depth essay about each book. The comments section will ideally be a place for people to discuss the month's book and if anyone wants to contribute more notable pieces about any of the books, they can do that too. They can be posted here or linked here, if you want to use your own blog to post your thoughts.

But real quick--some stuff about Goines: Was a pimp and a junkie, along with Iceberg Slim pretty much established Holloway House as a publisher and developed the current craze that is "street fiction", was shot dead at his typewriter, is idolized by tons of rappers (personal fave lyrical reference here) and most importantly, is still kinda slept-on as an author of a whole bunch of deeply compelling work.

If you want to read-up on dude a bit more, do not, I repeat do not consult Eddie Stone's Donald Writes No More. Do go find a cheap copy of Eddie B. Allen Jr.'s Low Road: The Life & Legacy of Donald Goines though, but only a cheap copy because even Allen's book isn't a masterpiece, but it does provide you with Goines' life story and some terse but effective criticism of the novels. All Goines' novels are relatively easy to find, relatively easy to read, and all will run you like $7 or $8 bucks new.

Below you'll find a "syllabus" and after that, some quick notes on why the reading list is structured as it is.

January: Dopefiend
February: Whoreson
March: Black Gangster
April: Street Players
May: White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief
June: Black Girl Lost
July: Eldorado Red
August: Swamp Man
September: Never Die Alone
October: Cry Revenge
November: Daddy Cool
December: "The Kenyatta Quadrilogy 1 & 2" Crime Partners & Death List
January: "The Kenyatta Quadrilogy 3 & 4" Kenyatta's Escape& Kenyatta's Last Hit

This reading list primarily goes in the order his books were published. The most notable shift is moving Crime Partners, Death List, Kenyatta's Escape, and Kenyatta's Last Hit towards the end and all in order because they are essentially one big novel--and a long-ignored American epic in my opinion. I've dubbed them the "Kenyatta Quadrilogy" because that's the guy that slowly becomes the main character and through which all of the action kinda sorta connects. Though these months, you'll have to read two novels instead of one but it's totally do-able. I read all four of them in a week.

Goines' Inner City Hoodlum is omitted from this list because it's up-for-debate as to how much he actually had to do with it. It was finished by another author after Goines' death and well, you can tell. That book will be used as a kind of February "coda" for the Year of Goines Book Club, a way to identify Goines' style and structuring through its rather apparent absence in that particular book.

Yeah, get reading! Any questions or suggestions on how to run this can be put in the comments section.

Metal Lungies Beat Drop: Best of 2009

2009-12-28T16:09:00.006-05:00

I picked my five favorite beats of 2009 along with a ton of other people for Metal Lungies' Beat Drop. My picks were "Rising Sun" by G-Side (produced by the Block Beataz),"Run This Town" by Jay-Z (produced by No I.D and Kanye West), Rhymefest's "Pull Me Back" by Rhymefest (produced by The Matrax), "In the Ruff" by Diamond District (produced by Oddisee), and "First Day Out" by Gucci Mane (produced by Zaytoven). Here's what I said about that Zaytoven beat. Click to check out the whole feature:

"Usually, a great beat brings together a bunch of disparate chunks of sound into a dope, cohesive whole. This beat by Zaytoven does the opposite: It stacks the same sound (a ping-ponging Zombie movie synth) on top of itself until it’s a crawling mess of bleeps, bloops, and whines, all up in your speakers. It’s deceptively simple and the power comes from the like, casual chaos of it all…the seemingly accidental rhythms and syncopations that stem from this sound-stacking."

Yelawolf's Redneck Manifesto

2009-12-23T00:43:00.004-05:00

"Confederate flags, I see em' on the truck with the windows down/Why's he playing Beanie Sigel?/Cause his daddy was a dopeman./Lynrd Skynrd didn't talk about movin' keys of coke, man/Ain't no such thing as a free bird..."

That's from Yelawolf's "I Wish", which features Raekwon and has a beat that rumbles like a Booker T & The MGs instrumental, a Duane Allman solo, and Triple H's entrance theme all at the same time. Notice how there's no interest in resolving all the tensions in that rap, how all the details float out there and link-up in some ways and don't connect in other ways at all. You either get it or you don't.

The Gadsden, AL rapper points out the absurdity an outsider would immediately gravitate towards--a Confederate flag on a truck, as hip-hop blasts from its speakers--and then, explains where the interests of Beanie Sigel and what a lot of you would call "a bunch of rednecks" intersect: Black or white, both poor, they're afforded those few luxuries they have because of dope money.

In the words of James Baldwin, Yelawolf is "put[ting his] business on the street": Letting-out some previously ignored, problematic reality for the rest of the world to see. In this case, it's the reality that the drug trade holds in its grasp as many whites as blacks, and not only on the typical, higher-up rungs, but on the, work-a-day, keep-the-lights-on levels illustrated in the music of many trap-rappers or on a show like The Wire.

This has never been a fun chunk of reality for white people to hear. Namely because white privilege (which exists when you're white, but not white and poor as fuck) makes it relatively easy to disassociate one's self from "white trash"...all the while of course, invoking it when necessary, as country singers like Toby Keith or ex-presidents like George W. Bush are wont to do.

Yelawolf though, like the scores of black rappers before him, realizes some kinda change, real awareness--and interesting stories--stem from actively putting one's business on the street, regardless of the perceived "hurt" it might do to one's race or reputation. And so, his music isn't only engaging with race/class on a political/social/"message" level, but in the dirty, details that've always been rap's specialty.

"Pop the Trunk" is full of them, drenched in novelistic details that build-up over and over, to that increasingly terrifying hook/threat: "Don't make me go pop the trunk." It's like when Wayne recalls having to go "get the cleaver" on Tha Carter III's "Playing With Fire" because his mom's "pussy second husband" is beating the shit out of her. Just serious, intensely personal, cinematic rap. Pay attention to the final verse of "Pop the Trunk", which makes good on the hook's threat, but it's a kind of country road shotgun stand-off, and the victim of some buckshot to the chest slows Yelawolf's staccato flow a to illustrate those bloody last gasps of life.

But there are everyday details too, the kind of sweatpants he's wearing when he's awakened, that both his parents are actively working--another reality for the working-class, there's always bullshit to do--and lyrical flashes of the fucked-up night before. And there are quieter, less loaded pieces of insider info running through Yelawolf's work, illustrated quite well in his interpolation/almost covers of rock hits of the past.

He screeched a Flock of Seagulls hook on Slim Thug's "I Run" and he's gotten a lot of interest lately for his "Subterranean Homesick Blues" reinterp on Juelz Santan's "Mixin' Up the Medicine"--that he's got Stereo, a whole mixtape of classic rock-sampling rap songs, speaks to open-minded, all over the place listening habits of regular-ass people. That his parents probably partied to Flock of Seagulls and reflect on a shit-day at work over some beer and a Dylan record. This is also deeply hip-hop, this grab-from-anywhere if it sounds dope approach to songwriting.

There's also something to say about a guy with an off-kilter flow that's super comfortable just doing hooks--he's the anti-Drake--and fully understands the fluidity of his rap persona. Because that persona's scattered, it's real, and because of that, it doesn't fit nicely into this category or that one, and he can fluidly move around.

He's a total rap outsider. He's an awesome hook man. He's as attuned to ghetto realities as any other rapper. He's a skate-metal, trailer-park, drug-dealing, white hip-hop head from Alabama, deeply in-tune to the contingencies of his upbringing, which ain't all that different from all his rap heroes and the dudes he grew up with.

Example: While Yelawolf's adjective-filled, scene-stealing verse on G-Side's "Who's Hood" overflows with trailer-park imagery, it's 6 Tre G who's got the Jeff Jarrett punchline on "Feel The"--the song right before.

Namely, Yelawolf realizes that by simply existing and speaking on his life, he defies much of the classist bile espoused by popular media, white and black cultural gatekeepers, and the types that use phrases like "red-state/blue-state" unironically--the people that don't want to acknowledge the ways the white and black working-class not only have a whole lot in common, but are one in the same.

That they're listening to the same rap and rock and metal, rocking the same fashion, selling the same drugs, trying to cop the same clothes, circling their town's hot spot in the same cars, hanging out at the same skate parks, of the same community, with the same interests, the same pleasures, the same pains.

further reading/viewing:
-Wikipedia Entry for Gadsden, Alabama
-The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad
-A weird interview with Yelawolf by J Dirrt of Baller's Eve
-"If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" by James Baldwin
-Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
-William Faulkner's "Snopes Trilogy"

How Big Is Your World? New rap.

2009-12-16T16:35:00.004-05:00

-Z-Ro ft. A-Ro "Best I Ever Had (Slowed)"

Z-Ro and um, A-Ro, go in over Drake's only good song because well, this rap-sing schtick's been Z-Ro's forever now. Not sure, but I suspect it bugged 'Ro and company when Drake rapped over "June 27th" and in some weird, smart way, this is the "response" record. Please note how Z-Ro's freestyles (and even A-Ro's in a way) are just as effortless and meaningless as Drake's but they work--nothing contrived, a guy going off the dome, wandering around the same topics (drugs, money, blowjobs, how fucking fake everybody is) because it's what was on his mind the day he recorded this, which was pretty much like every other day in the life of Z-Ro. The screwed version of the little bit ignored Relvis Presley tape came out before the regular version, which is genius because it's much better screwed--or "slowed" as it's listed--and it's the only way anyone would really give that version a proper listen.

-Gucci Mane ft Lil Wayne & Cam'ron "Stupid Wild"

The decade in mainstream but completely insane rap can be told through these three guys. So here they all are, the freaky-freak trap rap triumvirate rapping over a big, horrifying beat from Bangaladesh. Gucci waddling around the beat and locking-in like he does on damn near everything, and tossing in some genuinely mature insight ("Someone dissed me yesterday, what I supposed to do now, cry?") and a depressing hook. Then, it's over to Wayne who raps like he cares again which means enunciating in a way we haven't heard since he spoke to Miss Katie Couric and being all meter-obsessed, threatening to shoot your grandpa, and cackling a whole bunch. Cam'ron's still not quite there, but you still get something like "all the haters hate me" and that line about using your wifey for food-stamps.

-DJ Quicksilva "Where They Do That At"

This song's been out for a minute, and by "a minute" I mean since the summer, but there's been recent Baltimore and "DMV" remixes of this supposed-to-be-fleeting party song from DJ Quicksilva of DC's WKYS 93.9 and now it has a video too. The sub-regional remixes add rapping and a seriousness that the "Where They Do That At" totally doesn't need (though it is a good primer on Baltimore/DC rappers) so this original version stays winning for just following in the tradition of something like "Lookin' Boy" or Chalie Boy's "I Look Good". Like the former, it's full of edifying, hilarious observations (these songs are the closest we have to 60s/70s "party records"), and like the latter, it's just a kind of visceral, post-snap synth track with a hook fun enough to repeat for months and months. Mainly though, it's just a goofy, fun song that at it's heart calls for people to be reasonable.

-Nite Funk "Am I Gonna Make It"

On Stones Throw, remixing Animal Collective, collaborating with Nite Jewel...thing is, Dam Funk's music is just too good to be bogged-down by schtick or contained by potential niche audiences. Save for the brilliantly subtle female vocals (as coy and quiet as Dam's are loud and confident in their lack of confidence), it's hard to tell exactly what Nite Jewel brought to the song, but it seems like it's probably the dying-battery electronics and atmospherics that give "Am I Gonna Make It" that one more layer of sadness that it really needs. Unlike most Dam Funk songs, which are either blissed-out instrumentals or heart-on-the-sleeve love songs, "Am I Gonna Make It" is self-reflective and self-loathing, a song about being on one's way to some kind of epiphany--having fucked-up and well aware of it, but only like 70 percent ready to accept it.

-Harlem Children's Chorus "Black Christmas"

"Black Christmas" is from that weird, transitive era between 50s Liberalism and Black Power-informed Civil Rights. It quietly demands equality but wraps it around the Christmas holiday and still has that "we're gonna make it" power that all good soul has. Crime and poverty are invoked but instead, the joy that nevertheless exists is the song's focus. A few years later, hip, with-it, blacks and whites wouldn't dig the sentiment or the glowing warmth of the voices and production. It'd just not be political enough--a Christmas song built with the master's tools if you will. Re-released now, thanks to Strut's recent In the Christmas Groove compilation, "Black Christmas" is a weird time capsule, a sideways response to the use of kids voices for transcendent twee rather than sincerity in stuff like Where the Wild Things Are, and most importantly, a "new" awesome song for Christmas mixes.

further reading/viewing:
-"Gucci Mane, No Holds Barred" by Jon Caramanica for The New York Times
-DJ Quicksilva's MySpace
-Video for DJ Quicksilva's "Where They Do That At"
-"New Singles from Dâm-Funk, Solange, and Simian Mobile Disco" by Michelangelo Matos for The Stranger
-Food One/Jim Mahfood Art

City Paper: Year in Movies, Gomorrah

2009-12-09T00:28:00.005-05:00

One more thing. Actual blog content is soon to come. I wrote about Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah for the Baltimore City Paper's "Year in Film", it was ranked #2, right after Revanche, whatever that is...
"Sinners in the hands of an angry director. Eurotrash beats apathetically pound over scenes of sitting around and shooting all the same--and no self-justified, too-tan character is spared director Matteo Garrone's scorched-earth disdain. Not the "just doing my job" money collector, the knuckleheads who think this crime shit's like Scarface, or the guys in charge, stomachs spilling over too-tight DIESEL jeans. Even those far from Naples aren't absolved when the web of corruption stretches to Oscar night couture and Camorra cartel investments in rebuilding the World Trade Center. Gomorrah's biblical pun title is more than earned."
Also, here's my ballot:

1. Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, United States)
2. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (Tony Stone, United States)
3. Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone, Italy)
4. Madea Goes to Jail (Tyler Perry, United States)
5. Public Enemies (Michael Mann, United States)
6. Two Lovers (James Grey, United States)
7. Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, United States)
8. Good Hair (Jeff Stilson, United States)
9. Tyson (James Toback, United States)
10. Moon (Duncan Jones, United Kingdom)

Village Voice: "Huntsville's G-Side Are Thriving on the Internet—and East Village Radio"

2009-12-08T21:38:00.005-05:00

The reason this blog was relatively silent about G-Side's masterful Huntsville International was because of this article in this week's Village Voice about G-Side, the new mixtape, and their connection to East Village Radio's very awesome "Baller's Eve". In the process of doing the article, I managed to lose my driver's license, spill Crystal Light all over my Macbook, hang-out in New York with G-Side and The Baller's Eve dudes, as well as meet Joseph of "Geek Down" and yes, the Internets Celebrities Rafi and Dallas. Loads of fun. On the way back to Baltimore, I listened to Huntsville International for the first time and it just totally devastated me. I hope I was able to put some of that experience into words.
"Kat Daddy Slim, one-third of the East Village Radio show Baller's Eve, takes a shot at summing up Huntsville, Alabama's finest hip-hop duo, G-Side: "Outkast on steroids." His co-hosts, DJ Dirrty and Minski Walker, just nod their heads: "Yep."

G-Side themselves—rappers Clova and ST 2 Lettaz, alongside Codie G, manager of their label, Slow Motion Soundz—are taken aback. There is a moment of modest silence.

We're gathered in the EVR office after a mid-November Baller's Eve episode (there's another one every Wednesday, from 10 p.m. to midnight) heavily devoted to tracks from G-Side's Huntsville International mixtape, released for free online earlier that day. Clova's eyes grow big, taking in that profoundly flattering comparison. ST drawls out an appreciative "Shit . . ." Codie G, for once, has no words..."

Village Voice, Sound of the City: "Free Gucci, Fuck Diplo, & The History of "Free ___"

2009-12-08T17:42:00.002-05:00

So there's a pretty nutty thing I wrote about Diplo's loathsome "Free Gucci" T-shirt and upcoming mixtape up on the Voice's "Sound of the City" blog. Word to Zach Baron for sculpting it all into something that sorta makes sense:

"Gucci Mane's new album, The State vs. Radric Davis is in stores today, but the insanely prolific, remarkably consistent Atlanta rapper has been in jail since November 12th. This is Gucci's second stint in jail for a parole violation this year. Both sentences stem from a 2005 incident in which Gucci attacked a promoter, served six months for the attack, and was released under the agreement that he would take rehabilitation classes and do some community service--which he's now failed to do, and gone to jail for failing to do...twice.

And though this recent return to jail brought about another wave of "Free Gucci" T-shirts, mixtapes, and Facebook groups, there's an equal amount of healthy, hands-up-in-the-air frustration with the guy. It's impossible to turn Gucci Mane into any kind of victim of "the system" because the system's given him second, third, and fourth chances to get his shit right..."

Hip-Hop's Dying, Ya Heard?

2009-12-04T00:41:00.007-05:00

"One of the tasks of the film critic of tomorrow--perhaps he will even be called a "television critic"--will be to rid the world of the comic figure the average film critic and film theorist of today represents: he lives from the glory of his memories like the seventy-year-old ex-court actresses, rummages about as they do in yellowing photographs, speaks of names that are long gone. He discusses films no one has been able to see for ten years (and about which they can therefore say everything and nothing) with people of his own ilk; he argues about montage like medieval scholar discussed the existence of God, believing all these things could still exist today. In the evening, he sits with rapt attention in the cinema, a critical art lover, as though we still lived in the days of Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, and Eisenstein. He thinks he is seeing bad films instead of understanding that what he sees is no longer film at all."-Rudolf Arnheim, 1935.*

Regions have splintered further into town-specific styles, there's just a couple of discernible stars, a whole bunch of rappers it's hard to get one's critical bearings on, and it all meets on the streets and the internet, not the Billboard Charts or MTV. Hip-hop isn't dead. It just isn't as easy to write about anymore. That's what Sasha-Frere Jones' intriguing though problematic "Wrapping Up", and Simon Reynolds just plain retarded "Notes on the Noughties" are actually saying.

But instead of acknowledging the weird, new species that hip-hop's evolved into, it's gotta be just plain dead or at least, "ag[ing] out". Skipping over these dramatic shifts in "the industry" and the ever-growing influence and eventual reliance on the internet--best represented with mixtapes--is a huge oversight if you're diagnosing hip-hop in 2009.

These guys think they are hearing bad albums instead of understanding that what they hear is no longer an album at all.

Industry changes hover in the background of SFJ's piece and bubble up through the focus on Freddie Gibbs' mixtapes, but its Reynolds who out-and-out dismisses the mixtape, with the pithy adjective of "obscure". Now, it's depressing when a critic--even a pop critic--tosses out "obscure" as a negative descriptor (sorta how indie critics used "lo-fi" to negatively describe Wavves) but it's another thing when that same critic both performs ignorance (that unfortunate "Gummi Bares" joke) and proves his ignorance (lumping Soulja Boy, Yung Joc, Gucci Mane, and Boosie together like they have much of anything in common) and then tries to tell readers anything about hip-hop.

Many of the mixtapes one could cite to prove hip-hop's still vital aren't really obscure--if you're a notable critic and you declare them obscure, they'll remain obscure--but more importantly, these "obscure" mixtapes are maybe the only way vital hip-hop can even get out there anymore. You'd be hard-pressed to find a rapper that's debuted since 2004--the year Reynolds says rap started withering away--whose best work isn't on a mixtape or at least, has some mixtapes competing with their albums in terms of quality. This isn't a coincidence. It also isn't a coincidence that 2004 or so is about when hip-hop and the internet really started mingling. Just saying.

You know, on Tuesday, new albums from both Clipse and Gucci Mane drop. Most of you reading have already heard them. Neither of these albums are particularly good, both of them have their moments, but only Clipse will truly suffer from making a sub-par album. Clipse made their proper debut in 2001--though their first album dates back to 1999--while Gucci debuted in 2005.

The reason Clipse will suffer and Gucci will not is because Gucci's established himself as a creative rapping force via mixtapes, while Clipse fell back on the mixtape when their official stuff got mucked-up in label drama. Clipse need--or think they need--the album. Gucci's using it purely as a means to an end: More money, more ubiquity, maybe some respectability. Indeed, even if The State vs. Radric Davis were a masterpiece, it wouldn't sell better (it'd maybe sell worse) and in a world of "Gummi Bares" jokes by notable critics, it doesn't seem like "Gucci Mane" and "masterpiece" could even be conceived of in the same sentence. So why bother? Go get Gucciamerica or the official unofficial Murder Was the Case which is structured like a tight, worker-bee album...which means it's structured like a Gucci mixtape.

Clipse though, in part because they clearly care about rap in the long-term sense--Gucci does not, proven by the fact that he's going to jail again--and in part because they're undoubtedly from a different era, tie rap artistry to the album format. They also want to be successful. Til the Casket Drops is torn apart by this tension, neither as good as their past work nor pop-oriented enough to yield any hits, in part because the brothers Thornton translate "pop" as "stick a broad on the hook". Til the Casket Drops misses both of its intended targets and farts around in no-man's land. And unlike Gucci or plenty of rappers who've come since (but didn't indeed, have a few singles like "Icey" and "Freaky Gurl" to buttress their street buzz) Clipse don't promise a deluge of new material and so, this all we get.

The State vs. Radric Davis is a product and that's clear to all involved: a guest-heavy, bets-hedging group of songs that hopefully maybe will sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money. It begins like Gucci's mixtapes, rolls into a sequence of R & B jams, and wraps-up with a group of songs with big-name guests and up-and-comers. Gucci's artistry is on display on dozens of album-like mixtapes, not the actual album. In 2009, rap fans just know this. Critics apparently, do not.

*More accurately: J. Hoberman in 1998 quoting Rudolf Arnheim in 1935.

further reading/viewing:
-"Wrapping Up" by Sasha Frere-Jones for The New Yorker
-"Notes on the noughties..." by Simon Reynolds for The Guardian
"Audio: Gucci Mane Calls Into DJ Drama's Show w/Young Jeezy" from Dirty Glove Bastard
"The Film Critic of Tomorrow" by Rudolf Arnheim
"The Film Critic of Tomorrow, Today" by J. Hoberman

No Trivia in XXL's 100 Best Hip-Hop Websites

2009-12-03T11:50:00.006-05:00

Comments have been disabled so this doesn't seem like some kind of back-patting party or something. Finally held the new XXL in my hands and read the very kind comments on my blog ("Better known as No Trivia, Soderberg's blog gives rap the kind of intellectual, analytical respect is deserves.") and the other ninety-nine picks. It's a different thrill than seeing my byline in-print and we're all supposed to be too cool about this stuff, but damn, I'm honored.

XXL, besides being a magazine I actually read from time-to-time--there was a time when my sanity was kept by the routine of picking up XXL, Wax Poetics, and Film Comment after work on the days they came out--is one that's sorta active in the blogging world, so the list means a bit more? And not just because I'm in it. But because a big, giant, alphabetical list of dope blogs and websites is the proper way to advise someone on how to figure out the rap-blog world. The magazine's also always printed kindly letters from inmates and for a while, I was shipping out copies of the magazines to prisons, helping the children, wives, and girlfriends of the incarcerated help their in-fucking-jail loved ones...so in some weird way, my stupid name being in the magazine in any form means a lot on that level too. Thanks to XXL and Ben Detrick.

How Big Is Your World? New, good rap.

2009-11-30T00:35:00.004-05:00

-G-Mane ft. Bentley "Listen"

Guest rapper Bentley reveals the anti-message of "Listen": "Moral to the story, not a damn thing/Just another nigga trapped, trapped in the game." G-Mane puts it a little nicer ("See I done learned from folks' mistakes/And you can learn from mine too/I share the stories of my life, so you figure out what you gonna do") but either way, it's grabbing from the weird humanist moral center that pimp-hustlers like UGK and 8Ball & MJG took from. This is something sociologically-aimed, gender-worried rap "scholars" still haven't figured out. Simply by speaking on this shit, with the right degree of detail and self-seriousness, does it become "message music". It doesn't need to formally/structurally "redeem" itself or anything.

G-Mane's two verses are expertly put together here, the first verse outlining his path to rapping and the second verse, how he started selling. The song, the mixtape, his career--the intersection of the two. Weird, interesting details aren't spared either, be it the fact that his DJ/musician father didn't want him to get into hip-hop or that he used the projection booth of the movie theater where he worked to deal. This isn't just "I been into hip-hop/selling crack for a long time" type banalities. It's lived-in, cherry-picked from life rhymes. Then there's Bentley, younger than G-Mane, a relative newcomer, who tells a story that pretty much sounds just like G-Mane's only a decade or so later. It reinforces that final, resigned line about just being "another nigga trapped". Time and circumstances mean little. G-Mane and Bentley's tale is thousands of others' too.

-Mannie Fresh ft. Russell Lee & The Show "Get With Me"

Okay, "Get With Me" is burdened with a verse from The Show, an absolutely terrible Lil Wayne wannabe who shows up on too much of Return of the Ballin. Seriously. All you guys who throw around the word "ignorant" need to listen to The Show. Not because he's particularly offensive, but because he has no concept of how punchlines--or verbs and adjectives for that matter--really work. Still, there's an almost Haiku-like genius to, "All you gotta do is suck a dick and chill", so dumbness wins again.

But that almost doesn't matter or rather, the rest of what's going on in "Get With Me" makes The Show's part negligible and even kinda fun eventually. Fresh just brings an overdose of personality and fun to the song. His masterful and hilarious bridge--"get that, on e'rything"--rubbing up against just plain gorgeous beatmaking.That "1-2-3 Ow!" sample at the beginning, the rolling acoustic guitar loop, the rush of angelic synths in right after the sampled-hook...that hook itself which rest awkwardly but perfectly, like it was stuffed between the drums after the fact. Just another immaculate Mannie Fresh production, so immaculate here that you wish F-F-Fresh were less of a worker-bee beatmaker and would let this shit roll-out for 7 minutes or so, ONP style.

-G-Side ft. Kristmas "Rising Sun"

Wow. From the last chunk of upliftingly depressing songs on G-Side's Huntsville International. Block Beattaz are on some like Eno/U2 style mixing and production here, that same kind of chintzy glory where everything's reverbed and booming and it makes the shit really cinematic without being "cinematic". For awhile, they relied on the trance samples to bring it to that next, melodramatic level, but now it's their assemblage of sounds alone that hits you in the gut. When that bizarre sample comes-in on Clova's verse, like CP and Mali Boi sampled the music you hear in your town's Chinese Buffett and sent it through auto-tune a few hundred times, it's well, damn.

Credit should go to ST, Clova, and Kristmas too, who wisely rap against the Slim Thug hook. If this song "is for the Gs and the hustlers" it's "for" them in the sense that they need to hear "Rising Sun" so some sense gets knocked into them. ST's "Somehow, the game got twisted to shit/The whole point in flippin' the brick was to flip it legit" and Kristmas' extended brag about having a bank account feel immortal, inarguable. Clova then, sorta plays the role of drug dealer here, dropping contemporary coke-rap punchlines--"shit, we flippin' chickens call it Zaxby's" is personal favorite--but still centering his verse with a reminder: "I don't sell dope, or cut the dope no more-".

-Sensational & Spectre "Rip Like This"

Spectre's one of many, many, many hip-hop weirdos wandering about Baltimore. There's King Tutt or Labtekwon or Will Roc, and there's Spectre. Ostensibly dude is making "beats" but they're all airy and squonky and downtempo sometimes but not trip-hop or anything--they just defy categorization. Phaser sounds. Death knell drums. All coated with a fog of general insanity that still sorta knocks good and proper. So, pairing up with no-nonsense, nonsense spitter Sensational makes a lot of sense. Maybe too much sense. With age, Sensational's schtick becomes both legendarily hard-harded and kinda played-out. But man, when the shit works...

"Rip Like This" has a lot more hip-hop in it--a buzz of foggy guitar, some real drums-- than most of Acid & Bass and so, it doesn't deflate or get boring after a minute or so (the story of "avant hip-hop"). This song actually gets more interesting and doles-out surprises left and right, like this indie-blues kinda guitar-solo that sounds like the song's coda, but then, Sensational's GZA with brain damage flow comes in one last time. Wire almost got it right this month, it's just that they put the wrong part of this duo on the cover.

-Rich Boy ft. Rico Love "We Like It"

Rich Boy goes "hard" on this one, but he's just singing about girls and there's a hook from some guy named Rico Love. The low-end, Bladerunner rumbles at the beginning suggest a sequel to "Let's Get This Paper" and then it slinks in, and it's nearly electro-clash or something. Like it's from that weird, interesting time a few years ago where everything synthetic was on some full-of-menace, retro-futuristic shit, be it Pharrell, Poni Hoax, or Fennesz.

What does this track mean in 2009 going on 2010 though? A pretentious, music-crit question yeah, but one that's sorta vital for a guy like Rich Boy who's gonna forever chase the zeitgiest that made "Throw Some Ds" a hit while tossing-out some roaring mixtapes along the way. "We Like It" is also of course, just Jim Jonsin's beat for Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" minus the "Beat It" influence and made for the speakers in a strip club instead of a regular club--darker, oozing more, but still essentially a weird Atari-informed piece of pop production that a bigger star already turned into a hit. What's Rich Boy to do, then? Rap viciously on it, like he isn't just saying strip-club platitudes and find an odd, off-to-the-side synth melody to ride and keep it moving.

-DJ Pierre "I Deserve This"

Upping the energy of Drake's "The Winner" just makes sense, but doing so appends some swing, some soulfulness to the stilted, stunted production of Tha Bizness. Without a mumbling lightweight like Drake to worry about, the BPMs can go up a bunch and the song's allowed to really move. And it's this swing, the soulfulness at the center of an otherwise chaotic, discordant Club track that gives the latest Pierre track its legs.

"Deserve This" is very much of-the-moment and inching towards a more classical, less temporal type of Club too. The kind where the drums destroy (more Booman than Blaqstarr) and the structure's sophisticated--no longer just a cicada whirl of "hey"s and "what"s, samples of samples, and kick-less drums. It's got that oppressive craziness, but out of the cloud of stutter vocals, weird half-basslines, and space-noise syncopation comes that glorious brass. Pierre's already a masterful DJ--challenging and pragmatic at the same time--and a very clever post-Blaq Starr Club producer, but "Deserve This" sounds like DJ Pierre's first, tried and true Club classic. His "Ryda Girl", his "Pick Em' Up", his "Niggaz Fightin'".

further reading/viewing:

-"Sunday On Da Porch (Drops Thanksgiving)" by Codie G from Huntsville Got Starz
-"G-Side - Huntsville International" by Quan from Hater Player
-"Sensational & Spectre: Acid & Bass" by Michael Byrne from City Paper
-Matt Furie's Website

Be Thankful For What You Got.

2009-11-25T19:26:00.013-05:00

Posted this last Thanksgiving but thought it'd be appropriate again, so I drastically rewrote it and here it is. Have a good holiday.-b

Like What's Going On? or all those Sly and Curtis albums, William DeVaughn's 1974 album Be Thankful For What You Got is politically-minded soul--but it's also quieter than those message music classics. Less concerned with tackling the big picture head-on, DeVaughn's record is fascinated with all the smaller things that made Marvin wanna holler and made Curtis confident that if there's a hell below, we were all gonna go. It's a minor soul masterpiece tinted with a "the people's history" approach.

Be Thankful For What You Got's focus is less the world's problems than those directly affected by those problems. Opening track, "Give the Little Man a Great Big Hand" celebrates the guy behind the desk or the dude who picks up your trash without reducing the titular "little man" to a symbol of this or that. The less explicit point of the song though is, "no one else is paying attention to regular-ass people" and that's particularly true in times of historical turbulence and change, which was the climate of 1974--when the country was coming out of Vietnam, the boiling over of Watergate, when Patty Hearst was kidnapped, when Hank Aaron beat Babe Ruth's homerun record, when the "Rumble in the Jungle" took place, when Beverly Johnson smiled proudly from the cover of Vogue.

That's to say, in an attempt to bottle-up all the socio-political insight and outrage and even joy roving around, the piece of art that's "political" often loses track of the people really being twisted and turned by that history. So, when DeVaughn's album begins with a polite guitar and the sound effects of a room applauding, it's a gift to the people often skimmed over for that broader, sweeping message about the state of the nation.

And on "Something's Being Done", the album's sorta reassuring closer, DeVaughn assures listeners that change will come and stuff will get better. The fact that stuff's not currently all that good--the focus of most political music--sits around in the background: He wouldn't have to tell listeners things will be better if they weren't bad right now. That DeVaughn looks ahead with a little less cynicism than other political soulsters and rockers probably has a lot to do with DeVaughn still being "the little man" himself.

DeVaughn's sensitive to "the little man", so he knows that hearing how bad everything is, all the time, is a little unnecessary, even obnoxious, because "the little man" knows it, sees it, and lives it, day in and day out. When a big star get political, it's noble, but it's decadent too; rarely do the the concerns of the singer/artist affect that artist on a palpable, daily basis. And it's this disinterest in trying to be a voice of the generation musician and just being a thinking, affected-by-shit singer instead that makes Be Thankful... so humane and wisely closed-off from giant statements.

"We Are His Children" is a simple celebration of God. "You Can Do It" takes on vice and kindly urges people to stop drinking too much at parties. "Kiss and Make Up" encourages reconciliation, getting over the little stuff and moving on. There's a brilliant, teasing aspect to the chorus, where DeVaughn coos "Let's kiss...and make up" and that "make" plays on the tens of thousands of love songs heard and you expect it to be, "Let's kiss and make love".

But it isn't. For now, DeVaughn's concerned with the very immediate present of just not arguing or "taking off our rings". It's like that scene in Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep where works-in-a-slaughterhouse Stan embraces a dance with his wife but quietly rejects her increasingly feverish advances for sex--because shit's just too heavy on his mind, body, and soul. "Kiss and Make Up" has that kind of world-weary, wordly-wise sensitivity inside of it. 70's soul merged with political let's get-alongs bumping into let's get it ons.

Another reason for DeVaughn's specific form of modest social protest meets "it could be worse" appreciation may be his roots in Washington, DC. Marvin Gaye too, was from DC, but Marvin was already a celebrity by the 70s, no longer as closely connected to the city. DeVaughn sang on the side and worked for the government until he stumbled upon the soon-to-be-classic "Be Thankful For What You Got". Gaye addressed the politics with a question, DeVaughn answers with a sincere but simple statement. This is common for people from or residing in the District. They're way closer to politricks than the rest of us, and are more apt to digest the bullshit and come up with a pithy answer, and skip over the self-righteous indignation stage.

Musically too, it resides somewhere between comfort and ready-to-break-out ennui. Quite a few songs kick-off with a memorable slam of drums or stab of strings ("We Are His Children", "Sing a Love Song") before politely slipping into a groove, like that first moment of knee-jerk frustration with something on CNN followed by the point where you get your head around it a little more and actually process the reality of it all. Take the title track, which is all slow-burn atmospheric organ, with some plucked funk guitar that all just sits back and supports DeVaughn's brilliant chorus that lays out what "you may not have" ("Diamond in the back, sun roof top, diggin' the scene with a gangsta lean") all the while assuring you that it's okay to not have it and that you can "still stand tall".

Though DeVaughn's answer isn't as attractive as Marvin's rhetorical question, it's not as simple or besides the point as one might think. DeVaughn's not so much telling you not to freak, or to just chill-out--indeed, you don't sing this much about how we don't have to worry if you're not worried--as he is adding some right-minded moderation to Marvin's message from the year before, eschewing the get-with-it cynicism for minor victory appreciation.

further reading/viewing:

-Funk My Soul on Be Thankful...
-Killer of Sheep Trailer
-Beverly Johnson on her Vogue Cover

Protecting Rappers From Themselves (and Protecting Rappers from the Guys There to Protect Rappers from Themselves)

2009-11-23T02:12:00.005-05:00

The obvious but worth repeating part first: If you're a big-time rapper and you make your reputation talking about your weed and your guns, even if you do it really creatively (Wayne or Gucci) or like, render the uglier details of it all particularly well (Wayne, Gucci, or Lil Boosie), you're going to be a fucking target. Not saying it's fair, not saying it isn't just flat-out racist--it's also rockist--but it's true.

The less obvious part: These arrests are indeed, a mix of stupidity and misread privilege, but it's also a kind of nihilism that doesn't go away just because now a whole bunch of people know who you are and you got songs on the radio. If there's any "positive" to say, Gucci going to jail or the ridiculous amount of hip-hop deaths every year, it's that in some roundabout way, it's but one more way that hip-hop calls attention to a lot of the dirt swept to the side or ignored in this country:

How fucked it still is to be black or poor or poor and black. How "the bootstraps" stuff sounds good and inspiring but ignores all those years it took to pull up those bootstraps and all the scheisty, shitty people it put you into contact with that don't just go away, or your awful diet, or the doctors you never visited because you didn't have any dough or health insurance, or the generations of family that didn't even have the possibility for bootstraps-pulling and you're literally inheriting their health problems...all that stuff doesn't go away once your life is Bill O'Reilly approved.

J. Dilla's death to lupus, Baatin's battle with mental illness and his recent death, speak to the plight of the black lower-class--and if you got an imagination, the lower class as a whole--as much as say, [INSERT RAPPER HERE] getting shot.

And still, there's some uncomfortable something else coursing through these arrests. Namely, it's the very clear way that labels are scooping up these guys, promising them money--because they already have fame--and slightly, over time, shifting their style and approach to rap--in a sense marketing them--to make them more "pop", while doing none of the stuff to stop them from getting arrested and then, slowly but surely dropping them.

Perhaps you saw, "Lil Wayne's Sizzurp-Guzzler Blues", from The Village Voice two weeks ago. It describes the weird way that the Lil Wayne documentary The Carter went from a doc playing at Sundance, to a doc "mysteriously pulled" from Sundance, to one that Wayne's record label says Wayne himself no longer approves, to a quiet release on iTunes and DVD.

What's implied in the article and what seems pretty obvious to anyone following the doc's story since Sundance, is that a verite-style documentary that shows Wayne smoking a lot of weed and drinking a lot of purple, is no longer a good look for the rapper whose face is now slapped across T-shirts in Hot Topic.

That it's all wrapped-up as if it's Wayne himself who has an issue with the documentary is where it gets really problematic. It also recalls all that weird internet stuff Noz dealt with in regards to Gucci's label, which claimed that it was Gucci himself opposed to these leaks. Now, it's hardly inconceivable that a year or so after Wayne smoked tons of weed on camera he feels kinda strange about it and it's very possible that Gucci himself doesn't want his big album to leak, but there's something more nefarious going on here too. It's a label no longer speaking for the rapper but speaking as the rapper.

And it also seems to be a label, coming from a place of authority, and providing misinformation to a rapper--telling Wayne this looks bad for him, telling Gucci about the concerns about leaks--that the rapper will no doubt take very seriously. That then gets translated into "Wayne doesn't approve of this documentary"/"Gucci doesn't want any leaks". It reminds me of the many Boosie interviews like this one back when Superbad came out, where Boosie mentioned the album's "for the ladies" slant--because women buy albums apparently--and it's solidified by this interview where he basically reveals all the bullshit smuggled onto Superbad.

There's also the effect on the music itself. Boosie can attest to how Superbad was compromised, and something like Gucci's "Spotlight" is now just to be expected--though the return of the Plies version of "Wasted" and the relegating the OJ version to an iTunes EP, sounds like a wholesale dumping of Gucci's weirder, regional aspects--and even Wayne's No Ceilings sounds like a once-wild rapper tied-down, those limits self-imposed or not, but most certainly rooted in a slightly kinder, less harsh, more palpable version of weirdness than the syrup-sipping "pussy monster" of a few years ago.

These are labels that signed these guys for the very things they'e now being advised to temper or toss out altogether. Now, this is all speculation, but as these rappers go to jail, this image of a label deeply concerned with the whims of their artist--preventing negative documentaries, staving-off leaks--just seems ridiculous.

And you know, it sure would help if these guys would figure their shit out, bizarre, made-to-doom-you, draconian probation violation laws or not.

further reading/viewing:

-"Lil Wayne's Sizzurp-Guzzler Blues" by Jed Lipinski from Village Voice
-"Music Reviewer's Blog Suspended for Promoting Music" from Techdirt
-TSS Presents Fifteen Minutes with Lil Boosie
-"Dirty World (Lil Boosie Interview) by Maurice Garland for Ozone Magazine

How Big Is Your World? Some New Rap.

2009-11-12T01:01:00.003-05:00

-Mannie Fresh "Like a Boss"

An intricate thud of programmed drums, wailing guitars, some minor chords, a Bruce Lee "Wahh!", and a Star Wars reference and Mannie Fresh is back. Where's Fresh been? He deserved a break. He literally made hundreds of beats for Cash-Money for about a decade straight. Now, he's probably been sitting on his "Big Things Poppin" paycheck and tossing-out killer beats like "The Pimp and the Bun" and relaxing. Only he hasn't because his fucking sister got killed in late 2007. That mix of victory, sadness, and knowledge of one's tiny place in the world, are all coursing through "Like a Boss". "Let it be told, 40 million sold/I used to be hot but these days I'm cold" is telling: A quick acknowledgment of Fresh's lowered stock as of late, shifting slang, and fun, clever way of saying, "I'm still the best".

There's something changing--for the better--about how "older" rappers continue their careers. It isn't leaping onto trends with too much fervor, like a mom with a belly-button ring or something, and it isn't recreating the sound of the past as closely as possible, it's some tough-to-explain, know-it-when-you-hear-it middle-ground involving humorous meta-commentary on one's past successes, a confidence in the music being made now, and enough quietly turned innovation in there to make it still sound alive. "Like a Boss" has all those things. And it has real, down-to-earth emotions too.

-Diamond District "The Shining"

From the intro track that declares In the Ruff will "bring that east coast, raw, boom-bap hip-hop to the DMV", to the ODB, Gangstarr, and Jay-Z samples, to it's overall smoky, thumping sound, in terms of nostalgia and precedent, Diamond District's album is as audacious and obnoxious as 9th Wonder flipping "T.R.O.Y" horns on The Listening or Wayne aping Biggie and Nas on Tha Carter III--but unlike those examples, Ruff's exercise in nostalgia don't get by on moxy and audacity alone, it delivers and then builds on its not-so-modest promise. "The Shining" has the pop elements all that hard-as-fuck rap has (a damn catchy chorus) and it has the angular, hazy avant sounds too: Those lilting moan of strings, the record hiss. This isn't as simple as swiping the drum patterns from 90s rap and buying some R & B LPs, these guys really get it.

When Oddisee steps in to rap, with "I ain't even 'sposed to be here", stretching his not-Northern, not-Southern, kinda both accent, and recounts how he was born feet first, this isn't just recreating say, Enta Da Stage for his hometown. And if there's a "boom-bap" influence here, it's the conversational skits and interludes on all those NYC classics and not the focused rapping of those albums. If Prodigy rapped like he spoke on "Infamous Prelude" he'd sound like Oddisee here. Determined, mad, hilarious, confused, everything. An antidote to that boner-kill Wale album.

-G-Side ft. 6 Tre G "Ink"

This is not from the Huntsville International Project but some unreleased shit in lieu of that tape's absence, but hey, it's new to me, it's G-Side, it's Block Beataz, so let's go. "Ink" sounds like CP and Mali Boi found an 8-Bit cover of "I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight" and stuck a rawk band over it and then disassembled it all and put it back together...and asked 6 Tre G to jump on-board. ST's Andre3k beatless pre-verse here is sympathetic and matter-of-fact: "Some broads got tramp stamps, some boys got prison tats/Some boys got bootlegs and wish they could give it back/My neck say "Jackie's son" my chest say "Stay trill"/My leg got a rocket to rep for the H-Ville."

Basically, through some quick verses about tattoos, you get a great sense of G-Side and 6 Tre G's style and world view. ST transfers quick, humorous but real observations about tattoos and turns them into a kind of seize-the-moment fuck the world motivational speech thing ("one life to lose"), 6 Tre G's tattoos all funnel into the awful shit that's happened to him or he's done to others and what he's learned--his tattoos a kind of mnemonic/memory jogger--and G-Side's Clova ends it with the kind of mini-mythmaking he's really good at--a superhero "reveal" of his tattoos at verse's end. All wrapped around a really weird, confusing slab of futuristic Huntsville production.

-Ryan Leslie "Never Gonna Break Up"

The new Ryan Leslie album is really insular-sounding, even moreso than the last one...which also came out this year. It's the kind of album where every song's a hit if you like it and if you don't like it, the whole thing just kinda washes over you and you're all like, "whatever". Leslie's lyrics are super-direct--a nice way of saying they're terrible--and the production's weirdly elaborate, so the whole thing feels really lived-in, worked-on. The stacks and stacks of synthesizer and electronic production are the sound of a lonely-ass guy messing with his equipment day and night--a metrosexual, heart-broken phantom of the opera really into Cameo--and finding bizarro combinations of sound: "What if this 80s TV movie bassline mixed with some airy helicopter flutters of synth and shit, how about some scrunched-up hi-hats? Okay, now I'll jump in that vocal booth and bare my goofball soul..."

"Never Gonna Break Up" creeps along, but it's also creepy. Ryan Leslie singing genuinely confused, impulsive lyrics about lost love. This is Sonny Crockett circling Caroline's house. It's Albert Brooks in Modern Romance, drumming up every unfortunate scenario for his ex to be in and freaking out by buying her a stupid-ass talking stuffed animal. You know? Or not. Everything on this album exists somewhere between this calculated cool (those mood-setting synths) and feckless sincerity-- Leslie's too-real lyrics, especially that odd detail that he's "gonna get the finest clothes [he] can find on retail"

-DJ Pierre "Let Me Get That"

Dancefloor pragmatism pulling in one direction, the unwavering creativity and confidence of youth in the other, "Let Me Get That" from DJ Pierre--Baltimore's Best Club DJ 2009--bobs and weaves around Baltimore Club's usually ultra-hype production style. It's a kind of bridge track, intended to slow-up the dancefloor but only temporarily. Remember, "slow" is relative and a track like this might be somewhere near the peak of a set in a lot of other cities but in Baltimore, it's a shambling, break-down track. Not the one that has everybody dancing, but the one that parts the crowd and allows one special Club dancer to show-off. That moment in movies that really still happens in places like Baltimore's Club Paradox or Contrast Hall in Glen Burnie, MD where Pierre's part of a teen event on Friday nights.

A way to sell the song might be, "If you thought Blaqstarr was weird...". There's no pumping energy here, just a kind of waddling drone of rhythms and squeaks with Pierre himself saying "Let me get that" that within it, has it's own peaks and like, that's where you get the pumping energy. It isn't an ever-rising explosion of loops and stutter vocals, it's a meandering chunk of Club that slowly worms it's way into your head. Dance-wise, it gives club-goers a lot of options, as one could ride those double drum loops or bounce on one's heels to the ping-pong keys...or do a little of both. Daniel Krow also wrote about this track here. And do buy Pierre's latest mix CD Vol. 7 here.

further reading/viewing:

-"The Right Track(s): Z-Ro's "Raw" And More by Daniel Krow
-"Dart's Most Played for the Week" from Bloggerhouse
-"Didn't Make the Cut...Stay Tuned"
-Miami Vice - In the Air Tonight
-"Best Club DJ: DJ Pierre" from Baltimore City Paper
-The Remix Tour 08-22-08 Part III
-Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures directed by Hasko Baumann

Return of Session/Producer Weirdos!

2009-11-09T13:12:00.002-05:00

A couple random pop music snapshots from the past few years: Timbaland beefing with the guy who used help him make beats on a lumpy victory lap kinda hit. Kanye parlaying soul-beat success into backpacker pop into icy auto-tune warble hits. Mariah Carey singing goofball lines about "bathing in windex" so clearly from the pen of the The-Dream.

Though the ascent of producers and songwriters to all-out artists isn't anything new, this often awkward advancement dominates hip-hop and R & B in "the 'aughts". Timbaland. Kanye West. The-Dream. Ne-Yo. Keri Hilson. Even the explosion of DJ culture and the cult of Dilla and indie label careers of Alchemist or Black Milk owe to this trend gone a little crazy. It's the reason why a lot of music is so strange and form-stretching and it's why it's so weird and messy too. Sometimes, the radio sounds like the inmates are running the asylum. Because they kinda are.

The behind-the-scenes to the stage trend speaks to a bunch of shifts this decade, but namely the everybody's-a-star, post-reality show blah blah blah and the still confusing way that rap and R & B's increased mainstreaming runs parallel to it's idiosyncracies, porous borders, experimentation, etc. No doubt, this personalization of any and everything and the rarefication of a pop sound slam into one another in a ton of interesting ways, but like so many of the bizarro mergers and odd alliances of the decade, the "little guy", the actual weirdo, is pushed to the side. Not entirely pushed to the side and indeed, the internet and indie labels have adjusted expectations in some really cool ways, but well, there's a couple of interesting people that get to do everything and a lot of dudes that get lost in the mix.

For every, 808s & Heartbreak, there's a whole bunch of Mannie Fresh's Return of the Ballin' type records: Rolled out onto iTunes, eventually comes out on CD, and has no promotion. Something like 88 Keys' Death of Adam at one time, could've been "that weird record by the guy who produced "Thieves in the Night" but instead it was a three-years in-the-making, hyped-on-mixtapes, had a pre-mixtape-teaser-even record that was too weird and not poppy enough. There'd be more things like Cody Chesnutt's Headphone Masterpiece if the stakes were just a lower.

Yeah, this is dipped in nostalgia but there's something exciting about stuff like Eddie Hazel's Games, Dames, and Guitar Thangs or the records from Lee Hazlewood producer Billy Strange sitting in a bin of 25 Cent records. Or a Memphis Horns record. Or the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra. These one-off things a label conceded to putting-out or handed over some studio time for because hey, the people behind the hits deserved that much. Now, a label gives dudes a real budget, a P.R push, and facilitates some hit records which yeah, is surely preferable to the chance of making a weird, "personal" record but isn't so good for longevity or anything like that.

What stirred this all up though, is a few recent releases: Dam-Funk's Toeachizown, Ryan Leslie's Transition, and Mannie Fresh's Return of the Ballin, out now on iTunes, 11/17 physical). All three of these records are excellent and all of them give off the same feeling as some random-ass Billy Strange LP: A little too weird, a little too disinterested in catching a lot of listeners...jumbled, slabs of indulgence. And they gain their strength from this sensibility, they aren't weary listens and they don't fall back on the crutch of mega-popular artist's "experimental" album--there's something more being worked-out here.

You hear it in the all-over-the-place emotions of Ryan Leslie's new one--really, if you listen to the lyrics, the guy's a mess, obviously "a love addict" maybe a Co-Dependant--and you hear it in the underlying sadness of Fresh's "Like a Boss" or that coat of tinny vocoder on "Go Girl" and just pick up Dam's Toeachizown--it's over two hours of wash-over-you synth work. Steeped in the past but not aggressively "vintage" or anything, it's just Dam, free of the SOLAR Records studio or a Westside Connection sample-avoiding recording session. I could go on, highlighting a dozen more tiny details that make these records so fascinating, but the appeal here is how each of these will touch a listener totally differently; every song's a "hit" and none of them are. They're full of frayed edges and bubbling over with personality and shit just doesn't sound like this all that much anymore. Records that sound like the inside of the musician's mind.

This isn't to bemoan the current music landscape, though it's spitting out talents left and right all the time--like the economy, the free-market-ism hitting a critical mass to where only the super-successful have the right to do much of anything--it's just to point out that how music works right now (not enough pop stars, all the behind the scenes people want to and will get a chance to be pop stars and'll fail) doesn't allow for the kind of organic, slow-rolling weirdo creativity music behind-the-scenes-ers could once indulge in from time to time--and sometimes, they'd still make a hit.

further reading/viewing:

-"Rising: Dam-Funk" from Pitchfork
-Al Shipley talking about the new Mariah
-Billy Strange Conducts Sinatra
-Richard Rorty on "the free market" from Take Care of Freedom...

Beanie Sigel's Balancing Act: "What You Talkin' About (Average Cat)"

2009-11-05T21:01:00.004-05:00

What's been forgotten since Beanie Sigel released "What You Talkin' About (Average Cat)", earlier this week is just how well-rapped the thing is. Just how good Beans is on the song though, is pretty easy to forget, when such a delicate balancing act of a diss song is followed-up by an almost twenty-minute bitch-rant...in video form. That's the tit-for-tat internet for you though, right?

But really, this is the most solid, determined chunk of rapping from Sigel since The B.Coming. Every word and idea is wisely placed, there's a concern for meter and syllables, the way he stretches the word "mere" in one line to rhyme with "hairs" in the next--"The mere sight of fiends/Raise the hairs on your back"--or the weird, flurry of Michael Jackson references and something as vicious and nebulous "I can say shit that make 'B look at you different"--all too a plodding, piano beat and Mobb Deep hook that's obviously constructed to be the complete opposite of the Euro-house synth party that is the Jay song Beans "answers" here.

Beanie's also kinda mimicking Jay-Z's voice--that awkward, scrunched-up nasally accent--which is just funny, but is a subtler way of reminding you just how much Jay really does owe Sigel. Fuck "street cred" and all the dopey stuff Beans still cares about at age 35--that's no less pathetic than Jay talking "business" in response, just two guys leaning on their proverbial crutches--Sigel is pretty much responsible for making Jay-Z the more complex, introspective rapper he became around the time of Blueprint.

Ever notice how every early “reflective” Jay-Z song, if you thought hard about the lyrics, it was Jay who was the asshole? Beanie brought a sense of self and morality that Jay picked up on. Beans moved Jay away from “thug em’, fuck em’, love em’, leave em” and into a functional, knuckle-head with real feelings. There's even plenty of examples of Jay swiping Sigel's flow pretty much wholesale: Compare The Truth’s "Mac Man" and Jay’s "Girls, Girls, Girls". The joke here is, Jay doesn't have it in him to get this (publicly) upset about anything and so, on the sincerity tip, and only on the sincerity tip, Beanie Sigle's victorious.

The point is, this really isn't just a "diss song". Yeah, it's a little too insider-y and all that, but it's genuine response, with Beans recontextualizing Jay's song in nearly every way, inhabiting his voice and opinions, and then sitting down and writing an artful rap, that moves between anger and disappointment, violence and distress, and never loses sight of its target. But there's something unfortunate about the fact that Beans' rediscovered focus is rooted in being upset and the reality that a shit-load of people'll actually hear this song, so he better rap cogently.

But what all the zShare hawks get when they put on the "Beanie Sigel Jay-Z Diss" though, is sure, filled with the fruity gossip junk that a diss record requires in 2009, but it's also downright horrifying. The aforementioned scary-movie beat and the fact that it just sounds like a dude really trying to keep his shit together and then, just kinda exploding at the end, no longer even rapping just ranting. There's no "oh shit, no he didn't!" moment to the thing. This song does not make you excited for a follow-up.

further reading/viewing:

-"The Quarterly Report: Albums" (#5 is Beans' The Broad Street Bully) by Tom Breihan
-Beanie Sigel "What You Talkin About (I Aint Your Average Cat)"
-Jay-Z Responds to Beanie Sigel
-"Beanie Sigel Says If Jay-Z Dont Call Him..."

The House Next Door: "The Wizened Sympathy of Good Hair"

2009-11-02T02:07:00.003-05:00

Good Hair is a weird movie and if I had to compare it to anything I've seen as of late, it'd be The September Issue, just in being endlessly fascinating but not really sure what it's trying to be. That said, a doc by Chris Rock about weaves that wedges in all kinds smart insight and a bunch of humanism is more than alright. You'll love it when you watch it, you'll kinda stop and be like "Waitaminute that could've done a lot more" when it ends and then, you realize Rock would probably cop to that anyways.

And still, Good Hair succeeds in not giving-in to any of the awful trends of snarky, stunt docs of the 'aughts--it isn't condescending and it isn't sanctimonious and all serious and shit, either. Anyways, head over to The House Next Door to read my review of Good Hair:

Chris Rock is a comedian, not a documentarian. The success of Good Hair and it's need-to-be-noted but ultimately irrelevant failures hinge on never forgetting this rather obvious fact. What that means is the movie indulges in being funny first and foremost, pretty much always at the expense of any excoriation.

Good Hair's kinda conceit came from Rock's two daughters, one of whom asked him why she didn't have "good hair." The set-up suggests that we'll explore why his daughter thinks of her hair as, um, not good, but the movie actually does little of that. Instead it simply traces the ways "good hair" is attained and sorta holds the whole thing together via a twice-a-year, for-a-prize-of-20k hair-styling contest, which is so low-rent and absurd that Rock wisely steps back and quietly grins and primarily sympathizes with the competitors' unimposing goals.

This sympathy makes the movie, but it's a strange choice for a comedian and it's out-of-step with the perspective of most humorous, politically-minded, star-driven documentaries. Rock's not Sacha Baron-Cohen or Michael Moore here; he's more a shticky Errol Morris or a hammy Werner Herzog, fascinated and moved by his subject to the point that the movie's quality suffers even as its joshing humanity expands. Folksy jibing and absurd jokes always come first, but that doesn't mean Good Hair doesn't meander around some really interesting details, make some really good points, and stick itself out there. It's neither snarky nor entirely understanding of the phenomenon and sub-phenomenons (hair relaxer, weaves, hair-stylist sub-culture, etc) surrounding "good hair."

Don't Wrap Up Rap Just Yet: G-Side

2009-10-29T12:30:00.018-04:00

Did you see that interview with Tyler Perry on 60 Minutes last Sunday? Probably not, but Perry called his infamous character Madea, "bait": "Disarming, charming, make-you-laugh bait so that I can slap Madea in something and talk about God, love, faith, forgiveness, family -- any of those things." The beats on BP3 are bait like that.

Visceral, in-the-now slabs of synth and Euro-house party sounds so that Jay-Z can slip his grown-ass man insights onto a new album. It's more than "mildly entertaining" as Sasha Frere-Jones said in "Wrapping Up", it's a deeply affecting album about standing between two worlds and wisely inching towards the smarter, less "cool" choice.

Hunstville, Alabama's G-Side released an album full of beats not all that different from those weirder ones on BP3 and they did it nearly a year before Jay and they didn't reach out to 500k-a-beat business buddies, they were holed-up with their town's avant-rap geniuses the Block Beataz and crafted Starshipz and Rocketz, a perfect album about looking forward and cringing as you look back. The fluttering synths, the stuttering 808s, the waves of weird space-noise running through their songs are not there to reflect what's going on in New York City clubs--or on sites like Discobelle--but to musically manifest transcendence. Space and retro-futurism as escape from all that bullshit.

Album-ender "Run Thingz" is basically all-out rave stuff, it doesn't slow the BPMs down all that much and it doesn't remove the airy edges of the electronics--as is the production habit on BP3--and the verses, from ST 2 Lettaz and Clova, use their current success and parlay it into rap-it-so-it-happens utopianism: "I stay trill like ST/They put a lock where my soul be/And found a way to break free/Starshipz that's the dedication".

It's a long way from ST's killer first lines on "Youth of the Ghetto": "Momma stay gone, Daddy's been gone, lights ain't on so I had to get grown/No TV, can't watch The Flintstones/So I went outside with them boys and flipped stones." You'll notice that rarely are G-Side rapping in the present-tense about hustling. They're not that much different from Jay-Z, only their concerns are, even as they float around in space, much more grounded. It's the production sound and trends of the 'aughts wrapped in earthy, deeply sincere rhymes. The stuff Frere-Jones praised Gibbs for, just not as wrapped up in niche sound of rap's past. Looking into the past and then dragging the past into the future.

Their latest project, Huntsville International comes out on November 9th and in title alone, shows these hyper-specific regional rappers talking to the world. It's named after their hometown's airport, but it's also a reference to the group's broader scope. Since the release of Starshipz, the group's travelled up North and West and across the Atlantic, picking up new ideas and sounds, all now to be rolled-up in their forward-thinking space-age country rap tunes.

further reading/viewing:

-"Wrapping Up" by Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker
-"Das Racist to Sasha Frere-Jones: Stop Killing Rap"
-"They Don't Really Dance: G-Side at Guilford College" by ME
-"Artist Spotlight: G-Side" from KevinNottingham.Com
-Tyler Perry on 60 Minutes

Don't Wrap Up Rap Just Yet: Jay Electronica

2009-10-28T22:26:00.021-04:00

There's nothing wrong with Freddie Gibbs--though, that there's nothing wrong with him is indeed, what's wrong with him--but his raps and his business model served-up to contrast with hip-hop's bleeding into lots of more old/newfangled pop sounds, as they are in Sasha Frere-Jones' "Wrapping Up", is problematic. Gibbs does worker-bee, working-class, crime-tinged hip-hop really well but that's about all he does. And this might something to note or celebrate in terms of hip-hop as a genre if indeed, there weren't still a shit-ton of dudes stretching the 90s rap form to its limits and not simply carrying on the tradition.

Jay Electronica, a mutt of an MC, whose style, though primarily pulled from 90s New York rap, pads that kind of buzzing lyricism with the sound of the South (dude was born in New Orleans) is indeed the actual future of hip-hop. Like a Jim Jarmusch of rap, Electronica's art brims with a wordly-wise sense place (or lack thereof) as everything gets all muddled and global. He doesn't have a label. He tours. He drops a few songs and year and every one of them is a fucking event. He's Web 2.0 (or whatever point-"o" we're now on) and aggressively throwback, all at the same time.

The internet-wide rewindable on his latest song, "Exhibit C", is a prime example of 90s rap insular word-combo rapping for the sake of rapping and some personal/political/world-at-large type stuff that's deeply rooted in the concerns of the now: "They call me Jay Electronica/Fuck that! Jay Elec Hannukah/Jay Elec yamulka/Jay Elec Ramadan Muhammad Asalam Alakum/Rasoul Allah supana watallah through your monitor." And to boot, "Exhibit C" has some references to the East jacking the South's slang and a touch of self-mythology all wrapped in genuine, earthy struggles: homelessness, hunger, violence and all that good stuff. The song was posted on blogs as varied as Nahright and Dirty Glove Bastard and everything in between.

Oh yeah...and the lines before that quotable bounce from an old-school rap references, to a laundry-list of seemingly disconnected things (Fruit of Islam or Friends of Israel maybe both , Garvey, Tesla) to an MGMT reference. And it's all rapped over a fluttering soul-beat--which is deceptive because Jay is just as known to rap over mega baroque, synthy soul beats ("Exhibit A") and beatless, crystalline loops of something or other ("Act I") as he is something this stirring though conventional though no less glorious.

further reading/viewing:

-"Wrapping Up" by Sasha Frere-Jones from The New Yorker
-"Das Racist to Sasha Frere-Jones: Stop Killing Rap"
-"Audio: Jay Electronica - Exhibit C [Prod. by Just Blaze] (Radio Rip)" from Dirty Glove Bastard

Village Voice, Sound of the City: Interview w/Mike Williams of Eyehategod

2009-10-23T12:52:00.005-04:00

Really not trying to neglect this blog, it's just working out that way. There's plenty to comment on (SFJ's problematic article, a defense of Nicky Minaj), but for now, all you get is this pretty fun, though rather guarded interview I did with Mike Williams of New Orleans' Eyehategod--a group that's meant a lot to me over the years. The same hard-ass, fuck everything nihilism rubbing up against community-based humanism you get in stuff like UGK or whatever. I like that Mike throws in a reference to "Bounce" when discussing the sounds of New Orleans, not a lot of metal dudes would. Anyways, check it out. EHG plays with Pig Destroyer and Goatwhore as part of CMJ tomorrow night.

"The New Orleans sludge legends Eyehategod--a band of squirming, perpetual outsiders--have remained masters of miserablist metal for twenty years now. Dominated by weighty blues riffs, punctuated by bursts of hardcore, and anchored by lead singer Mike Williams' growl, the sound of the New Orleans-based band mixed and matched styles of punk and metal before that sort of thing was fashionable. Add battles with addiction and the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the band--temporarily derailing the group and leading to Williams' arrest for drug possession--and Eyehategod more than live up to their return-to-touring tagline: "Twenty years of abuse." The band plays a show on a boat this Saturday, along with Pig Destroyer and Goatwhore as part of the (though varied and ever expansive) still predominantly indie CMJ. Via e-mail, we spoke to EHG lead singer Mike Williams about the show, Hurricane Katrina--something Mike's tired of discussing on other people's terms--and how and why the world getting more and more terrible makes Eyehategod's devastating music sound that much better."

How Big Is Your World? New Rapz.

2009-10-21T11:52:00.004-04:00

-Z-Ro "Move Your Body"

Tossing in some superficial reggae slang ("rudeboy", "shotta", mentioning "the dancehall"), affecting a Jamaican--or Jamaican enough--accent, and ending the song with a chopped-and-screwed dancehall toast?! All of that with a straight face. Z-Ro takes this reggae approximation the same way he takes everything: Dead serious. There's also the clever, almost parody/inversion of the typical, dancefloor direction song, here "Move Your Body" not a dancehall chant, but a warning from 'Ro: "Move your body or lose your body."

The aside to "Mr. Preacher man", is Z-Ro both declaring himself beyond good and evil and showing a deep understanding of religious doctrine: "Hey Mr. Preacher man, yeah I know the bible/I'm not in love with murder, I'm in love with my own survival." The word-choice of "murder", along with 'Ro's aggressive "yeah, I know the bible", is some theological shit, as he's referencing what a lot of scholars say the commandment actually says--not the more nebulous "thou shalt not kill". Smart stuff.

This choiceless choice" street-talk is contrasted by a few points where indeed, it's Z-Ro with the problem, where he's looking for a fight. The moment where he can't have a good time because some dude's kinda maybe eyeing him up and of course, when he compares busting heads to "a PCP high", which is disturbingly apt; a fun, but fucked-up disassociative high...not even joyful, just a rush. Only on something as aggressively jumbled and epic as Cocaine could this from-the-soundtrack-to-Captain Ron reggae-rap jam work so well.

-BG "My Hood"

You can go home again. BG ad-libs "I'm back...and I'm better than ever..." like he ever really left and didn't just sort of make less-good music. Rap fans are actually, a fairly accepting, not very cynical bunch. This is why guys like Drake have actual street buzz and it's why Raekwon can make a The W-level rap album and have the internet going nuts or why, B.G can suddenly affect the wizened veteran stance, as if he didn't release an album with the Chopper City Boyz last year.

What's changed? Something. Not sure how or why it happened, but it's become fashionable in the past year for rap vets to acknowledge their vet-status and even their irrelevance and just make deeply moving tracks chock full of ignorance and old-head advice. Look, I'm not complaining, just pointing some shit out, it's ultimately a good look. There's some nostalgia going on here, but it's wisely tempered by the present and it isn't in denial that it ain't 1999 (or 1993 or 1988...), it's just kinda working-off that.

The tinny victory that skittered through every Mannie Fresh beat, back when he was knocking songs like this out on the daily, is in "My Hood", but it's bitter-sweet now, it's minor, so the joy comes in the fact that BG's still around, that he's still rapping, and that he can let his whole hood on his tour bus and yes, even in helping an old lady with groceries. Also, all this stuff about aging is good advice, unless you're fellow ex-Cash-Money buddy Juvenile, and you can still just jump in and eat a beat the same as always.

-Gucci Mane "Timothy"

Gucci doesn't do a lot of storytelling and that's totally okay. Much of his appeal was his seemingly infinite cache of flashy down-to-earth, words and turns-of-phrase for describing his jewelry. So, when "Timothy", an awesomely-wrought chunk of hood tragedy storytelling rap drops at the end of Great Brrritain--after the "Outro" even--it's a dramatic tonal shift to the mixtape and the goofball three-mixtapes, 10/17 event thingy, and Gucci's hype as a whole. And because the current style(s) of rapping are deeply disconnected from the era of storytelling--that's to say, "how you say it" means more and more and more--having a "how you say it" rapper like Gucci, tell a tale, is a kind of best of both worlds.

Every twist of Gucci's tongue, every nasally grunt, all the bouncing between garbled groupings of words and obsessive enunciation, guides you through the story. You're with car thief Timothy when he finds "a million bucks" in that truck, Gucci mimicking his surprise, with the peak of "What the fuck?!". And following up the lines describing the money blown at the mall, Gucci moves to the character of Blackie Joe--the owner of the what the fuck million bucks--and his delivery shifts to something more solemn. Appropriate as the verse ends with Joe shooting Timothy's mom in the head.

From there, it just kinda keeps going, the details and characters and the emotional weight of theft and revenge and revenge for revenge building and building until everyone's just sort of in a pit of despair and worry and guilt and paranoia. As Gucci says, almost like he's screwing his own voice live, "this shit is real". There's also absolutely no sense of "good guy" and "bad guy" here--something even hardened crime narratives rely on to some extent--it's all just the two characters' respective feelings and actions rendered with deep empathy...and tempered by a deeper sense of inevitability.

-E-Major ft. Kane Mayfield "Unheard"

Though ostensibly an E-Major song--a leftover from his upcoming mixtape--the song's produced by Mania Music Group's in-house producers Headphones and Bealack, and it's Mania's resident hard-ass, boom-bap revivalist, punchline machine, Kane Mayfield who absolutely destroys "Unheard".

Roaring in with a 300 impression ("Spaaartans! War-cry"), moving onto a Gremlins reference, and then just sorta tossing-out disses ("I don't respect y'all rappers, you dress like pirates/Chains and bandanas"), joke-disses ("You runnin' off at that mouth/Daddy's home, which one of y'all was jumpin' on my couch?"), and weird vocal tics ("and I rhyme like ewww"), for the next bunch of bars, like he bottled the fuck-it-all energy and fun of something like EPMD's "Headbanger" and transported it to 2009. His verse ends with, "pull your pants up, 28 waist, you can't fit a handgun." Damn.

E-Major's verses sandwich Kane's all-rap-sucks missive, and though they're seething with contempt too, it's quieter and more thought-out--the ideal contrast to Kane's multi-directional rap tantrum. Specifically saying "this is the new blueprint" and just the gut-level anger at 2009 rap and the cicada-like horns on the beat, makes this a quiet response to Jay's complainer rap single "D.O.A". E though, is more concerned with sincerity than hard-assness. Especially funny is the first verse-ending line, "And everybody wanna act like they care but/They're more concerned with Cassie's new haircut". In a way, it's as vicious of an ending as Kane's "28 waist" line, attacking the fact that everyone wants to "act like" they give a shit about rap, when they're really wrapped-up in some feminine-ass gossip blog bullshit.

-Say Wut "Streets of Baltimore"

First heard this song two weeks ago on KW Griff's friday night Club mix on 92Q, from 9pm-10pm--they stream online, all you dudes pretending to care about Club should probably fucking listen--and this 70s crime soundtrack Club flip from Say Wut made a lot of sense smooshed between the more synthetic, less rubbery Club tracks. Out of mix context, as just it's own song it's addictive, but it's hard to imagine it fitting into a Club mix, even though it most certainly does fit. Club music is just weird like that.

The current sound of Club is no longer horn-heavy really, it's post-Blaqstarr, droning, tinny, weirdness that just envelopes you. From DJ Class' "Tear the Club Up" to Debonair Samir's "Samir's Theme" to Say Wut's expertly-cut, bouncing horns, horn-based Club had a good run and it'll never go away, but the relatively lowered interest in the style is exactly what allows Say Wut to make a track as organically, conventionally funky as this--or make "Go Off Wit It", an auto-tune ode to the late K-Swift--and get away with it.

Part of Say Wut's genius on this track is precisely how little he does with the sample source (the theme from The Streets of San Francisco). He just ups the energy of the theme, throws a classic breakbeat under it, and leaves it at that. He grabs the horns and only the horns. He doesn't try to mess with any of the other, equally dope parts of the theme song, so there's no fusion-based bridge or a smattering of samples from the rest of the theme, just those rising and rising horns, some gutteral, wordless vocals, and super-tight drum smacks.

further reading/viewing:

-Google Search: "hebrew" + "rasah"
-"Lunatic Fringe" by Al Shipley for City Paper
-Mania Music Group WQFS Freestyle
-Henry Mancini Orchestra "Streets of San Francisco Main Theme"
-Sagat "Fuk Dat!"
-Wikipedia Entry for Guy Colwell

The House Next Door, Music Video Round-Up: Beyonce & Yo La Tengo

2009-10-19T09:22:00.005-04:00

Sorry about the lack of updates lately, you'll just have to jump off-site to read my rambling. Trying to get back on-track this week though. For now, there's another installment of my "Music Video Round-Up" column, this time talking about the wonderfully nutty video for Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" and the whatever but kinda cool video for Yo La Tengo's "Here to Fall" and the transformative qualities of CGI when used properly, in both.

"One part Victoria’s Secret commercial, another part dream logic anti-narrative, and a CGI-assisted freakout all around, Adria Petty’s video for Beyonce’s “Sweet Dreams” one-ups the minimalism of the instantly iconic internet meme and, um, Kanye approved “Single Ladies.” Director Jaka Nava’s video for “Single Ladies” already dropped the sensory overload expectations of music videos for a basically blank set, in front of which Beyonce and her dancers could approximate the singularly-focused energy of a live dance performance. No narrative, no props (save for Beyonce's robot hand), just dancing.

That odd performance piece couldn’t and shouldn’t be repeated and it’s why follow-up videos for "Diva" and "Ego" at least conceded to a setting, but now Beyonce and director Petty have found a way to make a video even more minimal, even more performance-based—via green-screen and computer-generated effects. Rarely ever is the use of CGI associated with minimalism—it’s more often connected to excess—but in "Sweet Dreams," CGI’s employed to create a context-less void in which Beyonce and her dancers can blow our minds anew.

The effects in "Sweet Dreams" are used to erase background and setting only to then fill the void-like digital canvas with a hot mess of bodies, clothes, and dance moves. A swirl of sophisticated and “street” dance moves, fashionable nightwear, elegant dresses and, finally, a bizarre gold bodice—it's an excess of body and action, not filmic techniques. The strange sterility of CGI, that weird dipped-in-Photoshop feeling, is employed to create a new kind of chaos, not really possible without computer effects."

BRRRRrrrrrr

2009-10-17T23:04:00.014-04:00

It's a Saturday night and way too many people sat at their computers as their digital clocks rolled over to 10:17 and three count em' three new Gucci Mane mixtapes dropped: Guccimerica, Brrrussia, and Great Brrritain.

This year there's been plenty of Gucci mixtapes already and if you slapped together the tracks from the official unofficial Murder Was the Case and the Wasted EP, Gucci's made a close-to-classic album before his actual official album even dropped (still TBA), but here we go, a trilogy of true-school rap album tight mixtapes that are also trap-rap batshit crazy. These tapes are ridiculous. Russian military song intros. Gucci joke-aping MLK. What the fuck.

No longer wandering around in his own headspace, Gucci's actually interacting with hip-hop as a whole here. There's an interest in this stupid "rap game" and it's beyond beefs with Jeezy or dudes that owe him money and get a pool cue to the temple. He's explicitly concerned with craft and style and all that good stuff, as he always has been, but you know, three conceptually-linked tapes, all landing at once, tends to announce these things extra loud and clear.

Gucci let the rest of the world name him a "great rapper", he didn't declare it prematurely a la Wayne and he didn't speak it into fruition like Jay Z, he just kept rapping and rapping and rapping until he got comfortable, even cocky, with his style...and still doesn't utter blog-hype hyperbole about being "the best". On these tapes, Gucci's not a termite rapper anymore, trimming around the edges of the same sounds and ideas with slight variation, he's a big, obnoxious, can do anything rapper now.

When Killer Mike merges his own rapid-fire post-Ice Cube style with Gucci's meter-obsessed rapping (Good Gucci example: Great Brrritain's "I Be Everywhere"), as he does on "Street Cred" (Guccimerica), well damn. "Timothy" (Great Brrrtain, also) is just classic, street-tale storytelling rap, wrapped in tragedy. Listen to that last verse, which begins with a character who "don't give a fuck no more" and "can't even love no more" and gets worse from there.

What are your favorite Gucci tape trilogy moments? That's not rhetorical either. Tell me. That's part of Gucci's dopeness. We're all in this together, sharing these tiny big musical events.

further reading/viewing:

-"White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" by Manny Farber
-"Overboard" review by David Drake from Pitchfork
-Twitter Search: "#coldwar"

City Paper NOISE: "Not With a Bang, Not With a Whimper"

2009-10-14T22:23:00.004-04:00

My review of Saturday night's ridiculous Big Bang! is up on the Baltimore City Paper's music blog. There were some pretty big fuck-ups here and there, but none the fault of the talent or the promoters and despite the lights going up early before DJ Pierre got to play, it was still an awesome night. Apparently it's going to happen next month with King Tutt returning and DJ Pierre finally getting to spin. Also, go cop DJ Pierre's Vol. 7 mix CD, it's pretty much all I've been listening to lately.

"Booked at the Depot, but moved at the last minute to after-hours spot 1722 a couple of doors down, and then ended early by 1722, this past Saturday's installment of Senari's Big Bang was all about keeping everybody, from those in attendance to the talent to promoter Puja Patel herself, off-balance.

At least part of the off-balance feeling, though, was intentional. Unpredictability is one of the most rewarding aspects of many of Patel's shows, especially past Big Bangs: DJ Booman at the Hexagon earlier this year and now, grab-bag dance party sets from Bmore Electro's Craig Sopo and Nacey of Nouveau Riche rubbing up against worker-bee club sets from King Tutt and DJ Pierre. The goal is diversity and an aggressive blurring of borders—and what better transition from electro to club than King Tutt?

The only "problem" with this mixing of scenes is that the promise of club music to anybody in Baltimore has the unfortunate effect of pushing everything that isn't club, no matter how awesome—and indeed, there were moments of pulsing, treble-filled glee in Nacey and Sopo's sets—off to the side, simply because anything that isn't club music can't compete. That's the whole schtick of Baltimore's signature music. It sonically wrecks anything and everything in its path."

The House Next Door, Music Video Round-Up: Interview w/ Severed Ways' Tony Stone

2009-10-12T12:46:00.006-04:00

So, my music video column on "The House Next Door" finally returns and I'm going to keep up a regular pace with it and not like, one every four months at the best. The first returning one is a little weird because it's not about music videos really, but it is an interview with the film director Tony Stone who directed the absolutely amazing Viking, Black Metal movie Severed Ways. Stone and I talk about digital video, Michael Mann, metal's appeal, and lots of other stuff. If you've not seen Severed Ways, please go rent it or buy it, you won't be disappointed...

"After confusing critics at festivals and brief theater runs over the past two years, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America—a set in 1007 AD, shot on digital video, heavy metal-scored, Viking anti-epic—made its way to DVD this past summer. Though most certainly not a music video, it's a movie not only dominated by the interplay between music and images but one that apes the quiet-loud dynamics of the heavy metal music that makes up most of its score. Music is at the movie's core and in that sense, seems appropriate for "Music Video Round-Up."

Like an art metal album abruptly but successfully segueing from low-end riffing to Brian Eno-esque ambience, director (and co-star) Tony Stone's Severed Ways bounces between Malick-esque patience and pulpy, in-your-face bursts of ugliness. Laconic hunting and gathering makes way for heathen church-burning. Wandering in the woods moves to the side for an awesomely unnecessary defecation scene. Imagine the atmosphere of your quasi-historical, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired metal video sucked of all the bombast and almost entirely focused on tiny activities of survival.

The result is one of the most bizarre and strangely moving films of the past bunch of years. And the film’s artfully jagged merger of opposites extends to its creation too; conceptualized, studied filmmaking sent into the Vermont woods, forcing on-the-fly, improvisation. Tony Stone was kind enough to break-down these unresolved tensions and why it was so necessary to go "off the grid" to make Severed Ways and explain metal's rarefied appeal."

Timmy Thomas' Basement Soul Masterpiece

2009-10-09T01:10:00.003-04:00

Probably because Timmy Thomas' "Why Can't We Live Together?" is spare like a demo--just a clunky drum machine, voice, and organ--or maybe it's because Thomas' plea for peace is a hushed yelp in a world of echo, like he knows the song won't change real-life (though it did in some small way, becoming the anthem for South Africa's first free elections in 1994), but Why Can't We Live Together? (1972, Glades) is less your typical socially-conscious soul classic and more like a guy working all that out in his basement. Comparisons to Nebraska might be a good way to sell it to somebody, because of the stripped-down appeal, but also because it's just a kind of terribly soul-crushing listen.

Intimate without shouting-out how intimate it is--something even Nebraska does--and really not trying to be anything but some kind of super-spare expression of worry and concern, Why Can't We Live Together?, song and album, are really like nothing else released at the time or since--save for say, the 90s lo-fi movement, or a couple of random jams from Faust. Had the album not yielded a hit, had LPs stacked-up, slowly disseminating around the country, the album might be getting some kind of fancy-pants re-release now. A piece of lost weirdo soul.

As it stands, Thomas was afforded a pretty successful career well into the 1990s, moving into some progressive disco on The Magician and from there, into some fairly successful Quiet Storm things, but this album, like so many soul albums, is just sort of relegated to "whatever" status these days. While we stand behind new jack soul-jackers like Mayer Hawthorne or some Brazilian Jazz Funk rarities, the dudes that like, palpably affected soul history get pushed to the side.

"Why Can't We Live Together" is slightly catchier, a tad more upbeat than the rest of the album, but it's as much a song that sets the tone, that trains the conventional radio-listening consumer in 1972 to accept an album of sorta improvised, voice, drum machine, and organ work-outs, as it is the obvious stand-out single. You know the song already and so, real quick just revisit it and check out the way the drum machine seems to slowly deconstruct, the tinny knocks coming closer and closer together later in the song, like when you bounce a ping-pong ball on the table and bring the paddle ever-closer to the table's surface, creating this weird arhythmic rattling. What's so cool about this, is it's the same weirdness that developed when much more consciously arty musicians started screwing around with their electronic equipment. Finding a piece of awkward beauty in imperfection...on a machine designed to sound "perfect".

There's a moment on "Take Care of Home", an appropriately confused song about the tension between America's global responsibilities and the in-house ones it just keeps shirking, where Thomas mumbles out "helps me out right here!" and a few moments later, between a coda-like cry of "take care of home", ad-libs "you know what I'm talking about?". Yeah, it's a recording and soul/funk often does this call-and-response thing, but there's something meta, something extra-solitary about it here. The record drips "guy alone in a room", so the calls seem consciously directed towards nobody.

That it's followed by an instrumental cover of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", which sounds more like something from the Eraserhead soundtrack than a soul album only drives home the solitary nature of Why Can't We Live Together?. In terms of just stretching the soul blueprint to its limit, the one-two punch of "First Time"s circus-funk and the "Walk On By" on a budget "The Coldest Days of My Life" (itself a Chi-Lites song), are a fascinating inversion of the slow-growing epic production sweeping Philly and Detroit and Memphis when Thomas holed-up to make Why Can't We Live Together?.

Hard to imagine, but the album actually grows darker as it goes along, save for the personal anthem/album-ender "Funky Me", Side B seems focused on institutionalized and inescapable fate for the oppressed. Beginning with "In The Beginning", which just explains the formation of the earth, with a focus on the visceral and horrifying (darkness, lightning) and in lieu of a hook--the song's either all hook or has no hook, you decide--has Thomas doing call and response with an abrasive lightning sound effect. A laconic, creation-myth organ vamp.

From there, disdain and even contempt bubble over. "Cold Cold People" kicks-off with Thomas lamenting "those S.O.Bs" and then sings in the voice of any and every victim of oppression since well, the aforementioned "beginning". You'd think it'd let-up on "Opportunity" but the song's essentially that 1970s soul version of "Umma Do Me" or some insular vision of "by any means necessary", in which Thomas half-apologizes for being single-minded ("This world is big enough for both of us/But I can't let you have my share") but knows that's the hand he's been dealt, lamenting "Now I've got to wheel and deal for perfection".

Calling Why Can't We Live Together? consistent would be an understatement. It's singularly focused. Just a bunch of songs whirling around in the same sonic territory. Every song kicks-off the same: The snap and pop of the drum machine, some plinks and plonks of an organ, Thomas' voice slowly creeping in touching on the personal and political and then, a fade-out or abrupt end. It doesn't let-up and shifts ever-slightly, but that's about it, just a bunch of bummed-out dirges for Thomas to sadly wail over. It's just one of the loneliest records out there.
further reading/viewing:
-Why Can't We Live Together? (Glades, 1972) from Snap, Crackle, & Pop
-Timmy Thomas entry in All Music Guide to Soul
-"Stone to the Bone" by Timmy Thomas off 1977's The Magician

The End of Neo-Soul.

2009-10-05T00:54:00.001-04:00

The most polite coup of popular music took place in the late 90s via "Neo-Soul". Though a wrongheaded, rockist-bait term nearly from its inception, the music of Neo-Soul--you know, the part that actually matters--casually but radically shifted what R & B and rap could and would do to this day.

Though the incense, plodding pretentious rhythms, headwraps, that nebulous "groove", and the pseudo-sophistication of it all should never be forgotten, the real legacy of Neo-Soul lies in its embrace of the avant-garde and the casual grafting of the vanguard (back) onto the pop landscape: Free Jazz, a comfort with ambition/pretension, skittering electronics, weirdo production tricks, open-space, Psychedelic music, etc.

That Neo-Soul arrived at the same time as the early rumbles of the regional--especially Southern--rap takeover that'd flourish in the 2000s, is no coincidence. Though Neo-Soul both actively and accidentally set itself up in opposition to Cash Money or No Limit (and of course, Puffy too), "Neo-Soul" and "Southern Rap"--two know 'em when you hear 'em subgenres--have a great deal in common and pretty much define the "sound" of R & B and rap in the 2000s. Conveniently for all involved, Neo-Soul's influence has been sorta pushed to the side. A pocket of open-mindedness instead of a piece of an ever-changing, ongoing popular music landscape.

For R & B and rap (or even just music) traditionalists, Neo-Soul's strength came in its appreciation for and building upon the past--at a time where many saw music of the past mindlessly pilfered for quick hits. As a result, there's no motivation or interest in connecting the dots between D'Angelo and Dilla and Timbaland and Mannie Fresh and The-Dream, though they're very much there. It's all avant-pop. Neo-Soul is both incredibly overrated and underrated. For once, focus on the underrated part.

As we move into fall, hit Google Blog Search and ~~download~~ look back at a summer of Neo-Soul and Neo-Soul derived releases: Jay Stay Paid, Mos Def's The Ecstatic, Sa-Ra's Nuclear Revolution, Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night, and Robert Glasper's Double-Booked. In these records, you'll hear the high-highs and mind-bogglingly pretentious lows of Neo-Soul, the way a whole bunch of singing, instrumentation, and melody, plenty of noodling, production trickery, and a hardheaded devotion to sonic and thematic consistency, ends up spreading out in weird, really interesting ways. For better and worse.

Mos Def finally figured out the rapping and singing thing and his work's all the more powerful for it. Something like "Life In Marvelous Times" may even at first, sound like Mos' resolute concession to synth-rap, but don't forget Neo-Soul innovator Dilla's work on Q-Tip's Amplified and you know, tracks like "In The Night/While You Slept (I Crept)" or "9th Caller" on Jay Stay Paid. Sa-Ra is all Dilla weirdness and nothing more, spread over two discs, the jammy, "experimental" half-formed aspects of Neo-Soul stretched to true indulgence--the non-rapping stuff on Willie Isz's Georgiavania sounds like Sa-Ra, "Dirty Beauty" even has vampire accents.

Maxwell's album, absurdly titled, apparently part of a trilogy (talk about indulgence) is also a tiny masterpiece. Oddly, quietly experimental and also ready for anybody's ears--this is why it's sold over 300,000 copies--feels oddly 90s and also on-the-cusp of something. Either way it's not of the moment. Then there's Robert Glasper's Double-Booked, a flat-out jazz artist but not really, who peppers the half of his record that isn't weirdly vivid traditionalist jazz with flutters of electronics and some vocoder mumbles. A perfect companion to BLACKsummers'night, touching on modern sounds completely on its own terms. This is the point where artists become fascinating and irrelevant. The point where Neo-Soul ends.

Not an "end" in the sense of it being over or irrelevant or uncool or passé (though all of those are true) but that the genre's eaten itself, fully worming its way into the landscape of mainstream R & B and hip-hop. Meanwhile, hip-hop's inextricably linked itself to pop, no small thanks to those radically individual Neo-Soulsters and some of the smartest, hard-headed-ly street rappers of the South and their maestro-like producers.

Neo-Soul prided itself on eclecticism and now, we're all eclectic because the internet's opened wide the doors of music and there's hardly a monoculture. For example, it's verifiable that the singing rapper right now Drake's heard some Houston stuff, if not because his good friends are Lil Wayne and Kanye (whose been working with Rap-A-Lot's Mike Dean for a while now), then the fact that he's rapped over "June 27th" on a mixtape, which mean his soul-rap warbles might have a tinge of Big Moe in them, as well as Maxwell or Mos Def. This is rap's 2009 model: The destruction of borders between rapping and singing, "street" and "for the ladies", corporate and commutative. Isn't that Neo-Soul?

further reading/viewing:
-"The End of Science Fiction" by J. Hoberman from Vulgar Modernism
-Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night review by David Drake for Pitchfork
-"Some Ol' Terminator Shit" by ME
-Drake "November 18th"
-Maxwell "Phoenixrise"
-Robert Glasper "Butterfly"

How Big Is Your World? New Rap...

2009-10-01T03:40:00.004-04:00

-Playaz Circle ft. Raekwon "Weight Droppin"

This is Raekwon doing Andre3K's schtick of the past few years: Dropping some wizened off-topic knowledge in a radio-rap banger from some youngsters. Only this isn't entirely a big bouncing party track, it's already kinda depressive and so, it's more like Raekwon adds a level of sophistication to the thing and does it in the same matter-of-fact, you can't tell me no different tone he has when he describes violence and the knuckleheads perpetuating it on OB4CL2

A one-note, quasi-"conscious" grown-man rap rant from Raekwon isn't really more rewarding than a whole album of in-a-vacuum tough talk, but when it bubbles up between two verses from Dolla Boy and Titi Boi of Playaz Circle it gets a little more interesting. Not that Playaz Circle aren't good or interesting on their own--they're continuing the mood and tone of say, Pastor Troy or Field Mob--but it's an unexpected guest spot which Raekwon utilizes well. You can see it, especially buttressed by the emotive hook, as a proper wrap-up of OB4CL2, or if you wanna get a little hyperbolic, a more effective sequel in and of itself than that entire album. The seething, vicious nihilistic street rapper looking back on it all, with sadness and resignation.

-Ghostface ft. Jack Knight "Lonely"

Ghost severely shifted the sonics behind his style on his latest because there's just no way to cram these kind of grown-ass man thoughts and feelings, without variation, onto tinny street bangers and dusty soul-wail beats. They need this kind of casual, even middling production to work. All over Ghostdini is some of Ghost's best writing and the best rapping of that writing since Pretty Toney. "Lonely"s first verse is just Ghost obsessing over the fact that his girl left him and another dude's living with her and his kids but he does it in a kind of hyper-obsessive way, moving through his home and imagining new dude using and touching everything that's his.

The next verse begins the same but it derails as Ghost basically realizes that shit's better without him there (no fighting, the kids are happier, etc.) and though he's still angry--he hilariously refers to the Knicks game New Dude took Ghost's girl to, as "some bullshit Knicks game"--he's sorta slowly getting it. There's also the very smart detail that Ghost's own son explains the situation, touching on the way that often in bad marriages/relationships, it's the kids who become the adults. This song is like "A Christmas Tale" or something, Ghost getting all the info and experiences second-hand and through that distance, feeling his own fuck-ups all the more clearly.

-Comp "Birth Defect"

Comp is a Baltimore rapper once signed to Def Jam, even showing up in Def Jam Vendetta: Fight For New York and then, like a lot of rappers, the major label debut never dropped and he slid back to the gritty streets and grimy stages of his hometown. Probably for the better though, as something clearly happened to Comp between signing that contract and waiting forever. Rap-wise, he stopped giving a fuck. His songs got more unhinged, he neither sounded like Baltimore's interpretation of gritty New York/Philly rap nor did he embrace the Southern half of his Bmore accent and morph into some down Southern trapper, he just got really weird and damned honest. Wearing chainmail as he raps weird. And rhyming about his birth-defective hand for six minutes honest.

What's so striking about this song is how multi-directional Comp's hopelessness is. Clearly dude's somewhat alright--he's one of Baltimore's best and most interesting rappers--but he's really digging deep here and working out why, from every angle, his one-handed life is kinda fucked. Friends aren't friends because there's always that nagging suggestion they just feel sorry for him, the prosthesis hurts like a motherfucker, he feels like his parents feel bad that by birthing him they've caused him a lot of pain. This is just one of those rap songs where it stops being rap and is just a guy structuring his deep, dark thoughts in a rhyming pattern and laying it bare. The always on-it Al Shipley already highlighted this track, the last one on Comp's Man With the Hand album, but I'd be remiss if I didn't throw-in my two cents about the song too.

-Anti-Pop Consortium "New Jack Exterminator"

Beans rushes in on this one like he's rapping over "Superthug" and in a way, he might as well be, with those lively drums and bing-bong electronics twirling all around, "New Jack Exterminator" possesses the immediacy rap needs to really work and still smuggles in enough mannered weirdness...which rap also needs to have to work. Yes, Anti-Pop are indulgent, yes they're complainers and yeah, they're not interacting with what rap sounds like in 2009 all that much, which is usually problematic, but these guys strike an awesome balance with all their purposefully discordant elements and it works.

Think about the structure of this song: Beans' intro verse hits the ground running, a brief respite with High Priest's barren monotone, back to grit-teeth but nimble straight spitting from Sayyid, and an truly earned, space-synth bliss-out coda full of Nintendo sounds, random noises, and samples of El-P that brings some formal structure to the chaos. Anti-Pop's masterpiece is not the limp "experimental" Arrhythmia but the Marley Marl tight, Rammellzee weird Tragic Epilogue and the best moments of Fluorescent Black sound like the former, not the latter.

-Nicolay ft. Carlitta Durand "Saturday Night"

Nicolay pushes "Saturday Night" past the six minute mark like it's some lost House 12-Inch and Carlitta Durand is on some low-key Joyce Sims shit here: Sophisticated but soulful, reserved but about to belt it out but maybe not? There's a shyness in the song, a coy feeling that singers like Beyonce or Estelle often affect, but it's palpable and touching here, especially in that lilting "I don't think I've done this before...". This is an under-used emotion in dance and R & B music, coyness. Prince played with a lot, New Order too ("tonight I should've stayed at home, playing with my pleasure zone") and Nicolay and Carlitta carry on the forgotten dance music trope of nerds longingly wanting to bust-out.

The xx and Memory Tapes may be what the kids are listening to, but producer Nicolay's City Lights 2 is the micro-pop, electronic dance album of this year. And though it comes relatively early in the album, "Saturday Night" is City Lights 2's centerpiece, the one that funnels all the cool sounds (blog-house arpeggiation, the mix-like nature of the album, the slow-growing thump of it all) and not so cool ones (fusion jazz keys, Wyndham Hill atmospherics, on-beat punches of sound effects) into a perfect slab of music and voice and longing.

further reading/viewing:
-Anti Pop Consortium Live at Other Music
-"The Man With the Hand Comes Around" by Al Shipley for City Paper: NOISE
"That's Ghostdini" by Zilla Rocca
-"Nicolay's Shibuya: City Lights Vol. 2" by Eric Tullis for Independent Weekly
-Marley Zarcone on deviantART

From Wifeys to Wives, From "Wildflower" to "Stapleton Sex"

2009-09-29T03:19:00.007-04:00

"Bow down in awe all would-be songwriters"-John Darnielle on "Shakey Dog Pt. 1"

Though the obvious pairing would be Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2 and Ghostdini Wizard Poetry in the Emerald City, the latest Ghostface solo album, lovingly dipped in modern R & B, a more appropriate two-course listen would consist of Ghostdini and the Mountain Goats' The Life of the World To Come--which you'll need to wait one more week to drop. Mountain Goats' Darnielle and Ghostface are lyric dudes--"lyrical", if you will--and both should be called "songwriters". Despite one's more tangible roots in troubadourism, they're doing very similar things: Word-obsessive, lived-in, omni-directional detail-filled song/tales. Ghost did put the very-serious word "Poetry" in the title of his album (and then he created the most absurd cover rap's seen in a long while, but rap's awesomely complicated like that).

And like a "singer-songwriter", Ghostface seems increasingly interested in new sounds, ideas, and conceits to test his writing skills. Bob Dylan going electric. Leonard Cohen working with Phil Spector. Springsteen becoming The Boss. That's basically what Ghostdini is, Ghostface laying down some rules for his raps, and then poking and prodding and bending those self-imposed rules for the duration of the album. It's a fractured R & B release, part of it ready for the radio and parts of it gleefully standing miles away from anything you'd hear on Hot97.

Sorta the same way Darnielle does a kind of deformed variation on oh-so-sensitive singer-songwriters. Darnielle's work isn't sensitive, it's empathetic, which is tougher than just straight sensitive. He fully immerses himself in story and character--he's like a rapper in this sense--and breaks down that folk-rock wall of brooding bard, through which everything's filtered. "Genesis 3:23", the third track from Life dives into the mind of a man revisiting a former home--exactly why's left nebulous--and touches on regret and changes but never gets schticky. It never shouts out "I'm inhabiting the moment-to-moment life of a reallistically rendered person!", it just does that shit.

Also like Darnielle's work, the latest Ghostface is a bit samey and though the rewards aren't super-visceral and apparent--a la Fishscale or Supreme Clientele--they're very much there. Ghostdini is the best Ghost album since Pretty Toney. It won't win awards and it'll neither appeal to those yearning for a quick dose of ugly, street rap after OB4CL2 or hipster-grabbing zaniness, but therein lies much of its appeal. That Ghost is lyrically focused again, no longer trying to rap (or write) like a guy who raps/writes well and just plain doing it, brings tiny rewards that'll stick in your crawl much longer than one of those super vicious lines on the new Raekwon or underwater-diving with Spongebob joke songs.

This new sophistication is best represented in "Stapleton Sex", a track previewed, with an awesomely raunchy video early this month. In a sense, this preview was something of a "SPOILER" in the sense that just how out-there dirty Ghost gets on this track is magnified by the album's otherwise relative calm and hearing this before the other songs lessened the intended thrill. At the same time, "Stapleton Sex" was a smart teaser because it's the perfect representation of the kind of aged, life-informed--versus say, Jay-Z's lifestyle magazine-informed--worldview on Ghostdini. That's to say, it isn't a radical departure or any kind of all-out rejection of before--it's just smarter, dripping with experience.

The genius of "Stapleton Sex" is just how dirty it gets and how for Ghost, being older and more mature manifests itself in subtler ways than turning into a boring-ass square. Dude still loves to fuck and loves every weird detail (shiny dickhead, pussy juice noises, pubes on your tongue, etc.) but there's more of a rapport between lovers on this track, than say, "Wildflower" which "Stapleton Sex" purposefully invokes. There's a sense of engagement between Ghost and his girl, notably different than Ghost's interruption of a female rapper, followed by his all-out rap attack on an ex in "Wildflower", and though there's still aggression and dirtiness to the whole thing, there's harmony, a comfort with the aggression--the couple might have a safe word--between the two, hilariously wrapped-up in the song's last moments of laughing together, pillow talk.

Or you get a song where Ghostface--or really, the song's Narrator--cheerfully envisions the son or daughter he'll soon welcome into his relationship. It's a quick joke on expectation, as there've been hundreds of love songs called "Baby" but not so many about uh, the very unsexy reality of having a baby. While most rap occupies a kind of persona and casual shifting of personas, Ghost takes this to really interesting places, more or less inhabiting the minds of a series of males in or out of love. Mistake-ridden dude doing a bid ("Do Over"), jealous guy in power ("Guest House"), classic bowing loverman ("Forever").

Children and wives--versus wifeys--casually enter Ghost's narrators' vocabulary.Ghostdini is smart, conceptualized maturity; not "maturity". Ghost takes the grown-man shit conceit a step further, slyly referencing past songs and slightly flipping the stuff that makes Ghost awesome but kinda, a little played-out by the time Big Doe Rehab dropped. Ghost, like Darnielle, and unlike most rappers or songwriters, is fully developing characters and inhabiting their narrative voices.

further reading/viewing:
-A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes
-Video for "Stapleton Sex"
-"This Is Not Huehueteotl Pt. IV" by John Darnielle from Last Plane to Jakarta

City Paper Books Issue: 27 Writers on 27 Short Stories from 27 Authors

2009-09-23T00:08:00.005-04:00

The Baltimore City Paper's yearly "Big Books Issue" is out this week, in conjunction with The Baltimore Book Festival and amongst the many very interesting articles--especially this one on the rather negative influence of Joyce's "The Dead"--there's a piece called "27 Writers on 27 Short Stories by 27 Authors". Sprinkled amongst the others writers' picks is my quick recommendation of the title story from Iceberg Slim's short-story collection Airtight Willie & Me:"The titular tale from street-fiction god Iceberg Slim's only short-story collection, is thoroughly swamped in slang—you'll need to know what a "jasper" is—and the ugly details and minor victories a life of conning and pimping brings, all wrapped up in a surprisingly neat, though appropriately cruel, O. Henry in the hood surprise ending."

Ghetto Techno

2009-09-18T00:01:00.014-04:00

The video for DJ Class' "I'm the Shit" finally dropped and though it's a tad too low-budget for it's own good, it's also sorta perfectly insular and Baltimore, full of cameos (Sean Caesar, DJ Booman, Jimmy Jones, Mullyman, Labtekwon, lots more), and within that insularity, grabs some of the equally, awesomely weird plurality of the city's current club scene: Thugs, nerds, skateboard hipster types, old dudes, really hot girls, the whole deal. The song's still thrilling and one can imagine it losing none of its dancefloor power in ten years when it's still a club staple.

At the My Crew Be Unruly 2 event back in July, there was a point where Baltimore's James Nasty got a big, sly grin on his face and dropped 2 Hyped Brothers and a Dog's "Doo Doo Brown"--those super-identifiable, down-tuned keys on the intro rolling out to a room of shouts, screams...hands thrown in the air showing approval. The song's from 1991.

It's worth pointing out that the videos for "Doo Doo Brown" were directed by a then, not that well-known Baltimore video director named Chris Robinson. This Class video's produced by Chris Robinson's Robot Films, directed by some dude named Iren. A few people've mentioned a rumor that Chris Robinson wants to do a documentary on Club music, a piece of information that even as rumor floating around is enough to make me cry with excitement.

That said, there's a sense that "I'm the Ish" has already been passed over by the main, mainstream and I doubt DJ Class or Unruly Records care all that much. This is a good thing. Club music needn't be Crunk or Hyphy or Jerk music or whatever, a blast of popularity followed by nothing really...all the artists crawling back and doing what they do. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes I feel like my city's musical heart couldn't handle it.

-Pitbull "Juice Box" (Produced by DJ Class)

Production work like this is hopefully how Baltimore's homegrown, handmade, worker-bee, avant dance music'll wedge its way into the mainstream. Less classicist than "I'm the Ish"--this is closer to what you'll hear young people in a club dancing to right now--it's all the rubbery horns of newer Club music while wrapping the sound around an aggressive template basically invented by DJ Class on his old club hit "Tear Da Club Up". Pitbull slaps on a regrettably silly hook--in Baltimore Club, there's no interest in euphemism--but he chant-raps around the beat enough and knows when to be quiet and let the menacing club drone takeover and a few listens in, even the hook totally destroys.

-Jay Z "Ghetto Techno" (Produced by Timbaland)

Daniel Krow already pointed out that this song is a kind of remake of Rod Lee's "Dance My Pain Away" which is pretty fascinating. Undoubtedly, there's some Club influence in Timbaland's work and so, who knows when and how this song came about.

It's basically a late 90s Club production dipped in Timbaland's video game electronics sheen. Did Timbaland give this to Jay with an mp3 of Rod Lee's local hit attached? Between Kanye, Pharrell, and TImbaland, some of Jay's closest musical collaborators are/were fucking with Club music. I'd like to think this song was recorded a bunch of months ago when the success of "I'm the Ish" made it seem like maybe, just maybe, Club music would be the next production trend to jump on and so, Jay did his approximation.

And it's a damned good one. A respectful one too. The Club aspects go beyond the production and into Jay's hook and verses and even the working-class thematics of the whole thing. Jay's a killer mimic, he knows how to inhabit other rappers' flow and cadences and here, he does a fairly convincing throaty Rod Lee yell. Kinda like how Jay does this startlingly hilarious 50 Cent impression at the beginning of "Hate".

further reading/viewing:
-"The Right Track(s)” by Daniel Krow
-DJ Class and DJ Scottie B performing "Tear Da Club Up" at MCBU2
-"Pharrell and Twista Discover Baltimore Club" by Tom Breihan
-"My Crew Be Unruly 2: Words and Photos" by Josh Sisk and ME from City Paper
-2 Hype Brothers & a Dog "Doo Doo Brown" (Version One) Video directed by Chris Robinson
-2 Hype Brothers & a Dog "Doo Doo Brown" (Version Two) Video directed by Chris Robinson

"Rock Cocaine" and Whitney Houston.

2009-09-17T03:05:00.010-04:00

A far more powerful sense of Whitney Houston's "recovery" is found on the simple, direct cover of I Look To You than in that rather leading and insincere Oprah interview. On that cover, Houston looks forward, poised, a little worn out, from a certain angle about to cry, and maybe even in possesion of a bit of a receding hairline, but she's not rail-thin and rambling or anymore.

Couple that album cover image with an actual listen to I Look To You, especially the fucking jam "Nothing But Love", a slow-burn electro R & B "haters" song that at least feels sincere, and that's about all the former Mrs. Bobby Brown should have to say about years smoking "rock cocaine"--not crack mind you, rock cocaine. The ravages of drug abuse are there in her voice, especially that weirdly stirring "shutup, shutup" but it works and the positive's found in the simple fact that she made a new album and it's pretty good. Therein lies the hope, alright??

But that's not enough, so there's this interview in which she brightens every time she tells Oprah about the how's, why's, and highs of drugs, all the while refusing to call the crack she mixed with her pot what it's commonly called. Instead, falling back on the term "rock cocaine" and for who? Maybe it's some kind of line she had to draw so that her problems seemed fixable or not too shameful, to never call it "crack"--like heroin addicts that refuse to shoot-up or dudes into piss-porn who look down on dudes into scat porn. I don't know, but it's unfortunate.

Maybe it's some concession to Oprah's primary audience, middle-aged white housewives, who've probably done coke--or are at least married to a guy who did coke, probably off a titty, at a bachelor party--but would scoff at "America's sweetheart" smoking some crack. What should be a somewhat restorative pop tale gets wrapped-up middle-class pandering, depressing self-delusion, and in an oblique way, the draconian crack law or "black law" as it's often called. Whitney's playing the overexposure media game of the aughts too well--talking so much you just play yourself.

further reading/viewing:
-Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, & the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb
-"The History of Cocaine Rap" by Kris Ex from XXL
-"Cracking Open" by Michael Short from Washington Post
-A Day in the Death of Donny B (1969) directed by Carl Fick

Best of Baltimore: AllBmoreHipHop.Com

2009-09-16T00:04:00.007-04:00

So, Baltimore City Paper's Best of Baltimore issue is out today which is always really fun. I wrote the blurb for "Best Idea", celebrating the website AllBmoreHipHop.Com, which has a ton of free mixtapes from Baltimore artists and stuff. My suggestions, as in, the ones I don't really think any reader of this blog could deny, would be Barnes' Blockwork, Mullyman's WiRemix 3 and Ogun's Checkmate. Oh yeah, here's the blurb:

"It's really simple: A web site solely devoted to disseminating new singles and mixtapes from Baltimore rappers. Bringing Baltimore into the "Web 2.0" world, AllBmoreHipHop hosts downloadable versions of homegrown releases from rappers established (Ogun, Skarr Akbar) and up-and-coming (Al Great)--but that's all it does. No fashion tips, no opinion pieces, and no knucklehead comments fray, just MP3s from artists whose music you'd usually only access if you caught them live--or at Lexington Market and had $6 in your hand for a physical copy. And the site's section for music videos is full of locals such as Mullyman, Tim Trees, 100 Grandman, and Skarr Akbar--a healthy way to feed the hypebeast that dominates the internet rap world in 2009, in a city that could afford some over-exposure."

Some other "No Trivia" favorites got awards too, young Club producer DJ Pierre and the totally fucking slept-on Mania Music Group. And Mullyman and DJ Class, but you probably already know about them. Other co-signs would be the paper's two shout-outs to Mondawmin Mall, which is this awesome mall that's a lot like the one in Dawn of the Dead and is hilariously known as the scary mall white people don't go to but isn't all that scary at all. Also, infinite shouts to Andy Nelson's BBQ and Club Paradox.

How Big Is Your World? New Rap!

2009-09-15T03:27:00.005-04:00

-Kid Cudi ft. Ratatat "Alive (Nightmares)"

The lowlight of this song is Cudi's rapping, but it's brief and almost at the three minute mark. The rest of "Alive" is Cudi melodically yammering on about becoming a werewolf or something. An easy but effective metaphor for how chasing girls turns dudes--every dude--into something of a creepy jerk. But there's some hope--self-involved, destructive male "save me" hope, but it's there--with, "I hope she can find the man within the beast". The hook here's a subtle monster (no pun intended) which isn't a surprise as Cudi kills on hooks ("Already Home", "Welcome to Heartbreak", and well "Day N Nite" is all hook)...it's the rest of the song he's got a problem with. Here though, he's got Ratatat, who are one of the few indie groups that really understand hip-hop production and if they step their drum game up, could easily compete with dudes like the Runners. Cudi and Ratatat should just hole-up in a studio and make a weird, wandering, next-level R & B album.

-Trick Daddy "That's How We Do It"

Trick Daddy going off over a synth-rap marching band stomp with a hook that exists solely to give Trick a brief break before he runs through and destroys again. There's a sense of how aware of his own fate and place in rap--and the world--Trick Daddy is, and it's easy to contrast with Raekwon and Jay's attempts to transcend and recontexualize their respective pasts all at the same time. Listen to how Trick says "iPhone" like the simple existence of such a device is loathsome. A close rap lyric cousin to Biggie's joke about a chick's "#1 Mom Pendant". The obvious line but one still worth breaking down is: "I wouldn't have made it in Wall Street/They woulda given me fifty years for what Martha Stewart did.". See, it's a genius refutation of the kind of crap people who watched The Wire or right-wing talk show hosts say, where it's like "If only these clearly intelligent drug dealers would apply themselves to legal, productive activities" because Trick's highlighting all the dirt going on there too and he's basically being like, the fucking system wouldn't allow a black dude like me to do the same shit and get away with it, so just fucking forget about it. I sorta wish this song would just go on forever. Yes, there is a new Trick Daddy album out today.

-Lil Boosie ft. Lil Phat "Clips and Choppers"

There's a lurching, comfortable quality to "Clips and Choopers"--the sound of pained acceptance, which is very different from plain old pain. By the way, Superbad has a song simply titled "Pain". "Clips and Choppers" is neither Boosie digging deep and getting real sad or turning those very same topics into some unexpected jam, he's getting novelistic with it here, nothing more, nothing less. There's not really even a killer line or insight to go on about, just a series of raw observations. This though, is actually an evolution for Boosie who often feels the need to constantly dig deep and confess, almost breakdown. The tempo, the way the beat kicks-in but doesn't, is like being dropped in the middle of the song, surrounded by detail with no bigger picture. Appropriate because the song, especially that "it's 2009 and these niggas ain't playin" part of the hook, is all about being overwhelmed, wrapped in details with no way to climb out and gain proper perspective.

-Nicolay "Satellite"

A lot of rappers and producers are jocking smoothed-out, sensitive guy stuff like Coldplay and [INSERT INDIE ROCK BAND HERE] but Nicolay, producer for Foreign Exchange is really the only dude to grasp some of mainstream art-rock's open-spaciness and translate it to hip-hop...and then remove the hip-hop again. "House of Cards" from last year's Leave It All Behind shares more than just a title with a Radiohead song. If Heroes-era Brian Eno produced a Pete Rock album it sounds like. Anyways, "Satellite" is propulsive, fusion-oriented, jazzy-wazzy Wyndam Hill-esque, Space Disco shit. Still though, it's loop-oriented, like 90s rap and there's some fairly wild, almost live-sounding drumming here all moving towards a falling synth melody. That right there is the tension of "Satellite" and of most of Nicolay's music. Dunno, this is just real good. Dance music is very hard to write about. And make no mistake, Nicolay made a dance album with City Lights 2: Shibuya Nights.

-Girls "Lust for Life"

An Elvis Costello vocal sneer (or maybe it's more Courtney Love)f rom Girls' Christopher Owens runs down a list of absurd and touching "wishes"--a boyfriend, a father, a sun tan, a pizza and a bottle of wine, a beachhouse. The "joke" is of course, that there's no tiering here, all these things are desired with the same aplomb. "Lust For Life" is a vicious, slanted pop gem, mocking the wants and desires and self-absorption of presumably, much of the band's intended audience and the band itself. This is indie rock growing up. That it's all comes together in a genuinely sad chorus/lament of being "fucked in the head" flips the page a bit. Girls are post-irony, post-sincerity, post-everything, which just means they're brutally realistic. Part of that realism though, is being really damned sad and the bottom-line of this song is a learned hopelessness matching up with a starry-eyed want to do better, partially mocked, partially celebrated. Girls are laughing into the void--no, they're on mushrooms, chomping on (vegan) potato chips, and cackling into the void. Production-wise, this song kills too. The shift in volume when he mentions "sun tan", the waves of melodica that rise up towards the end makes the radically down-to-earth song other-wordly.

further reading/viewing:
-Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by George Jackson
-Phonte Tells You Why NOT to buy City Lights 2 on iTunes
-Rafael Grampa's Furry Water Wordpress
-Girls video for "Lust for Life" directed by Aaron Brown

Thank Kanye.

2009-09-14T12:21:00.009-04:00

For the thousandth time now, Kanye turns being a douche in a trangressive act. Unlike other controversy-baiting outbursts at award shows, Kanye went there. He's the only person that comes out of this looking bad. Not that he should be the only person. When Twitter's all er, a-twitter with people invoking a lack of "class" and "cruelty" and pop-cult leeches like Perez Hilton--whose made a career of being cruel--randomly decide to put their foot down on this one, the places to point fingers are endless. Fuck it all assholism over self-congratulatory sympathy any day.

Taylor Swift's a grown-ass woman. If she can have a music career, she can take a swaggering, drunk on henny, Kanye West from swiping the microphone from her. It didn't help that pre-Kanye interruption, she was continuing her "I'm just a country singer" schtick that's not only see-through, but offensive to her pragmatic-pop which is significantly more sophisticated and honest than her "aw shucks" sympathy-grabbing persona.

It was great to see Kanye pop-up, looking like a complete asshole--and knowing it. Something he did by showing up dressed like Colin Farrell--Amber Rose, like one of Moebius' Dune designs--holding a bottle of alcohol and passing it to friends. The Swift speech hijack was just the culmination of it. The hijack though--it was like that part on Ghostface's "Wild Flower" where some random-ass female rapper is dropping predictably female rapper swagger raps ("A mind shockin'/Body rockin'") and Ghostface stomps through--"Yo bitch, I fucked your friend/Yeah you stink ho-"--and never gives the song back.

This blog characterized West as "a manchild who believes that the Video Music Awards reflect something beyond politics" but that's completely wrong. West's entire mic-grab, drunken-speech thing was in direct response to politics. The ones that dominate popular taste now, a kind of mediocre, push everything into the middle, so that sweet Taylor Swift gets an award too--because Beyonce couldn't sweep, even though she should. There needs to be time for boring, regular people because giving a few more minutes to interesting, beautiful people just wouldn't be fair. The in and out, rapid-fire empowerment anthem that is "Single Ladies" versus the sad-sack "regular girl" self-justification of "You Belong With Me".

The song's realities became plain reality when Beyonce, truly magnanimous (and confident, and concerned), offers some stage-time to Swift, who wanders into the exact same speech, the same schtick from an hour before, when the scary drunk black man swiped the mic. It was the character of her song, who trumps t-shirts over short skirts as if wearing one automatically makes you better, taking control of the pep rally and being as clueless and dopey as she's purported the "pretty people" to be. All these weird round-about truths, bursting out the sides of a particularly pedestrian awards show, exposed. Thank Kanye.

further reading/viewing:
-Tweet from @Samuelsurprise, September 14, 12:30 am
-"Ego: Beyonce's Deconstructive Dick Joke" by ME
-"Music Video Round-Up" by ME from House Next Door
-"Kanye West: Back to Reality" by Maura of Idolator
-"Idolator Live-Blogs The 2009 Video Music Awards: Pop Goes The Post-Pop World" by Maura of Idolator
-Kanye performs "Good Life" on the VMAs, 2007
-"Run This Town", "Can't Tell Me Nothing" & "Good Life" from Jay-Z's Madison Square Garden Concert, September 11th, 2009

Recreating Zeitgeist: The Problem With OB4CL2

2009-09-11T00:03:00.002-04:00

At some point in the past bunch of years, Raekwon, and company bought into the idea of 90s New York hip-hop pushed by weren't-even-there nostalgics and not you know, what it actually sounded like. Because rap got kinda fruity, New York rap was been retrofitted into being nothing but hard-ass aggression and tough-talk. No knowledge. No insight. Just pithy, gritty storytelling. Timbs and 40s. "Cracks and weed". Sprinkle in some Kung-Fu samples, some Killer clips and resurrect Papa Wu and you're there. Not that all those things weren't a part of Cuban Linx's success, but that's not all there was.

And yeah, occasionally, the sheer ugliness of the details boils over and the Wu's veteran status--heard in their voices even--works for them, like they're aged soldiers and all the shit and violence they saw and occasionally implemented is flashing before their eyes at 38--the weight of it all heavy upon them--but that byproduct of the shit-talk isn't investigated any further. That, coupled with the lack of a narrative makes the whole thing pretty toothless. Lots of stomping around but not much more.

The overdose of tough-guy rhymers, each digging as deep as they can and dredging up the most fucked-up images they can (but one of many examples: "They found a two year old, strangled to death/with a love daddy t-shirt/ in a bag at the top of the steps") to really no end at all is depressing--just not in the intended "shit's real" sense. This shit's not real.

Not that these guys should be "above" anybody or anything, but there's something very telling about tossing on some guest-spots from way more conventional street rappers like Beanie Sigel and Styles P and pretending they share an aesthetic. Rae and Ghost are like those guys, but they're also way more tripped-out. They've conveniently forgotten about that and that's the tough part. 90s rap's being rewritten here. Like one of those concerts where a 60s guitarist, a 70s butt-rocker, and an 80s virtuoso share a bill: It makes sense but it doesn't.

Maybe it's the surprisingly wizened words of BP3 echoing even as I try to move my way through Cuban Linx 2, but there's something kinda sad about Cuban Linx 2. Sad the way real street dudes at 40 are. Mean-mugging their way through life, be it a guy they're about to beat the ass of (probably for like $22 dollars) or the clerk who asked for an ID along with their credit card when they bought Guitar Hero 5. Cubax Linx 2 is street dudes turned superstars bending over backwards to sound like street dudes again and doing an okay job and patting themselves way too hard on the back for doing so.

further reading/viewing:
-"The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (A.K.A How M.O.P Won)" from Unkut
-Clip of Wu Tang in Japan from The Show

The Most Random Rap: Pizza Connection - "Free John Gotti"

2009-09-10T00:22:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, on the Howard Stern show, clips from a rap song called "Free John Gotti" by a group called Pizza Connection, consisting of current Stern show writer Sal Governale and some other goofyball Italian teen into hip-hop living in Long Island in the early 90s, was played and endlessly clowned. If Sal and his Pizza Connection buddy ever got some tapes or records pressed of this, it'd be some kind of "Oh my god" random rap collector's item. Some guy in Japan would drop $40 bucks on it.

"Free John Gotti"s got a real hip-house influence, by which I mean, it has some cornball keyboard lines and some god-awful Big Daddy Kane approximation hyper-enunciated raps over top of it. That said, it's a pretty fascinating misreading. Two ethnic Long Island kids reaching into all the politically-minded hip-hop of the era and grafting it onto the culturally protective, gravely misinformed dinner-table talk of their parents.

I also included the audio from the show, because of the heavy thicket of context you get via Sal Governale when he's grilled about this bizarre song. In terms of perception about hip-hop and snitching and politics, this is fun for showing the way every tightly-knit group of peoples has very similar, self-destructive and self-preserving codes about snitching and protecting one's own, etc. Also: Pizza Connection is a dope fucking name.

further reading/viewing:
-"Chicago Hip-House Documentary 1989" off YouTube
-"I Pissed On a Girl" by Sal Governale
-"My Wife" by Sal Governale
-"The Departed & "Thief's Theme" by ME

Ten Favorite Moments on Blueprint 3: Part Two

2009-09-09T15:13:00.000-04:00

6. Swizz Beatz Destroying "D.A.N.CE" And Putting It Back Together

Every Jay Z album since Blueprint has been an event in part, because you were waiting to hear the production: What producers, what samples, how they're flipped, etc. There was always a big surprise or two and here, it's Swizz Beatz grabbing Justice's "D.A.N.C.E" and slicing it into a hundred pieces, rendering it close to unrecognizable. There's these shards of the original, like a syllable of the hook popping-up in the verse, these weird, downward-falling "Beat It"-esque chunks of bassy synth, etc. This is just a dude in his studio completely destroying a song and having fun using the weirdest chopped parts and seeing if he can get away with it--he does. It's also "hipster rap" done right, broadening your samples arsenal then treating it no different than some old Stax 45.

7. Jay's Conflicted History Lesson on "A Star is Born"

Make no mistake, this song's not a homage to the rap history before and after Jay's debut, it's a cynical, slyly dismissive diss song and comment on the fleeting rap scene of the Web 2.0 world. Rappers are disposable, they'll stop being relevant...unless they're Jay Z. The message is downright loathsome really, awesomely loathsome though. If Daniel Plainview were a rapper, this is how he'd talk about his peers. Still, like the 9-11 metaphor--itself a piece of history Jay takes full, obnoxious possession of--simply by going for it and committing to the concept, some slivers of fun and reverence peak through. The points where his attempt at "objectivity" totally break down--the clever suggestion that Wayne needs to get his shit together ("I'll applaud him, if he keeps going"), the implicit speculation of Drake's ability to be a star, and especially the line about Prodigy--are fascinating. Speculative rap nerds can spend hour with this pithy history lesson reading all kinds of shit into it.

8. When "Venus Vs. Mars" Ends

"Venus Vs. Mars" ends up being pretty fun once you listen to BP3 enough, but it's also just kind of...icky. And so, when it ends, the album is better for it, but the real reason "Venus Vs. Mars" fading-out is a top-ten moment is because it has this time-traveling feeling to it--it's a three minute song that feels like it's 45 seconds. And when it ends, you're like "Huh, what?" for a moment or two. In part because Jay digs-in and really focuses on the song's dopey lyrical conceit, but mainly because Timbaland's beat, a lurching, low-energy, low BPM, electronic groove wraps around your ears, making you lose all sense of time. Dance music and electronic music can do this: Confuse your brain, making it unsure whether the song's been playing for a few minutes or a few hours. Timbaland's a master of this...when he isn't making perfect avant-pop bangers.

9. The Slow-Rising Horns on "Already Home"

Kanye and No I.D's production on most of BP3 is really what holds it together. Despite the bad sequencing, the album eventually finds its way back to their big, loud, but strangely immaculate beats and that, coupled with Jay's interest in being honest, works. Really, "Already Home", just as a piece of music, is gorgeous--all about tension and release, strings pinging back and forth and then stopping, low hums of horn that turns to a swell of mournful but victorious joy. A lot of the tracks also have these weird mumbles of voices in them, a stranger, more subliminal version of Kanye's obsession with Leslie West of Mountain's wordless mumbles he was tossing-in everything a few years ago. But those horns, the way they rise above the rest at peak moments, the way they're talking to some strikes of piano or keyboard...wow. It's the feeling of comfort and warmth and sincerity. The feeling of BP3.

10. Jay Z "living life like a video" in "Young Forever"

Jay drums up some utopian vision of success that exists only in music videos. A vision of success that's then projected onto MTV and BET to a bunch of kids that'll then aspire to the same kind of success. They're probably not aware that this kind of perfection only exists in the video--the completed project at that. If you've ever been on a music video set, it's an ugly, boring, awkward bunch of hours, all spent obsessively making it seem like it's the total opposite of ugly, boring, and awkward. Jay's rapping a music video treatment here and he's really knowing about it, blowing-up the unreality like Hype Williams, then exposing the complete unreality of it all but yearning for it anyway. Jay's no longer rapping wish fulfillment, he's rapping about that untouchable whatever whatever, willing it to existence in his mind alone and realizing that sometimes, that's enough. The idea can be as important as the reality. A strangely perfect ending to the album.

further reading/viewing:
-"Jay Z's Midlife Crisis Is Over" by Zach Baron
-"Parse Some Bars: Forever Young" from Rockabye Review
-"Plato's Idealism" by Dmitry Pisarev

Ten Favorite Moments on Blueprint 3: Part One

2009-09-08T13:45:00.004-04:00

1. The Beat on "What We Talkin' About"

A big, swooshing, synthy soundscape anchored by some stumbling, awesomely limp Kanye drums. Could be from a Jeezy album cut or a Vangelis soundtrack (which are basically the same) and either way, it's open-spacey enough for Jay to just kinda go off on any and everything. Rap's at its best when it's either obsessively, perfectly formal and cohesive or when it's a big, weird mess. "What We Talkin' About" is the latter: Jay rapping distinctly grown man shit over production that's trying in every way to sound hyper-contemporary.

2. What There "Ain't nothing cool" About On "What We Talkin' About"

Amongst many of Jay's winning qualities, it's his understanding of balance that will keep him relevant. That's to say, getting serious and all guidance counselor-like in your raps, when you don't do it all the time, holds more weight: "Ain't nothing cool about carryin' a strap/About worryin' your moms and burying your best cat/Talkin' about revenge while carrying his casket/All teary-eyed about to take it to a mattress-". This stems from experience and gained knowledge. Jay's not speaking in platitudes there.

3. Extended 9-11 Shit-Talk Metaphor on "Thank You"

Just an impressive piece of visceral writing, touching on sense and action and weaving it into a moment-to-moment narrative: "I was gonna 9-11 them but they didn't need the help/And they did a good job, them boys is talented as hell/Not only did they brick they put a building up as well/Then ran a plane into that building and when that building fell/Ran to the crash site with no mask on and inhaled/Toxins deep inside they lungs until both of them was filled/Blew a cloud out like a L/Into a jar then took a smell/Because they heard that second-hand smoke kills." The genius of this is that though he egregiously uses 9-11 for some shit-talk, his attention to detail--moment-to-moment it gets uglier with each line--touches on some of the chaos of the real event.

4. "Empire State of Mind"s Glorious Chorus

There's this cornball, guitar chug stuck in this otherwise formalist, super-respectable song and who knows why it's there, but it's a good cue just how out-there explosive the hook on "Empire State of Mind" is gonna be. Wrapped up in the hook is not only Jay's success but all the stuff that led to it and that's very, very different from many of his recent "I'm rich now" songs which were fully concerned with the moment. As if wealth and comfort were proof enough for him to do and say anything and to address his poor kid past, crack-pushing career, his buncha years as a nobody rapper, on a level more complex than "I used to be this and now I ain't" is beneath him. Here he's finally navigating two worlds with the same level of detail and acceptance. Real grown-man stuff.

5. Jay's "Probably" on "Real As It Gets"

"Now I eat quail, I'll probably never go to jail". The quail line is just plain hilarious--a straight-faced parody of food-as-materialism in rap--and the jail line is just devastating. It's that "probably". Like even at forty with a shit-ton of money and success and everything else, Jay can't for sure say he won't end up in jail. He's touching on the "street" shit still rolling around in his brain--for anyone that's ever lived recklessly, the appeal's always there--and acknowledging his own like, latent self-destruction. There's also something about BP3 that has Jay not only dealing with his past, but his blackness, something he either avoids--because he's something of a like hyper-capitalist Neo-Con and can't acknowledge multi-culti nonsense--or reaches for (like his street-cred references), just to short-cut thoughtful discussion. But throughout BP3, there's something about realizing that he's still a black dude in America and being mad-rich matters...and just doesn't at all. This coupled with the many, joyous references to Obama's election and sometimes clunky, but politically-minded lines like "It's 2010, not 1864" (from "Off That"), develops BP3's strand of terse but wise commentary on race in America in 2009.

further reading/viewing:
-"Ten Favorite Moments" on Kanye West's Graduation by Tom Breihan
-"Citizen Jay Z" by Armond White
-Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
-The All-American Skin Game or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and Short of It 1990-1994 by Stanley Crouch
-Wikipedia Entry for 1864

Aging Gracefully

2009-09-07T00:53:00.004-04:00

So, Juicy J's recently released two modest-budget, DV videos with an eye for the details of the streets. Swelling with super-specific hometown pride, "North Memphis Like Me" bubbles over with the character of Juicy's birthplace--it's hyper-regionality, which can't be turned into a movement by some A & Rs.

Then there's "Let's Get High" (DIRECTED BY JORDAN TOWER), sorta the opposite of "North Memphis Like Me" but not really. Full of the same gritty reality but it's deeply, disturbingly insular: Juicy wandering around a parking lot smoked-out.

-"Niggaz Ain't Barin' Dat"

Above is "Niggaz Ain't Barin' Dat" off Underground Vol. 1, a collection of Triple-Six demos or early works or something (it's subtitled "1991-1994") that you should go out and find if you've not heard it already--it's fairly easy to find "Used" in your hometown's record store, if your hometown still has a record store. If it doesn't, it will be at your mall's FYE...priced at like, 17.99.

I think Underground Vol. 1 is fairly prevalent in the used bins because a buncha people've bought it thinking there would be something like "Sippin' On Some Syrup" or "Stay Fly" on there and not like, proto-Glitch, fuzzed out electronic weirdness that doesn't even always have rapping on it.

There's precedent here for sure (DJ Spanish Fly's loops, Screw music's bliss, etc.) and this is surely rap music, but it's wrestling around in the same sonic arena with weirder, more explicitly strange electronic and sample-based music of the time (Gas, The Orb, Loop) and of right fucking now (Skaters, Tim Hecker, Block Beataz).

It's more like hearing the earliest, in-the-garage, fuzzed-to-hell demos from Mayhem or Satryricon or something. That "something" being the really obvious influence that I threw out a moment ago: DJ Spanish Fly.

So yeah, it's rap music too and if you're listening hard enough, isn't all that different from "Syrup" or "Stay Fly". Hidden within there is all the stuff that made those classics. That's to say, there's not exactly a way to be "disappointed" by this collection unless you're a complete dolt. And though Three-Six have certainly dropped the ball here and there, they don't have a "worthless" release in their discography and the story of how their sound travelled from clunky loops and delicately crumbling synths to still pretty nutty but more digestable beats is one of the most fascinating in hip-hop history. Namely, because it's organic--or relatively organic, don't wanna idealize anybody here.

Same way say, the Velvet Underground went from avant-garde to MOR in like five years. It didn't have too much to do with record sales.

And in a sense, it's the antithesis of how Jay Z ends up with the sonics of BP3 and it's the complete opposite of Raekwon's facsimile of 90s New York rap. Three-Six roll over current trends and pick up tiny pieces (a tinge of auto-tune, a slab of chipmunk soul) and find a proper--or fairly proper--place for it, they don't "reinvent" themselves and even when they do, they don't fucking announce it. And because their sound is always moving forward, they can jump back to '95 seamlessly, so it doesn't sound like they're trying real hard--so hard that, like Rae and company, it leads to an album that sounds like the idea of what 1995 rap sounded to someone who wasn't there when it happened than how it really did sound.

further reading/viewing:
-Mythologies by Roland Barthes
-DJ Spanish Fly's MySpace
-"Hypnagogic Pop" by David Keenan from Wire Magazine #147
-Sway visits DJ Paul in the Studio

It's All In the Details: Comments on Specific Parts of Some Rap Songs

2009-09-02T15:53:00.015-04:00

Man, it's 2009 and between months and months of hype and then the imminent album leak, nothing's interesting and it's all boring before the first album cut even finishes. Who has time for entire songs? And who has time for entire songs reviews? Here's reviews of parts of songs, mostly good parts. Maybe a recurring feature here, we'll see...

-RZA's "We soldiers..." coda on "Black Mozart"
off Only Built For Cuban Linx 2

RZA's high-pitched but gutteral wail of a chant that ends "Black Mozart" brings a flood of palpable pain into the song and the album, something it kinda lacks overall. It's like RZA found an old blunt of ODB's behind a monitor or something, smoked it, and the saliva ghost of 'Dirty--his exuberance, his pain and confusion, his deep pontificating on the er, "struggle"--possessed RZA and he ran into the booth and cried this out. Because rap's so sissified now (and it just is, sorry, it is) it's easy to repaint all those St. Ideas and Timbs, gritty-beat makers as ineffable hard-asses but in all that music is obviously a lot of pain, and sometimes they even let it seap into the music explicitly; RZA bring some of that back on "Black Mozart".

-Beanie Sigel's biblical syntax on "Run to the Roc"
off The Broad Street Bully

Beans adopting a sort of absurd but strangely affecting mess of Biblical talk (lots of "thy" and words like "wrath") shows you how seriously Jay Z's dropping of "The Roc" is for those involved. "Street code" is doctrine for better and worse, and when you violate that, it's over for you. But it also hurts because there's more at-stake than just a bunch of feelings (and now empty wallets) but like an entire belief system. For Beans and company, the dismissal is tragic and mythic and all that, an ultimate violation and sign of disrespect. Biblical. Shakespearan. All that smart-person stuff applied to things to legitimize them. Notice how this is still threat-rap and tough-talk, he doesn't explain why because he doesn't have to explain it. It just is. The shit's doctrine.

-Jay-Z's revelation that his teacher was a dick on "So Ambitious"
off Blueprint 3

"I felt so inspired by what my teacher said/Said I'd either be dead or be a reefer-head/Not sure if that's how adults should speak to kids/'specially when all I did was speak in class...". If there's an actual theme or like, thesis to BP3, it's Jay Z actually feeling grown-up, no longer chasing respectability or plain old comfort, just being a fully-functional adult with a wife and responsibilities and shit. With this comes, it seems a deeper realization of his environment, one he once took for granted, also bubbles to the surface. And so, Jay's really thinking about how having some jerk-off teacher tell you that you're doomed isn't normal or really acceptable. Obvious to a lot of us, but maybe not so if it's how every fucking idealist-turned-nihilist "educator" treated you your whole fucking school career. The line clearly stung, he's rapping about it years later, only now he's sort of got it--rap as psychoanalysis.

-The title of Robert Glasper's "Yes I'm Country (And That's OK)"
off Double Booked

A good jazz song with a particularly affecting or smart title can somehow make it even better: "Just Friends", "Idle Moments", "Mandrake", "Fables of Faubus". That said, this has led to a lot of musicians trying really hard to be clever or insightful (a ton of puns, pseudo-poetry, etc) but "Yes I'm Country (And That's OK)" is like, haiku-perfect. There's nothing explicitly "country" about the song, no twang or grafting of folk/country melodies here, but there is a certain ease and comfort, a rolling along feeling that indeed, invokes the cliches of a somewhat derisive adjective like "country" but turns them into the strengths big-city fucks are too cool for. A jazz tune for provincials. Cooly confident, but not stupidly prideful either. Robert Glasper's from Texas.

further reading/viewing:
-Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of OBD by Jamie Lowe
-Harvey Keitel's wail in Bad Lieutenant
-"The Documentary" by a bunch of the XXL Staff
-Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz by Stanley Crouch

Blueprint 3 Redux

2009-09-01T13:28:00.004-04:00

Blueprint, his "serious" soul-beat album and Blueprint 2, a big, sprawling double-album that's critic-proof really, because of course it'll be a mess--it's a double album! Black Album, was a retirement victory lap and then, Kingdom Come his regal return. American Gangster, some street shit when the regal stuff didn't work out so well, vaguely connected to a movie of the same name because once you've rapped about how you're beyond street rap, you can't rap about hustling straight and get away with it...unless it's couched in some concept.

And now there's Blueprint 3, set to "drop" on September 11th, leaked yesterday and seemingly, about Jay's undeniable victories of the past (a tradition, in his head at least, established by this Blueprint trilogy) and his continued relevance--buttressed by hip, young guests like Kid Cudi and Drake. Like previous not-really-concept, concept albums from the dude, Blueprint 3 seems intent on telling listeners what it's doing instead of simply doing.

BP3 certainly gives off the feeling of a "final" album from Jay Z: Looking backward and forward, trying to recreate long-gone zeitgeist and capture the now just as well. The problem is every song/minor statement that builds to a album/big statement is mind-bogglingly out of place. Can you kick off your "I'm comfortable in my own skin" album with "What We Talkin' About"--a song that devotes much of its time to ex friends and business partners? Can you end your album about how you're a wizened, forever relevant dude with a song that declares you're "forever young" so much it implies the opposite?

Like every Jay Z album--save for Reasonable Doubt and Black Album which surprise, surprise, hang-on and actually sell their concepts--Blueprint 3 is something of a mess, but there's quite a few things here and there that would go a long way to making Jay's latest more listenable and less damned embarrassing. Here's what Jay can do to save BP3 and it isn't too late--he's got a week. Pardon the hubris here, but I really think it's a pretty dope album with this tracklist.

1. "Thank You"
2. "Already Home" (featuring Kid Cudi)
3. "Empire State of Mind" (featuring Alicia Keys)
4. "D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune)"
5. "Run This Town" (featuring Kanye West & Rihanna)
6. "On to the Next One" (featuring Swizz Beatz)
7. "Off That" (featuring Drake)
8. "Reminder"
9. "Hate" (featuring Kanye West)
10. "Venus Vs. Mars"
11. "Young Forever" (featuring Mr. Hudson)
12. "Real as it Gets" (featuring Young Jeezy)
13. "So Ambitious" (featuring Pharrell)
14. "What We Talkin' About" (featuring Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun)
15. "A Star Is Born" (featuring J. Cole)

Tracks 1-6: These first six tracks are a look into the past, though tempered by 2009. Continuing the sonic tradition of the other Blueprint albums, if not in sound (corporate-sheen soul-beats) than in energy--they sound relatively conventional, slightly more sophisticated, and maintain a level of fun and enthusiasm. Jay's rap-rapping on these tracks and though there are some clunkers, he's on a respectable enough level of cruise-control.

1. "Thank You"
Not only does this sound like a first track, but it wisely introduces the tensions that stretch and confuse BP3. Namely, a mix of humble reverence to this rap game that's made him a big, fucking superstar and persistent desire to still remind everybody about how important he is. This has worked better in the past, especially on Black Album where he was still king of the world and on the tail-end of pretty much defining the first half of the decade's rap sound but I think he touches some of the five-years ago swagger--before we all called it swagger--on this track.

As I said before, the album simply cannot begin with "What We Talkin' About". The song sounds like a killer intro but Jay's decision to address essentially irrelevant critics/foes--that's to say, by 2009, anyone who cares about Jaz-O or Dame or the Roc isn't a Jay Z fan anymore--on the very first track just kinda ruins the whole album. That said, the song needs to be there because it's proof Jay's still street--if only in the sense that he still isn't mature enough to not shut up about dudes talking shit on him. I've moved it towards the end of the album.

"What We Talkin' About" is also false-advertising in the sense that you think the album's gonna be Jay's synthy, party-time, old man version of hipster rap but then there's plenty of basically normal, Jay Z songs (like the first six tracks on my version), so it's extra weird to kick the album off like that. I put it as a kind of final movie montage track, second to last on the album.

2. "Already Home" (featuring Kid Cudi)
3. "Empire State of Mind" (featuring Alicia Keys)
This is a quick intro, song-suite within a larger suite about Jay in relation to his hometown and critics: "Thank You", "Already Home", and "Empire State of Mind". Placed later, a song like "Empire State of Mind" becomes tedious, especially right after another female-sung hook ("Run This Town")-- but not bogged-down in clueless sequencing, it's fairly affecting and a culmination of the cynicism and joy that opens the album.

4. "D.O.A (Death of Auto-Tune)"
5. "Run This Town" (featuring Kanye West & Rihanna)
6. "On to the Next One" (featuring Swizz Beatz)
This begins the next suite within a suite, here one where Jay Z talks some fairly awesome shit and brings in some sort of weirdo, presumably more No I.D than Kanye squawks and scronks type production. "Jockin' Jay Z" can probably go in here too, maybe after "Run This Town". We're moving into the next bunch of tracks which to me are more the vaguely "new" or an attempt at a new sound going on in BP3.

Tracks 7-12: So yeah, these next bunch of tracks are what I think most assumed, based on the guest list and some of the pre-release talk, BP3 would sound like: Lots of synths, a safer version of Hell Hath No Fury, Jeezy's three albums (a better trilogy than Blueprint by the way, or even Kanye's Graduation, loaded with a slightly up-to-date guest list. Thing is, these songs work pretty damned well one after another, a kind of evil, wandering mix of tough-guy, synth rap.

7. "Off That" (featuring Drake)
Jay and Drake begin this song by saying "Welcome to the future" and so, it makes sense to begin this part of the album with "Off That". Besides the improved listenability of my re-sequencing, it adds in these little details--like Drake in effect, announcing the shift in sensibility--that suggest the album wasn't just grafted together but there's some genuine narrative and emotional arc to the fucking thing besides Jay, over and over being like "I'm still really important".

8. "Reminder"
9. "Hate" (featuring Kanye West)
10. "Venus Vs. Mars"
11. "Young Forever" (featuring Mr. Hudson)
12. "Real as it Gets" (featuring Young Jeezy)
The sonic arc here is towards things increasingly light and airy-sounding--like a dance mix that gets less aggressive as the night goes on. We're kinda in like 1999 Jay Z land here and that's a good thing. It also compartmentalizes the production to some extent, with the non-Kanye and No I.D beats sorta lumped together. A track like "Young Forever" is a real head-scratcher but it shares some open-space with "Real As It Gets" and both sound maudlin but victorious--an alright description of BP3 as a whole.

Tracks 13-15: One of the ideas is that these "suites" I've developed overlap a bit, like the "future synth" part is hinted at with "On to the Next One" and established on "Off That" and here, these final three tracks, particularly melodic funhouse mirror Vegas-sounding songs all heavy on legacy-talk, first rumbles in with "Real As It Gets".

13. "So Ambitious" (featuring Pharrell)
14. "What We Talkin' About" (featuring Luke Steele of Empire of the Sun)
Yeah, this songs works, like he's finally mastered some sound he's got in his head that failed miserably in the form of "Beach Chair", and waited until the end--but not the very end--to address hopeless clowns like Jaz-O and Dame Dash. All the stuff about how carrying a strap and worrying one's moms becomes damned affecting and sincere advice here because it has the album's experiences behind it now--it's not just Jay grabbing at anything to dominate the street dudes he long-ago ditched.

Coming after "So Ambitious" which once again highlights Jay's self-mythologized entry into this rap shit and before "A Star is Born", the track that recounts rap mythology as a whole and wrestles with the pool of new talent that simply by existing, moves Jay to the side, lightens the obnoxious aspects of the song and sorta justifies his confused contempt.

15. "A Star Is Born" (featuring J. Cole)
There's something deeply cynical about this song, Jay casually recounting rap history almost as if he's all above it and implicitly making the point that he's still around (and a star) and they...aren't. At the same time though, he's just as implicitly saying, this stuff's moving on. It touches on the tensions of the entire album, has enough joy and melancholy in there, and just has the feeling of a wrap-up, like a "shit sorta evens out" Wes Anderson type conclusion and not the denial of everything that is the real album-ender, "Forever Young".

And then, handing the track over to a relevative newcomer, J. Cole is a quiet sign of confidence, the kind of do, not show, thing Jay Z once mastered. Remember how "Encore" came on toward the beginning of Black Album and you were like, "Why the fuck isn't this the final track of his (then at least) final album?". Well, same thing with this.

further reading/viewing:
-"Late Registration Redux" by ME
-"Trimming the Fat: Ruff Draft & Detroit Deli by ME
-Fade to Black (2004) directed by Pat Paulson & Michael John Warren
-Eureka (1983) directed by Nicolas Roeg

How Big Is Your World? New songs with rapping on them.

2009-08-28T05:20:00.002-04:00

-Kristmas "Dopeman Girlfriend"

Reason number 1,0781 why the music industry failing is a bummer: If these incredible motherfuckers in Huntsville were doing this in say, 1995, a dude like Kristmas'd have a minor victory masterpiece album out, and not a couple of mp3s floating around. Notice how despite the "spoiler alert" title, Kristmas spends the entire first verse building to the revelation that indeed, he's "fuckin' the dopeman girlfriend". Verse two focuses on the why's of it, namely framed around the ways said dopeman's girlfriend is ignored--implicitly elaborating on the thing NPR types would often cite about The Wire, that indeed dope-dealing is a full-time job.

There's even a cool sense of complex morality to Kristmas' tale, when he devilishly admits in verse three that he "know[s] every stash spot in the house" (and apes Mims' "This Is Why I'm Hot" flow for some reason?) but adds, "[he] could rob the nigga but that's not what [he's] about". That's a kind of Goines-ian understanding of the roundabout morality amongst thugs. And lastly, there's a level of suspense throughout the song. Because it's totally of the gangsta rap storytelling tradition, you're waiting for the twist or the part where it goes bad--it's especially ratcheted-up when he mentions going out to get "a bite to eat" with her--but it never comes, though you assume it will eventually. It isn't often that a rap song has a life beyond the start and end of the beat, but "Dopeman Girlfriend" does. Word to Traps 'N Trunks for putting Huntsville, AL: Rocket City together.

-Lil Wyte "I'm Da Bad Influence"

Alright! New Lil Wyte--which means weirdo white-trash reality raps and a bunch more beats from DJ Paul and Juicy J. This one's hardly an evil synth stomper or an ugly-elegant Willie Hutch flip, it's a kind of blissed-out, on-painkillers whine of 70s Zombie movie synths. Or like, Boards of Canada in a slowly-dying cassette player. Or the music from some old-ass PBS documentary peppered with skittering drums. Seriously, the sample's gotta be one of those three or Paul and Juicy spent some syruped-up night fucking with filters on a keyboard until it sounded like any or all of the stuff described in the previous three sentences.

And Lil Wyte brings some funny and poignant lines to this thing, in his deceptively unlistenable flow--that's to say, if you power through your first listen, you'll really dig his cracker shout rap. Doesn't he beat Drake and Kanye and Wayne and all these faux-cocky rappers at their own game when he croaks out, "When I make 10 million, I'm gonna turn into a fuckin' jerk"? Is he even bragging there? He's sort of just saying it as an inevitability or like, a fairly deep understanding of his--and most people's--low-brow fate. This is that kid that your bus in middle school had to go way out of its way to pick-up all, the kid you fuckin' clowned for wearing Spaldings and not Nikes, grown up and rapping desperately.

-Beanie Sigel ft. Omilio Sparks & Freeway "Where's My Opponent?"

A song all about the build-up before heads are cracked, literally or figuratively via hard-ass raps. Contained quiet before the storm. The clacking about-to-pop-off beat is there enough to sound ominous and shit, but spare enough that Sparks, Freeway, and finally Beans, can rap however they like around it. Sparks, well he raps like Sparks, Freeway predictably ups the energy though he's wisely reserved a bit, gritting his teeth and then Beans almost whispers kill-you lines--all three verses punctuated by a regal, mob boss rhetorical, "where the fuck is my opponent?".

The genius of this track is how it never explodes or even comes close, energy-wise. It peaks with Free, his dependable fervor supported on each side by quiet, seething, James Caan grimacing before he pops you, Deniro staring straight ahead as "Sunshine of Your Love" plays, verses from two buddies from the Roc days. There's the feeling of a cipher on the track, which is all a "posse cut" has to have--it doesn't need to be an event or even a "banger", it just needs to sound awesome and be scary and destroy.

-Jay Z ft. Kanye West & Rihanna "Run This Town"

Best use of bird squawks in a rap song since The W's "Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off)". Anyways, obviously putting a Beans song with some old Roc members on it right above this half-successful jam makes a statement about what in the fuck Jay Z is or isn't doing in 2009--there's also a Jay diss on the new Beanie by the way--but it's important to realize this is still a fairly thrilling rap song for the radio. That Rihanna almost works on a militant clomp of a beat (pianos pounding, some Rave-esque wave of vocals, clunky guitar) like this is something and a reminder of how weird pop music is right now. Really everybody, there's a thing called radio and most American popular music listeners still get their music that way and you should listen to it every once in a while, if only for that reason.

For about the fifth time in the past year, Kanye runs away with someone else's song, capturing the kind of bitter feeling of victory that Jay Z once embodied and rode for an entire album on The Black Album but now only does in interesting ways on internet teasers for MTV specials from the backseat of some presumably, fly-as-fuck car--oh wait, that clip's from 2001. Back to Kanye, who has never been a great rapper but seems to be interested in having his words rhyme and embracing the very special ways that rap can hold up two disparate ideas at once. The line about requesting "no photos" while he's in church is really loaded and just good writing--hinting at a particularly grotesque violation of privacy, even as he brags about fucking girls just a few lines before.

-Barnes "5 In the Mornin"

A whole thesis on the shifting concerns of hip-hoppers could stem from Baltimore rapper Barnes' rewrite of the Ice T classic--Barnes drops "a bag of Indo"...Ice T lamented not having time to grab his "old-school tape". But not really, because the whole song's basically about what that fucking dropped bag of indo means to the dude. The repeated line that builds in meaning is, "I never had no motherfuckin' indo to smoke"."5 in the Mornin" is about how this 5am arrival of the Feds forces him out the back window, resulting in the dropped bag of weed, which is not only a bummer for the obvious reasons but because it represents like, awful, terrible waste to him.

That's to say, even at his relative level of wealth, Barnes remembers back when he was "broke" and "never had no motherfuckin' indo to smoke" and so, dropping it is like palpable waste, which is quite different than the "blow" that's flushed out of necessity, or the girls he proudly refuses to "give a fuck" about. It's all about that dropped indo--as it should be. This is a weird song because it's so brief and it's barely even a structured rap song--just a series of terse, repeated, rhyming couplets that resonate through repetition with a forgettable, kinda-verse sandwiched between them. It works though. From the first installment of AllBmoreHipHop's "Block Work" mixtape series.

further reading/viewing:
-"Thursday, August 30th, 1923" by Virginia Woolf
-"Three 6 Mafia's Cracker Protege Returns" by Tom Breihan
-Zach Baron from Sound of the City on Jay Z's "Off That"
-Scene from Thief
-Scene from Goodfellas
-Newsarama Interview with James Stokoe

Pulp & History: Inglourious Basterds & District 9

2009-08-26T07:29:00.003-04:00

The intersection of movies wrestling with atrocity and the top-grossers of the week's a rare occurence, but Inglourious Basterds and District 9 occupy the #1 and #2 spots respectively, while swiping some of pulp's grammar to engage with the Holocaust and South African Apartheid.

If either of these movies actively worked within pulp traditions properly or respectably, this would actually be an advance from the usual Oscar-bait historical tragedy movies that are way more apt to gross big money. Paradoxically, there'd be some sense of sophistication and breaking down of categorical thinking if lots of people were going to see artfully trashy concept pictures about history. Thing is, Basterds and District 9 run on the same "historically important" fumes as Schindler's List or Cry, the Beloved Country. Namely, a kind of sleight-of-hand trick that grabs lots of chin-scratching, simply because it tries to take-on the most taken-seriously events of the last century.

And because both offer some kind of "clever" flip on the expected, they're celebrated for basically being particularly egregious. Basterds removes all the the confusions--the how's, the why's, the what the fuck's--of history for a loaded "what if", while District 9, sets real-life history next to made-up history, devaluing the former and gaining "clever" points on the latter. District 9 though, is pretty easy to dismiss. In short, the sci-fi metaphor--maybe the only sci-fi metaphor, aliens=outsiders/immigrants--makes no damned sense when you set the movie in the very place that doesn't even need a metaphor--because it all really happened there. Aliens as shit-class citizens along with entire groups of people also marked as shit-class citizens sorta moots the point. These movies are "compassion fatigue" flicks, wrapping important things around too-clever so they're stupid conceits and pretending it's insight.

Tarantino's WWII pulp-epic/cinematic essay is far more respectful and healthily problematic--that's to say, you're not a dolt if you defend it on thematic terms--but it does have that one "District 9 moment". It's the aspect that Jonathan Rosenbaum cited (see "further reading" at the bottom, a new tiny feature I'm trying out) and it has to do with carving swastikas into the heads of that one Nazi they don't kill (so that he may spread the word of the Basterds).

A kind of reversal, though really a parallel, to Nazi perversity, it has the effect of over-extending something that totally doesn't need to be over-extended to resonate. Like the aliens in District 9, swastika carving is beside the point, not a reinforcement of that point. When the reality of the Holocaust is as equally horrifying as carved-on skin and one can pick your favorite fucked-up detail of death (Mengele's experiments, gas chamber concrete walls scratched by fingernails), there's no need to up the ante any.

Of course, excess is a big part of Tarantino's movie--District 9 however, grows more confusing the more you try to parse it out--and so, this critique and those like it are valid but nearly besides the point. Still, the whole sense of essentially turning Jews into Nazis and Nazis into Jews, despite being mindfully uncomfortable, doesn't so much wrestle with "revenge" as it just totally advocates it--something even the pulpiest of pulp rarely does. Undoubtedly, the best movies or "films" about revenge are well, about revenge: What it does or doesn't bring, the time spent and wasted enacting it, etc. Flat-out, this refusal to embrace rarefied Nazi evil is a key to something resembling solace for many Holocaust survivors--and you just can't push that to the side...and you can't lean on the implicit thick-headedness of pulp to skate by either.

further reading/viewing:
-Adam Katzman on District 9 vs. The Host
-"Film Threats" by Bret McCabe of City Paper
-Jonathan Rosenbaum on Inglourious Basterds
-"Blues in More than One Color: The Films of Quentin Tarantino" by Stanley Crouch
-Elem Klimov's Come & See (1985)

UNFUCKINBELIEVABLE: Lil Wayne in Raleigh, NC 08/08

2009-08-21T23:55:00.007-04:00

So, I was asked by a paper to attend the 'America's Most Wanted' tour and review it, but then the piece never ran and no one will tell me why, so here it is. It's a good reminder of why, despite rawk-star trappings right now, Wayne's still wonderfully weird and the only guy to pull something like this off.-b

Following a fun, but perfunctory performance from Soulja Boy, and a head-down, straight rapping set from Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, the star of the “America’s Most Wanted Tour”, which came to Raleigh’s Time Warner Cable Music Pavilion a couple Saturdays ago, took the stage amidst a flurry of samples from Scarface and a screen projecting a psychedelic collage of eyeballs. The self-declared “best rapper alive” immediately let-out an unhinged freestyle (“Cannon”) before segueing into mega-hit, “A Milli…which is also an unhinged freestyle.

See, that’s the thing about Lil Wayne: There’s no difference between the rote (samples from a tough-guy rapper-approved classic, playing the hits) and the rarefied (a trippy eyeball video, endlessly thrilling nonsense raps)--it’s all awesomely muddled. This was a big, outdoor show where it often felt like the audience indulged the performer.

Because he’s at his best when he’s impulsive and scatter-brained, indulgence is less of a problem than it might seem. Remember, Wayne is a guy who--though he’s been rapping and making hits since the late 90s—carved out his one-of-a-kind path to pop stardom via quasi-official “mixtape” tracks that more often than not, consisted of hook-less, structure-less, oddball rapping. Part of the enjoyment of listening or seeing Wayne is the experience: the high-highs as well as the distracted asides.

Even though the performance was anchored in mixtape songs and hits from last year’s Tha Carter III, it was also mired in Wayne’s most recent whims, namely his underwhelming Young Money Crew—made more underwhelming here by the absence of breakout star Drake—and an interest in middling alt-rock, the apparent sound of Wayne’s upcoming album this fall, The Rebirth.

The Young Money Crew was easy to ignore, dropping in for a verse and rolling out, but nearly every song was revamped to fit Wayne’s newfound embrace of rawk. The transformation of well-known skittering beats to recycled butt-rock riffs isn’t as jarring or awful as it sounds, but it wasn’t great either and it didn’t help that right before, Young Jeezy expertly performed a set informed, but not reconfigured, by a live rock band.

Jeezy didn’t throw out the end-of-the-world stomping synths of his albums, he just had a band that tossed-in skronks of horns and slabs of guitar shredding overtop of them. Whammy-bar dangling, Jeezy’s guitarist punctuated “Who Dat”, a snarling beat from last year’s The Recession, with a chunk of strangled guitar, bringing a palpable sense of chaos to a purposefully no-frills, worker-bee rap performance.

And when the live instruments fully took over Jeezy’s set, it was at the end--a kind of coda to the Atlanta rapper’s show. Jeezy’s guitarist stepped forward and approximated Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” which shifted into Jeezy’s Obama-inspired, “My President”. There wasn’t any rapping though, Jeezy thanked the crowd and walked away, letting an instrumental play out, back-up singers howling out the defiant, conflicted chorus: “My president is black/My lambo is blue/And I’ll be godammned if my rims ain’t too”. It was absurd and arrogant and moving all at the same time.

Wayne’s performance was entirely made-up of confusingly awesome stuff like that, bouncing between sensational and stupid and then blurring the line between the two. There were a few moments of stirring clarity, particularly an almost spoken-word (read: respectable) performance of “Let the Beat Build” that seemed to suggest the ease in which Wayne could put on a “good” show, but moments like that gained power precisely because other moments were so transcendently nutty.

He performed “I’m Me” with the word UNFUCKINBELIEVABLE flashing behind him, indulged in an especially raucous mini-suite of mindless raps (“I Run This”, “Always Strapped”) with Cash-Money mentor Birdman, and endlessly two-stepped around the stage, getting the crowd to shout back his nonsense couplets (“I’m a great dane, I wear eight chains!”). The show didn’t make a lot of sense but that hardly matters—Wayne’s adept at making something monumental from a mess.

Moving Image Source: The Devil's Spawn, the MTV Legacy of Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising

2009-08-17T08:22:00.001-04:00

So, over at the Museum of Moving Image's website, a video essay by Kevin Lee and myself that investigates sixties underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger's immeasurable influence on music videos is up. From Anger's weirdo, Manson-family member scored Lucifer Rising to Hype Williams, back to 90s alt-rock and Wu Tang, to Hercules & Love Affair--all in nine minutes. Partially narrated in my fruity-ass voice. This video essay's been awhile in the making and I'm glad to see it up and ready for viewing. Hope you enjoy it.

Big thanks to Kevin Lee for thinking of me and brilliantly editing and organizing the whole thing. You can watch it above or go to the website and watch it and read along. If you've never seen Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising, well it is on Google Video.

How Big Is Your World? New Rap, you know the deal...*

2009-08-13T18:14:00.003-04:00

*Can't find mp3s for two of these, so you just get some Youtubez links...

-Slum Village "Actin Normal"

Just from this song, it's clear the return of Baatin was what Slum Village needed--then he died on us. Album to album, but really anything after Fan-tas-tic Vol. 1, SV got notably less loose. The exit of Dilla, and the embrace of Elzhi, an awesome but highly-technical rapper (in a sense, the anti-Baatin) didn't help this much either. Though they probably needed something like success and conventionally-structured music in order to finally shift back into a blissed-out, hook-less, off-the-cuff sing-rap like "Actin' Normal". Even down to the grabbed-from-a-random-line title, this feels like "Pregnant" or something.

Nonsense love rap, lyrically obsessed with cartoon characters of the late 70s/early 80s, Baatin's digressive from the first line rhymes run perfectly alongside Karriem Riggins' mobius strip beat of soul horns and harp flutters (or something). Has some of the woozy victory of Kanye's "We Major" or those times when boom-bap beatmakers dig-in and pull out a trippy, druggy loop of something or other instead of a finely-chopped, headphone-perfect banger. RIP Baatin.

-Cam'ron ft. Vado "Ric Flair"

DJ Drama and the "Gangsta Grillz" series are a shell of their former selves. For those that are into the obvious (Drama is annoying) or flat-out miss the point (mixtapes with sound effects aren't easy to listen to), this probably doesn't matter, but when a track like this begins with shouts and then fucking Vado gets a rewind on his first-line, we've entered a kind of perfunctory, going-through-the-motions mixing. But the song is called "Ric Flair", has a mealy-mouthed awesomely complicated hook invoking the Nature Boy, has Cam'ron on it, and the beat's a low-end ominous twinkle and that's more than enough.

It's time to accept Cam'ron's just kinda over making regal bangers---it's clearly a conscious choice. Dude's always been honest, pathetically straight-forward--here's a guy who touted his 2008 return by wandering around seemingly lost in dollar store army fatigues, gets clowned in his movie/ego-stroke by his lawyer, and gets out-argued by his girl in that one skit on Purple Haze--and so, he probably couldn't keep dropping rule-the-world rap fantasies because he don't feel that way anymore. Instead, you get these low-to-the-block sad-ish raps about nothing in particular but mainly how he still rules (enough) and nothing and nobody else (really) matters all that much.

-Robert Glasper ft. Bilal "All Matter"

Pianist Robert Glasper's made his name in jazz by healthily interacting with contemporary hip-hop and R & B. That's to say, he's grabbing sonic ideas from the hip-hop here and there, but there's no synthetic beats or wack MCs interrupting his wisely conservative approach to modern jazz. That may change with his new album, Double-Booked which is apparently split between a typical jazz side and a hip-hop influenced side (Mos Def is featured), but then again, the conceit behind 2007's In My Element was its embrace of "hip-hop" and it worked just fine. Confusingly, this song, "All Matter" with vocals by Bilal is on the hip-hop side, so who knows.

The most hip-hop thing on "All Matter" is probably the drums, here not provided by drummer Damion Reid--as on In My Element--but Chris Dave. Reid in many ways, was the anchor of Element--as a jazz drummer should be--wandering around with double-time skitters and booming, almost boom-bap percussion. Dave's lighter and tinnier, but in that sense closer to the electronic-informed drums of so much rap of this decade.

There's also a lot more open-space here, which also reflects current hip-hop (the album also features some vocoder, it's clearly talking to 2009) and it's used expertly. The song slowly wanders between Bilal's singing and Glasper's piano-driven jazz wanderings. Try to ignore the usually stellar Bilal on this though. His lyrics, too thought-out, too mannered, are like some Sun Ra science/unity shit minus the grit and grime---a pretentious version of Everybody Poops. At the same time, there's something deeply moving and sincere about Bilal's vocals (what he's saying, not so much) and a few listens in, it makes the song vital. Caught this thanks to Eric Tullis.

-Zomby "One Foot in Ahead of the Other"

There's not been any discussion of dubstep on this blog, but I'm not sure why, as it's fascinating, deeply regional, rap-informed music. Not sure how or if people dance to this, but it's being made by a weird crew of quasi-provincials in parts of England and they seem to seeping-up all the sounds of 90s British "IDM", the video games they grew-up with, and the auteur/producer weirdness of American R & B of the past five or so years. The shuffling, clack of drums is nearly always the skeleton and so, it reminds me of Club music with the "Think" or "Sing Sing" drums that's then built upon and deconstructed over and over until it's something new. That said, there's something mannered about dubstep--again, are you supposed to dance to this?

Usually though, "mannered" is tossed-around on this blog as a negative descriptor, but it's almost a delight to find music that's imminently catchy and fun, but not designed for coke-head dance parties. The best thing Zomby does on this track is layer somewhat joyful blips and bloops around the idyllic shuffling, rainy-day-in-London evoking drum pattern. "One Foot Ahead of the Other" just keeps going, ever-forward but not fervently or aggressively, patiently and reserved--it's appropriately titled. Imagine this scored to a particularly hazardous level of Adventures of Dizzy. It seems a song about getting through the day, the sucky parts and the kinda good parts too.

What They Gown Do? NOTHING.

2009-08-11T00:07:00.003-04:00

Rod Lee "What They Gown Do"

When I talked to DJ Sega and DJ Tameil in Rod Lee's record store Club Kingz, Rod Lee hung out upstairs eating chinese food and blasting Gospel music that was like, the most soulful shit I maybe ever heard. To a lot of people, it might've seemed weird for one of the biggest names in Baltimore Club music to be listening to Gospel but that's incorrect. As I just told y'all, the truly avant-garde, the actually balls-out creative takes some sideways, inside-out approach to its influences.

When vet Club producers discuss the difference between their shit and the kids all over the world trying their hand at their city's weird music, the word "soul" comes up a lot: How much soul they're music has, how much soul they put into it, how little soul there is in any music right now, how little soul there is in breaking-down the music of poor-ass Baltimore kids into a bunch of signifiers (horns, "Think" drums, stuttered-samples) and slapping a tag of "Bmore" on it. You get the point.

On "What They Gown Do", all those signifiers are there for sure, but there's more going on too. It's a big evil anthem for not giving a fuck, an indirect way of calling pretty much everybody out there a big fucking pussy and an edifying piece of dance music about really giving a fuck. Rod gets cartoon gutteral and tells you, "Don't let nobody take your pride, stand tall, right!?" Simple but direct...and universally smart advice all the same.

This song, from 2006's Volume 5: The Official, maybe the only Club release that if you looked hard enough, you just might find in the cut-out bin of your local record store is pretty much the only thing I've been listening to this week. On the way to work on a loop and on the way back, each and ev'ry day--as Rod says it here.

Madlib, Cutting-Edge Producer.

2009-08-08T00:34:00.004-04:00

Noticed that Madlib's on the cover of the latest issue of Wire magazine and this, coupled with the hub-bub about Passion of the Weiss' whatever whatever "Top 50 Rap Albums of the 2000s" list has me thinking it's 2003 again--when you know, making an argument for why rap that wasn't exactly capital-R rap was just as awesome was a new enterprise or something. When I'd have to explain to people that got in my car that indeed, my enjoyment of Three-Six Mafia wasn't just because I hadn't yet been exposed to El-P and The Roots. It was years-festering frustration with that sort of thing that really got this blog rolling.

Anyways--why isn't Zaytoven on the cover of Wire? Bangladesh for "A Milli" alone? Or if it's legacy, well I already bitched about Juicy and Paul covering the magazine. Surely that shit's roving around the sounds of Reich or Riley (and Rubin and Rick Rock and RZA too) much more than Madlib's stoner boom-bap. Imagine Dilla without the craft or the context. The point is, rap's really weird and awesome and still kinda folk-oriented because it's often in the mainstream or close to mainstream that all the brain-busting stuff''s going on.

That's to say, totally normal people are dancing every night to the melancholy electronics and sound-effect percussion of "Turn My Swag On"...and obsessing over the wordplay of Gucci or Lil Wayne. Even something like the layers of corporate-sheen synths heard on a Runners track has more in common with a group like The Skaters (also featured in this month's Wire) than Madlib's stuff.

Ignoring this hyper-mainstream avant-garde or wandering around it to celebrate Grind Date or the mannered dystoproduction of El-P or the third-generation mumbles of Aesop Rock or MF Doom, is odd when an avant-garde and a sincerity deeper and kinder's no longer bubbling up out-of-reach on cassettes and mixtapes but becoming the dominant musical force for the entire decade.

It's similar to the critical think-pieces that highlighted "the death of irony" or a "new sincerity" in art during the 2000s as if being sincere and real, not being ironic, wasn't how much of the world has lived for most of time. Suddenly, Madlib or El-P grafts some explicitly weird weirdness onto their beats and the motherfuckers doing this in their basement for years get pushed to the side. De La twirl around in their own assholes and people gulp it down like its Buhloone Mindstate. Huh?

This isn't anything new, but it's an extension of something connected to the significance of provincialism/regionalism--it's always been the provincials that create that new new shit--and the reality that regular ol' people are the ones setting trends and it's the hip, cool, and with-it that follow.