Glued On Horns

Miley Cyrus - "Party in the USA" - Pop Chart Adventure Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 02:54:00 +0000

Let's talk about "Party in the USA".

Some people, as stupid as it would be, are going to interpret "Party in the USA", as yet another Miley song about growing up or something. It seems like Miley's handlers have been hinting at this almost since she hit the public consciousness, and rightly so: that's pretty much their job. It's the same thing they've already dealt with in the cases of Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan (oh my god what do we do when she she's too old to pull of the young and innocent angle?). At first glance, this could be Miley's "Come Clean" - Hillary's moment of transition for Disney tween sensation to almost full on mainstream pop star - and truth be told, it could sound good as a theme song to a better-than-it-should-be reality TV show. "Come Clean" was an obvious ploy, though, in the same way "The Climb" was. It's surprisingly easy to go from tween pop to epic inspirational pop. While the music is slightly heavier and more "adult" sounding, the saccharine sentimentality is the same, and its an easy way to get old people to pay attention to an act that's supposed to be for kids.

"She's talking about the climb? I know all about that! It's like, my job and like, how I went to school and shit? She's not just a kid anymore I think."

But this song has the fucking word "party" in the title, and Miley already did "The Climb". As much as "Come Clean" was a don't even think about it staple of dance parties I attended in 2005-06, it wasn't designed to be a jam, and Hillary never followed it up with much of anything. "Party in the USA" is a perfect follow up to "The Climb", and it works. It's a good enough song, and calculated well enough, to grab the 18-25 year olds that were both too old to get in on the early Miley hysteria and too young to appreciate the syrupy MOR bullshit of "The Climb. Even if my appreciation of its message hinges on a misheard lyric, I'll stump for it.

"I'm nodding my head like yeah" -> "I'm not in my head like yeah"

It's six of one in my book. Miley's songwriters would have written the second if they thought they could get away with it and why? Cause this song's about the ability of music to affect one's mental state and the perception of one's environment. It's a well worn subject in dance music, to be sure ("Music Sounds Better With You" comes to mind), but Miley and her people stumble on it gracefully here. The transcendental, context changing power of music, what I believe to be the primary message of the song, albeit hidden under layers of pop culture reference ("the Jay Z/Britney song was on" - meaning: "look I'm not one of those Jesus freak Jonas kids that doesn't listen to the radio") and standard adolescent unease, what I guess you could unfortunately call emo at this point, the "what am I doing here" shit ("my tummie's turning and I'm feeling kinda homesick").

If you look at the general narrative of the song it goes like this. Miley is going to LA. She feels like she is out of her element. People look different, people dress differently, and she feels self conscious. This partly due to the fact that she finds herself among people she deems to be famous. The only thing that snaps her back into her personal reality is music. She hears songs she knows, songs she can identify with, and she realizes that her current surroundings aren't so different from those she's used to. She is now able to go as apeshit as a caged 16 year old pop star can go (apparently this ends at throwing your hands up, shaking your hips, and doing a couple of other non-disruptive things "like yeah").

This is something we can all identify with, but it ought o be resonate even more for those of us who happen to be in the aforementioned early 20's demographic. Add to that fact that the rock/pop production lends to song some extra credibility and you have a song that might just finally cross Miley over. Kudos.

Unfortunately, it seems like it's impossible to find a version of the track on YouTube that doesn't have some sort of problem. I've chosen the version with the uniformly shitty quality rather than the over the one where the short bitrate results in the oddly distorted mids, or the one with the ridiculously overblown low end. Enjoy.

Summer Jam 2009 Candidate #3 - Medina - Kun For Mig

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 03:45:00 +0000

One of the things I can do at my job that looks like work but isn't actually is keeping careful and obsessive track of the ,iTunes charts. I don't know how familiar you are with the way they do it, but basically you can see, on any day, the top ten songs divided by country. The US charts are rarely all that interesting, but ability to see them against the international charts is a truly fascinating study. You can see the Black Eyed Peas at #1 at almost every country, followed by #2s that are as diverse as the countries actually ought to be. Usually the #1s are somehow identifiable, either as successful songs from internationally appealing artists, or as quickly overturning local hits. Denmark though, had an especially resilient local #1 for a few months this summer - "Kun For Mig" by Medina. I was intrigued, and, after encouragement from the Singles Jukebox, I checked it out.

There's the back story. Now, let's talk about what a great song "Kun For Mig" is, and forget for a minute about Summer Jam status and what have you.

It's a Danish dance track that builds to a chorus but never totally explodes. It runs on a deep, unsyncopated bass and bass drum pattern, synths that wouldn't be out of place anywhere, and some strings. It's clinical and chilly, while being intensely easy on the ears and rewarding on repeated listening, not unlike minimal house with a hook.

It's the second coming of Everything But the Girl's "Missing" as far as I'm concerned. [If "Missing" has already come a second time and I missed it - this is entirely possible, by the way. I'm entirely confident that someone in Italy or Britain has put together a track in the past 15 years that blends understated romantic melancholy with cool, vaguely disaffected yet emotive vocals and subtle, effective house music in a similar way to Everything But the Girl's classic, but I haven't heard it. Anyway, let me know where I can find it if it exists. Otherwise I'll just keep listening to "Kun For Mig".]

Like "Missing", it has a relatively slight and reproducible track, but the vocal saves the track from the banality into which these sort of songs all too easily slip. "Missing" feels like a club track that becomes a pop song just because it's so fucking good - you could take that groove and run it for 10 minutes, building it up and breaking it down into the vocal a few times, segueing it back into something else, bringing it back, and I'm sure there's a remix out there that does this very well. "Kun For Mig" seems to be the opposite, though. Listening to it, you do feel like you want it to go on longer, but it's structure is so entrenched in the ABABCB pop/rock structure that you're loath to concede more time to it. It's a pop song the evokes the feeling of a club, I guess similar to the way that trip hop was a genre built around being club songs you couldn't play in a club. Again, no doubt a remix has already fixed this and it's tearing up European discos as we speak.

Which brings us to the fact that, yeah, she's singing in Danish. Well, let's not deny that there's an exoticism going on here that makes "Kun For Mig" especially attractive to a non-Danish speaker. But this couldn't be farther from "Dragostea Din Tei".

"Dragostea Din Tei" was a joke - an entirely different sort of European dance music vacationism. You could sense that even though the lyrics were in Bulgarian (right?) they wouldn't be important even if you could understand them. The few intelligible parts of the song hinted at a vacuity that was hidden only be the inability to comprehend the rest of the lyrics - "Hallo. Salut." Plus there's no way "myahee myahoo myaho myaha-ha" means anything in any language.

There's nothing to hang your hat on in "Kun For Mig", unless you count the similarity of the Danish word "for" with the English word "for". It may as well be instrumental, if it wasn't for the clarity and purpose you can feel behind the vocal performance. Restrained, sure, but there's a sense of meaning that comes through without lyrics screwing the whole thing up. Where O-Zone (I almost called them O-Town LOL) works in the universal language of empty lyricism, Medina shows that it doesn't have to be like that, even in a pop song.

So yeah, you can get the same voyeuristic, "aren't I cool for liking this obscure foreign song" thrill while singing along to "Kun For Mig", while also identifying with something beyond a catchy keyboard lick.

But how is "Kun For Mig" a Summer Jam?

Fucked if I know. It lacks cathartic power, any reference to summer, any appeal in the realm of "too stupid to think about", and the sound of it certainly doesn't conjure anything particularly sunny. As such, it seems more suited to the Autumn Jam discussion. But it has been the coolest summer on record here in New York, so I chalk its appeal up to that. A cop out? Sure, but this song is totally worth copping out for.

Summer Jam 2009 Candidate #2 - Das Racist - Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:05:00 +0000

Do you like this? Do you hate this? It doesn't matter and I don't care. You have heard it or will hear it and that is what matters. Two guys who apparently live in Queens got high a few months ago, thought about how funny the idea of combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell was, put on a drum machine, and said "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" over and over again in a rhythmic manner for a few minutes (the video above is for a remix that adds a bit of musical intricacy to make the listening experience a little bit smoother, but the original is, for all intents and purposes, the same).

And you listened to it!

Why did you do that? How did you do that?

This is the perfect case of viral for the sake of viral, and I'll admit to getting some kicks from it. It's funny! I do think the idea of a Pizza Hut and Taco Bell is funny. I like it when people decide to make music for fun, which is obviously the case here. I'd rather listen to this than Vespatimesist any day because these guys are fucking having fun. I like it when people try things that sound like terrible ideas and don't care and just try them and sometimes it works. This works, for example, even though it seems like it shouldn't or, maybe you're thinking, actually, no, it doesn't work. I'll say it again - you listened to it (or you will).

I spent a lot of time one summer writing and recording songs like this one in my basement with a friend of mine. We once recorded an improvisational record in about 4 hours. A lot of stuff is terrible to the point of being, like, 4 levels below "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". But when we had actual ideas, like Das Racist did, the songs actually turned out pretty well. I'd go so far as to say that many of them were better than "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". But, again, that's not the point. You listened to "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", or you will, and you haven't listened to "Galavanting Unicorns of Love In Space".

You can look at a garage rock band and be like, these are the everyman. These are the blue collar soul of popular music, where rubber meets the road. But anyone who's been to a garage rock concert in the past two years knows that's not true anymore. Garage rock has graduated from the suburban garage to the abandoned urban garage and become art. Das Racist are the new everymen of music - dudes sitting in their basement with joints and pirated copies of Ableton Live. Think this song is stupid enough that you could have made it? You are exactly right.

There is no artifice, it's just fucking dumb, kind of funny, and frighteningly catchy. If these guys were British the song would be #1 over there already. The stoner's pick for summer jam '09, sure, but also something of a punk rock choice - if you're looking for a snapshot of the state of D.I.Y. in June 2009 you can stop looking.

Do I like it? Do you care? Do I care?

Summer Jam 2009 Candidate #1 - Keri Hilson ft. Kanye West & Ne-Yo - Knock You Down

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:18:00 +0000

Apparantly UMB Brazil is way cooler than they're North American overlords and have allowed me to embed this video into my blog. If you don't see it, you can do the old fashioned here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF5Q1jr28PM

Now, I'm not totally sold on what any of these three people are doing in general. I've got reservations about giving my whole hearted support to Kanye (though I'm close), Ne-Yo, or Keri Hilson right now.

But this track? No reservations at all.

Post Heartbreaks Kanye seems to be living in a sort of bubble where people are so happy he's not trying to sing that his verses once again seem awesome and immediate like they did way back when. His verse here is a good case in point, and I wouldn't be surprised if his next record is a lot like this - competent, almost perfect for the song, but lacking that weird sense of paranoia and persecution that made his early music so interesting. Still great, but it's Kanye without the caps lock, which I think we're all going to have to grow up and adjust to if we want to remain fans of pop music in the next few years.

Ne-Yo, on the other hand, I would've sworn I hated him. "So Sick" is a great song but he really lost it after that. People I respect have been all over Year of the Gentleman, but choosing to listen to "Miss Independent" was something I just couldn't bring myself to do. But I think I get it now - this is what it took. This is arguably the best sing-rapping that anyone has ever done without being R. Kelly. This verse may singlehandedly make it ok for an R&B singer to get a guest spot on a track and not only do a verse rather than a hook, but even deliver it like an MC, but I hope it doesn't, cause I don't think anyone other than the aforementioned Kels or maybe The-Dream could possibly handle that task. The last thing I want to hear is Akon trying to do this shit.

Man, Ne-Yo's verse on this is so good.

Keri Hilson - fine. She's good looking, has just enough personality visually and vocally, but she's obviously overshadowed on this track. And not only by Yo and Ye, but by the beat! It's been a while since I heard a hip hop beat I liked this much on a radio track. The form of it is interesting, splitting each verse in half between lackadaisical paint by numbers bounce and frenetic hi-hat shit for which I am a total sucker.

A little too long, but I'm ok with that in a Summer Jam. 2009 is already shaping up to be better than 2008 on the Summer Jam front. I'm not gonna be surprised if this one wins out.

Oh and yes I do realized I never finished by top ten of 2008. The top three were Portishead - Third, Robyn - ST (yeah I know this came out in 2005 - I like this record fucking sue me), and Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron & Fred Squire - Lost Wisdom. All great records that you should listen to all night. If you wanna know how I feel about em, in particular, get in touch personal like. This shit don't come for free.

Two Thousand Eight - 4. Islands - Arm's Way

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 17:52:00 +0000

Usually, even if I make an act like I don't understand why certain bands aren't huge and famous and popular - the Drones for instance, as Pitchfork noted in their review of Havilah last week, are one of those bands. But really, it ought to be pretty obvious why people wouldn't like them. They're just too bleak, and it's a very heartening fact, actually, that people at large would think that. Life would be significantly worse if everyone went around talking about war and death and being all, "maybe you should just die" all the time. Makes for great music, but not necessarily the type of thinking everyone should try to embrace.

But the quickness with which people lost interest in Islands is something of a surprise to me. The Unicorns' first record was justifiably received as a landmark of idiosyncratic turn of the millennium pop music, and like, girls liked it. Guys liked it. Square people and hipsters both liked it cause it was good pop music that was fun. Turns out, as the story goes, that the Unicorns were so idiosyncratic that they broke up before they could make another record. But when they reformed like Voltron into Islands and put out Return To the Sea, it was well received. I recall people saying things like, "I really like that Islands record".

So why then, did nobody give a shit when Arm's Way came out last summer? I'll admit that when songs get longer and less linear I tend to get skeptical, but it's not like most of the songs on Return to the Sea were straightforward pop songs. There's no "Rough Gem", yeah, so my best guess is that the indie rock listening public saw this record as an example of a band abandoning their true identity in the name of artistic progression.

C'mon though, I mean, and really. Besides certain lyrical themes (death, fear, illness) and odd pop culture references ("Ready to Die", "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby"), there's nothing that really ties Unicorns/Islands together as a style, beyond the mercurial personalities of their members. Whimsy, you could call it, within certain bounds. The real problem, then, is that it's not a complete departure from RttS. It's the continuation of the band's interests away from traditional pop song structures towards something more baroque and composed. The reaction to the record then, can't be a, "wow these guys do something crazy and original every time the come out", which was the mindset up iuntil this record, but that now needs to be modified in the direction of, "ok, here's a band finding their voice". Whims are becoming more explicable, messages are becoming more focused.

This record was not received especially well, I think, because it's a solid record, rather than a revelatory one. Every song on here is very good, but no songs on here are as great as "Rough Gem", "Les Os", etc. That said, Arm has moments of brilliance that equal or exceed any heights Islands/Unicorns have previously reached.

Examples:

The middle/end of "Abonimable Snow" is right up there with the Hair's "ghost" series in terms of expressing an endearingly naive, weirdly displaced, but very real fear of the supernatural.

"I Feel Evil Creeping In" hints more definitively than any previous Islands/Unicorns song at what, I think, anyone who listened closely enough to their first two records ought to realize: these guys are kind of bad news. They may be scared and their confused, but they've got a real mean streak in them. If you've ever seen an interview with Nick Thorburn, it's pretty clear that the guy is thorny in a way that's certainly different than the way, say, Lou Reed is thorny, or "rock stars" are thorny. You get the sense he's always had this charmingly innate distaste for things that could erupt at any moment.

The last two minutes of "In the Rushes". The main part of the song is sort of plodding and vague. Nothing anyone would be expected to remember or about which a letter would be written or a blog post written. But then - and when I first heard this song at a show in Montreal during February last year I broke into one of those laugh and smile fits that always strikes me when something totally wonderful and unexpected occurs during a show, usually regarding a new song or a song I've never heard before performed by a band for whom I hold a great deal of affection, once they got to this section - they break into an homage to/reimagining of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" that contrasts with the rest of the song in such a way that you kind of leave your brain for a hot minute. One of the best moments of pop music in 2008.

Two Thousand Eight - 5. The Killers - Day and Age

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:38:00 +0000

I love the Killers pretty much as much as any band that exists these days. Yep. Right up there with Future of the Left, the Drones, Max Tundra. And, as you might expect, I pretty vehemently resent the idea that there's no reason to put them in this kind of company. I don't think there's anyway around admitting that the Killers, unfortunately, have the market cornered on melodic pop rock music right now. Just because everyone else in their bracket (with the exception of everyone who unequivocally sucks) is way way past their prime - U2, Green Day, Fall Out Boy - doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

Of course, relevance has nothing to do with it, really. A good pop rock album out to be a good pop rock album and, in fact, is. Day and Age is a great album, as long as you consider albums full of great songs that have nothing to do with each other besides greatness to be great albums.

Something in the appeal that Day and Age and Sam's Town hold almost certainly has something to do with the fact that be very best music in 2008 was not made by musicians with thousands (? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? how much money does it take to make a polished studio record for a major lable if you're not Axl Rose?) of dollars to spend in the creation of a pop album. There is something to be said for professional, high tech, clean sound, and not just in hip hop or "pop" pop music, by which I guess I mean Kelly Clarkson. Would these songs sound ok if they had used No Age's studio setup to record them? Maybe, but more likely they would sound flat and boring.

Brandon Flowers as a starving indie rock singer is commonplace: a dude with an average but impassioned singing voice and a stupid and flashy sense of style. If I passed the dude on Bedford Ave on a Friday night I'd wish to stomp his face. But context changes everything about the Killers. What would be annoying becomes charming, what's boring becomes exceptional. What would it sound like if you took the boring pop rock music and dumb, disconnected, naively nostalgic stylistic obsessions of the last decade together and threw a bunch of money into trying to turn them into something cohesive? It would sound a lot like Day and Age.

In that last paragraph I used the word stupid and the word dumb. The Killers are both and I love them for it. They have never recorded a stupider song than "Joyride", or a "better" song than "Goodnight, Travel Well", or a more a confused rambling Steinmanesque concoction than "A Dustland Fairytale". So, it's a broad album, yes, but I don't mean to give the impression that this album is good only because of its breadth, because, while depth is certainly not their forte, the Killers get deeper on "Losing Touch" and "Goodnight" than they have on any previous songs.

But a broad album is what this is, primarily. Broad in its appeal as pop music is meant to be, even if it goes largely unrecognized on the charts or the radio. I'm really looking forward to blasting "Spaceman" out the window of my apartment this spring and shouting "Losing Touch" out of a moving car when it gets warm enough to roll down the windows.

Two Thousand Eight - 6. The Drones - Havilah

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:45:00 +0000

I probably listened to the Drones more than any other band in 2008. This worked out pretty well, as I've gone through some obsessive periods over bands during some pretty awkward times in their existences, and that doesn't work especially well. The most intense period of my Radiohead admiration took place between about 6 months to a year after OK Computer came out and the the release of Amnesiac. Roughly a 3 year span, I think, during which time they released an EP, which is still probably one of my favorite records of all time, in any case, and an LP, which definitely is, and did not tour at all. I could just as easily have listened to nothing but Thin Lizzy last year and been left with nothing to show for it but some perpetual blue balls.

So it was nice that the Drones not only released Havilah this fall and toured in such a way that I was able to see them blow about 20 people's minds in a very small basement room, but also that they're definitely still at the peak of their game.

You can see what I wrote about "The Minotaur" for Tiny Mix Tapes. I won't bother saying anything much more about that. It's an amazing track and represents exactly what this band is capable of when they set their sights on boiling the blood.

But the Drones seem to be dead set on being the exact opposite of their name, and that means that they can't just be trying to rock out on every track. For me this is more often frustrating than anything else. Why does Kanye have to sing? Why do the Drones have to follow "The Minotaur" with "The Drifting Housewife"?

Please do not get me wrong. Sequencing is not The Drones' strong suit, but I think "The Drifting Housewife" is easily better than 80% of the music I heard last year. And since it's by far the least good song in the record, that puts the rest of the songs a pretty decent percentile. "Nail It Down" isn't as exceptional as "Jezebel" or "Shark Fin Blues" when it comes to Drones leadoff tracks, but it's still freaking great. "I Am the Supercargo" is a slow burn for the ages and I'm still fucking trying to figure out what exactly it's about. If you know, please tell me.

Unlike, say Thom Yorke's lyrics, or which are impressionistic in the "I'm just trying to get a vibe going" kind of way, this shit is impressionistic in a way that is actually trying to get something across. You know that "Supercargo" is trying to tackle topics, and you get the sense that it's doing a pretty good job of tackling, even if it seems like it's going in eighteen directions at once. Gareth Liddiard's brain is running from colonialism, some sort of narrative about a marriage, to straight up post modern dissatisfaction, and he's doing what he can to make it make sense, but it's more about just getting things out and that's more than enough. When it's focused, as on "Oh My" and "The Minotaur" the vitriol is fucking blinding, and when it's mixed in with more complicated shit it just takes a little more work to get the marrow out of it.

And lest you think I'm down on the ballads, "Cold and Sober" is the heartbreakingest song the Drones have ever committed to an MP3. Rare is the band that can kill you with violence and silence on the same record. Why are these people not bigger than Jesus?

Two Thousand Eight - 7. The Presets - Apocalypso

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:36:00 +0000

Everyone loves Cut Copy, and I suppose that counts for me to. But in terms of albums by Australian dance music groups from 2008, Apocalypso is better than In Ghost Colors. But that's not really the point. Those are two very different records from two very different bands. People were into comparing Cut Copy to New Order, and if that's true than the Presets are Depeche Mode. The bottom line is that Apocalypso is more fun than pretty much any other records that got released last year.

Which I realize is a difficult position to defend: Apocalypso can get kind of dark. It's got that kind of odd sinister sexy as fuck sedo-masochistic vibe that not only worked for the Mode, but for some of the best Moroder fueled Donna Summer tracks, shit like "Tainted Love", take it back as far as you want and the best dance music, arguably perhaps, has a pretty strong current of darkness running through it. And talk til you're blue in the face about Hercules and Love Affair, but there's really only two good tracks on there - Apocalypso blows that shit out of the water if you take it song for song.

Obviously, my love for this record has nothing to do with originality, topicality, or anything fancy like that. The sounds on here are sounds that everyone has used before, sounds that everyone is familiar with if you've heard the stuff I hinted at earlier. And it isn't like they're doing anything new with it, so here is where we get into a nice little battle about craft vs. art. But who's saying this is art in the first place?

There's some great synth sounds on this record. That thing on "My People" that sounds vaguely like background vocals but I think is actually a synth? That thing is amazing. Groundbreaking, no, but it sounds so fucking good and who cares. There's no meaning there, necessarily, so I won't try to explain it. The point of dance music is to unlock something that you generally keep under lock and key, and it does that with sounds like that fucking "na, na, na" sounds on "My People".

And "Yippiyo-ay"? How awesome is it that they named the song "Yippiyo-ay"? That's maybe the best song title since "Song 2", in as much as a song title is meant to represent the meaning of a song. There are other lyrics in that song out of which you can easily cobble together a title. "Girl From the Creature Feature"? "Slide It In"? Those would basically capture the feeling of the song, it's general sexual notions, but "Yippiyo-ay" takes that to the next level. That song is not about sex, it's about the nonsensical euphoria of communal night club experience. These guys aren't articulate, otherwise they might have been able to put something into words that was able to really express what's going on here. "Yippiyo-ay" is damn close though. Damn close.

But they do try to do something other than just put some nonsensical lyrics on top of brilliantly brooding and impeccably produced instrumentals. And "If I Know You" is a valiant effort. The only bad thing I can say about these songs is that they're so complete, frequency wise, it's really hard to mix them in with anything else. I don't think this is why David Lee Roth was talking about, but these songs will melt your records too.

Two Thousand Eight - 8. Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:48:00 +0000

Should I use this space to talk about how much I'm still obsessed with Mastered By Guy at the Exchange, roughly five years after I first heard it? I'll do my best not to.

As I wrote back in October, I think it was, I expected great things from Max Tundra's long awaited follow up. And yeah, he delivered. I didn't go through the roof when I heard it, but it would have been impossible to take the same colossal leap forward from album two to three that he made from one to two. That would have required a recalibration of the word "greatness".

Nobody wants to admit that there are limitations to how good something can be. Everyone wants to believe that the musicians they look up to can constantly be taking steps forward and that everything can be constantly getting better. Radiohead seems able to convince people that they're always capable of blowing the lid off the musical zeitgeist and getting fucking crazy and blowing everyone's mind, keeping hope alive for the myth of musical progress. With everyone else, you hope that they can make another good record.

Which Max Tundra has done. On merit alone, Parallax Error Beheads You is probably just as good as its predecessor. It has the same elements, it has songs that are really just as good as any on Guy, but inevitably it feels less original (I almost said less novel, which is also sort of true) and somehow more of its time than Guy, which still sounds totally and timelessly oddball. I could make the case that the record even holds together better than Guy does.

Fuck! This really is just me masturbating over Guy at the Exchange in a backhanded, 3 weeks into January year end list kind of way, isn't it? Pazz and Jop came out this week and I was all, what took you so long, but here I am only on number eight out of ten, and look how much trouble I'm having even coming with a good reasoning for why you should care about Parallax Error Beheads You.

It ought to be fucking easy. This is a fantastic record from a rare visionary that we should all be happy is still spending some of his time producing music, but it's extremely difficult for me to say why without falling back on a sui generis saying that it's a third Max Tundra record. It's a sui generis thing, or maybe an a priori thing. I was never good with Latin. Just watch the video, enjoy it as much as you possibly can, and let me go to sleep.

Two Thousand Eight - 9. Chromeo - Fancy Footwork

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:08:00 +0000

Do some people obviously and for some reason sort of wish it was still the 80’s? Obviously that’s a yes. Are some people musicians? Uh huh. Lots of records come out out of this demographic intersection, but Fancy Footwork takes an interesting approach to making it sound like the era of Members Only jackets.

Most bands with an 80s fetish are content to retread hyper trendy ground by packaging dated arrangements in more modern compression envelopes EQed in more bands than Duran Duran could have ever hoped to see in their lifetimes. The resulting listening experience from this sort of approach, a band in 2008 trying to sound like the 80s, isn't the same thing as actually listening to music from the 80s. Talk ‘til you’re blue in the face about how much Cut Copy sounds like New Order or how much the Presets sound like Depeche Mode, you can’t get around the fact that, despite obvious similarities, the records these bands put out this year sound very of their time. Whatever the 80s means in terms of a sound, it comes from a precise meeting of mixing boards, early digital technology, reverb/gate matchups, and other things that are far too specific and far too boring for most bands to care about them.

But Chromeo sidesteps that concern. Forget about the video homage to “Money For Nothing”, Chromeo is on something else even if they don’t know it. Call it reverse engineering. Chromeo seems to start with the feeling you get from a the 80s pop canon recording, or the particular euphoria of geeking out to a blaring freestyle jam, then they somehow remove the essence of the experience from immediate context of production or musical style. Of course, they usually add a lot of that style back, but the point is that they reconstruct the 80s sound largely out of non-musical or non-technological parts. The aim is a faithful recreation of what it feels like to hear 80s music, without actually hearing 80s music being a requirement.

So, you hear vocoders, which ought to trigger some sort of 80s synapse, but if you look a little closer, they use vocoders way more than anyone short of Afrika Bambaataa. It’s awesome because, beyond the fact that it’s goofy, it also makes you think you’re hearing an accurate approximation of what 80s music was like, while it’s actually something totally weird.

Chromeo did this on their first record, too, but to a much more limited degree, and not as skillfully. “Momma’s Boy” is the easiest thing to point to as the turning point. While they were always good at making you dance like you were hearing “Lucky Star” for the first time, Chromeo has also now somehow learned how to do Hall and Oates too! What the hell? And “Bonafide Lovin”? That “oh-uh-oh” bit on the chorus is straight I’m not even sure. It feels like it could be New Edition, but I wouldn’t even compare the two.

Basically, this is a great pop record. The lyrics (I fucking love “what you need is an older guy/With a little bit of life experience/The right clothes and the right appearance”. That’s timeless songcraft in action.) match the music, which matches a certain skin deep, yet very positive and universally applicable emotion. I tend to think 2008 was pretty terrible for pop music, but then I play this record and I’m all: “what am I so worried about?”

Two Thousand Eight - 10. Gang Gang Dance - Saint Dymphna

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:28:00 +0000

God's Money was a good record, which I liked, and, unfortunately, never really internalized. It's something of an experimental record, whatever that means: in this case it means that the songs are indistinct - the sense that they serve to create an album, more than they seek to be songs in and of themselves. It is a music album, not a group of songs, and needs to be appreciated in 40 minute bursts. Serious listeners have a chance at really getting this record, and everyone else maybe only catches glimpses of what it's about. I pretty much never listened to it seriously enough, but I could tell that there was some subtle stuff waiting in there for me when I had time for it.

Well, three years later, I still never made time and Gang Gang Dance came out with the perfect follow up record. This one has all the great stuff that made God's Money great and other stuff that makes Saint Dymphna even better. The main thing, though, is that this time around the band manages to create memorable songs within the context of a cohesive album. The off kilter loops, Brooklyn via Africa percussion (not the other way around), and magically not cliched atmospherics from the last album are still there but now there are hooks too.

If I ever pretend that I like listening to experimental music that doesn't have any hooks outside of a live context, you have the right to tell me I'm full of shit. Let's be honest - God's Money didn't have hooks enough to bring me back to it, even though I enjoyed it and knew it was a great record. I couldn't be more thankful that Gang Gang Dance wrote "House Jam" and "First Communion" because now I can like them unreservedly. They're now a band I can enjoy concretely, not in some assumed world of musical validity populated by vision without intent, innovation without soul. I guess this is how some people felt when Animal Collective released Sung Tongs. A band that showed perhaps an excess of enthusiasm and too little conception of their own strengths on their first record, made the sort of record they were meant to make on the second try.

Hooray!

Link Corral Part VII

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:30:00 +0000

Here's some more stuff I've been doing:

Andrew W.K. and the Calder Quartet at Le Poisson Rouge, November 15th
From Tiny Mix Tapes

The Pitchfork 500's Five Most Obscure Songs
From Flavorwire

Japanese Review Roundup
From Flavorwire

Year end stuff to come when I have a minute.

Biweekly Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:00:00 +0000

This one just ended up at Tiny Mix Tapes:

Against Me!, Ted Leo + Pharmacists, and Future of the Left at Webster Hall - October 11, 2008

These are at Flavorpill:

JCVD

Frost/Nixon Premiere at the Paley Center - Dec. 2, 2008

Wild Style

Wild Style Party at Danbro Studios - Nov. 15, 2008

David Rees and Matt Taibbi - How Doomed is America at the Brooklyn Public Library - November 15, 2008

On a related note, the best birthday present I received this year - a hug from Andrew W.K. at le poisson rouge last night.

Sad is the New Black - or - The Portishead-Lehman Brothers Axis

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:58:00 +0000

The scary and exciting season, or more accurately, long weekend of Halloween and Presidential Election seem to have inspired me to immerse myself not in harsh noise, Arthur Brown, or other traditionally frightening things, but in really sad music. This should be evidenced by my "very creepy" Halloween post where, in case you don't want to scroll down, I posted a YouTube audio only clip of a BBC session performance of Portishead's "Magic Doors" pretty much without comment. For a minute I thought that the things I was listening to were actually scary, or some of them were, but nope. Just sad.

I wasn't so into Third when it came out. I thought it was good, but my mood this past week has lead me back to it in a new way. This is wierd for a couple reasons.

When people tell me music is depressing I generally don't understand their point of view. Granted, there are some pieces of music that are genuinely depressing - things that depress you when you listen to them, things that you listen to when you're depressed. Third, I guess is one of those pieces. Maybe Pink Moon is another. But I've always disagreed with those who say that Radiohead or the Smiths are depressing. If it's depressing, why would anyone who doesn't like to be depressed listen to it? The conclusion I've gradually come to on this is that people who say that not depressing music is depressing are just using the wrong words. They don't actually get depressed when they listen to Radiohead, they just feel like Radiohead is something that people who are depressed would listen to.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is I usually would be the last person to label music as sad or depressing - if music comes of as sad or depressing and the music is any good, then the point must be to get at something beyond depression. Wallowing in depression has never made good music and maybe this is why I have a problem with the way some people react to Elliot Smith.

Third is sad, but listening to it, you don't feel sad. You feel disabled. You want to go lie down and do nothing and not talk to anyone for a while. What's wierd is that this is exactly the kind of musical masochism that I hate. Nobody needs Third to make them feel shitty. The problem, I suppose, is that it seems that Third fits so perfectly into this moment in history. It hits you with the exact type of numbness and despair that a financial crisis, the re-emergence of a Russian militancy, and the strange confluence of fear and malaise that exists right now on tends to inspire. You listen to Third for the same reason you listen to anything else: to feel tied into the world. It just so happens that the world is really fucked right now and this is the music that speaks to it.

Lost Wisdom, which is by Mount Eerie, is just as good, if not better. It's not the soothsayer of doom type of album that is, though. It's a breakup record. "You Swan Go On" is easily the best breakup song I've heard in years. Yes, better than "Woke Up New". It's the centerpiece of the record as far as I'm concerned, even when the first two tracks are much more epic and immediately effecting. "Lost Wisdom" is the great foggy awesomeness that Phil Elverum should be producing for ever. "Voice in Headphones" isn't as good of a song, but thrives on the choral feel that comes from the reverb on the backing vocals. It shows some of the only obvious "production" on the record, which is mainly just voices and acoustic guitar with some electric guitar textures thrown in.

So sadness is in, I guess. Parallax Error Beheads You should be the record I'm pumping these days, by all rights, but the funk just doesn't fit right now. I'll give that one a proper drubbing later on.

Another Thing for Somewhere Else

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 01:19:00 +0000

Check this out at Tiny Mix Tapes.

The Notwist at Webster Hall, October 13 2008

Obligatory Halloween Post

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:11:00 +0000

I was totally going to do a really great halloween mix and post it up today, but then I remembered, around 1am last night, that I don't know how to use Ableton when I'm drunk. So here's Portishead. This is as scary as it gets these days anyway - just try to get up and go do something after listening to this. You don't want to do you?

Flavorpill Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:02:00 +0000

Here's some short, marvelously inconsequential things I've written recently. See I have been writing! Shut up!

Yura Yura Teikoku at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

Against Me, Ted Leo & Future of the Left at Webster Hall

T odd P Halloween Bash at Goldenrod Brewery

St. John's Halloween Extravaganza at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback at the Anthology Film Archives

A Week of Noise - Curated by Thurston Moore at the Issue Project Room

Bat-Manga Reading at the Strand

Pattern Is Movement at the Empty Bottle in Chicago

Thanks. More real posts soon I promise. I've been formulating plans for a long exegesis on greed, New York and the financial crisis that will probably never get written. But cross your fingers anyway. Also, aren't you glad there's no CMJ coverage here? Yeah!

Andrew WK: May 15 2008 -or- Belated Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:02:00 +0000

This has been lying around for almost 6 months now. Here, for the sake of completeness, is a review of Andrew W.K.'s show at the New Museum from last May.

Andrew W.K.
May 15, The New Museum, New York, NY

From the crowd, which varied from the type of 20 somethings (I shy away from any term making use of "hip" or "thou") whose clothes make you a little uncomfortable to sexagenarian performance art enthusiasts, the event announcements, which admitted "we really have no idea what this performance will be like," to the performance space, a grand piano and practice guitar amplifier surrounded on 3 sides by bleacher like seats and more intimately by floor cushions for close up appreciation, it was apparent that I was not the only one feeling a bit unclear as to what to expect when faced with an Andrew W.K. performance in an art museum in 2008.

And, well, rightly so. The man himself often seems oddly divorced from the music he made his name with - a soft spoken proponent of positive thinking and friendship who performs songs like "Ready To Die" (of his own creation, not the Unicorns or B.I.G.) in a quasi-metal growl. Especially now that some of his most recent work has been production a Lee "Scratch" Perry and Sightings.

In the end, while those who came hoping for dub, sonic experimentation, or a surprise full band run through of I Get Wet may have gone home disappointed, Mr. W.K.'s performance should have pleased everyone else. Though the show was billed as a solo performance, Andrew arrived with Matt Sweeney, a guitar, and a drum machine. With little introduction, the two launched into a blues number over which Andrew sang a bunch of seemingly nonsensical lyrics, which eventually coalesced into chants about milk.

Andrew then confirmed that he and Sweeney would be improvising, and they continued to do just that, playing songs, all relatively blues based and backed by drum machine, with lyrical topics ranging from love, to turtles, to food and gaining weight. All of this served to confirm what everyone in attendance should have already known. Andrew W.K. can do no wrong, and will always succeed, albeit through some backwards means, at everything he attempts. A recording of these improvisations surely would be underwhelming - as you can argue Andrew's records are - but that's not the point. As Andrew himself stated later on in the show, music, or at least his music, is about the experience of the moment and nothing else.

Following the improvisations, Sweeney left and Andrew ran through 4 or 5 of his hits accompanied by a backing track and the shouting, flailing and encouragement of any audience members brave enough to step within his 4 or 5 foot arm and hair swinging radius of affection and joy. If you didn't like "Party Hard" before, this performance wouldn't have changed your mind, but if you even kinda liked it, it became your favorite song of all time for its entire duration.

The 15 or so kids who formed a maypole-dance-like circle around the piano during one of the numbers attests to the fact that Andrew W.K. is one of the few performers seemingly to still be able to turn a crowd of jaded 20 year olds back into excited teenagers. Which is why, when at the closing of the show he claimed never to have experienced anything exactly like this particular concert, you could sense that he was being less than totally honest for the first time in the evening. Joy is every day with Andrew W.K.

Will Get Fooled Again - or - Six More Years

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 23:06:00 +0000

I'm always scared when a band I love releases new material. When this happens I often purchase or download a record as soon as I can, but don't listen to it for days or weeks, waiting for the perfect moment when I have cleared my mind enough of preconceptions to be able to give it a fresh, level headed listen.

Max Tundra's Mastered By Guy At the Exchange is one of the best records of the 21st century, and after six years, it's follow-up, Parallax Error Beheads You is coming out in November. Given my fondness for idiosyncratic pop musicians with distinctive and conversational lyrical voices, this should come as no surprise. What's surprising is that I managed to force myself to listen to the first single so soon.

It did not let me down:

This is the video for "Will Get Fooled Again" which I understand to be the album's first single.

I saw this for the first time the other day and, having never before witnessed Mr. Tundra in motion, I was primarily amazed by not the song, but by the fact that he was as charismatic visually as he is on record. While this song isn't the strongest thing he's ever released, (see "Lysine" or "Lights" for that) it's probably the best video he's done and, after six years devoid of any new recorded output, it's welcome as hell. The dance he does here toward the middle of the video is enough to make my day for days.

Most importantly, the song retains many of the indispensable qualities of Mastered by Guy: Max's clipped, unassuming voice against the sort of meticulous and playful beats the likes of which I've only ever heard from him. My rationale for loving Max Tundra as I do, stated simply, would read something like "only Max Tundra can be Max Tundra." It would have been a real travesty if he had somehow lost himself in the past six years, and I am overjoyed that it seems like he didn't. If this record doesn't end up as one of my favorites for 2008 I'll be mightily surprised and thoroughly disappointed.

If the video above didn't work, you should be able to watch it here.

G Unit Iron Ore -or- Formula 50 Strontium

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:27:00 +0000

I don't know how this didn't set the internet on fire. From a Forbes profile on 50 Cent:

That adds to an existing stable of other business divisions, including a G-Unit clothing line, a boutique recording label, and even a stab into gaming. “The financials of the music business have changed to the point that we have to find ways to make money in other places," 50 Cent brand manager Barry Williams recently told Forbes. “I didn’t think six years ago when we started trying to sell music that we'd be selling VitaminWater and shoes and clothes. Now we're moving into other directions, and four or five years from now, it's exciting to think about us looking at natural resources and raw materials and other businesses.”

That last sentence is so good. First, though William later clarifies this statement, hinting at a pending deal for G Unit branded diamonds, somehow 50 shilling for Exxon/Mobil still makes sense. The formula 50 jokes are just too easy. And second, in four or five years, the way things are going, 50 could perhaps more easily be a richer, scarier Eminem, or Cube without the acting to fall back on than a diversified mogul. Lord save us from a scenario where 50 is dressing like Puffy and selling us precious gems.

A Review Thing: Rhys Chatham's "A Crimson Grail"

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:49:00 +0000

This is belated, but I wrote this review of the canceled August 15 performance of Rhys Chatham's "A Crimson Grail". Click it to read it at Tiny Mix Tapes.

I have things I want to say about other stuff, too, but it'll have to wait. Look for the Doug Schrashun concert series of concert reviews of shows I saw, coming soon.

The Summer Jam 2008 Pt. 3 - A Sort of Off Topic Post About Weezer

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:32:00 +0000

Undeniably, summer jams are songs. Not to deny the existance of albums that function as long form summer musical entertainment, but it's rare that there is overlap between an album that functions well as a summer album and a song that qualifies as a true summer jam. You aren't gonna find me pumping an L.F.O. LP but that in no way detracts from the greatness of "Summer Girls". Paul's Boutique is an excellent summer driving record - I would venture that it is the best, but that's a discussion for another day - but if you take any one track from the album and try to sell it as a summer jam you won't have too much success.

Albums like Paul's Boutique don't come along all that often. While it's my contention that you can't have an American summer without a summer jam, you can certainly go from June to September without a new summer album. The classics are always there to prop you up if you feel the need to play an album all the way through for some reason, but the real crux of the matter is that you shouldn't feel that need. Summer is about the single and a summer album is a happy coincidence that's becoming more and more obsolete.

Still, in what was shaping up to be sort of a lame year for summer jams, I was holding out hope that we'd see a great summer album in 2008. There seemed to be at least a couple of releases that had potential to blow up in this manner. (The main other one I'm not mentioning in this post was R.E.M.'s Accelerate mainly because of the summery theme and awesomeness of the "Supernatural Superserious", even though it came out in like February.)

I generally think I'm pretty worldly, hard to fool. But Weezer still gets me every time. When the release date for The Red Album was set at June 3rd I honestly thought that this could be a great summer record. "Pork and Beans", even acknowledging its flaws, is a pretty great song, and, I think, the best single they've released since "Island In the Sun". (Which isn't to say "best song".) I'll admit that part of that statement is wishful thinking, because I really wanted to see Weezer be around for summer 2008. Sadly, there are only really 2 good songs on The Red Album, and they're both right at the beginning, which means there's really not much reason to listen to the whole album. In fact, the rest of the album is kind of terrible, and, to make matters worse, neither of the good songs, the aformentioned "Pork and Beans" and "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" function that well as summer jams.

I wouldn't say, though, that Weezer has let me down here. With the two songs mentioned above, they've proved more than they've proved since they came back from the dead on The Green Album, which proved only that they could still produce a record and get it released. Maladroit proved they could still produce a record with songs that didn't sound exactly alike, and Make Believe proved that the band was still very much a work in progress. What The Red Album proves is that the band is still weird, something that is more relavant in the wake of Rivers's demos comp Alone surfaced.

Some people have remarked about Weezer's seeming obsession with doing whatever they need to do to get at the heart of America's youth. Given Rivers's love for KISS and the fact that KISS's entire career was built on cultivating an image that would appeal a large teenage audience this isn't much of a stretch. What people forget, though, is that KISS were straight fucking businessmen from the beginning and that Rivers was one of the guys they were singing for - a weird, alienated, American male that needed desperately to feel like he was normal. (There's a part in Fargo Rock City that handles this aspect of KISS pretty well.) River's is weird, has always been weird, and, no matter how many times he writes the same song in pursuit of pop music perfection (which doesn't exist the way he thinks it does), he'll always be weird. On at least two songs, The Red Album proves that the weird side of Rivers, the side that has been responsible for 90% of Weezer's greatness throughout the years, is still alive and kicking. No summer jam, but so what.

Best Albums Since the Year I Was Born

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:52:00 +0000

Let's debate the merits of listicles later. Here we have an honest depiction of my current favorite albums from each year since my birth. Let it be known that I have ommitted from this list any albums that I have not, at one point in my life, listened to frequently.

1983: R.E.M. - Murmur
1984: Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
1985: Husker Du - New Day Rising
1986: The Smiths - The Queen is Dead
1987: Prince - Sign of the Times
1988: Journey - Greatest Hits
1989: The Beastie Boys - Paul's Boutique
1990: They Might Be Giants - Flood?
1991: Massive Attack - Blue Lines
1992: Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine?
1993: Yo La Tengo - Painful
1994: Weezer - The Selftitled Blue Album
1995: Tricky - Maxinquaye
1996: DJ Shadow - Endtroducing
1997: Radiohead - OK Computer
1998: Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children
1999: The Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
2000: Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun (released in Europe in 1999...)
2001: Microphones - The Glow Pt. 2
2002: Mclusky - Do Dallas
2003: Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow
2004: Zazen Boys II
2005: Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree
2006: The Knife - Silent Shout
2007: Future of the Left - Curses
2008: Islands - Arm's Way / Robyn - Robyn

Obviously the two real standouts here are 1990 and 1992, which I now realize are somehow total dead spots on my radar. There exist, to my knowledge, no albums made during those years that I can definitively say that I really like. Sure, when I was in high school Flood and Rage Against the Machine were on all the time, and I still listen to them now and again. They're good records, but there's no way they would enter this conversation if they weren't released in those years. I guess I'd better step up my early 90's game.

Not like the late 80's were much better. If Journey's Greatest Hits looks like a stretch, it is. Not because I don't love the album, but it totally bales me out of another 1992 situation.

Notable snubs - The Hold Steady, Cornershop - who unfortunately can't compete with Radiohead in '97, The Notwist, and - the more I look at this list the more obvious it becomes - anyone who isn't a white male. A good start to a summer soul search.

The Summer Jam 2008 Pt. 2 - Belated Honors

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:44:00 +0000

I like to think that I take a while to digest music, and that's why I'm often hideously behind the times. The truth might be closer to laziness, prudishness, or a totally unhelpful sense of obligation. But I like to think that when I get into a song it so possesses me that I'm unable to process any other new music while it's still got me in its grasp. Unfortunately, there are at least two songs that pretty much entirely disprove my this theory.

I no doubt heard "Paper Planes" at some point last summer. Everyone was all up on Kala last summer, including some close friends, and it would be a stretch to say I effectively avoided it. Though that isn't to say I didn't try! I hated, still hate, and probably will always hate M.I.A. She is not really very good at anything, and I don't find her brand of party music, if that's what it is, particularly fun either. She's easy to write about, easy to sing along with, I suppose, and those are things that in my capacities as a writer and sinalonger I can get on board with, but god Damn is she annoying. And, until "Paper Planes" she hadn't released anything that anyone would ever really want to listen to as far as I could tell.

Which should explain a few things: first, why I never really bothered to listen to "Paper Planes" when it came out and second, why I was as floored as I was when I finally did. "Paper Planes", as much as I hate to admit it, deserved to be mentioned in the discussion of summer jams for 2007.

And this really comes out of left field. I still don't understand it. How does a singer this bad, working with the same mediocre production team she's worked with on all of the other songs she's released that I hated, come up with something so universally amazing? It's got that simple brilliance that makes you think it was probably cowritten by an 8 year old. And that, I guess, is what a lot people see in M.I.A. all the time, whereas she comes off to me more like a kind of pathetic 28 year old trying to pretend like she's still got that 8 year old in her in all the good ways. In that sense, though, I can see the continuum from her usual style to "Paper Planes".

What's harder to understand is where all the trash went. Everything other than "Paper Planes" that M.I.A. has done sounds not only like it's trying too hard to be simple, spontaneous and "fresh", but also like it desperately needs to sound like it's coming off the street when the opposite is so plainly true. It's always been highly manicured music full of affectation and artifice, but with the image of speaking through some sort of international gutter-prole lexicon. And then "Paper Planes" just sounds like a great, very original, song. Somehow all the baggage M.I.A. has built up around her falls away and it's just the song. I use this baggage as the excuse for why it's taken me so long to get on the bandwagon.

But, I don't have that excuse in regards to Soulja Boy. I have no beef with him, and I heartily support pretty much everything he's ever done in his entire life, with the possible exception of robocopping that ho. I would've probably been on this song's jock last summer, except I somehow didn't hear this song until like September last year. That's it. I don't think anything needs to be said about this song that hasn't already been said, other than that I'd really like to see Soulja Boy play Jay-Z one on one to end the DeShawn Stevenson LeBron James feud once and for all (cause I still refuse to except that the Wizards lost that series).

So here's some historical revisionism for you: I propose to enter "Crank That" and "Paper Planes" for consideration as summer jams for 2007.

Or, again you can see the original video here thanks to disabled embedding.

The Summer Jam 2008 Pt. 1 - That Keyboard Sound

noreply@blogger.com (Doug) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:22:00 +0000

I think it was April when Usher's "Love in This Club" came out. Immediately, I had the same feeling I had gotten when I heard "Umbrella" for the first time last May. Here we have the obvious front runners for the crown of summer jam for their respective years, but released prematurely into the relatively lukewarm waters of Spring. "Umbrella" grew slowly, as it was able to, having been recorded by Rihanna - a vaguely odd not very famous not very good singer - until it was the most ubiquitous thing this side of "Hey Ya." Usher, unfortunately, being the ever famous celebrity he is, was not able to watch his track flourish in such a fashion.

Which is a shame. This song is damned close to perfect for at least a certain type of summer jam. Pretty much anyone could've performed it, which is important for things like this. I'm pretty sure someone extremely distinctive, like R. Kelly would never be able to pull of this type of summer jam, in the pure jam sense of the term. With this beat, and this melody, someone just needs to sing it and I credit Usher for doing just that, without trying to add any sort of fireworks. That bridge is fucking priceless, too. Can you think of another song where Usher's voice is this multitracked? I'm convinced after hearing this song that Usher would've made a heck of a backup singer for like Alicia Keys or something if his solo career hadn't ever taken off.

Jeezy, for his part, is fucking terrible, which is pretty much exactly what's called for. A guest verse on a pop hip hop track either needs to be great, putting a track over the edge, like Ludacris does on "Oh", or it needs to be so forgettable that you stop noticing that it's happening. Listening to "Oh", you wait for Luda with bated breath, you're silent while he's going, and then when he's done you say "oh shit he killed it" even if you've heard it a hundred times before. With "Love in This Club" you take a break during Jeezy's verse from thinking about how great the track is to take a drink, or say something unrelated. When even Jeezy's adlibs aren't compelling you gotta give him credit for not trying.

And as far as not trying goes, that's perfectly fine with this track. Admittedly, I'm a sucker for that keyboard sound, but it's put to such great use here. And by that keyboard sound I mean both the tremoloey one and the euro style pad, or preferably both of them together. Other than those keyboard sounds, nothing else is going on here, and that's as it should be. The drum sounds act like they were directly ripped from a CD called "Generic Hip Hop in the 21st Century" and, as per usual actually, they sound perfectly fine. To reiterate: it's that keyboard sound.

It makes me sad that I feel a little behind the times pumping this in 90 degree heat, but if Usher's entry came a little early this year, we've still got "Haterz Everywhere" by B.O.B. - which is pretty much the same song, except with more rapping, better rapping, and it's about haterz instead of having sex in public. I first overheard this pumping during a kickball game at sunset in Greenpoint and it was kind of perfect. And why?

Long story short, it has that keyboard sound. Plus there's a version with Rich Boy, who deserves a certified summer jam in his pocket.

The most surprising and pleasant thing here is how good B.O.B.'s verse is. Like actually pretty good! Which somehow doesn't make it any less stupid, and that's an accomplishment in my book. You can listen to it or not, but when you do it doesn't sound dumb.

I've seen the term "trance-hop" thrown around in reference to this track, and as far as i can tell that ought to at least tangentially apply to the Usher track too, since they're pretty damn close to being the same song. But, "trance-hop", as it turns out, is a pretty dumb term. These producers, Polow the Don on "Love in This Club" and some other guy on "Haterz Everywhere", are using trancey keyboard sounds, but they aren't even necessarily "trance" sounds, and there's certainly nothing like trance music going on in these tracks. These are hip hop beats with a little euro feel thrown over them, and to me the synths suggest house just as much as they suggest trance. Not to get too nitpicky, but lets not call this a movement or a genre or anything. Let's call it two badass summer jams for 2008, neither of which will be the summer jam of 2008.

Or go here to see the real video which you unfortuantely can't embed.