No Trivia

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:01:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:07:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:52:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:52:00 +0000

-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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:04:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:23:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:10:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:54:00 +0000

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...

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:40:00 +0000

-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"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:19:00 +0000

"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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:08:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:01:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:04:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:27:00 +0000

-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.

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:21:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:03:00 +0000

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"

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:22:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:45:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (brandon) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:53:00 +0000

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