The Tris McCall Report
Pop Music Abstract 1998
PM Dawn -- Dearest Christian, I'm Truly Sorry For Bringing You Here, Love Dad
"I should have never watched the O.J. trial…" - Prince Be, as the voice of God, in "Hale-Bopp Regurgitations".
If you ever watch Much Music, the Canadian rock video channel, you've probably seen the promo for Songs 4 Life, a compilation of contemporary Christian rock hits. No gnosticists on this collection -- these songs are straightforward and devout, and addressed to the kind of can-do big brother God who watches over county fairs and makes sure none of the mules kicks junior in the face. Elvis Costello and Randy Newman offered more idiosyncratic and personal takes on God, but both smack of the practicality and witticism of the non-believer, more interested in metaphors than rapture. And when Graham Parker flipped Jehovah the bird in the immortal "Don't Ask Me Questions", he was positively begging for the kind of hardcore retribution that would really impress the girls. Then there's Sam Phillips, reformed Christian rocker, who, before wimping out on Omnipop, grappled admirably with loss of faith. She even voiced Satan (albeit filtered through a record company exec) on "Fighting With Fire", but probably felt that it would be iconoclastic to pretend to a real divine perspective. And when you think about it, any genuine Christian rocker is bound to share her disinclination -- what kind of heretic would be presumptious enough to represent the infallible, omnicient big guy in a pop song?
Somebody with a mighty big set of unanswered questions, that's who, and on the absurdly-titled Dearest Christian…, Prince Be flips the devout script of Jesus Wept, and consistently imagines himself as a scatterbrained God apologetic for the dreadful state of his creation. He's a true believer, though, so none of this is tongue in cheek; and even when he shakes his fist spitefully at the heavens, as he does in "Art Deco Halos", he's resolutely determined to figure out how to get himself on the side of the angels. He was just absent from Sunday School, apparently (and luckily), on the day he was warned about the unspeakable evils of attempting to represent the divine. Consequently, even on "Hale-Bopp Regurgitations", his scathing portrait of a senile, detached supreme being suffocated and hypnotized by the same pop cultural dross that plagues the rest of us mortals is cut by the winsome, sympathetic kindness of a lifelong Christian straining to locate comfortable dimensions of a faith that no longer feels sufficient, even if it's unquestionable.
This struggle isn't new for the artist, and most would probably say that he's articulated most of this better on previous albums. He introduced himself back in '91 with one of the most profound double entendres in the history of hip-hop, standing the introductory shout-out then in vogue, and deepening its meaning, on its head with this audacious claim: "I'd like to say what's up to God". The album that followed, Of The Heart, Of The Soul, And Of The Cross: The Utopian Experience, featured soul-searching and occasionally horny lyrics laced over stunning bass drum programming. Prince Be hasn't lost his touch with the kick pads, but much of Dearest Christian… suggests he might be running out of the mesmerizing rhythm patterns that made him famous among beat connoiseurs. I'm sure it must be frustrating for him to hear artists from Dru Hill to Monica & Brandy pirating his beats and sprinting across the Billboard charts with them; nevertheless, his move towards more live instrumentation -- and even, God forgive him, live drums -- has yielded middling results. post-Utopian Experience releases have shown a penchant for noopy, undisciplined bass and guitar parts, and tinkly piano arpeggios better suited to Mantovanni than "Reality Used To Be A Friend Of Mine". But, hey, if Prince Be is maturing into a lite radio favorite, don't they all; as a matter of fact, with Air's ultra-hip "You Make It Easy" featured prominently at a Dunkin' Donuts near you, the line between smoothed-out adult contemporary music and the cutting edge is getting blurrier all the time.
I don't begrudge PM Dawn their moments of piano excess (to be fair, there's less here than on Jesus Wept), but I do wish that Prince Be would emcee more. I realize he's attempting to distance himself from a hip-hop culture that didn't want him, and which punted him out the door with malice aforethought, but that's all the more reason for the big guy to stick to his guns. I thought his defense of his hip-hop aspirations and skills on 1993's "Plastic" was about as convincing as anybody this side of KRS-One could ever ask, and by giving in to those purists who always wanted to marginalize his music for being too soft (read: feminine), he's essentially running up the white flag. Prince Be himself might be as uncomfortable with the generic category as he is with his spirituality, but his music has always been hip-hop -- and even if he never raps again, his mastery of the James Brown beat will insure that he'll always be hip-hop. All gentleness and soft-spoken piety aside, anybody who would record thirty seconds of silence at the gravesite of Martin Luther King and put it on an album as a track -- between two wack songs, no less -- any Christian audacious enouge to put lines like "I never should have brought the stork to the Dahmers'" in the mouth of the object of his worship -- has an ego and personality too large to be contained within any other genre.
Lyle Lovett -- Step Inside This House
"I'm not the kind of man with all the answers/ but I surely know the songs that suit me best" -- Lovett, ventriloquist's dummy for the Austin scene
The best and most essential participation in pop music is cultural and local; don't just be a consumer, be a participant in making music in your town. Thus saith Kari Orr, America's pre-eminent writer on hip-hop and pop music. Kari's just a kid -- a student at the University of Texas and deejay on the college radio station -- but as the most sagacious regular on the ferocious rec.music.hip-hop newsgroup, his mind-blowing posts cohere into a staggering manifesto of cultural action. (Don't believe me? Go to dejanews, search K. Orr, select "author profile", and prepare to have your most cherished beliefs about hip-hop and pop music pulled through a polarity.) Kari bemoans the state of Austin hip-hop, and Austin in general, claiming that there's lots of hip-hop consumption, but very little hip-hop community. Then again, Glass Eye and Slacker notwithstanding, we're talking about a cow town here, with a cow town's set of ethics. No matter how hip it's gotten over the past few years, any representation of austin that leaves out the hiking boots and cattle prods is dangerously one-sided.
Would Kari Orr be proud of Lyle Lovett, author of this year's number ten zillion charting album, but without a doubt its number one mensch? Ok, so he's essentially moved to California; Lovett's still a quitenssential Austinite -- a self-confessed cowboy wannabe, a watcher, a witty cosmopolitan straining to fit in in a rural setting. on Large Band (1990) and the brilliant Pontiac ('88) his observations smacked a bit of condescension, but he's over that now, and "That's Right (You're Not From Texas)" provided the Lone Star faithful a glorious, generous anthem that any state would be lucky to have. Throughout his career, he's represented Texas (and the Dirty South, too); first tentatively, and recently with the masterful assurance of the true balladeers of place: Springsteen, Jonathan Richman, too many emcees to list. It's a noble cause; certainly nobler than Lovett's other obsession, more reminiscent of Elvis Costello: cleverly and mean-spiritedly dissing his carefully-drawn female characters.
There's not too much of that arch meanness on Step Inside This House, but then again, Lovett didn't write any of the songs. They're all covers, versions of songs by Austin and East Texas writers, most of whom served as an inspiration to Lovett when he was coming up in the Seventies: Townes Van Zant, Steven Fromholz, Walter Hyatt, Guy Clark, and, of course, Trad., that perennial Southern favorite. The gorgeous packaging features pictures of Lovett hugging each of these now-venerable artists on the pages adjacent to their songs; for the departed Hyatt and Van Zant, he substitutes a handwritten poster and a framed photograph, respectively. It's heartbreaking.
How does this camaraderie, this bonhomie, this menschhood, translate on record? Well…um, let's put it this way; Step Inside This House might be the project of a real mensch, but Lovett can't shake his bastard streak. Houses, in Lovett's domestic-claustrophobic universe, are uncomfortably small places, suitable, mainly, for vicious lover's quarrels. Lovett's happiest/freest songs -- "That's Rright", "L.A. County", "I Don't Love You Anymore" -- find the singer on the road, or dreaming of being on the road; whenever he's in a house, whether in "Baltimore" or "Pontiac" or "It Ought To Be Easier", he's tethered, grimfaced, contemplating escape. Here, the house in the title tune, (by Guy Clark) is similarly depressing, filled with prized but meaningless junk that "couldn't be more than ten dollar's worth". By now, we all know what happens when Lovett steps inside a house: he wants to get the hell out, and the sooner the better. Is this really the metaphor Lovett wants to use for Austin-Texan music? Perhaps it is, and perhaps it's even an honest one. The Texas represented on Step Inside This House is not the rollicking, inviting locale of "That's Right"; rather, it's closer to the sleepy, sun-scorched and slightly geriatric tableau of "Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues".
But how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen the lights of L.A. county, and even had bit parts in Robert Altman movies? "That's Rright" was Texas represented by a displaced oddball to a gaggle of Californians; to Susan Sarandon (gruesomely name-dropped in "The Girl In The Corner"), Lovett's the genuine article, a real cowboy. Back home, he's surely looked at as a geek-a-zoid, a wannabe, and an outsider. It's only in exile that the pleasant face of Texas comes through, and perhaps "That's Right" was nothing more than the wistful reminiscences of a native son who happily escaped. I'm not trying to argue that choosing to engage, once again, with the Austin-Texan scene was a reaction to critics who claimed that Lovett had "gone Hollywood", but some consideration of the fokes he left behind must have weighed heavy on his hart (insert mournful slide guitar here).
Nevertheless, he probably couldn't have picked a shittier method of re-integrating himself than by recording Fromholz' "Texas Trilogy", a moving, slightly Bruce-ish collection of rural vignettes. Here, and elsewhere, Lovett's excellent singing radiates warmth for these characters, and his genuine affection for the Austin-Texan scene conveniently glosses over the fact that his chosen songs represent the locals as backward and trapped; at best "Bears", and at worst bumpkins preferring blown up rubber dolls to imaginary wives. No rave-ups here; these songs are, almost uniformly, slow, sun-baked, depressing, beautiful. The musicianship and production are stark and stellar as usual, but lovett continues his bizarre relationship with pianist matt rollings, who nearly stole the show on Joshua Judges Ruth ('92), and has been buried in subsequent mixes. (the prominent piano on Joshua was indisputably reminiscent of John Denver, but that was what was good about it, and a musician smart enough to re-record "Stand By Your Man" with a straight face ought to have realized that.) Veteran sideman Russ Kunkel is back, as are many of his regular guitarrist/stunt doubles. The sound is essentially indsitinguishable from that on the last few albums -- perhaps to fit all of these varying styles into the same tiny Austin house, all of the songs here sound exactly like Lyle Lovett originals.
I can't fault him for that, even if it is true, as some of his purist critics have suggested, that in his heart of hearts he considers these retrofittings a marked improvement over the dirty-dirty original versions. On Step Inside This House, Lovett gives us his most honest take on Texas yet; that it is, at base, a derisive one shouldn't really matter. So he's longing to get back to the fabulous Hollywood house party with Susan and Tim and Julia; if you were stuck in Texas, wouldn't you? If I was a loyal Austinian, I might be offended by Step Inside This House, but what were Springsteen's Route 9 epics if not wild dreams of escape from New Jersey? Mobb Deep represents the Queensbridge Houses with chilling versimilitude, but would anybody but a wacko like me expect them to defend it against its critics? Perhaps "local" balladeers can only be appreciated beyond their home-towns if they're actively looking for escape, or, like Deutero-Isaiah, reminiscing about a never-was promised land while in exile. Ultimately, it shouldn't matter. Lovett represents the Dirty South as ferociously as any emcee this side of the Dungeon Family; and the ultimate testimonial is the back catalog of unforgettable songs. Add a few of these, notably "Memphis Morining/Memphis Midnight", to that list.
Black Star -- Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star
"The African Diaspora represents strength in numbers/ a giant can't slumber forever" -- Talib Kweli, "K. O. S. (Knowledge Of Self-determination)"
Released on Rawkus Records -- hip-hop's underground label-du-jour -- the mighty Mos Def's highly anticipated debut LP disappointed many. Since he is, by almost every possible standard, Mos's inferior, Black Star partner Talib Kweli has shouldered most of the blame for that disappointment. I think it's misplaced frustration with the underground, personally, and I also think that this heavily introspective, backward-looking album has been received unfairly. That it does cohere as an album, is, in fact, mostly due to the enormous personality of Mos Def, but Kweli's contributions provide counterpoint and breathing room -- as Phife's invariably do for Q-Tip. Kweli isn't half the comedian that Phife is, and he's every bit as helpless as a battle emcee as you've heard, but I won't join the executioner's mob currently calling for his head. And for those of you who really can't stand Kweli, well, Mos Def allegedly has a solo album coming out on Rawkus later in '99, so let's all hold our horses until then.
But whatever egregious mistakes made on this, the most monday-morning-quarterbacked album of '98, Mos Def must share in the complicity for them. Before I start knocking the cat, let me say that Mos positively saves at least three of these songs with his performances. I'm not even talking about his flow, or his emcee skills, though Lord knows he has those -- I mean charisma, and energy, commitment and creativity on the mic; particularly "Brown Skinned Lady", which staggers along the road to disaster before Mos rescues it with a series of delirious "oooh!"s. Mos Def is the sort of emcee who generates the impression that you're just walking down the street with him, and he's rapping as a natural reaction to the things he sees. It's a realist trick, and certainly not to be valued in a vacuum, but compared to the studio-crafted phantasmagoria that most East Coast hip-hop producers favor, it's charmingly relaxed and comfortable. Kari Orr has complained about the seriousness of most mainstream hip-hop, complaining that nobody could drop a Dana Dane or "Picking Buggers" anymore without completely losing their artistic credibility. I maintain that Mos Def could do it.
But does he want to? Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star is by no means a comical or lighthearted album; even a song called "Hater Players" trades in jokes for disturbing imagery. Kweli's approach can best be described as philosophical (though never terribly deep), and Mos Def himself seems principally interested in purifying and protecting genuine urban and hip-hop culture from those within it who see it as a vehicle for making money. (This was not, by the way, the central concern on Stakes Is High, though I realize that many understood it that way.) An emcee with that agenda is sure to make lots of friends among the dispossessed, but he's hardly in a position to express much giddiness. Too many underground heads depend on that militancy to justify their own anti-commercial stance.
Me, I'm hoping Mos sells out. He's an odd and uncomfortable figure for an underground hip-hop messiah -- we're talking, now about a guy who was Bill Cosby's sidekick on The Cosby Mysteries -- and he wears it poorly. Ironically, the songs on Mos Def And Talib Kweli where the contradictions between Mos's natural playfulness and exuberance and his obligations to be an underground enforcer of the hip-hop rulebook come most to the surface are the album's most interesting cuts. On "Children's Story", a retrofitted version of the classic song, Black Star reimagines the protagonist as a modern beat jacking record producer (Puffy?) who meets a welcome demise because of his greed; Mos narrates this all using beats and lyrics stolen directly from Slick Rick. You don't have to be a freshman political science student to ask why Mos Def is doing the exact thing he's criticizing commercial artists for. Likewise, "Definition" jacks the "P Is Free" beat and borrows the chorus from "Stop The Violence". Who, exactly, are these guys battling?
If you asked Mos Def (and I had the opportunity to, since he's among the most visible hip-hop figures in the city and I caught him one day outside the Rawkus building on lower Broadway), he'd probably tell you that his borrowings are meant as tributes while Puffy's are pure piracy, and perhaps by reducing beat jacking to a matter of intent, deflect this criticism. But that's a specious argument, and not merely because Puffy's motives aren't as easily discernable as many of the underground elitists would like to believe. It's hooey because whatever their feelings about the "original" artists might actually be, ultimately, Black Star jacks beats for the same reason Puffy does: because they are dope to rhyme over. True tributes are always crap, anyway, and Mos Def And Talib Kweli Are Black Star does, unfortunately, contain some true tributes (a breakdance number with the requisite b-boy shout-outs that really ought to go straight in a museum, and a spoken word conversation about graf writing that sounds about as natural as a floor wax commercial). This is the unseemly side of the underground argument, anti-commercial heads as hip-hop Allan Blooms, berating commercial rappers and their suburban audience about respect for the canonical elements of the culture.
Mos Def doesn't need to be a schoolmarm; he's too talented an emcee for that. The ugly culmination of the underground's insistence on propriety and purity of motive and essence is present in full force on "Astronomy", the album's most remarkable cut; here Mos claims to be "blacker than the night sky in bed stuy/ blacker than a blackberry pie/ blacker than the middle of my eye". All brilliant poetry aside, this can only be received as a simple affirmation of blackness if nobody is getting called out. But on an album so obsessed with put-downs of crossover and commercial emcees; well, if Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and the underground are black, that must make commercial rappers…. white, or the very least not black enough. The intent, by implication, is indisputably to call into question the racial identities of emcees who decide to forego the aesthetic of the underground, and who allow themselves to be tainted by the crossover set of cultural expectations. I think a very good argument can be made on behalf of de-negrifying the mainstream emcee, but I don't think it's one which gets anybody anywhere, or which tells us very much about race in America.
Nor is it a very creative or rigorous foundational statement for a debut album. It's a withered, crabby, old-man-grumpus place to start an artistic career. You'd expect a bitter industry veteran to make those claims, not kids just beginning. It's too easy to put out hookless singles on Rawkus, turn a deaf ear to commercial radio, and call Puffy a white man in disguise. In twenty years, unless the underground steps up its level of cultural production, Puffy's songs are going to be remembered, by black folks and white folks alike, as nineties black music. that might seem preposterous to all of the emcees on the Lyricists Lounge collection, but if they want to change agendas and minds, they're going to have to start making better pop songs and getting some radio play. Otherwise, they'll be preaching to the converted for the rest of their careers. That'd be a predictable fate for Kweli, and it's probably where he belongs. Mos Def, on the other hand, has the potential to be the sort of emcee who can straddle camps, but in order to do that, he needs a hit, and "Body Rock" was not it.
There's a thousand and one reasons why it won't happen, but I think a Puffy/Mos Def collaboration would make perfect sense.
Six.By Seven -- The Things We Make
"I can change like the beat in a band that could never play" -- Chris Olley, "Spy Song"
From Bond to Symposium, the Loud Family to Billy Corgan, it was another good year to be a guitar guy in a guitar band. If it's truly the case that the rock group is an antiquated notion, and that the future belongs to genius auteurs with digital home studios, you'd think there'd be some evidence for it by now. Techno, just to give you a for instance, is getting old and grey already, and it hasn't changed American music culture all that much. Sure, lots more pop records are totally sequenced now, and everybody and their brother has pro tools on their Macintosh, but if you're waiting for that generation of young Aphex Twins spilling over into the mainstream; well, I'll catch up with you sometime next century, bruh. More likely, the kid with that home studio is the same one who has a guitar effects processor in his closet, and unlike the Europeans, who've always been backward on these things anyway, he probably recognizes that the difference between Radiohead and the Chemical Brothers is a razor-thin one at best.
Besides, the argument that rock and song-based music is dead in a post-modern era is an urban elitist one that conveniently ignores the fact that the bulk of Middle America couldn't give a damn about Roni Size, but sprints to the record store every time Garth Brooks coughs. European-styled post-rock and post-melodic music maintains a tiny toehold in some of the more fashionable downtown districts in America's biggest cities, and that's about it -- and from what i've seen, that toehold is slipping. Most rock writers live in these same downtowns, frequent the same downtown record stores, and write the same columns about the inevitability of vast musical paradigm shifts. Yeah, try that out in Nashville and see where it gets you.
Meanwhile, European masterminds continue to plot new North American invasions. Just as Brit-poppers, informed by grunge, threw away their copies of Ogden's Nut Gone Flake and toughened up their sound in order to sell stateside, electronica and new music artists have rediscovered the great American guitar midrange with big beat. I happen to be very excited about big beat, and i'm hoping that it becomes one of the major trends of '99, if for no other reason than that its intrinsic bounciness might move us all away from attempting to copy the production sound of OK Computer.
I've argued before that Radiohead is the new Rush. Now, I've never really minded Rush -- in fact, I get pretty hype when "Limelight" comes on the radio -- and I don't really mind Radiohead, either; but c'mon, if OK Computer was the best album of 1997, I'm a ham sandwich. Yes, Johnny Greenwood is a wonderful guitar player, but no amount of orchestral or synthetic guitar processing can compensate for the mordant, portentious seriousness of the lyrical approach, let alone the completely duff filler tracks. Like Rush (and U-2 as well), Radiohead has an infinite capacity for thinking they're producing something triumphant when they're just being boring. Now, when making philosophical statements about technology's effect on mankind, Geddy Lee always had the good sense to throw in a couple of cheesy solos or hellacious shrieks. Thom Yorke (very "close to the source", according to Michael Stripe; take it however you want) is too dignified to even change his inflection.
But since Radiohead is also one of the few guitar bands that it's cool for hip modern critics to dig, it certainly can't hurt to bring some characteristic orchestral sweep to any modern six-string production. With the rise of the Matthew Good Band and "Apparitions", we've seen the most ghastly shape this can take -- walls of processed, vainglorious sound, whiny Thom Yorke-cloned vocals, and angst-ridden, boneheaded lyrics, all slathered over what I have to assume used to be a backbeat before the overdub session ended. For groups on tiny labels without big wads of cash to hurl around, copying Radiohead is a trickier proposition. The opening track on Six.By Seven's The Things We Make is a straight re-write of "Airbag", recorded without the glossy, gazillion-dollar engineering; the glorious barrage is absent, but at least you can hear the kick drum. Six.By Seven's front-man and ideologue, is yet another bewildered, overwhelmed dude, but where Thom Yorke and Geddy Lee pointed the finger at the evil machine, Chris Olley identifies a more metaphysical enemy: speed. On "Candlelight", he repeatedly exhorts a lover, and then the whole world, to "slow down". "Everything's a cheap laugh", he tells his girl on "Spy Song", and he sounds lost and desperate as he does. Should we have any sympathy for these new rock dudes, these anguished souls more eager to shake their fist than their booty?
In general, no; but Six.By Seven isn't your average group. Stylistically, they're still floundering: several of the cuts here do aim for Radiohead's grandiosity, other long, disciplined guitar jams find them in Mogwai territory, and the single sounds like a grunge updating of IanMc Culloch's early singles with Echo And The Bunnymen, and really doesn't fit here. The instrumentalists are competent, and will probably improve quite a bit by the time they record a follow-up, but they're already cultivated a ferocious, stop-on-a-dime dynamic which serves them well on the more straightforward cuts. Chris Olley sings his love songs with monomaniacal fury and fatalistic abandon; he's passionate, alright, but I do feel for the woman on the receiving end. Like most prog-rock albums, The Things We Make doesn't really get going until after the single is over, and peaks in a second-side fury: here, the karn-evils are "Something Wild" and the demented "Brilliantly Cute" -- "the cutest things just slip away", he screams over and over, before changing his mantra to "do you wanna try that?" The "that", is, of course, left unspecified. Olley can't figure out whether he wants to marry this girl or mummify her.
"A quiet life with my wife is all I need for goodness sake", he drones on the opening cut, and then gives the lie to his stated desire by indulging in noise and chaos. At times, Six.By Seven approaches the full-scale derangement of Spiritualized, but the approach here is far less artful. What ultimately separates Six.By Seven from their prog-rocking peers, and, in fact, even excuses some of Olley's humorlesness (on the grounds of introspection rather than Vedderesque anthem-singing), is a thorough disregard for any sort of ostentation. Guitarrist Sam Hempton has an inclination toward jamming, but rarely to display hot licks, or a radical sound; rather, the song keeps going because the musicians are too obsessed to stop. This disregard for display extends to the album cover (eight white lines on a solid blue background is not what you'd call an eye-catcher on the level of Amorica) and the interior photograph of the group: five average looking dudes from unpretentious Nottingham, looking slightly paranoid.
The rock press would have you believe that European "everyday" music has undergone a complete transformation in the past ten years, and that the collaborative pop group is more or less a museum-piece. But if great British guitar rock wasn't still out there howling on the heath, records like this would never get made, let alone released. I'm about the last person in the world who'll ever make a case that alterna-rock deserves preservation and privilege over dance music, but the notion that guitars have been replaced in Europe by something "smarter" really makes me cringe. Here in the free world, most aren't quite so obsessed with trendiness and newness. In '99, I'd like to listen to nine big beat albums for every one album like The Things We Make; that's just funky old me. but don't deny me that one, and please don't pretend that it doesn't exist anymore.
Aceyalone -- A Book Of Human Language
"The reason why you hate me so bad is because you love me too much/ And don't like yourself enough" -- Ras Kass, psychologizing player haters
"The fox is smarter than the hound/ That's exactly why they hunt him down" -- Aceyalone
They're comparable figures, these two. Both are L.A. poets; lyrics-first emcees who comport themselves with great intellectual arrogance. And both have had problems bringing beats and music, or finding beats suitable for their songs. On the disappointing Rassassination, Ras Kass hired top-flight west coast producers to try to rope him in a big crossover hit; the effort was actually appreciated by me, even if the results were displeasingly generic. Everybody knows that Acey has no such commercial pretentions, and, consequently, he can put out a difficult, hookless, and dissonant album like A Book Of Human Language without raising too many eyebrows. Ras warned his hardcore audience that he was about to "retardate" his music in order to get airplay; Acey would probably sooner hand his battling title to Master P than pen a mainstream joint. But that points up the crucial difference between these artists -- Acey's interested in examining interiority and metaphysics, while Ras is an extrovert, engaging with (usually in unseemly, but never unfunny, style) government, the law, hip-hop society. Just as the Native Tongue family explored language-obsessed, insular, and interpersonal lyrical terrain while Chuck D was fomenting jailbreak and black power, Acey and Project Blowed represents the abstract aesthetic ideals behind Ras's political and cultural manifestos.
From Posdnuos to Andre, what keeps the aesthetic, abstract emcees tethered to the here and now has always been their willingness to drop vignettes. Acey is no exception to this, and his outstanding major-label '95 release All Balls Don't Bounce featured some serious storytelling grandeur; every off-the-wall word game ("The Greatest Show On Earth" was probably the most far-out example, but Mikah Nine's two guest spots were jaw-droppingly bizarre) was counterbalanced by an autobiographical tale, usually about a relationship with a woman (hilarious "Annalillia", unforgettable "Makeba"). Even if Acey's heart was always in the experimental stuff, the stories served to keep his character from flying apart into pure abstract shards. Consequently, any effort to sell this very loquacious, very ambitious emcee -- the self-professed "Mr. Outsider" -- to audiences depended entirely on his narrative pieces.
So it's no surprise that when Acey was unceremoniously dumped from Capitol Records, the story-songs went into the trash can alongside the ripped-up pages of his major label contract. Freed from the obligation to move millions of units, Acey has turned around with an entirely theoretical work, a series of philosophical, urgent rhymes about birth, struggle, time, barriers, death, and identity. If this sounds a bit like Dark Side Of The Moon to you, well, you're right; Acey's fatalistic, balanced vision and obsession with ticking clocks does share something with Roger Waters'. No chance, however, that A Book Of Human Language will eclipse the Floyd's record stay on the charts, because unlike Alan Parsons, the producer here (the appropriately-named Mumbles) seems to have forgotten to supply any musical ideas. That leaves you with a backbeat, an enormous vocal presence and a relentless, speculative lyrical approach. Acey's one of the few emcees with the skills, personality and nuance to pull this off, but, honestly, it is a bit like being locked in an insane asylum for an hour with the aged, syphilitic Nietzsche. Any resemblance between Acey's imagined metaphysical construct and the Prime Material Plane is purely accidental.
Surprising, then, that Aceyalone himself seems so committed to making universalist statements; he imagines the ideas explored on A Book Of Human Language as a set of fundamental truths, and he makes recourse to vast, sweeping generalizations wherever he can get away with it. I admire his balls and his ambition, but I also liked it a lot better -- and considered him a lot smarter -- when he was trying to pick up chicks in bars with funny lines. The best songs on A Book Of Human Language (and despite the general tone of this review, there are quite a few of them) forego the obsession with what can only be called the stages of life -- birth, growth, conflict, hurt, death -- and instead take as their subject intrinsically interesting concepts and spin out speculations and reverberations on their meaning: "The Walls And Windows", "The Guidelines", "The Face". Acey remains a master at twisting words and syllables to fit unexpected patterns, and the joy of following along with his logic is akin to that of reading Lewis Carroll (whose "Jabberwocky", sad to say, is recorded here, read through a vocoder, in what is certainly the biggest mistake of his lengthy recording career). His uniqueness, originality, and intelligence are beyond question.
And perhaps that's all Aceyalone wants for himself; to have those qualities removed as far beyond question as possible. He's done the battle emcee stuff to perfection, signed the major-label deal, and it didn't make him any money or win him much fame. Then again, as a true intellectual elitist, his reason for battling -- for engaging with hip-hop culture in the first place -- was probably not to supplant the mainstream emcee, but instead to prove how much smarter he is than they are. Alright, so he did that. We're all agreed that Aceyalone is intelligent; much, much smarter than Bizzy Bone. So what?
"I want a mansion and a yacht, and all those things wack emcees got". That's Ras Kass. Even with Dr. Dre producing and an eye on the billboard charts, he can't shake his old underground habit of talking about what he deserves rather than what he's already got; he's pissed off because pop music doesn't pay out on meritocratic principles. Emcees like Mase are certainly less intellectual than Ras, but they're clever enough to realize that their words are powerful enough to create the conditions they describe: boast enough about your Benz-o, and given enough time and heavy rotation, you'll conjure it. By constantly reasserting his desire rather than boasting about his accomplishment, Ras, like El Producto, guarantees that desire is all he'll ever have. If twenty years of rap music has taught us anything about accumulation, it's that in order to get that mansion and that yacht, you need to behave as if you've already got it, and that it's yours by divine right -- not gained in the court of hip-hop heads' opinion by besting Lateef in lyrical battle. Or, as Q-Tip says, act like you know. Acey's now gone to the other extreme; he thinks there's no battle worthy of his already proven skills, no prosaic worldly matter worthy of his formidable intellectual engagement. He may be right, but as a consequence, he's become a hip-hop autistic; lost entirely inside his own head. The results can be fascinating to listen to, but rarely much fun to follow far.
Marionette strings are dangerous things. Think of all the trouble they bring.