The Tris McCall Report
Pop Music Abstract 2002
50 Cent -- "Wanksta", "The Realest" (with the ghost of Biggie)
Above-average mixtape emcee with a sticky, vaguely threatening delivery and decent beats. "The Realest" continues to capitalize on the loathsome Natalie Cole "Unforgettable" technique of performing with tapes of dead people that has infested the increasingly morbid world of hip-hop over the past few years. "Wanksta" is a better bet: the synth hook will drive you nuts, but it's an effective signature coming out of a car radio. The lyric is your typical East Coast I-expose-phonies stuff; these Holden Caulfield emcees need ideas.
As the pretty face of the production/performance triumvirate (along with Missy Elliott and Timbaland) that pushed the margins of hit radio throughout the nineties, we really couldn't afford to lose Aaliyah -- no matter how much weight Elliott has shed, she's never going to have the same kind of smooth celebrity charisma, and hence her experimentation gets confined to hip-hop, where a performer can afford to be more of a cartoon character. Aaliyah's superpower was an uncanny ability to sound machine-generated yet believably human, which allowed Timbaland and Elliott to throw all kinds of crazy synthesized stuff and off-kilter beats at her and have the results climb the pop charts anyway. She was a one-woman walking argument against naturalism (and a superb singer, too!), and I will miss her more than Tupac, Biggie, Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer combined.
Alanis Morissette -- "Hands Clean"
Structured as a conversation between the narrator and a secret ex-lover, "Hands Clean" twice executes the soft-and-scratchy to loud-and-powerful production technique that drove grunge into the ground. The first time it happens, you think, oh, hell, that's typical, but the second instantiation is genuinely surprising. It's supposed to suggest maturation and coming to awareness, and like most of Morissette's ham-fisted arrangement decisions, it works in spite of its crudeness. (Come to think of it, "works despite crudeness" is a pretty good encapsulation of Morissette's whole career). So i file this one with "Hand in My Pocket" and "So Pure" as great, wordy, anthemic rockers that you might consider a bit dim, but which generate immediate emotional response anyway. Also who but Morissette could bellow "I have honored your request for si-lunce!" and sound convincing and impassioned enough that you pardon the idiocy? Ian Curtis, maybe. But that's about it.
Super-stoopid piece of frat rock meant to delight the boys and bewilder the girls, or perhaps blast them into submission. I dig it, but hey, I like Andrew Dice Clay, too. This is exactly the sort of song you would expect to find bubbling around the margins of pop culture during a war year. I guarantee you that U.S. bombers have already flown raids over Kabul and Iraq with "We Want Fun" blaring in the cockpit. The new "Push Push (in the Bush)".
Angie Martinez -- "If I Could Go!", "Take You Home" (with Kelis)
Moderately entertaining R&B. Martinez can't really sing, or rap, and I sorta hope her "appearance" is a plastic surgery disaster, because I do not wish to believe in a world where people naturally look that way. But like Neneh Cherry, who also couldn't sing or rap, Martinez picks her spots and stays the hell out of the forward path of the groove. This is the sort of FM filler that bridges a transition from, say, Mary J. Blige to Noreaga and helps it make sense as a set. It's radio glue. On its own it's about as interesting as listening to glue dry, but in the mix it may move you. That's worth something. Actually, it's worth quite a lot.
But as we remember from health class, sometimes glue has hallucinatory effects. This summer, we all sniffed this glue, and decided in our collective hallucination to put it on the top of the pop charts. Probably the year's weakest Number One song, it's little more than a piano riff and a vocal performance from the dog-eared back pages of Janet Jackson's playbook. Now, in baseball, sometimes a platitudinous coach will ask for a "bloop and a blast" -- a quick two runs from a cheap single and a home run. On the pop charts, you can sometimes eke out a narrow victory from a "hook and a holler" -- a memorable musical phrase and an acceptable vocal performance. Then you cross your fingers and hope the other team doesn't show up. Ashanti snuck one by us this summer; the odds are long against her doing it again.
Add three parts Rage Against the Machine to one part Soundgarten, shake vigorously. Pour. Surprise!, you got yourself a big glass of Whitesnake. Well, actually, it's not that bad. Back in the Eighties, every rock group with big hair and a Marshall stack was trying to be Led Zeppelin; but these days, with so many kid bands mimicking Green Day (or if they're really committed to being retro, The Replacements), it's kinda nice to hear a legit "Whole Lotta Love" ripoff on the radio. And if RATM fancies making themselves over into Kingdom Come for a season, well, that's still a hell of an improvement over hollering a bunch of unintelligible garbage and calling it leftist politics.
I think Audiovent and Audioslave should tour together, and then release a split-EP of Stereolab covers with Stereobate. Then Radiohead would really have a run for their Radiomoney. Hoo boy.
Avril Lavigne -- "Complicated", "Sk8er Boi", "I'm With You"
It looks so good on paper. Sixteen year old girl, plays some rock guitar, tuneful, compelling diary entries, what's not to like? Well, a certain sloppiness to the writing and execution, for one thing. (And with Lavigne getting so frus-tray-ted, Eminem needing a little controvers-eee, and Pink finding herself so ir-ri-tayt-ing, we've definitely entered into the golden age of mispronunciation on pop radio.) I give Lavigne loads of credit for her emphasis on narrative and character That trait coupled with her willingness to occasionally cultivate an edge has gotten her compared to Morissette, and that's fair. But while Morissette is always warmer and more welcoming than she initially seems, Lavigne is just the opposite -- close inspection of her singles reveals the writer to have a resentful streak that's interesting but also somewhat off-putting and mean-spirited. "Complicated", the big hit, is a leveling song -- it's not as much an attack on the boyfriend's mistreatment of the narrator as an expression of her disgust at his social-climbing and class aspirations (though it's pretty great to hear her sing "take off/all those prep-py clothes"). The melodramatic but oh-so-effective "Sk8er Boi" extends the ideology further, punishing the upper-class girl for her snobbiness by splicing a rock and roll Horatio Alger story with your standard I-stole-your-boyfriend narrative; it leans toward an intelligent critique at times, but it ultimately bogs down in petty one-upsmanship. As a singer and writer, Lavigne is affecting, but not as skilled as Alicia Keys or Michelle Branch, let alone big aesthetic hitters like Lauryn Hill or Liz Phair. You might think these are all unfair standards to hold a teenage girl to, but Lavigne clearly has potential, and anyway, at sixteen, Mozart was already king of the world. Or something. Hey, they used it on me, I'll use it on Lavigne.
Ben Kweller -- "Wasted & Ready"
Listening to the radio isn't like listening to an album. It's not even like hearing a 45 or CD single at home. The radio is a projection of our cultural values and beliefs, and the task of the deejay is to take artifacts (records) and put them together in such a way that they reinforce each other and create a kind of interplay, a dialogue. A song that takes you out of that dialogue, for any reason, isn't a good radio single. The brilliance of great radio producers from Timbaland to Butch Vig is that they manage to remain experimental and progressive while conforming to the conventions of the medium. They create radio highlights, signposts, waystations of excitement along a discursive path. Many of the people I know who make indie music wonder aloud why their songs don't get played on the radio, but if they really stopped to think about it, they'd realize why. You can't just throw any old thing next to Erykah Badu, you've got to find something that responds to and resonates with Erykah Badu, and that's difficult to do. This is not a referendum on the quality of anybody's music. Ben Kweller is a great writer -- too great, as a matter of fact. When you hear "Wasted and Ready" incidentally, as a single, it's so obviously aesthetically superior to everything else on the pop or rock playlist that it forces you out of the experience of listening to the radio or watching videos. You begin to question the validity of the medium. You've been knocked loose from the storyline. The obvious reply to this is "well, why doesn't the radio just play all stuff that has as much aesthetic merit as Ben Kweller's music?" I agree that, as a direction, that might be nice, but in practice, it's difficult to do. The problem isn't only one of scarcity, it's also that the songs that have the most intrinsic aesthetic merit aren't always the ones that do the best job of contributing to the cultural discourse that hit radio provides. "Wasted and Ready" the song, heard in isolation or at home, says all kinds of worthwhile things that I won't enumerate here. "Wasted and Ready" the single -- the cultural artifact -- principally says "gee, Ben Kweller sure knows how to compose music". You can't put that next to Erykah Badu and expect it to contribute anything to the conversation.
Hip-hop videos are like British comedy of the seventies and eighties in that they usually contain their own autocritique. People who don't like hip-hop ignore the autocritique and proceed as if everything in the videos is meant to be taken literally. Nobody had a problem understanding when Monty Python sent itself up, but when the Big Tymers do a video featuring a party yacht with a hyperspace drive, this is received by our cultural guardians with poker-faced disbelief. The guys are living it up in Hawaii with some bikini-clad girls on the deck; they hyperspace to Alaska and now the bikini-clad girls have fur caps on their heads. This is a joke; they are commenting on the absurdity of rap video conventions all while celebrating them, because yes, a yacht with a hyperspace drive would be a pretty cool thing. And hip-hop videos are pretty cool things, too.
Below average "feeling" rock; boys and their big hurt feelings, on full and ghastly display. What could have possibly happened to these guys that they'd be so worked up is beyond me.
Bruce Springsteen -- "The Rising"
Decent song, decent chorus, really nothing special. If this were anybody else's comeback attempt, it wouldn't have gotten on the radio -- and as it was, it was barely played. The Boss needs to work with one of the producers who've resurrected Tom Petty, somebody who'll encourage him to forget about sounding slick and presentable and instead bring it raw. Over the past decade, Petty's recorded output has waxed Springsteen's, and that shouldn't be.
Busta Rhymes -- "Make It Clap", "Pass The Courvorsier" (with P. Diddy)
Busta's singles sound great the first time you hear them, and then wear out faster than a fat transvestite's nylons. These are no exception. "Courvorsier" is probably the weakest Neptunes-produced single of the year, a playa track so disposable that you'd swear they put Puffy on it just to make him look bad. "Make It Clap" gives you a nifty beat, at least, and Busta rolls out his dependable schtick of funny noises, nonsense words, and irritating exhortations, open-mouthed leers and bug-eyed hollers. But all the Woo haa and Row row like a dungeon dragon is there only to obscure the fact that Busta has had nothing to say for more than ten years. Make moves, not movies, Part One.
Cam'ron -- "Hey Ma", "Daydreaming", "Oh Boy"
Cam'ron is like the guy you went to high school with who was popular and pulled a lot of girls, but who you absolutely knew would be a fat bald loser in a matter of minutes after graduation. The tragedy there is that while you knew, you also knew he didn't know, and I'm pretty sure Cam'ron doesn't know, either. Both of these are fine pop-rap singles, as good as anything for brain-dead party ciphers, but there's something important missing, and I'm forced to blame the emcee. He's patterning himself on LL, but communicates none of LL's vulnerability; he seems very self-satisfied, monolithically confident, and therefore mostly unnecessary in a pop landscape that feeds off of differing displays of insecurity. Although I can't front on the delicious "Oh Boy", and Cam'ron also manages to redeem "Daydreaming" with a chorus by dangling a vacation offer in front of his girlfriend's face like this: "Italy?/Sicily?/Tell me girl/Dis-uh-ney Worl?"
Chemical Brothers -- "The Test"
Not even a big midrange guitar and a vocal performance from honorary ugly-American Richard Ashcroft (hell, he's the son of the Attorney General, isn't he?) could rescue the Brothers' latest from the American cultural embargo on all non-homegrown music. That's a shame, as this is probably their most successful attempt at fusing American rock with European techno. But the borders were closed in 2002; this was not the year for cultural cross-pollination. Hit radio suffered for it.
Christina Aguilera -- "Beautiful", "Dirrty"
Periodically, indie purists will attempt to sell you on the idea that hit radio is nothing more than a machine fed by the soulless architects of cultural anesthesia. This is, of course, not true -- except for one case. Christina Aguilera is, as I'm sure you've noticed, a bot: an android fed bits and pieces of Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson records, and hard-wired to execute factory-ready "programs" such as N100fpopvocal and G188H4poutysexsell. Turn the crank and the next thing you know you've got "Beautiful", a technically flawless but entirely uninvolving piece of motivational fluff, memorable enough to slot into heavy rotation, but ephemeral enough to dissipate upon inspection or at the termination of the holiday buying season -- whichever comes first. In 2002, the team of scientists responsible for "Aguilera" fitted her nose and lip with rings, gave her a new wardrobe that looks picked from the dumpsters out behind the Thunderdome, and proceeded to write some new code to position their product as grown up and aggressively sexual. The vehicle for this transformation was "Dirrty", and "Aguilera" was asked to breathe some life into this sub-N'Sync synth-blast stomper with some gruesome sass and horny growling, resulting in a track about as erotic as disk error 404. The extra "r" is for extra raunch, or maybe extra retarded.
Clipse -- "Grindin'", "When The Last Time", "Ma, I Don't Love Her"
Sometimes I look at the Neptunes and I think I can understand what it must have been like to live through the Gamble-Huff or Holland-Dozier-Holland eras. Some folks just have a knack for getting artists on the radio. Here were a couple of their finest productions of an impossibly busy season: two outstanding rap singles from a young and improving group with good flow and ease with a metaphor. "When The Last Time" evokes the Bomb Squad at their most minimal, with great "la la" backing vocals and one of those indelible rhymed choruses that the Neptunes seem to be able to generate at will. "Grindin'" is even better -- not much more than slamming beats and voices, Clipse sound simultaneously spooky and familiar on the cut. Rainy, gritty, good sense of humor, East Coast production mill music at its best.
The conventional wisdom states that Coldplay became the only foreign group to defy our cultural embargo by refining -- or maybe just dumbing down -- the Radiohead approach to the point where it could be played on hit radio. Me, I think Coldplay shares much more with the Cranberries than with Radiohead, and while I don't hate them or anything, I find it hard to identify anything in their lite radio formula unusual enough to justify their status as an extreme outlier. No, I think Coldplay escaped the embargo because nobody could ever mistake these colossal wimps for terrorists. The new Toad The Wet Sprocket.
Common -- "Come Close" (with Mary J. Blige)
Good song, better video. After Like Water For Chocolate, I'd written off Common as a strident family-values type, all efficiency and no fun. "Come Close" keeps the Million Man March politics going, but softens its tone, recasting "Bonita Applebum" as a marriage proposal and throwing Blige on the choruses for extra sweetness (not that more was really needed). The video finds Common in a sun-dappled buppie suburb, standing on his deaf girlfriend's lawn and communicating Say Anything-style by means of big, goofy signs. It's the corniest artifact in the history of hip-hop, and the closet Republican pulls it off with a performance that's courageous in its willingness to be totally and willfully wussy.
Craig David -- "What's Your Flava"
I remember last year at Maxwell's, Little T & One-Track Mike came back from England talking about gaa-rage, and proceeded to sing "I Wanna Be Sedated" as "I Wanna Be Craig David". I thought it was the best Ramones tribute that anybody did. Rumor has it that back when David was doing gaa-rage, he was quite a revolutionary artist, but all we've gotten stateside from him has been standard issue R&B. Maybe next year.
Creed -- "One Last Breath", "Six Feet From The Edge" (are these the same song?)
I must admit that Creed is a huge guilty pleasure, and I deserve to be guilty about this, because Creed is not a good group. But now that the awful, keening Jeff Buckley/Thom Yorke vocal approach has started to become hegemonic, can't we give Scott Stapp a pass? Sure, singers who try to emulate Eddie Vedder were a huge problem for many years, but Stapp actually sounds more like Vedder than Vedder did, and at any rate, he's got a huge voice that saturates two inch tape and leaps out of the radio at the listener. Okay, I am clutching at straws here. Creed is a crappy act. Still, I don't turn the station when they come on.
Dashboard Confessional -- "Screaming Infidelities"
I do turn the station when this comes on. Each year, there's a song out that makes me embarrassed to be part of the same species that recorded it, and this year it's "Screaming Infidelities", a gut-wrenching display of whiny white man angst in action. Meet the song that has everything: woeful rhythm section sounds and performances, shrill acoustic guitar (didn't we bury that years ago?), a weenie singer who sounds like he's about to burst into tears, and lyrics that would have been laughed out of my junior high school literary magazine. Look, guys, I know the economy is lousy and your B.A. degrees don't carry as much weight as they used to, but that hardly justifies foisting this godawful little wrist-slasher on the rest of us. We're in this together. Have a nice day.
David Gray -- "The Other Side"
If I had just come back from a party, and it was four o'clock in the morning, and it was raining out, not a heavy rain, not a drizzle, but a light, persistent shower making ripples in the puddles along the sidewalk, and the streetlamps were dim, and maybe one of them was blue for no reason, and my eyelashes were wet with raindrops, and I'd had a good time but not a great one, and I'd left feeling happy but incomplete, and the grates were down on all the stores, and I passed a Dunkin' Donuts and went in, and this song came on the radio, just before my eyes adjusted to the brightness of the fluorescent light, I bet it would move me, when the drums kicked in.
Distillers -- "City Of Angels"
Girls can do cock-rock, too. Arguably, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts (who the Distillers most closely resemble) released some of the most important singles in cock-rock history. "City Of Angels" is another "I Love Rock And Roll" wannabe, and nobody's ever been able to write an intelligent lyric about Los Angeles, but the song has a certain bop to it, and the arrangement is as familiar and comfortable as an old, smelly easy chair. There's too much rhythm guitar for my taste, but my taste is usually for no rhythm guitar at all.
If a major label act releases a cover version of a song by a good Eighties artist, it will invariably be the one track you never wanted to hear covered. This is called the Alien Ant Farm axiom, and there are no exceptions to it. There wasn't any good reason to cover "Heaven", since the song has hardly dropped off our cultural radar, and it isn't even Bryan Adams's best power ballad. That said, this innocuous disco version of the Eighties bar mitzvah classic was pleasant enough, if evacuated of all its admittedly sophomoric emotional content.
Eminem -- "Cleaning Out My Closet", "Lose Yourself", "Without Me"
Make moves, not movies, Part Two: Eminem continued his inexorable transition from viable hip-hop artist to late night talk show host/gubernatorial candidate by incorporating still more cinematic nonsense into his sound and retreating further into a haze of faux-controversy and confessional-autobiographical crapola. I keep waiting for his mom to do an exposé e on 20/20, or at least a Barbara Walters interview, but for now, she's taking the high road. Too bad her son isn't -- not since the heyday of Bob Dylan has an artist felt so comfortable using a public forum to whine about his personal life and castigate family members who do not (yet) have record deals or platforms from which to strike back. True, it's open season against parents on hit radio these days, but is anybody else so driven to make a career out of embarrassingly melodramatic dark-night-of-the-soul kitchen sink drama? "Cleaning Out My Closet" is about the worst of it -- a litany of complaints about his mother and his girlfriend delivered over mediocre beats, rife with disingenuous apologies and the kind of abrasive venom that spoils a radio set. Only a cover of "Yakety Yak" could have redeemed him by showing he still had a sense of humor about his absurd excesses, but instead we got "Lose Yourself", an exercise in mind-boggling self-aggrandizement, and further evidence that Eminem has completely misplaced any perspective he might have once had. Over the kind of ominous, vainglorious backing music he seems to favor these days, Eminem tells the story of his desperate rise from hardship and willful triumph over all the insurmountable obstacles in his path, and glorifies his success at seizing his "one shot". I'd call it the "Eye Of The Tiger" of the '00s, but Eminem lacks Survivor's guileless emotional honesty; the song functions mainly as teaser for his movie and the accompanying mythologizing of his tedious backstory. Bette Midler also decided she'd rather be a celebrity than a real recording artist; her reward was a starring role in Beaches. Look for a touching Eminem/Barbara Hershey vehicle in your neighborhood theatre soon.
Further evidence of the cultural embargo of 2002: with a big singalong chorus, great beats and eighties-fetish synth programming, and an adept performance by a legit sex symbol, "Escape" fulfilled all the necessary conditions of a summer blockbuster. It made an impact on the charts, but not much of one, and it quickly faded from popular consciousness. Iglesias was our best bet for Latin crossover in an isolationist war year because 1.) his dad is an honorary American, conflated in the public imagination with Ricardo Montalban and endorsed by no less a red, white and blue icon than Willie Nelson , 2.) his "Hero", the best Latin-lover power ballad since Jon Secada's "Otro Dia Mas", was an unofficial national anthem after the attacks last year, and 3.) he had sex with Anna Kournikova, something none of us can imagine any member of the Taliban doing. But we're acting unilaterally these days, and nobody named Enrique is going to tell us red-blooded American patriots that we can run/we can hide/but we can't escape him. Not this year.
Erick Sermon -- "React" (with Redman)
Take the pop production and ease of delivery away from Eminem and you've got El-Producto; take the white man angst from El-Producto and you're left with Erick Sermon. It's been more than a decade since "You Gots Ta Chill", but Sermon can still bring the insidious party jams with the best of them. The unsettling hook is sung in some strange Middle Eastern language, or perhaps that's just a tape effect; in any case, it's a smooth counterpoint to the emcees' roughneck hedonism. Putting Redman on the same track as sermon is kind of like having a backcourt of Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston -- they're similar players, but Redman's shot-percentage is lower, so he ends up out of position most of the time. I'm quibbling. I've really got no complaints here.
Erykah Badu --"Love Of My Life" (with Common)
Not dissimilar from her standard single track: weird, almost atonal verse, moving into a brighter chorus that you still can't exactly sing with, closing with an outro section where Badu gets to show off those big money pipes. After Mama's Gun I said somebody needs to write a straightforward pop song for her to sing, and this ain't it, but what it is turns out to be better: a weird little slice of R&B that she manages to make radio-ready through the sheer force of her performance. As a love song to hip-hop it is utterly convincing, and hauling in Common to revisit "Used To Love H.E.R." feels conceptually appropriate but unnecessary in practice. Besides, who needs ornamentation or accompaniment when she can find that place in every line that transforms a simple phrase into a strange and unforgettable hook?
Eve -- "Satisfaction", "Gangsta Love" (with Alicia Keys)
The worst thing about the press response to the shooting of Jam Master Jay (besides the disturbing number of "journalists" who reported that he was a rapper) was the public interpretation of the Run-DMC deejay as a "nice guy" who was too much of a noble-minded communitarian to make G-rap records. The insidious implication, of course, was that those who do make G-rap records are evil thugs who deserve a bullet, or maybe just deserve a bullet more than Jam Master Jay did. Anyway, that's all besides the point, because Jam Master Jason Mizell did more to turn hip-hop into a braggadocious, aggressive, cock-rock medium than anybody in its history, and those who argue otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. Before Mizell's innovations, hip-hop was the territory of dance-floor rappers like Whodini and the Sugar Hill Gang -- people making party jams not dissimilar to contemporary R&B (even the Furious Five were huge softies by current standards). By stripping out the sugar 'n' spice and replacing it with nothing but a big beat and scratching, Mizell transformed hip-hop from good-time music meant for both genders to something more brash, direct, urgent, and meant for the boys. Run-DMC did not do G-rap because in 1982-83, there was no such thing as G-rap. But what they did do -- in songs like "Hard Times", "Rock Box", "You Be Illin'", etc. -- was kick gritty, funny urban "reality lyrics" with unswerving regularity. Their innovations and emphasis on aggressive realism (and an accompanying black sense of humor) led directly to "9 Millimeter Goes Bang" and Straight Outta Compton -- when "P.S.K. What Does It Mean?" first dropped, it was an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Run-DMC, not Melle Mel. If Mizell had come on the scene in 1989, it is indisputable that he and Run-DMC would have done G-rap. All of Mizell's representational predilections pointed in its direction. The point is not that Run-DMC's alleged "positivity" is a hoax -- rather, that there's nothing more "positive" than G-rap, if you look at it from a particular angle. G-rap, or so-called reality rap, is about outward engagement, and artists predisposed toward outward engagement will change as their circumstances do. Which brings us to Eve, who used to be known as Eve Of Destruction, and who made her name as the "first lady" of the Ruff Ryders. Eve decided to jettison the Destruction right at the moment when it would have simply been stupid for her to keep on rhyming aggressively. She'd become a star, and since she's an outwardly engaged writer. It would have been beyond her not to represent her stardom. So she smoothed out and went for the pop charts, and sang about how she's "satisfied". Is this a sellout? I don't think it is: I think Eve is doing her best to give you a snapshot of where she is right now, and it's just gravy that she's done it on two of the better pop-rap singles of the year. The distance between Eve and Eve Of Destruction is about the same as the distance between "Hard Times" and "Mary, Mary". Outwardly-engaged emcees try to represent the particulars of their actual outward circumstances, and it was Mizell who broke the ground that made those representations possible.
Fabolous -- "This Is My Party", "Holla Back Youngin"
No, no, no, NYC does not need an answer to Nelly. That is the same logic that put Vince Coleman in a Mets uniform. We're hip-hop's first city and always will be. No need to panic like this.
Fat Joe -- "What's Love" (with Ashanti), "Crush Tonight" (with Ginuwine)
Just as the Yankees invariably carry a sparky South American middle infield reserve, there must always be one frighteningly obese emcee on the charts. The unfortunate death of the great Christopher Rios turns the fatso mantle over to the man who discovered him, and it's in pretty good hands. Hip-hop is quite fond of the "Beauty And The Beast" paradigm (which accounts for the omnipresence of Ja Rule), and the overweight-lover emcee is always a decent bet too; thus, it's no surprise that Fat Joe's pairing with Ashanti sounds more successful than his collaboration with Ginuwine does. Fun, spirited performances, rambunctious, winning. Irrationally, it's tough not to knock Fat Joe for not being Big Pun, but he's probably as good now as Heavy D was in the early Nineties, and that's good enough.
The most nondescript radio rap single of the year. I must have heard this song a hundred times, and I barely remember it. Considering I can sing back most of the words to "Christmastime In Hell" from an episode of South Park I saw two weeks ago, I've got to blame Floetry and not myself.
Hilary has always felt there's something deeply pathetic about Dave Grohl soldiering on in an inferior group after shaking the world with Nirvana, and I've always resisted this, because what the hell was he going to do, sell used cars? But the more I think about it, the more I'm coming around to her point of view on this. It's not that it feels weak for him to have recorded a Foo Fighters record or two, it's that the group so clearly has nothing to say, but he's still up there howling and shouting about God knows what, all in the effort to establish a brand name and to keep a corporate rock career going. It's not that I ever dislike the songs, because I don't, but in some ways Grohl has turned out to be the anti-Cobain. Then again, maybe that's his point.
Freeway, Jay-Z & Beanie Sigel -- "What We Do"
The radio hegemony of the Neptunes may have pushed Wu-style production to the sidelines, but it bubbles up in unlikely places, and when it does, it can still be pretty exciting. Beanie Sigel has a stupid name, and he looks even more like a parking-lot wino than ODB did, but he's an underappreciated emcee with some smoldering paranoia to express. Jay-Z turns in his best performance of 2002 on this cut -- it's brief, but it raises everybody's game. Next to the silly business of "'03 Bonnie And Clyde" and the irritating "Song Cry", it's a welcome reminder of just how tight both Jigga and his Roc-A-Fella crew can be.
Good Charlotte -- "Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous"
Pop-punk kids with energy to burn and no particular place to go. Decent, nothing special.
Goo Goo Dolls -- "Here Is Gone"
It might sound implausible now, but in about ten years Dizzy Up The Girl is going to be considered one of the most influential records in mainstream rock history. You can hear it already: both Vanessa Carlton's "Ordinary Day" and Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You" incorporate as much of "Iris" as they can get away with, and Michelle Branch has already rewritten "Black Balloon" at least twice. Rob Cavallo's sweeping production sound, meant to accompany the heartbreaking moments of WB television dramas, has spawned a host of hopeful imitators, each with their own winsome version of "Slide". But nobody has really managed to approximate the incomparable sugar rush of the Dizzy singles, including the Goo Goo Dolls themselves, who appear to have shot their wad.
Ja Rule -- "Always On Time" (with Ashanti)
I often feel like the secret model for all these gruff-voiced emcees is Fat Albert. I still think of Ja Rule as DMX's annoying kid brother, but now that he's become a star as big as any in hip-hop, I suppose I ought to start taking him more seriously. At times it seemed like his vowel-mashing grunt appeared on every song on hit radio this year, but upon closer inspection, very few of those cuts were actually released under his name. "Always On Time" was the best of them: here, the Beauty-And-The-Beast act actually worked, with Ashanti feeding off the gruff energy of Ja Rule's performance with a confidence that Mary J. Blige couldn't manage on "Rainy Days" and a wide-eyed awareness that Jennifer Lopez couldn't provide on the dead-in-the-water "I'm Real". A streetsier production style helped, too. Oh, late in the year, Ja Rule made a movie and put out a few crappy singles linked to its release, one of which he had the nerve to call a "straight-up classic joint". We'll decide that ourselves, k?
You know that fantasy where a rich and famous A&R guy hears some gritty old busker crooning on the D train platform and decides to give him a major label deal? Well, that doesn't really ever happen, but if it did, this is what it would sound like.
Jay-Z -- "'03 Bonnie And Clyde" (with Beyonce Knowles), "Song Cry"
I hate to say it, but this might be the sound of a major artist losing the thread. After a run of phenomenal singles culminating in the delirious "Izzo", it felt like Jigga dropped the compass in 2002. "Song Cry" was Jay-Z's self-dramatizing schtick at its worst; particularly coming from a guy who'd just given us "Girls, Girls, Girls", it was downright embarrassing to hear him going all Alan Alda on us. "'03 Bonnie And Clyde" brings some of the old swagger, but with none of the musical innovation of, say, "I Just Wanna Love You" or the lyricism and sweep of "Streets Is Talking". What we get in trade is a cameo from Beyonce Knowles, some forced-rhyme couplets, and no player to be named later. My best guess is that Jay-Z is about to go into a Rattle And Hum period where he indulges superficial whims, chases stylistic experiments, does some obvious covers, and collaborates with crummy artists from Jewel to Yo-Yo Ma. He's earned his playtime and maybe even a little dilettantism, I suppose, but we're the ones who've got to sit there and listen to it while we wait for the next Ludacris song to come on the radio.
Jennifer Lopez -- "Jenny From The Block", "Ain't It Funny" (with Ja Rule)
Make moves, not movies, Part Three: I've been defending her for years, but isn't it about time Lopez actually got down to business and delivered a decent record? I know she can't really sing, but then neither could Lou Reed; that's not the problem here. I agree that the "South Bronx" sample in "Jenny From The Block" is pretty cool and a lot more meaningful than Common's revisitation of "Used To Love H.E.R." on "Love Of My Life", but then it ends, and you're back to listening to Lopez struggle through the verse. I like how she represents New York, I like how she reps BX, I like her in interviews, I like everything about her -- except her songs. Oh, and watching her cavort around with Ben Affleck in that video is pretty painful. C'mon, spare us.
Jimmy Eat World -- "The Middle"
Am I being to harsh here? I don't want to give you the wrong impression. The Rule Of Ridicule states that if you can't make fun of it, it's no good, and I wouldn't bother to knock records if I didn't, at a very fundamental level, believe that they were very much worth my time and yours. There's nothing on this list (with the exception of Dashboard Confessional) that I don't enjoy, viscerally, when I hear it on the radio. A record like "Jenny From The Block" demands a critique, whether chiding or constructive, in a way that other forms of cultural production do not -- I wouldn't know how to begin writing about some crappy movie or television show, because I believe that the forms themselves have become worthless, mediums for communication of only the most transparent ideas. An average pop song has a richness to it, a cultural saturation, that I don't find in other forms of production. I also marvel at the complexity of its production, the intelligence that went into the beat and instrument programming, the way the backing vocals are recorded, you name it; it's an achievement. An average pop song is a huge production featuring collaboration between scores of artists, each attempting to calibrate their vision to the vision of the others working on the project and to the brand name under which it's going to be sold. "The Middle" by Jimmy Eat World is a very average piece of radio rock, not in any way distinguished from all the other average pieces of radio rock, yet to me that means it's a superb work of art. That's where the discussion begins, and I will take it ahead of all the filmed entertainment Hollywood offered me this year, without thinking twice.
John Mayer -- "Your Body Is A Wonderland"
Upstart kid, uses a lot of major-seventh chords. He gets unfairly compared to Dave Matthews, but he's more like Eric Matthews -- he's a surer hand with arrangements, and he's got an intuitive grasp of composition. Unfortunately, he sings in a strange MC-Blowfish voice, which can make protracted exposure taxing. Don't ask about the lyrics to this single; they're embarrassing, sure, but you could do worse.
The entire attempt to prove your hip-hop authenticity by being a boring model citizen is so misguided I don't even know where to start. It pleases me that there exist young emcees who think so highly of De La Soul, but they all seem to have missed the point. De La Soul was and is the most irony-laden act in pop-music history, and if you're not hell-bent on being funny and/or satirical, then you aren't working in their spirit. The Jurassic 5 think of themselves as indebted to the Native Tongues: to them, that means they don't rhyme about shooting people or banging hos. It's defined negatively. Perhaps the 5 would be surprised to know that I consider a highly metaphoric G-rapper like Beanie Sigel much closer to the actual essence of De La Soul. Just as Ja Rule doesn't get to wave a magic wand and make his song a "classic" by telling us that it is, Jurassic 5's can't suggest the 1988-1990 era by using the word "golden" in their title. Frankly, I am insulted on behalf of the emcees of my adolescence every time these bozos open their mouths.
Justin Timberlake -- "Cry Me A River", "Get Ready"
Since Britney Spears has carved a whole career out of thematizing her underage sexuality ("Oops, I Did It Again", "Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman", etc.), former boyfriend Timberlake replies with a set of songs about taking the jailbait. Or at least he's not doing anything to discourage that interpretation, considering the Spears-lookalikes he uses in his videos. As for me, I've conflated Timberlake so thoroughly with Brian Austin Green's character on Beverly Hills 90210 that I can't imagine him performing anyplace but the Peach Pit, and I keep wondering if Steve Sanders will approve of his production choices. Long awaited by fans of alliteration and absurdity everywhere, the Timberlake-Timbaland collaboration "Cry Me A River" sounds like Terence Trent D'Arby making fun of Curtis Mayfield. Hell, I love it. Did I imply I didn't love it?
Kylie Minogue -- "Come Into My World", "Love At First Sight"
Outstanding, flimsy, lovable-stupid radio disco singles from Europe's notorious answer to Madonna. If you don't dig these, I recommend trashing your radio and sitting in the corner with some Mozart albums, smoking a pipe.
Las Ketchup -- "Asereje", aka "The Ketchup Song"
Three Spanish girls translate the chorus of "Rapper's Delight" into some strange pidgin-Castilian dialect, and then sing it over a disco-rhumba hybrid, accompanying it with a lazy and poorly-executed hand dance. What, I'm not supposed to think this is totally brilliant? In any sane year, America would have followed the cue of the rest of the civilized world and sent this single to the top of the charts. As it was, "Asereje" got caught up in the cultural embargo and had to settle for a status as a call-in show favorite, which is sort of the hit radio equivalent of being elected by write-in votes. I won't fret about it, since I'm sure we'll all be hearing this one over stadium P.A.s at sporting events for the rest of our lives. The new "Cotton Eyed Joe".
Linkin Park -- "Pts. Of Athrty."
In a universe built for maximum aesthetic economy, the great fantasy-league owner in the sky would simply stick Eminem in Linkin Park. Eminem would get all the brooding, ominous musical backdrops he wants, and he wouldn't have to pretend to enjoy the labors of his legitimate hip-hop producers anymore, and Linkin Park could lose that guy who says things like "keep in mind I designed this rhyme to remind me of a time I tried so hard" and thinks he's emceeing. Hey, I just want to make everybody happy.
LL Cool J -- "Love You Better", "Paradise" (with Amerie)
Have you ever noticed that every time LL Cool J attempts a comeback, he puts on about 50% more muscle mass? This guy must go through more andro than Mark McGwire and Serena Williams combined. Like Joe Torre, LL learned this year that endorsing George Pataki exacts a heavy karmic price. "Love You Better", a completely disingenuous apology to a wronged girlfriend, was easily the most emotionally dishonest song on the charts this summer; it's like "Song Cry" but about a thousand times worse. As for "Paradise": I'd call it a straight phone-in, but that presumes that LL was willing to expend the energy necessary to pick up the phone and dial. He wasn't. "Paradise/ is very nice"?? What the hell kind of a chorus is that? After rhyming for twenty years, that's what he's got to say to us?
Of all of the cultural injustices of the past decade, here's one of the most regrettable: since the release of Dummy, there've been about sixty Bond movies made, and Portishead has done the theme song to exactly none of them. Look, the whole point of Portishead was to do a Bond theme. What else was that group in the world for? I guess if the people who make those movies are dumb enough to think that Chuck Bronsnan, or whatever the hell his name is, can play James Bond, it figures that they're willing to waste their titles on Madonna and her ongoing battle with relevance.
Michelle Branch -- "All You Wanted"
My favorite of the new teen-queen singer/songwriters. Branch doesn't have Avril Lavigne's nascent storytelling sensibility or Alicia Keys's vocal and instrumental talent, but she's got a better grasp of song mechanics than either of them do, and her lyrics and singing are decent enough to carry her the rest of the way. Last year's "Everywhere" was a great pop-rock number that evoked Matthew Sweet as much as the Goo Goo Dolls, and sounded as big and crunchy coming out of a car stereo as anything from Dookie. "All You Wanted" is the Oasis knockoff with the heartrending, desperate chorus -- it starts like "Black Balloon" and morphs into "Wonderwall", all tied together by Branch's impassioned chirp. Works for me.
Missy Elliott -- "Work It", "Gossip Folks" (with Ludacris)
Like Outkast and Ludacris, Missy Elliott and Timbaland paint a picture of a bold and fully reconstructed American South -- larger than life and exuberant, hyperactively sexual, acquisitive, agonistic, bizarre, hypnotic and colorful, chaotic, a funhouse-mirror phantasmagoria of booty bass, chicken wings, and dollar signs, rife with marching bands, high school football games, barking dogs and candy-colored Cadillac doors. The transforming force identified? New black money and the emergent black middle class that grew with amazing velocity during the Clinton Administration. On closer inspection, almost all black cultural production of the past ten years has been about upward social mobility, just as white cultural production has invariably concerned social stagnation, confusion, and breakdown. Playa rhymes and R&B protestations over scrub boyfriends are simply flipsides of the same coin: they're songs about economics, and what it means to be able to either boast or fret over a bank balance. A relentless optimism has accompanied the transfer of black music's second city-status from Los Angeles and its gang, drug, and poverty associations to the Atlanta of sports and entertainment conglomerates, corporate institutions, and minority-owned businesses. In place of the ghetto anthems of the late Eighties and early Nineties, we've gotten song after song about money: boasting about having it (Cash Money Millionaires, Master P, countless playa emcees), disingenuously complaining about the ill effects of it (Puffy and "Mo Money, Mo Problems"), celebrations of status symbols ("Bling Bling") rejections of economic assistance cast as liberation anthems ("Independent Woman, Pt. 1"), commensurate rejections of peers who've missed the upwardly-mobile bandwagon ("No Scrubs", "Bills, Bills, Bills"). All of this singing and rhyming about cash dollar has made white people nervous, especially since white culture has been tacking so hard in the opposite direction. White mainstream culture has generated pessimistic stars and spokespeople, writers who take as their subject the deterioration of institutions and relationships, cynicism, betrayal -- Eminem, Radiohead, Alanis Morissette, an entire generation of disaffected nu-metal and "alternative" artists. The white press has responded to these shifts by attempting to discredit current "materialistic" hip-hop, directly in the teeth of its overwhelming popularity and cultural importance, which has in return made that music press look kinda stupid, and increasingly irrelevant to boot. We're told repeatedly, however, that modern emcees are "superficial" compared to those of the "golden age", who rhymed about social injustice and hard times in the hood. But hip-hop was an enormous force in the black middle class's arrival at cohesion and social consciousness, and that transformation was always part of the project. I recall one prominent white critic who put the case to me, off the record, that hip-hop was "designed to sell out", and I frequently return to this -- not because it's incorrect, per se, but because it's the most uncharitable possible interpretation of those crucial elements within the hip-hop subculture that were always striving for collective economic betterment. But as Ice Cube (the poet laureate of the transformation) reminded us, plenty of whites are more comfortable seeing blacks holding a gun than holding a wallet, and the spectre of "me and Lorenzo/rolling in a Benz-o" still stalks the main traverses of our popular cultural imagination.
Kinda silly, but if it reminds people of Biz Markie, then it's done its work. Better on balance than the "Heaven" cover, but then Mario was starting with superior material. I'd call a moratorium on Eighties covers if I could, but I'd probably just as well call a moratorium on the sunrise.
Mary J. Blige -- "Rainy Days" (with Ja Rule)
Like Erykah Badu, Blige is a great singer who's never really had material equal to her voice. But where Badu can blame her own predilection towards weird, dissonant, almost ambient production, Blige gravitates toward dominant accompaniment and stylistic choices, and has no problem piggybacking trends. I don't, for instance, think Badu would have allowed herself to be paired with Ja Rule; you would expect to find Blige, by contrast, in the company of the most popular current emcees regardless of their skill. Because of the difference in approach, I blame Blige more for her spotty track record than I do Badu. If you're determined to underachieve, you should at least leave behind a catalog of bizarre experiments, rather than middling, standard-issue throwaways like this one.
Moby -- "We Are All Made Of Stars"
The worst thing Eminem did this year was humanize Moby. He forced anybody who shares a simple human distaste for bullying to fly to the defense of the most soporific figure in popular entertainment, a man so boring, so devoid of resistance, perspective or aesthetic traction that he licenses his "songs" directly to commercials. Moby cranks out undistinguished background music, and applies what little intellectual exertion he can muster to the task of making his product as inert as possible, and usually succeeding not by trick or design, but as a natural result of his own fundamental edgelessness. That commitment to inertia was probably what offended Eminem, and while I share his distaste, his misplaced threats made him look puny and pathetic. But that doesn't mean we should automatically have sympathy for Moby, or his passive-aggressive response to Eminem's challenge, or mistake this glorified ad man for a genuine recording artist. At a certain point, even my heart stops bleeding. Moby has passed that point.
Ms. Jade, Timbaland & Nelly Furtado -- "Ching Ching"
What's the difference between a good radio producer and a great one? A good producer can hear a hook in the strangest places, a great producer can make a hook out of anything. If you thought Timbaland's production on "Work It" and "Gossip Folks" was extreme (and it is), brace yourself for "Ching Ching", 2002's most bugged-out radio single, and, of course, a big fave of mine. Timbaland loops Nelly Furtado singing the relentless semi-nonsense chorus straight through her nose, pinches the vocal until it sounds like a chorus of wasps, and sticks it right in the middle of the track. He then adds his trademark grunts and moans before allowing Ms. Jade to answer with a pissed-off screed of her own; the production is claustrophobic, urban, hallucinatory, with beats that skip and sizzle like streetlights with bad electrical connections. If the end result doesn't drive you bananas, you'll probably love it -- and if you're really lucky, it'll drive you bananas and you'll love it. This year's answer to "Oochie Wally".
Musiq used to be called "Musiq Soulchild", which, terrible as it is, is still a better name than "Musiq". Like Bilal, Musiq attempts to fill the void created when Maxwell couldn't figure out how to follow up his Hang Suite, and also like Bilal, his attempts are only sporadically successful. Misspelling common words seems to be his major stylistic innovation; hell, it worked for Sly Stone.
Nappy Roots -- "Po' Folks", "Headz Up"
If you've followed along so far, you've probably figured out that I think hip-hop is slightly past its sell-by date, mainstream rock and punk are half-interred, and our best chances for musical innovation have been shut out of the cultural discourse by our national reaction to the attacks on New York and Washington. Our embargo on all foreign signifiers will eventually lift, but until then, the hybrid forms that ought to be driving musical innovation won't be able to take hold, and we'll have no choice but to grit our teeth and buy American. In the absence of good crossover possibilities from Latin American salsa, merengue, and bachata (which would be welcome), European techno and Eurobeat music (not so wonderful, but at this point I'll take it), and J-pop and Asian rock (bring it on), it's been absolutely mandatory for the non-commercial underground to keep spurring change and pushing margins. Members of the rock underground, when not unhealthily obsessed with the formal task of making "perfect" albums or "perfect" songs, are usually pretty good about this -- they've come up with some stylistic innovations that have been adopted by mainstream artists and have entered into the national cultural discourse. Not so in hip-hop, where underground or backpack emcees are compelled by their form's emphasis on material success to self-justify by going on and on about their rejection of materialism, to the point where you just want to give them some bling bling and make them shut up. The Nappy Roots have, by the standards of underground emcees, a relatively refreshing outlook, and function as something of a clearinghouse for ideas that the Outkast have probably outgrown pursuing. That might justify their existence, but hardly warrants repeated listens or protracted exposure.
Like "Mama Said Knock You Out" in that it came at the precise moment -- seemingly with seconds to spare -- when Nas absolutely needed an undeniable song that would reestablish his credibility. But then we always knew he was a clutch performer. Doubters and revisionists can pipe down now.
Nelly -- "Air Force Ones", "Hot In Herre", "Dilemma" (with Kelly Rowland)
With the American military poised to level Baghdad and the world looking askance at us, do we really need a popular song gleefully saying "I'm stomping in my Air Force Ones"? I know, I know, there's a large element of irony at work here. That's going to be lost on the folks overseas who tend to get mighty pissed off at things like this. I agree that those guys sound really stupid when they run around chanting "Death to America", but hey, we've got to give a little, too.
New Found Glory -- "My Friends Over You"
Sometimes I feel like this really is the Stone Age. In the Ben Kweller comment, I wrote about how radio playlists generate their own set of arguments and statements through correlations and associations, discourse among artists, and friction created by related but clashing perspectives. Like all of us participants in our national discussion, radio stations swing between good years and bad years, depending on how sophisticated their arguments are, and how coherently they manage to make them. A station like Z-100 confronts a tough task: since top forty radio is a self-defining institution, the program director needs to pull together strands from all over the cultural landscape and turn that into something meaningful. So the station's continued ability to cope with changing tastes and stylistic shifts to produce a cogent argument in favor of go-go liberal pluralism and urban consumer capitalism is a constant source of amazement for me. Since hip-hop has never been shy about airing its issues publicly, life is easier for Hot-97, and the programmers do a nice job of balancing voices, even if the preponderance of NYC perspectives can become tiresome. As for WXRK, the city's top rock station, the ideological objectives have become simpler still: like most rock stations across the country, its programmers have indulged its listeners' desire for a homosocial, boys-only, wank-off club, impervious to intrusion by anything slightly feminine. You can listen to K-Rock for hours without hearing a woman's voice, but you will hear complaints and violent screeds against familiar female figures -- mothers, girlfriends, other men who do not display requisite masculinity. From New Found Glory to Linkin Park to Drowning Pool, nu-metal to emo to punk, K-Rock's programmers synthesize these voices into a seamless manifesto of male exclusivity. This is completely beyond any reasonable defense for it I can conjure, even hypothetically, and I honestly wonder how the station's executives can live with themselves. There is no justification for any broadcast policy that doesn't make provisions to include female voices and perspectives. To allow your station to play nothing but boys, all boys, all the time, and to defend that as a reasonable consequence of an equally reasonable program strategy blows my mind, down to the very last brain cell.
Nirvana -- "You Know You're Right"
This is unnecessary even to completists, but I suppose they felt they needed an extra song to help the marketing of the coffee table book. Better than "Free As A Bird," sure, but what does that really say?
No Doubt -- "Hella Good", "Underneath It All"
Because they're basically a college spring fling band that lucked into a record deal, bucking long odds to establish themselves as consistent hitmakers, No Doubt boasts more eclecticism than anybody else on the charts. Harmonizing elements of hard funk, synthpop, ska and reggae, standard R&B, college rock, and cheeseball Eighties party music (and looking good while they're doing it), these guys have become my model group, and proof that you don't have to go twelve-tone to make groundbreaking records -- you just need to keep your ears open and borrow respectfully and without condescension from disparate sources. "Hella Good" is a ferocious song with a synth riff that stomps around like a randy elephant; "Underneath It All" bops along on an elastic dub groove complete with a horn arrangement reminiscent of Madness and a winsome performance from the impeccable Gwen Stefani. It's doubtful that there's a "band" playing any of this live -- the drums feel sampled, and the rhythm guitar, so (unfortunately) prominent on Tragic Kingdom, is almost nonexistent now. Those are improvements, by the way. Their bass parts have always been fabulous, and these days you can actually hear them.
Norah Jones -- "Don't Know Why"
Somewhere in Indiana there's a whole mall full of moms who like this kind of music. Adult contemporary stuff, laid-back, slick, crafty but ultimately empty calories. But then I also felt that way about K.D. Lang, and even after the movies and television appearances there are still people who swear by her records, so I am sure we haven't heard the last of Jones.
The song with the staggered bass frequencies. It sure sounded cool, but I am sorta glad it didn't become a standard production choice. During the spring, when every Jeep with an Alpine system on Palisade Avenue was bumping this track, it frequently felt like a low-magnitude earthquake when one would roll by. Nore is a better emcee than most; he may not have the mixtape credibility of 50 Cent or the critical acceptance of Common, but in a blind-label test, I am sure four out of five rap fans would favor his delivery over those of his celebrated peers.
Oasis -- "Stop Crying Your Heart Out"
Gigantic, glacial ballad with a gradually descending bass and a soaring chorus. No tricks, just Liam Gallagher at the top of his game, hitting all of his marks, simultaneously communicating regret and bitterness. Your guess is as good as mine why it didn't become a hit; probably that embargo again.
Vaguely annoying check-your-brain-at-the-door power pop with lame lyrics and a chorus that's nowhere near as catchy or clever as the group thinks it is -- we don't need some smarmy white guy telling us to "get over it", no matter what the antecedent may be. Every year there's a song like this on the periphery of the pop charts, and every year we're told that "melodic" rock is making a comeback. Inevitably you never hear from the group again, the song gets recycled into a commercial, reminding us all that television jingles are about as "melodic" as it gets, and if all there was to musical excellence was coming up with clever melodies, Barry Manilow would be in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. See also: New Radicals, Semisonic, Fastball, Goldfinger.
O-Town -- "These Are The Days"
N'Sync appears to have split up, the Backstreet Boys are all in rehab, 98 Degrees are missing in action. Yet the most prefab of all the boy bands soldiers on, proudly releasing this Summer-of-'97 high-sheen radio product as if the backlash never happened. "These Are The Days" is exactly the sort of synthesized slimeball that makes purists cringe, but like "I Want It That Way" and "Baby One More Time", it's also a sturdy little vessel, perfectly suited for a long voyage over the airwaves. I often wish that a member of the popsmart generation of indie neo-traditionalists -- Jeff Tweedy? Will Oldham? -- would pull out an acoustic guitar and do a set of boy band songs, schooling everybody by showing exactly how well-constructed some of these compositions are, and proving once and for all that the divide between Hank Williams and Nick Carter is not the yawning gulf that many pretend it is.
P. Diddy -- "I Need A Girl", "I Need A Girl, Pt. 2", "Do That" (with Baby)
If you're a Puffy hater (and there are many), it couldn't have gotten any better for you in 2002 without Sean Combs getting served with a war crimes indictment. Not only has Pharrell Williams supplanted Puffy as the premiere East Coast hitmaker -- and done so without sacrificing any of his artistic credibility -- but the Bad Boy kingpin stooped to playing third fiddle on the Neptunes's crappiest production of the year, "Pass The Courvorsier". Unashamed, Puffy took to the airwaves with two embarrassing personal ads, one of which addressed Jennifer Lopez directly and pathetically. Lopez responded with a video which garishly showcased her bliss with Ben Affleck, and a series of interviews where she made the Puffy romance sound like a triviality, and an accidental one at that. How many people can really say they've had the experience of being humiliated in front of their entire culture? Bill Buckner, maybe. If that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, P. Diddy should be a weightlifting champ by now.
Like "We Want Fun", precisely the sort of song you'd expect to hear in a war year. Look, I'm not saying P.O.D. or Andrew W.K. are secretly pro-war or pro-violence -- only that they choose to make music that can easily be appropriated by people who are pro-war or pro-violence. If you sat down with them and discussed Iraq or Afghanistan, they might turn out to be the biggest doves since Wayne Morse. But all these guys are intelligent; they've got the capacity to know that if they record a chorus that goes "Boom! Here comes the boom! Ready or not!" over a battery of aggressive beats and guitar, it's going to inevitably end up providing the soundtrack to some unpleasant activities. You just can't say the same about Belle and Sebastian, know what I mean?
Papa Roach -- "She Loves Me Not"
When first I heard this song, I thought it was the worst single of the year. But then I heard it again, and realized that while it is pretty damn stupid, it's no worse than several other rock-rap whine-a-thons of recent vintage. Every frat guy with a gut English major and a copy of Licensed To Ill now believes he is the hard rhymer. Out of habit, I'd like to point the finger at Beck, but at this point it's probably not his fault.
Pink -- "Don't Let Me Get Me", "Family Portrait", "Just Like A Pill"
Every time I compare Pink to Cyndi Lauper, people resist me, but as far as I can tell, the only difference between the two artists is about fifteen years of pop history. Cyndi Lauper offered a skillful synthesis of new-wave with R&B and then-contemporary black music, Pink offers a skillful synthesis of alternative forms with R&B and currently-contemporary black music. Lauper threatened to cross the line between suggestively naughty and downright explicit ("She Bop") but wouldn't; neither will Pink ("Get This Party Started"). Cyndi Lauper traded in family drama and the difficulties of young-womanhood ("Girls Just Wanna Have Fun"), Pink does the same ("Family Portrait"). Lauper and Pink both dig synthesizers, hair dye, and squealing in funny voices. There was a lightheartedness to Lauper's approach that eludes Pink, but I think that's just the difference between early-Eighties optimism and 2002's marathon of moaning. Both are narcissistic, self-absorbed; both have had a few nice singles, one has become overrated in retrospect, and the other is currently underrated by comparison -- but surely will be overrated in due time.
Puddle Of Mudd -- "Drift & Die", "She Hates Me"
My theory about Puddle Of Mudd is that they were upperclassmen who kept Fred Durst from getting the shit beaten out of him in high school, and now he's returning the favor by making them into rock stars. Despite some really awkward couplets, "She Hates Me" is a neo-grunge favorite of mine; a hurt-feeling misogynist anthem that sounds straight from the crib, but maintains its sense of humor, and never gets ominous. The kind of group you would expect to see on The Howard Stern Show, making their girlfriends get naked in exchange for airplay.
Queens Of The Stone Age -- "No One Knows"
Acceptable pseudo-grunge from the new Urge Overkill. like U.O., the Queens are considered a thinking-man's hard rock band, which mainly means their chord progressions are somewhat unexpected, the lyrics are kinda cryptic, and the group members are extremely ugly. I appreciate the effort (and the attention to musicianship), but on balance I think I'd rather listen to P.O.D. Good guitar solo, though.
Red Hot Chili Peppers -- "By The Way", "The Zephyr Song"
They aren't even trying to be edgy or alternative anymore, and that's okay -- they're mostly just playing out the string, like Joe Niekro at the grueling end of his career. What will their legacy be, I wonder? Flea introduced a whole generation of misguided bass players to the evils of slapping the strings with your thumb, but that hasn't done the damage it might have -- the Novocelik and Green Day models took care of that problem. Anthony Kiedis contributed some truly vulgar lyrics to the great national dictionary of bonehead idioms ("Drink my love/young girl/chug-a-lug me"…eccch!), but as a serial mainstream offender he's got nothing on Eminem, let alone Luther Campbell. I can't think of any contemporary groups who bear unmistakable marks of their influence, and as popular forms continue to drift towards segregated poles, by the time of the next funk-rock revival, the Peppers may have long been forgotten. "Under The Bridge" will persist, but it's hardly one of their more characteristic songs. In the end, they barely left a scratch on pop history, and that's remarkable, considering all the clawing and thrashing around they were doing during their prime.
I'll say this for techno music -- the videos have been great. This one tells a rather heartrending story of a little cartoon animal forced to live in captivity. The song itself? A pretty nice chillout groove, perfect for boring cocktail parties and reefer blandness. There are those in the Bush Administration who believe that Europe is now irrelevant, and to Texans who require a beefy Randy Travis-like terrestriality to their pop music, Royksopp must sound like the very essence of irrelevance, strung out over an emasculated beat. Not subscribing to that point of view, mind you, but I know where it comes from.
Sahara Hotnights -- "Alright Alright"
If Elastica can rip off Wire with arrogance and impunity, why can't these guys rip off Elastica? "Alright Alright" is a straight rewrite of Elastica's "Annie", which is itself a rewrite of a half-dozen other songs. I haven't got a problem with it -- sometimes it's not the musicians playing the riffs, it's the riffs playing the musicians. My only beef is with folks who want to point to "Alright Alright" as an example of a "return to guitar rock", or something dopey like that. These licks are as old as the stones; they worked then, they work now, they're not going anywhere. Sahara Hotnights is their vehicle du jour; tomorrow it could be you.
Sean Paul -- "Gimme The Light"
What the hell is this man saying? I'm not Jamaican or anything, but I've been listening to dancehall emcees for years now, and at the very least I usually can parse a few lines. If I try hard, I can force about ten per cent of Paul's utterances into the general shape of words, but I'll be damned if I can string any of those into sentences. Like everybody else in America, I bop up and down and dance around when this song comes on the radio, but I would like to make sure I'm not tacitly endorsing anything too pernicious. I mean, what if he's chanting "mess up Hoboken" or "American children, the cast of Friends are your role models"? You laugh, but this is how subliminal advertising works; if I see people walking around with Spam on their heads, I know who to haul in for questioning.
Do you know that show they run on MTV2 where one video is pitted against another, and callers determine which one gets to be aired? The clip for this song took on "Underneath It All" by No Doubt a few weeks ago, and trounced it by a good twenty per cent of the vote. Now, I realize that success on these call-in shows is often determined by batteries of obsessive phone junkies organized by the record label. The actual calling might not have taken place at the time of airing, but rather at some hour when only the living dead were conscious. Regardless, there is something deeply wrong with a culture in which people in any context would rather watch this fat dope whine about his misfortune than Gwen Stefani jumping on her bed.
Shakira -- "Objection", "Underneath My Clothes"
If salsa is a bit too island-flavored for mainstream American tastes, merengue simmers with crossover potential. It's abrasive, combative, groove-oriented, masculine; a platform for experimentation and a site of discourse with hip-hop and alternarock. In the late Nineties, groups from Dark Latin Groove to Elvis Crespo and his backing band seemed poised to synthesize merengue with traditional American forms -- and one or two program directors, properly oriented and courageous enough to break the language barrier, could have helped it happen. They didn't, and Latin artists, having gone about as far as they were willing to go, retreated to the islands, self-determination, and musical genres wholly their own. Bachata -- defiantly Caribbean, with very little Anglo influence -- replaced merengue as the dominant Latin American form on American Spanish-language radio. That won't last -- before long this embargo will inevitably fall, and merengue and other crossover forms will come knocking again. Hopefully this time, we won't spurn the gift. Anyway, Shakira ducked the embargo by sidestepping all the dominant Latin genres and releasing a record or two that could easily have been made by Toni Childs. I'm sure she'll do a better job of representing Colombia on future recordings, but in 2002, she was the poster girl for assimilation and total surrender to mainstream Anglo tastes. I don't want to kill her for it, because on a visceral level she's quite likeable, and presumably she didn't pick up a microphone to become an ambassador.
Sheryl Crow -- "Soak Up The Sun"
Sheryl Crow is Liz Phair with a lobotomy. Hmm… that sounds a lot harsher than I meant it; Liz Phair with a lobotomy would still be considerably more intelligent than Jewel or Sara McLaughlin (or Radiohead, for that matter). Her highly technical and experimental song stretching and processing system might be disabled by the icepick, though, and that could cause her to write something like "Soak Up The Sun". Like Phair, Crow knows how to put a track together, and understands the relationship between harmony and accompaniment, but while Phair spikes her songcraft with twists, turns, and vertiginous drops, Crow substitutes obvious and crowd-pleasing compositional resolution. "Soak Up The Sun" was an obvious play for a summertime hit, but then "Supernova" was an equally obvious play for mainstream acceptance.
Compelling trip-rap from Detroit's finest. No, not Eminem, Slum Village -- Motor City mutants following a personal vision. Slum Village's byzantine path to mainstream acknowledgment gives the lie to Eminem's pontifications in "Lose Yourself" -- theirs isn't music made by desperate artists grabbing for the brass ring, it's a laid-back, expansive, and limitless flow; inevitable, a permanent resource to be drawn upon. The knock on Slum Village has always been that they lack urgency, and if urgency and manic intensity is something you require from your hip-hop, you will probably regard "Tainted" as non-confrontational to a fault. But only in the movies and in Marshall Mathers's self-aggrandizing fantasies do you "only get one shot" -- real writers recognize that you get a new shot every day, and that music isn't a vehicle to help you escape, but something that's always there with you.
Snoop Dogg -- "From The Chuuuuch To The Palace"
Urgency, meet thy nemesis. Snoop, indisputably the most relaxed pop star since the heyday of Bread and Jackson Browne, has made a nice career out of his own nonchalance. Every year, it seems, he releases a new record or two without much fanfare, every year it's an enjoyable mid-level hit, and then it's swallowed into the seamless flow of contemporary hip-hop radio. We remember Snoop more as a sound and a set of associations than as a writer and recording artist -- his public image is as indelible as his tracks are disposable. "From The Chuuuuch To The Palace" is a little better than the standard Snoop track, meaning that yes, you can still chill or zone out to it, but it also suffers closer examination. Snoop remains a deft and marvelous emcee -- he never fights the beat, he just slips effortlessly into the pocket and flows so smoothly it's like he's hardly there. Now that's the definition of the mack, mach 2002: so cool he barely exists.
Sum 41 -- "Motivation", "Still Waiting"
Teenage zillionaires and pop-punk royalty, Sum 41 are still insecure enough that they feel a need to attack The Strokes in their videos. And isn't that what it means to be a Californian?, no matter how big your bank is, no matter how many records you sell, you still know in your heart that street kids from NYC have it all over you. Sum 41's "Motivation" video comes from the same swamp of resentment that makes Hollywood production mills crank out movie after movie in which New York City gets blown up.
Talib Kweli -- "Waiting For The DJ"
A grower. Nothing too fancy about the beats or the production, and the lyrics are just okay, but it's the sort of easygoing groove that will probably have you bumping by the third verse. Kweli hasn't gotten much better as an emcee since he was screwing up Black Star cuts, but he's sanded down some of his more annoying tics. I think that's Bilal singing the chorus.
More ominous nu-metal posturing. Pretty good, for that; the singer's a little more winning than what you usually get in this sort of music, and the rhythm section plays with the requisite ferocity. This is a good time to do a quick roundup of other rock tunes of 2002 that I was exposed to, but didn't care enough about either way to catch the name of the song, the name of the group, or both. Okaaay… Exies: kinda silly, big kicking showgirl chorus (with no girls, of course), sub-Cher vocal effect on the verses. Chevelle: catchy, nice grinding bass sound, slavish adherence to Nirvana logic. Breaking Benjamin: I think this one is called "Polyamorous", the singer is so ridiculous with his ar-ar Jimmy Cagney voice that I kinda like him, explosive, fun singalong chorus. The song/video that goes "I remember every word you saaaay!" in which the band is imprisoned in a tumbling concrete cube: fun! They're all about as good as the Taproot track; probably too angst-ridden for my taste, but satisfactory by current (low) radio rock standards.
The Hives -- "Hate To Say I Told You So"
Speaking of low standards, here are The Hives: a bunch of Swedish rock poseurs with decent energy and a retro-groovy record collection who were anointed rock saviors for no explicable reason. "Hate To Say I Told You So" has the hump-on-one-note melodic approach that seems to be in favor among "hard" garage rockers these days, a spazz-out vocal performance, by-the-numbers guitar leads, and asinine lyrics that I am charitably assuming were a casualty of translation. You could walk into Luxx any Wednesday night and watch three to four groups do this better. See also: The Vines.
The Mooney Suzuki -- "In A Young Man's Mind"
Enjoyable, infectious, yet also intelligence-insulting. The Daily News recently ran an interview with Mooney Suzuki in which the group invoked their art-school training, suggesting they had learned "the importance of minimalism". Thus they claim to have willfully limited themselves to a palette of a few notes and chords. Fancy rhetorical move, that; I'm going to trot it out the next time I don't feel like trying very hard.
The Roots -- "Break You Off" (with Musiq)
Still more kitchen-sink drama from the Radiohead of hip-hop. Urban sophisticates and dilettante cosmopolitans love the roots because 1.) their songs are dark and angst-ridden, so they seem, superficially, to be more serious than those of mainstream party and G-rap emcees, 2.) they make a show at discussing "issues", so a person with an ersatz political consciousness can spin the roots and feel like he's somehow engaging with black struggle, and 3.) the group's fanatical and atavistic insistence on playing their own instruments live to tape (not that you'd ever be able to tell) gives a raging hard-on to anti-sampling purists, intellectual property law fascists, and fetishists of originality. Everything about The Roots is designed to make people who don't like or understand hip-hop conventions feel morally and intellectually superior to those who do. But for all their insistence on the principles of "true" hip-hop, The Roots appear to have been absent from class the day a crucial underpinning element was explained: humor, irony, satire. Nobody this poker-faced has any business modeling behavior for other deejays and emcees. Seen from a certain perspective, they are by far the most unsophisticated group in mainstream hip-hop -- rendered unable by their own self-important crusade to execute the simplest pun, gag, or shred of wordplay.
The Shins -- "Know Your Onion!"
It amazes me that I know people who will, with a straight face, criticize a Neptunes track for being formulaic, but then turn around and praise The Shins. "Know Your Onion!" is a great single, but everything about it was lifted straight from Kinks and Syd Barrett records, and it's as strict an exercise in formalism as anything done by Swizz Beats, or Motley Crue. James Mercer writes lyrics in a lovely, rambling poetic voice -- though it must be said that this touching geek-survival anthem would seem more effective if he hadn't sold his songs to the advertising industry. Real outsiders don't shill for McDonalds.
Beyond the indelible melody and the Smiths-hop beat, what have you got here? Not very much. The Strokes don't have the sonic grandeur of Interpol, they lack the wattage and tightness of Oneida or the Brought Low, the musicianship and harmonic sophistication of The Realistics eludes them, they don't experiment successfully with form as the Negatones do, or stretch the parameters of pop-song melodicism like Palomar. But if "drums and vocals on top" is still the formula for mainstream success, it was inevitable in retrospect that the Strokes would be the group to surface from the NYC rock underground. Just as the "best man" is infrequently the best choice to be President, the "best band" is rarely the best bet to spearhead a movement, or to serve as ambassadors from a subcultural scene to the rest of the world. The Strokes certainly weren't the city's best band when Is This It was recorded, and though they've improved, they're not too much closer to the summit right now. They remain what they always have been -- a crafty little rock and roll act, and one entirely worthy of carrying the city's flag from Bedford Avenue and the Lower East Side to the hearts and malls of Middle America and abroad. Standard-bearer for any city's rock movement is a tough job, and not one that a musician can pull off through sheer force of aesthetic skill. The Strokes are acquitting themselves well so far, and reflecting positively on our city. Would your favorite NYC group have done the same?
The Vines -- "Get Free", "Outtathaway!"
See also: The Hives. "Get Free" is a better song than "Hate To Say I Told You So" (mainly because the lyric is more than a blurt), but both suffer from the same malady -- monotonous one-note melodies. Somebody must have told these new rock groups that it's uncool to change pitch while you're singing a song. Now, the Seeds and the MC5 had actual melodies that you could trace out on a piece of staff paper; nothing that would impress Stravinsky, sure, but you could still see some evidence of internal variation. So we can't blame the source texts. My guess is that this is yet another misinterpretation of hip-hop -- white rock singers, incapable of hearing emcees' deliveries as tonally inflected, may have decided that it's rad to deliver Johnny One-Note performances. Some may hear the relentlessness as a sign of insistence, strenuousness, or urgency; to me, it's just a simple lack of imagination.
The White Stripes -- "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", "Fell In Love With A Girl"
See, these guys aren't too cool to sing melodies. They're all tethered to the blues scale, and they ain't too groundbreaking, but they're effective, and they are coupled with interesting lyrics. I don't ask for much. A bass player would be nice, though.
Thicke -- "When I Get You Alone"
I'm fully aware that I can be contrary. But I don't think I'm a contrarian first and a critic second; I hold contrary positions on subjects that I believe the rock critical establishment has stopped bothering to think about. To say there is a critical consensus that elevates the White Stripes above someone like Thicke is to state the absurdly obvious, and I won't disagree with that consensus. Over the course of a full-length album -- which is still pop music's best unit of aesthetic value -- of course the White Stripes are going to be more interesting and rewarding than Thicke. But a singles artist needs to be as brilliant as he can be in three minutes and then get the hell out, and "When I Get You Alone" does that as well as anything on the radio this year. Thicke samples Beethoven, laces it over an R&B groove, and unleashes all the soul man ballistics at his disposal, which turn out to be more than enough for the job. I would not rather hear "Hotel Yorba" in the mix, or at a club, or on the radio. It serves an entirely different function, one I consider aesthetically important, but not quite as culturally valuable.
Carrying on without L, T and C continue down that well-lit, four lane highway toward digital obsolescence. Their sound (with the exception of the great "Waterfalls", which will be their legacy) has always been plastic; lately, it's become brittle. The emergence of TLC was one of the first signals marking Atlanta's rise to cultural importance -- is the ossification of TLC a harbinger of the city settling into complacency?
Tori Amos -- "A Sorta Fairytale"
In which Scarlet takes a ride from California into the haunted New Mexico desert, and loses her boyfriend along the way. Roughly ten thousand other things happen in the song, too, but you'd have a hard time piecing it together from the single version -- not only are you up against Amos's notorious vocal swoops and bizarre phrasing, but the label decided to snip a verse. I guess they were thinking this would make it more palatable for Dawson's Creek, and a touching scene where Joey and Pacey make love while Amos sings about cultural desecration and genocide.
Trina -- "B R Right" (with Ludacris)
I don't want to short Ms. Trina, who's a fine potty-mouthed Southern emcee in her own right, but is Ludacris not the greatest guest performer in pop music history? James Taylor did some vital guest spots on Joni Mitchell and Carole King records, sure, but would anybody have really known the difference if he'd been replaced at the last minute by, say, David Crosby or John Sebastian? Ludacris announces his presence with authority -- you'd never mistake him for anyone else -- and then transforms tracks by assuming characters. On the remix of "Made You Look", he drawls a circle around Nas, illuminating the Queensbridge poet's hidden silly streak and even managing to fracture his reserve. On "Gossip Folks" Luda's back in his country-preacher role, updating "Children's Story" with a cautionary tale that turns braggadocious, all with impeccable timing. "B R Right" is just plain old sex talk, a Ludacris specialty, but he manages to create genuine naughty chemistry with Trina -- they reinforce each other's playfulness and exuberance. My favorite raunchy couplet of the year is here, too: "Tell me that you like it raw/tell me that my dick is mwah!" No, really!, it's funny, if you, like Ludacris, accompany it with a kiss noise. It's… ah, hell, forget it. Like his forebear Sir Mix-A-Lot, Ludacris can't really be translated to print.
Tupac -- "Thugz Mansion" (with Nas)
The conspiracy theorists are right, he's chilling on a Caribbean island. A triple album of new material? Close to ten years after his "death"? what kind of work ethic did Tupac have, anyway? Well, maybe he did do nothing but record rhymes all day -- that's not the inconceivable part. What's impossible to believe is that the label sat on this poignant life-after-death meditation for years. "Thugz Mansion" is precisely the kind of heartrending mush they rush to the stores before the ink dries on the obit. I smell a rat.
Still more Southernplayalistic-hallucination music, courtesy of the Timbaland-Elliott axis of chicken and grits hysteria. Tweet can't fill Aaliyah's shoes -- because nobody can -- but as a stopgap, she'll do.
It's nice to know he's still kicking around. Twista made his name in the very early Nineties by being the "fastest" emcee, rhyming at lightning pace with superhuman elocution. Back then, he was called Tung Twista, and though his rhymes said very little, his priorities (speed, visceral thrills) spoke volumes about the competitive and agonistic direction that hip-hop was taking. Rapid-fire emceeing requires similarly spastic production, and "Tattoo" finds Twista in a tight Miami vice, spitting Luke-style lyrics over an equally Luke-style track. I can't argue, particularly with the final verse, where the stop-on-a-dime, sinuous performance takes on a bizarre, mechanized feel; absurdly quick, purposelessly acrobatic, hypnotic as any feat of athletic excellence. The Yngwie Malmsteen of hip-hop.
Usher -- "You Don't Have To Call"
The third of three excellent R&B singles from Usher's second album. Usher doesn't get a lot of respect, but he's a superior singer and dancer, and he's been blessed with strong material. My guess is that within three years, he'll have made the classic neo-soul album that pretenders like Bilal and Musiq keep flailing at.
Vanessa Carlton -- "A Thousand Miles", "Ordinary Day"
Big, cinematic piano productions from a small young woman who evidently believes that Billy Joel, and not Elvis Presley, is the king of rock and roll. But some critical errors are best understood as a kind of public service by the inherent validity of oddball dissent, and it's about time somebody lifted the piano break from "Summer, Highland Falls". Joel's dedication to narrative and catholic arrangement sensibility would be welcome on hit radio (at least by me), and Carlton does her best to import them. She's not quite up to the task -- she doesn't really know how to write a character yet, and her singles don't contain much internal variation. But she's young, and she's working on it. I'm hopeful.
Weezer -- "Dope Nose", "Keep Fishin'"
There were no radio singles from X-Clan, Yellowman, or ZZ Top this year, so this discussion ends here. Hey, you made it to the end, and so did I. If you skipped around, or you're the kind of reader who prefers to hunt for the main idea, go back and read the Missy Elliott, Eve, Nappy Roots, and New Found Glory comments. If you, like me, are junkies for dense text, you probably hacked your way straight through the thicket. I thank you. It's my hope that you now understand why I'd take three nights of staying up late to engage with these songs, and why I think it's worth your while, too. On its own, a Weezer track -- or a track by any other group -- can be evaluated aesthetically, as an artifact: we can say it sounds like Sloan, or that Rivers Cuomo is a nice singer (he is), or that his songwriting has improved since Pinkerton, or become simpler, or has fallen off a cliff. And that's what most rock criticism does: it assesses recordings as formal, decontextualized artworks, there to be compared to other artworks in a constellation of associated but comparable objects. But put that song on the radio, and suddenly the context broadens: suddenly, the record is an explicit participant in a cultural discourse, simultaneously a broadcast and reflection of our values, preferences and beliefs. How do we map the psychology of our nation, in any given year? Do we take polls, or visit malls, or do as Tori Amos did and drive from state to state? Well, I suppose we could. But there's a great civic parliament that exists everywhere (and nowhere), and that parliament is popular radio. It houses representatives from all over the world, voices of all ages and all income brackets making arguments, calling each other out, elbowing each other for floor space, making long speeches and declarations, declaiming, insulting, praising, holding firm. And how do we observe this politas in action? We don't have to book a tour, or visit every congressional district. All we have to do is tune in, and listen.
I'm a slave to a page in your rhyme book. Where my gangsters at? Where my dimes at?