The Tris McCall Report

2004 Pop Music Abstract

Rising again.

Air -- "Surfing On A Rocket"

Uninspired movies starring the Baldwin brothers often go straight to DVD; increasingly, uninspired pieces of pop music have headed straight to Madison Avenue. This vapid piece of Euroschlock was used to pitch a line of mini-vans -- apparently Moby was busy the day Nissan was handing out contracts, so Msrs. Dunckel and Godin seized the opportunity to get in touch with their inner automobile salesmen. I thought Moon Safari was pretty cool, too, but that was years ago, and eventually these guys are going to have to decide if they want to be rockers or hucksters. No, you can't have it both ways.

Akon -- "Ghetto"

Litany-of-social-problems R&B songs go back at least as far as What's Going On, and are just never any good. Gunshots and crooked cops, jail, drug dealing, hopelessness, despair; AIDS wasn't around during the early Seventies, but if it had been, chances are that Marvin Gaye would have found room for a line about it. "Ghetto" feels particularly pro-forma, like some social-studies teacher with a checklist was standing over the songwriter's shoulder, grading for comprehensiveness, and its subject matter corresponds to the lived experience of absolutely nobody. It doesn't help that Akon sings like someone Peter Gabriel dug out of the basement of the MOMA. But even if he sounded like DMX, this one would ring phony.

Alchemist (w/Nina Sky) -- "Hold You Down"

Sometimes it's easy to forget that Jay-Z devoted a whole verse of the "Takeover" to Prodigy. It's a reminder that it wasn't that long ago when any discussion of New York's rap title had to include Mobb Deep. These days, even The Infamous sounds a little quaint in its relentless adherence to a rigid G-rap model, and Prodigy's subsequent attempts to extend his conceptual reach have ended in bizarre excess, incoherence, or both. The Alchemist handled production chores on the colorless H.N.I.C., and here, Prodigy returns the "favor" by adding a monotonous couple of verses to his beatmeister's debut single. Here he is, mumbling about how many bullets he's managed to collect, trying to act menacing, but instead sounding like the doddering old pack rat he's become. The chorus redeems everything, though. Nina Sky could sing the hook to every song on the radio, and that still wouldn't be enough Nina Sky for me.

Alicia Keys -- "If I Ain't Got You", "Karma"

Keys is one of my favorite pop stars, but I now see her rafting down the Rio de Sinead O'Connor. In the rush to validate her first record, we overlooked some pretty big flaws in her game, and gave her a flier on some clichéd, artless lyrics. Now that she's moved on to the I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got stage, she's in full command of her musical arsenal, but she's under the misapprehension that her well-worn platitudes require no further interrogation. So, like O'Connor, her penchant for stridently-sung vapidity has gotten worse on her second album. No matter how adorable she might look in her turquoise jumpsuit and braids, no matter how smoothly or passionately she discharges her lines, "what goes around comes around/what goes up must come down" is just not a chorus worthy of her talent. People do not remember that O'Connor was in the process of throwing away her empire even before she ripped up that picture of the Pope: nobody was pushing her to examine her content or check herself, and eventually she was swamped by her own unbridled pomposity. Somebody needs to grab Keys and reorient her before she releases an album of standards, raps about the potato famine, and overdoses on antidepressants.

Anthony Hamilton -- "Charlene"

Lest you think I'm going to spend this Abstract slamming everything, I want to get it on the record right now that I think 2004 was the best year for radio singles since the late Eighties. None of the good ones was put out by anybody whose name starts with the letter "A," though, so we're starting with the mediocre properties and streaking toward daylight from there. Hamilton is a middling crooner with a husky delivery, and this is his little one-act melodrama about how following his muse -- what he calls "this music thing" -- has cost him his girl. Sad, sure, but all things considered, I would rather listen to "Funky Ceili." Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, and like Black '47, I think.

Ashanti -- "Only U"

Jane of all voices, master of none. Over the past three years, Ashanti has ineptly ventriloquized Janet Jackson and Beyoncé Knowles; and now she approximates that whiny, Billie Holiday style that is currently in vogue, and does so over an Eighties-pop synth guitar riff that also sounds suitably market-tested. Expect her to cut a Rachel Warren soundalike track if Palomar keeps selling records. As faceless as major pop stars come.

Ashlee Simpson -- "Pieces Of Me"

In '87, I saw U2 at the Pier in Manhattan, and half of the Edge's parts were played over the P.A. on a prepared tape. I fail to see the distinction between this common practice and Simpson's decision to lip-synch her vocals on Saturday Night Live. In general, I don't understand why this woman raises so much ire. If she wants to concentrate on her dancing and mincing about, consider her core demographic, and give her a break. "Pieces Of Me" is not going to upend your world, but it's a pretty decent pop song, and is at any rate a hell of a lot better than the dreck her sister cranks out.

Bowling For Soup -- "1985"

I confess to a huge soft spot for the writer behind this band. All of his songs are featureless slabs of commercial pop-punk, but Jared Reddick's smirking, hyper-suburban perspective is amusing enough to drag his unit over to the territory usually stalked by the likes of Weird Al and the hacks who write song parodies for Z-100. Yes, I mean that as a compliment. "1985" is an effective satirical piece about getting hypnotized by nostalgia; if it doesn't have quite the bite of "Stacy's Mom Has Got It Going On" (a song it, um, really, really resembles), it feels a lot more direct and pertinent than anything else done this year by radio-friendly white guys with electric guitars. All emo symphonies aside, when Reddick sings "when did Ozzy become an actor?/please make this stop," now, there's despair that everybody can identify with.

Bright Eyes -- "Lua"

I read these articles about this great new act out of Omaha, Nebraska, but the writers keep misspelling Tilly and the Wall as "C-o-n-o-r O-b-e-r-s-t." In the future, the spellcheck feature on MS Word will be refined enough to catch these things; for now, you've got to depend on me.

Britney Spears -- "Toxic"

The song comes from former D-Mob cutie Cathy Dennis; yes, she of the best haircuts of the 1990s. Dennis also wrote "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" for Kylie Minogue, so apparently she amuses herself in high-Nico style by conflating obsessive love and drug addiction. But Spears doesn't sound intoxicated here. Rather, she sets herself up as a Bond chick -- sultry and even a little mysterious -- and snaps off her words on the chorus with a kind of command that could never be registered by a woman under the influence. The Bloodshy production team contributes two monster hooks: an action movie guitar riff and a dizzy string sample that sounds like it was lifted from an Indian pop album. Much was made in '98 of her kid-sister status to acts like the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync, but Spears now has as many top-drawer hit singles to her name as any of her contemporaries -- and unlike those peers of hers, she's shown she can do it without Max Martin's guidance. Spears is reputedly taking some time off to have a baby, get settled somewhere, and do whatever it is that megastars do when they're exhausted by their own success. I hope she recuperates fast, because nobody -- not even Nas or Jay-Z -- has been as reliable a hitmaker.

Cake -- "No Phone"

Don't confuse jock rock with frat rock. Just as frat guys are superficially educated and upwardly-mobile jocks, frat-rock is jock rock with social pretensions. Jock rock is simple, straightforward, masculinist; frat-rock adds either a patina of irony, or musical sophistication. The Dave Matthews Band, for instance, is frat-rock: the group indulges in displays of virtuosity, which looks like a kind of professionalism to the frat guy. There's an optimism underpinning DMB records that also goes down well in the frat house -- these guys expect to graduate and get good-paying jobs, and they don't need Stuart Murdoch bumming them out. Most contemporary rock criticism is written by guys who ran like hell from the frat house, so, unsurprisingly, frat-rock gets thrashed by reviewers. Cake, for instance, has taken a pounding from critics for years. Cake is unmistakably a frat-rock act: their songs can be dark, but they're always rendered accessible by an ironic-collegiate wit, and in their small way, they constantly call attention to their muso indulgences. The guys in the group take great pains to ensure that their songs have substantial internal variation -- a second verse will always contain new musical elements, or modifications of riffs from the first verse. Instrumentalists switch parts, horns are substituted for guitar licks, themes re-occur, change slightly, deviate, recombine. There is usually no objective correlative to all this cleverness -- it exists to amuse the listener, and to generate a low-grade intellectual experience. It feels superficial, uneconomical, exercises in wasted thought, like frat-guys spinning out well-calibrated haikus about sexual conquests for their mutual delight. As hipster listeners, we are supposed to prefer the approach of, say, Chan Marshall, who absolutely will not play a part on her guitar that does not serve the gestalt of the song. This minimalism and restraint is supposed to be proof of her singlemindedness, her commitment, her drive to communicate. I appreciate it in theory, but in practice, it can get kinda boring. I would much rather throw on a Cake record than a Cat Power record, and if that suggests to you that I am a privileged white guy who would rather spend my time doing puzzles and brain teasers than exposing myself to raw emotion, well, I can't defend myself on that score. But I will defend Jon McCrea, an outstanding, complex, and richly associative lyricist whose body of work has been largely ignored by critics who will not engage with his band. I also want to defend Xan McCurdy, a six-string artist whose geometric approach suggests a way forward for rock guitarists who cannot think beyond the B-DARG. Keith Olbermann was also an annoying, clever-clever, self-indulgent frat-house favorite, but you can't tell me that anybody is better off now that he's no longer anchoring SportsCenter.

Chingy -- "Balla Baby"

Because he is from St. Louis, has a sing-song flow, and is an unrepentant pop-rapper, Chingy is often considered a Nelly copy act. I'd like to be able to challenge this, just because I am a contrary cuss, but I really can't -- this guy rips off Nelly whenever he can, right down to his "herrr"-heavy inflection. He is not a good writer: there is very little poetry in his rhymes, and he averages one cringeworthy line per verse. He's nothing special as an emcee, either -- he doesn't take many chances, and rarely bothers to extend a rhythmic pattern past a couple of bars. But if this is replacement-level entertainment in 2004, we're doing pretty well. Chingy is pleasant, consistently amusing, and is perfectly acceptable in three-minute doses. Just don't try to spin me the album.

Ciara -- "Goodies", "1, 2, Step"

The new Paula Abdul -- a dancer turned singer with spazz-out energy to burn and a vocal range of about three notes. Jazze Pha does his best while working around her limitations, lobbing her songs that don't really require her to change tones while singing. Both "Goodies" and "1, 2, Step" are essentially "Cold Hearted Snake": effective funk workouts that employ hyperactive beats and accompaniment to mask melodies that are really, really monotonous. Ciara coos her way through the tracks as best she can, and then dances in a sinuous, oddly disturbing style reminiscent of Gumby. Missy Elliott phones in a brain-dead four-line rap on "1, 2, Step" -- if she got paid anything for it, expect the D.A. with jurisdiction over the Dirty South to move to indict for grand larceny.

De La Soul -- "Shopping Bags"

It's tough to argue that De La has ever had good gender politics -- "Bitties In The BK Lounge" is by some measure the most gynophobic song in rap history, and is certainly among the most vile and graphic. But I heard in "Bitties" a genuine attempt to give Shashawna -- the object of derision -- a perspective and a voice. If the song concludes with a vicious dismissal of her, she gets a few shots of her own in there, and some even feel like they stick. Now, there's no ledger keeping track of the musical battle of the sexes, and even if there were, nasty rap songs about women outnumber nasty songs about men by an unrecoverable margin. It's not up to De La Soul or anybody else to balance the scales, because that can't be done. But where I once believed De La had an advantage over the rest of American rappers, it wasn't in their progressive ideology, but in something more important: a reluctance to ever take the same position that anybody else was taking. That meant that in '91, when everybody was smacking hos, Posdnuos was resolute in his refusal to follow suit. Instead, he crafted his own personal off-the-wall misogynist scenario: he's behind the counter at Burger King, and his authority as the "manager" is challenged by a rude and spoiled young woman. His customer is, in some important way, driving the altercation. Or perhaps she isn't. But in any case, it's weird -- it's different, it was unlike anything that was taking place in rap at the time, and that fact alone made it feel subversive. Now, "Shopping Bags" is a pretty sweet production, and Pos and Dove are, as always, intelligent and observant: nobody bangs together metaphors with the same finesse. But no matter their acuity here: by rehashing the same old saws about gold-digging and price tags that we've all heard on thousands of rap and R&B records over the past fifteen years, for once, De La sounds like everybody else. And that, to me, feels like a much greater compromise and offense than the Massengill jokes and the off-color remarks about womens' genitalia on the second album. "Shopping Bags" might be far less venomous than "Bitties" was, but because it is so standard in its ideology, it feels much more troubling. It doesn't do what De La Soul is supposed to do -- challenge expectations, and gleefully tear up the social fabric. It fails to force listeners to think differently.

Destiny's Child -- "Lose My Breath", "Soldier"

During wartime, the entertainment industry has always done its best to eroticize fighting men. "Soldier" is, ostensibly, about the appreciation of street style. But in 2004, it's impossible to sing "I need a soldier that ain't scared to stand up for me" without making a tacit statement about armed intervention abroad. With menacing beats that sound like a face-off between marine drill teams, "Lose My Breath" recasts sex as a challenge, a battle, an athletic competition. Her uncharacteristically sappy turn with Jay-Z notwithstanding, Beyoncé Knowles is a fighter, not a lover. The natural standard-bearer for the new agonism, Knowles has, on some unconscious level, always been a USO performer looking for troops to entertain. Now she's got some. Meanwhile, Michelle Williams, the group's latest third wheel, is the most artiforg-sounding vocalist since the heyday of Aaliyah. But while the immortal Ms. Haughton had the sexy android bit down cold, Williams just sounds like bad voice imitation software. Her sections of these songs can't be over fast enough.

Diana Krall -- "Narrow Daylight"

The friendly, bruised half-smile that The Girl In The Other Room presents to radio listeners. Unlike the rest of the Krall/Costello originals on the album, "Narrow Daylight" isn't really a wrist-slitting depressive jazz tune -- it's a gospel song with ravaged but vaguely hopeful lyrics. Nonetheless, it kicks off the harrowing last third of Girl, culminating in "Departure Bay," a vivid Joni Mitchell rewrite about rain, mud, the death of Krall's mother, and general Canadian horribleness. Adult contemporary fans expecting to hear the singer who breezed her way through "They Can't Take That Away From Me" and "42nd Street" will be bewildered, and will surely blame McManus. It's nobody's fault, but they'll need somebody to burn.

Elvis Costello -- "Monkey To Man"

Elsewhere during '04, Mr. Diana Krall returned to the business of cranky rock and roll. "Monkey To Man" is a broadside against the human race delivered by a critical ape; it's well-written, but obvious. Because it's Costello, it's brilliantly sung and played, but there's also something disposable about it, and I can't help but feel like this is territory he's covered in the past. Then again, put out twenty-seven albums and chances are you're going to start repeating yourself.

Eminem -- "Mosh", "White America"

When you're the biggest rapper in the country, it's difficult to have delusions of grandeur: you'd figure that there's nowhere to go but down. Yet judging by the lyrics of these rants (I hesitate to call them songs, since they're the most unmusical things you'll hear on the radio all year), Eminem has decided that he is not a pop star at all, but instead a transformative social leader meant to lead a battalion of epigones against the power structure. That he has sold himself on this absurd fantasy is frightening enough -- what's even more chilling is the Koresh-style messianic rhetoric he uses to discuss his relationship to his fanbase: "I never would have dreamed in a million years I'd see/ so many motherfucking people who feel like me/ who share the same views and the same exact beliefs/ It's like a fucking army marchin' in back of me." Uh, okay, Marshall, whatever you say. He sets his inchoate quasipolitical scenarios to grim, colorless music, and raps slowly and without inflection in a low, throaty growl. Even his nastiest songs used to be a guilty pleasure; these days, an Eminem track feels like a chore to get through while you're waiting for the next Mannie Fresh video. I wish he would just run for office as a Green already, and get the hell off the airwaves.

Fabolous -- "Breathe"

Then again, any airspace vacated would probably just go to Fabolous and "Breathe"; go on, turn on Hot-97 right now, you know it's playing. This is a big improvement over his prior singles, right down to the Supertramp sample and the promise to ride up on his doubters "like they escalators." He still doesn't have anything interesting to say, but he's turning into a pretty deft radio emcee, and he's proven before that he can discharge other people's metaphors at least as well as President Bush can. No complaints here.

Franz Ferdinand -- "This Fire"

Just a big, dumb rock song. Franz Ferdinand wins points from brainy types because they're fey and vaguely identifiable as college students, but when you take the album and shake it, the only idea that falls out is that the frontman would like to have sex with his male acquaintances. Yeah, yeah, I hear that from everybody these days. The band you are looking for is Interpol.

Ghostface (w/Missy Elliott) -- "Tush", "Biscuits"

Not to bring you down or anything, but it takes a special sort of person to have a radio hit, and that person is not you. You need to contrive a personality bold enough to become iconic, yet it must be sufficiently ambiguous so it can appeal to folks all over a very large and polyglot country. Often, this means taking the personality you currently have and dumping it in the trash can, and replacing it with something cooked up by a team of social scientists in the employ of BMG. It's a strangely egoless act, and if you yourself have a big ego -- and I know you do -- you probably aren't going to be malleable enough to undergo the procedure. Look at Ghostface. From "Cherchez La Ghost" to Bulletproof Wallets, this guy has been trying to have a radio hit for years now. He can't do it, and it's not because he isn't a superior emcee -- it's because like everybody else from the Wu save Meth, his personality is too barbed, off-putting, and downright weird for mass consumption. (The popular reception of ODB among white American listeners is a sad chapter that I won't get into here, but I tend to think of it as a quintessential exception that proves the rule.) "Tush," a duet with Missy Elliott, is his latest flailing attempt to reach the Billboard charts; like many of his songs, it's primarily about how Ghost is very horny. Never mind that the image of Ghostface and Elliott actually having sex with each other is ghastly enough to make all the clocks stop from Shaolin to Virginia -- the track is far too bugged for club spins, and is no more likely to turn up on a mainstream playlist than the ten-minute "Quay Cur" by the Fiery Furnaces. You're better off sticking with "Biscuits," the street burner from Pretty Toney; here, Ghost sings a KRS-tuneless chorus, rhymes about his testacles, shoots a few competitors, fantasizes about getting shipped to Iraq, and demands a banana Nutriment. Mr. Starks cannot slip comfortably into anybody's iconography, and that's why we love him.

Gold Chains & Sue Cie -- "California Nites"

They're supposed to be electroclash play-rappers, and their reputation for bratty insouciance precedes them, but there's no discernable emceeing on this single. It's possible that they mean to be rapping but don't know how, but I don't really think it matters much: neither Gold Chains nor Sue Cie have any pro vocal skill at all, so whether they're singing, rapping, or intoning Gregorian chants, chances are they're not doing it convincingly. But the history of indiepop is strewn with accidental masterworks recorded by the talentless-yet-inspired, and on this recording at least, the duo is pretty damn charming. "California Nites" has a good singalong chorus and a great bass-line, and is better fake Prince than anything on The Love Below. You have to commend their West Coast loyalism, too: these two understand that repping your block is the first thing you have to do if you want to be taken seriously in hip-hop. Everything else is negotiable.

Green Day -- "American Idiot"

They get points for persistence, anyway: twelve years since the debut, they're still blasting out the same three-chord riff rock, still broadcasting the same mildly antiestablishment sentiment, still sneering and posing for the cameras like cartoon versions of Seventies punks. Green Day has been above average for so long that they've made themselves forgettable -- they do what they do, they don't make unforced errors, their predictable songs get a few spins on the radio, some rebellious eighth graders write the reductive lyrics on their notebooks, and then they go back into the studio for the next go-round. "American Idiot" is supposed to be the political statement and intervention in Decision '04, but it's nothing you didn't hear out of Billy Joe ten years ago. If this song shifted a single vote from George Bush column to the John Kerry column, I'm Stiv Bators.

Hayden -- "Hollywood Ending"

One weedy acoustic guitar, one drummer, one trumpeter, one low-key singer, a lyric that reads like the product of hallucinations brought on by too much late-night television, one Sixties pop "da-da" chorus, three chords and the relative minor. "Hollywood Ending" starts out with a hitchhiker's fantasy and winds up something like a California paranoiac's reimagining of "The Tell-Tale Heart". Hayden sounds delighted throughout, especially when the scenario gets disconcerting. If this one didn't make him a lo-fi, alt-campfire superstar, nothing will.

Interpol -- "Slow Hands"

The main reason the comparisons don't hold water is that Joy Division was never funny. Interpol, by contrast, are an absolute hoot -- and no, I do not think there is anything inadvertent about it, pal. For instance, the second verse of "Slow Hands" opens like this: "I submit my incentive is romance/I watch the pole dance of the stars." Wait, there's more. "You make me want to pick up a guitar/and celebrate the myriad ways that I love you." You just can't arrive at this kind of hilarity accidentally; I mean, really, Paul, myriad? There are lots of Kaplan and Princeton Review instructors kicking around the Williamsburg club scene, but most of them leave the prep books at the office. Ian Curtis was doped up on a cocktail of illicit pharmaceuticals, epilepsy medication, and manic depression; Banks clearly gets high off of his own thesaurus. Ten years from now, the only Interpol song anybody is going to be able to sing back to you is the doo-wop number that opens Antics. But I don't hold their inability to write pop hooks against them -- they can leave that ticky-tacky stuff to The Strokes. Interpol is all about rocking the Myriad, and sallying boldly and stupidly forth into the glorious, painful, shit-eating world of big city art rock. They love New York, and more than any other rock band, they reflect back its virtues and faults: its grandiosity, its complexity, its technical excellence, its maddening intellectual pretensions, its cold grey textures, its arch, literate humor. You'd love it here too if you were, as they are, the best group in town.

Iron & Wine -- "Naked As We Came"

The commercial spearhead of the acid folk movement, the straightforward and morbid Sam Beam really doesn't share all that much with Sufjan Stevens or Devendra Banhart: but he does sound a little like Garfunkel, just as Stevens sounds like Garfunkel, and just as Elliott Smith before them sounded like Garfunkel. In fact, sounding like Garfunkel was the surest ticket to indiepop success in 2004. Beats ten years ago when male vocalists had to disgorge a lung to get on the radio, but really, I have to think we might be overcompensating a little. I know we all grew up with the Greatest Hits album on 8-track or cassette, and we all learned "Sounds Of Silence" on guitar, but Art Garfunkel should not be exerting this much influence over contemporary music. Consider: he barely exerted any influence over Paul Simon.

Ja Rule (w/ Fat Joe & Jadakiss) -- "New York"

What a waste of a perfectly good BDP reference. The local B-team assembles to flex their credentials and remind everybody that they're Gothamites. Do you care? I certainly don't. There is very little in the song about New York -- instead, the rappers are more interested in talking about themselves, and in garnering recognition that's meant to automatically accrue to them because of their metro addresses. This is the sort of provincialism that pissed off Ras Kass on "Sonset", and I quote: "respect due to the pioneers/but what your borough did in '83 is ancient history, brah." Jadakiss gets off a cute line about being "in the hood like them low motorcycles", and I like Joe's boast about how his pinky has bling like the ring around Saturn, but beyond that, this one is a washout.

Jadakiss -- "U Make Me Wanna", "Why"

If you haven't heard "Dirty Kuffar" by Shiekh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew, and you're not worried about the Justice Department confiscating your hard drive, you should take the time to watch and listen. It's actually a pretty good song: it employs a decent riddim, the Shiekh himself turns out to be a perfectly okay Jamaican-style rapper, and it's much better produced than those ratty Al-Qaeda tapes that look like they were made in seventh-grade AV class. But what has made the track a 'net sensation (and, it turns out, a pretty big word-of-mouth seller in Britain, which ought to scare the hell out of Tony Blair) is that it's the most prominent musical expression of the radical Islamist position. We are all familiar enough with the psychology of topical verse to recognize the effectiveness of "Dirty Kuffar": no matter what you think of the Devil's music, if you yourself are an anti-American fundamentalist maniac, this song is going to get you pretty pumped up. The more squeamish culture cops among us will want to set aside First Amendment objections and attempt to suppress it in the name of sealed borders, but it's not like "Kuffar" has not had its many homegrown analogues. Paris, the Bush killa himself, aimed his own hijacked plane at the White House on the cover of Sonic Jihad, Immortal Technique gets "strapped like Lee Malvo" against the U.S. government on "Bin Laden"; hell, these days, Eminem talks about the Illuminati so much you'd think he was Robert Anton Wilson. KRS-ONE stoop up at the New Yorker festival and said that America needed to commit suicide to save the world. KRS says a lot of stuff, sure, and he has long been paid to play the part of the outrageous black studies professor, perpetually agitating and contradicting himself -- he is an extreme outlier, and certainly does not represent mainstream pop culture. But if Jadakiss's "Why" shows us anything, it's that no matter how many songs Clear Channel sticks on its "do not air" list, modern entertainers do not feel uncomfortable floating controversial polemics and conspiracy theories. Jada's wild indictment of the federal government was not meant to be the focus of his song -- it was just another throwaway line buried in the second verse between speculation about Aaliyah and Kobe Bryant. That many high-profile rap stations kept a track asking "why did Bush knock down the towers?" in heavy rotation for weeks is a pretty powerful argument against the existence of corporate censorship. I recognize this might instead suggest to you that nobody bothers to pay attention to anything Jadakiss says, but that's not really the point: he's not a bomb-thrower or dissident, he's a former member of the Lox whose principal objective is keeping his mug on MTV. He wasn't afraid to toss off a gigantic accusation against the current administration, and his listeners were, on the whole, unfazed. The label sent out an expurgated version, sure, but that wasn't John Ashcroft on the cut -- blame the Ruff Ryders for that compromise, not the PMRC. Does this mean that the Patriot Act is all bark and no bite? I'll tell you what I think: I think the Bush Administration is perfectly happy with all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Why? Because those theories perpetuate the idea that Bush was in control of the situation that day. They deflect from what is the much more likely circumstance: that the Bush Administration, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, and the U.S. military were all caught with their pants down. I believe this government was completely unprepared -- and when the attacks started happening, instead of following procedure, our elected officials panicked. When we concentrate our argumentative energies on conspiracy theories, mandated standdowns, and orchestrated cover-ups, we take the Bush Administration off the hook for its abject failure and its freaked-out response. We give the administration credit for an overarching and diabolical competence that I do not believe they ever had. I think they were just as scared and clueless as the rest of us were, and the question we ought to be asking them is: why didn't your responses conform to protocols and fail-safes already in place? That one would have been harder for Jadakiss to rhyme, but it also would have been much tougher for the powers that be to dismiss.

Jay-Z & R. Kelly -- "Big Chips"

Speaking of unanswered questions, why is R. Kelly still alive? Not content with cuckolding everybody in the music business and outraging the feds with his kiddie porn habit, he's apparently decided to piss off the most dangerous man in baseball for an encore. Guys like this are supposed to be capped outside the Copa. He either has some kind of weird playa immunity, or he's the luckiest, most inexplicable survivor since Tom Lenk's Andrew.

John Legend -- "Used To Love U"

Midwest cities have produced very few commercial hip-hop stars. Kanye West is attempting to change that singlehandedly. There are John Legends in every city: serviceable R&B shouters with good voices and requisite complaints about ex-girlfriends. Which ones get to grind their axes on mainstream radio depends on whose local champion attains success at a national level -- once the kingpin takes his place in the seat of power, he can distribute the pork-barrel contracts to the lesser lights in his old neighborhood crew. Legend has ridden West's coattails to substantial airtime -- if he wants to be something other than the Mack McLarty of R&B, he needs to step out of his mentor's shadow, and develop a style of his own. That wasn't going to happen on the first album. It's not inconceivable that it could happen in the future. He got the shot, and he has West's faith; now let's see what he can do with them.

Juelz Santana -- "S.A.N.T.A.N.A."

The little-known eighth sign of impending apocalypse is a solo album from Juelz Santana. It's here, folks, so I think you'd better get your spiritual estates in order. Depending on how generous you're feeling, the mainstream success of Santana's music represents either the complete democratization of hip-hop, or the end of the genre as we know it. His songs sound like the result of giving a recording contract to an enthusiastic special ed student. He has a vocabulary of about thirty words (most of which are onomatopoeic), and he seems completely unaware that rhyming requires two different utterances. Note to Juelz: Afrika Bambaataa did not drain the power from the streetlights in the Bronx so you could get away with couplets like "I kinda like that rapper/I wanna be like that rapper". On "S.A.N.T.A.N.A.", the emcee ineptly quotes lines from gangster movies, indulges in his well-chronicled obsession with erectile dysfunction, complains about his waitservice, and then stands aside for the most annoying sped-up chorus since Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Buttermilk Biscuits". As an emcee, he is abominable: he has no conception of breath control, meter, or pacing. Yes, the only thing more disturbing to me than Roc-A-Fella's decision to put this garbage out is (wait for it) how much I enjoy listening to it. I can't deny it: when in the midst of a radio set, I actually look forward to hearing Juelz Santana grope his way through this horrible, horrible cut. Oh, my God, I kinda like that rapper.

Kanye West -- "Where You At", "The New Workout Plan", "Jesus Walks"

Hipster Christian, now your time has come. From Sufjan Stevens' quiet, elegant testimonials to faith all the way to Mel Gibson beating the hell out of Jesus, the entertainment industry has found Christ again -- and just in time for the "moral values" takeover of mainstream politics to boot. I mean, when Kanye West is about to win a Grammy for "Jesus Walks", can the Doug E. Fresh retrospective be far behind? To be fair, "Jesus Walks" is less of a Christian song than it is a song about Christian songs -- but then everything about West is meta, and that's why he's the most chronicled commercial emcee to emerge since Illmatic. All writers are really looking for is a decent angle; then we're on your jock for good. Make our jobs easy, and we'll reciprocate.

Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz -- "What U Gon Do?", "Roll Call"

Eighty thousand reiterative Jazze Fizzle productshizzles, the cartoonish obscenity of Ying Yang Twins and Jackie O, further deification of OutKast: yes, 2004 was the year of cheap thrills from the dirty South. I loved them all, and the above two are no exceptions. Lil Jon will never again attain the heights (or the depths, depending on how you look at it) of "Get Low", because you can only talk about the sweat running down your balls once in a rap career; after that, you've got to move on to other subjects, and of course they do not compare. But not even Timbaland himself is handier with a sticky synthesizer hook, and Lil Jon's "rhyme" style -- screaming into the microphone like a conservative talkie drunk on too much Whitewater -- is generally enough to carry you through to the end of the track. Get used to him, because he's not going anywhere.

Lil Wayne -- "Go DJ"

We're entering a stretch of really excellent tracks now, so if you only like to read me when I'm beating the stuffing out of things, you might want to skip ahead to Papa Roach. Lil Wayne was always the best emcee in his kiddie group; here, paired again with fellow New Orleans artist Mannie Fresh, he's free to cut loose without the likes of Juvenile and Turk elbowing in on his mic time. As he's aged, he's developed a croaky, broken-voiced alligator flow that is long on tonality -- his delivery is hypermusical, leathery, assured. "Go DJ" is the best thing he's recorded yet: a boast rhyme with a big bass and some suitably Louisiana-grimy production by Fresh. Some people have the bayou in their voices. Give Cash Money credit for disregarding the sales record of his crewmembers, and keeping the only Hot Boy who stood a chance of becoming a hot man. A little foresight can go a long way.

LL Cool J -- "Hush"

It's a good thing that commercial rappers have fame and bling working for them, because judging from the lines in their lyrics, they have no idea how to pick up women. Take Jadakiss, for example -- in "U Make Me Wanna", he actually tells his girlfriend that she is "the next best thing to a soldier". Try that on your honey tonight, Jada, and you'll be sleeping in the living room. Despite his self-congratulatory name, LL Cool J has fucked up plenty in the past, but with the sentimental "Hush", he mostly gets it right. I'm not saying it isn't essentially duplicitious, because it is -- LL lays out the old market strategy on the next track: "you do it for the hustlers/I do it for the ladies/but it's all money, baby", he says, homosocially. He's no sweetheart; he's a Pataki-supporting Republican. If he has better strategies for hoodwinking the girls than the rest of the contenders in the lampin' proletariat, that just means he's one to watch out for.

Ludacris -- "Get Back"

The spiritual successor to the anti-social "Rollout", and further evidence that Luda is having a bit of a problem adjusting to worldwide fame. Only now, instead of growling "get out my biz-ness", he's busting out the whooping stick, and dealing out knuckle sandwiches to his overzealous fans. It didn't take De La Soul very long to get snarky about unwanted public attention, but then they had the disaffected intellectual bit working for them; Ludacris is supposed to be gregarious and whimsical. He's still a huge favorite, and "I came, I saw, I hit him right dead in the jaw" is one of the better beatdown chants I've heard since the Onyx stopped putting out records, but I am not sure his surly and ungenerous new cranksta-rap persona is working for me. Great as he is, I liked him better when he was rapping about having sex in the candy store and making all the chocolate melt.

Mannie Fresh -- "Real Big"

More Big Willie absurdism from the DeChirico of hip-hop. Mannie Fresh describes his truck: it has an aquarium in the dashboard, a two-lane bowling alley in the back, and a plush elevator. He boasts about landing his big jet plane in the projects, and then stops the song cold to give his phone number to "all the girls that's hot". As rap satirists go, he's got nothing on Kanye West -- he has nowhere near the acuity or scope of vision -- but dating back to the beginning of his career with the Big Tymers, he's been engaged in a project not dissimilar to the one on The College Dropout. Like West, Mannie Fresh wants to simultaneously celebrate and mock black upward social mobility. But where West often pillories his victims unmercifully, and seems to be motivated by a deep inner anger and a desire for revenge and self-justification, Fresh is burdened by no such hostility. Instead, he uses overstatement and surrealism to champion and poke fun at his own ambitions and those of his peers. There's no contempt at all in his stance: he wants you to go for the big house, car, and belly, even as he acknowledges that you're going to look silly doing so. Social climbing is ridiculous, but it certainly beats the alternative. As you sink, swim, and cough blood keeping up in the rat race, rest assured that Mannie Fresh is laughing at you and with you.

Maroon 5 -- "She Will Be Loved"

Yecch. Take the piano away from Coldplay, add a slight "street" sensibility, expunge whatever low-grade edginess there might be to Chris Martin, and behold the limp remains. Every time this bozo goes for the falsetto note on the chorus, I feel a panic attack coming on. Hip-hop has mostly expunged corporate rock from hit radio, but every now and then a sub-Gin Blossoms slimeball like this one still slips in, just to remind us all how awful the mid-Nineties were. The song that will ruin all of the year-end countdown shows.

Ma$e -- "Breathe, Stretch, Shake"

When Darryl Strawberry converted to Christianity in 1992, I made three projections: his hitting would never be the same, fans and managers would blame his faith for his coming slump, and he'd take it all back in a couple of years. I wasn't alone; apparently Lasorda was so frustrated by his lack of aggressiveness at the plate that he called the Mets and asked the front office what the hell was wrong with the superstar his GM had acquired for him. After Earl Weaver tried to stamp out an outbreak of Christian fervor in the Orioles locker room, a player asked: "Mr. Manager, why don't you to see me walk with the Lord?", and Weaver replied "I'd rather see you walk with the bases loaded". Apocryphal, maybe, but it sure sounds like the Earl. Anyway. You don't have to be Jerry Falwell divining the insidious influence of the Teletubbies to see the anti-Christian prejudice behind these assumptions: those of us who don't have any faith (and plenty of us who do, probably) see a public conversion as a sign of impending mediocrity. Is this fair? I hate to say it, but I think the evidence suggests it is. The Seventies were littered with cautionary examples of songwriters who found God one day and lost their talent the next. The Rev. Run never had much to say after he took the collar, Prince hasn't been the same since he pulled the Black Album, and Ma$e…. well, Ma$e was never really all that great, but he used to be better than this. I hear you saying "duh, McCall", but stop for a second and examine further. You'd think that a real spiritual transformation ought to be accompanied by a blinding flash of emotional energy that, when channeled into music (or baseball), would invariably result in something fantastic. Look over at your record collection - how many of your favorite albums were inspired by a breakup, or by the beginning of a new romantic relationship? Plenty, probably. Well, shouldn't the beginning of a new relationship with the goddamned Almighty inspire an even greater expressive fervor? Yet all of the records released by recent converts -- from Saved to Down With The King to the latest Ma$e -- are distinguished by their inability to articulate anything valuable about the religion they purport to champion. Consider that the rock and hip-hop stories are loaded with theologically-sophisticated chapters (the careers of PM Dawn, Sam Phillips, and Van Morrison come to mind, but there are many others) written by people who came into the game as thoughtful Christians and who were willing to interrogate faith. It is true that evidence of Bob Dylan's budding spirituality was apparent in his songwriting as early as 1963, but Ma$e, too, had been leaving us lyrical clues for years that his conversion was imminent. Guardians of the canon will cringe that I'm mentioning Puffy's former sidekick and Dylan in the same sentence, but that's not the point: hinting cagily at a general interest in the divine is not the same as suddenly swinging from "Want they ass in my limo because I'm a sex symbol" to "I tell those girls in Melrose to keep their legs closed". If it sounds like I'm questioning the underpinnings of Ma$e's faith, and the faith of other rock stars who've stumbled into salvation, well, maybe I am. If your personal transformation can't even kick your rhyme writing into a higher gear, you're kinda giving your source a bad name. Maybe the real lesson to draw from all the weak post-conversion releases is that real inspiration doesn't come in a flash -- it's an intellectual process that happens gradually. If you take as the basis of your personal philosophy something that you just adopted yesterday, you may or may not be on the highway to heaven, but you're also probably headed for a trip down the twisted path of incoherence. As for the rest of us travelers still wandering in the wilderness, we might be wise to heed the recent advice of Fat Joe: "I was just about to find God/ But now that Ma$e is back, I think I'd much rather find a ménage." Amen, brother.

Mike Jones (w/ Slim Thug & Paul Wall) -- "Still Tippin'"

Ooooh, yeah. In the 1950s, when the automotive logic that gave rock music its initial iconography was freshly minted, the car represented freedom from adult supervision and a rebellious recklessness. Car songs concentrated on speed, the open road, the Interstate, hot rod aggression, horsepower, fuel injection, exhaust fumes. White rock and rollers don't sing about their rides very much anymore, but rappers have compensated with song after song about how super their cars are. But these automobiles aren't Greased Lightning, racing down the highway -- they're Caddies rolling slowly through city streets, showpieces in a mobile inner-city museum of upwardly-mobile ambition made manifest in steel and chrome. Rappers are obsessed with tangential cosmetic details that have nothing to do with automobile performance: tinted windows, trim, tire fittings. The monomaniacal Mike Jones, Slim Thug, and Paul Wall of Swishahouse want you to know two things about them: their cars have really nice rims, and wood-grain interior. Never mind if the jalopies run or not; the accoutrements are the essence. The automobile is reimagined as a system of symbols -- less a vehicle than a rolling checklist of social requirements. These prestige markers are, to those tipping on four-fours, a matter of life and death, and these guys emcee about their rims and grip with an urgency bordering on demonic possession. Laugh if you want to, but it's no more arbitrary than any other value system. They make their concerns feel real, crucial. Ultimately, that is all you can ask of an artist, or any other subcultural representative.

Mos Def -- "Ghetto Rock"

Of course this was coming. Four years ago, Mos included those heavy tracks on Black On Both Sides not merely to make a statement, but because he likes the sound of distorted guitar. No matter what he wants to say in interviews, his collaboration with former members of Living Colour was not meant to form a revolutionary vanguard poised to take back the music from Whitey. It's just dudes getting together in somebody's basement studio, plugging in, turning up, and blowing off steam. Since this is Mos Def, it's a hell of a lot funkier than Linkin Park. He is still one of hip-hop's leading lights. He doesn't need to come up with an elaborate ethical and political justification for wanting to rock.

Nas -- "Bridging The Gap"

It is tough to stay hardcore when all you rhyme about is your mommy and daddy. But there are many who have followed this story from its first days at the BBQ in Queensbridge, and for us, the Jones family saga is our Michener novel in street verse. "Dance", from God's Son, might have been a little extreme for those harboring excessive Oedipal fear. Instead of killing his pops, though, Nasir Jones has giftwrapped a ridiculously hot track for him to sing and blow on -- an act of generosity exceptional even for rap's biggest-hearted star. There are probably cynics out there who can remain unmoved when Nas breaks rhythm to holler "you're the greatest, pops!" over his father's life story. But that's not me.

Nelly -- "Na-Na-Na-Na-Na"

"Hot In Herre" plus cowbell. Jazze Pha tricks up the track with everything in his arsenal, but Nelly's not showing us anything here he didn't do better in 2002. Some coasting was probably predictable, but it's all been downhill since "Country Grammar" -- every single has been a slightly inferior iteration of the last. I like him, too, but it's probably time for him to reach down into that bag of tricks and see if he has anything else for us.

Nicole Wray -- "If I Was Your Girlfriend"

So who won that King of New York thing, anyway? One of the contestants is preoccupied with recording a sprawling, comprehensive autobiography and family history, and the other one -- the guy who started it -- got as bored as Jordan and retired to become a businessman. If the measure of the master was in the ability to assemble a dynastic crew, then Nas was never really a contestant: an aesthetician to the core, he has larger and more poetic concerns than petty one-upsmanship and empire-building. But you can't have a rap industry without rap industrialists. If as an emcee Jay-Z was always somewhat remote, cold, and emotionally tight-fisted, there is evidence to suggest that he's about to have a much more profound effect on pop music as an impresario than he ever did as an artist. To give you a for instance, Roc-A-Fella was the only label with the vision to understand that Kanye West was more than just a talented producer (something West himself testifies to, at surreal length, at the end of College Dropout). And when the rest of the music biz had cut bait, it was Jay-Z's company that dusted off Nicole Wray, and matched her squeaky but unique set of pipes to music that amplified its qualities and de-emphasized its limitations. Presenting Wray as an artifact from the day-glo Eighties -- sort of a spastic cousin to Chaka Khan, or maybe Teena Marie's sugar-fixed twin -- "If I Was Your Girlfriend" is a love-starved, Lolitapop screamer with a monstrous beat and a lollipop-sucking chorus that could make Kelis drool with envy. The whispered bridge is too stylized to be sexy, but that's the price you pay for rendering such a nifty historical recreation: the Eighties were not a sexy time.

Nina Sky -- "Move Ya Body"

Nina Sky is the commercially-sustainable version of Lumidee. Begin with the premise that two Lumidees are better than one -- especially when they're twins, and they have a startling ability to create their own natural detune by singing unison parts slightly off-key. There's not a chance in hell that they're doing it purposely, but it doesn't matter -- the ineptness only add to their Jenny-from-the-block charm. This is the segment on the Venn diagram where commercial radio singles, cheaply-manufactured Latin CD-ROM releases, and winsome, amateurish indiepop overlap, and it turns out to be a place where we can all get comfortable. The teen queens of Queens kick the sublime chorus on the next number.

N.O.R.E. (w/Daddy Yankee, Nina Sky, Gem Star & Big Mato) -- "Oye Mi Canto"

Walking on Brunswick a week before the election; big, dark clouds rolling in off the palisade, and the late afternoon sunlight throwing long shadows against the pink faces of the two-storey housing projects. Puerto Rican flags, tied like tarps over windows, ripple in the wind. Nobody is on the street save one kid on a crummy bike, weaving all over the sidewalk, stopping to kick at sticks, taking swigs from a can of Sprite. From an open door, N.O.R.E. starts the chant: the volume on the invisible stereo inches up, and the block starts to move. A window is thrown open; a little girl appears at a doorway. Two men in silk shirts turn the corner and get into an old Corolla, as a geeky-looking tough with a head scarf starts to sing the liturgy along with Nina Sky: Boriqua, Morena, Dominicano, Colombiano. Twilight gracing the Siperstein's Paint sign, the breeze kicking up dust from the Turnpike overpass, a little moisture and white suds on the sidewalk from a car washing. I make the turn on Montgomery at the spot where the viaduct meets the downtown, and walk toward the brownstones and parks, the office towers, the waterfront. Distantly, the song follows.

Now It's Overhead -- "Wait In A Line"

The Saddle Creek house producer's solo project sounds and feels a lot like the Fixx, right down to the robot-funk guitars, the thunderous, gated tom-toms, and the sweeping, ominous synth pads. Where Cy Curnin's sites of concern were the United Nations, the Falklands Crisis and nuclear war, though, Andy LeMaster is worried about getting into the dance club and wondering why nobody will answer his personal ad. Laugh if you want to, but this is why Saddle Creek artists have connected with the International Brotherhood of Drama Queens -- they can make every minor personal setback sound like Armaggeddon. If you want to turn your embarrassing bad date story into an epic battle of good and evil, look him up. Better overdramatic than pathetic, I always say.

OutKast -- "Ghetto Musick"

Further proof that Antawn Patton is every bit as bizarre and gross as Andre Benjamin. Over a hyperactive beat that makes "Bombs Over Baghdad" seem like Englebert Humperdinck, Big Boi credits his grandmother for his swagger, compares his interpersonal strategies to a septic system, and tells you more than you wanted to know about his sweat and foot stink. Not even George Clinton -- he of Hey Man, Smell My Finger fame -- was more preoccupied with personal odor, poopie, and body functions than these guys are. As a reward, the closet scatologists in the rock press have made the Atlanta duo the biggest critical success story in hip-hop. See, we only thought that the Outkast project was about rap excellence. Really, all they ever wanted to do is create a prevailing social condition where people are comfortable walking around all day singing songs about excrement. They're succeeding.

Papa Roach -- "Getting Away With Murder"

Three and a half million votes is not a particularly close margin. You'd have to rig up a hell of a lot of optical scanners to steal an election that decisively. Me, I knew Kerry was doomed the minute Papa Roach came out against the Bush Administration in the video for "Getting Away With Murder". To be fair, most anti-administration broadsides were not as dumb as this one, but most of the election season did seem like an attempt to out-stupid the Republicans. My fellow blue state partisans behaved as if the key to victory was pillorying the other side, and running as many derisive Flash-animations of Bush and Cheney as we could generate. The trouble with calling Republicans evil monsters is that it means that we're then calling people who vote for Republicans (half the country, last time I checked) evil monster enablers. This is not a good strategy for winning hearts and minds. Strangely, it was a strategy that was adopted, more or less, by our reductive candidate, who spent the autumn attacking the President non-stop without ever bothering to argue why he'd make a better alternative. I still have no idea what Kerry's position on Iraq was, and I was paying attention as closely as I could. I think his infamous "plan to win the peace" involved getting France and Germany to do things that we all know damn well they aren't ever going to do (and probably aren't capable of doing anyway). But I'm not sure -- and I have a hard time believing that's my fault. People who expected the Senator's decisive debate victories to translate into votes are missing the point: we weren't electing a Chief Arguer or Head Rationalizer. Americans are calibrated to choose the man with the plan over the man without one, and that's what happened here. All nationally-televised pep rallies aside, I don't think mainstream Republicans were super-thrilled with the President, and I think he might have been beatable had we nominated somebody who projected a clear and manifest vision for the future. But nobody has ever won an election in America by arguing that the other guy sucks and we're all going to hell in a handbasket. This wasn't going to be the first time. Go back and look at the list of popular songs I've written about; ours is an optimistic country. We're going to have to take some pretty hard hits before a European-style doom-and-gloom campaign can work here. Time to stop drinking the Haterade.

Petey Pablo -- "Freek-A-Leek"

Or, Dr. Seuss gets horny. "Do you want it on the floor?/Do you want it on a chair?/Do you want it over here?/Do you want it over there?" Somebody stop this guy before he fucks Sam-I-Am.

Rooney -- "I'm Shakin'"

The bright-eyed, fun-in-the-sun group finally hit the charts after a few tries by concentrating on some quintessentially Californian topics: heroin withdrawal, sensory deprivation, and insanity. Okay, let's try that again. Despite the big sound and Beach Boys harmonies, there is nothing sweet or pleasant about Rooney, a gang of Golden State warriors with bad attitudes and worse habits. Hmm, that doesn't really work, either. Robert Carmine is evidently in the process of working out some contradictions, but he's such a good songwriter -- and so often a funny, honest lyricist -- that if you can put up with a little conceptual incongruity, you're not going to mind much. Think of him as a Left Coast version of Liam Gallagher: an all-too-knowing rake showing occasional flashes of great generosity and vampiric charm. If you have any taste at all for cads, he's going to win you over.

Rupee -- "Tempted To Touch"

What, did Sean Paul need to take a bathroom break? Just when you think you can depend on a guy, he turns around and sends in the understudy. "Tempted To Touch" might feel much closer to Fantasy Island than Trenchtown, but as a cold-weather reminder of summer on the beach, I suppose it'll do. Rupee is handy with the old biological deterministic arguments about male sexual compulsion, but at least he's more polite about it than Steven Pinker is: "Please excuse me/please forgive me/but there's nothing else a man can do." Down, boy.

Simple Plan -- "Welcome To My Life"

Oh, no, they got meaningful. The whole point of Simple Plan was to incorporate elementary school-level dirty jokes into their facile obsession scenarios. "I'm a dic- I'm addicted to you" might have been super-stupid, but it always made me smile. Take away the sophomoric "wit", and what do you have left?: a heavy-hitting, radio-competent guitar rock band with a whiny vocalist and a will to fill arenas. A dime a dozen, guys, a dime a dozen.

Snoop Dogg (w/Pharrell Williams) -- "Drop It Like It's Hot"

Top-drawer Neptunes track in the Lord Willing style: two different drum machines, weird !Kung mouth noises, mystery clicks, and a flown-in synth riff that sounds like an irruption from another song. You could see it as a further refinement of the production on "Grindin'", or just a musical expression of Snoop's dangerous smoothness. The Pharrell Williams verse is mostly marking time, but at least he doesn't try to sing. It's also sort of endearing when he refers to himself as "little skateboard P." Aw, Pharrell, come home; all is forgiven for your lackluster 2003.

Talib Kweli -- "I Try"

Nope, this isn't working. Talib Kweli's music is like the Baltimore Orioles lineup: it looks great on paper, but when you put it in a game situation, it fizzles. He wins his many plaudits for being a conscious emcee, but I don't think he's made a surprising or unexpected move on record since Reflection Eternal. When you're a slavish adherent to your own conventions, how do you expect to generate the kind of intellectual friction that can change minds? Talib is as predictable as Nader, and about as persuasive to the unconverted: anybody who has taken a course with a left-leaning professor will always know exactly what he's going to say. You might agree with him (I do), but he is so easy to pigeonhole that he doesn't make you think. For a words-over-beats emcee, that's the kiss of death.

Terror Squad -- "Take You Home"

Fake Kanye West. There's more than enough of the real thing on the radio, in case you haven't noticed.

The Faint -- "I Disappear"

Sure, they're insufferable over the course of an album. So were Men Without Hats, and believe me, I speak from experience. The Eighties were a decade of filler and pointless instrumentals (even the Police indulged), and if you're an Eighties-revival act yourself, you probably want to go the whole nine and cram some crapola into your allotted forty minutes. Or something. Eighties new wave bands were also great at crafting splashy, ambitious radio cuts, and "I Disappear" wouldn't have sounded out of place on Standing On The Beach. It's rare you hear a song with jaw-dropping bass, drum, and synthesizer sounds -- when those instruments are being used to play excellent parts, too, that's just gravy. The Faint cram in as many ideas into the track as they can, and when, after the breakdown, the main riff returns accompanied by an outrageous guitar lead, you might think you've died and gone to day-glo heaven. Great one-note solo, too. They might be a singles-only band, but they're a damned good one.

The Shins -- "Kissing The Lipless"

So I'm watching SportsCenter, not intently, mind you, sort of out of the corner of my ear, and I hear Dan Patrick say "As James Mercer is to the Shins, so Moises Alou is to the Cubs". My first thought: no, that's not right, Moises Alou isn't the lead vocalist or principal songwriter of the Cubs, because no position player could fill that hypothetical role. Perhaps Mark Prior could be the James Mercer of the Cubs, if he gets through the injury nexus unscathed; as grand orchestrator and conceptual leader, Dusty Baker could also lay claim to the status of the James Mercer of the Cubs. My second thought: holy shit, Dan Patrick is talking about the Shins on SportsCenter?!? What's next, the Negatones on the nightly news? Give that publicist a raise, James. About the group: they're very good, but to be perfectly honest, I can take them or leave them.

The Streets -- "Blinded By The Lights", "Fit But You Know It"

"Fit But You Know It" is nearly a Madness song -- all guitar downstrokes and snotty Midlands standoffishness. "Blinded By The Lights" is the trance track, minus any pretense toward tunefulness or danceability. If the new Mike Skinner has detached himself further from hip-hop, he's also drifting away from anything we'd recognize as mainstream rock, R&B, or club music. He certainly doesn't have anything to do with British gaaa-rage anymore, if he ever did. He's following his storytelling impulses into territory that is more or less uncharted by musicians: on some tracks, he's dispensing with musical elements altogether to speak directly to his audience. It's probably more useful to analogize The Streets to prose stylists now than it is to compare Skinner to other singers and rappers. The upside: an unprecedented fusion of spoken-word and experimental pop. The frightening possible downside: he could turn into an East London version of Garrison Keillor.

T.I. -- "Bring 'Em Out"

Lately, the Dirty Dirty has begun generating artists who seem strangely clean. This was bound to happen: sure as Sherman, the suits were going to capture Atlanta eventually. T.I. is some marketing czar's idea of a Southern emcee: a bald, intermittently grimy, competent, and wholly forgettable rhymer with a penchant for transparently fraudulent braggadocio and a few neighborhoody references to keep the Dixie fetishists happy. "Bring 'Em Out" is tolerable set filler, but I don't think we really need to hear anything else out of this guy. Skip.

Tift Merritt -- "Good-Hearted Man"

Red state blues shouter with deep traditionalist roots and no taste or patience for the sonic challenge that is alt-country. She wants you to think of Dusty In Memphis, but when the horns come in, it's all Tupelo Honey, right down to the lifts from "You're My Woman". A country-rock tweener, Merritt is still trying to find her commercial balance: she's much too blunt for Nashville, but she's never going to get on MTV with material as corny as this. At least she will never have to worry about having a Milli Vanilli moment -- I have seen her video, and I can say with certainty that she is the poorest lip-syncher in pop music history. Sometimes authenticity will kill you.

Twista (/w Kanye West & Jamie Foxx) -- "Slow Jamz"

Most of the people who've rocked to this track probably recognize that there's some mockery going on here, but patrician that I am, I worry that the depth of the satire is lost on the masses. Here we have a song about using romantic R&B ballads to get in girls' pants: "I'm going to play this Vandross/you going to take your pants off" is, if nothing else, as honest a statement of purpose and intention as any waxed this year. Consider also that Kanye West has made a career of sampling ballads like these, and speeding them up until their sentiment is unrecoverable. That's what he does here: what was originally a Vandross weeper is rendered instead a helium-voiced absurdity. Getting Twista to rhyme on it might seem like gilding the lily, but once the devil takes possession of West's muse, he will stop at nothing to drive his point home. Overkill or not, this is a perfect marriage of formal satire and parodic content, and a track where ridicule oozes from every beat. That "Slow Jamz" also functions perfectly well as a tribute to the songs and style that it mocks is further testament to West's uncanny ability to have it both ways.

U2 -- "Vertigo"

Yeah, that one -- the song that kicks off "uno, dos, tres, catorce". It'll be driving me crazy for years, I am sure; wondering whether Bono fucked up and nobody in his entourage had the balls to tell him, or whether he just thought he was being cute. My money is on the latter, since he has a long track record of amusing himself by doing silly things on record -- like the spoken word bit in "Bullet The Blue Sky", or the entirety of Rattle And Hum. Annoying, sure, but playing little mind games on the general public is, on balance, a more innocuous thing for a bored, aging rock star to do than selling your entire back catalog to Claritin and CSI.

Usher -- "My Boo" (/w Alicia Keys), "Yeah!" (w/ Lil Jon & Ludacris), "Burn", "Confessions Pt. 2"

On album number four, the first-rate R&B singer finally gets some material worthy of his performing skills. He also gets some more of the usual dreck. The singles are split between the aural dynamite and the business-as-usual: "Yeah!" could burn the processor right out of your iPod, but "My Boo" is standard corporate gar-bage, a forced duet with less chemistry than Kerry-Edwards. Gothamite loyalists might cringe that it was Li'l Jon who finally busted Usher loose from his contractual obligation straitjacket, but this guy was an Atlanta boy by birth, and no matter how Broadway-slick he can be, he is indisputably a cultural product of the New South. It's about time he started acting the part.

Young Buck -- "Shorty Wanna Ride"

And that's because 2004 was, in the final analysis, all about the American South. From "Yeah!" to "Goodies", Petey Pablo to Li'l Jon to Britney Spears, it gave us our number one singles, our cultural discourse, our critical successes; "crunk" became a popular style in its own right, OutKast became every urban sophisticate's favorite pop group, and Hotlanta became the undisputed center of our musical pop culture. Terrific trash singles from the Dirty Dirty flooded the rap charts, and drove Los Angeles hip-hop (and even some of the sacrosanct stuff from the five boroughs) to the commercial periphery. Over our loud objections, the South re-elected our national leadership. The South supported a U.S. military-interventionist policy that continues to baffle those who wonder what the hell our armed forces are doing in Iraq; when bad news from Baghdad and Fallujah looked like it might just undermine the rationale for the entire Bush administration, the South was the President's bulwark. Southern churches organized and forced us to contend with "moral values"; Mel Gibson's vicious version of Christianity was coupled with an accompanying resurgence of interest in Jesus among urbanites. Hipsters fell in love with the sound of Appalachia -- Joanna Newsom, Sufjan Stevens, Devendra Banhart, Sam Beam. Even our popular disasters were Southern: the spate of hurricanes, the flu shot controversy in Florida. Has Shiloh been avenged, and the South finally risen again? Well, maybe. Remember that in the 1980s we were all told that everything was moving to California, and for awhile, it appeared to be happening. These days, they can't even keep the lights on over there. Atlanta -- and by extension, the New South -- might look like a juggernaut right now, but I have to think its dominance is unsustainable. Regional powers rise and fall; only New York City is forever. Chin up, we're about to turn the calendar. We'll get 'em in 2005.

 

Mr. Jones, come and get your child.