2007 Pop Music Abstract
30 Seconds To Mars -- "From Yesterday"
Surely it has been pointed out that Jared Leto's post-notoriety combo sounds a lot like the music that was popular when My So-Called Life was still on television. His crowd-pleasing melodic sensibility does get choked by all the distorto guitar, but he digs The Cure and U2, and he's as likely to pilfer a sound effect from The Unforgettable Fire as he is from Vitalogy. None of that distinguishes 30 Seconds To Mars from any other band you might bump into on K-ROCK, and you might wonder why he's even bothering. But better a run-of-the-mill hard rocker in a run-of-the-mill band than a run-of-the-mill actor in an above-average teenage drama.
Now this is a truly strange rock song. The psycho-folk arrangement and higgledy-piggledy verse of "Beauty" reminds me of Stump, an Eighties band so out of step with the zeitgeist that they took Flann O'Brien as their lodestar. 31 Knots is hardly that literary or genuinely offbeat, and the rest of The Days And Nights Of Everything Anywhere sounds conventional by comparison. Still, it is nice to know that there still exist indie rock bands out there who aren't trying to rewrite Psychocandy (difficult) or Remain In Light (impossible).
50 Cent -- "Amusement Park", "I Get Money", "Straight To The Bank", "I Still Kill" (with Akon), "Ayo Technology" (with Timbaland & Justin Timberlake)
I really hate to open up the usual can of worms before I'm properly warmed up, but I do these alphabetically, and there's no time like the present: could all these honky record-review websites please go back to ignoring hip-hop altogether? No matter how much you guys rave about the latest Lil Wayne mixtape, I don't believe you're actually listening to any rap record more than once, and even if you are, you aren't coming to it with the base-level understanding I can expect from any of the ten-year-old kids who hang out on the corner of Monmouth and 4th. You don't need any "street credibility" to review rap albums; hell, you don't even have to like the genre. But you do have to show that you can differentiate between 50 Cent, who is an imaginary character and a projection of certain well-chronicled macho fantasies, and Curtis Jackson, who is a wealthy and talented dude from Queens, New York. That the new 50 Cent album is called Curtis and features a black-and-white photo of an anguished Jackson on the cover does not mean that it is now okay to confuse the artist with the artwork. Moreover, the fact that Jackson frequently plays the role of 50 Cent in public does not excuse you from falling for the oldest trick in the formal-realism playbook. The reviews of Curtis were among the year's most misleading (and that's saying something); and not because critics who would rather be listening to Melomane were forcing themselves through "Fully Loaded Clip". No, they sucked because they placed Curtis Jackson in a lie detector, and judged him on a script he wrote for his puppet. Of course Jackson isn't "still in the 'hood"; he's moved to Connecticut with his maid, his CFO, and his accounts-receivable department. But 50 Cent is, and if you don't get that distinction, you're lagging so far behind the rap audience that you can't hope to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.
Aesop Rock -- "None Shall Pass"
Yay area backpacker redefines Wordy Rappinghood for a new generation of disaffected heads. I don't have any true beef with his murky production, but I often wish he'd slow down juuuust enough so that we can judge whether his allegedly trenchant one-liners are any good. Aesop Rock isn't so far removed from Twista -- they both use their verbal dexterity as a sonic smokescreen, and one more effective than any vocal filter. Aesop wants you to believe he's really and truly smart; Twista wants you to believe he really and truly has blue balls. Still, wiser heads heed the advice of the great Shock G: "The definition of a funky rhyme master?/ Cleverly put together, but not necessarily saying it faster/ See, that style isn't hard at all/ The object of the game is to have a ball, y'all/ And to see who can come the funkiest/ A lot of emcees think it's just a speed contest."
Air -- "Mer Du Japon", "Once Upon A Time"
Pocket Symphony attempts to inject some alertness into the somnolent Air formula through the use of traditional Japanese instruments. Unsurprisingly, these make the same sort of reverbed plinks that the Dunckel-Godin firm have coaxing out of their synthesizers for the better part of the decade. "Mer Du Japon" came with a boner-inducing Madame Butterfly-type video: lesbian ballerinas, one Asian and one European, dancing around, dodging a Chinese dragon, and tongue-kissing. If they could transfer some of that horndog energy -- or some of that cheesy exploitation -- to their music, they might make something worth listening to again.
Alicia Keys -- "No One", "Like You'll Never See Me Again"
Speaking of lesbians, we all remember when Melissa Etheridge released an album called Yes I Am. Keys, the Etheridge of R&B, calls her new one As I Am; you could swipe the Y and the E from the artist's last name and complete the puzzle without buying a vowel. We all know she likes to monkey around with vintage synths; I think that's a Jupiter 8 on "No One". Nerds dig the analog gear, me and Melissa (and Howard Stern) love these lyrics: "People keep talking/ They can say what they like/ No one can get in the way of what I'm feeling for you/ I know people will try to divide something so real", etc. Come to my window!, and take that, Jayceon Taylor.
Amy Winehouse -- "Rehab", "You Know I'm No Good" (with Ghostface)
Received as a liberation anthem by self-righteous drunks, "Rehab" sent thousands whistling to the pub. There's power in that, I guess, but if getting twentysomething girls hammered was really so difficult, there'd be a lot more horny gentlemen staggering around the streets of Hoboken and Seaside Heights. Winehouse plays the bratty rich girl begging for her bub so well that she was sure to appeal to same; she may have lost the rest of us when she actually landed in the gossip pages for her heroic overindulgence. Because there are consequences, see, no matter what "daddy says". I'll give her this: her backing group kicks tush.
Arcade Fire -- "Keep The Car Running"
Yep, sure do sound like "On The Dark Side", don't it? "Keep The Car Running" lacks the great piano riff and guest appearances from Sal and the Word Man, but all the melodrama is certainly there. Turns out Win Butler does a credible Springsteen imitation; no mean feat, considering how many indie rockers are trying to cram their asses into that famous pair of blue jeans. It's almost enough to forgive the big Canuck for his tiresome anti-Americanism. Neon Bible improves on Funeral precisely because fake Boss > fake Bono, but they're really the same album -- four really good Eighties rewrites, some mildly experimental headscratchers, charmingly-stupid lyrics about transcendence, and a few shut-off-that-stereo-now! performances by Regine Chassagne. To be fair, there's less Chassagne here than there was on Funeral, and the Fire's handlers have decided to stealth her up a bit by running her glass-shattering "voice" through heavy processing. I recognize that they're married or something, but it should be obvious to everybody by now that this is Butler's act and the posse cuts are only wasting time and hard-drive space. You can never make your "Tender Years" until you tame your support band; even Eddie Wilson knew that.
Architecture In Helsinki -- "Heart It Races", "Debbie"
Show me a "collective", and I will show you a singer-songwriter surrounded by a coterie of delusional musicians. While none of the Bhagwan-robed backing vocalists in Polyphonic Spree really believe they're doing anything other than taking Tim DeLaughter's marching orders, the naïve Aussies of Architecture In Helsinki apparently thought they were part of a musical democracy. Cameron Bird put that concept to rest by relocating to Brooklyn, completely retooling the "group" sound, and punting those who weren't down with the new program. Which, as it turned out, had far less to do with experimental pop that any of us originally thought; apparently Bird, free from his quaint Melbournian strictures, just wants to get down. He hasn't changed his stripes completely: "Heart It Races" is just "Do The Collapse" with synthesized steel-drums and an even more abrasive vocal performance. But the rest of Places Like This is attempted white-boy funk of the most irrationally-exuberant kind. In practice, it sounds a hell of a lot more like Bananarama and the B-52's than any of his intended targets, but unlike the members of the Internet Rock-Critical Establishment (IRCE), I do give points for trying. C'mon, he's a skinny hippie from New South Wales -- of course he'd rather be Prince. I will make the IRCE a deal: the day you give guys like Bird a pass for reaching for the stars and falling on their faces, I'll promise to stop slagging your anodyne favorites for playing it safe.
Avril Lavigne -- "Girlfriend", "Keep Holding On"
More catfight anthems from the congenitally competitive Lavigne. "Girlfriend" suggests what The Go! Team or Le Tigre might sound like if they cleaned up their production a little and invested in reliable compression equipment. Which isn't saying all that much; I mean, Go! Team and Le Tigre have never been too hot. The act you're looking for is Paramore.
B.G. & The Chopper City Boyz -- "Make 'Em Mad"
American politics is rarely interesting or complex. Those in the mainstream media looking for the secret meaning of Bobby Jindal's upset win would do well to consult Occam's Razor. Surely everybody from David Vitter to Mannie Fresh had serious problems with Governor Blanco's response to the hurricanes, and nobody in Louisiana could have been too shocked by William Jefferson's freezerful of freshly-laundered cash. But the real reason socially-conservative Republicans stormed the statehouse is much simpler: most of the Democratic base is underwater. Two years after the flood, The Big Easy remains half-empty. To get a sense of the demographic shift, take a tour of spots made famous by the world-famous local rap culture -- storm fences ring 'Nolia, former center of the hip-hop universe and birthplace of bounce; St. Bernard, the setting for so many of Juve's stories, has been replaced by a tent city; Calliope Projects, long the headquarters and core constituency for the No Limit Family, has cautiously reanimated a handful of undead units. Chris Dorsey's flight to Detroit symbolized the exodus from Chopper City: if Uptown's best-known emcees couldn't stick it out, what hope had the average New Orleanian? But now B.G. has returned -- not to the Magnolia Projects, but at least to the general vicinity -- and he's brought a crew of competent mush-mouthed emcees with him. This is not the rebirth of Cash Money or anything, but in '07, we'll take what we can get.
Baby Boy & Lil Bootsie -- "The Way I Live"
During the heyday of Cash Money, Baby Boy Da Prince shared a management company with B.G.; if you're into obscure No Limit sides, you might remember Choppa, his big brother, from bounce cut "Choppa Style". His big-league connections did not save him from a FEMA trailer in 2005. He could have come back with a cold-eyed, nihilistic study in desolation a la Juve's Reality Check, or, like Mos Def on Tru3 Magic, raged against the indifference of the government. Instead, he rolled out of the toxic tin can with a BBQ anthem so laid-back in the face of adversity that Alex Rodriguez briefly used it as his intro music. Turns out it was just what the city wanted: not a ballad of victimization or loss, but a blithe affirmation that the life goes on as usual, full of boasts, hustle, conspicuous consumption, and ketchup-colored paint on the Lambo. For proving, once more, that it will take much more than a Category 5 to dislodge the dream of upward social mobility, Baby Boy became a hero in Chopper City and the latest bearer of a centuries-old mantle. It's anybody's guess whether Big Easy pop music will ever regain its footing or its casual chic, but listen closely: the wheels on the infamous N.O. production-mill are creaking back into action. Baby Boy even manages to get off a joke about the storm: "They say I'm like Katrina with money/ I blow that shit!" Hey, I didn't say it was a good joke.
Bat For Lashes -- "Prescilla", "What's A Girl To Do?"
Young heir to the Khan squash dynasty (no kidding) cannot decide whether she wants to be Bjork or Tori Amos when she grows up. Fur And Gold is, consequently, schizophrenic, unfocused, and derivative. But there are moments when she channels magic spirits that have been lost to her role models, and those suggest that the pleasures here aren't just guilty ones.
Intermittently compelling art band with a penchant for post-rock rhythms and weird vocoder effects; lead single "Atlas" sounds like a mash-up of King Crimson and the Seven Dwarves. I see you running for the hills, but I assure you that I went to high school with many nerds who would've begged for such a pairing. So feel superior if you want to, but remember: we could have fireballed your asses in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
Beyoncé Knowles -- "Get Me Bodied", "Listen", "Upgrade U", "Suga Mama", "Beautiful Liar" (with Shakira)
So how's that solo career thing working out? I don't mean the bank-stacking, or buffing up the celebrity brand; we all know she's got those bases covered. But as the former moneymaking third of the Destiny's Child empire and a corporate pop star of the first rank, it's fair to expect Knowles to have made a few memorable records by now. She almost delivered with "Crazy In Love", but Jay-Z screwed it all up with his self-aggrandizing guest verse. Most of the tracks listed above are from the B'Day Anthology, a video plus remix collection released exclusively through Wal-Mart (though I doubt the bigwigs at Beyoncé Ltd. were really expecting their fans to visit a brick-and-mortar store). "Get Me Bodied" is almost certainly the most annoying song of the bunch, and as these things usually go, it became the most interesting story: Knowles paired the extended version with a six-minute dance extravaganza, and kicked back as a delighted MTV put the video into heavy circulation. The "Bodied" clip played like a high-gloss, infectiously-inane YouTube spot: the singer hollers out names of dances, and a team of hoofers demonstrates their moves for the camera. So, yes, just the sort of thing that would drive you bonkers if you had to experience it without the visual accompaniment. But one of the main duties of a CEO of a big service corporation -- like Wal-Mart, or RCA Records, or Beyoncé Knowles -- is identifying alternative channels for distribution and evaluation, and Billboard is no longer the only game in town. Knowles was aiming for the portable-MP3 market from the start, and by July, the clip for "Get Me Bodied" had hit #1 on iTunes Video. Consumer excitement warranted a re-release to radio; an edit was made available, but our local hip-hop and R&B station insisted on playing the version with the interminable list of dance call-outs. We were meant to imagine the video while we heard it, or maybe we weren't supposed to care. Meanwhile, the star was busy considering other market synergies: "Upgrade U" got a slight, er, upgrade, and became a commercial for HDTV. Eventually Beyonce Knowles will have to decide whether she wants to be a businesswoman or an actual artist, and -- oh, wait, what am I saying? Of course she's decided; I mean, really. Sometimes I forget what country I'm living in. Hippie writer, go back to Frisco '67.
Normal people have always considered Limp Bizkit less of a band than a public nuisance. Now that rap-rock is officially over and not coming back (at least not from the direction of fraternity-row), the fate of the perpetrators barely troubles the minds of the psychologically healthy. Those of us who aren't so lucky have often wondered whether Wes Borland could escape the stifling atmosphere of his band and mouthpiece, and make some worthwhile music on his own. Black Light Burns is that project, and perhaps all too predictably, it sounds more like Nine Inch Nails than P.O.D. "Lie" is less preposterous than "My Body Is A Cage", but it trades in the same arty anguish. I can't say I don't dig it, because I do, and my humanitarian streak applauds Borland for shaking free of Fred Durst. But sometimes a guitar (player) is just a guitar (player), and it shouldn't be all that surprising that there was less going on behind those jet-black contacts than some had hoped.
Bloc Party -- "Hunting For Witches", "I Still Remember", "The Prayer"
Listening to Bloc Party is like going to a chic, hyped, and stylishly-appointed restaurant, ordering the most exotic-looking thing on the menu, and getting served a loaf of Wonder Bread. Waiter, this can't be right… can it? I mean, it's certainly edible, and if you toasted it up and put a little butter and jam on it, it might even be yummy. But you can get this kind of bland repast at any corner store.
Bone Thugs 'N' Harmony -- "I Tried" (with Akon)
Now that everybody from Usher to Mariah Carey to Weird Al is chewing on a mouthful of his style, we can recognize Krayzie Bone for what he is: the most influential man in contemporary R&B. He's from Cleveland, so he isn't too cool to be emo; in fact, his most memorable numbers lay the existential angst on thick. "I Tried" is the latest anthem of street hopelessness, and here they've gone for sheer melodramatic overkill -- the Bone Thugs' worried-aunt flow, Akon's graveyard croon, and, just in case you've got any tears left to jerk, a typically wrist-slitting verse from old undead Tupac. Distraught hand-wringing is rarely so funky.
Bruce Springsteen -- "Radio Nowhere"
Boss and pro baseball connections, 2007 edition: Springsteen rocked the benefit for Joe Torre's Safe At Home Foundation, and even made room under the stagelights for the prodigal Bernie Williams. Don't believe me?, here's a photo of the two legendary clutch hitters onstage together at the Chelsea Piers. Patti Scialfa sure looks into it, doesn't she? Do you reckon she was thinking to herself, "boy, we could have used that big bat against Cleveland"? Anyway, MLB returned the favor by wedding "Radio Nowhere" to its "One Shining Moment"-style World Series montage; barely had Jonathan Papelbon jigged off the field at Coors before FOX Sports cut to the E Street Band in action. Notorious Boss booster Chris Russo may have kick-started it all this summer -- he declared the lead single from Magic an instant classic, and commanded the bewildered Mike & The Mad Dog producers to air it, over and over. Now that's a non-traditional distribution channel if there ever was one, and one sorely needed, considering that the song is a cranky old man's complaint that, to paraphrase Eminem, radio won't even play his jam. Ironic, then, that "Radio Nowhere" is a straight lift of Tommy Tutone's "867-5309", a track hardly capable of guiding a spirit home through the last lone American night. But I'll be damned if he doesn't resolve the contradictions and make it all work. He can blow that speedball by you, make you look like a fool, boy.
If the Boss is still sprightly enough to traipse through the fields of forgotten chord-progressions, plucking as he goes, give credit to those Turnpike chemicals in his bloodstream. It keeps us, eternally, in a Garden State. Others were born to be geriatric rockers; even back when he was writing about white riots and phoning up Robin Hood for wealth distribution, Mick Jones always seemed more than a little like an old and fed-up Eurosocialist professor. "The News", his latest effort, is just Big Audio Dynamite without the samples and drum-machines. You might have always thought that the beatboxes were just an old, fed-up Eurosocialist professor's attempt to stay current; if so, you won't miss them at all.
Cassidy -- "My Drink And My Two-Step" (with Swizz Beatz)
Swizz Beatz, master of the hip-hop designer fake, spits out this cut-rate version of "Through The Wire" for the recently salvaged Philly emcee. Cassidy doesn't have Mr. West's gift for self-dramatization, but he's still plenty excited about his headline-making travails. Kanye elevated his own car-wreck to the level of Norse mythology; Cassidy just wants to get drunk and holler about his indestructibility. Hey, it might not be the one that the stoics would recommend, but it strikes me as a legitimate reaction to the Jaws of Life.
Chamillionaire -- "Evening News", "Hip-Hop Police" (with Slick Rick), "Not A
Criminal" (with Kelis)Houston's superbrain could have followed up the incendiary "Ridin'" with a string of booty cuts, and nobody would have thought any the less of him. Instead, he jumped on the barricades, turning his collection of one-liners and witticisms on the police, the Bush administration, and conservative talkies in the mainstream media. Cham seems particularly offended by those who blame rap music for social problems, and he's as disturbed by Reverend Sharpton's interpretive failures as he is by Bill O'Reilly's cultural fundamentalism. "Evening News" (there's also a "Morning News" on the album; this emcee is a current-events junkie) strongly suggests that we're all being herded toward celebrity-worship by White House apologists who are desperate to change the subject. "Every time I talk about Katrina", he grumbles in the guise of a recalcitrant anchorman, "they look at me like it's a misdemeanor". "Hip-Hop Police" picks up where "Ridin'" left off; now he's down at the station, and getting the third degree. Even under interrogation lights, his mind is on our collective obsession with the boob-tube: "Till I talk to my lawyer, you get no reply/ You've obviously been watching too much CSI". So, yes, he's easy to pull for, he's got a great sense of humor, and pop radio is ennobled by his presence. But, quite honestly, I can't say I wouldn't prefer to hear Gucci Mane rap about the very freaky gurl who got it from her momma. I blame the aggressively understated production on Ultimate Victory; I mean, Kane Beatz?, Happy Perez?, CHOPS? This is a major-label rap release? I understand there are good leftist reasons for getting the hands of lumpenproletariat on the faders, but the masses still must boogie to something. Let's set Chamillionaire up with the Neptunes and see what happens.
Charlotte Hatherley -- "Behave"
The Ash refugee calls her vanity imprint Little Sister Records. The shoe fits: there's something about Hatherley's music that tugs at your jacket-sleeve, follows you to school, and demands candy. She's endearing, and annoying, and it always seems as though she's trying much harder than she needs to. But as a six-string artist, Charlotte Hatherley takes a backseat to no big brother. The Deep Blue establishes her as the most imaginative rhythm guitarist to emerge from Britain since Graham Coxon, and Coxon never had her casual virtuosity. As would become a little sister, her style is playful and expansive -- the riff that underpins "Behave" sounds as though it's been run through every phasing, flanging, and 'verbing effect in Sam Ash's showcase. It doesn't stop there: The Deep Blue was produced by Eric Drew Feldman of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, she namechecks "Siberian Khatru" in one song, and co-wrote another with Andy Partridge. In short, she is every prog-rock nerd's wet dream, and it is only a matter of time before she is recognized as such, and develops a cult of devoted (if slightly creepy) fans.
Chemical Brothers -- "The Salmon Dance", "Do It Again"The Chemical Brothers have always made music that required listeners to be tripping balls to appreciate, so if those of us who prefer to remain sober have never quite grokked, that shouldn't be too difficult to understand. Depending on your level of intoxication, "Do It Again" will either strike you as mesmerizing or boring; it's finely-filigreed aural wallpaper, suitable for postgraduate dinner parties and intense mall shopping. "The Salmon Dance", on the other hand, is an utter travesty: over one of the corniest beats ever committed to virtual wax, a blotto-sounding Fatlip -- who must have really, really needed the check -- recites kiddy rhymes about spawning migratory fish. No, I am not kidding. Either this represents the nadir of the already-discredited electronica movement, or it's part of the Euro conspiracy to destroy our cultural memory by redefining "old-school" rap as the work of simpletons horsing around. Someone get Nas on the phone; here's another chapter of "Where Are They Now?," unfolding right before our eyes.
Wait, did I say Euro conspiracy? Let me expand that: the Canadians are in on it, too. The plan, as I understand it, is to hoodwink members of the IRCE whose knowledge of Eighties hip-hop does not extend past "Mary Mary/ why you bugging?" into comparing bands like Chromeo to vintage rap music. That way, we assume that there was a time when the old-school would ever have permitted anything as retarded as "Tenderoni" to exist. This, in turn, erodes our confidence in the entire rap enterprise. To be fair, Chromeo are getting a little bit better at making funky records, which is, after all, what this whole game is about. But they're still wallpapering over their staggering deficiencies -- and their liberal guilt -- by keeping all interpretive options open for their alleged audience. Are they kidding, or are they for real? Certainly they are acting much stupider than we'd expect grown men to behave; this implies that they are not wholly in earnest. Yet they've produced their record to fuck and back, and they pose like would-be thugs in their promo shots. If you're dumb enough to believe that what they're doing bears some actual resemblance to old-school rap and R&B, they'll take it; if you believe they're mocking rap music and rap conventions for the benefit of supercilious hipsters who believe themselves to be above Negro music, they'll take that, too. Really, all you need to know about Chromeo is that one of the members of this urban-music "posse" teaches French literature to undergrads at Columbia University. Tenured radicals, indeed.
Ciara -- "Like A Boy"
The Gumby-dancing R&B singer one-ups Alicia Keys with this oblique response to the claims of "her" alleged transsexuality. As spin-doctoring goes, "Like A Boy" rates slightly below the hot air generated by Senator Clinton's post-debate flacks, but I give Ciara points for creative damage control. The single describes all the things "she" would do were she actually a boy, which of course she is not, because if she were, then this song would make no sense, right? Right? Ignore its chart position: "Like A Boy" was a relative flop for Ciara, and made no meaningful radio impact, because all eyes were averted once it became apparent what "she" was trying to do. See, we talk a good, filthy game on the Internet, but when it comes down to it, there are some veils we don't want to penetrate. In 2007, the taboo territory included Ciara's panties.
Coco Rosie -- "Rainbowarriors"
Lest you think I'm calling out the urban audience for its inability to deal with female-to-male crossdressing, the indie-rock underground hasn't been any testament to broadmindedness, either. The Coco Rosie sisters get painted as shrill pseudo-folk fakers by the same gang of hipsters who are happy to mill about around Devendra Banhart's jockstrap. Bianca Cassidy's singing isn't all that much more annoying than Joanna Newsom's is. C'mon, admit it: you don't like that she wears a phony moustache.
This is not somebody you really have to worry about. Caillat is a solid-C mainstream pop singer, and her pop song (there won't be another) is aggressively okay. If Sheryl Crow is Liz Phair with a lobotomy, Colbie Caillat is Sheryl Crow drunk(er), half-asleep, slurring speech, and drooling.
Common -- "The People", "Driving Me Wild"
I think it was Byron Crawford who first complained about how much he hates it when Common slips into his "Def Poetry Jam" flow. Trouble is, that spoken-word mush is about the big lug is ladeling out at the hip-hop soup kitchen lately. Yes, Com has been buffing up his brand identity as the boho-liberal's favorite emcee, and that means he's given hope to every clown crowding the stage at your local open mike. Oh, you don't go to those? Remember the part on Late Registration where Common busts in and says, in that goofy-ass "wistful" voice, "relationships become jail/ children go unheld/ I wish love was for sale"? It's just like that, only it goes on for hours and hours, until the Master of Ceremonies passes out from pot-smoke asphyxia. "The People" is more of the same: Com sends the most predictable shout-out in rap history to his junior senator; his obligatory Obama/drama couplet is only partially redeemed by rhyming it all with "Botswana". When he sees the Chicago underclass struggling, he "thinks of how he's touching them"; as he steps into the gas-guzzling Lincoln Navigator that he shills in his shit-eating TV spots. Please, spare me from sensitive, big-hearted capitalist running-dogs.
Down South it is so much simpler. You have your plentiful ass, your candy-colored Cadillacs, the grind, and if you're lucky, a big styrofoam cup of that sizzurp to wash it all down. Rarely is there any pretense toward "conscious" rhyming or socially-progressive sloganeering -- MoveOn.org does not bother to enlist the Crime Mob in their petition drives. You may hear Southern rap as the end of civilization as we know it; to me, after the sanctimonious Chicago stuff, it feels like pure oxygen. The Crime Mob's mark of distinction is that they've got two girl rappers in the crew, and that is a rarity in a subgenre where "take you home/ let you juggle my balls" is the average emcee's idea of pillow talk. But theirs is no gimmick -- Diamond and Princess are both halfway decent emcees, and their presence in the group allows for some uncommon exchanges. For instance, on "Rock Yo Hips", Lil J kicks a verse about his erection, and then Diamond follows with another about her thirty-two flavors of bootylicious bubblegum. That may not be the rapprochement between the sexes that Gloria Steinem was looking for, but hey, at least the two sides are talking.
Crowded House -- "Don't Stop Now"
The next time somebody tries to sell you that hoary old line about how pop songwriting isn't a talent -- that it's all just craftsmanship, and any monkey with a copy of Smile and a decent six-string can do it -- think about Neil Finn. On paper, Crowded House isn't much different from Snow Patrol or The Fray, or any of those other soft-rock pretenders who've been clogging up the Billboard charts in recent years. But Finn is the only true heir to Paul McCartney's legacy in the bunch, and he can pen melodies that'll make your heart stop. Time On Earth contains at least three songs that Chris Martin would sell his soul to attach his name to; "Don't Stop Now" is one of them. Ironic, then, that it's his most sober-sided album yet: track after track, little brother Finn confronts depression and his former drummer's suicide. "Silent House", co-written with agitprop artist Natalie Maines (of all people), tackles Alzheimer's disease in brutal, unsparing language. In Mike Chunn's fantastic Stranger Than Fiction: The Story Of Split Enz, the author reports that Tim Finn once complimented his sibling's "sprightly poppish voice"; that's still there, but it's matured into a carrier of pure and scarred Kiwi soul. He's already levitated the Sydney Opera House at least once, and he's a legend in both hemispheres. His songs, and his performances, are going to outlast us all.
Like mononucleosis, grunge never goes away completely. When the body is exhausted, it flares up, and the next thing you know, you're weak and heaving. The American Idol television empire can be blamed for this particular relapse. Some might say that this is the price we must pay for Kelly Clarkson, but I think Fantasia Barrino is pretty dope, too -- so on balance, I've got no problem with the enterprise. Just don't ask me to watch the program.
Diddy -- "Through The Pain", "Last Night" (with Keyshia Cole)
Not content with a public inquisition of Stephin Merritt's race politics, Sasha Frere-Jones made another big stink this year about Whitey's unwillingness to get down with beat music. He should be careful what he asks for: is more Chromeo really something we ought to be working toward? No, the more interesting (and maybe disturbing) development is happening in the back of the bus, so to speak. Judging by video evidence, it's the rappers and R&B singers who suddenly want to rock out. Beyoncé fronts a band in the "Irreplaceable" spot, Lil Wayne grabs an electric guitar for the "Leather So Soft" clip, Rihanna makes like a CBGB ingénue in the "Shut Up And Drive" video; and then there were the Shop Boyz, who, in spite of their own willful stupidity, became a walking essay on cultural cross-pollination and musical desegregation. Kanye West's latest best-seller borrows from Elton John, Donald Fagen, and Daft Punk, and owes more to European synthpop than Run-DMC. When Graduation topped the charts, big brother Jay-Z bestowed upon Mr. West the highest compliment he could give: he called him a "rock star". Even Puffy, pillager of the new-wave songbook and famously unrepentant digital-sampler, has gotten in on the action: the "Last Night" clip casts him as a brooding indie bandleader, sound-checking in a dive bar. So what's going on here? Partially, it's just hemlines rising and falling -- back in the Nineties, snares and kick drums were compressed to the point of absurdity by rap producers, and we're hearing a return to a splashier full-kit sound. Check Rich Harrison's productions for Missy Elliott and Amerie (especially "1 Thing"); those gave other trackmakers the permission to loosen up the backbeat a bit, and maybe even to pantomime some live instrumentation. Never one to resist amplifying a trend, Puffy has dropped the biggest beat yet, and enlisted Keyshia Cole to sing over it; he does a little singing too, but the less said about that, the better. "Last Night" is, strictly speaking, a rock song -- it may wear its ProTools assembly proudly, but so does Minus The Bear. White-man radio still isn't going to play this jam, but that's why God invented podcasts. Musicians are culturally-absorptive people, and if you put Puff Diddy (or whatever the hell he's calling himself these days), Jay-Z, Kanye West and Keyshia Cole in a room with rockers, they're going to incorporate some of what they hear into their own mixes. They've got the ability to do that. You can't expect the same out of Arcade Fire, Panda Bear, or I'm From Barcelona. It's not that they wouldn't choose to periodically funk out if they could -- it's that indie rockers simply aren't as talented, and therefore they're nowhere near as flexible. When they try it, they become embarrassed, and often attempt to play it off as a joke, which isn't good for anybody. Far better that the rappers start to rock: that way, it's done with professional skill rather than self-conscious bet-hedging. This might not be the cultural dialogue that Sasha Frere-Jones is looking for, but it's been a gigantic musical storyline for 2007, and it'll continue as long as consumers are free to scramble playlists and share music on Last.fm and the like. Turns out it was a nation of a million program directors holding us back. Right, as if we didn't know.
DJ Khaled, T.I., Akon, Rick Ross, Fat Joe, Lil Wayne & Baby -- "We Taking Over"
Uninspired posse cut enlivened by a hilarious verse from Lil Wayne. As always, it's not what he says, it's the way that he says it. Plenty of rappers are as clever as Wayne is; few, though, have ever had so much fun playing with the sound and shape of words. If The Carter III was pushed back to the Day of Judgement, I'm not sure anybody would notice: Weezy can keep on putting out mixtapes, spitting on other people's beats (and showing them up), and guest emceeing, and his public profile wouldn't be diminished one bit. He's not looking for a spot on VH1 Classic Albums. He just wants you to call him the Greatest Rapper Alive, and, shrewdly, he's recognized that there are routes to the throne that do not involve the usual album-plus-tour slog. Smart guy, that Carter.
DJ Quik & AMD -- "Can U Werk Wit Dat?"
Quik returns from exile to rhyme "grow up and be somebody" with "want some calamari". He'd fit in great with my extended family. Good beat, good hook, spirited performances, decent booty rhymes. It's anybody's guess when the album will finally drop; Quik has relocated to Atlanta, which is surely exciting for him, but it means he's swimming in the deep end.
Bob Hope and Doris Day were unavailable, so the USO shipped Drowning Pool to Iraq instead. This nu-metal stomper shows genuine concern for the boys in sand-colored camouflage, but was it a good idea to bring to the Green Zone a band whose best-known song goes "let the bodies hit the floor"? Moreover, considering popular U.S. methods of interrogation, might Attorney General Mukasey not have something to say about the unfortunate name of this band? Aw, hell, I suppose the government knows what it's doing; you know, give the long-suffering guards at the black sites something to hum while waterboarding. Like Elvis Costello said on "Night Rally", it's just the sort of catchy little melody to get you singing in the showers.
Eskimo Joe -- "Black Fingernails, Red Wine"
In this era of cultural imperialism it may strike you as quaint, but Australia still has its own homegrown pop stars. Many of them are not even kangaroos. Eskimo Joe, L.D.U. chart-toppers and ARIA-award winners, represent Perth, the capital of Western Australia and the most isolated major city in the world. You probably remember Siberian Yakut from nights spent crouched over the Risk board; that's the only sub-national region anywhere in the world with a larger area than Western Australia. Three-quarters of the state -- a million and a half people -- live in Perth; past city limits, a driver confronts hundreds of miles of strip-mines, badlands, and uninhabitable desert. Yet somehow, despite that physical remove, Eskimo Joe makes slick, pro-quality indie rock indistinguishable from that of the typical Brooklyn careerist combo. Fans at their '06 CMJ showcase could have been forgiven for assuming they were watching three guys who'd just stumbled down to the club from their Lorimer Street apartment. The point: do not send your rockin' Doctor Livingstones out to discover fresh sounds in fresh territories; that day is over. If it's an English-speaking corner of the world, no matter how remote it is, the musicians there will surely be chasing the same consensus, established on the Internet by rootless cosmopolitan scenesters with weblogs. Metacritic, Pitchfork, and the All-Music Guide are accessible wherever wires can run; properly studied, they offer a guide to aesthetic homogenization unbeatable in the history of mass-produced pop music. The only strange bits of real-estate left to explore are the brains of first-world weirdos with the will -- or just the perversity -- to stand against conventional wisdom.
Warning: not a Nirvana cover. Nope, Amy Lee is having communication problems with her drunk boyfriend again, and her latest piece of enabler-rock is about what you'd expect: piano, distorted guitar, and hefty melodrama. Which is all fine, I guess, but shouldn't the Goths who constitute her audience be listening to Choirgirl Hotel instead? It's the exact same thing, only cogent.
Eve -- "Tambourine"
Because it's a Swizz Beatz production, Eve's "Tambourine" has lots and lots of, um, tambourine. And that's the whole problem with Swizz; as much heat as he can bring, the guy has never bothered to develop a change-up. As for the former First Lady of the Ruff Ryders, she can count her blessings: she's not deaf, or in jail, or saddled with a daytime talk show. Instead, Eve keeps making records, and in an environment that is about as supportive to a woman's career as the atmosphere of the moon is to tropical vegetation. Her mid-decade move on the pop market has, ironically, alienated her from the same charts she regularly visited as a g-rapper. "Tambourine" probably deserved to be a bigger hit, especially since it's another one of those novelty dance-instruction numbers that all the stars are rushing to upload to video file-sharing sites. But the ladies were all doing the scissor-leg and Naomi Campbell walk with Beyoncé, and once the kids figured out what "superman that ho" meant, there was no stopping them from cranking it along with Soulja Boy. Aim for the YouTube audience, suffer a YouTube fate.
Fabolous & Ne-Yo -- "Make Me Better"
I don't know, is this song any good? You tell me. Every time this one comes on MTV Jams, I immediately turn the channel to C-SPAN; I figure who knows?, there might be a scientist testifying before a Congressional subcommittee about depleted uranium. I probably encountered it while grocery shopping and figured it was some new Mase cut, maybe from the soundtrack of a new Rush Hour movie. Normally, if Timbaland has anything to do with a song, I'm all over it; but this one interests me less than a Gray's Anatomy spinoff. Fabolous must be the most ineffectual emcee in recorded history -- he must have, what, eighty-eight top ten hits by now?, and I couldn't name a single one of them. And in case you hadn't noticed, I'm a little bit obsessed with this stuff. In fact, I'm moving right along to the next entry so I can go back to pretending Fabolous doesn't exist.
Fall Out Boy -- "This Ain't A Scene… It's An Arms Race", "Thnks Fr Th Mmrs"
Damn, the next entry is Fall Out Boy. That's no fun at all. And unlike Fabolous, there's no wishing them away: from their promontory point atop Fueled By Ramen HQ, they keep sending their epigones out to swarm the emo-pop battlefield. What's more, they've lately taken to complaining on record about the dog-eat-dog world of professional rock and roll. Pete Wentz's fine whine would go down smoother if, oh, I don't know, he didn't own his own corporate-rock record label. If indie rock is now more an arms race than a scene, he's partially responsible. Moreover, no matter what literary aspirations he's developed in his old age, his band is the new Foreigner, and will surely be remembered as such.
Further evidence that America desires not supermodel good looks but legit talent from its pop stars: the shovel-faced and portly Fantasia Barrino, winner of one American Idol season or another. Not that her handlers know this; otherwise, they never would have allowed her to appear in a bathtub, covered in suds, in the video to "When I See U". My scientific estimates suggest that 75% of viewers immediately changed the channel to a depleted uranium special on C-SPAN, and the rest of us suffered irreversible retinal damage. The tragedy is that "When I See U" is frothy, twinkling, wholly engrossing modern R&B, and Barrino's sultry ad lib at the end elevates it into the rarefied territory inhabited by Mary J., Alicia Keys, and, lately, Keyshia Cole. She can croon, that's for sure. But I'm afraid she's going to have to try again.
Of all of the lies perpetuated by the American advertising industry over the past decade, the single most nauseating (and maybe the most pernicious) is that purchasing an Apple computer or electronics product is tantamount to striking a blow for individual freedom. Walk into Tekserve sometime, if you can stand the sanctimony, and inhale the propaganda: PC users are hopeless squares, while Mac owners are battering down the doors of perception by shelling out for the latest MP3 player. Never mind that a genuine nonconformist would build his computer from components and run Linux; folks, Apple is an international corporation, and one that operates on the same bottom-line, dolo-first principles as Gateway or Dell. Steve Jobs is not a revolutionary: he's a Silicon Valley establishment businessman with a clever plan to divest you of your money through hocus-pocus, empty rhetoric, and pastel colors. If he's hired an agency shrewd enough identify Leslie Feist as an artist with the proper caché to appeal to his self-entitled fanbase, that doesn't mean he's on your side. It means he's figured out exactly how to exploit you -- what music to play and what pretty pictures to flash in order to convince the Apple loyalist that she's a better, more stylish individual than her friend stuck running Windows Media Player. Furthermore, the iPod is not a transformative, world-changing piece of technology -- it's a digital Walkman with a firewire port and a light-up touchscreen. Portable MP3 players have been available since 2002 at least; were they really destined to stand the music industry on its ear, we'd see some evidence of that superpower by now. Go back and look at my abstract from 2002, and notice how many of the names on the list are the same. Certainly the genre structure hasn't changed at all: there's hip-hop, corporate rock and pop-punk, indie rock, and adult-contemporary singer-songwriter music. It may be true that people are privy to more music these days than they once were. But if that's so, it's because of file-sharing websites and social-networks, not Apple's visionary leadership. Make no mistake: Steve Jobs does have a plan to transform the music industry, and that plan involves seizing the major labels by the balls, sucking their catalogues dry, and seating himself on the vacant throne. This plan will only work if we buy into the fiction that the pop music now revolves around his dinky device and its accompanying software. Right now, he's cranking the PR machine as fast as he can, because he can smell the money. We've all seen the cutesy commercials, and read the corporate porn about the world-historical product launches. But if you think the new boss will be any different than the old boss, I've got a mainframe in Brooklyn to sell you.
Fergie -- "Big Girls Don't Cry", "Glamorous", "Clumsy"
The cashmere-smooth synth hook on "Glamorous" serves as an aural signature as boldly-scribed as any by Pharrell Williams, and it ought to be instantly recognizable to anybody who has heard the Rich Boy album. Polow Da Don is the most purely musical of the new "it" producers -- even on a roughneck track like "Boy Looka Here", he juggles harmonies, instrumental textures, and verse-by-verse internal variations with the sure, velvet-gloved hands of an orchestra conductor. This means his cuts are always worthy of close engagement and repeat listens, even when, as on "Glamorous", his vocalist isn't capable of working with any of his nuances. As for the star herself, I agree that she's pretty ghastly, but there's no need to call out the SWAT team. She's roughly 150 years old; I doubt she'll be hogging the spotlight for too much longer. Ride this one out.
Texas Christian hard-rock band with a deftly-concealed spiritual message. Lacey Moseley wants to sing about the Son of Man, but she also wants to get on mainstream radio. She's heard the second verse of "Jesus Walks"; she knows what time it is. "All Around Me" is, among other things, a beautifully-rendered account of a theophany, but if you asked the singer about it, she'd probably tell you it's about some boy. America 2007: land of upside-down priorities.
Foo Fighters -- "The Pretender", "Long Road To Ruin"
It's been sixteen years since Dave Grohl introduced himself to us with the Fill Heard 'Round The World. (Go ahead, you know it; hammer it out on your desk.) It took him five seconds to cement his place in rock history, and it's fair to say he's had nothing subsequent to add. In retrospect, it's clear that Grohl was the most likely member of Nirvana to make a showing during Century 21: his instrumental talent was obvious, and he was exorcised some of his unhealthy aggression behind the kit. By the time he'd established the Foo Fighters, he'd become the pure careerist entertainer he was always destined to be: nothing special on the mic, but handy with a melody and a thunderous backbeat. The songs above are the usual grind-'em-out power pop, but he remains a stupendous rhythm player, and "The Pretender" suggests a nascent political conscience. We expect Kanye West to lash out at authority; he's terminally adolescent like that. When good corporate citizens like Dave Grohl and Adam Levine begin to express doubts about the government, that's when you know the dissatisfaction is real, and widespread.
Girl In A Coma -- "Clumsy Sky"
San Antonio sister act possesses a few achy-breaky poptunes and, in Nina Diaz, a vocalist who developed her phrasing and tone by parroting performances on Morrissey records. The band's name, too, is a naked allusion to The Smiths. The Moz noticed, and chose the Girls as the support act for his 2007 tour. Imitation might get you ignored by critics; it can also land you a high-profile opening gig. Provided, of course, that you're imitating somebody with a massive ego, and a will to self-replicate.
Good Charlotte -- "I Don't Want To Be In Love (Dance Floor Anthem)"
Joel Madden's uber-dorky quintet has lately been pilloried for pinching from The Killers; they have, it seems, become exactly what they lampooned on "Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous". But that wasn't a very good song, either, and at no point did Good Charlotte ever have a distinctive identity separate from that of their better-publicized peers. Anybody who thought we had a real Holden Caulfield on our hands in 2002 needs to go back and revisit seventh grade. Madden was always a trendspotter, an unrepentant camp-follower, and a professional nuisance; he wasn't knocking celebrity culture, he was standing at the doorway and hoping to sneak into the party. Now that he's made it, he has, predictably, identified the popular kids and decided to shadow their movements around the room. While it is nobody's idea of a dancefloor anthem, "I Don't Want To Be In Love" is a sharply-minted imitation. Numismatics experts will surely identify it as a forgery; the rest of us will happily pass it along to the convenience-store clerk in exchange for another brightly-wrapped packet of empty calories.
Obscene, infectious threat-rhyme from Jeezy's replacement in Boyz N Da Hood. Gorilla Zoe's menacing performance turns on the mid-song punchline: "you don't wanna take a ride in that long black hearse". He's right, I don't. The beat is a sleek Atlanta assembly-line production, but "Hood Nigga" is probably best known for the emcee's closing-verse declaration of sexual interest in Beyoncé Knowles and Keyshia Cole. Then he descends into rambling, horndog incoherence, and not a moment too soon.
Grand National -- "By The Time I Get Home There Won't Be Much Of A Place For Me"
So it's four o'clock in the morning, and dreary, and your lips are dry and rough. Not kissing lips, no way, not these. Pairs of red lights blink against the clouds above Newark Airport, and you wonder which one of the planes is hers. The last few conversations, you admit to yourself, haven't gone well. You sounded anxious, and she sounded convivial, yet there was something absent, diminished, about her voice. Each time you hung up the telephone, you felt a little further away from her. And then there were those strange sounds in the background -- goddamn, where was she, exactly? Had she misreported her coordinates; had the mission changed? So you decided you weren't going to take the last call, you'd be out; you'd let the machine handle it. When you stumbled home, a little drunk from a party you shouldn't have attended, you raced to the answering machine with eyes shut, certain the light wouldn't be flashing, that she was gone for good. But there she was -- or there her voice was, anyway, strained and dispassionate, with a time and a flight number. And now the plane is down, and you can see the flash of her hair, and her teeth, as she steps through the sliding glass door. You help her load her luggage in the trunk. Air rushes between you; you feel dislocated, dream-stuck. It is as if she has been replaced with a precisely-drawn simulation of herself. Without speaking, she slides into the passenger's seat, extracts a CD from her handbag, and slips it into the car stereo. This is the song that plays.
Not for a second did I think he'd be back, certainly not after he'd turned himself into the cops for shooting first and asking questions later in the well-policed banlieues of Decatur. But here he is, folks, clinging gamely to the beat just as he did on "So Icy", fronting like Rick James over a snare, a ghostly kalimba, eerie synthesized strings, and not much else. "Oh, youse a college girl?", Gucci smirks at his target, and you can practically hear the smile-lines crinkling behind his shades. Bemused at her reticence, he tries again: "jumping out the phantom/ don't you think I'm handsome?" Well, no, no she doesn't, but he's got bigger fish to fry. Gucci is here to testify to the great matrilineal spirit; the motor animating endless generations of inherited ass. The emcee glibly inverts "Superfreak" by insisting that the very freaky gurl has gotten "it" from her momma, and of course she has. When the chords change in the chorus, it's troublingly effective. When the beat drops out and leaves the kalimba to clatter along on its lonesome, it slices the track with the precision of a sushi chef deboning a salmon. I could listen to this song ten thousand times and never tire of it. Before I hammer out my last goodbye to you, I probably will.
Gwen Stefani -- "The Sweet Escape" (with Akon)
True indie rock stories, Volume MMCVIII: on the hottest, muggiest day of the summer, Japan Seoul gathered at the lead singer's flat to take publicity photos for the upcoming release. The photographer asked for individual shots, so one at a time, we left the air-conditioning to stand under the midday sun in an alley between tenements. After an hour of this, we were all utterly drained; slumped in chairs and on benches, or on the lead singer's bed. Jesse Blockton lazily strummed a guitar, and without even really recognizing what he was doing, he began plucking out the progression to "The Sweet Escape". Five nerdy Jewish musicians and one nerdy Jewish wanna-be instantly reanimated, and sang, as one: "whoo hoo! whee hee!". The epiphany lasted no more than a moment, but it took the sun out of our heads, and reminded us all who we were and what we were doing with instruments in our hands. No breeze, canned or otherwise, blows cooler than a pop chorus.
Headlights -- "TV"
This is fun, isn't it? I always forget how much fun it is. I take a look at the singles list after Thanksgiving and wonder to myself how in the name of Tina Turner I'm going to write single-paragraph entries for two hundred pop songs. What a grind it's going to be!, why bother with this silly tradition anyway? Don't I have any good computer games to play? Then I get started, and the next thing I know, I've passed the ten thousand word mark, and I'm grinning myself to sleep. The trick, as I've written before, is to put your head down and let God handle the delete key, give yourself a chance to vent uncensored, let 'er rip. I'm sure I'm overusing the semicolon this time out, but hell, that's the herky-jerky mood I'm in this December. It's just an end-of-year letter, really, from me to you with love, friend: like the ones you get from your aunt Patricia, telling you that little Joey has gotten his first communion, and Madison has been waitlisted at Swarthmore. I don't have any children to baptize or to ram through college, so my days are marked by the steady rhythm of the release schedule. Write all day, listen to albums; take a ride and catch some Hot-97; have dinner in front of MTV Jams. I received the Headlights album in January, and have been listening to it ever since; in a way, the story of 2007, for me, could be told through my engagement with it, experiences I've had to it, reflections I've had after listening to it. I could tell you that it's the perfect middle ground between Mates Of State and Camera Obscura, or that the singer sounds a wee bit like the great Eleanor Friedberger, or that you might be surprised to learn that the very Scottish-sounding Kill Them With Kindness rolled in from the heaths and glens of Urbana-Champaign. But instead I'll point out that it's sitting next to the laptop on the little wooden table to my right -- the one my mom rescued from our basement, lacquered, and gave back to us on the day we bought this apartment. Beyond that is the baby blue of the bedroom wall; after that, crisp air and streetlamps, and the dull amber windows of Jersey City after dark.
Another dance number, but beware, kids: this is no chicken noodle soup with a soda on the side. Instead, it's one man's instructions on how to twerk it like a stripper. Huey wants to see the fanny scrape against the ground, and in order to make sure his dream comes true, he's decided to capitalize on the homemade choreography craze. He's even got his rejoinders ready for potential party poopers (like me): "pop lockin' cock blockers get up out the way/ let little mami get low!" Hey, it's her life.
Hurricane Chris -- "A Bay Bay", "The Hand Clap" (with Big Poppa)
And on higher (and dryer) ground, Louisiana kept right on rocking. Up in Shreveport, they call this stuff "ratchet"; if it's indistinguishable from Memphis proto-crunk, remember that it all flows into the same Mississippi delta. Contrary to popular belief, "A Bay Bay" is not something you holler at a good-looking girl. No, Hollywood Bay Bay is the key man in the Ratchet City movement; and this old codger is pleased to see a tyro emcee giving a veteran deejay and scene cornerstone his propers. Old-school NYC rappers used to send songs out to Red Alert just to brownnose and wheedle some pity airplay; Hurricane Chris has the same idea. "Ay, Bay Bay", he's yelling, "that's my song! Turn it up!" He's a little further in front of the beat than what we've become accustomed to -- at times, his phrasing is practically cold-weather -- but as an introduction to the Shreveport sound, this'll do fine. Now, about that insensitive handle…
I'm From Barcelona -- "We're From Barcelona"
I may look a spring chicken in my television appearances, but trust me, I've got some miles on the ol' odometer. Just to give you a for instance, I can remember when the C86 came out in the NME, and I also recall the circumstances well. The cassette that, theoretically, launched tweepop was meant as an intervention in the so-called "hip-hop wars"; half the magazine's staff didn't want to write about the funky stuff, and the legendary cassette was part of Operation Shutdown. Funny, then, that indiepop and hip-hop are, and have always been, my two favorite genres. Many long-time readers forcefully argue that I cut violent, misogynist, by-the-numbers Southern g-rap an unconscionable amount of slack. Nobody ever complains about the free passes I hand out to equally generic twee music -- and this strikes me as strange, especially as the form wilts under the glare of widespread public acceptance. I don't hate I'm From Barcelona, but I understand why I should, and I am willing to concede that the many spins I've given Let Me Introduce My Friends are the true indication of my moral weakness. See, back when indiepop started, there was nothing trendy about it. It was wimpy, and twee, and people only became involved in it because they loved pop music and wanted to be good songwriters. Now that indiepop has become a Pitchfork-approved "in thing", it's started to attract the same kind of opportunistic schmucks who would have joined grunge bands in 1994. It's easy to make a brain-dead indiepop song: just gather a bunch of friends around a microphone and do an inane three-chord cheer about something you experienced as a kid. The IRCE goes crazy for this stuff. Because I am me, I blame Sufjan Stevens: in future years, I think we're going to look back at the critical salivation over Illinois as the moment when the charlatans, plagiarists, and hucksters took over the form. My fey tweepop fellows find battle-rhyming distasteful, but there's a good argument to be made for quality control. Indiepop needs to develop a similar mechanism; otherwise, accountants with toy xylophones are going to hijack the entire subgenre.
Immaculate Machine -- "Jarhand"
Beautiful little Kathryn Calder arrived too late to play the bleeding heart show, but uncle Carl gave her her very own lead on "Adventures In Solitude", the penultimate track on Challengers. She killed the mic, of course; blood relation or not, you don't get to be Neko Case's understudy unless you've got mad skills. Back home in Vancouver, she brought her college band back together for another run, and, unwisely, the trio leads with a poorly-veiled Twin Cinema rewrite. The rest of Immaculate Machine's Fables escapes the long shadow of the New Pornographers, and really catches fire when Calder and guitarist Brooke Gallupe turn their voices against anxiety and small-town boredom. They're still as liable as not to make like overenthusiastic camp councilors, but they no longer believe they can defeat consumer capitalism by themselves. I mourn for their young-activist spirits, but the dash of disillusionment has made for sharper writing.
Interpol -- "The Heinrich Maneuver"
Crafty, upbeat power-pop; easily the equal of anything on Antics. Still, 2001 is now far enough in the rear-view mirror that it's fair to ask: exactly what made this band abandon the art-rock template they worked so effectively on their initial EPs and Turn On The Bright Lights? Back then, Interpol seemed to realize that Carlos Dengler and (especially) Sam Fogarino were the stars of the show, and that the two guitar players upfront were there for accenting, humorous sound FX, and clever asides. Their ferocious rhythm section made them distinct from the rest of the aspirants working the LES; if you got Paul Banks sufficiently inebriated, he'd probably admit that the pivotal moment in Interpol history was Fogarino's unlikely decision to ditch The Ton-Ups and pound the skins for this NYU youth gang. We're not in possession of our powers forever, and it's possible that neither Fogarino nor Dengler are capable of recapturing the imaginative fire they had in '01. But it could also be that they're getting crummy arrangement advice. It would be one thing if they'd decided they wanted to be a ska band or something. Since Bright Lights, all their adaptations have been far too conservative. Interpol, leave the safe musical gestures for the bands that can't play.
Iron & Wine -- "Boy With A Coin"
After Simon and Garfunkel gave you a few verses and choruses, and coo-coo-ca-chooed a bit, they often liked to settle into a somnolent acoustic groove for the fade. Sam Beam's songs always sound like S&G outros -- as if he'd sampled a bit of the release of a song from Bookends and tried to make an entire track out of it. I do not believe that this is a cynical attempt to cheaply conjure that S&G feeling. It's just all he knows how to do. Drones, repetitive acoustic guitar patterns, and whispered vox: that's his bag in full.
Jamie T -- "Calm Down Dearest", "Sheila"
Moneyed London kid talks street-tough over computer beats. His stories are patent fiction, but the details have the ring of truth: Jamie Treays knows he can't be a badass, so he's chosen to chronicle rude-boy (and girl) exploits instead. He's watched crime drama, so he's got a flimsy framework for his fiction. More importantly, he's ridden the buses and trains past the satellite-towns, and he's seen enough aimless teenage faces to invent elaborate yarns about their lives. Fools will compare Jamie T to Mike Skinner; really, they've got nothing in common beyond their software packages. Skinner spits rhymes about his disappointment in himself, rages, cautions, curses, pulls up his shirt to show off his injuries. Treays is a fabulist with a taste for violence; he has no scars on his face, and it's that very innocence that makes his project so frightening.
Jay-Z -- "Minority Report", "Blue Magic"
Whatever his merits as an emcee might be, Jay-Z's status as America's leading economic indicator ought to be unchallenged by now. It was therefore terrifying to watch the internationally-solvent superstar flossing in the "Blue Magic" clip with a roll of Euros. Jay was only making official what the federal government doesn't have the balls to say (though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was more than happy to volunteer it): the U.S. dollar is now barely worth the paper it's printed on. You'll no doubt remember that in Clinton-era videos it was obligatory for rappers to flash wads of greenbacks at the camera. That may still fly for Tum Tum, who seems to have never crossed the Dallas city limits. But Jay-Z is a jetsetter who hangs with Barbara Walters, and surely he caught the scent in the wind after paying seventy-five bucks for a cup of coffee in London. The Bush administration wants to assure you that the currency crash has nothing to do with the hundreds of billions dollars we've borrowed from China in order to finance our armed misadventures abroad. Never mind that the pace of military spending is unsustainable: you'd have to be a 2008 presidential candidate not to recognize that. We're now so far in hock to Asian governments that our entire economy only exists through their willingness to continue to purchase our debt. Now, it isn't in China's interest to pull the rug out from under us, because they're still finding their economic footing, and they need the export market. If our money collapses completely, they're going to be out a hefty sum, and that prospect can't please them. Every day the dollar slides, we wipe more real value off of their balance sheets. But those who take solace in China's predicament are missing the bigger picture: as long as our fate rests in the hands of foreign central bankers, it's no longer accurate for us to think of ourselves as an independent nation. If Hu Jintao woke up one morning and decided to call in the U.S. debt, we'd be totally screwed. All that money in your pocket, all your assets, everything you've saved, your mortgage, your stocks, whatever small shred of capital you've managed to get your hands on -- all of that would evaporate in an instant. And at that moment, the American dollar would cease to function as the world's currency of last resort: it would effectively be replaced by the much more powerful and valuable yuan. Hu doesn't even have to make that decision actively -- he can just patiently wait for allow international exchange rates to drift to the point where nobody in the world would want to hold an American dollar. That's the direction we're headed in, and if we continue to act like there is no price tag attached to bomb-manufacturing and empire-building -- if we continue to insist that we will spend "whatever it takes" to do battle with an abstract concept that cannot be defeated -- our debt is going to become so gigantic that default will become inevitable. Perhaps Jay-Z has already come to this conclusion. His team of economic advisers has likely encouraged him to diversify his currency portfolio, and he's got his share of precious metals salted away in a Zurich bank. The rest of us, whether patriotic or not, will live or die by the greenback. One more thing, and then we'll pick this up in four entries or so when we do John Mayer: with another national election knocking at our doors, it's worth recalling why we've destabilized our currency so dramatically. Not to educate ourselves, or to promote science or health, or to rebuild our roads or re-plant our farms, or to protect our seas or our airspace, or even to put a silly man on a silly moon; no, none of that. We took on this debt so we could quarter armies of occupation in foreign countries, wreck their cities, kill their soldiers and civilians, and line the pockets of the usual war profiteers. You'll be paying for it for the rest of your life, which will, in all likelihood, last years longer than Mr. Cheney's, Mr. Rumsfeld's, Mr. Wolfowitz's, and even the indestructible Mr. Bush's.
Jennifer Hudson -- "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going"
Is this even music? It was bad enough when Kelis was screaming on the track; at least that had some novelty appeal. Hudson yells her head off in a purely conventional manner: she thinks she's testifying, but mostly she's just hamming it up for the cheap seats. Recommended only to those who believe Carol Burnett's performance in Annie was the epitome of soul.
Jens Lekman -- "Sipping On The Sweet Nectar"
The Puff Daddy of Stockholm continues his wholesale pillaging of Sixties and Seventies AM radio staples -- this time out, he's sitting in the torn fusillage of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" and pretending to soar. Like Puffy, Lekman gets points for taste, and for presentation; also like Puffy, he's not much of a vocalist, and gets by on charm and understated enthusiasm. Other songs on Night Falls On Kortedala are better: much has been made about the letter to his lesbian friend's father, but I prefer the quiet studies of small-town Scandinavia and the one about the drive-in bingo. "Tonight's jackpot is a pig, hey, that's criminal/ G-42, ooh, I'm going diagonal": words worthy of that other famous Jens. I give him props for losing his mySpace page, too; that was courageous, even if a solitary Swede striking a blow versus technoconformity doesn't amount to much. Hey, what if they threw a social-networking site and nobody came?
J. Holiday -- "Bed"
Rappers and R&B singers are never going to cease referring to themselves as soldiers until the troops are home, martial law is lifted, and the Military Commissions Act is a distant memory. I don't like it, but I'm resigned to it. Still, some metaphors are more gruesome than others. Warrior language is to be expected when g-rappers rhyme about spraying the enemy crew with AK fire; when lover-men conflate battle-talk with pillow-talk, I draw the line. J. Holiday's invitation to the sack sounds so warm and sweet that you might think you're getting milk and cookies and a nice tuck-in. Until he croons the inadvertently-psychotic chorus, that is: "Love you till your eyes roll back/ Then I'm a rock your body/ Turn you over/ Love is war/ I'm your soldier/ I'm a put you to bed, bed, bed". Uh, no thanks, J., I'll just be over by the night-light with my body armor on.
Jibbs -- "King Kong"
Hmm, once again it's the holiday season, and I've misplaced my spirit of charity. Even after a year when I prayed to the hit radio more than I ever did -- and it delivered, as it always does -- I'm still crucifying its favorite sons. Oh, well, if you're looking for the "positive" Tris McCall, you might want to skip ahead to Say Anything and Shop Boyz. There's no use pretending that Jibbs is anything other than a temp to employ while Nelly is on ski vacation in Telluride, but he's already a sharper rhymer than Chingy, and this ode to his booming system is childishly effective. I didn't think he had another one in him after "Chain Hang Low"; good on him for proving me wrong.
John Mayer -- "Waiting On The World To Change"
In a sober moment, John Mayer might acknowledge that it's really irrelevant to him whether or not Ron Paul knows the Constitution. "One day our generation is going to rule the population", he (the pop star, not the Congressman) sings in "Waiting On The World To Change"; John, I remember thinking the same thing, and look what we've done with the responsibility. Mayer wants the war over but feels incapable of doing anything about it -- like many Americans, he's got a vague sense that demonstrations, petitions and angry weblog posts don't help; that the cards are already stacked against the peaceniks and will continue to be until there's a radical change in our governing philosophy. Yet he still believes that the game is worth playing -- that wresting control of the media from the corporations that "own the information" will raise our consciousness and protect us from further error. An optimist's proposition, to be sure, and a very American one, too. A cynic might point out that Aware Records is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Columbia Broadcasting/Sony BMG, a gigantic international conglomerate, and that we are only hearing Mayer's voice by the grace of the mainstream media. Still, it's safe to say that Mayer doesn't sit in at any board meetings, and the bigwigs are more than happy to bankroll some bestselling dissent. It's enough to drive a guilty young guitar player to drink, and then to confront his buddy from the Apple commercials -- another friendly face paid to front for an information-owning megacorporation -- with a radical-libertarian alternative. Never mind that Congressman Paul is about the last man on earth who'd ever slap a regulation on a broadcast entity: anybody who has watched the early debates now knows he's willing to stand up to bullies peddling crowd-pleasing conventional wisdom. His condemnation of U.S. interventionism has been unwavering, and if you had any misgivings about the Iraq War, some of his red-faced (but always even-keeled) denunciations had to hit you right in the sweet spot. Mayer is not the only young American to get excited by the paleoconservative -- his now-famous "money bomb" was essentially organized by political newbies. He's put his money where his mouth is, too, operating a decentralized and near-viral campaign: his most effective propaganda has been created, spread, and posted on YouTube and message-boards by volunteer enthusiasts with no formal relationship to Paul 2008 HQ. In interviews, the septuagenarian Congressman attributes his unlikely fundraising success to the notion that "freedom is popular", which is exactly what you'd expect the old fox to say. Me, I think it's more complicated than that; more elemental, too. In 2001, I was angry; in 2002, I was apprehensive; in 2003, I was reserving judgment. But for the past three years I have been ashamed to be American -- and I know I'm not alone. Ron Paul appeals to those who'd love to be able to wave Old Glory proudly, but who've been reticent about it ever since it became apparent that our international policy was bankrupting the treasury, killing and disenfranchising people with no stake in the conflict, and crippling the government's capacity to respond to natural disasters at home. He tells us what we desperately want to hear: that the precepts we were taught in kindergarten are not bullshit; that the flag we saluted does not stand for forcing our ideology on anybody at gunpoint; that the words we memorized in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution are alive and meaningful, and can still save us, if we really want them to. True guardians of the national spirit have, according to the Congressman, been alienated from power by a ruling class that has hijacked government, grown it to an untenable size, and disregarded its fundamental principles. In short, they're the unpatriotic jerks, not us. The Democratic Party has been trying to send that message for years now, but they're unable to; they're too compromised, they voted for the war before they voted against it, they didn't obstruct the passage of the Patriot Act, or the Military Commissions Act; they allowed the Bush Administration to read your e-mail, listen to your phone calls, and jail you indefinitely without trial; all in the name of counter-terrorism. They fiddled at the Reichstag Fire. It took a tiny beacon of consistency from Lake Jackson, Texas to convince us to stand up and take pride; that they stole that flag from us, and that we could take it back if we still felt it was worth anything. Like all successful political campaigns -- and Ron Paul 2008 has been successful whether he draws 1% of the vote in New Hampshire or not -- this is primarily an emotional appeal, rather than an intellectual one. I appreciate Congressman Paul's willingness to contextualize his claims, his sense of history, and his refusal to treat Americans as if we're economic idiots. But like John Mayer, I am a fan because any call to "restore our republic" will resonate deeply for me. Now, lest you think I've lost my marbles and abdicated my first responsibility to urban New Jersey, let me assure you that there's no way in hell I'm going to actually vote for Ron Paul. Just like you, I am prepared to hold my nose and pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. I owe my city and my county nothing less. But when I do, I'll be casting my lot with a Senator who beat the drum loudly for war, who will not repeal the Patriot Act, and who recently (and frighteningly) opted to designate the Iranian Republican Guard a terrorist organization. Moreover, I'll be voting for a candidate who has consistently misrepresented her initial position on intervention in Iraq -- unlike most allegedly-liberal Democrats, she did not support Senator Levin's attempt to limit the President's authority to wage war indiscriminately. So when she makes that campaign-trail claim that she advocated exploring diplomacy; friends, she's lying outright. She will say that she'll provide a better alternative to President Giuliani, President Romney, or (God forbid) President Thompson, and she is right about that. But when Paul worries that her election will occasion no meaningful shift in American foreign policy, I think it's hard to argue that he doesn't have a legitimate reason for his fears. Her latest quasi-plan keeps the armed forces in Iraq until 2013. As I wrote in the Jay-Z entry above, our treasury cannot sustain that kind of spending. You do not have to be a hard-money fundamentalist -- as the Congressman is -- to take a look at exchange rates and the current account deficit and recognize that we can't afford the War With Everybody anymore. And while it may have been the Austrian economist in him that convinced him to throw his three-cornered hat in the ring in the first place, the spirit that's seized him and animated his campaign didn't come from the Mises Institue. It's something very deep in the national consciousness, and it's armed him effectively against well-funded adversaries who will play neither fairly nor honestly. Ron Paul has already shown more guts than any politician in years, facing down hostile crowds and better-known opponents; speaking his mind and staying true to his principles. No, I won't vote for him. But I'll damned if I'm not going to cheer for him.
Joni Mitchell -- "Night Of The Iguana"Speaking of political music, Joni Mitchell returns from self-imposed exile with An Inconvenient Album. "We have poisoned everything", she croaks through her nicotine-tortured pipes, and that's just a warm-up for the rest of Shine. Mitchell even hauls "Big Yellow Taxi" out of mothballs -- which, to be fair, now seems eerily prescient -- and shows Adam Duritz and Amy Grant how to throw down on behalf of Mother Earth. Those who complain about her hectoring tone are missing the point: first, she remains funny as hell, and second, she's right. Sprawl-opponents in the Garden State will surely feel her when she asks the sun to "shine on fertile farmland buried under subdivisions". More problematic (some will surely say hypocritical) is her decision to enter into a partnership with the environmentally-questionable Starbucks Corporation. Commercial opportunities and distribution outlets for female singer-songwriters not that much younger than Congressman Paul are surely scanty. But I cannot help but think that the coffee company is getting more PR out of this co-branding arrangement than the living legend is.
Jose Gonzalez -- "Down The Line"
Solid, one-trick acoustic guitar player from Scandinavia; sings portentious doomsday stuff about trouble on the horizon. More spook than substance.
Junior Senior -- "Can I Get Get Get"
Starving artists in Williamsburg look enviously at countries whose federal budgets include provisions for rock 'n' roll tour support, video-making, and general coddling. During this year's CMJ Festival, you couldn't throw a rolling stone without hitting a foreign band adrift in Manhattan, gigbags stuffed with Ministry Of Culture money. Blowing government cash on publicity for Eskimo Joe is more constructive than using it to level Baghdad, but the recent output of prominent ministry-sponsored acts strikes me as a good argument against the welfare state. Junior Senior does the exact sort of music you'd expect the government to like: cutesy, hip, faux-multicultural junk, with melodies, beats, and arrangements so hokey and simplistic that even a department functionary can get down to them. Citizens of Copenhagen, this is what your tax money supports -- wretched, phony old-school R&B, delivered by a pair of Nordic goofbags with no discernable talent. Are you immigrant-bashing Danes really comfortable with that? Can a brotha get a "live free or die"?
Paris-based dance label Ed Banger isn't all that much more respectful to its U.S. sources than Junior Senior is, but at least they're not on the dole, so in my book they're at liberty to blow as many transatlantic raspberries as they want. The disposable but enjoyable "D.A.N.C.E." flashes Justice's best asset -- an elephantine bass guitar that dredges up some primeval funk. This is basically electrofluff, but the love here for the Jackson Five is sincere, and the duo is smart enough to sample a red-hot Donna Summer record that the New World has mostly forgotten. Think of it as a little Parisian payback for Mr. West's highly-profitable use of Daft Punk's best number. Fitting, considering it was an Ed Banger clip (for Justice's remixed version of "Never Be Alone") that won the MTV Euro Award for Best Video in 2006, throwing the Louis Vuitton Don into a world-famous snit.
Justin Timberlake -- "LoveStoned", "Summer Love", "What Goes Around… Comes Around", "Until The End Of Time" (with Beyonce)
Jason Molina (of Falcon and Longwave fame, not the one from Magnolia Electric Company) told me that parts of Futuresexxx/LoveSounds reminded him of The Flaming Lips. In retrospect, it is possible to see "LoveStoned" as a prelude to Timbaland's bizarre move on the emo-pop market. If these songs are his farewell to mainstream R&B (highly doubtful), they're terrific ones: maybe not as imaginative as "My Love", but still more than capable of moving the booty of the middle-manager of your choosing. Still, it's the dreamy "LoveStoned/I Think That She Knows" interlude that conjures the most intense impression; you tell me if you think it happened like this. Picture Timbo alone in the studio at 3 AM, headphones and slippers on, surrounded by beatboxes, pizza boxes, samplers and effects processors. Maybe he's smoked some marijuana for inspiration, maybe he's stone-cold sober; in either case, his eyelids are heavy from another day of carrying mainstream R&B on his shoulders. He walks over to the synth bank, stops, thinks again. Grabbing his Stratocaster by the neck, he plugs in a quarter-inch cable, leans back on the studio sofa, and begins to play.
Kafani & Keak Da Sneak -- "Fassst (Like A Nascar)"
So hyphy turned out to be really, really good. Those of us who care spent the better part of '07 playing catch-up, and, when necessary, consulting the Urban Dictionary entries on ghostriding, the haystack, and the yellow bus. Kafani's "Fasst" wasn't the best hyphy single released this year, but it might've been the most representative: sixteenth-notes on the hi-hat, a guest-shot from Yay Area vet Keak Da Sneak, verses conflating the vocalist with his expensive ride, and that casual, menacing, distinctive half-murmured flow. And at 2:23, it's over in an Oaktown minute, so don't sleep, motherfuckers.
Kanye West -- "Can't Tell Me Nothing", "Big Brother", "Stronger", "The Good Life" (with T-Pain)
The Elvis Costello of hip-hop drops his Armed Forces. Omnivorous Mr. West commissions an album cover from superflat artist Takashi Murakami, buys some electropop off the rack in Paris, and grants equal time to Lil Wayne and Chris Martin. Somehow, he's managed to distill his ideas into a tight, sharply-presented twelve-song set, which, while far from perfect, contains no obvious throwaways (and yes, I do think "Drunk And Hot Girls" is good, or at least as good as "Moods For Moderns"). On Armed Forces, the Attractions drew inspiration from square AM radio and ABBA; Graduation takes a shine to Eurodisco and fraternity-approved electronica. "Good Life" enlists machine-posing-as-man T-Pain to sing the pitch-corrected hook; "Stronger", rap's latest Friedrich Nietszche tribute-track, finds the emcee congratulating himself on the outsize of his own arrogance. Album-closer "Big Brother" is a quasi-homosexual love letter to Jay-Z; I found it moving, as I am gay-friendly like that. Best of all is "Can't Tell Me Nothing", a state-of-the-art piece of confessional emo-rap, performed with all the urgency, righteousness, and self-entitlement of a ten-year-old denied the Heatmiser because it's on past his bedtime. "Old folks talking 'bout back in my day/ but homie, this is my day!" Yes, Kanye, yes, it is.
Kat DeLuna -- "Whine Up" (with Elephant Man)
Our local non-paper is so desperate for trash gossip that its reporters actually spent a good week exhaustively covering George Clooney's motorcycle accident in Weehawken. Then they openly wonder why nobody under the age of thirty-five would be caught dead reading their lousy POS. Poor Kat DeLuna didn't know what she was stepping into when she moved to Hoboken; now, reporters from the Jersey Journal have decided to shadow her every move. She's still young enough to enjoy the attention, and she's certainly entertaining enough to warrant it. But she will learn that a stalker with a press pass is only marginally less deranged than a garden-variety celebrity obsessor. My advice to DeLuna is the same I'm giving out to everybody these days: escape to Brooklyn while you can.
Keyshia Cole -- "Let It Go" (with Missy Elliott & Lil Kim), "Shoulda Let You Go" (with Amina)
Best contemporary R&B singer? That's easy; it's Alicia Keys. Erykah Badu is probably still #2, even though she barely registers on the mainstream radar these days. She was always a little too weird, or just a little too smart, for true mass acceptance. Keyshia Cole, who is honestly neither, looks poised to snatch the silver medal from that mile-long neck. Just Like You plays like a football team clinging to a slim fourth-quarter lead -- lots of conservative play-calls, small gains and clock-management, and no real intention to score. One day she'll cut loose and make the record we all know she can. Give her time to consolidate her gains; if anybody deserves patience, it's Cole.
Kelly Clarkson -- "Never Again"
Radio won't even play her jam. Seriously, when did you hear this fine Kelly Clarkson number on your FM dial? How about never? This time out, Clarkson decided to forego Max Martin and the rest of the Scandinavian song-doctors, and come up with her own material. She returned to her label not with free-jazz or death-metal, but with this wholly-marketable piece of mainstream pop-punk. That wasn't good enough for the Headz at Company Z, who stuck their hard-working superstar (and best singer) with no promotion whatsoever. They felt disobeyed, you see. Apparently it's not good enough that Clarkson has paid for their villas in St. Barths with her sweat: no, she had to be taught a lesson in obedience to the Man. My December went on to sell 1.7 million copies anyway. Fuck you very much, record industry. Folks, download all you want.
Kelly Rowland -- "Like This" (with Eve)
One of my least favorite ways to be addressed by a radio singer is to be told that I didn't believe she had the capacity to do whatever it is she's currently doing. I am as obsessed with pop music as anybody can be, yet I can still say that never for a moment did I consider whether or not Kelly Rowland could bump like this. In fact, had I been asked in 2006 whether Rowland could bump like this, I think I would have answered in the affirmative, since my eighty-eight-year-old Aunt Anna can bump like this too. Bumping like this is no great challenge, Rowland. Okay, somebody please stop me before I become so pedantic that I receive a job offer from Air America.
So what's so great about strip clubs anyway? Are they just shooting galleries for NFL linemen, or is there some carnal thrill associated with them that eludes me? "You've got a body like the devil/ and you smell like sex," offers Kid Rock in his lap-dance anthem; but who gives a damn if you can't actually undress the girl yourself? I know the idea is to stuff enough money into her panties that she decides that you're an irresistible commodity, but if for-pay sex is what you're after, you can always pick up an escort circular (like, say, the Village Voice) and let your fingers do the walking. In the course of his weekly irreverence, Bill Simmons has pointed out that much testosterone-driven pop is made for the strip joints -- "Ayo Technology" is just the most obvious example, but there are many more. I really hope I don't have to go to Scores to understand these songs properly, because should I ever see a bunch of randy businessmen holler these lyrics at some booze-soaked sex worker, I think it might ruin hard-rock permanently for me. Let me go on believing that Kid Rock is addressing some nice bespectacled librarian; one who just happens to be the kiss of death, the hand of faith, apparently trouble, but he still wants a taste.
Lavender Diamond -- "Open Your Heart"
Big-voiced Brownie hooks up with a talented piano player for a 'verbed-out exercise in countrypolitan revivalism. I like it fine, but these people have had expensive educations; they can get back in the workshop and write us a second verse.
LCD Soundsystem -- "All My Friends"
A bright and snappy number, suitable for after-hours cocktails or for dips in the hotel pool. I have a question, though, for the many who praise James Murphy as a cross-cultural pioneer: in what way is LCD Soundsystem beat music? I know they use computers to make their tracks, and samplers, and drum machines; hell, Nikki Sixx does the same thing. Most of Sound Of Silver sounds like typical '07 indie rock a la Spoon -- only Britt Daniel is a legitimately funky dude (when he wants to be), and Murphy is not. Namechecking Daft Punk does not make you groovy. I can think of several emcees who tried to get away with the same trick this year; the rap audience turned out to be a little harder to game than the download-and-blog-it crowd. But you already knew that, or you should.
"Wipe Me Down" was originally billed as a Foxx song, and Webbie is by far the best-known emcee rhyming on this cut, but for some reason it's now credited to Lil Boosie. You don't care, and neither do those twerking to it in the Hotlanta clubs. I suspect the only person who truly gives a damn is Boosie's momma, who may have dreamed of the day her son would become a post-crunk starlet. Then again, she might be busy washing his mouth out with soap. No matter how many girls "try and steal his underwear" (what?), he's still prepubescent at heart: witness his boast that he's famous like the ninja turtles. Webbie kills the mood with some garden-variety obscenity; that's his specialty, and his star-turn here is pretty pedestrian. But by then, you're shaking it too hard to notice.
In Dirty South -- a comprehensive, if choppily-written, history of third-coast hip-hop -- Roni Sarig reports that Lil Jon was once an honor-roll high-school student. I believe it. His songs are usually little more than chants, but they're clever ones, and nobody south of the Savannah River can spot a trend faster. The world-famous spazz has recovered from his ill-fated dalliance with snap and done the Shop Boyz one better by putting together his very own punk band. "Act A Fool", the lead single from the upcoming (and self-explanatory) Crunk Rock features guitarzandbassandrumz by Whole Wheat Bread, a thrash trio from Jacksonville. Apparently, they'll be all over the next release, driving purists of all stripes straight up the wall. Me, I think Lil Jon fronting a punk band makes perfect sense. Mos Def fumed about soul-stealing and took his shots at The King, but the Shop Boyz know that was wasted energy: the best way for emcees to get some of their own back is to beat massa at his own game and serve it up with a smile. The resegregators of radio had a good run during the so-called "alternative revolution", but the walls are shaking again: Gym Class Heroes move the emo-pop crowd at the Warped Tour, and those clowns aren't even any good. Let me be the first to throw the doors to the Mercury Lounge open to Lil Jon and his crew. It sure beats sitting through another Calla set.
Lil Mama -- "Lip Gloss", "G-Slide"
"Chicken Noodle Soup" plus production values. To be fair, Young B and the Voice Of Harlem could not rap their way out of a paper bag, and Lil Mama is a pretty precocious old-school rhymer. But how you feel about these sides will likely depend on whether or not you want your YouTube hip-hop raw or cooked. Then again, you may be a nine-year-old girl; in which case, this'll head straight for your sweet-spot. The nine-year-old girl in me finds raps about L'Oreal and watermelon crushes irresistible, but what's really striking about these cuts is how arty they are. "Lip Gloss" sounds like MC Lyte's irate cousin flowing over a kiddie-Neptunes beat; "G-Slide" tosses all kids of crazy shit into the track, including a funky iteration of "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round". That's pushing it, of course. But if your little sister didn't tug on your shirtsleeve and hang on your pants, she'd get lost at the mall, and then it would be a whooping for both of you in the backseat of the Buick.
Lil Wayne & Birdman -- "Leather So Soft"
Cash Money Records is long gone now, over the hill and unrecoverable by friends, foes, or FEMA. Lil Wayne can call himself president all he wants, but we all know his was a meaningless inauguration: he's a citizen of the world these days, not a central cog in a regional production mill. But it wasn't so long ago when the great Mannie Fresh was working his magic for the Nawlins knights of quality, playing the Merlin to Brian "Birdman" Williams's King Arthur, and selling zillions of records to Southern listeners before ever landing a song on the Billboard charts. Up here in the frozen north, we Ice People still don't recognize the magnitude of Cash Money's achievement -- just last week, I rescued a copy of 400 Degreez from the dollar bin at Tunes. I've got it at the top of my CD pile now, an album just as classic as The Joshua Tree or Maxinquaye; if you want it, it's yours. There's that distinctive Cash Money cover: Juve's name spelled out in bling-silver and gleaming-grill gold, two images of the tough-guy rapper, scantily-dressed women in what appears to be some kind of royal library(?), fire, explosions, diamonds strewn like appleseeds, dollar bills, drama. Open up the CD booklet and there's a catalog of other Cash Money releases, each sporting a cover lousy with the same sort of farrago. This is not iconography developed in the well-lit graphic-design department of some international conglomerate. No respected artist crafted these pastiches -- no, these were coughed up by the alleys and levees; they're street-testimonials, and perfect visual elaborations of the music on these discs. Never mind that they're gauche: they're theirs, not yours. Snicker at them at your peril, and recognize that the moment you accept the conventionally-approved tightass aesthetic as the only way to go, you're cutting the independent spirit off at its knees.
Lily Allen -- "Smile", "Littlest Things", "Alfie"
Judging by her vicious videos, she's got an evil streak wider than 50's. But a winsome lass can always get by with her casual cruelty -- especially when there's an ocean separating her American listeners from her newsmaking misdeeds. Brits are surely weary of Allen's publicity-hog antics by now, but you and I don't get the Daily Mail. All we have are the songs, and they're quite good: slick white-girl reggae, nth-wave ska, and polished 2-step, sung with a smirk. This is frothy summertime stuff, for sure, but there's a jolt of cappuccino under the foam. Very little chance of a long career; enjoy her while you've got her.
Linkin Park -- "Bleed It Out", "What I've Done"
Is it possible to go megaplatinum without anybody buying your record? Because nobody, you know, likes these guys anymore. Chester Bennington always ran the risk of strangling his audience -- whining on the mic about his drug addictions and his poisoned relationship with his parents and letting that godawful rapper hijack many of his best cuts. The clumsy Jay-Z collaboration probably torpedoed any chance they had to position themselves as a crossover act (and cost Hov more of his beleaguered credibility, too). So that left Linkin Park with its original audience, most of which has, by now, moved on to less painful musical encounters. Yet the band keeps right on bringing the noise that made them famous: hard-luck hard-rock, amplified mea culpas, and rap-metal raging. Blessedly, the in-house emcee has gone on sabbatical and taken the butterfingered turntablist with him. The rhythm section remains supple -- in a fussy, five-stringed bass sort of way -- and when they get their teeth into something like "Bleed It Out", they can make it shake as hard as anything you'll hear on K-ROCK. You can't call them underrated, because nobody has any illusions about what they are. But they probably deserve a second look.
Lloyd -- "Get It Shawty", "You" (with Lil Wayne)If it's true that Weezy saves his best work for the mixtapes, it follows that he saves his worst for his guest appearances. The worst of the worst is reserved for his guest appearances with Lloyd. I am sure Wayne has determined to his satisfaction that Lloyd's "audience" consists of foxy grandmothers and children under the age of four. Thus, he believes nobody will remember that he appeared on "You", and delivered such non-rhymes as "the boy got dollars/ so women come frequent like flight mileage", or "feel a little desperate/so send a nigga a text message". Lil Wayne may be pushing toward an event horizon where every word out of his mouth ends up on somebody's record -- and considering the demand for his services, that could happen. But royalty is as royalty does, and the Greatest Rapper Alive does not dump a garbage van filled with inane babblings all over hit radio.
Ludacris -- "Runaway Love" (with Mary J. Blige)
Maudlin, humorless social-problem record from an emcee better known for his clever booty rhymes. Mary J. Blige floats in from the astral plane to sprinkle some extra saccharine into the chorus. These palookas are permitted to flash their compassionate sides on record, of course, but "Ludacris" has always been a character -- a very clearly-drawn one, too -- and it's odd to hear these poker-faced pieties coming out of his mouth. The man behind the Luda mask cares about the plight of poor runaway kids, because what kind of an asshole wouldn't? But nobody wants to listen to a Christopher Brian Bridges record.
Lumidee -- "She's Like The Wind" (with Tony Sunshine)
Some covers are so appropriate that they feel redundant. I mean, of course Lumidee sings "She's Like The Wind"; she was presumably singing it straight out of the womb. Lumidee is "She's Like The Wind" made flesh.
Lupe Fiasco -- "Dumb It Down", "Superstar"
God, he complains a lot. Give your cranky, overeducated uncle mad skills and put him on the mic: he'd be cynical, suspicious, defensive, prematurely bitter, self-righteous, etcetera. Lupe Fiasco is a deft and eloquent writer and a capable emcee, but he makes it nearly impossible for rap listeners to root for him. These are better beats than most of what he saddled himself with on Food & Liquor, and his flow has improved, too; but he's so determined to make himself a hip-hop pariah that he hasn't even given the community the opportunity to kick him out for being a nerd. Cheer up, already -- your talent has been recognized. Nobody is making you rap, Lupe; if you don't like the form, pick up a violin and join the Chicago Philharmonic.
Maps -- "You Don't Know Her Name", "To The Sky"
Recording engineers are talented people. If you go into the studio and play them your copy of Loveless, chances are, they'll be able to match those sounds for you. Now, rock writers are not talented people; because of this, when you send them the record you've just cribbed, they will likely compare you to My Bloody Valentine. They'll say that Album X sounds like Loveless, and if you've really got them hoodwinked, they'll recommend your copy act to fans of MBV. But is your album anything like Loveless? Of course it isn't. Hey, sound is important, but sound is also the single easiest element to imitate. While the sound of the MBV albums is justly famous, it was Kevin Shields's songwriting that made the group inimitable. "When You Wake You're Still In A Dream", "Soon", "You Never Should", "I Can See It But I Can't Feel It", "Only Shallow", "To Here Knows When"; you don't have to be dazed out of your mind on psychedelics to appreciate the quality of the composition. These songs can be stripped back to their basics, and they'll still move the crowd -- not only because the melodies are strong, but because the lyrics are effective and consistent. Sometimes My Bloody Valentine was called a drug band, and that's fair; but the drug they were always singing about is sex. Our science-minded friends like to argue that sex releases drug-like chemicals in the brain, and shields's writing went straight to the root of it: the total blur that happens when you're completely consumed by lust and desire. See, MBV understood that sex is trippy; and that's exactly what so many raunchy-mouthed contemporary pop musicians don't get. They're explicit; My Bloody Valentine was sexy. Break out the spectrum analyzer and steal the Shields guitar tone down to the last hertz if you want to; until you incorporate some erotic energy into your music, it's misleading for you to pretend there's any overlap between what you're doing and what Dublin's finest did back in 1989. By this measure -- the only measure that ought to count -- Alicia Keys is closer to My Bloody Valentine than Maps is.
This weird cover of the Smiths classic from Strangeways is performed without a trace of the irony and humor that made the original so compelling. Ronson is a big-name U.K. producer, which means he makes his many interior-decorative decisions and chord substitutions with confidence bordering on arrogance. They're still unaccountable. He probably feels the need to monkey with Morrissey-Marr in order to justify his price tag, but the Smiths are a notoriously tough group to reinterpret. Put one foot down in the wrong direction and you're suddenly on the road to grunge, or electronica, or worse. Morrissey's claim to rock 'n' roll sainthood rested on his alleged inimitability. We thought he was only boasting, but a quarter-century after "Hand In Glove", he's been proven right.
Maroon 5 -- "Makes Me Wonder", "Wake-Up Call", "Won't Go Home Without You"
Yowza, who'da thunk? Adam Levine dragged his beat-up Oldsmobile of a band back into the shop, applied some candy paint and a new transmission, and got the engine roaring like a jet plane afterburner. "Won't Go Home Without You" is the post-Synchronicity power ballad; "Makes Me Wonder" wraps a stealth-critique of the Bush administration inside a massive summertime blockbuster. Cinematic "Wake-Up Call" finds the frontman gunning down the dude who cuckolded him, and then petulantly begging his girlfriend (and his audience) for sympathy; only in L.A., people. Other highlights from It Won't Be Soon Before Long: love-'em-and-leave-'em club-burner "If I Never See Your Face Again", pussy-eating anthem "Kiwi", winsome "Better If We Break"; hell, it's all highlights. "Nothing Lasts Forever" swipes back the hook from "Heard 'Em Say" to astonishing results; "Back At Your Door" builds to piano-and-strings bridge urbane enough for Donald Fagen (or at least Bryan Ferry); "Not Falling Apart" is three-plus minutes of kick*ass sophisto-pop. Download responsibly: these tracks are marvelous on their own, but It Won't Be Soon is best experienced as a full album and a complete statement. Friends, never, never count a musician out, no matter how much slop they chuck at you. Today's MOR schlockmeister could be tomorrow's indispensable auteur.
Maximo Park -- "Books From Boxes", "Our Velocity"
Sometimes I make poor Hilary play the game of "is it Marillion or is it not Marillion"? Here's how it goes: I sing a line from a song, and she tells me if it's by Marillion. I might begin with "you are my sunshine/ my only sunshine", or "chicken noodle soup/ with a soda on the side", or "beat it, beat it/ don't ya make me repeat it", or maybe "adjectives of annihilation bury the point beyond redemption/ venomous verbs of ruthless candor plagiarize assassins fervor". That last one is Marillion. Somehow she always guesses correctly. Anyway, the wild card in this game is Maximo Park. On "Your Urge", Paul Smith tells his girlfriend to "codify your utterance, communicate your needs/ prepare your vocabulary". There's only one person on earth who talks to women like that, and he's been, er… incommunicado for the last decade or so. "You paradigm of womankind/ you could be mine!", the frontman announces on "A Fortnight's Time"; strangely enough, the girl turns him down. Because they're allegedly from Newcastle and their guitar player won't solo, Maximo Park has been lumped in with the dance-rock goofbags. But we know better: it's Marillion -- old-school Marillion -- wearing hipster masks and having a hoot at the NME's expense.
There's music that's easier to admire than listen to, and then there's M.I.A., aka Buffy St. Marie with a beatbox. Forcing your way through Kala is supposed to be some kind of a revolutionary political act; in the Eighties, we were assured that listening to Jewish lesbian folksinger Phranc would make us better people. Liberal guilt swells through me like a mighty tide, but it is not sufficient to carry me to make apologies for the fake-soca "Boyz", a song more relentless and annoying than Unk on helium. Nobody wants a terrorist pop star more than I do, but it can't be forced. Globetrotters, this is not your instrument of change; this is not your girl.
Then there's the anti-M.I.A. -- Lebanese-born Mika, an émigré whose musical ambitions rest entirely within the confines of the empire. While Maya Arulpragasam peddles her island spice to London sensation-seekers, Mika Penniman is the fully naturalized foreigner, all smiles and curtseys before the traditions of the old country. His smooth Freddie Mercury and Make It Big imitations suggest no consciousness of a world beyond the limits of Western popular culture, and no will to learn anything new. Mika has the skill to make it all mindlessly engaging anyway; as for the soul?, well, he's still working on that. But contrary to the beliefs of the pop revisionists, George Michael was never a beacon of authenticity himself. If the "Wham Rap" was a guilty pleasure for you in '83, the least you can do is cut Penniman some slack for his well-pressed Saville Row funk. Plus, he's got a good falsetto, and when's the last time you could say that about a new pop singer?
Mike Jones -- "Mr. Jones", "My 64"
Back in the day™, if you wanted a rap mixtape, you had to actually head down to Fulton Mall and buy it from a street vendor. That effectively prohibited Whitey from hearing popular emcees rhyming over other people's beats. But now, thanks to file-sharing and websites like Mixtrap, your friendly neighborhood record critic does not have to haggle with anybody in dreadlocks or dashikis; instead, he can get his bootleg CDRs delivered straight to the concierge at his gated community. We've awoken to a strange spectacle: street-compilations getting reviewed in mainstream publications as if they're official releases. For instance, Lil Wayne's Da Drought 3 ended up on MTV News and "Sky's The Limit" on the last.fm pages of countless iPod warriors. Never mind that the beat was lifted from "Mr. Jones", a song that no critic gave a second look; the track was Weezy's by divine right, or by superior name recognition, or by virtue of his better tattoos. It can be argued that Mike Jones's fate is to be overshadowed, and that he'll always have "Still Tippin'"; nonetheless, there's something unfair about how casually his track was hijacked and colonized by the mainstream favorite. "Niggas fucked up, you get no instrumentals", complains Pharoahe Monch on "What It Is". "Next time you're spitting over mine/ bet your bottom dollar you'll be spitting over rhymes." I feel him.
Implemented in Spring 2007 by New Jersey City University, the Measuring Intelligence in Minority Students initiative (MIMS) increased enrollment and retention rates by 13%. Just kidding, he's a generic corporate rapper from New York City. At first pass the explanatory chorus sounds tautological, but really it makes all kinds of sense: "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly/ you ain't 'cause you're not". In other words, fly status is the precondition for being hot. Hell, I wear ratty button-downs and corduroy pants; I'm in no position to dispute the claim.
Mistah F.A.B. -- "Ghost Ride It"
File this one under blown opportunites: given a chance to establish himself as Mr. Hyphy, the Yay Area's ambassador to hip-hop nation, F.A.B. decided to appropriate the "Ghostbusters" theme without getting copyright clearance. One great big whopping lawsuit later, the Yellow Bus Rydah found himself unwelcome on mainstream radio. He'll get all kinds of second chances in 2008 -- he may not be the best emcee in Oakland, but he's definitely the one whose style harmonizes best with East Coast expectations about what hyphy ought to sound like. PSA for you parents searching for reefer in your child's knapsack: ghostriding is the practice of jumping out of a slow-moving car and clowning around with it as it rolls down the street sans driver. Scary, but hardly more dangerous than steady drinking that sizzurp.
Mooney Suzuki -- "99 Per Cent"
Standard boogie from NYC stalwarts; nothing to get your gigbag in a twist about.
Mos Def -- "Dollar Day", "U R The One"
Aw, all you bastards weren't fans in the first place. So his record label remaindered Tru3 Magic the moment it was released -- that doesn't mean you've got to kick the emcee when he's down. Mos doesn't seem to believe in the product; he'd rather make movies than moves; he's down in the dumps. That's all true, but as The New Danger made clear, he's a depressive personality without any faith in providence or fairness. Hell, he was too bummed out to demand cover art from Geffen's design department. He's rhyming in the booth with eyes shut, waiting for the guillotine to drop on his neck. These days the prisoner can almost smell the blade. Has that fatalism diminished his skills any? Well, no emcee has ever been funnier under the gun, or more frightening when angry, or more scathing about romantic disillusionment, or braver in the face of dreams crashing around him. No rapper has ever been any smarter on the microphone, none has ever called out the authorities with more moral force, none had a more harrowing holler, or a chuckle so bleak. Echoes from the Bed-Stuy public pool reverberate in that laugh, that holler, that shattered-glass flow. Haters run down the beats on Tru3 Magic as if Black Star was anything other than a bare-bones backpacker production, as if Black On Both Sides didn't contain throwaways by DJ Etch-A-Sketch and Psycho Les. Nobody liked it when he sang on New Danger, so here he is, folks, rapping again, giving the ingrates what they want. This might be the last we hear from him, if so, let's remember him for what he is: the Mighty Mos Def, styles fresh like baby's breath.
Mum -- "They Made Frogs Smoke 'Til They Exploded"
Trust me, I'm not as xenophobic as I seem. At the moment, I am far past U.S. jurisdiction on the tropical island of Nevis, chilling oceanside in a hammock and scribbling all this garbage in a notebook. Down on Pinney's Beach -- the Caribbean strand on the leeward side of the island -- the beach shacks are crammed with European expats, gabbing in their various accents and guzzling all the Cane Spirit Rothschild they can swallow. The bartenders grate fresh nutmeg into the punch and grin at the borracho foreigners. Our rental jeep has a radio and CD player, but we don't seem to be able to get in anything other than devotional music; maybe this island really is as conservative and religious as advertised, and maybe 'tis the season. There are posters in Charlestown advertising a performance, but it happened before we arrived. Steel bands are everywhere, though: at the hotel, at the airport, on the beach, in restaurants, in the colorful waiting area for the ferry to St. Kitts. Since their repertoire is culled mainly from Bob Marley Legend and top-40 playlists of my childhood, I must conclude that I'm getting lite-entertained. Had we gone to Glasgow, or Stockholm, or Rio, I'd consult the guide (my record collection) and know where to head -- word is that the Laugavegur in Reykjavik never shuts down. What a party that must be in the summertime!, under the midnight sun, dancing with the elves and fairies in a nationwide Williamsburg. That's how I imagine it, anyway. The girls on the cover of Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like A Peasant used to play in Múm; nowadays, they're co-presidents of Iceland, the twee-est nation on earth, a nation made of argyle and eye-shadow. They probably know how to cast magic spells, too: they hide out behind the glacier, or beside the hot springs, beguile you with toy xylophone, and then open up the glittering sky for you to climb through. They sing about marmalade fires, and even here in the warmth of Caribbean, I can smell them roaring. Travel broadens the mind, I am told, and distorts the imagination, and makes you drunk with wonder and short of breath and susceptible to anything; book me that ticket on Icelandair.
My Chemical Romance -- "Famous Last Words", "Teenagers"
Gerard Way famously called emo a "pile of shit", but he howls away on In Defense Of The Genre like an irate and outraged true believer. It could be that Max Bemis gave him the title track to sing in order to bring him back to the reservation, so to speak, or maybe Way was too zonked to realize what he was screaming about. MCR assures us that the main influences on Black Parade were Queen and Pink Floyd, perhaps not realizing that these were the two most proto-emo bands of the Seventies. Guys, Liza Minelli sings on your album -- who do you think you're kidding? Rule of thumb for all gaseous emissions: he who denied it, supplied it.
Nas -- "Can't Forget About You"
Another trip down Memory Lane with hip-hop's most conscientious tour guide. Nas, who spent much of '07 rounding up his rap heroes and shepherding them back into the studio, name-checks more of the usual subjects on the second single from Hip-Hop Is Dead. "Some things are forever, and some are not", he reports with characteristic decisiveness, and, like a historian preparing a lecture on a dead language, prods himself into comprehensive recollection. See, when Nas says he can't forget, he doesn't mean he's incapable. He means he's got a moral obligation not to space on the accomplishments of the originators. Try to imagine Soulja Boy -- or Sam Beam, or Sasha Baron Cohen -- thinking the same, and you begin to realize what an unusual entertainer Nas is.
The shysters who own Tupac's master tapes often head into the studio, shuffle tracks around, add a hook, and call it a new single. The talented but intellectually lazy Nelly may have noticed, and decided that he could do the same without having to go through the trouble of, you know, dying. Nothing happens on "Wadsyanamme" that did not occur on a previous Nelly single; even the sample, from KCi & JoJo's "All My Life", is from a song he's already ripped off at least once. Even his fabled raunch is little more than product-placement: "stay harder than a Rodeo/ you can ride it like Isuzu". The human resources headhunters at Saatchi & Saatchi are surely salivating. The rest of us might want to usher him along to his desk job, and clear commercial radio space for those with ideas left.
Nelly Furtado -- "Do It", "Say It Right"
These two trail singles lack the flash of "Promiscuous" and "Maneater", but they're still very good: energetic Eurodisco, synth-colored and sample-studded, and graced with capable performances from the star. I still don't believe her when she says she's horny, and that's a problem. Maybe she's got a long fuse.
New Pornographers -- "My Rights Versus Yours"
And for album number four (five, if you count The Slow Wonder), Mister Newman and his nerd superteam deemed it no longer necessary to slay the listener with musical brilliance. They've also cut out much of the quipping and abstract wordplay, and in the process, they've become surprisingly coherent. The title-track is a sad and straightforward love song that could've been written by Robert Wratten or Leslie Feist; much of Challengers feels like an indie-typical account of a deteriorating relationship. Even normally incomprehensible Dan Bejar gets in on the action with the peripatetic "Myriad Harbor", a goofy, blow-by-blow account of a trip around New York City. "I walked into the local record store," he winks, "and asked for an American music anthology, it sounds fun!" For the first time it feels like the Pornographers have something they're determined to communicate to us -- and if that means stripping the songwriting back to I-IV-V chord progressions and simple harmonies, they're willing to chill just enough to drive the message home. Personally, I miss the sugar-fixed rhythm section and the bungee-jumping melodies. But after years of complaining about Newman's obscurantism, I suppose I should be grateful for the new direction.
It is largely fear of Nickelback that compels indie types to cut Carl Newman slack for his lyrical puzzleboxes. Chad Kroeger writes like an old-time country balladeer, and not a particularly endearing one: he's energetic but klutzy, his irony is of the grouchy-old-man variety, and he's got no ear whatsoever for aesthetics, meter, rhythm, or poetry. Nickelback's latest is the sort of song that an evil Top 40 deejay might pull out of the bowels of a godforsaken album and place in heavy rotation purely as an anti-intellectual exercise. Still, "gonna sing those songs that offend the censors/ gonna pop my pills from a Pez dispenser" is as good a hayseed-rock couplet as anything we've gotten out of Kid Rock lately. If "Rockstar" plays like Jeff Foxworthy's translation of "Jackie" by Jacques Brel, that's just to say that the divide between Parisian sophisticates and NASCAR fans is a lot narrower than either side likes to pretend that it is. It can't be one big Williamsburg the whole world over -- the Redneck Riviera needs its heroes, too.
Nicole Atkins & The Sea -- "The Way It Is"
Lovelorn and large-voiced Asbury Park chanteuse; she ended up with the deal that by all rights should have gone to Rachel Zamsteen. Subtlety ain't her thing, and her songwriting voice is still deep in development, but Atkins's sense of history is commendable. When she raids the Phil Spector archive for ideas, she doesn't grab the first thing the sees -- she pokes around, tries on a few outfits, maybe gets a little hypnotized by her image in the mirror. Eventually she'll find the costume that fits.
Northern State -- "Better Already"
Just as it is not possible for a baseball team to improve on the perfect postseason record of the 1976 Cincinnati Reds, Madonna's emceeing on "Vogue" represents a mathematical limit of awfulness that cannot be superseded by any human vocalist. That said, the three horrible rappers of Northern State appear to be trying. It hurts to knock these women: they clearly love hip-hop, and they don't try to hedge their bets by making a joke out of their project. Ad-Rock, the enabler here, may have put these soccer moms on the mic in his ongoing spiteful attempt to ruin rap music; he seems to believe that now that the Beastie Boys are bad, everybody else has to be bad, too. "Better Already" scored an episode of Grey's Anatomy; may hip-hop never again be dragged through muck so vile.
Of Montreal -- "Heimsdalgate Like A Promethean Curse", "Suffer For Fashion", "Gronlandic Edit"
Dear Kevin Barnes,
Nobody forced you to sell "Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games" to an international restaurant chain; it's a free country, and each capitalist tool has the right to do whatever he wants with his intellectual property. If some listeners now consider you an adman first and an indiepop star only after that, that's the price you pay for cashing those Outback checks. Get on Stereogum and rage at us until you're blue in the face: you know you fucked up. If you didn't, you wouldn't be half as defensive as you are. The issue isn't that you've "sold out"; you don't have to trot out that tattered straw man for cheap demolition. Don't insult our intelligence. You can make your opponents look like out-of-touch ascetics if it helps you sleep better, but I strongly suspect that it doesn't, and we both know why.
Like every artist who decided to take the money in exchange for billboard space, you're determined to cover your ass by conflating patronage and advertising. You're very well read; you know the difference. Under a patronage relationship, the company gives you the means to do what you want to do; if they don't like what you're doing, they can fire you or find another protégé. If you don't like what they're doing, you can take a walk, or tear up the checks, hell, it's your choice. But no patron can make you create a commercial for them without your consent; that's a completely independent transaction. Polyvinyl Records is your patron: they make it possible for you to put out troubling, dense albums like Hissing Fauna. They're your friends, or as close to friends as you can have under this economic system. They are in your corner.
The Outback Steakhouse media buyers, on the other hand, are not the de Medicis, and they did not commission any work from you. They grabbed a song of yours -- a really good song -- and they turned it into a lousy jingle. You're never going to get that song back. No, really, Kevin, you are never going to get that song back. It's ruined, shot, tethered for good to the production wagon, where it abets the American overconsumption you've purported to stand against. You may as well go from house to house, grab our copies of Sunlandic Twins, and scratch them all with your penknife. In your bones you know what you've done, and that is why you're so angry. That's why you're writing songs like "Gronlandic Edit"; bleak, scathing, withering songs in which you call yourself a faker. Perversely, you feel that the only way you can justify doing this sort of violence to your own catalog is to repeat the transgression and to encourage others to do the same. Now you want to tell us how much you dig capitalism: you're like a man sending postcards from the lake of fire, boasting that the water's warm. Dammit, I think the world of you as a songwriter and an artist; it's so hard to see you like this. The sanctimony coming from you is embarrassing. For God's sake -- if not for our sake -- cut the crap.
Your fan,
Tris McCall
NP wannabes from Chicagoland play it a little too rough to merit a comparison to Let's Active. "Oh My" is their choice cut: fizzy guitar, Christmas bells, plus howls of sexual desperation. On paper the gender-balance looks good -- three girls and two boys -- but the frontman hogs the mic time, and it's his personality that dominates A Night At The Ritz. Even Scott Miller used to farm one out to Donnette Thayer every now and then.
Okkervil River -- "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe"
Every critic's favorite emo band returns with a brand new album about a reliably emo subject: life in a touring emo band. Will Sheff's experiences on the road (he calls it "the sea", because he's a literary mofo who fancies himself a modern Lord Jim) turn out to be not much different than Ian Hunter's, or David Lee Roth's. He bones some groupies, drives miles through the dark night, feels lonely and dislocated, shakes his fist at the absurdity of the industry, and waits for the stagelights to come up and make the whole miserable shebang worthwhile. The Stage Names concludes with a cover of "Sloop John B"; "I'm Forever Yours Faithfully" would have been more honest, and probably more fun. Plus, wouldn't you love to hear Sheff sing it?
Day by day, indiepop nation grows more twee. Your 2007 Palomar tacked hard in the opposite direction, cranking up the six-string wattage and deleting all traces of the old whimsy. "Our Haunt" is the thunderhead that announces the coming of the storm: a hard-faced story of an acquaintance (competitor?) lost among the Brooklyn bricks. Rachel Warren won't drop her studied cool, but behind that indie-famous equilibrium you can hear her fuming: "aspire to sell/ I won't, you will/ I buried and crossed the things you left for lost." Then she slams down on the distortion, and the street scene -- and the relationship -- is swallowed by black waves of guitar fuzz.
Paramore -- "Misery Business", "crushcrushcrush"
Hayley Williams treats her guitar and voice as defensive weapons, too. She doesn't have the acute observational skills that Warren does, but she compensates by spraying mace in a wider radius. Her band caught its stride on Riot!, a Fueled By Ramen release in name only; "Misery Business" is closer to Tragic Kingdom than it is to Fall Out Boy. Now that Gwen Stefani is M.I.A. in Shibuya, Williams looks poised to take her spot as commercial radio's principal source of girl power lite. Your feminist cousin studying Dworkin at Vassar won't find much in Paramore to fire her up, but her fifteen-year-old sister might come away from Riot! feeling empowered -- or just less willing to take shit from her sexist history teacher. Nothing to sneeze at there, bucko. Pop music: if you aren't doing it for the kids, you're just doing it for yourself.
We start out this one slow -- the great Armando Perez settling into the groove, partying like a rock star, muttering something about his sexual appetite that won't make it past the radio censors. But by the time the timbale line slinks in at 0:31, the track is jumping: whistles, snares, shouts, a big kick drum, and Miami's favorite son inciting everybody to party. Yes, it does sound like "SexyBack". What, you'd had enough of that one?
Plain White T's -- "Hey There Delilah"
Given their druthers, the tattooed and muscled lifeguards at the NJCU pool might dial up K-ROCK on the gym radio and break off the knob. Nine out of ten professors surveyed, however, would not opt to breaststroke to Coheed And Cambria if they could avoid it. That sort of thing might blow the goggles off of a veteran swimmer; send his chlorinated ass staggering back to the locker room in geriatric disgust. Thus, the staff grooves to the Hot Adult Contemporary format: no rap, no hard stuff, just the blissed-out hits of the eighties, nineties, and today. In practice, it means "Hey There Delilah" at least once per workout, and if you stay in the pool for more than thirty minutes, you're damn well sure to hear it twice. John Mayer's "Waiting For The World To Change" was another poolside favorite; sometimes, the deejays at WPLJ would dip into the vaults for vintage Sade or, if we were lucky, Anita Baker. I'm told by those who aren't dirty bums that this is workplace radio; that if you have the misfortune to man a cubicle these days, acoustic balladry and "smooth" urban sounds are a nine-to-five reality for you. It strikes me that wage slavery is a rough enough fate for a twentysomething human being who may still be gleaming with youthful energy. Combined with the pungent odor of those mystery lunches that Ted from the Legal Department insists on eating, Hot AC seems like an OSHA violation.
Playaz Circle -- "Duffle Bag Boy" (with Lil Wayne)
Best known for its chorus, sung-spoken by Weezy, encouraging drug dealers to keep up that hustle. Wayne is the only reason this song made commercial radio; he's not a member of the Playaz Circle, so you can expect the crew to drop off the face of the earth shortly. That's not to say they aren't okay rappers -- they are. But they're already ticketed for the Southern-rap purgatory inhabited by the non-Big Boi members of Purple Ribbon All-Stars.
Of all the euphemisms for "good looking girl" used by rappers, "shawty" is the one that distresses me the most. Never mind that it's far from the most offensive; it's just viscerally unsettling. It always sounds like they're talking about midgets. Pitch-correction junkie T-Pain is halfway decent to his shawty -- like Mario in "Let Me Love You", he's begging her to allow him to rescue her from an abusive boyfriend. Many men have that fantasy, don't they?; sweeping in and snatching a dime-piece from the local hotshot, humiliating a rival and getting some play at the same time. It's not as noble as it initially sounds through the vocoder, that's for sure. Rapper Plies is considerably blunter -- he's determined to train his shawty to 1.) suck him with ice, 2.) enjoy the pain, 3.) act like she's bowlegged (what?), 4.) do many other things that cannot be repeated on a family website such as this. "Ain't called her in two days, gotta let her mind wonder"; he's a prince, I tell you. So two distinct models of boyfriend here: the one who enjoys abusing and degrading you, and the one who -- temporarily -- treats you well in order to gall one or more of his peers. I'd like to say a third model exists, but I've been kicking around for thirty-six years now, and homie has not shown his face yet.
Prinzhorn Dance School -- "Crackerjack Docker", "Up, Up, Up!"Radical-minimalist duo with an idiosyncratic approach to the drums -- instead of performing a steady beat, Tobin Prinz hammers out whatever rhythm he happens to be chanting at the time. Suzi Horn, the bass player, sticks to rudimentary, unsteady two-note parts, and screams her head off as she wobbles along. Fittingly, their songs are about psychic deterioration, paranoia, depression, monomania, and consumer-culture alienation. Plenty of indie rockers sing about mental illness; Prinzhorn Dance School is that rare act that actually sounds nuts, and not in a fashionable post-Barrett style, either. No March hares or rabbit-holes here; instead, Prinz and Horn offer a soundtrack for cutting, obsessive-compulsive hand-washing, stuttering, Asperger's syndrome, driving off the side of the road.
Speaking of going bonkers on record, Prodigy spent 2007 challenging Beanie Sigel's modern mark for nervous glances in the rear-view mirror. "I'm paranoid", he mumbles, "and it's not the weed." Queensbridge's second-best emcee (career value) takes us on a chase through the warehouses and docks of Long Island City, hanging sudden turns on the labyrinthine streets until he's lost the Impala he's sure is trailing him. Even then he won't get out of the car; he needs to circle the block a few times just in case. His destination is that famous four-cornered room, where his gun is stashed, and where he can smoke marijuana and fantasize about his next gunfight. He wears his sweat as a badge of courage, and boasts that it's keeping him cool -- then, just to make sure you know he's unhinged and capable of anything, he breaks an already fragile rhyme scheme to holler about day-planning a beatdown. Shades of The Infamous for sure, and the best side he's cut in a decade.
Project Pat -- "Raised In The Projects"
Enjoyable ultraviolence from inner-city Memphis. Astute listeners will note that the venerable Project Pat has been cutting this same song, over and over, since 1997 at the latest. I know I'm supposed to hammer him for belaboring the point, but somehow it never gets old. He gets the same diplomatic immunity that's been bestowed on the rest of the "Sippin' On Some Syrup" crew.
R. Kelly & Usher -- "Same Girl"
Ruh roh, R. Kelly and Ursh are dating the same young woman. Is Atlanta big enough for the zany hijinx? Unlike Brandy and Monica on "The Boy Is Mine", the two crooners play their feud for yuks; they can get away with that, you see, because we only demand catfights from girls. No matter how gross it is when the two galoots compare notes and feign outrage, male homosociality and sexual triangulation is too ingrained in the culture to cause any conceptual friction or handwringing. Here's the more pressing issue: that thirty-inch plasma seems to have scrambled R. Kelly's brains. First he attempted an R&B version of Desperate Housewives; now, he's made a hit-radio replica of a low-rated UPN sitcom. R. Kelly, turn off the television and cut some real records.
Rakim, Nas, Kanye West, KRS-One -- "Classic"
Word on the street is that the KRS-ONE verse is goofy. Well, of course it is, KRS is always goofy. It's still a thrill to hear him live and direct, big-voiced and braggadocious: "don't you want more KRS on your radio station?" Why, yes, yes I do. Nas rolls out of bed wonderfully grouchy -- "Oh, you went platinum, that's nice/ now let me see you do the same thing twice." Courteous Rakim gets down with the program fully; he namechecks the other emcees, and makes sure that the corporate benefactor gets their sponsored ups. Oh, and let me be the first, or the ten thousandth, to ask -- why the hell is Kanye West rapping on a Mount Rushmore cut? From time to time I've defended his microphone skills, but this is pushing it. I smell behind-the-scenes machinations and Louis Vuitton payoffs.
Ancient Midlands eccentric; used to kick around in Jarvis Cocker's backing band. He's got a sure hand on the fretboard of his hollow-body and his Roy Orbison records aren't collecting any dust, still, there's something about this that feels a bit pro forma. Caution: may have swiped Paul Weller's chair as U.K. indie-rocker emeritus, thus guaranteeing undue reverence from the British press.
Rich Boy -- "Boy Looka Here", "Let's Get This Paper", "Good Things" (with Keri Hilton)
Ignore the track for the ladies; that's a lousy context for the star. He makes those because he's twenty years old and he doesn't yet have the clout to buck the label heads. Those days will come. At his best -- and he's often at his best -- he's Juvenile Mach II, a mush-mouthed Southern music machine, flashing wit and vulnerability, dodging bullets, doomed, damned. Polow Da Don deserves some of the credit for this success, but it's easy to overstate: vocal i.d. is the most crucial commodity in commercial rap, and Rich Boy has it in spades. Listen to him chew his way through "Boy Looka Here", mashing up vowels like an apothecary with a mortar and pestle. I could translate the Mobile-ese for you, sure, but it's better to riddle through the phrases yourself. "Let's Get This Paper" is the serious track, and improbably, it's more coherent and moving than anything I've heard out of an underground emcee this season. His social-protest rhyme is delivered not with the stridency of an activist on a petition drive, but with the urgency of a street-warrior who has suddenly noticed there's blood all over his hands. I don't know who Pooh Bear or Kendrick Curtis were, but Rich Boy makes their losses palpable. "They underestimate me 'cause I'm comin' from Alabama". Not anymore.
Rihanna -- "Umbrella" (with Jay-Z), "Shut Up And Drive", "Hate That I Love You" (with Ne-Yo)
I take these lines and hammer them out for you, as if it's possible to assess pop song lyrics like that; as if they're poetry by Pope or Dickinson, and not wedded to melody, harmony, sound, and rhythm. Records may still be the moneymaker for the industry, but music is a performance art, and songs happen in real time and real space. Voltaire (and Jesse Fuchs) argued that everything too stupid to be said ended up getting sung, but pop radio proves that the opposite is true: if the singer and the song are good enough, even inane verse can acquire an air of transcendence. Pop songs speak to us when nothing else can reach us -- and when they speak, they do so in language that we wouldn't use in common conversation. "Go on and let the rain pour", sang Rihanna in the song that seized the summer, "I'll be all you need and more". A simple metaphor, a childish sentiment, one we've all encountered time and again; we've seen it in fairy tales and corny movies, and in pulp paperbacks we wouldn't be caught dead reading on the train. Now for true-confession time: 2007 was no joyride for your man. People close to me suddenly became sick. Our cat of seventeen years -- a cat we loved desperately -- became sick, and died. Then I became sick; my mobility was impaired, I felt isolated, stranded. I'm better now, or at least well enough to spend a few sleepless nights banging out the annual. But the worst of it was pretty damned bad, and there were moments when I didn't have the inclination to cook up unexpected metaphors for the way I was feeling. Figurative language is my business -- but the business day closes, and when the whistle blows, I'm out on the street with everybody else, heading home through the traffic. In 2007 I learned something that I should have known all along: you can't run from yourself. I expected that the platitudes and tautologies and simple solutions on the hit radio would strike me as shallow; I was wrong about that, too. These songs -- even the crummy ones I throw stones at -- meant more to me than I knew. Because it was raining more than ever; it sounds facile, sure, but I felt every stinging drop, and if I wanted to surrender to an easy metaphor, slip into it like a pair of old socks, I had a slamming beat and a big guitar and glorious vocal performance backing me up and telling me that for once it was okay. And then there's the other half of the chorus: "know that we'll still have each other"; the oldest and rustiest saw in the book, but the most precious words anybody could have told me this summer. Because we did have each other, didn't we? We got through it together -- I stood under your umbrella, just like the song said. You know I love umbrellas. I even have a special one in the hall, a patterned job, big enough for both of us. I will thank you, over and over, as we walk beneath it. And when the sun shines, we shine together.
Rilo Kiley -- "Silver Lining", "The Moneymaker"
Just before Under The Blacklight concludes, Jenny Lewis makes a passing reference to the "dogs of L.A."; right before that, on "Smoke Detector", her band channels whitechocolatespaceegg. Sympathy for Liz Phair bleeds through the cracks of the new Rilo Kiley, and why shouldn't it?, trill recognize trill. Like Phair, Lewis never considered herself "indie" except by trick of ill fortune: she had her eye on the Hollywood Hills from the outset, and if making nice with Conor Oberst could help get her there, well, that was a price she was prepared to pay. Liz Phair owed much of her initial run of terrific press to desperate rock journalists who believed that because of her indie-girl approachability, they stood a puncher's chance to fuck her someday; ditto for Lewis. And that's amusing for awhile, until it isn't. And when it isn't, you might be tempted to put out an album like Liz Phair, or Under The Blacklight: an album that says "no, sorry, you will not ever fuck me; moreover, here is some alienating hypersexuality for you to choke on, just so you understand that you and I are playing in different leagues". Then, those journalists race home to write their bad reviews, and whack off to St. Vincent. So everybody's happy.
Robin Thicke -- "Can U Believe"
This sounds nothing like a radio single, so I imagine that its mainstream release was a thank-you card from Interscope to an artist who had to have exceeded all commercial expectations. Funny, because it wasn't so long ago when he was a dirty-haired lost boy, recording left-of-center R&B replete with Beethoven samples. Pharrell Williams put an end to that, for better or for worse, and now Thicke toes the corporate-funk line when asked to. As long as he's still got free-form devotional ballads like "Can U Believe" buried beneath his piano bench, though, it's hard to argue that all the individuality has been beaten out of him. He won't become the new Daryl Hall, because that's too much to ask of anybody. But he's at least as soulful as Paul Carrack ever was, and now that he's shaved, he's a good deal more marketable. The next release should be red hot.
Rooney -- "When Did Your Heart Go Missing"
Wiseacre pop from the land of glamour, marijuana, and cheap handguns. Rooney has been wandering in the desert for a few years, but Calling The World proves that the Mojave sun hasn't scorched away any of Robert Schwartzman's caddishness. Nor are his romantic declarations any more convincing this time around -- he still seems to revel in his own unwillingness to invest his sentimental narratives with authentic emotion. His sarcastic commentary over the outro to "When Did Your Heart Go Missing" might be reminiscent of Zappa on "You Didn't Try To Call Me", but nowhere else on the song does he tip his hand so egregiously. Really, it's just a healthy blast of Cali heat; so go on and put the top down on the convertible, cruise Santa Monica Boulevard, and bask in the gleeful insincerity.
Say Anything -- "Baby Girl, I'm A Blur"
You'd be perfectly within your rights to hate this, as neither God nor Chuck Berry invented rock and roll so Max Bemis could complain about his Xanax addiction. But if oversharing is the soul of emo, nobody is better positioned to defend the genre than the aptly-named Say Anything. Bemis is actually a solid pop songwriter; he's cribbed enough hard copy from the great confessors that he's internalized many of their tricks, and his experimental sensibilities are sound. None of that accounts for the magnetic pull of In Defense Of The Genre, though: if you're here at all, you've come not to admire the structure but to bask in the sentiment. Or wallow, rather -- on song after song, Bemis rips his guts out, castigating his parents, girls he's slept with and boys he'd like to, his overburdened medicators, and, of course, himself. The profane title track is three minutes of fighting words for the haters; it's magnificently defiant and resoundingly correct. "They'll label us what they can never be", he instructs the troops; later, he'll close "You're The Wanker, If Anyone Is" with a thunderous "go fuck yourself!" On "Jesus Died A Jew", he picks a fight with blacks for no particular reason; "That Is Why" is obscene music-hall; "Skinny, Mean Man" is Okkervil River's "Black" with the ugly subtext made courageously plain. If you can't get your Irish up when Bemis hollers "people like you are why people like me exist/ defy your lies/ here's your kiss goodbye", well, you were never a fifteen-year-old kid. On days when all of indie rock seems to speak in the same polite, measured voice, Say Anything is the perfect antidote: a writer out of control, blessedly operating without a self-censoring mechanism, squawking songs until his heart explodes.
Sean Kingston -- "Beautiful Girls"
The steel band at the Nisbet Plantation Beach Club sets up right at the beachfront; you're lucky enough to grab the hammock by the pier, and now you're swinging in the Atlantic wind while you watch them play. The repertoire is stateside favorites from the Seventies and Eighties -- "I Just Called To Say I Love You", "Careless Whisper", even an islanded-up version of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"; that one sure gets you grinning. With its balmy, swaying rhythm, "Stand By Me" lays itself wide open to Caribbean reinterpretation, and the dudes dig into it; but hey, wait a minute, they aren't playing the Ben E. King melody at all… it's… it's the chorus to "Beautiful Girls" that they're banging out! They must be Sean Kingston fans! Suddenly you're singing "suicidal, suicidal", which is completely inappropriate for a beachside inn; I mean, really, there are children here. Black clouds bounce down from the volcano, and thick, warm rain pelts the sand. The musicians pack up their drums and tell you not to fret; it'll be over in five minutes and there'll be a nice rainbow over St. Kitts, just wait and see. Later, you'll eat dinner at a different resort, and there's another steel band in the cocktail lounge, dressed smartly in tuxedos for the tourists. Halfway through the set, they strike up the chords to "Stand By Me" -- and, once again, the steel drummer plays the tune you associate with "Beautiful Girls". Now you start to think that maybe your first theory wasn't right after all: maybe this is a well-circulated steel-band iteration of the song, and Kingston simply put words to the re-jiggered melody. Dinner arrives and it's excellent -- the plantation chef uses ingredients grown on its own farm on the south side of the island, down where the main roads don't go. You curse the exchange rates and pay the check, still humming Kingston, or King, or a maybe something else. Driving past ruined sugar mills and grey-stone colonial architecture, you're left with the same question that has flummoxed intellectual property courts (and plain old intellectuals) for centuries: who's sampling who?
The next time somebody tells you that some cheesy social-networking site is the new MTV, or the new pop radio, or the new music industry, just remember this: if that were true, you'd know who Sherwood is.
Shop Boyz -- "Party Like A Rock Star"
Twenty-five thousand words in -- a new chat record in this annual one-sided conversation -- and, finally!, we come to the heart of it, the very reason I went ahead and did another year-end Abstract. See, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to write about Shop Boyz. For years, I have listened to my fellow pale Caucasians mimic hip-hop dialect; they do it ironically, they do it in celebration, sometimes they even do it on record. When I was young and militant and ready to be overthrown, I crusaded against this practice: I considered it disrespectful, and as the sons of the slaveholders, I felt we ought to approach hip-hop with reverence. Now I am old and militant, but I've gained some perspective: none of those reactionary parodists (because that is what they are) have ever laid a glove on rap music. Hip-hop and R&B still dominate the Billboard charts, rappers still mint the new language, and numismatic Whitey still scurries to collect the coins. Really, emo is just the punk kid's artless longing for a soul of his own; check your liturgy and you'll discover that longing is half the battle. What makes Shop Boyz brilliant -- and yes, haters, it is brilliant -- is that in one inspired stroke, they've managed to stand the whole thing on its head. It is with no animosity whatsoever -- nor with any will to righteously re-appropriate what's been stolen -- that these flow-challenged emcees holler "totally, dude!". They love rock and roll; so does Lil Jon, and Rick Rubin, and Kanye West, and Brian Eno; and so do you. If it sounds like they're teasing Whitey; well, sure they are, a little bit, anyway. Look at the video: black folks and white folks kicking it together, getting down in one lovable-stupid mosh pit, pointing those Dio hand-signs at the camera, having fun with culture. Shop Boyz will leave it to the snobs to fret about musical miscegenation. The same amnesty is available to all of us if we choose to accept it. Angry mobster, put down that pitchfork and join the party.
Shout Out Louds -- "Tonight I Have To Leave It", "Impossible"
Further sign that something is going down, and that it's happening on a global scale -- even the damned Scandinavians are getting emo. Blame it on climate change if you wish, but Our Ill Wills melts away the ABBA-esque gloss of the debut to reveal something that sounds more like the Pogues on a lingonberry wine bender. That weird midnight sun shines on some restless and destabilized young hearts, and these are their stories: long-distance love affairs, sleepless nights, car crashes, altered states, hard rain. True, Adam Olenius still cribs most of his compositional ideas straight from The Head On The Door. "Tonight I Have To Leave It" might be the cheap Ikea version of "In Between Days", but it still looks pretty smart in a budget-conscious living room.
Silversun Pickups -- "Well Thought Out Twinkles", "Lazy Eye"
Imaginative alt-revival combo from Silver Lake; solid instrumentalists, big sound, good band name, too. That said, their songs have not, to paraphrase Dream Hampton, done much for my nipples. Sometimes the writing is the last thing that comes. Sometimes it never comes.
Slim Thug -- "Problem With Dat"
Geoscientists estimated a 0% chance that Slim Thug would not put out a song called "Problem With Dat" at some point during the course of natural history. Now that the mountain has erupted, I suppose there's nothing left but dormancy. As Houston's most glowering eminence, Slim is expected to cut beatdown records, but it's nice to know that he's ambivalent about the broken families in his wake: "I'm a pray for your mama, but her son gotta go/ But her son was a hoe, so my gun gotta blow." Hey, he says these things so that Paul Wall and Chamillionaire don't have to. I hope they send him nice Christmas baskets.
Snoop Dogg -- "Sensual Seduction"
Ignore the title, that's just the radio-approved handle; real fans and bootleggers know it as "Sexual Explosion". This is Snoop's long-awaited tribute to Zapp, which means he's run his entire vocal through a talkbox. Poppin', to be sure, but nine out of ten casual listeners will miss the reference and mistake this for yet another digitized T-Pain performance. (Is that the secret to the popularity of the pitch-corrected sound, I wonder?; that it reminds us of Zapp, the Mothership, and the funky vocoder?) Arguably, "More Bounce To The Ounce" and "Computer Love" were the two primary sources for the g-funk sound, and as Nasir the Fussy Archivist pointed out on Hip-Hop Is Dead, Roger Troutman's name is barely remembered these days. Snoop does his best to resurrect it here, and in the process, he's given the Westside something new to low-ride to. It's a neat novelty, but to be honest, when he breaks convention midway through the track and begins to rap, it feels like a happy homecoming.
Sonny J -- "Can't Stop Moving"
What's that sample, does anybody know? Must have been one hell of a Jackson 5 fake. It certainly puts me in the mood to cut a rug, so to speak. If, across the strobelite-dappled floor of an Ibiza nightclub, I espied a fetching young thing, I'd want this to be blaring on the house PA. (In this fantasy, mind you, I'd also be an accomplished dancer.) I'd then demonstrate that I couldn't stop moving, and that my body was a finely-calibrated instrument of my will. That's hard to do from this computer chair. At the moment, I'm wagging my arms wildly to Future Of The Left, the new project from the folks who brought you McLusky Do Dallas. I know, I know, that's not going to cut it in the discotheque.
Soulja Boy Tell'em -- "Crank That (Soulja Boy)"
Hip-hop's answer to "Turning Japanese", "Crank That" tells of the joys of "supermanning" that ho: whacking off on her back while she's sleeping, and then covering her up with a blanket. Because when she wakes, she'll have a cape. Get it? Ladies in the house, rest assured that if the young rapper ever did attempt such a thing, he'd be Bobbitized -- deservedly -- faster than he could say "date rape". Note that "Soulja Boy", in this song at least, is not actually the name of the emcee or of his YouTube dance, but the name of the emcee's member; I quote from text, "watch me crank that soulja boy/ now superman that ho! Now watch me yuuuuuuuu!" Um, no thanks, I'll be checking out this C-SPAN special on depleted uranium instead. For an encore, the rapper cut a track imaginatively titled "Soulja Girl"; this one was meant to be a sweet R&B ballad, but he couldn't refrain from yelling "yuuuuuuuu!" at inopportune moments. I hear there are drugs to control that these days. Needless to say, "Soulja Girl" was not much of a hit. "Crank That", on the other hand, topped the charts for weeks, and added an invaluable phrase to the prepubescent lexicon. Twenty-seven million views and counting; God bless America.
"Don't dig the Stripes", confessed Britt Daniel on "Small Stakes", "but I go for Har Mar". There's no accounting for taste, I suppose; hell, I like Soulja Boy Tell'em and you're still reading my writing. Still, I've got to think Daniel would like to have that one back: these emcee parodists have short shelf-lives, and they tend to leave behind trails of embarrassed enablers. But the point, as I took it, was that Daniel valued rhythm over instrumental chopsmanship -- and he's since put his money where his mouth is, undergoing a conversion from a typical guitar-guy to an arty, minimalist groovemeister. The boogie temperature on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga never quite exceeds that of a low-grade fever, but even those can cause entertaining hallucinations when coupled with the right cough syrup. "The Underdog" is one of the most traditionally-built cuts on the set, but even here, everything rests on those bouncy percussion tracks. If it reminds you more of Billy Joel than Parliament, just remember: the Piano Man was often a funky dude.
They don't chart, but Vega's radio singles are usually excellent anyway. "No Cheap Thrill"; remember that extended poker metaphor? That one was from Nine Objects Of Desire, the album that also featured coffee-shop standard "Caramel". Songs In Red And Gray didn't make much of an impression, but "Penitent", the lead cut, was slamming. Even Days Of Open Hand, the one Vega album nobody likes, has "Men In A War" on it. If she ever put out a greatest-hits collection, that'd be a must-have -- especially if the compilers scavenged up the DNA mix of "Tom's Diner", "Left Of Center" from the Mike's Murder soundtrack, and her luminous cover of the Grateful Dead's "China Doll". I could do without the creepy-faithful Leonard Cohen remakes; that's her own fetish to contend with, and it doesn't have to be yours. "Frank & Ava" continues her sharp practice of singing about old movie stars; she gets some (unnecessary) help on the chorus from KT Tunstall, but the verse is pure and clear-eyed Vega pop. Wins points for incorporating the word "bidet" without breaking the vibe; only a true intellectual's sex symbol could have pulled that off with grace.
Swizz Beatz -- "It's Me, Snitches", "Money In The Bank", "Top Down"
In a sense, it's nice that producers are becoming more widely recognized. A few years ago the average pop music fan didn't even know who Timbaland was. You'd have to shake him by the shoulders and say "dammit, man, you've merely been listening to his fine work for the past three years!" And you'd feel "in the know" and quite superior, and you'd chortle at your friend's ignorance, but at the same time, you'd weep at the plight of a great artist toiling away in obscurity. Kanye West sure changed all of that, didn't he?; now, everybody with grubby fingers on the faders is demanding his turn on the microphone. God gave us all individual talents; he maketh Ghostface to rap, and Pharrell Williams to produce, and Jack White to play guitar, and Max Bemis to scream, and me to run off at the mouth. Swizz Beatz is a sure hand with a sample and a hook; if Hot-97 needs somebody to whip them up a promo spot, he's the man. But he was never, ever meant to emcee. Open Exhibits A, B, and C at your own risk.
Pitch-correction software upsets people for the same reason that performance-enhancing drugs do: we adore our talent hierarchies. We want to believe that we're being entertained by extraordinary humans, not ordinary humans who've gotten their hands on cheater's candy. If it turns out that Roger Clemens was not, in fact, a freak -- if his fastball was an extra-natural entity and not the product of his own innate abilities -- we may as well have been watching the Dominican kids tira la pelota in Liberty State Park. We want our money's worth. Paying top-dollar to sit in a loge box entitles us to one hundred dollars worth of deviation from standard expectations, or so we insist. Likewise, T-Pain distresses listeners because he is so obviously not a star: he's gimmicky, fat, and funny-looking, and his over-reliance on the talkbox seems like an outright acknowledgement of his lack of skills. Never mind that it sounds cool, or that it's no more affected than anything Julian Casablancas used to do -- it makes his elevation to star status seem arbitrary, and that's the one thing we can't tolerate. In an era where performance review has become popular entertainment -- one where we plunk ourselves down in front of the tube for hours to watch the evil British dude and his cronies castigate aspirants who don't cut the mustard -- this is unacceptable. Worse, he appears to be rubbing our noses in it; slathering on the pitch-correction, unapologetically auto-tuning his vocals, exposing himself before an adoring America as a smiling puppet of the machinery. If T-Pain was able to achieve stadium status without any God-given talent, what's our excuse?
T.I. -- "Big Things Poppin'", "Top Back" (with Young Jeezy, B.G., & Young Dro)
Further delusions of grandeur from Earth's most overrated emcee. If I didn't warm to him when he was getting top-flight production, I certainly have no patience for him now that his beats are mediocre.
Togo-born Bonney attempts to spring D.C. from rap's second division. He cites Q-Tip as an inspiration, but in execution, "The Pocket" is more like Food & Liquor. Which isn't to say he can flow like Lupe; in fact, Bonney isn't a very good rapper at all. He compensates with some electric funk and a positive mental attitude, and not necessarily in that order. He generously deciphers his Capitol City slang for the uninitiated, talks about his threads, and kicks back and basks in his own self-confidence: on the slamming "Syce It" (more D.C. lingo, don't ask), he explains that there's no need to flash the cheese, since he's good-looking enough to pull honeys without it. I believe him. One to watch, and maybe even to pull for.
Pop music history is studded with neon-bright absurdity, but few tracks are quite this ridiculous. The Canadian R&B singer pens a love letter to herself, and delivers it with bonehead alacrity: "Her name is me/ And she loves me more than you'll ever know." Sadly, there's nothing onanistic about it, it's just another declaration of independence. Brace yourself for more glossy self-help anthems now that Oprah Winfrey is running for President.
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists -- "Bomb.Repeat.Bomb"
Maybe President Oprah can do something about the impersonal nature of the war in Iraq. Getting people in touch with their feelings is her trade, I am told. She may have a few books to recommend on the subject while she's at it. Ted Leo, too, is disturbed by the remove with which Americans fight their overseas battles: "Bomb.Repeat.Bomb" puts us in the cockpit of a B-1, dropping its explosive cargo on remote targets and returning to the Air Force base to restock the hold. It's a metaphor for casual American belligerence, our dispassionate warmaking style, and our frightening tendency to forget that our actions here at home have long-distance consequences for those stuck in target nations. The song is little more than a jeremiad -- Leo hollering his head off into the nearest microphone, and taking out his political frustrations on his six-string. Lately I get that way too. Now that it's raining more than ever, know that we'll still have each other.
The Clientele -- "Bookshop Casanova", "Here Comes The Phantom"
Look ma, no reverb! Stratus clouds part and the sun shines on The Clientele at last, and, as it turns out, they don't sound all that much different than they did when Alistair MacLean fed every signal through the Space Echo. The songwriting continues to tighten up: "Here Comes The Phantom" is the band's most straightforward exercise in classic pop revivalism yet. It could have been a hit, in Edinburgh, in 1965, if it had rained all summer and a polio epidemic swept through the city. MacLean is still a stellar guitar player, but his meandering days appear to be over; no wild, barbed skeins of notes like those on The Violet Hour here. If you, like me, always felt that "Lamplight" was their most rapturous recording, you, like me, might feel like it's all been downhill since then. God Save The Clientele attempts to spruce up the formula with piano, synth, acoustic guitar, and string settings, and they've even added a good-looking broad and plunked her down in the middle of the stage. I can dig it all, but I can't blame you if you're a little tired of their schtick by now.
The Dollyrots -- "Because I'm Awesome"
Blackheart Records still exists, and Joan Jett continues to scour the land for junior versions of herself. Kelly O. of the Dollyrots has the cheek, and sometimes even the vision: her amped-up cover of Melanie's "Brand New Key" brings new dimensions of naughtiness to a song that already had a scandalous reputation. I'm tempted to say that a true punk wouldn't have signed on to a Kohl's advertising campaign, but I know damned well that Jett would've done the same thing. That's not a pass, incidentally.
The Fiery Furnaces -- "Ex-Guru"
Fans raised on the small and fidgety sound of Blueberry Boat may need a moment to adjust to the newer, louder Fiery Furnaces. Widow City is a stick of sonic dynamite; that's not tape hiss you're hearing, it's the wick sizzling right down to the nitroglycerine. For the first time, the Friedbergers have ceded some creative control to their tour rhythm section (Bob D'Amico and Kevin Loewenstein, take a bow), and they've been rewarded with staggering, imaginative performances worthy of the Soft Machine. In keeping with the script they've written for themselves, the siblings have raided the shed for treasures befitting their outsized personalities. Brother Matthew has unearthed some great vintage gear: old synths that sound like flutes, King Crimson distortion pedals, and a mixing board so analog that you can practically smell the grease. Sister Eleanor did him one better, returning from the attic with a musty haul of fashion magazines from the Seventies; Better Homes and Gardens, that kind of thing. She's mined the adverts for leading phrases -- so this time out, she's singing about wicker whatnots and gigantic jacks, emergency cigarettes, and the proper aesthetic for a doormat. You know her superpowers by now; she can make any crazy phrase resonate, and when she wraps her pipes around a genuine seduction piece like "Right By Conquest", she leaves the two-inch tape quivering in its ribbon-runner. Despite the pair's love for pastiche and pomo serendipity, familiar themes emerge from the smoke: abduction, class conflict, the mistreatment of women by husbands and employers, frantic consultation of archaic texts at inopportune moments, vexed family relationships, the long legacy of colonialism. Dizzy, delirious, mesmerizing, erudite; a great American band at the very height of its powers.
The Game -- "Wouldn't Get Far" (with Kanye West)
By now, we've talked this one to death -- we can all agree that Mr. Taylor and Mr. West are a pair of big shitheads for their bilateral assault on video girls. I'm willing to let it slide on one condition: that they never work together again. Feeding sped-up soul-diva samples to a known celebrity stalker like The Game is just asking for trouble, and, as we learned on Graduation, West is desperate for a big brother. It's an explosive combination. Next thing you know, they'll be holding up liquor stores together.
Energetic Motown psych-revival combo, scrupulous about aesthetic and sonic detail. There's always a huge disconnect for me between the wild-man Roky Erickson personae you invariably see in these Rainbow Quartz acts and the scholarly rigor with which they mimic the production on the Nuggets compilations. No musicians are quite as fussy about adhering to code as late-Sixties fetishists are. I enjoy fake psychedelia like "You Go Bangin' On", too, but it's a little like dancing to a museum piece. Many bands have proven that they can capture the sound of era with remarkable fidelity to the source; I'm still waiting for the first one to show they can do something with it.
The Kooks -- "She Moves In Her Own Way"
For many moons, our homegrown emo favorites could not stay afloat in the U.K mainstream. They've preferred their boy bands to be studied traditionalists like the Kooks; this was talked up as evidence of their superior refinement, or their stiff upper lip, or maybe the tightness of the national ass. But all this is changing. The Early November may never have had a chance to bring some Jersey to the Old Country, but the sitting Congress of commercial emo-pop bands views England as a growth market. My Chemical Romance (who are definitely not emo) were a smashing success on their British tour; ditto for Fall Out Boy; now every band on the Fueled By Ramen roster seems to be planning their own transcontinental invasion. We'll all know when the tide has changed for good: when that first gang of Brits shows up in the Garden State with eyeliner, helicopter haircuts, and over-the-top corporate rock numbers about their prescription-drug regimens.
The Magic Numbers -- "This Is A Song"Persnickety indiepop quartet; made headlines in Britain after storming off of a television set after the host called them "a big fat melting-pot of talent". They're a little sensitive about their waist-sizes, you see; let's just say they'd fit in fine on the staff of Baseball Prospectus. All jokes aside, the cruel truth is that indiepop is a thin person's game: it's supposed to be music made by elves for elves, and hipster audiences will penalize musicians for hitting the buffet table with abandon. If they were doing heavy rock, or space jams, it would be a different story; hell, in hip-hop music, a big belly signifies conspicuous consumption better than any gold chain or ornate Jesus piece ever could. The Magic Numbers aren't the first fey indiepop group to have had their aspirations torpedoed by a less-than-ethereal look, and they certainly won't be the last. Subcultures have their filters, and some will, invariably, be discriminatory. My advice to the Stodart siblings: start rappin'.
The Pack -- "I'm Shinin'", "In My Car"
Neither of these has anything on the best sneaker cut since "My Adidas", but you weren't really expecting that, were you? You were just hoping Young L and company could come up with a reasonable facsimile of the song that made them the toast of the skateparks. Call them skills-deficient if you really want, but all four of these hyphy teenagers possess pleasant flows and endearing, playful personalities. They're not the second coming of the Pharcyde or anything, but as contemporary rappers go, The Pack are unusually likeable guys.
The Rocket Summer -- "So Much Love"
Piano-driven emo-pop combo from suburban Dallas, strongly reminiscent of Mêlée. Bryce Avary's enthusiasm for his devotional message is obvious, and his helium-voiced performances compare favorably to those of other frontmen treading this territory. That said, I've listened to the splashy, sharply-written, and sonically-appealing Do You Feel plenty of times now, and I'm not confident that I can sing you back any of the melodies. Not a good sign, kids.
The Shins -- "Phantom Limb", "Australia"
Tweepop songwriters love many things, and the thing they love most is lesbians. Because lesbians are magic, don't you know? James Mercer resisted the temptation to write his magic lesbian song for two whole albums, which must be some kind of record for restraint. But now it's album number three, and the gloves come off for "Phantom Limb", a tale of "white girls of the North" who, metaphorically, float above the grass of their repressed suburban town. They'll soon leave for the big city, where all magic lesbians eventually go; in the meantime, they're stuck in Mercer's fussy little scenario, and they don't even get to kiss. I feel for them. What would happen, I wonder, if the songwriter unbuttoned his pants and gave it to us straight up, so to speak -- if he made explicit in song that Girls Gone Wild videotape secretly playing behind his eyes? Would the indie rock enterprise implode? Go on and get as nasty as you wanna be, Mercer; this is pop music, and nobody's giving out any awards for self-denial.
The White Stripes -- "Icky Thump", "You Don't Know What Love Is"Thank goodness for Jack White, huh? If Jack White spends the afternoon salivating over sapphicerotica.com, you can be damned sure he'll write us a song about it later that evening. This is a man whose last lead single concerned his blue balls. "Icky Thump" is the Stripes's allusive (and wise) contribution to the national debate over Mexican immigration, but I'm more compelled by the classic-rock thumper "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)". White has been mean on record before -- "There's No Home For You Here" was a pretty vicious kiss-off -- but this one is an outright demolition of its subject. Compliant people make him nervous; he's all about the dust-up, and he's never too shy to say so.
Three 6 Mafia -- "Doe Boy Fresh"More dumb and drugged American fun from Juicy J. The capo of the Mafia gives us this pusherman primer from the backseat of the sedan: "Chopping up the dope like a butcher in the deli/ you know that purple kush will leave you clothes all smelly." He's got a selection of thrills to offer us, in other words; he's hawking the weed-'n'-speed special. He's like a rolling pharmacy, making all stops across the Mid-South. Meanwhile, DJ Paul is as inarticulate as ever, but you could see that as a testament to the irresistibility of Juice's wares -- he's apparently gotten his partner "fresher than a mint leaf, smelling like a coca-leaf", and intoxicated beyond sentience. Wait, Chamillionaire is on this record? What's the conscience of Houston doing here? Normally I can't get enough of Cham, but he's far too sober to be hanging with these two hyenas.
Timbaland -- "The Way That I Are" (with Keri Hilson), "Give It To Me" (with Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake)
In fairness, Mr. Mo has been rapping since the mid-nineties; we've all mercifully forgotten those records he made with the marble-mouthed Magoo, but dig down deep in those CD crates stashed in your basement, and you'll find a few. Since then, he's mostly confined his vocal contributions to assorted grunts and moans on other people's tracks, but his recent chart success and petty feud with Scott Storch has precipitated a return to the vocal booth. Furtado and Timberlake administer all the strong medicine they can, but this patient was D.O.A, I'm afraid. As Gertrude Stein said to Picasso after he showed her his poetry: get back in the studio, Pablo, and paint.
There comes a moment in every year when the astute listener recognizes that no matter how absurd it may have seemed on the first listen, the latest street-burner from Tori Amos is actually better than 98% of current radio favorites. Amos doesn't get pro airtime anymore, but it's not really an issue: her psychotically-devoted fans aren't going anywhere, and she can continue to bring the noise to them from now until doomsday. American Doll Posse is more than a little bit like one of those off-Broadway shows where the leading lady does one monologue dressed like a hooker, and another dressed like a Puerto Rican, and another dressed as her great-aunt, and another dressed as "herself". But she's such an exceptional musician -- and so passionate about everything she sings -- that her middlebrow concepts aren't likely to throw you. As always, she's got plenty to say, and some of it is downright WTF (check out the lyrics to "Programmable Soda", this season's answer to "Original Sinsuality"). But if you can stick it out until the end, you're rewarded with "Almost Rosey", one of the frankest pieces of revenge-of-the-nerd autobiographical songwriting ever waxed. The Southern-fried "Big Wheel" comes early, and rolls along uneventfully -- until Amos checks the calendar and begins to worry that the audience has spaced on her elemental, airy-fairy glamour. "I am a MILF!", she hollers, over and over, "don't you forget!" Relax, Ms. Amos, nobody is likely to forget.
Trembling Blue Stars -- "November Starlings", "Idyllwild"
Turns out that what Robert Wratten meant by "retirement" was "a quick trip across the street to get some new guitar strings, followed by the commencement of sessions on the new album". Geez, even Ryne Sandberg held out longer than that. Later the frontman would qualify: he only meant he was retiring from the performance game. Playing these Trembling Blue Stars songs is exhausting; exhausting, I tell you. Hey, it's not like I'm complaining -- I can't imagine Wratten kicking back with a mojito and a shuffleboard set in Boca, or its British equivalent. The Last Holy Writer is a sweet one, too; a refreshing hourlong sulk, spiked by drum programming that is (dare I say) funky fresh. Lead single "Idyllwild" is another magic-lesbian number, but Wratten is filthy enough to hand it off to Beth Arzy to sing. I dig the quintessential wrist-slitting TBS chorus, too: "life was wide open then/ now it's closing in/ one by one, we've watched our dreams disappear." Oh, Bobby, you just go right on being you.
Twista -- "Give It Up" (with Pharrell Williams)
Why wasn't this a colossal hit? It has everything: an "eclectic" Neptunes beat, a rapid-fire, horndog performance by Twista, a stunning Hype Williams video that conflates lovely ladies with ice cream cones and candy bars, an apropos Red Hot Chili Peppers quote; what else do you people want? It even has congas. Congas!
Tenor-voiced communitarian from Dallas; a bit of a roughneck, but not a gangsta rapper. Many of his rhymes are about his appetite -- not for fame or fortune, but for a big, steaming bowl of Tex-Mex chili. He doesn't want a gat, or a chain, or a stack, or even a dime; he wants dinner. In his heart (or just in his belly), I'll bet you Curtis Jackson feels the same way. While enjoyable, "Caprice Musik" is unrepresentative: the arty, minimalist beat makes Tum Tum sound like a snap artist. The rest of Eat Or Get Ate roars off in the opposite direction; these are big productions with vainglorious synthesizers, busy drum programming, and thoughtful, well-structured verses from the emcee. Tum slows it down on "Better Days" to stick up for illegal immigrants and to announce that Bush makes him feel ashamed to be from Texas. He and Natalie Maines should get together and cut a protest record. That'd fuck with heads on both sides of the country-city divide.
Turf Talk -- "I Got Chips" (with E-40)
"I stick to the g-shit", explains Turf Talk on "I'm Ghetto", "'cause everybody thinks the hyphy movement is dancing". One of the originators of the style offers up a corrective: Bay Area hip-hop, he demonstrates, is much more than car accidents and clowning around with your dreadlocks in your face. That said, there's plenty on West Coast Vaccine to dance to, courtesy of hyphy stalwarts Rick Rock, Droop-E, and the irresistible Traxamillion. Turf is the star of this show, though, and he hogs the limelight for an hour and a quarter; holding forth, issuing threats and condolences, bragging about his crew, discussing the merits of selling (and taking) various drugs, dodging the cops, cracking jokes, making fun of the music industry. The emcee has about five distinct voices, and he often likes to flip his style mid-song just to frazzle his listeners' nerves. The major-label treatment would probably strip Turf of some of individuality and most of his beat doctors. Still, it's hard not to think that if there's any justice at all in the music industry, this outsized personality will soon be one familiar to millions.
UGK -- "The Game Belongs To Me", "International Players Anthem" (with OutKast)
The opening verse to "Sippin' On Some Syrup" is justly famous. The last stanza of "Big Pimpin'", too, is well-known, even to those who don't ordinarily follow Southern rap. "What y'all know about them Texas boys?", asked Chad "Pimp C" Butler, "coming down in candied toys/ smoking weed and talking noise?" Less than a decade later, the rise of Swishahouse taught the rest of America plenty about them Texas boys and their candy-colored Cadillacs -- but by then the poor Pimp was in no position to enjoy it. UGK partner Bun B made the "Free Pimp C" chant an integral part of Houston's ascendancy, and the jailed rapper hovered around the H-Town movement like a spectral force. He was a spirit that the young emcees prayed to, a legend on lockdown, an ace in the hole. Sprung from the clink in '06, Butler caught the tail-end of the Texas craze, released Pimpalation, and then reunited with Bun for one more shot at the national recognition that had always eluded the Underground Kings. Things seemed to be looking up this summer; the "International Players Anthem" made the Billboard Hot 100 and Rolling Stone named it one of the best songs of the year. You know what happened next. I'm no eulogist, so I'll hand it over to Bun B: "Pimp C's genius was unparalleled. His passion was undeniable and his love was unmatched. To say that I lost a friend or brother would never do justice to the relationship we shared. I will never be the same again." In sum, good rapper, good hip-hop citizen, terrible timing.
"Weird Al" Yankovic -- "Trapped In The Drive-Thru"
Yankovic always gets short shrift in the Pop Music Abstracts because by the time I get to "W", I am mentally shot and preparing to wrap. This year, I've gone far longer and far harder than ever before, but I still feel the need to give Weird Al his propers for this one. R. Kelly's original was an exercise in intentional absurdity; he knew he was being ridiculous, but he stormed on anyway, tacitly acknowledging an addiction to garbage t.v. and daring the listener to call him out about it. How, then, to parody something that was already meant to be a joke? Yankovic begins by picking apart Kelly's -- and television's -- reliance on over-dramatized minutia as a substitute for storytelling. His narrator is sparring with his wife about where to go for dinner; the argument lasts for a full verse, the characters get in the car, and, once again, start bickering over trivialities. Like Kelly, Weird Al raises the emotional pitch to absurd heights at inappropriate moments -- only instead of emoting about infidelity, he's hollering over hamburgers. The point, and the critique, is that television -- and bad R&B -- keeps us glued to its flimsy narratives through cheap cues, crescendos, and over-indications. Did he really need to go on for eleven minutes? Well, sure; sure he did, as surely as I needed to go on for thirty thousand words and one hundred and seventy-one entries. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth overdoing, badly.
Wyclef Jean -- "Sweetest Girl" (with Akon & Lil Wayne)
Career-girl melodrama from the quintessential Ja-fakin'. Weezy rolls in for his umpteenth guest appearance and colors by numbers; Akon is his usual grim-faced, robotic self. The song does contain one revelatory aphorism, registered as a complaint, but secretly a prayer: "pimpin' got harder/ because hos got smarter". Would that it were so.
Polow Da Don has a legitimate claim to the title of Producer of the Year. This time he brings in the sinister marching band and the demonic church choir; it's more of that Southern gothic for your Cadillac grill. The result feels like the soundtrack to creepiest high school football game you've never attended -- the players are high, the referees are encouraging cheap shots, there's mud all over your Air Force Ones, and something wicked is going down underneath the grandstand.
It all becomes crystal clear once you know that I used to listen to Milli Vanilli voluntarily. It was my little sister's cassette, her purchase from Record World in the Short Hills Mall, but I won't front -- I was feeling it. For me, the golden age of radio began during the summer of Iran-Contra, and lasted through 1990: Soul II Soul, Technotronic, silly-ass rap crews with their serious implications, Stock-Aitken-Waterman, Dana Dane and Slick Rick, Fishbone and Living Colour, "Everybody Everybody" by Black Box, Lisa Stansfield, and Crystal Waters singing la da di, la da da. I was young and idealistic, and the walls were shaking. Bands out of Britain were trying on the James Brown beat: EMF, Jesus Jones, The Stone Roses funking out on "Fools Gold", Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. Singer-songwriters were unapologetically, un-ironically topical: "Luka", "Fast Car", Midnight Oil throwing down for the aborigines, Sinead O'Connor taking on the Pope. Every Tuesday, there'd be new rap records at the Music Staff in Westfield, each one with new innovations, new sounds, new emcees with new flows. De La Soul dropped 3 Feet High And Rising, and it felt like the very notion of intellectual property was going through the shredder. Whatever the future held for music, we knew hip-hop would be right in the middle of it; everything was changing, and Chuck D, BDP, and Ice Cube were the vanguard. It's here that the needle scratches in the groove of the soundtrack to my reminiscence -- Nas's "Carry On Tradition" or "Can't Forget About You" will surely do -- and reality sets in. Beginning in '91, assisted by new genre terminology, the resegregators took over and wouldn't let go. If you're young enough, "alternative" and "indie" might mean something to you; to me, coming up when I did, these artificial, meaningless categories looked like disguises for a new color bar. Beat music was not welcome on the white man's dial, or on college radio, and running down hip-hop became a cottage industry for amateur pundits. And this held, for years and years, long after the fall of grunge: one set of popular songs for Brick City and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and another for Belmar and Northern Boulevard. But traditions fall, and regimes crumble, and pop music so desperately wants to come together. Flip on your radio, watch your videos, put your ear to the street, friend -- the signs are unmistakable. We're listening to each other again. Our long, dark 2007 is almost over now; in another year, the mutilator-in-chief will be out, and someone, anyone, else will be in. We're flipping the calendar, popping the cork; we're opening up; doing it with the black and the white like a cop car, party like a rock, party like a rock star.
No one, no one, can get in the way of what you're e-mailing to me.
