Rockaliser Baby

Rockaliser Radio 2: Rockcast of Consensus

2012-01-08T15:01:00.008-06:00

Recalling vintage 1994-era Siskel & Ebert, your Rockaliser writers have independently cast the same vote for 2011's best album, and it's not what you think...unless you've browsed through this blog in the past week and read our lists in written form, here and here--then you know it's Destroyer's Kaputt.

As with last year, I invited my esteemed colleague onto my weekly radio show, which broadcasts Sunday nights live from the Radiohive studios in Manhattan, to talk about our favorite music of the year. Once again it was an excellent discussion, and apart from a momentary Internet shortage toward the end there were fewer technical errors this time around (errors of judgment, on the other hand, still number plenty). Feel free to stream our live "Rockcast" (as we have taken to calling it) below. It's an entertaining two-hour listen, with a murderer's row of high-quality music selections. How much of our discussion will be devoted to Bun B? Will your host be able to summon more precise language to convey music he likes than "hardcore rockin' beats"? Is the Spinal Tap reference at the beginning intentional? And how will either of us justify the lack of SuperHeavy commentary? None of these questions will be answered, befitting the uncertainty of today's troubled economic climate [\desperate end-of-year think piece].

An mp3 of the Rockcast is also available here. For convenience, our respective lists sans commentary:

Aaron M.'s Favorite Music of 2011

1. Destroyer, Kaputt

2. Fucked Up, David Comes To Life

3. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, Belong

4. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake

5. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy

6. Shabazz Palaces, Black Up

7. Wye Oak, Civilian

8. Big K.R.I.T., Return of 4Eva

9. Low, C'mon

10. Van Hunt, What Were You Hoping For?

Nathan S.'s Favorite Music of 2011

1. Destroyer, Kaputt

2. Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin'

3. DJ Quik, The Book of David

4. Big K.R.I.T., Return of 4Eva

5. Fucked Up, David Comes To Life

6. Blouse, Blouse

7. Boris, New Album

8. A$AP Rocky, LiveLoveA$AP

9. Mutemath, Odd Soul

10. Yuck, Yuck

Thanks to my colleague for an excellent conversation, and for introducing me to a few artists (Van Hunt, Shabazz Palaces) who would have otherwise slipped past my radar. Thus endeth the season of Rockaliser EOY festivities--time to get on to some real writing!

Nathan's Favorite Music, 2011 Edition

2012-01-04T06:11:00.013-06:00

1. Destroyer, Kaputt

The smoothest, most immersive listening experience of 2011, by a considerable margin. Singer/songwriter Dan Bejar takes a few compositional cues from AOR and soft rock but this nine-song set is the opposite of anodyne--it constantly teems with fresh ideas, from the silvery disco pulse beneath to the proudly anachronistic flute and sax solos on top. If there's a theme to this list, it's that the best music of 2011 didn't care what year it was.

2. Raphael Saadiq, Stone Rollin'

Saadiq is a veteran showman, producer and arranger, but his bounteous command of classic soul productions usually lags behind his skills as a songwriter. Not so with Stone Rollin', an album of immaculately-orchestrated tributes to different eras of soul, entirely devoid of retro-gazing. In 2011, no album made more mellifluous use of the Mellotron, an instrument not traditionally associated with soul and R&B, modern or otherwise.

3. DJ Quik, The Book of David

He may call himself a "crucial if not lesser-known artist from the West" but the pristine beats of The Book of David demonstrate that Quik, if not before, definitely now deserves a place in the top tier of West Coast hip-hop. Few late-career rap albums are as restlessly committed to an unstoppable groove--in Quik's eyes, funk and hip-hop are always mutually reinforced properties, etymologically unrelated to the overprocessed goo-goo synths of much modern hip-hop.

4. Big K.R.I.T., Return of 4Eva

Though Big K.R.I.T. has garnered a reputation as a Southern rap virtuoso, his 2011 mixtape Return of 4Eva is more than just a collection of a creatively-expressed drawly Southernisms spat over crunkified click tracks. K.R.I.T. is also rapper of great depth and range, and his evocations of life in rural Meridian, Mississippi give this album a country flavor that puts most rap from the city, Southern or otherwise, to shame.

5. Fucked Up, David Comes To Life

Just when you thought Fucked Up's massive three-guitar sound couldn't get bigger, they embark on the most epic undertaking of their career--a three-part, eighteen-song concept album about a dude in a lightbulb factory. The overall "concept" might be a bit lost among the fuzz and stentorian talk-vox, but the twin totems of beauty and aggression endemic in Fucked Up's best work are still there, to a transcendent, almost tiring degree.

6. Blouse, Blouse

Call them a dream-pop trio from Portland, but that really fails to do the sounds of Blouse justice. Coasting on the familiar 80s combination of gothic synths and ethereal lady vocals, Blouse makes novel use of common instrumental techniques. Their self-titled debut album is alarmingly dense, averaging an impressive two or three massive hooks per track. Consistency of this sort is harder than it looks.

7. Boris, New Album

In a characteristic move, the beloved Japanese metal band Boris set out to confuse fans as much as possible by releasing three albums in 2011. Attention Please was the more electronic-oriented release, while Heavy Rocks concentrated more on the band's aggressive punk-metal roots--but it was New Album, occupying a nebulous middle between those two extremes, that I found the most compelling. From careening Timbaland percussion stabs to string-laden metal monsters to the occasional dalliance with J-Pop, the diversity of tunes contained was unmatched in metal, or anywhere else.

8. A$AP Rocky, LiveLoveA$AP

As my colleague has previously noted, 2011 was a big year for insurgent rap from the likes of Odd Future, Lil B, Danny Brown, etc, but I bet that in 2012 I won't be spinning anything from that 2011 repertoire as often as LiveLoveA$AP, Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky's breakthrough mixtape. Augmented by spacey, codeine-inflected beats from the likes of Clams Casino and Spaceghostpurrp, 24-year old A$AP spits like a emcee repping an extra decade's worth of self-assurance. The result is a rare mixtape with almost too many classic tracks to name offhand.

9. Mutemath, Odd Soul

Bands like New Orleans' Mutemath--solid, dependable and exciting purveyors of mainstream blues rock--are an undervalued commodity in America. Mining everything from classic NO jazz to Peter Green-style blues guitar freakouts, Odd Soul is first and foremost an album filled with remarkable performances, from musicians who have clearly spent years learning to play together aggressively and effectively. There's a soulful side to these heavy riffs that give this a more playful and funky edge than recent material from, say, the Black Keys or other blues rock revivalists.

10. Yuck, Yuck

Speaking of bands not made for these times--the London-based Yuck might have garnered more comparisons to Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement than any other artist in 2011, but that doesn't take any value away from the explosive energy of this debut. In my opinion, Yuck isn't a perfect album (it does lose some energy towards the end), but as far as debuts go I cannot imagine a more youthful-sounding rejoinder to the pre-end times rhetoric of so much "2011 in music" think pieces.

Honorable Mention: Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX, We're New Here

A year ago, I gave Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here the highest accolades on my list of 2010's best albums. Back then, it was his big comeback album, but now it has become his swan song--Scott-Heron died in May, ostensibly during the planning stages for a followup to I'm New Here. A few months before, however, XL Recordings put out a remixed version of the album, with new productions from Jamie Smith (the bassist/singer from the xx). Though Gil Scott-Heron's vocal contributions are the same as before, We're New Here is at least 60% its own beast, and at the very least, a more rattly, electronic type of experience than the original I'm New Here. It isn't exactly a different album, but I would be remiss if I did not mention it in some fashion--it, as well as its dead creator, one of the greatest poets and musicians of the last 50 years. RIP once more Gil--and Poly, Gary Moore, Teena Marie, etc. etc.

Refrain From Being Lame: Aaron's Favorites, 2011

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-06:00

1. Destroyer, Kaputt

An icy melange--flutes, saxophones, synthesyzers, Sibel Thrasher--that travels from diaphanous to propulsive, from merely wry to really and truly devastating.

2. Fucked Up, David Comes To Life
A band with a talent for outdoing itself, even when that no longer seems possible. Fucked Up's trio of guitars again concoct a sound as large as their vocalist, with melodies arriving from every angle. David has few roots in punk, but courses with the life-saving power that made punk special in the first place.

3. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Belong

Pains have emerged from the library stacks, with their bookish songcraft intact. Ecstasy may have been a catalyst, by the sounds of it, but their idea of the perfect rock LP suffers not a bit from being twenty years old.

4. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake
Harvey's dense folk passes by in a violent rush, unsparing in its studies of war, death, and ideology. The most restless songwriter since Neil Young, PJ hasn't repeated herself once, here brandishing her autoharp as a weapon.

5. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
Annie Clark's guitar work is so texturally weird I often forget she's actually playing a guitar. Strange Mercy's buoyant art-rock is shot through with strange undercurrents--songs like "Cruel," "Suregon," and "Year Of The Tiger" dash in new directions each time I play them.

6. Shabazz Palaces, Black Up
The sound of a man driven mad by the noise of the city, filtered through beats constructed on a glowing monitor in total darkness. Or so I imagine: what I know for sure is that Shabazz Palaces' debut marks the most stunning reinvention since Daniel Dumile first donned a mask.

7. Wye Oak, Civilian
On their third, Wassner and Stack cut back on the blasts of surging guitar, following a tenser, more post-punk path. Wye Oak are still the most mournful rock band on the planet.

8. Big K.R.I.T., Return of 4Eva

Big K.R.I.T. references OutKast on two of his album's first three songs, but he's not just recreating the funk and bounce of vintage Kast. K.R.I.T., who mans the boards as well as the mic, pays tribute to the South by crafting a new addition to its canon.

9. Low, C'mon
Low make American Music in the way Neil Young does: brilliantly, toying with convention according to their idiosyncrasies. The Sparhawks' vision is, of course, a terrifying one.

10. Van Hunt, What Were You Hoping For?

A record that seems to have exploded out of Paisley Park--Van Hunt's cacophony is soulful, punkish and dripping in day glo. He's the rare songwriter making music about the Great Recession that sounds and feels like our times. Maybe that's the mechanism...

I wrote about most of these artists during 2011: Destroyer, Fucked Up, TPOBP@H, PJ Harvey, St. Vincent, Wye Oak, Low

2011 in 3000: André Benjamin's Year In Guest Verses

2011-12-13T02:27:00.002-06:00

2011 was André 3000's most active year since 2006--not that he ever disappeared completely. In this extra-stank Critical Beatdown, your hosts take you through 2011 in 3000.

"Dedication To My Ex (Miss That)," Lloyd feat. Lil Wayne and André 3000
NS: I love the exuberant buoyancy of this jam in full, and Andre's verse is just the virtuosic icing on the cake. There are some rappers--Kurupt and Styles P come to mind--who are uniquely capable of going hard on an extended metaphor for bar after bar, and Dre demonstrates that same type of focused dynamism here, wedding Lloyd's basic thesis (hint--he says it in the chorus) to some amusingly lucid car metaphors. Favorite line: "What, why so quiet?/Hate that all our memories happen in a Hyatt?" I think that's what the kids today call an "epic burn." 5/5

AM: Lloyd's retro-soul joint features negligible ad-libs from Weezy, along with a lead vocal that you will likely regard has either humorously pained or horrifyingly sexist. The tune is colorful edging on chintzy. André's verse stands out, of course. But his rap, ostensibly about the same lady Lloyd's worked up over, is minor André--this ex isn't as vivid as Sasha Thumper or Ms. Jackson. 4/5

"I Do," Young Jeezy feat Jay-Z and André 3000
NS: How many rappers out there can follow Jay-Z with reliably superior wordplay? Whereas Jay's verbiage rarely ventures outside the confines of normative hip-hop posturing, Dre breaks into an almost expressionistic sing-rap, more a tangle of feelings and associations than straightahead storytelling, in the best imagistic tradition. Surreal stuff, and I am fascinated by how he keeps talking into the outro about his hypothetically "nerdy" future daughter. 4/5

AM: This one first made the rounds pre-2011 as an uncompleted André track. The subject matter--and soul-soaked beat--inspires comparisons to a certain earth-shatteringly good Dre guest verse, but so be it: 3000 is at that level here. Insane technical control, with the vocal and lyrical flights of fancy that make him so compelling. That he clearly did this all in one take--listen for his breathing--makes "I Do" even more amazing. 5/5

"The Real Her," Drake feat. Lil Wayne and André 3000
NS: Take Care put me to sleep, and the mottled non-beat of "The Real Her" is fairly indicative of that album's lugubrious tendencies. Even Lil Wayne fails to rise above the material, which makes the transition to the Andre verse at 4:14 all the more unexpected. The drab tonelessness of Drake's autotuned meanderings gives way to a 3000's day-glo nightmare of insomniac thrillseekers and backstabbing strippers, tinged with a David Lynch sense of creeping, formless dread. Odd modifiers like "quote-on-quote bad bitches" stick to the mind, emblematic of the throwaway rhetorical flourishes that make a 3000 verse so distinctive. For a closer lyrical analysis, I highly recommend this article. 5/5

AM: Rapping in stop-start bursts that mimic the beat's pitch bending, Dre runs laps around the competition. Wayne is lazy but engaging, but that's 2011 Model Weezy F for you. And Drake makes us suffer through not one but two of his verses. Though it ends on an uncharacteristically venomous note, 3000 is the reason I've made it through this overlong track so many times. 4.5/5

"Interlude," Lil Wayne feat. Tech N9ne and André 3000
NS: 3 Stacks and Tech N9Ne make a not-surprisingly good tag team. This highlight of Tha Carter IV doesn't even feature Lil Wayne, but with such regal musings from messrs. 3000 and N9ne, who even needs "the greatest rapper alive"? Beautiful bits of elevated wordplay worm their way through 3 Stacks' short verse--"Today I feel electric gray, I hope tomorrow neon black," he begins, like a fashion terrorist from the future, going on to condense everything from the stars in Cairo "like marbles" to another classic 3000 trope--philosophic musings in "wild party" settings. No one else in rap writes with such sensitivity to the depth and evocative flexibility of language than Andre 3000, and this is another verse that proves it. 5/5

AM: A Carter IV track that features no contribution from Lil Wayne, and a fierce verse from Tech N9ne. 3000 rarely raps on beats as abrasive as this one, but his brief contribution is ace--hard, but weird too. 4/5

"Party," Beyoncé feat. André 3000

NS: Though he doesn't always care to show it, Andre 3000 can be a blisteringly fast rapper, making him well-suited to the high-BPM party stylings of Beyonce's 4 (I assume--haven't actually heard the album in full). Note on this verse how Dre manages to pull the trick of sounding subdued and frenzied at the same time--I imagine it takes years for a rapper to develop such a careful modulation of pitch and tone. In this case the content is secondary to the rhythms, although "in the food court, eatin' our gyro" sticks out for some reason. 4/5

AM: This song pulses like an MJ/Quincy Jones track, albeit at a BPM that's far too slow. At least for Beyoncé, who sounds like she's holding back. André, on the other hand, spends half his verse in an effortless doubletime. In his minute, he tries on flows like he does garish outfits, each one fitting him impeccably. 5/5

"Sleazy Remix 2.0 (Get Sleazier)," Ke$ha feat. Wiz Khalifa, André 3000, T.I. and Lil Wayne
NS: The Andre verse here is identical to Ke$ha's last "Sleazy (Remix)" released in January (for those masochists at home keeping track of Dre/Ke$ha collabs). It doesn't have the rhapsodic emotional buildup of his other 2011 verses, particularly once Dre starts repping "this crazy lady named Kesha," but the first part of the verse is a vivid, if brief exploration of one of 3000's most senescent themes--childhood fascination with adult marital discontent. Fascinating stuff, but Ke$ha is still the worst. 2.5/5

AM: Dre's verse appears on a couple remixes of Ke$ha's song. His verse is alright--he imagines rolling around in his Benz with Ke$ha, after mining more heartfelt territory--but less inspired than most of this list. On the December remix, Lil Wayne crosses paths with André for the fourth time, upstaging him for the first. 3.5/5

"Play The Guitar," B.O.B. feat. André 3000
NS: The beat (produced by 3000 himself) lacks impact, and B.o.B. gets everything off to a slow start, but 3 Stacks' tribute to his own six-string travails is touching and relatable for anyone who has ever been a novice guitarist. Dre may have come to the six-string as an adult, but he clearly understands the instrument's elemental force with lines like "if you're mad at dad or mum/you can grab an instrum." 3.5/5

AM: Well, it’s no “Gasoline Dreams.” B.O.B., who is apparentlystill a working musician, helms this cartoonish joint. He cedes much of thetrack to Dré, who spits a goofy verse about playing guitar on top of a Church’sChicken, and respecting your parents (not the fist time he’s sounded that notein 2011). Not a career highlight by any means, but even when 3000 isn’t great,he’s never on autopilot. 3.5/5

Expect some more OutKast-related writing on this blog in the near future. Until then, savor this evidence, from 1994, of Dre's prodigious freestyling skills.

Quality Decline Records

2011-10-19T14:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking about the recently departed R.E.M. lately,and listening to New Adventures In Hi-Fiin particular. It’s not their best work, and my younger self didn’t even havetime for “E-Bow The Letter.” For me, it bore the mark of following Monster, a record I once despised.But I like New Adventures, quitea bit actually.

It’s not a record that’s played a part in the R.E.M. obits.It was well-received at the time, though not the commercial success the pastthree albums had been (all quadruple platinum). It’s beenovershadowed because it’s the best album of R.E.M.’s protracted decline—a goodalbum, but certainly a slip in quality from the amazing 1982-1992 period.

In puzzling over New Adventures, I think I’ve identified a new species of album: theQuality Decline Record. I offer this concept to the world of rock writing, tojoin the taxonomy of Difficult Second Albums, Stripped Down/Back To Basics Records, SophomoreSlumps and so on. What defines a Quality Decline Record?

Obviously, the QDR comes amid a decline in an artists' output. It's better than what follows, but it's not what the group's reputation is staked on.

In other words, the album is less critically respected than a group's earlier work, or has been reappraised to this status. It might be fingered out--unfairly--but it's not as cred-sapping as other decline-era works.

The decline must be protracted. Albums like Speakerboxx/The Love Below or Brighten The Corners aren't followed by long enough declines.
The QDR is overshadowed by earlier, more respected albums, and by more commercially successful ones. It's probably not well known to non-fans.
It stands out from other, worse decline-period albums.
The QDR doesn't spark a rally, or second golden era.
A QDR gains extra points for manifesting the qualities that become the band's downfall.

These are general principles, many QDRs may deviate.

For example, I'd peg The Rolling Stones' Black And Blue as a QDR. It follows the 68-72 classic period, is the third consecutive record to fall below that standard, and sees the Stones lazily remaining in their comfort zone (except to chase a trend on the lead single). Yet it's complicated by 1978's Some Girls, a better record, on which the band's reputation is partly staked. Still, Black And Blue isn't critically beloved, is unknown to non-fans, is worse than the groups best, and manifests the qualities that would be the Stones' downfall (allow me to throw Ron Wood into the mix here). It's an overlooked, pretty awesome record. A Quality Decline Record has to be quality, after all.

New Adventures In Hi-Fi is a classic QDR. So are Sly and the Family Stone's Fresh and Michael Jackson's Bad, which in those cases inaugurates each artists' decline. Other QDRs might be more contentious. Does Public Enemy have a QDR? Does Jay-Z? What about Springsteen, New Order or Black Sabbath? I would personally point to Physical Grafitti as a Quality Decline Record, but I think I'm in the minority there. Any number of late eighties and early nineties Prince albums might be considered QDRs.

Artists who had short careers aren't really eligible for this honor. And artists who have had intermittent or near-constant successes frustrate this concept--Neil Young or PJ Harvey, say. Still, I think it's a mildly helpful way of considering certain albums and bodies of work. The albums themselves are also good listens--quality records, without the baggage of classic status. They often feel like discoveries. Favorite QDRs?

Taking Souvenirs: R.E.M.'s 10 Best Albums

2011-10-13T13:53:00.000-05:00

R.E.M. recently called it quits. I can't think of another band who had a decade as incredible as R.E.M.'s first, save for the Beatles (whose decade was only eight years). R.E.M. are one of my favorites, one of the greats. Listening to these records again has been my way of saying goodbye.

1. Murmur (1983)

Peter Buck’s shiny, ringing Rickenbacker paints in fadedyellows, buoyed by the most melodic and modest of rhythm sections. The singer doesn't mumble, just pieces together syllables. Murmur exudes aura, and the band's gift was letting us live in it.

2. Life’s Rich Pageant (1986)

A louder, angrier, more engaged and more decipherable band.At least at first—as Pageant unfolds, itwades into sublime waters. Only a handful of records from the 80’s Amerindiescene rival Murmur, but this is oneof them.

3. Reckoning (1984)

Murmur's sidelong attack, trained on exuberant and melancholy Americana. A record that traffics in undercurrents--Finster's art captures it well, with titles to match.

4. Chronic Town (1981)

Toss in the Hib-Tone single here. R.E.M. arrived with theseurgent, glancingly melodic oddities. They kick off their debut 7” and first EP with their very first pop moves.

5. Out Of Time (1991)

Guitar-pop that doesn’t sound huge, although the band wasgetting there. R.E.M. went several directions, surveying baroque harmonies, jangle-goof and devastating mandolin.

6. Automatic For The People (1992)
An elegiac procession of tunes, stately even. Stipe commits to each line with fervor, with a range that's surprisingly varied. This is the music you hear when you're lost in thought.

7. Fables Of The Reconstruction (1985)

You have to tear off the kudzu to unearth the brilliantsongwriting on Fables, but it’s there.Darker and folksier, still a series of bread-crumbs.

8. Green (1988)

An uneasy mix of straight pop and dirgey folk-rock, of whichthe band were newly fond. No noticeableconcessions to the major label—another fun, frightening colleciton.

9. Document (1987)

Featuring the worst production on a classic R.E.M. record, which neuters Bill Berry's drums. Thankfully, the band's sound had never been this strident before, playing with an ancient bite.

10. New Adventures In Hi-Fi (1996)

Expansive and rarely melodic, these sixty-six minutes ofarena alternative sketch a new landscape for the band. R.E.M.’s record for theAmerican West.

Heavy, Man

2011-09-29T13:17:00.000-05:00

In the age of 'everyone's a critic,' the vast majority of people are still not critics, and have no pretensions to criticism. No one studies these things, but I imagine most people have little exposure to arts criticism on a daily basis. The most widely-read form of criticism, movie reviews, rarely seem to influence people's behavior. It seems people would rather listen to music than read about it.

This is understandable, but it might help if high-profile criticism was engaging or thoughtful. Things like newspaper and TV arts coverage rarely rise to either of criteria, though. In fact, just this morning I opened the paper to find this interview with (who else) SuperHeavy. It is really, really awful.

So, in order to demonstrate the vapidity of our celebrity press corps, here are some favorites from the SuperHeavy piece. Celebrity interviews aren't the same thing as criticism, but this piece got a lot more space in today's paper than any music reviews, essays or thinkpieces (it was the only music coverage, unless Dancing With The Stars counts). Lest I be accused of picking on Jagger, I'll note that he really did say all these things. Italics are mine.

They had no idea if all the group's members, which include soulful singer-songwriter Joss Stone [?], Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman and reggae singer Damian Marley, would even have chemistry.

Dave Stewart: "We just did it because we wanted to do an experiment, and that got developed and more and more developed until in the end, this record appeared."

Jagger's legend was formed with the Rolling Stones and other successful musical collaborations, but he says none of that can be compared to his experience with SuperHeavy [this is an astounding statement]

Jagger: "Every time you get into a room even with the same people, it is different because people come up with different things."

Jagger: One thing serious [sic] that we did think about, we didn't want people with loads of entourages and that would have too big of egos

Jagger: I went toasting, we call it, but it is the same thing (as rap). Damian was doing this really good toasting, West Indian rapping, so I thought, "I could do that. It can't be that difficult." It actually was quite difficult. With a bit of practice, it is all right. It is a laugh.

Jagger: Dave created this whole raison d'etre why we didn't have songs. The raison d'etre for why we didn't have songs was because if we had songs ... people would feel that it wasn't their project as much [contrast with above statement about egos]

Jagger: This is quite conventional so we followed those

Q: All these musicians working together -- was there sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll?
Jagger: For Joss there was lots of sex (laughs). She is the only woman so she has her pick. That is the sex part.

R&B Listening Journal, Volume Two

2011-09-15T00:28:00.001-05:00

Part one is here.

"Go To Hell," Raphael Saadiq
Saadiq is a production maven--this year's Stone Rollin' sounds brilliant, even when the songs are mediocre--and nowhere is that more apparent than this track. One might expect "Go To Hell" to be dominated by bass, like Curtis Mayfield's dubby "If There's A Hell Below (We're All Going To Go)." And there is some wonderful, rolling bass here. But the treble dominates--"Hell" lifts off as soon as it starts, with its dreamy synths, and continues on an upward trajectory, fueled by strings, horns and backing vocals. Your usual palette, but especially vivid. Nothing invokes hellfire at all, and Saadiq's song soars higher and higher--this is a song that earns the lyric "we need more love in the world today"--until it enters the psychedelic promised land. Norman Whitfield would be proud.

"Muah," Electrik Red
Tricky and The-Dream's girl group project, released around the time of Love Vs. Money, bears the marks of their best work. "Muah" glides along, masking the dozen or so interlocking parts. It's complex, atmospheric music, one of the best productions on How To Be A Lady, Volume 1. And it turns out that female vocals make a lovely accompaniment to this sound, at least as good as Dream's own. The rub's in the lyrics, though. They closely resemble--how to say this--a certain male R&B auteur's idea of female empowerment. If I never hear Binkie spit her verse ("I'm not a freak, I'm not a ho/well I'm lying/but I'm classy though") again, that's fine here.

"Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You," Wilson Pickett
Wilson Pickett was a shouter with a knack for recording in the right places (the Wicked Pickett cut material at golden-era Stax and Muscle Shoals). This 1970 track found him in Philadelphia, working with Gamble and Huff just before their sound got huge. It's one of his sweeter numbers, and Pickett carries it with unusual restraint. The lyrics are a resigned plea, a mature missive from a man whose signature songs typically concern fucking. Pickett sells it though, his vocals a little more nuanced than on "Mustang Sally," even working in a few shouts where he can.

"Last Night Pt. 2," Diddy-Dirty Money
Diddy's Last Train To Paris was totally eclipsed by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, to the point that critics deemed it only the 153rd best album of 2010. But Sean Combs' latest is quite good--star-studded and grandiose, much like Kanye's opus. Last Train is never so instantly pleasurable as on this bonus track, which Diddy mostly cedes to Dirty Money and co-writer James Fauntleroy (I think). It's a fairly straightforward Prince rip, recalling the drum programming and sparseness of "When Doves Cry" and "If I Was Your Girlfriend." Like those songs, "Last Night," peppers a lover with questions, although the questions aren't as weird in Diddy's song. To amend, "Last Night" drops a chiming, Prince-worthy melody. It's dope.

"I Got Love," Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band
These guys are like Pavement's soul predecessors. Wright and his group jam on some of the loosest grooves ever laid down, forever sounding about to fall apart, behind the beat, and uncertain of what direction to go next. "I Got Love" is no exception to their formula, but this stoned soul number breezes by in a haze of melody and decomposing J.B.'s riffs. "I got the sun, the moon, the stars and the sky," Wright sings, "you're the only thing that can ruin my high." Maybe, maybe, but Wright sounds deeply in love, and soul this sweet has never harshed anyone's buzz.

"Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," D'Angelo
In just 45 words, D'Angelo paints an expressionistic portrait of love, rage and violence. It's delivered in the sultriest, most damaged voice--D'Angelo wasn't yet the sex symbol he became, but he sounded like one. And the slow groove, suggestive of the smoky backroom our narrator waded into, transmits the lyrics in slow-motion, stretching out each question, then flashing forward to find our man still uncertain of what's happened, even after his terrible mistake.

"Love Uprising," The Chi-Lites
The Chi-Lites do a pretty mean synthesis of The Impressions with solo Curits Mayfield. It's not a vast palette, but I mean this as a great compliment when I say that "Love Uprising" sounds like a song Mayfield could have made. "Love Uprising" works the same vibe as Superfly's "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)"--Eugene Record's lead resembles Mayfield's delicate vocal, and the strings summon a similar aura. Both songs are eminently hopeful. Wonderful things are possible, they say, with a little effort on our part. The 70's proved that things aren't that simple, but it saps none of these songs' power. Change starts with belief, and "Love Uprising" believes.

"Bob George," Prince
Prince didn't wan't you to buy The Black Album. Which means he doesn't want you to hear "Bob George," one of his sickest jams. Rocking a beat extremely similar to the previous year's "Housequake," it's an entire song of Prince spewing out hate. He plays a violent, vile pimp on a tear. His voice is pitched way down, and if the monologue hewed a little closer to the beat, this would be gangsta rap. It probably is anyway--the narrator unleashes gunfire, no small degree of hatred towards women and even slams the Purple One as "that skinny motherfucker with the high voice." Because you don't fuck with this dude. Who does he look like, baby? Yesterday's fool? For someone who can't stand them TV dinners, you sure eat enough of them motherfuckers.

"David Comes To Life" By The Numbers

2011-08-08T15:15:00.002-05:00

I caved yesterday and bought Fucked Up's David Comes To Life (my listening priorities have been elsewhere). I loved Fucked Up, and I love this beast of a record, perhaps as much as I did the last one.

I haven't necessarily loved the reviews, many of which seem pro forma. I set about determining how standardized reviews of DCTL have been, by picking out commonalities among the 28 reviews available online through Metacritic. If I had to spend another afternoon doing this, I might track occurrences of the phrases "arena," "pop," "American Idiot" and "ambitious." Extra demerits to Rolling Stone for describing Pink Eyes' vocals as a "barf-yowl." Here's the data, with the number of reviews out of 28 noting:

That David Comes To Life has 18 songs: 13 (46%)
That David Comes To Life is nearly 80 minutes: 19 (68%)
That David Comes To Life is a concept album: 24 (86%)

With a plot that is difficult to follow: 16 (57%)

That quote lyrics: 3 (11%)
That the album has a companion release, David's Town: 2 (7%)
That Pink Eyes' real name is Damian Abraham: 16 (57%)

That Abraham is physically a large man: 3 (11%)
That Pink Eyes shouts/growls/barks etc.: 22 (79%)

That Fucked Up have 3 guitarists: 12 (43%)
That Fucked Up have 2 guitarists: 1 (4%)
That Fucked Up's band name is explicit: 6 (21%)
That David Comes To Life is a magnum opus: 5 (18%)
That The Chemistry Of Common Life was the previous LP: 11 (39%)
Similarities to Tommy, Quadrophenia or The Who: 9 (32%)
Similarities to Zen Arcade or Husker Du: 8 (29%)
Similarities to the Hold Steady: 3 (11%)
That the album deserves four stars or equivalent: 17 out of 33 (52%)

Obviously, the craft comes in choosing which of these datum belong in a review, and how to describe a band's sound. Of course, listening to a record six times and reading the EPK lends itself to similar reviews, and a solid majority of the 28 reviews that I read were basically indistinguishable. I think the next step is a David Comes To Life review generator.

An album like this should inspire strange, intense writing--as I imagine it will in coming months and years--rather than the narrow range of responses that greeted it.

Critical Beatdown: Round 13

2011-08-01T11:10:00.001-05:00

Blitzen Trapper, "American Goldwing"

AM: Eric Earley doesn't have the hard living in his voice to sell a song like this. But as Cosmic American Muzak goes, this is pretty good. 3.5/5

NS: There's something about "American Goldwing" that makes me actively recall the sound of the first few Grateful Dead records--the overall sound, not any song in particular. Maybe it's just that homey West Coast atmosphere wedded to pedal steel guitars. With Blitzen Trapper, even their most obvious classic rock pastiches are irresistible. 4.5/5

St. Vincent, "Surgeon"
AM: A buzzing, pulsing piece of art-pop. The opening synth-brew is wonderful on its own, but as the song gradually starts to race forward it becomes something truly special. I wasn't a convert before "Surgeon," but Annie Clark has my attention now. 5/5

NS: What makes Annie Clark's music so immediately striking? It's all about the instrumental development of songs like "Surgeon," which begins with a wash of a synth choirs and builds itself into a micro bass-funk symphony. Confounding songwriting and guitar playing throughout--this is progressive music in the best sense. 5/5

Jay-Z & Kanye West, "Otis"
AM: Yes, Jay, it does sound soulful. But juxtaposing yourself with an extended Otis Redding excerpt--that's setting yourself up to fail, though you both do well enough. Tag-teaming needs some work though. 3/5

NS: Not that there's much to complain about with "Try a Little Tenderness," but normally, I expect more subtle classic soul samplings from Mr. West. Meanwhile, Jay and Ye fire off the most rote capitalist cliches of the hip-hop leisure class, as is their wont these days. I prefer the Game's version. 2/5

Yes, "We Can Fly"
AM: I'm having trouble reviewing this one--every time I turn it on, my attention immediately turns to something else. There's actually quite a bit going on in "Fly," but it all drifts by in the airy flow. 2.5/5

NS: In the annals of Yes, this song is actually pretty exciting. Like the St. Vincent track, it builds around a panoply of noodly guitar and synth parts, which wouldn't go anywhere save for the galloping bass and new singer Benoit David's earnest delivery. Go ahead and hate, but there's not a lot of music like this anymore. 4/5

Mastodon, "Black Tongue"
AM: Mastodon hammer away at several ferocious grooves here--on this alone I can recommend "Black Tongue"--but none quite approaches world-immolating intensity. Maybe the next single? 4/5

NS: Tricky time signatures, double-tracked guitar lines, an embedded sense of dread--everything about this song is classic Mastodon. At the same time, there's also a lot of humor in this music, and the band deserves more credit than it gets for avoiding the histrionics of so much defanged mook-metal. 4/5

SuperHeavy, "Miracle Worker"
AM: Lot of cooks in the kitchen with this group, as this absurd photograph demonstrates. I have no idea how SuperHeavy came together, or what their raison d'etre is. "Miracle Worker" doesn't give any indication about either, though it is serviceable reggae. 2/5

NS: Surprising no one, this limp noodle of a mid-tempo shuffle is significantly less than the sum of its parts. If you really like generic, repetitive reggae with no bounce, with British vocals on top, grab a UB40 album instead. 1/5

Inspiration Information: My Music Library As Data

2011-07-25T14:49:00.005-05:00

Last week, I woke up and turned my computer on. These are typically the first two things I do on a given day, and I was doing them especially early on this day, thanks to oppressive heat. But my computer wasn't turning on. It would start to boot up, then I'd hear a click and it would shut off. Every time. I was thinking "fuck, it's the hard drive."

I took it in that afternoon, and was told to expect the worst. My first thought was that I had lost my music files. I've spent years collecting them, listening to them, and ensuring the tags are correct. To lose my mp3s would be--and I'm not exaggerating--a tremendous blow to my well-being.

Thankfully, I don't keep most of my music on my computer's hard drive. I have an external drive for that, which I had forgotten about in my panic (aside from music, most of my life is on that hard drive). But it's a pretty precarious situation. My music is on there, and nowhere else, in many cases. I back up things I don't physically own once a year, in August. If my external hard drive stopped working tomorrow, I'd lose everything I've been listening to in the past year. I'm sure I'd remember to replace the Destroyer and Four Tops that have dominated my listening. But I probably wouldn't seek out the Vibrators' excellent first album, which I borrowed from Nathan--I doubt I'd ever hear that again.

If my library disappeared, I'd lose considerably more than files. This is why I still prefer CDs to buying music digitally. To pay for an mp3--that seems like paying for air. It's a strange experience, purchasing something you can't touch. And I never really learned that mp3s had any value. I spent a lot of time on mp3 blogs a few years ago, and was never asked for a fee. When I did college radio, labels just sent mp3s for free. When I do buy an mp3, I'm cognizant of the fact that it could disappear tomorrow.

But anyways, the reason these files are more than just data--that people would consider buying them at all--is that they're music, and they're really important to people. Losing these files is to lose the locus of every memory and connection you felt to them. To me, it's important to have the music I listened to in 2006 because that is one of few tangible connections I have to my life then. It's not that I fire up iTunes and listen to The Hold Steady all the time. But it's meaningful that I can access this music (and its personal context) when I choose to. It's even more significant with the music I wouldn't remember to seek out again--hearing the marginalia of my old listening on shuffle is one reason I love that feature so much.

So, count me as skeptical of the new cloud services. The concept itself--there's a lot to recommend it. But the idea that I would put my entire library in the hands of these companies (and pay fees that will rise once one of them corners the market)--that's crazy.* Apple, Amazon and Google don't really have my interests at heart. Trusting them to manage my music, without backing it up, is a terrible idea. Already, their services charge extra if you have a large library, or want to store music you didn't buy from their store.

I'll be holding off on the cloud, purchasing instead a second external hard drive. As for my computer--the hard drive was actually fine. It was the logic board, an even more expensive piece of equipment. But the other issue here--the precariousness of our information--has no easy fix. I have a lot invested in my data. If we're living in a time where information is easy to access, but more complicated to collect and maintain...that's a devil's bargain.

Clearly this is worse with things you've created yourself--music, writing, photos or whatever. And it's surely a bad system for archiving things. If the movie studios of the early 20th century couldn't keep tabs on their physical products, it seems unlikely that a music industry in freefall is carefully guarding its digital files for the long haul. I guess if there's a point here--been a while since I wrote a rambler like this--it's that archiving is essential. Both for a culture that respects its past, and for people who have a personal connection with their data. Because if we're going to sacrifice sound quality and physical product, surely we should get something out of it? Aside from a compromised convenience, that is.

*I don't trust YouTube to store my music either--things get yanked off there all the time.

Anti-Snark: Five Reasons Why the Lou Reed/Metallica Collab Could Be Good

2011-07-01T15:59:00.005-05:00

Our Cynical Music Press has treated the news of a potential Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration with the sort of derision usually reserved for fictional Park Slope racists and nefarious mp3 bloggers. This isn't surprising: few bands who makes millions of dollars are as resolutely unloved as Metallica, and given their recent track record, fans and haters alike have good reason to be skeptical. Reed's recent track record, it should be pointed out, is no less compromised by duds like his 2004 album adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. On the blog Metal Sucks, Anso DF writes that the album will bring out the worst in both performers:

Let’s decode the situation: A once-provocative songwriter now separated by thirty years from his good ideas (who demonstrated this fact with a 2003 album based on Edgar Allen [sic] Poe works — puh-leez) teams with flabby, out-of-touch hacks whose crazed ambition has led them to target Rolling Stone-type rockist wankers with daddy issues for their next demographic conquest. Like Lady Gaga’s attempts to woo metal people with her flimsy lip service, only in reverse.

To be fair, Anso DF also has the mistaken opinion that the Velvet Underground's music is "tuneless, boring, and ear-nasty," and he seems to hate all of Reed's solo work, so maybe we should look elsewhere for an opinion. But he is right to say that Metallica hasn't released a good album in years, whether due to unwise levels of bandwagon-hopping (St. Anger) or past-mining (Death Magnetic). Why should we expect anything different from this release?

Since I'm not in the band, or David Fricke, I haven't heard any of these new tunes yet, but they're reportedly super-long, loopy and improvisational. Good signs. So is the fact that they seem to enjoy performing with each other, which, if you've watched Some Kind Of Monster, you know must be some kind of miracle. There are other reasons why I would encourage fans not to be cynical, just yet. For starters, it's time to tone down the reflexive Metallica hate: that Napster hoopla was more than a decade ago and it's not like people haven't figured out ways to download music for free since. The guys in Metallica are all gifted players with a history of great tunes behind them--no amount of Lars Ulrich douchiness can change that. And Reed is still, we can hope, capable of writing songs that will do the band justice.

Now is the time to Rage Against the Snark. Here are five reasons why I think this album might end up being among the best of the year, contra y'all haters.

1. The album is reportedly 90% done, and was completed in only a few months
Why is this a good sign? Consider both Reed and Metallica's recent track record. Each Metallica album since 1991 has taken more time to record than the last, to the point that, as most fans know, the band had to hire their own therapist during the recording of St. Anger--the process of making the album was that depressing. Death Magnetic more or less came about after Rick Rubin browbeat the band into producing music as similar to Master of Puppets as they were capable of mustering; again, the labor showed, but not in a good way. By contrast, consider that their first album, Kill 'Em All, was recorded and mastered in May 1983, sans therapists. Fricke mentions that one of the songs on the new album, "Pumping Blood," was cut live in one take--this is certainly not how Metallica normally works. The problem with Metallica's music lately is that it often sounds overdone and needlessly orchestrated, but apparently with Reed there has been a looser atmosphere, suggesting at least that some of the tracks won't be as ponderous, despite uniformly epic length.

Reed, meanwhile, used to churn out an album a year or so in the 1970s and 80s. Even something like Berlin was recorded in a slapdash fashion, with an odd assortment of musicians. Speaking of which...

2. Reed performs better with collaborators; Metallica performs better with a specific direction
This isn't an absolute given, of course, but there is evidence to suggest that both parties play better with others. Reed obviously has a working history with many musicians, whether with the Velvet Underground, then with David Bowie and Mick Ronson, all the way down to Antony Hegarty and Gorillaz. Berlin, for some reason, had Jack Bruce playing bass and Steve Winwood on organ, among others. Reed could hardly swing his guitar in the 1970s and not hit a gifted collaborator--Robert Quine, John Cale, Michael Fonfara, etc. Of course, other collaborations with the likes of Merce Cunningham are less worth exploring...

Metallica, meanwhile, have offered a guest spot or two to Marianne Faithfull, but mostly they've depended on producers Bob Rock and Rick Rubin to shepherd their material. This has clearly resulted in a downtick of usable music, with the band too beholden to the most narrow of creative processes. With someone else calling the shots, Metallica can stop concentrating on whether or not their music is radio-ready or "classic-sounding" enough, and more progressive sounds may bubble to the surface.

3. Reed tapped Metallica for this project because of their instrumental skillz
Definitely a good sign. Surely I'm not the only one who remembers that awful moment in Some Kind Of Monster when gentle Kirk Hammett is ordered by Ulrich to stop playing guitar solos. People forget what dynamic performers these guys once were: Hammett, the virtuoso who invested Van Halen's noodly theatrics with Hendrix's depth of feeling; Ulrich, earth's mightiest double bass drum pounder; Hetfield, who could play just as well as his peers but was relegated to rhythm guitar by elimination (also, Robert Trujillo, the new bassist, who seems like a nice guy). These guys could blaze through multiple time signatures, operatic instrumental breakdowns, dazzling scalar runs and moments of pure noise better than any of their peers--they made the excess of 80s metal painful and personal to a generation of misanthropes. Reed hasn't really worked with instrumentalists on this level in the past, but it appears he is utilizing them to test the boundaries of his own playing style, which suggests this may be more Metal Machine Music than Load.

4. Reed is writing the lyrics
Lou Reed may be a published poet, but he's had his share of lyrical clunkers; With Metallica, on the other hand, one would be wise to ignore the lyrics altogether. Hammett and Ulrich hopefully are no longer part of any sort of lyrical braintrust like they were on St. Anger (the band collaborated on lyrics for that album, so we will never know who to properly blame for "My lifestyle/determines my deathstyle"). Reed's songwriting hand is no guarantee the lyrics or the music will be quality, but bad Lou Reed lyrics at least tend to be weird and striking.

It's funny, but I bet if I were to randomly throw out some lyrics from Berlin and lyrics from ...And Justice For All, a lot of fans wouldn't be able to correctly identify what came from which.

5. Reed calls it "maybe the best thing done by anyone, ever"
Lou Reed has plenty of faults, both as a musician and as a notable curmudgeon, but I don't think excessive hyperbole is usually considered one of them. In fact, I seldom remember Reed expressing excitement and enthusiasm for any of his work, let alone his new material. If nothing else, it sounds from interviews as if Reed and members of Metallica are convinced they have hit upon an entirely new sound, and whether or not it proves to be terrible, it's liable by those standards to be at least more exciting than the derivative work each has done lately. Hammett says it best in that Rolling Stone piece: "It feels like we're in a different band." For any fan of Metallica, this should be exciting enough news in itself.

On the other hand, this is a pretty weak foundation for an album (and it appears they were going for a Rock N Roll Animal vibe, big mistake).

Our Concert Could Be Your Life: The Review

2011-07-01T11:33:00.008-05:00

[Ed. Note: I apologize to readers who have been waiting on this for more than a month...for reasons that are not worth going into here, I thought this had been posted a long time ago, and I can no longer find a copy of the original article; what follows is a new draft, reconstructed somewhat from memory. Thanks to all the listeners and commenters who pointed this out and I hope you enjoy the review]

May 22nd's tribute concert for Michael Azerrad's famous book Our Band Could Be Your Life (now officially titled, I think, "Our Concert Could Be Your Life") was a slicker and shorter affair than I feared, although conversely that meant many of the sets had to be cut off after two or three songs. While the show was certainly worth way more than I paid for, one couldn't help leaving feeling whether perhaps five hours of this wasn't enough to do any of the bands justice. The large majority of sets were extremely solid and stuffed with crowd-pleasing numbers; there were also, yes, a few bands who couldn't live up to the transcendent expectations of their source material, but this wasn't really a type of event to nitpick such things. I'll try to recount some of what I witnessed, starting with a set I missed and ending with an all-star jam cover of...a major label radio hit?

Set #1: Dirty Projectors play Black Flag
I missed this first set, to my eternal consternation, because my weekly radio show was finishing up at around the same time the concert was about to start (you can hear audio of that particular show, which features telling moments of me and pal/"Save Live Music On Broadway" activist Andrew Hartwell clearly anxious to get out of there and me fumbling microphones settings as a result). After leaving a bit late and sprinting to the Bowery Ballroom, the Projectors had already ended their five-song set, and I had no idea they had played until I asked someone. I listened to the Projectors online after the fact (and you can too, at NPR!), and as expected, their set sounded restive, and faithful to the primordial rage of "Rise Above," "Thirsty and Miserable" and "Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie!," while fitfully making short work of "Police Story" and "Spray Paint." All these tracks are from Damaged, which disappointed this Slip It In fan, but since I wasn't there it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

Set #2: Delicate Steve plays The Minutemen
Andrew and I showed up with plenty of time to see the next band, Delicate Steve, and for a minute we were fooled into thinking we had wandered into an 80s indie rock version of The Last Waltz. Like Dirty Projectors, DS' set was heavy on the short songs, mostly instrumental at first, as is Steve's wont (and again, check out Wondervisions if you haven't). Also like the previous band, they focused on one album only, and guess which album that was? However, they concentrated on some of the weirder stuff: main player Steve Marion started out the set (I think it was him at least), with D. Boon's solo guitar instrumental "Cohesion," before moving on to amazing note-for-note versions of George Hurley's drum piece "You Need the Glory," and then Mike Watt's collage "Take 5, D." Playing those three songs straight through was a great way of paying tribute to the men behind the Minutemen, both as a cohesive, airtight unit and as individually creative musicians. To end their set, the band first brought out Les Savy Fav singer Tim Harrington to sing "This Ain't No Picnic," which (though no one noticed) he fucked up, singing each beat at half the tempo it was supposed to be at (audio for proof, at about 5 minutes in). The band adapted almost perfectly, though, to the different delivery style. After that, Lee Ranaldo came on and sang two songs: "History Lesson, Pt. II" (Replacing all the "me" pronouns with "D. Boon), and then "Jesus and Tequila," both of which first moved and then riled the crowd. Afterward, Janeane Garofalo was on stage and said that D. Boon would be proud of this concert, and one couldn't help but feel that the ghost of Boon was imbuing the room with friendly vibes.

Citay plays Mission Of Burma
Citay, a San Francisco garage act unfamiliar to me, began the trend of playing fewer, longer songs after the eleven-tune blitz of the last two acts. With a large cast of musicians that included what looked to be a hippie chick on tambourine, Citay seemed at first an odd choice to play the legendary Boston band. I can honestly report, though, that even at two songs, Citay's set was one of the highlights of the evening--even the hippie chick got in the act. Their first cover, of "Trem Two" from Vs., ably utilized multiple guitar arrangements of the famously oscillating tune, and while that song doesn't necessarily rock as hard as other Burma tunes, it was still conveyed energetically and with a great feel for the song's bewildering dynamics. This was followed by a cover of one of Burma's mightiest tunes (one of the mightiest tunes ever, really), "Peking Spring," which can be heard here and is definitely one of the two or three best performances of the night. "Peking Spring" never showed up on a Mission of Burma album proper, which is sort of a crime, but Citay may have provided a clue to why a song like this is best played live. Just an enormous, resonant sound, especially on that chorus and the "woos" at the ending. The main dude's stage banter was awful, though.

Set #4: Ted Leo plays Minor Threat
I previously wondered whether a Ted Leo solo set meant acoustic renditions of Ian MacKaye and co.'s early 80s repertoire; instead, the 40-year old Leo walked onstage alone, sans guitar, and sputtered his way through a five-song set while a prerecorded electric guitar track played behind him (according to NPR, it was a reel-to-reel tape recording by Leo, although at the time I was unsure if someone might be playing guitar live, offstage or elsewhere). Throughout the Our Concert Could Be Your Life show, I could tell that many singers needed cheat sheets to remember some of the lyrics, but this obviously wasn't a problem for Leo, who is demonstrably so steeped in hardcore that singing Minor Threat tunes is second nature. As for Leo's performance, he strutted around onstage expertly, he sang and screamed with expert timing, he made the audience part of the act, and he was appropriately forceful and respectful when winding his way through the final salute to hardcore that is "Salad Days." The song "Minor Threat," meanwhile, was treated as the anthem it is, and Leo took virtually no break between that and "Stand Up," "Filler" and "Look Back At Laugh." As expected, "Guilty Of Being White" was not played.

Set #5: Grooms play Hüsker Dü
Grooms didn't perform exactly faithful versions of Dü numbers (astonishingly, two Grant Hart tracks to one Bob Mould track!), and none of the band members seemed keen on exactly replicating the instrumental parts of Hart, Mould or Norton. Unfortunately, none of these rejiggered versions stood up to the originals. The hushed, whispered version of "Diane," for instance, was guilty of a type of dirge-y repetitiveness that was never present in the original, and while "Pink Turns To Blue" rocked somewhat, it lacked that delicious Bob Mould distorted arpeggio that provided that song's first and best hook. That was replaced with some lesser, more chimey guitar parts, but at least the soul of the song was still there. Their final cover, of "Something I Learned Today," from Zen Arcade, was even weirder, again adding some lesser, unnecessary hooks and basically breaking from that album opener's ringing intensity in favor of something stranger, maybe more Grooms-sounding. All in all, not bad, just not Hüsker Dü.

Set #6: Titus Andronicus plays the Replacements
I'm not a very big Hold Steady fan, but that didn't stop me from being amused to see Craig Finn in a police uniform, stepping on stage as Titus Andronicus finishing setting up, reciting the opening cop rant from "Kids Don't Follow" to the word, astonishingly (and the audience answering with all the right catcalls, even more astonishingly). So began Titus Andronicus' set, which leaned heavily on pre-Let It Be tunes, and no one could be more happier about that than I. Lead singer Patrick Stickles was, of course, a perfect belter of Paul Westerberg lines, and with his skinny frame and unkempt beard his look was perfectly in keeping with the 'Mats' old aesthetic. Even better was when a crowd-surfing Craig Finn climbed up onstage just in time to sing the last notes of "Kids Don't Follow" with Stickles, which led directly into Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash ender "Raised in the City." Stickles picked up an acoustic guitar and another guitarist brought out a violin for the last cover, of "Treatment Bound," and boy, I can't tell you how happy I was to see those first three Replacements releases honored in such a fashion. Titus Andronicus was wise to stick with some deeper cuts, and while it might have been great to see them do, say, "Bastards of Young," they proved themselves just fine without it.

Set #7: tUnE-yArDs plays Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth songs, with their odd guitar tunings and tricky melodies, are already hard to cover, and certainly doing the job without a guitar in hand makes the job even tougher. As predicted, Azzerad split the difference on Sonic Youth by hiring two bands to cover them, as it clearly took a lot out of Merrill Garbus to do even her one cover, of "Burning Spear" from Sonic Youth. That one performance seemed to be enough for the audience, and indeed it was a grin-inducing performance, even if it took a while for me to figure out what song was being played. Though the loops took a long time to build up intensity, when Garbus started singing proper she nearly brought the house down. Buoyed by the sound of a single floor tom, the song became a kind of chant, entirely appropriate for 1982-era Sonic Youth, and there was no better measure of that performance's success than witnessing Lee Ranaldo look upon her performance from backstage with approval. Of course, that wasn't the end for Da Youf accolades...

Set #8: Callers perform Sonic Youth
Callers were a late and somewhat confusing addition to this set; I had never heard them before, although my Rockaliser colleague saw them earlier open for Wye Oak, and described them as "not worth your time." That seemed to be my prevailing impression as well, even with the strong songs they covered. The most remarkable thing about Callers was their lead singer, who seemed less like Jeff Buckley to me and more like Tiny Tim, or a particularly chirpy bird. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the lead singer's vocal ululations during something meant to be as monotone as "Shadow of a Doubt" somehow made the song even more scary and exploitative, as if we had veered suddenly from Hitchcock into Final Destination or Saw. One of the coolest components of Sonic Youth's early sound was how Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore's guitar parts interlocked and alternated rhythm and lead parts, but with Callers it was all a mish-mash of woozy noodling and Norah Jones torch-singing. Unfortunately, the Callers set was probably the low point of the night, although at least the tempo picked up somewhat with "The World Looks Red."

Set #9: Dan Deacon plays the Butthole Surfers
Dan Deacon's set was when things started getting really crazy. Deacon is known for his energetic live shows, and the Buttholes are themselves no slouches in the crazy visuals department, and I knew things were going to get really good the moment someone brought out a fog machine. Deacon was flanked at all sides by a large collection of pedals, his band, and a background projection alternating pictures of Woody Harrelson, sandwiches, and other inexplicable images. Deacon's "all-star band" (a really, really strong group) started out with "Human Cannonball," and immediately the room started going nuts. Deacon handled all the Gibbytronics tricks like he had memorized them, and added a few new ideas to the proceedings as well, and the band played as if they didn't even need the vocals to back them up. This was followed, shortly, by "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave," in which all the crazy lighting and fog effects were utilized in full force, as the band started flipping out and audience members started jumping on stage. After blasting through those first two songs, the band ended with the Black Sabbath-biting number "Sweet Loaf," which was seriously one of the heaviest live experiences of my life. The Surfers never get as much respect in the book for their songs as some of the other bands, but Dan Deacon's set, a true highlight, proves there's a lot more to Locust Abortion Technician and Rembrandt Pussyhorse than other people think. I would pay a lot to hear Dan Deacon yell "If you see see your mother, be sure and tell her...Satan!" again. This set was so good it was scary.

Set #10: St. Vincent plays Big Black
A lot of people seemed to be at the show specifically for St. Vincent's performance, which was evidenced by the large number of people who bailed after her performance. Annie Clark truly did Albini proud, though, even with time to only play two songs. Backed by members of Dirty Projectors and spitting through a microphone with a weird distortion effect that made her bark as menacing as Albini's, Clark immediately kicked into high-gear with "Bad Penny," holding her own on guitar against the Projectors, bending the strings with stomach-lurching precision, and somehow she sounded too perfect for her material. Of all the guitar players throughout the night, Clark was truly the one to watch, especially to someone like me who has always been curious about the opening notes of "Kerosene." That song, by the way, truly clinched her performance in that rare category of "inspirational." Props to Projectors drummer Brian McOmber, by the way, for nailing those drum machine parts live on "Kerosene."

Set #11: Wye Oak plays Dinosaur Jr.
NPR informs me that Wye Oak actually played two songs, though to me their set seemed unusually short. If there was any musician who could give Annie Clark a challenge for the title of guitar MVP, it was Wye Oak's Jenn Wazner, who shredded perfectly, note-for-note, through "Sludgefeast." Wazner so expertly replicated Mascis' parts, in fact, that I was inclined until now to forget about the extraordinary playing of drummer Andy Stack, who played with one hand while punching out bass parts on a keyboard--esentially, playing Murph and Lou Barlow simultaneously. I didn't even notice that they eventually segued into "Tarpit," albeit without a break, but before I knew it they were already gone. "Sludgefeast" and "Tarpit" are already songs that sound like each other, I guess. All in all, a predictably perfect blast of noise, if ablated.

Set #12: Buke and Gass play Fugazi
The crowd really started thinning by the time Buke and Gass (pronounced "Gase," as I found out at the show) went onstage, and while I have previously exalted this band and their album Riposte, I was somewhat disappointed by this set and the band's choice of covers. Aron Sanchez and Arone Dyer came onstage rocking all sorts of marvelous-looking homemade instruments (including their "buke" and "gass") and looked ready to tear into a mighty set before Dyer played the opening riff of "Long Division" (never Fugazi's most amazing song in my opinion) and the band settled into a groove that was somewhat propulsive, but never really picked up speed. The other cover, "Guilford Fall," had the exact same problem--this wasn't Fugazi at its most energetic, these were the later, more contemplative songs. I'll admit to nursing a crush on Arone Dyer now, and I like the band overall, but maybe they should have seen what they could have done with songs like "Public Witness Program" or "Bulldog Front." Something to shout along with, I guess.

Set #13: White Hills play Mudhoney
One of the weirder moments of the concert was witnessing the band White Hills, its singer a dead ringer for Alice Cooper and bedecked in spangled cock-rock tights, playing tunes from the resolutely anti-glamour grunge stalwarts Mudhoney. The band, to their credit, played their coverse faithfully, albeit filtered through a somewhat generic hard rock sheen. Time seemed to be running out by the time they played, and while their performance of "In 'N Out Of Grace" was certainly welcome, it did seem rushed, as if the band picked the easiest Mudhoney song they could find. The next song "When Tomorrow Hits" was less effective, but I found White Hills overall a strong trio (and one of the concert's few actual trios) with a healthy respect for the original Mudhoney material, and they hit many of the right notes.

Set #14: Yellow Ostrich plays Beat Happening
Poor Yellow Ostrich were asked to play last, per the chapter order of the book, meaning that no matter who played before, the gentle, simple melodies of Calvin Johnson would be absolutely steamrolled by Mudhoney. The band was also playing in front of a smaller audience that by this point was starting to feel concert fatigue, and unfortunately Beat Happening probably isn't the best way to bring audiences out of that stupor. The singer did "Left Behind" and "Indian Summer," each at an octave higher than the original, and the rest of the band provided mostly workmanlike instrumentation, so it's not like Yellow Ostrich ended things on a bad note. It just seemed that, after performances as explosive as "Sweet Loaf" or "Sludgefeast," everything else seems anti-climactic. Fortunately for those who stayed, this wasn't the end.

Set #15: All-Star Nirvana Jam
Remember how I said I thought I had wandered into an indie version of The Last Waltz? For the most part, there weren't that many special guests (and Mould was a no-show, despite what I predicted), but after Azerrad gave a short speech thanking the bands and the audience (during which he was commanded, by Dan Deacon, to crowd-surf), a supergroup comprised of the Dirty Projectors' rhythm section, Jenn Wazner, and Deacon tore into a cover of Nirvana's "Negative Creep," from Bleach. A more positive and supportive crowd reaction I cannot imagine; I even broke my long moratorium on moshing to get into the action, it was that exciting to witness. The most amazing song was saved for last, however: "Lithium," this time featuring Merrill Garbus on vocals. That Garbus forgot some of the lyrics towards the end mattered to no one; the Bowery Ballroom had transformed into a shrine for Kurt and all the other musicians who held this music close to their heart. It was as much a tribute to music fandom as it was to any individual musician. And so Our Concert Could Be Your Life finally ended five hours in, not with a deep Beat Happenign cut, but with a major radio hit from a multi-platinum selling major label album. It was as if the circle of influence had closed in on itself, twice. And then it was over, and that was all right, too.

Overall, Our Concert Could Be Your Life was a richly enjoyable tribute to the book and the bands profiled, and it was nice to hear people like Deacon talk about their own experiences with the book--though Azerrad would probably claim no credit, he created his own DIY community of voracious readers and fans. The show's hosts Janeane Garofalo and Eugene Mirman didn't add much in the way of comedy (other than Garofalo's odd admission that she had a crush on Bob Mould, of all people), but the show was organized so well and the bands were so willing to cooperate that no one really minded the constant breaks between sets. I think more events like Our Concert Could Be Your Life can and should be attempted; maybe, with the right time and venue, even expanded. Only a crazy person would think this wasn't worth the money, if not for any of the bands, then for the opportunity to help Azerrad crowdsurf through an audience full of fans and supporters, people who like like me who were inspired by his writing and reportage. For a second, I felt an emotion that might have been akin to that sense of shared community experience that inspired Azerrad to write his book. Moments like this in life are too great and rare to even attempt to describe in total. It was a good show.

My personal favorite performances were:

1. Dan Deacon, "Sweet Loaf"
2. St. Vincent, "Kerosene"
3. Citay, "Peking Spring"
4. Dan Deacon, "Human Cannonball"
5. tUne-YaRDs, "Burning Spear"

Again, I think you can still listen to all the performances online at NPR. If you are interested in other articles we have written on the book, check out:

-A "where-are-they-now" summary of what the OBCBYL class has been up to since the publication of the book.
-An article profiling the bands playing at Our Concert Could Be Your Life, including predictions of what might be played. Also, an addendum to that article.

If you are interested in hearing my May radio shows, in which I discuss other aspects of the book in some detail, you can stream them all here:

-Week One (The Covers)
-Week Two (The Cover-ers)
-Week Three (The Labels)
-Week Four (13 Songs)

R&B Listening Journal, Volume One

2011-06-28T09:02:00.002-05:00

I'm currently hard at work, researching a book about R&B. It's for middle schoolers, the sort of thing you see in school libraries. The book isn't especially long, but I've been throwing myself into the research, taking it on as my summer project, as well as a second job (it's also a weak excuse for my recent absence here).

This means that I've listened to R&B and little else for the past month. In recent years, my exposure to the genre has grown considerably, but it's still selective--I dig the cinematic soul of the 70's, and love the Minneapolis Sound of the 80's. But New Jack Swing or Philadelphia Soul?--these are blind spots. I've made a few steps to rectify that, and to fill some embarrassing holes in my knowledge. It's been rewarding, but a little frustrating, since the book isn't really a work of criticism. That's the impetus for this possibly ongoing Listening Journal, which will highlight some of the most incredible or otherwise remarkable music I come across.

"Escapade," Janet Jackson

The opening bars of "Escapade" give the same insane rush as The-Dream's "Rockin' That Shit"--synth programming aimed straight at the pleasure centers. The chiming keyboard figure, which resurfaces for the chorus, gets even better when Janet harmonizes with it: "Don't hold back/Just have a good time." The production, by Jam and Lewis (the ex-Time maestros with seventeen number ones to their credit) is drunk on sound, mashing together the swooshing, chiming and thumping noises that their technology produces. Prince, especially "1999" and Sign 'O' The Times, is a reference point, but the song's deployment of several units of Jackson vocals gives it a unique texture. It's unusually dense for a summer jam, but that's what "Escapade" is--an invitation to get lost, to fucking enjoy yourself.

"7 Rooms Of Gloom," The Four Tops

The Four Tops were responsible for plenty of vintage Motown--"Bernadette" is staggering--but this song intrigues me because it's such an aberration. The group apparently hated it, unsurprising for a song that sounds so un-Motown. What "7 Rooms" does resemble is 60's garage--I swear this could be a lost Nuggets classic. Levi Stubbs belts with a shout-y frustration about his girl problems. And the track has a crude crunch, hitting its aggrivated groove and just staying there. The gothic backing vocals are the only embellishment. You don't hear this much anger or psychdelica in 60's Motown; "7 Rooms" outdoes plenty of 60's garage too.

"Sadie," R. Kelly

R. spends most of his solo debut dwelling on the carnal--this is a record whose centerpiece is the 10-minute jam "Sex Me". And, you know, he does that pretty well. It just makes "Sadie" that much more arresting. Part celebration, part remembrance, "Sadie" is Kelly's tribute to his dead mother. The organ places the song squarely in church, and the chorus rises high on Kelly's conviction and simple backing vocals. But a single detail about Sunday mornings helps fill in the portrait. 12 Play's least lascivious moment (and least hip-hop informed) is also one of its best.

"Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away," Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder's clavinet is responsible for his funkiest turns, but the instrument also informs the serene explorations of Music Of My Mind and Fulfillingness' First Finale. It lends this cut a quiet, naturalistic feel. Yet the vocals come from a place of pain--how is it that heaven seems so far away when hate and racism are so immediate? The short answer is that you don't believe in God enough. "Heaven" is pure gospel: ultimately, salvation is there, and here. Wonder's voice is joined by a small choir as the song moves towards its celestial finale. His conviction is so powerful, his talent so unique that, for these five minutes, he will make you believe.

"What'd I Say," Ray Charles

An epochal song in American music. I'd thought of Ray Charles as music for parents: well-performed, tastefully arranged, too safe. But the Genius' early Atlantic recordings are gritty, sweaty stuff, of which nothing tops "What'd I Say." For seven minutes, Charles' fingers dance across his keyboard, pounding out the electrified boogie as clattering cymbals drive the thing into further frenzy. By the time you reach Part Two, with its grunted give-and-take between Charles and the Raelettes, you realize: this still sounds dangerous.

"Me & Mrs. Jones," Billy Paul

Certifiably smooth--Paul's jazzy vocals and the drifting strings will take you there. But like all good smooth music, the quiet storm of the surface masks a fraught interior. In this case, the narrator is having an affair with the married Mrs. Jones. The tension is present in the verses, but really comes out when Paul lets loose right before the chorus. He's back to smoothness ten seconds later, but his outbursts--stretching words to the breaking point, belting with a deeper intonation--color the entire song. This is considerably slower than most of the 70's Philadelphia International hits, and the scene's maestros, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (who wrote this song together), made a rare commercial miscalculation in following up "Me & Mrs. Jones" with a song called "Am I Black Enough For You?"

"We Need A Resolution," Aaliyah

Aaliyah's tracks are blocky, shifting things that, on first listen, don't make sense rhythmically. On "Resolution," Static Major and Timbaland's production explores the friction produced by abutting plates of sound, while Eastern-sounding flourishes fill the center of the space. Timbo shows up at the end, spitting with admirable attitude, but only Aaliyah holds her own--her vocals are wispy, but forcefully so. Of course, Aaliyah's career never reached a state of resolution: she died shortly after Aaliyah was released. Static Major too passed before his time, a few years later, literally days before his frigid work on "Lollipop" bum rushed the charts.

Confiscated Dreams: Robyn Hitchcock's Ten Best Albums

2011-06-15T16:46:00.000-05:00

This June marks the thirty-first anniversary of The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight. It's as good an occasion as any to celebrate the work of Soft Boy and solo artist Robyn Hitchcock, whose vast and confusing body of work is, with several exceptions, a treasure. I can't find a list of Hitchcock's best best albums online, so I'll observe the birthday of one of my very favorite albums with this career-spanning Robyn Hitchcock Top Ten.

1. Underwater Moonlight, The Soft Boys (1980)
A record whose punkish energy is so warped by the Soft Boys' surreal touch as to render it a phenomenon unto itself. Very unlike anything Hitchcock, his bandmates, contemporaries, or followers would ever produce. A twisted, shimmering jewel of an album, one of the best ever made.

2. Olé! Tarantula, Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 (2006)
Achieving the long-sought synthesis of Syd Barrett with Reckoning-era, R.E.M. Robyn and his new group--which happens to include Peter Buck--play it loose and jangly, fitting accompaniment for a vocalist who has abandoned his lower register.

3. I Often Dream Of Trains, Robyn Hitchcock (1984)
The wintry Trains is the finest among Hitchcock's (many) folk-leaning efforts. It also contains some of his darkest material, circling back to schizophrenia and nostalgia even in its lighter moments.

4. A Can Of Bees, The Soft Boys (1979)
A wry, post-punk take on blues rock, sounding like a terrible nightmare that the dinosaurs and the punks could both disavow. But the Soft Boys were too good to completely obscure the heavenly melodies of their "human music."

5. Gotta Let This Hen Out!, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (1985)
Hitchcock is no virtuoso, but his taste in collaborators has been superb (Soft Boys/Egyptians bassist Andy Metcalfe deserves special mention). This live set bears witness to the prowess of the Egyptians, featuring definitive versions of several Hitchcock tunes.

6. Queen Elvis, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (1989)
Hitchcock and the Egyptians at their most majestic, with several moments of Beatlesque clarity amongst the tangled guitar figures.

7. Invisible Hits, The Soft Boys (1983)
More invisible than ever, after Yep Roc phased it out (the same is true of #9). Fuck that, these sixteen songs--scrappy oddities heavy on the low-end--are a main course, even if they are scattered footnotes.

8. Element of Light, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (1986)
Then-current production gets in the way now--not the only 80's record here to bear that distinction--but the diversity and quality of the songwriting shines through. Element's brightest moments soar, or are at least hilarious.

9. Invisible Hitchcock, Robyn Hitchcock (1986)
A ravishing hodgepodge, covering 1981-85, and featuring several stone cold classics. Askance folk and labyrinthine grooves dominate.

10. Fegmania!, Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians (1985)
"You've got arms and you've got legs and you've got heaven," Robyn sings in an especially distinctive Hitchcock moment. It's also telling that this is the third entrant with an exclamation point in its title. Fegmania's colorful baubles are distintively Hitchcockian--accounting for its fan-favorite status--if not always top shelf.

Our Concert Could Be Your Life: Who's Playing Who? [Amended]

2011-05-21T16:16:00.003-05:00

I should do a better job of googling pertinent press releases while blogging--though I observed in my last post that a mere nine bands were set to show at the renamed Our Concert Could Be Your Life (four shy of the thirteen profiled in the book), little did I know that Azerrad had posted the final billing on his blog at around the same time. Turns out there are now fourteen bands on the bill, meaning one notable double-booking, and now everyone, even Mudhoney, will have their chance to shine.

Color me excited, but slightly concerned that this concert may have been overstuffed as is. I'd never heard of any of the newly-added bands, so I won't be able to add much in the way of prognosticatin'. But in the interest of completeness, here they are.

Callers play Sonic Youth
Callers play what now? Turns out that Sonic Youth is either so monumentally important or so hard to cover that tUnE-yaRDs is getting it/herself a helping hand. Could it be that Merrill Garbus alone can't handle the Youth's 16-string wall of melodies, as I predicted? I'd never heard of Callers before, but they were recently described by my esteemed colleague as "an irritating three-piece" with "a female vocalist who sounds like Jeff Buckley," and given what I have heard on their Myspace, I basically concur. Most of Callers' tunes barely transcend their repetitive lite-shuffle rhythms, and while there are good instrumental ideas here and there, not many of them cohere into anything impressionable. Callers seem more well-suited to cover the Sonic Youth of Washing Machine and A Thousand Leaves than Daydream Nation or their other megaclassics. Maybe Garbus will aid them in injecting some soul into the proceedings.

Citay plays Mission Of Burma
I implored Azerrad to consider the amazing OBCBYL throwback band Yuck for the role of Burma on Twitter, but he obviously didn't like my idea, probably because Yuck is British. Instead, we have Citay, a collective of San Francisco psychedelic/garage players, meaning of course that they have a million members. Surely four or five guitarists can recreate the singular fury of one Roger Miller, right? If any of you know much more about Citay, let me know--nothing I've heard is as hard as vintage Burma, but they got the tunefulness part down, if not the noise. This song, for instance, sounds more to me like the Allman Brothers than Burma, with a bit of Feelies thrown in. As long as they keep in the overdriven bass, I'm good with whatever they choose to cover.

Grooms play Hüsker Dü
I can scarcely find anything about Grooms on their Internet--they describe their music on their Myspace page as J-POP/Nu-Jazz/Religious, which obviously isn't true. In fact, it appears that Azerrad has once again chosen a female-fronted band (or more accurately, co-fronted--there's a dude who sings on certain songs as well) whose recorded output rocks about half as hard as the Dü. Again, there's nothing wrong with that--it will just make it that more difficult to distinguish Grooms-on-Dü from Wye Oak-on-Dino Jr., and I hope they're up to the challenge. I still maintain that we'll see a cameo from Bob Mould at some point, so don't be afraid to collaborate where you can, Grooms (and I promise I will listen to more of your tunes later, once I can find them on the Internet). Meanwhile, check out this interview some members of Grooms did with Azerrad.

White Hills play Mudhoney
Aaaah...here we go. Check out the opening intensity of this track. I have no worries that White Hills will settle into anything approaching mid-tempo. The heavy riffs therein could have been dropped straight out of the 80s, and it looks like Azerrad has found the perfect group to cover Mudhoney, a band that in my experience gets a lot less respect than other OBCBYL artists. Though they were grunge pioneers, Mark Arm and co. also made far more experimental and radically-rocking tunes than most of their peers, and hopefully White Hills does a good job of demonstrating the depth of Mudhoney's repertoire beyond "Touch Me I'm Sick" (which, despite my reservations, I still think they should do). Of course a band called "White Hills" would immediately conjure the dirty stoner vibe of Superfuzz Bigmuff and the garage-psych melodic jewels of Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. Reach for the deep cuts, White Hills!

Yellow Ostrich plays Beat Happening
I have no idea what to make of Yellow Ostrich, which again probably bodes well when covering what is inarguably OBCBYL's least-rocking subject. Lead singer Alex Schaaf's voice is about two octaves higher than Calvin Johnson's on average (in other words, normal), but his minimal approach to songwriting will probably suit most Beat Happening arrangements. Yellow Ostrich probably has more leeway than most to cover his band however he pleases...might I suggest super-fast and intensely? Just in case, you know, not enough of these other bands get the picture. Weirdly, I can't think of any particular Beat Happening song I especially want to hear covered right now.

That's the bill as it stands, a day or so before the concert is set to take place. Be sure to check out this recent Paris Review interview with Azerrad about the book--I found it intriguing and enlightening, as usual. If you want even more OBCBYL-related material, you can stream or download my latest radio show (featuring lesser-known artists signed to labels like SST, Twin/Tone, Touch and Go, etc.), and here are links to two other recent shows, as well. I'll be broadcasting tomorrow at 7 PM ET, one hour earlier than usual, so I can get to the Bowery Ballroom in time for the doors to open at 8:30. I'll probably be too wrapped up in the spectacle to live-tweet anything, but if some sort of newsworthy reunion happens, I'll find a way to notify readers.

Also, the hosts for tomorrow's tribute are apparently Eugene Mirman and Janeane Garofalo. I remember seeing Mirman many years ago at the M-Shop in Ames, IA, stumping for John Kerry with Yo La Tengo. This will be my first opportunity to see Garofalo in the flesh; here's a clip of her "covering" Dirty-era Sonic Youth.

Expect to see a comprehensive review (hopefully with a vetted set list!) by Sunday night or Monday morning. And a special thanks to Azerrad himself for letting me know about the augmented line-up.

The Our Band Could Be Your Life Concert: Who's Playing Who?

2011-05-15T15:18:00.004-05:00

In advance of the upcoming "Our Band Could Be Your Life: The Concert" show at the Bowery Ballroom, we at Rockaliser wish to continue paying tribute to one of the greatest rock books ever written. Last week, I wrote a detailed "Where Are They Now" guide to the artists featured in Michael Azerrad's book, focusing mostly on band activity after the book was published in 2001. This week, I hope to similarly guide you through the list of bands performing OBCBYL standards at the Bowery Ballroom on May 22. It's an incredibly strong list of up-and-coming American groups, most of whom are already well-known, but a question still remains: can they all pull it off? And which performances are likely to be the most interesting? My thoughts, below.

Nat Baldwin, David Longstreth and Brian McOmber play Black Flag
You may not recognize the names, but this group is, for all intents and purposes, the instrumental backbone of Brooklyn favorites the Dirty Projectors, sans the two additional singing females. With the Projectors stripped to a power trio, the band's instrumental capabilities will be more at the fore than ever, which will be especially challenging when playing Black Flag's later, stranger work. Longstreth in particular is a major guitar talent, a guy who can noodle with the best of them, and while Bitte Orca certainly isn't very much like Damaged, Longstreth seems like a logical choice to appropriate Greg Ginn's strangled, atonal leads. Among all the bands playing on the 22nd, the Dirty Projectors are the only ones with a history of covering their chosen artist, though I'm not sure I'd recommend the band's 2007 tribute-by-memory collection Rise Above (if you're curious, check out this song, which is amusingly different from its source material). The issue for Longstreth and co. is whether they will work off the arrangements of that album, or try more streamlined, faithful covers. I sort of hope it's the latter, not only because I've already listened to Rise Above but because it would be nice to see the Brooklyn stalwarts rock really hard, for once. In my world, the prospect of seeing the Dirty Projectors play Black Flag live is hundreds of times more newsworthy than that time their biggest hit was covered by Beyonce's sister.

Delicate Steve plays The Minutemen
One of the lesser-known artists on the bill, I actually first heard of this enterprising New Jersey guitarist through Azerrad's blog. Delicate Steve is one guy, Stephen Wong, who plays all the instruments on his recordings and tours with a small band live, mainly on the East Coast. So far, he has only one album, Wondervisions, which came out earlier this year. That LP's MO is chirpy, bright guitar instrumentals, with songs like "The Ballad of Speck and Pebble" and "Don't Get Stuck (Proud Elephants)," each perfectly evocative of its respective title. Most of DS' tunes are brief and punchy, and one listen to Wondervisions will disprove any reservation that Wong is unworthy of channeling D. Boon. As for the rest of his band, I can't speak to their quality--collectively, Mike Watt and George Hurley are four massive, massive shoes to fill for any musician, especially rent-a-musicians, and their ability to play fast and loose depends highly on which era of Minutemen songs they focus on: there's the barely one-minute punk yelps of their early EPs, the funk-fueled maximalism of Double Nickels on the Dime, and the later era of placid, overdubbed classic rock homages. If forced to guess, I'd say Delicate Steve seems best suited for 3-Way Tie For Last-era material, but maybe there's a dormant punk shredder waiting to cut loose on the 22nd--I hope so. By the way, I recommend Wondervisions, although it isn't perfect (some tracks are negligible, the last track sounds more like a scale exercise than a legit song), but I concur with Azerrad's lovely description, that this is "strongly major key and unabashedly imbued with what can only be called a sense of joy and wonder that speaks louder than words."

Ted Leo plays Minor Threat
The eternally youthful-looking Leo, who has (shocking!) been in this business for two decades now, is, by my calculation, the closest thing this show has to an indie veteran. Mr. Leo is of course mostly known for his work with the Pharmacists, a band that has helped produce a mostly-consistent run of great records, most recently The Brutalist Bricks. Mr. Leo is also known for his musical populism, his high punk ideals and veganism, and his occasional acting roles in Tom Scharpling productions. He's so gregarious, he invites fans to play covers with his band. Leo is clearly qualified to do Minor Threat, although note that it is merely "Ted Leo" playing Minor Threat, sans Pharmacists. Does this mean that he is performing solo, or with a different backing band? What if he did an entirely acoustic cover set? Minor Threat is one of the key hardcore bands of any era, but their total musical output barely peaks over an hour--I don't think Leo has that much choice about what to play, although let's guess he skips "Guilty Of Being White."

Titus Andronicus plays The Replacements
Another worthy cover band: in fact, this might be a bit too obvious a comparison. Despite their stupid name, Titus Andronicus is one of the most notable punk bands operating today in the United States, and also one of the most progressive. Their last album, The Monitor, was a punk "statement" album about the Civil War, rife with 5+ minute songs, epic riff breakdowns, and pontifications on the nature of nineteenth century combat. It made a lot of critics' top ten lists last year, and while it didn't make mine, I know there aren't exactly a lot of punk bands left in America that can claim a similar level of authenticity and respect. The major boon here is singer Patrick Stickles' voice, which possesses a plaintive tear redolent of a young Paul Westerberg. No idea if they have a guitarist of Bob Stinson's caliber, though I know they lean heavily on auxiliary musicians these days (in that sense, they are almost Canadian). Replacements songs are hard to nail live, so my suggestion would be to keep the instrumental setup simple, and maybe not concentrate too heavily on Let It Be, if possible.

tUnE-YarDs plays Sonic Youth
One minor complaint some had about Our Band Could Be Your Life was that it was almost entirely dominated by male musicians. It appears Azerrad hopes to rectify this by handing the reins of these overwhelmingly macho groups to some of the best female musicians working today. This isn't to say, though, that the annoyingly-capitalized tUnE-YarDs, aka New England musician Merrill Garbus, isn't still a weird choice to cover Sonic Youth. Da Youf combined dissonant, experimental guitar-playing with punk miasma, but at their core they were a traditional rock & roll band, whereas Garbus is one lady who sings over drum loops for the most part. I don't expect her versions to hew exactly to the originals, but one wonders how she can repurpose Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's droney six-string interlockings without resorting to a closet full of alternately-tuned guitars herself. Her album w h o k i l l is highly recommended, by the way, although again I find her punctuation infuriating. She has a lot of potential material to choose from (even if she deigns to stick with the pre-major label albums, which is a rule I assume), so hopefully she doesn't get overwhelmed, and hopefully her strategy isn't just to turn guitar fuzz into corresponding bleeps and bloops.

Dan Deacon plays The Butthole Surfers
I may be the only person I know who hasn't yet seen Dan Deacon in concert; apparently his live shows are usually killer dance fests, which doesn't entirely make sense if you only know him from his albums. Lately his stuff has been more lush and freakish, and less about party atmospherics, which works for the Butthole Surfers. Whether or not he can do justice to the Surfers remains to be seen, although signs point toward him at least doing a relatively faithful job. With the increasing availability of home recording technology, Gibbytronics is not the impressive tape-loop feat it once was, and I would be disappointed to see Deacon trying similar tricks from a prerecorded laptop. Hopefully he sticks with the oldest and strangest material, but a few more straightforward rock numbers like "Human Cannonball" and "Fast" would be welcomed as well. Deacon may have the most daunting night ahead of him if he hopes to conjure the anarchic spirit of classic Surfers shows; I don't really care if he forgoes a lot of the additional multimedia stuff, but he has to really go crazy. The measure of his success will be in how bewildered people are after his set. If no one ends up being offended, something went wrong.

St. Vincent plays Big Black
I have little doubt, however, that St. Vincent can pull off a great Big Black set--of all the bands on the list, people seem to be most excited for the prospect of a brilliant lady musician barking her way through Albini's misogynist industrial rattle. St. Vincent's music is difficult to pigeonhole: most of it is more subtle and less aggressive than your average Big Black number, but there are certain tonal and dynamic similarities endemic to what they do, and one thing they both do incredibly well is veer off into scary and unpredictable bits of noise. I assume Clark will be playing the Albini guitar parts, which she is certainly capable of, though she may have less luck trying to recreate the attack from that drum machine. If Clark was born to do anything, she was born to cover "Big Money." I predict she will play that, as well as "Racer X" and "Kerosene." If all goes well, hopefully Albini will hate it, which is as good a sign as any that St. Vincent is approaching this music in the correct, most irritating manner.

Wye Oak plays Dinosaur Jr.
This will be the first time I see my colleague's beloved Wye Oak, playing the tunes of my colleague's beloved Dino Jr., no less. The chances of me bringing this up constantly over the next few months are high, FYI. Wye Oak started as a sort of slow, chimy, blandish duo that has gotten a lot more muscular and focused in the years since, especially on their latest Civilian. They're also another female-fronted group tasked with covering some of the most intense and powerful dude music ever committed to record. Recently I peeped their cover of Danzig's "Mother" to see if I could uncover any clues as to how they might go about covering this mighty trio--I'm not sure I was able to infer much, other than that Danzig cover is a whopper. It's also about half as fast as the original, though, and I wonder if that will be Jenn Wazner's strategy throughout. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing (the average Dinosaur Jr. song is, by my calculations, about twice as fast as an average Wye Oak song), but I really want to see Wazner's take on a J. Mascis guitar solo, and I fear that she won't even try to measure up. With no bassist to fill Barlow's role, can the band generate a comparable cacophony of rock bombast? I hope they make the effort.

Buke & Gass play Fugazi
I'd never heard of Buke & Gass until word of this concert got out; now I'm convinced they're the best thing to come out of Brooklyn in ten years. Apart from the expert songwriting, their instrumental setup is a wonder to behold. Buke & Gass are two individuals, neither of whom are named "Buke" or "Gass"--the names actually refer to the homemade hybrid instruments they sling, which include some sort of bass-ukulele ("Buke"), a guitar-bass hybrid ("Gass"), and lots of foot percussion devices makeshifted into an authentic, almost bluesy battery of noise. Meanwhile, lead singer Arone Dyer has a major talent for bellowing, and the band's tunes are smart, exciting, melody-driven, and full of unexpected hooks. Not unlike Fugazi, actually, although they don't sound similar at all. However they choose to approach the daunting task of covering America's Most Principled Rock Band, chances are it will sound more limber and energetic than any of us expect.

You'll note that there are nine bands being represented at the show, whereas thirteen bands are profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life; to date, there is no one yet ready to take on Hüsker Dü, Mudhoney, Beat Happening, or Mission Of Burma. Given that Azerrad has been working on this Bob Mould autobiography, I am hopeful that we get a Mould cameo at some point (in which case the chances of Grant Hart showing drop to absolute zero). Who knows: maybe Burma will drop by for a song or two. Even if that doesn't happen, the deck is already overstacked with major talents, and hopefully each band is given time to cover several of their favorite songs, and it doesn't become a round robin of two or three covers each. Basically, any of these bands could cover just about anything and I would be satisfied. If you're a fan of the book, or if you're a fan of any of these bands, I expect it to be a life highlight/endless party.

PLUG ONE: Be sure to check out my radio show, which is currently in the midst of its own month-long Our Band Could Be Your Life tribute. If you listen tonight at 8 ET, 7 Central, I will bedoing a show on notable OBCBYL record labels (such as SST, Touch and Go, Twin/Tone, etc.). You can also stream or download the last two episodes here and here.

The Class of Our Band Could Be Your Life: Where Are They Now?

2011-05-08T13:05:00.019-05:00

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Michael Azerrad's landmark musical historiography Our Band Could Be Your Life: Dispatches From the 80s Underground. As a nascent punk rock fan in the early '00s, few music books have played as necessary a role in the development of my own critical style, and of the bands profiled in the book, all thirteen have become obsessions of mine at one point or another (to say nothing of the bands Azerrad mentions in passing, like Meat Puppets, Bad Brains, Saccharine Trust, 7 Seconds, etc.). In retrospect, Azerrad's lucidly geographic long-view of the 80s indie revolution reads even better when compared with the catty, scene-obsessed amateur culture-bashing that often passes for music criticism today. Rather than base his criticism on a set of generalized, reductive assumptions (hipsters do this! Black people do that!) and meaningless sub-genres, Azerrad writes solely of the music and the extraordinary people involved in creating it. Azerrad thankfully doesn't romanticize this period of music (he is not blind, for instance, to Greg Ginn and SST's shady business practices), but he is respectful of and highly specific about what he likes, and why. His passage on the power of Hüsker Dü's "Eight Miles High," for example, is a gloriously snark-free, brilliantly-considered burst of pure music criticism, which perceptively describes the song's dynamic contrasts, its relationship to the Byrds original, and the invigorating effect of Bob Mould's primal screams.

This is a book's whose 10th anniversary I would normally celebrate, regardless of its popularity. But OBCBYL has been important in the lives of many music fans, as well as many aspiring critics and musicians. On May 22, a handful of those musicians will pay extended tribute to Azerrad by covering some of the bands profiled in the book. The bill includes Rockaliser favorites like Wye Oak playing Dinosaur Jr., Dan Deacon doing Butthole Surfers, and Ted Leo performing Minor Threat, among others. Tickets to the show were sold out roughly twenty minutes after they went on sale, but I managed to get a pair, and I look forward to seeing many of my favorite current bands covering old favorites that, in many cases, I never had a chance to see live.

It's also a testament to Azerrad's precision and research acumen that he chose the bands that he did--each of them, in their own way, has continued to influence succeeding generations of indie and alternative rock. For each of these bands, much has changed in the ten years since the book was published. Azerrad probably did not foresee the Second Coming of the Pixies and the subsequent reunion fever that claimed nearly every 80s indie band that didn't call itself the Smiths. Some of the bands in Azerrad's book reunited; some refused to get back together; others stuck together throughout, and still others embarked on second careers due to the popularity of this book. If it can still be said, for the umpteenth time, that of the few people that bought the Velvet Underground's first album, nearly all of them formed a band, then Azerrad's book is similarly influential, not only in the eventual formation of new bands, but in the reformation of existing bands. I can't think of any other music book that had such an effect. For your curious perusal, I thought I'd break down what has happened to the OBCBYL class since 2001, in preparation for the concert as well as some more OBCBYL-themed material that I plan to publish throughout this month. The bands fall into five basic categories.

The Let's-Stay-Togethers

Sonic Youth

It was probably during the 90s that someone casually labeled Sonic Youth the "Grateful Dead of alternative rock," and indeed, of all the bands profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life, the Youth have proven to be the most solid and reliable, still continuing to make resolutely weird major label rock years after the grunge wave they inadvertently rode on peaked. Azerrad's Sonic Youth chapters ends in 1988 with Daydream Nation (their subsequent album Goo is disqualified from discussion because the book's MO is only profiling bands up to the point they sign with majors), and by the time the book came out, they had six additional albums to their credit, the most recent being the career nadir NYC Ghost and Flowers. Sonic Youth's output since 2001 has become tighter, more focused, and closer in spirit to their 80s repertoire than the jammy avant-garde tributes that preceded it. Could Azerrad have ever predicted that Sonic Youth would move back to an indie label after so many years with Geffen (Matador, yes, but an indie label nonetheless)? Their 2009 release, The Eternal, was mixed by OBCBYL VIP Steve Albini, and it was more raw and uncompromising, with a harder drum sound, than anything they had produced in years. Of all the bands on this list, Sonic Youth has stuck through the bad times and continued to produce quality music that lives up to their initial 80s promise. Long live Da Youf!

Butthole Surfers

The Butthole Surfers, on the other hand, have only remained together nominally, finding unexpected success in 1996 with their conventional modern rock hit "Pepper" and again ten years later when "Who Was In My Room Last Night?" became a featured track in Guitar Hero 2. Since 2001, the Surfers haven't released anything new, other than a compilation of outtakes called Humpty Dumpty LSD (which I recommend) and a re-release of the first couple EPs on Alternative Tentacles. The Surfers still tour today with semi-original members Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary and King Coffey (as well as returning bassist Jeff Pinkus), and while I haven't had the opportunity to seen them live, I've heard from friends that their shows are as crazy and disgusting as ever. There's no indication we'll see new Buttholes material anytime soon--Gibby Haynes and Paul Leary seem to be focusing on side projects and art for the most part, and unlike many of their peers, they have a major 90s hit to fill their coffers. Nevertheless, their best work is still from the 80s; since 2001, that fact has not changed.

Mudhoney
Another band that made it through the 90s, although you probably didn't notice. Mudhoney made the switch to the majors in 1992, prior to the release of their album Piece of Cake; they have since continued to produce albums quietly and unassumingly on Reprise Records for a dwindling audience of grunge enthusiasts. It's a shame, because a lot of Mudhoney's major label stuff is pretty good, and not even that grungy in certain cases (one trend I note from Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge onward is that they jettison the modern rock sounds of Nirvana in favor of more psychedelic, Nuggets-type stuff). The last time I remember people paying attention to Mudhoney was when they played Superfuzz Bigmuff (plus early singles?) in its entirety for the 2010 All Tomorrow's Parties festival. The albums Since We've Become Translucent (2002), Under a Billion Suns (2006) and The Lucky Ones (2008), were all released by Mudhoney's former label (in this case Sub Pop), but if it wasn't Superfuzz Bigmuff, no one seemed to care. Would the fanfare have been more pronounced if Mudhoney had split for a while, and then announced a reunion? Azerrad claims that nothing Mudhoney did subsequently was ever as powerful as "Touch Me I'm Sick." I don't entirely agree, but nothing Mudhoney has released since that pronouncement has come close, for sure.

The Reunionists

Mission Of Burma
Of all the bands mentioned in OBCBYL, Burma probably benefited most directly from their inclusion in the book, and they managed to parlay a brief-yet-influential 80s run into one of those great and rare rock reunions where the new stuff is as good, even better, than the original hits. Burma was poised to become a breakthrough Boston band (years before the Pixies) when epic-loud guitarist Roger Miller contracted a painful form of tinnitus that made playing live difficult. No longer able to build layers of feedback onstage, Miller and the rest of the band decided to break it off amicably in 1983. A full two decades later, the band got back together (Miller's tinnitus had either improved or become more manageable), and started touring and working on new material. Eventually, they signed to Matador. Burma's original tape manipulator, the enigmatic Martin Swope, wasn't around for the reunion, so he was replaced with Shellac veteran Bob Weston. Their first reunion album, 2004's OnOffOn, was just as explosive and vital as Vs., and 2006's release The Obliterati was even better. Burma had sacrificed none of the viciousness and propulsive forward momentum of their classic punk tunes, and the new songs were always a familiar Burma mixture of catchy and discordant. Their most recent release, 2009's The Sound, the Speed, the Light, is somewhat of a drop-off, but I saw them in D.C. when they were touring that album, and "1, 2, 3..Party!!" is a sight to behold live. Of all the bands located in the OBCBYL aegis, Mission Of Burma has arguably produced the most great music in the last ten years, and that is saying a lot, especially given our next entry...

Dinosaur Jr.
Did Dinosaur Jr. ever break up? In theory, they pressed on through the 90s, even as the band became J. Mascis plus a series of interchangeable bassists and drummers. Dino chafed more than most grunge holdovers during their major label years, and while songs like "Start Choppin'" became minor MTV hits, the albums Where You Been, Hand It Over and Without a Sound signified a lack of engagement and an overreliance on filler that had never been characteristic of Dino during their 80s heyday. Mascis' former bandmates, Lou Barlow and Murph, had left long earlier on unfriendly terms, and Azerrad credits Mascis' dictatorial tendencies and blithely unfriendly attitude as proof that the original three would probably not be found working together, especially since Lou Barlow had already found another successful band with Sebadoh. And yet, somehow, the original power trio managed to return, in 2007's Beyond, and it was like everything from Green Mind forward had never happened. Mascis' hummable wah solos were once again at the front of the mix, and the combined distorted might of Murph and Lou Barlow added to that timeless melange of melody and aggression that critics had assumed no longer existed in the 21st century. I don't see any evidence to suggest that the band gets along together better (I noticed during their live act that they barely interact with each other, still), but their internal musical dynamic was as fresh as ever. Their next album, 2010's Farm, cemented the band's status as the most powerful power trio in America. Lou Barlow still moonlights with Sebadoh and gets at least a couple vocal showcases on each new Dino album; Mascis just recently released his first solo album; Murph just looks happy to be back, most of the time.

The One-Off Reunionists

Hüsker Dü
Bob Mould and Grant Hart had grown to hate each other long before Hüsker Dü broke up in 1987; Azerrad suggests that a split was inevitable from the day that Mould started to marginalize Hart's songwriting aspirations. Whatever the case, Hart still talks in interviews about Mould's alleged mistreatment, and Mould has never been shy about stating his indifference to Hart's point of view. It's hard to think of two guys in a band that have ever hated each other more, and this is especially apparent on Warehouse: Songs and Stories, where a number of Mould and Hart songs basically amount to inter-band sniping. Meanwhile, the poor mustachioed non-songwriting bassist, Greg Norton, started to drift from the band and bass playing entirely. A Hüsker Dü reunion has been clamored for since the 80s, although it seemed about as likely as the Clash getting back together--Mould and Hart, to their credit, have stuck to their guns and refused to trot out Hüsker nostalgia in the manner of a reunited Pixies or Stooges. They made one exception, though, in 2004, at a cancer benefit for Soul Asylum's bassist Karl Mueller. Shocking everyone at the show, Mould and Hart went onstage (sans Norton) with their guitars, and played two songs that expressly communicated how unlikely this was to ever happen again: "Never Talking To You Again" and "Hardly Getting Over It." That was it for Hüsker, although Mould and Hart continue to make solo albums, and Greg Norton has had a notable second career as a fancy chef.

The Replacements
Like Dinosaur Jr., the Replacements started as a guitar-bass-drums combo and ended as a solo act, as original members were jettisoned and the band's indisputable hard rock flavor led way to the more placid singer-songwriter style of a maturing Paul Westerberg. The Replacements' story arc over the course of OBCBYL is a particularly interesting one, as at first they are described as a barely competent group that then became a legendary live act, which then lost much of its vitality upon moving to a major label, ending up as more of an AOR act than the punk band they originally set out to be. With Westerberg still doing his solo thing and lead guitarist Bob Stinson long-dead, no one was particularly clamoring for a Replacements reunion. But people got it, sort of, in the most unlikely of circumstances--on the soundtrack for the wacky computer-animated bear movie Open Season. Westerberg, Tommy Stinson (who had spent his post-Replacements years playing bass for Guns N' Roses, let's not ever forget) and Chris Mars reunited to perform a couple songs on the soundtrack, although Mars stuck to backing vocals as opposed to drums. That dynamic continued into the recording of two new Replacements songs for the Rhino retrospective Who Do You Think I Was? Neither of them hark back to classic Replacements, and a reunion without Bob Stinson isn't really a reunion at all, but at least Tommy Stinson has become more accepting of Westerberg's delicate acoustic side. Many Replacements fans still lag behind in their appreciation.

Big Black
Long before Steve Albini was primarily known as a cred-bestowing "mixer" (he rejects the mantle of producer) for the Pixies and Nirvana, he was fronting the dark, stentorian industrial group Big Black, the band least likely to ever make it to the majors. Albini broke the band up in 1987 to head off their increasing popularity, and his subsequent bands Rapeman and Shellac have borrowed a lot of Big Black's punishing rhythms and analog production technology. There was no real reason for Big Black to reunite, but they did, in 2006, for Touch & Go's 25th Anniversary Show, paying tribute to the label along with the likes of Pinback and Scratch Acid. Supposedly, they did "Cables," "Dead Billy," "Pigeon Kill," and "Racer-X." That looks to be the last we'll see of Big Black, at least until Touch & Go's 50th rolls around; Albini is still doing his thing with Shellac, which is similar enough, Santiago Durango is now a public defender and Jeff Pezzatti still plays with Naked Raygun. Albini has made it clear that a reunion tour will never, ever happen, and I would be surprised if he said anything else on the subject.

The Permanently Defunct

Minor Threat
Ian MacKaye's first band certainly did their thing in the 80s, and they remain one of the two or three most important hardcore bands ever. But they broke up for a reason: MacKaye had become sick of violent, macho hardcore culture, and he wanted to make music that pressed the limits of hardcore, whereas the rest of his band remained more or less committed to churning out similar music. Thus was born Fugazi, an entirely different type of band that replaced Minor Threat as MacKaye's primary group. It is, I guess, entirely possible that Minor Threat could reunite: if Johnny Rotten can split his time between Sex Pistols and PiL reunions, and Lou Barlow can switch instruments between Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh tours, then certainly it's not unheard of for a musician to embark on reunion tours for multiple bands. This will never happen, though, not in a million years. MacKaye is more likely to be abducted by aliens than willingly participate in such a transparent money-grab. Minor Threat is a set story that ends in 1983; Azerrad was wise to continue that story with his Fugazi chapter. If you have the Complete Discography and really, really want something else to listen to, I can't recommend much besides the first demo tape that was released in 2003.

The Minutemen
D. Boon's fatal car crash in 1985 effectively ended one of the most productive and resourceful groups in rock history, making the prospect of a reunited Minutemen sans-singer/guitarist about as likely as a Nirvana or Jimi Hendrix Experience reunion. Mike Watt and George Hurley continued to work together a lot in the aftermath of Boon's death--the band fIREHOSE, which featured Boon superfan Ed Crawford taking over guitar and vocals, is the closest one will probably find to Minutemen-sounding music, and of course there's plenty of great additional Mike Watt stuff as well (when he isn't moonlighting with the Stooges). Watt and Hurley also occasionally perform as "The Secondmen," paying tribute to Boon as a guitar-less two-piece rhythm section. No one knows what might have happened to the Minutemen if Boon had stayed alive, but everyone agrees that the band ceased to exist the moment he died. Anything else would disrespect his legacy.

Black Flag
Black Flag had been through several line-up changes prior to the band's breakup in 1986, with guitarist Greg Ginn the only steady member throughout. They had left a legacy of oppressive, emotionally-bare hardcore, the intensity of which could never have been maintained indefinitely, especially after years of constant touring and poverty that were beginning to take a physical toll on the band's members. Strangely, I've never heard if anyone in Black Flag was ever interested in reuniting; Henry Rollins is a major public figure, for sure, but he had largely left music behind in order to focus on his acting and public speaking, and he was never asked to to play along when Ginn and Dez Cadena got back together to play a few Black Flag cuts in 2003. Since Ginn was, again, the only constant, one could argue that any show featuring Ginn playing Black Flag songs counts, but without Rollins the prospects of a full-fledged tour seem unlikely. Ginn still plays music professionally; there's no need to bring along his former bandmates as well. The story of Black Flag will remain closed indefinitely, in part because of Rollins' lack of interest but also because it was never particularly clear who and who wouldn't take part in such a reunion.

The Neverending Hiatus-ists

Beat Happening
Beat Happening never properly broke up; they just stopped making albums after 1992 and stopped recording songs after "Angel Gone" in 2000. But I don't know whether I can say that they continued to exist through the 90s; as usual, Beat Happening's story (as with its music) doesn't really fit in with its contemporaries. Two comps of B-Sides and rarities came out in 2003, and that appears to be the end of the story so far. Calvin Johnson has released a few solo albums (unheard by me), and seems to have plenty of other side projects besides. I know even less about what's happened with Bret Lunsford and Heather Lewis. They could still be practicing together, for all we know, but musical togetherness was never a major part of Beat Happening's charm anyway. Perhaps Johnson and co. have progressed to the point where it would be impossible to reproduce the amateur, lo-fi instrumental qualities that once arrested so many Beat Happening fans; if so, this would be one case where a band breaks up because they have gotten too good at their instruments. For any band other than Beat Happening, this wouldn't make sense.

Fugazi
Ian MacKaye recently played fast and loose with the hopes of Fugazi fans worldwide by saying in an interview that he hopes for an eventual reunion, but it won't be in the immediate future. The main hindering factor apparently is bassist Joe Lally, who has relocated to Rome, making regular practice in Washington, D.C. difficult. We can still hope, though, for the band that left us on an incomplete but exemplary note with 2001's The Argument, to devise some sort of follow-up. On the other hand, all four members of Fugazi have remained busy since, so it's not like we've had no music to show for it. MacKaye has produced records with his wife as the Evens, Guy Picciotto has played with and produced a number of notable acts like Blonde Redhead, Joe Lally worked with John Frusciante in a band called Ataxia, and Brendan Canty had a stint as Bob Mould's drummer for a while. But I think I speak for all Fugazi fans when I say "Joe Lally, go back to D.C." It is time for another Fugazi record, if only because the number of popular, respected bands who refuse to play 18+ shows and sell their tracks to commercials has dwindled to about zero.

Again, expect a bit more about this book, and the show on the 22nd, in the next few weeks. Until then, you can stream my radio show from last week, featuring famous covers recorded by the OBCBYL class, and make sure to check out tonight's show at 8 PM ET, when I will play a bunch of new stuff from the bands performing on the 22nd.

EDIT: As promised, here's a link to last Sunday's radio show, which you can stream or download.

The Concertgoer: Low & Halloween, Alaska

2011-04-18T15:42:00.001-05:00

Going to concerts alone is one of my least favorite things to do, and yet here I was, solo, at Low’s First Avenue show. Strangely, many of my fellow concertgoers also seemed to be attending alone. I hadn’t considered it beforehand, but this makes sense. Low’s music—especially that of their earlier years—sounds best in the dark of the night, soundtracking those sleepless moments and confused soulsearching. You can listen to Low with other people, or watch them perform in a crowd of several hundred, but their music is not really a communal experience. It’s often hushed, as if whispered, and the words dwell on topics like dreamlife and mental illness—things that we can only experience alone.

The days when Low fans sat on the ground during performances are long gone, but their performances are still intimate, even in their louder moments. This night, Low were well-equipped for higher volumes, playing with an unexpected fourth member. The Duluth, MN band are a trio—Steve Garrington is the latest in a rotating cast of bassists—but they were joined by a sunglasses-clad Eric Pollard, who is a member of the side project Retribution Gospel Choir. He played keyboards and sang backup vocals, both barely audible.

Low’s core is Alan and Mimi Parker, married Mormons whose vocal harmonies fill the open spaces of the band’s music. Mimi’s approach to percussion is minimalist: she plays standing up with a small kit, holding a mallet in her left hand and a brush in her right. Alan has become something of a guitar hero lately, but he still explores slower tempos. He held back on his often-disturbing banter, but contorts his hand whenever he’s not playing guitar.

At First Avenue, Low favored cuts from their last three albums. No complaints here, they’re all great, although the just-released C’mon is the weakest among them. If we’re being simplistic*, the new album basically moves Low into Neil Young territory, exploring the sweetness and dread of acoustic Neil while making a detour into Crazy Horse antics. Not all of C’mon’s mid-tempo numbers connected, but most of the new material sounded great. Hearing Mimi’s voice flood the room on “Especially Me” was beautiful, and the slow rise into soulful feedback on “Nothing But Heart” is as great live as it is on record.

Low’s older material has been expertly honed. Individual songs are difficult to pick, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “Breaker,” “Sunflower,” and “Canada.” That last song rode a runaway bassline to total immersion. It was the penultimate tune in an encore of older material, capped by “When I Go Deaf.”

“Deaf” is a song about hearing loss and the insularity that comes with it, with plaintive vocals from both Parkers that are followed by post-chorus bursts of frustrated distortion. It captures what Low do best. It’s beautiful but disquieting. And in the dark confines of First Avenue, it makes complete sense.

Halloween, Alaska opened the show. They're a local concern whose sound recalls the subdued clarity of the American Analog Set (Low's one-time peers). They work towards noisier finales, but keyboard-driven atmospherics color their songs. Halloween, Alaska sometimes utilize a electronic percussion--making them sound like Hot Chip--which was mostly distracting. They do quiet well, their low-key charm a fitting aperitif for the group that's made an art and a career out of hushed.

*And why not?—the previous two records got pegged as the loud one and the electronic one, which is fairly accurate.

The Concertgoer: Destroyer & The War On Drugs

2011-04-14T21:12:00.003-05:00

There was an accidental logic in seeing The War On Drugs a week and a half after former WoD member Kurt Vile came to town. Granted, I didn't see much of The War On Drugs--what sort of rock concerts begins at 7:30?--just enough to tease out the similarities. Vile's old band also have an underwhelming frontman, and similarly draw on classic rock without being wholly derivative. In the case of War On Drugs, their music takes the shape of something Wilco might've made between A Ghost Is Born and Sky Blue Sky. There's even some cool, Nels Cline-style guitar. The group's liability is frontman Adam Granduciel, whose vocals ape the stretched-out vowels of Blonde On Blonde. It's less an homage than a grating imitative gesture, and the band sounds better when his mouth is closed.

Destroyer have frontman issues as well. It's not that Dan Bejar is or isn't a good frontman, it's that he neglects the role entirely. Live, the roguish Bejar wanders around, distractedly. Bejar kept his mic stand at about knee-length, and returned his mic there when he wasn't singing; he crouched for many of the show's opening numbers, sipping beer when his vocals weren't required; he entered in a jean jacket; and he referred to lyric sheets for two of his own compositions. While he didn't seem pleased to be performing, Bejar did deliver his enjambed lines and trilled coos as on record. Even when he's just standing there, his vocals still sound like a man wildly gesticulating. He did not play guitar at all.

Destroyer's success rested less on Bejar's performance than the seven musicians he's playing with. These included a saxophonist/flautist and trumpeter in addition to the guitars, keyboard, bass, and drums. With the horns and a female vocalist, the band was well equipped to play material form this year's Kaputt.* They were never introduced, but whoever they are, their mélange--sultry horns, keyboard washes, and low-end kick--is brilliant. I hope someone recorded the extended jam at the end of "Song For America"--the band reached a dense, commanding crescendo, and then set down their instruments and left.

The Kaputt Players dipped into a few back catalog numbers. These were only lightly reworked, but the band added horns to some Rubies favorites, and conjured a sublime "My Favorite Year." I can personally attest that this performance was much better than the one Destroyer gave in Minneapolis three years ago, when they played that same song. The difference comes down to the music--the airy density of the Kaputt material allows Bejar to inhabit a space from which his disinterested verbiage becomes another evocative element. The 2008 show had him fronting a rock band, and onstage this does not come naturally to him.

So it's been disappointing to read that Bejar may give up music. For years, Bejar alone kept singer-songerwriterdom fresh. It seems like strange timing, now that he's pivoted from vagabond to sophisticate, and assembled a pretty tight band. But eccentrics don't follow career paths--Kaputt seems to have accidentally captured some zeitgeist--and if this is actually it (which I doubt), than Bejar went out with a good live show. For once.

*The band did not include Sibel Thrasher, whose backing vocals make such a lovely counterpoint on many of the new songs

The Concertgoer: Wye Oak & Callers

2011-04-09T12:03:00.001-05:00

St. Paul's Turf Club is a cool place, but not an establishment with great organizational skills. So a discrepancy between the official website and printed ticket led me to assume the show started later than it did, and for this and other reasons I missed first opener Zoo Animal. This was a let down--I've been meaning to see the group for months, having been assured that the band posses a ragged majesty. They are a rock band of practicing Christians, which is rarely a good sign. But as a Low superfan, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Alas, the Turf Club did not give me a resaonable idea of when doors opened. Another time.

I did catch Callers, who are touring with Baltimore compatriots Wye Oak. I was distracted during Callers' set, but paid enough attention to notice that 1) they are an irritating three-piece with 2) a female vocalist who sounds like Jeff Buckley. They are not worth your time.

Then came Wye Oak, underdogs now big enough to pack a small club. Wye Oak are a duo, but they work mightily to produce one of the highest volume to band member ratios in the business. Frontwoman Jenn Wasner plays guitar and sings, while her boyfriend Andy Stack drums with most of his body, using his right hand to play bass parts and occasional keyboard on a small synth. Wasner is the driving force in Wye Oak, but Stack is the workhorse, dexterously powering the group.

And Wye Oak are powerful. Their first album--totally unrepresented at the show--balanced folk with fuzz, but showed that the group could unleash moments of overwhelming intensity. Whenever Wasner's guitar begins one of its inexorable surges, time seems to stop. Their more recent work has tended towards these sudden blasts, a sort of americana via shoegaze, but this year's Civilian moves slightly in the direction of tense atmospherics.

Live, the band mostly replicate the sounds on their records, seeming a bit more laid back in person. The moments of paralyzing noise--which draw out the frustration and longing of Wasner's lyrics--are still the most exciting. Accordingly, "For Prayer" and "Holy, Holy" were highlights. The moment on the latter when the band pause, then hit their notes at exactly the same moment and kickstaring the song's melodic rush--that's perfection to me.

The whole show wasn't that great. Wasner's vocals don't have quite the same languor on a PA, and fans of the band's first two albums probably left disappointed. But the lulls were very short. Notably, after a rant about the internet and some guy in Iowa City with a camera, Wye Oak launched into a cover of Danzig's "Mother." That song is always and forever Glenn Danzig's, but the rising intensity of Wye Oak's version sounded awesome, and is probably a good sign for folks with tickets to see the band cover Dinosaur Jr at the OBCBYL show.

The evening ended with a short encore--one quiet song, one loud one. It was a relatively short set. While there are no happy Wye Oak songs--they played both "I Hope You Die" and "Two Small Deaths"--their music is lovely to get lost in, and the amount of closed eyes, swaying bodies and banging heads at the Turf Club indicated that, finally, people are catching on.

The Concertgoer: J Mascis, Kurt Vile & Fauna

2011-04-03T23:54:00.002-05:00

There's a moment during Dinosaur Jr shows, usually during the encore, when J Mascis rips into the opening chords of "Freak Scene." Five seconds later, when the drums and bass kick in, the roof has already been blown off. Two and a half minutes in, after Lou and Murph drop out, J returns to those opening chords and croaks

Sometimes I don't thrill you
Sometimes I think I'll kill you
Just don't let me fuck up will you
Cause when I need a friend it's still you

ceding that last line to the audience. It's cathartic, every time, and the lyric is a great metaphor for Dinosaur Jr's internal dynamic and live performances--brilliant but inconsistent, fractious, and almost accidently life-affirming. It's also the only moment during Dinosaur concerts that spotlights the laconic Mascis, and he basically surrenders it.

So a solo acoustic show by Mascis leaves a lot of questions, despite some obvious precedents. The tour follows an album, Several Shades Of Why, that's mostly solo and largely acoustic. But with no band to hide behind--or blast out noise with--Mascis actually seemed comfortable and engaged. He occupied the spotlight modestly, with a hint of charm. He even shared an anecdote--at Dinosaur shows, Lou Barlow handles all the banter--about how Murph's taste in cassettes resulted in his Eddie Brickell cover. It seems the Dinosaur drummer favored Zappa in the tour van, but introduced Mascis to the song "Circle Of Friends" on the road back in the 80's.

A seated Mascis began the show with newer material. It was fantastic live, Mascis sounding present in a way he isn't always on Shades. The album's best songs--"Is It Done," "Listen To Me," and the title track--cast Mascis as a forlorn troubadour. It's a new role, but there's always been a hint of John Fogerty and "Dead Flowers" Jagger in his voice. As on the record, the loose, Laurel Canyon vibe fits naturally within the Mascis landscape of confusion and self-doubt. On Dinosaur records, Mascis buries this emotion inside the maelstrom; on this new one, uncertainty takes the forefront. A few songs got away from Mascis, however, as they do on Shades. But Mascis was at ease and in control--it's always hard to tell, but it seemed like he was enjoying himself.

He made liberal use of a pedal that transformed his acoustic Martin into something electric-sounding. Mascis employed the pedal more often as the show went on, and brought out a number of Dinosaur songs. "The Wagon," "Little Fury Things," and "Thumb" sounded great, still resonant at lower volumes. A couple tunes could've used the full Dinosaur treatment, notably "Ocean In The Way." The filter's fuzz couldn't quite match the wild precision of a true Mascis solo, even with Mascis playing.

The highlight this evening was a whiplash "Not You Again." There was no "Freak Scene," but "Again" mimics the bouncy noise-pop and drawled self-doubt: "I got no advice bout anything/Just fuck it up yourself." And the way the crowd responded, it could've been "Freak Scene." J spat out the last lines fast and off-beat, a bit of self-sabotage during an unusually enlivened show.

Playing before Mascis was his touring partner, Kurt Vile, who made a brief appearance during J's set. I've encountered Vile's music sporadically, and mostly, it has failed to connect. I find it diffuse and underdeveloped, in the way that lesser Atlas Sound songs are. Live, this was not an issue. Vile and his equally long-haired band, the Violators, transform even the singer-songwritery moments into straight rock and roll. Vile's songs are rock as a bedridden autodidact might write it--Bradford Cox again being a good reference point. The Violators play loud, ending many songs with frenzied jams. But as long as Vile remains such an indistinct presence, I can't see this band getting much better. Not every group needs a Jagger, but until Kurt Vile's delivery becomes distinctly Vile, his music is doomed to be just good rock and roll.*

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy Vile and the Violators--they were a pleasant surprise. So were the openers, Fauna. A Minneapolis group from the 90's, which once included Linda Pitmon, Fauna reunited recently after seventeen years on hiatus. As I walked in, the group was playing with a flautist, cribbing from Loveless, and doing so pretty well. Sans flute, they sound quite a lot like Teenage Fanclub. All their songs are at least a minute too long, but they seemed thrilled to be on stage, namechecking Where You Been and playing like men excited to escape their dayjobs--as high school teachers or IT guys, if I had to guess. They also had an excellently packaged CD that, when propped open, becomes a theremin.

*Strange as that sounds...

The Month Of Attending Concerts

2011-04-01T11:23:00.008-05:00

There’s an unusual preponderance of concerts in Minneapolis this month. This no doubt coincides with the end of winter, which makes the Twin Cities a marginally more inviting place. In any case, my work calendar--which is mainly used for noting concert dates--is getting full of these shows, so I thought, “Hey, why not make a project out of this?” And so I will, writing up the shows I attend on this blog.

There are four I’m set on going to: J Mascis, Wye Oak, Low, and Destroyer. Expect reviews of those. A handful of others, including OFF!, the Joy Formidable, Cut Copy, Mike Watt, the Vivian Girls, and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, are in the maybe column. This list is pretty limited, genre-wise, but I’m open to additions (maybe Fela drummer Tony Allen? It’s kind of expensive).

Anyways, I’m planning on limiting the project to just April. There’s a reason I don’t typically review concerts or albums on Rockaliser, since so many other people do that. At the same time, I’ve written show reviews in the past, some of which are OK enough, and they can provide a different angle at which to explore an artist’s music.* On this blog, our focus is almost exclusively on recorded music. That’s typical of most criticism, and it’s not a bad thing, but neither is it an inherently better way of thinking about and experiencing music.

So look out for these Concertgoer posts (a name I borrow with all due deference to Geoff S., who does this same thing over at The Big Takeover). If there’s something you’d recommend I attend, chime in in the comments section.

*I believe that link is the first time I’ve publicly outed myself as James Yogurt, so there you go. While I’d love to rewrite that review with vastly shorter sentences, I think it’s got some valid points.

Rockaliser Radio: Plug One, Plug Two

2011-03-22T08:56:00.004-05:00

I haven't made much of a big deal about this, and that probably needs to change, but for the past few weeks I've been hosting a weekly theme-based radio show on Radiohive.org (whose studios we used to record our "rockcast" last year). It's called Rockaliser Radio and you can check out an archive of past shows (with descriptions and track listings) here. Each week's theme is different, but I especially suggest checking out this past Sunday's "Prince Samples in Hip-Hop," in which I probe the mutually beneficial-yet-prickly relationship between The Artist and The Genre. You can stream it, or download it and put it on your "pod" of choice.

One bit of errata: I mistakenly said "Do Me Baby" features on Dirty Mind, when it obviously comes from that album's followup Controversy. If you spot other mistakes, let me know.

Here's a description of last week's show:

Though their respective rises to commercial and artistic prominence ran basically synchronous courses through the 80s (in terms of continual MTV and radio dominance), the dual phenomena of Prince and hip-hop have always had a somewhat testy relationship. True, the artist formerly known as The Artist has paid odd tributes to the genre in his own inimitable way, starting with his hiring of a rapper (Tony M.) to fill out his early-90s NPG collective and later asserting during one of his myriad “comebacks” that “If it ain’t Chuck D or Jam Master Jay, know what?/They’re losing” in the lyrics for the 2004 golden age celebration “Musicology.” Prince obviously knew and appreciated the contributions of hip-hop, even as his tastes tended to veer sharply toward the old-school; his own attempts at rapping demonstrate an affection for an earlier, less linguistically-sophisticated (say, circa 1982) era of the genre, during its chrysalis.

Luckily, we have a long way to go before your host is forced to go with “Prince’s Greatest Raps” as a theme, so don’t be fooled by the inaugural choice of “My Name Is Prince” (it still fits with the theme–”My Name,” one of the Purple One’s early rap numbers, itself features a sample of “I Wanna Be Your Lover”). Instead, this week’s show will focus on notable cuts which prominently (for the most part) feature samples of Prince songs. Prince wasn’t a natural part of hip-hop’s DNA from the start, the way Sly, James Brown and Parliament would have been–his beatmaking prowess was a later addition to hip-hop’s lexicon, and while there isn’t an amazing amount of prominent stuff out there, there’s still a great, unappreciated backlog of diverse hip-hop which deserves to be listened to and commented upon.

Apart from issues of timing, part of the reason that Prince samples aren’t as prominent or ubiquitous as they once were has to do with outdated sampling copyright laws, as well as Prince’s own grim history of hoarding intellectual property. Though, it’s clear that the Internet has allowed and encouraged impromptu remixes of Prince jams now more than ever (see several Girl Talk songs), by the same token the notion of a great, Prince sample-centered song seems less necessary in a pop-rap landscape where Prince tributes (think The-Dream’s last album) are a lot more common and easier to write. Most of the songs below are sort of throwbacks, in this sense, and feature all types of wonderful samples, from synths to screams to sheets of guitar noise–your host hopes some of this will be recognizable. In the listing below you will find links to the invaluable web database Whosampled, which is a great tool for cross-referencing hip-hop research. Think I missed a crucial song? Email me here.

Iowa: A Musical Wasteland?

2011-03-07T10:08:00.000-06:00

In many ways, Iowa enjoys an outsize role in American life. Incredibly, the first Democratic and Republican caucuses remain in Iowa, which demographically resembles mostly itself and the Dakotas. The state is a shorthand for pleasant, uncosmopolitan Midwesterness (this pops up in The New York Times often). The first electric computer, the Atanasoff-Berry, was invented in Ames. Even culturally, Iowa is kind of important: the Writer's Workshop is in Iowa City, and the state was home to John Wayne and Johnny Carson, among others.

But musically, Iowa has always been a wasteland. Or a graveyard--the most important musical events to occur in the state were both deaths. The first was "the day the music died," when a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed outside Clear Lake. You can blame that one on the Iowa weather and Roger Peterson, a 21 year-old pilot from Mason City. The second event occured when Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off an already dead bat at Veteran's Memorial Auditorium in Des Monies.

Not exactly edifying stuff. To be fair, Iowa was home to Bix Beiderbecke, a mysterious Dixieland musician who played clarinet and piano. However, I have never really felt like Beiderbecke's hometown of Davenport was really a part of my home state, so I'm not sure how Beiderbecke fits in. I'll confess that I'm mostly ignorant about his music, but it doesn't help the state's case that he was born 108 years ago.

On the other hand, tiny Shenandoah, hidden in the state's Southwest corner, can claim a couple impressive musicians: The Everly Brothers and Charlie Haden. Neither of the Everlys was born in the state, but they spent a decade in Iowa during their youth, and went on to record the epochal "Bye Bye Love." Haden was born and raised in Shenandoah, and has impressive pedigree as a jazz bassist, having played with Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett, and in his own Liberation Music Orchestra. You can also throw in Meredith Wilson, of Mason City, who wrote The Music Man and set it in fictional River City, Iowa. If I remember the plot of the musical correctly, it concerns a con man who dupes a bunch of foolish Iowans, and then relents.

But that's a pretty small imprint.* Where are all of Iowa's musicians?

Not in the Iowa Rock n' Roll Music Association, the group who run something resembling an Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If you visit the Association's website, you'll notice that the organization seems to cling onto any group from the 50's or 60's with an Iowa connection. I won't pretend like I'm familiar with many of the Association's inductees, but those names I do recognize do not belong to Iowans, or people with meaningful connections to the state. Examine the Class of 2000, for example. Inducting Buddy Holly just seems cruel, and the Association fails to present a real reason that The Trashmen count as Iowans.

So, aside from a couple jazz greats, and some guys who died or passed through Shenandoah, is Iowa a musical wasteland? Not entirely. For one, Bob Nastanovich lives in Des Moines. Nastanovich was a member of Pavement, probably the greatest band of the nineties, and also played with the Silver Jews. Nastanovich's role in Pavement is limited, musicially speaking. Sometimes he plays a small drum set, or a few synthesizer notes, or shouts backup vocals. But he's been a full member of the band since 1990, and his joie de vivre makes him Pavement's second-largest stage presence. I saw the band on their reunion tour last year, in St. Paul and Nastanovich asked if anyone in the audience was from Des Moines. A few hands went up, and he shared his verdict on the city: "it's getting better." He works just outside of town, at the Prairie Meadows horse racetrack. Of course, the Iowa Rock n' Roll Music Association has ignored the chillest guy in indie.

The IRNRMA haven't enshrined Ames' Poision Control Center either--it seems there's an aversion to, or ignorance of independent music. I saw a fantastic PCC show last summer in Athens, Georgia. I chatted with the band after the show--Ames had just endured its worst flood in a century, so I asked if their homes were OK. But those guys are lifers--they didn't have homes, they were on tour.

Worse yet, the IRNRMA has neglected an Iowan musician who is an innovator and genuine legend. I'm talking about Arthur Russell, a cellist and songwriter who grew up in Oskaloosa. He's best-known for his avant-garde disco work, which was released under names like Dinosaur L and Loose Joints. Russell was an important figure in the New York art scene during the 70's and 80's, doing things like composing 48 hour orchestra pieces and playing cello on a discarded version of "Psycho Killer." Russell died in 1992, of AIDS-related complications.

Like most Iowa musicians, Arthur Russell didn't leave much of a footprint during his lifetime. But that has changed since 2004, when Audika mounted a reissue campaign spotlighting Russell's work. A prolific songwriter, much of his work went unreleased, but Russell's music has connected with many people in recent years (the Soul Jazz compilation The World Of Arthur Russell has been particularly influential). Russell's "mutant disco" and cello pieces have been rhapsodized about and discussed elsewhere. I'll accept that at face value--it's not my favorite work he made--and instead nominate his country album, Love Is Overtaking Me, as the greatest Iowa album of all time.

These 21 songs, recorded between 1974 and 1990, are lovingly crafted, simple, and full of heart. Russell's compositions--even standards like "Good Bye Old Paint" sound like originals here--have a homemade warmth. The plaintive Russell is not a born singer, but his unassuming voice fits the material. Despite the modesty of his approach, Russell's lyrics will tear your heart out. You'd have to be inhumanly stoic--even for a midwesterner--not to be moved when he sings "I couldn't say it to your face/but I won't be around any more." In Russell's hands, small details--orange birthday cakes, putting records back in their sleeves, the warmth of a friend's arm--lend the songs their lived-in feel. He seems to draw on his Iowa roots often, writing about love and uncertainty in a way that recalls Big Star, but with a more rural bent. This is most evident on "What It's Like"--the album's centerpiece, almost Southern rock--where he sets the scene: "In Iowa/In the tall grass/there's a couple."

It makes sense, then, that Love Is Overtaking Me's cover features Arthur Russell standing in a cornfield. This is the best Iowa Album there is, proof that there's life, even brilliance, among the cornfields.

*Compare this to neighboring Minnesota and Missouri. Even when you factor in a per-capita offset (both states are roughly twice as populous as Iowa), the Hawkeye State's imprint doesn't come close.

Shook Ones: A Few Theories About The Songs On PJ Harvey's Album

2011-02-25T12:32:00.000-06:00

After two weeks, I'm slowly wrapping my head around PJ Harvey's Let England Shake. Harvey's formidable back catalog ensures that her new music receives rapt attention it deserves, and the album doesn't disappoint in this respect. And PJ's idiosyncratic muse--only Neil Young's is more restless--guarantees that whatever lens shed light on her previous work is now outdated.

As critics have noted, Let England Shake is preoccupied with two themes: war and England. Neither of these is without precedent. In "The Soldiers"--a beautiful song so wrenching it's difficult to listen to--from Harvey's 2009 album with John Parish, she dreams about fighting in the Korean War. And England has long been a fixation--2007's White Chalk sounded like Harvey haunting the English countryside, and 2000's Stories From The City, Stories From The City was partly about her Dorset roots.*

Yet the songs on Let England Shake are distinct. They share some of the lightness that colored White Chalk, and Harvey's delivery, which relies on her upper register, places us firmly after that album. But the sound here is more fleshed out. The xylophone that begins a few seconds into the album is new, and there's a stronger rhythmic presence. Drummer Jim White is gone, but his Dirty Three colleague Mick Harvey joins Harvey's coterie, who often swap instruments. These songs churn when they choose to, sweeping up Harvey's autoharp. Thanks in no small part to the strange noise of that instrument, Let England Shake sounds distant, as if played from miles away.

Another aspect of this album--and this one is lost on no one--is the gulf between the compositions, which I suppose you could call "pretty," and the violent lyrical content. This isn't the emotional violence of PJ's early records (the acidic guitar of her first two albums is again absent), but violence in the most literal sense. In one song, "soldiers fall like lumps of meat," in another, "the music of drunken beatings" fills England's alleys. In "The Glorious Land," the narrator inquires after the glorious fruit of England's land. The answer? "Deformed children."

Like everyone else, I'm still parsing this. The ethereal rush of "Glorious" is really a thing to behold, but the relationship between the music and the lyrical content is oblique.** When I feel like I identify a piece of the puzzle, I still fall short of a clear picture. I do propose that the presence of male vocals--not a large presence on England, though more so than on other PJ albums--explains something, even if I couldn't tell you exactly what. The same is true of the narration: more of these songs are in the third person, or are sung by a character distant from the action, than on any other Harvey album. Likewise, the anachronistic bent of Let England Shake's violence plays a role. The soldiers on this album died before Harvey was born; this is not music about Iraq.

However, I have decoded one of this album's building blocks, in its various allusions. I count four songs on Let England Shake with direct references to other songs--one sample, one borrowed lyric, and two recontextualized musicial phrases. There may be others, which I'd love to discuss in the comments. We'll go through the four corresponding songs, but first I want to make my point. Which is this: each referent speaks to the history of violence that Let England Shake is fixated on. Consider:

The xylophone on the title track, which opens the album. That line is lifted from--and this is genius--"Istanbul" by The Four Lads.*** The songs don't bare much resemblance. The xylophone is based on the chorus of "Istanbul," and the Four Lads tune is a catchy novelty unconcerned with human misery. But that song, with its generically exotic melody, notes that Istanbul was once Constantinople. The Lads don't explore this ("it's nobody's business but the Turks"), but "Let England Shake" seizes on the history. I think the reference is to the bloody Siege of Constantinople, during which the Ottomans defeated the city's Christian rulers, effectively ending the Byzantine Empire. Afterwards, Constantinople became Istanbul.

"This Glorious Land" begins with a familiar bugle call. Not so familiar that I can name it--perhaps you can help out? However, the bugle's presence, incongruous and seemingly off-beat, transports the song to the battlefield before Harvey even sings. Once she starts, it stays there.

In the last minute of "The Words That Maketh Murder" (see what I mean about the anachronisms?), John Parish begins to sing, "what if I take my problem to the United Nations?" PJ shortly joins him, and they duet over bottleneck guitar. It's one of the album's best moments. It is also--as any scholar of rock will note--a "Summertime Blues" reference. In that song--originally by Eddie Cochoran, later twisted into a definitive proto-metal version by Blue Cheer--the lyric goes, "I got to take three weeks/I got to have a fine vacation/I got to take my problem to the United Nations." While the song might seem to place faith in the mediating powers of the U.N., in the next line, a congressman ignores the narrator. In "Murder" Harvey and Parish adapt and deploy the line with great irony. On an album where violence mars each track, the futility of taking one's problems to the U.N. is a given.

Finally, the gentle slipstream of "Written On The Forehead" is propelled by a reggae tune. The song is "Blood And Fire," by singer/producer Niney The Observer. In a few short lines, Niney describes a world in which there is no water, only fire. The chorus, which Harvey borrows, is a chant: "Let it burn, let it burn." "Blood And Fire" concerns a day of reckoning, and the picture it paints ("judgment has come and mercy has gone"), compliments the moral world of Let England Shake.

In these instances, Harvey draws upon music that either suggests the violence she depicts, or else twists the music to fit her purposes (a bit of semantic violence, if you will). This is one thread of Let England Shake.

There are many others, which Harvey's dedicated fans will be unspooling for years to come. I'd like to direct your attention a lyric from "The Last Living Rose":

past the Thames River/glistening like gold/hastily sold/for nothing

My line breaks are approximate, but Harvey's words are exact. Even as her lyric reveals an immediate meaning, it seems to withhold some hidden intent. There's mystery in this line--my favorite I've heard in quite some time--and like the rest of Let England Shake, it invites close, repeated listens. I'm happy to oblige.

*While we're on the subject of these two albums: I'm willing to go to bat for the gothic White Chalk as PJ's absolute best, while I find that Stories is probably her only overrated disc.
**This isn't true, I'd say, of most of Harvey's work. I already mentioned Dry and Rid Of Me, both brutal in lyrics, delivery, and instrumentation. Even on "White Chalk," when a song was insubstantial, I think it bore similarities to the mental states that the album portrayed (i.e. on "When Under Ether").
*** Heather Phares of Allmusic pointed this out.

Critical Beatdown: Round 12.5

2011-02-22T16:36:00.001-06:00

The Strokes, "Under Cover Of Darkness"
NS: Forgive me if I once again choose to believe the hype. Contrary to public opinion, the Strokes never "fell off" per se (the first half of First Impressions Of Earth is amazing, if you bother to listen to it), but clearly Casablancas and Co. want to reverse-engineer their lo-fi roots. A dangerous proposition, to be sure, but this impressively busy track is capped by a delirious Albert Hammond, Jr. solo, a real scorcher. 4.5/5

AM: A song that masks its fear of failure in myriad hooks, none of which are given room to connect. The overstuffed but clean "Under Cover" zig-zags along, evoking just enough of what made the band worth listening to in the first place. 3/5

J Mascis, "Is It Done"
NS: Mascis has always been a great, quaky singer with an intuitive songwriting style, which is why his Dinosaur Jr. antics translate just as easily into an acoustic number like this. No telling what Lou and Murph could have done with this, but I'm glad when some fleet-fingered electric playing enters the mix at 2:34. 3.5/5

AM: Shot through with the sweet uncertainty that's colored Mascis' songwriting since "Repulsion." His fabled Jazzmaster makes a brief appearance, but the C&W twang in his voice carries this one. 4.5/5

Raekwon feat. Ghostface Killah and Jim Jones, "Rock N Roll"
NS: Nothing I've heard from the Wu crew lately has risen to the level of Raekwon's previous, but given Rae's perfectionist tendencies (which, unlike Dr. Dre, don't seem to demonstrate latent OCD), I have high hopes for Shaolin Vs. Wu-Tang, and lo: this song feels like a real return to form. Ghost is better than I've heard in forever, and even if the production isn't next-level, these guys never needed it. 4/5

AM: DJ Khalil's beat tries to marry crossover appeal with Rae's punch you in your face ethos, and ends up with neither. The central metaphor--of rock and roll being like crack rocks sort of in some way--is empty, and even Ghost and Rae wring nothing out of it. 1.5/5

XXXY, "Ordinary Things"
NS: It's not a song big on variation, nor is it likely to change the mind of House skeptics who feel these sorts of Mancunian dub-techno epics never really go much of anywhere. But if you like a good, ponderous type of music build, "Ordinary Things" will set ecstatic expectations nicely. 3/5

AM: This recombinant cut splices together the DNA of a Missy Elliot production with rubbery synths and chipmunk vox. "Ordinary Things"--which is borderline extraordinary--just keeps floating up and up. 4/5

Boris, "Party Boy"
NS: Another great female guitarist I forgot to mention in my piece on Marnie Stern: Boris' Wata, maybe the most stoic Les Paul slinger in Japan, possibly the world. "Party Boy" may sound surprising to Boris fans more accustomed to the band's drone metal roots, but there has always been a heavy pop psychedelic streak underneath all the fuzz, and "Party Boy" juggles both sides of the band's personality with ease. 5/5

AM: Acid-tinged bubblegum pop. "Party Boy" won't set your next social event on fire, but it's soft, burbling groove might freak out your neighbors. 4/5

Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues"
NS: I didn't like the last Fleet Foxes album, and this track sounds exactly the same as the first, but I don't want to be accused of contributing to the Internet hate, so I'll stop there. Except: is "If I had an orchard" the most boring rock lyric ever? 1.5/5

AM: After a very lovely intro, the predictably rustic "Helplessness Blues" runs its unremarkable course. Alas, Fleet Foxes are still in need of a Levon Helm. 2/5

Pusha T, "My God"
NS: As Pusha probably learned in his pre-rap days, sometimes the best recipe for a chorus is the simplest ("My God." Not much need for fancy wordplay there). This mixtape highlight is anchored by some appropriately reflective versage, but I still must ask (if you don't mind me pilfering a favorite TV show) Where the fuck is Malice? Huh? (Oh, he also has a solo joint coming out this year, never mind.) 3.5/5

AM: This mean march sounds like a Booker T & the MGs jam from the ninth circle. Pusha T raps better here than he did on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even if a few of his weird empahses are West-ian. His expression on the cover art--a sneer masquerading as a smile--really says it all. My god. 4.5/5

King Of Limbs: An Early Review

2011-02-18T07:13:00.008-06:00

I'm sitting here at 8:13 AM, having just downloaded Radiohead's new album The King Of Limbs, and I figured it might be cool to write some initial responses to this recently-announced joint (not a second of which I've heard yet). Hopefully by the end of this article my mind will be blown by yet another Radiohead album. Let's find out together which tracks are "Radiohead-good" and which tracks are merely "good." And who knows, maybe it will suck.

1. Bloom
A very claustrophobic electrics 'n snare number whose biggest hook is a constant looping two-note figure--it makes previous opener "15 Step," seem hard-rocking by comparison. The intensity of the piece reminds me a bit of Kid A, but it leans more toward the ambient material of that album. Imagine the track "Kid A" except sung at Thom's normal register. A weird start: I'm predicting more dub material from these guys, but will any song truly rock?

2. Morning Mr. Magpie
This picks up the speed a little bit, though the irregular drum pattern is similar to "Bloom," with some choppy, almost Afrobeat rhythm guitar playing. Yorke's voice is a similarly disembodied, oppressive thing, but there are two other parts to this track which interest me: one where the beat disappears altogether and Jonny/Colin Greenwood appear to be building up some epic springy guitar noise, and a brief coda at the end that transforms "Morning Mr. Magpie"'s irregularity into something danceable.

So, so far: two tracks that sound like the Liars.

3. Little By Little
There's a weird psychedelic sheen to the beginning of this song, with some crazy percussion and some "I Might Be Wrong"--type drop-D riffage (it occurs to me that so far this album is like Amnesiac to In Rainbows' Kid A, although these weren't products of the same session). So far, this is the best Yorke performance, the first where he doesn't just seem to be yodeling over a constrictive beat. The title "Little By Little" makes sort of sense--I hope this album gets a more liberatory vibe as it progresses.

4. Feral
Again, "Feral" isn't really what I expected, although it continues the trend of tightly-looped mood drums (when does Phil Selway get to play a 4/4 beat? Remember when they were all over In Rainbows?). In fact, nothing about this song at first differentiates it much from "Morning Mr. Magpie." But then, "Feral" builds into something different, a sort of synth-bass guided gospel harmony. None of these songs seem to have any real build-up--those of you who complain that OK Computer is too airless and unfriendly, I don't know what to tell you here.

On second thought, I'm hearing some of the background guitar noises (this album has a lot of subtle things going on in the background), and I'm definitely starting to get into this sound more.

5. Lotus Flower
This might be the closest thing King Of Limbs has to a single, and I believe an accompanying video is coming out today. Finally, Phil Selway is playing a regular beat, although there's still some electronic treating going on with that hi-hat. Yorke's vocals here are probably the best on the album so far--hell, I am literally listening as I write this, and this is already becoming one of my favorite vocal performances he's ever done. Lots of (non-synth) handclaps as well. More afrobeat guitar, and a chorus of lovely Thoms at the end. Awesome.

6. Codex
Finally, something approaching a rich, open piano ballad, something Radiohead writes better than anyone else (think "Pyramid Song," "Videotape," live versions of "Like Spinning Plates"). "Codex" is more of a solo Thom piece (I think), with some rich, funereal horn-playing, but don't confuse this with "Life In A Glasshouse," which was a far weirder brass number. This, by contrast, is more subtle, and more befitting of a band who have seemingly tired (who wouldn't?) of trying to always defy expectations. I'm getting into the groove of this album now--songs like "Codex" reveal how much sonic depth one often misses on first listen. Everything on King Of Limbs seems to be building toward some sort of manic conclusion...or will the album end the way it began, true to the cyclical style of its drum beats?

7. Give Up The Ghost
The piano ballad gets followed by an acoustic ballad (I'm not sure about the sequencing choices here), and a Neil Young-ish one at that. I imagine it's Jonny Greenwood on the acoustic (as he was on "Faust Arp") [EDIT: On second listen I think it's actually Thom on acoustic, didn't hear as much in the background last time], but there are some other things going on that may require a few more listens to parse (disclosure: I am listening to this quietly, as to not disturb my roommate at 9:08 AM, and this is the regular-quality version). If I'm not mistaken, Colin Greenwood gets some dubby lines as well. Where's Ed O'Brien throughout this record? Maybe I'm just unable to tell. Like when I first heard Kid A, I couldn't tell who would play what live, but then it turned out to by Jonny on the Ondes Martinet and Ed wrangling weird non-guitar noises that you couldn't really hear on record. Final verdict on "Give Up The Ghost": could've been on On The Beach.

8. Separator
Phil Selway gets his "Funky Drummer" on, slightly, and as I expected the album ends by letting a little bit of air out of the sails. "Separator" demonstrates the kind of tension/release schismatic that differentiates Radiohead from a band like the Liars, but there seems to be less of that than ever on this album. I'm sad to report that, as this is the last track, there is virtually no rocking to be had on the album in total (even In Rainbows had "Bodysnatchers"). To be fair, this is pretty close to the type of album I had imagined, as an extension of non-album tracks "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)" and "These Are My Twisted Words." Neither of those songs impressed me that much, but it's definitely a unique, new style that works within Radiohead's atraditional rock framework. "Separator" could use an extra coda or two, but I think I'll be able to decide that better once I really listen to this album's basswork, which will require a lot more parsing.

In fact, I think this might secretly be Colin's album. I'll update with more responses as they come to me. I can't imagine running out of things to say anytime soon.

EDIT: I'm already hearing whispers from certain Internet hiveminders claiming this to be the first honest-to-goodness Radiohead failure. To those I say: turn up your subwoofers. The proof of this album is in the bass tones, and having given it another listen, I find Colin Greenwood's parts (like the little bass coda at the end of "Morning Mr. Magpie") even more striking.

Critical Beatdown: Round 12.0

2011-02-17T13:18:00.003-06:00

Thanks to readers Peter M. and Corey S. for their suggestions. Another seven reviews--Round 12.5--are on their way soon.

G-Side, "Came Up"
AM: The violin loop is gorgeous, and these guys sound hungry. I can't really improve upon those ten words except to say: whatever real hip-hop may be, this is a fine example of it. 4/5

NS: Violin samples have often figured more prominently in southern hip-hop than on the coasts, and that may be because on a certain level southern artists are more comfortable drawing on regional blues and country sounds. Anyway, this track is a great introduction to G-Side, who are rapidly becoming one of my favorite new groups. 4/5

Low, "Try To Sleep"
AM: A gorgeous lullaby--and another entry in the Jason Pierce/Sparhawk family mutual appreciation songbook--until you listen to what Alan's saying. He's still got problems, but they're not of the songwriting variety. 4.5/5

NS: The song's title may unfortunately be a little bit more than a performative gesture--I've always thought terms like "slowcore" were stupid, but this is a slow, chimy motherfucker of a song. Sparhawk nails the vocals, but nothing else jumps out at me. 3/5

Cut Copy "Need You Now"
AM: Again cribbing from 80's dance music, but this time without the exuberance. This linear tune takes its time, never managing to assemble anything satisfying. 2/5

NS: I had an argument with my roommate the other day about vintage synths (yes, I live that kind of life). I said I had finally had enough of bands which fetishize a certain type of 80s sound, particularly the groups that people seem to like inexplicably (Cabaret Voltaire, Erasure). This song is only timeless in the sense that, no matter what year it came out, I would still find it tiresomely retro. And I generally like Cut Copy, which suggests I might be getting really old. 2.5/5

Das Racist, "Swate (Feat. Lakutis)"
AM: The beat's the sort of thing that MF Doom used to gravitate towards, which gives us a continuity of sorts in smartass underground rap. The weird (Bollywood?) samples and Ernest references are pretty cool, but, as any Doom fan can tell you, getting high all the time does not correlate with perfect quality control. 3.5/5

NS: This is probably the best track I've heard yet from Messrs. Racist (for me, "Luv It Mayne" maybe comes close), due 90% to Mike Finto's multi-tiered B-Movie beat. I find Das Racist's shtick hard to take some times (i.e. jokes of "White people do this, Indian people do that" variety), but this seems mostly reasonable. Plus, I might be crazy but I think I hear monster noises from Half-Life 2. Sweet (yeah, that's how I say it). 5/5

Britney Spears, "Hold It Against Me"
AM: Brit asks for forgiveness, wondering if she's coming on too strong, but the real sin of "Hold It Against Me" is that it doesn't hit hard enough. Co-producer Dr. Luke has said that this sounds nothing like his other productions, but that's disingenuous--this only works because it sounds like everything else he does. 3/5

NS: Reviewing a new Britney Spears track requires a balance between longstanding critical prejudices and basic ethical responsibility. I don't want to keep harping on the same point, but she keeps sucking. "Hold It Against Me" is very much of the Gaga school of goo-goo synths, making me long for the days when Ms. Spears' jailbait antics were at least accompanied by some slap-bass, or anything really besides this pre-recorded mush. Yick, this song sucks. 1/5

William Tyler, "Terrace of the Leper King"
AM: "Leper King" deftly explores its knotty landscape, evocative of medieval times or Middle Earth, maybe both. I wish the brass would've stuck around for longer, but Tyler's wandering guitar traces its own path. 4/5

NS: This is a long, plaintive acoustic piece from an expert Nashville guitarist, rich and restless enough to sound like an outtake from one of Jimmy Page's Bron-Y-Aur open-tuned epics. Don't confuse this for a wankfest like "Classical Gas," though. Tyler plays fast, but he knows how to write and he knows how to build six-string harmonies, and like the best Nashville players, he knows not to distract from the power of his own composition. 4.5/5

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, "Belong"
AM: The pedal hopping of "Belong" ditches the bookish popcraft of TPoBP@H's first album. Something's lost, for sure, but I won't pretend like I'm not enjoying the crunchy, Pumpkins-indebted riffage. 4/5

NS: I hear a bit of early 90s Britrock shuffle in this otherwise straightforward patented POBPAH anthem. The instrumentation leans a little bit too heavily on periodic bursts of distortion, and who knows what the singer is going on about, but I like how all the parts come together at the end. 3/5

Update: regarding the proper acronym for The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, the band have informed us that they prefer "PAINS"

Stop Caring About the Grammys

2011-02-13T21:26:00.007-06:00

Now that I've gotten that of the way. After a long day of plowing through some Derrida, I just started looking at some of the Grammy tweets, many of which are infuriating (lots of complaining about Justin Bieber not getting his props--are we in a parallel universe?). I mean, some people are seriously getting worked up over Gwyneth Paltrow and Eminem, with the former in particular inspiring an alarming amount of bitching that could be better aimed towards, say, the major music labels who use the Grammys as their one night to pathetically proclaim their relevance (or the corrupt and unfair standards of the RIAA, or the lax attention given to radio payola, or the Live Nation monopoly, or...). I also wanted to call attention to this tweet from critic Charles Aaron:
It's funny. I haven't been watching the Grammys and have no idea of what performance he's referring to. And yet no matter which way you read into it, no matter what the context might happen to be, I know this comment is bullshit. Of course, I would say that, having previously made the case that 99% of the time, references to "white people" in music criticism only serves the point of making the same three or four dumb-ass generalizations about whitey's lameness, inability to dance or rap, and "pretentious" (oh how my blood boils) taste in clothes, music, whatever (and also 99% of the time, Mr. Aaron excepted, these comments are made by white critics). I'll admit that an "inability to sing," along with dancing and rapping, is not normally associated with white people, and I'd be really surprised if Aaron could pull out any actual statistics proving that white pop stars, on average, sing more poorly than their black counterparts. I'd wonder, even, how individual singing ability is even measured (do you think Charles Aaron would make the same bitchy remark about Ian Curtis, were Joy Division transposed to this year's Grammys? Or Lou Reed?). And please, include hip-hop music with those statistics, because I personally think there are a lot of black rappers out there who also can't sing very well. There are also some who can. Really, there's no correlation, no point of reasoning behind this cowardly yet unoriginal sub-Mencia racial "observation."

Remember, this is the Charles Aaron who wrote the article "The Wayward Crucifixion Of M.I.A.," in which he passionately defends not only a weak-ass album which features this type of singing, but also M.I.A.'s right, as a celebrity, to not be called out on the incoherent nonsense she peddles in interviews and on Twitter (at least not without the right of retaliation via phone number dissemination). In that article, he wrote the following paragraph:

Such sputtering speaks to music critics’ increasingly chaotic thought process—a rush-to-refresh ticker of childlike enthusiasm, glib put-downs, presumptuous advice, false dichotomies, fantastical speculation, abrasive careerism masked as political rhetoric, and honest revelation marred by cloying narcissism, all in a desperate quest to churn out splashy content and escape irrelevance.

Nice list, I couldn't have put it better. "Glib put-downs," especially:
Oh, and I might as well quote this now:

Bottom line: Were their 30 better records in 2010 than Maya (or Vicki Leekx, for that matter, released well after Pazz & Jop voting closed)? Is Maya such a joyless slog compared to her earlier records, Arular (#2 in 2005) and Kala (#3 in 2007)? After all the authenticity litmus tests thrown at someone who was born in a war zone (which most of us couldn’t find on a map) by desk jockeys who practice a profession that’s basically a glorified work-release program, those questions remain moot. Too many people showed their asses. Back in August, I embraced Maya as a cause célèbre, but as the nonsense wore on, it became pointless to defend a record that people refused to hear.

Answers: a) More like 100, at least (and Vicki Leekx is much, much worse). b) Yes (absolutely). c) What authenticity litmus tests? (Journalists went out of their way to wring coherence out of her college sophomore anti-globalist cliche-speak!). d) Everyone listened to Maya, no one "refused" to hear it, and Maya still sucks hard. And just because you're the only critic still drinking the kool-aid doesn't mean you alone suddenly have a point. And it doesn't mean, if you like her music, that you need to defend the Palin-esque celebrity behavior that goes along with it, either.

Great Rap Verses #1: Goodie Mob, "Goodie Bag" (Cee-Lo Green)

2011-02-10T08:40:00.003-06:00

Available On: Soul Food (1995)
Verse: 2:03-3:45

First of all
I stand a little more than five feet tall
But we can still brawl nigga, I ain't scared at all

So begins one of the most epic "fuck me? Fuck YOU" slow builds in rap history, Cee-Lo's "Goodie Bag" verse, a furious cascade of words that should, even post-Barkley, remind the world what a great rapper Cee-Lo Green was before he decided to make amazing soul albums instead. I mentioned this track yesterday sort of as a joke, but I was being honest about that verse: like many of the great Andre 3000 extended enders (i.e. "Royal Flush," "What A Job"), Cee-Lo uses this track as an opportunity to go WAY beyond the proprieties of the other Goodie Mob verses, and I think this was by design.

Big Gipp, T-Mo and Khujo deserve major points as well, but this is obviously meant to be Cee-Lo's joint and the band acts accordingly. Cee-Lo luckily wasn't the star he was today, so it wasn't unreasonable that he would get a standout track without being thought of as the general focal point of the group. In fact, he barely figures in what some would argue is Goodie's signature song "Dirty South" (he sort of just hangs around in the background of the video, too). Like Outkast, Goodie Mob had the talent to rest a particular track on one emcee, or do a group track, and expect great things either way.

What makes this verse so great? I'll try to explain, even as I don't think I have a developed enough vocabulary (does that even exist?) to describe what I like most about the tricky rhyme scales and syllable-specific intonations and uniquely southern vowel stretches (my linguistic skills are, alas, not so cunning). Basically, what I like about it is that it sounds like Cee-Lo had a verse prepared, did it straight on the microphone, and then just kept going into the chorus after the words on the page were finished, eventually working himself into some kind of mad freestyle that culminates in a shared breath of relief from both rapper and listener (as well as everyone else in the studio at the time): "Oooooh, shit!"

This is remarkable for two reasons. These days, most popular rap songs have their individual lines dubbed, one at a time, so as to create the impression of an invincible rapper who need not breathe off-mic, and rappers can sound laconic as hell without having to worry about keeping that flow for the rest of the tune (in a way, hypemen perform a similar sort of function live). What's missing from that technique is the sound and character of breathing and pause, one of the most important tools in a rapper's arsenal since at least the days of Rakim. There's NO WAY that could be the case, though, with Cee-Lo's verse here. Particularly toward the end ("I'm comin' through, I'm comin through/Oooh I can't even stop"--3:25), you can hear him veritably gasping for air, getting more and more charged with a mad inspiration that prevents him from cutting himself off, but at that same time it takes a lot out of Cee-Lo, who doesn't have the virtue of laying one intonation after another digitally, leaving the cutting and pasting to the producer. Just look at the way he sort of gasps "We're from Atlanta (breathe) G (breathe) A (breathe)/That is where we stay": everything about the end of his performance here seems unplanned.

This brings me to the other reason the verse so intrigues me, which is that it seems to be a rare instance of a written verse subtly transforming into a freestyle, albeit a freestyle that still goes in on the same themes that Cee-Lo had been writing about throughout Soul Food. I think this poses a challenge for a rap critic, because there seem necessary differences in criteria between evaluating someone's freestyle (did he/she manage to get off some good lines? Was he/she topical, not repeating the same whack shit?) vs. written words (is the wordplay strong and original enough? Does the verse have an overall arc, or sound more like a grab bag of random thoughts?). Cee-Lo straddles that line, and in fact this track made me begin to question whether I was going about the process of claiming what was and wasn't a dope twelve bars all wrong. Part of the power comes from the delivery, but part of it also comes from cheering Cee-Lo on as he continues to top himself, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen bars in.

Cee-Lo's solo career now is strong enough that I don't mind him not rapping on his new album, but I do hope Goodie Mob gets back together soon, as their music has held up way better than almost anything else from the 90s (they have that in common with Outkast, too). Frankly, I haven't even gotten into why I like some of the other devastatingly cool lines ("I still swing low with the lumberjack/track" is a favorite), and maybe with time I can concentrate more on the words themselves. But with some people, delivery is king, and Cee-Lo's verse definitely requires at least two readings, even to scratch the surface of this mightiest of verses.

I would also suggest checking out "Git Up, Git Out" From Southernplayalisticadillacmusik and "Big Ole Words" from Cee-Lo Green Is...The Soul Machine for two other great Cee-Lo verses. Two among many. No rapper has ever stood as proudly "a little more than five feet tall" and still sounded so giant. Well, maybe Prodigy, he's like 5'6. Let's hear it for the short folk.

A Valentine's Day Playlist?

2011-02-08T22:21:00.007-06:00

I'll get to some more Glee-bashing tomorrow (Sandinista! will eventually get its treatment as well-- we have plenty of time). For now, I have a question to pose. On Valentine's Day, I plan to post a special Valentine's Rockaliser mix CD, and I need your help. Which of these themes sounds the most conducive to good music-pickin'?

1. The Ambivalent playlist: Either songs about how people don't feel strongly about love, or songs about how love turns you into a cowering, insipid cipher of a man/woman.

2. The Classic Valentine's playlist: Love songs are the cancer of popular music--they limit the functionality of other types of songs, multiplying and metastasizing to the point where you either buy into the madness unreservedly or resolve how actually meaningless and miserable life can be. Nevertheless, putting this together would take like two seconds.

3. The Anti-Valentine's playlist: Probably my least favorite type of playlist, as I don't want to be playing "Love Stinks" or an equally obvious number. That would just make me sound bitter and sullen!

4. The Songs About Unrequited Love playlist: Sound Opinions is doing that theme this week, so chances are slim. Still, if I had to choose, I'd probably just throw this song on nine times and call it a day.

5. The Aggro playlist: this would be a nonstop rush of the hardest-rocking songs I can think of, with no letup, no ballads, not even anything slower than, say, 130 BPM. Nothing to do with the holiday whatsoever. This is probably my personal favorite.

6. The "Goodie Bag" playlist: This collection of divergent tunes would probably include the Goodie Mob song "Goodie Bag," which has one of my favorite Cee-Lo verses (peep it starting at 2:03 America! I almost cried when I first heard this verse, it is so good). Don't know what else I would throw on it, but know that I listen to a lot of Souls Of Mischief and the Boys these days. And Dedringer.

Vote below. Or not. If you don't, I'll carry on as if someone cares.

EDITED: Does "Valentine's" normally have an apostrophe?

Glee Against The Music: Nathan Watches The Post-Superbowl Show (Part One)

2011-02-07T19:02:00.006-06:00

It might be said, many years from now, that Glee came to stand for the last thundering death rattle of the flouted, rotting corpse that was once the American music industry, eaten from within by its own preponderance for recycling easy-listening classicist junk, forced in a last-ditch rescue effort to brand American Idol groupthink onto a nation of impressionable high schoolers, dooming them forever to repeat the mistakes of "Don't Stop Believin'"--this may all come to be true. But for now, this FOX show, despite being a relatively recent joint, has become a substantial brand on its own, with overall revenue supposedly peaking nearly a half-billion dollars. Not only that, but the show has its defenders, too, some of whom should know better. Glee is a high school musical featuring no original music--basically, it takes the song-cycle structure of an American Idol episode, adds some plot in between to explain why the characters in the show are singing a particular type of music each week, and then throws into that mixture a weird veneer of self-referential humor. The result is supposedly insane spectacle (tonight's episode must have been the most expensive hour of scripted television I've ever seen) that masquerades as an after-school special, featuring high schoolers and teachers behaving suspiciously like characters in the Reese Witherspoon movie Election.

The music, or rather show creator Ryan Murphy's opinion on Glee's role in foisting music appreciation on the sullen youths of America, was what finally drew me to the show's post-Superbowl episode after doing a good job of avoiding it for 1.5 years. The show obviously wasn't made for me, and I didn't spend much time thinking about the type of people the show would be for (now that I have seen it, of course, that's about all I can think about). At its best, Glee turns even the best of tunes into pablum; at its worst, it does Katy Perry. And since none of the high school drama was going to interest me (John Hughes films mostly piss me off, to give you an idea) watching it was never on the agenda. But here I am, having been motivated after reading about something Mr. Murphy said, in the same article I quoted above:

Then there are artists whose catalogs are off-limits. Glee’s best-known rejection: Kings of Leon, who rarely license their music. Murphy’s message to nonbelievers the Followill brothers? “F--- you, Kings of Leon,” he says, raising the volume of his monotonal interview voice ever so lightly. “They’re self-centered assholes, and they missed the big picture. They missed that a 7-year-old kid can see someone close to their age singing a Kings of Leon song, which will maybe make them want to join a glee club or pick up a musical instrument. It’s like, OK, hate on arts education. You can make fun of Glee all you want, but at its heart, what we really do is turn kids on to music.”

[Another fun fact from that article: honorary Black Eyed Pea Slash also refuses to license his songs on Glee! Quoth the guitarist/whore: "Glee is worse than Grease, and Grease is bad enough." Wait a minute, didn't Slash and Duff KcKagan sign over the rights to the GnR name to Axl Rose back in the early 90s? And that's why Axl can go around with Buckethead and the like and call himself Guns N' Roses? Unless there are some killer Velvet Revolver dance numbers which will remain unaired...]

I was happy to see any article endeavoring to piss on KOL (as I'm sure their misguided fans call them), but my attention quickly turned to what Mr. Murphy offered in defense, honestly equating dislike of Glee with "hating on arts education." I beg to differ. In fact, I think it is perfectly appropriate to dislike Glee intensely on the grounds that it actively does a disservice to arts education. For everyone on the show, music serves one simple, grindingly capitalistic and utilitarian purpose--to provide a vehicle to celebrity. Nothing about this show has anything to do with the individual performance of music, of learning how to play instruments, of scenes where kids listen to tunes and jam with friends. All this show ever builds up to is the performance, the moment where musical catharsis transfers itself into the adulation and appreciation of an audience. People who will then be moved to start a billion dollar brand around your name. All without ever having to pick up a guitar. It's sort of sick, and it is entirely 100% accurate in showing how pop stars get ahead in America today.

Glee is not a show, I think, where music spontaneously busts out of nowhere, and in the background of a lot of shots you can see the background musician ably playing behind the handsome football jocks and comely cheerleaders (and yes, cheerful, bespectacled nerds) of the Glee club. Who are these people, and what are their stories? You don't even see them move in and out of the picture, they just sort of disappear when they're not needed. In particular, there's one bearded guy on the piano who keeps popping up everywhere. And what's the deal with the people who just stop playing their instruments sometimes, in the middle of songs? Why does one mohawked dude even bother picking up an acoustic guitar if he won't even acknowledge the other musicians?

I know, these are old man complaints. But they get at the heart of what makes Glee feel so wrong, so disappointingly appropriate for a generation raised on Facebook. Glee doesn't particularly seem to care about its characters, who constantly act is if stationed in Bizarro World, where sensible behavior is particularly frowned upon. Nor does music qua music get much respect--you never hear anyone talk about music except immediately before and after a number, and no one has any particular taste or style of music, any individual predilections at all really, that would be uniquely their specialty. It's a homogenized, Clear Channel vision of the Nü American songbook as a solution to America's Great Economic Woes, and don't even get me started on the show's take on high school cliques: it is in the football team scenes of this new episode that the true stupidity of this show really shines through. On the other hand, Jane Lynch has some funny lines. Tune in tomorrow when I break the show and its choice of musical numbers.

Marnie Stern and Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Guitar Playing

2011-02-06T11:05:00.005-06:00

I said this a few weeks back, but now I'll repeat it in bold for posterity: Marnie Stern is the best guitarist in America. She may not be the fastest, the most well-rounded, or the most technically-gifted player out there, but those were never criteria for judgment in the first place. Style and ingenuity, as well as a desire to play and sound different than anyone else in the game, have always mattered to me more than blues scale memorization skills, and she has a handle on the instrument that just seems clearer, more unique and eager to take chances than the exalted standard-bearers of 21st century guitar (we'll get to them in a second). And now that Battles has lost its singer and one if its key players, it's looking more like Marnie Stern is the last great practitioner of that most hoary of guitar tricks: fret-tapping.

When Ms. Stern does get the love she deserves, the props come almost exclusively from experimental and post-rock circles, the types that fall into the same tradition as Battles and its rough antecedents Don Caballero, Helmet and Lynx. These bands have all, at one point or another, moved past the label of "math rock," which really isn't that offensive of a term as long as you learn to associate "math" in musical terms with something entirely unrelated, namely "crazy irregular time signatures and manic, digressive drumming." Ms. Stern's closest collaborator Zach Hill came out of that tradition, having drummed for Hella and the Ladies and dozens of other poly-roly rhythm groups. Mr. Hill is the second integral component of Marnie Stern's latest album: to call such an dexterous dude a "drummer" is to call Albert Einstein a guy with some thoughts about relativity.

With or without Zach Hill's underground cred, there are other reasons why Ms. Stern won't be showing up on the cover of Rolling Stone or Guitar World anytime soon. For starters, there's that lack of a Y-Chromosome preventing her from symbolizing anything beyond token female guitarism, which is to say acoustic, feminized rock of the Joni sort. A few years ago, RS came out with its "New School Of Guitar Gods" issue, a typically embarrassing affair in which the heirs of Hendrix and Clapton were revealed to be cover stars John Frusciante (who started playing with the Chili Peppers in the late 80s), Derek Trucks (Allman Brothers royalty and the slipperiest slide player north of Gainesville) and John Mayer (have I mentioned yet today how much of a raving whore Jann Wenner is?). Also included on this list of up-and-coming firebrands: Tom Morello, Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood (paired needlessly, as usual), Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, and most alarmingly, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready from Pearl Jam. You might note that all of these people are firmly "of" the 90s. Only one female, Kaki King was featured, and she was probably the RS pick for blandly virtuosic coffeehouse offal (with some weird chords!). As usual, the message was: women are allowed to jam soothingly, acoustically, but they can't rock.

Marnie Stern's existence is a challenge to nearly every rock guitar tradition. For starters, she started playing seriously in her late 20s, which is almost unheard of for a professional musician (think of any artist at all who didn't start in their teens--all I get is Haruki Murakami). The fact that she could play as well as she does in general astonishes me, but it makes no sense that she hadn't been cultivating this style until a few years ago. Like language, musical literacy is best inculcated in the extremely young, and the fact that someone in their 30's can thrive, especially someone female and not 10 years old, shows that the spectrum of acceptable female roles in indie rock and popular music alike may have shrunk over time, causing a certain number of progressive-minded artists (I'm thinking of Janelle as well) to rebel against such stratified social roles. This is a good thing.

Fret-tapping gets a deservedly bad rap amongst guitar players with taste, but there isn't anything necessarily wrong it, as a concept. The technique, supposedly developed by Eddie Van Halen as a way to figure out a part in the middle of Jimmy Page's "Heartbreaker" solo, has seen its share of overuse, especially in the days of hair metal. Hardly anyone can do it well, and at the same time it is among the oldest of traditions for duff guitar players to add some wiggilty-wiggilty into the normalistic wahhh wahhh of blues solo-dom. Marnie Stern doesn't do anything like that. She is to fret-tapping what Zappa was to the wah-wah pedal, someone uses the notes as the vehicle for her ideas, not to show off. Her honesty comes through in her playing. If female guitarists are indeed "the new black," then Marnie Stern's music is perhaps the greatest argument for their New Prevalence.

Who are some other great female guitar players? No points for Kaki King, Joni Mitchell, or Joan Jett--it's time to get beyond the Rolling Stone mentality.

Sandinista!: Side Two

2011-02-04T10:57:00.003-06:00

With a cymbal splash, a word of truth
And a rocking bass and drums

7. Rebel Waltz
"Rebel Waltz" is perhaps the first real oddity of Sandinista!, following as it does the basic structure of a waltz with rudimentary guitar exercises, themselves harbingers of very un-punk echoey reverb. Add in a harpsichord, some strained, deflated horn parts and random percussion and you get an idea of everything there is to this song. I can hardly imagining listening to it except within the context of the album, but positioned as it is between the brassy "Something About England" and the breezy "Look Here," it sounds even more like a sequencing gaffe, which I only imagine is intentional on the part of the band.

8. Look Here
With jazz/heroin enthusiast Topper Headon at the helm, this speedy yet sensible take on a Mose Allison tune is another successful piece of genre-poaching, albeit still beholden to that patented Sandinista! weirdness sheen. The song begins with a chanting chorus of Strummers before Headon takes off double time, outpacing even Jones' bluesy fill-ins and Simonon's steady, laconic bass descent. It's not often that the Clash take time to "jam," and it's not exactly clear what (if any) extra musicians are banging on the piano and the marimba, respectively. Nevertheless, I still think it ends too soon.

9. The Crooked Beat
No one expected Paul Simonon to top a song as good as "The Guns Of Brixton" for this record, but it would have been nice. Unfortunately, "The Crooked Beat" is not only a significant step down from London Calling's greatest protest anthem--it's one of the worst songs on Sandinista! as a whole, and probably the album's worst reggae composition. There's something vaguely uneven and half-formed about Simonon's bass line, which of course is heavily influenced by dub, except this time it sounds as if Simonon lacks the timing to work a steady groove. His vocals are even more haphazard, and it seems as if either he or the rest of the band is having a hard time keeping time with everyone else. The organ and one guitar chord in the background add very little. On the plus side, the lyrics read well, as was the case with "Guns of Brixton."

10. Somebody Got Murdered
In addition to being the band's hip-hop ambassador, Mick Jones was about the only one left in the Clash interested in writing proper rock tunes, as Strummer and Simonon started indulging in reggae and Tin Pan Alley and the like. Because of this, "Somebody Got Murdered" is, believe it or not, the first rock tune proper on the album. Yes, that's ten tracks in from a band that once got its rocks out of the way immediately with "Janie Jones." There's not much to the song besides an exultant cyclical guitar riff and some placid, sweeping Jones lyrics, but that's enough to place it more in the company of The Clash than the reggae tracks which bookend it. In sum, a Mick Jones classic, although it's Strummer who really kills it with the backing vocals: "Someone's...dead forever!" This song might bother you if you don't like people using "someone" and "somebody" interchangeably.

11. One More Time
One of the Clash's most overlooked reggae tracks, this Strummer tune is perhaps not given its proper due given the bad residuals from "The Crooked Beat" (to say nothing of the confusing dub version that follows--more on that later), but this is perhaps my favorite Strummer vocal performance, arresting in its simplicity and full of odd enunciations (check out the way he mumbles the word "Kung Fu," for instance). His opening lines rank among the most heartfelt and authentic on the album--it might even be one of the best moments of the Clash's entire repertoire. As a piece of songwriting, the song doesn't do much but shuffle between two chords, and the reggae piano stabs are among the most predictable staples in all of reggae, but this time Strummer transcends the baseness of the material, and co-writer Mikey Dread's vocals are an intelligent addition as well.

12. One More Dub
Any residual goodwill left over from "One More Time" is once again seriously tested by "One More Dub," which in classic reggae fashion is a dub version immediately following the regular version of a song, as opposed to being appended as a bonus remix at the end. So, for our intents and purposes, "One More Time" basically plays twice, with the exact same vocal performance and instrumentation as far as I can tell. What are the operative differences, then? Brother, I'd like to introduce you to a little something called flange. "One More Dub" falls short of being a classic dub remix, but it's far from the most inexplicable sequencing choice on this album or even this side.

Tomorrow: Another songwriting collaboration with Mikey Dread, Another Strummer rap, and another slice of old-school anthemic Mick Jones rock. Plus, the search for "that great big jazz note that destroyed the walls of Jericho."

Rockaliser At 100

2011-02-04T06:41:00.000-06:00

Over the wayward course of the last 20 months, Rockaliser has gotten to its first big milestone: 100 posts. While Nathan and I make a point to link back to our writing when relevant, the level of self-promotion around here has never been very high. You’ll forgive us, then, if we rest on our laurels this once, and reflect on a few memorable posts.

Aaron's Choices
From The Rockaliser News Desk: King Khan and BBQ Break Up: The impetus for this was my friend’s email, which is excerpted in the post. Khan and BBQ’s antics sounded an awful lot like a break-up to me, but I wasn’t able to find out anything about it on the internet. I figured if no one was going to cover it, that I might as well share what I had. The comments section was the best part: the tour promoter weighed in, and Mark Sultan raged. I stayed up really late that night, fact-checking everything, refreshing the comments page, and reveling in how weird it all was.

Deleted Scenes From The American Indie Underground: I often have difficulty forming ideas that I feel are worth writing about. No such problem with this one. It turned out pretty well, but taken with the ideas offered in the comments, you have the outlines of a book nearly as worthwhile as Our Band Could Be Your Life.

A List Of This Summer's Jams: Sometimes I miss Rockaliser’s first summer, when things were a bit more freewheeling. A post that places Pavement’s R.E.M. song alongside The-Dream’s R. Kelly one? Why not?--just make sure to include the fragment of a failed essay. Things have gotten a little more formal since then, but I like this list of summer jams.

Eric Clapton’s Evil Speech: Occasionally, I’ll really enjoy writing posts for this blog (these two were the most fun, and pretty much wrote themselves). That was not the case for this 2,500 worder; I had about as much fun writing it as I would listening to a Clapton album. Since piecing it together (which took forever) I chanced across Clapton’s memoir at the library. The awful, troubling non-response contained in Clapton: The Autobiography made me even angrier.

Nathan's Choices
My Christgau Problem: I've never been very interested in going back and looking at the particulars of my writings (not the least because, like many, I tend to see little besides my mistakes, turgid attempts at humor, and failed sentences that could be half as long if I learned to edit myself), but I'm always curious when something I write engenders a passionate response, particularly from someone I don't know. This article, for instance, still gets new comments from time to time (Xgauians are a protective bunch, as well as a constantly Googling bunch), ranging from productive criticism to the more classical Internet-y rhetoric of "You suck, Christgau rules," which may also be a legitimate point.

On Why Cameron Crowe Is Often Incorrect: This article is a pretty clear example of what I often do on Rockaliser, which is harp on the most obscure and needlessly specific pop music minutia in Vox-like detail. The impetus for this particular piece came while watching Cameron Crowe's Fast Times At Ridgemont High, particularly the part where a character claims that the first side of Led Zeppelin IV is like an aphrodisiac for females. Having had some relatedly embarrassing experiences, I knew that to be basically untrue, and being the nerd that I was I put on In Through The Out Door instead, thinking that basically any other Led Zeppelin album works better as a make-out album than the punishing rhythms of the opening "Black Dog"/"Rock & Roll" combo. So that was basically my point, to which I added a bunch of jokes. Let it be said, though, that I still like Almost Famous, despite the cheese.

Ten Questions For The Lady Gaga Apologist: I had been confused for a while about the critical and commercial success of Ms. Gaga's music, which featured some of the most unimaginative synthwork and retrograde pop-isms this side of the Black-Eyed Peas (little did I know then, of Ke$ha). Seeing critics I admired declaring The Fame Monster a pop masterwork on par with Prince made me even angrier, and originally I planned some sort of extra-lengthy rebuttal, but realizing I had already run out of adjectives to describe how shitty this music sounded, I chose a different tack: why not ask people who liked her music to explain how and why they like it? Ironically, this gesture of attempted understanding was misinterpreted as an attack on the character of Lady Gaga fans. Nevertheless, I am still willing to bet my the whole of my reputation on the observation I made then, that Lady Gaga will be in ten years what Creed is to us now: an "I can't believe people used to listen to this" joke.

Frank Zappa's Ten Best Albums: I made this list because I couldn't find any list of Zappa albums that went much beyond the first few Mother Of Invention albums and Hot Rats. Lists are indulgent, obviously, and too often they are used as automatic traffic-boosters/collector's items, but at their best rock lists can at least point curious music fans in different directions than what they are used to. After writing this, a commenter named bnm responded that I had forgotten One Size Fits All, and you know what? He was completely right. Not including that awesome album in this list might have been the biggest mistake of my blog tenure. Another reason why Zappa will always be the bomb.

Sandinista!: Side One

2011-02-03T10:54:00.006-06:00

No expensive accounts, or lunch discounts, or hyping in the charts
The band went in and knocked 'em dead, in 2 minutes 59.

1. The Magnificent Seven
Beginning with what could reasonably be called the best three-second opening to an album ever (sorry Loveless), "The Magnificent Seven" doesn't just serve the function of being Sandinista!'s lead single and bounciest number--it also announces the recalibrated political and musical intentions of what had become, in the aftermath of London Calling, a band repurposed. The litany of societal complaints that Strummer spits over that most limber of bass lines (important to point out that it was not Paul Simonon playing on this track, and you can tell--he was a great player in his own way, but never that fast or precise) is more specifically political and more ranged than something vaguely apocalyptic like "London Calling," sounding at once like a cross between the domestic protestations of "Career Opportunities" and the globalist critique of "Koka Kola" and "Lost In The Supermarket." Sandinista! was the album where the Clash started to get really personal and political simultaneously, as the added length of a triple album allowed them to expound upon those issues at sometimes absurd lengths. It also helped, having absorbed the sounds and styles of early hip-hop, that Strummer found perhaps the most suitable vehicle for rattling off lists of grievances at a breezy pace.

2. Hitsville UK
You are unlikely to find a more unlikely sequencing contrast on the record between this and "The Magnificent Seven," as this collaboration between Mick Jones and his then-girlfriend (as well as--and this is important--former Meat Loaf collaborator) Ellen Foley begins with some unexpectedly lush synths before transforming into a propulsive yet simplistic pop number. Lots of unexpected chimes and motown guitars can be heard bouncing in the ether surrounding Jones and Foley's harmonies, and automatically you're thinking: this doesn't sound like a Clash number. The lyrics, however, ironically stake territory similar to early Clash single "Complete Control," in that it unceremoniously upbraids the record industry for its emphasis on non-musical brand packaging. But whereas "Complete Control" was an angry, vituperative J'Accuse moment, "Hitsville UK" gets by on its easy listening vibes due to the hopefulness of Jones' tenor as he alludes to the independent labels he loves and hopes for: "It's Fast Rough Factory Trade." This song is one of many on the album that gets significantly better upon repeated listens--if you don't trust me, trust the litany of individuals on the song's last.fm page who write "Yes, it did in fact grow on me!"

3. Junco Partner
The first of many, many reggae numbers on the album, "Junco Partner" belongs more or less in the "Revolution Rock" department of mid-tempo punky reggae feel-goodness, or something (it's a cover of an old New Orleans standard but demonstrates more of a debt to popular late 70s reggae artists in my eyes). Moreso than "Hitsville UK," this seems like the first significantly slight track on the album, and it's probably the first side's weakest. Nevertheless, there are hooks to enjoy, if you look--some crazy woozy violin filling in some of the sound gaps, and a bright vocal performance from Strummer, clearly steeped in the lyricisms as well as the aural space offered by the structure of this oft-covered song. At its best, "Junco Partner" is a bright reimagining, and at its worst it's listenable and engaging.

4. Ivan Meets G.I. Joe
Even before he wrote the piano line to "Rock The Casbah," Topper Headon had established himself as perhaps the band's best and most necessary player, despite his lack of songwriting cred (not unusual among punk drummers, although we all know the exceptions). This track, which I think was his first solo credit, is as awesome an opening shot as "The Guns Of Brixton" was, for Paul Simonon. Headon was dubbed "The Human Drum Machine" by Sandy Pearlman due to the drummer's metronomic virtuosity, and that ease with which he juggled rhythm and structure translate smoothly enough into the writing of this tough yet economic disco track. Lyrically, it's pretty good, too--the title is equal parts comic book imagery and cold war commentary, and like Elvis Costello before him, Headon posits some interesting parallels between dance music and globalized fascism. This is also one of Headon's best drumming performances on an album that contains a lot of sampled drum tracks and auxiliary session players.

5. The Leader
Some songs on Sandinista! sound more like incomplete snippets of longer tracks than full-blown verse-chorus type satisfaction engines. "The Leader" is another fascinating example of a song that, while feeling abridged and unnecessary, also comes off perhaps too pleasantly, and even more surprisingly, it finds an unexpected hook through the strange refrain "The people must have something to read/on Sunday!" It's a low-key rockabilly-surf number for sure, equal parts the Cramps and "Brand New Cadillac," and there isn't enough momentum to even sustain two minutes, but contained within the retro instrumentation lies a pretty sharp explanation of the social currents undergirding the Profumo Affair, where in 1963 a British war secretary was caught sleeping with the mistress of a Russian spy. Historical exegesis in rockabilly form doesn't get better than this.

6. Something About England
"Something About England" starts out as the kind of tinkly piano-rock that might best be compared to 70s radio stalwarts like Elton John, but I don't imagine Sir Elton ever singing about English anti-immigrant sentiment, especially with such loose-flying bile. One of the great things about Sandinista! is that it isn't reflective of one of those band situations where someone writes the "political songs" and someone else writes the "love songs" or one gets the reputation of being the John and the other, by elimination, is therefore Paul. In this case, Strummer and Jones each have their own pet political projects (as does Simonon, although he tends to be even more blunt), and by combining their concerns you get one of the most politically dense rock albums in the history of the genre. The tune, though ablated and somewhat empty-sounding, still makes its case in a rousing fashion as the tinkly pianos build. Great horn parts too.

Tomorrow: Strummer carries on the King Tubby tradition of immediately following a reggae song with a dub version of that same song, Paul Simonon half-asses his one solo shot, and a rare number in 3/4 time. Those of you waiting for some traditional '77-sounding punk will have to continue to wait. This will take a while.

Sandinista!: An Introduction

2011-02-01T23:02:00.004-06:00

A few days ago, I read an article about music on the Internet that made me mad. It did so by invoking one of the hoariest of music crit formulas: "[X-band] that everyone loves is actually not as great as [Y-Band], which fewer people love." The X-band in question happened to be one of my favorites, the Clash, and the Y-band was Mick Jones' post-Clash outfit Big Audio Dynamite (of this song, among others). Yes, it seems The Guardian saw fit to publish an article called "Big Audio Dynamite: More Pioneering Than The Clash?", written by Ben Myers, which advances its brave thesis statement with all the confidence of a prospective troll. Here's the passage that has inspired me to write about Sandinista! for the next few days:

For all the lengthy magazine retrospectives and weighty biographies that rightly claim the Clash were musical pioneers, there's also a strong argument to be made that BAD were more forward-thinking – or perhaps more of their time, more now – than Jones's previous band. Less confined by the constraints of rock'n'roll and determined to shake off the Clash's formidable legacy, Jones – the member who brought hip-hop into the Clash and wrote their sole No 1 single – set out to create a sound that utilised the emerging technologies used by dance and rap music and took a more multimedia approach to their presentation.

I've listened to the first few BAD albums, and I know the Clash repertoire fairly well (ask me about Cut The Crap sometime, preferably later), and this statement is simply not true. We'll start off by putting aside the possibility that BAD was simultaneously forward-thinking, of its time, and of now, and focus more on the Clash side of the equation. The Only Band That Mattered happened to matter as much as they did in part because they regularly escaped the "constraints of rock 'n roll", starting at least as early as 1978 when they released a really good reggae track called "White Man In Hammersmith Palais." Their beloved third album, London Calling, includes old-school rockabilly ("Brand New Cadillac"), ska ("Rudie Can't Fail"), advertising jingles ("Koka Kola") along with some of the most exciting punk tracks to ever grace my untrained teenage ears.

Even if the Clash had never made anything prior to Sandinista!, though, Ben Myers' statement would still be absurd, because by itself Sandinista! is one of the most expansive, diverse, dense, and downright creative displays of rock prowess ever to grace three LPs. Yes, there's plenty of chaff (particularly, as we'll see, toward the end), but even the most interminable tracks somehow contribute to the overall Sandinista! experience. No one has ever asked me what my personal choice for a "desert island" album would be, but for the last few years it has felt as if Sandinista! is the only logical choice: at 2 1/2 hours, it's one of the longest albums ever, and with 36 diverse songs to choose from I am far less likely to get bored than I would if I brought in, say, the first New York Dolls album.

Another reason I wanted to do a track-by-track is that I felt, reading reviews of this album on Allmusic and elsewhere, that most people ignore all but a few of the most popular songs, and thirty years later it's about time that someone has something to say about "Junkie Slip," even if it isn't much. So, with that in mind, we'll see what happens tomorrow as I turn over side one, aka "the side with most of the hits," including "The Magnificent Seven" and "Hitsville UK" among others. See you then.

*Why is it guitars that are always so restrictive of creativity? Why not the sampler, or the beabox? Every instrument has its limits...**
**...Except the Moog.

Solicitations For A Month Full Of Content

2011-02-01T10:08:00.003-06:00

Last year, there was M.A.R.C.H., and it was good. My distinguished colleague set a deadline to write a new blog post every week, which resulted in gems like these.

This year, I'll try something similar, but (in Mountain Dew parlance) more x-treme. It's called February (no acronym this time--I'm not a masochist). Starting today, you should see new content from me for an entire month, every day, sometimes a little at a time but hopefully enough to increase traffic around these parts.

I have some ideas and some writings in the pipeline, but any suggestions you have for music-related issues you'd like me to write about would be greatly appreciated (in the comments or through email). For the next week or so, I'm going to take the template of our track-by-track reviews and apply it to an older album, namely The Clash's triple album Sandinista! Why that overstuffed album of all albums? There are a few reasons, some of which will be explained over the course of this project, but it mostly has to do with its insane length and manifold genre-crosses. Given that there are 36 songs total on three records (amounting to six tracks per side), I'll spread out these reviews over the course of six days.

Otherwise, you should expect a review of Glee's post-Superbowl show (I'm no fan, but recent comments made by show creator Ryan Murphy re: Glee's contributions to music education have me thinking I should check it out). Given that it will be February, I suppose I should probably do something about Valentine's Day, but I'm not sure what--the only thing lamer then a Valentine's Day mix is an anti-Valentine's Day mix (maybe I'll just post this Replacements song, the only I can think of that qualifies as neither). By the end of the month, I hope this will all lead to one gigantic post which would be a grand, extended scholarly exegesis on the socio-political factors guiding Brooklyn music criticism, borrowing the template and some of the terms first posited by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen in this PressThink piece on the supposed political biases of the Washington press corps. This project in particular will be different from anything featured on Rockaliser so far, I think, in that it would be a less colloquial and more reasoned longer piece complete with footnotes and sources and the like. Interested? I can explain it to you in more detail upon request, and would love to get you involved.

Rockaliser Radio

2011-01-20T11:17:00.007-06:00

The Pazz & Jop poll came out a few days ago, but here's what you've really been waiting for: our first Rockaliser End-Of-Year Radio Rockcast (Feat. Polite Convo, Minor Disagreements & Technical Incompetence). Broadcast from the offices of alternative media collective Radiohive, Aaron Mendelson and I discuss our Top 10 lists, share the love for Grinderman and Big Boi, compare the relative merits of Trill OG vs. Bun B on other people's albums, laugh once more at the stupidity of Kanye's album titles, and throw in a few easy barbs at Eric Clapton for no discernible reason:

You can download the show here. My list in written form is here; Aaron's is here. Bonus: list number-crunching.

Thanks to Juell S. for sharing the Radiohive studio and my esteemed colleague for editing numerous cuing mistakes and long, uncomfortable silences. To our readers: would you like to see more of this in the future? Let us know--we do have the technology.

In case you're wondering, my voice does sound that distorted in real life.

Retconned Out Of Existence: Café Tacuba's "Revés"

2011-01-14T09:47:00.002-06:00

I have no love for Warner Music Group, the gargantuan family of record labels that has accused itself of copyright infringement, but I've felt particularly rankled by one of the label's recent decisions. It's a reissue that demonstrates greed, foolishness, or ignorance, and maybe all three.

Café Tacuba, the Mexican rock band, are one of my favorite groups. Since 1992, when the band released their first album, los tacubanos have crafted some of the richest, most engaging music on the planet. Their relatively recent Sino took on classic rock, and they typically fuse art-rock with traditional Mexican music. I've seen the group compared to Beck, The Beastie Boys, Talking Heads, Radiohead, and The Beatles. It's a credit to Café Tacuba's eclecticism, evolution, and stature that all of these comparisons have some merit.

Anyways, in late 2009 the Warner subsidy WEA Latina reissued the group's 1999 disc, Yo Soy. The single-album reissue was a strange move, since Yo Soy was originally released as one half of the double album Revés/Yo Soy. The reissue appeared to celebrate Yo Soy's tenth anniversary, and came with new album art and the requisite remaster. But that seemed idiotic--why no Revés?

In the past ten years, the Revés/Yo Soy CDs have become a collector's item--in mint condition they can fetch $200, and it's pretty difficult to find even a shitty copy for less than thirty bucks. How this came to be I can't say. Online vendors claim that it's rare, but I'm skeptical--I assume it was mass-produced, by earth's largest record conglomerate, in Mexico and the U.S., barely ten years ago. Revés/Yo Soy was reviewed in Time magazine, and won a Latin Grammy, but has somehow become scarce enough to justify a three-figure asking price.

Maybe WEA rushed out Yo Soy to fill this void, but retconning Revés out of existence was the wrong way to do it. While the two discs are substantially different, and originally arrived in separate jewel cases, their very titles ask for them to be considered as a piece. Revés translates as reverse, and Yo Soy is a palindrome, spelled the same forwards and backwards. The CDs actually identify themselves as disc one and disc two of the same set. And Yo Soy's "La Muerte Chiquita," a minor hit in Mexico, reappears as "M.C." on Revés.

The difference between the Revés and Yo Soy versions of the same song illustrates another point: the halves of the double album are quite different. Yo Soy contains the pop songs, breezy and subdued. There's some weird stuff, for sure--the lovely "Bicicleta" is 2 minutes and 36 seconds long, but split into 26 seamless tracks, and a few of Revés' motifs make an appearance--but it's the Warner-neglected disc that's really far out.

Revés is 50 minutes of instrumental music. It eludes easy description, but the playful experimentalism of Café Tacuba is on full display throughout. The planes of sound on opener "11" (most song titles are arbitrary numbers) fit together like one of Diego Rivera's Cubist canvases. On "2," Café Tacuba appropriate the ambiance and Carlos Alomar guitar of Bowie's Berlin-era instrumentals, infusing them with their jumpy melodicism. Aggressive drum circles appear throughout the album--"10" features nothing else, save for some whooshing effects and a vocal sample towards the end. Songs take idiosyncratic turns: acoustic guitar will be joined, then overwhelmed, by airy backdrops, and the abrasive passages and percussive breakdowns approximate the electronica of the day. "M.C." doesn't even feature Café Tacuba--it's a cover of "La Muerte Chiquita" by The Kronos Quartet.

Revés isn't Café Tacuba's best album, but it's a rich listen. It illuminates not just Yo Soy, but also points towards the stranger moments on 2003's Cuatro Caminos, sometimes called the group's Kid A. And Revés could stand on its own, were it ever released that way.

Artistic intent and fidelity to the original release aren't everything, but I see no reason why WEA Latina would neglect Revés, which is not commercially available in 2010, even on iTunes. Here's an instance in which a major label forces fans to illegally download an album simply to hear it. To which I say: fuck Warner Music Group, fuck WEA Latina, fuck the botched Yo Soy rerelease. I'm going to go listen to Revés/Yo Soy.

Ears To The Street, Eyes To The Sky: Nathan's Favorite Albums of 2010

2011-01-02T11:07:00.011-06:00

My personal favorite moment of 2010 music-related esoterica was while watching the Olivier Assayas movie 'Carlos,' when "Sonic Reducer" by the Dead Boys blared over Red Army terrorist Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann's (aka Nadia) car radio as she tried to outrun the Swiss border police. Anyway, here are my ten favorite albums of 2010, with apologies to worthy candidates like Gorillaz, Sleigh Bells, Liars, Neil Young, etc. I also still haven't heard 'Apollo Kids' amongst thousands of others so this list is as always subject to post-publication grafting.

1. Gil Scott-Heron, I'm New Here
A decade in and out of Rikers on cocaine charges has evidently failed to hinder the great poet's capacity for adventurous, cutting lyrical commentary, even as I'm New Here seems immediately and evidently a less political, more personal beast than many of his 70s funk classics. Everybody these days seems to be combining blues, jazz, rap and electronica, but Gil jumbles these elements as a means of evoking a specific locale--New York--exploring what the city used to be, what it is now, and what it could be, in dreams. As a recent NYC transplant, I find it sings with the expectations of an exhilarating, enlightened materialist take on urbanity. I'm New Here is brave in its sequencing: it ranges from acoustic Smog covers to tracks of brief recited verse to torch songs, all of which add up to a virtuoso deconstruction of popular American music, hip-hop, and basically everything else on the remainder of this list.

2. Janelle Monáe, The ArchAndroid (Suites II and III)
I've spent a lot of 2010 belaboring the point that The Archandroid is meant to contain the second two suites out of a total of four, so I don't know if it's exactly fair now to bestow such accolades on an ostensibly uncompleted work. But everyone must know by now how good The ArchAndroid is, and the level of energy and creativity that goes into potent genre-crosses like "Cold War," "Locked Inside," "Wondaland," and 15 others would be staggering enough even if Ms. Monáe wasn't already perhaps the greatest live performer in the world.

3. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty
Confession: Were it not for the lugubrious Jamie Foxx-assisted slow jamz business "Hustle Blood," this would be #1 on my list. Having scrutinized every errant Big Boi mp3 for years as Jive and Def Jam battled for this album's soul, it's wondrous to discover how deep and how virulent a strain of ear-crack this still is, no matter how old some of the tracks are. Song-for-song and verse-for-verse, Antwan Patton has improved his delivery and increased the breadth of his subject matter, and he demonstrates heretofore unnoticed insane skills as a producer. Andre 3000 may be our Prince, but Big Boi is our George Clinton, with the longevity and next-level rhyming skills (peep "The Train Pt. II") to match.

4. Caribou, Swim
Dan Snaith, aka the best Math PhD in the biz, has never done anything as awash in different forms of tension (something that dramatically sets him apart from his dance-y peers) as Swim. A track like "Leave House" starts off in DFA Land but veers into something scarier, more minimal; a track like "Kaili" messes with the parameters of balladry and atmosphere in a way that seems...well, mathematical. And, as my colleague intimated, "Odessa" has the opening firepower of a "Born Under Punches," which is to say this is a finely-tuned audio experiment, every note and motif carefully applied, that also happens to be enjoyable to listen to.

5. Nü Sensae, TV, Death and the Devil
Vancouver is one of many hubs in Canada for some of the best hardcore punk being produced in the world today, but what separates Nü Sensae from heavyweights like Fucked Up is that they bring a simplicity that outstretches even the earliest conceptions of the form--no epic guitar overdubs here, just distorted bass and drums and some searing lady vocals on top. Almost every track on TVDATD provides a different kind of amphetamine rush despite/because of this simplicity. This album isn't diverse, it's obverse--every idea the band has, they throw it in your face.

6. Freddie Gibbs, Str8 Killa EP
Gibbs, as far as I know, is the first rapper of note to come out of Gary, Indiana (apparently the Hoosier State has traditionally been short on lyrical talent), and the perspective he lends, coming out of a city with the highest percentage of African-Americans in the country (to say nothing of a significant pop dynasty), is unique--but that alone doesn't sum up why the 35-minute Str8 Killa sounded so much better than most longer players (in both senses). Gangsta Gibbs has the flow and deep register of a young Tupac, and songs like "Str8 Killa No Filla" and "National Anthem (Fuck the World)" are direct and high-energy examples of no-bullshit hardcore hip-hop. At EP length, this is a chaff-less debut from a unique, perhaps needed new voice.

7. Grinderman, Grinderman 2
Grinderman and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, respectively my favorite albums of 2007 and 2008, still hold up better as collections of discrete middle-aged ramblings, but neither hit as hard as Grinderman 2, which takes the Nick Cave persona down unpaved paths of absurdity and self-flagellation as the band truly masters the idea of fuzz-as-feeling ("Worm Tamer") and makes occasional lapses into California stoner rock (see: the last half of "When My Baby Comes").

8. Marnie Stern, Marnie Stern
Up to now, one could enjoy Marnie Stern's music without really understanding what she was trying to do. Is this experimental mathcore, just intense rock tunes with insane drumming, or what? Her new self-titled release helps simplify what we should have known all along: Marnie Stern makes guitar records, and Marnie Stern is a great guitar record, and (on an unrelated note) Marnie Stern is the best guitar player in America. Quote me on that if you want, or just listen to the first twenty seconds of "Nothing Left," and see if it doesn't give you goosebumps like the end of "Cinnamon Girl."

9. OFF!, The First Four EPs
I found it hard to listen to The First Four EPs at once without unconsciously comparing the furious hardcore within to Black Flag's collection The First Four Years, which featured all of the early material recorded when Keith Morris was the singer. Now Morris, who formed OFF! with former members of Redd Kross and Rocket From The Crypt, is doing basically the same thing he did with Black Flag and Circle Jerks, and yet OFF! never sounds like a throwback. But that's the beauty of early 80s hardcore, in a way--elements can be appropriated and diluted by all the pop punks in the world, but the original core sound is always conjurable, and always compelling.

10. Cee-Lo Green, The Lady Killer
If the tunes weren't this good, I would complain that Cee-Lo needs to rap more. And he does, but The Lady Killer proves his cartoon soul croon to be just as mighty and flexible an instrument. "Fuck You" was deservedly a big hit, impassioned and thoughtful enough to bypass some (but not all) of the music industry's censorious forces, but the other soul homages, stretching from the North Philly sex-beat of "Fool For You" to the aggressively hooky Motown "It's Okay," are just as criminally relistenable, one after the other. Even the Band of Horses cover at the end has the air of a slow jam classic, and I still listen to it all the time.

Aaron's Favorites, 2010: Always Never Not Giving A Fuck

2011-01-01T13:40:00.003-06:00

With apologies to Let's Wrestle, who's fantastic In The Court Of Wrestling Let's has been deemed ineligible, Aaron's 10 favorite releases of 2010:

1. Beach House, Teen Dream

A diffuse, gorgeous sound world. Listening to Alex Scally's guitar unfold over Victoria Legrand's vocal and keyboard melodies is the most enveloping, elegant narcotic on the market.

2. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty
Big Boi just wanted to make an album. Label trouble delayed it for years and kept Andre 3000 away. Whenever it was released, Sir Lucious Left Foot's virtuosic mic acrobatics were never really in doubt. But who could have predicted an album this joyous, this gleeful about the possibilities of funk?

3. Crime In Stereo, I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone
On their swan song, the Long Island group construct a violent, fractured punk. This is "melodic hardcore," but there's little melody here. I hear only fury--in the controlled explosions of the tempo, in the anguished dual vocals, and in the eviscerating guitar textures.

4. Caetano Veloso, zii e zie
The Brazilian master, now 68, cracks open his skull and lets us take a peek inside. The contents--languid, martian jams, which Veloso has termed transambas--are no surprise, and yet he makes each moment sound like a revelation.

5. The-Dream, Love King
The synthesizer symphonies of Love King are a letdown after last year's genius Love Vs. Money, but only just. Dream's music remains the platonic ideal of contemporary R&B--effortless, immediate music, with quirks and charms still revealing themselves months later.

6. Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
A fascinating and uneasy mix of West's egocentric philosophizing and terrible humor with the collective ennui of the group vocals, always popping up to comment on the action, as in Greek tragedy. The production is, of course, next level--dizzying, colorful collages of sound that pulse and thump with tenacity.

7. Das Racist, Sit Down, Man
Overheard on Sit Down, Man: "We just like rap, we don't even need rap." Maybe so, but rap needs Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez, at once laconic and whip smart, and surely the first hip-hop group to make eating nachos and reading critical theory sound ill as hell.

8. Grinderman, Grinderman 2
This unholy alliance of Nick Cave and a trio of the baddest seeds don't yet rival their day job band, but damn if they're not coming close. The Grinderguys pound out a strain demonic blues-scuzz you thought they didn't make any more.

9. No Age, Everything In Between
All indie-rock should sound like this: flurries of fuzz and hooks. The album gets stuck in an ambient ditch for a few tracks, but No Age can shred and transcend at will, and even sneak in a couple mid-tempo stunners.

10. Tame Impala, Innerspeaker
A big, groove-oriented psychedelic record in a year when even Dungen disappointed. The reverberations and acid-tinged flow of Innerspeaker aren't just retro signifiers though, they're the building blocks of 2010's most immersive sound.

Eric Clapton's Evil Speech

2010-12-22T21:55:00.004-06:00

There's no mention of Eric Clapton on this blog. That makes sense--Clapton is not an especially relevant figure, and any honest assessment of his recent work must note how terrible it is (my dad occasionally buys Clapton releases, and this is certainly my impression). With a few exceptions, I don't care for his music, which I find boring and devoid of meaningful emotional content. Basically, I dislike Eric Clapton because I dislike Eric Clapton's music.

Recently, however, I came across a Clapton quote that almost defies words, and a very good reason to dislike Eric Clapton as a human being. It's from a 1976 concert in Birmingham, Enlgand:

Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. Wogs I mean, I'm looking at you. Where are you? I'm sorry but some fucking wog...Arab grabbed my wife's bum, you know? Surely got to be said, yeah this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like, just disgusting, that's just the truth, yeah. So where are you? Well wherever you all are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. You fucking (indecipherable). I don't want you here, in the room or in my country. Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch's our man. I think Enoch's right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking [indecipherable] don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don't want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country, what is happening to us, for fuck's sake? We need to vote for Enoch Powell, he's a great man, speaking truth. Vote for Enoch, he's our man, he's on our side, he'll look after us. I want all of you here to vote for Enoch, support him, he's on our side. Enoch for Prime Minister! Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white! [source]

It's an unusually clear statement of principles. You might note that an anti-immigration position doesn't necessarily imply racism, but that's an irrelevant argument here, given the torrent of racial slurs and white supremacist rhetoric.

Enoch Powell, incidentally, was a right-wing British politician, most famous for his "Rivers Of Blood" speech, which decried immigration to the UK in the harshest possible terms. In the speech, Powell, an M.P., quoted a constituent as saying "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man." Powell's assessment of that man was that he was "a decent, ordinary fellow-Englishman." The Times, not a liberal paper, called it "an evil speech."

Clapton came out of his would-be stump speech for Powell looking terrible, but he has remained unrepentant about his words. Later in 1976 he gave an interview to Sounds magazine, in which he says:

I thought it was quite funny actually. I don't know much about politics. I don't even know if it would be good or bad for him to get in. I don't even know who the Prime Minister is now. I just don't know what came over me that night. It must have been something that happened in the day but it came out in this garbled thing... I thought the whole thing was like Monty Python. There's this rock group playing on-stage and the singer starts talking about politics. It's so stupid. Those people who paid their money sittin' listening to this madman dribbling on and the band meanwhile getting fidgety thinking 'oh dear'.

There's nothing funny about incitements to racial violence. Clapton's attitude--that the incident was a big joke, what does he know he's just a rock star?--is deeply irresponsible, and it's a small miracle that no one was injured in Birmingham that night. It's a lame excuse anyway, since nothing in the Clapton persona suggests Pythonesque wit. Still, the Sounds interview gives Clapton a free pass. Barbara Charone barely mentions Clapton's comments, and does not quote or give any real indication of the content of his remarks. She attributes the comments to honesty on Clapton's part. Her selective take on Clapton's words is as follows:

Unlike other artistes of his stature, Clapton can't be bothered to disguise true feelings or adopt phony attitudes.

So one night in Birmingham someone said something that triggered off an unexpected part of Clapton's rowdier personality. Maybe it was the drink. Maybe it was just a bad day. But it was so human and typically Eric. How many times have you gotten a bit drunk and spouted out great truths and philosphies only to later blush the next morning?

Charone's excuses are logic-challenged--maybe he's just too honest! Sure, Eric just got drunk and said crazy, racist shit--but who doesn't! Let's laugh about it! Later in the article, Charone, jokingly and to Clapton's face, pins responsibility for his words on "the Arabs," probably a reference to the beginning of his diatribe. Clapton takes her bait, and criticizes Arabs for spending their riches poorly: "they're sinking a lot of money into England and we'll probably regain if we're clever enough. Then they'll have to go back and discover more oil." (No evidence of a rapier wit there).

Clapton and his apologists attribute his animus toward Arabs to a member of the Saudi royal famly taking a pass at his wife. Though Clapton was no stranger to adultery, one can understand his offense at a royal harassing his wife. Yet Clapton's actions blame all Arabs for the behavior of only one, as if his actions came from an inborn predisposition. That is essentialism. It's also present in his rant about "disgusting" foreigners, in which he names only dark-skinned immigrant groups. Clapton mentions one incident of a foreign-born person acting crudely, and extrapolates to the point where he can believe that "this is what all the fucking foreigners and wogs over here are like."

Imagine for a moment: what if a young Prince Charles had made eyes at, say, Jimi Hendrix's wife? Would Hendrix then be justified in vocally hating all white people? Would he be justified in advocating that all Britons be barred from entering Washington State? Would we stop short of calling his comments racist, since he collaborated with many white musicians?

The comparison is imperfect, but I think it illustrates the point: those things are unimaginable--Hendrix would have been labeled a Black Panther and his career as a crossover artist would have been toast. But let's pretend Jimi Hendrix did do those things, and then spouted a hateful, nativist jeremiad, and ask a question more to my point: would the music press then explain away and ignore his hateful outburst?

Because that's what has happened with Clapton.* On the one hand, there are the apologists. One of them is Harry Shapiro, who in 1997 published a book about Eric Clapton, Lost In The Blues. His book discusses the controversy, but charitably refers to Clapton's hate speech as a faux pas. Shapiro prints a story, told by Clapton, in which he was approached by a Rastafarian two years after his Birmingham rant, and asked if he hates blacks. Clapton told him no. The guitarist is then quoted as saying "what started it, was the upsurge in London of Arab money-spending." Shapiro adds, "there was a story that one particular Arab had made a grab for Patti, not guaranteed to endear them to Eric at all."

The use of the guitarist's first name betrays the sympathy Shapiro has for his subject, to the exclusion of other concerns. He also dismisses the incident in subtle ways--Rock Against Racism, formed in response to outbursts like Clapton's, is just a "left-wing group"; he complains that the "publicity surrounding the controversy tended to overshadow what was a fine tour"; and, most tellingly, Shaprio devotes less than a page to Clapton's comments and their fallout.

Clapton has other apologists. The comments on this post at the website modernguitarplayer.com demonstrate the attitude some fans take. Clapton, they say, is a man steeped in black American music who has worked with many African-Americans. This makes racism on his part impossible. Commenter BluesRockGuitarist captured this disbelief well when he wrote "how can you say hes racist? One in his good friends is Buddy Guy.. which is black and BB King which is also black." That was written in July of this year. You can almost hear the thought process--but some of his best friends are black! But then, prejudice towards certain racial groups doesn't imply prejudice towards all non-white peoples.

On the other hand, Clapton has faced few questions about his words in Birmingham in the past 34 years. Most damning has been Rolling Stone's fecklessness. The magazine's efforts to promote Clapton in recent years include a 2009 cover story (with Jeff Beck), naming him as the fourth greatest guitarist of all time, and including eight albums featuring Clapton in its list of the 500 greatest LPs of all time. Only The Beatles, Dylan, The Stones, and Springsteen, have a larger presence on the list.

This fulsome praise has not been tempered by a willingness to ask Clapton difficult questions about his past remarks. A search of "enoch powell eric clapton site:rollingstone.com" turns up zero instances in which the magazine has brought up the incident. Indeed, I can't even turn up an example of Rolling Stone mentioning Powell, apart from Clapton. In the magazine's 1991 Rolling Stone Interview with Clapton, James Henke doesn't avoid questions about the guitarist's recently deceased son, but never mentions the 1976 incident. Rolling Stone seems to have completely painted over the incident. I can't say for certain that the magazine has never covered the subject, since I can't afford to pay for complete access to its archives, but if they've ever asked the difficult and obvious question to the fifty-third greatest artist of all time, they're hiding it well. I imagine that the business relationship between Wenner's publication and Eric Clapton--Rolling Stone helps sell Clapton records, and Clapton helps sell magazines and keeps boomers renewing those subscriptions--would suffer were he to take issue with the magazine.

Clapton has given many interviews since 1976--including the Sounds puff piece--but very few of them touch on his views on immigration. On Twitter, I asked Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot why he didn't ask about the Birmingham incident when he spoke with Clapton in 2007. Kot responded "His standard answer: He was high/drunk in '76. Hard to argue." I find this difficult to swallow, if factually correct. Fellow Twitter-er flightjkt wrote "apparently @gregkot has never heard the phrase 'In vino veritas'," and I'm with him--drunken, anti-immigrant hate speech doesn't come from nowhere. Allowing Clapton to control the conversation by simply avoiding the issue is to cede victory to him. Such has been the complicity of critics.

Those of you who have made it this far down may be wondering "who gives a shit about something Clapton said over three decades ago?" It's a good question, if in fact anyone is still reading and thinking that. I find the comparison with Elvis Costello is illuminating. Unlike Costello--whose comments were wrong, but considerably less vitriolic--Clapton has never apologized for his stance. In fact, he's reaffirmed his words, and reiterated his support for Enoch Powell multiple times. Wikipedia features this astounding paragraph at the bottom of its Clapton page

In a 2004 interview with Uncut, Clapton referred to Powell as "outrageously brave", and stated that his "feeling about this has not changed", because the UK is still "... inviting people in as cheap labour and then putting them in ghettos." In 2004, Clapton told an interviewer for Scotland on Sunday, "There's no way I could be a racist. It would make no sense". In his 2007 autobiography, Clapton called himself "deliberately oblivious to it all" and wrote, "I had never really understood or been directly affected by racial conflict... when I listened to music, I was disinterested in where the players came from or what colour their skin was. Interesting, then, that 10 years later, I would be labelled a racist... Since then, I have learnt to keep my opinions to myself. Of course, it might also have had something to do with the fact that Pattie had just been leered at by a member of the Saudi royal family." In a December 2007 interview with Melvin Bragg on The South Bank Show, Clapton reiterated his support for Enoch Powell and again denied that Powell's views were "racist".

In other words, Clapton's position remains unchanged. The racial slurs have disappeared, and Clapton has been sporadically confronted, but he has never apologized for a single slur. He may find it "interesting" that he was labelled a racist, but I find it inevitable, given that Clapton self-identified as a one in front of an auditorium. But, let's let his words speak for themselves: "Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white."

Clapton's reaffirmation of his rant and continued support for Powell should have ignited further investigation, a campaign to bring hate speech to task. And still, the music press continues its campaign of quiet complicity.

There is no better summation of these events than the one I found on a white supremacist message board. On it, a poster wrote, "it would appear Eric Clapton is one of us".** If he's not, Eric Clapton has left the door open to that interpretation.

*This is not what happened with Elvis Costello or Public Enemy. Costello, who made an ignorant remark about Ray Charles, has apologized for his actions and worked with Rock Against Racism. Costello's remark--hateful, but mild compared to Clapton's words--is still a topic of conversation, including in a recent New Yorker profile. Or even compare Clapton's case to Public Enemy's. They have been dogged by questions about antisemitism since the early 90's--and rightfully so, given Professor Griff's statements, and some questionable lyrics. In both these cases, prejudiced statements have became an important part of the artist's career history, something Clapton has escaped.

**I'm uncomfortable with the idea that my blog could be sending traffic to a white power website, so I chose not to link this. If you provide your email in the comments, I will email you the link

Critical Beatdown: Round Eleven

2010-12-14T21:37:00.003-06:00

Ghostface Killah, "Together Baby" 
NS: The soul sample that accounts for the title of this song shows up haphazardly, sometimes mid-verse, and is otherwise unrelated to the Supreme Clientele-hearkening free-associative carnage contained within. Ghost has seemed less slapdash than this before, but not in the past few years. 4/5

AM: The jarring transition from the soulful chorus to the sub-RZA minor key verses--produced by someone called Yakub--is terrible, and Ghost, who just a few years ago attacked his beats so hard he sounded breathless, just seems bored. 2.5/5

PJ Harvey, "Written On The Forehead" 
NS: Overlaying Church harmonies and vast, Enya-esque synthmospheres with reggae beats isn't something I'd normally associate with Ms. Harvey--particularly not as the first single to an album ostensibly called Let England Shake. The song works, of course, as I think all PJ Harvey songs basically do, but there's still a lot of concentrated weirdness to unpack. 4/5

AM: The most ethereal thing Harvey's ever recorded, and by some margin, "Written On The Forehead" sounds less like a song than a collection of noises drifting in from outside. In less than four minutes the song achieves a quiet rapture, and the effect is the sort of thing many artists spend a career chasing. 4.5/5  

David Lynch, "Good Day Today"
NS: Speaking of weirdness..."Good Day Today" bears the stamp of Lynch's previous collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti, but this is obviously far housier than anything you'd ever hear on Twin Peaks. Lynch's lyrics are deceptively simple and childish, as we'd expect, spicing up the otherwise generic but still-rousing technobeat. 3.5/5

AM: For his first single, the director has transposed his oddities to the world of music. Over a throbbing synthesyzers and a drum machine, Lynch wrestles with the themes that appear in his work ("So tired of fire"), his vocals heavily processed. His delivery is arrhythmic--a proper R&B singer could have a hit with this--but the chorus is arresting in its simplicity. 4/5

Daft Punk, "End Of The Line"
NS: I have understandable expectations for Tron: Legacy (Jeff Bridges is in it, which is cool, and the dialogue couldn't be nearly as bad as the 1982 original, right?), but I have been really excited to see how Daft Punk's score underscores the onscreen video game action. "End Of Line" is about exactly what I imagined, but that doesn't make it any less exciting. Compared to the rest of the movie, anyway. 3.5/5

AM: Is a song that builds to something considerably less exciting than what it promises a success? Not in the case of "End Of The Line," which has the Detroit techno nods but not the radiant pop-funk workouts that color the group's best work. 1.5/5

Destroyer, "Chinatown"
NS: Not sure this sounds like any Chinatown I've ever been to--I can't remember the last time a Destroyer song has gone down this smoothly (and my lord, those saxophones shouldn't be as effective as they are). If I had to compare this to anything, it would be the melodic yet dance-y spaciness of The The's Soul Mining. In other words, I have to give this a perfect grade. There's literally nothing wrong with it. 5/5

AM: Huddling amidst the gauzy atmospherics, Bejar has rarely sounded more desperate as a singer. But as a songwriter he's flexing muscles I didn't even know he had--the female vocals and back-alley saxophone are both new to the insular world of Destroyer. This is Bejar at his best: inscrutable, yes, but also genuinely mysterious. 5/5

Bernard Sumner, Hot Chip and Hot City, "Didn't Know What Love Was" 
NS: I'm going to keep singling out these group collab tracks written for Converse commercials, not because Sumner and co. are particularly deserving of my ire, but because "What Love Was" provides a solid demonstration of what a song written for commercials sounds like. It's not as good; it's also a mish-mash of New Order's worst early 90's tendencies. 1/5

AM: I have not idea how this was composed, but it resembles a Hot Chip track--and this one, like the others I've heard, sounds like a sleepy version of New Order--with Bernard Sumner singing over it. It's alright, slightly too busy, but mostly it just makes me want to put on "The Perfect Kiss" or "Age Of Consent" or "Bizarre Love Triangle" or... 2.5/5

Aaron Listens To The Hits, Vol. 2

2010-12-05T12:26:00.003-06:00

About 18 months ago, I listened to the the Top 10 songs on Billboard's Hot 100, and offered my thoughts on them. I've meant to revisit the project on numerous occasions, but haven't followed through. At one point, half of the Top 10 was so nauseating that I considered doing the UK Top 10 instead, only to discover that it was just as awful. But with that behind me, it's time to check in with the pop landscape...

Billboard Top 10, Issue Date December 11, 2010
1. Pink, "Raise Your Glass"
A while back, I read something by (I think) Maura Johnston that really nailed the Pink persona. Pink plays the rebel, Johnston noted, but her music always remains just pop enough to score success among the fans of the artists she's supposedly edgier than. "Raise Your Glass" is a good example of that, a song that celebrates outcasts but that will sound at home on Top 40 and Adult Contemporary stations. Musically, there's nothing to object to: this is assembly line Max Martin pop, assembled well. 2.5/5

2. Katy Perry, "Firework"
After the coy, annoying single and the prom night single, the good folks at EMI have deigned to grace us with the inspirational single. This minor Perry, even considering that all Perry is minor Perry (I say this as a fan of "Hot N Cold"). "Firework" sounds too small to achieve grandeur, and Perry, lacking a set of pipes like Mariah's, can't carry the chorus convincingly. 2/5

3. Rihanna, "Only Girl (In The World)"
Rihanna has reached a point where her hits resemble other Rihanna hits, and "Only Girl (In The World)" shares some of the DNA of 2007's M.J.-sampling "Don't Stop The Music." "Only Girl" isn't nearly as compelling, but it shares the sense of anxiety and merciless dancefloor stomp. Rihanna's still not a great singer, but she's distinctive, which can be just as good. 4/5

4. Bruno Mars, "Just The Way You Are"
We covered a Bruno Mars guest spot in the Beatdown, and I have the exact same feelings about this that I did about "Nothin' On You." It's lite rock with percussive nods to hip-hop. Let's not get into the lyrics: this is pure treacle, no way around it. 1/5

5. Rihanna feat. Drake, "What's My Name"
On the fantastic "Rude Boy," Rihanna was a woman out to get hers. I can't help but hear "What's My Name" in the shadow of that jam, and in comparison it sounds docile--"You're so amazing/you figured me out" is not a lyric I ever want to hear, especially about a dude who provides a verse as lazy as Drake's. The production--itself nothing mind-blowing--is the saving grace, airy with a stuttering rhythm. 3/5

6. Ke$ha, "We R Who We R"
This was apparently written in the wake of this fall's string of suicides by bullied, gay teens. Not sure how to feel about that--Ke$ha is probably in a better position to address suicidal teens than most people, but this weak dance-pop does the message no favors, and "We R Who We R" gradually becomes just another song about clubbing. There is something craven in its inability to actually, y'know, acknowledge that subject, or to differentiate itself from Ke$ha first hit in any way. 1.5/5

7. Far East Movement, "Like A G6"
I wish I could tell you that "Like A G6" excoriates earth's six largest economies for their catastrophic hubris, but of course it doesn't. This G6 is some sort of expensive private plane. No, the Far East Movement--the first Korean-American rappers of note--celebrate how fucked up you can get on cough syrup. The beat is minimal-ish, and kind of woozy, but these guys would probably get laughed out of Houston. 2.5/5

8. Nelly, "Just A Dream"
In a list that features "Firework," "Just The Way You Are," and "What's My Name," being the cornball anthem is an accomplishment, and not a good one. I could've swore Nelly's career was dead even before that Akon collaboration, but it seems that a song about being in love with your ex-wife has reignited it. This is pop-rap, but it's not hip-hop. 1.5/5

9. The Black Eyed Peas, "The Time (Dirty Bit)"
With the Black Eyed Peas, you know it's going to be cynical and generic, you just don't know what angle they're going to take. "The Time" forces together a power-ballad chorus, lifted from "I've Had The Time Of My Life," with a bloopy beat not particularly distinct from "Boom Boom Pow." I don't mean to insult B.E.P. fans--the one I know is in second grade, and she's cool--but that music this unimaginative continues to captivate Americans...it just makes me sad. 0/5

10. Bruno Mars, "Grenade"
I'll give props where they're due: Mars was a co-writer of Cee-Lo's magnificent "Fuck You," which was at Number 9 last week (it's since fallen to 17). "Grenade" is no "Fuck You," but its certainly more dynamic than "Just The Way You Are," and the vocals here are alright. I even detect a hint of Jeff Buckley in its phrasings. "Grenade" is the only the third song in this week's Top 10 that I don't actively dislike. Props. 3/5

We Deal In Too Many Externals, Brother: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

2010-11-23T10:15:00.009-06:00

Preliminary thesis: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is Kanye's Station To Station. By which I don't mean to suggest some sort of stripped-down, motorik-heavy funk and soul pastiche. No, I mean that Kanye was obviously coked out of his mind at every stage of this album's development. The proof is in the songs, each its own wellspring of tweaked-out neurosis refracted through the conflicting ambitions of pop music's most shameless drama queen.

Inhibited neural reuptake seeps through the edges of this dark, obsessive, even laborious fifth album, tinging the proceedings with stultifying melancholy (or should I say Mellon Collie?). Even the more traditional beats are ablated and extended to the point of dementia, each piled on with extra echo and guitar blurts and gospel choirs, with West's extended supporting cast of rappers and producers, an impressive collection of egos in their own right, subsumed fully into the service of the auteur's ruminative id. Even the skits sound simultaneously monstrous and oppressive. The songs are longer than those you'd find on an average rap album, and I've already lost count of the number of extended outros, interludes, and otherwise random musical vacillations.

Like West albums before it, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was conceived as a major, game-changing work, and as sometimes happens, the stars aligned and every music critic in America started celebrating the "comeback" of an embattled celebrity, almost in tandem. Pitchfork's 10.0 review, for instance, was just as much about "the Taylor Swift incident" (you know, that thing that neither you nor I nor any actual music fan cares about) and the artist's Twitter feed as it was about the album's "expansive, all-encompassing nature"; meanwhile, Rolling Stone typically extolled the album as sonically diverse enough to attract non-hip-hop heads ("Coasting on heroic levels of dementia, pimping on top of Mount Olympus"--Good lord!). Kanye's genius was affirmed once again and rock mags congratulated themselves on celebrating the virtues of a celebrity in a way that didn't make them sound like, well, pandering to celebrities.

I am not here to complain about the Pitchfork rating (their first perfect grade since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), nor am I interested in inciting backlash. I'm glad that Ryan Dombal was allowed to give something a non-retrospective perfect rating (one unfortunate feature Pitchfork shares with Rolling Stone). I like this album, but if by "10.0" we mean that every single second of its 1:08:34 has to be both perfect and pleasurable, they could have at least docked a .2 for Nicki Minaj's English accent.

What a circus, though! You've got Pusha T (the album's MVP), Rick Ross and Jay-Z as the repeat offenders. Then you have one-verse killers like Minaj, Cy-Hi Da Prince and Raekwon. And, on the back-burner, the RZA, Swizz Beatz, Kid Cudi, John Legend, and, er, Justin Vernon. Elton John pops by for an uncredited piano solo, but unfortunately not on the track with Raekwon, if you were looking for a future "Kiss The Ring"/"Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" collab.

I'll go through this track-by-track, but overall I'll say that while this is an improvement over that shitbucket 808's and Heartbreak, what was most problematic about that excrescence of an album is still present in more muted forms here, the presence of autotune being the most serious repeat offender. But Kanye is still a young man, and I don't doubt that these problems could be corrected in the future, and the quality of his albums would increase dramatically. In order for that to happen, I would suggest that Mr. West first a) try pulling his head, if ever so slightly, out of his ass, and b) lay off the coke for a while. Less Ye and Less Yay, in other words.

1. Dark Fantasy
The opening is ominous, and not in a good way--first we get a few seconds of amateur storytelling from British Nicki Minaj, whose "performance" is irritating in a highly visceral, claw-out-your-eyes way. I wasn't impressed with the "Can we get much higher?" opening choir bit either, as I became immediately worried that we were entering Dewey Cox-during-his-Brian Wilson-phase-territory ("I need 10,000 didgeridoos!"). And I hope that massive choirs and the like don't become a staple of every "statement" rap album from here onward. But the beat, when it comes in at 1:07, is an old-school pleasure. My guess is that all praises should be directed toward co-producer The RZA, who's still better than anyone at constructing grimy, motif-oriented beats. As Rae would say, this is that Black Mozart shit.

2. Gorgeous (Feat. Kid Cudi and Raekwon)
Plaintive, wailing slide guitar (is there any other kind?) is the biggest draw of this subdued track, along with Kid Cudi's even more lachrymose singing style. I had more of a problem with Dark Twisted Fantasy on first listen because there didn't seem to be enough bangers, and "Gorgeous" isn't exactly rippling with energy--nevertheless, upon repeated listens, it lives up to its name. Kanye is more of a controlling factor here than he is on most of the other songs, with three verses versus Raekwon's one to his credit (my favorite line is "It's like that y'all/it's like that y'all/I don't really give a fuck about it at all/cause the same people that try to blackball me/forgot about two thing: my black balls"). Raekwon, bless him, ignores what comes before, and just goes on talking about what he does best.

3. POWER
Rockaliser already wrote up this song here, unaware at the time that "POWER" is supposed to be in all-caps and poor Dwele no longer gets a co-credit (more on the craziness of MBDTF's attribution rules later). I'll add that the song sounds even better between "Gorgeous" and "All Of The Lights" than it does as a single--while it does have that "third track, first single" vibe, it's also a departure from any other radio hit he's ever done. Surely "Stronger" and "Gold Digger" never had such fuzzy bass, nor would they deign to sample something like "21st Century Schizoid Man" in such a surprising and (I mean it) delightful way. Don't know why the current SNL cast is the subject of so much of West's ire (particularly in light of his burying the hatchet with George W. Bush). It's hard not to be taken by the song's epic sweep, but as always, be mindful of wack lines such as "Colin Powell's/Austin Powers/Lost in translation with a whole fucking nation/they said I was the obamanation of Obama's nation" etc. etc. UGH.

4. All Of The Lights (Interlude)
Another "10,000 didgeridoos" moment, but at least it's short. It's a piano and string bit meant to introduce the "All Of The Lights" melody. The piano solo is apparently the work of Elton John, who despite, as I understand it, being a pretty famous musician and songwriter, doesn't get a proper credit. I don't understand how the "Feat." attribution works in hip-hop at all, and as we'll see in "All Of The Lights" proper there seem to be no rules to it, perhaps other than that guest rappers get credited, guest singers sometimes get credited, and anyone who plays an instrument doesn't get credited unless they happen to be Carlos Santana (Gorillaz seem to be the exception to this, by the way--if Ike Turner gets a shout-out for his "Every Planet Thinks We're Dead" solo, why not Elton?). Anyway, maybe "All Of The Lights (Interlude)" could direct hip-hop heads to the latest Elton John/Leon Russell Civil War collab The Union.

Just kidding.

5. All Of The Lights
So according to this, "All Of The Lights" has ELEVEN guest stars on it, none of whom I guess were worth the attribution. Rihanna's voice is most prominent amidst the opening horn fanfare, suggesting we are about to be treated to some fairly generic pop-isms until an absolutely frenetic drum track kicks in and absolutely buries the track's remaining ten guest stars. The song, for once, seems to be about someone other than Kanye--our unnamed protagonist becomes so enraged by the death of Michael Jackson that he beats his girl and ends up in federal prison, only to arrange some sort of reconciliation with his daughter at a Borders bookstore after doing his time. The chorus, though, brings it all back to Yeezy's pervasive ego: "All of the lights/street lights/search lights/flash lights," lots of lights. Remember that Kanye already explored this subject to some degree in "Flashing Lights." Are lights supposed to be some sort of extended, intra-album metaphor? No, Kanye would just like to point out to you, again, that he's famous.

6. Monster (Feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj and Bon Iver)
Finally: a banger, and a next-level one at that. Pity Rick Ross, who really seems to be edging into a great verse for about ten seconds before Kanye interrupts with his momentum-killing "Gossip, gossip, nigga just stop it" hook. But for everyone else involved, "Monster" lives up to its name: the beat is hard, probably the hardest on the album, and also incredibly versatile. Kanye's spits aren't entirely unremarkable, but neither Jay-Z nor Nicki Minaj have a line as bad as that "put that pussy in a sarcophagus," so both of them are a lot easier to listen to. Most critics have extolled the wonders of Ms. Minaj's clownish verse, a grab bag of boastful speechifying, cartoonishly violent imagery, and one notable, transcendent scream. I agree with everyone else that she owns this song--it's too bad everything I've heard so far off her upcoming debut album has been deeply, deeply awful.

7. So Appalled (Feat. Jay-Z, Pusha T, Cy-Hi Da Prince, Swizz Beatz, and the RZA)
It might seem strange that Kanye groups both of the album's large posse cuts together in the middle of the album, but MBDTF has such an extended supporting cast that the entire album could have easily been lost in the mire of extended Pusha T and Jay-Z verses. So, in order: a) Swizz Beatz offers the novel observation that "life can sometimes be ridiculous" and only comes back to repeat that point on two additional occasions, remaining silent otherwise, b) Kanye engages in some amateur Muslim-baiting ("Praises due to the most high Allah/Praises due to the most fly, Prada") and makes an astounding, heretofore unheard of observation about how MTV no longer plays videos, c) Jay-Z, sounding uncharacteristically harried, wonders how to start his verse and declares himself a martyr on par with The Dark Knight's Batman, d) Pusha T talks about drug dealing (another shock) and makes intricate poker references, e) following a Swizz repeat, new kid Cy-Hi Da Prince declares himself "so outrageous" and claims God would be rocking his tunes on His iPod, and f) most disappointingly, RZA is relegated to repeating the non-Swizz Beatz chorus, which is awesome only because RZA is the loudest and angriest-sounding dude on this or any cut. Why not give the man his own verse, Kanye?

8. Devil In A Blue Dress (Feat. Rick Ross)
Could that be...a sped-up soul sample? People forget that this was once Kanye's MO, but "Devil In A Blue Dress" is probably the closest MBDTF comes to the classic Kanye of "Through The Wire" and "Gone." Appropriating a small vocal sample from Smokey Robinson's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Devil In A Blue Dress" is all about the slow build, starting at 2:51, that leads into a Rick Ross verse that is, as far as I know, a career best. The last 2.5 minutes of this song are astonishing in the way layers of tension are added in a grand, Hollywood sort of manner--it's perhaps my favorite part of the record as a whole. Props to Mr. Ross and the "double-headed monster with a mind of its own." I never really got Mr. Ross until now.

9. Runaway (Feat. Pusha T)
The length is epic--9:08 to be exact. So forgive me if I was expecting, based on the hype that this would be a next-level rap record, something like the hip-hop version of "Stairway To Heaven," or anything suitably epic in that regard. But this, the album's second single, is a complete dirge, with one notable exception. Yes, I know that the RZA could plink on the same piano note for a while and still make a beat that sounds great, but this isn't the RZA, and the piano "melody" of "Runaway," if you want to call it that, sounds like the work of a two-year old. I can't tell you how disappointed I was to see Kanye play this song on the VMAs, standing on a platform plinking a few elementary notes on the world's fanciest Fisher Price keyboard. And, on the lyrical side, the self-pity on display here, which would normally be restrictive, ends up being suffocated by Kanye's awful singing. As for the "Stairway" angle, the song ends with an appalling, and I do mean appalling, extended synth-blurt voice solo from Mr. West himself. It is, in terms of quality, the opposite of Jimmy Page's "Stairway" solo. It is so bad. On the other hand, Pusha's verse is great.

10. Hell Of A Life
I don't know why DJ Premier said Kanye was done with electro, since he obviously isn't, but "Hell Of A Life," despite invoking even more decadent rock star bullshit, features some of West's best moments as a rapper and as a producer (it's a great riff, for one). And this is all in spite of the fact that Kanye quotes Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" when he sings "No more drugs for me/pussy and religion is all I need" (as lifestyle sentiments go, I'll take George Clinton's "Don't need no girlfriend/I just need my dope" any day). The ending bit about falling in love with a porn star, getting married in the bathroom, etc. is actually kind of powerful, even for someone extremely, extremely wary of that sort of posturing. But again, all the choirs at the end--not needed.

11. Blame Game (Feat. John Legend)
Some people really seem to like this song, and I'll admit that the idea of using an Aphex Twin sample to engage in similar bouts of vocal and instrumental distortions sounds rife with experimental possibility. "Blame Game" sucks though--you'll just have to trust me on this. The piano sample, for instance, isn't as amateur as "Runaway," but never develops into something that matches the subject's fraught exterior. Between this song and the recent Venture Bros. finale, I think I've reached a point where this sort of adolescent male posturing, as it pertains to acting out towards supposedly unfair former girlfriends, is no longer something I want to hear or think about for a while. As the tension ratchets up and Kanye transforms his voice into a series of guttural, increasingly deepened and distorted accusations, I realized that I was starting to feel sorry for Kanye, in a way: epic self-regard, expressed on such a personal level, is a difficult thing to inflict on others. But then there is that Chris Rock skit, which is only slightly better than (if ten times as long as) the Tracy Morgan skit on Wu-Massacre which I declared to be the worst rap skit in the history of the genre. Again, I realized how vain and disgusting Kanye can be when he really wants to.

12. Lost In The World (Feat. Bon Iver)
Bon Iver is merely the latest representative "indie rocker" brought along to buoy Kanye's cred as a Serious Artist, but his talents, insofar as they actually exist (I am a Bon Iver agnostic, by which I've never been awake long enough to form an opinion), are completely absent when set against this fever-induced autotune nightmare. Christ, I hate autotune. The beat isn't bad amidst the bleatings and loopy vocal patterns that drive me nuts, and Kanye provides a sort-of nice capper to the proceedings, but this sounds like that "MMMM Whatcha saaaay" song whose name I can't actually remember, and repeated listenings confirm: it is awful.

13. Who Will Survive In America
However, I'm actually quite pleased with how Kanye chooses to end proceedings, with an extended sample (over the same "Lost In The World" beat) from a 1970 performance of Gil Scott-Heron reading his poem "Comment #1." Scott-Heron addicts will note here that West is returning a favor--I'm New Here's intro and outro track both sample "Flashing Lights." "Comment #1" is a wonderful poem, one of my favorites (check it here--really worth listening to) but whether or not it works within the context of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy depends on whether you see the album as an Important Statement by a Brilliant, Troubled Artist or as a series of bleatings from a vacuous celebrity setting his Twitter musings to music. Me, I declare myself once again to be agnostic.

Before They Make Me Write

2010-11-06T14:38:00.002-05:00

During the rock and roll era, few guitarists played to the acclaim Keith Richards did, with his popular group The Rolling Stones. Below, part of a recently recovered article about the musician. Textual references date it to 2010. The author is unknown.

I am standing at baggage claim with Keith Richards, and he is fuming.

"Fucking unbelievable,” Richards mutters, pulling out his fifth smoke of the morning. “Another fucking greyhound dead at LAX.”

Richards is referring to his dog Boy—named after “the old Muddy Waters tune”—who has passed away on the flight from Heathrow to LAX. Another of Richards’ prized greyhounds, King, died en route to Los Angeles in 1977. The guitarist—then Keith Richard—tells me that the dog’s death led to his decision to quit heroin in 1978.

While we wait for the local animal control to appear, I point out that this account is at odds with his book, “Life,” written with the journalist James Fox, but Richards seems unperturbed. “Right. The book.” He heads towards the door.

On the taxi ride to his hotel, we chat about the project. Richards admits that words—“mostly talking and writing”—aren’t his forte, and that he quit work on the book on several occasions. But he was guided by the conviction that if former Stones bassist Bill Wyman could write a book, Richards could write an equally long one. The book collects the wisdom that the guitarist has gained since starting rock’s most iconic band in 1962, the moss that this Rolling Stone has gathered, all 576 pages of it. 

As Richards checks in, the concierge gives him a fax. It look like a child’s drawing, but turns out to be a goof from Mick Jagger. Richards crumples it up and tosses it into a trashcan—an assistant removes it and finds the recycling—and begins to speak about the member of his writing partner of nearly fifty years. These facts are in line with what appears in the book. They are not flattering. 

We head immediately for the bar, and Richards has a scotch. Unprodded, he tells me that he wishes his band mates were better drinkers. “Ronnie, he used to be fun, and sometimes he still is, but the rest of them, I don’t know. I’d rather have a pint with the Exchequer than Jazzman,” he says, in an apparent reference to Charlie Watts. His thought is broken by the sight of a coconut above the bar. He allows his left index finger--the index finger that gave us “Satisfaction,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Rough Justice”--to sink into one of the deep crevices that line his face.

“You know, I’m proud of this book. I’ve been through hell, believe me, but I'm still here. Just wish Gram was too."

Life is a book marked by loss. Few people have lost as much as Richards has: friends, lovers, freedom, habits, Rolling Stones guitarists, and great chord progressions conceived while asleep.

At this moment, Richards seems to have lost his energy. He heads up to his suite for a nap--one of the "three or four" he takes on a typical day. He asks an assistant to text Johnny Depp and cancel their dinner plans as he walks away. He leaves me with the tab.

The rest of the article is lost, but the new information about Richards gives a fascinating look into the artist best known for popularizing the bandana.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: America's New Worst Music Critic

2010-10-10T11:45:00.003-05:00

Let's start out with the obvious: The Wall Street Journal editorial page, like its partner in quo-maintaining The Washington Post, doesn't often feature unadulterated Obama praise (or even checkered praise, at this point). As well it shouldn't, I guess--a healthy skepticism of those in power was once a critical component of American journalism, a long, long time ago. But a funny thing happens after weeks of running one editorial after another poking away at our president's supposed character deficiencies and deeply-held radical views. Vibrant, legitimate criticism leads to slightly more suspect criticism, which leads further down the rabbit hole into articles like "President Obama's 'Rap Palate'" (note the "rap palate" in scare quotes--scary!) by Thomas Chatterton Williams. The points raised by Mr. Williams are about the opposite of what anyone would call a "reasoned, rational political argument." I would call it "bitching for the sake of bitching/traffic."

Williams is responding to Jann Wenner's latest long-form "interview" (this time the scare quotes are justified) with President Obama in Rolling Stone. Wenner's panegyric intimations lie more toward using RS as a soapbox to insist how hip Democratic politicians can be, and the results are at least as embarrassing as the John Kerry interview in 2004. The difference is that in addition to questions about what Obama thinks of Bono or Bob Dylan, the subject turns, temporarily, to hip-hop. Says the B-Boy-In-Chief:

Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president's personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.

Obama also mentioned being a big fan of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones, and classical opera ("There are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need"), but his comments about rap being acceptable and even fun to listen to were what got the Fox Nation's goat (though Obama had noted even before he was president that he was a big Jay-Z fan). And then Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of the memoir Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, became so appalled by the mere mention of Lil Wayne in the Oval Office that he started his column thusly:

What's on President Obama's iPod? A wide range, he told Rolling Stone magazine last week, from the jazz of John Coltrane to the ballads of Maria Callas. And more: "My rap palate has greatly improved," Mr. Obama noted. "Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I've got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert."
Expert or not, that's the wrong message for the president to be sending black America.

The "wrong message": being passingly familiar with one of the dominant forms of African-American music, which is somehow insulting to the character of all African-Americans. The subtext: yes, Obama is indeed a Scary Black Man. Continue:

Does Mr. Obama like Lil Wayne's "Lil Duffle Bag Boy"? In that song, the rapper implores young black men to "go and get their money" through round-the-clock drug hustling. And with Lil Wayne, it's not just an act: The rapper is currently serving a one-year term on Rikers Island after being caught in New York with drugs and guns stashed in his Louis Vuitton overnighter.

Mr. Williams happens to be correct about Lil Wayne serving at Rikers, but I have no idea why he chose as his example a song that a) is by Playaz Circle, and only features Lil Wayne, b) is called "Duffle Bag Boy" (no "Lil") and c) being about drug-running, has no connection to the weapons charge that landed him in jail. Let's be clear: by "drugs and guns," Mr. Williams is trying to imply a great deal more than one (1) .40 caliber pistol that was registered to his manager and happened to be in a bag close to his person. Hell, let's be crystal: Mr. Williams is trying to imply that any black man who goes to jail is never to be trusted or admired again, even if he has served his time, even if he seems repentant about the issue, even if he's on suicide watch--never mind that. Jail! Drugs! Guns! Hippity-Hop!

Lil Wayne is emblematic of a hip-hop culture that is ignorant, misogynistic, casually criminal and often violent. A self-described gangster, he is a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of blacks have fought to overcome. His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass.

I understand and sympathize with the argument that hip-hop artists are given a free pass when it comes to issues of misogyny, casual homophobia, violence and general gangsta cliches. Modern pop radio is partially responsible for generally spurning lyrical and musical innovation in exchange for vacuous celebrity self-worship and lazy, repeatable innuendo. It remains in my mind of the utmost importance for music journalists to develop new modes of critical vocabulary when it comes to the discussion of hip-hop, to avoid endless valorization in terms of "flow" and "skill" when many popular rappers assert themselves as brands as opposed to musicians.

But calling Lil Wayne a "modern-day minstrel," with no qualifications, is beyond the pale. In order to believe something like that, you need to buy in, heavily, to these "virulent racist stereotypes," as if black hip-hop fans lack the agency to appreciate the music without buying into the lifestyle. A clue can be found in his last sentence: "His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass." This makes perfect sense, if you believe that these "pathologies" are inherent in black people and entirely the fault of a monolithic underclass. Never mind institutionalized racism and the pitiful job prospects of post-industrial America: if only popular musicians would stop talking about bitches and hos, all those nagging pathologies would stay nice and dormant.

Thus President Obama has conveyed his taste for the rapper behind lyrics like:

Put that white widow weed in the cigar and puff

look, ma, I'm trying to make a porno starring us

well not just us, a couple foreign sluts

Naming thuggish rappers might make Mr. Obama seem relatable and cool to a generation of Americans under the sway of hip-hop culture, but it sends a harmful message—especially when, in black America, some 70% of babies are born out of wedlock.

Why not stop there? Obama has also conveyed his taste for (and therefore must endorse everything ever said by) the artists behind the following:

White girls, they're pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get fucked all night
I just don't have that much jam
Chinese girls are so gentle
They're really such a tease
You never know what they're cockin'
Inside those silky sleeves.

She takes, just like a woman
She makes love, just like a woman
And she aches, just like a woman
But she breaks, just like a little girl

Racism. Misogyny. And how can he admire a woman who shacked up with Aristotle Onassis when so many black children are born out of wedlock? Miles Davis and John Coltrane were both addicted to heroin--does Obama believe casual drug use is okay for musicians? I'm just asking, yo! you decide.

(I would have loved to witness Mr. Williams' Google search for rap lyrics terrifying enough to alarm the boomers but also excerptable in a major newspaper).

The article goes on to quote similarly suspect lyrics from Jay-Z (Nas gets the shaft, due to space restrictions I guess), who is described by Mr. Williams as a "rapper and unrepentant ex-drug dealer" who has "been photographed sitting in Mr. Obama's chair in the White House Situation Room." This of course begs the question: "What president would ever let Marilyn Manson drop by the White House? Is Jay-Z any better?"

Good question. Would Mr. Williams be writing about it? Obviously not, because of course Marilyn Manson does not represent the pathologies of "white culture" in the way that Lil Wayne and Jay-Z, being official representatives of their race, do. Also, it's 2010.

I've known a few ex-drug dealers, some of whom remain unrepentant, and I can tell you that neither they nor Marilyn Manson have committed anything close to the sorts of heinous activities perpetrated by certain Washington lobbyists and Wall Street bankers in the last couple years. Not even close. These are the power players that are invited to the White House on a daily basis. In order to believe that Jay-Z's White House visit represents a lowering of Presidential standards, you must honestly be convinced that African-Americans who once dealt drugs aren't fit to grace the same halls as Jack Abramoff and Bernard Kerik, to say nothing of the actual war criminals who once occupied significant portions of our Executive branch. It requires turning a specific kind of blind eye--a kind that would have to be inured to all the horrors brought about by exporting American culture--with the exception of black people rhyming, over beats.

Williams, by the way, is black, not that such a fact would change my consideration of his essential cluelessness regarding rap music and race. Check out his absurd bio:

Like many young men in America, Thomas Chatterton Williams grew up in awe of Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and the parade of bling-bedecked rap stars he saw on Black Entertainment Television. Williams emulated their lifestyle - sporting chains and expensive designer clothes purchased for him by his girlfriends, who were themselves little more than accessories to Williams.

Williams' bio is candid about the fact that he used to be a pretty big asshole. Judging by this description, I agree: he was a prick. Treating women like "accessories" is, yes, a bad thing. Young Mr. Williams really does sound emblematic of everything terrible in hip-hop culture. Myself, I generally stop paying attention whenever cultural conservatives start to say "I used to have so many girlfriends," before going on to lament modern sexual permissiveness, but let's continue.

In LOSING MY COOL: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (The Penguin Press; May 2010; $24.95), Williams describes how he managed to juggle these two disparate lifestyles--"keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. Pappy grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato.

Being able to "keep it real" while simultaneously studying for one's SATS--it kind of is like the segregated South! Especially given Young Williams' father had to deal with the pernicious influence of Tupac's famous anthem "Plato and Aesop Iz Gay (Don't Ever Read That Shit)" or Biggie's "Make Sure To Treat Your Multiple Girlfriends Like Accessories (Make Them Buy Your Clothes Also)."

Well, I kid. Having not read Losing My Cool, I can't know for sure, but I'm sure the message is that if you're a young black man, if you manage to make it through high school without the demon Hip-Hop turning you to a life of drug-dealing and ho-abusing, you may one day use all the knowledge acquired from reading 15,000 books to selectively quote scary rap lyrics you've obviously never heard before, in the interest of making sure a public figure can never again exercise his or her aesthetic judgment when it comes to personal music preferences. Or alternately, I guess you can listen to all types of music, even if the subject matter is sometimes troubling, and focus on more important issues than whether or not a particular artist makes your race look clean and law-abiding. Maybe then you could be president, and not a tiresome moralizer who is obviously uncomfortable with how much of an asshole he used to be as a teenager. It isn't the demon Hip-Hop, Thomas: It's YOU.

YOU had a hard time treating women with respect. YOU were the one who decided the general takeaway message from hip-hop was wearing designer clothes and huge, ungainly chains. And then, when you must have realized what a ridiculous cliche your life had become, instead of choosing a more enlightened path YOU decided to latch onto another polarizing cliche, that rap music was the thing keeping you down all along. For every example you can bring up of lyrics that "diminish blacks," I can provide three or four counter-examples. Others could probably provide a lot more. Hell, I can show you stories of legit, card-carrying African-Americans who have indeed been empowered by a particular rap song, as have I to a certain degree.

Here's one:

Critical Beatdown: Round Ten

2010-10-03T18:09:00.001-05:00

Brian Eno, "2 Forms Of Anger"
AM: The increasingly busy first minutes of "2 Forms of Anger" sound like generic dystopian stuff--with a great drum sound, sure, but disconcertingly anonymous . The guitar at 2:08 lands with impact, but everything about "Anger" makes me wish for the joyfully experimental Eno of old, instead of this self-serious electro-gruel. 2.5/5

NS: In retrospect I should have tempered my enthusiasm for Eno first's Warp release, given that nothing that Eno had done lately, on Warp or otherwise, has interested me greatly. "2 Forms" has an exciting pulse and a number of enterprising new guitar sounds, but at its core it's basically a non-song, more in tune with the musician's ambient oeuvre. 2.5/5

Pimp C feat. Bun B and Drake, "What Up"
AM: Essentially a Drake song featuring the members of UGK, albeit one where everybody holds their own. It's pretty awesome--the exuberant production of Drizzy acolyte Boi-1da recalls "International Player's Anthem"--I just wish Pimp C was more of a presence on his own jam. 4/5

NS: The Naked Soul In Sweet Jones may ultimately be an exercise in poor judgment, but there's no denying that tracks like this are a lot stronger than anything Bun B's recent album Trill OG. Drake's verse in particular is stronger than anything I've heard him do in a while, even as I'm guessing that Pimp C would have never heard of the guy, unless he happened to be a fan of Degrassi... 3.5/5

Mark Ronson feat. D'Angelo, "Glass Mountain Trust"
AM: D'Angelo sounds haunted--probably by that synth pipe organ--and increasingly determined, as he escapes, breaks out, and busts through the glass, only to find himself still trapped. Why he's warbling out of the side of his mouth, well, your guess is as good as mine, but it's nice to have him back for these four minutes. 4/5

NS: Ronson deserves credit for wresting a decent performance out of a man who seemingly Sly Stone'd his way out of the business a full decade ago. He deserves significantly less credit for electronically treating D'Angelo's (basically tuneful) bleatings. Or has D's voice just changed that much? Either way, vintage synths only count for so much with such a canned drum sound. 2.5/5

Willow Smith, "Whip My Hair"

AM: "Whip My Hair" stands as a testament to that most American of ideals: that we could all make a credible Rihanna song if our parents were rich enough. One need not know anything about haters and getting the party started to sing about them. 3.5/5

NS: On some level, it's fascinating. At ten years old, she represents the first American generation to have no institutional memory of 9/11--or, to put it another way, it's possible she was conceived at around the same time Voodoo came out. The song is otherwise screeching, repetitive junk, but at least the subject matter is blessedly ick-free. 1.5/5

Neil Young, "Walk With Me"

AM: The 64 year-old rock god may be inconsistent these days, but that doesn't mean he can't still bring it. Lyrically, "Walk With Me" is Harvest material, but the sharp bite of Young's electric guitar has that Rust Never Sleeps crunch. Good stuff, Lanois' production even gives the song a foreboding sense of atmosphere, though the outro could be trimmed. 4/5

NS: Unlike Brian Eno, I'll basically follow Neil's career wherever it goes, even as the prospect of a team-up with Daniel Lanois doesn't exactly excite this non-U2 fan. But with Lanois keeping his trademark electronic textures at a minimal level, Young's unadorned guitar-playing sounds as spirited as it would have in a different context 30 years ago. Would this be better with bass and drums? Maybe, but it's already a high-level Neil Young song. 4/5

John Legend and The Roots feat. Common and Melanie Fiona, "Wake Up Everybody"
AM: John Legend one of those guys whose formal perfection as a vocalist makes him really boring, and his voice sounds too thin and passionless here to carry a wake the fuck up people-type R&B number. 2/5

NS: If this was 2008, "Wake Up Everybody" would have been a considerable step above what will.i.am accomplished in his Obama speech-in-single "Yes We Can." But now the 2010 midterms are upon us and "Wake Up Everybody" seems not only silly, but kind of sad. Common is a shot in the arm, but only in comparison to the sleepy-by-nature Legend. 2/5

Grinderman 2: A Real Cool Time?

2010-09-20T23:38:00.006-05:00

Grinderman have a song called "No Pussy Blues." You probably know this if you've read a review of their debut, self-titled album, many of which were almost entirely given over to descriptions of the track. You may even have read about the song in the reviews of Grinderman 2, which does not feature "No Pussy Blues."

In an effort to dispel the myth that "No Pussy Blues" is the only Grinderman song, I'll take a look at the nine songs on the band's week-old sophomore effort. I also hope to debunk that other fiction, that the band, which includes Nick Cave, Martyn Casey, Warren Ellis, and Jim Sclavunos--four-sevenths of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds--hearken back to Cave's first group, the truly depraved Birthday Party. No ratings this time, since I don't feel like it.

1. Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man
Martyn Casey's strident bassline anchors Grinderman 2's fiery opener, with each note landing with the thud of a typewriter run through a stack of Marshalls (a typewriter can be heard at the start of...a certain song from the last album). The other Grindermen merely augment Casey. When the chorus hits, things explode outwards, in a mess of noise that would do Ron Asheton proud, while the verses are exercises in finely controlled tension. The lyrics--something about a just-awoken creep, his brother, and a "lupine child" who is literally aflame--are hardly Cave's finest moment, but his genius is as a performer, and this is a good performance.

2. Worm Tamer
Part of Grinderman's appeal is that such talented men have set their sights so low. "Worm Tamer" is a grimy song, with dirty lyrics that include the already-famous couplet "Well my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/Two great big humps and then I'm gone." All well and good, but Grinderman approach garage rock with nuance: the song rises and falls with its backing vocals, staggering along with the crunch of whatever strange instrument Ellis is playing, and generally sounding like the misplaced anger that consumes a man's head moments before he makes the sort of decision you cant un-make.

3. Heathen Child
Already written-up here. I've become more slightly fond of this song in the past six weeks. I still find the tension/release ratio, especially at the pivotal moment where tension becomes release, to be lacking, but the unsettling bounce gets me through. Love the part where Cave's rejoinder to our delusions is always "YOU ARE WRONG."

4. When My Baby Comes
Warren Ellis, who has come to be a dominant force in the Bad Seeds, plays throughout this album with an attention to texture rarely heard in rock music, on instruments like the bouzouki. The two halves of "When My Baby Comes" see him first painting a creeping disquiet, via knotted instrumentation and rude interjections, and then crafting a trance-like abandon (with a large assist from Casey's Mordor-ish bassline). It's no wonder he scores so many films.

The lyrics on "When My Baby Comes" are probably the most compelling on the album. Cave will recite two lines, sing the title, and then start again, picking up from a different point in space or time. Sung in the first-person, from an institution, they represent the fractured thoughts of a rape victim who dreads visiting hours and is linked to a mysterious, possibly fictional girl whose dealings on the narrator's carpet elicit great anxiety. The structure of the song, from the claustrophobic first half (which features nearly all the lyrics) to the molten ebbs and flows of the second part, mimic the the before and after of the narrator's tragic experience, but also an essentially disjointed mind.

5. What I Know
Consisting mostly of a simple, repeated thump and a quiet melange of stringed instruments, "What I Know" is a disarmingly beautiful track on an album that disavows Boatsman's Call-style gorgeousness. Cave, whose voice is far too loud in the mix, sounds intimate and resigned. The brief lines he spits out at the beginning work well, but he nearly ruins the track with his trademark tics near the end. Not the unequivocal success it might have been, but still mostly lovely.

6. Evil
There's a weird dynamic at work here, as Cave's foolish narrator declares his love for his baby in humiliating and desperate terms, while punkish backing vocals shout "evil!" and "evil rising!" Who's evil? The narrator? Nah, he's just a fool. Then his baby? Perhaps, but we know nothing about her. I suspect Cave is singing from some hellish place, where he feels compelled to pin all his miserable hopes on a woman with no distinguishing characteristics. Wherever the narrator sings, he sounds lost inside the howling noise. The vocals are probably too loud, again, but you don't really notice.

7. Kitchenette
The leering "Kichenette" supplies Grinderman 2's other moment of comedy: "What's this husband of yours ever given to you?/Oprah Winfrey on a plasma screen." Lyrically, this is the closest we get to a "No Pussy Blues" sequel, as Cave begs and pleads for the object of his desire to desert her husband and hideous children ("the ugliest kids I've ever seen") and allow him to make good on his single-entendres. The slowest song yet, all about the low-end, "Kitchenette" doesn't drag, but five minutes is a long time for a tune that exists to let Cave ham it up.

8. Palaces Of Montezuma
Perhaps the least Grinderman of all the tracks on Grinderman 2, "Palaces" wouldn't have sounded out of place among the careening rock and roll operettas of Abbatoir Blues and Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! The presence of a piano may have something to do with that, as do the background vocals and complete absence of scuzz. Which is fine, since I think Abbatoir and Lazarus are unbelievable albums. Don't ask me what Miles Davis the black unicorn is supposed to be, though.

9. Bellringer Blues
"Bellringer" would also fit on Abbatoir Blues, which already had a bell-themed tune. For one, there's a more conscious literary bent here, with the talk of soul survivors a possible echo of Exile On Main Street's closer. It's a dense song--like most of the album, it sounds like the work of a much larger band--a T-storm's worth of thunder, lightning and screaming wind. In other words, a fitting end to an excellent album. Grinderman haven't yet put out anything to rival the Bad Seeds' very best, but nor do they sound like anybody's side project.

This Is Exactly What I Am Talking About

2010-09-10T08:42:00.004-05:00

The Village Voice's Sound of the City blog just posted an interview with Animal Collective's Panda Bear (we reviewed his new single here), conducted by Stelios Phili (who must be new, I think), entitled "Q&A: Animal Collective's Panda Bear On How He Is Similar To Kanye West." The accompanying tweet, published minutes ago, makes sure to add the "@" in the "@kanyewest" part in. What is the nature of the conversation regarding Mr. West?

I can see how you'd view a solo album in that way, just being dependent on yourself and trusting your own judgment.

Does that mean I have a massive ego? Is there something wrong with that?

No! You're not Kanye, far from it.

I've never been to an award ceremony, so you never know. If you let me loose in that zone, I'm going to go crazy.

This is the sum total of references to how Mr. Bear is "similar to @kanyewest" in the entire article. It's a total aside that has more to do with the differences between Animal Collective and Panda Bear's solo career than it does with anything having to do with a popular rapper's preening, attention-whoring antics. Then Panda Bear makes a joke, and they move on to the subject of how guitar-heavy Tomboy will be. But, for some reason, there's the subject line for the whole article, in the vain fucking hope I suppose that maybe @kanyewest will retweet it to his thousands of followers.

And this is an article that otherwise allows Panda Bear to make interesting points, ranging from his various psychological approaches to writing music to his general response to negative reviews (from one Jim Derogatis). Sure, the tone is as kiss-assy as we have come to expect from the Voice (sample "question": "After living in Portugal with English as your main language, I imagine coming back here, where everyone wants to talk to you, is pretty jarring"), but it's not formless M.I.A. babble either, so that's a plus.

I'm going to continue to document this nonsense, even if it doesn't fall under the strict purview of music criticism, particularly as I become more entrenched in New York's music scene and the trendy, otherwise musically-ignorant vampires that feed from it. I previously referred to the Brooklyn music journo establishment as "click-hungry starfuckers" and I stand by that assertion now more than ever. Play us off, Mick:

Goddamnit Morrissey

2010-09-04T11:46:00.002-05:00

Morrissey is again courting charges of racism with his claim that the Chinese are a "subspecies." It’s hardly the first time he’s made such provocations (around the sixth, I believe), and further indication that his admirable sympathy for animals outweighs his respect for people with darker skin than himself. It’s extremely dispiriting that a man of Morrissey’s intellect has learned nothing from previous controversies.

So what now? Morrissey has already released this non-apology

If anyone has seen the horrific and unwatchable footage of the Chinese cat and dog trade – animals skinned alive – then they could not possibly argue in favour of China as a caring nation. There are no animal protection laws in China and this results in the worst animal abuse and cruelty on the planet. It is indefensible.

About which he is largely correct. But his willingness to paint the situation in terms of racial inferiority is at issue, not the live skinning of animals. Even his statement, which deems--I'm moving his words around here, but I think the meaning is present--the Chinese to be uncaring and cruel. As someone who cares about human and animal rights, I'm aware that horrible abuses take place in that country, but I don't think these abuses are due to subhuman characteristics, or that all Chinese people are responsible for what was likely decided by a small coterie of Beijing bureaucrats.

The Guardian’s Tom Clark notes that, as a singer, we can hardly call on Morrissey to resign. As a fan, I don’t even want that; his trio of 00’s releases, Years Of Refusal, Ringleader of the Tormentors, and You Are the Quarry, were all good-to-great, his best album-length product since the 80’s. Questionable lyrics have cropped up throughout his career—why exhort us to anti-DJ violence in “Panic,” and why doesn’t the “Bengali In Platforms” belong “here”? Although I don't many detect nativist sympathies, many hear them in "The National Front Disco."

These lyrics, along with the public statements Morrissey has made, are difficult to square with his embrace of his Hispanic fanbase. He dedicated 1999's Oye Esteban! tour to these fans, and famously procalimed he wished he was born Mexican. His 2004 comeback single, “First Of The Gang To Die,” was about a charming latino gangster.

I find it extremely odd that Morrissey adores the ethnic group who personify immigration in the United States, where he lived for nearly a decade, while vilifying British immigrants, as he did in 2008. Perhaps, as is so often the case with those who loudly denounce immigration, Morrissey simply doesn’t know the Britons of Bengali descent or Chinese people that he denounces. Maybe if, as with Mexican-Americans, large groups of British minorities became Morrissey fans, he might question his prejudices.

Maybe. But if Chinese people--or anyone else--decide they never want to hear from Morrissey again, I can't say I'd blame them.