The Tris McCall Report
2005 Pop Music Abstract
That purple, purp purple, purp purple. It's going down.
50 Cent -- "Candy Shop", "Disco Inferno", "Just A Lil Bit", "Window Shopper", "Hustler's Ambition", "Outta Control (Remix)" (with Mobb Deep)
If I'd gone outside one evening this summer and found that Shady/Aftermath had managed to replace the moon with a picture of 50 Cent's face, I wouldn't have been surprised. A bestselling album, a soundtrack album, two books, a major biopic, a clothing line, and about seven thousand guest appearances ought to have bought Curtis Jackson a genuine, MJ-in-'83-style elvis year. That didn't happen, and we're left to figure out why. He couldn't come up with the immortal radio cut -- or anything half as good as "In Da Club" -- and that hurt. But the bigger problem is that 50 Cent shares with Matthew Sweet a tendency to single his most retardo material. Sweet honestly believed that America was super-stupid, and one shining day he'd be able to dumb down his writing to the point where it would be legible to the LCD. 50 just seems unnecessarily insecure. Twenty million sold ought to free you from your obligation to serve up junk food. He's got a mass audience in place; he doesn't need to tease with "Just A Lil Bit" when he's got "Ryder Music" and "The Ski Mask Way" in the trunk. We're not going to go through all the singles yet -- it's still early, and I want to keep you reading and wait 'til I'm warmed up. I'll run through the whole G-unit shebang when we get to Tony Yayo; lord knows the less said about him, the better.
I just don't like him. He reminds me of the dude who sang the straight-man part on "It Wasn't Me". Only that was a joke, and Akon is serious. We're supposed to pardon his cheesy delivery because it's West African or something. Back in the late Eighties, I tried forcing my way through Youssou N'Dour albums in the name of misplaced progressivism. N'Dour was an actual African pop star. Akon is an expat from New Jersey. Next time out, he should try incorporating some Garden State emo; then, maybe I'll pay more attention.
I understand it cannot be pleasant to be outed on a mainstream rap record. But if you're going to try to duck the entertainment industry and its accompanying irritants, maybe you shouldn't also sing lines like this: "We could act out like Will and Jada/or like Kimora and Russell making paper." And so on. C'mon, Alicia, you're not a E! TV anchorwoman, you're a piano player. And on the day when you really want to make the whole issue moot and shut up the gossip folks, you'll finally decide to make a record commensurate with your talents. Until then, it's your own fault.
Dammit, Batman, that beat is large. When was the last time the drums on a radio pop record sounded so slamming? Mr. Rich Nice, you are clearly out of compliance with the omnibus Puff Daddy Act of 1997. Then there's the stuttering, robotic, hyperprocessed lead vocal… ooh, baby, the great Aaliyah must indeed be chilling on that Caribbean island with Tupac and Biggie. But wait a second, that's not Aaliyah at all -- that's Amerie, best known for her lame-o supporting role on LL Cool J's worst single ever. Thank heavens for second chances, and for singers comfortable enough with modern electronics to allow Richard Harrison to chop their tracks to fuck and back in the name of the funk. Fiyah, straight digital fi-yah.
Annie -- "Chewing Gum", "Heartbeat"
As a rule, the United States of America does not import pop stars from Continental Europe. Therefore, Annie Lila Berge-Strand must settle for the same sort of niche popularity that accrued to Nina Persson way back when. The trouble for Berge-Strand (as Persson found out) is that hipsters cycle through bubblegum faster than they do the rough stuff. '05 was Annie's shot to make some noise stateside. It didn't really happen, so back to the Saab dealership she goes, barely driven, but pre-owned nonetheless.
Antony & The Johnsons -- "Hope There's Someone"
Sometimes a vocal style will come into vogue, and you wonder how the hell it happened, and how we all might try to turn back the clock. I think we all remember when singers were trying to mimic Thom Yorke. That was pretty gruesome, but it still wasn't as unlistenable as the cabaret-warble falsetto currently favored by Devendra Banhart and his many weed-carriers. Antony is a little bit more amusing than the rest of the howlers working this territory, since he's so unashamedly over-the-top, and when he gets his hands on a trad-rocker like "Fistful Of Love", he proves he can throw down with great transvestite conviction. His attempts to be arty are tougher to work with, though. I can get into the minute plus of vocal and piano feedback at the end of "Hope There's Someone", but the lullabye verses are mainly an irritation. It would probably have been better if, instead of trying to impress us with his forty-octave range, he just sang the song: the faux-operatic treatment exposes the thinness of the material. But then nobody ever edited Phoebe Legere, either. The circles Antony runs in aren't exactly known for quality control. I'm not hopeful about future releases.
Aqueduct -- "Growing Up With GNR", "Hardcore Days & Softcore Nights"
I want to make this argument one more time -- pare it down to its essence, and let it stand on the TMR for eternity. There is never a good artistic reason to sell your song to an ad campaign. There may be very good economic reasons: you might want to send aid to the Contras, or your mom might need a kidney transplant, or you might want a lifestyle transplant from your ratty apartment to a condo complex on the waterfront. There might also be good political reasons, too; I genuinely believe that when Bob Seger allowed Ford to use "Makin' Thunderbirds" in a TV spot, he was making a statement very much in keeping with his longtime support of the automobile industry in Detroit. I don't sneeze at any of those reasons, even the greedy ones: Lord knows this is not a cash business, and most of us are never going to manage to recover that initial investment in our amplifiers. But the minute you allow your song to become the backdrop for a corporate branding initiative, it's lost to you forever. That's because no matter how talented, indie-famous, or charismatic you think you are, you are never going to be able to complete with the meaning-making mechanics of the advertising industry. It is hard enough to communicate through a pop song; throw a Nike logo in front of that song and it becomes virtually impossible. Everybody knows Nike, and nobody knows you; what Nike means is straightforward, legible, and blunt, and what you mean is something ambivalent, emotionally conflicted, artistic. The logo will crush all of that subtlety out of your song; it will be reoriented so that it means exactly what the suits want it to mean. You're lost. You're no longer a singer or a writer; you're now a pitchman, a shill, an ad man. David Terry of Aqueduct is a pretty complicated writer -- he has things that he desperately wants to tell us about the nature of romantic entanglements, personal identity, the Great Plains states, male aggression, nostalgia, forced passivity. But I cannot now hear "Hardcore Days & Softcore Nights" without thinking of the values I associate with the Jaguar automobile company. That's not my imaginative failing; that's Terry's. He looked at the balance sheet and decided it would be profitable to pimp out one of his better and more complicated songs to a luxury carmaker. He's got every right to do that, but the song is now lost to me. More importantly, whether he recognizes it or not, the song is now lost to him, too.
Architecture In Helsinki -- "Do The Whirlwind"
There's not much to it: a two-note melody, an ostinato-octave synthesizer figure, a bare-bones horn arrangement, and some toybox percussion. That it works as well as it does suggests, once again, how very little is required to put together a serviceable, emotionally evocative pop song. No wonder everybody wants in. If a bunch of Australian nobodies can do it, what's your excuse?
Decent pop-punk song distinguished from the six million other decent pop-punk songs by the celebrity brand on the label. If this had been recorded by Sahara Hotnights or The Soviettes or somebody like that, critics would be rushing to damn it with faint praise. I really don't understand why Simpson raises such ire, especially since she's obviously about thirty seconds from the Spice Girls pile. In five years, nobody but bored college kids who sit around playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon are going to remember anything about either of the Simpson sisters besides their marketing campaigns. But while Jessica concentrated on making herself the subject of national condescension, Ashlee actually tried to record a few good tunes. Give the kid her moment in the sun; it'll be over soon enough.
Backstreet Boys -- "Incomplete"
For further inspection, consider the Backstreet Boys. At their pinnacle, they did bubblegum pop as well as anybody ever has -- one bright, gorgeous, scintillating radio track after another. But that pinnacle was traversed in a heartbeat, and now they can't do it anymore. It's not simply that they lack the inspiration or the material, it's that they're physically incapable of making their voices pull off the death-defying stunts that they could when they were in their prime. Brian Littrell used to be able to stop your heart in sixteen bars; now he barely registers. Pop music might be joyous, but pop stars are sad. They are constant reminders of the unbearable ephemerality of excellence.
Beanie Sigel -- "Feel It In The Air"
That four-cornered room is getting awfully crowded these days. Beanie hops on the H-Town bandwagon with this earnest tribute to the Geto Boys and their best-known song. It's a pretty good one, too, generating no small fraction of the late-night inner-city paranoia of the original. We rock critics are supposed to sneer at such wholesale borrowing, especially since the closest the Philadelphian Sigel has probably ever come to Houston and Acres Homes is by watching Rockets games on the tube. But really, it's no more imitative than basing your entire album on an obscure Tim Hardin song, and no more opportunistic than spending over an hour trying to convince coastal hipsters that you know thing #1 about Illinois.
Don't fight me on this, please, folks -- this song is as modest as anything on Sea Change, and about as tuneful, too. Back when well-meaning multiculturalists were turning in theses on Beck in the thousands, this dude was as non-sequitous as they come; these days, he's been fleeing from complex metaphor as if it was his own personal Kryptonite. Mr. Hansen is behaving as though he recognizes that he was, in his prime, maybe the most stunningly overrated act in pop music history, and one whose songs were so playfully obtuse that they never made a damned bit of sense. He cleared space and created breathing room for rock-rap followers who went on to record far more interesting music than he ever did, and for that, he deserves his props. But to me, he will always be remembered as the living embodiment of the white guy's misunderstanding of hip-hop. I am a white guy; I oughta know.
Black Eyed Peas -- "Don't Lie", "Don't Phunk With My Heart", "My Humps"
Speaking of white guys misunderstanding rap music, the next time you, Mr. Rock Critic, are inclined to talk up some dewy-eyed bunch of "positivity" charlatans on the grounds of their moral superiority to the gat-toters, I'd like you to back slowly away from that Jurassic 5 album, and spin your copy of Ready To Die instead. I remember when the Black Eyed Peas were the model minority of the moment. Critics who should have known better fed that monster until it gobbled up hit radio, and now we're forced to listen to total crap like "My Humps" in heavy rotation. Never insinuate your middle-class morality into commercial playlists; you'll end up regretting it. The Bare Naked Ladies of hip-hop.
Bloc Party -- "Banquet", "Helicopter"
I love all this stuff, really, I do. We've just got a rocky beginning of the alphabet, just like we had last year; yet another reason to regret the untimely passing of the great Aaliyah Houghton. It doesn't improve very much until we get to the Ds, either, but stay with me. Bloc Party is another rock group that is supposed to be political until you actually listen to them; then, you realize there's no more persuasive ideology here than there is on your average teenager's weblog. The band is tight, and they've got some pop smarts and songwriting hooks, but then so does most everybody else. They like Gang Of Four; so do you. They don't like George W. Bush; you don't, either. "Banquet" is a more compelling single than anything we've heard so far by Franz Ferdinand, but honestly, that's not saying much. There's nothing here you can't live without, or that you haven't heard a thousand times before.
Bloodhound Gang -- "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo"
There's a school of thought that says Jimmy Pop is a genius ventriloquist, better able to capture the mental state of a rowdy sixth-grader than any songwriter since Rodney Anonymous. The other school of thought, which is admittedly much larger, dismisses the Bloodhound Gang as pre-fraternity asshole music that swerves like a rickety tractor-trailer around anything that looks like genuine wit. This single isn't going to convert any non-believers, but I dig it, and structurally, it's the same joke as the one Nobel Prize-winner Harold Pinter uses in "Trouble In The Works". Hey, I'm just saying.
Bow Wow -- "Like You" (with Ciara), "Let Me Hold You" (with Omarion)
Back when he was Lil Bow Wow, he did what he could to imitate Snoop -- in fact, that was the whole act. Now that he's a Semi-Grown Bow Wow, he's taken to imitating Usher, or at least Usher's role as the non-threatening male component of disposable-pop eye candy duos. Then again, "Let Me Hold You" pairs him with Omarion, who is allegedly a man, and "Like You" with Ciara, who is reportedly a man. Anyway, Bow Wow is the rapper, which almost definitely makes him the boy half, since singing is for girls, and other sissies. Just ask Bow Wow, who is definitely still hard and down for life and Snoop Doggylicious and all the rest. He's gangsta-hard -- so hard that his former mentor has lent him to Jermaine Dupri for good. Right. Somebody inform NAMBLA.
Bright Eyes -- "Easy/Lucky/Free", "First Day Of My Life"
Or, selections from Conor Oberst's continuing attempt to make recordings at a faster pace than anybody can play them back. The physics of this project are complicated, but thanks to iTunes and expanded flash memory, it will soon be possible to download Bright Eyes songs from the Internet at a rate almost as quick as the speed with which Oberst rips the-, er, writes them and waxes them. Yes, portable MP3 players are amazing devices, I have learned in my old age, and perhaps I might even splurge for one someday. But, see, your man has a special device that stores millions and millions of songs. It enables me to create playlists, fast forward and rewind, and jump instantly to any track I choose. It is lightning-fast, and is compatible with every computer in the world. Best of all, it never needs recharging, and I take it with me wherever I go. It is called my fucking brain. With this device, I am able to organize, process, and evaluate all of the music in my collection. I strongly advise all iPod users to consider getting one.
Bruce Springsteen -- "Devils And Dust"
Yet another example of why he's the Boss, and the rest of us are just the Employees: here's the first anti-war song that doesn't feel like it was ghostwritten by MoveOn.org. The creepiest thing about this dark-night-at-an-Iraqi checkpoint isn't the scenario -- though Springsteen inhabits the perspective of the scared-shitless soldier with his usual sensitivity and grace. It isn't even the ghostly illumination of details that slip the minds of workaday protest singers: the smell of the battlefield, the mud and bones. No, it's that this melody is effectively indistinguishable from "All That Heaven Will Allow", one of his few unambivalently happy songs. It's as if he's taking back a gift that he once gave to his country.
Bun B -- "Draped Up"
If you missed out on UGK the first time around, Houston-mania is giving you a second chance. Co-founder Bun B is now an ancient red dragon by rap standards, but he still spits fire, and he's still the curator of the signifiers that make Lone Star hip-hop what it is (and what it do): candy paint, rims, vogues, gleaming grills, wood grain, tricked-out trunks, and that purple, that purple, that purple. Bun is a better pure emcee than any of the younger Texas rappers, and they seem to know it: they all clear prime real estate for him on their cuts, and stay out of his way while he's flowing. On his first proper solo single, he plays it safe -- he stays on top of the beat, rhymes slow, and gives his audience the precise subject matter they'd expect. And just as it seems as if somebody with a checklist is standing over him, enforcing the litany, it dawns on you: Bun B wrote the checklist.
Bryan Adams -- "This Side Of Paradise"
Speaking of OGs, if Cuts Like A Knife came out this year, it would be hailed as an alt-country triumph. Adams doesn't have the pipes he did back in '83, and he doesn't rock with quite the same kick. But his guitar sound has aged well, he still knows his way around a roots-rock number, and he's always a much better lyricist than you'd think he is. His heartland-defiance schtick has weathered two decades and seven Presidential administrations. It still works.
Cam'ron -- "Down & Out", "Get 'Em Girls"
Lazy, stream-of-consciousness rhymes from a veteran rapper who must think he is far too muscular to have to make sense. Now, the Diplomats have cornered the market on gibberish lately, so Cam clearly felt the need to up the ante and teach his protégés a firm lesson in gobbledygook: "Wreckx "N' Effects zoom zoom my poom poom/since the movie Cocoon had my uzi platooned" is about as coherent as it gets. Keep that up, Killa, and you're going to land yourself a gig in the New Pornographers. New York hasn't exactly fallen off, but as long as stuff like this remains industry standard for hip-hop's first city, it's hard to blame listeners for shifting their focus south.
Cassidy -- "B-Boy Stance", "I'm A Hustler"
Rap music is about upward social mobility. People who criticize rap music for being materialistic might as well criticize rap for being rap. There is a name for those who believe that it is gauche to state your intention to become wealthy and to boast about your possessions. We call these people aristocrats. Aristocracies fall, and when they do, it is because people like Cassidy are shaking the foundations. "More money, more problems, it's true/ because the more money I make, the more problems for you". He's talking about conceptual problems, now; the psychological difficulty of watching a young drug dealer -- a hustler -- pass you by on the ladder of success. He's beaten you down, he's dusted you, he never did what the dummies do, he's made a mil since he was 22. He's a hustler, like so many emcees before him: hard rhyming about money, economics and relative deprivation, head down, determined to get rich or die trying.
Chamillionare -- "Turn It Up" (with Lil Flip)
2005 was the year that the rest of America discovered the South. Not the "New" South, either, or the mainframe-designed buppie suburbs of Atlanta. We learned about the Throwed South: the South that exists in a drugged out, slowed-down, screwed and chopped heathaze; a land of low, flat houses that get washed away in gigantic floods; a great American swampland of mosquitoes and trash, fever-dreams and desperation and violence, Cadillac wheels and busted levees, and the slow, slow dripping of purple syrup. Recipes for lean, or sizzurp, or purple, or that purple stuff, or drank, or syrup, or barre, or any number of other euphemisms that are still unknown to the network censors vary, but almost all involve mixing codeine and promethazine with soda. What folks do, see, is mix the syrup and the prometh in a styrofoam cup -- usually filled with crushed ice -- and then add a Jolly Rancher to improve the flavor. Disgusting, sure, but it's no grosser than allowing grapes to rot in a vat. Wine is for drunks, too, but it's the subject of high-class interest and glossy magazine mystification; purple is dark and dangerous, completely disreputable, and still largely unknown to mainstream music listeners. The drink that swamped Houston -- the subject of ten thousand celebratory couplets -- is not something you can get in a liquor store, or at the corner pub. While the Georgians rhyme about their executive suites and their expensive cognac, the Texans boast about daily consumption of a beverage that literally must be looted from pharmacies. Compare also: while cognac and red bull, or "crunk juice", is supposed to make the drinker aggressive, lean is meant to get you totally throwed -- slurred, slowed-down, disoriented. This is not a social drug, and the folks who drink it do not share the upwardly-mobile aspirations of the Atlanta emcees. But like LSD in Haight-Ashbury or ecstasy in abandoned Midlands factories, it has generated a musical subculture devoted to amplifying and enhancing its specific antisocial effects. "Chopped and screwed" mixes take already extant recordings, slows them to molasses-dripping speed, and manipulates the vocal tracks. This is meant to feel incredibly fucked up when you're high on syrup. I'm sure it does, because even stone cold sober, it's some of the trippiest and most mind-melting stuff you'll ever hear this side of the Nuggets collections. DJ Screw, the progenitor of screwed tapes, turned out to be the movement's first martyr: he sipped himself right to an early grave back in 2000. Had he lived, the H-Town explosion might have happened years earlier, and Bun B and Big Pokey might now be megastars. As it is, the emcees who've spearheaded the Houston takeover are second- and third-wave purple-sippers: Run C, Aqualeo, Lil Flip, the "Still Tippin'" trio (Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and Slim Thug), Chamillionaire. Paul Wall is the guardian of the lexicography, and Jones is the good-natured popularizer, but it's Chamillionaire who best embodies the thick, moist, swampy, sun-stroked soul of Houston rap. He sounds high all the time, and it's not a fun buzz -- it's resentful, guarded, private, dangerous, claustrophobic, antediluvian. And when his tracks are chopped and screwed, he's taking you on a tour of territory rarely visited by Northeasterners, even the adventurous ones.
Chris Brown & Juelz Santana -- "Run It"
It's got the Pentagon and Colonial Williamsburg in it, but the Mid-Atlantic is the Throwed South, too. Trey Songs comes from Petersburg, an exurban node on the I-95 spine that's close to 80% African American, and that hasn't seen many of its boats lifted by the rising tide. Fantasia got into hot water for speaking out about her hometown of High Point, North Carolina; she didn't make fans out of the Chamber of Commerce, but her words had the ring of truth. Sixteen-year-old Chris Brown comes from Tappahannock, Virginia, a small tidewater city that got roughed up pretty badly by the infinitely condescending Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. Brown is too sharp a kid to pretend that his home is anything other than hick central, but he still reps it proudly, and he still has something to say. Those with no vision call this Usher warmed over; my guess is that in Tappahannock, they see something different.
Hi, we're Chromeo! We use vocoders, and we like Prince! Unless you don't like Prince, in which case, we're just making fun of Prince. What we do might suck, but we might be joking. If it does suck, then we're definitely joking. Okay?
Ciara -- "And I", "Oh" (featuring Ludacris)
Meanwhile, back in A-Town, the corporate hip-hop machine rolls forward. "Oh" was the last serviceable song on Goodies that hadn't been singled in 2004; Ludacris, the Director of Goofball Operations for the Dirty South, is on hand to goose it up a little and dangle the carrot in the faces of program directors. Ciara, Executive Vice President for Gumby Dances, actually varies pitch from time to time here, and manages some sweet-sounding harmonies on the chorus. All ground is given back on "And I", a piece of limp balladry released to capitalize on Gumby Dance mania, or perhaps the heightened interest spurred by all those sex-reassignment surgery rumors. Corporate Atlanta works any angle it can; that's life on the grind.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah -- "Is This Love"
This one is supposed to sound different from all of the other lame dance-rock acts polluting stages in tired, tired Manhattan. And, it does, I guess, but mostly because while everybody else Downtown resembles Win Butler doing a Thom Yorke imitation, this singer resembles Win Butler doing a David Byrne imitation. With the hiccups. We are so starved for variation from convention here in NYC that we're willing to call anybody making a 2% departure from expectation a new sonic explorer. I can dig it, though, I can dig it. It's no Fear Of Music, but it's less annoying than watching Régine Chassagne run around stage banging on things.
Chris Martin is a little tougher to dig, and not just because of his intelligence-insulting forays into global economics. The trouble with Martin is that he knows his band makes middlebrow snooze music, and he doesn't like it -- but he's got no idea what to do about it. Since he seems incapable of unburdening himself of his grand romantic obligations, he's probably stuck with that big, sudsy sound. But perhaps he could work a bit on the ole lyrics? "Speed Of Sound" is the usual basketful of rhetorical questions and half-realized metaphors, held together by a million dollars worth of compression and mastering, and a ten-cent melody. If he had ever learned how to rock, he could probably fight his way to an objective correlative; instead, he's just got to depend on crass emotional manipulation. He's too nice a guy not to recognize what he's getting away with -- in fact, if you're ever unlucky enough to watch Coldplay in action, you'll see it firsthand. Acknowledgement of his own mediocrity is written all over his face.
Common -- "The Corner", "Testify", "Faithful" (with Bilal and John Legend), "Go" (with Kanye West and John Mayer)
While we're on the subject of milquetoasts, here's Common, a rapper so agreeable that he's started grading his own albums for us. If he'd only called Electric Circus "Cee Plus", he'd have saved me $14.99. A perennial middle-of-the-pack emcee with an unfortunate tendency to slip into an annoying spoken-word delivery, Common's association with the pre-Katrina Kanye West landed his four singles in unfamiliar territory: heavy rotation. A couple of them even deserved the attention -- "The Corner", an inner-city tearjerker with a catchy chorus, and "Go", an interesting lesbian-panic number featuring what had to be the shortest guest appearance in musical history: a second of John Mayer, sampled and looped. Hey, it's not like anybody was asking for more.
This is what Fannypack was supposed to be, but was too arch and self-reflexive to pull off: girls rapping about shoes, shopping and accessories with the same murderous single-mindedness that non-distaff Southern emcees describe their autos. I particularly like it when color commentator/#2 emcee Diamond throws down and starts threatening club owners with vomit. Her voice is so squeaky that her tough-chick performance teeters on the brink of absurdity, but she's such a wild-eyed believer in the greatness of her own fashion choices that she carries the day. "Who ever thought that these girls would get crunk"? Me, motherfuckers!
Cut Copy -- "Saturdays", "The Future"
Australian techno-funksters with a decent ear for synth textures. These are the guys who picked up the baton when Daft Punk decided they'd rather be a Lionel Richie cover band than electronica's ambassadors to hit radio. I don't blame DP for throwing in the towel; they were probably tired of dealing with the groupies who looked like Peaches' kid sister. Now they're all Cut Copy's to do with as they please.
What do we really know about Cincinnati? Hi-Tek was from Cincy, and during his brief stint on the socio-musico-cultural radar, he was known to rock Reds jerseys. I believe the Isleys were originally a Cincinnati act, but they didn't hit it big until they moved to Motown. The Pure Prairie League, of "Amie, what you wanna do?" fame, were unlikely Queen City rockers, considering there's no prairie within a hundred miles of southern Ohio. There was that great rock radio station that refused to give in and change their format to easy listening, even when Les Nessman went on the air and… oh, yeah, that was just a TV show. Does any major league city -- and by that I mean any city with major league sports team, which is the only true measure of metropolitan significance -- have a crappier rock and roll track record? Don't say Hartford; Kurt Heasley and the Lilys made The Three Way up there. Czar*Nok is not likely to be the act that busts Cincinnati open for American inspection, but they're a good combo with a deacon's feel for the g-rap liturgy. "Pimp Tight" proves they've studied their UGK records, and that's what may have landed them their major-label deal: I see a Capitol executive, totally throwed from sipping that sizzurp, throwing pencils at the drop ceiling and slowly convincing himself that Cincinnati is a distant suburb of H-Town. 5% chance of having any career past 2006, but 25% chance of performing the national anthem at Great American Ballpark; I mean, who else are they going to get?
Da Back Wudz -- "You Gonna Luv Me"
Lovable-stupid Georgia duo; farms the same grubby hick-rap plot as the Field Mob. One of the emcees is named "Sho-Nuff"; need I say more?
D4L -- "Laffy Taffy"
The "Do The Whirlwind" of contemporary hip-hop, "Laffy Taffy" is built on little more than a slinky, straightforward beat, a synth plinking out octaves, and a fistful of serviceable booty rhymes: "Girls call me Jolly Rancher/cuz I stay so hard/you can suck me for a long time/oh my God". Of course it was a gigantic crossover hit, peaking at #7 on the Billboard pop charts. Here's a lesson we can all learn from hit radio: it does not take much to entertain a human being. A little ass, a little backbeat will generally suffice.
Daddy Yankee -- "Gasolina", "Lo Que Paso, Paso"
"Laffy Taffy" en Espanol. Sexual frustration is a transcultural language; you do not have to visit Babelfish.com to decipher what this South of the Border weenie is rapping about. Like other geeks from Mick Jagger to Mark Mothersbough to Kool Moe Dee to Lamar and the Tri-Lams, Daddy Yankee is hoping to compensate for his slight stature with gigantic, relentless riffs. In international politics, this sort of thing might get you exiled to Elba; in pop music, it's always been a formula for greatness. These tracks sound as if they were recorded live at 3AM in the deejay booth at some seedy club with all the VUs pegged to eleven, but that's urgency, baby; cantcha feel it when the drums kick in? Some make a booty call, others head to the studio and record stuff like "Gasolina". Those of us who were hoping that "Oye Mi Canto" would do for reggaeton what "Still Tippin'" did for Houston g-rap will have to settle for this, at least for the time being. It's a hell of a lot better than nothing.
Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley -- "Welcome To Jamrock"
This one is allegedly English, though it's in that Ja-fakin' dialect that they teach would-be Law & Order bit part actors in drama class. In case you can't figure it out, allow me to offer this translation: "Dear Club Med tourist with your digital camera! Treat my country with respect, or I will personally beat the shit out of you and drag your overfed American carcass to Trenchtown, and leave you there for dem rude boys to pick over. Sincerely, Jr. Gong." The Marley pedigree got this number on the radio in the United States, but I'd imagine that down in the islands this isn't an uncommon theme. The music may or may not be authentic, but surely the sentiment is.
As I see it, the two emcees whose public profiles were damaged the worst by Hurricane Katrina were T.I. and David Banner. Before Katrina, T.I. was getting taken seriously as a spokesperson for the Dirty Dirty; afterward, his Atlantan corporate-rap smoothness seemed a little vacuous, and firmly unrepresentative of the region. But T.I. is suffering from a disadvantage that David Banner isn't: he's overrated, and his rep was due to come back to earth sooner or later. Banner's failure is harder to reconcile, especially since he's the only emcee of national stature that Mississippi has ever produced. You'd figure that a guy who named two albums after his home state -- and has written elegantly and passionately about it -- would have something to say on the day it got washed into the Gulf of Mexico. But no, Joe Timing was busy pushing "Play", a brain-dead redux (and not even a particularly good one) of "Wait Til You See My Dick". I recognize that promotional campaigns are big, important company-level decisions that are set months in advance, and thus aren't flexible enough to respond to minor incidents like continent-rending hurricanes. But while Banner was flouncing his weiner around on MTV Jams, he let a guy from fucking Chicago steal the Katrina brand right out from under him. Damn, ColliPark, a marketing opportunity like the Storm of the Century comes around once a century. Homie really screwed up. I know, I know, he was taking care of his family and using his tour bus to ship in supplies. Some guys will never get their priorities straight.
Death Cab For Cutie -- "Soul Meets Body", "Title & Registration"
Boy, those Belle & Sebastian comparisons are looking pretty stupid now, huh? This is anodyne stuff to be sure, but there's usually enough going on in these pop songs to get you through three or four listens before they go in the recycle bin to clear hard drive space for World Of Warcraft. I once called Coldplay the new Toad The Wet Sprocket; that makes these guys the new Tears For Fears -- right down to Ben Gibbard's monkeying about with electronica.
Death From Above 1979 -- "Blood On Our Hands"
Their garage-rock schtick is pretty uncomplicated: one guy plays drums and sings, and the other slams away at an overdriven bass. There's a real grace in their brutality, and they appear to own a nice variety of vintage distortion pedals. I like them, but maybe that's just because they're Exhibit Z in the ongoing campaign to prove the superfluity of electric rhythm guitar to heavy rock. Even Jimmy Page would tell you so, if you got him drunk enough: it's all about that bottom end.
Dem Franchize Boyz -- "I Think They Like Me (Remix)"
Your basic Hotlanta-playa track, "I Think They Like Me" only becomes insidiously great on the remix. There, Dem Franchize Boyz run the hook through some kind of platinum-plated processing that converts it from disposability to indelibility, and bring in Da Brat to gussy up their middling-level lyrics with some of her trademark over-sharing. Don't get me wrong, "Oh I think they like me when they heard me on the other one/ so it's only right that I hit you with another one" is a still a piss-poor excuse for a chorus. But if you were able to get the tag line dislodged from your head this summer, you're a better pop warrior than I am, Gunga Din.
Destiny's Child -- "Cater 2 U", "Girl"
This is not what you'd call going out with a bang. Still, I have to think they'll be missed. Where, I wonder, do they fit in the great taxonomy of recent-vintage all-girl singing groups? They were never as musically adventurous as En Vogue, nor as immediately sympathetic as TLC. They couldn't do a chillout groove with the ease of Changing Faces, they could never be as exciting as Salt 'n Pepa, they were never as soulful as SWV or as cute as Blaque. But none of those acts had a frontwoman with half the superstar wattage of Beyonce Knowles, or a second banana with the poise and patience of Kelly Rowland. Their harmonies started out stock, but by the time they were doing stuff like "Soldier", they'd developed their own bag. Nobody's taking them ahead of the Supremes or the Vandellas, but at their best, they were probably just as good as the Pointer Sisters were, and maybe even a little better.
Devendra Banhart -- "I Heard Somebody Say"
This is some kind of social experiment, right? Already pushing it with some of the dicier songs on Rejoicing In The Hands and Nino Rojo, Banhart really needed to re-establish his credibility with an album that at least waved vaguely in the direction of coherence. Instead, he's come back with sixty-plus minutes about his Chinese children and growing his hair and wiping his nose and what have you. I'm as indulgent of asides and absurd minutia as anybody, but I also know that one day the music stops, and you either have to land a chair or accept that it's game over. Banhart had better get serious, and quick, because the hype isn't going last forever.
Don Omar -- "Reggaeton Latino"
God, I wish I could sing like that. He sounds like he's breathing out an entire nation. The beat is huge, sure, but Don Omar is so commanding on the mic that it might not even matter. Oh, what am I saying; of course it matters.
Eminem -- "Ass Like That", "Mockingbird"
And so it ends as it began: with self-dramatizing kitchen-sink melodrama, tinkle jokes, and rude comments about underage actresses. It might be hard to remember now that he's running on fumes, but there was a time when Eminem was worth paying attention to. It didn't last long, and it wasn't unbroken -- but he had a few valuable points to make about the role of the celebrity emcee and his own popular acceptance among middle Americans who wouldn't ordinarily pay any attention to rap music. Marshall Mathers made his whiteness a non-issue by rapping at least as well as, say, a second-string member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Thus, if he'd wanted to, he could have made us forget about it altogether. But he couldn't forget about it: race categories and expectations became a constant touchstone for him, coloring all of his verses and framing his project as an intervention in national sociopolitics. The logical extension of this was like "Mosh" and "White America": tracks that would have made better weblog entries or term papers than pop songs. You could argue that this was inevitable -- that as a prominent white face in a mainly-black genre, he was bound to end up a study in self-enforced tokenism, hyper-conscious of his mark of difference. But look at Paul Wall -- here's a rapper who, as far as anybody can tell, doesn't even realize he's white. He's so deeply embedded in his Houston milieu of rims, grills, and sizzurp that it would never occur to him that there's any meaningful cultural distinction between himself and Mike Jones. Wall even goes so far as to include, without a shred of irony, an honest-to-goodness "real niggaz" song on The People's Champ. Some might see this as simple naïveté; to me, it's further elaboration of why H-Town is, in the words of Bun B, taking over this rap game and shutting it down. It's also a reminder that Em was, and has always been, a nervous and rootless outsider -- and that has often been to the detriment of his art.
Leave it to Evans to fish this piece of sopping ABC gum out of the mouth of Lenny Kravitz. Everything about it is cheap and artificial: the "snare" sounds like a baseball card stuck in the spokes of a rusty bicycle. This is the fakest Motown you'll ever hear, so it falls to R&B's most plastic cyborg to discharge it. And that she does pretty well, for once -- at least there's no cognitive dissonance between the clumsily artificial cut and the aggressively phony-soul delivery. Like Dave Grohl, Evans has managed to hammer out a workmanlike career in the wake of the death of an inspired partner, calling on reserves of grueling persistence, or perhaps reserves of inherited cash.
Fall Out Boy -- "Sugar, We're Going Down", "Dance, Dance"
See, now you think I'm in a bad mood. I'm not, fellas, I'm in a good mood -- a really, really good mood, a holiday mood. And when I get in a good mood, I'm afraid the real me comes out. Not the smiling sweetheart who gives away free tours of the neighborhood, or even the careful critic, offering constructive advice to local bands; no, I mean the me behind closed doors, who spends days in fits of glee, ungenerously laughing his ass off at the culture industry. Privately, I even mock the records that move me: yes, that means yours, too. Displays of emotion are courageous, of course, but they're also a big joke. You break up with your girlfriend, you get beat up by bullies on the playground, you get fired, your love is unrequited, you feel like you don't fit in with the rest of the world. What do you do, Fall Out Boy? Do you take logical, progressive action to solve your problems? No, you decide to go home, force your feelings into a restrictive meter, teach the results of your labors of your friends, sing it all into a microphone while slamming on big vibrating sticks, and then convince an art bank to spend millions of dollars to digitally preserve and market your fine whine. Yes, it's noble, it's beautiful, it's fun, it's rock and roll. It's also completely absurd, and I will be damned if I'm going to pass up an opportunity to make fun of you clowns.
Fat Joe -- "Get It Poppin'" (with Nelly)
Fat Joe is not known for his wit or his battle skills. But he responded to "Piggy Bank" by landing a precise kick right on 50's crotch, calling him out on his enhanced physique and ridiculing him for his paranoia. Then again, 50 Cent has never minded exposing his insecurities, his ugliness, and his desperation to his mass audience. Certainly no man who does not, on some level, crave a critical beatdown dares to bait Nas. Fat Joe is a little safer bet, sure, but "Piggy Bank" was such an undisciplined spray of verbal machine-gun fire -- pathetic, really -- that it may have been meant to boomerang. Masochism must come reflexively to a guy whose greatest love is his nine bulletholes. Perhaps his selection of Fat Joe as a target was, in a weird sort of way, a compliment.
This is one dumb song. "Laughing gas, these haz-mats, fat cats/ Ladies, homies, at the track/ it's my chocolate attack"; what the hell does that mean? Trugoy has turned in some half-assed guest appearances before -- just check out his phoned-in verses on Uptown Saturday Night for starters. Exposure to Damon Albarn has amplified his natural tendency toward indiscipline. Blur's lyrics always were a bit garbled, but in Gorillaz, without Graham Coxon to look over his shoulder and periodically kick his ass, Albarn uses the cartoon mask to absolve himself of any responsibility to write articulately. He's got his solid track record, and his pop smarts; hopefully one day soon he'll stop baiting Bob Geldof long enough for us to discover if he's got anything left.
Green Day -- "Holiday", "Wake Me Up When September Ends"
Do the French really believe that anybody in the United States thinks their stupid has-been nation is worthy of a genuine international row? A few years ago, when we were cracking wise about the Axis of Weasels and "freedom fries", the joke was on those who didn't realize that France was too innocuous to bother confronting. Still, alarmists like to make believe that the French way of life is directly menaced by a glowering Uncle Sam about to spring a company of Green Berets upon the banlieues. On "Holiday", Billy Joe Armstrong puts it like this: "Bombs away is your punishment/ Pulverize the Eiffel Towers". He's being critical of America and its President Gasman, of course, and protective of the Rue de St. Denis. As I'm sure you know, I don't like the Iraq War any better than Green Day does. But us American anti-war activists are perfectly capable of getting our brains beaten in on own. We don't need the French making things worse by inserting themselves into the discussion and acting victimized. I mean, my God, these people can't even figure out how to air-condition their own country.
This was the first time most of us encountered Young Jeezy, heard here recycling a TP joke that Phife discharged more skillfully fourteen years ago. Still, there's something about the lad that leaves a lingering impression of quality. Lord knows it isn't his integrity; here's a rapper who confesses that he knows nothing about hip-hop, and he only bothers to make records to help move his Snowman t-shirts. But that's Atlanta for you. Gucci Mane is originally from Birmingham, and acts more country; he just wants to floss and show off those princess cuts. This song was an empty-headed '05 summertime favorite of many, including the kids who live downstairs. Our floorboards and our spice rack grew seismically familiar with the kick drum pattern.
Gwen Stefani -- "Cool", "Hollaback Girl", "Luxurious", "Rich Girl"
The best diss/answer track of the year was not "Fuck 50" or "Piggy Bank" or even "Blue Orchid", but Gwen Stefani's wicked rejoinder to Courtney Love, who called her a cheerleader. Hey, you'd be pissed off, too. With the assistance of Pharrell Williams, Stefani cooked up a track that not only grooves harder than anything Hole has ever recorded, but also taunts Love with a full inhabitation of the metaphor; i.e., Stefani becomes the cheerleader of Love's nightmares, terrorizing her with glamour, aggressiveness, and hyperfeminine superiority. Revenge is rarely this sweet, or this funky.
Yobs from Staines, England sing of their distaste for capitalist imperatives. I feel you, guys. Hard-Fi tries to stick some Eighties-inspired electro in there, but this is an old-fashioned Britpop band with solid pop songs and energy to burn. They're a nice alternative to the suave frat-rock now dominating the U.K. charts. The new Jesus Jones.
If I paid attention to movies, I'd be cross, besieged, and irritable, rather than garrulous, and flippant. I'd also probably be able to tell the difference between Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff. I think Duff is the blonde one and Lohan is the brunette, but I might have that reversed. I suppose I could use the power of the Internet to check, but my network connection is giving me fits this morning, and, honestly, if I make a habit of spending more that thirty seconds on stuff like Hilary Duff, I'll never get finished with this thing. Anyway, "Wake Up" is a pretty good starter-rock for pre-teens, and gets right the emotional charge of being young, attractive, and lost in an unfamiliar city. Unlike a certain U.S. Senator, Duff wins points for knowing how to spell her first name. Pay attention, guys, and don't make that mistake again.
Hot Hot Heat -- "Middle Of Nowhere", "Goodnight Goodnight"
For reasons I can't even begin to fathom, the new Internet Rock Critical Establishment suddenly turned on these guys, and trashed Elevator with the same fanatical uniformity that they praised Make Up The Breakdown. The IRCE is not particularly fickle: I have noticed they will make excuses for all manner of slumps and sudden downturns. That makes the savaging of Hot Hot Heat all the more inexplicable. Elevator is supposed to be overproduced, as if the glossy Make Up The Breakdown was lo-fi; it's supposed to be uneven, as if Make Up The Breakdown didn't contain crap like "Hold Me Down Aveda" and "Cairo"; it's supposed to lack cleverness, as if "Bandages on my legs and my arms from you" was a witticism; it is supposed to emphasize DeCaro's guitar over Bays's organ, as if there was more than one inexpertly-played combo lead on Breakdown; it's supposed to lack a killer single, as if "Get In Or Get Out" was "Way You Move". My guess is that the members of the IRCE always felt a little cheap about liking Hot Hot Heat, and now that the tenor of indie rock has changed and we all can do important things like learning the folk history of Illinois while rocking, they are attempting to distance themselves from their misguided Strokesy past. It's too bad, because Bays is still squeezing out the same redux pub rock that he always has, he remains a better singer than almost all of his peers, and his band displays some small but meaningful commitment to musicality. Fake VU is available on the cheap, fake Costello is not.
I Can Make A Mess Like Nobody's Business -- "The Best Happiness Money Can Buy"
You can be a snob about Jersey emo, but you ignore it at your own risk; some of the most interesting rock groups in the country are roaring in obscurity in garages and bedrooms across the Garden State. Okay, that's a total lie, but I had you going there for a second, didn't I? If you're not tapped into the Drive-Thru circuit, Ace Enders is easy to miss: he doesn't look like a rock star, and his band The Early November is sonically indistinguishable from thousands of others. But on his own, in the stripped-down I Can Make A Mess, Enders relaxes sufficiently enough to allow his songs a little breathing room. This is folk-rock, or folk-rock-emo, or just a dude with acoustic guitar and a simple melody. You could do worse.
I Wayne -- "Can't Satisfy Her"
What a jerk. I'll bet one man can't satisfy her, if that one man is I Wayne. It doesn't matter how sweetly-sung it is -- "she needs more wood for the fire" is the nastiest thing anybody recorded about a woman this year. Guys who croon sensitively about the dangerous lives of their female acquaintances can take their faux-concern back to the roadhouse. When I hear stuff like this, I feel the need to throw on some Eazy-E just to get a little emotional honesty.
They're settling into their roles as Verlaine-like NYC elder statesmen, no longer subjects of speculation in the gossip columns (even in the Voice) but still casting that angular shadow over nightclubs, studios, practice spaces, Williamsburg sidewalks. There was a moment not so long ago when bands tried to mimic their approach -- but then they discovered it was too hard, and decided to chase Franz Ferdinand or the Libertines instead. Antics did not set the charts on fire, so "C'mere" might be the last true radio single we get out of these guys. They'll be around.
For the record, Drew Barrymore did not actually talk to space aliens, and Corey Feldman did not really hang out with vampires; those were just movies, see? But they were kids at the time, and perhaps could be pardoned for confusing themselves with their characters. Jamie Foxx is a grown man, and one who has been kicking around the culture industry for years. What's his excuse for thinking that he's really Ray Charles? I know, I know, Kanye made him do it. That's the "dog ate my homework" of the '00s.
Jay-Z (courtesy of Memphis Bleek) -- "Dear Summer"
(Lights up on the Roc-A-Fella HQ. JAY-Z sits at his desk in a big leather chair, smoking a stogie. Enter MEMPHIS BLEEK, in ill-fitting pimp suit. He stands at the desk, wringing his hands.)
MEMPHIS BLEEK
Hov, we gotta talk.JAY-Z
Just the guy I wanted to see. I got big plans for your next album. Big plans.MEMPHIS BLEEK
That's great, you know, because M.A.D.E. didn't really sell as well as -JAY-Z
Never mind about that. Bleek, what if I told you I was going to rap on your next joint?MEMPHIS BLEEK
Great! That sounds hot! I got some good ideas, Hov; there's a jam I'm working on where we could go back and forth on the chorus, like -JAY-Z
No, hold up. I said I was going to rap on it. I didn't say you were going to rap on it.MEMPHIS BLEEK
Huh?JAY-Z
I'm doing a solo cut on your joint.MEMPHIS BLEEK
Oh. Well… I guess that's cool, I mean it might be a little confusing, but we could put it at the end of the album or something, and --JAY-Z
One other thing.MEMPHIS BLEEK
Yeah?JAY-Z
It's going to be the single.MEMPHIS BLEEK
(A beat.) But… (Pause.) Okay, let me get this straight. The single from my new album. You're going to be the emcee. And I'm not going to be on it.JAY-Z
Right.MEMPHIS BLEEK
But that doesn't make any sense! What about my identity? What about my career?JAY-Z
(Mimicking him.) What about my identity? What about my career? Don't I always take care of you? Haven't I always taken you along for the ride, and made you a wealthy man? You don't want to actually call attention to your "rapping", do you?MEMPHIS BLEEK
Uh, but -JAY-Z
Didn't you hear me on the "Diamonds Are Forever" album cut? "Bleek could be one hit away for the rest of his career/ as long as I'm alive, he's a millionaire?"MEMPHIS BLEEK
Chronologically speaking, that hasn't been recorded yet.JAY-Z
You're such a little pissant. Look, man, I am Jay-Z. Time is mine to manipulate as I see fit. I possess the power over life and death for you mortals. That you even exist is due to my magnanimousness. I am the greatest rapper ever. I originated hip-hop, and created entertainment. "Fun" itself is my invention. Thanks to me, life forms can respirate. All of these diamonds you see around you were crushed into their crystallized shape by my bare hands. I am the god of recorded music.MEMPHIS BLEEK
But you're retired now. I'm supposed to step out of your shadow and be my own man! I want to be a cornerstone of the ROC, too! What's my role?JAY-Z
(Thinks.) Bleek, do you know how I like to compare myself to Jordan?MEMPHIS BLEEK
Yeah.JAY-Z
You're the Washington Wizards.(Blackout.)
Jazze Pha & Cee-Lo -- "Happy Hour"
You wouldn't know it from a cursory listen, but this lame lounge-rap number is something of a landmark song. For years, even the most badass A-Town rappers have been using workplace metaphors to legitimate their business-minded aspirations. But Jazze Pha and Cee-Lo manage to evacuate the ambition, casting themselves as mild-mannered clock punchers plying girls with booze like any other junior execs. And in a sense, this is where Atlanta rap was in '05 -- at a buppie bar after a long day of marketing and paper-pushing, satisfied with its progress on the ladder of success, looking forward to the X-mas party and the next incremental salary adjustment. The most comfortable rap song ever recorded, "Happy Hour" marks the exact moment when Atlanta ceded the cutting edge to Houston and Memphis for good. Hip-hop may, at base level, be about getting loot, but without the grind, it's nothing.
It got overshadowed by "1 Thing" -- another killer Rich Harrison production -- but this red-hot cut boasted the most annoying, and therefore greatest, sax loop in R&B history and the first lead vocal by Lopez that doesn't sound like every syllable was flown in from a separate ProTools session. Turns out America wasn't ready for it, and after the initial single release stiffed, Epic rushed out a bowdlerized remix with Fabolous on it, and all the musical weirdness stripped away. (The same thing happened to John Legend's "Ordinary People".) As with all chickenshit moves, it didn't help. If you're going to ask Rich Nice to make your music, you should recognize that you're throwing the dice.
Jim Jones -- "Summer Wit Miami", "What You Been Drankin' On" (with Paul Wall, P. Diddy & Jha Jha)Or the Undisputed King of the Parking Lot shows some Big Apple come-latelies how to make a "Sprite remix" with prescription codeine syrup. Ever the gracious host, Paul Wall cements his reputation as the Brad Lidge of hip-hop with another dynamite closing verse. While it's none too surprising to see an opportunist like Jim Jones jump on the big purple bandwagon, when P. Diddy himself shows up at the syrup-sipping party, you know you've got a national movement on your hands. 2005: the year of sizzurp.
JC heads ask the question every day -- what the hell happened to the Joe Budden album? First it was supposed to drop in midsummer, then it was pushed back to October, then it fell off of the release schedules altogether. Homie has entered that amazingly effective branch of the witness protection program reserved for rappers who run afoul of their labels. "Gangsta Party" sounded to me like one of the few recent g-rap singles smooth enough to deserve its Nate Dogg cameo, but I suppose program directors took Budden at his word when he said "I could give a fuck if they play this on the radio." 'Cuz they didn't, see. And now the official DefJam website hasn't been updated since the single's release in June. Forget tax abatements; this the biggest issue confronting the Healy Administration. When your city has one commercially viable emcee, you can't afford to let him vanish into the ether. Jerramiah, organize a search party.
John Legend -- "Ordinary People"
The jizz-gargling vocal tone turns people off. I can understand that. But when was the last time you heard a real Joni Mitchell-style piano-and-voice ballad -- complete with major-seventh chords -- on mainstream radio? Even the lyrics are passable. And when those strings pour in like butterscotch at the end of the track, you'll forgive all of his irritating mannerisms, and maybe even his jock-sniffing relationship with Kanye West. Hey, I'm like The Game; I can say what the fuck I want. I love this Internet, man, I love this Internet.
Juelz Santana -- "Mic Check", "There It Go (The Whistle Song)"Welcome to the Smart Critics, Foolish Choices seminar at the DoubleTree Hotel in beautiful Downtown Jersey City. My name is Tris McCall, and I… oh, this is so hard to say. But I acknowledge that to beat my demons, I must first be able to name them. So yes, it's true: I like Juelz Santana. (Gasps.) Oh, I know, his flow is abysmal, and his diction is similar to that of the Listen 'N' Learn Farm Animals educational toy. But there's something about him that keeps me coming back for more. Maybe it's the cancer-patient bandana, or that shit-eating grin; I'm even sort of weirdly fascinated when he makes those randy Chihuahua noises. My advice to you: don't start. When he begins to vibe, get both hands on the dial and turn as fast as you can. Go to an easy listening channel, try Sean Hannity, anything but Juelz. Otherwise, you could find yourself rhyming "thang" with "thang", and hunting down obscure and terrible Dipset mixtapes. Don't be like me. Don't be a fool. Thank you all.
Above-average new-wave revival act with a sonic debt to Blur and a love-hate relationship to London not dissimilar to mid-period Madness. Worth checking out.
Kanye West -- "Diamonds (From Sierra Leone)", "Golddigger", "Heard 'Em Say"
Well, what would you have done? Say you had a chance to face the nation, and transmit a message to a country unraveling -- would you have read sanitized words from the script, like the rest of the Hollywood stooges? Or would you have turned to the red light, ignored the teleprompter, and tried to channel some of your frustration, fear, and bewilderment into a statement that might possibly begin to make sense of the senseless? At that moment of truth, we didn't get the Louis Vuitton Don; we saw Kanye West, record producer, would-be social interrogator, and complicated man, scared shitless and doing his best. We saw that storied arrogance for what it is: a coping mechanism and mask for an emotional, uncertain artist, destabilized like the rest of us, groping in the dark, trying to speak for those whose mouths had been filled with mud and silt and dirty rainwater. It wasn't graceful, or articulate. Had it been Ras Kass up there, he would have been succinct, pithy, and vicious; had it been Chuck D, he would have declaimed diagnostically, inarguably, and made every leftist in America even prouder of him than they already are. But we don't get to choose our spokespeople, or our pop stars. West turned out to be the rare mainstream performer beloved enough to get a national podium, and internally conflicted and contentious enough to use it to deliver something other than a soundbite. He showed us he owned a pair. He could have played it safe, done all of the talk shows, made College Dropout II, collected his Grammys and donated money to the Democratic Party and to PETA. Instead, he opened his difficult follow-up album by accusing the United States government of spreading AIDS and peddling crack-induced genocide. Kanye West is hardly the first emcee to make these charges, and when his predecessors -- Ras Kass again, who memorably said "it's not little green monkeys/ it's little white honkies" -- took on the establishment, they often did so with far more poetry. Ras Kass did not, and could not, move platinum numbers. If West really was the bankbook-driven industry whore he claims to be in his songs, he probably would have made a better, smoother sophomore album. Instead, he revealed that there were things that were important enough to him that were worth sacrificing some of his fanbase -- things worth acting the fool on live television to make manifest. It may take away from his spins, which takes away from his ends, but it ought to take away from his sins. In other words, he may not have earned any love at the National Broadcasting Company, or in the White House, or at Roc-A-Fella Records. But he earned my respect.
Kelly Clarkson -- "Behind These Hazel Eyes", "Breakaway", "Since You've Been Gone", "Because Of You"
Kelly Clarkson continues to make the case for the direct election of pop stars. Sneer all you want at hit radio and American Idol, but the only difference between contemporary radio emo and Clarkson's work is that those songs suck and these songs are good. This is what modern rock would sound like if any of those no-talent motherfuckers could sing.
Keyshia Cole -- "I Just Want It To Be Over", "I Should Have Cheated"R&B, on the other hand, is the one genre where a performer absolutely must have a good set of pipes in order to succeed. Cole can sometimes sound squeaky and juvenile, but when she heats up, she leaves the microphone smoking -- to illustrate, check out the sizzling last chorus and outro ad lib from "I Just Want It To Be Over". She's got a catch in her voice that she already knows how to exploit to emotional effect, and her line readings, while overwrought, are nonetheless awfully effective. "I Should Have Cheated" is her first crack at a heartbreak ballad, and while she's not quite as nuanced on the downtempo number as she is when she's shooting the works, she still acquits herself better than Mariah Carey did at her age. We could be hearing from her for a long time.
Somali freedom-fighter sings and raps, reads poetry and declaims; "Soobax" is a message to warlords and armed squads in the African Horn to stop harassing civilians. Now that's a protest song with some teeth. K'Naan is not a good vocalist -- at his best, he delivers his polemics in a strangled croak -- and that, more than any Clear Channel censorship, may have prevented him from getting his single released in the U.S. The video is everything the "Welcome To Jamrock" clip was supposed to be: astonishing footage of Mombasa and the Kenyan countryside that is neither exploitative nor apologetic. You won't find it on MTV, but poke around on the 'Net; it's there.
Laura Cantrell -- "Fourteenth Street"
I cannot understand why the IRCE shovels opprobrium on Liz Phair but gives Laura Cantrell a free ride. "Fourteenth Street" is every bit as transparent a pop move as "Why Can't I" was -- and it's a hell of a lot less enjoyable to listen to. While Cantrell has never worked with the Matrix, she has begun to select material unworthy of her talents but palatable to the Borders Books crowd. When she started out, she was kicking country-death ballads like "The Whiskey Makes You Sweeter"; these days she seems determined to repackage herself as an adult-alternative drone. Phair wants to be a commercially-successful musician, and thus fights stage-fright and the ridicule of ten thousand detractors to tour and record and make videos and appear on sub-moronic variety shows; Cantrell chooses her stages with a curator's discerning eye, but seems every bit as determined to leave a lo-fi, ramen-eating past for a bank-stacking future. I have been a fan since the beginning, but I do not think the double standard is serving anybody's interests.
This one practically ridicules itself: a nappy neo-luddite comparing the state of contemporary radio to the good old days of Marvin and Aretha and Ike Turner's domestic abuse. Every old fogey's favorite song, right? But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that if we're going to acknowledge the petty gynophobia of 50 Cent and T.I. and Kanye West but listen to them anyway, the very least we can do is sit there for three minutes and humor Leela James's critique. Think of her as that hectoring Women's and Gender Studies class you had to sit through before the bell rung and you ran off to the kegger. If the professor put a shred of apprehension or doubt or the fear of God in you, then she did her job. Besides, doesn't C. Dolores Tucker need something to rock to?
Speaking of misogyny and double standards with real-world consequences, where the fuck is my Free Lil Kim movement? G-Unit hollered for the liberty of the incarcerated Yayo until they were blue in the face, C-Murder has half of Gator begging for amnesty, and you can't watch an H-Town video without hearing Bun B stand up for his partner 'til they let him off the lock. While perjury might not be as cool as getting your bodyguard to shoot Mr. Dopeman in the back, the cells in Rikers are just as cold for fibbers as they are for those caught up in the hustle. CaféPress.com can only do so much; Atlantic Records, start printing up those tees.
Not everybody is going to understand this at all, and few are going to understand it completely; Lil Wayne and his g-rap compadres talking about the corner, automatic spitting, killing folks, slanging caine, pimping, showing off his diamonds, pissing wealth. In the early nineties, as suburban white kids jumped on Straight Outta Compton like Hello Kitty on a catnip toy, Michelle Shocked and her husband argued that the gangsta stuff gave white people exactly what they wanted: a caricature of black aggression, menace, and thoughtlessness that excited and ratified the American racist imaginary. This wasn't their argument alone; others made it, too, and lots of well-meaning liberals signed on to it. I remember thinking it made a lot of sense, as I sat there, reading the Village Voice and listening to 187 On The Undercover Cop. What didn't occur to me, or to Michelle Shocked, was that NWA didn't give a damn what we thought -- and that very act of not caring was, in itself, the crucial statement. This wasn't how we came up: we were used to Chuck D writing letters to the editor and threatening Greg Tate, and managing his own critical reception with the fussiness of Auntie May the flower arranger. See, we thought they were les badasses dangerouses, wearing those clocks around their necks; really, all they ever wanted was to engage in a constructive dialogue with whitey and his minions. And mainstream journalists were happy to oblige, as long as they could scold and praise like schoolmarms, and remind emcees constantly of their social obligations. Eighties rappers tried so hard -- every album had its anti-drug song, its positivity song, its stay-in-school song, its African history song -- and got so far, and in the end, it didn't even matter: they still got treated like the naughty kids on the playground. In retrospect, it was apparent that something needed to be done. When Ice Cube asked "do I look like a motherfucking role model?", he was doing more than just standing expectation on its head and providing some oxygen to a genre that had gotten awfully stuffy: he was liberating rap music from its obligation to sit up straight, fold its hands, and speak when spoken to. After NWA, there would no longer be any need to justify anything to authority figures -- rap had broken free from supervision, and from now on, rappers would achieve success on terms established within the culture only. In order for it to achieve its destiny as the world's most important music, hip-hop had to grow up and make this rupture. G-rap was, and is, the terrible mask that black upward social mobility had to wear to inscribe its importance on the globe.
I was right! Lohan is the brunette, and Duff is the blonde. I didn't even need to use the power of the Internet to find out; we just went to the mall, and there she was, biting her fingernails on the cover of a 2006 calendar. She looks a bit like the sort of girl you see in Hoboken on a Friday night, painfully underdressed and shivering in the October chill, running as fast as she can from Bahama Mama's to Drunky McSwiggin's to meet her friends. Of course, those girls are all marketing assistants, accounting students, and future CFOs, and Lohan is a tough-guy rocker. It could happen to you, too, if you make a wrong turn on Washington Street, and end up at the Guitar Bar rather than the Whiskey Bar.
Liz Phair -- "Everything To Me"
Okay, stop it right now. If Liz Phair were a rapper, and she decided to tell America she was going to make money money, make money money money, nobody would think twice about it. But because she began in the privileged world of alt-rock, and she's honest about her ambitions, she has become the whipping-girl for everybody who insists on the vast distinction between the sort of music that ends up on mainstream commercial radio and the sort that ends up on quasi-commercial college radio. There is a difference between professionally recorded rock and that stuff your weird cousin Butch makes in his bedroom, sure. But Atlantic Records is a business, and one motivated by the bottom line. Merge and Matador? They're businesses, and motivated by the bottom line. Phair is no more or less a sarariman than Memphis Bleek or Britt Daniel -- she's just pathologically candid, and calling attention to her own contradictions and perverse compromises has always been part of her project. "Everything To Me" isn't going to be the hit that "Why Can't I?" was, but that's not for lack of trying; it's just not quite as irresistible a tune. It's still very good, and nowhere near the departure from Exile In Guyville that the IRCE wants you to believe it is. There is no better illustration of the self-delusion, moral paralysis and complacency of indie culture than the critical reception of the last two Liz Phair albums.
Louis XIV -- "Finding Out True Love Is Blind"
If we're going to have to take Sarah Silverman seriously as a cultural critic, I guess we've got to put up with this, too. Like Rockstar Games, these guys peddle stuff that's just meant to make joyless Puritans cringe; it's useful for pissing off your parents, but there's no reason for anybody over the age of seventeen to listen to this stuff. If you're under seventeen, and your folks are joyless, go right ahead -- and remember, the first amendment is always the best, baby.
Ludacris -- "Number One Spot", "Pimpin' All Over The World" (with Bobby Valentino)
Sometimes your ace pitcher comes back after a star-caliber season, and there's something missing. The fastball doesn't have the same zip, the curveball doesn't break as sharply, some of that old composure is gone. The doctors check him over, but there's no sign of injury or impaired vision. Then you look at the back of the baseball card, and you see it: he threw 250+ innings last year, had crazy-high pitch counts, and spent far too long on the mound. He's not finished, he's just suffering from overuse. He needs to go on the DL for a little while, re-charge his batteries, get his mechanics together, and give himself a chance to sneak up on the league again.
Maria Taylor -- "Song Beneath The Song"
But Maria, is it a love song? I didn't get that part. The wan half of Azure Ray does her best Suzanne Vega impersonation, whispering into the microphone before stepping aside to share her chorus with Conor Oberst. Exhuming the song beneath the song is a Saddle Creek obsession: these guys wear their subtexts like Gucci Mane rocks bling.
Mariah Carey -- "Shake It Off", "We Belong Together", "Don't Forget About Us"
These are the best singles Carey has recorded since '97 at least, especially the gonzo weeper "We Belong Together". She sings the upbeat R&B numbers with renewed verve, too, as if she'd suddenly come home after a long trip to slumberland. In her youth, she was one of the most aggressively ostentatious singers to ever address a microphone windscreen, coaxing weird coffee percolator and nuclear meltdown noises out of that million-dollar throat of hers. The reborn Carey isn't feeling quite that chipper, but I'll take the '05 version over the morose "diva" who has recently sounded like an advert for Xanax.
Straightforward fuck-me ballad. Thematically indistinguishable from "Strip" by Adam Ant, and about as disposable.
Mates Of State -- "Goods (All In Your Head)"
A wonderful act to watch, the Mates Of State have never exactly been able to capture the exuberance and camaraderie of their live show in the studio. In concert, Kori Gardner's mastery of her gigantic Yamaha combo feels like a triumph of woman over machine; on record, the organ fireworks tend to become an afterthought. Which is weird, because Mates of State is a duo, and there aren't any other instruments besides Jason Hummel's drums. I am sure that Gardner has no interest in calling attention to her talent a la Keith Emerson, but consider this -- MOS songs are, like those of a certain mid-Seventies power trio, a series of smaller musical units stuck together like Lego pieces. See, they're prog and they don't know it. And if the shoe fits…
Metric, on the other hand, had an inkling that they were becoming prog, weren't comfortable with it, and decided instead to flatten their songs under distorted rhythm guitar. Confronted by the B-DARG, Emily Haines tries to squeal like Karen O, but mostly just sounds desperate. Worse yet, the dynamite rhythm section of Joules Scott-Key and Josh Winstead has been effectively buried. There are still good songs here, struggling to poke their angles through the production, and "Monster Hospital" is one of them. But the overall tone of Live It Out is one of grudging acquiescence to somebody else's value system. "I fought the war", Haines sings, "and the war won". Though she's a convicted opponent of the Bush Administration, I don't think she's talking abut Iraq.
I don't know where the members of the IRCE live -- the Chicago suburbs, judging by their patterns of idolatry -- but here in Jersey City, you could walk by any Indian bodega and hear music like this blasting from the store's sound system. This fusion of hip-hop, reggae, raga, and Middle Eastern pop is SOP for contemporary subcontinental music; there are record stores on Grove Street that deal exclusively in it. I'm not saying that it's not super-cool -- it is super-cool. But this notion that M.I.A. is some kind of groundbreaking artist or cross-cultural pioneer is the single most laughable piece of conventional wisdom I encountered in 2005 -- and I listened to all of the President's news conferences. How this goofy Sri Lankan party girl became the subject of hipster adulation, and the other seven hundred thousand Asian dance-pop acts got ignored, is a subject best left to her publicist.
Mike Jones -- "Back Then", "Flossin'"
Rumor has it he's a collective hallucination brought on by sipping too much sizzurp: the ghost at the bottom of the styrofoam cup. Whatever illicit chemical he represents, it was, in fairness, the catalyst for the H-Town explosion. You could make the case, as many uncharitable bastards have, that Jones played third fiddle on his own lead single -- but in the great filing cabinet of rap classics, "Still Tippin'" will forever be listed under his name. Based on that accomplishment alone, he could, to paraphrase Ras Kass once again, tell the haters to ride his dick for the rest of their lives.
Missy Elliott -- "Teary Eyed", "Lose Control" (with Ciara & Fat Man Scoop)
So she showed the non-believers that she could, if she wanted to, throw a party without the help of Mr. Mosley. With the Man from the Big VA out of the way, Elliott's well-known sentimental streak takes over -- and much of The Cookbook feels like a nostalgic Golden Age tribute. She's got that old-school "Apache" break working on "We Run This", some huge Eighties-style beats (courtesy of Rich Nice) on "Can't Stop"; even Mary J. Blige swings by to reprise her rap on "What's The 411". The two singles are probably the most current-sounding cuts on the album, if you don't count the crunk semi-parody "Click Clack", and Mike Jones's perfunctory guest-shot. See, behind the futuristic schtick and all the poo zoo my kizzer poo zigga hey zee, she's always been an old-fashioned girl.
My Chemical Romance -- "Helena"
If you press your face against the scratched glass of the PATH train windows and look out at the tunnels beneath the Hudson River, you can vaguely discern out the decaying artifacts of a great war that was fought between New York and New Jersey eons ago. Here, the hull of a gigantic battleship, sunk to the bottom of the river; there, a machine of infernal destruction, silently rusting in a disused tunnel; and everywhere, casings of strange ammunition, broken blades, jeweled scabbards, clubs, catapults. No record exists of what the battles were fought over, or how they were decided, but close inspection of the glowing hieroglyphs on the airshaft walls tells a story of slights given and gifts returned, spies captured, stolen messages, telegraph signals in dead languages. Dot-splashes of blood, strewn like punctuation across the tracks, whisper a sentence of their own -- a curse on both houses, and a black prayer to the ghosts of the slain to link hands below the Hudson in a cold net of spirit-flesh. And the train rolls on: through a region of unbearable frost, where the King of New York, dressed in well-tailored sealskin and a jaunty hat, fell beneath the savage blows of the Jersey hordes, dancing to a private and uneven rhythm. Here are the Red Stretches, lit once by lanthorns and now by the primitive fluorescent lights of the tubes. We commemorate this, today, this long-forgotten battle that has become a cold war, in the hope that when we emerge from the tunnels at Christopher Street, or in the husks of the World Trade towers, it will be to daylight, and a new understanding.
Nas -- "Just A Moment" (with Quan)
It is telling that 50 Cent went after his relationship with Kelis, but I am afraid it says more about Curtis Jackson than it does about Nasir Jones. "Sucker for love" does describe Nas -- he has always been motivated by a passionate affection, sometimes for girls, sometimes for his family, for his city, for fellow rappers, for knowledge, and sometimes, though not often, for himself. Those of us who love him right back appreciate his willingness to be love's fool. To 50 Cent, it is absolutely inconceivable, (not to mention purposeless) that a man would risk his private standing and personal well-being by trusting in the love of others. 50 dwells in a suffocating world where emotional headroom is scarce, every horizon is bleak, and every other man is a patsy, a target, a foe, or a betrayer. As entertaining as it is to visit -- and make no mistake, it is -- it must be horrible to inhabit.
Diamond's version of "My Way", or perhaps "We Are The Champions". It's a little odd for him to be taking a victory lap twenty years after his last hit song, but then again, he has never been a guy who has tethered his jazz-singing jamborees to specific achievements. He is Neil Diamond, fool, he'll party when he wants to. Great fist-pumping chorus, Shatneresque lyrics, that world-famous emo-Jew delivery: what else could a pop junkie ask for?
Nelly -- "Grillz" (with Gipp & Paul Wall)
We will remember the grill as the goatee of the '00s. Certainly they look every bit as stupid and affected. But Nelly can remove his grill any time he wants to, which is not something you can do with that sailor tattoo on your forearm. He can dunk it in peroxide until the next video shoot, put on a suit and tie, and address the shareholders meeting of St. Lunatics, Inc. In other words, if what you're looking for is a low-commitment, high-impact fashion accessory, the grill cannot be beat. And there's another reason why conspicuous-consumption conscious emcees have responded so enthusiastically to mouth jewelry: it is entirely personalized, and therefore it can't be faked. Any old wannabe can procure rental bling from Jacob's and pretend it's representative of great wealth. But if you've got a gleaming grill to flash, that means that particular piece of jewelry is indisputably your own; for god's sake, a dentist had to make an impression of your teeth in order for Paul Wall, or whoever, to craft it for you. Wall's unique status as jeweler-emcee made him an obvious choice to kick a verse on this tribute number, and as usual, he does not disappoint: he begins by comparing his mouth to a disco ball, and concludes by encouraging us to "call me George Foreman 'cuz I'm selling everybody grillz". Turn on MTVJams; you'll see he's not exaggerating.
Tell the truth -- do these guys make any sense at all to you? I know you probably root for them because of the intricacy of their arrangements and the stupefying musical intelligence of Carl Newman's songwriting. But I have never been able to come up with a reading for any of these songs that holds together for the three minutes it takes to listen to it. "Two sips from the cup of human kindness and I'm shitfaced"; that's clever, in isolation. "You had to send a wrecking crew after me"; that's a interesting refrain, and it makes me want to know more. But when I try to know more, I find I'm confronted with a gigantic clockwork puzzle-box filed with tricks and mirrors and gadgetry, and the best I can do with it is look at it from the outside and admire its dazzling circuitry. I have been trying for six years to make the jokes and one-liners and provocative phrases add up to something meaningful; despairing of that, I will settle for resonance. But if I haven't gotten there by now, chances are I never will, and the New Pornographers will remain a fascinating, unsatisfying open riddle.
Oasis -- "Lyla", "The Importance Of Being Idle"
Because they've got two singers in the group who are bossy enough to be heard over an earthquake, they can get away with bigger guitorchestra indulgences than most. To be fair (to the earthquake), Noel G. cuts through by grunging up his voice; thus, the more he sings, the more his band seems stuck in the Nineties. Little brother has no such problem, but ever since "Don't Look Back In Anger" hit, he's been given most of the featherweight material. "Lyla", for instance, is a lot of fun, but it's also "Street Fighting Man" without the street fight, and perhaps even without the man. I don't believe in "originality" any more than you do, but there comes a point when the borrowing becomes so egregious that it's tough to pardon. When they get their teeth into a power ballad, they can still make all of the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention. But if they would just become a cover band already and be done with it, it might come as a great relief to everybody involved.
Of Montreal -- "So Begins Our Alabee", "Wraith Pinned To The Mist And Other Games"
Holy shit, when did Kevin Barnes become a funkmaster? His late-career reinvention as a dancin' fool has got to be one of the unlikeliest transformations this side of Peter Pettigrew; I mean really, one moment he is attempting to write brittle Ray Davies songs about his dog, and the next, he's turned into a booty-shaking existentialist of the first order. Now, nobody who actually frequents dance clubs would consider this stuff worthy of getting down to, but that's their loss. Sir Mix-A-Lot proved you don't need a million dollars worth of compression equipment to move the crowd; Barnes has discovered he can do it with his four-track recorder and a shed-ful of cheap Radio Shack synthesizers. Again, people try to make this more difficult than it really is. Purple Rain for the argyle-sweater set.
Will Sheff's earnest alt-country-but-secretly-emo outfit was supposed to fill the Thinking Man's Rock Group slot left vacant now that the Decemberists have decided they are a frat-rock band. But unlike Colin Meloy, who seems to have gotten his vocabulary from the 365 New Words A Year Calendar (and who is constantly chomping at the bit to show mommy what he's learned), Sheff's heavyweight diction feels altogether natural and unremarkable. Eliminating the risk of malapropism also guts some of the thrill of the intellectual high-wire act. But indie rock didn't really need two Walt "Clyde" Fraziers.
You hate to belittle anybody's spiritual breakthrough, but when I saw that Orenda Fink had returned from her factfinding mission to Haiti with a song called "The Dirty South", I admit I expected more. Instead of the long-awaited Azure Ray-Goodie Mob collaboration, we got this Television For Women scenario not unlike "Little Amsterdam" by Tori Amos, only without the kick*ass piano playing. Indie producers need to recognize that there are very few songs that would not be improved by a Lil Jon cameo. Don't just tantalize us with titles, Saddle Creek; break open the checkbook and spend some of that Oberst money.
Paul Wall -- "Sitting Sideways" (with Big Pokey), "They Don't Know" (Paul Wall, Bun B & Mike Jones)H-town's gatekeeper is, on the whole, a very pleasant fellow, uninterested in gatting anybody on South Lee. Do not, however, get between Wall and his sizzurp. Not since the heyday of Cypress Hill has any commercial radio artist labored so assiduously to associate himself with a drug. But unlike B-Real, who just wanted to get totally throwed, Wall finds in that styrofoam cup something of substantial social utility; To Paul Wall, sipping drank is a patriotic act, and his cultural responsibility as a Texan. Not for nothing does he call it "oil"; it not only powers those tippin' sessions in candy-colored cadillacs, but it serves as a figure for the Lone Star's other liquid export. Out-of-towners, we're told in "They Don't Know", come to his Third Coast state taking junk; their crime is condescension and ignorance of local custom. But what kindness!, what great generosity Wall shows!, patiently cataloguing all of the people, places, and activities that a carpetbagger might need to learn about before he could feel at home in Acres Homes. He could make like Damian Marley, or Big Juss, and tell all newbies to take a hike or suffer the consequences. Instead, ever the good griot, Wall attempts the redefinition of his home city on his own terms, and offers dazed visitors the sacramental cup of codeine, promethazine and Sprite. With a big, throwed smile, Swishahouse wants you to think of lean as the H-Town version of a Philly cheesesteak. No word yet from the Houston Chamber Of Commerce.
Pharrell Williams -- "Can I Have It Like That" (with Gwen Stefani)
Because he insists on "singing" the hook on the half of the songs on the radio he produced, we get plenty of Pharrell's vocals on other people's cuts. And that was fine, sort of; relentlessly megalomaniacal, maybe, but nothing that was going to make you touch that dial. But now that Kanye West is a Newsweek cover boy, every fader-pusher thinks he can emcee. If anybody had actually listened to a N.E.R.D. album -- rather than just sticking them on year-end "best of" polls to fill out a quota -- perhaps this outcome could have been dodged. It wasn't dodged, so rappin' Skateboard P is part of our lives for the next year or two at least. Williams is an abominable emcee, but the track is so deftly constructed that you almost absolve him for his fruitless search for the downbeat. Plus he's had the good taste to bring in Stefani to coo out the tag line. But we all know he keeps impeccable company.
Terrific fusion of Miami ass music, Georgia crunk, reggaeton, and batshit Latin artistry. Throw in a crazed appearance on "Shake" by the Ying-Yang Twins, and that's one full year of irrational exuberance of the funkiest kind. The language barrier in hip-hop has proven to be a tough one to overcome. Pitbull does his best to vault it by concentrating on Spanish words that are familiar to most gringos: obscenities. Now there's some edutainment me, you, and your drunk Uncle Pedro can get behind.
Postal Service -- "We Will Become Silhouettes"
Delicate, mildly psychedelic electropop sung by the frontman of Death Cab For Cutie. Unobjectionable and unremarkable.
Pretty Ricky -- "Grind With Me", "Your Body"
This is enjoyable fluff, but if these guys are by chance heterosexual, they have to be the worst pick-up artists in hip-hop history. There aren't any women on earth who like to be compared to Everlast punching bags, so we are forced to conclude that the members of Pretty Ricky are singing to each other. The chorus of the clean version to "Your Body" contains a tautology so nonsensical that these guys risk getting canonized by the Pope: "We ain't got to make love/ we could just cuddle up/ and if you don't want to cuddle up/ baby we could make love." If you were wondering what they were really singing on the album version, trust me -- don't.
Purple Ribbon All-Stars & Big Boi -- "On It Tonight"
Launching a two-fisted attack on teetotaling network censors is our man Antawn Patton. "On It Tonight" was originally called "Kryptonite", but MTV shut that down once the suits discovered it was slang for marijuana. But if you've been reading closely, you might have noticed that the name of the act suggests a taste for a different intoxicant. In the video, fly girls with styrofoam cups wear t-shirts reading "Got Purple?" Now, thanks to all the bleeps, when the All-Stars chant about how they're "on it tonight", the morality police don't know what they're talking about. It's enough to drive a concerned parent to drink.
Pussycat Dolls -- "Don't Cha" (with Busta Rhymes), "Stickwitu"
Most only know "Baby Got Back" and Return Of The Bumpasaurus (the title, not the music on the album). But there is more to Mix-A-Lot than the booty. Rear ends come first for Sir Mix-A-Lot, of course -- but as anybody who has heard Seminar can tell you, he's got a developed social conscience, storytelling skills, and better pickup lines than LL. Swass, the lead joint, was groundbreaking for several reasons: it was the first major rap record from Seattle, it's one of the funniest albums ever recorded, and it introduced the world to Kid Sensation, Mix-A-Lot's so-absurd-it's-brilliant tape-manipulated alter-ego. It also contains the single best couplet of all time, including those found in the works of such timeless poets as Shakespeare, Edward Arlington Robinson, and O'Shea Jackson: "nuclear wo'head/ aimed at your fo'head/ your girl calls my name in yo' bed", from "Attack On The Stars". The Pussycat Dolls apparently dig Mix-A-Lot, too, since the chorus of their international hit is lifted from the title track of his debut. Only while the Seattle kingpin asked the ladies "don't you wish your boyfriend was Swass like me?", the Pussycats flip the gender and change the last part to "hot like me". Lame, especially to those of us who know that Swass stands for "so wild and so sexy". Make your dumbass teenybopper fans look it up, for Christ's sake.
R. Kelly -- "Trapped In The Closet (Parts I-V)", "Burn It Up"
The Rehearsing My Choir of R&B, "Trapped In The Closet" dispenses with hooks, choruses, conventional songwriting strategies, and brevity, and instead foregrounds the byzantine narrative. Sadly; R. Kelly is too cool to kick the can with his grandmother; he gives us some rehashed and undistinguished Dynasty plot instead. One of the structural advantages of a pop song is that it's over in three minutes. If you let your track drag on for a half an hour, you might as well be shooting a sitcom.
Ray Cash -- "Sex Appeal (Pimp In My Own Mind)"
I write a few different columns for dolo; usually, as I do them, there are rap videos playing in the background. Right now, for instance, I am typing away under the X-mas tree and forcing poor Hilary to sit through the "Laffy Taffy" clip for the umpteenth time. In recent months, I have been writing a column about rap videos for dolo, which sure serves as a convenient justification for my addiction. To me, watching rap videos is like going to mass. You get a parade of decontextualized and reified signifiers, all glowing and holy for the congregation: the cars, the girls, the candy-paint, the rims, the bling. The high priest stands surrounded by deacons and supported by the choir as he recites the liturgy. In the hands of a great theological interpreter like Hype Williams, the interplay between the preacher and his holy objects is positively sacramental. I digress. When I first saw the Ray Cash video, I was struck by how different it felt from other clips, but I couldn't figure out why. When it finally clicked for me, it was anything but straightforward: it wasn't just that he seemed insecure (you could say that about 50) or uncomfortable in his outfit (just check out the Ying Yang Twins) or from Cleveland (that was true for Bone Thugz) or weird around the women (examine almost every rapper in America). It was the combination of all of these disadvantages, plus an air of incompetence and frustration that hovered around his face. I felt like I was watching the Randy Newman of rap. "Sex Appeal" is a good song, but there isn't anything about it that would justify that impression. Still, if the purpose of the video was to make me curious, it certainly succeeded. I wonder if I caught something significant and promising about Cash, or if I was just falling for an illusion. It wouldn't be the first time, in either case.
The co-writer of "Jesus Walks" gets his payback: West's best track of the year, complete with a vanity verse from the Louis Vuitton Don himself. 'Fest makes the most of it, cracking jokes about being "whack-tose intolerant", and sending out a radio personal for a girl as authentic as his whip. He's got a big, goofy voice -- sort of Biz-lite -- and he discharges the chorus with tremendous energy. But some people were never meant to be pop stars, and Rhymefest is one of those people.
Rev. Run -- "Mind On The Road"
Faux-old school from one of the all-time greats. He's gone back to his original rhyme style, thankfully: right on top of the beat, shouting at the top of his lungs, thwacking his punchlines into your head with a twenty-pound spade. If he doesn't slam quite as hard in '05 as he did eighteen years ago, neither does anybody else from the era save Barry Bonds.
Richard Thompson -- "Let It Blow"
While we're on the subject of dudes who have been rocking it for awhile, Richard Thompson has now been in the game for thirty-nine years. I'd say he has a future in show biz. Thompson fans suffer his oddball experiments with a smile, comfortable in the knowledge that he will always return, yo-yo-like, to his métier: wrist-slashing English folk balladry and fork-bending (his ex-wife's adjective, not mine) guitar leads. As the name suggests, Front-Parlour Ballads is heavy on the former and light on the latter, but he's such an expressive acoustic player that only a terminal Stratocaster junkie would complain. "Let It Blow" is a track he's written a thousand times before, but that's par for the course with Thompson: his singles are always the same song. Skip it and start with #2.
Rihanna -- "Pon De Replay", "If It's Lovin' That You Want"
Totally ersatz dancehall from a diwali pretender who is about as "island" as Orrin Hatch (R-UT). "Pon De Replay" is kind of amusing, if you enjoy rubbernecking at Ja-fakin' fiascos; but "If It's Lovin' That You Want" is a complete Club Med disaster, and about as fun as a cruise ship quarantine. What with Sean Paul misplacing his talent in Montego Bay somewhere, it's been a bad season for phony Caribbeans. Someone throw me a dinghy; this glass-bottomed boat is going down.
Roisin Murphy -- "Sow Into You", "If We're In Love"
The coolest motherfucker on the planet. Murphy fronted Moloko for a little more than a decade, injecting some personality and charisma into a few genres -- trip-hop, techno, IDM -- sorely lacking in both. While a club singer, Murphy approached the microphone like an emcee, jamming as many words and phrases as she could into every bar, and squeezing inflections out of every syllable. The remix of "Sing It Back" made her a disco diva in spite of her best intentions, and from that moment on, it became inevitable that she'd eventually break from Moloko and release a solo record. When it came, it was as uncompromising as her work with her old outfit, but entirely distinct from it. "Sow Into You" might have fit on Songs To Make Or Do, but "If We're In Love" is something entirely new -- muted horns, brass bass, a beat like a skipping stone, and Murphy's most provocative and believable come-on yet. It is almost impossible to find her recorded work in the United States, but in Europe, Roisin Murphy is a legitimate leftfield pop star. This is the only argument I will countenance for the moral and aesthetic superiority of the Old World to ours.
Sans Souci -- "Locust"
Americans aren't much interested in electropop, but stateside bands keep on trying. Sans Souci is an independent combo from Queens; I think they're still together, but I'm not completely sure. Like many indie groups, they stuck a few MP3s on their homepage and on MySpace, crossed their fingers, and waited for the tide to turn. It never did, but if it had, this could have been the jam of the summer. The singer squeals in that Billie Holliday-lite delivery that has become all the rage in hipster circles, and the Casios don't exactly sync up with the beat. It doesn't matter: when the counting chorus kicks in, it's totally irresistible. I had "Locust" stuck in my head from the July evening I heard Sans Souci perform it at Southpaw until the beginning of the autumn. Mine are idiosyncratic tastes, I know, but I can't imagine my pathological obsessions are so far from the mainstream that this superior piece of new wave revival wouldn't work for you, too.
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Her handlers claim she's the queen of Colombia or something, but every time she opens her mouth, it's more like Toni Childs covering Alanis Morissette. There has been very little Latin influence in her American commercial radio singles, which is disappointing, since she could probably finagle a crossover cut into heavy rotation just by shooting one of her patented belly-dancing videos to accompany it. She ought to get on the stick, because she's not going to have those abs forever.
Slim Thug -- "Like A Boss", "I Ain't Heard Of That" (with Pharrell Williams)
In some ways the current Houston rap scene feels like a throwback to an earlier version of rap music where the object of the game was not to prove yourself a corporate executive in training, but instead to get high, and to fuck anything that moved, and to promote your friends' albums on your album. The solidarity between the "Still Tippin'" trio might be as phony as Kerry-Edwards, but as long as the tape is rolling, they treat each other like pals and equals. I like to hear a verbal beatdown as much as the next guy does, but I have to admit there's something refreshingly old-fashioned about a rap crew where everybody is too chilled out and throwed to battle. Slim Thug is the most glowering figure on the H-Town circuit, which means that unlike some of his peers, his assertions of superiority are more spirited than formal. His big, molasses-thick voice sounds positively alien and terrifying when chopped and screwed. In the complete set of H-Town action figures, he's the gigantic one who plays the enforcer. Collect them all!
Smitty -- "Diamonds On My Neck"
Ooh, yeah. Miami newcomer Smitty sounds so excited to have been given a record deal that he can barely get the words out; it takes him a verse and a half to settle down and stop doing roll call. But he could have been making elephant noises over this track and it would still bump. Wins points for incorporating the drum break I associate with "I'll Be Waiting For You" by PM Dawn; I don't suppose Smitty is a Prince Be fan, but you never know.
Pre-pubescent pop stars have one great advantage over teens -- they're relieved of the obligation to sing silly Lohanesque love songs. The Smoosh sisters are twelve and nine, and they write their own words; since they're unsupervised, they get on about some pretty fucked-up stuff. I particularly dig the one about the bone monster. Bands like the Decemberists have been trying to tap into this vein of monster-under-the-bed childlike horror and instability for years, raiding their closets for old George Bellairs novels and slogging their way through sea shanties and music-class primers. If you really want that creepy childlike vibe, why not raid the kindergarten? Hey, it worked for Roger Waters.
I think of Snoop's #3 singles as public-service warning messages to those who are tempted to purchase entire Snoop albums. When he subtitled his '04 joint Tha Masterpiece, I almost bit; we all know he's got the skills for one. Then "Drop It Like It's Hot" seemed to promise a whole album's worth of stark little street burners -- which would not have been Michelangelo, but would certainly have been superior to Paid Tha Co$t To Be Tha Bo$$. But nobody who hangs out with Lee Iacocca in Chrysler commercials is also dropping classics. Caveat emptor.
Spoon -- "I Turn My Camera On"
Examination of cyber-romance and webcam culture from sexual explorer and well-known porn addict Britt Daniel. Just kidding, it's the usual elliptical nonsense. Spoon gets props for being measured and intellectual, but this one is just a dumbass funk workout akin to ones you might have done in your cousin's rec room. It's even got that semi-lethal wannabe-Prince falsetto over the top. If this can get hailed as "alternative" anything, there is hope for all of us weekend warriors. Leave those four-track cassette recorders running.
The struggle continues. Former Lox member did Jadakiss one better, getting himself exiled from the airwaves for Black History Month, and proving once and for all that while it will always be okay to accuse the President of blowing up the World Trade Center on commercial radio, it's never permissible to discuss forced miscegenation and the rape of slaves. See, that would force us to confront actual American history, rather than comic-book stories and easily-debunked antiauthoritarian fantasies. We've got a long way to go, people.
Huckster Christian, now your time has come. Folk-rocker Stevens made a name for himself by writing with great sensitivity about two subjects he knows intimately -- post-industrial Michigan and evangelism. Unfortunately, back when he was an unknown, he also announced his intention to do an album about every state in America -- and the IRCE, terminal structuralists that they are, appear to be holding him to it. Illinois is his first foray away from familiar territory, and it feels like the fifth-grade homework assignment it evidently was: "Stephen A. Douglas was a great debater/ but Abraham Lincoln was the Great Emancipator". Glgaaaahhah. Now that we all know Stevens can use a search engine, can we move on? Certainly he is not the first concept-master to get hung by his own schtick, but such a big deal has been made about this stupid 50 States project that it probably feels to him that there's no way out of the corn-maze. Mr. Stevens, that's Jesus Christ on the phone; he is releasing you from your absurd conceit. Get back to work.
Superior jazz-pop alternative to Norah Jones, kinda sultry, kinda sophisticated, kinda airheaded. None of this Jolie Holland stuff is going to be necessary once the Jaymay album finally comes out; until then, at least you know you've got options.
T.I. -- "ASAP", "You Don't Know Me"
Aficionados have been known to grasp at straws before. T.I. is pretty thin; if he was a baseball player from the Thirties, he could be The Straw, or the South Coast Splinter, or the Semi-Sucky Shard. Back when he was rapping about silly shit like bear traps and Carl Lewis's hamstrings, he was vaguely tolerable; but ever since he began to take himself seriously as a hip-hop institution, the milk has curdled in the saucer. "You Don't Know Me" is about as insufferable as contemporary rap records get. It isn't anything he says (though nothing he says is notable), it's just how he comes off -- peevish and whiny where he means to be tough and braggadocious. The most overrated artist in mainstream hip-hop, and there's nobody particularly close.
My problem with the IRCE, so far as I've even got one, is that it all reads like guarded, carefully-researched term papers written to impress Professor Coolguy. I do not need forty indistinguishable websites soberly and responsibly considering the new Castanets album; I need somebody to beat the shit out of it and tell me whether or not it holds up to the abuse. I don't need a god damned numerical value or a letter grade assigned to the new Hold Steady album; I need you to make fun of its pretensions with a vehemence that lets me know why you and I both consider it indispensable anyway. I've lost any trace of individual critical voices or perspectives on the 'net -- it all has begun to wash together into one big, solemn Arcade Fire-appreciating mush. I recognize that the marketplace of ideas is supposed to have created the consensus tone best suited for all of us, but what if We The People suck? Somebody really needs to take a discursive torch to the whole operation. Consider my intentionally infuriating prose as a vain attempt to cause a little friction. Can't start a fire without a spark, guys.
The Clientele -- "Since K Got Over Me"
Uh oh, daddy has cut back on the old reverb. Mr. MacLean has also simplified his guitar patterns considerably, and added extra orchestration to flesh out his trio's signature fugue-state sound. They are still one of the world's most immediately-recognizable bands -- something like a London-bound version of Galaxie 500 fronted by Robyn Hitchcock. For rainy days and foggy twilights only.
The Cloud Room -- "Hey Now Now"
New Yorkers can be dumb as stones, too. Here's a big, sloppy rocker from a Gothamite quartet chasing the dance-rock bandwagon with the hopeless persistence of a half-blind old mutt. The lead singer, whose name is "Q Branch" or something cryptic like that, actually does a decent Ian MacCulloch impersonation. I'll take this hands down over that new Franz Ferdinand number, if only because it's funnier to see people bellowing "take the bus there, pay the bus faaaare" with high-Germanic seriousness than "I'm gonna make someone looooove me". It's so much easier, and saves so much time, when things satirize themselves.
The Decemberists -- "Sixteen Military Wives"
Speaking of self-satirists, the Decemberists spent 2005 nudging and winking, and pushing the minivan right to the brink of the cliff. Colin Meloy has a great sense of humor, and is always prone to making the sillier -- and therefore better -- choice, but Picaresque was more faux-macabre Lemony Snicket than legit-creepy Edward Gorey. Look, the whole point of doing pirate songs and Myla Goldberg tributes in the early '00s was that no music listener was expecting to be addressed like that. Now that everybody has decided that the way to beat file-sharing and to keep the album relevant is to hold it hostage to a quasi-literary logic, it no longer feels extraordinary to hear The Decemberists sing a nine minute epic about killing somebody in the belly of a whale. In fact, when your audience has begun to expect nine minute songs about killing somebody in the belly of a whale, there's your tip-off that something is seriously wrong. Meloy is obviously a good guy, and I am sure he wanted to give the people all the Arr Matey they have come to expect from him. He gets a pass this year based on his prior achievements, but next time out, he'd better change things up.
The Fiery Furnaces -- "The Garfield El"
It felt like a throwdown -- as if the Friedbergers got together over a game of Squad Leader Tactics one day and said "oh, you guys like 'concept albums' now? Okay, we'll give you a real concept album. Choke on this one, indie-nation!" But of course it wasn't like that at all. They just think their grandmother is cool. And if anybody had bothered to listen to Rehearsing My Choir before they panned it, they'd have discovered that the Friedbergers were right: their grandmother is cool. The great irony of rock criticism in 2005 was that we praised an album of superficial folk-impressions of Illinois from a guy who clearly knew nothing about the place, and dismissed actual Illinois stories from somebody who had lived her entire life there, and who had quite a lot to say about it. But it certainly wasn't the first time we preferred fairy tales to historiography.
The Game -- "Dreams", "Hate It Or Love It" (with 50 Cent), "How We Do" (with 50 Cent), "Put You On The Game"
And in the year of our lord two thousand and five, rappers discovered lesbianism. To think, all the while it was going on right under their noses, and they were too busy stroking their bling to notice. As emcees emerged groggily from their misplaced ménage a tois fantasies, most were freaked out: Common tried to act suave and cosmopolitan on "Be", but could not disguise his panic, 50 gave us some rueful autobiographical notes about his two mommies, Nas just sank into family-values despair. As usual in '05, it was Paul Wall with the clear-eyed perspective: "nowadays the broads pimp broads/ these girls got more game than most of these guys." I said when I started that I'd run through the whole G-unit roster when I got to Yayo; no sense in changing up now that I'm almost done.
The Heavenly States -- "Pretty Life"
Frontman Ted Nesseth is little more than a shouter, but he's an effective one -woodsy-outraged rather than punk-snotty, and likeable despite his aggressiveness. His band is just a hyper-adrenalized garage outfit, but they've got a secret weapon: electric violinist Genevieve Gagon. She can turn Nesseth's crushed tin-can songs into dirty-basement symphonies. Gagon doesn't fiddle on "Pretty Life", but her part here is just as crucial: a flute-mellotron stutter that tugs the track forward like a tide.
The Killers -- "Mr. Brightside"
Moderately amusing song about young romance and teenage jealousy, set to music pirated from one of those We Were The Eighties collections that K-Tel advertises on late night TV. Come to think of it, it sounds more like it was pirated from the faux-Eighties music that K-Tel uses to advertise its We Were The Eighties collections. "Mr. Brightside" is missing the feral orgasm sounds that Duran Duran surely would have added, but you can't have everything. Were I the producer, I would have told the singer to break open his journal and write me a second verse; but what do I know?, I think "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" is too short.
The White Stripes -- "Blue Orchid", "My Doorbell", "Denial Twist"
These sound so much better if you were living in Novaya Zemblya for the past two years and you did not know that Renee Zellwinger, or whatever the hell her name is, was engaged to Jack White. The last movie I saw was Crooklyn, so it could be said that I'm well-removed from contemporary film; but even I knew about it. Sexual frustration has been the motivation for songwriters since the dawn of time, but few have written so explicitly about blue balls -- the physiological condition -- as White does here. But we can always count on the White Stripes to take it one step too far.
Every year has its defining moment. 1969 will be remembered for the moonwalk, just as 1944 is forever linked with the Normandy invasion, and 1983 is forever linked with the moonwalk. 2005, the year of sizzurp, crystallized the minute the drums came in on "Stay High", and DJ Paul instructed "It's purple purp purple purp purple, and swallow it down/ with that yurple yip yurple yip yurple, it's going down". So raise your styrofoam cup to the Three 6 Mafia, the outfit that kick-started this whole purple craze back in '97 with "Sippin' On Some Syrup". They're still sipping, still totally throwed, and still doing what they can to accommodate the desires of their Memphis rap heroes Eightball and MJG -- who very nearly steal this show. If any OGs deserved a big comeback hit this year, these were the guys.
Tony Yayo -- "Pimpin'", "Curious", "So Seductive" (with 50 Cent)
Okay, let's pick through this avalanche of G-Unit singles, in honor of that historic day this summer when Mr. Curtis Jackson became the first person to have twelve songs in the Billboard top ten, thereby rewriting the laws of mathematics through gangsta superpower. "Candy Shop": the beat is much better than it originally seems like it is, and 50's performance kinda sneaks up on you, but this is nothing you're going to remember in five years. "Disco Inferno": quietly effective club track that sounds better in the context of The Massacre than it does on the radio, where it often gets overwhelmed by splashier cuts. "Outta Control (Remix)": ghostly production, super performance by 50, great, hushed chorus, terrific track, can't heap enough positive adjectives on this one. "Just A Little Bit": this is almost definitely the poorest cut on The Massacre besides the absurd "Toy Soldier", and the first 50 song with indisputably bad lyrics. "Hustler's Ambition": 50's attempt to come up with a soundtrack cut for his movie that would be as dramatic and indelible as "Lose Yourself"; the movie didn't do well, but the song was more poetic than anything Eminem has ever managed. My favorite line: "analyze me and what you will find/ is the DNA of a crook/ and what goes on in my mind is contagious." He believes the violence that drives him is endemic, see, and he understands his popularity as a viral mutation and a strange accident of a sick culture. "Window Shopper": something of a "Wanksta" rehash, and a pretty good tip-off that the Get Rich Or Die Trying soundtrack isn't anything essential. "Hate It Or Love It": when you get a glittering sample to sit in the track this well, you really can't go wrong, but both 50 and The Game step up and deliver platinum verses. "Put You On The Game": Timbaland's contribution to The Documentary, and nowhere near as good as some of the Dre productions on the album, but it does contain my favorite boast of '05 -- "making all that racket/ I got the U.S. Open". This coming from a guy who dedicated the centerpiece of his album to the slain sister of Venus and Serena Williams. "Dreams": that's the centerpiece. I don't know why people think the chorus ("Martin Luther King had a dream/ Aaliyah had a dream/ Left Eye had a dream) is disrespectful; I mean, I don't think he's really foolish enough to equate MLK and Left Eye's achievements to those of the great Aaliyah. Even if he did, I doubt she'd have taken offense; she was a magnanimous sort, by all accounts. "How We Do": the closest G-unit came to recapturing the spirit of "In Da Club", and not just because 50 saved his best verse of the year for this high-profile guest shot. One thing I have noticed about Dr. Dre-produced tracks is that they're inexhaustible; you can (and do) listen to these songs a thousand times and you never get sick of them. Go back and spin "Let Me Ride" or "Lil Ghetto Boy", and tell me if I'm wrong. "Curious": sort of a sleaze-bag piece, which is what you'd expect from Tony Yayo, rap's biggest sleaze-bag. "Pimpin": not a whole lot better. "So Seductive": at least 50 shows up for this one. "I can't stand when a dime acts anti-social", whines image-conscious Yayo; he doesn't want his date to embarrass him in front of his world-famous friend. But we know by now that 50 couldn't care less. Let's see…. Lloyd Banks didn't put out a single this year, but Young Buck did rap the most dispensable verse on "Stay High". I am pretty sure Olivia had a solo song on the radio this autumn, but since I don't really believe she's a human being, I ignored it; mannequin rap just isn't for me. There are a few new voices on the soundtrack album, but I didn't bother to disaggregate them; I'm sure I'll hear plenty from them in 2006 if they're really worthy of our attention and Shady/Aftermath's initial investment. G-Unit isn't about sentimentality or camaraderie -- this is a story of cold, corporate-rap efficiency. Sell records and bow to the kingpin, or hit the road.
Tori Amos -- "Sleeps With Butterflies"
You'd expect Amos to follow up a sweeping, eighty-minute examination of America's psyche with an album of straightforward love songs. Instead, early in 2005, we got The Beekeeper, eighty more minutes of music divided into six "gardens" of content, each symbolizing different elements and personal virtues. Allegedly, there was a story lurking behind this taxonomy, and cross-indexing the six hexagrams with the tracklisting was meant to coax out a complex autobiographical tale. Yet the more you spun The Beekeeper, the more you realized what it was: an album of straightforward love songs. "Sleeps With Butterflies" is about the simplest scenario she's ever written: boy leaves town in the early stages of a relationship, girl wonders if he'll come back to her. This is Amos, though, so there are also rushing rivers and kites and butterflies and unicorns, too. Okay, maybe not unicorns. But if the fairies can make you play piano like this, for God's sake, bring on the fairies.
Tracy Bonham -- "Something Beautiful"
Blink The Brightest is a schizophrenic album: half of it is superb power balladry worthy of Jefferson Starship (or at least Michelle Branch), and the other half veers into confusing genre experiments. Traces of the Angry White Female who released "Mother, Mother" in the wake of Jagged Little Pill still peek through here and there, but Bonham has decided that she's pretty content, and thus her will to shriek at the top of her lungs has abandoned her. Those who vaguely remember her from the summer of Alanis now consider her a one-hit wonder. Which is ironic, because she recorded an amazingly bitter song about the record industry called "One Hit Wonder" on her debut album. That's the funny thing about reaching the end of the earth, or, as it's better known, Los Angeles -- when there's no place left to run, every prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. And that's a shame, because Bonham has proven that she can sing almost anything and make it work. She's one of the few mainstream musicians who honestly deserves to be on the radio more frequently than she is.
Trembling Blue Stars -- "Helen Reddy"
Robert Wratten goes out with a bang. Actually, I shouldn't say "bang", because Wratten doesn't seem the type who digs loud, aggressive noises. Let's say Robert Wratten went out in a shimmer of evening color, and in the electric crackle of a telephone wire, and in the wind between the branches on the riverside. Let's say Wratten went down like a big moon over a still ocean, or like a maple leaf in a cool autumn breeze, or like water poured into a long silver vase. We can say Robert Wratten went silent like a telegraph after transmitting a message of hope, or like a radio station after an early morning signoff, or like a hummingbird, still in its nest. We could say all these things, or we can just say thanks, Robert Wratten, for putting your heart out there, for making the emotional complexity of your romantic relationships legible and approachable, for your unwavering faith in the close examination of motives and actions, for the fortunes and futures you saw in the patterns of our behavior, for your sympathy, for your kindness, for your guts. Thanks, Bobby, for everything.
Trillville & Cutty -- "Some Cut"
Crass customers. The creaking bedspring is inspired in its vulgarity, but c'mon, isn't there anybody in hip-hop who knows how to be seductive? Even chivalric condescension would be a welcome break from the monotony of brutality. Oh, well, this temple was built on a bedrock of misogyny; and the time to intervene was 1980, or maybe the dawn of civilization. If you are planning to have Catherine MacKinnon over for a party, I would not recommend this as dinner music.
Tweet & Missy Elliott -- "Turn Da Lights Off"
Nifty piece of pop-R&B production by Elliott, who continues to try to blow hot air into the leaky balloon that is Tweet's career. You have to give her points for perseverance; an asshole like Jay-Z would have given up years ago.
Twista -- "Girl Tonight" (with Trey Songs)
Shameless rehashing of "Slow Jamz", with all of the redemptive irony leeched out. Trey Songs plays the Jamie Foxx role, and while he doesn't ham it up quite as preposterously, he's a much better singer. Twista seems to be slowing down a bit in his old age; these days, you can even make out some of the stuff he's saying. Still, if this guy was ever chopped and screwed, he'd just sound like a normal emcee. He could be Michael Watts's greatest challenge.
Likeable singer expands on Beyonce's verse from "Soldier": she goes for them Southside boys. If this song had come out a few months later than it did, she'd have crammed in some H-Town content and maybe a nice glass of purple. Instead, she sticks with the Atlantan tropes: crunk, Hennessey, grillz, Lil Jon and Usher, etc. You could call this camp following or savvy marketing, and certainly it is both. But consider: nobody writes songs like this about New York City anymore. Ask yourself, homeboy, why is that?
Webbie -- "Give Me That" (with Bun B)
We took a walk through Louis Armstrong Park at dusk, and I remember marveling at how many menacing-looking vagrants were tailing us. I am a vagrant fan, usually, so I didn't mind. Back home in the non-throwed New York metro area, I was told that this was a big no-no -- that only crazy people walked in Louis Armstrong Park after the sun set. On the other side of Canal Street, we looked for the warehouse district, but found the Grungy Convenience Store district instead. Of course I dug it. Anybody could tell that this was a poor city: that the polished blocks along the riverside were propped up by acres of banlieues on low and crappy land. Flying in over Lake Ponchartrain, you could see the red square roofs of squat, single-family houses, the wide streets and the levees, the impressive sprawl of neighborhoods, all hugging the bends in the Mississippi. What I knew of the Big Easy, I'd mostly learned from Master P, No Limit, and Cash Money Records. I recall wondering if Mannie Fresh's mansion was anywhere near the drunk-tourist neighborhoods where we'd be staying. I remember wrought-iron terraces, strange architecture and shuttered windows on Burgundy Street, a street-fight outside of a museum north of Rampart, a restauranteur hosing down a sidewalk strewn with plastic cups. I remember a city with its own bag. I remember thinking we'd go back soon.
Flatfooted piece of college rock from a band intermittently capable of a worthwhile reflection. This is Rivers Cuomo's take on "Common People", but since he's a depressed Californian rather than a bitter Londoner, he concludes not with resignation to perpetual class struggle but with capitulation to the star system. He's not going to fight celebrity culture, he's going to figure out a way to channel his resentment into mindless voyeurism. The most depressing song of 2005.
While some singer-songwriters raised on hip-hop have tried to shoehorn as many words into their folk-rock as they can get away with, Anticon member Why? has been tacking hard in the other direction. Lately, he's stopped rapping altogether, and begun to croon in a dull croak over a raw indie-rock pastiche. His poems are death-fixated, and he's fond of vile images of deterioration and decay: slits in bags of fat, moths laminated in lye, writhing slugs, suicide. No matter how much Why? loves rap music, he is too gloomy and pessimistic a figure to fit comfortably in contemporary hip-hop. His music is obviously indebted to Beck, but that doesn't mean that Beck pulled off this stunt any better than he does.
Ying Yang Twins -- "Wait Til You See My Dick", "Shake" (with Pitbull), "Bad" (with Mike Jones)
Call me a sucker for a gimmick, but I truly believed that a whispered rap song was a pretty rad idea. The Twins get going pretty good, too, especially during the latter half of D-Roc's verse. The trouble with censorship is not merely is that there will always be a new batch of twelve-year-old boys who will find "Wait 'Til You See My Dick" empowering; it's also that will always be an old batch of older men who used to be twelve-year-old boys, and who still secretly find "Wait 'Til You See My Dick" empowering. It's a hopeless cause. As long as you've got a laptop and a dial-up connection, you can jump on the 'Net and download all the pornography you want; it's no use pretending we aren't a perv-enabling nation, and it's no help trying to stick your finger in the dike. There is big money to be made from the horny, and big money always clears the field. Those of us who have actually had sex will immediately recognize that there is no resemblance between this pre-pubescent phantasmagoria and real-world getting down. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something else valuable here, tucked away somewhere inside the folds of the fantasy.
After going MIA for a few years, the deejay made a mild '05 comeback. A few contemporary radio songs featured legit scratch breaks; this right here was the best of them. "Presidential" is not a political song at all, unless you believe (I do) that Lil Jon is preparing to run for president in 2008. I don't think he ever supported the Iraq War or anything, so that immediately makes him a better candidate than John Kerry, or that senator from New York who misspells her first name. Also, they'd be able to put the debate with Condoleeza Rice on Pay-Per-View.
Young Jeezy -- "Soul Survivor" (with Akon), "And Then What" (with Mannie Fresh)
Jeezy really is a businessman-rapper, a performer who is only doing this as a component in an overall brand marketing strategy. You could point out that he's only in it for the money, and he'd shrug -- what else would you expect him to be in it for? That his songs are pretty enjoyable is immaterial: like any powerful executive, he's got the capacity to hire the best underlings. Reverend Camden from Seventh Heaven once pointed out that the objective of any job was the same: make the boss look good. Mannie Fresh will always make his co-workers shine; but then Mannie, despite the Big Tymers rhetoric, likes to spread the love. And so it went -- the new Motown of the South bringing in raw talent from the provinces to bolster the upwardly-mobile trajectory of its appointed princes. This was the story of 2002, of 2003, of 2004: the rise of Atlanta and its business-minded emcees and moguls, and a new model of black enterprise and success for an emergent buppie middle class. And so it went, until a day in August when Mannie's town was swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico, and all of the striving and jockeying for promotion in Jeezy's city started looking a little shallow by comparison. And then there was an even bigger storm swirling in the gulf, heading for Port Arthur, Texas, the historic home of Bun B and UGK. The Mississippi River slipped its minimum-security strictures, and thousands upon thousands of African-Americans who do not scheme for bling were suddenly wading in the water with their possessions on their heads. Back on dry land, in the city of billboards, Atlantans tried to keep the momentum going. But that crashing sound in A-Town -- and in the rest of America -- was that of a beloved illusion shattering.
I'm Tris McCall, what you know 'bout me? I'm on that Grand Street, JC, baby holla at me.
