John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, getting ready to do some stuff

Mountain Goats
Bowery Ballroom
October 29, 2005

I showed up to the Mountain Goats party late, really late, 4AD-era late. The Mountain Goats cult has existed for nearly as long as the Mountain Goats themselves have existed, since a mental-hospital nurse named John Darnielle began recording songs on a boombox with an acoustic guitar in 1991, putting them out on cassette-only albums. 1991 was a long time ago, and now Darnielle is a big-label artist, signed to 4AD and making use of all the pretty cursive cover-art and moody, expansive production that the label must include in its contracts. Plenty of his cult professes to miss the tape-hiss and bleated immediacy of Darnielle's earlier work, the stuff he did before he had a string section at his disposal. I started last year with We Shall All Be Healed, Darnielle's second 4AD album, and so all that production sounds natural to me. WSABH doesn't skimp on the qualities that Darnielle's cult always loved about him: his forcefully nasal blurt of a voice, his percussively driving acoustic guitar, his gloriously refracted/emotionally concrete lyrics. The album just lays a thick carpet of swelling cellos and swirling pianos under all that stuff, giving it heft and warmth and grandeur. But then, I've never heard the vast majority of his older work. As with Lungfish or Three 6 Mafia, I like that there's this whole universe of stuff he did a long time ago, ready for me as soon as I decide I'm ready to start exploring it. Or that's what I thought before Saturday night's show, anyway. I can be really stupid sometimes. Some of these songs I heard that night, I can't believe I'd never let myself hear these songs before.

Earlier this year, Darnielle released his third 4AD album, The Sunset Tree, and I'll be shocked if this album doesn't end up at the top of my P&J ballot. The Sunset Tree is Darnielle's album-length exploration of his relationship with his abusive stepfather, the effects that his stepfather's abuse had on him at the time and have on him still. Musically, it's a gorgeous record, full of all the swelling and pounding I loved on WSABH. Lyrically, it's fucking corrosive and harrowing, and it still turns me into jelly every time I listen to it, which is often. I don't want to get too emo about the album in this space, but I love it. When I heard The Sunset Tree, I created this mental narrative of Darnielle's career in which The Sunset Tree is the final triumph, the ultimate use of Darnielle's heartfelt eloquence and unblinking fury, the end result of a career spent honing his gift. Turns out I was wrong. He's been this good for years.

The Mountain Goats' stage presentation is simple: Darnielle on acoustic guitar, another guy on bass, playing old songs and new songs and talking between the songs. The opening band, the Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, backs them on a couple of songs. It's a singer-songwriter show, and it's a good one. Between songs, Darnielle is as wired as he is erudite, introducing his songs in an embarrassed mile-a-minute stammer. The bass player's accompaniment is minimal and generally unnecessary; he's there mostly to hammer Darnielle's best lines home by joining him in a piercing harmony. He's a hypeman, basically. And so Darnielle doesn't have the uplifting curlicues of his 4AD stuff to fall back on; it's basically just him, playing the way he once recorded. And he delivers his songs with total conviction, grinning and baring his teeth and scrunching his face up during the instrumental passages. This minimal presentation lets his lyrics come through clearly, as they should. And those lyrics, on the older songs as on the newer ones, have a gutpunch psychic force that just completely knocks me dead. I'd quote them, but I don't want to drain them of their context. I'm not a good enough writer to do them justice.

This is all critic-friendly stuff, of course, the acoustic guitars and enigmatic history and fierce literary fluency. Someone at the show yelled "Jess Harvell says hi" at one point, and I don't even think it was Jess Harvell. Darnielle is a critic himself, writing with enormous grace and passion about obscure metal and Europop on his Last Plane to Jakarta zine and website. But the audience at Saturday night's show was something I haven't yet seen in New York: a crowd that simply demands a second encore, that cheers loudly and enthusiastically throughout the set, that gives the guy onstage a hero's greeting. Critics don't do that stuff, but at least in this case, maybe we should.

You're probably doing Halloween stuff tonight, but if you're not, you should go see the Mountain Goats at the Knitting Factory.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on the Mountain Goats at Northsix
Voice review: Laura Sinagra on the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed

So this happened.

Jay-Z
Continental Airlines Arena
October 27, 2005

Jay-Z didn't dis anyone tonight, not 50 Cent or Cam'ron or Game. I feel a little ridiculous saying this after all the time I've spent publically wondering who Jay's target would be, and Jay's big surprise, Nas, wasn't a surprise, at least not if you've been obsessively combing the internet dorking out over clues the way I have. But please believe me when I say that I am not the slightest bit disappointed; no one I heard leaving the Continental Airlines Arena was either. Even if you thought you knew it was coming, it was still a dumb-out moment: Jay stopping "Where I'm From" at the "Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas" part, falling silent for a minute, telling the crowd that the concert was called "I Declare War" but decided that it was bigger than that. And then: "You know what I did for y'all? You know what I did for hip-hop? I said fuck that shit! Let's go, Esco!" Nas rising behind Jay on an elevator at the top of a staircase, doing the hook on "Dead Presidents." And then the two of them standing side by side at the center of the stage, arms behind them, Nas wearing army greens and Tims, hat off to the side of his head, Jay wearing expensive-looking sunglasses and a black tracksuit, soaking in the moment.

The Nas introduction came at the end of the show, of course, the climax of a long night. I'd never seen Jay-Z live before, but the show's format was familiar from Fade to Black: Jay does a few songs, introduces a guest who does a few songs and then maybe brings out his own guest, Jay comes back, does a few songs, introduces someone else. Jay's song choices were sometimes confusing ("Hola Hovito" over "Big Pimpin'"?), but he was still totally comfortable in his skin, doing songs he knew well to a crowd who knew them just as well. The Biggie tribute, especially, seemed ripped straight from Fade to Black. But that's not to say the show was boring. Onstage, Jay is all quick, easy self-assurance, qualities immediately thrown into relief whenever his guests would overload the stage with hypemen and yell too much. "Song Cry," in particular, sounded heavenly after a chaotic, cacophanous D-Block set. And it's not to say the show didn't have its surprises. Incredibly, the Jay/Nas peace accord was only the second long-standing beef squashed onstage tonight; Diddy did "All About the Benjamins" with former adversaries the Lox. And I jumped out of my seat when Jay brought out Beanie Sigel, a guy I love, a guy who'd seemed to be on the outs with the Roc to the point where he was talking about signing with G-Unit.

And Jay's guest list was pretty staggering, even without the megaton starpower of Beyonce or Usher or Mary J. Blige. We got all the Roc-A-Fella guys we expected to get: Freeway snarling ferociously, Peedi Crack getting to spit a couple of verses, Bleek just being there. And there were a few other guys we knew would be there: T.I. and Young Jeezy got to do their own short solo sets. Beanie and D-Block and Diddy were more surprising, but the night's biggest non-Nas guest was Kanye West, who must've taken a night off his tour. Kanye's still-a-kid amped-up energy was a nice contrast to Jay's seen-it-all cool, and it's hard to imagine a time when it won't be fun watching him do his jerking-backward dance on "Gold Digger." (Bonus points: he didn't remove the "I was like Bad Boy's street team, couldn't work the Lox" line from "Touch the Sky" even after the Lox/Diddy reunion.) A few of the guests even brought their own guests: Jeezy had Akon on "Soul Survivor," and Kanye had Paul Wall and GLC on "Drive Slow," though we didn't get "Mr. Lonely" or "Sittin' Sidewayz." There were more guests than time-slots available, apparently; Bun B made a quick appearance onstage at the end of the show, but he didn't get a chance to rap, though Jay's last words onstage were "Free Pimp C." And then there was Nas, who didn't really wreck shit with his own solo set (mostly Illmatic stuff) but who lent the event an epic scope just by showing up. There was a great moment near the end when Nas stood side by side with Jay, Kanye, and Diddy, like it was rap's Mount Rushmore or some shit. And an even better moment came a minute later. The stage had been set up to look like the Oval Office, complete with desk, glass doors, presidential seal on the floor, fake Secret Service guys. While Nas did "Made You Look," Diddy sprawled in Jay's presidential chair and put his feet up on the desk, while Jay grabbed him by the leg and tried to pull him out. It was funny. Maybe you had to be there.

The show wasn't perfect. The sound was terrible through most of the night, and a few of the guests had serious mic problems (T.I.'s mic straight-up didn't work half the time.) The elevator at the back of the stage seemed to be working way too slowly, awkwardly causing Kanye and Nas's dramatic entrances to happen a few moments late. But the night began with a transcendent moment: Jay sitting behind the desk while the opening to "Public Service Annoucement" played, jets of flame shooting up from the stage when the drums kicked in, one of the coolest things I've ever seen onstage. And it ended with another one: Jay doing "Encore," joined by every rapper to come to the stage that night and Lebron James, everyone looking utterly dazed and happy to be there.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z

Yes. Yes. This is happening.

It's a little bit ridiculous for me to post about this right now, speculating about an event that's going to happen in a couple of hours, that may have already happened by the time you read this. But I just found out that I'm going to the Jay-Z "I Declare War" show tonight, and so I can't even think about anything else long enough to write about it. And I've talked vague shit on Jay before on this blog, how I don't like the way he comes down off a mountaintop to bless people with guest appearances, how a just-OK verse from Jay in 2005 qualifies as a crushing disappointment. But allow me to dick-ride for a minute: Jay has put himself into a position where every public move he makes is instantly scrutinized across the internet, and so a prearranged beatdown like this show becomes something huge and epic, something like the 2001 Summer Jam where he showed pictures of Prodigy in ballet clothes on the big screen. Jay is important enough that the Cam'ron shooting won't be the biggest story in rap anymore in twelve hours. I've never seen Jay live before, but I've watched Fade to Black enough times that I have some idea what kind of authority and Clintonian charisma he brings to a stage. To channel all that stature into a broadside against somebody, to enlist a mystery cast of rappers in this broadside, this is big. People have been speculating about this show for months. I fake-speculated about it a while ago, but now it's time for a good hard look at what might be going down tonight. Jay is going to go at someone tonight, and it could be any of these guys:

50 Cent. Allhiphop Rumors reported this morning that 50 was going to be the guy, that Jay mended a few bridges to bring a cast of G-Unit foes to the stage. This makes a lot of sense; 50 is the only target big enough to make this whole spectacle worthwhile. Even during the Rock the Mic tour in 2003, Jay and 50 were subtly sniping at each other, 50 taking up Jay's stage time and then a few months later moving up the Beg for Mercy release date to the same Friday as The Black Album. And of course Jay has been dissing 50 for, what, six years? More recently, 50 bizarrely took credit for Kanye West's success. And 50 is plenty prominent right now, with his movie coming out in a week; a Jay-Z attack could conceivably affect the opening-weekend gross of Get Rich or Die Tryin'. And more importantly, an attack against 50 would be a great excuse to bring out some high-profile guests. Nas and Jay have been teasing a team-up for a few months, saying nice things about each other for the first time ever; Nas has even been spotted in the Def Jam building. And there's any number of people who have problems with G-Unit who could come to the stage: Lil Wayne, Game, Jadakiss, maybe (maybe) Cam. This would make me happier than any of Jay's other potential opponents; can you imagine how hard 50 would have to come to respond to a united front of Jay-Z and Nas?

Game. Game has been beefing with Memphis Bleek and the Young Gunz for about a year now, and that's what got Nas on Jay's bad side more than four years ago. And Game has been really weird with the subliminal disses, saying "I don't wear button-up shirts or drive Maibachs" on "Westside Story" and then backtracking, inexplicably insisting that he meant the line for Ja Rule. Jay probably shot back at Game on "Dear Summer" ("If it ain't directed directly at me, I don't respect it"). And Game is just a temptingly huge target; Jay would just have to bring out a clip of Game on Change of Heart to top the Prodigy-in-tights bombshell. Game's manager Jimmy Henchman told Allhiphop Rumors that Jay was definitely not going to be dissing Game, but I have no idea whether he's a remotely reliable source. But then, it wouldn't be much of a challenge for Jay to handle Game; even after "300 Bars," Game isn't even close to Jay's level. And with Game already beefing with half the people in rap, an attack from Jay would just look like bad sportsmanship, kicking someone when he's down. Jay could probably get a much bigger reaction from bringing Game onstage than from dissing him, so Game isn't a likely target.

Cam'ron. Cam and Jay have always been on cold terms ever since Dame Dash made Cam the Vice-President of Roc-A-Fella when Jay was on vacation. Since Jay took the Roc-A-Fella name from Dame and Cam split with the label, Cam and Jim Jones have been throwing subliminal jabs at Jay. And Cam is maybe the only New York rapper with the eloquence to give Jay a really memorable battle. But Cam just got shot less than a week ago, and even with the conspiracy theories flying around, it's just not a good look to go at an injured dude. And in Juelz Santana Def Jam still has one Diplomat left on its roster with serious earning potential; I can't see Jay putting his money in jeopardy like that.

And so there it is. There's always the possibility that Jay will go left and bash someone totally unexpected like Nelly or Mike Shinoda or something, but I'm going into the arena tonight expecting to see 50 Cent get smeared. Check Status tomorrow for the real report.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z

Wolf Parade making rocks (courtesy Brooklyn Vegan)

Wolf Parade + Think About Life + Dante Decaro
Northsix
October 25, 2005

When Sub Pop sent me a copy of Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary a couple of months before it dropped, I listened to it once, decided that it sounds too much like Modest Mouse, and filed it away, comfortable in the assumption that I'd never listen to it again. So I was completely unprepared for the deluge of praise that the album attracted when it actually came out: 9.2 in Pitchfork (tied with Sufjan for the year's second-highest rating after Kanye), A and Album of the Week in Stylus, Metacritic score of 86. So how did this album that sounded to me like pleasant-enough boilerplate fuzz-crackle-rock get this much love?

After seeing the band at Northsix last night, I think I've got it figured out. Wolf Parade is the ultimate indie-rock band circa right now. They're not the best or the most important, but they give the impression that the primordial soup of indiedom just sort of burped them out, that we would've had to invent them if they didn't already exist. Evidence: they do the vaguely Tom Waits junkyard-blues thing just like Modest Mouse does it, their vocals almost studiously warbly and off-kilter, like they've spent year studying David Byrne's vocal tics. And yet somehow this warble doesn't feel forced; they've absorbed Byrne and Brock and Waits and organically woven them into their sound rather than forcibly jamming them in. They nod toward the tea-party Decemberism currently in vogue in indie-rock, occasionally breaking out the waltz time signature, but they never quite succumb to it; they're just burly and heartfelt enough to escape. They alternate between sloppy, grating verses and tight, driving choruses, and they come closer to falling apart when they play faster. They make room for vintage keyboards and laptops, but they're still very much a guitar band. They still have a Myspace page. Also: beards and Montreal and the word Wolf. They're everything indie-rock seems to want out of its bands at this particular moment.

And more to the point, they're a good band, something it took me a while to realize. Their melodies have a greasy Springsteen pull, a warmth and self-assuredness that comes through even more clearly in person. They tend to follow a fairly simple formula: vintage-keyboard guy plays the melody, laptop/themerin guy squiggles and twitters around the margins, and the two guitars fill in all the space in between. But this formula works; it keeps them from ever climbing into majesty or sinking into pretentiousness. They're just a strong band that does this now-indie shit right, and there's not a thing wrong with that.

So the real pleasure of Wolf Parade comes from how they color within the lines, how they take this thing we know as indie-rock now and play it with confidence and grace. It's an impression driven home harder by the opening band, which is billed as Dante Decaro but is basically three fifths of Wolf Parade playing truly pleasant coffeehouse singer-songwriter fare (Decaro himself is a former Hot Hot Heat bassist who just joined the band). It's simple pastoral stuff; the drummer from Wolf Parade drums while the laptop/themerin guy plays percussion and Decaro sings and plays guitar and occasionally makes use of one of those metal things that hold up harmonicas so you can play them while you play guitar. The two-drummers thing adds a hint of novelty to the whole thing and some drive to the songs, but this is still a singer-songwriter doing singer-songwriters stuff, something we've seen a million times before, and Decaro's lyrics do nothing to wipe away the whole cliche thing ("I look outside / The world goes by / And so do I / And so do I," for real). But it was all done so nicely and prettily and sincerely that I couldn't get mad at it. Cliches are there for a reason, and doing a cliche right certainly isn't a crime; I'd say it's an achievement.

Think About Life, who played between Decaro and Wolf Parade, threw the whole sincerity thing into sharp relief. The band is basically Napoleon Dynamite if Napoleon Dynamite was a band, and I hated Napoleon Dynamite. Think About Life's singer is a fat guy who uses his size to act clownish onstage, slapping his stomach and doing unbelievably irritating mime dances and pirouettes, wearing a shirt that says "Steroid Free Body". There's no guitar in the band, just drums and cheap keyboards, and it seems worth asking whether it's OK for an indie band to base its songs around Casio presets after LCD Soundsystem and Cut Copy and Supersystem. I'm inclined to say no, not even if the band is from Olympia, and Think About Life isn't from Olympia. By the time they got to their fake-cutesy Stay in School rap, I wanted to die. This band made me want to die.

Voice blog: Riff Raff interviews Wolf Parade

Big Bear, um, living large

Oneida + Big Bear + The Coke Dares + Awesome Color
Mercury Lounge
October 21, 2005

In his review of Oneida's The Wedding last week, Andy Beta wrote of the band's consistent lack of blowupitude:

Having babysat both Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars during Brooklyn's last rock boom, the trio still watch their opening bands snag sweet deals some five years and seven albums on.

If Beta is right and Oneida is forever doomed to watch its onetime curtain-jerkers become take over the world, it seemed to make sense to go see Oneida and grab an early look at the bands that the glossies will be jamming down our throats in a couple of years. So here's Status Ain't Hood's report on Oneida's newest crop of openers.

Awesome Color is a band from Ann Arbor led by a husky bearded dude in a tie-dyed shirt who got very, very drunk on Friday night and ripped some truly non-heroic guitar heroics. The band plays a noisy bar-band churn, sometimes making halfhearted attempts at MC5ian triumphal frat choogle. Its songs are mostly really long and really boring, and they keep inviting their friends onstage: a guy who does a weird werewolf dance and sings and a guy who plays saxophone and runs through the crowd. They're not very good at stage banter (bass player: "Oneida are a lot better at stage banter than we are"). And they play for a ridiculously tedious 45 minutes, way longer than any opening band ever needs to play.

The verdict: Awesome Color is not going to blow up.

The Coke Dares, a trio from Bloomington, Indiana, play burly and gleefully dumb Motorheadian punk-metal songs that average about 45 seconds in length, guitar solos included. Their jokey lyrics are about zombies and asshole mechanics and stuff like that, and their stage banter is strictly overblown fake-rock-star stuff (they just toured with Grand Buffet, which makes perfect sense). The big guitarist guy is funnier than the big bass-player guy. The three members each wear shirts with one word of the band's name ("The" "Coke" "Dares"), and the drummer's name is Jeff Jeff. The band relies entirely on its schtick, of course, but the schtick works; the endless barrage of unbelievably short songs just gets funnier as the set goes on ("We have seven songs left; we'll be off the stage in five minutes"), and they never get boring. They hit squeeze a nice harmony into their choruses from time to time, but the music itself isn't really the point.

The verdict: The Coke Dares aren't ever going to blow up as such; I can't picture them on MTV2. But I can see them becoming way more popular than they are; their fun, dumb appeal is hard to deny, and they'll only get better as they grow more confident with their schtick. They're a perfect opening band: not much of a threat to blow the headliner off the stage but virtually guaranteed to make the night more enjoyable.

Download: "Black Beauties"
Download: "Rocking All the Time"
Download: "Acid Church Party"

The band of the night with the best chance of blowing up was Big Bear, a female-fronted Boston band that plays jagged, screamy spazzcore, almost shocking in its ferocity especially considering how mild-mannered everyone in the band seems between songs. The band's brand of math-metal is more ragged than most of the stuff in Decibel these days, though it's certianly more Dillinger Escape Plan than Lightning Bolt. The songs lurch unpredictably between time signatures, but the primal force of the music remains fully intact. The crowd didn't know what to make of them, of course, but this was a Mercury Lounge crowd, so it wasn't all that surprising.

The verdict: Big Bear isn't going to blow up indie-style; their music is way too fierce to fit with the sniffly pastoralism that has taken over indie-rock lately. But I can see them getting on Headbangers' Ball if someone ever throws a decent recording budget at them.

Download: "Track 01"
Download: "Track 03"

I was going to write about Oneida, too, but then they started out with an unbelievably irritating ten-minute bloopy keyboard vamp, something like what Stereolab must sound like for people who hate Stereolab. I couldn't handle it, so I left.

Voice review: Andy Beta on Oneida's The Wedding

And he still has the car

Early Sunday morning, one of the greatest rappers in the world came very close to dying. Cam'ron, the nonchalantly amoral absurdist thug-rap prince, was driving from one DC club to another around 2:10 a.m. when "an unknown number of men" pulled up next to Cam at a stoplight and demanded he turn over his car, a royal blue 2006 Lamborghini. Cam refused, and so they shot him.

He's fine. Or he's not dead, anyway, not even seriously injured. MTV.com News said he was shot twice, once in each arm. The Channel 11 news last night said he was shot once. Dipsetmixtapes.com clarifies things: a bullet went through one arm and into the other. Ah. In any case, the carjackers fired multiple shots, and I have to wonder how close Cam came to getting hit in the head. A foot? Three inches? Cam drove himself to the hospital with a bullethole in one arm and a bullet in the other. He spent 12 hours at Howard University Hospital before flying back to New York yesterday. Here's Cam's manager, Joseph Sherman, quoted on Dipsetmixtapes.com: "He even asked the nurse for her phone number when he woke up." (This is awesome.) Here's Cam, quoted on Allhiphop.com: "People are foolish if they think I'm going to lose my head and give up anything to anyone just because someone threatens me ... I'm doing OK. It takes more than a botched carjacking to keep me down."

All bravado. Of course he's all bravado. Listen to him. That buttery monotone never betrays fear or regret or even anger, just effortless unemotional mastery and a sort of amused disbelief, whether he's quietly amazed that he's come this far in life or that some audacious fool would try to test him. If Cam was shaken after being shot (and he'd have to be insane to not be shaken), he'd never let us know. He's not the sort of guy who shows weakness or vulnerability in public. His fans wouldn't take to it. It would break the cult-of-personality spell he's spent years meticulously weaving, transforming himself from a clumsy one-hit Mase-affiliated rapper in 1998 to an unflappable don and border-hopping entrepreneur in 2005. He's got product to push, and every news report about the shooting takes care to mention that Killa Season is coming in February 2005. It's back to business as usual.

And maybe that public profile was something that flashed through Cam's mind on Saturday night when he decided to stomp on the gas at the red light instead of opening the gull-wing door and walking away. That blue Lamborghini is the most famous car in rap, a towering symbol of Cam's relentless self-reliance, the first thing he copped after selling his equally famous pink Range Rover on eBay and signing a $2.5 million deal for his Diplomat Records with Warner's regional-rap experiment Asylum Records. In July, Cam talked about his car on 106 & Park: "I bought the Lamborghini especially for New York," so he could drive around and let people see it, so they could realize that you could be from New York and own something like that. Soon after 106 & Park, Cam was arrested in Harlem for driving the car with a suspended license. And if Cam would've walked away from this famous car in DC, maybe he would've betrayed the image he'd made for himself and shown weakness.

Probably not. Probably he just stomped on the gas pedal because that's what you do when adrenaline is coursing through your veins and you don't have time to think your decision through. Imagine the scene: he'd been separated from his security, and he was trying to find his way to a club. Have you ever driven around DC and tried to find a club? It's a labyrinth. You think you're headed in the right direction, and all of a sudden you're on some completely other street with another name. You're in Southwest one minute and Northeast the next with no idea how you got there. Maybe Cam's security got lost. Maybe Cam got lost. But he drove to the hospital just fine, so maybe he knew exactly where he was the whole time; I have no idea.

I've been thinking a lot lately about rappers' personal problems, the ghosts of criminal pasts that follow them into their newly legit, newly artistic lives; check the Beanie post, check all the staggering new allegations about Murder Inc. But this was a different situation. It would be wrong to say that this could've happened to anyone, but it could've happened to anyone who was driving a new Lamborghini from one club to another late at night in DC. It had nothing to do with any criminal exploits in Cam's past. Did Cam's assailants recognize him? Would it have mattered if they did? What did they think when they saw that gorgeous blue spaceship cruising down a street that late at night, looking like an apparition? Did they follow it for a few blocks? Did they just decide that moment to pull out guns?

Or was it reckless for Cam to even be driving that thing? Does he understand the effect that a car like that might have on people who have nothing? What does it say about rap's rampant conspicuous consumption that one of the best rappers in the game came close to dying rather than relinquishing his car? And would it have said anything different if Cam had actually been murdered? They're important questions, but they're questions for another time. Right now, Cam is OK, back in New York. We haven't lost him, and we should breathe a sigh of relief.

Voice review: Jon Caramanica on Cam'ron's Purple Haze

The (International) Noise Conspiracy, playing somewhere other than the Virgin Megastore

(International) Noise Conspiracy
Union Square Virgin Megastore
October 20, 2005

You can't make this stuff up: the pretentiously-named Swedish anarcho-garage band (International) Noise Conspiracy totally rocking out on a rigged-up stage on the cafe side of the Union Square Virgin Megastore, yowling about revolution while people browse the 2-for-$15 CD bin a hundred feet away. And get this: in a beautiful accident, the red of their matching-uniform shirts perfectly matches the red in the Virgin-logo banner hanging right behind them. "I don't really know why we're doing this," said (I)NC lead yowler Dennis Lyxzen, "but it's probably a good thing." Probably!

Lyxzen was once the lead yowler of the Swedish post-hardcore band Refused, who released a molten fireball of an album called The Shape of Punk to Come in 1998. The Shape of Punk to Come ran steamroller riffs and adrenal smash-the-state lyrics through a filter of berserk time-sig changes, warped structures, and gleaming production. It was a gorgeous mess, and it may have actually lived up to its title; people have certainly been ripping it off shamelessly for the past seven years. The Allmusic bio of Refused says they broke up shortly after recording the album because they were "unable to reconcile their anarchist leanings with a career in music," which just makes this Virgin Megastore shit funnier and sadder.

When Lyxzen formed the (International) Noise Conspiracy later in 1998, plenty of people observed that he was now biting the Make-Up in the exact same way he'd been biting Nation of Ulysses in Refused. And yes, it was pretty bold: matching outfits, retro-glam haircuts, motionless hot girl (playing keyboard instead of bass). The new band also combined garage-rock white-soulman yelps with unlistenable sludge; the only noticeable changes from the Make-Up's blueprint were the (I)NC's cleaner production and their taller singer. On record, the (I)NC were pretty terrible, consistently forgetting to inject hooks into their workmanlike jerky stomp. But the one time I saw them a few years ago, they were thrilling onstage, flinging their bodies around and leaping over each other, Lyxzen climbing over balconies and doing airborne splits. They toured America's indie-rock circuit hard for a few years ago and then signed with Reprise in the wake of the Hives-led Swedish-garage buzz-wave of 2002. Rick Rubin produced Armed Love, their major-label debut, which came out in Europe last year but got pushed back in America. Reprise finally released the album to zero fanfare earlier this month. And now the band has gone the route of virtually every rabble-rousing left-wing band that rides press hype into a major-label contract: they're touring with the Bravery and playing the Virgin Megastore. Immortal Technique: meet your future.

To their credit, the band played hard for the duration of their 15-minute in-store set, still doing this same onstage careening, still executing perfect leaps and twirling their mic-chords and spinning tambourines on their fingers (Thunderbirds Are Now!: meet your future). Lyxzen didn't much acknowledge the ridiculousness of the situation (he leapt up on a trash can at the set's climax), and the store let the band play surprisingly loud. But you don't get transcendent rock moments at six in the afternoon at enormous and overpriced downtown record stores, and any attempts to create them are terminally fated to end up ridiculous and embarrassing. (Also: the band has made themselves far less entertaining by replacing their gorgeous female keyboard player with an ugly dude.) I wonder how Lyxzen feels these days about reconciling his anarchist leanings with a career in music.

Download: "Baby Doll" (N.E.R.D. cover)
Download: "Up for Sale"

Animal Collective throwing their sets up

"Animal Collective fucking blows."
-Status Ain't Hood, September 20

First things first: I don't get Animal Collective. That doesn't make this band unique in any way. There's a whole school of blurrily drifting soft-noise bands that I don't get. I don't get Black Dice. I don't get Excepter. I don't get Gang Gang Dance, even though I sort of like them. I don't get any of these bands that take the Boredoms' towering symphonies of free-floating bliss as a starting point, shrink them down to microscopic levels, toss in a couple of Indonesian hand-cymbals, gurgle out some wordless vocals, hold down one vintage-synth key for a few minutes, and call it a day. This might, of course, just be my problem. Everyone else seems to love this stuff. Maybe I'll wake up one morning and it'll be all I want to hear. Maybe I just haven't lived in New York long enough to crave the soft-focus pastoral escape that these bands offer. Maybe one day I'll liberate myself from my infantile need for hooks and structure. It's hard for a critic to say that there's no accounting for taste, since our jobs are based around the idea that there is such a thing as accounting for taste, that there are people better-qualified than others to say what's good and what's not. But it's true; I have certain things that I look for in music, qualities I might vaguely name as force and clarity and, um, like, bigness. These bands don't typically offer any of these things, and so I don't get them.

I've found a few things to like in Animal Collective. I like the deranged sunny tunefulness of the first couple of jams on Sung Tongs just fine, the only times I've heard focus in their aimless jangley scrawl. I like the triumphant autumnal ecstasy of the first couple of tracks on Feels, their new album. But every time I listen to the band for more than ten minutes, their music begins to turn into impenetrably bubbling streaked emptiness, pleasant enough but not something I could ever imagine spending money to own. So I should probably just cut my losses with this band and go back to jamming Back for the First Time on repeat, right? I've barely heard a note that Black Dice recorded after Beaches and Canyons unless someone from DFA was remixing it, and my life hasn't been any poorer. So why do I keep trying to like Animal Collective?

The simple answer: they're Baltimore dudes like me, guys who grew up in the same place at the same time as I did. Jess Harvell's Baltimore City Paper cover story about the band's local roots says that they're dudes from northern Baltimore County who graduated high school in 1997, a year before me. Group members Deakin and Panda Bear stayed in Baltimore after high school while the other two went to New York, though all four are scattered right now in New York and DC and Portugal. Track 8 on Feels is titled "Loch Raven," named after Baltimore's reservoir. Countless musicians came from Baltimore or spent formative years there but only found fame after leaving: Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Tupac, Mama Cass, Tori Amos, Phillip Glass, John Doe from X. None of them really addresses their hometown in any way I recognize, but then none of them share my age and suburban upbringing the way Animal Collective does. And still, I don't feel anything much in common with this band when I'm listening to them.

In the mid-90s, when the Animal Collective dudes were in high school and discovering their musical identities, Baltimore had the most amazing indie-rock scene I've ever experienced, directly or indirectly. A high-school kid named Ben Valis had borrowed enough money from his parents to rent a Hamilton storefront, which he turned into a makeshift club called the Small Intestine. Valis, at the age of 16, was booking bands like Rainer Maria and Songs: Ohia and Les Savy Fav, putting on shows four nights a week sometimes. He was also booking a ton of local bands, kids who would do anything to upstage each other: slamming mics through walls, smashing each other in the face with guitars, lighting themselves on fire. For a while, there was a band called Invert who would pull up outside other bands' shows in a van, jump out of the back, play five-minute sets outside, and then drive off. And even after the Small Intestine closed, a ton of short-lived illegal venues kept things going for years. The music was almost never particularly good, but exciting things were always happening; there was a freewheeling energy in the air that I've never experienced anywhere else. When I came back to Baltimore after four years of college in Syracuse, a few guys who had come up in this scene had gone on to get national press and do national tours: Cex, Oxes, the Convocation Of. But the scene had splintered as scenes like that always do. People had grown older and moved away or stopped being friends, and cocaine became a big thing for some of these guys. There are still great things happening in the city, dudes booking Baltimore club DJs for warehouse parties or starting semi-regular psyche-folk nights at restaurants. But in the last couple of years, I never felt the sense of anarchic possibility that had been raging in the city and its environs when I was younger.

The dudes in Animal Collective were certainly aware of all this stuff, and the influence of that scene's rampant pranksterism may manifest in their masks and goofy names. But they only address what was happening once in the City Paper article:

“Baltimore had a really strong DIY teenage punk and indie community, a warehouse and house-party thing, in the ’90s,” Weitz acknowledges. “But we were kind of on the outside of it.”

“We just didn’t know about it,” Portner says. “The city didn’t really have any influence on us. It was more about the back porch.”

And I guess that's my problem with the band. One band that came into existence during this ridiculously fertile period in my hometown has broken through to the national indie consciousness, but it's a band that seems to have stayed willfully insular and ignored the things that were happening at the time. I can't really articulate this in any clear way, but I'm disappointed in the band. They could've learned more from what was happening. If they had, maybe indie-rock would be better for it today, or maybe I'd at least get Animal Collective. From where I'm sitting, it's a huge missed opportunity.

Stream: "Grass" video

Voice feature: Nick Catucci on Animal Collective

Lil Wayne's shorts are kind of too big for him to be playing basketball

In 1997, the Hot Boys were a group of four young no-name Cash Money solo artists loosely and uncomfortably grouped into a unit. Even though Get It How U Live, their first album, came close to going gold independently, the group was a strictly regional thing. The four rappers in the group mostly served as foils to Mannie Fresh's amazing jittery future-bounce beats. So it's amazing that every member of the group has managed to carve out a strong identity for himself eight years later. Juvenile has become a Southern-rap elder, and his slippery groan has gained a sort of bluesy weight. B.G.'s slurry whine has become an edgy hiss, and he's on his way to becoming a Bun B figure, no Southern rap album complete without a guest appearance from him. Young Turk hasn't been putting out any music since he's been in jail for shooting a cop, but, um, he shot a cop. But of the group's four members, it's Lil Wayne who's gone through the most head-spinning transformation.

Lil Wayne started out as the baby of the group, a 16-year-old kid who talked about dealing drugs just like the other three but who didn't cuss because his mother might get upset. These days, he's a towering figure in Southern rap, an unpredictable master of ugly croaks and stunningly bizarre word-choices, the only guy in rap who seems to be improving with every verse. Last year, he made a lot of people very, very confused when, at the end of his single "Bring It Back," he made a clear reference to Jay-Z by repeating the line "best rapper alive / since the best rapper retired" a few times. It was a shockingly ballsy claim, but it was enough to get Jay's attention. When he became Def Jam president, Jay is rumored to have tried hard to get Wayne a deal at the label; he was probably also responsible for putting Wayne in a position to make his scene-stealing cameo on Destiny's Child's "Soldier," the song that gave this blog its name. But Wayne didn't sign with Def Jam; Cash Money CEO Baby Williams wasn't about to let his last remaining commercially viable rapper go without a fight. And now Wayne has a position as president of Cash Money Records (whatever that means), and he's making Southern-rap power moves. Rumors say he's dating Trina, he's on the cover of the Southern edition of the new XXL, and, weirdly, he's been announced as the newest member of the Atlanta rap supergroup Boyz N Da Hood, replacing the departing Young Jeezy. It's hard to even picture him in that group, but he's been in a rap supergroup before, and that seemed to work out for him.

Now, it would take a global apocalypse at the very least to make Lil Wayne the best rapper alive. But I've been finding myself looking forward to his guest verses more and more, especially after he annihilated Paul Wall with his insanely cold verse on the latter's "March Now Step" ("I'm so New Orleans that I can't hide / You know I'm cutting something; I'm spitting pe-rox-ide"). The Diplomats get a lot of credit for their thrillingly bizarre metaphors, but now Wayne matches them gibberish line for gibberish line ("Straight down ya chimney in ya living room, it's I / Weezy, allergic to wintertime, hot!"). But unlike the Dipset, Wayne matches his lyrical eccentricities with an equally eccentric delivery. His flow reminds me of a smarmy kindergarten teacher leading a classroom singalong of "Old McDonald"; it has a condescendingly patient smarminess, like he doesn't mind taking the time explaining things that you're too dumb to figure out yourself but he's going to have some fun with you while he does this. His voice was always a naturally croaky high-pitched moan, but he's learned how to toy around with it. I love this guy.

Voice review: Keith Harris on Lil Wayne's 500 Degreez

Bun B addressing the first-ever UGK Convention

Bun B's Trill is a good rap album. Sometimes it's great: the painfully complete weary honestly of "The Story," the unexpectedly sunny burst of playful Miami bass on "Git It," the incomparable joy of hearing Chamillionaire and Paul Wall right next to each other on the "Draped Up" remix. But it's not the album we were waiting for, the long-delayed solo debut of one of the greatest rappers of all time, a guy who has endured more than a decade of regional marginalization, record-label cluelessness, and personal upheaval on his long climb to the top of the rap world, someone whose tireless work ethic and authoritative eloquence and grizzled presence have finally brought him into a position where everyone in rap owes him favors, where his supremacy is universally recognized and the respect he's long earned finally being granted. Trill should be a revelation, the defining document in Houston's moment of rap-landscape dominance and the definitive showcase of a guy who's been breathing rap and accumulating experience since the South was a rap wasteland. Instead, it comes off as a pretty good album from a strong B-list rapper with a lot of powerful friends, a patchwork hodgepodge of obligatory guest appearances and semi-inspired thug-talk. The weak moments almost outnumber the great ones: the cartoon-squeak Jazze Pha track, the ridiculous "Hail to the Chief" sample on "The Inauguration," the inexplicable guest appearance from dumbshit Transplant Skinhead Rob.

And then there's "Get Throwed." On paper, it probably should be the rap song of the year: a beat from H-Town rumbler Mr. Lee, a hook from Southern legend Z-Ro, and verses from Bun, Pimp C, Young Jeezy, and Jay-Z. It's the sort of collection of talent that seems assembled with the specific intention of making my brain explode, like if Ian MacKaye did a song with Corin Tucker and Craig Finn and John Darnielle. I first heard it about a week ago on DJ Envy & Lenny S's We Gets Busy Pt. 4 mixtape, where it was listed simply as "Intro," and I immediately started scouring the internet to figure out if this was a real, actual new song with new verses or whether some enterprising DJ had just slapped together a few undiscovered verses from these guys. I got so caught up freaking myself out about this song's mere existence that it took a few listens for me to notice that it's not actually a good song.

Mr. Lee's beat is a world away from some of the monster bangers he's put together for Slim Thug, impossibly huge tracks like "3 Kings" and "Diamonds." "Get Throwed" is a clumsy, lumbering thing, a few pretty cursive synth flourishes floating above over flimsily overproduced metal guitar crunches and anemic drums. Z-Ro's voice sounds amazing, heavy and tired and throaty, but his crooned hook doesn't quite match up with the beat, and that voice is much better-suited for bluesy elegies than banalities about good weed/good drank/big money. The whole track, in fact, is oddly ground-down and deflated; it sounds like it just got done with a long day at work. And it has album track written all over it; I can't figure out why Bun would use it to showcase the biggest guests on his album.

All of the rappers on the song sound uninspired, but Pimp C at least has an excuse: he's been in prison for a few years now. His verse was recorded before prison, before the beat was made and before Bun had a solo album in the works; the datedness of its references proves its age: "Pimp C, PA trill nigga / Polo, fuck that Hilfinger." It's a decent verse, grainy nasal rasp stretching out syllables almost until they break, but there's a reason Pimp didn't use the verse before going to prison. Bun, for his part, inexplicably shanks his verse. It should be a triumphant moment for him, and he should be giving us one of those breathless demonstrations of virtuosity that he's been putting on other rappers' records for years now, but no; it's an ugly clump of inelegantly clumped syllables and lunkhead misogyny: "A bitch know I might just explode / And slap her in the face with a pie a la mode." Huh? This is the wrong moment for Bun to be sleepwalking, like when Shawn Marion fell apart during the Suns/Spurs playoff series this year. Jeezy talks the same trap-star game he always talks, and it's starting to lose its appeal; there's only so many ways he can say that he knows how to cook crack, you know? He needs one of those indestructible regionless beats like he had on his album to sound superhuman, and he doesn't have that here. Jay's double-time verse has a nice, crisp precision, but even he remains uninspired, saying the same stuff he's been saying on virtually every verse lately: "Started with the block, did it brick by brick / Then I charted with the Roc, nigga, hit by hit." He's not giving us anything new, not showing any of that casual mastery he usually displays effortlessly.

I've talked about this before, but every post-retirement Jay-Z verse is an event; it gets automatic heavy radio play and mixtape burn, and it makes dorks like me lean in hard to our radios and strain to catch every syllable. One guest spot went a long way toward turning Jeezy into a star. Even when he's not quite on, even if this coming-down-from-the-mountaintop is tiresome and vaguely condescending, it's a blessing to get his voice on a song these days, and any rapper who can get that look needs to make the most of it. Bun has been giving it all on mixtapes and guest appearances like a fool lately, and he deserves to cash in his chips right now, so it's truly puzzling that he just let this one slip away.