Also, this album cover is really bad

Secret Machines
Virgin Megastore
April 27, 2005

The last time I saw the Secret Machines, they didn't even have an album out. They were opening for Blonde Redhead at the Black Cat in DC, the place was half-full, and virtually nobody there had ever heard of them, at least as far as I could tell. And still they came out with a huge, blinding light shining out behind them, which made only their silhouettes visible and made them look like absolute titans. The lights thing is important to the Secret Machines. So are the enormous John Bonham drums and the soaring processed-up guitars and the woozy keyboard-blankets. All this usually tertiary sound-and-vision stuff is way more important to a band like this than actual songwriting, and that's not even a bad thing. They've carved out a space for themselves by carving space, by making the big rock gesture the entire basis for their band, and I admire that. But bands never realize when their peripheral stuff is way more important and powerful than their songwriting. Even after a good run of swinging for the fences, spectacle-bands usually eventually try to strip their thing down to its essence without realizing that there isn't any essence there. That's why Ten Silver Drops, the new Secret Machines joint, is roughly one third as interesting as Now Here is Nowhere, their first album. When a band has proven that they know what to do with crashing lockstep drums and interstellar guitar whooshes, nobody wants to hear it when they decide to start foregrounding their melodic chops, but that's what they're trying to do on this new album, and it doesn't work. It's also I guess what they were trying to do yesterday at their Virgin Megastore in-store, when they made the unfathomable misstep of playing an acoustic show. When a band's whole thing is that they're the shoegazer Zeppelin, why would they perform in a way that's pretty much guaranteed to leech out all the shoegazer and the Zeppelin from their music and leave pretty much nothing? It just doesn't make sense.

It didn't help anything that the Virgin Megastore seems to be getting progressively worse at hosting in-store performances. They've got a better setup for it than any record store I've ever seen: a coffee-shop area with enough room for a few hundred people to pack in, a makeshift stage with lights and a sound-guy and everything, and a soundsystem that allows bands to play at actual live-performance volumes. But this time, whoever makes these decisions had the bright idea that the store should only let people into the coffee shop if they bought a copy of the band's album and showed the receipt, which meant that about twenty album-buyers stood around in the cafe area before the band went on, along with the LIFEbeat table that always seems to be at these things, while most of the crowd stood in the rap aisle across from the coffee shop ready to watch the band from across the stairwell. Right before the band went on, someone decided that they needed to clear the area out and ended up letting everyone in anyway, which must've annoyed the people who'd already bought the damn album. If you're going to have a free show, have a free show; nobody likes jumping through hoops. Even after they let in all the people who'd waited around, the cafe was less than half full, so the whole publicity-stunt thing didn't quite pop off as planned.

"It's different, right?," Brandon Curtis mumbled after a couple of songs. "If you buy our album, our album doesn't sound like that." It was true. Everyone who jumped through all those hoops got to hear a bunch of thoroughly average cliched-up acoustic-rock songs that went on way, way too long. The band left enough space in the songs that you could tell they were hinting at something much, much grander without ever getting anywhere near it. Curtis's big adjustment was to do his big-rock howl slightly quieter, which ended up sounding totally ridiculous, while his brother Ben tried to do Simon and Garfunkle close-harmonies, which worked a little better. Drummer Josh Garza, who usually provides the vast majority of the band's epic heft, was reduced to shaking a maraca and, on one song, slapping his knee, which had a microphone helpfully pointed in its direction. "First Wave Intact," from the first album, sounded marginally OK; everything else was utterly forgettable. And in the cruel light of day, the three of them didn't look anything like mythical figures; they just looked like three vaguely hungover dudes with acoustic guitars. "That one guy looks like David Spade," said my friend Jeff, pointing at Brandon Curtis. He was right, and I never would've noticed that when he was just a silhouette.

Stream: "Lightning Blue Eyes" video
Voice feature: D. Shawn Bosler on the Secret Machines
Voice review: D. Shawn Bosler on the Secret Machines' Now Here is Nowhere

With a pistol he'll define the definition of pain

He makes terrible mixtapes, but DJ Whoo Kid may have justified his existence with this news story where he tells MTV about hanging out at a party in Bahrain with Michael Jackson. The entire scene Whoo Kid depicts is so utterly opulent and ridiculous that it makes me unspeakably happy that it even happened at all: the King of Bahrain throws a party for Michael Jackson, and John Legend and Tyson Beckford and Whoo Kid all show up. Whoo Kid gets invited because the Prince of Monaco and the son of the dictator of Libya both recommend him ("Huge G-Unit fans," Whoo Kid calls them.) Whoo Kid sits next to MJ at dinner and gets him to say cusswords. MJ asks Whoo Kid about Eminem and 50 Cent. Whoo Kid sets up a phone call between MJ and 50, trying to get a collaboration going.

It's hard enough to believe that this whole thing actually took place, so it makes sense that some random prankster would send out a press release earlier this week saying that Jackson would be doing a song with 50 Cent, and it also makes sense that a lot of news outlets would pick the story up before 50's people got around to squashing the rumor. The fake story is just hilarious: Jackson was apparently going to release a Radio G-Unit mixtape with Whoo Kid, calling it MJ-Unit: The Takeover. He was going to make a single called "Now That I Found Love" with 50 and "G-Unit talent" and Lucy Diamonds. There's no word on whether the single would be a Heavy D cover or whether "G-Unit talent" means like Spider Loc and Olivia or whether it just means that 50 Cent would be appearing along with his own personal natural talent, which would just necessarily be called G-Unit talent because he's part of G-Unit and he has talent. Nor is there any word on who Lucy Diamonds is; I've never heard of her. Neither has Whoo Kid, and neither, apparently, have most news outlets, many of whom reported the prospective MJ-Unit collaborator as Lucy Pearl, the circa-2000 neo-soul supergroup. The story isn't even that big of a leap, especially considering that he's releasing his next record through Two Seas Records, a new label apparently started by the King of Bahrain for the express purpose of putting out the next Michael Jackson album and run by the British music exec who figured out how to make Crazy Frog sell in the UK. Jackson has spent the last twenty years proving that he's way too potentially insane for us to dismiss any rumor about him outright. A song with 50 Cent and Lucy Diamonds would only be, like, the forty-seventh-weirdest thing he's done lately.

MTV News reported today that the story was a hoax; there's no word yet on who sent out the fake press release. So we won't be able to realize the dream of hearing MJ trying to sing over Whoo Kid's echoey gunshot-noise drops anytime soon, thank God. But something like this might actually be a good look for Michael; part of what makes Off the Wall and Thriller so great is that they work as sort of uber-pop answers to disco, like Jackson found a way to internalize the aesthetics of club music and turned it into something more expansive and universal without losing the ecstatic pulse. It's hard to imagine him doing the same thing with club-rap in 2006, especially after all the baggage he's racked up, but it could be worth a shot for him. It couldn't work any worse than that cluttered-up Rodney Jerkins technopop he was trying to do with Invincible, anyway, though admittedly the remix of "You Rock My World" with Jay-Z didn't exactly set the world on fire either. The Persian Gulf island nation of Bahrain has a king rich and bored and dumb enough to devote substantial resources to releasing the next Michael Jackson album, which is probably the only way we'd ever hear new music from MJ; who's to say he's not rich and bored and dumb enough to throw indescribably lavish amounts of money at 50 Cent to get him on it as well? And how long will it be before 50 Cent goes from legitimate pop superstar to walking tabloid punchline? In twenty years or so, it's not hard to imagine 50 following MJ's lead and convincing an obscure monarch to be his benefactor. I can't wait.

Still the best beard in rap, Rick Ross or no Rick Ross

One of my favorite things to write about last year was the big untold story in East Coast rap, the silent cold war between Jay-Z and 50 Cent that came to a head at Jay's "I Declare War" concert in October when he pointedly declared war on nobody but brought out a wide range of prominent 50 foes (Nas, Jadakiss) in what seemed to be a sort of massing of the armies. Jay had his team (Nas, Beanie Sigel, Kanye West), and 50 had his (Mobb Deep, M.O.P., Mase), and it looked like it would stay that way, a miles-wide chasm between East Coast rap's two most successful rappers and their warring conceptions of rap. Or that's what I thought, anyway. It became apparent pretty quickly that this was a totally simplistic and unrealistic image. Jay and 50 may not like each other, but they aren't going to let that mutual animosity get in the way of their cashflows. A few months ago, someone at MTV News asked 50 about the cold war, and 50 said that it wasn't real at all, that he'd even be working with Jay on Freeway's next album. This seemed unlikely, to say the least; Freeway's dusty, desperate, conflicted drug-rap never seemed to have much in common with the increasingly banal money-talk that 50's been doing lately ("Mansion after mansion / Next stop, the Hamptons," guh). But it turns out that it's true; the album is mostly done, and it'll be released as a joint venture between Roc-A-Fella and G-Unit, executive produced by both Jay and 50. The first hard evidence of the collaboration emerged a couple of weeks ago with DJ Whoo Kid and Freeway's G-Unit Radio 19 mixtape.

On the surface, it makes sense. 50 and Freeway both came up on mixtapes, and they released their first albums within a few months of each other. Freeway is one of those perennially on-the-rise rappers with all the right connections and unimpeachable credibility who nevertheless can't seem to make the leap to actual stardom. And 50's been making a habit of snapping up underperforming East Coast street-rappers lately; it's the reason the Mobb Deep dudes have G-Unit tattoos on their hands now. Allhiphop's news report on the album's progress makes it look like we could have a classic on our hands: guest appearances from 50, Young Buck, State Property guys, Scarface, Jay-Z, and Kanye and production from Just Blaze and Kanye, among others; all these guys should be able to match up perfectly with Free's rangy, classicist aesthetic. Free has consistently been one of the most fascinating figures in rap, a Muslim who raps about girls and drugs and violence but who always sounds guilty about it, who says he'll stop sinning and commit himself fully to his religion later in life, when he finally gets past all the temptation that constantly surrounds him. Philadelphia Freeway, his first album, didn't always address that dichotomy, and misguided pop moves like the collaboration with Nelly and the pimp-song with Snoop Dogg kept it from being great. But it's still a truly strong album, with Just Blaze's windswept soul production and Free's hungry hyena-yelp providing all the relentlessly churning tension that was often missing from the lyrics. Working with the right guys, Freeway seems like he could finally attack his own inner conflict on the new album and become the great rapper he's always had the potential to be. I'm not sure, though.

I'm not sure because G-Unit Radio 19 is a terrible mixtape, scattered and incoherent and generally unpleasant. Most of the blame can go to Whoo Kid, the most painfully inept big-name mixtape DJ working (worse than Kay Slay even). Whoo Kid can't put together a cohesive, listenable mixtape to save his life; his echoey vocal drops and gunshot-noises and intrusive skits can turn even a pretty good track into a piece of shit. He also wastes our time with interludes like this one:

Whoo Kid: Should I play a new Freeway joint?
Prince of Bahrain: Yeah, yeah.
Whoo Kid: What do y'all think of Freeway before I get into that?
Prince of Bahrain. You know Freeway Freeway, yeah, I like that dude, you know? You know what I'm saying?
Whoo Kid: He is a fellow Muslim, too, so you know, you got to respect that already.
Prince of Bahrain: Yeah, yeah...(trailing off)

Whoo Kid also pairs Freeway up with Lil Jon on the first track, and every East Coast rapper who tries that move always ends up looking desperate (see: Mobb Deep, Nas). But part of the blame lies with Freeway himself. His voice still sounds amazing, and he still wraps it around beats with a visceral, breathless dedication, but now he's rapping about his off-shore accounts and antique cars and shit, and it's even less interesting coming from him than it is from Johnny Q. Mixtape Rapper. Gritty rappers are having more and more problems translating their styles to the G-Unit milieu; Mobb Deep has the same problem all over their new album. When you come up evoking fear and hopelessness and longing and hate, it's hard to make jewelry-talk work. At this rate, M.O.P. is going to be talking about partying on yachts in Monaco before the end of the year, and nobody wants to hear that shit. Maybe Jay and 50 should get back to silently beefing.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on Freeway's Philadelphia Freeway

Probably the best album hardcore has ever given us

Avail
Knitting Factory
April 21, 2006

Ten years ago, Avail, a hardcore band from Richmond, VA, played the best live show I've ever seen. I was 16, and they were playing at the Black Cat in DC; my dad drove me and a few of my friends down and then picked us up at 11:30. The pickup time was supposed to be 11, but once everyone realized that the show wasn't going to be over by then, I called on a payphone and begged him to push it back a bit. We still had to leave before the show ended, but we got to see most of it. Avail had been around for a while by then: three albums, a whole lot of shout-outs in Rancid liner notes, a rep that was probably peaking at the time. And they were spectacular. Avail's version of hardcore had a sort of heart-on-sleeve intensity that just barely skirted the whole emo thing (which wasn't even really a pejorative then) by playing hard and loud and straight-up with big, beery classic-rock singalong choruses and huge, crashing chords. Their songs were mostly about being true to yourself or being from a small Southern city or not fighting or whatever, standard punk stuff, but they did this stuff with a full-bodied force that still feels violently cathartic when I listen to the old albums now. (Jade Tree just reissued the three best: Dixie, 4AM Friday, and Over the James.) They had this innate, magnificent grasp of tension-and-release dynamics, and so the songs would build to climax after climax, welling up suddenly from Jesus Lizard clattery feedback to flattening uber-hooks in the blink of an eye. I don't remember too many details about the Black Cat show, but a few images are good and stuck in there. The group had a hypeman (they called him a "cheerleader" in their liner notes) named Beau Beau, an impish dude with no shirt and lots of tattoos and one of those long-ass pointy goatees, and his whole job was just to jump around onstage and rile up the crowd and sometimes sing back-up, and I can remember the floor erupting into a huge circle-pit when he traced a circle in the air with his forefinger. I can also remember the mosh-pit, which was already at full-boil, visibly getting more hectic exactly in time with the five-second build near the end of "F.C.A.," still probably my favorite song of theirs. I remember my friends giving me shit when we had to leave early. I don't really remember anything else, but it's enough. I've been to hundreds, maybe thousands, of shows since then, and I don't think I even have the capacity to love a show like I loved that one.

Staggeringly enough, Avail is still around ten years after that show. They bounced from Lookout Records after Over the James and released a couple of pretty-meh albums, the last of which came out four years ago. I've heard that Beau Beau dated Lita before she got a job with the WWF. They probably all have day-jobs and kids and dogs and mortgages and everything else now, but they still tour pretty steadily, and they're still an amazing show. The crowds they draw aren't as big as they ones they got when being thanked on Rancid albums actually carried some cultural weight, but they still sold out the Knitting Factory days before they played there on Friday night, and the crowd still knew all the words to all the songs. The guys in the band look pretty banged-up and worn-out, and singer Tim Barry said something about how they think every tour will be their last one, but the songs still sound as great as they ever did. Beau Beau wears a shirt now, and he doesn't jump around like he used to, but he can still start a circle-pit by tracing a circle in the air. I used to sometimes see people cry at Avail shows, and that doesn't happen anymore, but people still bellow all the words and throw each other around with abandon and launch themselves off the stage butt-first. Before Friday night, it had been years since I'd been in a moshpit that smelled that much like sweat and feet and whiteboy dreads. It was molten-hot inside the Knitting Factory; either my eyes were playing tricks on me, or I saw condensed sweat dripping from the ceiling. I missed all three opening bands because I was busy getting drunk beforehand, but it was still pretty shockingly easy to fall back into half-remembered rituals: rushing the pit, dodging the fat guys, running backwards until I ran into people after getting knocked off-balance, comparing bruises after the show. When Avail's last two albums came out, I listened a couple of times and decided that I didn't like them much, but even those songs sounded amazing on Friday night. But the songs I loved the most were the songs I loved the most years ago: "F.C.A.," "Model," "Sanctuary 13." To see all this stuff that felt so magical when I was in high school happening all over again, even in slightly creaky form, is a pretty goddam inspiring thing.

Download: "On the Nod"
Download: "Simple Song"
Download: "August"

I'm still not tired of this image

Ghostface Killah + Slick Rick + Papoose + DJ Premier + M1
Nokia Theatre
April 22, 2005

Halfway through the best rap show I've seen since coming to New York, maybe the best rap show I've ever seen, Ghostface yelled for the light guy to "put the blue light on" before the DJ put on some dusty old 70s slow-jam and Ghost closed his eyes and swayed, wistful awe in his voice, talking about how his parents used to fuck to this music, how he was raised on this music, how he still loved this music more than rap. Then he launched into "Holla," the gorgeously weepy track from 2004's The Pretty Toney Album where he raps over an old Delfonics song, vocals and all. That was last October at BB King's, and what I didn't realize then was that Ghost had been doing the whole "put the blue light on" riff at shows for more than a year. He'd done it at Roseland during the Pretty Toney record release party, and he kept going back to it after that. But at BB King's, it sounded like he'd just thought of it, like that was exactly what he needed to tell us right then. When he did it again Saturday night at the Nokia Theatre, it felt like a riff, a familiar and dependable stunt he could use every show, right around the midway point, right when it was time to let the energy level dip for a few minutes before bringing it back up again at the end. It was still fun to watch him talking about "I'm like a 70-year-old nigga in a little body" and "one day I'm gonna have the whole fucking audience nothing but bitches, and they gonna scream for me like this." But it was a bit, just like the part of every Jay-Z show where he plays the first couple of lines of a Biggie verse and then lets the audience rap it back to him. An effective theatrical trick, nothing more.

Ghostface has been on tour for about two months now, and now he's selling out the Nokia Theatre, a club a little bigger and a lot less intimate that BB King's. His new album isn't going to go diamond or anything, but it's selling better than I thought it would and getting great reviews everywhere. And he's been on his grind, bringing dense, tight-wound New York rap shit to Boise and Tempe and South Burlington. His show is well-rehearsed and professional and crowd-pleasing, a lot more dependent on Supreme Clientele than it is on Fishscale because he knows what his audience wants to hear. And he's a great performer, huge and wiry and animated, with a voice strong and loud and melodic enough to cut right through his army of hypemen and hit every line with force and precision. But his set last night didn't have the same tense, volatile energy at the October show. Cappadonna, who seemed about ready to punch some random audience person in the face all through that last show, was nowhere to be found. In fact, no other Wu-Tang members took the stage at all on Saturday night, odd considering that GZA had reportedly opened an unannounced show for Ghost earlier that day at Columbia University. Last night's show only threatened to get out of control at the very end, when Ghost invited virtually every woman in the audience onstage and then serenaded them with an a cappella rendition of his misogyny-anthem "Wildflower," a weird and queasy moment that became a little easier to handle when some of them women rapped the lyrics along with Ghost. Naturally, an onstage old-school disco dance-party followed immediately.

Predictability is relative, and a just-OK Ghostface show is a whole lot better than just about any other rapper's best. I'll still do my best to see him whenever he comes around. But a Ghostface show is a lot more powerful when you're not entirely certain you'll make it out alive. Last night, he was just great entertainment.

Voice review: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Ghostface's The Pretty Toney Album

So was Slick Rick, who came out before Ghost and did maybe twenty minutes: "La Di Da Di," "Mona Lisa," "Children's Story," "Hey Young World," a song or two from that 1999 post-prison comeback album that no one bought, and that was it. He did pretty much the exact same set when I saw him in 1999, and he'll be able to keep doing it until the day he dies, though he might want to consider ditching those comeback songs for "The Show." He's a joy to watch, busting out goofy old-school dance routines unselfconsciously and rocking about a thousand pounds of gold chains around his neck. He came out onstage with Ghost a couple of times, but he always looked sort of sheepish and fragile, standing off to the stage with his hands in his pockets. When Ghost put his arm over Rick during "Run," it seemed like an oddly protective gesture. It was nice.

Rick followed Papoose, and it made for a telling contrast; Rick warm and vulnerable and conversational where Papoose is cold and hard and dictatorial. Pap came out doing "Alphabetical Slaughter," the song where every word of every line starts with the same letter ("Alert assassins at large allegedly automatic artillery automatically aimed," etc.), and it's an impressive technical feat, although I kept imagining his mic being totally soaked after he got done with the P part. On paper, many of Pap's lines can be haunting and evocative, and he can be good when he's just doing snarly battle-rap. But he loves doing awkwardly extended concept-songs (like how each of the five boroughs is like one of his fingers; you know that one), and that stuff gets old fast. He's got a hectoring, nasal voice, and more often than not, he barely acknowledges the beat. When he raps over "Let Me Love You" and tries to get all seductive, he sounds ridiculous. His two hypemen, both of whom are about a foot taller than him, rapped every line along with him, and the effect was furiously unpleasant. People keep mentioning this guy as the great future hope of New York rap, but I'm not seeing it; there's more to being a star than coming off hard, no matter how well-written your lyrics are.

M1 of Dead Prez isn't a star either, but he's getting better as a performer. He's still inexplicably bringing out two R&B singers, a truly bizarre and counterintuitive move even if he uses them better than Pharoahe Monch does. I never got much out of Dead Prez's stogy, humorless militarism, at least when it wasn't paired with a track as urgent and volcanic as "It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop." But M1 seems to be actively trying to get his shit played on the radio now, and there's an interesting tension between his black nationalism and the warmer, gooier sound he's been using lately; it was funny when he mentioned how you might hear one song on the radio and some dude in the audience started yelling "Fuck the radio!" and "Turn the radio off!" It's hard to imagine M1 blowing up off this stuff, but he does sound a whole lot less wooden and more human when he stops lecturing and starts reflecting. And he's not telling me to eat healthy anymore, so that's good.

Even if there weren't any stunning or memorable performances on Saturday night, though, it was still one of the better rap shows I've seen lately. There wasn't any dead time between acts; everyone came out and only grumbled a little bit when it was time to give up the stage to the next guy, a display of professionalism you don't often see at New York rap shows. And this was totally, completely a New York rap show, a rally-the-troops night. DJ Premier does that better than just about anyone. Non-rapping producers don't often make good performers, and Premier didn't do anything other than play records and talk loudly, but he's one of the greatest producers in rap history, and I can think of lot of worse things to do with an hour than listen to him play his old records. Premier also brought out the night's only surprise guest, Jeru the Damaja. Jeru might've looked a bit haggard, and maybe his leather pants weren't the best choice, but the audience still absolutely went apeshit for him, and he was visibly thrilled to do "Come Clean" in front of a bigger audience than he's probably had in years. It was a weirdly heartwarming moment; New York rap may not mean much in the larger scheme of things, but there's still one little corner of the world where Ghostface is a major star and "Come Clean" is an anthem.

I like this guy and all; I'm just saying

"You ain't get shot again, so what's your second album about?"
-Jadakiss, "Checkmate"

The MTV News website always has four stories at the top of the page, and today the bottom one is about the Smashing Pumpkins reunion, which I guess someone somewhere cares about. The other three involve rappers and violence: Cassidy talking about being in jail for five months before being acquitted on murder charges, D12's Swift being sentenced to a jail term after skipping a court hearing to attend Proof's funeral, and Daddy Yankee talking about the time he got shot. (It might be problematic to call Daddy Yankee a rapper because people haven't yet recognized reggaeton as a rap subgenre, but he's someone who got famous rapping, and so that's what I'm doing.) Here's what Yankee has to say: "At the time, I didn't understand it. But right now, I give thanks to that bullet." That's a really stupid thing to say.

I don't want to single Daddy Yankee out too much here; he's certainly not the first rapper to brag about being shot. 50 Cent certainly owes an enormous chunk of his fame to the night he got shot nine times and lived to tell about it; when his story started hitting magazines at the end of 2002, he looked like a superhero. And Yankee's story isn't some glorification-of-violence shit; he didn't get gunned down by a rival drug-dealer outside his trap-house or anything. He'd been trying out to play major-league baseball when he got caught in some crossfire outside a recording studio, and the bullet that he caught in his hip ended those plans. The next sentence after the two I quoted is this: "The bullet made me be focused in music because I didn't have any [other] options - it was music or music, you know?" So there are some extenuating circumstances, but what we have here is still a huge rising star giving an interview to an international entertainment conglomerate where he talks about being shot like it's a good thing. To call this irresponsible would be a vast understatement.

When I was down in Baltimore this weekend, I was talking with two of my oldest friends about the Proof shooting, and they asked me how I can still write about rap every goddam day, how all this stuff doesn't turn my stomach. I answered that 99% of the violence in rap is theatre, which is true. Rap wouldn't be nearly as commercially or artistically successful as it is if it didn't have all those stories of criminals who managed to turn their lives around through music, pulling themselves out of poverty without losing their edge. And the image of Tupac exchanging fire with two off-duty cops in Atlanta, for instance, is a powerful one; it helped make Pac a part of a long continuum of dangerous outlaw heroes, a trope that's been a huge part of America's cultural self-image since before the country existed. The joke that a rapper's fame is directly proportionate to the number of times he's been shot has been kicking around for a few years now, but it doesn't quite work out; if it did, MF Grimm would be the biggest star in rap. A few weeks ago, there was a since-dropped Sopranos subplot where a rapper hires Tony's brother-in-law to shoot him so that he can still become famous. It wasn't realistic, of course, but it says something that this idea of bullets = fame has entrenched itself in pop culture.

And that's why it's so infuriating to read Yankee talking about his shooting like it's a good thing. In Yankee's own personal experience, maybe it was a good thing, the one moment that sent him off on another path and eventually made him famous. But he's a cultural figure now, and he has to watch what he says. Kids love him. I'm not saying a kid is going to run out and get himself shot because Daddy Yankee said it was a great thing for him, but the whole nihilistic death-drive thing in rap can really cross the line sometimes, and this feels like one of those times. Right now, the things rappers say in interviews may actually be more influential than the things they say in songs (especially for Yankee, since a good part of his audience doesn't speak Spanish). I know I sound like C. Delores Tucker or my dad or something when I saw this, but at a certain point, people should realize that the things they say have actual consequences, that quotes like that one (which MTV helpfully placed in the story's headline) actually contribute to a climate where life is not respected.

Fuck, I don't know, rappers have probably been bragging about getting shot since before I was born. Maybe I'm just getting old.

"Undeniable classic," says MTV

For a rapper who cut his teeth doing morning-zoo radio-personality shit and whose lyrics couldn't possibly be more benign without altogether abandoning the whole money-and-hoes meme (which just isn't going to go away anytime soon, despite what an absolutely huge chunk of rap's audience, me included, might wish), Ludacris sure does seem to get a whole lot of hate from mainstream culture-commentator types. The whole Bill O'Reilly Pepsi-ad flap of a couple of years ago made sense, I guess: a popular rapper who says cusswords and brags about sex being hired to endorse a product whose target consumer base is all of humanity. But it was still weird; Ludacris is not Public Enemy or Luke or Too Short or Bushwick Bill or Eminem or Big Pun or any of the other rappers who made their names by making enemies and pushing social mores as far as they'd go in whatever direction. His whole thing has always been bawdy-funny strip-club nonsense and empty Southern signifiers and everybody-dance chatter and lots and lots of jokes. He doesn't really mess with politics or violence or pimp-talk much. He's never made a move that sickened just about everyone who was paying attention, the way Nelly did with the "Tip Drill" video. He's certainly been gleefully profane and misogynist ("Ho" from Back for the First Time immediately springs to mind), but he's always done that stuff with tongue firmly in cheek, and his stuff has always been completely within already-established parameters, so it was tough to see what O'Reilly was all up in arms about, other than the fact that it's that guy's job to be all up in arms about stuff. I don't actually watch O'Reilly's show (like, ever), so I don't know if he made similar noise about Kanye West being in a Diet Pepsi ad campaign at the exact same moment that he shit on the president on live TV; I'm guessing he at least had something to say about it, but he didn't manage to get Pepsi to drop the ad campaign or anything like that (which probably says more about an encouraging cline in the power of rightist blowhard pundits than it does about O'Reilly's own rancor, but that's someone else territory right there).

This is happening all over again for Luda, though in a decidedly more low-key way. Jay Smooth posted today about some sort of beef that's been brewing between Luda and Oprah Winfrey since before Luda appeared with the rest of the cast of Crash on Oprah's show a few months ago. I didn't see the show, and it's not on YouTube, but here's apparently what happened: Oprah and Don Cheadle were getting all heated with each other over whether or not it's OK for black people to drop N-bombs, Terrence Howard said that he doesn't use the word himself, Oprah asked Luda if he'd consider not using it, and Luda squirmed around for a few seconds and said he agreed with Cheadle. Then Sandra Bullock asked Luda to stop saying "bitch" and "ho," the crowd totally erupted, and Luda said that he'd stop when women stopped calling themselves bitches. Bullock said she wouldn't call a woman a bitch unless she was one. End of segment. Whew. (Seriously, read this thing, even if I did just pillage it wholesale.) He told Contactmusic.com a few days ago that Oprah cut a lot of his comments out of the show, that he didn't feel welcome in dealing with her at all, that she admitted in a backstage conversation that she felt like she was giving rappers a platform by having them on her show and that she wasn't very comfortable with that. Also: "I don't see why Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, who I am huge fans of, it's OK for them to go on Oprah. They speak the same language I do, but they do it though comedy, so I guess that's acceptable to her."

Now, Luda's response to Bullock is totally wormy and disingenuous; it's not a man's place to say how women should talk about each other just like it's not a white blogger's place to tangle himself in a debate among black celebrities about N-bomb usage. But it's a bit weird how Ludacris, of all people, keeps getting caught up in this stuff. It could be his visibility, as he's become the latest in a long line of rappers to jump completely into Hollywood culture, a cultural space that still doesn't know quite what to do with rap music. Most of the rappers who have made that jump (Will Smith, Queen Latifah) have either been total Nerf-balls or populist-empowerment types (exactly like Oprah), so there hasn't been much conflict, but things get considerably weirder when you consider the case of someone like Ice Cube, whose music was always incomparably more provocative and objectionable than anything Ludacris has ever done and who never faces talk-show host ice-grills when Are We There Yet? or whatever drops. But then, Ludacris is making this jump while he's still a viable commodity in the rap world, still capable of pushing something like that DTP compilation to gold even though he hasn't released a half-decent album himself since his utterly fucking amazing debut (one of my top five rap albums of all time, totally not joking). And then, maybe the whole routine banality of his misogyny is what gets under famous people's skin; he doesn't make a big show of it the way Ice Cube did, and maybe that makes it all the more disgusting. But I don't get the impression that Winfrey or O'Reilly spent that much time thinking about it; it's more like he's successful, he's a rapper, he's right there, let's say something.

I don't understand the way rap music works, and neither do you. Anyone who claims to have it figured out is a liar, including rappers. It seems possible that Ludacris could exponentially expand his audience if he stopped talking shit about half the world's population; Jay-Z certainly made moves in that direction a few years ago, and that's part of why he's become such a massive cultural figure. But there's also a tendency for rappers to suddenly morph into pandering cornballs a la LL Cool J the exact instant they decide they're going to stop objectifying women. If it's so easy to cut out unconscionable lyrical material, wouldn't more rappers do it? Wouldn't it be easier to find positive examples outside the backpack-librarian crew? Why can't we leave that shit alone?

As rap increasingly becomes an indispensable part of popular culture, we're going to have more and more awkward moments between rappers and clueless cultural-gatekeeper types. I can vividly remember Ice Cube on Letterman, promoting Anaconda when I was in high school. (Dave: "So, did you like South America?" Cube: "It was cool, but I prefer South Central." Dave: "Heh heh, yeah.") When Luda was on Ellen around the time Crash came out, there was a hard-to-watch moment where Ellen was gushing to Luda about the movie and naming all the actors she thought were great in it but naming only the white actors and forcing Luda to respond by naming all the nonwhite actors in the movie. If misogyny and nihilism can replace funny slang as the main part of this friction, maybe we can get some answers to those questions. Or maybe we can just get a whole lot more people confused.

Voice review: Keith Harris on Ludacris's Red Light District

I'm not quite sure why I always accept skateboards as indicators of normalcy in rappers when I've never skateboarded a day in my life

Lupe Fiasco is not happy. Food & Liquor, his heavily anticipated first album, just leaked to the internet in unmixed demo form, and he's saying all the stuff that people always say when their albums leak: it's not the final version, he's going to have to go ahead and scrap and recreate the whole thing now that this inferior version is out there, it doesn't have all its collaborations and skits and everything else in place yet, just wait until we hear the final version (whenever that might be). Lupe is more of an internet dork than the average rising rapper (which at this point is saying something), and so he seems to be taking the whole thing harder than the average rising rapper, not even sure the thing is ever going to come out now, convinced this is going to mess up all his label's plans for him forever. This is all pretty ridiculous; as Byron Crawford said, every damn rap album ends up leaking anyway, and the label might as well just put it out as is because this version is going to be the one everyone wants.

I can second that, especially since this leaked version of the album is just about perfect (or at least really really good; I can get too caught up on my first couple of listens). Avid Gawker readers will probably be able to figure out why I'm generally pretty bummed out today, and Food & Liquor turns out to be pretty much exactly what I needed. In this unmixed forms, the beats are mixed low enough that they don't overwhelm Lupe's vocals, and there aren't any distracting rapper cameos or big-name R&B singers cluttering the thing up, so I can focus pretty much exclusively on what Lupe brings to the table, and that turns out to be a whole hell of a lot. As a rapper, he's nimble and thoughtful and gentle and big-hearted; he's got a great ear for hooks and internal rhymes and a wicked eye for detail. He's getting a lot of internet burn off "Kick Push," the single, a strikingly gorgeous and disarming song about skateboarding, and he maintains that same wistful tone throughout the rest of the album, but it's not like a skateboarding album or anything. As a persona, he's fascinating: dorky bespectacled kid with backgrounds in both projects and suburbs, articulate and Islamic with the same fascination with ugly sneakers that Pharrell has, able to tackle complicated subjects in complicated ways instead of whittling things down to old backpacker binaries of money vs. soul or whatever. His throwaway lines are beautifully crafted ("There's no honor amongst fellows / It's harder than sitting with a blind man and trying to describe yellow," "I am Atlas at this, manage to balance massive masses"), and it's going to take a while to untangle all of them, but he always delivers them with this totally cool, conversational ease. On the harder tracks, which aren't really all that hard, he sounds something like Juelz Santana if he'd suddenly been caught in some bizarre lab accident that made him about fifty times smarter. The rest of the time, he's more like what everyone seems to think Common is, warm and incisive without losing the swagger that every great rapper needs. On "No Place to Go," he's great at describing the complicated relationship with rap that every halfway thoughtful non-asshole listener ends up trying and failing to resolve: "I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because the women degraded / But Too Short made me laugh; like a hypocrite I played it / A hypocrite I stated, but I only recited half, omitted the word bitch." And when he gets political, which is often, he sometimes comes up with a line so packed and twisty that I'm not even sure where to put the slash-marks that indicate where one line ends and another begins: "Yes indeed, democracy's a flirt in a miniskirt trying to give a handjob to the desert till it squirt Texas tea, then they give a condom to Congress to stretch and siege." Musically, it sounds more like Chicago (or the Chicago I imagine, anyway; I've only been there a couple of times) than any rap album I've heard, the expansive, humid soul samples sweeping up all these strings and horns and guitar-burbles and turning into this constant rippling strut underneath everything without overwhelming it, something like the tracks Just Blaze made for Philadelphia Freeway but with most of the tense fury subbed out for calm introspection. There's also an emo song, which should by rights be terrible, but Lupe is just so nimble on it and the synth noises are so pretty that it's hard to be mad.

So yeah, anyway, this thing is pretty fucking great as is; it can easily hang with the Ghostface and T.I. albums as one of the best of the year. If Lupe keeps tinkering with it, he's only going to fuck it up. The R&B singers who handle most of the hooks on the demo might just be placeholders (though the guy on "Ghetto Story" might actually be Ronald Isley or Charlie Wilson), but they do just fine. He doesn't need to go and get Jill Scott, who might try to hog the spotlight and sing all over him and suck some of the energy from whatever song she ends up guesting on. He's also talking about working with Three 6 Mafia. I've certainly made no secret of my love for that group, but it's hard to imagine a worse pairing; Lupe's gentle lilt just isn't built to complement DJ Paul and Juicy J's stormy, overwrought fuck-you-up production. And if Lupe thinks people actually want to hear skits, he's playing himself. It's funny; there's been something of a trend recently of people who seem totally cool and normal and down-to-earth coming up in rap and then getting all powerful and turning into weird megalomaniacs with jewelry obsessions and doofy joint-venture ideas; think Kanye getting made up like Jesus for the Rolling Stone cover or Pharrell bragging about getting his own diamond cut. These guys can still do great work after making the narcissistic-celebrity leap, but that initial naive they're-just-like-us buzz never comes back again. If Lupe keeps freaking out about this leak, he runs a risk of making the jump before his damn album even comes out, which must be setting some kind of record.

Wow, I really hate this cover

The tape itself is a couple of weeks old now, but I didn't even listen to it for a while. I do that. Mixtapes are five bucks, total impulse buys, and that's why you'll get stuff like the Chopper from Da Band tape that's crunched up at the bottom of my bag collecting dust right now. I'll buy anything with DJ Drama's name on it, even the Little Brother thing, just because Southern mixtapes are so hard to find in New York that you have to grab what you can get (still haven't heard the Young Buck tape) and because Drama makes more consistently listenable tapes than anyone else working (Clinton Sparks and Green Lantern have moments; everyone else generally makes me feel like my soul's getting sucked out around the twenty-minute mark). But I decided a few years ago that I didn't like Pharrell anymore, and it's hard to shake that. I didn't always hate him. "Superthug" and "Got Your Money" and "Shake Ya Ass" were some of the first mp3s I downloaded as soon as I could get Napster to work; those early Neptunes tracks felt like someone had taken Timbaland's squelcy/clattery future-synth stuff and translated it into something even more universal. I liked them even more when I found out that Pharrell wore trucker-hats and ghostwrote "Rump Shaker" and did some tracks on the Jazzmatazz 3 album (loved that album for some reason). But then there was the N.E.R.D. album, which sucked at first and then got worse when they got Spymob on it. And then Pharrell fucked up his adorably horrible squeaky singing voice, once the voice on the radio more fun to sing along with than any other, by taking singing lessons and getting all melismatic. And then there was that scene in Fade to Black where Pharrell tells Jay that he knows exactly what he was doing with The Black Album and then plays him the shitty-ass "Allure" beat. And then there was The Black Album itself, its only weak moments the two Neptunes tracks, totally infected with the swooshy Vegas-jazz production style they'd fallen into and which they still sometimes still bother us with (see: T.I.'s "Goodlife"). And then there was "Drop It Like It's Hot," which I hated and everyone else loved. I was done with this guy.

Oh, and also, he decided he'd start rapping, and that wasn't helping anything. It was tenative at first: a couple of bars on the Clones compilation, a verse here and there. He even had a half-decent little solo track on the Clipse's Got It 4 Cheap 2 tape, the one where he calls himself "the peaceful Roll Royce-driving black John Lennon," which was pretty funny. Still, the idea of a Pharrell solo album was a little bit much, as was the news that he'd be doing a Drama tape. But now that I've actually listened to the tape a whole lot, I'm surpised at how much I like it. Dudes have been talking about it, of course, and anything I'll have to say will necessarily end up looking like biting, but the tape works in ways that I never would've imagined: it makes everything that I hate about the guy seem somehow fascinating.

Pharrell's lyrics are as single-minded in their focus as the Clipse lyrics on Got It 4 Cheap. But he's not talking about coke-dealing other than a few weird throwaway lines about how he sells coke music (sort of true). Instead, he's talking about conspicuous consumption almost exclusively: jewels, hanging out in Aspen, "walking slow like it's a Hype Williams video," "me and a few shorties / landing on the tarmac with Paris Hilton right before me." He hammers these notes so relentlessly that the stuff doesn't sound fun; it's Nick Sylvester's F. Scott Fitzgerald banality-of-wealth thing maybe (or maybe he just always sounds bored whatever's happening). He's not a good rapper, not as such, but he's found away to make his unimpressed chatter sound cold. In a way, it's like the new Streets album, the one where he talks about how it's too easy getting with regular girls and spending all his tour money on coke in Vegas or whatever. Or it's like Gordon Gecko, a picture of someone so caught up in the signifiers of wealth that he becomes sort of magnetically repulsive. Even when Pharrell is talking about the dead people he misses, it's still done through the prism of his absurd fame-flexing: telling Tookie Williams that he didn't know him but his friend Jamie Foxx did, talking about the kid on his skate team who got killed. And all this stuff is done over notoriously grimy beats, stuff like "Liquid Swords" and "Trap or Die," not his own luxuriant tracks, so the cognitive dissonance of the whole thing can just spin your head around if you let it. Like Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" was a depressingly nihilistic and fascinating song because a good day for Ice Cube just meant a day when none of his friends got killed, but Pharrell uses the track to talk about his good day flying a private plane over the Swiss Alps (or whatever), and the subtext is ripped out so viscerally and blatantly that the resulting subtext vacuum kind of becomes a new subtext unto itself. Or he'll repurpose "The Message," rap's original struggle anthem, and use it to brag about his security guards. Also: he's still not a good rapper, and there are weird moments where you'll hear Drama yell something about "Skateboard P been paying a lot of dues" immediately after Pharrell giggles about his "Laffy Taffy chain" and immediately before he drops a mind-bendingly lame line like "the only mathematic / is drug traffi-ic." And still he manages to outshine T.I. protege Young Dro on that track, whose clumsy, aggro bark ("I am a Yugoslavian killer") feels gauche after all Pharrell's prim pimpery. Other guest rappers (T.I., Clipse, Fam'Lay) are at their absolute most predatory, and it feels like Pharrell is saying something (not sure what) by just being his unscary self while swimming with these sharks. And he's fascinated with actual gangsters ("Seen pictures of Jimmy Henchman when he was in jail / Fresh beeper, fresh chain, fresh sneaker detail / Like he could order anything from hits to sales / Like he in the Four Seasons ordering cocktails"), even playing at being one himself, but not interested in convincing anyone how hard he is. It's a whole new kind of self-mythologization, and it's hard to look away.

Of course, he also brags about his ugly-ass sneakers about five million times, but I'll take what I can get.

If we're all lucky, this is the future of this song

I guess it's been around for a minute, but I heard "Holla at Me" for the first time on Thursday night, driving the rented Dodge Stratus from New York to Virginia, on the way down to my friends' wedding and absolutely thrilled to finally get to listen to the top eight at 8 on 92Q, Baltimore's rap station. The Q remains the best rap station I've ever heard, far-reaching and good-natured and locally connected to the point where they'll throw an hour-long old-school Baltimore club mix on at noon on a Wednesday, with virtually no bourgie silk-shirt slow jams except during the obligatory midnight-love show. I don't have nearly as much fun listening to Hot 97 no matter how many famous people Angie Martinez manages to coax into the studio. I hadn't heard half the songs on the top eight, and I still don't know what three of them were since the DJ didn't say, though they leaned heavily toward the clubby housed-up rap shit that gets major play in Baltimore. The number-one track was T.I.'s "Why You Wanna," still not a single in most of the world as far as I know, destined to be a huge hit and already one in B-more, a city where a Crystal Waters sample can cause massive outbreaks of local pride. And then there was "Holla At Me." It starts the same sample of "Looking for the Perfect Beat" that Jermaine Dupri flipped on LL Cool J's "Control Myself," but Dupri's version is clipped and abrasive and antiseptic, so hard and shiny that it almost becomes an endurance test to hear on headphones, amelodic to the point of being hostile in the way that only gazillion-dollar hegemonic pop music can be. "Holla At Me" is just as pop, but it slows down the source material's oscillating synth blips to the point where they sound warm and natural, almost comforting. And then the rappers start coming on: "Hey! New Lil Wayne?" "No wait, that's Paul Wall. New Paul Wall featuring Lil Wayne?" "OK, I think that's Fat Joe now. I have no idea what this is."

Turns out it's the first single from DJ Khaled, a Miami radio personality with a few mixtapes out and some connection to the perenially also-ran Terror Squad crew. He's got an album coming out on Koch, and another track from it leaked a couple of days ago, a pretty good East Coast snarl with recycled Beanie Sigel verse and Jadakiss talking about bumping Michael McDonald in his ride. Khaled's album might turn out to be good; I have no idea. But even if it's great, it'll probably totally be dwarfed by "Holla at Me," which feels like a monster already. For one thing, it's a collection of stars that easily equals the one on the fucking garbage-ass "Touch It" remix that gets played every twenty minutes on New York radio: Wayne, Paul, Joe, Rick Ross, Pitbull. Plenty of the track's appeal comes from the lineup, and so Khaled's talent for coordinating celebrities' schedules probably eclipses his talent for producing rap songs. But it's also pretty striking that all five of these guys totally sublimate their outsized personalities to the track itself, fading away into its boom-stomp until all of them become parts of the beat.

Not one of them is all that stunning on his own. Wayne doesn't have the room he needs to go off on any of his supremely bizarre "dear Mr. Toilet" tangents, and half his verse is rendered totally incomprehensible in the edited-for-radio version anyway. His flow is all breathless and off-balance, and his big line is so weird that it might not actually mean anything: "I ain't Will Smith / Nah, I ain't a Fresh Prince / I'm a young king / I'm a Bun B." Paul gets in one fascinating line about immigration officials harassing him because he's riding in an expensive car, one of the most fraught and confusing white-rapper moments since the time I saw Eminem on the tracklisting of a Latino-rappers compilation back in 1999, but then he goes and ruins it with a fucking disgusting line about "leave her back all nutted like Almond Joy," which has ruined the candy bar for me forever. Fat Joe continues his whole "Hey, you guys from the South loved 'Lean Back,' right? That was great, right?' Now look at my grill that looks like the Puerto Rican flag!" campaign, although the forty-eight shoutouts he got on "Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It" seem to indicate that he may be on to something there. The best verses come from Rick Ross and Pitbull, both of whom have spent years playing second- or third-fiddle on bright plastic Slip-N-Slide post-bass tracks and know exactly how to put their heads down and ride the beat. But the cumulative effect of all these guys lining up and delivering their parts one by one is pretty visceral, especially in an era when rappers routinely hog tracks and do their best to make it look like an event whenever they work with anyone outside their little cliques. The track works as a sort of agrarian-socialist best case scenario, all these guys contributing what they can so it'll benefit the whole. It's not quite "The Symphony" or anything, but it's roughly one bazillion times better than the "Touch It" remix.

The track's organic thump resonates with Miami's bass history and the stranglehold that mutant house music still holds on Baltimore's black clubs, but it could work just as well in New York, where hopefully an Afrika Bambaataa sample can still trigger memories the same way a dusty jazz loop can. The video just dropped, and it won't do anything for the song. There are a couple of nice touches (Rick Ross's windshield decals, Pitbull's transcendently dorky sunglasses), but it's an aggressively ordinary affair, shot in muddy camcorder with low-rent cut-up editing and like two dancing girls. Nonetheless, I think this song has legs. I had a fucking great time at the wedding this weekend (congratulations Aimee and Richard!), but there was practically no rap played at the reception (Jay's verse on "Crazy in Love," Luda's verse on "Yeah," "Baby Got Back," I think that was it). This song would've fit in just fine, and I don't know if there's any higher praise for a club track.