Some of the best ever to do it

I got the e-mail two days ago by now, and chances are you've also heard about it by now: Sleater-Kinney, the best rock band in the world, is breaking up. A few months ago, they announced a few summer shows, including a New York show on August 2 at Webster Hall that sold out long before the breakup announcement. Here's the statement they put up on their website: "After eleven years as a band, Sleater-Kinney has decided to go on indefinite hiatus. The upcoming summer shows will be our last. As of now, there are no future plans for future tours or recordings." They're also probably going to do a farewell show in Portland, where all three of them live, but then that's it. They aren't doing any interviews on the breakup, so it'll probably be a while before we're allowed to understand why.

I can't claim any real insight on this thing, but it's a sad surprise, to say the least. From what I've seen, the three women in Sleater-Kinney seem to genuinely enjoy each other's company. A year and a half ago, I flew out to Portland to write a D.I.W. cover story about the band; it's still the only time I've gone out of town for an article, and it was the first time I'd ever sat down face-to-face with a group of musicians I'd been idolizing for years. Sleater-Kinney was and is my favorite band, and I was nervous as all hell about it. The first night I was in town, the band and Sub Pop's publicist picked me up at my hotel and took me out to a Japanese restaurant, and I had to drink like three cups of sake before my hands would stop shaking. But they were all totally welcoming and natural and fun to talk to, some of the best interview subjects I've ever had. The next day, I met up with all of them individually at different spots around Portland: Carrie Brownstein at a downtown coffee shop, Corin Tucker at this weird restaurant/bar that was made up to look like a log cabin, Janet Weiss at her house. Before going out to talk to them, I had this image of the women in the band as busy professionals who got together to record or tour only when it was convenient; I thought that was why they'd gone three years without releasing an album. But that wasn't the case at all; they're friends. They go over to each other's houses to watch the Super Bowl or the Oscars or whatever. Tucker's kid plays with Weiss's dog. All three of them own station wagons. They're likable people who like each other, and that probably has something to do with the inhuman levels of chemistry they've had on every album they've released as a trio. I only spent two days talking to them, so I could be wrong here, but I don't think they're breaking up because they don't like being around each other. It's more likely that they're tired of the grind of being in an actively touring indie-rock band, which is pretty sane when you sit down and think about it.

And maybe they don't feel like the three of them have any new places to go musically. The Woods, the huge, wooly, sprawling, stomping psychedelic record they released last year, was a huge departure from all the tight, tense, compact punk songs they'd been perfecting for the previous two albums. Instead of pristine production they'd always used, this time they hired the Flaming Lips guy to make all their stuff sound fuzzed-out and distended and wrong. When I talked to them, the album was still a few months away from release, and they didn't know whether people would get it or not. It turned out to be a whole lot of people's favorite Sleater-Kinney album, though it wasn't mine. They'd become so absurdly good at bright, intricate bob-and-weave interplay and gorgeously harmonic exuberance that I wasn't all that amped to hear them ditch that stuff so that Brownstein could get all Jimmy Page and play two-minute fuzzbomb guitar-solos. But it was still a strong and ballsy album and a commendable risk, and it's not like I don't still have The Woods on my iPod. Even if it wasn't my favorite album, it showed that they were still capable of completely throwing themselves into a new idea and just tearing it to shreds.

So it's tough to find a bright side to this breakup. Of course, an "indefinite hiatus" isn't necessarily the same thing as a breakup, and I suppose there's still some slim possibility of another Sleater-Kinney album somewhere down the line. And it's not like any of them has died or anything; they'll all probably move on to new projects, and maybe we'll even get another Spells EP out of it. But I don't much like the idea that the best drummer in the world is only in one band now and that that band is Quasi. And I don't know whether any of them will ever recapture the perfect chemistry they had in Sleater-Kinney. They've done a whole lot of incredible work, and I'll miss them.

Voice review: Keith Harris on Sleater-Kinney's The Woods
Voice review: Jessica Winter on Sleater-Kinney's One Beat
Voice review: Howard Hampton on Sleater-Kinney's All Hands on the Bad One
Voice review: Sara Sherr on Sleater-Kinney's The Hot Rock

Common sense. Simple common sense. (Mike Skinner portrait by Grant Siedlecki)

The Streets + Lady Sovereign
Webster Hall
June 27, 2006

It's amazing how one overdetermined hypeman can turn a spotty show into a complete trainwreck. I don't know the name of the diesel black dude who sings the hooks on Streets albums, but I'm pretty sure he's already considering launching a solo career, a record label, a clothing line, a cologne, and an action figure by the end of the year. While Mike Skinner amiably ambled around the wings, this guy grabbed the center of the stage, sang modified Pussycat Dolls lyrics at girls in the crowd, danced around in a silk boxing robe, played bass, sang over virtually every one of Skinner's lines, and generally did everything within his power to get people to pay attention to him instead of Skinner. And Skinner seemed content to let it happen; at one point, he even toweled the man off. This would all be well and good, except for one thing: the dude cannot sing. If Skinner is worried that he doesn't have the charisma or stage presence to hold things down by himself for an hour-plus, I can sympathize with his concern, but that doesn't mean he should let his no-talent homeboy take over the show.

Honestly, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking going to this show. Mike Skinner doesn't make live music, and there's no reason for anyone to expect him to be able to translate his persona to the stage. The first two Streets albums, masterpieces both, succeeded on detail and intimacy; Skinner using his beats as simple sonic wallpaper for his big-hearted and recognizable everydude persona. Skinner barely raps, but the pathos in his voice and the telling asides in his lyrics move him out of rap and put him more into the tradition of verbose, articulate songwriters like Craig Finn and John Darnielle, guys who put the writing before the song. It's the little things; I love how he talks about peeling the labels off beer bottles or playing Gran Turismo. And when he puts that writer's eye into a sweepingly sad song like "Dry Your Eyes," the result is just breathtaking. Things are a bit different on The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, the new one; it's the first Streets album that's not a fearless leap into the unknown, and I don't much identify with Skinner's stories about smashing hotel rooms and fucking coked-up pop stars. But he's famous now, and it would read false if he still talked about being a perma-broke corndog now. These days, he sounds tense a lot more often than he sounds expansive, but I guess that's how famous people are. The focus is more on the beats now, and they've got more of a tense, rubbery snap than anything he's done in the past. The album makes a pretty good case that he can keep churning these things out every couple of years forever, and that's good news; even if he's not dropping epics anymore, it's still good to hear him talking shit. But even the new album is obsessive bedroom-producer stuff, and it's a bit jarring seeing him go from doing that to whipping his shirt off and diving into the crowd.

Skinner is funny onstage. He's not a rapper, but he does his lines just fine, and he dances charmingly and reacts pricelessly to his hypeman's excesses ("I did not need to see that" when the hypeman teased taking his shirt off). And he makes for a low-key but engaging frontman: jumping in the air on the "jumping when she claps and that" line on "Don't Mug Yourself," singing off-key renditions of "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" and "Music Sounds Better With You" and "I Love Rock n Roll," getting the entire crowd to squat down to the ground and then jump up on cue for no reason beyond "it looks wicked, trust me." Sometimes he could stand to cool out on all the antics: when he tried to simultaneously rap and pour drinks for the front row on "Too Much Brandy," he pretty much stopped paying attention to the rapping part. But he's a lot of fun to watch, and the show would've worked just fine if it was just him and a DJ onstage. It wasn't to be, though; even without the hypeman, the show would've been a bit of a mess. Skinner became the third rapper I'd seen in three nights to perform with a live band, and it doesn't work for him. Jay-Z's 50-piece symphony added an epic elegance to his Reasonable Doubt show, and Slug's sleepy funk dudes noodled aimlessly sometimes but occasionally pulled off an impressively stormy build. But Skinner's band just half-assed everything, clattering up the already-hectic beats and turning his tracks into garbled, off-center nothings. There was no guitarist, and so the bass player tried to do the "Fit But You Know It" riff himself, a disastrous mistake. The drummer wore a tie over a T-shirt and played a solo. Skinner's prettier, more expansive songs sounded OK, but his jittery stuff was just head-spinningly awful. Other than Skinner, none of these guys had any business being onstage.

Voice review: Mikael Wood on the Streets' The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living
Voice review: Michaelangelo Matos on the Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free
Voice review: Sasha Frere-Jones on the Streets' Original Pirate Material

As for Lady Sovereign, I don't take any pleasure from saying this, but she's done. I repped for her CMJ set last year, when she seemed like both a great little novelty and a girl who could actually rap hard, both good things. She had catchy bounce-beats, crazy throat noises, convincing quick-tongue skills, and brash gum-snap attitude for days. But somewhere around the time that Jay-Z inexplicably signed her to an American deal, she lost her sense of humor and became just another cog in Def Jam's machine, albeit one who was now indefensibly higher than Joe Budden on the company totem pole. She stopped rapping crazy, stopped being funny, and leaked a couple of turgid, outdated club-jams that will probably never get any actual club play. Onstage last night, she was in full tantrum-huff mode, coming close to crying about her monitor: "I want to put on a good show, and this fucking piece of rustbucket fucking shit..." And it was all a bit much; she's not going to get over on being cute anymore, even if her fake American accent is pretty funny. She didn't have a band onstage, though she did have a completely superfluous bass player and a guy with a video camera and a fannypack who never left the front of the stage. But she still indulged in fake-rock nonsense like Skinner; "Public Warning," which sounded revelatory at CMJ, now sounds like Mr. Bungle, all frantic chopped-up music-hall nonsense. I'm not sure exactly what happened between September and now to transform her from an exciting new face to an overhyped brat; maybe it's just real-time blog mechanics in action, maybe she was never actually any good. But enough is enough.

Voice review: Nick Sylvester on Lady Sovereign at the Knitting Factory

Brother Ali, thinking about maybe doing some raps

The first time I saw Atmosphere was the first time they played New York. It was the summer of 2000, and I was living in the city for the summer and working at the Knitting Factory box office. The club was bouncing checks constantly at the time, and it's not like the job paid all that much in the first place, but working there meant I got to see whatever shows I wanted for free. So I got to see Luna tape their live album and Kristin Hersh premier half-finished songs from Sunny Border Blue, but that Atmosphere set was memorable one I saw all summer. They'd already released Overcast and the Lucy Ford EPs, but I don't think anyone in the club that night had even heard of them; I certainly hadn't. They were midwestern white kids opening for people with deep New York roots: MF Doom and J-Live and the Chuck D's unbelievably wack rap-metal band Konfrontation Kamp, so nobody really expected much from them. But they ended up being the best thing onstage that night by a ridiculous margin. Eyedea was playing hypeman a few nights before he'd win the Blaze battle. He was probably gearing up for that, so he and Slug bounced a bunch of shockingly fully-formed freestyles off each other, playfully half-battling with the sort of spontaneous joy that I almost never see from rappers onstage, all jokes and easy charisma. If Slug showed any indications that he'd eventually become an emo-rap titan, I didn't see them; stuff like that song about how he had a date with divinity but she wouldn't let him fuck just came off like standard-issue post-Rawkus conscious-rap gobbledygook. And so Atmosphere just seemed like a young rap group with a lot of hunger and potential.

Since that night, I've seen Atmosphere grow into an empire, and I've heard mainstream-rap vets like Alchemist openly ogle his tour money. Up until last year's depressingly blah You Can't Imagine How Much Fun We're Having, Slug was churning out remarkably consistent albums and a furious pace. In Ant, he has one of the only producers in indie-rap who makes sparkling, catchy, hard-rolling tracks, things recognizable as rap instead of headache-inducing synth-apocalypse noise-bombs or lite-jazz piffle. And Slug is one of the only rappers in the quote-unquote underground with any sort of swagger or personality or believable sex-drive or beat-riding ability, all of which goes to show that he could've probably signed to Roc-A-Fella in 2003 and become an honest-to-god mainstream star without switching up his style too much. But he's permanently attached to his drunken-schlub persona, and that's probably for the best, since he's managed to invest it with huge levels of pathos and detail. And I like how he's named one song on each of the last two albums after hyperliterate late-90s indie rock bands ("Lifter Puller," "Smart Went Crazy"); hopefully "The Dismemberment Plan" will make the next album.

All that said, he's spent the past year moving away from rap. Late last year in an Urb cover story, he called white rap critics to task for letting people like the Diplomats get away with violent and misogynistic lyrical nihilism. A few months later, the Diplomats were on the cover of Urb. And it's worth noting how little his audience resembles a rap crowd these days. It's not just the overwhelming whiteness; virtually every rap show I've seen in New York has had a predominately white crowd. But last night, Irving Plaza was awash in pooka shells and popped Izod collars and flip-flops; from all physical evidence, he's in Dave Matthews territory these days. And appropriately enough, he's been touring with a live band for about a year now, and it tends to fill up the all-important empty spaces in the beats with fuzzy noodling. Slug didn't do much rapping last night, delivering his lyrics in a sort of cocky-ironic spoken-word singsong cadence instead. It was weird and dissonant seeing this guy do heavy confessional stuff for a group of rabid kids and coming dangerously close to self-consciously half-assing everything. The work ethic was there; he spun through those old songs with professional efficiency. But things only sparked when he got into his epic material, like the show-closing "Always Coming Back Home to You," one of the best-written songs that any genre has produced this decade. "Shrapnel" was another highlight, even if the band replaced its robotic skank with a weird Middle-Eastern metal arrangement. But stuff like "The Woman With the Tattooed Hands," a song that gets dumber every time I hear it, fell flat. And so the best moments of the show came in the first half. The band only came out forty-five minutes in, and Slug did the first half of the show like it was an actual rap show, with Ant as his DJ and Brother Ali as his hypeman. Slug was still on autopilot, but at least he was rapping. He came out rocking over the beat to "Young, Gifted and Black," which was pretty funny, and he later switched up "Like Today" with "Ladi Dadi," showing how closely his song followed Slick Rick's blueprint. But he still looked more detached than I've ever seen him. If he keeps up like this, he won't be worth paying attention to for long; emo-rap is just too easy to fuck up for anyone to get lazy.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on Atmosphere's Seven's Travels
Voice review: Michaelangelo Matos on Atmosphere's God Loves Ugly

Case in point: abysmal openers Los Nativos, a duo who does guttural Mike Shinoda shout-rapping over fake West Coast funk and fake cumbia. The crowd ate up Los Nativos, cheering wildly for even the most bullshit lines ("We take our tradition serious / I'm teaching my children how to make origami pyramids"). So there's nothing at stake; a crowd who will cheer that group will keep coming back for anything, and Slug can keep deteriorating without ever facing economic consequences. If he does ever recover his vitality, it'll be because he wants to, not because his audience demands it.

And so the best act on the bill by a pretty considerable margin turned out to be Brother Ali, who spent forty-five minutes rapping loud and hard enough that he visibly sweated all the way through a black Dickies shirt, a feat I didn't realize was possible. Ali came out doing his version of "Mama Said Knock You Out," and I can't believe I never made the connection before; Ali raps with all the force and urgency of a hungry LL, even if he doesn't have LL's confidence or his ear for hooks. Ali has spent years touring hard and opening for Atmosphere, and it appears to be paying off. This was the first time I'd seen him in front of a crowd that knew him and loved him, and so he sounded validated, letting an infectious joy creep into his voice even when he was delivering his bleakest lines ("We don't have bar mitzvahs / We become men the first time our fathers hit us, and we don't open gifts up"). The a cappella song he did about his son rivaled "Forest Whitaker" as an anthem of vulnerability, and Ali seemed truly amped to have an audience receptive to both of those songs. He hasn't lost his smile yet. Slug could learn.

Voice review: Amy Phillips on Brother Ali's Shadows on the Sun

Only real hippies wear rugs on their head and shoot rainbows

Espers + Brightblack Morning Light
Mercury Lounge
June 23, 2006

Friday night was probably the biggest night in Brightblack Morning Light's career thus far, but you wouldn't know it to hear them. It's been said in everything I've read about the duo, but they take the whole hippie thing probably too far, past the point of self-parody and into a sort of transcendent goofiness, calling themselves Nabob and Rabob and going on about their Native American blood and the cabin where they live. It's easy to make fun of this stuff, but it's impossible to do so without acknowledging that they've put together maybe the best indie-rock album of the year, a hazy, blissy groove-fog with long vamps bleeding slowly into one another and formless vocals processed within an inch of their lives. The album sounds like a total studio creation, its lazy guitar flutters and unhurried bass rumbles and rippling funk percussion all melting together so perfectly that it must've taken a lot of work. But onstage at the Mercury Lounge on Friday, they were shockingly faithful to their recorded sound, all the instruments meticulously mixed into a bleary wall of snooze. The day of the show, the band had received huge props from both Kelefa Sanneh at the Times and Stephen Deusner at Pitchfork, and so the club was packed-out and buzzing; I'm pretty sure most of the tickets sold just that afternoon. But the band didn't seem to notice at all. When they did talk to the crowd, their voices went through so many effects pedals that nobody had any idea what they were saying. In fact, everything onstage seemed to be run through a gauntlet of effects, even the hi-hats. The band's songs differ from each other just slightly, the slow-core riffs and Rhodes quivers only morphing slightly from one song to the rest. And the band treats its live show something like a DJ set, barely pausing between tracks and letting everything ebb and flow with plenty of patience and space. My friend Seung: "You know what this really reminds me of? All the instrumental tracks on Ill Communication." She's right, but it's a bit better than that. Another comparison: Madlib, all the funk so sleepy and blunted that it's practically implied.

The band doesn't look like much onstage. The girl has white-chick dreads and big weird glasses. The guy had his head behind a speaker all night, I never got a good look at him from where I was standing. The band had two drummers and a percussionist, but drums didn't come anywhere near dominating their sound. Instead, all the percussion worked like rain, a steady background thrum. After a while, someone got up onstage and started playing a flute. It was all pretty hilarious in a way that didn't at all compromise its awesomeness. I have no idea whether anything this sleepy has a real chance of blowing up indie-style. But after freak-folk turned into a big contest to see who could be the most irritatingly, self-consciously weird, it's oddly refreshing to see a band willing to let its obvious eccentricities take a backseat, to focus instead on groove. If nothing else, they've made an album that works as amazing background music for when I'm writing reviews, and I'm thankful for that.

Download: "Everybody Daylight"

Brightblack Morning Light was the show's main attraction, but they weren't the headliners. The Philly neo-folk collective Espers is every bit as languid and hippyish as Brightblack, so they made for perfect tourmates, but that didn't stop the crowd from making a slow but constant exodus from the club during Espers' set like they were the Diplomats at Summer Jam. Espers' debut album and its new follow-up are the best things that the whole 2004 psyche-folk wave produced, and their proggy spaced-out Ren-Faire/Fairport Convention mysticism is as creepy and ominous as it is pretty. Onstage, they take up a lot of space: four guitarists, a drummer in a Crocodile Dundee hat, the bearded guy from the No-Neck Blues Band banging on a wooden stick. All the numbers mean their songs end up sounding more cluttered than they do on record. I'm guessing they don't all get together to practice all that often, since they make Brightblack sound tight and focused. Every song spirals off into a long mood-piece before ending, and there are long pauses in between songs where everyone figures out what they're doing. And so the band swings constantly between gorgeous and boring. In a warehouse with rugs on the wall and candles burning everywhere, this wouldn't be a problem, but it's not really performance music in the nightclub sense. Some of the prettiest moments came toward the end of their set, when most of the crowd had already left and at least a few others were sleeping on the benches off to the sides of the club. And as much as I liked some of it, I didn't stick around for encores. I had the gist.

Voice review: Mike Powell on Espers' Espers II
Voice review: D. Shawn Bosler on Espers' Espers

I hate to do it just as bad as you hate to see it done.

Jay-Z
Radio City Music Hall
June 25, 2006

History is written by the winners. Reasonable Doubt is a truly great debut album, but so is Doggystyle, and Snoop Dogg did exactly nothing to commemorate the tenth anniversary of its release. Illmatic is an absolute masterpiece, and I can't imagine any situation in which Nas would get a chance to perform it with an orchestra behind him. The difference is that Jay-Z is a rare case: a rapper who made a great debut and then went on to live up to the potential it showed, both artistically and commercially, to the point where his success story has grown to absurd levels and he can hang out with Bill Clinton and Prince Charles and Bill Gates and shit, to the point where he's modern royalty. In fact, Jay has grown to become such a massive public figure that Reasonable Doubt doesn't really have all that much to do with what he is today, except that he still considers it his finest artistic achievement and brings it up in every interview. So he gets to have his own special night at Radio City to celebrate its anniversary, but it's not really because of the album's greatness; it's because he does whatever he feels like and he felt like doing it. Still, it is a great album, and its stately elegance works perfectly with what Jay did at tonight's show. Illmatic might be the better album, but "Halftime" would sound ridiculous if an orchestra played it. "Can I Live" doesn't.

Jay announced the show about three weeks ago, but I'm pretty sure he'd been planning it for a lot longer. Everything about the show was truly opulent and meticulously planned out. The venue itself had a lot to do with the big-event air; it's nowhere near the size as his usual stomping grounds, but Radio City Music Hall looks simply breathtaking, to the point where I felt weird and out of place even being there, to the point where I was almost relieved to see a roach in the urinal before the show started. But then, the Roots played two shows there last month, and the one I saw was just OK, virtuosic as always but also messy and thrown-together and disapponting considering all the hype that went into it. And Radio City is famous for its sound, but the mix at the Roots show was muddy and indistict enough for me to be a bit nervous when ?uestlove was announced as the musical director for the show.

I shouldn't have worried. Jay is better at making entrances than any performer I've ever seen, and his introduction at this one may have even trumped the fake Oval Office and the forty-foot jets of flame from the I Declare War show last year. The show started with a not-brief-enough DJ set from Funkmaster Flex, who played a few seconds of about a million songs for maximum adrenaline effect, but that was really just to let people know they should find their seats. When the curtain came up, we were looking at a huge orchestra: nine horns, about thirty strings, a grand piano, ?uestlove, Just Blaze, a hot female conductor, a fucking harp. I tried to count the musicians onstage at one point, and it was around fifty. Jay came to the stage in a 96 Lexus. The whole orchestra wore matching blak tuxedos, but Jay wore a white one, and that is what we call attention to detail.

Jay had said that he'd be doing Reasonable Doubt in its entirety, but he hadn't said that he'd do them in order. He ended up coming up with a better idea: doing the songs in reverse, starting with "Regrets" and ending with "Can't Knock the Hustle." And it worked perfectly, keeping the album's sense of arc but building up to an honest-to-God climax. Before the show, it was fun to speculate on how he'd put everything together: Would Al Pacino show up to do the Carlito's Way skits? Who would do Biggie's part on "Brooklyn's Finest," Guerilla Black? But one of the few real questions was whether Jay-Z's mentors-turned-foes Jaz-O and Sauce Money would show up to do their verses on "Bring It On." Sauce Money showed up, not really a surprise considering he'd been at the I Declare War show. Jaz-O didn't, but it didn't much matter. Memphis Bleek strained the night's sartorial uniformity a bit by showing up wearing a goddam baseball cap with his black suit, but he made up for it by doing "Coming of Age" almost as musical theatre, he and Jay facing each other at a forty-five degree angle and subtly acting out the lyrics. Foxy Brown, back from hearing-restoration surgery, ran out dressed like a gangster's moll to do her verse from "Ain't No Nigga," and it was pretty great to see her again, even if she didn't sound that great. "Obviously, the surgery was a success," Jay said afterwards, but it wasn't completely obvious, though it's likely that she was just amped to be out in front of a crowd for the first time in a minute. Even if she's not yet back on her A-game, you have to admire her courage in coming out like that. The big surprise, though, was Beyonce, who sang "Can't Knock the Hustle" instead of Mary J. Blige and just murdered it, sounding even better than Mary. The Reasonable Doubt set ended with that song, and it was an ending worth building up to.

But even so, the guests weren't really all that important to the success of the show. Musically, Reasonable Doubt is a lush and restrained piece of work, and the orchestra sounded amazing playing this stuff, building the swells of the songs without cluttering up the beats too much. Occassionally, it would edge into Vegas territory (the pizzicato string plucks on "Cashmere Thoughts," the too-wobbly bass on "Ain't No Nigga"), but more often, they nailed their parts. The horn-stabs on "Can I Live" were some straight-up James Bond shit, and the extended big-band jazz-vamping at the end of "Feelin' It" made perfect sense. When the beat of "D'Evils" switched to "Murder Was the Case" on the last verse, it somehow became even more epic. More importantly, the orchestra (Jay kept calling them the "Hustler Symphony Orchestra") wasn't there as stunt casting. It wasn't like the violin players would just hit a couple of notes every song and let the DJ do the rest of the work; every instrument was fully integrated into the show. Even the harp.

And Jay himself was magnificent. He barely talked between songs, just moving from one track to another fluidly. The night before, he'd done a warm-up show at the Nokia Theatre to iron out any kinks. I'd intentionally avoided reading any accounts of the show, but I'd been told it was alternately great and, um, not-great. But he never once fucked up or forgot his lyrics tonight. He's a born showman, of course, Clintonian in his effortless charisma and fully capable of holding down a stage without ever depending on a hypeman. "Brooklyn's Finest" made for an awkward situation, since there's no real way to do a smooth and flawless live version of a song when that song is a back-and-forth tag team with a dead rapper. But Jay did it with a minumum of fuss, doing both his own parts and Biggie's while footage of Biggie played on the screen behind him and ending everything with an old Biggie verse. The best part of the show, though, came after Jay did the first verse of "22 Two's." Instead of doing song's second verse, he had the orchestra stop playing, and he debuted a new one: "44 Four's," a total jaw-dropping feat, the screen behind him counting up every "four." If Jay is still writing verses like this, we've got even more reason to hope this fake-ass retirement doesn't go on too long.

So the Reasonable Doubt part of the show was truly dazzling, and it seemed a bit anticlimactic when he came back to the stage in street clothes a few minutes after "Can't Knock the Hustle" ended. His second set was about a half-hour, almost all of it after Radio City's 11:00 curfew. He had Memphis Bleek in tow and Just Blaze DJing, and he did the same set he'll probably do in Poland or Ghana or wherever else he's going on this world tour he just announced. After the Reasonable Doubt stuff, it was funny hearing Jay do some of his most crass and popular tracks: "Money Ain't a Thing," "Jigga My Nigga," "I Just Wanna Love U." He even did a few seconds of "Excuse Me Miss," and I don't know anyone who likes that song. But Jay-Z on autopilot is better than virtually every other rapper giving their best. And this second set included maybe the fucking amazing one-two punch "P.S.A." seguing directly into "U Don't Know" while slow-mo footage of Kurt Cobain trashing the stage at the 1992 VMAs played on the screens. That was a total goosebump moment, but Jay seems to come up with stuff like that in his sleep. When Jay finally decides to stop figuring out how to market Tru Life and goes back to being a full-time rapper, the world will be a better place.

There were cameras all over the venue, and apparently they're going to release a DVD of the show. You should maybe buy it.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z

I can't dance. I can't talk. Only thing about me is the way I walk.

For the longest time, I thought I hated Phil Collins. Plenty of reasons: because of that unbelievably annoying "I Can't Dance" dance, because he looks like a giant human thumb, because of that time he was hosting the Billboard awards and he called Snoop Doggy Dogg "Snoopy Dogg Dogg" (he wasn't even joking). Plus I had this simplistic idea of the former-Genesis-frontman dichotomy between Collins and Peter Gabriel, with Gabriel as the art guy and Collins as the crass MOR pop guy. The problem with that whole thing is that Collins and Gabriel pretty much sound exactly like each other, except that Collins is a better singer with (mostly) better songs. In fact, Collins is pretty great, or anyway great enough to have four or five absolute monster classic singles. On the surface, it looks pretty weirdly anomalous that every rapper in the universe loves Collins to pieces, but, really, it's a natural fit. Collins is a powerful singer with a real sweeping range who sings big, cinematic songs over liquid electronic production, and rap always has room for that stuff. And he has a song about letting someone die. And he seems like a nice guy. And really, what more could you ask for? So I'm embarrassed that it took the Paid in Full soundtrack and a DMX sample and that Bone Thugs video where he sings "Stay With Me" to give this guy a chance. He can write ten garbage-ass Tarzan soundtracks; he wrote "Against All Odds," and that's enough.

That's why I dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 this morning; Collins was doing one of those free Today Show concerts, and I thought I'd have to be there at 7:00. It turns out that I could've gotten an extra hour and a half of sleep; Collins didn't take the stage until the show's second hour. I did, however, get to hang out with a huge group of tourists who held up signs and screamed "woo!" while Matt Lauer talked about the Sears Tower terrorist plot and who told me over and over that I must always have the best seat in the house (I'm really tall). Most of the crowd seemed to be college kids with their moms; I saw one guy give $200 to his daughter, and she didn't even thank him. No rappers made it out, but a few representatives from the Notre Dame swimming and diving team showed up, as did some kindergarten teachers in foam-rubber Statue of Liberty spikes and one guy who enlisted Al Roker's help to ask his girlfriend to marry him in maybe the least romantic proposal I've ever seen. A lot of people left before Collins even came out, and Matt Lauer and the swinging camera-crane got bigger cheers than anything Phil-related, so I guess this wasn't really a music crowd; it was more of a trying-to-get-on-TV crowd.

In fact, it took me a minute to figure out what was going on when Collins finally came out. His band was set up on a stage at one end of a between-buildings alcove in Rockefeller Plaza, but Collins first came out on a riser in the middle of the crowd, looking totally nondescript in a black T-shirt (I thought he was a stagehand at first). He came out singing "You'll Be in My Heart" from the aforementioned garbage-ass Tarzan soundtrack, and his vocal tone was just unbelievably rich and buttery. I'd always assumed he had crazy studio effects on his singles, but no, he really sings like that. He had no introduction or anything, and it turned out that he was just sound-checking; he'd do the same song again a few minutes later, after Lauer asked some people from Best Week Ever if they thought Superman was gay. In all, Collins only did four songs: the Tarzan one, "True Colors," his cover of "You Can't Hurry Love," and one other one that I didn't recognize, a duet with some guy who looked like a soap opera actor. He didn't do any of his truly great songs; I guess someone thought it was too early for that drowning song to be beamed into televisions across Middle America, though I can't imagine it would've bummed anyone out too hard. He also did an interview with Lauer out that I couldn't hear because the microphones were turned down really low. Collins is still great, but I'm staying in bed next time.

It's way too hot outside to look at a picture of someone wearing a parka

Street DVDs are sort of like the deformed mutant cousins of mixtapes; they're long and boring and incomprehensible half the time, and they never fail to bring out the absolute worst in rappers. And so we end up with platinum-selling millionaires pointing Uzis at the camera and random-ass end-of-mixtape rappers no one's ever heard of dissing each other and threatening to kidnap each other's grandmothers and disheartening shit like that. And it doesn't help much that they're always filmed with grainy-ass camcorders, that the camerawork is always horrendously shaky, that the editing is nonexistent. Anyone who's ever seen the infamous Stop Snitching DVD, the one that dominated Baltimore's local news TV for about a year and a half and launched a thousand T-shirts, knows that the real bad thing about it isn't Carmelo Anthony's apparent complacency with dudes who sit around threatening to kill Larry Brown; it's that the thing is pretty much unwatchable. But somebody must be buying and watching these DVDs; they always get an entire shelf to themselves at mixhuts citywide, and they're always playing in the conference rooms of rap-dependent indies whenever I go to interview someone there. The 500-pound gorilla of the street DVD game is the Smack series (it stands for Street Music Arts Culture & Knowledge; I'm not even joking), and someone at Koch has just decided to put up the money for the Smack guy to do a version of his series that you can actually buy in stores, printing up promotional posters and throwing together an accompanying compilation CD and everything. So the question is whether the Smack series will step up its everything now that it has the chance of reaching outside the obsessive-Gravy-fan demographic or whether it'll wind up like the official Funkmaster Flex and Kay Slay albums, diluted simulations of the real thing totally neutered by licensing problems. Well, the first official Smack DVD doesn't really go either route; it's pretty much the same as its predecessors in every way, except that now we get a few more actual big stars chopping it up alongside the endless parade of NY mixtape nobodies.

The weirdest and most annoying parts of the DVD are the "street videos," which are basically budget-ass music videos with rappers lip-syncing badly to terrible non-album songs while lots of people stand behind them. They don't have any sets or girls or production values, but they do have cusses left in and guns. They all pretty much follow the same formula with slight tweaks. Shea Davis ("your neighborhood hood nigga") has a skit where he robs someone's apartment and then shoots the guy when he gets recognized; it's like a deleted scene from Killa Season, if you can imagine that. Red Cafe and Mack-10 lip-sync in letterbox, and they share this priceless back-and-forth on the hook: "I'm the owner of the strip club," "And I'm the co-owner of the strip club" (they say this about 42 times). Maino lip-syncs while driving a car. Bun B lip-syncs in front of Screwed Up Tapes & Records. Juvenile lip-syncs in a living room. Everyone else stands in front of corner stores. They're not all terrible; the DMX video is OK because it's DMX and the song is pretty good, and the Def Squad reunion joint works because those three guys all come from the hoodies-and-Tims era of rap videos and because it's great to see Redman ripping a verse and Keith Murray making crazy facial expressions again. But we still haven't seen anyone fully exploit the artistic possibilities of the street video. In fact, we haven't seen whether those possibilities even exist.

The disc's interviews are generally more watchable, but they're all pretty much just standard rap interviews, the sorts of things you can read every day on Allhiphop. The DVD format doesn't really give us any further information beyond the knowledge that E-40 says "you smell me?" whenever he finishes a sentence-fragment. There are some intriguing moments (Juvenile and B.G. separately painting a picture of Baby as the worst boss ever, Mannie Fresh saying that he only takes between thirty minutes and an hour to make a beat and then showing us, E-40 bringing some guy on camera who then says "I don't really like the camera"), but there's nothing revelatory here. The only truly fascinating interview is the one with Bun B the afternoon before Pimp C got out of prison. In the interview, Bun is wearing the same shirt that he's wearing in the photos of him greeting Pimp at the prison gates, which makes me wonder whether he just stayed up all night beforehand. He's visibly anxious and jumpy and happy, especially when he talks about what's going to happen when UGK gets back together. It's a nice moment, but nice moments like this aren't enough to make wading through Stack Bundles street videos worthwhile.

There's only one thing that makes the DVD worth Netflix queue space, and that's the closing segment, the battle between Serius Jones and Murda Mook. Jones and Mook are pretty much made for street DVDs; they're both funny and charismatic and convincingly hard, and they're both willing to stand a foot away from their opponents and brutally disparage them instead of doing it from a safe distance the way all the other featured rappers do. The format of the segment is pretty much exactly like the Fight Klub show on MTV2, with the two rappers standing in a room surrounded by their friends and throwing a cappella jabs at each other for three rounds. It's a great format, totally conducive to great TV, which is why Fight Klub is pretty much the best show on MTV2 even though it has a deeply annoying host and no production values whatsoever. The episode of that show where Jones totally crushes Jin is a classic. Jones doesn't rap, exactly; he just tells loose and laser-targeted jokes and throws in a few words that rhyme. Mook does pretty much the same thing, except his stuff sounds slightly more like actual rap. And so the opening round has the best jokes, as it always does. Jones: "This nigga a shame / I mean, he can't even get in the game for a slave deal, a whip and a chain," "Talking about coke, the last time this nigga shaved a onion / He was in his kitchen on Thanksgiving making stuffing." Mook: "I'm furious; I'll slap you delirious, Jones / Make you bleed like a bitch with a period, Jones," "He's an act, he don't rap; he's a comedian, dude / You make niggas laugh cause, well, that's just what comedians do." There's also some stuff about how Mook went to a private school and how Jones never dealt drugs. And so the charge in the room escalates, the two of them basically screaming at each other by the third round. The DVD ends without anyone announcing a winner, but that's fine; the joy is in seeing two born battle-rappers just going at each other. Those fifteen minutes have some are some of the tensest, most compelling thing I've seen on my TV since game seven of the Spurs-Mavericks series. The rest of it is just two hours I'll never get back.

My world would never be the same

I was nine when I first started obsessively paying attention to pop music. My family was living in England for a year (Twickenham, just outside London) while my dad, a history professor, took a sabbatical and tried to write a book that he never finished. I had an allowance for the first time, and there was a Woolworth around the corner that sold tapes and LPs and sometimes CD longboxes, so I finally had the luxury of buying a new tape every few weeks or so. But the main reason I got into music was Top of the Pops, a BBC TV show that ran down the top 40 singles in the country and hosted lip-syncing performances of a few of the songs. Some BBC radio DJ would MC, and the bands would come out and perform on a stage that looked like a low-budget Dr. Who spaceship, all flashing colored lights and metal catwalks everywhere and dry ice. I didn't realize at the time that the bands were lip-syncing (or sometimes singing live over a prerecorded track); I remember being really impressed when the guy from the Fine Young Cannibals played piano with his foot on "Good Thing." The show would always manage to land non-UK acts; I can remember seeing R.E.M. and De La Soul and Midnight Oil, though I guess none of them were really stars at the time. But I'd usually get the most amped about the UK acts that came on, specifically the hip-house that was pretty much dominating the charts that year; my favorite shit was always, like, the Beatmasters or D-Mob, stuff that never made it to these shores as far as I know. (I still have a few of those tapes; they're fire.) And the show would present this stuff in this totally digestible format, reading out all the singles and then bringing the acts to the stage without putting them in any sort of context, so all you had to go on was the song and the performance. So it would become easy to follow the singles chart like it was basketball or something, keeping track of how Michael Jackson or Rick Astley or Poison was doing that week. It was fun. When we moved back to America, and I realized that there was no American equivalent on TV, I was pissed. I've only been back to the UK once since, on a two-week trip with my friend Nat in the summer of 1997. I watched the show once while we were over there, and the set didn't look much different, but they'd started doing this thing where people who couldn't make it in to perform would make a video and send it in. And so Puff Daddy and Mase sent in a video of themselves lip-syncing to "Mo Money Mo Problems" in shiny suits, just dancing while the Biggie verse played.

The BBC announced this week that it would be canceling Top of the Pops after forty-two years because the show's ratings have been falling for a while now. It makes sense; what with the interweb and all, kids don't really need a TV show to tell them what songs are popular. But it's still a shock; the show is a British institution. Its first show was in 1964, and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones both performed on that one. I've always loved the idea of the show: a weekly forum for pop stars to do their best to capture kids' imaginations, to pull out whatever visual tricks they had and worm their way into the public's collective head. In a way, the show had a democratizing influence; the UK has no equivalent of country, a genre that sells huge numbers of records despite a huge chunk of the public having no idea who its biggest stars are. The show never made genre distinctions, and so metal bands and Britpop bands and R&B singers and prefab teenpop groups would always share the stage with each other. Pretty often, bands would make a big point of protesting the shows lip-syncing policy by being really obvious about not playing their instruments; Oasis did that crap like ten times. But more often, groups would use the show to create iconographies for themselves, doing whatever it took to separate themselves from whatever random clump of chartpop stars they'd be sharing the stage with that week. And since the UK is a relatively small country, a lot of weird stuff would sneak its way through the gatekeepers and wind up on the country's biggest stage, scrappy punk bands and new-wave genderfuckers and clumsy British house-rappers.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on the show today, I'm learning that there actually was an American version of the show for about a year in 1987, and the producers had been planning on launching another one next year, though it's not entirely clear whether that'll happen after the cancellation. I hope it does. We've got a ton of TV shows now devoted to exposing the mechanisms at work behind the music industry, the way people become stars and find audiences: American Idol and Supergroup and Making the Band and whatever else. What we don't have is a show that gives us what that mechanism creates, a way to present the finished product to an audience that wants to see it and doesn't need be insidery all the time. I mean, MTV doesn't even show videos anymore.

In the meantime, YouTube has literally hundreds of archived TOTP performances, and it's a lot of fun to dig through them even if you don't have any memory of watching the show. A few I liked:
Beenie Man: "Dude"
Nirvana: "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Air: "Cherry Blossom Girl"
Tatu: "How Soon is Now?"
Public Image Ltd.: "Death Disco"
Pulp: "Party Hard"
Iron Maiden: "Running Free"
Ace of Base: "The Sign"
Black Sabbath: "Never Say Die"
Jacksons: "Get Happy"
Yazoo: "Don't Go"
Pogues: "Fairytale of New York"
The Cure: "Primary"
Madonna: "Holiday"
Julee Cruise: "Fallin'"
Bananarama: "Cruel Summer"
Sham 69: "Angels with Dirty Faces"

This is what Google Image Search gives me. Fucking useless.

Assateague Island is a thin strip of sand on Maryland's Eastern Shore; it separates the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean, and it's pretty much nothing but beach. There's no dirt and barely any plant life besides some scrubby trees, but for some reason the island has a huge and famous population of wild ponies who walk up and down the beach and strike dramatic poses against the skyline; there's also a bunch of weird, skittish little deer and some truly nasty mosquitoes. As long as you reserve a site a couple of months in advance, you can camp there for five bucks a night per person. You can lie around in the sun all day and go swimming in the ocean whenever it gets too hot, and then you can build bonfires on the beach at night. It's probably not legal to sit around drinking around the fire all night, but the park rangers don't bother you as long as your fire is close enough to the water and everyone is 21. A bunch of my friends from Baltimore have a mini-tradition where we all get together and spend one weekend a year camping on the beach out there, which is why I didn't go see Slayer and Mastodon last Friday. Every year, I stress out about going because I've always got a ton of shit going on, but every time we go it ends up being a totally relaxing and rejuvenating experience, exactly the sort of stuff everyone needs to be doing when summer comes along. I didn't bring my iPod to the beach because I didn't want to get sand in it (sand gets fucking everywhere), but if I'd brought it I would've been bumping Lily Allen nonstop.

It's a couple of months late to be writing this post, since Lily Allen's blog-hype has been in overdrive long enough that the backlash has already kicked in. She's managed to become an mp3-blog overnight celebrity despite the fact that she doesn't sing in the Modest Mouse scratch-whine voice, an achievement in itself. If you read music blogs, which clearly you do, you already know all the relevant biographical info, but here it is again: she's 21, she's from London, she's approachably pretty, she's the daughter of some famous British comedian I never heard of. She got famous off of a MySpace page, and it's pretty amazing to me that people can look at that site's ugly-ass layout long enough to make anyone famous. When she first got online attention, it was because of "Nan You're a Window Shopper" a song that turns 50 Cent's "Window Shopper" into a lite-reggae lope and gets on some Weird Al shit, perfectly imitating 50's mushmouth singsong so Allen can talk shit about her grandmother. She's already been on Top of the Pops, standing motionless behind the mic and looking kind of nervous. She's made a mixtape that you have to download to hear, and I haven't done it because it feels really lame to download mixtapes. She's got an album coming out next month, at least in England; I don't think she has an American label yet. She might get famous in America or she might not, and it's not really worth wasting all your mental energy trying to figure out whether it'll happen unless you're a label person or a publicist. She will invariably get a song placed in a car commercial.

And here's something else: she's great. The album, Alright, Still, sounds absolutely perfect on an oppressively hot day. Allen fits perfectly with this weird new wave we seem to be seeing of British songwriters who don't sing so much as talk, who traffic exclusively in detail minded day-to-day shit, songs about text-messages and smoking too much weed. The Streets and the Arctic Monkeys are the obvious touchstones here, and Allen fits in with them perfectly even before you start talking about MySpace (please God don't start talking about MySpace). Nick Sylvester totally hates her; he used the term bitchpop on the phone last week. It's true: four of the eleven songs on Alright, Still are mean little kiss-off breakup songs, another is about blowing dudes off at the club, and still another is about fighting girls at the club. But Allen happens to be absolutely great at kiss-off breakup songs, cooing sweetly in multitracked harmony with herself while she deadpans threats: "You ask if we can still be lovers / I'll have to introduce my brothers." And besides, anyone willing to give Cam'ron a pass doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to dismissing songwriters for coming off like assholes. When Allen gets tender, she can be almost shockingly evocative. On the ballad "Littlest Things," she mumbles memories to herself over tinkling pianos and pillowy drums: "We'd spend the whole weekend lying in our own dirt / I was just so happy in your boxers and your T-shirt." Most of the time, though, she's all tough-chick snap. The big single is "LDN," where she rides around London on her bike and tosses off a gorgeously sun-baked hook about how things that look nice actually aren't and the kid going to help the old lady with her groceries is actually mugging her. It's not a revolutionary conceit or anything, but she makes an amazing song out of it, and that's all anyone can ask.

All that persona stuff takes a backseat to her music, which is what really makes Alright, Still the best summer album I've heard yet this year. The Streets and the Arctic Monkeys mostly rely on monochromatic clatter, using background noise to draw attention to their rants. Allen's voice is a whole hell of a lot more pleasant; her breezy coo has a little bit of Neneh Cherry's tough confidence, and I'm always happy to hear that. And I don't know who produced the album, but credit is due. There's a lot of ska on Alright, Still, but it's not the herky-jerk polka-horn nonsense that's become hipster poison in America. For whatever reason, the British are a lot more patient with this stuff, letting the beats stretch and lope and breathe, filling up space with ghostly organ or delirious calypso horns. That's what made the Specials the best ska band ever (including the Jamaican ones), and it's what kept Mike Skinner from getting laughed out of the room when he did "Let's Push Things Forward." But Allen has other things going on, too: James Bond horn-stabs, lounge-jazz pianos, slick uber-pop production-sheen. This St. Etienne stuff can get a bit out of hand; the goofy music-hall oompah-tuba shit on "Alfie" makes for the album's only real weak moment. More often, though, we end up with something like "Take What You Want," a song that turns its glistening Afropop guitars and chunky big-beat drums into towering anthemo-pop, Natasha Bedingfield except with cussing. The mp3-blog world churns out wack shit at a furious pace, and it's getting worse than circa-2003 NME with all the next-big-thing talk, but they've struck gold with this one. The machine exists to turn people like Allen into titanic stars; I hope it does its job right.

Voice review: Frank Kogan on Lily Allen's "LDN"

Way better than Walk the Line

Johnny Cash spent something like fifty years singing wrenchingly sad death-meditations, and his voice was wise and heavy and gnarled from jump. He was never, ever a fresh-faced kid, and his thick, deep rumble is one of the greatest voices in the history of American music. I'm pretty sure that's why he became the one country music that even people who hate country love. Back in his Live at Folsom Prison heyday, he could be funny and righteous and fiery and powerfully alive, but even then he was dropping gems like "The Long Black Veil," hauntingly stark devil-chasing-me shit. So I hope I'm not utterly herbing myself when I say that my favorite Cash album is American IV: The Man Comes Around, the one he recorded and released just before he died. Cash's Rick Rubin collaborations started out awkward and never quite shook the faint whiff of exploitation, but it was amazing to hear their progress. When Rubin rescued Cash from Nashville hell, he knew that he had a voice that could lend bottomless gravity to anything it sang, even if it was a doofy-ass song that Glen Danzig wrote or a Soundgarden cover or whatever. When Rubin and Cash began collaborating in the mid-90s, there was a whole lot of stuff like that, lost artifacts of pop-culture past being trotted out as retro-cool, like when Tony Bennett showed up to the MTV Awards in a Dr. Seuss hat. And so the first couple of American albums had some horrible nudge-wink jokes, like the fake hillbilly whoops on "Tennessee Stud" that make my skin crawl every time.

By the time Cash made American IV, though, Rubin had figured out that Cash's alt-rock covers could sometimes come off like publicity stunts and that he might have to work a bit harder to figure out which ones might work, just like he should only bring in collaborators who would complement Cash's dusky moan instead of overwhelming it. And Rubin isn't exactly a Midas-touch producer (witness the Red Hot Chili Peppers), but he knows his way around a slow, wispy arrangement. The mythic strum of American IV is pretty much completely removed from country music, and it gave Cash the room he needed to play his wounded-prophet role to perfection. What really gets me about the album, though, is the tragic and poetic resonance it took in the context of Cash's death a few months later. It was just perfectly sad: June Carter Cash dies first, and then Johnny goes a few months later. I don't know if it's actually true, but the album certainly sounds like Cash knew he was about to die, that the album was about impending death. The album closes with "Streets of Laredo" and "We'll Meet Again," and they both just suck my breath out. I keep picturing Johnny playing "We'll Meet Again" for June on her deathbed, even though that's impossible since his hands were way too old for him to play guitar anyway. The album would be great even without its context, but the baggage is what makes it amazing.

American IV is one of my top forty or so favorite albums of all time, so I wasn't particularly thrilled with the news that we'd be getting another album of Rubin collabos. The artist's-death cottage-industry is nothing new; ask Tupac. And Cash's estate has been flooding the market with best-ofs and box sets and unreleased material since his death, but I'm not especially mad at that; he was, after all, a national treasure, and that's just what you do when a national treasure dies. But American IV had such an air of finality that I didn't want anyone fucking with it. The book was closed, and they should just walk away. But American V: A Hundred Highways, which drops on the fourth of July, is nearly as great as American IV. It's just as suffused with death and grief and regret as its predecessor, and it's just as sad and gorgeous. Cash recorded it in the months between June's death and his own, and he did away with all the alt-rock covers and marquee-name guests. There's a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Further On (Up the Road)," but the album mostly sticks with traditionals and Cash originals. And they're all about dying, of course. Cash's voice is still tough and sinewy, but you can hear the age in it for the first time, the breath intakes and soft quivers. Rubin keeps all the arrangements from getting within Cash's way except when he needs them to beef things up, like the ominous Angels of Light drum-stomp on the apocalyptic gospel burner "God's Gonna Cut You Down." And there's a lot of stuff about not wanting to go yet: "Oh Lord, help me walk another mile." Three songs are addressed to God, and a lot of the others are love songs; everything is just crushingly, unbearably sad. The song that sticks with me the most is "On the Evening Train," a ballad about a man watching his wife's coffin leaving on a train: "I pray that God will give me courage to carry on till we meet again / It's hard to know she's gone forever / They're carrying her home on the evening train." Some of the other songs are about personal failures, the sort of stuff that I can imagine just tearing you up when you know your time is short. It's summer, and it's a lot more fun to listen to Lily Allen and Field Mob and Brightblack Morning Light than some excoriating edge-of-mortality stuff like this. American V is one of the most depressing albums I've ever heard, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's not ready to be depressed. But if you're worried that it's a crass money-grab, stop worrying. Still, don't buy it until July 5th. This is not barbecue material.

Voice feature: Tom Smucker on the death of Johnny Cash