The album that changed everything

The most striking thing about "The Bomb," the new 50 Cent dis track aimed at Diddy, isn't the actual battle-rap content of the thing, but then, that never is the important thing about 50 Cent's dis tracks. 50's never written an "Ether" or a "Jack the Ripper." He doesn't rip holes through other rappers with his lyrics or his delivery. There's never been any passion or hate or wounded pride in his voice when he does these things. In fact, he always sounds pretty much disconnected from the whole process, like he could really give a shit whether or not the other guy even gets offended. He's always blithe and vaguely amused, like the whole thing's a game to him, which it almost certainly is. 50 effectively ended Ja Rule's career, but he didn't do it on "Back Down," probably still the best dis track he's ever released. He did it by constantly talking shit in interviews, by positioning himself as the hungry young turk gunning for the cheesed-out bubblegum rappers cluttering up the charts. Way back in late 2002, there was something really exciting about that: a hard-ass rapper with serious star potential, someone finally willing to talk shit and name names and put himself on the line. Of course, when he got famous, he turned into exactly the sort of fluffy pop-rapper he came up deriding; he conned everyone. When he releases dis tracks now, his lyrics don't even matter; it's like he considers himself above the actual business of rapping. It didn't make any difference what he said about Fat Joe and Jadakiss and Nas on "Piggy Bank"; what mattered was just the fact that he was talking shit about these guys. It was more a media stunt than a song, which is fitting; 50's more a media manipulator than a rapper these days, and maybe he always was. So "The Bomb" is typical of him; a quick little verse with a couple of throwaway lines about Diddy and then a long ranted outro. There's no effort in it.

The most striking thing about the song is the fact that 50 is rapping over the greatest track that the late-90s backpack-rap boom produced: Dead Prez's "Hip Hop." That song remains one of the best rap singles of the past decade, a furious blast of righteous fury over the sort of beat that gives everything they're saying an immediate punch. That wriggling sandworm bassline still sounds absolutely fucking gripping, and it made the track's lyrics that much more urgent. And it came from a brief moment where it was OK for New York rappers to appropriate the monstrous sonics of Southern rap without getting called out for trend-jumping. It sounded like a punch in the face, and so the Dead Prez guys didn't sound like deluded chumps when they talked about running up on them crackers in city hall; they sounded like guys who might actually be ready to do it. So when 50 Cent, the biggest rap star in the world, jacks that beat and flips the track's lines, it's a weirdly subversive gesture. 50's lyrics on "The Bomb" are pretty much the exact opposite of everything the Dead Prez guys said on "Hip Hop"; he's talking all the same consequence-free knucklehead bullshit that the Dead Prez guys disparaged on the original track, and he's using their lines to do it: "One thing about my music, when it hits you feel a pain / Ninja, I take control of your brain / Listen now, ninja, I'm not playing." He's bragging about his money and his cars on a track about how rappers should look beyond their money and their cars. It's fucked up.

And it's all part of the publicity stunt. Right now, 50 Cent is rap's greatest villain, and he's taking on the guy who was rap's greatest villain when Dead Prez released "Hip Hop." The nominal reason for the track's existence is Mase: 50 wants to sign Mase to G-Unit, and Diddy won't let Mase out of his Bad Boy contract. The real reason, of course, is that Lloyd Banks has an album coming out in October and nobody cares. We've seen this before: the buzz on The Massacre was basically nonexistent before 50 kicked Game out of G-Unit; it even looked plausible that Game would end up outselling 50. After the falling-out kicked up an enormous media shitstorm, The Massacre went on to become last year's second-biggest seller. 50 got his name in the papers, and that's exactly what he wanted to do. The same thing is going on here; 50 doesn't care about Mase, and he even says so on the track's outro: "Matter of fact, know what? I don't wanna do the deal no more." In a way, Diddy did 50 a favor when he wouldn't let Mase off Bad Boy. Mase's alignment with G-Unit has become a bigger punchline than the sales figures of Blood Money. There might not be a single rapper alive right now with less credibility than Mase; 50 would be better off signing Jamie Kennedy or something. On the part where he actually raps, 50 doesn't even mention Mase; he's attacking Puffy for something completely different: "Who shot Biggie Smalls? If we don't get them, they gon' kill us all / Man, Puffy know who hit that ninja, man; that ninja soft / He scared them boys from the West Side gon' break him off / Jump on his ass, so he run to Harlem shake them off."

He's certainly picked a great moment to attack Diddy. Diddy's spent the past year rebuilding Bad Boy, finally getting the memo that he can't possibly run a successful rap label and repackaging himself as a teenpop czar, getting hits out of Yung Joc and Cassie. And this track is now leaking exactly one day after the debut album from Danity Kane, Diddy's reality-TV girl-group, something nobody has ever treated as anything but a joke, has pulled off the mind-bending feat of outselling OutKast's Idlewild in its first week. Diddy has clawed his way back to the top, and 50 is waiting for him. Of course, 50's also in danger of becoming a joke; the last three G-Unit albums haven't sold well, and he needs to figure out a way to recapture the public's imagination if he wants to maintain his status. There's something really desperate about this attack: Diddy barely even raps, and I can't imagine much of a battle coming out of this. But there's something really devious about it, too. 50's goal, after all, is to rack up as much media attention as possible, and I did just write this column.

Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's The Massacre
Voice review: Krix Ex on 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Even the album cover sort of doesn't suck

People are going to hate me for this one.

There's a moment about three and a half minutes into "Losing My Way," the second-to-last song on Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSound where it becomes completely obvious that Timberlake, maybe the world's biggest pop star, has willfully turned himself into a vehicle for the weirdest ideas of Timbaland, pop's most inventive producer, and I'm not even sure I can adequately describe why. Lyrically, "Losing My Way" is Timberlake's take on one of pop's most tired constructs: the hamfisted stab at social commentary. In the song, Timberlake preposterously imagines himself as a crackhead in the most simplistic way possible: "Now I got a problem with that little white rock, see I can't put down the pipe." But there's something goofily endearing about Timberlake's Bono moment; he doesn't sound anything short of absolutely sincere, and there's a sad, searching pathos in the way he voices all these hopeless cliches. And more importantly, it sounds amazing: the bassline is just a loop of Timbaland humming, and it has all this skeletal little drum skitters buried under sweeping layers of power-ballad strings and fluttering harps and twittering flutes. But the great moment comes when the song emerges out of an utterly gorgeous bridge and back into its chorus, except now it's a gospel choir singing it. The whole gospel-choir thing is maybe the most dependably effective trick in rock: a million bands have done it, and it still somehow sounds powerful every time. Except now the gospel choir is group-howling over Timbaland's weird little percussion patterns, and it sounds more amazing than any gospel-choir power-ballad since, I don't know, Blur's "Tender." And it gets even better when either Kirk Franklin or someone who sounds exactly like Kirk Franklin starts exhorting stuff. I'm pretty sure this is the first time Timbaland has used a gospel choir on a track, and now I'm wishing he'd use one on every song. And this is on Timberlake's "Winds of Change"/"Heal the World" moment, the obligatory toothlessly vague anti-poverty statement that every single pop star is culturally required to make at some point or other; it's the sort of thing that you know is coming and you know is going to suck so you just get ready to look past it or make good-intentions excuses for it. And "Losing My Way" is great. If Timbaland and Timberlake can make that shit work, they can pretty much do anything.

FutureSex/LoveSound (horrible title, I know) is full of little epiphanies like that, moments where it become immediately obvious that we're hearing two artists who are totally in sync (no pun, seriously), who are willing to go off the deep end but who always manage to make it sound completely pop and completely amazing. It's a pop record, of course, which means it's all about immediacy; maybe my enthusiasm for it will dip with time, but right now it's one of my five or so favorite albums of the year. "SexyBack," the first single, has found itself a lukewarm critical reception, probably because it doesn't have any of the symphonic, layered complexity of something like "Cry Me a River." It also has horrible lyrics, but I can't imagine anyone's ever listened to Justin Timberlake for the lyrics. The song has grown on me a lot over the past month, mostly because I've managed to convince myself that it's more a track than a song. There's a moment where Timbaland, in hypeman mode, says "take it to the chorus," but there really is no chorus, just a bunch of alternating parts strung together in a furious vamp, the oscillating, blippy drums and screechy synths ebbing and cresting and then ebbing again instead of building up to a climax, everything tense and urgent and brittle. On the album, it's followed up immediately with "SexyBack Remix," which adds a quick, relatively uneventful little Pusha T verse but otherwise just repeats the song again without changing much. It's an odd sequencing decision: essentially just playing the same song at the beginning an album rather than tacking on the remix as a bonus track. But it really just extends the vamp like an Arthur Baker disco edit, and it sounds great.

The album is immaculately sequenced, especially on the club-heavy first half. Most of the Timbaland tracks come with outro interludes that help one song bleed into the next, and it's a great trick; it turns a lot of barely-related songs into a near-seamless whole. So the minimal slap-bass and disco synth-squiggles of "Sexy Ladies," one of the album's few filler tracks, fade into a quick little interlude where Timberlake and Timbaland do some likable, amateurish tag-team rapping (seriously) over dinging cowbells, which fade into the the delicate synth-flourishes and heartbeat drums of the album's first masterpiece, "My Love." Timbaland uses beautifully layered human-beatbox noises as percussion the way he did on "Are You That Somebody?" while Timberlake pulls his amazingly airy falsetto out of mothballs and everything suddenly turns symphonic. When T.I. shows up for his guest verse, he totally inhabits the track, letting his warm drawl sink into the beat and finding spaces and eddies to push his words around. Pete Macia already five-starred this thing, and I've got his back on that one.

"Love Stoned" starts out on some Medulla shit, with Timbaland building the track almost completely out of layered vocal noises: wicky-wicky cartoon-scratches, a hummed bassline, rhythmic breaths, all converted into a totally convincing club track. Then, on the chorus, a great Quincy Jones string flourish comes in and makes everything feel lighter than air while an awestruck Timberlake sings about clubbing as something like a religious experience: "Those flashing lights come from everywhere / The way they hit, I have to stop and stare." And everything keeps mutating and evolving; the Nile Rogers guitar-scratches and Latin-funk congas don't even hit until around the three-minute mark. And then the interlude: the song melts into an insanely gorgeous guitar riff and a slowly building string figure while the club track gets utterly swept away. When Timberlake comes back in, he's singing the same words, but he's doing it slowly and mournfully, completely changing the tone and leading everything into the next track. It's just an interlude, but it's a better Coldplay song than anything on X&Y. And it's an incredible lead-in to "What Goes Around," this album's answer to "Cry Me a River," the sad-tender-angry breakup song. But now, Timbaland is using some of the same organic warmth he used on Bubba Sparxxx's Deliverance, winding an acoustic guitar through strings and drum-snaps and vaguely Eastern synth-figures while Timberlake moans about the girl who cheated. He's saying in interviews that it's not about Britney, that it's completely non-autobiographical, but kids all over the world are going to be calling bullshit, especially when he gets to the next interlude, where he gloats when the girl finds out her new guy's been cheating. If it is about Britney, it makes perfect sense; who doesn't dwell on bad breakups, even years later, even when everyone has moved on? And then we're back to the club shit: "Chop Me Up," which has guest spots from Timbaland and Three 6 Mafia and a sung/rapped verse from Timberlake that reads like DJ Paul ghost-wrote it; it's like a goofy-rapping convention. Timbaland builds the track from descending strings and staccato piano-plinks like he's trying out a lusher, gentler version of DJ Paul and Juicy J's hypnotic stomp. On the chorus, Timberlake sings "you got me screwed up," and the words "screwed up" actually get slowed down; I wonder if, before he died in 2000, DJ Screw ever imagined that the guy from N SYNC would eventually be finding hilariously insane ways to shout him out on a song (and it's even funnier because Timberlake's slowed-down voice sounds exactly like the exaggeratedly deep slur that my high school friends use whenever they're making fun of the way I talk). And then Tim calls himself "aka Thomas Crown" and delivers this little couplet: "Grab ya friends, let's take it back to my hive / Let's watch Sex in the City or Desperate Housewives / Simon says touch yours while you touch mine / Parental discretion is advised." The first time I heard the song, I laughed out loud more times than I could count.

I haven't seen the album's production credits, but I'm pretty sure only two of its thirteen tracks come from producers other than Timbaland. On "Damn Girl," Will.I.Am is on some Rich Harrison shit, turning in a nice widescreen pastiche of golden-age rap techniques. It's pretty good, even if we're forced to sit through a fucking horrible guest verse from Will. And "(Another Song) All Over Again" comes from Rick Rubin; it's the self-consciously stripped down album-closer, meaning Timberlake doesn't multitrack his vocals and most of the instrumentation seems to be live, though it's all overproduced power-ballad stuff like the Brian McKnight song on Justified. It's pretty enough, but it's disappointingly pedestrian. Timberlake's not built for songs like this, and the rest of the album proves it. In a way, FutureSex is this year's Late Registration: an established pop star pushing his signature sound to cinematic extremes while making sure to leave in as many weird stylistic tics as possible and making the rest of the pop landscape look depressingly flat in the process. It's a triumph in every way.

Voice review: Christopher O'Connor on Justin Timberlake's Justified

Imagine how much happier Big Boi would be if these girls weren't all busted

After hearing the absolute mess of the Idlewild album, I was expecting the movie to be some sort of grand, ridiculous art-spectacle, like the scenes in The Song Remains the Same where it cuts away from Led Zeppelin playing to show soft-focus unicorns. Well, it's definitely ridiculous, but as Noz wrote here, it's essentially a B-movie. It doesn't really address the whole OutKast legend much, and it has absolutely nothing new to say about the tensions between the artist and the entertainer, which is fine with me. Beyond the admittedly bizarre concept of a rap movie that takes place in the 1920s, this is total standard-issue movie-movie stuff; we don't get a single thing we haven't seen before. There are weird little animated interludes, but they're all there to entertain the kids who probably shouldn't be watching the movie in the first place. In fact, the whole thing is pretty much a kids' movie, except with cussing and minimal nudity and an Andre 3000 sex scene that takes place in a thunderstorm with lightning flickering and the couple slowly unbuttoning each other's clothes. Director Bryan Barber has never seen a melodramatic movie cliche that he doesn't want to steal, and there's stuff in Idlewild that I can't believe someone seriously had the audacity to put into a movie in 2006. I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just say that the only tired-ass film scene we don't get is the one where someone does CPR on someone else while yelling "Don't you die on me!" It's crap, but it's entertaining crap.

The movie made $5.7 million this past weekend, less than Accepted or Beerfest or Step Up. It did have the highest per-screen average of any movie this weekend, but it seems a bit weird to me that they couldn't get the movie to open on more screens. I could be wrong, but it looks like a colossal brick from where I'm sitting. It'll be interesting to see whether the soundtrack album manages to outsell Diddy's girl-group Danity Kane this weekend, though it's probably saying a lot that it's even a question. So the era of OutKast as a world-conquering pop phenomenon may be coming to a close or at least an intermission, and this movie may be its final monument. If it is the last chapter in the group's history, it's an awfully weird one, but I guess that's fitting.

Anyway, here are some things I learned watching Idlewild.

• The opening flashback about Big Boi and Andre's characters as kids is a lot of fun in a Bugsy Malone sort of way, but it's a shame that they couldn't find two kids who look or sound anything like Big Boi or Andre.

• Macy Gray is looking more cracked-out every day; she's rapidly approaching Nolte territory.

• All of the backstage characters at Church, the movie's speakeasy, are totally broad and seriously annoying caricatures. It's so not my place to be pointing this out, but there's a disturbing minstrel-show shuck-and-jive undercurrent to a lot of these performances.

• Andre and Big Boi have both been decent in movies before (Andre in Four Brothers, Big Boi in ATL), but they're both seriously wooden here. I don't know if it's the stiltedness of the script or the fact that it's Barber's first movie and he doesn't know how to disguise bad acting or what, but it's a pretty serious problem, especially since they're both playing lead roles for the first time. There's been a lot of hype around the fact that they only appear in a few scenes together, like it's a sly tease, something for fans of the group to analyze endlessly. But the two of them have shockingly weak onscreen chemistry, which is especially weird when you think that they've been best friends since middle school or whatever; maybe Barber kept them apart just so it wouldn't be too obvious. It certainly makes sense to keep them apart when you consider that they'll both look better if they're interacting with actual professional actors instead of each other. Big Boi at least manages to come off as being likable. Andre is the movie's hero, and his character comes off looking like a total worm.

• Ving Rhames looks weird with hair.

• Onstage at Church, Andre plays a few seconds of "Makes No Sense at All," and people throw bottles at him. If I was at a bar and someone tried to play that song, I might throw a bottle too.

• Noz already pointed this out, but all of the songs that Big Boi performs come from Speakerboxxx, and all of them, especially "Bowtie," work shockingly well in the old-timey speakeasy milieu. I was worried it would come off all self-consciously postmodern like the pop songs in Moulin Rouge, but it seems perfectly reasonable that people in the 1920s would want to hear something that sounds a lot like a guy slick-talking over hot jazz. It almost sounds like "Bowtie" was conceived with this scene in mind, which I guess wouldn't be all that surprising considering how long this movie has been in the planning stages. During the "Bowtie" scene, Barber shoots couples swing-dancing in slow-mo Matrix bullet-time; he must've really liked that jump-and-jive Gap khakis commercial.

• Terrence Howard is far and away the best actor in the movie, but his character also has the worst, most awkward, most obvious lines, total mustache-twirling villain stuff. I wonder if that's a coincidence.

• The non-performance music scenes are utterly ridiculous; Andre and Big Boi will just start lip-syncing their songs for absolutely no reason whether or not the songs have anything to do with the scene. It's really odd, and I can't understand why they didn't just have the songs playing on the soundtrack. The part where Andre lip-syncs "She Lives in My Lap" made me laugh out loud.

• I think the scenes between Andre and his mortician father are supposed to be like the scenes between Prince and his father in Purple Rain, but they're totally boring and inept (as opposed to the ones in Purple Rain, which were inept but not boring), and they're death on the movie's momentum.

• Andre's character talks to the dead bodies he's working on, and he's kind of a dick to them.

• Paula Patton (Robin Thicke's wife!), who plays Andre's love interest, needs to be in every movie. She's utterly beautiful, and she manages to sell even some of the absolute dumbest scenes in the film.

• Andre narrates, and he actually says, "All the world's a stage." Twice. And then he explains why both times.

• Terrence Howard's henchman is my favorite character in the movie. He's got this deep, rumbling voice, and he pretty much just repeats whatever Howard just said and then chuckles.

• Barber films a fight scene in near darkness and edits it so that we have absolutely no idea what's happening. I hate it when people do that.

• We get one of those scenes where someone's playing a song in a rowdy club and the crowd starts out hating it but the performers gradually gain confidence and figure out how to play to the crowd and people gradually start liking it until they're all cheering by the end of the song. I love those scenes, like the one in that one episode of The A-Team where Culture Club is playing in a cowboy bar for some reason. This one is pretty good even though the song Andre is playing fucking blows.

Voice review: Michael Atkinson on Idlewild

They were almost over and their world was almost gone

Rancid
BB King Blues Club
August 25, 2006

Something great happened a little less than halfway through Rancid's Friday night set at BB King's: the band started playing "Knowledge," the first song from Operation Ivy's 1989 album Energy. Two of Rancid's four members had been members of Op Ivy, a Berkely ska-punk band that lasted three years and only toured the country once, and Op Ivy has always been the albatross around Rancid's neck; no matter how great Rancid got, people would always say how Op Ivy was so much better and these kids don't even know. I always thought that was bullshit, but Energy is still an unbelievably great little album, one I played almost every day for a few months in ninth grade. I saw Rancid for the first time ten years ago, and since then I've seen them every time I've had a chance, which hasn't been all that often since the band likes to take long-ass breaks between albums. But I've seen them enough times to know that Rancid never plays Op Ivy songs. It's always been damn near unthinkable, like seeing Fugazi do "I Don't Wanna Hear It" or something. So when "Knowledge" started, there was this wave of wide-eyed recognition going around the club, people all over the club making eye contact and mouthing holy shit! to each other, this great weird feeling of mutual recognition and amazement, and it lasted all of five seconds before someone inexplicably dumped an entire beer on Zach Baron's head and some of it got on me. But then the same thing happened about forty minutes later, when the band came out to do their encore. All four of them came out with acoustic guitars (even the drummer) and did a huge singalong version of "Fall Back Down," the band's last single, their big breakup song, and then they segued directly into "Sound System," Op Ivy's best song. Finally, after all these years, they were giving us exactly what we wanted, and they didn't even need to do it. Just being there would've been enough.

I didn't think I'd ever get to see Rancid again. Haunted Cities, the 2005 album from Tim Armstrong's punk-rap side project the Transplants, was the first Armstrong-related album I've ever sold back to the used-record store. A few months after that piece-of-shit album's release, the Transplants broke up acrimoniously. Travis Barker and Skinhead Rob, the other two guys in the group, hinted that Armstrong was just too unreliable to work with; instead, they said, they were forming a group with (seriously) Paul Wall. On Haunted Cities, Armstrong had a lot of lyrics about sniffing blow and doing shady shit like that. This stuff was really, really not fun to hear; Armstrong had started Rancid, after all, only after he'd emerged victoriously from rehab. And the Transplants' breakup had come after all sorts of weird moves and personal upheavals. In 2003, Armstrong's wife Brody Dalle, the frontwoman of the Distillers, dumped him for the guy from Queens of the Stone Age. After that, Armstrong did everything he could to "go pop," whatever that means: he cowrote most of Pink's (pretty great) 2003 album Try This, he signed Rancid to a major label, he signed the Transplants to a major label. And none of it worked; even the Pink album bricked, and Armstrong didn't come close to the fame he'd had back in the mid-90s when he was turning down major-label contracts right and left. After the Transplants' breakup, it looked like maybe he was done, which would mean Rancid was done too. So for a few of us at least, it was a big, big deal when the band booked a four-night run at BB King's, when they willed themselves back into existence.

In 2006, Rancid's records sound like comfort food, but then again they basically always did. I got into the band the same way tens of thousands of other ninth-graders must've done: I saw Armstrong's picture in a magazine and thought that holy shit this guy has a mohawk and who even has mohawks anymore and that's awesome. But what kept me was the sense of pride in the face of despair. Especially in light of all the self-pitying grunge stuff that still pretty much ran the world in 1994 or so, Rancid was all about self-actualization. Armstrong and Lars Fredrickson didn't sing about hating themselves; they sang about standing tall in the face of poverty and addiction and squalor, of finding strength in friends and music and beer, of figuring out that you loved yourself and helping your friends figure out that they loved themselves. Not to get too emo-personal here, but that's pretty much exactly what I needed to hear at the time, and it still resonates more now than it probably should. The music was mostly stuck in circa-78 fundamentalist British punk, but that's an awfully rich period, and the band eventually reached out into ska and reggae and dancehall and rap and disco and folk, internalizing all this stuff and phasing it into their frantic heartache without ever breaking stride, still bringing the meaty hooks and the singalong choruses and the viscerally satisfying rollercoaster tempos. When Armstrong started sort-of rapping in the Transplants, it really wasn't that big of a surprise. For one thing, he'd always been sort-of rapping; that broken-tooth garbleslur can only be called "singing" in the most nebulous sense. And he'd always been talking about rap stuff: coming up from nothing, staying true to yourself and your friends. The best Rancid videos ("Salvation," "Ruby Soho") are basically rap videos except with people playing guitar. They've always been knee-deep in Cali rap iconography, too: lowriders, Cadillacs, baseball bats, porkpie hats. Their thing is being strong. So it's immensely gratifying when they reaffirm that they actually are strong, that they're capable of coming back from things that would've killed ten weaker bands and playing one of the best shows I've seen all year.

The internet says that they're working on a new album, which is awesome, but it's also awesome that they didn't play anything new on Friday night. People don't go to Rancid shows to hear new songs; we go to hear the songs we've loved for years, to sing along loud enough to drown out the band, to get drunk and throw down in the pit like it was ten years ago. And the band obliged. They only played for about an hour, but that's long enough to play a whole lot of Rancid songs. They started out with two of their most indelible singalongs ("Radio" and "Roots Radicals"), but they drew from every one of their albums. Armstrong still did the thing where he barely says a word between songs and just lets Fredrickson talk instead. Fredrickson still did the thing where he tells us not to act like jocks. Matt Freeman still did the thing where he plays mindbendingly nimble bass solos and then sings a song or two in a raspy roar thick enough that it made depressingly perfect sense when he was mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of years ago. Bret Reed still did the thing where he plays drums. Apparently the entire universe isn't as amped as I am about a Rancid reunion; right before the band went on, tickets still hadn't sold out, and I'd never seen Rancid in a venue this small. But that made the whole thing more personal; there were times when Armstrong was perched on a monitor, leering out at the crowd like a gargoyle, and I could've grabbed his arm if I'd wanted to. The pit was as hectic as anything I've seen lately. I thought I'd be safe standing on the outside when Fredrickson was doing his acoustic Billy Bragg cover, but no: someone came flying out of nowhere and shoulderblocked me in the kidney. And the smell was fucking disgusting, like a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips left out open in the rain. And still, everything was vaguely comforting, even the sensation of fighting five dudes to stand up, of trying not to hit the guy with the bandanna and the no shirt too hard. I needed this when I was sixteen, and I still need it. Maybe you do too.

Voice review: Keith Harris on Rancid's Indestructible
Voice review: Michaelangelo Matos on Rancid and NOFX's Split Series/Volume III
Voice review: Nick Catucci on Rancid's Rancid (the second one)
Voice review: Joe Levy on Rancid's Life Won't Wait

Total no-brainer

I hated the soundtrack album, but I'm still vaguely excited to see Idlewild, which looks like it may be that rare case where the musicians' star-vehicle movie is somehow less pretentious than the album that accompanies it. Andre was pretty good in Four Brothers, and Big Boi was pretty good in ATL; I'm curious to see how the two of them do when they're basically forced to carry a movie by themselves. And I'm curious to see how the movie deals with the OutKast myth itself, still one of the most fascinating stories in pop music even if the music they're making these days mostly blows. Both the movie and the album have gotten a ton of press over the past week, of course, and it's got me wondering where Idlewild is going to fit in the canon of music-based movies.

Of course, Idlewild may not actually be a music-based movie, at least not by the definition I'm using for this list. I've decided to exclude movies like Nashville, films that use music scenes as a constant backdrop but aren't really about music. I won't know whether Idlewild is one of those movies until I actually see it. I'm also excluding musicals and straight-to-video rapper-vehicle DVDs and biopics of musicians, mostly because I don't generally like any of those things; the only halfway decent rock-biopic I've seen is Ray, and even that one fell into the trap of painting its subject in ridiculously broad, saintly strokes and hammering in the obligatory subplot about addiction and recovery. So I'm pretty much limiting myself to concert films, documentaries, and narrative movies that use music not only as background but as the central engine of plot; they have to somehow be about music. So by that definition, 8 Mile would qualify as a music-movie and Get Rich or Die Tryin' wouldn't, though neither one is making this list since neither is especially good. And this should go without saying whenever I run one of these things, but this is entirely a personal list; I'm not claiming any sort of objective authority here, and you can always suggest more in the comments section.

1. Purple Rain. This is basically all you could possibly ask for from a music-movie. It's a star vehicle, of course, and it does an amazing job of positioning its star in a context and cementing his legend. The First Avenue scene, as depicted in the movie, probably has basically no real connection to any music scene in the history of the world, but it really looks amazing: multiracial, immaculately dressed patrons cramming into a club with really cool laser-lights and fog machines, all somehow able to do synchronized dances to the music being played by multiracial, immaculately dressed musicians. The plot is ridiculous and cliched, of course, but it sort of has to be; Prince isn't really an actor, but he does just fine at playing the mythically pared-down version of himself, and he makes it look entirely plausible that a young prince would wear ruffly pirate shirts and eyeliner even when he's in his parents' basement. Even though he's about four feet tall, Morris Day makes an amazing villain, all peacock exuberance and withering sneer. Apollonia's nude scenes are like a gift from God. And, of course, the music, without exception, is ridiculously great. Prince was at his peak then, and so a document of one of the greatest performers ever to walk the earth playing to a hometown crowd and bringing big-moment emotion to every onstage moment is always going to be something you need to see. When he finally gets to the title song, and the camera pans the crowd and finds awe on everyone's faces, it doesn't look like acting. The soundtrack album is basically perfect, but I've always wished there was a bonus disc or something with the songs from the Time and Apollonia Six; they're nearly as good, and Morris Day manages to make a pretty credible case that he could've blown Prince off the stage at some point. I can't believe there are still people who haven't seen this movie.

Prince: "Purple Rain"
Prince: "Baby I'm a Star"
Prince: "Take Me With U"
Morris Day & the Time: "The Bird"
Morris Day & the Time: "Jungle Love"

2. The Decline of Western Civilization. A few of the performances in this documentary are great (X, Circle Jerks), but I love the movie more for its depiction of a ridiculously fertile LA punk scene at the exact moment before "punk" started meaning a codified dress and attitude and sense of ethics, when it was just a whole bunch of scary, violent kids who constantly looked so tense they were about to explode. The mosh pits are basically just big fights, and they make for some iconic images: Lee Ving kicking some girl in the face, a mob of kids ripping Keith Morris off the stage. If you made this movie now about any music scene anywhere in the country, there'd be talk of careerism: either the bands would be talking about market-positioning and target demographics, or they'd be talking about their absolute rejection of all those things. Here, that stuff is completely ignored (except for the Germs' manager talking about how she wants to quit all the time and she can't get them to do anything). Instead, we get weirdly hilarious rants and DIY tattoos and the dead guy that someone found once. And virtually everyone interviewed in the movie (musicians, zine writers, kids) seems to be a legitimate psycho. I can't even tell you how many times I watched this movie in high school; I showed a clip during an oral presentation once.

X: "Beyond & Black"
Circle Jerks: "Red Tape" and a bunch of other songs
Fear: "I Love Livin' in the City"

3. Stop Making Sense. It's just a concert movie, but it's so beautifully constructed. First, David Byrne comes out and does "Psycho Killer" by himself, with boombox accompaniment and nothing else. Then, Tina Weymouth comes out, and they do "Heaven." After every song, another musician or two comes out, and soon enough, the stage is absolutely jammed: Bernie Worrell, backup singers, some guy playing a huge bank of percussion instruments. Byrne blows his spazzy anti-charisma up to insane levels, flapping around in an enormous suit or dancing with a lamp. And the band had somehow figured out how to marry its twitchy art-punk with funk and Afropop and Eno atmospherics and a ton of other stuff, all of which served to make it fluid and graceful and huge. And everyone plays hard; you can see the beads of sweat flying off people's heads halfway through. We only get to see the crowd for a few seconds at the very end; we don't really need to see anymore. I was a little kid when I first saw this movie, and I didn't really get that the band was weird as fuck; I thought maybe this was what most rock shows were like. If only.

Talking Heads: "Psycho Killer"
Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime"
Tom Tom Club: "Genius of Love"
Talking Heads: "Once in a Lifetime"
Talking Heads: "What a Day That Was"
Talking Heads: "This Must Be the Place"

4. Wild Style. It might be a bit weird to call this one a music-movie, since it's about a graffiti artist, but then the plot (such as it is) revolves around the guy abandoning his own ego and realizing that he has to paint a mural glorifying the rappers in the park, not his own inner demons. The acting and production values are mostly terrible, and there's nothing that even resembles a story arc, but all the low-budget naivete actually works in the movie's favor. There's a real goofy joy in seeing the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic 5 rapping at each other while they play basketball or Busy Bee trying to spell his name out in money on a bed. The music is generally great, and it's also one of the very few visual documents we have of the early days of rap, which makes it a valuable reminder that the music and the culture just started out as a bunch fucking around and having fun and making names for themselves, which means it only really differs from The Decline of Western Civilization in race and aesthetic; they both show pretty much the same impulses at work. Also, I totally love the bassline that pretty much runs constantly throughout the movie.

5. Fade to Black. So it didn't turn out to be Jay-Z's retirement show, but everyone always knew it wouldn't be. There's still a ton of goosebump moments before the music even starts: the aerial shots of Madison Square Garden, Michael Buffer, the jersey going up into the rafters. And the show itself manages to get across all the Clintonian charisma you actually get from one of Jay's live show. I love Ghostface's cameo, the fast-rap calisthenics on "Jigga What Jigga Who," the way he runs out after the intro of "What More Can I Say," everything. But my favorite scenes are the ones in the studio, where he's talking to producers and putting The Black Album together. The scene of a pre-bodybuilding Timbaland drinking from a jug of purple stuff and giggling to himself while he plays beats is one of my favorite things in the world. Jay's expression the first time he hears "Dirt Off Your Shoulders" is absolutely priceless.

All up in your basement

Shins + J. Mascis
McCarren Park Pool
August 23, 2006

There's a lot of stuff I don't particularly like about the Shins, but most of that stuff isn't the band's fault. If we're going to talk about the music and nothing else, they're really good. The band makes comfort-food power-pop, pure and simple, and they're total pros at it. Their production has a sort of amber warmth, and their hooks lazily snake their way directly into your brain. As Zach Baron pointed out to me today, Oh Inverted World is pretty much a perfect soundtrack for cleaning up your apartment the morning after a party. They've only released two albums, and both of them are throughly satisfying minor slices of blissy indie-pop. They're a good band. The only real thing wrong with them is that their live show is a thoroughly average affair; nobody in the band has the sort of charisma that registers when you're standing more than a hundred feet from the stage. And even the live show thing isn't anything new. They've always been a bit listless onstage, and people still come out in droves to see them. A few thousand people came out to McCarren Park Pool last night and paid $36 plus service charges to get in, so good for them.

What really bothers me about the band is that they've somehow, through no fault of their own, become standard-bearers for the nebulously defined genre of music called indie-rock. I am definitely not the first person to make this observation, but indie-rock is an entirely different beast from what it was ten years ago. Indie-rock was once desperate music made and consumed by awkward and obsessive types who often had to comb through zines and mail-order catalogues to find shit. Ideologically and aesthetically, most of it was an outgrowth of punk and hardcore, the sort of thing that happened when people got sick of the rigidly defined boundaries of those scenes and went off to do some crazy shit on their own because they absolutely had to do crazy shit or they would die. This is all romantic nostalgia, of course, and it's not like 80s or 90s indie-rock was free of careerism or derivative bullshit. And there didn't used to be too many bands in the underground who could write hooks as potent as the ones on Shins tracks; hooks are generally a whole lot more important than social positioning anyway. But things have changed a whole lot as the internet has made indie-rock a lot easier to find. It's a less obsessive pursuit now, and that's been reflected in the music. If indie-rock dudes are taking their musical cues from mid-90s bands, those bands are less and less likely to be Fugazi or Bikini Kill or Today is the Day and more and more likely to be, like, Buffalo Tom or Tripping Daisy or Better Than Ezra. There's not a whole lot of passionate squall out there anymore, and most of it has moved off to the periphery or to weird little subsidiaries like the noise scene. Indie-rock's center, if such a thing can even be said to exist, has moved more toward the sort of stuff you listen to as background music for when you're on the internet. And that's made for some great music: Spoon's Kill the Moonlight, Mirah's C'Mon Miracle, the Postal Service's Give Up. But it's also made for a depressing sense that there's nothing much at stake.

The Shins are really good at the sort of fuss-free indie-pop, and that's why Natalie Portman leaned over to Zach Braff in that one movie and told him that they'd change his life. It's hard to imagine that the Shins' label, Sub Pop, would've fucked with this life-changing music ten years ago. The band made it known in their "New Slang" video that they completely revere the fucked-up desperation of the past to the point where they'll pose for pastiche recreations of the covers of Zen Arcade and Let It Be and Spiderland, but they don't have a whole lot to do with those albums either musically or culturally. The craziest things about their songs are the occasional spacey keyboard bits they sometimes work in. They're prim and controlled and safe, and they've stayed indie and taken their warm-fuzzy-pleasant music to something that vaguely resembles rock stardom. And so thousands upon thousands of people came out to see them at McCarren Park Pool last night. The Pool might be the perfect venue for this band; it's maybe the most remarkably pleasant place to see bands in the city. It's huge, big enough to get a whole lot of people inside without making us feel like lobsters crawling over each other. And it has a sort of decrepit majesty in the way its old brick walls rise up through the trees and the under-construction condos around it. When the breeze is blowing in the right direction, the smell from the barbecue pit in the corner drifts across the entire venue. It's hard to be in a bad mood in a place like that, and the Shins' crowd was ready to lap them up; the couple in front of me actually squealed in glee and hugged each other when the band played the opening notes of "Know Your Onion." It'd be nice to say that the band stepped up at the opportunity and gave a performance that captured everyone's imaginations, but no; they're nice-enough everydudes, and they don't have the sort of outsized personalities that a trick like that requires. The stage-patter was all stiff and awkward: "Stay out of the deep end!" And they completely fucked up their first attempt at playing "New Slang"; they had to ditch it completely and then try again during the encores. But they have good songs, and those songs still sound good when the people onstage playing them don't look entirely comfortable. If anything, they're set to move even further into the realm of tidy pop; one of the new songs they played quoted the opening chime-riff from the Chiffons' "Then He Kissed Me"; another was vaguely Killers-esque. And if they never actually get around to changing anyone's life, it'll probably just be because they aren't the sort of dudes who do that stuff.

Voice review: Janet Kim on the Shins' Chutes Too Narrow

It was a bit weird seeing one of indie-rock's old-guard warriors, J. Mascis, opening for these guys, and it was even weirder seeing him sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the stage and playing completely solo and acoustic, no huge bank of amplifiers towering behind him. These days, he's looking something like Garth from Wayne's World if he discovered punk and then got really old: frizzy white hair, pot-belly, Wipers shirt, big glasses. Every once in a while, he'd mash down on an effects pedal and launch into one of the gloriously tattered guitar solos that he's been doing almost as long as I've been alive. When he wasn't doing that, though, he could be damn near any singer-songwriter with a reedy Neil Young voice and a gift for diffuse, serpentine guitar lines. He barely said a thing to the crowd. It was like he'd willfully relegated himself to background-music status for all the people wandering around and looking at the graffiti on the walls.

Voice feature: Ken Switzer on the Dinosaur Jr. reunion

Way down in the hole

When I was walking from the subway to work this morning, I passed Andre Royo on the street. Royo plays Bubbles, the goodhearted police informer/heroin addict on The Wire, one of my favorite characters on probably my favorite TV show of all time. Seeing him walk past was weird; I don't know if I've ever felt such a sudden, overwhelming feeling of love for such a complete stranger, and it was even weirder because he was wearing a rainbow-striped sport coat and douchebaggy actor sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. I froze, but the construction worker standing next to me yelled out, "Hey ... The Wire!" Royo turned around and waved, and everyone standing on that street corner waved back, which made for a deeply strange and sort of life-affirming moment, like we were all unexpectedly united in recognizing a guy from a TV show that not many people watch.

I've been immersing myself in The Wire lately to the point where I wouldn't feel right writing about anything else today. Season four is due to start in a couple of weeks, and season three just came out on DVD, and I've been watching old episodes on On Demand and reading The Corner and making it all the way through this long-ass David Simon interview. The show has never gotten good ratings, and season four almost didn't happen, so it's sort of a miracle that it continues to exist at all; I can't tell you how amped I am to start seeing new episodes. But this is a music blog, and you'd have to stretch pretty far to say that The Wire has anything to do with music, so that's exactly what I'm about to do. When music does appear on the show, it's usually part of the background ambient noise, coming from a car radio or whatever, though every season ends with a long montage set to a song. The show has used musicians as actors: Method Man (Cheese), Fredo Starr (Bird), Big G from the Backyard Band (Slim Charles). A ton of the actors from the show have appeared in rap and R&B videos; Al Shipley listed damn near all of them recently. The show takes place in Baltimore, of course, and it gets a lot of local details absolutely right; there's a great scene in season two where Stringer Bell tells a hitman from DC that he can't stand go-go, which is how most people from Baltimore feel about DC's big indigenous genre. As for Baltimore's indigenous genre, the show used Baltimore club music long before the music started getting national press. I'd argue that the show also had something of a catalytic effect on the Baltimore rap scene, which has grown by leaps and bounds since the show started in 2002. Before the show gave the city some national visibility, Baltimore wasn't a big rap town at all; now local rappers get play on local radio and guys like Bossman are landing major-label contracts. Simon says here that they're planning on using a lot of local Baltimore music in season four, which is great, but I can't imagine it's all that interesting if you're not from Baltimore. It makes more sense to question whether the show has had any effect on rap in general and whether it should.

The Wire started in 2002, the same year that Scarface's The Fix and Clipse's Lord Willin' laid the groundwork for the coke-rap trend, which really kicked off with T.I.'s Trap Muzik in 2003 and which still dominates commercial rap. The show has become a big reference point for rappers. Wire references aren't anywhere near as dominant as Scarface references or anything, but it ranks alongside City of God as a left-field cult thing that really caught on with rappers mostly because it examines outlaw life in really gripping and though-out ways. Weirdly, Paul Wall seems to mention The Wire more than anyone else, but it's pretty obvious that a whole lot of rappers are watching the show. Now, people were rapping about dealing drugs a long time before the show started; Biggie and Jay-Z and Raekwon all had a lot to say about this stuff. But the show is a more naturalistic and detailed look at the day-to-day life of street-corner dealers than anything else that's made its way through the pop-culture fog. The show grants its cops more airtime, and it's also had a lot to say about dockworkers and local politicians and Eastern European prostitutes, but not too many rappers have backgrounds in those professions. It's not really realistic to expect rappers to tell stories from multiple perspectives the way the show does; rap is a medium that's based around the self, and it's rarely been big on empathy. But The Wire doesn't romanticize its dealers much. They get shot a whole lot more often than the other characters, and they have bad ideas and unrealistic dreams and weaknesses just like anyone else. They also do a lot of really odious things, like killing or ordering the deaths of close friends. Rappers make their names by turning themselves into mythological characters, and many coke-rappers do that masterfully. Pusha T's vivid eloquence, say, or Young Jeezy's larger-than-life wheeze are cinematic tools unto themselves. And there's usually some vague sense of consequence, stuff like the obligatory song for dead friends or Jeezy's evocative paranoia on "Don't Get Caught." But just once I'd like to see someone who raps about dealing drugs but still acknowledges his own flaws and weaknesses; it could only make the music more compelling. If nothing else, I'd like to see some of the show's storytelling sophistication creep into the vanity-project movies that rappers make. I'm willing to take it as an article of faith that a lot of people who rap about dealing drugs actually dealt drugs at one point or another, but you wouldn't know it from pieces of shit like Killa Season. What kills me is that we know Cam'ron watches The Wire; otherwise, he wouldn't have cast Michael K. Williams, who plays Omar, in a bizarrely tiny role in the movie. If Cam actually has the background he says he does, he should be able to tell a story about it without getting completely ridiculous; it's already obvious that the guy can write. I don't think there's anything inherently evil or harmful about coke-rap or the movies that coke-rappers make, but a well-told story would go a long way toward proving the point.

People of earth!

To more than a few of us internet rap dorks, Lupe Fiasco is exactly what the world needs. I don't even think there's anything horribly wrong with commercial rap these days, and I'm still ridiculously amped to see what this guy can do. He's a great rapper: warm and eloquent and humanistic, with a pleasantly expressive voice and a thing for internal rhymes. He engages with politics without getting too pedantic about it, and he has a fluid and gorgeous way of describing internal conflicts and crises of faith and self-doubt. The idea that he might become a major rap star is a tantalizing possibility, and it's given a lot of us hope that big-business rap might break out of its slump by expanding its boundaries beyond its current fixation on trap-star bravado, which has produced plenty of great music but which has convinced the labels to throw their weight (so to speak) behind half-formed jokers like Yung Joc and Rick Ross. An early, unfinished version of Lupe's debut album Food & Liquor leaked to the internet a few months ago; I went a bit overboard when I called it one of the year's best albums as it was, but it does give us a sketchy picture of a major artist emerging. Since the album leaked, though, things haven't been going all that well for Lupe.

After the leak, Lupe started making noises about how the album wasn't finished yet, how he had a whole bunch of sketchy-sounding, ill-advised guest-spots to collect (Jay-Z, Jill Scott, Pharrell, Three-6 Mafia). The album's release date has been pushed back countless times, and that's the sort of thing that labels do when they aren't entirely sure whether they want to put an album out or just cut their losses and bury it forever (see: Hell Hath No Fury). Lupe kept doing shows and popping up wherever possible, but fellow post-backpack Chicago rapper Rhymefest came out and bricked, and that wasn't a good sign. The prospect that Lupe might get buried like Joe Budden has been a considerable source of ongoing angst for those of us who think he'd be good for rap. But now it looks like we're actually going to hear this thing sometime before the sun explodes. Atlantic Records leaked a couple of new tracks, testing the waters to see if either one caught fire and became an obvious single. One of the tracks was "I Gotcha," the obligatory Neptunes collaboration. Lately, a Neptunes collab has become the sort of thing that aging rappers release as their first single when they're worried about looking out of touch (see: Ludacris). It's a sort of default move, and it's not a particularly good one, especially as the Neps' quality-control fades further with every passing month. "I Gotcha" isn't terrible, but it's one of the worst of Lupe's leaked tracks. Lupe sounds fine on the track; an extended riff about soap is particularly inspired. But the track itself is exactly the sort of tinkly Vegas fluff that's been ruining the Neptunes' name for a few years now; it's thin and plastic and generally boring. But "Daydream," the other new track, is pretty great. Lupe talks a lot about how much he loves jazz, and the track backs it up. It's a slow, luxuriant lope, all lush samples and warm strings and music-box chimes that just float in the mix. The chorus comes from Jill Scott, who has an amazing voice but whose music generally puts me to sleep. Here, though, she eases up on the self-satisfied earth-mother melisma and coos a simple, relaxed hook that only turns stormy at the end of the track. Everything sounds easy and unforced and pleasant. Lupe's first verse is a weird extended metaphor about a robot or something, and I don't really understand it, but he takes such pleasure in wrappping his voice around this beat that it never grates. Later, he has a dazzling bit on standard-issue rap-videos: "Hold up your chain slow-motion through the flames / Now cue the smoke machines and the simulated rain." It's complicated, though; he's making fun of these visual cliches, but it's clear from the glee he takes in describing them that he understands the exhilarating power of the images. And he turns his satiric eye on himself, too: "I'd like to thank the streets that drove me crazy / And all the televisions out there that raised me." If the rest of his collaborations turn out like this one, he'll be fine.

"I Gotcha" found its way into an episode of Entourage, but someone's made the exceedingly sane decision to make "Daydream" the single instead. There's already a video, and it's a bit ridiculous: Lupe wanders into a toy store at night and dances with a giant robot while Jill Scott gets made up to look like an old jazz singer and croons from a moving LP cover. And now the label has also leaked the album's insanely goofy cover, which makes Lupe look like the new herald of Galactus or something. It's hard to imagine anyone buying Food & Liquor on the strength of the cover or the "Daydream" video, but they're still both encouraging signs. Labels don't do stuff like this unless they actually intend to release the album sometime soon, and it looks like we'll finally get to hear Food & Liquor next month. It would all be cause for celebration if it weren't for the insanely stupid decision Atlantic Records made yesterday. After Nah Right, the best non-XXL rap blog going now, posted a YouTube link to the "Daydream" video, someone from Atlantic apparently wrote Eskay and threatened legal action against him if he didn't take down the link. Eskay is rightly pissed about this thing. If Atlantic actually wants to turn Lupe into a star, they're going to need the help of the internet rap community that's thus far been entirely responsible for his buzz. If they get all weird and reactionary whenever someone posts anything Lupe-related, they're going to lose their base. It's the sort of utterly wrongheaded and paranoid move that could help torpedo the career of their biggest star-in-waiting before it even really begins.

Sure is wacky

Girl Talk + Professor Murder
Mercury Lounge
August 18, 2006

So Greg Gillis is basically the Yngwie Malmsteen of laptop DJs. Gillis calls himself Girl Talk, and a little while ago he released Night Ripper, a mix CD that jams shrapnel-shards of at least a hundred songs into less than 45 minutes. It's a party CD, at least in concept. The songs are generally instantly recognizable floor-fillers, and there's a refreshingly open-hearted omnivorousness to the selections. A random minute-long stretch has the Paul Wall's verse from "Still Tippin'" over the piano line from Phantom Planet's "California," which fades into the drums from Clipse's "Grindin'" right before Poly Styrene and Trina start yelling at each other over the drum intro to Nirvana's "Scentless Apprentice." But that sort of ADD beat-jacking isn't particularly conducive to actual partying; you're too busy trying to catch all the bits and pieces of the individual songs to make much of the sum of their parts. Hollertronix did something vaguely similar on their Never Scared mix, but they knew when to actually let the songs play for a minute or so. Night Ripper is a truly impressive technical achievement, but the mix never ebbs or flows; it's just one continuous claustrophobic splooge of reference. Listening to Night Ripper is exhausting; I lost count of the times I wished I was hearing the original songs instead of their ripped-out-of-context pieces, that Gillis would just ease up on the pyrotechnics and let "Bittersweet Symphony" or "Knuck if You Buck" or "White Horse" play.

So then Gillis isn't so much a DJ as a sound-collagist who uses pop songs as his found objects, and that's probably why he played at the Mercury Lounge on Friday night instead of an actual dance club. I thought maybe he'd take advantage of the lack of time restrictions and do an actual DJ set, but no; he did pretty much the same thing he does on Night Ripper, except he did it onstage with a laptop. Before his set started, he told the crowd that we shouldn't think what to write about the show on our blogs, that we should just have fun. He also invited a whole lot of the crowd up on the stage to dance, which meant that his laptop kept getting unplugged and he had to keep restarting the show. And still people managed to dance. This was the drink-spilingest crowd I'd ever seen, and the dancing was mostly limited to jumping up and down and yelling "whoo!" and (eventually) crowd-surfing, but still. I was drunk enough that this was still sort of fun, but the set didn't have any peaks or valleys or builds or ecstatic moments. Like Night Ripper, it was just an undifferentiated mess of samples stitched together in a way that stayed rhythmic but didn't necessarily keep a beat. It had roughly nothing to do with what happened the next afternoon at P.S.1, where Matthew Jonson and Beppe Loda DJed. Jonson and Loda have basically nothing to do with each other; Jonson is a minimal techno guy from Canada and Loda is an Italo-disco guy from the 80s (or that's what Michaelangelo Matos told me, anyway), but both of them knew how to let their tracks breathe. I didn't recognize anything they played, so hearing their sets wasn't a matter of playing spot-the-sample; it was just a matter of dancing. Gillis ended his set singing a glitched-up version of "Scentless Apprentice" and so this DJing thing is clearly more about punked-up boundary-smashing for him. But dancing is a whole lot more fun when there's no statement involved.

Download: "Hold Up"
Download: "Bounce That"

I ended up getting a lot more out of Gillis's opening act, the local dancepunk band Professor Murder, who, paradoxically enough, were a lot more beat-minded than the DJ headliner. The guys in Professor Murder switch off instruments often, but their basic lineup goes like this: one guy plays bass, one guy plays drums, one guy plays a big bank of electronic doohickeys that mostly seem to be drum machines, and one guy plays a stand-up drum kit and sings and blows a whistle. So drums are a big thing for this band, and they know how to ride a nasty, rippling groove for a while without ever letting it get boring. The singer's voice is a nasal bleat in the Rapture/Radio 4 tradition, but he limits himself to simplistic chants and quick interjections of nonsense. And unlike most other dancepunk bands, they lean more toward tracks than songs; they're more function than form. That's not to say that they're euphoric or hypnotic; everything is urgent and raggedy and trebly. But Professor Murder uses its party music as a joyous release rather than as pop-art splatter. They might not grab for attention the way that Girl Talk does, but they're a lot more fun to hear.

Download: "Champion"

Portrait of Gnarles Barkey as Tron by Grant Siedlecki

I haven't had a lot to say about Gnarls Barkley in this space mostly because I haven't yet been able to decide how I feel about the whole endeavor: a once-great Southern-rap pioneer with freaky space-mystic pretensions pairing up with a goofy cartoon-funk producer and making an album of tossed-off song sketches and then marketing it to whatever's left of the Alternative Nation by dressing up like Napoleon Dynamite in press photos and generally willingly making fools of themselves whenever possible. I read the Noz hate before I heard the album, and that made it a whole lot harder to hear the album, especially since there's not all that much to hear there. It's a half-assed piece of work by design. They rushed it out, and that's supposed to be part of the charm. But so what they've got is one honest-to-God excellent pop-soul song in "Crazy" and a whole bunch of nice-enough filler. In a very real sense, it doesn't matter what I think of the project. They're platinum now; St. Elsewhere has sold more than Soul Food or Still Standing. Every indie-rock band in the universe is lining up to cover "Crazy." The album never seems to drop out of the top five while rappers with huge hype can't ever seem to stay in for more than a week. Cee-Lo will never usurp Andre 3000 as the public face of the Dungeon Family, but there's a pretty good chance that St. Elsewhere will end up outselling Idlewild. When the NBA season returns, Charles Barkley is going to get really sick of Kenny Smith calling him "Gnarls" (I can't wait). Nick Sylvester said it first: "They've found themselves or been forced into one of the more fascinating instances of the publicists and publicity engines becoming more "artistic" than the albums and artists themselves." In an age when even some of the world's most popular rappers are struggling to stay relevant, Cee-Lo or his handlers managed to figure out a really sneaky way out, using his built-in credibility to snare interest and then keeping it by acting as goofy as possible.

All that was driven home by their show last night. They've gotten big enough that they can sell out the Central Park Summerstage, a pretty huge venue. A few thousand people are willing to pay $35 to see a group that's only released 37 minutes of music. It was more frat-heavy than any crowd I've been in since maybe AmsterJam, and these people were singing along with album tracks, loud. People love them. They win. As for the show, it was good. They've got a 13-piece band: backup singers, strings, the whole thing. They flesh out the record enough that even some of the least developed tracks sound OK. Cee-Lo has a veteran's charisma, and he seems delighted at the chance to play the sex-preacher persona he's been nurturing for a few years, something he tried in the rap world, something that the rap world wouldn't let him get away with. He asked us if we could dig it a whole lot of times, and most of us agreed that we could dig it. The band came out dressed in plaid-heavy school uniforms, fulfilling their running gimmick of dressing like movie characters at every show (I thought they were supposed to be Rushmore, but no, fucking School of Rock). There's an element of buffoonery at work there, but then there's usually an element of buffoonery at work whenever a group of musicians gets popular enough to perform on large stages in front of huge groups of people; otherwise, Mariah Carey wouldn't feel like she needs to dress like a Bond girl and Kiss would've never worn makeup. They worked hard at putting on a fun show, and they succeeded. But there was something awfully strange going on when Cee-Lo talked about how the group is trying to inspire people to explore music and then played a fucking Greenhornes cover. The group did three covers: Greenhornes, Violent Femmes, and (seriously) Doors. (Cee-Lo: "I think Jim Morrison had an affair with my mom." Ew.) No rap; the closest they came was the spoken-word track "Necromancer." Cee-Lo said something about trying to do whatever they could to do a full set since they only had one album, but he never once made mention of his two solo albums or his three albums with Goodie Mob. I could be reading too much into this, but it was almost like he didn't want to scare off the white audience he'd worked so hard to find. It's not the end of the world or anything, but he's a good singer and a great rapper, and it'll be a while before we hear him rap again. It's good to see someone rising to the top of the world after being partially responsible for two of the greatest Southern rap albums of all time; he's earned his spot, but there's something unsettling about how he got there.

Voice review: Debbie Maron on Gnarls Barkley at Webster Hall

But the brilliant marketing continues. Someone had the genius idea of booking Mike Patton's garbage funk-metal project Peeping Tom to open the show; after that mess, the Gnarls songs sounded like symphonies to God. Before last night, the last time I'd seen Patton onstage was at my first-ever concert: Guns N Roses, Metallica, and Faith No More at RFK Stadium in DC, July 1992 (yes, you're jealous). I was way up in the back of the upper deck, but I'll never forget the image of Faith No More ending their set with "Epic," thousands of fists pumping along. Things have changed a lot for Patton since then; he's abandoned FNM's world-obliterating kitchen-sink theatrics and moved into a supremely ridiculous form of cult-based experimentalism: he growls and coughs and does shitty beatboxing, his faithful crowd buys the records, and no one else cares. He's had isolated moments of tolerability (Fantomas's The Director's Cut was pretty good), but virtually everything he's done in the past decade has been self-indulgent bullshit. Peeping Tom is supposed to be his return to accessibility, but it's really just turgid, screechy Tool-metal with DJ scratches. Patton dances like G. Love, and the grooves keep interrupting themselves before they have a chance to build to anything. Rahzel is in the band, and he gets to rap sometimes, but he's generally pretty inaudible except when he and Patton are doing dueling beatboxes. The whole thing left the crowd looking confused and unimpressed, which led to outburst after outburst from Patton: "What is this, the fucking latte crowd? Are we in Starbucks? We're in New York!" Doesn't Patton live in New York? If he does, he probably knows that it's entirely possible to be in a Starbucks and in New York at the same time. He didn't have to do any of that stuff when he opened for GNR, anyway. At one point, the rest of the band left the stage so Rahzel could do his stale "Touch It" routine. When they came back, Patton asked, "If you had a fucking Bentley, wouldn't you want to show it off?" Rahzel is Mike Patton's Bentley.