For Halloween, Pitbull is going as Cuba

Everyone's going to have to wait a week to hear what I think about the new Pitbull album because I'm going to spend the next five days over at Ye Olde CMJ Blog, where I'll be chronicling the events of the citywide industry schmoozefest along with Rob Harvilla and Zach Baron. Regular Status Ain't Hood transmissions will resume next Wednesday. Seriously though, go buy the new Pitbull album. It is so badass.

If Black Dice actually sounded anything like this, maybe I'd like them

I'm generally pretty suspicious whenever any institution tries to make explicit connections between pop music and art, whatever that term means, mainly because musicians' dumbshit ideas about art have resulted in some of the most boring and joyless forms of music ever invented: abstract jazz, prog, glitch, all that shit. Once musicians starts taking themselves uber-seriously and looking for new, more direct forms of self-expression, they usually lose all connection with the idea that music should be fun to listen to, that you can find plenty of ways to play around with ideas and preconceptions without sacrificing any notion of rhythm or melody. The new exhibition at the P.S. 1 is called Music is a Better Noise, and according to the museum's website, it "brings together musicians who make art and artists who make music, or for whom music is an integral part of their creative process." Questionable grammatical construction aside, it's an interesting idea: stripping the music away from art-music and dealing with these musicians' work through a whole other prism. The exhibition is named after a song by Essential Logic, a British postpunk band who made a whole lot of screechy bullshit that I've never been able to stand. I've only ever heard of a little more than half the artists whose work is included in the exhibition, and most of them come from the impenetrably arty wing of pop music, which means I'm not exactly predisposed to giving a fuck about any of them. Still, the exhibition includes a few artists who have made music that I actually like: early-rap weirdo Rammellzee, head Boredom Eye, Big Boys guitarist Tim Kerr, main Suicide guy Alan Vega, vintage-synth meditators Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore. I honestly don't know shit about visual art, but I liked some the stuff on display and didn't like some other stuff, and there wasn't a huge amount of crossover between the artists whose music I like and the artists whose art I like.

But I did have a good time at the show's opening yesterday, and free beer was only a small part of it. I'd never been to P.S. 1 to actually look at art before, and it turns out to be a totally fun thing to do: five bucks to get in, a whole lot of corners and crannies to explore, the weirdly self-satisfied feeling you get from looking at a whole lot of art that you might understand but probably don't. And there was plenty of stuff all over the museum that probably could've fit the music show's theme comfortably, like the painting of the Supremes holding the severed heads of white women. Todd P once told me that a whole lot of people are leaving the noise-rock scene because they can make a whole lot of money in the art world, that art people are a whole lot more likely to take young artists seriously if they make scary music. But then, a whole lot of people in the noise-rock scene went to art-school anyway, and there are crossovers between both worlds all over the place. So it wasn't all that shocking that the first thing I saw walking into the exhibit was the collage that ended up on the cover of Black Dice's Broken Ear Record. In Music is a Better Noise, some stuff deals with musical iconography (Kerr's Sun Ra portrait, Thurston Moore's hero-worship photo collages of Brian Eno and the Ramones), and some stuff doesn't (Don Van Vliet's ugly-ass primitivist paintings, Alan Vega's post-apocalyptic crosses made out of scrap metal and lightbulbs). But I like the idea of an art world so totally besotted with music's mystical power that they'd put together this big show of work that tried to explore it or at least leech some glamor off of it. And I'd rather look at Black Dice cover-art than listen to their music.

But the big downside of the art-music connection became totally explicit in Alan Vega's opening-night performance. With the first couple of Suicide albums, Vega was actually trying to make something approximating pop music, stuff that dealt with depression and squalor but still sounded really cool. In his performance yesterday afternoon, I guess Vega didn't really need to sound good at all, and he didn't. Everything about the performance looked amazing. The room had this weirdly beautiful circus-tent setup left over from an anniversary gala the week before, and so it had brilliantly colored cloth walls and a mirror ball hanging above everything, and Vega performed in front of a blindingly white wall. All the colors and contrasts were sharper and clearer than the ones in rock clubs because rock clubs are dirty and big art galleries aren't. And Vega looks every inch the old-school New York survivor. He's ugly as all hell, like Stephen King with fish-lips, and he wore a leather motorcycle jacket and sunglasses even though he's old enough to be my dad. But the music itself was a total endurance test. The show started when a frizzy-haired lady started making static noise with a Themerin, and she kept doing that while clanky industrialized beats pounded away in the background and Vega ranted for half an hour. Vega doesn't sing; he just repeats phrases over and over, and you couldn't actually hear any of his words because he held his mouth too close to the mic and because the room wasn't set up for acoustics. (I think I heard him say "freedom smashed" a bunch of times, but that's really just a guess.) When he got done, the room applauded politely. I guess you can get away with bullshit like that if you're an artist.

Voice feature: Simon Reynolds on Alan Vega

The snake, the cat, the rat, the dog

A decent Halloween party really doesn't need any particular playlist, since people are probably going to be too busy getting smashed and arguing over who has the best costume to even notice. And if you're actually throwing a party, you'll probably be too busy hanging up fake cobwebs to even read this post. But I like the idea of tapping into a sort of tense, ghoulish undercurrent running through popular music, of soundtracking a party with the sort of songs that make your heartrate inch up a little bit when you're walking home late at night and they come on your iPod. These songs don't actually have to be about werewolves or demons, though it doesn't hurt if a few of them are. They just have to have some eerie quality, something that'll unconsciously creep everyone out. If I felt like dealing with the hassle of throwing a Halloween party, it might sound something like this.

1. John Carpenter: "Halloween Theme." Preview/Buy at iTunes

Duh. This itchy, evocative little piece of music is about ten times better than the shockingly shitty and boring movie that it accompanies, and it's also the reason that DJ Paul and Juicy J have a production career. It's nothing more than a spookily insistent little piano figure, a few urgent electronic ticks, and a couple of ominous synth-noises, and it's probably my single favorite piece of soundtrack music ever. Dr. Dre sampled it for "Murder Ink" on Chronic 2001, and he somehow managed to fuck it up and turn it into a boring pseudo-horrorcore song.

2. DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince: "Nightmare on My Street" Preview/Buy on iTunes

"Parents Just Don't Understand" is probably still the greatest novelty-rap song of all time, but this one, from the same album, comes pretty close. The plotline: Prince goes to see Nightmare on Elm Street with a bunch of friends and then goes to sleep and gets visited by Freddy Krueger, excellently voiced by Jeff & Prince's beatbox Ready Rock C in his scary metal voice. Prince thinks he's just dreaming, so he makes fun of Freddy ("Yo Fred, I think you got me all wrong / I ain't partners with nobody with nails that long.") This turns out to be a bad idea. The song ends when Freddy kills Jeff, which totally gave me the heebies back in 4th grade. More importantly, the track samples the glistening, evil theme from the Nightmare movies and turns it into a really good spooky electro beat; Jazzy Jeff or whoever did the group's production also deserves credit for making great use of the Twilight Zone theme on "Then She Bit Me." If you're me, the nostalgia rush you get from hearing this song will probably trump any shivers you might get from it, but we're still in the early part of the evening, so there's no sense scaring everyone off yet.

3. Geto Boys: "My Mind is Playin' Tricks on Me" Preview/Buy at iTunes

The only Halloween party songs more obvious than this one are probably, like, "Thriller" and the Ghostbusters theme, but this is the only one that has anything like a legitimate sense of fear and paranoia. The best part, of course, is where Bushwick Bill is out on Halloween stealing kids' candy and attacks a huge guy who turns out to be in his imagination; Bill's performance in the video is some hilariously over-the-top shit. But the song is really about a sort of fierce paranoia, the feeling of walls closing in on you, and the lazy, insinuating guitar-line in the beat worms its way into your head and keeps nagging at you. Fifteen years later, I'm not sure anyone's managed to record a rap song anywhere near this unsettling.

4. Tricky: "Hell is Round the Corner" Preview/Buy at iTunes

The lyrics don't make a lick of sense, but the half-conscious mumbles and humming strings and dusty drum-lope and wispy, dissolving female vocals all wash together into an impenetrably dark and forbidding mood-piece creepier than anything RZA ever came up with. It sticks with you. Worth noting: iTunes has Maxinquaye for $5.99, so now there's no excuse for not owning it.

5. The Specials: "Ghost Town" Preview/Buy at iTunes

The hyperactive British second-wave ska OGs had their biggest hit ever with this one, though I'm not sure they ever recorded a song that sounds less like hyperactive British second-wave ska. The song starts with a lonely siren seeping through a fog of howling-wind sound-effects before a horror-movie organ and a few rumbling horns kick in. The song is about a town falling to pieces, clubs shutting down because people can't stop fighting each other. All these weirdly little otherwordly vocal effects drop in out of nowhere, shriek away for a few seconds, and then disappear. There's heavy echo everywhere; both this song and "Hell is Round the Corner" steal heavily from dub and come out sounding better than any actual dub tracks I've ever heard. "Ghost Town" sprawls out slowly and languidly until it dissipates into the air and you're not sure what you just heard.

6. Soft Cell: "Sex Dwarf" Preview/Buy at iTunes

Just a deeply fucked song. Marc Almond already had beefed up the standard icy posthuman new-wave singing voice with a haughty snarl, and here he turns it up to demonic levels while talking about some S&M shit that I still can't even understand. And the track throws all these shrieks and moans and graveyard sound-effects over its Moroder pulse and implies all the nasty shit that your next-door neighbor is probably doing right now.

7. Iggy Pop: "Nightclubbing" Preview/Buy at iTunes

I love this: it's 1976, and punk is just emerging and biting the torn-up blues that Iggy had perfected years earlier. He could've just attached himself to these new kids and kept plugging away at it, but instead he latches onto David Bowie and applies his bleary destroy-everything aesthetic to disco, which was on its way to temporarily replacing blues-based rock as the most culturally important music in the world. "Nightclubbing" starts out with heartbeat drums and luxuriant pianos and smeary synths, just like a disco song, and the lyrics are about going to clubs and dancing. But instead of ecstatically gelling and unfolding, all those elements slash into each other and trip all over themselves. Iggy's voice just drips merciless sarcasm and contempt. The song sounds like it hates you, and it still somehow works as party music.

8. Laid Back: "White Horse" Preview/Buy at iTunes

Disco didn't always need Iggy's help to sound scary. This one is clipped, evil synth-disco that might've learned a trick or two from John Carpenter. Everything is slick and harsh and synthetic: sharp, bubbling drum-machines, staccatto plinks, damaged flutes. When the vocal comes in, it takes the form of a multitracked horde of affectless goth-vampire cabaret-singers warning you not to do coke (I think). It sounds greasy and fucked-up and dangerous. Also: creepiest-man-alive Lars Von Trier directed the group's video for "Bakerman," which is some truly disturbing shit if you're as afraid of heights as I am. For some indefensible reason, iTunes is only selling "White Horse" in the form of its Funkstar De Luxe remix, but I can't imagine Funkstar De Luxe could fuck up a song this perfect that badly.

9. Danzig: "Twist of Cain" not on iTunes, WTF

It's not disco at all, but the relentless pulse at the center of this one makes it sound pretty great after "White Horse." Danzig's never really been scary, but I'm not sure anyone's ever done the whole over-the-top theatrical child-of-the-night act better. And this song has one of the all-time great metal riffs, a ballsy stomp that sounds huge even coming out of my shitty laptop speakers. If you pick the Misfits' infinitely shittier and dumber "Halloween" over this masterpiece, you are an idiot.

10. Lil Scrappy: "No Problem" Preview/Buy at iTunes

In the first track-review I ever wrote for Pitchfork, I said this was "zombie crunk." It still is; that oozing, throbbing piano is the sort of thing that Dario Argento and Goblin might've come up with for the Dawn of the Dead soundtrack. I hope Scrappy manages to maintain that snarly menace now that he's down with G-Unit; "Money in the Bank" does not bode well.

11. Sean Paul & Mr. Vegas: "Haffi Get Da Gal Yah" Preview/Buy at iTunes

Like the last couple of tracks, this one has a dark, authoritarian stomp, this time courtesy of the martial beat and Sean Paul's monumental growl. But it's Mr. Vegas's ghostly, nagging chorus that really drives this one into the stratosphere. He sounds like he's hurting you and laughing about it.

12. Goodie Mob: "Cell Therapy" Preview/Buy at iTunes

Everything about this song screams fierce paranoia: the floating, dubby pianos, the helium singsong Cee-Lo verse, the miles-deep roars of the other three guys. But the single creepiest thing about this song is that burbling noise that inexplicably phases in and out all through it; it sounds like there's a demon watching you and chuckling to himself.

Bring em out bring em out

Other than the NBA Live games, Def Jam: Fight for NY is the only video game I've played with any regularity over the past couple of years. One obvious reason is that it's fun. The moves aren't particularly hard to master once you get a feel for the flow of it, but they're hard enough that's pretty easy for me to beat any of my friends' asses at it when they come over. The special moves are completely ridiculous in a defying-the-laws-of-physics sort of way, and the punches and broken bottles and blood-splatters actually look like they hurt. Whenever you bang someone's head into a concrete wall or slam a car door on their head, you keep expecting it to get old. It never does. The other reason I keep playing the game is the virtually endless recombinations of possible fights between B-list rappers, some of the most random shit you could ever hope to come up with. Havoc vs. Bonecrusher? Mack 10 vs. FamLay? Memphis Bleek vs. Elephant Man? We also get a liberal sprinkling of "hip-hop celebrities" who mostly don't actually have anything to do with hip-hop: Henry Rollins, Carmen Electra, Omar Epps, Danny Trejo. And there's the usual roster of made-up characters, most of whom are based on utterly laughable racial stereotypes. The game's story mode is some utterly ridiculous shit about controlling the streets or whatever, and I love that it doesn't involve solving any puzzles or making any decisions. You just fight guys, win, and then get money, which you spend on ugly sweatpants or iced-out chains or whatever. It's good times.

The one big problem with the game is that it doesn't have any pairs of rappers who have been actively beefing at any time throughout history. The game would be a lot more fun if you had Canibus and LL Cool J to play around with, or maybe if you could have Joe Budden DDT the Game. The closest you can come is weird little proxy beefs, rappers who haven't ever directly addressed each other but who probably don't like each other by association: Prodigy against Fat Joe, stuff like that. Remember that one T.I. mixtape when Scarface said that Lil Flip wasn't from his neighborhood? Well, now Flip can finally get his revenge against Scarface, but that's still not particularly exciting. The game is awfully light on actual rap stars: other than maybe Ludacris and Busta Rhymes, most of the biggest names are famous-for-being-famous types, rappers who don't do much actual rapping these days: Snoop Dogg, Method Man, Ice-T. And even though the cover of the box says Def Jam, a lot of what was then the label's active roster is missing: LL, Cam'ron, Ja Rule, Jay-Z.

So I got pretty amped when the early reports of the Def Jam game, Def Jam: Icon, started coming out. The game has a terrible name (the word Icon does not connote violence in any way whatsoever), and apparently there will be a feature where walls of flame or whatever will come up in time to the beats playing in the background, which sounds really hokey and dumb. The game is going to be coming out on PS-3 and Xbox 360, and I'm not going to be able to afford either of those things unless I find a thousand-dollar bill on the ground sometime in the next couple of months. But there's one big reason I'm really amped to see how this game turns out: it looks like EA Sports has actually invested in a roster of rappers who are actually popular and relevant now, not the old string of washed-up vultures. Or, that is, they invested in probably the single biggest rapper right now: T.I. He and Big Boi are the only new names confirmed. But then, if they went ahead and sprung for T.I., there's a pretty good chance that they've put some thought into this thing. And if Big Boi is in the game, there's at least a half-decent chance that Andre 3000 will be in it too, and that would be hilarious. More to the point: if there's a roster of A-List rappers, we'll finally get to stage some epic battles. T.I. and Ludacris are already confirmed, so it'll be fun to play out the quickly-squashed beef that happened when they traded barbs on an early version of Young Buck's "Stomp." And for a second there, it seemed possible that we'd finally get to have Nas fight Jay-Z, which would pretty much justify the existence of a fighting game with an all-rapper cast just by itself. But MTV dashed my hopes earlier this week when it reported that Jay-Z wouldn't be in the game because of some bullshit about preserving his cool. Jay is the president of Def Jam; he's synonymous with the company, and that means he should be contractually obligated to take part in goofy cross-promotional stunts like this. He's apparently an unlockable character in the new NBA Live game, which doesn't even make any sense. Nobody wants to see Jay-Z play basketball. We want to see him beat some ass. Maybe he's just afraid that people will have too much fun using, like, Bubba Sparxxx to completely thrash him. But I'd say that this is more disappointing than the last three leaked Kingdom Come tracks combined.

Voice review: Nick Catucci on Def Jam: Vendetta

That's 120 Days' album cover. There are 120 slashes there, and you can count them if you want.

120 Days + Dysrhythmia + WZT Hearts
Union Pool
October 24, 2006

Walking into the musty backroom at the Williamsburg bar Union Pool last night, it was immediately obvious who was in 120 Days and who wasn't; the guys in the band were the ones with the elegantly straight hair and the immaculate wardrobes and the dazed look in their eyes. Supposedly huge in their native Norway, 120 Days are just one of a damn near endless string of next big things from overseas that'll be invading the city next week during CMJ. They're signed to Vice Records, and the label is already pimping them hard; they're in town for about a week, and they're playing something like nine shows: basements, industry parties, weird cobbled-together bills. And so that's how they ended up on one of Todd P's Brooklyn noise-rock bills last night, sharing a stage with Philadelphia math-metal noise-blurters Dysrhythmia and Baltimore wall-of-squall electronic-improv types WZT Hearts. Vice Records curated the night's lineup, but it was still pretty much alien territory for the Norwegians. The songs on 120 Days' new self-titled debut are totally allergic to restraint; they're built for huge outdoor festivals, and they push outward and unfold upward, aiming for cheap seats. And here they were playing a room that could comfortably hold maybe 150 people ("a tiny Bowery Ballroom or a big Pete's Candy Store," Todd called it), crowding the ornate old stage with their vintage synths and their weird boxes with lots of knobs. So those songs didn't have the space to roll around and echo the way they should, but they still sounded pretty great. The songs are long, and they flesh out their arena-rock reach with twinkling New Order guitars and oscillating Moroder synth blips. The band has managed to incorporate electronics into their show pretty seamlessly; they play guitars and drums sometimes, but they're a lot more reliant on drum-machines and sequencers. The singer uses a regular mic to holler his vaguely inspirational gibberish, but he keeps a vocoder right next to it. And I'm not even sure he sings words into that vocoder; he uses it mostly for texture. And the bass anchors everything and keeps all the swirling from spinning off into diffusion. The band can get a bit boring when they reach for Primal Scream's epic scuzz, but when they're pillaging krautrock for its untapped stadium possibilities, they're on to something.

Download: "Come Out (Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone)"

It's weirdly appropriate that that 120 Days played right after Dysrhythmia, since 120 Days' whole thing is, um, rhythmia. Their songs mine repetition for all it's worth, stretching their languid beats out further and further into space until they become mantras. Dysrhythmia, on the other hand, falls all over itself lurching in every direction at once, interrupting itself every few seconds and spazzing off into some other new counterintuitive time-signature. So the two bands had a sort of interesting point-counterpoint going; they felt like each other's textural opposites. Dysrhythmia sounds pretty much exactly like what you'd expect given the name and the Relapse affiliation: uber-jittery instrumental jazz-metal with screechy siren-riffs and berserk time-changes. The two guys up front do a lot of headbanging and make a lot of goofy facial expressions, and they're fun to watch. The bassist and guitarist trade off leads and sometimes sound like they're playing two completely different songs. A few years ago, when the Oxes and the Fucking Champs and a million other bands were doing this stuff, I couldn't stand it. These days, it feels like a nice change of pace. I liked them best when they locked into actual grooves for a second or two, but they didn't do that often. Their one long, extended groove was sort of an accident, apparently: the drummer locked into a repeating pattern that must've been in like a 25-14 time-signature or something while the bass and guitar slowly dropped out. For a few minutes, I didn't realize anything was amiss; I just thought it was the extended weird-drum part of the song. But no: the guitarist eventually got on the mic and apologized for the equipment fuckup, promising that something would happen soon. A couple of minutes later: "All right, folk, that's it. Sorry." Funny: it was my favorite part of the set.

Download: "SealBreakerVoid"
Voice review: Don Allred on Dysrhythmia's Pretest

WZT Hearts' main laptop guy is Jason Urick, a friend of mine from Baltimore who ran an indie record store until recently. I saw them open a whole lot of shows back in Baltimore, and I always made a point of telling Jason how I couldn't stand them. But when I saw them open for Dan Higgs at another Todd P show earlier this year, they'd integrated a few rhythmic dynamics into their repulsively ugly drone-assault thing, and I liked little pieces of it. I'm happy to report that they've kept pushing toward something that could actually be described as music; last night's WZT Hearts show was the first one I've ever actively enjoyed. They started out with pretty but ominous humming atmospherics with little shards of guitar, and they kept building it and building it until some quiet but urgent drums kicked in; the whole thing managed to be simultaneously trancey and visceral. After a while, the drone inevitably broke and white noise came flooding in to fill the vaccuum, but they slowly layered fluttering beeps over the scrapes and squeals, bringing pretty to their ugly and eventually fading into something resembling jagged but shimmery tribal disco. They're going for Boredoms, of course, but the surprise is that they're actually not that far off, though it would be nice if they gave us something to look at other than Jason nonchalantly sipping a beer and tapping a few keys on his laptop.

Download: "t2d1edit"

Be afraid

Gwen Stefani's career should've ended about fifteen different times by now. Not too many other beneficiaries of the mid-90s ska-pop boom are still around. The guy from Sugar Ray is hosting Extra. The guy from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones was a drive-time radio DJ in L.A. before he got fired earlier this year. According to Wikipedia, both Reel Big Fish and Goldfinger still exist; their recent achievements include getting dropped from their label and covering "99 Red Balloons" on the Eurotrip soundtrack, respectively. I have no idea what's become of Save Ferris. And the girl from No Doubt has sold eight million copies of a schizophrenic teenpop solo album.

Of course, No Doubt was hardly ever a ska band; they just wore checkerboard pants and talked about Madness in interviews. Still, Stefani's chameleon act is pretty stunning in retrospect. She can't sing, but that's never been much of a problem. Tragic Kingdom blew up on the strength of a feminist bubblepunk jam and blew up further from a terrible power ballad that egregiously jacked Aerosmith's "Dream On." No Doubt's second big-label album flopped, and she married the guy from Bush, who has since become yet another alterna-rock casualty even if he did manage to score a role in Constantine. No Doubt managed to pull of the dubious discovering-dancehall move on Rock Steady, and Stefani's big solo breakout came when she appeared on singles by Eve and Moby, both of whom have largely faded into pop-cult nonentity status. Her solo album and obligatory clothing line both had terrible names, and her clothes are ugly as all hell. Her solo singles are as follows: a heavily vocoderized Eurotechno cheese-blast (#47 US), an awkward but still pretty great repurposing of a mid-90s dancehall classic (#7 US), a deeply bizarre stomp-clap cheerleader chant with acoustic guitars and farting tubas shoehorned in (#1 US), a shivery bells-and-whistles new-wave prom-theme power-ballad (#13 US), a soft-focus new-romantic dancepop track with Slim Thug rapping on it #21 US), and a bleepy electro club-jam (#49 US). She's released half of the songs from her album as singles and managed to turn all of them into at least minor hits. None of them have sounded much like each other, and the two that sound most like typical top-40 radio fodder are the only two that didn't crack the top 40. "Hollaback Girl" is probably the weirdest #1 single in years, and it's also the first song to hit #1 after Billboard decided to start counting iTunes downloads toward its totals. So that means it managed to climb to the top because people were actually buying it, not just because radio programmers thought they could use it to keep people from flipping channels. Stefani has managed to turn herself into a pop mainstay, the sort of teflon figure who can navigate shifting trends effortlessly and still maintain her preteen appeal after her 35th birthday. Boomer-rock is one thing, but top 40 radio just doesn't allow for that kind of longevity; just watch Janet Jackson desperately thrash around as her record bricks hard enough to get Jermaine Dupri fired.

All that said, I can't imagine Stefani is going to keep her winning streak going with her new single, a ghastly mess called "Wind It Up." The Neptunes had something to do with the track; it's got their spit-bubble "Drop It Like It's Hot" drums and wobbly bass-noises and Pharrell's hypeman mumbles. But it's also got waves of off-center polka-march horns and sub-Fergie rapping and an utterly superfluous timbale break. And the hook is Gwen yodeling. It makes some sense that Stefani is using this nonsense as the leadoff single from her new album; it's as deeply inexplicable in its own way as "Hollaback Girl" was, and it has chants and marching-band signifiers that sound vaguely similar if you listen hard enough. But Stefani managed to invest "Hollaback Girl" with a sort of goofily likable tough-chick swagger; it might've been pantomime, but at least it was something. "Wind It Up" takes all those elements and makes them as repulsive and otherworldly as possible. Everything about the song is unpleasant enough to make me doubt my own sanity. If this thing actually turns out to be a hit, it's going to be a very, very long winter for some of us. I don't take any pleasure whatsoever in announcing an immediate and visceral dislike for this song. Stefani mostly makes the type of frothy, vigorous, hooky dancepop that I've sort of made a career out of defending. In a lot of ways, she's everything I want out of a pop-star right now: danceable, happily frivolous, open-hearted, experimental, expensively produced. But I can't imagine how she convinced herself that anyone would ever want to hear her yodel.

The best part of the song is where Pharrell mutters, "She's crazy, right?" Yes. Yes, she is.

Voice review: Amy Linden on Gwen Stefani's Love.Angel.Music.Baby

Never forget

Hip-house is the first music I ever loved. In 1988, when I was nine years old, my family moved for a year from Baltimore to Twickenham, a suburb of London, so that my dad, a history professor, could work on a book about British army barracks that he never ended up finishing. I started paying attention to pop music maybe a week or two after landing there. In Baltimore, most of the kids I knew were pretty much oblivious to any pop culture that wasn't Nintendo or Transformers or the Orioles. In Twickenham, though, kids actually listened to the radio and bought records and rode their bikes outside; I guess Nintendo hadn't really penetrated the market there yet. And pop music suddenly became a whole lot easier to follow because of Top of the Pops, the weekly TV show that counted down the top 40 singles and had artists coming out to lip-sync on weird sci-fi stages with lots of scaffolding and dry ice. It was pretty easy to figure out what was lame (Simply Red, Rick Astley, Jason Donovan) and what wasn't (Poison, Roachford, S'Express). I wasn't really cognizant of the differences between musical genres; all I knew was that some stuff was slow and boring and some stuff was fast and bright and fun. And about half the tapes I spent my allowance on were hip-house compilations. I didn't know that rap was underground black music from the US that had begun crossing over to the mainstream a few years earlier back home and was just beginning to catch on in the UK. I didn't know that house music was this revolutionary electronic mutation of disco or that kids a few years older than me were gathering by the thousands in fields near my house so they could get high and dance to it. I didn't know that hip-house was a briefly popular combination of the two, that American rappers were jumping on the bandwagon and recording a song or two before it would fall out of fashion and get regularly clowned for years in magazines like ego trip. I didn't know that the stuff was huge in clubs back home in Baltimore, that it would eventually pick up a bunch of other influences and mutate into Baltimore club music. All I knew was that the best tapes at Woolworth were always the ones that said hip-house on the cover.

Going back and listening to those old tapes today (I still have most of them, thank God), the people putting together the compilations didn't really understand what hip-house was either. None of those tapes have the Jungle Brothers' "I'll House You" or Big Daddy Kane's "The House That Cee Built" or most of the other house records that credible American rappers were making. Most of them, I guess, took the term as shorthand for black dance music with something that sort of sounded like rapping somewhere on it. So most of the compilations had Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" and Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance" even though neither of those songs had anything to do with house. My favorite one, the one just called Hip-House, was a total stylistic mess. I lost the tape's case years ago, and the tape itself just has an MCA logo and a note that says "please see inlay card for details," which is some bullshit. I can't remember the names of a lot of the artists, but the tape had a bunch of obscure acid-house tracks with no rapping and a few embryonic hip-house tracks from British rappers like the Cookie Crew and the awesomely named Wee Papa Girl Rappers (sample lyric: "Rap rap / Rap ra-rap rap"). It also had one straight-up disco track (Adeva's histrionic cover of "Respect"), a bunch of dancey pop-rap songs (Rob Base's "Get on the Dancefloor," Kid N Play's "2 Hype"), and "Straight Out the Jungle," a Jungle Brothers song which wasn't "I'll House You" and which didn't sound anything like house but which did sort of bite go-go, which I guess could've confused some people. It had Salt N Pepa's absolutely inexplicable version of "Twist and Shout," which is terrible but still better than the Beatles and Isley Brothers versions (not as good as the Ferris Bueller one, though). And it had Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True," which had rapping and house pianos and disco strings and Duran Duran breathy pop vocals and which, now that I hear it again, was just a great, great song. The compilers' confusion as to the actual meaning of the term meant all this great and uncategorizable stuff found its way in; it's like they were accidentally proposing a big-tent definition of hip-house that was better than the pretty-great genre that already existed. The tape is probably still one of my five or six favorite albums ever.

Baltimore club notwithstanding, hip-house didn't last much longer than the year I spent in Twickenham. A bunch of mysterious continental European collectives like Snap and Technotronic and C & C Music Factory turned it into facelessly muscular jock-jams and had a bunch of early-90s American hits. Madonna sort-of rapped on "Vogue," which was sort of a house song. Deee-Lite, a group of pan-global utopian hipster club-kid weirdos based in New York, somehow convinced Q-Tip to rap on "Groove Is In the Heart," which might be the best song ever. In England, acid house morphed into hardcore rave and then drum-and-bass, and it always kept a few elements of rap and dancehall somewhere in there, so I guess grime is a distant descendant. In 2000, the house DJ Armand Van Helden decided that he wanted to be taken seriously by rap dudes, so he recruited Common to rap on one song on his album Killing Puritans, but nobody noticed because the album was terrible. (Paradoxically, the one song where Junior Sanches and Van Helden himself rapped about girls' coochies was pretty good.) I don't even know if Fannypack exists anymore, but their two albums are both totally hip-house in the Cookie Crew mold, and they're both great. A couple of years ago, the Rub guys put out a couple of hip-house mix CDs, which should've caused a full-on revival in Fader circles but didn't. Hip-house still lingers a bit in Southern rap and in dancehall. Six or seven years ago, Timbaland and the Neptunes were jacking tricks from dance music all the time. Missy Elliot's "4 My People" and "Lose Control" are totally hip-house songs; so is Kanye West's "The New Workout Plan." According to Simon Reynolds, Mannie Fresh apprenticed with Chicago house producer Steve "Silk" Hurley. Lil Jon claims to be interested by the cheesed-out Euro-techno they play in strip clubs, which probably counts. And the new Diddy album, as I wrote on Friday, is basically the dance album he's talked about making forever.

But we'll probably never see another complete recombination of rap and dance because both styles of music have since fractured into a kajillion different subgenres and because they've both drawn boundary lines and become isolationist. Case in point: the column Noz wrote today where he indicts remixer CJ Mackintosh as an enemy of hip-hop because rap nerds bought import UK singles with house remixes on them. So hip-house's brief little moment in the sun might've just been a freakish anomaly, a tiny little sliver of time when two subcultures dropped their defences and found common ground. I miss it.

Voice review: Jon Caramanica on DJ Ayres and Cosmo Baker Present: Hip-House

Me Grimlock kick butt

Pennywise + Circle Jerks
Warsaw
October 19, 2006

Of all the mid-90s California punk bands that achieved something resembling fame during the post-Green Day boom, Pennywise was always the most dependable. Rancid started fucking around with ska as soon as anyone noticed they existed, and they kept playing with other genres after that. NOFX told lots of jokes and sometimes did awful fake-lounge cover songs. When they got a decent album budget, the Offspring jumped headlong into bubblegum. But Pennywise always sounded exactly like Bad Religion, or at least like Bad Religion sounded after they got done dicking around with keyboards and before Greg Graffin decided to memorize a thesaurus. Pennywise was melodic California hardcore through and through: fast drums, big vocal hooks, crunchy riffs, bro-down singalong choruses, absolutely nothing else. That fundamentalist rigor sometimes produced great results; I wore out my shoplifted cassette copy of Unknown Road through constant replay. And there was always something weirdly exotic about the band; they didn't look anything like punks, or at least not the punks I knew in Baltimore. They just looked like average fired-up California fratboys who loved punk music but never saw the point of the clothes or the image. They wore board-shorts and baseball caps, and guitarist Fletcher Dragge looked sort of like Kevin Nash. And they're still doing all that stuff. They're eight albums deep into their career, and their new stuff sounds exactly like their old stuff except not quite as good. They've had brushes with death and with commercial success, and they're still churning out the same album every two years, soldiering on. There's something heroic about that sort of persistence, but there's also something weird. They're all grown men, and you have to wonder if it ever gets old playing "Bro Hymn" to drunk moshpits every night.

Apparently not. Last night at Warsaw, frontman Jim Lindberg was so drunk he could barely stand up, and he looked like someone who gets that drunk every night and never stops enjoying it. Being drunk has always been a big part of Pennywise's thing; Loveline made a late-90s running joke out of the time Dragge cornered Dr. Drew and intentionally puked on him. And there was a lot of slurred talk last night. Two songs in, they were debating proper drinking form discussing what drink someone should bring them (Dragge: "Jameson? That's a fucking woman's drink!"). And Lindberg at least had the wherewithal to realize that something of local significance was happening tonight: "I say if the fucking mets win, we just go fucking terrorize in the streets of Brooklyn tonight!" (He's not from New York.) But that sort of extreme drunkenness didn't do much for the band aesthetically. Soaring vocal hooks don't soar so much when the singer can't get them out properly. And the venue wasn't helping much. Warsaw is cavernous, and it was only about half-full last night, with the smallest crowd I've ever seen in there. All the echo in the room rendered the band's lightspeed pummel flat and lifeless. None of that stopped the knuckleheads in the crowd from wilding the fuck out and maintaining a constant circle-pit throughout the night, blatantly ignoring the No Moshing sign at the ticket desk. Even with all that, the band kept telling everyone to get in the pit, and maybe that's what inspired some dude to dump a glass of what I can only hope was water on my head at the beginning of their "Blitzkrieg Bop" cover. (They also covered a Misfits song and, seriously, "Fight for Your Right to Party.") But the set only came to life on the last song, the eternally rousing dedication-to-dead-friends "Bro Hymn," which is the sort of anthem that makes drunk people in the crowd leap the stage barricade, grab the mic and sing along, which is what about half the crowd did at the end of the set. Two minutes later, the Mets lost.

Pennywise is still pounding this stuff out, but they don't exactly make grown-folks music. But neither do openers the Circle Jerks, a band formed the year I was born, and they're still plugging away at it for reasons I can't even begin to comprehend. When I was in high school, the Circle Jerks were my favorite of the class-of-81 LA punk bands, mostly because their stuff sounded more like 90s punk than anyone else's. They trafficked in short, interchangeably catchy bursts of nasal sarcasm, and they never got remotely arty. During their Decline of Western Civilization scenes, the crowd was slamdancing in ways that didn't look too different from the slamdancing I was doing in church-hall basements; they weren't yelling oblique insults at Kickboy Face or waiting for Darby Crash to pick up the mic. They made sense to me.

But last night's set didn't make much sense. Keith Morris looks nothing like he did when he was writing the songs that his band was playing. His face is full of grizzled resignation, not babyish anger, and his dreads reach down past his back. Other than guitarist Greg Hetson, who at least jumps around, all the band's members play their songs calmly with their feet planted; it's hard to imagine these guys as kids spazzing out the way the songs demand. Sometimes, Morris was openly dismissive of the audience: "Where did you get the Black Flag shirt? Is there a Hot Topic here?" At the beginning of the set, Morris promised "about 22 songs," and I'm pretty sure they delivered, but nobody needs to hear 22 Circle Jerks songs played back-to-back. The songs are still great, and I still got a Pavlovian rush when I heard the opening guitars from "Back Against the Wall." But there was still something deeply depressing in seeing a group of old professionals making their living playing songs they wrote when they were children. Keith Morris has been making music for roughly the same amount of time as Vince Gill, who I saw earlier this week. The big difference between them: Gill still looks like he enjoys making music.

In command with his cash, he drops the whole stash

Earlier this week, LCD Soundsystem released "45:33," a single continuous track whose title is also its running time; you can buy it on iTunes for $9.99 even though it's technically just one track. It's really good, a disco odyssey thing with all these movements and tangents and epiphanic horn-burst moments that still works as a single piece of music because of the unified pulse underlying the whole thing; the way it uses repetition borders on psychedelic. But the story behind the song may be more interesting than the song itself. James Murphy put the track together after Nike hired him to soundtrack an exercise routine. So it's a piece of art that exists because of its corporate sponsors, made to the specifications of those sponsors. You could, of course, say the same thing about any album that comes out on a major label; since the bullshit work-made-for-hire law went into effect, that's certainly how the courts treat music. But even with the most nakedly commercial mainstream-pop album, we're supposed to believe that it's the work of a person or a group of people who are so bursting with drive and talent that they need to get out into the world, that someone, on some level, has an artistic mission. But "45:33" doesn't attempt any such pretense. It's utilitarian art that exists for completely commercial purposes, a work made for hire in the purest sense, and as far as I know it has no precedent in modern pop music other than, like, commercial jingles. Nick Sylvester is, of course, extremely amped about all this: "Shit like this, these weird goofy product tie-ins, ARE the NEW ALBUM." I can't say I have any idea which way the music industry is going, since it's pretty much the most chaotic corner of the pop-culture world, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that record labels have no idea how they're going to keep making money in the years to come, and this seems to be as sensible an approach as any.

Case in point: When the Billboard charts come out next week, the number-one album in the country is going to come from a guy who isn't so much an artist as a sponsor. I absolutely hated Diddy for years and years, and that's mostly because I worked at a summer camp in 1997 and thus had to hear "I'll Be Missing You" and "Mo Money Mo Problems" on repeat-loop for three months straight. I spent years laboring under the unfortunate idea that someone who couldn't really rap and who admitted to paying other people for his lyrics couldn't possibly make any music that meant anything at all. Ghostwriting has always been around in rap, but it's been more a dirty secret of the industry; people would brag about writing other people's lyrics, but no one would ever admit to buying someone else's words. But Diddy actually sort of bragged about it, and other rappers' fingerprints are all over Press Play. The biggest and weirdest example is "The Future," which Pharoahe Monch wrote. There's not a single person in rap history who sounds remotely like that guy, and so "The Future" basically works as a pretty good Monch impersonation, Diddy doing Monch's scattered clumps of syllables and nasal preacher cadence almost exactly like Monch does them. It's hard to say why Diddy hired Monch; the song is way too weird and off-beat to ever be a hit, and it's not like it'll get Diddy the critical love or the street credibility that he has never had and never will have. So we have to we have to assume that Diddy hired Monch to write the song just because he likes Monch and wants to rap like him. And in the end, it doesn't even matter why Diddy hired Monch. Pharoahe Monch hasn't released an album in something like seven years, and "The Future" is one of the only Monch songs that's been released this year. And so next week, the number-one album in the country is going to have a Pharoahe Monch song on it, something that would've been virtually unthinkable a few years ago. "The Future" might be rapped by Diddy, but it's not Diddy's song. Diddy's just the guy whose ideas and financial backing gave the song life. I don't have a list of producer credits in front of me, but I'm pretty sure Diddy outsourced all the beats as well. And that makes Press Play basically a commissioned work from start to finish. Diddy admits as much on the album: "We interrupt this hot motherfucking album that y'all are presently listening to to hear a few words from our generous sponsor."

Diddy's sponsorship has made for a pretty good album. Press Play is probably the best New York rap album since, um, Fishscale, which isn't saying much but is at least saying something. The entire album only features four guest rappers; that's the same number as appeared on just "All About the Benjamins" in 1997. Those four rappers (Big Boi, Twista, Shawnna, Nas) shit all over him, of course. But Diddy's voice only occasionally grates over the course of the album. His writers come up with a few great lines for him: "The day I die, let a G4 fly and dump my ashes over NY." When he doesn't have a good writer working for him, it shows, like on "Special Feeling," when he's talking about "girl, let's have a sexy escapade" and pronouncing passionate like pash-o-net so he can rhyme it with won't forget. But he has good writers most of the time, and he's got a certain rich-guy exuberance in his lispy monotone. And he stays on beat, which is more than I can say of most of the rappers in New York.

But Press Play works better as a dance album than as a rap album. A few years ago, Diddy was making a big fuss in the press about how he was working on an electronic dance album. He supposedly did work with guys like Felix da Housecat and DJ Hell, guys whose names actually ring bells in the dance-music world, and he told Mixmag or one of those dance-music magazines that he used to go dancing at the Paradise Garage, a dubious claim considering he was maybe 12 when that club closed. The only thing that actually came out of that project was a twelve-inch single called "Let's Get Ill," an absolutely god-awful collaboration with Deep Dish and Kelis. But Diddy didn't really abandon the project; he just folded it into Press Play. "Come to Me," the single, is more disco than rap: itchy synth-bleeps, silky histrionics from the one Pussycat Doll who can actually sing, soft clouds of strings, only a couple of quick verses from Diddy. "Wanna Move" is basically a Ciara song with guest appearances from Diddy and Big Boi, and it's got the gleaming electro glide of her singles. "Diddy Rock" is one of those blindingly futuristic Timbaland tracks that might as well be house. "Thought You Said" is totally circa-97 boutique drum-and-bass with gorgeous little string-figures. There are a few straight-up rap tracks, but they all have rushing drums or synth squiggles somewhere in the mix. And even the cover looks like it should be belong to mid-90s Astralwerks compilation. With all those dance signifiers, Diddy turns his total lack of street cred into something resembling an asset. Too much New York rap is more concerned with hardness and formalism than little things like melody and rhythm and pleasure. But Diddy doesn't have to prove how hard he is because everyone knows he isn't hard at all. Part of the reason why Southern rap has been so ascendant over the last couple of years is its openness to dance-music influence. Southern rap producers don't seem to care whether anyone thinks their music isn't hip-hop enough, and that lack of purism can lead to some truly interesting and alive music. New York rap used to be the same way, back in the late 80s, when virtually every credible rapper had a hip-house record and when clubs would spin rap alongside new jack swing and synthpop and dancehall and house and Latin freestyle and Madonna. Diddy comes from that era, and he's got the money to pay the right people to bring it back.

Voice review: Eric Weisbard on Puff Daddy's Forever

I wonder how Freddie Foxxx feels about this (Rakim portrait by Grant Siedlecki)

It's sort of impressive that VH1 has managed to churn out three straight years of Hip-Hop Honors shows without ever adequately explaining just what the show is supposed to do. It's not an awards show or a hall of fame, and there aren't any trophies or plaques or statuettes handed out. The format of the show hasn't changed much since the beginning: important rappers get laudatory video packages and tribute performances from younger rappers, and then they come out and perform themselves. That's it. The whole format is full of problems. There's a reason why rap cover-songs hardly ever happen; the music is inherently self-referential, and there's not that much to be gained from one rapper pretending to be another when he's already basically pretending to be himself. And it's a bit ridiculous to sum up long and twisty careers with two-minute video montages. It's always interesting to see which rappers the network decides to get behind, but it's not like all these people haven't been honored to death in virtually every other conceivable format. But the network always manages to put together a pretty entertaining show, a weird combination of actual transcendent moments (Big Daddy Kane last year) and fascinating trainwrecks (Vivica Fox's first-year hosting job). And they'll probably never run out of important rappers to honor, so they can keep doing this forever.

9:00: Just like a whole lot of old rap albums, the show opens with a skit. Ice-T, this year's host, shows up to the Law & Order: SVU set because he forgot he was hosting the show tonight. Christopher Meloni: "Rakim rocks!" This is not what I'd call a good omen.

9:02: The skit continues! Ice shows up to the venue late, and he's mad because Fab 5 Freddy tells him that he got someone named Mike B to host instead. Mike B turns out to be Michael Bloomberg, who I guess has enough free time to do crap like this. He's wearing sneakers, which is supposed to be hilarious. Bloomberg: "You can't run the greatest city in the world if you're not down with hip-hop." But Giuliani did! So did Ed Koch!

9:06: 30 Rock is only one episode into its existence, and it's already hard to tell where Tracy Morgan's character on the show ends and the actual person begins; that's impressive! For some reason, though, Morgan always abruptly stops being funny whenever he shows up to any function that involves rappers; remember when he took his shirt off at the Source Awards? No? He makes fun of the Beastie Boys, who chuckle uncomfortably.

9:08: Mike D now has ill-advised long and curly hair, and he looks like an old lady. The Beasties are still dressing like twelve-year-olds; remind me not to do that when I'm 40. We really get the sense from their video package that they started rapping because rap was funny, which is as good a reason as any.

9:10: Diddy, Q-Tip, and a pre-shooting Fabolous come out in Adidas tracksuits and do a couple of License to Ill songs. Diddy is Mike D, Q-Tip is Ad-Rock (complete with over-the-top nasal whine), and Fabolous is MCA because he's the only one who can't make his voice go all high. Good casting! They're onstage for all of a minute and a half, and then Mix Master Mike chops up a bunch of other Beastie Boys records, which is boring. The actual Beasties come out afterwards and do "So Whatcha Want," which Raekwon appears to enjoy. When he's rapping, MCA still looks like he'd rather be meditating or something. Mix Master Mike switches the track up to the "Breathe" beat halfway through, which would've been amazing three years ago and is still pretty awesome now. They also do "The New Style," and VH1 bleeps the word cursing in what I have to assume is a weird joke.

9:23: In his introduction to MC Lyte, Ice-T manages to take credit for the "99 Problems" hook. See, Lyte definitely doesn't have a problem with a bitch. Or something like that.

9:26: In her video package, Lyte talks about making her first records when she was sixteen. It's virtually impossible to imagine a credible rapper that young coming out now, but it used to happen all the time. The kids in Ice-T's reality show Rap School, which comes on right after this show, are only a couple of years younger than that. The mind boggles.

9:27: Holy shit, it's Yo-Yo! And she doesn't look terrible!

9:28: I guess they really couldn't do this show without ?uestlove, huh? He's like the new Farnsworth Bentley or something. Da Brat, Remy Ma, and Lil Kim all do old Lyte songs. They're all wearing tracksuits and truck jewelry, and they all sound pretty good. Lyte comes out and destroys them all, of course. VH1 has done a pretty good job finding a bunch of rappers who can still hold a stage. There are lots of shirtless male dancers onstage; I guess this is a rare opportunity for equal-opportunity objectification.

9:39: As host, Ice-T is mostly just playing hypeman, reading stuff off a teleprompter and yelling "Westside!" every once in a while. He's not trying to tell jokes or anything, and that's a shame, since he's better at being funny than he is at acting cool.

9:42: Common introduces Rakim, and he does about as well as he possibly could given that he has like thirty seconds to explain why Rakim is great.

9:42: Most of these video packages are just straight self-mythologization, but Rakim actually gets a few seconds to talk about the writing process and internal rhymes, and that's a whole lot more interesting.

9:44: Black Thought and Talib Kweli tag-team on "Paid in Full." Talib can sort of rap on beat if he's doing someone else's song. Styles P, however, apparently cannot. I guess that makes Talib a better rapper than Styles. Rakim is wearing leather pants, which somehow looks less ridiculous than it should. He does a new song, but it's pretty much impossible to hear him rapping over the Roots' clatter, which is a damn shame, even if the song doesn't sound like much.

9:54: Has Mike Epps ever been funny? I really have no idea.

9:55: Ice Cube: "The definition of a gangsta is somebody that's living his life by his own rules." I'm pretty sure that's not actually the definition of gangsta.

9:59: A couple of weird song-choices to honor Ice Cube: Xzibit doing "Check Yo Self" and W.C. doing "It Was a Good Day." I guess we're meant to believe that The Predator is Ice Cube's best album, which may actually be true. Cube comes out and does the two garbage-ass singles off his garbage-ass new album. What is it with old rappers doing new songs tonight? Don't they realize everyone hates that? Cube and Lil Jon thoughtfully replace the word motherfucker with mother mother on some Tracy Bonham shit.

10:05: Chevy is still running that commercial with Slum Village? Or do they just drag it out of mothballs for shows like this one?

10:10: Ice Cube and Ice-T are both out to talk about Eazy-E. If Bill Paxton and William Sadler were there, we'd have a complete reunion of the cast of Trespass.

10:11: In the Eazy video package, Cube, Ren, and Yella all say nice things about the guy, but Dr. Dre is conspicuous in his absence.

10:16: Bone Thugs do "Crossroads" in remembrance, which is pretty funny since that one song was way more popular than any of Eazy's solo joints. They don't look quite right doing it onstage with no horse-drawn carriage.

10:18: Young Jeezy is onstage, but he's pretty much just playing hypeman to Eazy's son, Lil Eazy-E, who sounds eerily like his father. Then everyone does "Boyz N the Hood," and it's a cacophonous mess.

10:25: Diddy says that Russell Simmons is his hero, that he had the courage to bet his wife on the future. I'm pretty sure he meant to say life.

10:27: Simmons is in the crowd sitting next to Mike D, who has apparently forgiven him for stealing money.

10:29: Someone named Black Ice does some spoken-word nonsense about Simmons, and Lovebug Starski and Kid Capri play a bunch of old Def Jam records. It must be hard to come up with a halfway entertaining musical tribute to someone who never actually made music.

10:38: KRS-One is out to explain the difference between rap and hip-hop. Now we can all overstand! He talks about Afrika Bambaataa in the vaguest, most nebulous ways possible: "I say I am hip-hop. This man is hip-hop culture."

10:41: Bambaataa probably has the greatest collection of futuristic sunglasses in human history, but if I didn't know who he was before seeing this video package, I would still have no idea.

10:43: OutKast is here! Both guys in the same room and everything! But they're not rapping; they're just talking about Bambaataa.

10:44: Erykah Badu comes out in a crazy African headdress, which is weird since I don't think there's any singing whatsoever on most Bambaataa records. She leads a "Zulu! Gestapo!" chant, which probably confuses the hell out of about half the viewing audience. I will never get sick of hearing the "Looking for the Perfect Beat" keyboard line, but did they really need to get George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to blather messily over it? And now Black Thought and Fat Joe are doing "Planet Rock"? This is a complete clusterfuck, and it doesn't really make any aesthetic case for Bambaataa's music at all. Fat Joe is the only performer of the night who isn't wearing some sort of period costume.

10:55: Forrest Whitaker is excited that Wu-Tang is back together! So am I! He talks about working with RZA on Ghost Dog. I love that movie.

10:57: In the video package, RZA explains that Wu-Tang is foundated in hip-hop. I love it when he totally just makes up words. There's no Ghostface or Cappadonna anywhere in the video or onstage.

10:59: Raekwon does the first verse from "C.R.E.A.M.," and Ice-T comes out to say goodnight? Is that it? No, they're doing "Triumph" now, and we really never get enough chances to see Inspectah Deck and U-God rap on TV. Meth jumps into the crowd and everything, and the show ends with a great moment almost despite itself.