I don't hate him, I promise. I just hate this album.

I guess this is what you'd call a good problem, but going to live shows can get pretty boring sometimes when it's your job. 2006 is the first full calendar year I've spent doing Status Ain't Hood, and I've seen hundreds of bands, dealt with shitty door guys at tons of clubs, and blown off more than a few shows just because I didn't feel like going that night. I've gone to see the Secret Machines and Mates of State, bands I like, at the Virgin Megastore because that's less of a time-commitment than going to see them at clubs. Interesting trainwrecks, like the time M.O.P. let all their friends take over the S.O.B.'s stage, are just fine, since I know I'll have fun writing about them. But shows like Stereolab's snoozy Town Hall show are just the worst; they aren't good or bad enough to be interesting at all. Reviewing shows can start to feel like a job when it actually is your job, and so I'm especially grateful for the few shows that really snap me out of my stupor and make me feel lucky to be there. Here are my ten favorite shows from this year:

1. Jay-Z at Radio City Music Hall, 6/26/16. Nobody knew quite what to expect from this Reasonable Doubt tenth anniversary show. Jay had said that he'd be doing the entire album and that ?uestlove would be the musical director, but that was it. So there was an audible gasp at Radio City when the curtain came up on a fifty-piece orchestra sitting in neat rows on the stage's polished floor. Jay came out in a white 1996 Lexus and did the the album backwards, starting with "Regrets" and building to a triumphant "Can't Knock the Hustle" with Beyonce subbing in for Mary J. Blige and somehow outsinging her. Every second of the show was painstakingly planned-out, of course; when the crowd filed into the room, every seat had a gift bag sitting on it. But Jay still maintained a certain level of suspense; no one knew, for example, that he'd be premiering "44 Fours." The whole night, he controlled the entire stage with a sort of old-school Hollywood elan that I've never seen any performer come close to equalling. The music on Reasonable Doubt is perfect for that sort of schmaltzed-up setting, too; the album's cinematic glimmer practically demands strings and horns. If DMX manages to do the same thing to It's Dark and Hell is Hot in two years, I'll die happy. (He won't, but whatever.)

All you have to do is dream?

A couple of days ago, VH1 showed the 1998 TV movie The Temptations. I'd never seen it, so I watched for a little while, and it was, predictably enough, pretty meh: brutally expository dialogue, broad acting, flat production-design. It looks and feels exactly like what it is, a made-for-TV movie. In virtually every way, it's a vastly inferior movie to Dreamgirls. Both movies cover the same period of American music, and both follow the same basic story-arc: the rise and fall of a popular black singing group. Dreamgirls has an exponentially higher budget, and it shows: dazzling cinematography, spotless period-details, great pacing, amazing acting. Its story punches the enormously satisfying emotional buttons that Hollywood's screenwriting army can find when it's feeling uncommonly inspired. The movie opens with the sound of drumstick hitting cowbell and ends with a shower of gold confetti, and more movies should begin with the sound of a drumstick hitting a cowbell and end with a shower of gold confetti. I was sucked in for all two and a half hours. Dreamgirls is definitely a better way to spend an afternoon than The Temptations, except for one nagging little detail: the music.

Paid the cost to be the boss

In a way, it's more than a little absurd for me to sit here and my computer and eulogize James Brown. Brown was probably the most important musician whose lifetime intersected with mine at all, but he was about a decade past his creative and commercial peak by the time I was born in 1979. So all my direct memories of Brown are the late-period Brown, the guy who'd already allowed himself to become a sort of gaudy cartoon-character parody of his younger self: James Brown dancing with Apollo Creed in Rocky IV, James Brown dancing with Ernest "The Cat" Miller at WCW Superbrawl 2000, James Brown dancing with John Goodman in Blues Brothers 2000. I only saw James Brown perform live once, at a DC alt-rock radio-station Christmas concert four years ago, between Zwan and New Found Glory. I have no idea what he was doing on this bill, and I have no idea what the massively young and white crowd could've possibly made of him. Maybe he was being trotted out as an icon, and maybe he was being made the object of retro derison, and maybe it was a little of both. I'm not sure James Brown particularly cared either way. He didn't have his usual backing band with him; instead, he had the DC ska band the Pietasters backing him. He only acknowledged his backing band once ("Huh! Pah-tasters!"), but the members of the band still carry photos of themselves with Brown in their wallets and show them to random strangers when they're drinking in Baltimore bars. Brown was onstage with them for about ten minutes. He did "Sex Machine" and "I Feel Good" and maybe "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," and then he collected his check and disappeared. And of course he was the best act on that particular bill, but what could that possibly mean? That he was better than the Vines?

These dudes could use a few extra dollars

So there's this whole micro-economy built from the money that independent music generates. There's not a huge amount of money to be made from a bunch of people jumping into vans and playing music in dive-bars across the country, but the whole phenomenon still feeds armies of label guys and publicists and booking agents and writers and managers. Ideally, the money also feeds the people who actually make and perform that music, but it doesn't always work out that way. Indie-rappers and people in indie-rock bands, people who devote their lives to making music, rarely bring home enough money to quit their day-jobs or to buy health insurance. And if something catastrophic happens to them, they're fucked. This is the last entry I'm writing before Christmas, which means I'm wicked broke right now and so are half the people I know. But there are a couple of musicians I admire who are going through rough times this year, and they could both use a little help. Neither of these stories is particularly new, but I've been thinking a lot lately about Boots Riley and J. Robbins. They've both been responsible for a whole lot of great music, and they both need help.

Possibly his most ungainly album title yet

Trick Daddy is sort of a national treasure. Over ten years and seven albums, his warm, gravelly slur has deepend and expanded to the point where he sounds more like David Ruffin or John Lee Hooker than like any rapper I could name. His rasp has a lived-in smokiness, and its crags and wrinkles say as much as his words. Every album except his first has had the word thug somewhere in its title, and he's always done violent threats as well as almost anyone else, but my favorite parts of all his albums are the ones where he drops the hard veneer and comes off like a big-hearted drunk uncle, doing gorgeously hamfisted and charming inspirational kids' songs. When he digs into that stuff, he becomes a glorious anomaly. Thug Matrimony, his last album, had more than a handful of these, and they're some of the happiest, most genuine things I've ever heard an uber-hard rapper do. On songs like "I Wanna Sing," his idealism shines through with blinding force. "I ain't the typical American Idol / But when I'm done, I'm sure the boy Simon would like me": I'm pretty sure no other major rapper could sell a line like that one with such total sincerity, not a drop of irony in his voice. And other than maybe Ludacris, he's the only rapper who consistently does great things with Jazze Pha beats; Trick sinks into them and finds an organic glow in all the autotuned guitars and bloopy synths. I've never seen the episode of The John Mayer Show where he and Mayer go to Nashville to seek out their shared country-music roots, but I love that it exists, that a rapper like Trick would acknowledge that he even has any country roots. The great thing about Trick Daddy is the way he makes his warmth and his coldness inseparable; his death-threat sneers grant him the credibility he needs to give his fluffy kids-are-the-future meditations, and those in turn give his dark tracks a certain gravitas. He also loves doing freaky sex-jams, and those don't particularly require credibility or gravitas, but they're fun all the same.

They'll probably keep making ass-ugly covers like this one, though

There are plenty of reasons why emo has become the default modern-rock music for teenagers circa now. The meanings of the word emo have basically nothing to do with what they were as little as five years ago, when I was totally blown away by the prospect of Thursday getting radio play. It's unapologetically sugary, chirpy, hooky guitar-pop with big scenery-chewing hooks and literal-minded sensitive-dude lyrics. Its flagship bands are pretty much OK with making big-budget novelty-joke videos and co-hosting the MTV Movie Awards' red-carpet pre-show and generally playing the game. More than anything else, though, it has the best business plan. Emo bands aren't scared of vertical integration or symmetry. Bigger bands take smaller bands on tour, and sometimes those smaller bands blow up huge and then take the bigger bands they once opened for on tour. Festivals like the Warped Tour or Bamboozled work as vague meritocracies, where bands that put on fierce performances inevitably walk out of the shows with more fans than the bands that coasted through their sets. Everyone has a MySpace page. The bands mostly look the same: same clothes, same haircuts, same race, same gender. Everyone works within a very specific and somewhat limited musical template, so all the fans have a pretty easy time agreeing on who's good and who isn't. It's all quite efficient. But some of these bands have perfected that specific style so much that they've become famous and transcended the scene that birthed them, and bands do crazy shit when they become famous and transcend their scenes. A lot of interesting things are happening at the pop extreme of mall-emo, and it's only going to get stranger from here.

Also: this album is good

Diplo
Talking Head
December 18, 2006

So I'm spending the next couple of weeks in Virginia and Baltimore because it's Christmas and because I've got a wedding to plan. And I'm going through that weird sort of disconnect that happens when you leave your hometown and then realize that it hasn't stopped changing while you've been away. Case in point: the Talking Head, a small concrete dive a couple of blocks away from Baltimore's City Hall. The space used to house the Ottobar, which for years was the only half-decent live music venue in the city, the one reason touring bands started stopping between Philly and DC. The club had decent sound and great booking, and it was the only place in town with either of those things. The White Stripes played the old Ottobar, and so did At the Drive-In and any number of emo bands that blew up later. After a few years, the Ottobar moved to a bigger space further uptown, and the old space was empty for the better part of a year. The Talking Head started in a midtown rowhouse, and I'm not sure if it was a legal space or not. But after a few months, the guys who owned it moved it into the old Ottobar space. The Talking Head was never as professionally run as the Ottobar; they'd have shows most nights of the week, but most of them would be shitty local noise bands that didn't draw anyone. It was more of a clubhouse than anything else. Something was always falling apart, and they remodeled the upstairs lounge area more times than I can count. Last night, there wasn't any glass in one of the upstairs windows; someone had nailed a giant plywood board over it instead. The foosball table was busted. Beers were two for $3 before eleven. And last night was probably the last time I'll ever see that space. I'll miss it.

Clearly, they want to be the hands around your throat

Nachtmystium + Zoroaster + Gwynbleidd
Northsix
December 15, 2006

There's nothing particularly scary about Blake Judd. If anything, he looks a little ridiculous: a tall, blonde-haired, vaguely heavy dude with a thick California accent, stuffed into too-tight black clothes with a bit of white makeup splashed onto his face. "Raw black metal, right?" he asks between songs at Northsix on Friday night, and it sounds more like a plea than a declaration. Maybe I shouldn't have been all that surprised, but Judd calls himself Azentrius, after all. The logo of Nachtmystium, Judd's band, has two upside-down crosses and one inverted pentagram. On the back of the T-shirt I bought Friday night, there's a picture of Judd with an assault rifle and the words "I want to be your last breath ... to inhale the stench of your final air" written in Olde English. Nachtmystium's Instinct: Decay is one of my favorite metal albums of the year, but the only lyric I can make out is the one where Judd screams that he wants to be the hands around your throat. And the album sounds like a faraway demonic howl, its thundering blastbeats and ambient guitar squalls and throat-ripping screams flattened out by a pillowy, muffling production style that turns all their urgency into atmospheric dread. The band has scary mystique for days, so it's a bit of a shock to see them in person and not be terrified. Other than Judd, there's a shop-class stoner bassist and a heavy, short-haired drummer. The second guitarist goes for a bit of a Danzig thing (no shirt, black hair, eyeliner), but it seems like a safe bet that these guys aren't going to be drinking lambs' blood out of stone chalices after the show.

That Soul Plane movie's the bomb

When "Black Republican" first leaked, I made a point not to listen to it because I didn't want DJ drops to taint my first experience of the big song-event Jay-Z collabo. Turns out "Black Republican" is exactly what I hoped it would be. It's pretty amazing just to hear Jay and Nas ad-libbing back and forth at each other on the intro while L.E.S.'s epic, swollen strings churn and swoop; the song is huge and grandiose before anyone raps a single line. Jay's verse is all fractured, unfocused imagery, but the track finds him cockier and more self-impressed than he ever is on Kingdom Come. Nas responds in kind, all clipped, sneering precision, though standing on rooftops inhaling whirlwinds of beef sounds like a good way to catch E.coli. These guys understand how important this song is, and there's more than a hint of competitiveness in the way they push each other higher. Neither one wants to be overshadowed, and so they both work hard. I'm glad I waited to hear it. But waiting meant that I had to get through three near-unlistenable minutes of Nas impersonating Edward G. Robinson's "nyaa, see" gangster-movie sneer over a horrible twinkle-bap Will.I.Am beat, saying a bunch of stuff that doesn't even come close to making sense ("Your conspiracy theories won't work without evidence / That's the reason Eric B is not president.") "Who Killed It?" is hilarious and ridiculous and utterly pointless, and not only does Nas not delete it from the album, but he uses it to lead into one of the most feverishly anticipated songs in years. Nas may be a great rapper, but his decision-making skills could use a little work.

Portrait of the Ex by Grant Siedlecki

The first time I saw the Ex, they were playing to a crowd of slack-jawed Long Island skinheads who probably wanted to kill them. They were at the Roxy, the club where Madonna had spent nights snorting coke with the Rock Steady Crew fifteen years earlier. And they were opening for Fugazi, I band who I loved totally and completely and who I'd never seen live before. I sort of hated the Ex. When you're nineteen and you're waiting to see your favorite band, you could be forgiven if you didn't want a bunch of middle-aged Dutch anarchists shouting at you about how you should stop buying stuff over tense, jazz-damaged skree. You might not realize how wrong you were for another couple of years.