Good morning heartache, you're like a old friend

I wonder what Tim Armstrong thinks of Lily Allen. Armstrong's band, Rancid, blew up during the mid-90s ska boom, partly because they had mohawks and stuff and partly because they were great, but also partly because of "Time Bomb," a totally credible Farfisaed-out ska song and the band's biggest hit ever. Most of the ska bands who made it to the radio during those years sold themselves through a sort of Southern-California mall-punk primary-color brightness, a novelty appeal that revealed itself through cute matching costumes and intentionally goofy 80s-pop covers. But Rancid played ska as a sort of broken-down working-class urban folk music, building on the late-70s British 2-Tone ska revival's sad, ghostly blueprint, and they ended up with one of my favorite semi-forgotten radio nuggets of an era rich with them. But the ska bubble popped, soon becoming only slightly less unfashionable than zoot-suit swing-revival; a couple of years ago, members of the Killers and the Bravery were making fun of each other for having played in ska bands. The only band to muscle through the backlash and maintain pop success was No Doubt, and they did it by keeping all their bright bubblegum pep and by completely ditching all their ska signifiers, replacing them instead to nods toward dancehall and synth-pop and other more fashionable genres. Meanwhile, Rancid, who'd previously only toe-dipped into ska with "Time Bomb" and a couple of other songs, dove headlong into a sort of makeshift organic cosmopolitanism and recorded their masterpiece: 1998's Life Won't Wait, one of my favorite albums ever. On that album, the band recruited guest-appearances from Buju Banton and the Specials, and they toyed around with reggae and rap and soul and rockabilly, but their ska fixation was clearly the basis for all of it, and the band drove home the point further when they signed the Slackers and the Pietasters to their boutique label. I was hoping they'd continue reaching outward musically, but instead they viscerally yanked themselves back into lockstep bloody-knuckles gutter-punk shit. In 2000, they released a squalid knuckledragger of a self-titled album. When I saw them a year later, they didn't play a single ska song. Armstrong slowly eased himself back into musical experimentation in the years after that, delivering a relaxed and pretty breakup album with Rancid's Indestructible in 2003 and doing a couple of mixed-results punk-rap albums with his side project the Transplants. He also wrote some songs for Pink's best album, which nobody bought. With every successive project, Armstrong's one pop moment faded further into the past. And now he's gone and recorded a solo album, slowly releasing the first five songs over the past six months. At least thus far, it's a ska album, and Armstrong seems more comfortable than ever with his cultural obsolescence. It's a good look.

The instruments are crying out, where the sympathy at?

I didn't go see Deerhunter last night in Manhattan, and I'm not going to see them tonight in Brooklyn. I'm moving back to Park Slope this weekend, and that means I have to spend all my evenings putting my stuff into boxes. But I wish I could go see Deerhunter. I've been marinating Cryptograms, that band's newish album, for a few months, but it's only starting to reveal itself to me. I liked Cryptograms as soon as I heard it, but it didn't quite excite me. It sounded like a thoroughly professional pastiche of all the drugged-up bands that have been fashionable influences over the past few years: fuzzy ebb-and-crest guitar reveries from Sonic Youth, gentle motorik pulses from Stereolab, disaffected snarl-sneer vocals from Spacemen 3 via Lou Reed. And I didn't like that the album came loaded down with a bunch of ambient instrumental drones that pretty much sapped all the momentum away. I still don't like those drones, but it's slowly become apparent that those pieces are nearly as important to the band's sense of self as their actual songs are. For that matter, I'm guessing that so are their reportedly chaotic live shows, wherein alarmingly skinny frontman Bradford Cox dribbles fake blood all over himself and writhes around in a grandma dress. Deerhunter, it seems, are not a typical indie-pastiche band. Or more to the point, maybe they are a typical indie-pastiche band who desperately wants to be something more, which might actually be a more tragic and noble condition. At their most accessible, they're really not all that different from the Ponys or Interpol or any number of repackagers. That tendency is pretty evident on their new drone-free Fluorescent Grey EP, and I like them the best when they're hewing closest to older blueprints. But Deerhunter never quite resolve their songs the way those other bands do; they leave edges frayed and structures half-built. They plainly pull a whole lot of inspiration from the noise and drone undergrounds; the show they're playing tonight in Brooklyn is a Lightning Bolt afterparty, for God's sake. And their admiration for bands like LB shows through in what would otherwise be a really solid set of straight-up indie-rock songs. But they themselves are not a noise band; their pop-song instincts are just too strong. And so that struggle between noise and pop defines them and takes them to really interesting places. Now that I think about it, that struggle is a trait they share with Sonic Youth and Stereolab and Spacemen 3, all of whom were basically straight rock bands enamored of all sorts of messy non-rock stuff. It took a while, but I think maybe I'm starting to really like this band.

Chillin' in my Phantom listening to opera

I'm of two minds about last night's extraordinarily hyped-up Idol Gives Back special. On the one hand, it's certainly encouraging to see America's highest-rated TV show going out of its way to remind its millions upon millions of viewers that poverty exists and to raise money to help people who need it. The conditions that we saw in all of last night's video montages were pretty fucking horrible, and I'm happy to see the show's producers taking advantage of their massive cultural power to do some actual good. So I can't really call last night's two-hour special anything but a good thing. But I wish they could've done that sort of good without the disquieting patina of self-congratulation that was all over last night's show. The previous night, Ryan Seacrest had announced that NewsCorp would be donating ten cents for every one of the show's first fifty million votes to a number of different charities, and he drove the point home thusly: "It may be the most important call you ever make." (Bridget: "Give me a fucking break, Seacrest. It's ten cents.") And yeah, the show's corporate parent donated five million dollars to all these charities, and that's great, but doesn't Fox make about that much money off of one American Idol commercial break?

Ridin' with Bigfoot, Harry and the Hendersons

When Damon Albarn went on BBC2 last week and told an interviewer that he wouldn't be making another pop album with the Gorillaz, he only really proved one thing: Damon Albarn is a fucking idiot. I never particularly liked the Gorillaz' two albums, but I had to admire Albarn's unlikely coup. A lot of aging pop stars gradually grow deeply uncomfortable with the spotlight and look for ways to disappear from the attention that mass adulation brings. It's a cliche. But Albarn managed to figure out a way to disappear that somehow allowed him to sell more records than he had when he was an actual pop star. In the UK, Albarn had spent most of the 90s as a bona fide celebrity, feuding with Oasis and enduring a drawn-out tabloid-fueled breakup with Elastica's Justine Frischmann; he led the sort of life that could understandably make someone want to drop out of the pop-culture game for good. In America, though, Blur were culty imports who managed to go gold once on the strength of "Song 2," a fluke accidental jock-jam. So it's pretty amazing that Albarn's self-consciously goofy and deconstructionist pop-art project managed to go platinum in America with its self-titled debut album, and it's even more amazing that that Demon Days, the second Gorillaz album, managed to go double-plat here at a time when nobody was buying music. Albarn pulled off a rare trick: he took his pop-star alienation all the way to the bank. And now he's giving up on it. Maybe this guy doesn't know how good he has it.

I am just a Martian, get prepared for abduction

I've been to Iceland. Once. I was nine. My family had been living in England for a year, and we were moving home to Baltimore when we had a sudden, unexplained and unexpected 12-hour layover in Keflavik. The airport was tiny, and for some reason it had a Hard Rock Cafe that wasn't open. The cafeteria fed us this weird orange stuff that tasted pretty good. After a while, the airport staff decided that they should probably do something with this planeload full of extremely haggard-looking travelers, so they loaded all of us into a bus and drove us around the island for a couple of hours. It looked like the surface of the moon. I don't think I saw a single tree the entire time. Instead, there was this volcanic brown rock everywhere, piled into these craggy mounds. My brother and I were really impressed that this rock had actually been lava at some point, so we took a couple of tiny rocks home and kept them on top of our dressers for a few years. At one point, we drove past the Blue Lagoon, and there was so much steam rising off it that you couldn't actually see any liquid water. That two-hour bus-trip probably left a more vivid visual tattoo in my head than anything in the previous year in England; everything just looked so completely alien. After we finally got onto the Icelandair plane back to America, I actually remember reading an in-flight magazine article about the Sugarcubes and thinking they sounded pretty cool. But I'd probably associate Bjork's music with that layover in Iceland even if I hadn't seen that article. Bjork comes from the one place on Earth where she can seem otherworldly to virtually everyone on the planet, and that's an asset she's cannily played up again and again over the past twenty years or so.

I am a robot and this robot is on overload

Hot Chip
Webster Hall
April 20, 2007

The laws of irony clearly state that a band of mismatched uber-awkward dorks can't write lyrics about breaking your legs or being down with Prince without coming off like unendurable dipshits; the best they can hope for is Atom and His Package. And that's why I didn't initially give Hot Chip much of a chance, even after esteemed peers with high-functioning bullshit detectors (like this guy) fell all over them. But the laws of irony don't account for the icy melancholy and the fluid twerky bounce that these guys pull off beautifully. When I finally got around to seeing the band at Webster Hall late last year, they had a couple of extra weapons behind them: a drummer and a percussionist, both smart and locked-in enough to give dizzying force to the band's ecstatic techno buildups and Latin-disco breakdowns. I walked into Webster Hall that night looking for something to do to kill time before Todd P's anti-CMJ across-the-river throwdown, and I walked out utterly convinced. That one show was all it took. Immediately afterward, I started hearing The Warning for what it is, a compulsively listenable pileup of party-up earworm mantras and swooningly pretty teen-movie-closing-credits ballads. Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard never let their cheesed-out jokes or their weedy voices get in the way of their songs' sweep; if anything, they've turned their liabilities into assets, building up their gleaming synth-swooshes with all-too-human wounded sadness. The band fits perfectly into the grand tradition of whiteboy computer-soul, a line that encompasses Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode and, for that matter, Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds. In fact, now that I think about it, Timblerlake may have learned a thing or two from the way their spazzy loverman R&B twitches even as it swoops. And, as Hot Chip's recent remix of "In the Morning" shows, they can do the Junior Boys' thing better than the Junior Boys themselves can, no mean feat. Ten or fifteen years from now, some crappy indie band is probably going to score a minor hit doing an acoustic cover of "Boy From School," and Hot Chip's place in that lineage will be official.

Alas poor Khaled

After DJ Drama and Don Cannon got arrested for selling mixtapes earlier this year, mixtapes are probably never going to be the same again, and that might not ultimately be a bad thing. It used to be that every mixtape would be stamped "for promotional use only," a quick little disclaimer that meant exactly nothing since everyone didn't mind paying $20 for five of them. Actual physical mixtapes still exist, but they're trickling out slower, and the real action has been online, especially as far as single-artist tapes go. Now that the RIAA has basically criminalized the process, rappers actually have been using tapes as promotional items, offering them up for free download and never bothering to press up physical copies. As it turns out, the results have thus far been pretty good; online-only mixtapes from Talib Kweli and Chamillionaire have held up to repeat listenings a lot better than those guys' most recent retail albums. And something even weirder has been happening over the last couple of weeks. Lil Wayne and DJ Khaled have been working on Da Drought 3, a magnum-opus double-CD mixtape. But an early version of the first CD leaked last week, and the second one finally found its way onto the internet earlier this week. The very idea that a mixtape could leak is a bit hard to process; it's not like these things have traditional release dates or anything. In this case, though, the early leak will almost certainly turn out to be so completely superior to the actual finished version that nobody will ever bother listening to the real thing.

So it goes (pick jacked from Idolator)

The end of last night's padded-out hour-long American Idol result show was set up as a good-vs.-evil battle, at least from where I was sitting. Every week, Ryan Seacrest solemnly announces the bottom three contestants and then sends one of them back to safety. This week, the bottom three were the utterly detestable cheeseball improv-comic beatbox 311/Incubus fan Blake Lewis, the soaringly awesome raw-throated belter LaKisha Jones, and Sanjaya Malakar, the gawky teenager who's become the center of one of the weirdest and dumbest pop-cult hysteria-rampages in recent memory. When Seacrest announced the bottom three, before he told Blake that he was safe, the three judges pissed me off enormously by acting all shocked that Blake was up there, completely ignoring LaKisha even though she's consistently been one of the best contestants of the season. I'm certainly biased; LaKisha comes from Fort Meade, Maryland, an army town about a half-hour drive south of Baltimore, and I'd probably still rep for her on local-pride grounds even if she sucked. But she emphatically does not suck. Her souped-up roar might lean hard on old Southern-soul archetypes, but she knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off, and when she's done quieter and more nuanced songs like "Diamonds are Forever" or "God Bless the Child," she's been remarkably mature and polished. Other than maybe Jordin Sparks, she's also the only Idol candidate this year who could conceivably make an album worth hearing. Tuesday night was country theme night, and LaKisha sang Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel," a song I adore. And she did it well, giving it a straight soul-gospel reading and doing it justice; it might not have been her best performance, but she still owned most of the remaining contestants. The judges, for reasons I can't quite understand, shat all over her. She hasn't been pulling the fake-humble act that fellow soul powerhouse Melinda Doolittle has mastered, so she found herself staring down the barrel of elimination, right next to the contestant whose survival has famously confused everyone who's been watching the show this season. Consider, if you will, Sanjaya Malakar.

See here

Once upon a time, it was a great creative partnership. Jay-Z and Timbaland were titans of their respective fields years before they met each other, but they still found ways to immediately elevate each other. "Paper Chase" and "Jigga What, Jigga Who," which I'm pretty sure were the first Jay/Tim collaborations, came out in the fall of 1998 on Jay's Hard Knock Life album, and at least one of those tracks sounded different from anything either of them had done up until then. Jay had spent most of his time rapping on glossy, cinematic Premier/Ski boom-bap, viciously thumping Swizz-type synth-rap, and uber-slick jiggy-era stuff. Tim was mostly a spacey R&B producer, doing otherworldly slow-jams for Aaliyah and Ginuwine and sonar-ping cartoon-funk for Missy Elliott and for himself and Magoo. "Paper Chase" is a fine track, with Jay and Foxy Brown authoritatively navigating the beat's awkward lurch, but it isn't ultimately all that different from the Trackmasters-type stuff Jay was already doing. But "Jigga What, Jigga Who" is total next-level shit, and it still stands as one of the finest moments for both Jay and Tim. Tim's beat was like an irregular heartbeat, alternating quick clusters of rapid-fire hi-hats with huge silent spaces and laying gorgeously airy strings over everything. And Jay's delivery hit another gear. He turned his voice into a percussion instrument in ways he hadn't ever done, finding connections between Southern bounce-rap and the quick-tongue Das-EFX stuff of his pre-Reasonable Doubt past. A few years ago, I heard Jason King give an EMP paper where he went into crazy depth about the song's use of space, comparing it to feng shui. His entire paper wasn't about just this one song, but it could've been.

It doesn't hurt that she looks a lot like Jane Birkin

I'll probably have a lot more to say about Saul Austerlitz's new book Money for Nothing, an exhaustively researched and totally absorbing history of music videos that I finally just finished reading this weekend. But one thing in particular I really liked about Austerlitz's book is how it doesn't actually bother too much with history as it's usually understood. There's a quick chapter about the pre-MTV history of music videos and all their Beatles/Bowie/Queen/Suicide great leaps forward, but Austerlitz never really digs too deeply into the different forms of impact that videos have had on musicians' careers or the financial forces at work behind them. Instead, he spends most of the book analyzing music videos themselves, getting into all the artistic impulses and mini-trends that run through the form's history. Austerlitz also includes his list of the top 100 videos ever. I certainly don't agree with everything on the list: No rap videos until #40, and then it's "Hey Ya"? No rap videos with actual rapping until #53, and then it's "The Message"? But the list has sent me on a few nostalgic YouTube benders over the last couple of weeks, rewatching all these videos that I remember being really big deals when they came out. Plenty of random tiny revelations in there, like Sawyer from Lost, with a bowl cut, stealing Alicia Silverstone's purse in the "Cryin'" video. But the overwhelming impression I get from watching these videos is that the form itself has sort of given up on itself in recent years. When recent videos do show up on the list, they're either boringly smeared with prestige-ambition, like Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends," or small and concept-driven, like Basement Jaxx's "Cish Cash." Cable channels' wholesale elimination of actual videos from their scheduling blocks and nosediving album sales have really done a number on the music video itself. Big-budget videos are still coming out, but it's tough to imagine a video turning a smaller artist into a bigger one or revealing a new stage of a major artist's evolving persona (at least outside occasional flukes like My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade").