I recorded this podcast last Thursday; I'm obviously still having some trouble getting these things up on schedule, but I'm getting better at it. This week, I'm mostly dealing with a bunch of the ugly, sludgy, misanthropic guitar-rock that's crossed my desk lately; the Swizz Beatz feel-good anthem is the one glaring exception. This podcast includes these songs:

• Baroness: "Isak"
• Swizz Beatz: "Take a Picture"
• A Place to Bury Strangers: "To Fix the Gash in Your Head"
• Angels of Light: "We Are Him"

Alarmingly prominent veins on this guy

Kenny Chesney + Sugarland
Madison Square Garden
August 30, 2007

Before last night's Kenny Chesney show, the last band I'd seen headline at Madison Square Garden was the White Stripes. Kenny Chesney and Jack White are both slightly weird-looking guitar-slinging white guys who have seriously dated (or, in Chesney's case, briefly married) scrunched-up screen-siren Renee Zellweger. On "Livin' in Fast Forward," Chesney famously calls himself "a hillbilly rock star out of control," and Jack White has spent pretty much his entire career cultivating the image of a hillbilly rock star, albeit a hillbilly rock star of a very different stripe. (Both men's hillbilly status is deeply debatable; their rock star status is not.) Both Chesney and White live in Tennessee and wear cowboy clothes and sleeveless T-shirts. Weirdly, of the two, White seems way more concerned with proving his country-music bona-fides, engineering Loretta Lynn's comeback and bringing Porter Wagoner to open for him at MSG. Chesney released a single with Randy Travis once, but he had bigger hits with Uncle Kracker and Jimmy Buffett. The music piped in before Chesney's set last night wasn't country; it was John Mellencamp and Poison and, not kidding, "Party Like a Rockstar." Chesney is the better singer of the two; he's got a rich, twangy baritone that effortlessly rolls around the power-ballads he does better than anyone else in Nashville country. But White is, safe to say, a better guitar player. His set at the Garden last month was all solo: riffs imploding in on themselves, dissolving into noise before snapping back into shape, chords spinning and diving and sputtering. Besides Chesney, three other guitarists were onstage last night; his backup band's ranks changed over the course of the night, but they usually numbered around twelve, or six times the onstage personnel of the White Stripes. The other guitarists played all the solos. I'm not even sure Chesney's guitar was plugged in; it could've just been a prop, something to do with his hands. (On most of the songs where he didn't play guitar, Chesney played air-guitar.) The White Stripes definitely played the better show of the two, a shattering pileup of big-rock poses and small-rock skree. Chesney's was just OK, a generally satisfying if oddly perfunctory and stilted spin through a catalog of crowd-pleasers. But the White Stripes didn't have a single moment quite as magical as the one where Chesney kicked into his best song, "Anything But Mine," a soaring weeper of a love-jam with a singalong chorus so great that Chesney can't resist repeating it maybe five times. Also, the Stripes didn't have anything quite as awesome as the graphic on Chesney's stage-curtain: a skull and crossbones, except the skull had a cowboy hat and a lei, and the crossbones were guitars with skulls and crossbones on them. So there's that.

Do dat do dat do do dat dat dat

Q-Tip has a new album supposedly coming out in October, and it'll only be his second solo album to see release. His last one, Amplified, came out in 1999. Since then, he's been bounced all around the major-label system, recording two records that his labels refused to release. All I've heard from The Renaissance is "Work It Out," the song on his MySpace, and it's a nice little live-band groove. Tip is 37 years old, but he looked about 25 when I met him in his PR firm's office this morning. He was wearing bigass Cazal glasses, and I have no idea whether he was stoned or not. He definitely wasn't openly smoking weed during the conversation the way some of my past interviews were, but he has a sort of collegiate-stoner expansiveness about him. He's eloquent as all hell, and he speaks like he's lazily pulling ideas out of the air, playing around with them for a bit, and then letting them go. He is a cool motherfucker.

Go nuts go apeshit

My favorite lyrics on Kanye West's Graduation, at least today, belong to Kanye's conflicted ode to Jay-Z "Big Brother," the last song on the album. At last night's Graduation listening session, people passed out programs that included all the lyrics from the album, as well as some goofy-ass plastic replicas of the goofy-ass glasses from the "Stronger" video, and I read the whole thing a couple of times on the subway home. The big difference between the personas of Kanye and 50 Cent, and yes we're going to keep talking about this, is that Kanye makes personal pop music, whereas 50 mostly just makes popular pop music. 50 doesn't vent his soul, and he's not particularly concerned with coming across as an actual human being; instead, he blows himself out into this indestructible ghetto superhero character. Kanye, by contrast, is just as arrogant, but his arrogance brings with it hesitation and vulnerability and uncertainty. At least for me, there's always been a certain fantasy-baseball-camp appeal to Kanye: this is what happens when a typical dorked-out rap fan with no pretensions toward street-cred or hard-scrabble origins suddenly gains access to the mysterious world of rap stardom. Graduation, judging by last night's listening session, is an album about that stardom and what it might mean, which has the weird effect of making it his least personal album. "Big Brother" is the only point on the album where Kanye's lyrics really seem specific to Kanye's actual experiences, and that's by design. Talking about Jay, Kanye is as much a fan as a personal acquaintance: "J-A-Y, and Ye so shy / That he won't even step to his idol to say hi," "On that 'Diamonds' remix, I swore I spazzed / Then my big brother came through and kicked my ass." Kanye's talking about his own experiences with Jay, and the song's getting a lot of internet-notice because he bitches about Jay a bit and airs out some internal Roc-A-Fella issues, but he talks about Jay with the same awe and reverence that most fans feel for the man. The song feels bigger than Kanye because he keeps it so specific. On the rest of the album, he tries to keep his lyrics as impersonal and nonspecific and, as he kept saying last night, simple as possible, so that they'd have a wider resonance. Linkin Park once said that they painstakingly remove everything from their lyrics that could be construed as specific or personal so that listeners will more easily be able to apply those lyrics to themselves. Onstage last night, Kanye kept talking about opening for U2 and the Rolling Stones, how he wanted his words to punch through the stadium-echoes at those shows and reach the people who weren't generally inclined to pay him any mind. Or, as he put it: "My job, at least two hundred days out the year, I'm onstage in front of 50,000 people. So I did this album to make my job easier."

No no no no notorious

If the omnipresent and apparently inseparable tandem of Justin Timberlake and Timbaland are working on the new albums from Duran Duran and Madonna, does that make them the new Nile Rogers? And if TimbaLake is the new Nile Rogers, is 50 Cent the new David Bowie? Is Rihanna the new Diana Ross? Is Timberlake himself the new Sister Sledge? I'm starting to scare myself. A year ago, I would've been crazy amped at the idea that Timberlake and Timbaland would become the new go-to producers for megabudget pop-music deities. FutureSex/LoveSounds remains one of my favorite albums of the last couple of years, an album-long Big Statement as disarmingly emo as it is ambitiously sleek. Timberlake also showed up on half of the good songs on Timbaland's Shock Value. And we shouldn't forget that the two of them were responsible for "Cry Me a River," one of the defining pop masterpieces of the young century. But I'm not sure what to make of the recent brand-dilution. The pair have been turning up everywhere lately, but none of the stuff they've released since Shock Value has made any real impression at all. "Ayo Technology" is a pretty good song by recent 50 Cent standards, but that's saying absolutely nothing, and the song is a total mess compared to any of the Timbaland tracks on FutureSex. None of the songs that the team did for the Rihanna album particularly stands out, and I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope for their work on the new Madonna either. But back when they announced that they were working with Duran Duran, the match really sounded like it might work. If the two leaked tracks from the upcoming Duran Duran album are any indication, it's just not happening.

OK, so this is basically the first of my regular once-a-week podcasts. Every week, I'll talk about a bunch of new songs and then play the songs, pretty simple college-radio-type stuff. Maybe I'll eventually branch out into interviews or whatever, but I'm keeping it elementary while I figure my way around. I actually recorded this podcast last week, but we're still ironing out all the kinks involved in putting one of these up every week. In any case, I'll have another one done up in a couple of days, God willing, and then they'll be up every week like clockwork. This week, I've got these songs:

• UGK featuring Too Short: "Life Is...2009"
• Dude N Em: "Watch My Feet"
• Soho Dolls: "Crash the Rental (Crystal Castles Remix)"
• Jens Lekman: "Sipping on the Sweet Nectar"

If you'd rather do the right-click save-as thing, download the mp3 here.

Backwards. Forwards. Sideways.

The last time Scarface did anything that directly and forcefully impacted mainstream rap, it was the summer of 2004, and T.I. was mired in a long and bitter beef with Lil Flip. At the time, Flip was the more popular rapper, and it was anything but a foregone conclusion that T.I. would end up mopping the floor with him. Both of them were talking shit at any given opportunity. T.I. was, of course, calling himself the King of the South, a title he'd claimed for himself before anyone was paying attention to him. Flip, meanwhile, was calling T.I. a nobody and saying that Scarface was the real King, a tough claim to dispute. By that time, Scarface was as much folk hero as rapper; he'd gone a couple of years without releasing a proper album, he was as responsible as anyone else for the rise of Southern rap, and he had one of the greatest and most credible back-catalogs in the genre's history. But he didn't care about being the King of the South. On the Down with the King mixtape, T.I. included a phone conversation where Scarface said that he didn't know Flip at all and that T.I. could have the King thing if he wanted it. Last week, T.I. headlined Madison Square Garden, and I think he might be the first Southern rapper ever to do so. (Did Nelly ever headline the Garden? Master P? Bow Wow's from Ohio, so he doesn't count.) With that phone call, Scarface did a whole lot to help T.I. overcome one of the major challenges in his career, and he didn't even have to leave his living room or change out of his bathrobe to do it. Scarface might've never become a big crossover star, but he's definitely had a seismic impact on the music. He revolutionized Southern rap, he developed the wounded emotional street-rap style that Tupac would soon ride to superstardom, and he signed Ludacris. Even in 2004, in semi-retirement, a recorded phone call from this guy was enough to alter the course of T.I.'s career. So any indication that Scarface might be returning to rap is a big deal.

This is how we do it

This week, a weirdly snarky little Times piece and an Idolator follow-up both wondered about the plight of the wedding DJ; a Wall Street Journal article did the same thing a year ago. Seems like more and more couples these days are deciding to forgo the wedding DJ altogether and just play some playlist they slapped together on an iPod. Well, of course they are. As far as the whole wedding-industrial complex goes, the DJ is probably the least essential cog, and I have to wonder whether DJs are starting to feel like the flesh-and-blood tollbooth operators who must be realizing that it's only a matter of time before the machines replace them completely. Maybe that's a bad thing. In the WSJ article and the Idolator interview, DJs make the point that iPods can't read people's reactions or artfully manipulate moods. Here's one DJ, as quoted in the WSJ piece: "DJs can think on the fly and make adjustments. The whole idea of a party is that it's fluid. It's dynamic. It's an art." Fair enough, but I've never heard a wedding DJ that treats it like an art. And maybe it shouldn't be an art; these guys need to be as nakedly crowd-pleasing as possible, and they're dealing with impossibly wide spans of ages and backgrounds at virtually every event. A good club DJ can create peaks and valleys, move moods around, build everything up to a massive cathartic climax. Wedding DJs don't get to do stuff like that; they're just trying to keep as many people happy as possible. Still, I've never seen a wedding DJ display even the most basic aptitude for transitions or crowd-appraisal. Still, I like the idea that there's an actual person picking the songs, keeping everything moving and making sure that dead spots don't come too often. I'm getting married in about a month and a half, and the question of whether to hire a DJ or not has been a tough one.

Yup, still good

So I didn't go to the Scream Tour last night, even though I had tickets waiting for me at will call. I'd just done a reading for Marooned at the Housing Works bookstore, a totally nerve-racking experience since I never talk in front of people, and I had friends in from out of town. But so I blew it. During T.I.'s set, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and 50 Cent all shared the stage at the same time (and Diddy and Swizz Beatz, but who cares). This was the largest collective display of rap unity and starpower since, um, that one night at that club in Vegas during All-Star weekend. The Scream Tour, even in its most recent incarnation with an actual credible rapper headlining, is basically a show for 13-year-old girls, so I felt safe assuming that nothing as huge at this would happen. But the thing about transcendent NY rap moments is that you never know exactly when they'll happen and you shouldn't miss a chance to catch them whenever those opportunities arise. The fact that the moment actually happened is probably more important than what the real-time experience would've been like, but I'm still pretty severely bummed about this shit today. One of the very few things that could make me feel better on a day like this is a free five-CD box-set of Timbaland productions, but thankfully one of those exists, and it's right here.

Shit. Think. Shit. Think.

Matt Singer, the guy who's been hosting IFC.com's stream of the new "Trapped in the Closet" chapters, used to be a Voice film intern, and I've got this theory that he might've first heard about "Trapped" from fellow former Voice intern and vocal R. Kelly proponent Pete L'Official. (Pete can't remember.) But I actually knew Singer before that; I went to college with him. We lived on the same dorm floor sophomore year, and we both DJed at the college radio station. Matt and I were never boys or anything, but we were pretty good acquaintances, and I did see him every day for a while there. So the ongoing spectacle of the "Trapped in the Closet" saga gains an additional weird wrinkle with him attached, awkwardly interviewing Kelly and perching uncomfortably next to him on a couch before the individual episodes come on. Matt's a good guy, and I'm happy to see him playing such an active role in such a big cultural phenomenon, but his presence is just one of the many truly bizarre and anomalous aspects of the whole "Trapped" thing. Matt, to put it delicately, doesn't exactly strike anyone as being well-versed in R&B. (I can't remember what kind of music he listened to in college, but I do remember that his roommate was a big Dar Williams fan.) Matt's reactions to Kelly's labor of love are weirdly mesmerizing; the part where Kelly tells him that they need to get some girls up in there is by far my favorite. It'd be easy to view Singer as the "smirking hipster" that this article calls him, but I mean, you'd probably be chuckling to yourself if you were sitting in a living room with R. Kelly for an hour too. R. Kelly is funny, and he knows he's funny.