If this guy makes it, maybe Egyptian Lover will have a shot in a couple of years

Something totally unexpected happened this morning: I found myself getting sort of guardedly amped when I saw this year's list of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees. I'm not any more happy than I ever was about the basic concept of the Hall itself: a semi-official canonization process whose music ideally should fuck up the whole idea of canonization in the first place. And I especially hate the idea that artists aren't eligible until nomination until twenty-five years after recording their first records, a sure way to make sure nothing remotely vital or current will ever find its way in there. But the twenty-five year rule also has some weird ripple-effects, especially now that we're getting deep into the string of 80s-era nominees. The 80s were maybe the first decade in pop to actively resist the boomer-defined ideas of authenticity and rebellion upon which the hall itself was founded, where boomers ceased to be the music's chief target-demographic. The 80s certainly had their transcendent old-school world-changing rock figures, and most of those are already in the Hall: Springsteen, U2, R.E.M. But the decade also had a whole mess of stars who don't fit so easily into preestablished big-rock narratives. And this year's list of inductees is just an absurdly mixed group, especially when you look at the first-time nominees: one enormously popular all-surface pop icon (Madonna), one enormously popular all-surface robo-disco godess (Donna Summer), one folk-hero electro pioneer (Afrika Bambaataa), one instrumental surf-pop group (the Ventures), one culty folk-poet type (Leonard Cohen), and one snotty hardcore band who became snotty joke-rappers and took a long-ass time to absorb boomer-approved ideas of maturity and responsibility (the Beastie Boys). Not all of them have only just become eligible for nomination, but the Hall, for whatever reason, has waited up until this moment to pick Summer and Cohen and the Ventures, and all of them form into a really interesting group. Improbably enough, everyone on that list of new nominees is sort of great in one way or another; if we have to have a canon, we could do worse. And looking at that list, it's a whole lot of fun to imagine what might happen if you locked all of them in a room together and forced them to interact. The list also includes past nominees John Mellencamp, Dave Clark Five, and Chic, and the only two real no-brainers are Madonna and the Beasties, which will mean the induction ceremony will give Madonna and MCA another chance to make out backstage like they did during the 1985 Like a Virgin tour. I have no idea how the voters will possibly choose between the remaining nominees, but for once it'll be interesting to watch who they pick.

Or American Gangster, for that matter

"Bac Road Mississippi," the first song on the new Young Bleed album Once Upon a Time in Amedica, starts out with the sound of a lazy bottleneck guitar, and it keeps going for a while, along with soft train-track sound-effects and sad, slow trumpets. The drums don't kick in until about a minute into the song, and even then they just settle into a slow shuffle while the guitar mutters melancholy little blues phrases around it. This is pretty much the perfect way for a Young Bleed song to begin. The Baton Rouge veteran is maybe the least excitable rapper I've ever heard. He barely ever puts even the slightest emphasis on any of his words, instead letting his drawl drip out in a slow, assured monotone. Bleed stays right in the pocket of his beats, but he never quite sounds like he's rapping. It's like he's just talking in sentences that just happen to rhyme. And so an organic, bluesy track like "Bac Road Mississippi" works beautifully with his unchanging delivery, connecting it with older forms of black American music. On that song, he starts the second verse with this line: "I take the stage like a young Robert Johnson / And I light up some blaze and start yankin' on my johnson." That's maybe not exactly how the young Robert Johnson would usually take the stage, but how many other rappers would bother to name-check an ancient blues pioneer like that? Bleed also introduces the song's guest, the Dallas rapper Money Waters, calling him "my fish and grit-cookin'-ass partner." And in his verse, Money Waters mentions "sippin' cognac, bumpin' Bobby Womack." Once Upon a Time in Amedica is full of moments like this, offhand and unpretentious nods to a long musical continuum, and that's only one of the ways in which it feels like an album out of time. Ten songs later, Bleed says, "I'm out the window with that endo / Playing that Super Nintendo," and I love the idea that this guy hasn't bothered to update his video-game system in the last fifteen years. These days, most rap veterans sound uncomfortable and clueless when they try to keep up with newer trends in the music. Bleed sounds like he just doesn't care.

I guess this is Roc-A-Fella week, since I've got new stuff from both Jay-Z and Kanye. But yeah, another week with no real overarching theme. Stream or download the podcast. This week's songs:

• Jay-Z: "Blue Magic"
• Kanye West: "Can't Say No [feat. Trick Daddy]
• Yeasayer: "Waiting for the Winter"
• High on Fire: "Turk"

Seriously, "Christgrinding Avenue"

From what I can tell, the metal album that's found the most critical love this year seems to be The Apostasy, the new one from the Polish blackened death metal band Behemoth. In fact, the past couple of months have seen Behemoth cross over as much as a Polish blackened death metal band could possibly hope to cross over in America, headlining the Ozzfest second stage and scraping the bottom of the Billboard 200. And the acclaim the band has found is totally justified; The Apostasy is a seriously impressive piece of work. Frontman Nergal has a rumbling menace in his voice that goes way beyond the usual Cookie-Monster death-metal roar, and the album's production is almost shockingly full. The Darth Vader horns that pop up on "Arcana Hereticae" and the howling choirs on "Slaying the Prophets Ov Isa" are recorded with a symphonic grandeur that makes them sound that much more evil. Also, the album ends with a song called "Christgrinding Avenue," which might be the most awesome song title in the history of song titles, more for the "Avenue" part than the "Christgrinding" part. But for reasons that are probably more my fault than Behemoth's, I can't get too into The Apostasy. It takes a whole lot of experience and immersion to develop an ear for the twisting, roiling structures in death-metal, and I just don't have it. My big stumbling-block with the album is the drums. The album has rhythm, at least some of the time, but that rhythm doesn't come from the drums; it comes from the guitars, which play hard, precise riffs when they aren't bothering themselves with scrabbling cat-in-blender solos. But for the most part, the drums just maintain a constant double-bass barrage, a jackhammering chaos way too busy to concern itself with elemental concepts like groove. And that lack of groove keeps me at arm's length. For a metal record to achieve the sort of punishing force that I love, its riffs need enough space to really punch me in the face. The Apostasy might not have that sense of space and rhythm, but a couple of fairly new metal albums do: High on Fire's Death Is This Communion and Baroness's Red Album.

Brains!

Bjork
Madison Square Garden
September 24, 2007

For nearly the past decade, Bjork has been making decidedly interior music, music so hushed and intimate and textured that it really sounds best on headphones, alone, walking outside late at night. I once read an interview where she said she made Vespertine with laptop speakers in mind. Even her biggest, rowdiest post-Post songs ("Where Is the Line?," "Earth Intruders") are fragile, twisty thought-fragments that unfold according to their own logic. And when she tried to make a motivational individuality-anthem on this year's Volta, the result was the ludicrously awkward and somewhat unlistenable "Declare Independence," maybe my least favorite Bjork song ever. Since her stuff depends so completely on subjective absorption, it was deeply weird hearing these songs in a setting as massively communal as Madison Square Garden. Last night was the first time I'd ever seen Bjork live, but most of the New York shows she's done over the last few years have been relatively off-the-map venues: churches, the minor-league baseball stadium in Coney Island, the Apollo Theatre. I think I see the logic at work in picking those venues: for this interior music to work in a communal context, they have to somehow refer back to that other way in which people experience individual rapture in big numbers: church. I'm stretching a bit here, but all those venues can have an almost religious ceremonial air. If you can remember the first time you saw a lit-up baseball field, you know what I'm saying about Keyspan Park. And even Radio City Music Hall, the biggest place she played during her three-night stand earlier this year, has a sort of mystical glamor. Madison Square Garden, on the other hand, is a big concrete sports-arena. It may be the most hallowed big concrete sports-arena on the planet, and it may have amazing sound for a big concrete sports-arena, but it's pretty much impossible to make it feel like anything other than a big concrete sports-arena. And so the best shows I've seen there (White Stripes, Justin Timberlake, Nine Inch Nails) featured acts who played the venue like it was a big concrete sports-arena, displaying the exact sort of crowd-pleasing showmanship that works in big, concrete sports arenas. For big chunks of last night's show, Bjork tried to fill the venue with her quasi-religious thing, but it never quite felt like I was sitting anywhere other than an uncomfortable plastic seat jammed up next to another two uncomfortable plastic seats in a big concrete sports-arena. I went to last night's show hoping to be moved. I was impressed, but I was never moved.

I want what you got, Uncle Frank

If American Gangster is a music movie, it became a music movie retroactively. More precisely, it became a music movie when Jay-Z decided to make an album about it. When maybe the world's biggest rap star decides to make an album about a movie, and when that album's release date is set to coincide with the movie's own, the rapper effectively attaches himself to that movie and in the process attaches the movie to rap itself. It becomes a rap movie. Before Jay-Z decided to base an album on the movie, it was already sort of a rap movie simply by virtue of having a few rappers in its cast, but none of those rappers has a particularly big part. And the movie itself takes place almost entirely before the birth of rap, with only one actual rap song on its soundtrack. Jay-Z was really smart to tie himself to the movie, though, since American Gangster would've become a rap movie eventually anyway. It's a great movie, the best new one I've seen since Knocked Up or maybe Children of Men, and it comes steeped in the crime-life signifiers familiar from movies like Goodfellas and Scarface and The Godfather, movies that had nothing to do with rap but eventually became rap movies anyway just by virtue of being really badass crime movies. (In a way, American Gangster also works as a sort of critique of rap's ostentatiousness, but I'll get into that more further down.) Jay has connected himself to the movie more than any of the rappers who actually have bit-parts in the thing, and whether his album actually turns out to be any good or not, it'll only gain credibility from its association with the movie. I got to see the movie when Jay's publicist emailed me and told me to go to a press screening, putting me on the list. And I caught a quick glimpse of the guest-list when I was on my way in last night, and I saw more than a few DJs on there, so the movie is already being marketed as, among other things, a rap movie, a smart move for everyone involved. I can't really predict whether the movie will be a massive hit or win Oscars or whatever, but I can say with certainty that it'll become a rap touchstone immediately upon its release. Here are some things I learned watching American Gangster.

Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra

One of the things that really drives me nuts about Curtis is the creeping impression, quite possibly unfair, that "I Get Money" could've been something other than a fluke. "I Get Money" is the one moment on the album where 50 actually plays convincingly to his strengths. Probably not coincidentally, it's also the only track on the album that anyone seems to care about, probably the main reason he was able to do such monster first-week numbers. The track feels so easy and natural and organic that I feel like 50 could've probably just made it fifteen times over if he hadn't landed on the idea that people wanted to hear boring thug-love ballads and warmed-over club-rap from him instead. And if 50 actually makes Before I Self-Destruct, I hope he crams it with bangers like that rather than just allowing himself one. It's way, way too early to make predictions about Jay-Z's American Gangster. We've known of the album's existence for less than a week, and I have no intention to fall into the trap I fell into with Kingdom Come: endlessly hyping an album up in the weeks before its release and then being crushingly disappointed when the work itself finally surfaces. Still, at this point, I can't help it. "Blue Magic," the first leaked track from American Gangster, is great. Every time I've turned on Hot 97 over the past few days, it's been on, and I've been happy to hear it. "Blue Magic" sounds like Jay took the same lesson from the mediocre reception Kingdom Come got that I hope 50 learns from "I Get Money." Jay is almost completely back in his comfort zone on "Blue Magic," which is why it so easily trounces just about every song on Kingdom Come. I can appreciate what Jay wanted to accomplish with that last album: making a record that reflected his graceful maturation into postmodern tabloid royalty rather than continuing to revel in the desperation and violence of his long-passed youth. But desperation and violence almost always make for more interesting artistic catalysts than contentment and peace. On "Blue Magic," Jay sounds cold and hard and assured, a million miles removed from resorts and islands. Maybe Jay can write songs like this in his sleep, and maybe it takes the release of a major motion picture about a 70s drug-lord to get him into that mental space again. Either way, it's good to have him back.

No unifying theme this week; instead, I've got four songs that don't have a thing to do with each other other than the fact that I like them. If you want the mp3, you can right-click and download the podcast right here. This week's songs:

• 50 Cent: "I Get Money (Forbes 1, 2, 3 Remix) [feat. Diddy & Jay-Z]
• Born With It: "Stack My Paper Up [feat. B.O.B.]
• Hot Chip: "Shake a Fist"
• Cass McCombs: "Lionkiller"

The mule never showed

Black Lips Bad Kids Circus
Sound Fix
September 19, 2007

If the Black Lips were just a band, we might've never heard about them. In the past few years, demand for Estrus-schooled garage-revival shit hasn't exactly been high; the whole Strokes/White Stripes Return of the Rock hype and its attendant backlash, as well as all the lame-ass bands that rose up in its wake, drove that stuff pretty far out of fashion for at least the next few years. The Black Lips rarely venture outside Nuggets-revival territory, but they've still managed to secure themselves a rep as being a cool band, signing with Vice and showing up in the Fader. But they've become cool for reasons that don't actually have that much to do with their music. The Black Lips are cool because they make for great copy. Onstage, they make out with each other and piss in their own mouths and smash stuff. Offstage, they talk about drug-arrests and purpose-free juvenile-delinquent shit. They've supposedly been banned from and subsequently invited back to just about every cool club in the country, and they've built a mystique around being drunken assholes. Fair enough, especially since they're actually a really good band and I'm glad I know about them. Earlier this year at the Bowery Ballroom, they were chaotic but controlled, and their murky thump made me want to hear more. And their new album Good Bad Not Evil oozes riff-heavy raunch, mostly without making a big joke out of it. I especially like how they organically squeeze in lyrical signifiers from Southern rap without getting all ironic about it: singing about recreational cough syrup on "Lean," mumbling about "them Magic City titties" on the title track. This stuff works because they come off like the sort of fuckup white kids who probably do drink codeine and spend a lot of time a strip-clubs. When that dirtbag vibe comes through on the music, the band can be really compelling. But when the focus comes off the music and goes onto their publicity-stunt antics, the Black Lips are one of the dumbest, most irritating bands working. And that dumb, irritating band is the one I saw last night. My fault, really.

Best-case scenario: something like this

On the surface, the idea of a new Jay-Z album made up of songs inspired by a new big-budget movie and timed to coincide with that movie's release sounds like a terrible mistake in the making. Unless I'm forgetting something, the last time a rap group tried to tie in an entire album with a new movie (not counting straight-to-video rapper-produced stuff like Choices or whatever) was Public Enemy's He Got Game soundtrack album, an unfairly dismissed and ultimately pretty good work (still love that title track, Stephen Stills and all) that nonetheless was anything but a high-water mark for its creators. Jay's new album is going to be based on American Gangster, a big Ridley Scott period-piece crime movie that could be pretty great if this trailer is any indication. The story goes that Denzel Washington, the movie's star, lobbied its producer to let Jay do the entire soundtrack but the producer instead opted to put together a soundtrack album of period-specific 70s soul, something that also has the potential to be pretty great. But Jay saw the movie, and he claims that it sparked a serious creative run. In this morning's Times story, Jay talks about how he's already recorded nine songs and how each of them is inspired by a specific scene in the movie, and I'm already getting terrifying visions of Jay describing exactly what happens in every scene, like a little kid describing his dreams or something ("And then Russell Crowe says..."). There's a weird opportunistic cash-in streak here, too. Jay has famously accepted big sums of money to mention brand-names in his lyrics ("Motorola two-way page me"), and this entire album could be a grand, grotesque example of that trend. If Jay is, in fact, accepting any money from the film studio for this thing, it would make for some truly bizarre reverse product-placement, a movie's backers paying someone else to mention their movie in a song instead of accepting someone else's money to depict certain brands in their movie. Another wrinkle: American Gangster comes from Universal Pictures, which the Times article notes is no longer tied in with the Universal Music Group, Def Jam's parent company. Jay is also going against conventional wisdom by releasing an album only a few week after announcing its existence, and that doesn't seem to be a good sign. And then, of course, there's Kingdom Come, Jay's last attempt at a comeback album, a record that disappointed the hell out of me. Add up all this stuff and you get a pretty bleak picture. But then, we are talking about Jay-Z here, and maybe we should still give him the benefit of the doubt.