The Mountain Goats Squash Beef With Nas

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:22 PM, October 31, 2005

John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, getting ready to do some stuff

Mountain Goats
Bowery Ballroom
October 29, 2005

I showed up to the Mountain Goats party late, really late, 4AD-era late. The Mountain Goats cult has existed for nearly as long as the Mountain Goats themselves have existed, since a mental-hospital nurse named John Darnielle began recording songs on a boombox with an acoustic guitar in 1991, putting them out on cassette-only albums. 1991 was a long time ago, and now Darnielle is a big-label artist, signed to 4AD and making use of all the pretty cursive cover-art and moody, expansive production that the label must include in its contracts. Plenty of his cult professes to miss the tape-hiss and bleated immediacy of Darnielle's earlier work, the stuff he did before he had a string section at his disposal. I started last year with We Shall All Be Healed, Darnielle's second 4AD album, and so all that production sounds natural to me. WSABH doesn't skimp on the qualities that Darnielle's cult always loved about him: his forcefully nasal blurt of a voice, his percussively driving acoustic guitar, his gloriously refracted/emotionally concrete lyrics. The album just lays a thick carpet of swelling cellos and swirling pianos under all that stuff, giving it heft and warmth and grandeur. But then, I've never heard the vast majority of his older work. As with Lungfish or Three 6 Mafia, I like that there's this whole universe of stuff he did a long time ago, ready for me as soon as I decide I'm ready to start exploring it. Or that's what I thought before Saturday night's show, anyway. I can be really stupid sometimes. Some of these songs I heard that night, I can't believe I'd never let myself hear these songs before.

Earlier this year, Darnielle released his third 4AD album, The Sunset Tree, and I'll be shocked if this album doesn't end up at the top of my P&J ballot. The Sunset Tree is Darnielle's album-length exploration of his relationship with his abusive stepfather, the effects that his stepfather's abuse had on him at the time and have on him still. Musically, it's a gorgeous record, full of all the swelling and pounding I loved on WSABH. Lyrically, it's fucking corrosive and harrowing, and it still turns me into jelly every time I listen to it, which is often. I don't want to get too emo about the album in this space, but I love it. When I heard The Sunset Tree, I created this mental narrative of Darnielle's career in which The Sunset Tree is the final triumph, the ultimate use of Darnielle's heartfelt eloquence and unblinking fury, the end result of a career spent honing his gift. Turns out I was wrong. He's been this good for years.

The Mountain Goats' stage presentation is simple: Darnielle on acoustic guitar, another guy on bass, playing old songs and new songs and talking between the songs. The opening band, the Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers, backs them on a couple of songs. It's a singer-songwriter show, and it's a good one. Between songs, Darnielle is as wired as he is erudite, introducing his songs in an embarrassed mile-a-minute stammer. The bass player's accompaniment is minimal and generally unnecessary; he's there mostly to hammer Darnielle's best lines home by joining him in a piercing harmony. He's a hypeman, basically. And so Darnielle doesn't have the uplifting curlicues of his 4AD stuff to fall back on; it's basically just him, playing the way he once recorded. And he delivers his songs with total conviction, grinning and baring his teeth and scrunching his face up during the instrumental passages. This minimal presentation lets his lyrics come through clearly, as they should. And those lyrics, on the older songs as on the newer ones, have a gutpunch psychic force that just completely knocks me dead. I'd quote them, but I don't want to drain them of their context. I'm not a good enough writer to do them justice.

This is all critic-friendly stuff, of course, the acoustic guitars and enigmatic history and fierce literary fluency. Someone at the show yelled "Jess Harvell says hi" at one point, and I don't even think it was Jess Harvell. Darnielle is a critic himself, writing with enormous grace and passion about obscure metal and Europop on his Last Plane to Jakarta zine and website. But the audience at Saturday night's show was something I haven't yet seen in New York: a crowd that simply demands a second encore, that cheers loudly and enthusiastically throughout the set, that gives the guy onstage a hero's greeting. Critics don't do that stuff, but at least in this case, maybe we should.

You're probably doing Halloween stuff tonight, but if you're not, you should go see the Mountain Goats at the Knitting Factory.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on the Mountain Goats at Northsix
Voice review: Laura Sinagra on the Mountain Goats' We Shall All Be Healed

Jay-Z Brings Nas Onstage, Disses No One

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:00 AM, October 28, 2005

So this happened.

Jay-Z
Continental Airlines Arena
October 27, 2005

Jay-Z didn't dis anyone tonight, not 50 Cent or Cam'ron or Game. I feel a little ridiculous saying this after all the time I've spent publically wondering who Jay's target would be, and Jay's big surprise, Nas, wasn't a surprise, at least not if you've been obsessively combing the internet dorking out over clues the way I have. But please believe me when I say that I am not the slightest bit disappointed; no one I heard leaving the Continental Airlines Arena was either. Even if you thought you knew it was coming, it was still a dumb-out moment: Jay stopping "Where I'm From" at the "Biggie, Jay-Z or Nas" part, falling silent for a minute, telling the crowd that the concert was called "I Declare War" but decided that it was bigger than that. And then: "You know what I did for y'all? You know what I did for hip-hop? I said fuck that shit! Let's go, Esco!" Nas rising behind Jay on an elevator at the top of a staircase, doing the hook on "Dead Presidents." And then the two of them standing side by side at the center of the stage, arms behind them, Nas wearing army greens and Tims, hat off to the side of his head, Jay wearing expensive-looking sunglasses and a black tracksuit, soaking in the moment.

The Nas introduction came at the end of the show, of course, the climax of a long night. I'd never seen Jay-Z live before, but the show's format was familiar from Fade to Black: Jay does a few songs, introduces a guest who does a few songs and then maybe brings out his own guest, Jay comes back, does a few songs, introduces someone else. Jay's song choices were sometimes confusing ("Hola Hovito" over "Big Pimpin'"?), but he was still totally comfortable in his skin, doing songs he knew well to a crowd who knew them just as well. The Biggie tribute, especially, seemed ripped straight from Fade to Black. But that's not to say the show was boring. Onstage, Jay is all quick, easy self-assurance, qualities immediately thrown into relief whenever his guests would overload the stage with hypemen and yell too much. "Song Cry," in particular, sounded heavenly after a chaotic, cacophanous D-Block set. And it's not to say the show didn't have its surprises. Incredibly, the Jay/Nas peace accord was only the second long-standing beef squashed onstage tonight; Diddy did "All About the Benjamins" with former adversaries the Lox. And I jumped out of my seat when Jay brought out Beanie Sigel, a guy I love, a guy who'd seemed to be on the outs with the Roc to the point where he was talking about signing with G-Unit.

And Jay's guest list was pretty staggering, even without the megaton starpower of Beyonce or Usher or Mary J. Blige. We got all the Roc-A-Fella guys we expected to get: Freeway snarling ferociously, Peedi Crack getting to spit a couple of verses, Bleek just being there. And there were a few other guys we knew would be there: T.I. and Young Jeezy got to do their own short solo sets. Beanie and D-Block and Diddy were more surprising, but the night's biggest non-Nas guest was Kanye West, who must've taken a night off his tour. Kanye's still-a-kid amped-up energy was a nice contrast to Jay's seen-it-all cool, and it's hard to imagine a time when it won't be fun watching him do his jerking-backward dance on "Gold Digger." (Bonus points: he didn't remove the "I was like Bad Boy's street team, couldn't work the Lox" line from "Touch the Sky" even after the Lox/Diddy reunion.) A few of the guests even brought their own guests: Jeezy had Akon on "Soul Survivor," and Kanye had Paul Wall and GLC on "Drive Slow," though we didn't get "Mr. Lonely" or "Sittin' Sidewayz." There were more guests than time-slots available, apparently; Bun B made a quick appearance onstage at the end of the show, but he didn't get a chance to rap, though Jay's last words onstage were "Free Pimp C." And then there was Nas, who didn't really wreck shit with his own solo set (mostly Illmatic stuff) but who lent the event an epic scope just by showing up. There was a great moment near the end when Nas stood side by side with Jay, Kanye, and Diddy, like it was rap's Mount Rushmore or some shit. And an even better moment came a minute later. The stage had been set up to look like the Oval Office, complete with desk, glass doors, presidential seal on the floor, fake Secret Service guys. While Nas did "Made You Look," Diddy sprawled in Jay's presidential chair and put his feet up on the desk, while Jay grabbed him by the leg and tried to pull him out. It was funny. Maybe you had to be there.

The show wasn't perfect. The sound was terrible through most of the night, and a few of the guests had serious mic problems (T.I.'s mic straight-up didn't work half the time.) The elevator at the back of the stage seemed to be working way too slowly, awkwardly causing Kanye and Nas's dramatic entrances to happen a few moments late. But the night began with a transcendent moment: Jay sitting behind the desk while the opening to "Public Service Annoucement" played, jets of flame shooting up from the stage when the drums kicked in, one of the coolest things I've ever seen onstage. And it ended with another one: Jay doing "Encore," joined by every rapper to come to the stage that night and Lebron James, everyone looking utterly dazed and happy to be there.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z

Who Will Jay-Z Attack Tonight?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:13 PM, October 27, 2005

Yes. Yes. This is happening.

It's a little bit ridiculous for me to post about this right now, speculating about an event that's going to happen in a couple of hours, that may have already happened by the time you read this. But I just found out that I'm going to the Jay-Z "I Declare War" show tonight, and so I can't even think about anything else long enough to write about it. And I've talked vague shit on Jay before on this blog, how I don't like the way he comes down off a mountaintop to bless people with guest appearances, how a just-OK verse from Jay in 2005 qualifies as a crushing disappointment. But allow me to dick-ride for a minute: Jay has put himself into a position where every public move he makes is instantly scrutinized across the internet, and so a prearranged beatdown like this show becomes something huge and epic, something like the 2001 Summer Jam where he showed pictures of Prodigy in ballet clothes on the big screen. Jay is important enough that the Cam'ron shooting won't be the biggest story in rap anymore in twelve hours. I've never seen Jay live before, but I've watched Fade to Black enough times that I have some idea what kind of authority and Clintonian charisma he brings to a stage. To channel all that stature into a broadside against somebody, to enlist a mystery cast of rappers in this broadside, this is big. People have been speculating about this show for months. I fake-speculated about it a while ago, but now it's time for a good hard look at what might be going down tonight. Jay is going to go at someone tonight, and it could be any of these guys:

50 Cent. Allhiphop Rumors reported this morning that 50 was going to be the guy, that Jay mended a few bridges to bring a cast of G-Unit foes to the stage. This makes a lot of sense; 50 is the only target big enough to make this whole spectacle worthwhile. Even during the Rock the Mic tour in 2003, Jay and 50 were subtly sniping at each other, 50 taking up Jay's stage time and then a few months later moving up the Beg for Mercy release date to the same Friday as The Black Album. And of course Jay has been dissing 50 for, what, six years? More recently, 50 bizarrely took credit for Kanye West's success. And 50 is plenty prominent right now, with his movie coming out in a week; a Jay-Z attack could conceivably affect the opening-weekend gross of Get Rich or Die Tryin'. And more importantly, an attack against 50 would be a great excuse to bring out some high-profile guests. Nas and Jay have been teasing a team-up for a few months, saying nice things about each other for the first time ever; Nas has even been spotted in the Def Jam building. And there's any number of people who have problems with G-Unit who could come to the stage: Lil Wayne, Game, Jadakiss, maybe (maybe) Cam. This would make me happier than any of Jay's other potential opponents; can you imagine how hard 50 would have to come to respond to a united front of Jay-Z and Nas?

Game. Game has been beefing with Memphis Bleek and the Young Gunz for about a year now, and that's what got Nas on Jay's bad side more than four years ago. And Game has been really weird with the subliminal disses, saying "I don't wear button-up shirts or drive Maibachs" on "Westside Story" and then backtracking, inexplicably insisting that he meant the line for Ja Rule. Jay probably shot back at Game on "Dear Summer" ("If it ain't directed directly at me, I don't respect it"). And Game is just a temptingly huge target; Jay would just have to bring out a clip of Game on Change of Heart to top the Prodigy-in-tights bombshell. Game's manager Jimmy Henchman told Allhiphop Rumors that Jay was definitely not going to be dissing Game, but I have no idea whether he's a remotely reliable source. But then, it wouldn't be much of a challenge for Jay to handle Game; even after "300 Bars," Game isn't even close to Jay's level. And with Game already beefing with half the people in rap, an attack from Jay would just look like bad sportsmanship, kicking someone when he's down. Jay could probably get a much bigger reaction from bringing Game onstage than from dissing him, so Game isn't a likely target.

Cam'ron. Cam and Jay have always been on cold terms ever since Dame Dash made Cam the Vice-President of Roc-A-Fella when Jay was on vacation. Since Jay took the Roc-A-Fella name from Dame and Cam split with the label, Cam and Jim Jones have been throwing subliminal jabs at Jay. And Cam is maybe the only New York rapper with the eloquence to give Jay a really memorable battle. But Cam just got shot less than a week ago, and even with the conspiracy theories flying around, it's just not a good look to go at an injured dude. And in Juelz Santana Def Jam still has one Diplomat left on its roster with serious earning potential; I can't see Jay putting his money in jeopardy like that.

And so there it is. There's always the possibility that Jay will go left and bash someone totally unexpected like Nelly or Mike Shinoda or something, but I'm going into the arena tonight expecting to see 50 Cent get smeared. Check Status tomorrow for the real report.

Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z

Wolf Parade: The Ultimate Indie Band of 2005?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:56 PM, October 26, 2005

Wolf Parade making rocks (courtesy Brooklyn Vegan)

Wolf Parade + Think About Life + Dante Decaro
Northsix
October 25, 2005

When Sub Pop sent me a copy of Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary a couple of months before it dropped, I listened to it once, decided that it sounds too much like Modest Mouse, and filed it away, comfortable in the assumption that I'd never listen to it again. So I was completely unprepared for the deluge of praise that the album attracted when it actually came out: 9.2 in Pitchfork (tied with Sufjan for the year's second-highest rating after Kanye), A and Album of the Week in Stylus, Metacritic score of 86. So how did this album that sounded to me like pleasant-enough boilerplate fuzz-crackle-rock get this much love?

After seeing the band at Northsix last night, I think I've got it figured out. Wolf Parade is the ultimate indie-rock band circa right now. They're not the best or the most important, but they give the impression that the primordial soup of indiedom just sort of burped them out, that we would've had to invent them if they didn't already exist. Evidence: they do the vaguely Tom Waits junkyard-blues thing just like Modest Mouse does it, their vocals almost studiously warbly and off-kilter, like they've spent year studying David Byrne's vocal tics. And yet somehow this warble doesn't feel forced; they've absorbed Byrne and Brock and Waits and organically woven them into their sound rather than forcibly jamming them in. They nod toward the tea-party Decemberism currently in vogue in indie-rock, occasionally breaking out the waltz time signature, but they never quite succumb to it; they're just burly and heartfelt enough to escape. They alternate between sloppy, grating verses and tight, driving choruses, and they come closer to falling apart when they play faster. They make room for vintage keyboards and laptops, but they're still very much a guitar band. They still have a Myspace page. Also: beards and Montreal and the word Wolf. They're everything indie-rock seems to want out of its bands at this particular moment.

And more to the point, they're a good band, something it took me a while to realize. Their melodies have a greasy Springsteen pull, a warmth and self-assuredness that comes through even more clearly in person. They tend to follow a fairly simple formula: vintage-keyboard guy plays the melody, laptop/themerin guy squiggles and twitters around the margins, and the two guitars fill in all the space in between. But this formula works; it keeps them from ever climbing into majesty or sinking into pretentiousness. They're just a strong band that does this now-indie shit right, and there's not a thing wrong with that.

So the real pleasure of Wolf Parade comes from how they color within the lines, how they take this thing we know as indie-rock now and play it with confidence and grace. It's an impression driven home harder by the opening band, which is billed as Dante Decaro but is basically three fifths of Wolf Parade playing truly pleasant coffeehouse singer-songwriter fare (Decaro himself is a former Hot Hot Heat bassist who just joined the band). It's simple pastoral stuff; the drummer from Wolf Parade drums while the laptop/themerin guy plays percussion and Decaro sings and plays guitar and occasionally makes use of one of those metal things that hold up harmonicas so you can play them while you play guitar. The two-drummers thing adds a hint of novelty to the whole thing and some drive to the songs, but this is still a singer-songwriter doing singer-songwriters stuff, something we've seen a million times before, and Decaro's lyrics do nothing to wipe away the whole cliche thing ("I look outside / The world goes by / And so do I / And so do I," for real). But it was all done so nicely and prettily and sincerely that I couldn't get mad at it. Cliches are there for a reason, and doing a cliche right certainly isn't a crime; I'd say it's an achievement.

Think About Life, who played between Decaro and Wolf Parade, threw the whole sincerity thing into sharp relief. The band is basically Napoleon Dynamite if Napoleon Dynamite was a band, and I hated Napoleon Dynamite. Think About Life's singer is a fat guy who uses his size to act clownish onstage, slapping his stomach and doing unbelievably irritating mime dances and pirouettes, wearing a shirt that says "Steroid Free Body". There's no guitar in the band, just drums and cheap keyboards, and it seems worth asking whether it's OK for an indie band to base its songs around Casio presets after LCD Soundsystem and Cut Copy and Supersystem. I'm inclined to say no, not even if the band is from Olympia, and Think About Life isn't from Olympia. By the time they got to their fake-cutesy Stay in School rap, I wanted to die. This band made me want to die.

Voice blog: Riff Raff interviews Wolf Parade

Searching For the Next Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:56 PM, October 25, 2005

Big Bear, um, living large

Oneida + Big Bear + The Coke Dares + Awesome Color
Mercury Lounge
October 21, 2005

In his review of Oneida's The Wedding last week, Andy Beta wrote of the band's consistent lack of blowupitude:

Having babysat both Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars during Brooklyn's last rock boom, the trio still watch their opening bands snag sweet deals some five years and seven albums on.

If Beta is right and Oneida is forever doomed to watch its onetime curtain-jerkers become take over the world, it seemed to make sense to go see Oneida and grab an early look at the bands that the glossies will be jamming down our throats in a couple of years. So here's Status Ain't Hood's report on Oneida's newest crop of openers.

Awesome Color is a band from Ann Arbor led by a husky bearded dude in a tie-dyed shirt who got very, very drunk on Friday night and ripped some truly non-heroic guitar heroics. The band plays a noisy bar-band churn, sometimes making halfhearted attempts at MC5ian triumphal frat choogle. Its songs are mostly really long and really boring, and they keep inviting their friends onstage: a guy who does a weird werewolf dance and sings and a guy who plays saxophone and runs through the crowd. They're not very good at stage banter (bass player: "Oneida are a lot better at stage banter than we are"). And they play for a ridiculously tedious 45 minutes, way longer than any opening band ever needs to play.

The verdict: Awesome Color is not going to blow up.

The Coke Dares, a trio from Bloomington, Indiana, play burly and gleefully dumb Motorheadian punk-metal songs that average about 45 seconds in length, guitar solos included. Their jokey lyrics are about zombies and asshole mechanics and stuff like that, and their stage banter is strictly overblown fake-rock-star stuff (they just toured with Grand Buffet, which makes perfect sense). The big guitarist guy is funnier than the big bass-player guy. The three members each wear shirts with one word of the band's name ("The" "Coke" "Dares"), and the drummer's name is Jeff Jeff. The band relies entirely on its schtick, of course, but the schtick works; the endless barrage of unbelievably short songs just gets funnier as the set goes on ("We have seven songs left; we'll be off the stage in five minutes"), and they never get boring. They hit squeeze a nice harmony into their choruses from time to time, but the music itself isn't really the point.

The verdict: The Coke Dares aren't ever going to blow up as such; I can't picture them on MTV2. But I can see them becoming way more popular than they are; their fun, dumb appeal is hard to deny, and they'll only get better as they grow more confident with their schtick. They're a perfect opening band: not much of a threat to blow the headliner off the stage but virtually guaranteed to make the night more enjoyable.

Download: "Black Beauties"
Download: "Rocking All the Time"
Download: "Acid Church Party"

The band of the night with the best chance of blowing up was Big Bear, a female-fronted Boston band that plays jagged, screamy spazzcore, almost shocking in its ferocity especially considering how mild-mannered everyone in the band seems between songs. The band's brand of math-metal is more ragged than most of the stuff in Decibel these days, though it's certianly more Dillinger Escape Plan than Lightning Bolt. The songs lurch unpredictably between time signatures, but the primal force of the music remains fully intact. The crowd didn't know what to make of them, of course, but this was a Mercury Lounge crowd, so it wasn't all that surprising.

The verdict: Big Bear isn't going to blow up indie-style; their music is way too fierce to fit with the sniffly pastoralism that has taken over indie-rock lately. But I can see them getting on Headbangers' Ball if someone ever throws a decent recording budget at them.

Download: "Track 01"
Download: "Track 03"

I was going to write about Oneida, too, but then they started out with an unbelievably irritating ten-minute bloopy keyboard vamp, something like what Stereolab must sound like for people who hate Stereolab. I couldn't handle it, so I left.

Voice review: Andy Beta on Oneida's The Wedding

Cam'ron Almost Killed in DC

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:41 PM, October 24, 2005

And he still has the car

Early Sunday morning, one of the greatest rappers in the world came very close to dying. Cam'ron, the nonchalantly amoral absurdist thug-rap prince, was driving from one DC club to another around 2:10 a.m. when "an unknown number of men" pulled up next to Cam at a stoplight and demanded he turn over his car, a royal blue 2006 Lamborghini. Cam refused, and so they shot him.

He's fine. Or he's not dead, anyway, not even seriously injured. MTV.com News said he was shot twice, once in each arm. The Channel 11 news last night said he was shot once. Dipsetmixtapes.com clarifies things: a bullet went through one arm and into the other. Ah. In any case, the carjackers fired multiple shots, and I have to wonder how close Cam came to getting hit in the head. A foot? Three inches? Cam drove himself to the hospital with a bullethole in one arm and a bullet in the other. He spent 12 hours at Howard University Hospital before flying back to New York yesterday. Here's Cam's manager, Joseph Sherman, quoted on Dipsetmixtapes.com: "He even asked the nurse for her phone number when he woke up." (This is awesome.) Here's Cam, quoted on Allhiphop.com: "People are foolish if they think I'm going to lose my head and give up anything to anyone just because someone threatens me ... I'm doing OK. It takes more than a botched carjacking to keep me down."

All bravado. Of course he's all bravado. Listen to him. That buttery monotone never betrays fear or regret or even anger, just effortless unemotional mastery and a sort of amused disbelief, whether he's quietly amazed that he's come this far in life or that some audacious fool would try to test him. If Cam was shaken after being shot (and he'd have to be insane to not be shaken), he'd never let us know. He's not the sort of guy who shows weakness or vulnerability in public. His fans wouldn't take to it. It would break the cult-of-personality spell he's spent years meticulously weaving, transforming himself from a clumsy one-hit Mase-affiliated rapper in 1998 to an unflappable don and border-hopping entrepreneur in 2005. He's got product to push, and every news report about the shooting takes care to mention that Killa Season is coming in February 2005. It's back to business as usual.

And maybe that public profile was something that flashed through Cam's mind on Saturday night when he decided to stomp on the gas at the red light instead of opening the gull-wing door and walking away. That blue Lamborghini is the most famous car in rap, a towering symbol of Cam's relentless self-reliance, the first thing he copped after selling his equally famous pink Range Rover on eBay and signing a $2.5 million deal for his Diplomat Records with Warner's regional-rap experiment Asylum Records. In July, Cam talked about his car on 106 & Park: "I bought the Lamborghini especially for New York," so he could drive around and let people see it, so they could realize that you could be from New York and own something like that. Soon after 106 & Park, Cam was arrested in Harlem for driving the car with a suspended license. And if Cam would've walked away from this famous car in DC, maybe he would've betrayed the image he'd made for himself and shown weakness.

Probably not. Probably he just stomped on the gas pedal because that's what you do when adrenaline is coursing through your veins and you don't have time to think your decision through. Imagine the scene: he'd been separated from his security, and he was trying to find his way to a club. Have you ever driven around DC and tried to find a club? It's a labyrinth. You think you're headed in the right direction, and all of a sudden you're on some completely other street with another name. You're in Southwest one minute and Northeast the next with no idea how you got there. Maybe Cam's security got lost. Maybe Cam got lost. But he drove to the hospital just fine, so maybe he knew exactly where he was the whole time; I have no idea.

I've been thinking a lot lately about rappers' personal problems, the ghosts of criminal pasts that follow them into their newly legit, newly artistic lives; check the Beanie post, check all the staggering new allegations about Murder Inc. But this was a different situation. It would be wrong to say that this could've happened to anyone, but it could've happened to anyone who was driving a new Lamborghini from one club to another late at night in DC. It had nothing to do with any criminal exploits in Cam's past. Did Cam's assailants recognize him? Would it have mattered if they did? What did they think when they saw that gorgeous blue spaceship cruising down a street that late at night, looking like an apparition? Did they follow it for a few blocks? Did they just decide that moment to pull out guns?

Or was it reckless for Cam to even be driving that thing? Does he understand the effect that a car like that might have on people who have nothing? What does it say about rap's rampant conspicuous consumption that one of the best rappers in the game came close to dying rather than relinquishing his car? And would it have said anything different if Cam had actually been murdered? They're important questions, but they're questions for another time. Right now, Cam is OK, back in New York. We haven't lost him, and we should breathe a sigh of relief.

Voice review: Jon Caramanica on Cam'ron's Purple Haze

Swedish Garage-Rock Anarchists Totally Rock Huge Corporate Record Store

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:08 PM, October 21, 2005

The (International) Noise Conspiracy, playing somewhere other than the Virgin Megastore

(International) Noise Conspiracy
Union Square Virgin Megastore
October 20, 2005

You can't make this stuff up: the pretentiously-named Swedish anarcho-garage band (International) Noise Conspiracy totally rocking out on a rigged-up stage on the cafe side of the Union Square Virgin Megastore, yowling about revolution while people browse the 2-for-$15 CD bin a hundred feet away. And get this: in a beautiful accident, the red of their matching-uniform shirts perfectly matches the red in the Virgin-logo banner hanging right behind them. "I don't really know why we're doing this," said (I)NC lead yowler Dennis Lyxzen, "but it's probably a good thing." Probably!

Lyxzen was once the lead yowler of the Swedish post-hardcore band Refused, who released a molten fireball of an album called The Shape of Punk to Come in 1998. The Shape of Punk to Come ran steamroller riffs and adrenal smash-the-state lyrics through a filter of berserk time-sig changes, warped structures, and gleaming production. It was a gorgeous mess, and it may have actually lived up to its title; people have certainly been ripping it off shamelessly for the past seven years. The Allmusic bio of Refused says they broke up shortly after recording the album because they were "unable to reconcile their anarchist leanings with a career in music," which just makes this Virgin Megastore shit funnier and sadder.

When Lyxzen formed the (International) Noise Conspiracy later in 1998, plenty of people observed that he was now biting the Make-Up in the exact same way he'd been biting Nation of Ulysses in Refused. And yes, it was pretty bold: matching outfits, retro-glam haircuts, motionless hot girl (playing keyboard instead of bass). The new band also combined garage-rock white-soulman yelps with unlistenable sludge; the only noticeable changes from the Make-Up's blueprint were the (I)NC's cleaner production and their taller singer. On record, the (I)NC were pretty terrible, consistently forgetting to inject hooks into their workmanlike jerky stomp. But the one time I saw them a few years ago, they were thrilling onstage, flinging their bodies around and leaping over each other, Lyxzen climbing over balconies and doing airborne splits. They toured America's indie-rock circuit hard for a few years ago and then signed with Reprise in the wake of the Hives-led Swedish-garage buzz-wave of 2002. Rick Rubin produced Armed Love, their major-label debut, which came out in Europe last year but got pushed back in America. Reprise finally released the album to zero fanfare earlier this month. And now the band has gone the route of virtually every rabble-rousing left-wing band that rides press hype into a major-label contract: they're touring with the Bravery and playing the Virgin Megastore. Immortal Technique: meet your future.

To their credit, the band played hard for the duration of their 15-minute in-store set, still doing this same onstage careening, still executing perfect leaps and twirling their mic-chords and spinning tambourines on their fingers (Thunderbirds Are Now!: meet your future). Lyxzen didn't much acknowledge the ridiculousness of the situation (he leapt up on a trash can at the set's climax), and the store let the band play surprisingly loud. But you don't get transcendent rock moments at six in the afternoon at enormous and overpriced downtown record stores, and any attempts to create them are terminally fated to end up ridiculous and embarrassing. (Also: the band has made themselves far less entertaining by replacing their gorgeous female keyboard player with an ugly dude.) I wonder how Lyxzen feels these days about reconciling his anarchist leanings with a career in music.

Download: "Baby Doll" (N.E.R.D. cover)
Download: "Up for Sale"

Animal Collective: A Missed Opportunity?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:38 PM, October 20, 2005

Animal Collective throwing their sets up

"Animal Collective fucking blows."
-Status Ain't Hood, September 20

First things first: I don't get Animal Collective. That doesn't make this band unique in any way. There's a whole school of blurrily drifting soft-noise bands that I don't get. I don't get Black Dice. I don't get Excepter. I don't get Gang Gang Dance, even though I sort of like them. I don't get any of these bands that take the Boredoms' towering symphonies of free-floating bliss as a starting point, shrink them down to microscopic levels, toss in a couple of Indonesian hand-cymbals, gurgle out some wordless vocals, hold down one vintage-synth key for a few minutes, and call it a day. This might, of course, just be my problem. Everyone else seems to love this stuff. Maybe I'll wake up one morning and it'll be all I want to hear. Maybe I just haven't lived in New York long enough to crave the soft-focus pastoral escape that these bands offer. Maybe one day I'll liberate myself from my infantile need for hooks and structure. It's hard for a critic to say that there's no accounting for taste, since our jobs are based around the idea that there is such a thing as accounting for taste, that there are people better-qualified than others to say what's good and what's not. But it's true; I have certain things that I look for in music, qualities I might vaguely name as force and clarity and, um, like, bigness. These bands don't typically offer any of these things, and so I don't get them.

I've found a few things to like in Animal Collective. I like the deranged sunny tunefulness of the first couple of jams on Sung Tongs just fine, the only times I've heard focus in their aimless jangley scrawl. I like the triumphant autumnal ecstasy of the first couple of tracks on Feels, their new album. But every time I listen to the band for more than ten minutes, their music begins to turn into impenetrably bubbling streaked emptiness, pleasant enough but not something I could ever imagine spending money to own. So I should probably just cut my losses with this band and go back to jamming Back for the First Time on repeat, right? I've barely heard a note that Black Dice recorded after Beaches and Canyons unless someone from DFA was remixing it, and my life hasn't been any poorer. So why do I keep trying to like Animal Collective?

The simple answer: they're Baltimore dudes like me, guys who grew up in the same place at the same time as I did. Jess Harvell's Baltimore City Paper cover story about the band's local roots says that they're dudes from northern Baltimore County who graduated high school in 1997, a year before me. Group members Deakin and Panda Bear stayed in Baltimore after high school while the other two went to New York, though all four are scattered right now in New York and DC and Portugal. Track 8 on Feels is titled "Loch Raven," named after Baltimore's reservoir. Countless musicians came from Baltimore or spent formative years there but only found fame after leaving: Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Tupac, Mama Cass, Tori Amos, Phillip Glass, John Doe from X. None of them really addresses their hometown in any way I recognize, but then none of them share my age and suburban upbringing the way Animal Collective does. And still, I don't feel anything much in common with this band when I'm listening to them.

In the mid-90s, when the Animal Collective dudes were in high school and discovering their musical identities, Baltimore had the most amazing indie-rock scene I've ever experienced, directly or indirectly. A high-school kid named Ben Valis had borrowed enough money from his parents to rent a Hamilton storefront, which he turned into a makeshift club called the Small Intestine. Valis, at the age of 16, was booking bands like Rainer Maria and Songs: Ohia and Les Savy Fav, putting on shows four nights a week sometimes. He was also booking a ton of local bands, kids who would do anything to upstage each other: slamming mics through walls, smashing each other in the face with guitars, lighting themselves on fire. For a while, there was a band called Invert who would pull up outside other bands' shows in a van, jump out of the back, play five-minute sets outside, and then drive off. And even after the Small Intestine closed, a ton of short-lived illegal venues kept things going for years. The music was almost never particularly good, but exciting things were always happening; there was a freewheeling energy in the air that I've never experienced anywhere else. When I came back to Baltimore after four years of college in Syracuse, a few guys who had come up in this scene had gone on to get national press and do national tours: Cex, Oxes, the Convocation Of. But the scene had splintered as scenes like that always do. People had grown older and moved away or stopped being friends, and cocaine became a big thing for some of these guys. There are still great things happening in the city, dudes booking Baltimore club DJs for warehouse parties or starting semi-regular psyche-folk nights at restaurants. But in the last couple of years, I never felt the sense of anarchic possibility that had been raging in the city and its environs when I was younger.

The dudes in Animal Collective were certainly aware of all this stuff, and the influence of that scene's rampant pranksterism may manifest in their masks and goofy names. But they only address what was happening once in the City Paper article:

“Baltimore had a really strong DIY teenage punk and indie community, a warehouse and house-party thing, in the ’90s,” Weitz acknowledges. “But we were kind of on the outside of it.”

“We just didn’t know about it,” Portner says. “The city didn’t really have any influence on us. It was more about the back porch.”

And I guess that's my problem with the band. One band that came into existence during this ridiculously fertile period in my hometown has broken through to the national indie consciousness, but it's a band that seems to have stayed willfully insular and ignored the things that were happening at the time. I can't really articulate this in any clear way, but I'm disappointed in the band. They could've learned more from what was happening. If they had, maybe indie-rock would be better for it today, or maybe I'd at least get Animal Collective. From where I'm sitting, it's a huge missed opportunity.

Stream: "Grass" video

Voice feature: Nick Catucci on Animal Collective

Lil Wayne: Best Rapper Ever?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:40 PM, October 19, 2005

Lil Wayne's shorts are kind of too big for him to be playing basketball

In 1997, the Hot Boys were a group of four young no-name Cash Money solo artists loosely and uncomfortably grouped into a unit. Even though Get It How U Live, their first album, came close to going gold independently, the group was a strictly regional thing. The four rappers in the group mostly served as foils to Mannie Fresh's amazing jittery future-bounce beats. So it's amazing that every member of the group has managed to carve out a strong identity for himself eight years later. Juvenile has become a Southern-rap elder, and his slippery groan has gained a sort of bluesy weight. B.G.'s slurry whine has become an edgy hiss, and he's on his way to becoming a Bun B figure, no Southern rap album complete without a guest appearance from him. Young Turk hasn't been putting out any music since he's been in jail for shooting a cop, but, um, he shot a cop. But of the group's four members, it's Lil Wayne who's gone through the most head-spinning transformation.

Lil Wayne started out as the baby of the group, a 16-year-old kid who talked about dealing drugs just like the other three but who didn't cuss because his mother might get upset. These days, he's a towering figure in Southern rap, an unpredictable master of ugly croaks and stunningly bizarre word-choices, the only guy in rap who seems to be improving with every verse. Last year, he made a lot of people very, very confused when, at the end of his single "Bring It Back," he made a clear reference to Jay-Z by repeating the line "best rapper alive / since the best rapper retired" a few times. It was a shockingly ballsy claim, but it was enough to get Jay's attention. When he became Def Jam president, Jay is rumored to have tried hard to get Wayne a deal at the label; he was probably also responsible for putting Wayne in a position to make his scene-stealing cameo on Destiny's Child's "Soldier," the song that gave this blog its name. But Wayne didn't sign with Def Jam; Cash Money CEO Baby Williams wasn't about to let his last remaining commercially viable rapper go without a fight. And now Wayne has a position as president of Cash Money Records (whatever that means), and he's making Southern-rap power moves. Rumors say he's dating Trina, he's on the cover of the Southern edition of the new XXL, and, weirdly, he's been announced as the newest member of the Atlanta rap supergroup Boyz N Da Hood, replacing the departing Young Jeezy. It's hard to even picture him in that group, but he's been in a rap supergroup before, and that seemed to work out for him.

Now, it would take a global apocalypse at the very least to make Lil Wayne the best rapper alive. But I've been finding myself looking forward to his guest verses more and more, especially after he annihilated Paul Wall with his insanely cold verse on the latter's "March Now Step" ("I'm so New Orleans that I can't hide / You know I'm cutting something; I'm spitting pe-rox-ide"). The Diplomats get a lot of credit for their thrillingly bizarre metaphors, but now Wayne matches them gibberish line for gibberish line ("Straight down ya chimney in ya living room, it's I / Weezy, allergic to wintertime, hot!"). But unlike the Dipset, Wayne matches his lyrical eccentricities with an equally eccentric delivery. His flow reminds me of a smarmy kindergarten teacher leading a classroom singalong of "Old McDonald"; it has a condescendingly patient smarminess, like he doesn't mind taking the time explaining things that you're too dumb to figure out yourself but he's going to have some fun with you while he does this. His voice was always a naturally croaky high-pitched moan, but he's learned how to toy around with it. I love this guy.

Voice review: Keith Harris on Lil Wayne's 500 Degreez

Jay-Z, Young Jeezy, and Bun B Make Year's Most Disappointing Rap Song

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:36 PM, October 18, 2005

Bun B addressing the first-ever UGK Convention

Bun B's Trill is a good rap album. Sometimes it's great: the painfully complete weary honestly of "The Story," the unexpectedly sunny burst of playful Miami bass on "Git It," the incomparable joy of hearing Chamillionaire and Paul Wall right next to each other on the "Draped Up" remix. But it's not the album we were waiting for, the long-delayed solo debut of one of the greatest rappers of all time, a guy who has endured more than a decade of regional marginalization, record-label cluelessness, and personal upheaval on his long climb to the top of the rap world, someone whose tireless work ethic and authoritative eloquence and grizzled presence have finally brought him into a position where everyone in rap owes him favors, where his supremacy is universally recognized and the respect he's long earned finally being granted. Trill should be a revelation, the defining document in Houston's moment of rap-landscape dominance and the definitive showcase of a guy who's been breathing rap and accumulating experience since the South was a rap wasteland. Instead, it comes off as a pretty good album from a strong B-list rapper with a lot of powerful friends, a patchwork hodgepodge of obligatory guest appearances and semi-inspired thug-talk. The weak moments almost outnumber the great ones: the cartoon-squeak Jazze Pha track, the ridiculous "Hail to the Chief" sample on "The Inauguration," the inexplicable guest appearance from dumbshit Transplant Skinhead Rob.

And then there's "Get Throwed." On paper, it probably should be the rap song of the year: a beat from H-Town rumbler Mr. Lee, a hook from Southern legend Z-Ro, and verses from Bun, Pimp C, Young Jeezy, and Jay-Z. It's the sort of collection of talent that seems assembled with the specific intention of making my brain explode, like if Ian MacKaye did a song with Corin Tucker and Craig Finn and John Darnielle. I first heard it about a week ago on DJ Envy & Lenny S's We Gets Busy Pt. 4 mixtape, where it was listed simply as "Intro," and I immediately started scouring the internet to figure out if this was a real, actual new song with new verses or whether some enterprising DJ had just slapped together a few undiscovered verses from these guys. I got so caught up freaking myself out about this song's mere existence that it took a few listens for me to notice that it's not actually a good song.

Mr. Lee's beat is a world away from some of the monster bangers he's put together for Slim Thug, impossibly huge tracks like "3 Kings" and "Diamonds." "Get Throwed" is a clumsy, lumbering thing, a few pretty cursive synth flourishes floating above over flimsily overproduced metal guitar crunches and anemic drums. Z-Ro's voice sounds amazing, heavy and tired and throaty, but his crooned hook doesn't quite match up with the beat, and that voice is much better-suited for bluesy elegies than banalities about good weed/good drank/big money. The whole track, in fact, is oddly ground-down and deflated; it sounds like it just got done with a long day at work. And it has album track written all over it; I can't figure out why Bun would use it to showcase the biggest guests on his album.

All of the rappers on the song sound uninspired, but Pimp C at least has an excuse: he's been in prison for a few years now. His verse was recorded before prison, before the beat was made and before Bun had a solo album in the works; the datedness of its references proves its age: "Pimp C, PA trill nigga / Polo, fuck that Hilfinger." It's a decent verse, grainy nasal rasp stretching out syllables almost until they break, but there's a reason Pimp didn't use the verse before going to prison. Bun, for his part, inexplicably shanks his verse. It should be a triumphant moment for him, and he should be giving us one of those breathless demonstrations of virtuosity that he's been putting on other rappers' records for years now, but no; it's an ugly clump of inelegantly clumped syllables and lunkhead misogyny: "A bitch know I might just explode / And slap her in the face with a pie a la mode." Huh? This is the wrong moment for Bun to be sleepwalking, like when Shawn Marion fell apart during the Suns/Spurs playoff series this year. Jeezy talks the same trap-star game he always talks, and it's starting to lose its appeal; there's only so many ways he can say that he knows how to cook crack, you know? He needs one of those indestructible regionless beats like he had on his album to sound superhuman, and he doesn't have that here. Jay's double-time verse has a nice, crisp precision, but even he remains uninspired, saying the same stuff he's been saying on virtually every verse lately: "Started with the block, did it brick by brick / Then I charted with the Roc, nigga, hit by hit." He's not giving us anything new, not showing any of that casual mastery he usually displays effortlessly.

I've talked about this before, but every post-retirement Jay-Z verse is an event; it gets automatic heavy radio play and mixtape burn, and it makes dorks like me lean in hard to our radios and strain to catch every syllable. One guest spot went a long way toward turning Jeezy into a star. Even when he's not quite on, even if this coming-down-from-the-mountaintop is tiresome and vaguely condescending, it's a blessing to get his voice on a song these days, and any rapper who can get that look needs to make the most of it. Bun has been giving it all on mixtapes and guest appearances like a fool lately, and he deserves to cash in his chips right now, so it's truly puzzling that he just let this one slip away.

Brooklyn Art Festival Brings Art, Some Rock

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:09 PM, October 17, 2005

Blood on the Wall, not actually bleeding on a wall

Blood on the Wall + Telepathe + Freddie Mas
Soundbox
October 16, 2005

I first read about the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival in Arthur Nersesian's thoroughly garbage novel Chinese Takeout. The book was a tiresome exercise in chic-dirtballism, the sort of account-of-a-struggling-artist that might get introverted high-school kids or bored suburban desk-jockeys going but isn't about to offer anything new to anyone who's ever lived in a city or been broke. But Nersesian made the festival itself read like something to behold: a weekend-long open-house for all the grubby artist dudes who live under the bridge to check out each other's work just once a year. In the book, the artist-narrator guy gets to walk through, like, a whole warehouse without seeing anyone else, and of course the actual festival is nothing like that, at least not now. It's jammed with older versions of the art kids I knew in college and older yuppie types looking for stuff to buy, and it's crowded and networky. There seemed to be nearly as many furniture stores as studio open-houses, and money seemed to be floating through the air the entire time, from the signs showing where condos were going up to the business cards that the art people passed out. I didn't go into one single studio; I didn't think anything I would see would rival the view of the sunset under the Brooklyn bridge a block away from the festivities. But then, I'm not an art guy. I hung out almost exclusively with art students throughout college, but I couldn't tell you the name of one vital artist working today. (Is Damien Hirst still a vital artist? I liked that shit he did with the shark.) I'm a music guy, and I was there for music.

Every city has a few spaces like the Soundbox, a cheap, dilapidated concrete loft that probably serves as an art gallery or studio most of the time but occasionally plays host to DIY noise-rock shows. But the difference between the Soundbox and, say, the run-down loft apartment in Baltimore where I saw Lightning Bolt a couple of years ago is that the Soundbox isn't actually all that run-down or dilapidated. It had a soundman and big blue curtain behind the stage and a stage and everything, and it could probably serve as a club full-time if someone filled out a few forms at City Hall. Todd P., who I'm told puts on most of these shows in New York, put together a lineup of bands for the evening that any club would've been happy to get: Microphones and Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice on Friday, Free Blood and Love as Laughter on Saturday, Enon and the Rogers Sisters on Sunday.

But Sunday night's show, the only one I attended, veered precipitously from one side of the slick/scuzzy divide. I didn't stick around for Enon or the Rogers Sisters, but I've seen both bands before, and both times I've been bored by the jerky deadpan fashion-core coolness of it all. And I only saw a few minutes of opener Freddie Mas, some guy who screamed some stuff (only line I caught: "I don't like policemen") over chirpily unmusical low-tech electro in front of like ten people. I did, however, manage to see all of Telepathe, a new-agey experimental quartet who managed to encapsulate everything I've disliked about new-agey experimental New York bands since the first time I heard Beaches and Canyons. Telepathe plays formlessly woozy song-things built completely around ringing guitar sounds and aimlessly clicky drums, sometimes played over prerecorded throbby dub beats, the two timid singers sounding like they're sound-checking even when they're performing. The band's show was so insular and fuzzy and amelodic and alienating that I was actually tempted to put my head in my lap and fall asleep. I don't have Riff Raff's tolerance for sound-for-sound's-sake, and I was not down. Their fifteen-minute set was too long.

So thank god for Blood on the Wall, a band that somehow manages to play around with Brooklyn scuzz-rock signifiers without forgetting to write actual songs. The band's new album, Awesomer, brings fuzz and feedback and deadpan Kim Gordon vocals, but it also brings riffs and hooks and melodies and occasional heart-stoppingly gorgeous moments like "I'd Like to Take You Out Tonight," a blissfully stoned love-murmur buried in reverb and starry-eyed wonder. Awesomer makes it pretty clear that Goo is Blood on the Wall's favorite Sonic Youth album, but maybe I'm just saying that because it's mine.

The band didn't play "I'd Like to Take You Out Tonight" last night, but it never lost its sense of spazzily languid melody. They use ugly noise as a means to an end, a trick to make their songs better, not an end in itself. And so when Brad Shanks screwed up his face and let loose his gibbering, high-pitched tantrum-rasp, he was doing it in the context of songs strong enough to contain the ugliness and maybe sometimes turn it into prettiness. The band itself isn't pretty: Brad Shanks looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Punch-Drunk Love but fatter, Courtney Shanks (sister, not wife) looks like Sissy Spacek in Carrie but fatter, and drummer Miggy Littleton doesn't look like any fat people in movies but is losing his hair. The band made for a striking visual contrast with Telepathe, whose four members are all good-looking. There's nothing particularly fashionably artsy about Blood on the Wall's brand of scuzz; they're just three people using ugly sounds to make pretty sounds. And if that isn't the point of noise-rock, it probably should be.

Download: "Mary Susan"
Download: "Reunite on Ice"

Voice review: Brandon Stosuy on Blood on the Wall's Awesomer

Acting in a White Stripes/Michel Gondry Video, Part 2

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:20 PM, October 14, 2005

The White Stripes, Conan O'Brien, and a squished up red Saturn. Gangsta.

In my last post, I told the basic story: how I ended up in Michel Gondry's video for the White Stripes' "The Denial Twist," how the video will look, the basics. Today, it's the fun stuff: what I thought of the whole enterprise and everyone involved.

Conan O'Brien: Conan is exactly who you'd hope he would be off-camera, which is to say that he's pretty much exactly the same way he is on-camera. He's quick and funny and self-deprecating and charming. He kept dropping one-liners all day. Seeing me dressed like him, lumbering around 25-pound platform boots: "That's actually how I walk." Finding out I was writing about all this stuff for the Voice website: "Leave my racist rants out of there." If you need to clomp around for hours under ridiculously hot film lights, it's a lot easier when someone that funny is nearby. He came to the set late, after everyone had rehearsed the whole video a few times, and he was rocking the rarely-seen tough-Conan look (leather jacket, striped T-shirt), which was weird. It was vaguely reassuring when the makeup and wardrobe people made him look like his televised self, putting that enormous swoop back in his hair and slapping a suit on him. Everyone on the set seemed to be star-struck, including the actual stars. When Jack White walked up to him to talk about stuff, he didn't seem to be comparing notes; he seemed to be seeking approval. Conan still looks about 23 on TV, but he's 42, and you can sort of tell in person; his face has all these little microscopic lines that you can only see up close.

Jack White: I was vaguely hoping that he'd be as weird and introverted as he seems, but no, he's pretty normal and sort of dorky. He was always excited, always running around the set and asking Gondry questions and eagerly watching the playbacks of the takes. I didn't hear him talk about old blues records or furniture or the evils of technology once. Jack's pencil-thin Vincent Price mustache is either mostly or entirely painted on, so he doesn't look all that freaky when he doesn't have makeup on (though he did end up looking like a Scandinavian metal dude in the cell-phone pictures that my brother took with him). He's also totally diesel; it's not so surprising that he was able to beat down that dude from the Von Bondies so hard.

Meg White: She's absolutely gorgeous, easily the prettiest girl on a set absolutely overrun with pretty hipster girls. When she got there, she told the band's assistant, a New Zealander dude in a ridiculously sharp black-on-black suit, that she didn't want to bother with hair or makeup before the shoot. She ended up putting getting makeup done, but she really didn't need it; she showed up to the grimy Greenpoint soundstage looking like she stepped out of a magazine. She didn't hang out much when we weren't shooting; the quiet-and-withdrawn thing isn't just image. But she's very pleasant and polite when you actually talk to her, and she seemed happy to bum me a cigarette. Both she and Jack totally keep the White Stripes dress code going even when they're not onstage on on film, which is fun to see.

Michel Gondry: I'd met Gondry a couple of times before, and I like him a lot. He's a funny schoolboyish French guy who seems tiny even though he's probably close to 6 ft. tall. He'd shot the video for Kanye West's "Heard Em Say" last week, and I asked him about it. Apparently, it takes place in Macy's, where they filmed for two nights, and it involves little kids and magic; it was hard to tell what he was saying through his accent. When he's directing, he doesn't actually do that much directing; he leaves that to Tim, his assistant director, a barrel-chested, bearded American dude who basically ran the show and yelled at the crew when they fucked up and basically acted as Gondry's badass consigliere. It was funny to watch; Gondry would mumble, "Um, maybe zese people should walk over zhere," and Tim would yell, "OK, you people, walk over there!" By the end of the night, most of the crew was about ready to kill Tim, and nobody had anything bad to say about Gondry. I really liked Tim.

I'm not an actor (at all), and I spent most of the day feeling vaguely like I was intruding on something. Everyone on the set seemed to be some sort of professional; the only people who didn't so much seem to belong were my brother and me. Even the dwarves who played small Conan and small paparazzi guys were professional actors with agents and everything. It also quickly became apparent that my brother and me were the only people who weren't being paid to be there, and it felt sort of shitty to figure that out. The production person I'd talked to the day before had told me that the shoot was low-budget and that they couldn't afford to pay me, which was pretty much bullshit; I absolutely could have demanded money, since there were probably 100 actors and technicians and wardrobe people and lighting guys and prop-department people who were being paid to be there. Even if it was relatively low-budget for a big-name video, someone was laying out a lot of money. I did, however, walk away with maybe $500 worth of Conanesque clothes, and they're supposed to buy me a pair of shoes to replace the ones that they modified, so that's something.

And all the people who were getting paid seemed to be really, really good at their jobs. Since the video is one continuous camera shot, I could watch the whole thing in playbacks immediately, only without the stretching-and-compressing effects they're putting in later, and I was amazed at how slick and fluid the cameraman made everything look. The art-department guys, many of whom had been there since three the previous afternoon, had built this crazy-huge set in less than a day. The set itself was intentionally stylized and cheesy; most of the props looked like they were made out of paper mache, and my tall-Conan costume consisted of a suit, some platform shoes, and a giant flat cardboard Conan mask. But a whole lot of effort went into making these manifestly fake effects look as not-fake as possible, and that's why I had to keep the mask facing the camera even though I couldn't see a fucking thing when I was walking across the stage. The platformed-up shoes I was wearing added about five inches to my height, which made me an absolutely ridiculous 7 ft. 4 in., and I came dangerously close to snapping my leg in half about ten times.

When we weren't rehearsing or shooting, they kept my brother and me in a holding room with the little people, which led to some awkward conversations, mostly about difficulties finding clothes and whether I could find a casting agent who needed really tall people. Two of the guys were sort of cheesed-out mid-thirties Long Island dudes; one had thought that it was a Bon Jovi video and excitedly told all his friends. But the little Conan was a totally nice dude, a sincere younger guy trying to make a living as a stand-up comic without telling too many jokes about being a little person. He'd just graduated, gone to school for business, but he wanted to do comedy and only did the acting stuff to pay the bills. (His biggest payday yet was in a Cingular commercial where they dressed him up like a breakdancer and made him say, "Yo, pops, video phone.") I kept meaning to ask him if he'd ever met Bushwick Bill, but I forgot.

I felt a little bit weird with the part I ended up playing in the video: the big, subsurvient black security guard who went on the Conan show with the White Stripes in 2003. Last year, I saw Amy Phillips give a presentation at the EMP Pop Conference about the White Stripes' complicated relationship with race, and this guy's role made up most of her material. A year and a half later, I was playing this guy. Any time a white guy portrays a black guy, it feels problematic. I was wearing a mask, not blackface or anything, but they put an afro wig on me to cover up my blonde hair. The wig made me uncomfortable in both senses of the word; the curly hair kept getting stuck in my glasses.

Most of the fun in being in the video was just sitting around and listening to people talking to each other, like when I think I may have heard Michel tell Conan that his show used to be better (not sure about that one). I can't believe I got to do this shit; someone totally let me in the back door. I've been in one video before, Cex's video for "Kill Me." That video was done totally on the fly, including some completely illegal shooting in the steam tunnels under Johns Hopkins University. This one was done on a brightly-lit soundstage with catered meals and an on-site physical therapist. But the two experiences were oddly similar; the excitement and glamor of the experience fades after about seven hours of doing the exact same shit over and over again, getting tired and surly and losing faith that this thing will ever get done, that I'll ever see my bed again. But it's over now, and I can feel happy that I contributed to something amazing. Michel Gondry doesn't make bad videos; everything he does is completely infused with this joyous sense of naive wonder that I totally love. I love that there's this whole system in place, all these hundreds of people on call, bands and companies willing to put up what must be hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to make it happen whenever this guy has another idea. I'm way too close to the whole thing to even make any hopeless move toward objectivity, of course, but I think that "The Denial Twist" will be one of his best videos, and I helped make it.

Voice review: Keith Harris on the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan

Acting in a White Stripes/Michel Gondry Video

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:30 AM, October 14, 2005

No shit, that's Status Ain't Hood with the White Stripes and Michel Gondry

I'm going to keep this relatively short because I'm wicked tired, but I'm only now writing this at 2:30 a.m. because I spent fourteen hours today acting in a White Stripes video. The video is for "The Denial Twist"; it was directed by Michel Gondry, and I'm one of seven people who act in the video. The other six are: Conan O'Brien, Jack White, Meg White, and three dwarves.

Last month, I moderated a roundtable discussion for Devil in the Woods with four of the seven directors whose work has been compiled in the Directors' Label series, a DVD series that collects the work of music video directors. Gondry directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, probably my favorite movie of last year other than Before Sunrise, and his videos (Bjork's "Hyperballad," Daft Punk's "Around the World") are some instant-joy-producing shit. A few weeks after the roundtable, someone in Gondry's camp called me to ask if I wanted to be in a video. Gondry liked me, I guess, but he mostly wanted to use me because I'm crazy tall (6 ft 11 in). Gondry had this idea of recreating the White Stripes' performances on Conan O'Brien's show in 2003, except hyperstylized with stretched-out and scrunched-up sets and special effects. Gondry told me today that the idea for the video, which he'd already had, solidified when I met him. If that's true, I'm honored, since this video is going to be badass.

The video is all about perspective, putting Jack and Meg in these situations where they'll look weird and disproportunate, huge or tiny depending on where they are. The whole video is one long camera shot, so all the sets were built in a circle in one big room on a Greenpoint soundstage. The one-shot thing was really impressive, but it meant that everyone had to get their timing down exactly or the whole thing would fall apart.

When I told my brother Jim about the video shoot, he said that I should ask if they need any more tall guys (he's about 6 ft 6 in). I did, and they ended up casting him. He took a couple of days off his special-ed teachers' aide job in Baltimore and took the Chinatown bus up. When we showed up this morning drenched from the rain, they told us that I'd be playing tall Conan and he'd be playing the tall version of the hulking, weirdly subsurvient black bodyguard that the band had when they played on the show. To play tall Conan, I had a huge flat hard cardboard photo of Conan's head strapped to my head (without eyeholes), and the video's crew made me even taller by taping huge wooden blocks to my shoes. I was supposed to talk to the band and then walk them off the stage without ever looking away from the camera. This seems easy enough, but it basically meant that I had to walk forward while looking backward with a flat piece of cardboard covering my eyes and bigass ungainly clodhopper joints on my feet. This turned out to not be something I could not do. Eventually, Gondry decided to have Conan play himself and have me play the bodyguard (a role that required way less movement), and my brother got axed from the video. Sorry, Jim.

Tomorrow, I'll write about the funny shit Conan said and my awkward conversations with the dwarves (I didn't actually call them dwarves to their faces) and the Kanye video Gondry did last week and the greater role that this video and Gondry's other videos play in the world. Right now, I need to sleep.

Voice review: Keith Harris on the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan

DMX: Dancing Machine

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:47 PM, October 12, 2005

DMX with his dance teacher (photo courtesy Josh Ziering's Blog)

Rumors about DMX are flying all over the place these days, and most of them just aren't true. DMX has not, for instance, changed his name to "Troubled Rapper DMX" to make things easier for tabloid writers, and he's not starring in a movie about a computer-animated pit bull who does kung fu (yet). X's lawyer Murray Richman had to stop another one of these rumors this morning before it even started, telling MTV.com News, "He didn't do a dance out of the courthouse. I was walking right beside him."

It's a shame, actually. DMX probably needs to dance; he's had quite a time of it lately. Before he dropped his album The Grand Champ in 2003, X announced that he was retiring from music (it was a popular thing to do at the time) and becoming a preacher, though he later changed his mind and decided that he'd serve God better by continuing to do raps. In June of 2004, he was arrested after allegedly telling a parking lot attendant that he was a federal agent and crashing an SUV into a gate at Kennedy Airport; he later admitted that he was on Valium at the time. His license was suspended, and he was later arrested for speeding in an unregistered vehicle, going over 100 miles per hour in a 65 zone. And this past April, he injured three people in the Bronx by causing a three-car accident, slamming into one car and causing it to hit an unmarked police car.

Things haven't been easy for DMX lately (especially driving, apparently). But yesterday, a New York State Supreme Court Judge Dorothy Chin-Brandt granted an adjournment in the case against him for allegedly violating his terms of release in the Kennedy Airport case. If I'm reading all this right, he won't be doing any prison time if he doesn't get any more violations in the next year. On top of that, DMX has any number of reasons to celebrate: he's working on a new album and a new movie, it wasn't raining too hard yesterday, Eddie Curry is going to be playing for the Knicks next year, the King Kong remake looks really good. And Pat Milton of the Associated Press reports that he did, in fact, celebrate: "Outside court, he hammed it up for the media, even doing a dance down the steps of the Queens Criminal Court building."

Now, clearly DMX's lawyer Murray Richman is a better source than the sheisty-ass Associated Press, but Milton's report does raise a few questions. If DMX was dancing, what dance was he doing? The cabbage patch? The Macarena? Could DMX have been voguieng? In some sort of amazing physical feat, might DMX have somehow moonwalked down the courthouse stairs? These are troubling questions indeed. Status Ain't Hood readers should stay on the lookout for any signs of DMX dancing and send any firsthand accounts to tbreihan@villagevoice.com. We need to get to the bottom of this.

Voice review: Eric Weisbard on DMX's ...And Then There Was X

Ghostface: Best Rapper Ever?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:41 PM, October 11, 2005

This is clearly one amazing rapper

Ghostface + Cappadonna + Theodore Unit + Tru Life + Swollen Members + RA the Rugged Man
BB King Blues Club
October 9, 2005

Here's something I hadn't experienced before: the legendary New York rap show in all its glory. I've heard about these things, read about these things, heard tapes of these things for years: the Latin Quarter, Doug E. Fresh beatboxing against Biz Markie, KRS-One throwing the fat guy from PM Dawn off the stage. Cold, hard purism at work, artists and crowd protecting their music as their territory, absolutely unforgiving of subpar rap music, existing completely in the moment. Five years ago, I was listening to Bobbito's radio show, headphones on, holding the antenna so it would come in almost clearly, when Bobbito played this tape from a Big Daddy Kane birthday party, guys like Biz Markie and Busta Rhymes and "big Jay-Z" (rapping so fast I didn't believe it was really him at first) freestyling for like twenty minutes. I've been to a few rap shows in this city, but I've never seen anything like that. New York rap shows are supposed to happen in glitzy and overcrowded nightclubs, packed with hardass dudes who boo the opening acts when they need to be booed. The stage is supposed to be overrun with hangers-on. Rappers are supposed to leap onstage for cameo appearances. Headliners' sets are supposed to go on for longer than twenty minutes. I've seen newly-signed guys jumping onstage for ten minutes in front of crowds of industry leeches. I've seen white backpack guys rapping in front of white backpack guys. I've seen Marques Houston invite Mike Jones to the stage at the Scream Tour. I've seen Bun B at a hipster dance party. But I'd never seen the legendary New York rap show, and I'd come to accept the idea that I never would.

Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that Ghostface would be the guy to bring the archetypal New York show into 2005. He's old, old enough to talk about soul music and have grown kids. He's been around for a long time. He's the only guy left in the Wu-Tang Clan still making albums that I need to buy the day they drop. (Other Wu guys are making good music, but it's mostly not stuff that I feel the need to run out and cop right away.) He's still got his Def Jam contract, and now he's got Jay's assurance that his next album will get a marketing budget. He's got the eternal love of rap's backpack-dork contingent, a demographic he's spent the past year wooing (Wu-ing?), showing up on the Prefuse 73 and Danger Doom albums with guest verses so vein-popping visceral that they immediately overshadowed everything else on those albums. He's got working relationships with half the rappers in New York. And still, my friends and I were wondering whether we'd be lucky enough to get 45 minutes out of him, wondering whether he'd give us any of his classics or whether he'd just give us the surly, obligatory fifteen-minute new-joints set that most rappers seem to think is perfectly acceptable. We shouldn't have worried.

"Put the blue light on, man!" Ghost yelled about halfway through his marathon hour-and-a-half set at BB King's. While the light washed over the stage, he sang along (badly) to the Delfonics' "La La (Means I Love You)," telling the crowd, "I love this music. They don't make music like this no more. I was born in 1970; my mother and father used to fuck on this music." And: "I would rather write on this music than hip-hop." And: "Man, put the blue light back on. Do your fucking job." Later, he introduced his son: "Nigga came out my dick." (All paraphrased; I lost my pen.) Ghostface's son was probably 17 or 18, but he looked older. He rapped a cappella, starting out his verse shaky and nervous, gaining confidence as he went on.

So: Ghostface was born in 1970. He's old enough to have a son old enough to rap and not embarrass himself onstage. Now that I think about it, it's not impossible that Ghostface is a grandfather. His music has always been steeped in dusky old soul, horns and strings and pianos, force and emotion and pain. He's a grown man who isn't afraid to cry, and that's a lot of what's kept him interesting and relevant as the Wu-Tang Clan gradually lost its mystique. Ghostface was once the most mysterious member of a mysterious collective, hiding his face behind a mask, spitting cluttered lines of blistering free-association. He's not that anymore. We know what he looks like, and his lyrics are clearer and less abstract than they've ever been (though he still says some crazy weird shit). But he hasn't become any less interesting as his craggy yelp has become familiar. He's comfortable onstage, darting in and out of his small army of hypemen, bob-and-weave dancing as he raps, always smiling. He's managed to transition into the rap-elder-statesman role without any of the embarrassing nostalgia tours or desperate grabs at relevance that the term implies. He ran though classic after classic on Sunday night ("Ice Cream," "Daytona 500," "Apollo Kids"), but it never felt like he was running through the motions. It felt like he was happy to be there, happy to be doing this stuff in front of all these people after all these years, like he was giving us exactly what he wanted because it was exactly what he wanted, too. He kept his set going until the venue told him to stop.

Raekwon wasn't there, but a few familiar faces made cameos: Masta Killa, GZA. Pete Rock danced next to Ghost to zero fanfare on the new single "Be Easy." But other than Ghost's ridiculously great set, the big story of the night was the re-emergence of Cappadonna. Cappa split from the Wu a while back over financial stuff, and he's spent the past couple of years driving an unlicensed cab in Baltimore and going insane. Even before that, he always seemed like a hanger-on, the guy who won the lottery and got to rap clumsily tangled verses on the second wave of Wu-Tang albums. So it was a surprise when he came to the stage before Ghostface, and it was even more of a surprise when he fucking ripped it, towering over all the other guys onstage and screaming through his older tracks. He ran out into the crowd, and came back to stage without his sunglasses: "You made me break my shades. How dare you?" Whenever Ghostface's set hit a technical snag or paused for even a second, he'd pipe up again, roaring out amazing and probably unplanned a cappella freestyles ("loyal to the Clan, but I want my check") or shouting in Arabic. He was a man possessed, and stuff like that doesn't really happen onstage ever.

Another thing I don't see often: a crowd unafraid to voice disapproval with shitty opening acts. Scary new Def Jam signee Tru Life got some cheers, as did Ghostface's mostly-OK Theodore Unit crew, though one Theodore guy did give us a hilariously shitty freestyle about sitcom characters (Geoffrey got tired of being a butler, decided to be a hustler, that sort of thing). RA the Rugged Man's blustery proselytizing ("And another thing: get off Down South's dick!") found a tepid response, though his applause lines ("I don't want fans who don't know who G Rap is") had their intended effect. But the crowd greeted Canadian backpack jokers Swollen Members and California barker Planet Asia (Sean Fennessey: "He reminds me of the guys who Em eats in 8 Mile") with deafening boos, practically chasing them off the stage. "I'm a fan, too," one Swollen Member pleaded, hopelessly. If this crowd would come out to every New York rap show, maybe I wouldn't have to sit through I Self Divine ever again.

Voice review: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Ghostface's The Pretty Toney Album

Fluxblog-Approved Militant Dancepop Fails to Annoy

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:20 PM, October 10, 2005

Rock poses! Rock Poses!

United State of Electronica
October 7, 2005
Knitting Factory

Every critic has a pet band, someone who she likes and no one else does, someone who she writes about endlessly and yet can't seem to convince anyone about. I've got Grand Buffet, Riff Raff has Deerhoof, Kelefa Sanneh has Dr. Dog. Usually, these bands go against what anyone would rationally think the critic would like. I don't have any particular predilection for goofy nonsensical suburban white-guy rap, but Grand Buffet does it for me. Every once in a while, though, we find a critic who has an agenda, an aesthetic mission. A guy like this has a sound in his head, and he wants to find the bands that best conform to that sound and then to expose the world to that sound, thereby making the world sound a little bit more like that sound in his head. Matthew Perpetua is one of those agenda guys. If you're reading this, you probably already know who he is, but I'll tell you anyway: Perpetua is the guy behind Fluxblog, a massively popular daily MP3 blog. He posts a song or two a day, and sometimes these songs will grab people's imagination and lead to good things happening for the bands who recorded those songs. Perpetua posted a track by the Scissor Sisters when they were still a goofy downtown pop-art novelty, and poof, a few months later they were signed and had an album and blew the fuck up in England. I don't know if the Scissor Sisters blew up as a direct result of Perpetua's props, but it certainly didn't hurt. (Disclosure stuff: Perpetua is an editor at a website called Buzznex, and I write blurbs for him sometimes.)

Perpetua's taste generally runs toward music that might be called militantly twee, stuff that flaunts its ecstatic hookiness and twinkly smiles so egregiously that it becomes necessary at a certain point to wonder whether it was made by humans. Perpetua has a name for this stuff: joycore. Joycore seems to be what might happen if Beat Happening discovered disco and feather boas and then won a million-dollar grant to make something exponentially brighter and shinier than the muddily simple indie-pop they actually made. Perpetua has found the ultimate realization of this joycore dream in the Seattle indie-dance-pop band United State of Electronica. Even more than Scissor Sisters or Junior Senior, USE is the Fluxblog aesthetic brought to life. So when Perpetua champions USE, it doesn't come off like a crotchety critic vainly trying to convince everyone around him of the worth of some arcane bands. It feels like Perpetua trying to make this joycore thing happen.

The easiest and probably most accurate way to describe USE's music is Daft Punk filter-disco played on mostly non-electronic instruments by young and absurdly bright-faced indie kids with the self-consciously goofy partytime verve of the early B-52s. Their hometown shows are reportedly revelatory all-ages spectacles, often involving conga lines. And yeah, it's mostly pretty great: big hooks, sweatily loose energy, relentlessly and irresistibly blissed-out vibe-rays. The house element of their music isn't obvious at first beyond the liberal use of vocoder, but it becomes more apparent when the band goes from one track into another without pausing, keeping the same beat throughout, like a DJ set. Of USE's seven members, five could serve as perfectly serviceable frontpeople (possibly six, since the drummer has a microphone and likes to talk). Only the bassist came off looking introverted; the frontline of two ridiculously cute blonde female singers, two frantically sweaty dude singer/guitarists, and one flamboyantly sweatpanted keyboardist/vocoder-guy was a virtual army of ecstatically spazzy, starry-eyed charisma.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't have a lot of use for anime and if you've just spent, let's say, a rainy afternoon writing about Beanie Sigel, it can all be a bit much: the fog machine, the swirling middle-school-dance lights, the hey! hey! hey!s, the drummer who likes to rap. USE can be like that friend who gets drunk at parties and insists that everyone push the couches against the walls and dance to the Flashdance soundtrack. But then, this friend is usually right; you're probably better off getting drunk and dancing to the Flashdance soundtrack. And it's a tribute to USE and to Perpetua's mission that it wasn't even annoying when the show ended with a bunch of doofs from the audience jumping onstage to dance.

Download: "It Is On!"
Download: "Emerald City"

Status Ain't Hood is Worried About Beanie Sigel

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:17 PM, October 7, 2005

Hopefully, this guy is doing OK

Beanie Sigel's The B.Coming, which came out earlier this year, is an understated masterpiece of anger and dejection and loneliness and tension. Musically, it's a gorgeous example of East Coast soul-rap: moaning saxophones, warped metallic bass, twisted-up dusky 70s R&B samples. Recorded shortly before and released slightly after Jay-Z broke from fellow label founders Damon Dash and Kareem "Biggs" Burke, it also works as an elegy for Roc-A-Fella Records, the last album to feature most of the label's roster before it broke into two rival factions, Beanie and Peedi Crack and Young Chris yelling out "State Property" at the last moment that the crew's name would mean anything. More importantly, it's a document of one of Beanie darkest moments. Sigel recorded the album just before going off to prison to serve a one-year conviction on a federal gun charge, knowing he'd have to stand trial on an attempted-murder charge just after his release. And so Beanie's sadness and fear are right there on the record in the heaviness and regret of his voice and his words: "I do my dirt so my kids see heaven on earth / but the pain in my heart weighs heavy; it hurt."

Since The B.Coming dropped, I've been wrestling with my feelings about it, figuring out where it'll end up on my end-of-year list (music critics start do this), and I'm almost certain it'll end up in my top ten for the year. Beanie was in prison by the time the album was released, and he wasn't around to promote it or State Property 2, the movie he starred in before going to prison. (He didn't even get to see State Property 2 until he got out of prison.) Neither was a commercial success; the movie went from theaters to DVD in just a few months, and the album still has yet to go gold.

Beanie came home from prison on August 9 after serving about ten months of his one-year sentence. He started working quickly, appearing in Young Jeezy's "Soul Survivor" video as Jeezy's boss at a laundromat and then adding a verse to Sheek Louche's "Kiss Your Ass Goodbye" remix, appearing on a track for the first time with former nemesis Jadakiss. He refused to pick sides between Jay and Dash in the Roc-A-Fella split, opting to start his own State Property label rather than choose between his friends. He's apparently had at least one meeting with 50 Cent, and rumors are swirling that he'll sign to G-Unit Records. Beanie says that he won't sign with G-Unit because he doesn't want to be under another artist again, but he's talked vaguely about a "co-venture" with 50.

Most importantly, Beanie was acquitted of attempted murder on September 26 after two days of jury deliberation. Sigel was alleged to have shot a man named Terrence Speller twice outside a Philadelphia Nightclub in 2003, and the acquittal came shortly after Speller's friend David Aimes changed his testimony, saying that he couldn't remember seeing Sigel shoot Speller. Aimes and Speller had both testified earlier that they had received threats against their lives, and I certainly don't want to believe that Aimes changed his testimony out of fear, but the whole thing is really weird and sketchy. But a jury found Beanie not guilty, and I certainly hope that's the case.

In any case, this should be a great time in Beanie's life: out of prison, winning a huge court case, ready to find a new record deal and finally become the star he always should've been. And then his stepfather was murdered. Last week, Sam Derry's body was found in Philadelphia. He was dead from multiple gunshot wounds, and his body had been badly burned. The next day, Derry's friend and former cellmate Wallace Moody was kidnapped and tortured. It's unclear right now whether the two crimes are connected or if they have anything to do with Beanie, but Allhiphop.com reported last night that a federal grand jury subpoenaed Sigel in an unrelated case. The chaos in this guy's life never seems to slow down.

I don't know much of anything about Beanie Sigel as a person; I've never met him or seen him perform or anything. But he's made music that I love, and it's hard to read this constant parade of bad news about his life. I was talking to Riff Raff yesterday about his Clipse piece and how I've found myself enjoying coke-dealer rap without putting any thought whatsoever into what they're talking about, what kind of impact that drugs and violence and poverty have on people's lives. Things are different now that I live in Park Slope instead of Baltimore, now that I don't have to deal with the threat or the effects of violent crime on a daily basis, now that I never see people on the bus with pictures of their dead friends on their T-shirts or read stories in the local paper about people being murdered over pocket change or because someone stepped on someone else's shoes. In this Allhiphop.com interview, Sigel says that the image people get of him from his movies and his music isn't the real him. I hope it's true. I hope he finds peace.

Voice review: Raquel Cepeda on Beanie Sigel's The Truth

Indie Bedwetter Dweebs Maybe Not So Bad

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:51 PM, October 6, 2005

The Decemberists wearing clothes that I wish the Decemberists would not wear

Decemberists + Cass McCombs
Webster Hall
October 5, 2005

I had my angle all planned out. I went in to last night's show all ready to write about how the Decemberists are everything wrong with indie-rock, how they're the most visible symptoms of the genre's 15-year decline from nobly arted-up quixotic fuzz-fuckery to regressively fetal comfort-blanket navel-gazing mush, how Kurt Cobain's K Records tattoo casts a longer shadow over indie-rock in 2005 than his entire recorded output. Indie rock in 2005 is dominated by the likes of the Arcade Fire and the Fiery Furnaces and Death Cab for Cutie and the New Pornographers, bands with no use for rigor or chaos or rage or frustration. Some of these bands are good, but I can't shake the idea that the drama nerds have taken over for the punks and the punks are, um, listening to rap or something. It's virtually impossible to imagine a Fugazi or a Bikini Kill coming out of this landscape; everything is prim and meticulous and dinky and polite.

This brings us to the Decemberists, the most drama-nerdy of the drama nerds. I'd never listened to their records, and I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to their set at Intonation, but I'd seen pictures of them rocking Robin Hood tights and read interviews where Colin Meloy talked about making the world safe for pansies. To me, these guys always came off as the kings of insular, bedwetting crybabyism, and the fact that Picaresque dropped the same day as Arular and ended up 71 spots higher on the Billboard charts meant that indie-rock America had its priorities seriously fucked.

But this line of thinking isn't quite right for a couple of reasons. For one, bands like the Decemberists have been a huge part of underground rock since underground rock existed; They Might Be Giants have been indie-rock fixtures for longer than anyone except, like, Ian MacKaye. In his excellent Pitchfork review of the Just Say Sire box set, Nitsuh Abebe talks about two groups of 80s indie-rock historians: the group that only remembers Black Flag and the Minutemen and the group that remembers hearing those bands on college radio alongside bands like R.E.M. and Rank & File:

Both of these groups can be right, in the end, but notice how much the first of them relies on selective memory? Every time they talk about the "real underground" or nitpick about which bands were on truly independent labels, what they're really doing is writing off those who genuinely liked 10,000 Maniacs or Echo & the Bunnymen-- the equivalent of someone, 20 years from now, pretending that this decade was all about Wolf Eyes and Lightning Bolt, and nobody listened to Feist, or Annie, or Radiohead.

So pillowy drama-nerd indie-rock is nothing new. And another thing: the Decemberists don't always sound like coffee-table NPR fare. The first song they played at Webster Hall was a Crampsian swamp-gurgle, something maybe approaching the same neighborhood as metal. They never came close to rocking again, but it was heartening to see that they knew how to do it. And they didn't lean too heavily on the cutesy; their show didn't pause for banter for the first twenty minutes, there were no costume changes, two of the dudes in the band look like mechanics, and the off-kilter lurch of many of their songs is more proggy than folky. Their drama-nerdery manifested itself in other ways: practiced professionalism, big-moment chorus shoutalongs, and birthday dedications, all of which are good things. A little bit of their thing still goes a long way if you have a limited tolerance for Meloy's nasal bleat or fake-gypsy polka waltzes (or if you prefer Gogol Bordello's frantic and chaotic fake-gypsy polka waltzes). But even with the girls in the front row singing along while doing that thing where they stick their chins in the air and sort of shake their hair adoringly, even where everyone was supposed to scream at the giant paper whale-puppet, even when it got boring (which it did), the Decemberists never seemed like they were destroying indie-rock last night. So, good for them.

Download: "The Engine Driver"
Voice review: Brandon Stosuy on the Decemberists' Her Majesty the Decemberists

Opener Cass McCombs is someone I know from parties and barbecues in Baltimore. He's a good dude and, since he started blowing up, a local-music hero, so I always felt bad for not liking most of his awkward, unwieldy indie-pop shuffles. But these days he's playing acoustically with a bass player and a harmonizing female singer instead of a full band, and it's a good look for him. The open, uncluttered acoustic arrangements let his songs breathe and relax into themselves instead of drowning in shambling clumsiness, and it turns out he's a good songwriter after all. And as a bonus: he could teach these neo-folk kids a few things about that Simon & Garfunkle harmonizing shit. If he keeps up like this, McCombs could give Baltimore enough local pride to last until season four of The Wire starts.

Download: "Your Mother and Father"

The Quarterly Report: Status Ain't Hood's Favorite Singles Since July

Posted by Tom Breihan at 8:00 PM, October 5, 2005

This is the wrong Maceo, but you see if you can do any better with Google image search

The singles list is slightly more complicated than the albums list; it's a lot more fluid and subject to whim, and there's no guarantee that any of these are going to end up on my year-end list (though I'd be surprised if most of them didn't). More importantly, many of these singles didn't come out between July and September 2005; they're here in this quarterly report because that's when they wormed their way into my consciousness. If possible, this list is maybe even more subjective than my album list.

1. Maceo: "Nextel Chirp." Trust Southern rap to turn the most irritating sound in the universe, the high-pitched walkie-talkie bleep that you hear all the fucking time on the bus in Baltimore, into a regional anthem. Maceo is from Atlanta, a city that has become the country's leading exporter of drug-dealer rap, and Maceo fits right in with T.I. and Young Jeezy; the song's lyrics are fascinating stuff about how dealers shouldn't be talking to each other on the phone, yet another music equivalent of The Wire. The best part: Maceo's examples of people who fucked up: Irv Gotti, Jamal Lewis. This is heavily treaded territory, though, and "Nextel Chirp" wouldn't be anything special if it weren't for its space-bending hypnotic beat, floating whistles and aquatic gurgling beat and slow-motion drum-tics. Maceo's voice is a greasy, high-pitched slur, playful in its menace. This is first-rate reprehensible drug-rap, the equal of virtually anything Jeezy or T.I. has done. It's not villainous heroics or cold historical revenge; it's career advice, simple practicality, more in tune with the day-to-day mechanics of the drug trade than the rewards or the consequences. Swear to God I had this all picked out before Maceo got the Fader back cover.

2. !!!: "Take Ecstasy With Me." I don't know the Magnetic Fields original, but I imagine that !!!'s cover starts out pretty faithfully, gorgeous synth washes over a chunky Peter Hook bassline and locked-in drums, Nic Offer doing his best impersonation of Stephin Merritt's fussy, wounded baritone. But !!! just keeps piling all these bits on top of it: chicken-scratch funk guitars, swoony strings, berserk congas, blissed-out synth bits, white noise. But even as !!! stretches the song out to nearly eight minutes and transforms it into this ridiculous, triumphant dance-funk odyssey, the band keep the song's puppy-dog-eyed melody firmly intact, and so the gloomy romanticism and dancefloor insanity feed each other and become this inseparable goth-rave monster. This 12-inch dropped in early June, but I feel like I'm still discovering it; the B-side, a ten-minute cover of Nate Dogg's "Get Up," may be even better. !!! may not be able to write their own songs with any kind of consistency, but they can cover the fuck out of other people's songs.

3. Slim Thug: "Diamonds." Already Platinum isn't anywhere near platinum, and that's mostly because the singles have been weak. The gleaming, emaciated blips of "Like a Boss" and "I Ain't Heard of That" have nothing to do with Slim's strengths; the dude sounds lost and confused on fast, minimalist Neptunes tracks. But when he gets ahold of a harsh, muddy, disgusting track like "Diamonds," he just murders it. Mr. Lee's beat is exactly the sort of ugly Houston monster that Slim always needed, all distorted sandworm bass and hollow echoey handclaps and disembodied vocal samples. The violin (I think it's a violin) on the hook is sad like its dog just died, and it's almost cruel to put it on a track this hard and violent. And Slim is just nasty, snarling in that haughty guttural drawl and just dripping with contempt whether he's bashing Lil Flip or bragging about his steering wheel.

4. Teairra Mari: "Make Her Feel Good." On a purely aesthetic level, it's breathtaking, Sean Garrett swiping the tiny bells of "My Melody" and suspending them in the heartbeat drums and synth whooshes of this open, spacey track, Teairra Mari filling her thin voice with a tragic, desperate longing. But the track is also something else. Young R&B divas are thick on the ground these days, but their singles rarely get into feelings beyond the flush of initial attraction ("1 Thing," "Turnin' Me On") or erotically charged self-confidence ("Goodies," maybe "Girlfight"). But "Make Her Feel Good" finds a young woman dismayed at the assholism of dudes in general, how hard it is to find someone who treats her with anything resembling respect: "Do I have to apologize for my emotions?" Seems to me that there must be a whole lot of young women feeling like that nowadays, but you wouldn't know it from pop music.

5. Art Brut: "Good Weekend." A blast, swaggering skeletal staccato guitar over snare thwaks, simple and fun and propulsive and frayed like Bratmobile or first-album B-52s, cooing harmonies smoothing things out, an exclamation point at the end of everything Eddie Argos blurts. "Good Weekend" is a dude-rock take on Amerie's "1 Thing," a song about the dizzy rush of meeting someone that actually captures something of the stupid-sprung vertiginousness of those first couple of weeks. The thing that keeps Bloc Party and Maximo Park and, fuck it, Franz Ferdinand from graduating from good to great is their slick professionalism, the sense that they're too busy trying on new pants and polishing up their guitar parts to put their heads down and just fucking go for it. Someone needs to tie those dudes to a chair and blast this song at them until their teeth get sharp.

6-10. Fall Out Boy: "Sugar, We're Going Down"; Faith Hill: "Mississippi Girl"; Montgomery Gentry: "Something To Be Proud Of"; All American Rejects: "Dirty Little Secret"; Dem Franchise Boyz feat. Jermaine Dupri, Da Brat, and Bow Wow: "I Think They Like Me (So So Def Remix)"

The Quarterly Report: Status Ain't Hood's Favorite Albums Since July

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:02 PM, October 4, 2005

That guy yawning in the background obvously doesn't realize he's in the presence of the guy who made Status Ain't Hood's #1 album of 2005's third quarter

I did this every three months on my old blog, just as a way of keeping track of everything that had come out during that part of the year, helping me sort through everything so it wouldn't be this huge chaotic pile when I had to throw together an end-of-the-year list. This is, of course, a completely subjective list, way more reflective of my personal preferences than any sort of objective standard of quality that doesn't exist anyway. It's been an insanely great three months; I'm amazed that I had no room for Blood on the Wall or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or DJ Quik or the Juan Maclean or Rod Lee or the Slim Thug mixtape.

1. Kanye West: Late Registration. This shouldn't be a surprise. It has nothing to do with Kanye's etiquette-smashing telethon appearance or last weekend's SNL bit where he ran into Mike Myers in the hallway, though admittedly neither of those things hurst this album. The skits are still jarringly awful (though they're still better than the College Dropout skits), and a few tracks ("We Can Make It Better" in particular) drown under their syrupy, overblown, melodramatic string-section pretensions. The "eighteen years, eighteen years" bit on "Gold Digger" is fucked up, though it's not even one of the top fifty most fucked up things I've heard in rap songs I've enjoyed this year. He's still mostly not as good as his guest rappers. But Kanye West has done something really powerful with this album; he's made a rap album of tremendous warmth and vision and sweep without forgetting the part where it's a rap album. Critics have made a big deal about how Jon Brion has given West's compositions a serious heft and a lighter-than-air grace, and that's true, but it's also true that West has brought Brion's floating chimes and impressionist tones into the service of actual pop songs in ways that not even Fiona Apple could do; he's grounded them in his burbling drums and moaning soul samples and hardass guest rappers. And Kanye has improved enormously as a rapper himself. His delivery has found a crisp, fluid confidence, and he's mostly purged his lyrics of "Jesus Walks" condescension and constant references to his broken jaw. He's also avoided the trap that dorky-ass rappers usually fall into when they become stars where they start talking about moving keys and shooting you in the face (see: Paul Wall). What's left is a strong and complex and articulate worldview. He loves his mom but still bullshits her about going back to school. He knows diamond-consumption is killing people but can't let go of the thrill of it. And his rags-to-riches story is still more heartfelt and infectious than that of just about any former drug dealer. Late Registration also has a few hundred smaller treasures (Jay and Nas on consecutive songs, the strings switching the beat up on verse four of "Gone," the sample that interrupts Common on "My Way Home"), but the real treat is seeing this guy rising to the top without losing his mind, turning rap into what he probably always wanted it to be.

Voice review: Robert Christgau on Kanye West's Late Registration

2. Young Jeezy: Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. Jeezy's nihilism is sort of the flipside of Kanye's humanism; Let's Get It is one endless celebration of Jeezy's drug sales, the album T.I. always should've made. Absolutely nothing interrupts Jeezy's relentless drug talk; there's precious little remorse or regret to be found, though there's dejection on "Talk To Em" and tension on "Don't Get Caught." Jeezy's not a good rapper on the level of, say, Mr. Lif or Kurupt or Sadat X, but he's a great rapper in ways that those guys never could be. He sounds huge and immortal and bulletproof; his greasy rasp sinks into beats and makes them sound like these eternal documents of hardness. He's the action-movie villain you end up rooting for, just because he's so much smarter and more interesting and better-prepared than the hero--Dennis Hopper in Speed or Land of the Dead, but with the added weight and desperation of race and class. He doesn't talk about selling drugs because he likes being evil; he does it because it was one of the only options available to him; there's revelry and glee in his voice, but there's also a sort of grim determinism. I can't really speak on Jeezy as a person (even though I interviewed him and everything), but as a persona, he's likable and detestable and ultimately fascinating. Musically, Let's Get It is a towering, impenetrable fortress of glistening surfaces and royal horns and ghostly synth tones and impossibly huge drums, like all the best parts of Just Blaze and latter-day Mannie Fresh and DJ Oomp blended into this regionless, hegemonic thump, only interrupted for the insanely sunny pop insanity of "My Hood," which will probably be the single of the year if it ever becomes a single (and if Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago" never becomes a single).

Voice review: Nick Sylvester on Young Jeezy at Radio City Music Hall

3. Three 6 Mafia: Most Known Unknowns. I get funny looks every time I let people know that the Three 6 Mafia is my favorite rap group, that their miles-deep ignorant gothic crunk means way more to me than any New York rap, but this isn't exactly a unique position when you go south of the Mason-Dixon line. On the album's intro, DJ Paul says that it's called Most Known Unknowns because the press and the music industry have continued to ignore the group's contributions to rap music, even though they've created a regional empire and left an indelible imprint on the aesthetic of Southern rap. It's true; slower, heavier Lil Jon tracks like Lil Scrappy's "No Problem" would be unimaginable without the influence of Paul and Juicy J's gelatinous horror-soundtrack production. If Three 6 is under-appreciated, it's probably because their music doesn't make sense in discrete three-minute chunks. It's an immersion thing, floating black-hole snarls piling up on each other into this dense, hallucinogenic mass. Even though it's a great track, I was disappointed when I heard "Gotta Stay Fly," the album's first single; it seemed like the group was leaving behind the haunted house for chopped-up Kanye soul. But it turns out that they're just following a progression they started a few months ago with Me Being Me, the solo album of their protege Frayser Boy. They've added a layer of melancholy melody to their heaviness, and so Most Known Unknowns is sad and beautiful in a way that none of their albums has been before. It's not quite as great as Da Unbreakables, the 2003 album that remains the most complete realization of the group's aesthetic, but it's close.

Voice review: Kelefa Sanneh on Three 6 Mafia

4. Kano: Home Sweet Home. I got a lot of shit for my first post, where I had the nerve to say that Kano had a better live show than Roll Deep. Check the comment section; heads are quick to tell me that I know nothing about grime and that my opinion means nothing. The thing is that they're basically right. Plenty of critics follow every fluctuation in the grime scene, keeping up with all the chaos and talking about it as the next coming of punk or rap or hardcore techno, the future of music. I'm not one of them; grime isn't my beat. I think of it as an interesting rap subgenre, compelling evidence of rap's continuing global takeover and fracturing into regional scenes. From where I'm sitting, it's produced one great album (Dizzee Rascal's Showtime) and a handful of great singles and good albums. I don't seek out every mixtape import; I just don't like it enough. I'm a rap guy, and that's why I really, really like Kano. From a rap guy perspective, he's an amazing rapper, quick and precise and charismatic and fun. I like how he questions his own next-guy status on "Sometimes" and slams bouncers on "Typical Me" and gets all gooey on "Brown Eyes." And from a rap guy perspective, the production on Home Sweet Home is as varied as it is great: Latin horns and pianos on "Remember Me," "War Pigs" guitars on "I Don't Know Why," goofy big-room house on "Nobody Don't Dance No More." And "Ps and Qs" is easily one of the best grime singles I've heard, pinpoint fast-rap delivery and casual fuck-yous over this gorgeously breathless laser-ping beat. If more grime sounded like this instead of like M.O.P. bellowing in Jamaican accents over car alarms, maybe I'd pay more attention.

5. Sufjan Stevens: Come On Feel the Illinoise! It took a while for me to really hear this album because I couldn't get past "Chicago," simply the best song of the year. "Chicago" is just glorious, an achingly gorgeous epic of smallness, swelling and falling and expanding and just filling the air. The part in the middle where he sings "I've made a lot of mistakes" and the choir comes in on the chorus makes breath stop for a second every time. It's still hard for me to listen to the album without stopping and playing "Chicago" over and over again; it's what I'm doing right now. But the rest of the album is nearly as full of perfect little string bits and swoony choruses and tingley bells. Illinoise is an indie-pop Late Registration, an album of staggering sweep and ambition that doesn't sacrifice any of the pleasures of its genre. The simpering, twee cuteness of indie-pop is still fully in effect, and that sounds like a complaint, but it really isn't, since the escape-from-reality factor is really what I like about indie-pop. Illinoise is the best record of its kind since Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, and it deserves all the laudatory reviews it's gotten, which is quite an accomplishment since there have been a whole mess of them.

Download: "Chicago"
Voice feature: Nick Sylvester on Sufjan Stevens

6-10. Clipse: We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2: The Black Card Era; Cage: Hell's Winter; Paul Wall: The People's Champ; Frayser Boy: Me Being Me; Amadou & Mariam: Dimanche A Bamako.

Tomorrow: singles!

Nobody Shows Up to Two-Day Alt-Rock Fest

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:41 PM, October 3, 2005

One million scary happy people in Charlie Brown robes take a bow (courtesy of Waved Rumor)

Across the Narrows Festival
Killers + New York Dolls + Interpol + British Sea Power + Tegan and Sara + Ordinary Boys
Richmond County Ballpark
October 1, 2005

Beck + Belle and Sebastian + Polyphonic Spree + Ravonettes + Dragonette + Gang Gang Dance
KeySpan Park
October 2, 2005

It's hard to believe that it actually happened: four big shows in two separate minor-league baseball stadiums, no easy way to get from one to the other, $55 tickets, no re-entry, no second stage, no Moveon.org booth, one little spot where you could play Playstation. The lineup: entirely unreconstructed alt-rock, no rap or frat-friendly Chili Peppers stuff or Warped Tour emo-punk. An outdoor festival happening after the summer festival season ends, featuring a lineup of bands that have mostly played more than a few recent New York shows, and splitting the potential audience right in half by having the show at two different venues simultaneously. None of it seems like a good idea, but then AmsterJam seemed like a terrible idea, too, and people showed up to that. But Across the Narrows did turn out to be a terrible idea. No one showed up. The stadiums, already small for festival venues, were almost completely empty for just about every set. The bumbling event security and unbelievably half-assed unfunny comedians who hosted shows in both locations weren't helping anything. There will be no Across the Narrows 2.

The day-one crowd in Staten Island was just pathetic, maybe 3000 people in a venue that could comfortably hold four times that many during the Killers' headlining set. It was impossible not to feel sorry for the bands lower down on the bill, playing to a couple hundred half-curious people in an empty stadium. But then, none of these bands were anything special. The Ordinary Boys are boilerplate Cockney Britpop. Tegan and Sara are pleasant-enough Sunday-afternoon crossword-puzzle music, inoffensive Lilith-Fair folk-pop (also the only band on the bill with any girls in it). British Sea Power attempted to mask a total lack of hooks or personality by jumping on each other's shoulders and making the keyboard player run through the crowd banging on a drum; I've seen about a hundred teenage hardcore bands with better jumping-around theatrics. Interpol walked out to the first real crowd response of the day, and they sounded cold and dark and heavy at first, big in a way that none of the other bands had managed. But then they did what they do: they just stood still and played their songs exactly the same way they play them on their records. The group of frat kids ironically cabbage-patching in the back of the venue was way, way more entertaining.

Up until the New York Dolls started olding all over the stage, every band was just sort of there. David Johansen seems to be under the mistaken impression that anyone wants to see a 55-year-old man in a belly-shirt and a buttflap squawking about "Ah said uh rawkwwwk, bay-beh!" while tooting on a harmonica and reading his lyrics from a music stand. (Best Johansen quote: "This is a new song we're going to play for you. Our manager said we shouldn't play a new song, and I said, 'This is Staten Island, man!'") I know the New York Dolls are punk originators and local legends and etc., but their live show is a truly grating specimen of fossil-rock cliche, embarrassing for anyone who witnesses it.

So it was up to the Killers to save the show, and the Killers aren't really a band equipped to save a show like that. If the Killers last another fifteen years, they'll put out an amazing greatest-hits album, but right now they're a singles band with four singles. Those four singles sounded great, huge and expansive and beautifully overblown in their arch, burnished, glamorous angst. And Brandon Flowers knows how to play frontman, filling up the glowing-blue stage with self-conscious flair, like the lead in a high-school musical. But they had a big spot to fill, and their album tracks sounded as insubstantial as they sound on the album. To say that the Killers were the best band on the bill on Saturday is to say virtually nothing at all, and it's certainly not enough give of those 3000 people their money's worth.

The crowd at Keyspan Park the next day was several times larger, and that's probably because of one band: Belle and Sebastian, the only festival band that doesn't seem to play New York every other weekend, the only one that has a cult following rabid and large enough to make a minor-league baseball stadium seem maybe sort of full. Keyspan Park still wasn't anywhere near packed, but it wasn't a total embarrassment either.

Not many people came early enough to see Gang Gang Dance's chirpily diffuse art-school drum-circle shenanigans or Dragonette's awkwardly glib and tentative sex-kitten synthpop (think Berlin minus the self-esteem), but there was a decent little crowd by the time the Ravonettes emerged to drop washed-out luded-up icy drone-pop science on us for an unwisely long 45 minutes. Despite the commendably girl-friendly lineup (most bands had at least one female member), the show wasn't much different from the previous day until the emergence of the Polyphonic Spree. The Spree were an impressive spectacle simply walking out onstage, 23 members in matching red robes, machines blowing huge volumes of bubbles out over the audience. The band's maniacally bright-faced Up With People spazz-gospel never moved me much on record, but in the middle of the day on a huge stage with the choir girls' hair whipping around and one guitarist constantly jumping off stuff and the singer guy endlessly nattering about the Thumbsucker soundtrack, they were pretty fucking special, the first band of the day that had any idea how to rock a festival crowd.

Another band that knew how to rock a festival crowd: Belle and Sebastian, who had the additional advantage of a crowd who'd come pretty much just to see them anyway. A nice touch: they opened with "Stars of Track and Field," the first B&S song most of us ever heard. They've got fluffily gorgeous baroque pop classics for days, and "Me and the Major" and "Judy and the Dream of Horses" sounded so great that it didn't really matter when Stuart Murdoch kept missing his cues (he would've been kicked off Rock Star: INXS) or when they unloaded a couple of boring newer songs on us. And the charm offensive was in full effect; when Murdoch showed off his Mets shirt and talked about bopping his way to Coney like the Warriors, even the rap dorks in the audience had to give in.

Speaking of rap dorks, Beck was easily the closest thing to hip-hop on any of the four bills, which is to say that nothing was remotely close to hip-hop. Beck has toned down his frantic irono-showmanship tremendously since the last time I saw him eight years ago (he had some other guy do all his dancing for him). He pumped out his old hits with a thorough, professional efficiency, but he seemed happier performing Sea Change material than funkier fare. In one inspired moment, he played a song acoustically while the members of his band pretended to eat dinner at a table behind him, eventually picking up their silverware and adding a few layers of fragile, rippling percussion. It was a rare thing: a flash of impractically inventive dorkery at a music festival with nearly as many corporate sponsors as paying attendees. Too band we didn't get a few more of those.

Speaking of inventive dorkery, Michel Gondry was standing right in front of me when Beck dedicated a song to him. Stay tuned to Status Ain't Hood for big Gondry-related news next week.

More Across the Narrows coverage at Riff Raff