The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Gets It Right, Sort Of

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:08 PM, September 28, 2007

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

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

Here's something else: the Hall has always been really big on iconic guitarists, which is probably the main reason Van Halen made it in last year. But of this year's nine nominees, only five are really famous for guitars, and only two of them (Mellencamp and the DC5) really pull trad-rock guitar-moves with any frequency. Chic's Nile Rogers had no use for rock-hero moves; instead, he used his guitar more for rhythm than for melody, slashing and stabbing and touretically stuttering. Cohen played guitar, but he used it more for atmospheric shading than anything else; his voice was always the focal point. And the Ventures basically used guitars as stand-ins for singers; their guitars played the melodies that the vocals would've handled if their songs had vocals. Madonna and Summer, meanwhile, tended to make robotic dance-music where the individual instruments were all sublimated to the beat; the same could be said of Chic if Rogers' playing wasn't so distictive. Bambaataa, for all I know, has never touched a guitar in his life. And the Beastie Boys only really started fucking around with guitars once they got old; even then, the guitar wasn't particularly important to the music they were making. For probably the first time in its history, the Hall has recognized a group of musicians for whom the guitar wasn't really an especially big deal, and that, I think, says a lot about the Hall's perception of itself. One of the big ongoing controversies in the selection process is that the Hall never picks prog bands; Genesis partisans are going to be spitting mad once they see this list. Another stems from last year's inductions; according to Fox journalist Roger Friedman, the Dave Clark Five got more votes than Grandmaster Flash last year, but Jann Wenner, who supposedly exerts dictatorial control over this whole process, decided that they needed a rap group in there instead. As arbitrary and pointless as the whole induction process might be, I can't really argue with a governing body who ignores prog and who favors a group of rap pioneers over a fifth-string British Invasion band. If nothing else, Wenner has managed to insure that this year's induction ceremony will be a pretty entertaining affair.

The most interesting nominee on this year's list is, I think, the Beastie Boys. For one thing, just about everyone seems to agree that their work up until Check Your Head is way superior to their more recent stuff, but it's tough to imagine them being such a mortal lock for induction if they'd broken up in 1993. Seems to me they get patted on the back more for getting old than they ever did for being young in the first place, if that makes sense. Also, the only stuff the band was putting out in 1982 was particularly shitty hardcore. If it's wrong that the second rap group to find its way into the Hall might be a snotty group of white kids, it seems even worse that the Beasties would be the first hardcore band. You could probably argue that Black Flag or Minor Threat would make at least as much sense on that list as Bambaataa, but the Hall sure hasn't rushed to recognize them. Maybe next year.

Another New Rap Album That Isn't Curtis or Graduation

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:57 PM, September 27, 2007

Or American Gangster, for that matter

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

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an entry about the Coughee Brothaz' Waitin' Our Turn, a low-key, low-budget indie-rap album that came out around the same time as the twin Kanye West and 50 Cent opuses. Once Upon a Time is like that, too, and it actually came out on the same day as those two albums. You wouldn't know it to listen to the album. Bleed has been kicking around regional-rap circles for well over a decade, and Once Upon a Time is his sixth album. Bleed had one quick brush with national stardom; in 1998, he released his first solo album, My Balls & My Word, on the then-unstoppable No Limit label, scoring a gold plaque and a minor hit single in the process. Since then, he's been steadily churning out records, first for Priority and then for C-Bo's indie label West Coast Mafia. Once Upon a Time is the first of those albums that I've heard; I bought it from iTunes earlier in the week, pretty much on a whim. I'm glad I did. It's not a great album, but it is the sort of rap album we don't hear much anymore: one that sustains a mood and sinks pleasantly into the background. The production is laid-back but relatively indistinct Southern-rap slow-drive music with lots of rumbling bass and spaced-out 808s, and it never rushes itself or stretches to reach some new demographic. Even the two attempted club-tracks are slow and insistent; they draw on frenzied New Orleans bounce beat-structures, but they push all the elements so low in the mix that they never overwhelm Bleed himself. And Bleed would be pretty easy to overwhelm. He always sounds unruffled and imperturbable, like he's half-asleep and just rapping to kill time during commercial-breaks while he's watching TV. When a more animated guest shows up, like when David Banner breathes fire all over "Music 'N' Money," the contrast is jarring. On "People!," there's a moment where Bleed says, "On fire like Fire Marshall Bill, let me show you something," and it took me a minute to remember that the second part of the line was the old Jim Carrey character's catchphrase, since Bleed doesn't bother to turn his voice into the deranged cackle that everyone uses when they do Fire Marshall Bill impressions. He just delivers the line in his usual flat voice. I thought he really did want to show me something.

Once Upon a Time is a thoroughly unambitious record. Bleed never stretches outside his comfort zone, and he rarely addresses any subject-matter beyond the usual smoking-weed and being-gangsta stuff. When he does go a little deeper, though, it feels that much more powerful. "N' Da' Street," for instance, has one moment where you can start to see the desperation behind his droopy poker-face: "Here in New Orleans, we packed like sardines / All around the world like Daniel Pearl; I know what war means." But the overwhelming impression I get from the album is one of ease and comfort; Bleed sounds like he'd be perfectly happy making albums just like this one for the next decade or so. His moment in the pop spotlight may be long behind him, but Bleed knows that he's got a small and devoted audience who can keep him fed for years if he keeps making slight and satisfying records like this one. Writing about rap, it's really easy to sink into the Monday-morning quarterbacking trap of keeping half and eye stuck on record sales and talking as much about marketing plans as music. And so I'm really glad that albums like Waitin' Our Turn and Once Upon a Time in Amedica are still being made. Nobody's getting rich off of albums like this one, and so maybe the people making the records are just doing it because they care about making music.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 7

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:54 PM, September 26, 2007

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

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

Metal Gets Rhythm

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:58 PM, September 26, 2007

Seriously, "Christgrinding Avenue"

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

High on Fire is the sort of band that does exactly one thing and does it very, very well, and there's a certain honor in that sort of single-minded pursuit of an ideal sound. In this case, the veteran Oakland trio plays a huge, intense, galloping strain of doom-metal that owes more to Motorhead than it does to Sabbath. Frontman Matt Pike actually sounds a whole lot like Lemmy; he's got that same throat-shredded tough-guy howl. But the band's songs are typically longer and more complicated than most Motorhead tracks: multipart constructions that never feel strung-together because the band keeps snapping back into the same hammering riffs. Pike plays screaming, tumultuous solos, but those solos never detract from the targeted pummel that surrounds them. Death Is This Communion is the band's fourth album, but the band hasn't bothered to tweak its sound much. The only new tricks here are a short drum-solo instrumental that actually kind of kicks ass and a new strain of Middle-Eastern minor-scale mysticism on a few of the songs; every so often, a winding acoustic guitar even finds its way into the onslaught. But Death Is This Communion ultimately doesn't sound much different from Blessed Black Wings, its immediate predecessor, and that's just fine with me. This is overwhelmingly, primally satisfying stuff, and there's really no reason for the band to do a whole lot to change it.

Voice review: Adam Ganderson on High on Fire's Death Is This Communion
Voice review: High on Fire at the Knitting Factory
Voice review: George Smith on High on Fire's Blessed Black Wings

Like High on Fire, Baroness fits sort of uncomfortably into the doom-metal genre-tag, but Baroness's approach is a whole lot more nuanced than High on Fire's constant pound. The Georgia band has put out a couple of EPs, but Red Album is their first full-length, and it's a total monster, huge in scope and ambition. Frontman John Baizley doesn't scream or snarl, for one thing; he actually sings, and he does it in this open-throated screaming-at-the-sky bellow that just kills me. Like just about every other good metal band working, Baroness have a whole lot of prog running through their veins, but unlike most of those other bands, they've got at least as much Southern rock in there as well, so the odd time-signatures and counterintuitive changeups have an unpretentious greasy swing to them. The riffs crunch hard, but they do it with an understated, almost funky glide, and it always sounds natural and practically effortless even when they're lurching from one movement into another. The band never comes across as being theatrically evil or overbearingly eager to display their technical chops; instead, they let their songs breathe and drift of their own accord, radiating menace and contentment in equal measure. When I'm in the right mood, this stuff goes beyond satisfying and becomes somehow moving. Both Red Album and Death Is This Communion came out in September on Relapse Records, the hugely important underground-metal indie-label that took a big hit last year when flagship act Mastodon left to sign with a major. If these two albums are any indication, Relapse is going to be just fine.

Live: Bjork Takes Us to Church

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:24 PM, September 25, 2007

Brains!

Bjork
Madison Square Garden
September 24, 2007

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

Everything about Bjork's stage-set on this tour feels warmly ritualistic, especially the massive singing female horn-section, every member of which wore an absurd fake-native smock with a matching spiky headdress. Those girls made up most of last night's onstage personnel, but she also had a few male instrumentalists up there, quietly and assuredly banging away at their keyboards and drums and vast banks of electronics and, OK, jumping around like goofballs when they didn't have anything else to do. To call the set ritualistic isn't to say that it wasn't lively. Bjork herself is, of course, a total sparkplug of a performer. Last night, she wore a plastic-looking gold-lame dress with a whole lot of ruffles, and she looked something like a fake Christmas tree. She ducked and twirled and toe-danced around the stage, hardly ever standing still. During "Hunter," the second song, she sprayed some sort of Spider-Man webbing out of her fingers and over the front rows, and during "Cover Me" she tiptoed slowly forward, looking for all the world like she was playing Tinkerbell in a grade-school stage-production of Peter Pan. She's a lot of fun to watch, and as a singer she's just incredible. She may pursue her muse to all sorts of weird places, and her accent might give her voice a tingly alien sharpness, but her range and control are just crazy. And she never even seems to be trying; her face never so much as turns red, even when she draws huge notes out forever. When she brought out Antony for "Dull Flame of Desire," the two of them sounded like an alternate-universe Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson: two incontrovertible-weirdo virtuosos finding common ground in the sublime while thousands watched. That voice alone justified her presence in the Garden's big room, and the rapturous reception the crowd gave all her flailings reminded me of an old Lester Bangs piece about seeing Barry White at the same venue, Bangs looking on baffled and fascinated while White gravely intoned the word "love" over and over again and thousands lost their shit.

As entertaining as all this was, I would've rather seen Bjork treat Madison Square Garden like the sports-arena it is and played the greatest-hits set that almost everyone else who steps on that stage brings. She certainly has the hits for it, and it would've been amazing to her hear her bust out "It's All So Quiet" and "Big Time Sensuality," even if she's all but disowned those tracks by this point. At first, it looked like she might even try something like that, skipping out onstage to "Earth Intruders" while fireballs exploded upward behind her. But then she spent about an hour doing wispy, quiet songs, never dipping into anything that predated Homogenic. Of course, when she did finally rip into "Army of Me," the string of rowdy jams that followed felt like total explosions of joy. "Hyperballad" was particularly great; before it ended, it morphed into a jittery rave freakout, complete with green lazer-lights shooting everywhere and confetti-cannons spraying. For a little while, the show was exactly what I'd been hoping for. And then she left the stage, and her encores were a farting oompah-jazz read of "Oceania" and the aforementioned "Declare Independence." Last night's show had plenty of amazing individual moments, but I walked out wishing I'd seen her in a church or something instead.

Voice review: Greg Tate on Bjork's Volta
Voice review: Laura Sinagra on Bjork's Medulla
Voice review: Ann Powers on Bjork's Live Box
Voice review: Emma Pearse on Bjork's Vespertine
Voice review: Scott Woods on Bjork's Selmasongs
Voice review: Vince Aletti on Bjork's Homogenic

Things I Learned Watching American Gangster

Posted by Tom Breihan at 12:36 PM, September 25, 2007

I want what you got, Uncle Frank

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

• T.I., RZA, and Common all have roles in the movie, but I had no idea until I saw the thing just how small those roles would turn out to be. All three are practically extras. None of them gets any more than a handful of lines, and the closest any of them gets to a big scene is a sort of comedy bit RZA does toward the end. Most of the time, they just lurk in the background. RZA is also the only one allowed to come across as even a little bit of a badass, and he plays a cop. (One of the movie's main themes is that the cops are a lot scruffier than the dealers. The dealers, at least the successful ones, wear business suits and fade into the background, while the cops are out on the streets doing greasy unglamorous shit. RZA wears a big afro and a dirty wifebeater, not a uniform.) I think it's interesting how little the rappers are involved. Ridley Scott could've easily stacked the cast with rappers, but then he would've risked having this movie come off like Paid in Full 2 or something. He could've also played up the presence of those rappers a whole lot more. Antoine Fuqua, who was originally supposed to direct this movie, did something like that in Training Day, and I always thought it was a big forced the way he trotted out Dr. Dre for a big cameo near the end. Instead of going either of those routes, Scott put a few rappers in supporting roles as a small nod to one of the movie's intended audiences, a pandering move that doesn't come across as being too ingratiating since the rappers are barely involved and since all of them are good actors anyway. The movie is actually beautifully cast top-to-bottom with great character actors: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ruby Dee, Armand Assante, Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire), John Hawkes (Sol Star from Deadwood), Jon Polito (Detective Crosetti from Homicide), onetime Status Ain't Hood commenter John Ortiz. Even Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe are basically A-list character-actors when they're at their best, which both of them are here. To say that all the rappers manage to keep up with these guys is to pay them a serious compliment.

• There's also a quick cameo from Fab 5 Freddy, but he doesn't really get a chance to do anything.

• So yes, Common plays T.I.'s father, and yes, it's fucking hilarious. The two only get one scene together, and that scene is over in a blink, but hoo boy. The funniest thing about it is that it's totally believable; Common looks to be about 40 and T.I. looks to be about 16. If T.I. had started acting up at that dinner table, it really looks like Common would've sent him up to his room with no dessert.

• At the screening I was at, every time a rapper showed up onscreen for the first time, the crowd would murmur "Common" or "T.I." I didn't hear anyone murmur "Chiwetel Ejiofor."

• When Cuba Gooding, Jr., first shows up as Nicky Barnes, there was one split-second where I thought it was Pimp C making a cameo. Not kidding.

• Given that American Gangster is a period-piece mostly set in late-60s/early-70s Harlem, it obviously follows that the soundtrack would be great; I especially liked a dealing montage set to "Hold On, I'm Comin'." I would've probably liked the movie even better if that soundtrack had been more extensive. Ridley Scott doesn't have the same natural instinct for incorporating pop music that, say, Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee has, and so a lot of really dramatic moments come with stock churning-string film-score music where, say, Curtis Mayfield would've worked a lot better. That's obviously a small quibble, but this sort of thing drives music dorks like me nuts.

• If there's any one thing about the movie that might threaten its status as a rap classic, it's the relative lack of violence. There's one shootout and a couple of grisly scenes, but even The Godfather looks pretty over-the-top in comparison. (Also, I was ten minutes late to the movie, and apparently I missed Denzel doing some really cold shit. So, um, don't show up late.) Denzel is allowed to come across as being badass without being psychotic. That serves to make the character a whole lot more sympathetic, but I wonder how accurate it is. In the original New York magazine story upon which the movie was based, the real Frank Lucas seemed to take particular delight in talking about the people he'd killed, and the movie certainly leaves itself open to charges that it glamorizes a cold-blooded killer and an exploiter of other people's miseries. We get a couple of quick scenes that detail the human cost of the heroin epidemic, but those scenes seem pretty perfunctory. It'll be interesting to see whether rap's cultural critics jump all over this movie in the same way they do with music.

• It'll also be interesting to see what effect, if any, the movie has on rap itself. On the continuum of gangster-movie glamor, American Gangster sits a whole lot closer to The Wire than it does to Scarface. In fact, it's probably as close in tone to The Wire as a movie of its scope can possibly be these days. The movie's drug-kingpins don't hang out in musty funeral parlors or dank junk-shops, but they try to play things as close to the vest as possible. In one scene, Lucas scolds his brother for wearing a flamboyant pimp-suit instead of the conservative business clothes that Lucas himself wears. Whenever any of the characters takes any delight in their money or their notoriety at all, it's presented as being a sign of weakness; the one possible exception is the part where Lucas buys shit for his mom. The Frank Lucas we see in this movie would have nothing contempt for silly shit like, say, this. And since the movie is being released into a world where rap's consumer-culture fetishism has been going full-bore for at least ten years, it works as an indictment of that showy opulence. If nothing else, Jay-Z's whispery flow on "Blue Magic" makes more sense in the context of the movie. If rap's materialism scales itself back a bit over the next year or two, this movie might be a major cause.

Jay-Z's "Blue Magic": Pretty Great

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:46 PM, September 24, 2007

Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra

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

The weird thing is that "Blue Magic" doesn't sound much like anything Jay's done in the past, either musically or thematically. It's weird to see him get into the gritty details of crack production, the pyrex jars and all that shit. In the past, he depicted himself as a reigning drug lord, already above that stuff. We might hear about him getting pulled over on the highway with a trunk full of illegal stuff, but we never heard about him making actual physical contact with cocaine. I guess someone's got to start somewhere, anyway. And his delivery on the track is colder and less emotional than anything he's done in six years or so. I was just talking on the phone with Zach Baron, who doesn't much like the song. Zach liked the song's heartless authority but thought something was off about the vocal take; it was too quiet, without enough emphasis or fire. Jay's delivery barely raises above a whisper on the whole song. We only know when the chorus arrives for the first time because his voice doubles up; other than that, he never breaks the flow of his cadence. I actually like that under-the-breath quality in his voice; his slick-talk sounds more forbidding because he doesn't feel the need to clamp down on any particular word, implying menace and authority rather than smashing us over the head with them. His delivery has a great little syncopated bounce, which others have pointed out that he sort of swiped from Rakim's "My Melody." Every line is packed with internal rhymes and subtle alliterative runs: "P, I repeat if you show me where the pot is." I'm sort of loath to make the comparison because it's so goddam obvious, especially coming from a shameless Clipse-booster like me, but the whole thing really reminds me of Hell Hath No Fury. Pharrell's beat has the same polished glint as his beats for that album, and Jay's delivery is similarly dead-eyed and matter-of-fact, like he's explaining the way things are to you whether you like it or not. Even the grunt he lets out after the "try as they may, couldn't get me on the hook" punchline reminds me of the yeuch noise Pusha T used to use to punctuate his best points.

But I don't have any idea what "Blue Magic" has to do with the movie American Gangster beyond its title (it shares its name with the strain of high-grade dope that Frank Lucas used to push) and the quick sample of movie-dialogue that ends the track. On my last Jay-Z post, someone said in a comment that Jay actually recorded the track for Kingdom Come, something I'd be more inclined to believe if it didn't sound so much more evil than anything Jay's done over the past couple of years. (Even his verse from T.I.'s "Watch What You Say to Me" is cuddly in comparison.) I'll be curious to see what, if anything, a movie about a 70s drug-dealer has to do with a rap song where Jay talks about the 80s crack-trade while splicing his mid-90s kingpin persona with mid-00s crack-rap trends and stealing cadences from a mid-80s rap classic and a hook from an early-90s R&B monster-jam (En Vogue's "Hold On"). In the Times article where Jay announces the album's existence, he admits that he'd never heard of Frank Lucas before seeing the movie. So maybe American Gangster the album won't be about Frank Lucas so much as it'll be about Jay's own memories; maybe the movie just triggered an unstuck-in-time moment for Jay. Looks like I'm seeing the movie tonight, so maybe I'll be able to say more definitively tomorrow.

Voice review: Miles Marshall Lewis on Jay-Z's Kingdom Come
Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z
Voice review: Nick Catucci on Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse
Voice review: Selwyn Seyfu Hinds on Jay-Z's The Blueprint
Voice review: Kelefa Sanneh on Jay-Z's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia
Voice review: Miles Marshall Lewis on Jay-Z's Vol. 3 ... The Life and Times of S. Carter
Voice review: James Hunter on Jay-Z's Vol. 2 ... Hard Knock Life

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 6

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:16 PM, September 20, 2007

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

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

Live: The Black Lips Are Dumb

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:49 PM, September 20, 2007

The mule never showed

Black Lips Bad Kids Circus
Sound Fix
September 19, 2007

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

I wanted to go to the band's Music Hall of Williamsburg show last night, but I waited too long to request a spot on the guest-list and got denied. But the band also announced something about a free show at the Williamsburg record-store Sound Fix before the Music Hall show, so I figured I'd just go to that instead. Turned out that the Sound Fix thing wasn't really a show. Instead, it was something called the Black Lips Bad Kids Parade, and it was exactly as stupid as it sounds. Even before the show (or whatever) started, forced wackiness abounded. I got there a half-hour early and found a seat on a bench near the door. Outside, some guy manned a face-painting booth. He kept squirting me with a water pistol, and I kept doing my best to ignore him. Balloons and streamers hung everywhere. The soundsystem played Britney Spears' "Toxic" about three times in a row. Eventually, the place filled up and the band jumped onstage. One guy was wearing a blonde wig with a cowboy hat, cheap plastic sunglasses, and tight gold lame pants; another had an enormous bushy mustache that I think is actually real but which looks fake. The guy in the wig strutted around and said mock-ringleader stuff that I couldn't understand through a shitty megaphone. Then the band started playing, getting through a couple of bleary ramshackle acoustic rockabilly songs and sounding like a total fucking mess. Shockingly enough, the Black Lips' songs don't translate too well to acoustic guitars. Then a guy and a girl got up and did a dance routine to "Toxic" that was probably loosely based on Little Red Riding Hood. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be funny, but even if it was, hardly anyone would know. The place was jammed with people, and the Sound Fix stage is only a couple of inches off the ground, so barely anyone could see anything. When that ended, the band played a couple of more songs, still sounding like ass. Then the wig guy started calling for "the Human Floor," but I guess the Human Floor had gotten annoyed and left; I sympathized. So the band played one more song and then introduced an even shittier marching band (tuba, trumpet, cymbals, one-string jug-bass, banjo) who filed up to the stage from outside the store, played a couple of awful songs (fake-Tom Waits scatting was involved), and then led a parade to the Music Hall. While the marching band and a bunch of spectators walked down the middle of the street, the Black Lips guys ran around screaming stuff like "let's start a motherfucking riot in the streets" and handing out masks and noisemakers. At one point, the blonde wig guy climbed a mound of dirt next to a construction site, dragging a wooden barrier up with him. He threw it off and broke it, and then he ran down the street yelling: "We're so getting in trouble!" Immediately afterward, he ran right past an idling police car; the two cops inside either didn't see him throwing the barrier or just didn't care. This was Williamsburg, after all; it's tough to imagine a single neighborhood on the planet where an ironic art-kid brass-band parade would cause less of a stir. When everyone got to the Music Hall, the whole thing just sort of ended.

A pickup truck led the parade down the back of the street, and a cameraman, supposedly from MTV, sat on the back filming the whole thing. And maybe that's the most annoying thing about the whole pointless fucking spectacle. Back in Baltimore, I got good and used to seeing bands smashing milk-cartons with baseball bats or integrating weird nonsensical narrative plays into their live shows. But they were pulling those those art-kid stunts for fun, not for the benefit of MTV News cameras. The whole thing last night was a publicity stunt, and I guess it worked because here I am writing about it. The Black Lips are a good band, and I'm told that if I'd actually seen the Music Hall show, I would've gotten to see them just being a good band. But I didn't. The Black Lips I saw last night was the Black Lips who recorded the horrible joke-country lament "How Do You Tell...," the only glaring flaw in Good Bad Not Evil. That band is just one big unfunny publicity-grubbing joke. And fuck that band.

Voice review: Debbie Maron on the Black Lips' Let It Bloom
Voice review: Hillary (?) on the Black Lips' Black Lips

Jay-Z, Returning Yet Again

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:38 PM, September 20, 2007

Best-case scenario: something like this

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

If what Jay's saying is true, and I hope it is, he started writing the album after the movie unearthed all these memories of his own life. American Gangster is a movie about a New York drug lord, his aspirations and tribulations. Given Jay's background as an aspiring New York drug lord, it makes sense that he'd feel the same way after seeing American Gangster as I would after seeing, say, Superbad. (I probably could've written a rap album about Superbad; just thank God I didn't.) What's more, if Jay is going to make a good album in 2007, he's going to do it by digging deep into his past, not by telling us anything about his current life. One of the reasons Kingdom Come failed was its over-reliance on Jay's quote-unquote maturity, its loving descriptions of brand-name shit I've never even heard of. Jay was so far-removed from his hungry younger self that he was no longer recognizable or relatable. But when older, richer Jay starts contemplating the extreme circumstances of his younger life, we can still get stuff like "99 Problems" out of him. Kingdom Come felt like a grand statement, one that he didn't sound entirely comfortable making. Now that it's done with, he can get back to the business of rediscovering his sneer and making bangers. To an extent, he's been doing just that with his guest-verses this year. A few of those verses (guest-spots for Fabolous and Ne-Yo and especially his clumsy and embarrassing "Umbrella" intro) have been warmed over effort-free bullshit. But on Timbaland's "Laff At Em," his delivery hit that great snarly bounce that always characterized his collaborations with Tim. And on T.I.'s "Watch What You Say to Me," he's all implied violence and forbidding authoritarianism; it's heartening hearing him throw threats around even if he won't specify at whom those threats are aimed. And most recently, he doesn't say much on his quick appearance from this week's "I Get Money" remix, but his delivery drips with the sort of haughty disdain that the other two guys on the track will never be able to touch, no matter what their bank-accounts might look like. I was excited about Kingdom Come, too, and that album burned the hell out of me. But the prospect of Jay coming off autopilot and turning back into the old him is just too tempting to dismiss out of hand.

Also worth mentioning: at his best, Jay is someone for whom the distinction between artistic and commercial impulses is essentially meaningless. Jay is often quoted as saying that he slowed down his slippery Reasonable Doubt-era flow to double his dollars, but the results of that slowed-down stadium-rap, Volume 2 and Volume 3 in particular, are absolutely the equal of the later, more contemplative albums he'd record. Jay learned how to make his pauses resonate; his matter-of-fact delivery projected ease and security, not ineptitude. And nobody's been following the Kanye/50 showdown more closely than Jay, so now nobody knows better than he does that a cohesive, personal, confident piece of work can sell better in 2007 can sell better than a slapped-together collection of target-demo songs. Kingdom Come sort of toed the line between those two extremes, to its own detriment. Jay is better when he picks one or the other, and maybe he's learned something since last year.

Voice review: Miles Marshall Lewis on Jay-Z's Kingdom Come
Voice feature: Elizabeth Mendez Berry on Jay-Z
Voice review: Nick Catucci on Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2: The Gift and the Curse
Voice review: Selwyn Seyfu Hinds on Jay-Z's The Blueprint
Voice review: Kelefa Sanneh on Jay-Z's The Dynasty: Roc La Familia
Voice review: Miles Marshall Lewis on Jay-Z's Vol. 3 ... The Life and Times of S. Carter
Voice review: James Hunter on Jay-Z's Vol. 2 ... Hard Knock Life

50 Cent's Billion-Dollar Remix

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:22 PM, September 19, 2007

Yup, another 50 post

About ten years ago, Ted Turner gave an interview where he talked candidly about the effect of the Forbes 400, the magazine's annual list of the richest Americans. In that interview, Turner said that the existence of this list exerted a sort of constant pressure on all the people who were jockeying for position on it, admitting that he himself had been nervous to give away too much money to charity when it might fuck up his placement. Google hasn't been able to help me find any evidence of that interview today, but I read it in high school, and it bugged me out. None of the people on that Forbes list will ever have to do a day of work again. None of the grandchildren of the people on that list will ever have to do a day of work. Every single person on that list has more money than he knows what to do with. But if Turner was right, all of them were still stressed about how much money they might have, if only because some magazine might say they have a few billion less than some other guy. Last month, Forbes published a list of rap music's top twenty earners over the past year, and even though the list is oddly fascinating in a sick sort of way (Yung Joc at #20? Really?), it's easy to imagine a list like that having a similar effect on all the people involved. The money that rappers make is really just couch-cushion change to the people on the real Forbes 400, and it's pretty common to hear rappers talking shit on each other about who has more money. Around the same time Forbes released that list, though, 50 Cent went and got the list's three top earners together on one track, a remix of "I Get Money." That remix finally hit the internet yesterday, and it's weirdly exhilarating to hear these three guys talking about their money. 50, Jay-Z, and Diddy are all competing with each other, certainly, and Jay even manages to throw a couple of light barbs 50's way on the track. But every one of these guys has accomplished amazing things, and every one of them, at least here, seems completely amped to talk about it. They're all too happy to talk too much shit.

Part of the reason the "I Get Money" remix works so well is, of course, "I Get Money" itself. Lately, I haven't been able to go more than a few hours without hearing the track; it's become like a mental itch. The beat itself sounds like the opposite of how money-rap should sound. It's not slow or expensive or indolent. That Audio Two sample ties it directly to a time when having money in rap meant being able to afford truck jewelry, and the blaring, discordant synths only serve to further ugly up that urgent skeletal drum-crack. On Curtis, the song is the only moment where 50 actually sounds happy to be rapping, giggling like a little kid about all his Vitamin Water money. It's also the only place where 50's reptilian swagger feels larger than 50 himself; the song resonates even if your bank account is bone-dry. The remix has this weird flattening effect where all the rappers involved suddenly sound a whole lot like each other, where there's no significant qualitative difference between Diddy and Jay for four minutes and twenty-eight seconds. On his opening verse, 50's flow sounds a little more stilted and stuttery than it did on the original; he's clipped his phrasing and shortened his cadence, but he still sounds fired-up and irrepressible, like the world still belongs to him. Diddy manages to sneak in one line that rivals 50's Vitamin Water gloating on the original: "Shootouts, coastal beefs, yeah Diddy did it / But my lawyer's so good that Diddy got acquitted." It didn't really come through too often on Press Play, but lately Diddy seems a lot more amped to be rapping than he did in his No Way Out days, possibly because he has better-attuned ghostwriters these days. I love hearing him cackle gleefully even when I don't have any idea what he's talking about. (Like: he makes fun of someone for riding around Miami on mopeds, which actually sounds like a really fun thing to do.) And when Jay's voice comes on after 50's little singsong lead-in, it's a legitimately thrilling moment, if only because these guys have been tossing veiled insults back and forth for so many years. And they don't stop here: both of them make sure to sneak in competing claims about running New York. When Jay ends his verse with his version, "New York is still mine," it doesn't even matter that he tried to rhyme it with "Forbes dot com." And it's bizarrely heartening that neither of these guys is bragging about having more money than the other. Instead, they're still going back and forth over that old King of New York stuff. They still care about rap.

In this Entertainment Weekly interview, Jay talks about how he stopped 50 from releasing the remix until the sales of the first-week 50/Kanye battle were in because he didn't want it pushing 50 past Kanye. That's a smart, Machiavellian move, but it may have actually worked out in 50's favor. After he lost to Kanye, 50's career looks like it's teetering, and all the interview-tantrums 50's thrown since last Tuesday aren't helping anything. But, as Sean Fennessey writes here, the remix actually makes for a timely reminder of why 50 seemed like such a world-conquering force in the first place. The numbers are in now, and 50 and Kanye both actually manged to sell more than even the most grandiose projections claimed. 50's 691,000 might look paltry next to 957,000, but it's still amazing that a rap album could sell even that much in this climate, and this remix feels a lot more like a victory-lap than an admission of defeat. This guy isn't going anywhere, especially not as long as there's still one name above his on that Forbes list.

Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's Curtis
Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's The Massacre
Voice review: Kris Ex on 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'

The Death of Rap City

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:08 PM, September 18, 2007

Oh man, Cam'ron over "Dreams?"

Rap City won't be on in the afternoons anymore. The show is moving to 1 a.m., and BET is filling its old afternoon time-slot with some other video-block show. And honestly, I'm not even sure why I care. For one thing, I never watch the show in the afternoon anyway. And it'll still be on, so I'll still be able to stick with my old daily ritual, fast-forwarding through 80% of the previous day's DVRed episode while I'm eating my Lucky Charms every morning. And for another thing, the show has been god-awful terrible ever since Big Tigger quit the host position two years ago. A lot of people didn't like Tigger; he was definitely prone to mugging for the camera too much and showing off whatever shitty drawings some viewer just mailed him. But I liked Tigger. He had an unforced amiability, and he always managed to be respectful of his guests without getting too ingratiating or ass-kissy. It was fun to watch him in the booth, cracking up at the other rappers' punchlines and then jumping in for his own goofy little mini-freestyle at the end. Ever since Tigger left, things have gone to shit. The show has had three hosts, each more witless and irritating than the last: Mad Linx, J-Nicks, and most recently the utterly detestable Q45. Q45 is just the worst. Rather than actually interviewing his guests, he just sort of fawns all over them and parrots whatever they said at the camera with more yelling. Here's a typical exchange. Rapper X: "Yeah, so I've got a line of contact lenses coming out." Q45: "Please understand, people! This man just said he has a line of contact lenses coming out!" Rapper X: "Yeah, and, uh, Paul Wall is on my album." Q45: "Hold up. Do you understand the magnitude of what this man is saying to you right now? Paul Wall is on his album! This is crazy! I don't think these people understand." BET is legendarily chintzy about paying their on-air talent, but I seriously can't believe they couldn't find anyone more qualified than this guy.

Nobody complained much when Rap City went from two hours to one, and nobody's likely to miss seeing Rap City in the afternoon lineup either. And I'm still pretty sad about seeing the show disappear off into late-night exile. My reasons are mostly sentimental. I grew up in a house without cable, but I have fond memories of hijacking the TV at friends' houses and absorbing whatever bits and pieces I could: Method Man's gold fangs, Goodie Mob creeping through a gated community, Krayzie Bone sitting back on the hood of a moving car. When I got to college and finally got cable, I'd race home from classes to catch the show's second half: Silkk the Shocker getting electrocuted, shaking-camera shots of Jay-Z and Beanie Sigel intercut with Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun-Fat, the Iconz' "Get Crunked Up" in constant rotation. A whole lot of people probably have Rap City memories that run even deeper; the show debuted in 1989, and it ran through a whole assortment of hosts before Tigger. Perhaps even more importantly, the show always played a whole lot of videos from Southern and Midwestern and West Coast rappers, which means it was responsible for introducing a lot of kids to music and images they might've never heard or seen otherwise. Rap City might've actually been partially responsible for the success of both No Limit and Cash Money Records, since those guys usually had flashier, more jarring videos than most of their contemporaries. Even as the show shrank to an hour and lost its last good host, it could still be responsible for some fascinating moments. And it went out on something of a high note. Several days last week, 50 Cent played guest-host. Since he taped those episodes before losing the sales-battle to Kanye West, those episodes might be some of last we'll see of 50's unchecked bravado, and he was in rare form: clowning Soulja Boy, blithely talking shit about all of his recent adversaries, and sitting down for a deferential, conciliatory interview with an obviously pissed Master P, who he'd talked shit about at a BET press conference a few months ago. (Side note: It's been really, really weird watching P transition into Bible-thumping middle age.) It seems fitting that the show would end its daytime run during the one week this year when a couple of rappers managed to sell a ton of CDs.

Last night's episode of Rap City was pretty funny. I was hoping the show would turn into just a block of rap videos with no host, but no such luck. Q45 is still there, and last night he was trying to figure out some way to spin the change in time-slots and make it sound like a good thing: "I'm up at this time of night every night anyway. Guaranteed." (He also did a whole lot of "No, your TV set is not malfunctioning" bullshit. It was kind of sad.) Maybe Rap City will do just fine in its new time slot. BET Uncut, after all, managed to hang on for years in an even later time slot, and maybe the network's programmers will take advantage of the new time to play videos from lesser-known artists, clips that they might not have been able to get away with during the day. And in any case, YouTube has made the show pretty much obsolete; new rap videos sometimes hit the internet weeks before they end up on TV. Still, I can't imagine any big-name guests will bother to stop by the show and freestyle in the booth, the show is sure to lose whatever cultural cachet it might've once had. Rap City's been dying for a long time, and it's still not quite dead yet, but I already miss it.

A Place to Bury Strangers: Effects-Pedal Memory Games

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:13 PM, September 17, 2007

I liked Black Rebel Motorcycle Club too

Last week, Nick Sylvester wrote something that got me thinking. Nick was writing about a Place to Bury Strangers, a newish Brooklyn neo-shoegaze band that's found a whole lot of Pitchfork love on the strength of a limited-release ten-song self-titled debut album, and he called that album: "a songless one-trick turd" and suggested that maybe the whole thing is a pretty good marketing tool for Oliver Ackermann. Ackermann is the band's frontman, and he also runs Death By Audio, a company that sells hand-built guitar-pedals. And Nick sort of isn't wrong: the album is one long orgy of layered-up guitar-noises: swirls, screeches, fuzz-roars, moans, dings, hums, bleats, snarls. Nick is also sort of not wrong about the "songless one-trick turd" part. Ackermann and friends don't really do a whole lot with those guitar-noises; the songs seem to be organized around the noises rather than vice-versa, and only a few of the hooks manage to cut through all the murk. All the individual tracks collect a lot of song-parts without actually organizing them into logical song-progressions. We'll get a narcotically catchy quiet bit which will explode upward into a noised-up freakout, and then that freakout will gradually taper off into something quiet again. But the loud and quiet bits never quite cohere; they seem to fly off into each other haphazardly, as if by chance rather than design. The stoned-murmur vocals and the ticcy little bursts of staticy drum-machines almost always stay buried deep under the avalanche of guitar-sounds, rarely allowed to become anything more than implications. I can barely every understand a word Ackermann sings, and when I can, it doesn't exactly make me want to investigate further; it's all druggy-romantic cliches that a million bands have done better. But I really, really like this Place to Bury Strangers album, and I've been wondering why.

As far as I can tell, the short answer is that I like this album because it reminds me of a bunch of other stuff that I also like. With its hints of depressive, graceful melody obscured by squalls of feedback and broken, juddering drum-machines, it's sort of a cross between Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain and Automatic-era Jesus and Mary Chain. And, I mean, that's like two of the best four Jesus and Mary Chain albums ever right there (Automatic is better; I don't care what your Spin Alternative Record Guide tells you). And there's other stuff in there too. When the drum-machines really kick up a storm, I get welcome ninth-grade flashbacks to Ministry and KMFDM. In his Pitchfork review, Marc Hogan also mentions a sort of Joy Division/Factory Records hard-echo bleakness, which is definitely somewhere in the mix as well. And in the constantly cresting guitar-waves, the band seems to be consciously recalling the entire shoegaze class of 92. This isn't exactly a unique combination of influences; a Place to Bury Strangers is basically the bazillionth shoegaze-revival band to come along in the last couple of years. But they're the first of those shoegaze-revival bands I've heard that remembers more than just the wounded-romantic beauty of those early-90s bands; they also recall the forbidding buzzsaw ugliness of their drug-rock predecessors. So: the revive something that all the other shoegaze revivalists forgot to revive. That might not be sufficient to earn them a Nobel Prize or anything, but apparently it's enough for me.

See, a Place to Bury Strangers might not write great songs, but they have a great sound. And if it's a sound that a bunch of older bands already mined, fine. That means they mash down hard on a whole range of reptilian brain-associations and pleasure-center tinglers that exist somewhere in my DNA and in the DNA of at least a few music-dorks. Those associations have everything to do with effects-pedals, so it makes sense that Ackermann would've devoted a significant portion of his life to building and perfecting effects-pedals; it's almost as if he's chasing an innards-scraping guitar-fuzz Platonic ideal, using both his business and his band to get as close as he can to that plane of perfection. And maybe it's because they make me think of older, better songs, but the way the Place to Bury Strangers tracks bleed into the atmosphere when I'm walking around the city at night in a vaguely misanthropic mood is a very powerful thing. Enjoyment doesn't always require qualifications or explanations. A Place to Bury Strangers may be derivative as fuck, but that doesn't mean that they can't be really good as well. They've made a truly enjoyable album out of preassembled parts, and that's really no less an achievement than making one from scratch. I can't say if I'll be listening to a Place to Bury Strangers years from now, but right now, when I'm in the right mood, they do the trick.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 5

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:51 PM, September 14, 2007

This week's podcast is pretty heavy on sunny, breezy end-of-summer indie rock, and it might be my favorite one yet. To bypass the whole iTunes/streaming thing, right-click save-as and download the podcast.

This week's songs:

• Band of Horses: "Is There a Ghost"
• M.I.A.: "Paper Planes Remix [feat. Bun B & Rich Boy]"
• Vampire Weekend: "A-Punk"
• Black Lips: "Veni Vidi Vici"

50 Cent's Empire Crumbles

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:19 PM, September 14, 2007

Ferrari, I'm sorry

Scene one: Wednesday afternoon, September 12. 50 Cent is hosting Rap City, grinning huge at the camera. He's in good spirits, which leads me to believe that he taped the show a few days before it aired. "It's September 12, which means it's the day after I went platinum!" Lloyd Banks, Tony Yayo, Whoo Kid, Havoc, and Prodigy shuffle around quietly in the background, playing pool and laughing at 50's jokes. Young Buck is less quiet; he keeps screaming "We the best!" over and over, making fun of DJ Khaled. 50 calmly agrees: "We are, Buck." 50 plays the "Can't Tell Me Nothing" video and praises Hype Williams. Then he brings in Soulja Boy, interviews the 17-year-old kid, tries to be nice even though he's obviously bored. Soulja Boy is tiny compared to 50. He sits next to 50 almost cringing, painfully nervous, mumbling stuff about his record label and his clothing line. When they come back from commercial, 50 says he's here with Soulja Boy and Soulja Boy sheepishly says "yooo!," almost whispers it. 50 seems to be having fun intimidating Soulja Boy. He gets Soulja Boy to stand up and do his dance. Then he says he's going to try it. "I'ma thug it out, though, because they know who I am." 50 crosses his legs and slaps the back of his foot, the two parts of the Soulja Boy dance that any able-bodied person can do. Then he crosses his arms, scowls at the camera, and nods his head, refusing to finish the dance, clowning the fuck out of the kid. The G-Unit guys laugh like wolves in the background. Later, Jim Jones shows up to form strategic alliances and distance himself from Cam'ron. Jones says he has a new label deal pending that he doesn't want to announce yet. He also says that he has his money on 50 in the sales-battle. During the final fadeout, Young Buck slightly switches up his routine: "You can't tell me nothing, Kanye! We the best, Kanye!"

Scene two: Tuesday evening, 50's getting ready to do a show in Springfield, Massachusetts. He's disembarking his private plane with the rest of G-Unit behind him, and a local TV news reporter shows up to interview him. Someone must've already told 50 that Kanye West is on pace to outsell him by a pretty wide margin. He looks tired and haggard and disappointed. The news reporter asks him a couple of painfully obvious questions, and he wearily runs through his usual talking points. Then he veers off-script. Responding to a question about how his new album is different from the other two, he starts venting about the expectations on him: "Between each project, there's a shadow of a doubt cast over every artist. They don't ask if I make good music; they say, 'Do you think you can do it again?" when it may be impossible to do it again. Considering my first album sold twelve million records, my second album's about nine million worldwide, right now with technology, it may be physically impossible for me to sell that many units. Then you take an artist who hasn't had half the track record as me with the history of the sales. They put him there because his company is willing to spend the marketing dollars, and you have the public believing that he's actually my equal, as far as Kanye West is concerned." Weirdly, 50's outburst comes with no change in tone or facial expression; he just keeps talking in the same flat monotone. The reporter, having no idea what to make of any of this, asks him whether there's any "brawl" (?) between him and Kanye or whether it's just marketing. 50: "Its marketing from their standpoint ... When I've sold so many more records than he has, it's in their favor, if you can change the public's perspective of it." The reporter, desperately searching for a softball question, asks him to take viewers through a day in the life of 50 Cent. 50 says that a typical day might involve doing promo, climbing on private jets, and then he breaks character again: "It seems exciting, but after a while it's not exciting. I'm not really excited to go sell a record." He says he may never make another album, says that if he does make another album he won't travel to promote it. The reporter, finally catching on, asks if he's burned out. "Not burned out," says 50. "I just feel like I don't want to do it anymore." Most of this never makes it to air, but the entire unedited interview inevitably makes its way to YouTube.

50's right when he talks about how he was set up to lose in the Kanye competition. By releasing his album on the same day as Kanye, 50 made the other guy the underdog, himself the villain. 50 was an underdog when he first came up, so it's hard to see why he didn't understand what was happening during the release-date buildup, how the narrative was writing itself. If projections prove correct, and they almost never do, Curtis will sell about 500,000 copies in its first week. That'll mean it's had the second-best opening weekend of any rap album this year, well behind Kanye and just ahead of T.I. That's pretty good, especially during a time when barely any rapper can manage to go gold. It's not good enough for 50, though. The competition might've all been a big marketing ploy, the sales from both Curtis and Graduation might go to benefit the same group of investors, but 50 wanted to win, and he doesn't seem able to process the idea that he's losing. It's not fun to watch. 50 Cent is a good rapper; in Get Rich or Die Tryin', he had a debut album I liked better than College Dropout. But the robotic bulletproof superhero persona he's developed just isn't interesting, and it doesn't make for a whole lot of particularly good music. It would be an oversimplification to say that Graduation succeeds where Curtis fails because Kanye allows himself to look like a human being rather than a Terminator, but it's certainly a part of the album's success. 50 can still pull a titanic anthem out of his inhuman swagger every so often, and I'll take "I Get Money" over any single track on Graduation. But it's not sustainable. Last night, 50 did a show at Hammerstein Ballroom, and Jim Jones and Juelz Santana came out to join him. On Rap City, 50 and Jones played with the rumor that Jones was signing with G-Unit. If it actually happens, maybe those guys can help 50 relearn how to play the scrappy street-level underdog. Probably not, but maybe.

Yesterday, a new non-album 50 Cent song called "Smile" leaked. I don't know how long ago 50 recorded the song, but on it he vents the same frustration he showed in that Springfield TV interview and in the interview he gave Hot 97 on the morning of September 12. "My next album might be my last," he singsongs on the hook. The first verse tells of industry people telling him to calm down: "I guess I'm outta control / My mind, body, and soul / Tell me I'm being pimped / And it's making me sick / You know Em made that company over a billion dollars / And when he ain't around they saying foul shit about him." Later, he bitches about how Oprah will talk to Kanye (who, if what I've read online is true, produced the track) but not to him. And then: "Met Al Gore and his wife in them first-class seats / She said she didn't like rap until she met me / You gotta understand, I'm a charming young man / A whole lot has been changed since I went hand-to-hand." I don't for a second believe that story, but I love the audacity. Rap has never had a greater public enemy than Tipper Gore, and here 50 is saying that he changed her mind on charm alone. And that's the real triumphant story behind 50 Cent: the idea that someone made it out of hellish circumstances, life-threatening injuries, and industry bullshit, becoming the world's biggest star just on the force of his own natural charisma and intelligence and craft. But when he isolates himself and stops allowing us to see him as a human, that story loses its magic, and he eventually ceases to be the world's biggest star. On the outro, he rants further: "You should be happy, you know? I just want you to be happy. Smile for me. If I gotta go away to make you feel better, I'll go away." All of a sudden, he sounds more like a person than he has in a couple of years. And if he allows himself to stay human this time, he might pull himself back up to where he once was.

Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's Curtis
Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's The Massacre
Voice review: Kris Ex on 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Things I Learned Watching Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:37 PM, September 13, 2007

Burning with boredom now

Last night, Ryan Dombal invited me to a press screening of The Future is Unwritten, the new documentary about Joe Strummer from The Filth and the Fury/Earth Girls are Easy director Julien Temple. I'd never seen Temple's Sex Pistols doc, so I was going into this one pretty much blind. Temple, it turns out, has basically no idea how to put one of these things together, despite decades of experience making movies. If you watch The Future is Unwritten a couple of days after finally getting around to seeing Martin Scoresese's insanely great Dylan doc No Direction Home, which I did, Temple's movie is just glaringly inferior. Scorsese pulled a whole lot of high drama out of Dylan's life by focusing on a really specific period (1960 to 1966), by getting really revealing interviews from Dylan and the people around him, and by showing footage that actually made Dylan's appeal perfectly clear, exposing his legend without actually demystifying it. The Future is Unwritten wants to be a similar piece of mythmaking, but Temple fucks it up by crawling up his own ass. Rather than showing us why, exactly, anyone cares about Strummer, he just includes a whole bunch of testimonials from people telling us over and over that cared about Strummer, as if other people's passion would be enough. He also has a hell of a time constructing the guy's life into any sort of cogent arc, and he constantly distracts by bombarding us with film-school tricks that he should've gotten out of his system by the time he wrapped The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle. Strummer's life was totally fascinating, and the music and old footage in the movie is great enough that it rarely becomes completely unwatchable, but I really wish someone had done a better job with this guy's story. Here are some things I learned watching the movie:

• Temple really needs to lay off the montage shit. The early parts of the movie are particularly egregious, since there's barely any footage of baby Strummer and I guess Strummer died before he got to tape a proper sit-down with Temple. (There's a lot of audio of Strummer interviews but no recent video.) Anyway, so apparently Temple felt like he had to compensate for his lack of visuals by hitting us with the most gallingly obvious stock-footage he could find. Strummer, for instance, talks about he spent some time in Turkey as a kid, so we get footage of belly-dancers and camels and shit to illustrate the point. Temple also has the unbelievably annoying habit of turning old Strummer cartoon-drawings into horribly animated cartoons, which happens a whole bunch in the early stages of this movie.

• Speaking of gimmicks: Temple interviews a whole bunch of people who knew Strummer, and he also drops in a few gratuitous celebrities like Bono and Johnny Depp and shit, none of whom have anything particularly revealing to add. But for some reason, he decided to leave out graphics identifying all these interviewees, which gets awfully confusing. He also taped all these people sitting around campfires together, which doesn't exactly help him get great quotes from them.

• In his rock-doc ubiquity, Bono has basically become the mainstream equivalent of Thurston Moore, always willing to intone some puffed-up bullshit about how so-and-so saved his life. When he showed up on the screen last night, I just started laughing; I'm not even sure why. Thank God Bono never showed up in No Direction Home.

• One of those nameless talking heads says that Strummer briefly considered changing his name to Johnny Caramello before settling on his stage name, which would've been awesome. We also get to hear a bit of Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101ers, who sound sort of like ramshackle rockabilly. I wish we could've heard more, but this isn't really a movie about music.

• Strummer actually comes off really badly in parts of the movie. When he decided to become a punk, he started treating all his hippie friends like shit. And he eventually become a sort of dictatorial figure in the Clash, kicking Topper Headon and later Mick Jones out of the band. I wonder why none of the interviewees ever came straight out and called him a dick; it might've made things more interesting.

• There's a fascinating strain running through the movie about how punk rock became a haven for opportunists in late-70s England. Strummer, for instance, broke up the 101ers when he saw how successful the Sex Pistols had become and decided he wanted a piece of that pie himself. And Topper Headon talks about how he didn't even like punk, how he joined the Clash just so he could make it, cutting his hair and changing his wardrobe. We've been trained to think of the first-generation punks as these fearless mavericks; I love the idea that some of the music's most important figures were total bandwagon-jumpers instead.

• Temple's not particularly interested in the chronology of something like the Clash when he could be focusing on Strummer's cult of personality instead. So Strummer forms the Clash and all of a sudden they're famous and inspiring baby Bono. Somewhere in there, they signed a record contract and released a classic debut album, but we never hear anything about that. Also, we learn that the Clash were a political band, but we never learn what those politics were, at least not beyond vague stuff about how they were anti-establishment and how they didn't like racism. A lot more could've been done with that.

• The movie improves markedly when the band becomes famous, if only because that means the footage of them suddenly becomes decent. And wow, they really looked like some badasses.

• The celebrity testimonials are fucking hilarious. John Cusack says that the Clash taught him what it meant to be free. Depp shows up in full Jack Swagger drag, complete with goatee-braids. Flea gesticulates wildly. And this movie's total inferiority to No Direction Home becomes all the more obvious when Scorsese shows up to enthuse about the Clash. There's a great story in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls about how Robert De Niro would amp himself up to do his scenes in Raging Bull by pacing back and forth and listening to the Clash. It would've been awesome if Temple could've sat De Niro down to talk about that, but no.

• The best part of the movie: old interview footage of David Lee Roth. "The thing that the Clash don't understand and that a lot of these bands don't understand is that you can't take life so seriously, honey!" Someone really needs to compile a book of Dave talking about other bands, like that line about how critics liked Elvis Costello because most of them looked like him.

• Second-best moment: Strummer, disillusioned for years after the breakup of the Clash, finally getting excited about music again, rave music in particular. There's a great scene where he gets all excited talking to someone else about techno, reeling off the names of all these techno subgenres, my favorite one of which was intellectno. I really wish intellectno would've caught on as a genre name.

• Worst moment: Courtney Love, mumbling and crying about what a great guy Strummer was. At this point, it's basically cruel to interview Courtney on camera.

• For all the movie's awful quirks, the last twenty minutes or so are legitimately heartwarming: Strummer rediscovering the joy in performing with the Mescaleros, finally finding peace after years of chaos and depression.

• Even with that ending, though, you can find a better Strummer tribute in that scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Mark Ruffalo gets high and starts spazzing about what a great band the Clash were. I can't believe how badly Temple fucked this thing up.

A New Rap Album That Isn't Curtis or Graduation

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:34 PM, September 12, 2007

Or Hustlemonics, for that matter

Now that Curtis and Graduation have finally hit stores and everyone has (prematurely, but whatever) handed the sales-victory to Kanye, it feels like a good moment to take a break from event-rap and talk about another album, one that has none of the world-conquering ambition of those other two. Waitin' Our Turn, the new one from Devin the Dude's Coughee Brothaz project, hit stores a week before the other two. Or, rather, it hit stores theoretically; I haven't been able to find a physical copy of the thing at any New York stores, though thankfully it's on iTunes. Thus far, Waitin' Our Turn has barely received a fraction of the attention that even Devin's last solo album got, let alone Graduation or Curtis. And that seems almost by design; it's a loose, conversational album on the group's own indie label, a collection of songs where dudes always end up talking about weed or nasty sex even when the songs aren't strictly about weed or nasty sex, where nobody pretends to have more money than anyone else. After Kanye's headline-grabbing theatrics and 50's precision-tooled market-catering, it's a real relief to hear a rap album that doesn't try to be anything more or less than a rap album. Most rap albums used to sound something like this. In its nonexistent structure and its rampant, effortless shit-talk, Waitin' Our Turn reminds me of mid-90s regional-rap records like E-40's In a Major Way or UGK's Super Tight, albums recorded for virtually no money that ended up sounding organic and cohesive in part because their makers lacked the means to make blockbuster pop albums. Maybe once the event-rap market finally burns itself out, rap albums will go back to sounding something like this.

Some of Waitin' Our Turn might actually date back to the mid-90s. The Coughee Brothaz' MySpace page lists something like fifty members, and two of the most prominent Brothaz were in Devin's pre-solo-career group the Odd Squad. Most of the songs on Waitin' Our Turn already appeared on Collector's Edition, a mixtape the group put out last year, and the little meager information I've been able to find through Googling says that plenty of the songs are way older than that, that Devin and crew have been recording these things in their spare time for years. The only famous guest who turns up on the album at all is Scarface, who adds a quick verse to album-opener "Rise & Shine." "Rise & Shine" is probably the most ridiculous song here, though it has competition; the chorus is a gang-shout singalong, and all the singers deliver it an an insanely goofy fake British accent. That accent returns on the album-closing skit "Medieval Times," where some guy royally declaims a whole lot of hilarious sex-talk ("Let thine squeeze upon ye tits, caress thy nuts!") while a whole bunch of other people laugh in the background. All the sex-talk on Waitin' to Inhale, the last Devin solo album, skeezed me out a bit, but here it's easier to take, partly because everyone else on the album is doing it so it just ends up seeming like a big locker-room free-for-all and partly because Devin is more consistently funny this time, even as he's just as riotously offensive: "Wake up with a bitch from India who like rum on the rocks / Give her my email just in case she want me to com on her dot." And Devin's also just as likely to make himself the butt of his jokes; on "Fresh Rims and Vogues," the girl he's been chasing disappears when she sees that his car still has its original hubcaps. It's a casual, tossed off record, and even the big statements don't sound like big statements. UGK can make a song like "Quit Hatin' the South" sound like a declaration of intent, but Devin does the same thing on "Yee Haw!" without making too big a point about it, yodeling on the chorus and making chicken-noises. "It's like that, y'all, it's like that-a-doo-that / Some come to Texas and think it's just cattles and hats," he says, not bothering to argue against that impression. Later, some other guy rhymes "ball bats" with "straw hats."

The other guys don't have Devin's sly charisma, but all of them have personalities and all of them know how to ride beats, which feels like some kind of minor miracle considering the relative quality-control of most rap-crew albums. And the production could've come from almost any moment in the past seventeen years. These beats are mostly slow-rolling 808-driven affairs, sometimes with pianos or acoustic guitars lazily layered in. Devin doesn't rap on all the songs, but he sings a whole lot of the choruses in his unrushed, drawn-out sigh. He and the other guys easily and casually trade off verses; anyone writing a term paper about rap's connection to African-American oral-tradition would have a field day with this thing. Devin's been hanging out a lot with pre-rap sex-rhymer Blowfly lately, and it shows; I can't name another rap album that so distinctly recalls, say, Rudy Ray Moore's parking-lot rap from Dolomite. The a capella skit "High School Sweethearts" draws the connection most directly; it's a quick rhymed story about a school shooting. But "High School Sweethearts" isn't funny; it's tragic. And that might be my favorite thing about Waitin' Our Turn; there's not a thing conscious-rap about these guys, but they all have hearts, and they aren't afraid to be human beings.

Ten Favorite Moments on Kanye West's Graduation

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:54 PM, September 11, 2007

Something crazy on my arm

I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to drop $9.99 plus tax on Graduation at Best Buy this morning. I've already downloaded the thing twice, in its clean and unclean forms. And there's no golden ticket in the CD packaging, just a poster-sized version of the album's garish, ugly cover-art and a booklet full of credit-information that I probably could've found on Wikipedia anyway. As far as I can tell, I bought the album so I could participate in the PR-driven bragging-rights cold-war between two self-aggrandizing millionaire asshole Universal Music Group employees, which probably isn't a smart use of my money when my wedding is less than a month away and I need to hold onto every penny. Still, I don't regret the purchase one iota, though I'd be hard-pressed to justify why exactly. Graduation isn't even my favorite rap album of the year, but something about it keeps drawing me back in. I could've written entries about my ten favorite moments on Return of the Mac or Underground Kingz, two albums I like at least as much as Graduation, but for whatever reason I never did. And for whatever reason, I'm doing it right now for Graduation. Piecing this together, what really strikes me is that all these moments are tactile musical things, not punchlines or lyrical epiphanies. Kanye's absolutely not a great rapper, but he's great at piecing together these insidious little musical scraps that work their way into your bloodstream without necessarily letting you understand what's happening. Here we go:

1. "Big Brother," 4:11-4:22. The music fades back on Kanye's conflicted and occasionally passive-aggressive tribute to Jay-Z so he can half-eloquently, half-intuitively say why exactly he and the rest of us care about Jay in the first place. And what comes out is a disconnected parade of images, delivered in an awe-choked hush: "A idol in my eyes, god of the game / Heart of the city, Roc-A-Fella chain / Never be the same, never be another / Number-one Young Hov, also my big brother." It's the lyrical equivalent of Kanye cutting out magazine pictures of Jay and glue-sticking them to the front of his Trapper Keeper. "Big Brother" is my favorite song on Graduation by far; by taking the focus off Kanye and putting it on someone who Kanye wants to emulate but knows he can never equal, it humanizes all the shit-talking that came before it. And this one moment near the end where Kanye just lets loose with this iconic stuff humanizes all the shit-talk that came before it on this song. There's a bit on "The Glory" where Kanye talks about himself in a similar torrent of images: "The glory, the story, the chain, the Polo / The night, the grind, the empty bottles of No-Doz," and it's great. But I like it even better when Kanye lets up on the chest-puffed ambition and lets us know what he knows he'll never become. It's euphoric and sad at the same time, and it's also proof-positive that Kanye feels the same way about Jay that the rest of us do. Graduation is the first Kanye album with no Jay verse, but the ghost of his presence here accomplishes the same thing in a really interesting way.

2. "Drunk and Hot Girls," 3:45-3:48. "Drunk and Hot Girls" is a really interesting song. Lyrically, it's the most slight thing on the album: a halfassed rant about how annoying/alluring drunk chicks can be. Musically, it might be the most overblown thing on an overblown album: a fuzzed-out claustrophobic waltz with distended Middle-Eastern strings and tinkly pianos and keening backing vocals and a weirdly gorgeous epic sung bridge from Mos Def. And just after the bridge ends and the lugubrious drums kick in, Kanye finally abandons all the sputtering angst on the song and lets loose with a goofy-as-fuck one-liner: "Aaahdaadaadaadaadaa, that's how the fuck you sound!" It doesn't even rhymes with what he said immediately before, but it's such an unhinged and funny and ridiculous line that the rest of the song immediately becomes a whole lot easier to take. Kanye has more pretensions than he knows what to do with, certainly (this song's Can sample, for instance), but he's always willing to beat everyone else to the punch and completely undercut himself.

3. "Stronger," 4:05-5:11. Going through my $9.99 credit booklet, I see the names of a whole lot of other producers besides Kanye. DJ Toomp did the beat to "Big Brother" and coproduced a couple of other songs, Nottz did "Barry Bonds," Jon Brion helped out on a few songs, DJ Premier did the scratching on "Everything I Am," Timbaland did "additional drum programming" on "Stronger" and "The Good Life." The name that pops up the most is Mike Dean, a longtime Scarface crony and Rap-A-Lot house-producer and one of Southern rap's great unsung heroes, possibly because he looks more like a part-time Guitar Center employee than a rap producer. I don't have Late Registration in front of me right now, but I'm pretty sure he did some work on "Drive Slow" as well. Dean is all over Graduation: mixing, recording, playing keyboards. And he co-produced, recorded and arranged the long outro to "Stronger," which is where the album's much-discussed house-music influence comes most clearly into focus. Kanye and Dean gradually layer up all the track's synths and drums, dropping them out and suddenly bringing them back. It's a rave trick, a crescendo that has a profound physical effect on a dance-floor, not something that rap producers try all that often. Given that Dean usually traffics in slow, organic Texas-rap bangers, it's really exciting to hear that he has something like this in him.

4. "The Good Life," 1:36-1:37. Friends of mine were touting "The Good Life" as the single of the year the day after a snippet of the track leaked, but it took me a while longer to warm to the song's dizzy euphoria. What's weird about that is that most of the things about the song that I first regarded as stumbling blocks are now the things that I love the best: T-Pain, the squeaking vocal sample, the general air of celebratory emptiness. The moment I've listed here is the part where the song drops out and a screwed up voice booms "ass than the models." It really annoyed me at first because it's generally not a good idea to drop the instruments out of a track on a line that isn't necessarily a song's best. And the "ass than the models" bit is fucking dumb by any measure, but that screwed-up moment is definitely the one that jumps out of the song first, and at this point I can't imagine how the song would sound if Kanye just delivered that line straight. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does, maintaining the song's momentum but adding an idiosyncratic hook that just serves to make the whole song a little bit more memorable. This guy knows what he's doing.

5. "The Good Life," 0:01-0:34. Graduation is an album full of great intros: the "La la la" on "Can't Tell Me Nothing," the cotton-candy synths on "Champion," etc. "Good Morning" is my favorite because of the slow, assured way it pulls the entire album into focus: a grunt, a muted echoed-out drum-pattern, a washed-out electric piano, a floating vocal loop. It's just as relaxed and comfortable as it is epic and purposeful, and it lets us know we're in good hands from the first minute.

6. "Can't Tell Me Nothing," 1:12. I love that Kanye brought Young Jeezy into the studio just so he ad-lib, not letting him rap or anything. And I love that it totally works; that "ha-haaa" on the chorus just kills me. Jeezy's better at ad-libbing than rapping anyway, and Kanye knows how to play to his collaborators' strengths.

7. "Flashing Lights," 0:32-0:42. Kanye's clearly been spending a whole lot of time listening to FutureSex/LoveSounds, and he rips the strobing synths from "My Love" here just like Timbaland probably ripped them from Tietso or someone. And once again, they're totally gorgeous and ethereal, a perfect musical equivalent to the song's title.

8. "Champion," 1:59-2:21. One thing that I wish would come back to rap: shameless reggae appropriations, like for instance Brand Nubian's "Who Can Get Busy Like This Man." Lil Wayne's occasional forays into dancehall patois are a start, I guess, but he tries a bit too hard to ape the accent. But the fake-reggae bridge on "Champion" is a revelation, a lighter-than-air burst of joy on a song that didn't really need it.

9. "Barry Bonds," 0:23. Way more than any of the actual lyrics on this song, the moment on the chorus where Kanye clears his throat just drips with uber-confident entitlement and absolutely makes the hook work. I also love that Wayne does it after his verse. Kanye and Wayne should do an entire song of vocal tics and nothing else.

10. "Homecoming," 2:29-2:43. This song is, of course, Kanye's dedication to his hometown, and it probably doesn't make sense for Chris Martin to be anywhere near it, let alone rhapsodizing about fireworks on Lake Michigan. But I think I read somewhere that Coldplay actually practices in Chicago, and a friend recently made the point that when Chris Martin comes to Chicago he probably spends the entire time locked away from the city; the only bit of local color he probably gets a chance to experience would have to be fireworks over Lake Michigan. Even if Martin is totally bulshitting, the moment is so left-field and counterintuitive and fascinating that it almost makes up for the part on the chorus where he sort of yodels.

Voice review: Greg Tate on Kanye West's Graduation
Voice review: Robert Christgau on Kanye West's Late Registration
Voice review: Hua Hsu on Kanye West's College Dropout

The VMAs: A Running Diary

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:27 PM, September 10, 2007

Under that helmet, he's crying

Given that ratings for the VMAs have been sliding drastically for the past few years, MTV is probably right to worry about the prospects for this year's show. But this year's insane barrage of publicity stunts and hastily conceived viral-video schemes reeks of panic and desperation. Instead of hosting a whole bunch of full-song live performances in an actual theater, this year's show has a few big stars playing all night in a couple of pimped-out Las Vegas hotel suites, which means we get thirty-second clips of a bunch of different songs rather than any actual performances. I guess the idea is that we can go online to watch the full performances, but I'm not going to get on the internet to watch the Foo Fighters in a hotel room. I'm just not. Instead of overhauling the presentation, MTV might be able to slow its decline by actually working to put on a good, unpredictable show. Instead, we get an unwatchably chopped-up and disjointed night of entertainment with barely any single segment inching past the one-minute mark. Given that spectacle was pretty much the only thing the VMAs ever had going for themselves in the first place, and given that it's pretty hard to create a sense of spectacle in a fucking hotel room, there's pretty much no reason to watch the thing at all this year. But I watched it anyway. You're welcome.

Preshow highlights: Lil Mama is dressed like Little Bo Peep, which is a terrible, terrible idea on her part. Swizz Beatz and Eve are showing up together, though unfortunately they're not pulling up on neon-colored Japanese motorcycles surrounded by angry shirtless dudes, which does not speak well of any impending Ruff Ryders comeback. The various hosts make sure to ask every single interviewee about Britney, and the assembled stars are very nice and diplomatic about the whole thing. John Norris has been doing these things for basically as long as I've been alive, and still he somehow manages to get sadder and creepier every single year. Pharrell was nice enough to bring Clipse and Kenna along with him, though they're not allowed to do anything more than say their names into the microphone. Kanye has upped the goofiness factor once again, showing up in a tuxedo-jacket and a bow-tie with jeans and sneakers. Nicole Scherzinger's preshow performance with Lil Wayne is deeply awkward and sort of funny. I want an hour of my life back.

9:01: The much-ballyhooed Britney comeback performance thankfully does not include Mindfreak Criss Angel. Unfortunately, it doesn't include a whole lot else either. Britney at least seems to be in decent shape, and she remembers all her dance steps, so there's that. And "Gimme More" is a good song, a totally professional bit of futuristic studio-pop. But Britney's somehow become a massive charisma-vacuum; her eyes look cold and dead, and she makes would-be pop-stardom look like work. In the audience, Rihanna openly laughs at Britney on-camera.

9:04: Adding to the disconnectedness of the whole night, there's no host this year. Admittedly, Jack Black bombed last year and Diddy bombed the year before that, but this show needs a host, if only for continuity's sake. Without one, it just looks like a bunch of stuff happening sequentially. We apparently still needed an opening monologue this year, so Sarah Silverman is out to do the honors. She kind of tanks, doing the fish-in-barrel thing by going after Britney hardcore and then kind of clamming up when she sees that people aren't laughing.

9;10: Alicia Keys introduces the house band this year: Mark Ronson, apparently backed by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. She also throws it to Pete Wentz and his non-working microphone. This show is already a trainwreck before the first commercial break; that's got to be a new record.

9:12: Nicole Scherzinger is presenting an award and looking really, really Amy Winehouse-esque. This year, instead of just playing video-clips during the nominee-announcements, we see like sixteen different video-clips at once; it's the most hectic split-screen I've ever seen. The presenters also have about fifteen different kinds of ADD computer-graphics and flashing lights going off behind them; I feel like I'm going to develop epilepsy watching this thing. Rihanna wins Monster Single of the Year, an award that apparently has nothing to do with videos.

9:15: We get a quick little glimpse of Kanye's party, where everyone is wearing those goofy novelty-glasses. It looks like fun! It's not particularly fun to watch on TV!

9:21: Akon gets thirty seconds to sing "Smack That" with Mark Ronson's Royal Crown Revue behind him. This show makes no sense.

9:24: The new Quadruple-Threat Award I guess honors people who do more than just sing or rap, but why? Who gives a shit whether these people have clothing lines? Also: Kanye's an activist? Justin Timberlake wins and drunkenly screams that MTV needs to play more videos.

9:25: During their clipped in-suite performance, Fall Out Boy rip a bunch of stuff off their walls and throw it at each other. Uh, punk rock!

9:32: The Foo Fighters: Still rote and workmanlike after all these years. Why are they even here? And why have a cellist onstage if she's just going to be completely inaudible and unnecessary?

9:30: Kanye and 50 come out to present an award together, doing the Rolling Stone cover-pose on the way out. It's another new award: Earthshaking Collaboration or something. I'd completely forgotten about that Green Day/U2 thing. Beyonce and Shakira win it for the best of the nominated songs. Shakira's not there, and Beyonce looks predictably hot.

9:36: The new extra-scuzz Maroon 5 do the Mark Ronson/Cherry Poppin' Daddies thing, looking slightly less awkward than Akon. The difference between these performance-clips and actual performances is the same thing as the difference between thirty-second iTunes song-clips and actual songs; it's just maddening, even when I don't particularly like the songs in question.

9:41: T.I. is up in Justin Timberlake's hotel suite, rapping like a man possessed, so of course the camera lets him finish like half a verse before cutting away.

9:43: Chris Brown, on the other hand, gets to do a whole big-room performance, which starts out with a disturbingly creepy Charlie Chaplin robot-man dance. This kid has a really unappealing drama-nerd streak to him, and it's becoming more apparent all the time. He can be a lot of fun to watch when he's just dancing and lip-syncing, like the part of the performance where he and his backup dancers jump between stage-risers like they're lily-pads, but when he gets all high-concept with it he's unbearable. This somehow transitions into Rihanna singing "Umbrella" in front of an optical-illusion checkerboard background. There's a poignant shot of Ashanti in the crowd singing along. Just think: five years ago, Ashanti was Rihanna. Now it's back to Chris Brown, doing a Michael Jackson impression and bringing out his adorable krumping eight-year-olds. This is somehow just as disjointed as the hotel-suite performance-clips.

9:49: Someone, possibly Rhymefest, raps over Justice's "D.A.N.C.E." as we go to commercial. Just watch: within a year, rap is going to become a Cousin Cole remix of itself.

9:54: Soulja Boy performs in Kanye's suite, much to the delight of both Kanye and Farnsworth Bentley, who hasn't had this much opportunity to mug for the camera since 2004. I've actually been wondering how Soulja Boy does the Soulja Boy dance onstage, since it's pretty much impossible to do while rapping into a mic. I thought maybe he'd wear a Janet Jackson headset-mic or something, but no, turns out he doesn't do the dance at all. Boo.

9:54: For the second time tonight, Seth Rogen and that other guy from Superbad present the Best New Artist nominees; apparently this award has supplanted the Viewer's Choice Award as the thing that people vote for. For the second time, Rogen and Other Guy talk about how we should vote for people other than the people we hate. I loved Knocked Up and all, but this bit wasn't funny the first time, it isn't funny this time, and it won't be funny the next time they inevitably do it.

9:57: Justin Timberlake wins Male Artist of the Year. He and Timbaland share a moment, and JT says that Chris Brown makes him feel old. Chris Brown makes everyone feel old, JT. Timberlake does his trademarked humble acceptance speech, doing the obligatory shout-out to other nominees. He also reiterates his play-more-videos message, making fun of MTV's constant reality-show rotation right in front of the award's presenters: the chicks from The Hills, MTV's biggest reality stars. I love how this is Justin's big political cause.

10:00: I probably don't need to tell you that it sounds like a fucking mess when Cee-Lo sings for the Foo Fighters, but I'll just break the news here anyway.

10:04: It sure was nice of 50 Cent to cover for Justin when Justin was off accepting his award. 50's lack of onstage chemistry with Timberlake and Timbaland is palpable. Everyone is out of breath.

10:06: Shia LaBoeuf's new dirt-stache is just amazingly creepy. Fergie wins Female Artist, but she's not there to pick it up, so LaBoeuf weirdly attempts to coax Ludacris to the stage to accept the award. Luda wisely abstains.

10:08: Pamela Anderson introduces Kanye for like the fifth time tonight. During her spiel, she has to keep interrupting herself to say, "Stop it, Tommy" a whole bunch of times, which is pretty funny. Up in his suite, Kanye manages to complete one entire song: "The Good Life," with T-Pain. For what it's worth, Kanye's new stuff sounds really good when he's lip-syncing to it in a neon-lit hotel-suite on TV. We get a beautiful helicopter shot of Kanye rapping out on his glass balcony, and it makes the whole hotel thing look like maybe not such a bad idea. That impression only lasts a few seconds, but credit Kanye with pulling this bullshit off at all.

10:17: An utterly bizarre spectacle: Lil Wayne throwing down with the Gym Class Heroes guy and the Panic! at the Disco guy in the Fall Out Boy suite. It's official: Wayne will hang out with absolutely anyone at any time. He just doesn't care. If 50 Cent asked him to record a verse for a "Part Time Lover" remix, he'd probably do it.

10:21: Timbaland (tonight's maestro, whatever that means) is in some nightclub elsewhere in the casino idly toying with a huge bank of electronics and yelling like Lil Jon over this huge, awesome goth-rave track that turns out to be an introduction to Linkin Park's performance of "Bleed It Out." The moment that riff kicked in might've actually been my favorite of the night. "Bleed It Out" is a great song, a total minimal riff-barrage that rips shit up for two and a half minutes and then just ends. Nobody's done atmospheric tantrum-rock this well since Nine Inch Nails, seriously, and hyper strobes and lasers are a good look for this band.

10:23: The dudes from Entourage, it seems, have basically become their characters. They Give Best Group to Fall Out Boy, and the camera zooms in on Gym Class Heroes guy looking devastated. Wayne is no longer in the suite, possibly because he has to go kick a verse in the Foo Fighters suite.

10:25: Wait, no, here's the Foo Fighters suite and Wayne isn't there. Instead, the Foos are covering the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" with the guy from System of a Down, who does a really good Jello Biafra impression. You can't say that the Foos aren't making the most of this ridiculous set-up. I wonder how Jello's going to feel when he finds out about this. Infuriatingly, the camera clicks off just before the chorus comes in.

10:31: Whoa, now Fall Out Boy is backing up Rihanna on "Shut Up and Drive," which pretty much encapsulates the difference between the Foo Fighters and Fall Out Boy right there. (I should note, however, that "Holiday in Cambodia" is only a slightly better song than "Shut Up and Drive.") Patrick Stump, it occurs to me, has basically the exact same kind of voice as Rihanna; too bad his backing vocals are all but inaudible.

10:33: I can't quite understand why Alicia Keys is on this show, even though she's at least trying, wearing enormous glittery fake eyelashes and trying hard not to look like someone's hot mom. For some reason, she transitions from her pretty good new song into George Michael's "Freedom 90," a song recorded before Soulja Boy was born. Ne-Yo seems to like it a lot, anyway.

10:38: Up in the Kanye suite, Common is doing "Drivin' Me Wild." Lily Allen isn't there, so Kanye sings the hook. Kanye should not sing hooks ever again.

10:43: Fall Out Boy back up the Gym Class Heroes on "Clothes Off," and Ne-Yo inexplicably helps out on the chorus. I'm not quite sure what's going on when Fall Out Boy are playing host to more rappers and R&B singers than Kanye is.

10:44: Jamie Foxx does his usual award-presenter bit, going off-script and making fun of people in the audience. He says something about Tommy Lee and Kid Rock fighting; I was wondering if that was going to happen. That's one extra I'd watch online, anyway. Jennifer Garner looks perplexed with Foxx's ad-libs. She also looks like she shouldn't be allowed within fifty feet of another Forever 21 store ever again. They give Best New Artist to Gym Class Heroes (or, according to Garner, "Gym Class Fall Out.")

10:47: Because none of his new songs apparently warrant camera-time, 50 does "In Da Club" in the Timberlake suite.

10:48: Miss Teen South Carolina shows up to make fun of herself, which isn't something she does especially well. She manages not to fuck up while reading off a teleprompter, but her inflections are Shatner-level weird.

10:55: Robin Thicke is a pretty good fit with Mark Ronson's Brian Setzer Orchestra.

10:56: While introducing surprise guest Dr. Dre, Mary J. Blige calls 50 Cent "50 Cents," just like my grandma! It's nice to see that MTV managed to coax Dre out of his cave, but they pulled the same trick in 2002 with Guns N Roses, and Chinese Democracy still isn't out; I guess we shouldn't expect Detox before 2012. Dre, it should be noted, looks like the Incredible Hulk.

11:00: Diddy was apparently supposed to present something with Kid Rock, but I guess Kid got kicked out after the Tommy Lee fracas, so Yung Joc is up there instead. Yung Joc is not an adequate Kid Rock replacement.

11:01: Either I've passed through a vortex into an alternate reality or Mastodon is now onscreen, performing in the Foo Fighters room. That was both disorienting and awesome. The hotel-room audience looks confused.

11:05: Finally, we're up to the last performance of the night, the big Timbaland victory-lap. First, Nelly Furtado sings "Do It" and looks extra-glassy. Then Tim comes out on an imitation Daft Punk stage doing "The Way I Are," complete with hilarious D.O.E. verse. Then Timberlake comes out for the first verse of "LoveStoned" and dances a bunch. They tease "Give It to Me" but instead allow the show to mercifully end. I'd say there's a legitimate chance that this year's show will be the last VMAs ever.

The Wu-Tang Clan's 8 Diagrams: A Preview

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:32 PM, September 7, 2007

Move through any project with logic

First off, and most importantly: The 8 Diagrams exists, and it's already reached some stage of completion, though RZA apparently is still tinkering with it. By all accounts, the album will be ready by the planned November 13 release date, and hopefully the reanimated SRC/Loud label won't push it back anymore. This whole thing is almost impossible to believe, but there it is. Since the release of Iron Flag almost six years ago, nobody's been willing to do anything but tentatively hope for a new Wu-Tang group album. Ol' Dirty Bastard died, the remaining members publicly squabbled amongst themselves, and the entire group had a tough time reuniting for a large-scale tour without at least one member going AWOL at least some of the time. The group signed a one-album deal with SRC late last year, but I can't imagine anyone really fully believed that it would happen. It's happening. Earlier this afternoon, Wu-Tang's publicists set up a listening session for whichever bits and pieces of the album that RZA didn't mind letting us hear. In the fourth-floor screening room in an unobtrusive West Village hotel, a bunch of music writers got together today to hear snippets of eight songs: some as short as one verse, others covering what sounded like just about an entire song. The whole thing was only about twenty minutes long, and I have no idea how representative of the whole those twenty minutes will turn out to be. Maybe they cherry-picked the best individual moments and maybe they just grabbed a bunch of random shards; either one would be well in keeping with Wu-Tang tradition. But I sat and listened to those twenty minutes three times in a row, and I could've done it all day if I didn't have to get back to the office to write it up. If those twenty minutes are any real indication, and I hope to God they are, The 8 Diagrams is going to be a hell of an album.

The preliminary reports on the album were a bit dubious. In one interview, RZA talked about how Raekwon had made fun of him and Method Man for making "some Black Eyed Peas shit," and most of the stories anticipating the album mentioned one song where the Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante and George Harrison's son Dhani would play guitar on a cover of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." I don't know if I heard that Black Eyed Peas-esque song today (probably not), but I did hear most of the song with Frusciante and Harrison; the tracklist I got called it "My People Gently Weep," but in his taped intro, RZA himself either called it "The Needle Gently Weeps" or "The Beatle Gently Weeps." Or maybe he actually was saying "the people"; RZA can be tough to understand. Whatever, doesn't matter. The song is amazing, mostly because it sounds like a Wu-Tang song rather than like a classic-rock crossover-attempt. The guitars are there, but they're drowned in the murky, off-key mix, buried under a Fender Rhodes that itself sounds like it's underwater. And Ghostface is on it; the song faded out before his verse was over, but what I heard was an emotional, vividly rendered story about (seriously) going grocery-shopping at Pathmark and spilling milk on his pants.

That brings me to another great thing about The 8 Diagrams: Ghost is on it. Ghost has no-showed some recent Wu-Tang shows, and there have been plenty of rumors that he hasn't been getting along with the rest of the group, that he wouldn't have any verses on the album. But he appears on three of the eight songs I heard, and he's in top form. Actually, everyone is in top form. Raekwon sounds as hard and opaque as he ever has. Method Man has stopped playing the clown, sinking back into the gravelly menacing energy that made him so compelling in the first place. The ODB dedication "Life Changes" could've come off maudlin and cheap if these guys did maudlin and cheap. Instead, it's a touching piece of work, grief-stricken but level-headed. GZA's verse, where he talks about recording in the studio where ODB died, hit me especially hard: "I cried like a baby on my way to his place of death / Hate not being there the moments before he left." And the second-string guys all come hard as fuck, some of them (Inspectah Deck on "Watch Your Mouth," U-God on "Wolves") spitting the best verses I've heard from them in years. For the first time in a long time, every last member of the group has something to prove, and it shows.

Maybe even more importantly, The 8 Diagrams actually sounds like a Wu-Tang album. It's dark and swampy and eerie and gothic and mysterious and heady in a way that, say, Iron Flag wasn't. I don't know if RZA produced the whole thing or not, but all the tracks I heard certainly sounded like RZA tracks: creepy minor-key horror-movie strings, broken pianos, shuffling head-crack drum-loops, ghostly vocal samples, chanted choruses, kung-fu movie dialogue, clashing sword sound-effects, the whole thing. It's not catchy, not at all, but it absorbs. According to one publicist, Cappadonna and Street Life both get verses on the album, but there are no non-Wu guest-rappers. One song, though, immediately jumped out, partly because there's barely any rapping on it. "They Want to Stick Me For My Riches" is an amazing pseudo-reggae soul song with only one rap verse (Meth: "Since mama held me in her arms to tell me / That it's a cold world, I always packed heat"). The rest of the time, some singer wails intense and paranoid personal-memoir shit about coming up hard and poor and desperate; lush strings well up at all the right moments, but RZA keeps the sound low-key and dark and evil the whole time. Nobody from the group was at the listening session, and none of the publicists could tell me who the singer was. In a way, that's almost better. The Wu-Tang Clan should be mysterious and inaccessible; they should be able to bring in some incredible guest-singer without actually letting anyone know who that singer is. The 8 Diagrams sounds like an album out of time, and I have no idea how they expect it to do in a commercial marketplace that's become unrecognizable since the time these guys were able to sneak past the gatekeepers and become unlikely pop stars. But fuck it: it's a thrill to hear these guys, every last one of these guys, get back to the stuff they do best, markets be damned. If this album hits stores sounding anything like what I heard today, it'll be a gift to a lot of people who have waited a long time.

Voice feature: Tom Breihan on the Wu-Tang Clan
Voice review: Kelefa Sanneh on the Wu-Tang Clan's The W
Voice review: Joe Levy on the Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang

Celebrity Rap Superstar: What Might've Been

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:03 PM, September 6, 2007

You are now entering the Twilight Zone

Here's a fun mental experiment: watch tonight's episode of Celebrity Rap Superstar, the MTV show where actual rappers coach semi-obscure celebs on how to rap on live TV, and imagine me on the judges' panel. It could've happened. Maybe it was never anything more than a remote possibility; I'll probably never know. Last month, someone at MTV emailed me and asked if I'd be willing to come into the Times Square office and talk about a possible on-camera role on this show, which they were calling Rapping With the Stars at the time. And so I went in and sat for what amounted to an on-camera job interview. In the office lobby, I walked past Ashton Kutcher. During the interview, a couple of disarmingly affable and normal people asked me a bunch of questions on what kind of rap I liked, whether I'd be comfortable with live TV, whether I thought it possible that a bunch of non-rapping celebrities might be able to become convincing rappers. Apparently, someone involved in the show's production had read my stuff and thought I might make a good Simon Cowell-type asshole judge. For a minute there, I got all excited about the possibility, even though the entire concept of the show seemed totally ridiculous. I figured this would be something I could tell my grandchildren about, and I liked the idea of being semi-famous for being a dick. I also liked the idea of flying out once a week to LA, a place where I've never been, to film the thing. Well, it didn't happen. The show is already on, and the three judges are all exponentially more famous and credible than me: DMC, Da Brat, and the LA radio DJ Big Boy, who I sort of recognized because he's been on Entourage once or twice.

They probably made the right call in not bringing me in. I literally can't imagine what I would've done on that show. Last week, I tried to visualize myself sitting behind the table, delivering pithy sound-bite verdicts and participating in the whole circus of it. I couldn't do it. It just didn't make sense. Picking one contestant who'd be safe from elimination next week? Bantering with the unbelievably obnoxious Chris Tucker-esque host? Being in any way physically present for the awful, mesmerizing spectacle of Perez Hilton awkwardly but enthusiastically yelping out his rendition of "Right Thurr," let alone saying stuff like, "Perez Hilton, the hip-hop Oompa Loompa, is in the house"? No. Just no. Celebrity Rap Superstar exists in the same telegenic California parallel universe as most reality shows. Some reality shows gain momentum from the friction that comes from putting recognizable human beings into this universe and watching how they react. Consider, for example, The Pick Up Artist, in which some guy who looks like Perry Farrell teaches a bunch of self-conscious dorks to become sleazebags. But all the contestants on Celebrity Rap Superstar already come from the remote, mysterious world of semi-fame; they're as untouchable as their rapper coaches and judges. Can you picture yourself playing an active role in that? I can't, even if I almost did.

The show actually did a shockingly good job rounding up a group of credible rapper coaches. There are a few attention-starved has-beens in the mix (Tone Loc, Bizarre from D12), but more of them are actual great rappers who you wouldn't think would go in for this sort of thing: Too Short, Redman, Bubba Sparxxx. Some of them are also more famous than the would-be celebrities they're coaching: Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, some guy from Laguna Beach, etc. As glad as I am to see some honest-to-God good rappers on this show, there's also something sad about it. Kurupt should have better things to do than helping Sebastian Bach perfect his version of "Mama Said Knock You Out," you know? And I swear I'm not saying this out of bitterness, but the show could seriously use a Cowell figure; all the judges are polite to a fault, and only Brat seems to take any pleasure whatsoever in bashing the especially shitty contestants. Still, rendering any sort of critical judgment on this show seems preposterous. It's just another part of MTV's numbing arsenal, a readymade guilty pleasure, bereft by design of redeeming social value. If I'd ended up a judge, I wouldn't have been able to convince myself that I'm not part of the problem. So yeah, sour grapes.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 4

Posted by Tom Breihan at 12:01 PM, September 6, 2007

These podcasts are finally starting to get on something resembling a regular scedule. This is definitely the most rap-heavy of them yet, and it's got a whole lot of stuff about the impending 50 Cent/Kanye West showdown. Songs you'll hear this week:

• Kanye West: "Flashing Lights"
• 50 Cent feat. Young Buck and Nicole Scherzinger: "Fire"
• Kano feat. Vybz Kartel: "Buss It Up"
• Scarface: "Never"

To right-click save-as, download the podcast here.

50 Cent's Curtis: The Death of the Formula?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:09 PM, September 5, 2007

Have a baby by me, baby, be a millionaire

As entertaining as the alternately friendly and unfriendly competition for sales-dominance bragging-rights between 50 Cent and Kanye West has been, it's also a pretty egregious example of hype-manipulation. 50 and Kanye, after all, are both on labels that come under the umbrella of the Universal Music Group, and Universal stands to profit no matter who wins. So I wonder if it's a coincidence that both Graduation and Curtis leaked on the same day last week. Maybe the same disgruntled Universal employee leaked both of them, maybe competing departments within the same company tried to fuck each other over by leaking each other's records, or maybe it's all part of some grand marketing scheme that I can't even begin to comprehend. And here's another weird thing about those leaks, one that has nothing to do with halfassed conspiracy theories: both leaks were in their edited-for-radio forms, and I can't imagine why. In Kanye's case, it's really not a big deal; the only place where the cuts negatively impact the listening experience in any tangible way is during Lil Wayne's verse on "Barry Bonds." (That Wayne verse is still depressingly lazy either way, but it's a lot more fun when you can hear him cuss.) In 50's case, though, it's a much bigger problem; with all their bleep-silences, parts of Curtis are virtually unlistenable. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the abridged version of album-opener "My Gun Go Off": "We call it putting [silence] in / Leaving [silence] hurting / [silence] lurking / My [silence] go off." It's not hard to figure out 50's basic gist at any given time, but all those interruptions completely disrupt his flow and make for a weirdly exhausting listen. It doesn't help that the album's censors have taken out more than just the cuss-words. They've removed anything that even alludes to violence or explicit sex, and that's a problem considering that about 75% of 50's recorded output addresses one or both of those subjects. (He also talks about money a lot.) Maybe 50 didn't put out those early songs because they made the best choices for singles; maybe he put them out there because they were the only songs he had that sounded even halfway OK on the radio. The Wal-Mart version of Curtis really is a far-inferior product.

But honestly, Curtis isn't that horrible of an album. If it wasn't coming out on the same day as Graduation, there'd be absolutely no reason to compare the two records; they share virtually nothing in common. They're both pop-rap, but Kanye makes a form of pop-rap that makes a big point to include ambition and vulnerability. 50 Cent has absolutely no interest in ambition or vulnerability. Get Rich or Die Tryin' was the last time he sounded emotional for any real stretch of time, and even there he allowed himself a truly narrow range of feeling: desperation, hunger, wrath, pride, nothing else. Since then, his human moments have been rare and fleeting; the last one might've been the wistful, bittersweet opening verse on "Hate It or Love It." On Curtis, he seems to regard any overt display of emotion as a sign of weakness: "My eyes don't cry, I'm a fatherless child." It's as if he doesn't think he can afford himself the luxury of vulnerability. And so Curtis is a formulaic work, which is all it was ever going to be. It hits all the same obligatory marks as most mainstream rap records, and it should be judged against those connect-the-dots albums rather than against a unified statement like Graduation. On its own merits, it's nowhere near as satisfying as T.I.'s King, possibly the high-water mark of the connect-the-dots rap album, but it's a whole lot more convincing than, say, the last 8Ball & MJG album. 50 certainly isn't a better rapper than 8Ball or MJG, but those guys don't really fit comfortably into the landscape of circa-2007 mainstream rap, and 50 can't imagine a landscape other than this one. (Or maybe he refuses to acknowledge the possibility of another landscape.)

The clear highlight on Curtis remains "I Get Money," the one moment where 50 manages to recapture the urgency he had four years ago. The track is a huge, immediate adrenaline surge, its Audio Two sample hitting subconscious rap-dork buttons and 50 really attacking, sounding happy and motivated for once. With few exceptions, though, the rest of the album's beats stick too closely to a fake-Dre blueprint that gets old really quickly: chilly piano-stabs, blurting organs, precise drum-hits. Weirdly, one of the only tracks that strays from that formula is the only one that Dre himself produced. Musically, "Fire" might actually fit better on Graduation than it does here. Dre swipes hyper-compressed synth-textures from Justice, continuing mainstream rap's inexplicable French-house trend. Nicole Pussycat Doll's hook is thin and shrill but also really catchy; it reminds me of freestyle. Young Buck's voice also pops up on the chorus; he isn't given much to do, but it's still good to hear that he still hasn't necessarily worn out his welcome in G-Unit. The track completely swallows 50; he has no choice but to keep his head down and navigate the twists and turns, falling back on his considerable technical skill. He tries to do the same thing on "Ayo Technology," but he doesn't pull it off nearly as well; he slips and slides all over the track and never finds its pocket. Only two other tracks, both organic sample-driven Jake One productions, avoid the fake-Dre bullshit. I especially like "All of Me," where Mary J. Blige turns up to howl a hook and moan ad-libs, forcing a smidgen of grit into the record. But those are the only moments where anything seems to be at stake. The rest of the time, the only real asset display is 50's singsong flow. He keeps himself amused by toying with his derivative beats, using his voice to idly push them around. But he's punching the clock, and it shows. When Eminem shows up to lamely intone a couple of hackneyed strip-club come-ons on "Peep Show," he sounds like a desiccated husk; there's no trace whatsoever of the fire and playfulness that once made him great. At this rate, 50 will sound exactly the same as Em in a year or two. The formula is still working OK for now, but it won't keep working much longer.

And maybe that's why so many people are rooting for Kanye, why Kanye might actually have a chance in hell at winning the sales-battle. Rap sales are way, way down at a time when rap albums have lost most of their personality, and so the underdog is the guy who talks about wanting to cry when his single jumps a bunch of spots on the Billboard charts. 50 first became a dominant force by playing the underdog. Now he's the empire to be toppled, and weirdly enough, that actually makes him vulnerable. Too bad he'd never admit it. Maybe if Soundscan finds him at number two two weeks from today, he'll stop acting like such a robot on record. With Curtis, he's giving the record-buying public what he thinks they want. Let's hope he's wrong.

Voice review: Greg Tate on 50 Cent's The Massacre
Voice review: Kris Ex on 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'

Figuring Out Kanye West's Graduation

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:49 PM, September 4, 2007

Fresh off the plane, konichiwa bitches

I loved Late Registration as soon as I heard it, but my definitive moment with the album came late. I was leaving the office on night a couple of months after the album came out, and I stepped out into the first snow of the year just as "Heard Em Say" was coming on my iPod. It was perfect. "Heard Em Say" has this gentle, unforced float and this warm, muted longing that fit beautifully with that one evening, the snowflakes glowing for a split second as they fell past the streetlights, Christmas decorations up too early, cars going slower even though there wasn't any ice yet. Every time I've heard "Heard Em Say" since then, that image has automatically forced its way into my head. Graduation is still a week away from its release date, and I'm still sorting out my feelings about it, but I think I've already had my definitive moment with the album. That's either a tribute to the new culture of leaks and downloads and the accelerated way we process this shit or a condemnation of it, maybe both. I was driving back to New York two nights ago at two in the morning. Everyone else in the car was asleep, at least at first. I was moving fast and enjoying it, since the Jersey Turnpike is never, ever as empty as it was that night. And everything on the album sounded like it was custom-engineered to be heard in a situation just like that: lights streaking past, acrid factory-smoke hanging in the air, bass reverberating around the van. Every time Every time I hear "Drunk and Hot Girls" again, I'm going to immediately remember whipping over a deserted Verrazano Bridge, Manhattan lights glimmering away on the horizon.

I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about Graduation, but I like the album a lot better since taking that drive. Driving a car full of sleeping people at night is a weirdly solitary experience. People are all around you, in your car and in the cars around it, but you can't really interact with them, so you stare at the road and let your mind wander. Graduation has a similar feel. Kanye seems disconnected from the world around him: from his city on "Homecoming," from his mentor on "Big Brother," from the girls he's trying to fuck on "Drunk and Hot Girls." And that solitude can be a frustrating thing, but it can also be sort of comforting. The last two albums were full of songs about community and interconnectedness in one way or another: Kanye's faith, Kanye's family, Kanye's mother. The closest thing we get here is "Big Brother," a touching and personal dedication that's still written at a certain remove; Kanye's still too in awe of Jay-Z to consider him family.

In the lyrics and in the music, there's precious little warmth to be found here. Instead, there's frustration and resolve in the face of haters and dismissers. Even at his clumsiest, Kanye's music always has a serious evocative, ghostly quality. At first, all the new album's decomposing layers of synths sounded needlessly harsh and almost simplistic. After a few days, though, the album's gleaming electronic surface has become otherworldly in a weirdly moving way, like how that vocal sample in "Can't Tell Me Nothing" sounds like a trapped, lonely echo. DJ Toomp, of course, coproduced "Can't Tell Me Nothing," and the track bears a few formal similarities to his beat for T.I.'s "What You Know." But "What You Know" was an immediate rush, an instinctive roar of dominance. Kanye doesn't have T.I.'s swaggering ease, and he sound anxious and uncomfortable on those Toomp synths, which may be why I had to hear "Can't Tell Me Nothing" like ten times before deciding that I liked it. Plenty of times on Graduation, Kanye piles layers of apprehension and dread on rap tropes that most rappers deliver intuitively if not thoughtlessly. "Drunk and Hot Girls," as a friend recently pointed out, is sort of the ugly flip-side of something like "In Da Club," the girls always seeming just barely out of reach, the pursuit never entirely worthwhile, the beat awkwardly lurching sideways. On "Everything I Am," Kanye defines himself through exclusion, just talking about the things he can't ever be. On "Stronger," he talks about the resolve that comes with adversity. "Good Life" and "The Glory" feel so euphoric in part because they're the only moments on the album where Kanye allows himself to fully cut loose and enjoy his success.

I still have my problems with Graduation. I miss the warmth and fullness of Late Registration's strings and horns, and I wouldn't mind a few more guest-rappers breaking things up and leavening the mood every so often. Kanye wants this album to be, among other things, a display of his prowess as an MC, but the clunkers seem to come even more often than they have in the past: "Buy any jeans necessary," "Gnarls Barkley meets Charles Barkley," guh. But then, I've sort of come to like Kanye's lyrical blunders in the past as they've become familiar, and maybe the same thing will happen here. Kanye's albums take time to reveal themselves, and this certainly won't be the last entry I write about Graduation. Already, though, I can't think of another album I'd rather hear while driving across New Jersey at night. Given that that's something I'm going to be doing a whole lot over the next month, this album is already exerting more of a personal pull on me than almost anything else I've heard this year. Maybe Kanye's idea about making "theme songs for people" is working out after all.

Voice review: Robert Christgau on Kanye West's Late Registration
Voice review: Hua Hsu on Kanye West's College Dropout