Status Ain't Hood Podcast 14

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:50 PM, November 30, 2007

Sorry I'm so late with it this week. I recorded this the day before Thanksgiving and then promptly forgot about it, so all these songs have been around for a minute. I've already recorded another of these, but it's not up yet. Right-click to download the podcast. This week's songs:

• OutKast: "Da Art of Storytelling, Part 4"
• J.R. Writer: "We Gettin' It Baby Remix [feat. Lil Wayne]
• Justice: "D.A.N.C.E. (Benny Blanco Remix) [feat. Spank Rock & Mos Def]"
• South Rakkas Crew: "Carry Feelings [feat. T.O.K.]"

Three 2007 Albums That Got Away

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:58 PM, November 30, 2007

Who's got some words of wisdom?

So today's the day I had to have my year-end top-fifty-albums list into Pitchfork, and fifty albums is a whole lot of albums. For the past couple of weeks, I've been going on a real binge listening to every 2007 album I remembered sort of liking and trying to get my list bashed into acceptable shape. When you're writing one of these daily music blogs, you're supposed to stay up on everything, writing about music as soon as it becomes available. Initial opinions certainly aren't invalid, but they do change; I remember writing nice things about Young Buck's Buck the World, for instance, and I can barely make it all the way through that record anymore. And I sometimes end up missing albums that took a little while longer to sink in. Looking at my list, I've got a few albums on there that I haven't written hardly anything about despite writing a couple hundred blog entries this year. These three albums aren't slept-on; every one of them is a critical favorite on some level or another. But they're albums that I needed to hear a few times before I really heard them, and I think it's interesting to look back at them and to think about the ways they work and why I might've underrated them early on.

Grinderman: Grinderman. Nick Cave's new band isn't really a new band; all the members are longtime Bad Seeds. But it is his return to creepy-obsessive clangor, and the album's sound seems designed to be as repellant as possible. At first, I just couldn't stand listening to the thing. Its assaultive qualities reminded me of all the deliberately terrible mid-90s pigfuck stuff I couldn't stand in high school, and I had trouble empathizing with the frustrated old deviant character Cave plays on a lot of these songs. I listened to the album a couple of times and then promptly forgot about it until I saw Grinderman opening for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden and putting on a roiling show that came pretty close to overshadowing a great Stripes set. Back when I gave the album its first cursory listens, the feedback-squeals tended to get in the way of some serious churning bottom-end grooves and the self-mocking hilarity in Cave's posturing. Looking back, I have no idea how I missed that stuff. These songs sound a whole lot different after I heard them coming from four men who looked like well-dressed swamp-creatures onstage like they were arena-rock anthems and doing it in an actual arena. Spectacles like that have a way of recontextualizing things.

Gui Boratto: Chromophobia. Chromophobia came out around the same time as the Field's From Here We Go Sublime, another album of wistfully melodic minimal techno from the Kompakt label. At the time, I got stuck on the Field album and barely paid attention to Boratto's. The Field has these gorgeous gleaming textures, and he pulled tiny pieces of songs I recognized and used them to craft quiet but immediate hooks. Chromophobia took a whole lot longer to sink in. It's a long album full of long songs, and I don't much like long songs as a general rule. All the elements work a lot more subtly: pittering heartbeat drums push up against each other and form tiny little counter-rhythms, synths hum and twinkle contentedly, nothing ever builds up or breaks down. The album never quite forsakes rhythm, but it's basically an IDM album; I can't imagine ever hearing it on a dancefloor. But tracks from the record kept coming up on shuffle, and I kept confusing them with tracks from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which is about the nicest thing I can possibly say about an IDM album. Boratto also loves to use lush, twangy New Order guitars, and he knows how to make them fit perfectly with his pings and ripples. The kicker is "Beautiful Life," an ethereal new-wave jam so blissfully warm that I become physically unable to feel grumpiness whenever it's on.

Magik Markers: Boss. Whenever I hear about a band from the No Fun Fest horrible-noise axis making its pop move, I get suspicious. Accessibility means different things to different people, and I've seen people keep a straight face while describing something like Sung Tongs as straight-up pop, like it was a Fergie record or some shit. That new Sightings album is supposed to be their accessibility move, but that thing still pretty much sounds as much like ass-ugly gut-rumbling skree as all the other bullshit I've heard from that band. So when critics started praising Boss as a pop move from a band previously known mostly for nauseating squalls, I didn't put a whole lot of stock into it. When I finally got around to listening to Boss, though, I found a truly welcome surprise: it's basically Sonic Youth's Goo, except with psyche-rock organs and prominent basslines in place of sardonic pop-cult commentary. It's not a pop record by any stretch, but it has a compulsively listenable apocalyptic heaviness that can be weirdly soothing. And I think it's interesting that Magik Markers and Grinderman both arrived at their strikingly comparable evil groove-snarls from such opposite ends: one moving toward darkness, the other moving toward light.

Voice feature: Zach Baron on Magik Markers

Will Oldham Finds Blissful Surrender in Danzig and R. Kelly

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:00 PM, November 29, 2007

Seen it all

In the movie Old Joy, Will Oldham plays an aging stoner who's so comfortable in his rootlessness that he can't understand why everyone else isn't as content as he is to drift aimlessly through life. He convinces a friend to leave his extremely pregnant wife at home for the weekend and to go camping, and then he gets the both of them extremely lost in the woods, which suits him just fine since being lost in the woods is pretty much his natural state. I've never met the real-life Oldham, but I've known plenty of guys like his Old Joy character, and I've always imagined the real Oldham to be basically just like them. He strikes me as someone who gets so obsessively devoted to one idea that he forgets everything he was doing before he had it, and when he gets done with that he moves onto the next idea. I have this idea that he's been jumping from epiphany to epiphany for so long that flux has basically become his status quo. And even though he's mostly worked in subdued, rustic genres, he's also taken evident pleasure in confounding the hell out his his built-in audience. That tendency to wander has led to some insufferable music. The last time Oldham recorded an album of covers, for instance, he teamed up with Tortoise and mangled the hell out of a few totally great songs, leaching all the anthemic joy out of "Thunder Road" and turning Lungfish's "Love is Love" into gloopy half-jazz fuzz. But even when Oldham's indulging his worst ideas, he sounds totally committed to them, and he never seems to be forcing himself out of his element. Last year, Oldham released The Letting Go, a gorgeous little pastoral folk album full of wispy tremolo guitars and pillowy female backup vocals and sighing strings. When Oldham hits on a really good sound, I'm always afraid that he'll abandon it just as quickly and move onto something less interesting. So I'm happy to hear that Ask Forgiveness, the new mini-album of mostly covers that Oldham just released, ambles even further down the same aesthetic pathways that he tried out on The Letting Go. On Ask Forgiveness, Oldham sounds comfortable and settled-in, and that's fitting for a record that's actually about feeling comfortable and settled-in.

The choices of source-material on Ask Forgiveness seem guaranteed to get message-boards working; Oldham must know that people will think it's weird that he's covering Bjork and Danzig and R. Kelly. But none of those choices are all that forced or bizarre; Oldham's fandom of all those artists has long been established. He's worked with Bjork before, he spent a few days on the road with Samhain as a kid and later wrote about it, and his admiration for Kells was enough that he turned up for a deeply inexplicable cameo during a flashback segment of chapter 15 of "Trapped in the Closet" earlier this year, playing a cop. (Even if none of Kelly's characters shared that one scene with Oldham, Kelly directed the whole "Trapped" saga, so presumably Kelly and Oldham had to have at least one conversation. I would've loved to be a fly on the wall for that one.) The ironic indie-rock cover is an unfortunate tradition as old as indie-rock itself, and on some level Oldham's been guilty of indulging it in the past; he did, after all, sing a Mariah Carey song on the putrid-by-design Guilt By Association compilation earlier this year. (Interestingly, Oldham's version of "Can't Take That Away," with its twerked-up drum-machines was a lot more synthetic than Carey's string-heavy original.) But Oldham sings "Am I Demon" and "The World's Greatest" with the same hushed reverence as he gives his Phil Ochs and Mekons covers. In fact, the only track Oldham seems to take lightly at all is the one original, "I'm Loving the Street," an easy and casual little song about bees. Every song is fragile and pretty, with lots of delicately interweaving acoustic guitars and no drums whatsoever. There's a quiet, trancelike quality to the arrangements here; the record reminded me of the Philly doom-folk collective Espers even before I found out that a couple of Espers played on it. If I hadn't heard any of these songs before, I'd have no idea that they weren't all Oldham originals; he delivers all the lyrics in the same hushed, muttery sing-speak, and even the stuff about seasoned schemes of slimy curs on "Am I Demon" sounds like the sort of thing Oldham might write. I love that he sounds more like himself when he's singing other people's songs than when he's singing his own.

Slowly, it emerges that all the songs on Ask Forgiveness share the same basic lyrical theme: they're all about accepting your place in the world after tearing yourself to pieces wondering if it's the right place for you. Frank Sinatra's "Cycles," for example, is a song about looking back on life and realizing that every apocalyptic event you've been through was really pretty petty: "There isn't much that I have learned in all my foolish years / Except that life keeps running in cycles: first there's laughter, then those tears." And the Mekons' "The Way I Am" is about wishing you were somewhere else in life but then gradually accepting the way your life is. On "The World's Greatest," he sings about standing up tall and being proud. And even if "Am I Demon" doesn't come to any neat conclusions, at least it asks itself tough questions: "Am I demon? Am I human? Am I just like you?" It occurs to me that not a whole lot of songs address the resignation and acceptance that only come after intensive periods of self-doubt. Resignation and acceptance aren't particularly romantic subjects, and they don't lend themselves to the sort of intense, heightened emotion that drives most pop music. But when Oldham lines all these songs up next to each other and gives them all the same whispery, intimate, matter-of-fact delivery, those feelings develop a sort of dignity that just kills me. He doesn't sound like he's lost in the woods anymore.

Voice review: Amanda Petrusich on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Sings Greatest Palace Music

8 Diagrams: RZA's Drug-Rap Masterwork

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:25 PM, November 28, 2007

And I might not even be overreacting

8 Diagrams is about the millionth Wu-Tang album to start with a dialog sample from a kung-fu movie, but this one is different from those that came before. RZA has complicated reasons for just about all of his production decisions, but I have this idea that he usually just picked out the kung-fu samples that sounded the most badass. The sample at the beginning of 8 Diagrams doesn't sound badass. No swords clash, and no threats are made. Instead, a teacher tells a nasal-voiced student how to be a good man, telling him to keep control of himself and to stay patient. Those of us outside Wu-Tang's inner circle can only make fogged-up guesses about the group's internal dynamics, but by all accounts RZA's always been the crew's undisputed leader, and his leadership must've faced its challenges over time. In the documentary Rock the Bells, when the concert promoter was having a stroke worrying about how he'd get ODB to the venue, RZA was the guy he went to to smooth the situation out. And the crew's unlikely period of commercial dominance only started to flag when members of the group started making albums that weren't completely under RZA's control. To tell such a talented and chaotic group of rappers what to do, RZA must have unreal leadership skills, and I get the feeling that he's been repeating that refrain about control and patience more and more often lately. The fact that 8 Diagrams even exists is some kind of miracle, and it's even more amazing when you consider that not one song on the entire album has the faintest chance of becoming a crossover hit. 8 Diagrams is a deeply weird album, a total immersion in weed-fried mythology and willfully obscure tangled-up black psychedelia. It's clearly the album that RZA wanted to make, and recent developments show that he may have burned up all his goodwill with the rest of the group in the process.

Raekwon and Ghostface have already voiced frustration with the group's recent direction, but I always thought that frustration boiled down to money issues and nothing else. This interview surprised me; according to Raekwon, his problems with RZA are more aesthetic than financial. At his best, Raekwon is one of the wooziest, hardest to follow rappers working, but even he apparently doesn't want any part of an album this obtuse. "RZA's trying to create to much of a orchestra," he says. "He's trying to do too much of this guitar shit, like he's got a guitar on his fucking back ... It's more or less like, yo, I don't want to be here doing this because this is not the vibe I want. It's his vibe. He's like a hip-hop hippie right now." RZA is definitely somewhere near crazy, and his solo showcase "Sunlight" may be the strangest thing on the whole album: RZA ranting brain-melting crackpot-philosophy silliness over humming soul-samples and harpsichord drones. I've never much liked RZA as a rapper because he always sounded totally content to ignore his own beats, but "Sunrise" hardly has any drums, and so his vocal comes off like urgent, drunk spoken-word poetry. "I been highly misunderstood by those that met us / They had ears of corn and heads of lettuce," he says, and the funny part is that he doesn't even treat it like a punchline; he bleats it out with raw sincerity like it's the most important thing he ever said, which is how he says everything. 8 Diagrams is full of dizzy musical left-turns: underwater Lee Hazlewood guitars, riotous out-of-tune horn-stabs, thrilling ominous spaghetti-western whistle-loops. RZA's bragged that "The Heart Gently Weeps" is the first rap song with a legally-cleared Beatles sample, but even with a guest guitar-noodles from a Chili Pepper and George Harrison's son, the track still sounds like burbling mud. Only about half the tracks even bother with hooks, and virtually none of them have any recognizable structure at all. After a few listens, I've only just begun to absorb the actual lyrics; the pure auditory experience of hearing these guys going hard on such bugged-out tracks has been more than enough to keep my brain spinning.

So RZA's putting together the first Wu-Tang group album in six years, and he's decided to make it a dense, inaccessible hunk of drugged-out space-rap; no wonder his troops are restless. Raekwon's put forward the idea of putting out another Wu-Tang group album without RZA, something I can barely imagine ever happening. Any discontent that Rae and Ghost might've felt about the album doesn't manifest itself in the actual music, though. Both of those guys rap hard throughout, as does everyone else in the group. Ghost has a particularly great narrative verse on "The Heart Gently Weeps" about beating up a gun-toting would-be killer in the middle of a Pathmark. The real welcome surprise on 8 Diagrams, though, is Method Man, who just raps out of his mind whenever anyone puts a mic near him. On "Stick Me For My Riches," he comes on roaring after a couple of minutes of tortured 70s soul with a riveting, desperate up-from-nothing verse. I seriously thought Meth might never return to his former glory; he's seemed so mad at the world over the last couple of years, but suddenly he's just breathing fire. One of the welcome byproducts of the great rap sales decline has been the sudden, unexpectedly hungry comebacks from older rappers who have seen their crossover attempts crash and burn; Busta Rhymes is on a similar tear right now. But Busta Rhymes doesn't have an album full of heady, druggy beats the way Meth does here, and Meth makes the most of his shot. The things that Raekwon doesn't like about 8 Diagrams are the things that make it something like a masterpiece. At least during the recording of the album, all the Wu guys seemed to realize how great they sound over RZA's bent orchestral beats, and they stepped it up accordingly. And even if RZA never manages to get these guys back under his spell, the end result may be worth it. It's going to take a long, long time to untangle 8 Diagrams, but even a few days after it leaked, it's pretty evident that we won't be hearing another rap record this bent and fascinating anytime soon.

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

A Quiet Riot Story

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:19 PM, November 27, 2007

Also, this was a great album cover

Look, it's a slow news day. These happen. It's the end of the year, and pretty much the only albums coming out are crappy Christmas records or crammed-in tax-writeoff fourth-quarter rap records, and I just can't write about those things every day. I'd say something about the Busta Rhymes' Dilla-tribute mixtape, but too many people are jamming up Mick Boogie's website, and the stream is all fucked up. I honestly considered writing an entire entry on this photo of Kanye West posing with Evel Knievel, but that's just too much. Instead, I'm going to tell my Quiet Riot story. Kevin DuBrow, the band's singer, was found dead in his Las Vegas apartment on Sunday, and, as fellow Voice guy Mike Clancy just pointed out, everyone has a Quiet Riot story. I never felt any particularly strong connection to Quiet Riot beyond their two big singles, the bigger of which was a cover of another band's song anyway. They were about seven years past their peak when I picked up my first copy of Hit Parader, and even before Nirvana, pop-metal bands were more likely to namecheck Mott the Hoople or David Bowie as precedents than to talk about any of the actual pop-metal bands they probably actually grew up listening to, so I never even experienced them as a cool influence. I was never a fan, and after DuBrow's death, it's not hard to find testimonies from actual fans. But I do have a Quiet Riot story, and here it is.

For a few years, I lived a couple of blocks from the Ottobar, Baltimore's big indie-rock venue; it's where I met my wife. One night, about four or five years ago, Quiet Riot played at the Ottobar. It was a really weird booking for the Ottobar; at the time, their bookers rarely ventured outside the indie-rock ghetto, and the most left-field names you'd see on their calendar would be backpack-rappers or emo bands. But Baltimore is a metal town, and Quiet Riot still easily had enough of a name to jam the place. I didn't go to the show, but I did go drinking at the Ottobar's upstairs bar that night. The soundproofing between the upstairs bar and the downstairs show-space was always really good. If a particularly rowdy noise-band was playing downstairs, the floor might erratically vibrate a bit, but you'd never hear much. For whatever reason, though, you could hear whatever was going on downstairs perfectly when you went to the upstairs bathroom. As it happened, I walked into the bathroom that night at the exact moment that Quiet Riot was hitting the first chorus on "Cum On Feel the Noize," and I could hear every single person they could fit into the downstairs space screaming the chorus back at the band. It was awesome. I stayed in the bathroom for the whole song.

Quiet Riot, of course, had more going for them than just "Cum On Feel the Noize." They managed to get a metal album to top the Billboard charts during the pre-Soundscan years, a near-impossible feat. They helped established a glam-metal blueprint that helped a whole lot of other bands find audiences. They were really serious rock stars for a while there, but I was always impressed at how humble and appreciative they were once they got old and hit the reunion-band circuit. If a band has headlined arenas at any point in its life, it can't be easy to swallow pride and go back to venues like the Ottobar, but Quiet Riot seemed to accept that fate gracefully, like they were just happy to have anyone listening to them at all. I never felt the personal connection to DuBrow that thousands of others must have, but I was surprised how bummed I was to hear of his death, if that makes any sense. He strikes me as being a good guy who lived a good life, and he died too young.

Voice review: George Smith on Quiet Riot's Guilty Pleasures

Things I Learned Watching I'm Not There

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:36 PM, November 26, 2007

Bad popcorn

The title to this post is totally, utterly misleading because I didn't learn anything watching I'm Not There: not about Bob Dylan, not about myself, not about the Dylan myth. In fact, the act of watching the movie felt almost like an afterthought. You probably know all the relevant facts about the movie already: rather than making anything resembling a straight biopic, Todd Haynes split the multitudinous Dylan myth into six component parts, turned each of those parts into a separate character, and went on a stunt-casting binge to find the right actors for those characters: Cate Blanchett plays the mid-60s Don't Look Back press-hating trickster version of Dylan, for instance, and a little black kid named Marcus Carl Franklin plays the rootless fabulist Dylan who fixated so hard on Woody Guthrie that he tried to become the guy. All those different Dylans have their own names, and no one in the movie ever utters the phrase "Bob Dylan." Haynes has done this sort of free-associative film-essay on his musical heroes before, but even Velvet Goldmine, which I loved, is as linear as a Mentos commercial compared to I'm Not There. Haynes could've just as well invented three or ten or 136 separate Dylans, and the effect would've been basically the same. He releases his various free-floating Dylans into a miasmic anti-narrative, and it never becomes entirely clear whether all these various Dylans occupy the same world. The Heath Ledger Dylan is an actor who portrays the Christian Bale Dylan, for instance, and the Marcus Carl Franklin Dylan turns up in what I guess was a dream of the Heath Ledger Dylan's wife. "Mystery is a traditional fact," the Cate Blanchett Dylan argues near the end of the movie, and the movie takes him on his word. Haynes never tries to pin Dylan down the way biopics generally do; instead, he celebrates Dylan's elusiveness by making a deeply elusive movie. The problem is that I'm Not There is so elusive that it's barely a movie; instead, it's a collection of riffs, and 135 minutes of cinematic riffs is too much.

I've been doing these "Things I Learned" posts for a minute now, whenever a movie seems sufficiently connected to the pop-music universe to justify a weekday afternoon at the movies. I'm not much of a film person, though, which puts me decidedly out of my element when I'm talking about I'm Not There; Haynes's Fellini references, for instance, sailed right past me. I'm Not There, anyway, is not a movie about music. The music is there, floating constantly through the movie, both in Dylan's original recordings and in the cover-versions on the pretty-good soundtrack album, and most of it is great, but it's never anywhere near the film's center. Instead, the real subject of this movie is the Dylan myth; music, as far as I can tell, is just presented as a means toward creating that myth. Two of the six Dylans in the movie aren't even musicians; the Heath Ledger one is an actor and the Richard Gere one is a retired gunslinger or some such nonsense. (The whole Richard Gere plotline, where he's an anachronistic post-fake-death Billy the Kid, is pretty much entirely bullshit. Dylan might've once played Billy the Kid's sidekick in a Sam Peckinpah movie, and he might've made a concept album out of an old-west outlaw, but the connections to this character are tertiary at best, and it's not like the Gere story has anything going for it outside its Dylan connections. I had no idea what was going on when Gere was watching My Morning Jacket's Jim James, in greasepaint, singing "Goin' to Acapulco at a funeral, and I didn't care.) We never see any of the Dylans writing or recording a song; the movie never gets that literal. And his attitude toward his fellow musicians is telling. The Marcus Carl Franklin Dylan sings a pretty great version of "Tombstone Blues" on a front porch with old scraggly Richie Havens, but he just absorbs Havens' compliments and then rambles on. And the Cate Blanchett Dylan might cavort with the Beatles, but he also introduces Brian Jones as being from "that groovy covers band," a great bitchy slight. So musicians are peers at best, but the Blanchett Dylan practically drools all over Allen Ginsberg, goofily played by David Cross. Ginsberg, rather than anyone else in Dylan's profession, is the ideal here.

Part of my problem with virtually every historical representation of Dylan is that I actually prefer acoustic folk-baby Dylan to pretty much every subsequent incarnation; for my money, he didn't actually hook up with a backing band who could convincingly play amplified rock until long after his motorcycle crash. But the Dylan I like best is generally regarded as the hopelessly pre-cool one, the one who allowed himself to be co-opted by the self-righteous conservative dickfaces who turned on him as soon as he plugged in. That early-60s downtown folk scene, from what I've read, was just stupefyingly lame, but Dylan had transcended it long before he consciously flipped it off. Christian Bale plays that Village Dylan here, and plays him as a slumping bag of tics, which seems about right. And the movie covers the whole Bale sequence as a fake documentary, making all the same mistakes as most real documentaries make in the way it shows people effusing about how great the kid was instead of showing us any actual evidence of that greatness. I actually really liked the Bale sequence, which has fun showing how contradictory Dylan was from the start. I liked a lot of the movie's individual sequences, which serve to make I'm Not There a much better mess than, say, Southland Tales. But I'd have to see the movie a few more times to even come close to unpacking its cumulative effect, and I'm not sure I'll ever feel like watching it again.

My favorite of the movie's Dylans was Cate Blanchett, who seems to be the favorite of just about everyone who's seen the thing. Blanchett might've arguably been Haynes's most egregious bit of stunt-casting, but she's also the only one who completely disappears into her character. She gets a bunch of great scenes: mumbling stoned through a gaudy swinging-London party, dealing with an angry knife-wielding fan's abandonment issues, sniping back and forth with a journalist who actually raises some worthwhile questions. My favorite moment of the movie is the mythic recreation of the heretical moment at the Newport Folk Festival when Dylan first plugged in. The movie first plays that moment as a fantastically exaggerated cartoon (Dylan and his band pulling out machine guns and opening fire into the audience), and then it comes only slightly further down to earth, showing the reactions of a mouth-foaming axe-wielding Pete Seeger and a paying audience reduced to snarling jackals. And I guess maybe that's the biggest problem I had with the movie: Dylan's entire public can't have been made of of proprietary philistines, can it? Can it?

Or maybe I was just getting annoyed with Film Forum. The popcorn at that place has no butter. Seriously. It tastes like sawdust. It says "no butter" right on the menu, and I still bought some. Five bucks gone, and I couldn't eat more than a handful. I'm an idiot.

Voice review: J. Hoberman on I'm Not There

Freeway Preaches to the Choir

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:29 PM, November 21, 2007

The best beard in rap

If onstage body-language is any indication, Jay-Z loves Freeway. The two times I've seen Free make guest-appearances at Jay's shows, Jay's made the same faces during Free's "What We Do" verse that he made when Free did the song in Fade to Black: a sort of enthralled disbelief, a fan's reaction. But even if Jay loves Free, that doesn't mean he has a whole lot of commercial faith in the guy. Free At Last, the new Freeway album, is coming out into an absurdly crowded third quarter, and it's coming with absolutely zero Def Jam marketing muscle. Three cheap made-for-YouTube videos of Free At Last tracks hit the internet this week, and they're all pretty good, but I haven't seen a single one of them on TV yet, and I still DVR Rap City every day for some reason. "Step Back," the track Free did with Lil Wayne, which Free played during the album's listening party a couple of weeks back, is nowhere to be found. Free At Last comes out two weeks after Jay's American Gangster and two weeks before Beanie Sigel's The Solution, which effectively forces Free to compete in the marketplace with both his mentor and his mentor's mentor, along with every single end-of-year Def Jam tax writeoff. The purported 50 Cent exec-producer credit is nowhere in the album's liner notes. And as Free complains on "It's Over," there's not a single Kanye West or Just Blaze track anywhere on the album. Back when Free released Philadelphia Freeway a billion years ago, there were a few indications that Jay actually thought he might make a star out of Freeway; it had guest-spots from Nelly and Mariah Carey, and Just Blaze produced virtually every track. But as Kelefa Sanneh points out here, the idea that Freeway might ever become a major star were always sort of ridiculous: he's a raspy-voiced sparkplug with a giant beard and no crossover appeal whatsoever. So it's not even especially sad to see Def Jam treating this guy like a B-lister. After all, he makes a great B-lister.

The first track on Free At Last is "This Can't Be Real," a warm and jazzy track with no real chorus, Free making like Bun B on "The Story" and sinking into a deep reminiscing section about how he first came into rap, still sounding pissed at himself about getting locked up right after he first met Jay. The second track, "It's Over," is on some great hammering runaway locomotive shit, horns blasting royally while Free comes hungry and heated, venting about all the disrespect he's forced to endure. And the third, "Still Got Love," is a pretty, happy track with a busy synthed-up Bink beat where Free growls thankfully about everyone who supports him. So in the first three tracks, we've got Free in three distinct modes: pensive, angry, and contented. The thing is his delivery doesn't really change when he switches from one mood to the next; it's the same guttural drawn-out yammering whine throughout. With virtually any other rapper, that would be a profound liability. With Free, it's almost a saving grace; his voice never really gets old over the course of the record, though Free was probably smart to keep the thing to a quick 50 minutes.

Even though Free switches moods throughout the album, he doesn't play the pandering connect-the-dots game where every song is a concession to some potential audience. Only two songs really leap out of the sequencing: "Take It to the Top," the putrid and ill-advised loverman track with the zero-chemistry 50 Cent chorus, and "Lights Get Low," the synthed-up Cool & Dre car-chase track with the unbelievably cheesy club-pop chorus and the surprisingly decent Rick Ross guest-spot. Free never really connects on "Take It to the Top," but he's plenty comfortable on "Lights Get Low"; the only real problem with the track is that it fucks up the album's flow a bit. Pretty much every other track is stormy, soulful East Coast street-rap with busy drums and screaming R&B samples. Freeway isn't an especially quotable rapper, but his urgent vein-popping delivery more than makes up for any unremarkable lyrics. It's probably no surprise that the album doesn't sound as exciting on headphones as it did in S.O.B.'s at the listening session, where Free stayed at the front of the stage, rapping along with his recorded voice. Some of the beats are too flat and trebly make the best use out of Free's raging yowl, and there's barely a hook to be found on the whole album. But tracks like "Baby Don't Do It," where Free and Scarface trade verses over a well-worn Willie Hutch sample, are a big part of the reason I get out of bed every day.

In interviews, Free's been talking about how annoyed he was that Philadelphia Freeway stalled out after going gold, how he thinks this album will put him where he needs to be. That's standard rap-interview talk, and I'm really happy to discover that Free At Last is a real niche-audience product, a gift to the tiny sliver of the pop-music audience that wants to hear furiously passionate roars of pride over big drums and bittersweet Vietnam-era samples. Rap sales have gone all to hell this year, but now that most rappers have accepted that they aren't going to be pop stars anytime soon, they've readjusted their expectations and started working to keep their core audiences happy. Looking back, this has actually been a pretty good year for full-length albums from mid-level rappers. If albums like Free At Last keep coming out, maybe the whole sales-dive phenomenon will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on Freeway's Philadelphia Freeway

The Death of the Billboard Music Awards

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:35 PM, November 20, 2007

Never again

Congratulations are due to the American Music Awards. During yesterday's running AMAs diary, I pointed out that if it weren't for the Billboard Music Awards, the AMAs would be the single shittiest annual music-awards show. Earlier today, Idolator reported that the Billboards won't be happening this year, which saves me from two excruciating hours of TV and which officially renders the AMAs the worst award-show of the year, a distinction that Sunday night's show certainly lived up to. The Billboard Awards have been happening every December since 1990, but their cancellation this year is no great loss whatsoever. Even back in middle school, when my critical facilities were still so weak and underdeveloped that I paid good money for an Ugly Kid Joe album, I knew the Billboard Awards were some bullshit. I knew they were bullshit because nobody who won an award ever seemed the least bit shocked or surprised. In fact, nobody involved in the production of the show ever bothered to manufacture any sense of suspense whatsoever. I can remember watching Kris Kross win the Best New Artist award in 1992 (I think they beat Nirvana), and rather than coming out of their seats in the audience to accept the award, they burst out of a giant Christmas-present box onstage and performed before making their way to the podium to accept the award. While I was watching the show, I remember feeling really gypped. Kris Kross obviously wouldn't have been sitting onstage in that giant Christmas-present box unless they knew they were going to win that award, and if they knew beforehand that they were winning, that what was the fucking point?

The Billboards won't be happening this year presumably because the show's always gotten bad ratings and because those ratings have only gotten worse. I didn't do a running diary of last year's show (or, for that matter, last year's AMAs) simply because I forgot that the thing was even on. If a daily music blogger can't remember to watch a music award show, what hope does the rest of America have? I still have painful memories of the 2005 show: Chingy and Larry the Cable Guy struggling through their award-presentation banter, Ashlee Simpson performing with Pretty Ricky, Pharrell doing reggaeton. If the viewing public of America decided not to watch that ten-car pileup last year, who could blame them? The fools behind the Billboard Awards are saying that they're canceling this year's show so that they can put together a bigger and better show in 2008, but I'd be shocked if these awards actually return. Since the awards have always been forthright about acknowledging the biggest-selling artists rather than the by-consensus best, they've never looked like anything other than a cheap ratings-grab. That in itself isn't terrible; the AMAs did just fine with that exact same setup for a while. But the Billboards always felt like an afterthought. For all the proof you need, check the list of past hosts at the Billboards' Wikipedia page. They were prescient enough to get Jon Stewart in 1995 and Chris Rock in 1996, but the rest of that list is just grisly: Paul Shaffer, Phil Collins, Kathy Griffin and Andy Dick together. I can't imagine anyone is going to mourn the death of anything this consistently shitty.

But the announcement of that death, coming right after a near-unwatchable American Music Awards, got me wondering what exactly has happened to the music awards show. Awards shows don't actually reflect the state of the music industry; they only reflect how the music industry wants to present itself, which is why unthreatening MOR types so often walk away with armfuls of Grammys. But there used to be some sense of glamor when basically the entire music industry would assemble under one roof. That's basically gone, and even the Grammys need to rely on stunts like luring boomer heroes out of semi-retirement because the actual music of today just won't draw the large-scale ratings they need to survive. It's getting boring to talk about the splintering and narrowcasting of what was once a vast pop-music audience; everyone knows it's happening, nobody knows what to do about it or whether anything even should be done about it, and we're all getting sick of hearing about it. As a result, the only dependably entertaining music-awards shows are the ones that focus on one specific corner of the music universe: the CMAs, say, or the BET Hip-Hop Awards. At shows like these, guys like Kenny Chesney or Lil Wayne end up looking like major stars only because they're surrounded by their peers. At mass-audience award-shows, though, their names simply don't carry the same weight. The AMAs had to give Beyonce a lifetime-achievement award to convince her to show up, and they needed her; she's one of the only pop-music stars with a big enough name to actually attract eyeballs. Before long, there will be no Beyonces left, and maybe musicians will no longer gather in well-lit auditoriums to congratulate themselves and thank their managers, a truly scary thought.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 13

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:40 PM, November 19, 2007

We switched over to a new server late last week, so there was some drama with the site: Thursday and Friday's posts not showing up until Saturday, stuff like that. This podcast appeared briefly and then disappeared, so here it is again. It's a good one, I think. Right-click to download the podcast. Songs this week:

• Cam'ron: "Bum Bum [feat. Penz]"
• Radiohead: "Ceremony"
• Wu-Tang Clan: "Life Changes"
• Burial: "Archangel"

The American Music Awards: A Running Diary

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:23 PM, November 19, 2007

Just impale your eyeball on one of these things right now

Oh man, OK, so the American Music Awards should really thank the Billboard Music Awards for being the only reason the AMAs are not the least relevant music awards show on the face of the planet. In theory, I kind of like how the AMAs don't even pretend to base their decisions on the actual quality of the musicians they salute. But the whole "Favorite" thing has a massive drawback: nobody famous ever wants to appear on this show. Somehow, the AMAs have managed to become progressively more boring over time, which means that this year will probably be the most boring AMAs in AMA history, at least until next year. This is going to be a long three hours.

8:00: Oh Jesus, they're really starting the show with Fergie? And she's doing "Fergalicious"? And Will.I.Am is standing next to her doing the robot and wearing a tux with a top hat and white gloves? Who's going to see this opening and not realize that we're heading straight into trainwreck hell? Things actually go downhill during this opening, as "Fergalicious" (which I sort of like OK) becomes "Clumsy" (which I don't) and then "Big Girls Don't Cry" (which I actively hate). Seriously "Big Girls" always makes me feel like I'm waiting for surgery, and she does more or less the whole song. Whose idea was it to let her do three goddam songs?

8:07: Oh fuck, now Will.I.Am gets to do a solo song too? Are we going to get solo tracks from Apl.De.Ap and Taboo next? Will.I.Am has an all-model backing band, and he's surrounded by naked silver mannequins. He's like the new Robert Palmer. At least he's nice enough to squeeze like one synth-riff from "Looking for the Perfect Beat" into the tacked-on dance-sequence at the end of the otherwise regrettable "Heartbreaker."

8:10: Jesus fucking Christ, now Will.I.Am's doing a song with Nicole Pussycat Doll. It's like the producers wanted to remake the VMAs, except without any actual stars or good songs or anything. In the crowd, Beyonce looks bored until she realizes that she's on camera. Wow, this show is only one-eighteenth over. The best song of that five-song opening montage was "Fergalicious." This show is never, ever going to end.

8:16: Jimmy Kimmel, tonight's host, makes fun of the fact that he's scabbing on the Writers' Guild strike. Apparently, there will be no written jokes tonight, which actually isn't much of a letdown. Instead, he's bringing Jordin Sparks and Kellie Pickler onstage to do the Soulja Boy dance. And they're all going to dress like Soulja Boy, too. Hilarious. Kimmel basically does the Soulja Boy dance exactly like I do when I'm drunk, which is to say not very well. The real Soulja Boy predictably shows up to do the dance. Wow, that was amazingly awkward. Soulja Boy is also helping to announce that this year's awards were decided by viewers' votes. 1.2 million people voted this year! That's really not very many people at all!

8:18: Carrie Underwood gives the Breakthrough Artist award to Daughtry. At this point, they're going to run out of former American Idol contestants before they hit the half-hour mark. One of the guys in Daughtry's band has the worst little mohawk I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of bad little mohawks.

8:25: Christina Applegate and James Blunt are presenting an award together, and the assembled onstage starpower is blinding me. They give some award to Rascal Flatts, who don't even look a little bit surprised to be winning.

8:27: If the guys in One Republic really want to get big, they're going to have to work on their award-show presentation skills. They introduce a throughly mediocre Avril Lavigne.

8:31: Hey, it's Rascal Flatts again! I was starting to miss them. The announcer calls them "America's #1 band," which is probably true, frighteningly enough. They do some fluffy but OK power-ballad, which makes them far and away the best performers of the night thus far. I guess I can't stay mad at them.

8:39: Ryan Seacrest shows One Republic how to do this award-show presentation thing. He introduces Maroon 5, who are almost good. Maroon 5 developing some sense of swagger is really one of the weirdest and most welcome things to happen to big-money pop music in the past year or so. I mean, who would've thought?

8:44: Akon wins the Soul/R&B Male award, which he tries to give to T-Pain. Robot love onstage!

8:51: As the Jonas Brothers start playing, a bunch of screaming preteen girls rush the aisles. All three Jonas Brothers stand behind panes of glass that shatter when they start singing. One of them trips and falls in the glass, but he gets back up without missing a bit or cutting an artery or anything. Other than the fall, this whole intro was totally planned (someone told all those girls when to go), but this sort of goofy spectacle works amazingly well on a show like this, and the Jonas Brothers' precise power-pop actually has some energy working for it. Two of the screaming girls make it onstage and sort of awkwardly stand by one of the Jonases for a second before an enormous security guard chases them off. Aw!

8:54: Fabolous and Taylor Swift are standing next to each other. Whose idea was it for these two to present an award together? Did they just pull names out of a hat? They present some award to Justin Timberlake; he accepts via taped message and doesn't seem interested at all.

8:57: Terrible skit time: Kid Rock punches out Jimmy Kimmel over Celine Dion. Kimmel scabbed for this?

9:01: High School Musical 2 wins a soundtrack award. Does this award exist specifically so the HSM people would accept it?

9:03: Rihanna sings "Umbrella" and "Hate That I Love You" with a full orchestra and Ne-Yo because, you know, she's a serious recording star now. Actually, this is sort of great. The show looks a whole lot less second-string when the people onstage look have some idea how to act like stars.

9:13: Some guy from Grey's Anatomy says that Fergie rocks. Huh? Were they on Double Dare together or something? He gives some award to Carrie Underwood, and even she doesn't look all that amped (no tears).

9:15: Sugarland covers "Irreplaceable" all exaggerated jug-band style. They could've just done it straight; it's not like that song is all that different from their regular style. Beyonce comes in halfway through for an unsurprising surprise appearance, and the lack of chemistry onstage is truly something to behold. What a well-intentioned mess.

9:19: Solange Knowles is dressed like a cupcake. Daughtry wins the Adult Contemporary Award, which seems sort of like a double-edged sword.

9:28: Josh Groban, introducing Celine Dion: "I guess you could say that she's got an edgy attitude now because her new song is called 'Taking Chances.'" Was that sarcasm? Or just a deeply ridiculous statement? He sure looked sincere. "Taking Chances" is actually a really good Kelly Clarkson song, which makes it probably the best song Celine Dion has ever released, weirdly enough. Celine's attempts at sexy dancing are too goofy for words, but this is really perfectly OK.

9:33: Lenny Kravitz plays a piano, which I guess means he's being sensitive. This new song isn't even interesting enough to suck properly.

9:39: Chris Brown is dressed like a character from Tron, and he's dancing to hair-metal. He's not even pretending to actually sing. I love this guy! Whoa, now he's dancing while suspended upside-down. This kid is too much.

9:49: Hannah Montana gives Carrie Underwood some kind of text-message award. My brain hurts.

9:56: Jimmy Kimmel makes a sex joke about the girls from High School Musical, ew. Naked picture means fair game, I guess. They give some award to Daughtry, and there's that fucking mohawk again.

9:59: Alicia Keys's gospel choir is sitting on the hood of a pickup truck onstage, and "No One" suddenly turns into an awkward reggae remix with Junior Reid. And now he's singing "One Blood"? And Chaka Demus and Pliers are singing "Murder She Wrote"? And now Beenie Man is doing "Who Am I?"? I can't even process what's happening here. Does Keys think "No One" is a reggae song? Is that why she's doing this thing? Whatever, this is great.

10:08: Good Lord, now Tony Hawk is here to introduce Duran Duran? This is turning into the Southland Tales of award shows; I'd love to know just how much cocaine went into the planning process. Duran Duran's middling Timberlake song is slowly growing on me, but it's still a middling Timberlake track, and it would probably be better if Timberlake sang it. Tonight, Simon Le Bon is actually singing like he has Timberlake's entire head lodged in his nasal canal. But all is forgiven when they sing the deathless "Hungry Like the Wolf."

10:15: Slash appears onstage but fails to reproduce his endlessly entertaining string of drunken cusswords from 1990. Instead, he gives an award to Carrie Underwood.

10:17: Usher, looking dapper, gives a lifetime achievement to Beyonce. Nobody younger than me should ever win a lifetime achievement award.

10:27: Mary J. Blige's Catwoman jumpsuit is more memorable than her new quasi-disco single, but it says something that she's still hugely likable even when she's singing something this boring.

10:33: The nominees for the Rap Group award are Bone Thugs, Pretty Ricky, and the Shop Boyz. Wow, what does that say about the state of the rap group? Bone Thugs win, which is good since they were the only remotely defensible choice. One of the random backup guys onstage has a mohawk almost as bad as the one on the Daughtry guy.

10:39: Queen Latifah sings smooth jazz. Post-rap maturity has never been so boring, ever. She can sing and all, but guh.

10:44: Upset! Rihanna beats Beyonce for something. Akon gives her the award. The cyborg takeover marches on.

10:50: Daughtry Unplugged is somehow even more ragingly tepid than Electric Daughtry. His awards are sitting onstage behind him, along with a whole bunch of lamps and throw pillows. They really aren't making this last hour easy on me, are they?

10:55: An extra-skeezy Gene Simmons gives something to Fergie. Is this show over yet?

Who the Hell is Flo Rida?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:29 PM, November 16, 2007

He has a song on his MySpace called "Ghetto Techno." It sounds sort of like ghetto techno.

Flo Rida's "Low" is a perfectly acceptable bit of nondescript club-rap with a typically histrionic chorus from omnipresent horny robot T-Pain. In a lot of ways, it's a nice little distillation of a lot of the trends happening in rap right now: voice-filter overload, synthetic up-tempo ringtone-ready beats, faux-epic Euroclub keyboards, lyrics about butts, T-Pain. Still, I was a little shocked earlier this week when I checked the iTunes sales charts and saw that the song had debuted at #1. In the past few days, more than a hundred thousand people paid to download the song, and it catapulted itself into Billboard's top ten singles even though radio program directors are just now scrambling to get the song into their playlists. Before the song's big iTunes debut, I knew basically nothing about Flo Rida beyond his song "Birthday," another club-rap single with a synth-riff that moved it uncomfortably close to glassy, emotive trance. (I guess I also knew that he has a vaguely stupid-clever name. Flo Rida is from Florida and he rides flows, see?) "Birthday" found its way to a few mp3 blogs and scraped the lower end of Billboard's R&B charts, which seems about right. But "Low" is practically the same song, except with T-Pain doing the chorus instead of Rick Ross (a tremendous improvement, admittedly), and now all of a sudden it's huge. Judging by those two tracks, Flo Rida is a decent enough technical rapper who knows how to ornament a beat without getting in its way, but he shows basically zero personality on both tracks, and I'm not sure I could pick him out of a lineup. I hadn't even heard "Low" before its massive iTunes debut. So how does this happen? How does an indistinct, relatively unknown rapper suddenly end up with the best-selling song in the country?

The simple answer is T-Pain, whose pop-charts dominance is getting scary. When people look back on 2007's singles charts, the back half of the year will look like it belongs to T-Pain as completely as 1963 looks like it belongs to Phil Spector. On this week's Billboard Hot 100 top ten, T-Pain appears on no less than four songs, none of which are his. And it makes sense: T-Pain does have a way with simple and undeniably sticky melodies; just try, for instance, to get "Cyclone" out of your head after hearing it once. His modulated robo-squeak is one of the few immediately identifiable sounds in contemporary pop, and it fits beautifully with the glistening dance-pop textures that have been taking over club-rap lately. As a producer, he knows how to internalize and re-channel just about everything that works; his track for "Low" makes room for Lil Jon synth-whistles, jittery Miami bass stomp-claps, and high-gloss late-Timbaland synth-presents. In videos, he dances funny. Everything he does sounds efficient and streamlined; he's taken the messy aesthetic leaps that others have made and turned them into something easy to process. Pop history is full of guys like that. And T-Pain seems custom-created for a moment in rap when the genre's more danceable end has never been more European. The clangor that came with crunk's circa-2003 wave of popularity is all but gone, replaced with a sort of precision-engineered laser-lit superclub glide. T-Pain understands this stuff better than anyone else, and I wouldn't be shocked to discover that he was really from Germany or that he was an original member of Black Box or something. If there's anyone who can take an unremarkable rapper and hand him a pop hit at this exact moment, it's this guy.

To my ears, "Low" sounds like Southern club-rap with every last sliver of regional eccentricity carefully bleached out. But maybe that's an unnecessarily harsh judgment. Both Flo Rida and T-Pain come from Florida, after all, and one of T-Pain's other big current hits is "I'm So Hood," a decent-enough Florida-pride posse cut from DJ Khaled (though it's a bit disingenuous when T-Pain sings that he doesn't dance when he's in this place; anyone who's ever seen that guy on TV knows that he clearly does dance when he's in this place.) And so maybe "Low" represents the mainstream breakthrough of some sound that's been bubbling in clubs for a while. I'm going to Florida tomorrow to do story on Lil Boosie for King (seriously), and I'm looking forward to finding out firsthand how this stuff sounds in clubs down there.

Live: Fall Out Boy's Arena Emo

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:02 PM, November 16, 2007

They just buy tight jeans till they nuts hang all out, boy (photo by Ryan Dombal)

Fall Out Boy
Madison Square Garden
November 14, 2007

If MySpace emo is to be the new hair-metal, which it already sort of is, the genre is going to need to produce at least a few bands who look at home on arena stages. Earlier this year, I watched My Chemical Romance give it an honest shot at Nassau Coliseum, leaning hard on their Tim Burton theatrics. But one of the band's blimps wouldn't inflate right, and none of the band's members seemed ready to inhabit that provincial arena, though they certainly had the kids on their side. Fall Out Boy are probably the closest thing emo has to a Poison or a Motley Crue: a big band unashamed of their vicious pop hooks or their delight in fame. And last night's show had all the obvious arena-rock trappings: gratuitous pyro, massive Jumbotron videos, a brief acoustic set where everyone in the band sat on stools like they were Extreme or something. They also assembled a bill jammed with their crossover-emo peers. Gym Class Heroes managed to push an album full of risibly unthreatening emo-rap to gold status even though frontman Travis McCoy makes Will.I.Am sound like Kool G Rap. (How many actual rappers have managed to go gold this year? Five? Six?) Plain White T's managed to turn a nice, unassuming puppy-love ballad into an unstoppable Starbucks-pop juggernaut. Judging by the sheer volume of T-shirts they evidently sold last night, openers Cute is What We Aim For are creeping on a come-up. Apparently, that's a stacked enough bill to fill Madison Square Garden full of starry-eyed fourteen-year-old girls who sang along loudly with the videos that ran between bands and who unleashed Scream Tour-level screams at every indication that Fall Out Boy might be about to walk onstage.

I'd been interested to see how all those openers would translate to the big stage, but I ended up missing all of them save for the final thirty seconds of Gym Class Heroes' set, which featured berserk laser-lights, FOB singer Patrick Stump giving a histrionic guest-spot, and a fat dancing mascot-thing. I missed those openers because I tagged along with Ryan Dombal to a meet-and-greet thing that Fall Out Boy's handlers set up somewhere in MSG a few minutes before the band was set to take the stage. The meet-and-greet thing was weird. All these industry-types sat around a dorm-lounge-looking room, eating cold pizza and drinking beer and waiting for the band to show up. When they did show up, a publicist escorted all the band members over to our table one-by-one for a few seconds of awkward conversation. (All the band members, that is, except ostensible frontman Pete Wentz, who opted to go to the bathroom instead.) Those couple of seconds of awkward conversations offered a tiny, infinitesimal glimpse into what a pain in the ass it must be to be in such a famous band: all three of the non-Wentz guys seemed totally decent and normal and overwhelmed from a few years of people telling them to be somewhere and talk to some random assemblage of strangers every few minutes.

I'd hoped to give Stump some sort of pep talk, to tell him to man up. He is, after all, the band's singer and the guy who writes all the music, but he's constantly playing second-fiddle to Wentz, the self-obsessed megalomaniac bass player who writes all the band's self-obsessed megalomaniac lyrics. But it's hard to give someone a pep talk in two seconds, and I said pretty much nothing to Stump. And after all, that one megalomaniac is probably the main reason that Fall Out Boy is big enough to headline Madison Square Garden in the first place; normal, polite guys don't get to that level without some asshole forcing them. (And unlike Poison or Motley Crue, Fall Out Boy only has one megalomaniac, and he can't sing well enough to go solo, which says good things about their long-term viability.) All I can really tell you about Stump is that he's perfectly polite, extremely short, and nowhere near as ass-ugly as he tends to look in the band's videos; maybe Wentz bribes cinematographers to make Stump look like a herb. Also, drummer Andy Hurley was wearing a Wu-Tang shirt, and he says he's got like ten Wu-Wear shirts at home. I wonder what he thinks of Gym Class Heroes.

When the band got to the stage, they opened with their one truly great song, "Sugar, We're Going Down." That's a risky gambit, especially when audience screams actually threatened to drown out the band during the first few minutes of their set. The band wasn't at a hundred percent last night; Wentz broke his foot a little while back, so he couldn't do any of the jumpy-spinny stuff he usually does, and the absence of that stuff actually made the band a whole lot more boring to watch. And with "Sugar, We're Going Down" out of the way, the band didn't have a whole lot of surefire tricks left for the rest of the night. Their songs are fast and vigorous, but they come weighed down with turgid, samey melodies and precious little in the way of internal dynamics. Jets of flame shot up from the floor every few minutes, but the band's songs don't actually have any moments big and cathartic enough to justify those jets, and it almost looked like they were playing arena-rock dress-up. Someone I didn't recognize kept running out to do the screaming on a few tacked-on screamo moments, but those were the only indications that this music had even a tangential relationship to hardcore. They're a band in a different universe right now, but they don't seem quite able to fully occupy that universe. Stump's nasal yowl can get a bit irritating at times, but he's also an authentically powerful rock singer; last night, he even tried out a few little melismatic mini-runs, which totally worked. At times, he looked like he was trying to will his choruses into Journey territory, but Fall Out Boy just don't have the songs for that. Near the end of their set, the band played a snarky-not-snarky cover of "Mr. Brightside," a song from their labelmates and sometime press-feud opponents the Killers. If that cover was intended as some sort of oblique dis, it didn't quite work. "Mr. Brightside" is a better song than virtually anything Fall Out Boy have ever written.

Still, every time I looked over my shoulder, I saw a mob of thirteen-year-old girls absolutely transported with happiness, and I felt sort of like a dick for not feeling the same way. Fall Out Boy may not be arena-ready quite yet, but at least they're fucking trying. What the fuck have you done?

Voice review: Mikael Wood on Fall Out Boy's From Under the Cork Tree

Cam'ron's New Mixtape: Pretty Great

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:50 PM, November 14, 2007

"I pitch China in Boston, like Dice K, that white yay"

I don't know why I even still watch the show, but on Monday's Rap City, in between showing videos, Q45 was doing this thing where he'd walk around Harlem and ask random passersby if they'd seen Cam'ron in Harlem anytime lately. He kept calling Cam "the missing rapper"; it was really annoying. In pretty much any situation, this would be a curious way for Q45 to waste the screen-time he could be using to ask some DJ about his MySpace page, but that Monday show was four days after Cam'ron had released a double-disc mixtape for free on the internet (or in front of the Apollo Theater, if you bothered to show up, which Cam didn't), and it makes absolutely no sense to ask why someone is missing just days after he releases two hours of new music. Public Enemy No. 1 starts out with Cam ranting for six-minutes about bullshit stunts like the one Q45 just pulled, taking time out to bitch about NYPD YouTube surveillance and to bid a fond goodbye to Jim Jones ("Ain't nothing last forever ... Have a great career!"). Cam has definitely been keeping a low profile ever since declaring war on 50 Cent earlier this year, but whether that hiatus was intentional or not, it might turn out to be the best career move he could've made. While virtually every other rapper in the universe (including Jim Jones) has been regaling anyone who'll listen with inside-baseball talk about marketing plans and first-week numbers, Cam has gone off the grid, and in the process he's created a weird cult-leader sense of mystery around himself. Given that Cam is too weird a rapper to maintain any level of pop stardom for any protracted period of time, that mystique fits him beautifully. Since Public Enemy No. 1 is a mixtape rather than an album, since it's totally free of big-name guest-appearances or target demographics or cleared samples or any general sense of coherence, it feels almost like Cam willed the thing into existence. And it doesn't hurt that despite its double-disc bloat, Public Enemy No. 1 is more absorbing than virtually any rap album I've heard lately.

Killa Season, the album Cam put out last year, is generally regarded as his career low-point, but even that album wasn't that bad. "Suck It or Not" remains great either despite or because of its total asshole ignorance, and "I.B.S." is both disarming and disturbing in its candidness. But yeah, the whole formula of Cam rapping borderline-nonsensically over histrionic opera samples and cheap synth-preset beats was getting a little old, especially when no-talent cronies like Max B and 40 Cal were backing him up every other song. Well, Max B is in prison or something now, but 40 Cal is still kicking around, and Public Enemy is totally packed with all the stuff that was getting tired when Cam made Killa Season. And the weird thing is that it suddenly sound great, almost comforting, after Cam's period of absence. It helps that the mixtape's questionable legality allows Cam to rap over some insanely recognizable samples: melodramatic 70s stadium-rock from Journey and (I think) Foreigner, indelible classic reggae from Sister Nancy, depressive soul-rap from Ice Cube and Nas, unjustly forgotten early-00s soundtrack-fare dance-rap from Pastor Troy and Timbaland. "Can't Hurt My Style" has a beat that sounds like an insanely sped-up calliope version of DJ Shadow's "Organ Donor" with big, clumsy drums and a goofy singsong hook. "Fit for the Grind 2" has evil horror-movie pianos and voice-clips of George Bush speeches manipulated so he sounds like he's admitting that he's trained by Al Qaeda. Jones and Juelz Santana are gone, but older Dipset knucleheads like Hell Rell remain, and I'm sort of shocked to find that I actually really like Hell Rell these days, possibly because I may or may not have sold him a coffee table six years ago but also partly because of lines like this: "Standin' on the roof, shootin' off a Uzi / I'm Ruger Ricardo, bitch; I'm looking for a Lucy." Ruger Ricardo! We also get a whole bunch of verses and a couple of solo tracks each from two new proteges, Tom Gist and Penz. Gist and Penz are both at least a little bit better than the average Dipset hooligan because both of them show vulnerability and personality in ways that NY mixtape rappers never, ever allow themselves. On "Kill My Dog," where Gist and Cam get all emo about dead friends over tinkly melodramatic pianos, Gist actually sounds like Cam may have picked him off a Def Poetry Jam audition line. And even if Penz sounds like a D-Block second-stringer as often as not, he also offers a harrowing and shockingly moving a capella freestyle about growing up in foster care. For the first time in a while, the guys who share track space with Cam'ron aren't always reasons to hit fast-forward.

And then there's Cam himself. On Public Enemy No. 1, Cam doesn't offer the same level of batshit-crazy free-associative ontamontapia nonsense that he had on, say, "Get Em Girls," but the virtuosic eloquence of his puffed-up tough-talk is something to behold. Over and over again, he keeps the same rhyme-scheme going for verses at a time. Last week, I gushed about the complex wound-up interpersonal dynamics of "Just Us," an early leaked track and my favorite thing on the mixtape. On most of the tape, though, he talks standard guns-and-money stuff, but he redeems it through sheer articulate weirdness: "Get with me physically, I'll take you out your misery / My bracelet is Times Square, necklace a Christmas tree / The piece you see across the entire state, children / The night version of the Empire State Building." Sometimes he'll ride the same vocal sound so hard that he starts to sound loopy: "Let the shit begin / We get it out, they ship it in / The shipment that they ship is sitting right there on the shit, my friend." (And it doesn't even matter much that he repeats the word ship a billion times since that line comes at the end of a whole sixteen of nothing but stuff that rhymes with "shit begin.") There's a whole lot of pleasure to be had in the total unlikeliness of Cam's grandest boasts: "Cipriani for a fly dinner / Me, Mark Cuban, and the boy Steinbrenner." Cam is, after all, funny as hell, and even the two skits on the first CD are fucking hilarious, "Roaches in the Chicken" in particular. Cam is also one of the very few New York rappers with the vocal flexibility to flow on Southern beats as well as any Southern rapper, something he reminds us of on the group freestyle over Pastor Troy's "Are We Cuttin'." The mixtape is way, way too long, of course, and I start to nod out midway through the second disc when Cam lets Penz carry things for five songs straight, only showing up for one verse. But Public Enemy No. 1 is still an embarrassment of ignorant riches and a pretty great way of declaring his continuing relevance. Cam is still here, and judging by this tape, he's doing just fine; it's not hard to imagine him churning out a couple more of these in the coming months. Maybe someone should tell Q45 to look harder.

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

The Best Thing About Year-End Top Ten Lists

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:54 PM, November 13, 2007

You may never see these guys again

Around this time of year, we music critics get extra weird. The creation of the year-end top-ten list is the sort of thing that keeps critics up at night, and right around now is when we need to obsessively chart our iTunes listens and make impossible decisions: "Can't Tell Me Nothing" or "Stronger"? "Boy Looka Here" or "Let's Get This Paper"? "Innocence" or "Innocence (Simian Mobile Disco Remix)"? Since most of us labor under the delusion that people actually care about what we think, that people will painstakingly scrutinize our top-ten lists and judge us accordingly, these become serious questions. And never mind that we've still got a good month and a half left in the year; if the critic in question happens to write for an outlet that wants his or her top fifty tracks of the year (say, a website like Pitchfork), that stress increases exponentially. This is the time of year where enjoying music starts to become something other than enjoyable. The upside: looking back on the year, we almost always come up with a song or two that we'd totally neglected, songs that snuck up on us and burrowed their way into our frontal lobes, songs whose greatness we're now compelled to acknowledge. A couple of months ago, I podcasted a song called "Stack Paper Up," from the Georgia rap group Born Wit It. I'd downloaded it from Discobelle, a Scandinavian mp3 blog and a surprisingly reliable source of synthetic bangers and hilarious mutations of American slang. I don't know a whole lot about Born Wit It "Stack Paper Up" (which I now realize I've been mistakenly calling "Stack My Paper Up" since I first heard it). Born Wit It's MySpace page offers that he's from the Ellenwood/Decatur area and that he wants to make "everlasting music." There's a non-functional link to an indie label called Riva Road Records and a few thoroughly nondescript songs and virtually zero further information about "Stack Paper Up" or the guys who made it. According to Discobelle, "Stack Paper Up" is a DJ Toomp production, and it features B.O.B., a young Atlanta rapper who's been accumulating some buzz lately. And I'm going to have to go by what Discobelle says, since I haven't seen a word written about this song anywhere else.

The first thing you notice about "Stack Paper Up" is probably the main reason Discobelle posted it in the first place: it makes heavy use of the sampled string-section from the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony," a song I love. Back in 1997, when "Bittersweet Symphony" was inescapable, I can remember feeling profoundly moved just about every time I heard it, even when it was playing in a Nike ad during the closing montage or Cruel Intentions or whatever. When the Verve cancelled their appearance at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert in DC, I was seriously pissed even though I didn't particularly like any of their other songs; I knew I'd be missing out on a peerlessly huge stadium singalong. And when Justin Timberlake's Madison Square Garden show ended with the song blaring over the arena speakers while Timberlake and his band took their bows, it almost felt like a long-deferred promise fulfilled."Bittersweet Symphony" should be a piece of shit, but those surging, straining strings save it, turning a bloated, meaningless dad-rock monstrosity into something devastating. Those strings were, of course, the reason the Verve never made any money from the song. They'd sampled the string section from the Andrew Oldham Orchestra's version of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time," and through some massive lawsuit clusterfuck that I don't quite understand, they had to give up the song's rights and royalties. And so those strings are probably going to insure that "Stack Paper Up" will never see legitimate release. Born Wit It is, after all, a completely unproven rap group, and no sane label is going to shell out the bajillions that the sample would probably cost just so "Stack Paper Up" can hit record-store shelves.

Too bad. I liked "Stack Paper Up" when I first heard it, but it only really became a top-ten contender for me when my brother got ahold of it. He's looking for a job right now, and he told me that the song made him want to find work that would actually pay, convinced him that the shitty bike-messenger job he'd just landed wouldn't be good enough. I can see what he's saying. "Stack Paper Up" is basically nothing more than the "Bittersweet Symphony" strings with big drums and heavily-accented rapping, but those strings give a sort of world-weary dignity to the hunger and pride in the rappers' voices, and the rappers' voices lend the strings a sense of all-consuming urgency. When rap producers use gallingly obvious samples, especially samples of white pop rather than black soul (think Kanye with Daft Punk), there's an element of stunt-casting; part of the thrill is just in the recognition. Occasionally, though, that thrill of recognition blows out into something bigger. Last week, I wrote about Cam'ron's "Just Us," another song that'll make my year-end top ten. "Just Us" uses a sample of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing," and it's about the billionth time Cam'ron has rapped over some instantly recognizable pop detritus; elsewhere on his new mixtape, he also raps over Journey's "Separate Ways" and some Foreigner (I think it's Foreigner) song that I should probably recognize but don't. But "Just Us" is that rare example of a stunt-sample that becomes something else because the new song finds powerful new ways to connect with the sentiment already there in the sample-material. "Stack Paper Up" works the same way. Maybe it'll probably never see proper release, but at least it'll end up on at least one critic's year-end top-ten list.

Live: Jay-Z Makes Up with Lil Wayne, Ordains Jadakiss

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:04 PM, November 12, 2007

Too easy

Jay-Z
Hammerstein Ballroom
November 11, 2007

Last night at Hammerstein, Lil Wayne wanted to clear something up. "Best rapper alive," he said, pointing at Jay-Z. Then, pointing at himself: "Next rapper alive." So maybe that's a direct contradiction of everything Wayne's said on the billions of mixtapes he's released in the last couple of years. And maybe it's a bit weird considering that Wayne didn't rap a single word onstage; instead, he showed up during "Hello Brooklyn 2.0" to do his weird singsongy verse and then seized his brief spotlight moment to wail out the chorus to "Duffle Bag Boy," leading a huge, cathartic mass singalong like this was a Fugazi show or something. But it was still a powerful moment of conciliation, these two guys signaling that they're going to stop tossing darts back and forth at each other, at least for now. Jay loves to use New York shows to make big cultural statements like that one. Granted, this wasn't anything like Jay bringing Nas onstage in New Jersey a couple of years ago. But even if the Jay/Wayne conflict never became public, even if Wayne showed up on American Gangster, I didn't see this thing coming: these two guys onstage together, both looking truly happy to share space. Wayne's appearance was one of last night's two big headline-grab moments. The other one, Jadakiss's big Roc-A-Fella debut, didn't come off nearly as well; Jada and Green Lantern managed to bungle it completely. During "Roc Boys," the last song of the evening, most of Jay's Roc-A-Fella guys walked onstage, Jada quietly joining them. A verse in, Jay stopped the song to announce Jada as the newest member of the crew. But when Green Lantern threw on the "All About the Benjamins" instrumental, Jada wasn't having it. "That's Puff's shit," he said. "Put on one of my joints." What followed was an excruciating, endless pause, Green frantically checking his laptop to see if he had any Jadakiss tracks. Finally, he found one: "The Champ is Here." Jada: "Man, I don't know that song. Why you gotta put me on the spot like that? They don't want that." (I wanted that, but whatever.) After another excruciating pause, after Beanie Sigel actually went behind the DJ tables to help Green Lantern find another Jadakiss track, someone finally decided fuck it and put "Roc Boys" back on. Jada looked miserable.

So: two big moments, only one of which actually came off right. Two non-Roc guests: Wayne and Diddy, who came out for his verse on the "I Get Money" remix. (No 50.) One nostalgic Roc-A-Fella crew-love segment. (Young Chris: still alive! Young Neef: maybe not!) One big announcement: the Jada thing, which just about everyone already knew. No Kanye, for obvious reasons. (Jay dedicated the show to him.) By Jay's hometown-show standards, that's practically a coffeehouse open-mic night performance. Jay's been talking up American Gangster as his art-rap album, despite the major movie tie-in and the buckets of money evident on virtually every second of every track. On his quick weeklong tour, he's been playing clubs rather than arenas; for him, that's the equivalent of a Springsteen acoustic tour or something. In New York, Jay could probably fill up Shea Stadium without too much trouble, but he instead opted for Hammerstein, probably not the best possible choice. Hammerstein's dinky soundsystem doesn't even come close to doing Jay's beats justice, and its harried security detail kept most of the ticket-holding crowd waiting for upwards of an hour on a line that wrapped around the block while ignoring the fights breaking out inside. I'd worried that the show would be dominated by industry-types, but it didn't look that way inside. Instead, the people who made it out to this show were Jay's faithful, the fans with the energy and inclination to hit the refresh button on the Ticketmaster website over and over the minute tickets went on sale. But even when he's working his art-album in front of a crowd of diehards, Jay is a born populist, and so last night's show, like most Jay shows, ended up as a two-hour greatest-hits marathon. And a two-hour Jay-Z greatest-hits marathon in a smallish, jammed-full room is about the best thing you can do with a Sunday night.

After a near-endless Funkmaster Flex DJ set, the show proper started with Jay's fifty-foot shadow projected on a screen-curtain, and just about everything between that curtain going up and Jay leaving the stage after "Roc Boys" melts into an ecstatic blur when I try to remember it. Jay had a 13-piece band with him, the same one that he'd had at the VH1 Storytellers taping. On the newer, lusher tracks, the band had some opportunity to make its presence known; let it be known that multiple drum-solos don't really improve "Show Me What You Got." But on the older songs, the members of the band were mostly just well-dressed props, and it's to Jay's credit that he didn't try to rework "Jigga What Jigga Who" or "PSA" to make room for his horn section. I've basically seen this show before, and I'll probably see it again, but I can't really imagine a time when I'll get tired of it. Jay's iconic status has only sharped his showman's instincts, and he knows how to make every tiny gesture work for him. And he's got an absurdly deep catalog, one that allows him to find hidden segways and slide from one anthem to another with slippery ease. After the "fuck Bush" line on "Blue Magic," his guitarist played a Hendrixian "Star-Spangled Banner" and then launched directly into "99 Problems," which in turn led right into "U Don't Know." And the weird thing is that the whole night felt like that sequence: hardly any downtime, just a head-spinning succession of bangers, artfully arranged to maximize impact and minimize down-time. Part of Jay's genius is that he'll never pull a Lauryn Hill Unplugged move; he's impervious to self-destruction. At least when he's onstage, he knows exactly what his audience wants, and he couldn't hold back from giving it to them even if he wanted to. As much as I love Lil Wayne, I'm not sure he'll ever be able to do a show like the one Jay did last night.

Voice review: Amy Linden on Jay-Z's American Gangster
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

The Blood Brothers Break Up

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:20 PM, November 9, 2007

Everybody needs a little devastation

For two years, I lived three blocks away from the Ottobar, at the time the one club in Baltimore that regularly booked decent touring bands. I went there a lot, often three or four shows a week. Shows in Baltimore are different from shows in New York. People in New York, for the most part, don't go off the way people in Baltimore do. Unless things have changed significantly since I moved away (entirely possible), nobody records Baltimore shows for posterity on digital cameras on notepads. Instead, they bug the fuck out. I've got a sort of greatest-hits reel of visceral Ottobar show-moments in my head: twenty drunk rednecks at a sparsely attended Tuesday-night Avail show taking turns jumping on each other's faces, the spontaneous moshpit that sprung into life the second M.O.P. started doing "Ante Up," Dillinger Four staging a contest to see who could most convincingly dance like a drunk homeless person (I won a T-shirt and a couple of CDs). But I can only remember two shows where the entire packed-in mass of humanity at the Ottobar became a flailing, indistinguishable tornado of limbs for the entire hour-plus the headlining band was onstage. One was a surprise last-second Andrew WK show, and the other was the Blood Brothers. The Blood Brothers, who announced their breakup yesterday and confirmed rumors that had been spreading for a couple of weeks, were a Seattle band who took the basic building blocks of early-00s post-hardcore (jagged slashing guitars, sudden tempo shifts, ecstatically pissed-off vocals) and turned them into a sort of convulsive day-glo sound-collage. The band's two vocalists, Johnny Whitney and Jordan Billie, both roared in incomprehensible cat-screeches, so snotty and nasal that they always sounded like they might be making fun of themselves or each other. If you didn't consult their lyric sheets, you had no idea what they were saying. And if you did consult those lyric sheets, you found delirious strings of non-sequitur images: "There's a man behind bars milking abandoned cars," that sort of thing. But the weird thing about that one Ottobar show I saw was that their audience (mostly high-school hardcore kids) knew all their lyrics and treated all their dizzy smashalongs like absolute anthems, sort of the way I'd done with more linear songs from the likes of the Bouncing Souls or (yeah) Avail a couple of years before. It looked like a lot of fun, causing teenage riots by piling musical and lyrical absurdities on top of each other. But nothing lasts forever.

The Blood Brothers broke up. It feels weird writing that sentence; the name itself denotes an unbreakable lifelong bond. Onstage and on record, the guys in the band always sounded like they were having a blast. In his quick Blood Brothers eulogy yesterday, Idolator's Jess Harvell noted that the band had once told him of their love of Basement Jaxx. You don't have to look too hard to find parallels between those two groups. The building blocks might be totally different (Gravity Records hardcore vs. lush, euphoric disco-house), but at their best, both groups gave the sense that everything was happening all at once, that every song came packed with enough melodic ideas to fuel an entire album. Neither group had the inclination to separate all those ideas out into their component parts, so both of them just smushed all of them together into chaotic messes. The Blood Brothers' melodic hooks were thrashy and obscure, and they popped up in truly unlikely places. But the hooks are there, which is probably what convinced V2 to make them one of the most unlikely major-label signings of the past decade. Those hooks are probably also what convinced Ross Robinson, the onetime Korn/Limp Bizkit impresario, to produce their 2003 album Burn Piano Island, Burn, their major-label debut. Robinson is, unfortunately, a really shitty producer, and he's ultimately responsible for that album's unconscionable sound: super-compressed high-contrast mud. 2004's Crimes, on the other hand, remains my favorite of theirs, the album where they finally slowed their attack down enough to let their hooks shine through relatively unmolested. Listening to it today, I actually feel sort of drunk. It's hard to tell where one song ends and another begins without constantly checking my iTunes, and its clanging, clashing melodic elements surge up against each other so quickly and violently that the mind races to keep up. If you're not in the right mood, it can feel like landmines going off in your skull, which is why you should basically never listen to it on a crowded city bus. In the right setting, though, those unpredictable adrenaline-spikes can be furiously exciting.

I have no idea why the Blood Brothers decided to break up. The notice that the group posted on their website offers only that "we feel it's best that our futures move forward on separate paths," which could mean any number of things. Those of us who have never toured the country in a cramped van for years at a time can only imagine the sort of mental strain it involves. And by all accounts, it's not easy to be a low-selling, experimental musician with a major-label contract. Most of the former Blood Brothers had side-projects going anyway, and maybe they were just sick of playing the same songs over and over again. Still, I'm awfully tempted to blame the creeping Sufjanization that we've seen over the past couple of years. It's not an across-the-board thing, of course, but the dominant voice-tone in underground rock music isn't the strangulated scream anymore; it's the contented sigh. Hardcore, meanwhile, has further polarized itself into grunting tough-guy fare and eyelinered-up MySpace emo, a process that was already well underway when the Blood Brothers were at their peak. Bands that don't spoon-feed us their pleasures seem to be having a harder time of it, and most of us are part of the problem. Last year, the Blood Brothers released their final album, Young Machetes. I barely noticed. Listening today, it sounds sort of great, and I feel like an asshole for not paying enough attention.

Voice review: Amy Phillips on the Blood Brothers' Burn Piano Island, Burn
Voice review: Nick Catucci on the Blood Brothers' March on Electric Children

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 12

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:04 PM, November 8, 2007

Hopefully this HTML comes up OK. I had a tough time coming up with four good songs this week, but I've got them. Right-click to download the podcast. Songs this week:

• Cam'ron: "Just Us"
• Saigon: "Don't You Baby Remix [feat. Jay-Z]"
• Durrty Goodz: "The Weather Man"
• Britney Spears: "Heaven on Earth"

The CMAs: A Running Diary

Posted by Tom Breihan at 12:59 PM, November 8, 2007

I came to bring the pain

I missed VH1's Hip-Hop Honors because I was on honeymoon and BET's Hip-Hop Awards because of CMJ, but the awards season is just now kicking into gear, and the running diary lives on. I've had a sort of extra fascination with the CMAs, country's big prestige award show, ever since it came to New York two years ago and I watched from a backstage bunker at Madison Square Garden. Once again, the show is back in Nashville, where it belongs, and once again it's way too long

8:00: Rascal Flatts predictably enough get the show-opener pole position. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate these smug fuckers? "Still Feels Good," their new single, is total inoffensive midtempo fluff, only really country by dint of its semi-prominent fiddles and banjo, and I think maybe I just hate it because it reminds me so much of the Eagles and because of Gary LeVox's sinus-clogged squeak of a voice. It's nice to see someone keeping the Janet Jackson headset-mic alive, anyway. At the end of the song, the big TV screens behind them run a quick montage of old CMA moments, and it just serves to reinforce how little these tools sound like Porter Wagoner or Willie Nelson. The assembly-line is still alive and well, but it really has changed.

8:05: Whoa, no host this year! Weird. I'd definitely imagined that Brooks & Dunn would still be doing this thing long after I was dead. Instead, some chump from Desperate Housewives is out to kick off the festivities. He immediately endears himself to me by introducing Miranda Lambert, probably the single best reason to watch this year's show.

8:07: They've got Lambert rocking a sparkly dress, and the cameras seem to be studiously avoiding her bass player's mohawk. Doesn't matter. "Gunpowder & Lead" is such a badass song, and the way Lambert scrunches her face up on the chorus is probably the best thing I'll see tonight. A perfect example of why the Nashville assembly line still works.

8:08: It's sort of simultaneously endearing and pathetic the way the Nashville establishment will embrace any mainstream musician who deigns to recognize its existence. That explains Sheryl Crow, a country beneficiary for the past couple of years, coming out to present Single of the Year. Carrie Underwood wins for "Before He Cheats," the first real pop-radio crossover country has had since Shania Twain was hitting her peak and probably my favorite of the nominated songs. (Fuck "Ticks.") For maybe the first time in her career, Underwood manages to accept an award without exploding into tears. After seeing her radiating gratitude through the TV so many times, it's almost a disappointment.

8:15: The Desperate Housewives guy is back again, but he's no longer introducing Miranda Lambert, so I have no further use for him. Instead, it's leathery George Strait's old-school Nashville orchestra, here to dispense dignified deadpan hooks pretty well despite showing absolutely no immediacy or life. It's OK.

8:20: Once again, Montgomery Gentry don't get to perform, but they do get to hand out Song of the Year, so that's something. Eddie and Troy look like they've been hitting the buffet line a little hard this year, and Eddie looks like maybe he stole his skull T-shirt from the Shop Boyz and his blindingly white rhinestone shirt from, um, someone who wears blindingly white rhinestone shirts. They're quite a sight. George Strait's "Give It Away" wins this one, and it's always fun to watch the anonymous pro songwriters get the spotlight for like two minutes, sort of like watching someone win an Oscar for Best Sound Editing.

8:24: I really like Taylor Swift, but whenever she's on TV she's got these weird dead fish-eyes and these awkward staccato movements, both of which have to be huge liabilities for a prospective country star, even one who comes out of a huge flower-looking rig and who plays a glitter-covered guitar. Also, her guitarist is all dressed up in stereotypical Sunset Strip glam-rock gear; he looks like an alien up there. This makes for an absolutely absorbing three minutes of TV. Good song, too!

8:32: Sara Evans, who I guess is replacing the Desperate Housewives guy, introduces Brad Paisley. Paisley manages to come off all aw-shucks humble and normal even when a marching band is playing his song's intro and Taylor Swift and Kellie Pickler are awkwardly dancing up on him. Ladies, please! He's married to the chick from Father of the Bride! "Online," it must be said, sounds a whole lot better when that unbelievably obnoxious George Costanza video isn't attached to it.

8:38: Alison Krauss is here to provide prestige-cred. She's got an amazing voice and everything, but Jesus, how boring. Robert Plant is nowhere in sight, unfortunately.

8:46: Big & Rich might be putting out dogshit records these days, but they sure do know how to wipe away any sanctimony residue Alison Krauss might've left: fur coats, flying Vs, backup dancers. Within five years, they're going to be the best act in Vegas. They dedicate "Loud" to Porter Wagoner and call him "the king of bling," which is equal parts stupid and hilarious. Too bad "Loud" is pretty much their worst single ever; they should've just gone all in and done the Lil Jon remix.

8:49: Three random-ass one-hit-wonder male country singers, one of whom looks like the wrestler Edge and all of whom look like dipshits, present Vocal Group of the Year, and Rascal Flatts surprise absolutely no one by winning. Little Big Town might want to consider hiring a hit man; it's the only way they're ever getting that thing.

8:53: Rodney Atkins sure works his everyman schtick hard; it's kind of nice to see a musician onstage wearing a trucker hat for pandering purposes rather than ironic ones. I like this guy, but "These Are My People," the would-be smalltown anthem he does here, is no "If You're Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows)."

8:59: ABC synergy at work: it's the chick from Pushing Daisies! She introduces Carrie Underwood, who brings a massive string section and blows the shit out. The power-ballad will never die.

9:04: Vince Gill, introducing the motherfucking Eagles, calls them "the blueprint of what country-rock is all about." Urgh. Remember when Nashville was going all nuts for whatever zero-original-members version of Lynyrd Skynyrd was kicking around? I liked that better. The reunited Eagles sound a lot like the old Eagles, which is to say so boring and joyless that I'm amazed they're actually alive.

9:13: Brooks & Dunn might not get to host again this year, but they do get to kick out another pious and sentimental song about God. This one is about people going through rough times, thinking God is too busy for them, and then realizing he hears their prayers after all. I have a massive weakness for this stuff.

9:18: Jason Aldean does "Johnny Cash," a song which sounds nothing like Johnny Cash but which absolutely fucking rules nonetheless. Thus far, this show is doing a pretty good job balancing the boring out with the not-boring.

9:21: Jewel and her rodeo-guy boyfriend/Nashville pass come out to present Vocal Duo of the Year. If the Wreckers win, we'll be greeted with the alternate-universe Lilith-Fair spectacle of Jewel handing a CMA award to Michelle Branch. The Wreckers, of course, don't win. But! Sugarland get the award, finally ending the bazillion-year Brooks & Dunn reign of terror, or at least interrupting it. They seem shocked.

9:29: Dwight Yoakam, wearing some truly regrettable leather pants, announces Sugarland's victory-lap performance. They do "Stay" all bare-bones and acoustic, and it's really good even if they don't let the clearly audible organ-player onstage. Jennifer Nettles's facial expressions are crazy; she's like the country Mary J. Blige or something.

9:34: You can tell Dwight Yoakam's about to start talking about Porter Wagoner because he's wearing an ass-ugly rhinestoned jacked to match his ass-ugly leather pants. He also gives Album of the Year to George Strait, who seems happy but not remotely surprised.

9:43: LeAnn Rimes, looking weirder every day, introduces Martina McBride, now in semi-casual story-song mode rather than formal-wear power-ballad mode. I'm pretty sure McBride's gospel-choir backup singers are the first non-white people onstage all night, and it's to McBride's credit that she doesn't make that move look any more forced than, say, Alicia Keys would at the Grammys or whatever.

9:49: These days, Keith Urban has been bothering less and less to dress his lite-rock up as country. I can't believe I'm skipping Gossip Girl for this shit.

9:54: Carrie Underwood presents the Horizon Award, which is sort of like a Best New Artist award except you can be nominated for it multiple times for some reason. Taylor Swift wins, and she's weirdly taller than Underwood, something I wouldn't expect. Swift totally falls apart Underwood-style.

10:02: Reba McIntire and LeAnn Rimes sing a duet. This show could really stand to lose an hour, huh?

10:06: Little Big Town do us a massive favor, skipping their kinda-meh new single to do "Boondocks." This song is like two years old now, and it still bangs.

10:09: Dierks Bentley is wearing a black velvet suit and a chain-wallet. Country fashion is just mind-boggling. Carrie Underwood wins Female Vocalist of the Year, once again screwing Miranda Lambert out of an award she deserved. This can't keep happening. Underwood loses it, finally. If she's still winning awards in fifty years, she's still totally going to scream, "You guys!" and start crying.

10:12: It's the annual Hall of Fame segment, this time a whole lot shorter than usual. At this rate, the CMAs are going to be taping all the performances in hotel suites next year. Hey, Vince Gill made it in this year! Mazel tov, Vince Gill!

10:18: Brad Paisley's wife introduces Kenny Chesney? Uh, that makes sense, I guess. Chesney does "Don't Blink," which is about as good a melodramatic inspirational ballad as you could ask for.

10:23: Josh Turner brings the old-school formalist rockabilly, which is fine with me if he keeps doing great little novelty-jams like "Firecracker."

10:33: "I Wonder," Kellie Pickler's big why'd-mom-leave tearjerker, just kills me. Apparently it just kill her too; she barely manages to make it to the end of the song before collapsing into tears. See, this sort of display of nakedly cliched and sentimental emotion is exactly the sort of thing Nashville was built for, and it's why country will still stand strong long after the rest of the music business crumbles completely. This show is going a little nuts with all the showstopping ballads, but right now I'm not mad.

10:37: Someone should tell Kid Rock that the Gumby haircut is cool again. He and Gretchen Wilson give Male Vocalist of the Year to Brad Paisley, who's been nominated for this award and lost it way too many times.

10:46: Jamie Foxx and Gary LeVox from Rascal Flatts used to be roommates? That's what Brad Paisley's wife just said by way of introducing their duet. I bet Foxx was a total asshole about doing the dishes. Here, he makes a pretty good case that he should just sing all Rascal Flatts' songs for them. When LeVox tries to trade vocal runs with Foxx at the end of the song, he sounds like a joke.

10:55: Entertainer of the Year time. It's kind of fucked up how Carrie Underwood is quickly becoming one of Nashville's main meal tickets but she still can't even get nominated for this show's biggest award. Kenny Chesney wins again. Whatever.

Britney Spears, Almost Triumphant

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:52 PM, November 7, 2007

La la la la la la la la

Thanks to some weird backroom machinations, Britney Spears does not have the number one album in the country. And that's fine; she shouldn't. Long Road Out of Eden, the new album from the reunited Eagles, sold more than twice as many albums as Blackout, the new Britney thing. Not too surprising: Britney has obviously been on a massively public self-destruction rampage over the last couple of years, with pundit after pundit declaiming about how she'll never be able to recover a shred of the stardom she once enjoyed, while the Eagles still have the best-selling album in history; their reunion is a big deal, despite the incontestable fact that they suck. (I have this theory that "Hotel California" is the worst song in the history of the universe. I hatched this theory during freshman year of college, when my roommate was trying to teach himself to play guitar by listening to the "Hotel California" mp3 over and over again and playing guitar along with it. He tried the same thing with "Tears in Heaven," the second-shittiest song in the history of the universe.) Despite the massive disparity in their final sales-tallies, Britney briefly held the top spot because of some arcane Billboard rule that prevented the magazine from charting any album that was sold exclusively at one retail outlet. (You can only buy Long Road Out of Eden at Wal-Mart, and that album's astronomical numbers, 711,000 sold, is another chilling testimony to that chain's power.) Billboard changed its rules at the last second to account for the Eagles' victory, and Britney's failure to top the album charts on anything other than a technicality will probably be seen as the latest in an endless procession of public embarrassments. But Blackout isn't the bomb that slavering tabloid-news shows the world over will almost certainly depict it as. The album sold nearly 300,000 copies in its first week, an impressive number coming from such a pilloried figure. And even if some of those sales did come from the car-crash appeal of its creator, at least a few of them must've come because it's a pretty good album, one that might even yield more than one big single.

At this point, it'd be overkill to even begin to recount Britney's string of misdeeds, but one of the really refreshing things about Blackout is the way it plays around with her trainwreck turboskank image without ever falling back on it. At the beginning of "Piece of Me," she purrs, "I'm Miss American Dream since I was 17," which, you have to give her, is an awfully weird thing to be. Very few people have become as famous as young as Britney Spears without completely falling apart somewhere down the line. But the funny thing about "Piece of Me" is how simultaneously defiant and happy she sounds about the whole turbulent circus she inhabits. It's there, too, on the way she squeaks "center of attention," on the sleek, layered single "Gimme More," as if that position was something to aspire to, not something to dread. On the other hand, her Kevin Federline kiss-off "Why Should I Feel Sad?" is forlorn and tentative where it could be vengeful. But Blackout isn't an album about the inner life of Britney Spears, though I can't think of a single artist more deserving of the cliched "Leave Me Alone" sentiment since Michael Jackson sang it. I always thought it was weird that the first singles from Britney-wannabe pop chicks like Lindsey Lohan and Brooke Hogan were all about how the paparazzi should stop following them when, at the time the songs came out, neither one really merited a whole lot of paparazzi attention and even though most of their intended audience would probably regard the whole paparazzi thing as a good problem, not one deserving of sympathy. It would make a whole lot of sense for Britney to go down that road here, but Blackout is mostly an album about dancing and fucking, and at its best (the first half, basically) it actually does a pretty good job conveying the joy that ideally comes with both activities. "Heaven on Earth," my favorite song on the album, is a full-blown no-joke love-song, one that opens up into the sort of dizzy sunstruck chorus that I've never heard Britney convincingly pull off before.

Writing about Blackout, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote that the album works because Britney had the money and the taste to bring in a dream-team of collaborators, but that doesn't quite seem to be the case either. Most of Britney's collaborators here (Danja, Bloodshy & Avant) aren't quite A-list; if her label wanted to ensure massive success, it might've sprung for Timbaland and Akon instead. T-Pain and Pharrell both pop up, but most of them are there in service of god-awful tracks near the back of the album. Assigning credit on an album like this one can be a dicey business, but the tracks here are mostly streamlined Euroclub dance-tracks that fit Britney's icy monotone a whole lot better, for my money, than the precise Max Martin teenpop that made her famous in the first place. Tracks like these need serious hooks to work, but as often as not the hooks are there. Things only really get out of hand on the second half, when the hooks disappear and Britney tries out when Britney tries out a couple of ill-advised vocal tricks, like operatic wailing or stilted rapping. The godawful rapping, as much as the glossy dance-pop, reminds me of the self-titled album that the internet-beloved Swedish pop singer Robyn released a while back. Maybe not coincidentally, Robyn shows up as a backing vocalist here, and it'd be fun to credit her with some of the album's triumphant moments as well as the rapping. But then, we don't really know much of anything about the creation of Blackout; it's practically the only thing mysterious left in Britney Spears's life. Blackout probably shouldn't exist, and it certainly shouldn't be any good. The Eagles might have blown her out of the water commercially, but Britney Spears should still hold her head high.

Voice review: Theon Weber on Britney Spears's Blackout
Voice review: Sterling Clover on Britney Spears's In the Zone
Voice review: Irin Carmon & Amy Phillips on Britney Spears's Britney
Voice review: Metal Mike Saunders on Britney Spears's Oops! I Did It Again

Lupe Fiasco's Self-Defeating Tendencies

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:30 PM, November 6, 2007

Pimp tight!

The hilariously overblown Fiascogate story broke when I was on honeymoon, blessedly if temporarily free of the internet. When I got back, I was amazed at how the whole Fiascogate mess had found itself so much burn while something like Prodigy's long-ass prison sentence practically became a footnote. So Lupe flubbed a couple of lines during the Tribe Called Quest tribute segment at VH1's Hip-Hop Honors show, and then he got all defensive and aggro on the internet, none of which is particularly shocking. In an admirably perverse if confoundingly dumb canon-smashing move, Lupe said that 8Ball & MJG were better than a Tribe Called Quest. Shockingly enough, I don't agree with him there, though he might've convinced me to side with him if he'd brought up UGK or Goodie Mob instead. I understand what Lupe was trying to do; charitably, he wanted to argue for the worth of music that self-righteous gatekeeper types hadn't already enshrined. In the process, though, Lupe managed to make himself look like even more of a self-aggrandizing ass than the internet strawmen he was trying to attack. A little while before the whole Hip-Hop Honors kerfuffle, I'd asked Q-Tip about Lupe's claims that he didn't listen to Tribe, and one thing that didn't come across in my interview was the long, uncomfortable pause that settled over the room as soon as I brought up Lupe's name. Before Q-Tip could muster up some conciliatory words, he leaned back in his chair, pointed at a giant Lupe poster on the office wall behind him, and giggled. Given the tension that apparently existed between these guys long before the show, it's puzzling that Lupe would've even shown up in the first place to fete a group he doesn't like that much. It makes sense that Lupe wouldn't be too happy to be railroaded into the backpack-rap clique, but he's not going to do anything but alienate his own audience when, in trying to make himself look like less of a fuckup, he fires unprovoked bile at one of his audience's favorite groups; it's not like he managed to switch out the Tribe audience for the Ball & G one. Now Lupe finds himself in the bizarre position of having to sell his music to an audience he bitched at less than a month ago.

Lupe Fiasco is a genuinely great rapper. He crams his verses with enough freeform imagery that his tracks take multiple listens to unpack, and he delivers that imagery in a casual, conversational chirp that always sticks pleasantly to the beat. But as much as I liked his debut Food & Liquor at first, I haven't listened to it in months, and its problems (weak hooks, leaden beats, a general lack of comfort with ideas about song-structure) are all over the two songs I've heard from The Cool, his fourth-quarter sequel. "Dumb it Down," the first single, has a nice atmospheric synth-glide of a beat, but his extended metaphors float off into such indecipherable silliness that before the second verse ends he's talking about "flying on Pegasus while you flying on a pheasant." The pseudo-satirical chorus, all about how everyone keeps telling him to water down his ideas, is exactly the sort of self-important bullshit that always irks the fuck out of me. "Superstar," the other new one, has a beat I couldn't pick out of a lineup and an unbelievably lame and goopy lounge-singer hook from nobody Matthew Santos. It's worth noting that Lupe sounds really great when he's actually rapping on both of those songs, even if I have basically no idea what he's talking about, but the two songs just aren't strong enough to support Lupe's voice. 50 Cent loves to say that Lil Wayne is a good rapper who can't make good songs, but that charge is a whole lot more true of someone like Lupe than it is of Wayne, who actually has a pretty strong back-catalogue of singles. Lupe remains sadly attached to longtime cronies like Santos and Soundtrakk, who produced both tracks, when he really should be looking for collaborators who know how to get the best out of him. All the fluid verbal gymnastics in the world don't mean a thing if they don't come attached to songs that work.

The videos for "Dumb It Down" and "Superstar" don't help anything. "Dumb It Down" got an unbelievably cheap YouTube video that somehow served to make the song even more annoying. But "Superstar" went bigger. Hype Williams directed the video, which hit the internet today. Since Williams came out of semi-retirement, he's completely sidelined the weirdo imagery and quick-cut pyrotechnics that once distinguished him, instead going for a slow, gleaming aesthetic that shares more with, say, Stephane Sednaoui than it does with, say, Dave Meyers. Maybe the "Superstar" video will benefit from being seen on an actual TV rather than a computer screen, as the videos for "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Blue Magic" do, but right now it looks like one of Williams' weakest. In the video, Lupe falls asleep (the first thirty seconds or so are silent) and dreams of what it would be like to famous, giving Williams opportunity to give a dreamlike impressionistic collage of simulated red-carpet moments. In Williams' new world, everything moves glacially and reflects waves of light; his pictures are awfully pretty, but this sort of thing can get boring fast, and he doesn't push it anywhere. "Dumb It Down" and "Superstar" had basically no chance of becoming hits anyway, but these videos basically ruin whatever shot they had.

Look, I'm rooting for Lupe. He's got a great voice and a lot of interesting ideas, but he doesn't always seem to know how to use those ideas, and he could use some organizational help. For my money, the best thing that he's done since Food & Liquor is "Us Placers," the song he did with Kanye West and Pharrell over a gorgeously luminescent sample of Thom Yorke's "The Eraser." Those three share a whole lot aesthetically, and they sound deeply comfortable trading verses over ethereal IDM. All of them indulge their most pretentious impulses, but they all somehow keep each other in check in the process. But "Us Placers" was just a mixtape track. Lupe has said that the three of them have a supergroup called CRS together and that they'll be recording an album, but I'll believe that when either Kanye or Pharrell confirms it. I hope it does happen; Lupe has a whole lot to gain from working with people who know how to use him.

Voice review: Corin Fleming on Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor

Cam'ron's Best Song in Years

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:26 PM, November 5, 2007

Hold on to that feeling

Journey released "Don't Stop Believing" in 1981, when I was two years old, and the song has had such a weird cultural omnipresence throughout pretty much my entire life that once I got around to realizing how great the thing was it'd taken on so many weird subconscious memory-associations that I felt weirdly bound to it forever. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment where I started loving it: the scene in Monster where Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, both uglied up for their roles, find a totally unexpected and temporary and ill-fated moment of happiness with each other, staring into each other's eyes at a roller-disco. When that opening dreamlike piano-riff came in, I got this immediate flashback to hundreds of half-remembered doctor's-office visits and long car trips. "Don't Stop Believing" (like "Lights" and "Faithfully" and a whole lot of other Journey songs) is exactly the sort of song that can easily spend years as a constant background thrum, especially if it's been an AOR-radio staple for most of your life, but that suddenly takes on this huge emotional weight the second you let it in. Earlier this year, the song took on new associations when it was used during the final scene of the final episode of The Sopranos, cutting off suddenly and abruptly during a tense and unresolved diner scene. Given how that scene made for one of the definitive cultural moments of the decade so far, "Don't Stop Believing" should by rights absorb some of that scene's lived-in paranoia, but the moment from the episode I think of when I hear the song now is when Carmela walks into the diner and smiles at Tony. The scene makes abundantly clear that Tony will never know peace again for more than a second, but he gets a second of it when she walks in and the song starts playing, and it ties in with that sort of doomed and fleeting but all-encompassing happiness that it had in that scene from Monster. When I got married last month, Bridget and I wanted "Don't Stop Believing" to be the last song the DJ played; we had this image in mind of all our friends signing along as the night was ending. It didn't happen; police shut the wedding down, and so the last song ended up being "Into the Groove" or "Hot in Herre" or something, which is fine. But my mental image of "Don't Stop Believing" playing at the wedding remains completely real to me, almost as though it actually did happen.

So Cam'ron has this new double-CD mixtape coming out in a couple of days; it'll be the first thing we've heard from him since he maybe sort of went to hiding during simultaneous feuds with 50 Cent and Roc-A-Fella hired muscle Tru Life earlier this year. "Just Us" is one of the two songs from that mixtape that Cam has leaked, and it's built from that opening "Don't Stop Believing" piano-riff. Cam loves filling out mixtapes with great songs made from super-obvious and financially unfeasible samples, like that one track where he rapped over Prince's "Diamonds and Pearls." He never got to officially release that one, and he probably won't officially release "Just Us" either, though it doesn't much matter. "Just Us" is probably too weird and oblique to be a big hit anyway, and so it's probably just now actualizing its potential as a widely-circulated mixtape track. Still, "Just Us" is probably my favorite Cam'ron song since, I don't know, "Killa Cam." On the first verse, Cam tells a story: he meets a woman and finds an unexpected moment of basic human connection. It starts out with a total cheesed-out pickup line, one you actually can imagine a goofball like Cam trying and scoring with: "She said she hate a pusher / I said I hate a booger / A snotty attitude." A few moments later, though, they're smoking weed together and she's telling him all her problems: got laid off, father dead, mother with breast cancer, son with sickle-cell. And it reminds me of that moment from Monster, that moment where two damaged people find each other: "Under this damn pressure / She looked at me, I looked at her, and then Cam measured." And then the punchline: "Started to sanchez her." (Later, he clarifies: "Yes, the dirty one.") But the story that came before is too heavy to just be the setup for some nasty shit-sex joke, and Cam knows it; he's just the type of guy who can't resist leavening the mood with a nasty shit-sex joke. The chorus to "Just Us," which Cam sort of sings, is genuinely pretty. I have no idea what some of the stuff Cam says on the second verse means: "Once the grape get dry, hope y'all enjoy the raisin"? But even there, even as he's bragging about being a candle because he's sitting on cake, he's talking with real sympathy about the problems of the girls he knows: "Tanya living check-to-check / Kim getting high, no self-respect."

Cam is a funny guy. "Glitter," his other new song, is about a two-year-old asking why he's all covered in glittery jewelry, and Cam can't resist pointing out on the chorus that the kid's diaper is "filled up with shit." (Cam likes talking about shit.) In the lead-up to the new mixtape, he's been making a lot of fun of all the rampant speculation about his silent period. But in this interview with Miss Info, Cam reveals the real reason he's disappeared for half the year: his mother, in Florida, had a stroke, and he's been taking care of her and making sure she's OK. Maybe it's completely wrong to be looking for parallels between someone's real life and his music in situations like this, but i like to think there's a sort of compassionate streak running through "Just Us," despite all the dirty sanchez jokes, and that that compassionate streak is the same thing that makes Cam quit rap for six months to take care of his mother even though that hiatus makes him look weak and afraid. Writing about "Just Us," Brandon Soderberg mentions that maybe the Journey sample plugs into the Sopranos connection: "the image of a getting a little older, made too many mistakes, sorta paranoid Tony Soprano would certainly resonate with Cam." Maybe he's right. But I think "Just Us" works so well because it plays on the desperate romanticism of "Don't Stop Believing," that same quality that the Monster scene tapped into. "Just Us" isn't black superhero music. Cam's made superhero music before, but "Just Us" is something more grounded and pointed and maybe more necessary. If there's more of that on Public Enemy No. 1, I'm more than willing to just pretend Killa Season and "Curtis" never happened.

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

Project Pat: Scarier Than Ever

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:51 PM, November 2, 2007

Tattoo misspellings are the worst

It doesn't even come close to excusing crimes that, if true, are practically inexcusable, but the most interesting commentary about T.I.'s recent arrest for buying machine-guns comes from this Allhiphop interview with Project Pat. Starting in 2001, Pat served four years in federal prison on charges nearly identical to the ones that T.I. will likely be facing, and when Allhiphop writer Carla Aaron-Lopez asked him about those charges, he had this to say: "This real talk, the drug dealers and killers could be riding down the street and they could be signing autographs. They got the fan-base in my city. To a dude that’s coming from that, old habits are hard to break. You just gotta be smart, man. The robber got the gun to your back and the police got they gun to your face ... And a lot of people don’t understand, they say, 'He could’ve did this and did that,' but believe you and me; I was in the same situation. I had bodyguards and all that but at the same time, my mind was, 'Can’t nobody protect me like me.'" I'm not on board with Pat's logic; there's a lot of room between fearing for your personal safety and sending your bodyguard to buy you unlicensed machine-guns and silencers. Still, that interview makes for a revealing glimpse into the worldview that went into the creation of Walkin' Bank Roll, Pat's great and terrifying new album. In that interview, Pat goes on to suggest that T.I. or anyone else facing conviction "give God a try" and "turn your life over to Christ." But the only track on Walkin' Bank Roll that even mentions God is "Motivated," which starts with a similar plea to put God first but which gives way to vivid, graphic death-threats within minutes.

Walkin' Bank Roll is the second album Pat has released since leaving prison in 2005. The last one, Crook By Da Book, was released deep into the fourth quarter of 2006, and it got lost in the avalanche of rap records that came out around then. Pat is a longtime Three 6 Mafia associate (Juicy J is his brother), but Crook By Da Book made for maybe the most downbeat and depressed album that DJ Paul and Juicy J ever produced. The album found Pat deep in a hungover post-prison funk, and Paul and Juicy's beats made heavy use of the organic Memphis-soul phase they were going through at the time. If anything, Walkin' Bank Roll sounds even heavier and darker. Kelefa Sanneh has reported that Paul and Juicy used a studio band in recording it, and every once in a while, we'll hear moaning rock-guitars or tinkling Fender Rhodes cutting through all the eerie synths. But the album sounds different mostly because Paul and Juicy have thickened their churning, atmospheric beats. Rather than going for the simplistic horror-movie keyboard-riffs they've long used, they layer up softer sounds: gasping choral vocals, church-bells, heaving strings. Some of these tracks sound so dark that they practically suck all the air out of a room; "Powder," for instance, has the eeriest beat they've done in years. On that song, Pat raps about sticking people up while high on coke, which makes for some terrifying images: "Take a pause for a minute, heart beating through my chest / Simple robbery can turn into a true bloody mess." Drugs figure heavily on the album; elsewhere, Pat talks about driving around popping ecstasy pills or spraying embalming fluid on his weed, and his vocals throughout the album seem to come through a drug-induced fog. And there's some serious depressing nastiness on display here; on "Talkin' Smart," for instance, Pat and guest asshole Pimp C take turns dressing down "a smart-mouthed freak with a mouthful of cum." But the scariest, heaviest thing about Walkin' Bank Roll isn't the stuff Pat says; it's the obvious delight he takes in saying it.

See, Pat is funny. On what I saw of Three 6 Mafia's regrettable fake reality show Adventures in Hollyhood, which I could bear to watch for more than a few episodes, Pat plays a withdrawn but willing participant in his associates' buffoonery. But his own sense of humor is a lot sneakier. On "Bull Frog Yay," for instance, Pat brags about the purity of the cocaine he's supposedly selling, in the process painting a picture of a decayed, dystopian American city where dealers take turns robbing each other and putting bullets through each other's windshields. But he keeps interrupting all the nihilism to yell "ribbit!" every couple of seconds, which is fucking hysterical. And his delivery is one of the straight-up goofiest in Southern rap. Rather than simply riding beats, he slides his voice around them; unpredictably shifting between a singsong low register and a squeaky high-pitched yip. He sounds like a cartoon character, and he loves the sound of his own voice. The haze of regret that hung over Crook By Da Book is all but gone now, and he sounds almost giggly when he's telling his graphically descriptive tales of bloodshed: "Nine-millimeter heater cracked his skull like a watermelon / Naked in his blood, duct-taped on the floor I left him." (The way Pat enunciates, "watermelon" really does rhyme with "floor I left him.") There's something deeply chilling and darkly compelling about someone so cheerful in his blatant disregard for human life. I'd like to dismiss all the heavy stuff on Walkin' Bank Roll as empty horror-movie posturing, but the album doesn't let us off that easily. It's one of those troubling works that implicates as it engages.

Guitar Hero III: Better Than Nas

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:19 PM, November 1, 2007

T-t-totally dude!

I suck at Guitar Hero. It's OK; I've come to peace with it. I suck at video games in general. There's a difference, though. Most video games rely on video game logic; you have to look for the hidden door or the boss's weak spot or whatever, and if you didn't play countless hours of video games growing up (like, say, if your parents quite understandably thought you'd get sucked in completely and thus banned Genesis from the house), you'll either have to endure about a million maddeningly repetitive repeat-attempts or you'll ask a friend who's good at them to get past certain parts for you. The Guitar Hero games, on the other hand, rely on musical logic, on melody and rhythm. There have been music-based video-games like Dance Dance Revolution in the past, but I haven't really fucked with them. Guitar Hero is impossible not to fuck with. Rob Harvilla, my editor, once called it one of the greatest consumer-electronics breakthroughs of the last few years, right up there with the iPod. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I definitely bought Guitar Hero III the day it came out, so maybe that makes it my iPhone. Because of some video-game-industry mergers that I don't quite understand, Guitar Hero III was made by a different set of developers than the previous games, but I wasn't able to detect much of a difference. Maybe that's because I haven't bothered with most of the game's new features. I'm not on Xbox Live because I don't need any more wires in my apartment, so I haven't played online or bought extra songs from the website. And I didn't buy the new guitar-controller because it sort of sucked when I tried it in GameStop. So other than slighly niftier graphics and a few new features (fucking impossible guitar-duels being first among them), Guitar Hero III is basically just Guitar Hero 2 with a bunch of new songs, which means it's exactly what I wanted.

For music-obsessed nonmusicians like me, the appeal of the Guitar Hero games isn't the chance to act out rockstar fantasies (though that part is fun); it's the chance to figure out in really immediate ways how certain songs work. You develop a certain new respect for, say, Mountain when you can see up close how the riffs in "Mississippi Queen" keep restlessly shifting and coming back in altered forms. My brother, who plays guitar, insists that actual guitar experience isn't much of an advantage in playing Guitar Hero, though he's a whole lot better at the fucking game than I am. And I'd certainly like to believe that my overall suckiness at the game has more to do with my inability to push buttons really quickly than my inability to grasp musical logic. Still, playing a song on Guitar Hero is a whole lot different from passively listening to it. Listening to a song, you can get carried away by all sorts of distractions: lyrics, the musicians' personas, whatever you might be doing while you're listening to the song. Playing Guitar Hero, those distractions are pretty much entirely removed. A song becomes a series of dots, and you aren't judging it; it's judging you. About half the songs in the game come from the original master-recordings or from brand-new replayed versions that the musicians have done specifically for the game. The others come from session-musician cover-bands, and that's the sort of thing that would drive me nuts if I was passively listening to the music. Playing the game, though, I barely ever notice.

The songs I enjoy playing the most on the Guitar Hero games are the ones I can do intuitively, mostly through repeated and prolonged middle- and high-school exposure: "Bulls on Parade," "Kool Thing," "My Name is Jonas," "Cherub Rock." Prolonged exposure, however, did not turn out to be a whole lot of help with Slayer's "Raining Blood." That song is fucking fast. That so is so fast, in fact, that its groove basically becomes a blur and, for the purposes of the game, loses its status as groove. Kerry King's guitar solo, awesome though it may be, is more an empty display of technical skill than a melodic statement. In Guitar Hero 2, the most recent songs came mostly from stoner-metal bands like Wolfmother and the Sword, presumably because those are the only guitar-based bands currently working that incorporate a whole lot of rhythmic logic into their songs. On the new game, though, we get recent fare from bigger-selling bands like Slipknot and Disturbed and Muse, and they're a whole lot harder and less fun to play because they're so much less interested in groove. It's possible, in fact, to concoct a sort of alternate musical history playing the new game, as the songs that groove the hardest are almost invariably the oldest ones: "Sunshine of Your Love," "Paranoid," "Black Magic Woman," "La Grange." And that stomp is all but missing in songs from, say, Dragonforce or Killswitch Engage. The new metal and nu-metal in Guitar Hero III have very little of the blues influence that animated and drove a lot of the older songs; they're way more Slayer than Sabbath, and they groove a lot less as a result. Given that playing Guitar Hero III actively reshapes the way the player listens to guitar-based music, it's fun to think about the ways that the game's success might actively affect rock music, at least somewhere down the line. When I ducked into Best Buy the other day to buy the new Project Pat album (which is awesome), I walked past a mob of kids playing the game. In a few years, maybe some of those kids will have bands of their own.