Wired and well-connected

Summer Jam probably isn't the defining annual big-money rap moment that it was in years past. In the past two years, no major beefs have been started, extended, or ended on that Summer Jam screen, and there hasn't been a holy-shit surprise-guest moment on anything like the level of Jay-Z bringing out Michael Jackson. Mostly, these days Summer Jam is just the moment where people look at the lineup, scratch their heads, and then bitch about how bad rap is these days. But! I'm going, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've only been to the past two Summer Jams, but I've never not had fun, even last year, when the one big special surprise guest was an endlessly punishing and spirit-crushing day-long rainstorm. From where I'm sitting, Summer Jam is basically the equivalent of those traveling 50s and 60s variety shows when, like, the Supremes and Eddie Cochran and the Coasters and Waylon Jennings would get onstage, do their couple of big hits, and then disappear immediately. The stage managers at Summer Jam are just completely ruthless; two years ago, they cut T.I.'s half-hour set short just as "What You Know" was starting, and I'm surprised a riot didn't break out. The performers this year will have time to do their hits and bring out their guests, and that'll be it. And stadium-level efficiency like that makes for a good show. It just does. So after last year's wildly inaccurate speculation about what'd go down on Sunday's show, here's the sequel, which will probably be just as wrong.

Alicia Keys. Keys is the big special-guest late-addition, which makes me wonder whether ticket sales were way down this year and Hot 97 was just trying to do what Coachella did by shelling out ridonkulous sums of money to recruit Prince. If that's the case, I have to say, Alicia Keys is a deeply sad Prince equivalent, iron grip on radio playlists notwithstanding. And if the Mary J. Blige set from two years ago is any indication, Keys's set will be both the most professional and the most boring of the day. Stadium crowds are nothing new to Keys, and she's definitely got enough hits to keep everyone interested, but she's way too tasteful and bland of an artist to try for any of the headline-grabbing stunts of which Summer Jam legend are made. As for special guests, the best we can hope for is probably Damian Marley on the "No One" reggae remix.

We tripped through the 60s with some blissful little hippies (photo by Rebecca Smeyne)

Dark Meat + Ex Models
Music Hall of Williamsburg
May 28, 2008

There are sixteen people in the terribly-named Georgia-based overdriven-psyche collective Dark Meat. Or, anyway, that's how many were onstage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg last night; more play on their album. Or I think that's how many were onstage last night; with people jumping off and on again every couple of minutes, it was a bit hard to tell. Dark Meat is a whole lot to take in. Remember that one unbelievably annoying Brian Jonestown massacre guy from Dig, the one who wore giant sunglasses and only played maracas? Well, Dark Meat has at least three guys just like that, including one whose job description was basically prop-comic (wandering through the crowd honking on a tuba, blowing a confetti-gun into the air during climactic moments) and one dress-rocking guitarist (one of, I think, four guitarists) who looked just exactly like the BJM guy. Taken as a whole, the lot of them looked like the hippie farm-commune types who inevitably show up to wave their hands around during the acid-trip sequence of every single late-60s road-movie: facepaint, multicolored blankets, muttonchops, peasant skirts. They have one song called "Angel of Meth" and another called "There is a Retard on Acid Holding a Hammer to Your Brain." Vice Records just reissued their self-released debut. There's at least one Elephant Six type floating around in the band. All of which is to say that Dark Meat should by rights probably be the most irritating band ever, and it's near-impossible to write about them without making them look like just that, but I like them a lot anyway.

First, here's the one from last week. Songs:

- Bun B: "Swang on Em [feat. Lupe Fiasco]"
- Swizz Beatz: "Where the Cash At [feat. Foxy Brown]"
- Cool Kids: "What Up Man"
- Scarlett Johansson: "Falling Down"

And now this week. Songs:

- The Hold Steady: "Sequestered in Memphis"
- Busta Rhymes: "Don't Touch Me (Throw da Water On Em) Remix [feat. Reek da Villain, Spliff Star, Game, Lil Wayne, Nas & Big Daddy Kane]"
- Common: "Universal Mind Control [feat. Pharrell]"
- Bonnie "Prince" Billy: "So Everyone"

Try to pick Pearlman out

Ten years ago, Lou Pearlman basically ran the music business. He assembled and managed both the Backstreet Boys and 'NSync, which, for a minute there, was something like owning both Coke and Pepsi. He also essentially owned half the Tiger Beat entities who made runs at TRL back when TRL was something worth making a run at: LFO, O-Town, Aaron Carter, the briefly revived former New Kid Jordan Knight, the fascinatingly horrible Orlando rap duo Smilez and Southstar. Last week, a US District Court judge sentenced Pearlman to 25 years in prison for running conning investors in his fake ponzi-scheme charter-plane company out of hundreds of millions of dollars, marking the apparent end of maybe the dizziest, most extreme fall from power in pop-music history. Since it began, the popular music business has never been a stranger to con-men and creeps and hustlers; just witness the ongoing media-circus R. Kelly trial. But Pearlman is a special case: a massively successful supervillain figure who may well have molested many of the kids who he made famous even while he was taking the money they were earning.

Or maybe not

Two years ago almost to the day, Swizz Beatz crowned Busta Rhymes King of New York onstage at Hot 97's Summer Jam in the single least defensible display of rap bravura I've ever witnessed. Busta was in that show's de facto headliner spot (second-to-last, since everyone leaves when the last act is on), and he built up to his big coronation by trotting out every NY rap legend he had in his rolodex for one song each: Wu-Tang, Rakim, Slick Rick, Big Daddy Kane, Q-Tip. But not even the goodwill he earned with those twenty minutes of euphoric stadium-rap nostalgia could make the coronation any less ridiculous. Busta Rhymes is not made of kingly material. At his creative and commercial peak, he was basically a really funny guy who wasn't afraid to dress in stupid costumes in his videos and who could rap really fast. He was impossible to hate, but nobody expected him to personify an entire city's hopes and dreams, either. The Big Bang, the album he was pushing at that show, was meant to change all that. It didn't. It failed. That album, Busta's first for Dr. Dre's Aftermath label, played host to a series of garbage-ass singles (one of which, the godforsaken "Touch It" remix, stayed in heavy radio rotation way, way past its sell-by date). And right around the time it was failing utterly to turn Busta into a Serious Rap Star, Busta himself worked hard to become one of rap's most loathsome figures. He got himself arrested for some of the dumbest, least sympathetic reasons ever (beating up a teenager who'd spit on his car, beating up a driver who'd demanded the wages he was owed), he refused to talk to police after an assistant was killed on his video shoot, and he gave nonsensical vein-popping interviews to anyone who would listen. For a minute there, it looked like Busta Rhymes might become rap's first roid-related heart-attack fatality. Now, all of a sudden, he's back, and he might even be that really funny fast-rapping guy he once was.

"Now I'm at a loss for words"

There's been a decent amount of movement in the iTunes charts over the past few weeks, but nothing like what happened this morning, when all the post-finale American Idol tracks went up on sale and the top ten pretty much exploded. As I write this, we've got three David Cook songs and two David Archuleta one in the top ten, and poor Duffy, who only skimmed the top ten earlier this week, is already plummeting out of the top twenty. I'm never going to get to stop writing about these tools, am I?

David Cook: "Time of My Life." This is the song that won the annual American Idol songwriters' contest, and it's exactly the sort of overblown treacly silliness that always wins that thing. None of these songs are ever any good, and "Time of My Life" abuses nonsensical Hallmark-card cliches particularly vigorously. Cook actually has to sell a line about "looking for that magic rainbow on the horizon." Seriously, who, in 2008, sits down with a piece of paper and a pen and comes up with "magic rainbow"? And how does that song then go on to win a contest of any kind? The assembly line exists for a reason. The song is concerns the nebulous concept of living life to the fullest or whatever, just like all the rest of them, and so Cook gets to promise us that he'll "taste every moment and live it out loud," which is, at best, a mixed metaphor. The good news is that Cook's elegantly grizzled growl is uniquely suited toward making a mess like this work. He's shameless enough to treat a nothing like this like it was "Everybody Hurts," and the way he builds from the gurgley snarls on the intro to a big drawn-out lung-busting note at the end shows that he's already a pro. And the song's construction is time-tested big-payoff power-ballad; I especially like the backing-vocal ahh-ahhs on the chorus. That Cook can make anything of this song is a minor miracle, and it bodes well for what might happen if Clive Davis starts throwing actual good songs his way. This mess immediately shot to #1 on iTunes pretty much the minute it was released, but it's not for sale there anymore, which doesn't make any sense at all. 5.7

So much for inevitability

For all the producer manipulation and reliance on ringers this season, an actual amateur singer won American Idol last night, and I don't even mind that it's the one who picked a fucking Collective Soul song as his big finisher. This year's season finale was everything the rest of the season wasn't: fun, surprising, lighthearted. All of a sudden I'm looking forward to season eight.

8:00: Seacrest: "What happens when a nation is gripped by the closest competition it has ever seen?" Really, Seacrest? Really? We do still have actual elections in this country, don't we? Cook and Archuleta, both in all white, stare each other down like this was a publicity still from A Clockwork Orange or something.

The end is near

"For me, this whole thing has been a progression," said David Cook last night, immediately after singing Collective Soul's "The World I Know," the third of his three songs last night. Which begs the question: Why am I rooting for the guy whose progression is ending with a damn Collective Soul song? Simon Cowell had told Cook he should've reprised one of the 80s pop songs he'd transformed into goopy buzz-bin leftovers, but Cook was evidently more interested in singing a song that really meant something to him. That's nice and all, but it'd be a whole lot nicer if the song that really meant something to him wasn't a character-free yarl-nugget that haunted alt-rock radio during its late-90s death-slide. In retrospect, I've mostly been pulling for Cook by default and because he's the contestant with whom I'd rather drink a beer. He's a smart, erudite, self-aware dude who's evidently spent some time in the everyday adult universe rather than a cringing, stammering child whose commandeering stage-dad has kept him on the reality-show circuit for half his life, but that says absolutely nothing about Cook's ability to make an album that I'd actually pay money to hear. David Cook will definitely release a major-label album sometime in the next year, and it might even sell, but it almost certainly won't be anything I'll want to hear. David Archuleta might represent everything that's wrong with this season of American Idol but there's at least some chance he'll turn into a more Jesused-up version of George Michael, which would be OK. I won't be paying to hear either of them, ever, but Archuleta has a marginally better chance of making a song that I won't hate when saturates radio. That won't make Archuleta's near-inevitable coronation tonight any less objectionable, but it might be a bit easier to take after that one shining insight.

Lost in space

It had to happen eventually. The T-Pain robot-voice gimmick has come to completely dominate commercial rap over the past six months or so, with every possible rapper and R&B singer rushing to swipe it. Eventually, someone was going to come along and rediscover the vocoder's potential for pathos. When electro was still a relatively new thing, people seemed to realize that these voice-filters could do more than make you sound all awesome and futuristic. That was obviously still the main draw, but on, say, Cli-N-Tel's "2030," there's also a curiously blank melancholy to be heard, a feeling of feeling being lost. Those early electro tracks were all about technology in some sense or another. This was science fiction as music, and the futures depicted in science fiction are almost never completely happy utopian ones. If the Glow in the Dark tour is any indication, Kanye West is on his own science-fiction kick these days. And even if that science-fiction kick mostly exists to give a goofy-ass narrative framework and cool visuals to his struggle toward becoming the "biggest star in the universe," it's worth noting that "Homecoming," the show's triumphant pre-encore closer, is really a song about being unable to feel at home when you're home after you've found success elsewhere. Vocoders are in constant use during that show; Kanye even croons some of the T-Pain parts from "The Good Life" himself. But one new single shows that Kanye's also able to use that same effect in a way that transcends T-Pain's mercenary hook-man ephemeral immediacy. On his verse from Young Jeezy's "Put On," Kanye slathers his voice in autotuner and turns it into a song about the loneliness and dissatisfaction that can come when you spend your entire life working toward a specific set of goals and then realize that those goals, once achieved, won't really make you any happier than you were on your journey.

Taylor Swift will bury you

The Academy of Country Awards are basically the least entertaining of the three annual country awards shows. They don't have the general sense of legitimacy that the CMAs have or the freewheeling randomness of the CMT Awards (which I totally forgot about this year). They're in Vegas, which means that only the most cheeseball possible mainstream celebrities will show up. And they're on CBS, the network that loves to awkwardly turn its B-list stars into awards-show presenters in the vague hope of synergy. And still I never got too bored watching this year's show. In the music business's apocalyptic end-times, that's a great testament to the durability of the Nashville production line, which cranked out a whole lot of great singles over the past twelve months.

8:00: Carrie Underwood starts the show singing "Last Name" under a gigantic lit-up C. This song is basically Underwood's attempt for another trashy-stomp crossover monster, a "Before He Cheats" part 2, and it absolutely rules. I won't give away the punchline to anyone who hasn't heard the thing, but it's the first time I've guffawed out loud watching CMT since Bobby Brown clowned Dee Snider on the Gone Country premier. This performance, though, yee. Underwood has a tendency to sound weirdly flat on live TV, confusing considering that she got her start singing on live TV. And she's a whole lot more convincing doing dewy "Jesus, Take the Wheel"-type stuff than chickenhead neck-snapping her way through something like this. She looks good, though.