Hot 97's Summer Jam: A Preview

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:06 PM, May 30, 2008

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.

Kanye West. Given that Kanye's coming off the earth-shattering Glow in the Dark tour, I guess there's some possibility that he'll attempt a scaled-down version of that same live show on the Summer Jam stage. I can't see it, though. There's no way his army of stagehands would have time to build that set, and Kanye is such a stickler for details that he probably wouldn't consent to a halfassed version of that elaborate show. I'm hoping Kanye ends up in the de facto headliner spot (second from last, since everyone leaves whenever the last artist is on), which is always the time when all the huge surprise guests show up. Obviously, our best shot of a surprise Jay-Z appearance comes here. And honestly, there aren't too many big names who Kanye wouldn't bring out; I'm fully expecting some combination of Nas, Jeezy, T.I., and Chris Martin. Kanye will almost certainly do the "Lollipop" remix with Lil Wayne. I wouldn't even rule out a 50 Cent appearance here. Or, hell, Michael Jackson. Kanye has more pull than anyone right now, and he loves big moments.

Rihanna. I do sort of expect Rihanna to reprise her Glow in the Dark show, since it was pretty much awesome and since it's basically the first indication we've had that Rihanna is a stadium-sized star. A Chris Brown cameo here seems just about inevitable, and we could also get Jay-Z here. Ne-Yo will probably show up for "Hate That I Love You." Adam Levine could show up for that song she does with Maroon 5, but I hope not. I'd love to say that M.I.A. might come out on Rihanna's "Paper Planes" cover, but I just can't convince myself that something like that might happen, and anyway, if it did, all the kids in the audience would have no idea what was happening.

T-Pain. This had to happen, huh? T-Pain was on the bill at last year's show, but I don't remember seeing him; I was probably hiding from rain when he was on. But this show comes after his chart-dominating ascendancy, so we'll probably get some ridiculous parade of doofuses who have hired T-Pain for guest-chorus duties. Hey, maybe 2 Pistols and Tay Dizm will be there! This will probably be a pretty solid midday set, and I'd bet money on Flo-Rida and Rick Ross making appearances. Maybe Akon too, but I don't want to get too crazy here.

Ray J & Yung Berg. Speaking of crazy. What the hell are these jokers doing on the bill? They've got like two hits between them! This is just dumb. I'm thinking they'll probably go on last, when everyone is leaving, and they'll do the same thing Rich Boy did last year: they'll do their two songs, and then they'll give the stage to Jim Jones. Except people won't care as much about Jim Jones this year.

The-Dream. Fuck this guy. I saw his opening set on the Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige show, and he just did his three unbearable songs and got out of the way, so at least he won't be hogging the stage. Maybe he'll bring out Fabolous or some shit. Honestly, who the fuck cares.

D-Block. Hey, New York rappers at a New York rap show! What a concept! On the show's site, this is billed as "D-Block featuring Styles P and Sheek Louch," which is disquieting. Why isn't it "the Lox"? And is Jadakiss just not showing up? My guess is that this'll be a mid-afternoon NY-rap nostalgia-set, sort of like Mobb Deep two years ago except better. These guys have too many great singles to name, and their set at the Zune Barbecue last year was pretty much all those hits in rapid sequence. Plus Sheek actually had an inescapable radio hit this year (the pretty great "Good Love"), so they won't even look out of place up there. As long as I hear "Money Power Respect," I'm good.

Public Enemy. Uh, what? Is this because of Flavor of Love? Jesus, I'm getting depressed just thinking about that. Even if they're a truly left-field choice for a show like this, I'm guessing this'll pretty much rule. I ran into Chris Weingarten on the street this morning, and he told me about the Public Enemy set he just saw in London: Nation of Millions in its entirety, followed by a crazy intense forty-minute medley of all their hits. If that forty-minute medley happens on Sunday, I'll bug the fuck out. Kids will be confused, but whatever.

Lil Wayne featuring Gym Class Heroes. Again, what? Why? Why the fuck is this happening? Can't I just be amped about seeing Lil Wayne? Doesn't he realize that "featuring Gym Class Heroes" are about the four most buzz-killing words in the English language? Honestly, I'm still amped to see Wayne, and those jokers will probably only share the stage with him for a song or two, but still. I do not understand this, and I probably won't understand it any better come Monday.

Live: Dark Meat's Freakout Circus

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:52 PM, May 29, 2008

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.

The music on Universal Indians, their self-released debut, is exactly the sort of towering swamp-boogie drug-rock that justifies both their numbers and their schtick. When sixteen people all play the same riff at once, it can be a magical thing. Dark Meat specializes in a sort of drooling, troglodytic retro-scum rock, sort of like Black Mountain with all of the empty space and dynamic tension forcibly removed. The people in the band like to namecheck Albert Ayler, but that's sort of a red herring; their nods toward free-jazz really just sound like the extended last note of a long metal song. (And, anyway, the horn section is just as likely to go for frantic Voodoo Glow Skulls riffage as they are to drift off into the improv ether.) Over their own long songs; Dark Meat will all dissolve into a supremely loud miasmic freakout mess before all simultaneously snapping back into their bar-rock riffage with a precision that you wouldn't think these freaks could muster. It's a simple trick, maybe, but every time they lock back into the song, my heart sings.

Last night at the Music Hall, they played to a mostly-empty room, not all that surprising considering that just a month ago they were playing rooms like the Cake Shop, where I can't imagine the whole band managed to fit. And none of the band's members, even ostensible ringleader Jim McHugh, bothers with much in the way of actual showmanship, unless being a dude in a dress counts as showmanship, which it doesn't. At any given moment, half people in the band are wandering chaotically around the stage haphazardly banging on their instruments and the other half are dancing ecstatically. And yet neither the embarrassingly small crowd or their actual tumult of a stage-show mattered much last night; the sheer spectacle of all these fuckups wailing away made for a pretty fucking memorable show just by itself. These guys aren't above cheap theatrical tricks, like asking the whole crowd to sit down when one of the female singers keened the gorgeous acapella intro to album opener "Freedom Ritual" and then to jump back up again when the band kicked in. When the Decemberists pull that same move at every show, it bugs the fuck out of me. When Dark Meat does it, it feels earned. When this unruly mob is willing to collectively act the fool onstage in front of a crowd whose numbers only slightly exceed their own, it seems ridiculous to refuse the request. And if it wasn't so hard to keep a sprawling group of fuckups like this on task, Dark Meat could just rule the summer festival circuit.

The last time I saw Ex Models, they were playing boring, tuneless mathy bash-skronk to a bored and half-full room in DC. This time, they were playing boring, tuneless mathy bash-skronk to a bored and quarter-full (if that) room in Brooklyn. Things change! One new wrinkle: before getting to the bash-skronk this time, they played an even more boring drone-piece that lasted something like fifteen minutes! That was fun. They also went way, way over their allotted opening-band time, playing for at least an hour. They played really loud, too. By the end of their set, I actually felt physically depleted. Ex Models are just the worst.

Voice review: Amy Phillips on Ex Models' Zoo Psychology

Status Ain't Hood Podcasts 39 & 40

Posted by Tom Breihan at 11:49 AM, May 29, 2008

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"

The Spectacular Fall of Lou Pearlman

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:52 PM, May 28, 2008

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.

Back in his relevant years, I hated Pearlman and his products with a fiery passion. These days, I'm a bit more sanguine about the whole thing. Plenty of the products that Pearlman willed into existence were actually pretty great: "I Want It That Way," the "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" video where they all dress up like mummies and vampires. And I have to admire the get-money acumen of someone who, by his own admission, had the idea to combine New Kids on the Block and Chippendale's and then sell the resulting supremely crass mess to millions upon millions of twelve-year-old girls. Ten years later, it's hard to even fathom the idea that these groups of dudes with elaborate facial hair and fireman-pants and goggles on their heads were packing stadiums full of screaming kids by doing actual chair-dances, though admittedly that's not whole phenomenon might not be that much more bizarre than, say, Hannah Montana. Pearlman is also in some way indirectly responsible for the career of Justin Timberlake, possibly my single favorite pop artist working right now. Beyond the instantly sneery punk-kid gut-reactions I had to Pearlman's creations when he first released them into the world, I mostly just feel a general sense of wonder that the guy actually pulled those massive schemes off. He's probably one of the twenty or so most important figures in the past fifty years of popular music, even if he totally lucked into that position.

Last year, Vanity Fair ran this morbidly absorbing article, which details the criminal charges against Pearlman and which also basically accuses him of doing really nasty sex stuff with members of the boy bands he put together. In fact, the massive success of his whole enterprise may have been a complete accident; the article quotes one source as saying, "Basically this was an excuse for Lou to hang around with five good-looking boys. He was along for the ride. What he liked to do was take boys out to dinner." Most of the victims of Pearlman's advances haven't really gone public with their accusations, but if any of the charges about Pearlman are true, he's just about the most loathsome form of sexual predator imaginable. And even if all that stuff is wrong, it's still worth noting that virtually every act ever associated with Pearlman eventually sued him and that virtually every one of those cases was settled out of court. This guy is not a good guy.

And so it's been perversely thrilling seeing Pearlman's sentence come down, even if the crimes he's going away for didn't actually have anything to do with his musical endeavors. All told, Lou Pearlman is a total Jabba the Hutt figure, a creature so purely vile that it's actually really fun to hate him. I can't wait until someone makes a movie about him.

Busta Rhymes, Reanimated

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:30 PM, May 27, 2008

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.

Actually, Busta's reemergence isn't all that sudden at all. Over the past year or so, he's been making a quiet return to the guest-rapper circuit he once ruled, delivering the sort of raspy double-time workouts I never thought I'd hear from him again. And even though he never quite distanced himself from his recent Incredible Hulk persona-switch on tracks like T.I.'s "Hurt" and Freeway's "Walk Wit Me" and DJ Khaled's "I'm So Hood" remix, he did accomplish the way more important goal of reminding everyone that he could actually rap. More recently, he showed up on "Head Banger," a track from the Grand Hustle ranter Alfamega, and delivered an astounding breakneck yammer of a verse that must've left at least one studio mic dripping with saliva. If Busta manages to shake off all the bullshit of the past couple of years, if he fully rediscovers his strengths as a rapper, we might be looking at one of rap's great comeback stories. It might happen, and it might not, and we're in the rare position of seeing a rapper contemplating the two diverging paths his career could take. Busta's got two new singles out right now. One of the represents everything that's right about Busta Rhymes, and one of them represents everything that's wrong. We'll see which self he picks.

Actually, I'm being melodramatic. "We Made It," Busta's new Linkin Park collabo, isn't quite the worst thing Busta could possibly do. I mean, at least he worked with a rock group who has some idea how to make room for rappers; it's not like he jumped on a track with Seether or something. "We Made It" makes for vaguely OK sports-highlights music, something the inexplicable Lamar Odom cameo in the video drives home. And I like the one scene in the video where Busta stands at the top of a muddy hill and all these people run up at him; someone needed to remake the "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" video for really, really dumb kids, I guess. But the song is one of those by-the-numbers collaborations that plays toward the strengths of exactly none of the people involved. Busta's never been any good at self-serious motivational-speaker talk, and Linkin Park's never been any good at chest-thumping chariots-of-fire ragers. Busta needs adrenal humor to make his shit work, and Linkin Park needs wilted vulnerability, which is to say that these guys should never, under any circumstances, work together. And to make matters worse, Mike Shinoda actually manages to deliver a verse more direct and powerful than anything that Busta can muster, which just makes me embarrassed for everyone involved. "We Made It" is a total obvious bid for crossover acceptance, and it might even work, but it loses everything good about Busta in the process.

Everything good about Busta is firmly on display, though, in Busta's other new single, "Don't Touch Me (Throw Da Water On Em)." The beat, from Sean C and LV, is pretty much just a barely-there bongo-ripple and a hint of stand-up bass, which gives Busta plenty of room to go absolutely berserk. Which he does. Honestly, I didn't even have any idea this guy was still capable of this sort of sustained galloping fast-rap silliness. "Don't Touch Me" is a song about pretty much nothing, and I can't think of one line worth quoting, but any line I could quote wouldn't tell you anything about his intricately tangled but breathlessly hard delivery. I mean, he's screaming at us again! I love the part where he pretends to run out of breath, pants for a couple of seconds, and then takes back off again. In the video, he's back in cartoonish form, returning to his old fisheye-lens theatrics and rocking a series of insanely ridiculous costumes, my favorite being the old-school soul singer with the silk shirt and the giant pompadour. The track's obligatory posse-cut remix has one of the weirdest lineups in recent memory, but it totally works, mostly because every last one of them goes nuts. Alongside the usual weed-carriers, we get Game and Nas and Lil Wayne and Big Daddy Kane? Um, OK! I'll take that! "Don't Touch Me" isn't going to make Busta into the king of anything, but it knocks hard. Busta was at his best when he was making tracks like that, and maybe he can get there again. Maybe he'll even sell a few albums in the process.

It's not like the cheesed-out nu-metal "We Made It" Busta can't coexist with the playful speed-rapping "Don't Touch Me" Busta. Even back when he was good, Busta was making tone-deaf entreaties to his white frat-boy base; he did, after all, make that one song with Ozzy Osborne. And all credible sources indicate that he's still completely batshit-ass insane; seriously, I know people who could tell you stories. So I'm not going to tell him what to do. I just know which fork I'd like to see him take.

Voice review: Will Dukes on Busta Rhymes' The Big Bang
Voice review: Harry Allen on Busta Rhymes' Genesis

Grading the iTunes Hits: David Cook, Rihanna, Coldplay

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:51 PM, May 23, 2008

"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

Rihanna: "Take a Bow." Another instant #1 and a song that completely dominated the iTunes singles chart up until that American Idol finale. This is one of those awful tacked-on ripoff tracks on a forthcoming special edition of Rihanna's album, but unlike most of those shady bonus-tracks, this one can hang with just about anything on the rest of the album. I've never much liked Rihanna's ballads because her voice is too icy and hard-edged to tackle anything resembling actual human emotion; she's generally a whole lot better off with robotic dance-pop. "Take a Bow" works, though, because it the wronged-woman sentiment at its hard couldn't be more cruelly expressed. "You're so ugly when you cry," she sniffs on the first verse, before sarcastically applauding whatever big speech the guy is giving her. She lets a few vague glints of humanity creep through ("Don't tell me you're sorry when you're not / Baby, when I know you're only sorry you got caught"), and there's a subtly regretful undercurrent running through the thing, but this whole thing is basically what you don't want to ever hear from a girlfriend. The track is one of these gleamingly professional and satisfying Ne-Yo/Stargate things, but the stately piano-and-strings construction doesn't even has that vaguely comforting acoustic guitar running through it the way "Irreplaceable" did. Rihanna, meanwhile, sounds more confident every day; it's fun watching her turn into an honest-to-God star. 7.6

Coldplay: "Viva la Vida." This whole Brian Eno thing might work out after all! The Eno who shows up behind the boards here is the Unforgettable Fire Eno, not, like, the Cluster Eno, thank God. And suddenly Coldplay feel ready to make something other than another sweetly trancey pop tinkler about feeling good or something (not that I was complaining about that stuff) and go for the whole ridiculously proggy fallen-king concept-song thing instead. It's fun to hear Chris Martin, still all mild-mannered falsetto, cooing about seeing the fear in his enemies' eyes, and it's even more better when all the delicately layered string-rondos explode into a bells-clanging, kettle-drums-baronging monster of a chorus. Maybe this gigantic splurge of a song says something about the self-defeating nature of absolute power, or maybe these goofballs are just thinking about how their titanically huge sound just isn't titanically huge enough and how they should make adjustments accordingly. Either way, I'm sold. 8.2

Katy Perry: "I Kissed a Girl." If nothing else, you have to respect the blatant mercenary hit-mongering going on here; any song willing to marry stomping glam synths to wound-up MySpace emo howls and sticky-gross Last Night's Party sexiness wants to be a hit so badly that we can all taste it. And when we compare this track to the last song to hit with this title, we've got a full-blown Harbinger Of Changing Times on our hands. The 1995 Jill Sobule song wasn't exactly unsexy, but it was more about genuine exploration, about a girl figuring stuff out for herself, delivered in the form of soft focus Lillith Fair folk-pop. It wasn't a great song or anything, but it didn't exploit the hell out of itself either. It was innocent. "Ain't no big deal, it's innocent," yowls Katy Perry on the new one, but it's so totally not. Coked-up club-pop is never innocent, and this song, I'm pretty sure, exists mostly to inspire boners on 14-year-olds everywhere: "I hope my boyfriend don't mind it." (Um, yeah, I'm sure he's gonna be pissed.) It's a fucking terrible song, but I can't knock the hustle. 2.8

Duffy: "Mercy." So British white-girl retro soul really is its own movement these days, huh? How does this stuff even happen? After the whole Winehouse apocalypse, it's nice to hear someone as buoyant and drama-free as Duffy. She's got an adorable little squeak of a voice and a pretty great clippity-clop polished-up Northern Soul dance-track working for her. It's hard to complain about pastiche as lively and bouncy and competent as this; I just can't quite understand why it exists. 7.4

The American Idol Season Finale Running Diary: David Archuleta Totally Loses

Posted by Tom Breihan at 10:52 AM, May 22, 2008

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.

8:01: 97.5 million votes came in last night. According to Seacrest, even Ruben Studdard got some votes. Cut to Ruben, who's starting to look like Big Pun. Should we be worried about this guy's health?

8:03: Go-nowhere contestants from seasons past are in the two finalists' hometowns, reporting live. That looks like reality-show purgatory.

8:05: Hey, another creepy group singalong with the whole top twelve! I kind of missed these things. They're singing the Temptations' "Get Ready," an impossible song to screw up. People from So You Think You Can Dance stand all around them and sort of do the wop. As intros go, this one's a lot of fun.

8:10: Cook and Archuleta sing that "Hero" song from the Spider-Man soundtrack, with Cook as Chad Kroeger and Archuleta as the guy from Saliva. If Archuleta spends the whole rest of his career doing things that the guy from Saliva has already done, I'll change my mind about him. (I've always sort of wanted to do a post on the guy from Saliva and what a batshit-weird career he's had. He's the guy who sings "Faaa-aame!" on "The Takeover"! He had pretty much the worst rap verse ever on Three 6 Mafia's "Mosh Pit"! Clearly, Archuleta should do these things.) These two actually don't look completely awkward onstage together, which is a first.

8:12: Seacrest calls Chad Kroeger "Chad Krueger." Like Freddy! I love this show.

8:14: Oh good lord, they're devoting significant screen time to promoting that godawful new Mike Myers movie. I feel bad for everyone involved in this.

8:18: Shameless promotions aren't any less lame when you make jokes about them being shameless promotions.

8:20: Syesha Mercado and Seal! Who comes up with these duet combinations? Actually, this is pretty great, especially when Seal does the raising-the-roof dance. For a randomly-appointed duet between an American Idol runner-up and a past-his-prime adult-contempo star, there's a whole lot of chemistry on that stage.

8:26: Jason Castro gets a "Hallelujah" encore. I still can't believe that whole thing happened. I've listened to every version of this song I could find since Castro sang it the first time, and I'd probably put his quavery, tremulous version in the top three. I like that he doesn't do all the overblown vocal swoops of the Jeff Buckley version, that he just sort of calmly speak-sings those words. If a song like this can get play on a whizjet-circus like this finale, there's hope for all of us.

8:29: All those Ford music videos get recapped, and then Seacrest tells both Davids that they've won free hybrids. That is some cheap cross-promotion right there.

8:31: A Donna Summer tribute? Holy shit! All the female contestants are singing "She Works Hard for the Money," complete with fumbly choreographed danced. Amanda Overmyer and Carly Smithson kind of rip through "Hot Stuff." I guess "I Feel Love" would've been too much to hope for. Still, Giorgio Moroder synth-jams on ratings-behemoth TV! I will not complain about a segment of this finale that gives burn to both Leonard Cohen and Giorgio Moroder, except to say that they really should've had a disco-themed show this year.

8:34: The real Donna Summer shows up to sing her new single, and it's pretty good grown-lady inspirational synthpop. She looks good, too. The So You Think You Can Dance people are excited. Wait, was that Ryan Seacrest breakdancing or just a So You Think You Can Dance person dressed exactly like Ryan Seacrest? I'm rewinding my DVR like four times, and yeah, it totally was Seacrest! This show rules. And Donna Summer sings "Last Dance." Other than the Love Guru thing, this finale has just been awesome straight through thus far, and not even that Diet Coke commercial with the Paul Oakenfold/Shifty Shellshock song can kill the momentum.

8:42: The two shock-elimination contestants get their moment: Carly Smithson and Michael Johns sing "The Letter." I can feel a lot better about these two now that I don't have to worry about either one actually winning. The arrangement is tinkly Vegas jazz, Carly looks all scarily intense, Michael comes perilously close to doing the white man's overbite, and all is right with the world. Hey, remember when American Idol still had contestants who looked like they maybe had sex every once in a while?

8:46: Jimmy Kimmel makes fun of Sanjaya, who's sitting right there. Somewhere, Danny Noriega is pissed. He also introduces a montage of Simon Cowell bashing fools. If they don't start bringing back freaky auditioners, this might be the best A.I. finale ever.

8:48: No, wait, it actually is the best A.I. finale ever: the top six dudes sing "Summer of 69"! David Hernandez kind of kills it! Oh wow, and here's the real Bryan Adams. I miss this guy. This new Bryan Adams single is pretty great. I wish this whole tribute segment could've found room for "Run to You" or "Cuts Like a Knife," but I am so not mad. This show really needs theme-shows for Donna Summer and Bryan Adams next season.

8:53: Jordin Sparks, via video package, announces that there's going to be an American Idol Disney World ride or something. Well, that doesn't make any sense.

8:55: I take back everything I said about David Cook yesterday. as he sings "Sharp Dressed Man" with ZZ Top. I can forgive Collective Soul covers as long as this guy is willing to share stage-space with those two mammoth beards and do the Chuck Berry duck-walk. I hope Chuck Eddy is watching this.

9:00: For a second, it looked like Seacrest was going to introduce Neil Young, which would've been weird. But no, it's Graham Nash, looking like someone's creepy uncle and singing with Brooke White. Snore.

9:06: The Jonas Brothers show David Archuleta how to do this teen-idol thing right. (Hint: it involves not being utterly boring.) In the audience, heads explode. Why don't these kids have a sitcom yet?

9:10: Obligatory freak montage. This makes me feel bad. One of the freaks shows up to sing with a marching band. Because giving this guy the attention he so psychotically craves is a good thing.

9:15: Geesh, OneRepublic. Without Timbaland. Ah, but here comes Archuleta to handle the second verse. Those Ryan Tedder/David Archuleta harmonies are the stuff of nightmares. I'm officially back to rooting for David Cook.

9:24: Jordin Sparks sings some decent-enough new single. It's no "No Air." Hasty prediction: the second Jordin album, whenever it comes out, will be a whole lot better than the first.

9:30: More summer-comedy cross-promotion: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey, Jr. try out to be Pips, Forrest Gumping themselves into some old Gladys Knight Footage. Downey would actually make a pretty great Pip, I'm convinced. This goes on for a really long time without ever reaching a punchline, but it's still a whole lot better than that Love Guru shit.

9:35: Hey, it's Carrie Underwood singing "Last Name." Didn't I just see this? She sounds a whole lot better here than she did at the AMC awards; maybe she's still scared of Simon.

9:45: Another top-twelve group-sing, and they're doing George Michael songs. Oh man. You know what that means. Yup, here's George Michael, getting a titanic welcome and just monstering "Praying for Time." Paula cries. This guy just doubled his comeback-tour ticket sales right there.

10:02: Seacrest is teasing the results, and my DVR is coming dangerously close to cutting off. Come on, Fox.

10:03: Simon apologizes to David Cook? Whoa. He also says he doesn't care who wins, which is such a lie.

10:05: Holy shit, David Cook wins! About two seconds before the DVR cuts off, too. This is like the first honest-to-God surprise result we've had all season! America, it turns out, likes grown folks. And now that I think about it, David Cook might actually have a good album in him, as long as Clive Davis hooks him up with Max Martin or Polow da Don or somebody. I'm feeling pretty great about pop music after that show, I have to say. (The priceless Archuleta-fam reaction shot is on YouTube, of course.)

American Idol Week Thirteen: The Long-Awaited Battle of the Davids

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:44 PM, May 21, 2008

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.

I don't want to keep slamming this point into the ground too much, but this year has seen just about the shittiest, shadiest season of American Idol that I could possibly ever imagine. The judges have been in the tank for Archuleta the entire time, the cast has been loaded-down with major-label refugees and reality-show leftovers, and anyone who threatened to become interesting was singled out for elimination right quick. I can't blame so many viewers for turning away from the show this year; I would've done the same thing if I wasn't getting paid to write about it. It's not like anyone watching had any doubt about the final two contestants we'd see last night, but the show's goofy-ass boxing-match concept, Michael Buffer standing in for Seacrest during the intro and some boxing coach showing up repeatedly to spout cliches, would've never happened if Syesha Mercado had somehow miraculously made it past last week (though she really wouldn't have looked any less ridiculous in gloves and robe than Archuleta looked last night). This was all planned, and that's a gross mutation of the show's mission, which was crass enough at the outset. The show's producers had the brilliant idea to use the viewing audience to find a singer who those producers could then sell back to the viewers, a neat little feedback loop. But when those producers manipulate that audience into voting for a predetermined contestant, that loop becomes something resembling an arrow, and the show loses its whole reason for being.

All that said, David Archuleta was really good last night, even someone did dress him like a baby Russian gangster. He managed to scale back the melisma a bit on "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," a total MOR anthem. He also reprised "Imagine," the song that guaranteed his win way back at the beginning of the season, and he made it just as emptily pretty as he had back then. Cook, meanwhile, did just fine with "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" and "The World I Know," good songs both (I cant front), but neither had quite the rafter-swinging pull of the two Archuleta selections. That's weird, since Cook sure looked like a winner at the beginning of the show, poised and confident, while Archuleta looked like he wanted badly to crawl under his bed and cry. But Archuleta's spent basically his entire life in child-star boot-camp, and he knows how to bring it when he has to. When Simon Cowell repeatedly trumpeted Archuleta's superiority during last night's episode, he didn't even seem to be jerking us around, even if the other two judges did seem to be reading from a script. When Archuleta wins tonight, I won't be happy, but I'll understand.

I haven't mentioned either of the two songwriters'-contest winners, which Cook and Archuleta had to sing last night, mostly because they both sounded like end-credits music for C-grade 80s sports movies. American Idol really, really needs to get rid of that contest before next season. The show could stand to get rid of a few other things, too.

Kanye West: Going Nuts?

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:24 PM, May 20, 2008

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.

"Put On" is the first single from the forthcoming Jeezy album, and it's a Jeezy track through and through up until the end: coke-talk, drawn-out ad-libs, epically gothic Drumma Boy synth-twinkles. ("Put On" is also, I should point out, a really great Jeezy track. The guy's lyrics are finally becoming as vivid as his vocal presence, and there's a newfound sly sense of humor at work here: "Big wheels, big straps, you know I like it supersized / Passenger's a redbone, her weave look like some curly fries.") But the song abruptly becomes something else at the 2:53 mark, when a gratuitously manipulated version of Kanye's voice shows up. At the outset, Kanye's singing the title, drawing it out into some weird R&B vocal runs that he never would've tried without the benefit of autotune. (I can just imagine how ass the untreated vocal must've sounded.) As he starts rapping, Kanye swings wildly between sneery defiance and gut-twisted ache: "I feel like there's still niggas that owe me checks / I feel like there's still bitches that owe me sex / I feel like these butt niggas don't don't know the stress / I lost the only girl in the world who knew me best." This isn't the first Kanye verse to emerge since his mother died; the appearance on Estelle's "American Boy" came first, and I might be forgetting a couple more. But the "Put On" verse might actually be the first thing Kanye recorded after his mother's death; either way, it sure catches him feeling raw. Throughout his verse, Kanye abruptly switches between wounded openness ("All these Jesus pieces can't bring me peace") to ugly if standard-issue rap girl-talk ("Sure I need just at least one of Russell's nieces") and back again. And with the benefit of that robot-filter, he stretches his voice into shapes he's never attempted before, dramatizing his emptiness. For reasons I can't quite place, it just kills me when he sings "I'm so lonely," stretching that I into a long moan. It's a verse about losing the people who really matter to you and who understand you, about being surrounded by people who want something from you instead, about the paranoia and bad faith that come along as byproducts of wild success. That it comes stapled onto the end of a triumphal Jeezy single somehow only increases its impact. It's the saddest thing I've heard in forever.

After disappearing for a little while, Kanye is firmly back on the high-profile featured-rapper circuit these days, and his newest verses are about the most joyless he's ever released. On the remix of "Lollipop," he has to contend with a Lil Wayne who, thank God, seems to be having fun rapping again, and Kanye's labored metaphors ("Tell a girl, like Doritos, that's nacho cheese") can't match up with Wayne's free-associative insanity. But even through the autotuner that's once again all over his voice, Kanye sounds really heated; that "best in the world" line is pure defiance. The pretty great remix to N.E.R.D.'s horrible hammering single "Everyone Nose," meanwhile, is all sinister brittle club-pop, the track approximating the dizzy, sticky heart-pound of the drug that made all those girls get in line for the bathroom. Kanye's back to talking about girls on his verse again, and, as on "Put On" and the "Lollipop" remix, he's doing it without any of the humane warmth he used to sometimes bring. He's switching between extremes again, but now it's between predatory pickup lines and haughty disgust at coked-out fellow celebrities. Taken together, the three songs represent one of the weirdest and most uncomfortable victory-laps in pop history. Even when we're talking about someone who broadcasts his feelings as loudly and publicly as Kanye, it's dangerous to infer anything about someone's mental state from his music. But the image these three songs give me is of a Kanye numbed by success and heartbreak, one who might be running himself off the rails. But, then, I really like all three of these tracks, even despite their shaky metaphors and ooky misogyny. Maybe I shouldn't be complaining as long as whatever wrongs are helping him write these songs.

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

The Academy of Country Music Awards: A Running Diary

Posted by Tom Breihan at 11:45 AM, May 19, 2008

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.

8:04: Oh Jesus, we the fans are voting on the Entertainer of the Year award for the first time ever. Something tells me this isn't going to work out too well. She's not nominated or anything, but I feel like Hannah Montana probably has a fighting chance now.

8:06: Reba McIntire is hosting for the bazillionth time. She gets booed for a Roger Clemens joke? Is everything sacred? She also makes a joke about how even when women and black people are now running for president, they're still not up for Entertainer of the Year, which is probably the closest thing we'll get to a political joke tonight. Reba, I should point out, was basically born to host these things.

8:08: Shot of a face-squinching Nicole Kidman in the crowd next to Keith Urban. I'm never, ever going to get used to seeing her at country-music events, ever.

8:09: One advantage the ACM Awards have over the CMAs: Toby Keith has not been so repeatedly insulted that he won't show up anymore. He does new single "She's a Hottie," which is completely autopilot except for the one part where he sort of raps. Someone should commission a scientific study on why this guy never looks like he's having any fun onstage.

8:12: It's the first random CBS-crossover presenter of the night! They really busted that one out early. Someone from Without a Trace, alongside Mindfreak Criss Angel, is presenting Single of the Year. Neither one of them gives a shit about country music. All the nominated songs pretty much rule (except the Big & Rich one), and I'm not the least bit sad to see the gut-wrenching pseudo-R&B Sugarland ballad "Stay" take it, even if I was pulling for "Don't Blink" and "Watching Airplanes."

8:16: The George Constanza guy, whose chief post-Seinfeld cultural achievements have been repeated Brad Paisley video appearances, is here to introduce Paisley. I'd love to know how that connection happened. Paisley does "I'm Still a Guy," his newest aw-shucks novelty-jam, which is mostly about how you shouldn't get your eyebrows plucked. It's no "Alcohol."

8:20: Taylor Swift wins Best New Female Vocalist, an award that may or may not have been specifically concocted so she could win something. She gets all teary-eyed and thanks her mom. Aw.

8:30: Miranda Lambert, who in a better world would be sweeping this thing, snarls her way through "Gunpowder & Lead," the song that makes killing an abusive ex-boyfriend sound like a really fun thing to do. Also fun: headbanging! Miranda Lambert is now the first person I've ever seen headbanging at a country-music awards show. Bass player mohawk-watch: it's still there! Her grey-haired biker-looking guitarist appears to be gone, though.

8:35: Lady Antebellum, who I'd never heard of before last week, win Best New Group. That "Love Don't Live Here" song is the first thing I've heard in like ten years that makes good use of the post-Vedder yarl.

8:42: Rodney Atkins sounds like total ass live. Good to know. I wish his hits medley started with "If You're Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows)" and ended with "If You're Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows)," but no such luck. I don't know about this guy. If his whole thing is that he wears greasy jeans instead of rhinestones, then why does his fiddle player look like a casual-friday stockbroker?

8:48: Jack Ingram wins Best New Male Vocalist. This show has too many awards.

9:02: Is there just bad sound tonight? Is that what's going on? Because Kenny Chesney sounds like he's in the process of swallowing his own larynx.

9:08: George Strait will still be doing leathery plainspoken grown-man laments after we're all dead. Can he tell his own songs apart? Because I sure can't.

9:15: And now "Shiftwork," the song that combines Kenny Chesney with George Strait and somehow makes both of them more boring.

9:26: Obligatory thank-the-troops moment.

9:28: Sugarland does "All I Wanna Do." Choreographed butt-dances should really not be a part of the Sugarland repertoire. This is what happens when genial Hee Haw goofiness goes too far.

9:30: Hey, it's Jewel! Hyucking at John Rich's jokes! Country music really provides a home to way, way too many out-of-it former pop stars. Seriously, if Lisa Loeb and Shaggy and the "Mambo Number 5" guy decided to reboot their careers by heading to Nashville, they'd be greeted with open arms. Anyway, she gives Album of the Year to Miranda Lambert, which is an outcome way better than anything I could've anticipated. She never wins these awards! This was just awesome to finally see.

9:36: I like barreling honky-tonk Brooks & Dunn way better than Jesused-out power-ballad Brooks & Dunn, but I'm still not sure why either one continues to exist. Reba runs in at the end of "Put a Girl in It," which I guess is the new single, and sings both of them off the stage.

9:40: "Stay," which already won Single of the Year, wins the somehow different Song of the Year. Jennifer Nettles cries a bunch. I love the idea that an acoustic ballad is somehow revolutionary for commercial country.

9:45: Taylor Swift, the heretofore undiscovered missing link between Nashville country and MySpace emo who also once did the Soulja Boy dance in a video, starts out "Should've Said No" wearing a gigantic black hoodie and pounding an acoustic guitar before her band roars in and stagehands dramatically rip away the hoodie. Then she grabs her poodle-hair guitarist and runs under a huge fake waterfall. I love this stuff. I wonder if Brooks & Dunn can feel their relevance slipping away when they look at this chick.

9:50: Rascal Flatts win some humanitarian award. These segments always remind me of those glaringly insincere NBA Cares promos. Stuff like giving money to charity and singing to sick kid is great and all, but it loses something when you show up to accept an award for it on TV, you know? Or maybe I'm just saying that because Rascal Flatts blow.

9:52: Urg, Dr. Phil and his wife. This show must really be starving for celebrities. They shock absolutely nobody by giving Best Vocal Duo to Brooks & Dunn. Did they even do anything over the past year? Montgomery Gentry stays getting robbed.

9:55: Oh damn, Trace Adkins is about to do "You're Gonna Miss This." Can I watch this? I can try, but this song always reduces me to a total puddle, which might make it hard to make fun of Rascal Flatts later. OK. OK. Let's do this. OK. The high-school daughter can't wait to leave home, but her mom says she should slow down and enjoy this part of her life because it'll be over too soon. OK. That's sad, but I can deal. Now she's older and married and living in a one-bedroom apartment. She want to buy a house and have kids, but her dad says that these are some good times and she'll want this back. Oh wow. That's really really sad. But we're doing this. We're getting through. Oh my god, but now she's apologizing to the plumber when her kids are crying but the wise old plumber knows that she's going to wish these days hadn't gone by so fast. Oh shit. OK, I'm done. Can't handle it. That song is just too sad. How did the "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" guy pull this off? "You're Gonna Miss This" is like the best power ballad ever. I can't even talk about it. Fuck.

10:02: Hasn't the country music establishment already given Garth Brooks every possible lifetime achievement award? Apparently not. Reba says he's the highest-selling solo artist in American history, which is just nuts. Garth, headseat mic and vertical-stripe shirt and all, sings a cheesily great hits medley that could probably go on for like five hours if he wanted it to. Virtually everyone in the room gets to make a living because of that guy. I'm buying "Thunder Rolls" off iTunes as I write this.

10:10: Oh what the fuck, it's someone from The Big Bang Theory and Kimbo Slice. And Kimbo is dressed like a cowboy. I feel sort of funny saying this about someone who could take my head off without even trying, but does this guy have to be such a cartoon character? Isn't it enough to be a complete badass? They give Top Vocal Group to Rascal Flatts in maybe the least suspenseful presentation of the entire night.

10:15: Obligatory Paris Hilton joke!

10:17: Keith Urban performs on the floor, just like Lightning Bolt! Part of his rhythm section is some girl going "chicka-chick-ahh." The song he's doing is some tossed-off fake-jugband come-on, and it sort of rules. Pretty amazing that Nicole Kidman's husband can pull off stompy down-home shit without looking like an ass. Popular culture just gets weirder every year.

10:22: Speaking of which, here's David Spade! Something terrible happened to this man.

10:25: Rascal Flatts do "Every Day," the newest entry in their seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap-seats power-ballads. This one is actually pretty good, and Gary LeVox isn't even dressed like an anime character, but it'll take a lot more moments like these before I feel comfortable not hating Rascal Flatts.

10:32: Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood pay tribute to Eddy Arnold, who just died. They sing a pretty, tender, quiet acoustic version of "Make the World Go Away."

10:40: Kellie Pickler does her post-Parton pretty-hick act, which I'm liking more all the time. This song, about knowing you're beautiful, has none of the gut-punch wallop of the one about her mother walking out on her, but it's still pretty good.

10:45: Brad Paisley wins Top Male Vocalist, beating out a whole bunch of titans in the process. Nice to see this guy finally working his way toward elite status.

10:50: LeAnn Rimes sings a surprisingly grimy Southern rock song. This show is still too long, but it's good to see the producers aren't cramming all the boring stuff into the last hour.

10:53: Presenting: Karolina Kurkova and Dwight Yoakam? This show has the weirdest relationship with celebrity. Carrie Underwood wins Top Female Vocalist. Miranda Lambert: robbed again!

10:56: I'm not going to complain about this show being too long again if it means Montgomery Gentry get to close the show out. These guys rule so hard. Eddie is either visibly drunk or doing a great impression of someone who is. "Back When I Knew It All," the new single, is about the least greasy thing on their new album, and it's still pretty greasy.

10:59: Kenny Chesney wins that interactive Entertainer of the Year award. I feel like I've seen this before. He thanks his parents for having sex. That, at least, is new.

Status Ain't Hood Interviews Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:56 PM, May 15, 2008

Yes. Beg.

I thought 50 Cent was going to be on this call. He wasn't. But hey, Banks and Yayo! That's something, right? To be fair, I do really like "I Like the Way She Do It," especially the part where Yayo says he makes money every time he breathes on a track and then he just breathes. Also, I'm intrigued, though not entirely convinced, by the idea that bad-guy rappers are now underdogs. And I got Yayo to talk about his bucket hats. I'm pretty proud of that last one.

I have to ask you guys about this Young Buck situation. I'm sure you've been answering questions about it all day.

Tony Yayo: Aw man, you know what's crazy about it? What you say your name was again?

Tom.

Yayo: Tom, you know what's crazy about it to me? This the most media Buck ever got in his life. Like, every question be about Buck, and the only reason people is asking questions is because him and 50 ain't getting along. So to me, it's like it makes him want to do it more. Because he's still on the label. He's still on G-Unit Records. But I think the media and people around him and just the industry period is fucking with the guy's head. Because he feels cool. Like, every question is about Buck because he's going against 50, as well as Game. That's why when we drop a XXL cover, Game is on the next one. So like me, personally, I'm just tired of the Buck questions. I just feel like he made a lot of mistakes. He's still on G-Unit, the label. And we got an album coming out July 1. He's gonna be on it. We gonna let him eat. And, you know, ain't nothing changed. We still gotta get this money.

Have you spoken with Buck since...

Yayo: I don't speak to Buck period. He doesn't even know what my new son looks like. It's really nothing to talk about. I feel like the relationship I have with Banks and 50 is way different from the beginning because Banks live right around the corner. I've known him my whole life. I know his mother. I know his grandmother. I could go over there and get a slice of cake when he's not there. 50 as well. I know his grandmother. I know all his family. Buck, he was put into a good situation while I was incarcerated, and I feel like he should be more appreciative toward Banks and 50. To me, those are the two people that made him. When he was on a bus with Juvenile on UTP, you didn't know Buck. Sometimes I just look at it as a smack in the face when the media is like, "Yo, why y'all kick him out the group?" Because he's making it seem like we're the bad guys. That's the only reason why I will be totally honest with you and tell you how I feel. Why are you the bad guy when you collectively made over five million dollars? How are we the bad guys when you owe 50 $300,000 right now because you have tax problems? How are we the bad guys right now? How are we the bad guys when we was focusing on the album and you was running around focusing on yourself? Sometimes people let media get to their head. Me, I'm not going to let it get to my head. Because I say eff the media, I say eff Interscope. I say eff everybody except for Banks and 50. It doesn't matter to me. That was the circle. I think they forgot that me and Banks helped make this empire before Buck was around, on the first beginning mixtapes. So when he goes around pleading for sympathy from the media, it kind of upsets me because he shouldn't be pleading for nothing. Your house in Cashville that you have is because of 50. The girl that's braiding your hair is because of Banks. The babysitter that you got is because of G-Unit. Everything that you have is collectively from the Unit. A lot of people is making it seem like they feel bad for him.

Obviously the three of you are the core of the group and always have been, but when Buck was with the group, he seemed tight with all three of you.

Yayo: I was incarcerated, so he was really more tight with Banks, and Banks could explain to you their relationship. To me, I knew him, he was cool, he screamed Yayo so I had respect for him. But I lost a lot of respect for him.

Do you want to talk about that, Banks?

Lloyd Banks: I mean, what do you want to know, specifically?

It seemed like the three of you were a very tight unit. How does it feel to lose an element of that? Do you feel like you've lost anything?

Banks: Well, you gain and lose. It was a time when it existed before him, and it exists after him. Of course, it's evident, the groundwork that he's put in while he's been around. He's been around five years. But the comment that you just made, you said it seemed to be a hundred percent OK, right? So when you say that, it makes you wonder. If it seemed that way to you, then how the fuck did it just go left-field so fast? It seemed that way with Game too, right?

Yeah. Well, it didn't seem quite the same way with Game...

Banks: All right, so my point is that if it seemed that way, then why did you hear things that made you feel like he's been uncomfortable for so long? I can't put my finger on it because you just said yourself that it seemed OK. Nobody planned it this way. Nobody planned and said that when we wake up, Buck is not going to be with the group.

What do you think of the record he made, "My Interview"? It doesn't seem like a dis record against the group; it seems like he's admitting his faults.

Yayo: Like I said, Buck is letting the media get to his head because this is the most media he ever got in his life. It's like, dude sit around and want to be 50 while Banks and Yayo just want to be theyself. I don't want to be 50. 50 is his own entity. Eminem is his own entity. Dr. Dre is his own entity. I don't want to be them. I would love to sell as much records as they did. I wouldn't mind. But a lot of statements that Buck made in his career was dumb. A lot of what he said in the media was dumb. When he said he's gonna sell more than Eminem, he's gonna sell more than 50. It's good to think that, but sometimes the things that you say in the media, you should think before you talk. I don't understand how people just can't see the situation for what it is. The guy, I guess, is tired of being who he was in his career, tired of being around the Unit. He wants to focus on his self. Let him focus on his self. It's not like it was a disrespect, like we told him, "Buck, get out of here." He's on the radio complaining that 50 doesn't call him. Jay-Z doesn't call Beanie Sigel or Freeway when he tells them that he's dropping them off Roc-A-Fella Records. Some of them guys on Def Jam didn't even know what his couch looks like. As for the relationships with 50, 50 brings everybody, from M.O.P. and Mobb Deep to Hot Rod and Spider Loc. They all got love. They all came to the house before, popped bottles and did what they did.

G-Unit Records seemed to expand a whole lot a couple of years ago when you had everybody signing. Now, for a variety of reasons, it seems like it's shrunk back to the three of you.

Yayo: Well, contractually, everybody is still on G-Unit, from Hot Rod to M.O.P. to Mobb Deep. Prodigy, shout to him, he's incarcerated now at Downstate Correctional Facility with my man El Dorado. Shout to them. Havoc, he's still making beats. M.O.P., they just have to deal with their own issues. They have to get theirselves together, but they still contractually still with G-Unit, along with Hot Rod and Spider Loc, and everybody else. It's not shrinking. It's just going back to the original formula of just me, Banks, and 50 in the studio going hard. And Buck, he's contractually under G-Unit too. He's still on the label. You could believe anything you want to believe, but he's still on the label, and he's still under the Unit. Nobody did anything to disrespect Buck. These are all the moves that he wanted to make. He complained about royalties. I never had a royalty problem, a publishing problem, ever in my life. I never had no complaints about it. I live in a million-dollar home. I own numerous properties. I have nice vehicles. I live the life that you supposed to live, being on G-Unit.

My newspaper interviewed Prodigy a couple of months ago, and he said that when he got arrested, the police were trying to get him to cut a deal by setting up 50.

Yayo: That's very unbelievable, but a lot of people, the stuff that they hear in the lyrics that the fans believe, the police believe too. You hear 50's name in a lot of stuff. Sometimes hip-hop police concentrate on the wrong things. They pull me over, harass me. They pull 50 over, harass him.

So you're feeling that glare on you?

Yayo: Of course I feel that glare on me. Hip-hop police, sometimes they know me personally. They know 50. One of them pulled Prodigy over and tried to set him up. Sometimes that's how police play.

Banks: Fuck the police.

Yayo: Banks know what hip-hop police is. They follow him. Matter of fact, I think G-Unit is number one in the hip-hop police book. We definitely on the radar. Banks and them got arrested at Madison Square Garden, leaving the Garden. We've been pulled over and harassed, but it is what it is. The police just shot Sean Bell fifty times, and they got a not-guilty verdict.

Banks: Fuck the police.

Yayo: That's why we got a tribute on our album called "Straight Outta Southside," a tribute to Sean Bell. So rest in peace to him and shout out to his family.

What else can you tell me about Terminate on Sight? I don't know anybody who's heard the album yet.

Banks: The album is wrapped up. A lot of different things stand out on this project. It's dealing with personal things, with issues in the group, our separate issues. Buck is on three or four records. But it's touching on a lot of different perspectives, and it's real aggressive. It's a good album for the time in hip-hop right now, and it's a good album for us. We need this album right here to open the doors for all the other rappers out there, aspiring rappers, that come from the struggle. It's kind of hard for an artist that comes from the vein that we come from to focus and know what to do next when you hear, like, when people think that Kanye won. Everybody doesn't fit in the Kanye bracket.

The kind of music you guys were doing was absolutely dominant for a while now. Do you feel like you're the underdogs now?

Banks: Oh yeah, most definitely, because it's not the year of the bad guy anymore. It's the year of everything else, agreeing to disagree. Think of the things that hip-hop was based off of. Just think about the message, of where hip-hop came from and the things that were being said in the music from the beginning to where it's changed right now, to the glamour and glitz and gold and all that shit that it's came to now. It's a big difference, and I think we're a breath of fresh air for the new artists that's coming up, showing them that they could do their music, music that expresses where they come from as opposed to just doing what everybody else is doing. You could have a hit record in the midst of a fad, but you have to be truly talented in order to have three or four or five successful albums.

So this is going to be a real grimy record then?

Banks: You heard Beg for Mercy; it's in the same vein of that. But at the same time, we are creative. We make records like "I Like the Way She Do It." We make records like "No Days Off," like "Death Around the Corner," "Party Ain't Over," fun records like "I Get Down," the Swizz Beatz record. You have to be creative and able to make a complete record. Ladies listen to music too. You got to have records that cater to all kind of markets. For the most part, the bulk of the album is aggressive. And like Yayo, said, it's the time. Crime is up. Murder is up. Everything's up. The economy is down.

Yayo: Yeah, there's a struggle everywhere. When we got to markets like Angola, these dudes is bopping to joints of my album and 50's album because it's aggressive where they from. When you go to Africa, they not snapping and popping out there like that. They going through the everyday struggle. They fighting for shoes and hats and stuff like that.

And chains.

Yayo: So when you see three dudes that came from the bottom, they the number one rap group in the world. And don't forget what we did for LA and down South because we created artists like Game, we created artists like Buck. So for us to branch out over the world, you know G-Unit's going to give you some good product July 1. You know that for a fact. You already know, "Rider Part 2," whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. That was a mixtape record that went straight to radio on its own. And then "I Like the Way She Do It"? Everybody loves that. It's got a new producer, Stereo. We giving new producers chances. I mean, come on. Look what we did for the mixtape game.

Yayo, you seem to be doing some different things. You're making jokes more now than I remember you doing, like the breathing on a track thing.

Yayo: Because in this rap game, you go through transitions. And Banks, I learned a lot from Banks. Now I'm more laid-back with it. We don't have Jimmy Iovine or one of them big-head executives over our shoulder telling us to try to make these ringtone records or whatever. That's number one. Number two, I'm more relaxed with myself. I'm not wrapped up into the industry thing. I'm not going to Puff Daddy's all-white parties or none of that. I'm happy where I am. I'm chilling. And I'm happy with where I'm from. Where we live, we live in a nice neighborhood that's probably a half an hour or an hour away from the hood. So I get to jump in my cars and go to the hood and see what's going on. The same people still on the corner. So for me to be where I'm at, I'm happy. I'm good. If I die tomorrow, I'm good with where Tony Yayo's career is at and where G-Unit's career is at. We'll always be remembered no matter what.

But if you look at, like, the lineup of the Hot 97 Summer Jam this year, it seems to be mostly artists who've had problems with you guys. Do you feel that as pressure?

Banks: It's not pressure. You just making them want to see us more.

Yayo: Yeah, it's cool. G-Unit been hated on from the beginning. 50 got blackballed from when he did "How to Rob," when Ja Rule and Irv and them was on top. Banks always talks about the resistance, and there's always a resistance from G-Unit. Our records always gotta be the ones that are super, super clean. We get different treatment than everybody. But when I wake up in the morning, I always look at it like it's G-Unit against the world. It's been like that since I came home. It's been like that since the beginning.

So on Terminate on Sight, you're not going to be reaching outside your camp at all?

Banks: For the most part, it's just G-Unit artists. The artists that make up G-Unit, that's enough right there. Me, Yayo, and 50: that ain't enough? We don't really compromise with what everybody else is doing. If the record's hot, it's hot. We've been touring and we been on the move a lot, so it's not really time to go fly to Miami or fly to Atlanta to sit with producers. Those beats, with the exception of Swizz Beatz, all the other records got done with us in the studio right there. We not going to force any features or anything. Just stick to the core.

My friend would kill me if I didn't ask this one last question. Yayo, I wanted to ask you about your hats. You kind of brought back the bucket hat. It was gone, and you brought it back.

Yayo: Aw man, I love the bucket hat. You gonna see me wearing them. I had one on BET the other day when we dropped the video. I had a Gucci one. I just like them, man. I like to wear different things. I like to be a little flashy sometimes. A little different.

American Idol Week Twelve: Please, God, Let It End

Posted by Tom Breihan at 12:32 PM, May 15, 2008

We'll always remember you, Syesha, unless we don't

Syesha Mercado went home last night. I wasn't surprised. Neither, probably, were you. Syesha is exactly the sort of singer who always finishes at number three on American Idol: a nice-enough dependable workhorse of a singer who got as far as she did by weathering meltdowns and shock-eliminations from most of the other front-runners but who nonetheless utterly failed to capture the imaginations of grandmothers and ten-year-olds across the country. She's Melinda Doolittle, she's Nikki McKibbin, she's Vonzell what's-her-name, and there's every chance in the world that we'll never hear her name again once this season finally grinds to its long-overdue halt. More to the point, anyone not already convinced that the show's producers had their hearts set on a David-off only had to watch Tuesday night's show. Randy Jackson explicitly referred to her as "number three" (and meant it, apparently, as praise! During the top-three show!). Contestants all had three songs to sing, one of which was chosen by the producers, and they gave her an ostentatiously bad fake-Rihanna club-pop jam from the Happy Feet soundtrack, a song no one even remembers. Granted, Syesha didn't do herself any favors either, opting for a sexed-up cliche version of "Fever," and nobody has ever done well on American Idol by playing to the horny-dude demographic. But last night's results show was still the end of a long and gallingly blatant assassination campaign, and the total transparency of it just further highlights the main reason why this season of American Idol has been the worst, by far, in the show's history.

It's not like American Idol has ever been a stranger to viewer manipulation, but the praise heaped on this year's chosen frontrunners has taken things to completely new levels. David Archuleta was the show's hand-picked golden boy from the very beginning, and only his most trainwrecky performances have managed to elicit even the slightest criticism from the judges' table. Last night, he added another one to the pantheon: a version of Chris Brown's "With You" that might've been the unintentional-comedy highlight of the entire season. Archuleta might be 17, but he doesn't seem even the slightest bit comfortable with any pop-cult advancements since, at best, the mid-70s. Doing this supremely awkward rhythmic-squat dance and trying to sing in the actual words that teenagers use in these degraded times, he looked like a boy in a plastic bubble or something. Chris Brown is about as mild and wide-eyed and parent-friendly as any newly-minted pop star of the last ten years could possibly be, and still Simon's criticism that Archuleta was "a chihuahua trying to be a tiger" was on point. If Chris Brown is the tiger to your chihuahua, you're not going to make much of a pop star. Sorry. He was way, way more at home singing the godawful Dan Fogelberg treacle that the show's producers had picked for him.

David Cook, to his credit, at least took a little while longer to gain his front-runner status; he had to endure a couple of weeks of withering Cowell jibes before his strategy of covering old pop hits as grunge power-ballads really took hold. Cook, unlike Archuleta, has had a few great moments on the show, and he seems to at least consider what the songs might be about before singing them. He certainly had the highlight of last night's show: a delicate, nuanced rendition of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," which was enough to convince me that he has a chance at finally winning the thing despite the fanatical adulation that Archuleta seems to provoke in so many. The world needs another post-Vedder consonant-swallowing yowler like it needs a summer gas-tax suspension, but I'm pulling for Cook. So, it would seem, is Simon Cowell, the one judge anyone listens to, which could give him the edge tomorrow night. Mostly, though, I'm just rooting for this season to end. This year found the show's producers desperate to find someone who might actually sell records in a crumbling industry, going so far as to stock its roster with major-label refugees and past reality-show contestants (Archuleta and Mercado included) to prevent the show from becoming the amateur singing contest it's supposed to be. That the show's ratings have suffered mightily can only be considered justice.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 38

Posted by Tom Breihan at 10:52 AM, May 15, 2008

Songs this week:

- N.E.R.D.: "Everyone Nose Remix [feat. Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco & Pusha T]"
- Alfamega: "Head Banger [feat. Busta Rhymes]"
- DJ Khaled: "Out Here Grindin' [feat. Akon, Rick Ross, Plies, Lil Boosie, Trick Daddy, Ace Hood & Lil Wayne]"
- Young Jeezy: "Put On [feat. Kanye West]"

Live: Kanye West Justifies Everything

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:31 PM, May 14, 2008

Can't believe he pulled this off

Kanye West + Rihanna + N.E.R.D. + Lupe Fiasco
Madison Square Garden
May 14, 2008

A few years back, I read an interview with Dr. Dre in which he talked up his next big touring idea: a bastardized rap musical. The idea was that the songs would somehow fit the show's narrative logic; an undercover cop would get shot, say, and Snoop and Dre would emerge to do "Deep Cover." "It could work," said Dre, and I remember thinking No. No, it couldn't. Needless to say, it never did, and maybe the sheer galling logistics of the challenge were what ended up driving Dre into permanent semi-seclusion. But on his ridiculously ambitious new Glow in the Dark tour, Kanye West is trying something analogous, delivering his set in the form of a loose narrative and waiting until the very end to break character. That Kanye's tastes tend toward stylized sci-fi rather than grimy gunplay only renders the very concept more insane. And yet there Kanye was, standing alone amid dry ice and elaborate lights, talking with an on-board spaceship computer named Jane rather than the thousands assembled to see him. In a show-opening voice-over, Kayne outlined the story's relevant details: Earth is dead, and so Kanye and his spaceship leave to search the universe for inspiration, crashing on an alien planet as the narrative begins.

None of Kanye's songs actually have anything to do with this malarky, of course, and so the transitions between story and song are awkward at best: Kanye does "Spaceship" when the spaceship finally gets ready to fly and "All Falls Down" when it crashes again, etc. He couldn't find ways to shoehorn some of his songs ("Drive Slow," "The New Workout Plan") into that story, so they never appear. Others find vaguely disturbing placement; Kanye only does "Gold Digger," for instance, after his spaceship basically offers to fuck him. Given Kanye's attention to detail and his penchant for theatrical excess, it wasn't too surprising how straight-up beautiful his stage set was: a rippling polygonal landscape, projections of sunrises and deep space on the wall behind him, a raised platform that starts out looking like a giant laptop and eventually becomes a robotic riser, beams of pastel light shooting in every direction. Kanye also threw himself into his acting role with hilarious gusto ("What are we going to do, Jane?").

This was the first time Kanye had ever headlined Madison Square Garden, making it his biggest-ever New York show and probably one of the biggest press-circus nights of his career, so the temptation to derail his carefully planned narrative with random guest-stars must've been overwhelming. But he stuck steadfastly to the absurd purity of the show's concept; other than a quick run-in from opener Lupe Fiasco on the show-closing "Touch the Sky," Kanye was the only visible human onstage all night. And I can't help but admire the dizzy ambition of a show like this. Just a week earlier, I'd seen Kanye's onetime mentor on the same stage, breezily and effortlessly running through his hits for the millionth time. Kanye's show was exponentially more involved and intense, and his set will stick around in my memory a whole lot longer. The Glow in the Dark show is Kanye's attempt to pull off a rap equivalent of, say, Bowie's Glass Spiders tour, an immersive experience way beyond a mere greatest-hits show. Years from now, I'll remember the name of Kanye's tour.

At a Graduation listening session last year, Kanye said that he'd written the album with gigantic venues in mind, spacing out his words and simplifying his lyrics so the people in the cheap seats would be able to hear him. It showed. Virtually every one of the newer songs made for a massive Garden-wide singalong, probably the reason that Kanye extended "The Good Life" for what felt like ten minutes. This wasn't a rap show in any real meaningful way; Kanye's rapping wasn't anywhere near the focal point, and his new arrangements don't exactly favor tricky wordplay. That's a smart adjustment; rapping has never been Kanye's strongest point, and I thought I heard him stumble over his own tracks a few times last night, though the reworkings were too busy to say for certain. Older songs, songs Kanye made when he still concerned himself with quaint concepts like dusty drums and Talib Kweli guest-spots, morphed into alien things. The pianos in "Get Em High," for instance, became gasping trancey synths, and Kanye rapped his verse through a filter that made him sound like Darth Vader. Vocoders were everywhere; even the Ray Charles sample on "Gold Digger" got robotized. And Kanye did a whole lot of singing, too, even taking on some of the T-Pain parts on "The Good Life." And still, somehow, everything worked. At its worst, most self-indulgent moments, all this spectacle still thoroughly entertained. And at its best, it became moving. "Dear Mama," a song Kanye blessedly didn't try to fit into his narrative, was a bruising emotional climax, Kanye for once ending his chest-thumping/stage-humping spasmodics, standing stock still and clutching the mic with two hands, rapping heartbreaking words straight ahead. When he got done, he sat off to the side of his stage while his unseen band led the arena in a massive incantatory singalong of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing." It was cheesy as hell, I knew it was coming, and still I got caught in the moment.

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

In one way or another, all of Kanye's openers responded to the theatrical challenges that his headlining set posed. Rihanna, for her part, went nu-rave goth, rocking a huge, lacy black dress as she entered a stage made to resemble a blinking neon cave, keeping pace with vinyl Catwoman jumpsuits and fencing masks. Later, she changed into her own Catwoman jumpsuit, and then into a gleaming red shirt with giant plastic shoulderpads that made her look like an Autobot. (I'm still figuring out which one. Ironhide maybe?) During the set's opening segment, her band played what sounded like Crystal Castles remixes of her club-pop hits, and she and her dancers later twirled gigantic glowsticks during "Don't Stop the Music." Even when she's smiling, Rihanna evinces a kind of icy, imperious ferocity onstage; when Chris Brown, the night's one big surprise guest, emerged for the show-closing "Umbrella" remix, Rihanna looked about ready to cut his head off and soak his doofy Happy Days letterman sweater in blood. She also, evidently, has great taste in covers: Beenie Man's "Who Am I," M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)." Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how this happened, Rihanna has about the most viciously fascinating live show in arena pop; it really didn't matter that her backup singers did most of the vocal heavy lifting. She only violated her dystopian aesthetic for a quick ballads segment, and even that offered the welcome insight that "Unfaithful" could totally be a Def Leppard song.

Voice review: Rodney Dugue on Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad

N.E.R.D.'s set raised questions. Like: Why did they end their set playing the riff from "Seven Nation Army" over and over? (Absolutely no reason.) Did Pharrell really say "What up, Murakami?" mid-"Spazz"? (Pretty sure, yeah.) Did Lupe Fiasco, finishing his vocal-free run-in, actually flash the Roc diamond? (I may have hallucinated that one.) And most importantly, why did the Neptunes decide to submerge their frisky synth-funk in thudding brotosaurus riffage? I have no answer for that one. N.E.R.D. have evidently reimagined themselves, at least onstage, as drooling mall-rock with a nine-piece lineup (two drummers!) that does them absolutely no favors. N.E.R.D. was the only act on the bill performing without the benefit of an already-released new album, so maybe they felt like they had to ramp up the mosh-up aspect of their sound to work in an arena. This was total bathroom-break material for me, but I liked the psychedelic WinAmp screensaver graphics on the screen behind them.

Voice review: Christian Hoard on N.E.R.D.'s Fly or Die
Voice review: Jon Caramanica on N.E.R.D.'s In Search Of...

I missed at least half of Lupe Fiasco's opening set, but I got to my seat in time to see a whole lot of running, jumping, and flashing of the gold record that Lupe had apparently earned that day. It was good, even if he let boring-as-hell crooner Matthew Santos hog the mic a bit too much. I was absolutely unprepared for how nuts the kids in the audience went for Lupe, though; an arena-wide Lupe chant is not something I ever expected to hear. Kids really like this guy, and at this point I wouldn't rule out the possibility that he might end up headlining the venue some day. After last night, anything seems possible.

Voice review: Dan Weiss on Lupe Fiasco's The Cool
Voice review: Corin Fleming on Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor

Live: The Roots' TV Taping

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:20 PM, May 13, 2008

This looks almost nothing like the band I saw last night

TV tapings are weird. They're not so much live shows as simulations of live shows, and even if you're legitimately amped to be there, you can't help but feel like an extra in someone else's movie when people are telling you to applaud on cue. Before last night, I'd only ever been to one of these things: Jay-Z's episode of VH1 Storytellers, which I've never written about at length because the VH1 people who let me in told me that they wanted me to sit on a review until the episode was about to air. At that show, Jay ran through about half of American Gangster with his touring band, telling stories about how these songs related to scenes from specific gangster movies, not scenes from his actual life. When he finished his set, he restarted it from the beginning and did the whole thing over again so the cameras could get some different angles. That night, I was totally happy to be there. It was a Jay-Z show, after all, and I was hearing most of these songs for the first time. It was only sort of boring in retrospect. The Roots, who taped an episode of VH1 Soul's SoulStage last night, can't coast on that sort of mysterious starpower. They've got the tightest, most furious live show in rap, but it's exactly the sort of show that the intangibles of a TV taping might derail. It's hard to build up any sort of momentum, after all, when you have to make room for commercial breaks every ten minutes or when an assistant director might run onstage mid-song, waving his hands and asking you to start it over from the top.

This soundstage was a whole lot smaller than the one Jay-Z used, which makes sense, considering that I'm not even sure whether I get VH1 Soul. The set seemed constructed for the Roots of the late 90s, the one at the center of a thriving Philly neo-soul scene. The decor was what I'd have to call fake-coffeeshop: dark wood paneling, light dusting of smoke-machine smoke, calculated signifiers of authenticity. The Roots of Rising Down don't have much to do with that stuff anymore, at least not on record. Rising Down is harsh, grinding, apocalyptic synth-rap, the type of thing that would clear out most actual coffeeshops. But the Roots' live show has maintained its own form of chaotic focus for at least the ten years I've been seeing them; it exists virtually independent of the actual records. I've seen them in half-empty college auditoriums and rammed-in clubs and huge free-festival outdoor stages, and they've adapted to all of them admirably, so maybe the soundstage last night wasn't too huge of a stretch. (This wasn't, after all, their first TV taping.) Weird as it was to see Black Thought silencing his own cusswords or the band cutting itself off in the middle of its entropic jams to make room for commercial breaks, they never seemed out of their element. And this was the first time I'd seen them in front of a crowd this small (about 150), and so it was cool to see them working as a sort of mechanistic unit up close, everyone pulling off subtle little mid-song rhythmic shifts or stopping on a dime. In front of a crowd that small, Black Thought's frontman deficiencies amount to a whole lot less; the band's interplay becomes the main attraction.

Even though the Roots' live show has maintained its singular identity, the band itself keeps changing, last night's lineup only sharing three members with the one I first saw a decade ago. The latest switch-up was particularly disorienting: Owen Biddle, a smallish white guy with a neck-beard in place of Hub. Lamont Caldwell, a guy I met at a barbecue in Philly last year, now plays saxophone for them, making up a third of their horn section. (Lamont also fronts a rock band, MACH22, which he keeps emailing me about.) Tuba Gooding Jr., apparently the newest full-time member of the band, doesn't play a part in that horn-section. Instead he's a free-floating presence, playing the bass parts whenever Biddle takes a solo and tirelessly lugging his gigantic instrument across the stage like it's nothing; last night, he was probably the most charismatic figure onstage.

After starting out with a tense, furious "Rising Down," Black Thought doing the Mos Def and Styles P verses along with his own, and trotting Wale and Chrisette Michel out for a joyous, frenetic "Rising Up," the band was done with the new album, digging back through their older material with their usual revisionist flair. And so they made another entry into their long tradition of versions of "You Got Me" that sound nothing like the original. "The Seed 2.0" morphed into a roiling take on Bobby Womack's "I Can Understand It," with Thought actually singing and doing pretty well at it. The obnoxious indulgent jammy moments still came up every once in a while: Captain Kirk Douglas simultaneously soloing and scatting during "You Got Me," for instance. But this was probably the closest thing I've seen to a fat-free Roots show, the band trimming its set down to fit the hour-long TV format and still managing to summon their usual onstage energy. These were pretty much the worst possible circumstances in which to see a Roots show: soundstage, cameras getting in the way, frequent enforced breaks, recent sweeping lineup changes. And they still managed to pull off a pretty great little set. The last Roots show I saw was the near-disastrous first of their two-night stand at Radio City a couple of years back, and I was disappointed when ?uestlove couldn't deliver the insane barrage of surprise guests he'd promised. Last night, though, they promised next to nothing and still wrecked. I wasn't even mad when they had to re-take the first couple of songs for the camera's benefit. It'll probably look great on TV.

Voice review: Harry Allen on the Roots' Rising Down
Voice review: Will Dukes on the Roots' Game Theory
Voice review: Oliver Wang on the Roots' The Tipping Point
Voice review: Dave Tompkins on the Roots' Phrenology
Voice review: Miles Marshall Lewis on the Roots' Things Fall Apart

Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits Tribute Album: Pretty Good, Actually!

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:37 PM, May 12, 2008

Get silly

Reasons that Scarlett Johansson would want to record an album of Tom Waits covers abound. From the most cynical possible angle, she's an indie-film actress who needs to ramp up her cool-chick bona fides after getting engaged to Van Wilder and appearing on every lad-mag hottest-chicks-ever countdown and making a Michael Bay movie (though The Island, I'll argue, was a whole hell of a lot better than Match Point). More to the point, though, I know at least five people who, given the money, time, and fame necessary to record Tom Waits tribute albums, would do the exact same thing. And in any case, Johansson proves on Anywhere I Lay My Head that she's a better junk-blues weirdo than Waits is an indie-film actor these days; see Wristcutters: A Love Story, or don't. Even the most sympathetic critics have to concede that Anywhere I Lay My Head Johansson's Waits love-letter, is a fundamentally ridiculous enterprise, almost stunning in its total lack of need to exist. (Sean Fennessey: "This album is sort of like if the 25-man roster of the New York Mets came to my office and rapped the Pharcyde’s 'She Said' at me. Two things I love dearly coming together - and it’s not quite right.") It also seems guaranteed to vengefully piss off a certain segment of the population; when I mentioned that I really like the album at the Voice editorial staff meeting today, a howl of protest went up. The people who people who deeply love Waits's bruised, scraggly rambles, after all, are generally exactly the people who won't take kindly to a rich and famous and mindbendingly pretty actress offering her interpretations of these songs. But there's something to be said for the sheer ballsiness of the exercise, and something more for the fact that the end product sounds nothing like a Tom Waits record.

Johansson recruited Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio to produce, a canny choice. I'll listen to virtually anything that guy produces, even Dragons of Zynth. His immersively woozy sense of float here is almost the polar opposite of the precision-skronk he brought to the Foals' Antidotes; Sitek buries nearly every sound in the mix, letting everything bleed into everything else. More than anything Sitek's done yet, Anywhere I Lay My Head feels entrenched in the old cathedrals-of-gauze 4AD aesthetic, a smearily grand beauty that almost no one else seems able to pull off anymore. As a technique, Sitek's muffling enormity serves to distance the album from Waits's ramshackle clangs-and-bagpipes originals and to render Johansson's celebrity into something approaching a nonfactor. Her voice doesn't show up until track two, and when it does, it's just another element in Sitek's muffling mix. Sitek buries Johannson's voice so completely, in fact, that this album manages to render Waits's lyrics less comprehensible that Waits's muppet croak could ever manage. And Johannson's voice totally works for this stuff. I've always loved the husky depth of her speaking voice, and she puts it to good use here, intoning Waits's lyrics in a breathy near-whisper that actually becomes a full-on whisper a few times. It's nothing like Wait's ground-down crackle of a voice, of course, but it has a world-weary force of its own. She can't quite make the self-consciously anachronistic colloquialisms of those lyrics work, and she really shouldn't have tried; I wish she'd just say "Houston" instead of "Houston-town," for instance. But her interpretations take on their own welcome contexts; when she talks about drinking you under the table, there'd be a walloping sexiness in her voice that'd still be there even if we didn't know it was Scarlett Johansson singing.

Johansson and Sitek try out a few stylistic left-turns over the course of the album. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" becomes a sunny synthpop hymn, and the drum-ripples from Blondie's "Heart of Glass," last heard on Missy Elliott's "Work It," show up on "Who Are You." On "I Wish I Was in New Orleans," Johansson's only accompaniment is a reverbed-out tinkling music-box. For the most part, though, everything on the album comes submerged in a viscous shoegaze amber that honors the faraway mystery of the Waits originals without ever attempting to replicate their sound. When David Bowie shows up to sing background on a couple of tracks, he's in caterwauling self-parody form, but Sitek responds by reducing him to a near-echo in the mix. Nothing is allowed to break the narcotic mood. And so the elegant simplicity of Waits's songs emerges in a completely different way than it does on Waits's own records.

Anywhere I Lay My Head is inevitably going to draw comparisons to She & Him's Volume One, another vanity-project album from a gorgeous indie-film actress. But even if Zooey Deschanel is both a more distinctive and a more technically gifted singer than Johansson, even if her "Baby, It's Cold Outside" from Elf completely destroys Johansson's "Brass in the Pocket" from Lost in Translation, Volume One strikes me as a much safer, less interesting record. Rather than a weirdo visionary like Sitek, Deschanel made her album alongside the amiable middlebrow indie-folk-popper M. Ward. I like Volume One just fine, but it's a low-risk, low-reward affair, and it never strives for anything beyond a breezy utilitarian pleasantness. For all its pure goofiness, Anywhere I Lay My Head is a braver and heavier work, a slow dive into honeyed ether. It's not a masterpiece, but it unfolds like a long, luxuriant, theatrical sigh, and I'll take that.

The Singles Column: Coldplay, DJ Khaled, Ting Tings

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:54 PM, May 9, 2008

Fix your face

If there's one overarching reason why I write about music the way I do, it's the Singles column that Charles Aaron wrote in Spin in the mid-to-late 90s, so assign blame accordingly. Back when the entire rock-critical universe had set up shop on Eddie Vedder's dick, Aaron danced across the pop playground with total impunity, using that singles-review format to unload on whatever caught his ear. Given that there's no one music thing happening today that really demands comment, I thought it'd fun to completely rip off Aaron's column for a day. I might even make this a regular thing, unless Aaron tells me to stop or something.

Coldplay: "Violet Hill"

A hamfisted attempt at canyon-spanning big-rock catharsis that endears on the strength of its overbearing puppydog earnestness. These guys are totally going for it! Searingly meaningless lyrics! Impeccably manicured squalls of fuzzed-out guitar! Brian Eno organ-sustain, courtesy of the real Brian Eno! Overwrought, ambitious stadium-rock silliness like this is always a noble endeavor, especially considering that these guys could absolutely get away with soundtracking very special Grey's Anatomy episodes for the rest of their lives.

DJ Khaled: "Out Here Grindin' [feat. Akon, Rick Ross, Plies, Lil Boosie, Trick Daddy, Ace Hood & Lil Wayne]"

A loathsomely, loudly vacant non-entity in absolutely every other respect, Khaled is good for exactly one triumphant all-star synth-rap posse cut every summer. This latest one shortens verses and expands numbers, always a good idea. Trick adds grizzled authority, Wayne comes atypically coherent, and Plies incoherently yells at us from across the street, but Boosie's Pixie Stix yawp steals the show, even though he devotes half his verse toward spelling out Khaled's mantra too many times. Also: No Fat Joe! Can't wait for the outrageously expensive helicopter-chase video.

Ting Tings: "Shut Up and Let Me Go"

British fashion-pop duo smirk brattily over sideways Maroon 5 vanilla-disco guitars and bouncing Teletubbies bass, more a playground taunt than a song. Electroclash will never die, at least not when its mutant offspring can be used to sell iPods. CSS wish they came up with this one.

Alfamega: "Head Banger [feat. Busta Rhymes]"

Scary Grand Hustle cameo monster and reanimated roid-freak veteran uncork insane fast-rap shop-class threats over squeaking spaceship beat: instant knucklehead adrenaline rush. The unexpected Busta Rhymes renaissance continues: "Now let's get it popping like we fucking misbehaving / And I got a bitch with thirty-two shots, I nicknamed her Iron Maiden / And that little bitch got a twisted sister, she a little quicker to twist a nigga cabbage / She short but'll leave a nigga hole-y so I call that pretty little miss Black Sabbath." Even with T.I.'s "Hurt" as precedent, I didn't see this thing coming. Pure evil.

Nelly: "Party People [feat. Fergie]"

Jay-Z onstage at MSG Tuesday night: "Only dudes moving units Em, Pimp Juice and us." It's a little bit funny but mostly just sad to see one of the commercial titans of the decade's first half recruiting the meth-head Black Eyed Peas chick to join him in sub-DMX growly chest-thumping trance-rap mess and then actually letting her totally steamroll over him on the double-time third verse. Can't he just go country full-time? "Over and Over" was the jam!

Ashton Shepherd: "Takin' Off This Pain"

Vengeful neglected-wife putdowns delivered in uber-thick Alabama twang over surly but precise Nashville bar-rock. Possibly even more terrifying than Alfamega and Busta Rhymes. That exhilarated dizziness in Shepherd's voice rings out like a pop-country take on righteous Bikini Kill bile. She doesn't need you. Does that scare you?

Mountain Goats: Lovecraft in Brooklyn (Aesop Rock Remix)"

The original's wriggling apocalyptic dread was John Darnielle at his most percussively wracked, so it makes sense that Aesop would see a bridge to that desiccated-warehouse Def Jux aesthetic, and plus these guys love each other, so this at least makes sense. The loping bloopy beat makes for awkward company, and I have no idea what Aes is talking about on his verse, but what else is new? Like last year's Aesop/Darnielle collabo "Coffee," this finds two forcefully evocative writers working in two very different aesthetic wheelhouses moving toward middle ground, something worth encouraging. Maybe next time it won't even sound so forced. (Related: Read this right now, if you haven't.)

American Idol Week Eleven: Saying Goodbye to Jason Castro

Posted by Tom Breihan at 3:02 PM, May 8, 2008

He hopes you like jammin' too

I'm going to miss Jason Castro. I'm not going to miss him because he was a particularly great American Idol contestant or anything; in retrospect, he was a pretty terrible fit for the show's ballad-hawking chops-intensive blueprint. In terms of pure vocal skill, Castro couldn't come anywhere near any of the other serious contenders this season. He had no particular range, cooing everything in a near-whisper and never letting loose with the big crashing song-ending notes that have long been the show's money-shot moments. As a performer, he rarely ventured out from behind his guitar, awkwardly bobbing across the stage whenever he wasn't parked on a stool. And he showed no real acumen for the show's PR-hustle element, famously telling Entertainment Weekly that he didn't especially care how long he lasted on the show. But that last point is actually what made Castro a fascinating figure in an otherwise near-unwatchable season. I can't think of a single other contestant in American Idol history who so visibly disdained the whole structure of the show.

Last year, Blake Lewis would occasionally chafe at the show's formal constraints, but he was still transparently trying to win the damn thing. There's been speculation that Castro was actually self-consciously trying to torpedo his own chances on Tuesday night. (Apparently he mouthed "don't call" at the camera when Seacrest read off his call-in number? I missed it.) Throughout the season, he's kept the same blunted, bemused smile, happily shrugging off whatever feedback he got from the judges, good or bad. He never once seriously attempted to adjust his style for the different theme-weeks, always the biggest litmus test for Idol hopefuls (though the same charge could be leveled at most of the contestants in this niche-heavy bottom-dwelling season). And he never pulled any of the riotously cynical vote-grubbing tricks that his fellow contenders relied on so heavily, never grabbed blindly at heartstrings or belted out a patriotic chest-thumper just because. In his absolute lack of respect for the dictates of the show, Castro actually jerked the curtain back hard, revealing the manipulative thrashing of the enterprise for what it was. Next to his beatific grin, the test-marketed stage-kid trickery of the other candidates couldn't help but seem soulless. As long as Castro was on the show, it somehow felt like one of us had made it through, like someone as deeply suspicious of the unstoppable ratings-machine had snuck past the gatekeepers and was working to bring it down from the inside. No wonder the judges were so eager to see him celebrated home.

Castro certainly has a career waiting for him once he extricates himself from American Idol; jammy dorm-room stoner-folk is, after all, one of the few remaining music-business strongholds where there's still money to be made. But I can just as easily imagine him saying fuck it and shrugging off all the effort that would doubtless be involved. Either way, I don't have a whole lot of further use for the guy, and I can't imagine him making an album that I'd actually pay money to hear. Despite a few magical moments on the show (obligatory "Hallelujah" reference goes here), he faded firmly into the background most of the time, coasting by on pleasant but lifeless performances week after week. For all the bile he heard from the judging table, Tuesday night's show was actually fairly typical for Castro in that respect. The exceedingly goofy version of "I Shot the Sheriff" that he mugged his way through certainly wasn't anything I'll ever need to hear again, but it was no less defensible than David Cook's yowly "Hungry Like the Wolf." And even if the lyric-flub in his take on "Mr. Tambourine Man" was pretty glaring (how hard is it to remember "jingle jangle morning"?), his pared-down version was, I thought, one of the night's stronger moments. The judges and producers might be breathing easier now that he's gone (their anti-Castro campaign over the past couple of weeks was some serious Bay of Pigs shit, Paula gaffe and all), the show is going to be a whole lot less interesting now that we're left with three effortfully bland paragons of naked careerism. At this point, I really can't root for anyone.

That said, Tuesday night actually might've been my favorite of the season. The show's concept, a run-through of some of the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs That Changed the Universe Forever or whatever, was a canon-enforcing boomer-pander on the level of those two endless Beatles tribute shows, but everyone picked at least one great song and actually did it justice. Cook might've shanked "Hungry Like the Wolf," but I liked his smoothed-out "Baba O'Reilly." I missed the synth-arpeggios, and Cook is no Daltry, but the big moments from that song never fail to thrill in any context. Syesha Mercado's take on "Proud Mary" was competently obvious, and I flinched hard whenever she tried to equate the civil-rights movement with her own struggle to become a famous singer, but her "A Change is Gonna Come" actually did move me. Surprisingly enough, though, I thought the strongest performer of the night was the demonically grinning lizard-child David Archuleta, even if I do generally hate the kid. He sang two elegant, simple renditions of two elegant, simple old songs, and he never got lost in his own vocal calisthenics the way he can on the Richard Marxist Jesus-jams he usually favors. For once, he looked something like a confident, nuanced performer instead of the steamrolling engine of pander that his creepy stage-dad has turned him into. I even liked the nod toward "Beautiful Girls" on "Stand By Me." I'm still dreading his near-inevitable win, but I have to hand it to the kid; he made his thing work this week.

Status Ain't Hood Podcast 37

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:15 PM, May 8, 2008

I can't believe how many of you comments-section dudes are riding for The-Dream. Here are some new songs I like.

- Hotstylz: "Lookin' Boy [feat. Yung Joc]"
- Bun B: "Damn I'm Cold [feat. Lil Wayne]"
- Montgomery Gentry: "Long Line of Losers"
- Nine Inch Nails: "Discipline"

Live: Jay-Z and Mary J. Blige Come Home

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:46 PM, May 7, 2008

Adult swim!

Jay-Z + Mary J. Blige + The-Dream
Madison Square Garden
May 6, 2008

So Jay-Z has officially entered the bourgie Vegas-glitz stage of his career, the part where he can happily, triumphantly coast on past achievements from now until whenever. He doesn't make music for kids anymore; he makes expensively produced grown-folks soul-rap that leans enormously on his own iconic persona. This is Sinatra/Billy Joel territory; he'll be able to effortlessly sell out Madison Square Garden anytime he feels like it for the rest of his life. Entering center-stage alongside Mary J. Blige with a massive dressed-up twenty-some-piece band behind him last night, getting the obligatory "Can't Knock the Hustle" out of the way first, he looked like someone with nothing to prove. Every past Jay-Z hometown show I've seen has been a staged spectacle of some sort, a deluge of surprise guest-appearances and headline-grabbing pyrotechnics. This one wasn't like that; it was the second of a three-night Garden run, another stop on a long tour. I've heard reports from other cities that Jay seemed detached and unmotivated onstage, as well we might expect. Since this tour started, after all, he's married Beyonce, signed an absurd $150 million LiveNation deal, and entangled himself in a bitter quagmire of a blood-feud with Washington Wizards shooting guard DeShawn Stevenson. And still he's routinely responsible for great moments like this YouTube clip of him and Bun B in Houston. Jay just might become the first rapper to successfully enter that classic-rock arena-staple zone where he can tour on past hits forever and nobody cares whether or not he's still putting out new music.

Judging by last night's show, he can pull it off. Even if his suited-up live band routinely cluttered up his tracks a little too much, drowning out samples and eliminating all empty space, his voice never came close to getting lost in the mix; Jay is the rare rapper who doesn't have to shout to be heard onstage. And as glitzy and expensive as his current stage-set might be, no show that makes room for "P.S.A." and "U Don't Know" and "Jigga My Nigga" (the three most dependable highlights of any Jay-Z show) is going to be entirely free of grime. And even at a relatively routine show like this, Jay always seems happy to be home; last night had that extra intangible exhilaration that only seems to happen at MSG shows. The big moments came, too. During a long segment where Jay played snippets of past hits, Beyonce danced across the stage, never touching a microphone and departing after like twenty seconds. (She was Jay's only surprise guest all night, unless Memphis Bleek counts, which he absolutely doesn't.) And during "Blue Magic," Jay stopped on the "fuck Bush" part, did the first verse of "Minority Report" a capella, and then flashed Bush's scrunched-up face on the screen behind it so everyone could boo and throw middle fingers at it. When that ended, he said, "I think it's time for a change, don't you?" as the screen behind him showed Barack Obama's face. On the night when Obama may have locked up his party's nomination, this was good enough for goosebumps from me. But the moment ended as soon as it started; Jay clarified that Obama in no way endorsed him, said we should get back to the party, and launched into a spirited rendition of I forget what song. As long as Jay wants to keep stepping onstage and effortlessly breezing through his hits, I'll keep showing up.

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

So Jay's autopilot is better than just about anyone else's full-speed. But Mary J. Blige doesn't appear to have an autopilot setting. This tour is billed as a coheadlining outing, and Jay and Mary finished the show onstage together, but Mary's solo set came before Jay's, and I wondered before the show how a massive star like Mary might feel after being relegated to glorified opening-act status in her hometown. Turns out I had nothing to worry about; the crowd, from what I could tell, was there as much for her as it was for Jay. When her band played "I'm Goin' Down," she just stood onstage grinning while the crowd sang the whole song back at her, the same thing Jay did for "Big Pimpin'." Mary also had the most euphoric, unexpected guest-spot of the night; she brought out Method Man for "You're All I Need," and he looked ecstatic to be sharing her stage. And her show had a really satisfying arc to it, starting out with her smoother, more restrained early tracks before building into her gut-ripping screamers and then ending with a set of joyous uptempo club-jams that felt earned in their happiness. Mary's whole career has relied on that narrative, of overcoming hellish personal demons and fighting for peace, and the show neatly encapsulated it. Mary's self-help ambitions can sometimes make for moments of serious kitsch; on "Your Child," for instance, three actors came onstage to hammily pantomime the lyrics. But those moments coexist with flashes of catharsis that you'd be an asshole to dismiss. By the end of "Your Child," Mary was either actually crying or doing an impeccable impression of someone crying, and as she finished the song, she told us that "the system has messed up the minds of all the men since the Vietnam War." By the time she got around to "No More Drama," her whole face was slick with sweat, and she stomped across the stage and pounded the floor, uncorking those great raspy wordless wails like she was screaming at God. And even though breezier dance-tracks like "MVP" and "Be Without You" and "Just Fine" were hardly free of emotional force, they still felt like sweet relief after all those teary pyrotechnics. Mary didn't quite upstage Jay-Z; nobody can do that. But she came a lot closer than I expected.

Voice review: Alfred Soto on Mary J. Blige's Growing Pains
Voice review: Jason King on Mary J. Blige's The Breakthrough
Voice review: Barry Walters on Mary J. Blige's No More Drama
Voice review: Arion Berger on Mary J. Blige's Mary

Opening an expensive, elaborately choreographed show from two pillars of black-pop royalty, both of whom could've easily sold out the Garden on their own, R&B goofball The-Dream (I hate that hyphen so much) came off like a complete clown. Performing in front of Jay and Mary's curtain, Dream's whole stage-show consisted of four backup dancers pulling egregious stripper-moves and two basketball hoops with Christmas lights on them. Dream wore leather pants and put on a different hat and jacket for every song he sang. I'm not sure why anyone picked this guy as an opener; I can't imagine that even the people who inexplicably like "Shawty is the Shit" getting all whipped into a frenzy when it comes on. Dream at least kept it brief, doing his three singles and disappearing, which at least was nice; I couldn't take much more. Once this guy's moment ends, R&B will be better off.

Nine Inch Nails' The Slip: A First Impression

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:35 PM, May 6, 2008

"This one's on me"

Maybe it's insane to quibble when one of your childhood musical heroes dumps a gang of almost-free music on the internet, but I wasn't one of the overjoyed faithful when Trent Reznor unleashed the 4-CD Nine Inch Nails song-sketch marathon Ghosts I-IV on the world a couple of months back. For all the middleman-cutting democracy of its release, Ghosts struck me as a massively indulgent and vaguely ridiculous rock-star move, Reznor clearing out his not-quite-there file and trusting that it was worth something. By itself, none of the set's 36 tracks made for more than a half-interesting rumble; taken as a whole, the whole thing blurred into an indistinct fog of vintage Reznor production-tricks. Reviewing the thing for Pitchfork, I wondered whether Reznor's break from the major-label system that spawned him meant we'd never get a good song out of him again. With a hardcore fanbase willing to buy his leftovers and no music-business military-industrial complex tutting over his shoulder, Reznor was now free to keep puttering around his studio from now until infinity. Turns out I needn't have worried. Reznor might not still be the brilliant slither-pop mind he was when he made Pretty Hate Machine, but he's still writing songs, and now he's giving them away without even asking us for five bucks in return.

With virtually no real warning, yesterday Reznor offered up The Slip a brand-new for-real album, for total free-download on this website. And even the presumably ridiculous traffic didn't stop me from getting my download link after only a few hours of waiting. The idea that Reznor isn't even submitting to the pay-what-you-want Radiohead model, that he's just handing this album out to us out of the goodness of his heart, is a beautiful thing. As the whole Ghosts saga revealed, Reznor stands to make plenty of money by selling his music direct, and still he's asking for nothing in return this time. More importantly, The Slip is a powerful, compact album of ten straight-up songs. Or rather, it's an album of six straight-up songs, two washed-out ambient drone-pieces, one really nice serpentine instrumental, and one track where Reznor mumbles inaudibly over dusty, minimal piano-plinks. But even "Lights in the Sky," that piano-plink track, works within the context of the album, separating its bash-screech first half from its more contemplative side. The Slip only carries with it the faintest hint of rock-star pretension. Rather than giving us half-finished sounds for their own sake, Reznor applies his considerable studio skills toward serving the grandly, cathartically bitchy melodies that made us care about him in the first place. After a day of repeat-listens, The Slip may be my favorite NIN album since The Fragile.

Year Zero, the last proper NIN album, went for the big statement at every turn, taking on the Bush administration via dystopian screeds and paranoid rants and an elaborate internet-based mythology. Exhilarating as it was to hear Reznor thrashing against bigger walls than the ones in his own mind, protest-rock was never what Reznor did best. His best moments, for me, have generally been his most slowest and bottomlessly sad: "Something I Can Never Have," "Hurt," "The Great Below," and most of the new album, like those songs, finds Reznor looking inward. It's hard to tell what, exactly most of the songs on The Slip are about, especially without a lyric sheet. (The download comes with a liner-notes PDF, but that's mostly dominated by a series of grim, ominous geometric patterns.) Still, I could just be projecting here, but The Slip seems to deal with Reznor's break from the corporate machine, or at least from the numbing conformity-minded forces it represents. "1,000,000," the post-intro opener, finds Reznor sinking into alienation and desensitization, graphically imagining his own suicide; I'm hoping music-watchdog groups don't get wind of it. On "Echoplex," Reznor finds shelter from the forces of assimilation, possibly in his own mind: "My voice just echoes off these walls." And on "Demon Seed," the closer, Reznor finally seems just on the brink of breaking free. "I have been trying to behave myself," he repeats over and over, like a mantra, before slowly interspersing it with "I have been trying to tolerate you," the sort of line that just lets you know he isn't going to bother much longer. The moment of triumph never comes on The Slip; the whole album remains immersed in struggle. But it's an optimistic album in that ending; victory and self-realization are just around the corner. And so maybe the album's title and its general existence serve to drive home the idea that this guy made it out.

Over the past few years, Reznor has been sanding away his stylistic tics. His new-wave and IDM influences, which once jutted out forcefully, have fully internalized themselves into the whole. Beyond those pretty-good ambient tracks, there's nothing especially musically surprising on The Slip. But even as his sound ossifies, Reznor remains totally competent at what he does, distressing his hooks with just the right amounts of squalling entropy and processing his riffs so completely that they sound like purely electronic vrooms. "1,000,000," with its mechanized distorto-guitars and relentless forward momentum, would make a great Rock Band song. The gorgeously clear piano that interrupts the scrape-thuds on "Discipline" add a dynamic layer of unashamedly pretty stillness. "Head Down" starts with Trent shouting in a pinched, declamatory bark, but its punishing trudge gives way to moments of frightened beauty. All these songs are going to sound perfectly at home when Trent starts turning up at outdoor festivals and hockey arenas this summer. And so one of our last great channelers of middle-school rage has not, it turned out, disappeared up his own ass just yet. With Reznor still able to conjure these bursts of radio-ready frustration seemingly at will, the world is a better place.

Voice review: Christopher R. Weingarten on Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV
Voice review: Ray Cummings on Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero Remixed
Voice review: J. Edward Keyes on Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth
Voice review: Scott Seward on Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile

No Age Rides the Zeitgeist

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:07 PM, May 5, 2008

The Vampire Weekend of the second quarter

Matthew Fluxblog posted an interesting piece today about No Age, the LA dreampunk duo currently basking in the sort of critical adoration usually reserved for shitty Animal Collective descendants. Matthew's point resonates for me: No Age is just now releasing its first proper album, and they're maybe still figuring out who they are as a band; these immediate critical hosannas aren't going to help them get there any faster. Even on a day when Nine Inch Nails have suddenly dropped a late Easter present of a surprise free album, No Age have completely dominated internet music-chatter. Matthew's post might, in fact, be the first ambivalent critical reaction I've seen to anything No Age-related. Full disclosure blah blah blah, but Pitchfork today gave Nouns its highest numerically-rated review of 2008 thus far, and even the cranks over at Decibel are on board. They're playing another giant outdoor festival just about every weekend this summer, and half the nightly patrons at the Smell, the LA DIY venue they've come to embody, are probably journalists honing trend-pieces at this point. This band is loved, and I can mostly understand why.

Because they bury their weirdly mannered spazz-punk anthems under so many layers of fuzz-pedal effects and tape-hiss and because they space their ragers out with prettily washed-out ambient drone-pieces, No Age add an element of mysterious drift to what would otherwise be fairly meat-and-potatoes post-hardcore. They're a basement-show band, something their anarchic live shows certainly bare out, but they have a way of staying just out of reach on record. Basically, they've found a way to turn tinny cheap-ass recording techniques into an immersive experience. Even as their cymbal-spashes sound like static, their guitar-fuzz, muffled as it is, takes on an almost luxuriantly pillowy diffuseness. Their guitar riffs are like ships drifting through fog a few hundred yards away; you know what they are, and you can almost make them out, but you can never quite tell where nothingness ends and their edges begin. The vocals, meanwhile, are on some total early Michael Stipe shit, so garbled and buried in the mix that I can only pick out the odd definitive phrase here and there. Since their style is so fuzzy and undefined, they're a really fun band to play spot-the-reference with, and you know how much we critics love doing that.

I've listened to Nouns at least once a day since I got the advance, partly because I want to see what my peers are getting so amped about and partly because the album promises its own unlockable mysteries. It's a warm, comforting record, hooky but not overbearingly so, and the band stays away from the militaristic compression techniques that render so many new records impossible to keep on repeat. But that elusiveness that makes them intriguing also keeps me from getting all the way into the record, from feeling it on a visceral level. In the band's buried vocals and distancing techniques, Matthew Fluxblog hears "cowardice," "a sort of passive-aggressive, ethereal blankness." I can't really ride with Matthew on that point; if anything, it's refreshing to hear a band applying punk-rock giddiness to the floaty, vaporous reverb-pop that's been slowly taking over indie-rock over the last few years. But it's also little wonder that my favorite No Age song by a pretty serious margin is "Everybody's Down," from the 2007 EP collection Weirdo Rippers; it's the only song I can name where the band keeps a discernible riff front and center for the whole two minutes the song is playing.

I'm all for any band who can push the sloppy, chaotic basement-show aesthetic back into an indie-rock universe that's spent at least the past decade trying to forget it ever existed, and I'd certainly rather see No Age getting this love than another shitty Animal Collective descendant. But I wish my reasons for liking No Age didn't tend so often toward the extramusical. Hopefully, this wave of enthusiasm will continue beyond No Age, beyond even their LA contemporaries, and toward the unheard throngs of basement-show dwellers who don't live in coastal media-centers. I wouldn't bet money on that happening, though. At CMJ last year, I saw No Age play a fun spazzout of a show. The next day, though, I saw another Smell band, the terrifyingly fierce all-female skronk-rock quintet Mika Miko, and they pretty much annihilated No Age from my memory. Nobody's talking about Mika Miko today.

Voice review: Zach Baron on No Age's Weirdo Rippers

Indie-Rap Survives the Crash

Posted by Tom Breihan at 2:49 PM, May 2, 2008

I miss Pen & Pixel

Last year was a bad year for rap, but at least a few people got to put out albums. We're in the fifth month of 2008, and the first thoroughly solid major-label rap album, the Roots' Rising Down, only just hit stores on Tuesday. Nobody's making any money anymore, and labels are habitually pushing records back until they get the vaguest indication that the things might move a couple of copies; I'm already looking forward to the third straight fourth-quarter deluge. These days, practically every working rapper considers himself a scrappy underdog whose label doesn't understand him, and that includes relative commercial titans like 50 Cent. But rap albums are still coming out; they're just coming out on indies that know better than to commit actual money to marketing these things. A whole left-behind generation of mid-90s NY rappers and their stylistic descendants are now shifting indie, releasing low-overhead product to devoted fanbases and realizing that their chances for crossover stardom are over. And considering the surprising number of comments-section denizens requesting that I say something about Guilty Simpson's Ode to the Ghetto, these guys are doing something right, so let's have a look.

Guilty Simpson owes his career to his J. Dilla connection, which, combined with his Stones Throw contract, probably means he's got more in common with old Rawkus-era notions of indie-rap than anyone else on this list. As a rapper, though, Guilty is a total everythug, rapping in a turgid and deliberate monotone and swinging back and forth between garden-variety tough-talk and conversational slice-of-life stuff (jealous girlfriends are a particular fixation). He's a solid rapper, and sometimes he comes with a really nice little turn of phrase ("To get paid some, go to every extreme / One black'll leave another red for green"), but I probably wouldn't pay this guy much mind if he was rapping on tinny mixtape-rap beats. But there's a pleasant dissonance in hearing him rap instead over the miasmic psyche-rap beats of Stones Throw's stable of Dilla acolytes like Black Milk and Madlib. The appeal of Ode to the Ghetto goes beyond novelty; it turns out that half-asleep gun-talk actually sounds pretty great over flanged-out guitars and falling-apart horns and evil robotic 80s movie synths. I especially like "Footwork," where Guilty's unimpressed sneer sinks easily and naturally into Oh No's dementedly vwerping homemade electro. But I can't help but notice how completely Sean Price hijacks "Run." Unlike Guilty, P never lets you forget how much he loves rapping; delivering his intricately constructed punchline-rap, he's just deliriously amped. I can't help but wonder what might've happened if Price, rather than a journeyman like Guilty, had an album full of beats like these.

Buckshot, Price's Boot Camp Clik compadre, had that same fire in his soul until pretty recently, and he still regularly summons it onstage, at those great NY BCC shows when at least half the crew reliably shows up regardless of whose name is on the bill. Consider Buck's turn on "And So," from BCC's 2002 group album, one of the great incensed performances from a rapper who knows exactly how underappreciated he is. Over the past few years, though, the Boot Camp Clik have solidified a decent little underground following, and Buck, in particular, seems completely satisfied with that. On The Formula, Buck's second collaborative album with the producer 9th Wonder, the little guy gets comfortable to the point of complacency. His lyrics, for the most part, are total autopilot stuff, the sorts of things that a rapper on his level should be able to come up with in the morning while he's pouring his Frosted Flakes: "I don't preach / But I do teach / My little homies in the hood how to outreach." (That's the first line on the album!) 9th, for his part, does little to justify his equal billing. His beats serviceably approximate that classic sweltering Beatminerz boom-bap, but they're too clean and orderly; there's none of that chaotic vinyl-pop grime. But then, nobody involved seems to be laboring under the perception that The Formula is going to be replacing Enta Da Stage anytime soon; this is low-risk, low-reward rap music, quite possibly the result of a few pleasantly lazy Sunday-afternoon studio sessions. Buck's still knows exactly how to use his pinched, craggy voice. With contentment gradually pushing out resentment, that voice over low-impact soul loops makes for perfectly acceptable sunny-day headphones material. The Formula is one of those albums that works better when you don't pay too much attention to it, and nobody could begrudge Buckshot the ability to consistently and steadily churn out albums just like it for the rest of his life.

As breezily pleasant as The Formula might be, though, it's hard to ignore the reality that Buckshot isn't quite as sharp as he once was. I honestly have no idea whether the same thing is true of AZ, though I find it hard to imagine. Undeniable is AZ's seventh studio album, but it's the first I've heard. AZ basically owes his career to his guest-verse on Nas's "Life's a Bitch," so I've always basically considered him the very first post-Illmatic NY rapper, and post-Illmatic NY rap has never been something I particularly cared about. In a better year for rap, I probably never would've bothered with Undeniable. That would've been my mistake. Along with Rising Down and H.N.I.C. 2, Undeniable is one of the very, very few end-to-end satisfying rap records I've heard this year. AZ's voice is nothing special; it's a punchy, ground-down east-coast mutter, but he does great things with it. Specifically, he jams every throwaway line with every internal rhyme he can find ("Doggy, since a shorty I was speaking like I'm forty"), keeping his lyrics on-message and making it sound easy. And he grounds all those writerly tricks in a shockingly cohesive and pretty musical palate. On the album's cover, AZ puffs a cigar while glancing over a New York Times and sipping a huge, expensive-looking glass of red wine, and the sound of the album goes a long way toward furthering that image of AZ as an urbane, mature, sophisticated voice. He favors underrated regional producers like Fizzy Womack and Nottz, who give the album an old-soul melodic sensibility. Koch, AZ's label, is notorious for conveniently forgetting to clear its samples, so these guys get to use all the unlicensed 70s-soul sounds they want: strings, bells, rippling quiet-storm guitars, spare snatches of vocal melody. Over tracks this luxuriant, AZ can't help but sound calm and assured. Barely any guests show up on the record, which is almost a shame; if even Ray J can sound like a grown-up on this stuff, imagine what he might've gotten out of somebody with actual talent.

Status Ain't Hood Podcasts 35 & 36

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:16 PM, May 1, 2008

Two for the price of one this week. First, here's the one I recorded last week. Songs:

- Young Buck: "My Interview"
- Prodigy: "I Want Out [feat. Un Pacino & Havoc]"
- Atmosphere: "Your Glasshouse"
- No Age: "Sleeper Hold"

And now the one I recorded yesterday. Songs:

- T.I.: "No Matter What"
- Kidz in the Hall: "Driving Down the Block Remix [feat. Cool Kids, Pusha T & Bun B]"
- Killer Mike: "2 Sides [feat. Shawty Lo]"
- Constantines: "Brother Run Them Down"

T.I.'s Inspiring Return

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:32 PM, May 1, 2008

Not gone yet

T.I. has had some time to think. Since his ridiculously dumb machine-gun arrest last fall, he's been on house arrest, lounging around his mansion in his bathrobe and slippers, possibly watching a whole lot of TV, occasionally issuing reassuring YouTube missives to his faithful. And working on music. For the first time since his debut album, T.I. is reportedly writing down his lyrics rather than arranging them in his head. We first heard the results on the remix of Lupe Fiasco's "Superstar," were Tip slip-slid his familiar slur all over the track with a newly joyous mastery. T.I. shared that track with Lupe and with Young Jeezy, both at or near the top of their respective games, and he managed to outdo the both of them by finding a way to fuse their best qualities: Lupe's showily convoluted verbosity with Jeezy's domineering confidence. That track emerged weeks before the the details of T.I.'s blessedly lenient plea-bargain became public, and already Tip sounded completely rested and refreshed. Last year's T.I. vs. T.I.P., even with its handful of highlights, felt like a forced lurch toward introspection, but the T.I. on the "Superstar" remix was miles removed from that one, a near-miracle considering all the time he was then staring down. Well, that T.I. is apparently here for at least a little while longer. "No Matter What," the first thing we've heard yet from the forthcoming album Paper Chase, leaked earlier this week (Nah Right has the mp3), and it might herald a new chapter in this guy's artistic life. And given that his plea allowed him to take a whole bunch of personal time before he starts serving his year in prison (enough time, incredibly, to finish his album and to film a role in some bank-heist movie) we'll probably get to hear a whole lot more of this T.I. I'm seriously amped about it.

"No Matter What" is the first great T.I. song since the last great T.I. song ("Hurt," if you're keeping score at home), and the track works by lacing the swaggering enormity of T.I.'s existing persona with a new sanguine introspection. Though he never comes close to apologizing for his crimes, there's a regretful/not-regretful warmth in his voice throughout the track, like a movie gangster looking back heartsick on a lifetime of unforgivable sins but still unable to repress an inward half-smile before the end-credits fade-out. T.I. presents his self-inflicted trials as setbacks to be overcome on a quest toward immortality, a stance that would be totally disingenuous if he didn't sell it so well. T.I., after-all, is really good at this sort of self-help talk; not even Jeezy can invest get-money talk with this guy's level of all-consuming urgency. "Facing all kind of time but smile like I'm fine / Brag with such passion and shine without trying," he says at the beginning, and we're led to believe from the outset that that level of confidence is a noble and righteous thing. He then goes on to paint those of us who commented on what looked like a man's life unraveling publicly as doubters to be smilingly brushed off: "You let the blog sites and the magazines tell it / I'm sure to be in jail until 2027." And the chorus, where he layers his voice up into an anthemic rumble, drives that affirmation home: "Still I stand, no matter what, people / And here I am, no matter what." And all of a sudden it's too easy to forget that I'm listening to someone who illegally bought machine-guns that I can't imagine he really needed. Moralistic reservations wilt in the light of this kind of radiant certainty.

And it sure doesn't hurt that T.I. sounds as technically in-command as he does here, finding all sorts of great little ways to slide unshowy internal rhymes into his lines: "That why the dope boys and the misfits feel it / This still his city as long as Tip still livin', listen." Details on the track itself are sparse, but Sean Fennessey reports here that it probably comes from Danja. If it's a Danja track, we should commend that guy for so easily inhabiting the sort of bluesy, organic Southern rap that T.I. worked so hard on Trap Muzik: triumphant snare-rolls, sustained organ-sighs, everything unfolding at a slow, unrushed lope. The only space-pop element of the track is a weird vwerping synth-ping that really doesn't add anything to the track, but that's the tiniest of quibbles, and thank God T.I. didn't try to come back with trance-pop or whatever. "No Matter What" is only one song, and it could be a total red herring on a slapped-together mess of an album; it is, after all, coming right after T.I. vs. T.I.P. But I'm hoping it turns out to be a sign of a new direction, the first indication that T.I. might be one of those rare rap figures whose voice actually gains force and resonance as he grows older.

Voice review: Katie Hintz on T.I.'s T.I. Vs. T.I.P.
Voice review: Makkada B. Selah on T.I.'s King
Voice review: Keith Harris on T.I.'s Urban Legend