Janine points us to an interesting Boston Post article (bugmenot) about Def Jam Left, which will I guess be Jay-Z's boutique label for undie hip-hop. Since I've already compared two of his contemporaries to the developmentally disabled, let's start with the positive:

As Jay-Z told Billboard, the label is designed to be ''an artist-driven label with very low deals so people are not pressured by first-week SoundScan [sales], so we can build artists."

This certainly sounds great, although it's maybe worth noting that if any artists get developed at major labels these days, it's hip-hop artists. That said, Jay's A&R choices have been far from inspiring (both as Def Jam president and as a mentor previously), and if there's any better indication that he's simply looking to get a share of that college kid market, it's signing the uber-respectable Roots.

But what's more questionable is nonsense like this:

With Def Jam Left, and his inaugural signing of the Roots, Jay-Z has created a boutique label for rap artists with more on their minds than the run-of-the-mill topics stifling mainstream rap. For the most part, commercial hip-hop is where rock was in the early 1990s before Nirvana and its seminal 1991 album ''Nevermind" flushed away all that brain-dead hair-band nonsense.

There's so many lazy assumptions here it's almost impossible to parse, so let's just zero in on the subtext. The key error in the analogy here is that Nirvana didn't simply differ from Warrant in that Warrant was singing about fucking and Nirvana was singing about...uh, how everything sucked, I guess. (What was Nirvana singing about?) There was also a pretty big difference musically[1], as I think everyone would agree. But there's no mention here of bringing in "forward-thinking" producers[2] to go along with the "socially conscious" rappers. The implication being that you could finally "get" people to listen to raps about global warming if only they could get Just Blaze to give 'em a beat.

But how would this be an improvement over what folks like this writer perceive as the present model, i.e. get a great beat and people won't care so much about the actual rapping? If you think people aren't listening to the words anyway, then what the hell does it matter if the rapper is talking about? If the listeners are so undemanding as to listen to lyrics critics perceive them to not actually care about, why would they care about undie lyrics either?

This seems foolish. You can say "once there were mainstream audiences for both N.W.A and A Tribe Called Quest" but the fact is that even if you took the vocals off, anyone could tell the difference between Straight Outta Compton and Low End Theory. I'm not sure that would be true with the oppositions being proposed here--after all, Kayne did produce songs on both Jay-Z's and Common's albums. In other words, it seems insulting both to mainstream and undie hip-hop to assume that the latter's been unsuccessful simply because the producer suck (I do tend to think undie producers suck, but then I don't particularly like the MCs, either) and the former's been successful despite the fact that no one likes the rappers. This last point is clearly wrong, and not a bit short-sighted: even if they don't like the lyrics per se, there's a musicality about the vocals of lots of mainstream rappers--call it "flow" or whatever--that is a big part of what makes them appealing. "In Da Club" would be great even if he was reading his grocery list both because the beat's great and because of his voice, which is far more compelling than it deserves to be.

It's just all a little too reminiscent of the perpetual indie-rock daydream that if only our bands got promoted, man, everyone would recognize how good they are and they'd be successful. Well, no. For one thing, lots of bands get heavily promoted and don't do well; there's lots of luck involved. For another, the band that I think comes closest to this dream, the New Pornographers, clearly lack the kind of straighforward lyrics that would be necessary to have a radio hit, neither simple enough nor ridiculous enough to really connect. Ditto for undie rappers. I'm not saying there aren't scattered travesties, nor am I going to claim that A&R people aren't generally morons. But to claim that there's this huge untapped underground that just needs a major-label push to break through a la Nirvana seems way off.

[1] Although if you want to be that way, you could argue that in some senses it was just a recentering of influences--early pop-metal's debt to certain strands of punk and 70s hard rock was often noted, and arguably Nirvana just took it back to a different set of inspirations while also adding bits of 80s college-rock.
[2] Like the ones detailed in Making Beats, which I've been meaning to write up a response to for some time.
posted by Mike B. at 11:20 AM 0 comments

Actually, thinking about it more, it's even funnier to think of Trent Reznor as host of a children's television show. Especially if all the music was NIN songs done with toy instruments--you know, like "Head Like a Hole" arranged for Casio, animal keyboard and plastic-stringed guitar. It would be adorable!

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Last night Miss Clap and I watched all of the Trapped in the Closet DVD. A discussion ensued afterwards about how R. Kelly is a bit of a Kevin himself. I disagreed. I would say that if 50 is Kevin, Kells is Dewey:



You know, the kind of kid who you can't quite tell or not if he needs to be in the special class, but you put him there anyway just to be safe. Sometimes he'll bowl you over with a burst of totally unexpected genius, but then other times he'll go nuts and bite someone's leg, and back in the special class he goes. (Let it be noted that Dewey is perhaps one of my favorite characters in all of television.)

posted by Mike B. at 10:43 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

...or, rather, it would be time to go home if I wasn't watching videos of Butterstick.



There's a good booty shot at the end, so if someone wanted to cut this to "Baby I Got Your Money" I'd be eternally grateful.

posted by Mike B. at 7:28 PM 0 comments

Ever have one of those random thoughts that make you laugh and you don't really know why? I had one the other day that was just the very basic concept of Trent Reznor as a parent. I think it was specifically the image of his kid wandering around the house and hearing dad in his home studio recording vocals at the top of his lungs.

And hey, Trent's looking pretty stacked these days, huh?



Anyway. Time to go home.

posted by Mike B. at 7:19 PM 0 comments

Not to stir up shit or anything, but is David Brooks saying Jews have no character? He starts his review of a book about admission policies at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton like this:

A few years ago, I wrote a book about the rise of a new educated class, the people with 60's values and 90's money who go to Starbucks, shop at Whole Foods and drive Volvos. A woman came up to me after one of my book talks and said, "You realize what you're talking about is the Jews taking over America."

My eyes bugged out, but then I realized that she was Jewish and she knew I was, too, and between us we could acknowledge there's a lot of truth in that statement. For the Jews were the vanguard of a social movement that over the course of the 20th century transformed the American university system and the nature of the American elite.

This is a large part of the story Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, tells in "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton."

...and ends up here:

Furthermore, while he leaves the impression that he believes academic merit should be the dominant criteria for college admissions, and can't fathom why anybody would want to have jocks running around campus, he never steps outside the story, the way an essayist might, to measure what was lost and gained with the decline of the chivalric ethos and the rise of the meritocratic one. Those old WASP bluebloods may have been narrow and prejudiced, but they did at least have a formula for building character. Today we somehow sense that character matters, and it still vaguely plays a role in admissions decisions, but our thoughts about character - what it is and how to build it - are amorphous and ineffectual.

I'm just sayin'. (Emphasis mine, obvs.)

(ADDENDUM: Forgot to mention that this all just reminded me of Gilmore Girls.)

In other book news, there are certainly things I could say about this, both positive and negative (positive: good point about American literature seeming unable to address politics without only condemning it, although this is hardly the only subject it treats in such a way [pop culture, cough cough], negative: telling people for approximately the ten gazillionth time they should Write More Like Orwell--we know, we know--and not even bringing up The Public Burning), but maybe it would be easier to point you to the final paragraph of this (very good and admirably restrained) review, which makes a similar point in much less space:

Seth speaks of the "evil century past" and ends his book with the wish that we "believe in humane logic and perhaps, in due course, in love." If the new century seems set on disregarding these earnest hopes, that may be, at least in part, because we're still learning the lessons of the "evil" recent past through the literary romanticism of the 19th century.

Zing!

posted by Mike B. at 6:38 PM 0 comments

Over at The Rambler, Tim has a series of good posts up about the idea of "applicability" in music and how this might be a better way of talking about it than "relevance" i.e. it's not about whether the work itself seems to be addressing events in your life, either world-historical or personal; it's about whether the work makes itself a part of your daily life and an event in and of itself. It gets started here and there's a little more here, but for my money, he really gets rolling with this post. Key bit for me:

...a bugbear of mine is that music (especially classical music) is almost invariably talked about as though its components are such things as melody, harmony and rhythm, when in fact it is more useful to talk about music as formed of time, sound, memory, quotation, distortion, and so on. What's more, these terms actually apply to all music, rather than the small subset of Western art music 1600-1900, so they're doubly useful (if admittedly nebulous). These are qualities, like light, colour and space in the visual arts, that listeners encounter in every moment of their daily lives, and it is at these conjunctions that music can attain 'applicability'. Because when a work has something to say, or to reveal, about one of these things, that revelation can be passed through the listener into their daily experience.

After this he goes somewhere I'm not entirely sure I'm willing to follow him--it leans a little too heavily on the questionable idea of art as something grandly life-changing, and I'm not sure what he's describing (to be more than a little snarky about it, you're walking down the street, and then bang, Messiaen!) is in any way unique to art, at least not in any way that wouldn't be better accomplished by making the now-standard argument for a widening of the definition of art. (Isn't anything that changes our perspectives art?) But the bit I've quoted above is very good, and, it seems to me, very important. Although we're primarily concerned with different things (I think Tim's working on the vitality of art music whereas I'm dealing with understanding pop), it reminds me of something I used to blather on about: the necessity of discovering the meaning of pop songs not just in the lyrics but also, maybe primarily, in the music, and not through the shallow, uninformed "semiotic" readings that are usually the best we get on this score. Tim here is, in part, explaining why this is so important: it's these qualities, not the formal elements, that follow you out into the world.

He's also (though I think he's dancing around the point) making a great case for the importance of personal criticism. Personal criticism is oft-condemned these days, especially when folks who actually get paid to write things are feeling threatened by "bloggers." But when it's done right, personal criticism addresses the phenomenon Tim describes: the way music interacts with the rest of your life, with those horrible banal bits we seem to dislike associating with art, and this is maybe the primary way we experience music. Personal criticism isn't an excuse to write about yourself instead of the subject you're criticizing, it's an opportunity to take music into the social realm in which it actually functions. Personal criticism isn't narrow, formal criticism is, because it puts the subject in a box and tries to observe it in isolation; personal criticism lets it run free in the world, talk to other people, go to parties, drive to work, cook, clean. And, if anything, this gets us closer to the truth.

posted by Mike B. at 6:35 PM 0 comments

Yay, the internets is working again.

Anyway, you will find two new reviews by me in Flagpole this week: The OC Mix 5 and the Fiery Furnaces. They're both pretty good reviews, I feel, so check 'em out. Although maybe I shouldn't have leaned on the Bitter Tea crutch at the end of the Furnaces review. Meh.

posted by Mike B. at 6:28 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

I saw 50 Cent on Letterman last night and they made the mistake of interviewing him. While undeniably painful, the interview plus the performance (with the Late Show band doing the backing OMG most painful thing ever and a totally unresponsive audience of middle-aged midwestern tourists) made me realize something about Mr. 50: he's sort of like that one kid in the special needs class--let's call him Kevin--who likes thinking he's really tough and so the teachers always tell him he's tough and he says things like "I'm really tough!" and yells a lot when they play whiffle ball. You know that kid? Yeah. That's 50 Cent.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Kevins of the world--they're awesome and they don't take shit from anybody--but when they start doing things like this, you just have to say, "Kevin, calm down. Time for a nap, OK? You can promote your biopic later."

posted by Mike B. at 11:41 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 07, 2005

This may be slightly outside my readership's field of reference (as, honestly, it's pretty much outside my field of reference), but does anyone have anything to say about When Music Resists Meaning: the Major Writings of Herbert Brün? I saw it in St. Mark's Books and was intrigued, but it's a bit pricey for my blood (though it does come with a CD of his music) and I wasn't entirely sure it was up my alley. Anyone read the book itself or any of Brün's writing?

posted by Mike B. at 12:06 PM 0 comments

There are those of us who remember Esselle, although we appear to no longer even have the ability to "dig around," as Hillary used to direct us to do. (Ah! memories.) I probably should have realized something was up when I stopped getting referral links from the post about Brent's Beastie Boys review.

At any rate, it is sorta back, in group form, and is called Recidivism. It is very good and takes very little time to read because when things are short they are funnier. You should check it every day, or else you might miss something you would be sorry to have missed. Am I not selling this very well? Fair enough.

In somewhat related news, if you haven't been checking Quo Vadimus lately, you should.

Finally, the comments are actually working again, so Blogger's get turned off. Weep quietly.

posted by Mike B. at 11:47 AM 0 comments