1/16/09 - Party and Bullshit

Notorious coming to the movie theaters, and it looks like Biggie's getting the full-on hagiography treatment, which is almost a shame since the bulk of his recorded output is summed up by one of his earliest songs from '93:

Biggie: "Party and Bullshit"



Death has a way of whitewashing life; so too to any kind of lasting achievements. Phil Spector seems to be on a mission to balance the karmic scales by going full-blown crazy to reverse atone for all the girl-group singles he helped produce, but even with what looks an awful lot like blood on his hands, his epitaph is still going to be dominated by his musical work in the '60s. Abraham Lincoln put the Emancipation Proclamation in place, but they don't tell you in high school that he loved dirty jokes.

So it's a little disconcerting to see Biggie mythologized like this, blown up to a larger-than-life image, when he was especially gifted at creating himself as a larger-than-life image anyway. The tough part of it is that his version is a lot more complex and a lot more real feeling than the hagiographic treatment that seems to be advertised in the promotional materials for Notorioius. It's not an encouraging sign that Sean Combs help produce the movie; as the overblown explosion of "I'll Be Missing You" post-Las Vegas shooting showed, Puffy's trades in sentimentality and melodrama when it comes to his now 15 years dead friend. That's all well and good from a coping perspective, but it murders art.

The genius of Biggie was the way that he traded in operatic images and themes, but extracted real drama, not melodrama, from them. The blinged-out fantasy world that Puffy luxuriates in was, for sure, something that Biggie also cast as aspirational lifestyle shit in his rhymes. But Puffy's motto is to never let them see you sweat - Biggie let the contradictions hang out, and deepend the thrust of his lyrics by showing the fear, desparation, and hopelessness behind the gangsta mask.

Take the opener, "Things Have Changed", from Ready to Die - it comes replete with thug life imagery:

"Turn your pagers, to nineteen ninety three
Niggas is gettin smoked G, believe me
Talk slick, you get your neck slit quick
Cause real street niggas ain't havin that shit"

But what comes before that, what it opens with, is an invocation of what's been lost:

"Remember back in the days, when niggas had waves
Gazelle shades, and corn braids
Pitchin pennies, honies had the high top jellies
Shootin skelly, motherfuckers was all friendly
Loungin at the barbeques, drinkin brews
with the neighborhood crews, hangin on the avenues"

Biggie: "Things Done Changed"



In the opening verse of his debut album, Biggie sketches out the lament of the crack epidemic in the inner cities - the dissolution of neighborhood bonhomie in the name of the real. It's this "real" that Chris Rock so memorably skewered as a dead-end street, and the critique is right there in Biggie's verse - this is the way things are, he's saying, I'm a part of it, but the way things used to be worth lamenting.

It's the filling in of the context, of the margins, that make his verses so resonant, and that give even his straight-up gangster songs and verses their tragic weight. Without Michael Corleone in Italy, the depth of his fall doesn't quite tug on the heart so hard. Without the image of a Biggie waking up "fucked up/pockets broke as hell/another rock to sell", all the threats to grab his shotty and identify the body and smuggle crack and all that would just be the empty swagger that we've seen Xerox'ed into irrelevance by 50 Cent et. al. Similar to the way that one of 50s most compelling stories is that of wanted to sell drugs to buy a new hat (context is king), Biggie's gangster narratives are made so much richer by the details filling out the margins.

10/22/08 - Devil Without A Cause (I'm Going Platinum!)

In Fargo Rock City, Chuck Klosterman's excellent memoir of an '80s pop-metal drenched childhood in North Dakota, he spills a lot of ink defending the music that gets popular over music that gets the nod from the critical establishment. In his formulation (and I paraphrase), a lot of what's considered beneath contempt at the time due to its lowbrow/lowest common denominator appeal winds up being more culturally resonant than what's championed by the serious musical critics and thinkers at the time. So, for example, Led Zeppelin, famously critically reviled, has since been a beneficiary of revisionist history by dint of their hugely influential discography. And likewise, AC/DC has outlasted and out-endured anyone that originally held them to be unoriginal and repetitive (sure, they are, but so is a Mantra).

This divide between popular and critical opinion is fascinating to me; half of the time I agree with music critics that take terrible acts like Matchbox 20 down a peg, but the other half of the time I think that the position of cultural arbiter goes to the brain and it becomes difficult to identify those artists with a certain kind of visceral appeal of the kind that AC/DC and Led Zeppelin both exemplified.

Which brings me to Kid Rock. Now, I'm not going to argue that Kid Rock is someone whose artistic output is any kind of shining peak of musical accomplishment, but there's a a reason that Devil Without A Cause sold something like 8 bajillion copies. At heart, Kid Rock is musically inclusive, and did a better job than anyone this side of Rage Against the Machine of integrating the cadences of hip-hop with the enduring musical idioms of blues-rock. And Rage, I would argue, for all their hip-hop influences, fall on the stiff side of funky- musically, they seem more out of the hectoring KRS-One side of the hip-hop lineage than the G-Funk party music side of things.

Kid Rock, on the other hand, is all about the party. This doesn't necessarily diminish his output - so is AC/DC. So is Snoop Dogg. So is Chuck Berry. The linchpin of Kid Rock's inclusive musical spirit is right there in his first big hit: "Get in the pit and try to love someone". What this means musically is a shotgun wedding between Southern/Midwestern sleaze rock with the bombastic boasts of hip-hop. When it works, it's an inspired fusion that could be called a truly original hybrid. "Cowboy", one of the Kid's high-water marks, lays out Snoop's Cali fantasies over a loping, funky rock bed, expanding the gangster boasts sonically by setting them to the sounds of self-confident southern rock.

Current hit "All Summer Long" is a rock mashup of "Werewolves of London" and "Sweet Home Alabama", a remix for the rock idiom in which the Kid spins out a summer fantasy straight out of Grease (well, with a lot more booze and weed) over the recontextualized sounds of summers passed. "Picture" is an old-school country duet with Sheryl Crow that showcases Bob Ritchie's embrace of the occasional classicist move.



Now, on the downside, Kid Rock I think is ultimately going to serve as more of blueprint than the finished edifice, more Elvis than Beatles, because for the most part his lyrics are terrible. He brings in hip-hop, sure, but he employs the couplet structure of early Beastie Boys/Run-DMC with only the occasional witty touch. For the most part, it's empty bluster; read any interview with the Kid and one comes away with the impression that he shares some traits with our soon-to-be-departed POTUS - a love of self precluding introspection and a self-satisfaction that impedes forward progress.

Nonetheless, some of Kid Rock's best songs apply the kind of rock/hip-hop fusion that points the way towards the inclusive musical future that we're all heading toward. And he carries the torch for the forgotten Midwest, a self-proclaimed American bad-ass who is going to wave the flag, chug Jack straight from the bottle, and let a midget rock the guest verse while a black woman holds it down on drums. Don't write the man off.

10/7/08 - Rick Ross Was A Prison Guard - Cracks in the Hip Hop Persona

"JULY 21--Apparently desperate to distance himself from any affiliation with law enforcement, the rapper Rick Ross has recently denounced as fake photos purporting to show him in a former career as a Florida prison guard. But Department of Corrections (DoC) records show that Ross, whose raps detail the Miami gangster lifestyle and his supposed days trafficking cocaine, did, in fact, work as a correctional officer for 18 months."
--http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0721081rickross1.html

When I first read this, my first instinct was to smirk and move on - surely, this was just of a piece with Vanilla Ice claiming some kind of blatantly plagiaristic ghetto background in an effort to give himself some legitimacy. Cred-seeking is no new story in music; every epitaph written for the Smashing Pumpkins mentioned the way that they released Gish on an "independent" label to bolster their indie bonafides in the grunge era even though there was already an agreement in place that Siamese Dream would roll out countrywide on one of the majors. Robert Zimmerman cast himself as Bob Dylan, enigmatic Woody Guthrie heir, so as not be written off as a Twin Cities pretender.

So Rick Ross is not alone, then. But I think that this particular expose/downfall/what have you points up a vexing dilemma confronting contemporary hip-hop and those that wish to be successful practitioners of the art in particular. Namely, it limits the form.

The distinction between Dylan/the Pumpkins/the White Stripes and all of the rest of the rock artists that have lied about personal histories and personas and what Rick Ross did is that the lies did not seem to affect the actual musical/lyrical content. The rock artists in question conjured biographical spice to take charge of the narrative that has grown up around music with the legitimization of the music press and its attendant musical hagiographies. In essence, by making up personal or business histories, these artists were adding spice to the biography to get the storytellers/mythmakers/audience to feel more invested in the music and the process. By mythologizing themselves or their process, they made the creation of their music more compelling.

What this didn't seem to affect, though, was the music. Jack and Meg White hold to the lie that they're siblings even after it's been defunct, but most of the White Stripes songs don't have anything to do with siblinghood or divorce. Or, if they do, they seem to be written from a psychologically penetrating place. It may add an extra frisson to the listener when Jack tackles the subject of infidelity if said listener has read up on the Stripes biographical liberties taken, but the songs themselves tend to approach emotions and subjects without incorporating biography into the equation. The music is mostly untouched by the myth.

Similarly, no matter who originally signed the Pumpkins, one gets the sense that Billy Corgan was going to write widescreen guitar epics, no matter that guitar solos, 70s pomp, glam rock, and titanic ambition were seen as out of fashion in the cred-obsessed 90s grunge scene. The business arrangement was cover for what Corgan was trying to do with the music - the band may have released Gish on an independent label, but in no way were the sonics altered - Corgan didn't strip out the guitar solos and produce it to sound like it was recorded in a trash can.

And in the case of Dylan, one gets the sense that he pretty much wrote about whatever the hell he wanted to, and appended the false biography so that people would cut him slack or find him more interesting, whichever he preferred at the time.

So, then, Rick Ross. I'd argue that one of the stark limitations of mainstream rap as it exists is an extremely narrow focus on the tropes of gangsta rap as laid out in the '90s by Dr. Dre, Snoop, Biggie, etc. It's long been lamented in spaces other than these that before the gangsta hegemony hip-hop seemed to be about to branch into many different directions (Rawkus records, De La Soul, Pharcyde, Deltron 3030 are some examples of alternate paths not taken), but with the incredible popularity of gangsta rap a hegemony of subject thunderously took its place at the top of the rap charts.

Billboard top singles in rap for the week:
T.I. - Whatever You Like
Lil' Wayne - Ms. Officer
T.I. - Live Your Life
Lil' Wayne - Got Money
The Game - My Life
M.I.A - Paper Planes
Jay-Z - Swagga Like Us
Ludacris - What Girls Like
Young Jeezy - Put On
Nelly - Body on Me

Subject matter - Money, drug dealing, cheap sex, crime. I would never dream to argue that these topics are going to lose their mainstream appeal: from film noir to summer action movies to beach-bound spy novels, these are the currencies of popular appeal. But in hip-hop the lyrical subject matter seems almost exaggeratedly narrowcast. Everybody's drinking Patron tequila in between bouts of selling kilos of cocaine to finance their various 'hos in different area codes, apparently, such that you could swap out today's T.I. from tomorrow's Lil Computerface, or whoever.

Also: the club. Apparently that is where it is all jumping off.

(An aside here to point out that there is a universe of rap/hip-hop outside the mainstream purview that occasionally crosses over to have a hit that has plenty of artists working in different subject matter - your Mos Def's, your Little Brothers, your Kool Keiths, etc. etc. etc. So I don't mean to paint all of rap with one brush, but it's the mainstream rappers that are going to get the cream of the production crop, the bulk of the marketing push from the label, and stand in for a genre in mainstream American culture).

Into the breach comes Rick Ross, such that he felt compelled to position himself as the king of Miami coke-rap. I mean, Miami coke-rap?? What. The. Hell. Because there are only a limited set of subjects that serve as gates to mainstream rap success, Rick Ross, EX-PRISON GUARD, felt compelled to present himself as the complete polar opposite of what he actually was. Every day he was hustling, all right.

Easy to mock, sure, but the larger point is a sad one. Instead of another drop in the bucket of raps about cocaine, a more artistically interesting way to use the form might be to, oh, I don't know, talk about working in a correctional facility. Rap can be an extremely expressive, poetic form, so how about some poetic thoughts on the conflicts/thoughts/feelings expressions of serving the prison/industrial complex in a nation that incarcerates its black men disproportionately. That's subject matter to sink the teeth in; not ridiculous rehashed Scarface fantasies that the next flavor-of-the-month is going to take a go at.

Lupe Fiasco's "Kick, Push" was a great song, sure, made exponentially greater by being about skateboarding. Come on, mainstream rappers - you're using a firehose of an artform to get a drink of water.

7/11/08 - Next Steps

So, sure, Run-DMC's "Walk This Way" was a watershed moment, but it feels like the combination of rap with rock 'n' roll music still hasn't explored any past the front gates. I know that there was a period there where rock radio was filled with the likes of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park and such, but just because something combines rap with rock doesn't mean that the music is any good. Conversely, it doesn't necessarily make it bad either, but the graceless lunkheads sprayed across hit radio after the Fred Durst & Co. hit it big sure would give that impression to the casual observer.



Rage Against the Machine is probably the most critically and commercially successful example of the genre, and I would posit that the Roots crew is the current paradigm of underground indie success. But both represent very specific paths toward the fusion of hip hop and rock, which means, Occam's Razor style, that there are a multitude of paths still left unblazed.

Because of the lack of workable models, Rage stands as the paradigm of the primarily "rock" act working in the hip-hop mode, which is somewhat strange due to the limited nature of their focus. Limit not meant in the pejorative sense, but literally - Rage's music is designed to accomplish a narrow set of aims - namely, make the listener feel just as pissed off and energized bout left-wing politics as Zach De La Rocha. The name of the band is the thesis statement of their sonic and lyric concerns - this is not a band given to experimentation. In this way they operate with the same kind self-limitations delineated by punk - like the buzzsaw pop of early Ramones, Rage's bludgeoning assault operates within a narrow range of tempo, attitude, and sound.

Now, this is not to denigrate the band - just to frame it. Rage has a lot of crucial strengths, and their central (and only) innovation was/is a powerful one. Recognizing that hip-hop's lack of melody and ratatat rhythms allow form of vocalization more assaultive and dramatic than anything sung could be, they proceeded to alloy said vocal style with the similarly amelodic and staccato rhythms of metal. The produced music that was assaultive to the core, but catchy through its rhythm (as opposed to its melodoy). Thus, the perfect message of form and function - when de la Rocha pops off about bulls being on parade, he really does come across as calm like a balm. There's no sing-along chorus to blunt the impact, but it's not deliberately alienating or off-putting like the Cookie Monsters of metal - it's just aggression, flattened down and welded the hip-hop's insistent beat.

So, a triumphant example of an aesthetic realized, but not exactly a viable model for the genre - Rage is pretty much a niche unto themselves (similar to a band like the Violent Femmes, and similarly inextricably linked with the powerful and powerfully peculiar personas of their frotnmen), and as such are more of an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

An actual step toward a successful fusion is the Roots crew, whose live performances are legend and well-known as bringing serious instrumental fire. Like Rage, the Roots musical dynamic is a push and pull from the musically restless ?uestlove and the solidly earnest MC Black Thought. "Here I Come" is the most rock 'n' roll song from the band that I'm familiar with, and it, like Rage, courses with the best of the 4/4 rock beat and aggression, riding ?uestlove's drums and the wah'ed guitar out of the gate all the way to the close.


Still, though, the Roots work solidly in the vernacular of hip-hop - their commitment to live instrumentation sets them apart and gives them a rock sheen, but really their project is to bring live instruments to the hip-hop sound. Thus, their songs are not structured as rock songs; with riffs, verses, choruses, bridges, and dynamic shifts/peaks/valleys. They're structured more as hip-hop songs - with the instrumental there as the bed for lyrical dexterity. It's somewhat of an fallacy to say that the play rock/hip-hop - really, they're almost pure hip-hop with live instruments. "Here I Come" rides the same riff the whole way through - were it taking from the rock vernacular there would at least be a solo - or the guitar part would change during the chorus (like Bulls on Parade).

Still, Black Thought is a more varied MC than de la Rocha, so stacking the 2 bands up next to each other illuminates the yawning gap that is still open for a fusion of genre to fill. Pop acts have taken hip-hop sounds for a while now (see: "Every Morning", Sugar Ray), and vice versa (see: every hip-hop song with an artfully placed female-sung chorus) - rock is a genre that's encrusted with a bit more traditionalism. Still, though, it's 2008 - it's time to get with the program. I'm about ready for Led Zeppelin fronted not by Robert Plant, but by Nas - which means not just hip-hop with live instruments, or aggression-dialed-to-11, but a full range of moods, styles, and instrumental color in the rock style with some rhyming woven through. Too much to ask? I'm keeping the faith.