This Week in Jams: Hurry Up With My Damn Croissants! edition

Kanye West Yeezus.  Def Jam, 2013.

Did Kanye West deliver the politically charged, racially conscious, sonically radical rap album hinted at by his performances on SNL this spring?

No.

Maybe?

Partially, but it’s wrapped together with another album that’s pretty gross, not as funny as it thinks it is, and, Kanye being Kanye, self-absorbed as hell.

Yeezus is a pretty frustrating listening experience.  It features tons of exciting, deadly production, as on “Black Skinhead”, so devastating in live performance, here stripped down to a Navy Seal night assault of a beat — in, out, maximum devastation, minimum ammunition expended.  It’s rap as programmed by Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy.  Not everything is original, though; some of the noise just sounds like second-generation El-P (or third-generation Bomb Squad, if you like).

Sadly even the best of the beats are put in service behind lyrics that are…questionable.  Yes, I think Kanye has moments of inspiration.  He manages to paint vivid pictures in tiny spaces, he lashes out as his natural enemies (the paparazzi, the haters) with taut lines like “ya’ll niggas can’t fuck with Ye/I’ll move my family out the country so you can’t see where I stay” (a reference to his stated desire to raise he and Kim Kardashian’s new daughter out of the watchful eye of the media).  In what may be Yeezus‘ best moment, the first verse of “New Slaves,” he returns to themes from The College Dropout and adds some new commentary on celebrity and wealth, and particularly celebrity and wealth of the black variety:

You see it’s broke nigga racism
That’s that don’t touch anything in the store
And this rich nigga racism
That’s that come in, please buy more
What you want, a Bentley? A fur coat? A diamond chain?
All you blacks want all the same things
Used to be only niggas now everybody playin’
spendin’ everything on Alexander Wang

But the moments clarity, when Ye seems to be a trickster figure unafraid to speak truth and Fight the Power, are quickly overshadowed by the bad jokes (“In a French ass restaurant/Hurry up with my damn croissants!), the limited hate-laced vocabulary, the misappropriated cultural-historical references (“I’m going 300/like the Romans”), and just pure, unnecessary racist-misogynist filth (there are a dozen examples that I see no need to repeat here).  Worst of all, I think, are the uses of important bits of grave cultural iconography (Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit,” Martin Luther King’s “Free at last!” speech) in the service of songs that unapologetically degrade and dehumanize.

Maybe we need this Kanye, though.  He fulfills a role for us as a kind of collective id.  Or a pop culture villain, or an advocate for the devil, or a scapegoat.   He says things that frighten us — frighten us perhaps because they are thoughts we have ourselves.  I think he goes too far, too often, and I do wish he’d develop some kind of filter mechanism (it’s astonishing to me that such a notorious studio perfectionist could be so blasé when it comes to editing some of his downright ignorant lyrics).  But I don’t want him to filter out his rare moments of vulnerability, when ego gives way to honesty: “Got the kids and the wife life, but can’t wake up from the night life.”

***

Quick reviews of new and new-ish tracks:

Wavves, “Demon to Lean On” from Afraid of Heights.  Mom + Pop (Warner Bros.), 2013.

This is one of those songs, for me, where when I heard it the first time I just assumed I had heard it before, because the melody is just so right that OF COURSE I’ve heard it before, who is this by again?  I love this song!  Wavves?  Is that a new band?  No?  They have like four albums out and they’re so popular that they’re on a major label now?  Oh my god, am I old?  IS THIS THE FUTURE?  I guess the kids know how to find this music with their Vevo and their Soundcloud and their American Express commercials or whatever, but I had to wait for good ‘ol terrestrial radio to catch on before I discovered this band.  That’s who I am now, the guy that doesn’t even know what’s popular until the radio countdown tells me.  I feel free.

Tricky, “Valentine” from False Idols. False Idols/K7 2013.

This is kind of an interesting counterpoint to “Blood on the Leaves,” the Yeezus track where Kanye samples “Strange Fruit”. “Blood on the Leaves” takes a big risk with such a charged sample and falls flat on its face when the rest of the lyrics seem to have no connection to the source material (the beat is HOT though with those big Crimson Tide marching band horns).  On “Valentine,” Tricky samples what has to be the second most-famous male jazz vocal of ALL TIME, Chet Baker’s “My Funny Valentine,” which seems like just a goofy, boring choice of a sample, except, Tricky is pretty smart and he makes it work really damned well.  He builds a velvet trip-hop rhythm around the sample and turns it into an insistent, sad refrain to a character driven song about Tricky’s perennial subject, “what it’s like to be British and to live in a city.”  This is where I plug the whole False Idols album, because it does crazy stuff with samples like this all the time and it kinds of sounds like an even better mix of Maxinquaye and I feel like Tricky is a million times edgier than like any big American rappers right now.

The-Dream ft. Fabolous “Slow it Down” from IV Play.  Def Jam, 2013.

I didn’t mean for all my ranting about Ye earlier to make it sound like I don’t like hip-hop music about sex.  Lets’s be clear, guys: I LOVE HIP-HOP MUSIC ABOUT SEX.  I just think Kanye’s version of sex is scary, too violent, and a little racist.  The-Dream, though?  Here’s a guy I can fux with (no homo?).  This is a slow jam about slow jams: “enough with the motherfuckin’ dance songs/you gotta slow it down,”  and although “I know they ain’t gonna play this on top 40 radio,” we will definitely be playing it through my car speakers at a loud enough volume for nearby pedestrians to enjoy as well. Plus: Fabolous, resurgent.

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This Week in Jams: But Everyone Just Calls Me Giorgio Edition

Without question the big news in pop this week has been the release of Daft Punk’s new album Random Access Memories, their first LP in 8 years (excluding the Tron: Legacy score).  A lot of folks I respect seem to agree with Sasha Frere-Jones’ review in the New Yorker.  I definitely think Frere-Jones nailed the key fact about the album: in turning away from largely sample-based compositions in favor of almost all live instrumentation for this record, Daft Punk is engaging in a form of musical archaelogy, reconstructing the very albums which they had been sampling in the first place.  Random Access Memories is a beautiful, abstract disco album, reconfiguring the language of early 80s disco and dance music into a satisfying meditative chug.  I am afraid that many people who got turned onto Daft Punk by their more energetic EDM album Discovery or their blockbuster Alive tour will be turned off by this more ambient album which borrows from such unsexy influences as Phil Collins, Alan Parsons Project, Hall & Oates, and of course early Eurodance producers such as Gary Numan and Giorgio Moroder.

The track that I keep coming back to, and I think the key to understanding the whole album, is the nine minute centerpiece, “Giorgio by Moroder,” which begins with a short narrative by Mr. Giovanni Giorgio himself about how he got his start in the German discotheque scene of the early 70s.  It focuses on the moment when Giorgio combined a click track with a modular synthesizer and somewhat inadvertently introduced one of the two most influential techniques in late-2oth/21st century music — the other being the sampling and record scratching that was being developed around the same time in Jamaica and the Bronx.

From there, the song veers off, first into a long baroque-inspired synthesizer solo, then gradually bringing in more and more elements, including breakbeats, arena-rock guitars, and strings, and eventually reaching a cacophonic crescendo that resembles nothing so much as Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  Although this may actually be the *least* old-school disco song on the whole record, by starting with Giorgio and then sort of telling the story of the development of electronic dance music through the rest of the song, “Giorgio by Moroder” really places Random Access Memories in the context of the Euro/Italo disco tradition, which has lately been championed by such acts as College, Chromatics, Glass Candy and Sally Shapiro.  What is surprising, to everyone, is how well that old ZYX Records sound has aged, and how rich of an artistic palette it has proven to be.  Disco is Dead, Long Live Disco.

Kanye West premiered two songs from his upcoming Yeezus album on this past week’s SNL.  I was very surprised by the songs themselves and especially, aspects of their performance.  Kanye incorporated many elements from noise music, riding some of the sames vibes that Death Grips has been pioneering, and, although Kanye has always been somewhat outspoken about the plight of the poor and black, these two tracks contain his most radicalized lyrics yet.  One strain of criticism of these performances is that Kanye has once again gone too far, letting his own sense of his own genius get in the way of making listenable music.  The performances, featuring projected images of barking dogs and price tags and featuring quite a bit of screaming, were alienating and, for many viewers, pretentious.

I’m not going to go along with the narrative that Kanye has become too arrogant or elitist and he’s just dissing his own fanbase now.  I would rather celebrate the Narrative that ‘Ye has consistently pushed not just rap but popular music further and further, especially in the second half of his highly productive career.  College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation are great albums laden with good beats and tracks that will remain perennial favorites, but all three of those straight-forward studio rap albums are dead-boring compared to the emoting synths on 808s and Heartbreak, the operatic science fiction of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or the hyper-aggressive punk’n’DUBlic production style of Watch the Throne.

So whether these two tracks are particularly entertaining or popular in their own right (I think “Black Skinhead” has a lot of potential and I look forward to hearing a studio version) is really beside the point for me.  I continue to applaud Kanye for what he’s doing, shining a spotlight on the hypocrisy of wealth and fame even as he acknowledges that he may be the biggest hypocrite of all.  But honey, it aint trickin’ if you got it.

I’m curious to hear from some country radio listeners out there — are Florida Georgia Line as much the poster child for capital “P” Pop Country as Nelly is (or was?) for Pop Rap?  Whatever, I don’t really care if these guys have “cred” or not, this song is super catchy and it got me to listen to their whole album Here’s To The Good Times, which came out back in December but has definitely earned a place near the top of my summer car stereo playlist.  I actually like the Un-Nellified version of the track better, but I’m glad this version is all over the radio to let people know that a hip-hop/country collaboration can work out a lot better than “Accidental Racist.”  Now I’m off to throw a lift-kit on my Kia Soul and find some mud to drive around in.

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