Random pop notes: 1/29/06
A Review by Bobby Lashley
01/30/2006
Kanye West is a genius, but not for the reasons that everyone else who calls him a genius thinks. Late Registration suffers more from people pleasing and product placement than any classic album since Thriller. There's a Crunk song (“Drive Slow”),a “b*tches” song (“Gold Digger”), an ego song (“Touch The Sky”), a self pity song (“Bring Me Down”) and a blame everything on the white man song (Crack Music), to appeal to every demographic in the mainstream hip hop food chain. Also, in a nod to Michael, Kanye's ego is getting so preposterous that he is making Donald trump look like an septuagenarian Anglican nun, as his Jesus Christ pose on the cover of Rolling Stone shows. But the reason that Kanye West is a genius is that no crossover record that I have ever heard has ever been so in on its own purposes. Unlike Michael, who was phenomenally brilliant but had no center, Kanye knows what he's doing, when he's doing it and how it wants to be done. This makes him less a pop star and more like American music's number one trickster.
Listening to “Roses” and “Heard Em Say”, you can tell he desperately wants to be Common, the latest of a long list of eloquent Chicago street laureates ranging from Leon Forrest to Curtis Mayfield to Nelson Algren. But he doesn't want Common's paycheck, and he also knows Common's complex wordplay and delivery, humanism and positive masculinity makes the preppies who love "crack music" nervous. So Br'er Kanye keeps his metaphors simple and over pop hooks while juggling his masks brilliantly. But, given his toxic ego, he could take a lesson from Michael and realize that juggling those masks too long will cause you to lose a great deal of your soul.
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I respect the fact that Kanye has tried to get the three greatest black male artists of the Post Prince era, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Common, heard by the masses. The result has been hit or miss, with albums ranging from sublime (Common's "Be") to slipshod, (most of the last album Kweli did with him). But the sensibility there, to try and sell the most unsellable and scariest quality in all of modern art, young black male sophistication and intellect, to a broader public deserves commendation.
It is that sensibility that guides ”Get Lifted”, the debut CD from John Legend. No CD by a soul man this decade has been this hyped, And given such buzz, the CD can at first sound off putting. Legend has an array of great ideas and a cogent theory of what the post soul song should sound like. His songs are a mélange of old and new school sonics that borrow without stealing; yes there are the obligatory Marvin and Stevie musical references, but the CD's production has a feel closer to Jazzmatazz than to Songs in The Key of Life. The problem is that he runs those ideas into the ground. The enticing hip hop track built on seductive soul melodies turns formulaic after the first 7 songs, some of the ballads on the rest of the album meander and "Number 1" and "she don't have to know", is generic neo soul crap.
But dammit, much of it is worth listening to. His great songs might have not have the profound intellectual weight of Donnie's great songs, the effervescent beauty and meticulous craft of Rashaan Patterson's great songs or the otherworldly ethereal power and moral authority of Anthony Hamilton's great songs, but they're still great songs. And at his best, Legend places himself square in the tradition of the great Chicago soul artists who have braced and took hold of the crosscurrents of sounds and styles that have came from Chi-town during the great migration and made music entirely their own. To the extent he's successful in Get Lifted, makes it the Debut Soul CD of 2005. To the extent he can do it for a whole album will make him one of the premier forces in modern American pop. What he's got will do, for now.
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Someday, a post rockist school of criticism is going to look over Sleater Kinney's body of work and realize that they made about a half dozen of the best rock and roll records of their era and two of the best records, Call the Doctor, and All Hands on The Bad One, Ever made. Someday people are going to listen to their dexterity, veering between riot grrl punk and Beatlemanicac pop, and realize that they wrote some of the most sophisticated songs Rock and Roll has ever seen. Someday those critics are going to look at all the whiny male crap that has been written about them and wince like rockists now wince now when they read Albert Goldman's pieces or the stupid shit Rolling Stone said about Curtis Mayfield in the 70's. Will I live long enough to see that someday? Dunno. For now, I will continue to like them, because they're smart, they write damn good songs, and they scare people. And because I'm smart and I scare people, I can empathize. But not on the song part, I can't write a song to save my life.
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The running Joke that soul fans had regarding B2K was that out of the tens of thousands of black church vocal groups, they're record company found the only one that couldn't carry a tune. O is Omarion's, the lead off key carnival barker of that bunch, debut solo album. He likes R Kelly a whole lot and he copies R's musical accoutrements: Dim witted sex jams, ballads filled with phony self pity, and club tracks that give voice to the miracle of pro tools. What he doesn't like is anything that shows he has a hint of musical acumen. And I ain't saying that he sounds like a wounded basset hound when he sings, but my neighbors called the ASPCA twice on me when I played the CD
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2003's I Can't Stop showed Why Al Green and Willie Mitchell were among the greatest artistic partnerships in the history of modern popular music. 2005's Everything's OK shows why that partnership ran aground in the 70's. Not to say that the record is a failure; much of it, "Build Me Up" and " I Can Make Music" in particular, is as scintillating as soul music, no let me phrase that, any music can get. But the problem with the record is the same problem that Mitchell and Green had with 1975's L.O.V.E and 1976's Full of fire: the excessive, bloated productions get in the way of the singer and the songs themselves. Almost every track is souped up, every horn section blaring, every rhythm section overbearing and every Memphis string overwrought. This is not to say that even the excess has its moments of brilliance, as even the most bloated of arrangements has a genius to them. And Al, arguably the greatest soul singer to ever draw breath, sounds like he could make the Lil Jon soundtrack seem interesting. But given the astronomical standards that Green has set for himself, Everything is OK ends up being the most lavish and most magical letdown you will ever hear.
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Strokes apologists need to come to terms with the fact that Julian Casablancas isn't going to be Lou Reed or Ray Davies, and Albert Hammond isn't going to be Marc Bolan. Strokes bashers need to come to terms with the fact that there a damn good band. They need to leave out strings and any influences involving the band YES, but there a damn good band.
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Given 2pac's appreciation of her, Maxwell's cover of “This Woman's Work”, and Big Boi being influenced by the melodies of The Sensual World in Speakerboxx, I think it's cool that hip brother's like Kate Bush. Why, because I'm one of them. Aerial, her latest CD, isn't her best, but there is nothing in it that she should be ashamed of and nothing that sounds like it doesn't belongs in her catalogue. Her lyrical muse might veer more toward Jane Austen and Joan of Arc than does toward Aretha, but she thinks and writes like a great soul singer; in dramatic, intense, personal flourishes, and when the spirit moves her. Aerial is a double album, which means there's some fat, but for a double album, the fat is remarkably little. The first disc reminded me of why I liked Syd Barrett, Brian Jones, and other out of left field geniuses in English pop so much: because of their unwillingness to stay in category and their willingness to make the weirdest, wildest and most imaginative music ever heard.
Yeah, her literary references are gonna scare the shit out of rockists, but her delivery of them doesn't come off as pretentious, and, to be honest, that's what I kind of like about her. And given the funk touches in “how to be invisible”, she kinda likes hip brothers back. The second disc reminded me (in artistic aesthetics, not sound) of Ray Charles 70's albums, in which he just played whatever the hell he felt like at the time, legacy and trends notwithstanding. And at that time she made the second disc she felt like communicating with the birds and nature. And dammit that's OK. Some critics might have busted her chops for that, but not me. Do your thang, Kate, do your thang.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 01/30/2006
