Category: Music

Pop Music

The yearly Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle takes place this weekend. I’ve gone to all the previous conferences, and they have been great, but unfortunately this year I am unable to attend, due to family circumstances. I was supposed to be giving a talk on the Kleptones, but I had to cancel.

The conference has always had a wide and open definition of “pop” — pretty much anything goes — but this doesn’t really address the question of what it might mean, in somewhat narrower terms, to talk of “pop” as a genre (alongside, and only partly overlapping with, genres like rock or heavy metal or alternative, or hip hop or crunk or grime or reggaeton. These days, invoking “pop” is inherently problematic: in some contexts, it sounds like a dated term from the 1960s; and in others, it bears a weight that certainly is not innocent, when it is invoked in relation to “rockism,” or when it is contrasted to music that is deemed more adventurous, more experimental, or more authentic.

Woebot raises the question with his usual sharpness and polemical verve in a thread on dissensus. I suppose it is a bit crass of me to respond with my thoughts here, instead of joining the dialogue there; but I need the space the blog affords me — rather than the rapid fire of post and response — to really work things out to my (at least semi-) satisfaction.

Anyway: Woebot doesn’t find the term “pop” to be either coherent or interesting; he works through several possible definitions, and finds them all to be lame, self-contradictory, and (to the extent that they do articulate any sort of identifiable tendency) worthy only of being resisted. It’s too vague, he says, to define “pop” as whatever music is in the charts, or to think that the Top Forty any given week somehow mirrors with precision what is happening in (American or British) society that same week. And it’s tired and unilluminating to trot out the old cliches of high culture vs. low. That doesn’t explain, Woebot says, what the positive appeal of “pop” — of defining “low” or “mass” culture in that populist way — might be, given so many other ways of working through the issue.

Which leaves the most polemically charged of Woebot’s possible definitions of “pop”: he suggests that it is just a marketing term:

When I discovered that by Pop music people meant “music for imaginary rather than real communities” I was depressed for about a month. That people could consume Grime as “Pop”, that they could do the pick’n’mix shake and vac ting and “consume” something oblivious to its source, well for me it just didn’t bear thinking about. That all music could be subjected to the whim of the consumer like this, that there were people out there for whom all music was essentially reducible to a quotient of it’s entertainment value (a mark out of ten, an “A” minus, a four star rating in their iPod ratings menu)…… sad innit. Each song becomes a unit, an equal unit, stripped of anything approaching life. How murderously void.

I think that there is a real issue here, an unavoidable one, since recorded music today really is on the leading edge of consumerist commodification. (A situation that is not really undermined by the nonetheless delicious irony that I, like millions of other people, choose on principle to download music for free as much as possible; I’ll spend hours of my time to find a song that I could order almost instantly from the Apple Music Store for 99 cents. This is not out of penny-pinching — since the time I waste tracking down the song is worth far more to me than 99 cents — but out of a kind of Kantian categorical-imperative sense that it is morally wrong to remunerate the record companies and the current copyright system).

Getting back to the main point: the fact is that music is one of the most social of all human activities (I risk this assertion despite the fact that all human activities are social, that ‘human’ and ‘social’ are virtually synonymous). Because music is so social and collective an activity, it is inevitably tied, in modern societies, to money and the commodity form (which capitalism makes into the primary, if not exclusive, conduits of sociality). Which paradoxically means, in turn, that music today is close to being the most reified and privatized of all human activities. I take myself as an example: a quintessential music consumer (even if I often don’t pay). I download music online, or order it over the web — I’m scarcely ever in one of those quaint old places formerly known as ‘record stores.’ I don’t listen to vinyl, or even very much to CDs: I rip whatever music I get in CD format, and listen to music almost exclusively over headphones, on my laptop or my iPod. Though I live in Detroit, a center of musical activity and production, I’ve never even gone to a live gig here, which means I’ve never listened to music here in the company of other people. What’s more, most of my favorite genres of the moment — grime, reggaeton, baile funk — are produced geographically far away from me, for audiences with whom I will probably never enter into contact (for reasons of race and class and age as well as geography). What’s more, I’ve ‘softened’ considerably since my twenties and early thirties, when I would never listen to music that was less grating than the Sex Pistols or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, or less hardcore than Run/DMC, or less dissonant than Sonic Youth. Now I’m at the point where I listen to a lot of “pop”: my favorite songs of the moment include (alongside a bunch of heavy grime tracks) things like Amerie’s “One Thing” and Tweet’s “Turn Da Lights Off” and Tori Alamaze’s “Don’t Cha” and M.I.A.’s “Pull Up the People.”

I suppose this makes me into Woebot’s “Online Pop Straw-man”, listening to all sorts of cultural detritus indiscriminately while being ignorant of its particularities and its provenance, “cautious about aspiring to belong to subcultural groups (like, er, Grime) on the basis that he’s Middle Class, White and Old,” and ultimately only willing “to accept something less-threatening and fake in some compromised quasi-ironic manner. To give up on the real because it underlines the uncomfortable reality of one’s own situation.”
The very fact that I like M.I.A. so much pretty much convicts me of these charges. (“In fairness,” as Jerry Springer likes to say, Woebot never makes this point explicitly; but blissblogger — Simon Reynolds, I presume? — pretty much does, later on in the thread. Referring to the M.I.A. controversy, he complains about “the tone of sheer indignation voiced” by M.I.A.’s supporters responding to the criticisms of her: “how DARE you interfere with my pleasure, how dare you pose any impediment to my unproblematic enjoyment of this thing… that debate was so fierce because of a displacement involved… they weren’t defending M.I.A.’s right to be a dilettante-producer, they were defending their own right to be a dilettante-consumer… pop is invested in so intensely i think because it’s about the right to consume, and in this day age consumerism, that’s one of the few areas of power and agency anyone has”).

An anecdote: a couple of years ago, in a class I was teaching, a student gave a presentation on “underground hip hop,” and the dangers of its co-optation by the commercial manistream. His definition of what made the music “underground” was pretty vague; I pressed him, and he ultimately came to the position that it had to be music that I (as an outsider, from an older generation) had never heard of, let alone actually heard. But when it came down to listing specific examples of what he considered “underground hip hop,” it turned out all to be stuff that I was familiar with, and even had on my iPod.

My point in recounting this story is not to boast of my extensive musical connoisseurship (which really isn’t all that extensive, anyway). But rather to suggest that the widespread dissemination (precisely via reification and commodification, enabled by the global communications networks of transnational capital) of all sorts of music (together with all sorts of other things, from sexual fetishes to images of celebrities) makes any sort of “alternative” or “underground” position untenable. Even if you accept (as I am pretty much inclined to) that NOTHING is ever invented by Capital, that creativity is ALWAYS from below, from outside, from “the streets”… and hence in the public sphere, in that very “society” whose existence Margaret Thatcher denied — still, at the very moment that creativity is first expressed, it has already been privatized, commodified, locked up as “intellectual property,” and sold by massive corporations to individualized/privatized consumers worldwide. It has already become solipsistic jouissance, or what blissblogger describes as “the absolute denial of the producer’s existence — the absolute blanking out of the actual material origins and conditions of existence of the pleasure-source you’re enjoying — something for nothing.”

To decry this situation — as blissblogger and woebot seem to do — and to suggest there is a more acceptable alternative to it, is really to contribute to the very myths (of authenticity, of “realness”, of plucky underground inventiveness at odds with mainstream pop) that support the situation of capitalist appropriation and bourgeois-consumption-as-private-jouissance in the first place. Which is why I don’t accept woebot’s maxim that “meaning is always dwindling in Pop, it’s never accreating in the way it does in the underground rhizomes.” Rhizomes aren’t underground anymore; it’s the whole Net, the whole so-called “market”, that is now a rhizome (or, more accurately, that is now rhizomatic). And movements of both accretion and diminution are pretty much going on everywhere.

Or again: blissblogger says, summarizing the situation: “everything that once exploded into public space, becomes interiorized, corralled, quarantined from the world, insulated from ever changing anything.” Here it’s that “once” that I’m suspicious of; the same way I’m suspicious when Guy Debord writes that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” The point being, not that things are always the same, but that — in both blissblogger and the translation of Debord — the “once” has no historical applicability, for it is merely a back-projection from, and inversion of, our current circumstances. It’s a fictive negation of the oppressive circumstances of the present; it provides no path to freedom, no “line of escape,” for it is only a reflection and a symptom of the oppressive circumstances.

Which is why, though I don’t really think of myself as a devotee of “pop” — and in cultural politics terms I am not in the least a populist — I am also unable to join the anti-pop bandwagon. Brecht said somewhere that we shouldn’t start with the good old days, but with the bad new ones. I seriously think that the only way out is through, and that we have to find some way of working through the paradoxes of solipsistic, hedonistic consumerism, pushing them to their limit, rather than moralistically condemning them by refusing to listen to M.I.A. or go to Starbucks.

The yearly Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle takes place this weekend. I’ve gone to all the previous conferences, and they have been great, but unfortunately this year I am unable to attend, due to family circumstances. I was supposed to be giving a talk on the Kleptones, but I had to cancel.

The conference has always had a wide and open definition of “pop” — pretty much anything goes — but this doesn’t really address the question of what it might mean, in somewhat narrower terms, to talk of “pop” as a genre (alongside, and only partly overlapping with, genres like rock or heavy metal or alternative, or hip hop or crunk or grime or reggaeton. These days, invoking “pop” is inherently problematic: in some contexts, it sounds like a dated term from the 1960s; and in others, it bears a weight that certainly is not innocent, when it is invoked in relation to “rockism,” or when it is contrasted to music that is deemed more adventurous, more experimental, or more authentic.

Woebot raises the question with his usual sharpness and polemical verve in a thread on dissensus. I suppose it is a bit crass of me to respond with my thoughts here, instead of joining the dialogue there; but I need the space the blog affords me — rather than the rapid fire of post and response — to really work things out to my (at least semi-) satisfaction.

Anyway: Woebot doesn’t find the term “pop” to be either coherent or interesting; he works through several possible definitions, and finds them all to be lame, self-contradictory, and (to the extent that they do articulate any sort of identifiable tendency) worthy only of being resisted. It’s too vague, he says, to define “pop” as whatever music is in the charts, or to think that the Top Forty any given week somehow mirrors with precision what is happening in (American or British) society that same week. And it’s tired and unilluminating to trot out the old cliches of high culture vs. low. That doesn’t explain, Woebot says, what the positive appeal of “pop” — of defining “low” or “mass” culture in that populist way — might be, given so many other ways of working through the issue.

Which leaves the most polemically charged of Woebot’s possible definitions of “pop”: he suggests that it is just a marketing term:

When I discovered that by Pop music people meant “music for imaginary rather than real communities” I was depressed for about a month. That people could consume Grime as “Pop”, that they could do the pick’n’mix shake and vac ting and “consume” something oblivious to its source, well for me it just didn’t bear thinking about. That all music could be subjected to the whim of the consumer like this, that there were people out there for whom all music was essentially reducible to a quotient of it’s entertainment value (a mark out of ten, an “A” minus, a four star rating in their iPod ratings menu)…… sad innit. Each song becomes a unit, an equal unit, stripped of anything approaching life. How murderously void.

I think that there is a real issue here, an unavoidable one, since recorded music today really is on the leading edge of consumerist commodification. (A situation that is not really undermined by the nonetheless delicious irony that I, like millions of other people, choose on principle to download music for free as much as possible; I’ll spend hours of my time to find a song that I could order almost instantly from the Apple Music Store for 99 cents. This is not out of penny-pinching — since the time I waste tracking down the song is worth far more to me than 99 cents — but out of a kind of Kantian categorical-imperative sense that it is morally wrong to remunerate the record companies and the current copyright system).

Getting back to the main point: the fact is that music is one of the most social of all human activities (I risk this assertion despite the fact that all human activities are social, that ‘human’ and ‘social’ are virtually synonymous). Because music is so social and collective an activity, it is inevitably tied, in modern societies, to money and the commodity form (which capitalism makes into the primary, if not exclusive, conduits of sociality). Which paradoxically means, in turn, that music today is close to being the most reified and privatized of all human activities. I take myself as an example: a quintessential music consumer (even if I often don’t pay). I download music online, or order it over the web — I’m scarcely ever in one of those quaint old places formerly known as ‘record stores.’ I don’t listen to vinyl, or even very much to CDs: I rip whatever music I get in CD format, and listen to music almost exclusively over headphones, on my laptop or my iPod. Though I live in Detroit, a center of musical activity and production, I’ve never even gone to a live gig here, which means I’ve never listened to music here in the company of other people. What’s more, most of my favorite genres of the moment — grime, reggaeton, baile funk — are produced geographically far away from me, for audiences with whom I will probably never enter into contact (for reasons of race and class and age as well as geography). What’s more, I’ve ‘softened’ considerably since my twenties and early thirties, when I would never listen to music that was less grating than the Sex Pistols or Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, or less hardcore than Run/DMC, or less dissonant than Sonic Youth. Now I’m at the point where I listen to a lot of “pop”: my favorite songs of the moment include (alongside a bunch of heavy grime tracks) things like Amerie’s “One Thing” and Tweet’s “Turn Da Lights Off” and Tori Alamaze’s “Don’t Cha” and M.I.A.’s “Pull Up the People.”

I suppose this makes me into Woebot’s “Online Pop Straw-man”, listening to all sorts of cultural detritus indiscriminately while being ignorant of its particularities and its provenance, “cautious about aspiring to belong to subcultural groups (like, er, Grime) on the basis that he’s Middle Class, White and Old,” and ultimately only willing “to accept something less-threatening and fake in some compromised quasi-ironic manner. To give up on the real because it underlines the uncomfortable reality of one’s own situation.”
The very fact that I like M.I.A. so much pretty much convicts me of these charges. (“In fairness,” as Jerry Springer likes to say, Woebot never makes this point explicitly; but blissblogger — Simon Reynolds, I presume? — pretty much does, later on in the thread. Referring to the M.I.A. controversy, he complains about “the tone of sheer indignation voiced” by M.I.A.’s supporters responding to the criticisms of her: “how DARE you interfere with my pleasure, how dare you pose any impediment to my unproblematic enjoyment of this thing… that debate was so fierce because of a displacement involved… they weren’t defending M.I.A.’s right to be a dilettante-producer, they were defending their own right to be a dilettante-consumer… pop is invested in so intensely i think because it’s about the right to consume, and in this day age consumerism, that’s one of the few areas of power and agency anyone has”).

An anecdote: a couple of years ago, in a class I was teaching, a student gave a presentation on “underground hip hop,” and the dangers of its co-optation by the commercial manistream. His definition of what made the music “underground” was pretty vague; I pressed him, and he ultimately came to the position that it had to be music that I (as an outsider, from an older generation) had never heard of, let alone actually heard. But when it came down to listing specific examples of what he considered “underground hip hop,” it turned out all to be stuff that I was familiar with, and even had on my iPod.

My point in recounting this story is not to boast of my extensive musical connoisseurship (which really isn’t all that extensive, anyway). But rather to suggest that the widespread dissemination (precisely via reification and commodification, enabled by the global communications networks of transnational capital) of all sorts of music (together with all sorts of other things, from sexual fetishes to images of celebrities) makes any sort of “alternative” or “underground” position untenable. Even if you accept (as I am pretty much inclined to) that NOTHING is ever invented by Capital, that creativity is ALWAYS from below, from outside, from “the streets”… and hence in the public sphere, in that very “society” whose existence Margaret Thatcher denied — still, at the very moment that creativity is first expressed, it has already been privatized, commodified, locked up as “intellectual property,” and sold by massive corporations to individualized/privatized consumers worldwide. It has already become solipsistic jouissance, or what blissblogger describes as “the absolute denial of the producer’s existence — the absolute blanking out of the actual material origins and conditions of existence of the pleasure-source you’re enjoying — something for nothing.”

To decry this situation — as blissblogger and woebot seem to do — and to suggest there is a more acceptable alternative to it, is really to contribute to the very myths (of authenticity, of “realness”, of plucky underground inventiveness at odds with mainstream pop) that support the situation of capitalist appropriation and bourgeois-consumption-as-private-jouissance in the first place. Which is why I don’t accept woebot’s maxim that “meaning is always dwindling in Pop, it’s never accreating in the way it does in the underground rhizomes.” Rhizomes aren’t underground anymore; it’s the whole Net, the whole so-called “market”, that is now a rhizome (or, more accurately, that is now rhizomatic). And movements of both accretion and diminution are pretty much going on everywhere.

Or again: blissblogger says, summarizing the situation: “everything that once exploded into public space, becomes interiorized, corralled, quarantined from the world, insulated from ever changing anything.” Here it’s that “once” that I’m suspicious of; the same way I’m suspicious when Guy Debord writes that “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” The point being, not that things are always the same, but that — in both blissblogger and the translation of Debord — the “once” has no historical applicability, for it is merely a back-projection from, and inversion of, our current circumstances. It’s a fictive negation of the oppressive circumstances of the present; it provides no path to freedom, no “line of escape,” for it is only a reflection and a symptom of the oppressive circumstances.

Which is why, though I don’t really think of myself as a devotee of “pop” — and in cultural politics terms I am not in the least a populist — I am also unable to join the anti-pop bandwagon. Brecht said somewhere that we shouldn’t start with the good old days, but with the bad new ones. I seriously think that the only way out is through, and that we have to find some way of working through the paradoxes of solipsistic, hedonistic consumerism, pushing them to their limit, rather than moralistically condemning them by refusing to listen to M.I.A. or go to Starbucks.

M.I.A.

Over the last year, I’ve probably been listening with more pleasure to M.I.A. than to any other musical artist. I first heard her first single, Galang (iTunes), last summer, when I got it off an mp3 blog (I don’t remember which). I had no idea what it was, or who she was, but I immediately fell for it: there was something about the upbeat yet aggressive girl-group-y vocals, the strange lyrics, plus the spare, underproduced beats… and then there was that chorus, that finally came in, right at the end of the song, like a gleeful, swooping affirmation.

Gradually, I learned more about M.I.A., and heard more of her songs, as they dribbled out over the Net. She’s a Tamil Sri Lankan, now a Londoner, having come to the UK with her mother when she was 11, as a political refugee (her father is apparently involved with the Tamil Tigers, which has been mounting a bloody rebellion against the Sinhalese Sri Lankan government for years). Though a musical newcomer, she is apparently well-connected, and not raw from the streets (as almost nobody ever is, despite the frequent hype): art school, visual arts recognition, former housemate of the lead guitarist for Elastica, etc.

M.I.A.’s album Arular (iTunes) is finally out, after months of delays, rumors, net hype and net sniping (of which more below), and it’s simply great. The music is pretty much just primitive/dirty/analog synthesizer riffs, plus a bunch of samples (Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, for one!), with vocals rapped, chanted, sung, and everything in between, no voice besides M.I.A.’s (though it is often multitracked). The beats are derived from hiphop and UK garage, and especially from such up-to-the-minute genres as Grime and BaileFunk. But M.I.A. doesn’t really sound like any of her sources: and it’s as important as it is difficult to explain precisely why.

There’s a certain sense in M.I.A.’s music that all her sources (various genres, or, more precisely, various funky beats) have been promiscuously mixed, and passed through a blender, and this is what came out. But such a metaphor implies a certain blandness, or homogenization, and nothing could be further from the truth. Everything in Arular is sharply etched and singular. The beats crackle and jump, and the energy level is high. There’s a lot of space to this music, it’s the diametrical opposite of a wall of sound. And M.I.A.’s vocals reverberate through the space, suggesting a kind of ongoing expansion, as if this were music streaming outward from some primordial Big Bang. M.I.A.’s rhythmic sources, particularly Grime and BaileFunk, are heavy, grounded, and immersive (even though BaileFunk is quite minimal, often little more than a bass line accompanying a rap); but M.I.A. reconfigures their beats as being light and expansive/centrifugal. That is to say, M.I.A.’s music is POP — which Grime, BaileFunk, and the heavier sorts of HipHop certainly are not. And its Pop quality is precisely what I love about it. Arular is irresistably cheerful and breezy, without being syrupy; direct and simple without being simple-minded; girl-centered but not girly; extroverted, and more interested in making bodies move than in expressing emotions or psychological states. M.I.A.’s lyrics are loopy and scattershot: boasts, taunts, political slogans, military and video-game metaphors, made-up slang and fake advertising jingles, all mixed up promiscuously. Altogether joyous and affirmative music.

(I should add as a footnote, though, that my definition of Pop isn’t everybody’s — despite the fact that the only reasonable definition of Pop should include that it appeals to everybody. If the world shared my sense of what’s Pop, Basement Jaxx would be the most popular and best-selling band in the world. To judge by the response on Metafilter, M.I.A. is way too esoteric for the “average” listener, though she is scorned by the purists for being way too pop).

(I should also add a note about the anti-M.I.A. backlash: extreme distaste for her and her music has been expressed in the blogosphere by music critics I generally respect, like Simon Reynolds (whose blog has a pretty comprehensive set of links to the controversy) and woebot (can’t verify the link right now, but I think it’s this). The line seems to be that M.I.A. is a vapid middle class rip off artist, stealing the beats from authentic music-from-below like Grime and BaileFunk, making them safely bland and non-abrasive and mainstream, turning harsh, abrasive sounds into pop in other words. Like white people stealing black people’s music, even though M.I.A. is herself a woman of color. She’s also accused of being either irresponsible or a poseur because of the political sloganeering in her lyrics. I’m sorry, but I really can’t see anything in these criticisms but a moralistic, holier-than-thou, knee-jerk-anti-pop purism. I love the sounds of Grime and BaileFunk, even though obviously I can’t relate to these musics and their communities in any other way than as a distant and privileged outsider; and I don’t know what sort of relationship M.I.A. has to them. (She’s a Londoner, but not part of the Grime scene). But in this case, I don’t see that M.I.A.’s “appropriation” has anything in common with Elvis or the Stones doing r’n’b, let alone with something like Beck’s smarmy simulation/putdown of black music on Midnite Vultures. She’s transformed the beats by making them Pop, in a way that is irreducible either to slavish imitation or to one-up-manship or to making-bland-and-safe. And that’s really all I can say.).

Over the last year, I’ve probably been listening with more pleasure to M.I.A. than to any other musical artist. I first heard her first single, Galang (iTunes), last summer, when I got it off an mp3 blog (I don’t remember which). I had no idea what it was, or who she was, but I immediately fell for it: there was something about the upbeat yet aggressive girl-group-y vocals, the strange lyrics, plus the spare, underproduced beats… and then there was that chorus, that finally came in, right at the end of the song, like a gleeful, swooping affirmation.

Gradually, I learned more about M.I.A., and heard more of her songs, as they dribbled out over the Net. She’s a Tamil Sri Lankan, now a Londoner, having come to the UK with her mother when she was 11, as a political refugee (her father is apparently involved with the Tamil Tigers, which has been mounting a bloody rebellion against the Sinhalese Sri Lankan government for years). Though a musical newcomer, she is apparently well-connected, and not raw from the streets (as almost nobody ever is, despite the frequent hype): art school, visual arts recognition, former housemate of the lead guitarist for Elastica, etc.

M.I.A.’s album Arular (iTunes) is finally out, after months of delays, rumors, net hype and net sniping (of which more below), and it’s simply great. The music is pretty much just primitive/dirty/analog synthesizer riffs, plus a bunch of samples (Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, for one!), with vocals rapped, chanted, sung, and everything in between, no voice besides M.I.A.’s (though it is often multitracked). The beats are derived from hiphop and UK garage, and especially from such up-to-the-minute genres as Grime and BaileFunk. But M.I.A. doesn’t really sound like any of her sources: and it’s as important as it is difficult to explain precisely why.

There’s a certain sense in M.I.A.’s music that all her sources (various genres, or, more precisely, various funky beats) have been promiscuously mixed, and passed through a blender, and this is what came out. But such a metaphor implies a certain blandness, or homogenization, and nothing could be further from the truth. Everything in Arular is sharply etched and singular. The beats crackle and jump, and the energy level is high. There’s a lot of space to this music, it’s the diametrical opposite of a wall of sound. And M.I.A.’s vocals reverberate through the space, suggesting a kind of ongoing expansion, as if this were music streaming outward from some primordial Big Bang. M.I.A.’s rhythmic sources, particularly Grime and BaileFunk, are heavy, grounded, and immersive (even though BaileFunk is quite minimal, often little more than a bass line accompanying a rap); but M.I.A. reconfigures their beats as being light and expansive/centrifugal. That is to say, M.I.A.’s music is POP — which Grime, BaileFunk, and the heavier sorts of HipHop certainly are not. And its Pop quality is precisely what I love about it. Arular is irresistably cheerful and breezy, without being syrupy; direct and simple without being simple-minded; girl-centered but not girly; extroverted, and more interested in making bodies move than in expressing emotions or psychological states. M.I.A.’s lyrics are loopy and scattershot: boasts, taunts, political slogans, military and video-game metaphors, made-up slang and fake advertising jingles, all mixed up promiscuously. Altogether joyous and affirmative music.

(I should add as a footnote, though, that my definition of Pop isn’t everybody’s — despite the fact that the only reasonable definition of Pop should include that it appeals to everybody. If the world shared my sense of what’s Pop, Basement Jaxx would be the most popular and best-selling band in the world. To judge by the response on Metafilter, M.I.A. is way too esoteric for the “average” listener, though she is scorned by the purists for being way too pop).

(I should also add a note about the anti-M.I.A. backlash: extreme distaste for her and her music has been expressed in the blogosphere by music critics I generally respect, like Simon Reynolds (whose blog has a pretty comprehensive set of links to the controversy) and woebot (can’t verify the link right now, but I think it’s this). The line seems to be that M.I.A. is a vapid middle class rip off artist, stealing the beats from authentic music-from-below like Grime and BaileFunk, making them safely bland and non-abrasive and mainstream, turning harsh, abrasive sounds into pop in other words. Like white people stealing black people’s music, even though M.I.A. is herself a woman of color. She’s also accused of being either irresponsible or a poseur because of the political sloganeering in her lyrics. I’m sorry, but I really can’t see anything in these criticisms but a moralistic, holier-than-thou, knee-jerk-anti-pop purism. I love the sounds of Grime and BaileFunk, even though obviously I can’t relate to these musics and their communities in any other way than as a distant and privileged outsider; and I don’t know what sort of relationship M.I.A. has to them. (She’s a Londoner, but not part of the Grime scene). But in this case, I don’t see that M.I.A.’s “appropriation” has anything in common with Elvis or the Stones doing r’n’b, let alone with something like Beck’s smarmy simulation/putdown of black music on Midnite Vultures. She’s transformed the beats by making them Pop, in a way that is irreducible either to slavish imitation or to one-up-manship or to making-bland-and-safe. And that’s really all I can say.).

Petra sings The Who

I have a strange and fierce love for Petra Haden‘s new album, an a cappella rendition of The Who Sell Out.

“The Who Sell Out” was originally one of The Who’s early albums (1967); it contains such songs as “Armenia City in the Sky,” “I Can’t Reach You,” “Mary Anne With the Shaky Hands,” and (most famously) “I Can See For Miles.” It’s also a concept album; it has the format of a radio broadcast, complete with callouts for the radio station and mock commercials.

It’s been years since I’ve listened to “The Who Sell Out,” years since I had even thought about The Who. But Haden brings them back to a sort of uncanny afterlife. Her multi-tracked singing replicates the album in extreme, exquisite detail, as she sings not only Daltrey’s vocals, but Townshend’s guitar lines, Entwhistle’s bass, and even sometimes the swish and bang of Moon’s drums. (I don’t think she reproduces every instrumental line from the album, but she does enough to create a rich texture reminiscent of the original).

Nonetheless (or, rather, precisely because of this extreme fidelity), Petra Haden’s album does not sound much like the actual Who. The reason is textural — it has to do both with the high pitch of her voice (especially effective for an album that is so anguished over questions about manhood), and with the overall oddness of hearing those killer guitar lines turned into a kind of maniacally determined, but nonetheless gentle, scat singing (Haden is a genius at miming diverse instrumental timbres with her voice; but by ‘miming’ I mean that she somehow suggests these timbres in ways that are instantly recognizable, but without literally reproducing them). As a result, the furious amphetamine rush of The Who comes out sounding hauntingly lyrical. Or more precisely, the lyricism that was always at least in the background of Townshend’s songwriting is foregrounded in Haden’s rendition. The rage and pain and depression aren’t washed away, exactly, but rather sublimated — in both the psychoanalytic sense and in the sense of being ‘made sublime’ — and distanced through a sort of bright and blurry haze. I am thinking of the way in which — at least in my experience — antidepressant medication doesn’t take the pain and despondency away, but situates those feelings at a distance from which they don’t seem quite so overwhelming or impossible to deal with. You don’t become mindlessly happy, or happy at all in fact, but you are better able to live with your unhappiness. You don’t lose your (rare) moments of exhilaration, either; but those moments, as well, are put into a kind of perspective. As a middle aged person, hopefully without too much of that odious boomer nostalgia, I can’t at all identify with the adolescent angst (probably foreign to today’s adolescents) that the music of The Who (especially early) was straining to express; but Haden’s reiteration gives me something that I probably would be unable to get at this point from the original: a deep aesthetic appreciation of the music’s precisely hewn beauty. I like to listen to this album — as would never be the case with The Who themselves — just before going to bed; not that it is in the least soporific (it isn’t), but because it translates the music’s conflict (without pretending to resolve it) to a kind of other plane, or other scene.

I think this is what Deleuze calls “counter-effectuation”: “to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualisation with a counter actualisation, the identification with a distance, like the true actor or dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualisation.” The turmoil is not resolved, not pacified, not swept under the rug, but repeated in a new register, and in such a way that it becomes the double of itself; and that space between the event and its “counter-effectuated” double — not really even a space, but more like a membrane, or like the two sides of an infinitely thin piece of paper — is where creativity happens, where life finds the resources to continue even in the face of catastrophe.

Does this seem too heavy a burden to put on a 40-minute album that might more likely be described (as the album publicity notes describe it) as “a technical tour de force that highlights The Who’s own achievement”? But it isn’t heavy: that’s precisely the point. Petra Haden’s “The Who Sell Out” is a kind of magic that brings the dead back to life, neither as vampires and zombies, nor as venerated saints, but in a sort of mirroring that allows the discarnate ghosts to, finally, and from the immense distance that separates death from life, resemble themselves.

I have a strange and fierce love for Petra Haden‘s new album, an a cappella rendition of The Who Sell Out.

“The Who Sell Out” was originally one of The Who’s early albums (1967); it contains such songs as “Armenia City in the Sky,” “I Can’t Reach You,” “Mary Anne With the Shaky Hands,” and (most famously) “I Can See For Miles.” It’s also a concept album; it has the format of a radio broadcast, complete with callouts for the radio station and mock commercials.

It’s been years since I’ve listened to “The Who Sell Out,” years since I had even thought about The Who. But Haden brings them back to a sort of uncanny afterlife. Her multi-tracked singing replicates the album in extreme, exquisite detail, as she sings not only Daltrey’s vocals, but Townshend’s guitar lines, Entwhistle’s bass, and even sometimes the swish and bang of Moon’s drums. (I don’t think she reproduces every instrumental line from the album, but she does enough to create a rich texture reminiscent of the original).

Nonetheless (or, rather, precisely because of this extreme fidelity), Petra Haden’s album does not sound much like the actual Who. The reason is textural — it has to do both with the high pitch of her voice (especially effective for an album that is so anguished over questions about manhood), and with the overall oddness of hearing those killer guitar lines turned into a kind of maniacally determined, but nonetheless gentle, scat singing (Haden is a genius at miming diverse instrumental timbres with her voice; but by ‘miming’ I mean that she somehow suggests these timbres in ways that are instantly recognizable, but without literally reproducing them). As a result, the furious amphetamine rush of The Who comes out sounding hauntingly lyrical. Or more precisely, the lyricism that was always at least in the background of Townshend’s songwriting is foregrounded in Haden’s rendition. The rage and pain and depression aren’t washed away, exactly, but rather sublimated — in both the psychoanalytic sense and in the sense of being ‘made sublime’ — and distanced through a sort of bright and blurry haze. I am thinking of the way in which — at least in my experience — antidepressant medication doesn’t take the pain and despondency away, but situates those feelings at a distance from which they don’t seem quite so overwhelming or impossible to deal with. You don’t become mindlessly happy, or happy at all in fact, but you are better able to live with your unhappiness. You don’t lose your (rare) moments of exhilaration, either; but those moments, as well, are put into a kind of perspective. As a middle aged person, hopefully without too much of that odious boomer nostalgia, I can’t at all identify with the adolescent angst (probably foreign to today’s adolescents) that the music of The Who (especially early) was straining to express; but Haden’s reiteration gives me something that I probably would be unable to get at this point from the original: a deep aesthetic appreciation of the music’s precisely hewn beauty. I like to listen to this album — as would never be the case with The Who themselves — just before going to bed; not that it is in the least soporific (it isn’t), but because it translates the music’s conflict (without pretending to resolve it) to a kind of other plane, or other scene.

I think this is what Deleuze calls “counter-effectuation”: “to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualisation with a counter actualisation, the identification with a distance, like the true actor or dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualisation.” The turmoil is not resolved, not pacified, not swept under the rug, but repeated in a new register, and in such a way that it becomes the double of itself; and that space between the event and its “counter-effectuated” double — not really even a space, but more like a membrane, or like the two sides of an infinitely thin piece of paper — is where creativity happens, where life finds the resources to continue even in the face of catastrophe.

Does this seem too heavy a burden to put on a 40-minute album that might more likely be described (as the album publicity notes describe it) as “a technical tour de force that highlights The Who’s own achievement”? But it isn’t heavy: that’s precisely the point. Petra Haden’s “The Who Sell Out” is a kind of magic that brings the dead back to life, neither as vampires and zombies, nor as venerated saints, but in a sort of mirroring that allows the discarnate ghosts to, finally, and from the immense distance that separates death from life, resemble themselves.

Where’s the Mash-up?

Jennifer Lopez’s current single “Get Right” uses the same backing track that was originally written for Usher, and used by him in a song called “Ride,” that was left off his Confessions album, but has been circulating in mixtapes. (Story here). The trouble is that the backing track, by Rich Harrison is really hot, with a vicious backbeat and a screaming saxophone loop; but in both Usher’s and J-Lo’s versions, the singing is totally lame, and not up to the quality of the instrumental. It’s too bad the US doesn’t have a system like that in Jamaica, where producers release “riddims” that multiple artists rap or sing over, competing with each other. I’d really like to hear a vocal (perhaps a rap rather than singing?) that does justice to this track…

Jennifer Lopez’s current single “Get Right” uses the same backing track that was originally written for Usher, and used by him in a song called “Ride,” that was left off his Confessions album, but has been circulating in mixtapes. (Story here). The trouble is that the backing track, by Rich Harrison is really hot, with a vicious backbeat and a screaming saxophone loop; but in both Usher’s and J-Lo’s versions, the singing is totally lame, and not up to the quality of the instrumental. It’s too bad the US doesn’t have a system like that in Jamaica, where producers release “riddims” that multiple artists rap or sing over, competing with each other. I’d really like to hear a vocal (perhaps a rap rather than singing?) that does justice to this track…

Top Six

I’ve been meaning to do an end-of-year musical Top Ten for a while, but I’m not sure there are really ten albums from 2004 I love enough to make up a full list. So I’ll restrict myself to just six. Also, looking at all the Top Ten lists out there, I realize that I haven’t heard many of the albums other people are raving about. (Not to mention the hipster lists that are filled with music by groups or artists I haven’t even heard of). So my list is partial, not just in the sense that it reflects my own idiosyncrasies, but also in that I may well discover belatedly that there were other albums released in 2004 that should’ve been on it.

Nevertheless, here goes:

  1. Ghostface,
    The Pretty Toney Album     (or here)    . I wrote about it here. It still holds up better than any other hip hop I’ve heard in 2004: the mixture of moods, the way the words both work with and cut against the (excellent) 70s soul samples, the modulations of Ghostface’s voice (boasting one moment, whining the next; now tender, now tough, now hilarious).
  2. The Kleptones, A Night at the Hip-Hopera.. I wrote about it here. A brilliant (both conceptually and sonically) mash-up of the music of Queen with a variety of hip hop vocal tracks. An absolutely brilliant terrorist mindfuck; of course, it’s completely illegal, which means it’s our moral duty to disseminate it as widely as possible.
  3. Bjork,
    Medulla     (or here)    . This mostly a capella album is as beautiful and haunting as anything she has ever done. Cyborg music, except that here it’s human voices that serve as prosthetic digital machines, rather than the reverse. Less erotic than
    Vespertine    , but perhaps more sensuous, in the sense of full-body, full-voice immersion.
  4. Brandy,
    Afrodisiac     (or here)    . Actually, I only rate it this highly when I listen just to the nine Timbaland tracks, skipping over the ones produced by Kanye West and others. The nine tracks form a cohesive more-than-EP (about 45 minutes), moving through different emotional registers, and ending on a note of hope. Brandy is alas not as strong or subtle a singer as Aaliyah was, but Timbaland’s production has never been better. This is R&B, of course, not rap, but it crackles rhythmically without losing either tenderness or smoothness, a combination I find affecting and compelling.
  5. Blonde Redhead,
    Misery is a Butterfly     (or here)    . I wrote about it here. I don’t have much to add. Seductive melancholy, like Faure’s Requiem.
  6. P J Harvey,
    Uh Huh Her     (or here)    . I love P J Harvey. This isn’t her best album, by any means, but it’s a return to form after her rather lame previous album. I’m not generally a fan of the strictly (and in this day and age, quite aesthetically conservative) blues-based hard rock that is Polly’s bread and butter; but there’s so much emotional intensity and perplexity roiling under the surface of her music that I’m utterly won over.

I should also mention some albums I’m just not feeling. It’s not that I hate these albums, just that I am unable to share everyone else’s enthusiasm. Kanye West’s The College Dropout just sounds kind of smug and self-congratulatory to me; the production is solid, but to my mind not extraordinary. I don’t get why it seems to have been proclaimed, by general consensus, the hip hop album of the year. People with more offbeat sensibilities are instead in love with MF Doom and Madlib’s Madvillain; all I can say is that it’s clever and all, but it doesn’t really do that much for me (maybe because I gave up smoking pot over a decade ago). The (illegal) mash-up that’s gotten the most attention this year is not the Kleptones, but DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album; it was definitely a clever conceptual coup (Jay-Z’s Black Album + the Beatles’ White Album), but I just didn’t find it all that interesting to actually listen to.

I’ve been meaning to do an end-of-year musical Top Ten for a while, but I’m not sure there are really ten albums from 2004 I love enough to make up a full list. So I’ll restrict myself to just six. Also, looking at all the Top Ten lists out there, I realize that I haven’t heard many of the albums other people are raving about. (Not to mention the hipster lists that are filled with music by groups or artists I haven’t even heard of). So my list is partial, not just in the sense that it reflects my own idiosyncrasies, but also in that I may well discover belatedly that there were other albums released in 2004 that should’ve been on it.

Nevertheless, here goes:

  1. Ghostface,
    The Pretty Toney Album     (or here)    . I wrote about it here. It still holds up better than any other hip hop I’ve heard in 2004: the mixture of moods, the way the words both work with and cut against the (excellent) 70s soul samples, the modulations of Ghostface’s voice (boasting one moment, whining the next; now tender, now tough, now hilarious).
  2. The Kleptones, A Night at the Hip-Hopera.. I wrote about it here. A brilliant (both conceptually and sonically) mash-up of the music of Queen with a variety of hip hop vocal tracks. An absolutely brilliant terrorist mindfuck; of course, it’s completely illegal, which means it’s our moral duty to disseminate it as widely as possible.
  3. Bjork,
    Medulla     (or here)    . This mostly a capella album is as beautiful and haunting as anything she has ever done. Cyborg music, except that here it’s human voices that serve as prosthetic digital machines, rather than the reverse. Less erotic than
    Vespertine    , but perhaps more sensuous, in the sense of full-body, full-voice immersion.
  4. Brandy,
    Afrodisiac     (or here)    . Actually, I only rate it this highly when I listen just to the nine Timbaland tracks, skipping over the ones produced by Kanye West and others. The nine tracks form a cohesive more-than-EP (about 45 minutes), moving through different emotional registers, and ending on a note of hope. Brandy is alas not as strong or subtle a singer as Aaliyah was, but Timbaland’s production has never been better. This is R&B, of course, not rap, but it crackles rhythmically without losing either tenderness or smoothness, a combination I find affecting and compelling.
  5. Blonde Redhead,
    Misery is a Butterfly     (or here)    . I wrote about it here. I don’t have much to add. Seductive melancholy, like Faure’s Requiem.
  6. P J Harvey,
    Uh Huh Her     (or here)    . I love P J Harvey. This isn’t her best album, by any means, but it’s a return to form after her rather lame previous album. I’m not generally a fan of the strictly (and in this day and age, quite aesthetically conservative) blues-based hard rock that is Polly’s bread and butter; but there’s so much emotional intensity and perplexity roiling under the surface of her music that I’m utterly won over.

I should also mention some albums I’m just not feeling. It’s not that I hate these albums, just that I am unable to share everyone else’s enthusiasm. Kanye West’s The College Dropout just sounds kind of smug and self-congratulatory to me; the production is solid, but to my mind not extraordinary. I don’t get why it seems to have been proclaimed, by general consensus, the hip hop album of the year. People with more offbeat sensibilities are instead in love with MF Doom and Madlib’s Madvillain; all I can say is that it’s clever and all, but it doesn’t really do that much for me (maybe because I gave up smoking pot over a decade ago). The (illegal) mash-up that’s gotten the most attention this year is not the Kleptones, but DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album; it was definitely a clever conceptual coup (Jay-Z’s Black Album + the Beatles’ White Album), but I just didn’t find it all that interesting to actually listen to.

Haunted Weather

David Toop has long been one of my favorite music writers. His new book is called Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. It’s about various modes of contemporary experimental music, including free improvisation, environmental (ambient) music, music produced entirely on computers, music produced by chance procedures or by generative algorithms, music that is so minimal, and at such low volume, that it is barely distinguishable from silence, and so on. It’s also about the psychoacoustics and affectivity of playing music and of listening to it, the blurriness of the distinction between music and other types of sound, the way we relate to sonic environments, the effects of digital technology on the musical experience, listening as an experience of space, the way sound evokes memory, and so on. Toop’s approach is not systematic or theoretical, but associative and evocative: he slips and slides from topic to topic, from musical piece to musical piece, from interview to anecdote to description to open questioning. He rarely states specific theses, but continually provides suggestive formulations, food for thought. I love his writing for the rich, emotionally charged detail with which he describes musical compositions, most of which I am unlikely ever to actually hear. (Though Toop has compiled a CD to go along with the book). Haunted Weather is a book as beautiful, and almost as impalpable, as the music it evokes: its prose flows along lightly, and its ideas haunt the reader, without ever congealing into statements you can actually pin down.

David Toop has long been one of my favorite music writers. His new book is called Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. It’s about various modes of contemporary experimental music, including free improvisation, environmental (ambient) music, music produced entirely on computers, music produced by chance procedures or by generative algorithms, music that is so minimal, and at such low volume, that it is barely distinguishable from silence, and so on. It’s also about the psychoacoustics and affectivity of playing music and of listening to it, the blurriness of the distinction between music and other types of sound, the way we relate to sonic environments, the effects of digital technology on the musical experience, listening as an experience of space, the way sound evokes memory, and so on. Toop’s approach is not systematic or theoretical, but associative and evocative: he slips and slides from topic to topic, from musical piece to musical piece, from interview to anecdote to description to open questioning. He rarely states specific theses, but continually provides suggestive formulations, food for thought. I love his writing for the rich, emotionally charged detail with which he describes musical compositions, most of which I am unlikely ever to actually hear. (Though Toop has compiled a CD to go along with the book). Haunted Weather is a book as beautiful, and almost as impalpable, as the music it evokes: its prose flows along lightly, and its ideas haunt the reader, without ever congealing into statements you can actually pin down.

A Night at the Hip-Hopera

A Night at the Hip-Hopera, by the Kleptones, is the best mash-up I’ve heard, at least since Strictly Kev’s Raiding the 20th Century. (The Disney Corp. is taking legal action to suppress Hip-Hopera; the Kleptones are no longer allowed to host the mp3s on their own site. But they list other sites that carry the files; these won’t go offline until Disney gets around to contacting each of them individually with cease-and-desist orders. And if these don’t work, Google has a lot of links to it too).

A Night at the Hip-Hopera consists of music by Queen (whose copyright is owned by Disney, hence the cease-and-desist orders), together with vocal tracks taken mostly from various hip hop artists (both current and old skool, ranging from Afrikaa Bambaataa to Vanilla Ice to the Beastie Boys to Grandmaster Flash to Dilated Peoples to Missy Elliott) together with a few non-hip-hop bands (Electric Six, Morris Day), plus a montage of soundbites from (real and fake) news broadcasts, interview tapes, and old low-budget SF movies (not to mention attacks on copyright law and exhortations in favor of piracy/sampling/remaking). (There’s a fairly complete list of sample sources here).

Now, the name of the game in mash-ups of this sort is matching the vocal track with the musical track in some sort of convincing way. One strategy is purely musical/formal; The Freelance Hellraiser’s meld of The Strokes and Christina Aguilera a few years ago is the classic example of a mash-up that produces a hybrid pop song that’s superior to either of the originals. Another strategy is conceptual; thus Danger Mouse’s Grey Album combined Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album to provocative, if not always musically satisfying effect.

The Kleptones, however, take the art of mash-up as provocation to a new level. The album works both musically/formally and abstractly/conceptually, in a way that creates a wonderful cognitive-dissonance confusion. The choice of Queen as musical source is itself inspired, since they are so oddly contradictory: a monster success in their time, they represented the ne plus ultra of bombastic and ponderous arena rock, combining the worst of heavy metal declamation and prog symphonic pretentiousness; except that their pounding unilateral heavyhandedness was also leavened by a ludicrous, campy theatricality, and by a flirtation with disco. The macho implications of the music were constantly being undermined by Freddie Mercury’s performative excesses (even if nobody knew he was gay/bi at the time).

The contradictory strangeness of Queen is brought out and amplified by the way the Kleptones match their music to hip hop vocals. Sometimes the juxtapositions are just really weird (ODB’s “Got Your Money” over “Another One Bites the Dust”); other times they are wonderfully subversive (the quasi-fascist pounding of “We Will Rock You” becomes the backing for a militantly anti-racist rap, apparently by Killa Kela, with whom I am unfamiliar); still other times they suggest parallels and affinities where one would never have suspected them (the anthemic, soaring “Bicycle Race” melds all too perfectly with Eminem’s “Slim Shady” sarcasm: it’s hard to say here which one is a comment on the other).

Beyond these specific examples (and I could comment on the aptness/cleverness/revelatory force of just about every individual track), A Night at the Hip-Hopera as a whole excavates the fault lines that underlie Anglo-American popular music on the deepest levels: black vs. white, gay vs. straight, confrontation vs. entertainment, organic vs. mechanized, populist vs. elitist, artifice vs. sincerity, utopianism vs. cynicism, and so on. The rhythms of Missy Elliott or De La Soul oughtn’t to match with those of Queen, but somehow they do: yet this doesn’t efface the sense we have of totally separate musical universes somehow clashing and (at the same time) existing secretly in parallel.

Queen’s music is pretty white-sounding; by which I mean that it appropriates black musical sources (mostly the blues) but in doing so deprives them of energy, soul, funkiness, and grace, substituting a plodding insistence, a deadening literalism, and an almost unbearable earnestness. Yet this is the normative musical atmosphere we all (white, black, or other) live in, in American imperial culture today; black music (hip hop as much as blues) still today largely exists only to be appropriated, even when it is black artists themselves doing the appropriation (there’s more minstrelsy in hip hop than most of us would like to acknowledge). A Night at the Hip-Hopera somehow dramatizes this situation, with the way the various sources it orchestrates together are contradictorily made to cohabit with one another. At times the cognitive dissonance is too much; at other times, the consonance we are actually hearing override these dissonances. Voices of protest are chained to sounds of conformity (if only by virtue of Queen’s gigantism and lockstep rhythms); or is it that this depressingly massive and normative music is releasing bubbles of perversity and queerness even when we fail to notice? (I don’t think I’d be able to endure listening to an entire album of Queen’s greatest hits; but the Kleptones succeed in releasing the beauty and strangeness of these overly familiar dinosaurs). The album stages a series of anarchic clashes which themselves embody the transformative vitality that “popular culture” continues to offer, even when (at its frequent worst) it is being monopolistically controlled from above, and squeezed as tightly as possible into the straightjacket of the (heavily cross-promoted) commodity form.

I don’t believe in redemption; I’m suspicious of a con whenever it’s offered. But The Kleptones suggest a kind of reaching — precisely because they don’t paper over the contradictions that they are rubbing our ears in, but gleefullly insist on them — that turns even the corniness of Queen into something: not redemptive, quite, but at least possessing a secret reserve of utopian hope, of potentiality — a potentiality that can only be released when creativity is not constrained and chained by copyright, by so-called “intellectual property rights,” by the privatization of culture. So that A Night at the Hip-Hopera ultimately becomes a meta-commentary on its own mutant procedures. In other words, if this album is illegal (as it apparently is), then creativity, innovation, and joy are illegal too.

The final cut of the album is a soundbite collage, to the background accompaniment of Queen’s “Who Wants To Live Forever?” All the quoted comments relate to copyright and free expression, presented in various juxtapositions and with differing levels of irony. The last voice we hear says: “Without free communication, you don’t have a free society. Democracy’s based on it.” (Does anybody know the source of this?). That’s why A Night at the Hip-Hopera is such a brilliant and powerful accomplishment, and that’s why it needs to be disseminated as widely as possible, in deliberate defiance (if need be) of the law.

A Night at the Hip-Hopera, by the Kleptones, is the best mash-up I’ve heard, at least since Strictly Kev’s Raiding the 20th Century. (The Disney Corp. is taking legal action to suppress Hip-Hopera; the Kleptones are no longer allowed to host the mp3s on their own site. But they list other sites that carry the files; these won’t go offline until Disney gets around to contacting each of them individually with cease-and-desist orders. And if these don’t work, Google has a lot of links to it too).

A Night at the Hip-Hopera consists of music by Queen (whose copyright is owned by Disney, hence the cease-and-desist orders), together with vocal tracks taken mostly from various hip hop artists (both current and old skool, ranging from Afrikaa Bambaataa to Vanilla Ice to the Beastie Boys to Grandmaster Flash to Dilated Peoples to Missy Elliott) together with a few non-hip-hop bands (Electric Six, Morris Day), plus a montage of soundbites from (real and fake) news broadcasts, interview tapes, and old low-budget SF movies (not to mention attacks on copyright law and exhortations in favor of piracy/sampling/remaking). (There’s a fairly complete list of sample sources here).

Now, the name of the game in mash-ups of this sort is matching the vocal track with the musical track in some sort of convincing way. One strategy is purely musical/formal; The Freelance Hellraiser’s meld of The Strokes and Christina Aguilera a few years ago is the classic example of a mash-up that produces a hybrid pop song that’s superior to either of the originals. Another strategy is conceptual; thus Danger Mouse’s Grey Album combined Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album to provocative, if not always musically satisfying effect.

The Kleptones, however, take the art of mash-up as provocation to a new level. The album works both musically/formally and abstractly/conceptually, in a way that creates a wonderful cognitive-dissonance confusion. The choice of Queen as musical source is itself inspired, since they are so oddly contradictory: a monster success in their time, they represented the ne plus ultra of bombastic and ponderous arena rock, combining the worst of heavy metal declamation and prog symphonic pretentiousness; except that their pounding unilateral heavyhandedness was also leavened by a ludicrous, campy theatricality, and by a flirtation with disco. The macho implications of the music were constantly being undermined by Freddie Mercury’s performative excesses (even if nobody knew he was gay/bi at the time).

The contradictory strangeness of Queen is brought out and amplified by the way the Kleptones match their music to hip hop vocals. Sometimes the juxtapositions are just really weird (ODB’s “Got Your Money” over “Another One Bites the Dust”); other times they are wonderfully subversive (the quasi-fascist pounding of “We Will Rock You” becomes the backing for a militantly anti-racist rap, apparently by Killa Kela, with whom I am unfamiliar); still other times they suggest parallels and affinities where one would never have suspected them (the anthemic, soaring “Bicycle Race” melds all too perfectly with Eminem’s “Slim Shady” sarcasm: it’s hard to say here which one is a comment on the other).

Beyond these specific examples (and I could comment on the aptness/cleverness/revelatory force of just about every individual track), A Night at the Hip-Hopera as a whole excavates the fault lines that underlie Anglo-American popular music on the deepest levels: black vs. white, gay vs. straight, confrontation vs. entertainment, organic vs. mechanized, populist vs. elitist, artifice vs. sincerity, utopianism vs. cynicism, and so on. The rhythms of Missy Elliott or De La Soul oughtn’t to match with those of Queen, but somehow they do: yet this doesn’t efface the sense we have of totally separate musical universes somehow clashing and (at the same time) existing secretly in parallel.

Queen’s music is pretty white-sounding; by which I mean that it appropriates black musical sources (mostly the blues) but in doing so deprives them of energy, soul, funkiness, and grace, substituting a plodding insistence, a deadening literalism, and an almost unbearable earnestness. Yet this is the normative musical atmosphere we all (white, black, or other) live in, in American imperial culture today; black music (hip hop as much as blues) still today largely exists only to be appropriated, even when it is black artists themselves doing the appropriation (there’s more minstrelsy in hip hop than most of us would like to acknowledge). A Night at the Hip-Hopera somehow dramatizes this situation, with the way the various sources it orchestrates together are contradictorily made to cohabit with one another. At times the cognitive dissonance is too much; at other times, the consonance we are actually hearing override these dissonances. Voices of protest are chained to sounds of conformity (if only by virtue of Queen’s gigantism and lockstep rhythms); or is it that this depressingly massive and normative music is releasing bubbles of perversity and queerness even when we fail to notice? (I don’t think I’d be able to endure listening to an entire album of Queen’s greatest hits; but the Kleptones succeed in releasing the beauty and strangeness of these overly familiar dinosaurs). The album stages a series of anarchic clashes which themselves embody the transformative vitality that “popular culture” continues to offer, even when (at its frequent worst) it is being monopolistically controlled from above, and squeezed as tightly as possible into the straightjacket of the (heavily cross-promoted) commodity form.

I don’t believe in redemption; I’m suspicious of a con whenever it’s offered. But The Kleptones suggest a kind of reaching — precisely because they don’t paper over the contradictions that they are rubbing our ears in, but gleefullly insist on them — that turns even the corniness of Queen into something: not redemptive, quite, but at least possessing a secret reserve of utopian hope, of potentiality — a potentiality that can only be released when creativity is not constrained and chained by copyright, by so-called “intellectual property rights,” by the privatization of culture. So that A Night at the Hip-Hopera ultimately becomes a meta-commentary on its own mutant procedures. In other words, if this album is illegal (as it apparently is), then creativity, innovation, and joy are illegal too.

The final cut of the album is a soundbite collage, to the background accompaniment of Queen’s “Who Wants To Live Forever?” All the quoted comments relate to copyright and free expression, presented in various juxtapositions and with differing levels of irony. The last voice we hear says: “Without free communication, you don’t have a free society. Democracy’s based on it.” (Does anybody know the source of this?). That’s why A Night at the Hip-Hopera is such a brilliant and powerful accomplishment, and that’s why it needs to be disseminated as widely as possible, in deliberate defiance (if need be) of the law.

DJ Spooky

I heard an excellent lecture/demonstration tonight by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. It was a heady evening of intellectual, visual and sonic montage. There was text from Miller’s book Rhythm Science and citations of postmodern thinkers and writers from Derrida to William Gibson, together with sound collages combining everything from Public Enemy to Miles Davis to Pierre Boulez, and video clips ranging from 1950s TV ads that featured electronic music to excerpts from Miller’s multimedia remix/deconstruction of Birth of a Nation.

Miller/Spooky is an important artist, both because of the sheer vitality of his sampled/remixed sounds, and because he so thoroughly registers and reflects upon what it means to live in our 21st century network culture. Miller speaks to and for a world in which everything is hybrid, everything is continually being transformed and “remediated” — but also everything is instantly commodified and branded, reduced to an identifiable and marketable tag. He reminds us that we are constantly being bathed — literally as well as metaphorically — in sound waves and electromagnetic waves of all conceivable frequencies, carrying messages intentional or not, and whether we are aware of all these messages or not. Miller plays with all these messages, both ironically and seriously, and encourages us to play with them in turn.

Everything is a sample, everything is waiting to be sampled; and everything is renewed when it is sampled, broken down, reconstructed and recontextualized. If architecture is, as they say, frozen music, then — Miller says — music is liquid architecture. Music fills and reconfigures space, puts it into motion. All that is solid melts into software — actually, into free software or shareware. I found Paul Miller’s lecture exhilarating, as it envisioned — but also pragmatically demonstrated, in brief — the utopian potentialities of postmodern culture. Remix/Remodel. Deform in order to Transform.

Spooky.jpg

I heard an excellent lecture/demonstration tonight by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. It was a heady evening of intellectual, visual and sonic montage. There was text from Miller’s book Rhythm Science and citations of postmodern thinkers and writers from Derrida to William Gibson, together with sound collages combining everything from Public Enemy to Miles Davis to Pierre Boulez, and video clips ranging from 1950s TV ads that featured electronic music to excerpts from Miller’s multimedia remix/deconstruction of Birth of a Nation.

Miller/Spooky is an important artist, both because of the sheer vitality of his sampled/remixed sounds, and because he so thoroughly registers and reflects upon what it means to live in our 21st century network culture. Miller speaks to and for a world in which everything is hybrid, everything is continually being transformed and “remediated” — but also everything is instantly commodified and branded, reduced to an identifiable and marketable tag. He reminds us that we are constantly being bathed — literally as well as metaphorically — in sound waves and electromagnetic waves of all conceivable frequencies, carrying messages intentional or not, and whether we are aware of all these messages or not. Miller plays with all these messages, both ironically and seriously, and encourages us to play with them in turn.

Everything is a sample, everything is waiting to be sampled; and everything is renewed when it is sampled, broken down, reconstructed and recontextualized. If architecture is, as they say, frozen music, then — Miller says — music is liquid architecture. Music fills and reconfigures space, puts it into motion. All that is solid melts into software — actually, into free software or shareware. I found Paul Miller’s lecture exhilarating, as it envisioned — but also pragmatically demonstrated, in brief — the utopian potentialities of postmodern culture. Remix/Remodel. Deform in order to Transform.

Playlist

I haven’t posted anything about music in way too long, so here’s an annotated playlist of songs in heavy rotation on my iPod. Most of these are things I would never have heard of, let alone heard and obtained, if it weren’t for the numerous music blogs currently available. It’s not as easy to find out-of-the-way things on today’s P2P networks as it was in the time of Napster and AudioGalaxy… but I am hearing a far wider range of things now than I was able to then.

  1. Kelis, Trick Me (Basement Jaxx remix). This sounds more like Basement Jaxx’s last album Kish Kash than it does like Kelis’ other songs. Irresistibly catchy, and at the same time wonderfully headstrong.
  2. M.I.A, Galang. So far, my favorite song of 2004. Equal parts grime and Timbalandesque and late-70s girl-punk. Clang clang clang. Infectious, ridiculous, ferocious all at one. M.I.A. is a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in London, under 20 I think. The other songs of hers I’ve heard (“Sun Shower” and “Fire Fire”) are also great.
  3. Shystie, One Wish. Grrl grime, not quite as mindblowingly original as M.I.A., but powerful, aggressive, angry, take-no-shit feminist assertiveness rapping.
  4. Mya, Fallen (Zone remix, featuring Chingy). OK, this one ain’t exactly feminist self-assertion, but swoony romanticism of the original version (with a creepy stalker edge in the video) is transfigured by the remix into a propulsive beat utopia.
  5. United States of Electronica, La Discoteca. Good mindless fun.
  6. Girl Talk, Bodies Hit the Floor. Screaming, glitchy mash-up that’s both violent and playful, and whose samples include what seems to be an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River.”
  7. LBR, Monda’s Beat. Another mash-up appropriating Mr. Timberlake, this time for what sounds like a robots’ dance orgy.
  8. Sia, Breathe (Four Tet remix). A gorgeous cry of despair, pain, vulnerability, and living on.
  9. Pixies, Bam Thwok. Their new reunion single is just a throwaway, but I love those slashing, buzzing guitars and Kim Deal embracing the universe.
  10. Kleenex/LiliPUT, Split. The only “oldie” on this list, but it still sounds utterly fresh. Late 70s girl-punk assertiveness, totally ecstatic, with pounding guitars, wailing saxophone, and gleeful call-and-response vocals mostly consisting of screamed-out words beginning with the letter “H” (hopscotch, harakiri, hugger-mugger…). (I’ve been meaning to get the 2CD set of this band’s complete works, reiussed on Kill Rock Stars, but I am pissed off that downloading it on iTunes is more expensive than buying the hardcopy on Amazon).
  11. Electrelane, I’m On Fire. Beautiful, atmospheric, but also pulsing and fast, cover of the Springsteen song by a band (with woman singer) that sounds a bit like Stereolab and a bit like the aforementioned late-70s girl-punk bands
  12. Rekha, Good To Go. Sexy, bouncy dancehall number , but from the woman’s point of view. Rekha, like Missy Elliott, wants to be the one in charge, wants her sugar, and won’t stand for a one-minute man; and she moves fluidly between come-on and mockery as she states her case.
  13. Ce’Cile, Hot Like We. More women’s dancehall, raunchier than Rekha. Ce’cile is so high-energy I can’t imagine her finding a man who could keep up with her.
  14. Nina Sky, Move Ya Body. A big hit on “urban” radio, I am told, though in Seattle I’d have no way of knowing. Fortunately I’m moving to Detroit in a week. Infectious New York (Puerto Rican via Queens) take on dancehall. And you don’t stop…
  15. Jadakiss, Why (featuring Anthony Hamilton). Jadakiss transcends his own thug cliches, and gets both political and metaphysical, which is a great thing. The song still has some of the same old stupid boasting and sexist posturing, but it also addresses racism and rigged elections and the American gulag and existential emptiness and mortality. “Why they let the Terminator win the election? C’mon, pay attention.”
  16. Ghostface, Sun. Love and praise for the glory of the star whose expenditure without return is the source of all life and energy on Earth.
  17. Shing02, Suck On My Dub. Japanese rap. I have no idea what the words mean, but the rap sounds ferocious and it is accompanied by a heavy beat with insane surf guitars (???).

I haven’t posted anything about music in way too long, so here’s an annotated playlist of songs in heavy rotation on my iPod. Most of these are things I would never have heard of, let alone heard and obtained, if it weren’t for the numerous music blogs currently available. It’s not as easy to find out-of-the-way things on today’s P2P networks as it was in the time of Napster and AudioGalaxy… but I am hearing a far wider range of things now than I was able to then.

  1. Kelis, Trick Me (Basement Jaxx remix). This sounds more like Basement Jaxx’s last album Kish Kash than it does like Kelis’ other songs. Irresistibly catchy, and at the same time wonderfully headstrong.
  2. M.I.A, Galang. So far, my favorite song of 2004. Equal parts grime and Timbalandesque beats and late-70s girl-punk. Clang clang clang. Infectious, ridiculous, ferocious all at once. M.I.A. is a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in London, under 20 I think. The other songs of hers I’ve heard (“Sun Shower” and “Fire Fire”) are also great.
  3. Shystie, One Wish. Grrl grime, not quite as mindblowingly original as M.I.A., but powerful, aggressive, angry, take-no-shit feminist assertiveness rapping.
  4. Mya, Fallen (Zone remix, featuring Chingy). OK, this one ain’t exactly feminist self-assertion, but the swoony romanticism of the original version (with a creepy stalker edge in the video) is transfigured by the remix into a propulsive beat utopia.
  5. United States of Electronica, La Discoteca. Good mindless fun.
  6. Girl Talk, Bodies Hit the Floor. Screaming, glitchy mash-up that’s both violent and playful, and whose samples include what seems to be an Alvin and the Chipmunks version of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River.”
  7. LBR, Monda’s Beat. Another mash-up appropriating Mr. Timberlake, this time for what sounds like a robots’ dance orgy.
  8. Sia, Breathe (Four Tet remix). A gorgeous cry of despair, pain, vulnerability, and living on.
  9. Pixies, Bam Thwok. Their new reunion single is just a throwaway, but I love those slashing, buzzing guitars and Kim Deal embracing the universe.
  10. Kleenex/LiliPUT, Split. The only “oldie” on this list, but it still sounds utterly fresh. Late 70s girl-punk assertiveness, totally ecstatic, with pounding guitars, wailing saxophone, and gleeful call-and-response vocals mostly consisting of screamed-out words beginning with the letter “H” (hopscotch, harakiri, hugger-mugger…). (I’ve been meaning to get the 2CD set of this band’s complete works, reiussed on Kill Rock Stars, but I am pissed off that downloading it on iTunes is more expensive than buying the hardcopy on Amazon).
  11. Electrelane, I’m On Fire. Beautiful, atmospheric, but also pulsing and fast, cover of the Springsteen song by a band (with woman singer) that sounds a bit like Stereolab and a bit like the aforementioned late-70s girl-punk bands
  12. Rekha, Good To Go. Sexy, bouncy dancehall number , but from the woman’s point of view. Rekha, like Missy Elliott, wants to be the one in charge, wants her sugar, and won’t stand for a one-minute man; and she moves fluidly between come-on and mockery as she states her case.
  13. Ce’Cile, Hot Like We. More women’s dancehall, raunchier than Rekha. Ce’cile is so high-energy I can’t imagine her finding a man who could keep up with her.
  14. Nina Sky, Move Ya Body. A big hit on “urban” radio, I am told, though in Seattle I’d have no way of knowing. Fortunately I’m moving to Detroit in a week. Infectious New York (Puerto Rican via Queens) take on dancehall. And you don’t stop…
  15. Jadakiss, Why (featuring Anthony Hamilton). Jadakiss transcends his own thug cliches, and gets both political and metaphysical, which is a great thing. The song still has some of the same old stupid boasting and sexist posturing, but it also addresses racism and rigged elections and the American gulag and existential emptiness and mortality. “Why they let the Terminator win the election? C’mon, pay attention.”
  16. Ghostface, Sun. Love and praise for the glory of the star whose expenditure without return is the source of all life and energy on Earth.
  17. Shing02, Suck On My Dub. Japanese rap. I have no idea what the words mean, but the rap sounds ferocious and it is accompanied by a heavy beat with insane surf guitars (???).

Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album

Though I’ve never been a big devotee of the Wu, I’ve fallen in love with Ghostface‘s latest, The Pretty Toney Album.
Judging from what I’ve read on fan websites and bulletin boards, the true Ghostface Killah fans don’t like this one as much as his earlier solo work, Ironman and Supreme Clientele. This seems to be because, in dropping the “Killah” from his name, Ghostface has changed the ratio between hard-headed thug narratives and squishy love songs, having less of the former and more of the latter. But for my part, this is precisely why I like Pretty Toney more than anything else Ghostface has ever done.
There are some great gangsta narratives on the album, particularly “Run” (produced by Wu mastermind RZA) with its urgency, speed and off-the-beat rhymes. But they are outweighed by songs like “It’s Over” (a eulogy for the thug life, which Ghostface has now outgrown) and “Save Me Dear” (redemption through a good woman’s love — corny and a bit patriarchal, but moving all the same) and the Missy Elliott collaboration “Tush” (a spunky, upbeat sex song, that many of the fans have denounced as lightweight and commercial, but whose beat I really like, not to mention Missy’s “if you ain’t slurpin’, then you better off jerkin’ “).
And, though I usually hate the “skits” that populate recent hip hop albums for some reason, the ones here work for me, in a slice-of-life meets comedic-exaggeration way).
What really makes the album work are the soul music samples that dominate most of its tracks. They aren’t sped up and chopped up as is often the case (in Ghostface’s earlier stuff and elsewhere) with soul samples in hip hop. Instead, we get them relatively intact. In at least one case — “Holla” — we get the sampling (if it can still be called that) of a complete song, the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You” ; Ghostface raps over the verses, and joins in on the chorus, with “la la means I love you” etc changed to “holla holla holla if you want to, I love you.”
Ghostface has done soulful songs, backed by soul samples, in the past, of course: think of “All That I Got Is You” (on Ironman) or “Never Be The Same Again” (on Bulletproof Wallets). But on Pretty Toney he moves it to a whole new level.
Let me explain. Using an old song for emotional impact is an old trick in hip hop (and in other genres of music as well, of course). The most egregious example I can think of is Puff Daddy’s eulogy for Biggie, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which basically just added a few new lyrics to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” The emotion seems unearned, gotten through a knee-jerk reaction to the original song, and therefore phony. I’m always saying that sampling is creativity: that imagination works by taking a prior work, and reworking and recontextualizing it, and hybridizing it with other prior works. But “I’ll Be Missing You” is the lame degree zero of that.
But on The Pretty Toney Album, a very different dynamic is at work. Ghostface isn’t just using soul music to get an emotional reaction. Rather, he is working with the fact that soul music signifies or connotes emotionality. It stands for passion: for longing, desperation, and blocked desire, on the one hand, and warmth, fulfillment, drawn-out erotic bliss on the other. In this way it stands at an opposite pole from the ethos of the Shaolin warrior (the big theme in Wu Tang mythology), or from the pimp/thug/gangsta/Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines lineage of so much rap in the last decade or so. Soul is about emotional outpouring, while hardcore rap is about maintaining a reserve of cool, never letting yourself go (withholding is the best way to manipulate others, while letting go imperils your survival).
These can be seen as the two sides of black music, and can further be seen (stereotypically) as “feminine” and “masculine” modes. Soul includes men singing to women as well as women singing for women; hardcore rap is addressed by men to other men, and is filled with masculine bravado. Of course, these are both extreme reductions — what’s really going on in black music is far more multifarious — but they express the dichotomy that Ghostface is working with.
So, Ghostface doesn’t just use his soul music samples for cheap emotional impact: he plays off his vocals against the music. His voice adapts itself to the rhythm and flow of the samples, while at the same time his tone — sometimes desperate, more often dry and deadpan, at times comedically mock-hysterical — cuts against it. The result is complex and conflicted. Sometimes the disjunction is played out narratively, as the song tells a story that moves from anger, nihilism, or boasting to acceptance and opening up. This is the case in “Holla”, for instance: Ghostface’s lines seem initially to totally contradict the Delfonics’ lovey-dovey mood, but by the end he has moved on from “pimp talk” to almost-preaching about education and keeping the peace. Other times, tension is maintained throughout the song. “It’s Over” expresses regret for the thug life he’s left behind, at the same time that it reminds us that “what goes around comes around”: soul nostalgia and hard-edged aggression interpenetrate and almost seem to change places.
My favorite song on the album is “Tooken Back”, a duet with the raunchy Jacki-O. It’s a battle of the sexes that turns into the hope of reconciliation. In the first verse, Ghostface is telling his woman that he was right to dump her, and that even though she’s taken him onto Jerry Springer to beg for forgiveness she won’t get it. The second verse is Jacki-O’s rejoinder, cajoling and pleading with him, but also subtly keeping her distance from desperation (“your sex wasn’t wild… but I dealt with it”). The third verse flips the situation, with Ghostface begging the woman to come back. Throughout, a soul sample pleading “take me back” loops in the background, and swells up to the foreground during the chorus. (If anybody knows the source of this sample, please email me and let me know what it is). The intonations of both rappers pass through a number of affective states, from derision to desperation to love. The soul sample makes the emotion over the top and larger than life, while the voices’ nuances introduce subtlety and qualification, and eventually a kind of warmth. Both speakers are calculating in everything they say, yet the soul sample drags them into a warmth, and an erotic pull, that are beyond calculation. The sample loops and loops with the stirrings of desire, while the raps rationalize and then give way, giving a narrative shape to that underlying pulse. The song manages to be heartfelt rather than ironic, even as it shows a fully ironic, self-conscious awareness of what’s going on.

Though I’ve never been a big devotee of the Wu, I’ve fallen in love with Ghostface‘s latest, The Pretty Toney Album.
Judging from what I’ve read on fan websites and bulletin boards, the true Ghostface Killah fans don’t like this one as much as his earlier solo work, Ironman and Supreme Clientele. This seems to be because, in dropping the “Killah” from his name, Ghostface has changed the ratio between hard-headed thug narratives and squishy love songs, having less of the former and more of the latter. But for my part, this is precisely why I like Pretty Toney more than anything else Ghostface has ever done.
There are some great gangsta narratives on the album, particularly “Run” (produced by Wu mastermind RZA) with its urgency, speed and off-the-beat rhymes. But they are outweighed by songs like “It’s Over” (a eulogy for the thug life, which Ghostface has now outgrown) and “Save Me Dear” (redemption through a good woman’s love — corny and a bit patriarchal, but moving all the same) and the Missy Elliott collaboration “Tush” (a spunky, upbeat sex song, that many of the fans have denounced as lightweight and commercial, but whose beat I really like, not to mention Missy’s “if you ain’t slurpin’, then you better off jerkin’ “).
And, though I usually hate the “skits” that populate recent hip hop albums for some reason, the ones here work for me, in a slice-of-life meets comedic-exaggeration way).
What really makes the album work are the soul music samples that dominate most of its tracks. They aren’t sped up and chopped up as is often the case (in Ghostface’s earlier stuff and elsewhere) with soul samples in hip hop. Instead, we get them relatively intact. In at least one case — “Holla” — we get the sampling (if it can still be called that) of a complete song, the Delfonics’ “La La Means I Love You” ; Ghostface raps over the verses, and joins in on the chorus, with “la la means I love you” etc changed to “holla holla holla if you want to, I love you.”
Ghostface has done soulful songs, backed by soul samples, in the past, of course: think of “All That I Got Is You” (on Ironman) or “Never Be The Same Again” (on Bulletproof Wallets). But on Pretty Toney he moves it to a whole new level.
Let me explain. Using an old song for emotional impact is an old trick in hip hop (and in other genres of music as well, of course). The most egregious example I can think of is Puff Daddy’s eulogy for Biggie, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which basically just added a few new lyrics to Sting’s “Every Breath You Take.” The emotion seems unearned, gotten through a knee-jerk reaction to the original song, and therefore phony. I’m always saying that sampling is creativity: that imagination works by taking a prior work, and reworking and recontextualizing it, and hybridizing it with other prior works. But “I’ll Be Missing You” is the lame degree zero of that.
But on The Pretty Toney Album, a very different dynamic is at work. Ghostface isn’t just using soul music to get an emotional reaction. Rather, he is working with the fact that soul music signifies or connotes emotionality. It stands for passion: for longing, desperation, and blocked desire, on the one hand, and warmth, fulfillment, drawn-out erotic bliss on the other. In this way it stands at an opposite pole from the ethos of the Shaolin warrior (the big theme in Wu Tang mythology), or from the pimp/thug/gangsta/Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines lineage of so much rap in the last decade or so. Soul is about emotional outpouring, while hardcore rap is about maintaining a reserve of cool, never letting yourself go (withholding is the best way to manipulate others, while letting go imperils your survival).
These can be seen as the two sides of black music, and can further be seen (stereotypically) as “feminine” and “masculine” modes. Soul includes men singing to women as well as women singing for women; hardcore rap is addressed by men to other men, and is filled with masculine bravado. Of course, these are both extreme reductions — what’s really going on in black music is far more multifarious — but they express the dichotomy that Ghostface is working with.
So, Ghostface doesn’t just use his soul music samples for cheap emotional impact: he plays off his vocals against the music. His voice adapts itself to the rhythm and flow of the samples, while at the same time his tone — sometimes desperate, more often dry and deadpan, at times comedically mock-hysterical — cuts against it. The result is complex and conflicted. Sometimes the disjunction is played out narratively, as the song tells a story that moves from anger, nihilism, or boasting to acceptance and opening up. This is the case in “Holla”, for instance: Ghostface’s lines seem initially to totally contradict the Delfonics’ lovey-dovey mood, but by the end he has moved on from “pimp talk” to almost-preaching about education and keeping the peace. Other times, tension is maintained throughout the song. “It’s Over” expresses regret for the thug life he’s left behind, at the same time that it reminds us that “what goes around comes around”: soul nostalgia and hard-edged aggression interpenetrate and almost seem to change places.
My favorite song on the album is “Tooken Back”, a duet with the raunchy Jacki-O. It’s a battle of the sexes that turns into the hope of reconciliation. In the first verse, Ghostface is telling his woman that he was right to dump her, and that even though she’s taken him onto Jerry Springer to beg for forgiveness she won’t get it. The second verse is Jacki-O’s rejoinder, cajoling and pleading with him, but also subtly keeping her distance from desperation (“your sex wasn’t wild… but I dealt with it”). The third verse flips the situation, with Ghostface begging the woman to come back. Throughout, a soul sample pleading “take me back” — from a song of that name by The Emotions — loops in the background, and swells up to the foreground during the chorus. The intonations of both rappers pass through a number of affective states, from derision to desperation to love. The soul sample makes the emotion over the top and larger than life, while the voices’ nuances introduce subtlety and qualification, and eventually a kind of warmth. Both speakers are calculating in everything they say, yet the soul sample drags them into a warmth, and an erotic pull, that are beyond calculation. The sample loops and loops with the stirrings of desire, while the raps rationalize and then give way, giving a narrative shape to that underlying pulse. The song manages to be heartfelt rather than ironic, even as it shows a fully ironic, self-conscious awareness of what’s going on.