Inspired by the Ridley Scott crime epic, Jay-Z's quickly-made drug kingpin record isn't as conceptually tight as he'd have liked, but it rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.

American Gangster

The story goes like this: After seeing an advance print of the Ridley Scott heroin-trade epic American Gangster, Jay-Z found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, and Jay saw so many parallels between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay recorded his own widescreen epic, a concept-album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, an imagined what-if trajectory for what might have happened to Jay if he'd never left the drug trade.
It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling. But as music?
Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song.
Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, "Blue Magic" and "American Gangster", that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. On "Blue Magic", he even growls, "Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?" like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses fuck up his concept.
So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. Jay's evident obsession with the post-Don Imus furor over nihilistic rap lyrics has fuck-all to do with his gangster narrative, for instance, but Jay's willingness to break narrative and address that obsession leads to lines like this one, where he calls out recent rap foe Al Sharpton on "Say Hello": "Tell him I'll remove the curses/ If you tell me our schools gon' be perfect/ When Jena 6 don't exist / Tell him that's when I'll stop saying 'bitch,' bitch!" The album's story gives it enough structure to feel huge and all-encompassing, but Jay floats in and out of it as fluidly as he switches between the first and second person. And so the drug-dealer story serves an important purpose: It rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.
On American Gangster, he's fallen back in love with language, making slick puns and jamming his lines with internal rhymes and vivid, detailed images without letting those devices detract from the emotional punch of his mini-narratives. "No Hook" has some of the most complicated rhyme-patterns he's tried in years, but it's all in service of a sad picture of the conflicts of anyone who makes a living doing dangerous, immoral things: "'Stay out of trouble,' mama said as mama sighs/ Her fear her youngest son being victim of homicide/ But I gotta get you out of here, mama, or I'm [long pause] die [long pause] inside." (Nobody uses long breathless pauses like Jay-Z; when he's at his best, as he is here, those silences can say as much as his words.)
On "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)", the buoyant and celebratory ode to financial success, Jay thanks every device and corrupt institution that made his rise possible: "The Nike shoebox for holding all this cash/ Boys in blue who put the greed before the badge." On "Blue Magic", his wordplay is so dense that it can take multiple listens to parse: "Blame Reagan for making me to a monster/ Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra/ I ran contraband that they sponsored." (Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a while to realize that the second of those lines ends with the exact same four syllables as the next line's beginning.) On "Fallin'", the song about the dealer's comeuppance, Jay sounds like he's spent a lot of time thinking about the fate he avoided: "Come January, it gets cold/ When your letters come in slow and your commissary's low." And on "Ignorant Shit", a Black Album outtake revisited and revamped here, Jay positively relishes the contradictions of rap, a genre where every artist theatrically proclaims himself to be more real than everyone else: "Actually believe half of what you see/ None of what you hear, even if it's spit by me/ And with that being said, I will kill niggas dead."
Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious. The sampled voices of Al Green and Marvin Gaye float through the record like ghosts of Jay's past, sweetly offering encouragement like benevolent angels. Jay's handpicked lineup of producers keep his voice grounded in thick, organic globs of 1970s soul. Diddy and the Hitmen, the reunited production who gave old Bad Boy albums their flamboyant elegance, turn in five tracks on the album, and their work drips with ambition. On album-opener "Pray" they outfit Jay with churning strings, screaming guitars, cinematic sound-effects, and a histrionic gospel choir; the horns, windchimes, and rolling drums of "Sweet" are almost exhausting in their richness. But not all the production is that warm and languid. On "Success", Jay and guest Nas rant paranoically over No ID's disorienting storm of organ-wails and murky, off-kilter drums. On "Ignorant Shit", Just Blaze layers up a furious storm of tinny synths and guitars, giving Jay's shit-talk a trashy "Miami Vice" veneer. And "Hello Brooklyn 2.0", built from an old Beastie Boys track, is a stark corrective to all those florid harps and violins: all booming bass and skeletal handclaps, Jay sounding more at home than guest Lil Wayne.
When Jay taped his episode of "VH1 Storytellers" in Brooklyn last month, he kept comparing tracks from the album to moments from The Godfather and Scarface. American Gangster isn't really about Jay's own memories, and it's certainly not about Frank Lucas. Instead, it's an album about Jay's mythic legacy, his place in a pantheon of larger-than-life outlaws. Problematically enough, it works because it reconnects Jay with the verbal and musical eloquence that allowed him to escape from an outlaw's life. If it took a big Hollywood movie and a half-baked concept to get him back to that, then thank God for big Hollywood movies and half-baked concepts.


The Louisville indie rock trio takes a gloomy, fantastical turn on its third album.

Fairy Rust

To create Fairy Rust, Wombo transported themselves into the haze of a mystical forest. Inspired by the works of Washington Irving, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson, the Louisville indie rock trio dug through old morality tales for their folkloric wisdom. While their previous record, Blossomlooksdownuponus, had a happy-but-possessed childlike energy, this one searches for darker, more tormented subject matter, complemented by hypnotic music that seems suited for live performance in a cave.
The album has a more exaggerated post-punk tint, foregrounding cyclical basslines and combative, dry drums. Each track sounds both organic and artificial, with traditional instruments filtered through eerie effects that make it sound like you’re listening through a cardboard roll. On opener “Snakey,” vocalist Sydney Chadwick’s typically satellite-high vocals sound overcast, lower in range and pushed back in the mix, making space for her mid-tempo arpeggiating bass. Her voice disappears for the haunted instrumental breaks that highlight Cameron Lowe’s detuned droning electric guitar and drummer Joel Taylor’s cowbell hits. Compared to the ASMR baby-talk of Blossomlooksdownuponus opener “Sweet Powder Sugar Sandy,” it’s a noticeable departure: Levity seems to have disapperated, leaving ardent gloom in its place.
In some tracks, the references to mysticism are obvious and immediate: The title of “RVW” is short for “Rip Van Winkle,” while “Headstand” opens with the Greek myth of Athena being born from Zeus’ skull. In more subtle ways, the concept of a warped reality threads throughout the whole record. Imagery of a hidden town beneath a hill, a demon wading through a creek, and lopsided walls covered in shadows feel as though they exist on a Twilight Zone plane. Wombo have stated that lyrics always come “dead ass last” in their collaborative writing process, a fact that occasionally comes to mind. Between the more bracing imagery, they incorporate catch-all lines like “I am slipping through while grabbing for my memories,” and, “On a winding road you come to meet yourself again/Never growing old, you only gain experience.” On a record that draws from such vivid source material, these vague thoughts feel out of place.
Even grittier spots, like the feedback-ridden electric guitar outro on 7/8-time standout “Below the House,” can seem choreographed. Compared to the band’s more experimental past work, only a few moments actually feel adventurous: the echoing vocal canon on “Regular Demon,” or some delightfully unexpected saxophone on “She Go.” Even the nod to atonality on “It Melted” is overshadowed by a repetitive bassline and drum pattern. Although their journeys lead to mostly familiar places, Wombo sounds right at home in these moments of dark escapism, and the mystical tales of Fairy Rust are short tours into the murky caverns of the mind.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore Eminem’s monumental album The Marshall Mathers LP.

The Marshall Mathers LP

Eminem prowled down a long line of young men, each sporting close-cropped, bleached blonde hair, each dressed just like him. Floodlights lit up the empty avenue outside of Radio City Music Hall where the rapper marched into the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards with his army to perform “The Real Slim Shady,” the first single from The Marshall Mathers LP. Underneath the song’s wide umbrella of references, a fleet-footed MC took up residence in Dr. Dre’s gooey bass and ornamented harpsichord—J.S. Bach bouncing in a lowrider. Proto-memes and trending topics got thrown into a blender; they came out laced in elegant knots. This was the primordial oil slick from which Eminem emerged, the god particle that launched him to new levels of superstardom.
”The Real Slim Shady” wasn’t rap about what was happening on the streets of Brooklyn or Compton or Atlanta or even Detroit. It was rap about what was on television. Specifically, what was on television at that very moment. It was an echo-chamber of MTV-watchers, a real-time “Beavis and Butt-Head” for those who would be later be crowned millennials. As reality TV gained traction, Eminem’s dressing-down of celebrities endeared him to a generation who would soon find “drama” to be the coin of the entertainment realm. He knew it before many: People like the stuff they recognize. That’s pop music.
This was 18 years ago, two or three epochs in music-industry time, back when “Total Request Live” held sway while boy bands and newly crowned pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera filled the airwaves. Long before I ever started thinking critically about music, I sat watching Eminem’s VMA performance from my rural Wisconsin couch, a 10th grader with no social media, no cell phone. I was Eminem’s audience, a teen from Middle America, one of millions. As he stormed the theater with about a hundred carbon copies of himself, countless sociopolitical minefields were being set up around me. I had no awareness of any of them. What I thought, instead, was: This guy is really fucking good at rapping.
After the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem would shatter sales records with 1.7 million copies sold in the first week alone, 6.5 million in the first month, and eventually, over 35 million sold worldwide. It’s still the best-selling rap record of all time. He would cross over from rap to pop and rock radio, sell out arenas, win Grammys, rankle Lynne Cheney in front of the U.S. Congress, add a word to the dictionary, and incite protests from no small number of social justice groups. By virtue of his whiteness and talent in almost equal measure, Eminem would come to rule pop culture in America by becoming this century’s prototypical troll.
Whatever he’s become since, there can be no question that Eminem was one of the greatest to ever do it. He blew a young Kendrick Lamar’s mind, teaching him things about narrative clarity that he wouldn’t learn elsewhere. He killed JAY-Z on his own track, thus spoke Nas. It was Dr. Dre—N.W.A., The Chronic, Aftermath Records, kingpin of West Coast rap-Dr. Dre—who got Eminem’s demo tape in the late ’90s and co-signed this twentysomething, lemon-faced, twiggy, vociferously self-proclaimed son of a bitch from the East side of Detroit born Marshall Bruce Mathers III.
He was also, and remains, a homophobe, a misogynist, a confessed domestic abuser. He wrote later that, because of his critics, he went into what he called the “‘faggot’ zone” for this album “on purpose. Like, fuck you.” He defended this ugliness using the modern troll’s boilerplate: double down on the thing they want you to change until they can’t tell what you believe and what you don’t. To be a long-suffering listener of Eminem is to contend with this petulant fake-radical impulse, but it remains an impulse that defined the scope and tenor of The Marshall Mathers LP and became part and parcel to its success.
Before “The Real Slim Shady” came out, Eminem was convinced he didn’t have another song in him that could attract as many new fans as his 1999 breakout single, “My Name Is.” The fear of being a one-hit wonder—a point hammered in a 1999 interview with a pretty-racist Howard Stern, widely regarded as the impetus for the line about “cocky caucasians” who thinks he’s some “wigger”—hung over his head. At a remove, the spacious “My Name Is” scans just barely as rap, something that could possibly have been lumped in with the era’s droll, white-guy rhymes from Nada Surf, Cake, the Butthole Surfers, and Beck.
”My Name Is” landed on “TRL” in January of 1999, tipping the scales just enough to give suburban teenagers their first taste of Eminem’s aesthetic: The lyrics were violent, full of one-liners and references (Usher, Nine Inch Nails, Spice Girls) that piqued pop listeners while having the air of danger and a beat by Dre that signified its home was on rap radio. The Beastie Boys debuted at No. 1 with Hello Nasty in 1998, but Eminem was the first solo white rapper whose name wasn’t a pun on vanilla or snow to achieve huge crossover mainstream success.
Across his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, Eminem established the framework of his mythology: He was born into poverty, raised without a father, shuttled between Missouri and the lower-middle-class black neighborhoods of Detroit, rootless, bullied to near-death. The album established his to-put-it-lightly Freudian relationship with his mother, his clear love for legends like Big Daddy Kane and Masta Ace and Nas, and his come-up battle-rapping at the Detroit hip-hop clubs. When the dust settled, his rapid ascent and sudden fame began to burrow into his writing, coloring his every want, thrumming behind the text.
“The Real Slim Shady” was one of the last songs written for the record. All through 1999, Eminem had been scribbling lyrics—not actual lines, just two or three words, little scraps of meter and verse unarrayed on a page—while on a world tour supporting his debut. Verses began to blacken notebooks after had found inspiration in the deregulated drug culture of Amsterdam, so much so that he almost named this album after the city. Meanwhile, over in the States, Dr. Dre and several other producers, including the Funky Bass Team and the 45 King, were assembling the beats for what would become the bulk of The Marshall Mathers LP. In early 2000, when Eminem submitted the project to Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine, he was unsatisfied. It was macabre, morose, reflexive, and unflinchingly personal. It also didn’t have a hit.
The album’s second single, “The Way I Am,” was a direct response to the boardroom ultimatum with Iovine. Eminem got the three-note piano rhythm in his head on the plane ride after leaving Interscope’s office in California, but the rhyme scheme that he wanted to do wouldn’t fit with any other beat he had in the bank. So Eminem made his own backing track, ratcheting and mechanical, giving him his very first production credit. Yoked to this short-short-long cadence, Eminem shadowboxed his critics, his fans, his label, anyone who, real or not, got in his way:

I’m not gonna be able to top on “My Name Is”
And pigeon-holed into some poppy sensation
That got me rotation at rock’n’roll stations

The virtuosity of “The Way I Am” gained Eminem access to an audience that believed that the better you were at your instrument, the better music you made. That virtuosity  made his skill logical, diagrammable, even provable: just look at his enjambment, his multisyllabic rhyme schemes, his never-before-done cadence. It was less about the feel or joy so ingrained in the black music that inspired it, and more about the rap qua rap that awed those white teenagers (there are thousands of videos on YouTube of fans attempting Eminem’s raps, in spiritual concert with the thousands of videos of people trying to play Eddie Van Halen guitar solos).
The goal of rap, for Eminem, is to overwhelm. The Marshall Mathers LP floods the room with “South Park” and grisly kidnappings, Ricky Martin and ecstasy, the assassination of Gianni Versace and the impregnation of Jennifer Lopez. One minute you’re dealing with hypocritical gun legislation, the next you’re subject to an Insane Clown Posse diss track; as soon as you consider Bill Clinton’s abuse of power, Eminem is recasting the shooters of the Columbine High School massacre as the real victims. It is data overload, that sharp inhale and sigh of never getting a word in edgewise. For 70 minutes, you are tethered to a twirling Mathers, eye to eye, a dizzying and intimate manipulation by pathos and abuse by words. Sometimes it really is just a litany: “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts,” or, “Fuck, shit, ass, bitch, cunt, shooby-de-doo-wop, skibbedy-be-bop.” The album’s centrifugal force is thrilling and it is to Eminem’s great credit that he doesn’t once let go of his grasp.
American culture allowed Eminem to freely negate any kind of identity he wanted to, as was his inherent privilege. But, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in his 2003 essay “White Noise,” it didn’t matter to Eminem. “Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged,” Als wrote. It’s interesting, though, that Eminem never negated his masculinity or heterosexuality, two identities that were and, more or less, remain intrinsic to the success of male rappers. His privilege meant that he could shed his racial signifiers and become a ghost, a psychopath, a loving father, a bigot, a clown. So why do fans believe any of this? Why, when they listened to Eminem rip his vocal cords open and disconnect from reality and mimic slitting the throat of his wife while he screams at her to “bleed, bitch bleed” do they take him so seriously?
Part of it has to do with that virtuosity. If contemporaries like OutKast and Ghostface grew their albums from the soil, Eminem grew his from the salted earth. He’s grounded but acidic, you see the ink of his words, the indent they make on the page, the ridges formed around the letters by the force of his pen. The delight when he finds a little turn of phrase like “ducked the fuck way down,” or, “I guess I must just blew up quick” shoots out dopamine. It would be one thing if Eminem simply loved language, but more than that, he loves the tradition of rapping, this guy whose passion was donated to him by hip-hop at an early age, a vocation that rescued him from the status quo of poverty, that kept him from becoming among the millions just like someone else. At his best, he is like watching a gymnast spin on the parallel bars in slow motion:

I’m blind from smokin’ ’em, with my windows tinted
With nine limos rented, doin’ lines of coke in ’em
With a bunch of guys hoppin’ out, all high and indo-scented

Part of it, too, was the fantasy he offered. Along with his ’00 nu-metal tourmates Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Eminem’s music became synonymous with a kind of ball-chain necklace, mad-at-the-world angst, channeling the latent rage leftover from rap rock’s heyday. Here was a guy who put to carefully chosen words the feeling of being broke, at the end of your rope, jealous and backed up into a corner. Those who threw up their arms and screamed “You don’t want to fuck with me” along with him could feel a little bit of anger exiting their bodies, and the mental pressure dropping by a few millibars.
But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it.
Art bends the world in ways we can’t always see. This album is categorically music for kids, and it rests on the shelf as a time capsule from the last big cultural flashpoint of the 20th century. Heard now, the album is still a considerable piece of music, but it’s also full of this hate. And the targets of that hate—women, the LGBTQ community—are the same people that those in power seek to marginalize. To say otherwise is to rob great art of its power. To say that Eminem’s clearly homophobic lyrics should be read as satire is to argue in bad faith that the impact art has on the world, the way it shapes the life of those who experience it, can be controlled and mitigated. Because hate emerges under the guise of art, it doesn’t erase the profound hurt it brings to a population that may be out of your own purview.
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut’s words are consigned to the long epilogue of The Marshall Mathers LP, one that began at the 2001 Grammys. The album won Best Rap Album honors but lost Album of the Year to Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature, a fine record made by two aging private-school-educated jazzbo hipsters who sang about incest and pedophiliac threesomes. The toast of the evening was to be Eminem’s performance with Elton John. As Mathers saw it, this was somehow an olive branch to the gay community, irrefutable proof that he wasn’t a homophobic rapper, that he didn’t have a problem with gays. Protests from the gay-rights group GLAAD and women’s rights group NOW sounded loud from outside the theater. “This is not Lenny Bruce,” said NOW president Patricia Ireland at the event. “This is not even Tupac Shakur. Eminem is not rebelling against authority. He’s attacking groups who are the minority. This is vicious, old-fashioned bigotry.” They chanted “Two-four-six-eight, Eminem is full of hate” and GLAAD bought a 30-second anti-bullying ad on CBS that featured the mother of Matthew Shepard, a man who was beaten and left to die because he was gay.
The grand finale arrived: Eminem walked out in a baby-blue crushed velvet tracksuit with that same left-to-right prowl he had five months ago at the VMAs, sat astride a bed, and calmly went into “Stan.” Stoic and austere, at his best, Eminem just talked to you while the rhymes seemed incidental, divined without effort. He casts himself as the obsessed fan, Stan, and fires off three letters to himself with escalating severity until we find out that, having drawn inspiration from Slim Shady, Stan kills his own pregnant wife and himself in a car crash. On the fourth verse, Eminem steps into back into a calm Marshall Mathers to respond, tender and apologetic.
“Stan” was the third single from The Marshall Mathers LP, built from a beat made by the 45 King after he heard the Dido song “Thank You” used in a commercial preview for the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. It is the lodestar, the faint and slow-beating heart of the album. The word “stan” was added to the dictionary last year, demonstrating how Eminem articulated a brand of sensationalism and celebrity-worship we now take as normal. The song is the key Rorschach test into the indulgent fame-drenched persecution complex of Mathers at the time. He plays both sides of the coin, signifying his total understanding of any controversy around him: He’s both the troubled fan who misunderstands the art of Slim Shady, and he’s Marshall Mathers, the guy who says all “this shit just clownin’ dawg.” It is the light and the dark that gives dimension to the entire album.
In the performance, Eminem, again, offers a studio-perfect version, crescendoing through Stan’s verses with histrionic flair, his mic glued to his lips, his other arm a besieged windsock. As the song ends, Elton John trots out to meet Eminem centerstage. They embrace. Mathers glares impudently at the audience, as if the hug were a provocation on its own, as if deeming to touch John in public somehow proved something to his critics. It was a feckless, empty gesture born of a basic bigot’s misunderstanding: How can I be a homophobe with a gay friend? But during Eminem’s imperial year, these objections were drowned out by the roar of the crowd. He joined hands with Elton John and they raised them together, and then Eminem threw his middle fingers up. Everyone in the theater was already on their feet.


The Britpop icons contemplate middle-age turbulence and inertia on a meticulously polished reunion album.

The Ballad of Darren

Soon after booking the biggest concerts of their lives at Wembley Stadium, Damon Albarn played his Blur bandmates the demos for a prospective reunion LP. It was an easy sell: The Ballad of Darren would become the prettiest and tightest of their nine albums, elegantly arranged with lush harmonies, baroque flourishes, and a splurge of 1990s cosplay. They opened an early run of reunion sets with “St. Charles Square,” a new song that strides into the boardroom and slaps the whiteboard with an irresistible pitch: This is the Blur you really remember, in all their delinquent glory.
You can compulsively play “St. Charles Square”—a doghouse blues brawler with a throwback “Oiiii!” and nostalgic squeals of fretboard skidding—10 or 20 times, perhaps still waiting for a proper chorus but so very pleased they are back, being Blur. Along with Pulp’s latest reunion dates, Blur’s two sold-out Wembley shows received raves from critics who made their names in the heyday of ’90s music press. For better or worse, Britpop and Blur were back on the agenda.
The Blur that is both revered and reviled for its class-coded caricature of humdrum English life was immortalized in the early ’90s. Middle-class Essex boy Albarn—dropping pull quotes at such a clip he sometimes lost track of whether he had a Cockney accent—swanned into the grunge years denouncing rock as “ornamented and cliquey” and claiming to prefer “the vagueness of pop, its lack of any real message.” Giddy magazine editors sidelined jungle and drum’n’bass coverage and fired out resources to arm these insouciant art school fops to storm the charts and daytime radio.
Everything changed in 1997. Princess Diana died and Blur got into Pavement. Neoliberal centrist Tony Blair swept into government and alienated everyone to his left, starting with the Cool Britannia artists who had piggybacked him into power. “Britpop is dead,” announced a derisory column by journalist Caitlin Moran, who nonetheless tweeted from Wembley last month, “Oh Blur. For thirty years, you’ve been the best.” The Blur who survived that reckoning—who clawed themselves out of Britpop’s nadir—are emblems of the long ’90s: the decade that calcified the cultural and political imagination of the London media class.
Albarn has now completed the journey from celebrity hell-raiser to heroin user to yoga guy. His ever-renewable guises conceal his status as the antsiest man in pop: Since Blur’s 2015 LP The Magic Whip, he has released four albums with the endlessly scalable Gorillaz and three more with other projects; he also composed an Alice in Wonderland musical, conceived an opera mixing “Goethe with club music,” and tried to develop a Gorillaz movie for Netflix. He was made a local king in Mali. Like many former addicts, he is on the run from inertia. Blur’s fourth act was always coming for him.
The Ballad of Darren’s title playfully honors Blur’s security guard and resident everyman Darren “Smoggy” Evans—but also riffs on the more melodramatic Ballad of Damon, suggests Albarn. That implied title aligns with the romantic split that has plunged Albarn, or at least his narrators, into mortal reflection. Comeback single “The Narcissist” surveys Blur’s history while reckoning with their legacy of addiction: Albarn’s call-and-response with Graham Coxon suggests fraternal sympathy with the guitarist’s own destructive alcoholism. Across the record, Albarn describes heartbreak and chemical temptations while the band drifts along in a crystalline reverie, insulated by James Ford’s double-glazed production. After hitting their anthemic cues, both “The Narcissist” and closer “The Heights” climax with guitar noise that threatens, or promises, annihilation.
Albarn makes a show of tearing himself open, yet stretches so far to “transcend” autobiography, as he puts it, that the guts drop out. Could “Barbaric”—a lackadaisical breakup anthem with a Johnny Marr-style riff and a chorus about “barbaric” disunity—in fact allude to political polarization? The heartbreak songs studiously maintain plausible deniability. Albarn invokes current affairs and tiptoes around rich man’s self-pity as if tormented by visions of cynical hit pieces: “Reunited in Their 50s, Blur Rewrite ‘Country House’ From the Homeowner’s Perspective,” and so on.
He invites us along when he gets in the storytelling zone: We see the “basement flat with window bars” in “St. Charles Square,” hear the “balalaikas and singing” in “Russian Strings” (a song about Putin’s “senile autocracy,” says Albarn). Highlight “The Ballad” poignantly links breakups with mortality to the tune of Think Tank on antidepressants. But in lovely songs like “The Everglades,” the man so proud to write his own lyrics can summon only vague “paths I wish I’d taken” and “times I thought I’d break.” There is an irony to these platitudes, implied in drummer Dave Rowntree’s admission this January: “The sneering songs we wrote about old people when we were in our 20s are now aimed at us…. I remember thinking at the time, these people don’t know anything. They don’t even know they’re alive!”
Snarky anthems like “End of a Century” were always alive with the latent fear we might yet become their dowdy, domesticated subjects. The reunion hyperbole betrays those songs’ lasting sting for some—a hardened anxiety that things can only get worse, that life peaked back in the day. The Ballad of Darren pegs that melancholy to middle-aged turbulence, but its gentility and concision displace Blur hallmarks that would more forcefully evoke a man’s unraveling: Coxon’s trapdoor drops, blunt sharps, screwball blues; Albarn’s riptide swims into hypnagogia and alien genres. Albarn plays the part of heartbroken confessor, but these meticulously polished songs conjure something more real than anguish: the dulling of losses, the warm aura of midlife decline, and the fading belief, with advancing years, that crisis serves to raise the curtain on your next act.


Rilo Kiley leader steps out on her own with an indie-yuppie soul/country record released via Conor Oberst's Team Love label.

Jenny Lewis With the Watson Twins: Rabbit Fur Coat

Rabbit Fur Coat

Linda Ronstadt never got hung up on writing her own material. When she found a song she liked, she sang it, and nobody complained that her biggest hits were covers. Jenny Lewis, armed with a lovely voice and too little material, should have taken the same route. On her solo debut and her most soul/country record to date, Lewis' vocals sparkle and the intimate performances make a great first impression, but ultimately, the material grounds her.
The production is arresting: The engineers-- primarily Bright Eyes guy Mike Mogis-- are always ready for Jenny Lewis' close-ups, from the soaring a cappella opening track to the acoustic ballads, where they adoringly catch the strengths and nuances of her crisp, clear alto. The Watson Twins also earn their album co-credit with big gospel harmonies. (And the twin thing doesn't hurt: dig their Shining-esque pose on the front cover.) The twins are a winning addition to every song on which they appear, although they sound so good that you start to take them for granted. It's not that they sound good here, so much as they would sound good anywhere; they could back up Khanate and still turn heads.
But on repeated listens, the songwriting makes the album lukewarm. The melodies feel textbook, and the lyrics disappoint; they're often unwieldy (like the flurries of multisyllabic words on "You Are What You Love") or vaguely nonsensical (the title song seems heartbreaking, but just try to parse it). This material lacks the grace or the wit that could make the songs sizzle: a line like, "When you're sleeping with someone who doesn't get you/ You're gonna hate yourself in the morning," lacks the clean punch of, say, "I may hate myself in the morning/ But I'm gonna love you tonight." (It's not even a "This One's for the Girls".)
While the spare acoustic arrangements suit Lewis' voice, they don't lend themselves to the hooks and idiosyncracies that made Rilo Kiley. Lewis put far more on the line in her band's "I Never", and although that song has a bit of kitsch, its ruby red cowboy boots stomp on the toes of most of this album. In fact, more than any indie country album in months, Rabbit Fur Coat makes me question why indie singers put on their cowboy hats in the first place. The classy folk and Americana that Lewis invokes here never goes deeper than an aesthetic decision, and she's better at talking about bad times than bringing them to life-- or making them go away.
That's also why the lone cover on the record, of the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle With Care", doesn't bug me. Some Fork staffers hate this cut with a burning bile, especially when Lewis invites Conor Oberst, Ben Gibbard, and M. Ward to sit by her campfire and share the vocals. I just think it's cute that the quartet set themselves up as aged Bob Dylans or Roy Orbisons-- even if it's an easier sell to aim a few years younger and call them our generation's Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Stephen Stills, and, of course, Linda Ronstadt.


The West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter Anderson .Paak showed up frequently on Dr. Dre’s Compton. His third album, his most assured and most personal project yet, is informed by voices from the past and full of guests (the Game, ScHoolboy Q, Talib Kweli) who are given ample space to do their best work. Malibu is an expansive opus that flows in multiple directions like a classic '70s double album.

Malibu

It doesn’t take long to reach the heart of Anderson .Paak’s new album, Malibu. Just a minute into opening track "The Birds," the West Coast-based rapper and singer/songwriter offers: "My mama caught the gambling bug... My papa was behind them bars/ We never had to want for nuthin’/ Said all we ever need is love." His voice is warm, strained, and conversational, like a Baptist minister or your favorite uncle schooling you, and the wide-open groove has an unhurried feel. It's immediately clear: This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.
Brandon Anderson Paak has seen a lot in his 29 years. His mother was a farmer from South Korea, and his father served in the Air Force and later worked as a mechanic until he was sent to prison. "I didn’t see him again until he was being buried," .Paak told Consequence of Sound in a 2015 interview. All of this life experience is reflected in Malibu, which is both his most assured and most personal project yet.
.Paak's name is more prominent these days given his recent work on Dr. Dre’s Compton, where he appeared on six of 16 tracks, but even his sophomore album, 2014's Venice, showed flashes of brilliance. Venice was an easy listen; on Malibu, .Paak celebrates his progression by acknowledging where he’s come from, the trials he’s endured and things he’s seen. "I spent years being called out my name, living under my greatness," .Paak asserts on "The Season / Carry Me," a shape-shifting album highlight. He grew up performing in church, and on the song’s second half, you can hear a rich gospel flair in his voice: "Ya moms in prison, ya father need a new kidney/ Ya family’s splittin’, rivalries between siblings/ If cash ain’t king, it’s damn sure the incentive." Much like Kendrick Lamar, .Paak skillfully depicts his surroundings while remaining in the foreground.
Kendrick's spirit feels present at many points on Malibu. .Paak's quicksilver flow on "Your Prime" feels teleported in directly from To Pimp a Butterfly as the music flows expansively from creamy soul harmonies to trap cadences. But .Paak is a confident and unique presence, with a strong command of style and genre as a producer and songwriter. He leapfrogs three eras in a festive suite of songs mid-album that examine heartbreak: '60s soul on "Put Me Thru," club grooves on "Am I Wrong," and '90s hip-hop on "Without You." His musical and emotional generosity ties everything together, making Malibu an expansive opus that flows in multiple directions like a classic '70s double album.
Malibu is a community-oriented project, much like Chance the Rapper on last year's Surf, informed by voices from the past and full of guests who are given ample space to do their best work. The Game drops one of his most disarming, winning verses in a minute on "Room in Here"; Rapsody flows affectingly about heartache over Dilla-style boom-bap. Many songs ride out on extended breakdowns, like "Parking Lot," which feels like a studio band given room to stretch.
On "The Dreamer," the album’s celebratory final track, .Paak shares his success with his community, people who look like him and work to avoid similar pitfalls. "Who cares ya daddy couldn’t be here/ Mama always kept the cable on/ I’m a product of the tube and the free lunch/ Living room, watching old reruns." This is powerful art, not only for people of color, but for everyone who exists beyond societal constraints. It’s for those who’ve been told they don’t quite fit, those viewed through a different lens because of their circumstances. It’s a beautiful reminder that, no matter what you’ve endured, you can go anywhere and reach glorious heights.


The Scotland-based duo delight in controlled chaos, interweaving arguments and anxieties with their most exuberant work to date.

Run Around the Sun

The neon sheen of Carly Rae Jepsen may not be the first thing one associates with Sacred Paws, the UK duo known for Rachel Aggs’ loose guitar licks and Eilidh Rodgers’ punchy percussion. But the Canadian queen was evidently on their minds as they recorded their second album, Run Around the Sun: “We don’t make similar music but we want to create a similar feeling,” Aggs said of Jepsen in a recent interview. Over ten propulsive tracks, the similarities to Jepsen’s pop philosophy come into view: lyrics that detail arguments, anxieties, and regrets are set against the duo’s most exuberant work to date.
Take “Life’s Too Short,” the bright and brassy third track. Its snappy snare hits and warm horn section feel primed for a party, but the duo is focused on an absentee lover: “I don’t know what you want/I don’t care, life’s too short.” “Shame on Me” similarly masquerades as a celebration filled with rubbery guitars, but Aggs’ and Rodgers’ sunny vocals wax nostalgic about a past romance: “Can’t you see this was meant to be forever?” The song ends as they repeat the titular phrase, an act of self-flagellation set to breakneck arpeggiated chords.
Speed is perhaps the point here; whereas 2017’s Strike a Match punctuated energetic pacing with more meandering tracks, Run Around the Sun barely stops for breath. Aggs has called Sleater-Kinney’s The Hot Rock one of her biggest influences as a guitarist, and that album’s frenzied urgency manifests in the reverberating guitar squeals of “Brush Your Hair.” Sacred Paws’ lyrics share this immediacy; their strongest verses tend to open in media res. “Fresh air was everything,” Aggs declares on “What’s So Wrong,” and suddenly the scenery zooms into a perfect summer’s day.
Sacred Paws have also mastered Sleater-Kinney’s fiery instrumental give-and-take, a shifting rhythm that constantly reestablishes the band’s center of gravity. Seven songs in, as the onslaught of Aggs’ fretwork threatens to send the record into a tailspin, “Is This Real” finds Rodgers unleashing a chorus of bells and claves. The power exchange extends to the verses, which diverge into anxious repartee that conjures miscommunication in a long-distance relationship. “The Conversation” sounds like an argument over a broken telephone (“Why would we even try to have this conversation?” Aggs asks stubbornly; “It can take a while,” Rodgers offers patiently). “Write This Down” finds the two nervously singing over each other, backgrounded by drum fills and crashing symbols. But more often than not, these parallel verses melt into triumphant harmonies. These moments, where Aggs and Rodgers tackle two distinct narratives that meet at the chorus, cement the band’s dynamic: controlled chaos that, against all odds, finds its way to a central refrain.
Sacred Paws used to be a multi-city affair—Aggs in London, Rodgers in Glasgow—a fact that provided consistent interview fodder, and one they seem to nod to here. “It’s just a page on a map that’s keeping us apart,” they sing over Aggs’ meandering noodling on “How Far.” It’s by far the record’s slowest song, and one could read the chorus (“How long, how far”) as a plea to reconcile the miles between them. But if much of Run Around the Sun is concerned with repenting for past mistakes, the present looks brighter: Aggs recently relocated to Glasgow, where the two bandmates now share a back garden. On the closing track, “Other Side,” they reach an uneasy peace. “I found you/Nothing can stand between us,” Rodgers sings, while Aggs’ answer is more ominous: “I have changed in ways I can’t explain.” But her final riffs, reviving the song after its last refrain, hint that she’s having more fun than she might’ve let on.


With theatrical élan, the Swedish rabble-rousers lampoon the masculine and the moneyed on songs that match parody with precision.

Street Worms

In the mid-1990s, wrestling went into storyline overdrive, welcoming a new cast of cheesy antiheroes, convoluted backstories, and gimmicks too silly for even a teenage drama club. Perhaps nobody did this better than Mick Foley, who wrestled as three distinct personae: Dude Love, Cactus Jack, and Mankind. When Cactus Jack made his WWE debut, Foley simply donned a new costume in order to provide a more imposing threat. That era of wrestling perfectly captured the difficulty of designing characters who play into machismo stereotypes while mocking them, too, a surprisingly sophisticated feat of writing and acting. Swedish six-piece Viagra Boys are the Mick Foley of the post-punk world: a tour de force of musical comedy disguised as society’s most accepted reprobates.
From their name to their vocal delivery, Viagra Boys appear to be a joke, but they want to be in control of when and how the comedic plot unfolds. Until now, they have left a small, nearly untraceable trail of clues about their identity. They formed in 2015, released two short EPs, performed occasionally in Europe, and, for the record, have only taken Viagra once. Street Worms, their debut album, is a grand introduction. Viagra Boys manage to mock everyday negative qualities—boasted virility, misplaced classism, and blissful ignorance—with sincerity and ambivalence.
Like most mid-’90s WWE characters, the Boys depend as much on exclamatory writing as hammy performances. “Down in the Basement” emerges with an instant snarl, the rhythm section pulsing with restraint and grit to match Sleaford Mods. Singer Sebastian Murphy points a new finger every few seconds, as when he calls out a cheating husband and demands he give his wife the apology she deserves. The interplay between his wobbly singing, itself an homage to Mark E. Smith, and the band’s tempo-aligned tightness creates an intense but aloof dynamic. The mix makes Viagra Boys confrontational. When guitars and the saxophone take turns flashing in “Slow Learner” or the manic, descending noise of “Frogstrap” refuses to relent, that’s the band fortifying Murphy’s criticisms and quips. There’s a freeform enthusiasm to Viagra Boys’ music, even if nobody is taking solos.
The band’s greatest trick is mimicking the very people they despise. On “Best in Show,” a whirlwind of unnerving synth squeaks, Murphy nails the elitist mentality of wealthy breeders and silk-stocking owners devoted to competitions. He introduces a Texas dog show by rattling off fake contestants. Purebred names become rambling titles. Fruits come into play. He’s suddenly idolizing the seriousness of it all through absurdist comparisons, like cocker spaniels defying the space-time continuum or moonwalking canines literally taking a piss. Then there’s “Sports,” which funnels the vapidity of U.S. masculinity through reverb and distortion. On paper, Murphy’s words read like a liberal arts student mocking the game his parents dragged him to: “BASEBALL! BASKETBALL! WEINER DOGS!” But when heard, those same exclamations take on a gruff exterior, his game of tongue-in-cheek word association now driven by deep-bellied roars and anger. Viagra Boys match parody with alarming precision.
On Street Worms, Viagra Boys pull off the very feat that made mid-’90s wrestling so successful: They put on a show that’s as corny as it is engrossing, with more trenchant commentary. The album’s final lyrics—“The same worms that eat me/Will someday eat you, too”—leave Murphy’s lips dryly, an attempt to put every self-absorbed person already mocked in their place. But as he sings the chorus again, the send-up’s bleakness becomes clear—not all who commit common indecencies will see punishment. Like that, the chorus becomes the album’s signature move, a lesson that may make you feel queasy but, somehow, won’t make these songs any less entertaining.


This is the first full-length collaboration between the rappers, whose styles are almost completely opposite. If Gucci painted pictures, Waka looks at a blank canvas and dumps a can of red paint on it. Then maybe breaks it over his knee.

Gucci Mane / Waka Flocka Flame: Ferrari Boyz

Ferrari Boyz

Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame have always shared a symbiotic relationship. With Gucci frequently in and out of jail, keeping the Brick Squad name and label relevant has mostly fallen on Waka's shoulders, and he's done a more than adequate job, releasing a few legitimate radio hits as well as one of the best rap albums of last year. Waka has also gathered a host of new rappers under Brick Squad's wings-- most notably Slim Dunkin, who appears on Ferrari Boyz twice-- and while likely none of them will end up as stars, the brand extension certainly can't hurt. Waka, of course, was brought along for the ride as Gucci ascended upward, and his success was undoubtedly accelerated by his proximity to Gucci's budding stardom.
What made the partnership work artistically is that their styles are almost completely opposite. At the height of his profligacy, Gucci was penning colorful and singular verses that, from a writing and conceptual standpoint, put him in rap's upper tier. But he also had a keen ear for pop; his best hooks were almost impossibly intricate (arguably even unnecessarily so, considering how much music he gave away for free), and he managed to embed most of his ad-libs in the genre's collective consciousness. Standing in stark contrast, Waka's style is purposefully non-lyrical, and his choruses are often him just shouting a phrase or two-- no less catchy, but still an altogether different tactic. And where Gucci's beats were highly musical, Waka's are often loud and seemingly best fit for head banging. If Gucci painted pictures, Waka looks at a blank canvas and dumps a can of red paint on it. Then maybe breaks it over his knee.
But here's the dirty secret about Waka and Gucci: They've never worked well as collaborators. Though they've now been on dozens of songs together, none ranks in either artist's upper echelon, and many have been an outright bore. On paper, their styles do not mesh, and in practice they don't either. They both sound awkward and out of place on each other's tracks-- Gucci blunts Waka's raw emotion, and Waka leaves little room for Gucci's writerly leanings. That trend doesn't change on Ferrari Boyz, their official commercially released collaborative album.
Most of their collaborations arrived after Waka really blew up, and they've found Gucci heavily drawn to his aesthetic. That can probably be chalked to staying with the hot hand-- basically everyone in rap is flocking to the beats of producers Lex Luger and Southside (who partly owe their success to Waka's), so why go in a different direction? And truly, if you took Gucci's contributions off Ferrari Boyz and replaced them with Brick Squad underlings, you'd probably be looking at something close to Flockaveli's follow-up.
But that raises another question: If Gucci is worlds better than guys like YG Hootie and Kebo Gotti, shouldn't Ferrari Boyz be as good, if not better, than Flockaveli? Theoretically, yes, but it's missing most of the elements that made Waka's solo album so great and so invigorating. Namely, it lacks the manic energy that is Waka's calling card: If it's possible to go through the motions while still mostly shouting, Ferrari Boyz would be a prime example. The album can also get drearily monotonous-- though at times the beats will switch out of the album's minor key template, Ferrari Boyz desperately lacks the standout outliers like "Fuck the Club Up" or "Grove St. Party" that help buoy Flockaveli.
The album does pick up near the end: "Too Loyal" rides a blippy beat that's maybe the record's most fun production, and it also finds Gucci retaining some of the playfulness that's always been a part of his music. "So Many Things", the real keeper, is a fluttery track that finds Gucci singing the album's best hook with an endearingly amateur whine. (It should come as no surprise as to who is behind both: Fatboi, a frequent Gucci cohort.)
Though guys like Hootie couldn't hold Gucci's rhyme book, they fit perfectly into Waka's aesthetic-- even if they don't rock anti-skill as a skill nearly as well as he does, they're at least willing to sound animated. Gucci, in contrast, puts little effort into his writing here, which is made all the worse by him sounding profoundly bored, tired, stoned, or some combination of the three. It's a problem that has plagued a lot of his music recently, but it's a bigger issue now that he doesn't have the appropriate production to perk, or prop, him up. That said, Ferrari Boyz is far from dire-- it's largely just disappointing. Gucci and Waka still don't sound at home together, and it's of little comfort that their clashing styles are what made them great in the first place.


On the Kentucky metalcore band’s titanic fourth album, they’ve amplified and concentrated their sound into something so potent that it has its own gravitational pull.

Knocked Loose: You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

The verdict on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To appears to be well settled among the Knocked Loose faithful. That’s if the reaction videos for “Blinding Faith” are to be trusted—and they probably should, since the lead single of the Kentucky quintet’s titanic fourth album is all reaction shots: That’s a seven-string Ibanez Iceman; oh shit, a SECOND breakdown; 3 members of the band screaming within 5 seconds is fucking god-tier. That’s not entirely accurate because Bryan Garris is not really screaming, but making a death metal gurgle so heinous that it can’t be compared to any actual vocalizing so much as Banned from TV, Joe Theismann’s leg injury or the Alien chest-burster.
But can Knocked Loose break out? This sort of question has surrounded the band since they appeared at both Coachella and Bonnaroo in 2023, not just as each festival’s biggest draw in contemporary metal, but the only one, an emissary for the totality of heavy musics for the most casual but curious of listeners. If You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To draws this demographic, it does so as the exact opposite of a “crossover event.” Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.
So, despite what you might assume from those Slipknot opening gigs and the presence of a producer who’s worked with NLE Choppa, Beartooth, and Disturbed in the past two years, there are no clean vocals, no alt-metal choruses or wavy trap drums, no rage-rap guest verses. In short, nothing that might suggest Knocked Loose had reached their logical endpoint with a concept album about a fatal car wreck and could only make their heavy heavier by contrast. They’re a hardcore band in practice, an action/horror franchise in spirit, one that takes its escalating success as a mandate to re-up a self-imposed arms race—the stunts, the thrills, the killshots, they all need to be bigger, badder and bolder before something hungrier takes its place.
And if the breakdown has indeed replaced the riff as modern metal’s lingua franca, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is about as eloquent as it gets. Bring back the nasty riff but slower? Maybe that was enough in 2016, but “Piece By Piece” is going to bring in a new nasty riff and also an ultra-hammered China cymbal that sounds even gnarlier. Half-time breakdowns? “Thirst” achieves the heretofore inconceivable quarter-time tempo switch, while the Southern shuffle riff on “The Calm That Keeps You Awake” turns Pantera’s “Walk” into a funeral procession. The breakdown on “Don’t Reach For Me” hits, but mostly because there’s at least a half-dozen little teasers of silence where it doesn’t happen first.
Of course, any art form reliant on this much physicality can easily devolve into parody without some sort of emotional anchor. Some of the trepidation surrounding You Won’t Go was fixated on the cover art’s implication that Knocked Loose might be a Christian band now. I’d describe it as spiritual, not religious; “Blinding Faith” shouts down any form of dogma, whereas “Don’t Reach For Me” imagines a great, cleansing flood in more of a Taxi Driver way than a biblical one. The album title was taken from a pep talk Garris received from an elderly woman as he stressed through the band’s first post-COVID flight—yes, God’s plan and all, but maybe you’re supposed to go today.
Throughout, Garris still sounds like that guy before the conversation, someone who probably would’ve called for a couple of Xanax if his seatmate wasn’t so chatty. It’s fitting that music so reliant on breakdowns takes its lead from someone who sounds like he’s in a constant panic attack. Or, it’s fitting that Knocked Loose’s riffs often mimic the exact sound someone expects to hear on a 737 before a crucial piece of equipment flies off.
And yet, none of this means that You Won’t Go is inaccessible. Giving shape to aimless rage, the illicit thrill to imagine playing it for people who have no interest whatsoever in “metal” or anything that ends with “-core,” let alone “metalcore,” the way it makes metal that actively catered towards mainstream tastes sound washed and timid. As a teenager, I remember Far Beyond Driven or Life is Peachy getting on the charts by doing similar things. Or, just go look at those Coachella and Bonnaroo sets—Knocked Loose isn’t playing to empty tents of college kids wishing they were watching Matt Maeson or Jai Wolf instead. Whether Knocked Loose fits into anyone’s perception of what popular metal should sound like, they know they belong.


Filled with warmth, horns, and many messages of love, Woods’ tenth album is a feel-good record for these rough times.

Love Is Love

Woods have never been a band of grand gestures. Over nine albums in a dozen years, changes for the Brooklyn indie folk band have been incremental. There was the record where they ditched the tape effects of G. Lucas Crane (2012’s Bend Beyond) to discover that one of their signature elements wasn’t as integral to the group as thought. There was the one that proudly flaunted itself as the first Woods full-length recorded in a “real studio” (2014’s With Light and With Love), a move that stripped lo-fi as a defining characteristic. For a band that’s rivaled in success by both a former member (Kevin Morby) and a soundalike (Whitney), there is an unspoken imperative that their 10th record shifts the status quo, and songwriter and bandleader Jeremy Earl is explicit in stating his intention: Love Is Love is a political album.
The platitude from the days following the 2016 presidential election stated that at least we’d get good music out of the era of Donald Trump. Besides the obvious fallacy that good tunes somehow could make up for contingents of people having their rights stripped, this also ignores that there will be releases of all sorts of quality responding to the political climate. Earl struggles with this notion over the six songs and 31 minutes of Love Is Love. The title alone is a mantra that seeks to gain meaning through its repetition, echoing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poem at the 2016 Tony Awards dedicated to the victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, used here as the core of the record’s bookends. It’s a phrase that sounds better on a picket sign than it does in a real-world application, where it doesn’t take a cynic to note that love’s mere existence isn’t negating laws or bombs or walls.
Earl’s sloganeering doesn’t end there. On “Bleeding Blue,” he reflects on election’s immediate aftermath, with flower-power cadences applied to lines like “Have you heard the news? Hate can’t lose” and “I am the wind/Love’s not dead.” The album’s closing track, “Love Is Love (Sun on Time)” asks “How can we love if this won’t go away? How can we love with this kind of hate?” It’s enough to think Earl might start quoting John Lennon or even Moulin Rouge!. Yes, love is a many splendored thing, but on a lyric sheet announces itself as “A Meditation on Love” and literally ends with a peace sign, the need to have something to say should be predicated by actually having something to say.
Where Love Is Love lacks ambiguity is in its musical presentation. Woods’ incorporation of jazz on last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light returns the ten-minute leg-stretcher “Spring Is in the Air,” full of patent leather vibrato and a lava-lamp glow balanced by a moaning horn section, a versatile layer of sound throughout the album. On “Hit That Drum,” Alec Spiegelman’s saxophone and flute are both texture and canvas for Earl to pile on the drama, while Cole Kamen-Green’s trumpet grounds “Bleeding Blue” in a triumphant spirit that paints the song as a rally rather than a wallow. Earl as bandleader is getting the most out of his supporting cast, allowing his effortless pop sensibilities to form the collection’s sturdy spine.
On “Lost in a Crowd,” Earl retreats to one of his most charming tendencies. He fills his lines with a few too many syllables and has to rush out the lyrics, singing “Just when we thought that it couldn’t get worse/I’m lost in a crowd, a descending darkness.” It’s a direct sentiment that lacks the heavy-handedness of the rest of the record. Here, Earl allows himself to be confused, battered, and worried. He doesn’t have all the answers for the world and he doesn’t have to. The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.


Juliana Hatfield’s new album is her angriest by a landslide. It’s packed with scathing vignettes about predatory men, particularly the one currently leading the free world.

Pussycat

It was supposed to be the moment Donald Trump lost the election. Republicans bolted by the dozens, rescinding their endorsements and calling for him to drop out. Paul Ryan uninvited him to a rally. His own party chairman denounced him, and even Mike Pence, perhaps the most unwavering of all of Trump apologists, seemed to tease the possibility of turning on his running mate. And then somehow, with remarkable speed, the news cycle moved on. Within just a few weeks, the press seemed to completely forget about that unprecedented video of a presidential candidate admitting to—graphically bragging about—serial sexual assault.
That voters were able to look past Trump’s “Access Hollywood” confessions remains astounding to Juliana Hatfield, who wrote of how deeply she was shaken by them in an essay for Talkhouse. “Since the Trump ‘pussy grab’ tapes were released, I’ve found myself wanting to reach for my emergency supply of valium,” the veteran alt-rocker wrote, describing what she dubbed “the Trump effect”: “The sight of his face and/or the sound of his voice tightens the stomach, the heart, the sphincter. Everything’s clenched. Even—maybe especially—the ‘pussy.’”
Trump’s comments hang heavy over Hatfield’s latest record, Pussycat, an album packed with scathing vignettes about predatory men, particularly the one currently leading the free world. “I Wanna Be Your Disease” opens the record with fantasies of smiting the President, bringing him to his knees and making him pay for all his “vile and hateful words.” Heated as that track is, it’s tame compared to some of what follows.
Few records this year have cried out quite so loudly for a trigger warning. On the queasy “When You’re a Star,” Hatfield connects Trump’s words to Bill Cosby’s sexual assaults. “She won’t remember a thing, and even if she did the law is on your side,” she sings, “They never prosecute your kind.” The sex in “Rhinoceros” is more consensual but no less graphic. Over a whimsically nasty riff, Hatfield imagines the horror of what intercourse with her husband might be like for Melania Trump. She spares no grotesque detail: the stench of rotting meat, the slobbering of his thick tongue, the hopelessness of feeling crushed under his mass (she likens it to being water boarded).
Pussycat isn’t above some cheap shots—“Short-Fingered Man” pries at one of the President’s most legendary insecurities—but Hatfield’s lyrics nail the gut-level revulsion the President provokes in many women, especially those who’ve been victimized by powerful men. Apparently she wrote and recorded the album in a flurry of inspiration right after the election, playing everything but the drums herself, and that impulsivity often shows. Like much of the country last November, she was still working through her shock, straightening out her thoughts, and giving herself the freedom to follow them when they turned ugly.
And yet, as loaded as the subject matter is, it does amazingly little to diminish Hatfield’s bright spirit. Even on this, her angriest record by a landslide, the singer retains the intrinsic tunefulness that’s marked every record she’s made since she was a teenager. Three decades after her debut with Blake Babies, her voice remains perpetually youthful, and her guitars continue to default to an agreeable jangle whenever she doesn’t make a concerted effort to toughen them up a bit. It’s difficult to imagine anybody else coming across quite so good-natured when singing about lighting Kellyanne Conway on fire and watching her face melt off.
Ironically, Pussycat is the kind of bluntly political record Hatfield used to be knocked for shying away from. At the height of her 1990s stardom, Hatfield was dismissed in the more activist corners of the music world as a lightweight (never mind that her songs frequently explored the ways society needles and dismisses women). She’s spent her career in an often thankless middle ground, too feminine for the masculine music press, yet not punk enough for the riot grrls. But Pussycat lends to the case for a critical reappraisal. Now would be an ideal time for one, given how the DNA of Hatfield’s hooky, plainspoken alterna-pop has carried through some of indie-rock’s sharpest young songwriters, from Waxahatchee to Bully to Laura Stevenson and Charly Bliss—artists that have demonstrated there’s plenty of substance in this sound. What a treat it would be if, 30 years into their careers, they were all making records as relevant, passionate, and strangely personable as this one.


This 1973 album by a group of Lagos high-school students shines a spotlight on a Nigerian psych-rock scene that’s long been overshadowed by the legacy of Afrobeat.

Try and Love

According to Soundway Records boss Miles Cleret’s liner notes to the 2008 compilation Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria, the Afrobeat movement wasn’t that nation’s most popular musical style of the decade, as many Anglo-Americans believe. Rather, Westernized, fuzz-laden psych rock captured more local mindshare back then. Ofege, whose players were still in high school, ranked among the most beloved of a scene that included Blo, the Funkees, and Ofo the Black Company. It’s easy to hear why. Ofege’s 1973 debut album, Try and Love, abounds with open-hearted rock that can connect with anyone who’s fallen in love before reaching voting age.
Given the accomplished musicianship and gravity of emotions on display here, it’s hard to believe that Ofege’s members were all between 15 and 17 during the recording of Try and Love. These Lagos students come off as rock-infatuated youths expressing feelings of love for the first time, and it’s absolutely charming. More strikingly, the songs sound as if they could’ve been the handiwork of London art-school proggers, Arthur Lee’s post-Forever Changes Love, or the filthy funkateers rescued for posterity by 2003’s Chains and Black Exhaust comp. On Try and Love, no debts to Fela Kuti are detected.
Opener “Nobody Fails” instantly subverts whatever expectations you may have of Nigerian rock with its quasi waltz-time rhythm, chikka-wakka guitar punctuation, and Melvin “Noks” Ukachi’s vocals, which sound as if he hasn’t totally transitioned out of puberty. The lysergic, alpha-male guitar solo that divides the song is by top session musician Berkley Jones, who also played with Blo. The joyous music of “Nobody Fails” contrasts with Ukachi’s laments about potential lovers inevitably leaving one disappointed. The occasional double- and triple-negative constructions sow confusion (e.g., “You can’t never see nobody fail”), but, regardless, such bleak jadedness is shocking for a teen songwriter.
Ofege’s compositional complexity flowers on “Gbe Mi Lo,” as drummer M-Ike Meme flaunts the semi-galloping gait and intricate stickwork of much modern Tuareg desert rock. Meanwhile, in a plot twist, Jones’ majestic guitar solo recalls the florid runs of Lino Ajello of Italian prog rockers Il Balletto di Bronzo. Similarly, “You Say No” is dramatic prog that’s wise and sophisticated beyond its years. By contrast, “Lead Me On” bustles with youthful optimism. Ukachi pleads with his crush to take his hand and lead him on to idyllic planes of love as Meme’s beats emulate the skitter and tumble of a heart in the throes of a new passion.
Try and Love peaks on “It’s Not Easy,” the lone track with lyrics written by bassist Paul Alade. It’s one of those songs that never fails to stop time and launch you into a rapturous reverie. The mood is as languorous as Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” or Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” but it replaces the latter song’s grown-up creepiness with an adolescent’s doe-eyed earnestness and tenderness. The yearning beauty of the melody and the swaying, sighing backing vocals could move Jagger and Richards’ wild horses to tears. No wonder the song’s been licensed in four TV shows this decade. Perhaps the pinnacle of West African love balladry, “It’s Not Easy” is the anomalous, gooey center of an album that proved these young Nigerians could compete on rock’s world stage with the best that the West had to offer.


Young producer Nicolas Jaar issues a sharp collection from his Clown & Sunset imprint that offers intriguing new horizons in minimal.

Inès

Ever since Ricardo Villalobos forged a 17-minute club anthem out of a looped piano riff and children chanting in Spanish (2007's "Enfants (Chants)"), minimal's narrative of rewriting the definition of club music has felt exhausted (more kindly: completed). The astonishingly young Nicolas Jaar has emerged in the shadow of that endpoint, and he has pursued a sound that cuts diagonally across modern house and techno's continuum of revivalist simplicity to outré sound design. This range can be heard from his straightforwardly lush disco edits to the generous use of silence and repetition on his forthcoming solo album, Space Is Only Noise.
It's as if Jaar is simply adding new lines across post-minimal's completed coloring book, straining through sheer craft to change the tone and feel of the pictures. This restlessness gives his work the feel of being transitory, offering no statement of a fully formed aesthetic, only snapshots of resting places between one mode and the next. Somewhat perversely, the most coherent articulation of Jaar's approach is captured on a release not even in his name. Strictly speaking, Inès is a compilation of output on Jaar's experiment-slanted Clown & Sunset label, though as compilations go it's very single-minded: four of the 10 tracks here are from Jaar, and he collaborates with artists Soul Keita and Nikita Quasim on two others, while Keita and Quasim offer two solo tracks each.
Inès is also single-minded in feel in spite of its sonic diversity, each track asking different versions of the same questions: what is the relationship between groove and non-groove, between chaos and order? Does the sun shine more brightly if it suddenly emerges from behind clouds? While stylistic contexts differ, from the softly popping Jan Jelinek downtempo of Quasim's "Freshman Year" with its woozy accelerations and decelerations, to the loping blues-disco stomp of Jaar's "Love You Gotta Lose Again" to the morose and mysterious instrumental hip-hop of Keita's "Dusties N 808s", everything here points to an underlying sensibility of absolute looseness finding itself pressed into the service of the beat.
If that sounds like Downtempo 101, well, it is; Inès' point of distinction is the deliberateness of its constructions. They are simultaneously more fragmentary and more intricate, more tentative and more precise than your standard narcoleptic headnodder, with tracks that are rigid with barely restrained tension. So, the seemingly adrift piano tinkles of Jaar's "Tribute to My Mother" become drawn into a cat's-cradle of electronic zaps and buzzing bass surges, while on his "Dubliners" papery rustles and scratches gradually coalesce into an eerie percussive house groove, like cells becoming molecules before your eyes. Best of all is the entire collective's "Her String", where succulent hand percussion and live bass build to a gorgeously deliquescent flamenco guitar solo.
With its fragile, whispery pools and eddies of sound, Inès recalls the rhythmically attenuated constructions of Villalobos (in particular his Achso EP) but also Henrik Schwarz's naturalist dance music fusions. But unlike these artists, Jaar and company remain determinedly small scale, preferring to offer carefully constructed pinnacles that never outstay their welcome. As such, it's easy to dismiss Inès as a minor work, to conclude that the delicacy of its articulations feel hard-won only because they're staged that way. All of which is true, but once you're on the album's microscopic level of activity even the slightest developments feel immensely evocative.


The New York/Berlin composer and choreographer’s second album explores creative collaboration as a means of creating family, particularly within the context of queer liberation.

Siblings

There’s a noise-techno stomper right at the heart of Colin Self’s new album, Siblings. Fragments of mangled vocals play hide and seek with a pounding beat: “Whaaaa,” one yell-yawns on repeat, while others are condensed into tics that form its sticky percussion. The track is called “Stay With the Trouble (For Donna)” and it’s the lit match to the beacon that the album builds in reply to  feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s 2016 book Staying With the Trouble. In it, Haraway makes the case that the most fruitful response to challenging times lies in “making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.”
Finding kin has been the meat of Self’s artistic practice for many years now. The work of the composer and choreographer, who lives between New York and Berlin, actively creates community. He co-founded the performance collective Chez Deep in 2012; he organized a group deep-listening walk for the release of his 2015 debut album, Elation; he’s collaborated with artists including Holly Herndon and Amnesia Scanner for their own releases; and four years ago, he founded the Xhoir vocal workshop, which is open to beginners and professional singers alike. “[I]t’s a really important outlet for dealing with the present moment, politically and socially, ” he said in an interview at the time. “Singing is a very freeing act, it lets you leave your body and touch people with sound.”
Siblings is the final installment of Self’s Elation Series, a six-year body of collaborative work that spans opera to performance art, sculpture to song, and in doing so showcases the vitality and versatility of the queer creative underground of New York and beyond. Such interdisciplinary interdependence both necessitates and creates the ideal conditions for kinship: trust, play, close listening. On his debut album, Self’s musical expression was centered on choral arrangements with electronic production that he tagged “devotional.” While his debut LP remains a salve, Siblings demonstrates an extraordinary evolution, pulling the concept of the devotional into an abundance of new shapes. To borrow Haraway’s term, the album is a compost of sonic vocabularies—including choral, techno, pop, folk, string quartet, noise, and East Coast club rhythms—and vocal evocations of kinship, in and among which a network of invigorating ideas burst into life.
On the tender synth-pop bubbler “Emblem,” Self sings of feeling like an “anomaly” before finding “the others who get it/Who might/Take care of me/Stand together/As a family.” His vocal, specifically on the intro, recalls Jimmy Somerville’s ecstatic falsetto on UK group Bronski Beat’s 1984 song “Smalltown Boy.” On it, Somerville sings that “the love that you need will never be found at home.” “Emblem” doesn’t just pick up the story where Somerville left off, it replaces the runaway narrative with one of running to; toward new ways of synergistic understanding and learning.
The album makes home for exquisitely arranged, empowering odes that work within the Western songwriting tradition, marrying skin-prickling strings with Self’s clear-eyed soar of a voice (“Survival,” “The Great Refusal”), as well as tracks that earnestly sidestep structure altogether. A Belarusian political poem written and read aloud by artists Tanya Zamirouskaya and Anastasia Kolas kicks off the chaos of “Ante-Strategy,” which fashions hyperactive dialects from digital distortion. “Research Sister” reads like the sonic sibling of WALL-E’s junk compression, a sci-fi speed-walk through humanity’s trashing of the planet and the care-taking that continues in spite of everything.
Siblings, like any chosen family, is held together by moments of joy. There’s a melodic jig near the end of album opener “Story” that would flash a mischievous grin if it could. Snatches of laughter and gossip, exaltations and excitations, punctuate the ballroom-influenced “Quorum Feat. Aunt Sister,” which is built around a video chat conversation between artists Martine Syms and Diamond Stingily. The tick-tock tumble of “Uncounted,” which features fragments of artist Emily Roysdon’s text of the same name and evokes the sound-effect explorations of Art of Noise (whose music Self has previously performed to), is set in motion by a conspiratorial cackle by Amanda Peters Gilmore, who Self counts as one of his “many mothers” in the liner notes.
Roysdon’s voice and ideas can also be heard on the earwormy “Transitions,” which reminds that the margins have always been, will always be, a site of movement, resistance, and joy. “Genders and governments,” she proclaims; “a chance to be moved.” While the Trump administration attempts to commit acts of trans erasure, “Transitions” makes its position clear. Over rainfall chimes at the song’s tail-end, a mantra is repeated: “We commit to you.” A simple statement of siblinghood, its spirit resounds throughout the whole album. In creating space for such a rich spectrum of expression, Self and his many families of collaborators have created a timely and timeless document of the kinship possibilities that await when ears and hearts stay open.


Matt Kivel's acoustic Double Exposure is a small masterpiece of humble virtues: warm, patient, calm. It is beautifully, pristinely recorded, finely wrought; its twelve songs represent some of the least insistent music you will be spellbound by all year.

Double Exposure

Matt Kivel's Double Exposure is a small masterpiece of humble virtues: warm, patient, calm. It is beautifully, pristinely recorded, finely wrought; its ten songs represent some of the least insistent music you will be spellbound by all year. Kivel's close-miked acoustic guitar strums close to your ear, but everything above it, from Kivel's high, frail falsetto to the washes of electronics that occasionally stop the action, is constantly threatening to dissipate. Kivel wrote and recorded it over the last two years, redirecting his creative efforts away from the band Gap Dream in favor of this sort of acoustic music—not quite shapely or distinct enough to be folk, too temporally detached to be grouped near rock— that is simply music we murmur to ourselves. Daily music.
Ever since I first heard Double Exposure, in March, it has been that for me. For awhile, I was hard-pressed to articulate its appeal, even to myself; it was delicate and pretty, for sure, but I was hearing something else in it, something elusive. Now that the record has made its way onto a label, Olde English Spelling Bee, I think I've located what that something is: There is a modesty here, of a particular, almost-holy sort. It's the sort that doesn't much make a spectacle or a point of its own performance. It is simply written into the delivery, in Kivel's musing, unaffected vocals and in his steady, artful finger-picking.
Nick Drake is an obvious comparison point, and a strong one. Like Drake, Kivel doesn't sweat comprehension in his mumbled, blurred lyrics, sharp phrases of which only swim occasionally to the surface: "You said all these boys will do is fuck/ Take away their cocks and they dry up," he sings, startlingly, on the title track. With a lyric sheet, the darkly personal nature of the music swims into focus. "Pleasure to me/ Wishing I was dead," he croons on "Tetro." The phrase "When I'm dead" is one of the only phrases in "Eleison."
There is a frightening amount of death in the record, in fact. But Kivel doesn't seem or sound frightened by it himself—simply drawn toward it, compelled to examine it. The lullaby of "Rainbow Trout," with its refrain of "sweet babe, don't cry," turns on some ghastly imagery: "As the body/ shook with pain/ It was thrown again and again/ Up against the fissured wall/ Covered in the bile of it's maw." And on "Whip," he sings gently, clearly, "I want to kill myself." The effect is unsettling precisely because you're unsure how unsettled to be—the song appears to be told from the perspective of a whipped horse, and the phrase is sung so lightly, over an ascending finger-picked line, that the overwhelming emotional message is one of contentment, serenity.
Mark Nieto produced Double Exposure, and his work is strong enough to serve as a supporting character. (Paul Oldham mixed and mastered the album). Atmosphere is a fragile strength, the first quality to disappear when pressed, but it blossoms in headphones, and it's really in this setting that you should hear Double Exposure. The muffled boom of the bass drum on "White Rice", the pearly piano notes, ringing down a long hallway in "Rainbow Trout", the humming—insect looping guitars that swarm through "All Will Be Well", the small bursts of static at the edges of "Days of Heaven"—each touch registers like an event within the hallowed space that Kivel creates. The album doesn't so much grow on you as accrete, like daytime shadow creeping across the room. It's been seven months since I first tried to puzzle out Double Exposure, and it keeps eluding me. I don't know when I'll want to stop trying, but not soon.


Featuring gorgeous, dynamic live studio recordings from her last two albums, In the Same Room is a showcase of Holter's imagination and her ability to reimagine.

In the Same Room

The essential fibers of Julia Holter’s compositions are sturdy yet pliable, amenable to shifts in contour and color. “Goddess Eyes” first appeared on 2011’s Tragedy in subtly exultant form; Ekstasis, released the next year, featured both a blocky rejigging and a retextured version. And on an EP that year, an acoustic “Goddess Eyes” revealed the patient ballad earlier obscured by static. They track Holter’s inclination towards clearer vocals and ensemble ingenuity. It’s as if, as time passes, she’d rather reimagine a song than retrieve its original spirit.
The 32-year-old Los Angeles artist’s latest release, In the Same Room, is a live studio recording of songs largely from her ravishing last two albums, 2013’s Loud City Song and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness. Some of the players—drummer Corey Fogel, violist Dina Maccabee, and bassist Devin Hoff—are familiar from Holter’s touring outfit and those two records, the strength of which owes much to the musicians’ intuitive, often idiosyncratic groove. In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.
“Horns Surrounding Me,” on Loud City Song, features a backbeat and shades of terror. It’s nearly arrhythmic on In the Same Room, a mélange of cymbals and viola. Its darkness evokes calm instead of anxiety. The spiraling outro on In the Same Room’s “Silhouette,” meanwhile, intensifies its impending madness. It’s among her most stirring vocal performances, full of melismas on the brink of abandon. “Lucette Stranded on the Island,” sung from the perspective of someone left to die by her lover, makes the earlier version’s noisy climax seem overdone. Unadorned, we hear Holter mid-disenchantment, amorous going on helpless.
Holter has said that producer Cole M. Greif-Neill insisted on bringing her vocals, less thoroughly treated than usual, to the fore of Have You in My Wilderness. In the Same Room, though, lacks that record’s saturated backdrop, leaving Holter’s voice as palpably present as each of the instrumentalists (whose subtle dynamics enliven “In the Green Wild.”) That completes an impressive arc for Holter: from an interior, hermetic-seeming artist to one who can unlock the nuance of her compositions in live ensemble settings.
Which is why I wish In the Same Room—which does feature a couple redundancies, like a familiar “Feel You”—retooled more pre-Loud City Song material. All but two songs are from her last two albums: “Betsy on the Roof” first appeared in similar albeit hazier form on 2010’s Live Recordings; and, more significantly, “So Lilies” returns from 2011’s Tragedy. In place of the album version’s field-recordings and interference, there’s pattering percussion and hesitant bits of melody. What would more of these predominantly electronic, in-the-box recordings sound like as band arrangements? With Holter’s restlessness to reprise, we may yet find out.


"Look, I don't know why, but George Wagoner is going to kick my ass today. Don't laugh, bitch ...

Licensed to Ill

"Look, I don't know why, but George Wagoner is going to kick my ass today. Don't laugh, bitch, I'm serious! I never should have told that slut that skins were assholes."
"Haha, you're dead, man."
"Shut up, bitch, I'm telling you I can't wait for the bus because they know where I catch it. You have to try to get Mr. Davis to drive around to the side like he sometimes does for Chris. I'm gonna go out the back, from the cafeteria. And I already talked to Nick, but he just said he didn't know if he could do anything. Which, that doesn't even make any sense because I thought they were supposedly best friends."
"Hey man, I think you're gonna get killed today. You know Tracy's sister?"
"Yeah, fool, that's the one who I told about skins. That's what I was talking about."
"Yeah, she's crafty and she's just Dom's type. Hahahaha!!!"
"She is a crafty bitch."
Poltergeists and Licensed to Ill: Some things only make sense to kids. Too many years removed from junior high, they tend only to reveal themselves in annoying bursts of violence, confusion and rhymes like Abe Vigoda. And it's not even because their appeal is particularly juvenile, but rather that they operate in a realm only comprehensible to the innocent; those untouched by the brutal reality of the real world, where everyday injustice skews our perception to the point that what might have been common sense to us as adolescents now seems mystifying. To little Carol Anne, Ad-Rock simply is another child.
New York brats-cum-activists Beastie Boys have gone to great pains to explain the error of their 80s ways. This is not to say they've been apologetic, but only too keen to emphasize the arcs of their characters over the years. Licensed to Ill, like Cooky Puss and the underrated Rock Hard EP before it, were indeed both impressively ahead of their time, and rudimentary to the extreme. How a city that already had ESG felt it needed the Beastie Boys in the mid-80s is a question that confounds the ages; yet, Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D could hardly have predicted the slacker generation better if they'd tried (which they didn't). Chalk it up to NYC eclecticism, perhaps. Chalk it up to Run-DMC and Madonna, who helped showcase them to the most economically and culturally powerful generation of kids since the boomers. Chalk it up to Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin. And MTV. Most of all, remember that at their worst, these guys got thrown out of White Castle for being too loud.
Licensed to Ill is given a lot of credit for predating the whole rap-rock thing of the 90s. Bad news for the Beasties: History appears to contradict that assessment. First of all, their cornball Cali cousins the Red Hot Chili Peppers had already graced the earth with two LPs prior to Ill, not to mention beating them to the 70s funk revival by working with George Clinton. Secondly, contrary to most rock writers' beliefs, white guys + guitars do not necessarily = rock. Had they released Ill even four years later, it would have been a novelty record. It's dated remarkably badly, while Rick Rubin's skill with the mixer (and drum machine) is entirely questionable. The rhymes... well...
"I got franks and pork and beans/ Always bust the new routines."
"Spent some bank, I got a high powered jumbo/ Rolled up a wooly and I watched Colombo."
"I keep a pistol in my pocket so you better be cautious/ Fly around the world but it makes me nauseous."
"Get ready/ 'Cause this ain't funny/ My name's Mike D and I'm about to get money."
Okay, so it isn't the music or all the rhymes that translate beyond the scene of the crime. What, then? Probably just that the Beasties didn't give a fuck-- AND AMERICA DESPERATELY NEEDED TO BE SHOWN HOW NOT TO GIVE A FUCK. And it sort of still does. Licensed to Ill demonstrated that you could be "groundbreaking" and "important," and still have no goals beyond getting drunk before 6th period. Think about that. It meant that you could live life as one giant inside joke, speaking in tongues and making hilarious references to Chef Boyardee with no one outside your circle of jerks the wiser. Sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash, but that's okay because I drink Brass Monkey and I rock well. "What?" "Nothing."
In light of this information, it almost seems pointless to recap the highlights. Does anyone really care that "Rhymin' and Stealin"" witnessed Rubin's genius for exposing the sample-ability of Led Zeppelin? No, because, "My pistol is loaded, I shot Betty Crocker/ Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker" is awesome, and if you don't get it then what-the-fuck-ever. Does it matter that "Fight for Your Right" actually does kind of invent rap-rock? No, because everyone has their best porno mag, and these guys are just telling it like it is, and rap is the CNN of rock. Do you know what "I did it with my whiffleball bat" means? Has anyone ever even been to Brooklyn? Who in their right mind is sampling Creedence? Is "I should have probably guessed her gay" the best line ever, or is it when they brag about having more rhymes than Phyllis Diller?
Despite its seeming defiance of respectable society, there is no shortage of folks who would canonize Licensed to Ill-- hence this new edition, replete with commemorative DVD. For Miller's sake, it's the Beastie Boys' worst record. (Even though we all secretly know it's their best.) Yet, there's something impressive about tapping into the secret language of the immature and terminally slack. All these years later, with every listen, it becomes clearer to me that you can never really outrun your inner idiot.