The spectacular Red transformed pop and country music around it. It remains the pinnacle of Taylor Swift’s career, an intimate album of disappearances and lost relationships.

Red

In early 2012, Taylor Swift turned in 20 songs to her label for what would become her fourth album, Red. They were all further outgrowths of the pop-country sound she had mastered in her early years, as a teenager finding her voice in the Nashville scene, trying on songs like “Tim McGraw” to reflect the starlight over Georgia and the allure and disappointment of romantic love through a lens that was unmistakably hers. As she amassed a body of work for Red, she was still writing songs about love and its fugitive presence, songs about relationships that swelled like an obsessive thought, songs that picked up and enhanced the smallest pixels of intimate detail as if they were scanning security footage in a crime procedural. When she strummed a chord, it shimmered and just hung there. It sounded like Swift, an organic progression from her previous records.
Looking at the albums that followed Red, it’s obvious Swift longed for the inorganic, to send her songs through the distortions of modern pop and see what kind of genetically-scrambled horror would come back. You can hear it immediately in the first song she wrote in collaboration with pop gurus Max Martin and Shellback, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”—a mutation is happening. A chord thrums from an acoustic guitar which then turns inside out as it plays, as if caught in the neck of a vacuum. It didn’t sound like the old Taylor Swift, the one who wrote 20 new Taylor Swift songs for a new Taylor Swift album. It sounded like a new version of her, being fitfully born.
Swift was trying to push her music outside of its traditional boundaries, to stray into the interzone between pop and country. Pop was just beginning to mingle its DNA with EDM; dubstep, a once varied and relatively new branch of dance music, had been reduced to the stomach-flip of the drop just as its popularity in America crested. Martin and Shellback were aware of these shifts in pop’s geography; they incorporated many of them into Femme Fatale, the Britney Spears album from the previous year. One of the other Swift/Martin/Shellback collaborations on Red, “I Knew You Were Trouble,” starts as a pop-rock song but its edges mimic the queasy wobble of dubstep. Synths scream behind Swift’s voice like mechanical saws. It was as if she had finally found a musical backdrop sharp as her lyrics—the lakes and backroads of Tennessee and Georgia disappear, replaced with formations of jagged crystal, a perfect environment for a song about falling in love with someone you know will hurt you and leave you feeling empty as a canyon.
Red is an album of disappearances, of things that have gone or are just about to go missing—lost relationships, old sounds, previous Taylor Swifts, each photographed just as they’re receding out of frame. Even on the album cover, Swift is partially disappeared, her downcast eyes swallowed by a lip of shadow falling from a wide-brimmed hat. It’s her somewhat obvious way of referencing the front cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, where a photograph of Mitchell’s face is submerged in a blue-black lake of shadow.
Red is also the first record where Swift directly echoes Mitchell’s writing, a once potential and hazy inspiration now coming into view. In a counterpoint to the musical wanderlust on display, there’s a newfound patience to Swift’s observations, a knowledge that narratives form out of brokenness and frustrated communication more often than they do out of ease or any emotional clarity. Many of Swift’s earlier, fantasy-driven songs, like “Love Story” and “Mine,” end neatly; both resolved with marriage. But real stories have a way of ending in places uneasy and uncertain, and what seemed to be the most enduring relationships splinter off into loose ends and glass shards. Swift knew this; she described Red in Billboard as being about “all the different ways that you have to say goodbye to someone.… Every different kind of missing someone, every kind of loss—it all sounds different to me.”
So she sought out different producers and collaborators to give shape to these kinds of missing. She wanted the drum sounds that Jeff Bhasker brought to Fun.’s 2012 pop album Some Nights, hushed, cottony throbs that sound cobwebbed over. They bloom beneath the skin of “Holy Ground,” a song where Swift discovers a brief connection so glowing and true that she skips over the end of the relationship because it’s not important: “And I guess we fell apart in the usual way/And the story’s got dust on every page.” “Treacherous,” which she co-wrote with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson, initially sounds like an old Taylor Swift song, but it deepens over time like none of her songs before or since, a masterclass in dynamics from arrangement to lyric. It starts off relatively motionless, frozen in time by all the tension in Swift’s voice, as if by keeping absolutely still she might not fall for the song’s subject. Then the guitars and drums melt into dark, wet echoes like pelting raindrops, as Swift’s focus narrows toward a driveway in the distance: “Two headlights shine through the sleepless night/And I will get you alone.”
Even the songs she recorded with Nathan Chapman, the producer of her first three records and the initial 20 songs she turned in for Red, are expanding, sometimes sounding like a bloom of sound from an empty arena. On opener “State of Grace,” guitars chime like sonar, as if trying to measure the diameter of Swift’s feelings: the early blushes of a relationship, when you seem to recognize something in someone else that you’re not certain anyone else has seen. “We are alone/Just you and me/Up in your room and our slates are clean,” she sings, wiring images into a lattice of memory, “Just twin fire signs/Four blue eyes.”
If Red holds together at all as it rockets through hybrid genres, it’s in the attentive way Swift dwells on memory and loss and the effect of time on both. In the liner notes, Swift borrows a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem—“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”—and, accordingly, the songs on Red stretch to the length of their forgetting. “Sad Beautiful Tragic” sways like a slowcore desert mirage, a Taylor Swift song on the verge of signing to 4AD. “Time is taking its sweet time erasing you,” she sings, while the music simulates that stuttered crawl of days after a breakup, a soft melt of chords that make seconds feel like hours.
“Time won’t fly/It’s like I’m paralyzed by it,” Swift sings in “All Too Well,” the centerpiece of Red and potentially her entire career. It might be her own “Tangled Up in Blue”; like Bob Dylan, she sweeps up drifts of time into loosely-chronological piles of images. “There we are again in the middle of the night,” Swift sings, “We dance around the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” The tenderness with which she observes this moment of intimacy makes it come to life; she reanimates a feeling instead of reacting to it, exploring all the howling negative space a person leaves behind when their shadow recedes—the things you talked about, the kinds of attention you gave each other, the arguments you had, the rooms where you held onto each other desperately.
A kind of Chekhov’s Scarf that Swift sheds in the first verse reappears in the final verse (“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week/’Cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me”) as a metaphor for the continuity of their connection, how feelings persist long after they’ve lost their use. Nothing dies without leaving some trace of itself, she seems to say throughout the length of Red, and in “All Too Well” she becomes one of those traces—“I was there,” she sings in the chorus. “I remember it all too well.” Swift, like anyone, is a hostage to her own experience, but she’s also capable of being a witness to it, able to see a relationship—even as it shrinks further and further away in her vision—for what it was rather than what it couldn’t be.


Brooklyn emcees Elucid and Billy Woods’ third album as Armand Hammer is a stellar underground hip-hop record. They are radical and full of heart, delivering cocksure homilies from the margins of rap.

ROME

Stratify today’s hip-hop scene in broad terms and you’ll find a commercial crop of reality TV graduates and Soundcloud poster boys mirrored by a huddled mass of hardscrabble rappers making up an oversized underground. The New York-based Billy Woods and Elucid, who form together as Armand Hammer, are often plotted as part of their city’s underground—but for ROME, which follows 2013’s Race Music and 2014’s Furtive Movements, the two emcees have delved deeper and burrowed further into the leftfield, carving out a shadowy nook that not only shuns the commercial trappings of the mainstream but also moves on from the boom-bap theology that can plague these kinds of records. ROME sounds like two outcast preachers delivering cocksure homilies from the duskiest hip-hop margins, a siren call from the subterranean.
Geographically, Billy Woods and Elucid ready their work in Brooklyn. Elucid crafts music in “a proudly-crumbling East New York brownstone” situated in an area he says is the borough’s last holdout from gentrification. Woods, who ran with Vordul Mega of indie rap heroes Cannibal Ox in the early-2000s, is based in Bushwick where he writes rhymes inspired by the rugged facade of New York City culture. This grounding anchors Armand Hammer’s music. On “Tread Lightly,” Woods swaggers into action like the unofficial mayor of his block. “Words stolen from neighbors in bodegas when I cop my paper,” he announces. “Now you know where I got my flavor.”
Across social media and press photos, Woods hides his face. His lyrics express a healthy distrust of the world that sometimes bleeds into paranoia. He barks with a punk attitude. “Microdose,” which features a guest verse from Quelle Chris, captures Woods in full force. Time-traveling through war-torn worlds while weaving in personal history via street-cosigned walkie-talkie, he spits, “Gonna need both those barrels, kid/Nextel chirp/My ancestors: ‘You’re gonna need more than bows and arrows, ya dig?’”
Woods’s impactful style combines smartly with Elucid’s flow, which has a beguiling serpentine quality to it. As an emcee, his words seethe and coil around the beats. Raised in a religious household, he balances scriptural imagery with political commentary. “Made a bed of black orchids in the Leviathan’s fortress/It’s 2017 and Flint still ain’t got clean water,” he vents on the percussion-heavy “It Was Written.” Over the low-slung gumbo of Messiah Musik’s “Dead Money,” he throws out a call to arms: “Built to destroy, not self-destruct/There’s a time and place to not give a fuck/Right now seems so critical/I wanna see everyone who’s been made invisible.”
Befitting its protagonist’s words, ROME is an unapologetically heavy listen. It can batter the brain as densely-packed lyrics fly forth, especially during the album’s mid-section where the production escalates into a cacophonous funk on “Shammgod,” a track that announces itself with screeching siren-like synths and is produced by Anti-pop Consortium’s High Priest. Throughout ROME, light relief comes only in the form of sardonic quips like on “Dead Money” where Woods shrugs, “If God made the world, motherfucker was wearing gloves.”
But hold on for the ride and ROME successfully settles into a gentle ending. Just like Ka and DJ Preservation’s Days With Dr. Len Yo experiment from 2015—or parts of MIKE’s May God Bless Your Hustle from earlier this year—the closing trio of songs dispel the charge that so much underground New York City hip-hop apes ‘90s production styles; instead, atmospheric tones and sonic ticks are used to give tracks rhythm and momentum. The second half of “Pergamum” marries Woods’ voice to a rustling bed of static; “Barbarians” dissolves Elucid’s vocals into a slurry of fractured ambience. The closing cut, “Overseas (Epilogue),” has Woods imploring someone lay him to rest out at sea while playing Thug Life’s “Bury Me a G,” with his sentiments backed by a haunting saxophone riff and crystalline wind chimes. It’s serene and it’s powerful—it’s the sound of being beneath the underground.


Durk’s first studio album since signing to Def Jam has the spectre of death looming over it at all times. While it isn’t going to change lives, it is a view into the psyche of those who reframe the concept of death as a way of life, a cost of doing business, or even a source of motivation to create a better life for yourself and those you care about.

Remember My Name

Deonte Hoard. Giovanni Matos. Savon Davis. Jennifer Ponton. Amari Sutton. Nicole M. Towns. Javante Linson. Terrell Campbell. Anthony Diaz. Uchenna Agina.
These are a few of the 150-plus people killed by gun violence in Chicago so far in 2015. All of these names (and the ones I don’t have the space to list) are important, but for 22-year-old Durk "Lil Durk" Banks the last name hits incredibly close to home. Agina (better known as OTF Chino) was Durk’s manager, a confidante who was, in a cruel sense of irony, murdered after meeting with Bulls player Joakim Noah in an attempt to partner Durk with the latter’s anti-violence organization. It’s doubly frustrating given Durk’s affiliation with French Montana’s Coke Boys imprint, which recently suffered the loss of rising member Chinx Drugz. Durk’s first studio album (he’s released 5 mixtapes overall) since signing to Def Jam back during the Great Chicago Rap Gold Rush a few years back, Remember My Name, is a project that has the spectre of death looming over it at all times.
A common criticism of Durk’s music revolves around his near-total dependency on Auto-Tune. He’s aware of the charge, addressing it on "What Your Life Like". The software is Durk’s friend when he adopts a singing delivery, like on single "Like Me". The tune showcases Durk (and featured crooner/fellow Chicagoan Jeremih) in his lane fully, producing a smooth entry into the pantheon of Sensitive Thug jams. Other times, like on the absolutely grating "Tryna' Tryna'" or when he tries to feebly hit high notes during the chorus on, uh, "Higher" it can be his worst enemy. Luckily, the highs outweigh the lows. It’s apparent after a few listens that Durk is only getting better, from both a rapping and writing perspective. He’s definitely grown from his earlier mixtapes (he sounds like a different person entirely than the one who once rapped "Yo' bitch know she doin' dick, we call that ho double D." Growth! Progression! Artist Development!).
It’s apparent that Durk has a solid ear for production and a nascent ability to craft songs that get caught in your ear. The C-Sick-produced opener "500 Homicides" is a thunderous intro that finds Durk viciously addressing enemies, shouting out his affiliates and reminding folks that there are repercussions of your online actions. "What’s up with this Twitter beef?/ Thought we was keeping in the streets?.../ Hell yeah, you can die over a retweet!"
Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives. It is, however, a view into the psyche of those who reframe the concept of death as a way of life, a cost of doing business, or even a source of motivation to create a better life for yourself and those you care about. On the album standout "What Your Life Like", Durk laments, "They say the murder started after L’s/ Now my phone got shit to tell... /Got that call, they cancelled 20 shows/ That's money down the drain/ I got kids, don't take it wrong."
The moment underlines a curious tension for Durk and the other artists in his orbit. The culture of the neighborhoods that produced Durk, his OTF (Only The Family) affiliates and the rest of the various artists who find their sounds lazily lumped together under the name "drill music" find themselves in a weird catch-22. You rap about the stuff you’re seeing (and participating in, for some) and you’re rewarded with money, fame and the opportunity to make your life better. At the same time, you’re branded as "trouble" by promoters, your profile is raised among the police and old enemies, and you’re forced to go on the defensive. The thing that might make your life better might be the same thing that ends up killing you. What in the hell are you supposed to do? On Remember My Name, Durk chooses to keep on keepin’ on.


These landmark albums have been remastered and reissued in 2xCD sets, accompanied by period bonus tracks, instrumentals, and remixes. They remain encouraging reminders of what a hip-hop album can be to the world.

Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back/Fear of a Black Planet

Roosevelt, New York is a beautiful social experiment gone awry. As post-war urban renewal squeezed black families into towering inner-city housing developments and whites out into their sprawling suburbs, this hamlet near the south end of western Long Island’s Queens bordering Nassau County served as a template for suburban integration. Blacks and whites cohabited there for years until real estate agents’ racist scare tactics pushed white families to sell at a loss and funneled new black ones into the same homes at inflated prices. The city’s methodical transformation would have a profound effect on Nassau local Carlton Ridenhour, better known as Chuck D. On the short trip from home to nearby Adelphi University, where he studied graphic design, Chuck could watch the soft segregated lower-middle-class black community of Roosevelt give way to golf and country clubs for the affluent, predominantly white Garden City, home to Adelphi and a pair of prestigious prep schools. First-hand experience of racialized contempt, along with a rich education from civil rights activist parents, sparked a righteous ire in Chuck that would burn hot and bright in the following years.
Public Enemy formed around Chuck’s gig at Adelphi’s student radio station, gaining momentum as he and his friends’ forays into rap music grew increasingly accomplished. Their squelching, skeletal “Public Enemy No. 1” won a fan in Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, kicking off a lengthy courtship of Chuck, sidekick Flavor Flav, DJ Terminator X and producers Hank Shocklee and Eric Sadler. Two years later, the group caved and signed with the label. A debut album (1987’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show) and a package tour with Run-D.M.C. and LL Cool J followed. The music was boldly gritty, if a touch late to the party, scooped by advances in landmark singles by Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim released the same year. The live show was gripping, Chuck and Flav stalking the stage as “Minister of Information” Professor Griff cut in with searing political diatribes and the S1w’s, the group’s security detail, performed silent combat exercises with toy rifles in the background. It was black power theater. It shocked American audiences cold. Concerns about P.E.’s image and intent quickly arose: Were they gangsters? Terrorists? Separatists? Yo! stalled out around 400,000 units sold, a modest turnout in the wake of the Beastie Boys’ blockbuster Licensed to Ill, and Public Enemy entered into a contentious dance with the media that would precipitate their greatest successes and their darkest hardships.
In retrospect, Yo! Bum Rush the Show was a blueprint. What came after it was the work of a well-rehearsed unit keenly aware of its purpose and capabilities. Released the following summer, Public Enemy’s sophomore album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was a brash refinement of the themes of Yo! and a jab at the jaws of detractors, high and low. “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” railed against the press, holding up the lurid sensationalism surrounding the group as a warning against trusting anything you read. “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” is a nightmare where P.E. gets nabbed for sampling. (More on that later.) Nation teemed with a didactic social consciousness too. “She Watch Channel Zero?!” strikes out against junk television, while “Night of the Living Baseheads” addresses the crack epidemic, and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” leads a draft-dodging conscientious objector through a vengeful jailbreak. Chuck’s booming ministerial baritone sparred with Flav’s piercing yawp in a masterful hero-and-sidekick interplay. The message couldn’t entice the masses without the levity; the levity was gimmicky without revolutionary grit giving it weight.
Nation found a way to expound on the explosive soundscapes of the debut without exhausting listeners or cluttering the mix. Chuck, Sadler, and the Shocklee brothers’ production as the Bomb Squad was as thick as its source material was diverse; it was rap, soul, rock, funk and musique concrète all at once. “Most people were saying that rap music was noise,” Hank Shocklee told Rolling Stone in 1989, “and we decided, ‘If they think it’s noise, let’s show them noise.’” "She Watch Channel Zero?!" pulls its central riff from Slayer’s thrash classic “Angel of Death”. “Night of the Living Baseheads” outfits a stable of trusty James Brown samples with over a dozen assorted soul and rap tidbits and bridges, folding in elements of ESG’s “UFO” and David Bowie’s “Fame”. Snippets of legendary speeches from Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X and stage banter from Public Enemy’s successful European tour formed connective tissue between songs for a unified listening experience that only let up briefly in the middle and finally, at the end. The Bomb Squad built beats like ships in a bottle, delicately stitching tiny pieces of black history into layered blasts of sound. Public Enemy looked and sounded a fright to the uninitiated, but careful attention showed every piece of this black radical machine moving in perfect concert.
Nation of Millions netted Public Enemy the elusive American audience and platinum sales their debut couldn’t, and it changed the face of rap music. The hip-hop landscape of ‘89-’90 was dotted with sample-heavy sons of Nation. Chuck sent early copies of the album out west to Dre and Ice Cube, and N.W.A.’s landmark Straight Outta Compton cropped up like a gangsta rap rejoinder to the Bomb Squad ethos. (Cube would later tap the team for production on his post-N.W.A. solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.) De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique added a playful, psychedelic charm to the proceedings. Nation’s message of black self-sufficiency resonated through the proudly Afrocentric art of A Tribe Called Quest, X Clan, Brand Nubian and more. Beyond the ’80s, the music of Nation of Millions would continue to find new life in unexpected places: Weezer’s 1996 comeback single “El Scorcho” nicked its “I’m the epitome of public enemy” barb from “Don’t Believe the Hype,” and Jay-Z’s 2006 post-retirement salvo “Show Me What You Got” is a nod to Nation’s “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got.” (Without Public Enemy we don’t get Kanye West; in addition to sampling the Long Island legends liberally, Kanye inherited a bit of his fearless politics and kitchen sink beat construction from here.)
Critics warmed to Public Enemy in the wake of It Takes a Nation of Millions but remained suspicious of their political affiliations. “If Farrakhan’s a prophet my dick’s bigger than Don Howland’s,” Village Voice scribe Robert Christgau quipped in a year-end roundup, “but that doesn’t make Nation of Millions anything less than the bravest and most righteous experimental pop of the decade.” Others would be less warm as Professor Griff’s incendiary ethics began to strike sour notes. He publicly accused white America of bestiality during a press-filled gig at Rikers Island in 1988 and voiced a shocking disdain for Jews and gays in various interviews overseas. In the spring of 1989, Washington Times scribe David Mills sat Griff down and coaxed out a rant charged with cold, ugly hate speech that would quickly torch the group’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Privately, Chuck struggled with how to respond to the controversy. At first, he stood by Griff, then he announced Griff’s expulsion from the group, then, amid a growing media firestorm, he disbanded Public Enemy entirely. The hiatus was short-lived. Spike Lee’s blistering racial relations passion play Do the Right Thing debuted a week after the firestorm with a new Public Enemy song as its theme. “Fight the Power” summarized the mood of both the film and the climate it was released into. It telegraphed the tense discomfort of a New York summer where innocent youth from Central Park to Bensonhurst would pay the ultimate price for being black in the wrong place at the wrong time. By July, the seemingly inactive group had a #1 Billboard rap single, and work was quietly underway on a Nation of Millions follow-up.
Fear of a Black Planet from 1990 made kindling of the previous summer’s anti-Public Enemy sentiment, quoting the group’s biggest critics in interludes and ribbing them in the songs. “Contract on the World Love Jam” weaves negative news reports into a scene-setting intro; later “Incident at 66.6 FM” sets outraged calls from a Chuck D squareoff with New York political radio host Alan Colmes over sedate keys and drums, playing the grumps for squares without even responding to their charges. A late album Terminator X showcase snarkily titled “Leave This Off Your Fuckin Charts” is a tenacious dare. Elsewhere, Fear pulls the camera off P.E. to speak to community issues. “Anti-Nigger Machine” and “Who Stole the Soul?” levied heavy accusations of censorship while “911 Is a Joke” explored black community police mistrust and “Fear of a Black Planet” tackled apprehension about interracial dating. Sourcing Public Enemy’s media struggles back to age-old racial strife was a brash, heavy-handed play, but Fear’s genius trick was coating its righteous rage in music that aimed to groove where earlier songs seemed to want to maim.
Fear of a Black Planet finds the Bomb Squad at the height of their powers, assembling deeply intricate grooves out of infinitesimal building blocks. “Pollywannacracka” cycles through a breakneck array of sounds inside of its first 10 seconds and modulates between spacious verses and a jam-packed chorus, bubbling into bedlam whenever Chuck stops rapping. “Fight the Power” manages to cram over a dozen different samples into five minutes of shockingly smooth funk. What sets these songs apart from the last batch is that their structure was often as varied as their list of ingredients. They didn’t just modulate between similar verses and choruses. These compositions breathed, moved, changed from one refrain to the next, from one second to the next. A new sound showed face on every listen. Fear of a Black Planet deftly stated the case for hip-hop as savvy collage art rather than pastiche. Sure, they borrowed liberally from pre-existing music, but these patchwork symphonies bore scant resemblance to their source material.
It should be noted that none of this can ever happen again. Biz Markie was sued over an unauthorized sample in 1991, and the judge’s ruling required future producers to seek the original artist’s clearance before incorporating a sample into a new composition. Overnight it became forbiddingly difficult and expensive to incorporate even a handful of samples into a new beat. The nightmare of “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” had become the hard reality. Producers scaled back their creations, often augmenting one choice groove with a bevy of instrumental embellishments. This is how we arrive at the lush live band pomp of West Coast G-funk, the cold synthetics of early 2000s East Coast rap, and the gothic textures of Southern crunk and trap. The early Public Enemy masterpieces remain unique and inimitable now, relics of a world irreparably changed though in a few notable ways, very much the same.
The strife that birthed Nation of Millions and Black Planet is mirrored in some of the upheaval of 2014. The business of hip-hop has changed, as free mixtapes have supplanted retail albums as the chief method of kicking off a rap career. Artistic freedom can evaporate at the drop of a gavel. (see: Lord Finesse’s pursuit of Mac Miller for borrowing a beat on a free release.) Hip-hop has again had its political mettle tested by social injustices too systemic to deny. Returning to It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet for these just-released reissues is an encouraging reminder of what a hip-hop album can be to the world, a peek back at that one time a rap act pissed square into the mouth of adversity and came away unscathed. Hear the drummer get wicked.


Promising hip-hop star hits #1 with a compromised and creatively limp record. Thanks, major-label record industry.

The Adventures of Bobby Ray

B.o.B began griping about the trials of fame long before he had any. "They say that I'm changing/ Cuz I'm gettin famous," went the chorus to 2008's "Fuck You", a bluesy lope of acoustic guitar and twangy harmonica that recalled vintage Dungeon Family. The logic was counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous, but the song itself was warm, fluid, and surprising. It was B.o.B in a nutshell: arrogant, self-aware, undeniably promising. The long road from that to The Adventures of Bobby Ray seems dominated by record execs who manicured, man-handled, and placated the rapper. They catered to all his worst instincts, and he gladly surrendered himself to theirs. The result should serve as a cautionary tale to all involved, except for one small detail: The Adventures of Bobby Ray was the No. 1 album in the country last week.
To put that in perspective: Bobby Ray sold 84,000 copies. In 2003, when people still bought CDs, these numbers would have been embarrassing for a high-profile hip-hop debut, but in 2010, they are, apparently, victory-lap worthy. Atlantic invested time and effort into "grooming" B.o.B, and since record companies tend only to take notice when their pre-planned strategies pan out (ground-level phenomena like Gucci Mane tend to get dismissed as flukes), we can expect to see a lot more records patterned explicitly on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. And that's a truly depressing prospect. As a primer on what major label execs think they need to do to sell a rap record to a mass audience in 2010, Bobby Ray is a queasily fascinating document. As an actual album, it is wretched-- a dishearteningly generic and hollow product with no soul or demographic or viewpoint that arguably bottoms out three separate times.
It turns out that the answer to the above question-- "What do major labels think it takes to sell rap albums in 2010?" -- is simple: hide the rapping. Bury it under dewy pianos and sensitive cooing; sugar-coat it with emo-pop choruses; tuck it behind compressed guitars. Basically put it anywhere listeners are least likely to notice it. This is a disturbing strategy to pursue, but it's particularly galling here; B.o.B is a fantastically gifted rapper, with an astonishing rhythmic command and a tricky, limber way with phrasing. On Bobby Ray he's reduced to a guest rapper on his own songs. Only three tracks feel even remotely connected to a rap aesthetic, and they are the best things here by a mile: "Bet I" finds him somersaulting joyfully around a juddering 808 kick, backed by an equally on-fire T.I. and Playboy Tre. "Fame" flips a sample of Canadian cheese rockers April Wine into a surprisingly funky horn loop, and "5th Dimension", despite a ludicrous yowled hook from Lenny Kravitz stand-in Rico Barrino that bites "Inner City Blues" and regrettable space-rock guitars, features some of B.o.B's most vivid rapping.
The bulk of the record, though, is a undifferentiated mass of sticky-sweet modern-rock radio in which it's difficult to single out the lowest moment. Is it the air-conditioned sub-Coldplay crooning of Bruno Mars on "Nothin On You"? Bobby Ray's inexplicable decision to turn Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand a Chance" into a Sublime song? Or the appearance by Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, whose creepily blank vocals on "Magic" sound like the engineer has a gun to his head? B.o.B himself struggles to inject personality into the proceedings. In the lyrics to "Airplanes", a moody teen-pop melodrama with a chorus by Paramore's Hayley Williams, Bobby Ray pines, just like he did on "Fuck You", for simpler times. "Somebody take me back to the days/ Before this was a job, before I got paid," he asks, remembering, "back before I tried to cover up my slang." It's a brief acknowledgment of what he has had to give up to get here. The Adventures of Bobby Ray is a curiously lonely affair, the sound of a singular talent being drowned in a tidal wave of cheerful banality.


Two new reissues of the group’s early-1980s albums capture a band at the intersection of AOR and power pop for whom precision was everything.

Shake It Up / Heartbeat City

An anomic interzone at the nexus of disco and new wave, 1981 needed the Cars more than ever. While the hundreds of Steve Dahls working as programming directors stuck with ugly AOR bands, the Boston quintet had done their part to popularize carousel keyboards, blocky rhythms, and splashes of controlled guitar anarchy, as well as the affected vocals beloved by Anglophiles who regarded Roxy Music and Bowie as the church of man love. Exploiting the possibilities of FM radio, 1978’s The Cars and 1980’s Panorama offered songs as gleaming and formidable as a new Impala; hell, song titles like “Moving in Stereo” could’ve been taglines for Impala ads.
In that pre-MTV era, the Cars were an ideal first vehicle—fleet and meaningless, sure, in Robert Christgau’s ambivalent judgment, but also educational, for their meaningless was the point. Remember: This was a time when Styx had to doll up romantic banalities with elephantine concepts like Kilroy Was Here. By contrast, singer-guitarist Ric Ocasek wrote hooky songs about girls on hoods: dumb but not stupid, sexist but not offensive. They were touring vets whose stunted idea of female sexuality—and men’s, too—resonated with their teenaged fans. Ensuring their popularity, the Cars bridged rock’s swelling boomer gerontocracy and the kids besotted with power pop. Those harmonies? A cyborgian distortion of 10cc and the Eagles. Elliot Easton’s riffs? The Edgar Winter Group might’ve played them.
Thanks, again, to Rhino, fans can enjoy Shake It Up and 1984’s blockbuster Heartbeat City baited with demos and single remixes. For audiophiles, owning these uneven albums in crisper mixes than the boxy sound of the original CD releases will give them a sense of how the Cars moved in stereo; fans can follow how the band became pop stars with “Shake It Up” and Heartbeat City’s “Drive,” sung by bassist Benjamin Orr, often mistaken for Ocasek despite the prettier voice.
Given the stature of, say, “Just What I Needed” and “Let’s Go” on album rock and oldies radio, it’s still a surprise to learn that the title track of Shake It Up became the Cars’ first top-10 hit in America, in early 1982. But not much else took (imagine a half-dozen variants on the debut’s “Don’t Cha Stop”) until, bizarrely, the ballad “I’m Not the One” appeared in remixed form on 1985’s Greatest Hits, and as a single. Shimmying Stone Age drum machines and Elliot Easton’s wistful sigh of a guitar bend, “I’m Not the One” is a study in paradox: Romantic melody and harmonies foil Ocasek’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”-style declarations and pinched delivery. The remainder of Shake It Up has the aura of contract fulfillment, a recovery of commercial momentum after the relative failure of 1980’s Panorama—a worthwhile follow-up to 1979’s Candy-O and the eponymous debut, and one of the steeliest albums ever to make the top 10. Shake It Up’s “A Dream Away” survives as a reminder of what was.
Between these two albums, though, Ocasek released Beatitude, a crucial link between his day job and the more outré bands he produced. It deserves a listen for “Jimmy Jimmy,” a worried valentine to a teenager in the throes of sexual frustration and sexual confusion. Unreliant on curt intimations of un-weird sins, Ocasek’s lyrics for once tell a story. Drum machines thud. Synthesizers imitate the rattle of a foul industrial wind—the influence of Ocasek clients Suicide. Ocasek uses irony for poignancy: The more detached his performance, the more moving the scenario. He allows himself to use “We’re all in this together” as a refrain; coming from Ric fucking Ocasek, this is like hearing “God bless you and keep you” from Donald Trump.
A promising dead end, “Jimmy Jimmy” influenced Heartbeat City insofar as it showed how to strip a song to its chassis. Ocasek and Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the latter applying the lacquered reproductions learned with Def Leppard’s Pyromania, did similar transformations. “The Cars” ceased to exist except as perfect sounds pounded out of Greg Hawkes’ Fairlight keyboard (David Robinson admitted he did little live drumming). The result is as subtle as a gas fire and as loud a thermonuclear explosion. A considerable hit that rode the top 10 for months in 1984, Heartbeat City is often forgotten as one of the year’s pop music touchstones. Like Billy Ocean’s Suddenly and the Pointer Sisters’ Break Out, it was a mini-Thriller: five singles, including three top 15s, all of which, to use industry palaver, dominated all the markets, especially MTV, where Ocasek’s gaunt ice-packed face joined the iconography of the era as surely as David Lee Roth’s mugging and Cyndi Lauper’s dancing.
The moment when seemingly everyone in sixth grade saw the same videos had a marked effect on pop. Thanks to Thriller, record companies bled albums dry; thanks to MTV, the songs turned into aural accompaniment to videos, which made those songs flashier and hookier than anything in a generation. The rat-tat-tat keyboard hook of “You Might Think” complemented its animated antics, MTV’s first Video of the Year winner: Ocasek riding a jackhammer on model Susan Gallagher’s teeth, turning into a fly, into King Kong. Well, it was amusing for anyone who was 10. For “Magic,” dependent on Orr’s ethereal multi-tracked harmonies, Ocasek walked on pool water so shiny that David Hockney’s reproductions look like bogs. Andy Warhol made a cameo in “Hello Again.”
Chic and as chewy as nougat, the Orr showcase “Drive,” a rewrite of “I’m Not the One,” became the Cars’ biggest hit; the Live Aid organizers used it to soundtrack footage of starving Ethiopian children, in a move that the archangel Gabriel will explain on the Day of Judgment. The title track inexplicably appeared on cassette and CD versions of the 1985 comp. As for the rest of Heartbeat City, return to the phrase “bled dry.” Discrete touches matter. “I Refuse,” for example, is reliant on Orr-Ocasek call-and-response vocals; “It’s Not the Night” boasts an unwelcome AOR rhythm-guitar chug. Better to regard Heartbeat City as a Lange palimpsest on which listeners can read the traces of subsequent productions. The massed “Hello”s that cold-open “Hello Again”? A first draft of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and the Corrs’ “Breathless.”
Like Hall and Oates, the Cars barely made it past the first Reagan term—no one bought 1987’s Nice Price-rack perennial Door to Door. Better to end with a marvelous example of fleet meaninglessness: “Tonight She Comes,” their last top 10, recorded for the 1985 comp and included on the Heartbeat City reissue. Easton, for the most part cowed and quashed on the last album, unleashes a series of whammy-bar dives and soars that, set against Hawkes’ pastel synth interjections, a playful Ocasek vocal, and Orr-acular harmonies, demonstrated the salience of noise-annoys: A splatter looks great against a sparkling clean kitchen floor.
Other than a solo hit single apiece for Ocasek and Orr in 1986 and 1987, that was that for the Cars; it’s if humankind could no longer bear so much precision. Ocasek would pack up his toys and produce the likes of Weezer, whose own adolescent fantasies were, shall we say, more inchoate than the ones Ocasek chose to share. Skip Shake It Up and Heartbeat City and you won’t miss much if you own the greatest hits, but students of pop understand: Those who don’t know their history are condemned to choke on the exhaust fumes of progress—or regression. It was hard to tell where the Cars stood.


The Queens band Wives channel the bygone squalor of NYC’s Y2K rock renaissance.

So Removed

Had they emerged 15 years ago, it’s easy to imagine the Queens band WIVES getting scooped up by RCA in the post-Strokes feeding frenzy and lingering on the fringes of the New York Y2K rock renaissance just long enough to collect a few saucy backstage anecdotes about Albert Hammond Jr. to share in Meet Me in the Bathroom. But seeing as the infrastructure to hype up post-punky garage bands has all but disappeared in 2019, this quartet are free to be as weird and wired as they want to be. By channelling the locomotive rumble of the Velvet Underground, the menacing, bass-driven pulse of the Fall, and the surrealistic musings of the Pixies, WIVES eagerly hitch themselves to a long lineage of anti-social record-collector rock.
But more than any particular band, their debut evokes a bygone era when underground New York City rock bands couldn’t help but reflect their seedy surroundings (back when there were still seedy surroundings to reflect). At a time when so much of the music we engage with is grappling—whether overtly or implicitly—with political turmoil and mental health, So Removed feels, well, so removed from the current conversation. Instead, WIVES coolly roam a subterranean nocturnal netherworld of their own design.
WIVES guitarist Andrew Bailey is also a founding member of dream-pop phenoms DIIV, but any connection between the two outfits ends there. Fitting for a group that formed because one of its members had some leftover time at his practice space, WIVES conceal an improvisational jam-band soul in a punk band’s body—though in their case, the jamming is verbal. On the opening “Waving Past Nirvana,” singer/guitarist James Beach rifles through a series of free-associative internal rhymes and open-ended kickers (“And your uncle, he wears a dress/With a shotgun and some meth/And no teeth where he peeks in his mirror to speak in tongues”) sounding like Black Francis after a CBD-oil massage.
Beach’s musings are the focal point of every WIVES song, but his presence isn’t always enough to invigorate the album’s more even-keeled tracks, like the Stonesy rocker “Servants” or “Why Is Life,” which recalls post-reunion Pixies. But Beach can deliver the hooks when he tries: “The 20 Teens” relocates the E Street Band to the corner of Lexington and 125, while the glam racket of “Hideaway” yields the album’s most quotable chorus (“Don’t you sweat it girl/You’ll regret it, girl/You’re doing all the cocaine in the world”). In fact, there’s enough evidence here to suggest here that WIVES’ true calling is to shake off the agitated post-punk posture and embrace their inner Marc Bolan: On the space-bound ballad “The Future Is a Drag,” they bow out with a rusted-out “Metal Guru” to call their own. “We blew it, just for kicks,” Beach sings as the planet around him crumbles, but he doesn’t sound too bummed—because this song is his first-class ticket from the gutter to the stars.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Seventh album from Dan Bejar encapsulates and elevates the best of his back catalog, serving as a potent reminder that the intelligence of his songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

Destroyer's Rubies

Those of you who keep abreast of online rumor-mongering might be surprised to find that the rating at the top of this page is a few points shy of a 10.0. No sooner had Destroyer's Rubies leaked to internet file-trading services than rumors (credited, as these things always are, to "reliable sources") began to spread that the album was to receive a perfect score from this publication. It wasn't until I actually sat down and gave Destroyer's Rubies a few good listens that the aptness of such a rumor really hit me: The album is structurally complex, thematically dense, and labyrinthine in its self-referentiality. Dan Bejar's vocals are, like many of his indie contemporaries, yelpy and dramatic, and many of his lyrics seem preordained to serve as mp3 blog headers. In other words, the qualities that once made Destroyer albums so "difficult" make Destroyer's Rubies a perfect record for this critical moment.
Writing about Destroyer has proven to be, to borrow a quote from Bejar himself, "a playground for fun." Destroyer reviews have an unfortunate tendency to read like essays written for college seminars. Bejar's writing seems to lend itself particularly well to analysis as a "text," often resulting in reviews that focus exclusively on the referentiality of his lyrics. But, while listening to Destroyer's Rubies, I think many writers-- myself included-- have been missing the point. At its core, Destroyer is an almost unfashionably conventional (or, as Bejar would say, "classical") project. Bejar writes well-crafted pop/rock songs that, for all their lyrical complexity, tend to be about people (usually girls) and places he knows. The obtuse character of Bejar's lyrics strikes me not as a Waste Land-esque shot at epic intertextuality, but rather a simple refusal to write things that will make sense to everybody. If more singer/songwriters wrote lyrics without stopping to explain every single reference, or reducing their thoughts to poetic-sounding generalities, Bejar's lyrics might not seem so impenetrable.
Yet, while some have been busy puzzling out every reference in every Destroyer song, Bejar has been quietly and consistently honing his craft, putting out albums that are uniformly strong but thoroughly unique in their musical sensibilities. Though 2001's Streethawk: A Seduction stands as his most concise and catchy record, 2002's much-maligned This Night was a triumph in its own right. With more-reverb-than-guitar guitars, more-fill-than-drumbeat drumbeats, and choruses that mostly consisted of "ba ba ba" or "la la la," Bejar recast musical excess as the core and foundation of a surprisingly solid rock album. With 2004's Your Blues, he dabbled in flamboyantly theatrical vocals and canned MIDI instruments, committing two of the very few aesthetic crimes that might have effectively dismantled the substantial buzz that was building around Destroyer.
Which brings us to Destroyer's Rubies, Bejar's seventh, and best, full-length as Destroyer. The album's nearly 10-minute self-titled opening track makes clear that whatever Bejar may have lost in terms of precision he has made up in versatility. Structurally, "Rubies" is remarkably sophisticated, cycling through several mini-verses but never congealing into any standard song form. Built around a few simple themes, "Rubies" covers a great deal of ground both musically and emotionally as Bejar's characteristically serpentine melody carries him through careening guitar hooks, military snare drum fills, and a strikingly spare acoustic guitar finale. The endlessly catchy "Painter in Your Pocket" opens with a similarly stark acoustic guitar intro, then unexpectedly builds up more bounce and swing than any Destroyer song to date. By the time the song reaches its final chorus, it has attained a blissful, sing-songy energy that hasn't really graced any Destroyer record since Streethawk.
The success of epic songs like "Rubies" and "Painter in Your Pocket" owes a great deal to Bejar's development as a singer. While Streethawk is considered by most fans to be the best Destroyer record, Bejar's vocal performance seems stifled and flat in comparison to Destroyer's Rubies. On Your Blues, Bejar's substantial growth as a vocalist was more or less entirely obscured by the record's synthetic accompaniment. But over the course of Destroyer's Rubies, Bejar coos, hisses, and snarls with uncharacteristic confidence. He's always had a knack for unique phrasing in his melodies, and his newfound expressive range greatly enhances their impact.
Unfortunately, the album does falter a bit toward its end. "A Dangerous Woman Up to a Point" substantially outstays its welcome, ultimately coming across like a half-assed rehash of "Looter's Follies". "Priest's Knees" is sorely lacking in melody, and probably could have been omitted altogether. The album's closing track, "Sick Priest Learns to Last Forever", pushes the bar-band-from-hell aesthetic a bit too far, and winds up living up to its name in a rather unflattering manner. Given the generally high quality of the songs on Destroyer's Rubies, these bouts of sloppiness come off as particularly frustrating. But while Destroyer's Rubies is by no means a flawless record, its most glaring flaws are for the most part mercifully self-contained. Encapsulating and elevating the best of Destroyer's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies serves as a potent reminder that the intelligence of Bejar's songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.


On its fourth album, the Oakland duo uses disco-fueled dance grooves and gently psychedelic atmospheres as vehicles for introspection.

Macro

A solid groove can be a gateway to the sublime. When the rhythm section locks in just right, it triggers a profound physiological response: As your hips move and head bobs, cortisol levels drop, replaced with a blissful rush of dopamine. Time may start to lose its shape, marked only by the throb of a kick or tick of a hi-hat. Songs throughout the ages have spoken to the ecstasy of getting lost in music, celebrating the ways that dancing can make one’s troubles vanish and wipe the emotional slate clean.
Brijean Murphy understands this transformative power. She’s long been an in-demand live and session percussionist, bolstering the pulse of artists like Mitski, Toro y Moi, Poolside, and U.S. Girls. After years of playing for hire, Murphy realized that the freelance life was losing its sustainability. With the encouragement of friends and her partner, multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Stuart, she began recording her own songs. Since 2018, the duo of Murphy and Stuart (operating under Murphy’s first name, à la Sade), has been making warm, lightly psychedelic dance music that weaves together bits of tropicália, Latin jazz, house, disco, and dream pop, placing emphasis on Murphy’s command of undulating rhythms. Macro, their fourth and most ambitious album, is a seductive invitation to boogie on the astral plane.
Brijean’s debut, 2018’s Walkie Talkie, was set deep in the tropics, but they’ve never stayed in one place for long. On each successive release the duo has sharpened its pop instincts, adding instruments and collaborators, and widening its scope beyond easy genre tags. Macro’s swooning arrangements bloom and bend, revealing a band comfortable with experimenting within the boundaries of a certain sound. The Vancouver bounce of “Counting Sheep” morphs into stoned lounge music with the addition of a syncopated triangle. A sound collage briefly interrupts the ’60s mod swing of “Bang Bang Boom,” setting up the swirling psych of the song’s jammy coda. They’ve maintained a mimosa-and-CBD-gummy chill that gently nods at the sun-drunk, day-glo jams Murphy’s collaborators in Poolside make, but Brijean’s work has more depth. Even at their most billowing, these songs maintain a slight edge, an understanding that it’s easier to get to a place of cathartic release when your muscles are already tense.
Twenty-five seconds into “Euphoric Avenue,” Murphy coos a sincere concern: “All I know is time moves much too fast.” Lightly picked guitar, synthesized strings, and ringing chimes run together as her words descend, leaving a vapor trail of reverb in their wake. Such a definitive, almost anxious phrase seems at odds with the pleasant instrumental fog that surrounds it, but as soon as Murphy intones the word “fast,” a waltzing bossa nova drum beat snaps to life, bongos rippling behind it. On “Breathe,” a plea for slowing down, Murphy asserts that she wants “to do more things that don’t take currency.” Her silvery voice uncurls over the lush but jittery breakbeat soundscape; the song is governed by an existential tug between ecstatic abandon and the looming dread of waking up the same as you ever were.
“Workin’ On It,” Macro’s first single and arguable centerpiece, is giddy, iridescent roller disco. The classic hallmarks are there: Stuart plays a walking bassline, open hi-hats accent the upbeats, and tension builds to the occasional, emphatic “woo!” You’d expect a song like this to be titled “Work It Out” or some similarly sweaty encouragement. But strange touches like Murphy’s dry, upfront vocals and the textured delay radiating from the title phrase, give the song a more interior feeling. When Murphy sings about her desire for “depth and complexity,” the infectious groove feels like an invitation to get lost in self-discovery. You’re made to feel it all; your shaking legs, beating heart, and swimming thoughts are all part of the same dance.


For their first album of original productions, the second-wave drag-and-drop duo ropes in over 20 collaborators, including Class Actress, A.C. Newman, Hooray For Earth, Kleenex Girl Wonder, and Cadence Weapon.

FEAT

If second-wave drag-and-droppers the Hood Internet ever offered anything, it was that, in the wake of Girl Talk, their mashups were simple and digestible. At just two or three artists per track, the duo allowed a good idea to breathe and flourish, leading to some genuine moments of inspiration. FEAT, their first album of original productions, ropes in over 20 collaborators, and it threatens to ignore the very formula which has served the Hood Internet so well. Alas, this Frankenstein does not go on a rogue murder spree, but you almost wish it would-- despite the packed roster, FEAT is almost shockingly hemmed in. Something more messy and all-over-the-place might not have resulted in a better album, but after slogging through the deluge of blandness that is FEAT, it begins to sound at least like a more appealing idea.
There is a war going on within FEAT, but it's probably not one that the Hood Internet wanted. This is an album where guest appearances have seemingly no rhyme or reason, yet, despite that, nothing interesting manages to occur. It's an experience not unlike visiting a supermarket deli on a weekday afternoon-- everyone gets served in a random but orderly fashion and all you want to do is get on with your day. It is a polite, neat album, especially coming from a group that has cut its teeth playing clubs and parties for several years. Every rap verse, for instance, sounds like it could've been recorded in your parents' family room without their minding. Most guests sound bored at worst, and at best like they are just trying to stay out of each other's way.
This is not a mashup album, but sonically it feels fossilized in the same way. It is mostly an indie rap record, but its tones recall the bright, plasticky indie pop still prevalent when the Hood Internet formed a half-decade ago. If Kevin Barnes spent a few hours fiddling around and making rap beats, or if the Blow tried to rekindle their relevancy by capitalizing on the Soundcloud "trap" scene, they might end up with tracks that sound like what we hear on FEAT. "Uzi Water Gun", for instance, is what I imagine a lot of college kids thought the future sounded like after Arular dropped. On "Won't Fuck Us Over" there's even a particularly nonsensical and wretched interpolation of the National's "Mr. November".
Sounding dated isn't a sin in and of itself, though, and anyway it's the least of the Hood Internet's problems at it pertains to FEAT. The main issue here is a distinct and debilitating lack of craft. Whatever skills the duo have at making mashups did not carry over to their original productions, at least not here. "Amateurish" is a phrase that can be used charitably at times, especially if you get the sense that artists are working toward unlocking their own music. But FEAT is amateur in a wholly negative way-- every beat, and thus the album's core, is thin and rudimentary. Tracks like "Won't Fuck Us Over" and "These Things Are Nice" are built around synth-horns that try and nod at Southern rap but instead sound like what you'd come up with in the first five minutes of ever using Logic.
There are a few moments where things sort of click into place, but they happen to be when the floor is ceded to established professionals like Class Actress (the final 90 seconds of "Critical Captions") and A.C. Newman ("One for the Record Books"), a development that is probably not a coincidence. Those happen to be the first two songs, and the rest of the album is a string of dull, droning rapping and unmemorable choruses. Just about the only song that doesn't adhere to a numbing verse-chorus-verse structure is the brittle and "atmospheric" palate cleanser "Exonerated", which is so torturously dreadful that it makes the argument for never speaking of Kid A ever again.
An album of original productions was a logical next step for a group that's been slowly easing its way out of mashup purgatory for years, but FEAT makes it clear that the Hood Internet were not ready. That isn't quite a death knell in theory, but the larger problem is that there's almost nothing on the album that suggests they ever will be. There may be more Hood Internet albums in the future, and if that's so, I guess the best we can hope for is better networking.


After the delicate, warm Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, Bill Callahan returns with a more idiosyncratic record.

Apocalypse

A list of adjectives to describe Bill Callahan's writing and music is a list of contradictions. He's penetrating, he's ironic, he's intimate, he's elusive, he's distant and calcified, he's vulnerable and warm-- it's all there, album to album, song to song, and sometimes line to line. His voice is low and his songs are slow, so it's easy to mistake him for being sad. As a lyricist, he writes meticulously about distance: the distance between people and other people, and between people and themselves. He's a cartographer of broken roads. But more than sadness, his writing represents a stoic quest for understanding in the face of knowing that these gaps usually can't be filled. "There's no truth in you, there's no truth in me," he sang on 2003's *Supper. "*The truth is between."
Apocalypse is his first studio album since 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The contrast between the two is stark. Eagle was a bath of strings, open-air ambience, French horns, and soft, measured drums. It was delicate and planned, it called out warm. Lyrically, the songs were direct and steady admissions of the kinds of sentiments that rise to light after funerals and breakups-- an exercise in what we normally call "vulnerable."
Apocalypse, ostensibly recorded live in the studio with a small band, is idiosyncratic and reluctant. Its narrators chew grass in silence and give you a too-long stare. They have meltdowns in foreign hotel rooms. And they come to us in a sound that is spare and liberated from Eagle's insistence on being gorgeous every single second. It's occasionally distorted, even ugly, a word I wouldn't use to describe almost anything Callahan's done since he recorded as Smog.
One of his most remarkable tricks-- and one he returns to all over Apocalypse-- is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might've scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. "Baby's Breath" speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on "America!" quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: "Well everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention.") A few songs feature, prominently, the flute.
But the feeling of spontaneity is also in Callahan's voice and delivery, which brings out the emotional dimension of the lines in ways the lyric sheet can't. On "One Fine Morning"-- one of two songs to use the album's title-- he sings, "It's all coming back to me now: my apocalypse, my apocalypse." The lyric is literally a realization, but it's the way he sings it that brings the feeling across: Curious and questioning, like he actually figured it out while tape was rolling. On "Universal Applicant", he describes a moment where he shoots a flare gun into the air, and punctuates it with a sound: fffff, pouh-- the flare burning and going off. The music falls silent for a few seconds. It's an aside that anchors the song. Ironically, it's not in the lyric sheet.
All these apparent accidents and asides produce a strange effect: It's like Callahan is alive in the music while it's being documented. It's vital that way, but permeable, like a friend who can tell the same story over and over again with subtle variations and capture their audience each time.
For me, Callahan's albums always return to questions of truth in song. For some people, the acoustic guitar-- when compared to the synthesizer-- is truth. For some, it's a line as unambiguous as "Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come," from 1997's Red Apple Falls. For others, it might be a line like "You always wanted to be the fire part of fire," from 2005's Woke on a Whaleheart-- a crowning example of Callahan at his most profoundly anti-poetic. He sets up alone and sings a lot of lines about feelings that start with the word "I" and doesn't use Auto-Tune, and so it's tempting to think of him as being a truth-teller. But it's more interesting-- and more flattering to him, I think-- to acknowledge the way in which he tries to climb to truth from so many different angles, where he finds footing and where he loses it, and the things he sees along the way.
One of Apocalypse's prettiest and most agreeable songs is called "Riding For the Feeling". It's a slow waltz. Callahan strums an acoustic guitar and sings close to the mic. The drums are brushed and patient. The sound alone tells us it's honest. And yet the scenario presented in the song is so strange: Callahan singing about moving, leaving, disappearing. Callahan singing about being in a hotel room with the television on mute, listening to demo tapes: "My my my apocalypse," he calls it-- the other song where the album's title comes in. "I realize I had said very little about waves or wheels/ Or riding for the feeling/ Riding for the feeling/ Is the fastest way to reach the shore."
The richness, as I hear it, is that the line describes how elusive-- and maybe even impossible-- honesty is. I don't have a clear idea of what "riding for the feeling is," but I wonder if that's the point: it's a journey toward something vague and variable. It's about the distance between how simple things feel when you experience them and how cluttered and gummed-up they come out sounding in song or verse. It's about the distance between something like Eagle's "Jim Cain" and "America!": The healthy-looking guy standing in a field telling you in past tense about his heartbreak and the one barking at you live and uncut from an Australian hotel room. One sounds too close to their feelings to make sense of them, the other sounds too far away to embody them. Which is more honest?
When his first records as Smog started coming out, it would've been easy to situate Callahan in an axis of singer-songwriters who sounded both rooted in American folk traditions but also radically disjointed from them: Dave Berman (of Silver Jews), Cat Power, and Will Oldham (then playing as Palace). Berman has retired, Cat Power has slowed down, and Oldham, like Callahan, has become the kind of musician who only makes sense within the context of himself. Callahan has nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011 but is making the best albums of his career. And despite the superficial changes he makes to his sound or focus, everything he's done ends on similar gestures: a stare, a nod, and the quiet question of whether trying to get to the heart of something is the same thing as actually getting to it.


The krautrock master Hans-Joachim Roedelius continues—at 80!—to experiment across genres, here dipping into trip hop with Gotan Project's Christoph H. Müller. Though it's often as ominously dark as Massive Attack's best work, Imagori is marked by a strict adherence to precision, culminating in works that feel as though they were finely shorn down with an X-Acto knife.

Imagori

Music continues to pour out of krautrock figurehead Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who, at 80, shows no sign of pulling back from his work anytime soon. Still, Imagori comes at a difficult time for him, having recently lost his old sparring partner in Cluster and Harmonia, Dieter Moebius, who passed away in July. It’s unlikely Roedelius would let sentiment cloud his vision—much of his recent output is marked by a strict adherence to precision, culminating in works that feel like they were finely shorn down with an X-Acto knife. Imagori continues in that vein, with Roedelius linking up with Gotan Project member Christoph H. Müller. Over 10 tracks, the pair work around weighty, impenetrable electronics, dispensing with any loose ends and producing an overall sound positively suffocating in its density.
The genesis of Roedelius and Müller’s collaboration lies in a series of concerts undertaken in Paris in 2012, where the pair improvised on stage together. Video footage of the events show the men bathed in stark white light, sharply dressed and fully focussed on the machines at their disposal, including a grand piano. Imagori is less tender than those performances, with the pair retreating into darkness in the studio. There’s a morbidity that eats away at the corners of these tracks, forming an atmosphere not far from the rolling banks of angst that blanketed Massive Attack’s trip hop classic Mezzanine.
Trip hop may seem an odd reference point for Roedelius, especially as it possesses an emotional weight he’s rarely approached in his career. Müller's work in Gotan Project veers far closer to the genre's environs, although this album lands some distance away from his output there. Instead, Imagori finds Roedelius and Müller setting genre ideas in the abstract, linking classical piano embellishments to twists of bass synth reminicent of Mezzanine’s "Risingson" (on "Time Has Come") and letting ripples of piano form an echo back to Protection’s "Heat Miser" (on "Valse Mecanique"). The album contains an overall sketch-like quality, executed from shards of thought—not necessarily a bad thing, but not conducive to producing a work as enveloping as Harmonia’s "Watussi" or Cluster’s "Caramel".
There’s a cameo from Brian Eno buried deep in Imagori, on a track about the process of recording music that's appropriately titled "About Tape". It’s a standout, largely because it forgoes the thickness that encases much of the album, instead working through glassier layers of electronics, plus a half-spoken, half-sung vocal from Eno that adds a welcome measure of eccentricity to an otherwise rather dry record. Its nadir comes on "The Question", where a Kraftwerk-like robo-voice peers from its slowly shifting groove—an idea that feels a little too rote for someone of Roedelius’ stature. Imagori is perfectly serviceable as a piece of background noise, but it doesn’t work in the multifaceted way that Cluster and Harmonia albums can, where they either prick the attention or provide a soundtrack to other things going on. This just drifts along in its immaculately chiseled way.


In a shocking turn, the Flaming Lips offer their most audacious undertaking since Zaireeka, an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic.

Embryonic

Over its seven-year gestation, Christmas on Mars had come to represent everything wonderful and frustrating about the Flaming Lips. As much as we loved the idea of Wayne Coyne producing a sci-fi flick in his backyard with hardware-store materials, the Lips' musical production became less frequent-- and less consistent-- during its making. 2006's scattershot At War With the Mystics tried to cut down on the lightness of their two previous landmark albums but was largely overwhelmed by cloying singles ("The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", "Free Radicals") that felt like little more than excuses to shoot off their confetti cannons. The trio's desire to produce crowd-pleasing spectacle-- whether on stage or on film-- had seemingly taken priority over their desire to be a band.
But when Christmas on Mars finally surfaced in late 2008, it came with a peace offering to fans longing for a return to the band's bizarro roots: a full-length soundtrack of unsettling instrumentals that conjured the film's icy desolation. Now, rather than close a chapter on this seven-year saga, the Flaming Lips have taken a dramatic left turn with their Mystics follow-up-- the double album Embryonic is the band's most audacious undertaking since 1997's Zaireeka. The sprawling 70-minute marathon ruminates on themes of madness, isolation, and hallucinogenic horror, translating them into an unrelentingly paranoid, static-soaked acid-rock epic. Embryonic actually feels like it was produced in one of Christmas on Mars' hermetic space-station labs, with squelching equipment that takes a few moments to warm up and frequent instructional studio chatter that gives the impression of a subject under observation.
There's a raw directness to Embryonic that's been largely absent from Lips records since the mid-90s. For the first time in years, they've made an album that actually sounds like a band playing live together in a small room. In light of Mystics' overly processed, grab-bag quality, the holistic, audio-vérité approach on display here is remarkable-- the record is extremely dense, initially overwhelming, but unusually rewarding upon repeat listens. Like the double-disc, high-concept rock epics of yore (think Physical Graffiti or Bitches Brew), it captures them at their most sprawling and ambitious, boldly pushing themselves towards more adventurous horizons.
Musically, too, Embryonic leans heavily on the Lips' formative 60s/70s psych-rock influence (like In a Priest Driven Ambulance's "Take Meta Mars" before it, Embryonic's formidable opener "Convinced of the Hex" grooves heavily on Can's "Mushroom"), but never before has the band recorded an album so unwaveringly sinister, or so devoid of pop-song levity. (Hell, even Zaireeka had "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now".) Wayne Coyne no longer assumes the role of the endearingly creaky, puppet-toting crooner. Instead, he's a world-weary fatalist describing scenes of environmental holocaust in a chillingly unaffected monotone on the rampaging "See the Leaves". Or he's a cult leader deviously summoning his minions on "Sagittarius Silver Announcement", before leading them to a fiery demise on the monstrous, stoner-metal onslaught of "Worm Mountain" (featuring fuzzbox-stomping assistance from MGMT). The atmosphere of dread reaches its fever pitch in the album's spellbinding seven-minute centerpiece "Powerless", where, over top a coolly ominous bass riff, Coyne's nervous verses yield to a Syd Barrett-on-Mandrax guitar freak out.
There are brief respites amid Embryonic's thundering eruptions, but even these carry a calm-before-the-storm unease: On paper, "I Can Be a Frog" reads like another of Coyne's animal-populated nursery rhymes, but the foreboding orchestration and giggly background squawks (courtesy of Karen O) render it too creepy for kindergarten. And the vocoderized lullaby "The Impulse" serves only to make the screaming intro to strobe-lit freakout "Silver Trembling Hands" all the more startling. True to an album named Embryonic, there are tracks that aren't fully formed (namely, the drunken Bonham stumble of "Your Bats" or the free-psych splatter of "Scorpio Swords"), but even in its slighter moments, Embryonic exhibits a renewed sense of fearless freakery for a band who so recently threatened to lapse into stagy routine.
"I wish I could go back, go back in time," Coyne sings on "Evil", Embryonic's most conventionally Lips-ian ballad, but the nostalgic impulse is immediately undercut by the admission that "no one really ever can." Perhaps Coyne is anticipating the confused reactions of recent Lips converts expecting more life-affirming anthems along the lines of "Do You Realize??" or "Race for the Prize". But given the band's history, Embryonic's sea change arrives right on time to herald a new Flaming Lips for a new decade. Back in 1990, In a Priest Driven Ambulance signaled the Lips' transformation from garage-punk misfits into a splendorous, kaleidoscopic rock outfit; 1999's The Soft Bulletin reconfigured them once again into a sophisticated, sincere symphonic-pop troupe bestowed with increasing commercial acclaim and street-naming ceremonies in their honor. We can only hope that, as we enter the 2010s, Embryonic portends yet another new phase for the Flaming Lips-- one that's equally as improbable and rewarding as the ones that have preceded it.


On her debut album, 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter Ella Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde, has fashioned herself as a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Pure Heroine is a collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop.

Pure Heroine

In the current pop firmament, Lorde is a black hole. That’s the message you get from the defiantly low-concept video for her single “Tennis Court,” in which the 16 year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter (real name: Ella Yelich-O’Connor) stares right at you—her taunting, onyx pupils burning a hole through the computer screen—for a hypnotic and somewhat uncomfortable three and a half minutes. (I’'s an anti-video in the tradition of the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” and, fittingly, her moody cover of “Swingin Party” has been making the rounds.) In a moment when too many new artists seem afraid to offend or go off script, Lorde is an exciting contradiction: an aspiring pop star who’s had a major-label development deal since age 12 (she was discovered at a local talent show) but has retained a seemingly genuine iconoclastic streak. The other day she spoke too truthfully in an interview and accidentally insulted Taylor Swift; Katy Perry asked her to tour with her and—politely but firmly—she said no. With the global smash “Royals” (the first song in 17 years by a female solo artist to top Billboard’s alternative chart) she made her name by sneering at everything else on the radio (“We don’t care/We aren’t caught up in your love affair”). The message is clear: Lorde has introduced herself to the world as someone who gives very few fucks. Twenty seconds into her debut album, Pure Heroine, she’s already announced that she’s bored. Twice.
Lorde’s voice occasionally takes the form of a wide-eyed, Feist-y coo, but much more often it’s a low, clenched growl; like everything else about her, it has an air of “wise beyond her years.” “I didn’t start writing songs until I was 13,” she said in a recent interview, almost apologetically, but then quickly accounted for the lost time, “Before that, I wrote short fiction.” Now that she’s a wizened 16, Lorde, who wrote all the lyrics on Pure Heroine and co-wrote the music, has fashioned herself a correspondent on the front lines of elegantly wasted post-digital youth culture and working-class suburban boredom. Her songs capture the drama and debauched regality of being a teenager: Their subjects include online gossip, empty bottles, queen bees, and young people who already feel old. “I’m kinda older than I was when I rebelled without a care,” she sings with a languid sigh on the bleacher-stomping single “Team.” Or is she saying “revelled”? It’s hard to tell the two words apart, and maybe that’s the point.
That carefully cultivated ambiguity is precisely what makes Pure Heroine work. “Royals” walks the line between rebelling against and reveling in the trappings of power, luxury, and excess of contemporary pop. The arrangement is economical—just a few finger snaps and a barely-there beat caught in the gravitational pull of Lorde’s charisma—but overall, “Royals” gets to have it both ways. Lorde says she wrote it thinking of how she and her friends would listen to A$AP Rocky rapping about couture while they rummaged through a particular friends’ well-stocked kitchen, too broke (or too lazy) to spend money on dinner. And that’s a crucial subtlety: “Royals” doesn’t critique hip-hop culture so much as express a disconnect that many of the people who love it (Lorde included: “I’ve always listened to a lot of rap”) feel when listening to songs about luxury culture. Whether she’s singing about her schoolyard peers or the world’s most famous pop stars (who, as she admits on “Tennis Court,” have just become her new peers) Lorde achieves a tricky balancing act of exposing irony and even hypocrisy without coming off as preachy or moralistic, simply because—thanks to Pure Heroine’s constant use of the royal “we”—she’s usually implicating herself in the very contradictions she’s exposing.
More fully realized than her debut EP, The Love Club, Pure Heroine is a fluid collection of throbbing, moody, menacingly anesthetized pop that sometimes sounds like St. Vincent’s “Champagne Year” mixed into whatever’s in the punch at Abel Tesfaye’s house. Still, a lot of its best production ideas and lyrical motifs repeat in such a way that it sometimes feels like you’re listening to 10 versions of the same song. Current single “Team” has a memorable chorus, but most of its lyrics (“I’m kinda over being told to throw my hands up in the air”; “We live in cities you never see on screen/Not very pretty but we sure know how to run things”) feel like scrapped lines from the “Royals” session. “Glory and Gore,” too, rehashes the same bloody/regal/teen imagery, but its greater crime is the way Lorde overstuffs the verses with so many words that it weighs down the melody. And yet, there’s something endearing about Pure Heroine’s more unfiltered impulses—though she’s had a record contract nearly a quarter of her life, you get the sense Lorde is still being given a lot of room to breathe and hone her own particular songwriting voice. These tracks all feel like they were written by a very precocious teenager, and that’s a big part of their charm.
Pure Heroine is a decidedly post-internet album. Some of that has to do with its genre-agnostic blend of influences (in her live show Lorde has been covering both Kanye West and the Replacements, and her music is being marketed to a generation of people who in no way find that weird), but it’s mostly a comment on a certain kind of sensibility of self-presentation in the characters it deftly depicts. “It’s a new art form, showing people how little we care,” she boasts on “Tennis Court.” As the song goes on, though, cracks in the facade begin to show. “We’re so happy even when we’re smiling out of fear,” she admits, but at least “it looks alright in the pictures.”
What’s fueling Pure Heroine is a tension between the tweet and the truth, the cumulative effect of the little digital fictions we craft for ourselves daily. But “Ribs” is the best song that this very promising songwriter has written so far because—even at the risk of seeming uncool— it gradually allows the walls to crumble. “It feels so crazy, getting old,” she sighs at the beginning, in a smoky pantomime of maturity and detachment—sort of like a sepia-toned Instagram filter applied to her voice. Soon, though, the beat ramps up and the song turns into an impressionistic swirl of memories: “The drink you spilled all over me/‘Lover’s Spit’ left on repeat.” She gets so caught up in the feeling that she lets herself blurt something truly vulnerable: “I’ve never felt more alone/It feels so scary, getting old.” Lorde’s music is quietly wise to a particular modern irony: Beneath every #DGAF there’s a person who secretly gives a fuck about something, and behind every anti-pop song there’s a singer who—just like everybody else—knows what it’s like to feel happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.


The latest from these funk/soul throwbacks further affirms the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: I Learned the Hard Way

I Learned the Hard Way

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are the rarest type of retro/revivalist band-- the type that transcends its devotion to a style of music associated with a distant past. They make soul music in the classic sense, the kind of tracks that might have been laid down in Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Chicago in the late 1960s and early 70s. But there's more to their sound than a nostalgia trip-- it's an affirmation of the validity of working in specific styles, even ones most people stopped exploring decades ago.
The Dap-Kings succeed through attention to detail. While a lot of music makes aesthetic or stylistic nods to 60s, almost none of it actually captures the sonic character of the era. But on each of their albums, Jones and her collaborators, led by Gabriel Roth, have done just that. And it doesn't just come down to the production and placement of the microphones. Jones deserves the most credit, simply for having an amazing voice that she understands how to wield effectively. Her impeccable sense of delivery balances power with nuance, varying her forcefulness for maximum impact. The songs give her plenty of room to move, too-- if these tracks weren't every bit as good as the ones that inspired them, all of the performance and production acumen in the world couldn't save them. As rote as it sounds, "Better Things" and "The Game Gets Old", among others on I Learned the Hard Way, would likely be classics today if they'd been released alongside the music that influenced them. In fact, they may yet become classics to a smaller, more niche audience today.
"Better Things" in particular is incredible, a brilliant kiss-off in which Jones reveals layers of anguish beneath her anger, while the band supports her with a heavy Muscle Shoals-style groove. It's striking to listen back to the very basic pastiche of the band's first album and see how far they've come, exploring different corners of funk and soul, experimenting with different meters and very complex arrangements. The trumpet in the intro to "Better Things" plays around with the vocal melody with a jazzy slyness that hits even harder when Jones follows it up by taking it over. Elsewhere, the horns and stormy backing track on "Money" save it from being a pretty typical soul rumination on being down and out, while Jones grabs the surfish guitar and bounding beat of "She Ain't a Child No More" and runs with them, delivering a commanding vocal to which her bandmates dutifully respond.
It all comes together to make an album that stands up as a varied and well-sequenced work, and as a collection of songs you can scatter through a shuffle and dig just as deeply. It's nice to hear the band really stretch themselves and develop the drama and tumult of songs like "I'll Still Be True" and "The Game Gets Old", which you can really hear the band putting its creative all the way into. This record hardly needs to be recommended to soul fans, but even if revisitations of older music styles aren't usually your thing, I Learned the Hard Way is worth digging up.


The Los Angeles singer’s whole songwriting vibe is magnetic, blending future pop, bedroom pop, and funk into a new and colorful swirl.

I’m Allergic to Dogs!

Remi Wolf has a bright, gamboling sensibility that extends from her music to her record titles to the way she presents herself and her work. Her ecstatic single “Woo!”, from her new five-song EP I’m Allergic To Dogs, is an “explosion of my feelings on LOVE,” she told Clash magazine. And Wolf has a whole cache of it judging not only by her joyful, sultry, playful new record but by her whole thing. It was clear even from her appearance on American Idol at 17, where she sang “Let’s Get It On” to Jennifer Lopez, Keith Urban, and Harry Connick Jr. not long after pivoting from training to be an Olympic skier. Wolf shied from the Idol-type path, though her expressive soul chops could certainly have carried her all the way.
Wolf exists at the center of a Venn diagram that includes the post-PC Music hyper pop contingent (like Rina Sawayama and Wolf’s friend and collaborator Alice Longyu Gao), feel-good, “lo-fi,” “bedroom” pop artists (like JAWNY and Still Woozy, also friends of Wolf’s) and the current wave of funk and disco (like Ric Wilson and Ian Isiah). Her music clicks all the trend boxes, yet it feels super fresh. There’s a lot going on in the pop world right now, but Wolf has managed to nail all the fashionable references without losing her own sound. She’s cited Chaka Khan, Daryl Hall, David Byrne, Michael McDonald, John Mayer, and Erykah Badu as influences. There’s some reggae in here, too, on “Hello Hello Hello,” about “a certified gambler” who’s playing with Wolf’s feelings from the opposite coast, and the celebratory nature of her music at times recalls early ’90s dance hits from Deee-Lite and C+C Music Factory. Wolf’s music begs for remixes (Free Nationals’ “Photo ID” one is great) and the closeness of a club or a barbecue.
Wolf’s puckish vibe is highly endearing. I’m Allergic To Dogs is her proper debut EP on Island, and a follow-up of sorts to her first EP, You’re A Dog!, which came out last September. (Wolf is in fact allergic to dogs, and yet she recently bought a puppy.) In the EP’s opening track, “Down The Line,” she references OutKast’s “Hey Ya” and at one point there’s a puppy bark and a baby’s squeal. She recently told The Line of Best Fit she’s been inspired by the silliness and absurdity of kids’ shows—there’s something about the freedom of childhood-informed expression that gives Wolf’s music its unhampered feel. She has a sense of humor about herself.
The playfulness pairs well with the intrinsic sexiness of Wolf’s rhythms, even if her lyrics sometimes border on nonsensical. She annotated the Genius page of her own record to note You’re A Dog! was created in various bedrooms across California, all while she was “sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, and most times angry.” I love this summation because she speaks to the way this kind of punchy pop music can encapsulate a whole range of emotions while remaining what it is: really fun. It is possible to make a banging, exuberant pop song while full of rage or disappointment. “You’re so mean/But I can’t dream without you,” Wolf sings, her vocals pitched-up, on “Photo ID,” which was co-written with Solange collaborator John Carroll Kirby. The song snaps, zips, and fizzes with funk verve. It makes me wanna shake my ass. The whole EP does.
The energy never really dips—it’s lowest on “Hello Hello Hello,” perhaps the EP’s weakest moment, but not by far. And although it’s cool when Wolf distorts her voice, it’s much better when you can hear the depth of her vocals, the emotion in her voice, like on “Woo!” or “Disco Man,” which is particularly passionate, as she sings about a man who’s “wasted all his money” but has “never been a waste of time,” and can decidedly “kiss [her] hand.” Above all, Wolf’s clear sense of herself is what makes her music really work. You can almost picture her, like a collage artist, going galaxy brain with all her references and kooky found sounds. There’s nothing exactly new happening here, but the deftness with which Wolf wields her voice, and guides what could be a too-chaotic sound into precise pop magic, is remarkable.

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On his solo debut, Ghostface recreated the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits over scythelike RZA beats. It is lean, vulgar, and irresistible.

Ironman

The drums on “The Faster Blade,” the third song from Ghostface Killah’s 1996 debut, Ironman, come from a song called “El Rey y Yo” by the Chilean band Los Ángeles Negros. The lift is direct, uncomplicated; RZA adds some body to the low end, but the pattern is unchanged. The new beat finds its melody, however, in a vibraphone borrowed from the Persuaders’ “Can’t Go No Further and Do No Better,” a plea from one lover to another to work through their problems. “The Faster Blade” strips the sound of its tenderness, repurposing it as a warning: Whatever sweetness remains in the world is about to be swallowed whole.
The mutation suits Raekwon, who raps about locking down the cocaine trade in coastal Georgia, ripping off his Korean suppliers, arranging murders for hire from remote British territories. It’s the sort of pulp crime—meted out in bursts of improvised slang and girded by Five-Percenter moralism—that he and Ghost had perfected on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Rae’s monumental debut from one year prior. But when his verse ends (“All my Spanish niggas love us/We movin’ like Russia, bone crusher/At the flick, stick the usher”), Ghost is nowhere—the song is simply over. Just two tracks later, on “Assassination Day,” RZA’s instrumental is taunting in its sparseness; he, Rae, Inspectah Deck, and Masta Killa trade verses about stalking enemies “like prey” and the devil “poisoning the birth water,” the blurring of lines between literal and metaphysical, criminal codes and animal chaos that are tenets of Ghost’s writing. Yet once again, the headliner is nowhere to be found.
These absences had precedent on Wu-Tang records: Cuban Linx’s “Wisdom Body” is a solo Ghostface song. But where that was a creative decision (Rae, Ghost, and RZA agreed that Ghost’s extended pickup attempt would seem more unnervingly intimate if left alone), these new ones were symptoms of a yawning depression. Between Wu’s 1993 debut and the release of Cuban Linx, Ghost, then in his mid-20s, was losing weight and suffering headaches and blurred vision. By the time he was diagnosed with diabetes, his drinking had gotten so bad that RZA was patching together disparate vocal takes to work around Ghost’s frequent slurring. And in the spring of ‘96, his best friend was arrested for a murder he did not commit. “I couldn’t write to those records,” Ghost told Billboard last year, referring to tracks his collaborators had prepared for him. “I couldn’t come behind that, not feeling how I was feeling.”
Recorded in that fog and against a deadline—the last one he would ever accept from a record company—Ironman captures a Ghostface who is scattered, overflowing with angst, lashing out. Where on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) he wrote concentrated bursts of athletic threats or longer, mostly linear reflections, here his internal logic is scrambled, the syntax shifting, time an afterthought. But this fragmentation is a natural complement to his written and vocal style. Whatever sorrow or delusion bleeds through the mix ends up making the rapper seem like a method actor, whipping himself into such a frenzy that he can convincingly render a world where there is a bag of cash sitting in the trunk of every bait car, an assassin in every vestibule. Over scythelike RZA beats that recall the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, Ghost recreates the New York underworld of his adolescence in impressionistic fits.
The idea for the Blaxploitation riff came from RZA, whose creative whims dictated every Wu release he helmed. Working first from his estate in Ohio, the Abbot played Ghost beats over the phone: Al Green’s God-fearing “Gotta Find a New World” morphed into an impish bounce on opener “Iron Maiden.” Bob James’ “Nautilus,” a staple sample for rap producers dating back to the late ’80s, is made to sound, on “Daytona 500,” as if it’s gasping for its first breaths. The palette is loose and hooky, and it underlines Ghost’s humor. It also lowers the album’s stakes, at least in the early going. If Cuban Linx was a sweeping epic, Ironman is The Mack: lean and vulgar, irresistible all the same.
The New York that Ghost and Rae (and Cappadonna, who receives prime billing and appears on the album cover) imagine is icy and intermittently forgiving. The album came out at the end of October, and its scenes are largely set in winters that are broken up by short trips to the Caribbean or Hawaii, where middle-class drug runners sip “mixed drinks out of broke coconut bowls” and trudge through slush on their way home from JFK. Ghost’s verse on “Motherless Child,” the cleanest distillation of the album’s concerns, crescendos to a rich young dilettante-hustler being killed during a robbery of his $5,000 King Tut necklace; one of his assailants’ puffy Guess outfit might suggest a bulletproof vest underneath, while the other’s Pelle Pelle certainly hides a gun.
Raekwon’s numerous guest appearances do not make him quite the co-star Ghost was on Cuban Linx, but he adapts well to the lighter fare. One of his many gifts as a writer is to pack familiar patterns with so much idiosyncrasy that they feel wholly new. This is true when he’s dispensing straightforward wordplay on the wrong half of a bar (“Slide on these niggas like a fresh pair”), packing layered insults and odd imagery into seemingly overdetermined rhyme schemes (“No, you won’t play me like your lady/Pay me 380, spit it at you like a baby”), or sinking into the beat as if it were quicksand, as he does on “260” when he raps, “We walked in, both of us, looked like terrorists.” Cappadonna appears a comparatively modest five times and might be even more impressive—especially for his turn on “Camay,” where his “heart was racing like the hands on the clock” as he leaves a seduction on a tantalizingly ambiguous note.
But Ghostface is one of the most inimitable writers New York has ever produced. His verses, like the vignettes within them, double back over themselves with plots intersecting or evaporating entirely. Momentary glimpses into his childhood (from “After the Smoke Is Clear”: “They used to push me in shopping carts”) read, initially, as myth. The silliest images, like Kiana’s girlfriend Wanda—the one with a cream Honda and legs like Jane Fonda—are precisely drawn. His understanding of the supreme mathematics short circuits the slot machines at outer-borough racetracks; he inhales smoke on the floor of a steel mill just to exhale it at his enemies. These threads of memory and imagination coil around each other in the text as they do in our brains.
Even when something obvious seems to jut out, it’s quickly qualified with asides—or with plausibly deniable threats. “Poisonous Darts” is a typically breathless pair of verses from Ghost, but transforms in its final five seconds. “My heart is cold like Russia,” he blurts, a line so simple it scans as a real revelation. But he continues: “Got jerked at the Source Awards/Next year, 200 niggas coming with swords.” The picture of the Paramount Theater rushed by medieval warriors with chain mail and opinions about MC Eiht muddles time and context as amusingly as when RZA uses a whole verse, on “Smoke,” to move from Staten Island to the Punic Wars.
That reflex—to smash stories about his own life into a thousand splinters—obscures any hint of real autobiography. But Ghost does not flinch when he sketches other characters. “Wildflower” is wickedly angry, rapped from the perspective of a scorned lover berating his ex. Whether or not you believe it was Ghost’s intent, the song plays with a knowing wink: It becomes a self-portrait of pettiness at some point between the wistful remembrance of the time the speaker “broke your ovary” and when he gets indignant about having introduced you to the films of Robert De Niro. Or take Juanita Cash Hawkins, the woman Ghost introduces, on “Camay,” who’s half-Hawaiian and works at a law firm on Fifth Avenue, “three blocks from the Gucci spot.”
There is a notable exception to his tendency to hide the personal. On the album’s lead single, the Mary J. Blige-assisted “All That I Got Is You,” Ghost’s writing turns completely naturalistic as he recounts growing up with 15 people packed into a three-bedroom apartment, being asked to carry notes that begged for food to neighbors who might not have any, caring for two brothers with muscular dystrophy. On a song that is so sentimental, Ghost’s picture of his mother is surprisingly evenhanded. He remembers her buckling under the weight of his father’s disappearance; he remembers her wiping the crust from his eyes before he left for school. Case workers lurk like undercover cops, or poltergeists.
It’s fitting, given both the uncanny state of commercial music preservation and Ghost’s own crypticism, that the album’s most representative song is not available on DSPs or new pressings, presumably due to sample clearance issues. “The Soul Controller,” Ironman’s original closer, is built around a Force MDs rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But where Cooke’s song elegantly reduces civil rights issues and spiritual reckonings into tidy verses, “The Soul Controller” lurches and sprawls like the paranoia that snaked through the decades following Cooke’s death. “I don't know what’s up there/"In that great big ol’ sky” becomes less mystical, applying instead to the “UFOs” Ghost raps about—“Faces you never seen before” roaming the halls of your buildings, undercovers or out-of-towners. By the song’s parameters, the upper limit on success is you and your friends splitting a house in “the white part of Queens,” while hell is “being watched all day like enemy’s prey.”
The arc of this story is supposed to be: Brilliant artist hits bottom, pours anguish into work, overcomes. Instead, things got worse. The year after Ironman’s release, Ghost’s best friend—the one arrested for murder—would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison. (Grant Williams was paroled in 2019 after serving 23 years of his sentence. Last year, that sentence was vacated following a review of the case that uncovered eyewitness testimony exonerating him.) His diabetes worsened, and he moved to a tiny village in Benin to seek alternative treatment. When he returned to the States, Ghost had to do a bid of his own—four months on Rikers Island for an attempted robbery outside of a club in Manhattan. It was around this time that the FBI started investigating the Wu as a gang whose true purpose was not music, but whatever could conceivably fall under the scope of the RICO Act.
After surviving Rikers and gaining control of his health, Ghostface finally finished his masterpiece, Supreme Clientele, which was released in February 2000—long after it was promised; no deadlines. With that record and a handful of others (2006’s Fishscale and the leaked advance of Bulletproof Wallets chief among them), Ghost’s career seems to reject the notion that the dire circumstances under which Ironman were recorded are necessary for him to write or rap well. Federal agents and the ghosts of friends haunt his later raps, but their evocations feel literary. On Ironman—a record that is mired in, rather than about, this psychological torment—they’re tangible forces to be looked directly in the eye.