Retire for Real: The Trouble with Jay-Z

Jay-Z said this to NYMag's Vulture blog on the subject of his "Death of Autotune" song:

I really just wanted to send a message to rap; I didn’t know it’d be a cultural dispute. I really wanted to have the conversation, like “are we just going to sound like each other? Everyone’s going to sound the same? That’s what we’re gonna do? Don’t ya’ll know this is dangerous? And this is just how rock and roll got pushed from the forefront?” We did this to rock and roll. Everyone was doing the hair-band thing on MTV with the tight pants. They all had the big hair, just different colored tights. It just became about more of a look and a sound than the emotion of the music. And that’s what hip-hop’s becoming. It’s losing the emotion — you can’t have emotion in the robotic voice. I can’t feel anything! And then everyone sounds the same. I really wanted to have the conversation amongst us. And it went outside the culture.

Jay? You can't have it both ways. Blueprint 3--the album you seem to think really broke free of the hip hop pack--would be the most tired thing you've released to date, had you not also released Kingdom Come and American Gangster. And it's not exactly high on emotional expression. Your words and your actions are completely at odds with one another. It's going to take a LOT more than eschewing heavy autotune use in order to breathe life back into hip hop. Maybe you gave a damn about the music contained on BP3, but it certainly didn't sound like it. Sure, "Empire State of Mind" is a pretty good track, but it doesn't sound like anything that couldn't have come out in 2003 (and while we're on the subject, it would have been among the weakest tracks you did release in that year). If you want to keep making music this boring, that's fine. You're way past the Three Classic Album Rule. But please, stop acting like you're here to save us.

Now, if you've read this blog before, you might know a bit about my feelings on the state of hip hop: that it's tired, it's boring, it's just one stop short of dead. Everyone's afraid to try something new, and any feeble attempt to do so gets so chopped up by meddling hands that it ends up a sad neutered excuse for a record. And that's just for the artists who care, which most of them don't seem to. Call me cranky, but I defy you to come up with a compelling argument to the contrary. The best I can do these days seems to be Kid Cudi, and again, that record came out completely lopsided (I still like it a lot more than anything on BP3).

The only silver lining that I could possibly conceive of here is right in line with Jay-Z's rock music/hair metal analogy: the revitalization that rock music saw in the days during and after the hair metal craze was a direct result of said craze; four kids in Forest Hills needed to be bored to death by rock radio before they could bring it back to life as The Ramones (and that's just one example). So here's hoping that Jay can move along the utter stagnation of hip hop to the point that some kid, somewhere, gets fed up and does something completely insane, original, interesting, vital, and fun. Or any of the above. If they're out there and you know it, let me know where I can hear it in the comments.

Jay-Z on DJ Hero, 'D.O.A.,' and His Future Career As a Bar Mitzvah Performer [vulture blog]

I Can't Think of Ten Great Ones Either

You guys know how I like to complain about hip hop all the time, right? How no one makes decent LPs, no one cares about their live show, no one gives a fuck? Well, it really warmed my heart this weekend to see this piece by Free Darko blogger Dr. Lawyer Indian Chief (seriously) on the Straight Bangin blog. It's at once thoughtful and off-the-wall bonkers--in the good way.

Basically, Dr. LIC was asked to make a list of his top ten hip hop records since 2000, and he could only think of about six, so he penned this condemnation of the genre instead. It contains nuggets like:

That black male figurehead has been replaced by a white woman. Jim Jones would rather have Cory Kennedy on his jock than Chuck D at this point. Not exactly sure why this is (is it simple economics that white girls drive the market-->get white dudes to buy stuff/white people = 80% of America = buying public?), but it is. This whole steez has led to pointless Feist-sampling/MIA-jocking/Lady GaGa-collab’ing/KANYE STATING THAT HE KNOWS WHO PETER BJORN AND JOHN AND ANIMAL COLLECTIVE IS SO THAT HIPSTERS ARE LIKE WOW THAT IS SO SURPRISING and other nonsense that has generally resulted in music that sounds like the opposite of The Infamous or Livin’ Proof. Aside from the Lykke Li/Drake collab, which I really dug, rappers’ pursuit of validation of white women has created this super-faux “Pitchfork Media got Pharoahe Monch to play so it’s like the Roxy with Talking Heads and Afrika Bambattaa and Debbie Harry” in one room. Except it isn’t. It fucking sucks.

That's what I'm talking about! He also actually says something negative about Dilla and then backs it up with so much evidence, you can't even get mad, just kind of disappointed in yourself for never realizing it. I'm gonna make you clickthrough for that line, though. And I'm not gonna repeat what he has to say about ?uestlove, but suffice it to say it chilled me to my core. And:

Here’s an interesting experiment: Pull out your Ice Cube and Paris albums from the Bush I presidency and listen to their anti-prez raps. Shit makes waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more sense and is oddly far more topical than any political rap produced in the past ten years. Putting the strange new Obama-era aside for a moment, let’s focus on Bush II era political rap, one of the greatest creative letdowns of our time. I remember reading some article in URB magazine right after 9/11 about how the fuckedupedness of the time would spur a renaissance in political rap. Never happened. Instead groups like dead prez et al. made the hip-hop equivalent of Farenheit 9-11, conspiratorial, jumbled oversimplification with an easily digestible “Fuck Bush” tagline.

Yeah! And he's looking at you too, Jigga:

Jay and Nas became de facto kingz after Biggie died for no real reason other than there was a throne to fill. This was also during the point in their careers that they both started snoozing hard. [...] These days we can’t accept an empty throne, so we have been stepping over each for the past few years trying to give the “crown” to people like Cam’ron, the Game, and Weezy. And seriously, I love Lil’ Wayne, but I once tried to tally the number of instances on The Carter III where dude makes an “I’m the shit”/actual pooping pun, and I lost track. The guy is great, Top 30 all time, sure. But, like I said, let’s have some standards.

Alright I guess I'm just reprinting the post at this point, but you get the idea, there's much more to it and if you care at all about the quality of popular music (hip hop, indie or otherwise) these days, get over there and take a look.

All That Glitters Ain't Shit [straight bangin]
(Thanks for the heads up, Jonathan)

Hack/Genius/Both: Kanye's Breakthrough

Kanye's album 808's and Heartbreak is out this week, and I for one never thought I'd be writing this post. The album does not suck. Kanye West's career trajectory has been anything but promising. After producing almost all the tracks on Jay Z's The Blueprint, one of the greatest hip hop records of all time, and one of the most timeless, his 2004 debut College Dropout was a fun if all-over-the-place collection, lacking focus but bursting at the seams with five-star jamz. Following that up was 2005's Late Registration, co-produced by studio genius Jon Brion. This record, while more cohesive, was nowhere near as strong. That being said, the songs were more fleshed out and at the time I thought they pointed to a more cohesive direction for Kanye. Boy, was I wrong: Graduation dropped in 2007 and had a few excellent tracks (I think "Good Morning" could go on a list for my favorite of all time), but the album as a whole sounded tired and phoned in.

So when it came to light that Kanye's next album, 808's and Heartbreak, would be an Autotune -heavy breakup album, my hopes were not high. Sure, it sounded interesting, but I thought Kanye was gonna blow it. Hard. I held out a miniscule amount of hope that Kanye's take on Autotune would take the tool beyond gimmick to valid studio tool. Someone's got to take this fad and make it worthwhile, right? Well there is good news and bad news about 808's and Heartbreak. Bad news: Kanye's use of Autotune doesn't look like it's broken any ground. Good news: it stands up as a cohesive concept album and a break with the style that seemed so damned tired on Graduation.

The sad state of hip hop is something I've posted about before. Good things happening in the genre seem to get buried in the underground, while sub par performers are hailed as saviors of the form. I think it's great that Lil' Wayne appeared on something like 1,674 songs over the last two years, but if those songs range from boring to grating are they really worth the words that so many critics write about them?

It is the responsibility of artists already in the canon to branch out and try new things. Not all of these experiments are going to work. Some of them are going to be outright failures. But anything is better than more albums that don't stand up to the hype. Kanye's album is not one of my favorites, but here's hoping other producers and emcees of his caliber take his cue and start pushing more boundaries.

808's and Heartbreak stream [kanyeuniversecity.com; you have to dig around but it's there]

Photo courtesy The New York Times

Telegram to Hip Hop

This was going to be a post all about how I'm mad about the state of hip hop. About how hip hop is dead. How its artists are pissing away its potential by not really giving their all, by half assing their records and doing even worse on stage. But somehow (I think Nas had a lot to do with this) "hip hop is dead" came to be code for "long live hip hop," employing in its defense the same subtle bricolage that makes the genre so powerful. So fine, my hip hop is dead post has been derailed. I guess that's a good sign. But hip hop is far from thriving. To use a completely unfair and perhaps even irresponsible analogy, it's like alt rock before the early-90's boom, except there's no Nirvana on the horizon and no Sonic Youth guiding the young'ns.

So: LONG LIVE HIP HOP. Certainly, the old guard is falling into pieces as more and more emcees we once respected and admired resort to releasing terrible, sprawling (not in the good way) records with no direction. Here's a hint for all you struggling-yet-established emcees: if you're feeling like your album doesn't flow right, and isn't running cohesively, adding more producers to it will NOT help the situation. In fact, it will do just the opposite, taking the album even further from its central point, whatever that may be. (Another thing: try to HAVE a central point every once in a while.)

Anyway, I can rant all day about the problems with hip hop, but I'm just going to call it like I see it: close mindedness is killing hip hop. Rappers, DJs, producers, even label execs need to be much more outgoing as far as trying new things and looking for new sounds. As it stands, all we're looking for is the new Jay-Z. This is not what we need, and besides, he's not coming, and nor is Hov himself going to brush himself off and start making great albums again. Blueprint 3 is going to let you down even harder than Blueprint 2, if you catch my drift. Take a risk every once in a while. I'm not saying that there's no one doing this right now, I'm just saying that more people should be.

Take us out, Saul.



Saul Williams - Telegram (acapella, live at the Boulder Theatre) [YouTube]