May 30, 2004
Farewell to an id ear (slight return)
'Strue, the last word on Hornby is his own, as caught by close reader Jay Smooth....
Unless the last word is "heteronormative," as periodically inserted in Hornby's bleatings (this being a woman called Daphne Carr's fine idear; it's like Snoop's fizzle game as played by Judith Butler!)
But I want to express my solidarity with Little Latin Nicky Ho. He pines, he yearns for "the Righteous Brothers' "Little Latin Lupe Lu" — or, better still, a modern-day equivalent ." Heck, who wouldn't? A semi-nonsense-syllable dance groove that's not trying to crush you with its social policies or deep thoughts, it just wants to shake its ass and hustle erotically in the general direction of unfettered and non-ironical youthful enthusiasm? I mean, I am so down with Nick Hornby, because I totally want that too! Fun!
Ah, but here's the rub. The very special neuron that can under no circumstance be allowed to leap between the fine novelist/soccer fan's last two synapses might inform him that the modern-day equivalent is released every few days. It's called "Rapper's Delight." Except when it's called "Peter Piper." Once it was called "Push It." Sometimes it's called "Hot in Herre," or "Work It." In epic form it's called "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel." Recently it's called "Tipsy" (occasionally mispronounced "Hyphy"). It's even called "Crazy In Love" and/or "Get This Party Started," if all you have is MTV Europe.
One feels great compassion for the man who starves to death while seated at the banquet.
May 29, 2004
That Song (two decade fade)
When I listen to that song, that hip-hop song, the really great one with the heavily distorted guitar, that one with the distorted guitar sifted down to one attack, two attacks, repeated over and over for the duration of the track, that Rick Rubin song, when I listen to that song I forgive almost everything stupid that hip-hop has done to kiss rock's ass or borrow its fire or shark its audience, when I hear that song I have to meditate on history, that song makes me cogitate on theory, that song seems to be about the point at which a superfuzz guitar chord is still rock, is still music, that song that wonders at what point another genre is reduced to abstraction, that song so patiently aggressive about whether or not it is calling on another tradition or breaking it down and boosting its shoes, when that song comes on the radio in the mid-day mix I wonder for a second if that song is "99 Problems" or "Rock The Bells."
May 28, 2004
inacrowfirededtheater
If I was, say, J. Niimi, or any other interesting voicy young music writer studying away at the University of Chicago (there must be dozens!), maybe I would "put a sock in it" or "grit my teeth" or "suck on my talent like an s/m ball gag," and write a piece for TV Guide. I would be, you know, a sort of fluffer for some music star who needs to stay hard long enough to make it through whatever televised special is happening that week. It would be embarassing for me to do this, and folks would think I might be a nitwit whore, but hey, I'm J. Niimi and I have a huge bookstore bill, I'm talking hundreds of dollars every month, and folks understand this, they will not hold it against me later in life. It's not like I am Alan Light, with my long closet of Italian suits, with my Vibe and Spin deals that involved sharing in the advertising profits, with my recently-born glossy New Dog For Old Cats. If I was Alan Light, I would never ever do that, because, I mean, why would I? Do that, I mean: "interview" Toby Keith in TV Guide, available at finer checkout stands now!
Don't call it a cupcake
One of the classic Econ101 lessons involves the rationale for offering "second ticket, half-price" bargains at porn theaters: in short, because otherwise no one's going to sit next to anyone else and you'll get nothing for every adjacent seat.
High Fidelity was fine. John Cusack is superadorable, and his minions were fab (launching Jack Black toward his current toxic level of chipper bloviation). But the audience in my Bay Area spot might as well have been rolling with the Mitchell Brothers: lank-haired zip-jacketed record nerds transfixed by finally seeing their story brought to the big screen, an event apparently so erotically hefty that the theater was almost exactly half-full. There was something creepy about it, as there always is in the specter of a host of beta males basking in their own validation by the swaggering culture machine (...surely each of us would one day have sex with Lisa Bonet and Iben Hjele in a two-hour span)
Tthis was not a proud moment for any of the assembled record nerds, and I'll include myself. If the movie itself offered validation, anyone looking around the crowd should have gleaned the opposite: an indisputable survey of the culture's wan, dudely homogeneity, almost fatally low on elan vital, hybrid vigor, cultural difference, self-recognition, immediacy and intensity, but high on stunted aggression, a blindered sense of superiority and convenient, flattering identification.
That makes the movie, somehow, great -- that it could, for two hours, render such a list of values tolerable and even appealing. But please stop telling me that the books are okay. This has become common wisdom, as any number of smart people sit around snarking on Hornby's humiliating stabs at music crit have ponied up for his books.
Okay, I think we can all agree that Mr. Hornby is rather hopeless at talking about an art form with which he couldn't keep pace, even as it toddled ahead in a rather leisurely fashion. But Hornby's books have also always sucked (and this is no new news. Here's a passage from a review of his second novel: "Hornby invokes the two great streams of middle-class sentimentality: the Afterschool Special and The New Yorker story.") Moreover, they have always sucked in exactly the same way: wan, dudely homogeneity, almost fatally low on elan vital, hybrid vigor, cultural difference, self-recognition, immediacy and intensity, but high on stunted aggression, a blindered sense of superiority and convenient, flattering identification.
The books no less than the music writing race toward the endgame of the lost, melanc- and alco-holic boor, the ugly white guy whom culture has passed by, but who still manages to feel smug and lash out at everyone who fails to replicate his values. The sentiment is awful; the prose is no better than in his music writing. I'd propose that if the Hornby-bashers recognized the stakes of fiction to be as high as those of music, they wouldn't forgive the books quite so easily.
May 22, 2004
The Fashions
New York. Iatrogenic in the summer, rimey in winter, and that's enough to lower its rank out of the top something or other. But that's not so say the town's without consolations: Ange, Mike, Sharon'n'Ellis, Sasha, you know how we roll. And there's something even dearer about meeting friends in New York -- non-New York friends, I mean, whom one might see every week in the sheepmeadowes of Berkeley but gets to make with the downtown rendezvous in Manhattan and everything's new again, even hot water.
And then there's the fashions. I don't mean the the crypto-models of Williamsburg, the former models of Chelsea, the model models wandering the Soho streets in search of an angry fix of jivamukti; I mean the guy who was walking behind me in Greenpoint yesterday, wearing fresh white shell-toes, black velour Kani sweatpants with a nice drape, an oversized white t, and a black suit jacket over that, topped with a black Yankees cap. Shouldn't shouldn't shouldn't did anyway, did work in every regard. Ahhh. And then party discussions: Stephin Merritt a racist? Jewish summer camps good place to get sexed? Alice Quinn's fashion sense? Most frequent aside, said by anyone to everyone: "don't blog this, okay?"
"The thinning of the war function and the thickening of the police function"
Biopower wields not just the power of mass destruction of life (such as that threatened by nuclear weapons) but also individualized violence. When individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture....Torture is today becoming and ever more generalized technique of control, and at the same time is becoming increasingly banalized....Torture is one central point of contact between police action and war; the torture techniques used in the name of police prevention take on all the characteristics of military action. This is another face of the state of exception and the tendency for political power to free itself from the rule of law.
from Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (forthcoming August 2004, written in 2003)
May 19, 2004
Domesticity
I am on the road for the next few days, but will nonetheless endeavor to post my critique of Lakoviana, from some Apple store somewhere.
May 18, 2004
The Passions
In another amazing essay by David Brooks (whose ludicrous red state/blue state "analysis" still holds currency in the pseudopolitical imaginations of people who wish very much to not think about actual politics as it affects daily life), he opens like this:
There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American.
No other nation would have been hopeful enough to try to evangelize for democracy across the Middle East. No other nation would have been naďve enough to do it this badly. No other nation would be adaptable enough to recover from its own innocence and muddle its way to success, as I suspect we are about to do.
One may suspect the howler is that this fellow, supposedly not a propagandist, can conceive of anything that's going to happen in Iraq in the near future as a "success."
Nope. That's small beer compared to the deep insanity of his overall claim, right there in black and white. That stuff you're reading about in the news? Believe David Brooks: it has nothing to do with revenge, military force, or violence as such. It's not about domination and/or the material means to exercise it. It also has nothing to do with economics. Apparently, it doesn't concern geopolitics even conceptually.
No, the fundamental American qualities on offer -- in Iraq right now, but also in general -- are hope, naďvete, and adaptibility. And if any other country had these, if Albania or Monaco were blessed with such talents, they would be obliterating and occupying any number of far-flung lands as well. I think that's pretty self-evident, don't you?
May 17, 2004
Unused material from old Andre Benjamin interview
“Kind of like Little Richard on hip-hop, that James Brown sound. But also that Soulsonic sound, and that European sound, Kraftwerkish. We were in London [Fall 1998], this was our first time going there, we was in the hotel. We had something with Baghdad. We were like bombing, like shooting missiles, but we wasn’t really trying to bomb their cities, just hitting the outskirts. That’s where the title came from, like really, like “Don’t Beat Around The Bush.” Our first single we were trying to let people know we weren’t playing around at all. That’s what it meant.”
May 15, 2004
Poet Discovers Political Allegory In Drinking Songs!
The shift in progressive and even radical American political thought can be seen most clearly in the motion from Garth Brooks' oppositional "Friends In Low Places" to Toby Keith's neoliberal "I Love This Bar," the two greatest drinking songs written since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"Friends," which counterposes the narrator's boots to high society's "black tie affair," and the fancy party's champagne to his bar's beer and whisky, is explicit about the dialectical struggle between high and low -- not in culture or brow, but social status. The song is, in short, a brutal tale of class conflict resolved when the lone voice, having ventured alone and alienated into the "ivory tower" to speak truth to power, returns to his bar where his voice can join into the collective, the chorus of equals which bears the song off to the Marxist worker's paradise.
"This Bar," however, brooks no such conflict. But neither is it the achieved collectivist utopia, in which the competing interests of differing groups have been resolved. Instead, it simply makes space for all within the social plurality; on this occasion, the concluding chorus is specifically a contingent alliance of individuals who, outside the bar, are compelled to prey on or serve each other. "High-techs, Blue-collar boys and rednecks," along with yuppies, bikers, winners and losers; these terms are scarcely lacking in class consciousness. It simply doesn't recognize this as potentially problematic; it invites all equally to loaf. One suppoes it vends equally champagne, whisky, and beer. This is an elegant formulation of the way in which "inclusionary" or "big-tent" liberalism shills for unrestricted profit-taking, and how such supposedly progressive virtues are dialectics at a standstill.
We here at sugarhigh! would like to thank Mr. Brooks and Mr. Keith for their labors in bringing to light the collapse of meaningful politics in the America they both surely love.
May 12, 2004
How I won, didn't win, didn't fight, fought the war, what war?, join us!
"The perception right now is that we are not acting in a decisive fashion," John McCain said on ABC a few days ago, "and there's no greater mistake you can make in the conduct of warfare."
McCain is living in the 19th century. The quote above was the conclusion of a brief piece in the NYT (from before the Abu Ghraib turn, which is to say, back when information management was only implicitly job one of the war's masters), which proffers the situation in Falluja as unsettled, unstable, and the political problems verging on insoluble. This is no doubt true. What the article, and the thousands like it, and old-school warriors like Mr. McCain take as a given is the desire for, and desirability of, clearing things up.
And yet. The article can’t help but detail the exact opposite: the production of unclarity by military and government spokesmodels, at levels that beg the word hysterical. Here’s a redacted version.
...a new setback, amid questions... a top United States officer said today, contradicting news reports...Confusion over the situation in that besieged city...as the United States military and political leadership struggled to deal...enormously difficult for American forces to root out without resorting to force levels that could spark wide, new resistance... the coalition might gain short-term calm while risking longer-term instability...indicated today that the situation around Falluja was still in considerable flux....That represented a step back from news reports...” it will not be”...”He will not be”...without suggesting...Questions arose...did not address...The brigade might include... But General Myers insisted today that some aspects of reporting on General Saleh were "very, very inaccurate," without saying exactly why... multiple television appearances appeared designed to counter suggestions...unable to find a solution..."It's not a reversal".
All that in 865 words.
Decisiveness may be the warrior’s pal, but it is of as much use to an occupying force as uniforms with target decals on their breasts. In a wrong war, there are no right choices; every decision becomes a screen on which the immorality and unjustifiability of the occupation cannot help but appear, much as on the screens of camera-phones in Abu Ghraib. Do one clear, decisive, but immoral thing and you face retribution and disaffection. Experiment with a thousand, hesitating and faltering amongst’em, denying and changing, retrenching and revisiting, and you may discover that those not on site recoil and wander away, unable to find traction, bewildwered and info-wasted. This and no other is the prime lesson that Washington learned from Vietnam.
I have written about the sometimes-intense pleasure of living in an age rich in excess signification, in a largely chaotic data heaven. This is the hell of it. The truth of what Tim Clark calls “symbol management” in the United States isn’t the spinning of problematic facts into persuasive rhetoric. It’s deferral/differance as a PR stratgey, the unceasing proliferation of infinitely irresolved, competing claims which make hanging out in the public sphere vertiginous and exhausting, and send a plurality of perfectly lovely people slinking off to read mystery novels. No, I am not suggesting the deconstruction leads to moral relativism leads to no ethics, jerk. I am saying that an imperial army in an age of informatics would rather be an electron than a proton, vaguely everywhere and definitively nowhere. The spokesmodels of empire don’t care what you think, as long as you don’t think anything in particular. They’ll settle for the tired, reputedly humanist assumption that there are at least two sides to every story, or three, or eight, and let you nod off from quandariness. Patriotic zealots are just the lagniappe;the war guys don't really need to pitch the NRA guys.
This is the first of a two-part post; the second half will take up the issue of symbol management as regards domestic politics, starting with the propositions of the linguist George Lakoff on language and electoral politics, so admired by Sasha but, in the end, not so much here at jane dark's sugarhigh!
May 08, 2004
The Dozens (+ Julianne Shepherd)
12) "Holding Out For A Hero," Frou-Frou (Shrek OST)
11) "Roller Girl," The Little Rabbits. The same way Japan has the story of the 47 ronin, and remakes it over and over; France has Serge Gainsbourg songs. It's frightening to hear a mod try to sound louche, but the instruments make all the right choices. Stupid.
10) "Hallelujah," Rufus Wainwright.
9) "Going To Marrakesh," The Extra Glenns. Proof that you can have a good song with th line "our love is like Jesus."
8) "B.O.B.," Outkast. In one invented word, laying bare how immoderately the considerable chatter about "American exceptionalism" in the This Is Pop anthology believes in countries but doesn't think much about social class: inslumnational.
7) "Girl from Ipanema," vocals by Astrud Gilberto. The guy who wrote the original words also wrote the Brazilian New Wave film Black Orpheus. It's all about looking and looking back and looking black, or dark. The song, I mean.
6) "Volcano Girls," Veruca Salt. The coulda-been perfect song. If I could go back in time, I would grab Bob Rock the day he mixed this, and beg him to pot down the hi-hat and ride. Sweet Jesus.
5) Carrie Brownstein writes movingly in This Is Pop: It is hard not to be reduced to the category of "women in rock." I didn't feel like I could be rock'n'roll. Instead, we were women imitating and participating in rock'n'roll, something we didn't create.
4) "Roller Girl," Anna Karina. And yet somehow, Karina, the actress, is rock'n'roll absolutely, for a couple minutes. In this original version, the way Gainsbourg ripped off "Get Off Of My Cloud"" is obvious, except it's better. That's how Gudrun Ensslin looks in snapshots from 68-69; not a Baader Meinhoff terrorist, but a Rolling Stones terrorist. Begging the question: do you have to play rock to be rock'n'roll?
3) "Terminal Grain," The Extra Glenns. "It was so easy and it was so hard, you were clutching your copy of Kierkgaard: Repetition, repetition," and then the guitar repeats an 8-note figure several times, exactly, as if locked up in fear. Wouldn't you know it, the piano trembles. That it happens at an Iowa train station makes it all okay. No, not okay.
2) "En el Muelle de San Blas," Mana
1) "Hallelujah," Jeff Buckley. Heard by me, as best I know, for the first time just this week, under the season's last scene on The O.C. This is the ideal situation to hear any song.
Click on the link immediately below to read Julianne Shepherd's freestyling limnation of "I Love Your Smile," by Shanice. Alas, we have no pix of her terpsichore.
SHANICE’S “I LOVE YOUR SMILE”: MY TIME AS A DEMOGRAPHIC.
I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place I will forever refer to as a “cultural island.” In 1992, I was part of a performing dance troupe, with many other 14-year-olds, called “CHEYENNE STARSTRUCK.” We performed in malls. Parking Lots. Halftime at University of Wyoming basketball games. Cheyenne Frontier Days. We performed anywhere that would book us, really, that we could legally enter. I believe we even performed at the Wyoming Territorial Prison—a prison for tourists, but a prison nonetheless.
Our instructor, a local community college student named Stacey, called her choreography our “language”; fittingly, we spoke in the parlance of the times, usually in some variation of the Roger Rabbit, the Running Man, and that weird face cutting thing Janet Jackson did in the “Pleasure Principle” video. [demonstrate] We danced in grand thematic routines and wore red sequined leotards, and smeared Vaseline on our teeth to keep us smiling.
This, in 1992, was one of our songs; the routine went a little something like this:
[demonstrate 1992 choreography; pretend you are wearing Hammer pants]
This is the happiest music ever made. In 1992, Shanice’s “I Love Your Smile” was the first cassingle I ever shoplifted, from the Musicland in the Frontier Mall; I had no money (this was back before tweens started making lots of money) but I wanted to practice. In the shadow of the Gulf War and the barren vacuum of Wyoming, “I Love Your Smile” was the consummate escapism music, akin to reading my Bible-at-the-time, YM Magazine, back when the “M” stood for “Miss” and not “Modern.” I was a young miss, and Shanice showed me how. She was liberated by this boy, whose smile she adored—so liberated, in fact, she went buckwild “putting that new black mini” on her charge card—a whole and unfettered action of consumption without remorse, exactly what it meant to be a middle- class teen girl in Anywhere USA. Together, in that moment, Shanice and I lived the perfect girl-dream, crushing on boys, wearing cute clothes, dancing when and wherever we pleased, freed from our depression (depression evidenced by the MIDI thunderstorm in the bridge). Freed through the sparkling teeth of “your smile.”
But the danger in escapism—and the mall, and the pages of YM—is that they all smell so uniformly sweet. And the right force can rip you, irreparably, from their baby-tender crush. “I Love Your Smile,” for me, was a fulcrum; as the Gulf War wound up, rage burned, Nirvana released Nevermind and I surged from the teen-dance circuit into America’s collective tumult: the safety unclasped.
Do you need training not to torture people?
I suppose we'd better start the military discipline project Stateside, lest torture just break out in the streets of, say, Laramie, Wyoming.
Remember, it's about training.
MediaWar.i (+ Michaelangelo Matos)
Loyal, as a word, seems to suggest an at-least semi-blind ideological following, and a local effect, as in "the last loyal guardsmen surrounded the inner chambers of the mosque." It does not suggest, say, a lot of dissimilar people spread across a nation and a region, prosecuting a similar interest through an organizational mechanism.
"Gunmen loyal to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr rampaged through Basra and another southern Iraq city," begins this Times article.
There seems also to be some problem with al-Sadr-lovers in Falluja and Najaf, etc.
When we talk about the American soldiers in Najaf and Falluja, in Abu Ghraib and at the National Library, why do we not call them "gunmen loyal to Rumsfeld"?
On a more gracious plane, click the link directly below to read Michaelangelo Matos on George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby," which might also be read along with other delights on his self-titled weblog.
George McCrae, "Rock Your Baby"
Dancing is a communal activity, but most quote-unquote “dance music” involves solitary, non-partnered dancing; if you can feel alone in a crowded room, you can feel even more alone on a crowded dancefloor. The most important thing about George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” is how passive it is. The song makes you-slash-the singer feel coddled--musically, it’s a big red wash with gold-sparkle guitar and silver lamé hi-hats--but there‚s nothing brash about the song apart from McCrae‚s muttered “Sexy woman” at the top, before an organ whorls in and carries everything away. But that’s a false start, because with the first line--“Woman, take me in your arms/Rock your baby”--turns what in the title sounds like a command into a plea. He’s surrendering himself to you, wholly and utterly. There’s confidence here, but the urgency undercuts it a little, adding a sense of hesitance to the way McCrae--or maybe just the song--approaches things. Sure, it’s sexy: McCrae coaxes his lover into seducing him. It’s a double seduction. But while nothing about the song is awkward, everything about it is vulnerable, and that, I like to think, resonates with anyone who’s ever wanted to be saved from their own loneliness.
The first time I heard “Rock Your Baby” was probably more like the 50th: last September at a bar-slash-restaurant during a workplace party. About halfway through, I realized that I’d heard it before--and that it had always sounded great, and that I’d always wondered what it was, and that I‚d never found out. (Naturally, I already owned it, on a compilation.) “Rock Your Baby” is famous--the second disco single to hit no. 1--but it was new to me, and ever since then it’s sounded like the missing piece to a puzzle I’ve been forming for years. For a long time, I‚ve been obsessed with what I think of as a specific form of dance music interiority--the way certain records evoke an eyes-closed, living-in-my-head introspection that balances and belies dance music‚s extroverted image: the two Luomo albums, the Superlongevity compilation, Triple R's mix-CD Friends, Richard Davis’s “Bring Me Closer,” and Armand Van Helden and Roland Clark’s “Flowerz.” In particular, “Flowerz” has always sounded to me like an aural iris shot, and as my friend Kristal Hawkins once put it, “Yes, and it’s both wonderful and too much at the same time.”
She had a point: “Flowerz” is ten minutes long. But “Rock Your Baby” is not too much; it hovers, tangible and tactile but still just out of reach. But when the rhythm guitar shadowboxes with the beat during the bridge, turning more liquid-metallic by the bar, the distance lessens. And when McCrae opens up his heart and sends out the most beautiful high note ever sung, the world sounds a lot less lonely.
May 05, 2004
No Pasera! (+ Oscar Garza)
Cinco de Mayo is here again, which is a fine occasion to recall Bob Dylan's best 70s narrrative ballad, which begins on the fifth day of May and ends about a year later. I do not know why he chose this date. On the live version from Biograph, Dylan intros "This is a song about marriage. This is called "Isis." This is for Leonard if he's still here." I also do not know who Leonard is, or why he would leave.
One of the song's charms is how thoroughly it rises and falls on the peculiarities of Zimmerman's voice; in the penultimate verse, the lyric breaks into a dialogue between the title character and the narrrator in which they reduce the song's gothic narrative and romantic postscript to a quatrain. Speaking in quotation marks, the moment is stunning for its inarticulacy. Isis gets these four half-lines:
where you been
you look different
you been gone
you gonna stay?
and the narrator, who has seen the world, searched for treasure, been to the pyramids, survived many hardships, buried a partner, and straggled home, answers
no place special
well I guess
that's only natural
if you want me to --
What he says next varies depending on version; it's only one word, or part of a word. It's not semantically ambiguous, but it is as emotionally ambivalent as any single syllable on record (and it is profoundly different between the studio Desire and the live version performed at twice the hurry and quintuple the fury). Today is a good day to sit with the mystery!
Click on the link immediately below to read the Critical Karaoke proffering of freestyle hero Oscar Garza, reflecting (in his own ambivalent way) on Smokey Robinson's "Save Me."
SAVE ME
You can have "Tracks of My Tears" and "Ooh Baby Baby"
and "Beauty's Only Skin Deep." Great songs all, but
they are overkill victims of narrow playlists on
oldies radio, which has killed the oldies. But that's
another story. What we find then among the
considerable ouevre of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
is this gem, "Save Me," from the album "Going to
A-Go-Go," released in November of 1966. With its
intro distinguished by those pinging notes--what is
that, a glockenspiel or a cheap toy xylophone?--the
song's pulsing rhythm surges along, carrying Smokey's
plaintive tenor. And of course, he's singing about a
lost love. And he spoke to me because I had lost Susan
Villarreal. Technically, we hadn't broken up because,
well, we'd never been together. You see, we were in
the 4th grade. But I knew that if someday we were to
become a couple, she would break my heart because with
her bouncy jet black hair and pixieish smile, she was
simply too beautiful. And she would come to know the
power of that beauty. And this would be the song that
I would be left singing.
I first heard it as I hunkered down on the backseat
floorboard of my older brother's best friend's GTO. My
parents were out for the evening and I was 9 years
old, too young to be left alone, so I was left in the
care of my 18-year-old brother. But he and his friend
couldn't resist going for a ride to cruise past the
hot disco in downtown San Antonio--the Pussycat
A-Go-Go. If they spotted some cute girls and could
beckon them to the car for a chat, I couldn't be seen.
How uncool would that be? So that's how I found myself
down in the well, looking out the back window. All I
could see were neon signs and telephone lines as
Smokey's bittersweet lament poured out of the radio.
And even at that tender age, I knew what heartbreak
sounded like.
It sounded like a man hoping for salvation, and deep
down knowing it wasn't going to come. It sounded like
a man looking for a miracle, knowing it wouldn't be
found. It sounded like a man I didn't want to become,
so I vowed, right then and there, that I would never,
ever let a woman break my heart. Not Norma Narvaez in
the 5th grade, not Christy Hill in the 6th grade, not
Paula Ramirez in the 7th grade, not Maria Davalos in
the 8th grade. Not after you, Susan Villarreal, not
after you. Damn you.
May 03, 2004
Go white boy go (+ Jon Caramanica)
Robert Christgau has bombed Jay Farrar (sometimes in his Son Volt guise) time and again, every time the Consumer Guide gets him in its sites. He gets down on Mr. Farrar for not being concrete enough; apparently, Bob (who never gave Pavement less than an A-) can't tell what the songs are about.
Hey, neither can I.
Of course, I know what Jewel songs are about, and I know what 50 Cent songs are about, and whoop-di-damn-do. Jay Farrar has a riverdeep baritone that makes me cream, but is that ever enough? He also chooses notes in an utterly distinctive way; if we are to accept that melancholy is a justifiable emotion in the first place, he does it right and then some. "Woke up in the West..." begins the best song on the latest product (and he does keep them coming; this one is the live disc Stone, Steel & Bright Lights); I'm not sure which West he means. The cowboy West? The not-the-East West? Or just barely across the time-line? After all, the song is called "Greenwich." When I understand the plot, I'll drop you a line. When I thnk it's a good poem, I'll hire a skywriter. When it stops filling my gray six-fifteen AMs with teary goodness, I will send Bob some gum.
Click on the link below to read the ruff ruggedness: Jon Caramanica's critical karaoke breakdown of Smoothe Da Hustler f/ Trigger Tha Gambler, "Broken Language," complete with stage directions! And photo!
Smoothe Da Hustler f/ Trigger Tha Gambler, "Broken Language"
Jon Caramanica
"Broken Language": The song I like so much I did what any self-respecting writer with some things to get off his chest and a desire to just loudly spit would: I named my blog after it.
In the Kanye West video for "Through The Wire," there's a great moment when a friend of his is making fun of how Kanye got famous, effectively, off of a car accident. Suggesting that he himself should also get into a crash in order to get some shine, he jokes, "Without a arm I spit! Without a arm I spit."
And I'm thinking: what ever happened to spitting? I don't mean rapping, in the sense that someone delivers a set of verses in time over a beat. But spitting. Lowdown, dirty, grimy, unrelenting rapping, impervious to the machinations and permutations of the beat
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Everybody, meet Smoothe Da Hustler (That first verse was his brother Trigger Tha Gambler.)
Hailing from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and a former running buddy of M.O.P., Smoothe isn't much more than a footnote to most. This song was the b-side to his first single, "Hustlin'," released on Profile in 1995 while he was spending some quality time behind bars.
"Broken Language" was a breakthrough largely because it was, in a sense, a step backwards. Smoothe and Trigger, who was at one point signed to Def Jam, used to try to one-up each other with witty turns of phrase, swapping lines back and forth as a way to keep each other on their lyrical toes.
Hip-hop was always prized for its narrative potential, but what's fantastic about this song is just how anti-narrative it is. There are almost no VERBS in the song, just a litany of increasingly odd roles to inhabit, positions to claim. Hip-hop is about loads of things, it's about bragging and arrogance, and it's about identity and locating oneself in what is sometimes hostile territory.
And how does one respond to those constraints? Maybe by adopting a position that sounds impregnable, or that's so outside of the traditional rap discourse that it stands out proudly.
For example, you could try becoming the "rugged picture poser"
It could be that, or it could be any of a number of increasingly bizarre roles Smoothe and Trigga inhabit in this track - "the slug to your mug tussler," "the body polluter," "the Egyptian spirit inviter," "the chicken tricker," "the chain, ring and bracelet flaunterer," or my personal favorite, "the -tologist without the derma."
I'm not trying to offer some explicit hierarchy of spitting vs rapping, but when I'm talking about "Broken Language," and moreover about the era of time it represents, what I think of is a time when rhyming qua rhyming was valued on its own terms.
So committed was Smoothe to the act of unmediated spitting that there's a picture of him rapping in a stairway cipher in the back of his CD tray. And in this song, he and his brother give what is effectively a child's game a certain degree of heft and urgency.
Smoothe's full-length album came out the next year, and that was probably the last time when merely an ability to just SPIT could get you a record deal.
Look at Lord Finesse, an incredible freestyler and one of hip-hop's true punchline kings, who hasn't had an album of original material out since that same year, 1996.
What happened? A lot of shit happened, but what really happened was the Puff.
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And sure, it's easy to malign Puffy, but that's what I'm about to do. What he did wasn't water hip-hop down, as many accuse him of, but by locating hip-hop so fiercely on the dancefloor, he fucked it up for all the rappers, all the spitters. Even for Loon, and that's a handsome dude.
One of the sadder things I've ever read in a hip-hop magazine came in a Source cover story on Puff Daddy back in 1999 or so. At one point, Puff's surrounded by all sorts of folks, and out of the mob emerges our man Smoothe Da Hustler. "I know you hear this from a lot of cats," he says to Puff, "But me and my brother, we got some shit." If I recall correctly, Puff gave him his cell number, but it was clear from the tone of the piece that Smoothe was something of a broken man, and that he'd probably never call.
May 02, 2004
May Day Reading
Saw Jeff Johnson, Kaya Oakes, and Steve Smith read new work yesterday at Mama Buzz gallery in Oakland. Also heard: "Kral Majales" and "A True Account...." Steve read the still in-progress "Kensington" and shone in general in his public debut, though it was no mean task to outshine Garrett Caples' shirt.
