7) "Numb/Encore" Jay-Z and Linkin Park. We are not mad at this song being the promo track for the Miami Vice remix, even if the Crockett/Tubbs-as-mashup semiotic is a little sledgehammer-to-the-brow. It's pleasing to notice how "Encore" is such an adamantine song that, like "Big Yellow Taxi," it basically cannot be ruined.
6) "Tell Me When To Go (remix)," E-40 feat Kanye West and Ice Cube. Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody Kanye is hip-hop for buppies and white rockers who like to talk about "the production" and enjoy Magnolia Electric Company. Out in the dust of Fairfield and V-Town, where hip-hop still draws racial lines, the indelibly soft Mr. West is on the other side: quoth The Federation, "I'm from Fairfield, that's where my mind stays, strapped in my backpack, nothing like Kanye." Which is why it's so hilarious when Kanye tries to be down. While scraping some cred off the current king of the streets, he promises, "any haters get they nose broken, yeah tell me when to go" — sounding about as threatening as a Gap store manager telling you the store is closing in fifteen minutes. Though perhaps there's genius at work here; we are always impressed when megamillionaires persuade us to be embarassed for them.
5) "I Wear My Stunna Glasses At NIght," The Federation. Hyphy for lifey. When you can make an idea this idiotic work out, you are having one of those can-do-no-wrong Nelly 2002 moments when every single thing you do is going to come out auratic, and you should be in the studio every night, just now, before the moment passes.
4) "Rock On," Def Leppard. Their first video ever to chart on VH1 is directed by NIgel Dick — who is older in video years than the band in rock years — is a sort of post-industrial western with the band perform-synching in a dusty, rusty abandoned factory yard while, on the wall of some background building, shredded posters for a Def Leppard concert featuring the white men in Hammersmith Palais yellow and flutter. Sign system very clear: a video set in the ruins of their own career. Narcissism, cruelty: two great tastes that go great together.
3) "Hell Yeah," San Quinn feat. E-A-Ski. The best song of this title since Montgomery Gentry. Possibly even better, and we do not say that lightly.
2) "One," Mary J. Blige feat. U2. Entering the VH1 charts just in time for Pride weekend, this video ends with a shot of Bono walking a few feet across the stage to clasp Mary's hand — a pointed gesture so you'll know they were actually in the same place at the same time, unlike the transatlantic cable collaboration between George Michael and Aretha Franklin (the parallel case in which white male queerness reaches out through the artifice of falsetto and realizes itself in the non-artifice of a black woman's "natural" voice). This actual being-together is important, one supposes, because they are one — because the song concerns the struggle over bodies being together. Of course, other things are exchanged, starting with access to the withheld portions of each other's markets. Mary also gets melody, of the sort that current r&b doesn't oblige. Bono gets to try, not for the first time, to fill the hole in his soul with a black woman. Well, at least he understands what he's missing. Even if we are not wool-dyed fans of Mary J., it's audible to us from the first vocal turn that she's everything absent from Bono's voice: depth and range and doesn't that about cover it, no wait, there's also the capacity to turn to Jesus and to "the social" without sounding hopelessly self-serious, tendentious. "One" was always a magnificent song despite Bono's singing, not because of it. Re Johnny Cash's cover of this song, Rob White noted "he sings better than Bono." Greil snorted and offered that "a cardboard box sings better than Bono." Mary is more like Johnny than she is like Bono, for what it's worth, and we at sugarhigh! thank Allah for Baptist singing traditions, like, every day.
1) "I Do," Toya. The best song of this title since Lisa Loeb. Psych! Much much better. The lyrics have some clinkers (do we still call guys "stallions"? wasn't that, like, the Seventies?), and a fascinatingly odd slippage about who's talking when, such that Toya seems to be calling the stallion a shorty, and herself an iced out player balling out of control, a confusion the song never resolves. And something about the confusion of who's who makes sense with the spectrality of the track, out-haunting the ghostly minimalism of Cassie's "Me & U" while gathering in a club full of sonic histories, the strangely-placed tch-tch-tch-tch-tch of moisture-free hi-hat inherited from Destiny's Child who got it from Timbaland who got it from England, the tuned percussion that clarifies how utterly the loop for "Can I Get A..." became the DNA for the kind of slow soul creep that made perfect sense in hip-hop clubs and ended up as snap'n'b, which this more or less is, and so the first half of the decade starts to take a kind of form, a kind of fluid give'n'take between transnational soul sounds and fiercely local scenes, wait, wasn't it always that way, isn't that an aging double-structure for world systems, how does it keep inventing things...?
Posted by jane at June 25, 2006 11:07 AM | TrackBack