Alas poor Khaled

After DJ Drama and Don Cannon got arrested for selling mixtapes earlier this year, mixtapes are probably never going to be the same again, and that might not ultimately be a bad thing. It used to be that every mixtape would be stamped "for promotional use only," a quick little disclaimer that meant exactly nothing since everyone didn't mind paying $20 for five of them. Actual physical mixtapes still exist, but they're trickling out slower, and the real action has been online, especially as far as single-artist tapes go. Now that the RIAA has basically criminalized the process, rappers actually have been using tapes as promotional items, offering them up for free download and never bothering to press up physical copies. As it turns out, the results have thus far been pretty good; online-only mixtapes from Talib Kweli and Chamillionaire have held up to repeat listenings a lot better than those guys' most recent retail albums. And something even weirder has been happening over the last couple of weeks. Lil Wayne and DJ Khaled have been working on Da Drought 3, a magnum-opus double-CD mixtape. But an early version of the first CD leaked last week, and the second one finally found its way onto the internet earlier this week. The very idea that a mixtape could leak is a bit hard to process; it's not like these things have traditional release dates or anything. In this case, though, the early leak will almost certainly turn out to be so completely superior to the actual finished version that nobody will ever bother listening to the real thing.

So it goes (pick jacked from Idolator)

The end of last night's padded-out hour-long American Idol result show was set up as a good-vs.-evil battle, at least from where I was sitting. Every week, Ryan Seacrest solemnly announces the bottom three contestants and then sends one of them back to safety. This week, the bottom three were the utterly detestable cheeseball improv-comic beatbox 311/Incubus fan Blake Lewis, the soaringly awesome raw-throated belter LaKisha Jones, and Sanjaya Malakar, the gawky teenager who's become the center of one of the weirdest and dumbest pop-cult hysteria-rampages in recent memory. When Seacrest announced the bottom three, before he told Blake that he was safe, the three judges pissed me off enormously by acting all shocked that Blake was up there, completely ignoring LaKisha even though she's consistently been one of the best contestants of the season. I'm certainly biased; LaKisha comes from Fort Meade, Maryland, an army town about a half-hour drive south of Baltimore, and I'd probably still rep for her on local-pride grounds even if she sucked. But she emphatically does not suck. Her souped-up roar might lean hard on old Southern-soul archetypes, but she knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off, and when she's done quieter and more nuanced songs like "Diamonds are Forever" or "God Bless the Child," she's been remarkably mature and polished. Other than maybe Jordin Sparks, she's also the only Idol candidate this year who could conceivably make an album worth hearing. Tuesday night was country theme night, and LaKisha sang Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel," a song I adore. And she did it well, giving it a straight soul-gospel reading and doing it justice; it might not have been her best performance, but she still owned most of the remaining contestants. The judges, for reasons I can't quite understand, shat all over her. She hasn't been pulling the fake-humble act that fellow soul powerhouse Melinda Doolittle has mastered, so she found herself staring down the barrel of elimination, right next to the contestant whose survival has famously confused everyone who's been watching the show this season. Consider, if you will, Sanjaya Malakar.

See here

Once upon a time, it was a great creative partnership. Jay-Z and Timbaland were titans of their respective fields years before they met each other, but they still found ways to immediately elevate each other. "Paper Chase" and "Jigga What, Jigga Who," which I'm pretty sure were the first Jay/Tim collaborations, came out in the fall of 1998 on Jay's Hard Knock Life album, and at least one of those tracks sounded different from anything either of them had done up until then. Jay had spent most of his time rapping on glossy, cinematic Premier/Ski boom-bap, viciously thumping Swizz-type synth-rap, and uber-slick jiggy-era stuff. Tim was mostly a spacey R&B; producer, doing otherworldly slow-jams for Aaliyah and Ginuwine and sonar-ping cartoon-funk for Missy Elliott and for himself and Magoo. "Paper Chase" is a fine track, with Jay and Foxy Brown authoritatively navigating the beat's awkward lurch, but it isn't ultimately all that different from the Trackmasters-type stuff Jay was already doing. But "Jigga What, Jigga Who" is total next-level shit, and it still stands as one of the finest moments for both Jay and Tim. Tim's beat was like an irregular heartbeat, alternating quick clusters of rapid-fire hi-hats with huge silent spaces and laying gorgeously airy strings over everything. And Jay's delivery hit another gear. He turned his voice into a percussion instrument in ways he hadn't ever done, finding connections between Southern bounce-rap and the quick-tongue Das-EFX stuff of his pre-Reasonable Doubt past. A few years ago, I heard Jason King give an EMP paper where he went into crazy depth about the song's use of space, comparing it to feng shui. His entire paper wasn't about just this one song, but it could've been.

It doesn't hurt that she looks a lot like Jane Birkin

I'll probably have a lot more to say about Saul Austerlitz's new book Money for Nothing, an exhaustively researched and totally absorbing history of music videos that I finally just finished reading this weekend. But one thing in particular I really liked about Austerlitz's book is how it doesn't actually bother too much with history as it's usually understood. There's a quick chapter about the pre-MTV history of music videos and all their Beatles/Bowie/Queen/Suicide great leaps forward, but Austerlitz never really digs too deeply into the different forms of impact that videos have had on musicians' careers or the financial forces at work behind them. Instead, he spends most of the book analyzing music videos themselves, getting into all the artistic impulses and mini-trends that run through the form's history. Austerlitz also includes his list of the top 100 videos ever. I certainly don't agree with everything on the list: No rap videos until #40, and then it's "Hey Ya"? No rap videos with actual rapping until #53, and then it's "The Message"? But the list has sent me on a few nostalgic YouTube benders over the last couple of weeks, rewatching all these videos that I remember being really big deals when they came out. Plenty of random tiny revelations in there, like Sawyer from Lost, with a bowl cut, stealing Alicia Silverstone's purse in the "Cryin'" video. But the overwhelming impression I get from watching these videos is that the form itself has sort of given up on itself in recent years. When recent videos do show up on the list, they're either boringly smeared with prestige-ambition, like Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends," or small and concept-driven, like Basement Jaxx's "Cish Cash." Cable channels' wholesale elimination of actual videos from their scheduling blocks and nosediving album sales have really done a number on the music video itself. Big-budget videos are still coming out, but it's tough to imagine a video turning a smaller artist into a bigger one or revealing a new stage of a major artist's evolving persona (at least outside occasional flukes like My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade").

Diamonds on my damn chain

Last month, I wrote an entry about a few new mini-genre trends that I saw emerging, all of which took little bits and pieces of electronic dance music and ran with them. My favorite of the three by far was swirly percussive post-noise, not really a catchy name but whatever. The only two real examples I had were Soft Circle's Full Bloom and Gang Gang Dance's live shows, but I definitely liked the idea that all these postpunk types were simultaneously discovering the pleasures of hazy dancing-on-clouds psychedelia and full-bore endless-repeat club music. I really liked the Soft Circle album, which approached that fusion firmly from the experimental-psychedelic side of things, finding room for rippling echoed drum-thumps in its seas of reverbed-out guitar-noodles and wordless chants. But lately I've been even more taken with another album, one that combines the same sounds but filters them through a different set of prisms, taking dance toward psych instead of taking psych toward dance. That album is Kathy Diamond's Miss Diamond to You, a disco record that pushes its sound outward toward its retro-futuristic logical conclusions.

Rove if you want to, Rove around the world

Lily Allen
Irving Plaza
April 11, 2007

Lily Allen doesn't make club music. And she definitely doesn't make the sort of music that works in clubs where people are all jammed in, trying to get a glimpse of some Next Big Thing. Last night's Irving Plaza (or Fillmore, whatever) show was Allen's third New York show. Most critics had already seen her, and so they stayed away, but a full third of the crowd still had those VIP stickers on; the entire bigass upstairs balcony was now labeled a VIP section. As her blog-hype buzz trickles down, most of the crowd seems to consist of bored yuppies with leather jackets who chatter obliviously all through her performance and eyefuck me for being tall even when I'm standing in the back, definitely one of the least tolerable crowds I've yet experienced. An artist like Allen, one who's generated a whole lot of excitement and made a lot of people curious, needs to be able to step on a stage in front of these people and get on some real Klaxons-esque zeitgeist shit, personifying and justifying all that excitement, and that's not the kind of artist that Lily Allen is. She doesn't make jarring, immediate music; she makes wispy, frothy barbecue music, lazy sunbaked loping ska-pop that derives its charm from its casual ease and from Allen's own likable forthrightness. It's summer-afternoon walk-in-the-park music, not packed-nightclub music, even if she herself is a club-friendly demi-celebrity. Last night, she walked onstage after a really shitty 80s-pop DJ with no sense of flow (turns out it was Aaron LaCrate; good to know firsthand and conclusively that that guy sucks) smashed a bunch of high-impact dance-tracks together, and it's a bit ridiculous to expect Allen to do anything with that sort of hackneyed party-up intensity, even if that's what last night's show set her up to do.

It's gotta be the shoes

Blonde Redhead
Soho Apple Store
April 10, 2007

Plenty of good reasons exist for indie-rock bands to play in-store sets at the Apple Store, especially the one in Soho. Apple is, after all, pretty much the most important music store in the world these days, and if a stunt like that can get them iTunes front-page placement, it's worth a hundred Virgin Megastore acoustic sets. And the Soho Apple Store is actually a surprisingly functional venue: an actual stage, a whole lot of seats, a crystal-clear sound mix, relatively clear sightlines, and enough second-floor space to fit in at least a couple of hundred onlookers. And it's free, which is probably the reason why the line outside the venue last night wrapped around the block and why some of the people who got in must've been waiting for hours; everyone loves free stuff. But there's still something deeply wrong about seeing a downtown underground-rock institution like Blonde Redhead in such an antiseptic spot. For one thing, the building's sharp lines and minimalist geometric design clash blatantly with the band's elegantly rumpled art-deco messthetic. For another, the very concept of the record-store set, with all the casual access it implies, doesn't really mesh with a band as elegantly aloof as this one, whose members tend to play with their backs to the audience and who barely even make eye contact with each other, let alone us. Most glaringly, though, the Apple Store is a temple to technology, and Blonde Redhead seem to hate machines. That's not to say they're Luddites; onstage last night, they used vintage synths and electronic drum-pads and sequencers along with the usual guitar-bass-drums, and on one song, Kazu Makino sang along with backing-tape vocodered guide-vocals that meshed beautifully with her own. Even with all that accompaniment, though, Blonde Redhead base their sound around the three members' ability to rely on each other and sink perfectly into their organic locked-in sprawl. And last night, they seemed to hate their equipment, apologizing constantly about mics that sounded just fine to me. After three songs, Amedeo Pace addressed the audience for the first time: "It's a little strange playing here."

"Noisy new songs"? Dude, come on

Pretty Hate Machine is probably always going to be my favorite Nine Inch Nails album because it's the least fully-formed. In a lot of ways, it's a Human League album, except with punchier guitars and vocals from the Bright Eyes tortured Midwestern sincerity school, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Phil Oakey's arch British sneer. Trent Reznor may have been trying with all his might to rip off the Chicago Wax Trax industrial scene, but everything came smeared in a huge, resonant pop sensibility that gave all his woe-is-me theatrics their power. Bits and pieces of metal and industrial peeked their head out from time to time, but the pathos came straight from Depeche Mode and New Order and the Cure. For me, Reznor has always worked best when he's been at his most confused and confounded about the enormous instinctive power of his songwriting gift. Or maybe that's just a projection; Reznor is certainly a skilled craftsman, and maybe he spends so much time between Nine Inch Nails albums because he's working out all his arena-sized hooks, not finding ways to elegantly distress them. Still, I like the idea of Reznor as the conflicted intuitive pop genius, the guy who tries to make difficult art but who always manages to churn out transcendent tantrum-rock in the process. That conflict is all over Year Zero, the Nine Inch Nails album that leaked to the internet late last week. Reznor's been building up to the album's release by preying on his fans' obsessiveness in totally ingenious ways, leaving USB drives with new songs in the bathrooms of his concerts and hiding clues to the album's various meanings and subtexts all over the internet. It's a smart move; Reznor clearly understands the nature of high-school fan-devotion, and he's flatting his online cult by letting its members play Da Vinci Code detectives. Year Zero is ostensibly a concept album about life in a near-future totalitarian dystopia, and naturally there's already a few bazillion message-board posts' worth of fans trying to decode its messages. But my first impression of Year Zero isn't that it's a Radiohead-style hall of mirrors, and I feel pretty confident that more listens won't reveal some overriding buried truths. But there's stuff going on in there that's a lot more interesting, to me at least, than Trent's big grand-guignol opus ambitions. What I like about the albums is its constant warring impulses; it's like the album can't decide whether it's a rarified cult object or a mass-market arena-goth album, so it splits the difference between the two.

This guy again

Last week, the video for the DJ Khaled all-star posse cut "We Takin' Over" leaked to the internet and got a whole bunch of people all excited, mostly because it's awesome. The instant internet buzz for "We Takin' Over" was pretty surprising, though, when you consider that it's the second awesome all-star DJ Khaled posse cut in a year and that the last one, "Holla At Me," never got anything like this level of notice even though it was one of my favorite songs of the year and I wrote an entry about it and everything. I was talking to a few friends about it last week, and they all attributed this phenomenon to the videos; "Holla At Me" was a no-budget piece of shit, and "We Takin' Over" is the sort of virtuosically glossy blast of blockbuster nonsense that gets people excited about the song even if they didn't like it that much to start with. That explanation makes sense, but it doesn't make "Holla At Me" any less unappreciated. It's a slow day, so I figured I'd use infallibly accurate scientific techniques to figure out which song is better. That's actually a pretty easy proposition, considering that both of them follow pretty much the exact same blueprint: propulsive, synthed-out electro bangers with five rappers (three of whom appear on both songs) and no real point beyond the general celebration of those rappers' collective hegemony. It should also be noted that DJ Khaled himself apparently has little to do with the quality of either of these songs; he didn't produce either one, and his participation seems to be limited to annoying hypeman shouts on both, though I guess we should give him credit for convincing so many rappers to show up on the same tracks together. Khaled remains a shitty mixtape DJ, fairly good producer, and constant remix-video presence who somehow managed to put together a pretty good official album on Koch last year and who seems to be on track to put out another one this year. Let's not talk about him anymore.

Throw em in the mosh pit, stomp em in the mosh pit, swing your motherfucking fist and beat em in the mosh pit

I guess everyone has to have a moment like this, a real soul-destroying glimpse at a favorite artist losing the plot and making terrible decisions for even worse reasons. I guess it's a rite of passage. The thing that kills me isn't just that I should've seen it coming; it's that I sort of did. Look: it's not like Three 6 Mafia are this unimpeachable artistic powerhouse or that they've spent a career resisting their most commercial urges before finally throwing their hands up and jumping in with everyone else. It's not like I have a lot of illusions about this group. They've always had their own aesthetic, but that aesthetic probably owes its existence as much to circumstance as to the artistic visions of DJ Paul and Juicy J. They're not maverick geniuses who formed in a cultural vacuum. Their monstrous, monolithic horrorcrunk style has precedents in Memphis get-buck music and in the thumping bombast of the No Limit house producers, as well as probably a few dozen out-of-the-trunk Southern rappers and producers who I've never heard and who I'll probably never hear. They're the products of a scene as much as they are the pioneers of one. And it's not like they never tried to become popular. They've been part of the major-label machine for a decade, and they've knowingly crafted novelty hits, even showing up to the 2000 Source Awards brandishing baby-bottles full of cough syrup. They've made unwatchable straight-to-video action movies with absolutely no artistic value beyond their soundtrack albums. They're also cold, calculating businessmen; Memphis is full of rappers they've used and discarded, and they're down to two members now because they've fired or alienated virtually everyone ever included in their once-teeming ranks. Since their shocking Oscar win last year, they've grabbed every crass mass-exposure opportunity that's come their way, popping up on My Super Sweet 16 and Studio 60 and every other TV show that would have them. But it's still tough for me to describe just how much despair and humiliation I felt watching last night's premiere episode of Adventures in Hollyhood, their new MTV reality-sitcom. If you've ever admired anything about this group, do yourself a favor and forget that it exists.