More rappers should kick their custom-made mic-stands over (photo by Ryan Dombal)

LL Cool J + Brand Nubian + the Lox + Large Professor + Clipse + Cham
Empire Fulton State Park
August 4, 2007

Nobody I know has paid actual money for a Zune, the mp3 player that Microsoft created to compete with the iPod, but Microsoft is totally smashing Apple in at least one area: the promotional event. Or, to put it another way, no Apple event has ever given me opportunity to drink free beer and eat free barbecue chicken while watching a festival roster jammed with rap legends performing for free. Saturday night's Live at the BBQ show was the third of three big free rap shows that Zune had sponsored, following shows in LA and Chicago, and it turned out to be one of the most pleasant and laid-back shows I've seen this summer, quite a feat in a season rich with big free shows. Zune staged the event at Empire Fulton State Park, the same location that played host to the Boredoms' 77-drummer opus a month ago. But the line to get into that Boredoms show stretched about a half-mile back at one point, and I never saw more than a couple of people waiting in line for the Zune show despite a similar free-with-RSVP setup, pretty funny considering that the Zune show's combined lineup has probably sold several hundred times as many records as the Boredoms. Zune kept the show's location and a good portion of its lineup secret until just before the show, which might explain the thin turnout; at any given time, the crowd back in the VIP tent seemed to equal the number of people out on the actual festival grounds. I wasn't mad, though, since that lack of overcrowding led to an appealingly casual atmosphere; you could see the stage from pretty much anywhere, and I never had to sacrifice my personal space to get close to the performers. When I got to the park, Cham was just beginning to perform my favorite single of last year. He got about halfway through, stopped, mumbled something about how cursing wasn't allowed that day, said that Jamaica was the most beautiful place on Earth (to the elation of maybe five presumably-Jamaican kids up front) and then restarted the song. Nobody minded. When Cham emerged during Sean Paul's set to do "Ghetto Story" at last year's Summer Jam, it made for an apocalyptically exciting moment. At Saturday's show, he was just a guy on a stage doing a really good song, to the delight of a few and the casual enjoyment of a whole lot more. And it set the tone for the day, since there was a whole lot to enjoy besides the music: tetherball poles, picnic tables with checkerboards set up, basketball courts, an Xbox tent, an amazing riverside view of Manhattan. I would've had a great time even if all the acts had sucked, but thankfully that never became a concern.

Even if you were broke, their love don't cost a thing

Every music biopic depends at least a little bit on a built-in familiarity and sympathy. We're already supposed to know a couple of things about Ray Charles or Johnny Cash or Mozart, and that's what's supposed to get us into the theater in the first place. And then our appreciation for these guys is supposed to deepen once we get some sense of their struggles and their contexts. Well, El Cantante isn't going to teach anyone about Hector Lavoe, and it isn't going to deepen anyone's appreciation either; I learned more about the man from spending ten minutes with his Wikipedia entry than I did by spending two hours with El Cantante this morning. The movie doesn't build on an already-extant affection for the man; it depends upon it entirely. The Lavoe of the movie is a total cold fish, an emotionless bumbler who barely even tries to keep his dangerous appetites in check and who seems singularly undevoted to craft or artistry. Maybe that's because Marc Anthony, who plays Lavoe, isn't an actor; he's a singer, and he only seems alive in this character when he's onstage singing. The rest of the time, he just sits there bemused while stuff happens to him. The music is good enough that the movie never becomes a total waste, but it definitely wasn't worth my eleven dollars, and it probably won't be worth a spot in your Netflix cue when the DVD comes out in a couple of months either. Here are some things I learned watching El Cantante.

Shake off your flesh

I probably shouldn't rep too hard for something affiliated with one of my home teams, and I probably wouldn't even be talking about this if it wasn't such a slow day, but the new continuous DJ mix from JD Twitch, which Pitchfork made available for free download on Monday, is one of the best pieces of music I've heard in a while. Twitch is half of Optimo, a Scottish DJ duo who lean hard on psych-rock but who have a whole lot of fun grabbing from any available source, and this Pitchfork mix reflects their aesthetic beautifully. The Pitchfork mix is ostensibly a dance mix, and there's plenty of dance music here, both old and new, but the real joy here is in the connections that Twitch makes between that dance music and music that virtually no right-thinking club DJ would ever even consider pulling out. Some of the most devastating moments here come from recontextualization. Black Sabbath's "The Wizard" comes in after some old obscure French guy's Afrobeat tribute-song, and so the first thing you notice about "The Wizard" is the song's breathlessly funky drum-work, not the megalithic guitar-riffage. We hear a bit of John Cooper Clark's "Evidently Chickentown," an apocalyptic postpunk rant and probably the best end-credits song in Sopranos history, but they come with fluttery Italo-disco synths and drums layered underneath, and that makes for a neat contrast with the original track's stark menace. The same thing happens with "Shaking Hell," a particularly vicious early Sonic Youth song; in the accompanying interview, Twitch notes that he'd been dicking around with the song and he'd realized that it had a 4-4 beat that might actually work in clubs. The mix ends with Grinderman's "No Pussy Blues," a song I've been sort of obsessed with since I saw Grinderman absolutely murder at Madison Square Garden about a week ago. Twitch fades from Lee Douglas's "Breakwind," a straight-up disco instrumental, into "No Pussy Blues," and he leaves the former's drum-track in place until the latter's climactic guitar flare-up; Nick Cave sounds even sleazier with Douglas's drums burbling underneath him.

I don't even hate the cover

There's certainly plenty to dislike about Finding Forever. Virtually every song falls into one of three cliched conscious-rap subjects: the vague and nebulous for-the-people non-statement, insight-free world-gone-wrong cautionary tale, and the sickly and pandering loverman song. As plenty have already pointed out, Common's pop-culture references have somehow become so boring and mainstream that they distract: the first verse of "I Want You" is a really evocative meditation on the physical sensation of absence that comes with a breakup, but then he gets to that "it's kinda like The Breakup with Jen and Vince Vaughn" clanger and everything goes to hell immediately. There's no urgency in his delivery, and combined with all the pillowy Fender Rhodes noodling in the beats, the album fades right into the background. But here's the thing: I sort of like the way the album fades into the background. Speaking as someone who sort of hated Be, with all its tweeting flutes and somnambulant drums and flat righteousness, I had pretty much no expectations for Finding Forever. Resurrection might be a great album, but Common even sort of pisses me off there, if only because his intonation has this unbearable smugness, like everything he says is this divine jewel of knowledge that he's deigning to bestow upon us. But I like him on Finding Forever, and I like him because of the way he disappears into the music. The album is all surface, and I mean that as a compliment. In a weird way, Finding Forever reminds me of Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 because of the way both albums so single-mindedly pursue a certain aesthetic. Let's Get It went for overblown gothic melodrama just like Finding Forever goes for soothing soft-pop languor, and lyrics are almost irrelevant to the success of both. Let's Get It is a much better album than Finding Forever, just like Resurrection is, but I still like it way more than I expected to.

Also, he can apparently fly

When I was 17, my friend Nat and I spent two weeks in London, and we went to one day of the 2007 Reading Festival. That night's headliners were the Manic Street Preachers, a band I'd heard of but never heard, and it was sort of profoundly disconcerting to stand in a field with tens of thousands of people, all of whom were singing along at full-volume to these big puffed-up rock anthems that I'd never heard. Last night, I experienced a similar kind of amazed disconnect at the free Machel Montano show at Brooklyn's Wingate Field. Montano might be the world's biggest soca star, but that doesn't necessarily mean much when you don't know anything about soca, which I sure don't. So here's what I learned last night: a whole lot of people love soca. Wingate Field is in Flatbush, and it's a pretty massive venue, a high-school football field with enough room for something like 15,000 people. For 25 years now, it's played host to a free concert serious honoring Martin Luther King. Seventeen years ago, Curtis Mayfield was doing a show there when a lighting rig fell on him, paralyzing him from the neck down. Mayfield's accident took place during a freak thunderstorm, and as Montano took the stage to a completely packed field, lightning was flickering not too far off in the distance. A few songs in, Montano paused the show to say that the show would have to end early if the storm got too close, but then he added that he wasn't worried: "When I see lightning, I think God is taking pictures of me." (He followed this, inevitably, by smiling and striking a pose in the lightning's direction.) The storm never came, and I wouldn't be surprised if the collective willpower of the assembled thousands was enough to hold it off. From the moment Montano stepped onstage, the entire crowd was dumbing the fuck out: pogoing in place, twirling Caribbean island flags over their heads, screaming along with Montano's anthemic choruses. Virtually every song Montano sang last night had an anthemic chorus. In fact, it often had nothing but an anthemic chorus; more often than not, he didn't even bother with the verses, using that time to exhort the crowd to even higher levels of frenzy. Before last night, I might not have recognized Montano if I'd tripped over him, but he's an absolute superstar.

What happened to this guy?

I was out of town over the past few days, so I missed a big weekend for rap nostalgics. Over the past couple of days, the New York area saw three huge festivals full of rap veterans: Rock the Bells on Randall's Island, the Wild Style 25th Anniversary show in Central Park, and the Rock Steady Crew 30th Anniversary show in Newark; I wonder how anyone chose among them. If those three shows prove anything, it's that older New York rappers are still totally capable of holding down successful careers but that those careers are more likely to center around the reunion-tour circuit than around any real interaction with circa-2007 pop-charts. It's been years since we've heard new albums from Rakim and Slick Rick and EPMD, but all of them can still tour. And some of those rap veterans who maintain active recording schedules (I'm thinking specifically of the Boot Camp Clik here) have smartly adjusted expectations, catering to a growing cult audience rather than making pandering pop-moves and attempting to stay commercially relevant. New York rap's two big hall-of-fame exceptions are Jay-Z and Nas, both of whom are keeping their crossover appeal mostly intact even as both of them are now releasing albums primarily concerned with aging. But when aging New York rappers attempt to maintain their popularity, they're more likely to pull embarrassing moves: Busta Rhymes' last megabudget album, LL Cool J joining G-Unit. In the rest of the country, though, things are different. E-40, Common, Bun B, and Pimp C are all getting up there, but they've all managed to adjust to rap's changing styles without seriously compromising their own core aesthetics. Given all that, I'll be really curious to watch what happens with the Fixxers, the new duo of two West Coast veterans who aren't even bothering to pretend that they're doing something other than chasing trends. I've yet to hear "Can U Werk Wit Dat" on the radio in New York, and the song's low-budget video hasn't been getting any Rap City burn, but I'm told that the single has been inescapable out west for months now. DJ Quik and AMG now have major-label deals for the first time in almost ten years, and they've achieved that with a song that sounds absolutely nothing like the stuff that they've been doing for years and years. So is this a triumph or a capitulation? Or both?

Still standing

Twista + Black Moon
Canal Room
July 26, 2007

Well, it certainly looked like it was too good to be true. When the email came from the Duck Down Records mailing list that Black Moon would be doing a free RSVP-only show in New York with Scarface, it just didn't sound right, as much as I wanted to believe it. Scarface, one of my favorite rappers ever, doesn't like to fly, and as far as I can tell he doesn't enjoy New York too much either. He left the presidency of Def Jam South (after signing Ludacris), seemingly because he just didn't feel like doing it anymore. Last year, he announced his semi-retirement from rap and said that he wouldn't be putting out any more solo albums. We all know how rap retirements usually work, but more than any other big-name rapper I can think of, Scarface seems totally willing and ready to let the rap world spin on without him, which is to say that he's probably the last guy you'd expect to see performing at a promotional event for Olde English Malt Liquor in a tiny and cramped downtown Manhattan club. My tentative hopes started fading pretty soon after I joined the line outside the Canal Room last night. That line stretched all the way down the block and around the corner before the event's planned start time, and it didn't move much for more than an hour after that. This was your typical NY rap clusterfuck: a huge line of ordinary suckers in an orderly line and a small but chaotic crowd of would-be VIPs swarming the bouncers at the door. It's that old story: the VIPs inevitably get in, and the line doesn't move. After a while, I got sick of waiting and managed to talk my way in; I have no idea how many people ended up getting in after waiting in the real line, but it couldn't have been too many. Inside, Olde English was running some weird competition to determine which one of three tattoo artists (all of whom looked like they'd rather be competing at a Social Distortion show) would get to design the new O.E. can (or something), like anyone who drinks Olde English gives a damn what the can looks like. Sway from MTV wandered around the stage looking bored while a DJ played a bunch of old NY rap touchstones and one of the competing artists claimed to be "inspired by graffiti, medieval stuff, pretty much skulls and stuff." And, shockingly enough, no Scarface. Nobody onstage even mentioned the man's name all night; I should've realized there was no chance. And still we ended up getting a pretty great little rap show out of it. New York really is a great place to live.

...Why?

OK, so I've officially given up on trying to figure out how the greatest-hits wing of the music industry works anymore. It just makes no sense whatsoever, and I guess I'm OK with that. In this space, I've recently enthused about greatest-hits albums from Luscious Jackson and DMX, and while I couldn't imagine that either one of those albums had an overwhelmingly huge target-audience, at least both of those artists had signature sounds that helped to define their respective eras. This week, on the other hand, brings Absolute Garbage, the awfully-titled greatest-hits disc from Garbage. I'm wracking my brains trying to figure out who might possibly be expected to buy this thing, and I'm getting nothing. Garbage might've sold a lot of records, and they might've been considered an important band at their peak, but they didn't develop a sound that helped to define an era. Instead, they absorbed and synthesized every sound that was popular in alt-rock circles at the time, blurring it all together into a sort of stylistic orphan sound, something both completely dependent on smaller scenes and trends and somewhere outside them. Listening to Absolute Garbage is an exercise in musical history roughly analogous to checking tree-trunk rings for incremental changes in the atmosphere; we know electroclash must've arrived in 2001, for instance, because of the burping neon synth-riff of third-album single "Cherry Lips." On Absolute Garbage's first few tracks, we hear revved-up candy-grunge, post-shoegaze guitar-swirl, Stabbing Westward-esque pop-industrial, uber-clean boutique-techno drum-thump, sunny rave synths, and vaguely transgressive lyrical gibberish. If Geffen had sat on this anthology for even a couple of years, the ever-increasing nostalgia-cycle would've inevitably brought all those sounds back and made them cool again, and the compilation might've had some cachet. In the summer of 2007, though, it's just like seeing a senior-year class-picture before warm memories of high school have had time to gestate.

This whole entry is just an excuse to post this picture again

I have a really vivid memory of sitting in my parents' minivan in my parents' driveway about six years ago, around the time White Blood Cells came out, paralyzed by indecision. The White Stripes were about to play Fletcher's, a shitty little bar in Baltimore that always smelled like an ashtray, and I really wanted to go see them. But I had to get up around five the next morning to open the coffee shop where I was working that summer. I ended up skipping the show, and I've been regretting it every since. Up until last night, the closest I'd come to seeing the White Stripes live was when I was in their video and they were lip-syncing a few away from me. Every time they've toured since that Fletcher's show, I've been living in the wrong city, or tickets have sold out just as I was hearing about the show; fate seemed to conspire to keep me from seeing this band, and I had to make do with rapturous secondhand reports. I haven't been happy about it, but after last night, I'm glad I missed all those shows. Last night was the first time the band has ever played Madison Square Garden (Jack: "I don't believe we've played this bar before"), and it's a whole other thing to see this band explode into such a huge and historic venue, ignoring all received arena-rock logic and burning the place down all the same. The crowd last night was one of the weirdest and most heterogeneous I'd seen in a while: suburban Hot Topic kids, aging New York weirdos, studious-looking collegiate types, fratboys, yuppies, parents with kids, Nick Zinner. On the way out, I didn't hear anyone grumbling. After last night, the White Stripes don't look like indie-garage weirdos who somehow lucked their way into becoming something resembling rock stars. They look like they've always been rock stars; the rest of the world (or at least New York) has finally caught up.

No relation to this guy, presumably

You wouldn't believe how easy of a time I have ignoring the whole jam-band sub-universe. I have such an easy time ignoring it, in fact, that even the bands in that whole universe who don't actually jam don't generally show up on my radar. Up until a few days ago, I knew basically nothing about the New Orleans funk band Galactic other than that they sometimes play shows Talib Kweli types. I think I actually worked the door at one of their shows once, about seven years ago, but I don't remember paying any attention to their music. So it comes as something of a surprise to learn that they keep the noodling to a minimum; none of the songs on From the Corner to the Block, their new album, is more than five minutes long. In fact, their rippling funk comes in such discrete and precise pieces that I find myself wishing they'd actually jam more; the compressed sterility of their production is probably the biggest obstacle preventing them from achieving their evident goal and becoming the Meters. Still, as goals go, becoming the Meters isn't too bad. It's something of a pleasant shock to learn that one band in the whole Jammy axis gives a damn about quaint notions like rhythm and song-structure. I probably would've never bothered to discover Galactic's low-simmer swagger if not for the smart gimmick behind From the Corner to the Block. According to their bio, the album is Galactic's first since the band parted ways with vocalist Theryl DeClouet and became an instrumental unit three years ago, and they've made the exceedingly sane decision to replace him with a gang of rappers. If a jam-band is trying to get me to notice them, hiring a whole bunch of rappers is a pretty good way to go.