Take me to the glory, Kanye!

Kanye West- The Glory

(From Graduation: Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, 2007. Buy it here)

Recently, I remarked in an email chain after his VMAs debacle that if Kanye West was someone we actually knew, not just someone we saw on a screen, we would hate the guy. Which, you know, is pretty weird to state about a celebrity, people we’ll never likely meet and should probably all hate. It’s even weirder that I said it about Kanye, an artist that I spent about half a year loving. When I saw the video for “Through The Wire” on MTV Jams in the great 90-degree South Florida winter of 2003, there was something totally endearing about the guy. Between that and the didactic but bumping “Jesus Walks,” I was living on the hype of his debut album, The College Dropout. The album came, it was pretty good, and more than anything, I thought that he had a classic in him; probably by the time I did my first keg stand at college. At some point I even mentioned to my friends that I planned on naming my first-born son Kanye.

And then I began to hate him. I hated him because other people began to adore him. Other people, who didn’t read Pitchfork everyday, who didn’t do any research on what to listen to, and most importantly, didn’t care about championing a new voice, were all on Kanye’s tip now. His punchlines seemed forced and obnoxious, while his flow had no wired jaw to excuse its staleness; it was like that moment in Step Brothers when Seth Rogen’s character first finds Ferrell and Reilly’s tuxedo schtick funny, and then realizes later that it’s just fucked up. Since then, I’ve followed along with each album, hoping that this will be the one where everyone realizes that HE CAN’T RAP. I treat him awfully, as he’s one of the few artists whose albums I’ve excised half of from my hard drive, an act more of vituperation than of necessity, and I almost always take the counterpoint when my friends laud him (don’t get me started on how not great “RoboCop” is.)   Yet I can’t figure out where this disdain stems from, because if you made a mix of his seven best songs of the decade, it would compare with mixes from some of my favorite artists. Maybe I criticize out of disappointment, or from misplaced love, but it’s most likely out of pure interest: will he ever become something I can marvel at again?

For someone whose genius I publicly repudiate almost any chance I get to, Kanye West has been tied to my academic pursuits far more than any other artist. When I worked for my high school newspaper, I utilized the lax budgeting of stories to review The College Dropout, labeling Kanye as “ground-breaking.” In my first article for the college paper, I reviewed Late Registration, and proceeded to slam most of it, leading to a group of strangers knocking on my dorm room door at 1 AM, asking if I really listened to hip-hop. And my final paper of college was about notions of the post-human conceived in 808s & Heartbreaks, a piece that I actually find myself interested in pursuing further and even more interested in letting everyone know was accepted as part of my degree plan. Kanye West has never shifted far from my conscience, even when I want him to, and I think it’s due to his ability to astound, even if only in small spurts, like Robert Horry in the postseason.

“The Glory” never really gets a lot of credit, but it’s the most obvious reminder, aside from making Mike Myers squeamish on live TV, of just how great Kanye can be. He’s always been a much better producer than rapper (this point shouldn’t have to be made), yet he really impresses with the array of sounds he uses on “The Glory,” placing the digital next to orchestral substantially better than, yes, “RoboCop.” It’s a lesson in letting a two second-long sample dictate instrumentation and arrangement, with sped-up Laura Nyro vocals serving as the foundation for Kanye to pull out almost every variation on a sample he can think of. A gospel choir, choppy (but not chopped) strings, and spare, anti-“Flashing Lights” synths complementing sampled piano melody— it’s a notably passionate effort, especially when sharing vinyl with “Drunk and Hot Girls.” It doesn’t excuse “Stronger,” or his social blunders, or all of the weak drum programming, or the general public’s consensus that he’s one of the best rappers alive. But if one lets it just exist without thinking of who he makes himself out to be, lets it soak in every few weeks or so, plays it on repeat four times with headphones in, then one is brought back to the Kanye of “Through The Wire,” someone who you actually want to root for. Then the next track hits, you hear Chris Martin singing, and realize the glory’s over.

A decade is a long time, wide enough to find and lose inspiration in the same thing. Before I wrote this, I listened to The College Dropout again while I drove around. I hoped to find what made me inspired—inspired!— by Kanye West in the first place. What I instead found was what I remembered from his other albums: a third bangers, a third middling, and a third shit, with a lot more awful skits than the others. At this point, I’ve lost faith in Kanye as a consistent genius, and certainly wouldn’t count on an opus in his future. But maybe I should treat him more as a R. Kelly-esque figure, an artist who whiffs hard at times but at the end of the day still has his share of stellar moments. He fails, but most do, I just don’t give them shit about it. I don’t really want to spend the rest of West’s career bemoaning his musical trajectory; I’ve got to dwell more on his triumphs and the fleeting glory his best can bring.

You’re okay, Kanye, you’re okay. I’m okay, too. But my watch sick.

Springfield

Arthur Russell- Springfield (DFA Mix)

(from Springfield: Audika, 2006. Buy it here)

I have to admit, four blog entries in and I still feel somewhat uncertain of what I write. It’s not the words themselves— I know what I want to say (most of the time)— it’s the final arrangement of them. I keep telling myself that I’m destined to be a writer, that it’s my gift (it’s certainly not woodworking or grocery shopping), and if I keep at it, I’ll be successful and married to Tawny from Even Stevens by the end of the (next) decade. Yet as I look over each draft right before I click “publish,” I have my doubts: everything’s sloppy, it’s not nearly as witty as I might think, I write like Don Delillo did in 4th grade. Writing for blogs is something I haven’t done much of, and I always feel like I’m coming off trite when discussing some of my favorite works of art. As I doubt my abilities in this new forum, I find myself scared that I’ll not only fail to meet my own expectations as a writer, but also disappoint my friends and family. Typical post-grad, “I’m-on-the-cusp-of-the-rest-of-my-life” thinking, I’m aware, but a true sentiment nevertheless. There’s an urge to find flawless forms of expression, which tends to fall back on the ways I’ve expressed myself in the past.

I’m attracted to artists that fail to find themselves content with a singular thing that they excel at. They push things forward, inhabit new zones, roll up people’s expectations and throw them in a wastebasket. Arthur Russell has been one of my heroes for the second half of this decade, and I’ve been lucky enough to find inspiration in a musician who has undergone an extensive critical reappraisal this decade, as it’s led to the unearthing of previously unheard gems from his enormous catalog. His story is best documented in the wonderful Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, but the most pertinent thing to stress is that there are few artists I’ve encountered as multi-layered as Russell: disco, classical, synth-pop, folk, blue-eyed soul— all of these terms seem to be inadequately descriptive, but Russell has encompassed them all, infusing each genre with a generous helping of his idiosyncratic personality. My impression of him has progressed through the many resissues and compilations of his work the past five years, going from leftfield disco producer to haunting cellist to pop craftsman. But when Springfield came out in 2006, I was surprised to learn that Arthur Russell could also write one of my favorite pieces of dance music.

“Springfield” appears in three different versions on the album. The original version is more loose and almost indecipherable at times— it’s a very pleasurable haze, mind you, but still nebulous enough to facilitate listener indifference to some of its charms. It sounded like a lot of Arthur Russell that I had heard: dreamy, august, and sort of all over the place. Danceable, though, would not be the word to describe it. Really, a lot of credit must be given to the DFA on their work with “Springfield,” particularly in the way they approached mixing. They don’t announce to the world immediately that it’s a remix (i.e. shouting “IT’S DA REMIX BABY, YEAH!”) Their work is less about reconceptualization and more about reordering; simply, they take pieces of the cluttered original and arrange them in a new, streamlined way. The percussive elements lead for the first three minutes, broken up only by a muted, ramshackle trumpet line, not revealing more than a flash of a synth line. It’s not quite danceable, like most of the DFA’s work, the bass strangely thudding instead of bouncing, but it keeps a pulse, even if it moves like an irregular heartbeat. Suddenly, a full-bodied synth phrase drops in, and once it locks in around the three and a half minute mark, the syncopated groove is irrepressible. It calls attention to each space between notes, creating a duplicate rhythm in the bobbing of my head, and then Russell’s vocals glide in, that high timbral voice that makes me feel like I know him, not as something detached like Uncle Arthur, but as one of my best friends that I’ve yet to meet. I’m trying to remember a time when “Springfield (DFA Remix)” sounded foreign to an Arthur Russell admirer like myself, but it seems like every time I’ve been surprised by him, it’s expected, because that’s what he excelled at.

I’m feeling better about these blog posts, because I’m accepting the fact that they aren’t going to be perfect, and that shouldn’t affect my image of myself as a writer. It’s just me going forward in a different direction, although I don’t know how far I’ll venture. I do know that I’ve spent the last two years writing short films and short stories that are sad (thematically and, often times, technically,) and although I don’t regret that work, nor do I want to banish that creative impulse for good, part of me is excited about a new feature-length script I’m writing. Why? It’s a romantic comedy, tentatively titled “The Duchess and the Fat Duke.” At times, I’m uneasy with the construction of the script, because it’s not ground that I’ve cultivated yet, but I find inspiration in Arthur Russell, and the idea that exploration isn’t necessarily limited to inconsequential forays. It’s part of any artist’s quest, to find new ways of expression, even if it ends with lovers kissing in a maelstrom while Taylor Swift’s “You Belong to Me” plays over the end credits (spoiler alert.) The writing might not be great, it might feel disjointed and not right, yet I’ll keep trying.  Maybe the DFA will do a rewrite.

Finality Implies Closure?

Jim O’Rourke- Life Goes Off

(From the album Insignificance: Drag City, 2001)

If Jim O’Rourke were a painter, he’d probably paint a beautiful poppy field and then run over the canvas with an ATV. He’s an artist who thrives on creating some of the most gorgeous pop music in the world, but only under his conditions, which usually means that he dabbles in avant-garde touches and stays lyrically tongue-in-cheek. “Life Goes Off,” the final song on Insignificance, is a love song, but it’s a Jim O’Rourke love song, which means that he’s more interested about the clothes he’ll die in than the girl who’s left. Of course, he also has a song about nailing a paraplegic, so it’s not always best to perceive his lyrics as literal (Jim O’Rourke: “Well, duh.”) Still, he finds ways to affect, particularly with an intermittent delicate slide guitar fill and lines like:

I don’t recall your face no more, but you left behind your mask

And just when it seems likes he’ll leave us on a beautiful, elegiac note, the taste of that slide guitar is overtaken by a drum machine fallen off its rails and what sounds like a desktop computer processing too much information. All memories of the soft acoustic strumming go out the window, frequencies keep swirling upward, the pop song machine goes bonkers and eventually fails to function any longer. He then rides away on his ATV, laughing.

Jason Forrest- 10 Amazing Years

(From the album The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash: Sonig, 2004)

The Who’s “Who Are You” should never sound this crucial. It’s not glitchy, it’s not glam— is it glitch glam? Is that just gibberish inspired by a monolith roller disco jam? Where do the chorus of Townshends that reflect off a shimmering piano loop and minute vinyl scratches go? Why does this sum up why I love the 70s much better than Hal Sparks and Donal Logue could ever hope?

Forrest bides his time, giving us a flash of each element here and there, then lets them vanish until the final minute, when everything rises and converges, because it must. This isn’t the end of an album; this is the end of a decade, and you feel fine. You can feel the majestic, proto-prog swoop of “Who Are You” being bullied by 2000s-era technology. It all culminates in a blast of distorted white noise, equivalent to a decade being constructed and demolished, and it’s like a million Princes jacking off their guitars at the end of “Baby I’m A Star.” Epic? Homer just shit his bell-bottoms.

Clipse- I’m Not You

(From the album Lord Willin’: Star Trak/Arista, 2002)

For me, every theme and sentiment that Clipse has dealt with is elucidated most clearly on the last song of Lord Willin’. After all the requisite thug posturing and coke rap punchlines, the question posed on “I’m Not You” is: why? Why are we living this lifestyle? Jadakiss thinks in religious terms (“God is great/The devil is a motherfucker”) and Styles P sees it in a fatalistic way (“I’m in the hood like it’s my fate to rep”), but it’s Malice who comes most correct with his assessment, raising his white tee to do some navel gazing. It’s all on him, the good and the bad of being a drug dealer/rapper, and didn’t you know that that can weigh on a drug dealer/rapper’s soul?

It shames me to no end,
To feed poison to those who could very well be my kin
But where there’s demand, someone will supply
So I feed them their needs at the same time cry

It’s an honest portrait of confliction, and one of the few times that I have felt like an emcee has truly cut through any of his own hyperbolic bullshit, especially after an album featuring superficial joints like “Mama I Don’t Love Her” and “Let’s Talk About It.” Is it an act of contrition? Maybe not, because seven years later they’re still rapping about the same tropes, but Malice completely drops the conventions of how a rapper should act when he confesses:

And with this in mind, I still didn’t quit/ that’s how I know I ain’t shit

Words like that just leave me feeling cold.

The Modern Age

The Strokes- The Modern Age

(From Is This It, RCA/Rough Trade, 2001)

My family went on five different cruises between 1997 and 2003, partly because of our close proximity to the Miami seaport and mostly because of my mom’s inclination toward relaxation rather than exploration. Not to be bougie, but it got sort of boring by the fourth trip to the Caribbean. In the prime of my youth, here we were neglecting world travel, or at least the kind that doesn’t involve midnight buffets and steel drums. However, when I was 14 we finally eschewed our familial norm and went to Paris for a week. To prepare for the vacation, I bought a Game Boy Advance and a copy of Mario Kart Advance. Allez Yoshi!

My family was on a shuttle bus en route to our hotel from De Gaulle and we were all pretty jetlagged, so I tried to listen to music before I fell asleep. Before the trip, I had made three mixes: one of The Strokes, another of The White Stripes, and that last a blend of Yo La Tengo, Stereolab, and Saves The Day (if one of these bands stand out, let me repeat that I was 14.) I didn’t know much beyond the hits for any of the aforementioned groups, and was coming off a freshman year where Tenacious D figured as heavily in my listening rotation as any other band. When I think about my music library at the time, I see pieces of a MusicMatch Jukebox replete with classic rock, HBO theme songs, and somewhat obscure 80s pop hits (well hello there, “Dance Hall Days”) amongst the many gaping holes my mind’s dug out of said library over the decade. Thus, when I downloaded as many Strokes songs as I could find on Kazaa right before the trip, I did it with the intent of bringing something fresh to accompany my journey in a foreign capital.

I hadn’t looked at the tracklisting for Is This It, so my Strokes mix began with “The Modern Age.” Upstrokes, distorted vocals, “Up on a hill is where we begin,” and once the chorus struck, a frisson working its way through me.  Looking out the window at the graffiti-covered rock walls that line the freeway into the city, I felt like I was viewing the opening credits to the movie of my life, which looking back, is pretty unfair to my first 14 sugarshit years. But there was something about the setting and song, briefly conjoined in their unfamiliarity, which initiated a thought process similar to:

Maybe I’ll make more friends this year, and maybe they’ll show me things that I haven’t seen but are cool, and then I’ll make everyone realize that I’m not just a carbon copy of my older brother, and I’ll wear a Strokes tee like the one hipster in my school did but with the sleeves cut off, and I’ll work out with my mom’s hand weights so that my arms will look buff in those sleeveless shirts, and I’ll go to an Ivy League school that wasn’t so cliché as Harvard, and there I’ll be able to use run-on sentences without getting chastised, and I’ll fuck up only in loveable ways, and that’ll make me like who I want to be, like those people who get away with those things.

If any of these thoughts stick out, let me repeat that I was 14. I don’t want to make my teenage life out to be like the Where The Wild Things Are trailer.

The last night of our trip my parents and my brother went out to dinner with a friend, but I stayed in the hotel room, alone for three hours. I finished the Lord of the Rings, something I had been reading since earlier in the year, and ended up reading the timeline of future events in one of the appendixes. I’m not sure why, but reading about the eventual deaths of each member of the Fellowship made me melancholic, more so than anything else in my young life. I thought about how little I had done by the age of 14, how inchoate my life seemed, how I didn’t want to leave Paris, because it was my first chance to do something that I hadn’t done before. I wish I could say that I cried because I was alone in a foreign land, or that I listened to “The Modern Age” until I brightened up, but both aren’t true. I just listened to The Faces’ “Ooh La La” on repeat roughly 15 times and played Mario Kart on my Game Boy until my family came back to me.

Nothing has really pushed me to that point of sadness since, including the twelve months that I was 15 and a few Pixies CDs away from being full-on emo (there’s an online journal to corroborate this.) My grandfather passed away later that year, and although I did cry at his funeral, it wasn’t exactly a personal moment, since five weeping cousins surrounded me. For the rest of the decade, I’ve had a reliance on artworks to bring about any crying fits, yet beyond my yearly ritual of watching Au Hasard Balthazar and breaking down like a baby, it usually only amounts in a slight increase in moisture about my eyes. I don’t really let life get me down, and when I do, I have an austere code of non-crying.

But how I felt that last night in Paris was something that hasn’t happened to me again, when I just wanted something to happen with my life and it seemed like it wouldn’t, and I carried the perturbing idea that I would be helpless to do anything about it.

Magic School Bus

I rode the bus to school almost everyday during middle school, unless I could cajole a ride out of my dad on his way to work (and maybe even a swing by the Original Pancake House.)  On the bus, I was one of about five white kids, surrounded by anywhere from 40 to 60 other students, many of whom were of Haitian descent, so I heard my fair share of masisis and bouzins shouted each ride. Additionally, because of the amount of kids assigned to our bus, we usually sat three-deep to a seat, and as if I didn’t stick out already, every other day I carried a French horn with me. Also, I was fat. So there were afternoons that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the hour-long ride ahead, a certain mélange of fear mixed with vexation at the predicted playlist to be heard on the bus. In the morning, we usually listened to the Tom Joyner Morning Show (oh-oh-oh), but in the afternoon, the selection usually oscillated between 99.1 (more well-known as 99 Jiggity Jams) and Miami’s “number-one party station,” Power 96. Both of these were in direct contrast with my love for alt rock, which is where musically I started this decade .

When I was twelve, I had nothing to base my identity on but being different. I rejected rap and pop, in hopes of standing out from the crowd (unable to recognize that my love for pro wrestling and velvet shirts bought at Pacific Sunwear didn’t occlude me from being part of a majority.) I’m not sure how well it worked, this effort to be idiosyncratic in a time and place that grounds people in fitting in, but a glance through my 8th grade yearbook reveals almost every message to include the description “you’ve been a weird friend.” Hell, even my best friend Justin calls me weird in his yearbook entry. So I must have stuck out some, although I listened to the same alternative drivel that everyone else who didn’t fall into the hip-hop or pop crowd listened to. There was a binary drawn between the different crowds that made it seem impossible to dabble in both genres, as if you would adulterate the Smashing Pumpkins catalog if you liked a Juvenile song. But with such exposure to the rap world every afternoon of my middle school life, it seems like this was how I became something that was truly dissimilar to everyone else I knew. Maybe these songs are indelibly stocked away in my memory because they are what I heard on the way home, free from school and JNCO jeans and feeling like a dork. Maybe they’re just great.

Aaliyah- Try Again
(From Romeo Must Die: The Album, Virgin Records, 2000)
The fact that I can safely name at least seven songs that I loved (and still love) during 2000-2001 (7th & 8th grade), and all of them were from listening to hip-hop/pop stations on the bus tells me something. “Try Again” is one of the chief songs from this time. Not only does it keep “Romeo Must Die” somewhat relevant, but it also was one of the first songs from the radio that I let a friend know I liked. I recall being in gym class with my friend Curtis, discussing how it was a “pretty tight” song and trying to mimic this one dance move Aaliyah does during the bridge in the music video, standing akimbo and jerking her head back and forth. Our efforts were interrupted by our coach forcing us to do pull-ups. I managed zero.

Shaggy- It Wasn’t Me

(From Hotshot, MCA Records, 2000)

Mystikal- Danger

(From Let’s Get Ready, Jive Records, 2000)

It seems like the bus was the first place that I was introduced to actual musical characters, so different than what I found in the whitewashed alt rock genre. There was no one else like Mystikal or Shaggy, and no songs like  “Danger” or “It Wasn’t Me” on 103.1 The Buzz, my preferred alt-rock station. Even nowadays, there aren’t many musicians who sound as off-the-wall as Mystikal did (confirmed by his arrest record), or who have the gall to write a song like “It Wasn’t Me,” truly one of the best executions of a one-dimensional idea. That’s probably why these guys stayed with me, and not JT Money or Lil Troy, as did my busdriver.

My bus driver for two years was a guy named Kinito, and he always treated me nicely, since I was last kid to be dropped off. I would put the windows up for him after the other kids were dropped off, and one afternoon he took me to 7-Eleven, buying me a small Slurpee. Anyone who knows me knows that this has consistently been the way to my heart, and I tried my best to develop some sort of friendship with the guy. One day, while browsing through the arts section of the newspaper, I saw his face. Apparently, he was the leader of a merengue band that was headlining a local music festival. I asked him about it the next day, and he sheepishly grinned, asking me where I heard that. I told him, and he just kept smiling, never telling me if it was true, as if I had just told him I knew that he was Santa Claus. I’m glad I rode the bus, and I’m glad he was my driver for two years, because there’s just no way I would have known him otherwise.

Daft Punk- One More Time
(From Discovery, Virgin Records, 2000)

Although 99 Jams didn’t play anything but hip-hop and the occasional R & B cut, Power 96 often latched onto a techno song. DJ Sammy ruined a fair amount of afternoons for me, and “Sandstorm” never made a ride better. But then “One More Time” etched out this place in their 15-song rotation for a whole semester, and I had to reevaluate my stance on “electronica,” a phrase only used by people who have no clue what the fuck they are listening to. Likewise, my busmates were thrown for a loop when Daft Punk came on. Especially during the near silent middle section. No one knew what to do when the drums dropped out for two minutes. It was the only time the bus really ever felt quiet, and when you’re with 60 kids, a uniform awkwardness is one of the last traits you want to share (as if this isn’t the one thing kids ages 11-13 all inherently share.)  How something so pervasive could ever have seemed like an anomaly still amazes me and reinforces the idea that middle school is a place where anything seemingly amorphous isn’t so much rejected as not understood.

Eminem- The Real Slim Shady

(from The Marshall Mathers LP, Aftermath, 2000)

Full disclosure: I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the past year. Which is weird, because it seems like the most dated of all the songs in this entry. Because whenever I am reminded that the “Real Slim Shady” came out this decade, still sharing some inconsequential relationship with the moment I am currently typing this, I realize how long these past ten years have been. I went to my old high school last month to visit a few teachers, and ran into my old 7th grade English teacher. I called her Miss Rodriguez, and she told me she was married now, so I called her something else. She was surprised that I looked different, but why would I look the same when I was twelve as I do now at twenty-two? Beyond her shock of the physical change ten years had produced in me, she didn’t really ask me anything else. She just shook her head and walked away. At first I was surprised at her lack of interest in filling in blanks, but later it seemed more logical than trying to play catch-up. What do we really have to keep two moments together? Who can say? All I know is that Dr. Dre said nothing, you idiots.

Outkast- B.O.B.
(From Stankonia, La Face Records, 2000)

If there was one glaring omission on radio during this time, it has to be “B.O.B.,” especially when I consider the constant radio play soon after of “Ms. Jackson.” One of my good friends from the time told me to download “B.O.B.”, even though I didn’t like rap.  I think the first time I used Napster was to download the song. I loved it, because it was different and peregrine from other rap or even rock that I had heard. From there, it occupied the opening spot on my first mix CD ever, unfairly followed by Dynamite Hack and Candlebox. It became the first song I ever learned how to rap, and if I could point to an early turning point for me musically, it has to be accepting and loving “B.O.B.” But as much as my appreciation continually grows for finding the song when I did, I remember how it was still surrounded by a lot of shit, like Candlebox, that would take a few years to shake off.

More than anything, it just seems weird that I now openly love these songs, when I spent so much time not letting anyone in on this. I kept these things hidden, and it took nearly the rest of the decade to let my friends on. I guess it’s the same with middle school: afterwards, everyone spent so much time talking about how bad it was, and I certainly used to, but I’m ready to admit that beyond the maladroit moments and Pokemon, I’m glad I was thrown into that shitshow, as everyone likes to watch a good shitshow, even if they don’t know they are the ones wallowing in the shit.