Pitchfork Reviews 5/30/08

Bun B
II Trill
[Rap-A-Lot / Asylum; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.

I think this is the guy who said the most important place in the history of Houston hip hop was wherever he was standing on that Vice documentary about the codeine cough syrup they drink down there. That was awesome. I will watch that documentary again. I will not listen to this. Wait. He's also the guy from "Big Pimpin'." "It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B!" Those non-Jay verses were kind of garbage, except I think this is the guy who said "no I can't fuck a scary ho." That was pretty good. I can't fuck a scary ho either. Too scary!


Steinski
What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
[Illegal Art; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it an 8.7.

The entire academy attitude towards early hip hop is bullshit. You know, the guys on documentaries who say things like (I'm quoting nobody in particular, I don't think, I might be paraphrasing somebody without knowing it, who cares, it's a blog) "here we have a culture born out of poverty in the hyper-segregated ghettos of the 70's, where the people have been completely forgotten, and they create this wonderful, vibrant American art form that takes the detritus of shit-end-of-the-stick consumer culture that society has handed to them and reworked the pieces of it--disco pop hooks and funk breaks into beat loops, billboards and brick warehouses into spray paint murals, asphalt and cardboard into a dance floor--until the end result is a transformative expression of both joy and pain..." Bullshit, right?

I mean, technically, dead-on. Sure. But: condescending, because what are people in the ghetto or in any poverty-stricken environment supposed to do, not express themselves? It's as if the accepted academic attitude is "Oh, they're poor, so they're supposed to just give up and take their lot in life without being creative. Wait a minute, what's this? They made something? Those poor people? I'm suprised! Hooray for the human spirit!" Ok, good job on hooray for the human spirit, I can get behind that. But the other stuff about how you're not supposed to be creative unless you have the proper resources? That has got to go.

But I can't get too mad at the collective culture-level writing and thought about a thing. I contribute to it in my meager way. And I'd probably miss the point too if I were to guess what the point of hip hop is. So: fair warning. But as far as I've observed, a big thing with hip hop is staying in the now. Being current. Living for today. I think.

Maybe that's the driving force behind all of that "recycling culture" stuff that pseudo-intellectuals are so keen on picking up on when early hip hop is under consideration for whatever reason. Maybe it's just as simple as a guy with no money but a ton of pride deciding to call himself "Grandmaster Flash," and hearing some electronic disco on a shitty ghetto street, and summarizing that exact moment and experience in his life by saying "broken glass EVERYWHERE" because that's what he sees and that's all there is to it because that's all he's got. He's not like "oh, maybe I'll recycle all of this and create a vibrant American artform." He's just like "this is it, this is what I've got. I'm telling it." But I'm probably missing the point and that's just my guess.

But this is what I think about hip hop. It's about right now. Boiled down as honestly as possible. Sure there's a history to it, and sure it's a valid American art form. But it withers on the vine as a revivalist movement because it's supposed to be about now. And only the true classics are able to express now so truthfully and succinctly that it could be about any now.

And hip hop culture really really really fucking sucks as a commodified entity, where "right now" means "drinking Sprite." Remember those commercials? I know this is an old thing to worry about, but we're at a point where now graffiti "artists" who have cushy "creative" jobs in hip neighborhood loft spaces are the ones designing the Mountain Dew billboards (the very things once defaced by original graffiti writers) that line the ghettos--but that's just because they honestly like the way graffiti looks, and the top-grossing emcees and producers are manufacturing pop hooks because that's their right now--they're honestly music industry bajillionaires or at least pretending for PR purposes, and all the best breakdancers are insanely athletic Asian kids from the suburbs who do like a weird martial arts thing with too many head stands--but that's honest to their experience, and you're supposed to sit an allow all of this because hip hop is "positive and inclusive" and otherwise if I took the time or the interest to be a purist about any of it, I, unfunky white dude that I am, wouldn't be invited. Which is pretty much fine with me but beside the point.

I realize this is a pretty 90's hand-wringing way of thinking about hip hop. It's maybe still relevant, I don't know. The 2000's might have been hip hop's big coming out party as a subsumed, miscegenated music and culture, much in the way that the same thing happened to the blues in the 60's. I don't mean that white people like hip hop now. That was the 90's phenomenon that got Tipper Gore's panties in a twist. I mean that white people (and all people, I heard an NPR piece where they're really into hip hop in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) by now feel fully unselfconscious about doing hip hop without fear of being ostracized as a "wigger" or whatever bullshit racist backlash thing used to be in effect. It's now no longer a "way of life" with guidelines and expectations. It's big enough to where it's just a music-sound you can make if you feel like it, and no big deal in any direction. You can tell because there's no longer as much in-song bragging about something being real hip hop, and it rings hollow whenever you do hear it.

And I can't tell if that's good or bad. Probably more good than bad, and probably the question is irrelevant. Because there's nothing to be done, the genie is out of the bottle. Teenaged corporation Miley Cyrus, daughter to he of the "Achey Breaky Heart," is now singing about the DJ playing a Jay-Z song, and nobody is batting an eye about it, they're even flocking to the download store in the thousands to hear about it, and nobody is stopping to think that Jay-Z (with Bun B) was the guy who said "you know I thug 'em fuck 'em love 'em leave 'em, cause I don't fuckin' need 'em" about all women and meant it. Not worrying about whether an artist should or shouldn't say something like that is more good than bad on a macro level, for sure, but good or bad is an irrelevant question because by now we've got more important things to worry about than Tipper Gore's panties. Like for example did you know that four out of five of our own children are transmitting child porn cameraphone pictures of their own cooches to Tiger Woods? Or whatever other moral panic de rigueur that Oprah's crying about.

And there's no use crying over spilt milk. There's still room for hip hop to grow and evolve. It's just that "expand" is pretty far out of the question at this point. We're gonna have a Dolly Parton album produced by Timbaland sometime soon, just you watch, and it's gonna sound totally natural. And, like with blues, all that older stuff isn't going away. We can all still listen to it. Of course it's such an immediate medium that it's a lot more like giving yourself a history lesson that sitting and enjoying some music, but that's just one way of looking at it. Another way is that "Check The Rhime" would absolutely be a monster summer single just as much if it came from now instead of then. It's the low-in-the-mix organ. Unstoppable.

Anyway, Steinski was one of the original sampler/mixer/remixer guys, and he could never sell any of the stuff he did because it involved sampling everything in the world and not worrying about the legality of it, and now here's a collection of his stuff that you can actually buy. Listening to it now is an exercise in esoteric history that's been rendered completely unnecessary by the intervening years. Sure, you want to pay respect to the elders and the originators when you can, lest you think that Girl Talk invented this whole whiplash mix-em-up style. I'm all for mitigating that guy's ability to get laid.

But listening to this Steinski stuff for pleasure seems like study hall for DJ's and/or a soundtrack for chic al fresco urban dining more than a thing I'd happily bop to in my private time. I get that it's supposedly danceable, but I don't know how you would do that, it's mostly lookatme/tryingthisout. And I reckon it also was that way even back in 1983, when it must have dropped jaws and/or spiked adult diaper sales. It's hard to dance when you can't believe what you're hearing. Nowadays it's all too believable, and to be impressed you have to keep saying "can you believe it? He was doing this in 1983!" like some kind of history professor aficionado. And you'd do that in order to convince yourself that you like it and you care because you're one of the good ones who "gets it," but you'll be lying to yourself in most cases.

And double negative bonus points for reminding me of those empty "what a vibrant medium, created from society's culture trash" attaboy platitudes that hip hop sometimes gets like a pat on the head from the approving father of high society. That's a bumout, because I agree with the sentiment behind such condescending positive reinforcement: "I don't quite know what to do with this." It gets a no point thanks, not only for being what it is but for running me in circles thinking about all of this stuff that I have no business thinking about and in the process making me feel stodgy and bloated full of shit.

Whelp. Speaking of, I need an adult diaper change. But not because this made me shit my pants. I just can't hold it in these days.


The Dø
A Mouthful
[Cinq7; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.

This is a not very good pop collaboration between an ex-Fin cutesy girl singer and a French guy. It displays plenty of genre-straddling bet-hedging, poor word choices, and melodic simplicity and repetitive borrowed cadences (think Cat Power's patented "duh DUH duh DUH DUUUUUUHHHH... nnduuuuuuhhh") combined with unnecessary musical complexity. That is all I feel like saying about it, because the fastest way to stop listening to it is to sum it up succinctly.


Vijay Iyer
Tragicomic
[Sunnyside; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.1.

This is Pro Tools piano jazz from now, and my ears don't even hear it.


Nortec Collective Presents Bostich + Fussible
Tijuana Sound Machine
[Nacional; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 3.8.

According to Joshua Klein, "Nortec" is a cross between "Norteno" and "Techno." Regardless of what he thinks the results of such a marriage are, I think these guys are a total success. They took two musical styles that usually annoy the living shit out of me and combined them to make something that annoys me even more than the sum of its parts. It's like discovering refrigeration, except for pissing my ears off instead of making things cold.