My wife, God love her, complains that all male country singers sound the same. This is patently untrue. Blake Shelton sings like a smarmy geezer wiling his way into a younger crowd, while Luke Bryan’s blank prettiness belies his terror of turning into Blake Shelton. Big difference. Eric Church is the reedy outlaw, Jason Aldean is the wannabe outlaw who also wants to rap, Brantley Gilbert is the outlaw who can’t sing. Justin Moore, who claims to be an outlaw, is really a big-hearted romantic; Kip Moore celebrates “Young Love” but remains a sociopath. Isn’t this all obvious? You can hear it in their voices!
Regional Mexican radio works in a similar way; all genre radio does, really...
From my latest Sheep & Goats, over at Burnside Writers Collective:
You don’t look to the Managing Editor of Entertainment Weekly for music tips, but it was still jaw-dropping to read this in his post-Grammy editorial: “Mumford & Sons’ victory established folk rock as the most exciting and artful movement in music right now.” Do people really think that? Apparently so — EW ran a cover story on the “movement” the following week, and worship music has started biting the Mumfords’ style like they’re a new U2. Nothing against the Mumfords, who basically resemble what you’d get if Coldplay replaced ZZ Top in Back to the Future III, but surely folk rock is only the most exciting and artful music played by acoustic instruments, covered byEntertainment Weekly (a Time Warner company), and directed at English-speaking brains — if that. (I’d still take jazz, fwiw.)
Where I live, in the northern suburbs of Chicago, the winner of Most Exciting And Artful Musical Movement is currently banda from the state of Sinaloa, Mexico. Like English folk music, banda’s been around for a long time and is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences. If you’re seeking acoustic radio hits, the big swinging horn sections of Roberto Tapia, La Arrolladora Banda El Limón, and Banda El Recodo get as much radio play as the Mumfords, the Lumineers, and their ilk. One of our seven (!) Spanish-language FM stations recently changed its slogan from “Más Y Más Música” to “Banda Y Más,” which seems significant, though several other Latino genres are hot on banda’s heels. This is the cultural bounty of demographic shift, of course; the suburbs where I live and work are both younger and more Hispanic than the country at large. But if the last presidential election taught us anything, it’s that diversificación is sweeping the nation, so with any luck your radio waves and public library will soon carry some of the following, if they don’t already. (Or you can click on most of the titles below to stream them.)
(... and then you get reviews of the astounding Torres, the suave Felicianos, the dreamy Veronica Falls who don't really fit, the Dovells-like Los Caporales de Chihuahua, and more...)
Despite the retrophilia and specialism in all styles, the Souljazz Orchestra never seems to spin its musical wheels. They attack each genre like it’s never been heard before. The album’s longest song and highlight, “Serve & Protect”, speeds along relentlessly like a cop car with its lights on, but it also goes through different levels of intensity, building and backing off, wave on wave of escalation, packing a Fela-style epic into six and a half minutes. Their simple but effective melodies use different attacks and timbres to their advantage, as though Chrétien, his cowriters, and bandmates experimented to see how many effects and techniques they could incorporate into these genres. The ten songs of Solidarity draw from a huge variety of old music, but the Souljazz Orchestra always knows how to make a simple staccato speak with immediacy.
Way better'n the Robert Glasper Experment's Black Radio.
First off, welcome to the 2012 countdown! I know it says #40 up there, but we may end up with more or fewer as the list continues to settle. Facts and insights may or may not appear; the point here is really pretty album covers, so if you're at the store and you're sifting through, say, all the albums by Los Dareyes, you'll know that at least this cheapo Sony comp is good.
2012 IN NARCOCORRIDO COMPS
Los Dareyes de la Sierra Mis Favoritas
(Sony)
My limited exposure to Jose Darey Castro -- this cheapo Sony comp and their new video for "Sangre Guerrera" (not included) -- leads me to believe they specialize in waltzes that pit Castro's accordion against his tuba player, with Castro's husky foghorn of a voice commanding everything. Their waltz performances fall into two basic categories: big dumb waltzes, with horns pounding out the upbeats, and quick subtle waltzes, with tuba, guitar, and accordion flying around in stunning pointillism (a word Matt Cibula once applied to Banda el Recodo, I think). A song like "Juanito el Comandante" isn't real far from James Brown in the '70s -- only, you know, it's a waltz -- with the instruments doing amazing things and adding up to something light and floating. (Please note -- this being regional Mexican, there are a bunch of different versions of "Juanito" floating around out there, including probably a couple recordings by Dareyes. This comp includes the studio version, though it includes live renditions of other songs. Dareyes seem to have lots of other comps, too. Definitiveness is not the point here, for them or for me.)
Gringo that I am, I enjoy their waltzes but prefer this big dumb cumbia:
#40 - way better than Lupillo Rivera's A Mi Manera.
I didn't point it out in my PopMatters review, but Bachata Roja was Robert Christgau's 45th favorite album of 2011. Hey, mine too! Here is the review:
¡Qué grande es el amor!
Bachata music has lately threatened to take over Latin pop radio. Turn on your local station for a half-hour and you’ll hear the romantic fibs and bereft longings of some bachata singer, like Prince Royce or Romeo Santos, handing you his still-beating heart over guitar arpeggios and ticky-ticky percussion. (Women sing this stuff, too, though most conspicuously in duets with men.) Back in the ‘90s, Santos and his band Aventura innovated traditional bachata by mixing it with R&B chord changes and vocal mannerisms. This proved a winning combination, since R&B singers also truck in romantic fibs and bereft longings, and Aventura achieved crossover success and began printing money.
Integral to bachata’s sound are its guitars. If you count modern bachata as an R&B subgenre—and you really should—it’s the most guitar-centric of any R&B that currently charts. When contemporary R&B highlights a guitar, it strums a ballad or throws in a novelty solo. (Think Lil’ Wayne’s “How To Love” or Beyoncé’s “1+1”.) The sound of bachata, though, is unimaginable without the guitars: bright rhythm and lead lines interlocking with the percussion, creating clockwork structures whose regularity and precision provide secure frames of reference for all the vocal emoting. The guitar solos can be pretty impressive, too; bachata still prizes virtuosity.
It’s always done so, on the evidence of these two recent albums of traditional bachata. Bachata Roja: Amor y Amargue compiles Dominican recordings from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, and The Bachata Legends gathers many of the same players, Buena Vista Social Club-style, to recreate old songs live in a modern studio. This traditional music resembles Aventura and friends in its abundant guitars, steady 8th-note rhythms, and bittersweet vocalizing. ButBachata Roja also betrays unexpected variety, both in beats and lyrics. It showcases a genre still in the process of being codified, and therefore looser and wider-ranging than its modern incarnation lets on. Listening to Roja is sort of like hearing about the wild early lives of your grandparents, before they settled into the predictable grandparentness you know and love.
The wildest guy on Roja is Eladio Romero Santos, who celebrates girls and knife fights in “Las tres muchachas” and wanders through a drunken haze in “A los 15 o 20 tragos” (“At 15 or 20 drinks”), which Eric Church should totally cover. Santos’s music is irresistible and closer to merengue; his guitar work is less intricate but more danceable than most bachata, and his percussion parts have more space and variety. For straight up bachata heartache, there’s Augusto Santos (no relation), who implores “Con el amor no se juega” (“Do not play with love”) and claims “Yo soy puro amor” (“I am pure love”). His voice floats like a feather while his guitar picking and background singers elaborate his anguish. “What springs from my chest is pure love”, he sobs. Eek.
Most of Roja’s songs fall somewhere between those two extremes. Indeed, most tracks are in major keys, and while very few evoke the most disgusting scene from the movie Alien, they do get their love and their pain all tangled together. The music gets tangled, too. Like lots of genres in the process of being formed, this early bachata borrowed songs and styles from other places: Ramón Cordero adapted Mexican rancheros; Ramón Isidro Cabrera drew from Spanish décima poetry, and so on. Cordero sings with a wonderful smoky tenor, a bit like Harry Belafonte. Cabrera, meanwhile, uses his braying timbre to appropriate a Spanish persona called “El Chivo sin ley” (aka “the lawless Goat”); he’d run with it the rest of his career. The hard-living Marino Perez laments never taking his mother’s advice over adventurous chord changes that try to escape their own song. (He’s rumored to have vomited up his own liver, but that can’t be true, can it?) And along with Augusto Santos, the great guitarist Edilio Paredes livens up many of these tunes with virtuosic lines that astonish and delight.
I have a theory, rejected by Science, that tone color is the strongest musical memory trigger—stronger than melody, harmony, or rhythm, and comparable to smell in its power to conjure forgotten places and feelings. Roja bursts with memorable tone colors in guitars and voices, the odd saxophone, and instrumental variety from song to song. It’s an expert compilation. Less successful is the newly recorded Legends, which features our friends Paredes, Cordero, El Chivo, and Augusto Santos, among others. Paredes remains a guitar hero—the warring rhythms of “Calzoncillo largo” dropped my jaw—but the men’s voices have lost some distinction and the overall sound is too homogeneous to maintain excitement. Still, when the Lawless Goat honks out the quick “Tirale bajito” with accordion and merengue rhythms, he proves that traditional bachata has some surprises left in it.
SUCH a good album -- song for song, as good as anything on this list, the distinctions becoming smaller from here on up. Maybe my marching band background renders me more susceptible to El Bebeto's charms, but even if you don't THINK you like regional Mexican stuff, this is undeniably big and bright and impressive, with indelible melodies and virtuosic funk. I could listen to gigantic banda ballads (like the one below) all day long; they're a pinnacle (a plateau?) (a really high plateau) of consistent greatness in Western music, like Western swing songs. It's hard to find a bad one. And this album does a whole lot more.
#5 El Bebeto y Su Banda Patria Chica Quiero Que Seas Tú (Disa)
2011’s splashiest regional Mexican debut came from babyfaced 20-something Carlos Alberto García Villanueva—“El Bebeto”—and his Sinaloan Banda Patria Chica (“hometown band”). Their Disa album Quiero Que Seas Tú comprises 26 minutes of fat brass grooves and unbelievable moments—it’s hard to fathom that human lips and fingers can achieve some of these effects. El Bebeto was last seen in the likable but little-heard Banda Sairú, and he leads his own group with the confidence and drive of a tiger freed from a cage. Equally adept at rapid-fire waltzes, huge swinging ballads, and one very catchy cumbia, the band fires off 10 well-chosen songs full of humor and high drama. They sound perpetually eager to play their next amazing tune—not a bad way to begin a career.
Music geeks like to call New York’s Fania Records the Motown of salsa music. That’s not completely accurate, because Fania wasn’t exactly Hitsville, but you can boil the comparison down to three factors:
1. Like Motown, Fania created a sound all its own.
The genre of salsa music didn’t exist before Fania invented it in mid-’60s NYC. Fania’s bands were happily mixing up exotically named Afro-Cuban styles—son, charanga, guaracha, bomba—that sounded intimidating to gringo audiences without access to Wikipedia. Fania co-founders Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci created “salsa” as a catch-all marketing term.
On Strut’s wonderful new two-disc compilation Fania Records 1964-1980: The Original Sound of Latin New York, you can hear the music throb with energy as it picks up different genres, like a giant snowball tearing down the Manhattan streets. It starts with Pacheco’s 1964 “Dakar, Punto Final”, a simple three-chordpachanga that alternates impressive trumpet solos with a repeated gang vocal line. From there, the songs grow louder and more aggressive, gobbling up jazz and soul, Chopin and “Bat-maaaaan!”, until they sound like the hungry streets of New York. Joe Bataan’s “Subway Joe” drives the point home by creating a subway train out of relentless handclaps and blaring trombones. (What do cities sound like? Horns and clatter, mostly.)
2. Like Motown soul, Fania’s music is both great salsa, and great salsa for people who don’t like salsa.
A couple of these 29 songs—stuff by Ismael Miranda and Orchestra Harlow—are what you might call “generic”. They sound fine, but non-afficionadi would have trouble picking them out of a salsa lineup. At their best, though, Fania artists rarely settled for craftsmanship. On plenty of songs they seemed to be daring each other to record the most outrageous horn cascade, or the goofiest group vocal, or the most outlandish instrumental texture they could imagine. (Cheo Feliciano’s “Anacaona” has vibes but NO HORNS.)
The instrumental solos are similarly daring. Pianists like Markolino Dimond, Larry Harlow, and Richie Ray demand to be heard, cutting through their bands with noisy tone clusters and, in Ray’s case, Chopin’s “Revolutionary Etude”. Various timbaleros bang away like John Bonham doing “Moby Dick”, only they’re not boring. Hovering over all this instrumental activity is the great trombonist and bandleader Willie Colón. He leads five songs here and arranges others, and his imaginative arrangements and meaty horn sound helped establish the label’s muscular, try-anything atmosphere.
For several of these songs, “salsa” seems an inadequate descriptor. (But since these guys invented the stuff, whaddo I know?) “Subway Joe”, Ray Barretto’s “Mercy Mercy Baby”, and Bobby Valentin’s “Coco Seco” are groovy soul tracks. With its deep bottom end, electric keyboard, and call-and-response vocals, Mongo Santamaría’s “O Mi Shango” sounds like a great Manu Dibango outtake. And then there’s singer Héctor Lavoe’s “El Cantante”, a deranged epic on the order of the movie Fitzcarraldo, with bizarre pasted-on strings and wild cymbal crashes. A Celebration of The Singer’s Art, it tries to devour the whole world and doesn’t really succeed, but once you’ve heard it you won’t forget it.
3. Like Motown, Fania was a uniquely American enterprise.
Besides establishing an indigenous American musical form, Fania embodied its country’s diversity and capitalist drive. Salsa was music played by Caribbean immigrants, sure, but it was also music played by NYC-born Latinos (Barretto, Colón) and non-Latinos (Bataan, Harlow). Along with its omnivorous music, Fania was also an omnivorous company, swallowing up smaller labels and their Latin-soul assets. Fania’s two biggest pop hits—Barretto’s “El Watusi” and Joe Cuba’s “Bang! Bang!”—started their lives on the smaller Tico label. (Neither is included here.) All together, Fania released about 1,300 albums, many of which are currently out of print.
After an initial creativity burst of 12 years or so, Fania’s ambition began to catch up with it. The final five songs on Fania Records show us musicians mired in nostalgia while attempting big statements. In other words, Fania succumbed to that peculiar American insecurity that’s afflicted everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Robin Williams. Why settle for crass and delightful when you can be Big and Important?
“El Cantante” is one such folly—generally, if a Fania song is a Celebration of the Singer’s Art, it’s kind of boring. And once singer Rubén Blades shows up, on 1977’s “Pablo Pueblo”, the songs take on a bad case of Significance. Back on Ray Barretto’s 1973 “Indestructible”, vocalist and horn lines were musical equals, rudely battling for audio space and drowning each other out. But on “Pablo Pueblo” and “Padro Navaja” (a “Mack the Knife” rewrite), Perico Ortiz’s arrangements tiptoe carefully around Blades’s socially conscious lyrics. On this compilation’s final two songs, singing superstar Celia Cruz’s bands seem cowed by her talent and reputation, to the detriment of the musical energy.
Even so, the Significant songs are listenable and well worth hearing. Most of the other songs are well nigh essential. Summing up 1,300 albums in 29 songs will always be a fool’s errand, and there are glaring omissions: Cuba, Tito Puente, and the fabulous crackpot singer La Lupe are all excluded. Fania Records also shares three songs with Strut’s last Fania compilation, Salsa Explosion! But if you need a salsa comp that showcases the genre’s variety and it’s heaviest hitters, you won’t do much better than this one.
Somewhat redundant with 2006's Grandes Exitos, probably a total cheapo money grab by Warner, but on the other hand, you probably don't own a Bacilos exitos collection, DO YOU??? Well, here you go: the ONLY comp to include both the hilarious "Cronica de Una Immigracion Anunciada" and the gorgeous "Sangre Americana", and 18 other songs besides, full of rhythmic spunk and soft-rock beauty. (Some years ago, I wrote about their final studio album here.)
#4 REISSUE Bacilos 20 Grandes Exitos (Warner Music Latina)
Sometimes I have the disconcerting feeling that I'm the only person, aside from the band and their lovely cover model, who heard this album. Maybe she didn't even hear it! Judging by the production values of the cover art, Ms. Cover Model could've been photoshopped in from some magazine ad for a gentleman's club, and nobody'd be the wiser, BECAUSE NOBODY LISTENED TO THIS CD. I just got it blind from the library, and I probably could've stolen it without anybody noticing, but it's good! Livelier than most Latin albums I heard this past year. Bragado aren't changing the face of regional Mexican art or anything, but they've got one solid accordion-led tune after another, with lots of what I (possibly incorrectly) call "cumbias" -- uptempo dance tunes that don't sound like polkas, with a beat in 2 instead of 4 and jaunty syncopation -- and even some tunes that you could call rock en espanol (e.g., "Como te Va Con El", a rockin' cover of a song that previously sounded like a syrupy waltz, in the hands of Grupo Zima or whoever). (In case you were wondering, Grupo Zima do NOT resemble jolly ranchers.) For a cumbia, try the one below: "El Mudo", i.e. "The Mute" or "The Dumb Guy". Make sure you keep listening until you hear El Mudo "speak"! (This song annoys the heck out of my wife, as it does all right-thinking people.)
#21 Bragado De Pies a Cabeza (Discos Power)
Apparently this "El Mudo" is a thing, a meme or a trope or whatever -- witness this mindboggling 2009 tune from Chacarron Macarron:
Anyway, the songs aren't all novelties, but they ARE mostly spritely and energetic, and even the polkas and waltzes are full of harmonies and crammed-in syllables and rhythmic invention. Inter-library loan them today!
This boutique label specializes in vinyl singles of synthy new-wave and various international genres, most of it done really well. Bongolia is their first compilation.
#22 Various Artists 101 Things to Do in Bongolia (Electric Cowbell)
Though not as cool as owning all its constituent singles on 7-inch vinyl, 101 Things to Do in Bongolia is definitely a cheaper way to enjoy the output of Brooklyn boutique label Electric Cowbell. Easier to play in the car, too, where it sounds really good—one indelible driving rhythm after another, it’ll get you across the county with hooks and personality aplenty. MVPs are the horn-driven combo Superhuman Happiness, who deliver five songs full of hooks, riffs, and beats. Their “GMYL” (“God Makes You Live”—a fine sentiment) is super-catchy and chill New Wave; its warm synths evoke sweet and lonely teenage hearts.
Also nostalgic are electro-dudes Amazing Ghost, whose “Tiny Raindropz” quotes both “Band on the Run” and the early ’80s Genesis keyboard sound. LVPs are probably Virginia salsa band Bio Ritmo, whose tunes come across as limp and by-the-book. But NYC’s Spanglish Fly know how to bugalú; Boston’s Debo Band make free-swinging Ethiopian pop; and the two electro-scuzzballs in Talibam! fall apart all over the place but still pack a wallop. Most arresting may be “A Troll’s Soirée Troll” by label owner Jim Thomson and his CSC Funk Band. It’s seven minutes of mysterious gamelan groove, ripe for getting lost inside—just like Brooklyn!
A sureshot Grammy nominee for Best Album Packaging -- if the Grammys weren't a CORRUPT CABAL RULED BY THE MONEYED INFLUENCE OF STING AND CHICKENFOOT. But I digress! (And anyway, Cabo Wabo serves a fine fish taco.)
#29 Chucha Santamaria Y Usted Chucha Santamaria Y Usted (Young Cubs)
Reportedly there’s a concept buried inside the self-titled debutChuCha Santamaria y Usted, something about the complex historical relationship between Caribbean people and the U.S., and how that parallels the complex relationship between hi-hats and synth arpeggios in all your favorite disco genres—I count freestyle, Italo, motorik, the hard-charging Pitbull stomp, and maybe more. The album may also describe how Puerto Rico’s “Fiebre Tropical” equals a tropical fever on the dance floor. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I’m not sure. Thankfully, as with all good concept albums, ChuCha Santamaria y Usted’s music doesn’t need its concept. Matthew Kirkland’s synths play a thinned-out version of early ‘80s hi-NRG, only without the 4x4 thumps. He’s got bass churgles and he’s not afraid to drop ‘em, but the focus is on the treble sounds—mallet percussion and lush Moroder-esque ostinatos that suck you into their rippling propulsion like a wave pool. Singer/wordsmith Sofía Córdova sings in inglés, español, y Vocoder, carefully unfolding her melodies with stately restraint. She never sounds like she’s reaching for the high notes, and her low notes just sort of drift into the heat haze. You’ve been here in your dreams.
(Way better than Tapes 'n' Tapes's Outside.) (Did I already rip on that one?)
It DOESN'T all sound the same. As proof, I offer the delightful polka "Carmelita", which adds texture-changing tuba and accordion arpeggios on the chorus. There's also a slow cumbia later in the album called "Agua Bendita", and it's gringo-accessible touches like these that help Huracanes stand out from the packs of polkas and waltzes that occupy the regional Mexican charts.
But even when the songs DO start to sound samey, Huracanes are worth hearing for their singers' close harmonies, their lead singer's rich tone, and their accordion players' inventiveness. We're not just talking flashy runs of notes, here -- the accordionists (I'm pretty sure there's more than one) buzz and float around the singer like clouds of gnats, or comp like jazz pianists, jamming chords into whatever spaces they can find. Listen to more here; way better than Ricky Martin's Musica Alma Sexo (but you knew that).
O Sergent Garcia, why you disappoint me so? Here's my review of his/their new album, Una y Otra Vez, at PopMatters. And here is a tantalizing tidbit:
The rest of the songs, though, are basically well-executed genre
exercises with exactly zero surprises. The exceptionally detailed CD
booklet lists 12 regular members of the band, all of whom sound like
they’ve planned their music to within an inch of its life. Whether
playing reggae, salsa, bolero, rap, or one of their invented offshoot
genres, they are chivalrous, polite, and well-heeled. Solos and fills
fall neatly between cracks in the melodies, most of which sound like
uninspired first drafts. Even the rhythms, which you’d figure would
kick, tend to simply pick one thing and do it over and over.
This is disappointing, because Garcia the lyricist obviously sees
himself as anything but polite. He’s an outsider, a rebel. In fact, he
is… salsamuffin. This is helpfully explained in the song “Yo Soy
Salsamuffin”, where Spanish toaster Supa Bassie sums up the salsamuffin
genre: “CUMbia, RAGga, DANCEHALL con SON!” And since he is salsamuffin,
Garcia continues, he lives on the corner, he is Tomorrow, and he is
Culture. In the French rock song “Chacun Son Combat” (“Everybody Has
Their Battles”), he’s a freedom-fighter, hunting “Nazis nostalgiques” and railing against the multinationales
that confuse art and money. In other songs he dreams of better
tomorrows, where everyone loves and sees beyond the horizon and dances
like it’s their last dance. Imagine if Theodor Adorno wrote Disney
princess songs.
Here are some of my recent blurbs from The Singles Jukebox, which continues to inform and delight. Click on over there and read what other people wrote, too!
Bon Iver - "Holocene": Nice drumming, I guess. Justin Vernon seems like an upstanding Wisconsin homesteader, but his fans speak a different language, or are ruled by different physical laws, or something. I learn from Pitchfork that “Holocene” is a “virtuosic vocal performance”, when in fact Vernon sounds like Peter Gabriel trapped in a cistern. Christianity Today loves his “rich soundscapes” and impressionist poetry, his “palpable vulnerability and reliance on love’s redemptive power”, but I’m pretty sure they hear that stuff everywhere, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t move me even if Vernon suddenly learned to enunciate. “Hydroponics lifestyle” mag Rosebud says the Bon Iver album makes you “stop what you’re doing and just let your jaw hang” — well, that makes sense. Teen Vogue says the album’s “incredible”, if you can believe it. Most endearing is my wife’s fraternal magazine Pan Pipes, which called the album “a recommended listen if you’re looking for something new and relaxing”, but did complain that the song “Wash” is “a bit too much at times”, with “many things going on at once”. I eagerly await their feature on K-Pop. [3]
Rihanna - "Cheers (Drink to That)": It’s about time somebody captured the depressing slog that is obsessive barhopping. Your mind’s always on your money, everybody just sits around complaining about the bastards at work, and some idiot keeps singing the same line from that stupid Avril song OVER AND OVER. Cheers to the freakin’ weekend.
[9] (CONTROVERSY!)
X-Cross - "Crazy": During my first hapless attempt to transcribe “Crazy” I became convinced I’d uncovered a murder, John Travolta Blow Out style. Coming out of the first verse I heard Mr. X-Cross say, “Hey girl, sexy girl! Dehdehdehdeh deh- deh- DEAD girl!”, and suddenly everything became clear. THAT’S why people are getting shot in the prechorus, and why that damn Crazy Frog voice keeps mocking X-Cross’s lovelorn entreaties as “CRAZY!” It especially explains why X-Cross hit their lovelorn peak singing, “We can make it out, baby, you and I” — the only way they escape this song together is in a closed casket. The lovely pop!gasa website informs me my transcription’s a little off, but even the pop!gasa translation features eyes getting wider, legs shaking, hearts exploding, people turning into dynamite. In 1981 movie terms, it’s the next-to-last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, yeah, bom-bas-tic.
[9]
Pitbull ft. Marc Anthony - "Rain Over Me": So many good lines! Not in this particular Pitbull song, mind you, but in Mikael Wood’s wonderfully droll Pitbull article in June 17th’s Billboard. He really takes you behind the sausage. “‘We wanted somebody to embody our brand who’s one of a kind — who’s a real pioneer,’ Dr. Pepper director of multicultural marketing Olivia Vela says,” right before Wood lists Pit’s other partnerships with Kodak, Zumba, Sheets Energy Strips (??), and “Voli, a line of low-calorie vodkas” prominently name-checked in “Rain Over Me”. Says one DJ of Pit, “This guy is printing money.” But lest you get too cynical about the music, Pit’s manager assures you, “This was never about calling up RedOne and scheduling an appointment to hook into the RedOne sound.” Yeah — that’s why RedOne’s track for “Rain Over Me” sounds so LATIN. On the other hand, it’s sort of impressive that this inevitable smash, featured on The Today Show, is the bilingual tale of a diet-vodka pitchman who has a threesome with his buddy, recently separated and desperate, and some anonymous but classy broad. It’s the kind of surreal scuzz Warren Zevon might’ve gotten away with. How far we’ve come.
[5]
Ke$ha - "Shots On the Hood of My Car": This starts as standard-issue, if pretty, transgre$$ion — K goes joyriding with her friends and jumps the fence to the Hollywood sign, just like when she snuck into the Stones concert with Harold. Only this time — what else? — she’s consumed with a vision of Garveyite apocalypse. She’s 10 miles (or wherever) from the city, watching (Hollywood) Babylon burn, just like Louie Culture and Capleton and U-Roy before her, only with no hint of judgment; she’ll be blown into oblivion with everybody else. All the burbling polyphonic euphoria at the end sounds so communitarian, it’s easy to forget all those suffocating suckers downtown who aren’t blessed with friends and Scotch. But that’s OK — this is the apocalypse from inside the Scotch-haze, and as such, it chokes me up. And here’s the other me-choker: How long can she keep this up? Where “this” equals “exploring wildly different facets and implications of a coherent persona”? I suppose the end-times imagery might be a portent that she’s running out of ideas, because where can you go from there, but at this point point I’m holding my breath with every new Ke$ha song, and “Shots” makes it feel really good to exhale.
[10] (ALSO CONTROVERSY!)
HyunA - "Bubble Pop": The beat is hard and severe like a row of brick walls, and HyunA’s job is either to squeeze between each pair of walls or, if she’s on a roll, to soar over the top of the walls and contain them, as though she’s being unfurled by Christo. Also there’s a dubstep interlude. None of this adds to the beat’s forward momentum, but all of it adds to the song’s energy, by turns invigorating and herky-jerkily frustrating, not unlike a real game of Bubble Pop! with a child who INSISTS on always being the bubble-blower and never the bubble-chaser. You know the contortions you gotta put yourself through to contend with one of those bubble guns? “OOH! AHH! OOH-ah-ooh-AH! ooh-AH! OOOOOOOHHHH” sounds pretty close.
[7]
Blake Shelton - "Honey Bee": I’d say he misunderstands the particulars of honeysuckle fertilization, but he backs off: “That came out a little Country / But every word was right on the money.” Of course, that contradiction flies in the face of the recent Corbin-Paisley hypothesis that Country Must Always Speak Truth About True Things. My sensible and, it turns out, eight-months-pregnant wife is now explaining to me about poetic license. Herself no stranger to lies about bees, she once suffered a debilitating sting WHILE HOLDING STILL.
[5]
The comments thread for Blake's nothing of a song erupts into a conversation about country music and The Voice, largely between Anthony and Brad and Katherine, that is one of the most entertaining things I've read this year.
I won't deny enjoying Pitbull's license to print money Planet Pit, but I'm not sure I'll ever need to hear it again either. Maybe it'll serve as an amusing time capsule of this moment in pop-radio history, when obnoxious club beats and naked capitalism ruled all. From my PopMatters review:
I’ve got similar reservations with Pitbull’s popular, Eurocentric new album Planet Pit. The title Planet Pit sounds like some hellish vision of our eco-disastrous paint-soaked future, Wall-E meets the Morlocks on The Road, but it’s actually an opportunity for Sr. Armando Christian “Pitbull” Pérez to introduce his brand new slogan: “Mr. Worldwide”! He used to be “Mr. 305”, see, but now he’s got hoes in different area codes. “International Love” (first promotional single, feat. Chris Brown) mentions at least nine locales, plus “countries and cities I can’t pronounce / And places on the globe I didn’t know existed.” (Kyrgyzstan?) So in the interest of increasing his market share and his genetic footprint, Pitbull has decided to grow his brand and sink it deep into virgin territory. He positions himself for action, feels out the strategic gaps, and fills them with his acumen, forever keeping his eye on the back end. The guy’s a rainmaker.
(I should note that the string of puns at the end there totally rips off Chuck Eddy's review of Sir Mix-a-Lot for SPIN, Al Shipley's review of Chris Brown over at Singles Jukebox, and Ethan Padgett's review of Birdman/Lil'Wayne for Baltimore City Paper. Shoulders of giants and whatnot.)
Next up, a completely underwhelming Fania Records remix CD by Joe Claussell. The rhythm may be gonna get ya; the Sacred Rhythm, on the other hand, will not. Also from PopMatters:
Claussell has long been prominent in NYC’s house music scene, but he has strange notions of what the kids are listening to these days. “How many kids… now even know what Fania was?” he asks in the liner notes. “Maybe some of them might hear this and get turned on.” I dunno; at times Hammock House resembles one of those Grammy-winning Herbie Hancock tribute albums, or deep house night at Body&SOUL, or even the suede-chested tones of Chuck Mangione, but how many kids are getting turned on by that stuff? (Besides all the Destroyer fans, I mean.) Straight-up Fania albums are crisper, noisier, and way more exciting, and they have cooler album covers too.
Not that Claussell should have released a bunch of straight-up Fania songs. But that’s what I’d rather listen to, and I know plenty of kids who’d agree.
(Yes, I will take ANY opportunity to make fun of Destroyer.)
Best Thing I've Actually Played This Year: Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata from his 5th Organ Symphony (Easter postlude! Play as you peruse. I was competent, but not this good:)
And now, here's the buyer's guide. Or at least a checker-outer's guide. These are all the albums I've heard that've been Worth It on the patented Worth It/Not Worth It grading scale. It's very similar to the patented Sheep & Goats grading scale: Worth Its don't seem like a chore to listen to again, whereas Not Worth Its do. Not all Not Worth Its are bad, per se; I wouldn't hate you for liking them or anything. But when I think of sitting through them again I feel apathy at best, revulsion at worst. So... the following albums don't create feelings of apathy or revulsion in my sick soul. High praise! (My reviews, or sometimes the Singles Jukebox's reviews, are linked where available.)
Just a brief statistical note -- There's 22 albums on this Worth It list, and I've heard 68 new albums this year. 68 is a drop in the overall bucket, of course, but we'll assume that this .324 average is statistically relevant as a baseline. The genre I've heard most of is CCM (13 albums), which is sitting at a .308 average, .016 below baseline. Not terrible. (Actually, I've probably heard more than 13 indie rock albums, but I don't feel like agonizing over what counts as indie rock right now.) Genres I feel guilty about neglecting so far this year: metal, regional Mexican, rap, and jazz. Much to do!
