Now he’s back with the double album Evolve or be Extinct, basically a tribute to his workaholism.
After the so-so introduction “Welcome to Zion”, Evolve slams into your brain with its title song, a boxing match between track and rapper. Wiley’s track mainly consists of a double-time riff repeated over and over, while his flow is a hyperactive syncopated wonder that darts in and out of the spaces in the production, elaborating and playing off its rhythmic possibilities. A hypeman declares, “If you’re not spittin’ this way on the 140 bpm, you are not evolving, rudeboy,” and you don’t doubt him.
The beat for “Link Up”, by name-to-remember Nana Rogues, is mostly implied, with a huge snare on the fours, a shaker and chime twinkling unpredictably, and a bass vroom that swells and throbs the rhythms of seduction.
Also great is Most Wanted Mega’s mega electro racecar roar “Boom Blast”, which makes Wiley’s heart stutter like “voodoodoodoo dadadada voodoodoodoo POW!” At several points during the song, he touches the ceiling.
As a varied production showcase, Evolve impresses like DJ Quik’s The Book of David and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives.
In the sparse meditation “This is Just an Album”, Wiley reveals that he maintains his breakneck schedule to connect with the public and provide for his family. But his big dance song, “I’m Skanking”, is all about dancing alone. The atonal loner anthem “Weirdo” asserts “You ain’t in the same planet as me / They ain’t in the same planet as me”. And in “No Love Lost”, Wiley acknowledges that he’s lost touch with many homies: “We started together / Now we move solo,” an appropriate motto for a guy who apparently vacations in Barbados by himself. Blame his fans, who double as his enablers: “People ask me every day, ‘Wiley, what you workin’ on?’” No wonder he wants to see what the sea’s like.
Still, this guy’s so good at his job, it’s hard to imagine him lazing on a beach somewhere, with or without Rihanna. Evolve or be Extinct succeeds as both a collection of songs for public use—dancing, drinking, celebrating Christmas, protesting customs officials—and as a complex portrait of the artist who’s sacrificed his sleep and sanity to create them.
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.
My negative review at PopMatters has been a fruitful source of angry comments from the Cursive Army. (Did you know they had an army?) I admire the commenters for using their full names rather than pseudonyms. Below, the I Am Gemini review in full, followed by some of the choicer responses.
Coquettes in concupiscent dress bat their eyes. Seriously.
When considering the failure of Cursive’s concept album I Am Gemini, it may be helpful to ponder the words of Stephen Sondheim. Or Friedrich Nietzsche. Or noted aesthetic philosopher Phife “Go get yourself some toilet paper ‘cause your lyrics is butt” Dawg. Any words, really, that distract you from those of Cursive lyricist/singer Tim Kasher, because his words are butt. Terrible, terrible butt. You can open the script to any page—btw, THE LYRIC SHEET IS A SCRIPT, COMPLETE WITH STAGE DIRECTIONS—and find gems like, “When the cat’s away / It’s said the mouse will play”. We all remember Nietzsche’s dictum: “Prefacing a cliché with ‘it’s said’ renders it no less a cliché, while rendering its user more an ass.” Kasher soldiers on, still babbling about cats: “Now the cat’s out of the bag and someone’s got to pay.” Imagine, if you will, the terrible dialogue from the movie The Happening, where Marky Mark talked to the trees but they wouldn’t listen to him. Now imagine that same dialogue full of halfhearted attempts at rhyme and assonance (pun intended), and you’ll approach the cringe-inducing cleverness on display here. Also you’ll bang your head against furniture.
Gemini’s “plot” revolves around two estranged twins, named Cassius and Pollock by their smug hipster mother Edith Hamilton. (She’s not a character.) Cassius was that dude talking all the smack about cats. At the time, he was getting ready to kill his sleeping “doppelganger” with a knife. (Phife: “Sucker MCs go and use the word ‘doppelganger’ / Now their song won’t never be a banger.”) You can’t really blame Cassius. Pollock had earlier shackled his brother and cut his head open, a misguided attempt to delve into the secret world of twins. Most of this action takes place in a big old creepy house, though for imagination’s sake, there’s one scene at a creepy sideshow carnival, where creepy Siamese Twins teach our heroes about life. That’s after the brothers’ past crimes appear dressed as Skeletons, but before we learn that It Was All A Dream. At one point the brothers travel through a looking glass—THAT’s the dream!—“into a world similar, although somehow askew”. Sounds like a challenge for Art Direction.
In The Man Who Mistook His Show For a Hat, Stephen Sondheim praises Porgy and Bess, writing that lyricist DuBose Heyward “understood the difference between character and characteristics; the lyrics sounded like heightened natural speech rather than self-advertised ‘poetry’.” Kasher doesn’t understand the distinction. His line “Albatross necktie / Looks so dignified / But you gotta loosen it up!” fails both ways: it’s not poetic, nor does anyone talk like that. The line doesn’t even help to establish character, which would have been helpful since Kasher sings both brothers exactly the same. Without the script, it’s impossible to differentiate Cassius from Pollock; both just sound like facile indie-rock singers making awful allusions and puns.
This seems a good time to share the dodgiest line from I Am Gemini: “Out cold, run over by the boulder of Sisyphus / Doesn’t it seem to get a bit repetitive? / Overandoverandoveragain…” High school mythology students in Cursive’s audience grin knowingly.
Believe me, I understand: writing a rock opera is hard work. The Drive-By Truckers only attempted it once. Look, I like the Who as much as the next guy. (Next guy: “What’s an Eminence Front?” Roger Daltrey: “IT’S A PUT-ON!”) But nobody pretends like the lyrics to Tommy are good, with their painful exposition and their supple wrists. Tommy gets by on its songs, which have held up to decades of radio play, endless cover versions, and armies of high school students singing them on the bus to speech contests. I Am Gemini falls into every rock opera trap—even its title is exposition. But if Cursive had brought the tunes, all would be forgiven. (Well, except for “I’m gonna paint this bloody town black and blue”.)
Sadly, the band chokes on the albatross necktie of Kasher’s lyrics. From the press release: “Kasher… wrote album lyrics in a linear fashion, in order, from song 1 to song 13.” Hooks appear during Act One—the “Come out, come out” chorus of “Warmer Warmer” is pretty catchy—only to get chased away by the all-important storyline. The band alludes to rock music without fleshing it out into self-reliant songs. “The Sun and Moon” is probably the best, with its organ-driven New Wave momentum, but even that’s killed by Kasher’s mythological asides. And if Act One is where hooks go to die, Act Two is a wasteland. Kasher briefly tries to play the resurrector and give the dead some life, handing his band an actual EXPLOSION to play—“We’re gonna blow this unholy house to dust!”—but they just sound like some guys playing an explosion.
Back in 2006, Cursive released the extremely likable concept album Happy Hollow. Lyrically it was more transmissions from the Kasherian sphincter, something about religion and The Wizard of Oz, but the music had so much life and so many bizarre horn lines, the words hardly mattered. Realizing that storyline was their least important concern, Cursive built their concept from discrete hooky songs. I Am Gemini gets its priorities backwards and lacks horns. For all its tempo shifts and attempts at fun,Gemini sounds like the work of an ascetic band scared of pleasure. When Cursive attempts another one of these things—and you know they will—they’d do well to heed Sondheim’s dictum from his manifestoBrainyQuote.com: “If you’re dealing with a musical in which you’re trying to tell a story, it’s got to sound like speech. At the same time it’s got to be a song.” Just one of those goals would suffice.
In response, Cursive fan Erik sez:
First of all, you're not funny. You're the only one laughing at your "quips." You don't even review the album, you just show how many references you can make to either rock-opera albums or philosophers. Your review is terrible, one-sided, and makes poorly-supported (or completely uninformed) claims. Also, you obviously wasted a good portion of time writing a review on a website I've never heard of, probably for no money at all. Continue writing negative reviews in an effort to feel superior, since you're a hip writer and all. However, a writer should at least know that art direction shouldn't be capitalized. I hate it when Writers capitalize Nouns when they're not supposed to be. How about stick to being a church musician - sorry, I meant Church Musician - rather than write scathing reviews for an album that is in no way as bad as you say. 2/10 rating? Wrong. Just wrong.
And Glenn sez:
I read [reviews] to get an actual description of how good or bad an album is. This album is an A+. The time you spend analyzing every little word of the lyrics is quite tiresome. The guy wrote a play, then set it to music. It is a peice of literature and here is what you say: "Go get yourself some toilet paper ‘cause your lyrics is butt”".
So your critisizing someone's art while bastardizing the English language it was written in.
and this "Believe me, I understand: writing a rock opera is hard work." Really when did you write one?
The words don't have to be poetic as you want them to be, like rock music is meant to be perfect prose, free of the cliche's that you don't like.
The fact is that this album is over your head. Any person who appreciates music would recognize the thru composed nature of this cd, YES WITH KEYBOARDS, NOT HORNS, (sorry they didn't pick your favorite alternate instrument this time) and recognize that it is A) amazingly complex B) Addictively memorable C)something no other band could ever create.
She's still got it! Some lines from my PopMatters review of How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? that I enjoyed writing:
Good Lord, there are moments here as bloodcurdling as anything she’s ever done.
But O’Connor doesn’t settle for [Tori] Amos’s quiet creepiness—she embodies the avenging Spirit, building and building in intensity, multitracking the different timbres of her voice into a caterwaul that combines the best elements of an air raid siren and a slap in the face.
What’s happening is that O’Connor the lyricist is getting better and better at apparent artlessness. Much like John Lennon on Double Fantasy or Lou Reed on New Sensations, O’Connor writes songs that seem like simple conduits for her personality. Her lyrics don’t put on airs and they invite derision. She writes lines that nobody aiming for the Great Irish Songbook would ever allow themselves. So, you know, her Holy Spirit really digs Energizer commercials.
But the more desperately she clings to the promise of eternal bliss, the more poignant her songs become.
Fortunately for Sinéad the songwriter, she’s working with Sinéad the vocalist, who possesses a divine gift: on any given note, she can choose from four or five different voices, all unmistakably Sinéad. Multitudes of multitudes! She moves from whispers to bleats and back again, sometimes within the same syllable.
There’s hardly anything in the way of riffs or solos, nothing to distract from the tumbling cascades of Sinéads.
Escort's Escort is on Escort Records. Can you think of any of any other eponymous albums on eponymous labels? Or is it homonymous? Either way? And why must this trivia question make me start singing "Bad Company"?
When Escort does a song called “Cocaine Blues”, not only is it not a blues, it’s not really about cocaine. It’s about careening around the city, wired out of your mind, during a bygone era when cocaine was chic and abundant. Escort wouldn’t be caught dead doing meth—that’d be like playing a banjo solo.
“Makeover” resembles Kylie Minogue engaged in a funky hand jive battle with that sinister steampipe noise from Genesis’s “Tonight Tonight Tonight”.
Comparing these lyrics to Donna Summer’s vibrant and human persona, particularly on Bad Girls, is like reading a Harlequin romance after Anna Karenina.
Escort’s lyrics, one-dimensional caricatures of the disco life, are especially disappointing when compared to their music, which for all its references, sounds layered, assured, modern, and unconstrained by history. Take what’s maybe their best-known song, “All Through the Night”, a.k.a. “that YouTube video where the Muppets sing about freaking.” Lyrically, it’s standard do-it-all-night wish fulfillment, and apparently Balis and Cho haven’t read William Saffire’s open letter to R&B singers, “Sex Is Not a Verb”. But the song’s musical blend of Casio blips, Rick James synth shrieks, flute fills, and rapid-fire funk vocals sounds great. The instruments and voices weave contrapuntal polyrhythms that ebb and flow, creating unique musical structures. And the song does improve immensely, if you imagine Muppets singing it.
UPDATE: If you are wondering whether the Graffiti6 album is good, because maybe you saw "Free" on VH1 or something, I think I underrated it. It's a good album! Check it out.
“Graffiti6” sounds like the name of Prince’s new girl group, but it’s actually the British musical duo of producer TommyD and ridiculously handsome heartthrob Jamie Scott.
Like many poor saps saddled with perfect bone structure, Scott is really a folk artist in his heart of hearts—the bio says, “Upon hearing [Joni] Mitchell’s Blue at the age of seven,” blah blah blah—and this gives Graffiti6 a Serious Side that pops up every so often.
You want pedigree? TommyD produced the alltime classic “I’m Too Sexy” for Right Said Fred, and a bunch of other stuff; he’s the older, wiser, vaguely mafioso-looking brains of the operation. Scott has led his own heartfelt pop band, the Town, and you no doubt remember his song on the Step Up soundtrack. (OK, I remember it.) He’s everything in Graffiti6 that’s not the brains.
The drumless album closer “Over You” portrays that universal dream we all have of finally getting over someone, then sitting down at the keyboard and pouring out our deepest feelings as a room full of people bursts into tears. “Now I can dance”, Scott whispers.
Occasionally Scott seems not to understand the concept of metaphor, as when he sings on the title song, “I’m seeing colours, flowing through my mind”. I took an informal survey around the office, and it turns out Scott’s condition—“seeing colours in the mind”—isn’t so unusual. Even the blind guy could relate.
At some point in life, everyone recovers from a broken heart and becomes a psychedelic poet. Graffiti6 show that only the most brilliantly plumed among us can turn such terrible poetry into pretty pop tunes.
On Chief, Eric Church plays the cad, honing his voice into pure aggressive TWANG. He’ll pick a fight with your boyfriend and then graciously let you buy him a drink. After you dump his sorry liver, he’ll drown his sorrows in breakup songs that sting like prime Taylor Swift. It figures that this album’s most perfect line, “Here’s to all us haters of old lovers’ new last names”, is a toast. But rather than weepy honky-tonkers, Church and producer Jay Joyce have made wall-to-wall classic rock tunes, including a Springsteen ode that sounds more like John Waite. And the singles are phenomenal. In 2011, no song embodied America’s racial and class tensions like “Homeboy”; few songs chronicled our subsequent need to medicate those tensions like “Drink in My Hand”.
At Singles Jukebox, where "Country Music Jesus" was Anthony Easton's pick, I wrote:
No no no, Eric, you’re thinking of Charlie Daniels, and he is not Jesus, no matter what he says when you’re together hunting, fishing, and enjoying other outdoor activities. But then, Eric and I have so much to talk about. Why, for instance, does his excellent soft rock ballad “Springsteen” sound like Bad English, while THIS song swipes the riff from Springsteen’s “Fire”? (Maybe to set up the “Fire On the Mountain” bit?) Will Country Music Jesus’s reach extend to all humanity, or simply to the realm of country music? I dunno where Eric places Jamey Johnson in the great “Country Music Jesus” sweepstakes, but the shaggy concert I attended was a little more laconic than this whole revival business, while I’m pretty sure people bang drums, scream, and shout at Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum shows. Which, I guess, proves once again that you can never predict what Jesus is gonna look like. Speaking of which, has anyone ever told Eric Church, maker of my favorite album of 2011, that his twang sometimes resembles Rob Thomas?
[7]
(From Anthony's blurb, in a passage that gives me chills: "So he is blaspheming the good Lord, and he is blaspheming country music, but sacramentalizing both at the same time. It is a viciously sophisticated work.")
At Singles Jukebox, where "Homeboy" enjoyed a somewhat controversial reception, I wrote:
As a narrative I buy it, because I know the Brother. Back in high school he had ridiculous dreadlocks instead of a “hip-hop hat” and the rest, he didn’t push Daddy around but he did spend some time in jail, and now he’s a solid taxpaying citizen with strong family ties. Small predominantly-white towns SUCK in many ways, so you try to escape to the first Other that comes along, and your conception of that Other is probably based on the broadest stereotypes, and maybe you pair those stereotypes with violence because that’s an Other too. The problem is, Church isn’t handing this sermon to his wayward Brother as a private press 45. As a cautionary tale “Homeboy” is worthless, because any real-life Brothers won’t listen to it. No, Church is preaching to a public country audience, much of which already views hip-hop culture as an Other and equates it with violence. But I’M Church’s audience too, and maybe lots of us know Brothers of our own and “Homeboy” touches us as a well-constructed piece of songcraft. Job well done! On the other hand, “Homeboy” is definitely constructed — Church and co-writer Casey Beathard have invented this Brother, the fake gold on his teeth, and his superficial take on Otherness. They’ve also appropriated the word “homeboy” and the synths from the hip-hop culture they’re dissing. They’re hypocrites and opportunists. But the synths sound great, and the lyrical twist “come on home, boy” is deeply felt; this song isn’t glib about Otherness like the go-to pariah “Beer for My Horses”. Finally all my back-and-forth on “Homeboy” zips it up into a tense interlocking bundle of contradictions that I can’t separate from how much I enjoy its details, guitars, and narrator, even if he’s using his bully pulpit to congratulate his country’s narrowest minds.
[THIS IS WHERE I GIVE UP ADDING LINKS] 19. Iron and Wine--Kiss Each Other Clean (4AD/Warner Bros.) (major) 5 REISSUE. Stephin Merritt -- Obscurities (Merge) (indie, reissue) 20. Locussolus--Locussolus (International Feel) (indie, dance) 21. Bragado -- De Pies a Cabeza (Discos Power) (indie, Latin) 22. Various Artists -- 101 Things To Do In Bongolia (Electric Cowbell) (indie) 23. Jake Owen -- Barefoot Blue Jean Night (RCA) (major, country) 24. Group Doueh--Zayna Jumma (Sublime Frequencies) (indie) 25. Mikko Innanen & Innkvisitio -- Clustrophy (TUM) (indie, jazz) 26. Paul Simon--So Beautiful or So What (Hear) (indie?, CCM) 27. The Lonely Island -- Turtleneck & Chain (Universal Republic) (major, rap, comedy) 28. Dead Cat Bounce -- Chance Episodes (Cuneiform) (indie, jazz) 29. ChuCha Santamaria y Usted -- ChuCha Santamaria y Usted (Young Cubs) (indie, dance) 30. Los Huracanes del Norte--Soy Mexicano (Musinorte/Disa) (major, Latin) 31. Those Darlins--Screws Get Loose (Oh Wow Dang) (indie, country) 32. Buraka Som Sistema -- Komba (Enchufada) (indie, dance) 33. Thompson Square--Thompson Square (Stoney Creek '10) (indie, country) 34. Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans -- Electric Fruit (Thirsty Ear) (indie, jazz) 6 REISSUE. Drive-By Truckers -- Ugly Buildings, Whores & Politicians (New West) (indie, country, reissue) 35. Alexi Murdoch--Towards the Sun (Zero Summer) (indie, folk) 36. R. Kelly--Love Letter (Jive ‘10) (major, R&B) 37. David Banner & 9th Wonder--Death of a Pop Star (b.i.G.f.a.c.e./eOne ‘10) (indie, rap, CCM) 38. Heavy Winged -- Sunspotted (Type ‘10) (indie, metal) 39. Blind Boys of Alabama--Take the High Road (Saguaro Road) (indie, country, CCM) 40. Gucci Mane--The Return of Mr. Zone 6 (Warner Bros.) (major, rap)
A commenter at PopMatters notes, "Josh Langhoff and Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield must be hanging out in the same circle of friends, or one of them is a plagiarist. It seems strange that you both began your reviews the exact same way. FWIW, Langhoff’s appears to have been published first." Also FWIW, Rob Sheffield is one of my favorite writers, but I did come up with my opening line (see below) before I read his Rolling Stone review, which opens, "If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, these are his Sun Sessions." See? Clearly different! Sheffield omits the unnecessary "then"! Full disclosure: I read Sheffield's Neil Diamond overview for the most recent Rolling Stone Record Guide -- which employs the term "Jewish Elvis" -- while preparing to review this essential compilation. And my wife will attest that I was wildly excited to open Rolling Stone and discover that my thought patterns, at least, travel in the same circles as Sheffield's.
#1 REISSUE Neil Diamond The Bang Years: 1966-1968 (Legacy)
If Neil Diamond is the Jewish Elvis, then Bang was his Sun Records. Bang was a small New York City label, distributed by Atlantic and operated by “Twist and Shout” songwriter Bert Berns. When Berns signed Diamond in 1966, Bang Records was best known for the McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy”, another Berns composition. Like his boss, Diamond had graduated from New York’s Brill Building, a sort of Harvard for staff songwriters; unlike Berns, Diamond didn’t graduate with honors. As he puts it kindly in the liner notes of his new compilation The Bang Years 1966-1968, Diamond’s early non-hits were “silly songs about made up people”. By 1966, Diamond was frustrated and out of work, with a baby on the way. Bang was where he pulled it together and found a voice that was completely new.
As with most completely new voices, Diamond pillaged what other people had already done. Specifically, Diamond’s music combined the introspection of Greenwich Village singer-songwriter folk, the tightly wound beats and arrangements of Brill Building pop, and the brooding, leather-clad urban cowboy sensibility of a thousand solitary men toiling away in garage bands. This music was post-Beatles and post-Dylan (another compelling candidate for Jewish Elvis), but it was an utterly contemporary urban pop sound, with a scraggy rock edge in Diamond’s voice. Had Diamond undergone electroshock therapy and become friends with John Cale, he might have started the Velvet Underground.
That’s a big “if”, but listen to “Someday Baby” and see if you don’t hear more than a little Velvets in its droning, cavernous groove. “Someday” is a deep cut from Diamond’s debut album, The Feel of Neil Diamond, heretofore unavailable on CD except as part of sketchy bootlegs or a short-lived stereo compilation. Feel only reached #137 on Billboard’s album chart, but it’s terrific from top to bottom. It showcases Diamond the rhythm fiend, the backbeat scientist, the Dr. John of NYC guitar-slingers.
Feel’s songs are practically a taxonomy of different backbeats. Besides the druggy Factory vibe of “Someday”, there are the boogaloo touches of “Cherry, Cherry”, the horn stabs of “Solitary Man”, the slowed-down bubblegum of “Do It”, and the morose tambourine folk of “I’ve Got the Feeling (Oh No No)”. Diamond’s covers catalog his influences: “Red Rubber Ball”, “La Bamba”, “New Orleans”, “Monday Monday”, and “Hanky Panky”. Each is seemingly chosen for its locomotive energy, each manifests that energy with a distinct rhythm.
These rhythms are played straight, rarely swung, and they subsume all other musical elements. The trombone chorus, honking one-note bari sax, and omnipresent bottom half of the piano don’t play melodies so much as extensions of the grooves. Even Diamond’s melodies are rhythmic marvels. Go ahead, sing the stunning line that opens this album (you know you want to): “Melinda was miiiine ‘til the tiiiime that I found her.” Notice how it starts and ends with syncopated figures, and how they contrast and highlight the longer notes in the middle. Diamond’s biographer Laura Jackson describes those early recording sessions:
“He didn’t merely sing the song. To the surprise of those in the control room, he performed it, and in such a way that the strong sense of rhythm running through him was channeled visibly in the way his body and his acoustic guitar would sway in perfect harmony with each other. [Engineer] Brooks Arthur called it ‘a kinetic thing happening’...”
—from Neil Diamond: His Life, His Music, His Passion
If Diamond wrote and performed with innate beat savvy, his arranger Artie Butler and producers Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich made those beats explicit. Barry and Greenwich had discovered Diamond, and the authors of “Hanky Panky” knew how to bring songs to life. That’s them singing backup and clapping throughout these songs; their vocal arrangement on “Cherry, Cherry” is one of humanity’s proudest achievements.
The Bang Years also includes Diamond’s second album Just For You—as poorly represented on CD asFeel—and the single “Kentucky Woman” b/w “The Time Is Now”. All this stuff is uniformly great. Just For You boasts the hits “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, “Thank the Lord for the Night Time”, and the eternal classic “You Got to Me”. It features songs that were bigger hits for other artists: “I’m a Believer”, “Red, Red Wine”, and the eternal classic “The Boat That I Row”. It’s got “The Long Way Home”, a majestic song that barrels like a subway train. And the whole comp ends with “Shilo”, the first big Neil Diamond power ballad—it trades Ellie Greenwich and her handclaps for strings and actual drum fills. A harbinger of adult contemporary schlock to come, but a great bittersweet song nonetheless.
Two caveats: this package omits two of Diamond’s unofficial Bang songs, “Shot Down” and “Crooked Street”, and the mono remastering sounds a little loud through headphones. No matter. Overall, it’s a steering-wheel-pounding treat. For decades it’s been hard to find all these songs in the same place, especially in the sonic glory of their hard-hitting mono recordings. Because half these songs are already widely available elsewhere, this collection has slightly less archival impact than the Gentile Elvis’s Sun Sessions or last year’s widely-circulated Never Mind the Bullets, Here’s Early Bob Seger. Musically, though, it’s in their league.
For reasons I sort of understand but hold in contempt, my positive review of this album (see below) was far and away the most controversial thing I wrote all year. Usually negative reviews get all the angry comments, but this one garnered its share. People like and dislike what they like and dislike, I get that. But the conventional wisdom of people who read reviews and make lists of popular music TENDS to arrive at the consensus that Limp Bizkit Sucks. Before I heard this album, I was inclined to agree. I'd barely listened to the guys, just whatever was on the radio around the turn of the century. I still haven't listened to their other albums. As I said earlier (somewhere around here...) I did not expect to like Gold Cobra when I requested it for review. I expected I'd be able to listen to it, form an opinion, and quickly turn around a review full of smutty jokes.
But here's the thing -- IT'S REALLY GOOD. I wish I'd written more about this in the review -- Fred's persona kind of sidetracked me -- but Wes Borland's riffs somehow manage to ape death metal while being catchy and funky, and the hooks are monsters, and the beats make me jerk around my car like Ke$ha. For PopMatters's year-end list extravaganza, Adrien Begrand, whose metal writing I admire, called this one of the worst albums of the year for its "incredible lack of hooks," and I literally have NO IDEA what he's talking about. I hear a song like "Douchebag" or "Shotgun" (one of Entertainment Weekly's worst singles!) and I'm chanting it in my head all day long.
And the thing is, this conventional wisdom is unwarranted because Limp Bizkit haven't been universally loathed. Sometimes music writers ACTUALLY LIKE THEM, to say nothing of all those music fans who don't read reviews or make lists. I mean, they're not Radiohead, but Significant Other got a positive lead review in Rolling Stone, Chocolate Starfish got good writeups in RS and SPIN, people love to pay Wes Borland backhanded compliments, but for some reason Durst's persona, which is diametrically opposed to most review-reading listmakers' personalities, overwhelms anything else that people might actually hear in their music. This is the main reason I chose to focus my review on Durst's persona rather than what the band's doing musically: I was writing to those people. Of which I am one -- albeit one who jams the Bizkit.
You can't make them stop, no matter how hard you tryyyyy...
“A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”
—Marcel Proust
“I’m really feelin’ bad that we both gonna hafta say good-bye now… (GOOD BYE!!!)”
—Fred Durst
Like plenty of rappers before him, Fred Durst feels beset on all sides. Sometimes it seems like that was his main takeaway lesson as a neophyte rapper: “Dude, everyone hates rappers. Run with that.” Who exactly hates the guy, I’m not sure. Limp Bizkit haven’t done much lately—Gold Cobra is their first album since 2005—but a mid-career slump doesn’t equal the trials of Job. I’m guessing they have enough money to live. Besides, it’s worth remembering that they’ve garnered pretty good, if sheepish, reviews throughout their career. Nü-metal may be scorned, but at least Bizkit aren’t Hollywood Undead. (SERIOUSLY, have you heard that Hollywood Undead album? Don’t.)
Fortunately, Durst has figured out a way to fight back. He actually has several coping mechanisms. There’s the unbridled aggression (“Douchebaaag! I’mma fuck you up! FUCK you FUCK you FUCK YOU UP!!!”). The regression to an animal-like state (“Polar Bear ain’t a cracker you should fuck with”). Sometimes he walks away (“Walking Away” doesn’t have any memorable lines, sorry). Mostly, though, he lies like a polar bear rug. Look at that quote at the top. He doesn’t feel bad about leaving his lady at all; the gleeful “GOOD BYE!!!” clinches it.
Durst lies when he cries. He also lies when he doesn’t cry, when he shuns tears and emotion and turns himself into a cold shell of a man. “Should I remind you motherfuckers I don’t give a fuck?” Durst asks over the big lurching riff of “Shotgun”. No need, Fredrick! You’ve already told us so, over the monster riffs of “Bring It Back”, “Get a Life”, “Shark Attack”, and “Gold Cobra”. Remember when you were rapping all those words back there? Funny thing about making an album is that you have to MAKE it—write words and music, rehearse, book studio time, basically run a whole gauntlet of rigamarole designed by the music industry to ensure that, if anybody’s ever gonna hear your music, you do in fact “give a fuck”. If you didn’t, you might sit in the living room with the sawed-off on your lap, but you wouldn’t release a song about it.
So by definition, Durst lies about not caring, which means when you listen to most of Gold Cobra you’re dealing with some version of the unreliable narrator so adored by pop sophisticates. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone who loves pop music, because pop singers say one thing and mean another all the time. At the very least, music makes singers overstate their cases, and listeners can see right through that. For some reason, though, people tend to think Fred Durst is incapable of irony, maybe because they sell him short in the intelligence department. At one point he does rhyme “habit”, “grab it”, and “stab it”, so that might have something to do with it.
Just to be clear: Durst’s unreliable narration isn’t some abstract device meant to curry favor with pop sophisticates. This device may or may not provide Durst himself with some aesthetic satisfaction, I don’t really care. But in his songs, Durst’s irony comes across as clear-cut communication with listeners. It’s a writing device that clarifies and specifies our feelings.
You ever have a really bad day at work when it felt like you were, I dunno, fighting off a bunch of douchebags or sharks or something? And all you wanted to do was either obliterate your adversaries or convince them you don’t care about them? But you couldn’t attempt either of those things because they’d see right through you? So instead you drove off and got all teary listening to “Working Class Hero”? (I, um, must’ve read about this somewhere.) Fred Durst also understands the impotent rage of the working class hero. He knows it’s vitally important to convince your enemies that YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THEM, he knows this desire is futile, and he knows his listeners feel that same futility. All that impotent rage is embodied in his lyrics.
Musically, too, Durst knows what he’s doing. Though his rhymes and rhythm patterns aren’t complicated, you don’t rap as well as he does without honing some technique. He’s got a good ear for a syncopated line. Durst makes rhymes that are easy for his Everydude audience to learn and remember, but they’re also indelible enough that they’re hard to forget.
Bizkit’s music, played here by their original lineup, clarifies and specifies Durst’s rage. As plenty of reviews last decade sheepishly pointed out, Limp Bizkit are actually a Good Band. They’ll nod your head. Guitarist Wes Borland pulls off one huge catchy riff after another, and he and DJ Lethal add sound effects that alter their songs subtly and not-so-subtly. (“Shotgun” ends with an Andes flute playing “There’s a Place in France” over a beat made entirely of shotgun sounds. Badass.) The rhythm section’s bottom end is fatter than your girlfriend.
That reminds me! Limp Bizkit have some unreasonable expectations of women. Specifically, if Limp Bizkit attend a party, they expect that there will be nine women for every one of them, and that these women will undress, enter a swimming pool together, and kiss one another. I think they request this stuff in their tour rider. Frankly, with Odd Future innovating the field of female objectification every day, Bizkit’s imaginations seem a little quaint.
Also quaint, at least in the context of all Durst’s fighting and threatening, is a sung bit of advice that just sort of appears out of nowhere. In the middle of “Get a Life”, right after screaming murderous threats at some haters, Durst sings, “Don’t let the world bring you down.” Twice. That advice could serve as the band’s aperçu, sort of the flipside to Durst’s refusal to care about the haters he’d like to kill.
You and I both know the world is full of haters. Life in the world is inseparable from pain, at least if you care about people, and nobody except a sociopath is capable of not caring about people. Caring equals pain like love equals reciprocal torture. Proust and Durst don’t share much, but they do share this darkly funny truth: the more you try to detach your feelings from a lover or an adversary, the more you realize how little control you have over those feelings. People go to desperate lengths to assert that control. Some people even liken themselves to golden cobras or go swimming with sharks like Frank Whaley (not to be confused with Frank Ocean). With any luck, those people also form a crack band and make an album that sounds better than 90% of the music released this year. Let your guard down and jam some Bizkit. You owe it to yourself. Besides—and I hate to make threats, but it’s true—if you tangle wit’ the lion you gon’ end up in the zoo.
