Never Mind The Hiatus, I Dispel The Myth

Clipse, "Trill" - If, like me, you were expecting Hell Hath No Fury to be the greatest rap record of the year/since 2001/since 1993/since Kool Herc's first block party, then I have to say that you should probably go ahead and get ready for disappointment; having spent virtually every conscious moment leading up to November 28th in feverish anticipation of it and every second since studying it like the test was in an hour, I can honestly say that it's exactly as unavoidably unimaginative as the haters would lead you to believe. In retrospect, of course, I'm left wondering why this is even a little bit surprising; the best moments on Clipse records are almost without exception the ones where they get to announce themselves to the world ("From ghetto to ghetto/From backyard to yard/I sell it whip on whip/It's off the hard", anyone?), and a proper, official-ass album isn't going to afford you as many opportunities to exploit that as, say, a series of mixtapes, especially not a second album. That's not to say that Los Hermanos Thornton shouldn't shoulder some of the load for Fury's shortcomings, especially when it comes to the hook department ("Chinese New Year"? "Mama I'm sorry I'm so obnoxious"? "Miami Vice"? DO NOT WANT) and especially when it comes to Fury's layout, which feels almost cannibalistic of Lord Willin' ("bangin' ass intro" -> "shitty Pharrell skronk-a-thon married to an unlistenable hook" -> "blown-out trunk assassin" -> "poorly-executed second-single party anthem attempt" - seriously, if it weren't for the unstoppably great "Virginia" on Lord Willin', these albums might as well be twins, albeit where the younger one's substantially sleeker and sexier than the older one) but really, placing blame on this album's failure to leap out of my CD player and slice my bread feels almost quixotic; this record was as doomed to damnation for diminishing returns as the Strokes' sophomore effort. Merely being better than King or Thuganomics feels like settling for fucking a fat girl; frankly, I don't even think this is a better record than Fishscale, which is a wholly uncontroversial statement to make until you take into account the fact that I've listened to Fishscale, undeniably excellent as it may be, about twice since it came out. Fury just isn't a great rap album, and that's all there is to it.

It is, however, a rather extraordinary pop album - one of the five or ten best I've heard this year, actually. It's become clear that at least part of the price of anointing Clipse as candidates to save hip-hop from its excesses involves turning a blind eye to their exceedingly pre-fab roots - lest we forget, these guys broke big at least partially thanks to a friggin' Justin Timberlake album. Is it really so inconceivable that, five years later, they'd be competing with him? I mean, I can accept the fact that two hard-ass motherfuckers rapping about killing everyone who inhibits their ability to process and/or distribute cocaine might not have the wide commercial appeal of Justin Timberlake singing songs proclaiming his love for/sorrow at the hands of a girl - but does that mean that it's a totally different project?

I say no, mostly because Hell Hath No Fury's defining characteristic - its unyielding overtness - lines up so perfectly with pop's that it's almost hard to see anything else. Hell Hath No Fury may be the most aggressively topical album since John Lydon got together with Jah Wobble and came up with a record fundamentally about Lydon's all-consuming contempt for his fans; even its love songs and maternal addresses sound like conversations ripped from scripts of The Wire. But it's not - repeat, not - a great album because of the window it affords us on the cocaine trafficking game or even the effect that a life spent in said game can have on a person; for one, the lyrics aren't particularly insightful or introspective, and for another, if we're going to start using that as a qualitative criteria then I've got a whole lot of message-board posts to delete about the absolute turd Jeezy dropped on everyone last year. No, what's compelling about Hell Hath No Fury is the room it affords coke to function as a sine qua non - it's an album built on bricks the way Nevermind was ostensibly built on angst, which is to say "not really if you look closely, but who looks closely at a record making a point with that kind of force?"

"Trill", I think, sums up everything I like about Fury best, which is a little ironic considering how it may be the least coke-centric song on the record. Coke's there, of course - the song wouldn't be on the record if it weren't - but it's hardly the sole concern; the song exists as an excuse to listen to Pusha and (to a lesser extent) Malice just fucking dance with the sickest Neptunes beat since, well, "Grindin'". I mean, if you've been reading this blog with any regularity, I'd say the odds of you thinking you've got a handle on why I like "Trill" so much within the first fifteen seconds of those majestic snarling synths or that bloodlessly kick-drum-free beat; it's practically textbook futurepop before Pusha steps up to the first bar. It's just that then he starts in on his verses and, well:

Flow chameleon
Worth 'bout a million
Sell Bolivian
Feds in oblivion
Bitch Brazilian
Purse reptilian
Took her from off her island like Gilligan

In the interest of brevity, let us simply say that these lines come out sounding kinda good, and then expand vehemently on this premise by pointing out that they don't sound good because of the subject matter or the characters Pusha's pushing or the scene he's trying to set. These lines sound good because they sound fucking good, because Pusha knows how to percolate his delivery to keep stride with Pharrell and Chad's Michael-Bay-club-scene beat, because, well, they exist and you just heard 'em. I mean, even the explicit coke reference in the middle of the verse doesn't manage to stand out as, y'know, a coke reference so much as just an exceptionally instance of verbal tidiness, especially in the context of such a ridiculous rhyme scheme. And that's what the whole album is like - if you give yourself over to it, after a point, all the coke talk changes over from subject to cipher, and you're left at the mercy of Pusha and Malice's ability to push that cipher go in capriciously filthy directions. And even if they don't push it on all twelve of Hell Hath No Fury's songs - hell, even if they only really manage to push it to that level on four or five songs - it's still such a captivatingly calculated project, and one which yields such exhilarating results when it works, that it's hard to keep from calling it one of the best albums of the year. (Click here to order Hell Hath No Fury from Amazon.com)

Steve Reich, "Six Pianos" (WARNING THIRTY-THREE MEGABYTES OF PRETENTIOUS CLASSICAL BULLSHIT) - I've always thought that my benign resistance to classical music in pretty much all of its forms (all but impervious until the start of this year) stemmed from the fact that I tend to dream in excruciatingly meticulous detail. I mean, one night during college I dreamed that I watched a Behind The Music documentary about the making of the video for Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf", a dream so packed with nuance that even six years and six million bongloads later, I can still remember quotes and verbal inflections delivered by these dream-state Durans - and I'm supposed to be impressed by the "imagery" pushed in opera or pastoral symphonies? "Pfft," I said. "Better to concern myself with the workings of Ryan Adams' psyche." Then, of course, I discovered minimalism, and soon after that the fact that I could pretty much listen to minimalist music to the exclusion of all else; there's a part of my music-consuming nerve center that refuses to even hear it as such simply because as a genre, it offers up big, fat, pitches right around my belt-level with the kind of regularity that even the cheesiest trance producers can't hope to attain. Take, for instance, Steve Reich's "Six Pianos" - and yes, I realize that any prayer I ever had of introducing people to one of the (like, two or three) most accomplished and feted composers of the 20th century went up in smoke the moment Pitchfork published their (admittedly fascinating) interview with the man a few weeks ago, but bear with me. "Six Pianos" may be the least dreamlike piece of music that I've ever encountered in my life; its actual text conjures up no imagery whatsoever, and there's absolutely no mystical character whatsoever to either its composition or its inspiration - it sounds like what it is, namely six pianos having the everliving fuck played out of them and going in and out of phase as they do so. It's also one of the single most intense pieces of music I've ever heard - I mean, talk about unrelenting! - and among the most demonstrative, as it's hard to imagine a piece of music justifying a technique's employment than "Six Pianos", with its seemingly endless permutations of interlocking piano lines. I mean, this is pretty much literal music the way Black Dice (ostensibly) just make literal noise; is it a big surprise that such a thing would appeal to someone who dreams about watching TV shows? (Click here to buy Variations, a Reich compilation containing "Six Pianos", from Amazon.com)

ELSEWHERE
- HOLLA AT YR BOY MOTHERFUCKERS
- Also, apropos of absolutely nothing, I'm pretty sure my upstairs neighbors are torturing their dog, which , under ordinary circumstances, would be fine since dogs may be the only animals I hold in more of a teeth-gritted state of contempt than humans, except for the fact that the goddamn thing WILL NOT SHUT UP WITH THE WHINING AND BARKING. God, do I ever miss the days when they'd just have angry hate-sex instead.