And Now, An Update From The Green Pea-Ness Timeliness Department

Lil Wayne, "Hustler Muzick" - I have a sneaking suspicion that if it weren't for my unabetted attempts at intervention, my friends would all be walking around trying to out-cool each other by talking about that hip new band called The Arcade Fires; for god's sakes, they're looking to me, and I'm only just now waking up to Lil Wayne. For those of you who live your lives completely ensconsed in some dreadful-sounding rap-free Broken Social Scene-dominated bubble looking to put this lapse in judgement in perspective, think of Lil Wayne as the White Stripes circa 2001; whether you like the music they make or you don't, at the very least it's expected of anyone who claims to pay attention to pop music with any sincerity to be aware of them, an expectation I failed to live up to in spectacular fashion with regards to one Weezy F. I mean, yeah, there were the big songs ("Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", "Hotel Yorba", "Fell In Love With A Girl"/"Stuntin' Like My Daddy", "Shooter", the "Show Me What You Got" remix), but I wasn't interacting with them in any way that had to do with the actual artistic virtues being put forth, just whether or not I'd rather listen to them than whatever happened to be on the radio. The fact that the answer is almost invariably "yes" is barely even germane; I liked "Shooter" about as much (and in an almost identical fashion) as Beyonce's "Deja Vu", and motherfuck a B'Day.

And then pow, Lil Wayne just happened to me. All of a sudden, I stopped trying to figure out whether or not he was using the medium of rap to do anything substantial and started tackling the question of just what the hell I was listening to in the first place - in other words, how it compared to Music For Airports instead of The Blueprint. Against competition like that, of course, the only reasonable answer is "not too well" - but better than you might think, because Tha Carter II is just as singleminded in its determination to Not Get In Lil Wayne's Mouth's Way as Music For Airports was in its own drive to keep people relatively tranquil as they bolted to catch the 8:05 to Cleveland. The man just cannot fucking shut up, and I say that in the most reverential tone available to me; Lil Wayne can't shut up the way the DFA can't resist giving the dancefloor that extra few bars to go that last little bit nuts or the way Animal Collective can't resist telling conventional pop music to kindly go fuck itself in the nose. It's just what he does when it comes to making music, and the fact that it has little (if anything) to do with the hows and whys of rap music probably goes a long way towards explaining his popularity among certain subsections of the population who'd never fuck with a Cash Money album otherwise (i.e. me). If anything, 2006 feels like the year music caught up to Wayne rather than the other way around, like he'd have gladly put out forty thousand mixtapes and nine albums and drop a guest verse on every other song on the radio every year leading up to this one if only people thought he should have the right to do it. Well, good for all of us, I guess.

My favorite example - if not my favorite Lil Wayne song outright (a throne reserved for the royal ass of "Shooter" alone) - is, as you might have guessed, "Hustler Muzick", a tropically warm soul burner which could conceivably occupy the same space on the radio as Christina Milian's "Say I" if it weren't five minutes long and largely about shooting people. There are, I'm sure, ten thousand reasons why this song isn't great, and, were I Tom Breihan, I'm sure I'd have one full-ass comment section detailing every one of them, but somehow I can't get past the way Wayne can't shut up; he gives himself twenty or thirty seconds to sync himself up with the track and then pow, he's out of the gate and you're hard-pressed to find five consecutive quiet seconds. "Hustler Muzik" may also be the finest repository of Wayne's vaunted "sing-song" flow; I personally don't truck much with it (there's a voice in my head that won't stop asking if someone just sat on Mos Def), but it's a magnificent event to watch happen organically, Wayne rejoicing in getting thatmuch closer and thatmuch closer to pure mathematical precision, slathering every syllable with relish like it cost five bucks at the ballpark. Even as the song tries to peacefully expire he won't let up, riding the track until the literal last second; he just can't seem to bring himself to unwrap his fingers from aroud its neck. Nor should he. (Click here to buy Tha Carter II from Amazon.com)

Guillemots, "Moonlight" - By the time the Guillemots found themselves nominated for a Mercury Prize, it had been months since I'd felt any sort of proprietory notions towards them; from the first moment I heard "Trains To Brazil", it was clear that this was a band that deserved to belong to as many people as could be called smart enough to play chicken with their aesthetic. But that doesn't mean the circumstances aren't worth rueing a little; Fyfe Dangerfield and his merry band of tricksters can quite reasonably be called the first band which I've ever been able to introduce to people on anything which could possibly be construed as a wide scale, and it rings unavoidably hollow to see people discovering them on their own. I'm thrilled for their success, of course (not least because it gives me that much more license to be an insufferable I-told-you-so indie-rock prick, a development as globally dangerous as if Hitler had discovered a way to make tanks grow in a beanfield), but I used to own their songs, and it's awfully hard to maintain that sentiment when you've got to share it with every soccer mom in the North of England. Gil Scott Heron indeed.

Fortunately for me, Japan be buggin'. On a routine archaeological dig through Amoeba's racks, I stumbled across a copy of From The Cliffs, a compilation of their first two impossible-to-find EPs, from the Land of the Rising Sun with two tracks I still haven't seen anywhere else; I mulled over the purchase for a while before giving into the Greek chorus in my head that seems to exist exclusively to make me buy records, and I doubt any tracks could have been better chosen to keep me from regretting my purchase. One of them ("Pa Moila") is not exactly what I would call a song that I want to ever listen to again, of course, but them's the breaks; these songs exist because they couldn't find a place on the album, so hating on them for sucking seems a little churlish. But "Moonlight" is poignant and lilting and motherfucking gorgeous, the kind of song you can imagine them fashioning a second career out of in a decade or so when the zeitgeist succeeds in shitting the Guillemots out as it eventually does to everyone and today's shrieking indie girls have given way to tomorrow's suburban socialite matron figures. And the best part is that, as of this writing, I still can't find it anywhere else; Derek was threatening to post it a few months back but never ended up following through, and I might have seen it on a t0rr3nt site in the past when I wasn't really looking for it, but that's pretty much all the mention I've seen of "Moonlight"'s existence, and if I'm incapable of saying a single other thing definitively about it, I can certainly say that a song this pretty deserves to be more easily attainable on the internet than gigabytes' worth of horse porn. And while we'll never know whether I'd have felt as compelled to post "Moonlight" if it didn't let me momentarily relive my opium delusions of influence, I'd like to think that I would; if I had enough taste to like the Guillemots back then, I certainly have enough to like one of their minor classics right now. (Click here to buy the Japanese import of From The Cliffs featuring "Moonlight" and "Pa Moila" from Amazon.com)