No Trivia

The best record store in Baltimore, True Vine sends out a weekly sometimes more than weekly e-mail “digest” that lists all the great new releases and new, old LPs they got in and is often, accompanied by some engaging and exciting descriptions or anecdotes about those LPs, from co-owner Ian Nagoski. In the latest digest, he wrote about the discovery of a break from an obscure Baltimore artist and how it went from some weird record in his store to just recently showing up on a Breaks compilation. It’s an interesting and affecting read and because I don’t think its available to anybody not on their digest, I thought I’d copy and paste it here. If you are or know Mr. Nagoski and would like it removed, please contact me and I will do so. Oh yeah, just for the sake of clarity- when he mentions “The Golden West”, he means this restaurant a few stores down from True Vine.

If you’re ever in Baltimore or the area, I’d highly suggest checking out the store.-brandon

‘LEAF: A Twisty Story of a Baltimore Record’ by Ian Nagoski of True Vine

On a sweltering afternoon two summers back, a guy – white, about 50, with several gaudy rings and one ear superglued to an expensive cel – walked in with a box of records for sale. There were a dozen more boxes in his car, and I helped him load them into the shop while he told me that his uncle had died and this had been his collection. I flipped though them, found the stuff we could sell, and made an offer, based largely on the presence of a stack of local 45s that looked good. The man got his money, and I started sorting the stuff in the boxes. Most of it was shot – just in lousy shape -and a lot of it was junk, but the first thing I noticed was that the earliest stuff was hard rock, dating to the early 70s and the last of it was pop-r&b piffle from the mid-90s. No way this was the collection of an older family member of Mr. Fancy Cel. Whoever owned this stuff was about 15 in about 1972, making him not yet 50 years old in 2006 – about the Verizonmeister’s same age. But it wasn’t HIS collection, since he didn’t watch me go through it. Everyone who sells their entire life’s record collection wants to see what the Record Store Guy pulls out of the boxes. Even if the decision has been made to sell everything, it still matters whether the collector’s taste is being affirmed by the buyer. This is always always always true. This guy’s body language gave away that he probably didn’t know or care what was in the boxes. So, it registered that I had been lied to, but whaddaya-whaddaya. People have millions of reasons for lying to strangers. You think I’m the monk in Rashomon, agonizing over the morality of mankind? Nope. I buy records, and I sell records, plain and simple, and I just notice when things are weird, and I file it aways for future reference.

One wierd thing about the collection was the profound predominance of two personalities: George Clinton and John Lennon. Over and over, the visionaries of P-Funk and the Fab Four looked out from the stacks. Whoever had collected these things worshiped those two to a discomforting level for an adult. But again, healthy or not, wacky hero-worship is just part of the job in the record biz. So, with the first level of sorting done, I got to the good part of any big buy: listening to the stuff I didn’t recognize. And in this case, it was a couple local 45s by a band called Leaf. Right off the bat, it’s a good name for a band, cause it’s clearly the name of a band that smokes weed, right? And aesthetics aside, just in terms of sheer market-demand, stoned records are salable records, because anything “psyche” is in demand, because serious record-heads are, generally speaking, serious doobie monsters, or at least guy with a lot nostalgia for their days under the old smoke tree.

So, in one hand I had a stack of about twenty copies of one 7″ by Leaf and in the other hand, I had half a dozen of another of their releases plus a 1/4″ mastertape reel with their name scrawled on it. Clearly, I was dealing with the collection of one of the band members. (Musicians always have odd and interesting record collections.) The title that was only the half-dozen copies strong was a four-song EP, released as a Christmas record in 1982 here in Baltimore and dedicated to John Lennon, according to its title. The music was goofy power-pop, notable only for an out-of-nowhere lyric instructing the listener to “throw your tits up and down” during one track. (Whut thuh?) The other record, however, issued earlier the same year felt immeadiately like something special. Each copy was sealed across to the top of the white paper sleeve with one sticker and had another sticker on the front, orange with a picture of a cleaver in a slab of meat that said “PRIME CUTS,” clearly taken from the meat section of a supermarket. Inside, there was a xeroxed sheet printed with info in an awkward/awesome combination of type-writer and handwriting. Side A was labeled “Funk” (good sign!) and was titled “Food Stamps” (‘nother good sign!) I put the needle on it and smiled at the first sound of a wah-wah guitar comping. The recording was a crude basement affair, but the damn thing swung hard like too-fast Go-Go with some seriously funky in-the-pocket drums. The singing was inept, but the vibe was fun and loose. After a harmonica solo that sounded like it must have been performed after the player had first picked the instrument up about two weeks earlier, all of the instruments dropped out except for that funky drummer. This, in record parlance is what they call an “open break,” and on a scarce, locally-produced independent record, for hip-hop heads, producers and diggers, it is pay dirt for hundreds of hours of listening. Before the track was over, my tounge was hanging out as I starting hitting all the big web sites for rare records and drum breaks looking for a trace of “Food Stamps.” And I got nada. Nothing. So, then I flip the record to the side labeled “Rock” and lo-and-behold, it started with another giant, heavy open, mid-tempo drum break before decending into some oozing fuzz-guitar riffing nearly worthy of Jungle Rot-era George Brigman and what one friend described as “glazed, sub-Ozzy basement vocals.” A closer look at the credits showed that both songs were penned by a certain Billy Senger and that he played all the instruments except for the drums, which were played by Joe Senger – Billy’s brother, I guessed. I kept listening to both sides and started to really dig the good-times-in-the-basement party vibe – boys having fun, playing at being rock stars and cranking out some wicked-sounding stuff.

Within 20 minutes, I had called every psyche and funk 45 collector I knew and asked them what they knew about Leaf. Again, nothing. In a few hours, several collectors and arrived to hear it. Almost everyone agreed – it was the real thing, a monster. Several people called everyone THEY knew. But no one had heard of it, and no copy that anyone knew of had ever sold, so there was no established price – an unknown commodity. So, over the next few weeks, I started playing it for collectors and beat diggers, and I sold about a half-dozen copies for about the cost of a dinner at the Golden West or the cost of a new CD. A few months later, I started getting phone calls saying that those copies were already changing hands for a hundred bucks a throw. We consigned a couple copies to an ebayer who posted them with soundclips of the drum breaks and sold them for more than $100 each. Here’s one of them:

http://www.popsike.com/php/detaildatar.php?itemnr=330087400312

Around that time, we had a visit from Joe Vaccarino, the author a Baltimore Sounds, a beautiful, labor-of-love discography of local bands from the 50s to the early 80s. I asked him about the Leaf record, of course, and since he didn’t know it, offered him the mastertapes (which turned out to be for the inferior EP, rather than the killer “Food Stamps” single) as a gift for his archive and asked whether he wanted to buy copies of the records. He listened carefully to the records but left quietly without even taking the the tape. A month later, though, he emailed me and asked if I had seen that month’s issue of the free local music rag – Maryland Musician or something, I forget the name. I hadn’t. He said there was a letter to the editor from the Leaf’s drummer, saying that his brother had recently died and that his landlord had absconded with his posessions, including the only tapes of their old band, and would anyone with information on the whereabouts of documents of the band please contact him. So, I sent Billy Senger an email and said I had a master reel and copies of the two 7″s, and he was welcome to them. He wrote back, very gratefully, and said that he’d be in Baltimore in a couple weeks and he’d meet me at the shop then.

Sure enough, a two weeks later Joe Senger and his sister arrived mid-afternoon in business clothes. They had come to Baltimore for a court date in an attempt to sue Billy’s landlord for theft of Billy’s possessions. They’d lost the case. I gave Joe a copy of each of the 7″s and the mastertape, and in exchange he told me a little about his brother, the author of the records. Billy had worked for years at the Mondawmin branch of Bernie Schwartz’s 25-year record shop/institution Music Liberated. Over the course of the 90s, he lived down by the Enoch Pratt and kept getting himself into trouble while he dealt – and failed to deal – with some serious mental health problems and pretty well alienated everyone in the family with cockamamie middle-of-the-night calls to bail him out of some bullshit or other. So, when he finally succumbed to his demons, his family didn’t hear about it for some time afterward, in which time the landlord – appearantly Mr. Celphone – had grabbed Billy’s earthly posessions and started selling them off, partially to recoup backrent I would guess, and partially cause the landlord was a louse. Joe lives in Florida and continues to play drums and plans to reissue what he’s been able to salvage of his old brother’s life’s work. Joe has a myspace page, which includes a tune called “Guardrails in Heaven,” which I take to be a tribute to Billy:

A bittersweet story, ending in resolution for the talented kid brother and the gratified record dealer who was still sitting on about ten copies of a record that he was selling periodically for $100 a throw. Until last week, when I got a call from a well-known DJ and record dealer in England. He asked if I was still in touch with the fella from Leaf. I said I was, why did he ask? Because “Food Stamps” had been reissued on a breaks comp. Turns out the copies we ebayed had gone to a DJ named Mr. Thing who had included the “Funk” side on a comp called Strange Breaks & Mr. Thing. The first of two discs had a bunch of profoundly obscure tracks; the second disc was a continuous mix using the breaks from those same tracks. He said that Joe Senger ought to contact the label and collect his royalties on the release. “Gee, I feel really loyal to Joe Senger, but BBE has done a lot of great stuff, too. I hate to cause trouble for them,” I said. “No trouble,” he replied, “he writes to them, and they’ll have money for him. Simple as that.” So, I wrote to Joe, and he wrote to BBE, and he should be seing a check from Jolly Old England in the near future.

So, the music lives on. And we got in copies of the Strange Breaks 2CD set, now available for $17 – the cost of dinner at the Golden West – and it’s got a bunch of nice stuff on it. They did a great job cleaning up the sound of the Leaf record. Or, for $100 you can still buy a sealed copy of the real thing and get that shitty xerox insert and that “glazed sub-Ozzy” basement sound on the B-side.

Cyrus Alexander’s ‘Black Terminator’ Trailer
And while I’m pushing other people’s great shit. Producer Cyrus the Great, who I wrote about a bit on this entry Some Ol’ Terminator Shit, made a movie based on his song ‘Black Terminator’! Cyrus somehow found my entry and contacted me and told me that indeed, my dream of a cheap, blaxploitation-esque movie to match his song was already in the works! Here it is:

This just looks really, really incredible. I like how it’s funny, even hilarious at times (“270 with the coat”) but never winks at the audience too much. I’m very excited about the finished product of this…the camera work looks really good, there’s lots of quotables just in this trailer and the acting is the perfect for the project, and the music, which I’m assuming Cyrus made is fucking amazing, these warm, fuzzy synths and gurgles that emulate the original ‘Terminator’ score really well and kinda ups it because it more on some John Carpenter ‘Escape from New York’ shit…

On ‘20K Intro’ from the latest Clipse tape, Pusha mentions a “tree-huggin’ ass bitch” that told him he was “nice” but proceeded to give him a lot of shit about how his songs are all about “dope” and “street shit”, which of course, is very, very bad. Pusha, in one of the few points on the depressive tape where anyone climbs out of their frustration, responds with “Tree-huggin’ ass bitch please” and asserts who he really rhymes for: “niggas on the corner.”

This kind of defense or half-defense met with an angry assertion about “street niggas” or “niggas on the corner” isn’t new to rappers’ attempts at sounding “real” but it seems more glaring because well, the Clipse simply aren’t rapping for those “street niggas”. Maybe they are in the sense that that’s their intended audience, or maybe they mean it in some instructive way, but in terms of whose ears are open to Clipse, it is not who they claim to be rapping for; if this were true, Pusha wouldn’t even be confronted with a woman offended by their crack rap, you know?

Maybe some drug dealers have decent music taste, but the assumption that because one is from the street, one is apt to embrace street music, is incorrect. I see the logic, but most people are just more into ideas of escape and it’s why blue-collar whites listen to mainstream country music and not sad-sack songs about why their life sucks. The illusion that the drug-dealer is some near-Nietzschean businessman beyond good and evil that embraces his/her fate is a myth sold by dealers and the popular rappers that leech off of that myth. It’s a fucked-up circle of bullshit and the reality is, dealers are stupid too. They want to feel good about themselves like everybody else so, 50 Cent’s image of thuggery is way more appealing than say, ‘Chinese New Year’. In last night’s episode of ‘The Wire’, there’s a scene of Snoop and Chris driving down the street with Hurricane Chris playing out their speakers; that’s what I’m getting at!

Not that Clipse is the pinnacle of actual street realness- whatever that means- but they represent something a little less ideal than many of the other rappers talking about how street they are. The brilliance of Clipse is the way they offer up the same old bullshit but said a little better, song after song, and then suddenly drop a particularly dark insight or emotional reality. These details weave through ‘Hell Hath No Fury’ but they become palpable on the closer ‘Nightmares’, despite or in spite of its cloying acknowledgment of regret. Malice’s verse on the last track on ‘We Got it 4 Cheap Vol. 2’ about being “a hamster in a wheel” is all the more affecting because he hasn’t been this emotional, depressed rapper on every track. On the latest tape, the depression seems more real and upfront but the main point is still drug-pushing punchlines. Peppered throughout however, are lines like “we keep it from the kids and tell em’ it’s detergent”. Young Jeezy might say that line, but he’d be half-bragging or throw in one of those “Ha-HA”s to downplay the reality of selling crack with a bunch of kids around; Pusha just drops that fucked-up reality and keeps going.

If anything, Pusha should stop dropping weird defenses about who he makes his music for or who listens to it, because he should be proud “niggas on the corner” don’t want to hear his fucked-up version of reality: It means he’s doing his job! It also says something about how deluded the criminal element is, that Clipse don’t offer enough escapism and justification, but this is getting long already…

Although Clipse boast and glorify, their music never feels too exciting and their swagger is on the defensive and defiant, never there on principle or some fake-ass Tupac “I don’t give a fuck” thing…the Clipse care, a lot. The dudes aren’t perfect but they certainly do not create ideal forms that can be embraced by delusional thugs or angry too-cool for rock but too-dumb for real rap middle-schoolers. That’s what the current debate on hip-hop’s quality is really about and always has been: ideal vs. the reality.

On DocZeus’s entry on Clipse earlier this month, the lively comments debate went into a smart and even-handed breakdown of what exactly made Clipse more complex or better or less amoral than Young Jeezy. At first glance, the two have a lot in common. Both rap coke braggadocio with a vague catering to regret, over cold, sterile, electronic beats but as smart listeners have pointed out, even when the darkness of dealing is not apparent in the rhymes, it’s heard in those harsh, beats. But there’s a difference.

Indeed, Clipse are hardly the ideal non-ideal rappers and Jeezy is not totally in drug-dealing fantasy land, but comparing the two illustrates my point. Clipse have production that is almost tinny and truly minimalist and it underscores their bragging; Jeezy’s production is disturbing but has a triumphant edge that turns his non-rapping into an unstoppable force of hard-ass synths and regal horns. Jeezy is what a drug-dealer wants to be and Clipse are a little closer to what a drug dealer really is. So, it makes sense that “street niggas” would gravitate towards Jeezy and it makes sense that jerkoffs who think drug-dealers are cool or people who think they’re drug dealers, would also prefer the Jeezy treatment of dealing.

I’m reminded of a similar division between the ideal and the real in film scholar Ray Carney’s The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. The book’s primary argument is that filmmaker Cassavetes consistently avoids the clean-edges of Hollywood cinema- including the Hollywood art of Welles, Hitchcock, etc.- for a less ideal and more accurate representation of life (I’m really simplifying…). Late in the book, Carney contrasts Cassavetes’ crime film ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’, a portrait of a down-and-out strip-club owner who has a lot of debt, with Orson Welles’ classic ‘Citizen Kane’, a very different kind of portrait of a failed man. Carney’s most effective point is to suggest that even as Orson Welles makes a movie opposed to Charles Foster Kane, it really only “pretends to criticize the excesses of capitalistic arrangements and manipulations in its content [and] collaborates with them in its form” (230); Welles’ movie is as bombastic and overblown as Kane. Cassavetes’ relationship to Cosmo (the main character of ‘Bookie’) is very different; the movie constantly seeks out ways to undermine Cosmo’s illusion of himself and his surroundings.

Cosmo is never smooth even when he tries to be, the women of his strip-club are either downright beat or beautiful in a way that is realistic*, and his gangster friends are hardly Deniro cool or handsome. To drive the point home, Carney creates a hypothetical, wherein the main character of each movie could watch the movie about themselves: “As his political rally suggests, Kane would love the style of his own film (even if he might have problems with its satiric point). Cosmo would hate his movie’s style.” (231).

*Sorry about the soft-porn link, there’s not a lot out there on Azizi Johari…

I know that comparison is not perfect, for rappers are not in the same exact position as the movie director, but despite most rappers’ tendency to use the “I” whether telling the truth or not, both rapper and director tell stories, create portraits, and generally, subjectivize experience. And just as Kane would approve of the however negative still aggrandizing portrayal of self in ‘Citizen Kane’, would most “street niggas” prefer the version that paints them as larger-than-life transgressors. Replace “Welles” with just about any drug-talk rapper in the following quotation and the connection seems clear: “Welles [or Young Jeezy?] is addicted to crafting a self-contained, self-justifying, self-referential imaginative world…” (230). Carney of course, is interested in art and so, his focus is on the creator but I’m shifting the focus on the audience- or a part of the audience.

The world Carney describes is the one that Jeezy chooses to reside in, but it is also the world that his audience prefers because it breeds complacency and zero self-reflection. Those “true” dealers on the corner like it because it justifies their way of living and then pumps it up a few sizes. Those outside “the life” generally think its either cool or somehow want to connect their own dreams to Jeezy’s motivational speech rap, so they too prefer the idealized form. It’s not how Jeezy intended it, but he really is like a motivational speaker in the sense that like Tony Robbins or Dr. Phil or those twin midgets that sell real-estate kids on TV at 3am, he feeds his audience a load of complacent bullshit masquerading as insight or theory.

I think I need to clarify that the embrace of this ideal is held by everyone, and is hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers (which is what we must assume Pusha means by “niggas on the corner”). I generally do not concern myself with being offensive, but I do fear this could be misread as a critique of the black criminal mind-set or blacks in general, when I’m first, discussing the escapism of popular rap and second, the growing obsession with escapism in the world at-large. That is to say, Pusha is not referring to white drug dealers or criminals, not because he uses the word “nigga”- for this word is often used as nearly all-inclusive, go to a Ghostface show, he’ll call his crowd of many white faces “my niggas”- but because going back to ‘Lord Willin’, Pusha and company have been focused on their community and their world.

Basically, when it comes to ideals, everyone likes to feel cool and smart and not part of the shitty reality in which they live. Rock musicians still revel in an ideal version of the debauched rocker, or, when it comes to crime, escapist forms of the life of crime are hardly exclusive to black drug-dealers. The best example would be the mafia, which has pushed idealized forms of their life since their life came about during the 1920s and 30s. Most “gangster” movies end morally and have an edge of justice to them, but they are first and foremost, obsessed with the criminal and his (especially during that early era) transgressive acts of crime.

It is interesting to note that so much of the glorification of the criminal life that is so pervasive and sensitive to criticism in rap, has its roots in white crime films that mainstream critics have praised since the 1930s. The pinnacle of course, is hip-hop movie royalty, ‘Scarface’ and ‘Goodfellas’ and rappers have continually picked apart these movies for influence. Ridley Scott’s recent ‘American Gangster’ and in some ways, Jay-Z’s accompanying album, would be the pinnacle of this embrace of the ideal life of crime and a conflation of the white-oriented “gangster” ideals with the black oriented “gangsta” ideals.

As Jay-Z recently said on ‘Ignorant Shit’, “Scarface the movie did more than Scarface the rapper for me”, and of course, that’s true because despite occasional forays into a less glamorous image of thug-life, Jay-Z has worked in ideal gangsta forms in a way that Scarface the rapper, never has. Even on his recent semi-hit ‘Girl, You Know’- a song that is a rejection of love, another ideal- there’s that reference to how “she don’t suck dick like she used to do” and he dubs in this gross slurping sound, which you now, is real because getting your dick sucked is this weird thing of this girl like slurping all over your dong; it’s weird if you think about it.

The point is, you watch ‘Scarface’ or ‘Goodfellas’ and while they end poorly and do not approve of their characters’ actions, the movies are celebrations of the swagger and confidence of the lifestyle. The directors reject the moral perspective of Henry Hill or Tony Montana, but love the attitude. This is why you read stories of real-life mobsters watching and performing the actions of these characters; it makes them feel awesome and not you know, gross weird, kinda pathetic criminals (which is how ‘The Killing of Chinese Bookie’ and maybe a Clipse album and certainly a Ghostface album, makes you feel…). Corner dealers, once given the option, will choose nebulous coke rap over the well-wrought realities of Ghostface and to a lesser extent, Clipse, every time: Nobody wants reality!

-Stills stolen from DVDbeaver.com.

-Carney, Ray. ‘The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies’. Cambridge UP, 1994.

The video- or possibly first half of the video- for Kanye’s ‘Flashing Lights’ premiered last week and it’s a pretty brilliant three minutes. Summary will be spared because you can watch it above and it’s fairly clear what it’s about, because even though people toss around phrases like “avant-garde” and “next-level” to describe the video, it’s fairly straight-forward: a few long, elegant camera moves that culminate in a women presumably stabbing a tied-up-and-in-the-trunk Kanye with a shovel. Like everything on ‘Graduation’ it’s about how celebrity and sex appeal are fucked-up.

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has a thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the video chick or the sexless and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

Kanye putting himself at the center of a revenge fantasy for rap’s misogyny and exploitation is typically cloying and oh-so-contradictory of ‘Ye, but it works because the video is genuinely real and disturbing and never gives in or steps back from its intended concept. Dunno why this comes to mind, but think of this Toby Keith video, which too involves revenge on the opposite sex (and a shovel!). Way more disturbing and genuinely misogynist than anything Nelly’s ever done (note to everybody: Sliding a credit card between a girl’s ass cheeks is funny), Toby’s video shows him singing an angry song to a tied-up Ex as he walls her in the basement, brick by brick. In the final moments of the video, the joke switches and is on Tobes as he somehow accidentally walled-himself in! Hilarious. This video’s always annoyed me because it’s a video of genuine misogyny that covers its ass in its final moments with a twist that allows it to still get airtime. Fuck that- ‘Flashing Lights’ sticks with its gender-revenge reversal to the end and gives you a genuinely complex and fucked-up experience.

Kanye takes a genuine backseat to the video chick, and in a darkly comic way, absorbs rap’s misogynist sins. He doesn’t even show up until half-way through the video and when he does, he gets stabbed with a shovel. The model, on the other hand, is allowed to strut in slow-motion and totally take control. The moment where she tosses the zippo and turns is as bad-ass as all the mean-mugging done by rappers in other videos. I get the weird sense that this will all be played for laughs when there’s a second half of the video and go the way of Toby Keith, but as it stands now, this is how I’m reading it.

The comfortable and patient camera too, adds to a certain level of respect (or relative respect) to the entire thing and moves it further away from being any kind of “typical” music video. This avoidance of the typical is the root of Kanye’s brilliance as well as why his work so often falls short of being brilliant but here, it works because it’s fairly out-there and it thematically connects to the song’s sense of how fame can put you in some goofy and/or dangerous positions. Upon seeing the video, I was immediately reminded of a comment on my ‘Flashing Lights’ entry by commenter Miss Shai:

“Maybe I read too many gossip blogs (maybe? lololol) but from the moment I heard it I figured this track was about his last girlfriend Brooke, the one that ‘be running on myspace’. The chorus about her taking things too far would be a reference to her apparent affinity for fame, being photographed everywhere (whether Ye was around or not)and then discussing her relationship issues on the internet or to anyone who’ll listen. Anyway, thats my reason for assuming both verses are about the same girl. I also felt like his reference to the paparazzi was a frustration with being caught cheating by the paparazzi, like them catching him out to dinner with other women or in places where he told her he wasn’t, making them a believable target for his contempt. The ending of the verse is her discovery of the infidelity and the end of the relationship, the beginning of the next is the separated reminiscing.”

Yeah! Taken with Miss Shai’s reading of the song, it’s a very confessional video in the sense of delving deep into Kanye’s post-fame fears of the women he’s fucked, fucked-over or both.

The entire thing has the feeling of a dream (or nightmare). The song never really matches up with the video in any overt or kinetic way and the actions both make sense and seem inexplicable. Why does she park the car, walk twenty or so feet out, strip, burn her clothes, and then walk back to the car? It doesn’t matter because you feel it and that’s what dreams and nightmares are about; a feeling. And it’s a feeling that matches the song quite well. It’s both obvious symbolic and totally free of a simple interpretation. The burning of her clothes is a sort of classic ritualistic trope but here, what does it mean? She’s in a sense, reduced to “shoes and cars” when she removes her clothes and walks in heels back to the car…but Monique pointed out to me, that the car is sort of unidentifiable and has the dust of the dirt road all over it; most videos go to great lengths to keep cars and objects of wealth clean. This is the second video where Kanye has sort of used the car as a sort of after-thought. One of the best parts of the ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video is the brief appearance of a Lamborghini, as if it’s stuck in there for a few moments to say “Look, I can get a Lambo but I’d rather give you this weird Madonna ‘Frozen’ type shit…”

It is interesting that Spike Jonze “co-directed” this video, for he’s a director that only occasionally makes rap videos but always breathes new life into the ones he does. It’s fun to see this video as the opposite of ‘Gold Digger’ because in a way, Spike Jonze is the anti-Hype Williams. Both guys are perhaps the most well-known music video directors of all-time and both have immediately identifiable styles, but while Hype’s style often signifies nothing, everything Jonze does is intended to serve the song or feeling of that song. The desert, car, and woman too, recall Williams’ ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ video. We’re again in the desert and it’s again this beautiful night, but Jonze cuts a great deal less and incorporates a grittier film stock, not the super-clean imagery of Williams. I never thought Williams and West fit because Kanye’s always something of a joker and Hype Williams is embarassingly sincere, even though his videos are like, Ma$e floating in Vegas-space in a shiny-ass jacket.

The ‘Flashing Lights’ video is a good excuse to look back at Jonze’s decidedly anti-Hype Williams rap videos:

-Beastie Boys ‘Sure Shot’

Spike Jonze has made better and more conceptually cohesive videos for the Beastie Boys than ‘Sure Shot’ and that’s why I’m highlighting it. It’s a conventional performance style video but finds way to be weird and kinda reverse hip-hop video conventions. Like Kanye, the Beasties are dudes who’ve constantly moved in and out of the world of rap and are defiantly “hip-hop” in the same way that they are defiantly “punk rock”: because they do whatever they want.

You get the classic rap video “beatdown” shot here, but it’s the Beasties and Hurricane and they are having fun and it’s like mid-day in California and not like, midnight in Queensbridge. If you listen to the commentary on the amazing Criterion DVD of their videos, they mention that those weird igloo-ish homes they are walking around are some kind of California version of housing for the homeless, so in one sense, they’re as surrounded by poverty as any of the other “real” rap videos that would have followed this on ‘The Box’. Don’t sleep on Ad-Rock’s Peace Frog shirt.

-The Pharcyde ‘Drop’

Another thing that’s great about Spike Jonze is the way he totally commits to super-complicated concepts and rarely shorts-cuts on them, which for this video as you probably know, meant shooting the whole thing backwards, including the Pharcyde memorizing their lyrics backwards and other impressive stuff. Again, a kind of variation on rap video cliches that doesn’t try to be some corrective , but just happens to be a stranger take on a conventional concept.

-Notorious B.I.G featuring 112 ‘Sky’s the Limit’

A video that puts Jonze’s sometimes annoying cleverness to good use. Quite a few videos or guest verses by Biggie after his death used old-footage of him, which had a way of being very affecting, but somehow, this video that recreates Biggie videos with children is fun as well as affecting. It’s the sort of video that if not out of necessity, a label probably wouldn’t have approved because it breaks Biggie’s mainstream “gangster” persona even though it highlights the playful and funny side of Biggie that real fans remember equally well. As usual, the idea is saved because Jonze keeps it as authentic as possible, doing his best to match the old videos.

-Fatlip ‘What’s Up Fatlip?’

A totally low-budget video that perfectly fits Fatlip’s depressive but hilarious single. Some of it invokes the aesthetic of ‘Jackass’ which Jonze had a part in…the kid kicking him in the nuts, the obviously-shot-without consent gags, the shaky cameras, and a general sense of on-the-fly fun. The part where he visits his Mom is really great.

On the Spike Jonze Director’s Series DVD that Palm Pictures put out, there’s a pretty lengthy documentary about Fatlip that’s really revealing and funny and adds another level to his insane persona.

-Ludacris ‘Get Back’

This video seems to be sort of forgotten because it came in a time where rap videos stopped being fun on like, any level. The concept of giving Ludacris Robert Altman’s ‘Popeye’ arms and a team of uniformed fat chicks is brilliant and fits Ludacris’ comedic take on aggression; a lesser director would’ve taken the song’s hard-ass message as serious.

The fact that the arms are these big rubber things is good as well becauses it avoids annoying CGI (see Luda’s stupid ‘Stand Up’ video…) and you can tell Luda’s having more fun because he really is inhabiting the dude with big arms character. Some of the best parts are these quick, obviously improvised shots of Ludacris just being goofy with the arms. The whole video is a celebration of easy, old-fashioned special effects…the wire effects when he punches people, Fatlip’s twisted legs, the exploding bricks of the wall, it’s just really fun. When it came out, it made me wish the Keenan Ivory Wayans would’ve just turned this into a movie…like a low-budget blaxploitation pic about this dude in the hood who fights pimps and drug-dealers because he was born with these big-ass arms.

It’s pretty weird that nowadays, every New York punchline-based mixtaper, hardass Southern trap-hopper, and everyone in-between, kinda raps like Grand Puba. Not that his influence stretches that far or that he invented the style, but the whole willfully weird or just purposefully bad pop-culture similes stacked atop one another until finally stumbling into a vaguely thematically-linked hook, is something Puba’s all over on his second album, 1995’s ‘2000′.

Other than Kanye West and Lil Wayne- both of whom probably do still care about Grand Puba- Puba-ish similes and references don’t really jibe with the cold-as-ice persona of most of today’s radio rappers. Weirdo metaphors for how much coke one sells are cool, but they don’t make sense because it’s like this goofy thing being used to brag about this very real, even scary thing. Like- just off the top of my head now- when a Clipse song is like “I was like Richard Gere/I had bitches breathless”, it’s funny because Clipse are making a reference to the Gere version of ‘Breathless’ and there’s an interesting tension to these emotionally-distant coke-selling machines making such a nerdy reference, but it just doesn’t work; It makes more sense when it’s this dirty old man like Grand Puba coming up with this shit because he’s not trying to be anything more than this like awkward, hilarious weirdo.

‘2000’s first track ‘Very Special’ starts with some vague jazz horns under layers of record crackle before kicking into Puba briefly interpolating The Delfonics’ ‘La La Means I Love You’ years before Ghostface (at other points on the album Puba slips into ‘Rock the Boat’, ‘Get Down Tonight’, Phoebe Snow, and Beavis & Butthead and Urkel impressions), doing a hilariously dead-on approximation of the Delfonics’ soul-singer whine and then all of a sudden, that part’s just over and he’s actually rapping and dropping these brilliant, almost non-sequitur punchlines that if you think about them long enough, hold a kind of internal logic that can’t be explained but works: “So many brothers try to be me/Only two can probably see me, that’s Ray Charles and Stevie.” A few lines later, he’s telling us how he gets “honeys hooked like they kids is hooked on Power Rangers” which is one of many superhero and cartoon references that, have since become the obnoxious go-to for rappers that want to signify nerd-dom but here, feel more like Puba just doing Puba.

Nothing about him feels forced, so when Puba decides to actually say something it doesn’t feel like the token “message” song we anticipate on most rap albums, but a sudden revelation from the jokester of the group. ‘Backstabbers’ is a kind of reversal on the (sorry) “bros before hoes” track you expect and album closer, ‘Change Gonna Come’ totally sells its serious message because Puba’s spent most of his time just being a dirty old man, referencing a girls’ “stinkbox” and stuff, so when he tells the listener “A gat don’t make you a man/Cause the man made the gat/So, stop with the black on black”, he means it, precisely because he hasn’t spent the past ten tracks going in that direction.

On ‘I Like It’, one of Puba’s most popular songs, his ability to not really say much but never devolve into a monotone flow or lose listener interest is impressive. You get record fuzz, tight drums, ghostly vocal samples and a perfect vibraphone loop, while Puba flows casually but somehow immediately too. He sounds off-the-head but never intimidated by the beat, never bleating out the lines, just taking his time and running up and around the beat, sometimes on-beat with the drums, other times he stops or runs a little off and repeats a word to catch-up or decides to temporarily ride some subtle production flourish but eventually finds his way back in time for the chorus. The best example starts with Puba’s line about “Gold diggers who try to get it” and how he “left em’ backwards”, adding the hilarious line, “they thought they farted when they shitted”, and then in a sing-song voice bragging nonsense like “Cause Puba’s everything and everything is Pu” before moving towards the Debarge-sample assisted chorus.

The album’s production arguably, fits his persona even better than the equally-classic work on his debut and Brand Nubian’s ‘One For All’. ‘2000’s production, moves further away from the Marley Marl style and towards the cohesion and musicality and lack of chaos found on the Native Tongues’ stuff and the genuinely game-changing ‘The Chronic’. These beats are not disparate pieces of samples put together, but extended grooves that gel into songs for Puba to do whatever the fuck he wants over. Every track is anchored by some heavy, boom-bap drums and a warm film of record hiss, but each has its own thing for your ears to obsess over. The Sci-Fi bleeps and bloops that meet a lightly plucked guitar on ‘Keep On’, some synths that are on some Michael Jackson ‘Human Nature’ shit and a particularly yearning soul music wail hold ‘Amazing’ together, and some thick flanged-out keyboard work helps sell the affecting ‘Change Gonna Come’.

One of my favorite aspects of ‘2000′ is the way it links and mixes-up so many of the best things about rap of the mid-90s. The drums on every track are hard but the beats drip with 70s-soul crackle and vibed-out jazz; the rapping is immediate and fun but wordly-wise and far from disposable and it also has that thing so many 90s rap albums have: a bunch of dudes just yelling shit in the background. Rap’s always been about ego and being that dude, but there’s a communal aspect that permeates even an album like this, which is essentially guest-less and pretty much totally focused on Grand Puba. The shouts and chants and Blackstreet-esque “yeah-eahhh”s on ‘A Little of This’ and the classic New York crew call-and-response on ‘2000′ remind you that the world doesn’t revolve around the guy who left Brand Nubian. Now that’s something besides punchlines today’s rappers could afford to swipe from Grand Puba.

Grand Puba’s ‘2000′ is sadly, currently out-of-print but isn’t too hard (or expensive) to find on eBay and probably all over one of those Mp3 blogs that kids love so damned much….

DOWNLOAD:
-‘Keep On’ (produced by Chris Liggio)
-‘Change Gonna Come’ (produced by Dante Ross)

BONUS SONG:
-Consequence ft. John Legend ‘And You Say’ (off ‘Take Em’ to the Cleaners Mixtape’): Cons raps over the ‘I Like It’ beat.

“YouTube houses dozens of cell-phone videos of Axel Willner, aka the Field, in front of his VAIO laptop, beers to the right, in the same striped T-shirt, performing concentrated microhouse in venues around the world. Like a hipsterized Where’s Waldo?, Willner is the same, but his context changes dramatically. At a chic club in an elevated DJ booth, he’s a rave master to people on the dance floor. A few feet from his fans in a dingy indie-rock space, his songs yield contemplative head nods. Or through the crummy speakers of a Toyota Corolla, his music nicely soundtracks lonely winter drives.

Last year’s From Here We Go Sublime worked for that reason: House fans dug it, but it was ethereal enough to slip out of the club. This year’s iTunes exclusive Sound of Light is Willner’s ready-for-listener-projection response to Stockholm’s Nordic Light Hotel challenge: “interpret our hotel experience and express it by making a record.”

Each of the EP’s four tracks represents a different part of the day. “Morning” is leisurely pulses, weary but hopeful; “Day” mechanically bounces along locked in a groove; “Evening” is sophisticated–ghostly female voices tease as heavy drums overwhelm; “Night” is a staccato synth loop that sounds like it’s about to blast off but never does. Tension and release are at the core of the Field’s music, but with 15 minutes per track, it’s taken to extremes that engage some and test others’ patience. Sound is either glorified elevator music or it perfectly captures the excitement and monotony of the 24-hour day. Really, it’s both–Sound’s conceptual roots are a custom fit for the Field’s all-things-to-all-people laptop electronics.”

-Also, good friend David Ford just started a Film Blog: Already Half-Naked. He has a very engaging write-up of Lindsay Anderson’s ‘Brittania Hospital’:

“Brittania Hospital is also a movie about movies and amply shows Anderson’s love for films, even when he is lampooning them as ruthlessly as he does in this one. The conventions of the horror genre, particularly its Frankenstein mode, are held up in the scenes of the birth and subsequent dismemberment of Professor Millar’s reconstituted man. Further, the casting of Mark Hamill as the journalist Red, a hashish smoking proto-Beavis, seems to be no accident. The set design and staging of the scenes inside the Millar Center were pulled right out of George Lucas’s Death Star playbook. Moreover, Hamill’s shouts into his remote microphone when realizes that they have lost contact with the now-dead Mick Travis recall with great hilarity Luke Skywalker’s frantic paging of his droids from the depths of the Death Star’s trash compactor”

“Dickensian”. The oft-used word by critics to describe ‘The Wire’ and also used by this season’s apparent enemy, the Baltimore Sun’s James Whiting. Whiting, in a scene that’s a small joke on supporters of the show who fall-on that however accurate, kinda stupid descriptor, demands “Dickensian” tales of Baltimore’s “lost” youth. As this ‘New York Times’ article notes, the point of the scene is how the editor “devalues the word” and “strip[s] it down to a synonym for abject poverty, instead of a world of stark contrasts with unlimited scope and a rich, teeming bog of detail”- but both definitions of “Dickensian” work for ‘The Wire’.

Like Dickens, ‘The Wire’ melds muckraking outrage with an impressive scope and focus on detail, but also a grotesque catering to its audience, just Simon’s audience scoffs at sentimentality, and wants pat, digestable ambiguity. All of London wept when they read the death of Little Nell; ‘Wire’ viewers knowingly nod when Joe gets popped in last week’s episode; they aren’t happy about it, but they got what they wanted out of the episode; to feel complacent with the faux-“with it” thought: “man, that’s just how the game goes…”.

See, ‘The Wire’ is “teachable” and that’s a little frustrating. This is why “real thugs” and rich people who want to feel the pain and outrage of city violence both enjoy the show. Pretty much anyone watching can pick up what it is commenting upon and each episode ends in a way that acts as if moral complexity and ambiguity haven’t been around in art for thousands of years (so it hasn’t been on TV a whole lot, big deal). Yet, the episode is just out-of-reach of the average television viewer, so it has an obnoxious exclusivity to it all. It’s how ‘No Country For Old Men’ is basically this bad-ass crime drama and then tacks on those stupid dream scenes at the end that aren’t good (and basically explain the movie) but make dumb smart people feel arty.

This isn’t a ‘Wire’ hate-piece though because I’m writing about the show now that’s it’s finally sort of clicked for me. I’m captivated. I genuinely can’t wait until Sunday night at 9 to watch it and you know- that’s sort of the best time to seriously dissect something.

Before this season, I never got through an entire episode. I’ve seen bits and pieces of plenty of episodes, but the show would always annoy or bore me and I’d turn it off. I was totally ready for Season Four’s premiere and within fifteen minutes, the show just didn’t sit right. The writing and acting are genuinely bad at points, especially amongst the white characters, who have trouble narrating the show’s not-real but real-for-television dialogue and it falls back on this portentous hard-ass attitude that reminds you “this ain’t your Grandmomma’s cop show!”; it’s horrible at times. ‘The Wire’ prides itself on being a very good television show and that’s setting the bar pretty low. “Dickensian” is impressive on one level but you know, there’s way better writers’ names turned adjectives one can use to praise a show.

I know a thing or two about Baltimore’s crime issues- without any grabs for street-cred, just for clarification- this book is about some of my relatives and so, a world I didn’t know of wasn’t being exposed and being from Baltimore, I don’t have the same response as people not from here or you fucks I went to school with that decided to live here after you graduated. Baltimore is not “cool” or whatever to me, so the show has none of this “inner-city” grime appeal or anything like that, and the occasional things that would be incorrect or off highlight a certain lack of craft to the show. The actors sometimes drop a line that clearly should’ve been done over or the camerawork will be particularly obvious, or the show’ll drop the ball on some minor Baltimore detail and it’s just weird. I know, I know, we’re in David Simon’s universe, not real Baltimore and that’s cool, but hearing New York accented actors strain to say “Baltimore” the way dumbasses like me actually say it (Ball-Duh-Moore) kinda hurts to hear. Also, some people on the show just don’t know how to curse! It hurts to hear. The same with the occasional Baltimore in-joke; it’s just heavy-handed and a cheap way to appease the more knowing viewers.

In the third episode of this season, Michael and Dukie hack to ‘Six Flags’ and there, meet two white girls from Virginia, who upon hearing Michael’s from Baltimore go, “Baltimore? That’s really cool.” It’s a funny comment on Baltimore’s reputation as the place plenty of assholes think is cool because its dangerous but would never live there themselves, but it’s stupidly obvious and as much as I want to laugh knowingly with the scene, I feel gross for doing so.

It’s funny that a lot of dopey people in the press say David Simon’s plan for this season to be a partial attack on his former paper the Baltimore Sun is too personal or whatever; in scenes like the one above, he’s just as seething with anger. The guy takes everything in Baltimore personally, even pre-teen white girls from Virgina! That is the reason the show is ultimately quite good. Simon’s weird mix of accuracy and totally overdoing it makes the show. Like the best artists, Simon picks and chooses the aspects of reality to focus upon to create an environment that is surprisingly accurate to real-life and a rarified vision of the artist.

‘The Wire’ may be at its most brilliant when it nearly enters the surreal. The “Hamsterdam” experiment a few seasons back was great and this season has McNulty faking a serial killer in a crazy, radically pragmatic attempt to get more funding for the police force: McNulty places red ribbons on the fingers of dead or murdered homeless and then retroactively adds ribbons to the files of unsolved homeless cases. The brilliance and comedy of the situation comes about when no one really gives a shit because its homeless people and then, in an even darker and more surreal grab at reality, Detective Freamon doesn’t scold McNulty, but points out that reality and offers to help make it something.

So…the two begin making the serial killer more insidious: McNulty cuts up the fingers of the homeless to reflect a struggle and Freamon has fake dentures to bite the corpses. It’s a weird and funny and maybe a not-so-subtle jab at sex-pervert-killer obsessed shows like ‘CSI’. Just as the whole Baltimore Sun thing pisses Simon off, I can imagine him catching an episode of ‘CSI’ and growing just as angry, not only because the show is stupid but because it turns crime and criminals into this very palpable sick, evil thing, which you know, make crime way easier to accept. The show’s a fucking juggernaut because Simon and company see how everything fucks everything and are pissed about it.

Nowhere is that understanding more apparent than in this season’s implication of ‘The Baltimore Sun’. Some critics have noted this plot seems a little more obvious than stuff of the past. It’s a testament to the grotesque groupthink amongst critics that this sub-plot’s (relative) lack of ambiguity is causing frustration. It just proves that many have blindly internalized the show’s palpable sense of complexity and turned into another cliché, because anyone attuned to the show’s rhythms and logic would see why the Baltimore Sun gets it so hard. Cops go crooked or half-crooked for reasons that make sense, criminals rob and steal and we understand why, but guys like Whiting and Templeton are just out-of-it dopes who don’t know or care how they affect things; that’s real evil. They aren’t “in it” on any level, but will pick it apart for their benefit- and that’s all the worst because their not being “in it” could allow them to have a significant, positive impact. So yeah, fuck them harder than any piece of shit cop or drug-dealing asshole.

One can imagine that if a Season Six were to exist, it might go super-Meta and be about the way ‘The Wire’ as a TV show affects the image of Baltimore and in typical David Simon fashion, it would be part-brilliant, part-obnoxious and just a little too clever, but just like this (and every) week’s episode, by the end of it, the best stuff sticks in your head- a very realistic shootout (the way it farts out and is just suddenly over is rarely portrayed in even the best “films”)- the bad stuff is negligible, and you’ll be back next Sunday.