Contrarian Dept.

Sorry, but DJ Premier is not Rich Harrison.

Hard rock

Young Jeezy "I Do This"
Street single mang

Mah-fukka I'm nice

Zschyamn!

Top Sider

The Pack "Vans"

Like the Pharcyde, less weird, more hyphy-snappy.

jessica + simpson -ball -chain

The somewhat awkwardly titled "Public Affair" is up for stream here. Notable mostly because it swagger jacks the living hell out of Madonna's "Holiday." And it's better than anything she's ever released, but that only gets you so far.

I recently saw Jessica walking into Jive (secret Nick reunion collabo already?), followed minutes later by the man paid to carry the Louis Vuitton bag purchased to carry her dog.

In other news from the largesse front: Hov. Tomorrow. Chyes mang.

Unit shifter

Grauzone "Eisbaer"

Would you rather this or a new Kelis song that isn't "Bossy?" The latter could be arranged, but aside from some so-so Will.I.Am joints, I'm not hearing tremendous fire. Or maybe you'd prefer that song by Swayze, "Bang," off the Prawjex vol. II or III (what up, Google?)

Grauzone, briefly, are a German rock band, this song from 1980. It's post-punk of the goth, Joy Division, not particularly dance-able variety, with some very cool atonal synth noise breaks and lyrics, if we trust the title, that are about polar bears. Lone obstinate cold as all hell polar bears, sounds like.

So, yesterday's Grauzone vs. tomorrow's Kelis. There's been much made of how CDs started moving focus from albums to songs and how MP3s put albums to bed for good, but I think now it's time to start talking seriously - as opposed to simply complaining about - how music blogs and myspace and pure volume have started moving the focus away from bands themselves, in the traditional sense.

We now have access to basically every band on earth (that has a decent internet connection, which I recognize weighs the game toward the developed world [although the aboriginal hip-hop song lemon-red posted is stunningly weird evidence to the contrary], but still), which means that it's possible to have a different favorite band EVERY WEEK if you like, and this does not have to be evidence of a perversely short attention span or any other failure on your part.

I don't think we should instantly dismiss the rapid-fire blog cycle (best line on this subject: xgau: "50 lost his flava on the blog post overnight") but take it seriously as a fascinating consciousness shifter. This week my favorite band is the Arctic Monkeys. Next week it will be Tigarah. Next week it will be Elastica. Next week it will be Cold War Kids. Next week it will be Grauzone. Next week it will be Brightblack. (One interesting and counterintuitive byproduct of internet music proliferation is the decreasing importance put on timeliness - sure, Arctic Monkeys are played out already, but are the Stone Roses, who X didn't know about till he read their name in an Arctic Monkeys review and then tracked down on Soulseek?)

To the extent that many of us hail the song's de-authoritizing of the album as a by-definition politically promising strike against modernity/rockism/jann wenner/etc, why shouldn't we hail or at least give a fair and open-minded look at the way the staggering depth and variety of music available on the net means that a PERFECTLY SANE reaction is to cycle through 'favorite bands' much more quickly, leaving last month's faves on the iPod or in the Trash, maybe even without guilt.

[[[Speaking of download phenomena, I will be on MSNBC Friday 6/22 around 3 talking far more cogently (fingers crossed) about Gnarls Barkley. Now I have to go shave.]]] UPDATE: Chi-ami Sears bombers got me bumped. Nice one, terrorism.

Skate in no prob-a-lem

Clipse & Fam-Lay: BET Rap City Freestyle

Mal's verse is off of "Hell Hath No Fury" - Pusha's too, probably, but I don't recognize it. Big Tig's is off of "I Wish Whoever Posted this to YouTube had Cut this Part Out Vol. IV"

The new album is as dark and noisy as everyone's hoping: full of the nastiest, dirtiest beats Pharrell's ever done, with a lot of the sort of fucked-up synth sounds he started messing with on "Light Ya Ass On Fire." The rhymes are insane, not quite as punchline-packed as on "We Got it 4 Cheap Vol. 2," which I guess is what happens when you shift gears from street release to airplay album.

That said, it's kinda-sorta missing a radio song - which is to say, a "Grindin'," to the extent that that matters. Imagine if the timing had been right and "Drop It Like It's Hot" had gone to Clipse.

Jon's already pointed out that the "Mr. Me Too" video is a Pharrell solo joint - the saddening question, perhaps, is what else could it have been? Clipse are my favorite rappers going, but in the parlance of video directors, they don't quite 'pop' on camera. Bucket hats or no.

Sharing

Apropos of nothing much, love for the don.

Frogger

Herman Dune "Suburbs With You"

If it hadn't been recorded summer '05, this could be the '06 summer jam for those waiting on a new Wes Anderson soundtrack and/or a new band of cracky-voiced indie-popsters who manage to be pretty good despite no StereoFork love (so far). Maybe it still can be.

More on dudes here and here.

Plus, a video for another song, via YouTube. They look a touch freak folk, but when is a standing drummer not an exciting proposition?

Lupine fiasco

TV on the Radio "Wolf Like Me"

Single one from Return to Cookie Mountain.

Liberte et

Justice "Waters of Nazareth"

Qu'est-ce qui se passe ici?

Just when you thought...

A co-worker swore off of 24 this past season, livid at the surprise revelation that President Logan was himself the nefarious – if sorta unwitting – author of the terrorist plot. This was unforgivably implausible, the co-worker said, and he would no longer "even Tivo that shit" in protest of the show's bottomless contempt for audience intelligence.

This is a perfectly reasonable reaction, but it falls low on the list of reasons to stop watching 24. Higher, certainly, is the show's FOX-typical celebration of the gut-trusting moral clarity cowboy, deified here as Jack Bauer. Jack's truest other is not Habib Marwan, the nuke-armed Islamic militant from season 4, but the chubby, Jewish, effeminate "Amnesty Global" lawyer who shows up that same season to annoyingly prevent Bauer from torturing a valuable witness.


Also high on the list: the show's extreme woman-hate. Attractive female characters are either treacherous ur-bitches or whimpering punching bags who appear only insofar as they are in need of being rescued. (Three interesting variations on the show's dude-normative themes: You knew Jack's wife was going to die in the first season from the moment you saw her butch haircut. You knew implicitly that Chloe is trustworthy because she is so radically de-sexualized. You suspected Secretary Heller's son might be gay because he cried a lot).

Surprise: it turns out it's 24's ludicrous implausibility that has kept me hooked in the face of all the misogynist neocon crap. It's a triumph, in large part, of form over content: the mere structural fact of the cliffhanger/surprise twist – at least four of which are crammed into every episode – is enough to reduce me to a craven fiend. ("24 is DVD crack" as a friend accurately put it). 24 runs on an insane dose of diegesis steroids: I don't want to know what happens next episode (or, for that matter, after the commercial break), I desperately need to know, even though I don't truly care about anyone on the show (except for Edgar, RIP), and even though I am truly unconcerned that the nuke/nerve gas will go off, etc, etc.

Similarly, the whole "twist" genre of movies is bizarrely effective. The only information the trailers need to proffer is "you will never guess the ending," "the twist of the year," etc. and suddenly we are filled with an urge to subject ourselves to a movie we know/care nothing about simply to be told two hours or so into it that what we thought was A was actually B the whole time!

Sometimes the twist seems to have some organic purpose – in retrospect it refigures/enhances the story's meaning, however gimmick-ily. Sometimes it's a monumental gotcha! And sometimes it's the whole (cheap) sell, and the movie's directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Now Playing

An army of shadows is either an army that works in the shadows or an army itself composed of shadows, specters, ghosts. Both are fitting for Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film about the French Resistance, which New Yorkers should go see before it closes June 20th. The movie is remarkable for the little that actually happens over its two-hour span: it's a film more about noble futility than anything else.

To the degree that the Resistance was ineffective, Melville argues, it was nonetheless imperative for one to act, to stay true to some interior code of morality in the face of morality's continental inversion – perhaps if only to stave off the specters that would go on to haunt France's memory of the war. This sort of existentialist stance – that one must act in the face of dark unknowability/ despair – is echoed on a narrower scale in the fantastically taut Le Samourai, in which Alain Delon's hitman (a sleek, beautiful, bloodless counterpart to Lino Ventura's flattened nose, rumbling voice and almost comic physicality) follows a strict, self-imposed code of ethics that demands his ultimate destruction.
That sense of implosion carries over to Army of Shadows. What's especially striking is that we never see the film's Resistance members ever strike, at least not outwards – their time is consumed by escapes, botched escapes and the periodic housecleaning of traitors (see the exquisitely prolonged strangling scene). The script's one great tragedy is quiet and a bit minor-seeming (and there is a slight spoiler alert coming, to the extent that minimalist '60s films with not much action can yield spoilers): Ventura is captured by the Nazis and, faced with a firing line alongside several other prisoners, he is given a proposition: he can run with his comrades to a far wall, and whichever prisoner gets there first will be rewarded with a delayed execution. He tells himself he will not run, he will not sumbit to the cruel game, but then he does – and it is this moment of compromise/ panic/ acquiescence/ cowardliness/ base animal fear that, ironically, results in his escape. What is life worth, goes the implicit question, if living is predicated on such a devastating compromise?

Am I the only one who sees this?

When I wave the kitty purrs

The video is up for "Mr. Me Too," in which Clipse hit us with a little Puerto Rican judo. (via spinemagazine.com)

Sniff

I auditioned for this show in late May with a verse that rhymed 'snakes on a plane' with 'bake all the 'caine'. Despite this, I learned today that I will not be a resident of the South Bronx anytime soon.

Just curious

Why is Nina Sky on a Fader cover in '06 when this girl has released this song? "Me & U" is in the tradition of Lumidee's "Uh Oh" and Sky's "Move Ya Body" - minor and tinny and infinitely playable summer songs, only here the tinny voice is flipped into cold droid-sexiness, which is only heightened by the unexpected Gary Numan synthage on the chorus.

Take a flick flick flick flick flick

This song is pretty good - liked it a bit better when it was slower and featured Ludacris and was called "Oh," but since that was the only Jazze Pha beat* I've ever really liked (most of his stuff strikes me as, for lack of a more elegant word, stupid, as opposed to stoopid, which I have no problem with), I guess I can't totally argue with him rolling it out again.

The video gets really good once all the girls start dancing quasi-dorkily together in various rooms of their house - I wish the director had expanded on that idea and had them doing the lean-with-it-rock-with-it and the pool-palace (swear to god three people at work heard that one as 'poop alley' in this oddly engrossing EPK, "How to Snap") throughout the city: dancing at the drugstore, at a softball game, at the Chik-fil-a, etc...

UPDATE: Sean informs me that, despite the shout-out Ludacris gives Jazze on "Oh," dude did not produce the song - so now I can return comfortably to not really liking any Jazze Pha beat ever, except maybe sorta this one and maybe sorta "1,2 Step."

Sweet Tooth

I'm excited by all the love the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped, is getting, namely here and here.

For one, because it is really good, all the more so because who was expecting it to be really good? I listened to the whole thing over dinner a couple of weeks ago and that indicates not only the slightly confused priorities of someone who choose Sonic Youth as dinner music but also how pleasant the record turned out to be - 'pleasant' being a compliment that sounds like an insult in this context, because Sonic Youth have spent a career slinging molten lead at pleasantness, their fields memorably screaming, not pastoral. It's still a compliment (I think the melodies on Rather Ripped shine especially bright because of the way the old detuned weirdness is miraculously worked into the new hookiness), but I'll leave most of the reasons why to the first two links above, which have already done a better job than I'm going to do here.

I am a drone junkie and so I find bands like this one full of lush, dumb-happy sexual charge rather than abrasive, but when I first heard Sonic Youth, a bit over 10 years ago, they felt listenable only insofar as they were intriguing/demanded further investigation - not actually listenable in the more traditional sense. They took work and I was willing to cede them that and that's only one reason why I later joined the collective eye-roll when this came out (I still don't think pop music needn't demand any effort before it yields its pleasures, dayjob ethos notwithstanding). One of my favorite moments in all of music is in "100%" right after Thurston Moore yelps, "Wastewood rockers it's time for crime - hey!" when the fuzz switched to cruise control, Steve Shelley hammering then trotting out a beat and helping the squeals and groans arrange themselves into a groove, even as they gradually unspool and overtake him. But after that, the album got kinda scary for a 14- or 15-year-old only a year or two removed from his $4 Totally Krossed Out Canal St. cassette. I kept listening, rapt like a student hot after mysteries, but I didn't quite have fun except when "Sugar Kane" came on. The fun came later on, after I'd heard enough other stuff.

That's my real topic here: how listening is always mediated, even at its most apparently 'visceral.' In a job where I'm paid to monitor hype and to act as a hype-blind critic at the same time, the two ways of hearing can become blurred, to the point where I'm not sure that really liking something because a bunch of people you trust and admire loved it first (recently: TI "King," Lil Wayne "Tha Carter 2," Arctic Monkeys "Whatever...") is a meaningfully lesser reaction than 'really liking it yourself', whatever that means. As I asked here, when is "musical passion" ever so pure that it exists in a vacuum, sealed off from "social expectation"?

Sometimes I'm nagged by that mediated-ness, though. What reactions are truly mine? the question goes, and the haunting but inevitable answer is: all of them and none of them at the same time. (I think that's one thing Carl Wilson writing about Celine Dion for 33 1/3 cleverly addresses - it's a critical othering from oneself, the kind many music critics must do on some scale every week, an enterprise that implicitly interrogates how stable one's 'actual tastes' ever were to begin with.)

But there was still deep satisfaction - perhaps no more authentic than its 'shallow' counterpart - to be had with being early (nowhere but in my own mind, but still) on Rather Ripped - an album I decided I loved, 'viscerally', before its Xgau/Ratliff anointation, and despite a lukewarm Douglas Wolk review in Blender that I read before even hearing it. It allowed me a less dubious claim to the ownership of my pleasure.