Grow Up Jones

Bronson's Best Mix: A Saaab Stories Review

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:19:00 -0400

You can’t see this guy when he’s grinding

Action Bronson is part of a group of very good rappers who hover on the edge of caricature. Danny Brown, Gunplay, and Bronsolino are all talented enough to carry entire tapes without resorting to the cartoon versions of their rap personas, but each will occasionally slip into that lazy territory, relying on a predetermined formula which flatters an outsize persona rather than doing the work of writing something new.

This kind of fallback on a pre-made blueprint was the problem with Bronson’s Rare Chandeliers, a perfectly acceptable follow-up to his breakthrough Blue Chips but a record that relied more on cramming as many ridiculous statements into a single song than it did on solid verses. His new effort, Saaab Stories, (which sounds as if it may have been either written or recorded before Chandeliers) finds a middle ground, with some of the best street-centric rap that Bronson has put out yet, and one excellent song that continues to provide evidence of the depths that Bronson revealed on Blue Chips.

Songs like “No Time,” “Strictly 4 My Jeeps,” and, to a lesser extent “Triple Backflips,” have that concrete New York City sound; they’re chantworthy anthems on which Bronson often still sounds aspirational. Consider the first couple bars of “Triple Backflip:” “Peel the top off the can of Pellegrino, lost my money at the tables but I got it back at cee-lo, I’m trying to have the bank account with all the zeros, rollin’ Camaros, Jose Canseco was my hero.” These are lyrics that posit Bronson as a striver, which plays well when he begins his now-typical outsize boasting later in the song. There’s nothing wrong with some absurd brag-rap, but it’s always good to have balance, and on Saaab, Bronson has brought that back, with the eye for detail and the rapid-fire subject switching that keeps his verses interesting.

His poise complements the beat of a song like “No Time,” on which the bass and horns are perfectly calibrated towards summer. Here again we’ve got Bronson hilarious, —higher than a Shaq knee, swerving side to side like Mutumbo finger” – but also serious, griping about truancy, how no one will hold him down if he happens to go to jail.

The depressive streak that a statement like that hints at is what made Blue Chips so compelling. Bronson’s work post-Blue Chips had me doubting whether the glimpse of a truly talented artist we got on the songs “Thug Love Story 2012,” “Hookers at the Point” and “9-24-11” were just me latching onto something that wasn’t there. But “Alligator” finds Bronson indulging his dark side in a third verse that makes it clear that, however absurd the red-bearded hulk acts, he’s got more to get off his chest than a storm of old wrestling/baseball comparisons.

“Alligator” jumps off with Bronson sounding laid-back, imagining the acquisition of exotic animals and dismissing anyone who doesn’t have money to their name. But spaghetti-western piping soon transitions into minor-key guitar noodling and the mood turns dark. It’s here where you’ll find Bronson at his best, not because he’s taking on more serious subject matter (and it doesn’t get much more serious than a verse which includes the lyric “annual abortion time”) but because it’s songs like these where he can focus on one character for an extended period of time. With his powers of description concentrated on one character, here, a former whore with cancer, he’s unable to tell a story like few other rappers active today. It would be foolhardy to think of the title Saaab Stories as anything other than a half-clever throwaway pun. But whether it’s unwitting or not, Bronson is at his best when he’s telling vignettes like these, a third aspirational, a third fantastical, and a third deadly real.

Thoughts on that Winkie Piece in the Village Voice

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:11:00 -0400

“All of this is fine. It’s good to talk about what music means and represents, and how we ought to digest and respond as a society. But there’s one inescapable issue with the entirety of our discourse. Simply put, if you were to listen to Shaking the Habitual without paying attention to any of the conversation around it, I seriously doubt you would spend any time thinking about male privilege. There is nothing politically self-evident about the music. It’s a record that sounds like it’s about vampires, hell, mysticism, isolation, anxiety, brutality, and being very cold.”—Luke Winkie

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2013/04/shaking_the_hab.php

I’ve had a couple of friends visit New York in the past couple of months, which has given me a great excuse to go to some of my favorite museums and look at art. Plenty of the paintings at, say, the Met, are self-evidently beautiful, or disturbing or otherwise viscerally compelling. But other paintings and (for me) all of the sculptures are borderline incomprehensible without the help of two things: the work’s title and, if the curators of certain exhibits have been gracious enough, a little placard which explains the context of the work, (which frequently comes from the ideas that the artists themselves expressed.) There is little doubt in my mind that, in this case, context makes otherwise compelling works of art appealing to a great many more people than those works would have been otherwise. And in many cases (the one that comes to mind most readily is the recent Fluxus exhibit at MOMA) art that would have otherwise had little to no effect on me can actually become more thought-provoking and memorable than art that was more visually compelling.

That’s the only issue that I take with Luke Winkie’s piece in the Village Voice, the salient part of which is excerpted above. He agrees that the Knife album is worthwhile, but then dismisses the lens which the Knife have provided critics to help view their album. It’s somewhat cynical to dismiss the artist’s interviews as a pure PR campaign, which suggests a manipulative and possibly mendacious intent on the part of Karin and Olof Dreijer. And I would argue that context, especially context which encouraged the exploration of new ideas, is nearly always a good thing.

You don’t ignore a manifesto. But you also don’t just accept it wholeheartedly. Winkie is annoyed by two aspects of the universal praise that are different than complaining about context: convenience and groupthink. I think he’s absolutely right to criticize the way that critics pounce on intellectual bait in order to have a sturdier frame on which to hang their aesthetic opinions. When an artist presents the world with a syllabus, it requires the critical establishment, not just to take the artist’s word for it, but to grapple further with not just the work at hand, but also with the influences cited. There’s an extent to which that doesn’t happen in publications that put a lot of stock in speed and thought leadership. If there’s a problem with the adulation the Knife are receiving, I think it has very little to do with the context that the band originally provided, and much more with the lack of additional context which critics writing about the album have yet to provide.

"I understand I have the authority… Invested in you? Of an institution, and of a space, right. And..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:19:58 -0400

“

I understand I have the authority…

Invested in you?

Of an institution, and of a space, right. And that’s a big deal. And there’s no doubt that a million people or a thousand people in America would love to have that freedom to write in The New Yorker. But I do firmly believe that the authority of any piece is a rhetorical authority and it’s made each time you write a piece, and that’s what makes reviewing quite interesting: that you’re trying to win a legal argument; you have quotes and a case to make. And you’re trying to do a very peculiar thing which is you’re trying to convince a reader who hasn’t read the book and who may never read the book that it is or isn’t worth reading. That always seems a little perilous to me: at any moment it seems to me likely that you’re not quite winning your case; that you haven’t quite convinced enough with your marshalled evidence or with the force of your arguments. In that sense I don’t think you can rest on authoritative laurels. So on the one level I understand that thing about authority but on the other I think it’s just a nice freedom of reviewing that it’s made anew each time.

”

- James Wood on Critical Authority, more here: http://jonniemcaloon.com/2013/04/03/the-good-truant-my-interview-with-james-wood/

Smilez and Southstar—Tell Me

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:35:10 -0500

Smilez and Southstar—Tell Me

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz—Deja Vu

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:13:00 -0500

Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz—Deja Vu

This is one of the best Neptune songs ever.

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:00:30 -0500

This is one of the best Neptune songs ever.

"INTERVIEWER What does it mean to you now? Why is crime an important subject in American..."

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 18:44:26 -0500

“

INTERVIEWER

What does it mean to you now? Why is crime an important subject in American fiction?

ELLROY

We’re a nation of immigrant rabble. A great rebellion attended the founding of this republic. We’ve been getting into trouble for two-hundred-and-thirty-odd years. It’s the perfect place to set crime stories, and the themes of the genre—race, systemic corruption, sexual obsession—run rife here. In a well-done crime book you can explore these matters at great depth, say a great deal about the society, and titillate the shit out of the reader.

”

- http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5948/the-art-of-fiction-no-201-james-ellroy

Video

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:46:38 -0500

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”—Orwell"

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:46:07 -0500

““The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”—Orwell”

For the most part, when I listen to music, I listen to full...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 18:57:00 -0400

For the most part, when I listen to music, I listen to full albums. I like the idea of the full album functioning like a novel with certain chapters, or alternately, as a short story collection, in which themes, concepts, and even characters are revisited within a collection of tracks. (I am not pretentious.) However, there is one time that I give in to the shuffle era and listen to pure singles. Usually, it’s right before I go to sleep. That’s why I’ll be starting this post series; some posts long, some posts short, but all dedicated to songs that I heard last night that I feel are worthy of attention.

Directly after work yesterday I took a sweaty, fluorescently lit train ride home to Washington DC. I don’t understand why they light train cars up in such a painful way—it makes for an incredibly unpleasant trip when you’re able to categorize each and every blemish on your fellow passengers’ faces. Anyway, once I got home and grabbed a quick shower, I hopped in my own car and drove up to Delaware to see my parents for the weekend.

The weather was odd last night, especially getting into Eastern Maryland and Delaware, as dense mist saturated everything, covering bridges, lampposts and passing cars.Driving down a one-lane road, every rig that confronted me was cloaked in mist, heralding its own arrival with a corona of fog.It was incredibly cool, especially after the dual fluorescent miseries of office and train.

I was unable to listen to my ipod in the car so I was at the mercy of XM radio (not actually a mercy thing at all; XM is pretty comprehensive, I just usually plan my listening schedule meticulously and had hoped to have several more run-throughs with the new Action Bronson).Late in the trip, I settled on the station “Chill” which was playing Guido (great), a twelve minute song by an artist I’m unfamiliar with and then, The Chromatics version of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” (absolutely perfect).

The song, already my favorite Springsteen by about half a mile or so was always perfect for this kind of night drive, but Ruth Radalet has a way of lilting over the lyrics which make them seem even more prescient, especially when you’re operating on very little sleep and going as fast as you’ve gone in at least three or four months. She refuses to mutter and sings the words slower than Springsteen does in the original, so that in the Chromatics version, you feel the full impact of lyrics like “it’s like someone took a knife baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six inch valley through the middle of my soul.*”The music rises to meet her register, and chiseled into a subtler version of the original, it rides smoothly along.

*This is a great lyric but I had always thought that it was skull not soul, which reminded me of the trepanning in His Dark Materials and is a more formal (and less trite) type of prescience.

More recently, the Chromatics transformed another classic from an aging rock balladeer.Their version of Neil Young’s “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” is similarly haunting.It pops up on the end of the excellent February mix from Gorilla vs. Bear and changes the tone of the entire mix, introducing a somber air that works perfectly as a cool down.

It’s no easy to feat to remake these classics, and some might think that there’s something blasphemous about the attempts, but both of them work extraordinarily well.There’s something potent in the simple gender switch between the originals and the Chromatics versions; these are straightforward covers, but Radalet’s voice lends a diaphanous quality to both tracks, a quality which doesn’t deviate to far from the tone of the originals but instead reimagines them for a more fractured and fragile musical era.We’ve been waiting for the new Chromatics album Kill for Love

since 2007 but if they were to release an album of classic rock covers, it would easily tide me over for a couple more years.

Two of the best albums of 2011 were by Rustie (who made...

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:42:24 -0400

Two of the best albums of 2011 were by Rustie (who made Passion’s list at number 17) and Mayer Hawthorne (who made my personal list at number 23). The two live pretty far away from each other on the musical spectrum, so I was genuinely and happily surprised when I opened an email from my friend today to find both names embedded in the attached link (along with SebastiAn, who I’d honestly never heard of previously).

It’s pretty simple what happens here. The song turns from fuzzy disco into a more elemental sort of pop as Rustie removes the distortion and speeds Hawthorne up so that the latter starts to resemble a tired Michael Jackson. Rustie has a great ear for this kind of candied sound; the huge and varied textures that he works with never seem to distract from the most fundamental building blocks of a song. And Hawthorne, (who obviously wasn’t involved past his presence on the original track) sounds comfortable ditching his fifties classicism in exchange for something more eighties. At about the 2:30 mark, he can be heard in a duet with Rustie’s trademark merge of synth and sample—a merging of two prerecorded sounds and one artificial one that somehow manages to sound completely natural.

For the most part, when I listen to music, I listen to full...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:50:00 -0500

John Legend looks like a nice man. He’s got that short curly hair and he dresses pretty vanilla. He’s generally pretty harmless-seeming. My dad likes him.

These facts make people forget that John Legend’s debut album was filled with awesomely cruel songs, none more so than the epic “Number One,” which I was very excited to hear when it popped up on shuffle last night.

The thing about “Number One” is that it doesn’t sound mean at all. It’s ostensibly an apology song, and the music is as uplifting as a Kanye West production can get, with a cheerful church choir moving in during the chorus and horns to spare. But don’t get it twisted; this song is just as gross, as low-down, as all-men-are-pigs as anything that R. Kelly has ever released. It’s just that this track is dressed up in its Sunday best.

Consider the first (amazing, hilarious) line. It’s “You can’t say I don’t love you, just because I cheat on you.” That’s the premise that Legend starts with here. And it only gets better. First off, Legend works very hard to keep you from knowing that he’s cheating and wants kudos for it. He also knows that he said all this the last time you caught him, but this really is the last time, he swears. In the second verse, you can hear the frustration in his voice—when his girl innocently asks “Who is she? What’s her name?” he grumpily declare-sings “You don’t need to know about everything!”

And then of course, there’s a vintage Kanye verse, the only purpose of which is to get off a silly couple of lines in which he and his penis have an antagonistic relationship. It’s goofy and fun and lighthearted—a happy reminder that, even before he got all heavy, Kanye was always completely absurd.

What makes the song really work though (aside from its classic vibe and strong vocal performance) is its knowing quality. Legend is in on the joke here and it’s clear that he’s poking gentle fun at the actual apology song (an R&B staple) and the kind of women who are taken in by a melodramatic, over-the-top show of regret. Of course, even knowing this, the chorus with its familial sound effects and sample from The Staple Singers sounds mighty attractive. After all, the implication is, if you accept Legend’s cad back into your heart, you get to hang out in the kind of community that listens to this amazing soulful music all the time—and that might be worth sticking around for.

I'll Be Back Soon

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:42:03 -0500

Hi Everyone,

Clearly, i haven’t been blogging much lately. This is not due to laziness! What happened was, I moved from Wisconsin back to Washington DC to live with my parents, then Christmas, then I got a job in New York and moved up here and then I started my job. But now I have an apartment am settled and focused and so I will resume writing very soon, which I know is an urgent thing that serves as a kind of balm for those lonely souls who just need some more reviews written about semi-obscure rappers to make all their pain go away. Anyway, I have a Rick Ross review running over at Passion soon and there will be new things to read over here very soon as well. Like a lot of rappers have said, but the one that comes to mind is Jay-Z, it feels so GOOD to be BACK!

Common Write-up Over at Passion

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:25:38 -0500

Common’s new album is pretty good and not as annoying as the intro and outro tracks make it seem. Here is my review of it and check back here later today, because I’m hopefully going to write about something.

#6 Lost In Translation-Mr. Muthafuckin' Exquire

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:28:00 -0500

If this had been the album cover, the record would have made a lot more year-end lists.

I’m not sure why this record hasn’t been taken more seriously. Maybe it’s the cover. Maybe it’s the expletive in Exquire’s name (but without that it’s nothing). Maybe it’s the disgusting skit that occurs halfway through the album. But I don’t think those are good excuses because a lot of really classic rap albums have really bawdy skits on them and you don’t have to look at the album cover if you don’t want to and if you’re a big rap fan, you should be pretty used to cursing. Also, a band called Fucked Up did really well this year.

On Lost In Translation, Exquire shows that rap in 2011 can easily be tough, gritty and gangsterish without actually ripping off gangster rap tropes or crafting elaborate thug personas. Exquire’s just a fed-up, slighty nerdy kid, and that sentiment expresses itself in varied ways through the course of the album. It starts off bawdy, angry, and nihilistic. We get introduced to Exquire as a “broke degenerate, alcoholic, pill-poppin’ addict” and the first half of the album has fun with this persona, particularly on the barn-burner “Huzzah!” The rapping is clean and while not technically masterful certainly nothing to laugh about. Exquire has several different flows, he knows how to ride a beat and he’s working with great Def Jux material. He has a nice gift for stretching syllables, growling on his “r’s” and generally making his lyrics sound as catchy as possible. Songs like “Huzzah!” and “Triple F” are really fun sure, but they’re also serious songs that explore the roots of debauchery as much as they celebrate it.

Elsewhere, Exquire shows that getting drunk and stoned aren’t the only means of escape; there are far more juvenile ways of distracting yourself from your situation. On “Fire Marshall Bill” he claims to be “driving in the Millenium Falcon” with two vixens whereas on “Maltese Falcon” he conconcts an absurd story that draws on pulpy detective fiction, John Woo movies and reality television.

On the second half of the album he drops any kind of façade whatsoever and we start getting a picture of how difficult his life really is. “Weight of Water” is reflective and sincere, as Exquire complains about a rough period, in which he’s having trouble writing and the only reason this song exists is that it was “inspired by his pain.” But the song isn’t just a boring whine-fest. It’s got a narrative arc, as Exquire contemplates leaving rap because he’s getting nowhere, kvetches for a while, and then eventually decides that dedication to the music is worth the possible failure.

That reflection is sincere, but it doesn’t prevent Exquire from despairing again on “Nothing Even Matters” and “Lou Ferigno’s Mad,” just two of the tracks on which he threatens suicide. And even on “I Should Be Sleeping,” a nostalgic reflection on childhood and how the things his mother told him still apply is tinged with melancholy, a beautiful beat lending depth to quotidian travails.

And then the record ends, on a high note with four excellent songs. “Galactus Redux,” “Build-a-Bitch,” “No Time,” and the excellent “Huzzah! Remix.” All of these tracks are long, with great beats and clearly defined concepts and Exquire spits his heart out on them as if he thinks this may be the last thing you’ll ever hear from him. And while all the depression and despair on the album might worry new fans, we at least know that this guy is capable of big things, expressing despair and euphoria and drunken fun with incredible depth and personality all over the course of one mixtape. We think that the idea of “realness” was killed off by Rick Ross but Exquire shows that being real means being honest as hell, even if that honesty takes you to some of the darkest, most disgusting places imaginable.

I am only posting this because rewatching Vicky Christina...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:52:40 -0500

I am only posting this because rewatching Vicky Christina Barcelona and The Town recently reminded me that Rebecca Hall is gorgeous. And that’s her in the video guys! Regular posting/best album write-ups to recommence tomorrow because I know you’ve been dying for some year end wrap-ups. Eh?

azealiabanks: “Liquorice” - Azealia Banks

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:48:03 -0500

azealiabanks:

“Liquorice” - Azealia Banks

Wrote about DC rapper yU’s new album The Earn. Check it...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:15:31 -0500

Wrote about DC rapper yU’s new album The Earn. Check it out over at Passion and look for more stuff in the next few days, been doing a lot of writing over my last few days in Madison.

#19 We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves-John Maus

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:14:54 -0500

You see what I mean about this unassuming guy? Well, you will shortly.

There’s all kinds of ways to think about what it means to be cool but looking at John Maus’s credentials before I listened to his album, I didn’t realize that I would ultimately think this guy was really cool. He seemed (and seems ) like a nerd. Which is what I am, so no judgment. But his music is really, really cool.

What makes We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves such a cool album?

It could be Maus’s voice. It’s really deep, and intense, like someone whose come back from the grave but still has all his faculties. His voice is spooky, both in detatchment on the haunting “Cop Killer” and with enthusiasm on “Quantum Leap.” It’s acerbically robotic on the hilarious “Matter Of Fact” and expansive on “We Can Break Through This.’ It’s both recognizable and (in tone) chameleonic. I guess it is definitely Maus’s voice that makes this record cool.

It could be the lyrics. I’ve talked about the difference between fictional art and factual art before when I talked about David Bowie way back when, but just to review what David Mazuchelli taught me “fictional art…creates an illusion…as in a figurative painting that asks you to see arrangements of pigment as an apple or a mountain or a saint” while factual art “makes an honest transparent statement about itself…as in an abstract painting whose content is its form: paint on canvas.” Maus’s songs, like Bowies, are so goofy, and so clearly songs written by someone who has studied songcraft that they’re easier to enjoy as factual art; you can’t get lost in them because they’re so self-conscious but you can admire them as studies in songwriting. That’s more or less the exact same thing I said about Bowie, but it’s true of both artists. Songs like “Cop Killer” aren’t about actually going out and killing cops. They’re about creating an moody environment on which it sounds like a song about killing cops could exist. “Hey Moon’s” lyrics sound like they were crafted around the music, rather than vice versa. And that kind of knowingness betrays an intelligence that I find incredibly cool, especially since it takes a little bit of uncovering to see how smart the songs are. I suppose it has to be Maus’s lyrics that make this record cool. Also, listen to “Matter of Fact” if you want to hear some great, great songwriting.

And of course it could be and is, the music. Synths abound on “Streetlights” creating a dazzling contrast with Maus’s voice. “Quantum Leap” is just killer pop, a pulsing earworm with verses as infectious as the chorus. “The Crucifix” sounds like something Harold Faltermeyer foolishly discarded sometime in the eighties. And “Believer” is just transcendent, creating the same kind of epic atmosphere that’s being (rightfully) lauded in M83 songs. So yeah, it’s the music, and the lyrics, and John Maus’s voice, and the fact that I’m sure there are a million brilliant academic principles behind each and every one of these songs and I don’t have to give a damn, because We Must Be The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves is some of the coolest sounding music that came out this year.

Homeboy Sandman is now on Stones Throw and is releasing an EP in...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:46:00 -0500

Homeboy Sandman is now on Stones Throw and is releasing an EP in January. I’m excited.