conclusions

1. Todd Snider, Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
Define this record by its three ingenious, flawlessly incisive recession songs – a succinct and bullshit-free people’s history, a bad-luck ballad manufactured to validate a sweeping designation of “bad people”, and the one that climaxes with “what’s keeping me from killing this [rich] guy?/takin’ his shit?” – and it comes off like the rabble-rousing anthemic masterpiece the put-upon left has been choking down its bile waiting to sing along with. Yet it’s fallacious to characterize any of Snider’s undeniably felt righteous indignation as anger; all he’s armed with is a keen-eyed empathy that verges into sympathy when the situation warrants it, through which he filters fictional accounts of various unchecked passions he knows when to render his own distance from clear, as with that “what he called” qualification in “Crazy Woman Blues”. Snider admires the vigilance and vitriol that comes from failing to secure your portion of the land of opportunity’s opportunity, especially when it’s someone else’s fault, and he’s unafraid to say that he gets the accompanying impulse for reactionary violence. But as a writer first and foremost, he never dodges an objective gander at both sides, acknowledging in the very first song that the twin poisons of class and religion were borne from a self-defense imperative to survival in (somewhat) more barbaric times. When his own points emerge, tolerance is his only message, and like the best satiric humanists the types he inhabits are never the subject of mockery. This is most impressively illustrated with “Kids”, officially “Precious Little Miracles” (they don’t call him Snider for nothin’): though the boomer narrator is allowed a passing and far from unrealistic line about low-rise pants and offensive hat to match, the full extent of the ribbing is contained in its wryly old-timey music, which in its sheer beauty covertly serves to disprove myths about Snider’s own melodic limitations. No, previous generations cannot adequately comprehend the bleak-future shitstorm currently clouding the judgment of the current one – but at the end of the day, cleaning up parks and working a bunch of skits up aren’t half-bad cures for directionless despondency, particularly the kind that leads to a belief that revenge is the best revenge. And “buckle down and love us” works just as well as a potential plea from the have-nots to the haves, or from any human to another. Add to all the topical triumphs a message-bolstering barroom weeper borrowed from Jimmy Buffett, a cute breakup tune which deepens over time, a melodic-pop wonder that functions as an ode to both soul mates and the Stones, and a big finish essayed as expertly as the other nine, and you end up with a masterpiece that belongs to everybody, regardless of financial bracket, from the most unpretentious intellectual in all of rock ‘n’ roll.

2. s / s / s, Beak & Claw
Say this for Sufjan Stevens – for a guy whose ’05 public embrace should by all rights have compelled him into a holding pattern of twee-folk hell, he’s set up some serious shop off the sellout grid, spending time once dedicated to paying tribute to 48 other states floating around a pillowtown of inarguably original, if often less than riveting, atmospheric electronica.  But far more significantly, he’s got a hell of a taste for collaborators, which if it wasn’t clear before is highlighted beautifully by this incredible EP, an ethereal twenty minutes with the scope of an epic soundtrack. Though there’s a rawness and ghostliness to Son Lux’s music Sufjan’s lacks, as well as a baroque stuffiness that renders them kindred spirits, the marriage of both sensibilities is seamless in the best possible way, two affectations of dreams that fall just short of a certain surreal power merging into one captivating, shimmering aural reverie. And though both artists can fall victim to a tendency to get lost up their own asses, they were awfully sharp in anchoring their heavenly noise to the plainspeech of sage Serengeti, multifaceted mastermind of the Kenny Dennis and Grimm Teachaz records. His words complement the wistful, willowy sonics with an earthbound wisdom splendorously illuminated by the fractured-yet-soothing cinematic/existential dream in which they exist. As Serengeti spins autobiography while Stevens interjects aphorisms, the result is pure majesty, a subtle suite about growing up that effortlessly echoes the universally understood magic of the experience.  Its conclusion inhabits an even sweeter sphere of brilliance – the uncanny “Octomom”, wherein Everyman Protagonist grows up for good by serving as stepfather to his former prom date’s media-hounded ward. Said song’s casual envisioning of that ubiquitous national freakshow-feature as the object of a another real live human being’s real live love reminds us how crucial it is in this particular American moment that the younger subculture subsumes the culture whose thumb it’s under – reflexive judgment and media-perpetuated moral scavenging are received behaviors if they’re there at all. What all this amounts to is woozy indie soundscaping in service of true profundity, an idea it’s amazing it took this long to achieve.

inconclusions

3. Withered Hand, Heart Heart
Good News could’ve easily gone down as one of rock history’s great career sole-shots without sacrificing a cent of prestige, a brokenhearted and -voiced personal history of transcendent thematic thoroughness as devised by a guy who didn’t sound like he’d be alive the next time you visited. Fortunately, this teeny-weeny EP verifies that Dan Willson is hardly cracked beyond repair; he’s even conscious of the only thing his last record left him needing to prove, that thing being whether or not he has a way with a relentless rock-out rhythm section. Turns out he does, and though the whoa-oh-ohs and heart! heart!s of the first track do remind me a little of Arcade Fire’s jubilant juvenilia, the smart schizo structure, warbly grunge guitars and (especially as well as obviously) fantastic lyrics burn those concerns away to ash and nothing. Whether or not the tunes resurface on a sophomore classic or merely serve as Willson’s standing proof that he was made to cut a perfect platter every two or three years in perpetuity, they’re his way of informing us he’s not just some unwittingly prodigious freak novelty. The remix, meanwhile, must be his way of informing us he’s got a sense of humor, or at least that his fondness for weirdness isn’t exclusive to the brand he was born with.

4. Jack White, Blunderbuss
Who cares?

5. Bruce Springsteen, Wrecking Ball
Two things changed when Bruce Springsteen hit the 21st century. For all his mid-heyday pigeonholing as bellower-in-chief for the common man, the ‘00s were the first decade in which he fully shouldered the myth bestowed upon him by regular Joes who saw their reflections in populist character sketches from “Badlands” on, a solidified commitment the twin can’t-ignore NYC tragedies of Amadou Diallo and 9/11 were primarily responsible for. Since then, he’s put out five studio albums of mildly fluctuating social-consciousness overtone, and with each his heroic status has faded slightly in the collective imagination. Which brings us to change #2: after three decades of brilliantly disguising his status as pop’s most gifted dork behind that boundless energy, unparalleled passion and studied cool, Bruce Springsteen attained his dinosaurhood, something that has tended to happen to rock’s originals around the time of their 30th anniversary and Hall of Fame induction even if they kick off the period with a comeback as keen as The Rising. The man’s affinity for corn made sense when he was young and spry and his peers were wielding worse clichés; now it only serves to distract prospective younger fans from the brains and brotherly love behind a lark like “Queen of the Supermarket”. But though his inextricable seriousness and the lack of irony he prefers to operate with have lent his recent albums the accompanying requirement of more and more grains of salt, there are moments when that unflagging conviction is exactly what an occasion calls for – watch his appropriation of “41 Shots” as a commentary on the Trayvon Martin case and try to see through your tears as he steps away from the mic, still mouthing that chorus. Since Working on a Dream, America has become a country defined by a misfortune it isn’t used to, and since die-hard lefties aren’t all cynical intellectuals, there’s a class of disenfranchised folk in dire need of a Springsteen CD as right-on as the last few haven’t been to soundtrack their humble, righteous rage. And on a recession album that’s no less artful than Todd Snider’s for being more sincere and less clever, he delivers it, going for the gut with enough force to stifle most objections to his built-in sentimentality. Welding his usual vocabulary of stadium-rock clichés to a couple of new stylistic shades as invigorating as they are silly – a surplus of Poguesy stomp, a retro notion of “modern” informing several beats, even a passage of rap he wisely delegates to somebody else – the sounds are all markedly livelier and less by-rote than on any of his recent offerings, and all of it works. Meanwhile, the lyrics nail it over and over in the most adeptly unadventurous ways possible, every track keyed to a phrase often penetrating, sometimes heartrending and usually a little of both. I could try to cerebrally color this analysis by polysyllabically probing for additional contours and deficiencies, but really, sometimes rocking and meaning it are all you need to forge a masterpiece.

ryan maffei

homegrown

1. Thomas Anderson, The Moon in Transit
Regular people with no natural musical prowess the nation over still put into practice their rock ‘n’ roll ambitions unabated – it’s no longer so easy to exorcise such inclinations with parables about homeless people and threats of military school. And though our democracy often (or rather always) denies these dedicated creatives the arbitrary living it offers anybody willing to debase themselves for Super Targets and Olive Gardens and your local post office, such misfit methods of self-expression are the American dream exemplified, and the self-styled troubadours have been catching on in droves and droves since the post-war era engendered the Great Loosening Up. In the age of everybody-is-a-star and poverty-is-the-new-middle-class, the slim motivation that destitution-for-art’s-sake probably took a little more out of you in the past our greatest pre-war poets and painters frequently died penniless in is justification enough for every 21st-century denizen to whom those terms at all apply. So there’s an outsider art setlist in the heart of at least one person per street corner under our grand old flag, and good for the USA. As bad habits go, better singer/songwriting than crystal meth; let both be legal and lucrative and only one encouraged. But just as Central Valley is bogged down by the latter, Austin is host to an epidemic of the former – “live music capital of the world” simply means that everybody and their neighbor thinks they have an album in them whether or not they can afford to record it (much less distribute it). And no matter how weird its citizens are personally, the unifying characteristic of the ones whose personal soundtracks don’t catch on outside Travis County seems to be that he she or they are locked in a box of innate ordinariness it would betray their muse to wander too far outside of. Hence cascades of garage-punk against which MC5 sound futuristic; hence twangy folk ordinaires with names like Bob Schneider you wouldn’t notice ‘til somebody put on a choice slice of their epic catalogs at a hazy party. Small-time veteran Thomas Anderson, who despite having done what he does for a quarter of a century hasn’t even earned a Wikipedia page, is one such citizen with writerly gifts sharper than those of innumerable peers. Though he has real records, few are as instantly captivating as this compilation, a dozen demos covered in lo-fi cobwebs of ethereal hothouse privacy. As is typical of budgetless homemade opuses, the built-in distance transforms what might ring more generic into something deeply affecting, whether he’s going for surf-rock camp (“Cool It, Frogman”) or graveyard ghoulash (“Heckling Houdini”). Yet as the record progresses from the mid-90s to the Obama administration with nary a kilobit of sonic improvement, craft worthy of any working genius shivers through your stem – the song about the genial groupie, the unusual uncle, the disaffected donuter and the Sun Records obscurity prove this regular cat with a voice that’s nothing to shout about as adept at character sketches as [insert balladeer hero here]. Meanwhile, loveless laments like “Lunch With Nefertiti” and “Antihistamines” casually highlight a way with the Stephin Merritt trick of landing with such apt feeling on an obvious rhyme it eats you alive. 

2. Es.a, Had it On Vinyl
One of the odder attributes of the arty, airy white rap coming out currently, genealogically divorced from and apparently uninterested in echoing Eminem, is a distinct lack of urgency – we’re a long way from Caucasian expatriates test-driving the form as punk expressionism more potent than punk itself, though Scroobius Pip continues to snarl terrific, vicious verse. When the content is as skillfully cerebral as that of Buck 65, Serengeti, Homeboy Samdan and Dessa, the calmness of approach enhances the effect, but a handful of the greener, mainstreamer up-and-comers (Astronautilus, say) just sound harmless. Part of the reason for this may be the fact that most popular rap, that which younger, more conventional pale faces from comfortable places are probably primarily exposed to, is largely less aggressive than it used to be, what with Wayne neutered by the system, Kanye overdosing on arch, Nicki a pop queen in (convincing) spit-game drag, and the well-earned financial security of all the old wild men an audible ghost in their respective verse machines. This plays into Childish Gambino coming on full of lily neurosis, which gives the DIY kids the wrong idea. Here we have a preppy Minnesotan full of the kind of gentle love you can hear in rapturous melodies by Eurocentrists from Paul McCartney to Ezra Koenig, stitching together an easy listening mixtape merely because he has both the basic technology and a surprising aptitude for beatmaking and rhymestitching. The -slinging is secondary – more often than you’d prefer the lack of gift for rhythmic placement is audible, and the lyrics aren’t as interesting or inventive as might make that okay. But catching each snatch of familiar tune Kanye chose not to pilfer for his own Eurocentric opus is almost fun as the way each is used, so the kid’s got concept. If he chose to focus that on what’s being said, he could make his crystal-clear competence shine, and essay a gem. 

3. Jacob Bailis, Thirty-Three Sense
An atmospheric guitar-and-voice soul testament, a la King of the Delta Blues, Song to a Seagull, Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy or Yip/Jump Music. As with those and all the others, its effectiveness hinges entirely upon how appealing the personality making noise with both things is, and as autobiographies in song go, this is the charmingest purely human comedy imaginable, by the realest realist misfit never to stare back from the racks of the record stores he’s worked at and often frequents. Over eighteen tunes in a politely schedule-friendly half hour, each unassuming poetic stroke on a standard everyman canvas examines a dimension both ingratiatingly eccentric and instantly relatable, our hero shuffles amiably up and down six adroitly plucked tightropes as he calls, croons, incants and otherwise warbles his audibly giant heart out. “Poor Jacob” makes off with our affection via expert laff tracks, praying they don’t take away his Rhapsody subscription, catching hell for his sacrilegious preference of Paul to John, and wondering aloud what Simon Cowell’s got that he ain’t got. But since there’s more to canny self-effacement than gags about rotten luck, he brings the portrait full circle with an interspersed song cycle about a disintegrated relationship, and shows he knows exactly how to wring the tears while both dodging the sentimental and keeping the speech plain, which takes talent. And when his frill-free voice, which sounds like Loudon Wainwright III when he’s having fun but gets much prettier and more refined for the heartstring-strumming, necessarily holds a note and gives way to an untrained quiver, it’s never off or unpleasant or vérité-flawed like an Irwin Chusid find. Much like its progenitor, the album is aware enough of its own scruffy uniqueness to be content in its statistical ordinariness. But it transcends the crowd it’s hiding in, keener, craftier and more valuable than stuff that gets taken far more seriously. 

4. dan ex machine, Hits
Dan Weiss knows what a typical record sounds like, but he’s not interested in adhering explicitly to the conventions. This is because as far as popular music goes, Dan isn’t just a creator and superfan but a connoisseur, aesthete and every other overwrought ex-French term applicable to rockhounds who like it raw but know how to rationalize their appetite for destruction in unpretentiously pretentious-sounding razor-sharp terms. Having spent most of his life swallowing down variants on the kind of vibrant melody that’s rarely served with the roughage of the purest rock ‘n’ roll, and short of band members with which to organize a full-scale attack on the ideas that form inside his intellectual intestines, he squeezes out his junk-punk classics one by one, corralling in the bits of singing and playing that get further away from him than he intends with cute/anarchic flourishes and intrinsically ironic Casiotone trappings as if they’re the cleverest and rustiest chicken-wire fence. The result is ten ugly bedroom fuckouts whose sheer beauty could blow up the entire block. Though the killer architecture of every one of these ineffable popturds unfolds in spurts with every play, this proponent’s pick hit is the wily, bitchy, sagacious “Avril Lavigne”. (Go here and play the tracks in reverse.)

5. Funkyman, Another Side of Funkyman
NOTE: Of all the ragged glory reviewed herein, Funkyman’s records mean the most to me. Though to the untrained ear their avant-playground sound might seem self-indulgent, the conviction and feeling behind the ideas locked like amber in his toybox surrealism is impossible to deny if you approach the sound with acceptance aforethought. Unable after months of pondering to adequately summarize the effectiveness of the artist’s three records’ (Funkyman & Friends Vol. 1, this one and Meneo Obscuro), I’ve adapted this from inebriated impressions ca. late ‘11. If you’re ever in Venezuela, touch the hem of this boy’s garment. …and not just one side neither. This opens with a gorgeous psychoustic drone in the manner of an in-tune Jandek, complete with scene-setting bed creaks, its straightforward allure almost obscene after an EP that careened like a motorpsycho nitemare between bursts of playfully ugly dimebag dissonance, a rumination on Umberto Eco, gleefully unpunkish anarcho-punk (or sympatico-punk, really: “EUROPA! ES! CONVALACIENTE!”) and the Chariots of Fire theme before getting locked in the back of ELO’s model spaceship with a drunken Popol Vuh. (“This is like a labia in my coffee,” I gushed to perpetrator Juan Carruyo; “it was designed precisely for that sort of praise,” he demurely replied.) Its quiet current ripples like a fata morgana diamond sea seamlessly into more solo folk, still gorgeous and strange, evoking and conceptually related to clichés of imagery like a desert landscape in winter. [What sort of genius is this angular stranger? This is a person actually achieving a flawless evocation of Bob Dylan’s trademark: the ability to invite interest in, even reverence for, the manner by which he’s fucking with you, locked into contemplation over the level of thought-out coherence the content actually has, and hoping you never get there so that the Rubik’s cube’s faces never settle into the dullness of uniform colors. That he does this without a budget or detectable technical prowess is just like a genius.] After you start to wonder if he’s really just trying to be Vashti Bunyan or somebody he should by no rights admire, he gets bored and decides to overdose on the $3 techno weirdness you just felt yourself starting to miss from record #1. Then comes an automatic garage classic: “Mar Caribe” (“Caribbean Sea”, aw), a distracted momentary snatch of jangle-rock followed by a burst of casual-jam drums and then some atmosphere until the whole thing transforms into an oscillating vision of a bad backroom 80s demo by four college-agers trying to be Sonic Youth but still hungry for Top Gun soundtrack money. Then “Hora de Intentar” comes crashing in to kick off side two (or five, if he decides to put it out as a shoebox of 45s), a punkritudinous facsimile of the burning ‘n’ yearning pillow-pop songwriting sustaining the foundation of the American everywhere before Reagan fatigue really hit. Then minutes of not deciding whether he wants to be Pip Proud, Yoko Ono or Tom Zé; he settles on lost ’01 tUnE-yArDs demos, Merrill Garbus in her imaginary These Monsters Are Real stage. Then a majestic and lilting ballad with trebly, nuisance-chic syndrum frosting, which of course can’t help but have disintegrated by the end of its six-and-a-half minutes. Then a blissed-out coda as phosphorescent as you’d predict, which sounds like the kind of shit only heaven would allow, and like the rest of the record is better for it. He dubs the follow-up Dark Wiggle.

and

that

is

that.

ryan maffei

popstar of the year (last year too)

It was five years ago, back when our country was still in the rotten climax of Bush #2’s comprehensive destruction plan and the Great Recession was just a suspicion whispered in cynical corridors, that a girl born in Trinidad and raised in Queens made a couple of tapes, did a couple DVDs and made a couple mistakes. Not so much stumbling as tacitly dipping her toes into the wicked waters of 21st century rap, which Kanye had primed and Wayne was chopping up, it was a comparatively inauspicious introduction, though even in those porn-lite beginnings there are signs of a sly, ironclad vision impressive for any hip-hop novice, much less one who happens to possess a vagina. Now it’s 2012, and if it ain’t the end of the world it sure feels like it. Pop music is a mercenary machine as shamelessly moneyed as a Michael Bay movie, rotating its spotlight between savvy has-beens (a certain femme fatale), anonymous pinups (a certain teenage dream), anarchic image manipulators falling short of their aesthetic promise (a certain fame monster), and cultural overreactions set up for us by a decade of high American Idol ratings (we could’ve had it aaaaaaa-aalllll…). Not counting country, which by now never has to step outside of its own bubble to break even, music’s other twin commercial peak, good old-fashioned rap, is a slicked-up shanty town praying for a hurricane following Drake’s ascension, Wayne’s incarceration and Kanye’s narcissistic Europeanization. Great rap still exists in shallow pockets, but worse rap takes over (see: Odd Future), and an institution constructed on hard-earned dreams of its own cultural dominance (discussed nicely throughout Watch the Throne even if its music remains insularly eccentric) has welcomed its own recession-proofing with an identity muddled by its lack of a star who brings it like the best once did. But in 2010 that very sort of hurricane hit, and for a precious fleeting moment, rap had a savior worthy of its tradition of vitalizing vision. Then said hurricane chose to debut on CD with a bald-faced bid for the title of pop heavyweight champion – owning just one genre was well beneath what she was capable of. The storm in question was Nicki Minaj, and ever since that CD she’s eaten shit from purists on all sides.

As far as I’m aware, few backlashes were half as asinine as the onslaught of indifference with which the more articulate masses greeted the still-very-successful Pink Friday, divided evenly between laymen who couldn’t get with the deeply surrealist component of her act and critics who felt obligated to the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll to accuse her of fatally tempering the gifts with which she ignited a key Kanye track. And maybe it wasn’t the shrewdest of commercial moves to officially debut with a giant-hearted and generally nonconfrontational, radio-embracing meditation on the euphoria of success, though in almost every other pop (not rap) star’s case an album as shrewd and daring and exciting as Pink Friday would’ve been greeted as a revelation (or, more likely, wouldn’t have happened). And yet she’d already crowned herself the king and queen of rap after four ambitious years (“50K for a verse, no album out!”), and few things are more impressive than a self-made original who defies definitions – I count no female stars in the history of the game whose personality was as rich with vision, or whose talent wasn’t still lent in full to thematic conventions (à la Missy Elliott). Nicki hate was propagated by narrow-minders who couldn’t abide her very conscious decision to indulge in deeply mainstream aspirations, hinted at in previous references to Barbie and Miley Cyrus, and for whom her absurdist insanity shtick wasn’t serviceable compensation. They wanted to confine her to the game she’d enflamed, a game whose every firebrand was cooled by circumstance in the Obama era. She was a reinvigoration of a rap scene in which every marginally exciting performer was a veteran, in which Kanye was an arty basket case with no need to appease visceral public expectations, in which Wayne’s flow dried up during an unjust prison term, and in which lethargic smoothie Drake was the anointed leader of the pack (with privileged, moderately gifted nerd Donald Glover yelping hubristically from the sidelines). And in the wake of that feeling of betrayal, nobody was interested in acknowledging how adeptly she soared to the top of the popstar-art heap as well – over airheaded Katy, hot-air-espousing Ke$ha, fame-bloated Gaga, will o’ the wisp Adele.

Pink Friday was ebullient beat after ebullient beat about how hard this 28-year-old had worked to vaunt past as much competition as she had, and how satisfied she was about it, which yielded a few big singles more sedate than onlookers probably hoped: “Fly”, which shimmered heavenward on the wings of a super-pro Rihanna vocal, and “Moment 4 Life”, where Nicki addressed her fame with the humility of a sage and the ordinariness of – well, a human being. (It also featured a hilariously overconfident Drake verse that paled on arrival like his flow always does when others are around to flesh out its vanillatude.) These moments seemed real where her wildest and most confident verses were expert theatre, and the contrast wasn’t appreciated by the same people who swooned when K. West climaxed his great white elephant album to a nine-minute soft-rock ballad about how hard it was to be an asshole to everybody else. And in Nicki’s defense, only those two songs risked unwise self-softening. The other deliberately bright, peppy and grit-free numbers were beatifically invigorating, stuffed silly with melodic ideas any Beatles-fond guitar-popper would murder their mother for. There was the burst-of-boast opener (“I hear they’re comin’ for me/because the top is lonely”) with its gorgeous cadence upward on the hook (“I am the best”), the uncanny phosphorescent ethereality of “Your Love”, a dazzling 6/8 love ballad which culminated in a harmonized “stop” as beautiful as any sound out there, and a club raver that put fiercely anti-intellectual will.i.am to immaculate use. Somehow, this ingenious friendliness distracted scrutinizing critics from the razor-edged justifications, namely the casually vulgar, perfectly pokerfaced competition-evisceration “Did it on ‘Em” and the ferocious “Roman’s Revenge”, which coerced out of now-dinosaur Eminem his best work since his third album. Many casually deadpanned that Nicki’s still-amazing-even-in-its-overexposure verse on “Monster” was better than the entire album. What’s most hypocritical is that these are the same people who went crazy over “Super Bass”, a killer chart-topper more explicitly deferential to convention than anything on the actual CD. Sure, the Natasha Bedingfield-graced “Last Chance” sounds cliché, but it’s no crossover love note – it’s a powerful statement of personal purpose.

But Nicki never slowed down, or showed signs of it getting to her, which devotees would’ve noted as deeply uncharacteristic anyway. Friday hadn’t been the item that won the masses over, but it certainly gave less familiar everypeople a chance to digest this rare talent without needing to meet her more avant-garde tendencies head-on. I can see this progression continuing to bother those who saw a God gone rogue in that batshit “Monster” verse – the track burned with such unhinged intensity it was practically arson, turning to ash any lingering impress from Kanye’s very good I’m-so-great verse and Jay Z’s touch too dramatic I’m-still-great verse before perpetually flaccid Bon Iver stepped in to bog down the rest of the tune. As somebody who’d only caught Nicki’s expertly sexy little cameo on Wayne’s Da Drought 3, which had left me indelibly stamped even if I didn’t think she’d come to anything and didn’t follow hip-hop closely enough to realize how wrong I was, I shared everybody else’s sense of wicked excitement over her breakout performance. But I also love any supercharged prefab sprout willing to back up her self-conceptual elephantitis with synthbeats that electrocute the soul, and in the year of Gaga’s overexposed AOR death, a few more dumb Katy number ones and fucking “Rolling in the Deep”, Nicki’s candy-coated infiltration of the radio made more cosmic sense to me than anything else did. She became more ubiquitous than any other performer from the sheer breadth of her appearances alone, and justified that arguable oversaturation with a startling ability to turn every fragment of a track outside of her contribution pale with comparative weakness. She could be heard getting a generic Trey Songz party wildly started (“Bottoms Up”); injecting an actual sense of danger into a faux-ominous Drake track (“Up All Night”); stretching a visionary slice of Britney convention into something even visionarier (“Till the World Ends [Remix]”); endorsing Willow Smith without losing an ounce of cool (“Fireball”); keeping up with another Lonely Island fratboy gag (“The Creep”) without needing to reduce herself to faceless objectification like Gaga did. Thus did the arc of her career continue to exemplify a peerless keenness, and thus did silly stuff like her nipple popping out on Good Morning America (good for her), the endless cascade of “What Were They Thinking?” fashion-mistake slideshows (she makes a better Elton John than L.G. on account of actually meaning business), and a Grammy performance whose utter ridiculousness still didn’t manage to match that of the ceremony itself (duh) not bother me an ounce. Haters had no logic with which to make their arguments, because Nicki had no interest in mere logic. The culmination of this forceful occupation was her two appearances on the David Guetta compilation Nothing But the Beat. On “Where Them Girls At”, she blows dunderheads Flo Rida away with a jackknife verse and some magnificent wacky-ass singing, summing it up with nonsense as exuberant as, you know, “Tutti Frutti” – “day day day da day day/day da da day da day da day day”. And on “Turn Me On” she raps only when she has to, filling to the brim an instant pop-disco classic about missing her mate.

Next, Nicki’s ideal strong-woman icon Roman, the voice she takes on when she gets more calculatedly, ingratiatingly wild than anyone else – ideal because she’s not just dizzyingly talented and completely self-empowered but fucking dangerous, more legitimately threatening in attack than Ye or Jay or Wayne or any of those sluggish-voiced macho hacks who also rap right now without ever losing a sense of fun, which is insanely hard to do when you’re spitting like Nas or Big Boi on a racecar full of amphetamines; ideal because not only is Roman free of trope, he isn’t even a woman, and isn’t some sexy fella but a vampiric invocation of Roman Polanski who’s miles more predatory, which as delivered by a mamacita modeled into statuesque feminine perfection by way of surgeries most women can’t afford becomes the strangest and most empowering brand of sexy imaginable – ushered in 2012 with two wildly atonal and blissfully tradition-bucking singles, “Roman in Moscow” and “Stupid Hoe”. The first was a mere hors d’oeuvre, two-and-a-half generous minutes (“ain’t no bridge, ain’t no hook, ain’t no motherfuckin’ third verse!”) of long-anticipated preview (the follow-up to Friday had taken over a year, and though Minaj kept very busy that’s still a while for any breakout pop artist) that blew its every last competitor away. Minaj bent and stretched and shook and bruised and otherwise ably contorted her AK-47 reeds, acknowledging her pipes’ innate nasality by strangling raw noise worth of Peter Brötzmann out of every word. When the girl’s on fire, a choice as cognizant as any of her deliveries even if the limitations of her arsenal of personas is starting to show ever so slightly (and all 3.5 are still leagues more talented than Drake, and more energetic than Carter IV-model Weezy), not a trace of track is left, and here she went out on a deliberately bratty elongated “I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaack” that reminded me, in a strange way, of Rugrats bully Angelica. I’m sure there’s a better example, but let’s not ignore that Minaj’s sense of play makes no self-consciously “adult” concessions. When she calls herself Barbie, the only two ways she knows she differs is in her blackness and the fact that she kicks ass. And just because she’s a giant step up in terms of feminine idols doesn’t mean she begrudges Barbie her plasticity – she really does mean she’s Barbie, bitch. She respects what Barbie represents no matter how badly the doll’s handlers have managed her mantle, because this business of pop is about image manipulation. Nicki herself is closer to image catapult – so aggressively does she pursue her own cracked vision of what a pop idol should be that it would be far from inaccurate to call her a ’65-’66 Dylan with a Britney Spears marketing sense.

“Stupid Hoe” was more accessible, but only in that it made more concessions – it was a deeply cunning work of pop art disguised in sounds no popular vote has ever indicated is airwave-desired. Taking a cue from Roxanne Shanté’s spare and impossibly impassioned dis of every other rapper out there “Have a Nice Day” (and for that seven minutes back in old, unwild 1987, she was absolutely right), as well as the chance to turn the Rolling Stones’ amicably assy “Stupid Girl”, whose vision seems more limited every year, on its playful faux(?)-misogynist head, Minaj set off a cheapo beat that sounded positively epileptic within its rhythmic rigidity (tempo was probably key – it’s really damn fast) and layered as its only music a “woop” as boisterously persistent as the artist herself, a noise somewhere halfway between a police siren cut off seconds before ejaculation and a piglet being spanked. Over this noise, Minaj set loose her thing like it was no skin off her neck to blow a beat and her competition up all at once, and its vocal variety must be heard to be believed. Starting off with a pair of cool and entirely collected casual hip-hop noises (of the “unh” variety; you know what I’m talking about), she elevates without hesitation into a slightly more moderated version of the higher-intensity voice she employs for her more Romanesque insanity, the one where she sounds a little like she’s going to cry except it bears not a trace of sadness or fear or anything but triumphant, aggressive confidence (which is very Shanté even if the resemblance is likely unintentional). “I’m crackin’ this bitch like a bad back,” she begins, and barrels into an Angelina-Brad-Jen reference that somehow eschews any hint of US Weekly perspective limit. Within seconds she’s doubled her speed, and we’re into a casual, double-tracked rat-a-tat spray of fuck-you musing that bears only passing relation to anything like parsable diction: “ice my wrist-es/then I piss on bitches/you can suck my diznick/if you take these jizz-es/you don’t like my disses/give my ass some kisses/yeah they know what this is/you bitches – THE BUSINESS”. Dick-sucking is a favorite image of Minaj’s because she takes it as the time-tested symbol of empowering aggression it is, but the kooky nonchalance with which she dives into it cuts out all ugly traces of chauvinistic glee, even though you’d do well to worry what she’d do to you if she tied you up and pulled out a strap-on. Her penchant for inventive depravity is no less sick than Slim Shady’s even if she’s too image-attentive to go for M. Mathers’ psychology-on-display game, whose hatefulness was only ever appealing on account of its aesthetic expertise. But what sets Minaj apart, and makes her if not revolutionary a kind of tonic for the times, is how unfazed she sounds by all of it, and expects you to follow suit. Nicki’s foul mouth is as don’t-look-back unchecked as  Em’s, the brutality of her threats as gleeful as any gangsta rapper’s, but rather than getting hung up on the gory details and childishly thrilled with the nature of her own offense, she merely barrels through each violent assault with an excited eye on her one and only point: I am way better than you at this shit.

After “Stupid Hoe” tumbles over the rest of its equally spare parts – faux-innocent valley girl-voiced threats, nursery rhyme-phrased threats, badly sung threats, breathlessly growled threats – it lands on a spoken sample from an earlier Birdman track: “I am the female Weezy”, a deliciously intoned (Minaj’s NY accent does superficially serve to enhance her punk cred) statement of purpose that would wash only if she resembled Weezy in the slightest. But nay – between Weezy the wizard, Drake the drip, and Nicki the paragon of nasty virtuosity, none of Young Money’s big three sound anything like each other, which is perhaps why the naïf enterprise often seems a lot less coherent than the parts of its sum. What made Weezy a wunderkind was similar to what makes Minaj a master; the control they each have over their respective flows, their ability to mold each syllable into a different brand of enhancement for whatever free-association word that rhymes keenest. But their instruments are as sonically separate as a muted trumpet and a squiggly alto sax, and where we hear Wayne for the sound of the journey from thought A to thought B all the slushy way over to thought Z, he made no bones about the fact that the words and the sound were what he was in it for. Though it stands as no case against the quality of the product, every Wayne word was a captivating perk for a fairly generic vehicle of I’m-the-best. His sole point was that he was amazing, and as every verse pre-prison served as highly able demonstration, he had no need to conceptualize any deeper. Nicki spends a lot of time talking about how great she is too, but she has the ability to key that to an exploration of a theme – every song on Pink Friday is just that, a song in the classic sense, and the lyrics are terrific by any standard. Check out the intricacy with which she unpacks an unromanticized great relationship in “Right Thru Me”, delivering each little five-syllable dimension with delicately dealt, forcefully felt rapidity. So where Wayne’s free-association had its limits only when you got bored of the trick, which wasn’t often, Nicki’s random array of metaphors and similes with whatever universal subject she’s tackling has a bit more brain behind it. And it makes sense – no penchant for sizzurp or need for arms compromises a note of her single-minded pursuit of vision. Wayne was a prodigy who lived out his image; Nicki is a talent who knows what being a true artist requires.

And now we have Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded, an every-angle embodiment of what she’s been after from the beginning in two separate sections, over the course of a generous nineteen staggering tracks (which compared to Drake’s Take Care’s drearyCD-filling is economy; this one’s only as long as Exile on Main Street) that not only never let up but also manage ebbs and flows worthy of the greatest art. And unless you’re still caught up in backlash idiocy, its only dubious feature is a Chris Brown appearance in which Roman deigns not to make an appearance and deservingly disembowel him. I’m not sure what it bespeaks of Nicki’s definitively sly self-awareness that she’d raise no loud objections to involving a guy like that, but then again, she’s not exactly one for clouding her persistent platform of bringing down the house with ideological nothings. She’s on the right side of history when it comes to L’s, B’s, G’s and T’s, she drops plenty of awareness of what’s worth it and not in her rhymes (“who’s gassin’ this ho/BP?”) even if she leaves stands second to slinging the noise, and since she’s such good friends with Rihanna, who’s given Brown her seal of approval recently too, we might as well let that particular smallcocked asshole’s community deal with him and focus on what we the critics are supposed to: the music. And the Brown feature is really, really good, a pop killer that surges acrobatically to the same euphoric-melodic heights as any of Pink Friday’s wondrous winners. Brown’s singing works, and though the song isn’t better because of him, it’s not better in spite of him either. So there goes that principled objection, and elsewhere go all the others, following the happycore tornado “Roman Holiday”, which slides from a chorus laden with baroque-tinged hypersynths to verses that are only worse than “Monster” if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics. It’s a glorious appearance of a commercial splendor pieced together from post-apocalyptic wreckage, and it blazes brighter and hits much harder than any bullshit in Revelations. And it’s charmingly loaded with the same fact every radio cameo has made clear – this girl slaughters all of her competition, even the talents and semi-talents she invites over to bolster her demand. One by one, mighty and less mighty mouths wither in her wake, from a clod like Rick Ross to a master like Nas.

As if to address her musichound content critics head-on, which she rarely does in words (she’s too busy picking off the haters who actually pose a threat, even if that threat is never serious, though every reference to her commercial triumph is issued with a brutal elation), Nicki has chosen to bifurcate her sequel to what was essentially a concept job about how she’s here to blow our mind into distinct genre halves. The effect is sort of like an I Am… Sasha Fierce as envisioned by an actual crazy person, albeit one who’s sane enough not to make you switch out the discs halfway through. She clears the hard stuff out of the way first, quietly intent on following her pop muse but carefully concealing it until she’s ravaged enough hypothetical doubt not to have to hear it anymore. Not that she gives a shit about the doubters – “a hundred motherfuckers can’t tell me nothin’,” she insists, and she’s such a dedicated original that it’s hard not to believe her. From “Roman Holiday” proceeds song after hard-hitting song you wish had been on Carter IV, or even Watch the Throne (whose best tracks were still hard not to define by their arch trappings). There’s the molten “Come on a Cone”, which starts out steely and quickly builds into a rage of rabid self-celebration with every chorus before barely containing itself once again. She breaks into the same trick she uses toward the end of “Stupid Hoe”, a snatch of sweetly sung hater hate using the phrase “dick in your face”. Nicki’s notorious dick makes another appearance in “I Am Your Leader”, which recalls two previous big dumb choruses while subsuming both – Eminem’s “Under the Influence” and Weezy’s “Phone Home”. Tempo-wise it’s a deliberate recollection of “Did it On ‘Em”, and while it’s less anthemic it ably reasserts the theme, slowing down only when the inexplicably popular Rick Ross makes his inevitable appearance. She adds a new metaphor to an appropriately venomous track with “Beez in the Trap”, where she’s graduated from isolated instances of affrontive defecation to “shittin’ on your whole life” in various US locations while the beat scrapes behind her, then speeds it up for another stroke of writerly brilliance: “Hov Lane”, as in H to the Izzo, which she’s in and you’re not. The title track drudges up a tired-sounding Weezy (who nevertheless becomes the first person to come up with “Minaj-a-trois” on record) and meets the opposition where it currently stands: “you mad coz I’m at the Grammys with the Vatican,” which if you think about it is a silly objection when religious oversincerity played a big part in Bush’s campaign against stability. I said it, she didn’t; she’s got no motherfuckin’ time to spare and no need to watch over her shoulder. Her shit bang; she’s a champion, and even if she isn’t working with any big-name producers she manages to get a melodic victory out of all of ‘em.

The Brown track is next, and though it’s autotuned pop rather than straight-up rap it’s divorced from the record’s supercharged radio half with “Sex in the Lounge”, a slow-jam ballad she lets Bobby V do the singing on, possibly her only acknowledgement of Breezy’s moral taint. These two tracks are arguably the most generic on the album, lazy amour-pop without the dynamic distinctiveness of “Super Bass” and “Your Love” – though like both singles they’re still loaded with melody, their tracks ready to reward attentive listening with an abundance of touching little touches. But the full-force gale of the rest of the record, a majority of it produced by Fame Monster synthmeister RedOne, doesn’t really rear its head ‘til the enthusiastic vibrancy of “Starships”, which starts with a chugging guitar and sparkles like a crystal sledgehammer before slamming sans restraint into the club chorus of the year. “Check it Out” having borne more of a Black Eyed Peas sheen than was totally becoming, this track immediately polevaults to the top of Nicki’s pop heap (“higher than a motherfucker!” exalts a chipmunk built into the beat), and deserves to blow up radios the world over until nobody can stand it any longer. Without a millisecond of hesitation we’re into the harder-hitting “Pound the Alarm”, which she raps, but which is unmistakably a hypercharged pop track in the vein of her Super Bowl cohort Madonna. In fact, while hiring Gaga’s main man was a discerning recognition of a brand of big sonics the Lady owned in 2009, an awareness of Nicki’s ambition brings into fair clarity the fact that Queen Madge is probably who she’s going for here. Gaga’s highly distinctive fifteen minutes notwithstanding, she’s evidenced little of Madonna’s sharp sense of staying power, and Minaj has both an aesthetic competitive edge and a dominance of a style Madonna herself would be foolish to try too hard. For the entire half-hour stretch from “Starships” to “Gunshot”, you’ll be on your feet the way The E.N.D. could never get you – what your ears are bearing witness to is one absolute talent in the last throes of a five-year plan that ends with world domination. And though she investigates a previously unexplored insecurity complex on two breakup songs, she can spit, she can sing (with robot aid [just like every other popstar]), she’s got a way with both words and weirdness, and now she’s slipped the dance record of the decade thus far into rap that rivals it all. “It’s automatic/some might call it insane/I assure you/I’ll be stuck in your brain”. The girl has you cornered. And after the highly charming Beenie Man feature finishes the chapter, she throws “Stupid Hoe” at you, and the concluding “I am the female Weezy” suddenly sounds unnecessarily humble. “Stupid hoes is my enemy/stupid hoes is so wack/stupid hoe should have befriended me/then she could have probably came back.” Those still foolish enough to believe there’s anybody hotter in the current commercial music climate would do well to take her advice, or soon enough she’ll be shitting on your whole life.

NOTE: Some of the songs discussed above that feature but aren’t by Nicki became familiar to me by way of a Spotify-engendered playlist made earlier this year – in an attempt to tackle an already-unwieldy discography, I clicked the ‘popularity’ tab and pruned to twenty tracks. What I came up with slams even if only a quarter of it is by Nicki; on every feature you’re left salivating for her to show up, and for any moment she’s audible she lords over whatever turf she’s on. Kicking off with her two Guetta tracks, it segues into “Monster” and “Fly” and then a charming if hapless ode from Dreezy, “Make Me Proud”. “Roman in Moscow” follows, after which she deftly cranks up the patois on Sean Kingston’s “Dutty Love” and supercharges a half-time remix of Britney’s 2011 coup. Then come “Super Bass”, “Stupid Hoe”, “Moment 4 Life”, “Bottoms Up”, the Rihanna favor “Raining Men”, the remarkable and aptly entitled Rebirth shard “Knockout”, “Up All Night”, and then a terrible Jay Sean robbery of “1999” called “2012”, which at least serves to date this crucial chronological moment in Nicki’s trajectory. Then the Willow track, then the song with Cash Money head Birdman (“Y.U. MAD”) that provides the source of the “I am the female Weezy” quote (Weezy contributes a solid verse as well, while Birdman himself is hopeless). Then the Lonely Island tune, and a Ludacris track (“My Chick Bad”) that helped expose her earlier on.

The cover art is included in the collage at the top of the page. Burn yourself an energizing, edifying treat.

ryan maffei

copouts

1. The Shins, Port of Morrow

This band always reminded me of Pink Floyd – you know, wispy white soundscaping space-cases prone to ponderous poetry, though James Mercer was always too good at writing about relationships for the comparison to be fair. His best songs are too defined and too clever, their narcissism-on-sleeve too subtly skillful. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re as amazing as people say they are. And before I try to justify that, I should probably admit that I’ve just never understood the fey fellow behind ‘em, including but not limited to what he feels, how he operates, why people go so crazy over him. Oh, Inverted World’s mystery was compelling, if sometimes meandering, because the music sounded like it was made by alien sprites from a dimension as fun as Austin and as colorful as Yellow Submarine. Any shard of stark-laid autobiography would’ve slaughtered the sense of intrigue. His subsequent song cycle about himself and his recent failed relationship worked because arch turns of phrase too awkward for recitation were concealed in tunes almost as fetching as the transcendent “Caring is Creepy”. But ever since he ascended the stairs from Garden State’s irksomely sincere hype into SNL supersemistardom, Mercer’s spotlight has increased in brightness to a white heat as unflattering as bathroom fluorescence, and the better I see him the more viscerally annoyed I become. I differ from the Pitchforkers who were going to embrace this album whether or not the mother site did in that I’m not charmed by his aversion to directness, his disinterest in real momentum or adrenaline release, his penchant for prog and flower-power psychedelia, or his stupid fucking album titles. What I am charmed by are his melodies, a few of which (“It’s Only Life”, “40 Mark Strasse”, “Fall of ‘82”, the gradually ingratiating arena-rock single) could be automatic classics if they just communicated more. I’m all for deliberate obscurity when it’s married to dynamic personality – vintage Dylan, David Byrne, Don Van Vliet, a vocalist like Britt Daniel. But when it comes to self-serious self-importance such as this, my policy’s a strict come clean or don’t come at all.

2. Leonard Cohen, Old Ideas

As per usual, the music is a quaint, ungainly, haunting patchwork quilt of What He Had to Work With, as generic and cliché-laden as it is affecting. And as per usual, the lyrics are an astonishingly, effortlessly elegant distillation of What Was On His Mind in tones as plaintive as watercolor and as sketchy as charcoal, as communicative as music and as universal as love, and impossible to comprehensively access, dissect and appreciate in anything shorter than the time it took to write and record the record.

3. Wussy, Cake Shop

Injustice follows Wussy as devotedly as the handful of fans that came from further than down the street to catch them at this too-short show, including living legend Robert Christgau, the only important writer currently taking them as seriously as they warrant. If it didn’t, not only would this be a physical product, it would be expensive. Instead, you can only snag it here, an opportunity that for all I know will be fleetingly temporary. But be sure to do so, because this intimate, energetic, love-filled document makes rivetingly clear how every one of their classics-on-arrival becomes a motherfucker when they play it out. The guitars are as exciting as earthbound gets – never sidestepping into wanky sonic showmanship (such nonsense is for the youth), three axes fall, crash, clatter and climb over each other in search of harmonic combinations that veer breathtakingly between hell-yeah heavenly and damn-right discordant. Chuck’s creaky vocal hinges hang on for dear life inside the aural hurricane, while Lisa matches the mad magic by singing as if she’s strangling the sin out of every single line. And when they pause, they’re the nicest and most on-the-level bunch of regular people ever – you can scarcely believe how real they are. Still, it only makes sense that they end up casually issuing some of the finest stage banter on record, the peak being Chuck’s succinct and right-on take on a trio of shittier bands. They’ve got a deep sense of history when it comes to their trade, and their desperate devotion to rock ‘n’ roll bleeds beautifully all over every note.

conflicts 

4. The Magnetic Fields, Love at the Bottom of the Sea

Merritt’s earlier, fuzzier Casiotone symphonies weren’t made to catapult him into the synthpop-hero stratosphere – their busy, buzzy arrangements were a way to render Merritt’s songsmith strength both unique and fashionably obscure, at a point where neither his vocal presence nor his lyrical gifts were surefooted enough to exhibit unfettered. Itchy, ironic commentaries on the inartfulness of internet-age relationships produced in perfectly primitive kind, Merritt’s pre-’97 (or so) songs were budget-free and junkyardesque, yet each resonated like seraphic tones on the strength of its thousand heartbreaking buried melodies. There’s an ethereal quality those gloriously cheap soundscapes conjure up of which no other music is capable, and it’s met by lyrics that are stranger and more literarily adventurous than 69 Love Songs’ rhyme-high Irving Berlin constructs. But 69 Love Songs’ artist-admitted function as a bid for as big a time as he had coming was necessarily accompanied by a commitment to clarity, and since that peak Merritt’s words have grown more and more predictable as his arrangements boast more and more facility. Sure, Merritt’s stated sacred mission is to reject the fruitless pursuit of originality in favor of popform and the expertly reconstituted trope, but we’ve come a long way down from “there is no sun except the one/that never shone on other guys/the moon to whom the poets croon/has given up and died/astronomy will have to be revised” to “humping to the thumping/jumping to the bumping/leaping to the beeping/thing on the dance floor”. That not-so-random choice might be an unfair callout, but though Merge is touting this tweeting, fleeting little thing as a return to form after an NPR decade of hoity label affiliation and Great American Songbook aspiration, and though many of Love at the Bottom of the Sea’s endearingly cluttered arrangements do resemble indelibles from Holiday and Wasps’ Nests (particularly the over-when-it’s-over codas), it’s become hopeful and dishonest to suggest that Merritt is really working at the level he once was. Whereas ages ago his every tune was graced with a lyrical turn that could disarm both the picky intellectual and the brokenhearted layman – so keen and uncanny were his lexical dexterity and human insight – his fondness for the cheap joke sans sideways emotional suckerpunch has considerably increased in the time since Stephin still found it proper to equip songs about porno nuns and zombiephiliacs with serious, heartfelt dimensions. Where once you sobbed you can only smirk; over where once lay Wildean wit Merritt has melted an abundance of yukky cheese.

But then let’s surmise for a second that I’m mistaking good old-fashioned dumb fun for puerile inelegance – you probably think the Merritt who admires the Ramones is wiser than the Merritt who idolizes Sondheim anyway. Let’s say a good lowbrow line like “so go ahead and hire Saatchi & Saatchi/to advertise the sausage in your pants” flatteringly contextualizes apparently clumsy stuff like appending the simile “like a little wiener dog” to the plenty serviceable innuendo “my tail began to wag” in the very best song. Let’s say his less clever “Mama Told Me Not to Come” and more annoying “Heart of the Country” are justified by the brains you know he has, even if he deigns less than ever before to put them on display. And since Merritt’s talent for creative instrumentation is a world of reward all its own (Realism having been his surest-ever case for that claim), why should lyrics that don’t quite build Paris wherever you are put a dent in your enjoyment of what, being his return to his synthesized element, just has to be the most sonic fun Merritt’s had in ages? Except that despite the Future Bible Heroesy fidelity upgrade and the use of synths as cutting-edge as RedOne’s, shrewd moves both, the arrangements are more audibly aimless than ever, and a majority of the melodies lackluster. ‘90s Merritt still subversively engaged even as his tunes refused to unfold right away, but after at least twenty optimistic listens I still only look forward to a scant few things: those punctuative shrieks in “God Wants Us to Wait”, the staggering single “Andrew in Drag”, the devilish “Your Girlfriend’s Face”, and the undeniable melody that is “Quick!”. “Drag” is especially immaculate, instant kin with his other nine career top-tenners, and all the more significant for the sheer understated grace with which the artiste conquers and renders relatable a subject that in this country at this moment is still somehow regarded as audacious. If “God Wants Us to Wait” had been just a little more pointed and a little less obvious, and the rest of the songs had followed topical suit, we might’ve found another Magnetic Fields record that conceptually honored its title, a series of profiles of modern loves submerged and/or adrift in their chaotic age. Instead, it ends up the shallowest album Merritt’s ever made. The fact is that a guy as fluent in synth and as deft a writer as he should be able to craft an electropop record as brilliant as Robyn’s, as savvy as Gaga’s, as witty as Dr. Luke’s, a superior to Goldfrapp’s Singles. And the fact is that for the first time in his career, he hasn’t.

5. Lana Del Rey, Born to Die

Thought immediately prior to posing this review: the key to understanding this album is the bright red bra you can make out through the cover’s American Gothic mise-en-scène.

This bizarro pop muzak has never seemed worth the magnitude of its maker’s mystery, but compiling the clues has been fun nonetheless. “Video Games”: very strange, not unlike the Bee Gees song it’s a damn dead ringer for. I was initially put off by its cascade of string section syrup and lack of upbeat (or any, actually) rhythm, things to which years of reading rockcrit have trained me to react negatively. But soon I recognized that not only did I have less of an idea of what was going on than I should for lyrics entirely composed of clichés, I was a little disturbed by it. Del Rey’s videos were mystifying in the same why-is-this-so-mystifying manner; it was almost as if the girl from the cover of Contra had broken free of that photo’s vacant trappings, gotten a few shrewd touches of plastic surgery, and sought out special permission from the mayor to swarm through LA like a plague of carefree ghosts. There was a kind of modern American poetry to this superficial madness. In search of a clearer guiding narrative, I noticed the curious fact that the loudest voices in a bizarre and seemingly unprecedented epidemic of Del Rey-related dialogue were – how do I put this? – mainstreamers. The girl had titanic exposure, and what struck me about her SNL failure wasn’t her neither-eccentric-nor-professional-enough performance but the fact that this mystery girl was already on SNL, a gig few undergrounders, nobodies or true-blue counterculturals are able to book so soon. Suspicious of her origins (as everybody else seemed to be), I did some casual investigation of the album itself, and noted both Interscope’s brand and the presence of multiple writers on every track. Ah: the dame was corporate. And by the time I made this discovery, I’d come to adore “Video Games” – it was distinctive, it was memorable, it followed a lovely arc of writing construction, and it still unsettled the shit out of me. What was that, I’ll think ten years from now when it shivers out of the radio during a cheeky lineup of one-shots, and my nostalgia will distract me as it fades into the lesser and dissimilar (save for a theoretical take or two) “Rolling in the Deep”.

At about this point, Lana talk inexplicably exploded around me, and I figure mine was hardly the only conversational HQ Lady LDR was penetrating at the time. The polarity of the myriad takes was bizarrely impassioned; nobody seemed interested in deflating the idea of her significance,be it good or bad, and the moderates weren’t keen themselves to totally write her off. It quickly became clear that the SNL nondebacle amounted to a message-muddling chain reaction of irrelevant distractions, because the girl seemed fairly keen on her own definitions and contradictions in her interviews, and she had a sense of it well before anybody gave a shit. There was vision behind the sugar-smooth Blue Velvet platter that creeped me out in the same can’t-look-away manner of a lighter video nasty. Yet I found that the CD itself still fell short of its direct competition both commercial (Femme Fatale) and crazy (Strange Mercy). Then my pal Joey angled some light onto “Off to the Races”, an obvious highlight, and the whole Del Rey deal clicked for me in the form of a spontaneous assessment I’m still kinda proud-a: “arty Ke$ha”. The lass may inspire more ponderous thought from more pedigreed people than is at all reasonable, but if you attend her lines, all she’s actually selling (and selling is the right word) is a stiffer-upper-lip version of Ke$ha’s pseudo-edgy cartoon glamour hedonism and counterculture-chick-as-unrelenting-cocktease shtick. She’s may be a little deeper than Ke$ha, or at least sound like it by being ruminative and obscure, but she’s also less fun, on account of a general resistance to big-beat pop, which she isn’t deep enough to signify more than. When she’s on, I find myself endeared to every inch of her tar-black soul, but such moments sound inadvertent. If she were a little more inventive and adventurous and possibly if it isn’t unfair smarter, she’d be able to occupy one of those little niche islands around Gaga country, just like Annie Clark (the hip one), Merrill Garbus (the brainy one) and Regina Spektor (the girly-girly one) and Fiona (the burnout) before her, to pick a bunch of talented lasses whose model she’s clearly attempting to maneuver within. But what keeps her in the water is the general weakness of her songs, however great you think the good six or seven are, and no manner of hypothetical contortion from her choir of admirers can argue that away. Still, that the production and the vocals (their own eccentric brand of bland) are consistently strange and intriguing, even when the tune is slow or shallow or stupid, reminds me of and brings me to the only comparison that jibes just right: Nine Inch Nails. He had thin pipes and a silliness fetish too. And boy, if she made a record like Downward Spiral next I’d be on this bus for ages.

Contradictory original review, tweeted 2/9/12 smack in the middle of a cloud of smoke: “but it’s really GOOD shit, Mrs. Preske”.

ryan maffei

conclusions

1. Rihanna, Talk That Talk

In the current crop of multimillionaire filles synthetically straddling the modern pop throne, Rihanna has always been on the receiving end of my thickest skepticisms. Younger than most and more carefully shepherded than seems typical from her inception, she’s product down to her pelt, and it’s the resultant absence of autonomy in every act she acts that triggers the majority of my discomfort. Chalk it up to the uncanny valley. My distaste was compounded when I caught singles from last year’s Loud on the airwaves: the big ballad was lazily perfunctory, “Man Down” was the kind of weird you don’t credit the artist for, and the momentarily notorious, conceptually harmless “S&M” turned me all the way off with its mock-menacing track and perfectly asinine lyrics. And that last slim effort had shadier implications, conjuring up the image of a recent abuse victim being shoved by her corporate handlers with a similar brutal insensitivity into an objectification role you could never be certain she felt entirely committed to. If she wasn’t so young my reflex might not be so prudishly parental, but really, no other thriving girlpop career so risks grotesque Marilynization. Britney’s fuck-me routine is the ideal liberation channel for a kid whose sanity was raped by fame, Gaga’s a mildly revolutionary model for our nation of outcasts’ freakiest, freest fantasies, Katy Perry’s a lame pastiche of high school misconceptions and Ke$ha’s a devilishly witty burlesque of same. They all make an unconvincingly big deal about sex, and though their art’s lack of intellectual thrust validates the superiority of those less preoccupied with and more casual about it (see N. Minaj), its requisite coyness is functional in an age where the family values pushback is at its fiercest and most frantic. Their stuff still gets on the radio coz they’re one of the few ways the Biz still makes money, and the franker it becomes the less repressed our culture becomes. But what powers these ladies’ pop porn is how clearly they’re all enjoying telling you about it, while Rihanna’s pretty vacancy remains plenty detectable on her fifth album in about as many years. This is best evidenced by her mid-song declaration of “I’m so intoxicated!” during “Drunk on Love”: both the phrasing and the wording are beyond belief, yet it’s sung in that same glorious, twisty, soulful tone she graces her every performance with, as if she never thinks twice about belting through the script. The confident prowess of Rihanna’s voice is, after all, the only real reason she’s so big in the first place – too thin for Aretha comparisons but several steps above American Idol, and recently lent its most flattering context yet by her inclusion on some of our choicest recent rap records. So from a personal perspective, I can only hope the more self-sufficient talents behind said records (the Kanyes, the Nickis) keep her safe, and from an aesthetic perspective, I can reason through her cheesier stuff by remembering Elton John, who wouldn’t stop releasing albums for albums’ sake either. When his songs were good, he was good, and since the quality of material never seems to affect Rihanna’s performative consistency, so long as it comes across, the girl who sang on “Umbrella” and “Disturbia” comes across. In vocal showcases conviction never hurts, and she gives better conviction than Elton ever did. Talk That Talk is rife with work worthy of her pipes, from an opening quartet that never flags to a serviceable “Milkshake” update to an xx sample you savor to a finale you skip to start the CD over again. And two songs are too skillfully sensual to have merely been shoved through her by others – the instant “Watch N’ Learn” (“just because I can’t kiss back/doesn’t mean you can’t kiss that”, lordy) and “Birthday Cake”, a towering slice of metaphorical innuendo with a premature fadeout whose awkwardness I can’t get over.

2. Britney Spears, Femme Fatale

AKA How to Do It* (since Fucking Amazing Fake Fucking could only cut it as a bootleg of outtakes). It’s bizarre that the inevitable new wave of Britney backlash didn’t seem to register on a widespread level ‘til this record came out, since this is where she finally solidifies the comeback she’s been through enough psychological bullshit to have earned. And this is how you solidify a fucking comeback, even if her albums have only gotten better as her personal stability has graphed a zigzag. “Till the World Ends” is the kind of event that serves to refresh the collective memory as to why pop music is so vital, a soaring, cavernous, ruthless snatch of overproduced perfection whose Roland Emmerich-esque video only enhances its gorgeous topicality – if we really are this fucked, we might as well stop confining ourselves to received inhibitions, right? That her presence on the chorus is all rhythmic editing, chopped and carefully placed and repeated little chunks of notes they got out of her by (one assumes) any means necessary, immediately draws attention to Britney’s most perennially polarizing attribute, the screaming inhumanity in that permanently prefab voice. But because by now humanity is something you’d be a fool to expect (I guarantee you that very few of her critical well-wishers actually want to hang out with her), you never miss it, and every beat is a golden android drenched nose to nuts in glistening honey, the light reflecting on which illuminates what scant filler there is. Assuming it’s not just my own personal sweet tooth talking, this is as pleasurable as synthetic music gets, diamond-hard but never feigning aggression to bolster its risqué pose. Though every little comely gesture is both familiar and rehearsed, Spears achieves a sense of domination without needing to come on like she’s trying to, which is the exact, heroic opposite of being submissive. The only track that goes there is the only one that ditches the brand of candy she’s always sold – the pummeling “Drop Dead (Beautiful)”, which sounds a lot like a Lady Gaga album track, and which hits you with such unnecessary force it takes you out for a second. Elsewhere it’s liberated fantasy come-on after liberated fantasy come-on, the surface-silly promises of the often very good lyrics fulfilled in full by the bonky beatitude of the beats. And though every one is about the best she’s ever had, this masterpiece’s masterpieces are “Big Fat Bass”, a will.i.am-aided reminder of our place (we’re the bass, she’s the treble, and in the most transcendent little entendre on a record made of ‘em she observes, “it’s getting bigger/the bass is getting bigger”), and “Criminal”, a slow closer wherein she almost manages to append a socially conscious bottom line to an album about doing the proverbial nasty by way of what sure sounds like a cliché: “this type of love isn’t rational/it’s physical” (not to mention equally valid). But for the most part, this is the kind of good that makes you stop caring if it makes or even has a point, which in pop music is as valuable to these bringdown times as anything armed with a message.

contemplations

3. Lady Gaga, Born This Way

Has any album in recent history opened as ridiculously as Born This Way? The overture of hype wasn’t exactly measured, but nothing – not the sub-Bat Out of Hell cover art, not the ridiculous “Judas”, not the delusions of grandeur the artiste seemed to be suffering every time she told us about it – could have adequately prepared people for the insurmountable inanity of “Marry the Night”’s first thirty drumless seconds. Hating that moment is the closest I come to anything like a conclusion over this album, which along with Watch the Throne left me more frustrated than any other 2011 release. But whereas that one felt too far out to fully figure, I’m stuck on the idea that this she’s-gone-mad album isn’t half mad enough. It’s not that Gaga lacks a way with the weird, though at the end of the day she isn’t even as crazy as Britney (in fact she’s sexier, which sort of undercuts her voice-of-the-freaks act). It’s that The Fame Monster’s success has her locked into an obligation to follow her muse in its direction, and while that album is one of the greatest of its year, its gothic shtick wasn’t quite as convincing as the bubblegum bimbo shtick (if not autobiography) on The Fame, which may well have been 2008’s best album. A creature of keen instincts, she gets the idea of the Yoko/Björk/Kate Bush mode, and that she knows to gravitate that way in the first place is encouraging enough. But Yoko still seems more aesthetically significant, Björk more sonically adventurous, and Kate Bush more melodically adept, and though I like Gaga more than all of them, but I don’t know if I like this particular album nearly as much as Fly, Post or The Whole Story. It’s dumber, more obvious, and a lot less wild than both Fame and Fame Monster, concerning traits for a record so clearly intended as a codification of her increasingly wild persona. And that the woman who singlehandedly brought pop into our current future spends so much of its running time sucking on the seventies seems just as regressive. Even Springsteen couldn’t keep from erring silly when he was inventing the stuff she’s gratuitously (if exuberantly) invited into her new sound, and in more numerous occasions on this album than there are on Greetings From Asbury Park you can barely believe how ridiculous she gets – see the spoken intro on her noble Madonna theft (you know, the title track), or a generous majority of her brand new lyrics. Then again, maybe that’s because this really is weird enough – not rivetingly jagged like Beefheart or early Ubu, but an act of defiant nonconformity that arrives in bubble-wrap by choice, and whose neutered oddness can still only aid our increasingly conventional modern mainstream. And it does have a handful of great songs: “Government Hooker”, “Americano”, the Springsteen-worthy “Hair” (“I just want to be free, I just want to be me/and I want lots of friends that invite me to their parties”), “Yoü and I”, “Bloody Mary”. So it doesn’t exactly dishonor the spirit of rock and roll; I’m just not at all certain if it does the previous dynamic edition of Gaga enough justice. Then again, I’m also not certain if this right idea by Cerebral Decanting’s Jason Gubbels – “the worst that can be said about this hour of music is that unending club anthems in a Pat Benatar/Bonnie Tyler vein eventually prove wearying” – does Born This Way enough justice. I’m not certain about any of it, really. But I’m pretty sure her fourth record will be a lot more informative.

4. Beyoncé, 4

Of all the current pop rockettes, this former fake schizophrenic is probably the stablest, at least from a personal perspective (happy 0th Blue Ivy, a name I wish was mine). But from a musical perspective, she’s usually the one who seems in most ardent pursuit of interesting and uncommon sounds, the one most likely to hit you from left field assuming she can hit you at all. It’s bold for a chartbuster of any level to open her album with a song like “1 + 1”, even if its gospel contours are sorta safe and its build is a pro forma kind of undeniable. But forms like gospel and in general suit that giant, acrobatic voice, and Beyoncé and her team spend the whole album twisting conventions around its swoop and call and weave. And so we end up with an art-soul record that lacks Al Green’s intimacy but would make his eccentricity proud, and which deigns to corral its fire only with the same kind of sweetness and light Steely Dan used to wield in service of subversion. It’s still pure pop for now people, and Beyoncé has little to say outside of money-pop’s usual romantic vocabulary. Still, shit, she really rocks those vocals, plus she’s a solid actress and she’s got excellent taste in male companions; all that and probably a lot more less obvious stuff signifies a talent special and dignified enough to start trusting aesthetically, her current incarnation not dissimilar to smoothie N’SYNC dropout Justin Timberlake’s transmogrification into the keenest commodity any major could conjure up. This record is stranger than Born This Way and is tied to a sharper sense of groove. It takes comparable risks for surer payoffs. It’s absolutely beautiful. Cons: it’s a little arch, it’s probably not as brilliant as Watch the Throne, and one of its songs is by Diane Warren. Al Green did one of those too.

5. Adele, 21

A Special One-Time-Only Real Time Review For the Album That Wouldn’t Let 2011 Get Away: So I’m ready to admit that “Rolling in the Deep” deserves its status as the undeniable historical fact it was anointed as ages ago – like “You’re So Vain”, resistance isn’t just futile but mildly ignorant. And “Rumor Has It” has more grit than I’d expect from an album everybody in America who bought the Sue Boyle album dove headfirst for, and renders immediately clear a talent for evoking classic sounds with an appealing purity, as per Norah Jones, if an equally inarguable technical sterility and dubious emotionalism, as per same. I can also see somebody finding depth and atmospheric mystique in “Turning Tables”, which I am unshakably suspicious of, the way I’m drawn in by Regina Spektor’s Disneyer moments (not so much “Wallet” as sap like “Samson” – wit always conquer sincerity, even if it’s cute wit). The idea of this album silently unifying the hearts and psyches of millions of Americans starts to become very moving around the time of this track. If I had any interest in delving into the lyrics’ narrative, I might even find the record more dramatically compelling. But I don’t, because even as I snag the occasional verse I admire, the obvious overall serves only to strengthen my doubt that Adele has anything half as valuable as Annie Hall to say about heartbreak, much less love. At the point of “Set Fire to the Rain” I begin to worry, in no small part because of the title, which also functions as the hook, which is regrettably overblown. “He Won’t Go” gives off the smell of a Rick Rubin job; one percussion instrument in the right channel keeps making me think there’s someone in the room behind me. When the song picks it up it becomes quite pleasurable, but in that vaguely anonymous way you’d expect a record you can buy at CVS to sound. I still don’t care about what she’s singing about; her words are too unfiltered, too underdeveloped, too diaristic. I’m instantly thrust back into the asshole cynicism I’m trying to suppress about 21’s massive audience, from this distance a formless, scentless conglomerate of people for whom free will must not be a regular experience. How many registered Republicans are uninhibitedly enjoying this record as I sit here puzzling over it? Wikipedia confirms I called the Rubin thing; I read an article about him recently while waiting for a haircut in which he came off as something of a self-important frig. (Why can’t I conjure up images as free and elemental and vivid as Allen Ginsberg’s? Adele says as much about America now as Vietnam did back then.) I’m losing track of the record as I think; it’s too generic, too homogenized, and I’ve been struggling since I found out about it to comprehend how this girl captured the critical as well as commercial vote with such a predictable platter. Then I get the sense that I’m giving the engineers of this critical consensus far too much credit, and wonder if House of Balloons would be better if I were as high as I am now. But the high hasn’t enriched Adele’s music, or made it sound as worthy of the effort of unpacking its arrangements the way all the seminal girlpop of this new century is. Sonically it’s a retreat into the past, an orderly coffeehouse shuffle toward good old days that Adele has even less idea than I do were probably actually a lot worse. Around the time of “Turning Tables” it occurred to me that I might have fallen in love with this record when I was nine, but now I figure that’s just because I fell so hard for Billy Joel. Right now I’m in the middle of this paint-by-numbers gospel breakdown featuring the lamest handclaps I’ve ever heard and it feels like The Bridge or something. But the fact is it’s worse, it’s worse than low-grade Billy Joel because the comparative lack of thought and craft screams through every note; because she’s just a kid with a gorgeous voice who’s trying to make it in this workaday world by putting her emotions front and center, and at her age that magnanimous task can only overwhelm the insight and attention great art requires. The thought of millions of people simultaneously losing themselves in “One and Only” as the sun peers the sedan windshield just right sickens me. The country is struggling to grow its balls back and this is how the majority empowers itself. I stop myself for a second. As a human being, as one who cares about the state of society and others’ well-beings as best as he can accommodate, it bothers me that this art makes me prejudicially bugged by an imaginary other that probably represents a sizable chunk of my American brothers and sisters. But the music blaring through my ears right now is so unrelentingly banal I’m fighting off fond memories of “Forgive Me (My Little Flower Princess)”. I hate this record because I don’t need it; I hate this record because I know I’ve outgrown it. This girl is a year my junior; I don’t feel like I have much more than a few toes through adulthood’s door and how the hell must she feel now that life is an extended vacation? Yet every article I read about her makes me wonder how ready she is for it, how tailored she could be for that level of inevitable superstardom. Every other story is about a tour cancellation due to throat problems (can’t the voice of God sustain it?) or a casual anecdote about having projectile vomited on a crowd once (her unabated normality has always seemed to me her greatest virtue). But for the most part, I’m simply (stupidly?) happy for her. She’s got tidal wave after tidal wave mass validation to ride on, a lot of spiritual ammunition with which to combat those final lingering vestiges of the heartbreak that wrought this record. I’m glad she’s out of it. And thirty years from now, if all is right and the world survives (knock knock knock on every splinter in sight), people will gather around the piano on holidays and somebody will whip out a wistfully off-key rendition of “Rolling in the Deep”, and everybody will play remember when and have a grand old time. I’ll still think Selena Gomez’s “Who Says” was miles better, if I’m alive. And if there really is such a thing as cosmic justice this album will be enshrined in history the way Come Away With Me or Can’t Slow Down are; with skepticism by those better at fending off bullshit.

MORAL: Some things are harder than others to be objective about.

*text on reverse cover: …In Your Dreams

ryan maffei