Friday, November 19, 2004

Beers for a clown

It's time here at Stuck in My Head for a little reader participation.
Wherever you're reading this, you're probably no more than five minutes away from your nearest corner store. Walk there, and select a 40-ounce bottle of the cheapest, vilest malt liquor available.
For our purposes, it would be more appropriate if you were to shoplift your 40, but if you're concerned about your arrest record, go ahead and buy it.
While you're at it, tip the deli guys. They have to deal with you and your ilk at 2 a.m. on weekend nights, and it's the least you can do.
All right. Do you have your 40?
"Yes, Dave, I have my 40. What's this all about anyway?"
Don't get impatient. This is serious business. Life and death.
Now find the nearest patch of bare ground, open your 40, and pour one out for the Old Dirty Bastard.
It would be most in keeping with the spirit of the great man himself if you poured out the 40 in an exceedingly public place, as it would be self-evidently preferable to get hassled by the NYPD for your act of remembrance.
But if you've attracted the fuzz by this point - even, really, if you haven't - feel free to stop pouring.
After all, Russell T. Jones quite obviously had enough in life. And what better way to continue to honor his memory than by polishing off the rest of your 40 yourself, as quickly as possible?
(The correct answer to that question is " Smoke some crack," but last I checked they weren't selling that at Hayden.)
As the passing of any legendary figure will, ODB's death seems to have resonated with people.
Subconsciously, and sadly, it's probably because his legacy will be as hip-hop's more cognizant answer to Wesley Willis, with all the exploitation that implies.
Ol' Dirty could be a fine rapper at times - when he could find the focus for it - but for all the brilliance of "Got Your Money," his success didn't arise from his musical talents.
At its outset, the Wu Tang Clan contained enough bright stars that to stand out in the constellation - as ODB, without question, did - was enough of an achievement.
But that he did so because he was alternately a clown and a train wreck, a celebrity horror story of extra-value-meal-sized proportions, is not beside the point. It is the point.
We need not review the litany of his more salacious endeavors, although since he was reported to have fathered upwards of a dozen children, it's maybe worth pointing out that, in terms of both nature and nurture - he was the ODB because "there ain't no father to my style" - he'll be back.
The lascivious, edge-of-legal lifestyle he led was in many ways one of personal tragedy, but from the perspective of a PR agent it gleamed.
Back before his jail sentence, the headlines practically wrote themselves, especially after his moniker kept getting progressively wackier as his life spiraled further out of control. Nothing sells records like notoriety, folks, and it's no mystery why his biggest hit record came shortly after some of his most literally crazy, drug-addled behavior.
In this way it seemed like his success was fueled mostly by schadenfreude.
Although he obviously profited - although let's not forget that he also obviously suffered - from the ruckus, from at least one perspective, his career stands as the most shamefully over-the-top example of the music industry's exploitation of its artists.
After all, according to a widely circulated rumor that's almost tragically credible, the guy had been blowing rails for two days straight before he collapsed in the studio where he was recording his big comeback.
The tragic thing is not that he died so young, but that it seemed so inevitable that he would, since to the vast majority of pop music listeners, Ol' Dirty was just a few hit singles and a lot of deliciously bad news.
If indeed his career was ultimately cut short by the vicious cycle of fame, money and addiction that in many ways actualized it, the banality of such a fate should leave a bitter taste in our mouths.
A conversation I overheard on Saturday night helps make this point:
"Hey, I heard Ol' Dirty Bastard died.
"Oh really? Of what?"
"Being Ol' Dirty Bastard."
On second thought, if you've still got any of that 40 left, pour the rest out. The poor bastard deserves it.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Buck up, blue states

"One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain." - Bob Marley, Trenchtown Rock
"Fear is a weapon of mass destruction." - Faithless, Mass Destruction
"Anger is a gift." - Rage Against the Machine, Freedom



Music has always been there for me.
Like many people, I have always popped on the headphones when life's churned up some turbulence.
Through two decades punctuated by the occasional heartaches, disasters and defeats, pop music has been my constant solace. Bob Marley's double entendre gets right to the root of its relieving, anesthetizing, cathartic effects. It's always seemed to me that even - actually, especially - the saddest of songs can bleed away my blues.
But late Tuesday night, as I sat sprawled against a couch on my roommate's floor, music wasn't enough.
While some friends and I watched Ohio slip away, Roomie had been busy downloading some hot new jams. When I retreated to his room, the election wasn't quite over, but it may as well have been. When he tried to raise my spirits with sonics, I realized that no mere record could possibly assuage my rapidly mounting anxiety.
Particularly not Le Tigre's cover of "I'm So Excited," which only sounded like a cruel, cruel joke.
Given the high stakes of this election, it's not surprising that campus was such a sad sight on Wednesday. All the liberals and moderates - which is to say, a mighty hefty chunk of the student body - looked pretty inconsolable. Apparently, music wasn't enough for lots of us. Aside from a few ebullient College Republicans whose smiles were just begging to be kicked in, there was no joy in Mudville.
But this is certainly not the right time to accept ignominious defeat, or curl up and die of disappointment.
The presidency is lost, but an opposition strong enough to express the will of the 56 million people who voted against Bush this time around is not only a possibility but a necessity.
To further such an opposition's chances of coming into being by improving morale, and in the spirit of the Rage and Faithless quotes above, let's remember a few of the positive effects this election will likely have on pop music.
For example: By most accounts, pop gets better when the world is losing its mind. Just peep the '60s. I fully anticipate that as America's geopolitical role gets crazier, the music we're listening to will improve - at least until the crusading evangelical moral majority that now rules the country finishes off the infidels and us faggots, and starts in on rock'n'roll.
Of course, in Bush's defense, given how much his daughters seem to enjoy the swinging social scenes of blue-state metropolises, that day might still be a few years off.
Another corn kernel-like nugget of hope in the record-setting pile of elephant shit that Tuesday's results constituted is the possibility that P. Diddy will act on the threat implicit in his "Vote or Die" campaign. If you didn't make it to the polls, watch your back, because Diddy has many, many Sean John shivs.
And just imagine the next Radiohead and Bruce Springsteen records.
I don't mean to make light of a bad situation. As I see it, the world just changed for the worse, and the next four years have the potential to be truly dire.
Things are looking pretty bad right now for those of us afraid of a draft, a Supreme Court stacked to defeat Roe v. Wade, and the most epic budgetary buck-passing in American history.
But it does nobody any good to mope about. The quicker that former Kerry supporters get up off the mat and start swinging again, the better the chances for damage control.
Music wasn't much of a match for the apocalyptic disappointment of Tuesday night, but as we move on from that experience, it will once again motivate, move and comfort us.
Buck up, Blue States. It's time to start working again to take the country back. And don't forget to whistle.

Dems gone wild!

It's nearly midnight and the NYU College Democrats are out in force - in Pittsburgh.
After a long Saturday of canvassing the downtrodden of post-industrial western Pennsylvania, these 50-odd representatives of the still-beating heart of Greenwich Village student activism are ready to party, if only to relieve election-related hypertension. And their gracious hosts, their counterparts at the slightly less dreamy University of Pittsburgh, are more than willing to oblige. They've rented a profoundly skeezy sushi-bar-themed-dive (replete with a cloudy aquarium, plastic cups, and a prodigious assortment of shitty domestic beer) for the occasion.
Yes indeed, the stage would seem to be set for a night of highly liberal - some might even argue, progressive - debauchery.
Unfortunately, the harried 'burgher running the soundsystem - which consists of one skip-prone CD player and a dented mixer - has just replaced a mix of club bangers with "Livin' on a Prayer," and begun to hector people into dancing.
Even after rounds of sake and the Champagne of Beers, I am getting testy.
Turning to a fellow College Dem hanger-on, I ask a pressing question:
"Why is it that in the year 2004 people still think that Bon Jovi is acceptable party music?"
"Because they don't live in New York," he says. His tone is matter-of-fact enough to defy charges of elitism.
"In my experience, people who don't live in New York or California generally tend to think and care a lot less about music," he explains further. "Their experience of music is less conscious and more passive."
"Which would explain how the girl who was in charge of music for this party could tell me without any shame that she'd just downloaded a bunch of random stuff based on MTV," I say as "You Give Love a Bad Name" begins to skip terminally.
"She said she usually listened to Jack Johnson."
The death-spasms of the CD player are quickly defining the deviancy of the party, meaning that when one of the city-folk arrives on the scene brandishing an iPod it is cause for much rejoicing.
Since he's another one of the people to whom I've been bitching about the music, he asks me for technical assistance.
"Do you have any idea how to hook this up to the mixer?"
I seize my opportunity. "Sure," I say. "Any chance I could play a few songs?"
Five minutes later I'm standing in the DJ booth, a stranger's iPod in one hand and the mixer -- which, as it turns out, is dented because the struts it rests on are angled toward the floor, necessitating constant vigilance to keep it from committing mixercide -- in the other.
Faced with the spinning equivalent of a blindfolded quadruple salchow -- the salvation of a party that's been nearly fatally Bon Jovied, using only someone else's music collection -- I try to remain calm.
One of the funny things about iPods is the extent to which one can make assumptions about a person's lifestyle and personality based on the music they carry around in their pocket.
It soon pains me to discover that the man to whom the 'Pod in question belongs does not have enough crunk in his life. In point of fact, there is a deficit of all things booty-shaking. Yes indeed, this here hard drive is owned by a member of the genus whitus rhythmlessicus.
Luckily, even white guys who can't shake it love "Toxic." Surely this is the pop trash single of the year: the Dems, hitherto satisfied to molest one another at the bar, react with a Pavlovian mass seizure. Simple as Britney, the dancefloor goes from zero to hero.
If my thought process at this moment were a bumper sticker, it would read "I'd rather be playing New Order." My Grinchy elitist heart shrinks a few sizes. Nevertheless, there's something undeniable about a surging dancefloor.
Actively spinning a party is a strangely alienating experience, since the DJ controls the groove of the shindig rather than partaking in it. The best DJs govern from the center, sensing intuitively what dancers want and taking them there.
Unfortunately, the dancefloor, which now boasts a two-to-one Pitt-fratboy to College Dem ratio, wants very badly to get Dirrty, and my options in that respect are severely limited.
The divide evoked earlier, between New Yorkers who want to be challenged by music and Pittsburghers who'd rather the party be programmed by Clear Channel, becomes sadly evident. I lose track of the number of times I am asked to play more Britney.
By two a.m., my compatriots have grown tired of being manhandled by Pitt kids and it is time to leave.
Upon departure, I consider willfully killing the dancefloor that got away by playing the iPod's strangest selection: Barack Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention.
I couldn't bring myself to do it, but it probably wouldn't have worked anyway.
After all, to your average College Democrat, Barack Obama is the crunkest motherfucker alive.

Friday, November 05, 2004

Why peer-networking is the shiznit

Lil' Jon - the King of Crunk and, according to Thefacebook, a resident of John Street residence hall - and I have been friends since July.
Of course, that seems like nothing when compared to my friendship with Stephen Malkmus, with whom I've been connected since last winter. And though Ziggy Stardust may have fallen in 1977, when we became friends - well, OK, Friendsters - in the summer of 2003, he was hale and hearty. Even if he was actually a friend's hermit crab.
Over the last 18 months or so, several charming social networking Web sites have - with little more than the simple yet revolutionary idea of six degrees of separation - radically transformed the way NYU students, and people in general, interact.
Now, I know this is a column primarily about music. But it's also about the fascinating and complex ways in which the digital revolution - note to demographers: If the generation born after 1979 must garner a stupid collective shorthand name, please reject "Gen Y" and go with something like "Generation Net," except less lame - has changed the ways people are able to organize and thereby navigate their social contexts.
So please forgive the tangent, and in doing so, recall that sites like Friendster and Thefacebook have huge ramifications for most aspects of people's fraternization, even the way they understand and act upon musical preferences.
For instance, take the "fakesters" mentioned above. Soon after Friendster's inception, phony profiles in homage of famous people began to proliferate. This is meaningful in a broader context both because of the stalkerish overtones of the "friendship"that fans grant themselves with their favorite artists, and because fakesters allow networks of particular artists to connect in ways that are far more immediately intimate than, say, going to a concert.
For example, my friends J. and K. started hanging out a lot together after perusing each others' "favorite music" lists on one of these sites, noticing they each had a yen for Dylan, the Velvets and the Stones.
Then there's the gentleman who runs a music store in Denver with whom I've had a pen-pal friendship for the last few months. He found me on Friendster by searching for gay men who liked Dizzee Rascal. Apparently, I'm one of five.
Of course, peer-networking sites have a more concrete impact on socialization, on a weekend-by-weekend basis, than simply facilitating the formation of mutual admiration societies. Let's not forget that an invitation posted on Friendster inevitably results in a party full of people a few Kevin Bacons away from your closest confidants - but who seem to dig on "Like a Prayer" and "Billie Jean" as much as the next kid full of "borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered '80s."
These sites have only been around for a short time, but they've already had a huge impact on the ways people meet each other and the role music preference plays in that process.
And it goes without saying that as people continue to sort out their services, they'll keep finding new uses for them.
A friend who works for an NYU campus organization told me a story about an application process he was overseeing. The position being filled was one with certain political sensitivities, so after perusing each applicant's submitted materials, he logged onto Thefacebook and checked out their stated political affiliations. All of the applicants, as it turned out, had fairly complete profiles that included their party of preference.
If he hadn't been an ethical person, the staggering amount of personal information he found on each person's profile could have easily colored his decision.
But something tells me that - regardless of politics - Lil' Jon wouldn't have made the cut.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

The honky problem...Or, the unbearable lightness of keeping it real

Writing about hip-hop makes me a little self-conscious.
Let's review my credentials: White? Check. Privileged? Um, does my consciousness of it make it any less distasteful? In any case, check.
My flow is nonexistent, even when drunk. All the attempts I've ever made at graf writing have been pretty pitiful, and I have too much respect for breakdancing to have ever even tried.
If you're keeping score at home, that's three of the four fabled elements of hip-hop I don't have covered. The only one I don't completely strike out on is turntablism, but no one would characterize me as nimble on the ones and twos. What, you mean scratching is supposed to be rhythmic?
OK, so we've established my overwhelming honkiness. Honestly, the emo glasses in the picture above should have given away the fact that Eminem I am not.
But let's complicate the suburban white boy stereotype a bit. Fact: from age 6 to 11, I rode a bus to public school in San Diego's "gritty" inner city. Fact: Most school bus drivers prefer the urban radio station to NPR. Fact: I was exposed to the glories of hip-hop before I could ever have realized that the "Juice" to which Snoop Dogg referred was not, in fact, made from apples.
Of course, as a child of the '90s, it's only natural that hip-hop has been an integral part of my aural environment since day one. It's the music that defined our generation -- namecheck "Smells Like Teen Spirit" all you want, but it's a fact that, in the last decade, rock 'n' roll has had at least two distinct resurrections while hip-hop has remained unrelentingly vital.
So why should it matter that my only claims to street cred are, in order of viability: my best friend from high school who wore a different Wu-Tang Clan shirt every day, my eternal devotion to Juvenile's "Back that Azz Up," and my frankly startling capacity to operate a 40 and a spliff at the same time?
If hip-hop is everywhere, affecting everyone, why do I feel so self-conscious about my love for it?
To sum it up in a sentence: because there's a long and tragic tradition of music originating within the African-American community and then being invaded, colonized and claimed by white artists.
On that, let's go to one of the best rappers of the last decade, Mos Def: "You may dig on the Rolling Stones, but they didn't come up with that shit on they own. Elvis Presley ain't got no soul -- Chuck Berry is rock 'n' roll."
Thanks, Mos.
White folks' historically blithe appropriation of black musical forms means that any conversation about hip-hop -- especially any input on the subject from a white boy like yours truly -- is going to have to deal with the racial politics of popular music.
The topic of race is elided from much of the mainstream discussion of popular music because it's just as potentially uncomfortable as pop is potentially escapist.
And as enlightened and as progressive as we like to imagine ourselves, here at this profoundly diverse urban university in the most racially diverse city in the world, race is still a sketchy subject. Conversations about race relations don't happen as much as they ought to because people are terrified of being perceived as less informed or evolved on the topic than they ought to be.
So when I think about hip-hop, I constantly second-guess myself. For instance: Does the fact that I think most rappers fail to live up to the potential of the most profoundly verbal popular music form ever by fixating on misogynist, homophobic, criminality-glorifying, bling-and-booty-celebrating subject matter just mean that I'm missing the point? Is it racist to suggest that too many rappers seem to have remarkably little to say?
Well, actually, no, it isn't.
One of the most beautiful things about hip-hop is the fact that it functions as the cultural site where the cycle of white appropriation of black art finally ended. White artists who have made it in hip-hop -- Vanilla Ice excluded, as I think it's clear he always should have been -- have had to do so on the form's own terms, and according to the desires of a black marketplace.
To put it simply, one of hip-hop's more dominant paradigms, "keeping it real," can be glossed as "keeping it black." For example: Eminem keeps it real because he's down with Dre, who keeps the beats real hot, and will kill you with words if you cross him in accordance with the old-school battle ethic.
There's certainly no problem with that. The issue only becomes troubling when "keeping it real" begins to be understood as "keeping it gangsta," and the message of commercial hip-hop becomes "black = gangsta."
You know, because Common and The Roots, for all their consciousness and literacy and engagement, just aren't as "real" as Jay-Z (who is, it should be noted, no less a genius for only talking about what a great criminal he used to be). And their beats aren't as bangin', either.
But there's light at the end of the tunnel. When Kanye West can sell 3 million on a Chaka Kahn sample and the lyric "It wasn't about coke and birds, it was more like spoken word," he's keeping it real soulful. When Dizzee Rascal reminds listeners to "stay ghetto if you want, but remember to get out," he's keeping it real, UK-style.
And me? Well lil' lily me can't help but be really happy that hip-hop's idea of reality seems to get broader by the day.

Hot time, summer in the city

A few months ago, New York magazine ran an obituary for a proud New York tradition: the song of the summer.
Mark Jacobson's "The Boom-Box Years" argued that in an age characterized by studded iPods as far as the eye can see, the boombox anthems that defined the hot months of a generation - the "Hot Stuffs," the "Rapper's Delights" - are a thing of the past.
I guess he just figured Nina Sky's "Move Ya Body" was a cell-phone jingle.
His premature eulogy went on to argue that, back in the good old days, the summer song was a much more public phenomenon than it is for us droll moderns, and that as "Play That Funky Music Whiteboy" reverberated off the sticky pavements of yesteryear, it worked to unite New Yorkers in an intimate sonic embrace that is now forever lost.
In Jacobson's words: "Aside from the occasional non sequitur from a dissonant sing-along, [modern-day] listeners tend to be hermetically sealed."
Now, this isn't completely off the mark. What, with Bloombergian crackdowns on noise pollution and a decade of draconian "quality of Life improvements," I'm sure that "Lean Back" was slightly less ubiquitous than "Funkytown."
And I'll grant that the pod people seem, on a superficial level, to participate less in a public discourse on pop music than, say, a dude with a ghetto blaster.
But to argue that pop music is somehow no longer a public phenomenon, that the annual tournament of the fittest, hottest tracks no longer plays out on the city's streets, is to invite a diagnosis of hearing loss.
A walk down 10th Street on a typical summer day would have done a lot to assuage Jacobson's worries.
For starters, even if boomboxes are no longer the hottest thing coming, a 12-inch sub-woofer still is. This summer, even the Windstars (or at least the ones with spinners - don't laugh, because they are out there and that is terrifying) were bumping Lloyd Banks' claim that "On Fire" would "last the whole summer," and thereby make him sound like the prophet he's mostly not.
And it goes without saying that there are plenty of people dedicated to sharing their musical preferences with the Village at every intersection.
Then there are the various apartment complexes clustered around Avenue B that seem to have special rooms dedicated to playing hip-hop club hits at ear-splitting volume so the crowds of young Puerto Ricans huddled in front can jam out on the sidewalk.
A stop at aany deli on this little walk would have revealed that even New York's "One and Only Light Music Station," which is apparently the only radio station picked up inside delis, was playing Mario Winans and Usher. Ditto coffee shops and hipster hangouts, except they were playing "Float On" and "Take Me Out" like it was 1983. Or 2004. Or something.
Of course, in the Village, you don't even need to leave your house to find evidence that popular music is still experienced publicly, since paper-thin walls and bangin' home systems ensure a communal listening experience. Denizens of Weinstein: Enjoy the cinder block that muffles the jam rock from down the hall while you can.
And you know what? The pod people were listening to the same songs privately that they were whenever they shook the buds out of their ear canals.
The relationship between the music listened to on a public basis - the still-omnipresent beat of the street - and the music listened to on a private basis on personal jukeboxes, as facilitated by a digital marketplace that allows greater pop-musical individuation by the day, is vastly more complicated than the hermetically sealed wasteland Jacobson describes.
People are seduced by the latest pop sound standing on the corner, or in the club, or in the liquor store, or while bearing witness to their next-door-neighbors' soundtracked copulations, just as much as they were back when New York was scuzzy. That perfect chorus still sails out of the blue and into ubiquity.
But nowadays people can download it and listen to it wherever and whenever they want, too. The author seems to think that the individualization of popular music constitutes an alienation from the public sphere. But that's a gross oversimplification.
A more accurate model is the feedback loop, wherein the combined influence of public cacophony and private selection detect out the hottest joints and then turn them into aural juggernauts that get played five times a minute anywhere there's an amplifier.
Just because people are using headphones doesn't mean they're out of the loop.
Journalists like Jacobson should endeavor to embrace and understand the growing complexity by which people share music.
Every day in New York, people experience pop music in myriad fashions, each of which is worthy of careful examination and thought, because pop music is one of the most effective and beautiful ways of effecting a growing unity in our ever-more-heterogeneous populace.
That, in a nutshell, is what this column will be all about this year. I hope you'll be along for the ride.