I don’t do as much musicblogging as I expected to when I restarted ADDTF; I suppose that’s because I find it difficult to be pithy when talking about music. (Seriously, get me started on “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads someday. Make sure you have an hour or to kill first, though.) But the glorious synchronicity engine that is the Internet conspired to place three interesting articles in my path over the past few days, so I’m passing them on to you.
First, One Louder does one of its periodic YouTube music video roundups by gathering together a whole bunch of Cocteau Twins clips. The day before I read this post I watched the video for the Twins’ “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” on The Alternative, VH1 Classic’s indispensable punk-new wave-indie-altrock video show; damn, was I ever moved by the late-afternoon melancholy and England-in-the-’80s ambiance of that song and that video. I find that songs from that general era and nation fill me with nostalgia for a time and place I never experienced. Honestly, listen to (say) “West End Girls” and tell me that you aren’t suddenly in a flat in London at 4 o’clock in the morning, finishing off a bottle of something and chainsmoking as your makeup runs off. (Yes, I’m a woman in these pangs of nostalgia.) Maybe it’s from my repeated exposure to Hellraiser and the comics of Alan Moore, I don’t know. Anyway, go watch some videos and enjoy some Liz Fraser. (“Song to the Siren”‘s in there too.)
Next is a compelling piece by Willing Davidson of Slate on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and what it means to have black performers on stage in front of a black audience when their usual audience is predominantly white, and when they’ve been eclipsed in popularity in both communities by unapologetically commercial acts. I’ve thought a lot about hip hop in these terms lately. When I was in college (1996-2000), “good hip hop” was the musical lingua franca, something everyone could agree on. I wouldn’t say I listened to a lot of “conscious” hip hop at that time, to use the term preferred by Davidson, nor was I a backpacker per se, but a steady diet of the Wu Tang Clan and all its solo offshoots, Gravediggaz, Prince Paul, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Dr. Octagon, Kool Keith, the Automator, the Fugees, Lauryn Hill, the Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, UNKLE, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Tricky, Public Enemy, Massive Attack, Outkast, Portishead, and so forth sustained me and pretty much everybody I knew; few of us felt any motivation to get any more mainstream than The Chronic, Doggystle, and Ready to Die. These days nearly all of those acts and their brethren in the conscious and backpacker schools are relegated to the dustbin of history, and critics devote column after column to Lil’ Jon. I think it’s tough to overestimate the influence that talented and commercial producers like Timbaland and Missy Elliot (brilliant), and Dre and the Neptunes (brilliant about 50% of the time), had in creating that state of affairs, but I find that I barely relate, or listen, to contemporary hip hop at all anymore. Is this just a case of “in my day we listened to real music, not this noise!“? I guess that’s possible. But the thing is, I find that I don’t care, and I also find that that is not an acceptable viewpoint to have in critics’ circles these days. After all (the theory goes), one must be interested in what is popular and therefore relevant. (You see similar arguments being made against comics readers who don’t read a lot of manga, incidentally.) My question is, what is it about hip hop (and manga, I guess) that has enabled popularity to replace quality in terms of the reason why a listener/reader/critic should or should not get into a particular work? Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but the popularity barometer seems to come up a lot more often than you’ll see someone say “No, seriously, ‘Laffy Taffy’ is every bit as good as ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.'” And it really is endemic to hip hop fandom and criticism more than anything else–I mean, very rarely do you see any film critics of merit say “Man, quit wasting your time with Cronenberg–Michael Bay’s who the kids are into these days!” Why the condescension toward Dave Chappelle for still really, really liking the first Fugees record, then? (See this comment by Matthew “Fluxblog” Perpetua for a more forceful statement of that same sentiment.)
Finally, here’s something I didn’t expect: Rich Juziak, whose FourFour blog is best known (to me, at least) for its fabulously bitchy weekly recaps of America’s Next Top Model, posted the best thing I’ve ever read about Mariah Carey. She’s an artist about whom I have no feelings to speak of, really, save pity for what the pressures of fame have done to her instrument (why doesn’t anyone notice she can’t sing anymore?) and her dignity (I once remarked that as long as she was married to Tommy Mottola she’d never take her clothes off in her videos; then came the divorce, and bang, the clip for “Honey” made my point better than I ever could). But man, this piece manages to be insightful about her, her work, and the entire music industry in any number of ways. Highly recommended.