Music Of The Weak: State Of The Union (Part Two)

When Portishead miraculously reappeared earlier this year after a 10-year hiatus, they could have easily released an album that treaded the exact same territory as their mid-90’s classics.  Especially for a genre that never took off the way its pundits wished it would, trip-hop still sounds remarkably novel nine years into the new millennium.  Fans that spent a decade wishing for a secret stash of Dummy-era recordings to materialize would have been sated, and critics—many of whom are fans themselves—would likely have been on board as well.  Instead, Portishead released Third, an album that drastically rethinks the band’s iconic sound.  Whereas 1994’s Dummy and 1997’s Portishead both revolve around the simple formula of hip-hop rhythmic foundation plus creepy sample plus turntable scratching plus Beth Gibbons’ inimitable voice, Third essentially gives 11 self-contained hypotheses of where Portishead’s sound could live now—from a drum machine face-off to a ukulele torch song—with uniformly excellent results.

Then there’s Erykah Badu.  The release of her debut album, Baduizm, in 1997, garnered Badu untold numbers of Billie Holliday comparisons, an Album of the Year nod from Time Magazine, and the usual savior-of-R&B plaudits.  Though she released two proper albums in the subsequent ten years, she became known more as a collaborator and muse to some artists she wasn’t dating and plenty she was—including OutKast, The Roots, Common, Nas and D’Angelo.  Last February, New Amerykah: Part One (4^th World War) dropped with little magazine or website coverage, and has steadily amassed a bona fide commercial and critical success—going gold and getting mentioned as Album of the Year in comments sections and music blogs, seemingly more than any other album this year—maybe in the last six.

Reaching such a critical consensus on Third and New Amerykah: Part One (a contingent of I Love Music even lobbies for “Badu/Portishead ‘08”) seems nearly earth-shattering, given the sprawl of available music in 2008—though it’s doubtful that Portishead and Erykah Badu will top either Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop or Idolator’s Critics Poll (that will probably be the worthy TV on the Radio, or the polarizing Vampire Weekend.)  The real coup of Badu/Portishead ‘08’s internet success, however, is that both albums are fucking weird:  Third reduces the low end Portishead trafficked in last we heard from them, and replaces it with movie chase-music, electronic squall and, yes, ukulele; New Amerykah channels P-Funk and J Dilla through a new hip-hop blueprint—from the minimalist “Hip Hop/The Healer” riding on sparse xylophone dings and cymbal crashes to the skittering “Twinkle,” which sounds the end of a Squarepusher track snuck onto a rap album.

If “forward-thinking” music can be loosely defined as music that not only proposes new ideas, but inspires audiences to rally around those ideas, then Portishead and Erykah Badu are shining examples of forward-thinking artists.  Last week, Music of the Weak took a look at artists who geared their 2008 albums toward audience expectations—specifically, the internet-dwelling audiences—and stumbled as a result.  This week, we look at some spots of hope in an otherwise messy musical landscape.

Another characteristic Badu and Portishead share is the amount of time they’ve spent in the music industry.  It used to be that we could count on veterans like Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Tom Waits to craft compelling albums—but we could also reasonably predict what those albums would sound like.  Even relatively progressive sounds like those found on Costello’s When I Was Cruel or Waits’ Real Gone fit snugly into each artist’s oeuvre.  The results were often nice, but rarely pushed the boundaries of popular music.  Now we can count on mature artists to also be forward-thinking artists in a way we haven’t in the history of rock & roll.  Partly, this is because the same bloggers and internet critics who are so quick to pimp underdeveloped new artists are also ferociously loyal to their longtime favorite artists—often, where “next big things” get eaten alive by the very bloggers who championed them (hello, Black Kids, Tapes n’ Tapes, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), veterans have leave to experiment with new sounds.

Last year, Jay-Z, Wu-Tang Clan, Spoon, Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Devin the Dude, Sean Price, Manu Chao, Róisín Murphy, Atmosphere and Mark E. Smith all put out forward thinking albums.  Ghostface Killah has made four in the last four years.  Each of these artists came up in the 90’s; most of them are now hitting their stride.  This also means that the very artists I talked about last week—The Streets, The Hold Steady, and Lil’ Wayne, but also Deerhunter, No Age, and Times New Viking—have plenty of time to find themselves (or find themselves again.)  While plenty of the internet’s attention has been given to underdeveloped and unproven artists, it has never been at the expense of the great new ideas—the way it has (and continues to be) in print media.

One example of everyone getting it exactly right is the near-universal critical successes of TV on the Radio’s Dear Science.  TV on the Radio has always been an artistic force—their 2004 debut, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, contained an a cappella doo-wop song—a trick that tons of indie bands have since imitated; that album also starts out, “Woke up in a magic nigger movie;” they have always experimented with a unique, drum machine-based sound that comes off as equally anachronistic and era-specific.  2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain, while being an artistic leap forward for the band and universally acclaimed, also steered them acutely toward hallowed indie-rock territory.  With the exception of “Wolf Like Me,” each song came with a mid-tempo lurch, lack of melody and overwrought production.  Dear Science simplifies that sound for their best album yet.  They get rid of the layers of fuzz, add variations in tempo, severely up the melody count, and infuse it all with funk.  It’s almost as if they snagged so many indie-rock fans specifically so that they could now lead them back to Prince.

Though it’s a dubstep-influenced dancehall house album, The Bug’s London Zoo shares many of Dear Science’s more endearing qualities.  Both albums share a consciously political undercurrent (something they both have in common with New Amerykah), both are obsessed with finding new ways to use rhythm, both lead their respective audiences into new territory; and both have received <a href="http://www.metacritic.com">near-universal acclaim</a>.  Simply by inserting dubstep into mélange of genres he’s been perfecting for years, Kevin Martin (AKA The Bug AKA God AKA Ice AKA Techno Animal) makes London Zoo a timely gateway album to dubstep, dancehall, grime, and hip-hop.

That kind of negotiation of current trends and styles is a tricky one—vital for any great artist, but easy to tip over into pandering.  Kanye West’s upcoming 808s & Heartbreak reportedly lays heavily on the use of AutoTune, made current by T-Pain’s unbreakable string of hits.  If anyone can turn AutoTune (which is intended for correcting vocalists’ pitch problems, not turning weak rappers into singers) into a legitimate instrument, it’s West.  Yet he also runs the risk of putting out his first trainwreck of an album, if his audience isn’t willing to follow him into R&B territory.  Similarly, Of Montreal’s Skeletal Lamping may (debatable) hinge upon a forward thinking idea—a dance-rock record that sounds like a mash-up made of entirely new material—it doesn’t yet appear as if their audience will hang in there with them.  My Morning Jacket’s ugly Evil Urges may have single-handedly destroyed all good will that band has built up since the turn of the millennium.

Yet My Morning Jacket couldn't have put out another Z.  Kanye and Of Montreal might have gotten away with Post-Grad and The Revenge of Hissing Fauna (He Is The Destroyer, After All), but that's not what we expect from that caliber of artist.  Each of those albums was an incredible reflection of the time, and to attempt to repeat that would be technically impossible.  There's still hope to be found in those artists that attempt to take their audiences somewhere new, and fail.  That's the test that promising new jacks like Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, The Dodos and Quiet Village will all have to face--as will Wale, whose The Mixtape About Nothing is one of the best rap albums of the year.  There's no evidence to suggest that a mixtape centered a Seinfeld theme would ever connect with an audience.  It does because Wale takes the conceit and riffs on and around it--structuring his first song like Jerry's opening monologues, but breaking later to use Michael Richards' on-stage racist breakdown as an entry point to the most intelligent discussion of the word "nigger" in music.  (Sorry Nas.)  In other words, The Mixtape About Nothing works because Wale obsesses over the art of it, not the payoff.

That's a good sign.

-Martin Brown, 2008

Comments

[Kenny]

Marty!

I'm exhausted and burnt out, but this article was the same engaging read as always and definitely the Marty I like to read! The "here's some good stuff" Marty! Yay!

[Spitfire]

And yet this article by optimist Marty didn't receive nearly as many comments. Perhaps it's because we all feel safe and happy like warm, fat, sleeping kittens. Prrrrr... But even kittens need to be shaken up now and then. I'd say more but I'm really enjoying my daydream about being a kitten. Off to find some yarn or kill some mice, or throw up on someone's rug.

[Barbara]

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Barbara