Prince – The Black Album

The Black Album

Prince – The Black Album Warner Bros. 2-45793 (1994)

When Whitney Houston died, there was much talk about how she was long ridiculed by some for appealing too much to white audiences.  That unfortunate sentiment — that only insular identities based on differences were valid — looked down on what has long been called “crossover” appeal.  It is the idea that different musical styles that appeal to different groups can be synthesized into a hybrid that appeals to audiences for all its sources.  Prince in his prime years of 1981-87 was every bit a crossover success.  But some unfortunate pandering reared its head toward the end of the 80s.  So he made “The Black Album,” with some overt attempts to appeal to black audiences.  For whatever reasons, though, the album was aborted in late 1987 after a few promo copies were given to industry insiders — replaced by the adequate but by comparison inferior Lovesexy album, which had a more mainstream pop sound.  Due to its dubious status, this was a much bootlegged album until a belated official release in 1994.

In the mid-/late-80s Prince was working on an album project tentatively titled Crystal Ball, which was never released (another collection later adopted the same name) but evolved into Sign “O” the Times.  One of the tracks (“Rockhard in a Funky Place”) intended for Crystal Ball that was dropped from Sign “O” the Times ended up here.  Other songs still have a bit of the sonic flavor of Sign too.  That is a positive, in that Sign was Prince at his best.  But the opening few cuts (“Le Grind,” “Cindy C.”) are made for dance clubs.  There are other songs that suggest how “Slow Love” from Sign would be more representative of things Prince would do in the 1990s.

The weakness of the album is the middle section.  The P-funk workout “Superfunkycalifragisexy” gets monotonous quickly.  “Bob George” is a skit-like song with Prince playing the role of a macho critic of himself.  It’s a strange, unsettling performance, much talked about by critics and fans, but also a bit disturbingly violent and the backing track drags on like an afterthought.  It is a fascinating song in concept, but actually listening to it is kind of secondary.

The album picks up mightily at the end.  The jazzy instrumental “2 Nigs United 4 West Compton” is a highlight, complete with chaotic group segments, stinging synthesizer, and a lengthy bass solo that actually propels the songs forward.  The closer “Rockhard in a Funky Place” is also unstoppable.  It’s a funny song too.  The lyric “I just hate to see an erection go to waste” seems like the same sentiment from Leonard Cohen‘s “Don’t Go Home with Your Hard-on” (Death of a Ladies’ Man).

In the end, The Black Album is weighted down by some filler, and it lacks an obvious candidate for a hit single.  Still, it is mostly really good stuff from the tail end of Prince’s finest years.  Anyone who has exhausted Prince’s greatest material of the 80s (and that should include, well, everyone) but still wants more should consider checking this out.  In spite of the inconsistency of The Black Album, the Purple One scarcely mustered this intensity again at album length.

Jackie-O Motherfucker – The Magick Fire Music

The Magick Fire Music

Jackie-O Motherfucker – The Magick Fire Music Ecstatic Peace! E# 70c (2000)

Much like Earth gained notoriety on Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version (1993) playing heavy metal rock at a glacial pace, to the point that the same chords take on a different character, Jackie-O Motherfucker played long jams that vaguely resembled so-called post-rock acts of the preceding decade (Dirty Three, Gastr del Sol, Godspeed You! Black Emperor) but slowed down and with jazzier improvisational choices.  The opening song “Extension” is like “Blind Willie” from Sonny Sharrock‘s Guitar (1986), played at a snail’s pace, with an amiable, meandering progression like Sharrock’s “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black” from Black Woman (1969).  The slow tempos also give this album an atmospheric quality, not quite to the point of being ambient, “furniture” music, but to the point that the percussive and rhythmic qualities of the playing subside.  The band’s later recordings leaned further toward both folk music and juxtapositions of disparate genres.  The way this music takes its time to unfold is refreshing.  It is also cautiously optimistic.  Worth seeking out.

Prince – The Very Best of Prince

The Very Best of Prince

Prince – The Very Best of Prince Warner Bros. R2 74272 (2001)

More appropriately titled “Greatest Hits” than “The Very Best of,” you could stand to get a much better overview of The Purple One than this compilation — The Hits/The B-Sides would be a slightly better choice.  Still, for the mildly Prince-curious this gives you most of the biggest hits to use as a starting point.

What Prince stood for in the 1980s — his prime — was a contemporary R&B (as Little Richard has it, that means “real black”) counterpart to David Bowie of the 70s.  Prince was this slightly androgynous, racy character who had these incredibly catchy, popular and just plain great songs.  Now, the fact that Prince was coming along in the wake of Bowie breaking into the charts might be explained by the somewhat socially conservative streak found in afro-american culture — especially when it comes to sexuality, the core of Prince’s musical subject matter.  Strange that Prince died just a few months after Bowie then.

An Enemy of the People

An Enemy of the People

An Enemy of the People (1978)

Warner Bros.

Director: George Schaefer

Main Cast: Steve McQueen, Charles Durning, Bibi Andersson, Robin Pearson Rose

Action star Steve McQueen plays the lead in this  film adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play about a whistleblower.  There are a few such films around, like The Life of Emile Zola (1937) with Paul Muni.  McQueen portrays a doctor in a small Scandinavian town that is planning to open a hot springs to boost tourism — they practically salivate over their ambitions to be richer and more cosmopolitan than other towns nearby.  When the doctor sends water samples to a distant university, however, the tests show that the water from the springs has been polluted by a nearby leather tanning factory.  He seeks to make this publicly known.  At this point the townspeople turn against him.  The viscous actions of the townspeople might seem extreme — they stage a biased, sham “town hall” meeting in which they deny him the opportunity to speak and then vote him “an enemy of the people”  — if it were not for copious real-life examples that have played out similarly (or worse).  The closest comparison for an individual might be those involving lead poisoning, like the scientist Clair Patterson who was vilified for trying to remove ban lead as an additive for automotive fuel, or, perhaps even the way the lead pipe industry, the tobacco industry, and so many others have acted throughout history.  McQueen is quite good, actually.  Complete with long beard that makes him almost unrecognizable, he plays the lead a bit like a Nineteenth Century hippie (or the equivalent for small town Scandinavia).  The cast playing his immediate family is excellent in their pleading and perilous sympathy, save for Charles Durning, who is miscast as McQueen’s brother, the self-important mayor and chairman of the corporation opening the shot springs — he wasn’t the first choice, brought in as a last-minute replacement for Nicol Williamson.  It is sort of appropriate that this film was scarcely shown upon release.  It may have come along shortly after Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, and some other famous acts of whistleblowing, but vested interests despise whistleblowers.  Just look at the attempts to suppress publications like Hau Hoo’s 現代相似禪評論 [A Critique of Current Pseudo-Zen] (1916) and A.S. Mercer‘s The Banditti of the Plains (1894) — the later having only a few surviving copies at one point, some of which were riddled with bullet holes (!) that testified to the attempts to suppress its availability.  An Enemy of the People isn’t wholly successful.  It has a claustrophobic quality like many film adaptations of stage plays.  But the story is compelling and many of the performances first-rate (Robin Pearson Rose is excellent as the eldest daughter choosing conviction over personal ambition).

Antipop Consortium – Arrhythmia

Arrhythmia

Antipop Consortium – Arrhythmia Warp WARPCD94 (2002)

Hip-hop often is very boring, because so much of it is so conservative.  There are plenty of acts following the party line, so-to-speak.  Everything is wrapped in the protective blanket of genre “rules”, and expectations and ambitions are contained within carefully delineated formulas that can seem like an inescapable supermassive black hole.  Then, on the other end of the spectrum, there are acts like APC.  With cerebral, abstract lyrics jammed full of non sequiturs and poetic wordplay, plus production that bears more resemblance to European electronica than traditional breakbeats, these guys definitely offered a unique sound.  And they were willing to depart completely from convention to do that.  It seems APC are loathed by many solely because their records don’t resemble so much other hip-hop music.  But that kind of criticism (if I’m generous enough to even call it that) is so thick-headed and laden with narrow-minded assumptions that it hardly is worth the effort to debunk such obviously flawed logic.

One of my favorite aspects of Arrhythmia, clearly the group’s best album, is the way in which it sidesteps all the nonsense that I earlier dubbed “the party line”.  This album isn’t about grown men trying to live out adolescent fantasies.  It isn’t about macho boasting of vicious and violent tendencies, not to mention empty self-promotion and grandstanding about non-existent talent.  It isn’t really about demeaning women or homosexuals.  It isn’t an apologist’s monologue on life as a dimwitted fool.  Of course, the album isn’t explicitly about avoiding those things, in some kind of preachy, paternalistic fashion either (except maybe parts of “We Kill Soap Scum,” if I read the symbolism right).  Like I said, it sidesteps all that, and ultimately derives its power from allowing us listeners to ignore the party line out of existence.  Instead the listener is treated to esoteric wisdom, abstract personal narratives and funny musical tricksterism.

The group:  M. Sayyid was perhaps the best rapper around at the time, in terms of his technical ability to vocalize, and yet was still willing to joke around with his lyrics.  Then there’s Beans, who is an incredibly well-rounded rapper, capable of writing some impressively complex lyrics.  High Priest may have the least imposing talents, but he’s a master of rhythm and timing, and he can build tension by applying those skills like few others.  Producer Earl Blaize finely crafts minimalist, glitchy beats in a way that smoothly pulls together the contributions of three rappers who are really quite different in their individual styles.

This disc is definitely not the kind of thing you would throw on at a party or a dance club.  It’s more inwardly drawn and inflected.  There is hardly a single sample on the whole disc, stripping the affair of clear reference points.  This isn’t to say more dance-oriented stuff is automatically whack, but why must everything be that way?  APC go in another direction.  They certainly aren’t the only ones who do that.  Although I do feel like they were among the few acts around the turn of the millennium identified with the hip-hop genre that made music that was interesting for what new ideas it presented rather than merely how well it satisfied genre formulas.  Hell, there ain’t many act period that can do that, hip-hop or otherwise.

But of course, if there is no other reason to love this album, I must add that here High Priest delivers one of my favorite lines in hip-hop on “Dead In Motion”:

“Shasta after I slash rap with a protractor”

Airborn Audio – Good Fortune

Good Fortune

Airborn Audio – Good Fortune Ninja Tune ZENCD95 (2005)

Years ago, the groundbreaking hip-hop trio Antipop Consortium broke up (they later reunited for a tepid “comeback”). Beans went solo, releasing two albums and an EP in the following two years. The other members, M. Sayyid and High Priest, formed Airborn Audio. A full two years after the breakup, Airborn Audio’s debut Good Fortune arrived. It would seem that an appropriate response would be, “Why the wait?” Good Fortune is pretty disappointing. It certainly is a solid album, one as good or better than any mainstream hip-hop album of the day you could name. Still, Sayyid and Priest have to be held to a higher standard. On Antipop’s landmark Arrhythmia, Sayyid could tear up lyrics with speed, clarity and rhythm that most rappers only dream of attaining (well, contemporaries like DMX and 50 Cent probably gave up on that dream a long time ago). Now, his rhymes are mostly lethargic, and always heartbreakingly mundane. Both Sayyid and Priest waste most of Good Fortune on pointless jabs at and nods to other rappers, boring pop culture references and lame self-promotion. Their raw talent bubbles up from time to time, but mostly it is hidden behind hokey effects.

The major disappointment with Good Fortune is that these former innovators have now thrown their hats into the same ring as countless others. Despite the claim on “Monday Through Sunday” that Airborn Audio has the “same agenda” as Antipop, it comes out sounding like a lie. If even if this album is slightly ahead of the pack that counts for little. That would give too much credit to direction in which the pack was headed! The best songs, like “Bright Lights,” lean on beats that probably would have been cutting edge eight or ten years ago on a DJ Spooky album. Today it’s hard to get excited about them.

Good Fortune proved far less interesting and nowhere near as the best releases from former bandmate Beans. This album seems like a step backward for two of hip-hop’s brightest young talents.

Gummo

Gummo

Gummo (1997)

Fine Line Features

Director: Harmony Korine

Main Cast: Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Chloë Sevigny, Linda Manz, Jacob Sewell

Harmony Korine is the heir to the likes of Pier Paolo Pasolini, making films that are about sociological premises.  So, Spring Breakers (2013) makes the most sense after reading Thorstein Veblen‘s book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), with its sardonic descriptions of how rituals of the elite (much like spring break for college students) presuppose the means to fund such activities — the poor have to steal (money) in order to acquire that social capital themselves.  There was a review of Gummo by Janet Maslin in the New York Times who wrote that no other film that year “will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine’s debut feature.”  But, to me at least, the film is the exact opposite of that, and it was New York Liberals like Maslin projecting their bigotries onto the film.  This is what I though was remarkable about Gummo: it forces liberals, etc. to reveal their elitist bigotry and tentatively reveal their oppressive tendencies.  Uwe Nettlebeck (producer of the early Faust albums) made a similar comment in the 1970s about the need to “force the other side to show its true colours; they won’t react in a liberal way as they would like, but in an authoritarian way as they must when things get serious”.

Gummo is most like Pasolini’s Accatone (1961) in taking unsympathetic characters and trying to humanize and find sympathy with them.  It is a difficult proposition.  Korine took 1990s daytime TV trashsploitation and tried to celebrate its inhabitants.  It’s fair to say he’s exploiting them too — its almost impossible to make a film without some kind of exploitation — but he’s also pushing against condescension, taking on what seems on the surface irredeemable.  He also embraces the weird as an end unto itself, as kind of non sequiturs of capitalism that create small pockets of escape.

Oh, and anyone wondering what the title “Gummo” refers to, that would be Gummo Marx, the vaudeville performer who quit his brothers’ troupe before they went into film.

Eric B. & Rakim – Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em

Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em

Eric B. & Rakim – Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em MCA MCAD-6416 (1990)

Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em was an ambitious hip-hop album in its day. The duo pulled rank. Their earlier albums were more popular and acclaimed then, but it’s those other ones that today sound like relics.

There are at least three stages to hearing this album. First, you just dig it because it’s a solid album with a snap to the beats. Next, you start to decipher Rakim’s intricate lyrics. Finally, you realize how intricate Eric B.’s mixes are and how they intensify everything on the disc. You don’t even have to get past phase one. Really that’s the beauty of it. Bobbing to it or dissecting it, either works.

That “Keep ‘Em Eager to Listen” comes right before “Set ‘Em Straight” says it all. Nothing on the album is accidental. This feels like the album Eric B. & Rakim always wanted to make if they could. Well they did it. The record receives all the talent like uninvited guests who arrive with inexplicable expectancy.

There seem to be more than enough James Brown samples to go around. It takes quite a Godfather fan to pick out precisely where they come from though. Eric B. breaks everything down a rebuilds something of an entirely different form. He was a bridge between old school and new school. As a DJ he could scratch with anybody, but he could build cohesive songs through improvisation. Eric B. seems to have a greater awareness of why he’s improvising and where this is all headed.

Rakim was simply one of the most talented rappers and lyricists of his day — a status that isn’t exclusive to hip-hop. “In the Ghetto” is the unsentimental tale of his grim existence. Rakim flexes his lyrical muscle to get some needed breathing room.

This is known as a lyricist’s album, but that sells Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em short. Rakim lays out some fine lyrics but it’s the delivery and the assembly of the choice whole that make this a classic. Bleak in a dense mass. The lyrics fit into an orchestrated statement said in more than words.

Hip-hop albums too often end up disposable vehicles for nonsense fads. Eric B. & Rakim set out to make an album for the ages. Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em quickened hip-hop’s ascension. A few have continued the challenge. The others perhaps ignore this as it might reveal their own weaknesses.