Firstly:
Apologies for the lengthy delays. I’ve just
come out of a rather full-on exam period. However,
if someone could be helpful and point me towards
a workable, free and non-trial version webpage application
for Macs, I would both be very grateful and able
to update more often. I’m sick of downloading
Dreamweaver every couple of weeks, but on the other
hand writing this particular entry on Word has taken
me absolutely ages and produced no small amount
of frustration! (which results in sub-par writing,
I fear)
Secondly:
the actual entry…
For the longest time I managed to avoid buying Wu-Tang
Clan’s Iron Flag, which
was foolish seeing as I’d heard and loved
both “Rules” and “Uzi”.
And of course it turns out that after a week of
actually owning and listening to Iron Flag, it’s
shaping up to be one of my favourite Wu-related
albums ever, perhaps the favourite. There’s
something so, I dunno, driven about it, and I don’t
just mean the rappers’ enthusiam or all the
war imagery. Listen to the grooves – especially
the first three tracks in succession – and
it’s clear that what seems to be business
as usual is in fact a fundamental shift within the
typical RZA-patented style.
The
rhythms are no longer clanking and oppressive but
pounding and kinetic; the shuffling beat on “Rules”
actually sounds sprightly, which would have been
unthinkable eight years ago. Maybe it’s just
that there’s a new sense of clarity here:
while on one level the arrangements are “rougher”
than on previous albums, they demonstrate a pleasing
immediacy and clearheadedness that suggests a significant
shortage of weed in the studio – this is the
first Wu album I’ve heard that actually sounds
like a collection of “bangers”. Which
is why, when the Trackmasters sidle in with the
luscious gothic funk of “Back In The Game”,
it doesn’t sound out of place at all: RZA
and his cohorts have already switched up their style,
be it on the shimmering horn-infused groove of “One
Of These Days” or the ruthless stomp of “In
The Hood”.
All
of which would mean nothing if the rappers weren’t
so damn on form and charismatic this time out. It’s
like the lot of them have mastered the art of the
soundbite: songs rebound from great one-liner to
great one-liner. Some are more experienced at self-promotion
than others, of course; Method Man’s verse
in “Rules” feels like my favourite thing
in the world ever, and it’s probably because
it sounds like the rap that his numerous guest appearances
on everybody else’s albums have been building
up for all along. And because he talks about the
Backstreet Boys.
More
than that though, Method Man here seems to understand
better than ever the power and charisma within the
grain of his voice, which conveys so much
more than the words would alone. I mean, the words
are great too, but they're not what I specifically
delight in. When he jumps in with "We can eat
right, or we can clap these toys," and the
last word just rolls out his mouth with that husky
burr of his, it fills me with such a profound sense
of rightness - perhaps it's the realisation
that Method Man has captured Method Man perfectly.
This is why Meth and Ghostface are my favourite
Wu members: their connection to their own characters,
and their ability to spin it off into a thousand
delightful variations via permutation of flow, is
second to none. The other rappers, though less immediately
distinctive, generally put a fine effort in as well,
and above all it's the jostling interplay between
members that has always been the Clan's constant
strength, even when RZA wasn't coming up with the
goods.
For
the most part Iron Flag keeps the pace
at a thrilling level of intensity, and as a result
the one time the group do significantly drop the
tempo, on the opulent quasi-trip hop of “Babies”,
the shift pays off massively. A gorgeous “C.R.E.A.M.”-style
slow number with an aching dovetail groove and ragged
soul vocals, not to mention the slyest bassline
ever, “Babies” mines a particular seam
of relaxed mournfulness that should have lost its
power to affect me through over-exposure. Instead,
I’m captivated. Like Lina’s Stranger
On Earth, by reclaiming the retro-modern tradition
of trip hop for black pop styles “Babies”
makes a powerful case for a third way between nu-soul
traditionalism and pop-happy futurism; one that
recognizes the potential for ear-tickling sonic
delicacy within “old” sounds without
becoming enslaved by reverence. “Babies”
does nothing that Mobb Deep at their best haven’t
done already but, um, hello? "Mobb Deep at
their best." That’s praise enough.
Part
Two of my trip hop turnaround focuses on my implausible
love for DJ Shadow’s The Private Press,
a set of ponderings I had almost completed when
my computer FUXX0rED it.
eleven-fifty-four
pm
Friday 07
Hard
to believe that I once dismissed Foxy Brown
as Lil' Kim's less talented, less compelling double
- finally actually buying last year's Broken
Silence has reinforced my slow-forming, mp3-induced
realisation that she might just be my favourite
of the big female rappers (ie. Missy, Kim, Eve,
Trina - all of whom I hold varying degrees of affection
for, generally orbiting "strong").
But
then again, the thing is that when it comes to Lil'
Kim's territory (brazen sexuality and violence),
Foxy Brown really does sound like a less distinguished
also-ran. Kim can fire off three different ways
that her pussy can snap off your dick before you
can say "talk dirty", while Fox is left
in the dust rhyming about her Christian Dior and
Prada shoes. Compare their album covers too - both
almost grotesquely sexual, but Kim's arresting pose
(unbuttoned jeans, arms covering her breasts and
a gritty snarl) seems so much more dominating and
in control than Brown's (standard issue bikini +
smirk).
It's
a matter of confidence, I think; what makes Kim
fascinating is how she sounds as if she genuinely
believes that she's the Queen Bitch, that if she
asked you to, you'd happily let her urinate in your
mouth, and that if you refused she'd be able to
take out her glock and shoot you cold. In comparison
Foxy sounds uncertain, and her attempts to paint
herself as the illest bitch seem more for her own
benefit than for the listeners (compare and contrast:
Foxy's constantly thanking the fans who have stuck
by her, whereas I'm not sure it would ever occur
to Kim that she wasn't universally admired and feared).
What
becomes clear upon repeated listens to Broken
Silence is that Foxy's weakness is actually
her strength, her lapses into uncertainty
actually creating a compelling sense of pathos to
complement the rough talk and ghetto posturing.
In fact Foxy steadfastly avoids Kim's deadening
invincibility - where Kim opens her album with a
surrealistic courtroom shoot-out, Foxy plays voiceovers
from news reports of her crashing her car, her overdosing
on drugs, her losing her mind because of all the
pressure. Foxy is more real than Lil' Kim's
(if that means anything), her tales of enforced
hospital confinement and lingering depression more
touching and tangible than Kim's near surrealistic
fantasies of cataclysmic shoot-outs. If Kim is a
crazy fuck, Foxy's fucked up.
It's
best expressed on "The Letter", a straight
recital of a suicide letter over a mournful, plangent
groove, in which Foxy apologises for and comes close
to rejecting her gangsta life, her voice constantly
cracking under the strain. "All cried out,
feel like I've gotta go" she almost whispers,
while Ron Isley croons tenderly in the background.
"730" is more incongruous: bizarrely but
brilliantly sampling an insanely cheery prog keyboard
riff courtesy of Styx, it's all uptempo thug boasts
circling around the uncomfortable admission, "They
say I'm 730/say I spaz out/"F.B. is ill/she'll
wild out"/But can y'all feel my pain?/I can't
let it slide/How can I smile/when I'm hurting so
bad inside?"
I
suspect that Foxy - or at least Foxy's persona-
is unhappy with herself, with her flaws, with her
inability to hold up underneath the weight of the
world's expectations. And perhaps it's this which
makes her sound so restless, so voracious in her
desire to land upon the formula that will reinvigorate
her. So Broken Silence whirls through a
myriad of exciting costume changes: the grinding
pound of the thuggish "B.K. Anthem", the
raunchy Neptunes-pop of "Candy", the eerie
and alien bhangra-infused "Hood Scriptures"
and the power ballad-tinged title track. Foxy's
best costume, however, is her rampant dancehall
obsession, which flowers brilliantly on a number
of tracks here.
"Tables
Will Turn", for example, is a full-on ragga
joint, boasting a trademark yard rhythm, ragged
reggae warbling and raucous toasts from Baby Cham,
not to mention a high-pitched chorus that could
have been swiped from J-Pop song. It's not Foxy's
best ragga turn though, because she herself sticks
to her usual delivery. Much better is "Run
Dem": over a conventional hip hop arrangement
(although to be fair it's a totally gripping concoction
of prowling piano runs and dramatic strings) Foxy
slips between her natural style and utterly convincing
ragga chat so naturally that it appears she can't
tell the difference between them. "So what?"
you might ask, "why not just get Lady Saw for
the real thing?" But there's something thrilling
about Foxy's drift in and out of comprehensibility,
her deviation between the familiar and the exotic.
When
I put on a ragga album, I lose sight of the fetishistic
aspect of ragga's alienness after about ten minutes
- it's not that I get bored, but rather that I quickly
adjust to the foreignness of the approach. Foxy's
a tourist like me, so she understands that the secret
to the appeal of the exotic lies in context and
careful presentation. Thus her ragga moments blaze
out like a stripe of red on a grey background, or
a liberal dosing of spice to season her savoury
mixture. On the similarly excellent "Na Na
Be Like" (which benefits from a restlessly
rustling groove that totally slays me) Foxy deliberately
divides her chorus into a New York/Jamaica/Jamaica/New
York juxtaposition, as if to evoke an image of her
venturing out into a rudegyal netherworld, before
returning to the firmament.
For
Foxy, dancehall is more than a costume among many:
it's an emotionally necessitated roleplaying exercise.
Secretly riddled with insecurity, Foxy uses her
Jamaican persona to achieve the hardness, the sense
of invincibility that she can't capture otherwise.
Knowledge = power, and Foxy's mastery of what is
essentially another language gives her a crucial
edge over other bitches, because she understands
another way of conceptualising and enacting violence
and superiority. She's literally allowing herself
to be possessed by dancehall, and drawing on the
almost superhuman strength this spirit provides.
The
fascination of Jamaica (and thus of the exotic generally)
exerts itself over a disproportionate number of
female rappers; Kim, Eve and Missy have all succumbed
to varying degrees. Foxy is the only one so far
to be savvy enough - or desperate enough? - to allow
it to actively corrupt and corrode her persona,
to give herself over to psychological impurism.
This marks her out as a gangsta rapper particularly
and peculiarly resistant to ossification of character;
hopefully though she'll hold onto enough of her
current flux and restlessness so as to make her
next venture a similarly exciting one.
eleven-twenty-one
pm
Sunday
02
I
hope David H continues on with Shazam,
which i only just discovered. The first entry certainly
provoked a laugh. Also, Mr. David Werner, if you
read this could you please e-mail me? I've lost
your e-mail address/details, and I believe I owe
you a cd or something!
eleven-forty-seven
pm
I
do enjoy it an awful lot, but I must admit to being
ever so slightly disappointed by Coloma's
album Silverware, which maybe
suffers slightly from trying a bit too hard to turn
microhouse into art-pop, losing the best part of
microhouse (the grooves!) in the process. It's a
starkly serene, frequently beautiful album, but
even when a minimal house template is used and not
discarded, it is stretched so thin that it sounds
like a largely superficial aesthetic choice; the
arrangements are about as close to microhouse as
Depeche Mode's Exciter is. Which isn't
a bad thing, but after hearing "In A Snowstorm"
and especially "Transparent" I was hoping
that Coloma might achieve that rare (or, at least,
rarely successful) alchemic combination of soul-searching
and dancing.
There's
a distinction, perhaps, between Coloma's approach
to the song, and that of other microhouse artists.
A mental rundown suggests to me that most forays
into pop by microhouse artists have tended to be
interested in pop's fomal qualities: a love of choruses,
of the emotive pull and engaging directness of pop's
aching refrains and simple chord changes, of the
grain and texture of pop singers' voices. These
artists aren't interested in the "song"
as a medium for a message, but rather as a conglomerate
of appealing sonic tricks handed down through the
decades.
Taken
to its extreme, this approach reveals itself in
the cubist-pop of M. Mayer's "Amanda",
or on Sascha Funke's deconstruction of Bros, or
MRI's homage to Aaliyah. Coloma's singer Rob Taylor
lent his vocals to Mathias Schaffhauser's "Hey
Little Girl", which sounds like a extended
house mix of Icehouse's version rather than a new
performance, so faithful is it to the architectural
impressiveness of the original. Like the other artists
mentioned, Schaffhauser regards pop songs as constructs,
with his take on "Hey Little Girl" being
the perfect simulacrum, a thoughtful improvement
upon the original via the addition of dance friendly
beats and a deeper, dub-inflected arrangement.
Coloma
meanwhile regard the pop song as a dream-world,
an impressionistic landscape in which no two emotions
appear twice. Whereas on "Hey Little Girl"
Taylor's vocals exhibited a studied perfection,
on Silverware his singing is multifaceted
and idiosyncratic, slipping in and out of a thick
British accent and riddled with eccentricities.
The songs seem to be self-consciously designed as
texts - the overripe lyricism of You
Came As Yourself (a tale of a costume party
filled to the brim with misty-eyed brides, prophetic
soothesayers, banana-skinned clowns and celebrity
chefs; indeed, filled to the brim with "such
perfect workmanship/such oneupmanship" as couplets
rhyming "mercurial Alice" with "poisoned
chalice") suggests that it was written purely
for the joy of reproducing the words in the lyric
booklet, although in point of fact Coloma saw fit
not to include one.
(I should note that I reckon Taylor is an intermittently
brilliant lyricist. There's a moment of particular...
precision?... on the glowering "Waltzer",
when he grandly declaims, "I'm a bearded lady!
Who's gonna buy me a drink?!?").
And
the music, ah the music, so rich in gloomy lugubriousness
and morose minimalism: droning organs, twinkling
music boxes, misanthropic bass riffs, sullenly chiming
guitars and gently clicking static all connoting
indulgent torpor. So why do Coloma feel the urge
to so frequently tie it all onto a pulsating 4/4
beat? What does "house" - in this, its
most abstracted and peripheral articulation - signify
to the duo? Perhaps it's in fact that old red herring:
the house beat as a restraint mechanism. Only it's
not a red herring here, because the duo are romanticising
the style's supposed deficiency. Coloma intentionally
use the 4/4 beat as a straightjacket - or, rather,
a corset - to judiciously stifle their
songs, to render their gasps at once more painful
and somehow more vital. It's an act of containment
that might be a product of fear of letting the outside
world in, but I rather think it's the opposite.
This is defiantly not landscape music,
not horizon music, because Coloma's haunting
visions are of the things we carry within us, the
secrets caught between our skin and our clothes.
Grooving
quietly but firmly, "Transparent" stands
apart from its bedfellows on Silverware,
perhaps because it was given over to labelmates
Decomposed Subsonic to reproduce and remix into
a spartan dancefloor wallflower. Coloma return the
favour on Decomposed Subsonic's "Part of the
Machine", with singer Rob Taylor providing
vocals. "Part of the Machine" is an entirely
different beast to "Transparent", however:
a menacing bass burble announces an evil intent
that is swiftly rammed home by the most punishing,
remorseless house beat outside of a Green Velvet.
And like some of Green Velvet's work, "Part
of the Machine" sounds a bit like an attempt
to make gabba at house tempo - there's that same
edge of delirious, dangerous abandon, a sensation
of too much intensity. The beats have an
almost resonant clamour about them, sounding like
the cold, clanking timpanis of the underworld. There's
this great moment, too, where the whole thing slows
down, grinding to a shuddering halt, before snapping
back into action, as if hell itself momentarily
closed down to absorb a particularly evil new arrival.
For
his part, Taylor sounds at once neurotic and unhinged
as he sets about doggedly translating the thoughts
of a psychotic robot. "I'm a spring, I'm a
cog, I'm a wheel/I'm a king, I'm a pawn in the deal/I'm
cool, I'm calm, I'm clean/I'm a part of the machine!"
Compared to the sculpted grandeur of Silverware,
it's a surprisingly blunt performance, though you
might not know if you heard this in isolation. I
don't think I necessarily like the results more
than Silverware, but I think I like it
more often, its harshness hitting a spot
that the fragility, the precariousness of Silverware
perhaps prevents it from touching. Coloma write
songs trapped in straightjackets; "Part of
the Machine" is the straightjacket.
eleven-ten pm
