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Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (pt. 2)

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36chambers

Dear Matt:

Our little project has gotten me thinking a bit about the appropriate way to express a first impression of an album. I know we’ve both struggled with this on occasion: this format forces us to pretend that we have something meaningful to say about albums we’ve only just heard, and for which we only have the context the other provides. (Which, I mean, sometimes that’s plenty.)

Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to express total bewilderment. Occasionally, we’ve been merely nonplussed, or slightly distasteful. There have been expressions of immediate enthusiasm. And on occasion we’ve had something genuinely interesting to say, right from the get go.

I’m just going to be forthright here: I have nothing interesting or insightful to say about the massively dense album that I finished listening to for the first time mere moments ago. Frankly, I still have mild whiplash (and possibly tendonitis) from clicking all of the links in your assignment.

Let’s just acknowledge that the appropriate response to a first hearing of 36 Chambers is to marvel at its obvious brilliance and not pretend like you have anything special to add. Having acknowledged that, I’m going to reel off some things I love about 36 Chambers.

I love the unified aesthetic of the album. Considering that it’s basically a cavalcade of great verses from rappers that have almost no stylistic common ground, it is a testament to RZA’s guiding vision that 36 Chambers feels cohesive.

I love the interview at the end of ‘Can It All Be So Simple.’ The members of the Clan are such interesting people that I could just listen to them talk about themselves and each other for the duration of the whole album. Which, come to think of it, I basically just did.

I love GZA. ‘Clan in Da Front’ is, indeed, genius. I feel an urge to check out Liquid Swords coming on.

I love the way Wu-Tang collectively assumes that we know everything about them. It’s like picking up a random issue of a long-running superhero comic and trying to follow the plot. This may sound facetious, but I mean it sincerely. The phrase ‘world-building’ can easily be made to apply to Wu-Tang, and they accomplish it by implying that you’re listening in on a small portion of a much larger saga. I love that.

I love Ol’ Dirty Bastard, because WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING NOBODY RAPS LIKE THIS

I love RZA’s verse on ‘Tearz.’ It’s got to be one of the most heartfelt rap verses I’ve heard, up there with Killer Mike’s on ‘Crown.’

I love complex dynamics between radically different creative individuals. One of the reasons I love writing about music is that music always involves throwing a bunch of creative people into rooms together, and that is a story-generating machine. The Wu-Tang Clan are every bit as fascinating an assembly as the Second Viennese School, the Canterbury Scene, or the lightly fictionalized glam rockers of Velvet Goldmine (the latter of which is explicit foreshadowing of your next assignment).

I love ostentatious displays of cleverness.

I love recognizing the DNA of music I love in much earlier music.

I love when universally acclaimed classics live up to their reputations.

— Matthew

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Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (pt. 1)

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36chambers

Dear Matthew:

In the spirit of your most recent assignment for me, I’ve also got a ‘back to the basics’ assignment for you this week. My first assignment for you was Deltron 3030, an underground rap classic. And I know you’re a fan of a lot of other modern underground/alternative rap, like MF DOOM and Run the Jewels. I’ve also often noted that I’ve heard the DNA of some of my favourite modern music in older records you’ve assigned to me. This is going to be a long post, so please bear with me.

Your assignment this week, then, is nothing less than one of the most influential albums in rap history: Wu-Tang Clan‘s 1993 debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

•          •          •

To understand why 36 Chambers was so influential, you have to know a bit about what hip hop was like before Wu-Tang. Rap music started in the late ’70s at street parties in New York City — specifically, in poor black neighbourhoods in the Bronx — thrown by guys like DJ Kool Herc. You’ve probably heard the song most often cited as the first recorded rap song, the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight‘. This is pretty representative of most early hip hop music: an MC performing rhyming spoken raps over a looped disco beat. (Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks‘ is another good example of this.) The rhyming schemes don’t usually get much more complicated than having the last syllable of a line rhyme with the previous one. The words are generally about dancing, partying, and the talents and general desirability of the MC and his friends, and the delivery is almost singsong. At this point, musically, rap is kind of just this weird offshoot of disco.

By the mid to late ’80s, however, rap has taken off in a major way. In what is now generally known as the New School era, artists like Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and the like are all becoming household names. Def Jam, a NYC-based label specializing in hip hop, is now a record industry titan. Beatmakers start using technology like samplers, drum machines and synthesizers in their production. Turntablism is born. Soul and funk music, particularly that of James Brown, is sampled extensively. You also start to see rhyme schemes get more complex — rappers like Rakim start using things like internal and multisyllabic rhyming, and move away from that distinctive ’80s singsong-style rap toward a more monotone, yet aggressive, delivery. (A lot of critics say that, in terms of lyricism, you can draw a pretty distinctive line in the sand in terms of pre-Rakim and post-Rakim.)

After this decade of explosive creativity, rap is now A Thing. It has coalesced from a scene into a genre, and now it’s expanding. On the West Coast, Dr. Dre and N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) pioneer a style that comes to be called gangsta rap that focuses on the violent criminal lifestyles said rappers (claim to) lead. (Dre also pioneers a style called G-funk that features lots of smooth synth leads and highly synthetic drums.) Now there’s a sort of tension in the industry, because labels want to sell rap music to white people, but white people are kind of scared by black people who make songs with titles like ‘Fuck tha Police‘. So in the early ’90s, the major labels are still putting out rap, but it’s mostly a sort of ‘rap lite’ — marketable and completely inoffensive acts like DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince or Young MC.

In 1992, this is the musical landscape in which Robert Fitzgerald Diggs finds himself. His cousin, Gary Grice, has released a solo album as the Genius, but it was not particularly well promoted by the label. Diggs is pissed off at the industry for what he sees as an unwillingness to invest in music made by black street kids, from whence hip hop was originally begot. So, he formulates a plan: in five years, he and his high-school-dropout friends are going to take over the industry.

It’s an insane plan. But what’s even more insane is that it worked.

•          •          •

Drawing from the Supreme Alphabet, Diggs — formerly Prince Rakeem — rechristens himself the RZA. He rounds up his cousins and rap comrades Grice (now the GZA) and Russell Jones (Ol’ Dirty Bastard), and six others: Clifford Smith (Method Man), Corey Woods (Raekwon), Dennis Coles (Ghostface Killah), Jason Hunter (Inspectah Deck), Elgin Turner (Masta Killa), and Lamont Hawkins (U-God). Sharing a mutual love of kung-fu movies and Five-Percenter philosophy, they dub themselves the Wu-Tang Clan, after the practitioners of the most deadly sword style. In RZA’s Staten Island basement, he presents the Clan with his proposal: he has a plan to do nothing less than take over the entire industry — but the only way it will work is if he calls all of the shots. If you sign on, you’re essentially signing your career decisions over to him for the next five years, no questions asked.

The pact is made. RZA collects $100 from each member who wants a verse to produce the group’s first single, ‘Protect Ya Neck‘. It’s a gritty, lo-fi number literally made in a basement that doesn’t have anything you could really call a chorus, or even a hook. Instead, it’s got eight whiplash-inducingly different MCs trading verses for almost five minutes. RZA spikes his crunchy drum samples and eerie piano loops with kung-fu movie dialogue and a take-no-prisoners verse of his own. Verbally, the Clan is mixing post-Rakim lyricism with the violence and realness of gangsta rap, with a heaping dose of pop-culture references on top*. They bully a few local DJs into playing it, but they don’t have to try hard — it’s a dynamite record that sounds nothing like anything anyone else is doing.

Soon, hype for their first album is building. RZA is able to negotiate a unique deal with the nascent Loud Records. For a paltry $60,000, Loud gets the Wu-Tang Clan, but with a catch: the individual members of the Clan can pursue solo careers in any way they see fit, with any label they see fit, with the full backing of the Wu-Tang name. In 1993, 36 Chambers hits the streets, and it’s a smash hit. Already, RZA’s plan is working.

See, RZA’s plan isn’t really about getting the Wu-Tang Clan a record deal; remember, he wants to infiltrate the entire industry. So, almost immediately after 36 Chambers drops, RZA is back to work in his basement studio making beats for the first round of Wu-Tang solo projects. And RZA doesn’t just want his Clan members to get any old record deal — he uses specific members to target specific labels and markets. He knows Raekwon and Ghostface will appeal to the street/gangsta crowd. He knows the aptly named Genius will appeal to the college crowd. He figures Method Man has the most mainstream crossover appeal, which is why Meth gets one of only two solo tracks on 36 Chambers, and why RZA signs him to Def Jam. ODB is, as always, the wildcard. (There’s a great NPR On Record piece on this from which I am cribbing heavily.)

Over the next three years, RZA produces a whopping five Wu-Tang solo projects, all on different labels. All are well received. (He also somehow finds the time to join Prince Paul’s Gravediggaz.) And now, not only is the Wu-Tang name everywhere, but so is the sound. Cut-up soul samples are everywhere. Harsh, street-life rhymes are everywhere. The Ol’ Dirty Bastard is everywhere. Wu-Tang is nothing short of a movement. In 1997, the group reunites for a double LP, Wu-Tang Forever. It debuts at number one.

RZA has done it. In five years, he has taken over the industry, exactly as promised — and he’s kickstarted a major East Coast rap renaissance in the process.

•          •          •

So, how does 36 Chambers hold up in 2015? Well, I think the first thing you’ll notice is how modern it sounds. It’s certainly a product of its time, but it’s not that big a leap from this record to something like Deltron 3030 or Madvillainy, or even RTJ2. To use a comparison I’ve used before on this blog, 36 Chambers is the Seinfeld of underground rap: to a modern ear, its explosive originality is essentially invisible, because so much of what set it apart from its contemporaries has been so widely adopted in its wake. Lots of rappers and producers owe their entire careers to the sound pioneered by RZA and the Clan, musically and lyrically. (Kanye names RZA as one of his biggest production influences.)

Of course, the Clan ended up being a bit of a victim of its own success. At the conclusion of the five-year plan, RZA took on more of a managerial role in the Clan, and its solo and group efforts thereafter have been met with very mixed responses. Ol’ Dirty Bastard, arguably the biggest mainstream success story of the clan, was in and out of prison and became increasingly unstable, as so many big musical personalities do, and eventually died of a drug overdose in 2004. And of course, the Wu-Tang sound and name being everywhere became a problem in itself; listening back on them today, the first round solo projects all sound kind of samey**. They oversaturated the market. He who fights monsters and all that.

Having now written 1,400 words about a 60-minute rap album from 20 years ago, I realize this is a lot of baggage to have to unpack. But luckily, even without this tome, 36 Chambers stands up on its own merits. Even though there are nine full Clan members, the chemistry between them is electric. (Don’t worry too much if you can’t pick everyone out by name by the end of the first listen, although a few are bound to stick in your mind. I’m curious to know who, though, and why.) The corny kung-fu dialogue, the sludgy soul loops and bloated low-end, the ghostly bit-crush of the RZA’s shitty sampler — it all just works. Even without the backstory, 36 Chambers is just a damn good rap album.

I hope you enjoy it.

— Matt

* This is yet another rabbit hole in a post already full of rabbit holes, but there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about the idea of masculinity in the lyrics of 36 Chambers. Maybe not on your first listen, but when you’re more familiar with the record, pay close attention to the things they rap about — and just as interestingly, don’t rap about — and how they rap about them. I’d love see an academic article that really digs into this aspect of the album.

** GZA’s Liquid Swords is still great, though.

Major Lazer: Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt,

If this seems like a poorly thought out response, fair enough. It’s been a week.

This album is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for from this project, like A Walking Fire was for you. It strikes me as something that’s as central to your sensibility as a music fan as Brooklyn Rider is to mine — which means that Guns Don’t Kill People was always going to be a tough sell for me. I have some problems with this album, but I’m intrigued.

I’m definitely not the right person to attempt to parse the probably somewhat problematic cultural appropriation on this album. (I fully acknowledge my cowardice.) But I can certainly understand your preference for this over an album full of ‘bass drops and white people.’ That sounds terrible. Whereas Guns Don’t Kill People is the complete opposite of that sort of lazy blandness. Its entire appeal comes from how totally bonkers it is (those videos!), and the fact that it takes inspiration from sounds that come from outside of Diplo and Switch’s narrow cultural sphere.

Now comes the part where I say denigrating things for several paragraphs, in spite of my general admiration for the album. I know it’s becoming a habit, but I can’t help being perverse.

To me, Kala absolutely towers over this. The reason for that is, for all of its eclecticism, Kala still has one foot in pop songwriting. And the fact that my favourite track on that album is still ‘Paper Planes’ probably indicates that I value that characteristic. Hell, even Thick as a Brick is structured around (deeply unconventional) pop songwriting. I tend to like my pop songs clothed in somewhat flamboyant garb — be it prog rock bombast or a Diplo beat — but that doesn’t change the underlying value.

(The fact that your next assignment will have absolutely nothing to do with the craft of songwriting ought to indicate just how inconsistent my musical value system is. I am not at all sorry for this.)

Basically, my issue with Guns Don’t Kill People is that there’s no figure equivalent to M.I.A. on it — nobody to provide the raw goods for Diplo and Switch to dress up in mad, eclectic sonic outfits. (Though I did love that B-side with her on it.) Instead, we get a cavalcade of guests who each seem somewhat incidental to Diplo and Switch’s central concept. Aside from the Paul Simon-esque colonialist implications of that, which we’ve agreed to blithely ignore, this presents an aesthetic problem for me: for all of its internal cohesion and its high-concept grandstanding, Guns still feels like it lacks a core. It feels like a very attractive coat that nobody’s wearing.

And as for the guest artists — who occasionally wander by the coat, but never really consider putting it on — they’re a bit hit-and-miss, aren’t they? M.I.A.’s politics may piss a bunch of people off, but they make for more interesting listening than ‘Mary Jane.’ Granted, that’s an easy target and I’m a humourless d-bag. ‘What U Like,’ then.

So clearly, I didn’t love this. I liked it, basically. But I’d stick it at the lower end of my positive responses on this blog — above the Micronauts, certainly. But significantly lower than, say, Belle and Sebastian.

Okay, then. On to your next assignment, which I hope will be as challenging for you as this was for me.

— Matthew

Major Lazer: Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (pt. 1)

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Dear Matthew:

As alluded to previously, I’ve been wanting to give you this album for a while now, and your last assignment was chosen at least in part as a setup for it. This week, you’ll be listening to Major Lazer‘s debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do.

Major Lazer is a laser-armed Jamaican commando from the future who rides around on a rocket skateboard fighting the undead. Behind the scenes, though, it’s a musical project originally started by Diplo and Switch — two producers who you may recall having produced most of your last assignment, M.I.A.’s Kala. Major Lazer is their take on the music of Jamaica — mostly dancehall and reggae, with a bit of good old-fashioned pop and electronic bullshit thrown in for good measure. They work extensively with Jamaican artists and Guns Don’t Kill People was recorded at Tuff Gong, a legendary recording studio in Kingston that’s been used by Bob Marley, among many others. Major Lazer is sparse and futuristic and wonky and disorienting in all the best ways.

…or at least, that’s what Major Lazer used to be. A short time after the release of Guns Don’t Kill People, Switch left the band due to ‘creative differences’, and while he did work on a few songs on the band’s second album, Major Lazer is now essentially just a Diplo solo project. It’s been kind of heartbreaking to watch such a unique and interesting band go from the astonishing nugget of weirdness and awesomeness that is Guns Don’t Kill People to what it is now — especially since it’s made them a huge international success. Their third album came out a few weeks ago, and while it’s got some decent tunes, it mostly just makes me sad. It’s full of trap and bass drops and white people, and the production is very noisy and in-your-face, but not in a good way. It’s not an album, it’s just a bunch of tracks meant for DJs to play in clubs. Sigh.

They used to be so much better, man. You know, before they sold out. *takes drag on clove cigarette*

But I digress. Seeing what happens to a band when you take half of it away is interesting from an academic standpoint, if nothing else. Diplo (who produced your standout Kala track ‘Paper Planes’) is very much a DJ at heart. He’s a straightforward guy who makes straightforward music. His reputation as an oddball producer is really only because he’s ahead of the curve in knowing who to work with and what sounds are on the bleeding edge of what’s ‘in’. (There’s a discussion about white appropriation of black culture to be had somewhere in regard to this album, and Diplo is probably at the centre of it.)

Switch, on the other hand, is much more of a producer. (He produced — well, he produced most of the rest of Kala, actually. And a lot of Matangi, which is why I love it so much.) In comparing old Major Lazer to new Major Lazer, he is very obviously the source of the weirdness and sparseness of the first album. He brings a level of restraint to to the studio that Diplo just can’t muster. I think that’s why the first album works so well — Switch is able to rein in Diplo’s madness and bring a level of focus to the project that it now seems to utterly lack. Switch is the reason Guns is a cohesive album rather than just a bunch of songs like the newer albums. (This is probably also why he works so well with M.I.A.)

Anyway, this is turning into more of rant about why I don’t like a band’s new music than actually saying anything useful about the record at hand, so I should probably wrap it up and hand it over to you. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Jamaican music, but if not, it’s time for a crash course in patois. This album is all over the place, but if you liked Kala, there’s definitely something here for you somewhere. It’s controlled chaos. It’s lightning in a jar. It’s Major Lazer. Booyaka.

— Matt

PS: There’s also a Major Lazer cartoon. It’s essentially a sendup of bad 80s action cartoons like G.I. Joe, and it’s about as insane as you’d expect. Also, J.K. Simmons plays the president of future Jamaica. Yeah.

PPS: Bonus M.I.A.-featuring B-side.

M.I.A.: Kala (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt:

This tweet notwithstanding, I can detect no connection between M.I.A. and Kate Bush. But hey, one’s ears are one’s own. Moving on.

I have never been much for subtlety. You will have gathered that by now. That tendency extends from my taste in rock to my preference of Beethoven string quartets. (Opus 132, please. Keep your 127.) So, M.I.A’s aesthetic is well within the ballpark of ‘stuff I tend to like.’ (Subtle as a landmine, indeed.) Kala’s great.

But, let me be totally honest: after a couple of listens, ‘Paper Planes’ still eclipses everything else on the album. You may find that disappointing, the same way I do when someone informs me that their favourite Jethro Tull song is ‘Aqualung,’ or their favourite Peter Gabriel song is ‘Sledgehammer.’

Why should that be disappointing, though? Once in a while, the slightly-left-of-centre (though not necessarily obscure) artists that thinky music people* listen to make a song that allows the rest of the world to get in on the joy. Isn’t that worth celebrating? Of course it is. That, for me, was a key takeaway of the most tiring ideological debate in pop culture over the last decade.

But, to write that just now, I had to subdue a tremendous amount of pathological geekiness and symphony-goer snobbery. Because, the fact is, the music that speaks most deeply to me speaks to a relatively small number of people. I’m under no illusions that there’s any superiority in that. But, some part of me can’t help thinking that when an artist does manage to conjure the secret sauce for a ‘Paper Planes’ or a ‘Sledgehammer,’ they sacrifice something that makes the bulk of their music so meaningful to the true believers.

And it’s entirely possible that I’m not equipped to be a true believer in this case. You entreated me in your assignment to engage with M.I.A.’s mashup aesthetic, and consider her as one of the first breakout artists of the digital age. And while I love mashups in concept, I suspect that some of the effect was lost on me in this case, since Kala appears to mostly reference stuff I’ve never heard of. The only references I caught were the Clash and the Pixies — the first only because you told me, and the second only because of Fight Club.

But, I’ve just realized that I’m doing that thing again where I make it seem like I enjoyed an album less than I did. I really enjoyed Kala, and I’ll definitely be checking out more M.I.A. One of the structural weaknesses in this project is that it can only ever be about first impressions. Ten listens from now, ‘Paper Planes’ might be my least favourite track on the album.

— Matthew

*These people are the worst. (Mea culpa.)

M.I.A.: Kala (pt. 1)

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Dear Matthew:

If you’ll recall, I once posited on this blog that Kate Bush was the Seinfeld of female art-pop stars. (New readers: in context, this is more flattering than it sounds. I promise.) When I talked about the modern female art-pop stars she influenced, I mentioned Björk and Fever Ray, but mostly I was thinking of M.I.A. This week, you’ll be listening to her album Kala.

Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam — get it? M.I.A.? — is a British-born Tamil who grew up in Sri Lanka during the outbreak of civil war, something that has underscored much of her artistic career. She makes a chaotic sort of electro rap pop type of music that is often highly political in nature. She also draws on many other genres from around the world, from dancehall to baile funk to Bollywood film scores. A trained visual artist, she’s also known for the striking visual elements of her music, including videos, fashion and art. Combine all of these traits, and you have someone almost destined to get huge if she happened to be around at the advent of the digital music revolution. And hey, guess what?

Her first album, Arular (named for her father, a prominent member of a militant group called EROS), caught the ears of all the hip music bloggers when it came out in 2005, right around when music bloggers were starting to become a thing. But it wasn’t until Kala (named for her mother) that she really blew up, and blow up she did — you are hopefully at least passingly familiar with the Clash-sampling mega-hit ‘Paper Planes‘. Kala is also when she first teamed up with producer Switch, and also features further collaborations with Diplo, who was still relatively unknown at the time (and also her boyfriend). In contrast to the comparatively stark beats of her bedroom-produced debut, it’s a lush, worldly collage of sounds — owing to the fact that it was literally recorded around the world. It’s a bombastic, idiosyncratic, in-your-face record, and it solidified her place in the pantheon of internet pop stars. It was probably about as successful as you could ever ask a ‘difficult sophomore album’ to be.

I’ll be honest: Kala is not my favourite M.I.A. album*. But this assignment isn’t about listening to her ‘best’ album — this is about the context. I want to hear your thoughts on one of the first big albums of the digital era, an album that arguably couldn’t have been made in any other era. I want you to really dig into Kala‘s mashup aesthetic. I want you to see how many musical allusions, references and samples you can identify in its sonic collage, and to know how you feel about them. And, of course, I want to know if my Kate Bush analogy is grounded in any sort of reality.

M.I.A. isn’t for everyone. She’s about as subtle as a landmine, and her politics certainly rub a lot of people the wrong way. But her music is like nothing else out there, and that’s more than most can say. Even if you don’t love it, I hope you at least find it interesting.

— Matt

* For the longest time that was Arular, but it’s been recently supplanted by the extremely good Matangi. I’ve warmed up a lot to /\/\ /\ Y /\ over the years, too. In fact, now that I think about it, Kala might actually be my least favourite M.I.A. album. But again! Not the point.

Die Antwoord: selected videography (pt. 2)

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dieantwoord

Dear Matt:

Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

Alright. So, here’s how I approached this. When I fired up your playlist, I decided to just let it run, and resist the urge to Google everything. I figured, let’s just allow this to be a pure encounter, informed only by a half-remembered read of your assignment four busy days ago. I’ll just hit the fullscreen button, let Die Antwoord flow through me unmediated, and scribble down a few notes as I go.

Those notes look like the hastily scrawled confessions of a hallucinating trainspotter. It is a testament to the alienating weirdness of Die Antwoord that I appear to have descended into a dissociative state about midway through your playlist.

Honestly, I am as baffled by this music now as I was last night when I listened to it, and I’m spinning my wheels here because I don’t know what to say. I feel like I’m missing a huge chunk of the context for this, and I’m pissed off at Die Antwoord because I’m certain this is by design.

I have one potentially interesting thought, and it is about the tiring question of whether or not any of this is real. One of the many questions I posed to my future self in my scribblings on this viewing was “are those real scorpions?” That is, of course, regarding the video for “Fok Julle Naaiers,” on which Ninja raps: “Next time you ask me is it real, I’m gonna punch you in the face.”

Trouble is, with the way that Die Antwoord present themselves, “Is it real?” is a worthwhile question that everybody’s obviously going to be asking, as regards both the scorpions and the band itself. This is a move that’s been pulled before. It’s a classic Glass Onion — you bait your audience with deliberately cryptic art, then you mock them for trying too hard.

There was a time when I would have had the patience for this. Maybe sometime I will again. Don’t get me wrong: there were plenty of moments when I could barely pull myself away from the screen to make notes. But, it’s late and I’m frustrated and right now I kind of feel the same way about this that I do about the Stockhausen I used to listen to in high school: cut the performance art bullshit and make some goddamn music.

I take no pleasure in disliking things. It makes me feel ignorant. This one will require a revisit.

— Matthew

Die Antwoord: selected videography (pt. 1)

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Dear Matthew:

I just watched an insane movie called Chappie, so this week you’re going to listen to some Die Antwoord.

Die Antwoord (‘the answer’) are hard to describe. They’re usually referred to as a ‘rap-rave’ group, but that really only scratches the surface. The principle members, Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser, are two white South African lowlifes who espouse the idea of ‘zef’, a Afrikaans slang term that means something like a white equivalent of ‘ghetto fabulous’. Along with the mysterious (and possibly apocryphal) DJ Hi-Tek, they make over-the-top club rap in a mix of English and Afrikaans that embraces every ridiculous trope of the genre — all accompanied by some of the most insane music videos ever committed to film.

…except that’s not really the whole story either. Digging beyond the initial weirdness yields no answers, only more weirdness. Ninja and Yo-Landi seem to have a Jack and Meg White sort of relationship — they have a daughter, but it’s not really clear if they’re dating, if they ever have dated, or even when they first met. They’ve both been involved in various other hip hop and art projects before Die Antwoord, and the pair seem to have both attended and later dropped out of art school at some point. Zef doesn’t seem to have really even been a thing before Die Antwoord, or at least not as they portray it. When the band was first blowing up, all of this led a lot of music journalists to write a lot of tiring essays about what Die Antwoord actually is. Is it a prank? Is it performance art? Is it insensitive cultural appropriation? Are they even a ‘real band’? What does ‘real band’ even mean? Do any of these questions matter to anyone who isn’t a music journalist?

I have my own thoughts on Die Antwoord — and even more on the absolutely bonkers aforementioned Neill Blomkamp film in which they star as ‘themselves’ — but I’m interested in hearing yours. Of course, if I just had you listen to an album, you’d be missing out on probably the most striking component of the band, which is their videos. So, in lieu of an album, I’ve put together a selected videography for you to peruse. (A viewing of Chappie afterward is optional, but encouraged.)

Sit back. Relax. Set your YouTube window to fullscreen. And hold on tight.

— Matt

Deltron 3030: Deltron 3030 (pt. 2)

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Dear Matt:

Thank you for starting me off with hip hop, rather than Black Flag or some other thing that’s going to alienate me. You are a kinder blogmate than I.

You were right in predicting that I would love this album. It has all of the properties that I love in music, nowadays. It is deeply idiosyncratic. It is full of ostentatious displays of craftsmanship. It contains a reference to Armorines. ARMORINES, dammit!

And, it’s a concept album. At the risk of starting a turf war: concept albums are my domain. I’ve always felt that you can trace them back to classical genres like opera and the program symphony, which were amalgamated into jazz by people like Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, and found their way into pop music through psychedelia and its twin offspring, prog and glam. This is territory I’m comfortable in.

But, I’m the first to admit that there’s something distinctly adolescent about most classic concept albums. Tommy. Ziggy Stardust. The Wall. Dear god, 2112. (Even I can only stomach about seven minutes of that album.)

And, I don’t think that Deltron 3030 entirely escapes from that legacy. Any science fiction epic about dismantling a totalitarian state with rap is at risk of lapsing into that same earnestness you detect in Godbluff, Fight Club and Japanese RPGs. And, for the first few tracks on the album, I thought that’s more or less what I was dealing with.

But that was before I realized that Deltron 3030 is a magical incantation.

*Ahem.*

Allow me to indulge in a little light conspiracy theorizing.

One of the central tenets of magic (and I do mean magic — not illusion) is that you can manipulate reality by manipulating symbols. (Allow my current hero to explain more fully.) So, the practice of drawing a picture, telling a story, or spitting a verse can have a profound impact on the material world.

On ‘Time Keeps On Slipping,’ Del gets straight to the heart of this by noting how he can “convert energy into matter instantly with a pen and a pad,” and puts a finer point on it with the bold claim “I remake my universe every time I use a verse.”

This clearly positions the whole of Deltron 3030 as a spell. Naturally, Del doesn’t frame it this way, because it wouldn’t fit the SF aesthetic he’s going for. Instead, in ‘Virus,’ he equates his verses with computer code — a language with a long history of being equated with magic. As game scholar Jeff Howard writes: “Simply put, programmers and magicians both master a grammar to make things happen.”

With the cyber-magic of his lyrical talents, Del’s character Deltron Zero wins rap battles, which are portrayed as causing actual physical damage to his opponents (remember: manipulate the symbol, manipulate reality) and structural damage to the status quo of his oppressive universe.

So, this album is no mere adolescent anti-authoritarian fantasy. It is the most profound kind of subversive creation: it is an act of magic in practice. Del’s sci-fi incantation may have failed in its aim to bring down the government, but as you note, the album’s popularity has grown substantially since its release. Give it time.

Wow. This blog got weird way faster than I expected.

— Matthew

Deltron 3030: Deltron 3030 (pt. 1)

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deltron3030

Dear Matthew:

Last week, you had me listen to some goofy, epic, over-the-top prog rock. In that spirit, your first assignment is probably the closest thing the hip hop canon has to prog: Deltron 3030.

Deltron 3030 is a supergroup consisting of MC Del the Funky Homosapien, producer Dan the Automator — both hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area — and DJ Kid Koala, from Vancouver. They’re all prolific and celebrated in their own niches, but this record is, in my opinion, the best distillation of everything the three bring to the table. Remember Gorillaz’ first single, ‘Clint Eastwood’? That’s these three guys plus Damon Albarn, a year after Deltron 3030 came out. (As far as I’m concerned, ‘Clint Eastwood’ is a Deltron 3030 song. Hell, they even do it as their encore when they play live.)

Deltron 3030 is a concept album. The year is 3030, and times are tough for Deltron Zero and his sidekick Automator. Hip hop is outlawed, corporations rule the galaxy with an iron fist, and Deltron is on the run from a corrupt military-industrial complex — or at least that’s been my interpretation. Unlike a more classic concept album like Rush’s 2112, Deltron 3030 doesn’t have a clearly defined narrative arc. Instead, it’s more of an exercise in atmosphere and world-building. There are some set pieces here and there, but a lot of it is just Del — an MC renowned for his ability to freestyle — riffing on post-apocalyptic sci-fi imagery and technobabble over Automator’s gritty, stripped-down beats. (It may interest you to note that Dan is a classically trained violinist, and many of the samples on this record come from the music of contemporary classical composer William Sheller.)

The result is utterly captivating. There is no other rapper in the world who sounds like Del. And more than anything, this record really seems to capture this feeling of the ‘used future’ of something like Star Wars or Alien — a future that feels dirty and diseased, run-down and as far from the shiny idealism of Star Trek as it’s possible to get. The universe of Deltron 3030 is in rough shape.

This album is very much a product of its time, of course. The various skits and vocal cameos are a who’s-who of 90s alternative hip hop. Released in the year 2000, it shares a cultural moment with other similar sci-fi classics like The Matrix, The X-Files, and even Final Fantasy VII. It definitely feels like an album that came out in 2000 — but in a good way. It has aged extremely well (how scarily prescient is the track ‘Virus’?), and I think a lot of that has to do with how it just sort of sprung into the world fully formed. Like a lot of cult classics, there wasn’t a lot of hype when it first came out, and it’s only in the following years that it amassed its legion of fans. (In 2013, the band released a long-awaited followup, Event II — which is a good album too, don’t get me wrong. But unless you’re Death From Above 1979, it’s hard to get that sort of lighting to strike twice.)

Obviously, I love Deltron 3030. And I know you have a taste for MF DOOM and Madlib’s Madvillainy, so I think you might too. I am very much looking forward to your thoughts on this album.

— Matt