Underrated K - Knowledge Reigns Supreme?

LaLa died, and with it, much of the fun streaming music I had embedded on this little blog here. So maybe I'll get to creating DivShare players for all the songs I've jabbered about previously. Until then, I hope to get through letter R and post a few chapters of a little project I've been working on by the end of the month.

KRS-ONE & Boogie Down Productions - "My Philosophy," By All Means Necessary.

You could make the argument that KRS and Scott LaRock, as the two primaries of Boogie Down Productions, are responsible for introducing gun violence to hip-hop, creating rap original sin. They certainly weren't the first to inject the gun/gang/gangster trope into hip-hop songs. Schooly D's "P.S.K. What Does it Mean?", with it's overt drug and gun lyrics, as well as it's veiled reference to Philadelphia gangs in the song title, predates BDP's "Criminal Minded." They were not responsible for the idea or language of guns in rap songs (though "9mm" was a rather on-the-nose song title). Rather, KRS and BDP created Hip-Hop's first martyr when Scott LaRock was killed after trying to mediate/intimidate in a fight between D-Nice, a young BDP crew-member, and another kid from the South Bronx. He died only months after the release of their first album, Criminal Minded.

BDP's 1987 Criminal Minded was widely and wildly influential. And while the group initially became famous for their dis tracks and rap battles with Marley Marl and MC Shan, this album paved the way for mainstream hip-hop to expose, embrace, and exploit the violence of the late 20th Century ghetto. The art-form that began as a live-performance experience in city parks and dance clubs transitioned quickly into a highly lucrative niche in the record industry. By 1988 Ice-T had recorded Rhyme Pays and West-Coast gangster rap began in earnest. N.W.A had already released N.W.A and the Posse and were in the process of recording Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It. BDP's last album in 1992, before KRS-ONE went solo, was titled Sex and Violence, an obvious commentary on the two most surefire ways to sell records. Eazy-E, Biggie Smalls, and Tupac would be dead less than ten years after Criminal Minded was released.

After the death of their musical leader, LaRock, BDP followed up with By All Means Necessary. KRS-ONE, still a young man of 23, matured quickly while processing the loss of his best friend. As evidenced on the album cover imitating Malcom X, KRS did not immediately distance himself from the idea of ghetto violence. Instead, he became possessed by the belief that hip-hop must address the problems in the poor black neighborhoods, as it was one of the few popular art forms that was explicitly poor and black in its content (as opposed to Jazz, Blues, and Rock which were poor and black in genesis, but were often marginalized when themes of the African-American experience were introduced.) The idea of the white performer as invader or cultural pilferer was far more entrenched in hip-hop as a result of this. Although, D-Nice helped introduce the world to Kid-Rock, so go figure. But that is a story for another thesis project.

"My Philosophy," while perhaps not as dense with poetic devices as a Rakim or B.I.G. track, is lyrically as strong as nearly anything being released today. Sure their are plenty of colloquialisms that sound dated in the minuscule geologic time of hip-hop. But some of his phrases are still quoted and sampled. "It's not about a salary, it's all about reality," ring any bells? "When some clown jumps up to get beat down?" Brand Nubian made a career off that line.

While it took time for KRS to reconcile some of the troublesome dichotomies of conscious rap--strains of misogyny, the idea of solving violence with more violence--he matured much faster than the rest of hip-hop and the world at large. He's still recording regularly and touring, but like many trailblazing artists, his newer recordings can't ever achieve the monumental, sea-change impact of his first two albums.

And not to be an old fogey, but the whippersnappers of today could use a dose of KRS, who has quickly gone from a recognized and respected progenitor to a grossly underrated influence on one of the few genres still actually selling records.

Listen to it Here: "My Philosophy"

Underrated J Cont'd - Juliets and Juke Joints

Is adhering to the alpha-order structure killing my productivity? Hardly.

Anxiety, apathy, and adulthood are the only things keeping me from writing like I want to. And while only one of those three is intractable, the other two have some wicked inertia.
So, on to the rest of the J's it is.

/Blog couch talk-therapy

With LaLa out of bidness thanks to The Notorious J-O-Bs I don't know how I'll link to all these. But I guess I'll have to figure it out by the time I'm done with this post.

Joey Kneiser - "Adelina," The All-Night Bedroom Revival

Joey's already on the list as the lead singer/songwriter for the band Glossary. He is a master of mood, establishing an immediate coherence between the musical tone of each song and the theme or narrative of the lyric. Every album Glossary has recorded has at least one extraordinary song on it, a song that contends for the song of the year on any of the crazy mixed-up lists I make in my head. See this if you need further clarification.

So why should his solo record be any exception? Overall, it is a very good album. Four out of five stars. Four and a half, even? Initially, I wasn't thrilled by the title, too verbose even for little ol' me, but after listening to the whole thing, it grew on me like only a title of true depth can.

The All-Night Bedroom Revival is about a songwriter who locks himself in his sleeping quarters and records an album, because if he doesn't he'll go crazy. It is about a couple who stays up all night talking about their relationship, beating it to death with words, resurrecting it with closeness and copulation, and perhaps killing it once again, the minute they leave the room. The album is a revival in the very Christian tent-meeting sense, but the leaping preacher is replaced by a quiet Southerner with a beat up Gibson guitar, stuck in a ten by ten rented room with worn wood floors and a sputtering ceiling fan. This preacher man favors the power of the word too, the words we speak to each other in our most bare and vulnerable moments. He cherishes the old-time religion of honesty in the face of loss and wants us to be baptized in the tears of love gone wrong and the sweat of love made right.

And once again, on an album full of well-made, intimate songs, Joey brings one that is simply perfect. I wouldn't change a thing about "Adelina." It jangles along like lovers do when they just don't quite know how to make the thing work, but, by God, some of it feels so goddamn good that they just can't quit until they've burned it to the ground. And until a whole lot of people have heard this song, it is most definitely underrated.






 John Hammond - "2:19," Wicked Grin.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young man with musical aspirations whose father is credited with discovering Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Even if you were exceptional at songwriting and were charismatic as hell, people would still always whisper, "Yeah but, his dad was the guy who..." You're either not as good as the other guy, or you only got your shot because of your dad.

Growing up John Hammond, Jr. (actually, The Third) must've felt like making music was nothing less than his destiny. His dad was already an established music producer and helped establish the careers of many music luminaries from the Thirties into the Sixties. The elder Hammond was so important and influential to the popular music of the Twentieth Century that I will not even try to discuss it here. There are many books that address the subject.

His son became a gifted singer and guitarist with a moving Baritone. Hammond Jr. sounded as close to a Delta blues singer as any white boy who'd come along. And while he wrote some excellent tunes of his own, his racially ambiguous vocal chords and his family tree may have dictated the arc his career more than his own musical talent, which was abundant.

Since he was a teenager, Hammond has always sounded best singing other people's songs. No shame in that endeavor at all. But I can't imagine it was all roses and lollipops considering that his father is linked so closely with two of the most important original voices in the history of rock and roll. Nevertheless Johnny seemed to know that a great song could be both venerated and improved by a singer and player who cared about the rendering and fussed, in a good way, over every inch of the song. Whether that meant injecting new tropes into a classic, or just leaving perfect alone, John Hammond was, and still is, a GREAT cover artist.

On Wicked Grin, Hammond takes on the always polarizing Tom Waits. He plays the songs as straight ahead blues, taking care to avoid mimicking Waits' vocal idiosyncrasies. He employs some renowned blues session musicians to aid him in the endeavor, and even brings in Waits himself to help on the "I know I've Been Changed."

Every song is a gem, coaxing out the brilliant songwriting that is often obscured by Waits' madman howl. Waits' lyrical wit is even more apparent when delivered by Hammond, in his dry, off-hand manner. "You know there ain't no Devil, it's just God when he's drunk," becomes a convincing argument when Hammond says it, as opposed to street-corner raving as in Waits' original. The whole album is spectacular. Dance up close to a pretty girl on a hot night. Grab your man and tell him he ain't no good if he don't give you a sip of that whiskey. Get the record.

John Hammond may not have been a Dylan or a Springsteen, but he was one of the great musical apostles of the last hundred years. He knew that great art was more important than one person, in some cases, even more important than the person who created it. And that kind of dedication to continuing the legacy of great artists is always underrated.

Underrated J - Jump on in, the water is solipsistic.

If you have any artists to suggest, you teeming throngs of readers, let me know. If they are in my iTunes library, maybe I'll be swayed and give them the old one-two. To the right, in the blogroll, my friend Gabe has undertaken a similar project as that which I have, here. Be warned, he rather enjoys jam bands.

Otherwise, the next two float at the margins of of Underrated/Under-appreciated.

Musicians, artists in general, are probably best defined by their idiosyncrasies. It allows listeners to distinguish one voice, one guitarist, one group from another. The question of authenticity is then raised when judging an artist's idiosyncrasies. Are they manufactured for effect? Or, are they character traits and natural artistic choices emerging from an organic creative process?
 

Jamiroquai - "Half the Man," The Return of the Space Cowboy.

Jamiroquai emerged from the UK/European Acid-Jazz in the early '90s as a listenable and highly danceable group of excellent musicians with a super-funky, diminutive sparkplug for a vocalist and songwriter. Jay Kay was clearly an intriguing stage performer, and as Jamiroquai grew more popular globally he began to make his performer persona more weird and out-sized, turning into a striking, but sometimes ostentatious caricature. His disco moon-walk on the moving floor in the video for "Virtual Insanity" is one of the last memorable MTV videos, as far as I'm concerned. And while the song is a pretty clumsy deconstruction of modern life and technology, the video was fun to look at.

The song smacked of the same sort of self-importance and silly sociology found in many of their "socially conscious" songs. I'm all for artists making bold and loud political statements, if they can do it well. Jay Kay's affectations, the very idiosyncrasies he created/accentuated to get noticed, killed any chance of being taken seriously past the dance floor.

Which, in the end was fine, because Jamiroquai was best when they were doing dance tunes and chocolaty-rich ballads. "Half the Man" is one of the latter. A trippy lament about break-ups to make-ups that, if you listen to the lyrics too hard, makes no sense in terms of linear narrative. However, the keyboards play with your synapses like lysergic acid and the vocals are perfect Northern-soul--heart stripped bare, soft and smooth until they become full of brass.

It's not what got them noticed by the masses, but it's what they did best. And this song, compared to their inferior hits, is underrated.

Half The Man - Jamiroquai

Jeff Buckley - "Last Goodbye," Grace.

I'm not going to go too far with Jeff Buckley, because there are people--fans, fanatics, Buckley-completists, devotees, acolytes--who know way more about the guy than I do. I could do the whole Wikipedia thing and regurgitate stuff I didn't really know about him, but Buckley, as a figure, is far too important to lots of people, myself included, to give that kind of treatment.

Suffice it to say, I remember (as many my age do) when he died. I remember having heard Grace at the record store listening station, telling myself that I needed to buy the album when I had a few spare bucks. Several music rags had lavished him with praise, describing his live shows as transcendental, calling his voice a once-in-a-generation gift. And then he was dead, washed away on the banks of the Mississippi River. Craig Finn remembers.

He achieved one of the great feats in music, recording a cover version of a very well-known song by a rock and roll HoFer that surpasses the original. It may well be the saddest song ever recorded.

But what got lost in the Qawwali-inflected, strange beauty of his voice and the fugue-like nature of his guitar-work, was that the kid knew how to write a great song when he put his mind to it. Taking hold of the verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure and placing your personal stamp on a well-composed song is a simple goal, but it is a goal not often reached. Buckley absolutely nailed it with "Last Goodbye."

He was venerated for being unique, idiosyncratic, and mourned mightily for the same reason. His live recordings and semi-finished studio work sold well for years after his death. People hunted for clues as to how someone so talented walks into a river late at night to cool off, and is suddenly gone.

I just wonder if he might've made the perfect song at some point in his life, had he lived. "Last Goodbye," underrated despite the feverishness of those who love him, tells me my hunch was well-founded.

Last Goodbye (Album Version) -...

Underrated I - I don't like you, but I love you.

 Some of my favorite humans are Humanists. Maybe that term is too vague or loaded, but I think I'll stick with it.

That is, the people I find most interesting, insightful, and imitable, are primarily interested in people. Particularly when it comes to my favorite songwriters. Whether they are truly Humanists who reject other more dogmatic theological doctrine, or just find humans more interesting and valuable than imaginary wizards in the sky, I don't know. (Not that sky wizards aren't cool, they just don't show up 'round here enough for my tastes. Every two-thousand years is less frequent than the elusive McRib, for goodness sake).

However, these same Humanistic songwriters who seem genuinely concerned with the plight of their fellow man and worry when injustice is done, also like to hold a giant magnifying glass up to the sores of humanity. They don't shy away from sticking their fingers into abscesses or turning on the bright lights to see the boils and scabies even better.

Dylan took this tact often, with songs like "Lonsome Death of Hattie Carrol,"  "The Death of Emmit Till," and plenty of others. Westerberg worried mightily about the plight gender-queer kids in tight pants with wallet-chains long-ago, many years before Pete Wentz married the prom-queen. Fiona Apple might be a co-dependent bore in real life, but in her songs, she will punch you in the dick if you mess-over another girl. Eddie Vedder used to wear a hair-shirt for ever bete-noir teenager in the world. Rhett Miller, even though he married a super-model, has to work very hard to write anyting but songs of romantic lament, sad anthems for every skinny dork in Texas who never got the girl.

Ike Reilly - "I Don't Want What You've Got (Goin' On)," Sparkle in the Finish.

Ike Reilly falls in with this very loose assemblage of songwriters. He is most assuredly disturbed by the callousness with which the modern world treats his fellow man. But goshdarn if he doesn't find his fellow man in equal parts, pathetic, annoying, disgusting and despicable. If there were another form of life on Earth with whom he could cavort, converse and copulate, he would undoubtedly prefer them to human beings. But since there is not, he's thrown his lot in with the Adams and Eves.

A glance at his album titles lets you know he's a bit jaded and not always hopeful when it comes to his brethren. Salesmen and Racists? Pick one, or maybe you're both. Junkie Faithful. Opiate of the masses or Church of Burroughs. I don't know which one makes me less nauseated. Posion the Hit Parade. Music biz got you down, Ike?

That said, he is the most underrated purveyor of cynical folk-rap this side of St. Bob. His songs make you want to shout, dance, lock arms and march, break bottles and fight, and then go back to the bar to tell each other stories as you bleed on the beer-soaked floor. See him live.

I Don't Want What You Got (Goi...

Underrated H cont'd. - Holes in the Backdrop of the Memory

The most satisfying aspect of this exercise is not shilling for my favorite bands, but looking back through my music catalog and finding the bands that I, myself, never paid enough attention to. Both of these two fall into that category.

Homunculus - "Cornelia," The Pulse of Directed Devotion.

I first got romantic with my wife at a Homunculus show. We didn't neck in the corner of the club or anything so classless. We simply danced. Not even that junior high dry-hump kind of dancing. More like late '80s Solid Gold hip-couple-on-the-upstairs-scaffolding dance. It was sexy, I'm sure.

Homunculus was composed of IU dudes who all had wildly eclectic tastes in music, but actually found a way to create a somewhat focused sound guided by a mission statement that went something like "The Funky Meters meets a Beatles Fan Club, with a little Jam Bandiness thrown in."

They weren't afraid to drop it on the one and at the same time loved syrupy sweet lyrics and choruses. Their overall visual aesthetic was remarkably consistent, with every band member wearing a suit onstage. I loved them and went to every show at the Bluebird in Bloomington that I could make it to. They were exceptional live--funky, sweaty fun with lots of this going on.

And like friends from college with whom we've lost touch, I lost touch with Homunculus after I left Bloomington. The singer from the song above and below left the band around the time I was finishing at IU. I saw the band a couple of times in New York, but not nearly with the frequency I did in Southern Indiana.

Homunculus recorded one more album and toured extensively in the early Aughts, but eventually broke up.

My wife and I danced to one of their songs at our wedding.

Their first two records are highly underrated.
 

Cornelia

 

Hot Hot Heat - "Goodnight, Goodnight," - Elevator.

Talk about textbook underrated. I don't even own a complete album from these guys, but I would put two of their songs, "Bandages" and "Goodnight, Goodnight," in my top 100 singles of the 2000's.

They are best described as post-Punk post-Ska post-alternative Alternative-Ska-Punk. That's some fine genre murder, right there.

My brother-in-law even has a fleeting cameo in one of their videos.

Every time I hear their songs I think about how much more I ought to listen to them. I never do.

This song should make you happy and dancey and think about a time when you kicked some dude/chick to the curb and felt good about it.

Goodnight Goodnight - Hot Hot ...

Underrated H - We're gonna start it with a positive jam. Hold Steady.

The Hold Steady - "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," Separation Sunday; "Stuck Between Stations," Boys and Girls in America; "Sequestered In Memphis," Stay Positive

"You either love them or hate them." How many times have fans or lazy critics uttered this phrase when recommending a band? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The problem is, ten times out of nine, the band is not very good at all. The people who love them are their friends and family. The people who hate them are everybody else. Don't tell me your brother-in-law's noisecore project with three turntablists and a Theremin player is a "love it or hate it" proposition. Unless I am related to the people on stage, that is a "hate it or drink arsenic" proposition.

So, obviously this is the point where I say, "Love it or hate it is a myth, EXCEPT FOR THESE GUYS..." Well, I'm not gonna do that.

In the first place 8000 other Monday Morning Christgaus have already said it. And the second-to-last thing I want to be is trite. (The absolutely last thing I want to be is from New Jersey.)

My thesis is, therefore, rather muddled:

I hereby proclaim that you will NOT find yourself tied to a binary choice between adulation and antipathy when you listen to The Hold Steady.

You might think they sound kind of weird and interesting, but aren't your cup of tea. Perhaps you'll find their anthemic rock and roll reminiscent of early era Bruce/E-Street records, mixed with a more punk rock aesthetic, as so many others have described their sound. Maybe lead singer Craig Finn's tales of burnouts and barflies will take hold of you like Dickens' serials took hold of the readers in the nineteenth century. Maybe his voice will make you want to crawl up the walls and stuff cactus in your ears just to make it stop.

And so you have options. You don't have fall in love with this band that simultaneously venerates and tears down the Twin Cities like Dr. Johnson did with London. You don't have to want set the disc on fire and douse it with urine, either.

So why are they underrated? After all, websites like Pitchfork and numerous other critics love these guys. The fact that Finn keeps a cast of characters weaving in and out of all four Hold Steady records fascinates some, mainly because virtually no other modern songwriters use this device. He also creates a lexicon that initially seems limited and repetitive, overusing words like positive, party and killer. He juxtaposes elementary words-- cold, hot; soft, hard--sounding like a poet who lost his thesaurus on first listen. But if one follows the entire through-line of the narrative from Almost Killed Me to Stay Positive all of the words and figurative language that appeared simplistic at first, take on immense poetic significance. He unpacks every double meaning and injects a sense of risk into the simplest turn of phrase. And Finn makes no bones about shooting to be a 21st century Kerouac. The album "Boys and Girls in America" grew out of Finn's belief that he could write a whole record about just one of Sal Paradise's lines in On the Road.

But, again, none of this points to being underrated. And maybe they aren't. But that whole bullshit about love/hate that gets lumped on these guys, and has been since they broke up Lifter Puller and formed The Hold Steady, hasn't allowed for any sort of accurate gauge of how many people might actually enjoy this band. Hipsters and music geeks superpraise THS, wanting to be counted in the Love Them crowd, so their fervor (count me in) can't be trusted. And the material might be too dense and Finn's vocals too idiosyncratic for casual listeners to sift through when they've already been prejudiced with the love/hate preface by whoever gave them the record.

Personally, I think that twenty-years from now, I will be glad that I knew who these guys were. For everyone who doesn't know who they are, give them a try. You might kinda, sorta, halfway enjoy them a bit. Or you might not.

Your Little Hoodrat Friend - T...

Stuck Between Stations - The H...

Sequestered In Memphis - The H...

How A Resurrection Really Feels

It really hasn't been that long since a team from Indiana has been in the NCAA championship game. In 2002, the IU Hoosiers lost to Maryland in an improbable post-Knight run to the Final Four. But since then, IU has spiraled into sanction-laden obscurity. Purdue, despite always performing well in the Big Ten, has classically under-achieved in the NCAA's. Looking past college basketball, the Pacers have gone from lovable, scrappy contenders to a bunch of uninspired millionaires who continue to play with the shadow of the 2004 brawl in Detroit hanging over them.

So while it hasn't been long at all since an Indiana team has been successful at basketball, it feels like the lid has been lifted on an old hope chest and all the musty, old blankets have been cleaned with fresh air and sunlight. Kelvin Sampson, Gene Keady's sad final seasons of an otherwise hall-of-fame career, the refs in the Butler v. Florida game, Ron Artest and Jermaine O'Neal, I can go flick jumpshots in the driveway without thinking about any of that.

I'll get back to my regular programming of navel-gazing and trying to convince other people that my tastes in music are superior to the public at large pretty soon. But right now, I'm savoring the way basketball tastes for the first time in nearly a decade.

I have no illusions about some return to a more "pure" form of college basketball. Butler is not a babe-in-the-woods program who made it all the way to the big game by wishing on butterfly wings and sprinkling pixie dust on the court. During this recent window of time when other programs in the state were struggling, they went and ferociously recruited in-state talent. They pursued and signed players from out of state who fit their program and who were passed up by bigger D-1 programs, so they play with a chip on their shoulder. They are all gifted athletes who play great defense and battle anyone who steps on their court.(And if Hayward and Mack don't declare after their junior year, it will only be because they are thinking with their hearts instead of their retirement funds. Honestly, if I had my druthers, I'd probably eliminate athletic scholarships altogether and tell David Stern to stick his NBA age limit where the pampers is.) But college basketball is a BIG money endeavor and no one, not even Butler and Brad Stevens, no matter how much they may be exemplars of how to do the whole "student-athlete" thing right, comes out of the NCAA wringer totally clean.

That said, I will have no second thoughts tomorrow about shredding my vocal chords yelling for Butler as the Bulldogs attempt to knock off Duke and Kaiser K Coach K. I will be shooting as many hoops as I can before then. And hopefully, at around 11:45 PM, I'll be singing along with a really cheesy song that was first broadcast after an Indiana team won the championship, listening to my neighbors cheer and scream into the night sky.