Mariah Carey — “Obsessed”

Released:6.16.09

Peak:#7

You can’t just blame the drugs, of course. You can never just blame the drugs. No use blaming Proof’s murderers or Kim or Debbie either for Eminem’s by-far worst album. Relapse was the work of a man well aware that he was pissing away his talent. Pushing forty, Marshall Mathers’ heart just wasn’t in the juvie mayhem any more, so he feigned serial murder by numbers and filled in his ad feminam Mad Libs with the first celebrity to flicker across his short-circuiting synapses. Few party tracks have highlighted how overdue an artist was for sobriety quite as pitilessly as “Crack the Bottle.”

The incoherent revenge fantasy “Bagpipes from Baghdad” might not have been the nadir of Eminem’s recording career, but he did receive its most embarrassing bitch-slap as a result. An A-List diva taking pot shots at a bottom-feeding rapper should have been embarrassing for all concerned, especially when that diva’s courtiers insist on calling her “the real MC,” especially when that diva boasts “You’re a mom and pop / I’m a corporation,” especially when that diva is Mariah Carey. And yet, not only do Tricky and The-Dream deck Mariah out in a suitably regal track for “Obsessed,” but Carey manages to come off as not the slightest bit bitchy. She’s just above it all, luxuriating in her own gifts with a noblesse worthy of Jay-Z — when she encounters the shared assonance of “you’re delusional” and “losing your mind,” it’s a career highlight.

Ah well, live by the starstruck dis, die by the starstruck dis, eh? But the fable of the Princess and the Peashooter has a more complicated moral. Mariah Carey has always remained true to herself because her true self is a woman who wants to be rich and famous, a desire with which the non-rich and non-famous will always identify. (“Stars—they’re just like us” may seem like a sentiment designed to soothe us plebes, but it’s really the culture industry seeking to reassure its marquee producers.) In contrast to Jennifer Lopez’s cartoonish desperation to prove she’s maintained her roots (you ain’t driven your own car in years, girl, let alone played stickball), Carey really does seem like a Long Island gal who hit the big time, and this attitude seems the key to her resilience.

Eminem, to his credit and his detriment, wanted to be an artist — something more than a star, or at least something not identical — and so stardom took its toll, on his sense of humor, most of all. Em regained his footing on Recovery by jettisoning the multifaceted trickster of his first two albums and fully inhabiting the one-dimensional hero of “Lose Yourself” — in other words, by limiting himself as an artist.

Black Eyed Peas — “I Gotta Feeling”

Released: 6.16.09

Peak: #1

I’ve never seen the percentage in hating the Black Eyed Peas. They’re never bullying or misogynist, and their closest stray toward the sententious, “Where Is the Love?,” was bold enough to remind us that the C.I.A. is a terrorist org. Far be it from me to guess what roils foes who’ve been markedly unable to articulate their beef, but criticisms seem to boil down to the fact that the group is uncool — either tagged “corny,” in rap-snob parlance, or with the old anti-pop snub “plastic.” Me, I like uncool people. Some of my best friends are uncool. Including you maybe.

But though I’ve supported will.i.am’s decision to exuberantly sell out ever since he recognized the error of his earnest, backpacker youth, I can’t say he’s mostly done me proud. “Let’s Get Retarded” was this Roxanne Shante fan’s coulda-been jam before marketing softened it to “Let’s Get It Started” for sports arenas in need of a “Rock and Roll Pt. 3.” And though plenty of pop is more deserving of the scorn heaped upon “My Humps,” the ick factor of “lovely lady lumps” is hard to listen past.

With “I Gotta Feeling,” though, the quartet finally surrendered to sheer sensation, here embodied by the equally despised David Guetta.  The track accretes so craftily — staccato guitar establishes that mood of early evening anticipation, high-end synth adds that wistful edge, one-finger bass tugs us forward until the long-delayed backbeat propels the works upward and outward — that it’s easy to overlook that this dance hit is wholly drumless maybe a full third of its run time, And Fergie finally comes into her brassy own, belting at her most ovaries-out one moment, interjecting “smash it!” like a demented Bowery boy the next. For a few minutes, at least, the club, now the dominant setting for rap and pop, is no longer a drab, noisy site for wrangling temporary mates, but a place to cut loose.

The Peas topped the Billboard singles chart for exactly half a year: Prior to “I Gotta Feeling”‘s fourteen-week residence, the silly “Boom Boom Pow,” which goofed on club music’s futurism and hip-hop’s empty boasts while jacking the thrill of each, had already rested on top for twelve weeks. It was a success story so unnerving to some critics that their denial compelled them to wax with desperate thoughtfulness over the cultural importance of Lady Gaga. The Peas, you see, raise no chewy gender issues, nor is there the slightest bit of transgression about them — they simply plug into our trivial, disposable culture with an awkward eagerness to please that was once pop’s point. I guess there will always be folks less willing to forgive the gregarious and trivial than they are the overblown and self-important. Poor things.

a quick question

Hey there, neglected blog readers.  Hoping to squeeze out the past few entries soon (or not-so-soon), but I have a quick request: Could you let me know which of these posts have been your favorites? Trying to round up and revise a handful of the best.

DJ Quik & Kurupt — “9X’s Outta Ten”

Released: 6.9.11

Peak: Did not chart

My opinions on ’90s L.A. hip-hop are highly suspect. Even my taste in Cali gangsta runs toward the agile semiotics of Jersey transplant Ice T rather than the blocky bludgeoning of Compton homebody Ice Cube. Chalk it up to east-coast nurturing if you like; my personal theory is that I was old enough to appreciate George Clinton’s greatest hits before Dre lopped off their humor and humanity. And as much as NYC irritates me, its cosmopolitan pretentiousness at least forced dopes to feign intelligence, while L.A.’s method-acting conventions encouraged even some of its smarter MCs to dumb it down.

But DJ Quik’s frisky flow always skipped along with a sharp self-awareness. Though no ace lyricist, Quik’s eye for detail allowed him to sketch a world of backyard barbecues and everyday scuffling that his contemporaries often obscured with b-movie stage trappings. His long-running ambivalence toward thuggery came to a head in 2000 with Balances and Opinions, which not only featured a call to “Change Da Game” but the explicit assertion “I’m not a gangsta.”  And as a producer, Quik peppered his easy-listening g-bounce with an arsenal of funny sounds, particularly a trademark plink that’s somewhere between a spoon-tapped water glass and a thumb-popped cheek.

From the seductive exotica of “Hey Playa! (Moroccan Blues)” to the flutey darting of “Whatcha Wan Do,” Quik outdid himself on BlaKQout, his full-length collaboration with formerly negligible Dogg Pound mutt Kurupt. Buried at the center is “9 X’s Outta Ten,” its hard-ass beat a lump of coal compressed into a diamond. His no-bullshit baritone contrasting with an upper register flutter hook and Quik’s own slightly higher-pitched voice providing contrast, Kurupt repeats “When it stops/ 9x outta 10/ It’s gonna start again/ Where it started at ended up and restart again” so solemnly you’d think he was intoning some forgotten ancient wisdom — so solemnly you might even wonder what he means.

Best Albums 2009 (11-15)

15. Shakira – She Wolf

Clocking in at barely more than a half hour (Spanish-lyric versions, label add-ons and all), Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s favorite pop star scales back her pretensions so drastically I worry that she’s come to accept that polyglot dance-pop won’t change the world after all. Whether insisting that lycanthropy is no laughing matter or grudgingly accepting that California ain’t for her, she’s getting in touch with her inner timidity. But just because she’s feeling her age more than a thirty-two year-old bombshell should doesn’t mean she feels it any more than her less-famous female contemporaries do – in fact, that’s kind of the point. Anyone who can score four great tracks from the Neptunes in 2009 must know what she’s doing.

14. Yonlu — A Society in Which No Tear Is Shed Is Inconceivably Mediocre

If Elliott Smith had been a sad Brazilian kid, he might have sounded something like Vinicius Gageiro Marques. But while Yonlu shared Smith’s becalmed vocal chill, he thankfully lacked the petulant undertow. For indie-rock depressives (and, more importantly, their non-clinical admirers) who get off on the supposed beauty of sadness, the clincher is Marques’ creepy back story—he not only threatened suicide online, he followed through. But though Yonlu relished his sensitivity, but he didn’t wallow in his despair, and he knew how to talk sense to his fellow sufferers: “Katie don’t be depressed/ Seriously I mean what the fuck.”

13. A Place to Bury Strangers — Exploding Head

Oliver Ackermann, the founder of effects-pedal design firm Death by Audio, is noise-rock’s answer to Tom Scholz. Shoegaze comparisons may be inevitable, given the surface clamor and structural undergirding, but they’re off the mark – Ackermann has no interest in either the girl-group prettiness of JAMC or the Pre-Raphaelite preciousness of MBV. The sound here is bigger and uglier than on the band’s self-titled debut, but the songwriting is also more streamlined, which very much disturbs fans of perpetual disorder. But any clod can mimic chaos. Crafting a discrete art object and then splattering its contents all over your speakers—that takes skill. I mean, what part of “exploding head” don’t you understand?

12. Doom — Born Like This

As though his metal-masked supervillain persona wasn’t concept enough, Doom couldn’t resist piling on aliases and gimmicks throughout his comeback decade. But while the Madlib collab Madvillainy focused him, the Adult Swim tie-in The Mask and the Mouse diluted colorful interactions with suitable sidekick Danger Mouse by ceding so much time to lesser comics, and the Victor Vaughn discs, apparently designed to prove his illimitability, were too slight by half. After a four-year hiatus, though, his word power felt as pent-up as it had when he first returned in ’99; it hardly matters whether he flows over his own recycled beats of vault material from Dilla and Madlib. Not the “real” Doom, maybe, whatever that means, but the uncut shit, for sure.

11. PJ Harvey & John Parish — A Woman a Man Walked By

Not a “real” PJ Harvey album, if you insist–and maybe, by delegating the music to longtime collaborator Parish, Harvey intended to agree with you. But though Uh Huh Her reassured goth grownups she wouldn’t be happy forever and the drab White Chalk mysteriously beguiled fans of quiet piano, this side project sounds less minor than the supposedly major efforts that followed Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. For someone who values Harvey foremost as a performer, the screeches, bellows, wails and other vocal effects she hauls out of her old bag of domina-tricks are welcome reminders that what she had to say was always less important than how she said it.

Das Racist — “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”

Released: 6.9.11

Peak: Did not chart

Here we have what seems like exactly the sort of internet novelty blip that annoys all the right people. (By whom I mean, of course, “not me.” The internet novelty blips that I–and, I’m sure, you, wise reader—hate are wholly deserving of opprobrium.) The lyrics aren’t solely limited solely to “I’m at the Pizza Hut ( What?)/ I’m at the Taco Bell (What?)/ I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” but aside from a few stray adlibs (“I don’t see you here dog”), an occasional shift to second person plural, and confirmation that both rappers are in the correct (Jamaica Avenue) establishment, that’s what Das Racist’s got to say.

The smarts are right there in their name; the fun comes from wondering if these are smart guys playing dumb, or smart guys disguising smart as dumb. (I pick option A.) If you wanted to be fancy about it, you could say Heems and Kool A.D. are working in a minimalist vein, exploring how many variations can be worked on a simple string of words, like the Philip Glasses of alt-web-hop. No need to be fancy though, ’cause that really is what they’re doing, though (probably?) without the highfalutin rationale—mining comedy from repeated shifts in intonation. Even more repetitive is the staccato pulse, like an electronically augmented pipe clang, threatening but never quite achieving breakdown throughout.

So there was evidence that Das Racist might be more than an internet novelty blip, if not that they’d be able to make a career of it, even before they showed their hand as lyrical maximalists on their mixtapes. And they were great interviews, whether shaming the Times’ shameless Deborah Solomon (“Would we even be on the page of this publication if we had not gone to Wesleyan?”) or, responding, when the Voice’s Rob Harvilla asked them if they feared being pigeonholed as “fast-food rappers”: “There are at least three other things we talk about.”

Michael Franti — “Say Hey (I Love You)”

Released: 6.7.09

Peak: #18

I wasn’t startled to hear a song by the creator of “Television, the Drug of a Nation” in a TV beer commercial — I was just glad Michael Franti and his label sponsors at Anti- were getting paid. Even back when he thought his Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were doing for Chomsky what Public Enemy did for Farrakhan, Franti was warmer than most ideologues, with a heart that was always bigger — and more reliable — than his brain. And with his major-label outfit, Spearhead, Franti crafted an uncommonly humanist “political rap,” translating social awareness into a very Bay Area funk groove without enshrouding himself within the incense-clogged aura of superiority endemic to the genre. Not for nothing did U2 pick him to open the Zoo TV tour.

But though only someone who took the politics of pleasure seriously could have created “Say Hey (I Love You),” Franti himself isn’t what makes the song soar. His lyric struggles too hard to justify his bubbly mood, not just apologizing “I don’t want to write a love song for the world/ I just want to write a song about a boy and a girl” but noting the “junkies on the corner.” Cherine Anderson’s warm supporting vocal, however, bolsters Franti’s own serrated voice, while Sly & Robbie tauten his frothy, late-period dorm-room skank. And much love to Raleigh Neal II, whose piano cuts against the beat every which way.

No wonder somebody figured the song would make somebody want to drink Corona Light, watch Valentine’s Day, and root for the Giants in the 2010 Series (way to capitalize on that Willie Mays connection). Disposable? Maybe. Hiphopritical? Like Big Bill Haywood used to say, nothing’s too good for the working class. And as far as heroes go, I stopped looking for hip-hop to serve up such mythical creatures a long time past.

Maxwell — “Pretty Wings”

Release date: 4.28.09

Peak: #33

All my old complaints hold true. Maxwell’s singing still not only verges on the bodiless, but aches toward it, as though winnowing away all carnal presence to achieve the Platonic form of desire. His ornate vocal curlicues suggest an ideal of soul composed solely of fingertip caresses and candlelight flicker and bubble bath residue. It’s all too much for an Otis Redding fan to take.

The hyperbolic responses to BLACKsummers’night, ranging from Jody Rosen’s snide “an R&B album about love, not just sex, for grown-ups who know the difference” to David Drake’s smitten “only someone as passionate about music as they are the human heart could so successfully produce work that reflects well on both,” failed to fully correspond to my experience of sex, love, hearts, and music. And yet, with the romantic essence of R&B having largely degenerated to a 2D porntasia of robots macking on strippers, my reservations about Maxwell felt less pressing by 2009. In fact, his sensual self-absorption rendered “Pretty Wings,” a breakup song arranged for wind chimes and handclap, suitable as a makeout soundtrack if you overlook (underhear?) the words.

Lyrically, “Pretty Wings” has its moments — “One day you won’t remember me” is a pretty cold line. Yet overall, Maxwell never clarifies who’s at fault. It’d be too charitable of fans to interpret the lyrics as ambiguous; it’d be too uncharitable of me to suggest that they lack coherence. Let’s split the diff and call them “evasive.” The snazzy horns recall “Adore,” and Maxwell even works up to a show of gruffness toward the close (“climax” would be pushing it). True, that vocal shift is a purely formal aesthetic decision—dude know his arrangement requires a contrast in tone — and what Prince recognizes as the icing on top Maxwell serves up as a full course meal. But if the arty slow jam betrays a tendency to preciousness in its creator, it also suggests an attention to detail. And that’s hardly a bad trait bring to bed with you.

Taylor Swift — “You Belong With Me”

Released: 4.21.09       

Peak: #2

The problem with romantic comedies isn’t their rote hewing to a hackneyed plot. You could bitch the same about Dickens — handled right, predictability can be part of the fun. What rankles is the romcom refusal to acknowledge that genre cliché is a privilege, not a right. Rather than earning our sympathies, the modern boy-meets-girl hopes to buy them off with celebrity — negotiable back when Meg Ryan retained enough of her original face to still charm, downright insulting in the Katherine Heigl era.

Taylor Swift is an American girl, raised on these clichés. Her big pop breakthrough, “Love Story,” may pretend to find precedent for her infatuation in literature, but Swift gets The Scarlet Letter even wronger than she gets Romeo and Juliet because her real inspiration is far lower-brow — her climactic “Baby just say yes” is the sort of exhilarating affirmation most Hollywood product flails hopelessly toward. Swift balanced off that happy ending with the sour “White Horse” — “I’m not a princess/ This ain’t a fairy tale” reflects the bitterness that an adolescence of immersion in romantic happily-ever-afters sets you up for. (And whatever Swift’s live problems with pitch, the woman who attacks “someone who might actually treat me well” is a mighty convincing singer.)

But if its predecessors hint at their romcom heritage, “You Belong With Me,” aided by the rare video that supplements its song’s storytelling, is a full-on homage, right down to the  removal of those beauty-obscuring nerd glasses. Though concerned adult feminists heard the song as pitting girl against girl, that’s barely half the story — Swift’s unworthy competitor is a plot device. Just as the music’s nuanced power-country rocks more flexibly than much of the Nashville competition, the lyric distills the sap of Hollywood fable down to its humane essentials — that friendship should be the cornerstone of romantic love. Nothing too fairy-tale-ish about that.

Kelly Clarkson — “I Do Not Hook Up”

Released: 4.14.08       

Peak:#20

There’s plenty to admire about Kelly Clarkson, from her unfussy good looks and normally proportioned body to her non-self-aggrandizing attempts to steer her own career. As for her music, well, we all love “Since U Been Gone.” But though no one who tells Clive Davis to shove it can be all bad, the purity and strength of Clarkson’s voice, an integral part of the attraction for her fans, sacrifices personality in the name of force, an aesthetic choice that’s always struck me as not only unempowering but uninteresting. Pat Benatar may have had her moments, but she was never Joan Jett.

After the RCA-riling personal statement My December, Clarkson surrendered to outside songwriters for All I Ever Wanted, with a noteworthy decrease in melodrama. I even warmed to its monster ballad, “Already Gone,” once So You Think You Can Dance adopted it as exit music, which is more than I can say for “Halo,” the carbon copy that two-timing hack Ryan Tedder peddled to Beyoncé. But though fun, that album’s biggest hit, “My Life Would Suck Without You,” was typical Dr. Luke blammo, its guitar too obviously replicated from “Since U Been Gone,” the entirety of the joke crammed into the title. Clarkson sounds far too proud to be half of one of those couples whose on-and-off antics annoy the rest of us. (And if you’re gonna use “dysfunctional” in a song, come up with a better rhyme than “can’t let you go.”)

“I Do Not Hook Up” was a Katy Perry leftover produced by a radio-rock dreckmeister – and, against those formidable odds, the most emotionally nuanced of Clarkson’s hits. Rather than over-relying on technique and firepower, Clarkson permits her voice to flicker alternately with pride, with flirtiness, with confusion, and with regret. She squints to see a decent man underneath the smooth mack with whom she pleads to “give up the game,” persuading herself of his worth more successfully than she persuades herself that she’s not going to bed with him. What initially presents itself as a boast of sexual autonomy reveals itself as a fight between desire and reason.