Albums Of The Year 2010

So it’s that time of year again, when everyone starts choosing their favourite works of art of the year. For the last few years I have been pulling my picks together for a magazine run by a friend, and this year will be no different. I think my overall take is that it has been a really, surprisingly good year for music. I say “surprising” because lots of the bands that have been my favourites for the last few years haven’t released records this year (no Thrice, Thursday, Brand New etc.) and yet quite a few newer bands have stepped up and put out records that I have really dug. That said, there are definitely some old hands on the lists too, which I suppose proves that you like what you like! Anyhow, my choices (with rap, as ever, split out from rock) are:

Albums Of The Year:

1) I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone by Crime In Stereo (Bridge Nine)

2) White Crosses by Against Me!!! (Sire / Warner)

3) Chamberlain Waits by The Menzingers (Red Scare)

4) High Violet by The National (4AD)

5) Buzzard by Margot & The Nuclear So-And-So’s (Mariel)

6) My Dinosaur Life by Motion City Soundtrack (Epitaph)

7) This Addiction by Alkaline Trio (Epitaph)

8) Total Life Forever by Foals (Warner Bros.)

9) Invented by Jimmy Eat World (Dreamworks)

10) Symptoms and Cures by Comeback Kid (Victory)

Honourable Mention 1: Treats by Sleigh Bells (Mom & Pop)

Honourable Mention 2: Demos by Matt Skiba (Asian Man)

Honourable Mention 3: Recitation by Envy (Temporary Residence Limited)

Contenders released too late: Varuna by The Republic of Wolves, Disambiguation by UnderOath, What Separates Me From You by A Day To Remember

Rap Albums Of The Year:

1) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West (Def Jam)

2) Sir Lucious Leftfoot, The Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi (Def Jam)

3) Thank Me Later by Drake (Cash Money)

4) Man On The Moon II: The Legend of Mr Rager by Kid Cudi (Universal Motown)

5) A Badly Broken Code by Dessa (Doomtree)

EPs Of The Year:

1) To All My Friends… by Atmosphere (Rhymesayers)

2) Farewell Continental by Farewell Continental (Self-released)

3) Never Mind The Bombings, Here’s Your Six Figures by United Nations (Deathwish)

4) Touche Amore / La Dispute Split EP (No Idea)

5) Simple Science EP by The Get Up Kids (Self-released)

Honourable Mention 1: Appendage by Circa Survive (Atlantic)

Honourable Mention 2: The Young and Defenceless by Funeral For A Friend (Self-released)

Favourite Lives Shows Of The Year:

1) Polar Bear Club upstairs at The Garage

2) Funeral For A Friend (Casually Dressed Show) at Shepherd's Bush

3) Jimmy Eat World at Brixton Academy

4) Against Me!!! downstairs at The Garage

5) Motion City Soundtrack at Electric Ballroom

Honourable Mention 1: A Day To Remember / Architects (UK) at Kentish Town Forum

Honourable Mention 2: The Menzingers at The Fighting Cocks, Kingston

Looking across all of the categories, it really does strike me as having been a really strong year. Even the honourable mentions that didn’t make the Top 10 in my albums of the year list are all really strong – Sleigh Bells released what was in many ways the most original, ‘new-sounding’ album I heard, the Matt Skiba demos record was of very high quality and while the album as a whole is a little inconsistent, the best songs on “Recitation” are absolutely stunning. Overall, though, it’s noticeable that in each of the record categories there was just a little something that separated the top two from the rest of the ten, as far as I was concerned. It was hard to decide which should be 1 and which should be 2, but they did pick themselves. The Crime In Stereo and Against Me!!! records are quite different – the CIS one is inventive and inward-looking and stormy whereas AM!!! released a record that by their standards was anthemic and universal in tone. Kanye West’s album was idiosyncratic and hugely experimental whereas Big Boi released a record that deployed a lot of what is traditionally effective about hip-hop in a rock-solid way. And Atmosphere made an EP that’s engrossing but clean and tidy, whereas Farewell Continental write songs that emerge from a haze of fuzz and feedback. However, I love all of the records, and think I’ll still be listening to them once 2010 has expired.

F Bomb Threat?

Author: DC

Date: October 2010

Word count: 1,350

Ladies and gentleman, I believe that we have reached a landmark moment in the history of the human race. A moment that shall be remembered with some fondness, a touch of sorrow, and a great deal of awe by those who lived through it – and yet a moment that will scarcely be understood by those born after it. A moment that all men should rise up and celebrate, sure in the knowledge that... oh, sorry, I was getting carried away a bit there. Everyone wants to be Abraham Lincoln, right? But seriously, during this past month I do believe that we have witnessed something momentous – we have seen cursing cease to be cool. Let’s face it, as much as we’d all like to think that we’re mature, grown-up adults, most of us (the religious aside, to whom I would like to apologise for the entirety of this article) have gotten a bit of a kick out of well-implemented swearing. Not just random cursing or vulgarity but the unleashing of a perfectly timed, well-chosen curse word (none of which I can say while writing here, of course) can be satisfying, and can give us a brief thrill. In the modern world there aren’t too many ways for a guy or girl to feel like an outlaw, a badass, a wild person (unless, of course, you actually are any of things. In which case more power to you, and good luck dodging the parole officers), but dropping an f-bomb when you really shouldn’t can do that. But I think even this thrill may be on the wane. Let me explain...

Here’s the theory: cursing has gotten its cachet, its frisson of danger, its cool, because according to social norms it has always been viewed as marginally unacceptable behaviour. And almost everyone, even if they are otherwise entirely clean-living and well-meaning folk, likes to think of themselves as a rule breaker, of someone who just occasionally is willing to be unacceptable. As a result, when we curse it makes us feel just a little bit cool, that we may be 99% certified public accountant but that we’re still 1% Roger Sterling. I believe that social norms have now changed to such an extent, however, that cursing is no longer really unacceptable to most people and is in fact viewed as just part of the dialogue, as something that even the most straight-laced of us are expected to do. Given that, it’s no longer cool. What is more, I think we can see evidence of this by looking at four pop songs of recent years, all of which flirt with the f-word.

Song one: F*** It (I Don’t Want You Back) by Eamon. This was the first song of a pop persuasion to be so completely upfront in its use of the f-word, to the extent that it caused a social scandal on release. Sure, hip-hop songs had been laced with profanity for years before this, and hard rock songs had always featured their fair share of cursing, but genres always appealed to a non-mainstream demographic and as such their use of cuss words can’t be taken as evidence as a broad social trend. Eamon, however, inspired a real backlash, with commentators condemning him for his inability to express himself to a lady without dropping the bomb (and, not uncoincidentally, ladies dissing him for being a total ass). Given this, F*** It serves as both evidence that times were changing – someone could write and release, and have a hit with, a song featuring some hardcore swearing – but also a clear indicator that as recently as eight years ago it was still seen by the majority of people as unacceptable that curse words be used in popular songs and cultural dialogue.

Song two: If You Seek Amy by Britney Spears. Now fast forward a few years, and you can find incontrovertible evidence that attitudes have really moved on. On the face of it, this song was to a great extent even more risqué than the Eamon number (and wasn’t sung by a guy who would surely be on Jersey Shore if he’d been born ten years later, which must be a good thing). This wasn’t because of outright cursing – in fact, if you read the lyric sheet Britney doesn’t swear once while singing this song. Instead, she simply talks to a guy who is looking for a girl in a club, hence “if you seek Amy” (if you don’t get it, just say it fast. There you go). But that cute use of pronunciation doesn’t hide the fact that somehow this song is more shocking than F*** It simply because it serves no other purpose than to be a delivery system custom-designed to get 12 year old girls cussing like troopers. It’s a blatant attempt to sidestep censorship and deliver serious profanity to a tween audience. The telling thing, though, was that Britney didn’t receive a quarter of the backlash that Eamon did. Even though she was using a schoolyard trick to get young children to buy and sing a song during which the singer clearly invites someone to... well, you know... people couldn’t find it in themselves to get too worked up, because attitudes were changing.

Song three: Florida University by The-Dream. Another landmark song, released earlier this year by The-Dream on his “Love King” record. This track had a sing-song refrain that was sure to get everyone in the club up and a-cursin’ (“F-U, F-U, F-U [repeat until out of breath]”) and was even more knowing than Britney in the way that it went about its business, with The-Dream even noting sarcastically that the track was “a hell of a clean version”. It got radio play, again aimed at a young adult audience, and it shocked absolutely no-one. There was no complaint or surprise, and there was certainly no outrage. It had become perfectly acceptable for the hook of a sugar pop record to feature a strong curse.

Song four: F*** You by Cee-Lo Green. No surprises what the last song is, given its cultural ubiquity this year – and that in itself says it all. Not only was there no shock value in Cee-Lo releasing this song (other than some minor Fox News scare-mongering and chatter, which bordered on the racist in the extent to which it focussed on Cee-Lo’s blackness as a cause of his addiction to the f-word) but the track was actually viewed as cute and fun. As fluffy and kittenish. The opposite, in other words, of dangerous cool. Yes, this is part to do with the funky soul-drenched tone of the music, and the degree to which the venom of the swearing is undercut by how oddly loveable Cee-Lo is), but it also reflects the fact that any residual outlaw spirit attached to swearing has died and gone, the fact that cussing is no longer cool.

This mirrors what we’ve seen about the presentation of sex and sexuality in popular culture. Just as cursing has crossed over, so it has become more acceptable to talk about sex in a frank and up-front fashion. Again hip-hop was doing this comfortably before pop was, but chart pop and even songs aimed at young audiences are now talking pretty explicitly about sex, as anyone who has heard a Ke$ha or Gaga song this year knows. Just about the only barrier that hasn’t been surmounted is open discussion of male gay sex, and even that has to happen sooner rather than later.

So The-Dream’s song is likely to be the last of a breed, the last song to have any residual novelty value or to receive a boost by trading on profanity. For some this will be a refreshing sign that society is at last getting over some quite antiquated hang ups about language and sex. For others it will be a worrying sign that a set of desirable cultural values has been eroded, and that the young are being exposed to too much too young. Either way, we’ll all have to find new ways of convincing ourselves that we’re still badasses...

Douchebags, Scumbags and Vanilla Thunder

Author: DC

Date: October 2010

Word count: 1,155 (inc. footnotes)

I’ve just returned from 3 gloriously sunny weeks in California spent driving very slowly from San Francisco to LA in a ridiculous record-exec-pimp-wagon Mazda called “Vanilla Thunder[1]”, sampling amazing restaurants and brilliant local record stores on the way. Seriously, Californians, I’m not sure that you realise how lucky you are to still have the phenomenal collection of indie stores that you do. Every town we went to, from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz, had a fantastic record emporium staffed by fun and insanely knowledgeable folk, and that is absolutely not the case everywhere in the world. Support the local, as you won’t realise how good it is until it has gone. Anyway, not the point, which was this: while cruising in Vanilla, I got to listen to a crazy amount of chart music, simply because I forgot to take any CDs with me and as a result was at the mercy of the FM dial. While much of it wasn’t my thing (or, in the case of “DJ’s Got Us Falling In Love Again” by Usher, really wasn’t my thing but still ended up stuck in my head for three entire weeks), something really interesting struck me about some of the songs that were getting a lot of play.

Let’s take two songs as examples. Both were getting increasing amounts of airplay as our trip went on, building up to what will inevitably be radio ubiquity for both. Neither was a life-changer in and of itself – one is a very good modern rock song, and the other a very funny but quite lightweight hip-hop jam. The former being “Waiting For The End” by Linkin Park, and the latter being “Runaway” by Kanye West. However, both were fascinating in as far as they perfectly encapsulate a trend that we’re increasingly seeing in popular music.

Musical convergence is what we’ll call it. The basic thesis here is that the concept of ‘genre’ in modern music is becoming less relevant all the time as artists increasingly look beyond the confines of a single style, set of influences or “sound” to inspire them. If you will, it’s the end point of the shuffleisation of music – if your iPod plays you a smooth r ‘n b song followed by some speedmetal, a samba number, a sugarpop Katy Perry song and a South African zef-rap, why wouldn’t you begin to see commonalities between the songs, or ways in which the elements that they bring could be blended together? On the flipside, this expectation of variety is what has made FM radio stations, with their myopic focus on single micro-genres[2], feel so staid a medium.

You can see the convergence at work in these songs, without even having to listen that closely. Linkin Park, who are commonly perceived to be relatively conventional rockers, bring out a huge assortment of styles and influences on “Waiting…” The song begins with a Nine Inch Nails-style treated guitar line, is underpinned by a hip-hop beat embellished with country-sounding woodblock hits, uses a reggae cadence for some of its vocals and a traditional balladeering approach for others, has an Indian chant harmony part, and also includes some electro pulses and DJ scratching. While the resulting songs sounds big and busy, it doesn’t come off as a badly-combined Frankenstein’s monster of a track. In fact, it’s astonishing how unstrange the final product seems. We have simply gotten used to genre-blending. Sure, I could still just about describe it as a ‘modern rock’ song in my opening paragraph as there are some crunchy guitars in the mix, but to do that is to use pretty lazy journalistic shorthand to describe a song that is in fact very difficult to pigeonhole.

“Runaway”, in contrast, is in its recorded form much more minimalist, certainly when compared with the live version that Mr West has been performing lately, which layers over the core track with grating vocal drops and Bomb Squad noise effects. The song is also a degree more conventional than the Linkin Park effort – it is at least a hip-hop song underpinned by a traditionally hip-hop beat, and has a dextrous but recognisable guest verse from Pusha-T of the Clipse. But in many other ways the song is still all over the map, especially for the second single by a major-label artist: for instance, there’s little clear delineation of verse, bridge and chorus with Kanye instead repeatedly drawing on certain motifs cyclically throughout the song[3]. He also brings in an almost dubsteppish baseline, disco vocodering and a prog-rock echoing of vocals, just for fun. And again, none of this seems surprising or out of place. Convergence does that to you.

Sure, there are problems with convergence. If handled poorly, style-blending can result in songs that are just random-seeming soundclashes, with little stylistic coherence or thematic clarity. The appropriation of styles from other nations, if not done with sensitivity, can also lead to charges of cultural imperialism or ‘fakeness’, as can be seen in the criticisms of globetrotting producer Diplo for the way that he has drawn from South American and African culture. Equally, stressing how refreshing convergence can be can lead to the marginalisation of artists or bands who choose to operate within a particular niche and to perfect that particular craft, and this marginalisation can potentially be as constricting as the FM radio insistence that bands DO have a particular genre. It may explain why, for example, there is the start of a backlash against Brooklyn’s superb The National, with it alleged that they are “just indie”. Well, when you write songs that good, being “just indie” is more than enough. Given the state of radio, however, defending genre traditionalists seems to be of lesser concern than trying to encourage boundary-blurring, if only to finally put the nail in the coffin of single-genre stations. So, having spent three weeks in Vanilla Thunder with only the FM dial for company, I’d like to raise a toast, as Mr West would say – just in this case to musical innovators, rather than his “douchebags”, “scumbags” and “jerkoffs”.

---

[1] Because it was huge and very, very white. Seriously, thanks to car rental company that shall remain nameless for the free upgrade, but seriously… a ridiculous white hybrid the size of a killer whale?

[2] During our trip, we noted stations dedicated to “modern urban salsa”, “Hispanic hop-hop”, “contemporary Christian active metal” and “granola-inspired rural passive whale song”. Only one of those is made up. Promise.

[3] I wanted to write more about the absolutely extraordinary lyrics to this song but my editors weren’t keen on it, seeing as how my last 4,289 articles have been about rap lyrics. Let’s just say that Kanye outdoes himself, and becomes the first guy to release a song to radio with the word “douchebag” featuring prominently in the chorus.

The Giraffe of Rock Records

August 2010

Author: DC

Word count: 880

During the last couple of weeks I have been reading one of Henry Rollin’s journals about his travels and career, the excellently-named “Smile, You’re Travelling”. During 1997 he took a trip to Kenya and Madagascar, and as part of that he went on a safari. Rollins writes wonderfully about being a product of sprawling American cities, of Washington DC and Los Angeles, transplanted to the wilds of the world.

In particular, he talks about being completely astonished by the animals that he saw, and how he found each one more amazing and wondrous than the last. First he saw monkeys with “blue balls”, then baboons with their amazing twisted bodies and protruding backsides, then majestic lions. All of these creatures blow him away but to a degree at least he felt that he know what to think of them, that he had a frame of reference for their looks, their behaviour, their size. Then, however, he sees a giraffe, and has what he would call a “holy shit” moment. It’s not that any of the individual elements of a giraffe were necessarily shocking to him: in isolation he could handle the long legs, the horsey face, the yellowish skin. But put together they made the giraffe totally incredible to him, a creature that took recognizable parts but put them together in a completely different way to anything that he had seen before.

The way we react to records can be a bit like the experience that Rollins describes. You have your monkey records, those that are of a really high quality but are absolutely of their type and somehow how familiar, as if you’ve hard many things similar to them before. You have your red-assed baboon records, which are still somehow comprehensible but add an exciting new twist to the things you have heard before. Then, just occasionally, you have a giraffe record. It’s not totally alien as you can pick out recognizable component parts – guitar riffs, drum lines, vocals, keys, handclaps. But somehow the way that the elements are welded together is surprising and fresh.

While this year has, in my humble opinion, been a genuinely excellent one for music so far, until recently all of my favorite records of the year had been monkeys or baboons. Wonderful, aggressive or romantic, sweeping or claustrophobic records, but all within the realm of what I think I understand. Recently though, I found my giraffe record. I don’t know if it will still astonish me in a few months time, or whether the shock of the new will gradually wear off, just as a giraffe would somehow become more ordinary if you were to see it a hundred times. But for now, it’s all I want to listen to.

That record is "Treats", by Sleigh Bells. It's a deeply strange record in many ways, and not least because it's the product of a hardcore guitarist and a singer who sounds like she's most inspired by the vocal stylings of Gwen Stefani or a “Mickey”-era Toni Basil. Ex-Poison The Well axeman Derek Miller writes the music, which broadly speaking is huge guitar riffs layered over dancey, drum machine boom-bap beats. New Yorker Alexis Krauss sing-chants in a Hollaback Girl fashion over the top.

So far, “Treats” must sound relatively normal, yet another hipster rock-dance crossover record – not even a monkey but a horse, if you will. But then Miller extends its neck by making the record, to put it simply, noisy as fuck. Every guitar tone is overdriven and distorted, every beat hit fuzzy and boomy, the whole production echoey and indistinct. The only thing that comes through clearly is the pseudo-click track of fingersnaps that serves to keep time for the songs. Krauss's vocals aren't pop-crystal-clear either. They swoop into and out of focus in the mix, are equally distorted in recording, and she doesn't really enunciate at all. As a result the vocals almost become another element of the rhythm, rather than the driver of the melody.

That's not to say that there's no variation here - some songs are funloud, others tenderloud, others brutaloud, and some just ecstaticdanceyadrenalinerushloud. But it’s not a record for the faint of heart. And that's perhaps what's so exciting about it - when many rockers seem to be trying to shorten their necks and scrape off their yellow skin to fit in with the horses that get airplay on modern rock radio, Sleigh Bells add more weirdness. More distortion. More noise. And more fun.

The song that steals the deal for me is the album recording of "Crown On The Ground", a song that has been floating around in demo / lo-fi form for a while. Simply put, despite being hopelessly static-ridden, lyrically impenetrable and, yes, loud, it's the most purely fun, exhilarating song I've heard all year. It's more pop fun than every chart number one this year put together. It's more likely to get you dancing than a million Tiesto mixes. And once you've heard it once, it will be the only song you'll want to hear at one in the morning when you're at a club, nicely drunk, and waiting for that one euphoric jam to blow the roof off the place. It's a giraffe in a sea of monkeys.

Light It Up or Shut It Down

Author: DC

Word count: 1024

The majority of albums that top the charts now, as has always been the case, are relatively straightforward affairs. They are, for the most part, fairly down-the-line representations of one of the major musical genres – mainstream rock, country, pop and hip hop / r’n b. Since record sales have declined and thus the number of albums you need to shift to number 1 has dropped off precipitously (if you’d suggested four years ago that you’d have number one albums selling fewer than 100,000 copies the execs of Behemoth Recording Industries would have laughed you out of their lavishly-decorated boardroom), you now get the occasionally strange pick. An indie rock upstart getting their die-hard fans out in week one. A comeback album by an ageing nostalgia act. But for the most part the rule still applies.

The rule seems to operate within genres as well, as most notably within hip-hop. In the last 10 years, with the exception of some of Kanye West’s more experimental moments and some of the early-90s blockbusters that managed to combine huge sales with quirky creative statements (listen to Illmatic now, and you’ll be surprised by how odd it is), the hip-hop records that have sold huge have conformed to a formula. A mix of hood tracks and party beats, one huge pop jam, repeat to finish. Look at the failure of many of the backpackers or underground kings to penetrate the higher reaches of the charts. The reliance on using existing beats to test lyrics via freestyling, and the periodic dominance of top producers with their own styles have made it hard for original sounds to break through.

That’s what makes it so unusual that hot property Drake saw his debut full-length major label LP go straight into the charts at number one, before he was unseated in his second week by sales titan Eminem. Drake and his producers have curated a vibe that, while drawing on recent touchstones like Kanye West’s “808s and Heartbreak”, is unique and distinctive. A minimalist sonic palate, 808 rattles, dreamy synth washes drawn from indie rock and a reliance on singing and talk-rapping rather than all-out flowing mark him out. What’s even more surprising is that he seemed to arrive at this sound early on in his career, that it seems fully formed even in the pinnacle tracks of his early releases (listen to “Houstatlantavegas” and “Baby, You’re The Best” from his So Far Gone EP). Even his limitations as a lyricist and his as yet relatively underdeveloped rhythmic sense marked him out as something a bit different from the polished wit-slinging wordsmiths in the T.I. vein that have come to the fore in hip-hop.

However, this originality could be a double-edged sword for the man who, regrettably, really really wants us to call him ‘Drizzy’. While listening to a few songs in his style sound originally, too many in that style put together tend to underwhelm, regardless of how good the individual tracks are. 5 minutes of minimalism is a refreshing palate cleanser after you’ve feasted on big beats, but 30 minutes tends to have a soporific effect on you. The key thing that Drake will have to master, as most other innovative creators have, is how to take your basic sound and build on it, innovate around it, so that you retain the distinctive core but retain interest.

You can see this very clearly on Drake’s chart-topping new record “Thank Me Later”. The album is a genuine mixed bag, with some fantastic high points and a reasonable amount of filler. The songs broadly fall into 3 categories. There are some very good songs in what we can now legitimately start to call the characteristic Drake style. The album opener “Fireworks” and another early track “The Resistance” just flat out work, they throw in all the usual Drake ingredients but still sound fresh. Then you have the filler tracks that repeat the formula of the more winning numbers but somehow fall flat due to weaker hooks, less interest textures or simply a lack of that magic hook or perfect one-liner that lodges in your head. Tracks like “Show Me A Good Time” and even the Lil’ Wayne-starring “Miss Me” fall into this category, coming and going unmemorably.

If they were the only styles of track on the album you’d be a bit concerned about the potential longevity of the Drizzy career. However, most intriguingly and promisingly for the Canadian, there are some tracks that have something a little extra. Tracks that throw in new ingredients while still being recognizably the work of the particular artists, and it is these tracks that elevate the album from merely acceptable to very good. The best song is the long r ‘n b jam “Shut It Down”, a genuine duet with ferociously hot soul man The-Dream. The song takes the standard orchestration of almost every Drake song but smartly and deftly layers on new elements like electric piano, some slashing electric guitar, and towards the end of the song a digital bitstorm of backing vocals, synth strings and effects. It all sounds organic and complementary, not over-egged but more substantial that his usual. Lyrically and vocally The-Dream challenges Drake as well, forcing him to push the limits of his singing voice, and encouraging him to concentrate his raps into brief bursts, mitigating Drake’s tendency to ramble rather than be concise.

The other stand-out song is another collaboration, the smouldering “Light Up” with Brooklyn kingpin Jay-Z. The song is almost exactly the opposite of “Shut It Down”. It is lean and spare where that song is ornate, menacing and terrifying where “Shut It Down” is enticingly sexual. The staccato flows of the two rappers reverb around with an echo chamber effect, lending the song a street-corner-at-2am vibe that is hard to capture and unforgettable once you’ve heard it. It’s a diversion, but still somehow bears the Drake trademark – and that’s what is most encouraging about it. It’s what is most encouraging about Drake’s album as a whole – that it contains these moments of relative experimental exploration, while still establishing a core sound that Drake can build on .

To Grind Or Not To Grind, That Is The Question

Author: DC

Word Count: 1,761

For as long as human beings have been making artistic creations, be they paintings or musical compositions or documents, there has been debate about whether artistic greatness is the result of effort and toil, or simply springs from an indefinable “creative genius”. In short, some believe that certain individuals are simply blessed with a unique creative talent which they can then channel into their work – a sort of divine inspiration, if you will, that separates a Shakespeare from a Stephanie Mayer. Other thinkers, while accepting that levels of talent vary from person to person, place more emphasis on the development of skill and creative understanding via hard work and repeated activity. The most sophisticated analyses of the backgrounds of our great artists, such as that conducted by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers”, have concluded that, unsurprisingly, the real answer lies somewhere between those two polarised views. Some people are simply more talented than others, and of those people who are talented the men and women who apply time and effort to their chosen field tend to achieve greater things than those who coast.

This evaluation of talent and effort isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise, however, as the beliefs of particular artists in relation to this issue seem to have very marked consequences for the ways in which those artists practice their craft. This can clearly be seen in relation to the modern music industry, in which the effort / inspiration debate is shaping the way in which music is created, presented and sold. The debate is also moulding the development of the music industry, whether artists fully realise this or not.

In rap music, the notion that artistic success is a direct function of effort and toil has become a dominant, broadly-accepted construct that very few artists, producers or label executives disagree with. It has become axiomatic that rappers who work hard and fully commit to a ‘life in the industry’ are more likely to become successful than those who don’t, and that having artistic talent is no substitute for some bleeding-knuckle effort. Work is valued so highly in the hip-hop community that a complex vocabulary has emerged to describe the application of effort to the craft. The recording studio has become “the lab”, rappers are no longer creating songs but “building something”, and most notably recent years have seen the characterisation of the creative and commercial process that a rapper must go through to make and sell records as “the grind”. In fact, a whole family of grind-related words has evolved; “the grind” is the day-to-day struggle of being a rapper, you can “grind” or “be on your grind” (work hard to get what you want), you can hire a “grinder” (someone who will work hard at promotion or sales on your behalf), and you can also use a “grinder” to separate your weed before smoking it. Oh no, hold on, that’s something different[1].

So many chart and underground rap songs of the last few years have talked about the grind that it has started to fall into non hip-hop usage (the New York Times recently quoted a Senatorial candidate as saying that he “has been grinding hard, trying to drum up support”). Most recently the latest single by Asher Roth is actually called “G.R.I.N.D.”[2] During the song Roth lays out a positive social message that he hopes to promote by successfully making uplifting music – and why is he confident that he will achieve this? Because “I work real hard and all for every little bit that I get”. It’s the work that results in great music, it’s the work that will lead to his success. Roth admits that this can make things difficult and tiring, and that it would easier if simply having talent was a guarantee of good fortune, as he notes that “I… I’ve been on my grind / I can only grind / for so long”. In fact, if you listen to what rappers are saying, work has become almost the only thing that’s perceived to result in record deals, the creation of hot beats and strong rhymes, and ultimately in record sales. Having good luck is said to help, but the possession of actual artistic inspiration is some way down the list of prerequisites.

In contrast, you don’t hear very many rock stars talking in a similar fashion. Occasionally a band will stress the importance of effort and time in their creative process, as anyone who has read one of the recent flood of interviews with Brooklyn group The National can attest to. However, their statements aren’t exactly the same as those made by their rap counterparts, as in the eyes of The National the work on its own didn’t make successful creation more likely. Instead, the application of effort was necessary simply because the five members of the band and their musical associates had very different musical tastes and inspirations, and it was hard to combine them all into coherent compositions. Most of the time, however, rock stars seem to ascribe to the view that they, when writing and recording music, are tapping into a pure vein of artistic creativity that exists within their souls. Sometimes it may take months for genius to strike and no amount of hard work can force it, on occasion you may strike gold on the first take and that’s that, but regardless of timelines the concept of ‘inspiration’ guides them. In the recent documentary “Stones In Exile”, Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller describes how the band, while recording “Exile On Main Street”, spent the vast majority of the time being unfocussed. They didn’t work hard or knuckle down, they just came and went as they pleased until, just occasionally, “inspiration struck, and Bill looked at Charlie, and then it was on”.

This antipathy to effort and reliance upon the creative muse has become such a part of the rock and roll psyche that we are now suspicious of any act who releases more than one record a year, on the grounds that producing that much material so quickly must be ‘forcing things’. The dominant ethos in rock and roll is that the avoidance of steady work is the surest way to ensure a consistent idea flow, and that placing restrictions on anything can lead to stifled creative potential. This partly explains why rock bands are obsessed with shutting themselves away for months to write, and recording in expensive studios in Malibu mansions. It’s all about putting as much distance as possible between the artists and any obligation to do anything.

Neither of these constructs, expressed in terms this strict, are a correct identification of the ideal creative and commercial process. Artists are individuals and will respond to different creative environments, and while some are suited to writing frequently others genuinely have to contemplate the songs that they are creating for months before they take shape. Undoubtedly, having a focus on these approaches can be unhelpful in certain situations – there are many rappers who would benefit from grinding slightly less and instead taking time to actually write half-decent rhymes (2009/10 Lil’ Wayne, here’s looking at you!) and some rockers would be more productive and less self-indulgent if challenged slightly more about their process. In music as anywhere else, the Gladwell maxim about needing a balance of talent and effort may well be true.

What the constructs have done, however, is served to shape the modern commercial landscape of the music industry. In the hip-hop field, volume of material produced is now perceived to be everything. Artists are flooding the market with studio albums, mixtapes and freestyles. Around this they are trying to find time to undertake waves of touring and promotion, as well as opportunities simply to “be on the street” and connect with fans simply by physical presence in their communities. All of this effort is thought to be required simply to develop or sustain a successful commercial position, and very few rappers are ever perceived to have become such big stars that they no longer need to jump through these hoops (recently, only Eminem comes to mind). And this serves a purpose, as having a constant presence raises profile and keeps an artist fresh in the mind of the customer. However, as we have said, it can be a double-edged sword that leads artists to rush out half-baked material, and can lead to the saturation of fans to the point that they become overwhelmed with output. In rock, in contrast, artists undoubtedly feel that they have more room to breathe and focus on developing high-quality material, without the same pressure to release records on tight, regular schedules. However, this makes rock acts more difficult to manage for record labels, as it is challenging to maintain interest in artists who only release a record every three years – in three years an entire generation of fans can have grown up and moved along, depriving artists of their core fans.

The upshot of all of this may be that we need a new set of directives for our artists, to maximise their commercial potential and the quality of their releases. Rappers, it’s okay to grind slightly less hard than you have been. Even God rested on Sunday, so feel free to spend one day a week sitting on your porch / diamond-encrusted throne, just musing. Honestly, we can go one day without hearing your third freestyle over “Wipe Me Down”. Rockers, get out of the hammock and put down the pina colada, your month of beach-lounging and waitress-seducing in Hawaii is not a key part of your creative process. Maybe rappers and rockers have something to learn from each other, to their mutual benefit. Just please don’t bring back rock-metal, we don’t need another Limp Bizkit…

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[1] “Grinding” should also never be confused, especially in conversation, with the type of dance also known as grinding, which is hilariously described by UrbanDictionary as “A form of the most horny dancing imaginable. Guys looking for ass will grind profusely with random girls in order to persuade them to come home and get some bun action. Involves pushing the male genitalia up the [censored]”. Telling your friends that “me and my brother were grinding last night” could lead them to make some false assumptions about your lifestyle, for example.

[2] Apparently this stands for “Get Ready, It’s A New Day” – perhaps a day when Mr Roth hopes that people will talk about him for his rapping skills, and not just for how annoying “I Love College” was after a few listens

Montag Music

Author: DC

Word count: 700

The modern musical world is all about perfection. Sonically, singers, bands and engineers have fallen in love with advanced studio technology and are using it to create evermore polished and note-perfect songs, and we are buying them. The charts have become dominated by songs that are as immaculately arranged and styled as Mitt Romney’s hairdo – and that’s not always a bad thing. Some bands have used Pro Tools tweaks and cutting-edge systems to create sounds that are new and exciting, and that push what bands are capable of compositionally to new levels (if further proof of this is needed, listen to the new Foals and Ratatat records).

In terms of the personalities of our pop artists, things have for the most part gone the same way. Many of our chart starts have been moulded into perfect, airbrushed human beings who seemingly feel only the purest of human emotions, the Disney take on life. Or they have gone the other way, albeit to another extreme of perfection – people who want to be seen as edgy or dangerous can’t just be flawed, they have to be perfectly imperfect. They can’t just be freaks but have to be superfreaks, they need to position themselves as girls so far off the rails that they’ve replaced their Colgate with Jack Daniels, or guys so corrupting that they can instantly make even the good girls go bad. It’s not really acceptable to just be human anymore, you have to be a Greek ideal of virginal, chaste behaviour or a Keith Richards harbinger of chaos.

As a result of this Heidi Montag airbrushing approach to humanity, it sometimes feels like there isn’t much in modern pop and rock for many of us to relate to. Most of us aren’t angels but we’re certainly not Slash either, we’re neither squeaky-Bieber-clean nor Ke$ha-disinfectant-dirty. WE get many things right and we fuck some things up, we mostly have good intentions but are sometimes vindictive, and we hope that our 20 minutes on the treadmill today will cancel out the beers and a slice that we wolfed down last night.

I think that this is why I haven’t been able to stop listening to Chamberlain Waits, the new album by The Menzingers, since my friend Dusty recommended it to me. There isn’t even a touch of the robot, of the studio polish, about this record. From start to finish it is 100% heart and 100% human, for all that entails. The protagonists of The Menzingers’ lyrics fall somewhere between angels and devils – they argue, fiercely, but out of belief and conviction rather than spite. Their arguments are frequently trivial but that doesn’t make them any less vital or worth waging; after all, what’s more important to argue about than music and bands (“we argued over which Bad Religion album was better / I thought No Control or Suffer”). They want to get things right (“Maybe one day I’ll mend your wounds / maybe then I can mend mine too”) but know that, like everyone else, they’ll have to overcome their self-destructive streak first before that will even be a possibility (“I’m gonna get me fighting fit / I’m gonna let my liver play offense”).

This sense of failure and aspiration extends to the way in which The Menzingers have crafted their record. One of the two singers that they band employs is sometimes struggling so hard to find the right key that even Auto-Tune couldn’t help him, but it doesn’t matter, it’s somehow masked by the way that he half-yelps his words, making the belief worth more than pitch-perfection. The other vocalist has a sweeter singing voice – but can’t force himself to sing perk-pop, instead choosing to brutally assess his own shortcomings via three-minute punk jams. The guitars twitch and roar and fuzz, the drums clatter and bathe the whole recording in cymbal-splash… and the whole thing is just so perfectly imperfect. The lack of smooth edges, the unwillingness of the band to use all of the technology that they can afford to buff their songs to a 21^st century sheen, is what makes Chamberlain Waits quite so wonderful. It’s the anti-Montag, and for that we should all be very grateful.

The Limits of Description

Author: DC

Wordcount: 976

Progressive hardcore band Crime In Stereo have called their new album “I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone”. On one level this perfectly sums up the lyrical content of the record, which is all about relationships and the difficulty humans face in ever really knowing and understanding each other. More knowingly, however, the album title is a sly nod to the fact that CIS understand that their music is not easily pigeonholed. It’s not quite hardcore, it’s not punk and it’s not post-rock. It’s all of those things fused together, and this both makes things easier for the band (as having a unique style helps you stand out from the crowd) and harder (as standing out from the crowd often means standing alone). The music that Crime In Stereo make is inventive and original, which is a rare thing in music. Many bands lay claim to originality, some deliver, but many flatter to deceive.

Crime In Stereo haven’t always pushed the boundaries in this way. Their music has always been a step ahead of their post-hardcore brethren in its scope and intelligence, but only a step. On their early records, the roots of the band in the fertile Long Island scene of the 1990s clearly showed. Their songs sounded like an amalgam of the edgy pop-punk of the Movielife, the vocal lines of Brand New and the arcing atmospherics of GlassJaw. This referencing of peers and forebears didn’t make the music that the band made derivate, as they always added a little something different. But taken as a piece, the band were solid but not exceptional. This reputation was confirmed by the live shows that the band put on, which were always raucous affairs but often featured short sets and some uneven musicianship.

On their new record CIS have taken a leap forward and made a piece of art that, as the album title suggests, can’t easily be described using simple terms and ready references to their peers. The album is at once musically complex but simple in effect, alloying textures and sonic dazzle with clean song structures and driving focus. The song “I Am Everything I Am Not” is a perfect example of this, combining fiendishly tricksy patterned drumming and sparkling electronics with blunt-force gang vocals and a pair of simple repeated guitar lines that, in one form or another, run throughout the song. Similarly on album-opener “Queue Moderns” ghostly voices emerge from a guitar fuzz, and then the song slams into life in the style of a classical hardcore jam. Throughout the album the band throw curveballs at you, lead you down musical alleys that you don’t expect, but not in a way that feels pretentious or indirect for the sake of it. Everything feels organic, with the various song sections sympathetic and complementary to each other. Key album track “Young” is perhaps the starkest example of this, with a slow opening section with almost monastic chanted vocals suddenly exploding into frenzied wall-of-noise guitars – and even this whiplash a transition seems just right in the hands of CIS.

The same richness and sense that CIS are operating with a higher degree of skill than many other bands in the punk and hardcore scenes comes through when you read their lyrics. The majority of current bands seem to have gravitated towards lyrics that are either purely (dashboard) confessional or so opaque as to be almost impossible to parse by anyone other than the author of those lyrics. Try listening to “Daisy” by Brand New if you need proof of this. I really like that album but even after repeated listens I still have no idea what the songs are about or relate to. CIS, as scene father figures Jimmy Eat World did before them, tread a middle path, presenting a poetic take on some big themes – love, isolation, relationships and… well, police brutality – that is clear enough to understand and relate to but oblique enough to retain a real artistic force and subtlety of impact.

Now that they are touring again after something of a hiatus, the band convince even further. The dynamics of their shows are different to those of almost any other band currently touring. Hardcore bands have often used atmospheric or ultra-melodic interludes to amplify their onslaught, and poppier bands have in recent years turned to punk and hardcore sounds to add an edge to their tunes. Bands like A Day To Remember and Four Year Strong have built careers on top of exactly this sort of fusion. Frequently, however, this duality has always felt slightly bolted-together, a touch strained. This doesn’t bode well when you consider that CIS are trying to fuse together both of those two strands of modern rock, and then adding in spacey atmospherics and some grunge-esque choruses. However, based on their current performances that are managing it and then some. Their recent London show was mesmerising, with the variations in tone stunning and very moving, much more so than a hardcore show has a right to be.

I came out of that show wanting to tell you, and the friends that I go to shows with but couldn’t make it that night, what had made it so special. I wanted to take Crime In Stereo, and try to describe them to someone. I tried then, just I have tried now, during these last four paragraphs. And now, as then, I don’t feel like I have quite managed it. I have drawn out some comparisons, I have tried to pin down just what make their album and shows so special, but I haven’t succeeded. So all I will say is this: check out the new Crime In Stereo album. Go and see them live. And when you love them, pass on the message to your friends. Just don’t expect to be able to describe them to anyone.