The Optical Files #122: Kool Moe Dee - How Ya Like Me Now (1987)

With a new generation making noise in the NY scene (BDP, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim) the old-schoolers were under pressure to compete. Kool Moe Dee, a legendary member of rap's pioneering Treacherous Three, & his style were already starting to seem like old hat. After his modestly successful 1986 self-titled album (that mainly contained retrofitted Treacherous Three material), Moe Dee was determined to prove that he could hang with the new jacks. Part of this strategy involved the battle-tested Moe Dee (just ask Busy Bee) picking a fight with one of the newer jacks, a cocky young cat named LL Cool J. He addresses this beef on at least 2 songs here, & the backed-into-a-corner energy pervades the entire record. The result is a firecracker of an album, with some of the best & most unique rhyme writing of his career, that had the misfortune of appearing in a stacked year.

Moe Dee pokes fun at his own reputation as an old head on "Way Way Back," where he uses a reverb effect on his voice & crowd samples to try to replicate the feeling of rapping in a packed club. It's funny that the "way way back" he's referring to is, like, 5 years ago? but hiphop as an art form advanced at breakneck speed in those early days. To a modern listener, the style he showcases on this track might not sound much different from his rhyming on the rest of the album. But what he's doing here is the original meaning of "freestyle": an extended rhyme on no particular topic, intended to showcase skill & hype up a crowd. Moe Dee's lyrics on the rest of the album are much more focused, & he uses more of his trademark multisyllables, which are mostly absent from "Way Way Back."

Let's talk about those multisyllables. Moe Dee frequently uses a technique where he carries a 2 (or more) syllable rhyme pair across a 2-word phrase, placed at the end of a bar while the sentence continues into the next bar. From the title track (a sub diss to LL): "Schemin' like a demon, you're screamin' & dreamin'/I'm from the old school, I used to see men/Die for less[...]" This creates a natural moment of suspense while you wait for the emcee to finish whatever he's saying. (In the above example, it has the added humor of initially sounding like "I'm from the old school, I'm used to semen.") Kool Moe Dee does this all the time. On "Rock You," another song taking aim at LL, he opens the song with "Boy you're going crazy, really getting lazy/Rhymes as weak as water, even shorter than the days we/Saw you on the pop charts[...]" (Note the internal rhyme he packs into this example as well.) Sometimes he even breaks a single word across the bar line for the sake of the rhyme: "I am authentic, like the Titanic/But I'm unsinkable, believe it & then ac-/cept it, it's reality[...]" I don't know if I've explained this well, & I don't know if there's a name for it. I've always called it the Kool Moe Dee technique.

A lot of rap albums from this era don't list specific producer credits, but I know that the great Teddy Riley, along with Chuck New & Kool Moe Dee himself had their hands in this. I don't know about each producer's specific contributions, but the popcorn synth bass & wordless "aah" vocals of "Wild Wild West" have Teddy Riley written all over them, as does the interpretation/interpolation of Aretha's horn stabs on "No Respect." Then there's the Paul Simon-sampling "50 Ways," with its deep, slow drumbeat with snare rolls & pitched toms that builds over the course of the track, which is wholly unlike most of the beats people were rhyming on in 1987. The track wasn't meant for dancing, & Moe Dee says as much. He's mostly not trying to make you move (although on an album packed with this many James Brown samples, it's hard not to)--the bars are the main attraction here.

Too bad we get another one of those slut-shaming anthems in the song "I'm a Player," where he criticizes a woman for having lots of sexual partners while bragging about doing the same thing himself. This one is notable for how close he comes to articulating the double standard while still somehow managing to miss the point: "If a guy has 100 girls, he's a hero/A girl with 100 guys is a zero/Don't blame me cuz society made the rule[...]" But that's the only stain on this otherwise lyrically flawless album. Moe Dee was always a rapper's rapper, & the clarity & power of his vocal delivery, the assuredness of his messages & the writerly precision are all evidence of a carefully honed craftsman experienced both onstage & in a vocal booth. "Rock You" particularly is a master class of intricate rhymes, close to the state of the art in 1987.

Mind you, I said "close to," because this album had the misfortune of dropping 8 months after Criminal Minded & 4 months after Paid in Full. Those 2 records completely changed the game in NYC, & even though How Ya Like Me Now was more commercially successful than either, the gauntlet was thrown down. People weren't looking to the past anymore. Moe Dee rode the LL Cool J beef to solid, but diminishing success for the next few years, but the writing was on the wall. How Ya Like Me Now is the peak of his solo career, & a document of a moment that passed almost before it even began.

The Optical Files #121: Boogie Down Productions - Edutainment (1990)

I have a lot of history with this CD. When I met KRS at a lecture/book signing in 2004 (back when I cared about autographs), this was the album I brought for him to sign. After scrawling his graffiti tag with a flourish over his photo on the inside flap, Kris put highlighting brackets around the portion of the liner notes that read: "A special thanks to George Bush for fuckin' up the nation and continuing the conspiracy to destroy the African. Thanks!" We shared a rueful smirk at the fact that, almost a decade & a half later, another George Bush was continuing that work in the nation's highest office.

A glance at the liner notes is useful here for more than just my nostalgia or finding historical parallels. Kris was mad this time around. You can tell in the way he repeatedly points out the hypocrisy he sees around him--conscious rap was having a moment around 1990 (largely thanks to Public Enemy's runaway success) & like any other trend, this brought a lot of insincere bandwagon jumpers. Kris doesn't mince words in decrying the "frauds of revolution" who "call themselves the teachers and in another breath they're gangster pop star pimps acting the way the government wants black people to act." So much of the indignation that fuels KRS-One's music has come from watching a culture he deeply loves--a culture he helped give birth to--be repeatedly coopted, watered-down, disrespected, misrepresented & exploited for literal decades. It's easy for me to say, "hey, mainstream gonna mainstream," but I'm not as deeply invested in the culture as KRS-One. (Getting there, but not quite.) Kris was beginning his speaking engagements around this time & the album features several interludes taken from them. The interludes (one of which is by Kwame Ture, not KRS) mostly discuss white America's perceptions of hiphop & of Black people in general. "Exhibit E," in which Kris critiques the Emancipation Proclamation, was always my favorite. He points out that Lincoln didn't realize that "the African is not a slave [...] What Lincoln is ultimately saying is, 'Now you're born a slave, you'll always be a slave, & all I will ever see you as is a slave--& I'll free you.'" That blew my mind the first time I heard it at age 17 or so, having been brought up to think of Lincoln as one of the good ones.

Kris fully came into his own as the Teacha on this album, but I've always noticed a disconnect between songs where he's getting busy & showcasing rhyme skill ("Ya Know the Rules," "The Kenny Parker Show," "Original Lyrics" or the title track) & songs that exist merely to convey a message. "Beef" is a good example of the latter. It was the 1st time I'd ever heard a rapper speak on vegetarianism (beyond the no pork rule observed by Islam & NGE), & I always loved it as a topical song. But I noticed that, as opposed to his economy of well-chosen words when he's just rappity-rapping, in his message songs KRS often inserts words & phrases at the ends of lines that are only there to make it rhyme. "Fear & stress can become a part of you/In your cells & blood, this is true." Or "When the cow is killed, believe it/You preserve those cells, you freeze it." "This is true" & "believe it" are verbal fluff--it's possible to make your point & keep the rhyme going without inserting superfluous phrases. Kris figured that out, though, since this is the last album where he does it.

The production here is handled almost entirely by Kris himself. The only track he doesn't have a producer credit on is the classic "Love's Gonna Get'cha (Material Love)," which Pal Joey laces with a '60s-style bass groove, a drum-machine cowbell, & a Jocelyn Brown sample. The song is iconic with good reason: it's a chilling feat of storytelling as Kris explains the path that many ghetto youth take from innocents to criminals, complete with well-articulated details of poverty ("I've got 3 pairs of pants & with my brother I share [...] I've got beans, rice, & bread on my shelf"). It's always struck me that the story does a better job of illustrating how the deck is stacked against poor urban Black people in a way that makes desperate antisocial measures seem like the only way out (see the despondent refrain "tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do?), rather than the stated moral about not falling in love with material items.

Another storytelling joint I always loved is "100 Guns," with its synth bass & reggae piano & horn samples that create a deceptively cheerful beat for a story about gun smuggling that makes it clear the real villains are the corrupt cops. We've also got the rhythmically complex "Breath Control II," built on samples of a blues shuffle in 6/8 retrofitted to fit a 4/4 time signature. 

One of the most compelling yet problematic songs here is album centerpiece "Ya Strugglin'." Over a bouncy D-Nice co-produced beat driven by jazzy piano stabs & a swanky sax chop, KRS criticizes Black people who change their appearance to try to look less Black. None of this is really any of my business--but I do know that the history of Black women's relationship with their hair is long, fraught & complex enough that a glib "you should just wear it natural" is reductive--but Kris spends most of the 1st verse promoting the myth that white supremacy seeks to "feminize" Black men. "Are there any straight singers in R&B?" he asks. This is implicitly homophobic (& GNC-erasing as well) while not really relevant to the topic at hand. Verse 2 & Kwame Ture's spoken interjections are great though.

Because of the iconic "Love's Gonna Get'cha," I can't really argue that this is the "lost" BDP classic that more people should hear. (We'll get to that one soon enough.) But I do think people who stop after Ghetto Music are doing themselves a major disservice. He hadn't quite mastered the integration of his teaching with his mic-murdering instincts yet, but there are so many gems to be unearthed here--except the unfocused dancehall workout "7 Deejays" that clocks in at over 9 minutes, every song is a heavy hitter. Damn, I had really good taste as a teenager!

The Optical Files #120: The Clash - Give 'Em Enough Rope (1978)

Wanting very badly to break The Clash in America, & convinced that their self-titled debut album's unrefined production wouldn't do it, CBS records hired Blue Öyster Cult hitmaker Sandy Pearlman to give some commercial sheen to the production of their sophomore album Give 'Em Enough Rope--the 1st Clash record to be released in the US. Pearlman wastes no time signaling his intentions: the album opens with the cannon-shot of a solo snare drum hit before the band crashes into "Safe European Home," & the tom rolls that carry it into its coda make the song a fine showcase for Pearlman's huge, reverbed drum production.

Of course, there's another reason to show off the drums in the album's opening moments: the band finally had a proper drummer! Terry Chimes was technically a session player on the debut & was never intended to be a band member (at least not until they brought him back in 1982), as evidenced by his cheeky credit in the liner notes as "Tory Crimes." New drummer Topper Headon was the best pure musician who ever played in The Clash. His unerring sense of rhythm & stellar technique are obvious in the unpredictable upshots of "Drug Stabbing Time" & the subtle swing he adds to the shuffle of "Julie's Been Working For the Drug Squad."

People like to dismiss this album because of the polished production, saying that Pearlman had no idea how to produce a punk record. That may be true--& there's certainly nothing wrong with the debut album's thin, dry sound--but Pearlman did have a knack for teasing out the arena rock elements that always existed in The Clash's sound. Witness the pinwheel-worthy downstrokes in "Tommy Gun" or Mick Jones's Mott the Hoople-flavored ballad "Stay Free." In an era of The Clash broadening their songwriting, I think Pearlman was the perfect producer to guide them through explorations of different sides to their sound.

Sadly, while I am a big fan of the music on this album, in all its excited energy, this is the Clash record with the least lyrical appeal for me. My favorite Clash modes are champions of global leftism, penning odes of solidarity to resistance guerrillas worldwide; & sardonic chroniclers of the grinding drudgery & inequity of working-class life in Britain. Give 'Em Enough Rope is a dog's dinner of lyrical topics: "Tommy Gun," "English Civil War" & "Guns on the Roof" are typical (to the point of being samey) Clash material about militarism & complacency. The peppy "Julie's Been Working For the Drug Squad" is a sarcastic song about the absurdity of locking people up for decades for the crime of manufacturing LSD, although "Drug Stabbing Time" comes off as strangely sanctimonious for a band whose members (including lyricist Joe Strummer) were all using drugs at the time. We also get songs like "Last Gang in Town," a West Side Story-esque colorful romanticization of gang violence. "Safe European Home" is an interesting lyrical exercise, partly satirizing tourists who get robbed overseas, partly acknowledging that their own compassionate politics don't insulate them from the desperate actions of poor Jamaicans ("I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery"). "All the Young Punks," as a rumination on the rock star profession & how it isn't all it's cracked up to be, is mostly successful, but I have never understood the bizarre chorus phrase "All you young cunts, live it now, there ain't much to die for." (??) Meanwhile "Stay Free," Mick Jones's sole lead vocal turn about a school friend of his who took a different path in life, is the kind of introspective ballad that Joe Strummer always tried to keep Mick from doing, but I think the band should have recorded more of.

It's easy to overlook Give 'Em Enough Rope, as it lacks both the charging, snotty energy of The Clash & the freewheeling genre-bending of London Calling. What is does have is a whole bunch of big muscular rock riffs & a massive sound that commands your full attention. If the lyrics were up to par, it would be the middle chapter in an untouchable trilogy of perfect classics. As it stands, it's still the Clash album I put on when I want just a concentrated blast of rock for rock's sake.

The Optical Files #119: KRS-One - The Sneak Attack (2001)

I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure this was the 1st KRS-One CD I bought, & it must have been right around the time it was released. It had been 4 years since I Got Next, the longest break he's ever taken between albums before or since. As he explains in the song "Hiphop Knowledge," Kris put his recording career on pause in the late '90s to become a record executive, working as vice-president of A&R for Reprise, a WarnerMedia label. After a few years the cognitive dissonance got too much for him, feeling like a sellout while being so publicly critical of the mainstream music industry, so he quit that job & returned to making records, beginning with The Sneak Attack. You don't need to know all this history to hear that Kris sounds reinvigorated on this album, demolishing every beat & taking out all frauds. Simply put, even more than usual, the Teacha is rapping his ass off on this record!

This album title does not use the word "attack" frivolously. This is possibly the most aggressive album KRS ever made. A lot of it has to do with his delivery: even on ostensibly softer moments like the female-sung hooks of the title track or "The Lessin," the Blastmasta is still blasting with exuberant authority. The production is almost uniformly loud, brickwalled & in your face. More than half the beats are produced by either Kris or his brother Kenny, & their production styles are pretty much indistinguishable: hard drums & stabbing synth chops. Rather than sounding samey, though, aggressive uptempo beats like "Attendance," "Why," "I Will Make It" & "Get Your Self Up" contribute to the album's overall breathless, propulsive energy. When a beatmaker not named Parker enters the arena, it provides a little bit of relief--they still knock just as hard, but there's a bit more melody & subtlety to be found in Domingo's "What Kinda World" with its off-kilter drumbeat & Latin-flavored horns; his mournful strings loops on "Hiphop Knowledge"; the descending harp lines of Fredwreck's "Shutupayouface"; or the tremolo-picked acoustic guitars & eerie choirs of Mad Lion's "The Raptizm."

KRS didn't always walk that fine line between righteous rage & excessive preachiness with success, especially in his later work, but he's nothing if not surefooted here. He hits on a variety of subject matter, but it's usually straight out of the KRS playbook: the sorry state of mainstream rap, his Black liberationist take on politics, & the spirituality of hiphop. I think the most interesting piece is the aforementioned "Hiphop Knowledge" (also the album's midpoint), where he uses a fast, insistent flow, just shy of speed rap. to recount the story of his entire career up to that point, broken down year by year, & how he came full-circle in his thinking. The way he describes the decision to quit his record label job by echoing the sentiment from Afrika Bambaataa that set him on the road to conscious rap in the first place is beautiful & resonant. By the time we get to the closer "The Raptizm," where Kris innovates a wholly unique flow, 2 things are clear: the old master was still bringing new styles into the millennium, & he was thinking deeply about spirituality (it came as no surprise when his next album was Spiritual Minded, though the explicitly Christian lens was kind of a curveball).

I think of this record as the start of "new school" KRS--it follows a natural break after his experience as an executive & after he stopped even trying to court the charts. It's weird (i.e. makes me feel old) to contemplate that The Sneak Attack is now 7 years older than Criminal Minded was when it came out. After a certain point, it becomes a little silly to categorize eras of an artist's career, because once enough time passes the stylistic subtleties will be irrelevant. Just like nobody but the most fastidious classical music nerds makes a big deal about the 16 years between Beethoven's 5th & 9th symphonies, in 200 years when KRS-One's oeuvre is studied (which I hope it is), it will be taken as whole. I have a feeling when removed from the context of "it's not classic KRS," the pounding, pugnacious, quotable-filled The Sneak Attack will take its rightful place among his best work.

The Optical Files #118: Scarface - Last of a Dying Breed (2000)

I know this album has its fans, but there's a lot more people who forget it even exists. Face has always had a tendency to vacillate between challenging projects & crowd-pleasing ones--witness the jump from the meandering 70-minute The World Is Yours to the laser-focused The Diary. Arriving in between the bloated feature bonanza of My Homies & the streamlined, commercialized The Fix, the 56-minute The Last of a Dying Breed feels like a transitional album in multiple ways. The record, released as Face turned 30, was his most reflective work until that point, & began the transition from delinquent street kid to his serious OG persona that I discussed in my writeup on Made. Unfortunately, this is one of the albums that were hamstrung by Rap-A-Lot & J. Prince's infamous cost-cutting: for an album so mature in its subject matter, its presentation just feels cheap.

The trouble begins with the mix. In almost every song, the beat is turned up & the vocals are buried to the point where you have to strain to discern them. Nothing wrong with Face's beatmaking (he is the 1st credited producer on every track here except 1 Erick Sermon beat), but his bars are always the main attraction, & submerging the vocals does everybody a disservice. "Look Me In My Eyes" is a good example: between its dramatic orchestrals & pizzicato strings & its surgical dissection of everything stacked against a successful Black man from the hood, it's probably the most interesting song here both musically & lyrically. But when those awesome timpani punctuate the end of every 8-bar phrase, they overpower Face's punchlines. There's also a problem with the song transitions. Most of the tracks are supposed to blend into each other in a seamless mix, but somebody must have messed up the master & left a half-second gap between them. It's distracting & jarring & takes you out of the atmosphere, conveying a feel of unprofessionalism ill-suiting a legendary grown man emcee more than a decade deep in his bag.

Thankfully, these problems don't extend to the content, which remains at a high level throughout. Occasionally Face's albums can be marred by less than stellar collaborators, but every feature here is entertaining, including the not-always-impressive Jayo Felony, who joins Face & Tha Dogg Pound over the strident, sinister synths & strange sound effects of the Mike Dean coproduction "O.G. To Me." You wouldn't think Redman's Jersey wiseass & Face's Texas heavyweight styles would mesh, but they support each other well on the propulsive "And Yo." If anything, Jay-Z has the least impressive feature on here (that's something that doesn't happen too often) with the desultory caper story "Get Out."

It's no secret that I love Face when he gets reflective, & songs like the title track (basically a detailed, pessimistic description of childbirth), the emotionally naked reincarnation-contemplating "In My Time," & the aforementioned "Look Me In My Eyes" make up the beating heart of this sonogram image. I especially appreciate these lines on the latter song: 

You know I ain't no dopeboy, ain't never been a mule

I admit I use to sell rocks, but that was back in school

Now I just do music, and smoke a little weed

But not enough to run a dope house, so why you fuck with me?

In these lines, Face admits that his drug lord persona was just a gimmick for his early records, & implicitly reflects on rappers not being given the same benefit of the doubt for poetic license as other kinds of writers. 

This album comes so close. The content is all there; if it weren't for the weird mix & occasionally low-budget sounding production, it would be mentioned in the same breath as The Fix or The Diary. As it stands, it will remain a deep cut: plenty of riches on offer for the die-hards willing to do a little digging.

Editorial: Decline & Fall of the Scarlet "N" - by Cullen Wade

On the summer solstice of 2005, I joined an upstart DVD-by-mail rental service called Netflix. The first DVD I rented was Last House on Dead End Street, followed by Blood Feast & Nightbreed. 

Today, over 17 years later, after much hemming & hawing, I finally canceled my membership.

My relationship with Netflix has been longer than any romantic relationship I've been in, any job I've had, any place I've lived. When I returned from overseas in 2010, I found that I finally had fast enough internet to use their new streaming service, so I started taking advantage of that, though I didn't start streaming regularly until I moved to Charlottesville in summer 2011, plugging my Macbook into my big boxy CRT television with a mini DVI to composite video adapter.

Around 2015, I started to notice that Netflix was slowly but surely removing its archival back catalogue from streaming while simultaneously pouring tons of money into its original programming--which, with a few exceptions, I never thought was very good. These trends snowballed over the next several years. I've probably been talking about canceling Netflix since 2018 or so. But there was still enough interesting programming to keep me hanging on, & through it all I continued to use the DVD mail service.

Over the past 2 or 3 years, though, I've noticed an even more insidious trend. I am pretty much convinced that Netflix original programming is not being made by humans anymore. At the bare minimum through the conceptualization & treatment stage, if not all the way through screenwriting & preproduction, I think these shows & films are being created by AIs that crunch massive amounts of customer analytics & spit out entertainment calculated to please various sizes of viewership cross-sections. As an artist & as someone who would love to make films one day, that offends me. It's even worse when it works. For instance, the Netflix original series Archive 81 seemed precisely calculated to appeal to me--me, specifically--from subject matter & writing all the way down to style & casting. I don't want that. I don't want to feel like a guinea pig for a robot focus group.

Let's go back to those first 3 DVDs I rented from Netflix. Roger Watkins's Last House on Dead End Street, H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast, & Clive Barker's Nightbreed are all intensely personal, quirky films full of their creators' auteurist obsessions. They are not wholly successful films. (I won't even argue that the first 2 are even good films.) They are messy & ambitious & ragged & human.

That's what film discovery has always been for me. I don't want to be spoonfed algorithmically perfect content anymore. I want to be left alone to discover my own weirdness. I want to buy random dollar store DVDs, I want to crowdfund indie dreamers, I want poke around in neglected corners of the internet for backyard SOV opuses with single-digit views on Letterboxd. I want to support freaks & weirdos making films outside anything recognizable as a "system" but at least they're made with authenticity & fucking passion. I don't want to be told what I'll like. I want to discover that for myself.

The more universal story here is how David slew Goliath & then indulged in gluttonous excess until he ended up taking the giant's place. But my personal story is a lot simpler: I miss humanity.

So goodbye & good riddance, Netflix. You did this to yourself.

The Optical Files #117: Ludacris - The Red Light District (2004)

I'm sure I have nostalgia for my late teens/early 20s, but I still maintain that the 2000s was a good era for mainstream rap music. The radio played a diversity of sound & subject matter, & emcees were still really, really rapping. 2004 was a year where you heard "Jesus Walks" & "Why?" by Jadakiss on Top 40 radio alongside "Drop It Like It's Hot" & "Lean Back," "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" & "I Like the Way You Move" sharing airplay with "Welcome Back" by Ma$e. At the tail end of this storied year, Ludacris dropped his 2nd consecutive #1 album, which I uphold as the best possible version of mainstream rap. The Red Light District is a fine example for anybody trying to court the pop charts & dancefloor without losing their artistic integrity, street cred, or hiphop bona fides.

First of all, Luda was really spitting on this album! Most of the time he favors relatively simple flows with clearly articulated punchlines, but every once in a while he'll break out the quick-tongue, go on a multi-syllable run or surprise you with an intriguing phrase ("Put the booty of a Swish' at the end of a flame" is one of the most creative ways I've ever heard to describe the lighting of a blunt, while also sounding really, probably unintentionally, gay). Luda is probably the best quick-tongue rapper who does it least often--he never wants to alienate his audience, & his pop instincts tell him that a little fast rap goes a long way.

Luda's commanding, booming vocal presence is helped by the absolutely huge production. This album sounds expensive, with lots of vocal tracks compressed up-front & layered thickly over every song. ONP takes a left turn from their trademark live band sound into "Blueberry Yum Yum," with a trippy keyboard line, sub bass & sparse drums underneath multitracked vocals from both Luda & Sleepy Brown. Luda imitates an echo effect with his voice, adding to the off-kilter cool of a great smoker's anthem. The sure-shot dancefloor combo of Timbaland & Ludacris join forces for "The Potion," with Tim's usual clattery percussion, squealing vocal chops & sinuous synths. There was no way this one wasn't going to go stupid in the club. We also get the obligatory "tryna get my life right" reflective song in the Teena Marie-sampling Nate Dogg feature "Child of the Night," where DK All Day does his best to capture Kanye's sound. Speaking of imitation, the album's weirdest production moment has to be "Spur of the Moment," featuring DJ Quik & produced by DTP's LT Moe. The track sounds exactly like a DJ Quik beat, which is fine in & of itself--it does a credible job of recreating the sundrenched, laidback Cali sound with its portamento synths. But it must have been weird for Quik to be invited to lay a guest verse on a poor man's version of one of his beats.

While we're on the subject of features, I've always wondered why you would pay a rapper to not rap. I guess it was flattering for DMX that they only wanted him on "Put Your Money" for a hook & an adlib, but my attitude is as long as you hired the guy, get him to drop a verse. I know Def Jam was good for it. At any rate, "Put Your Money" is a good example of what made Luda special in comparison to his peers: his albums had a diversity of subject matter. I don't think many other mainstream rap guys at the time were writing songs about being a compulsive gambler.

Yeah, I have some quibbles about this album. I love timpani, but the "Get Back" beat has way too much of it, to the point where it's almost constant. The Austin Powers references on "Number One Spot" did not age well (who really gives a shit about Austin Powers anymore?) but I doubt the song was really intended to stand the test of time (despite the opening line "I'm never going nowhere"), & I love the single-rhyme 1st verse. The album sags a bit in the middle, with generic tough-guy joints like "Pass Out" & "Who Not Me," but unlike a lot of albums this long, it comes roaring back at the end with album highlights like the bluesy Trick Daddy feature "Hopeless" & "Virgo." Yeah, I'm a Virgo, but I also don't really care about zodiac signs & I mostly love this song because Luda, Nas & Doug are all doing top-notch work, & by closing his album with it, Luda is paying respect to the old school, the origins of hiphop, & the NY scene while staying proudly southern.

I'll acknowledge that I'm likely biased because it was the only one I had on CD, but I think The Red Light District is probably Luda's best album. Chicken-n-Beer has some great songs but a lot of filler, & Word of Mouf is still a bit immature & undisciplined. This album found the 27-year-old emcee starting to emerge into grown man territory while still in touch with the fire & irreverence of his early career--& most importantly, aside from a few minor misfires, it still knocks to this day.

The Optical Files #116: Kris Kristofferson - The Essential Kris Kristofferson (Compilation) (2004)

If you pay attention to the Optical Files annals, you'll certainly notice a pattern in the type of singer-songwriters I grew up on: sentimental but not too cheesy; rootsy but not too country; humbly poetic, slightly sardonic, with unconventional singing voices; exclusively white & exclusively male. One trope that appears over & over is the "wounded man." All of the above-linked songwriters use this archetype (though Kristofferson's friend Prine largely sidesteps it), but it's particularly ubiquitous in Kris's work. Whether he's speaking in 1st person ("Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "The Best of All Possible Worlds") or 3rd person ("Billy Dee," "The Pilgrim: Chapter 33"), his songs are heavily populated by down & out drunks with hearts of gold, damaged souls who talk a slick game but keep getting in their own way, & who just need the patient love of a good woman to make them whole again. "The Pilgrim" is probably the apotheosis of Kris's work in this mode: "He's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet, he's a pusher, he's a pilgrim & a preacher & a problem when he's stoned." Unfortunately, the prominence of the "lovable fuckup" in popular culture has given a lot of guys permission to fuck up with the assurance that they'll still be lovable. Kris's hero might be "running from his devils & reaching for the stars," but in real life a lot of these dudes forgot about the reaching for the stars part, & decided to skip the running & just embrace their devils instead, & if you get exasperated with them it's because you lack the compassion to see them as picaresque cowboys in a country song. It's one of the many ways our culture (for a long time now) reinforces the "boys will be boys" narrative, not only excusing but actually rewarding shitty male behavior. Perhaps the most barefaced example is "The Silver Tongued Devil and I," where Kris claims a split personality: the nice guy who just wants to get to know a lady, & the smooth-talking "devil" who'll say whatever he needs to get her in bed. Guess which side wins this battle of wills every time, allowing Kris to hold himself blameless because it's not actually him doing it?

While they are superficially less screwed up than the men, the women Kris writes about don't get the benefit of the same depth. The men are flawed but at least dynamic, complete humans. The women in these songs (when they appear at all) are one-dimensional, idealized angels & saints: either tragic memories ("Jody and the Kid," "Me and Bobby McGee"), innocent victims of manipulation and heartbreak ("The Silver Tongued Devil and I"), or long-suffering nurturers who are always there to pick up the pieces ("Help Me Make It Through the Night"). Whatever the particular flavor, women in these songs are always objects of love and/or lust, always exist to move the wounded man further along in his journey. No, it's not Kristofferson's fault. He didn't invent these tropes (once you tune into them you realize they are FUCKING EVERYWHERE in our mass media), but he is pretty consistent in his employment of them, & given his intelligence & leftist political perspective, you kind of hope he would break or at least challenge these patterns.

Speaking of challenging patterns: while leftist Americana fans tend to think that Republicans invaded & colonized our Workers of the World music tradition, the reality is that country music holds a pretty obvious appeal for conservatives, & even fascists, with its romanticizing of the past. Is there even such a thing as futurist country music? (Maybe Johnny Cash's verse on "Highwayman," but we'll get to that.) Kris's oeuvre is full of songs that idealize bygone times, whether it be gutter drunks longing for the simple days of childhood ("Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," "Just the Other Side of Nowhere"), or parting couples wanting to return to when their relationship was strong ("For the Good Times," "Once More With Feeling"). Kris does challenge this trope a few times, the most interesting being "Casey's Last Ride." In a similar way to Guy Clark's "The Last Gunfighter Ballad," the song uses form to interrogate both modernity & the genre's obsession with mythologizing the past. Both the title & the musical arrangement lead us to believe we're getting an old-fashioned cowboy ballad, when in fact we are treated to a vaguely-worded story about a modern man with a lonely, unfulfilled life--the sad fallout of all that romanticized ramblin' & gamblin'.

If you've noticed that most of the songs I'm referencing are from Kris's first 2 albums, that's because this compilation, while purporting to be a career retrospective covering everything up to the late 1990s, focuses heavily on 1970 & 1971. Those first 2 albums are reproduced almost in their entirety, while later albums only get represented by a track or 2, & some albums, like 1990's brashly leftist Third World Warrior, are skipped entirely. I've made my thoughts on best-ofs known in this series, but I will say that when it comes to country music, compilations make a little more sense. The genre tends to be more song-driven than album-driven, singles have historically been more important than LPs, & artists tend to play a lot of covers & even self-covers. Still, this collection, being so disproportionately focused on a narrow slice of time, can't really claim to be a career summation. You could just listen to the Kristofferson & The Silver Tongued Devil and I albums back to back, get all the same songs as Disc 1 of this compilation, & it would only take 10 minutes longer. Okay, let's say for the sake of argument that those first 2 albums contain the bulk of Kris's best songs, & there are only a few gems scattered here & there among subsequent records. In that case, why include "Highwayman," which Kris didn't even write? Just because it was a hit? The production, lyrical perspective & group dynamic makes it vastly different from the other, rootsier, solo songs on this compilation. Even if you like that song (I do), it sticks out like a sore thumb.

It may sound like I'm coming down a little hard on old Kris here, but in reality he has a whole raft of classics under his belt. The songs can be deceptively musical, too: witness the jazzy vibraphone chords & offbeat, Willie Nelson-style phrasing of "Just the Other Side of Nowhere" & the big bold key change in the middle of "Me and Bobby McGee." Kris's reputation as a songwriter is unchallenged, but I think he's underrated as a performer. While there are dozens of high-profile covers of his songs by other artists, I tend to think that Kris's recordings of his own songs are almost always better. (The major exception, of course, is Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee.") Kris's gentle, inexorably building arrangement of "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" is more moving than Johnny Cash's strident version built atop that old Cash 2-step. The raw sadness & resignation of "For the Good Times" are grittier in Kris's hands than in the swooning, polished Ray Price chart-topper.

I used to love strumming & singing my simplified version of "Just the Other Side of Nowhere" when I was living overseas, an hour's drive down a dirt road on what many people would consider quite literally the other side of nowhere, thinking about home. Once I returned to the land of fast-food billboards & supermarket bread aisles the size of an entire developing-world grocery store, I still played the song, but now the other side of nowhere meant something different. Back then I fancied myself one of Kris's lovable fuckups, the ones who keep rolling those dice for a chance to clean up their act. Later on, Kris found sobriety & sharpened his political consciousness, started writing songs about inequality & speaking truth to power. It seems Kris & I grew up in the same way, so it's no surprise I feel some kinship with him. His early work gives us beautifully written but unexamined assumptions about artistic masculinity, & his later work shows us a more nuanced way forward. I just wish this compilation--like country music as a whole--weren't so stuck in the past.

The Optical Files #115: Big Pun - Capital Punishment (1998)

Lemme keep it a stack: for a number of reasons, I'm trying to get away from the mental framework that pits rappers against each other. All those Top 5s & rankings & GOAT conversations, etc. 1st of all, obviously, art is subjective. But even if we think in terms of "favorites" rather than "bests," I still don't think art lends itself to ordinal ranking; it's kind of antithetical to the spirit in which most art is made. Specifically as it pertains to hiphop (where this kind of thinking is encouraged more than any other music culture), the mindset of competition that encourages rappers to be their best selves ("steel sharpens steel") also creates the kind of backbiting mentality that is poison to local music scenes. So the more years pass, the more I try to deprogram myself of the tendency, ingrained to some extent in every hiphop head, to rate & rank & elevate some emcees to the detriment of others. 

With that being said: fuck you, Big Pun was nicer than your favorite rapper. Yep, that one too.

Despite about 4 dozen feature appearances & an unfinished, cobbled-together sophomore album, Pun's legacy rests on this debut LP, the only album he completed during his lifetime--& what a legacy it is! Pun was a rapper's rapper, & every verse is an absolute masterclass in rhyme writing. Beyond the headspinning multis, assonance out the ass, internal rhymes nested inside other internal rhymes, startling turns of phrase & unexpected poetic devices, what impresses you most about this album is his consistency. The dude never phones it in, never strikes out--never even bunts. Every single verse is a screaming moonshot over the grandstands. That holds true whether he's solo or collaborating, whether he's working in a hardcore or pop milieu. Not long ago, I asked on social media whether there is a high-charting rap song more lyrically intricate than "Still Not a Player." There might be a few ("Ms. Jackson" by Outkast, Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P."), but I still maintain "Still Not a Player" is in class by itself. When other rappers said "I want this to be a single so I'mma simplify my bars a little bit," Pun said "hold my Big Gulp."

But of course, that's not the album's preeminent lyrical workout. I'd probably vote for "The Dream Shatterer," which is the closest he gets on the album to a straight-up ego trip song, i.e. "rappity-rap." I know a lot of people disdain the practice of rapping about rapping for the sake of rapping, but I don't know how that's possible when Pun breaks out like this: "You ain't promised mañana in the rotten manzana/Come on, pana, we need more rhymers/Feel the marijuana snakebite, anaconda/A man of honor wouldn't wanna try to match my persona/Sometimes rhyming I blow my own mind, like Nirvana/Comma, and go the whole 9 like Madonna/Go try to find another rhymer with my kinda grammar."

All those multisyllables suggest a clear forefather to Pun's style, & that's Kool G Rap. Superficially their styles are very similar, but in my writeup on The Giancana Story I shared my opinion that G Rap is so good that it gets boring after a while. Pun sidesteps this trap by doing a few things differently: first, his flow is a lot more nimble than G Rap's: he slows down to emphasize his punchlines, speeds up on the onramp to another rhythmic run, switches into triplet flow & back again mid-rhyme scheme. He also has more flavor in his voice, varying his inflection in contrast to G Rap's hardcore monotone. He also just generally has more humor & charisma, offering a certain geniality that doesn't interfere with his gangsta affectations. The closest Pun comes to G Rap's style is the title track, where he raps in a measured monotone & maintains a steady flow of almost uninterrupted syllables. That's a shame, because the song is conceptually interesting, comparing white supremacy's systemic condemnation of the ghetto to a death sentence. It doesn't help that Pun is joined on that song by Prospect, his most monotone compatriot. Pun also echoes G Rap's absurd sex rhymes in the song "I'm Not A Player," which features such bizarre & anatomically ignorant boasts as "Climbing up the walls with my balls banging off your hymen." I try to stay away from Biggie comparisons because he & Pun don't really have that much in common other than stature, but this song is obviously "One More Chance"--you know, the 1 track that keeps Ready To Die from being a flawless album & should have been swapped out for its remix?

Pun's bars are clearly the star of this album, & when you have something so lyrically dense, the main thing you want from the production is that it not interfere with the words. Most of the beats satisfy that, offering a gritty, often sinister gym mat for the lyrics to perform their acrobatics on top of. There are a few musical standouts, though, like the movie-score dramatic strings of Domingo's "The Dream Shatterer," the Latin jazz horns of "You Came Up" by Rockwilder, or Knobody's poppy pianos on "Still Not a Player." Showbiz contributes the beat for the closer "Parental Discretion," whose wonky, off-kilter keys sounds like it was tailor-made for Busta Rhymes to demolish, so it's a little odd that he only contributes the hook & a spoken-word outro.

Speaking of "Parental Discretion": in my memory, Capital Punishment was full of bangers but overlong & frontloaded. Well, it is certainly long, but it is most definitely not frontloaded! For an album of this length, actually, it's remarkably well-sequenced. Early-album standouts like the Black Thought feature "Super Lyrical" (you have to be crazy confident as an emcee to go toe-to-toe with Thought) are balanced out by late-album highlights like the aforementioned closer & the RZA-produced "Tres Leches (Triboro Trilogy)" ft. Prodigy & Instectah Deck, which gets my nomination for the most NY rap song of all time. It's hard to make a 73-minute album feel coherent & unbloated, but Pun pulls it off through sheer artistic vision. Most of the time when I revisit a well-loved album for this series, I find myself in a nitpicking, critical frame of mind. This time, I actually came out of my analytical listen liking the album more. 

Hearing, seeing & thinking about Pun always makes me a little sad. Here was a brilliant writer, a once-a-generation talent, whose life was cut tragically short simply because he couldn't make his body do what he wanted. Why are some things preternaturally easy for people & others preternaturally difficult? You can feel this struggle against cosmic unfairness in songs like "Fast Money" & "Capital Punishment," where if you strip away the gangsta bravado you're left with the anxious pleas of a gifted young man who feels like the world is spinning out of control, looping a lasso of intricately braided words to rein it in--trying to outrap a runaway train. I think this fueled a lot of the anger that was evident in both his music & his personal life. I won't sugarcoat it, because I know we've all seen that footage of Pun pistolwhipping his wife. There is no justification for spousal abuse, but it's a fact that hurt people hurt people, & while he was less nakedly confessional than some other emcees, we can make some pretty safe inferences about the source of his hurt. Being betrayed by his body again & again behind a relatively simple task that most other people seem to accomplish without any work at all must have been baffling for him, especially since he had seemingly effortless powers of eloquent self-expression.

I know my readership here is an enlightened crowd, but I feel the need to say this anyway: stop making fun of fat people. Stop assuming that being fat is a choice, or the result of laziness or poor self-control. As a matter of fact, stop fixating on other people's bodies altogether. I promise it's better that way.

The Optical Files #114: Leaders of the New School - A Future Without a Past... (1991)

I have to admit that I've been a poser when it comes to this album. I bring it up all the time in conversation when I put forward my contention that Busta Rhymes is the best emcee with no classic albums. He has classic songs, classic verses, huge impact on the culture, but never made a 5/5 album. When I present people with this take, I always say, "of course, that's assuming you don't count Leaders of the New School." But friends, I have a confession to make & here's where the poser part comes in: I've really never listened to A Future Without a Past... enough to make that determination. I bought the CD off the strength of "Case of the P.T.A." but I doubt I listened to it more than a handful of times. Not because I disliked it, but just because it was long & kind of odd & at the time I got the CD my interests were elsewhere...you know how it goes. Sometimes you can acknowledge that a record is good even if it's not clicking with you at the moment. So this one got put away & I never got around to revisiting it, but periodically I would think about it & it went down in my head as a great, classic album--just one I didn't have much interest in listening to. So, upon this long-delayed revisit, did it live up to my memory?

1st of all, the name Leaders of the New School feels kind of ironic, because what Buss, Dinco & Charlie flex is a style that was already retro even in 1991. The energetic, uptempo style with lots of hypemanning call & response is reminiscent of the unison routines of some of the earliest rap groups. Their innocent subject matter, mostly discussing the rather mundane travails of high school students--chasing girls, dealing with bullies, smarting off to teachers, believing in yourself--must have seemed quaint in an NYC scene that was already being taken over by hardcore rap. Within this framework, the guys manage to walk the line between being childlike & being childish--they interject with snatches of Disney songs & nursery rhymes, & at one point Charlie Brown literally sings the entire ABC song. But thanks to the guys' nimble flows & interesting wordplay, it's all shot through with a hip intelligence & street smarts.

One contemporary group that comes to mind as a comparison is De La Soul: LONS have a similar freewheeling, goodnatured energy, & the beats, while not as left-field as Prince Paul's off-the-wall sample collages, have the same gleeful unpredictability. Check out Vibe Chemist Backspin's work on "What's the Pinocchio's Theory?", which manages to incorporate both Dixieland jazz & bagpipe music into its sonic stew. The Long Island boys also got some help from Eric "Vietnam" Sadler from the Bomb Squad, whose best beat on here is the moody "Sob Story," a lowkey epic punctuated by wonky piano scrawls.

My understanding is that part of the reason the group split is because the other members got tired of Busta stealing the show all the time, & I'm sorry to fuel that particular fire, but he absolutely does. On the other hand, Dinco & Charlie are no slouches--they all set themselves apart with distinctive flows, deliveries & lyrical perspectives. True, future icon Bussa Buss outshines his partners with his sandpaper voice & dancehall-inflected flavor, but at no point does it feel like The Busta Rhymes Show Featuring LONS--well, except for "Feminine Fatt," Busta's solo celebration of cellulite where he even manages to make lines like "Spandex makes small fat look real fat/I'd rather deal with fat that is actual fat" sound dope.

So was I right? Is A Future Without a Past... a true classic? Well, for one thing, I still think it's too long. Occasionally it feels like listening to a slightly less out-there De La Soul. But aside from just being a good record, I can see how it is positioned between 2 eras. The members' camaraderie & their slang-heavy worldbuilding almost seem to anticipate the rise Wu-Tang, while at the same time honoring hiphop's most primitive traditions. (Maybe the group name was more apt than I gave it credit for.) For that alone, plus being a breeding ground for Busta's talents, this one goes down as iconic. He still never made a great album on his own though.

The Optical Files #113: Warren Zevon - Transverse City (1989)

Serious music fans have a quasi-spiritual connection to our favorite albums. You know what I mean. There are those records you enjoy, records you have nostalgia for, records you know front to back, even records you love--but beyond that, there's yet another tier: those records that are part of you. In case you didn't figure it out from my quasi-cover of "Run Straight Down," or the time I stole the main riff of "Gridlock" for a metal song, Warren Zevon's Transverse City is one of the most important albums of my life. At first glance it might seem like an unlikely candidate for that position: I don't have a particular affinity for its genre ('80s radio rock I guess?); the production is overwhelmingly dated; & while I admire Zevon's other work, he doesn't have another album that hits me in this same way. There are some great songs on Excitable Boy & Sentimental Hygiene, but sometimes his snark is a bit too snarky for me, & he occasionally exudes a certain flavor of toxic masculinity that deifies the rakish, stubborn male genius who hurts people but has a heart of gold.

There's none of that to be found on Transverse City, though. What we get instead are 10 deeply-felt songs about near-future social collapse. Similar to Japan's Quiet Life, I happened to discover this album at the same time I was getting deeply into cyberpunk literature, & I uphold it as one of the finest musical developments of those themes. That Warren Zevon loved books is obvious from his literary approach to songwriting. His work always had a special appeal for novelists. He seemed to fit in better with writers than rock stars, & his close friends included Hunter S. Thompson, Carl Hiaasen & Stephen King. Transverse City was the result of his devouring & processing the dystopian science fiction of authors like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, & Bruce Sterling. But unlike the savage technoir nightmares of industrial groups like Front Line Assembly, Zevon chose to focus on the human elements at play. Like Richard Linklater when he made A Scanner Darkly, Zevon seemed to understand that the cyberpunk future wouldn't turn us all into sleek tech-ninjas with neural-linked sports cars battling murderbots in neon-washed alleys--it would look a lot like our current world, just shittier, with a bit more government surveillance & a bit less human connection.

Like the best cyberpunk authors, Zevon clearly saw the consequences of technology separating us from our humanity ("Networking"), out of control consumerism ("Down in the Mall"), environmental degradation ("Run Straight Down"), government overreach ("The Long Arm of the Law"), urban bloat ("Gridlock"), & geopolitcal fuckery ("Turbulence"). While the themes of the album are bleak, the music isn't necessarily all doom & gloom. Who says there can't be some fun times in the dystopia? It's in the more lighthearted musical moments that Zevon's deadly sarcasm really emerges, like the rockabilly/jangle pop grooves of "Down in the Mall" & "Turbulence." The narrator of the former lives a life where capitalist consumption is the only source of joy, both for him & his partner ("We'll go shopping babe, it's something we can stand") so for him, it really is a happy song. The song's dramatic irony transcends mere scorn. There's a certain innocence to the kind of complacency when you don't even know what you're settling for, or what you're sacrificing.

That's what gives these songs their souls, & where Zevon's writerly instincts shine: the characters he creates. With just a few well-considered lines, he paints a convincing portrait of a world populated by high-tech mercenaries, disillusioned diplomats, distracted consumers, plugged-in businessmen, & just regular guys waiting for the world to end. The exuberant harmonica & triumphant, ascending chorus of "Splendid Isolation" mask what the song is really about--somebody who wants to just be left alone to let the apocalypse happen, because people are scary & people represent pain & it would be simpler to just block the world out & let what happens happen--& it hits harder this way than if it were a moody sad piece. (Trust & believe, this track got a lot of play in my house during the spring of 2020.)

Zevon ties it all together with 2 glimpses into the lives of people trying to find love among the ruins: "They Moved the Moon" & "Nobody's In Love This Year." These are the songs that took the longest to grab me--as a younger man, I would sometimes skip them. With the benefit of some years & the perspective of having loved, lost & loved again, these 2 songs (which end each side of the vinyl version) may even hit hardest for me today. The eerie, electronic "They Moved the Moon" with its hollow, ominous bass drum is about the agony of being dumped in a world that's already moving so fast, that's already so topsy-turvy, that you barely recognize it as the planet you used to live on. The gentle, wordplay-heavy "Nobody's In Love This Year" uses the language of high finance to paint a picture of a world where love is just another commodity & investors are skittish. It seems like too much of a gamble for the risk-averse: "I don't wanna be mister vulnerable/I don't wanna be the one who gets left behind."

Zevon, who always chose starry sets of collaborators, here enlists the aid of lead guitarists like Jerry Garcia, who adds his trippy runs to the title track's jagged death poetry; David Gilmour, who gives an epic touch to "Run Straight Down"; & Neil Young, who feeds the sun-baked grit & scuzz of the freeway through his amp on "Gridlock." There's also an appearance from the great Chick Corea, whose frantic piano skitters embody the paranoia of "Long Arm of the Law." With that kind of talent on display, I can understand Zevon's choice to give everything a bright, polished production, but in my opinion that is the album's 1 & only flaw. The super '80s production feels dated, with its big sound & splashy drums making it feel like cheesy arena rock. But maybe that's the point: just like the shiny surfaces of the dystopia, the ultra-commercial sheen of this production makes you think you're getting something friendly, & by the time you realize what's lurking beneath, it's already too late.

I've bought this album twice--once on CD & once on vinyl, & the only reason I haven't bought it more is because nobody's gotten around to doing a reissue yet. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until some boutique label brings out a new vinyl remaster with extended notes & an extra disc of rarities & I'll be screaming at them to take my money. On this listen, the CD completely glitched out on the final track because I'd played it to death, but that's cool because I have the original Virgin vinyl I can always play until something new comes along. Shit...consumerism wins again. Damn you Warren.

The Optical Files #112: Common - Be (2005)

Remember the rumors that this album title was actually an acronym for "Before Erykah"? Like now that this dangerous witch had gotten her claws out of him, Com was gonna go back to humble b-boy shit where he belonged? It was Yoko theory all over again, but for some reason there's something even funnier to me about Assata-supporting backpacker dudes blaming a Black woman for Common wanting to mess around with psychedelia. Anyway the theory was always nonsense because James Poyser (one of Erykah's closest collaborators & a major contributor to Electric Circus) is very present on this album too, playing on 4 tracks.

But of course, the collaborator that got everybody's attention was not Poyser, but Kanye West. As an album, Be is credited solely to Common, but it feels like a duo project, since Kanye produces all but 2 tracks & contributes vocals to half of them. As I've written before, I try not to let my feelings about modern Kanye interfere with my assessment of old Kanye, & the fact is that his work here is simply stunning. Yet, the album is not as much of a singlehanded Kanye masterpiece as it might appear. For instance, the iconic intro with its swelling strings & beautiful keyboard work by Soulquarian James Poyser. Even "Faithful," which is the closest to classic Kanye chipmunk soul, has Poyser's fingerprints all over it. Kanye does fly solo on the stellar urban jazz of "Real People," with its restless key changes under a complex rhyme by Common making it a contender for best beat on the album. "Chi-City," with its layered funk guitars & horn fanfares, is a fine beat as well, although the rhyme is a bit unfocused, making it one of the weaker pieces lyrically. Outside of Kanye-land, we have "Love Is" with that inimitable Dilla bounce, complete with eerie, ghostlike sample drops of Marvin Gaye repeating the title phrase to "God Is Love."

The next thing I'm going to say will come as no surprise to readers of this series: I appreciate this album for being so short. Of the 6 top-selling hiphop albums of 2005 (by 50 Cent, The Game, Young Jeezy, Lil Wayne, Paul Wall, & Kanye himself), the average length is about 73 minutes. In an era dominated by excruciatingly long albums with bonus tracks out the ass, Be's breezy 42 minutes was a breath of fresh air. (Although I'm sure part of the album's brevity was to atone for Electric Circus's 73-minute excess.) Not to mention, in a year lorded over by all things G-Unit (in addition to 50 & Game's albums, the Get Rich or Die Tryin' movie soundtrack went plat & even fucking Tony Yayo charted for god's sake), Common's gentle good-naturedness was an antidote to the performative thuggishness that was, well, pretty much everywhere else you looked.

The amount of respect I have for Common as an emcee doesn't match the amount of time I spend listening to him. I admire his eccentricity: there's not another rapper who flows remotely like him, unfussy about precision, pauses in odd places like rap's Christopher Walken, vocal patterns derived from an older set of jazz cats than seemingly anybody else. I heard a rumor that his abrupt pauses came from an early-career struggle with breath control--whatever led to it, he made it into a trademark & it sounds really cool. I'll admit, though, that for whatever reason I have trouble sitting through an entire album of Common. Sometimes both his voice & subject matter can create a bit of a drone effect, or maybe he's just too grownup for me--I like a bit of ignorance or a bit of wild-out ego tripping to supplement my conscious rap. Records like the watershed Resurrection, the explosive Like Water For Chocolate, the righteous Black America Again & even the sprawling Electric Circus have their charms for me, but Be is the only one I'll come back to, front to back, time & again. 

Hey, remember when Kanye was gonna shepherd a whole conscious rap renaissance in the mainstream? Whatever happened to that? 

The Optical Files #111: Haystak - Car Fulla White Boys (2000)

Look, I clowned the dude pretty hard the last time I wrote about him, but the truth is, aside from his weird obsession with being white that led him to associate with some dodgy characters (more on that when we get to Crackavelli), at his peak Haystak was a fine emcee with a distinctive sound & authorial voice. The problem I pointed out with From Start to Finish handicaps Car Fulla White Boys even more fully: simply put, the early 2000s were not a good time for indie rap production. As I've written about many times in this series, 2 dovetailing phenomena--fear of sample clearance lawsuits & the still relatively primitive state of software instruments--forced producers even slightly outside the major-label system to rely on a whole lot of cheap & cheesy MIDI. The beats here are all by Street Flavor Records mastermind Sonny Paradise, & I can't say the guy is bad at what he does. He has a fine ear for composition & texture, but the tools he has to work with are just inadequate for the task. The escalating MIDI horns & orchestrations on "Need It Get It" are woeful, but they sound positively pristine compared to the unspeakably corny AM radio sub-gospel brass of "Love You Like." It's a shame, because while the former song is no great shakes lyrically, the latter really had potential as a tribute to Stak's grandparents. It's in these moments of vulnerability that Stak really comes alive as a lyricist, but sadly the instrumental just isn't equal to the task.

The album does have a few bright spots production-wise: the Geto Boys-interpolating "Everybody Wants to Ride" is suitably rough-edged; "Wish You Could See Me" finds Stak at the bedside of his friend who is slowly dying from bullet wounds, & as his vivid descriptions of the crime & its aftermath increase in their desperation, the compositional texture thickens, from eerie acoustic guitar to strings to drums to even more strings. It's a striking piece, & a testament to what Stak's pen could do when he was serious. The most interesting instrumental, though, is the strident, bluesy "Brother Like Me." Here we get some live instruments--piano, organ, fretless bass, trumpet--& it hits harder than all the MIDI in the world. Lyrically, though, I'm not sure about Haystak's use of the word "brother" in reference to himself, nor of the way the song seems to romanticize his mistreatment of his girlfriend ("every day I put you through so much pain") in support of a "love is blind" type moral.

On "Ride," Stak answers hypothetical critics who question his reasons for making music: "I'm motivated by the paper, pussy & diamonds/But in the back of my mind, a part of me still exists/That still writes rhymes for the thrill of killing lyricists." I get it--at that particular time & place, it wasn't fashionable for an emcee to want to just be an emcee. I'm of the opinion that Haystak spent a bit too much time on this album focused on superficial things, & attempting to court the radio & dancefloor with the tepid hooks of songs like "Dollar" & "Down South Players." Later albums would work out some of the problems that plagued this one: the production got a little more polished, Stak let his lyricist-killing instincts run a little more rampant, & he even injected some social consciousness--while not going too far down the "victimized white boy" hole that would later swallow up some of the goodwill he generated. Car Fulla White Boys doesn't quite hit any of the right notes often enough to have much replay value--but for a fully independent hiphop album from Tennessee, you have to admire how far they were able to take it.

The Optical Files #110: MC Lyte - Lyte as a Rock (1988)

As readers of this series will know, I've always been a fan of '80s hiphop, but it seems to be the prevailing opinion among my peers that this era of rap music has aged horribly. That's a point I'll concede, & I think it's by design, or at least a consequence of an art form that was very invested in sounding of its time. Those early rappers & producers were not interested in making something that would stand the test of time, they were trying to capture the exact sound & feel of their historical moment, that giddy revolutionary rush of hiphop's first explosion.

While Lyte as a Rock is no exception, I'd argue that it has held up better than a lot of other records of the same vintage, by virtue of its simplicity. Most of the beats are little more than a drum loop & some angular samples, & Lyte (who was 18 when the album was released) is reciting lyrics that she claims she wrote as early as age 12. But please do not misconstrue this as me saying the lyrical content is primitive or childish, because a lot of it is quite forward-thinking: the Antoinette-targeting "10% Dis" is a bit more savage & personal than the diss records we were accustomed to hearing at the time, & "I Am Woman" stakes out territory that Queen Latifah would fully inhabit a year or so later.

I love the sound of this era of rap: dry, dusty drum loops, low-fi samples, unadorned vocals; everything warm & up front & close together, little regard to subtlety in the mix. Little recording errors or inconsistency in levels or jagged sample chops are just left in--it makes you feel like you're there in the studio or in the park with the boombox. The title track with its furiously stuttering drums chops & organ sample, or "10% Dis" with its horn stabs, both produced by Audio Two, are good examples of this specific, warts & all sound. King of Chill contributes "Paper Thin," which is an interesting composition making use of vocal "ooohs" & a memorable distorted guitar loops that serves as a hook for the chorus-less, relatively unstructured rhyme. The album has some interesting beats like that here & there, but the real standout is "MC Lyte Likes Swingin'," by a young man named Prince Paul, then known as the DJ for Stetsasonic before his career-catapulting work with De La Soul. Paul's hitmaking instincts are evident here: he's the only producer on the album who makes use of sonic space, he employs reverb to fill out the composition, his sample collaging is just at a higher level. Anybody could tell this guy was gonna do big things.

In my opinion, Lyte's best work was still ahead of her (can't front on Ain't No Other), but this album is an enjoyable listen, & as the 1st full album by a solo female rapper, its historical significance is huge. I know you think '80s rap is corny, & I don't blame you, but if you haven't heard this one, give it a shot.