web analytics

Pop Rock Nation

Blog

  • #19 album of 2012 – bell hooks by BBU

    Artist: BBU

    Album: bell hooks

    “Too many conscious rappers can’t face the facts/ that drug dealers happen to make better raps”. BBU’s bell hooks — made by a band whose website explains their name as “short for Bin Ladin Blowin’ Up or Black, Brown and Ugly, depending on the day” — is a catchy, proudly defiant bbu_bell_hooksalbum that (1) has no desire to appeal to condescending white liberals whose main ghetto experience comes from schoolteaching, e.g. me, and (2) is nonetheless well-positioned to do so. It is, for one thing, what rappers mean by “conscious”: the kind of album where even There’s Something About Mary, which is 1/3 an angry and self-disgusted complaint about being taken as a sucker by a girlfriend, is 2/3 a sympathetic portrait of the young woman’s life challenges, her attempts to meet them, and the police abuse and urban dysfunction that end up destroying her life. It’s varied but essentially old-school hip-hop, like Dead Prez, or the bratty kid nephews of Public Enemy. Every song has a groove, a couple of instrumental hooks, probably re-purposed from elsewhere, and plays them steadily, with adjustments for dynamics, throughout the song. Lots of whooshing noises; BBU like those. No one sings (except Kurt Cobain on a sample of Nirvana’s Polly), but it’s excellent music to foreground the words. Jason Perez, Richard Wallace, and Michael Milam each have musical speaking voices that play off each other well — sometimes as banter, sometimes with the teamwork of a sabotage plan coming together.

    They surely think they’re more fun than “conscious rappers” like Common or the Roots, and I’ll agree; bell hooks is as catchy and danceable a hip-hip record as I’ve heard. Beau Sia is as loose and playful as a series of jumprope chants, aware of its own ridiculousness from the hook (“Brother tryin’ to figure out what’s your major” “What’s my major?!?!”) on down. I could disapprove of “This right here? Open letter/ from Jason Perez, one nerd-ass nigger/ Let’s fuck first, read a book together/ after that, change the world forever”, but I adore it. It’s so transparent, including in his obvious belief that every part of it makes a fine step-by-step plan (and why not, really?). Same with rhyming “Don’t forget your past” with an Afrocentric compliment on “your ass”. The Wrong Song is an all-out assault on American politics and Clear Channel pop culture both, but it’s giddy with the joy of its pitter-pat drums and Spanish chorus call-and-response. Please, No Pictures is a minimalist assemblage of soft percussion, groaning synth, and beepy synth melody, and a serious attack on racial profiling (by cops, by Fox News in its story inventions, by 19th-century slaveowners). But aided by guest stars Heems and Kool A.D. from Das Racist and a goofy spoken sample of the title, it plays as amused — even when “at shows making fun of white folks”, even when threatening to “go Nat Turner”.

    bbu_band_pictureNot everything here feels amused. “My city is like a zoo/ these crackers keep us in cages, get crazy when we get loose”, from the ominous 26th and Cali — Stevie Wonder-ish piano and sax riffs overshadowed by unison vocals and fierce whooshing beats — picks up, full-frown, on the daily life concerns that spawn so much hip-hop. The Hood, six minutes of funk guitar, soul horns, fierce toy instruments, and the singers’ firmest voices, insists “We were all born into circumstances pre-existing/ some with the silver spoon, others straight into the tomb/ Some will make it, but most will be consumed/ by this fast food, test-tube, pill-popping [something]”. We’re born into the language we speak, too, which makes our accents an idiotic thing to judge us on. But people do, and BBU reply while shaking their head in disgust. “And they wonder why I talk like I do? Maan – just look at *you*”.

    “Not a racist, no, not a terrorist/ just want white America to go see a therapist”. I’d be pissed at a record that talked at any other ethnic group that way, and I wouldn’t enjoy BBU hunting me down in person to be mean, but this is a-ok. A few decades of banks and the government refusing to loan to any neighborhood with one *white* person in it; a few dozen new state laws passed by black legislators to make it hard for whites to vote; a couple policemen of any race patting me down because I’m white, and then I’ll be sensitive for my race. In this world, BBU are making excellent music and giving it away for free. They’re young and rash; on Kurt de la Rocha they put a lot of gusto into “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me/ You don’t like me, you wanna sell me”, and at my age I roll my eyes and say “Well, duh”. But I’m wrong, and they’re right; how the hell did it become okay that that’s normal? It’s not an *eloquent* line, but they apologize for that. And give us the record for free. Voluntarily, as free men. It beats the method by which my shoes were made, I’m quite sure of that. I like them for it, whether they want me to or not.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

    Technical note:

    If you’re game for buying things via our Amazon links (and it makes us happy when you do) – well, we’d be jerks trying to get you to spend money there on a free record. But if you’d enjoy BBU, we bet you’d enjoy the Dead Prez album we’re linking in its place. Or did you know that Amazon sells jewelry? Maybe you should go from the Dead Prez link to stocking up on wedding rings. You never know when you’ll need some!

     

  • Happy International Women’s Day! Songs for Women…

    This goes out to all the girls out there… on International Women’s Day

    I’ll be honest. I had never even heard of International Women’s Day until I lived in the Republic of Armenia. Although my experiences in Armenia in the mid 1990s did not leave me with the impression that Armenians cared much about feminism, I did notice that they celebrated this holiday every March 8th. Then I learned that International Women’s Day started out as a Socialist political event in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Soviet bloc countries. It was originally intended to honor working women and their social, political, professional, and economic achievements. Since Armenia was a Soviet country until 1991, it makes perfect sense that they’d still be recognizing this holiday in the mid 1990s and beyond. I liked this holiday a lot better than Vartavar, a holiday that takes place 98 days after Easter that involves throwing water on people– especially women wearing thin blouses. On that day, you have to be careful walking down the street because it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to dump a bucket of water on you from their balcony.

    In the fifteen years since I left Armenia, I notice that more people seem to be embracing International Women’s Day. Indeed, on my personal music blog, a commenter from Ireland left me a link to a song that he thought was perfect for today’s festivities.

    Trouble In The Fields by Nanci Griffith

    This particular version was recorded live in Edinburgh, Scotland in July 2012. The song is about farming, and the hard work that goes into making soil produce. The lyrics very poignantly outline doing what it takes to survive during hard times. They also point out how city life divorces people from the reality of where food comes from and how important rainy weather is. I guess I should remember that, next time I complain about the rain! I think it’s especially meaningful that this song was co-written by Nanci Griffith, since women are generally seen as the primary source for nurturing, even if when we think of farming, we might think of men first.

    Hammer and A Nail by Indigo Girls

    I remember the first time I heard this song by Indigo Girls. I was a sophomore in college, working at the campus radio station. I remember thinking this was a great song back then. It has an upbeat melody and lyrics about empowerment and social justice. Years later, when I earned a master’s degree in social work, this song was featured at our hooding. It seemed to fit really well with the concept of social work and helping those in need. Social work is a profession very much dominated by women of all ages and the words to “Hammer and A Nail” are all about putting your shoulder to the grindstone and making the world a better place. I think it fits here perfectly on International Women’s Day.

    Women Be Wise by Sippie Wallace (and Bonnie Raitt)


    I will admit the first time I heard this song, it was on Bonnie Raitt’s Collection, which had a great duet version of Sippie Wallace’s blues song about how to keep your man around. She advises, “don’t advertise your man!” The first video is just of Sippie Wallace singing her song, but I love the sassy duet she did with Bonnie. It totally changes the mood of the song to one of two girlfriends sitting around, talking. The second video is Bonnie performing it in Montreux in 1977.

    This Woman’s Work by Kate Bush

    Switching gears, here’s a sublime song by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Kate Bush. This song was originally written for the John Hughes film, She’s Having A Baby. In the film, it plays when the character, Jake (Kevin Bacon) learns that his pregnant wife and their unborn child are in danger. In the video for “The Sensual World”, Kate Bush depicts a pregnant woman who collapses while dining at a restaurant and is rushed to the hospital. The song is written from the man’s viewpoint as he prays that his beloved wife and child will pull through. There’s nothing more feminine than giving birth.

    Strati Angelaki Dunashe (Strati Angelaki was saying) by Trio Bulgarka

    Kate Bush has done two albums with Trio Bulgarka, a trio of amazingly talented Bulgarian female folk singers. I had actually heard of Trio Bulgarka before I purchased Bush’s The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, both of which featured songs with Trio Bulgarka. In the summer of 1996, I went on a vacation by bus that included stops in Turkey and Bulgaria. While I was in Bulgaria, I happened to purchase Trio Bulgarka’s album of selected folk songs on cassette. I remember thinking it was very primitively produced. Then I listened to it and was amazed by the vocal chemistry of these three women, Stoyanka Boneva, Yanka Rupkina, and Eva Georgieva. Since International Women’s Day is celebrated worldwide, especially in Eastern Europe, I thought it was only fitting to include a song by Trio Bulgarka. Thankfully, I was later able to download this album on iTunes.

    The Song of Solomon by Kate Bush and Trio Bulgarka

    Here Trio Bulgarka joins Kate Bush on “Song of Solomon”, a love song inspired by the Bible.

    Kirvem by Kizilirmak

    On that same bus trip through Turkey and Bulgaria, I discovered the Turkish band, Kizilirmak, named after a river in Turkey. As I wandered around Istanbul with my friend Elaine, we passed a music store and the haunting song “Kirvem” was playing. We were both lured into that store by this song’s lush melody and poetic lyrics. We both bought a copy of the album it came from, Rüzgarla Gelen. I have to admit, the entire album makes great lovemaking music, even if I don’t understand the words. Kizilirmak is a co-ed band, but there’s something very feminine about “Kirvem”, which is why I included it in this list.

    Maybe this list of songs for women seems curious, since these are all old songs! The women singing on these songs are women who have been around awhile and certainly have made contributions politically, culturally, socially, and professionally. I also discovered many of these women around the time that I discovered International Women’s Day. Perhaps my readers can inspire me with other songs that celebrate women.

  • #20 album of 2012 – Gossamer by Passion Pit

    Artist: Passion Pit

    Album: Gossamer

    So far, when I’ve praised pop songwriters (e.g. Jon Lindsay) on this countdown, I’ve centered the praise on artists who, like the Beatles or XTC or Elvis Costello, produce unexpected melodies: songs that recombine the basic 12 notes in ways that feel catchy but are somehow new. Passion passion_pit_gossamerPit don’t really do that. I’ll grant them I’ll Be Alright and Carried Away, and parts of Love is Greed and Where We Belong, but most of the tunes on Gossamer move your basic step-by-step, except in the transitional leap from verse to chorus. If, as I claim, it’s a special album, it comes down to arrangements: instrumental and vocal. The instrumentation (mainly the synthesizer sound envelopes) is inventive and intriguing. The vocals on the verses, by Michael Angelakos, are strong and clear-voiced but ordinary (and enhanced quite a bit, I think, by doubling and multiple takes). The chorus vocals, often en-masse, are as shameless as any jingle-writer ever conceived. In context, I am claiming, that’s a very *good* thing.

    The instrumentation is crucial to that context. The hook on I’ll Be Alright is as creative, obtrusive, and in-your-face as anything by Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, but as adoring as a puppy, and it leads to a firm disco beat that, like the very best of original disco, races us past dozens of shiny sound effects, with just enough time to goggle at each before being swept along. Take a Walk, Carried Away, and others are the sort of danceable mainstream ’80s synth-rock celebrated in John Hughes movie soundtracks, with multiple hooks, sighing counterpoint, and a playing-up of the artifice of the sounds their keyboards make possible. Constant Conversations is moody modern R&B, unsettling in how none of the instruments’ attack/decay patterns sound at all natural (until string pizzicato near the end), and with brief, cleverly alien-sounding uses of pitch-correction. Cry Like a Ghost is spooky and spare on its verses, the abandoned remains of a Giorgio Moroder Eurodisco hit, but makes good use of a hook/sample that sounds at once like gangsta mice and Middle Eastern prayer music. Hideaway acquires an illusion of subtlety by having the first minute seem to filter in from a cathedral over a bad phone connection. Love is Greed mostly sounds like Christmas music with a redeemingly peppy beat, but is introduced by 33 seconds of odd yet lovely a-capella vocoder duet. Where We Belong flutters along on almost holy-sounding oscillations and hidden, scuffling drum machine.

    Lyrics are probably crucial to the context. Gossamer is largely messages from the inside of a failing romance, marked by verbal fights, earnest and no-more-pleasant attempts at reconciliation, bouts of self-loathing, and frequent inquires into why the other person doesn’t just give up. If closing track Where We Belong is the closet thing to a love song, and the final lyric is “All I’ve ever wanted was to be happy and make you proud”, even it still gets there by way of “Who says you ought to stay? How’s this the easier way? It’s far from giving up. Cowards never say ‘Enough is enough’”. It matters because *real* Christmas jingles at the mall don’t say “Someday we’ll all agree, it’s not worth making/ another person that is yours for the taking … Love is just greed, it’s selfish and mean/ It follows all you lead/ if we really love ourselves, how do you love somebody else?”. (Although you wouldn’t think commercials would be able to use Take a Walk, the outward-focused lyric here, a six-verse three-generation tale of the disappointments of the American Dream. Taco Bell’s marketers still decided “This is perfect!”)

    The choruses of Take a Walk and Love is Greed and I’ll Be Alright have gone through my head this past year as much as those of any other three songs; the context allows me to be glad of it. Passion Pit muster the full force of group vocals, assertive production, easy but not-too-easy melody, and repetition short of the point of unbearability to drive them home: they have no mercy. Their songs are selfish little memes.

    Susan Blackmore wrote a fascinating non-fiction book called the Meme Machine, based on Richard Dawkins’s tossed-off concept of the “meme”, which he meant as metaphor and analogy to genes: ideas as evolutionary devices. Memes might be moral principles or jokes; poems or just half-remembered lines; logos or concepts like “flying saucers of little green men who abducted me”; cooking techniques or fragments of song. Blackmore’s case is that memes *literally* evolve — anything that makes imperfect copies of itself, some copies of which are better-suited to survive and reproduce than others, literally evolves, and human brains are an environment. She further argues — and outlines several experiments to test the notion with — that human brains have evolved to be better and better meme-spreaders. The result is that while The Ability To Sell Other People On Memes helps an individual mate and raise healthy offspring (and so our species gets smarter and cannier and wordier), the memes themselves — which produce everything from laughter to religious awe to sex discrimination to suicide — don’t need to serve anything but their own ability to spread, as they evolve at the speed of viruses. There may, for example, be no genetic explanation for music at all: once human brains got capable of producing the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, they were simply an available environment for those ruthless eight notes to breed in.

    Passion Pit‘s Gossamer is a small masterpiece of viral melody. I rate it highly because I enjoy the symptoms. I recommend it to you because, it turns out, my brain makes a handy transmitter to hijack.

    – Brian Block

    To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!