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Surreal Life
Nearsighted nerds with ill nicknames. Cats wearing Vans and...
Can I Have
Pharrell Williams' new dolo offering "Can I Have It Like That" is not...
Mos Def
Many in the black community feel that some Americans would sooner...
STAY TUNED
Read Tanya Morgans - Stay Tuned review by Will Dukes on Pitchfork Media.
ONE BE LO
I hate hype. Many rappers smacked with this label inevitably disappoint me...
RARE ESSENCE
"You know the crazy drum action on Amerie's 'One Thing'? It's that."
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GRANDMASTER CAZ
Grandmaster Caz, DJ/MC of the infamous Cold Crush Brothers, the crew that most...
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Will Dukes
Nearsighted nerds with ill nicknames. Cats wearing Vans and slouching like skaters. Boys who wrote twisted, iron-fisted rhymes. Boys with no muscle tone, who intimidated with their weirdness, their bulk, or on the strength, on the fact of their blackness alone. This amused and angered them, sent them to arty white girls or beatnik black or brown girls for compassion, and then back to their clubrooms to get blunted and beery, to peruse deliciously sick comics, brutal graphic novels, and the newest porn. In the above excerpt--from the formidable Danyel Smith's excellent new novel Bliss--ambitious heroine Eva Glenn is recalling the sort of atypical black men she has encountered in major cities across the US, but she may as well have been describing who (or what) she saw at an MF Doom show.
Doom--formerly know as Zev Love X back in the KMD days--is presently dominating hip-hop's underground in much the same way 50 Cent monopolized mainstream rap in 2003. The reason for this, I think, is quite obvious: Doom possesses a keen understanding of his fan base and, in turn, gives the people what they want--on some O'Jays shit. As opposed to other left-of-center acts, whose most recent records have aimed "Hey Ya"-high but succeeded in only alienating initial enthusiasts and the ever-so coveted pop audience (hi Talib!), MF Doom appears content to revel in the sort of dusty, every-song-is-a-story board, cartoons 'n' kitsch steez that used to exclusively appeal to 90-lb weaklings and anime A-alikes . . . until recently, that is.
Beginning with last year's stellar Madvillainy, a new, more cosmopolitan slew of fans, including the crit cognoscenti and this particular reviewer, began endorsing the metal-faced villain, with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for newer artists. (Doom has, for the record, maintained a sizable cult following for more than a decade.) Yet Madvillainy, which, last December, topped many a critic's year-end list, more effortlessly blends all the idiosyncracies found on Doom's earlier albums--comic book characters, squalid, bipolar beats, bugged-out wordplay, etc.--into a perfect meta-rap pastiche that brims with blurry-eyed b-boy grit. And thanks to one Sasha Frere-Jones, who reviewed the record for the New Yorker, some middle-aged Columbia professor somewhere is, no doubt, preparing notes on the Copernican Revolution in time to the tasteful, neoclassical thump of "Accordion." (Now, that's what I call moving The Movement.)
Naturally, anticipation for Doom and producer Danger Mouse's forthcoming DangerDoom project has--for those who feel that way--been sky-high. The album's first single "The Mask"--a spirited little lint ball of a banger featuring Ghostface--has been circulating for some time now, wooing, and whetting the appetites of fanboys either too loyal or preoccupied to drop their strangleheld dicks and preview the album (which leaked a few monts back). As for those less-disciplined, who've succumbed to downloading the record, it's likely that most are die-hards who will, nevertheless, purchase the disc when it's properly released later this fall.
In any event, MF Doom has managed to generate interest among neophyte trendsters and the rock press, by sharing his comix and cockeyed charisma with a devout, albeit motley demographic that rap's so-called saviors have disassociated themselves from. Undoubtedly, he has become the metal face of below-the-radar rap in 2005. Hate it or love it: the underdog's on top.
Though it's likely that the aforementioned Eva Glenn--a life-long lover of hip-hop--would admire MF Doom's freewheeling, surrealist approach, it's safe to say that she, the over-achieving, tough-shit record executress, probably wouldn't sign him. (Eva's a winner, boasting a quasi-spiritual multi-platinum singer-songwriter named Sunny Addison.) As General Manager of Roadshow Records, Eva has money, power, respect, and not much time for anything else, save facilitating Sunny's comeback concert, which is planned for an industry showcase on Paradise Island. During the course of said soiree, Eva, who might be pregnant again, begins to slowly unravel, and is convinced by Sunny's emotionally unstable brother D'Artagnan (who would totally fucking love MF Doom) that an unscripted visit to idyllic Cat Island is in order. On Cat Island, Eva is forced to come to terms with, among other things, a sometimes-scandalous sex triangle, and the grim possibility that she might be falling off, career-wise. (All this takes place in 1998--an insane year for an industry still grappling with the deaths of Tupac and Biggie and the awesome and often evil influx of "new money.")
With Bliss, Smith has crafted an indelibly rich narrative ensconced in scenic prose that is informed and enlivened by an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and the inner-workings of the music industry. The characters are all worldly and (mostly) wonderful--I dig how Eva thinks in song lyrics and how Sunny is, like, this Mariah-esque diva, with Hidden Beach intimacy, and how D'Artagnan always RAISES his VOICE when he talks. Smith's sheer love for the music virtually spills off the pages and will have you up at 4 a.m. downloading shit that when it first debuted, you didn't even like. Heavy D's "Now That We Found Love (What Are We Gonna Do With It?)" fucking owns that previous sentence.
In short, if you enjoy weak-plotted, trashy novels with sophomoric writing, please do yourself a favor and do not read Bliss.
If you'd, by chance, appreciate a book written with depth (and loving attention to detail), about a woman's spiritual journey to find herself, you need to cop that before you brush your teeth. Before lunch, even.
Rill talk.
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