Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Best Albums of 2011

I’m naming 12 albums to my best-of list because there are 12 months in a year, and so it feels like a less arbitrary number than 10, even if it is also less round. Plus, where good music is concerned, more is always more. If you put Wilco at the top of your ballot, you forgo any chance of seeming fashionable (especially if you put them ahead of Frank Ocean and Tune-Yards), but if you’re going to engage in any activity as subjective as ranking the albums released in a given year, listing them in rough order of how much solace you’ve taken in them is the only honest rubric. If you haven’t heard any of these records, I feel qualified in saying that there is one sort of solace or another to be found in each of them.


Happy New Year, everybody.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Das Racist/Drake

To put a rather fine point on it, Drake and Das Racist provide clear examples of the broadening definition of rap: ethnically diverse, liberally educated (two of the three members of Das Racist met while they were undergrads at Wesleyan), and, in Drake’s case, confessional in a way that would have led to some name-calling a decade ago. If the Das Racist guys are smarter (they are), it would still take a fool to deny the pleasures of Drake, superficial though they may sometimes be. 

Das Racist: Relax
“But are they serious?” That’s the question that’s dogged this Brooklyn crew since they dropped their exceptionally daffy—and brilliant—single “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” in 2008. The mix tapes they gave away two years later didn’t necessarily settle the debate, and the less-than-rapturous reaction to their first for-profit LP suggests many have stopped caring altogether, which is a serious shame. Indian-American Himanshu Suri (aka Heems) uses his first verse here to share the story of his immigrant parents: “1980, from Delhi to Queens/She had a pocket full of lint/He had a suitcase full of dreams/From holdin' me to bagging groceries at the Pathmark/To scoldin' me for drinking and driving in fast cars.“ Then a promise: “I ain’t backin’ out until I own a bank to brag about.” We’ve come a long way from the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Heems, along with fellow Indian-American Ashok Kondabolu (aka Dap) and Cuban/Italian/African-American Victor Vazquez (you can call him Kool A.D.), are so self-aware and hyper-informed about the world around them that their apparent contradictions and bone-deep irony sound like honest reactions to information overload. They say Urban Dictionary is for “demons with college degrees,” but make fun of themselves for all the poetry readings and jam band shows they attended at Wesleyan long before you have the chance to. Along they way, they prove that hip-hip is now as much the province of those places—not to mention the posh dorm room—as the ‘jects, even if they would roll their eyes at me for being so earnest about it. What does it all mean? Here’s a clue: “If you wanna be me, you can be me/…you can look all day but you still wouldn’t see me/If you wanna be you, you can do that too/And if you don’t, then I don’t really know what I can tell you.” Call it alternative rap or psychedelic rap or meta rap or whatever hashtag you can think of. Just don’t call it a joke. A-

Drake: Take Care
I don’t begrudge Drake’s apprehensions about his own fame and fortune; I wish I had his problems, but I’m sure I’d find plenty to gripe about in the life he leads. I don’t even get annoyed when he drunk dials his ex to tell her how all the sex he’s having is hurting his soul; that nakedly pathetic Hail Mary is the most compelling moment here. Drake—along with Kanye West—is a hip-hop confessor who pays little regard to the understood musical definition of ‘hip-hop.’ But because he’s not exactly what you’d call deep, his musical vision is a whole lot more engaging than his take on himself. The words ‘head case’ come up a lot in conversations about Drake, but his stakes are penny ante even before the Kanye comparisons he begs for and suffers by. The good news is that this follow-up to last year’s Thank Me Later never sounds anything less than terrific. Rapping and singing better than ever, getting the most out of his Toronto pal The Weeknd, and co-opting snippets of songs by Lil Wayne, Juvenile, and—on the title tracka Jamie xx remix of a Gil Scott-Heron cover of an R&B classic made famous by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Drake makes the case for the aficionado as artist. His taste and skill are plain throughout, and the beats he gets from his go-to producer Noah “40” Shebib are luxurious. I just wish all the above made as strong a case for Drake's soul as it does his ear. B+