The Cold Inclusive

My favorite thing lately is to listen to music as quietly as possible. This works best in the car, where the sound of the road drowns out most of the frequencies. For the first 10-20 seconds of a song all you can hear is the drums, and then eventually an errant guitar or vocal note gives the song away. Then your brain starts to fill in the parts that you can’t actually hear, and you start singing along to the best of your ability. And then it gets to the chorus and it turns out you were singing in the wrong key the whole time. Which is kind of symbolic of life.

That is my favorite thing lately.

Elsewhere, Maura says Amerie’s mixtape Because I Love It is almost her favorite album of the year. I can’t disagree, and actually I’d bump it up to the top spot, for just the reasons Maura describes, as well as the fact that it’s the most barn-burningly catchy assortment of tunes anyone released last year. Yes I am looking at you, Mssrs. Hova and Starks.

My favorite track was “Weekend Love.” The original, in Cam’ron’s hands, is a catchy but by-the-numbers come-on to a sideline ho. Under Amerie’s guidance, the song is transformed into an empowered anthem and tribute to any woman who has her shit together, and is above running the kind of games Cam’Ron is intent on instigating.

Where Cam digs his heels in and tries to force a hook by repeating “You could be, you could be” ad infinitum, Amerie just glides effortlessly over the track, not so much responding to the original as she is willing it into reinvention. They’re both great, but Amerie has–to use the parlance of the day–swaggerjacked this one out from Killa.

Compare/contrast:

MP3: Cam’ron: Weekend Love

MP3: Amerie: Weekend Love

(photo: photophonic)

• “Broke up” when singer decided to go solo. He still puts out albums but they’re nowhere near as good.

• Disbanded when the drummer died.

• Only released one album, then got day jobs.

• Remained awesome for three more albums, then did a farewell tour that did not come to your town.

• Bus crash killed two members.

• Maintained for years that they were working on a new album, but it never materialized.

• Recorded an album for a major label, who then refused to release it. Broke up.

• One guitarist quit and they kept going for a little while as a three-piece but it wasn’t the same.

• Just disappeared.

• Split up, then reformed with same members under a different moniker. Released one album, split up again.

• Broke up when the singer and the guitarist each decided they wanted to front their own band. Both incarnations still exist and are just OK.

I still remember where I was the first time I heard The Roots, but being a fan of theirs has been a frustrating experience over the years. Even when they were at their best, you couldn’t help but wonder why their songs didn’t grip you a little harder. The Roots have always been hip-hop scientists: very skilled and knowledgeable in their area of expertise, but cooly detached; rational, when they needed to be emotional.

I don’t know what changed, but they finally got angry, and found that emotional center they’d often been lacking. This year they released Game Theory, the strongest album of their career. Unfortunately, not many people heard it.

“Don’t Feel Right” is the centerpiece of the album. Black Thought’s flow is unstoppable, ideas and connections assailing the listener with the venom of someone who’s been bitinh his tongue for far too long. The chorus, with its repeated chant of “It don’t feel right,” repeated and buried under layers of delay, perfectly evokes the unrelenting waves of bad news that have been coming at us non-stop since Katrina, or since Iraq, or since 9/11, or since the 2000 election, or since whenever it was we started paying attention. Just because the Democrats won a round this year doesn’t mean anything’s changed, and things are probably going to get a lot worse before they get better.

I really wanted to see this song blaze up the charts and stay there this year, because it’s an absolutely perfect summation of what life on this planet was like in 2006.

MP3: The Roots - Don’t Feel Right

While playing–nay, completely rocking out to–”Killing In The Name Of” on Guitar Hero 2 this past weekend (116 note streak on Hard, thank you) I realized that I’m still harboring lot of frustration and anger towards Zack de la Rocha. Surely I am not the only one who is totally disappointed by his career trajectory?

Rage Against The Machine was never quite as good as I wanted them to be. Most often the music was threatening to skate out from under the vocals, or the vocals were charging too furiously for the music to keep up with. When everything clicked it was delightful, but I can count on one hand the number of times it clicked. So news of their break-up was welcome to me–Tom Morello’s riffs are a little by-the-numbers for me; it was always Zack’s venom and politics that I mainly responded to–I was really eager to see what kind of next-level shit Zack could accomplish if he associated himself with musicians and artists who had a wider sonic comfort range, or with a DJ who evoked sonic bombast more adeptly than one guitar and a so-so rhythm section ever could. Get him Just Blaze, get him Rick Rubin, get himTimbaland on crank. Remember the first time you heard a song produced by The Bomb Squad? Get him whoever’s going to be the next version of that.

But that was six years ago, and Audioslave has released three albums in that time. Sure they’re all kind of disappointing, but at least they have something to show for themselves. The only thing of substance we’ve seen from Zack was a less-than-stirring protest song with DJ Shadow, who for some reason still has a cult of devotees, despite the fact that it’s been 10 years since he did anything interesting. Maybe next is a split 7″ withSmashmouth? Or a press release announcing the title of Zack’s solo album as Chinese Democracy 2.

It can’t be writer’s block, can it? Did he decide that maybe things haven’t been so bad after all, since our current President got elected? Or maybe he’s been holed up in his bedroom since 2000, glued to CNN and just choking on his own rage. One has to wonder how the two events (the break-up and the election) are connected. He failed us when we needed him most.

Some possible career moves for Zack de la Rocha that are better than what he’s currently doing:

• Guest judge on the next season of American Idol
• Back-up vocalist on a Nickelback song, all Linkin Park-style
• Hanging out at D’Angelo’s house and re-enacting key scenes from On The Waterfront.