The new Big Digits album, Know Tomorrow, is out now! I’m very proud of this project (I recorded and mixed the vocals) and congratulate Big Digits on a job well done!

Purchase the real live vinyl LP from Anchor Brain Records.
Download the mp3s from iTunes and Amazon.

The longer we slow to look at the flashing red and blue lights, to inspect the mangled chassis, to peek into the rear of the ambulance–the longer I dwell on all of the unsettling and disturbing and captivating issues–the more I want to take up the cause of the policeman waving cars on their merry way:

“There’s nothing to see here people. Move along.”

It’s not that easy, is it? Forgive me while I synthesize…

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NOVELTY ACT

Sure, their appearance on Jimmy Fallon is up there in the category of “Best Things to Happen on Television Since the Kanye Rant after Katrina.” Clearly, this moment and these firebrands caught everyone off-guard. But tell me you haven’t seen bands that wouldn’t have wilded out like that if given the opportunity to perform on late night television. Tell me you’re not a little ashamed of being sucked into the novelty: “Surprise America! Rappers aren’t always wooden thugs! Sometimes they’re crazed youth with tube socks!”

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Now, NPR is on their jock acting like naive parents who think they can convince their kids they’re cool by turning their friends onto their kids’ music:

“You know what else? They’re really good. Especially their ringleader, called Tyler The Creator. And another thing? It’s awesome to see them play live.”

Are you fucking kidding me? You couldn’t invent a better parody of NPR’s tagalong music staff. The New York Times does a little better, but they celebrate the music and describe the disturbing content while essentially giving Tyler, the Creator a pass because of hard times. Word to hard times. But hard times don’t get a pass. They get a moment, some space, a solemn acknowledgement. We do not give hard times license and we do not get to wash our hands when others fall on them.

As for Pitchfork, they’ve got me on some “Fear of an Eight Point Oh” maths: a 20-minute edit DNE a 2.0 deduction when the bulk of said edit is wretched music.
As I began working on this post last Monday, Pitchfork, reporting statements by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara challenging the press and fans to take a stand on OFWGKTA, went all “Just the facts, Ma’am” and dropped an old Tegan and Sara video. Come on, dudes! Grow a pair! Tyler, the Creator’s “If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!” response deserves more than your “predictably fucked up” shoulder shrug!

Everyone is writing about it because it’s a spectacle, because there’s some new outlandish addition to the news cycle every time they pop up on the internet or break something on stage or bleed some member of the audience. The music media is feeding off of their network for web traffic. #OFWGKTA is great advertising.

Meanwhile, OFWGKTA are telling us we don’t get it. And they’re right. We don’t get it. We shouldn’t get it. We’re entertaining it because we want to be hip to the zeitgeist. We’ve been seduced by energy. And we’re accountable.

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TYLER

At present, this movement is all about Tyler, the Creator. And, sadly, what was disarmingly charming about him in that first network television takeover is exactly what’s missing in his new album: piggy back rides. Goblin is not remotely fun music. It is dark and angry and unwelcoming, even more universally unpleasant than the “rapey” and “homophobic” descriptions would lead one to believe. Essentially a rehash of the format of the first album, Bastard, it bears only a handful of legitimately compelling tracks, one of which is the leadoff single, “Yonkers.”

Tyler, the Creator – Yonkers

Everything else is lazy production, artless vitriol, pedestrian shock schlock, incessant insults to its listeners, and songs that appear designed as an exercise to see how many times someone can use “bitch” in his lyrics. The two worst offenders simply seem like antagonistic joke tunes, one of which doesn’t even feature Tyler’s rapping:

Tyler, the Creator with Jasper the Dolphin and Taco Bennett – Bitch Suck Dick

Tyler is not without talent. He has a particular minimal production aesthetic that is occasionally quite moving. He has an incredible rap voice and great cadence and delivery. There are fascinating moments on Bastard.

Tyler, the Creator with Hodgy Beats – French!

The problem now is that he’s all id and venom for every detractor and supporter and bystander equally. While that may be captivating for the time being, it’s not something that sustains great art; it’s what alienates foes and fans alike.

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THERAPY

The stories of Bastard and Goblin are apparently two of three sessions with Tyler’s pitch-dropped therapist character. He’s clearly troubled and aware of it. He’s ironic about treatment while admitting its importance. His sudden rise to fame gives him more fuel for the fire. No matter how much we’d like to see him harness his talent and forego the upsetting content, I don’t know how a fan base can possibly facilitate rehabilitation. For him, the music is therapeutic. And thankfully, most of these intense songs are among Tyler’s most memorable performances.

Tyler, the Creator – Bastard

Tyler, the Creator – Nightmare

But when does therapy go too far? Where do we draw the line when outlets for angst and rage force themselves upon others? It’s not a tenable relationship for listeners to give such leeway or for artists to expect so much.

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FRANK

At the end of Goblin Tyler reveals that his pitch-dropped therapist character is actually his conscience. The irony is that OFWGKTA’s conscience really is built into itself. Their lone R&B croon slinger (who should keep singing and stop rapping), Frank Ocean, manages to be consistently on the surprising side of all the talking points. Take, for example, the track “We All Try”, in which Ocean actually lists principles instead of making ruins:

Frank Ocean – We All Try

“I believe a woman’s temple gives her the right to choose.
But, baby, don’t abort.
I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and woman
But between love and love…
You must believe in something.
You’ve gotta believe in something.
I still believe in man…
I just don’t believe we’re wicked.
I know that we sin.
But I do believe we try.
We all try.”

The moral is precisely what makes us sympathize with Tyler. Look at that big, goofy smile. Most of us are Platonists: everyone starts out good and is merely corrupted. There has to be some good reason for Tyler to behave that way. There is, of course, his troubled relationship with his father, the anger from which is entirely legitimate. But here the comparison continues. Consider Frank Ocean’s take on being fatherless:

Frank Ocean – There Will Be Tears

Frank clearly has a different relationship with his feelings than his cohorts, of whom we imagine him singing: “These boys had no fathers neither. And they ain’t crying.” Instead of Tyler’s oft-quoted “I just want my father’s email so I can tell him how much I fucking hate him in detail,” Frank cries for his loss, even in the company of guarded friends.

Beyond these comparisons, the real dividing line between the two artists is Tyler’s absolutely abhorrent language regarding women. In Frank Ocean’s music, sexuality can be difficult and complicated without being abusive or misogynistic. The highlight of nostalgia, ultra, “Songs for Women,” shows the kind of vulnerability one can be found in where romantic feelings are involved.

Frank Ocean – Songs for Women

So we’re presented with the paradox of membership. In this celebrated and maligned collective are two individuals who appear to profess very different world views who create very different music. Yet they work and operate together quite intimately. How does Frank Ocean sit and where does he stand with all of this? Or Tyler, for that matter?

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FOR VIOLENCE

There is something deep and primal about the appeal of OFWGKTA. By the time they surfaced, the gun raps of pop gangsters (as well as their club lives and sexual escapades, which OFWGKTA similarly mock) had grown utterly tiresome, mundane, unmoving, unthreatening. Yet a large part of what is attractive in rap music is its threatening character. We love to feel equally dangerous and endangered. We cannot ignore the success of OFWGKTA as evidence of an extensive desire for violent content (musical or lyrical) that isn’t so bored and commonplace that it’s dismissed outright as fantasy. What we’re seeing here is a fan base that is exhilarated by merely wondering whether Tyler, the Creator is really a rapist. The adrenaline of violence, the passion for conquest, the simultaneous desire for both survival and extinction–these are triggered by the music, which resonates on a level of instinct beyond both morals and aesthetics.

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AGAINST VIOLENCE

But the violence is clearly generational too. I revisit a quote from Blood Meridian that’s been inspiring a good deal of my next album:

“For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.”

OFWGKTA are bastards in a more fundamental way than by just a lack of a father. Each new generation scrapes and claws for its footing in the world, against the world as it is, a world that is against its young, Saturn devouring his children. Generation Z have transformed the very nature of identity in a sociopsychological transmutation that suffers the physical world as a platform to explorations of a boundless cyberspace. It is too much science fiction for us. And too real to absorb. We are alien to the future. And so, we are to be destroyed.

The repeated acts of rape and the frequent use of the term “faggot” that are employed in this campaign are indeed disgusting and reprehensible. They are also circumstantial. Nothing menaces femininity and masculinity, respectively, in a more potent manner than this act and this insult. We are to be shaken from our foundations. Our false witness is to be purged.

Still, these kids aren’t anything like the gang in Graham Greene’s The Destructors, who would coldly and methodically dismantle the teetering edifice of the tired, old world. These are teenagers. I can remember how I felt being a teenager and I didn’t have much wrong with my life. We were “fuck all” too. OFWGKTA aren’t entirely far off. By which I mean, I don’t think they even get it. They’re too much blindly flailing about at the spectre of adulthood. Whatever intelligence these kids employ (and there is intelligence) is still not developed enough to give them all the credit for meta-commentary they’ve been showered with.

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ONLY ONE SWEATSHIRT

Lesser members like Hodgy Beats and Left Brain may continue to play with firearms. But it’s no mere coincidence that OFWGKTA’s most talented rapper traffics in the menace of hands-on violence unmediated by guns, in mortal combat at close distances with knives and blunt instruments, in unsettlingly painterly visions: Earl Sweatshirt.

In Earl’s instance, NPR’s directive is indeed worthwhile, though you shouldn’t be listening to the words themselves at all. Take but a few moments to hear the sound of Earl’s language and encounter a surpassingly smooth, round wordplay, easily gliding through vocabulary with an understanding of the palatable feeling of language, refreshing and textured, like chewing a wet sponge on a liquid-free diet. Consider what I believe to be the finest moment of the entire OFWGKTA ouvre:

Earl Sweatshirt – Stapleton

This track encompasses the highest highs and the lowest lows of the collective. The lurching beat is both incredibly disorienting and transcendently moving. The verses are disciplined, thematic, formalized. The chorus is vivid and utterly terrifying, the words of a deranged screen villain delivered with a jarring, cinematic effect:

“Tell your boyfriend that’s a bat and it’s a migraine.
Don’t ask why my jean’s splattered with these white stains.
Wait! Where you going? What you doing tonight?
Stop running. I just want to know what you’re doing.
Come back. Please?”

It’s chilling. Meanwhile, Earl proclaims himself a “rapist-in-training” and promises to “smack a faggot in his shirley temple.” From the heights to the depths: hateful, malicious, terrible language compromises what could be such a unique contribution to the musical landscape.

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FREE EARL

Beware when the Free Earl movement is delivered its messiah. The prodigal son will return bearing equally the promise of legitimizing the talent of OFWGKTA and of either confirming its intent to remain steeped in vile content or refining and elevating its content. With regard to Earl’s disappearance, his narrative is quickly becoming more complex by the news cycle. His talent runs in the family: he is apparently the son of South Africa’s most beloved poet. He has sought refuge of his own volition, contrary to initial reports claiming his mother sent him away to a boot camp. And he demands his space to reflect in a way that tempts us to reconcile his and his crew’s content with some higher moral inclinations.

When we meet Earl again, we may very well meet a grown man in command of his abilities, with a voice to temper the tide. We also might well not. Regardless, for now, while Earl is on his mysterious sojourn, we’ll have to weather the fearsome affirmation of his truest premonition, as mobs of reckless journalists, gold-rushing artists, salivating businessmen, and misguided listeners kneel at the OFWGKTA altar:

“Fans’ll stand in sleet season with their fucking feet bleeding,
In hail and fucking snow, in Hell with fucking coats.”

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FIGHTING WORDS

Which is all to say…

If OFWGKTA actually has any capacity to make truly lasting, moving, edifying music, I firmly throw my gauntlet:

Let’s see how compelling your content can be when you quit resorting to your tired, crass mainstays. Let’s see what you can do to menace me artfully. Let’s see what you can make when you spend more than ten minutes on a beat. Let’s see what happens when you choose quality over quantity, when you actually try to craft art instead of vomiting gall and bile on the world.

Until then, to OFWGKTA and all the architects of their moment:

Fuck you back. I’m over it.

’01. INITIALS B.R. we have seen the moment of our greatness flicker
’02. SESAME we never sleep
‘03. STRIKE ON BACK we play with fire
‘04. HEAVYWEIGHT BULLION we buy gold
‘05. THE MUSIC MAN we are open for business
‘06. THE CONFIDENCE MAN we give you our word
‘07. HENRY DARGER we need a moment alone
‘08. WALTER SICKERT we have got to be kidding
‘09. T.R.O.B. we quit

This album was made in Cambridge, MA and Santa Fe, NM from 2005-2008 and mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Music. The photograph for the cover art was taken by the very talented peon. This album would not exist without its initial conception with B.R.other Stephen Brackett (!) aka Brer Rabbit. It’s been a long time coming and many thanks go to Mom and Dad, my wife Caroline, Molly and Robert, Joey and Alana, Thom, Farhad, Devin, Torin, Galen, Sam, Simone, and Big Digits for their influence and support during the making and releasing of the record.

People don’t rap years anymore. “2006″ doesn’t sound cool. We’ve arrived in the future and been here for a decade. Somehow, this millenium still feels alien. I wouldn’t say I’m simply nostalgic. It’s something about the gestalt of the decade—it doesn’t congeal.

As cliché as it has been to revisit the deaths of Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur and to aggrandize their talent, the transition into 21st-Century rap music has eerily reflected the fate of their ghost-voiced posthumous catalogues. After two decades as a fearsome outcast, rap music, the enemy of American Puritanism has ascended into its own life-after-death and been rewarded for all its earthly effort with everything one could imagine. The popularity of urban culture, the modernity of the genre itself, and the investment of major-label record companies in rap markets has turned the art form into the number one selling genre in all of music. Furthermore, the mixtape and DJ culture it created became one of the most successful translations from physical to digital media delivery, playing a pivotal role in the redefinition of the material of recorded music. Without a doubt, in the last ten years, we’ve seen incredible success and we’ve heard incredible music. But we’ve also come to know something about authenticity.

Take it back to ’88 (one of the best sounding years you could ever speak). In that year, Rick Rubin left Def Jam because of conflicts over musical integrity, upset that rap music was becoming more concerned with commerce than with creating moving art. It was a hint at what was to inspire the late-90s conflict between underground credibility and commercial success. Just a few years later the war bore the two sides their prophets. In ’94 (“rugged raw, kicking down your goddamned door”), we received two of the best rap albums ever by two of the greatest rappers to ever pick up a microphone: Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die and Nas’s Illmatic. The former exploded with critical acclaim into an international phenomena; the latter received the first 5-mic review in The Source and sold disappointingly. But what the character of these two albums embodied, what the tenor of these two voices conveyed, was a deep dichotomy of artistic expression.

When an artist creates his work, he stands in himself to engage what he is and what he knows. When an artist sells his work, he goes into the world to engage what it is and what it wants. All artists operate on this spectrum, moving between persona and position, between actor and individual. In 1994, what B.I.G. and Nas established for the rap world were the definitions of public music and private music. B.I.G. raps on the corner, for the corner; Nas raps from the corner, transcending the corner. B.I.G. raps in a mansion, in a Benz, in a fantasy; Nas raps at a barbecue, in a bedroom, on a pad. Where is B.I.G.? “The back of the club, sipping Moet is where you find me. / The back of the club, macking hos, my crew behind me.” Where is Nas? “I be ghost from my projects / Take my pen and pad for the weekend, hitting Ls while I’m sleeping. / A two-day stay, you may say, I needed time alone / To relax my dome, no phone, left the nine at home.” It took me years to understand what these albums were, but when I did, everything clicked.

The 2000s, for me, have been about finding private music, however publicly it may be distributed, against an overwhelming inundation of public music, about searching for honesty, however it may manifest, against a tsunami of rap factory product. It’s been about trying to breathe in a dump of bloated mixtapes and turgid recyclables, hoping to come across something that might remotely resemble the Illmatic architecture that eschewed a jam-packed buffet for the craft of nine perfect songs.

Since 2000, for as long as I have been making rap music, it has been all done up in heavenly gowns, shrouded in celestial mists, reeling, opiated, Roman. Initials B.R. is an elegy of the 90s as much as it is an ode to the 00s. It is a glance back at the days when we rapped our years like mile markers on the road of history. It is a hymn to the vastness of possibility which in the 21st Century forgets what year it is except that it is the future.

Initials B.R. is my attempt to cover the public/private dichotomy in narrative form, each song being a stage in the journey of, on the one hand, making an album, and, on the other hand, forging and forgiving a career. We compose. We practice. We share. We present. We perform. We sell. We work and we tire. And when we have exerted our effort completely, we concede to fate. We finish; we put our things in order; we quit. Initials B.R. is my attempt to come to terms with being impelled to make art, with selling my work on stage and in stores, with lying to listeners, with self-delusion and make believe. It is as inspired by Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus and Common’s Resurrection as it is Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne” and Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It is an homage to con films and musicals. It is my own silly Makaveli legend.

But most of all, it is done. I hope you enjoy.

The first record I was ever given—or ever really owned for that matter—was LL Cool J’s Bigger And Deffer. When I received the present for my eighth birthday from my father’s coworker, I had no idea what was in store for me. It wasn’t Elvis (my first musical infatuation). It wasn’t David Bowie (my perennial musical hero). But it was utterly new. And it was mine. It clearly left an impression…

I don’t claim any kind of authority in the realm of rap knowledge. But like anyone concerned with some subject over a long period of time, you discover at some point that the individual present moments that seemed so dire at the time have congealed into a historical perspective that’s far more meaningful. Everything lines up in rows and columns and reads like a story. With regard to my rap romance, I can evaluate the world I lived in at any given time in conjunction with the music to which I listened.

For the most part, through my listening childhood, I was still just a kid. I chose Public Enemy and Ice Cube alongside Moni Love and Father MC. It was a strange, enchanting world that I was young enough to ingest, but fresh enough not to process. I noticed things change in my relationship with rap in the early and mid-nineties, as grunge and alternative began to hack at the music industry and the subversive urban genre grew into its hand-me-downs. Wu-Tang Clan, The Notorious B.I.G., Nas, A Tribe Called Quest: these figures heralded a new age for a new musical landscape. I went through puberty with this music, growing with it as it too began to demand the respect of adults. And by the time I finished growing twelve inches in eighteen months, I felt so intimately involved with rap music that it was more familiar to me than my awkward body. I had arrived and so had rap. I drove my car around Denver consumed, blasting the opposing epiphanies of Common’s Resurrection and Company Flow’s Funcrusher Plus, marinating in the defining spectrum of my musical understanding, thinking without worry, “It will never get better than this.” In some ways, for me at least, it didn’t.

In 1996, when Busta Rhymes rapped “There’s only five years left” in the introductory track of The Coming, he wasn’t far off. As the nineties elapsed, the schism between commercial and underground rap became the defining characteristic of the genre itself. Entrenched against Puff Daddy’s & Hype Williams’s decadent and blinding vision of the promised land, the indie renaissance made Rawkus Records the Mecca of underground hip-hop culture. Yet just as soon as it had risen to prominence, it pulled its best Sugarhill Records impression, short-sightedly letting their greed get the better of the music they built. Soundbombing II was the zenith pronouncing the denoument of golden era rap, bearing “1-9-9-9” as its poster-child and Mos Def & Talib Kweli as its prophets, bragging that they knew the real Eminem as he shrewdly slipped away towards unbelievable fame and fortune. The abysmal self-destruction of the Rawkus enterprise was the Y2K of rap. By 2001, the upstarts were doomed. It took just five years.

In the post-apocalyptic rap world, New York crumbled at the hands of the marauding South, the West built their Alamo around the great white hope and gangster nostalgia, and avant-gardists such as Def Jux and Anticon scurried through the rubble surprising the establishment with firefights like erratic survivalist militias and pesky terrorists. Meanwhile, against all odds, the music managed to conquer the world. But we all know how that went: Jay-Z the emperor, Kanye the crowned prince, 50 Cent the enforcer, Lil’ Wayne the court jester, Drake the savior, and more nobodies than ever fighting for the crumbs. Here we are.

But really, where are we?

To be continued…

Matt is right: I give Pitchfork too much credit. Joey is right: it’s to their credit that they’ve been bold enough to give a perfect score to an album that isn’t a reissue. Joey is also right: there is no album more appropriate to justify Pitchfork’s independent pop/rock/electronic + mainstream rap editorial agenda. Justin is right: five stars > 10.0.

All criticism withstanding, here’s a toast to the assholes: this album is 9.5 great. I get the moment.

How do you moralize about rap music without sounding white? How do you ask more of it without being an asshole too?

What?! After a five-second warning/threat/promise that “The future holds nothing else but confrontation”, Public Enemy are going to ease you into this album with a band roll-call set to the sounds of demolished relics and renegade emergency vehicles. It’s diabolically ill and there’s no way I could have understood it.

What brought me to the album was this video for the single “Can’t Truss It”, which I must have seen on The Box at some point because I keep picturing it obscured by scrolling jukebox numbers…

By then, I had seen videos for “Fight the Power” and “9-1-1 Is a Joke”, but this was different. I wanted more. Once I had it, I remember obsessing over “Can’t Truss It” and pouring over the lyrics in the liner notes. I remember wishing they had made a real song out of that first track, “Lost at Birth”. I remember wondering what Arizona had to do with anything. At some point, I moved on. I think my Dad borrowed/stole the tape from me. I didn’t revisit it again until college, when I worked for Buildings & Grounds, for whom I would rake leaves and remove trash among milling peers, seething in a righteous headphone bubble, clearing the way “for the S, the S1Ws”.

A couple of years ago, I happened upon the eBay auctions for the leftover Sandbox Automatic vinyl stock and picked up the “Nighttrain” single, not even remembering that it came from Apocalypse ’91. It didn’t matter–the album track isn’t even on the single. Instead, we get the “Get Up Get Involved Throwdown Mixx”…

Now that is a disgusting track. Though the album version has its virtues and sits naturally in the sequence, this one slays the album version and is just about one of the gnarliest, hardest, most hectic rap hits ever. It makes me want to wild out every time I hear it. I melt for that “oohwaayoooh” cut with the pitch slider in the chorus. I assume it’s Terminator X but it may well be the man talking all over the track’s background, unmistakably responsible for the alchemy: the one and only Pete Rock, who injects the harsh PE aesthetic with some nasty funk flavor that inspires a bit more dancing than the usual headbanging. As well as it works, CL Smooth guesting on a PE track doesn’t make a whole lot of sense beyond the obvious affiliation, so I find it distracting (same thing on Run-DMC’s take on this formula, “Down with the King”). Though I prefer the “Throwdown Mixx”, the “Pete Rock Strong Island Mt. Vernon Meltdown” on the B-side is pretty hot as well and apparently was the version used in the video…

Pete Rock also provided the remix for another Apocalypse ’91 single, “Shut Em Down”…

The beat is ridiculously hot. But it sounds far more distinctly PR than PE; it works very well but not seamlessly. Fortunately, when Pete Rock decides to drop his typically lackluster verse, Chuck’s superiority is abundantly clear and the quality of Chuck’s voice and delivery ultimately sell the product as a whole. But the style is more music than movement, which isn’t the Public Enemy aesthetic.

All Pete Rock contributions aside, Apocalypse ’91 is an amazing album. Public Enemy has to be the craziest pop group ever assembled. A vitriolic leader, an oddball jester, a silent giant on the decks, a dancing security corps, a Department of Information, an elusive but ubiquitous production squad. It’s elaborate theater and dead serious. And then you have the music. They put “Lost at Birth”, “Nighttrain”, and “Can’t Truss It” as three of the first four tracks on the album. It’s ruthless and relentless. The PE militia might as well be punching you in the face with the speakers. You can’t remove their politics here, but I mean to celebrate statement and grandeur. How can you not miss that kind of conviction in modern rap?

It reminds me of that song by The Field, “Over the Ice”. Guess I’m a sucker for that repetitive vocal sample technique. The Gold Panda full-length is the best dance music I’ve heard this year.

I understand the claim that it’s some kind of representative of a modern zeitgeist. I acknowledge the honoring of its boldness and musical adventurousness. I will credit the formidable creature it is and the remarkable ability of Kanye to allow his most personal work to be the most shared stage of his career. Indeed, there are virtues to be celebrated in this album. But saying it is perfect is not a reading of the album as a work in its own right–it is an appropriation of the work for an unclear cause in a way that ultimately invalidates the real value of the work by not really hearing it.

The aggressive review further discredits the album by setting the stage for a visceral reaction to its pronounced judgment that should be reserved for the experience of the music. Instead of approaching the album generously, I for one felt impelled to quickly compose a list of several reasons the album is not perfect and had to fight for even ground to come to some more objective decision on its worth. I continue to listen to the album; I find it to be more enjoyable with every listen. But I continue this list in my mind, spending every moment looking for things to dislike about it. I shake my head at dozens of clumsy production moments. I cringe at the continuation of his revolting string of blow-job raps. I raise my eyebrows at the way his guests out-perform him over and over. I marvel at the claim that Kanye is a better rapper than he ever has been, on an album full of awkward phrasings and generally lacking in the clever, disciplined constructions of songs like “Jesus Walks” or “Gold Digger.”

Aside from all these reasons of imperfection, the most celebrated and characteristic theme is the most vulnerable: honesty. Riding the success of his 808s and Heartbreak across the wake of the incredible Taylor Swift incident, Kanye is sharing more with his listeners than ever about his mistakes and missteps and misfortunes. But this sharing isn’t the kind of shockingly transformative cathartic experience that a band like Xiu Xiu provokes. It’s exotic, masturbatory self-indulgence, the likes of which could only exist in the bizarre microcosm of a superstar’s life of luxury and excess. It often feels like listening to an indulged child growing into adult desires.

Kanye raps like Caligula might. In “Monster”, he brags that “She said I bruised her esophagus.” In “Runaway”, Kanye says “I sent a bitch a picture of my dick.” In “Blame Game” he talks about fucking and strangling his lover in a bathroom. But details like these don’t surface in a 10.0. For critical cheerleaders, all of it is assembled into an ambiguous psychology and framed with a sense of Kanye’s humanity, thin veils that purport to forgive his transgressions by fabricating remorse. “Runaway” is not regretful; it is a parry to shame and embarrassment. It’s an anthem for kids in high school who tried to play it off like fucking up was cool when they really just couldn’t help it. The pretense of remorse is a disguise for a cowardly self-pity that cannot pledge to take a complaint seriously.

An unqualified celebration of this moment pays into a dangerous enabling cycle. Kanye errs; Kanye feels guilty; Kanye shares error and guilt in turn. Meanwhile, the public criticizes Kanye; the public forgives Kanye; and then the public admonishes Kanye for the transparency of his errors. The more transparent he is, the more people love him. But the more aggressively Kanye shares his faults, the more his fans respond to the content of his art, validating and encouraging it more and more.

Pitchfork is complicit in this, verifying the appropriateness of this kind of art for not only Kanye and his fans, but for other artists. Which is not to say that music critics have any responsibility to some kind of moral rehabilitation of artists. Artists are fucked up and a lot of the time that makes for great music. But it’s dangerous to herald honesty in art without certain essential conditions, foremost among them being the evidence of a transcendent, historical, timeless accomplishment; the “art for art’s sake” argument is bogus here because as good as this album might be, there’s no way it is perfect.

In fact, the only moment resembling such transcendence comes in the last track, whose finally calmed beat, disciplined and compelling at last, platforms a snippet of a beautifully lacerating Gil Scott-Heron poem, the one extended meditation on something larger than being a judged celebrity. Here now we are free from the Kanyesque quagmire of license and paparazzi, as Scott-Heron muses on grave concerns of freedom and politics, of race and revolution, of human needs and global tyranny. As I sober from reveling in the powerful moment, I react ambivalently to Kanye’s use of the claim that “All I want is a good home and a wife and children and some food to feed them every night.” On the one hand, I feel compassion and pity for a man who I can easily imagine knowing such a simple and universal desire; on the other hand, I reel in bewilderment at the appropriation of such a phrase in the seriousness of its context with no regard for the incredible excess of his glamour life. In a reading of the poem’s original lyrics, I cannot help but find in the edited content a call to Kanye for greater action and a condemnation of Pitchfork for the levity of its piggy-backing pom-poms.

Boo Radley / Radiohead – Nude (Rap Remix)

“An escalating romance falls disastrously to the wayside when, a year shy of graduation, Luke Kirkland moves across the country with his band, Night Rally to give a music career the old college try instead.”

Unfortunately, brevity has never been my strong point. Instead, I find it’s taken almost three years to sort through what happened that year and 70-something minutes to narrate it. Boo Radley Bruises Badly is a twelve song sculpture of those twelve months, a four course conclusion to a four season psychologue, an album of opposites and obstacles, of assimilation and isolation, and a mess of confusion becoming perfectly certain of what it’s doing.

Perhaps too certain…

I’ve always feared becoming an apologist for Boo Radley Bruises Badly. Perhaps I’m too quick to assume the listener’s surprise upon hearing split personalities duel for the spotlight. “I’m listening to a love song. Now I’m listening to a rap song. Again, love. Rap. Hmmm. I’m confused.” How are we to justify the juxtaposition of such musical styles? It was never my intention to become a musical Dr. Moreau, piecing and pasting spasmodically at whim. On the contrary, Boo Radley was a rap alias confined to a world that had transformed suddenly and dramatically and whose narrative had been and was being sussed out into rock songs. Boo Radley Bruises Badly became a coping mechanism, a project without conditions beyond the consideration of the events of 2003, and ultimately a collection of songs that could only stand apart from one another at the risk of sacrificing the gestalt and misunderstanding the narrative.

But this conflagration is a convenient opportunity for a larger musical discussion. On the one hand, escaping the love song in rock music is impossible. Songwriters incessantly delving into their personal love lives comprises the great majority of rock music’s subjects. The romance of the breakup song or of the unrequited love song remains so appealing to the musical audience largely because of the excitement not of meeting one’s match, but of pursuing one’s match. On the other hand, rap music and the “hip-hop” culture in many ways approaches a celebration of pure escapism. While the content of many songs attempts to elevate or address problems of great import affecting the artists, there is nevertheless a violent opposition to the conditions of earthly life. In fact, the urgency of the sentiment is nearly apocalyptic and/or suicidal in nature and expresses itself as a desperate lashing out at all who might represent and/or fulfill the weaknesses of earthly life. In the end, both are concerned about encountering something else that can be both one’s glory and one’s downfall. For rock, the love song is the yearning for the other. For rap, the battle is the yearning for the other.

Despite the success of artists like DJ Shadow and the “Get Paid” rap industry machinery still supporting producers such as Kanye West, I find it hard to imagine that Boo Radley Bruises Badly could ever be released legitimately. The number of samples I’ve co-opted for my own psychiatric ends could never be fully given their due. Ever since the crime spree that was P. Diddy’s career, the successes of the rap world have relied increasingly on original beats. The sampling hey-day is long gone. No one can afford it anymore. But while I would never insist that a musician be denied his monetary compensation for the use of his recorded material, it is unfortunate that artists can’t be honest about their inspiration. A million hacks with guitars have ripped off other artists’ songs without batting an eyelash and without the Puritanical slap on the wrist of a “Cease And Desist”. Doubtlessly, there is something innately shameful about the sample. The feeling of dependence upon others for inspiration or of incompetence in comparison to those who have influenced will always soil the creative achievement in some manner. But as if this weren’t enough, many go so far as to label those who sample as thieves and condemn the practice as destructive to the spirit of artistry or to the gasping illusion of a rock and roll ethos. Musicians are thieves first and foremost. It just so happens some build beautiful artifices out of the many things that fit into pockets. We should be so lucky as to profess our debt openly without being assaulted by the weapons of those who falsely claim license to cast the first stones, be they rolling or otherwise.

Ironically, the recording’s fate is potentially the same as that of Harper Lee’s hero: its public life will remain a relatively private one. As is the case in To Kill A Mockingbird, I don’t guess that’s such a bad thing. Nevertheless, Boo Radley will push on in his guise, though this guise will, from here on out, enjoy rap’s respite exclusively. Love songs will perhaps find their moments or even their proverbial R&B hooks within the bounds of their rap counterparts. But they will be few and slight impressions on a dreaming recluse whose monogrammed chest will be henceforth embroidered Initials B.R.

1. Overtour In Media Res / Tin Piece
2. Milton Bradley (Alexander The Great Gatsby)
3. Transmissing (Crimebridge Mix)
4. Little Caesar
5. Challenger
6. Man Down (Pigs)
7. Presto Change-O
8. Breathing Room (East Egg)
9. Boots Of Spanish Leather
10. Give Up The Ghost (Hawaii Calls)
11. What If By Land? (Model T)
12. It Ends In The Street