100 Songs: "No Hook/Tangerine" (Mash up of Jay-Z and Led Zeppelin by DJ Doc Rok)

One of the most interesting contrasts between Jay-Z and Dr. Dre (arguably the most important figures in hip-hop of the 1990s and 2000s, respectively) is that Dre releases instrumental versions of his albums while Jay-Z releases a cappella versions of his albums.  This has helped make Jay-Z one of the most sampled rappers in the mash up community.  On my iPod, I have Danger Mouse's mash up of The Beatles with Jay-Z's Black Album, (the resulting Gray Album might be the most famous mash up so far) Cookin' Soul's mash up of J-Hova with Oasis, and DJ Doc Rok's mash-up of Jay's American Gangster album with Led Zeppelin, and when faced with space limitations, I've chosen the mash ups over the original Jay-Z albums.  Jay-Z has even released an official mash up album (unfortunately, he chose Linkin Park to mix his songs with, and after having to listen to the mash up of "Encore" with "Numb" before every NCSU basketball game a few seasons ago, I have no interest in ever hearing that particular blend again.  

Another Jigga dialectic- during the prominent Jay-Z/Nas beef, I generally broke the rivalry down like this: Jay-Z had the charisma and Nas had the better flow and lyrics (even if, as rumor sometimes has it, MF Grimm actually ghostwrote parts of Illmatic).  But just as Nas' blistering set at this year's Rock The Bells forced me to re-evaluate his charisma, one track on last year's American Gangster led me to hold Jay-Z's writing and performing in a higher light (this is not to say that I ever thought Jay-Z wasn't talented.  I just always felt that his best rhymes couldn't compare to the best efforts of a number of other MCs).  The song was "No Hook" and hearing Jay-Z break out a more complicated rhyming scheme (look! internal rhyme) with a more measured cadence left me more impressed by a Jay-Z track than anything this side of Eminem's verses on "Renegade".  

While the official version is the clear stand-out on an otherwise pretty good album, it's the mash up of the song with Led Zeppelin's "Tangerine", from the Zeppelin III album that I've been listening to at least weekly since I got the American Zeppelin album.  It's not the first time that Led Zeppelin has been sampled- John Bonham's drums on IV's "When The Levee Breaks" is an old favorite for samplers, perhaps most notably by Rick Rubin on the Beastie Boys track "Rhymin' and Stealin'".  But here the only sample is a Jimmy Page riff- no other beat at all, and the result is captivating.  While the original version features subtle background music and a relatively sparse beat, stripping the song down even more forces even more attention onto Jay-Z's lyrics and flow.

I find it interesting, given the breadth of famous producers that Jay-Z has worked with (9th Wonder, Kanye West, Rick Rubi, The Neptunes, Timabaland, Eminem and Diddy, who produced "No Hook", just to name a few) that I keep turning away from the album versions and to the mash up versions, in a way that I don't with other rappers I have mash ups of (for example, as good as 9th Wonder's remix of Nas' God's Son album is, I still listen to the originals).  I don't know exactly what it is about Jay's voice or flow, but it always seems to sound better over, say, a lick from "Glass Onion" or "Wonderwall".  It might be the little spaces that Jay-Z often leaves between words (I refer you back to "Renegade", Jay-Z's duet with Eminem on the Blueprint album, and the difference between Jay-Z's more paced flow with Eminem's more rapid fire delivery).

Of course, the whole song could rearouse the whole debate about the artistic and legal merits of sampling itself.  In general, I don't have a philisophical problem with sampling.  I don't see it as fundamentally different from the way that Woody Guthrie borrowed melodies (for example, the melody of "This Land is Your Land" is based on an old gospel song called "Oh My Loving Brother".  I agree that sampling can be an easy crutch for a lazy artist to simply graft an already beloved hook onto their own song (I'm looking at you Puffy), but it would be silly to argue that just because sampling can be abused by the uninspired it shouldn't be accepted.  The legal argument is more complex, and I'm sympathetic to the notion that if one's actual recording is used in another song, one deserves compensation of some sort, but beyond that the whole argument wanders into a series of sticky debates that I'm not particularly interested in.  I will point out that, for all the people who see this as one of hip hop's cardinal sins, the practice goes back at least a decade before Kool Herc.  The first sample I can think of is actually on a Beatles song (I wouldn't be surprised if the practice predates the Beatles, but I find the notion that this is just another item on the long list of Fab Four innovations especially satisfying- call me a romantic of some sort).  Remember the bit in "Yellow Submarine" after Ringo sings "andthe band begins to play"?  That's a sample.  It's not certain what engineer Geoff Emerick put there, but it's thought to be a distorted version of a song called "Le Reve Passe".  (At least, that's what wikipedia thinks.  I know a lot of Beatles lore, but my grasp of early 20th century marching band composition lore is a touch shakier.)  Throw in John Lennon's other experiments with what might be called "found music" ("Revolution 9" and "Radio Play" from the Life With the Lions experimental album come to mind immediately), and the notion that sampling was just another form of hustling that hip hop unleashed upon an unsuspecting world of pop music seems ridiculous.  That doesn't prove anything, of course, but it remains interesting.  My friend Keith once observed that if Lennon hadn't been killed when he was, he would almost certainly have released a rap album.  I immediately agreed, as potentially horrifying as that notion is.  Now that I think about it in this light, I'm more certain than ever.

Talking Ticketmaster and Commerce Digression Rant Blues

Over at the Consumerist blog, there's a story about Ticketmaster, and how they're evil.  This is not news, but it did get me thinking, in particular about Pearl Jam's Quixotian attempt to destroy ticketmaster back in the mid-1990s.  It's hard to imagine Pearl Jam succeeding in that attempt, even if other acts that would have been imaginably sympathetic had joined them (say, Springsteen, R.E.M., Neil Young, U2 and Green Day, let alone other acts like Metallica or The Stones or the Eagles, who have generally been more shameless in their interest in filthy lucre).  Ticketmaster was, and is, simply too big to be brought down by anything less than the government.  But that, along with my continued frustration with the entire concept of the third disc of the new Dylan Bootleg Series entry essentially costing an extra hundred bucks, led me to ruminate on music and money and a bunch of other things.  

Let's start with the new Dylan album.  I've long since given up trying to make sense of the things that Bob Dylan decides to do.   Trying to understand the mind of a man who chooses to put "Joey" on an album while leaving "Abandoned Love on the cutting room floor is a mug's game.  But still, one does wonder exactly why he would only include the third disc of outtakes with the 150 dollar "deluxe" set that also includes a book of his artwork, instead of just putting out a three disc version for forty bucks, which would have been a no-brainer purchase for lots of us who try and think up new ways to give this man our money (I bought Live at Budokan for god's sake.  I'm not choosy when it comes to the recorded output of Mr. Zimmerman).  In the Entertainment Weekly review, the critic suggested, perhaps half-jokingly, that this was Dylan's sly way of encouraging fans to bootleg the Bootleg Series.  I don't really think this is true (although, that does involve me trying to decipher Bob's thought process, which I have sworn to myself that I won't do), but it's probably as good of an answer as "Bob just wanted more money" which also seems wrong to me.  (This is not to say that I don't believe that Dylan's in it for the money.  Of course he is.  He just is usually in it for the money in weird ways.  Dylan generally does nothing in the way that anyone else would, and this goes for selling out too- that Victoria's Secret ad for example.  It's almost too weird to be offended by, if you're like me and still get a little offended by hearing a favorite song used to hawk a product.  My point is, the easy way would be to sell "Like A Rolling Stone" to Rolling Rock beer, "Lay Lady Lay" to Viagra and "Mr. Tambourine Man" to Pepsi.)  This isn't the first time that I've been frustrated by the way that Dylan releases his outtakes and rarities- the Dylan collection that sells on iTunes, where for two hundred bucks or so you can download his entire catalog and about forty rare cuts, still drives me mad, mainly for the sheer inanity of it- there is no person alive who wants to hear both versions of the "George Jackson" single who doesn't already own the entire Dylan catalog.  That's just common sense.   (As opposed to how Neil Young maddeningly refuses to release most of his rarities and outtakes at all, but in a lot of ways Neil Young can make Bob Dylan's thought processes look normal). There really isn't a moral to this story.  In the end, I broke my own rule about illegally downloading commercially available music for the third disc.  Every Dylan bootlegger will, at some point, quote "Absolutely Sweet Marie" when defending their actions- "To live outside the law, you must be honest", so I'll just use that too as my defense, to the extent that I feel the need to defend this action, given how much of my money Dylan already has.  (For the record, anyone who takes a stance against Dylan here is morally obliged to also criticize Radiohead.  When they did their "pay what you want" deal with In Rainbows, they also sold a second disc of the album as part of a package that cost quite a bit more than I was prepared to pay for it.  Just saying.)

But I digress.  I was talking about Pearl Jam.  Everyone here read Sandman, right?  For the sake of spoilers and simplicity, I'm just going to assume the answer is yes.  Anyway, remember Lucien's theory about how Morpheus put all of the events of the series into motion deliberately, because he wanted to quit being the anthropomorphic embodiment of the concept of "dream"?  I sometimes feel that Pearl Jam did the same thing.  I mean, when you consider some of the decisions that the band made- fighting Ticketmaster and essentially not touring at the height of their popularity, refusing to make videos, their gradual shifts from grunge into a territory more closely resembling a jam band, initially releasing what would become their biggest single as a fan-club only issue and then, when radio stations began playing it anyway, releasing it as a charitable single giving all of the proceeds to Kosovo refugees- these are not the kinds of decisions that, say, Brian Epstein or Albert Grossman would have made.  It's almost as if they saw how Kurt Cobain got out of being the biggest act in the rock world, and thought "he has the right idea, but let's be a little more subtle".  

In this post, I pick on the blind!

Okay, there's a new movie coming out called Blindness.  It's based on a novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago.  I haven't read it, although I've meant to.  Basically, it's a Magical Realism novel about a sudden epidemic of blindness, and the immediate effects of this.  The film adaptation is coming out today, and it looks pretty shitty (38% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes), and according to the newspaper, a group will be outside of theaters tonight protesting it.  But they won't be protesting it for looking to be mediocre at best.  No, it's an activist group for the blind who are worried that people will believe that the movie's premise is plausible.  In other words, they have managed to completely miss the fucking point.  And this is what irritates me about special interest groups- they are usually so myopic (yeah, I used the word myopic to pick on a group of blind people.  I never claimed to be a good person) that they do stupid shit like this.  The story isn't about what's plausible, it's a fantasy- a sort of parable.  But because these groups will do anything to push their agendas, they will try and exploit anything that look like it falls into their narrow little world.  And this helps no one.

Quick Notes Towards A Greater Understanding of the Underlying Philosophy of "Greatest Movie Character Lists"

On a message board, I saw a post mentioning that "Empire Magazine" had put together a list of the hundred greatest movie characters of all time.  I scanned the list, and it was as laughable as one might expect- Indiana Jones at number one, Heath Ledger's Joker at two, Forrest Gump in the top ten while Travis Bickle languished at 27.  Obviously, this is one of those deals that is too ridiculous to take seriously.  But it got me to thinking about the metaphysics of such a list- how if you get to really thinking seriously about this inane endeavour, it might drive you crazy.  

First of all, we have to throw out the central question- what does "greatest" even mean?- it's way too objective to approach here.  It's some kind of a combination of most complex, most memorable, best written and best performed, but we'll leave it at that.  No, instead we have to begin with the question of what is a film character.  Sure, it seems self-evident.  It's a character in a film.  But what about characters who did not originate on the screen?

If you had a poll on the greatest fictional character of all time, from any medium, you'd likely find a consensus pointing to Hamlet.  In fact, if you made a top ten list, it's likely that Shakespeare would take up a lot of that real estate.  Sure, Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, Don Quixote and Captain Ahab all might sneak in, but you'd expect to see Lear and Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and Rosalind and Falstaff and Iago monopolizing the list.  So, wouldn't it follow that since all of these characters have been portrayed in films (although off the top of my head, I can't remember an As You Like It movie), that these same characters should dominate a similar list of film characters?  I'd be surprised if they did, because no one thinks of them as film characters.  So, does that mean that these lists have an unwritten rule about characters from plays and novels?  No, because I'd be surprised if any list was missing James Bond or Don Corleone or Hannibal Lecter, all of whom were in novels before movies.  So how does this bit of cognitive dissonance work?   I suppose it comes down to how memorable the character was in the book versus the film- when you bring up James Bond, everyone thinks of Sean Connery, but if you mention Jay Gatsby, who thinks of Robert Redford?  This is an imperfect answer, but it seems like the best that thirty minutes of distracted meditation can produce.

There's also the question of "real people".  Nixon, for example, is an incredibly interesting person, and the Stone picture about him was pretty good.  But I'd be surprised if he made such a list.  But if, say, T.E. Lawrence or Jake LaMotta made the list, I wouldn't be surprised, and not just because those two examples I chose are among the most memorable performances in the history of the cinema.  Again, I think it comes down to how people think about these people.  If you mentiond Lawrence, I can imagine what Peter O'Toole looked like in the movie, but I probably couldn't pick the real Lawrence out of a lineup.  So even though Muhammad  Ali is arguably a greater "real" "character" than LaMotta, and Will Smith was pretty good in the movie, I believe people consider LaMotta to be a film character in a way that they can't with Ali, even if this is a slightly bullshit comparison because of just how goddamned great DeNiro is in Raging Bull.  But I think you might see my point.

For the record, my top five list would probably include some combination of:

Charles Foster Kane (Citizen Kane)

Rick Blaine (Casablanca)

Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)

Ethan Edwards (The Searchers)

and, I don't know, John Huston in Chinatown.  I can't remember the name of his character.

This Month's eMusic Downloads (September)

The Beach Boys- Good Timin'.  Live in England in 1980 with the real line-up for one of the last times.  

The Hold Steady- Boys and Girls in America.  I realize that everyone is in love with the band at the moment, but goddamn are they great.  Now if they could only manage to not schedule their shows opposite Murs.  

The Hold Steady- "Teenage Liberation"

P.O.S.- "All Along The Watchtower".  Kind of a hip-hop Dylan cover, but the Rhymesayers MC wrote new lyrics for his version of the Dylan standard.

The Kinks- Muswell Hillbillies.  Wikipedia describes this 1971 album as being about "the frustrations and stress of modern life".  This makes it stand out among the Kinks catalogue how?

Rick Danko- "Blind Willie McTell".  One of the Band's lead singers covering one of Dylan's absolute greatest songs live.

Murs- Varsity Blues

The 3MG's- Gypsy's Luck.  More Murs, in preparation for his show at the Cradle in November

Ian Dury- New Boots and Panties!- We need more rock stars with Polio.  Who are also awesome. And how great was the Stiff label?  Besides Ian, you have Elvis Costello, The Damned, Nick Lowe, Madness, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Wreckless Eric and the Pogues.  

The High Llamas- Gideon Gaye.  If I wind up disliking one album from this set, I'm guessing this will be it.  I was reading about them in a book I picked up called The Rock Snob's Dictionary, and thought I'd give it a chance.

On September 10, 2001, I had two things to do the next day.  I failed on both counts.  The first thing I was supposed to do was turn in a paper about a Hawthorne short story ("My Kinsman Major Molineux", for those keeping score at home), and my failure to go to class and hand in the paper had everything to do with procrastination and oversleeping.  My other task that day was to hit Schoolkids Records and buy the new Bob Dylan album, "Love and Theft".  I didn't accomplish this because after my roommate woke me up that afternoon I wound up watching CNN for the rest of the day.  

I actually don't remember when I wound up finally buying the Dylan album.  I think it was that same week, because I remember agreeing with David Menconi's piece about the album from the Sunday News & Observer. 

But that's not what I've been thinking about over the last day or so, even when I think about music and 9/11.  What I've been fascinated with is that Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's original release date was also September 11th, 2001, but the Reprise label's refusal to release the album (this is a whole other story) wound up pushing it's official release back to 2002, although the band, in an effort to stop piracy of the MP3s, began streaming the album online on 9/18/2001.  

If Reprise hadn't been such dicks about an "unreleasable album" (that went on to sell about half a million copies, despite Wilco generally being absent from radio that isn't prefixed by the word "college"), and the album had come out on 9/11, I can't help but wonder if Menconi's piece from that first Sunday paper after the attacks wouldn't have been about this album.  Despite being finished before the attacks, the album seems to have echoes of 9/11 throughout- from the cover picture of two towers in Marina City, Chicago, which bear a passing resemblance to the Trade Centers, to songs with titles like "War on War" and "Ashes of American Flags", to the lines in "Jesus Etc" about "Tall buildings shake/voices escape singing sad sad songs" and "Voices whine/Skyscrapers are scraping together/Your voice is smoking/Last cigarettes are all you can get/Turning your orbit around".

Fun With the New iTunes

So, at the moment I have a very favorable view of Apple, since my computer turned out to still be under warranty and I got a new wireless card for free.  Full of good cheer and in possession of my computer, I thought I'd try out the new version of iTunes, which added a potentially interesting new feature called "Genius".  "Genius" sends Apple an anonymous list of all of your songs and playlists, and then, when you click on an individual song, it creates a new playlist for you based on that song.  I've been playing with it, and the results seem to be pretty decent, albeit predictable and somewhat repetitive (although hopefully that will change when more playlists are added to the Big Brother database).  So, in the spirit of fucking around before I go to sleep, I thought I'd try out five of my favorite songs and see what songs Steve Jobs thinks will complement them.  Even though I've put up unfortunately long lists of songs here before, I'll limit my results to the first five suggestions, as then someone might actually get to the labels at the end of the post.

The Coup- "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night"

1. Living Legends- "After Hours (Extended Euro Mix)"

2. Brother Ali- "Self Taught" (Great call, but that might be from one of my playlists)

3. The Roots- "Criminal"

4. Little Brother- "Good Clothes"

5. Black Star- "Astronomy (8th Light)

The Hold Steady- "Constructive Summer" (I can't stop listening to this fucking song.  It's awesome and the Hold Steady are becoming one of my favorites.  They're playing in Raleigh in November, on the same day that Murs is playing the Cradle, which is creating an agonizing dilemma for me.)

1. Beck- "Orphans"

2. Wilco- "Impossible Germany"

3. Spoon- "Finer Feelings"

4. Nick Lowe- "I Trained Her To Love Me"

5. Guided By Voices- "I Am A Scientist"

I'm not too impressed by these.  I have plenty of songs by acts like Springsteen and the Clash who have much more in common with The Hold Steady than Wilco or Beck or recent Nick Lowe.  

Bob Dylan- "Shelter From The Storm" (Live version from Hard Rain)

1. The Band- The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"

2. Bruce Springsteen- "Thunder Road"

3. The Rolling Stones- "Midnight Rambler"

4. Warren Zevon- "Lawyers, Guns and Money"

5. David Bowie- "Rebel Rebel"

Again, I'm not blown away here.  It almost seems like they chose five songs upstanding classic rock songs at random to go with Dylan, particularly the final three.  

Otis Redding- "Cigarettes and Coffee"

1. The Marvelettes- "Please Mr. Postman"

2. Aretha Franklin- "Soul Serenade"

3. Sam and Dave- "Hold On! I'm Comin'"

4. The Supremes- "Come See About Me"

5. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes- "If You Don't Know Me By Now"

Oh come on, "Please Mr. Postman"?  You're just choosing R&B and Soul songs at random, aren't you?

Tom Waits- "Clap Hands"

1. The Velvet Underground- "Beginning To See The Light"

2. Neil Young- "Mr. Soul" (Unplugged)

3. Wilco- "Hotel Arizona"

4. Pavement- "Summer Babe [Winter Version]"

5. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds- "Red Right Hand"

A little better.  Not sure about the Wilco song here, and I'd have chosen a different Neil song, but we're showing a little bit of improvement.

The most obvious issue for the "Genius" gadget is daring to make the leap from one genre to another within one playlist.  The problem is so ridiculous that when I tried a Howlin' Wolf song, I got a playlist of 25 songs, all of them either Robert Johnson or Howlin' Wolf (which reminds me that I really need to load my other Blues cds onto the computer).  If the music supercomputer can learn how to do that, then this might actually be pretty cool.  

Let the Mediocrity Resume

I got my laptop back from the Apple store today, and it seems like my internet problem has been fixed, and I can return to failing to do as much as I'd like with this blog.  

That is all.