If you have to ask whether or not hip-hop merits the curatorial attentions of a major metropolitan museum, you’re obviously not attuned to the truly significant forces that shape American culture.
Y’know, like “Nightline.” In September, with correspondent Robert Krulwich mustering an air of only slightly feigned guilelessness on the mic, MC Ted Koppel’s show conducted a painstaking three-night investigation of hip-hop culture, eventually concluding that it makes some very nice bank for a great many people, and (thus) is definitely important, if a little scary and irresponsible.
Then there’s Newsweek, which got out the extra-extra-broad brush for the recent cover package, “Battle for the Soul of Hip-Hop,” about how today’s rap is so violent, misogynistic and materialistic that even some rappers find it troubling. The “Battle” was a celebrity death match pitting Mos Def — fast becoming hip-hop’s most vocal neoconservative — against Eminem, enemy of all that is good, and Cash Money’s iced-down Millionaires. The subtext, roughly, was that because the music reaches a wide, eager and young audience that rock can only dream about, hip-hop’s problems are everybody’s problems. Also, “booty videos” are bad. Oh, so bad.
The Brooklyn Museum, which stared down both the Catholic archdiocese and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani last fall when both attacked its controversy-courting “Sensation” art show, probably doesn’t care what a few media naysayers have to say about hip-hop. Besides, the museum’s new hip-hop exhibit, “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage,” crams over 400 rap artifacts into four rather cramped ground-floor galleries, which leaves little room for dung paintings. A roughly chronological survey of rap’s journey from Bronx block parties to cold-lampin’-in-the-Hamptons, “Hip-Hop Nation” was originally staged in November 1999 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
For its Brooklyn debut, the museum’s Kevin Stayton and guest curator Kevin Powell (former Vibe scribe and “Real World” cast member, and card-carrying Gen Rap pundit) have beefed up the show with supplementary East Coast content. They’ve also solicited the input of a large and varied advisory committee, which includes both old-school faculty members (graffiti artist Lady Pink, early rap impresario Fab 5 Freddy) and industry machers (Russell Simmons, Jann Wenner.) All this effort puts the exhibit in sort of a weird position. It’s a frustrating failure, but it’s a painstakingly researched, authoritative failure. Ultimately, the worst thing about it is how close to good it comes.
Hip-hop’s prehistory offers a team of curators any number of potential entry points: African griots and other oral poetic traditions, the Beats, talking blues, Muhammad Ali trash-talk, C.W. McCall’s “Convoy.” But “Hip-Hop Nation” begins with the basics, and in the relatively recent past. A yellow Cab Calloway zoot suit is displayed front and center, signifying the visual pomp and verbal hi-de-ho hip-hop picked up from jazz. Vinyl LPs — Vicki Sue Robinson, Dizzy Gillespie, the Last Poets — highlight the genre’s debt to the soul and funk in Mom and Dad’s record collection, the main factor that kept rap from making generational division a priority to the extent that rock always did (at least until Bob Dylan’s kid started making Tom Petty records).
From there, it’s on to the break of hip-hop’s dawn: With its roots established, hip-hop bloomed across the poverty-scarred South Bronx in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The exhibit illustrates this phase, the music’s teen years, with a collection of vintage rap-show flyers that’s almost worth the suggested donation on its own. The T-Connection club’s groovy art-deco handbills (one Afrika Bambaataa/Jazzy Jay/Treacherous 3 triple bill is “dedicated to disillusioned folks”) share space with posters for community events that just happened to include hip-hop (the Cold Crush Brothers playing a graduation ball at Throgs Neck Community Center in the Bronx in 1982, and something called the “1979 Tennis & Terry Cloth Affair,” presented by the P.A.L. Teen Council) and party invites that approximate the design sensibility of garage-sale announcements. By pointing out hip-hop’s unassuming beginnings, this stuff testifies, succinctly, to the form’s extraordinary, who-woulda-thunk-it growth. Puffy sells out Madison Square Garden now, but there was a time when the phrase “hip-hop show” meant Kurtis Blow doing a playground-renovation benefit at the skating rink around the corner. (“Parents relax downstairs in lounge, while your child skates upstairs.”)
When it left the outer boroughs en route to the world stage, though, hip-hop got complicated real fast. In 1982, when Charlie Ahearn and Fab 5 Freddy shot the lo-fi quasi-documentary “Wild Style” on the streets of the Bronx, they assumed they were catching a fad on its way out; four years later, Rick Rubin-produced, Russell Simmons-masterminded juggernauts like Run-D.M.C.’s “Raising Hell” and (especially) the Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill” were sounding like rock and selling like pop. There’s a shift in tone here, and the museum kinda turns into the Hard Rap Cafe, as hip-hop stars — and their significant-by-association hip-hop stuff — take over the conversation. Which is, in its own way, perfectly fine — for any self-respecting rap geek, the chance to view Afrika Bambaataa’s space-shaman cloak and Boogaloo Shrimp’s dance pants, Slick Rick’s eye patch and Rakim’s Dapper Dan Gucci jacket (as seen on the cover of the Eric B and Rakim classic, “Follow the Leader”), Flavor Flav’s timepiece and (icon of icons) Run D.M.C.’s Adidas, is akin to gaining admission to the Batcave trophy room where Bruce Wayne kept the giant penny.
For an exhibit originated by the Clapton-is-god Rock Hall (and one that outsources most of its multimedia content to MTV), “Hip-Hop Nation” is extremely sensitive — hypersensitive, maybe — about the way white cultural gatekeepers have traditionally read and misread hip-hop. This makes for some of the show’s sharpest moments. Cringe at a 1984 cover story from Newsweek that chuckles about that nutty breakdancing fad. Cheer the December ’86 appearance of Run D.M.C. on the cover of Rolling Stone! Groan to TV Guide’s “‘def’ glossary” of hip-hop slang, pegged to the fall 1990 debuts of ambiguously rap-related programming like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and, uh, “Cop Rock”!
Inevitably, though, when you try to sum up this much history in a finite space, somebody’s going to get dissed. Seemingly vital stories — like hip-hop’s late-’80s “Afrocentric” phase and the influence of Islam on outfits like Brand Nubian and the Wu-Tang Clan — don’t get told at all, while other cultural mainstays, like female MCs and beat-digging DJs, get quick glosses. It’s also a painfully New York/Los Angeles-focused affair — the contributions of rappers from the flyover states are addressed on a single placard, under the heading “Regionalism in Hip-Hop,” positioned beneath a looming, billboard-size image of L.A.’s own Snoop Dogg. This might have been excusable a few years ago, when Southerners-without-portfolio like Master P, Mystikal and the Cash Money contingent were just beginning their chart assault. But these days, it seems like major myopia — rappers from Atlanta, Louisiana and the Midwest are only “regional” if you live at Kevin Powell’s house.
Really, though, the exhibit’s main problem is depth, not breadth. The Grammy award DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince won for “Parents Just Don’t Understand” is displayed, with a card identifying it as the first rap Grammy ever awarded by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. But there’s no mention of the fact that Jeff and the Prince boycotted the Grammies that year, along with most of the other nominees in the category, because NARAS wouldn’t include the presentation of the rap trophy in that year’s live telecast. And a letter Ice-T manager Jorge Hinojosa sent to Warner Music brass at the height of the flap over T’s song “Cop Killer” — asking Warner to either defend Ice’s work more vigorously or release him from his contract — makes for interesting reading. But it doesn’t begin to suggest the way “Cop Killer,” which Ice-T recorded with his speed-metal side project Body Count, raised the possibility of black rage walking into the suburbs through the front door, or the mix of hyperbole, hucksterism, irony and dead-seriousness that infuses Ice-T’s oeuvre even in its most ostensibly “confrontational” moments.
“Hip-Hop Nation” isn’t interested in that stuff, anyway, and the fact that even the supposedly morally-bankrupt gangsta era produced a lot of thrilling pop art doesn’t really matter here. Instead, we’re supposed to see the gangsta vogue of the late ’80s and early ’90s as a pivotal coming-of-age moment for hip-hop, the times that tried the genre’s soul. Powell’s favorite gangsta is the late Tupac Shakur — his image appears on the poster for “Hip-Hop Nation,” and a moody painting (by graffiti legend and “Wild Style” star Lee Quinones) that imagines “Pac” as James Dean on the boulevard of broken dreams establishes him as the show’s patron saint/martyr.
For writers looking to draw vast conclusions about black American life from gangsta rap, Shakur was too-too-perfect, from his archetypal, hellafied background as the son of a Black Panther-turned-crackhead, to the “Thug Life” tattoo across his abdomen. After Shakur was shot dead in a still-unsolved Las Vegas drive-by, when it seemed like every media outlet in the country was calling Powell up for some insight, he repeatedly called Shakur the black Kurt Cobain. The problem is, holding up Shakur — and all the “contradictions” he supposedly signified — as an exemplar of hip-hop is as dumb as letting Cobain represent all of rock. It seriously circumscribes what the show can say about the culture and about black life in general. Scores of hip-hop artists — from KRS-1 to Ice Cube to Outkast — have wrestled more intelligently and productively with the pressure and responsibilities of being a black artist and a black adult in an America that eats its young. Shakur, by comparison, was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and his absurd demise only reinforced everything hip-hop’s clueless detractors already believed about it anyway.
In the exhibit’s final act, subtitled “The Culture Goes Pop,” the curators advance their most specious thesis: Having lost two heroes (Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.) to gun culture, hip-hop kicked its addiction to gangsta shit and set about becoming a productive member of society. So the weird curios of hip-hop culture’s formative years are replaced by big-baller successories (Puff Daddy’s shiny silver suit, a talking Master P doll) and earlier emblems of the mainstream’s cash-in (Vanilla Ice’s sparkly stagewear, cels from the “Hammerman” Saturday-morning cartoon) are reclaimed as notable milestones on the road to popular acceptance. Any implied critique of the media’s slant on hip-hop goes out the window — Sean Combs flosses on the cover of Forbes with Jerry Seinfeld, Lauryn Hill fronts Harper’s Bazaar, Will Smith smiles for Rolling Stone, People and Vanity Fair, and the overall effect is like a blast of paparazzi flashbulbs, obliterating thought.
In a move that says a lot about their agenda, the museum (according to the Village Voice) rejected a multimedia installation about police brutality produced by the editors of Russell Simmons’ urban-culture Web portal 360hiphop.com — one of the exhibit’s sponsors — on the grounds that it wasn’t hip-hop enough. The countless rappers who’ve spoken out about the killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond by trigger-happy police would probably beg to differ. The police-brutality issue helped catalyze a major renaissance of activist rap this year, giving “conscious” rappers from Mos Def to Dead Prez something to be conscious about, but acknowledging that groundswell might have screwed up the show’s mo’-money/less-problems happy ending. As is, the exhibit retroactively rewrites hip-hop’s history as a “Jeffersons”-esque triumph of assimilation: The Fresh Prince can open a blockbuster, so send over another bottle of Cristal ’cause we’re a winner, yo!
Don’t get me wrong — the most interesting thing about art, and about music, and especially about hip-hop is the way it mutates when exposed to commerce, to the desires and agendas of the marketplace. Modern music would be incalculably poorer without pop-rap, deprived of Puff Daddy’s sacrilegious hot-wirings of the pop-music memory bank and Jay-Z masticating cadence and hard-nosing playa narrative like a black-mack Ed McBain. And any exhibit about popular culture that ignores the manifestations of that culture’s popularity risks denying the reasons for its own existence.
But there’s been a lot of compromisin’ on the road to this horizon, and presenting a Top 40 hegemony as an unqualified win for the entire culture is as wacky as holding up John Stamos’ Emmy nomination as proof of the significance of Elvis. Hip-hop arrived in the pop penthouse with a multitude of conflicting self-images and just as many ideological rifts. That’s a good thing; hip-hop’s plurality is what makes it a nation. But to hear this show tell it, democracy’s dead and we’re all getting jiggy in the sparkle and fade.
Jim Jarmusch’s
href="/ent/movies/review/2000/03/09/ghostdog/index.html">“Ghost Dog:
The Way of the Samurai” isn’t a gangster movie that happens to have a
hip-hop score (composed by RZA, major-domo of
href="/june97/sharps/sharps970617.html">the Wu-Tang Clan). It’s a
hip-hop movie that happens to star nonrappers, with a script that steals
back every genre convention rap stole from crime dramas in the first place. In
a Jersey City, N.J., so run-down it makes
href="/feb97/brasco970228.html">“Donnie Brasco” look like a Hype
Williams music video, a black contract killer wages a one-man gang war
against wheezy Italian mob guys who can barely make the rent on their
social club. Forrest Whitaker’s lone-wolf assassin boosts luxury cars and kills
with soldering-iron precision. He’s like a martial-arts-schooled Incredible Hulk
imbued with Dr. Bruce Banner’s brains. You know from the jump that he’ll
prevail because he reads Japanese philosophy, while his enemies (or most
of them, anyway) will die because they have no code.
Like a lot of the best hip-hop in the late ’90s — Chef Raekwon’s mind-blowing
black-Godfather fantasia “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx,” which RZA produced,
comes to mind — “Ghost Dog” wears its gangsta-genre formulas with maybe
too little shame. But it juices what would otherwise have been pure pastiche
with the deadpan humor of Jay-Z doing his impression of Al Pacino in
“Carlito’s Way.” And because Jarmusch treats hip-hop, and its saturation of
American life, as both foregone conclusion and gag-machine grist (e.g. the
Italian mobster shuffling to Public Enemy’s “Cold Lampin’ With Flavor”), the
movie’s a wiser, funnier cultural-collision study than the silly-ass improv
workshop James Toback convenes in
href="/ent/movies/review/2000/04/05/black_and_white/index.html">“Black
and White.”
“Ghost Dog” is RZA’s first foray into full-length film scoring, although he’s
had songs in movies like
href="/ent/movies/reviews/1998/05/cov_15review.html">“Bulworth,”
and produced the three emblematic Wu-Tang cuts on the soundtrack to
“Fresh” (1994). Aside from the occasional murmur of temple bells, a nod to
the kung-fu-movie roots Jarmusch’s film shares with the Wu’s self-mythology,
the music in the film is basic RZA: dreamy but tightly wound, like Raymond
Chandler firing off instant-messaging bursts, and uncommonly visual, like the
whole Mobb Deep catalog rendered in 3-D. An intermittent but crucial
presence in the movie, the music’s good enough to suggest that if RZA
makes a second career out of this, he might someday be the first best
original song Oscar winner to use his acceptance speech to thank Allah,
Steve Rifkind and the guy who delivers his weed.
The problem is, the “Ghost Dog” soundtrack CD — officially titled “Ghost Dog:
The Way of the Samurai, The Album” — is one of those
“music from and inspired by the film” deals, and its relationship to the music
that actually appeared in the movie is purely tangential. Apparently RZA
realized that the Wu-Tang brand isn’t the market mover it once was — even
Ghostface Killah’s off-the-wall/off-the-hook
href="/ent/music/review/2000/03/03/ghostface/index.html">“Supreme
Clientele” is selling sluggishly — and that his core audience wouldn’t
have ponied up for a whole CD of samurai-beat instrumentals. For the album,
he’s extended a few of the score’s cues to song length, composed a bunch of
new tracks and brought in his own dawgs (stalwarts like Kool G. Rap, Wu-Tang vets like Masta Killah and a whole me-too-Tang Clan of Wu-nabees
from his Razor Sharp label) on vocals.
It’s a little disappointing. Neil Young’s rustic-ambient soundtrack to
Jarmusch’s “Dead
Man” doubled as Young’s best late-’90s record, all fuzzy guitars
impersonating wind and crackling underbrush. It would have been cool to
hear RZA stretch out along those lines. As is, the “Ghost Dog” album is a
kinda-OK sampler of post-peak Wu product, juxtaposing vintage RZA
curveballs (Suga Beng Beng’s haunted sing-scat over beats by the ounce on
“Don’t Test/Wu Stallion”; a gospel sample on Masta Killah and Superb’s “The
Man” that’s like a Staten Island take on Moby’s
href="/ent/music/review/1999/06/08/moby/index.html">“Play”) with
mediocre tough-guy material (Black Knights’ “Zip Code,” Royal Fam’s “Walk
the Dogs”).
Method Man (who leads off the Wu Tang reunion cut “Fast Shadow”) can do
no wrong as far as I’m concerned, and it’s neat how Whitaker sounds just
like Tony
Soprano when he reads the samurai-code excerpts in between tracks,
and how RZA insists on pronouncing the “w” in the word “swords”
(subliminal Wu-logo branding?), and how “Strange Eyes” lifts its blues riff
from another RZA song (Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “All in Together Now”) — just like a
real blues song would! But the closest thing to great movie music here is
“Walking Through the Darkness,” sung by regular Wu hook-crooner Tekitha,
and it feels soundtracky only because its rippling melody loops the killer
intro from Bobby Womack’s 1972 “Across 110th Street” theme (itself a
semisteal from Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s
1968 single “Till You Get Enough,” and the template for everything from the
Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” to the opening credits of Quentin Tarantino’s
“Jackie Brown”). And
it’s still awfully ironic that a movie about a hit man who wastes wiseguys, but
not words, has been immortalized on CD by a bunch of rappers with nothing
to say.
Everything you need to know about Grand Royal’s “At Home With the Groovebox” compilation is right there in the album title. The “Groovebox” is the programmable synthesizer on which the album’s 14 tracks were composed. It reproduces the sounds of various ’80s rhythm machines — 808 thumps, 303 bleeps and assorted boom-baps — along with a veritable cheese platter of similarly retro keyboard sounds. The “At Home With” speaks to the spirit of the project: This is a collection of larks and throwaways, artists amusing themselves with a cool pro-audio toy. (The cover illustration even shows a quartet of lovable preteens gathered ’round the Groovebox, as if it were a Simon or a Chutes & Ladders board.)
The record’s defining moment is probably Beck’s contribution, the “amateur night at the Miami bass bar” workout “Boyz,” a limp sequel to the “Kraftwerk-meets-Kraft-cheese” funk of Midnite Vultures’ “Get Real Paid.” Over a skeletal rhythm track, Beck taps out prefab drum fills, Furious Five keyboard arpeggios and canned klaxon sound effects, whispering about “Boyz … pushing million-dollar buttons … turning jams up to 11.” He sounds as if he’s turned on by his own detachment from the process, by the idea of phoning it in, and treats the Groovebox like a labor-saving device; it funks so we don’t have to.
This is one of the better songs. Much of the rest is interesting only as a study in personality projection. On the swooshy, beatless “Campfire,” for example, Sonic Youth make their Groovebox sound like Sonic Youth, but there’s no trace of the somewhat less dynamic Sean Lennon in “Winged Elephants,” an unremarkable drum ‘n’ bass songlet. Bis and Buffalo Daughter (whose “303+606=Acid” is appropriately formulaic) can’t suppress their snicker reflex. Cibo Matto do a blithe, quasi-Brazilian, croon-over-beats routine even they’re probably sick of by now. Jean-Jacques Perrey gets far, far too busy with the slappy “Seinfeld bass” button on “Groovy Leprechauns.” And Money Mark reworks “Insects Are All Around Us” for no reason at all.
There’s a reason why Kraftwerk’s ode to push-button melodies, “Pocket Calculator,” stressed a human voice asserting, “I am the operator of my pocket calculator.” Like all instruments, electronic or otherwise, the Groovebox is only as funny, cool or interesting as the people who program it, and most of these artists haven’t exactly been bursting with exciting new ideas of late. (A more inspired lineup could have saved this record — were Les Rhythmes Digitales, IF, the Beta Band and Fatboy Slim all otherwise occupied? And where were the hip-hop producers?)
Only three tracks manage to go beyond the project’s built-in kitsch factor. Pavement’s “Robyn Turns 26″ introduces Matador ’94 to Tommy Boy ’83, as a rhymin’ Steve Malkmus chews his pop-culture references (“Sister Christian” karaoke, Trustafarians, Mr. Clean) like Rocky Mountain granola, then drops the math-rock science: “20 Camel Lights, a six-pack of brew — that’s 26 friends, the same as your age.” Pretty fly for indie rock’s archetypal white guy.
Air’s “Planet Vega” punches up pathos, drama and old-school Madonna on a track that’s either a homage to the really sad parts of the “Devil in Miss Jones” soundtrack or a tender rip-off of Mono’s “Life in Mono,” je ne sais pas. And “Today I Started Celebrating Again,” by Bonnie Prince Billie (aka Palace Brothers/Songs/Music’s Will Oldham), is the collection’s jewel: a tune about slowly drinking and brawling yourself to death, rendered even more bizarre by an instrumental bridge that sounds like a MIDI file of Eddie Money’s “Walk on Water.” Oldham sings it like a despondent day trader slumped over the can in a TGI Friday’s men’s room, like the Young Marble Giants with a mouthful of broken teeth, like the strangely peppy high-hat is a pacemaker he’d just as soon unplug.
Montreal’s DJ Kid Koala performed at New York record store Other Music Monday, promoting his Ninja Tune Records debut, “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.” He spun records on three turntables simultaneously. I wrote down the following observations during his set.
1. Five different people are filming Koala’s performance on teeny handheld camcorders. The turntablism movement documents itself obsessively; this equalizes the tension between the genre’s improvisational aspects (cutting records back and forth wildly against the needle) and its programmed ones (the carefully pre-planned selection of records that goes into a DJ set). After waiting outside in a line that stretched all the way to Crunch Fitness around the corner, I am part of the fourth or fifth wave of spectators allowed into the store. I have a lousy sight line to Koala’s turntables, but I’m able to watch his hands on the screen of a nearby Sharp Viewcam.
2. The last time I saw Kid Koala perform, he was 22 and looked about 12. He is now 25 and looks about 15. Youth is king in DJing right now — the champions are either teenagers or strangely teenage in appearance, like Olympic gymnasts. People are always remarking on Kid Koala’s babyfaced cuteness — someday, he’ll get fed up with it, grow a beard and drop the “Kid” from his name. It’s hard to be taken seriously when your name starts with “Kid.” Decide for yourself if Kid Rock is: a) supporting evidence of this theory; or b) a notable counterexample. Koala seems to make satirical reference to his cuteness with the first needle-drop of the evening. It’s a sketch in which a woman talking to a radio-talk-show host compares her (married) boyfriend to a koala bear. “Apparently he’s very cute and cuddly,” the host says. (He’s one of those sly vintage comedy-album personalities, like Tom Lehrer or Mal Sharpe, an affable wink in his buttoned-down voice.) The woman agrees, but points out that while koala bears are small, “they’re very strong.” The host chuckles, “I wonder what sort of bear his wife thinks he is,” then Kid Koala goes straight into his first song — a heavy prog-rockish organ groove, more than a bit menacing, as if to suggest that Koala’s own cuddliness masks a hidden strength.
3. If you were to go into Supercuts and ask for a haircut like the one Kid Koala has, you would ask for it not by name, but by number.
4. Other Music stocks a great deal of “serious” underground music. There is a rare Big Black record (“‘Headache’ 12-inch … sealed w/poster … limited ed. 500″) on the wall directly above Koala as he performs. Koala’s set seems to take cues from its context — it’s darker and less schticky than the material on his album. He mixes in Radiohead’s Mac-voiced daily affirmation “Fitter, Happier” and a William Burroughs sound bite (“Random imagery … how random is random?”)
5. Records of Burroughs saying cryptic things are a nuts-and-bolts item for many DJs. So are snippets of voice-over from trailers advertising ninja movies. So are “Star Trek” records.
6. Koala plays a “Star Trek” record in which Captain Kirk talks about alien attackers who “feed on laughter.” To ward them off, Kirk says, “everyone is directed to think only sad, depressing thoughts. Anything which will make you want to cry.”
7. The DJ segues from this dialogue into some moody hip-hop breaks, then begins scratching a glass-harmonica sound over the beat. It sounds a little bit like the “Forbidden Planet” soundtrack — played on the musical saw, by a novice musical-sawist — and a little bit like the way a forbidden planet would make one feel. I begin to think sad, depressing thoughts. The guy in front of me turns on a slow-motion “strobe” special effect on his Viewcam. On the screen, Koala scratches in flickering, dramatic slow-motion.
8. The three-turntable setup is a stunt, the DJ equivalent of the amps in “This Is Spinal Tap” that go up to 11 instead of 10. It increases the element of trickery inherent in the performance, makes it more like a would-be Vegas entertainer spinning plates on broomsticks on “The Gong Show” or the guy from Cheap Trick playing a guitar with six necks. But to deride this kind of stuff as mere trickery seems disingenuous; even playing a “rootsy” instrument like guitar involves technical contrivance, performing complex finger-placement exercises (so complex I can’t do them, anyway) to create a sound. And at its best, scratching is techy trickery in the service of funk, noize, yuks. Koala’s stage demeanor helps defuse the performance’s sonic-stunts aspect; he winces at the occasional clumsy mix and responds to the audience’s enraptured “Oooohs” with (if he’ll forgive the characterization) a boyish Dennis the Menace grin.
9. Like many of his DJ peers, Koala can scratch really really fast. But his approach is more musical; he’s interested in speed and fireworks only as a means of making more interesting sounds. At one point, he scratches a synthesized whoosh — it could be from the same “Star Trek” record, perhaps the sound effect for a being of pure energy dissipating into cosmic dust — faster and faster, until it sounds like the hiss of dry sand poured on sheet metal, the tone of the hiss growing more trebley as the sand bag empties and the sand falls more rapidly.
10. The finale of Koala’s set — a live re-creation of the track “Drunk Trumpet,” from his album — is a remarkable integration of musicality and technical craft, skills in the service of sound. Koala cues up a corny jazz record, a walking bass line augmented by banjo; it sounds like Dixieland from Disneyland. He puts another record on another turntable. The second record has the sound of a trombone on it, and Koala begins sliding the trombone record to the beat of the Dixieland record, so that it plays a “solo.” It’s a moment of comical, jaw-dropping virtuosity, as the trombone wiggles around the scale in ways a real horn couldn’t — you can close your eyes and picture Ornette Coleman as Plastic Man, twisting his toy saxophone into various balloon animals, the contortions as natural as breath.
From Hemingway to LL Cool J, on up to “Fight Club” — to say nothing of Axl Rose’s “Get in the Ring,” Paul Simon or Everlast — the boxing metaphor has always been kind of a guy thing. It’s belonged to the bloodied-but-unbowed, a shorthand symbol of spiritual toughness revisited endlessly by artists who want us to know how bad they are. So while Fiona Apple’s new album has a rambling, sweet-science themed title that you could easily dismiss as 90 words of raging bull, I prefer to read it as her way of comin’ in with her aesthetic dukes up, digging in her heels as tempestuously as LL did after his mama told him to knock the playa-haters out, intimidating the enemy with a torrent of (somewhat hokey) rhymes about moral victory and mind power Muhammad Ali could have ghostwritten.
Predictably, Apple’s record has already drawn cheap shots and low blows for all the Guinness Book-ready verbiage on its cover, but — here goes — “When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He’ll Win the Whole Thing ‘Fore He Enters the Ring There’s No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and if You Fall It Won’t Matter, Cuz You’ll Know That You’re Right” is Apple as a “Shadowboxer” turned heavyweight, the pugilist at her best. Don’t call it a comeback.
“When the Pawn …” doesn’t sidestep the traps that typically snare an artist into a sophomore slump. Apple spends a lot of time sifting the hate mail her precociously damaged 1997 debut, “Tidal,” generated. “So keep callin’ me names, keep on, keep on/I’ll keep kickin’ the crap till it’s gone,” she sings in a song titled “The Way Things Are,” lest we miss her drift.
“To Your Love” opens with the line “Here’s another speech you wish I’d swallow,” and the rest of the song suggests that she’s actually got something really personal and painful to get off her chest, preferably in private. But it’s hard not to think about Apple’s most infamous foray into public speaking, that ludicrous moment at the 1997 Video Music Awards when she evidently went, “Wait a minute, I’m beginning to think some of the images on MTV might not be entirely realistic,” and stepped to the podium to rail against the tyranny of media-legislated coolness, like a junior Nina Simone defecatin’ on your microphone (or, as Chris Rock giggled right after the fact, like “Fiona X”).
Most of the songs are less self-referential; think of this record as Afghan Whigs’ I’ve-been-a-bad-bad-boyfriend concept album “Gentlemen” translated into fatalist Plath-rock. But the music crackles with the sense of humor that comes from unashamedly embracing your own fuck-ups, acquiring a taste (as Fiona X puts it) for well-made mistakes. There’s more to admire on “When the Pawn …” than mere displays of guts, but if nothing else, it’s the best non-apology since Madonna’s “Human Nature.” Smart move — being 22, urban and probably over- or under-therapized means never having to say you’re sorry, and I’ll take the more-than-occasional lines of embarrassing verse (“My derring-do allows me to dance the rigadoon around you” — blecchh) as an occupational hazard on a record that kisses so little ass.
If Apple has an MTV doppelgdnger, it’s Kaia, the hyper-analytical, world-weary poetry-journal scribbler who flounced through this season’s Hawaii “Real World” like Dorothy Parker forced to host “Total Request Live.” The difference is that the Apple of “When the Pawn …” keeps doing what you always wanted that loopy mixed-up Kaia to do, identifying the enablers and energy suckers in her life and chopping them too short to shit. Apple doesn’t want their pity any more than she wants ours. She’s full of shivery lines like “You wanna lick my wounds, you want the badge of honor when you save my hide … You fondle my trigger then you blame my gun” (from “Limp,” which eventually leaves some guy “lying limp in [his] own hand”) and “I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up” (from “Paper Bag”).
Speaking of MTV, ex-boyfriend Paul Thomas Anderson’s video clip for the single “Fast as You Can” makes these intimidation tactics visual. While the drummer keeps a junglish pace with the stream of her consciousness, a fast-forwarded Apple puts out matches on her tongue like a cross between Sherilyn Fenn and G. Gordon Liddy, or the world’s scariest video-dating-service applicant.
We’re pulled toward the extraordinary closer, “I Know” (which could be subtitled “… Too Much”). As the Nino Rota homages, bat-winged sax licks, DJ-bait drum solos, clanking poltergeist activity and guitar-as-turntable-scratch breaks of Jon Brion’s shrewd production recede, Apple wraps her Jennifer Jason Leigh bruise of a voice around a wry and unsentimental after-hours lament. She tells her man she’ll be waiting “by the backstage door” while he decides whether to come, stay, lay or pray (and don’t think it’s a coincidence that now it’s the guy who’s onstage; Apple’s finished growing up in public).
Lines in the last song, like “You can use my skin, to bury secrets in” and “Baby, I can’t help you out while she’s still around” indicate progress: A girl who once worried about being careless with a delicate man is starting to grow into a woman who won’t get fooled again. The string arrangement’s so pretty that Rufus Wainwright would sucker-punch Ray Charles for it, but the way the words dance around volatile relationship upheaval is pure Apple, and suddenly it’s no great mystery why all these songs sound like waltzes — can you think of a better way for a fighter to practice her footwork?
Waitressing, as Harvey Keitel told remorseless non-tipper Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs,” “is the No. 1 occupation for female non-college graduates in this country.” That makes it a classic symbol of struggle, of shorts taken and dues paid, of inner strength in a greasy-spoon world. And it crops up even in songs and videos by artists who didn’t actually wait tables while waiting to be discovered. By playing a waitress who sheds her apron for a big production number in her “(You Drive Me) Crazy” video, Britney Spears joins a star-studded wait staff in the grand rock ‘n’ roll canon. Her forebears: new-wavers the Waitresses, Chrissie Hynde, playing the server most likely to hawk in your tuna melt in the Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” video, “Gina” in Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” (who “works the diner all day”), Courtney “hooker/waitress, model/actress” Love, Tori Amos, contemplating waitricide on “The Waitress,” and Donna Summer, whose ’70s stage-wear included a rhinestoned waitress’s uniform.
Spears’ problem, in donning the symbolic apron, is that she’s too fresh-minted a star to have “early years” to dramatize — her first job, after all, was “The New Mickey Mouse Club.” Not exactly hard labor. She can’t bring to her waitress performance the day-job-punk frustration of Olympia, Wash., riot grrrls Heavens to Betsy’s plate-breaking news flash “Waitress Hell,” or evoke the poignancy of the waitress “practicing politics” in a room full of cryin’ drunks in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” And because the video’s about waitress-Britney transforming into sexy-Britney in front of the makeup mirror, there’s no celebration of the unrecognized beauty of the ordinary waitress. That tends to happen more often in customer’s-perspective songs by men, like Tom Waits’ 1974 “The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House),” which moons over a waitress with “Maxwell House eyes” and “marmalade thighs,” or (more recently) murmuring synth-playa Jimi Tenor on “Love and Work,” telling his girl, “I want to be every customer in the diner where you work.” (Supertramp, whose “Breakfast in America” album cover depicted the Statue of Liberty as a matronly Edie McClurg type serving a giant glass of O.J., basically invented putting waitresses on a pedestal.)
The best waitress song of all time, however, remains Prince’s “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” from his 1987 funk classic “Sign O’ the Times.” Parker turns up as “a waitress on the promenade.” Prince says, “Let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain’t 2 hungry.” Parker questions his manliness, and the whole story bounces out the window in a whirl of bubble baths, Joni Mitchell quotes and teasing did-they-or-didn’t-they narrative confusion. Next to that sexy lyrical scramble, Spears’ over-easy clip looks about as compelling as an “Alice” rerun.
