Salon.com > Jon Caramanica

Cryin’ shame

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:00:00 +0000

Last month was National Military Appreciation Month, and in anticipation of the event, Orange, Calif., high school freshman Shauna Fleming decided she needed to do something. She settled, as eager, civic-minded teens sometimes do, on a letter-writing drive. The campaign, titled A Million Thanks, has to date collected almost 600,000 notes of encouragement and support for disbursement to American troops overseas and here at home.

Think of it as an Amnesty International movement for prisoners of politics, as opposed to political prisoners.

Fleming was inspired in part by a song and video that had just begun to grab attention, John Michael Montgomery's "Letters From Home." The song is No. 2 on the Billboard country music singles chart right now, and in heavy rotation on the two country music video stations, CMT and GAC. The lyrics document three letters to a soldier penned by people he's left behind: first, his warm-hearted mother, then his lonely girlfriend and, finally, his stoic father. The accompanying video culminates in what has emerged as a country music video money shot: the melancholy soldier.

Sharps & Flats

Wed, 15 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Rap needs saviors. The genre lionizes certain individuals beyond artistry and to the point of spectacle, whether it's the dead (Tupac and Biggie); the mad (Ol' Dirty Bastard); the disaffected genius (Dr. Dre); the crossover star (Will Smith and Lauryn Hill); or the Johnny-come-lately ascendant (Nas and Jay-Z). Rap's greatest weakness as a genre, and as a community, is that very same need. Often, in times of artistic void, the hope for the Next Big Thing eclipses any real possibility of it. At these points, certain artists wear the tag with ambition (Canibus, Noreaga), only to find it to be a burden down the road, preventing their career from developing naturally.

This is one of those times. Meet Beanie Sigel, Next Big Thing.

The Philly rapper first appeared on record with hip-hop progressives and fellow City of Brotherly Love natives, the Roots, on a song called "Adrenaline." Up against Roots' MC Black Thought's organic intellectualism, Beanie came off as the hardened thug, savvy about the street corners and quick to react, not think, when the situation called for it. His aesthetic didn't exactly mesh with the Roots, but Jay-Z heard the future in Beanie's words and flow, and quickly signed him to a deal -- even though Beanie had no formal music industry experience, no demo and no finished songs, only a loose collection of mix-tape drops and radio freestyles.

Sharps & Flats

Wed, 08 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Time was when the Jungle Brothers could do no wrong. Their first two albums, "Straight Out the Jungle" (1988) and "Done by the Forces of Nature" (1989), established them as the most adult of the Native Tongues collective, a loose agglomeration of socially conscious MCs, swathed in Afrocentric garb and spitting out accessible rhymes about social uplift.

Even when the duo teamed up with house legend Todd Terry for the one-off "I'll House You," the track that established hip-house as a genre, they still managed to come off kinda fly, especially as compared with, say, Fast Eddie, the flyweight singer behind housey cuts like "Booty Call." But sometime in the mid-'90s, the JBs took a wrong turn. Hip-hop, increasingly gritty, had no room for them or Native Tongue compatriots like A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul. So while the latter two groups hibernated, JBs Mike G and Afrika Baby Bam were adopted by old-school revisionist cats in England, the guys who fetishize pre-Rakim hip-hop and mesh it with newer, faster breakbeat science.

Sharps & Flats

Fri, 03 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

When Wu-Tang Clan first appeared on the scene, Ghostface Killah would never be seen without a mask, typically a thick stocking pulled over his head. However hidden, Ghost still became the most popular Wu MC among the hip-hop cognoscenti. While his peers created vivid images from B-movie fantasies, obscure ethical codes and self-aggrandizement, Ghost's free-association rhymes veered toward chaos. Miraculously, though, just as his verses appeared to slip into the ether, their internal logic became evident, with very deliberate syllable placements and cadences, intense alliteration and plainly absurd references somehow cohering into a successful flow.

Of course, anonymity is antithetical to fame, and soon enough the mask came off. By the time of his first solo album, Ghost's face was upfront -- as were his heartaches. "Ironman" (1996) was an astounding document of syllabic dexterity and personal revelation. Amid the above-standard braggadocio and Mafioso apocrypha were fragments of a tormented soul: a paean to his mother, a vicious skewering of an unfaithful ex. These were more profound than typical thug tears; the language captured an emotional complexity uncommon in hip-hop and rendered his heart in full color.

Sharps & Flats

Wed, 23 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The Grammys are for the people -- right? The Grammys are really for the industry, a self-fete on a grand scale and an excuse to bring Britney, Christina and Jessica under one roof and focus their combined star power, provided they don't all go down in the Greatest Catfight Ever Televised. As alternative awards ceremonies -- the American Music Awards, the MTV Video Music Awards and so on -- proliferate, the Grammys have tried to compensate with ostentation for what they lack in edge, whether it's a deranged Ol' Dirty Bastard or the outing of spicy Ricky Martin to the world (as a pop sensation, of course).

On the whole though, moments like that are as scarce as Will Smith on urban radio. Instead, the telecast inevitably degenerates into a record-label-sponsored match of My Diva Is Bigger Than Your Diva. And yes, that goes for the boys too -- how else do you describe Sting and his tantric career longevity or (p)opera heartthrob Andrea Bocelli? Like the gladiator matches of Rome, these square-offs aren't so much about who wins as the game itself -- it's all bread and circuses.

Sharps & Flats

Fri, 18 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Pop music has always resided at two extremes -- glib, substance-free tunes that preach bliss and ignorance vs. pained confessions that celebrate the triumph of the will in the face of adversity. Of the two groups, the latter is more potent and has greater staying power across generations. It's those singers -- Robert Johnson, Sam Cooke, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits -- who etch themselves into memory, as others' curves peter out to nothingness.

Tina Turner and Wynonna Judd are two women who've known pain, who've built entire careers out of anguish. Turner's violent marriage to R&B producer Ike is the stuff of myth, and Wynonna -- who uses the more diva-esque single name now -- survived the breakup of a massively popular partnership with her mother and suffered a recent divorce.

Yet while Wynonna's pain may still be fresh, her music as a soloist lacks some of the fire she shared with her mother, particularly on their later albums. Now on her fifth album without Mom, she's covering Joni Mitchell, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and even Macy Gray. With records of songs written for her largely flopping, she's trying to capture the heat of others. But "Tuff Enuff," her Thunderbirds rip, is far from it, and she can only fantasize about Gray's elegant scrapes on "I Can't Wait to Meet You.

Sharps & Flats

Wed, 09 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Guy took contemporary rhythm and blues away from singers -- dynamic
vocalizers who played with words like feathers -- and gave it to
stylists, artists who complemented adequate singing with a
broader sense of performance. The trio was led by Teddy Riley, an
unassuming producer from suburban Virginia raised in a musical
family. In the late '80s, Riley pioneered a way to meld R&B
vocals with synthesized, club-tempo beats that approximated the
edge of that era's hip-hop. The new genre was dubbed New Jack
Swing, and it was with the trio Guy -- Riley, Aaron Hall and
Timmy Gatling -- that he found his muse.

Of the complete group (Gatling was replaced by Damion Hall after
the first album), only one, Aaron Hall, could saaaang. The rest
floated on slick suits, thin ties, hi-top fades and generic,
tinny beats. Before Guy, the R&B world had been content with its
Luther Vandrosses and Peabo Brysons -- genteel, portly men who
weren't overtly threatening sexually. Afterward, sexy stage men dominated the pop R&B world, and so many flashier imitators rushed in that the trio could no longer compete.

Sharps & Flats

Fri, 14 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The myth of the hypersexualized black male is one of the most potent tales ever told in this country. America's fascination with the black penis dates back to slavery, when Eurocentric rationalism proffered a mind-body split that placed Africans on par with chattel, and therefore more prone to be dominated by sexual urges than their "civilized" owners. Trace a line from slavery through anti-miscegenation laws, jazz and blaxploitation and you end up at hip-hop, America's latest contested racio-sexual space.

It's rarely clear whose zealotry is greater -- the critics who lambaste the genre for unrepentant misogyny and homophobia, or the artists who drape extreme, mindless (hetero)sexuality under a shroud of free speech and good vibes. Regardless, it's a particular strain of black masculinity at play in these debates: debased, unhealthy and, most crucially, other.

Despite what you see on the news, most artists wear their lecherous smirks with irony. Take, for example, Ol' Dirty Bastard's mania, Akinyele's foolish Casanova persona and the legendary Blowfly's playful boasting. Sex is natural. Sex is good. More important, sex is fun! And it turns out that a silver-tongued rapper who rhymes about carnal knowledge is often as popular with women as with men, if not more so.

Prince for a day

Thu, 16 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Listening to Prince's "1999" album today, in the year of supposed Armageddon, it's striking just how ... well ... millennial it sounds. In the early '80s, just as popular music was moving toward its post punk-angst, carefree phase, Prince dared to make troubled funk, deep with lechery and riveting in its profound sadness. To this day, "1999" (originally released in 1982) is unique in its ability to invigorate a dance floor while also being able to tear at the heartstrings -- all the petit mort fatalism of dance music captured on 11 fleshy tracks.

Oddly, when the Roots, a hip-hop outfit from Philadelphia that uses traditional rock instruments, came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music over the weekend to re-create "1999" from top to bottom, they checked their gloom at the door. Rather, the performance approximated a good, old-fashioned revival, with the sold-out crowd often finding itself at its feet, either drawn in by the music or cajoled into standing by an eager slew of guests stars. Unlike Prince's album, it was all overwhelmingly innocent, replacing doom with exultation and sexual anguish with simple lust.