The Dixie Chicks and Eve are the only female artists to debut at No. 1 on Billboard in
1999, and they both did it with albums featuring anti-spousal abuse songs in
which the abuser ends up pushing up daisies. Is it time
to dust off the grrrl-theories we haven’t had a
chance to use since the heyday of Sporty Spice? Nope,
more like a lucky fluke: What we have here are two
hits that usher new sensibilities into restrictive genres
the artists in question nevertheless love to death.
You may know Philadelphia-bred Eve as Eve of Destruction from the Roots’ “Things Fall Apart.” She also sang “What You Want,” where she played the stand-out chick at the Ruff Ryders’ sausage party, “Ride or Die, Vol. 1,” and provided the only remotely musical moments on the back-to-school locker room jam of the year. Here she changes up a bit. Hard as hell but head over heels in love, she offers the toughest admission of vulnerability you’ll hear on the radio all year. A stunningly naive pursuit of old-fashioned pop bliss that feels innovative without crossing over into Mary J. country, it’s simultaneously wistful and hardcore — the thug-hop “Be My Baby.”
“I open wide/I don’t give a fuck/I’m swallowing my pride,” is her way of saying, “For every kiss you give me/I’ll give you three.” But it’s an emotional metaphor, not a coochie reference. Set against flighty backing harmonies and post-Wyclef acoustic-guitar triplets, it’s also a hymn to the pleasure principle — something rare in dickcentric hip-hop, which still regularly denies women much pleasure at all.
Kind of revolutionary, and lovable too. Eve’s Swizz Beatz-produced “Ruff Ryder’s First Lady” would seem even more radical if it weren’t sitting atop the charts right next to a girly country group using the exact same kind of sensibility. The song “Ready to Run,” the Dixie Chicks’ mad dash out of the chapel of love, starts picking up steam right where Eve’s fantasies usually go south. “When my Mom says I look good in white/I’m gonna be ready this time,” Natalie Maines sings, savoring not just the fun of fucking over her obliviously doting parents and dough-eyed groom, but the pleasure of usurping a moral code that’s given her nothing but grief since puberty. And when backing Dixies Emily Erwin and Martie Seidel fly in with their floaty harmonies, the insistence on immediate, physical fun flies in the face of a genre where songwriters’ moral compasses often seem twisted by Pat Buchanan.
With their bluegrass chops and Carter sisters-cum-Spice Girls positioning, these “Young Country” flag wavers are certainly traditionalists. (Check out the “Yankee Doodle”-esque fiddles and flutes that open to “Ready to Run.”) Yet they tweak their traditionalism to upend country convention. Excepting a couple of speedy hoedowns (“Sin Wagon”), the fiddles etc. are always aimed at leavening the album’s strident pop and Maines’ rockwise singing. For example, the Buddy Holly homage “If I Fall” is a flatter, dustier version of Holly’s West Texas hiccup that, in context, has more to do with the playfulness of a Sheryl Crow than with the standards of Music Row. And while the Chicks’ sister act might serve as an implicit endorsement of the fambly way, its gal-pal vibe is feminist-communitarian in a way Shania Twain’s Madonna-esque individualism refuses to be. Even if “Sin Wagon,” “Hello Mr. Heartache” and “Ready to Run” all might imply that there’s hell to pay when the hayride is over, there’s “Goodbye Earl” to proudly piss on the fantasy of marital joy. “Those black-eyed peas/They tasted all right to me!” Wanda gloats as they mutilate him. They even stuff him in the trunk as they head off to L.A., making the song karmic payback for Eminem’s “Bonnie and Clyde ’97.”
Eve’s anti-abuse song, “Love Is Blind,” has the same kind of gentle acoustic guitar bit as her wispy, oneiric “Gotta Man” single, starkly implying the absolute flip side of its bliss, and she too ends the song standing above the motherfucker, Glock cocked, as she catalogs all the shitty things he did en route to killing her girlfriend. But for every moment like the punkily short, compu-poppin’ riot-rap “My Bitches,” there’s a cut like “Dog Match,” where the “Rufffff Rydddderrzzzzz” (DMX, the Lox, et al.) swarm in like a plague of locusts to overshadow their baby’s attempts at self-assertion. It underscores the fact that if the boys and Swizz hadn’t come along, Eve wouldn’t have the marquee value that turns a debut by a moderately famous rapper into a blockbuster.
Ultimately, just as the Dixies’ ballads are only a smidge less drecky than your average Faith Hill/Tim McGraw/Trisha Yearwood hit, Swizz Beatz’s admirably weird sense of rhythm and stark samples get strained the deeper you go. But surveying the charts, I’ll take either of ‘em over Britney Spears or Korn any day.
And so here’s where we finally begin to suspect that the dastardly motherfucker is beginning to lose his shit. When Sean “Puffy” Combs backs a thank-you letter to the Lord with a sample of Christopher Cross’ bourgeoisie escape fantasy “Sailing” it sounds a lot like the self-critique of a man reduced to self-parody. But listen. You can almost hear Puffy mawkishly blowing into the wind of his own stylistic innovations: “Ha, you think I’m over, I’ll give you motherfuckers over.” The reality is a bit simpler. This time out Puffy isn’t blowing anything: He’s sucking.
Only two weeks in release and already falling out of the Top 10, “Forever” is being passed up by wise consumers for brighter lights and bigger hitters. Maybe it’s because even in a jigga genre where a limp vocal cadence underscores the detachment of getting so paid that any physical or emotional exertion seems plebian, Puffy’s usual monotone delivery seems unbearably limp, especially when set against newcomers like Jay-Z. On the party cuts up front (the duet with Jay-Z, “Do You Want It? Do You Like It?” and “I’ll Do This for You”) Puffy seems to relish the idea that feigning the buoyantly bumpin’ pop-hop of his older hits like “Been Around the World” might put this lackluster music over. He’s wrong.
By the end of the album, he’s arrogantly turning a version of Public Enemy’s agit-prop “Public Enemy No. 1″ into a flat rant about playa persecution. What’s amazing is that the song doesn’t really wave audacity in the face of the indie-rap romantics who want Puffy dead. Instead, it pretends that the romantics don’t even exist, and that the schism they’ve invented between underground, “real” hip-hop and commercial rap is as mythological as some old, wick-wick weird America. (Which, of course, as far as the real real world is concerned, it is.)
There’s a sexiness to all this. Puffy’s “No Way Out” (1997) was the “Hotel California” of rap — a dark, decadent essay on jet-set jaundice. That was an amazing thing. But to make the record after “Hotel California” and the one after that and that, and to relish your power and spit in the face of your own demise — now that is something special. That’s America, simple and straight-up, America as no Randy Newman satire or Bob Dylan mythology could even hope to distill, America as your old man and my old man and pretty much everyone’s old man that I’ve ever met would have it — America as a place where you work your balls to the nubbins until you make enough money so that you’ll never have to work again and then you get fat.
But if most of “Forever” is about as not-workin’ as it gets, it’s still fun to watch Puffy try to live in his dwindling utopia. After the would-be hits at the top of the record, things get real dark, and kind of compelling even, real quick. “I Hear Voices” is boring but spooky, and his pseudo-slammin’ cover of MC Lyte’s “Fake Thugs Dedication”
is the only cut that could ever make the Cash Money generation wonder if they’ve fully usurped a forebear, even if it’s guest Redman’s blathering that provides the real fireworks.
Throughout, Puffy fetishizes his life, but he can’t live it without looking over his shoulder; he can’t stop grasping for more. The megalomaniacal paranoia that unfolds on the rest of “Forever” goes way beyond the average don’t-hate-on-me bullshit. It’s real. Puffy hears voices, he sees visions, he wakes up in his bed out in the Hamptons sweating. “Missin’ my hood now … surrounded by woods now,” he raps on “Journey Through The Life.” He’s an Ebenezer Scrooge clawing around his bed chambers grasping for the ghosts of Haters Yet to Come. “Can 10 shots stop spirits?” he asks. His dream may be dead, but the nightmare is just beginning, and there’s a freaky, fucked-up future just around the corner.
With a melody so flighty it merely refracts through producer Lauryn Hill’s airy groove and wispy scratching, Mary J. Blige’s “All That I Can Say” thrushes and flushes gingerly, even indecisively, barely coalescing as an emotion — let alone as a lead single. Even when the Blige leans into the cut, she sounds a little like someone hovering above her own performance, surveying new environs from an oblique vantage that’s got to be difficult for a diva who’s always defined herself by letting honest power and personality outweigh a relative lack of vocal prowess. “I wish I had the words to tell this feeling that I know so well,” she sings against warm jets of keyboards, waiting to exhale a swell of emotional power that might fill Hill’s low-ebbing tide pools.
But if the track “All That I Can Say” suggests a post-“Miseducation”/-”Baduism” makeover, the overall feel of “Mary” has more to do with capitalizing on the innovations of her imitators than with readapting to make sense of them. The Cesaria Evora-lookin’ Blige on and inside the album’s cover is dressed and photographed to look like she’s weathered decades since the tackily flashy queen of “Share My World” (1997). Her songs echo that choice. The stately, ’70s feel of much of the music on “Mary” — from the florid Stevie Wonder cut “Beautiful Ones” to her dead lock on First Choice’s disco rarity “Let No Man Put Asunder” — suggests Blige has graduated from her role as the big sister of hip-hop-soul to full-fledged matriarch. At her best, her slow, sumptuous record radiates the same sort of wise good vibes and communal integrity that made last year’s brilliant career stopgap “The Tour” one of the great sisterly be-ins of the ’90s.
Unlike Hill, who equates self-awareness with a kind of socio-spiritual and boho-rasta-aesthete transcendence that implies an insecurity with the realities of, well, real life — be it for buppie divorcee or spurned white college girl — Blige keeps things grounded in personal experience. It’s the difference between being self-righteous and righteous, middlebrow and middle-class, and it touches deeply personal music that begs to be abstracted and appropriated by anybody in earshot who needs a helping hand. The most amazing performance here is “Your Child,” on which her boyfriend’s baby’s mother shows up with his kid in her arms and Blige bonds with her, saving her beautifully administered wrath for her prick-daddy in one of the best examples yet of her most wonderful vocal trait — an ability to nuance the physical limitations of her voice to mirror the strain and complexity of the feelings it expresses.
It’s a form-function talent that’s anti-virtuosic, populist and very rare in a divasphere where overpowering talent is taken as the only coin of the realm. So, while Blige knows she can’t touch Aretha Franklin on the Babyface-produced “Don’t Waste Your Time,” she perfectly adapts her vulnerability to the role of a done-wrong woman taking advice from a friend who’s been there a million times, just as her testifying intensity turns the celebrity persecution complaint, “Deep Inside,” into a sweet vision of a non-hierarchical world where she’s “just plain ‘ol Mary” and we’re all just equals. Maybe someday her self-styled teaching-preaching inheritors will finally inherit her down-to-earth maturity.
If the gazillion-selling Backstreet Boys seal themselves and their fans in a sonic terrarium of soundboy solitude and stark sentimentality, Lolita star Britney Spears — who shares the same producer — allows something else to step into her world. As the Crystals would say, it feels like a kiss. Her intruder is self-subjection at best, physical violence at worst, and she implies that she’s gotta have it.
Much of Ms. Teen USA’s fame is centered around the line “Hit me baby one more time.” And while the vocal hook might seem like a coded hip-hop sexual entendre, given the new-conservative culture that produced the Louisiana native, it’s hard to imagine that it means anything except for exactly what it says: “Hit me.” In suburban America, where the song blew up, it’s a Stepford-whelp male fantasy with nasty implications, a teenybopper corollary to Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie.” Just as that band’s front man, Fred Durst, has drained hip-hop of everything but its viscera and darkest misogyny, Spears’ inventors have turned back the clock to a time before the post-femme Spice Girls and determined diva Monica raised the bar for new, aggressive female pop singers.
“(You Drive Me) Crazy” is a brilliant snatch of boilerplate electro rock, and the post-Beenie Man/Shaggy rasta-twirp vibrations of “Soda Pop” twirl and flaunt with kicky bliss. But every song, especially the gloppy ballads (“Born to Make You Happy”), systematically bulldozes our baby’s agency. Where other contemporary lite pop stars like Natalie Imbruglia dream of approaching a Dusty Springfield plane where raw vocal-emotional intensity bullies out everything but the intensity itself, Spears just wants to remind us that Tiffany did not vanish in vain. Vocally, her niche makes her the oldest teen in America — a 17-year-old bringing kids half her age the gospel that you’re never too young to grow up too fast, basically Mike Eisner’s worst nightmare — but her fabricators seem to have no need to program in any of the seemingly hard-won maturity that makes Monica special, let alone a dash of the Spice Girls’ pussy positivity.
So, in the first single she’s letting you kick the tar out of her, and on the next one (“Sometimes”) you’ve got her running and hiding in terror. Eventually, it gets to the point that even the most simple “I miss you/I’ll be there/I’ll popmail you some digicam shots of the boob job my mom bought me”-style sentiments become quite spooky. Spears might sound as if she’s trying to sing like a real, live, all-growed-up dance-pop diva who can get into real live clubs and even buy drinks, too, but she really just sounds like a Backstreet Girl — under your thumb.
A light, pop quiz. What is Fred Durst?
A) The brash, churlish rapper-singer for the chart-topping hip-hop-rock outfit Limp Bizkit.
B) An ambitious grassroots entrepreneur and proto-Master P of the burgeoning rap-metal revolution.
C) A recently knighted senior vice president of Interscope Records.
D) A rapacious little hunk of jackal spawn with the cold-eyed ambition of a corporate raider and the soul of a gnat.
Trick question. In the last couple of weeks, Durst and his accomplices in the vile Limp Bizkit have both sullied a perfectly good rock ‘n’ roll word with their grimly misogynistic single “Nookie,” and — if the media-porn flowing out of Woodstock 99 like chapters from a post-Korn “Lord of Flies” is true — goaded a mosh pit to acts of violence that included the gang rape of a crowd-surfing woman. All of the above. And worse.
Paradigmatically, their “Significant Other” is the vanguard of a wave of conservatism in alt-rock that’s just beginning to crest. Durst may be an idiot but he’s no dummy. With “Nookie” he and bandmates Wes Borland, Sam Rivers, John Otto and DJ Lethal have taken everything playful out of the Chili Peppers and everything turgid and challenging out of Tool. They’ve drained Korn’s Reznorian density and flattened hip hop into a girder for rants against primary oppressors — Durst’s ex-girlfriend and the disgusting sexual response that keeps him crawlin’ back to the bitch. In short, they’ve taken dumb shtick and made it dumber; they’ve taken mean music and made it meaner. “Every day is nothin’ but stress to me / I’m constantly dwellin’ on how you got the best of me / I wanna know something I can’t believe the way you keep testin’ me / Mentally molesting me … I’m stuck with my dick in my hand / Because you don’t feel nothin’ at all,” etc., etc.
Which pretty much sums up the attitude: Young white male subject to a hostile world reaches boiling point known to Uzi-toting postal workers and high school shootists. “It’s just one of those days when you don’t wanna wake up / Everything is fucked / Everybody sucks / You don’t wanna know why but you wanna justify / Rippin’ someone’s head off.” Self-pity cum attachment disorder cum warfare. And suddenly the Korn-Rammstein-Manson golden era of freak-friendly goth-rock theater looks like Camelot.
Selling African pop to an American audience has never been easy. Many labels, playing to the first-world audience’s predictable jones for exotic authenticity, have come up with some pretty condescending ways to do it: textile tableaus of euphoric natives doing the post-colonial hustle; restive visions of tranquil East African grasslands cooling at dusk; watercolors of rotund village matrons raising their hands in a cappella ecstasy.
With “Freedom Blues: South African Jazz Under Apartheid,” the reissue label Music Club isn’t being condescending so much as reductive, selling apartheid-era South African post-bop around the dated American notion of the jazz musician as alienated artist, diffidently fleeing oppression to discover an aesthetic freedom commercial music can’t offer. The theory is incredibly intriguing, if a bit flawed.
Few places on Earth in the last 40 years have seen oppression define everyday life like South Africa has. It only makes sense that the musicians — the most famous among them trumpeter Hugh Masekela, pianist Dollar Brand and the descriptively named Blue Notes — would infuse a political subtext into work rife with appropriations of shared heroes Rollins, Monk and Coltrane.
At times they seemed to, mixing their bop stylings with the melodies of the ’40s folk-jazz form, marabi, but often they simply stopped at well-crafted homages. There are moments on “Freedom Blues,” from Winston Ngozi’s cool wing to the Blue Notes’ torch ballad “O My Dear,” that could have been recorded by talented, no-name jazz bands in Akron, Ohio, or Stockton, Calif., circa 1963. Oddly enough, it’s those songs that make this compilation interesting, not only because mimesis is never a proper avenue for the “simmering sense of rage or heartache” that Graeme Ewens’ liner notes allude to, but because it suggests that, like bop’s innovators, these players had a more complex relationship to jazz as a conventional music, and a commercial music too.
The myth surrounding these sounds is that they symbolized a break from marabi’s escapist, summertime swing (compiled beautifully on the essential “Township Jazz ‘N Jive: 18 Swing Classics From the Jivin’ ’50s”), providing a perfect analog to American bop’s disabuse of dance music. But history is never that tidy. One of the darkest, funkiest things here is “Switch,” by Chris McGregor & the Castle Lager Big Band, who used to play a version of “When the Saints Come Marching In” in the early ’60s — hardly a move that would line up with the self-conscious desire for constant innovation that’s traditionally typified bop’s self-removal from commerce. Maybe McGregor led a dual life, shilling for sponsors by day, chasing his dreams by night. Or maybe he saw that American jazz was an amorphous blob, a storehouse of ideas and styles that could be pulled from simultaneously. That would explain why there are more joyous fanfares and genteel orchestrations on “Freedom Blues” than violent discord or fire-throwing sax solos.
So what was jazz to these musicians? An impossible chance to feel distinguished? A dream of creating a magic reality by erecting a funhouse mirror for an American music they loved? A chance to make recordings that might reach the European audience many of the best players here would flee for in the years to come? It was probably all of the above, but let’s just chalk it up to the universal need to do that thing — by any means necessary.
