John Mayer is the best thing to happen to vanilla sex since the missionary position. Much like the regularly maligned ice cream flavor, kinkless intercourse has always been tastier than advertised. So when the musically and sexually adventurous alike dismiss Mayer’s Berklee-tutored guitar and Abercrombie-swaddled purr as aural Vicodin for soccer moms and timid schoolgirls, it only goes to show how limited a palette both kinds of fetishists have. In fact, Mayer’s new “Heavier Things” is just the thing to heat your bathwater on those occasions when you don’t want to get your freak on — but you’re still game for seeing where some heavy petting might lead.
Mayer sidled into the limelight two years ago with the mildly rebellious “No Such Thing,” on which he insisted “I am invincible” in all but a whisper and defied the powers that be by running through his old high school — no doubt while chewing gum, and I bet he didn’t even have a hall pass either. The single sprang from his second album, “Room for Squares,” an acoustic-based collection of modest romantic ruminations that stirred equally modest heart flutters in suburbs and dorms across America. Mayer was always just a twitch of the larynx away from simpering, and his ability to resist that temptation seemed (again, modestly) courageous.
For years, women friends of mine have heard sex in Dave Matthews’ voice where all that reached my ears was Peter Gabriel in need of a lozenge. But Mayer I hear, maybe because he strips the self-involvement and pseudo-yodels from Matthews’ style, leaving a warm, cottony buzz, the vocal equivalent of lavender oil. (He also steers clear of Dave’s Hacky Sac party vibe.)
Of course, they don’t call the tame stuff vanilla for nothing. Mayer’s follow-up, “Heavier Things” debuted at the top of the Billboard charts before settling comfortably in the top 10. Like those of his former tour mate Norah Jones, with whom he shares a knack for the genteel nuzzle, Mayer’s brisk sales have been at least partly a fearful response to hip-hop hegemony. Yet virtual white flight isn’t the whole story. From Missy Elliott‘s threat, “I’ll put my thing down, flip it, and reverse it” to Chingy’s inviting a woman to whip her genitalia at him “like a shortstop,” there’s a pretty narrow definition of sexuality on the charts these days. Pop sex has become a strenuous combination of pole dancing, Pilates and pro wrestling — plenty fun, but not really practical when you’ve both got to work in the morning.
And now that hip-hop has all but completely colonized R&B, the former province of the gentle lover man, R. Kelly is as demanding a bedmate as any MC, and even a nice guy like Justin Timberlake plays at playadom. With the prognosis for quiet storm as bleak as that of poor Luther Vandross himself, who’s to keep the scented candle burning?
Granted, a dude whose idea of a come-on is “Your Body Is a Wonderland” is an unlikely bedroom savior. But the awkward title of Mayer’s follow-up to “No Such Thing” was part of its charm, as was the contrast between dud lines like “your skin like porcelain” and kindly details such as “I’ll never let your head hit the bed without my hand behind it.” Like Shakira’s “Underneath Your Clothes,” this was sex as adoring exploration rather than an expression of mastery.
Mayer was conscious of the rarefied gentility of the fantasy he advanced — what he described on “City Love” as “the kind of thing you only see in scented, glossy magazines” — and he also undercut it, fretting on the same song that there wouldn’t be room in his apartment for his sweetie’s toothbrush. Although he’s sensitive, he’s no prude; he jokes with interviewers about the difference between electric and acoustic guitars: “Well, one of them will get you laid — and one will get you laid after like an hour and a half of conversation.”
The shift in album titles — from the coyly requesting “Room for Squares” to the deliberately pondering “Heavier Things” — looks like bad news. Like so many pretty boys before him, Mayer wants to make sure you love him for his mind. But while his lyrics predictably fall flat when he’s aiming to eff the ineffable — the lead single, “Bigger Than My Body,” fumbles toward some kind of spiritual transcendence — his voice is so grounded and earnest that even then it sounds like he’s reminding his honey to buy milk on her way home from work. Mayer is rarely revelatory when he flexes his brain, but he’s often cute (“How come everything I think I need/ Always comes with batteries?”) And when, on “New Deep,” he pledges to be less superficial from now on, he also gently mocks his own pretensions, quipping, “I’m so enlightened/ I can barely survive.”
So Mayer’s curiosity is just a part of his romantic technique, which, while still self-deprecating, has smoothed out considerably. Mayer has learned that the secret of seduction is not to wheedle and plead but to quietly assume. On most of the songs here it sounds like both parties have slipped out of their shoes before the music kicks in. “Come Back to Bed” is a sharp contrast to the last record’s “My Stupid Mouth,” in which he tried unsuccessfully to talk his way out of a dumb comment. On the new song he surrenders ground (“You can be mad in the morning/ I take back what I said”) without ever begging, and if you’re at all susceptible, “I survive on the breath you are finished with” clinches the deal. Mayer doesn’t even suggest that you’ll be, you know, doing it if you slip back between the sheets. He’s voicing the sensuality of monogamy, and he lusts after “Home Life,” a fantasy both practical and idealistic: “I will marry just once/ And if it doesn’t work out/ Give her half of my stuff/ It’s fine with me.”
None of which would matter if Mayer didn’t command his own groove. The opening track, “Clarity,” for which he recruited Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the mighty drummer from the Roots, along with jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, is hardly the “hip-hop” move Mayer’s been boasting about to the press. But the layering of guitar atop piano propels the song forward rather than just supplying a sumptuous backdrop, and the tune’s break, in which Hargrove pushes against the drum fill, shows a far cannier rhythmic sense than most singer-songwriters display. For what it’s worth, his hip-hop-accredited guest was impressed. “John Mayer is incredibly underrated. Ohmigod,” Thompson raved in an interview with the Believer. Referring to the murky, heavy-breathing neo-soul masterwork of D’Angelo, Thompson added that Mayer “wants to do his ‘Voodoo’ so bad it hurts.” (Mayer’s manager, apparently, put the kibosh on the in-studio experimentation between Thompson and Mayer.)
If it seems like Thompson and I are overstating the case for Mayer — well, we are. “Heavier Things” is just a tiny slice of what you can accomplish in a bedroom without throwing out your back or charging up the camcorder. But he’s still a rarity. While nerdy white musicians have always coveted the imagined sexual prowess of their black peers, they usually try to cultivate a wild sensuality, as though overcompensating for their self-perceived unworthiness.
Though no one is likely to mistake Mayer’s voice for D’Angelo’s — aside from Matthews, his clearest vocal antecedents are soulish white Brits like Paul Young or Peter Cox of Go West — he’s assimilated the subtler physical assurance and candor of R&B into his delivery. After all, there’s a world of fashion accessories between chastity belt and bondage gear, and as wide a range of fantasies as well. Nice teenage girls aren’t immune to orgasms, and not every soccer mom is a latent dominatrix. John Mayer never lights up the sky with garish strokes of passion, but he can put you to sleep with that special smile on your face.
Swizz Beatz is a hack genius. The hip-hop producer fingers a simplistic splash of keyboard, generates some haltingly syncopated bump and calls his boys in to chant some hoarse phrase like “Ryde or die!” All of a sudden he has another hit. Though he secured his rep working with already respected rhymesayer Jay-Z and bald, bullyish multiplatinum heavyweight DMX, Beatz has seemed determined to prove that he can turn any mouthy street kid with a microphone and a baggy football jersey into a star. As if to demonstrate that, he piloted a crew of DMX’s Yonkers pals, who called themselves Ruff Ryders — among them the terse Drag-On, the snide Jadakiss and female M.C. Eve — to an unexpected No. 1 berth on the pop charts one year ago.
It all sounds so simple, you see, because it is so simple — especially the tracks themselves. In a field where track masters brag of their attention to technical detail and the depths of their vinyl vaults, Swizz is state fair champion hot-dog eater as paint-by-numbers auteur. No one — not even rival assembly line producer Mannie Fresh of hip-hop outfit Cash Money, who averages a mere half-hour to pump out a jam — can match Swizz’s economy. According to an interview with Blaze, he can whip up a hit in an astounding 10 minutes.
You don’t need a calculator to figure that the 16 tracks on the Ruff Ryders’ inevitably platinum, No. 2 Billboard debut “Ryde or Die Volume II” should have killed off no more than two hours and 40 minutes in the busy life of the talented Mr. Beatz. Then again, you might be able to guess how little time he invested just by listening. That’s a compliment, of course: How long do you think it took to compose the first Ramones record? The spare whomp of Ruff Ryders isn’t arty minimalism, though the bobbing, off-kilter influence of superproducer Timbaland (Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Nas) is palpable, and many of these doodles coagulate into bona fide hooks. It’s dumb-ass punk, ryding out a wallop that either merges irreparably with your arterial pulse or slams with unwelcome suddenness against your tympanum, never to be translated from blare to cheer.
The M.C.s seem to have tossed off their rhymes with equal briskness. “We ain’t industry niggas,” the assembled Ruff Ryders blurt on the leadoff track, “we in-da-street niggas.” And that’s as deep as their bully-boy playground taunts get. Unless you count outrageous similes from ringers the Lox (“I got ‘em looking for my solo album/Like Kennedy Jr.”; “I want my shit back/Like Castro and Elian’s pops”), the highest verbal points are bludgeoning quips like newcomer Larsiny’s: “I hate cops and I like you/Even less/I turn your whole block into/A bleeding mess.”
In this simplified context, even often-overwrought tuff guy DMX gets to wrest himself from the stifling curse of Nu-Pac significance his albums often wallow in, to prove that (despite his svelte, rippled torso) he is best suited to what we’ll just call grumpy-old-man rap. As on “Party Up (Up in Here),” he seems to snarl for you kids to giddafuck out his yard — it’s his ball now, muhfuh. And on “Ryde or Die’s” “The Great,” he bellows like you’ve woken him up an hour after he passed out from too much Hennessey; as soon as his eyes adjust to the light he’s gonna pound you.
And give X one good reason why he shouldn’t pound you. Maybe the members of Ruff Ryders generally offer less social critique than the WWF, but the notion that gangsta rap is an implicitly political art form has always been a bit of a con anyway. Maybe it all started when Ice Cube claimed to have predicted the Los Angeles riots, or maybe way back when Schooly D was fronting sociological interpretations of his bad behavior like a ghetto Pat Moynihan. In either case, one arm of the well-meaning punditry began to excuse the metaphoric violence not as a fun bout of playacting but as a critique of inner-city social policy.
But something was missing from such facile analysis: Sometimes you don’t want to beat someone’s face in because of your socioeconomic status. Sometimes you don’t want to beat someone’s face in because the NYPD has declared open season on folks who share your skin color. No, sometimes, say the Ruff Ryders, you just want to beat someone’s face in because you want to beat someone’s face in.
Next
“Welcome II Nextasy”
Arista
Keeping it up all night may be some kind of achievement, but boasts about bedroom stamina come cheap. Call some would-be stud’s bluff and he’s, what, embarrassed? Meanwhile, the lady is left with a limp lump monopolizing the blankets and wheezing a self-satisfied snore. You’re likely to hear both sides of the story on urban radio. But while the hip-hop hard boyz spin endurance fantasies about boning on and on till the breakabreakadawn, the R&B artists ply the ladies with ingenious proposition, unexpected delight and a flick of the tongue instead of a thrust of the crotch.
Of course, even if you’re a vocalist as supernaturally transporting as Al Green or Marvin Gaye, that sort of enticement requires imagination — the kind of imagination that comes from hours of adolescent musing about what you’d do if a real live girl accidentally wandered into your bedroom, the kind of imagination that the Minneapolis trio Next demonstrated on their 1997 debut, “Rated Next.” On that album, R.L., Tweety and T-Low promised to nuzzle your corn-free toes on “Butta Love,” then topped that chivalrous vow with “Too Close,” a tale of dance-floor erection hooked by the single entendre “You’re making it hard on me.” Their idea of risky romance was a dirty joke whispered into your ear during a slow dance, and it was a winning one.
“Welcome II Nextasy” ups the freak quotient, with production again from Naughty By Nature’s KayGee adding a hip-hop bump to the smoothed-out groove. “Jerk,” about taking sexual matters into your own hands, is already making the dance-floor rounds. “I make the decision/To handle my own business,” R.L. boasts. “Back in forth in a rhythm/Till I make the jism.” And while the gushy “Cybersex” starts out merely goofy, “I want your PC/Sit on my laptop,” by the time it broaches the ridiculous (“Download all over me”) it draws the dirty-minded giggles it intends.
But it’s disconcerting that Next’s two squishiest tunes don’t have any women in them. Nor does “Let’s Make a Movie”: after a steamy shooting session the boys have you in their video library; what makes you think they’re gonna bother hitting you back when you page them? By comparison, the nicey-nice first single, “Wifey,” while modestly tuneful and a tad more sprightly than the midtempo R&B love dedication norm, comes off as a bland, vague commitment to cohabitation.
Of course, smart women and honest men have always known that R&B’s softcore come-ons are well-meaning lies at best. The most you can expect are interesting lies. And though they remain admirably oral in their intentions (though a bit self-congratulatory about that fact), no cunnilingual acuity can make up for “Beauty Queen,” a blast of virulent misogyny camouflaged as ghetto moralism. The story: Fine young thing runs with older men in high school and winds up pumping out babies, sucking on the crack pipe and turning tricks, while the male narrator — who certainly isn’t jealous, not him — follows her decline with a vicious sense of superiority and satisfaction.
That’s the trouble with imagination, after all: It’s hard for any mere female human to be able — or, for that matter, willing — to live up to those dream-spawned ideals, and disappointment tends to turn the callow kid in search of something freaky real mean, real quick. And ladies, you might find, “Girl I’ll pay your bills/If you freak me like I want” a more mercenary, limited definition of “What U Want” than you expected. Like so many lover boys before them, Next talked a sharper game when women weren’t throwing themselves at them. And they told more clever lies to hustle up some action when they couldn’t afford to pay for it.
When I was 14, in the mid-’80s, owning a Duran Duran record was as definitive a way for a boy to sabotage his claims of heterosexuality as wearing lavender bikini briefs in the locker room. Other fey icons of the moment, like Michael Jackson or Boy George, were marginally more acceptable to those of us being overheated in the homophobic crucible of teen male identity. But these Brits weren’t cuddly or non-threatening or gawkily freakish — they were sneeringly arrogant, and their exploits diddled our square-headed assumptions that men weren’t supposed to be prettier than the models they bedded.
More perturbingly to anyone whose testosterone was in flux, girls actually swooned to the confident swish of Duran Duran’s eyeliner. In retrospect, this was a far more cynical pitch of seduction than our current spate of boy groups; you’ve got to have a low opinion of your audience, after all, to expect them to buy the notion of England as a sexy, exotic locale. With their contrived decadence, the sickly sheen of their synths and dance rhythms that owed more to James Bond than James Brown, the quintet was as healthy a set of sex symbols for girls as porn stars are for boys.
The band that has released “Pop Trash” is hardly the stuff of Teen Beat centerfolds. With perfectly convoluted Duran logic, Nick Rhodes and Simon LeBon years ago jettisoned Andy and John Taylor (the duo misguided enough to think they were playing in a funk band all this time) in an attempt to leave teenybopdom behind them. In 1993, with the decidedly non-glam Warren Cuccurullo on guitars, they adapted to grunge anti-stardom with the dreadful ballad “Ordinary World,” a title confirming their commitment to unscrupulous hackdom. Pretentious, derivative, unlistenable — Duran Duran had been all of these. But ordinary? Simon, how could you?
One-dimensional fellows that they are, titles signify a lot in the Duran mythos. And so their latest shtick is again announced on the CD spine — “Pop Trash.” Duran Duran aren’t one-dimensional because they’re so severely talent-impaired, you see. They’re one-dimensional because they’re “Pop” — not like Celine Dion or Backstreet Boys — but in the true Warholian sense of the word. Similarly, “Trash” doesn’t mean they’re just spewing garbage into the marketplace — they’re again being true to the spirit of real gutter flash, again in the same Warholian sense.
All lies. “Pop Trash” is, in fact, a mediocre Britpop album. Where once the band passed off Bowie clichis as gourmet bubblegum, now they pass off chilled-out Phil Collins ballads as lounging Eurochic. And they may succeed yet again. “Someone Else Not Me,” with Rhodes’ synth banks impersonating cellos and LeBon imitating a human, mewls about “love that’s real/Like a flower to the bee” with an ambience that should fit right into the tedium of current mainstream radio programming. The song is so inoffensive and catchy, that you can hum it without realizing you’ve ever heard it. (There’s another version in translation, so our Spanish-speaking friends won’t feel slighted.)
But whether they score a hit or not, Duran Duran’s back cover photo tells all. There, this trio of aging rouis, robbed of all resonance by the wrinkling of time, postures on a white vinyl couch, the glare of the photograph unflattering to their jowls and their dated fashion sense alike. In their leopard prints and plunging necklines, Simon and Warren look like the kind of middle-age letches routinely ridiculed by healthy young clubgoers, while Nick looks like some remember-the-’80s “Saturday Night Live” parody. The fact that they haven’t ripened into a genuinely intriguing decadence just proves that they were never even real frauds to begin with.
If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, Eminem damn sure has a right to feel insulted. The white rapper’s debut record, “The Slim Shady LP,” was supposed to set off a stampede of fair-haired MCs who would overrun hip-hop. Yet since last year, Eminem’s success has launched the careers of exactly as many white MCs as his white, multiplatinum predecessors the Beasties and Vanilla Ice did in their time: none.
So why does the first single of his follow-up record, “The Real Slim Shady” on “The Marshall Mathers LP,” explode with such wicked vitriol toward supposed imitators? Well, like any self-respecting battle MC, Eminem feels the need to dis imaginary foes. It’s the same reason that he slobbers with the hoarse intensity of DMX, the same reason that the bloodshed level has risen almost as high as the “fag”-per-minute quotient and the same reason why he unleashes jaw-dropping feats of verbal dexterity with impunity. Example: “We ain’t nothin’ but mammals/Well some of us cannibals/Who cut other people open like cantaloupes/But if we can hump dead animals/And antelopes/Than there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope.”
In other words, Eminem is, uh, keeping it real. So real, in fact, that he’s beyond fake: I mean, what other rapper would prove his street cred by calling out boy-girl groups as “sissy” music? Would Jay-Z even bother griping about ‘N Sync? Christina Aguilera? Carson friggin’ Daly? But “The Marshall Mathers LP” is the first hip-hop album to assume universal attention — not just from hip-hop fans, not just from under-20s, not just from media watchhounds, but from the American culture at large — and it relishes the attention, even as it recoils from it.
If Eminem’s expert convolutions use the tired gangsta excuse that he’s “telling it like it is,” they make even Madonna’s expert media-twiddling seem like standard issue PR. The track “Stan,” for instance, reads a series of letters from an imaginary fan who identifies too closely with Eminem, or Marshall Mathers, and as a result drives off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk when he doesn’t hear back from his idol. These are the sort of imitators the “real” Slim Shady fears — and in his mind that the media accuses him of cultivating — stupid, desperate and, above all, full of rage. And it is exactly this sort of rage that Eminem wallows in here, exploiting its every ugly, hilarious and multifaceted aspect.
In its rise to prominence, after all, gangsta rap has often inadvertently isolated rage in the public eye as a solely black male pathology. Eminem — backed by Dr. Dre’s beats — returns that destructive passion to the transracial Y chromosome. This rage is something more than the party slugs of Limp Bizkit’s fratty violence, something even more than the macabre wisecracks of Eminem’s own “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” the cut on his first record where he fantasized about killing “his baby’s mama.” The melodramatic prequel “Kim,” which details his wife’s “actual” “murder” over an intense thrash metal stomp, breaks down into self-hatred, self-doubt and those other nasty demons that make the American male such a disheartening specimen.
“The Marshall Mathers LP” is an airtight masterpiece of rhyme. It’s a self-serving retort from a troubled smartass who got too fast too quick. And it’s also a more cogent essay on the fan-star nexus than any media panel blurt or chat room gossip could ever provide. Because in this era of winner-take-all corporate pop, the increasing distance between the famous and the rest of us — and the question of how much control we cede to them in the process — may be the only valid topic left. And so, Mathers has constructed a hall of mirrors that reflects the reality and fantasy of both himself and of every kid who identifies with him. We may just never know who the real Slim Shady is after all.
