Fluxblog Weekly #33: Best music books 2015, Chance, Sleater-Kinney, Isaiah Rashad, Coldplay, CL
This week I posted my third annual list of the year's best music books at BuzzFeed. You can check it out here – they're all great, but though this isn't really a RANKED list, I did include my two favorites at the top.
Also over at BuzzFeed, a few of my colleagues and I put together this list of 69 recommended indie rock albums from the past year.
FYI, the 2015 survey mix will arrive early next week.
December 14th, 2015
My Message Is Massive
Chance the Rapper featuring Jeremih and R. Kelly “Somewhere In Paradise”
Did you see Chance on Saturday Night Live this weekend? If not, please go do that now. I’ve seen a majority of episodes of SNL in the show’s history, and I can confidently say that his appearance on the show ranks in the top 5% of all SNL musical performances. A lot of SNL performances, even by some of the best artists you can name, are just sorta perfunctory and professional – people playing their current hits and just hoping they don’t fuck anything up on live television. Chance’s performance felt truly live – rehearsed quite a bit, I’m sure, but very clearly alive in a moment and aware of the space where it was taking place. This guy is a hugely charismatic performer, and he’s very aware of what kind of gestures come off well on tv, and how to create a sense of intimacy in a medium that resists it.
Chance is a one-of-a-kind guy, but he’s not alone in the history of hip-hop. The most obvious precedent is Andre 3000, who I think is largely responsible for creating the specific template of rhythm and melody in Chance’s flow. And yeah, there’s also a bit of early Kanye in the vibe of his music. But in the context of popular rap from the past several years, Chance may as well have beamed down from another planet. Rap has been dominated by Drake and Drake-alikes in the past few years, and Chance is very much the radical opposite of Drake. Drake is all about presenting selfish fuckboy feelings over music that implies that he’s otherwise dead inside. It’s empty and soulless, and can be compelling and powerful sometimes for that reason. But Chance is very much alive inside, and the music comes from a place of compassion and generosity that is unusual in contemporary pop. Chance’s music radiates joy and warmth; it’s life-affirming music coming out of rather dire circumstances in Chicago. This feels fresh and different, and it’s a thing I think a lot of people want and need after so many years of cold, cruel-hearted music. Watching Chance on SNL was like watching a new zeitgeist click into place – 2015 may have been a major year for apex fuckboys like Drake, Weeknd, and Bieber, but it’s beginning to look like 2016 will belong to Chance.
Get it from iTunes.
December 15th, 2015
Only Together Do We Break The Rules
Sleater-Kinney @ Kings Theater 12/12/2015
Price Tag / Far Away / Fangless / Jumpers / Light Rail Coyote / What’s Mine Is Yours / No Cities to Love / All Hands on the Bad One / Words + Guitar / Wilderness / Surface Envy / A New Wave / Was It A Lie? / Bury Our Friends / One Beat / I Wanna Be Yr Joey Ramone / Turn It On / Entertain // Merry Xmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight) / Oh! / Dig Me Out / Modern Girl
Sleater-Kinney @ Irving Plaza 12/14/2015
Price Tag / Fangless / Jumpers / Get Up / Surface Envy / What’s Mine Is Yours / Ironclad / Start Together / Was It A Lie? / A New Wave / Bury Our Friends / All Hands on the Bad One / No Cities to Love / One Beat / The Fox / Words + Guitar / Turn It On / Entertain // Modern Girl / Rock Lobster (with Fred Armisen) / Dig Me Out
Sleater-Kinney “Surface Envy”
Before these two shows, I hadn’t seen Sleater-Kinney since August of 2006, when they played their final gig in New York, about three shows before they disbanded for nearly a decade. During their original run, I saw them many times over – maybe 15 times between 1997 and 2006? Something like that. S-K were a very big deal to me, and their shows were always very emotional for me, particularly during the Hot Rock era. I am happy to report that the Sleater-Kinney of 2015 is just as vital and powerful as the version I saw many years ago, and if anything, they’ve become a stronger live band as their technical skills have evolved and their occasional reluctance about being rock stars has almost completely disappeared. This is most notable when Carrie Brownstein performs “Entertain” at the end of the set, and her theatricality and showmanship is slightly at odds with a song in which she’s telling you “we’re not here cos we want to entertain.”
Corin Tucker’s voice is still astonishing, both in how well she controls its intensity and volume, and in how it can convey particular emotions and depths of feeling that I don’t think anyone else is capable of approaching. The sound of it triggers something that I can’t explain, but hearing her sing is very cathartic. Everyone leaves an S-K show with this sort of “what just happened to me, I need to recuperate” feeling.
These two shows were in very different venues. Kings Theater is a large and fancy theater; a converted movie palace that’s roughly equivalent to Radio City Music Hall. Irving Plaza is a small club, and was THE place for well-known indie acts to play from the mid ‘90s on through the very early ‘00s. (It never went away, but Bowery Presents have basically pushed every cool act towards Bowery Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, and Webster Hall in the past decade or so, and Irving Plaza is only back in rotation lately as a result of what I’m told is a beef between Bowery Presents and Webster Hall.) Sleater-Kinney is much better in a room like Irving Plaza, where the audience can be in close proximity to the band, and the audience can be a bit more physical in their reaction to the music. The enthusiasm of an audience in a seated venue tends to get dispersed, but all the most enthusiastic people gravitate to each other on a floor, and it changes the temperature of everything. The intensity in the room last night was what I remember best from seeing them in the old days. Seeing how other people connect in an immediate and visceral way to songs like “Get Up,” “Start Together,” “The Fox,” “Words + Guitar,” “Turn It On,” and “Dig Me Out” amplifies that feeling in a way that’s almost entirely overwhelming.
A word about Fred Armisen’s appearance in the encore at Irving Plaza: Their version of The B-52’s “Rock Lobster” was INCREDIBLY faithful, right on down to wheeling out a vintage Farfisa for the exact right organ sound. Armisen is famous for being a gifted impressionist, but his Fred Schneider is so complete and accurate that it was easy to just pretend you were there watching the B-52’s of the late ‘70s. (I saw the real B-52’s play this song a few years ago, and it wasn’t quite as good, but hey, they’re all in their 60s now and it’s fine.) It was very fun, and one of the most committed covers I’ve ever seen, particularly as The B-52’s have one of the most specific sounds in the history of rock music. But hey, that’s true of Sleater-Kinney too.
Buy it from Amazon.
December 16th, 2015
We Can Be The Jam
Isaiah Rashad “Nelly”
Isaiah Rashad’s voice has some of the same grain and accent as Lil Wayne’s, but whereas Wayne often has this sort of manic energy, Rashad has this odd drag to it. He sounds tired and weary, and that’s amplified by the minor-key organ part that’s mixed so far into the background of this track that it’s like a musical rack focus with Rashad’s voice in the foreground and the keyboard notes as a blurry backdrop. “Nelly” has a strong chorus, and I like the way it implies a slight boost in energy while the sound of the music and Rashad’s voice are still rather sedate. The song’s about trying to escape difficult circumstances, and when the chorus kicks in it’s like entertaining an optimistic idea while feeling very skeptical about it.
Buy it from Amazon.
December 17th, 2015
Where There Are Miracles At Work
Coldplay “A Head Full of Dreams”
Coldplay’s new album is so self-consciously joyful that it’s kinda creepy, because even if a guy like Chris Martin has plenty of reasons to be extremely happy, his insistence on telling you how happy he is over and over and over just comes across like overcompensation and/or self-delusion. Coldplay records often feel like performances of emotions, like the things you’d do to show people that, yes, you’re totally a human being and nothing is wrong with me, ha ha, no, look away. But this new one pushes that all to an extreme, and it’s fascinating to hear funky, upbeat, relentlessly optimistic music that perhaps unintentionally signals so much doubt and emptiness. “A Head Full of Dreams” draws on Martin’s career-long obsession with transcendental experiences but has this quasi-EDM throb to it that suits his music surprisingly well, maybe because that music is always angling for transcendence too. The vague sadness at the core of it makes the desire to be happy and feel good about the universe seem urgent, maybe even desperate. It sounds less like a musical comb-over for an aging band and more like someone who’s just fighting for his survival.
Buy it from Amazon.
December 18th, 2015
Hello Kitty Getting Hella Old
CL “Hello Bitches”
You might remember CL as a rapper in the K-Pop group 2NE1, who I’ve featured here a few times, and from her feature on one of the best tracks on Skrillex’s last album. She started out mainly rapping in Korean but is transitioning into a bid for worldwide/American success, and this new single is mostly rapped in English. In either language, she’s an impressive and forceful rapper, even if a lot of her moves can seem like the work of a person who’s carefully studied Lil Kim and Nicki Minaj records for years. On a musical level, “Hello Bitches” sounds very American, but even if they’re in English CL’s lyrics are unapologetically South Korean – she’s seamlessly dropping local slang into traditional rap structures, and about half the lines address Asian stereotypes – dismissing the more hateful shit, but having fun with other aspects of it and generally repping for Asian girls all over the place. It’ll be fun to see where she goes with this in 2016. I’d love to see her actually cross over here, because she’s so fun and there’s disturbingly few Asian pop stars in American culture.
Buy it from iTunes.