
If you haven't checked out Chris Brown's new album Exclusive, but were considering it, I'll save you the trouble: this song "You" is good...annnnnd, that's it.
I just don't get this kid. In a year of embarrassingly excruciating No. 1 singles, I believe Chris Brown may have turned out the worst with "Kiss Kiss." No, my memory isn't faulty: I still find Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" to be disgusting in every way, but god, at least that song makes me feel something. "Kiss Kiss," like the rest of Exclusive is innocuous to the point of being outrageous. Indistinct synth lines and beats flurry around the endlessly moving Brown, and what comes of his tongue ("That laffy taffy! That kiss kiss!") is blander than snow. It's the kind of ugly "club record" that makes me want to go home. It's indistinct enough to taste like 2007's backwash.
Some nimble producers contribute to Brown's second album (Jazze Pha, Swizz Beats, the Underdogs, Stargate), but they're just rubber-stamping -- Exclusive feels like a dumping ground for the tracks that didn't go to other artists this year. I can't blame anyone for phoning it in with Brown. He's so pointless that anything he can do, someone else can do better. In the realm of young, black entertainers, Lloyd's a better singer, Omarion has better taste in material (and is quite possibly the better dancer), Marques Houston is cuter (and thus, his sexual ambiguity is more intriguing), Ne-Yo's a better songwriter, Bow Wow's got a more convincing swag. And don't even full-package me, because Usher wraps circles around Chris Brown with more panache in his crow's feet than Chris has in his twinkle toes.
It's funny to write passionately about music, particularly pop music, because it often all seems so arbitrary. I love Britney Spears' recent work and I hate that of the more technically talented Fergie's. Homo say what? I think it's all just a matter of perception, however it falls on whatever day. (An example of rationale: Brit's woven into our pop culture and she's going to be releasing albums no matter what so instead of wasting the time pointing out her inherent pointlessness, it's more constructive to praise her work for what it is; whereas, minor blips that were Kids Inc. and Wild Orchid aside, Fergie's mega-fame is a relatively recent phenomenon -- the trip back to the bridge she crawled from under doesn't seem so far at all.) And from where I'm sitting on this very day, my 30th year on this earth in clear view as is the fact that Chris Brown's fame is utterly needless. To me. The kids love him, and I don't and that's fine. After years of dreading aging and worrying about falling out of touch with youth culture, I've hit the ground and I can't even be bothered to look up at the superstars shooting into the stratosphere. High School Musical, Billy Ray Cyrus' daughter (whatever the fuck her name is), Chris Brown...they just aren't relevant to me, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm better off for it. I've gotten to the point where I can say, "I'm too old for this shit!" and not even worry about the kids missing the reference.
Of course, I'm never so self-righteous that I can't neurotically examine where I'm headed: If I ever start freaking out about being in the fast lane to geezerdom (not yet in a youth-recapturing convertible, but hey...like all things, it's only a matter of time), I can take refuge in the post-post-retirement Jay-Z's American Gangster. The album, my favorite hip-hop LP of the year and my favorite Jigga record ever, proves that there is life after, "I'm too old for this shit." It reportedly was written and recorded in a four-week frenzy of inspiration following Jay's early viewing of the not-half-as-good film of the same name. A portrait of Jay's history of slanging and banging, you could call it Reasonable Doubt '07 and get away with it (though it's better than the comparison to Jay's slightly overrated '96 debut implies). Gangster comes on the heels of Jay's failed Kingdom Come, a record that was full of I'm-rich-bitch sentiment and had little practical application for, I don't know, 98 percent of his audience. Because Come sucked, cynics could peg Gangster as a flailing bid for renewed street cred, a good old dose of yin because yang didn't work.
For once, I'm not so cynical. Over the course of its 15 tracks and virtually chronologically, Gangster calmly charts Jay's rise from the streets to moguldom. The truth is undoubtedly stretched and twisted along the way, but it's as neat of a musical biography as I've ever heard on wax. People will wonder, why now? Why should a 37-year-old be talking about shit that happened so long ago? Is it, as the movie has been accused of, to further glamorize a life of crime (although I can't imagine leaving American Gangster feeling that Frank Lucas is anything but a despicable fuck of a guy, as the supplier of an unfailingly life-destroying drug, as a man whose livelihood was based in the continuation of the fucking Vietnam War and as, ultimately, a snitch). But I don't think glamorization is the case here. Things are a little too grave for that: Gangster is more effective than Reasonable Doubt because of the added perspective that only comes with time. It's not that Jay's wise (morally, he's still scattered and conflicted: "Now when the rules is blurred / As they is and were / What am I to do but...pray"), but at least he's wizened enough not to care about hip-hop's de facto law of ageism.
When people write their biographies early in their lives, the problem isn't that by jumping the gun, they're leaving out the chapters to come, it's that when you're sitting right up against what just happened, you don't necessarily have the time to process it. Hip-hop is so ridiculously moment-driven and trendy that it doesn't even keep people around long enough for them to develop perspective publicly. Very few people are in Jay's position -- still relevant after over 10 years in the game and still relevant as he approaches 40 -- and I love that he's taking advantage of it. He's a boss, through and through, ignoring hip-hop's ageism and, maybe even more impressively, pumping out the tracks he wants to. Diddy, who produced a lot here with Jay, has said that he approached Jay with a bunch of "blaxploitation tracks," which seems awfully quaint and turn-of-the-century. So the turn of the century happened less than 10 years ago -- that's too little time for the sound here to be retro (or, really, retro-retro). The heavy soul-sampling flared up to a Chipmunks-esque frenzy by '04 (thanks to Just Blaze and Kanye) and soon passed out. A lesser artist turning out Gangster might seem out of touch, but the thing is that as a business man, if there's one thing that Jay isn't, it's out of touch. He chose to revive this increasingly classic sound. He could have gone with Timbaland or Polow or someone who would have attempted to blast him into the future. Shit, he has enough money that he could have commissioned a spaceship and gone on a beat-quest through the galaxy. But he didn't. He's looking back and so are his tunes and he's not afraid to reference Al Green or Marvin Gaye. He doesn't even feel the need to interject, "no homo" or anything.
As much as it shakes things up, Gangster isn't an anti-hip-hop hip-hop album: even as Jay grapples with morality, he never betrays hip-hop's golden rule of self-celebration (it goes: I'll treat myself as I'd like to be treated by others). As heavy as it often is, there's plenty of fun to be had -- the horns on "Roc Boys" are jubilant enough to be gayish and Jay isn't afraid to get his 4/4 on as "Ignorant Shit" pumps a breath of life into the Isley Brothers' "Between the Sheets." I've never been convinced of Jay's supreme lyricism and I still am not: at the very least, he's a storyteller and not someone to pull quotes from. His analogies are too far on the obvious side of tangibility ("Like a mama you birthed me / Brooklyn, you nursed me") and at times, he just doesn't have enough ideas to fill 16 bars ("I ain't no ordinary nigga / Look around, this ain't what ordinary gets ya / Extraordinary figures / I'm an extraordinary nigga"). Jay often needs time to show his brilliance -- it can sprawl out over the course of a song. A cycle of 15 interconnected ones, then, seems like a perfect showcase.
Maturity, patience, taste and at least a dab of humility ("Truth be told, I had more fun when I was piss poor," he says in "Success" -- how's that for perspective?) are not generally associated with hip-hop and yet Jay-Z offers an album rich in those elements. See, what's so notable here isn't that he's an American gangster; it's that he's an artistic one. He's balking at so many codes and de facto rules and, in the process of creating such a compulsively listenable record, making his own game. It's something truly graceful to behold. Fuck the kids; this is hope for the future.