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Tyra done picked a pretty 'un this time!
I've always known that the American Music Awards is the most masturbatory major awards show our fine country has to offer, but now I have the gif to prove it:
"Every filmmaker should be so lucky to be granted a character as unique as Lil Wayne to explore," reads a slate that appears early in Adam Bhala Lough's brilliant documentary The Carter. Every viewer should be so lucky to be granted the same. The Carter is endlessly fascinating as a portrait of a chronically inebriated workaholic -- the main thing I took away from it is that it's amazing that Wayne gets any work done, let alone at the staggering rate that he does. The weirdest thing about the documentary is how likable and seemingly humble its subject is. Save one instance where he arbitrarily tells a journalist, "I don't like you" after being asked about New Orleans and jazz and how they influenced his work, he doesn't seem to have too much of an ego as rappers go (when asked, he tells Lough that he's only starting to see himself as a legend, and he downplays Tha Carter III selling a million copies in a week to an almost delusionally modest extent). If he's charmed you with his music, chances are he'll only charm you more via this movie (which he oddly went on to withdraw his support of - more delusional modesty?).
Anyway, he's awesome. Take it from these white kids:
I don't want to give too much away, because I think everyone should see it, but another thing that keeps Wayne appearing to be so humble is his ability to say the most bizarre shit like it's nothing. I guess that's part of the genius of his lyrics: they manage to feel simultaneously off-the-cuff and out-of-this-world. Wayne would be the first to admit that he's an alien, and where the truth stops and the performance starts is left deliciously ambiguous. He's such a consumable personality because he offers so much to figure out. He is a puzzle of a man, especially because so much of what he's offering is delivered via mush-mouth. It's to the extent that he's often subtitled in the film, and so I've rounded up my Top 10 subtitled quotes from the movie and posted them below. This guy is a purple gem:
Continue reading "Syrup, Topanga and an absence of jazz: The Carter" »
I remember seeing a Current Affair segment back in the late '80s about parents who bought a VHS of Cinderella for their kids, thinking it was family fare, but instead thanks to a packaging error, turned out to be an adults-only flick. The most disturbing part of this story was that once the parents realized that they had popped in a porno for their kids and promptly turned it off, the kids cried, saying they liked their movie and wanted it back on.
Ugh. That is so fucked up, and I'd hate for it to happen again. Scarily: it could. Last week, Disney/Pixar released to the home-viewing market Up, their CGI-animated colorfest that just happens to share a name with a 1976 fuckfest by Russ Meyer (the latter adds an exclamation mark just to convey how excited it is to exist). It would seem that an animated film about a man who saves his life from the shadows of the twilight years by attaching thousands of balloons to his house, sailing to a far-off land and saving a rare bird species from exploitation has little in common with a who-killed-Hitler murder mystery that's a thinly veiled excuse to showcase people having (softcore but graphic) simulated sex while Kitten Natividad narrates it all as the one-woman Greek chorus. However, there are more similarities than you might think. So come, let's explore the two via a compare-and-contrast session. If nothing else, this is so you don't get the two films mixed up. I never want you to have to deal with a little one who walks up and informs you, "I'd like to strap you on sometime."
(I thought about making this safe for work, but it'd be pretty fucking impossible since I'm talking about a Meyer indie. Sorry, it's strictly fake-dickly and NSFW up in here...)
Alternate punny post title:
"Imp interrupted." Or "Impterrupted", even. Or, hey, how 'bout, "The evil, dead"? God, a double elimination yields an embarrassment of riches. Or an embarrassment of bitches, even. Hey, there goes another one. I'm like Lionel Richie: I can't slow down.
I had one of those beautiful moments a few weeks ago where it seemed like every new piece of music I listened to I loved. And I listened and listened and meant to write and then didn't, and now the shit is old news in Internet time and it's getting ready to be replaced by a new batch in my rotation. It's sad whenever the kind of permanent transience that defines my listening habits is spelled out like that, but hey, it's how I live. And love.
Anyway, I've got something to say! (About some albums and singles and shit.) Before they're totally irrelevant (i.e. two weeks old)...
I would be so frustrated right now if I were Amerie. With the help of producer Wiz the Buchanan, she created "Why R U," a calculus problem of a pop song that starts at the same time in two different directions (the explosive agitation we expect from her, and a new old-school hip-hop soul angle courtesy of a sample from Ultramagnetic MCs' "Ego Tripping" and so much more), and meets in a place that apparently only makes sense in her head, if the song's poor performance on any chart is an indication. This song, like the rest of In Love & War, save two tracks (the drab "The Flowers" and the "We Belong Together" rewrite "Dear John"), is fucking brilliant. At this point, the retreads of "1 Thing" that she's so fond of doing (the first five tracks fall under this umbrella) feel more like the cultivation of a style (frenetic retroism) than a desperate clinging to the past. (In retrospect, the fact that "1 Thing" was so huge was a happy accident -- in the scheme of R&B this decade, it was a sonic fluke.) The more straightforward R&B cuts that round out the album are arguably even better. "Pretty Brown" borrows heavily from Mint Condition's 90's classic "Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)" (as full-band R&B, this was a "1 Thing"-like commercial fluke, come to think of it), but it only uses a few weird bits of its source, so that it seems more like a re-edit than a remake. "Different People" is the kind of grimy heartache that inhabited Mary J. Blige's My Life. Don't even get me started on "Swag Back," which braids Southern 808 flourishes with keyboards Whitesnake would covet and a main beat that shuffles like Siouxsie & the Banshees' "Kiss Them for Me." Mind-blowing.
Not that any of it matters from a commercial perspective. This will be ignored by radio and the few people left who buy CD. It's frustrating because Amerie displays her work ethic with every yelp, grunt and lift-off into the inevitably effervescent chorus. She is a powerhouse by trade. On her last album, she informed us, "I do it 'cause I love it." Let's hope that love never dies, because really, it's all she's got.
