fourfour

Black Eyed poop

If you remove all the current pop trends that inform Black Eyed Peas' The E.N.D. -- the raging house beats, the electro (even though it didn't sound particularly fresh when Missy did it four years ago with "Lose Control"), the 808s and heartbreaks, the lightly Southern-fried boom-clap, the Baltimore shuffle, the '80s retrosim ("Footloose" sample, anyone? Didn't think so.), the Autotune, the filters, the stompy club-ification of Top 40-ready rock -- there would be nothing left. Nothing, that is, but will.i.am saying, “Let’s do it let’s do it let’s do it let’s do it and do it and do it let’s live it up and do it and do it and do it do it do it let’s do it let’s do it let’s do it.” Nothing but Fergie intoning in a half-assed patois, “Bitches on my dick, oh no, they on my dildo!”

Fucking Fergie, whose tastelessness trumps her talent at every turn. Fucking Fergie, who manages to over-sing a chorus that demands to be over-sung ("People in the place! If you wanna get down! Put your hands in the air! will.i.am drop the beat now!"). Fucking Fergie, who apparently has not been sat down yet by someone whose opinion she trusts to be told, "STOP RAPPING. YOU FUCKING SUCK. FEMALE RAP IS IN SUCH A HORRIBLE PLACE AND AS THE MOST VISIBLE FEMALE WHO RAPS, YOU AREN'T HELPING MATTERS YOU FLOWLESS POSEUR." The idea that she shares space on this album with Roxanne Shanté (whose Biz Markie collabo "Def Fresh Crew" is sampled in the embarrassing-even-for-BEP "Ring-a-Ling") should make me nauseated or sad or homicidal, but mostly it makes me glad that there is now something that neatly illustrates the tumble women have taken in hip-hop over the past 25 years. Saves the explanation time, you know?

The E.N.D. is dance music for people with no interest in dancing, but it's too opportunistically commercial to work as evangelism. Maybe that's why I take such offense to it and don't write it off as mediocrity in motion, as I would so much of its ilk. I care about house music like it's a person; will.i.am and his goons clearly don't if their take on it is this flavorless. Certainly they won't once the fascination with the 4/4 beat once again dies down. It will not be surprising if it turns out that they aided its demise, that The E.N.D. is the beginning of the end. With 10 out of the 15 tracks here pumping like dispassionate pistons, it at least feels like overkill. (That said, I will concede that "Meet Me Halfway" manages to be lovely, which is something that the Eurohouse it apes rarely is.)

After the party jams, so mindless they make your typical frat kegger seem like something passed down from Dorothy Parker, there's some even worse crap that attempts to be socially conscious because the Black Eyed Peas do that sometimes I guess? In "Now Generation," we're told, "We are the now generation / We are the generation now / This is the now generation / This is the generation now." Translation: we're fucked. The song sounds like a mix of "We Didn't Start the Fire" and those fakey Juno Comcast commercials (which at last answered the burning question of how to make Kimya Dawson more maddeningly cloying: create a fake Kimya Dawson!). I think my favorite line is, "All about the http, you're a P.C., I'm a Mac." But who can be sure when the song also offers the gem, "Checkin' my account, loggin' in and loggin' out." This song sounds like the soundtrack a fake-rap instructional video for people who haven't been paying attention to the past 10 years, be it because of coma or that they just can't get their heads out of their ass. The Bob Sinclar rip-off (and Bob Sinclair in his current state is nothing to aspire to) "One Tribe" is worse, but you probably got that already from its name! It is here that will.i.am hopes for color-blindness where race relations are concerned, despite the culture-obliterating consequences of that and the fact that it's, you know, impossible since we're not fucking blind! will suggests we go to a place "where the language is unity." He then suggests Pangaea, to which I say: OK, let's go. You go first, we'll follow. Promise. His ultimate answer to curing society's problems? "Let's catch amnesia!" Wouldn't just shooting ourselves in the head be easier?

Here's a tip: go through the ear.

Yeah, so about that song...

I mentioned earlier this week that thanks to prolonged exposure to Soulja Boy Tell 'Em's "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" (via L.A. radio), the song is permanently lodged in my head. I complained about it, but, in fact, I not-so-secretly love it. And I know that's wrong. Soulja Boy Tell 'Em is a talentless, toxic waste of space, who couldn't even come up with a coherent moniker. Seriously, is it a name or a command, and if it's the latter, who's Soulja Boy telling to tell 'em? Us? Himself? And what are we supposed to tell 'em? That he's Soulja Boy? He could have done that himself by choosing a simpler name! In fact, I don't want to tell 'em anything because it all seems so unclear. I might make a mistake. I'm not expert in these Soulja Boy matters.

And yet, I don't hate myself for loving "Kiss," despite the fact that it is maybe the stupidest song this side of Flo Rida. "Baby, you know that I miss you / I wanna get wit' you / Tonight, but I cannot baby girl and that's the issue," sings anonoteen Sammie. I'm really glad he explains what the issue is, because I really wouldn't have gotten it otherwise. I seriously would be sitting in traffic, screaming at my radio, "What's the issue?" without Sammie. So, thanks Sammie. I appreciate it so much that I'll tell 'em for you. Whatever you want, I'll tell 'em.

Soulja Boy's raps (if you want to call them that, and if you're like me, you don't) are devoid of ideas enough to make Sammie sound like Thomas Edison. "Baby, I know that you like me / You my future wifey / Soulja Boy Tell 'Em, yeah! / You can be my Bonnie..." he sing-songs, making narcissism seem less like a disorder and more like a syndrome (as in Tourette) as he drops his (did I mention?) really fucking stupid moniker for no reason beyond reminding us how stupid it is. "I can be your Clyde / You can be my wife," he continues, which: really? I can be your wife? Because I thought that "You my future wifey" already implied permission, but I suppose no amount of commanding is enough from a manchild who calls himself, in case you need reminding, Soulja Boy Tell 'Em. "Baby, I been thinkin' lately / So much about you / Everything about you / I like, yeah, I love it," he says, and then later, "I miss ya / I miss ya / I miss ya / I really wanna kiss ya, but I cain't." In these examples Soulja Boy Tell 'Em is using repetition for effect. The effect just happens to be more support of the notion that he is an idiot with nothing to say. And then, the bridge: "She call my phone like, 'Dah-dah-dahdahdahdahdah-dah Dahdahdahdahdah-dah Dahdahdahdahdah," he intones, proving that he doesn't even have the musical talent to imitate a ringtone worth illegally downloading.

I'm dogging this hard after professing my love for it, but that's the point. When you think as much as I do about all the pop culture that passes through your senses, there's something wonderfully refreshing about surrendering to the charms of something you know is terrible. There's something primal and basic about loving a piece of shit like this: like oxygen, you take the pop song in and it does what it's supposed to and you don't have to think about it. (The guttural bass line that contrasts with the bubblegum nature of the song, as well as the insanely catchy chorus don't hurt, either.) To call "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" mindless seems almost too obvious, but it's worth doing since this song does stupid particularly well: it makes sense that someone dumb enough to believe that a kiss can be placed through the phone would be dumb enough to rap any and all of the lines quoted above. Bravo, Soulja Boy! You really told us.

Making sense of Kanye

I wish I could quit Kanye, but the fact of the matter is that his whims and tantrums will never not be fascinating to me. Even if I'm gagging with distaste, I'm still paying attention, and so, like a kicking and screaming child, Kanye wins. I had many issues with the words he spoke in the February cover story of Vibe, and instead of doing my usual complaining-about-Kanye rant, I decided a different approach. I know the writer of the piece, Sean Fennessey, so I got on the phone for a discussion about the piece -- an interview on the interview, if you will -- as well as the man himself. "Rappers just never unravel, ever," says Sean on Kanye's...specialness. For better or worse, I'm captivated for the same reason.

[I know that the posting of this could have been a bit more timely, as the interview's been out for a while, but whatever, I was sick last week and napping was always a more attractive alternative to transcribing. Regardless, I still feel like this stuff is relevant. It's not like Kanye or his immaturity are going anywhere, you know?]

fourfour's 44+ reasons to love 2008 (Part 2 - 34-25)

It continues.

fourfour's 44+ reasons to love 2008 (Part 1 - 44-35)

I tend to bemoan list-making, when I'm asked to do so. And yet, here I am compiling not just a Top 10 singles/albums/movies/moments/boys that made me swoon of the past year, but a 'cross-the-board, mixed-media uber-list of my favorite things about 2008. Maybe it's that I'm getting older (like, monumentally so), maybe it's that I'm getting easier to amuse, or maybe it's just that 2008 was brimming with noteworthy pop culture, but whatever the case (even though I think it's more the latter than anything), something's telling me to organize my year in entertainment into a countdown. So that's what I'm doing this week: 10 items per day, except for Friday, which will carry the Top 4 (and maybe a few things I hated about this year, as well). A lot of what shows up shouldn't be surprising, but I'm also going to take the opportunity to cover some stuff I loved but never got around to writing about or felt that my take didn't deviate enough from popular opinion to warrant sharing. It maybe still doesn't, but hey, hindsight's 20/20 so I'm gonna hold onto that, just like I expect you to hold onto that grain of salt you should always take with lists in general and me specifically. Because if 2008 has taught me anything, it's that the more things change, the more comfort there is to be taken in cliches.

Actually, I already knew that before 2008, but whatever.

You have suffered an emotional shock

At last, it is impossible to separate Kanye West's arrogance from his music. I'm assuming that's what people do, anyway, when they remain interested in his music despite his frequent temper tantrums, his nauseating emotional investment in meaningless award shows and his delusions of critical exemption. Prior to his fourth album, 808s and Heartbreaks, you could always chalk up any musical cockiness to Kanye's chosen territory: hip-hop's built on boasting. If you're rapping and not bragging, you're Skee-Lo. No such separation is possible on Heartbreaks, wherein hubris is as essential a component as the drum machine and remorse named in the album's title. It's hubris that drives a man with a voice as unremarkable as Kanye's to sing, and hubris makes a hook-writer leap to full-fledged pop songs.

But if it were all ego, Heartbreaks would be easy to dismiss, and it simply is not. It's sort of a sonic litmus test: you're either on board with Kanye's weird artistic detour or you aren't (in a broader scope: you either trust that pop music has room to breathe and stay relevant, or you don't). It's the album to have an opinon on right now: no matter where people's taste tends to roam, I find myself interested in what they think of this thing. In a way, it's like one of Kanye's frequent public fits in hard-copy form -- it's hard to turn away from and an undoubtedly conscious byproduct is its conduciveness to controversy. Yes, this album is a temper tantrum...except for the fact that it is tempered.

There's a lot of that kind of contradiction here. The same way thorns snake around cheesy heart tattoos, so winds the aforementioned hubris around the album's actual beating human heart. And yeah, even though about 75 percent of these songs are just dressed-up iterations of a message that goes, "I'm sad," I buy it all -- it's too stubborn, too one-note and, consequently, too flawed to be anything less than believable. Like a Björk album (I'm thinking the icy Homogenic, in particular), Heartbreaks is immaculately and intensely conceived, and yet, it's so simple-sounding. It is artistically indulgent, yet ultimately humble. It's pride-driven and yet bounding with insecurity. It walks the line between staunch minimalism and necessary sparseness. Clearly, an album with pulsing, direct 808s, occasional piano and strings, bleepy synths (sometimes sounding like heart monitors, just in case you don't get it that his heart is broken), vocal Autotuning and choral "aaahs" is what Kanye's going for. But is he going for it because he's so out of his element that he can't do much more?

No matter really, because his simplicity works in the same way that M.I.A.'s often does: the lack of virtuosity defines the aesthetic but who the fuck cares about all that because it's catchy as hell. A lot of Kanye's melodies are as unfettered and limited in range as typical contemporary pop, but there's something about his inability to sing well that gives them a chanty charm beyond standard Top 40 fare. A glaring exception is my favorite track, "RoboCop," which feels less sing-songy and more song-songy than most of what's here (its strings are positively symphonic). It loses no effect upon repeat listens that reveal lyrics that are muddled as hell. (Really: is he calling his object of waning interest "RoboCop" because she's up late at night like she's on patrol? He's the one who keeps saying, "Drop it," and thus sounds way more like RoboCop to me. Maybe he doesn't want a RoboCop because he's already a RoboCop and dating another would be, like, robogay? Robosexual?)

And though the Autotune only makes the whiny bitch that Kanye is sound more like a mosquito, it comes dripping with pathos: my interpretation is that the main reason he threw that shit on there as a method of socially acceptable detachment. It could be that as trite as Heartbeats' lyrics are ("When I grab your neck, I touch your soul / Take off your cool, then lose control"), they're still too personal and raw to sing directly. A very real part of the human experience, after all, is being clichéd.

Oh yeah, and also 'cause Autotune sells. Do not underestimate Kanye's ability to wag tongues and completely embody what it means to make pop art. Heartbeats has quite the angle. He's marketing obtuseness, and all signs point to public enthusaism. I'm sure he's extremely proud, and I'm not sure I can blame him.

T.I.: Crisis icon

I don't know if I'll have my job this time next year, if the building I report to everyday will have been shelled, if the city that building's in will still have running water, if the home I'm confined to for lack of having anything to warrant leaving will have Internet access or even electricity. That sounds dramatic, but so does so much of the shit I read about what could be, and I'm doing the best I can to cope with the unfathomable. As a result, I find myself envying T.I., but it has little to do with how much better than me he'll fare in the face of economic catastrophe (though there is always that, as he's the type of guy who's like, "Sheet, what the fuck is a million bucks?"). Mostly, my jealousy comes from T.I.' s certainty in our age of uncertainty. On his sixth album, Paper Trail, he's staring down a year's worth of jail time after pleading guilty to weapons charges earlier this year. He knows exactly what kind of temporary misery he faces and responds to it accordingly. "Pain's a small thing to a giant," says the future inmate while smiling with his larynx. The effect is incredibly comforting.

T.I. is a picture of grace under firestorm, and I didn't know he had such strong character in him. In fact, I didn't know he had much of anything besides ego in him after he spent his last album, T.I. vs. T.I.P., up his own ass. While the infinitely superior Paper Trail is again devoted to the inner workings of Clifford Harris, the death of his friend Philant Johnson and his subsequent conviction have given him the gift of perspective. Few things are as constructive as spinning art from tragedy, and it's a joyous occasion when something as wonderful and emotionally rounded as Paper Trail comes to exist. The album is a microcosm of creative flourishing, a sign of its time not unlike that which arose during the Great Depression. It's not Grapes of Wrath or anything, but who wants depressing at a time of possible depression?

And that's the thing: even when he's verbally scoping the topic of his arrest and jail time with the precision of a sharpshooter, as on "Ready for Whatever," T.I. doesn't wallow. He doesn't ask for sympathy, he just explains in the most lucid terms why a millionaire rapper would put himself in the position of possessing illegal firearms in the first place (if his friend Johnson were strapped at the time of his death, it would have given him a fighting chance, and that idea pushed T.I. beyond the point of rationality). The organ-infused "No Matter What" pumps your heart instead of pulling its strings (a minor distinction, surely). From someone with a lesser bark, all of its keep-on-keepin'-on-in' ("Make the impossible possible / Even when winning's illogical, losing's still far from optional") would sound excruciating. T.I.'s heightened sensitivity in the context of such bravado, instead is a feat. (Regarding that bravado, the word "swagger" is practically his mantra here. It's to the point where talking about swagger is an essential part of his swagger.) Even the lies that bust out of the ode to an incarcerated dude "You Ain't Missin' Nothin'," ("You only do two days in the joint: the day you get locked up and the day you go home"; "You know the club on hold and the broads on pause / You get home, it's gonna be waitin' on y'all") feel valid because they're driven by earnestness. The unmistakable truth is that T.I.'s not afraid to be vulnerable, because he's had his vulnerable ass handed to him. You can't see the tears running down his eyes, so he makes his songs cry.

There are tracks that simply sparkle in the face of adversity like the Ludacris-featuring, best T.I. song ever, "On Top of the World," in which the 808 snares breathe new life, as they're allowed to kick as fast as noisemakers on New Year's Eve. "Live Your Life" (which has grown on me considerably since the VMAs) celebrates existence with the joy that only wordlessness can ("Hey-ay-uh-ay-uh-ay!"). And as T.I. engages in progressing (he, for example, murders his gangster-cliche tendencies in "Dead and Gone") so does his music -- "World" and "Life" are in major keys (and least, they sound like it to me), which isn't common for rap, let alone Southern rap. There's a sonic freshness here that suggests that problem with Southern rap maybe has less to do with 808-sameiness and more to do with its perma-scowl. When that unsmiling vibe is taken to the monotonous degree of something like Young Jeezy's piss-poor The Recession, it feels as cold and punishing as metal. It is what it is, but it's such a drag in the process.

And don't get me wrong, Trail and its creator are far from perfect. T.I.'s full of contradiction and sometimes painfully lacking in self-awareness. In "You Ain't Missin' Nothing" he says, "The time do itself, all you gotta do is show up," and then seconds later: "Do the time, homeboy, don't let the time do you." There's too much bitching about fame. On a major-label rap album, it comes off as frivolous as bitching about the cost of gas in a Humvee. And sometimes that swagger is just silliness realized: he's too butch to dance, but he's not too hard to take his Luis Vuitton and Gucci rags out and wave them to the music? Does he not realize how much gayer that looks?

But it's this imperfection that makes his coping relatable. He may go extra with it, but he's ultimately an everydude. T.I. maps out very practical ways of handling strife from catharsis in complaining ("My Life, Your Entertainment") to reliance on friends ("Swagga Like Us" with Kanye, Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne) to the comforts of sex ("Porn Star" and "Whatever You Like," the latter of which would be the rap ballad of the decade were it, you know, rapped -- instead, here's M.I.A.'s sing-songy-rappy-chanty style commercially realized). Sure, on Paper Trail, the recession is something to just gloat about ("High as gas is, the country at war and people are starvin' / And I pay a million dollars for Ferrari's, retarded, huh?"). It makes his ultimate social consciousness seem...well, unconscious. That sounds stupid and impossible, and yet, the man's words soothe. Maybe T.I.'s positiveness, his sensitivity, his rationale are no match for our to-be-ravaged society. But for now, I'm hopeful that he'll conquer his tragedy unscathed and we'll follow his lead.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to make it through. You know?

The darker knight

The boldest thing about the release of Nas' untitled ninth studio album has nothing to do with the word "nigger" -- instead, it's the timing. Nas' no-name disc (which I realize is more easily referred to as Untitled, except that misses his point entirely) arrives during a week when it's hard to think about any piece of pop culture besides The Dark Knight. But there Nas is, swooping into consciousness four days before the caped crusader, diverting some attention from 'round-the-clock superhero hype and Heath Ledger's still-unfurling eulogy. I guess that makes him a hero.

He thinks so, too. Nas comes with his N blazing (instead of on his chest, it's lashed on his back), the blood of a martyr ("I always put myself in a sacrificial position") and his head puffed up with importance ("The people need something to believe in," he says in reference to himself). The disc's first real single has all the bombast of a TV theme song, and if you're still not getting it, it's titled "Hero." (Incidentally, it's also the most energizing commercial hip-hop track I've heard all year, and Nas' best single since "If I Ruled the World." I don't know about that "behind every great man, there is a great woman" shit, but there's often a fantastic female singer backing Nas up on his best singles. Then it was Lauryn; now it's Kerri Hilson.)

At least he puts his all into the role. Regardless of release-date circumstance, you could fill caves with the similarities between Nas and Batman. On this album Nas battles villains who possess irrational evil -- busybody haters, racists and Fox. It's hard to root against him -- his heroism is virtually archetypal. Like Batman, who became one of the bats that haunted his childhood, Nas reclaims what oppresses him on an album that was scrubbed of its Nigger title, but not its theme (there's a lot of metadiscourse happening, but the most beautifully phrased, win-any-argument-with-this sentiment occurs in "Y'all My Niggas": "We changed the basis of derogatory phrases / And I say it's quite amazing / The use the ghetto terms developed our own language / No matter where it came from / It's celebrated now people are mad if they ain't one"). He takes the therianthropy to an even more literal extreme on "Project Roach" when he paints himself as that titular insect. His moves for common good are rooted in the personal - you wouldn't have too hard a time arguing that he's primarily motivated by selfishness. Nonetheless, he's obsessed with justice (a particularly eloquent example from "America": "Too many rappers, athletes, and actors / But not enough niggas in NASA / Who give you the latest dances, trends, and fashion? / But when it comes to residuals, they look past us"). Y so serious, Nas-man? Because if he isn't, who will be?

And like Batman, Nas uses a mix of his birthright (in his case, not a billion-dollar empire but street smarts) and the resources he's accumulated ("I use Viacom as my firearm") to complete his self-appointed task. When he's on, as is the case for so much of this album, the results are the stuff of breathtaking spectacle. His rapid-fire spitting in "Breathe" is enough to make me ooh and ah: "I'm fresh out of city housing / Ain't have too many options / Pennies on a pension or penitentiary-bounded / Plenty Henny in me / Envy was simply they trend see / My enemy was every hater that was bigger than me." He smacks you upside the head with cleverness in "Sly Fox": "The Fox has a bushy tail / And Bush tells / Lies and foxtrots / So I don't know what's real." And pulls associations out with his portrait of ghetto life in "N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave and the Master)" that are so sharp, you don't know what hit you: "Girls dye their hair with Kool-Aid / They gave us lemons, we made lemonade." His toys are remarkable, but then of course they are coming from someone who told us all those years back that he was, "Holdin' an M-16 / See, wit' the pen I'm extreme."

Maybe the most vital comparison to Batman is that even though he's reliably impressive, Nas is still explicitly mortal. He's obsessed with people's perception of him, as evidenced in his repeated references to criticism over his love for flossing jewelry. He seems completely unaware of the age-old battle against the patriarchy (in a spoken interlude just before the album's last song, he says with no sense of context, "I think it's just been recent where everybody started to feel like there was an elite group that runs everything and everybody else was sheep, ignorant, making all ethnicities, colors and creeds niggas"). He's even capable of performing acts that he rages against: in "Testify," he reveals prejudice for his fans "that life way out in safe suburbia," for no discernible reason beyond the temporarily release that catharsis brings. See, no matter how heroic and strong and well-equipped, he can still fuck up and fall off the buildings that he climbs upon.

And that's always the way it's been, as we've watched him fail album after album to deliver a worthy follow-up to Illmatic. Maybe, as with Batman, we were just watching him train for all those years. It could be fleeting, but it certainly feels like his career has been leading up to this moment. Nas' untitled record isn't perfect -- there's a palpable sense of it being watered down (like SFJ says, where's "Be a Nigger, Too"?), but then it's a little silly shackle something as dark and violent as Batman in PG-13 constraints, too (and at least Nas got his R-rated say with the more furious, less P.C. The Nigger Tape, which came out earlier this year).

You can even view Nas' untitled album as a parallel to The Dark Knight itself, though I haven't seen the latter yet (Friday night!). Both obviously aspire to be more sophisticated renderings of a story we all know. And, just like the early reviews indicate that The Dark Knight wants to be more than a superhero movie, so does Nas' disc want to be more than just a rap album: it functions even better as polemic, a conversation piece, a conduit for discourse. As such, it is more focused on Nas' primary strengths (lyricism and provocation) than yet another paltry, album-long attempt at hit-making. It's about time that someone of Nas' talent and clout took this sort of bold move, to talk about the shit that needs to be talked about, regardless of how it ends up selling. We've known all along that Nas is one of the greatest rappers alive, but this album proves that it's not who you are underneath -- it's what you do that defines you.

Better than heaven

Completely obsessed with this:

In true mash-up style, Swizz Beatz taken two songs with similar names and put them together: Alicia Keys' stomach-turning "Teenage Love Affair" (I seriously can't believe that anyone likes it in its original form) and Slick Rick's classic "Teenage Love." But the results are much greater than just impressive pop-culture referencing. What once sounded like a saccharine take on '50s jukebox favorites (with none of the character-boosting scratchiness) in Keys' first go 'round, now sounds like plausible nostalgia -- Keys wasn't a teen in '88, but at least she was, you know, alive. For the sake of familiarity, LL Cool J plays himself (immediately referencing "I Need Love") and former Def Jam labelmate Slick Rick, though I doubt today's kids even know the difference. They probably don't even know who Slick Rick is. You know how teenagers are!

The real credit goes to Keys, who takes no shorts in stepping up to Swizzie's brilliant idea, rerecorded vocals and all. I had no idea that she was down enough to sing over something this hip-hop -- the original track is barely touched (as far as I can tell, it's merely been sped up slightly) and she's, like, fluttering over boom-bap. As Michaelangelo Matos' ingenious review of the equally ingenious compilation Gold: New Jack Swing points out, it was only at new jack swing that rap and R&B did meet. Back then, you just did not hear people singing over straight hip-hop beats (when "Teenage Love" was out, Mary J. Blige's What's the 411?, the album that pretty much changed the musical world forever, was still four years away). All this is to say that there's a sort of anachronistic chic going on here. And like using an Atari joystick as a CD spindle, it works almost eerily well. This record is perfect.

One to rule them all

Monday night, I dreamed that an entire Jeopardy! category was devoted to Lil Wayne. I only got through the first two answers (whose questions were: What is Carter? and Who is Baby?) before my imagination gave up, but holy shit was it amazing to hear Alex Trebek say, "Weezy F. Baby," when he read off the full name of the category. That's an ridiculous notion, I know ("I have no brain, I'm retarded. We are not the same, I'm a Martian."), but after watching Wayne move six figures of Tha Carter III its first week out in ailing '08, I'm thinking anything's possible. Jeopardy! category. Vice presidential nomination (the real dream ticket?). The utterance of the phrase, "Yes, homo." Anything. This is not to express shock over Wayne's success, but awe over his power. Like his friend Robin Thicke, he can reach the sky.

"There's no logical answer," says Universal Motown President Sylvia Rhone on Wayne's ability to fly off shelves. But if we think hard enough, we can take a stab at one. The last album to sell within striking distance of six figures its first week out was Graduation by Kanye West, who, like Wayne, is a rapper with across-the-board appeal. The pop freaks love him, the snobs love him, the hip-hop listeners who probably don't pay much mind to the bigger picture love him. Kanye, after all, is safe. Even his flashes of outrageousness ("Heard they'd do anything for a Klondike / Well, I'd do anything for a blonde dyke," and backstage tantrums, alike) wash right into the middle of the road. At his most cerebral, Kanye's articulate to a fault, and that articulation combined with his soulful, often live, sound makes for an nonthreatening package. Do not be surprised if someday in the future, Kanye's material is considered easy listening.

But Wayne goes hard! And what's more, he goes everywhere. What's thrilling about him is his intellectual unpredictability. He cold gets dumb ("Swagger tighter than a yeast infection / Fly, go hard like geese erection") and then spits associations so complicated, they fold on themselves so much that they almost threaten the time-space continuum ("Fuck we / I’m all about oui like Paris / Hilton presidential suite already / I’m richer than Nicole / And I’m a Lion like her daddy"). He's like any cash-obsessed rapper flinging-money around, but alternately finds time to chin-stroke and properly observe (with a seeming straight face), "Rather unhuman, I should say," when talking about Al Sharpton's public behavior. He's sometimes so right ("Repetition is the father of learnin'") and sometimes so wrong ("I'm a venereal disease like a menstrual bleed"). You get the feeling that he's in total control as he weaves his complex metaphors ("Don’t you ever fix your lips unless you ‘bout to suck my dick, bitch / Swallow my words, taste my thoughts, and if it’s too nasty, spit it back at me"), but there are also what seem like wild tics, especially when he's at his most potentially offensive (in "Mrs. Officer": "And I beat it like a cop, Rodney King, baby, yeah I beat it like a cop / beat it like a cop, Rodney King, baby, said, beat it like a cop,"; and again in the bonus track "Whip It": "I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave / Yes, I whip it like a slave / Yes, I whip it like a slave / I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave / Yep I whip it like a slave, like a motherfuckin' slave..."). If Kanye is this one preppy thing to all people, Wayne is as close as it gets to being all things to all people. Cha-ching.

To me, he's primarily a cultural critic flyer than Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. He's capable of Godfather IIing one of the best pop songs of last year: his (unofficial) sequel to Beyonce's "Irreplaceable," the Babyface-featuring "Comfortable," is better than the original. And who else has the wit, cultural savvy and diabolical sense of humor to strip the phrase "fuck the police" of all the rage associated with it to create a song about...fucking the police, literally (the aforementioned "Mrs. Officer")? Tha Carter III isn't perfect -- there's some boring-ish money rap set to tinny 808s that sounded rusty even two years ago. And then, to make it worse, there's the contemporary pop equivalent of a pissing contest: an Auto-Tuned duet with T-Pain.

But Wayne's verbal chest-puffing serves to make his frequent bouts of sensitivity so much more poignant. In "Tie My Hands," Wayne raps about there being a silver lining in the dark cloud over New Orleans that was Hurricane Katrina. The final result is his demonstration that a song can be that very silver lining. "Tie" is as gloriously gentle as relief should be. Elsewhere, Wayne often qualifies his sensitivity or eccentricity with, "No homo," which is vaguely offensive to me as a gay man and as a linguistic trend-watcher (enough already, you know?). But whatever, I forgive it. I don't think he's being hateful, and I know that the collective sexuality of straight men is so sensitive that it might need a crutch every so often. If that's what it takes for the testosterone-laden to express vulnerability, so be it. Boys will be boys will be fragile.

Plus, the phrase has practical usage, as in, I love Wayne, no homo. But my penis is about the only thing he doesn't stimulate. And yeah, I know it's trite as a white blogger to be big-upping Wayne. I'm joining a years-long chorus. But I don't give a fuck: I'm happy to be part of the group. I'm happy to be one of a milli. For once, I'm happy to be a cliché. Leave the radical eccentricity to Wayne, you know? He's earned it.