Man, I will say this, the funniest joke I ever heard Tracy [Morgan] say during a stand-up was, ‘C’mon man, I think gay people are too sensitive. If you can take a dick, you can take a joke.’ [Cracks up laughing.] That shit was funny to me. And it’s kind of true.’ While T.I. makes clear that he supports anyone’s sexual preference, he then connects, in his opinion, a current oversensitivity among gay people with a consequential and ironic offense of the First Amendment. “They’re like,‘If you have an opinion against us, we’re gonna shut you down.’ ... That’s not American. If you’re gay you should have the right to be gay in peace, and if you’re against it you should have the right to be against it in peace.’ [Vibe]
- That five days after first reading about it, I'm still thinking about it.
Continue reading "Things I hate about the part of T.I.'s Vibe story about gay people" »
Just so you know what you're getting into, Pitbull (with the help of Akon) warns that he is not Mr. Right, but he can be Mr. Right Now. I think that is very polite! Here are some things that Mr. Right Now aka Mr. Worldwide will to do you (but, I'm guessing, only if you want):
- Make you his queen
- Love you "endless" [sic]
- Make sure your peach feels peachy
- Steal your heart
- Play night and day
- Unsnap your bra (with his teeth)
- Hit the spot (ding, ding, ding)
- Pop your clutch
Pitbull's sixth full-length, Planet Pit, is the most respectful bit of extended lewdness that I've ever experienced. His sexual prowess is based on how much pleasure he can provoke. After listening to him go on for an hour, I have no sense of this man's penis or even his own preferences because they are, per his on-record character, dependent on the taste of the woman he's inevitably trying to please. The wildest he gets is when he engages in the occasional threesome, but that's ultimately the product of an open mind ("Other girls want my girl, and I think that's cool"). He's so giving that he's practically a bottom. He makes me swoon.
I'm not the target audience for his come-ons, but his voice, the way purrs and then pinches into a scratch, is the sexiest in music today. It's the larynx's answer to squinting eyes. That it might flip into Spanish makes it even sexier. I do not mean to exoticize this Cuban American -- I only mean to say that his calculated seduction hits the spot, ding, ding, ding. (I do realize that his Lothario character could just be playing a character to woo women with counterfeit compassion.) That he surrounds himself with those prone to flights of fancy (Ne-Yo doing some sweet-booty crooning on the lovable "Give Me Everything," Marc Anthony going to freestyle levels of drama on "Rain Over Me," Chris Brown straining while delivering what amounts to a jingle on "International Love") is somewhat like a moderately attractive woman deliberately choosing homely friends -- maybe it's cheap, but the effect only makes him look better.
As a whole, Planet Pit is as ravishing as its star. It's mostly house with some outer genre flourishes (merengue, Beetle Juice among them), but its uncomplicated percussion designs remind me of '08 and '09, when house was just starting to penetrate pop music again, and sounded accordingly naive and tentative (instead of blowing you out with brick waveforms and crunching polyrhythms, as it does now all over Top 40 radio). Save some bongo fluttering, Pit's tracks star the stomp and the beats are as satisfying as really great 25-cent rubber balls you buy at the supermarket. (The sole freestyle oriented track, "Where Do We Go," which was unexpectedly, bizarrely produced by '90s house god Marc Kinchen, is excepted.) As opposed to so many other contemporary pop-house tracks, Pit doesn't belabor club talk (in fact, the only person to set such a scene explicitly is one of the guests on "Took My Love" -- Vein, perhaps?). That he is in the club is inevitable, either because he's been there for a while now or when you're having as great of a time as he is, the world is your club (and he has, per constant reminders, gone global).
Besides, Planet Pit is mostly about private matters, and I love the idea of house music as sex music. It's insistent and at a much more exciting tempo than, say, "You Are My Lady" (not that "You Are My Lady" isn't wonderful however you want to use it). It's also a way of making house more matter-of-fact than the bottle-service propaganda it so often tends to be. You don't have to mention the club to get played in one, and that Pitbull realizes that makes him sound smarter than so many of his contemporaries. Strange but true!
In last week's New York Times review, Jon Caramanica wrote that Planet Pit "suggests the full-fledged arrival of a new strain of hip-house." The thought crossed my mind, as well, although serious hip-house artists like those on DJ International were serious about hip-house and Pitbull is kind of a clown. Yes, his voice is great and many of his lines are impressively dumb clever ("Mami, you the Internet / And I'm lookin' for a download"), but he's having too much fun to settle down (god help you when he does and pukes out the "Airplanes" rip-off "Castle Made of Sand" alongside Kelly Rowland). Often lasting only as long as 8 bars and doing much of his own hyping ("Now go, stop, drop, pause..." he moans on the brilliantly literal "Pause"), he seems more like the best house music guest rapper of all time (my favs are those on "Finally" and "Too Blind to See It"). Or maybe he puts Snap, Black Box, Culture Beat, Captain Hollywood Project, et. al., to shame and emerges as the best Eurohouse rapper of all time. That would, after all, be pretty worldwide of him.
By the way while I'm taking music, my Beyoncé 4 review is up at the Village Voice now, and also I recently did a Q&A with Pete Hammond that was extremely enjoyable to conduct!
I recently unearthed some old tapes (and by "some," I mean "hundreds")...and now you have to pay! Kidding. Ignore this all you want. In this post are very specific relics from a very specific childhood: six mixes worth of songs taped off the radio. My obsessive media gathering began as soon as we got a VCR and hasn't really changed since -- I burn shows obsessively in the event that they'll somehow cease existing (not everything goes to iTunes, I'll have you know!). Music's a different story, though -- thank god I no longer have to rely on timing to have in my possession new songs that I may or may not want to listen to recorded until they're officially released! The medium contained in this post is officially extinct.
As opposed to whole listening experiences, these tapes mostly represent cataloging -- I recorded many of these songs as I heard them for the first time, and given the obscurity of much of this junky, poppy house stuff, it was also the last time. I was completely justified in my paranoia of never hearing this stuff again with good reason: not much of it was worth hearing again.
But still, I listen to this stuff and I'm mesmerized -- being exposed to this much dance music as a 14- and 15-year-old kid certainly shaped my current listening. The comparably small proportion of hip-hop I apparently listened to from 1992 to 1993 (when these were made) has remained pretty much constant. That said, when listening to these tapes again after almost 20 years, what hit me the hardest was hearing Grand Puba's "360 Degrees (What Goes Around)" (on Radio 8) -- hearing that joyous, tactile hip-hop coming off tape felt like home to me.
I was also clearly obsessed with Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross' "The Best Things in Life Are Free" (it pops up no fewer than three times), as well as the weekly countdown American Dance Tracks, hosted by the excruciating Downtown Julie Brown (stick around for a bit and you'll hear her assert that she was "gettin' down" with every single artist on her weekly lists). That countdown was particularly great because it allowed me to finally hear so much of the stuff that I'd read the names of when I'd scan the Billboard dance charts (which I would do whenever I could, though I remember as a child only rarely being able to swing the $6 per issue that Billboard charged).
It's funny how much this stuff seemed to matter then and how little it matters now. This used to be my playground, truly.
(Added bonus: My voice can be heard on a few of these, mostly calling in with hot-or-not type of votes for new songs. This happens immediately after the first song on Radio 4.)
"Do what the fuck you want. Stand for what the fuck you believe in, and don't let nobody tell you you can't do what the fuck you want," says Tyler the Creator on his second proper album, Goblin. Given his permission, what the fuck I want to do is post each instance of him saying "fag" or "faggot" on this record:
This is to say nothing about his use of the word "dyke" ("If you disagree lick a couple pimple cover clits from some stripping lesbian dykes that fight niggas that like to rap about those dykes that fight niggas, all right..."), "retard," "chink," "wetback," and "nigga/-er." It's to say nothing of his frequently violent imagery of both the sexual and nonsexual kind. (It's also to say nothing about his swift sense of humor, his diabolical irony or his plodding sense of storytelling, which often amounts to high-school creative writing-level exercises.)
More than most of his contemporaries outside of the ballooning collective he heads, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, his lyrics rely in hate speech, and yet to my gay ears, they are less offensive than the casual F-bomb tossed out by, say, Rick Ross or T.I. The latter phenomenon is so matter-of-fact, it feels like it could easily bespeak an entire mindset that goes something like, "Well, of course gay people are inferior..." Tyler, on the other hand, comes from a place of defiance -- his words increasingly seem calculated to spite those who'd attempt to alter them. At the very least, he doesn't seem to take his music as seriously as the masses who've produced think pieces in its wake: "Nigga had the fuckin' nerve to call me immature. What the fuck he think I made Odd Future for? To wear fuckin' suits and make good decisions?" (So much for "I don't even want any of the opinions and reviews to jeopardize my natural way of doing music," though, since he bitches about Internet feedback all over the place.)
This isn't an excuse for his hate speech, but it is an explanation for it. Like the album that preceded it, Bastard, Goblin features a running exchange between Tyler and his Camille-like therapist, but what it really sounds like is a conversation between his id and superego. Transparently setting things in the realm of the id ("Random disclaimer: Hey don't do anything I do in this song, OK? It's fucking fiction. If anything happens, don't fuckin' blame me, white America. Fuck Bill O'Reilly.") is a bit of a cheat, like conjuring magic while writing a novel or using the it-was-all-a-dream convention -- it's such a cure-all that it leaves little liability on its creator. The fact of the matter is that even if Goblin's content is largely fiction, it is still real -- at least, as much as any thought that pops into a 20-year-old's head is real.
It's fascinating to be thrust into someone's darkness so fully, and Tyler/the rest of Odd Future's laser focus on their inner visions beg for insight beyond what a pseudo-therapist of Tyler's creation can achieve. This is why they've been so heavily written about -- their music isn't necessarily fun, but voyeurism and arm-chair psychology are. Tyler's beats are largely unsatisfying from a low-end perspective, at times giving off zero sub-bass or the tiniest of an 808 tinkle, but his sparse designs are unfailingly easy to parse out and thus explain (another thing that makes them so satisfying to write about). He may get the atmosphere right, but his music is unlikely to throw you into another world, wondering how it all came about. He leaves that to his lyrics, delivered by a seriously gorgeous voice that's all gravel and no affect, like cemetery paving. No one will ever mistake "Radicals" for "Fight the Power" ("Kill people, burn shit, fuck school...I'm fucking radical, I'm motherfucking radical"), especially Tyler, who's too self-involved at this point to write something altruistic, anyway.
Is he a homophobe? Maybe, but at least he's familiar with the label (that already places him light years beyond most of his contemporaries where expressed awareness is concerned). At least here, there's something more to chew on that isn't just flawed logic holding onto vague concepts ("the sanctity of marriage") over concrete equality. At least this isn't a drag show with an agenda, like that of the Westboro Baptist Church. At least it isn't just plain idiocy. Here we have someone who couldn't possibly understand the shame of being called a faggot when you are one, using the word for his own benefit ultimately (Odd Future without the hateful imagery would be like Cannibal Holocaust without the animal mutilation: largely ignored). He says he isn't homophobic, but then he says a lot of things. Leaving it up to us to sort it all out could be a cop-out, but it could just as easily be a sign of respect.
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