Category: Music

Trans-DF Express (YouTube) by Dungeon Family (Even in Darkness)

Closet Freak (YouTube) by Cee-lo (Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections)

Crazy (YouTube) by Gnarls Barkley (St. Elsewhere)

Cee-lo has finally done it. In the company of Danger Mouse, under the loopy name of Gnarls Barkley, Cee-lo has crafted one of the finest singles ever made. “Crazy” is genius, pure and simple. It achieves its effect without cameos, guitar solos, lengthy intros, psychedelic outros or bootylicious videos, in three minutes that feel like two and are over way too soon. You can dance to it, fall in love to it, break up to it, drive to it. You can play it in front of your kids, but it’s not childish. The lyrics are richly allusive, deeply moving and easy to memorize. “Crazy” harks back to the tight and driving three-minute symphonies of the Phil Spector era. About the only song I can think of from the stereo era that matches its compression and force is “We Will Rock You,” which hits harder but carries less transcendent emotion.

I first discovered Cee-lo in Korea. I was late to the whole Dirty South phenomenon, but in a country where Uhm Jung Hwa’s (엄정화) “DaGaRa (YouTube)” (다가라) was about as funky as things ever got, we were desperate for whatever scraps of American cool came our way. When I caught Dungeon Family’s “Trans-DF Express” on late-night TV, I knew I had to find the album.

Despite its cheeky reference to Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express (YouTube),” “Trans-DF Express” is utterly American and a fine introduction to the startling talents of the Goodie Mob–OutKast. But even surrounded by so much talent, the unusual voice and lyrics of Cee-lo stood out. His snap ends as follows:

I wouldn’t be amazing without God’s amazing grace / I can travel outer space while standing in one place.

In that one couplet, Cee-lo managed to transcend the default nihilism of mainstream hip-hop, tap into the spiritualist universalism of late-sixties Black Power soul and the sci-fi tropes of seventies funk, and deliver a legitimately evangelical declaration of Christian faith. And all with a slight lisp.

Everywhere he popped up on Even in Darkness, Cee-lo brought something special, so when I caught the video for “Closet Freak” later that year, I ran out and bought his solo record as soon as I could. Unfortunately, Cee-lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections was, well, imperfect. One good single does not an album make, and Cee-lo just couldn’t keep the intensity going over the length of the album. It never made it into my regular rotation, and when his next record came out, I ignored it entirely.

Considering how much the Dungeon Family has done to broaden hip-hop musically, it seems strange to suggest that Cee-lo needed a different producer, but with Danger Mouse he seems to have found his muse. Like its lead-off single, St. Elsewhere is admirable for what it omits — cameos, skits, filler — and for clocking in at just over 38 minutes. It also manages to overcome the limitations of genre, venturing as far afield as “Gone Daddy Gone,” a pretty straight cover of the classic Violent Femmes song, and “Smiley Faces,” which has a beat Andrew Ridgeley could dance to. Admittedly there is nothing else as good as “Crazy.” But then, no one else has produced anything as good this year either.

To read more about this extraordinary song and the many cover versions it has inspired, check out Jody Rosen’s article in Slate.

Russians (YouTube) by Sting (The Dream of the Blue Turtles)

(Nothing But) Flowers (YouTube) by Talking Heads (Naked)

My father has, from time to time, grown wistful about that beautiful period between the invention of the birth control pill and the discovery of AIDS. I try not to think too hard about what this time meant for him specifically — he was, after all, married by 1965, when he was 19 years old — but certainly I see his point.

The time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 was a kind of political equivalent to that earlier episode. The terrifying spectre of total war, which had grown ever more sinister since it first appeared in 1914, had at last given way, while the postmodern tribal warfare of distant peoples had not yet impinged upon our society in a way we couldn’t ignore.

Five years after 9/11, The Onion’s AV Club has inventoried 8 Musical Artifacts That Capture What Nuclear Paranoia Felt Like At The End Of The Cold War, and it’s a good reminder that though we are now afraid of finding ourselves in the middle of a terrorist bombing or abandoned by the government in the wake of a natural disaster, we are no longer terribly concerned that the end of all civilized existence is imminent (just as the arrival of AIDS didn’t spell the end of the sexual revolution).

When it comes to grandiose statements of late-Cold War paranoia, Sting’s paean to Russian child-loving is pretty much the cream of the crop, and I appreciate The Onion’s point that “this song had the odd effect of criticizing the policy of mutually assured destruction while explaining how it worked.”

A very different and much cleverer post-apocalyptic vision animates the classic Talking Heads song “(Nothing But) Flowers.” It’s a video that makes you keep hitting the pause button so you can read the little facts (which I suspect should be taken with a grain of salt), and it is, in Talking Heads fashion, a very clever little piece of art.

Bonus: New Wave Breakdancing

Crosseyed and Painless by Talking Heads (Remain in Light)

Girl U Want by Devo (Freedom of Choice)

Along with paranoia, the 1980s gave us hip-hop, the pop music sound that in the 1990s took over the world. But back in the early days, before “rap” was a mainstream term for a kind of music, what first got people’s attention was a confluence of dance and visual art: graffiti and breakdancing.

And, curiously, it wasn’t mainstream black artists who embraced it at first — you will find no breakdancing in Prince or Lionel Ritchie videos of the era — but arty white New Wave groups. The two videos above are both from albums that came out in 1980 and both feature breakdancing. The Devo video is not much more than a goofy lark, but the Talking Heads video for “Crosseyed and Painless” is a breakdance ballet of sorts. The video effects are laughable, and the dance has little to do with the actual song, but the dancers are extraordinary. And, for the record, it exhibits significant quantities of moonwalking from well before Michael Jackson released Thriller in 1982.

Now this is dangerous: The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator that allows you, with the click of a button, to listen to the latest tracks from a ton of blogs, or else the most popular tracks, and provides links to the original posts so you can download the stuff you like. There are hundreds of blogs, and thus hundreds of eclectic tracks — more than you could possibly listen to, especially if you let yourself get waylaid by interesting blog posts with additional songs in them. But it’s also an inexhaustible source of new music, which is pretty fabulous.

Knock ‘Em Out by Lilly Allen

Big Chief by Professor Longhair

Lily Allen is a pop sensation in the UK, where she’s already hit number one with her single “Smile.” Set to chipper, ska-inflected beats, Allen’s songs hide a sharp wit and a dark worldview. Though she doesn’t rap, her lyrical rhythms and density are informed by hip-hop, and there are hints of The Streets and Lady Sovereign in her music — Allen has the dour intelligence of the former and the charm of the latter — as well as a touch of Dawn from The Office.

I first heard of Allen through Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker. You can hear a great deal of Allen’s music on her website, and also catch a couple of videos. And the MP3s are from Aurgasm, which may well be where Lily Allen first heard that fantastic Professor Longhair piano riff before turning it into the backing for “Knock ‘Em Out.”

Looks like Beck’s new album is to be called The Information and released on October 3. The tracklist is up at Beck.com, and you can hear two new tracks — “Nausea” and “Strange Apparition” — there, while Beck’s MySpace page has “Nausea” plus “Motorcade.”

According to Billboard Magazine, The Information will have 15 tracks and come packaged with a DVD containing videos of all the songs.