Week 19: Portishead - Third (2008)

“Esteja alerta para a regra dos três/O que você dá, retornará para você/Essa lição você tem que aprender/Você só ganha o que você merece”

(“Be alert to the rules of three/What you give, will be returned/That lesson, you have to learn/You only earn what you deserve.”)

     -     Spoken word intro to “Silence” (translation here, rewritten slightly be me)

While American rock hit a peak of anger and unintelligibility, the UK was intent on calming down. Whether it was a reaction to the harder-than-ever rock coming from across the pond or simply an outgrowth of the rave scene and its signature drug, E, is impossible to know, but the reality of England’s big chill in the 90s is inarguable. The rock music exported from the country during this period, as a rule, was less aggressive and distorted than the American counterpart. The singing was cleaner too. 

The strongest contrast though was between the two countries’ respective hip-hop trends. While the gangsta rap of NWA and Ice-T, as well as the abrasive hard rap of Public Enemy and martial sound of the Wu-Tang Clan, was the rule of thumb for mainstream rap in the early and mid-90s (the West Coast sound, exemplified by De La Soul, was an exception rather than the rule) over in the US, the UK had perfected and centralized the Bristol sound of trip-hop. Then hailed as the first truly original English rap genre (the garage sound of The Streets was years away, then), trip-hop became a household name with the advent of Massive Attack’s debut album, Blue Lines, and breakout single, “Unfinished Sympathy”, in 1991.

Although Blue Lines was a great success itself, “Unfinished Sympathy”, which featured singer-songwriter Shara Nelson to the exclusion of the bands other vocal members, such as Tricky, was far more important in the future shape of the trip-hop. The hip-hop inspired rhythms, strings, and soaring vocals became calling cards of the genre in the years to come, much more so than any actual rapping. Although neither future Massive Attack songs nor Tricky’s debut album, Maxinquaye (a classic itself), followed the formula of “Sympathy”, the die had nevertheless been cast. 

Week 18: Doug Paisley - Doug Paisley (2008)

Break-up songs are the single most fertile field in all of Western pop music. A glance over the Billboard year-end charts shows that at least one song about love in the past tense has been in the Top 10 since 1946. No other trend is as consistent or specific; the closest you can get is songs written in the first person or sung by a man.

There’s a pretty obvious reason for the break-up song’s popularity; it’s a nearly universal experience. At one point or another, we’ve all suffered a bad ending to some form of relationship, whether it be a friendship or a marriage. I’d wager that the majority of people have even suffered the kind of emotional breakdown immortalized in songs like “Walk On By” or “Cryin’”. Like “Heartbreak Hotel” says, “Although it's always crowded/You still can find some room/For broken hearted lovers/To cry away their gloom;” heartbreak is timeless, and we could always use a little room with someone else that understands.

The heightened drama of songs like “Hey There, Delilah” or “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” are fairly common and certainly well-remembered, but the songs that really grip me are the ones that take a more mundane look at love. Quiet desperation speaks to me more than high drama and powerful words; I still enjoy the latter type of song (“Alone Again (Naturally)” is a favorite, for example), but songs that depict the slow burn of relationships sound truer to me, for reasons I’m not going to get into.

Many of those mundane perspectives come from the country and folk genres, which follows from the enjoyment artists from both take in exploring the minutiae of life. While country has more than its fair share of dramatic songs, almost all of it is based in the low-key emotions that, even when they are present in soul, get blown up into operatic excess.

That difference in delivery is key, I think. With emotional songs the exact degree of passion is more dependent on the singer’s tone and volume than it is on the lyrics. For example, Kanye West’s “Heartless” can be artlessly transformed into a blue-eyed soul ballad simply by yelling it; the lyrics haven’t changed, but the song is transformed in a single stroke from an icy rage to heartbroken sobbing. Which is better is a matter of opinion (I think you can guess my preference), but this is illustrative of how important personality is to songs of bitter, damaged love.

Week 15: The Tallest Man On Earth - Shallow Grave (2008)

Robert Johnson’s shadow falls on everyone in music that seeks authenticity. Those 31 songs, so mythologized by artists all around the Western world, crop up time and again in the way of references both stated and implicit. Even those who don’t acknowledge, or are simply unaware, of Johnson’s legacy will likely feel an echo of it in some way during their career, whether by the choice of a producer or by a lengthy comparison written by some critic.

I’d argue that Johnson’s music had three major effects on music: it helped create the blues craze in England, which provided the counter-point to the Motown and vocal jazz influence expressed in the music of The Beatles and The Kinks, among others; it helped develop the model for musical authenticity, as I alluded to above; and it taught musicians and producers that music didn’t have to sound “good” to be popular or influential. The first point isn’t strictly relevant to this post, nor is the second, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, but the third is extremely important.

Authenticity and lo-fidelity are often bundled together, but I want to tweeze them apart for the purposes of this write-up, partially because I’m assuming you’re all sick of hearing me talk about the former. The connection between the two is simple, and one I’ve talked about before: older, “authentic” music was poorly recorded due to the poverty of the artists and the poor technology available to them. The two were tied together by coincidence rather than explicit choice. There’s plenty of brilliant blues and folk from the 50s that sounds comparable to music from decades later, so it’s hard to say that artists like Robert Johnson were poorly recorded for some artistic, “authentic” reason.

Week 3: Kanye West - 808s And Heartbreak (2008)

Week 3: Kanye West – 808s And Heartbreak

Bet you didn’t see this one coming, huh?

Three entries in and I’ve already spent quite a bit of time discussing what I see as the biggest problem in modern-day pop. That issue, as I’m sure you can guess, is the lack of emotional depth. Aside from the bubblegum instincts that have been an omnipresent threat to music since at least the 1960s ("Yummy Yummy Yummy" is worse than anything even Katy Perry has ever done, and that was released in ’68), music producers nowadays have access to two tools that allow them to minimize the human element in their songs to a level smaller than anything before. Those two tools are the genre of hip-hop and Auto-Tune.

First, let me assure you that I’m not calling hip-hop soulless. Far from it in fact; in terms of emotional honesty and accessibility, I see hip-hop as the strongest successor to blues music the modern era has. Like blues music, hip-hop was born in the streets, often (though not always) in areas of extreme poverty, such as The Bronx. Both genres are also extremely simple in terms of equipment; much like how the blues requires nothing more than a singer and an acoustic guitar (sometimes even less), all hip-hop needs is a rapper and a good beat, which is often taken from another song. Both genres can be approached by virtually anyone, while most others require much more in terms of equipment and/or virtuosity.

Unlike the blues, however, hip-hop, at least nowadays, has a strong emphasis on production. While the pinnacle of blues is often held to be the music of Robert Johnson, which sounds like it was recorded in a broom closet with a reel-to-reel player, hip-hop relishes technology, using the latest in synthesizers and drum machines to create something that almost, but not quite, sounds real. After all, electronics are far easier to control than real instruments. For a producer focused entirely on generating a certain sound or beat, keyboards and computers are much easier to use in teasing out the necessary sound.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you like any hip-hop made in the past 20 years not made by The Roots, chances are that most, if not all of the music used in the songs was either sampled or artificially generated. The problem in my mind is that this tendency to artificiality in hip-hop leads producers to go too far and turn to a method to perfect the few human elements in their songs: the hook and the rapper. This is the process that calls for Auto-Tune.