Summer Jam 2009 Candidate #2 - Das Racist - Combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell

Do you like this? Do you hate this? It doesn't matter and I don't care. You have heard it or will hear it and that is what matters. Two guys who apparently live in Queens got high a few months ago, thought about how funny the idea of combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell was, put on a drum machine, and said "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" over and over again in a rhythmic manner for a few minutes (the video above is for a remix that adds a bit of musical intricacy to make the listening experience a little bit smoother, but the original is, for all intents and purposes, the same).

And you listened to it!

Why did you do that? How did you do that?

This is the perfect case of viral for the sake of viral, and I'll admit to getting some kicks from it. It's funny! I do think the idea of a Pizza Hut and Taco Bell is funny. I like it when people decide to make music for fun, which is obviously the case here. I'd rather listen to this than Vespatimesist any day because these guys are fucking having fun. I like it when people try things that sound like terrible ideas and don't care and just try them and sometimes it works. This works, for example, even though it seems like it shouldn't or, maybe you're thinking, actually, no, it doesn't work. I'll say it again - you listened to it (or you will).

I spent a lot of time one summer writing and recording songs like this one in my basement with a friend of mine. We once recorded an improvisational record in about 4 hours. A lot of stuff is terrible to the point of being, like, 4 levels below "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". But when we had actual ideas, like Das Racist did, the songs actually turned out pretty well. I'd go so far as to say that many of them were better than "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". But, again, that's not the point. You listened to "Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", or you will, and you haven't listened to "Galavanting Unicorns of Love In Space".

You can look at a garage rock band and be like, these are the everyman. These are the blue collar soul of popular music, where rubber meets the road. But anyone who's been to a garage rock concert in the past two years knows that's not true anymore. Garage rock has graduated from the suburban garage to the abandoned urban garage and become art. Das Racist are the new everymen of music - dudes sitting in their basement with joints and pirated copies of Ableton Live. Think this song is stupid enough that you could have made it? You are exactly right.

There is no artifice, it's just fucking dumb, kind of funny, and frighteningly catchy. If these guys were British the song would be #1 over there already. The stoner's pick for summer jam '09, sure, but also something of a punk rock choice - if you're looking for a snapshot of the state of D.I.Y. in June 2009 you can stop looking.

Do I like it? Do you care? Do I care?

Summer Jam 2009 Candidate #1 - Keri Hilson ft. Kanye West & Ne-Yo - Knock You Down

Apparantly UMB Brazil is way cooler than they're North American overlords and have allowed me to embed this video into my blog. If you don't see it, you can do the old fashioned here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF5Q1jr28PM



Now, I'm not totally sold on what any of these three people are doing in general. I've got reservations about giving my whole hearted support to Kanye (though I'm close), Ne-Yo, or Keri Hilson right now.

But this track? No reservations at all.

Post Heartbreaks Kanye seems to be living in a sort of bubble where people are so happy he's not trying to sing that his verses once again seem awesome and immediate like they did way back when. His verse here is a good case in point, and I wouldn't be surprised if his next record is a lot like this - competent, almost perfect for the song, but lacking that weird sense of paranoia and persecution that made his early music so interesting. Still great, but it's Kanye without the caps lock, which I think we're all going to have to grow up and adjust to if we want to remain fans of pop music in the next few years.

Ne-Yo, on the other hand, I would've sworn I hated him. "So Sick" is a great song but he really lost it after that. People I respect have been all over Year of the Gentleman, but choosing to listen to "Miss Independent" was something I just couldn't bring myself to do. But I think I get it now - this is what it took. This is arguably the best sing-rapping that anyone has ever done without being R. Kelly. This verse may singlehandedly make it ok for an R&B singer to get a guest spot on a track and not only do a verse rather than a hook, but even deliver it like an MC, but I hope it doesn't, cause I don't think anyone other than the aforementioned Kels or maybe The-Dream could possibly handle that task. The last thing I want to hear is Akon trying to do this shit.

Man, Ne-Yo's verse on this is so good.

Keri Hilson - fine. She's good looking, has just enough personality visually and vocally, but she's obviously overshadowed on this track. And not only by Yo and Ye, but by the beat! It's been a while since I heard a hip hop beat I liked this much on a radio track. The form of it is interesting, splitting each verse in half between lackadaisical paint by numbers bounce and frenetic hi-hat shit for which I am a total sucker.

A little too long, but I'm ok with that in a Summer Jam. 2009 is already shaping up to be better than 2008 on the Summer Jam front. I'm not gonna be surprised if this one wins out.

Oh and yes I do realized I never finished by top ten of 2008. The top three were Portishead - Third, Robyn - ST (yeah I know this came out in 2005 - I like this record fucking sue me), and Mount Eerie, Julie Doiron & Fred Squire - Lost Wisdom. All great records that you should listen to all night. If you wanna know how I feel about em, in particular, get in touch personal like. This shit don't come for free.

Two Thousand Eight - 4. Islands - Arm's Way

Usually, even if I make an act like I don't understand why certain bands aren't huge and famous and popular - the Drones for instance, as Pitchfork noted in their review of Havilah last week, are one of those bands. But really, it ought to be pretty obvious why people wouldn't like them. They're just too bleak, and it's a very heartening fact, actually, that people at large would think that. Life would be significantly worse if everyone went around talking about war and death and being all, "maybe you should just die" all the time. Makes for great music, but not necessarily the type of thinking everyone should try to embrace.

But the quickness with which people lost interest in Islands is something of a surprise to me. The Unicorns' first record was justifiably received as a landmark of idiosyncratic turn of the millennium pop music, and like, girls liked it. Guys liked it. Square people and hipsters both liked it cause it was good pop music that was fun. Turns out, as the story goes, that the Unicorns were so idiosyncratic that they broke up before they could make another record. But when they reformed like Voltron into Islands and put out Return To the Sea, it was well received. I recall people saying things like, "I really like that Islands record".

So why then, did nobody give a shit when Arm's Way came out last summer? I'll admit that when songs get longer and less linear I tend to get skeptical, but it's not like most of the songs on Return to the Sea were straightforward pop songs. There's no "Rough Gem", yeah, so my best guess is that the indie rock listening public saw this record as an example of a band abandoning their true identity in the name of artistic progression.

C'mon though, I mean, and really. Besides certain lyrical themes (death, fear, illness) and odd pop culture references ("Ready to Die", "Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby"), there's nothing that really ties Unicorns/Islands together as a style, beyond the mercurial personalities of their members. Whimsy, you could call it, within certain bounds. The real problem, then, is that it's not a complete departure from RttS. It's the continuation of the band's interests away from traditional pop song structures towards something more baroque and composed. The reaction to the record then, can't be a, "wow these guys do something crazy and original every time the come out", which was the mindset up iuntil this record, but that now needs to be modified in the direction of, "ok, here's a band finding their voice". Whims are becoming more explicable, messages are becoming more focused.

This record was not received especially well, I think, because it's a solid record, rather than a revelatory one. Every song on here is very good, but no songs on here are as great as "Rough Gem", "Les Os", etc. That said, Arm has moments of brilliance that equal or exceed any heights Islands/Unicorns have previously reached.

Examples:

The middle/end of "Abonimable Snow" is right up there with the Hair's "ghost" series in terms of expressing an endearingly naive, weirdly displaced, but very real fear of the supernatural.

"I Feel Evil Creeping In" hints more definitively than any previous Islands/Unicorns song at what, I think, anyone who listened closely enough to their first two records ought to realize: these guys are kind of bad news. They may be scared and their confused, but they've got a real mean streak in them. If you've ever seen an interview with Nick Thorburn, it's pretty clear that the guy is thorny in a way that's certainly different than the way, say, Lou Reed is thorny, or "rock stars" are thorny. You get the sense he's always had this charmingly innate distaste for things that could erupt at any moment.

The last two minutes of "In the Rushes". The main part of the song is sort of plodding and vague. Nothing anyone would be expected to remember or about which a letter would be written or a blog post written. But then - and when I first heard this song at a show in Montreal during February last year I broke into one of those laugh and smile fits that always strikes me when something totally wonderful and unexpected occurs during a show, usually regarding a new song or a song I've never heard before performed by a band for whom I hold a great deal of affection, once they got to this section - they break into an homage to/reimagining of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" that contrasts with the rest of the song in such a way that you kind of leave your brain for a hot minute. One of the best moments of pop music in 2008.

Two Thousand Eight - 5. The Killers - Day and Age

I love the Killers pretty much as much as any band that exists these days. Yep. Right up there with Future of the Left, the Drones, Max Tundra. And, as you might expect, I pretty vehemently resent the idea that there's no reason to put them in this kind of company. I don't think there's anyway around admitting that the Killers, unfortunately, have the market cornered on melodic pop rock music right now. Just because everyone else in their bracket (with the exception of everyone who unequivocally sucks) is way way past their prime - U2, Green Day, Fall Out Boy - doesn't mean they're irrelevant.

Of course, relevance has nothing to do with it, really. A good pop rock album out to be a good pop rock album and, in fact, is. Day and Age is a great album, as long as you consider albums full of great songs that have nothing to do with each other besides greatness to be great albums.

Something in the appeal that Day and Age and Sam's Town hold almost certainly has something to do with the fact that be very best music in 2008 was not made by musicians with thousands (? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? how much money does it take to make a polished studio record for a major lable if you're not Axl Rose?) of dollars to spend in the creation of a pop album. There is something to be said for professional, high tech, clean sound, and not just in hip hop or "pop" pop music, by which I guess I mean Kelly Clarkson. Would these songs sound ok if they had used No Age's studio setup to record them? Maybe, but more likely they would sound flat and boring.

Brandon Flowers as a starving indie rock singer is commonplace: a dude with an average but impassioned singing voice and a stupid and flashy sense of style. If I passed the dude on Bedford Ave on a Friday night I'd wish to stomp his face. But context changes everything about the Killers. What would be annoying becomes charming, what's boring becomes exceptional. What would it sound like if you took the boring pop rock music and dumb, disconnected, naively nostalgic stylistic obsessions of the last decade together and threw a bunch of money into trying to turn them into something cohesive? It would sound a lot like Day and Age.

In that last paragraph I used the word stupid and the word dumb. The Killers are both and I love them for it. They have never recorded a stupider song than "Joyride", or a "better" song than "Goodnight, Travel Well", or a more a confused rambling Steinmanesque concoction than "A Dustland Fairytale". So, it's a broad album, yes, but I don't mean to give the impression that this album is good only because of its breadth, because, while depth is certainly not their forte, the Killers get deeper on "Losing Touch" and "Goodnight" than they have on any previous songs.

But a broad album is what this is, primarily. Broad in its appeal as pop music is meant to be, even if it goes largely unrecognized on the charts or the radio. I'm really looking forward to blasting "Spaceman" out the window of my apartment this spring and shouting "Losing Touch" out of a moving car when it gets warm enough to roll down the windows.

Two Thousand Eight - 6. The Drones - Havilah

I probably listened to the Drones more than any other band in 2008. This worked out pretty well, as I've gone through some obsessive periods over bands during some pretty awkward times in their existences, and that doesn't work especially well. The most intense period of my Radiohead admiration took place between about 6 months to a year after OK Computer came out and the the release of Amnesiac. Roughly a 3 year span, I think, during which time they released an EP, which is still probably one of my favorite records of all time, in any case, and an LP, which definitely is, and did not tour at all. I could just as easily have listened to nothing but Thin Lizzy last year and been left with nothing to show for it but some perpetual blue balls.

So it was nice that the Drones not only released Havilah this fall and toured in such a way that I was able to see them blow about 20 people's minds in a very small basement room, but also that they're definitely still at the peak of their game.

You can see what I wrote about "The Minotaur" for Tiny Mix Tapes. I won't bother saying anything much more about that. It's an amazing track and represents exactly what this band is capable of when they set their sights on boiling the blood.

But the Drones seem to be dead set on being the exact opposite of their name, and that means that they can't just be trying to rock out on every track. For me this is more often frustrating than anything else. Why does Kanye have to sing? Why do the Drones have to follow "The Minotaur" with "The Drifting Housewife"?

Please do not get me wrong. Sequencing is not The Drones' strong suit, but I think "The Drifting Housewife" is easily better than 80% of the music I heard last year. And since it's by far the least good song in the record, that puts the rest of the songs a pretty decent percentile. "Nail It Down" isn't as exceptional as "Jezebel" or "Shark Fin Blues" when it comes to Drones leadoff tracks, but it's still freaking great. "I Am the Supercargo" is a slow burn for the ages and I'm still fucking trying to figure out what exactly it's about. If you know, please tell me.

Unlike, say Thom Yorke's lyrics, or which are impressionistic in the "I'm just trying to get a vibe going" kind of way, this shit is impressionistic in a way that is actually trying to get something across. You know that "Supercargo" is trying to tackle topics, and you get the sense that it's doing a pretty good job of tackling, even if it seems like it's going in eighteen directions at once. Gareth Liddiard's brain is running from colonialism, some sort of narrative about a marriage, to straight up post modern dissatisfaction, and he's doing what he can to make it make sense, but it's more about just getting things out and that's more than enough. When it's focused, as on "Oh My" and "The Minotaur" the vitriol is fucking blinding, and when it's mixed in with more complicated shit it just takes a little more work to get the marrow out of it.

And lest you think I'm down on the ballads, "Cold and Sober" is the heartbreakingest song the Drones have ever committed to an MP3. Rare is the band that can kill you with violence and silence on the same record. Why are these people not bigger than Jesus?