New Music

After a summer in which nothing good came out for most of June or July, 3 new, high profile albums have come out in August.  First, the Kanye/Jay-Z joint album, Watch the Throne; then came The Game's album, The R.E.D. Album.  Today, I downloaded Tha Carter IV from Lil Wayne.  Since I haven't had class, I've spent the last few weeks listening through them enough to get a good sense.  So I guess I'll cram my review of all three into one post.

The first to come out was Watch the Throne.  I had really high expectations for this album.  Every time Kanye and Jay have collaborated in the past, the result has been pretty explosive.  On Kanye's last album, "So Appalled" was a great track.  "Run This Town" was memorable.  Kanye produced "Heart of the City" from The Blueprint.  So, judging by that bar, the album was a disappointment in the sense that not EVERY track was as great as their previous collaborations.  But, objectively, it was still a pretty good album.  "No Church in the Wild" with Frank Ocean is a really good track-- Kanye's verse in it is unreal.  Jay comes back and does great things in "Murder to Excellence".  And, while the boasting on "Otis" isn't necessarily original, it showcases both Jay and Kanye at their best.  The rest of the tracks aren't necessarily bad, but there's nothing else that's memorable.  And, given that I expected half the album to be memorable, I'm a bit disappointed.  But, still, objectively, this is a B+ album.

Next was The R.E.D. Album.  Now, I'm not a huge Game fan.  His lyrics are pretty simplistic.  His flow is pretty solid, though, and this album is about as good as he gets.  "The City" starts the album off well-- a dark beat with a heavy bass highlights Game's flow.  "Drug Test" is also solid-- I'm not a big fan of the flow; it's quicker than is ideal for Game, and Dre is a bit out of place on the track: his flow is heavy and he doesn't do well with quick beats either, but it's still a pretty good track.  "Martians vs. Goblins" with Lil Wayne is pretty good.  The beat is more in line with what both Wayne and Game excel in.  I think the best part, though, might be a new artist named Tyler, the Creator, who comes in and lays down an absurd verse that reminds me of what Bizarre used to do for D-12: hate on everyone and drop occasionally amusing punch lines.  But my favorite track on the album is "Red Nation", which samples the old stadium track "Zombie Nation" for its beat.  The beat is ideal for Game's flow, covering up the silly lyrics.  And the Wayne hook is great.  I wish Game and Wayne would put out an album together-- they tend to do real well when they collaborate.  The two collabs on this album are great, and they're just as good together in "My Life" from Game's last album, LAX.  Overall, I think I give this one a B: solid, but a lot of filler at the back.  But then I can't imagine giving a Game album better than a B, so I guess I like it.

Tha Carter IV is an especially weird album.  It's the first solo album Lil Wayne's released since he spent the better part of a year in jail on weapons charges.  Before he got locked up, he was putting out a top-notch mixtape every 3-4 months (No Ceilings and Dedication 3 were my personal favorites); plus, one of the better hip-hop albums of all time in Tha Carter III.  Literally half of the 16 tracks were top-notch.  So I didn't really know what to expect from this one: since getting out of jail, Wayne's mostly done collaboration on others' albums, and he's done pretty well; his appearance on Eminem's last album in "No Love" was great.  When I started this album, I thought this would be a historically great album.  The very first track, "Blunt Blowin", is, for my money, one of Wayne's best ever.  The beat is incredible, Wayne is lyrically on top of his game, and he's really on his game.  But, as I listened more, I felt like this was an album recorded in one sitting in which Wayne smoked a blunt, and waited as his high kicked in.  The crisp delivery disappeared a few songs in, and by the time I got to "How to Love" it felt like Wayne was blazed out of his mind, and also half asleep.  He recovered a bit and put together a couple of solid tracks in "President Carter" and "It's Good", but I still don't think it's anywhere near his best effort.  While getting high probably helps him write his lyrics, I kind of wish he'd put down the weed and the codeine syrup when he goes to record, since he sounds like he's half-asleep on most of his tracks on this album.  While this is still a solid album, all things told, it definitely doesn't live up to the early promise.  For me, this is a B/B- album.

P-Diddy Ruined Music

In the history of music, very few people have managed to do real lasting damage.  Boy bands in the 90's were awful, but they also shriveled up and disappeared as quickly as they appeared.  Whatever talented members they had (Justin Timberlake) went into acting/making club bangers with Timbaland, and the rest shriveled up and went away.  They still made some awful crap, like this insult to music:

But, luckily, no one listened to it, and they disappeared.  Probably to make cameos on Entourage for people to laugh at.  Ringtone rappers come in waves, and they do their best to suck, but they really only impact rap.  I don't like Hurricane Chris and Chingy any more than any other rap fans, but it's hard to say that they're destroying music.

P-Diddy.  Or Diddy.  Or Puffy.  Or whatever he calls himself these days has had probably the most effective campaign to destroy all music. First, there's rap.  Now, P-Diddy isn't a very talented rapper, but he's not the worst there is.  He blows, say, Gucci out of the water.  His flow is mediocre, and his lyrics are cliche, but that just makes him a dime a dozen, not exceptionally bad.  Either way, it wasn't rap that made him famous.  He first became a big name when he established Bad Boy Records in 1993.  That's when he became famous as "The guy who stands behind Biggie in his videos chuckling and dropping 'uh-huh' and 'yeah'" in at pretty inopportune moments.  And at that point, no one really minded him anyway.  Sure, he was kind of a clown, and everyone made fun of him the same way they made fun of Jermaine Dupri for being the guy who's hanging on to every aspiring pre-teen rapper in the game.  See: Example below.

But then, in 1997, Biggie was gunned down, and P-Diddy had no clue what to do.  His cash cow was dead.  But Biggie was arguably the best rapper of his generation, and without a doubt one of the greatest of all time.  So finding another Biggie just wasn't very likely.  So P-Diddy decided the right move was... to try his hand at rap himself.  That's where he ran into a problem.  As I might have pointed out, he wasn't much of a rapper.  And, unlike Dr. Dre, whose unspectacular (though still MILES better than Diddy's) ability as an MC was overshadowed by his legendary beats and production ability, P-Diddy couldn't make beats either.  So that's when he decided to take a nuclear bomb to rap and start ripping off classic songs.  And making them not just worse, but awful.  And he didn't just do it once and disappear, the way ringtone rappers do now.  He did it over and over and over.

It started out tolerable, because he'd take old tracks from Biggie and throw them onto the track.  Also Frank Reynolds made an appearance in the Victory video.  And the video was pretty sick, so I could give him a free pass for stealing his beat from "Going the Distance" from Rocky.

But that was just the beginning.  Pretty soon he'd managed to turn Grandmaster Flash's The Message (a social commentary on gangs and a rap classic) into a  piece of steaming garbage about nothing, in which he and his buddy Mase (whose claims to fame were 1) sounding EXACTLY like P-Diddy on the track, and 2) quitting his job as P-Diddy's voice double to try to become a church minister.  Which he also quit.) made a video in which they hung out in a padded white room for awhile.

But that was just the beginning.  Other victims included I Did it for Love by Love Unlimited.  Which P-Diddy turned into It's All About the Benjamins.  Which Wikipedia describes as being about "living rich and the importance of having money."

Then there was I'll Be Missing You.  Where he took Sting and the Police's song about... stalking and turned it into... a posthumous tribute to the guy he stalked.  Then he did his best to destroy classic rock by convincing Jimmy Page's coked-out corpse to appear on Come With Me and play the guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's Kashmir.  Now, Kashmir as a song doesn't really make much sense, probably because Page and Robert Plant probably wrote it after doing a mountain of coke and then huffing all the glue at the Home Depot.  But it sure as hell was NOT about Godzilla.  But, surprise, the Godzilla soundtrack is exactly where the Zeppelin classic showed up.

And that was pretty much the last straw.  After a 3-year run of destruction, P-Diddy kind of disappeared.  Yeah, he and his soul patch still made appearances with Jennifer Lopez at award shows, and in that absurd billboard over Times Square, but he stopped trying to make music.  Unfortunately, now, every time I watch Rocky, every time I hear Sting come on, and whenever I listen to Zeppelin, I think about P-Diddy and I get angry.

Thank you, P-Diddy, for ruining music.  I hope your next album doesn't sell a single copy.

Worst Songs to Get a Lap Dance To

Today, I was sitting at my internship, writing a motion to deny a bankrupt debtor's discharge.  And, naturally, I started thinking about lap dances.  Now, just for the sake of disclosure, I should admit that not only have I never gotten a lap dance, but I've never even been to a strip club.  I think the idea always felt kinda grimy to me.  But this post is NOT about why I've never been to a strip club.  Rather, I got to thinking-- I don't really know what makes a good lap dance song.  But there are definitely songs that are bad for lap dances.  I had a few ideas of my own, but then I asked some of my friends for advice.  I've gotten some solid suggestions, and now I've got a decent list.  Here goes:

1. Cotton Eye Joe, Rednex

If cowboy songs that sound like they were written and performed by your drunk uncle Cletus from West Virginia are your thing, then maybe Cotton-Eye Joe is an option.  If not, it's too fast, too country, and doesn't have a regular enough beat.  Also, the dude who sings it is toothless.

2. Down in Mexico, The Coasters (Suggested by Precious Benally)

I'm not gonna lie, I'd never heard this song before Precious suggested it here.  But it's painfully slow.  Great song, but it sounds like a song you'd hear in a black barber shop.  NOT in a strip club.

3.  Candle in the Wind, Elton John (Suggested by Dan Boyle)

This song was written by Elton John to commemorate the life of his friend Princess Diana after she died in 1997.  A ballad by Elton probably isn't getting much airtime at the strip club in the first place.  A ballad by Elton about the poor Princess's candle burning out long before... probably never will.

4. Friday, Rebecca Black (Suggested by Christine Brozynski)

Hating on this song is kinda cliche at this point.  Hating on it as a song to get a lap dance to... NOT cliche.  This is a pretty ordinary bad song with bad lyrics.  But Rebecca Black is, what, 14 years old? Lap dances to songs by 14 year olds are most definitely even more inappropriate than lap dances to tributes to dead princesses.

5. It's Raining Men, Weather Girls (Suggested by Steve Wolf)

I can't say I entirely agree with this one.  It's got a steady beat, a catchy hook, and isn't too slow or too fast.  I think Steve threw it out there because it's possibly the gayest song of all time.  Which still doesn't necessarily make it a bad song to get a lap dance to, as my good friend Noam Fliegelman would without a doubt attest.  I'll leave it on, but I'm not convinced.

6. Kim, Eminem (Suggested by Matt Allen)

From Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP, this song makes people uncomfortable.  Em spends the track fantasizing about killing his ex-wife in front of their daughter.  It's raw, it's emotional, and while Em's rhymes are as great as ever, it's also INCREDIBLY graphic.  The subject matter is so violent that I'm not even gonna get into the reasons the flow of the song is all wrong for lap dances.  But this is definitely one of the last options for anyone requesting a lap dance.

7. Barbie Girl, Aqua (Suggested by Sonalee Joshi)

I'm not actually sure what the video I put up with this is, but Barbie Girl is a song everyone loved in middle school.  The band is Eurotrash, but the real reason it makes the list is that the singer sounds like she's 9 years old.  I don't care how old she actually is, any female singer who sounds younger than 25 is borderline when it comes to lap dance tracks.

8. Never Gonna Give You Up, Rick Astley (Suggested by Chao Huang)

Because no one wants to get Rick Roll'd at the strip club.

9. Amazing Grace, Any Church Choir (Suggested by Steve Wu)

This is a song normally played at military funerals.  I think.  Even if it's not, you definitely hear it in churches.  And a divine guilt trip is definitely the opposite of what the strip club experience is supposed to be about (I think). 

10. Funeral March, Chopin

On a related note, funerals and strip clubs definitely do NOT go together.  And the slow track they play when they carry a casket to its final resting place probably isn't up there on the list of songs people like to hear at the strip club.

11. Imperial March, Star Wars (Suggested by Christine B.)

This is Darth Vader's theme from Star Wars.  Meaning it's a terrible pick for lap dances for the same reasons as the funeral march.  Only instead of thinking about how someone close to you is dead, you're thinking about how Darth Vader's gonna kill you.

12. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Suggested by Sonalee J.)

Holiday songs are a bad idea at strip clubs.  Holiday songs about animals are a worse idea.

13. The Chicken Dance (Suggested by Jason Anton)

A song that has its own dance is probably not a good candidate for a lap dance.  Also it has its own absurd dance where you impersonate a chicken.

14. Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton (Suggested by Dave McCallum)

I like Eric Clapton.  I like this song.  I don't like this song for a lap dance.  Eric Clapton wrote this song after losing his four-year old son.  Which makes it bad for lap dances for a combination of reasons-- basically, most of the reasons Friday is bad (child references) and Candle in the Wind is bad (commemorates a dead person).

15. Hakuna Matata, The Lion King (Suggested by Matt A.)

Hakuna Matata has the problem of the singers sounding like, well, kids.  Also it's an upbeat kids' song about not worrying about anything.  It's also sung by one guy imitating an overweight pig and another one imitating a talking muskrat.  Not so great for lap dances...

16. Puff the Magic Dragon, Peter, Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary claim this song isn't about smoking pot.  I actually believe them.  But, either way, it's now associated with pot.  And Peter, Paul and Mary all sound super blazed the entire song.  Listen to it once, and you wanna pull out a tub of chocolate-chip ice cream, eat the whole thing and watch cartoons.  Which is pretty much the opposite of getting a lap dance.

I think 17 is enough for now, but feel free to send others if I didn't include them.