Quote Of The Day That I Did Not Need To Hear:

Ever:

Cosplay is the new Che t-shirt, we’re calling it now.

The horror (courtesy of io9).

Moustache Monday: Ain’t Nothin’ New Under The Sun

In Young Money’s currently ubiquitous single Bedrock, current it girl Nicki Minaj has raised several eyebrows with her offer to put her, ahem, coochie on a man’s sideburns. Audacious? Yes. Logistically improbable? To be sure? Original? Well, not exactly. True hip-hop heads know that the real pioneer in improbable cooter/facial hair pairings would be Amil, who offered to put it on a man’s moustache.* And for this, we dedicate Moustache Monday to Amil, because god knows she’s not getting anything else dedicated to her. Hold your head, Amil.

* Provided, of course, said man does not rely on a bus pass.

Be Afraid

Regardless of whether this rumor is true, this represents a loss of innocence for last.fm users. Realistically, anybody who used the service had to know in the back of their mind that sooner or later the RIAA would figure out a way to turn it against people, and when last.fm sold itself to CBS, the writing was on the wall. But now, even if this story turns out not to have legs, a lot of people are going to disable scrobbling on their less-than-legally-acquired albums.

Shame.

Garamond Goes Hard

The new Jay-Z video’s an eighteen-car pileup of competing interests: it’s a tie-in with Bono’s clothing line AIDS charity-no, it’s a promo for a movie about Biggie Smalls-no, it’s an attempt to sneak Santogold onto Power 106 a la M.I.A. and the “Paper Planes” remix… The most crazy explanation of all is that it’s just trying to drum up some excitement over The Blueprint 3.

Either way, Evan Roth’s created a video for Brooklyn Go Hard that’s sure to get talked about, and makes us damn glad we live in the 21st Century. Jay-Z’s reference to Annie in the song reminds us that a decade ago, his sampling a Broadway musical was considered pushing the envelope. Now we’ve got the Garamond font drawing out his video while the uncategorizable Santogold crashes the party and Kanye does whatever he’s doing these days, and no one even blinks. Living in the future’s great sometimes.

(See more at Free Art & Technology)

Paper Route Recordz Does The Lord’s Work

Not two days after this blog posted Viva La Hova as an example of how to exploit the internet to distribute great music and challenge the industry’s flagging business model, Mad Decent and Paper Route Recordz have raised the stakes. Radiohead’s lucrative “pay-what-you-want” model is starting to attract followers, and the more artists try it, the less it looks like a gimmick and the more it looks like the future of the music industry. There’ll always be a place for artists who give music away for free on the internet, but getting people to actually pay is going to get taken more seriously as a business model. Lil Wayne’s deluge over the last few years only paid off for his label after it sold a lot of physical copies in stores… in other words, Universal still sees the internet as, at best, a loss leader to promote 1998’s industry model. Which is why the ability to get people to pay willingly (and not just out of fear of a lawsuit, or inability to find it on the hype machine) is key. Mad Decent and Paper Route are rewarding those who pay over $5.00 for their new release Fear And Loathing In Hunts Vegas with a higher bitrate and five bonus tracks. This looks like a winning business model, and one that even thick-headed suits like Universal CEO Doug Morris could understand.

In a week in which the aforementioned Lil Wayne dropped the much-hyped Dedication 3, which is already being written off as a disappointment, it’s nice to see at least one mixtape deliver the goods. The title refers to the remote burg of Huntsville, Alabama, and the geographical remove from traditional hip-hop hotspots shows. It’s as if people who had never heard hip-hop were handed a rough description of the music on paper and asked to create it sui generis. Hearing the Paper Route roster is like hearing Three 6 Mafia for the first time; in both cases, rappers had to create a scene where none existed, and the fact that neither initially expected their music to reach an audience outside their immediate area lent the music a freedom (not to mention a very loose approach to sampling). Actually, hearing Jhi-Ali take on Underworld’s rave classic “Born Slippy” on album opener “Stuntastic” is the best argument yet for reforming copyright law; it’s more convincing than an essay from Lawrence Lessig or Cory Doctorow (although they’re pretty damn convincing too).

The involvement of Mad Decent brings on board some high-profile guests and producers–Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Wale among them–but never threatens to overpower the Huntsville flavor of the tape. The formula’s so straightforward, it’s a miracle it isn’t tried more often: Take a blank slate of a regional scene, rappers with so-bad-they’re-good stage names (Dawggy Bagz and the half-Asian MC Jackie Chain), innovative (and brazen) use of sampling, a forward-thinking business and distribution model, and an assist from well-connected Mid-Atlantic bloggers and DJs.

How hard can that be?

Download It Here

They Finally Fixed The Last Coldplay Album

Mick Boogie and Terry Urban’s Viva La Hova represents everything this blog stands for: free music on the internet, a Creative Commons-esque approach to remix culture (in other words, the willingness to face down a $10 million lawsuit like Danger Mouse), and a love of digging into interesting failures.

Failures? Sure, they might have tens of millions of records sold between, them, but Jay-Z and Coldplay both have some flops in their recent history. American Gangster‘s undone some of the damage from the outright disaster that was Kingdom Come, but calling his next album Blueprint 3 reeks of desperation (as well as trying to catch up with Lil Wayne in the franchise department). Coldplay, in addition to becoming something of a punchline (perphaps even unfairly¹) is still seeing the law of diminishing returns, with each album since the one with “Clocks” on it being treated like the tepid rewrite that it is.

Thus, it’s nice to see a mashup album that doesn’t shy away from redeeming these failures. Viva La Hova works well divorced from any context (the true acid test for a successful mashup), and hearing verses from Kingdom Come and The Blueprint 2 in a fresh context gives them a chance they never stood against the overcooked production on those albums.

Not to mention Chris Martin gets to good and truly cement his title as this generation’s Phil Collins.

Download Viva La Hova

Courtesy of Viva La Hova and Get Right Music

¹ And anybody who laughed at the part in 40-Year Old Virgin about knowing a guy was gay because he listened to Coldplay is just trying too hard.

The Funky Four + 1: 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps

As the price of hard drives goes down, and the relative storage capacity increases (Moore’s Law), the unspoken corollary is that the size of information will increase to match it. Even flash-based mp3 players can hold 16 GB these days, and it’s not like the number’s going to go down. Greater broadband speeds and penetration (although the U.S. lags most developed countries–hell, we’re even getting lapped by some places where we wouldn’t even drink the water) are constantly reducing the speed and effort involved in sharing an album. In return, consumers (paying and otherwise) demand higher quality files, usually measured in bitrates. In the glory days of Napster, the thrill of free music was enough to make people overlook the 64kbps rips that cut off in the middle, punctuated by the alert sounds from the ripper’s AIM program. Now, anything less than 192kbps is considered not even worth stealing. When Radiohead gave away In Rainbows last year, they caught hell from audiophiles–and can we imagine a Venn diagram of audiophiles and Radiohead fans?–for encoding it at 160kbps. That’s right, people were complaining about something they were getting for free. VBR and 320kbps rips are fast becoming the standard, expanding in file size to match the increasing capacity to store them. Five years from now, music pirates of the future will probably turn up their noses at 320kbps rips as unlistenable. The Loudness War that’s going in the mastering rooms isn’t helping either, as accompanying the increased bitrate is a command from music engineers to flatten the dynamic range to optimize records for cellphones and tinny computer speakers.

And as the first generation to grow up without cassettes comes of age, the classic Maxell tape of the 1980s has achieved an iconic status. For these Millenials, mixtapes are something you download, not buy from the guy at the subway station (although the standards in cover art haven’t improved much). On the indie rock side of the dial, muxtape (R.I.P.) may have replaced mixtapes as the fastest way to a would-be lover’s heart, but High Fidelity types still fetishize the cassette regardless.

And as the Millenials age, it’s inevitable that crappy rips will take on a nostalgic element, whether it’s warranted or not. In anticipation of this, Black Ships is presenting the Top 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps. Many considerations went into this list. Recent attempts, like Justice’s Cross, are penalized for intentionally aiming for this effect (it’s also mastered at ear-splitting levels). Hip-hop classics like Straight Outta Compton or It Takes A Nation Of Millions… would seem like logical choices too, but Dr. Dre and the Bomb Squad both took enough care to include a full dynamic range that, even accounting for the JVC boomboxes of the time that they were designed to be listened on, demand to be heard in high quality to be appreciated. No, this list comprises records that, through a combination of nostalgia, bad mastering, and low budgets, really flower at 128kps. Due to his prolific output, the entire career of Bob Pollard (Guided By Voices) is not eligible for this list.

Top 5 Albums That Sound Better At 128kbps:

5. Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures
After singer Ian Curtis took his own life and the band forged on as New Order, Peter Hook’s basslines grew even more prominent, and the guitar and synth lines explored new textures and tones that accompanied their plunge into rave culture. Before that, though, producer Martin Hammett enabled a punk band’s foray into a dark, lonely place. Even before their bleakness reached oppressive levels with Closer, debut album Unknown Pleasures carried a chill about it. From the iconic cover art to the judicious use of synths, everything about this album is a piece of one aesthetic. To listen to it on a great stereo is to add a warmth to it that was never intended. Low bitrates keep the feeling intact, just as God (and Martin Hammett) intended.

4. Wu-Tang Clan: Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
There’s countless essays that can be written on this album (and producer The RZA’s already written a book on its creation), but one feature of many that made this stand out in 1993 was its violently lo-fi aesthetic. Even by the grittier standards of the time, everything about his record was, well, kind of punk, from the hand-drawn cover art on the “Protect Ya Neck” single, to the damn-near impenetrable inside slang, and especially the music. The drums lurch like a drunk in an alley before periodically attacking the listener. Inspectah Deck’s crack about mountain climbers who play electric guitar notwithstanding, the album does in fact utilize electric guitar stabs placed at random intervals. Rumor has it that The RZA ran Method Man’s microphone through a Marshall guitar amplifier to roughen his voice up, and nothing about the album suggests otherwise. Regardless of the financial constraints that might have gone into making this album, everything about the sound feels like an aesthetic choice.

3. Gravediggaz: 6 Feet Deep
With a major-label budget at his disposal, an equally inspired creative foil in Prince Paul, and an apparently inexhaustible supply of free time despite producing three other classic albums that year, The RZA took a left turn with the Gravediggaz project. While the Wu-Tang debut summed up a lifetime of sherm sticks and grindhouse flicks, Gravediggaz was a self-aware attempt to test how exactly how violent a rap record could be. With an almost clinical flair, the participants adopted stage names for the project straight out of the E.C. Comics vault (the Undertaker, the Grym Reaper, the Rzarector, etc.) and invented horrorcore as we know it. While this requires a strong sense of irony (or a superhuman willing suspension of disbelief) to enjoy, real cannibals don’t have access to expensive studio equipment. Thin sound only aids the illusion.

2. Cat Power: Moon Pix
While any of her early (pre-You Are Free) albums would work, Moon Pix is the best of the bunch before Chan Marshall started modeling for Chanel. The Beastie Boys sample on “American Flag” sounds as out of character for her now as it does then. Even as she’s branched out into styles beyond the gauzy folk of her early years, most of her music avoids drums of any kind, never mind the cassette-based backwards sample from “Paul Revere” (here we go again with the cassette nostalgia…). In low sound quality, her spidery guitar lines don’t stand a chance against her voice. Even when she sounds like she’s faltering, or about to give in entirely, her voice overpowers everything in sight. The school of singing that treats it like an Olympic sport has only gained more currency in the last decade, but sometimes the most poweful statement is the one that doesn’t puff its chest out. Truly haunting.

1. Scarface: Mr. Scarface Is Back
By the end of the 1990s, Rap-A-Lot Records had assembled an in-house production team that rivaled that of any label. Not only did it separate Rap-A-Lot from the contenders nipping at its heels, but its unified aesthetic helped define the Texas sound as much as anybody, with the possible exception of Port Arther’s UGK. At the start of the decade, though, the book had yet to be written, and Scarface, fresh off the Geto Boys’ breakout success, launched his solo career with Mr. Scarface Is Back, an excellent album, but one that also showed a sound that was a work in progress. The cover art hails from an era before Photoshop (when they build a Southern Rap Hall Of Fame, Pen & Pixel graphics is getting its own wing in recognition of the ludicrous Photoshop jobs it’s performed for album sleeves). Mike Dean and N.O. Joe had yet to crystallize the gumbo-funk sound that would serve as ‘Face’s constant companion. The beats largely lean on the popular sounds of the time: the Bomb Squad is an obvious touchstone, but so is Sir Jinx, who was largely responsible for Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted. And while glimpses of the hard-edged social commentary that would become Scarface’s trademark poke through, a lot of the album also mines similar territory as the Gravediggaz album would five years later (“Born Killer,” “Murder By Reason of Insanity”). The combination of low-tech mastering (label head J. Prince had only just come over from the used-car business), classic samples thrown at the listener in haphazard fashion and violent lyrics that border on goth (“I’m Dead,” anyone?) give Scarface the top spot on this list. Brad Jordan, come forward and claim your championship belt.

Crossfaded Bacon Makes The Leap

Philadelphia’s Emynd and Bo Bliz have been running an above-average hip-hop blog for a while now with Crossfaded Bacon, in addition to their side career as DJs and party promoters (and anybody who’s dipped their toes in running events knows that every dollar is earned twenty times over in sweat).

And while Crossfaded Bacon’s been a great source for megamixes, blends, and the occasional loose mp3 floating around the noosphere, their newest post, featuring an original release with Emynd and Young Chris (of State Property fame) is particularly noteworthy.

Their admonition to “distribute this track as freely as you like: post it on your blog, add it to your Myspace player, send it to your girl friend, remix it, or whatever” embraces the Creative Commons ethos that is going to ensure music thrives in the 21st Century (even as the traditional music industry encounters what business types lovingly refer to as “creative destruction”).

Also, ever since the runaway success Lil Wayne’s Carter III proved the viability of Web 2.0 as a career boost for rappers, it’s encouraging to see what moves major-label rappers are willing to make. Hip-hop’s always been about building alternative distribution channels (mixtapes have always been a part of the culture), but the fact that most of the marquee labels are owned or otherwise controlled by the RIAA/Big Four conglomerates¹ tends to put a damper on innovation. Witness how the RIAA arrested DJ Drama on trumped-up piracy charges. This would be the same DJ Drama who helped Lil Wayne make the leap from “that kid in Cash Money” to “Best Rapper Alive^tm.”

And while Lil Wayne might have a decade in the business under his belt now, there was definitely a fallow period where his career was all but left for dead. His willingness to constantly experiment and keep releasing music regardless of the immediate payoff propelled him to sales numbers that look like a statistical outlier in today’s industry climate. Young Chris is at a similar point as Weezy’s nadir. While he had a hit five years ago with “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop,” as part of Young Gunz, subsequent Young Gunz albums have flatlined. He might still be able to draw a crowd in his hometown of Philadelphia, but anticipation for the Young Chris solo album is more or less nonexistant. Roc-A-Fella’s ability to market a record is debatable, and and equally debatable is where Chris fits on the label’s list of priorities.

Which leaves him with very little to lose. Philadelphia’s hip-hop scene has, at least from a national perspective, failed to develop its own identity. While it had a brief run in the late 1980s where rappers like Will Smith and Schooly D achieved national prominence,² since then, it’s largely been a bastard cousin of New York. Notably, national acts like Beanie Sigel, Freeway, and, yes, Young Gunz are all signed to New York-based Roc-A-Fella, and genuflect at the altar of label head Jay-Z. From a live perspective, The Roots have had the most successful career of all, but aside from a few associates like Bahamadia, they’re sound hasn’t really had much of an influence on their immediate contemporaries locally. Ironically, their success as a touring act has meant that their influence has been felt all everywhere but their hometown. Meanwhile, the city’s close proximity to Baltimore has meant that much of the club music that originated there has made its way to Philly clubs.

In this climate, it was inevitable that some Philly rapper from the Roc-A-Fella assembly line would take the plunge, and Young Chris has stepped up to the plate. He’s not the most gifted lyricist in the world, but his lyrics work in a club context (and like the Game Manager post on Young Jeezy, he manages to avoid any obvious gaffes, which is often enough). More importantly, he sounds comfortable on a club beat, which was the greater challenge in the first place. Moving from the 95 BPM range that Kanye, Just Blaze, and their contemporaries work with to the 125 BPM range of club tracks has made greater rappers than Chris look foolish, but he seems completely at ease.

Most importantly, though, he seems willing to take chances, which gives hope that he’ll be able to pull his career out of its current holding pattern. Working with multi-hyphenates like Emynd who’ve tried to bridge the gap between the clubs and the internet (which can be a bigger gap than that between Philly and Baltimore) signals that he isn’t holding his breath for State Property 3 (though that couldn’t hurt either).

Download Emynd feat. Young Chris – “We Don’t Give A… (Dirty Version)

One question, though: if you’re serious about people remixing it, how about some acapellas?

Young Chris models the American Apparel Winter line?

¹ Roc-A-Fella, Chris’ label, is a division of Vivendi Universal.
² With styles that were diametrically opposed, no less.

Things We Love: Kirby Dots

Douglas Wolk’s Understanding Comics is one of the best books yet in the nascent field of comics critical theory, but for all that he gets right-which is a lot-he makes one generalization that doesn’t always hold, and in the case of the industry legend Jack “King” Kirby, sells short one of the author’s greatest strengths. The generalization is that mainstream comics sell a story, while alternative, or “art” comics (he uses the terms more or less interchangeably) sell the artist’s personal drawing style. Regardless of the relative merits of the stories in art comics, or the art in mainstream books, the statement, Jack Kirby, while clearly working on the mainstream side of fence, managed to blur the above distinction.

After a fertile stint at Marvel, where Kirby co-created just about every superhero known to man, he became, along with frequent collaborator Stan Lee, the first creator to achieve marquee status in an industry that had previously prided itself on using anonymous hacks, disposable parts on an assembly line who could be replaced easily without the readers noticing. When Kirby jumped ship to rival publisher DC in the early 1970s, he was handed more or less total creative control, and notably, his name appeared on the cover of his comics. It wasn’t just vanity on Kirby’s part. He had built up enough of a reputation that his name could indeed sell an unknown (or, in the case of Jimmy Olson, a known but flagging) title. Kirby set his stories in a universe he called the “Fourth World” a setting in which intergalactic gods used earth as an arena for battles with cosmic consequences. Some of its flaws are glaring: clumsy exposition, terrible dialogue, and no resolution to the story (his contract with DC expired before the battle did). The story’s not without its charms (its nods to the optimism of the youthful counterculture of the time is particularly poignant), but overall, it generally indulges in the excesses common to the “hash-hobbit”¹ school of sci-fi and fantasy of the early 1970s.

But that artwork! Those dots! Even when Kirby’s writing fails, every panel is instantly identifiable as coming from the hand of the King. And no feature marks it more clearly than the dots. Ink splotches bleeding into each other everywhere-in one panel, they’re clouds, the next bubbles, the next some indefinable cosmic explosion. Perhaps Wolk is right, and early 70s readers were buying the Fourth World comics for the story or because Don Rickles was on the cover (yes, seriously). But it’s not likely. Mostly, they were buying them because they wanted Kirby’s artwork-his sense of motion, his use of collages, and most of all his dots. Hell, they even have their own wikipedia entry. For all of the far-out cosmic exploration that takes place in titles like The New Gods² and The Forever People, the dots ground the comics with a certain humanity, letting the reader know that even as they were going into the farthest reaches of the galaxy, the hand of Jack was always there to guide them.

And for that, We Love Kirby Dots.

Haywire comet

¹ This will probably get a post of its own, but the term “hash hobbit,” ripped from a throwaway line in a Dan Clowes comic, refers to the aesthetic, most prevalent in the 1970s, that was marked by an intersection of the drug culture, fantasy (especially Tolkien, obviously), New Age and neo-Pagan influences, traditional folk music, geek culture, a touch of the Occult, and a heaping spoonful of misplaced optimism. Dungeons & Dragons came out of this aesthetic. Many Led Zeppelin records hit all of the above bases at the same time: “The Battle of Evermore,” featuring Sandy Denny from Fairport Convention, another hash hobbit band if there ever was one, practically manages to make the scale explode.
² When a comic starts out with the line “On the day that the old gods died…,” it’s like the Movie Trailer Announcer is aligning his chakras on the spot.

The Audacity of Dope

NOTE: In the wake of Barack Obama’s historic victory, Black Ships will be taking a one-week sabbatical from strictly political posts. We’ll be sweating off our election hangovers with a variety of topics.

There’s nothing hip-hop likes more than co-opting a sports cliche, and as the concept of the Game Manager (or Custodian) solidifies itself in professional football, it’s only a matter of time before the concept finds itself applied to a rap album. Conventional thinking on football has held that great quarterbacks win Super Bowls, and thus teams that want to win the Super Bowl (and who doesn’t, other than the Detroit Lions?) should find a great quarterback. There have been holes in this theory before, of course; record-breakers like Dan Marino never took home the ultimate prize. This decade, though, has seen the complete implosion of the idea. The 2000 Baltimore Ravens won the title behind Trent Dilfer, a joke of a quarterback, and the Tampa Bay Bucs followed two years later with the equally mediocre Brad Johnson. While great quarterbacks have won Super Bowls since (Peyton Manning and Tom Brady have four between them), the ironclad rule that a team needs a great quarterback has diminished in importance. Even now, the Tennessee Titans are the NFL’s only undefeated team, and they’re helmed by locker-room cancer Kerry Collins, who can’t even be counted on to show up to games sober. The game manager can’t be awful, but they must be aware enough of their limitations to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes. Instead, they avoid making too many mistakes, and let the rest of the team (defense, special teams, ground game) pick up the slack.

Similarly, the idea that in order to make a great rap album, one must be a great rapper, is getting left behind in the 20th Century. Sure, Jay-Z’s going to have an easier time making a classic than, say, Jim Jones, but it’s not a given. Plenty of talented rappers (Canibus, Ras Kass) have never made an album that even qualifies as tolerable, while Cam’ron’s goofy charm makes Purple Haze stand up pretty well. Get enough guests, the best production team money can buy, and avoid saying anything really dumb on the record, and you too could make a listenable album. It truly takes a village to make a hot record.

Even by these relaxed standards, though, Young Jeezy seems like an unlikely candidate. In interviews, he’s repeatedly stressed that he’s not a talented wordsmith, but a hustler who happens to rap. On “3 A.M.,” the lead single from his previous album, he couched it in more charming terms: “A ad lib here, a ad lib there, fuck it, ad libs everywhere!” His one gimmick–that he knew a lot of ways to describe cocaine–seemed destined to relegate him to the historical dustbin of 2005, the year every blogger fell in love with coke rap.

And yet, his new album The Recession goes beyond tolerable into the realm of actually listenable. He still hasn’t refined the formula that much, but throws in just enough references to our current malaise (gas prices, food prices, George Bush’s plummeting approval rating) to sound almost political, and the goofier lines (“eyes so low, I look like an Asian”) never quite tank the affair. Album highlight “Circulate,” in particular, demonstrates why people turned to so-called “reality rap” as a respite from the blinged aesthetic. Jeezy’s a smart enough businessman to know that in the middle of an economic crisis, talking about diamonds is as tone-deaf as a Lehman employee complaining about the size of his bonus. Even when he acknowledges his newfound wealth, he does so with an empathy that takes the edge off, and his multiple references to health challenges that various relatives of his are facing make the case for single-payer healthcare better than any commercial a 527 can whip up. The beats, predictably, lean towards the anthemic. Almost every song sounds like a conscious attempt to outdo T.I.’s “What You Know” for sheer bombast, and most of them at least come close. The influence of 70s soul that informed Jay-Z’s American Gangster also runs strong throughout the album, especially on the aforementioned “Circulate.” Nas’ appearance on “My President” closes the album out on an appropriately topical note. Does it touch the heights of The Blueprint? Of course not. But Young Jeezy has, almost in spite of himself, managed to game manage his way to a pretty damn good record.