Missy Elliot disperesed an aural assimilation agent called “Work It”. A supplementary visual agent broadcast through the entertainment network MTV was also employed.
Assimilation was effortless. Aural antidotes — what is usually called “rock ‘n’ roll” — were irrelevant.
Missy Elliott further dispersed the aural agent on the data module named Under Construction. Module saw penetration into millions of data playback components. Margin of success: significant, but flawed.
Accompanying agents on data module did not match “Work It” in effectiveness and memorability.
On Stardate -320898, Missy Elliott introduces This Is Not a Test! as an upgrade to data module Under Construction.
Missy Elliott scales back intra-track homilies, deploys adjunct perfomance units — what is called “collaborators” — clarifies themes of previous release.
Module This Is Not a Test! does not contain agent with an effectiveness factor comparable to “Work It”. Agent “Pass the Dutch”, released prior to introduction of This Is Not a Test!, achieves comparritive torsal response but inflitration into memory engrams shows degradation over time.
Lack of comparable effective agent is irrelevant.
Overall focus and cohesion of module This Is Not a Test! compensates for any single agent. Module compensates for flaws of last release.
One of Nine Binary Adjunct to Unimatrix Zero — obsolete designation: Timbaland — provides stronger sonic backdrop over which Missy Elliott deems playas, fake weaves and skinny bi-yaaches insignificant.
Margin of success: closer to perfection.
The following agents contain distinctive characteristics contributing to the whole:
“Ragtime Interlude” serves as respite to overall synthetic timbres.
“Toyz Interlude” appeals to prurient interest by charting errogenous effectives of mechanical aide compared to actual mating rituals.
“Don’t Be Cruel” quotes Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Push It” without resorting to parody.
This Is Not a Test! achieves further assimilation. Other data modules are irrelevant. Antidotes to Missy Elliott agents — ineffective.
It’s tough trying to quantify why one album is more likeable than another, especially in a genre in which I’m not familiar.
How is it I can still listen to TLC’s 3D but not give 3LW’s A Girl Can Mack a second chance? And how is it Mary J. Blige, who’s never been mentioned on this site before, got review space over Alicia Keys, who has?
Perhaps it’s because Blige is everywhere nowadays.
Right at the start of Missy Elliott’s This Is Not a Test! — wh00t! There she is. About three tracks into Sting’s Sacred Love — wh00t! There she is again.
And with a voice as powerful and expressive as Blige’s, it’s tough not to take notice.
Love & Life is the only album from Blige to which I’ve listened. As such, it’s the best album from Blige to which I’ve listened.
Thematically, the songs on Love & Life don’t exactly break new literary ground.
Girl meets boy. Girl pledges devotion to boy. Boy does girl wrong. Girl gets hers back.
But here’s a case where the storyteller is better than the story.
When Blige delivers her plea “Don’t Go”, it’s enough for me to say, “I’m staying right here, babygirl.” (Never mind the fact we both bat for the same team.)
When she ruminates on the idea of “Friends”, you almost wanna kick the shit out of the duplicitous sonofabitch who broke Mary’s heart.
And when she vows to cook and clean for you on “Ooh!”, you almost expect to find her waiting at home for you.
Blige’s plain-spoken — and surprisingly grammatically correct — lyrics won’t reveal their sincerity on paper. For that, you’d need to listen to the woman herself.
And don’t let the celebrity (or notoriety?) of Sean “Puffy AmiYumi” Combs interfere with your enjoyment of Love & Life. Dude may be a heel for convincing Sting to let him mangle his biggest hit, but his production work on Love & Life does right by Miss Mary.
The samples of harps and guitars at the start of “Don’t Go”, the ominous bass on “Press On”, that bizarre loop underpinning “When We” — all nice touches that wonderfully underscore Blige’s voice.
So maybe that’s it — why an album makes a connection in a unfamiliar genre. Sing it with conviction, and it doesn’t matter what the story is.
I really wouldn’t have understood this album at the time of its release.
In fact, I actively avoided rap back in 1988, when N.W.A. unleashed Straight Outta Compton on an unprepared world. The cool kids in high school listened to rap, and with my Kronos Quartet tapes playing in my Walkman, I was not a cool kid.
But what would have happened had I been subjected to the unabashed rage of Straight Outta Compton?
Would it have spoken to my teen-aged need for rebellion? Would I have been drawn to it unwittingly, not fully comprehending the bigger socio-political underpinnings inherent in its content?
Most likely not.
So it’s at the age of 3x when Straight Outta Compton not only makes sense but downright reels me in.
This shit is fucking rock ‘n’ roll.
It taps into the soul of discontent. It speaks plainly and brutally. It’s loud, obnoxious and everything your mother told you stay away from.
No wonder it sold big.
But this kind of high praise would never have come from me back in 1988. Hell, it wouldn’t have come from me in 1998. It took a little bit of my own life experience to understand the anger directed at the racial divide described in detail on the album.
No, I didn’t grow up in a gang neighborhood (although I have to say my old stead has really turned into a slum), and no, I have no immediate family getting harrassed by police, dealing drugs or causing shit.
If anything, it’s something of a big stretch to link Ice Cube’s indignation toward civil authority and my own anger at the racism internalized by gay Asian men, devaluing their own masculinity.
(I don’t need no fucking white boyfriend, bitch.)
But the rage speaks to me. The vitriol speaks to me.
Never mind the fact that as a studio work, Straight Outta Comptom stands up, it still sounds imaginative more than 15 years later.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the aforementioned unprepared world couldn’t see the forest for the proverbial trees.
The lyrics of “Gangsta Gangsta” are indeed violent and perhaps gratuitous. Thing is, I didn’t notice until I actually tried to visualize Ice Cube’s words in my head.
To someone who has never had cause to express the kind of discontent (perhaps malcontent?) depicted in “Gangsta Gangsta”, N.W.A. would certainly come across as a menace to society.
And that may be Straight Outta Compton’s mixed legacy.
In their own way, the members of N.W.A. were journalists. They spoke to the reality of their surroundings.
But like all messages, the audience took from it what they wanted.
I have never had to live in the kind of urban environment that fueled the creation of Straight Outta Compton, but for some reason, I still feel it said something to me.
And that’s an important achievement to accomplish regardless of when it happens.
Dragon Ash announced the participants of its remix album to be released on March 24. Titled Harvest Remixes, the album is based on tracks from the band’s 2003 release, Harvest.
In addition to remixes by such Japanese artists as Dry & Heavy and Riow Arai, the album includes contributions from drum ‘n’ bass group Ganja Crew and electronica artist Hood.
Some of the band’s members, billed as different side projects, will also contribute remixes. Guitarist Hiroki joins his old band Strobo on one track, while he pairs up with Sakurai Makoto as Techno-X on another. Furuya Kenji and DJ Bots call themselves as Fellows, Inc. on yet another remix.
For all its assests as a classic album, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On still posseses one major flaw.
It stands alone.
No album (that I’ve encountered, at least) manages to weave all the contradictory elements Gaye brought together on What’s Going On.
Influenced by the social upheaval of the late 1960s and the sonic creativity of the Beatles, Gaye, who was unsatisfied with the trappings of pop success, wanted to produce something different.
After he threatened to leave Motown if boss Berry Gordy didn’t release What’s Going On, Gaye found himself with a hit album, which has since remained on numerous all-time greatest lists.
What’s Going On endures because Gaye injected a social conscience to the pop machinations of R&B without getting didactic.
He also expanded R&B’s breadth by demonstrating it too had the ability to be symphonic in scope. R&B need no longer be relegated to the three-minute pop song.
The title track serves as a kind of opening theme to the album. It’s also a convenient single, since the fade out at the end separated it from the rest of the album.
But starting with “What’s Happening Brother”, What’s Going On transforms into a 15-minute suite. Taken by themselves, the five contiguous tracks starting with “What’s Happening Brother” are lush, beautiful songs by their own right.
But woven together as a single entity, they become an emotional roller coaster of gravity and optimism, of unrest and hope.
In its wake, R&B artists have attempted to create a similar theatrical feel as What’s Going On — getting rid of pauses between tracks, tying together themes between songs.
But no other album has managed to replicate its social conscience. Gangsta rap may style itself as the voice of an urban conscience, but the genre possesses none of What’s Going On gentility or subtlety.
What’s Going On is an architechtural feat. Like Antonio Salieri’s lament in the film Amadeus, misplace one note, and the structure would fall.
Gaye slows down the momentum of the album with the last three tracks. At 7 1/2 minutes, “Right On” is big in and of itself, while “Wholly Holy” does a fine job of setting up the album’s final definitive statement, “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)”.
What’s Going On is a towering masterpiece, influencial as it is enduring.
And that’s the problem — the album makes you hungry for more, for a musical experience with both heart and mind, painstaking in its detail as it is free in execution.
The problem with “essential” or “definitive” albums is the exact thing that makes them “essential” and “definitive”.
Expectations.
An album labeled with those adjectives blew expectations when it was first released, but over time, those same expectations can get pretty inflated.
It’s tough to appreciate the significance of Ludwig Van Beethoven’s nine symphonies in his time when composers 200 years after have all attempted to write works of a similar scale and demeanor.
The critical writings regarding John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme are no less star-struck.
The testimonies of fellow famous musicans in the first few pages of Ashley Kahn’s book, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album come across like Protestant faith — you wonder what’s so great that you feel like you’re missing out.
More specific to this context: What value would a webzine publisher covering mostly Japanese indie rock find in John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme?
A little more context, if you will — I am not a jazz enthusiast. I’m barely an appreciator.
So writing a review about Coltrane’s eponymous album, with so much ink already spilled, is a compounded exercise in pointlessness.
But hey, it’s new to me …
First off, A Love Supreme is a jazz album.
It is not a hybrid work. It is not a combination of divergent traditions ushering in a new cultural perspective — like, say, the combination of metal and punk that culminated in Nirvana.
Nor is it a dilution of the jazz aesthetic with an external influence. John Cage has no bearing on A Love Supreme as he does in John Zorn’s game piece, nor does Willie Nelson as he does on Norah Jones.
A Love Supreme sounds like a jazz album. It smells like a jazz.
And on first listen, it doesn’t seem so remarkable to all the other jazz albums that have come in its wake.
But even if A Love Supreme sounds like just another jazz album, it still possesses a charisma, a charm — something it reveals on subsequent listens.
It may have to do with how the album came together. Coltrane sequestered himself in his attic for five days, and when he emerged, he announced he “had all the music”.
A Love Supreme has been called a suite, and its an apt description — the album’s cohesiveness, although intuitive in its feel, comes across more like classical music.
Coltrane may not have notated a single note on the album, but it feels like he had. And the very best jazz makes the improvised sound like fate.
There are a few subtleties that make A Love Supreme stand out. When Coltrane intones the relationship between the four-note theme of “Acknowledgement” and the title of the album, it’s like the clouds parting to reveal the sun.
And the timpani on “Psalm” gives the suite just a hint of its symphonic potential.
A Love Supreme is indeed a special album. The problematic superlatives in this case are well earned.
But don’t expect it to change your life the way it did, say, Carlos Santana’s. The album nonetheless makes a fine addition to music collections and libraries everywhere.
Art-School announced on its web site details of a live album to be released March 17. The album, titled Boys Don’t Cry, contains 23 tracks recorded at Club Quattro in Nagoya, Big Cat in Osaka and Liquid Room in Shinjuku. Art-School filmed the Liquid Room performance, which was the final date of that tour, for a DVD to accompany the album.
An album collecting Utada Hikaru’s first 15 singles hits stores on March 31, the singer’s web site announced. The collection includes her very first single, “Automatic”, all the way to her most recent release, “Colors”. The tracks are being remastered by Ted Jensen, who has worked with Fiona Apple and Santana.
The site also announced the delay of her next single, the theme to the movie Casshern. The new release date is April 21.
Utada’s official US site for her forthcoming debut album on Def Jam has also launched at Utada.com.
Speedstar Records has posted audio excerpts from Kicell’s third album, Mado ni Chikyuu, on its web site. The duo of brothers plan to promote the album with a series of special events, one of which features actress Sano Shirou. Kicell will then embark on a country-wide tour starting in Haruno. Mado ni Chikyuu arrives in stores on Feb. 18.
The title of Quruli’s fifth original album is Antenna, according to the group’s official site. The album is expected to include the two pre-release singles, “How to Go” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll”. Quruli also revealed the titles of other songs to be included on the 10-track album — “Race”, “Good Morning”, “Hanehane Rock” and “Kuroi Tobira”.