360 records from the year 2000: 180 - 176

180. Quasimoto: The unseen

All the work of producer Madlib who features on this album as himself and as his altered voice/alter ego Quasimoto. The difference between the two is that Madlib ‘wastes all his money on records and getting high’, while Quasimoto ‘is labeled as a bad character’. It’s a subtle record, this.

Like most hip hop albums this has a ridiculous amount of tracks (24). The difference with most hip hop albums is that there’s really no dividing line between skits, segues and the actual tracks. And that’s a good thing. It’s all a dizzying rapid fire of jazz and obscure 70s soul samples, one or two verse raps and interlocking audio-scenes (check the hilarious ‘Madlib visits a records store’ section on ‘Return of the loop digga’), all packed in short tracks (none reach 4 minutes, 8 under 2’30”), many of which comprise any number of sections. In other words, it’s a mess, but a stoned, kaleidoscopic and funny mess – and I love those.

If you’re into it, all you need to know about the record, you can hear on the 1’55” of opening salvo ‘Bad character’. A dry drum break breaks open into an undefined trippy and eerie effect and one note bass line. A stoned voice deadpans on that famous line Public enemy number one’, though he sounds harmless enough. Sampled voices form a chorus line ‘unjust, sinful, vicious…’. Quasimoto comes in ‘there’s a new bad character in town, causing mischief in your city’. Mischief is the right word for the whole record – not gangsters, mischief makers. I mean, you can’t believe this guy talking about ‘hitting a nigger with a brick / for talking out of place’ or putting them in his ‘dungeon’, when two lines on he’s ‘up in outer space’ or ‘astro travelling/ playing a game of javelin’. You can’t believe a guy who says he ‘stabbed a nigger in the chest / with a pitchfork from the back’. He’s ‘always looking under some girl’s dress’ or going out on the street ‘passing out poisoned apples’ (voice in the background ‘shit he’s dead’), now those are stoned fantasies I can believe. The point? ‘No matter what I do / I’m labeled as a bad character’. Understand that all of this is in no way threatening, it’s like stoned Dennis the Menace. Or a surreal send-up of gangster talk, take your pick. All this violence only happens in Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s a lot of fun. And it’s all over in two verses and 1’40”, after which you get a jazz piano like out of a speakeasy, bar singer cracking himself up and swinging ‘yes, I’m the new bad character’ in a send –up of a blues drawl. This is all fantasy, is what it means. Hip hop needs more of those.

At its best: Bad character, Discipline 99 pt 0, Return of the loop digga, Bluffin, MHBs, Put a curse on you, Green power

179. Kaija Saariaho: Cinq reflets de L’amour de loin

First of all, call me a Hollywood-educated rube, but when a guy sings in a really low voice, he’s the bad guy. That’s just how it is. Unfortunately it seems nobody told the opera, and in this story the guy singing really low is the love interest. Anyway, it’s not like you can understand more than a couple of fragments of the words, so I made up my own story in which we’re all very happy when he dies.

Some background: Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer, whom I first heard of in the last chapter of Alex Ross’s excellent ‘The rest is noise’. ‘L’amour de loin’ is her first opera, and was finished and performed for the first time in 2000. I couldn’t find any recordings of the opera, but she also composed these ‘Cinq reflets de L’amour de loin’ – or the abridged version which summarizes the whole story in just under half an hour, and that’s what I‘ve been playing.

I’ve been playing it a lot, tons of times in fact. First because, well, I didn’t understand a thing about it (I really am a rube when it comes to opera) – and I wanted to. Later on, because I was really digging the orchestra playing these great, discordant, disorientating flashes of bobbing and weaving sound in the background, seemingly completely independent of the singers. Then the instruments quiet down to a repeating ripple pattern, a waltz like rhythm which sounds like it’d be great to meditate to (if it wasn’t interrupted by new waves of those discordant clusters of notes every other minute, of course).
Then I read the storyline - song 1: woman sings a beautiful lonely and longing lament, song 2: man who lives in a country far away hears about the woman, dreams about her and falls in love, song 3: he’s lonely and decides to travel to her, song 4: she hears he’s coming, wild emotions rage (doubts, hesitations, nothing about love is joyful for these characters), he gets sick from travelling and arrives only to die in her arms at their first meeting, song 5: woman sings a beautiful lonely and resigned lament. It works better when he’s a bad guy, trust me. You can see the direction this is going: this thing was pulling me in.

Make no mistake, the singing is a hurdle. The conversational singing style of pop music (the development of the microphone for singers is one of the major influential factors in the sound of what became pop music) is hard wired in me. This artful, ancient, mannered singing style is so alien and artificial to me. But I’m getting into it. Just think of the voices as musical instruments like the rest of the orchestra, it seems to do the trick.

One of my favorites is the last song, ‘Vers toi qui es si loin’. The orchestra sets up a sad drone and stays there for the duration, weaving all sorts of accents and noises into it, and the singer sings an almost recitative song on top, which basically ends in utter alone-ness. I believe it when I hear it. You see, I’ve been pulled in.

At its best: Outremer, L’amour de loin, Vers toi qui es si loin

178. Matt Bruno: Punch & beauty

In power pop this was one of the surprises of the year – actually of several years, the record first circulated as a bunch of homemade recordings, then it was re-released with a couple of new studio tracks added in 2000. And it’s easy to see why, it fits the power pop checklist to a T, songs about unfulfilled teenage love and songs about dancing that you can’t dance to but good for head banging with headphones. Bruno is a craftsman, the nuts and bolts are all correct and you can let yourself get swept away easily. Truth is, there’s not much substance in the home recordings, nothing to get to you. The studio tracks on the other hand – all Brian Wilson orchestrations and yearning. Really good, all 3 of them. It was waiting for what he’d do next, but searching on the internet revealed nothing. Maybe the well ran dry.

No Youtube

At its best: Do you love me?, Lover may I, That someone (alternate mix)

177. Pearl jam: Binaural

I think it was around the time I heard that song ‘Bugs’ on Vitalogy that I decided I wasn’t going to listen to anymore Pearl Jam records, but well now, that was nowhere near as unpleasant as I thought it would be. Far from the teenage spleen of their early work (which, I admit, was effective, though I don’t know what I’d think today), these days they take things at an amiable stroll. No one more than Stone Gossard. Is this the man who wrote such classic rock riffs? On this album his songs range from folksy strum ‘Thin air’ over ‘Of the girl’’s downer semi-blues groove to ‘Rival’’s concession at least to the electric guitar, but not really to the concept of RAWK. That concept is far behind – the rickety piano’ll make sure of that. I’m not putting it down, they were never that great at RAWK (too tortured). I’m just saying it’s quite an evolution, and Gossard’s songs are among my favorites of the album. 

There are a couple of things holding this back from a higher placing. A skewed idea of sequencing: opening with two shorter and up tempo songs is fine, but then veering off path with the awkward drummer song and the predictably too long ‘collaboratively written’ song, and following that with two more long and slow (though much better ) songs. It’s not effective. 

It’s still a bumpy ride: my respect for Vedder as a songwriter (look, I’m not going into the lyrics) is greater now than before I heard this, but not all of his five solo compositions should be here (‘Insignificance’, ‘Grievance’). Most importantly though: it’s funny how skeletal a band with three guitarists can sound. The arrangements are so skeletal, it’s almost under-rehearsed. It may jibe with their ‘authenticity’ badges, but it wouldn’t hurt to put some color on those bones. Still, they’re really ok, Pearl Jam. I like ‘em more now than before.

At its best: Breakerfall, Nothing as it seems, Thin air, Of the girl, Sleight of hand

176. Wyclef Jean: The ecleftic

Wyclef Jean is responsible for my favorite Whitney Houston song of all time, ‘Your love is my love’. OK, competition isn’t steep, but that’s something.

Oh yes, I’m placing this higher than Ghostface killa, Common etc. You wanna know why? Because he plays guitar. You wanna know why else? Because he plays with a real band. Yes that’s right. I’m that rockist. If hip hop artists want to fill the foreground of their records with rapping instead of singing, they better make sure the background is interesting enough. And you need a guitar for that.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure hip hop fans won’t share my opinion, but I like this mess of a record. Who can resist a song with the awesome title ‘Kenny Rogers - Pharoahe Monch dub plate’? It has that sprawling feel, and it’s pretty damn musical for a hip hop record (oops, there I go again…). There are missteps along the way: single ‘Perfect gentleman’ (enough with the praises for strip clubs already, rappers of 2000!), ‘Diallo’’s awfully long sincerity about something of political import. But there are plenty nice moments, and the whole thing just hops along (it feels shorter than 77 minutes somehow), buzzing between pop and weirdness (self-referencing to the max ‘Where Fugees at?’, Pink Floyd-cover ‘Wish you were here’!). It just has that energy (the energy of inspiration) that makes me forgive the embarrassing stuff. Hey, if you’re not doing embarrassing stuff, you’re doing this artistry thing wrong.

But he blows right near the end, damn, on ode to weed ‘There’s something about Mary’. It’s bad enough that he opens the song with a shout out to ‘everyone that was at Woodstock ’99… DMX…Limp Bizkit…Sheryl Crow’. On the end he announces a guitar solo ‘for all those people sleeping on his guitar skills’. After four notes (!) he’s talking again ‘What’s up, Hendrix’, three more notes, ‘Thanks for the lessons, Carlos Santana’, a couple more, ‘I didn’t forget you, Steve Vai’… It goes on. What’s up, Hendrix?

At its best: Kenny Rogers Pharoahe Monch dub plate, It doesn’t matter, 911, Low income, Whitney Houston dub plate
At its worst: There’s something about Mary