Month: May 2019

The Lady Gaga phenomenon is now a memory just distant enough that most of us can barely remember why we thought what we thought about it at the time. To be honest, I was one of the few relatively neutral parties—I never completely bought into either the people who proclaimed Lady Gaga a genius when she first came on the scene, or the people who excoriated her as some kind of musical abomination. Believe me, there’s a whole universe of far worse pop stars than Lady Gaga out there. But there is undeniably no shortage of better ones, as well (Adele, Pink, Taylor Swift, etc.), and at her peak of popularity, Lady Gaga was without question ridiculously overrated. I remember in 09-10 when the frenzy was at its peak, and even if you were aware that she had a certain measure of talent, it was hard not to get annoyed at the overinflated claims that she and her idolaters were making. Still, the honest truth is that, as pop stars of her sort go, she was above-average, at least early on, and there is plenty of good material on her first two sets to attest to that.

Indeed, if everything she had ever released was as good as her first two singles, I might have been calling her a genius along with everyone else. “Just Dance” is a superb dance song with a strong undercurrent of desperation and despair, and we wouldn’t see another club track this powerful until Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin In Love”. “Poker Face”, Lady Gaga’s original signature song until “Bad Romance” came along to steal that torch, is a distinctive and striking track with fascinating lyrics that deserves every bit of the success and acclaim it received. “Paparazzi”, while not featuring nearly the same degree of substance as those items, is also an effective combination of glamour and creepiness, especially if you’re willing to buy into the not entirely implausible alternate interpretation of its lyrical contents.

The problem is that, whether from uneven talent or from putting too much emphasis or her image and not enough on quality control, she can’t maintain this level of quality throughout the whole album. After about the eighth track, after the singles and the title-song, the album devolves into glitzy, empty filler. Some of this filler is pleasant, like the pretty ballad “Brown Eyes”, but it’s still extremely thin, featherweight material, and it kind of undercuts the comparisons to acts like Queen and Bowie people were making at the time…Gaga’s inability to actually fill out a wholly successful and consistent album really damaged the credibility of some of her claims.

Even some of the singles are of poor quality. “Lovegame” was easily the worst of Lady Gaga’s actual hits prior to the Born This Way album…it did capture an oddly arresting production sound, but it also features some of the stupidest lyrics in pop music history, with infamous quotes like “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”, or “Got my ass squeezed by sexy Cupid”. “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” aren’t much better, the former sounding exactly like the kind of vapid Euro-Pop we quite rightly got rid of after the Nineties, while the latter is one of those songs where if you’ve heard the title, you’ve heard the entire song.

The title-song is the only album track on the original album that could have been a single…granted, it isn’t entirely clear whether she’s being satirical or whether this actually how she sees the world, but at least the materialistic credo is presented with enough cleverness and style to be genuinely intriguing. Unfortunately, most of the other attempts at luxury pop on the album (and there are a lot of them), are simply blatant indulgences in pointless materialism in an era that was known all too well for them. There’s nothing particularly ironic or clever about them, and they aren’t even gender-flipped like Kesha’s attempts at this kind of thing; their lyrics could just as easily be sung by a man. Still, even the lesser items on this disc feature distinctive production by Lady Gaga’s secret weapon RedOne that makes even the weakest compositions seem smooth and stylish, resulting in the album coming off as a triumph of style over substance…exactly the note Lady Gaga herself struck at that point, so I suppose it was if nothing else fitting.

A year after the album’s initial release, she released what was basically an unusually extensive version of the deluxe bonus discs that were starting to be popular at the time, but with the fanfare usually reserved for an entirely new album. This would  inspire a surprising number of other artists to do the same thing over the next year or so (e.g. Kesha, Usher), but whether you think Lady Gaga’s eight-track ‘bonus EP’ counts as a ‘real’ album or not, the fact remains that The Fame Monster is her only album of original material prior to 2016’s Joanne to approach real consistency of quality. Perhaps this was partly because its shorter length translated into her spreading herself less thin, but it’s still an impressive achievement for her.

Interestingly, in this case the album tracks were actually more interesting than several of the singles. Some of the finest items Lady Gaga ever recorded, such as “Monster”, “Dance in the Dark”, and “Speechless” languished in relative obscurity on the album while pleasant but far from essential items like “Telephone” and “Alejandro” got the lion’s share of publicity. Granted, there’s nothing really wrong with “Telephone” or “Alejandro”…they’re both well-made, enjoyable pieces of fairly clever Pop pastiche. But they don’t exactly sound like the output of a visionary genius, and at the time they would both have been much easier to enjoy coming from a person who hadn’t essentially declared herself the Great White Hope of the pop music world.

And even The Fame Monster has one rank filler track on it…the closing track, “Teeth”, which barely qualifies as a song at all. But of course, The Fame Monster also has what would end up being the defining song of Lady Gaga’s Pop career…the iconic “Bad Romance”. Why this song is still instantly recognizable when even its former equal, “Poker Face”, is now little more than a punchline could be a subject of endless debate, but I’d say it’s because this song, and this song alone, actually fulfills the promise of Lady Gaga’s Pop persona. Lady Gaga was supposed to be this insane, wildly eccentric, iconoclastic visionary, but while her videos, live shows, and public behavior supported this position strongly, her actual music was always disappointingly bound by convention. Even the best of her other Pop-era material, such as “Poker Face”, “Just Dance”, and “The Edge of Glory”, ultimately sounds relatively normal…either standard, if above-average, late-2000s Pop music, or capable but conventional pastiches of earlier Pop styles. This song is the exception to all of that: with its hypnotically nonsensical chant of a chorus and random, out-of-nowhere references to old Hitchcock movies, this really does sound like the kind of music a person who goes to award shows wearing nothing but raw meat would make.

As much of a cultural sensation as it was at the time, it has become abundantly clear in this last three years that the phenomenon and frenzy that was Lady Gaga has disappeared almost completely. This may have been partly a result of the ill-advised timing of her ‘hiatus’  in 2012, but I imagine it’s primarily because once we had mainstream Pop stars like Adele and Taylor Swift who were actually making genius-level music, we really didn’t need her anymore.

I strongly suspect that the entire Lady Gaga phenomenon happened mostly because, at the end of the 2000s, Pop music had been so stale and uninteresting for so long that we were in desperate need of a genius to come and break through the barriers, much like Nirvana did in the early Nineties. We were so desperate for this visionary savior, in fact, that when none seemed to come along, we finally had to essentially make one up, ascribing that status to anyone who seemed slightly more interesting than the average Pop star. But once Adele broke the guardrails between mainstream Pop music and the various kinds of Alternative music, and the ‘New Grunge’, as some people used to call it back then, became a reality, that kind of make believe simply wasn’t necessary anymore

Still, all that aside, these two albums do contain several of the very best songs of two-year period they spanned, and even the worst material on them seems relatively harmless compared to most of the songs on her next album, the appalling Born This Way. Indeed, while she’s done much better stuff in her current career as a sort of high-class musician-of-all-work (Cheek to Cheek, Joanne, the A Star Is Born soundtrack), this is pretty much the undisputed highlight of her overt Pop phase. And if it doesn’t remotely compare to Adele’s 21 or Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Beyonce’s Lemonade, it’s still far from a disgrace and well worth hearing, although if you decide to skip the second half of the first disc, I’ll be the last one to blame you.

If any band defies all the stereotypes about Christian Rock, it’s this one. The Chariot are, essentially, a Christian Metalcore band…all their members were Christians, they worked a lot of Christian themes into their lyrics, and they even publicly copped to the label. But most people’s idea of Christian Rock, or even Christian Metal, could not be further from the reality of this album’s face-melting intensity.

Metalcore generally tends toward more conventional melodic structures than the other kinds of Extreme Metal (which is part of the reason it usually gets less respect than those other kinds). But even the edgiest acts from the genre, such as Converge, rarely approach this level of sheer chaotic cacophony. These guys completely ignore the conventional rules of structure that even the iconoclastic genre of Metal is expected to follow, and they make it work beautifully.

But of course, despite how it appears on the surface, the music isn’t really chaotic at all. This is a complex and carefully planned-out collection of music, far from the random noises of such bands as Anal Cunt. Although the lead singer modestly deferred the title in an interview, this band truly belongs to the prestigious subgenre of intelligent and sophisticated Hardcore music referred to as ‘Mathcore’.

There are also lyrical passages here and there to keep the sophisticated brutality from getting monotonous. There is even one song, “Your”, that is in a gentle Indie Pop style totally different from the rest of the album, and the result is jarring in all the right ways. (The song titles on the album are designed to spell out two sentences: “Forget” “Not” “Your” “First” “Love” and “Speak” “In” “Tongues” “And” “Cheek”. This probably limits their extractability, as the titles make no sense out of context, but then, this is an album that was meant to be consumed whole to begin with).

As for the lyrics, while their Christian themes are fairly overt, the truth is that religious themes can make for some highly dramatic lyrics that are very suited to Metal (and do, in this case). After all, the earliest true Metal songs, such as the works of Black Sabbath, were essentially fire-and-brimstone sermons set to music. The final track, “Cheek”, even includes a lengthy clip of the inspirational speech from the end of the classic film The Great Dictator, and yes, they manage to make overtly idealistic and inspirational content mesh effectively with the anger and defiance that are the most fundamental principles of Metal. Such a feat is admittedly not easy, but this band is up to it.

I probably don’t have to inform any of you that Christian Rock has a notorious reputation for being insular and insipid, and Christian Metalcore in particular is known for producing some of the most vanilla Metal out there (look at bands like The Devil Wears Prada). But this band proves that there’s an exception to every rule (or at least every generalization). This album was their last and most critically acclaimed effort, and it ranks alongside Deafhaven’s Sunbather, Machine Head’s Bloodstone and Diamonds, Carcass’ Surgical Steel, and Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit as one of the greatest Heavy Metal albums of the current decade. And given how many bands throughout history have fizzled out at the end of their careers, having a swan song this impressive is a true achievement. The band may have broken up after this album’s release, but (no pun intended) they left behind one Hell of a legacy.

It may seem hard to believe after the acclaim her last three albums received, but there was a time when Beyonce was thought of strictly as a ‘singles artist’. Her material with Destiny’s Child was primarily singles-oriented, after all, and her first solo album, Dangerously In Love, was downright uneven, with entirely too much dull Scott Storch-penned material. Her second album, B’Day, was more consistent, but still had little ambition to be more than a collection of individual Pop songs. This, her third album, was her first real stab at joining the prestigious ranks of the ‘album artists’, and while it admittedly didn’t entirely succeed on the first try, there’s still much more first-rate material here than on her first two albums.

This double album was the first time Beyonce attempted to make an ‘album statement’, as they say. It has a clear overarching concept, and each of the two dual discs has a consistent sound and style, with a deliberate contrast between them. The only thing that isn’t consistent about this album is the quality…the good material is often very, very good, but the album unfortunately contains three of the worst songs of the entire 2000s decade, and all three of them were unwisely promoted as singles.

The first disc, titled I Am…, is Beyonce singing in her ‘normal’ persona, and consists almost entirely of soft, pretty piano ballads with singer-songwriter-style lyrics. And if the songs are perhaps too similar to each other in sound, the disc works as a soul-baring exercise, offering Beyonce minus the attitude and glitz, and several of the songs offer a rather touching glimpse into the real person underneath the glamour. In addition, all of the song are lovely as music, with exceptionally pretty melodies and the softest and gentlest vocals Beyonce has ever provided.

The only problem is that one of these songs (the first track on the album, in fact) has lyrics so horribly offensive that Beyonce is still paying the price for them regarding her reputation. The song is set to a pretty melody just like the others, but the lyric is a misandrist rant about how all men are shallow, philandering, insensitive creeps…and yes, I mean all men. To be fair, Beyonce didn’t write this…it’s literally the only song on the entire album she doesn’t have a writing credit on…and I’m fairly sure she doesn’t actually think it, but the fact that she chose of her own free will to record it means that she kind of brought the accusations of misandry that have dogged her ever since on herself.

The second disc is supposedly sung from the perspective of Beyonce’s performing alter ego at the time, the titular Sasha Fierce, and features a heavy R&B sound and a sophisticated and even somewhat experimental style. The big hit from this disc, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”, is so familiar today that we generally don’t notice that it actually has a very unusual structure for a Pop song. And items like “Sweet Dreams”, which has such a heavy electronic sound that it almost qualifies as EDM, yet never loses its R&B edge; “Radio”, which sounds uncannily like a Prince composition; or “Ego”, an R&B jam that abruptly turns into a piano ballad two-third of the way through, all represent some of the smartest and most sophisticated mainstream R&B of the era.

Unfortunately, the two most experimental tracks are collaborations with star producer Bangladesh, of “A Milli” and “Break Up” fame. Bangladesh is certainly an experimenter, so I suppose I can see what drew Beyonce to work with him here, but unfortunately his ‘experiments’ always turn out horrifically unlistenable, and this was no exception. “Diva”, where Beyonce adopts a not-very-convincing ‘thug’ pose over a maddeningly repetitive chorus and one of the most nauseating beats of all time, is easily one of the worst songs of its decade. The other Bangladesh song on the album, “Video Phone” is slightly less saliently terrible, but it’s still a world-class headache.

Ironically, given the wildly uneven content of the main album, this album features the rare commodity of a consistently fine set of bonus tracks, something that even Beyonce has had trouble delivering on her later albums (“7/11” being an obvious example). In fact, there were no less than 18 separate songs released on some permutation of this album, and with the exception of the three colossal duds mentioned above, all of them are pretty solid.

With all of that good material, there’s really no way I can call this a bad album, and its heights, such as the Ryan Tedder-penned “Halo” on I Am… or “Single Ladies” on Sasha Fierce, are sublime enough to counterbalance even the horrific low points on display here. It’s actually quite inconvenient to try and purchase this album because of the plethora of alternate releases it’s received, all of which are missing at least one song out of the full 18, but I actually recommend wading through those options, even in spite of the album’s unevenness. I don’t really know if this album qualifies Beyonce as an ‘album artist’ on its own, and it certainly doesn’t reach the same level of artistic success as her next three efforts, but it’s worth hearing either way, and even if you’ve heard the hits, I guarantee you’ll find some interesting stuff here that didn’t make it onto the radio.

While most amateur critics seemed to detest the shallow, willfully stupid party rappers that cropped up around 2015 like Rae Sremmurd and Migos, many casual listeners and a surprising number of professional published critics tried to defend them with the argument that their lyrics (which is the most common complaint brought against them) aren’t the point and that their music is merely meant to be mindless fun. And while I would certainly buy the ‘lyrics-don’t-matter’ argument in regards to the more sophisticated melodic Hook-rap genre that would evolve out of this movement a year or two later, as far as the 2015 “Crunk Revival” itself goes, this is one of those times I have to side with the amateur critics.

It’s not that the ‘mindless fun’ argument couldn’t conceivably have merit…it’s just that it didn’t really apply in most of the cases where it was used. Rae Sremmurd’s first album was produced primarily by Mike Will Made It, who has somewhat redeemed himself since but who at the time was known for making some of the dreariest beats of the current decade, so arguing that the beats rather than the lyrical content is supposed to be the source of that record’s appeal doesn’t really help them much. And Migos’ early fondness for endlessly repetitive hooks of the “Imma Be”/”Whip My Hair” variety made their music from this time period about as much ‘fun’ as having a sharp stick jammed in your ear. And at least those two acts have improved since then…when it comes to the genre’s B-listers like Silento and T-Wayne, their beats weren’t any more interesting than anything else about them.

Contrast those acts against this album, the debut effort by a relatively minor Rap name who only has one Top Forty hit to his name, and you’ll see an immediate difference. It came out a couple of years before the Party-Rap trend really caught on, and could be considered a direct ancestor of the Crunk revival, but in contrast to most of its successors in the field, it’s actually fun to listen to. The beats are consistently superb and really manage to create a genuine party atmosphere. The one hit, “No Hands”, is particularly good, combining its strong beat with a genuinely beguiling chorus.

The album has only one flaw: the actual Rapper at the center of it. Granted, this kind of Party Rap is not known for intelligent lyrics at the best of times, but Waka Flocka Flame is right down there with Soulja Boy and Insane Clown Posse as one of the worst lyricists in all of Rap. Perhaps the best way to describe him is to ask you to imagine if Shaquille O’Neal had actually had a legitimate Rap career. Frankly, even that is a bit kind…Waka’s lyrics are every bit as juvenile and simplistic as Shaq’s, but Shaq was at least trying to be clever. These are the kind of Rap lyrics that result from putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into your work, and they make the lyrics by acts in the Rae Sremmurd vein seem capable by comparison.

The reason for this is apparently that Waka Flocka Flame actually hates Rap, is only sticking with his Rap career because he can’t bring himself to turn down the money, and thus goes out of his way to put as little effort into his lyrics as possible. This accounts for this album’s closing track, “Fuck This Industry”…and no, contrary to what you might think, writing a song with actual content does not cause his lyrics to improve. This is a man who can still be completely simple-minded and cliched even when talking about his defining hatred for the Rap industry and paying tribute to his dead family members.

There are a fair number of featured credits on the album, but they don’t really contribute much to the lyrical quality. Most of the contributors are obscure nobodies, largely drawn from the rest of Gucci Mane’s ‘Brick Squad’ posse, and while, like most Rappers, they’re more capable than Waka Flocka Flame, they aren’t especially interesting in their own right. Of the few people you’re likely to have heard of, most are other famously terrible artists like French Montana and Gudda Gudda (best known as the “grocery bag” guy from “Bedrock”). Even Wale’s verse on “No Hands” (the only appearance by a genuinely talented rapper on this album) does not catch him in particularly good form.

One could argue that Waka Flocka Flame is a kind of modern-day version of the Crunk era’s biggest party “rapper”, Lil Jon…an act with no discernible skills as a Rapper who still managed to make genuinely enjoyable music. The only problem with this parallel is that Lil Jon was actually good at something…granted, that something was not Rap, but there’s no denying he had an utterly unique and outsized personality. Waka Flocka Flame seems more like a random no-talent who lucked into a good production team, and I understand the frustration some people feel about his largely undeserved success and the fact that he is not the one primarily responsible for what good qualities his work does possess.

All that said, the truth is that this album is still pretty enjoyable, even with the large flaw of the idiotic lyrics. The lyrics are enough to detract somewhat from the experience, but they’re not enough to ruin it, and the album still makes for a fun listen. If you really must listen to mindless Party Rap, I’d certainly recommend this over Sremmlife or any of the other albums in that vein…in spite of the near-rock bottom lyrical content, there are still no shortage of far worse Rap albums than this one.