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Monday, December 31, 2007

Page 1: MUSIC
Page 2: FILM
Page 3: BOOKS/INTERVIEWS


MUSIC

Not since Lee Atwater got the blues and whanged his whammy-bar has a presidential insider jived so publicly as Karl Rove did at last week’s White House Press Correspondents’ Association dinner. With his flaccid gizzard, paste-pot complexion and hair grown out like a sanatorium resident who has given up on grooming, Rove went on a hip-hop dance binge for all to see, as if to balance the purge of US attorneys that was his recent shuck. Taken on the strictest hip-hop terms, the performance lacked truth in labeling. An MC is a Master of Ceremonies, a Microphone Controller. Implicit in the title is a statement of intent: An MC comes to rap. But Rove had no rap. Instead the Neocon Shadow Government's resident hype-man only danced like a prig in a torture garden.

— Peter Relic

Like Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Ray Charles before him, R. Kelly has reached the point where his albums transcend failure. He’s so far past the point of being “bad” or “good” that no amount of criticism will diminish his permanent niche in the pop landscape. No one listens to the new Kells to see if he’s dropped off or not: We listen to the new Kells album to hear Kells do what he does best, which is, undeniably, something that no one but he can do.

— Sam Sweet

[The Bonnaroo Music Festival] began in decidedly forgettable fashion. With nearly 90,000 fans expected to flock to a farm 60 miles east of Nashville, police began escorting lines of traffic to a small country road. The road’s name, Altamont, brought to mind another gathering of long-hairs, though this one hopefully wouldn’t end in violence and death. … As concertgoers became impatient, ancient VW vans and hybrid coupes alike began cheating ahead of the sluggish procession in the name of the old hippie adage: Peace, love and illegal lane usage.

— Nicholas Schreiber

Easy Tiger is a terrible record with a perfect title, one that says as much about Ryan Adams as the album’s cash-register residency in Starbucks kiosks across America. … What else except a gimmick makes his latest album news?

— Nathan Kosub

Few artists adhere to the “no such thing as bad publicity” idiom like Kanye West, and if it isn’t obvious by now, most of his moves are well-calculated, even the ones that seem spontaneous. And the gimmicks are all well and good when you’re making good albums, but by Kanye West standards, Graduation is hardly a good album. The egotism that took the world by storm in 2004 remains, but because of such a heightened sense of self-worth, we’ve come to expect more from one of the music industry’s biggest megalomaniacs.

— Ronnie Reese

As contrast to the promise of the film [I’m Not There], it’s more that depressing to listen to the soundtrack album, with its impressive roster of musicians, and hear, in the range of performances of Dylan covers, the unmistakable fear of failure: not of losing something, but of not measuring up to a legacy, of sounding crappy — of pissing off the Pope. Unfortunately, by choosing to risk nothing, to play it safe, so superbly safe, collectively they end up producing a tame, timid sound: the sound of two shoulders shrugging.

— Michael Helke

Common is someone who only sees innovation in rap as it exists in artists that jibe with his persona… What’s he going to say to the kid who finds inspiration in the tidal wave of determination of Young Jeezy’s Thug Motivation albums? That’s he’s wrong? That the lite-radio rap of Finding Forever is the sound of a better tomorrow?

— Sam Sweet

Strawberry Jam [opens with] “Peacebone,” the first of two conventionally structured rock songs that signal Animal Collective’s potentially base-alienating move toward electability, Democratic National Convention-style. On “Chores,” the album’s pinnacle, Panda Bear sounds as though Bizzy Bone has invaded Kevin Barnes’ body before crashing the hissing craft spectacularly into the bubbling Dagobah swamp, “Cabinessence” still wafting from the cockpit.

— Nicholas Barker