the new gangsta: cold and shiny like all that chrome they're rollin on

paging tim and sterling to new answers. (i really think the warmth thing is the key. compare the string of anonymous "bangers" i heard this morning on the radio with the squelching, almost analogue warmth of janet's "someone to call my lover," which i completely underrated. it sounds like mouse on mars! also the new mystikal single which - i would guess was manipulated via computer if not samples - balances the human warmth of "da funk" with the cyber- beats.)

I agree with Simon that there needs to be a damn good excuse for coldness/noise post-9/11. What could outdo 9/11 - so in that sense silly old Karlheinz 57 Varieties Stockhausen did have a point. Of sorts.

Please don't EVER compare Swans to somthing as empty and stupid as Hip Hop, "gangsta" or otherwise.

m. gira circa body to body = much sillier than dmx.

9/11 and after *is* the excuse for coldness and noise surely?

explain yrself.

Worsening economic and international situation likely to be reflected in music, I'd have thought, Jess.

well, that might be the "reason," but i dunno if it makes it an "excuse" as reynolds and our man carlin were using it. i.e. what's the point of you contributing more hairshirt-ness to the collective din rattling bout our heads from the "real" world, what's the point of *more* miserablism, sonic or otherwise? which is a whole 'nother discussion entirely.

The point of more miserablism? People deserve it. No one is innocent.

9/11 hasn't had any effect on pop music aside from a few album covers (Coup) a few songs (NYC Cops & the benifit singles) and some sad hastily-contrived television appearances and concerts. Most of the stuff out was in production for some time prior. And what rilly puzzles me is where this coldness and hardness is. Certainly not in the increasingly sappy lyrics (Fabolous excepted) -- & the production may be mechanical, but it always feels organic anyway, sort of like scrapheap robots on junkyard wars. The coldest singles I've heard lately have been R&B check-yr.-mind-get-yr.-groove snaps like 112's "Dance Wit Me".

sterling i will be attentively listening to urban radio all day today to provide examples (as i realized that i posted this question with none at hand.)

By new wave gangsta are we talking about the relatively crisp direction Dre's been going in, or about something more along the lines of Ca$h money or "The Great Depression" or..??

In hip hop I'd imagine different types of harshness.. sometimes it's more viscerally felt as a grating force (El-p/AlecEmpire on HBMS as an extreme example), but sometimes its more implicit, lurking around in relentlessly gritty samples (the foreboding nature of the quintessential RZA beat). What exactly is the culprit for the coldness that bugs you, jess? (waiting for the radio examples.....)

Reducing emotion in music to absolutes (this track is 'miserabilist') and suggesting what is or isn't good for us lissnas seems to fit the brave new Ashcroftian post-9/11 world a lot better than making a few noisy tracks, to be sure.

One possible response to it all (and as Sterling says artistically the response seems to be business-as-usual) is to turn away from it and suggest alternatives. Another is to reflect it, render yourself an aesthetic accessory-after-the-fact in the way that politicians (theirs and ours) have made us all political/emotional accessories a.t.f. (either by assuming we're sympathetic proxy-victims, or more simply by designating us as legitimate targets).

So that'd be my 'excuse'.

(note: i don't necessarily agree with either reynolds or marcello, mind. just clarifying the posiition. considering i spent most of the weekend listening to lightning bolt noize hasn't stopped being a calmative in certain situations for this personage.)

the radio (only one of our hiphop stations will come in and i brought no cd's with me today) is playing nothing but ultra-sucrose r&b today as a way to thwart me. the one fabolos track i've heard is actually a good example. as is a chunk of the timbaland record.

What I keep coming back to as cold gangsta hip hop's major difference to the comparison Jess mentions is the fact that, well, no, it doesn't all sound the same, a criticism I'd even accept for my beloved early techstep (although I'd qualify that by saying it sounded the same in a good way). If there is a paradigm of cold machinism, it's balanced by all the other elements that the producers can't help but bring to the work, be it James Brown funk for the Neptunes, or a warm organic rhythmic approach for Timbaland (who sounded much colder circa two years ago), or the disco/house elements in Irv Gotti's work. Even Christina Milian's "AM To PM", which strikes me as the decadent peak of cold R&B, has too much strange shit going on to simply be reduced to one term. Plus as Sterling notes the rappers are all bursting out into implausible throes of sentimentality.

Other thought: Jess, how does this all square with liking Cannibal Ox (who strike me as generally much colder than anything in the gangsta world)?

Other other thought: I love The Blueprint to death, but it more than anything else strikes me as sounding anachronistic, ill-reflecting our current social position however you choose to look at it. Out of interest, who was Reynolds criticising?

I agree some of the super-iciest stuff a la "Is that your bitch?" and "What's so different?" came out a couple years back - and how can it be post-Timbaland?, he's still goofing around and doesn't seem to have turned boring yet.
I like Reynolds' work a lot & I wonder if he and those who write in the same vein become exhausted through constantly trying to top themselves, trying to replicate Reynolds' "Energy flash" trick, being in the middle of a Big Cultural Moment & being able to nicely draw together critical theories in order to prove it's taken place. I don't think such moments happen every year, maybe not even every decade; I think it's better for me as a listener to fight the urge to contextualize into a greater movement as long as possible.
Let me follow Reynolds again, nevertheless: blame the drugs! Jay-z's as paranoid on The Blueprint as Station to Station-era Bowie.

The whole Jay-Z = paranoid equation I hear frequently confuses me, if only because The Life & Times struck me as *much* more paranoid ("Come & Get Me"? "Dope Man"?) whereas The Blueprint aims for a tone of superior amusement - he doesn't even need to be paranoid because he's so incomparably above and beyond it all. Which is still a coke thing, I guess...

If he's so above and beyond it all then why all the time spent bigging his ass up?

Actually Simon compared Schoolly-D to Swans (and Sammy Beckett) in his MM review of the 1st S-D LP in '86. Good for driving past burning lorries on the M25, as I recall (see also Mantronix, Test Dept, Tackhead, Janet Jackson, Diamanda Galas, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Mel & Kim etc. etc. for that Ballardesque '86 aura).

Am I the only person on these boards who just doesn't get what is supposed to be so great about "The Blueprint"? I mean, exactly like his previous 46 albums, I've got money/women/am better than Nas/Mobb Deep/grew up in the projects/sample Gilles Peterson's record collection. So what?

I like it but I think its rep around here is slightly baffling. It's hip-hop's "Ray of Light" maybe - megastar icon vaguely on slide makes a 'classy' pop record, wins massive consensus approval. The difference being that The Blueprint actualy has a few incendiary moments and ROL didn't.

Dubplatestyle: i put "the bridge is over" on a mix tape for someone on ilx...thats still a brill single.
ethan P23: boom bap and krs-one are straight-up classics
Dubplatestyle: i actually wanted to talk about it on that minimal gangsta thread i started, because it does sound really fucking hollow.
ethan P23: criminal minded = el-p
Dubplatestyle: hmmmmm. this is true.
ethan P23: you know it is
Dubplatestyle: early el-p anyway
maybe cold wasn't the right word after all (although i do find a lot of the neuvo gangsta stuff a little too cold for my liking) and hollow is better. it just sounds...thin to me. in much the same way that a good chunk of criminal minded sounds thin to me. whereas with "the bridge is over" the "hook" (the piano sample and krs' flow) are enough to keep me interested. (even the staccatto, programmed drums of criminal remind me of modern hiphop rhythm prograaming, although they probably sound like that because they didn't know how to work the presets...) now, i like minimalism and i like repetition, but one of the great mysteries therein is how in one instance it can be brilliant and in another water torture. which is why, fer instance, early company flow is so patchy for me. all the music i've really enjoyed this year has been, for lack of a better term, packed with incident. cannibal ox does have a searing sort of coldness in places (although not across the entire album), but the inventiveness and density of the production force my "holy shit, listen to that" factor to override the dirge-qualities. really, i do think that the cold vein sounds like nothing so much as metal box for the y2k1: dense, oppressive, menacing, self- knowing yet naive, a TRIP down down down with the faintest ray of light at the end. (btw: the blueprint worship baffles me as well. some of it is great, and i still think jay-z is the best hiphop persona out there (something i though even everyone was hating on him for sampling annie), but it sounds like the type of record people who haven't been paying attention to the last 4-5 yrs of hiphop would champion as their way to seem hip.)

(oh crap, that's *exactly* what I was planning to do, Jess. There goes "The Blueprint" from my wishlist, then)

Defence of The Blueprint: surely the main difference between it and previous Jay-Z albums is that Jay-Z's flow is just undeniably better than it was before - he's never been as amazingly funny or effective as he is here. Which doesn't mean that the album is more innovative or 'now' or necessary than his previous releases, but it means that those who do dig his persona can dig it more than ever before.

Also: "inventiveness and density of the production" - Jess, why do you think you readily identify this in Cannibal Ox and yet not in gangsta rap? I thought it was a well-established cliche that gangsta rap's saving grace for a lot of people is the inventiveness and density of the production.

tim: i think that my "argument" is still failing because i've yet to provide any examples. i'm home from work today, so i suppose i'll try the radio again...

the reason i love can ox probably comes down to my essential "indie"- ness on all fronts. however, i really do dislike most undie rap, and this is one of the most *sonically inventive* undie (or period) hiphop records i've ever heard... it might be (and i am loathe for this to be true) that it's all gone a little too futurist for me, and it's my own problem... but at the same time, another problem i have with a lotta modern gangsta is that it's rather monogroove. the late period co. flow of "simple" and "dpa" and the can ox record are dripping from end to end...maybe i was wrong earlier and can ox actually = the associates of sulk? but it's not just the layered density, but the multiple...movements(?)...it's a bad word, but the radio songs (perhaps out of necessity) seem much more linear to me. (comparing, perhaps, "to shape the future" with "weird energy"?)

i've argued before that actually PRE-timbaland most hiphop tracks were perfect circles, with the apex probably being the rza in terms of mono-loop. so i'm doubling back all over myself, as per usual.

btw, points to any tracks which might disabuse me of these notions are welcome...

cf. my post on Jay-Z's flow in In Review.

ahem.

Back to the topic at hand, I heard some of what jess was talking about yesterday on Bubba Sparxxx' "Ugly". The beats were actually further from trad hip-hop than Get Ur Freak On. The beats are piled at the end of the bar, instead of near the front with another set on the 2.5, then an extended pause before it closes (which is my lose description of the normal rap beat). Anyway, consequently, it felt absolutely undanceable, and made no visceral connection with my groove thang. I wonder if some of the coldness you hear comes from the increasing "headphone" quality of some pop-rap. The new P. Diddy single, Fabolous, Bubba, &c. are all hard to imagine blowing up in a club. And on the other end, the increasing house influence may also have sort of a familiarity-shock effect.

Increasingly, we're living in the era foretold by Bombs Over Baghdad where production is matched as much to flow as to funk, which seems absolutely the opposite of techno paring itself down for the dancefloor.

Oooh! Speaking of unexpected emoting find Eve's new single "You Me and She" right away. Quite an offering from a label known for producing tight shiny clockwork loops and known for rapping about nothing but riding and dying.

Is there a clear distinction to be made between the cold/hollow offensiveness of undie hip hop (which champions the sample-loop form of pre-timbaland productions) and that of monogroove nu-gangsta (a post- timbaland phenomenon)? There's an alleged hollowness in both, but I suspect it's not the same one... or is it?

Yeah Jess, I was meaning to ask you if you'd thought of any tracks yet. Your descriptions sound to me as if they'd apply to stuff like Ludacris' "Southern Hospitality", Bubba Sparxxx's "Twerk A Little", Redman's "Let's Get Dirty", the Adam F album, 112's "Peaches & Cream (Remix)" etc. I absolutely adore all of these, of course, and (maybe just personally) the distance between, say, "Southern Hospitality" and Cannibal Ox's "Vein" doesn't strike me as that large (especially if mediated by Adam F - dis ist a spectrum, right?).

I do see the monogroove thing you mean - there's an air of decay within Can Ox stuff that gives it that sense of constantly disintegrating, moving between different radioactive groove half-lives or something. As you note though, monogroove = a staple of hip hop generally. Although maybe it's the shiny perfection of modern hip hop that makes it sound much more rigidly defined than say RZA, who is in truth far more repetitive but in a vaguely ramshackle way.

I personally find something really impressive about the locked groove approach; moment of truth came when reading Sterling's sound-by-sound dissection of Nivea's "Don't Mess With The Radio", which really captures the subtle undercurrent of an almost arty minimalism at work.

One big exception that comes to mind since we're talking about the Trackmasters elsewhere is their remix of Usher's "You Remind Me" with Method Man and Blu Cantrell. Firstly, the groove is an awesome crunk-riddled thing that is undeniably "warm". Secondly, the combination of the different performers with new twists on the melody gives the track a very distinct multifaceted appearance, both musically and emotively (Method Man's section is sly and sexy; Blu's is quite sad). Thirdly, the entire thing has a really naturalist live swing to it that makes me think the next stage in digital sophistication is a partial rejection of the overtly digital sound and the appropriation of a live "hands-on" feel that actually slightly mirrors the move from electro to sample-based hip hop (see also: Toya's "I Do (Part 2)", Bubba's "Bubba Talk" and "Lovely", Mystikal's "Bouncin' Back", Ja Rule's "Livin' It Up").

The Life and Times of Sean Carter (turn-of-century commercial rap's highest peak) = rushed, paranoid, compulsive.

The Blueprint = triumphant, luxuriant, not quite as compulsive, still v.good. I can't imagine myself preferring it to Life and Times in a couple of years, though. In fact I'm not sure whether I prefer it *now*.

Cover imagery of "The Great Depression" = awesome. Shame there's nothing close to "Party Up" or "What's My Name" on there.

Somehow w/Jay-Z just pure sound of language is really gorgeous, despite times when he's not saying anything remotely deep. Also he's quite funny in a rather understated way, & yes, it's certainly true that the idea of being into this record is attractive & that always influences me.

Also don't forget the Nelly. I Am Number One is quite some single, & he seems the most approchable rapper since the days of De La.

he seems the most approchable rapper since the days of De La

spot on. nelly sounds very comfortable, instantly recognizible, and vaguely unthreatening. yr laughing with him, as opposed to at him or him at you (which is how i feel for a lot of gangsta's...ludacris, etc.)

But very often I am walking in the street or at work and I want to feel cold and shiny and robotic. And I like music that takes all my rage or whetever and just turns it into impassive seething cool.

Yes Sterling is right: chrome-hop = headphones music for walking to work and feeling vaguely dissatisfied about that fact.

search: busta, chingy, nick cannon and just blaze - "shorty (put it on the floor") - PURE SYNTH MENACE!

(this is probably an interesting thread to revive for other reasons too)