Classic – Jeru the Damaja "You Can't Stop the Prophet"

Ohhh if it wasn’t for Illmatic, Nas‘s unassailable masterpiece of 1994. Nas’ New York was Dickens’ London. Eerily understated but epic in scope, Illmatic encapsulated hip hop’s past, augured its future, and set a ridiculously high standard for everything to follow. It’s an absolute classic and sits comfortably in my top 5 hip hop records.

But if it had never come along, life might have been quite different for Jeru the Damaja a.k.a. Kendrick Davis. Illmatic originally dropped on April 19, 1994. Almost exactly one month later Jeru released The Sun Rises in the East, his first proper album. It’s safe to say that these two developed an unspoken rivalry. Nas was from Queens, Jeru was from Brooklyn. Both rapped from an elevated perspective but were nonethless mired in the push and pull of the streets. Both had crazy fresh production from DJ Premiere.

But Nas never invented a superhero….

“One day I got struck with knowledge of self that gave me superscientifical powers”

On “You Can’t Stop the Prophet” in a scant 3:55, Jeru invents a dozen characters and raps a comic book. His protagonist, known simply as The Black Prophet, “runs through the ghetto battling his arch nemesis, Mr. Ignorance.” Every time he has his fingers around Mr. Ignorance he slips away, leaving the Prophet to battle his lackeys Anger, Despair, Jealous, Hatred, Envy, and Animosity. Of course they’re no match for him and and get “broke with the slickness”. But it’s not until the Prophet tracks Ignorance to the library that things get dicey. And, like the best comic books, we’re left with a cliffhanger…

The Sun Rises in the East is a perpetually underrated album, one that quite simply got lost in the shuffle of all the other great hip hop albums that came out in 1994, and “You Can’t Stop the Prophet” stands as one of the most inventive and thoughtful rap songs ever put to tape.

Stream The Sun Rises in the East in its entirety by clicking here.

Stream Illmatic in its entirety by clicking here.

Stream the new Flying Lotus LP "Until the Quiet Comes"

Steven Ellison is almost certainly a genius. He started out making backing beats for Cartoon Network’s [adult swim] under the monicker Flying Lotus, and in the last 5 years he’s had as good a run of releases as just about anybody.

Now he’s set to drop his newest LP, entitled Until the Quiet Comes. Stream the album, which also features contributions from Thom Yorke and Erykah Badu, below.

Also, Frank Ocean Can Rap

Here’s a new Frank Ocean song just posted to his tumblr called “Blue Whale” on which he’s doing something odd. I mean he’s singing… but it’s really fast and it’s kind of atonal…. I know there’s a word for this….

This track is a characteristically smart and clipped address on a lot of the issues that have been flying around pertaining to Ocean. It’s the first time he’s making music from a position of fame, and he handles it quite humbly.

Check out “Blue Whale” below and stream Channel Orange by clicking here.

Grizzly Bear, Orpheum Theater Boston, 9/22/12

It’s easy to forget that there was a time before recorded music. A time when the only merits on which to judge a musician were presence, dexterity, and, well, musicianship. Now I’m all for recorded music —  the album process, all of it — but one of its symptoms is that we listeners are constantly judging live music against the studio version.

In the car on the way down to Boston we got speculating about how Grizzly Bear would pull off all of the symphonic and choral flourishes that pepper the new LP Shields,  a work so meticulously constructed that its execution on record sounds simple and effortless. Would they have a string section? A choir? A twenty-seven foot theramin?

The show started right on time at 8pm with opener Unknown Mortal Orchestra, a group whose debut album I liked a lot. UMO is a band whose crackly analog sound is idiosyncratic and artful on record, but it’s hard to transfer that to a live setting. They certainly weren’t bad, but nobody left thinking they had stolen the show.

Grizzly Bear came on around 9:30. Ed Droste is normally quite reserved on stage, but he was excited, giddy even, to announce how good it felt to be back in his home state and playing to family and friends in the audience. From the opening drone of “Speak in Rounds” the show unfurled. The playlist read like “Kevin’s Favorite Grizzly Bear Songs”; the band played just about all of Shields, most of Veckatimist, and the tracks included from earlier albums were perfect (the devastating “Lullaby” from the Blue Valentine soundtrack was particularly tough).

I had never seen this band in concert before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Often a unique voice can lose its particularity in a live setting, and I was a bit nervous for Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen. Both men sing in a distinctive way, and their voices complement eachother so well on record, so I at least expected competency. What I got was mastery. Not only do both Droste and Rossen retain those unique voices, but those voices are so strong. Droste sings like he’s telling you something you already know, but he wants to make sure you understand it. Rossen has always fascinated me, and even more so in a live setting; he’s this perfectly balanced combination of rage, ennui, and waggishness.

They closed the set with “Sun in Your Eyes”, the final track from Shields and a song I was looking forward to all night. The trading-off of vocals is something that Grizzly Bear — despite having two very gifted lead singers — doesn’t do that much. But the outro section of “Sun In Your Eyes” makes me wonder why they haven’t been doing it all along. After a short break they came back out and played a two-song encore of Yellow House standout “The Knife” and a hushed, quasi-a cappella  rendition of “All We Ask”. I’ve never thought of “All We Ask” as a particularly moving song, but the collective “wow” exhale when the song ended was a fleeting moment of transcendent joy.

Try to imagine a time, maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe not even that long, when we look back at music in the 20th century and are completely dumbfounded by the idea of “selling records”. The “make an album, sell copies, tour” process could (and it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s in our lifetime) someday be abridged to “make an album, tour”. Grizzly Bear clearly understand what they are selling at this point, and it’s not albums: it’s Grizzly Bear. There was no choir, no orchestra, just four guys making music that sounded better than a record.

Stream new LPs from Tame Impala and How to Dress Well

With all the excitement over Grizzly Bear’s masterful new album, it’s been easy to lose some other new releases in the shuffle.

How to Dress Well is Tom Krell, a philosophy graduate student who makes music at the gentle intersection of R&B, electropop, and dreamy chillwave (remember chillwave? damn, I miss 2009). His first album, Love Remains was roundly praised at the time of its release in 2010 and now he’s back with sophomore LP Total Loss. Stream the album through Fader by clicking here.

Tame Impala deliver on the promise of the strong early singles “Apocalypse Dreams” and “Elephant”. Interestingly, this album charts a lot of the same thematic territory as Grizzly Bear’s Shields. It’s all about the struggle between self-reliance and the need for connection. Kevin Parker paints relationships as situations to be examined detached from emotion. His matter-of-fact delivery on tracks like “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” and “Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control” belie a wistful melancholy; it’s a quite sad album that ends up sounding rather happy. Stream Lonerism below.

Stream Grizzly Bear's new LP "Shields"

Grizzly Bear does this thing where they take fragments of infectious melodies and lace them into larger segments that meander and mislead. They’re constantly throwing you off their trail. And at times, even as recently as 2009’s critically celebrated Vekamist, keeping up didn’t always feel worth the effort. Not the case with their new album Shields, a record that is hard not to view immediately as the best work the group has done.

The first time I listen to an album front to back I’m always conscious of whether I’m tempted to skip forward to the next track. I remember listening to albums like Illinoise and Our Endless Numbered Days and being so enthralled by what was unfolding in each song I never considered it. Same case here. This album surrounds; it throws upon; it pulls out from under; it’s fascinating.

Check it out, below:

Stevie Wonder makes possibly homophobic comment about Frank Ocean, Back-peddles by Using Word "Love" 16 Times in Sentence

If there’s one thing Stevie Wonder values it’s love. If there are two things Stevie Wonder values they are love and understanding. When Stevie Wonder makes a comment that is not understood, he’d love it if you’d understand that love and understanding are the things he truly loves. So last week, when interviewer Paul Lester asked Stevie Wonder about Frank Ocean, Stevie made the following comment:

“I like frank…. But I think honestly, some people who think they’re gay, they’re confused. People can misconstrue closeness for love. People can feel connected, they bond. I’m not saying all [gay people are confused]. Some people have a desire to be with the same sex. But that’s them.”

All I can really say in response to that comment is:

It seems this predilection for Hellenic closeness, we’ll call it  the “confused gays phenomenon”, is something that Stevie has pondered. But, not to be misunderstood or unloving, Stevie issued a statement to MTV over the weekend that doesn’t so much clarify his point as drive home how OK he is with people being gay:

“I’m sorry that my words about anyone feeling confused about their love were misunderstood. No one has been a greater advocate for the power of love in this world than I; both in my life and in my music. Clearly, love is love, between a man and a woman, a woman and a man, a woman and a woman and a man and a man. What I’m not confused about is the world needing much more love, no hate, no prejudice, no bigotry and more unity, peace and understanding. Period.”

So the takeaway there is that Stevie is cool with any gender loving any gender (it’s a good thing he listed all four possible arrangements, I don’t think I would have gotten the point). As someone who’s huge on both Stevie and Frank, I don’t think Frank Ocean gives two shits what Stevie Wonder thinks of homosexuality, the tendency toward it, or the authenticity of identifying with it. This sounds, to me, like an opportunity seized upon by the Perez Hiltons of the world to provocatively decry a comment most likely taken out of context. Hilton, ever the pot-stirrer, wrote that Stevie was ” “imply[ing] a heterosexual loves their Cherie amour more authentically than a homosexual loves the sunshine of THEIR life”. To imply that Stevie Wonder is an intolerant or homophobic guy strikes me as laughable. This is not to say his comments were a good idea from a publicity standpoint, but I find it hard to believe the interviewer said “So Stevie, what do you think of Frank Ocean?” at which Stevie launched into a diatribe about how gay people are just confused and perhaps ungay.

Hear Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” below, in which he sounds both confused AND gay.