This is how we do it

This week, a weirdly snarky little Times piece and an Idolator follow-up both wondered about the plight of the wedding DJ; a Wall Street Journal article did the same thing a year ago. Seems like more and more couples these days are deciding to forgo the wedding DJ altogether and just play some playlist they slapped together on an iPod. Well, of course they are. As far as the whole wedding-industrial complex goes, the DJ is probably the least essential cog, and I have to wonder whether DJs are starting to feel like the flesh-and-blood tollbooth operators who must be realizing that it's only a matter of time before the machines replace them completely. Maybe that's a bad thing. In the WSJ article and the Idolator interview, DJs make the point that iPods can't read people's reactions or artfully manipulate moods. Here's one DJ, as quoted in the WSJ piece: "DJs can think on the fly and make adjustments. The whole idea of a party is that it's fluid. It's dynamic. It's an art." Fair enough, but I've never heard a wedding DJ that treats it like an art. And maybe it shouldn't be an art; these guys need to be as nakedly crowd-pleasing as possible, and they're dealing with impossibly wide spans of ages and backgrounds at virtually every event. A good club DJ can create peaks and valleys, move moods around, build everything up to a massive cathartic climax. Wedding DJs don't get to do stuff like that; they're just trying to keep as many people happy as possible. Still, I've never seen a wedding DJ display even the most basic aptitude for transitions or crowd-appraisal. Still, I like the idea that there's an actual person picking the songs, keeping everything moving and making sure that dead spots don't come too often. I'm getting married in about a month and a half, and the question of whether to hire a DJ or not has been a tough one.

Yup, still good

So I didn't go to the Scream Tour last night, even though I had tickets waiting for me at will call. I'd just done a reading for Marooned at the Housing Works bookstore, a totally nerve-racking experience since I never talk in front of people, and I had friends in from out of town. But so I blew it. During T.I.'s set, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and 50 Cent all shared the stage at the same time (and Diddy and Swizz Beatz, but who cares). This was the largest collective display of rap unity and starpower since, um, that one night at that club in Vegas during All-Star weekend. The Scream Tour, even in its most recent incarnation with an actual credible rapper headlining, is basically a show for 13-year-old girls, so I felt safe assuming that nothing as huge at this would happen. But the thing about transcendent NY rap moments is that you never know exactly when they'll happen and you shouldn't miss a chance to catch them whenever those opportunities arise. The fact that the moment actually happened is probably more important than what the real-time experience would've been like, but I'm still pretty severely bummed about this shit today. One of the very few things that could make me feel better on a day like this is a free five-CD box-set of Timbaland productions, but thankfully one of those exists, and it's right here.

Shit. Think. Shit. Think.

Matt Singer, the guy who's been hosting IFC.com's stream of the new "Trapped in the Closet" chapters, used to be a Voice film intern, and I've got this theory that he might've first heard about "Trapped" from fellow former Voice intern and vocal R. Kelly proponent Pete L'Official. (Pete can't remember.) But I actually knew Singer before that; I went to college with him. We lived on the same dorm floor sophomore year, and we both DJed at the college radio station. Matt and I were never boys or anything, but we were pretty good acquaintances, and I did see him every day for a while there. So the ongoing spectacle of the "Trapped in the Closet" saga gains an additional weird wrinkle with him attached, awkwardly interviewing Kelly and perching uncomfortably next to him on a couch before the individual episodes come on. Matt's a good guy, and I'm happy to see him playing such an active role in such a big cultural phenomenon, but his presence is just one of the many truly bizarre and anomalous aspects of the whole "Trapped" thing. Matt, to put it delicately, doesn't exactly strike anyone as being well-versed in R&B.; (I can't remember what kind of music he listened to in college, but I do remember that his roommate was a big Dar Williams fan.) Matt's reactions to Kelly's labor of love are weirdly mesmerizing; the part where Kelly tells him that they need to get some girls up in there is by far my favorite. It'd be easy to view Singer as the "smirking hipster" that this article calls him, but I mean, you'd probably be chuckling to yourself if you were sitting in a living room with R. Kelly for an hour too. R. Kelly is funny, and he knows he's funny.

Soon enough, these kids will own all of us

The first High School Musical was some bizarre combination of cult success and cultural juggernaut. The soundtrack album was last year's highest-selling CD, the movie was maybe the greatest success in Disney Channel history, and the cast toured arenas. But all of this came through something like word-of-mouth; other than the Disney Channel, the mainstream media barely picked up on the story and not even top-40 radio got near the album even as it was outselling Justin Timberlake and Beyonce and Rascal Flatts and everything else. So this was a cult phenomenon, and in this case the cult was mostly made up of 11-year-old girls. I haven't yet seen any sales figures for the sequel's soundtrack album, but expectations are high. Disney has already announced plans to get another sequel ready to go next year; they may well keep jamming out these movies until Corbin Bleu starts losing his hair or Lucas Grabeel gets arrested for knocking over a liquor store. This time around, though, the outside world has at least started to sit up and take notice. HSM lead Zac Efron appeared in the Hairspray movie-musical this summer, and last month Rolling Stone put him, in some intermediate stage of undress, on its cover. But none of this attention made the slightest impact on HSM's sui generis universe; if anything, the sequel finds these kids even more frighteningly chipper than they were in the last one. High School Musical 2 finally premiered on the Disney Channel on Friday night, and here's what I learned watching it.

They're so sorry for everything

The National
South Street Seaport
August 17, 2007

South Street Seaport gets a bad rap sometimes. If the comments section at Brooklyn Vegan is to be believed (and I really have to stop reading those things), the Seaport's free shows always end up getting compromised by the hordes of Wall Street post-frat types there to drink at happy hour, paying cursory attention to the bands onstage but never shutting up for long. And, well, that's true. The crowd at the National show at the Seaport on Friday night was still pretty huge even after a series of sudden cloudbursts had probably scared off much of the potential audience, and maybe half of those who were left remained decidedly non-rapt throughout the show. But, I mean, it's a free outdoor rock show; awe and reverence shouldn't be on the menu. It's also a beautiful space, full of ascending lights and surrounded by really old boats. There's also a Pizzeria Uno right there, which is awesome. And when the National was onstage, the surrounding topography actually added an extra otherworldly patina to the sound. The National have a truly great drummer, Bryan Devendorf, who holds the band's refined elegiac fuzz together with rigor and panache. Every time his snare cracked, the sound would bounce off the highway overpass behind the stage and echo back queasily; it was like a real-time Martin Hannett recording. When a band works as hard as the National does to hold off on big rock moments, little things like those echoing drum-cracks make a difference.

...So buy his album

The discussion has shifted. All talk of 50 Cent's upcoming album Curtis seems to revolve around the album's first-week sales rather than whether the record will be any good or not. That's understandable; most of us have come to accept that Curtis will be straight garbage, "I Get Money" notwithstanding. Songs from the album keep leaking, those leaks keep sucking, and 50 can barely stay on the radio. Nothing seems to be working for the guy, and I almost feel bad about how much I'm enjoying watching him fall apart. His G-Unit underlings released a bunch of total bricks, so he told Vibe that he'd be happy kicking all of them (except Yayo) out of the crew. MTV put a a whole bunch of rappers above him on their hottest-MCs list, and he threw a bitchfit, saying in some interview that the network could suck his dick. His shitty video with Robin Thicke somehow leaked, and he threw an even bigger tantrum, rampaging through his office, ripping a TV off the wall and throwing his phone out the window. Now he's spitting mad at his own label, talking shit about them in interviews and songs, threatening to leave the label as soon as he can. Curtis is set to come out on the same day as Kanye West's Graduation, and it's shaping up to be a really interesting battle, a total good-vs.-evil art-vs.-commerce thing. 50 is grabbing that hype and running with it, pulling dumb shit like challenging Kanye to a debate on 106 & Park. Still he can't seem to escape his own negative buzz, so now he's going back to his old record-selling techniques: dissing people right before his album comes out. A huge part of the deafening hype over Get Rich or Die Tryin' surrounded 50's beef with Ja Rule, and I remember being really amped about it at the time; finally someone was willing to come out, naming names and talking shit, exposing a horrible rapper for making horrible rap music. Before The Massacre, 50 tried the same thing with Fat Joe and Jadakiss, but it didn't quite work; he had no real reason to be going after those guys, and he attacks on them were pretty much without substance. For a minute there, I actually thought Game's The Documentary might outsell The Massacre. Then, of course, 50 kicked Game out of G-Unit, sparking a beef, calling a truce, and then going back to beefing within a few months. It worked; The Massacre got its buzz, and it ended up selling like crazy. So now 50's going back to shit-talking, and his newest foe is rap's biggest target, Lil Wayne.

This is some real dog-ugly Sailor Moon shit right here

A couple of months ago, Lil Wayne announced that he was signing with the same management company as Kanye West, a deal that promised to yield some interesting results. Since then, the two of them have formed a sort of mutual appreciation society. In short order, Wayne said that Kanye would be doing a bunch of his tracks on Tha Carter 3, which is shaping up to be Wayne's Apocalypse Now. The first Kanye-produced Wayne track, "La La La," hit the internet and racked up some positive notices. When Wayne did his big pre-arrest New York show, Kanye showed up to do "Can't Tell Me Nothing." And when MTV put Wayne at the top of its scientifically-determined Hottest MCs list, Kanye made sure to point out that they were right to do so, enthusing about Wayne at every opportunity. It's hard to say whether this public love affair is entirely genuine or whether these guys have realized that it's just good business for them to form a tactical alliance, but then again it doesn't really matter either way. What matters is that Wayne and Kanye are probably going to be doing a whole lot of work together. As much as I love the both of them, I'm not totally sure how I feel about that. "La La La" wasn't my favorite of the supposed Carter 3 leaks; the sample of kids singing on the hook gets annoying fast, and Wayne's delivery on the track is a lot lazier and less inventive than usual. One great thing about Wayne is that he doesn't particularly need big-name producers; he does a lot of his best work on random mixtape tracks, and most of my favorite songs on Tha Carter 2 came from underrated Southern guys like Tmix. Kanye turns everything he does into a grand event, and Wayne is relatively content to fly under the radar. If he releases five songs a day, none of those songs is necessarily going to be better than any of the others. Wayne also sounds his best when his tracks come with a whole lot of bass, and one of Kanye's biggest weaknesses as a producer is that he hasn't mastered that rumble yet. But, all skepticism aside, these two seem determined to work together, and a few days ago "Barry Bonds," the first song to feature verses from both of them, hit the internet. It's a really good song and also a really interesting one, mostly because Kanye totally outraps Wayne.

Please explain: how is that speakerbox supposed to look like an E?

Maybe the weirdest thing about the existence of This is Next, Vice and MTV2's new Best Buy-targeted mainstream-indie comp, is that it isn't really all that weird at all. As Pitchfork has pointed out, the compilation aims to be a sort of Now! That's What I Call Music for indie-rock, and most of the compilers' choices are appropriately obvious. Vice and MTV2 used the most nebulous definition of indie that you could possibly imagine. Indie here doesn't necessarily have anything to do with actual independent record labels, so we get major-label stuff from Sonic Youth and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, as well as Vice beneficiaries Bloc Party, who, to be fair, fit as neatly into this album's structure as any of the other bands. (Refreshingly, Vice opts not to exploit synergistic opportunities to shoehorn in any of its other acts; we won't find any Black Lips or Boredoms or Run the Road album-tracks here.) Most of the other acts come pilfered from bigger indies: Spoon from Merge, the Shins from Sub Pop, Ted Leo from Touch & Go. And while it's a bit tough to see what might unite the Hold Steady with Of Montreal or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, it's basically true that all of them occupy places in some loosely defined indie-rock continuum. The compilation's press release mentions the Garden State soundtrack as a precedent, and the comparison totally holds water; the Garden State soundtrack might've featured a decidedly non-indie Coldplay song, but then This Is Next could absorb Coldplay into its fabric just as easily. Probably with good reason, Vice and MTV2 mostly pull from the subsections of indie that share as little obvious lineage as possible with punk and postpunk. Even prog is in short supply; there's no Muse or TV on the Radio here; either one might make cultural sense, but neither one would work aesthetically. Pulled from the contexts of their respective albums, Sonic Youth's "Do You Believe in Rapture?" and the Hold Steady's "Chips Ahoy!" are both a whole lot more MOR and palatable than those bands' respective bodies of work might suggest. The only band that's allowed to work up anything resembling a threatening clangor is Deerhoof, whose inclusion is pretty hard to figure out, even if their song here, "The Perfect Me," is accessible as fuck by their standards. The album isn't targeted toward people who consider clangor to be a virtue; it's a Whitman's Sampler of blog-friendly pop-rock. The cover includes the term "indie's biggest hits," but it offers no indication of what that might mean. The packaging, in fact, looks like someone spent five minutes with some instant album-cover Quark template, and the liner notes don't have any rapturous accounts of touring in busted-down vans and sleeping on strangers' floors. Instead, we get the pictures of the bands' albums and a quick note that maybe we should check those bands out. Plenty of people, after all, don't have an hour to parse Pitchfork every morning, and so this approach makes a certain sense. It's a quick, clean overview of what I guess we'll be calling indie from now on.

Album cover of the year, anyway

During his first wave of success, I basically couldn't stand Swizz Beatz. That rule had exceptions: "Ruff Ryders Anthem," "What Y'all Want." Most of the time, though, his jacked-up atonal synth-runs and clumsy drum-sputters felt like sandpaper on my brain. In these pages, Sasha Frere-Jones once called Swizz "a guy road-testing his Casio presets at the Nuremberg Rally," and that about covered it for me. Those beats had riled-up adrenaline, but that was all they had. What little melody you'd hear on Swizz tracks invariably came from unbelievably cheap-sounding synth-plinks, and everything was EQed for maximum impact, never leaving room for quiet-to-loud dynamics or organic lift. Timbaland and the Neptunes, both Swizz's contemporaries, understood how to use the same synthetic ingredients to build spacy epics and sticky hooks; Swizz only did cheap grandeur. A few years later, though, I came to appreciate the ugly assaultive aspects of the man's work. A track like "Money Cash Hoes" or "WW III" could take those thin sonics and use them for serious angry bombast, turning his emotionless grandeur into a virtue rather than a liability. And Swizz got better and better at harnessing and directing his assaultive chaos; by the time he got around to hooking up Yung Wun's "Tear It Up" and T.I.'s "Bring Em Out," he was churning out straight-up bangers as consistently as any other elite producer. It took a while, but he finally justified his status. In some ways, Swizz was ahead of his time; virtually everything he ever made was geared primarily toward clubs, and his emaciated synth-sounds anticipated ringtone-rap a couple of years early. These days, he's one of my favorite rap producers; songs like Beyonce's "Get Me Bodied" and Eve's "Tambourine" jump out immediately by bringing a sort of furious kinetic motion that's virtually missing from rap and R&B; these days. UGK's "Hit the Block" might be a bonus-track on Underground Kingz, but it's not because it can't hang with the rest of the album but because its handclaps-and-sirens attack couldn't have been more at odds with Pimp C's slow bluesy crawl. Swizz could've shot his progress all to hell when he decided to start rapping, but he effectively camouflaged his plentiful shortcomings on "It's Me Bitches," turning an incoherent rant into one of the year's great club-rap anthems. "Money in the Bank" followed the same blueprint and pulled similarly great things out of it, and suddenly we were faced with the unlikely prospect of a really great Swizz Beatz solo album, a nonstop eruption of nervous energy. But then, last week, this song with Chris Martin from Coldplay came out, and now I'm not sure about anything anymore.

I wonder how Wilson felt about this ugly-ass movie-poster

1. Joy Division: "She's Lost Control" Preview/Buy from iTunes

Most of what I know about Tony Wilson, the famously motormouthed founder of Factory Records, comes from 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom's alternately great and infuriating Wilson biopic from a couple of years ago. The movie is really good at creating a character for Wilson; Steve Coogan plays him with a weird mix of self-deprecating con-man smarm and starry-eyed idealism. But I'm not as crazy about how the movie deals with the actual music; anyone going on the flim alone would have no idea what the big deal about the Happy Mondays is, say. But my favorite scene in the movie is a music scene. Wilson has just started Factory Records and hired Martin Hannett to produce Joy Division, and he's sitting there in the studio watching his money trickle away while Hannett gives the band all sorts of inscrutable directions: "faster but slower," that sort of thing. Then Wilson and the band drive around listening to the finished song and have a piddling argument about David Bowie. But in that scene, "She's Lost Control" sounds like an evil, slithering piece of devilry, all inscrutable menace and barely-contained venom. Wilson wasn't a musician, and the movie casts all his greatest moments as total accidents, products of entropy and confusion. But in putting Hannett together with Joy Division, Wilson is directly responsible for some truly forbidding, powerful music. "She's Lost Control" became my favorite Joy Division song pretty much immediately after I saw the movie; the bit where Peter Hook's seething surf-bass riff slides onto the soundtrack while nighttime Manchester unfolds outside the car windows has been tattooed on my brain ever since.