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10.05.2003 posted by William 13:01 link |
So my new PowerBook has an 80 gig disk and even though OS X is pretty bloated there's still a good 65 gigs left for me to fill up with mp3s. It's refreshing not to have to choose what to delete in order to pirate something new -- I had to make my own Sophie's choice every time I wanted a new album on my old p3 w/ 12 gigs. Christian suggested the new Outkast and I'm glad he did, looks like this will be what finally gets me into hip-hop, sorta, kinda.
Since my rap background is more lacking than a Dirty South album without skits, I temporarily checked my aversion to reviews and looked at a few to get a sense of context. I read three different ones from some of the usual suspects -- the AV Club, Pitchfork, and the AMG -- and they all make analogy to the White Album. One expands the analogy further by making the White Album comparison conditional on Stankonia being Outkast's Sgt. Pepper. I think two of them explicitly call Dre and Big Boi the Lennon/McCartney of hip-hop. Dre himself might even be making a Beatles reference with the name of the last track on his disc, A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre. Such is the longevity of the impact those boys from Liverpool have had on popular music that even nearly four decades after the advent of Beatlemania, theirs is still the standard by which artists who achieve combined critical and popular success are measured. The Beatles worshipper in me loves this, naturally. But I also have to wonder, is it healthy for this comparison to be the default for all widely popular and/or accomplished acts? It's the most obvious and easiest, which makes it, in many cases, hackneyed and cliched. And when an artist really deserves it, like Outkast seems to, some of the power and impact has been diluted by the thousands of hack reviewers who went for a thrill of the minute, e.g. on the Backstreet Boys ("They write their own songs!") or any four-man band who can roughly sing in harmony and use standard rock instrumentation. It's the curse of being simultaneously the best and most popular at what they did, an accolade few can claim in any field of human accomplishment, that forever condemns the Fab Four to unwarranted comparison and undeserving association, which is a disservice to them, the artist in question, and the reader looking for intelligent criticism. So exercise some restraint, please, critics, and maybe the next time I read that an album has the best collection of melodic pop since Revolver or brings a sense of energy not felt since I Want to Hold Your Hand, I'll experience genuine excitement and curiosity for a new musical gem instead of contempt for mercenary, unimaginative punditry. In the meantime, since this harangue will go unread by the entirety of the critical community, it's back to avoiding reviews like, well, skits on a Dirty South album (the Achilles' heel of an entire genre!). |