Radio Rant: Eminem – Not Afraid

Posted on August 14, 2010 by bgibs122

Yeah, yeah, a few days behind; I had a busy week. Anyway, point is we’re back with a new one!

So as you might have noticed, I’m not exactly the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to rap, but I’m able to pick out what I like and what I don’t. And through years of sort-of-not-really paying attention to the genre, I’ve noticed that I’m something of a casual Eminem fan. And one thing I’ve noticed is that he’s much better when he tries something serious as opposed to his trying-too-hard class clown persona that took over around 2004. And I’m not the only one that’s noticed this; hell, this might be the reason that Recovery as an album exists.

Which brings us to “Not Afraid”, the album’s lead single and a number 1 hit for Em. The song opens with the chorus/hook that’s fairly typical of the “Getting through hard times” genre of music. Over this, Eminem has a spoken word intro conveying the same message that comes off as being almost…too serious and kind of corny. Not because of what he’s saying, but the delivery comes across as stiffed and awkward, like a nerd trying to rouse a crowd.

Eminem is one of the most celebrated rappers of our day for his impressive flow and rhetoric, and he brings his A-Game to “Not Afraid”. Right from the first line, he sounds royally pissed and remains so through the whole first verse, capping it off with “forget the earth he’s got the urge/To pull his dick from the dirt/and fuck the whole universe”. A line that’s pissed off, weird as hell, and vaguely misogynistic. Eminem is back!

The second verse is a shoutout to the fans to try harder. “Let’s be honest, the last Relapse CD was ‘ehhh”” he says, and just about everyone nods their head in agreement. He also starts looking into his personal life and getting rid of his inner demons, presumably the ones that have made his music take a dive in the past 6 or 7 years. After another round of chorus we come to the bridge, where Eminem does a little sing-y thing that adds some weight to the words.

Then comes the final verse, which is all sorts of awesome. Eminem raps about his decision to get clean and how nothing can really stop him now, but the best part comes in some of the final lines: “To treat this roof like my daughter and raise it/You couldn’t raise a single shingle on it/Cause the way I feel, I’m strong enough to go to the club/Or the corner pub and lift the whole counter up/Cause I’m raising the bar, I shoot for the moon/But I’m too busy gazing at stars, I feel amazing”.

I do have one issue with “Not Afraid” though. The music, which consists solely of some weak synth chords and a hitting-an-empty-soup-can quality snare drum. I guess you could pass it off as “minimalistic”, but it just sounds so bland, tinny, and annoying that I have to force myself to focus purely on Eminem, which is mercifully easy here.

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Album Review: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Posted on August 9, 2010 by bgibs122

Arcade Fire’s discography so far has progression not unlike growing up. Funeral, for all its emotional bombast, could be imagined as an adolescent’s notebook, with phrases like “Children, don’t grow up” at the top of the page, or “Every time you close your eyes/LIES! LIES!” in big letters. Neon Bible flips the focus outward, and instead sounds like a list of the modern world’s problems being proclaimed on a street corner.

On The Suburbs, Arcade Fire thematically return to the old haunts on Funeral, but with the perspective flipped. The kids aren’t kids anymore, and they’re starting to realize that. “Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling” sings Win Butler on the opening title track, and that detachment from living and dying in the moment is definitely part of aging. The song is definitely a standout, kicking the record off with a deceptively jaunty and an almost folkie swing; piano, acoustic guitar, and a simple drumbeat are the primary backers on the easy-swinging opener.

Over The Suburbs‘ 16 tracks and 64 minute runtime, Arcade Fire covers a whole lot of musical ground. One thing that’s true about the whole record is that she is gorgeous. This is best seen in the one-two of “Rococo”, which ends in an Arcade-Fire-meet-Sonic-Youth feedback squall, and “Empty Room”, which adds some propulsive drum work to “Rococo”‘s slow, pretty flourishes. In other places, the band takes a more indie rock approach (“Ready to Start”, “Sprawl I”, and “Suburban War”), culminating in “Month of May”, which is less indie rock and more Ramones. Even through all of this, Arcade Fire never loses their trademark theatrics; everything on here is made to be grand. And then there are times where the band jumps into new territory entirely, as shown by “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” that continues the Arcade Fire Tradition of pen-ultimate tracks being awesome. Regine Chassegne leads the way through a twinkling, synthy trip through accepting that you won’t leave the sprawl, bringing closure to living in the suburbs.

Lyrically, Butler and Chassegne are able to hit the sweet spot of personal and universal without being bland. “Suburban War” exemplifies this best; it talks about that friend that you used to want to take on the world with (the other person from “Neighborhood 1 (Tunnels)?), and now you want so much to hear from them that you look at strangers in cars for them. Elsewhere, Butler totally trashes hipsters, and laments the rampant instant gratification present in modern culture. It wouldn’t be a stretch to call a lot of lyrics bitter, but there’s also a lot of hope on here that things will end up ok. It’s this hope that made Funeral succeed where Neon Bible occasionally faltered, and it also makes The Suburbs hit harder than it would have otherwise.

Like its predecessors, The Suburbs works best as a full album. Each song is strong on its own, but each one is so much stronger when it’s given a context and stands next to its kin. For example, “Month of May” seems kind of oddly paced when listened to in a general mix, but when it’s placed between “Suburban War” and “Wasted Hours”, it’s kick works wonderfully and sounds so much better. The Suburbs might be a longer album, but not unnecessarily.

I’ve listened to The Suburbs all the way through everyday since I bought it, and I still keep coming back for more. It’s musically impressive, the lyrics are wonderful, the length is good…Arcade Fire does it again. Five stars.

tl;dr: The best album I’ve heard all year. Five stars.

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Why Gaga Needs to Gogo (If Only For Awhile)

Posted on August 8, 2010 by bgibs122

I’m tired of Lady Gaga.

Is it her music? Eh, kinda. In terms of music, I’ve gone from mild curiosity to dismissal to annoyance to a second chance to dismissal to disdain to loathing to a third, in-depth look to acceptance to peace to boredom. No, I’m just tired of hearing about her. Seeing her on magazines, hearing about her fashion and wacky hi-jinks, the parodies of her and her videos, and her overhyped and quickly diminishing hook as a bizarre artiste.

This might just be because I’m writing this at 2 AM and cranky. Or it might be the over-saturation. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the over-saturation. To give you a timeline of the Gagadom, let’s rewind the clocks to…eh, late 2008. “Just Dance” did a slow, long climb up the charts that included lots of airplay, and culminated in the song finally hitting No. 1 of the Hot 100 in early 2009. On the heels of this success, “Pokerface” stepped in as the most overplayed single of the first half of ’09. But then came summer, and “Lovegame” was unleashed, and despite being much weaker than “Just Dance” and “Pokerface”, it remained a contender for the whole summer. And after this, goddamn “Paparazzi” was put out because why the hell not, and Gaga started taking a definite turn for the weird. But hey, she just went through the two and a half good songs on The Fame, and even one of the meh ones. She was out of material!

Wrong! Then she dropped worldwide hit “Bad Romance” on us, and launched herself into the stratosphere with one of her best songs and tripped out videos. It was like a second wind when her first was only faltering. At this point, we’re at early 2010 on the timeline and I haven’t even gotten to “Telephone” and “Alejandro”, the latter of which still gets constant airplay to this day.

The point I’m illustrating with this list is that ever since “Just Dance” caught on, we haven’t had a real breather from Gaga. After her latest hit starts losing steam, bam, she cracks out another one. And after that one starts slowing, boom, it gets a video for resurgence. Then the wheels start slowing down just in time for the next fucking single! And with the singles in rotation, she’s still in the spotlight and we still talk about her.

If she had more music I think I’d be more willing to put up with this. I’m not saying she doesn’t have great songs, but her total catalog is so small and as a whole doesn’t merit the hype and attention she gets. Sure, she has something like “Bad Romance”, but then we also have “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say”. Granted, very few artists could hold the hype, but she’s gotten where she is on a handful of good pop songs, more than her share of not-good ones, ludicrous levels of empty theatrics, and attention-whore style weirdness. What’s more is that she’s reaching the point where two years of constantly topping herself has finally caught up with her; the cool reaction to the music video for “Alejandro” is a telltale sign of this.

So I say, take a sabbatical, Gaga. Hole up somewhere for three months, six months, and write some songs, design some new outfits, and maybe even reimagine your image. Because as it is right now, you’ve painted yourself in a frilly, over the top, corner with nowhere to go but self-parody.

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Radio Rant: Travis McCoy feat Bruno Mars – Billionaire

Posted on August 4, 2010 by bgibs122

Welcome back to Radio Rants, where I listen to it because all of us have to! So I do have to say, these things have been a lot of fun so far. I actually do like being informed about pop music and knowing what’s up; means I’m able to cite reasons for hating it. I kid (mostly). Alright, so what’s on the list today? I hope it’s something better than Jasample Jason DeRulo, or at least more original.

Answer: Maybe

Alright, sure. Travis McCoy was always at least kinda clever with Gym Class Heroes. Ok, so I’m basing this judgment off of all…three GCH songs I have on my computer, but each one has a few lines that are quirky and memorable enough. It’s kind of interesting to see that McCoy’s flipped the Band-Solo Success Rate; GCH have had virtually no airplay besides “Cupid’s Chokehold” while McCoy going solo has netted him a no. 4 hit on the Hot 100.

Said hit, “Billionaire”, also features Bruno Mars, who opens the song with some “never heard it before” acoustic strumming (I’ll come back to this) and the phrase “I wanna be a billionaire/so fucking bad”. Look, I’m not anti-swearing, not at all. But when you’re doing a breezey-chill-sounding-laid-back-summer song, throwing an f-bomb in the first line takes the maturity down a few notches. The radio version uses “freakin” which I for some reason works better with McCoy’s rhetoric. Ah well.

So speaking of McCoy, he does a pretty solid job here. He spends the song rapping about what he would do as a billionaire, and while his rapping isn’t the best, he’s got some lines that make you stop and think “heh, that was actually pretty funny”. My personal favorite is “And I’d probably visit where Katrina hit/And damn do a lot more than FEMA did”. Yeah, one or two lines are kind of stupid, but at least he’s trying to change it up. And dammit, he’s having fun here, what’s not to like?

Which is more than I can say for Bruno Mars. Vocally, he sounds pretty strained and thin, and his lyrics aren’t that great. His idea of being a billionaire is Forbes magazine, Oprah, and…the Queen? M’kay, I’m guessing that was just to keep the rhyme up. Yeah. And then the chorus goes “Every time I close my eyes/I see my name in shining lights/A different city every night/Oh my I swear/The world better prepare/For when I’m a billionaire”. Hey, not bad! It makes me wanna sing along, which is good. But the words I wanna sing are “What I really wanna know/My baby/What I really wanna say I can’t de–

Waitaminute, that’s not how “Billionaire” goes.

No, that’s how Sublime’s 1996 you-know-you’ve-heard-it-before hit “Santeria” goes. It’s…they synchronize uncomfortably well. I mean, if it was just a passing similarity I’d be able to look the other way, but taking the music from “Santeria” and singing “Billionaire” over it reveals that the only difference comes when Mars sings “The world better prepare/For when I’m a billionaire”.  It kinda feels like being betrayed. Kinda like…if you were with Santa and pulled his beard and it revealed not Santa Claus, but…

“You can call me Travie Claus minus the ho-ho!”

Sigh. Ah well.

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