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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Forget those boring white boys with guitars. Thanks to Missy, OutKast and Timbaland, for the first time since the Beatles, the most vital forms of pop are found at the top of the charts.
Jan 2, 2004 | In many ways, 2003 was a depressing year for music. The New York rock explosion of 2001, from which we'll be feeling the aftershocks for years, enshrined as the cutting edge of cool a shameless and sadly unironic parroting of the past. That ethos spread far from Brooklyn this year, and it was disheartening to see just how much acclaimed music demonstrated an enormous debt to the past, and very little to any kind of personal vision. This was a year in which it was easy to feel that there was nothing new under the sun. At least, it was easy to feel that way if you didn't listen to any hip-hop.
Full disclosure: I know very little about hip-hop and have only recently started buying the albums rather than just listening to singles on the radio. And yet, it was hip-hop that gave me hope this year, that made me feel that perhaps this really was an exciting time in music. I was not alone in that feeling. The Grammy nominees were announced last month, and they are overwhelmingly hip-hop dominated. During the week of Oct. 4, the top 10 singles on the Billboard chart were, for the first time, all by black artists. We've been told for years now that hip-hop has arrived, that it is now the dominant genre in the music business, in much the same way that every day for the last three months an article has appeared somewhere with the news that Howard Dean is on his way to becoming the front-runner in the race for the Democratic nomination. Hopefully the Billboard stat and the Grammy nominations list will act as Al Gore's endorsement did, and put to rest some of the novelty.
Exhibit A in the hip-hop revolution this year was OutKast's double album, "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," really a pair of solo albums by Big Boi and Andre 3000, the group's two members. Andre 3000's glittering mindfuck of a record, "The Love Below," qualifies as hip-hop only because it is so clearly a product of hip-hop culture. Musically it's all over the map, refusing to be tied down, held together only by Andre's brilliance at turning a zany idea into a successful song. The eclecticism and the humor become a little wearying after a while, though, and unless you have an unusually high tolerance for musical theater with dirty lyrics, you may find it difficult to get through the entire record, and prefer to focus on brilliant singles like "Hey Ya!" or, even better, "Spread."
Unlike Andre, Big Boi is content to reinvent the music from the inside, and this attitude results in a far more listenable and, in the end, important album. "Speakerboxxx" plays with complete assurance from beginning to end (quite a feat for an album that's nearly an hour and 20 minutes long), gently nudging hip-hop forward as it goes. That an album this experimental and this groundbreaking made it to the top of the charts is extraordinary. The only other chart-topping record in recent history that can even begin to compete is Radiohead's "Kid A." But where "Kid A's" popularity felt like a non sequitur, a delightful but ultimately meaningless joke, OutKast is part of something bigger.
That something is a spirit of experimentation and true artistic exploration injected into the highest echelons of commercially successful hip-hop. Leading the charge is the producer Timbaland, best known for his work with Missy Elliott. Following close behind him are the Neptunes, aka Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo. These three men are responsible for an astonishing number of hit songs, and while the Neptunes are certainly capable of slipping into mindless commercialism, by and large their productions are adventurous and sometimes even groundbreaking. The closest you can come to guaranteeing a hit song at this point is to work with one of these producers, almost regardless of who the artist is. They are pushing the music industry back toward the way it worked before the late '60s, when the producer was more important than the performer: It mattered less that a record was by the Ronettes or Dionne Warwick than that it was produced by Phil Spector or Burt Bacharach.
These producers are particularly impressive in the way they bridge the gap between hip-hop and pop, producing hits by artists like Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. Rolling Stone recently named Timberlake the new king of pop and artist of the year, a ludicrous assertion given his weak, pretty-boy Michael Jackson imitation. His album is listenable, and a hit, because of the production provided by the Neptunes and Timbaland. What cannot be overemphasized is the strangeness of the music they make, particularly Timbaland. His beats are often marked by their spareness and minimalism, but they rarely fail to astonish, combining a few sounds in a totally unexpected way. His new single with the Southern rapper Cee-lo, "I'll Be Around," is, for me, the most exciting song of the year. Missy Elliott's just-released "This Is Not a Test" might be her best album yet, and it's certainly one of my favorites of the year. As usual, it is largely produced by Timbaland, and he provides a stunning array of beats, all of which involve heavy bass sounds and stuttering, slightly disorienting rhythmic alignment. Despite the basic similarity of the beats, they never feel repetitive or stale. It's like James Brown in the glory days, when he and Bootsy Collins turned out bass line after bass line that followed many of the same rules, but never failed to be exciting.
