Jay-Z - Friend or Foe
Jay-Z - Friend of Foe '98
Dr. Dre - The Watcher
Jay-Z - The Watcher 2

Sequels, according to Oscar winning screenwriting guru William Goldman, are always about the money. It's not about further character development or exploring things you didn't get to in the first one, it's about milking as much money out of the same idea as you can. And while I can think of at least a couple films I think are exceptions to this rule, these words of wisdom generally seems to ring pretty true in Hollywood. But of course, this is a music blog, so what's the comparison to movie sequels in pop music? Sequel songs used to be popular in the early days of rock and roll. Hank Ballard and The Midnighters' "Work With Me Annie" spawned both sequels and at least one major hit answer song. Chubby Checker seemed to build his whole career on singing sequels to "The Twist". (Which, coincidentally was also written by Hank Ballard.) But in modern times song sequels come in a broader sense of the word. Half the pop songs on the radio sound like sequels, the same formulas rehashed, with slightly different lyrics and a few notes rearranged. A producer like Lil John may as well be the musical equivalent of the Friday the 13th series. So today I want to talk about Jay-Z, an artist who for his 10 year career managed to avoid the pitfalls of writing carbon copy regurgitations of his hits, but also knew his way around writing a great sequel song.

The genius of Jay-Z, and one of the reasons he has managed to become an icon in a genre notorious for the short shelf life of its artists, is that he hardly ever retraces the same steps twice. How easy would it have been after his breakthrough single "Hard Knock Life" to have tried that Broadway-sample trick a couple more times hoping for another hit? But "Hard Knock Life" doesn't sound like anything else, neither does "I Just Wanna Luv U", "Izzo", "Bonnie and Clyde", "Excuse Me Miss", "99 Problems". There's no "Izzo 2", no "100 Problems"; when Jay does write a sequel song, it's not what you'd expect.

"Friend of Foe" is one of my favorite songs on Reasonable Doubt. Even though it's the shortest song on the record, and not usually one of the tracks mentioned on an album full of classics, I think it's the point on the record when you realize that Sean Carter is something special. No one can touch Jay when it comes to switching up their flow. On "Friend or Foe" he spits in short, stunted lines, funny and menacing at the same time, sounding completely different than he does on the rest of the album. The song contains some of his best lines: although a little dated now "Chances slimmer than that chick in Calvin Klein pantses" still makes me laugh every time; the delivery of "Don't do that/You're makin' me nervous/My crew, well they do pack/Them dudes is murderers" is perfect. And in 1 minute 50 seconds (at least 20 seconds of which is an opening skit) he creates a story and characters more captivating than a lot of 2 hour films I've seen.

Despite my personal affections for "Friend or Foe" it seemed like an unlikely candidate for Jay to revisit on his next album. "Ain't No Nigga" was the hit, "Can't Knock the Hustle", "Dead Presidents", "Politics as Usual" were the instant classics. But it's "Friend or Foe" that gets the "motion picture shit" treatment. Jay abandons the unique sputtering style of the original and opts for a more conventional flow, but the cinematic storytelling and humor remain and the beat is another killer. "Friend of Foe '98" suffers a little bit from the law of diminishing returns, but as far as it's place in the small canon of sequel songs it's at least better than "Twistin' U.S.A." or "Twistin' Around the World".

"The Watcher 2" from Blueprint Vol. 2 is more succesful as a sequel. Technically it might be better categorized as an answer song since Jay wasn't credited as the artist of the first "Watcher", but he did so much ghostwriting on Dr Dre's Chronic 2001 that for all I know he very well could have written the original. And either way, Dr Dre is back for the sequel, providing a very similar sounding beat (I had to listen closely just to discern that it was actually different), a decent verse and a couple artists from his circa 2002 stable: Truth Hurts and Rakim. Rakim's verse is good but he's about 15 years past his prime here and it shows, and Truth Hurts is an unnecessary addition on the hook. But the reason "The Watcher 2" is better than the first is simple: Jay-Z's in it. He's like Robert DeNiro in the second Godfather. And if you're not one of those people that thinks Godfather Part II was better than Part I, well then there's just no comparison. It's like if Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino had shown up in Duece Bigalow 2.

"The Watcher", like "Friend or Foe", wasn't a hit. Which may be why Jay sounds so fearless on it. He doesn't have to worry about messing anything up and can have free reign to experiment with style and inflection; a tricky rhyme scheme, an effortless lesson on consonance and assonance. If you're not a Jay-Z fan, and think everything is Cristal poppin and Big Pimpin, just listen to his verse here and keep in mind: this is a filler track. This is about the 20th best track on a 25 song double album. A song on one of the weakest records of Jay-Z's career. If you don't have the records I've linked to below in your collection, you're missing out. It's like you've never even seen Godfather 2, like you've seen Star Wars but not Empire Strikes Back. Sequels may usually be all about the money, but there are always exceptions. It may seem like every rapper in the modern Bling Era of hip-hop is all about the money, all style and no substance, all big budget special effects and no artistic credibility; Jay-Z is one of the exceptions.


(Click here to buy Reasonable Doubt on Amazon)

(Click here to buy In My Lifetime Vol. 1)

(Click here to buy Chronic 2001)

(Click here to buy Blueprint 2: The Gift and The Curse)

The Figurines - The Wonder (Video)

Hey Everybody. Be sure to swing over to Pitchfork Media today and check out their interview with The Figurines. Remember you heard them at Cacophony and Coffee first!

Don't you wish your band could be state-sponsored as Cultural Ambassadors!

And enjoy this great video that mixes parts Un Chein Andalou and Michel Gondry. Classic!

Pitchfork Interview: The Figurines

The Silence Xperiment - Wannabe My Badd Bitch


The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco.

I don't think it's necessarily true, but it's a helluva name for a compilation. Mashups are something we haven't really touched on at Cacophony and Coffee, but Jeff and I are both big fans of the genre. If you too like to get your bootleg on, The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco 2 is a pretty solid release. Unfortunately I couldn't really point you in a direction to buy it since the only information on the CD other than the tracklisting is "2006. no label. for promotional use only."
The legal issues surrounding the bastard pop movement are part of what makes it so intriguing. It ensures that embarrasing mainstream appropriation of the genre (see Jay-Z and Linkin Park) is kept to a minimum and the fledgling movement has a chance to grow and thrive underground. And mashups have come a long way since the simple A+B equation that I first heard on Freelance Hellraiser's "A Stroke of Genius" a few years ago; pioneers like Go Home Productions are stretching the limitations of working exclusively with pre-existing songs. Several of the artists on TBMITWEAFSF2 weave together multiple songs in complicated beat and tempo matching arrangements that should bury the notion that it doesn't take any talent to be a mashup DJ. But I must confess that my favorite mashups are still the ones that keep it simple, and the stand out track for me on TBMITWEAFSF2 is The Silence Xperiment's "Wannabe My Badd Bitch".

You may already be familiar with the Silence Xperiment; they were the DJs responsible for Q-Unit, the Queen/50 Cent mashup experiment. "Wannabe My Badd Bitch" is proof that Q-Unit was no fluke, and these are two DJs to watch. Continuing with the idea of taking two artists as disparate as possible and squishing them together, Silence Xperiment taking the backing track and a few vocal snippets from the Spice Girls' "Wannabe" and marry them seamlessly with the acapella of Mike Jones and Ying Yang Twins' "Badd". It's easy to take two good songs and put them together, and "A Stroke Of Genius" was the template for taking one good song and putting it over a crappy pop song - but how about taking two songs that I don't like and morphing them into one perfectly danceable gem? That takes some skill. "Wannabe" was a song that haunted me in my sleep in 1996; it was horrible, nonsensical and annoyingly inescapable. And "Badd" is substandard even for the Ying Yang Twins (which is saying a lot). Although Mike Jones is always great, this is a pretty weak verse for him, lacking most of the sense of humor that makes him so listenable. He doesn't even give out his cell phone number.

And yet somehow The Silence Xperiment make it work, and it works beautifully. Keeping with my tradition of listening to a song on repeat while I'm writing about it, I've listened to this song over a dozen times now and my foot is still tapping furiously against my desk. If I could stand and type I'd probably be dancing my ass off right now. Maybe I was missing something in the Spice Girls all these years because this mashup has me thinking this track is actually kind of awesome. And that of course is the sign of a good bootleg. Not only making both songs sound better but bringing out qualities you didn't even know existed in those songs. In "Wannabe My Badd Bitch" it sounds like these songs were meant to be together. Mike Jones may have been laying his verse down over Mr. Collipark's boring-by-numbers crunk beat but I think he might have had "Wannabe" in mind all along.


(If you're in the Bay Area look for The Best Mashups In The World Ever Are From San Francisco 2 at your local independent record store.)

Love Is All - Aging Had Never Been His Friend
Love Is All - Busy Doing Nothing

I'm not sure why we do it, but whenever a band comes from someplace other than our hometown, we feel the need to draw comparisons with that locale's major exports. Perhaps it's a holdover from Elementary School reports about some country and we'd just grab whatever we could from the Encyclopedia. (I wonder if that's different now that we have the internet?) Maybe after writing so many reviews and blogs about music, we latch onto anything that sets this band apart. I could see that being the case for mainstream magazines, and blogs where the music covered never strays too far from one genre, but I don't think we should be able to get away with that here at Cacophony and Coffee. If Patrick had made some link between Chicago's famous architecture and Dwayne Wade... or even worse, some far-fetched comparison with Mrs. O'Leary's cow, I would have called him on that shit. (Not in a public forum... but he'd know.)

Lots of great stuff comes out of Sweden like Volvos and Muppet Chefs and Gummi Fish candy and my family-name. Lots of reviewers mention these things whenever they're discussing a band from Sweden. If they're lucky, the band warrants an Abba comparison, and then the writer can call it a day.

But I have a genuine comparison. Love Is All is Ikea in reverse.

Ikea provides affordable (read: cheap) furniture for those of us who have a little taste and just a little money as well. Ikea looks pretty nice and well-designed, but that's all on the surface. Closer inspection (and the fact that you put it all together with hex-bolts and Allen wrenches) reveals that this not investible, classic furnishing; it's a cheaper simulation.

Love Is All give it to us backwards. The recording is lo-fi and full of warmth and good old overdrive distortion. But the "cheap" veneer does not immediately reveal the intricate layers or musical complexity LIA is putting down. Their debut full-length could have been recorded with all the sound perfectly mastered and balanced in the vein of Yngwie or countless Praise bands, but I'm sure I wouldn't be as into it. The lo-fi quality is far from a pandering-to-the-crowd maneuver akin to Smashing Pumpkins "indie debut" either. It's the proper production for these songs. (And I'm already curious to hear how further records will be produced as well as how LIA might sound live with "professional engineering.")

Love Is All profess a strong affinity for Eno-era Roxy Music and the comparison is apt. Beautifully written pop songs are given an airy, experimental, almost atmospheric treatment that remains tight, nearly claustrophobic at times. The brilliant melody remains intact but the typical pop song clichés are avoided by throwing in a dash of distortion and 'skronky' saxophones. (And, of course, the production itself.) Every chance to take a wrong turn is missed; every decision seems to be the right one. Love Is All has all the right stuff to be a perfect band: punk veracity, pop hooks and melodies, an avant-garde edge, and an exotic foreign origin.

Of course, if you read Pitchfork daily, you've probably been after this record since their glowing review when the record wasn't even available in the States. But those of you who aren't obsessed with being hip or don't have some time to kill at work on a computer to keep up with the latest, take a listen to Love Is All. It's definitely been one of my most-played in the weeks since we've on hiatus. Maybe it'll be one of yours too.

(Buy Love Is All Nine Times the Same Song at Amazon.)

Kanye West - Soulful

Guess who's bizack? I'm not smelling any blow in my clothes but I am back nonetheless after an inadvertent hiatus. The main reason, in case you were wondering, that I've been disconnected (literally and figuratively) from the internet lately is I've been working six days a week on a constantly fluctuating schedule that usually leaves me too tired to have any inspiration left for writing. But I got some inspiration tonight, from a most unlikely place. In tribute to Chicago native Dwyane Wade (if you don't follow basketball let me be the first to prepare you: get ready to hear that name a lot) who a couple hours ago just wrapped up one of the most incredible performances in NBA Finals history, here's a song from another Chi-town native with a strikingly similar will to win. Apologies again for being gone for a minute, but you can go ahead and start checking back regularly again. And thank you if you if you're reading this right now; thanks for keeping the faith.

Rah Bras - "Poisson"
Rah Bras - "Bus Stop"
Rah Bras - "The Fifth Allen"
Rah Bras - "Skin=Chronized"

One of the things I used to do in between bands at shows was try to count up all the shows I'd been to. I can still remember the show when I realized I could no longer count them up. I had started going to shows pretty regularly and I just lost track somewhere along the way. I remember the band playing was called fLUF and they were just about the worst thing I had ever heard. Maybe they aren't so bad, but I certainly never gave them a second chance. I stepped outside to the patio at Old World and started to mentally go over the shows I'd been too. (I think it was partly because some of the first shows I ever went to were at Old World and it put me in a contemplative mood.) I felt slightly proud of myself for getting out so much and by the time I was done reminiscing it was time to try and grab a spot close to the stage for the next band, Jawbreaker.

It's hard to narrow it down to a favorite show ever, but that came pretty close. Despite fLUF's awful contribution, I can remember the other opening was called Blacktop Special or something like that (not Blacktop Cadence) and they had a rootsy sound and garage bin lids for cymbals. Goddamn... Blacktop something or other. At any rate, flash forward a few years and I'm discussing memorable shows with a co-worker and he brings up his first show ever: Jawbreaker at Old World. I reply with the standard, no, really? But deep down inside I want to say, "Aha, bitch! That was the show when I couldn't count up how many shows I'd been to... condescending asshole." But I don't say a word about it.... instead I soak in my own self-gratification like one-man reach-around. And like Colbert said, "That's a difficult thing to do, but worth it." (About the one-man reach-around, mind you.)

But what even trumps Jawbreaker for me was the time I saw Rah Bras at Che Cafe. Che's at least an hour and half away from where I live, but sometimes, when the bands were important enough, my friends and I (or sometimes just me) would head down to the UCSD campus for some 'intimate live music.' Back then the Che was really chill and there weren't any Security or professional booking agents; volunteers ran it all and they did a phenomenal job. I never had or saw any trouble at the Che.

When the Rah Bras played at Che, The Locust opened (or headlined) so some of my 'other' friends were there too. See, Locust is hard enough to balance out the 'weird' for these folks. They were more interested in Zeke's favorite Taco Bell items than what time signature or vintage synth The Locust were using. So when these squares were actually impressed with the Rah Bras, I knew they had something special. (Rah Bras, that is.) I think my friends were most impressed with the band's closing number, a cover of Ginuine's "My Pony." Whether or not my friends knew it was a cover is unclear, but they did enjoy the ridiculous lyrics and the way the drummer acted out the song.

Most impressive for me was the fact that the Rah Bras could completely pull off their insanely arranged songs. The layered and strange sounds all made their way to the stage that night. It was like having their songs spelled out for you and you're still in utter disbelief. They made all that sound with their mouths, a bass, keyboard and drums? And even more phenomenal, the drummer recreates his off-kilter beats with the technical precision of a fine craftsman. He totally rocked "Poisson" live like you couldn't believe. To this day I have no idea what he was playing on "Water Damage," but he managed to reach down to the floor, pick up this washboard-type-thing, and give it one hit, put it back down, and never miss a beat. Now if you've been reading for a while, or know me, technical proficiency is not really all that important to me, but when you witness something this incredible being created in front of you, and when you are familiar enough with the work to recognize the complexity, well, you just can't forget something like that.

Rah Bras have been, since Concentrate to Listen to Rondo We Christen King Speed came out so many years ago, one of my favorite bands. And their newest album is almost good enough to make me drop the "one of." I've never been able to commit to a favorite band, but Rah Bras just may be it. (Now admitting this opens me up to a lot... what if you HATE this band? Can we still be friends?) Perhaps it's because Rah Bras manages to embody just about everything I love about art and music. Yes, they have the skills but they also have a ton of ideas. Yes, they have a sound but they manage to progress with each release. And while I don't like Ruy Blas as much as the earlier EPs, this makes me like the band even more. Who else would attempt to create some kind of Medieval Sex Jam record? There's all the art but none of the artifice (unless it's sort of silly.) The keyboardist/vocalist sold used bras after the show rather than merch. And she even gave consultations on the best size. I think I would have called it 'performance' if I knew what that was at the time.

After a good friend and I attempted to discern the lyrics from the bridge on "The Fifth Allen," we sent what we had figured out to the Rah Bras. They even wrote me back with the 'correct' lyrics, but said that they liked our version better, I doubt that I could explain any better than this series of sound bites and anecdotes, but their latest record which came out late 2005, Whohm, surpasses all the esteem I already held for this band.

Their early efforts always had an epic, operatic underscore to them that sometimes worked well with their bizarre post-rock arrangements and sometimes took to the forefront. Whohm finds the same grandiose sound and vision but with such a refined focus it thumps you in the chest. And I could be mistaken, but I believe this album introduces to the Rah Bras with the Blast Beat, which is more potent than that most brutal cacophony of all time from "Bus Stop." Yes the double bass pedal can be used effectively.... or shit; maybe this guy just hits one that fast. I honestly wouldn't be surprised. Rah Bras also make use of the almost as hard as the whammy bar to use well, the synth pitch bender. Have you heard a better riff in your life than "Skin=Chronized?" How about one with bended notes? Ever?

The rest of the album is just as mind-blowing. (Did I really just use mind-blowing?) The rest of the album continues along the trajectory set by "Skin=Chronized," the second track, and builds from there. Each song contains so many details that are easy to miss for the big hooks and grooves. The sound is even fuller as Rah Bras uses the production to near its full effect in capturing and creating a gale force of timbre, textures and textbook music terms. I don't know what time they're playing in most of the time, but I know I'd be hard pressed to ever write a song so difficult. Once in a music class I thought to myself, like the Beatles were groundbreaking in digging the foreign American blues records, maybe Rah Bras have records from Atlantis or some indigenous culture as yet undisturbed by the Western world.

I don't think you'll like Rah Bras as much as I do, but I do hope you'll find something you've never heard in there. And hey, you might be really into them like me and start your own blog. And the entire catalog is great as far as I'm concerned and you'd do well to find it all. (Though even I don't have the tour seven-inch with "Bus Stop" live in Japan.)

Here are the lyrics to that bridge from "The Fifth Allen:"

"When there's time / there's a place with poison gates / I bitterly eat the bars on my plate / And all those wires / They made my mouth all tired / An optical exception with an illusion of mire."

You can listen to "No Furture," "No Lime" and "As She Rah" on Whohm's MySpace.

(But Rah Bras Whohm at Amazon.)

Bob Dylan - Summer Days

The first official day of summer may not be until June 21st but here in southern California it's so miserably hot I'm already dreaming of the fall. I don't deal well with hot weather, I guess it's the Minnesota in my blood. I hate summer clothes, shorts and tanktops and sandals, I hate the beach, I hate sweaty and sticky and smoggy. The only thing I do like about summer is the songs. Summer always inspires great music, or maybe summer just makes certain songs better. There's something about 90 degree weather and driving with the windows down and the AC up that elevates songs like "Hot In Herre" by Nelly or "Summertime" by Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff (two artists I don't exactly regularly listen to) into blissful territory. I'm already anxiously anticipating what the summer anthem will be this year. Will Jay-Z step out of retirement again to hold us down for another summer? But while I'm waiting for that song to drop, here's one of my favorite summer songs from another guy with Minnesota roots.

I felt a little weird in my last post, talking about Bob Dylan and not posting a song by the man himself, so here's an attempt to rectify that. "Summer Days", in addition to being my favorite track off Dylan's last studio album Love and Theft, perfectly captures a wonderful muggy July rockabilly barbeque vibe. Love and Theft was given generally positive reviews when it was released in 2001 but perhaps the fact that it came out on September 11 of that year led to it not really getting the critical analysis that it deserved. The basic consensus seemed to be that it was another decent Dylan album, fun to listen to but not as good as Time Out Of Mind, and of course not as good as his 60s output. But music critics are mostly idiots, so while the rest of the world is waiting for Dylan to write another "Like A Rolling Stone" I'd prefer to focus on what he's doing now, because I find it just as exciting and important as any other point in his career.

Dylan left plenty of clues for the critics to understand what he was doing, the album is called Love and Theft after all, but I don't think most people got it. While any of his contemporaries that are still alive are putting out crap albums and then touring on the coattails of hits written decades ago, Dylan is still trying new things and still writing great songs. Love and Theft is a postmodern tour of American music, stealing bits of blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll and fusing it together with Dylan's ever cantankerous wit. People that think Dylan doesn't write as well as he used to because he's not writing about political issues or psychedelic drug metaphors aren't paying attention. The lyrics of "Summer Days" appear simple and direct but each line is drenched in subtext. And the delivery of course is key. Dylan wasn't exactly blessed with the prettiest voice in the world, and years of smoking have ravaged an already rough tone into a weird Muppet-ish scratch, but he knows how to use what he's got. He can't do any melismatic runs, but he can sneer a clever line better than anybody. Listen to the winking "She said you can't repeat the past/I said you can't?/what do you mean you can't?/Of course you can" and tell me this man is not still a genius.

That line in particular was plucked out in a lot of reviews, but the point was always missed. Dylan's repeating the past alright, but not his past. He's never going to repeat his past no matter how badly old hippies and baby boomers want him to. He continues to do whatever he wants and he could care less what the rest of the world's expectations of him are. And maybe I can get down with Dylan's newer work because I sense his kindred music nerdness. (Check out the playlists of Dylan's radio show on XM satellite radio, it's amazing.) Here he's repeating the past of Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie; an entire century's worth of musical visionaries, and filtering it through his unique lyrical eye. The result is something different and new that feels familiar. "Summer Days" sounds like a swinging rockabilly song that could have been written in the 50s (credit the production, by Dylan himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, for that) but it's got lyrics that you'd never hear Carl Perkins singing. Kind of like how this song feels like summer for me, but it's a summer that only exists in my imagination. And I kind of like it better that way.

(Click here to buy Love and Theft on Amazon.)