RSSBetween a Rock and a Hard Place
Alternative, Alternative, Who's Got the Alternative
Back in November, nobody knew who would win the 19th or 20thPazz & Jop Critics' Poll. By January, everybody did--everybody butme. "It's notgood enough, Joe," I protested earnestly to CrownPoobah Joe Levy, and of that I felt certain. The kvelling aboutArrested Development's3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of. . .--the first winning album ever named after how long the bandshopped for a contract, but not the first whose title begins withthe numeral3--started the moment it was released last March.Pumped by a cover that looked as if Dwayne and Freddie had hustleda spinoff fromA Different World, I home-taped it, confident thatsooner or later one of those juicy titles--"Raining Revolution,""Blues Happy," "Dawn of the Dreads"--would grab my mind-asscontinuum. But a boring thing happened on the way to the pleasuredome. FirstVoice music editor Joe Levy found himself unable toland a review--one, two, three excellent writers eagerly signed on,then came up dry. And having run the record through my head a dozentimes, so did I. Not horrible by any means.Interesting. But toooften the beats shambled and the raps meandered, and though Icertainly enjoyed "People Everyday"'s gangsta dis, the rhymesvagued out as well--or, worse still, preached. So I declared thealbum a Consumer Guide Dud forthwith.
P.S.--Then I moved my car. And one night in May somethingrelaxed and mysterious punctuated the new jack schwing thwockingout of my Blaupunkt. It was Arrested Development! On "urban" radio!"Tennessee," great song, how did I miss it? Well, itwas the 14thcut on a 57-minute album, and I don't even know which "Tennessee"I heard--the commercial 12-inch featured four mixes, a subsequentpromo three more. But right, I blew it--should have named"Tennessee" a Choice Cut and split. Goofy, deeply downcast, aglowwith tragic hope, Pazz & Jop's overwhelming number-one single is anadamantly spiritual but humblyunpreachy meditation on black painthat stands as a far more startling radio novelty than the number-three"Jump." If I prefer "Jump," that's because popcraft is sacredand "Jump" is an act of God--and because "Tennessee" does meander,even if it seems miraculous as a sunshower after too much slickdance music or hardcore rap.
I'm trying to be nice here. It's churlish to put down aprogressively conceived popular and critical favorite that soundsgood on the radio. And compared to Elvis Costello'sImperial Boredom,the only other Pazz & Jop winner I wished had stood in bed,3 Years . . . is a funfest. But those three aborted criticalpaeans stick in my mind, as do all the wan-to-belittling pollcomments, not to mention the interested parties who professedthemselves as delighted with its electoral prospects as they hadbeen with Our President's. "Do you ever listen to it?" I'd ask.Somewhat sheepishly, every one allowed as how he or she didn't. Andthis unenthusiasm is reflected in our results. The support for3 Years . . . just about duplicated that of our 1989 winner, whichwas not only a soft-edged rap debut, but a soft-edged rap debutbeginning with the numeral3: De La Soul's3 Feet High and Rising got 1070 points from 255 voters,3 Years . . . 1050 from 253. De LaSoul, however, attracted only 89 voters, Arrested Development 97,so that Arrested Development averaged only 10.8 points persupporter, the lowest ever for a winner; in recent years Nirvanagot 12.8, Neil Young 12.3, De La Soul a flat 12. Clearly, a lot ofpeople voted for this album because they felt they should, notnecessarily as a racial or genre token but simply to reward theband for taking on the thankless burden of rap reform. TonyaPendleton ofThe Philadelphia Tribune sums up the feeling: "Awelcome relief from the excesses of gangster rap--it's moving,intelligent music that you can groove to."
Ah yes, gangster rap. It was a terrible year for gangster rap,whatever that means any more--street, hardcore, I don't know. Thedefamation of Ice-T's dead-eyed metal sendupBody Count (whichfinished a hard-earned 31st despite scattered copout andantimusicality charges) was only one symptom of a dilemma wrackingthe rap community, whatever that means any more--constituency,market, I don't know. Rap is undergoing a crisis of authenticitythat makes Philly teen dreams, Hollywood hippies, punk versus newwave, and who's got the funk look like style wars. Hooked onsexism, blamed for the violence it prophesied, threatened musicallyby formal quandaries and brute property rights, the talking headsof black CNN found themselves between rock and a hard place. Overin the middle distance was the white crossover audience for four ofthe five 1992 rap albums to sell a million: Sir Mix-a-Lot, Wreckx-N-Effect,House of Pain, and triple-platinum Kris Kross. And intheir face was the spiritual source of the music, the fast-changingcore audience of fucked-over young black males, making anunreasonable demand it was hard for any rapper to gainsay: that rapbe for them.
Inside the rap world--where artists as diverse as EPMD, BlackSheep, Da Lench Mob, M.C. Brains, and Too Short went gold withbarely a pop ripple or critical notice--there were two acceptableresponses to this ghettocentric demand, both of which courtedup-and-coming hards by rejecting the prevailing orthodoxy of jagged,densely explosive, Bomb Squad mixes. Progressives favored the jazzyswing of Gang Starr (Brooklyn, old jack, 43rd) and the Pharcyde(California, crazee, tied for 100th), while a new neotraditionalistfaction stuck to the straight-up funk of 105th-place EPMD (who alsoproduced 106th-place Redman and the trippier 78th-place Das Efx),with the so-called soul grooves of 49th-place Pete Rock & CL Smoothsplitting the difference. These artists are also diverse--anyonewho believes rap is monolithic has never listened to two decentalbums back to back--but while none are gangstas, only Gang Starrand Rock & Smooth try any positive messages; the EPMD crew inparticular is waging a de facto rebellion against the calls toself-improvement that trip so readily from the self-appointed racemen of the old and new schools, and also against what rappersloosely refer to as "critics," which means anyone who puts themdown. What else can you expect when entertainers barely out of highschool become point men in the struggle against a system ofoppression that defeated Malcolm and Martin? But it also reminds meof the '70s, when waves of metal bands led a young, angry, male,working-class audience into its own unreconstructed market niche.
As with metal, I understand in theory and can't connect inpractice--of the 10 albums just cited, only the Pharcyde's gets megoing for more than a cut or two. The same goes for the electorate,where our sizable little contingent of rap specialists--which wouldbe larger if we'd managed to get out the vote in our precinct atthe hip-hop nationalistSource, where a ghettocentric response tothe crisis has long been in full effect--gave the above-named mostof what support they received. Raised on college radio, rockcriticism's thirtyish mainstream has its own program--thealternative rap of Arrested Development, Basehead (10th place), andthe Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (19th).
Arrested Development pursues this program consciously,aggressively. AD headman Speech has attacked the sexism of Cube,Quik, and N.W.A in "20th Century African," a column he cowrites forhis parents' community newspaper in Milwaukee, and was happy totell an interviewer: "There are a lot of people who look up torappers, and I want people to be aware that sometimes what artistsare saying isn't always right." Talking revolution soon-come ratherthan violence now--"So this government needs to beoverthrown/Brothers wit their A.K.'s and their 9mms/Need to learnhow to correctly shoot them/Save those rounds for a revolution"--Speechtypifies the rarely acknowledged class divisions of a musicthat seems doomed to romanticize the street even when that's whereit comes from; he's the kind of young progressive whose parents owna small newspaper. Yet unlike Basehead and the Disposable Heroes,Arrested Development at least squeezed intoThe Source's five-pagespread of 1993 "Noizemakers" (though they didn't makeany of the 45Efx-and-Rock-dominated year-end top fives the mag printed). TheirAfrocentric rhetoric, and off in the middle distance theirmulticultural pop reach, should keep them in some kind of contactwith the hip hop community. But it would be easier to believe thatSpeech is strong enough to negotiate the tricky internal politicsany grander reform scheme will require if his music packed morefirepower.
As for Basehead and the Disposable Heroes--and my ownalternative rappers of choice, Philadelphia's street-leftist Goats(five mentions)--they'd better settle for college radio. And that'ssad--sad for the hip hop community, but also sad for rock critics.To an extent the almost complete absence ofnon-alternative rap inour top 40 is a statistical blip, but I'm struck nevertheless bythe bare 40th-place finish of Ice Cube'sThe Predator, whichstormed Billboard's pop charts at number one and went platinum inJanuary. (I'll take this opportunity to run down 41-50--Ministry,Klaatu Doing Business as XTC, Gang Starr, Skeletons, Suzanne Vega,Sade, jazz champ Randy Weston, Lemonheads, Pete Rock, and pomo divaAnnie Lennox--and mention that when I totted up the record-breakingpile of 54 late ballots for my own amusement, I didn't findan Ice Cube in the bunch. In an expanded 308-voter poll, Cube comesin 49th, Gang Starr 55th, Pete Rock 56th. Tori Amos and the Rochesalso fall off, while Annie Lennox leapfrogs ecstatically to 32nd.)With nothing more epochal than Arrested Development on the horizon,it bodes ill that the Prophet Cube is losing his crit cred, thatIce-T blinked, that Public Enemy's avowed nonalbum got only onemention, that the nearest thing to another Cypress Hill coming outof left field was AD itself. It means the critics--and thedemanding if faddish consumers they don't so much speak for asprovide a clue to--are rejecting rap's core audience in much thesame way the core audience is rejecting them. And though I hate tosay it, I can hear why.
Rap is far too juicy to dry up and go away, and it contributeda respectable quota of albums to my own Dean's List. So of courseI recommend Eric B. and Yo Yo and FU-Schnickens and BDP, Kris Krosstoo. I just won't claim that any of them was as momentous as PE andIce-T and Cypress Hill in 1991--or as the Goats and the DisposableHeroes in 1992. Whether because the sampler has lost its power tosurprise, as the easily bored Ann Marlowe believes, or because thecopyright wars have squelched creativity, as I'll argue untilthere's a revolution in capitalist concepts of intellectualproperty, or just because the wrong artists sat out the year, rapfelt a little tired. Moreover, the canard that the alternativepretenders lacked beats is hip-hop chauvinism of no relevance tothe omniverous listener. For me the musical failure is ArrestedDevelopment's rootsy post-Daisy Age, which softens established rapparameters, not the pulse of the Goats and the Disposables, whomeld hip hop usages into a longer, steadier rock groove (not sodifferent from the swing and straight-up funk strategies, afterall), or the wiggy indeterminacy of the private joke on rap that isMichael Ivey's Basehead. Supposedly, critics flock to alternativerap because they can relate to its corny "liberal" lyrics, and nodoubt some do. Me, I don't think the lyrics are as cliched asthey're made out to be, and I go to these records for music first.
Like the listenability test I threw at AD, music-first is oneof those criteria that seems so incontrovertibly self-evident itbecomes necessary to point out that it's not. Even the mostenjoyable records don't suit all occasions, difficult and painfulones can reward your labor tenfold when you're motivated, andsometimes the keenest artistic pleasure is conceptual, which canmean anything from overall structure to formal frisson to thehistorical or political or ethical or just plain mental excitementof hearing a stranger choose the right moment to do the rightthing--assume the right stance, forge the right synthesis, make theright statement. As you become less inclined to look to music forthe meaning of life you discover that music per se endures muchbetter than moments do, and so, although the concept album per seis associated with old fartdom, it's the excitable young who tendto overlook the messy details of what's actually in the bytes thatunderlie somebody's cool move. But that's neither reason to denytheir concepts nor proof it's impossible to share them from adistance.
For me, PJ Harvey'sDry is a prime example. By yoking rock-not-poplate-'60s virtuosity to postpunk neoprimitivism and stakinga strong-not-macho female claim on the rockist pose, it'sconceptually powerful two ways, and the music-lover in me would addthat the sheer sound is arresting no matter what it means.Unfortunately, I see scant evidence of the profound poet or witchyprankster some also perceive in Polly Jean Harvey, which bothers memore because too often the sound isn't shaped into fully realizedsongs (a pop demand, I know--sue me, I want it all). And while Iadmire her womanism and root for the uprising it spearheads, it'snot my dream come true. So I ended up withDry in the bottom halfof my A list. But I'm not surprised that it came in fourth, northat only one voter was so smitten that he or she (he, actually;Dry's 23 per cent female support was barely higher than women's 17per cent share of the electorate) gave it even 20 points. Withsomething to give now and plenty of promise for later, this is thekind of record that always inspire broad-based critical favor. Thecult item was Pavement's second-placeSlanted and Enchanted, whichaveraged almost 15 points per mention--and which to my ears notonly packs the conceptual punch Joe Levy describes but stands up toheavy rotation.
That's the idea, of course--concept that "works," to use thesubjective critical shorthand of artistic gatekeepers everywhere.To my ears,3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of . . .doesn't work, and neither does a rap album I somehow forgot tomention, the Beastie Boys' fifth-placeCheck Your Head. Greatconcept--arty posthardcore band turned world-class rappers addresstheir whiteskin marginality by picking up their instruments again.Problem is, the execution is halfway there at best, and sincethey're into New Orleans funk rather than fast garage-rock, itmatters--the pleasureand meaning of that style isn't an idea, it'sthe physical reality of the cross-rhythms. But as I know becauseI've asked around, many fans so enjoy the Beasties' "spirit ofplaying (and playing with) the grooves" that they listen toCheckYour Head all the time. And whatever the limits of thelistenability test, I guess I believe the voters also literallyenjoy all the other failed concepts to march to the head of theclass this year.
Not counting Lindsey Buckingham (and believe me, we weretempted), these failures were all top-20: Los Lobos'sKiko (sixth,third with the more middle-American late vote), Tom Waits'sBoneMachine (ninth or seventh), K.D. Lang'sIngénue (12th), Lou Reed'sMagic and Loss (16th), and maybe Bruce Springsteen'sLucky Town(17th, though raw critical loyalty certainly helped this ponderous,well-crafted disappointment, a shorter and by most accounts lighterpiece of work than its more songful coreleaseHuman Touch, whichfinished way down at 80). Tastes--and judgments--differ. Otherswould add or substitute R.E.M.'sAutomatic for the People (third) or Neneh Cherry'sHomebrew (13th), albums I say "work" despitetheir seriousness, or perhaps Lucinda Williams'sSweet Old World(11th)--maybe even, such is progress, Sonic Youth'sDirty (eighth).But with Arrested Development setting the tone, few would deny that1992 was lousy with serious works of art, and not many woulddeclare themselves improved in wisdom by all of them.
Together withCheck Your Head, three of the four failuresended up after many, many plays in the computer file I callNeither--neither as dull as a Dud nor as effulgent as an HonorableMention. More than R.E.M. or Cherry (both high B plusses) orWilliams or Sonic Youth (both in my top 10), all these artistsprogressed, took chances, and so forth with their music, the betterto frame their words. But their words don't justify the effort, orthe notice. K.D. Lang casts herself as a cabaret singer and remindsus why cabaret singers dig Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, StephenSondheim--hell, Alan and Marilyn Bergman. When Lou Reed writesabout Andy Warhol, I listen; when he writes about death, I try tolisten, really I do, but soon my thoughts turn to Michael Stipe, toMichael Hurley, to what's in the fridge. Set on balancing theirHispanic identity and their American prerogatives at a higher levelof expressive fluency, Los Lobos prove their command of folk/rocksonics with lovely settings like "Wake Up Dolores" and "ArizonaSkies" and their subjection to folk-rock corn with portentoustitles like "That Train Don't Stop Here" and "Angels With DirtyFaces." And onBone Machine Waits is an ace arranger under thethumb of a fourflushing singer-songwriter. When he's got thecards--"Goin' Out West"'s petty delusions, "All Stripped Down"'sfinal judgment, "I Don't Wanna Grow Up"'s parting shot--theWeillian bite of the junkshop music cuts through his plug-uglyvocal shtick and his fondness for literary subjects like hangingsand unsolved murders. But he's always been a beatnik manque who gotaway with shit because it impressed pop pygmies, and he always willbe.
These are the kind of records rock critics are always accusedof falling for--the kind of records Sting makes, you know? But notsince 1987 (U2, John Hiatt, John Mellencamp, Robbie Robertson, andthe indefatigable Waits, not to mentionTunnel of Love andSkylarking, which worked) have we put up with so much bigthink.Voters noticed the trend, and their explanations make sense: AIDS,the economy, George Herbert Walker Bush. But what I mostly see ispeople getting older--young adults fending off intimations ofmortality by rejecting the evanescent jollies of stance andsynthesis for something more substantial, more verbal, moremiddlebrow. And if AIDS and the economy obviously fed their senseof rampaging limits, I think it's possible Nirvana had something todo with it too.
In the wake ofNevermind, critics braced themselves for an"alternative" onslaught of unknown dimensions, and if you like youcan find one here. Hard-touring perennial also-rans Soul Asylumsold out and broke out; the Jayhawks relocated their Gram Parsonsmemorial to a major and soared.Play With Toys started out onBerkeley's Emigré, the Disposable Heroes as San Francisco'sBeatnigs. Rykodisc's three charting albums put it in a league withevery major except WEA, and three archetypally impecunious indiesalso made their mark--TeenBeat withSassy pinups Unrest, whoactually would have risen to 30 if late ballots had counted;Bar/None with transplanted Kansan Freedy Johnston, who would havegone all the way to 19 if his Midwestern backers had mailed early;and Matador with shockeroo runner-up Pavement, whose disjointlytuneful, perversely unreadable noise/sound collage would have beenour biggest indie album since X'sWild Gift even if the stragglershad pushed it down to fourth where it belonged. On the other hand,Amerindie product disappeared from the singles chart and didn'teven dominate EPs. Seattle's only album finisher got most of itspoints in 1991 and inspired the kind of opprobrium usually reservedfor Madonna--Pearl Jam was the grunge band scoffers warned usabout. And though 1992's indie albums aren't as folky as lastyear's, Rykodisc gave us one old-timer, one dead person, and one46-year-old new Dylan, while Freedy Johnston's uncannily self-assuredpiece of singer-songwriter neotraditionalism achieves a,well, maturity that most of the conceptualizers on the chart wouldbe lucky to imagine.
Yeah yeah yeah--maturity, what a drag. But like the man said,it's only castles burning. And now, in the wake of Lollapalooza andtechno and accrued professional responsibility and Nirvana'sdream-come-true-and-then-what and the shift of boomer power from popularmusic to the federal government (and, oh right, more birthdays thanone could once conceive), rock criticism's thirtyish mainstream iswondering what's next while various collegiate-on-down cults--fanzineseparatists, ravers, trancers, riot grrrls, overly self-conscious poppostironists, maybe even alternative rappers, allsniping and crowing and splitting off and dropping out and climbingback in again--are cordoning off whatever turf their immediateelders will cede them and claiming they're owed more. This disputedefines itself above all in terms of meaning it--of trying to saysomething even if it makes you middlebrow, because in the face ofdeath and deprivation, irony don't cut it--and Pavement sets up onits cusp. 'Tudewise they stand between Sonic Youth, clearly old-guardas of this verbally direct, musically achieved, inexplicablyunexciting release, and Unrest, who get over on more stance andless music than any finisher in Pazz & Jop history. Since Unrestdon't lack IQ, they may follow in the footsteps of Sonic Youth andadd music gradually, but for now the reaction against their smart-asspomo irony--not theirs specifically, they're not thatimportant, but the whole structure of feeling that culminates inWayne's World,Achtung Baby, and, er,Malcolm X Park--generateshigh-concept new sincerity as surely as any underemploymentepidemic or killer virus.
We've seen this split before, of course--middlebrow conceptversus pomo irony is a new one, but the poll often pits meaningagainst pleasure, which usually reduces to albums versus singles.So it's fitting that another trend to spark comment was the conceptalbum's obverse, the novelty record--an analysis that reflects thehealthy awareness that a good laugh can help you cope every bit asmuch a profound insight. Still, even though our singles chartfeatured two songs about butts and two more about jumping around,I'm not sure I buy the theory that 1992 was a big novelty year,especially if we honor Greil Marcus's strict definition and insistthat they be funny--"Jump" and "Jump Around" are delightful(especially "Jump"), "Rump Shaker" and "Baby Got Back" bodacious(especially "Rump Shaker"), but only the KLF's delicious TammyWynette tribute/exploitation "Justified and Ancient" makes meguffaw. Anyway, in the broader sense rap is always a novelty on popradio, and all that makes this year different is that out of itsidentity crisis it's produced more Pazz & Jop chart singles thanever--six of the top seven and 10 of the top 19, including entriesfromSource faves Das Efx and Pete Rock & CL Smooth.What cheers memost about the singles chart is that that's what it is. Of the 28songs in our jam-packed top 25, only eight are from any of thisyear's top 40 albums--and just as impressive in an era when MTV andsuch have replaced radio as song machines, only three are also onour video list. Although this could also prove a blip, it's the waythings ought to be.
I wish they could be that way for me, but working with yourears is time-consuming. So shortly after discovering "Tennessee" onmy Blaupunkt, I bought a newer car with a removable entertainmentconsole, and while this upgrade enriched my music life, it renderedmy singles experience more arbitrary than ever. As for albums,well, after you try fending mortality off with meaning for a whileyou discover why they invented irony, and also why they bannedpleasure--men and women who deny themselves Madonna on what are atbottom niggling moral grounds bewilder me. I want it all--meaningand irony and pleasure, in the concept and in the bytes. So I pickand choose--Pavement not Unrest, Freedy Johnston not DavidHildalgo, Eric B. not Pete Rock,Wayne's World notAchtung Baby.Those who know my quiddities may snort at the jewel that crowns mylist, although in fact I enjoyed less contemporary Afropop than atany time since the stuff found its U.S. market niche. Nevertheless,the one 1992 release I could always count on for wisdom and fun andpure musical gratification was South African poet-singer MzwakheMbuli'sResistance Is Defence (87th).Resistance Is Defence isalternative rap at its best. I wonder what Mbuli could do with asampler.
Get on college radio? If we're lucky. As you know, Pazz & Jopwasn't the only place where rock critics' votes counted this year.The U.S. has a new president, and I'm for him, albeit lesspassionately than some think meet. But though I believe thatculture responds as much to image, mood, zeitgeist as to theeconomic realities few claim Bill Clinton will change much, I'm notthe kind of corny liberal (or convoluted radical) who's persuadedthe musical playing field is about to undergo a drastic change. I'mnot even certain that the year's happiest development, an upsurgein self-determined women that I trust will continue until such timeas the fascists win, is totally momentous--not with womengenerating almost half my top 10 but less than a tenth of whatfollows. Sometimes it's salutory to make a point of music'sultimate dependence on the substructure, but with all the kvellinggoing on I feel more inclined this year to insist on its relativeindependence--even to agree that sometimes it leads the way. SoI'll just pray that rap gets through its identity crisis, thatpublic housing is erected where those castles used to be, and thatmy mind and ass remain a continuum long enough for me to get mysustenance from whatever happens next--and what happens after that.
Village Voice, Mar. 2, 1993
 | 1991 | Critics Poll |Dean's List | 1993 |  |