In My Changer, 3/31/04

Because I waited too long to do this since the last time, there is one more CD here than I can actually hold in my changer. Ah well.

Kanye West

The College Dropout

Rocafella

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If this isn’t the best hip-hop album of 2004, I’ll be very surprised. After producing monster hits for Jay-Z’s (“Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and “Takeover”) and Talib Kweli (“Get By”), Kanye has taken up the mic for Jay’s own label and dropped an album that’s quirky, soulful, catchy and beautiful. There’s a lot of range in between the American-dream hustlerism of Jigga and Kweli’s hyperskilled social consciousness, but rather than choose one of those two dominant strains of hip-hop, Kanye embraces both, bragging on “Breathe In, Breathe Out” that he’s the “first backpacker with a Benz.” His rhymes, though, don’t sound like anyone on the current scene: often delivered in a sing-song rhythm or even just sung, his lines draw you in with a relaxed cool but, upon further inspection, reveal jokes, professions of faith, deep ironies, and some of the finest superlative similes to come along in some time. His production supports his lyrical vision; Eminem-like irony is served up on “We Don’t Care,” a sky-blue anthem to alternative moneymaking methods that features kids singing the chorus “We wasn’t s’posed to make it past twenty-five/Joke’s on you, we still alive,” but it’s followed by “All Falls Down,” a remarkable critique of ghetto materialism… the same materialism that Kanye embraces later in the album. The duo of “Jesus Walk” and “Never Let Me Down,” which I’m confident in declaring the two most frankly God-loving rap songs of 2004, are followed by “The New Workout Plan,” which recalls Jay-Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” in its casual collection of amusing yet degrading puns about women’s wiles. He’s as conflicted as most of us thinking hip-hop fans are about hip-hop’s tropes, in other words.

None of this matters if the production ain’t hot, and Kanye’s certainly is; the best of the three (!) current hit singles off the album, “Through the Wire,” was recorded while Kanye’s jaw was wired shut, and its hilarious puns and heartrending couplets wouldn’t work nearly as well without Kanye’s trademark pitched-up vocal samples, these from Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” and the relentlessly optimistic beat. The only nasty snag is Kanye’s titular distrust of higher education, a topic which is beaten to death as the album goes on; Kanye does not appear to have considered that while professions like hip-hop producer do not require advanced degrees, most people need that diploma paper in order to get where they want to go. Otherwise, The College Dropout contains multitudes, in a lyrical style you can’t get anywhere else and with production a degree beyond what anyone other than Dr. Dre and DJ Premier are providing right now. It is literally the state of the art – every strand of it.

Jay-Z

The Black Album

Rocafella

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Not as good as Kanye! But still excellent. Jigga’s supposed swan song (he claims he’s retiring after this one, but I’m don’t know why this self-proclaimed hustler would walk away from the opportunity to make a lucrative return), this one is full of personal narrative in addition to the normal embrace of street and showbiz capitalism. Young Ho’s rhymes are as tight as ever in either lyrical domain, the beats (a couple by Kanye, one by Timbaland, one by Eminem) work nicely with the narratives, and the narratives themselves reveal an unusual amount about Shawn Carter himself in this time of relentless hip-hop braggadocio. (Wait…hip-hop has always been about relentless braggadocio! Why do people always talk about this like it’s a new thing?) The Black Album is not quite as good as The Blueprint or Reasonable Doubt, but many, many rappers have distinguished careers without ever making an album as good as The Blueprint or Reasonable Doubt. Jigga fans (one of whom I seem to have become) will take a solid third and wait to spend their money again after Jay gets tired of running the Nets.

Big Boi

Speakerboxxx

Arista

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Yes, this is only half of Outkast’s dual solo albums, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, but I’ve only been listening to Speakerboxxx, because Andre 3000 and his down-under amour look a bit too freaky for me to handle in the album art. I’ll listen to his Prince emulation eventually. Big Boi commands that Southern speed-rapping style with assurance and good humor, and there are some mighty seductive beats on this album as well; the neck-snapping horns on “Bowtie,” for example, or the much-celebrated catchiness and perfectly placed accents on “The Way You Move.” Sometimes the numerous guitar-driven beats and mixed choruses singing hooks get to be too much for lil’ old East Coast me, though, and I start having nostalgia fits for one or another of the DJ Premier beats on Illmatic. Outkast’s achievement, in part, is that they’ve made hip-hop that sounds like nothing else in hip-hop, and while this has proven successful in appealing to people who don’t normally like hip-hop, it’s left me a little unmoored while listening. Perhaps my opinion will change in the coming weeks.

Antonio Vivaldi

Violin concertos, Op. 4 (La Stravaganza)

Rachel Podger, solo violin and conductor; Arte del Suonatori

Channel Classics

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It’s probably an oversimplification to say that the first generation of period-instrument performers was still learning to play their instruments and the second generation was still learning how to play with them, but this third generation of period-instrument performers regularly surmounts technical and stylistic barriers to deliver fearless and thrilling performances. Besides Fabio Biondi and Andrew Manze, we apparently need to add Rachel Podger to the upper echelon of the new period pantheon, because this is one amazing recording. Podger has an absolute blast with these violin concerti, taking enormous risks with phrasing, tone color and dynamics and making all of them pay off with an astonishing command of her instrument and a palpable joy in making this music come alive again. Arte del Suonatori, a Polish group, follow her enthusiastically around every turn, making for some thrilling ripenio-solo interactions, and the recording has a nice swell in the bass that you can hear in live period orchestras but rarely hear on record. Anyone who still thinks Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 400 times needs to buy this two-CD set (which costs about the same as one CD) and hear what committed musicians can do for what is revealed here as great music.

Osvaldo Golijov

Last Round; Lullaby and Doina; Yiddishbbuk; The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

St. Lawrence String Quartet plus guests

EMI

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Osvaldo Golijov doesn't need a school or an -ism to tell him how to compose, and he doesn't compose as a reaction to past composers, or as a tribute, or with the desire to break cleanly from any past anyone might bring to his or her listening. He just composes: lyrical, emotional, forthright works that nevertheless sound as modern as anything out there. Yiddishbbuk is subtitled "Inscriptions for String Quartet," and the aching fragments of melodies in the music, says Osvaldo, attempt to reconstruct "a book of apocryphal Psalms" that Kafka read and to commemorate three children interned at a concentration camp, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Leonard Bernstein. It's as messy as that sounds and as heart-rending as you'd hope it would be, and the work acts as an emotional center for this CD. But there's more to love: the nerve-wracking windup of the first movement of Last Round and the echoing stillness of its second, the characterful klezmer evocation in The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind. If Lullaby and Doina seems a little little bit less characterful than the other music, that's probably only because I can't quite appreciate it yet. The St. Lawrence, augmented as necessary, delivers gripping performances of all four works. If you like modern classical even a tiny bit, check this out.

Johannes Brahms

Symphonies nos. 2 & 3

Columbia Symphony Orchestra; Bruno Walter, conductor

Sony Classical

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When I was a little person becoming interested in classical music, my mother attempted to steer me away from Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner, mostly (as far as I can tell) because she herself did not want to have to listen to them when I played them, as I played everything else when I was a little person, at excessive volume. She succeeded with Mahler and Bruckner (though I am probably going to end up liking Mahler eventually) but failed miserably with Brahms. To me, his highly disciplined late Romanticism is a balm for the soul — even when the music is bleak and unforgiving, I always feel as though Johannes is speaking of something true, and sometimes that's all the comfort you need. These two symphonies, though, are for-real comfort food, large-scale heroic-themed works with motivic connections and heartfelt melodies galore. Bruno Walter, as one might expect, draws performances both humane and grand from the handpicked orchestra, and the sound is good enough that it doesn't distract from the performances.

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