CD REVIEWS | |
COCAINE MUZIK "My last album dropped/And you may think I flopped," raps Yo Gotti. And you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. He doesn't deny that his strong 2006 album, Back 2 da Basics, found fewer buyers than he might have liked. But he's not asking for sympathy, instead he has returned with a brash new mixtape, Cocaine Muzik, compiled by DJ Smallz, which gives listeners another chance to appreciate two of his greatest assets: his slurpy voice and his stubbornness.
As the title suggests, Yo Gotti still specializes in rhymes about the risks and rewards of the drug trade. He's a Memphis rapper with an unusually musical voice, a warm drawl - enriched by a rasp and a slight lisp - that turns just about every phrase into a singsong melody. In Aww Man, a collaboration with Juelz Santana, Yo Gotti is almost whispering as he delivers the chorus: "Hood faaame/Got my swag' so hot - yeah, I'm the maaan." Yo Gotti doesn't just rap his verse, he moans it. In the tone and texture of his voice, it's not hard to hear evidence of hip-hop's debt to the blues. | ![]() |
LOVE BEHIND THE MELODY "I go by the name of the R 'n' B hippie, neo-soul rock star Raheem DeVaughn." That's how DeVaughn announces himself at the beginning of his second album, Love Behind the Melody.
Those opening words are happily misleading. DeVaughn isn't really a hippie or a rock star; he's a slow-jam specialist with a mellow voice and a restrained approach. He doesn't (or perhaps can't) fill his songs full of ostentatious ad-libs, so he sticks to the tunes, even when he's ascending into falsetto to underscore a point. Like many R 'n' B singers, he positions himself as a soulful alternative to the competition. And he sounds pretty convincing; lovingly paying tribute to "that old four-letter word," or using a placid hip-hop beat for Woman, in which he explains how he feels about the same. (In a word: good.) But he sounds even better when the plot thickens in She's Not You. It seems "you" might be learning a bit too much about "she": "Even if I took her seven digits, trying to be slick, she's not you/If I crossed the line, laid with her one time, she won't do." If this album isn't quite the R 'n' B triumph it wants to be, you can blame some meandering tracks produced by Kenny Dope, from the pioneering dance music duo Masters at Work. And Customer, which beats a fast-food metaphor into the ground. | ![]() |
BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK
Through a half-dozen studio albums since 1998 the Drive-By Truckers have revealed a mission: Come up with a song for every kind of person in the modern American South. There are 19 more on their new album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, including family men, criminals, drunks, workers, addicts, soldiers, even musicians. The music is a wide-ranging idea of Southern rock that draws on not only the amalgams made by bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, but also on their sources and roots. Over the past decade songs from the Drive-By Truckers have juxtaposed observation and fiction, autobiography and allegory, but not a lot of ego.
Instead of aiming for a particular trademark sound, the Drive-By Truckers have always let the song dictate the style. They can be noisy and turbulent, as in That Man I Shot, or steadfast and long-suffering, as in The Home Front. This is a typically crowded Drive-By Truckers album, but the overload is part of the point. | ![]() |
LIVERPOOL 8
Now that the surviving Beatles are in their 60s, they're turning nostalgic and avuncular, with occasional thoughts of mortality: First Paul McCartney, with his 2007 album, Memory Almost Full, and now Ringo Starr. He brings his own kindly perspective to an album of songs he wrote with various collaborators - notably the producer Dave Stewart from Eurythmics. Starr always presented himself as the guileless, good-natured Beatle, and he isn't stopping now. He wants his old band to be remembered for declaring All You Need Is Love. For most of the album he sings about the power and virtue of love. He treats the past with nothing but fondness. The title song of Liverpool 8 is his chronicle of joining the Beatles and leaving their hometown behind, while Harry's Song emulates the Tin Pan Alley-gone-1970s-Hollywood sound of Harry Nilsson, who died in 1994. The production on Liverpool 8 has the heft and definition of modern multitracking, resembling Starr's early-1970s hits rather than the Beatles themselves. | ![]() |
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the