VIEW THIS PAGE With apologies to Debbie Harry, Tairrie B, Invincible and Amanda Blank, the most significant white female rapper of all time is Natalie Portman. (To Northern State and Uffie, no apology is necessary.) Based on Eazy-E’s No More ?’s, Natalie’s Rap, which originated in 2006 as a Saturday Night Live sketch written by Lonely Island — and appears on this comedy team’s first musical album, Incredibad — is savagely funny, a reputation changer for a young actress and, most surprisingly, an utterly convincing revisiting of late-1980s Los Angeles gangster rap. It isn’t parody; it’s a love letter.
Over the last few years the members of Lonely Island — Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone — have been responsible for writing many of the comic high points on SNL. That US television’s grandest comedy institution was rejuvenated by three white hip-hop kids from Berkeley, California, says a great deal not only about Lonely Island’s deftness but also the penetration and evolution of rap culture.
The first Lonely Island album, in parts, gets hip-hop to laugh along. T-Pain is the guest on “I’m on a Boat,” a sendup of triumphant materialism. And on Santana DVX, a celebration of a Carlos Santana-branded sparkling wine (“The sham-pan-yuh/from the man with the bandana,” Samberg raps) produced by the indie rap satirist J-Zone, E-40 raps amusingly as Santana, though it’s not as funny as E-40’s 1994 ode to cheap wine, Carlos Rossi.
There has been shockingly little well-meaning rap satire over the years, which makes these affectionate songs all the more potent; here verisimilitude is the joke. Ras Trent, a savage takedown of trustafarians (privileged, culture-slumming white kids), is produced by the reggae legends Sly & Robbie. And the hilarious Like a Boss, based on the Slim Thug song of the same name, uses rap to comment on the deadening effects of corporate life: Hip-hop can be a comic mode, too, Lonely Island knows. (Most of the songs are produced by Taccone, who has a keen ear for the nuances of different rap styles.)
About half of this album is a greatest-hits collection. The accompanying DVD includes the group’s essential SNL digital shorts, including the 2007 Emmy-winning one, with an unprintable name, which features Justin Timberlake in a lewd spoof of early 1990s R ’n’ B, and the more recent megaclub trance-influenced song, also with an unprintable name.
The only place this collection falls flat is in its inclusion of some pre-SNL Lonely Island material. It’s funny,
but no-fi and awkward. Back then Lonely Island clearly wasn’t yet comfortable enough truly to poke fun, or maybe wasn’t totally sure that it was allowed to.
Love is both bliss and panacea, while politics is a test of fortitude, on India.Arie’s fourth studio album, Testimony: Vol. 2, Love & Politics. One of the most determinedly virtuous songwriters in R ’n’ B or pop, India.Arie strives to make faith, goodness and positive thinking seductive, and on this album, working as her own co-producer (with Dru Castro), she’s endearing even when she’s preachy.
Testimony: Vol. 1: Love & Relationship, released in 2006, delved into the pain of a breakup, and in Psalms 23 she hints at more strife: “I’ve been through a couple of litigations/through character assassination.” But on most of Vol. 2 her equanimity has been restored. Her lover in the lilting Chocolate High (as portrayed by her duet partner and co-writer Musiq Soulchild) is an addictive treat. Elsewhere her man is an ever-understanding listener in the celebratory Therapy and the ballad He Heals Me.
As usual most of the songs feature India.Arie’s acoustic guitar and her forthright but still girlish voice, with its Stevie Wonder phrasing. Acoustic syncopation accompanies her global view of poverty and survival in the flamenco-tinged Ghetto and in Pearls, which features a singer from the Ivory Coast, Dobet Gnahore. But the music doesn’t stay folky. Long Goodbye, about a last tryst, grows into a power ballad akin to Prince’s Purple Rain. In Better Way, India.Arie protests the response to Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and prematurely sexualized children, matching bluesy vocals to Keb Mo’s electric guitar.
There’s a limit to how many self-help platitudes a song can bear, and it’s certainly exceeded in A Beautiful Day, with lines like, “There’s only one you/Just take a moment to give thanks for who you are.” But with a brisk, pulsating track and boundless anticipation in her voice, India.Arie comes close to making the truisms ring true.
If the guitarist Nels Cline had joined the revered and more than semi-popular rock band Wilco in his early 20s, rather than in his late 40s, he might never be making solo-guitar albums on the side like Coward. This record reflects a far-and-wide aesthetic imagination, one that’s been broadening for a long time.
Cline’s playing has seriously mixed blood, and when he records multiple versions of himself on electric and acoustic guitars and about a dozen other stringed instruments, he becomes exponentially more mongrelized. He does his version of John Cipollina’s wide runs and fast vibrato; he likes crying slide guitar glissandi, looped clumps of distortion and amplifier hum, the clashing overtone sounds of Sonic Youth and the slow, deliberate, almost monastic music of traditional Japanese koto players. But he doesn’t let anything rest in one place. Meditative and minimal as these pieces may be, they’re written with rigor. Hear them once, and you might only be lulled, but one more time and you’ll hear the purpose and symmetry.
Rod Poole’s Gradual Ascent to Heaven is the imposing accomplishment here. It begins and ends with long zither chords, and over the 18 minutes between, links together slowly evolving figures, building and ebbing. Poole, an experimental English guitarist who lived and worked in Los Angeles and who was a friend of Cline’s, was murdered in 2007; a piece like this seems the right kind of homage to someone who had the patience to fully absorb long-form music. But then much of this record strikes a similar tone: It sounds like both an advertisement and an elegy for deep listening.
The Von Bondies last released an album five years ago, around the time that this decade’s garage-rock revival was petering out. And while the album, Pawn Shoppe Heart, made an urgent case — its standout single, C’mon, C’mon, had the force of a defibrillator jolt — it also felt like something destined for dismantlement. Jason Stollsteimer, a whippetlike lead singer and guitarist, howled his compact choruses as if on borrowed time.
What then to make of Love Hate and Then There’s You, which mainly flogs the same formula as its predecessor? Once more we find Stollsteimer pushing a catchy anguish, and the drummer Don Blum pounding his way to rapture. And here again are the female background singers, with their hey-nows and their whoa-oh-ohs. (This time those voices belong to the bassist Leann Banks and the guitarist Christy Hunt.)
The riffs are tight, but not so fresh. When they don’t evoke vintage Von Bondies, they suggest the Killers or, in the case of a dramatic lead single, Pale Bride, the British band Bloc Party.
Stollsteimer seems painfully aware of his band’s restrictions, imbuing the album with a defensive streak. “Can you say a good word about us?” he pleads, or dares, in a song called Shut Your Mouth. Elsewhere he insists on forced apathy (“I don’t care anymore/Don’t care anymore”) or churlish indignation (“Who’s sorry?/You’re sorry”). These would feel more like private sentiments if they weren’t all delivered as anthems.
His most straightforward lyrics arrive in the opening track, This Is the Perfect Crime, apparently a new manifesto. “We are the spark/We are the grit,” Stollsteimer declares, adding, “We are the underground!” It’s a hopeful idea for a band that no longer has any claim to the mainstream. And it gets more hopeful still:
A lot of fads will come and go
It’s hit or miss on unpaved roads
And chances are that crowds will
grow
To seek the sounds below.
— NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE VIEW THIS PAGE
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