The first thing that strikes you about James Blake is all that singing. His acclaimed EPs didn’t have much of that. But on his self-titled, debut album, Blake’s voice is the most immediate entrance into the albums emotion. Or, perhaps, “emotionalism” is a better word. Blake sounds like a person who feels things strongly, but rather than excite similar emotion in the listener, his emotion itself seems to be the subject matter. Listening to James Blake is then a strangely voyeuristic enterprise, where a subject is seen to be exhibiting signs of, for instance, pain without creating a reciprocal or empathetic relationship with the listener.

If you think of art as a way for someone to create a shared space of meaning, then, it seems like James Blake should be a failure.

When you think about it further, though, James Blake is not necessarily an album where James Blake the producer decided to sing dispirited love songs. Rather, it’s the album where James Blake the producer decided he needed absolute control over everything. As an exercise in the deployment of total control, James Blake is a stunning success. Like every terrible partner you’ve ever had, Blake wants the final word in every decision; he’s not afraid to repeat himself, and in fact uses repetition as a philosophical hammer to shape the listener into a pliant accomplice in his endeavor.

The best case for such an interpretation is “I Never Learnt to Share.” Blake intones, “My brother and my sister don’t speak to me. / But I don’t blame them.” As he layers pitch-corrected vocal harmonies, a beat of sorts emerges. Even as the words of the song correspond to the title, they lack a narrative or even discursive force. Rather, there is a semblance of story created by the clipped samples and synthesizers. For the first several verses, a meandering scale climbs triumphantly to its resolution; as Blake adds more layers, though, the song deteriorates—it’s a powerful function of subtraction by addition. Signaled by the downward walking baseline around 2:50, the song takes a plain nosedive that results in sonic carnage. “I Never Learnt to Share” tells the story of a petulant young man who would rather destroy his belongings than, yes, share. It’s emblematic of the control-oriented role of the singer/songwriter/producer role that Blake plays. After the soundscape has been ripped up, the melody resolves for a final time, as if to smile and say, “Sorry about that tantrum back there.”

There is a perverse tension between the very fact of Blake’s lyricism and his productions. The liner notes list all the songs’s lyrics, though they’re soundly unimpressive. Blake is not a strong lyricist. Rather than the words themselves, their shapes and colors, the interesting thing about James Blake is the way it employs lyrics in order to show how inessential they in fact are. The album is a serious pull-the-ladder-up-after-yourself sort of object lesson on the meaningless of words as words.

The duo of “Lindisfarne I” and “Lindisfarne II” is a smooth palette cleanser after the ragged “I Never Learnt to Share.” Lindisfarne, as far as I can tell, is the location of a internationally renowned nature preserve known for its wintering birds. The songs form a safe harbor for Blake. But there’s a healthy amount of irony interpolated in the songs. The Lindisfarnes tell an ostensibly heartbreaking story about a lost relationship among the wintering kestrels, but Blake’s heavily auto-tuned vocals obscure much of the lyrical content. Again, it’s through repetition and manipulation that the lyrics are stripped of their meaningful content; the meaning of the song is then regained through the its atmospheric production.

Blake’s cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love” is another one of the standout tracks. It operates in a way similar to the best covers in that it uncovers different aspects of composition, but it does so by practically excising most of its source, as if it were a malignancy. Blake preserves a few healthy lines of Feist’s song and adds some meaningfully massive bass. The result is one of the strangest dub songs ever conceived.

As it falls across the topography of James Blake, “Limit to Your Love” is one of the few songs that are both direct-sounding and good. The album is extremely front loaded. “Unluck” and “The Wilhelm Scream” (along with the previously mentioned tracks) are by far the best pieces on the record. “Unluck” in particular is a gorgeous song with inspired production choices: An asynchronous, Autechre-style beat, odd blasts of noise, and abstracted, mush-mouth vocals. Again, like the better songs on the album, it seems like Blake is singing something very important, but just what that is is unclear—an effect for the better.

As the last third of James Blake shows, as the compositions trend toward the direct and the vocals are most decipherable, the quality of the songs goes down sharply. Blake’s voice sounds like a poor imitation of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) on the dire “Give Me My Month” and “Why Don’t You Call Me?” When he shifts the pitch of his vocals up, he sounds like an approximation of Yo-Landi Vi$$er, the girl in Die Antwoord. Rounding out the end of the album are “I Mind,” a fine dubstep number; “Measurements,” Blake’s kind of bland take on soul music; and “Tep and Logic,” another above-average dubstep track.

Overall, James Blake is a vexing and somewhat contradictory record. The very execution—and perhaps the underlying reason for the album’s creation—is an almost pathological will to control. The album’s best songs are meticulously crafted sound sculptures. Lyrically, the album deals with the unmooring sadness of being in and out of control of your life. The rub, of course, is that the best songs’s lyrics are distorted, buried, or destroyed beyond comprehension. Blake’s briefer piano songs sound like little more than sketches. James Blake is uneven and perhaps two or three songs too long, but its peaks are thrilling and its vision for the future of music—a post-lyrical, sound-oriented approach to record making—is both interesting and seductive.

[James Blake is available right now on iTunes. If you’ve enjoyed the record (or this review, perhaps) then please purchase it.]

Taylor Swift is basically a goldendoodle.

In this new series, 10 Listens will publish two writers’ takes on a given record, artist, or concept. The exchange will be given as a series of brief essays, with each subsequent one a response to the previous. Today, B Michael responds to Brad Nelson’s response to his original post.

I do not disagree: Taylor Swift’s main songwriting strength is the ability to pick out one, two, or three details in a situation or story; she bludgeons you about the head, neck, and ears with her limited observational palette until you’ve mistaken detail for depth. Shining up a mirror really good doesn’t provide you with a singular biographer. At the most basic level, it’s still you and your experiences that are what allows you to parse and express your idea of you and your experiences. And I’m saying that Taylor Swift isn’t even a particularly well-polished mirror. She’s more like one of those pitted, surface-blasted plastic mirrors you’d find at a garage sale or broken into pieces in an alley.

Saying that something isn’t deep has already lodged within it the rejoinder that you’re not trying hard enough. It’s like, Oh, you don’t get the latest Almodóvar film? It’s like cutting the cheese in an Olympian’s hyperbaric chamber. Sorry…

The thing about perspectives is that everyone’s got one, but some people have, like, ten. My previous criticism—that Swift is immoral because of her conflicting perspectives—does not hang on the conflict of the perspectives. It hangs on each perspective’s impoverishment. We’re talking painting with a wide brush or using light from a narrow spectrum. Naiveté, narcolepsy, car crashes. The point is not that Swift contradicts herself. The point is Swift, herself.

It’s always nice to hear songs with a complex emotional or perspectival valence. That’s why, for instance, people appreciate irony. Because, ironically, it shows the patient has a pulse. One-dimensional songwriting needs to be pretty amazing in order to be amazing. There’s no multiplier. Swift’s songwriting is profoundly one-dimensional, but it’s not profound.

You closed your piece by saying,

Of course there’s no outright dawning of self-awareness. Swift considers herself exempt from the whims and calculations that govern others. None of her steps are light. She moves or is moved and it resonates in the fucking earth, and meanwhile attendant bodies, events, tablecloths are dragged into the rift. This is why half of Speak Now is didactic.

I’m not sure that a dearth of self-awareness should be the marquee attribute of your singer-songwriter type. And, therefore, I think you’ve again proved my point about Swift (or her record, at least) being something like immoral. You have an elemental, non-self-aware, one dimensional tweener millennial writing best-selling, didactic pop music. I mean, I think the War On Terror is a little ill-prosecuted. But even I don’t think Al-Qaeda should be the ones writing the strategy papers.

If I’m not mistaken, we have a twenty-year-old Swift telling grown men that they’re “innocent” at one point. And at another, she’s telling her unborn child to cherish his imagined childhood and to be nice to his non-mothered mom. Considered from a distance, “Never Grow Up” could be reconfigured as an avant-guard planned parenthood jingle.

The last time I checked, it was a good thing to have experience on the job. I’m not sure you can make getting hornswoggled because you were so young (nineteen) the centerpiece of your album, and then go on to write a bunch of condescending songs about being the America’s Next Top Authority On Grown-Up Shit. I mean, you can do that, but call me crazy? I want our teachers to finish college before we let them teach the freshman seminar. Thing is, there’s no such thing as an “emotional prodigy” like there are math prodigies or chess prodigies. There are tons of young, talented people doing creative work, but Taylor Swift is more of a technician than anything else. Her work paints inside the lines, and the lines are drawn up with star-chart precision. She’s like a goldendoodle: Cute, with big fluffy hair; created entirely to please a large swathe of people who are allergic to natural interaction.

In this new series, 10 Listens will publish two writers’ takes on a given record, artist, or concept. The exchange will be given as a series of brief essays, with each subsequent one a response to the previous. Today, B Michael Payne leads off with his initial take on Taylor Swift’s Speak Now.

It’s the sort of thing we might not ever agree on, so I’ll lead with the fact that I don’t really care for how Taylor Swift’s Speak Now sounds. If I had to elaborate, or if you wanted me to “say more,” I would say that I somewhat dislike the music. But it’s more like I just don’t deign to notice it.

It’s much more interesting to me, what she says and what she says means.

Ostensibly, the album is supposed to be a series of autobiographical sketches. Each song delineates a portion of Swift’s life. There’s the infamous “Dear John,” which details her relationship with John Mayer. There’s a song about dating a Jonas Brother. I don’t really know what the other songs are supposed to be about. I’m not really that interested in what they’re about. The album isn’t called Taylor Swift Wikipedia, after all. (That would be a more [!?] terrible album.)

What the songs seem to get at—significantly, tellingly, way way way more than Taylor’s take on certain parts of her life—is how Taylor portrays herself to herself as seen through the crucible of experience.

My main problem with Taylor Swift’s Speak Now is that it seems to go out of its way to tell me that it was written by a really morally uneven person.

The thing about writing an album about these disparate, non-linear points in your life is that at least fifty percent of each song is the revelation of your personal character at each point. On the album, what each character displays is often, taken as a whole, a totally univocal, me-me-me sort of person who seems to give little regard to the wants, needs, or validity of others.

Take for example the songs “Speak Now” and “Dear John.” The former describes a situation in which Taylor steals a man at the altar. The latter describes a situation in which Taylor is heartbroken by a man who has abandoned her.

I realize that life is made up of fairly discontinuous moments—temporally and emotionally (the combination of the two could be said to make up the development of character)—but the glaring contradiction of the two points of view, combined with the songs’ being sequenced in a row, just brings out the nastiness of Swift’s own person. In the one, she wholly advocates taking someone’s husband. Further, she paints a situation in which the husband would be willingly taken. To start, why would he be marrying this other woman in the first place? If, on his wedding day, he would abandon her in an instant, he clearly should not be getting married. And Swift goes on about disparaging the bride’s family. The whole song goes on and on in a repugnant way, and it’s clearly a childish exercise in narcissistic wish fulfillment.

“Dear John” comes at you from the other direction, from the perspective of the heartbroken lover. She lashes out at the man who broke her heart. But Swift doesn’t seem to consider for an instant the feelings of the man (again) or of anyone else who may have aided this heartbreak. She doesn’t realize that other people in the world exist, and that those other people have desires that seem at that moment to burn and exist only to be fulfilled.

The thing that puts “Dear John”—and Swift, therefore—over the line and into sadistic/morally repugnant territory is the line, “The girl in the dress cried the whole way home.” Right after a song where a woman gets left at the altar, she has the nerve to write a song about being the girl “in the dress” who’s heartbroken about a late-adolescent romance? The juxtaposition of the two perspectives shows a chilling lack of self-awareness combined with a not small amount of churlish nastiness.

Just from these two examples, it seems clear that Swift’s music is meant to appeal to a broad audience who is used to gaining exactly what they want, and who reserve the right to whine, bitch, and moan about it if they don’t get their way. It’s for people who lack a nuanced view of the world and of their own selves. It is immoral and bad.

Wow. The new Of Montreal album is getting some juice from its guest stars (bionic robo-soul singer Janelle Monae and the indie Knowles, Solange), but I suspect it will go down in history as one of the most acerbic, self-loathing, bleak albums. Which is to say: It is an Of Montreal album of recent vintage. While there are no tracks as fierce and shaggy as “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” the record features its share of cutting songs. While the musical mood of False Priest is somewhat bubbly, bouncy, and effervesescent, it has its share of claustrophobic neurosis vehicles. “Around The Way” sounds like a particularly demented Aladdin Sane-era Bowie track. “Godly Intersex” sounds vaguely chillwave-y, without the lack of substance and philosophic verve the genre typically displays. “Hydra Fancies” uses the deranged, multi-track voice effect to, well, great effect. The entire album is made of recriminations aimed squarely at self and chunky barbs that hurt everyone. While I can’t hardly imagine the amount of psychic pain that propels the creation of such a document, False Priest seems to make it sound pretty fun.

As a follow-up of sorts to our Zilla Rocca interview, here is a new video from the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers for the “No Resolution 2.” The video is a tribute to 12 Angry Men. It does a good job marrying the intense film to an equally intense song, which turns the Velvet Undeground’s”Venus In Furs” into a raucous party jam beat. The song can be found on the Broken Clocks EP (and downloaded here, for free). Enjoy.

Zilla Rocca is a busy man. He is a Philadelphia-based rapper who’s been writing and rhyming for more than thirteen years. From 2003 to 2006, he was a part of the experimental hip-hop group Crooked Souls, which released Break Bread & Nails. In 2004, he teamed up with Nico the Beast to make the rap duo Clean Guns.  He created Beat Garden Entertainment, a Philadelphia rap consortium, with Nico and Octavius “Big O” Mitchell. And then in 2008, Zilla Rocca teamed up with producer Douglas Martin (aka Blurry Drones) to create the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers. With Martin on production and Rocca on the mic, they released a breakthrough album, The Slow Twilight, which was loosely based on the noir film Blast of Silence. Earlier this year, 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers released an EP, Broken Clocks.

The 5 O’Clock Shadow Boxers have gained a considerable online following by working unconventional (read: Indie Rock) influences into a gritty, East Coast rap sound. Rocca’s verses center around the feelings attendant to living among the urban decay and uncertainty of the burgeoning 2000s. You can stream the album and EP by hitting the links above. Earlier this week, Zilla Rocca took a break from rapping, blogging, Tweeting, and Tumblring to answer a few questions via email.

10 Listens: I have to admit, I first got into the 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers because of the song “Eric Lindros,” which samples Cat Power. It seemed like a novelty song. But after listening to the complete album, it definitely hangs together pretty cohesively. Did you and Douglas Martin plan on making an album that combined traditional indie-type music (Cat Power, Velvet Underground, Elliot Smith, etc.) with hip hop?

Zilla Rocca: I don’t think we planned on doing a whole album in that style.  It just happened to be the way Douglas was throwing beats together, and everytime he sent me something of that ilk, it spoke to me moreso than “traditional” hip hop sounding tracks, so to speak.  I think after 4-5 songs, we realized this would be the sound of Shadowboxers, but then again on our new EP, Douglas sampled Fela Kuti and pulled it off.  Whatever he’s listening to usually ends up in the beats I get from him.  During that stretch, I’m assuming he was heavily into the artists that ended up on the LP.

10L: You mentioned in an earlier piece that you hadn’t even met Douglas before you came out with the album. Have you met Douglas Martin yet?

ZR: We still have not met yet!  He doesn’t exactly live around the corner, but we are supposed to be meeting in LA at the end of September.  I have a show out there on the 26th I believe and I think that week is his birthday, so he’s coming down from Seattle.  I’m sure we’ll hit off like 2 old maids.  And I owe him a beer for putting me on the map I guess.

10L: I get the sense that you listen to indie music. Who are some of your favorite musicians?

ZR: Shabazz Palaces, Why?, Dose One, Aesop Rock, the chick from the Kills, the drummer from Bloc Party, Javelin, Bonobo, El-P.  I’m sure there’s plenty more but I haven’t been keeping up with the indie stuff.  Too stuck on songs like “Crooklyn” and “Stress” by Organized Konfusion.  I’m getting back into great rap from ‘94 again.

10L: This might sound corny, but who are the nine rappers you relate to? (Or is that a Wu-Tang reference?)

ZR: The nine rappers I ACTUALLY relate to?  Hmmm….Worshipping, studying, and relating are three different things.  Let’s see…I always related to Andre 3000 because he was a brilliant introvert who came out of his shell through music.  That one line he said in “A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre” about being the quiet kid in class who kept his head and was always drawing–that was me.  I relate to Ghostface in his storytelling mode; he reminds me of my uncles in how vivid and hilarious and detailed his stories are.  Irish uncles are the best at that.  I relate to Mos Def because now he almost never writes a third verse and toys around with traditional hip hop song structure.  Eff a third verse, man–always hate writing third verses!  Geechi Suede of Camp Lo because sometimes I like to just put words together that sound killer and figure out the meaning later.  I like guys that are into words because I love words more than anything.  Raekwon, Roc Marciano, Palaceer Lazarro from Shabazz Palaces, Aesop Rock, Dose One, GZA.  I think that’s about nine, right?

10L: You call yourself the “rap Jack Bauer” a few times. This seems like a good image, since a lot of times your lyrics are violently intense, but you seem to have a pretty rigid moral character in your songs. I mean, you’re not saying people should sell drugs, rape women, and murder people. You’re clearly expressing yourself vis-a-vis the political, social, and economic climate. But again, you’re not really anything like Eminem, anger-wise. The song ‘No Fury’ teases out a relationship between fire and fury, and you seem to remain on a side other than unmitigated anger. Then again, rather than it being for the ladies, the song says it’s “for the drunk dude by himself.” How do you see anger being used in your songs?

ZL: “No Fury” really sums up how I am when dealing with conflict or unpleasant things.  It takes ALOT for me to snap or flip out.  I have tons of patience and an open mind, and I always prefer to figure out a resolution rather than rock the boat for no reason.  In my songs though, sometimes the music I get pulls out a primal urge to just destroy things.  It’s pretty great to get lost in the mindset of someone who WOULD do all the things I wouldn’t do.  I think I’ve actually been angrier this year then I was at any point when making the Shadowboxers joints. And the new stuff I’ve written is darker.  But I’m not into shocking people like Eminem.  I try to do what Alice Cooper did: I’d rather suggest what can happen than fully outline the pistolwhipping of a defensless nun on the 61 bus.  It’s hard for me to be outright crude and vulgar.

10L: There’s a verse in “Dirt Naps” that goes,

My pops had a heart attack scare, why bother?

To worry about some internet love (Who the hell is this?)

The blog boys got holes and can’t fill ‘em up

Cause a Zshare link don’t equate to real buzz

which makes an interesting point (and actually similar to the point TI argues against a lot in Fuck A Mixtape). Clearly, the Internet has had an interesting effect on yours and a lot of other contemporary, up-and-coming rapers’ careers. It seems to me that the Internet has probably helped rappers pretty spectacularly in some cases, but it’s also created a kind of race to the bottom, oversaturation of tracks, and mixtapes that are just rushed out at a frenetic pace that often means a sharp dip in quality. How have you worked the Internet in your career, and what do you think are some of its ups and downs?

ZR: Without the internet, there’s no way you’re interviewing me, so I have to appreciate it.  I think the biggest problem with the internet is the instant access of everything: information, news, porn, shopping, sports, rap shit, etc.  It gives people unrealistic expectations when it comes to their music, as if people will magnetically cling to their stuff by virtue of it being a Zshare link or a retweet or a blog post on 2dopeboyz or whatever.  It also gives way to unprecendented charading–suddenly, everyone is on the same level.  If I logged onto NahRight.com with only a passing interest in mainstream rap, by default I’d have to assume Blog Rapper X is just as big as Lil’ Wayne because they’re both on the front page.  When we used to only go to record stores, the big name cats would have all their stuff in the front, posters everywhere, display racks with their record/CD/tape, etc and if you were a newjack or local cat, your music was buried in the bins and forgotten.  Now, there really is no shelf to create a natural order of importance.  Superstars are featured right next to openers and vice versa.  And the openers think THIS IS MY TICKET! MY SONG IS FEATURED RIGHT BELOW LLOYD BANKS!  MY INTERVIEW IS RIGHT NEXT TO SNOOP DOGG’S YOUTUBE CLIP!  No one wants to work, to slave away, to polish and refine and try and fail and fail and fail again and then MAYBE succeed.  But that’s how it was for a looooong time.  15 blog posts on NahRight doesn’t mean you’ve actually accomplished anything–it just means you have a good publicist.

The good thing about the internet is now people have choice, albeit too much choice at times, but if you don’t like what’s on TV, or the radio, or at the movies, you can literally spend 10 seconds and find whatever YOU like.  I try to approach my fans like that.  I hate selling stuff because I don’t like to be sold anything.  I like to digest information and experiences then make up my own mind.  I’m very accessible to people, and it’s cool to talk to a fan from Singapore via Facebook, or have Twitter debates with cats in Detroit about why LeBron is a born loser.  Internet users now are very sophisticated and savvy–they know how to find things.  If people want to find me, that’s awesome.  I try to keep a respectful distance in terms of the musical output and promotions because I know when an artist turns into a self-promoting spam machine, I’m gone.

10L: A sort of follow-up. I didn’t listen to a lot of rap growing up. In fact, I came to it at a pretty late age (when I was almost done with college), and I’ve only gotten really into it over the last few years. In a lot of ways, I don’t think about it in a geographic sense, which seems like the traditional way to carve it up. I more think of rappers as Internet Rappers versus (I suppose) Traditional Rappers. So in this way, I situate 5 o’Clock Shadowboxers with artists like Cool Kids, Wale, and Das Racist, even though you all come from across the country. Do you think this is a kind of, well, stupid way to think about rap music? Do you feel a sense of competition with other rappers coming up on the Internet? Do you follow their careers?

ZR: I used to trip and get salty about internet competition with other rappers 3-4 years ago when I first started getting press. But after a while I realized the folks who I love and respect the most, whose career paths I’d like to follow, would never give a shit about blog coverage.  They would only be interested in doing something cool and sharing it with other cool people who might like it.  And after they got really good at it, maybe more people would notice.  And they would take it from there.

In my mind a Blog Rapper is worthless.  They put out so much music and are basically saying, “Here–YOU sort through all this trash and figure out what’s good”.  A Blog Rapper drops 100 songs before they drop a physical, actual release.  They are egotistical, entitled assholes.  They’re not concerned with making a GREAT album, making a GREAT song, putting on a GREAT show–they want hits and downloads and more Twitter followers than you and YouTube comments and all this other secondary, childish junk.  To them, it’s a new toy, it’s not an obsession or a vocation or a way of life.  For you, the only thing I would say is understand the difference between a Blog Rapper and a Traditional Rapper–a Traditional Rapper puts the craft and the art and the fans and the live show and the cohesive album FIRST.  A Blog Rapper puts HIMSELF first–he always needs attention.  A Traditional Rapper can be all over the internet–look at Bun B; he’s been dropping music since ‘92.  But look at the decisions he makes with his career and why.  Then look at the decisions Charles Hamilton makes.  Blog Rappers are the Reality Show contestants of music.

10L: Can you let us in on any information regarding upcoming projects?

ZR: Well we dropped the Broken Clocks EP in March with videos coming shortly for “No Resolution 2″ and “Dirt Naps”.  Just dropped a homage to Cannibal Ox called “Life’s Ill: The Redux” over on Bandcamp.  We also just partnered with World Around Records for a maxi-single/EP for “Weak Stomach” that’ll be a joint project between Shadowboxers, Alex Ludovico, and Curly Castro–tons of remixes, some new stuff, some old stuff built around the song “Weak Stomach”.  That’ll be out in late summer/early fall.  I know Douglas is working on his first instrumental release Legit Punks.  I’m doing a mini-project with DJ Dylan, a wellknown and respected drum n bass pioneer from England.  That’s coming along pretty well.  I might drop an EP of either drum n bass, dubstep, downtempo stuff or my long awaited proper solo project Fall Back Friday.  Haven’t figured out which way to go yet.  And myself, Small Professor, and Curly Castro are doing a project inspired by The Wire called Major Crimes.  I might do another end of summer mix.  Essentially, whatever is cool that day, that’s what I work on.

10L: Do you watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia?

ZR: I do watch it.  The coffee shop they shoot in is 3 blocks from my front door.  And I’ve been drinking at Mac’s Pub–used to be this awesome shitty hole in the wall called Skinner’s that looked like Milwaukee in 1983, then Mac from the show bought it and spiffed it up.  I always miss them when they’re filming in the city.  And I do practice the D.E.N.N.I.S. System quite accurately.

10L: Are you working a dayjob, or is rap a full-time career at this point?

ZR: I do have a dayjob.  With the economy and the internet, I’m not sure how to make rap a full-time career just yet.  I know maybe 2 people who pull it off.  I have some power moves coming down the pike that might change all of that.  Or it might not.  Either way, I’ll be doing this for a long time.  A pesky little thing like a 40 hour dayjob will never get in the way of me spending (and wasting) time and money to do this.

10L: What do you think of Kanye’s Twitter?

ZR: It’s like giving Ryan Adams speed–don’t we already get the maximum amount of Him just from Him being Him already? Do we need more enabling devices?  I was pretty good with my 3-4 ridiculous Kanye Moments every year doing it the old way: letting one of the biggest stars in the world open his mouth to the 24 hour newscycle.  I love Kanye though; I should’ve put him in my list of the 9 Rappers I Actually Relate To.

10L: You really don’t follow hockey? Did you make the song “Eric Lindros” because of the man’s huge presence in Philadelphia sports?

ZR: Douglas named the song “Eric Lindros”.  I was here for his entire era though.  It was madness–he was a god.  And then, he was not.  And then he was hated.  And then he was traded.  Superstars in Philly rarely leave on good terms.  The people here hate greatness; they don’t like it when it looks like things are too easy for someone.  Iverson was great but it looked hard.  Same thing with Chase Utley.  McNabb–not so much.  Definitely with Lindros either.  But I did love watching the Flyers in the playoffs this year. And I will always hold a place in my heart for NHL ‘96 for Sega Genesis.  Radek Bonk WHAT UP!

10L: Are there any collaborators you’d really love to work with?

ZR: I need to work with Shabazz Palaces.  And Why?  And Mos Def.  I need to be working with guys who can rap their ass off and choose not to do it as much; conserve the greatness.  Stretch that shit out!

I suspect that this will be a divisive record, and it’s easy to see why. The Suburbs seizes occasionally, like an epileptic, recalling the jarring, fresh sensibility of the Arcade Fire’s debut, Funeral. And right now, book it: “Sprawl II” is the second-best song of the year. The title track and “City With No Children” each proceed with a stylish shuffle. Songs like “Empty Room” and “Half Light II” rush out as towering, four-on-the-floor vehicles for propulsion. They offer what Arcade Fire is good at: melding the classy, high-register foliage of strings to slick, crashing guitars. You kind of expect frontman Win Butler to proffer one of his silly, winsome yelps. But Win doesn’t yelp anymore. Win doesn’t yelp anymore because Win is epically bummered. You see, after leaving his Québécois paradise to tour America, Win witnessed the great tragedy that threatens constantly the very edifice that makes us human in the most transcendent sense: Urban Sprawl.

It’s such a common criticism that it’s practically no criticism at all. I mean, you don’t need signs posted everywhere telling you not to rush out in front of traffic. Nonetheless, it is more true for The Suburbs than for many recent works: There is an album in here, somewhere. But what got pressed onto vinyl/laser etched onto compact disk/ encoded into mp3 is emphatically not an album. There are heavy makeout sessions, limbs striking walls and breathing like gasping, that are more of an album than The Suburbs. Clattering pans and chefs pratfalling on spilled olive oil may sound more like an album than The Suburbs. No, The Suburbs sounds like the lifeless reflections of a chastised middle schooler set to a funereal caricature of this band I heard about a few years ago. They released a great debut called Funeral. It’s not an album so much as a boring lecture set to forgettable background music. It sounds like getting your pant leg stuck in the bike chain and you dump and have to go home to your mom yelling at you about grass stains. It sounds like an Elk’s Club essay about the topic Modernity. There’s something alive in it, but it’s buried deep.

This third Arcade Fire record weighs in at a long 16 songs, spanning an interminable 65 minutes. There are songs on the record, but they don’t sound like songs. If a Las Vegas bookie offered me an over/under of 20% for the percent of the words coming out of Win Butler’s mouth that are “suburb(s),” “cars,” “sprawl,” and synonyms for darkness, I would take the over. The album is maniacally focused on disliking the suburbs, discovering that the world is a shopping mall, and feeling bad about either being from the suburbs or having to drive around the suburbs once you’ve gotten out of the suburbs. From a lyrical perspective, I don’t think I have ever heard such a poor album from such a talented band. A verse from “Modern Man” goes,

Oh I had a dream I was dreaming
And I feel like I’m losing the feeling
Makes me feel like
Like something don’t feel right
I erase the number of the modern man
Want to break the mirror of the modern man
Makes me feel like
Makes me feel like

which, I think we can all agree, is a terrible verse. “I had a dream I was dreaming” is an unacceptably hamfisted way to convey any sort of feeling (or feeling of a feeling), even if it is profound and incisive feeling. And this feeling doesn’t feel, you know, like a profound feeling. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. There are some very simple lyrics that wonderfully convey commonplace feelings. That effect is arguably what pop music is primarily about. The Suburbs doesn’t do this. The album is like a nagging, whinging expression of modern man’s powerlessness over getting papercuts. Its effect and sentiment is actually what the phrase “banality of evil” should have been meant to mean. The sophistication with which Butler tackles problems is so childish and effete that it seems like it could actually be a really clever ‘meta’ joke. It’s like a 65 minute version of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” if only she actually knew what “irony” meant and she was just fucking with us the whole time. Because that would have been ironic. But I really don’t think Butler is self-aware enough to know that neither his subject matter or the form of his denunciations are about as sophisticated as a baby wearing a lab coat and a gray wig, sitting in front of a chalkboard that says E = mc^2.

I mean, unemployment is destroying America. People are losing their homes. And Win Butler has released an album shitting all over the idea of “punching a clock” and having a nice home. The whole shitty mess is so privileged that, I mean maybe Butler should have his artist card revoked for a while. There’s a climactic moment in “The Sprawl” where, over dramatically buzzing strings, Butler complains about curfew: “Cops showing their lights / On the reflectors of our bikes / Said, ‘Do you kids know what time it is?’ / ‘Well sir, it’s the first time I’ve felt like something is mine’.” Life is really hard, I know. Getting hassled by the suburban cops to get off the well-maintained suburban street and ride your suburban bike back to your suburban house where your suburban family has prepared a suburban dinner for you to suburbanly eat before you study for your suburban algebra test and go to suburban bed is emphatically not how life is hard. In “Wasted Hours” Butler sings, “We’re just kids in buses longing to be free,” and that line seems true. His problems are of such an unsophisticated, boring, and kind of offensively bland nature that a lot of The Suburbs sounds like some kids on a school bus doodling in their notebooks, singing, and making a ruckus until their bus is in position to let them off to school. To the sixth grade. In which they’re eleven years old. The Suburbs is about eleven-year-old problems. I mean, come on. Grow up.

It’s nice to end on a high note. This is the end of the review, so I will say again that “Sprawl II” is a really great song. It recalls Abba in pleasing ways, and for some reason the banal lyrics sound better when Régine Chassagne is singing them. It’s a mystery why Régine is only used for about a third of the songs. Practically all her contributions are fun and good. The rest of the album is, well, the opposite: tedious and bad.

[Purchase the Arcade Fire's The Suburbs (mp3) for $3.99 from Amazon. That's about what it's worth.]

• 18.75% propulsive rock
• 69.44% mid-tempo meditations on napping/modernity
• 12.5% zzzzzz

Best Coast’s debut album Crazy For You is like a lot of things: Lying in the sunny spot on the shag carpet trying to pick bits of weed out from Chips Ahoy crumbs and cat fur; a bitter slice of life from the frontiers of post-feminist living;  the sort of music Oedipa Maas would listen to as she journeys around California on her ultimately deranged quest. But what it’s most like is too many scoops of cotton candy ice cream in an overflowing glass of cognac and Coca Cola.

Is Bethany Cosentino high? (Hah, yes.) Every song on the album is at the same time a joy to listen to and aural torture. The sound of the album refers to gauzy 60s surf rock and slacker 90s alternative rock. In other words, the album’s bona fides check out. To people our age, Crazy For You is a very appealing record. Unfortunately, it suffers from being made for people our age. It’s made to be muzak for your next trip to Urban Outfitters. Unlike her previous 7″s and singles, the album lacks both lo-fi charm and sensible mixing. Every song (excepting the last) is too loud and obnoxious to hear for very long. The record has an ostensible lo-fi sound, but the texture of it is wielded more as a stylistic choice than a material necessity. The recording lacks dynamics, and its consistent guitar tone — at first is quite pleasing — starts to grate. Its crackles and pops are not recording artifacts or spontaneous ephemera from the equipment; that’s just the sound of too much volume. Crazy For You seems  a little disingenuous in that the sound merely refers to the warmth of poor quality and vintage equipment, but what it actually presents is an almost clinical representation of the punishing digital representation of sound. The only song that comes close to capturing the charming, warm sound of her earlier recordings is the final track, “When I’m With You,” which is the only older song to appear on the album. It’s listenability seems like a fortunate accident.

Lyrically, the record also presents a curiously cruel give and take. At times it offers heartbreaking candor and self-inquisitive aptness. Lines like “I lost my job / I miss my mom / I wish my cat could talk” and “The other girl is not like me / She’s prettier and skinnier / She has a college degree / I dropped out when I was seventeen” give us a glimpse of the shut it, stoned out humor and self-doubt that everyone experiences when they’re having a summer bummer. On the other hand, most of the songs read like they’re straight from a seventeen year old’s journal. They’re all simple self-loathing, worthlessness, and boy craziness. I have to return again to “When I’m With You,” because it’s honestly the only great song on an otherwise kind of all-right album. Its pleasing refrain of “The world is crazy / But you and me / We’re just crazy, so / When I’m with you I have fun” sets the listener’s expectations perfectly. It’s a simple, fun rock song that expresses one of the most common human conditions, looking for shelter from the uncanniness of the world by pairing off with another searcher. It’s about a fully integrated We that’s against a likely malicious Them, which is what weed paranoia is all about. Rather than expressing disgust with herself, or her generally unappealing tendency to wait by the phone for another guy (why does she like him so much? she never says), it sets the table and gives us a pretty simple, sweet meal. The rest of the album could give pablum a bad name.

Crazy For You is ultimately a pretty large success, despite all. It was clearly created for summer barbecues, driving with the windows open, and playing at the beach. The record is an anodyne for the summer heat and its sometimes endless loneliness. Except, of course, the summer does end, and so does loneliness. When its fall or winter, I can’t see Crazy For You being that great of an album, and I can’t see Best Coast being a band with a career unless they develop fast. Or only release albums in July.

The sad pop song has existed since pop music began in America in the 1920s and 30s, during which time virtually everyone was sad. Women have had it particularly bad. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment gave them the right to vote. But it wasn’t until 1925 and the publication of Irving Berlin’s “Always” that women could go out and dance, meet guys at dances, and have those guys break their hearts. When the Greatest Generation went off to fight Krauts and Nips, ladies wallowed in their own sadness by listening to songs like Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” and “I’ll Be Seeing You.”  In the 1980s, the sad pop song reached its apotheosis with synthesizer-dance numbers like “Don’t You Want Me,” “Hold Me Now,” and “Take On Me,” which, incidentally, were all written about the same guy. Every good sad pop song has since then fit into the mold cast by these songs. Of course, there are sad pop songs that don’t fit this tradition: “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Maps,” “Since you Been Gone,” Natalie Imbruglia’s pop classic “Torn,” and many others. But they fail to realize their full potential in some one or more ways.

Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” is one of the greatest damn sad pop songs in history. There are five reasons.

First, it’s about jilted, unreciprocated, or slowly withered love. The saddest pop songs are about these topics. There are very sad songs about abortions (“Brick”), doing too much cocaine (“Tears In Heaven”), deceased parents (Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”), being a spinster (“Eleanor Rigby”), and dying on a giant boat (“My Heart Will Go On”). But those topics are a little too heavy. Great art is about capturing the overwhelming remainder of the human condition, and spontaneously manifesting the paradox of transcendence within a circumscribed experience. Great pop songs are about transmitting the freedoms and limitations of wholly relatable social codes using concrete, graspable examples drawn from everyday life. Robyn’s song succeeds here in every way. It begins, obviously, with the first line, “Somebody said you got a new friend.” It’s not “lover” or “girlfriend” or “wife.” It’s “friend,” a hook-up, someone he goes on dates with and fucks probably. The relationship is pretty casual. That’s life, right? Girl Number Two will pretty soon be replaced by Girl Number Three. X = n + 1 The equation’s pretty simple/common, but it still hurts like a sumbitch. Everything about the song is wholly relatable because it describes one of the most common, almost insignificant occurrences in adult life. And even if you haven’t had an experience like this (possible), it’s still so widely talked about and portrayed that it feels like you have had this sort of thing happen to you. I used to listen with relish to Tori Amos, and I sure as hell didn’t understand half of what she was going on about.

Second, it is an incredible-sounding song. And there are two versions of the song, like a wave-particle bonus round. The “Original Radio Mix” features a twinkling, looped synthesizer floating above the action. The car-rattling bass line is lower in the mix, and it lacks a little of that pleasant way it grates against your eardrums. That said, there’s a lot more space in the verses, and the minor key chorus gains a little subtextual significance against the more upbeat accents. The “Album Mix,” which is my preferred method of ingestion, makes the song sound like the house is going to fall on top of your stupid head. It sounds like it was packed in one of those As Seen On TV vacuum bag things. It makes you feel The Knife’s influence on Robyn as artists and personal saviors. The Original Radio Mix presents as an infective, bittersweet pop parasite that invades your ears, infects your cerebellum, and impels your arms/legs on the dancefloor. The Album Mix has more in common with Metallica’s “One” than, say, The Cardigan’s “Lovefool.” It’s just a marvelous, dense slab of perfect sound punctuated by the odd woodblock thwap and a whirling synth bridge. Put it this way. If the Original Radio Mix is the DJ playing your favorite dance song, the Album Mix is Merzbow playing your favorite dance song.

Third, aside from its easily relatable theme, the song is kind of creepy. “Dancing On My Own” is about voyeurism, witness, and, like, stalking. Lines like “Yeah I know it’s stupid / I just gotta see it for myself,” and “I’m in the corner / Watching you kiss her” are really the main argument of the song. The song isn’t about the being jilted thing. It’s about suffering and watching your former “friend” with his new “friend.” Going to the club they’re at and skulking in the corner like an old pervert or something. How did she even know where they’d be? People need to stop checking in on Foursquare. But why does the song’s creepiness make it great? For one, people like crazy women. It’s an archetype. “Man, bitch is so crazy just stalking me and shit.” The song plays right into our conception of what it’s like to date women. This is like some kinky, Fatal Attraction-meets-Flashdance deal. Except— But— It’s not. Robyn takes it and turns it, which leads into reasons four and five.

Fourth, the song is specular. It’s also spectacular and about spectatorship, but philosophically the song is specular, which means being like a mirror. (“Specular” is related to words like “speculum…”) Both the Official Music Video and last weeks’ Letterman performance of “Dancing On My Own” showcased Robyn pulling the classic gag of making out with yourself, back turned to your audience. But the song isn’t called “Making Out With Myself On My Own,” so what’s that all about? Well, the core of sadness that propels the song and makes it so great is that it’s not really about stalking an ex or being a voyeur. “Dancing On My Own” is about the human condition as its given to us by each other, in relationships and social life. People say reading novels and watching movies and good TV shows like Mad Men (I guess) teach us about what it means to be human, and they do in a way, if you wan to be all didactic about it. (Watch me be all didactic about other things, momentarily.)

The great pop songs use everyday stuff for instruction. The way we learn things is by seeing, doing, and repeating. It was little Ah Ha! moment to discover that the making out with herself thing was part of the whole performance apparatus of “Dancing On My Own.” She’s there making out with herself. Not with another person, as how you’d like expect her to do. She’s making out with her self. There’s a philosophical idea called auto-affection, which I will not get into except to say that this is what Robyn is showing in those videos. Wait, nevermind. I will get into it a little bit. There are a couple ways of thinking about yourself and love and the world and stuff. But the one way that seems pervasive is that things aren’t quite right. You’re not complete. You’re not whole. You’re not at home in the world. This idea can be conveyed like in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We’re essentially split from our ideal partner and cut off from ourselves in some irreparable way. That’s the general idea behind the movie’s source material, as well. You can look at it in another way. You might think that by talking to yourself you are getting at, you know, yourself. What you think. But within the process of talking and hearing, there’s a minute gap differentiating subject and object. The same thing with mirrors. You look in the mirror and move one arm and there’s a conceptual (and imperceptive perceptual) gap between the act of moving and the act of seeing.

When Robyn makes out with herself in the videos and performances, she is making two visceral-physical arguments. 1.) Not only are we alone in the world essentially (demonstrated by the making out with herself rather than taking up the temporary shield of another person), but it’s no use finding another person because our condition just is to be in a continuous swoon of falling in between lovers and friends who move in and out of our lives. More importantly, 2.) We can’t fully relate to others in principle because we can’t even fully relate to ourselves. Every act of loving affection is as essentially empty as the auto-effective act of making out with yourself. The making out with herself is a visual gag that conveys a, I guess, kind of crudely sophisticated argument: Within the blink of an eye, we’re always already split and cut off from ourselves. Trying to bridge the schism is as futile as making out with yourself. If  the best you can try to do is affect yourself with pleasure, speaking, the thrill of endeavor—whatever—then that’s not good enough. Life will be best portrayed in a sad pop song. Seeking solace with another is only as good (as bad) as  wrapping your arms around yourself, pretending to be with someone else. You might as well draw a face on your hand and make out with your hand-face. Every person is at the same time a one and a no one else trying and failing to be with another one/no-one-else. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen a pop star do this side of shaving her head or shooting someone in his mansion. So what is there to do? Well—

Fifth, the song is one of the greatest sad pop songs in history because it both facilitates and is explicitly about what the best pop songs facilitate and are about: Dancing. Most people only do it when they’re drunk. Some people are terrible at it. And some people are very good at it. But just about every person has danced because dancing really is one of the more pure expressions of being human. It’s a spontaneous expression of joy. Sure, there are routines and steps and things, but even within the strictures of structure there’s slippage reserved for creativity and excellence. But it’s also sad, necessarily sad, because like every other human endeavor, it hinges upon the You that’s actually doing the It. (You want the best players, even if it is a team sport.) It might take two to tango, but if one or both of them fuck it up, there will be no dancing, no tango. The fewer rules there are to dancing, the more alone you are. Dancing in a club, even if its up on your girl or boy, is really a very solitary thing. At best, you’ll blow the Perception → Brain Command → Body Moving circuit and just start, like, dancing. You’ll lose yourself and everyone else along with it. It’s a great way not only to be alone but to entirely efface the self. “Dancing On My Own” is about these two ironies, 1.) dancing in a crowded club in order to be alone, and 2.) a whole room full of people who at best are hoping to erase the evidence of their’s and everyone else’s existences.

When Robyn sings, “I’m giving my all, / But I’m not the girl you’re taking home,” it’s a sad truth to life. It’s not a meritocracy, even on the dancefloor. I mean, I’ve seen Robyn dance. She’s good at it. But all she has is her body to be in control of, and alone with, and not even fully connected to. Every dance is a dance on your own. (Deep.) When the music dies and the lights come up, at least you have the illusion of grave, meaningful, human-to-human contact. On the dancefloor, that’s all stripped away. There’s just music, motion, and (at best) the promise of a release from the obligation to be a good person who considers others’ feelings and the goodness of your own intentions. The heartbreaking crux of Robyn’s song is that we’re alone, even (especially) when we’re surrounded by people. The obvious specularity of the song is that Robyn is reflecting the dancers around her as she tries to just fit in. But it’s the other way around: Her dancing alone is a reflection of everyone else’s solitude. She’s alone right now, the new girl is going to be alone soon enough, and the one who replaces her is going to be alone too. But solitude is a good muse, and Robyn’s managed to turn a woozy, heavy club song into a philosophical treatise.

Robyn’s latest album, Body Talk, Pt. 1, has a bunch of like-minded songs. It’s only $8 on iTunes, and you should buy it.