I really feel like I experienced the music of the 2000s from an ideal vantage point; I was a high school junior when the decade began, around the same time I started thinking seriously about what music meant to me. As a result, going back through the music from the early 2000s has been a crazy nostalgia trip. How insane is that concept, by the way -- nostalgia for the 00s!
While working on my list for pitchfork's 'best albums of the 00s' feature coming out in late September, I spent a lot of time listening to the music I explored in college ('01-'05), when I first discovered just how expansive of a world 'music' really is. I think one of my main problems with the way many people write about music generally (not excusing myself here) is simply that the writer's lens is focused only on what's in front of it, without regard for what else is out there, oblivious. Not that you should or could cover everything; more that a self-awareness of your blind spots leads to smarter coverage. But more significantly, and this is exceptionally difficult: it's about remaining open to the possibility that the music that moves you most profoundly could come from an entirely unexpected direction.
This record was put out on Kompakt, a Cologne, Germany-based techno label. It is by a trance artist from Japan named Hiroshi Watanabe, aka Kaito. On one significant level, his debut record Special Life is perfect. Perfect as in the music has no clear flaws, a surface of internal reflection so smooth that you feel your own emotional motion reflected back at you. Everything in the music is layers, each poised with zenlike balance, always topped with one more beautiful melodic trick than you deserve (yes I'm Catholic), its ceaseless rhythm perfectly congruent to your pulse (in spirit if not BPM).
DJ Spinna's new record is pretty hit-or-miss, a bunch of solid-to-great beats with a bunch of decent-to-mediocre rapping; Torae is so bland that he seems to exist only so folks hating on current NY rap can point to exactly what is wrong with it. But there are a couple great tracks on it, including lead single "New York" which has a solid verse from Krym of the Jigmastas, "performing so sick with it, i'm worth about six digits, i'm hot like a Chinese kitchen cookin with six skillets." Although there's no excuse for Yung LA-lookalike Spinna explaining Krym's lyrics for us via punch-ins ("this ain't the Matrix man!!") The beat kinda reminds me of this remix to O.C.'s "Born 2 Live."
In fact, Spinna's beats on the record all embrace this ambiguous unease, as if El-P's tracks for Company Flow had become an actual blueprint for anything underground rap that came afterward. (In fact, there's even a track with Breezly Brewin featuring a Sitar sample -- an obviously intentional reference to 'The Fire in Which You Burn.') The greatest thing is that they seem really unconcerned with sounding either classicist-traditional, or like Dilla, which are pretty much the only two directions anyone seems to care about in underground rap right now, for good (Marco Polo) or evil.
The best track on the record is the incredible "More Colors" with Elzhi. It helps that he's by far the best non-Brewin rapper on the record. I really appreciate that it doesn't try to do anything too-clever with the 'colors' concept, and that it never feels like he's really trying to force something -- like he's unafraid to break concept for a couple lines in order to make a point that makes sense. And the beat is one of the best on the album. And yeah, he might be second to Gucci or Dro, who've been doing color-wheel raps for awhile now, but if it takes a Trojan horse like Elzhi to get this creative approach up north then so be it. Elzhi manages to spin it into a detached 3rd-person observer perspective, which makes it more critic-friendly, but that's not really taking anything away from its quality.
The great thing about this remix is how it transforms cocky, douchebag L.A. scene cornball raps into this over-blissed burnout poignancy. Great remixes and edits of crap often work by removing the parts that don't work; instead Classixx (who have done high-profile & excellent remixes for Phoenix & Holy Ghost!) take elements that were just obnoxious in the original & manage to re-contextualize them so effectively that they become the best parts of the new version -- i.e. the hokey chorus vocals transformed into a gauzy druggedness, or the way the pop-rap goes from total trash to Crazytown-effective.
But the reason Classixx have finally 'clicked' for me is not in spite of their embrace of the trashy L.A. club-scene-kid aesthetic, but kinda because of it. I continue to be suspicious of this ‘scene’ as a whole, partly because of received wisdom, partly because of the ridiculous clothing, and mostly because much of the music credited to that world feels creatively bankrupt & emotionally like a lot of detached fronting. This can work in doses, but feels borderline nihilistic for an entire night out. Classixx embrace the slowed tempos that have turned the disco revival into more of a chugging balearic/sundrenched haze, the same spacious tastefulness, focus on craft, the epic sonic scope, and, most importantly, the emotional heft of peers & artists as diverse as Aeroplane, Mark E, Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe." This is where they earn their hype & attention, even if functionally they aren't doing that much different than some of those artists. But by transmitting these values, these musical qualities, onto the trashier, Kitsune/Cobrasnake affiliated crowd, it feels like Classixx are also giving the style a big shot in the arm, all while differentiating themselves from the nudisco pack & enlarging their potential audience. This lack of 'seriousness' in collaborators & associations gives a genre that occasionally veers too close to record-spotters, collector-nerds & obscurantists (aka men, primarily) a needed shot of superficiality, an embrace of the facile, the artificial, the fleeting & the ephemeral. But it's all grounded with an emotional seriousness that sees meaning & feeling in the whirlwind youth world party, rather than dusty record sleeves, hidebound tradition & 'reference points.'
