Operation Appreciation: Kid Rock, I Have Mixed Feelings for Your Music

Anyway, this post was [originally] inspired after watching Kid Rock perform at the Grammys a week and a half ago. To an extent, I will defend Kid Rock. I don't ask for much from musicians - especially those whose music seems to exist as a ticket into a helluva party (if you'd like, pretend "helluva party" was a link to the Kid Rock/Scott Stapp/Gaggle of groupies sex video. I myself won't actually make a link to it). Something tells me Andrew WK will be the subject of a future post.

 

Also, there somewhat of a nostalgic quality: Rock's Devil Without a Cause was the fifth CD I ever bought, and I still consider it a fun piece of rap-rock fluff to this day. I mean, c'mon, it at least concerns itself with having a good time and rapping over some decent grooves while his contemporaries spent lyric-writing time hating dad/women/society. Did he have his moments of misogyny and sexism? Yeah, sure, but it was never out of angst. It was in the same mold as Motley Crue or Aerosmith before him. It's stupid music, and it ought to be treated as stupid.

Also, "Fuck Off" has a verse that is some awesome early Eminem goodness, with Shady Renegade-ing Kid before "Renegade" even got recorded.

 

But then we get into everything that's happened since then. He probably should've been a one-album wonder, with "Bawitdaba," "Cowboy" and "I am the Bullgod" doing fine on the charts and fading into obscurity - as mediocre but spirited party rap songs should. But then "Only God Knows Why"* is released and becomes a hit. Completely different from anything else on the album, or in his past discography (including a debut so bad and yet so funny that it ranks somewhere between Back 2 Back Hits: MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice and Jennifer Love Hewitt's BareNaked in my collection), it managed to salvage his career for a few more spins.

   

If that seemed like a Hail Mary-like "Please, God I hope this crosses over, I need another diving board on my swimming pool!" move, then Cocky, which flopped like Kid Rock's career by any reasonable standard honest-to-God should... until "Picture," his duet with Sheryl Crow, got radio play (and a boring-ass video to boot). Dude pulled the same trick twice. If you replace "autotune" with "Sheryl Crow," it's the exact same desperation play.

 

And hey, I will stick up for Kid Rock, his self-titled album that, to my ears, is the perfect balance between his redneck rock-plus-Detroit rap sound, managing to name drop himself and bands he likes while not losing the party atmosphere. Plus, it show Kid aging with relative grace**. Sure, it had no hits, but he could be hap-- wait... no hits?

 

One album later, enter "All Summer Long," the song where he not only mashes "Werewolves of London" with "Sweet Home Alabama," but also sings about how he likes Lynyrd Skynyrd. Sure, "American Badass" was Metallica's "Sad But True" with the lyrics turned into a list of band names - but Metallica was not included in those band names (correct me if I'm wrong). I strongly believe that this is the longest, laziest crossover attempt possible. It's barely its own song. All Music Guide's review makes it sound like the entire album is like this.

That makes me sad.

The guy started out as a bad License to Ill-era Beastie Boys ripoff, up to one of the better party rock makers of the late 90s, to a totally respectable, predictable and reliable southern rocker... And now I'm not even sure if he should be taking credit for his own songs.

Kid Rock, I have mixed feelings about your music.

*"Only God Knows Why" predates Kanye West's use of autotune to make a rapper sound like a robot for an "emotional" outpouring. Think about that. Your mind: Blown.

**Can we all agree that Kid Rock's '00s are about equal to Motley Crue's 90s? I think so.

Operation Appreciation: The Smiths - The Queen is Dead

Another rainy day in Massachusetts, and as the drizzle dripped along my windshield, I decided to put on The Queen is Dead, a rainy day classic. Perhaps the refraining "Oh mother, I can feel the soil pouring over my head" from "I Know It's Over" makes me feel like this is a good weather-to-music match. Surely, though, nobody does this kind of gloomy theatricality better than The Smiths on this record.

 

I'll readily admit that this is one of the more softball entries in The Desert Island series. This was the first Smiths album I ever bought. It remains my favorite Smiths album to this day (though their self-titled debut and the compilation Hatful of Hollow both have slots on The Desert Island Playlist). I'm not going to mince words: nobody, but nobody, does this kind of sorrowful pop music better than The Smiths. Not like this. Wedding Present and Suede's music echoes it, but they don't have the same balance that makes it seem so damned cool to feel life's low moments. Cool to say, "I never want to go home/because it's not my home/it's their home/I'm welcome no more" or to say, "now I know how Joan of Arc felt/as the flame rose to her Roman nose and her walkman started to melt."

 

In a perverse twist, the band chose to end it the hilarious "Some Girls Are Bigger than Others." It's a simple song with very few words. After the weight of "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out," (romance-as-one-grand-gesture if I ever saw it!) closing the album with "Some Girls Are Bigger than Others" takes it from cute throwaway to album highlight. "There Is a Light that Never Goes Out," though is also one of the definitive Smiths songs.

 

Going back and listening to The Queen is Dead, though, I get sidetracked and think about the new Best-Of package due out in a couple weeks (The Sound of the Smiths). It's heartening that Morrissey and Johnny Marr are working together (sort of/I guess) to put it together, but where are remasters of the albums themselves? Hopefully, Rhino Records is following its standard pattern of "best-of then remasters" and we'll have a CD of The Queen is Dead with better sound quality and a couple bonus tracks.

Expect it on some rainy day in the future.

The Smiths - The Queen is Dead (YouTube)
The Smiths - There Is a Light that Never Goes Out (YouTube)

Operation Appreciation: The Old 97's - Alive & Wired

I've thought The Old 97's Alive & Wired has somewhat soft-sounding guitars that prevent it from entering my "Everyone should hear this! I would personally deliver a copy of this to every person I know!" realm of love. But man, those guys just love to perform. It's more ragged and much less polished than most of their studio albums (especially almost-maybe-kinda-masterpiece Satellite Rides), but having seen them in concert, I can say the album captures their spirit better than most live albums capture other bands.

 

And hey - the track list beats their Hit By a Train: The Best of the Old 97's collection, since it contains pretty much all the highlights from before then. The lone exception is "Victoria," but hey, that's what "getting the actual albums" is for.

 

Anyway, what I love so much about this album is that the band blazes through spirited versions of every. single. song. They never seem bored. They don't really have hits to half-heartedly karaeoke through. They don't pad the album with visual gags that translated better in concert (I'm looking at you, blink-182's The Mark, Tom and Travis Show). They just play, and the guitars might not be as audible as I'd like, but it's hard to argue with songwriting as strong as these tunes. Any of them. Except maybe "Coahuila," but I'm almost certain that that song might be some kind of inside joke for them or something.

The songs from Alive & Wired's immediate predecessor, Drag It Up shine here, too. "Smokes," in particular, blazes up through a wild coda, and yet they perform the rest of the songs with the same kind of passion of a hungry young band. "Wish the Worst," and "Stoned," off their first album, are terriffic, and I still consider "If My Heart Was a Car" on here to be the definitive version. The slowed intro here gives the song a fantastic sense of momentum once it blows open.

 

So really, all I wanted to point out is that the Old 97's have been one of the best bands in the country for over a decade now, and this live album is a much better testament to that than the "best-of" that was assembled after leaving Elektra records.

Operation Appreciation Day 9: Stardust

Forgot to post last night. Been sick. Sleep soon.

Okay, I will make a conscious effort not to talk like Rorschach.

AVClub.com posted this article about Willie Nelson's genre-hopping efforts. I have always had an affinity for Stardust, particularly, as it was either the second or third Willie album I bought (after Red Headed Stranger and maybe Songbird). The arrangements are unique, and he treats the songs with a jazzy delivery that swings a bit but also maintains a steady subtlety throughout its 10 songs. I can't even pick a favorite. Willie's version of "Georgia on My Mind" stands up to Ray's. "Blue Skies" is playful and wonderful... Well, I won't go through the tracklist. It's just all good.

Speaking of standards, I spent most of yesterday listening to a Billie Holiday box set. Can't say anything about her that hasn't already been said, but, well, that shit's awesome.

I will also offer this observation: No duos in the 80s were doing white R&B quite as well as Hall & Oates. Think about it.

And now, Lily brings a good point:

(10:55:34 PM) Lily: i always thought bon jovi looked in his youth like a giant pet rat
(10:55:49 PM) Lily: because of all the hair and mismatched clothing

Discuss.

Operation Appreciation Day 8: Prince and the number 3

I think on day 1 of this series, mentioned that Prince's LOTUSFLOW3R release would be the lone exception to my "no new music for a month" vow.

It is interesting to note that Prince did a similar trick back when he split with Warner Bros., with the release of the Emancipation album. Each of these releases are 3 discs with distinct themes. In the case of Emancipation, each disc is 60 minutes, and the separation is more thematic than sonic. Disc 1 was full of party/pop songs, the second love songs, and the third was funk music that often related to the theme of freedom.

All of this was perhaps the hungriest thing Prince did in the 90s - it was at least as ambitious as his Love Symbol album (featuring the hit "7," a video that is a must-see for its literalism, but I can't find it), but much more inflected with hip-hop. The album as a whole showcased a Prince who was lost in the hip-hop landscape of the 90s, but in love with a wife and looking to prove he was still as shocking and dirty as ever.

I bring this up because it is through this lens that I see LOTUSFLOW3R. In 2009, we have Prince the Jehovah's Witness, a man who has performed at the Superbowl halftime show and exorcised the swearing from his setlists, but seemingly much more at peace with his place in the pop landscape. He's not an innovator, anymore; he's a seasoned vet who makes tasteful albums that don't enhance or detract from his legacy. As such, LOTUSFLOW3R as a whole is less ambitious, yet each separate album is more consistent than any on Emancipation.

LOTUSFLOW3R, the disc, is a guitar-heavy rock album that best shows the chops that Prince often shows off in concert. It's a dream for a long-time fan, since Prince albums aside from Purple Rain tend to be very synthesizer or horn-heavy, working on setting up a groove rather than showing off his instrumental prowess. MPLSOUND is a funk-heavy disc made of synthesized instrumentation like the albums early in his career. "(There'll Never B) Another Like Me" and "Chocolate Box" kick things off with a fantastic 1-2 punch. The slower moments are less interesting, but it works as an overall success.

The real wild card of the set, then, is the debut of his latest protege, Bria Valente, Elixer This album is meant to be sensual, somewhat jazzy and very R&B-oriented. It is only slightly less effective than MLPSOUND, which has songs that are more distinctive. If there is one criticism that can be used against the purple one, it's that his use of proteges manage to reduce them to little more than a vessel for his creative energies. For every song on Elixer, one can imagine Prince singing the lyrics in exactly the same tone, with the same delivery. The album echoes the second disc of Emancipation, with songs as a window into domestic bliss, but with more of a focus on monogamy than parenthood (his own son died a week after birth in 1996).

While most of the artists of the 60s and 70s suffered through an awkward 80s (I'm looking at you, Dylan and Bowie), Prince suffered through an awkward 90s, trying on trends, living much of the decade with a symbol for a name, even doing a Santana-esque "comeback" album full of guest stars. Here, he is in full control of his destiny and his legacy. He's left his audacious plans to his live shows (often with multi-night stints at the same venue, a series of conceptual concerts, the Super Bowl, etc.), leaving the music to be occasionally bland but genial and pleasant. The LOTUSFLOW3R disc is some of the most challenging and dynamic music he's recorded in years, though, maybe since the first half of 3121, if not since his Jehovah's Witness jazz romp, The Rainbow Children. The 00s have found Prince living comfortably, always on the verge of something truly great.

And I mean that as a high compliment.