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Moodymann: DJ-Kicks
Despite a dance music career now stretching into its third decade, it's rare for the man born Kenny Dixon, Jr. to grant an interview. But in 2010, Moodymann sat down for a now-legendary talk with the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the bon mots he drops across its two hours are legion—"My bitches and my hoes is my MPCs, my SP-1200, my bass, my keyboards"; "Detroit is a dying city; well, I'm going to die with that motherfucker"; "Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas"—whoever watched the video came away with only one image: The entourage of African-American women who walk in with him and twist his unruly afro into braids onstage and then pass Hennessy around to the audience.
This strategy of misdirection has cemented Dixon's legacy in house music while also keeping his mystery intact. I've seen him DJ with a black veil over his face or else a hoodie pulled tight, keeping attention off of him. A set of disco and house can easily veer into White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana before swerving back. The cover of 2014's self-titled album portrayed him as a house slipper-wearing, Solo cup-swigging layabout while the music within slyly touched on heartbreak and urban decay. With his first officially licensed mix CD for the 50th entry in the DJ-Kicks series, one might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house, but Dixon confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.
Whether he alights on underground hip-hop (Dopehead), vocodered soul (Talc), quiet storm psychedelia, or skittering, looping grooves (Jitwam), Moody moves at a flâneur's pace, easeful yet determinedly at his own leisure and meter. Beats might never accelerate beyond headnod speeds, but Moodymann continually changes up the drums: crisp snares drop into swinging hi-hat patterns, Brazilian congas into Rich Medina's kickdrums back into smoky downtempo, with fellow Detroit producer Andrés' contribution adding a Latin flare to the mix. The first half posits an alternate history of 21st century soul and R&B: Passing over well-known acts, he finds jewels in the shadows, like the Pied Pipers' remix of "Can't Hold Back" and Julien Dyne's "Stained Glass Fresh Frozen," and places them alongside tracks by Flying Lotus and Jai Paul.
It's 16 tracks in before the BPMs enter disco territory, with Rodney Hunter's "Uptown Tricks" remix of the Fort Knox Five. But not even two minutes later, that momentum veers into the solemn solo guitar of José González, who sings "we'll remain after everything's been washed away." From there, Moodymann picks it back up, from the quickening future jazz of "Tag Team Triangle" to the deep house of Joeski, and where other producers might lose or confuse a crowd with such temperamental switches, Moodymann holds us calmly in the palm of his hand. Who else would suss out a Kings of Tomorrow track from 2013 (stuck on a CDR promo no less), some 20 years after their '90s heyday, to push the mix to its ecstatic peak? But that's exactly what he does on "Fall for You."
He again deviates from trajectory for a dramatic, beatless reading of Anne Clark's "Our Darkness." For Detroiters who grew up on legendary radio jockey the Electrifying Mojo, this proto-techno spoken word track is a classic, the type of brooding synth-pop track (what you'd now deem darkwave) that in the early '80s music blurred the color lines on the dancefloor. Dropping a live, piano-only version here, Moody harkens back to his Detroit roots, and Clark's lines about "[an] idealistic assurance that…we'd keep our heads above the blackened water/ But there's no room for ideals in this mechanical place" are particularly resonant. Clark's song rails against detachment as a means for surviving in the modern era, of keeping ideals intact in the face of insurmountable odds. It might sound like an outlier in the mix, but it doubles as Dixon Jr.'s own outlook. "I am not the hottest motherfucking DJ in the world," is how Moody put it during his RBMA lecture. "I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world, but what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables."
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Kanye West: The Life of Pablo
Pablo Picasso and Kanye West share many qualities—impatience with formal schooling, insatiable and complicated sexual appetites, a vampiric fascination with beautiful women as muses—but Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. Kanye, specifically, toasted them. The Life of Pablo's namesake is a provocation, a mystery, a sly acknowledgement of multitudes: Drug lord Pablo Escobar is a permanent fixture of rap culture, but the mystery of "which one?" set Twitter theorists down fascinating rabbit holes, drawing up convincing stand-ins for Kanye's Blue Period (808s & Heartbreak), his Rose Period (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), and his Crystal Period (Yeezus). If Kanye is comparable to Picasso, The Life of Pablo is the moment, after a turbulent life leaving many artistic revolutions and mistreated women in his wake, that the artist finally settles down. In this formulation, Kim Kardashian is Jacqueline Roque, Picasso's final muse and the women to whom he remained faithful (she even kinda looks like a Kardashian), and the record is the sound of a celebrated megalomaniac settling for his place in history.
The Life of Pablo is, accordingly, the first Kanye West album that's just an album: No major statements, no reinventions, no zeitgeist wheelie-popping. It's probably his first full-length that won't activate a new sleeper cell of 17-year-old would-be rappers and artists. He's changed the genre's DNA with every album, to the point where each has inspired a generation of direct offspring, and now everywhere he looks, he sees mirrors. "See, I invented Kanye, it wasn't any Kanyes, and now I look and look around and there's so many Kanyes," he raps wryly on "I Love Kanye." The message seems clear: He's through creating new Kanyes, at least for now. He's content to just stand among them, both those of his own creation and their various devotees.
Kanye's second child Saint was born in early December, and there's something distinctly preoccupied about this whole project—it feels wry, hurried, mostly good-natured, and somewhat sloppy. Like a lot of new parents, Kanye feels laser-focused on big stuff—love, serenity, forgiveness, karma—and a little frazzled on the details. "Ultralight Beam" opens with the sound of a 4-year-old preaching gospel, some organ, and a church choir: "This is a God dream," goes the refrain. But everything about the album's presentation—the churning tracklist, the broken promises to premiere it here or there, the scribbled guest list—feels like Kanye ran across town to deliver a half-wrapped gift to a group birthday party to which he was 10 minutes late.
Thankfully, he's bringing a Kanye album, and Kanye albums make pretty goddamn good gifts. His devotion to the craft of album-making remains his greatest talent. Albums are his legacy, what he knows, deep down, will endure after the circus of attention he maintains around him subsides. His ability to package hundreds of stray threads into a whole that feels not just thrilling, but inevitable—at this, he is better than everyone, and he throws all of his best tricks into The Life of Pablo to remind us. He picks the right guests and gives them idealized settings, making people you don't care about sound fantastic and people you do care about sound immortal. Chance the Rapper, a spiritual heir to backpack-and-a-Benz Kanye if there ever was one, is given the spotlight on the opener "Ultralight Beam," and uses his dazed, happy verse to quote both "Otis" and the bonus track to Late Registration. His joy is palpable, and it's clear he has waited his entire adult life to be featured on a Kanye album. On the other hand, "Fade" pits Future knockoff Post Malone, of all people, against a sample of Chicago house legend Larry Heard's "Mystery of Love" and a flip of Motown blues rock band Rare Earth's "I Know I'm Losing You" and rigs the mix so that Malone, somehow, sounds more important than both of them.
This moment is also a reminder of Kanye's audacious touch with huge, immediately recognizable pieces of musical history—his best work as a producer has always drawn from iconic songs so venerated most sane people wouldn't dare touch them, from "Gold Digger" to "Blood on the Leaves" and beyond. He doesn't just sample these songs, he climbs in and joyrides them like the Maybach in the "Otis" video. On "Famous," he does it twice, first by matching up Nina Simone's "Do What You Gotta Do" with Rihanna, who sings the song's hook before Nina does, and then with Sister Nancy's "Bam Bam," which gets flipped so it sits atop a chorale-like chord progression. It sounds like a dancehall remix of Pachelbel's Canon, and it's the most joyful two minutes of music on the album.
"Waves," a song that made the tracklist at the last second at Chance the Rapper's insistence, has a similar energy. You can hear why Chance, specifically, might've wanted it back: It is a throwback to the Rainbow Road maximalism of "We Major," and it is so warmly redemptive it even makes Chris Brown, who sings the hook, sound momentarily benevolent. "Waves" is hardly the only last-second change made: The Kendrick Lamar collaboration "No More Parties In L.A." is back on here, as is an inexplicable minute-long voicemail from imprisoned rapper Max B, granting Kanye permission to use his popular slang term "wavy." Such last-second fidgets seem to say something about The Life of Pablo itself. After years of agonizing over how to follow up the conceptually triumphant 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, he seems to have settled upon eternal flux as a resting place, and the album plays like Kanye might still be remixing it furiously in your headphones while you listen.
"Father Stretch My Hands" tosses a sample from Southside Chicago icon, activist, and one-time fraud convict Pastor T.L. Barrett into a gurgling trash compactor alongside some pigeon-cooed backing vocals and an entire undigested verse from another Future knockoff, Brooklyn upstart Desiigner. It's the least-finished-sounding piece of music to ever feature on a Kanye album. This is the logical endpoint to the sort of obsessive perfectionism that led West to make 75 near-identical mix downs of "Stronger," and in the song's lyrics, Kanye admits that the same workaholism that made his father a distant figure in his childhood now keeps him from his family. On "FML," he name-checks the antidepressant Lexapro on record for the second time in a year, and alludes to something that sounds like an awful lot like a manic episode. The life of a creative visionary has dark undercurrents ("name me one genius who ain't crazy," Kanye demands on "Feedback") and it's possible that The Life of Pablo title serves as much private warning as boastful declaration.
The album's most humane moments come when he reaches for his family: "I just want to wake up with you in my eyes," he pleads at the end of "Father Stretch My Hands." On "FML," a bleak song about resisting sexual temptation, he sings to Kim, "They don't want to see me love you." "Real Friends" reprises his "Welcome to Heartbreak" role as the unhappy outsider at his own family events, squirming through reunions and posing for pictures "before it's back to business"; it's maybe the saddest he's ever sounded on record. "Highlights" has him feeling hotly protective of his children, but on the same song, he sneers openly at Bridget Phetasy, one of the dozens of women who has gone on record as being sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby. This is days after he tweeted "BILL COSBY INNOCENT!!!!", a gesture that prompted only universal disgust and derision, suggesting that maybe Kanye's heel act is growing tired; even his hardcore supporters were forced to sadly turn away.
Tuning into the humanity in Kanye's music amid bursts of boorish static can be difficult, and the most prominent example of assholery on Pablo comes from the instantly infamous jab "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex," which feels like a piece of bathroom graffiti made to purposefully reignite the most racially-charged rivalry in 21st-century pop. But there's lots more where that came from, sneaking in behind the headline: "If I fuck this model/ And she just bleached her asshole/ And I get bleach on my T-shirt/ I'mma feel like an asshole" is maybe the most unforgivably stupid thing Kanye West has ever rapped. And on the bonus track "30 Hours," he takes a moment to sneer, "My ex said she gave me the best years of her life/ I saw a recent picture of her, I guess she was right."
At moments like this, you sense the airlessness of super-celebrity closing in around him. Even when he was being loathsome, Kanye's behavior always felt rooted in something messy and relatable. During the wild scrum of The Life of Pablo's press cycle—when he tweeted "I own your child!!" at Wiz Khalifa in response to a minor misunderstanding, for instance—there was a prevailing sense that Kanye had entered such a consequence-free zone that we can never truly relate to him anymore. Once upon a time, he was The Asshole Incarnate, the self-described "douchebag" that we couldn't look away from. But there are moments here where he just sounds like another asshole.
And yet, as it always does in Kanye's essentially crowd-pleasing, deeply Christian music, the light wins out over the darkness. A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes. "It was my idea to have an open relationship, now a nigga mad," he jokes on "30 Hours," sending up his own masculine fragility. "I need every bad bitch up in Equinox/ I need to know right now if you a freak or not," he jokes on "Highlights."
And with The Life of Pablo, this humor isn't just in the verses, it's in the rollout, too. Somewhere between the record's several title changes, it started to feel like Kanye had decided to turn his troubled-blockbuster-syndrome into performance art. "We still don't have a title," Kim Kardashian tweeted, days before the announced rollout. The day after he rented out Madison Square Garden so he could plug in his laptop, it was suddenly unclear, again, if the album was coming out at all; the mess was so profound that a tweet noting "Young Thug claimed on Periscope it was coming out on SNL tomorrow" suddenly seemed like solid intel. Chaos reigned, and as the twists and turns mounted, it was hard to keep from laughing helplessly.
Around this point, the joke became clear: This whole thing—album cycles, first-week sales, release dates, the album-as-statement, the album itself—is ridiculous. The only other recent marquee star to allow something this messy to bear their name was Rihanna, whose ANTI was released into the world last month in an similarly slipshod manner. Both stars are jewels in the late-period Roc-A-Fella dynasty, their careers forged in the dying embers of the old-school music industry where promotional campaigns were telegraphed months in advance, where singles and video rollouts were executed with airstrike precision, where release dates loomed like skyscrapers. In the ensuing industry freefall, Kanye and Rihanna have weathered every absurdity imaginable—platinum plaques handed out by Samsung, biometric suitcases carrying leakproof records, artist-owned streaming services that put up their records for a few minutes by accident. Watching the sea of confusion and despair on news feeds and timelines, you can almost hear them chuckling: None of this matters, because none of it is real.
If there was a larger message behind all this impulsive last-second lurching and heaving, that was it. "We on an ultralight beam/ This is a God dream" reads like an affirmation that we live in a world touched by divinity—but it could also mean the universe is a trick of the light, and we're nothing but a figment in a higher being's imagination. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is safe from revision, and nothing lasts: In one last rug pull, Kanye claimed that the "Pablo" of the title was neither Escobar nor Picasso, but St. Paul of Tarsus ("Pablo" in Latin). The claim slots neatly with his assertion that The Life of Pablo is a "gospel album," and on "Wolves," he offers a resonant, lonely image: Kim and Kanye as Mary and Joseph, alone in the manger and surrounded by the void. "Cover Nori in lamb's wool/ We surrounded by/ The fuckin wolves," he raps. If Pablo is indeed St. Paul, Kanye might have a passage on his mind from Corinthians, Chapter 3 verse 2: "If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing."
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Porches: Pool
In the music video for Porches' "Be Apart," Aaron Maine and his band wear black turtlenecks as they mope around an apartment decorated like a dollhouse. They bounce basketballs, play ping-pong, strip down to share a bubble bath, activities that might take place at a party thrown for the very idle rich. Near the halfway mark, they stare into the camera like the Children of the Corn, barely mouthing along to words in a way that will make you suspect they have either an awful or incredible sense of humor. The song is about whether Maine wants to be apart or a part of it all—and the sight of five hip youngs looking sad at a social event leads you to think he's stuck in between.
Mopey New Yorkers are endlessly renewable in independent music, but here's the thing: You can sort of dance to "Be Apart." On Pool, his newest record and first for Domino, Maine has shed the murky folk of previous recordings for a homespun electronic sound that consciously pulls away from the "rock" elements. (Call him another indie kid who sold his guitars and bought turntables.) Fittingly for a record titled Pool, it sounds like it was recorded with one in the room. Oceanic synths, wobbly basslines, and precise snare drums cohere into a crisp pop sound, while his high, expressive voice bobs brightly above the surface.
Also fittingly: Water is a recurring theme throughout the LP. Maine watches people slip into swimming pools ("Underwater," "Pool"), envisions black water surrounding him as he weighs depression against the need to go out ("Be Apart"), and fantasizes about washing his car ("Car," which is the closest thing here to a rock song). Getting stoned is a theme, too. Sometimes, he lights one up and hangs out by the metaphorical pool, as on "Hour," whose dark electronics evoke the dinginess of a locker room at the Y.
In an interview on Pitchfork Radio, Maine said he wanted to make something "more positive" that could be energetically performed live, and that he wants people to dance to his music. The shimmering groove on "Braid" and "Mood" will make you believe in his ambitions—people will at least be swaying—as does the boogie that breaks out at the end of the title track. The singer Greta Kline, who fronts Frankie Cosmos and is also Maine's girlfriend, loans backing vocals or basslines to the half-dozen best songs. Her plucky strumming on "Mood" and "Glow" creates the record's most genuinely funky moments, when you can imagine the shy kids thrusting hips in their living rooms.
Maine isn't an involved lyricist, but his melodic instincts connect the gap between intent and outcome. He has an alien-yet-captivating way of phrasing syllables that recalls the unblinking stoicism of Majical Cloudz' Devon Welsh, or the weirdo brooding of Arthur Russell. The melodramatic sigh in the chorus of "Be Apart"—"And I-I-I-I want to be apart"—reminds me of Morrissey, as does the lyrical preoccupation with whether or not to go out that night.
You could also observe that Morrissey had the gumption to rhyme "rusty spanner" with "play piano," and that some of that spirit might be missing here. The piercing clarity of Maine's voice imbues his relatively simplistic lyrics with profundity, but you might wonder how much is going on in his brain at times. At least one Pitchfork co-worker gasped when I suggested Pool sounded like a chillwave record, but it does remind me of how that micro-genre enabled listeners most likely to get lost in a K-Mart to wade through shallow depths.
But a wading pool can be a perfect meditative space. Pool is an introspective record, tailormade for lonesome nights. It was made in Maine's apartment, and while the record has a noticeably professional pop sheen, there are still vestigial hints of amateurism (such as the sound of fingers squeaking against the strings on album opener "Underwater") that convince me of its ideal setting. Aanyone who lives in a city knows how easy it is to be pulled between lonely apartments and lonelier dance floors. By the end, the appeal of water becomes clear. You immerse yourself in it, disappearing from the rest of the world, but you're still close to land.
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Porches: Pool
In the music video for Porches' "Be Apart," Aaron Maine and his band wear black turtlenecks as they mope around an apartment decorated like a dollhouse. They bounce basketballs, play ping-pong, strip down to share a bubble bath, activities that might take place at a party thrown for the very idle rich. Near the halfway mark, they stare into the camera like the Children of the Corn, barely mouthing along to words in a way that will make you suspect they have either an awful or incredible sense of humor. The song is about whether Maine wants to be apart or a part of it all—and the sight of five hip youngs looking sad at a social event leads you to think he's stuck in between.
Mopey New Yorkers are endlessly renewable in independent music, but here's the thing: You can sort of dance to "Be Apart." On Pool, his newest record and first for Domino, Maine has shed the murky folk of previous recordings for a homespun electronic sound that consciously pulls away from the "rock" elements. (Call him another indie kid who sold his guitars and bought turntables.) Fittingly for a record titled Pool, it sounds like it was recorded with one in the room. Oceanic synths, wobbly basslines, and precise snare drums cohere into a crisp pop sound, while his high, expressive voice bobs brightly above the surface.
Also fittingly: Water is a recurring theme throughout the LP. Maine watches people slip into swimming pools ("Underwater," "Pool"), envisions black water surrounding him as he weighs depression against the need to go out ("Be Apart"), and fantasizes about washing his car ("Car," which is the closest thing here to a rock song). Getting stoned is a theme, too. Sometimes, he lights one up and hangs out by the metaphorical pool, as on "Hour," whose dark electronics evoke the dinginess of a locker room at the Y.
In an interview on Pitchfork Radio, Maine said he wanted to make something "more positive" that could be energetically performed live, and that he wants people to dance to his music. The shimmering groove on "Braid" and "Mood" will make you believe in his ambitions—people will at least be swaying—as does the boogie that breaks out at the end of the title track. The singer Greta Kline, who fronts Frankie Cosmos and is also Maine's girlfriend, loans backing vocals or basslines to the half-dozen best songs. Her plucky strumming on "Mood" and "Glow" creates the record's most genuinely funky moments, when you can imagine the shy kids thrusting hips in their living rooms.
Maine isn't an involved lyricist, but his melodic instincts connect the gap between intent and outcome. He has an alien-yet-captivating way of phrasing syllables that recalls the unblinking stoicism of Majical Cloudz' Devon Welsh, or the weirdo brooding of Arthur Russell. The melodramatic sigh in the chorus of "Be Apart"—"And I-I-I-I want to be apart"—reminds me of Morrissey, as does the lyrical preoccupation with whether or not to go out that night.
You could also observe that Morrissey had the gumption to rhyme "rusty spanner" with "play piano," and that some of that spirit might be missing here. The piercing clarity of Maine's voice imbues his relatively simplistic lyrics with profundity, but you might wonder how much is going on in his brain at times. At least one Pitchfork co-worker gasped when I suggested Pool sounded like a chillwave record, but it does remind me of how that micro-genre enabled listeners most likely to get lost in a K-Mart to wade through shallow depths.
But a wading pool can be a perfect meditative space. Pool is an introspective record, tailormade for lonesome nights. It was made in Maine's apartment, and while the record has a noticeably professional pop sheen, there are still vestigial hints of amateurism (such as the sound of fingers squeaking against the strings on album opener "Underwater") that convince me of its ideal setting. Aanyone who lives in a city knows how easy it is to be pulled between lonely apartments and lonelier dance floors. By the end, the appeal of water becomes clear. You immerse yourself in it, disappearing from the rest of the world, but you're still close to land.
Put the internet to work for you.
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