Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  André's similarity to Prince has been widely noted. ("She Lives in My Lap" is basically a remake of "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" from Sign 'O' the Times). But after Prince became his own boss and retreated deep into Paisley Park, he lost his sense of humor. André's has never been stronger. The Love Below is one of the only hip-hop albums where the skits are actually worth listening to. The laughs mean he can engage moral questions without making you want to hit him with a wet sock. The video for "Hey Ya!" (which you can watch here) is more witty than hilarious, but it's spectacularly welcome in an era where rock stars truck in more self-pity than panache. André appears on a mythical English TV show with himself, digitally edited together, playing his own live band. A multiracial crowd, leaning toward white, screams like it's 1964 while he tears the scorecard to bits. His acting is pitch perfect: shirtless, stoic drummer; cowboy cool bass player; shy, friendly bandleader. André twists and shouts and wears green, exposing the upper body TV was made for. Think of it as the one thing Queer Eye for the Straight Guy could not improve.

  There are few gigs less appealing to the ego than standing next to André. Big Boi has been playing George and Ringo to André's John and Paul since the second OutKast album, ATLiens, made it clear André was a gifted child. This is unfair, because Big Boi is one of the best MCs working. He is, at the very least, hip-hop's fiercest enunciator. If somebody tries that "rapping isn't music" nonsense with you (it still happens), hand them any of Big Boi's verses from Stankonia and ask them to map out the accents, references, and feet. Give them several days and lots of graph paper. (You might want to mention the quality of something is rarely correlated to complexity, but that stuff tends to impress ignoramae.) OutKast's overtorqued physical impact, the sense that their records are more there than anyone else's, comes in large part from Big Boi. The essence of Southern rap, the bounce, is all there in Big Boi's voice and beats. Just listen to the first two minutes of "Knowing," one of Speakerboxxx's most propulsive tracks. It's like watching someone tap-dance on a moving sidewalk while carrying three glasses of champagne. Blindfolded.

  Speakerboxxx is not a solo disc in the sense The Love Below is, where André produces all his own tracks. Big Boi only produces some of Speakerboxxx, leaving the rest to Mr. DJ, Carl Mo, and André 3000 himself. "Ghetto Musick" is André's production and is OutKast's most formally twisted song yet. It is, literally, three songs jump-cut together. But Big Boi's productions hold their own, and as a series of songs, Speakerboxxx gains in consistency what little it loses in familiarity. The slinky crunk rehaul of "Tomb of the Boom" and the Parliament sound-alike "Bowtie" are sprung things. Apparently there are people in this country who would not dance in their chairs when "Bowtie" comes on. This is why we need national health care now, because that is not right.

  The distinction isn't as simple as André the omnivorous genius and Big Boi the genre-bound floor filler. André and Antwan both think about being good and being hip-hop, through different filters: "What about repenting?/ What about committing the same sin over again and again?" Big Boi asks on "Church." On "Flip-Flop Rock," Big Boi addresses someone who's worried about being a "goody-two-shoes." If there's a gangsta script Big Boi believes in, he still knows it's a script. Big Boi's friends, though, are not as worried about the implications of their genre—just check the guest verses on "Tomb of the Boom" to see what it's like to be a B-list thinker on an A-list album. (The exception is Ludacris, whose typically excellent verse makes good use of "pistachios" and "cuticles.")

  A quick scan of the current interviews tells even the pie-eyed fan that there won't be a lot more OutKast records, though there will be records from both André and Antwan. That's good enough news. But if America's greatest rock group breaks up, it'll still be a shame.

  Hasten Down the Wind

  Warren Zevon's sad, sweet final album.

  By Bill Barol

  Posted Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2003, at 7:58 AM PT

  Samuel Johnson, in one of the most overexposed aphorisms to come out of the 18th century, said there's nothing like the prospect of hanging to concentrate the mind. If that's true, the fates have paid back Warren Zevon's fondness for dark jokes with one of their own: Zevon, who recorded his new CD while living with terminal cancer, is one songwriter whose mind has never needed concentrating. Dagger-sharp and dry as dust, he's turned his eye on characters from junkies to mercenaries, spooks to lovers, with a wit that none of his peers from the '70s singer-songwriter boom have been able to touch. But unlike some of the writers to whom he's been compared—not lyricists most often, but prose stylists like Hunter S. Thompson—Zevon has a dirty little secret: There's a leavening note of compassion to his best work, a beating heart behind the skeletal grin. For every "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner," there's a "Hasten Down the Wind."

  It's not surprising that this part of Zevon's sensibility is front and center on The Wind (Artemis Records), or that the project carries with it a valedictory air. It's a mantle the record wears gracefully, though, in ways both small (the keening crunch of David Lindley's lap steel guitar, a sound so recognizable to anyone who was there in the '70s that it's sure to induce a small shock of sense memory) and big: The familiar outlaw-on-the-run motif of "Dirty Life & Times" holds an unmistakable sense of the clock running down. Even funny and very Zevonesque tropes like "I'm sprawled across the davenport of despair" are mounted in a setting of creeping decay ("Disorder in the House," with a raging guitar lead by Bruce Springsteen). Other old friends and co-conspirators are in the mix: longtime collaborator Jorge Calderón, plus Ry Cooder, Don Henley, Timothy B. Schmit, Jackson Browne, T-Bone Burnett, Tom Petty, Joe Walsh, Emmylou Harris—a Murderer's Row of singer-songwriter talent. It'd feel like a gimmick if the guest stars weren't so well-used—Cooder's plangent guitar on "Dirty Life & Times," Henley and Schmit's sympathetic vocal backing on "She's Too Good for Me," Walsh reprising the gutbucket pleasures of "Rocky Mountain Way

  " in "Rub Me Raw."

  It's possible to look at the guest cast as an auxiliary, helping an ailing Zevon shoulder the job. But the whole assemblage feels more like a goodbye party, with old friends in from out of town. That note gets struck most forcefully in the goofy frat-house stomp of "The Rest of the Night," with Petty bleating harmony. The song's a throwaway, though, and one of the two tracks on The Wind that feel inessential. The other, oddly enough, is Zevon's down-the-middle cover of Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." It's the record's most overt nod to Zevon's illness, but lyrics like "That long black cloud is comin' down/ I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door" fall with a clang here. Zevon has always been slipperier than this, more allusive, and Dylan's self-consciously mythic take on impending doom seems downright ham-handed in comparison.

  Even Zevon's record label seems to grasp that this is a moment to keep it simple. "July 2003: Warren is still alive," the official bio says, and that's that. He lived to finish the record and to see his grandchildren born. A PR person for Artemis says, "Some days are better than others for him. He's hanging in there. Unfortunately, his prognosis is the same." It doesn't seem likely that Zevon will be appearing in public again. In two ballads co-written with Jorge Calderón, though, he found the voice for a songwriter's farewell. "Keep Me in Your Heart," finished at his home studio in April after he was no longer able to travel, bids a cleareyed goodbye to an old love, and the language couldn't be much homelier: "Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house/ Maybe you'll think of me and smile/ You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse/ Keep me in your heart for awhile." It's the modesty of that qualifying "maybe," and the shrugging "for awhile," that make the sentiment hard to shake off. And in the spare, heartbreaking "El Amor de mi Vida," Zevon leaves the listener with an unforgettable image: a man looking out at a world that, somewhere, holds the woman who used to love him: "I look outside, I know you're there/ And you've found a brand new life somewhere/ I only wish it had been us/ But I'm happy for your happiness." It's a lovely sending-off, with forgiveness an
d an open heart—the way we'd all want to be sent off, to a new lover, a new place, or whatever fresh mysteries lie beyond the life we know.

  The Beethoven Mystery

  Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?

  By Jan Swafford

  Posted Monday, June 30, 2003, at 2:58 PM PT

  This summer, as every summer, the end of the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood season will be marked by another round of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The world over, the Ninth has become an indispensable adornment for socio/musical hooplas. Chances are, it will be played soon by an orchestra near you. If you know Western classical music, you know this one. Probably half of humanity can hum the little ditty that serves as the theme of the choral finale—a setting of Schiller's revolutionary-era drinking song, "Ode to Joy."

  Which is all to say, the Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens to gut any artwork. Think Mona Lisa. Still, as with Lisa, when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons.

  One reason is its mystery. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth. But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets. In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of the epic and the slippery.

  First movement: loud, big, heroic, no? No. Big and loud all right, also wildly unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren't. The formal outline, on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder, etc.) At the end there's a funeral march over a slithering bass. Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the "Eroica" Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But who died in the first movement of the Ninth?

  Next comes the scherzo, Beethoven's trademark skittering, ebullient movement. Here it's those things ratcheted up to a Dionysian whirlwind, manically contrapuntal, punctuated with timpani crashes. Strange choice, to follow a funeral march. Even stranger: For all the apparent over-the-top gaiety, the movement is in D minor. Gaiety generally means major keys, but not here.

  Given its surroundings, the third movement is peculiar mainly in its cloudless tranquility. It's one of those singing, time-stopping adagios that mark Beethoven's last period. Two themes alternate, and nothing much happens but the themes acquiring delicate filigree and little dance turns in a dreamlike atmosphere of uncanny beauty.

  The famous finale is weirdest of all. Scholars have never quite agreed on its formal model, though it clearly involves a series of variations on the "Joy" theme. But why does this celebration of joy open with a dissonant shriek that Richard Wagner dubbed the "terror fanfare"? Then the basses start playing stuff that is unmistakably a recitative, the familiar prose patter between arias in opera and oratorio. Here, a recitative with no words. And for the supreme oddity: One at a time, themes from the earlier movements are introduced only to be rebuffed by the basses—opening of the first movement, nope, too grim; second movement, too light; third movement … nice, the basses sigh nostalgically, but no, too sweet.

  This, then: The Joy theme is unveiled by the basses unaccompanied, sounding for all the world like somebody (say, the composer) quietly humming to himself. (In fact, Beethoven sketched the Joy theme early on and aimed the whole symphony to be a revelation of it.) The theme begins to vary, picking up lovely flowing accompaniments. Then, out of nowhere, back to the terror fanfare. And now up steps a real singer, singing a real recitative: "Oh friends, not these tones! Rather let's strike up something more agreeable and joyful."

  Soon the chorus is crying, "Joy! Joy!" and the piece is off, praising joy as the universal solvent, under whose influence love will flourish, humanity unite. Schiller's ode is a stylized drinking song, meant literally or figuratively to be declaimed by comrades with glasses raised. And what a tipsy course Beethoven's setting follows: At one point a mystical evocation of the godhead is followed by a grunting military march in a style the Viennese called "Turkish," which resolves into a learned and majestic fugue.

  Nobody has figured out what Beethoven meant by all this. The result has been that every age and ideology has simply claimed the music for its own. Communists, Catholics, lefties, and reactionaries have joined in the chorus. A 1999 book by Esteban Buch, recently available in English, traces the course of the Ninth through history. It's been attached to European disunity in the form of nationalism, it got sucked into the Nazi cult of blood and race, and finally it became, with the Joy theme's adoption as the anthem of the European Union, a symbol of togetherness. Others have seen the Ninth as a universal human anthem. Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the international celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and what else would do the job?

  For the composer's part, it's a good bet that Beethoven didn't intend for the Ninth to be precisely figured out. As with the Mona Lisa, maybe its very ambiguity is part of its success. Paint it any color you like, and it remains its exalted and inexplicable self. If you want universality in a work of art, here you are. One could argue that the best way of keeping the Ninth alive and fresh is not to pin it down but to embrace its mystery.

  What can be said about the Ninth with reasonable certainty? One is that its position in the world is probably about what Beethoven wanted it to be. In an unprecedented way for a composer, he deliberately stepped into history with a great ceremonial work that doesn't just preach freedom and the unity of peoples but attempts however strangely to foster them. Another thing to note is that most late Beethoven pieces take surprising courses. His earlier works tend to have a tone (which sometimes he names for us, as in the "Pathetique" and "Eroica") that propels a dramatic unfolding: We hear what happens to the pathos and the heroism. In his late works Beethoven turned away from such clear dramatic curves to more elusive and evocative trains of ideas whose effect he and his time called poetic. And in keeping with the turn from drama to poetry, he left the heroics behind.

  I'll add one more surmise. Famously, the Ninth first emerges from a whispering mist to towering, fateful proclamations. The finale's Joy theme is almost constructed before our ears, hummed through, then composed and recomposed and decomposed. The Ninth is music about music, about its own emerging, about its composer composing. And for what? "This kiss for all the world!" runs the telling line in the finale, in which Beethoven erected a movement of epic scope on a humble little tune that anybody can sing.

  The Ninth, forming and dissolving before our ears in its beauty and terror and simplicity and complexity, ending with a cry of jubilation, is itself his kiss for all the world, from east to west, high to low, naive to sophisticated. When the bass speaks the first words in the finale, an invitation to sing for joy, the words come from Beethoven, not Schiller. It's the composer talking to everybody, to history. That's what's so moving about those words. There Beethoven greets us person to person, with glass raised, and hails us as friends.

  Steely Dan Is Getting Old

  And that's a good thing.

  By Fred Kaplan

  Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 9:31 AM PT

  It's been 30 years since Steely Dan came out with the first of nine albums that infused pop music with new layers of knotty harmonies, insouciant irony, and a cryptic poetry that Dylan might have conjured had he pored over Burroughs instead of Guthrie. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the former school chums from Bard who created Steely Dan (a name taken from the steam-powered dildos in Burroughs' Naked Lunch), are now 55 and 53, respectively; their output of late has been less than prodigious (three records in the past two decades); their basic sound is as distinctively slick—detractors would say soullessly repetitive—as that of any act in rock history.


  So, why, at least for their fans of long standing, do they still delight, compel, sometimes—as on the best tracks of Everything Must Go, their new CD—even startle? It's not just the retro doo-wop backup singers, the Blue Note horn charts, the slam-dunk backbeat, or the skylark guitar riffs, though these things do help break down resistances. Above all, it's the Fagen-Becker songs: literary sparklers with oddball narratives, usually about loss, illusion, or unfulfilled dreams, sung by a narrator who's either blithely clueless or self-loathingly aware of his slim prospects.

  Then there's the narrator, played by Fagen, who sings nearly all the Steely Dan songs. Can Fagen properly be called a singer? He strikes attitudes more than notes; his vocal cords strain when they exceed their half-octave range. Yet without his harsh knife-edge cri de coeur, the polished instrumental arrangements can slack perilously close to smooth-jazz fusion. This is why letting Becker sing "Slang of Ages" was a bad move; the tune comes off as a middling blues. When Fagen's at the mike, a tension brews between the voice and the musical mix. (For a more elaborate theory of Fagen's role, click here.) He's a troubadour for our times, just as Dylan, that other great nasal whiner, was for his: Dylan's persona, the rebel-protester who storms off Maggie's farm; Fagen's, the world-weary Sybarite who sees "the blood orange sky" above the freeway but feels too beat for rage, and so takes refuge in "the long sad Sunday of the early resigned" (to quote from two of the new songs, "The Last Mall" and "Blues Beach").