Recently in Reggae Category

Irony Doesn't Kill People, Curmudgeons Do
Being allergic to most things ironic, I half-expected to get some kind of rash from rubbing up too close to Guns Don't Kill People, Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch's kinda-sorta concept album about a one-armed commando from Jamaica named Major Lazer. (It's all very Gorillaz meets, oh, I don't know, Dr. Alimantado or something, or Rex the Dog meets rockers uptown.) But the record's actually kind of awesome. The first track alone features surf guitar; horse whinneys and clip-clopping hooves; Nokia ringtones; cash-register bells; a hyperactive Santigold loop; and gruff, absurdist chat from Mr. Lex. The album's first half offers a solid stretch of dancehall bangers and earnest lovers' rock; Major Lazer achieve genius with "Baby," a 67-second sketch featuring the roly-poly-voiced Prince Zimboo waxing philosophical to a newborn. (The baby has "built-in Auto-Tune," wouldn't you know.) For all the goofiness, Diplo and Switch flex considerable muscle with tracks like the supercolliding "Anything Goes" and the martial, minimalist "Pon De Floor." To make the latter beat, one imagines the producers having rigged up a Whac-a-Mole game with those toy cans that moo when turned upside down. As The Hudsucker Proxy's Norville Barnes would say, "You know, for kids."

London's Hyperdub label has found its greatest commercial success with Burial, whose music offers a blurred, flickering image of the U.K. garage and two-step of a decade ago. (Fittingly for his alias, Burial's music is the equivalent of dubstep's Shroud of Turin, with rave's own resurrection myth woven into its very fiber.) But his catalog is just the tip of the iceberg -- or the corner of the subwoofer, as it were. From Hyperdub founder Kode9's very first release, the label has consistently pushed at the limits of U.K. "bass music," an amalgam of dub, dancehall, hip-hop and breakbeat hardcore.

Lots of people would just call that "dubstep," but Kode9 (Steve Goodman, to his dissertation adviser) has long kicked against the genre's status quo, releasing a steady stream of records that thumb their noses at convention. The beats jostle like a bag full of cats, stuffed with scraps of techno, house, electro, soca and G-funk; vocals, when they appear, are melted down into chopped 'n' screwed caliber syrup. (Few listeners realize on first listen that the funereal "Sine of the Dub" is actually a Prince cover.) Tempo, meanwhile, is totally up for grabs.

The label's been on fire of late, with tracks from Quarta 330, LD and Kode9 himself pushing a mixture of hurtling grooves and eerily precise sound design, while Zomby turns out his inimitable, viscous interpretation of hip-hop. If you're in New York, you can catch Kode9 in action on April 17 at the American Museum of Natural History -- a fitting venue for a label so clearly interested in musical evolution -- alongside fellow traveler Flying Lotus. (Don't miss Sasha Frere-Jones' writeup in The New Yorker here.) And no matter where you are, you can dig deep -- 62 tracks deep -- into Hyperdub's history in a chronological playlist of all the label's releases so far. Check the selection below, and click on over to Playlist Central to get the whole thing in all its shuddering glory.

Never having raved much, I hardly mourned when the hype that the U.S.biz labeled electronica fizzled away a few years back. But there was a time, oddly enough, that I was listening to scads of the stuff. And especially in the wake of the Prodigy’s 1997 chart success, the idea of rocking synth music seemed real smart: entities like Lo-Fidelity All-Stars and Hardknox and Uberzone and even (in his pre-Elvis-remix guise) Junkie XL put out techno albums I could totally sink my teeth into. Since then, I don’t doubt my crankiness has deafened me to plenty of worthy beeps and blips; I’ll gladly defer to specialists like Philip Sherburne on such issues. But from my particular vantage point, it sure seemed like techno snobs decided all that so-called “big beat” was too cheesy for its own good (apparently because it had actual hooks, for shame). So, before you knew it, it was gone. And unless I’ve been looking in all the wrong places, it still is – though at least albums I heard this summer from Londoners Dub Pistols and the Chap gave me a little hope.

by Toshitaka Kondo

 

Kardinal Offishall is quite the paradox. He's been a heavyweight with music industry insiders for years but he remained largely unknown to the masses despite minor hits like “Bakardi Slang” and “Ol’ Time Killin’” from his 2001 debut, Quest for Fire: Firestarter. The Toronto native’s bellowing voice and unique style of spittin’ in English and Jamaican patois made fans of producers he’s worked with like Pharrell and Timbaland, and superstars that tried to ink him like Jay-Z and Akon, whose Konvict Music he eventually signed with. Kardinal was finally catapulted into the spotlight when he dropped the Akon-assisted 2008 summer anthem “Dangerous,” which reached the top five on the Billboard Hot 100. With his sophomore album, Not 4 Sale, about to drop, Rhapsody caught up with Kardinal to talk about what “Dangerous” has meant to his career, the difficulties he faces as a Canadian rapper, and the circumstances under which suing can be ill-advised.

by Chuck Eddy

When somebody tells you a new dance-pop album (or really, maybe a new anything album) is mind-blowing because it “mixes up lots of different genres,” take their claim with a grain of salt. Not that mixing genres is bad; it’s just that that’s what dance-pop has always done - usually without making a big whoopdydoo of it. This year, for instance, the self-titled debut by Philly-to-Brooklyn hipster heroine Santogold will inevitably finish the year near the top of critics’ polls. Which is fine, because it’s a pretty good record. But it’s no more “eclectic” than the significantly more lively and songful self-titled debut by suburban L.A. Mexican-American quinceañera-pop duo Prima J, which will struggle to get reviewed in any magazine not targeted at Latin teen girls.

by Piotr Orlov

Behold, a requiem for the music producer! In 2008, when pretty much any Tom, Dick or Harriet with a Pro Tools set-up and some decent microphones could finagle a “produced by” credit onto the meta-data file of a digital release, let’s take a moment to pay homage to a pair of gentlemen who worked a little harder in creating great music. It wasn’t just different skill sets or historical perspectives that separated Teo Macero and Joe Gibbs from the multitudes of today’s whippersnappers. Macero, who passed away after a long illness on February 19 at the age of 82, and Gibbs, who died of a sudden heart attack on February 21 at the age of 65, also possessed visions (sonic, aesthetic, hell, even commercial) they could share with their collaborators and guide them to a new place. Rare gifts in the age of press-and-record.

by Piotr Orlov

You could be forgiven if you thought that reggae fell out of the limelight in ’07. Yet while there were no headlines to feed the populace -- no Sean Paul or Matisyahu, no “Ghetto Story” or “Welcome to Jamrock,” certainly no single riddim ruling the nation and no backward-/forward-looking trends taking over – reggae continued its 21st century expansion into the minds of the pop masses. The JA singles market may have fallen off due to the shortage in vinyl production -- coinciding with the riddim train running out of track. But the one-drop roots remained strong, and foreign talents from unlikely shores -- like the Italian, Alborosie -- gained reps and scored hits. Here’s a rundown of the year in reggae: the tragedies and triumphs, the hellos and goodbyes, the easily predicted and the highly unlikely.