Soul Review: Van Hunt, "On the Jungle Floor"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com

Genre-benders work the angles. In a world of Cheshire cat grins and six-foot frowns, Van Hunt’s On the Jungle Floor is the crooked smile on the portrait of a man that transforms the mass- distributed into the Louvre-exhibited. (More...)

Hip-Hop Review: KRS-One, "Life"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
First Sign that KRS-One Owns His Own Personal Time-Machine That Will Either (a – indicating the less likely of two alternatives) Reverse The Ongoing Collapse of Hip-Hop into Lafftafftastic Crapulence Or (b – highly favored among experts from the National Department for Literary Theory and Quantum Physics) Alter the Space- Time Continuum and Plunge Us All Into a Mind- Bending, Downward-Spiraling Wormhole of Metarap: his latest album, Life, is simultaneously one of the year’s best releases and a meta-lyrical tear in the fabric of hip-hop that would probably consume me whole if I had sufficient government funding to explore it. (More...)

Essay: Down with the "Harvard Man": Owning our Education Existentially and Pragmatically

Published in Student Essays: On the Purpose and Structure of a Harvard Education (Cambridge: Fellows of Harvard College, 2005) (Full PDFs)

"The College should... encourage individual perspectives, ideas that have real lasting power specifically because they are one's own, not because they are Harvard's. Life is long and complicated, and we will all have to change to meet its challenges. Finished products will get left behind. Harvard's greatest gift to the future will be students capable of tackling the world on their own unique terms." (Full PDF)

Hip-Hop Review: Omni, "Ballyhoo"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
"You're a stranger, strangers don't talk to strangers." If I followed Omni's own advice, I would've missed out on his third solo album, Ballyhoo. But you're talking to a man who once played rock-paper-scissors for three hours in an apartment full of unfamiliar, non-English speaking Chinese immigrants just for irony's sake. So naturally, I dove headfirst into this paranoid, clanking beast of an LP. (More...)

Hip-Hop Review: A.Z., "A*W*O*L"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
With a single guest-shot on Illmatic, rapper AZ announced himself as a full-fledged rhymer with a relentless flow and a vision to match. For those taking roll, the old AZ is accounted for on his fifth solo disc, A*W*O*L. In fact, he never left. But something’s missing… (More...)

Hip-Hop Review: Ohmega Watts, "The Find"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
Over the course of his stellar Ubiquity Records debut, The Find, Ohmega Watts searches for many things: the right person, the perfect sample, the way home. But what is the Oregon- based MC/producer's greatest find: a compelling balance between live and electronic production, with earnest lyrics to match. (More...)

Soul Review: Dwele, "Subject"

A CanineMind Exclusive
On Subject, the major label debut from Detroit soul crooner Dwele, the beautiful and the bland collide. There’s much in a name, with “subject” suggesting both something abstract (the concept of a song) and something unfinished (is there a master sitting in a studio somewhere with a post-it stuck on it saying 'real title here'?). Ultimately, for better and for worse, Dwele has created not a soul album, but an idea of a soul album.

To place Dwele in the “neo-soul” category that includes D’Angelo and Bilal (amongst others) would be misleading. He is not a singerly singer – where D’Angelo and Bilal rely on their great ranges, falsetto flourishes, and some technological enhancements (see D’Angelo’s stacked vocals that explode on Raphael Saadiq’s “You Should Be Here” or his own “Put it on the Line”) to draw attention to their singing, Dwele’s approach is much more subdued. Throughout much of Subject, he seems not to be singing, but to be speaking or humming as he develops the melodies and lyrics for the songs. On cuts like “Truth” and “Sho Ya Right,” Dwele’s breathy and clipped delivery seems to be covering for a lack of range… and for questionable songwriting. It’s hard not to smirk at the intro to “Without You,” where we hear Dwele rifling furiously through his notebook looking for the opening lines of the song: “Palm trees / Green leaves / Colors in the fall…” “Without You,” however, provides a perfect example of the weird polarities of Subject. While the lyrics are, at face value, simple, the listener gets a stream of disjointed phrases, random ideas that evoke powerful images.

“Without You,” provides one of the rare instances of a heavier, faster song that Dwele pulls off. Although his voice is too flat and weak for most of the up-tempo productions on the album, it’s perfect for the slow, slight, and suggestive. On tracks like “Kick out of You” (which features a stripped-down, light drumming), “Lady at Mahogany” (where he tells the story of an uncomfortable encounter between the ex-girl and the next girl with a humorous twist: “Why is it that my ex-girl is all up in my grill? / Must be that new Colgate / No wait”), and “Subject,” Dwele uses his voice conversationally. As the production fades in and out, he seems to be carefully creating the track note by note, adding a single word or a slight inflection to complete it. Sometimes, as these closing tracks suggest, less is more – and if you’re still unconvinced, check out the “Whoomp” interlude, as Dwele glides over a throbbing drum and a shifting bed of guitar and keys, laid down as sparingly and suggestively as his voice. For all its shortcomings, Subject delivers a few gems and hints at real potential for growth. Behind Dwele’s light voice are some heavy ideas, with a need for just a little touching up.

Hip-Hop Review: Edan, "Beauty and the Beat"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
On his latest album, Beauty and the Beat, Boston MC/producer Edan "uses pens like hallucinogens" to reconnect hip hop with the psychedelic rock 'n' roll of Jimi Hendrix. The result is a super-compact, simulated acid trip—34 minutes of space-age whirs, echoed vocals, and free association lyrics—all offered up with undeniable pace and energy. (More...)

Hip-Hop Review: Mike Jones, "Who is Mike Jones?"

A CanineMind Exclusive
Only two hip-hop albums have ever been more hyped than Mike Jones’ new disc, Who is Mike Jones? The first is Wu-Tang Clan’s The W (2000), which, as the RZA explained in 1997, would “come back with a comet.” The other is Dr. Dre’s perpetually soon-to- be released Detox. In both of these cases, the hype was well- deserved: the Wu and Dre have vaults of classics and walls of gold and platinum plaques to show for their years in game. Mike Jones? Well, he has given out his cell phone number (“And it’s REAL!”)…over and over again.

So, who is Mike Jones? A small-time hustler turned rapper who made his name on Houston’s Swishahouse label writing songs about impotence, fifth-wheel reclinin', and "molestin' the wood." A friend of mine put me on to Jones in early 2004, and I was hooked. Not because he was the wittiest rapper, not because his beats were the best, but because his whole schtick, from his persona to his rhymes, was absurd. He usually repeats the last two lines of his verses three or four times; he shouts out his name to fill space like other rappers say “Yo!” (“Mike Jooooones! Mike Jooooones!”); and he gives out his “real” phone number ("JEEEEEAH, wassup, baby, it's ya boy, Mike Jooooones").

In the midst of all this marketing, I’m not aware of him ever actually rapping about anything. All of his rhymes about cars, rims, money, and ballin’ are just elaborate -- dare I say "meta"? - descriptions for how well he’ll rap when his album finally comes and he “done blown up.” It's only fitting, then, that the first track on Who is Mike Jones? is a promo. That’s right, before we’ve even heard the album that he has promised us for years, Mike reminds us to buy his next album, “The American Way”… coming soon.

(I'm sure there's one or two comp lit dissertations being written about this as we speak.)

In my mind, Mike was able to get away with all of this because, in the process of promoting himself, he said some funny things. For instance, as he moaned on "Lyin'" off the Swishahouse “Day Hell Broke Loose 2” mixtape: “I can’t have people that hang around me and lie all the time / And I hate hoes that be UGLY, lyin’ sayin they fine!” The problem with Who is Mike Jones? is that it can’t be listened to seriously, and unlike a horrendous album, it’s not so bad that it’s good. Instead, it’s incredibly bland. Imagine being asked to write a song using a magnetic poetry kit that only includes the following words and phrases:

1. Mike Jones

2. who

3. my album, coming soon/is here

4. my cell phone

5. 2-8-1-3-3-0-8-0-0-4 (Mike's cell phone number)

6. turning lane

7. gripping grain

8. candy

9. hos

10. pimp

11. limp

12. shrimp

13. grind

14. shine

15. Pappadeaux's

Good. Now imagine writing an entire album with the same 15 pieces. You can get an idea of how tedious Who is Mike Jones? is.

Without a doubt, there are some bangers. The internet, MTV, and BET have been going nuts over his collabo with Paul Wall and Slim Thug, “Still Tippin’,” and rightfully so – regular speed or screwed, this is one of the songs of the year. Also solid are “What You Know About” (featuring Paul Wall and Boss Hawg Outlaw Killa Kyleon) and “Know What I’m Sayin’” (a sort of screwed version of Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” featuring Texas legends Bun B and Lil Keke). As for the rest, well, Mike Jones has filler at levels normally reserved for double albums. Of course, in a sense, this is a double album. Along with the regular version comes a screwed version done by DJ Michael Watts. While screwing usually adds a refreshing twist to a song (like “Still Tippin’,” again), in this case, it just needlessly extends the agony.

And thus we come to the brutal, walking, rapping conundrum that is Mike Jones. In theory, Mike Jones is an entertaining idea: a rapper who is so blatantly capitalist he rhymes only in order to sell albums on which he rhymes about the next album he’ll sell you. In practice, Mike Jones makes no bones about his elevation of the art of promotion over the art of hip-hop, a sorry scenario for anyone who likes music that does something – anything really – besides promote itself.

Hip-Hop Review: Bigg Jus, "Poor People's Day"

Reviewed for okayplayer.com
Complacency, like sleep, is the cousin of death. As long as the endless beat of the 808 pacifies insiders, the world will need anti-musical alarm clocks like Bigg Jus’s latest, Poor People’s Day. Of course, like the alarm that pierces an early morning slumber, the sound of a man “annihilating everything before your very ears” isn’t always the most soothing. (More...)

Essay: The Death and Rebirth of the Critic: Notes on Cultural Criticism in the Age of Fast Media

A FOUNDATIONAL CanineMind Exclusive

In his Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera offers a grim picture of the contemporary cultural field: where once the writer could be seen as an isolated scribe amid an otherwise wordless, or perhaps even illiterate, population, he now must assume his place as merely one of an endlessly multiplying legion of writers. Everyone has something to say; everyone has a book to write. Libraries upon libraries are being filled with reams upon reams of papers, all testimony to the subjective (over-)self-importance of the contemporary mind. In short, the world of cultural production is now an asylum, and the “graphomaniacs” are in charge.

Kundera’s language of pathologies and productive overloads is partially a response to what he perceives as a very real threat to the continued feasibility of novel-writing. If it is the case that the novel has devolved into a vehicle for narcissistic, bordering on solipsistic, subjectivism, Kundera holds, it will lose its primary and original purpose: the asking of questions, the humbling of one’s knowing self to the potentially unsolvable mysteries of existence. Insofar as Kundera is concerned with the future of the production of the novel, he is also concerned with the future of the criticism of the novel. The critic, for Kundera, is the protector of the cultural field and the guide for the reading public: it is he who sifts through the works that are produced, in search of the best, and only the best, for his readers. The graphomaniacal proliferation of the written word makes his task significantly more complicated. With such a great volume of works being produced, who could ever hope to salvage the best? Even more, how can the critic, operating in a cultural field where he can never hope to have read/heard/seen/witnessed everything, hope to give an authoritative assessment? Above the gates of Kundera’s graphomaniac Bedlam hangs a simple warning to future critics: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

As evocative as Kundera’s reflections are at first blush, they only capture half the current state of the cultural field – the production side. While he is right to see the critic’s role as being complicated by expanding literary output, Kundera could not anticipate, in 1991, a second challenge arising – this time, from the reception side, spurred by the coupling of critical forums with web-based platforms. Just as new cultural objects appear to be multiplying out of control, critical responses to those products are emerging with equal, if not greater, rapidity. Far from being the last word on the subject, the critic is now frequently only the first.

At the risk of engaging in revisionist history, let me suggest an old model for the critic, one which seems to lie behind Kundera’s own notion of the critic: the stately, detached man of letters. When I describe him as “detached,” I’m not referring to his attitude or character – it was just as possible, nay, just as likely, to find a politically, economically, or socially motivated critic “then” as it is “now.” Disengagement, thus, is not an element of ideology, style, or orientation, but rather, a fact of position within the cultural field. The newspaperman, or the editor of the literary journal, stood at a remove from the readership. His words were passed on to the reading public in a neatly defined format that suggested an air of definitiveness to his opinion. An editorial was formulated, a review was written, and then inserted into the paper with a bold heading, a by-line, and maybe even a special box on the same page of the paper, week after week. The editorial apparatus surrounding the critic symbolized the finality of his opinions – after he had surveyed the cultural field, his judgments were passed on, set in type-written, self-contained pages, if not in stone.

This editorial apparatus survives to this day. And, as a consequence, perhaps the true division to be drawn is not between “old media” of times past and the “new media” of today. A better framework is the division between “slow media” and “fast media.” In slow media, such as monographs, magazines, and even daily newspapers, the acts of writing, publishing, and response are distantiated – once an item is written, it must be entered into an editorial and publication apparatus that can take hours, days, months, or even years to produce a publicly available piece of writing. Nevertheless, it is not this gap that truly marks slow media. By all accounts, the turnaround of material for a daily newspaper is very fast; meanwhile, even pieces published on “fast media” platforms (the web) can take extended periods of time to be written, edited, and published.

In other words, slow media are identified not by the speed of production (in all its phases), but the speed of publicly available response associated with their output. Readers, when confronted with an opinion delivered through slow media, can, and frequently do, take issue. Short of establishing their own parallel, competing media organs, readers must resort to letter-writing, or, with growing frequency, e-mail. In response to the critic’s opinion, the reader writes a letter or message, which is then sent to the slow media publisher (or sometimes the writer himself), where it usually sits in a pile with similar letters. Perhaps, if space allowed, one of these letters is selected to be run in the paper, generally a few days, but sometimes a few weeks, later, in much smaller type, in a less prestigious part of the paper, with all the other commentary from “outsiders.” Even if e-mail speeds up the delivery of the reader’s response, it cannot single-handedly overcome the distantiation between the initial formulation of a reaction and the publication of that reaction – in keeping with the practice of slow media, responses are only slowly and selectively made available to a larger reading public.

All of the above conditions contributed to the seemingly “self-evident” or “unchallengeable” nature of the critic’s opinion. Under these terms, it was difficult to question a published opinion in a quickly, publicly accessible way: the writer wrote infrequently, he could be responded to in “slow” forms of writing. Once received, these letters were subject to an elaborate process of institutional filtering, even when (if) ultimately printed: responses are selectively read, less frequently put into print, and printed both at a point when most readers have forgotten the relevant issue and in a format less prominent than the initial piece. Make no mistake about it, the letters to the editor section found in virtually every newspaper segregates and hierarchalizes as much as it democratizes: an outsider’s letter might work its way in, but once in, it will be identifiable as such, smaller font, word limit and all.

If the newspaper represents the archetypal “slow media,” the on-line news magazine and discussion-based web forums represent the cutting-edge of the “fast media.” From a production standpoint, articles can be uploaded to audiences of hundreds of thousands in seconds – almost infinitely faster than the process of bringing an issue to press. For the writer who desires to see his name in print, the internet offers almost instantaneous gratification.

As noted previously, however, the true division between slow and fast media is not on the production side – not only do newspapers offer a relatively quick turnaround for writers desiring to see their name in print, but also quality web content still requires time for thought, drafting, and editing. The real change from slow media, as such, is found on the reception side.

E-forms -- like blogs, message boards, etc. -- contribute to a leveling the opinion sphere. Through web forums, comment boxes, and other feedback mechanisms, a reader can formulate and publish responses within minutes. More importantly, these responses can frequently be posted alongside or beneath the original article, pairing them visually in the reader’s field of view. It has become common practice on news websites to include readers’ polls and open responses alongside articles by paid professional journalists – after reading what the critics think, the reader is asked to articulate his opinion, an opinion which can then be published alongside the initial article. In web forums, meanwhile, integrated discussions can be structured around a review lifted from another site; in other cases, responses can be posted beneath the article on its original platform. Visual hierarchies still undoubtedly exist – readers of threads must almost inevitably read the initial article as the thread lead, before selectively scanning the response title lines. Nevertheless, the web forum format those original critique and responses together into a single, integrated thread.

As the above discussion suggests, the development of electronic response forums has dramatically reduced the effort required to formulate responses and increased the access to a reading public for the unaffiliated writer. These quantitative changes have produced a qualitative change in the critical process. According to the Kunderan model of criticism, the sheer volume of cultural product churned out on a yearly basis complicates, if not wholly undermines, attempts by individual audience members to identify quality pieces of culture. The community of critics, in turn, helps reduce the effort of the audience by collectively sifting through cultural materials, extracting the best items and directing audiences toward them. In this sense, critics are devoted to cutting down on paper, cutting down on words, cutting down on noise, and cutting down on visual confusion: like wheat being separated from chaff, the mass of cultural material is filtered down into a set of short articles.

As far as critics who operate in the web environment are concerned, the day of the Kunderan reviewer is dead. The advent of fast media, while adding new approaches to criticism on the production side, has also liberated the reception side of the critical practice. In a bizarre e-inversion, one review can spawn eighty-five responses, each of which can not only voice entirely idiosyncratic, non-overlapping opinions, but launch into a mind-boggling circle while criticism is passed not only the original review or the item being reviewed, but other reviews, potentially endlessly. As a result, we now have overload on both ends: the production side and the reception side.

In a testament to the charybdic potential of web-based “fast media,” the critic’s plight can no longer be localized to web critics. As the practice of publishing all critical material in both print and web forms, even opinions turned out by slow media critics can be pulled into the critical, meta-critical, and meta-meta-critical whirlpool of web forums. In short, any opinion conveyed through the printed word is now up for constant, seemingly endless debate.

Of course, with the expansion of critiques of criticism comes a new opportunity for the critic: if he so chooses, he can enter the evolving discussion, clarifying, expanding, qualifying, or retracting as necessary. In doing so, the critic must deal with several implications for his practice. The first is theoretical, and deals perhaps more with the critic's ego: does his identity as a critic require him to maintain his distance from his audience? Wouldn’t he be compromising the authority of his opinion by allowing himself to remanufacture it in real-time on the web? The second is ethical: can he defend his own writing anonymously, just as many critique his work anonymously? How much clarification post hoc becomes abusive or deceptive? Wherever one comes down on these issues, if one comes down into the critical forum at all, a basic fact must be acknowledged: The critic’s opinion is no longer unassailable(if it ever were) and the reader’s response is no longer hidden and inaccessible to the greater community of readers.

Such developments, however, don’t spell the end of criticism, but merely suggest a necessary reorientation of the critic’s self-conception. Without the protective institutional apparatus of detachment to rely upon, the critic can no longer hope to offer the definitive, LAST word. The goal of the critic in the age of internet journalism? To have a particularly strong, provocative FIRST word, to set the terms for a lively, informed debate. The e-critic is the structurer of conversation, and insofar as the remainder of the journalism world can be pulled into that forum, so moves the enterprise of writing: structuring a conversation for a virtually connected community of readers.