Houston Blog

What it do, Rancid? What's crackin', formerly crusty-punk rude boys? Been a long time since we last hang, bros. When Dan Zeller lent me Let's Go during senior year of high school, I knew y'all were onto something special: three-billy-goats-gruff sung scrabbling punk anthems and routs with just a hint of ska. ...And Out Come The Wolves was what really sold me, though, as you found a slightly more commercial sound that brought MTV rotation (for "Time Bomb"), plus a platinum plaque.

Our interest began to wane after you flew to Jamaica to record Life Won't Wait. I bought 2000's Rancid out of loyalty, but nothing on it resonated with me; it's probably rotting in a Baltimore-area record store's used bin as I type this. As for 2003's Indestructible, I can't front: haven't heard a note of it.

It wasn't you, guys, it was us; our interests changed. Separated from higher education and the friends who indoctrinated us to the Epitaph/Fat Wreck Chords/Punk Uprisings/etc nu-punk axis, I suddenly had less of a desire to listen to dudes yelling about smashing the state and so on. I wanted more indie, more rap, maybe some Flaming Lips. I didn't even notice that y'all were on a 6-year hiatus, though your side projects were duly noted (if never explored).

"Workmanlike."

There - I said it. Though I'm thinking that "workmanlike" might actually be too kind an adjective to use in describing Relapse, Eminem's fifth album produced by Dr. Dre. "Workmanlike" suggests a modicum of competence, and Relapse isn't satisfying on any level whatsoever. Like, at all. It literally fails even at going through the shock-and-awe motions. Shady's immortal "I just don't give a fuck" refrain has been replaced by "Guess it's time for you to hate me again" (from "Medicine Ball"), which scans here as "Time to make the donuts."

There are vulgarities and inhumanities that flash by in a dull blur. There are all manner of stale celebrity rape and murder fantasies, rendered sans panache. The grating dialects that marred 04's Encore - a gone-loco trainwreck that improves in comparative retrospect - recur here, sliming Dre's canned carny beats. (All is forgiven, "Just Lose It." Defending that delirious bit of self-cannibalization is a cinch compared to justifying Em's latest.) Who'd have imagined, back when we were throwing "Yellow Brick Road" on mixtapes for friends, that there would come a time when we'd be nostalgic for vengeful-yet-impassioned rants about Eminem killing his ex-wife or loopy forget-me-nots about how much he loves his kids?

So thanks, Marshall, for making the Distillery's mission pretty much impossible. Distillery's aim is to break albums that are 16 or more songs long down to a manageable 10 keepers; with Relapse, I struggled to come up with eight - and one of those is a skit. Most of the others are tracks I can tolerate without having to fight off the urge to yank the CD out of the player and break it.

Marshall, by sobering up and wading into rap, you - probably inadvertently - have made an album that mirrors the circa-right-now experience of soldiering on through life in a world on the verge of collapse, day in and day out, despite feeling empty, uninspired, totally unsure whether the future holds much of anything, and convinced that our collective best days are far behind us.

Any Cam'ron reckoning that doesn't address the Harlem MC's unflagging inhumanity is a dishonest one. Most hip-hop heads have developed a cognitive-dissonance filter for the misogyny and nihilism coating most rap product; we try to see the hateful forest for the acrobatic trees.

Still, though: Jay-Z takes the drug-kingpin longview, Clipse spits creative coke-rap chatter, 50 Cent celebrates a crime titan-as-corporate-asswipe aesthetic and Lil Wayne gets psychedelic with hustla tropes. But Cam'ron's persona is something more maligant: he's pure evil incarnate, cataloguing the usual monied extravagances but honing in on the finer details of running trains, turning women into drug mules, getting 'em hooked on the product he knows we know he doesn't push anymore, taking lives as casually as he slips into one flamboyantly hued outfit or another (no homo!) - and doing so with a black-as-coal comedic gallows humor that at first scans as humorlessness.

Photo by Hryck.

Chuck "Chuck Inglish" Ingersoll (Michigan) and Antoine "Mikey Rocks" Reed (Illinois) - the Cool Kids, to you - may qualify as the 00s' biggest teases. Since 2007, they've unleashed a cavalcade of individual tracks and mixtapes, massaging Internet buzz into a sort of droning hum: 80s babies building a name with hot sixteens full of 80s signifiers and 80s-aping flows over 80s boom-bap beats. (See "Black Mags," which was featured in a late 2007/early 2008 Rhapsody commercial in tandem with Sara Barilles' "Love Song" - so don't front like you've never heard it.) And just When Fish Ride Bicycles - the Kids' oft-delayed full-length debut - seems on the verge of seeing release, Inglish and Rocks (in conjunction with Don Cannon) drop yet another frickin' mixtape on us.

Truth be told, we envy N.A.S.A.'s bumptuous production acumen almost as much as we envy principal astronauts Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon the depths of their Rolodexes - even if, somehow, they couldn't rope Lil Wayne into their genre-mashup free-for-all.

Seriously - as you'll see below - N.A.S.A.'s debut, The Spirit of Apollo, is on some profoundly next-level Judgment Night-soundtrack shit. It's not all amazing, of course, which is why it's the subject of Rocks Off's inaugural "The Distillery" entry, in which we cherry-pick the choicest cuts to create the album N.A.S.A. should have made all along.

3. "Money," feat. David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip: N.A.S.A. hop on the rap-as-world-music bandwagon, with United Colors of Benetton results; call it a UN monetary conference of musos. Hey, they could've just covered Pink Floyd's "Money," right?