10 Records I Loved in 2013

This was an unusually good year for music in a broad range of genres. Here's an alphabetical list of ten albums with some youtube streams, which is more useful than any writing I would do to convince to give these a shot.

Autre Ne Veut - Anxiety

__________________________________________________________

Beyoncé - Beyoncé

_________________________________________________________

Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe

______________________________________________________

Brandy Clark - 12 Stories

_____________________________________________________

Earl Sweatshirt - Doris

____________________________________________________

Kanye West - Yeezus

___________________________________________________

MGMT - MGMT

__________________________________________________

Oneohtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven

______________________________________________________

Sturgill Simpson - High Top Mountain

______________________________________________________

Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

Apple Gets Misunderstood

If you haven't seen Apple's new ad, "Misunderstand," you probably should if you want to be a part of teh internet:

So after the initial crying and "goddammit, Apple, give me a break, I'm sensitive at this time of year!" screaming, your response to this ad is probably one of two things:

1. Wow, they thought he wasn't paying any attention to them, but he was making a video, that's so sweet.
2. What a fucking asshole, no one wants to see your stupid video. Put down the phone and have a normal conversation with your family.

If you thought number 2, you probably think you're pretty great. You're also like half of the internet, mostly the people who hate Apple and forgot what it was like to be 13.

I've read some defenses of the ad, most notably Kottke, which are very good arguments for documenting your life and general reflection on what is happening. But that is not the point of this ad. In fact, even if you thought number 1, you probably assume the ad is about how teenagers are misunderstood and you shouldn't judge them. Also not the point of this ad.

The point of this ad is that Apple products bring people together. That's a pretty stupid, generic marketing point, but like all good marketing it's done in a profound way. See, teenagers hate the world. They don't like to interact with family, they hate to be sentimental, and they try as much as possible to avoid doing stuff with anyone who isn't a teenager. This isn't Apple's fault, because I was a teenager when Apple was basically nothing and it was totally true. It's also not the smartphone's (or the computer's, or even the internet's) fault, because those things either sucked or didn't exist when I was a teenager, and I still went to my room and read comics or listened to punk rock and gangster rap or ate a whole bag of chocolate covered pretzels while watching Mr. Show.

This is why when anyone says Apple is missing the point and kids should put down their phones and live in the moment, they aren't doing anything different than people who told youngsters who used the telegraph machine that they weren't enjoying each other's company. Have you ever seen a shrill parent tell their teenager they should stop what they are doing and spend time with them, whereupon the teenager says "Oh shit, you're right, I should live in the moment, thanks Mom/Dad!" (The parent is dual-gendered in this example.) No. This has never happened.

What happens in "Misunderstood" is the shy teenager that doesn't like spending time with his family is actually in the moment. He's not using technology to hide in his room, he's using it to connect with people in the only way he can, in the way he enjoys. This is a larger-and-cheesier-than-life example of what really does go on in the real world today - where messaging makes friends immediately and casually accessible and any teenager can find his or her niche community to be engaged with.

You can disagree that what smartphones do is worthwhile, and you can certainly be annoyed at everyone constantly glancing down at their phones, but when you decide that they are harming our interactions, that's when they become misunderstood. Like every technology and innovation ever (even coffeehouses), smartphones will continue to be shit on until the people who grew up with them are the only ones left. Don't worry, though, I'm sure there will be plenty for everyone to misunderstand then.

How to Make a Bar

I like liquor, and I like to make drinks at home. A lot. Too much. For people who have been to my house, this is obvious. I have probably around 100 bottles, including far too much whiskey. I also have five or ten rums, all three basic types of tequila (blanco, reposado, and añejo), brandy, applejack, pisco, three or four gins, six or seven amari, and so on and so on.

This doesn't include my fancy whiskey on the
top shelf that you aren't fancy enough to see.

Not everyone needs a collection like this (actually, no one does). But if you drink and, in particular, entertain at least intermittently, having a bar is an important part of being a grown-up. It should be the next step after having "your drink," the thing you order whenever you are at a bar and don't know what you want (mine is whiskey neat, by the way, whatever is the best bottom- or mid-shelf bottle I can see - this doesn't really matter any more, of course, because I have a toddler so the only time I'm in a bar is at my house).

When I first set out to put together a bar, I found it very intimidating, basically because I didn't know anything about liquor and had no money. Don't let that last thing be an impediment for you. Do you go to bars? Then you have enough money not to go to one more bar, or order that extra drink a couple times, and pick a bottle of something every month or so. If you don't drink a lot, it will last you more than a year, and it will keep for at least five times that before you notice a difference in taste. See that picture up there? That's six years of doing what I just said and there is absolutely no reason to go these lengths. Once you have 10-15 bottles, all you really need to do is restock every few months and not lose your shit like I did. There's even a blog dedicated to how this is all you need.

So what if you don't know anything about liquor? What do you think I'm doing here? If you know something about liquor, go read something else. For everyone else, there are two schools of thought on this. The first is pretty good, which is to go out, have a drink you like, find out what's in it, and buy the things to make that drink. Then repeat the process and before you know it you've built a speakeasy in your basement where you handcraft your own Moscow Mule mugs. Not bad, right?

The problem with this process is that it's actually kind of a chore. Who wants to go out and try drinks until you find one you want, make sure it has ingredients you don't have but aren't too expensive or difficult to acquire and repeat every few months? You end up spending a lot of money on cocktails out - something you were avoiding in the first place. And if you pick the wrong drink, you might buy an ingredient you find you don't really like in any other drink. Then you end up with a whole bottle of St. Germain when you only need .25 ounces of it for each drink you make, which means you need to make like 200 of those drinks you thought you liked the first 25 times to even tap out the first bottle.

The second school of thought is for people who have a steady flow of just enough cash and the right vision to achieve their goal. I like this for any aspiring adult, because it gets you settled into your life steadily and with minimal fuss. For people who agree, the following is what I think the basic bar should have. Note that I have far more than this, and you probably will too once you find out which liquor you like. But I am silly, and maybe you can control yourself.

For mixing:

Rye (Rittenhouse if you are lucky to find it, Redemption if not)
Gin (Beefeater if you like juniper, Plymouth if not)
Light Rum (Matusalem is a good starting point)
Demarara Rum (El Dorado 12)
Reposado Tequila (Siete Leguas is good, El Jimador is cheap)
ONLY Smirnoff Vodka (if you buy expensive vodka, I will be sad for you)

For sipping:

A nice Bourbon/Rye/Rum depending on your preference
Scotch (maybe one Islay and one Highland or Speyside if you want to be fancy)
An amaro (Nonino is pricey, Ramazzotti is cheap, either is a good place to start)

Mixers:

Vermouth (Sweet and Dry - start with Cinzano sweet and Noilly Prat dry)
Campari
Cointreau
Wild Card!

Bitters:

Angostura
Peychaud's
Fee's Orange
Bittermen's Mole

This is all you need ever. Really, ever. Use the wild card in mixers to spice up your life or throw a party. Replace your sippers with nicer or cheaper stuff depending on how you did at bonus time. Don't get fancy with the mixers - you don't want to end up with a whole bottle of a trendy gin it turns out you hate in every drink you used to love. And of course if you don't entertain enough to warrant having a mixer you hate, like say tequila, then by all means skip it - although you should remember this stuff keeps really well, I like a good margarita when the weather's nice, and I'm not afraid to give you a bad review on Yelp.

Buy some glasses that aren't 25 ounces (you really don't even need martini glasses or coupes - just get cheap tumblers), invest in nice ice cube trays, buy some citrus, avoid Guinness posters, and boom. You're done.

Now go forth and be an adult.

25 Essential Hip Hop Records

What's all this, then?

These are the records every complete record collection should have, even if you aren't necessarily a hip hop fan. These records define hip hop to some degree, but represent the core qualities of what hip hop has to offer to an even more significant one. These aren't my favorite records in hip hop - and really anyone who gave you this list as their top 25 is either lying to save face or works for Rolling Stone - but they are all five-star classics that will forever be cited as the fundamental works of the genre. And, of course, many if not most of them are my favorite hip hop albums, most notably duh Illmatic.

I may have taken a bit of artistic license with some of this set - some people may argue that it needs more 80s records and maybe my 00s records trend too closely to my own personal likes. But as much as I love them, I don't think Run DMC, Criminal Minded, or Radio is as significant as a work of art as many of the 90s choices I absolutely had to include, and I happen to think even if Madvillain and Hell Hath No Fury didn't sell millions of copies, they represent what has been best about hip hop over the past ten years in significantly different ways. (By the way, I placed the cut-off at January 1, 2010, so no Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy).

Anyway, we could argue this all day (and I'm happy to do so in the comments - that's what they're for) but at some point I need to lock this in, so let's get on with it. These are the 25 records in hip hop that deserve to be canonized, in chronological order.

The Essential Record Collection

Drool.

Even with digital collections allowing for maximum volume in limited space, I don't think everyone needs to own 2000 records and amass the kind of catalog that used to be reserved for libraries. Especially in this age of youtube and Spotify, holding onto records you aren't going to listen to just because someday it will come up and you have to hear that one song to refresh your memory simply isn't necessary like it used to be.

I do, however, think every self-respecting music obsessive needs to have the kind of collection where, regardless of genre, a certain amount of bases are covered so you can combine your own eclectic (or non-eclectic) tastes with a generally acknowledged canon. This canon forms a backbone that allows you to experiment with different aspects of a genre and, as you get older or your tastes evolve, immediately revisit important records that might not have grabbed you the first time around.

Sticking with records that other people like and you just "don't get" can be frustrating sometimes and often fruitless. But the times when it works out and the clouds part and you suddenly understand the hype can be some of the most rewarding moments as a music listener. Many of my favorite albums didn't grab me the first time around, whether it's Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising, and I think keeping your mind open even to records you've rejected before is the only way to make sure you continue to discover new records to fall in love with.

So keeping this goal in mind, what is the ideal "essential collection"? In my mind, it contains a certain amount of generally acknowledge classic or landmark records from each of the key genres (rock, hip hop, jazz, electronic, R&B, country, folk, etc.), providing the kind of solid core that every basic music collection should have. (Of course, by collection I mean a real amassing of records - not just whatever records fall into your life. The latter is obviously perfectly acceptable for most people, but if you're looking at a post like this you are most likely not one of those people so I don't really need to justify this.) These aren't necessarily the best records, because that's more obviously subjective and everyone can make their own list of their favorite or best records, but they are the ones you are most likely to find on those lists, because they are the records people know they can't leave out without having a good reason if they are going to be taken seriously. It is the canon.

Of course, if you love, say, hip hop, you aren't going to be satisfied with a set amount of records to own. One person's satisfactory collection of 10 records is another person's woefully underpopulated set. Developing a hip hop head's dream collection is not the purpose here. Instead, these sets are meant to be useful to listeners who aren't familiar with each genre and would like to learn more. I've picked the arbitrary number of 25 records because it allows for a wide range for most genres, but I might expand or contract this number depending on the genre. I'll post my first set, hip hop, shortly.

The 5 Best Books for Toddlers for Me

Most books for kids are pieces of shit. They are put together by some jerk with a stock photo website account and a list of all the right special interest groups to hit (truck lovers? check. cute animals? double check. weirdly photoshopped babies? please get out of my nightmares.). You might think it's easy to write a kids book, since most of them are only like 56 words with derivative art. You're probably the kind of person who thinks they sound just like the real singer when they do karaoke.

So here are my favorite books for kids. Not my 2-year-old's favorite books for kids, because I know way more about books than him. He likes Richard Scarry books. That guy sucks. So read this and click on the covers to buy every single one of these ass-kickers.

Don Freeman - Corduroy

Holy shit, have you read this? At the end (spoiler alert) the little bear (who wears OVERALLS with ONE BUTTON MISSING) is all "I always wanted a friend." And then the little girl - who at this point has not responded to the bear and we don't even know she can hear him - is like "Me too!" Me. Too. Tears, people. Literally tears.

Philip C. Stead and Erin Stead - A Sick Day for Amos McGee

This book is so beautiful it's retarded. Plus, it's a heartwarming story about an old dude that works at a zoo and has friends like an elephant, a penguin, an owl, a rhino, and a tortoise. These are the five pillars of Toddler Awesomedom and they all show up at his house and then have some fucking tea.

I love this book more than I love my child. Seriously, if the house was on fire and I could only save one of them, I would 100% save my child. What did you think I was going to say? I'm not a monster. Also, I can always buy another copy of the book. Did you not think this through? Imagine how poorly you would deal with an actual fire, Jesus Christ.

Judith Kerr - The Tiger Who Came to Tea

As I mention above, I go totally apeshit for animals coming over to drink tea (note to self: make book about ape coming to tea). So obviously, this book had me at "The Tiger who came to tea." But it's also a rad book, even though the tiger is kind of a dick. Basically, he comes over and eats and drinks everything in the house. There isn't that much more to the story, but you're kind of an asshole if you need more than that. This book has sold more copies than the Bible in England, because British people know what the fuck is up.

Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen - Extra Yarn

The guy who illustrated this book also wrote the existential masterpiece I Want My Hat Back, and is funnier than you or I could ever be. But Extra Yarn is the balls. A girl finds a box filled with yarn and starts knitting up a storm. Just when you think this is a quaint story a Duke shows up and shit goes down. Let's just say it involves three thieves, some ladders, and a motherfucking turntable. If you like yarn you will love Extra Yarn.

Virginia Lee Burton - The Little House

If you live in the city and you read this book, you are no joke going to be like "wtf am I doing to my house? I'M SORRY HOUSE PLEASE FORGIVE ME." Typically, I think anti-city screeds are bs, but this one had me with the changing of the seasons. I want to see the children playing in the brook and the apple trees dancing in the goddamned moonlight. Oh man, little house. You are so awesome. I love how your steps are your mouth.

That's all, go buy those books, read them to your child, and when they are happy tell them "Mommy didn't pick this book, Matt Gasteier did" and they'll be all "who is Matt Gasteier?" and you can be all "He's a great man who has his shit together when it comes to children's books."

The Government Shutdown and This Is the End

I watched two movies this weekend, the overwrought but fairly entertaining Prometheus and the under-baked but often funny This Is the End. Both made me think of the current debacle that is the United States of America, a farce that would play out funnier than Satan with a giant CGI penis if it wasn't for the fact that what's happening is arguably a bigger threat to our constitutional democracy than Watergate.

Don't worry, I have a reason. See, despite the fact that it is totally obvious that the shutdown amounts to nothing more than blackmail by a few extreme right-wing congressmen who have taken over the House, the media goes along with their constant narrative that both sides have created disfunction. This happens for a number of reasons, but the most obvious in the current political landscape is that if the media called these people on their shit when they got out of line, the media would be regarded as even more biased than they already are because they would constantly be calling them on their shit. So they feel they have to walk the line - even when it is as obvious and damaging as it is now.

Film criticism (I hesitate to even call it that these days) is a lot like news journalism at the moment. This Is the End currently sits at 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while this is simply an aggregation of up or down votes, its average score is a 7.1, not too shabby. And yet This Is the End is not very good. In fact, as a movie, it is decidedly worthless. The script is almost non-existent, the dialogue seems to have been invented on the spot, and it is shot like a drunk person trying to take a picture of the toilet after they threw up. On the other hand, as a piece of mindless entertainment, the film is perfectly acceptable. This Is the End ranks so far above total excrement like Grown Ups 2, released in the same summer, that its surprising they share a medium. Similarly, Prometheus, an admirable but ultimately generic action/horror sci-fi think piece, might be dumber than it first appears to be, but it is still loads better than After Earth, which manages to be both an offensively forced attempt to turn Jaden Smith into the new Will Smith and another in the long line of M. Night Shyamalan clusterfucks. So it's really no wonder that critics who were forced to sit through every awful film the studios release would be thankful for the opportunity to bask in some quality stupidity for a change.

But this is where the bar has been lowered to in the past decade or so. Hollywood movies have become so bad, and the variation in topics and intelligence so narrow, that critics are forced to wade through the garbage to find the simply redeemable. It's why Fast and Furious 6 gets a fresh rating and The Avengers tops 90% despite being a film about cartoons blowing up behind men wearing capes and helmets. What other option do they have? Like journalists, reviewers must avoid spending their time spoiling everyone's fun or no one will listen to them again (or so they assume). It's no coincidence that just as both professions have turned towards populism and the broad base, their jobs have become much less essential as more and more people turn to aggregation sites like the Huffington Post and Rotten Tomatoes.

Just as we (or at least half of us) might not want to hear over and over again that the Republicans are doing crazy shit but we need to hear it, so too do we yearn for someone to tell us what meaningless forgettable blockbuster is a good way to pass two hours when what we really need is for someone to shine a light on the movies that make an impact. At some point we have to reject the garbage that is handed to us by the people we are supposed to trust to hand us sustenance.

Of course, sometimes what we really need is garbage, and that's what This Is the End, along with many other shitty but lovable Hollywood movies, is for. (Prometheus is more admirable - an attempt at an intellectual blockbuster that ultimately doesn't come together and is too rigorous in its conventionality to seem unique. It's just sad that this now represents the vanguard of Summer cinema, the pathetic excuse for the thinking man's movie.) But I don't need someone to tell me which garbage pail is the one that doesn't have the dead raccoon in it, and I certainly don't need anyone to treat politics like a mysterious land of nebulous facts with two sides to every story. I don't really think giving the public what they need instead of what they think they want is going to change many minds. But if it's your job, you should at least give it a fucking shot.

You're Listening Wrong (or Why the New MGMT Record Fucking Rocks)

Fuck the Haters

About three years ago, I heard "Flash Delirium," MGMT's follow-up single to their relative-to-other-post-file-sharing-era-records smash debut Oracular Spectacular and thought "Is this a joke?" Then I saw the cover to the full record and though, yeah, this is definitely a joke. A brief listen through proved what everyone suspected, that MGMT froze up at the expectations weighing them down and rather than attempt to create another "Time to Pretend," they had fallen off the deep end, never to be heard from again.

Two years later, on the cusp of a psychedelic revival from Tame Impala, Foxygen, and other Pitchfork-approved niche saviors of the dead rock genre, I picked up Congratulations and realized I had been stuck in 2010 when I listened to it while MGMT was leading the way towards Obama Term 2. "Flash Delirium" now stands as one of the great singles of the new decade, and the album as a whole seems decidedly less goofy than it did on first release and more impressively indebted to the sprawling art rock of the late 60s and early 70s with a firm grasp of modern studio technique that yanks the record out of the retro bin. It sounds every bit as fresh today as it sounded overwrought then.

Unfortunately, even if many of the trends that MGMT predicted in 2010 have come to fruition, many people still seem to have missed two key lessons:

1) MGMT does not need to be psychoanalyzed
2) This is the band they were all along

What ended up happening the first time around was a general critical consensus around the idea that MGMT had been so desperate to either make a grand statement (good old Pitchfork even capitalized Creating Art in their otherwise fair enough dismissal of the record) or reject their previous success that they froze up and produced a work that was too messy to be enjoyable (there were a few champions of the record). People simply couldn't forget Oracular's core singles while listening to the follow-up. Still, nearly ten years after those singles were made, and after the narrowing of the band's audience in the wake of Congratulations, people remain fixated on the band they first came to know, like Radiohead fans wishing for "Creep" in the wake of OK Computer. MGMT is no Radiohead, given, but psychedelic electro rock of the most spectacular kind would never reach the 2013 audience that Radiohead's soaring alt-rock statement did in 1997, so as one audience has drifted away the people who are left to savor the beautiful cover of Faine Jade's "Introspection" running into the subversive first single "Your Life Is A Lie" are few and far between.

That's a real shame, because MGMT might turn out to be my favorite rock record of the year. Building on the psyche-prog influences of their last record, this self-titled statement feels much tighter and more directed than its predecessor. As impressive as Congratulations could be, a full listen could feel exhausting - there's just so much packed into its running time that listening in two or three song segments felt appropriate (the record often felt like it was in movements, anyway). The new record is much tighter, incredibly tight, I would say, even if the vinyl presentation feels appropriate because each side has its own personality (if you can find a vinyl rip, by the way, I highly recommend it, as the CD is brickwalled to shit). The first half begins with the brilliant "Alien Days" before segueing into psych-prog epics that balance a tongue-in-cheek tone with a straight-faced execution. Post-"Your Life Is a Lie," though, the album takes on a decidedly kraut-rock air, balancing their pop sensibilities with driving rhythms and purposefully muddy production. It's both dirtier and less experimental than Animal Collective's last two records, but where Centipede Hz started to feel repetitive, Congratulations maintains its energy level as well as Merriweather Post Pavillion. Like that record, there are only a handful of truly straightforward pop songs, but every track is brimming with ideas and unexpected twists. It feels modern, even as it wears its decades-old influences on its sleeve.

From a commercial perspective, these choices seem to have doomed MGMT to general rejection. I seriously doubt "Alien Days" or even "Plenty of Girls in the Sea," the two pop masterpieces that (nearly) bookend the record, will get any notable play on the radio, and most people continue to come to MGMT expecting pop sugar instead of art meat, dooming this record to the same fate Congratulations unjustly suffered. But who listens to the radio anymore, anyway? And people who are looking for their next hooky four minutes can take Foster the People or Fun. if they are so inclined. Congratulations and MGMT are mission statements, meant to allow the band to produce the music they want to produce, yes, but intended to draw out not the right fan or the true fan but a certain kind of fan, the kind who wants to hear whatever it is MGMT makes next. These are the people who show up to concerts (where bands make money) and follow you down the rabbit hole towards the increasingly sub-divided world of rock in the 2000s. That's when they start to seem much more savvy, and their career plan starts to look just as forward-looking as their music.

The truth is of course that there's nothing wrong with dismissing another MGMT record. But if you're coming at it expecting something and responding to it in those terms, regardless of what you find, you aren't really listening to music, just like I wasn't in 2010 when I streamed "Flash Delirium" into my shitty computer speakers sandwiched between the regular flow of whatever else I stumbled upon that day. You're crunching the numbers, and there are plenty of people to do that for you. Listening to MGMT with an open mind is not a guarantee you'll love it - this isn't music for everyone, nor is most good music - but it is a guarantee that you won't miss out on something you could have loved, if you'd only left your expectations behind.

Criterion Best ofs

Now that I've finished the bulk of my Criterion journey, I put together a list of the best movies in the collection. Rather than pick just ten (which I will still probably do eventually), I created a top ten for every decade from which Criterion includes films. Here is the link to the 1920s list, with a link to each decade in the summary:

The Top Ten Criterion Films of the 1920s

Spotify Playlist: Errybody Grind

Blood on the Cash

This summer, Kanye West and Jay-Z came down from the mountain to each offer up quickly hyped releases that jumped on the schedule unexpectedly and blew up the internet. One of them was fucking amazing. The other one was not good.

Still, I can't help but lump the two together - and not just because they made a circle jerk/product together a few years ago called Watch the Throne that had a few great singles and some other stuff people called music at the time but I'm pretty sure was just Tylenol PM in 1s and 0s. (The last few Jay records have been so lazy and unobtrusively mediocre that it wasn't much of a surprise coming from him. But, with the exception of the similarly dull Graduation, Kanye usually puts out pretty good records. Not 10.0 records. But, you know. Good ones.) I think they personify the level of success hip hop has reached in today's culture, both in terms of achievements and limits. They are pretty famous (Jay a bit more so) but they aren't, like, Michael Jackson or Madonna famous (i.e. they don't pass the "do old white people know them?" test) and I don't know that either one of them is going to get there, basically until I'm an old white person. That's just where hip hop kind of stops at this point in time. They both achieved their level of success through immense talents, but really only partially, as both artists are perfectionists when it comes to crafting their personas and reputations. There are real people who think Jay Z is the best rapper ever and Kanye is the most important artist of the 2000s. Neither one of these things is true, but sometimes I'm in a room with someone and I get that vibe from them.

Yeezus and Magna Carta...Holy Grail are wildly different records. Kanye's record is cutting edge, aggressive, absurdly ambitious, but totally focused and tight without feeling overworked (because it really wasn't). Jay's is like sitting in your "cool" dentist's waiting room. I think I fell asleep three or four times while listening to it, but what I got out of it was that Jay Z is the least hungry emcee in the history of emcees and Timbaland can make music for 40-year-olds in his sleep. In the oral history of Yeezus, apparently published to celebrate the heralded record's one week anniversary, producers talk about hearing songs off the record for the first time and literally jumping out of their chair. It's safe to say this never happened with Magna Carta.

But again, Kanye and Jay don't seem that far apart. Like any artist at this point in their career, the bubble has taken over. The life experience that art demands gives way to the fake experience that fame imposes. What do you say when the only thing you can reflect on is how long it's taking this French-ass restaurant to make your croissants?

Jay's records post-Blueprint (his last truly notable full-length) have set him on the inevitable path to where he sits now, the fat and slow king who is too busy spending his money to give a shit (he does still occasionally show up for his friends). Jay's mentor Biggie made the quintessential rags-to-riches track two decades ago - here it's just riches-to-riches and something feels really, really empty. Look, I'm sure Jay loves his life - and the only moments of energy on the record come when Jay talks about his family - but it also seems like he's very uneasy about the position he finds himself in at this point - stuck as some sort of "cultural ambassador" for a life from which he's long been detached. He's not really sure what to do about it, partially because Jay's never been a conscious rapper, per se, but mainly because he's totally blinded by the bright lights that shine only for him. I wish someone had told him to wait on putting out a record until he figured some shit out, because I can't imagine anyone thinking this thing needs to exist.

Kanye is all id. He screams about himself and black people and history and politics but can't quite make any coherent thoughts out of any of it. His jokes are often clever, but more often too clever for their own good. He confirms that the misogyny he's been flirting with on the past few records is now moving in with him. At one point, he samples Nina Simone's cover of "Strange Fruit" for his shitty story about alimony or whatever dumb thing he cares about that has no business being talked about over a story about lynching.

And yet listening to Yeezus is a thrilling and invigorating experience in the way few records this decade have been. There are multiple epiphanies here - screeches and horns that punch the mix and swoop out just as fast as they swoop in, layers so consciously and carefully built up and dropped in that each listen rewards more than the last. Occasionally, as on "Send It Up" and opener "On Sight," Kanye will let the elementary pieces of a beat loop monotonously for a handful of bars, building to a sample or an especially impressive turn. It's a darkly sexual record even without the explicit lyrics, reminiscent of the best late 80s Chicago house and, as Kanye pointed out to the New York Times, the most primal hip hop club anthems of the post-dirty-South era. Even closer "Bound 2," clearly the track most recognizable as a Kanye song, feels like a conscious step forward and the perfect end to a unified whole.

The music is so good that I find myself making excuses for him. My favorite one right now is that he doesn't care how people receive his music and he's not really trying to say anything intentionally, he's just throwing it out there and hoping people feel it (hence my "id" comment above, sorry to put the cart before the horse). His clumsy attempts at political points then become one of those moments you have when someone says some dumb shit like "Trayvon Martin's murder wasn't about race" and you are so mad that you end up saying "But the slaves and then with police the when what the fuck how do you live in America?"

This is not a good enough excuse. Kanye is simply too powerful, both culturally speaking and as a man, to let his shit run downhill. Fucking a white woman is not getting back at their white husband, it's perpetuating the objectification of women that white men perfected. You aren't justified in taking aim at white people for calling you King Kong when you're making a joke about sweet and sour sauce as a condiment for Asian pussy. Your alimony payments aren't anything like lynching. These aren't even arguments worth having, but they're arguments Kanye forces me to make. It doesn't make Yeezus any less of an artistic statement, but it does completely eradicate his credibility as a cultural critic.

I've read a lot on Yeezus because it's a bullshit record that I really, really love and I don't know how to get around that. Most of the problems people seem to have with it boil down to the idea that Kanye keeps elevating his own experiences to Epic Black Problem level - hence the lynching as alimony metaphor. This is the "Kanye has taken the 'personal is political' saying in entirely the wrong way" theory, and it's a pretty good one. But I'm not sure I even want to give Kanye the credit for a concept this complex. The only really thoughtful song he's ever made was "All Falls Down" ten years ago, and since then every attempt at social commentary has felt totally oversimplified or weirdly self-absorbed, so I think he's really just fucking around and seeing what sticks. This makes me feel like Kanye's dad. I'm not angry, son. I'm just disappointed.

It's really hard to love an album as a musical work so strongly when the lyrics are so mediocre, but if Kanye really was speaking "swag-hili" and I had no idea what he was saying (note: this is still possibly the case) I'd probably think he did a pretty good job. This comes back to a theory I've always had about Kanye, which is that he's not really a rapper to begin with. He's always seemed to have more interest in how his flow and delivery sound than with what he's actually saying. He's usually a funny guy (though surprisingly silly for someone with such an asshole persona) and at times he can even be rather insightful about himself. But if you are asking for complex wordplay to go with these things, look elsewhere (might I suggest Kendrick Lamar?). This is kind of why 808s and Heartbreak, which might have turned out to be the most embarrassing record of his career, is kind of sort of everyone's not-so-secret favorite record he's ever made - until this summer, that is.

The irony of loving Kanye's music and hating his rhymes is that he didn't even really make his music on Yeezus. Most of the best beatwork on the new album is done by other people - though clearly with Kanye's strong guidance. You don't make a record this unified without someone at the head of the table. Let's say Kanye is an incredible director who keeps insisting on starring in his own movies, even though he's not that much of an actor. Jay is, of course, nearly the opposite of this - a spectacular actor who has decided he's going to run the studio, which never really worked out. Jay has always been better at picking beats than, say, Nas (obvious point, I know). But his ear for hooks and BANGERS not interesting music but BANGERS has so obviously dissipated that I'm not even sure he could describe the music on his new record. This is what makes every Kanye record an event even when they aren't really that good and why Jay is slowly sliding into old-man irrelevance.

It might seem unfair to lump the vanilla Jay record in with the dangerously offensive Kanye one. But calling your record Magna Carta... Holy Grail isn't that far off from Yeezus. Jay's cover, too, attempts to project an image of high art and minimalism that is not far away from Kanye's packaging. This isn't the first time Jay has overstated his position. He called his signature record The Blueprint and, more absurdly, his comeback record Kingdom Come. Technically speaking, their talents are much more complementary than they are parallel. But their career ambition is nearly identical, and when quality is ignored the completed records project a similar amount of aimlessness and misguided swagger. Here are two cultural giants lost in the game. Kanye's grasping for straws, rejecting black culture because it doesn't sit right with him just as surely as he's embracing it sonically because he knows its his savior, suddenly left a man without a country. Jay's unsure of where hip hop goes when you're at the top and all you see are Basquiats and diapers, trying on his own to pull hip hop into grown-man land, not yet realizing the cultural touchstones are being lost along the journey. "Strange Fruit" refers to "black bodies swinging in the summer breeze" but all Kanye and Jay see are the fruits of their labor. In the bubble, there doesn't seem to be a difference.