Tuesday, June 09, 2009 - Posts
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Speaking of aging rappers, it's easy to forget that De La Soul is still alive and kicking it. Their albums aren't wire-to-wire masterpieces anymore—1996's Stakes Is High was probably the last of those—but there are pleasures to be found in their mature material, much of which addresses the subject of maturing in a young man's game. "Everyone cools off from being hot," Posdnous observes on The Grind Date, "it's about if you can handle being cold or not." De La has handled it better than most.
But what to make of their new album? In late April, De La released Are You In?, part of the Nike+ series, in which the sneaker company commissions workout music from indie acts like LCD Soundsystem and Aesop Rock. De La's album has prompted some hand-wringing over whether the group has finally sold out, but I doubt devoted fans are losing much sleep over it, particularly when it's been five years since their last release.
The more interesting question is whether De La has produced good exercise music. Over the weekend, I took Are You In?—which consists of a single 44-minute track—for a 44-minute jog. Appropriately for this runner, it starts lethargically, with Posdnous rapping about how hard it is to get up in the morning. (His first attempt fails, and he retreats to his conjugal bed to "spend another hour curled up, intertwined, like curly fries.") But around the 18-minute mark, the tempo gets faster, and the lyrics lower in saturated fat. "Got to keep up with your cardio," advises Trugoy "so you can have energy to stash." From here on out, the beats are arranged into a series of effectively inspirational crescendos. They're punctuated, however, with refrains borrowed from the Richard Simmons songbook: "Run! Pick up the pace!"
This is exercise music about exercise. Personally, I prefer running to something that makes me forget what I'm doing—something more like the De La exercise playlist I've had on my iPod for years. Despite their reputation as cerebral rappers, De La has always made music that's great to move to. Herewith, my De La Soul running mix, guaranteed to improve your next cardiovascular activity:
"Intro," Stakes Is High
"Respect," AOI Presents- Impossible: Mission
"Eye Know," 3 Feet High and Rising
"Magic Number," 3 Feet High and Rising
"A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays,' " De La Soul Is Dead
"Live @ the Dugout '87," AOI Presents- Impossible: Mission
"Oooh," Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
"Brakes," Stakes Is High
"Verbal Clap," the Grind Date
"Rock Co. Cane Flow," the Grind Date
"Kicked Out the House," De La Soul Is Dead
"I Can Do Anything (Delacratic)," 3 Feet High and Rising
Cool down:
"I Am I Be" Buhloone Mindstate
"Breakadawn" Buhloone Mindstate
As for De La themselves, Posdnous admitted to EW's Music Mix blog that "We're not the biggest of runners." When he does feel the need to work off the curly fries, he listens to Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back.
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Big thanks to everyone who wrote in about the notion that Tom Waits clears the musical palate.
Here's the stuff that you use to reconnect:
Music: Sibelius, Neil Young, Townes Van Zandt (many times), early Frank Zappa, weeks of Steely Dan, a Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers/Little Feat marathon, Kind of Blue (which allows you to feel "pensive and relaxed while engaged and pensive"), and ACDC. ("How many songs can one band write about girls, getting girls, or being awesome around girls while only using A, E, and D chords? It doesn't matter.")
Movies: Most common were various favorites from one's early moviegoing days, followed by Godfather I and II. No argument there.
Books: Even more variation here, with Tolkien and Murakami as the only consensus gatherers. What I'd forgotten about is poetry—sorry, poetry—which many of you turn to when the mind needs a new meadow. One nice discovery (for me) was David Berman's "Self-Portrait at 28."
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As Dana promised in her alternate reading last week, Sam Raimi's marvelous horror throwback Drag Me to Hell spits you out with your brain buzzing (and your clothes phlegm-drenched). Unlike Dana, I saw this movie with friends, and we puzzled out our own theories afterward. Be warned: Spoilers lurk just around the corner, working their moistened gums and preparing to pounce.
Our question was: Putting aside whether Christine's supernatural torment is real or imagined, what point are Raimi and his screenwriting brother Ivan trying to make with it (besides, of course, scaring us silly)? We landed on a sort of mortgage-crisis allegory. Christine works, obviously, as a bank's loan officer—it's in her eagerness to prove to her boss that she is capable of making "tough decisions" that she denies rheumy-eyed, shark-toothed Mrs. Ganush a mortgage-payment extension, and thereby invites upon herself an ancient Gypsy curse consigning her soul to eternal rot.
This much has been observed, for its recession-era significance: In succumbing to base careerism, Christine jeopardizes her soul. But we can push this further. What I haven't seen discussed is how Mrs. Ganush's curse has the effect of throwing Christine at the mercy of a shadowy, unknowable, bizarro economy: Mediums and spiritual advisers—"specialists" who may, in fact, be con artists weaving an elaborate, greedy fiction—demand various outlandish sums from Christine, both monetary ($10,000 for a séance) and feline ("Here kitty, kitty!"); these prices are free-floating, untethered to any product or service bearing a concrete, determinable value. What better punishment, really, for a representative of the mortgage system, that shadowy, unknowable, bizarro economy full of "specialists" who weaved an elaborate, greedy, and untethered fiction for the ages (of which, it should be pointed out, Mrs. Ganush was a victim)?
In this reading, Drag Me to Hell operates as a wild, spooky riff on postmodern capital. Note how the plot line is built around a series of (frustrated) transactions: The rejected payment extension, the palm reader's fee, the kitten sacrifice, the medium's fee, the pawn shop, the goat sacrifice, and, finally, the cruel reversal—worthy of O. Henry but especially relevant today—in which a rare coin is rendered profoundly worthless and a cheap wooden button becomes priceless. What is the movie's penultimate scene—the one in which Christine digs up Mrs. Ganush's corpse and shoves an envelope into her mouth—if not a visit to one hellacious ATM to make a deposit?
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