RIFF MARKET

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Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

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YEAR IN RIFFS: SAM UBL
Probably reading too many novels, not enough discobelle.net. Best: Sam.

If you think old sold in 2006, consider the year's best album. Despite packing more jams than a canefield, Rather Ripped was met by critic dudes with all the enthusiasm of a Walmart cashier on X-mas Eve overtime. Sonic Youth plug in to bug out, to "let melody ring" (Thurston's words), and the kids don't bag it? Sam is brain hurts.

But-- shock shock-- kids don't want old farts at play. They want what's hot and for cheap, and nuanced iconoclasm comes at a high price. If few felt Thurston's "sunshine beat", who's surprised? A million Christmases won't make America's shit any shallower. Computes, then, that shock-and-awe noise sorties and bunker-busting hipster metal fed the experience vacuum in '06, arming the intelligensia against a rising surf of scary words from exotic lands. Reliably contrary, Sonic Youth rediscovered the fun, the straightahead, the hummable while avoiding the buzzworthy like the plague. Boris et al inspired loftier thinkpieces, but Rather Ripped remembered that pop can just as successfully be enlisted in the name of an avant-garde ethos (whatever that means) as it can in defiance of one.

I thought I thought rap sucked this year, but a cursory top 10 suggests otherwise. Among those I suffered gladdest: Trae (rhino), Weezy (cheetah), Pitbull (...). Spare Ross for the "fat boy in a big body" line, Luda for "Grew Up a Screw Up." I'll forever remember 2006 as the year I stopped throwing darts at my will.i.am dartboard, because he gave Game the most hilariously infantilizing hook ever on "Gangsta Boogie", and because I figured out hot international girls really love the Black Eyed Peas. Lupe's leak was better than the finished product, and I'll jam that Pharrell/DJ Drama tape all motherfucking day before I mess with In My Mind. Meanwhile, don't even ack like you don't love Young Dro.

The Clipse really do make everyone look foolish, though, especially the rap-retarded bloggers they've drawn into the coke rap discourse. For my monies, Hell Hath No Fury toilet-paperizes everyone in part because its production dramatizes G-rap hyperrealities more creatively than the gunshot-sample addled, ghetto-cheap-synth driven tableaux we're used to. And trap-hop deniers are blind if they can't see that the words more than fulfill the sub-zero flows' weighty promise. The Clipse may hit the streets with all the joie de Visa of troubled young talent, but remember, these are boys who claim to read Deepak Chopra when they're not toasting motion-free. Everyone, regardless of hustle, is pretty much constantly dogged by the kind of questions money can't chase away.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006