Author: Max Ross

Originally written for Realbuzz 

There’s something deliciously lame about Clay Aiken’s new album, On My Way Here. On all his previous outputs, Aiken’s milked his boyish, Pee-Wee-esque persona, happy to satisfy both the teenie-boppers and their wannabe moms. On this release, though, young Clayton is trying to mature. Sadly, it seems he’s playing dress-up in his father’s clothes, without realizing he’s just playing.

On songs like "Ashes," Aiken is full of angst, sadness, and remorse (lately this has become the standard emotional cocktail for young, disgruntled pop artists…perhaps it’s always been that way). Maybe it’s an unfortunate condition of having come up knowing nothing but the interior of the industry, but whatever emotions he has can only be expressed through the most commonplace clichés.

"Someone told me what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger," he leads off. Which sets him up for the reprise, "Now I can rise above the ashes."

But "Ashes" presents us only with general, widely relatable emotions. It’s not until the introspective "The Real Me" that Aiken really gets into his groove.

"Foolish heart/looks like we’re here again
the same old game of plastic smile/don’t let anybody in
hidin’ my heartache/will this glass house break?"

I haven’t done the investigation, but there’s no way this wasn’t ripped from the journal Aiken kept in junior high. Unless maybe Jewel helped him with his songwriting. The Chorus:

"You see the real me/hidin’ in my skin/broken from within"

Apparently The Real Him is a fourteen-year-old boy whose date to the spring dance has just rejected him. Now he’s looking in the mirror, of course.

Underlying each track is a predictably undulating progression: When the songs are loud and over-produced (which is often), Aiken is defiant and/or angry and/or triumphant; when the instrumentation dies away and we’re left with only his voice (which is also often), Aiken is morose and/or contemplative.

The guitars have been filtered through so many computers they sound like electrical currents; the drums have been softened and tweaked so they sound like guitars. Sure, Aiken’s got a good voice. But it’s so obviously manipulated that even this, which should be his strength, gets ruined. The term for magazine models is airbrushed; I’m not sure what it is for musical artists.

I guess what it comes down to is, Aiken is now professing sincerity, and yet his music hasn’t really changed at all. Before, at least, he was (outwardly) content to be a poster boy for the industry. Now it seems he wants to break away and become independent – if we’re to take his lyrics seriously at all, this is the message he’s sending – and yet, he is completely without the faculties to do so.

Kill your darlings.

This is the command given young writers when they’re learning to edit their stories and poems. (It usually comes directly after the first piece of advice for novice authors: Quit now.)

Kill ‘em dead. The line is attributed variously now to Faulkner, now to Hemingway. Extrapolated, it’s something like, ‘take your best sentences, and get rid of them. Chances are, if you’re impressed with your own writing, you’re being too cute.’ Really it’s just another injunction highlighting the masochistic aspects of this practice. Editing is peeling away dead skin, but there’s some pain involved.

Vladimir Nabokov compares a first draft to a loogey you’ve coughed into a tissue – it’s this ugly thing that you don’t want to show anyone, but also it came from deep inside you. At the end of his life, it seems the author of Lolita and Pale Fire took the editorial call to arms a step further than most.

Nabokov died in 1977, leaving behind 138 index cards with a draft of his last novel, The Original of Laura, scribbled on them, and instructions that the cards should be destroyed. (In terms of darling killing, this is something like being an accomplice to murder, I think.) Last week, Dmitri Nabokov – Vladimir’s son – announced he was publishing the manuscript.

I’m reminded of a scene from Don Quixote, when the beautiful Marcela comes down from the hills and confronts a group of travelers. Anyone who looks upon Marcela, it’s said, will immediately fall in love with her. She’s here to tell them not to look:

"Heaven made me, as all of you say, so beautiful that you cannot resist my beauty and are compelled to love me…But until now heaven has not ordained that I love, and to think that I shall love of my own accord is to think the impossible…The limits of my desires are these mountains, and if they go beyond here, it is to contemplate the beauty of heaven and the steps whereby the soul travels to its first home."

And, having said this, and not waiting to hear any response, Marcela turned her back and entered the densest part of a nearby forest, leaving all those present filled with admiration as much for her intelligence as for her beauty. And some…gave indications of wishing to follow her, disregarding the patent discouragement they had heard.

What always bugged me about this episode was that, if Marcela doesn’t want people to see her, she shouldn’t come out of hiding. I suspect that deep down, like everyone else, she likes to be doted on from time to time.

I have the same suspicion of Nabokov’s feelings toward his ‘lost’ novel – if he wanted it destroyed, he would have destroyed it. Dmitri, at least, insinuates as much in an interview with The New York Times. "I also recalled," he said, "that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with The Original of Laura – could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?"

The same thing happened about eighty years ago, when Max Brod decided to publish the manuscripts that his good friend, Franz Kafka, had left behind – despite the fact that Kafka wanted his texts destroyed, as well:

Dearest Max,

My last request: Everything I leave behind me (in my bookcase, linen-cupboard, and my desk both at home and in the office, or anywhere else where anything may have got to and meets your eye), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should t least promise faithfully to burn themselves.

Yours,
Franz Kafka

As Dmitri doubted his father’s intentions, so too did Brod doubt Kafka’s:

Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.

I am far from grateful to him for having precipitated me into this difficult conflict of conscience, which he must have foreseen, for he knew with what fanatical veneration I listened to his every word…I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a post card.

Coming to the end of this blog post, I’m finding that I don’t really have a point to make. These are just things that happened. I’m not here to reprimand the authors for attempting -genuinely or not – to destroy their works. Rather I find comfort in the fact that, even on their deathbeds, these writers were still playing head games with those they held dearest. And, of course, I’m thankful to Brod and Dmitri Nabokov for not being the literal-minded readers that might actually have fulfilled their respective authors’ (faux) requests.

 

^{Originally published on Realbuzz.com}

In 1999, The Roots came out
with a double-disc live album, The Roots Come Alive, with songs
culled from performances in Switzerland, New York, and various other
locations. Rising Down, the group’s tenth album — second
since Jay-Z brought them over to Def Jam Records — is in many ways
more live than that release. Throughout, we are treated to a number
of interludes, speeches, and instrumental shifts reminiscent of a Roots
concert. A somewhat grungy tone pervades, as if the band went in, played
their instruments, and the tracks made it to the album without too much
tinkering (that’s what it sounds like, though I doubt it’s true…).
The result is something somehow personal, as if we are witnessing the
album, instead of just listening to it.

The usual cast of cameos makes
its appearances — Common, Dice Raw, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, among others.
But really, as all Roots fans know, Black Thought emerges as the most
impressive. The only other rapper I can think of that has a flow as
natural and entertaining as Black Thought’s is Ghostface Killah. I’m
not sure if it’s a function of their having been MCs for so long,
or if they’ve always been able to rap this way, but it really seems
as if they’re just talking, and what they’re saying happens to rhyme.
Nowhere is Black Thought more impressive than on "75 Bars (Black’s
Reconstruction)": "Show me a puppet without a puppeteer/I’m in
the fields with a shield and a spear/I’m in your girl with her heels
in the air." It’s a free-association track on African American
identity that rivals Beck for Rorschach-like complexity.

Because The Roots play their
own instruments, instead of relying on samples and looped beats, their
sound is often much fuller and more organic than most other rap music.
It’s not without its jarring qualities – sometimes it’s strange
to hear that rock-style electric guitar cutting through a rhythm. But
the band members, led by visionary drummer ?uestlove, by now have developed
such chemistry that at times it really seems they can do anything with
their respective instruments. (Last time I saw them in concert, they
reproduced Mims’ "This Is Why I’m Hot.")

Though much of their ouvre
is phenomenal, very little of it is actually marketable. Usually, though,
The Roots will deign to reserve four minutes of each album for a radio-friendly
song. On Phrenology we got "Break You Off"; The Tipping
Point gave us "Star" and "Don’t Say Nuthin’"; and
Game Theory brought the shoulda-been-huge "Don’t Feel Right."
(And of course, "You Got Me" from Things Fall Apart sort
of defined their careers- but that entire album is so classic I prefer
not to single out any song as better than the others.) Likewise, on
Rising Down, The Roots have given us "Rising Up."

It begins with some soft female
vocals:

"Yesterday I saw a B-Girl
crying, and I walked up and asked ‘what’s wrong?’

She said the radio’s been
playing the same song all day long.

I told her I got something
you been waiting for

I got something you been waiting
for!"

Then Black Thought jumps in
with his non-stop spit-fire lyrics, delivering exactly what the song
promises – something different from anything else out there, but still
incredibly exciting. Beneath the vocals, there’s an ocean of drums
that sounds like the guys in Washington Square Park banging on upside-down
paint cans — a sound that, for whatever reason, never fails to elicit
adrenaline.

By no means is Rising Down
the easiest or prettiest album to listen to. The Roots demand some attention,
and even some thought, from their fans. But they have a mission, namely
to make music that they want to make, unadulterated by others’ interests,
and the craftsmanship they put into their tunes is visceral, and worthy
of our time.