May 2009

The mid-1990's was the strangest time in American cultural history. It was a reckless free-for-all, high on that ignorantly blissful period of peace between the Cold War and the War on Terror. Well, maybe not high, but at least drunk. I say this because America's musical tastes were a lot like a drunk's tastes at the end of the night. It was a mix of things we never would have touched otherwise, in quantities that were, at best, ill-advised. Still, some really amazing stuff came out around this time, not the least of which was the explosion of electronic music. Oddly enough, rock temporarily fell out of favor. Most of what was out there didn't try very hard to escape the samey fuzz of alterna-rock or the oxymoronic harmonies of pop-punk.

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On "Things Done Changed", the first (non-intro) track of his debut LP Ready To Die, The Notorious B.I.G. says, "The streets are a short stop/ you're either slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot". Biggie, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, really lived the life of a ghetto-bound criminal. From that came a certain verisimilitude and sharp clarity that set Biggie apart as an artist.

A rap career was practically unintentional for Christopher Wallace. He was a talented youth who showed promise as an English student, but he ended up selling drugs and messing around with guns by the age of 12. The material that would become his career-making demo might never have happened if it weren't for a 1991 jail sentence.

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If there's one thing doing Artists Condensed has taught me, it's that an individual's love for the work of a particular band is, to borrow a phrase from previous Condensee Rufus Wainwright, an imaginary love. By tearing through an entire artist's catalog, I've come to discover time and again that I just don't like a number of artists as much as I thought I did. I try to imagine what kind of person actually enjoys even 75% of what a given artist produces, let alone the full 100%, and the only kind I can think of is the raging super-fan who literally doesn't listen to anyone but Band X or Artist Y. Sure, I can say that I like The Cure, just not nearly as much as I thought I did at the outset.

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The Cure is one of those bands that listeners try to encapsulate with a particular sound, but were never actually beholden to any one style. Some remember the gothic bookends, others the poppy middle years, still others have the band's handful of forlorn love songs stand in for their entire run. We all develop internal relationships with our favorite artists by applying their music to periods of our lives, but in the end that's really just a lot like snipping a particular individual out of a larger photograph and calling what remains the full picture. Given the constant rotation of members and frequent alterations of style, the full discography of The Cure ends up looking like a collage anyway. Snipping out your favorite part is easier because of this, but doing so dismisses the artfulness of the whole.

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Some bands are just plain inexplicable. Somehow, The Cure has remained popular for thirty solid years despite being unbelievably weird and off-putting. Their pop songs have kept them afloat in a sea of strange, abrasive and often experimental music. They have been claimed by any number of subcultures, from the goths to the post-punkers to the general cultists of all things 80's. The truth is that, like most acts that survive this long, The Cure isn't really any of these things. In fact, the band itself has only been one thing consistently, and that's the home of Robert Smith. I can't think of a single rock band that has gone through as many lineup changes as The Cure, not that it really makes much of a difference. All Cure albums stand on their own, even defying expectations within themselves.

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Nelly's Country Grammar came out in 2000. Rap had definitely experienced some major transformations in the years between the infancy of Gangsta and the mainsteam acceptance of the genre. The 90's were a pretty rough time for rappers in a very real sense. The biggest stars of the day found themselves literally in the crossfire of violent rivalries that were only further inflamed by sensationalist media coverage. Those who survived had a tendency to sell out, or at least relinquish what little talent they had after seeing that making albums full of honest topics did little more than hopelessly politicize those who ought not to be painted as crusaders.

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There are a lot of great bands that took a hard shift in their sound at some point in their career. Sometimes it destroys them and sometimes it saves them. In the case of Depeche Mode, their switch from 80's dance pop to a darker, more experimental sound rescued them from the growing obscurity of synthesizer-based acts at the end of the decade. By making a niche for themselves in a less techno-industrial corner of electronic music, the band went from being the best in their genre to creating an entirely new soundscape.

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