Kanye West is too talented to be making the albums he's put out recently. Elsewhere, Justice rocks, the Cribs grow up, and Into the Wild wanders.
Kanye West is super-talented. That may seem an obvious statement, but I want to make sure I establish my allegiance to the man before getting into my review of Graduation, which, to my mind, continues one of the biggest traps the super-talented can fall into.
I prefer The College Dropoutto Late Registration, by a wide margin, because the Kanye West of the former was a rambunctious egomaniac still tempered by his near-fatal car crash, his years of struggle, his inability to fully negotiate the divide between mainstream rap’s bling and indie hip-hop’s artistic integrity. When The College Dropout’s internal tension gave way to Late Registration’s fully-armed sonic mastery, it was hard not to miss the engaging signs of insecurity that made hits like “Jesus Walks” not just spectacular but also very human. Now with his silly sales competition with 50 Cent a done deal, Graduation can perhaps be more accurately judged. It’s an attempt to merge the confessional element of his first record and the world-beater persona of the second, which probably explains why nobody prefers it to either of the earlier two. He’s still not able to make a convincing love song – the odes to his momma have subsided, but now he’s giving it up for his hometown of Chicago – and although the party anthems are suitably potent, I never much cared for his showmanship. Instead, give me lots more of the Eminem-worthy frankness of “Drunk and Hot Girls,” where he exposes just how empty fame is, and “Big Brother,” where he acknowledges he’ll never escape his mentor Jay-Z’s shadow, and “Everything I Am,” where he allows a moment of reflection so poignant that I want to forgive him everything. He deserved to blow up as huge as he did, but I’ll always prefer the Kanye who joked and hustled as quick as he could in the hopes that maybe someday somebody might give him a shot at the big time. The Kanye we have instead is, for the second straight album, a guy who can make a bestseller so endlessly catchy but only intermittently involving.
Justice is two guys. Two arty French guys. And while you can expect that their strain of dance music won’t be just a parade of big, dumb beats all in a line, I’m impressed how smart they are at making self-consciously stupid tunes. The tracks work as dance tracks first. Then you notice the rock elements – I bet Andrew W.K. loves this stuff. Then you realize that the whole thing comes together nicely as an album concept – not just in terms of segues from track to track, but as a tonal whole so as to break the monotony that so much instrumental music suffers from. The occasional vocalist grabs your attention and adds his or her own hooks to the mix. Let there be no mistake: This debut is more a collection of previously established singles than a brave new world. But from home office to car commute, pop chill-out to ego-crazy club banger, Cross glides, tickles, and rocks plenty.
The Jarman Brothers have evolved from Strokes-biting juveniles who fumbled their way through their random romantic hookups into a proper pop-rock group who have obtained a certain level of poetic faculty to analyze their still-complicated romantic problems. Some of the development might be the result of producer Alex Kapranos, who manages to keep them sounding tight without morphing them into a version of his own band, Franz Ferdinand. But it might just be the songs. “Moving Pictures” takes the boring old complaints about our shallow celebrity culture and spices them up with a nice parallel between the singer’s personal affairs and the idiots he sees on TV. In several spots, the Cribs let you know they don’t think too much of the unwashed masses, and especially when Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo chants his edgy monologue on “Be Safe,” you get the impression that this band gained maturity while they gained perspective, even if they still blame their problems on MTV. They remain hopeless about their less-than-impressive love lives. But at least I no longer root against them.
The danger of bedroom electronica is that its miasma of sensitive shards of delicate tunefulness never congeals into anything. (It’s also known as the Morning Becomes Eclectic problem.) Although there are lyrics here, Dan Snaith’s one-man-band mostly aims for an ephemeral prettiness that’s virtually impossible to distinguish from track to track. Everything’s lovely and angelic, and I’m sure the real-life Sandy, Desiree, Eli, and Irene honored in the song titles are all deeply touched by his gently sunny tunes. But this is one more marginal, well-touted record whose chief selling point is its complacent willingness to not interfere with your life in any significant way.
Since complaining about the stylistic mannerisms that marred Midnite Vultures and Sea Change, I’ve pretty much loved the Beck that’s emerged since. Guerobegan a move away from a studied approach to album-making, a reassuring sign that he was easing up a little and actually having as much fun as he always pretended he was. After I completely misunderstood “Nausea” when it first came out, I was shocked how terrifically it folded in with the rest of The Information, an overlong record whose ambitions, even when misguided, are pretty dazzling. Now comes this one-off single, a track attached to nothing. It continues the rhythm-first strategy of his recent albums as well as a nearly subliminal merging of obscure samples, hip-hop beats, and hooks, hooks, vocal hooks, hooks. Whereas earlier in his career his lyrics were off-puttingly dumb and nonsensical, now they’re a dazzling collection of urgent fragments, which is handy for a song about, well, a time bomb. No one’s paying attention, but I’m telling you: Beck is in the middle of the most fruitful, intriguing, and rewarding part of his career.
Writer-director Sean Penn’s treatment of Jon Krakauer’s book about a doomed young man who went to Alaska to find himself and ended up meeting death is precisely made and exactly what it set out to be. How you will respond to it will probably depend on your own take on the quest for personal freedom, the call of the wild, and the desire to test your limits against the cruelties of nature. I’m probably on the low end in my enthusiasm for such Thoreau-ian passions, but I’m not opposed to them outright, and yet I found that Into the Wild doesn’t take a critical-enough perspective or offer persuasive counter arguments to young Christopher McCandless’ romantic wanderlust. This isn’t a crippling blow because the movie sweeps you along with his scattershot quest to escape himself. And as long as Penn doesn’t try to provide answers in the form of his parents’ casual cruelty – William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden are conceived so narrowly that they’re not monsters but toothless clichés – I can accept the ambiguities of McCandless’ mission. And there are nice supporting turns to help out as well – Catherine Keener is great, topped only by a truly fantastic Hal Holbrook. I’ve only seen one other of Penn’s directorial efforts, The Pledge, and it too featured an unknowable protagonist driven by impulses so powerful and yet so unfathomable that he became a walking puzzle. Penn digs these sorts of souls, and even if they don’t make for perfect films, it’s sure an adventure sitting through them.
A breezy delight and a fun look at a nerdy microcosm of the single-white-male American subculture, The King of Kong might be a touch overrated, but I’m not gonna badmouth it too loudly. What I will say, though, is that documentary director Seth Gordon sometimes tips into smugness when he presents this world of competitive video-game playing, including bad ‘80s movie-soundtrack rock anthems into the proceedings so that if we didn’t know already, he thinks a lot of these people are losers. The true masterpiece some people claim to see here would have happened if Gordon had made us as addicted as his lovable geeks are to Donkey Kong. And I speak as someone who obsessed about the game back in the day but am quite pleased that I no longer frequent arcades. But I still am curious about other people, and I wish Gordon was the same.
Consumables is a biweekly overview of popular culture.
