The rock star is the bloated corpse of another musical reality, one where musicians were revered as unto gods, where tales of drug use and casual chauvinism cast their decadent shadow and dimmed the glow of the songs. Yes, the rock star is dead; let us throw rocks at his withered carcass and laugh at ourselves for ever falling in thrall to these idols of pomp and circumstance. Long live the humble musician. Long live teamwork and creative friendship. Long live fucking and making music babies. Long live music where the concept is the thing, rather than the dude in the skinny jeans who made it. Most of all, long live laying it on really thick for a couple of paragraphs for no real reason at all.
In other words, we should be celebrating the gradual diminishment of the almighty ego from popular music (or at least our kowtowing to such ego). Some amazing music has come to us through unexpected collaborations or musical projects where an artist's cultivated identity has been laid aside. Here are some specialists of double-teaming ideas to create delicious sonic spit-roasts.
Mike Patton (Faith No More; Tomahawk; Fantomas; Mr. Bungle; countless others)
The god-king of restless spirits, Mike Patton might be most famous for lending his elasto-spastic vocal chords to Faith No More after the departure of Chuck Mosely. Patton's performances on FNM albums stretched miraculously from angelic warbling to hacking up chunks of atavistic deathscreech. It's this versatility and enthusiasm for the new that has propelled the post-FNM Patton, skipping spryly from singing Italian pop songs with a 40-piece orchestra (his solo album Mondo Cane) to evoking the horror of surgery without anaesthetic on Delirium Cordia, a concept album with Fantomas, the band Patton presides over with members of Slayer, The Melvins and his first band Mr. Bungle.
If there's one thing that unites Patton's scattershot approach to recording, it's a fascination with the extreme and the absurd. From Tomahawk's self-titled debut album, on which he deliriously inhabits a frothing, Leatherface-esque backwoods madman, to the name of the label he somehow found time to establish (Ipecac), Patton is clearly a first-class fantasist obsessed with the bizarre intersection of humour and nightmare. The amazing thing is that across all his varied releases, the slimy, dribbling dimensions that he creates are consistently as enticing as they are repulsive.
Click here for my retrospective review of Tomahawk, possibly my favourite Patton-led album, on the MOJO website. It even made my top 10 albums of the 21st century.
Danger Mouse (Solo; Gnarls Barkley; Danger Doom; Dark Night of the Soul; Broken Bells)
This might be a bit of a cheat, given that Danger Mouse is a producer as well as an artist. After all, a producer who doesn't collaborate with artists is just a guy sitting on a park bench trying to conduct the pigeons. But Brian Burton is more than just a producer; he's an engine room of ideas, a project leader who clearly thrives on matching collaborators with exactly the right material and bending expectations of genre (most obviously with his Grey Album in 2004, which mixed samples from the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album to startling effect).
Outside of his production work, Danger Mouse has presided over a host of great, original projects. Dark Night of the Soul, a collaborative record he curated with Sparklehorse's now sadly departed Mark Linkous with visual accompaniments (and two songs) from legendary surrealist David Lynch. Despite other contributions ranging from Wayne Coyne to Black Francis to Suzanne Vega and beyond, the album felt united under an umbrella of existential angst and spiritual doubt (and a none-more biblical title). He also knows when to stand back and let other personalities shine - Dark Night bears Linkous' fingerprints all over it, which is appropriate both because doubt was much more his territory and because the album ended up as his epitaph.
Even on the projects that go tits up, Danger Mouse tends to find a way to salvage the situation. Though his inspired idea to team minimalist blues-rock duo The Black Keys and Ike Turner may have been disrupted by Turner's inconsiderately timed death, the material was used to create the Keys' funkiest and most spirited album to date (Attack and Release, 2008). Exquisite judgement, good people skills and the ability to operate behind the scenes and out of the spotlight makes Danger Mouse the music world's ultimate project manager.
Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees; Queens of the Stone Age; Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan; The Gutter Twins)
Mark Lanegan might be the ultimate collaborator, as he seems to make his best music when he partners up. With his cement-mixer voice and a jaw so set that it appears to have spent the last 40 years chewing on asbestos, Lanegan might appear the epitome of the lone wolf, but he has spent much of his career as a wandering muse. As a man who looks and talks like he's stepped out of a detective novel, he's not been short of dance partners.
With three excellent albums under their belt, his perfectly mismatched partnership with Isobel Campbell (small and sweet and used to play in Belle & Sebastian) has certainly borne fruit, his bleeding baritone mixing with her wispy croon to create a spectral interplay that's reminiscent of pulpy folk tales and old ghost stories. He's also contributed lead vocals to some of Queens of the Stone Age's most memorable tracks ('Hanging Tree', 'In The Fade') and teamed up with pal from the old grunge days Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs) to create the gloriously scuzzy and curiously eerie rock opus Saturnalia as The Gutter Twins (not to mention his recurring appearances with Dulli's Twilight Singers). Lanegan might have been at grunge's ground zero in the early 90s (check out his collaboration with Kurt Cobain), but he was never trapped by it. He wandered onwards and upwards, seeking inspiration and the ability to inspire.
The Lonely Island
The Lonely Island make stupid music. Glorious, ridiculous, stupid music. Conceived by Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer as a comedy sketch group, The Lonely Island began to focus more on musical shorts after the phenomenal success of the songs like the mercurial 'Lazy Sunday' and the elegant 'Dick In A Box' on Saturday Night Live. Now there's a hit album, Incredibad, with follow-up The Dudes on the way.
The popularity of Samberg and his hombres can be partly chalked up to the fact that although the songs are hip hop parodies, there's a genuine love of the genre in evidence that boosts their credibility as catchy, well-written tracks as well as effective comedy vehicles. The insane collaborations probably helped, too. Using SNL as the perfect celebrity contact book, The Lonely Island gleefully manipulate their guests' public personas to give the jokes a pleasing meta quality, or just to shock the fuck out of anybody listening. You haven't quite lived until you've heard Natalie Portman threaten to sit on your face and take a shit ('Natalie's Rap'), witnessed Julian Casablancas deliver the deadpan line "I saw a Spanish guy doing the Bartman" ('Boombox'), or watched a music video that features Akon launching fireworks from his dick ('I Just Had Sex'). With the aforementioned Akon team-up and a deliciously grotesque collaboration with Nicki Minaj ('The Creep'), signs suggest that the joke-well hasn't run dry just yet and The Lonely Island will continue to reign supreme in the admittedly underpopulated kingdom of Good-Natured Hip Hop Spoofdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment