HIP-HOP
The Coup,
"Pick a Bigger Weapon" (Epitaph) *1/2
Though he's been
a hero in the underground hip-hop world since 1993, Boots Riley, the
main man behind the Oakland, Calif., duo the Coup, is best known in
the music world for the controversy over the original cover of
"Party Music," released shortly before 9/11, and presciently
portraying him blowing up the World Trade Center with a guitar tuner
as detonator. At its best, the group's music has indeed been
explosive: Witness the way DJ Pam the Funkstress' electro-synth
groove propels the 2001 track "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO," which
found Riley striking the perfect balance between his Marxist
politics, righteous anger and wicked satire. But the equilibrium is
all off on the Coup's fifth album, which is a muddled mess when it
isn't outright annoying.
"I'm here to
laugh, love, f--- and drink liquor / And help the damn revolution
come quicker," is the line most often cited by the disc's
boosters. But what they hail as an infusion of playground humor
making the politics more entertaining, I hear as sophomoric
silliness and lowest-common-denominator pandering. Riley's
self-serving praise of shoplifters in "I Love Boosters" and his
attack on brownnosers in "A---Breath Killers" are tedious from the
first couplets, and the nursery rhyme at the heart of "Head (Of
State)" is the sort of "critique" that makes you think Fox is right
about pea-brained liberals; there are a lot of more pressing things
to say about Iraq than, "Bush and Hussein together in bed ...
Billions made and millions dead." But the problems with "Pick a
Bigger Weapon" are musical as much as lyrical.
Largely recorded
live in the studio with a big band featuring local guitar hero Tom
Morello, Dwayne Wiggins of Tony Toni Tone and veterans of Maze and
the Gap Band, the Coup is aiming for a version of Digital
Underground's update of the classic psychedelic party grooves of
Parliament-Funkadelic, but it actually delivers pointless, unfocused
eclecticism. With 17 tracks clocking in at 65 minutes, the disc
seems twice as long, and the effort to weed out the few successful
moments such as Silk E's guest turn on "BabyLet'sHaveABabyBeforeBuchDoSomethin'Crazy"
just aren't worth the trouble.
ROOTS
Elvis
Costello & Allen Toussaint, "The River in Reverse" (Verve/Forecast)
**
I've always
preferred the former Declan MacManus, when he's in straight-ahead
rock mode, rather than dabbling with ill-conceived or pretentious
genre experiments such as his forays into country ("Almost Blue"),
baroque ("Imperial Bedroom") and classical avant garde ("The Juliet
Letters"). As one of these detours, his collaboration with New
Orleans soul/jazz legend Allen Toussaint is more successful than
most, but it still requires us to accept Elvis Costello as a great
interpretive singer, and that has always been the least of his
talents.
The two artists
met in New York at a benefit to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina,
and they recorded in New Orleans late last year as it was still
struggling to climb out of the wreckage. (Toussaint lost his home in
the storm.) Costello scoured his latest partner's lengthy catalog
for overlooked gems; rewrote some to comment, albeit obliquely, on
disasters natural and manmade; and penned a few new tunes, alone or
in collaboration with Toussaint. Augmented by the R&B legend's
Crescent City Horns, Costello's backing band the Impostors turn out
passable though hardly stellar version of the more uptempo Nawlins'
grooves, but the more swampy ballads really drag. And even the best
of these tunes sink beneath ol' Declan's homely vocals, his tendency
to mistake over-singing for emoting and the fact that he just
doesn't have the soul to make moving tunes such as "On the Way
Down," "All These Things" and "Nearer to You" his own.
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