I think so far in my listening challenge
it must be clear: I do not have any hip hop
in the collection. I do not own any rap albums.
There may be hip hop moments in a Beyoncé
record, guest spots by rappers on a James Blake
album, spoken word artists doing a thing that
could not justifiably be called rap or hip hop.
I did buy a couple of CDs of superstar Kendrick
Lamar because I felt like I needed an education.
He does not appear in the vinyl stacks,
but this guy, Anderson .Paak, does. I heard
Malibu first, downloaded it, listened and
marveled at his fluidity between genres
and his undeniably great musicianship.
A multi-instrumentalist, but primarily a
drummer who happens also to be a great
singer, this hip hopper was not using drum
machines and loops–all the instruments
were real and the playing was virtuosic.
My beef with rap and hip hop, even if
I understood intellectually its significance,
was that I just could not get behind
feeling yelled at for forty-five minutes.
I own that shortcoming. I have always
been enticed by melody–so any kind of
music in which melody is absent, just
does not float the boat. Here, though,
with .Paak, I finally found a perfect fusion
of genre, a cross pollination of soul, pop,
jazz, funk, and yes, rap. Okay. I’m in.
Eventually, I bought this predecessor to
Malibu, called Venice. I haven’t listened
to it in years, partly, I’m guessing, because
I did not like it nearly as well. Let’s listen!
It’s all programmed drumming, which is
disappointing. Very few songs feature musicians
other than .Paak and the producer, LO_DEF.
Very few of these tracks have the melodic
structures anywhere close to the sophistication
of the tunes on Malibu or Ventura or any of
the collaborations he will do later with Bruno,
but it is completely listenable, enjoyable,
interestingly sequenced with interludes of
ocean waves and various found audio bits
about Venice Beach, but ultimately, the things
I most respect about Anderson .Paak are largely
missing from this record. Thankfully, there’s
more singing than rapping, but there’s more
than enough rapping for me and I find the lyrics,
when they are not deliberately provocative in
the ways that hip hop lyrics often are, just
kind of silly–the lyrics of a very young man
with serious musical chops. Girls, girls, girls.
Since 2014, .Paak has only released officially
four solo albums, all titled after California
place names: Venice, Malibu, Oxnard, and Ventura.
I’ve only heard three of these, and while
I find Venice a million miles from terrible,
I would have preferred tonight to listen to
Malibu or Ventura.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Venice, Steel Wool/OBE Records, 2014, double black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 