Why I Hate Will Smith

Several times in the past few weeks, I’ve encountered metrobuses emblazoned with the phrase “Will Smith is going. Are you?” I don’t know what sort of event or activity these advertisements are advertising, and I don’t much care. In fact, Will Smith’s attendance or inclusion to just about anything would make me avoid it. I can’t stand Will Smith. I don’t care if he’s a huge box office draw (despite his limited range), the “most powerful actor on the planet,” or good-looking in a non-threatening way, or whatever. I can’t stand him.

I have no objections to the whole clean-cut and wholesome thing. There is nothing wrong with being either clean-cut or wholesome. I appear rather clean-cut myself. And I feel that modern American culture could probably use a little more wholesomeness. What causes me to detest Will Smith is his smugness about being clean-cut and wholesome. It’s great that his grandma told him not to cuss and to respect women. But dude, don’t brag about the fact that you don’t cuss in raps, as if that makes you better than other MCs. That’s obnoxious. In the words of the bard of Detroit, Mr. Marshall Mathers: “Will Smith don’t gotta cuss to sell raps, well I do, so f**k him, and f**k you too.”

The other thing I dislike about him is his constant pursuit of the lowest common denominator, whether musically or on film. His desire to be as well-liked as possible by as many people as possible causes him to shy away from anything remotely controversial, and thus, artistically challenging. Musically, this trend became most apparent when he parted ways with DJ Jazzy Jeff, who really was keeping him real (with the exception of the unfortunate “Boom! Shake The Room!”). This is also about the same time he contributed to the unfortunate trend of rappers using their real name, rather than creating a witty sobriquet. (I only approve of rappers using their real names if they are going to repeatedly use a screwed & chopped sample of themselves saying their name throughout their songs. Mike Jones!) And speaking of the lowest common denominator, what sort of rapper puts out a love song to his son? How sentimental and maudlin can you possibly get? Gag me with a shovel. He insists upon using samples from well-known songs by Stevie Wonder, Chic or The Clash, rather than actually working with producers who will come up with something interesting and new.

The main reason this is such a shame is that the erstwhile Fresh Prince is actually a really good rapper. The dude can flow. “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble” are deservedly ensconced in the pantheon of hip-hop classics. And “Summertime,” perhaps the duo’s greatest concoction, is one of the great jams of all time.

He has his defenders who will insist that he is a good actor. But that pursuit of the lowest common denominator is equally apparent when you examine his choice of movies. Let’s not forget that he has appeared in some truly God-awful films. He may have made Ali and Six Degrees of Separation, but he also made two Bad Boys movies. The first one was just piss-poor, but the second was so ludicrous and nonsensical that it actually crossed the line into camp. The only thing that saved these films was the comedic brilliance of the underrated Martin Lawrence. (Oh, and Gabrielle Union in the sequel. She’s got it going on.) Will Smith also appeared in Wild Wild West, which found two really talented actors (Kevin Kline & Kenneth Brannagh) slumming for a paycheck. He also was one of the leads in one of the worst blockbusters of all-time, Independence Day. In Enemy of the State his silly presence (combined with a bad script) created a mess that even Gene Hackman and Hollywood’s most underrated director couldn’t salvage. And the less said about “A Shark’s Tale” the better.

So, to sum up: I hate Will Smith.

Coloured lights can't hypnotize, sparkle someone else's eyes.

Several years ago, I was watching some sort of superfluous music awards show, and I chanced to see the Barenaked Ladies accepting the award for “Best Canadian Group.” As is obvious from their music, the Ladies have well-developed wry senses of humor. This was apparent when lead singer Ed Robertson (or perhaps it was Steven Page) acknowledged the silliness of the award’s title by commenting: “We’d like to thank our competitors in this category: Loverboy, Rush, and The Guess Who.” The audience chortled heartily. Clearly, Barenaked Ladies and Rush can both be considered under the rubric of what I like to call “Canadian Dork Rock,” and the less said about Loverboy the better. The Guess Who, however, is an entirely different kettle of clams.

The Guess Who was without question the biggest Canadian rock band of the sixties. They were well known in the States, and they had some hits here, but they were massive superstars in the Great White North. Representing Winnipeg (which sounds sort of like a game one-legged pirates might play), they started off as Chad Allen & The Expressions in the early sixties. In addition to Chad Allen, one of the initial members of the band was Randy Bachman, who went on to form Bachman-Turner Overdrive after leaving the Guess Who (shortly after becoming a Mormon) in 1970. (BTO would go on to inspire one of the best names for a band based on the name of another band ever: Kathleen Turner Overdrive. Bourbon Tabernacle Choir is also pretty rad.) While their first few albums were heavy on the ballads, they really hit the big time when they turned on the distortion and cranked the amps up to 11.

In 1970, they released American Woman, which is arguably their best album. Not only is the title track an all-time classic, but the album also contains “No Time,” and another personal favorite, the double rocker “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature.” And here is where the irony enters: the only number one song the band ever had in the United States is an extremely sarcastic anti-American diatribe. Obviously, the song is a reaction to the Vietnam War. (Incidentally, do you know what the Vietnamese call the Vietnam War? They call it the American War. Go figure.) It was recorded between August and November of 1969, which would overlap slightly with the “Summer of Love.” Listen closely to the lyrics of this song and it should become apparent that a bunch of sanctimonious Canucks are basically accusing us of being a pack of warmongers: “I don’t need your war machines; I don’t need your ghetto scenes.” Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of that assertion, Cummings, Bachman et al. are conspicuously and brazenly turning their collective back on the longstanding ties of amity and cooperation that exist between the two northernmost nations of North America.

And yet. I absolutely love this song. It rocks. It totally rocks. There’s simply no other way to put it. It’s so masterfully arranged, too. It starts off with that little acoustic blues intro: “American Woman, gonna mess your mind…,” and then Randy Bachman comes in with that riff-tastic fuzztone and the song kicks into high gear. Awesome. My intense love of this song kind of bothers me in a way, because for some reason it especially bothers me to hear Canadians talking trash about my country. Granted, they are entitled to their opinion. And it’s not like I’m going to disparage Canada. Why would I criticize them? Because they’re too nice? Because putting gravy and cottage cheese on your fries is weird? Or perhaps I could criticize the federal government’s foot-dragging in according more autonomy to the Quebecois? It’s hard for me to get too worked up about any of that. Canadians generally are pretty innocuous.

This tale gets even stranger, though. For the second Austin Powers movie, they got Lenny Kravitz to cover “American Woman” as a sort of theme song for Felicity Shagwell, the character played by supervixen Heather Graham. Lenny’s cover is pretty good, as he is one talented cat. I’m just not sure it works in that context. But then his version got used in a context where it really didn’t work. That would be a Nike commercial with Mia Hamm. This is totally inappropriate. Mia Hamm is probably the greatest all-around soccer player the United States has ever produced. She’s a team player, an incredibly hard worker and she doesn’t showboat or cause static. She is a model to millions of American girls (and boys, for that matter). Using “American Woman” in an ad with her is not only inappropriate, it’s kind of insulting.

Bizarrely, the album became such a hit that the band was asked to play at the White House for the Nixons and a visiting Prince Charles. “American Woman” was not included in the set list.

Rock Me Amadeus!

If you're not familair with pandora.com, you should be, because it is awesome. The idea is based on something called the Music Genome Project. You set up channels on the website, based on songs or bands that you like. The channels then play songs that are musically similar. Here's an example: right now I'm listening to the Los Amigos Invisibles channel, and a song was recently chosen "because it features male lead vocals, major key tonality, simple harmonic progressions, romantic lyrics and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation." Some of the songs the software chooses are a bit of a stretch. But it's a great idea; you know you'll like most of the new music you hear because it's similar to something you already like.

One of the channels I have programmed plays music that's similar to Xzibit. So if it only played West Coast hip-hop, I'd probably like most of it. I was listening to the Xzibit channel recently and they played a song by an MC out of Kansas Citay named Tech N9ne. I was not familiar with his ouevre and in fact he is the first and only rapper I have heard of who represents K.C. Here is his description of the significance of the name Tech N9ne:

"My name means Technique Number Nine. Nine is the number of completion. Nine months completes a pregnancy. A cat has nine lives. Three plus six is nine. Three hundred and sixty degrees is a complete circle. Technique number nine – I am a complete technique of rhyme."

The song was entitled "I'm a Playa." This is not the most original title one can come up with for a rap song. The song, however, was really good. They sampled "Rock Me Amadeus" by Falco, and of course the chorus goes:

"I'm a playa, I'm a playa
I'm a playa, I'm a playa, I'm a playa
I'm a playa, I'm a playa, I'm a playa
oh oh, well I'm a playa
I'm a playa playa,"

That's pretty creative.

"People critically don't think of Brad in terms of the Jim Morrisons and the Kurt Cobains, but they will."

At the end of December, I made a short visit to the NYC to kick it with my main man W. Nathan "Nasty Nate" Aiken. I also wanted to hang in Queens with my friend Andrea "Dre" Schwartz. Dre represents Queens, but we met in D.C., so we’d never chilled together on her turf. Or with her hometown friends. Both of which sounded rad. On Thursday evening, the 28th of December, I met up with Dre and her peeps at a Lower East Side spot called the Skinny. If you have ever been to the Skinny, you’ll understand how it came to acquire that sobriquet. Having spent uncountable hours in D.C.’s own Adams-Morgan, I am used to bars in narrow spaces. But the Skinny is kind of extreme. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not extreme, and 10 being extremely extreme, I give the Skinny’s narrowness a 9. It feels like it is about twelve feet wide.

At the Skinny, I was talking about music with Dre’s friend Matt. (I love talking about music.) We were discussing bands, specifically. More specifically, I mentioned that if I had to name my five favorite bands, not one would be American. At the time I think said, and this is in no particular order, Led Zeppelin, Los Amigos Invisibles, Queen, AC/DC and The Police. And actually, I’m going to make that top eight, so I can include New Order, the Clash and Super Furry Animals. Anyway, for the top five, one is Australian (although Bon Scott and both Angus and Malcolm Young were born in Scotland), one is Venezuelan, and the remaining three are English. If we make it top seven, we add a Welsh band and two more English ones. Matt expressed the opinion that the British really have us, as bands go. We’ve got some incredible musicians, no doubt, but American musicians frequently become famous as solo acts.

So I thought about what my favorite American band is. I thought of Sublime. I can think of a few people who will take issue with this (two Langley graduates come to mind), but I think Sublime had an absolutely fantastic sound. There are two things, I think, that a band can do to be great. One path is to pick one style, and play that better than anyone else. AC/DC is the best example. The other is to create a synthesis of more than one style. After you introduce it, other cats might start playing it, but the creation will be your own. The Police, Led Zeppelin, and Sublime are good examples of this.

The straight-up punky stuff Sublime did was good (especially if you dig the O.C. Punk, and I do), but I don’t think it was terribly groundbreaking. No, they made their mark with those reggae/hip-hop/ska/rock jams. That’s what got them on top 40 radio and made them beloved by whitebread college students across the nation. Their eponymous album put them over the top (it included the Modern Rock chart number one "What I Got," "Doin’ Time," "Santeria," and naughtiest of all, "Caress Me Down"). It was arguably the biggest rock album of 1997. But Brad Nowell, Sublime’s sublimely talented songwriter and singer, didn’t get to see any of this. Inexplicably, he had o.d.ed on heroin right before a European tour, and two months before the album ultimately came out. He died three days after he was married. There was nothing cool about this. It was just a shame. Due to this pointless event, Brad Nowell’s son will grow up without his father. His wife, family, friends, band mates and dalmatian were left behind. And that’s to say nothing of all the people who loved his music because it held meaning for them.
(I don’t mean to suggest in anyway that Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson, the other 2/3s of Sublime, are not incredible musicians whose talent was anything less than a critical part of the band’s success. I have the album they recorded as the Long Beach Dub All-Stars after Brad Nowell’s death, and it’s great. But it’s not Sublime.)

My favorite Sublime album is "40 Oz. to Freedom." This is technically their debut album. It was released in 1992 and was sold largely from the trunk of Brad’s car, a method that would later set Master P on his road to success. Brad Nowell was about 23 when he wrote the lyrics for many of the songs on "40 oz." When I was 23 I listened to that album a lot. Usually I pay a lot more attention to music than lyrics when I listen to CDs. But there was something about the stuff that he was writing about in those songs that got me. The thoughts he expressed felt awfully familiar. And Brad Nowell was only 23 when he composed those songs. This is the worst part of his death, for Sublime fans. Imagine what Sublime albums would have sounded like when the band had been around for 15 or 20 years. When they had been alternately cosseted and then discarded by the cruel mistress called fame. After they had gained the maturity and wisdom that comes with fatherhood, marriage, success, failure and an awareness of one’s own mortality? What kind of songs would Brad Nowell have written then? We shall never know.

No one's gonna save you from the beast with forty eyes.

And now, for no reason whatsoever, I give you the text of the full introduction to "Thriller," as originally read by the late Vincent Price:

Darkness creeps across the land,
the midnight hour is close at hand.
Creatures crawl in search of blood
to terrorize y'all's neighborhood.
And whomsoever shall be found,
without the soul for getting down,
must stand and face the hounds of hell
and rot inside a corpse's shell.
The foulest stench is in the air,
the funk of forty thousand years.
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
are closing in to seal your doom.
And though you fight to stay alive,
your body starts to shiver.
For no mere mortal can resist:
the evil of the Thriller.
(Cue diabolical laughter)

Northern European Cheese House

One thing that’s fun about electronic music is the wide variety of sub-genres that people come up with to describe it. There’s tribal house, tech-house, disco house, microhouse, deep trance, progressive trance, UK garage, two-step, ambient techno, dark ambient, freestyle, neo-electro, big beat, broken beat, gabba, and many others. You get the idea. Some people only listen to one of these. I once met a cat at a party who told me he was a DJ. “Oh, yeah? What do you spin?” I asked. “Progressive trance,” came the reply. “And what else?” I countered. “Just progressive trance,” he said. “Hmmm. Sounds rather . . . limiting,” was my response.

There’s a sub-genre whose name I made up myself, but I think it defines a cohesive sound, and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the music I’m referring to. That sub-genre is “Northern European Cheese House.” This style is marked by basic four-to-the floor house beats, with sing-along choruses and simple chords that can be played with one hand on a keyboard. It goes without saying that these songs are always in major keys. There is a large overlap between N.E.C.H. and what is commonly called “Eurodance” or “Eurobeat.” But what I’m referring to is a particular sound that is, by design, incredibly poppy, totally mainstream, terribly catchy, and really, well, cheesy. And for some reason Germans and Scandinavians seem to be the premier purveyors of this musical guilty pleasure.

The Crazy Frog cover of “We Are The Champions,” or any Crazy Frog song for that matter, is an excellent example. (You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCj-RyKCmHQ) I understand it was a massive hit across Europe last summer, but it’s not too well known on this side of the pond. The frog was originally created by a Swede named Daniel Malmedahl, and the production of the songs is done by the unimaginatively named German production duo Bass Bumpers.

Another N.E.C.H. classic (and by classic, I mean it’s from the nineties) is “Cotton Eye Joe” by Rednex. AllMusicGuide reviewer and friend-of-a-friend Johnny Loftus once referred to their album Sex and Violins as “inane, even for the cartoon land of Eurodance.” Precisely.

The most widely heard example would be the Vengaboys, particularly “We Like To Party.” Americans who live near a Six Flags theme park will recognize this as the song the creepy old guy in the mask dances to in the adverts. The Vengaboys went on to produce other N.E.C.H. hallmarks like “Boom Boom Boom Boom,” and “We’re Going To Ibiza.” Despite the name, the Vengaboys was mainly composed of two Dutch DJs/producers, Wessel van Diepen and Dennis van den Driesschen. While they are not German or Scandinavian, for my purposes we’ll count the Netherlands as Northern Europe. 2 Unlimited were pioneers of Northern European cheese house, and they were composed of two Belgian producers, a Dutch rapper and a Dutch singer. Remember “Twilight Zone” and “Get Ready For This?”

Oddly, one of the songs most representative of N.E.C.H. was not composed by Northern Europeans. That would be “The Hampsterdance.” It was one of the first examples of a popular internet meme, and it was created by a Canadian art student named Deirdre LaCarte. Heather Phares, another AllMusicGuide reviewer, writes that the Hampsterdance song has a “Chipmunks meets Rednex” vibe. If you’ve seen See Spot Run (and who hasn’t), you will remember this music from the scene where David Arquette gets locked out of his apartment. (As an aside, here’s some career advice for Mr. Arquette: everyone knows your career is not doing great if you’re making a movie with an animal, i.e., Chuck Norris in Top Dog, or a little kid, i.e., Burt Reynolds in Cop & A Half, but if someone hands you a script with an animal and a little kid, you should run in the opposite direction as quickly as possible.)