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Backspin: 2001 in Review

"Music should never be harmless".
— The Band's Robbie Robertson to Greil Marcus

Every winter since 1998, I've written the same comment in my end-of-the-year pieces: "Hip-hop has never seen a more depressing year".

This year, there's obviously some mitigating factors contributing to such a sentiment but even without the juggernaut of Sept. 11 looming over 2001, hip-hop still would have tripped over itself, arms flailing in a failed gesture of self-importance. The irony is that rap music has never been bigger, never been more successful, yet it feels, at times, that it's never been poorer either.

At the risk of sounding naively populist, what ails hip-hop is that it's increasingly losing touch with its audience. Don't get me wrong -- hip-hop is the best-selling musical genre in America and it's never enjoyed a greater global consumer base. But I've always believed the best works of popular culture were simultaneously art (i.e. possessing aesthetic worth), folk (i.e. meaningful to the lives of both its creators and consumers) and entertainment (i.e. a source of popularly shared pleasure). Hip-hop, at various times in its history, has been all three but for the last few years, it's slid much more into becoming just entertainment with still a promising amount of artistry mixed in but little folk value.

To put it another way, hip-hop still scores the soundtrack to our quotidian tasks but its sound effects/affects are increasingly void of any larger power to make sense of those lives. This is exactly what happened in the wake of Sept. 11 -- a terrible event that didn't sound hip-hop's death knell -- it just amplified it.

All the quantifiable evidence suggests that the music has never been more robust - check album charts, video channels, department stores and it's clear that hip-hop runs America from basement clubs to corporate towers. Yet the higher hip-hop has climbed, the less certain it's become on where it's headed. Most just haven't noticed, distracted by hip-hop's dazzling success stories but that terrible September morning cast everything into vivid relief and the music suddenly seemed meek and frail for the first time in its history.

I don't always find myself agreeing with Cedric Muhammed, the outspoken Nation of Islam minister who frequently takes hip-hop to task for its excesses, but when he wrote the following in the days after Sept. 11. I found myself nodding in complete assent: "Imagine if what happened on September 11th, 2001 had happened on September 11th, 199. Although there were no all Hip-Hop radio stations; no list of Hip-Hop videos being played on MTV in regular rotation; no Hip-Hop clothing lines in Macy's; from 1987 to 1991 Hip-Hop was more globalized and relevant to its listeners than it is today, by far". As Muhammed makes clear, though hip-hop has become firmly entrenched in America's economic, social and cultural structures, the music's success has left it without much to struggle with or comment upon. Ever since hip-hop took over the world, it stopped caring to change it.

Therefore, when I thought about which albums really stood out to me in 2001, I tried to think of records that were more than just competently imagined and executed. I looked -- or listened -- to what albums deserved to be thought of as meaningful or relevant to our lives. That doesn't mean finding music that deals with Sept. 11. Instead, I'm talking about music that has the power to invoke something within the listener -- a sense of belonging, a provocative thought, an appreciation for beauty, an all-encompassing joy: anything that connects people to art in a way that's more meaningful and powerful than just a quick, 50 minute thrill ride.

The Coup: Party Music (75 Ark)
The big story of the Coup this year, of course, has been their macabre, prescient cover art -- composed much earlier in the year -- that shows Boots and Pam the Funkstress literally blowing up the World Trade towers. But get past the stunning, unsettling image and you'll find an album that's compellingly incendiary in a different light.

This is far from the Coup's best album and in any other year, it probably wouldn't have ranked so high on many critics' top 10 lists (mine included). Some overwrought P-funk beats and tired agit-prop on the part of rapper Boots Riley make it less consistent than any of their previous LPs: Kill My Landlord (1993), Genocide and Juice (1995) and Steal This Album (1999). It's not a bad album per se, just not as great as they are capable of making.

But post-Sept. 11 (ah yes, revisionist criticism in full e-f-f-e-c-t), Party Music is important, if not straight up necessary for hip-hop to regain some legitimacy in its ability to actually speak to people, rather than babble at them. With their unabashed politics that champions the struggles of the black working class -- an oddly ignored demographic despite hip-hop's professed ghetto rhetoric -- The Coup rap for the everyday person trying to deal with poverty, racism, violence and other oppressive forces. There's no escapist fantasies here -- just powerful, provocative songs that deal with everything from the anxiety of unplanned pregnancies ("Nowandlaters"), how to raise a revolutionary woman ("Wear Clean Drawers"), and fighting against the indignities of the daily grind ("Ghetto Manifesto").

Jay Z: The Blueprint (Roc-A-Fella)
The utter beauty in pop music is its ability to transcend any intellectual response and just plug directly into your emotional cortex and light it up. Like many of his peers, Jay Z isn't exactly the most socially responsible artist, despite his penchant for introspective confessionals like "Song Cry" and "Blueprint". He's as unapologetically capitalist as Boots is socialist, he's a scoundrel with women and he's no stranger to hypocrisy, now that he has pled guilty despite telling us on "Izoo": "not guilty/ya'll got to feel me." But Jay's charisma is so charged that he could recite raps from the back of a cereal box and still sound genius. Luckily, there's no need him to bust out with a Count Chocula rhyme ("1 , 2, 3, 4, ah ha ha ha"). The Blueprint is hip-hop's most complete and compelling pop album of the year.

The whole package -- Jay Z, the music, the song concepts - just sound amazing. Much of the credit needs to go to the production team, led by newcomer Kayne West and Roc-A-Fella veteran Just Blaze, who turn to classic, 70s soul and blues: The Jackson 5, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Donny Hathaway; to sauce up the music. True, it doesn't break any new barriers -- Wu-Tang Clan's Rza already perfected this whole aesthetic years ago -- but there's an incredibly comforting feeling to the album's music since its sound is wholly familiar to an entire generations of soul babies. At the same time, West, Blaze and others know how to juice it up too: best heard on the thunderous, raucous energy of Jay Z's vicious dis song, "Takeover".

As for Jay himself, he combines slick, clever wordplay with an effortless flow that never seems to falter. His moods on The Blueprint range from playful, such as the sexist but sublime "Girls, Girls, Girls" to mockingly defensive, asking "where's the love" on "Heart of the City" to aggressively offensive (the aforementioned "Takeover") but he never loses that Fonzie cool that's become so much of his pop persona. Hip-hop has rarely seen albums this well conceived, assembled and executed -- let's hope Jay starts a trend with it.

Cannibal Ox: Cold Vein (Def Jux)
The achievement that Cannibal Ox make on their debut album is in how it creates an entirely new world of sound and mood. Imagine William Gibson colliding with Dante and you get the universe of Cold Vein: a metallic, mechanical portrait of heaven, hell and earth that's as alluring as its alienating. The man behind this striking image is the producer El-P, formerly the front man for hip-hop's independent heroes Company Flow. He's like Dr. Frankenstein on the sampler -- layering a jigsaw of electronic noise, ancient analog synthesizers, dirt-slathered beats and other mangled, musical bits.

MCs Vast and Vordul complement El-P's track wizardry with lyrics as sinister as the beats, especially with Vast's heavy toned voice lumbering with a vicious lope. While the group still might live up to Co Flow's old motto: "independent as fuck"; Cold Vein rises above and beyond the vast majority of self-indulgent, creatively anemic music that the underground pumps out pre-fab. This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but in transporting the listener to a land of Cann Ox's choosing, you have no choice but to be pulled into their world. Ten years from now Cold Vein will still sound ahead of its time.

Aceyalone: Accepted Eclectic (Project Blowed)
I don't know how else to say this but to say it: no other rapper cares as much about words as Aceyalone. He is fascinated with their shape, their sound, how they play against one another, how they string together and how to break them apart. In that respect, Acey is probably hip-hop's purest poet -- not necessarily because he rhymes the best (though he's pretty damn good) -- but because he goes further in playing with his words.

The problem he's faced in the past has both been in anemic production as well as a tendency to get a little oblique at times. But on his third solo album, Accepted Eclectic, Acey has managed to avoid his common slips. A strong production team, lead by Fat Jack's well-crafted minimalist aesthetic, makes sure that Acey doesn't have to resort to glorified acapella and his own verses are more accessible without being dumbed down.

His moods range from intimately introspective ("I Never Knew") to flamboyantly confident ("Rappers, Rappers, Rappers") to tongue-in-cheek humorous ("Master Your High") but throughout it all, Acey makes his presence known through his innovative rhyme schemes -- playing with rhythms and tone stretches, tongue-twisting out a collection of masterpieces for scholars of the Word.

Notable Mentions:

Poets of Rhythm: Discern/Define (Quannum)
This German group proves that you can make exciting and sublime funk music without just carbon-copying James Brown, the Meters or Fela Kuti. The Poets are all about synthesis -- drawing upon the multiple threads of funk that have been woven over the last 30-some years and creating a unique sound that's both vintage and original.

Atmosphere: Lucy Ford (Rhymesayers)
Led by a rapper named Slug, Minnesota's Atmosphere proves that not all of hip-hop's compelling narratives and perspectives have to emerge from the urban ghetto. Sure, he sounds like he's a white guy, straight out of a suburban strip mall, but Slug's blend of lyrical moxy, humor and creativity make for a brilliant storyteller who can be clever without having to resort to the bitter misanthropy that Eminem -- another white, Midwestener -- indulges in. This is a brilliant album -- both lyrically and musically -- and only the most stubbornly small-minded would refuse to even consider its gifts.

Gorillaz: S/T (Virgin)
Say what you will about the group's hokey premise - a bunch of superstars masquerading in cartoon form as a "virtual band" but you can't take anything away from their music. Swinging between upbeat and funky to darkly down-tempo to delicately layered and packed, this was one of the best produced albums of last year thanks to contributions of Dan "The Automator" Nakamura who seems to have a knack for collaborative work (he's joined forces with Prince Paul and Kool Keith in the past). You may or may not like Damon Albarn's laconic vocals -- personally, I thought he pulled it off with his post-millennial update on Chet Baker's disaffected touch. But with other cameos from Del tha Funkee Homosapien and Cibo Matti's Miho Hatori, the Gorillaz offered a wealth of delights for the ear.