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Ani DiFranco

To the Teeth

(Righteous Babe)

 Amazon

 Lala

Ani DiFranco’s To the Teeth marked a time I now remember not as false innocence, but as false jadedness. Released the year I finished high school, To the Teeth was a challenge set forth for me and many others who’d come of age in the time of Righteous Babe. The idealism of my youth plus the spirit of potential fostered by the Clinton years paradoxically drew awareness to problems the United States faced, problems that now seem smaller in the face of recessions and secret prisons and torture and Patriot Acts. The album’s title track, with its orgiastic litany of gun-happy politicians, felt like—pardon the expression—a call to arms. “Hello Birmingham” had the same effect; I listened and vowed to change the reproductive-rights landscape of the places that seemed to be standing still while the rest of the country moved forward. At the time, I had no idea that five years later, I’d be living just south of Birmingham and know it as the most progressive place for miles. I also didn’t know that these never-ending domestic issues would almost be luxury causes.

While To the Teeth has personal resonance for the paradoxical innocence it now conjures, it functions in DiFranco’s canon as a testament to her own loss of musical innocence. Her music didn’t need to retain its sparse, acoustic sound in order to be compelling—Little Plastic Castle proves that—but sacrificing vulnerability for experimentation did little to improve DiFranco’s career. Rather, songs like “Swing” (with Corey Parker’s silly rapping) and the carnivalesque, annoying, and bland “Freakshow” posited her as someone who could, yes, put aside her tears and her girl-with-guitar act, but also as someone who’d become famous for that music with good reason. Fortunately, another unknown at the was that DiFranco would be back to recording solo albums by 2004’s Educated Guess, and that her return to vulnerability would be strong medicine in a time of war. Erin Lyndal Martin

Dr. Dre

2001

(Aftermath/Interscope)

 Amazon

 Lala

• Review [1.Jan.1995]

The disappointment that I feel after re-listening to Dr. Dre’s 2001 is the result of the disconnect between the album’s opening line and the nearly 70 minutes that follow. 2001 appeared a full seven years after Dre’s groundbreaking solo debut The Chronic, which fails to place it in Chinese Democracy territory, but which did qualify it as “highly anticipated” nonetheless. Seven years is an eternity in the world of pop culture, and the album was a prime opportunity for the man who helped create gangsta rap to reflect upon its growing pains.

And, judging by that opening line, he was tempted to do so: “Things just ain’t the same for gangstas”, he raps in that first song, “The Watcher”. In it, he assumes the point of view of a man whose beard is both greyer and longer than his alleged peers, and the wisdom of his years has made him reconsider his previous ways: “How would you feel if niggas wanted you killed?” he asks. “You’d probably move to a new house on a new hill / And choose a new spot if niggas wanted you shot / I ain’t a thug, how much Tupac in you, you got?” However, he also makes it clear that, if threatened, he’s never too far outta Compton, and he’s doubly dangerous now that he has so much to protect: “Nigga, if you really want to take it there we can / Just remember that you’re fucking with a family man”.

“The Watcher” fascinates as it juxtaposes Dre’s edge with his vulnerability. Rarely do artists—rarer still, rap artists—let their guard down, and in featuring this song at the top, 2001 promised to reinvent the game yet again, a promise that lasted all the way to the next song, the elegantly titled “Fuck You”. “I just want fuck bad bitches / All them nights I never had bad bitches / Now I’m all up in that ass bitches”, he says. And away we go….

It’s worth pausing here to remind ourselves that, though 2001 is widely considered a sequel of sorts to The Chronic, Dre’s name did appear on an album in the interim, the ill-fated Dr. Dre Presents the Aftermath (1996), a compilation that featured a stable of artists from his newly launched Aftermath Records. The mushroom cloud that graces the album’s cover is appropriate, because it’s a disaster. Of the 16 tracks, only “East Coast/West Coast Killaz”, by a rap supergroup that goes by the name of “Group Therapy”, and Dre’s own “Been There, Done That” have any kind of staying power. The rest is utterly forgettable. (Anyone pick up the new Nowl album?  Or the latest by Who’z Who?)

Dre usually gets a pass on this record, but he had a hand in producing nearly half of the album’s songs, which is more than he produced on Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP, a record for which he receives much of the credit. In retrospect, even the video for “Been There, Done That”,—in which Dre, tuxed-out, actually tangos—seems like a miscalculation.

But the point here is not to beat up on Dre for putting out a shitty album; rather, the point is that 2001‘s immediate predecessor was a failure rather than a success, which makes it more of a comeback album than a sequel—which in turn explains a song like “Fuck You” or any of the other lyrically-undercooked tunes that permeate the record. Though he claims to be torn between the “old me” and the new, Dre spends most of his time insisting that, like Ralph Malph, he’s still got it.

When his claims take the form of good ol’ fashioned boasting, they’re amusing enough. For example, from “Forgot About Dre”: “I told ‘em all / All them little gangstas / Who you think helped mold ‘em all? / Now you wanna run around and talk about guns / Like I ain’t got none / What you think I sold ‘em all?”  But when he falls back on the tried (tired?) and true combo of sex and drugs to prove that he’s still the undisputed champion, the results are less convincing. Would the champ really write, “Yeah, I just took some ecstasy / Ain’t no telling what the side effects could be / All those fine bitches equal sex to me / Plus I got this bad bitch layin’ next to me / No doubt, sit back on the couch / Pants down, rubber on, set to turn that ass out / Laid the bitch out, then I put it in her mouth / Pulled out, nutted on a towel and passed out”? Unfortunately, all this does is serve as a reminder that, for all of the brilliance of side one of Efil4zaggin, side two is absolute shit.

To be fair, in addition to “The Watcher”, there are other moving moments on the album. The last song, for example, “The Message”, which is about Dre’s dead brother, never quite reaches the level of poetry that, say, Ice Cube does in “Dead Homiez”, but it is equally affecting by virtue of its subject being more specific. Equally so are the references to Eazy-E, dead for four years by the album’s release from HIV-related complications. From “What’s the Difference”, an otherwise jaunty club song: “Eazy I’m still wit you / Fuck the beef, nigga I miss you / And that’s just being real wit you”.

In fact, this idea of “being real” is probably more responsible for my disappointment than anything else. I like those moments. I like when he’s real—about getting older, about losing friends, family. The problem is that when he is real, if only fleetingly so, he only accentuates the fact that the rest is posturing. Not that there’s anything wrong with playing a role, but, well, like he says, been there, done that.

I suspect that Dre would say this is less about posturing and more about giving the people what they want. The bitches and ho’s. The pop-a-cap-in-they-ass. The smoke-a-pound-of-weed-every-day. And maybe it is. But ten years after the fact, this sure feels like pandering, too. Kirby Fields