The Saints: (I'm) Stranded (1977)

(Sire)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It seems that when the Saints are remembered at all in punk culture outside of Australia these days, it's merely as fire-breathing originators (arguably) of the archetypal Punk Cover Version of luminous classics like "River Deep Mountain High" and "Lipstick on Your Collar," both included as bonus tracks on modern CD issues of their debut album. To remember the Brisbane outfit as a novelty act, as punk marginalia, does them a great injustice indeed, but with equal disrespect typically afforded fellow pioneers the Damned, it's hardly surprising. The broad narrative of punk rock, it seems, can only find room for three bands: the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash.

The Saints weren't as brilliant or as politically conscious as the Clash, granted, or as convincingly angry as the Pistols; and their appallingly early origin -- they formed and were playing essentially the type of music that would forever be defined as punk rock in 1974 -- doesn't dissipate credit that rightly belongs to the Ramones for singlehandedly inventing their craft. Much as the revolutionary flavor of the Ramones reveals a lot about the time in which they came to be, a time in which straight-ahead rock & roll was an abnormality, the Saints' virtual cofounding of the official punk rubric is quaint in the sense that their work hardly displays the threadbare purism or outlandishness that would quickly become associated with the genre. Indeed, what is special about the Saints -- and what survives about them -- is that they are not a confrontation, not even really a challenge. They are a powerful Stones-like rock band swept invisibly under the punk rug -- their songs full of muscle, rhythm guitar propulsion, and natural, emotive rock attitude.

This isn't to say that they're an ordinary band, just that it's become less and less useful to describe them in terms of their punk rock significance, the same way it doesn't hurt the Only Ones to declare them more power pop than punk outfit. And whereas the Ramones and the Clash sounded at times like displaced bands of the late '50s, the Saints seem propelled from a less distant period, mid-'60s England just when it was OK to be serious but before the folkies and druggies took over.

There is, honestly, one stone-cold punk classic here, even if it sounds as at home amongst the Jam, Nick Lowe, and the New York Dolls as with its closer brethren. "(I'm) Stranded" is a quite gleeful, grand anthem when you think about it, very reminiscent of Lowe's "Heart of the City" and drawing a straight line from garage or frat rock of the mid-'60s, which indeed gave rise to the "punk rock" term to begin with. The hook is to die for in the perfect "Wooly Bully" "Louie Louie" fashion but with, naturally, just a touch of wit and presence those songs lacked.

At first, it seems like the album of the same name can offer nothing to match the instant infection of that single. "One Way Street" and "Wild About You" are relatively low-key rock, the former firmly in Stones/Who territory, the latter toying with more guitar faux-heroics than most punks would allow and brushing with hard rock and metal.

But after that, the big Mick and Keith move comes, and the result completely turns everything around on this album, this band, this decade. "Sometimes you get that old lost feeling," it goes, "sometimes it hits you when you're feeling down." Yeah. "Messin' with the Kid" is a ballad of enough skill, on-point feeling, and shadily reflective, triumphant hooks -- completely, gorgeously drenched in guitar -- that it could rightfully make a claim as being punk's first masterpiece if it constituted punk in any real way. Not to discount anything those other bands did; fuck, the Clash is still one of the finest groups of men ever to do anything together in my opinion. But "Messin'" is nothing short of a classic rock ballad, perfectly wrought and executed as well as anyone ever has from the '50s on. It's not an exaggeration to state that it could be on Let It Bleed. And don't tell the punks, but the thing runs six goddamn minutes, all of them tremendous. It has the feel of an immediate touchstone, written by lightning and miraculously discovered somewhere in Queensland.

Once you've heard that, it becomes extremely difficult not to pay careful attention to what the Saints are doing. Writer and singer Chris Bailey is a maverick, unafraid of expression and exuding utter confidence for the full scope of the rest of the LP. Guitarist Ed Kuepper wouldn't be an ill fit for a stadium group. The band's rhythm section (bassist Kym Bradshaw at this point, and drummer Ivor Hay) is too adept and excitable to ever join the ranks of any one-chord wonders, and the songs give them plenty to do. "Erotic Neurotic," which delightfully quotes "I Wanna Be Your Man" (and accidentally, Dylan's "I Wanna Be Your Lover"), returns to punk and amazingly manages not to feel like a letdown after the stare-at-the-sun of "Messin' with the Kid." The second half opens with more classicist Ed Kuepper riffage, loud and fast but more garage rock than punk rock, on the irresistible "No Time," and the irreverent Elvis Presley cover "Kissin' Cousins," probably the best in their novelty repertoire. Yet again, though, the midtempo is where the Saints truly reign.

"Story of Love," which sounds uncannily like a certain song about teen spirit recorded fourteen years in the future, is a varied, oddly structured Beggars Banquet-like stomper featuring the kind of levity for which Bailey deserves greater fame, and a brilliantly timed Kuepper solo that gives reason to think of the Saints as more in line with Big Star than the Damned. This is two steps away from radio pop, ingeniously so, but the world was different then. Even a surface punker like "Demolition Girl" has trickier riffage and more playful, ambiguous humanity than Malcolm MacLaren would've ever allowed, and another New York Dolls chorus. It's hard to find a band threatening when they're so likable, in the end, but that's the thing; they don't need to be a threat, they're just good.

(I'm) Stranded ends much as it began -- with a loud, fast, vaguely dissatisfied banger, "Night in Venice," the oddity being that it rails off into a guitar and feedback tangent and extends to 5:41, forecasting Television and Yo La Tengo -- but the implications it leaves today in its mere half hour are enticing. It makes sense that a band spawned in 1974 would give a sort of missing link between the Velvet Underground, whose garage persuasions calculatedly masked a high (contextual) skill level and adherence to songs, and the Ramones, who learned what they were doing as they went. But what's so intriguing about the Saints is that they don't seem to have had anything to prove; they have no issue with displaying their chops (a big no-no in the punkiverse) and see no suspicious element to just banging out their songs as best they can, whether they're simple or ornately emotional or even instrumentally complex. They aren't interested in being part of a movement, in making impressions or force-feeding primitivist ideals. Does that make them less rebellious than their peers... or less conformist?

Fuck the intellectual breakdown, though; if you want to hear a great rock band playing great rock songs you've probably not heard before, get this shit now. It's worth blasting. A punk collection might seem complete without "Messin' with the Kid," but it sure would be missing a lot of soul.

Shabazz Palaces: Black Up (2011)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

In 2009, Digable Planets were scheduled to play a show at a venue I frequented. I don't typically respond well to reunion tours, but this seemed -- along with Television -- a crucial exception. True to form, as in their initial career, by the time word got around that a band of such magnitude was playing Wilmington, they disappeared; yet another bout of infighting had ripped them apart again, with barely a wisp of warning. In a way, it was appropriate that such a legendary unit would remain so elusive. Maybe seeing them would've lessened the still-searing impact of Reachin' and Blowout Comb, both near-masterpieces that stomp on the notion of early '90s conscious hip hop as a novelty device for the gen-Xers who sort of remember it. Maybe it would've been disheartening to witness Butterfly and Ladybug singing their hearts about in front of a crowd of well-meaning young parents who file "Rebirth of Slick" somewhere between "Rump Shaker" and "Bust a Move."

This respect for self-preservation through unattainability, a strategy regularly employed in the rockist world by luminaries dubious and non from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin, has informed Butterfly's handling of his latest project, Shabazz Palaces. As virtually every music writer working this album and the preceding EPs has excitedly pointed out, it was for some time quite difficult to glean Butterfly's involvement in SP, not least because he's traveling under the new title Palaceer Lazaro. I have a lot of suspicion about the increasing influx of anonymity in pop music, as both a gimmick and an act of cultural calculation. Why else it is so impossible to trust Gorillaz as much as we trusted Blur? In the case of the Weeknd, it divorces what might otherwise be intriguing music from any racial or societal context, rendering it (replete with Spiritualized-derived cover art) bite-sized acceptable for indiecrit zealots who can't handle the icky explicitness of modern R&B. In the case of WU LYF, it allows deeply uninteresting, superficial music to glean wildly overexcited press (especially in Britain, but what else is new). I wouldn't mind if Shabazz Palaces dropped the talk about being "ethereal" and came out in the open, because this music deserves better than mystery.

But Butterfly is unmistakably here, his flow still youthful and exuberant and filled with the same dead-serious wit as ever ("things are looking blacker, but black is looking whiter"; "clear some space so we can space out"), tempered by age only in the most artistically rich manner. At times during Black Up, I find myself thinking he's as good as Jay-Z and Black Thought, with each of whom he shares crucial traits -- Jay's sly, selective aggression; Black Thought's eloquent wariness of an at times dark globe. The thrill is how little Shabazz Palaces sounds like Digable Planets, hard-hitting and musically tangential and unencumbered. People keep saying there's "no jazz" here, but I vehemently disagree. If not jazz, what the hell do you call "Endeavors for Never," a work of tremendous freeflow with stark, urban, nocturnal, glorious musical rambles?

People say "no jazz" simply because that's not all this is. Not that I necessarily mind ringtone rap, but this is its dictionary opposite. Black Up passes itself between razor-sharp ideas with expert wisdom, and with the expectation that the audience is bright enough to stay with it; the ideas come fast and furious, typically in single tracks that seem to cast multiple songs under one umbrella, usually with an outrageously pretentious title. The individual cuts run together so much it becomes impossible to separate them, to contemplate one specific element as falling here or there, and so the record demands to be heard complete -- an increasing rarity, particularly in the context of an LP that deserves such attention. But in just 36 minutes (the titles may be uncomfortably lofty but the music keeps it clean and brisk), we're treated to the bottom-heavy club pound of a Timbaland-Elliott production, four on the floor house-funk, generally hard-hitting lurches between wildly unorthodox notions old and new, all at irregular intervals with only emotional logic. The opening cut "Free Press and Curl" curtains up on an electrofunk poetry reading before diving into twisted Halloween freakiness and wandering off into a bare-minimum, achingly slow house tangent; warm community devolves to ageless electronic paranoia. "Youlogy" brings a shadow of disorienting distortion across oldschool Bambaataa beats, reimagining Slick Rick and Kool Moe Dee as an entrance into disturbing, infectious avant garde; at 42, Butterfl-- er, Lazaro is recording real goddamn music still, everything old new again.

Shabazz Palaces do as they please, and while never boring, they intend to take whatever time they need to make their point however they wish. Deeply considered, restless, and brashly excited with possibility, this is music that demands to be played loud, and insists on devotion. It's a sonically disparate experience heard on good speakers or on good headphones, and it needs either (and both, at some point). Without hearing it on a good system at some point, you could miss how "Recollections of the Wrath" sounds like it's overtaking the room, how deftly it hides its illest soul persuasions. Without detailed listening, you could miss the brush of history. "Are You Can You Were You" opens on a bleak '70s Marvin Gaye landscape, and builds on a vague record skip like a transference (successful) of turntablism to a new age. "The ship I came here on vanished," laments Lazaro on one of his saddest, most playful lyrics, just before an incredible earthquake of a hook propels us up into grandiose soul, the kind of pure and familiar pleasure the record is careful only to offer in limited quantities.

How refreshing to hear an album that provides such a sense of journey with music that is strong and insistent enough to back that up and to provide the proverbial beat lover with so many new compulsions. And don't cast this off as "alternative" rap with no wider relevance; "A Treatease Dedicated..." runs nonstop through its sensual, barking flow as if to prove Nicki Minaj isn't the only one who can do this. So there are moments when the record seems to target the typical prog-indie Sub Pop consumer a bit too enthusiastically -- the backwards psychedelia of "Kings New Clothes..." seems too long even at 2:06 -- but hey, there are moments like that on labelmates Male Bonding's new album too, and don't tell me that Shabazz can't manage to convert anyone, an individual skeptic or a roomful of clubbers, to the fragments of synthpop and confrontation that gradually form the banger "Yeah You," a divine illustration of the irrelevance of where sounds initially came from in 2011.

The reason I want Shabazz to break into the mainstream, though, is their wholehearted embrace of African music -- a trait more frequently seen in recent years within white groups like Vampire Weekend, whose cuddly version is undeniably infectious and beautifully crafted, and tUnE-yArDs, who use it for the hit to the jugular I wish I heard more in modern hip hop. That's why "Swerve... the Reeping of All That Is Worthwhile" and "An Echo from the Hosts That Process Infinitum" are so valuable. The latter is dramatically unsettling, casting jungle-misery sample and beat against joyous instrumentation, even a kalimba. But grand finale "Reeping" is extraordinary -- a crushing multipronged beat at the outset renders Lazaro's latest rant nearly beside the point; guest vocalist Thee Stasia bursts forth with nightclub heat across generations, and after a fade, we tap back into the underground with a decidedly Digable-like, unashamedly nonwestern roll call of what Black is (you, me, us, free). Though it runs for less than half the song, less than a twenteth of the album, the moment is as celebratory and ingratiating as anything else here. Lazaro shed some light on his growing interest in the music of Ethiopia in an interview earlier this year:

My girlfriend was from Ethiopia, and that's all I was listening to, straight up. I love those melodies and those rhythms. A lot of that stuff sunk in, but I can't remember any names because I didn't know what any of them cats was talking about-- can I say that?

I was drawn to the emotion, even when it wasn't apparent. There were some barriers between myself and the music and the language, but I was able to absorb the sentiment of the music and get a deep sense of the emotion, of what the music was. That's what it was and what remains to me. It unquestionably has an influence on what I'm doing now. A deep one.

Very little in rock & roll, in hip hop, is new. But when it feels new, that's when the joy of discovery can overtake. For hardly the first time in his illustrious career, Ishmael Butler, a.k.a. Butterfly, a.k.a. Palaceer Lazaro, has found that moment. I doubt it will be the last time.

Afrika Bambaataa: Looking for the Perfect Beat (1980-2001)

(Tommy Boy)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

For someone with a nearly religious belief in the transformative power and artful directness of rock & roll, it can be tempting to drop everything under the rockist umbrella. But that gives short shrift to hip hop, the sole major innovation in western pop music since the '60s. Punk might have crafted its own subculture, but at bottom it was a resurrection of the speedy '50s anthems once wrongly thought of as primitive. Rap music is its own art form, with its own rich history, but it is friendly to the rock mythologist because of its narrative parallels. When you think of the 1977-86 period as the '50s, it all becomes quite clear. The '50s were the decade of excitement, the '60s of ambition and sometimes wildly successful innovation. So it goes here. You still get a fresh rush out of the earliest Grandmaster Flash and Treacherous Three records, relentlessly thrilling in their uncluttered starkness and rampant flamboyance of pure creativity, the starry-eyed discovery of unlimited possibility in a new artform. And nobody's early records -- not in rap, not in rock, not anywhere -- were so explosively exciting as those offered up by Afrika Bambaataa, the brilliant, conscientious South Bronx DJ who laid a groundwork and lit a fuse that remains alight three decades after.

We think of the golden age extending well into the '90s, but the truth is that well before pretentious boneheads like Dr. Dre began to appear on the landscape, even heroes like Bambaataa were succumbing to the temptation to cop to "progressive" ideals, busying up their records with appeals to outside importance beyond their countercultural audience. As so often, the counterculture had it right -- it is in those early good-hearted, joyful, emotionally straightforward, at times bitterly angry hip hop records that the true potential of the genre was realized. Before those recording it even realized they were crafting art. Not to say that the well dried since then, or that there haven't been plenty of enormously vital and gifted performers in the field since then, but all of those who've laid down masterpieces, The Score to The College Dropout, owe their strongest debt to the conscious but body-driven arm-wave of hip hop's tirelessly lively roots.

On a personal note, I would give a lot to be able to craft a description of how Bambaataa's output in the first half of the '80s, exemplified by the first seven tracks on this fine collection, makes me feel. It is like nothing else in the pop music annals. More than just an admiration of Bambaataa's filthily efficient skills as a producer and an event-maker, more than the infectious enthusiasm that was always a feature of his work, and more than the indisputable positivity of his outlook (a heart in the right place rather than the supposed Right Words than an inexcusably bland Arrested Development or PM Dawn might put across), there's an almost spiritual rightness and beauty to "Jazzy Sensation" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat" that make them some of the most infectious and provocative music ever laid down. I've written before in this space of the way that great music refuses to accept being placed in the background by losing its shape when attention isn't being paid to it. Bambaataa's '81-'85 sides refuse to even allow that to happen. When they're on, it's impossible not to give them all of your focus -- and all of your body.

This set opens with the sole significant cut released under the Cosmic Force rubric, 1981's "Zulu Nation Throwdown," and it's one of the most impressive early rap records -- issued before I was born, it still sounds futuristic to me, a textured and wildly varied merry-go-round of disco-funk and space-hop with a genuine party atmosphere. Its funky flatness provides a backdrop for goofy, funny traded barbs leading up to a staggering verse by some force of nature named Lisa Lee. She make the ants crawl in your pants, put you in a music trance, and she is the climax of these seven minutes. There's another "Zulu Nation Throwdown" here, a totally different song credited to Soul Sonic Force, and it's comparatively quaint and sweet, dropping no bombs like Lisa Lee did.

But the disc only gains momentum after that. "Jazzy Sensation," "Planet Rock," and "Looking for the Perfect Beat" all lay claim to being Bambaataa's masterpiece, and the latter could quite easily be the single greatest hip hop record ever made. "Jazzy Sensation" outsteps in one regard, though, possessing the craziest and most relentless bassline ever; this pounding monster of a 12" flies through percussive vocal ideas ("the boys the boys") too fast to bother with much of a refrain, a relentless cascade of warmly funny and twisting, winding rhymes. It's a dance music thrill that doesn't deserve to be overshadowed by its two brethren, but they both make it nearly inevitable.

"Planet Rock," Bambaataa's most famous record, deserves credit for many innovations, not least of them being the virtual creation (out of nowhere) of the electro-funk subgenre by the simple but audacious act of using Kraftwerk as the basis for a hip hop cut. There's more to it than that, though; Afrika and the Soul Sonic Force don't just use "Trans-Europe Express," they appropriate its mildly off-kilter kitsch and emotional desperation as their own. In contrast to its usual jam-hailing boasts and enthusiastic mating calls, the track is almost horrifyingly stark, thereby crafting (courtesy of producers Arthur Baker and John Robie) a unique sensation of bearing muffled witness to something far more ominous than a mere party. There's a sense in which it's a pity that Bambaataa would achieve his lengthiest brush with mainstream fame (outside of New York City, where he regularly played venues like the Mudd Club) with a song so conceptually at odds with his typical righteous pushing of fun, love, and productivity. But the song is too brilliant, too assured and too unique, for that to matter for long.

Besides, "Looking for the Perfect Beat" marries that impressive sonic boom with a stargazing nightlife serenade so wide open it seems to lift the room. Clearly this track takes the dance floor potential of hip hop to its fullest, with an all-out enthusiasm, an embracing of the boogie night, that no one's ever duplicated. It also recasts the space funk of "Planet Rock" as something over the top and robotic, then undercuts it with a Wall of Sound hugeness. Rife with unconventional, cunning beats and palpable, busy excitement, it plants us in the middle of one of Afrika's famous block parties but also points us squarely into some scarcely imaginable, assuredly remarkable future. Not only is the music thrilling, it's gloriously optimistic; true to form, "Beat" still sounds astonishingly current, like something we still have to catch up with.

Those three juggernauts plus the Cosmic Force 12" can, when heard in sequence, make "Renegades of Funk" and "Frantic Situation" seem marginal, but don't be fooled. "Renegades" says a lot about Bambaataa's character, framing his work in context with a historical breadth that seems assured but never cocky -- and musically, in the context of the rockist sympathies of the time (even propagated by such supposed on-our-side forward thinkers as the Replacements), a heroic refusal to accept synthetics as a hindrance or a limitation. And "Frantic," while less catchy, gives long overdue attention to the sounds of Africa that must have permeated the artist's ears on his life-altering trip there in the late '70s. It has the most organic feel of anything he had laid down since dropping his live band.

With the broader context we now have, we might rightfully be wary of the purity of Bambaataa's message. Peace and love are, after all, the tantamount concerns of the Jurassic 5, the Black Eyed Peas, and Santana as well. But you have to consider how much Africa made this man, and how much the feelings that were stirred up by his journey there are audible in his music. "Zulu" isn't a buzzword for Bambaataa; it is a lifestyle of brotherhood and empathy, the virtues he witnessed laid against unspeakable strife. When the former gangland warlord began to speak out against violence and organize block parties to celebrate hip hop as a way out of such dead ends, his influence and intelligence allowed him to change the course of the music, and more importantly of generations worth of the disenfranchised. His story alone spits in the eye of any notion that hip hop (and rock & roll, because why not) isn't important. He represents, in the most real and inarguable way, the literally life-saving potential of the music.

But he also is an intelligent and ambitious guy, and he wanted the Zulu Nation on the pop charts. The pop charts tend to require sacrifice. On streamlined, evened-out later works from 1985 onward, such as "Unity Part 1" (the famous James Brown collaboration) and the rather silly "Funk You!" Bambaataa doesn't sound like the same man who laid the revolutionary foundation for the areas of early rap culture that remain most relevant even today. But one must accept that he was valiantly attempting to spread that same message farther. Still, when trading lines with Brown or John Lydon (on the enjoyable but equally silly "World Destruction," not included here), the scrappy punk-rock joy of Cosmic Force seems leagues away. The demands to be taken seriously, amidst ironically generic queries such as "Who Do You Think You're Funkin' With?" and, well, "What Time Is It?" seem surprisingly out of character -- free of character, even.

These pop and progressive persuasions (he would later, into the new millennium, branch off into abstract club music, trance even) didn't really fuck up Bambaataa's career, and his legacy was safe before even "Planet Rock" was released, frankly before he ever released any of his music commercially. His imprint and fortitude, his brilliance as a performer and a recognizer of talent, will echo in the streets of New York and in every beat of great hip hop that's released long after he's gone. And a big part of that legacy comes from his leadership and selflessness -- most simply, his determination to help others discover a better life through art; but also, at bottom, his willingness to give the floor to others. There was Mellie Mel on "Frantic Situation," James Brown serving up the hook on "Unity," and of course the unforgettable, ghostly Lisa Lee making those proclamations that seem almost like battle cries writing history in their fiery prescience, freshness, and razor-sharp rebellion.

This ain't a Broadway play or a high school plot
It's the real deal that makes you feel
Like, like you got sex appeal
Now party people in the place you feel the bass
Can you check out the highs, check out the grace
So wallflowers in the house, this is your chance
To show everybody that you can dance
Punk rock to the left, and Patty Duke to the right
Move your body now, you can do it all night.

WU LYF: Go Tell Fire to the Mountain (2011)

(LYF)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Prince: 1999 (1982)

(Warner Bros.)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Don't worry, I won't hurt you. I only want you to have some fun.

Things you're not allowed to say anymore, volume 1: 1999 is twice the album Thriller is. Across its sprawling seventy-one minutes is the liveliest fruition ever of what funk and R&B could once have been: a genuine kicking, screaming against ever-enveloping darkness, and that fits the world we live in even you don't think "we might die anyway," even if you're not "in love with God, he's the only way," even if, hey, 1999 was twelve whole years ago. If Dirty Mind marked the moment when the radio zeitgeist of the '80s became Prince's to own, 1999 is the point when you can actually hear Prince taking over the world.

Prince's prior two albums had contained some expert music, including his all-time masterpiece "When You Were Mine," but the difference on 1999 is two-pronged: its brilliant conception as a complete, stacked-with-genius double-LP entity, far beyond the song-by-song structure of Dirty Mind and Controversy; and more simply, the size and scope of its songs. The record is overrun with worldly, emphatic mastery, particularly on the first disc. Prince had written anthems before, but nothing even in a league with "1999," a perfect instance of a song so well-written its universal utility has failed to allow it to age, even with its antiquity in the text.

By transferring Prince's stark synth explorations of Dirty Mind to a full-band format, "1999" crafts a new kind of musical apocalypse -- quite literally, with its imagery of End Times fire and brimstone. And what is Prince really talking about, here? Is it truly that 2000 would mark some grand transformation or was it simply the idea of the last few hours of listening to one's body, of real freedom wrought by doom? It doesn't matter when the numbers still invoke a united catharsis, when strong and often passionate memories have given partying like it's 1999 an entirely separate meaning today, and when Prince has offered the finest opening lines ever penned down for a pop song, traded amongst his bandmates. "I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray." It serves doubly as the introduction to the golden age of Prince's career. But "1999" itself continues to rave on mightily as a classic, as weird and wonderful a release for private listeners and club inhabitants alike as ever. And by celebrating the weirdo, as personality and musician, in an unfettered pop context, filling this muscular piece of genius with noises and idiosyncracies you don't notice the first hundred times, Prince fulfills the promise of legions before him. He was the first geek superstar, and the first geek sex symbol since Buddy Holly.

"Little Red Corvette" may mark the moment when it became impossible not to consider that Prince might just end up in a pantheon with Holly, with Stevie Wonder and James Brown, which he quickly would. If "1999" is one of the finest club songs ever written, "Corvette" is one of the finest songs ever, period. Lyrically flawless, its ribald condom imagery, romantic longing, and sophisticated characterization are all far beyond the typical boundaries of the rock lyric. And even in 1982, which is three whole decades ago now, men and women had already spent decades if not centuries trying to pin down the emotion Prince so succinctly expresses with these eleven words: "It was Saturday night, I guess that makes it all right." He doesn't toss it off, of course, because he's Prince. He wraps his voice around it and grinds through it like it matters immensely, which it does.

Approaching "Corvette" historically, it could be the first instance of layered, undeniably emotional pop balladry in such an artificial, synthesized context; rock dorks could no longer deny that the drum machine had its place. It's songs like this, the low-key late night weekend anthems, that really alter the course of millions of adolescent lives and set the world on its ear. It is the tune of its type to beat, to this day. By the flight of fancy on the bridge, the "run into the ground" streetwise lost-soul that makes rockist notions of Saturday night loneliness seem absurd with banality, you are left marveling at the utility and durability of this music, of this sequence of tracks that has lived on already through so many hundreds of Saturday nights when it seemed to erase the distance between people.

That basic emotion elevated to insurmountable, stargazing heights carries through to "Delirious," a warmer song with band interplay that Prince's former chilliness could never have duplicated, despite its continued reliance on the all-important programmed drums. The single's nasty hook belies its thematic humanity, which elegantly runs down basic lovelorn folly without condescending, overreaching, or falling off into Prince's kooky shenanigans. "I get delirious whenever you're near," we've had millions of songs about that, but none that knew quite how to say it so well.

Still, Side One is where Prince leaves his eccentricity at the door, and if that's what you really want, you don't really love Prince, even if no one would deny that "1999" and "Little Red Corvette" are the champions of all four sides. What makes 1999 so breathtaking is what's still to come. The massiveness of "Let's Pretend We're Married," its arid soundscape and disgusting groove soundtracking insane tangents of graphic sex ("fuck you so bad it hurts / it HURTS") and eventually God (basically out of nowhere at the end), crunches along for 7:21 without becoming anything less than intoxicating. The song's intricate sci-fi detail would seem an odd fit for Prince's joyfully explicit come-ons, but the IBM setting works, and unlike on Purple Rain, Prince really lets the track spin out to its conclusion, leaving no corner of its soulful rudeness and power unexplored.

"D.M.S.R." is nearly as sick, a towering synth buildup that even in its first few seconds is already laying claim as a clit-kissing party anthem for all; it stands for dance, music, sex, romance, all of which it offers excessively. Few things feel better until Prince begins to let the darkness cloud over again. The first half of the album ends with a woman screaming for help, rather believably; is it conceivable that there are more threats in this surreal urban partyscape of Prince's than just the Christ war machine at two thousand zero zero? When he talked about "fun," was he being sarcastic?

Much of the second record is spent wrestling with the implications of that moment, which clearly expresses some fear in Prince's heart. Is open sexual permissiveness a bedrock for rape and abuse, or is that repression? Is sexual permissiveness itself truly the radical idea (Prince seems preoccupied with "free love" hippies, particularly in the middle section here), or is it far more outrageous that we're so afraid of sexuality? Or is he just reminding us that the bigger the party is, the seamier the underbelly? Picture 1999 as a tall building, each song one floor, the windows spreading out lights and music and shouting in many different orders, each party unaware of those above and below it but all in the end able to say in years to come that they were in Prince's building when this night went down. And some of them even heard the scream.

But the people on whatever floor corresponded with "Automatic" were having a blast. Though hardly a cultural behemoth on a level with "Little Red Corvette," this is the album's juggernaut -- a nine-minute bondage funk attack as far-out glorious as "Erotic City," an audaciously mainstream celebration of getting tied up and whipped and fucked. The song is barely there, a minimalistic backdrop for skittering beats and impossibly eccentric, feverishly humid vocals (it may be the first song in pop history to contain backing vocals consisting of weeping, and certainly the first to frame it as eroticism). Does anyone celebrate Prince's astoundingly prescient out-in-the-open promotion of alternative then-fringe sex? No, because people are still terrified to talk about that sort of shit, which proves his point -- a point he probably no longer even agrees with. But seriously, only Leonard Cohen sang about domination and submission so consistently, and only Depeche Mode were gauche enough to make it an anthem... but Prince came out and faced it and made it unmistakable, and steamy.

The second half of 1999 has no fear of weirdness; "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)," though it forecasts the wildly divergent production style of Purple Rain, is the most sterile atmosphere of all, and takes far longer to understand than any other cut here -- but eventually, its groove strikes hard. More immediate, but still defiantly uncommercial, is the extended freakout "All the Critics Love U in New York," a nonsequitur blown up to bare-minimum funk theatrics like a series of half-formed ideas, impossibly catchy but disconnected, all strung together to make a perversely dizzying club track. It's like the Abbey Road medley as a 1:00am sex banger.

Prince proves he hasn't forgotten his roots, his original calling, with a pair of slow-jams that manage pleasingly to expand his balladeer horizons, though he would soon easily eclipse them with masterpieces "Purple Rain" and "Adore." For now, "Free" is the beautiful loverboy moment, built on a heartbeat and an itchy falsetto and triumphant melody line; "International Loverboy" the silly loverboy moment that climaxes (!) with Prince pretending to be a pilot on, yes, Prince Airways.

But if any single track gives some idea that Prince could go even farther than this, even more sophisticated, even more complete, even as this seems to do more with sex-funk and electro-urban dance music than anyone ever had or would need to, even as he seems to already be at the absolute top, it's "Lady Cab Driver." The guy didn't need to be even better, how could anyone be better than 1999? But this song contains so much, so many ideas that he and others would spend years reeling from and tweaking. Remember all that talk about Prince renaming himself The Artist many years later? Well, this is art. Not only is it a monster of a jam, pulsating and drifting and pounding like a space shuttle, it embodies a range, aesthetic and emotional, that would be fully realized on Purple Rain and especially Prince's greatest record, Sign o' the Times. Initially it sears with the same seduction as "Let's Pretend We're Married," maybe a tad more specific and sensual than just blatantly horny, but then you get to the part in the eight minute track when Prince begins fucking her and making a lecture while her orgasmic moaning persists.

What a moment this is. At first you think there's something nasty, indefensibly improper and monstrous in play when he begins naming injustices ("politicians who are bored and believe in war," "whoever taught you how to kiss in designer jeans") -- is Prince raping a woman because he doesn't like war? But no, he isn't raping her; soon, he's doing this one for me, yeah, and this for you. It's a fuck, a hard and fast fuck, as a rail against the bullshit. The place you have to live, the cab you have to drive, the rich, the tourists at Disneyland, love without sex. The thrusts are an act of defiance against whatever would rather they didn't exist, would rather short nerdy types didn't fuck lady cab drivers if the two of them wanted, would rather no one ever went out of their way for nothing more than shared pleasure -- which may finally be all that some have. Prince wants to please her, to take care of her orgasm, but also wants us all to know that he's doing this for himself too, and he's doing it because he's a person and because some things are worth believing in. The sun, the moon, the stars, God, women, and yes, sex. One wonders if in her PMRC crusade, Tipper Gore ever heard this rant, ever heard Prince making the lady cab driver come just to piss people like Tipper Gore off, and just to thrill the rest of us.

The PMRC is long past relevant now. So are Reagan and Gorbachev, so are most of the moral crusaders and crass public figures dominating the airwaves in 1982. And so, alas, is Prince, who will never be so bold as to bring it like this again. Maybe the world isn't even quite as scary now. But we have other moral crusaders, other crass people, we have others whose grand notion of justice is not letting people who like to fuck others of their gender visit their same-sex de facto spouses in the hospital. And we are nearly consumed by our own darkness, by a litany of debt crises and unemployment line, credit card declined; by rich and religious gluttons suspicious and disdainful of lady cab drivers who get paid nothing in shabby apartments; by a political landscape dominated by fear and hatred and a president whose promises of Change have been slow and compromised and anything but fierce. And what do we do in 2011 to get through this? We party like it's 1999, we fuck the ones we love and we have our Saturday nights even if we are ladies, even if we're cab drivers, and even if we're black. Or gay, or young and scared.

The idea of 1999 is simpler than it appears, then -- we can't escape the fear, we shouldn't embrace it either, but we can dance atop it without allowing ourselves to forget it's there. "My mind says prepare to fight," as the song goes. But have some fun. That's what They don't want. Perhaps this foreboding is a function of being in one's twenties and somewhat conscious of the world, but it rings as true for me here as on the more explicit (and less broadly pious, therefore more meaningful to me) Sign o' the Times. I know that 1999 invented the Minneapolis sound, but it seems to reach so far beyond that, to exist on a plane above a lot of those surely magnificent records it initially begat. It connects as if no time has passed at all, so awe-inspiring and smart it's scary, as brilliant an example as we've ever had, in any modern art form, of the personal found in the universal -- and finally, irreversibly becoming it.

[SEE ALSO:]
Dirty Mind (1980)
Controversy (1981)

Bon Iver (2011)

(Jagjaguwar)

I love his vocals. As the current folk rock set goes, Justin Vernon's coos and cries hit the sweet spot many others wish they could; even when placed against uninspired music and melodies, he doesn't tend to sound forced, which is quite remarkable. On the opening track of the second Bon Iver record, "Perth," he manages to convey emotion against a heavily melodramatic musical backdrop that sounds like something from the old Family Channel show Crossbow -- something embodying that 1980s idea of what Medieval times were like. So while you may be distracted by the militaristic Mr. Mister sound (little drummer boy percussion and all), Vernon scores and gives the aimless emotional swells a target.

So it is for much of Bon Iver, the summit of a bizarre indie rock moment that has seen the vaulting of Air Supply's production style to veneration once reserved for the likes of Steve Albini. The record bears surprisingly scant aesthetic resemblance to the ingeniously calculated For Emma, Forever Ago, a far less proggy and more convincingly fallen-apart affair. The closest the sophomore effort probably comes is the lovely "Minnesota, WI," which complements a deceptively desolate yet lush log cabin sound with funky enough singing from Vernon to suggest another Kanye collab. The rest travels in either the direction of total subservience to pillowy, tempo-free yacht rock or ever starker Vernon noodling. (Someone said something to me recently about how good Bon Iver's drummer is; my unspoken reaction was "Bon Iver has a drummer?") The more Vernon attempts to score on his own adorability (see "Michicant" and the almost insufferable softcore porn soundtrack "Calgary") the less fun he is, and at the very least a throwback of this kind should be fun.

There are some nifty ideas here; "Hinnom, TX" provides an answer to the burning question of what happens if you remove the beat from a mid-'70s Bee Gees song, which is that you're left with what sounds like a fallen star's impression of post-rock. That's interesting enough, and it even plays to the artist's ample strengths as writer and vocalist, both of which he inexplicably ignores most of the time in favor of some over-the-moon artificial fragility. Vernon knows he's gifted, and he's right, he even knows where and how, but what he doesn't know is when to cut it out; most of these sticky-sweet recordings are just overload. "Holocene" compensates for an initial minimalism by building so much it subverts its own beauty, and the excessive tracking on Vernon doesn't make its chilly preciousness any more convincing. And if "Wash," a repetitive piano figure layered with vague atmospheres and vaguer singing, was any closer to nonexistent I don't see how he could collect songwriting royalties for it.

Vernon's current obsession with 1980s soft rock is less compelling than Dan Bejar's because he fails to sense anything playful about it, instead buying into the "Take My Breath Away" idea of beauty. It does work sometimes; "Lisbon, OH" is a splendid Summer Sun-like mood piece, and "Towers" hits hard because of atmosphere, but keeps its shape because of stronger, grittier instrumentation and writing than on most of the other songs -- and also because it's pure pop, never mind retro. Whatever message Vernon may have taken from his work with Kanye West, I'm wishing he interpreted it as a need to move farther in this direction.

At its most offensive, Bon Iver shows that Vernon's impression of pop music is basically a distillation of the dullest, most dunderheaded musical ideas he's ever heard over the Muzak machine at a mall. "Beth / Rest" is the draggiest piece of irksome indie-pop I've heard this year, and that includes Kurt Vile's album. It's a Peter Cetera song filtered through a Pure Moods ad, and it only conquers boredom because it's so appallingly tasteless -- but across five minutes, it never lifts itself enough even to give a purpose, satirical or emotional, for its skillful appropriation of antiseptic, dated Eric Carmen non-hooks and non-music. It is as objectionable in its own way as Odd Future. Those are your two enemies right now, rock & rollers: Odd Future and "Beth / Rest." Both couch emotional terror in bite-sized, convenient packages that will ultimately be to society's detriment. Both deserve to drift quickly to the bottom of cultural memory. Both are evil, pure evil. Luckily, nothing else on Bon Iver even comes close to being as inhumanely awful. Enya fans may like it; they can add it to the end of their Julianna Barwick mixtape and throw it on when they're feeling adventurous.

The perverse thing about Bon Iver, which was also apparent to a lesser extent on Emma, is that the music can be perfect for a background moment. Even listening while typing this I like it more than the three and a half times I concentrated on it. When you step closer, it loses detail, emotional signifiance. The music I love, from Pet Sounds to Prince to tUnE-yArDs, tends to work in precisely the opposite fashion. Try to ignore them and they'll sneer at you and blow out incomprehensible, displeasing signals. Put Bon Iver on during dinner or a lengthy conversation and you're likely to want to embrace it. It's also a handily succinct thirty-nine minutes, and that counts for something. But no, I don't think you're magnificent either, Justin.

The Faint: Blank-Wave Arcade (1999)

(Saddle Creek)

This is everything people who don't listen to indie rock hate about indie rock and think the whole of it embodies -- smug, smarmy, impersonal, self-consciously aloof. And "cool," of course. Not that plenty of cool and detached bands haven't been great, but there was always an undercurrent of sorrow or desperation this thoroughly lacks; see Joy Division. Even White Light / White Heat has some emotion and/or feeling besides clipped and edgy. This is music kids decided to write when they got bored with skating and wanted to foist their claustrophobic (lack of a) worldview on unsuspecting grownups. The Faint -- amazingly enough, formerly co-led by Conor Oberst, which is particularly ironic given his wide-armed heart-on-sleeve lyrics and vocals -- write chilly, sneering songs about what sounds like dreadful sex ("Sex Is Personal," "Worked Up So Sexual," "Casual Sex," sense a theme?) but you can dance to them.

Firmly in the Orange Juice / Joy Division / Suicide mold that would soon spawn Franz Ferdinand, because they think that stuff is really drab and deep and fail to sense its arch humor, this can be heard as innovative in its derivations if you like, and it certainly isn't the worst party album you could cue up. So the key to enjoyment is the same as when eating a hot dog: just don't think about what you're consuming, for even a second, and you'll have a decent time. (The hot dog's better for you, though.)