Another Year In America April 23, 2009
Apr. 24th, 2009 02:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotGot another shot at the Green Day and the Em, which I wrote about earlier this week on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
poptimists; the Em gets more interesting the more I hear it, while the Green Day is running out of gas.
Eminem "We Made You": Since we made you, we should have you, says our man Slim to the celebs; but that's not how it works, and his come-ons come to naught, of course. There's the same mutual dysfunction as in the old days, Em and his love objects complicit in each other's pathology ("You're my Amy, I'm your Blake"), but he keeps finding new angles and new gags ("Oh Amy, rehab never looked so good, I can't wait, I'm goin' back!"). What's strange and compelling but not fun about this track is its struggle, the narrator's compulsions reduced to an impersonal mechanism, a player piano rattling on. He's not the ebullient Slim of past days but a machine that's filing syllables into slots: "Back by popular demand/Now pop a little Zantac or antacid if you can." It's the ghost of jauntiness, performed by skeleton bones. TICK.
Keri Hilson f. Kanye West and Ne-Yo "Knock You Down": As a singer Keri's just there, an easy glider without much character. As such, she's a good enough vehicle for the song's thin beauty. Ne-Yo's pale presence is only half functioning (pale but not present), and Kanye's overrhyming is unexpectedly leaden, his voice the wrong mood for the track though not on long enough to destroy it. TICK.
Green Day "Know Your Enemy": Rousingly tuneful rattle-clatter of a rock song... well, a rousingly tuneful start of a rock song that resolutely refuses to develop or resolve, just repeats and repeats. I'm a sucker for maniacally minimal rock forms and suspended or denied release, but this track's repetition never achieves propulsion or obsessiveness or any feeling of necessity or tension. NO TICK.
poptimists; the Em gets more interesting the more I hear it, while the Green Day is running out of gas.Eminem "We Made You": Since we made you, we should have you, says our man Slim to the celebs; but that's not how it works, and his come-ons come to naught, of course. There's the same mutual dysfunction as in the old days, Em and his love objects complicit in each other's pathology ("You're my Amy, I'm your Blake"), but he keeps finding new angles and new gags ("Oh Amy, rehab never looked so good, I can't wait, I'm goin' back!"). What's strange and compelling but not fun about this track is its struggle, the narrator's compulsions reduced to an impersonal mechanism, a player piano rattling on. He's not the ebullient Slim of past days but a machine that's filing syllables into slots: "Back by popular demand/Now pop a little Zantac or antacid if you can." It's the ghost of jauntiness, performed by skeleton bones. TICK.
Keri Hilson f. Kanye West and Ne-Yo "Knock You Down": As a singer Keri's just there, an easy glider without much character. As such, she's a good enough vehicle for the song's thin beauty. Ne-Yo's pale presence is only half functioning (pale but not present), and Kanye's overrhyming is unexpectedly leaden, his voice the wrong mood for the track though not on long enough to destroy it. TICK.
Green Day "Know Your Enemy": Rousingly tuneful rattle-clatter of a rock song... well, a rousingly tuneful start of a rock song that resolutely refuses to develop or resolve, just repeats and repeats. I'm a sucker for maniacally minimal rock forms and suspended or denied release, but this track's repetition never achieves propulsion or obsessiveness or any feeling of necessity or tension. NO TICK.
