I'm not going to complain anymore about long album titles after I read today what the title of the new Fiona Apple non-masterwork is. Is anyone else out more deserving of being laughed at these days? IDIOT!
Now, this album. Prince Be is the guy everyone wants to be their brother, I'm thinking. That big friendly guy who is relaxed and thinks about things in his own way and who always leaves you smiling, if you will. And lucky him, his own brother is the other guy in the band!
And the thing about this album is that I don't know if it's astoundingly prescient or simply a logical end conclusion. Or both. See, the big canard these days is the complaint that pop hip-hop just samples a bunch of eighties tunes and is finally dead. Yet of course we've got the big breakthrough tune on here being "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss," transforming Spandau Ballet's "True" into something soaring, beautiful and funky all at once. Did everyone forget about this? Or more to the point, perhaps, did they think that Puff Daddy's own ham-handed efforts didn't compare to the seemingly effortless wonder they came up with here? I could also mention the clever way they snuck in Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator" under "If I Wuz U," but then again, sampling Kraftwerk is just one of those things everyone is supposed to do at some point.
But also a logical end conclusion. I'm thinking of the way "Paper Doll" captures up a certain icy-cool-lovely 80s synth pop flow in its own way, like some of what a-ha was doing on their more underrated cuts (and given the album cover, which might as well be Porcupine by Echo and the Bunnymen with two American dudes instead of four Englishmen, perhaps all the more appropriate). So that's part of it, but naturally not all of it.
And who can resist the beats, the feel, the trips? This was perhaps the more clean, mass-market flipside to Basehead's Play With Toys, but there's the same sense of casually stepping aside through and around boundaries, creating varied and wonderful albums just because they could and cocking curious eyes at anyone who complained. The big difference was that P. M. Dawn was able to immediately take it to everyone with the first record, get the videos on the air and add that certain sweet something -- and to maintain it throughout the album.
All this and the Trinity and Todd Terry too. Like the man says on the final song, "Damn." This is the real teenage symphony to God.