Life is Just Totally Not at All Like a Box of Chocolates

I’m not sure I understand the concept of the mixtape. I mean, I know what one is, but I don’t know why it’s something that musicians release. Perhaps they function much like EPs, as a sort of “hey-here-ya-go” for the fans between full-length albums. At the very least, I suppose mixtapes and EPs are a good way to let the people know you’re still making music.

In the case of Shareese Renée Ballard – Res, to her hopefully growing legion of fans – that sort of reminder has special significance. After all, those of us who have been following her since her 2001 debut (How I Do, which was largely co-written with Santi White, who I’m hoping will release her second album before 2016. Oh shit, I guess I better hope she gets it out before May 21st!) had to wait eight years for a follow-up (2009′s folky but fine Black Girls Rock), largely because of industry bullshit.  So giving her fans the sense that the interim between Black Girls Rock and whatever her third album is called (rumors abound of an album called Reset, but I’ll believe it when I can listen to it) will be relatively short makes her free mixtape, A Box of Chocolates, all the sweeter, if you’ll pardon the pun (I wouldn’t).

Res gave us A Box of Chocolates on Valentine’s Day and if you think that’s as cutesy as it gets, wait until you realize that the first thing you hear on the mixtape is Forrest Fucking Gump saying his pithy little line about what life is like. Apparently Mr. Gump, a retard of infuriatingly vague (read: no) diagnosis, has never actually seen a box of chocolates; you see, most of them come with little cards that tell you exactly what you’re gonna get. And let’s face it, even if you get the shitty boxes of chocolates that don’t tell you what’s in them, sometimes in life, you know exactly what’s coming. Like when your wife/husband/significant other says, “We need to talk.” You know what’s coming – your ass is in some kind of trouble. I realize that has nothing to do with Res but I really really don’t like Forrest Gump. It’s Baby Boomer Nostalgia Bait at its absolute worst.

Anyway, you can download A Box of Chocolates here if you wanna check it out. I’m sure you can also download Forrest Gump plenty of places too, but I don’t want to link to any of them. It’s not an anti-piracy thing so much as it’s a not-wanting-to-steer-my-readers-toward-crappy-things thing.

A Box of Chocolates features new versions and/or remixes of songs from Res’s two great albums, a couple songs I’ve never heard before, and a cover of Harry Nilsson’s “One.” The whole thing is just about a half an hour long and I think it’s safe to say that Res’s fans will find a lot to like about it. So if the intention of this particular mixtape is to let us know that Res’s creative juices are still flowing just fine, thanks, then mission accomplished. It certainly doesn’t hurt to have a brief reminder that Res is one of the best (and by far the most underrated) Soul/R&B/Pretty Much Whatever Else She Does vocalists of the last eleven years.

Both its intense brevity and my lack of experience with mixtapes make A Box of Chocolates kind of hard to judge like a conventional album. Don’t get me wrong, there is stuff to criticize here, chiefly the use of Auto-Tune on “Say You Will.” I get, for the millionth time, that some people use it as an aesthetic choice. But I still hate it. Auto-Tune makes everything sound awful, especially awesome voices. Res’s voice is way too awesome for Auto-Tune and that’s final (honestly, the Auto-Tune and the presence of his Gumpitude are my least favorite things about this whole album. You can file those under “minor grievances”). Plenty of people disagree with me about Auto-Tune, by the way, but I didn’t start doing Bollocks! because I thought everyone would (or should) agree with me. I started Bollocks! because I was tired of masturbating.

Conceptually, A Box of Chocolates flows kind of like a flashback episode – there are new versions of old songs (the stuff from How I Do still sounds fresh as hell), and a few spoken-word bits about Res’s career up to this point. It may seem premature to do that after only two albums, but remember that Res fought for years to get her second album out (and Black Girls Rock is really only her second released album. According to her website, she recorded an album for Geffen that never saw the light of day. Nobody knows how to fuck up good music quite like the music industry). So yeah, the sung/spoken/rapped “Industry Diaries” might seem a little obvious but overall, A Box of Chocolates shows that Res is still excited to make music (and plenty playful at making it too) at a point when a lot of people would’ve thrown in the towel and gotten a job mucking out the video booths at an all-night porn arcade (Official Bollocks! Fact: everyone who quits or is forced out of the music industry is immediately offered a position as All-Night Porn Arcade Video Booth Mucker-Outer. What do you think the guys from Semisonic have been doing for the last ten years?).

The new songs – at least they’re new to me – indicate that Res Album #3 might have more of the funk/hip-hop vibe of How I Do, which is just fine with me. I like Black Girls Rock quite a bit, but How I Do had a real swagger to it that I kind of missed on the second record. “One” seems to split the difference between the two albums, to extremely pleasant effect. Regardless of which album you prefer, Res, like her pal Santi White, has a real potential to make awesome, genreless music and if A Box of Chocolates is as much a mixed bag as it is a mixtape, it still offers compelling evidence of that fact.

The Very Worst Album of 2010 Part II: Reflection (And Maybe Just a Little More Hostility)

Having vented my spleen on Santana’s utterly shitty Guitar Heaven, I would like to turn now to a broader contextual discussion of the record. How does something like this come into existence (and I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that a mad scientist created it in an attempt to destroy the world) and who is it for? And what, if anything, could such a musical abomination mean?

To take the last question first, Guitar Heaven might be the last nail in the coffin that holds the rapidly putrefying remains of Rolling Stone’s credibility. The magazine gave the album three stars (out of five) and called the performances, “mostly faithful to the originals” which suggests to me that Rolling Stone‘s Mark Kemp may not have actually listened to Guitar Heaven. Not that I can blame him. If you think the Joe Cocker-sung abortion that they call “Little Wing” on this album is “faithful” to Jimi Hendrix’s original, I will fight you. I will literally, violently, will all the force of my rage, fight you. With a two-by-four and a sock full of quarters. If anything, Cocktana’s version of “Little Wing” serves as definitive proof that we should pass an international law that forbids people to cover Jimi Hendrix songs.

And how did something like Guitar Heaven come to exist? That’s the easiest question of all to answer: it came about the same way every Santana album has for the last dozen years. Santana decides he wants to buy a boat, some producers come in and write some shitty tracks, arrange the collaborations with some brand-name, talentless vocalists (I know some people think that lasting a few weeks on American Idol means you’re talented, but I submit to you that it means exactly the opposite of that), and behold! a full-length album’s worth of crap is ready to clog up your FM radio for another year. Santana gets his boat, one or more asshole collaborators get Grammys, and everyone wins except, of course, people who believe in things like truth and beauty. Guitar Heaven turns the formula on its head by eliminating the need to actually write songs at all – now, Santana and his partners in crime (let’s just call it what it is, okay?) can mangle songs that people already know and love. And don’t believe for a second that this is a one-time deal; I’ll bet you every one of Carlos Santana’s dollars that there will be a Guitar Heaven II some time in the near future.

So who’s it for? You might be inclined to guess that it’s for the same Baby Boomers who saw Santana, drugged off his ass, at Woodstock forty-one years ago. If so, shouldn’t they be outraged? After all, Guitar Heaven almost certainly represents the co-opting and watering down of some of the great, primal rock ‘n’ roll moments that were the soundtrack to the youth of a many a Baby Boomer. Santana’s guitar tone renders the notes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Angus Young in a warm, digitally polished shine that is about as vital as a road-killed squid (it happens more often than you think) and only one vocal performance on Guitar Heaven really does justice to the original song; Chester Bennington’s performance on the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, is every bit as boring as Jim Morrison’s.

Of course, Guitar Heaven isn’t just a cynical attempt to create and cash in on the perfect Baby Boomer nostalgia bait. It also tries to nab those of us on the cusp of Generation X and whatever the fuck the generation after X was. “Photograph” was a song from my childhood and having Chris Daughtry sing it is a clear attempt to get fourteen-year-old girls to buy this album or at least get that one track from I-Tunes. And if we’re talking about cynicism, what other word describes putting “Under the Bridge” on the album at all? The song is clearly not a guitar classic, but it was on the radio twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for about two straight years in the 1990s. That one is aimed squarely at people my age (as is the inclusion of Chris Cornell, although I was not fooled into believing for even a second that Cornell is as great as he was even as late as Superunknown), but literally nobody my age has ever strummed a solitary air-guitar note to “Under the Bridge.” Why? Because it’s the slow, sensitive song you put on when you want to try and slide into second base (I never did that, but I knew guys who did).

If you’re troubled and/or infuriated by Guitar Heaven, allow me to provide you with some comfort: although you’re right to be infuriated by this album (because – and I’m listening to it as I type this – it really fucking sucks), you needn’t worry that it represents some new kind of musical evil. These attempts to cash in on music someone else wrote have always been around. Paul Anka tried it a few years back with an album called Rock Swings which was so transparently hungry for the money of twenty-and-thirty-somethings that Anka even attempted a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” There are, of course, good covers albums but they are the exception that proves the rule (the rule being, “Covers albums are generally cynical attempts to get money quick”). Astute readers will be in a hurry to point out that I loved Bettye LaVette’s Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook, and I say, “That’s very astute of you.” The thing is, LaVette, without any big-name assistance, took songs other people wrote and made them her own. There’s a sense, for instance, of the personal resonance that “Wish You Were Here” has for LaVette. When you listen to Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana choke the life out of “Sunshine of Your Love”, you can hear that the song means dollar signs to them and nothing else. They’re wringing it out like a sponge, waiting for money to fall out.

It might be tempting to try to link Santana’s decade-long mission to sell out as much as possible (which is his right, by the way – if you want to suck for money, that’s up to you, but don’t get all indignant when I call you a whore) to the Baby Boomer Generation as a whole. After all, a lot of these people spent maybe a decade (some more, some less) trying to stick it to the Man before deciding that they can save more for retirement if they just started working for him. Again, that’s their business and I certainly don’t mean that all Baby Boomer are sellouts, but I am willing to bet that those among the Boomers who buy Guitar Heaven are probably the most ashamed of their hippie-dippy past.  And to be honest, I don’t care so much that Carlos Santana is a sellout per se. I care that he’s a sellout who makes shitty music and now he’s making shitty music out of formerly good music.

And, lest I receive any Red-baiting comments, let me clear up what I mean when I say someone is a sellout. Making money doing what you love is not selling out. Watering down, pussifying, and taming your passions for mass appeal is selling out. Let the great Joseph Campbell sum it up for you: “There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.” Carlos Santana hasn’t just fallen “off the beam”; he’s swan-dived off of it into a swimming pool full of money, exchanging soulless, lifeless “music” (for it can just barely be called that, and mostly only because it consists of known chords and notes) for cold, hard cash. Or, to put it more succinctly:

Ladies and gentlemen, Carlos Santana has “lost his life.”