Glitter and Doom

Sixty years ago today – the day after Leadbelly died (for those of you who believe in reincarnation, this could be regarded as auspicious), right here in southern California, lightning struck a bottle of moonshine, shattering it into thousands of tiny shards, one of which pierced the pregnant belly of a school teacher, opening her up wide enough for her newborn son to step out into the light. He was born walking – he made a bedroll from his umbilical cord and set off on the road that very day, bumming smokes, bread, and beans as he went. He got a few gigs here and there crooning country/jazz in shitty little bars; no great shakes, but it kept him in cigarettes and whiskey until the early 1980s when he took folk, jazz, rock, beat poetry, Kurt Weill, and everything else, threw ‘em in a blender with some stale beer and train smoke, and became one of the foremost songwriters in American music history.

I’m talking, of course, about Tom Waits. Happy birthday, Mr. Waits. You are an American hero; you are, in fact, both a folk hero and a maker of folk heroes and not even Bob Dylan is that anymore. And, in all seriousness, thank you, sir, for the music you’ve been making for most of my life. Thank you.

But to get down to business: live albums, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are almost always treats for diehard fans and no one else. You don’t generally put on a live album as a way of introducing someone to your favorite band. The live album is typically “Greatest Hits with Cheering” but every so often, you get a live album that is a treasure for fans and newcomers alike. Glitter and Doom, by our Birthday Boy Tom, is one such album. There is everything Waits fans love on this album and an energy that is only adequately described as a force of nature. One spin through Glitter and Doom and you will understand why the man doesn’t go on long tours anymore. He puts everything he has into every show he plays, and Tom Waits has a lot. I can confidently say that, if you’re going to like Tom Waits, you’re going to like Glitter and Doom. If you love Tom Waits, you’ll love the album’s second disc, which is Tom Waits bullshitting for half an hour. I know I love it.

One of the bigger problems live albums face, in my humble (ha!) opinion, is that the songs sound like the recorded versions, but there are more assholes singing along. Waits is not content to leave his songs alone, and that creates a very compelling argument for seeking out his live shows. Ideally, you’ll get to see the man in concert but, if you’re like many people who cursed the ill luck of living in a city that Waits didn’t visit on his “Glitter & Doom” Tour last year, you’ll grab a live Waits album and revel in its awesome weirdness, its blustering theatricality, and its distorted beauty.

Tom Waits avoids the pitfall of sounding like “Greatest Hits with Cheering” because he doesn’t have any hits. The radio is not ready for Tom Waits (except for National Public Radio, which is just college radio for college-educated grown-ups – and that’s clearly not driving our culture right now. If it were, you’d hear more Waits and Flaming Lips on American Idol and Sarah Palin would have no supporters) and he steadfastly refuses to let people use his music for commercials. Despite being the only guy I know of to win both the Best Alternative Rock and Contemporary Folk Grammys, Waits has what I consider an extremely healthy disdain for awards. Having said all that, Glitter and Doom does cover some familiar territory to Tom Waits fans. But the songs do not remain the same. “Singapore” ends with Waits simulating a bombing, while “Such a Scream” becomes a chugging funk number (it’s like a Bizarro Prince tune) and “Goin’ Out West” becomes a twisted homage to T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”

Waits was surrounded by incredible musicians (all the bass on this album is upright bass, played by Seth Ford-Young) for this tour, including his son Casey on drums and percussion (Casey also played the ass-beating drum part on Waits’s cover of “The Return of Jackie and Judy”), but Waits’s voice remains the most versatile instrument in the ensemble. Whether whispering, howling, or growling, Tom Waits has one of the most distinctive voices in music, and he uses it to inhabit his characters fully. On “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down,” Waits brings William the Pleaser to life as a wounded, terrified, and haunted man who “left Texas/ to follow Lucinda/ Now I will never see Heaven/ or home.” Glitter and Doom tends to mine from Waits’s darker stuff, relying heavily on Blood Money, Bone Machine, and Real Gone for the bulk of its material. The only song that is a repeat from Waits’s other live album, Big Time, is “Falling Down” which was a studio track on that record. It’s nice to see Waits take that tune back after that uber-dilettante Scarlett Johansson mangled it on her ill-advised album of Tom Waits covers (it’s called Anywhere I Lay My Head, for those of you who think I’m making it up. Johansson commits the cardinal sin of thinking that prettying up Tom Waits songs will somehow 1) pay fitting tribute to them and 2) please fans of Mr. Waits. Her album, of course, does neither. I listened to the album shortly after starting Bollocks! and hated it so much that I couldn’t find the words to give it a sufficient review).

Though the album is cobbled together from the fistful of dates Waits played across the American south and parts of Europe last year, it’s sequenced like a proper Waits concert, with all the roaring loud moments (“Lucinda,” “Metropolitan Glide”) and low-moaning soft moments (“Trampled Rose,” “Fannin Street”) that entails. It’s surely no substitute for an actual ticket, but Glitter and Doom is still a nice bone to throw me for not making the road trip to Phoenix to see him in person. I can’t really blame Waits for not wanting to come to L.A., but if he can make it as far as Bakersfield, I’ll be the first in line to see him and I’ll even bring him dinner.

The Illest Villain

Sometimes you have to wait a long time for your favorite artist to make a new album. And sometimes, you wait a long time, find out the album is finally coming out, and it’s a tremendous disappointment. Fans of Guns ‘n’ Roses know what I’m talking about, but let’s face it – if you were on the edge of your seat for a decade and a half waiting for Axl Rose to drop the fetid turd that was Chinese Democracy, your priorities are fucked.

It was, all things being equal, much easier to wait three years for MF Doom to drop his MF, enlarge the remaining letters, and release Born Like This as DOOM. Last time the Supervillain graced us with his offbeat and awesome rhymes, he was flowing over Danger Mouse beats and screening calls from Master Shake. Rumors of Born Like This being released last year abounded, only to have the release date pushed back like an unattractive groupie trying to wile her way backstage. But DOOM is no unattractive groupie. No sir, he’s  a dude in a metal goddamn mask.

You know how you think something is going to be awesome and then it isn’t awesome – it’s not bad either, just not awesome – but it’s not-awesomeness diminishes it so much in your esteem that you have to abandon it all together, forgetting it ever happened? Hmm. Perhaps an example: I thought last year’s Gutter Twins album was going to be fucking awesome. It was not fucking awesome. It was barely good. And now I have banished it from my thoughts. Well, you’ll be happy to note that Born Like This is not at all like that thing I just took way too long to describe.

It would seem that three years is not too long to wait (although DOOM does us the courtesy of asking if he’s been away too long on “That’s That”) for new DOOM music and, indeed, it would seem that for some artists, three years is some sort of magic incubating period. Consider: Neko Case released Middle Cyclone three years after Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs waited three years after Show Your Bones to drop It’s Blitz! And DOOM took three years from the release of The Mouse and the Mask to release Born Like This. If this trend continues, one can safely predict that the new Sonic Youth album will be un-fucking-believable.

There’s a lot of the old DOOM stuff on Born Like This: the album is ushered in with a skit where a guy talks about joining forces with the Supervillain. The guy sounds like a bad American voice actor who would be hired to shittily dub into English your favorite anime shows.  And he has some of the more hilarious lines on the album, like “Time to get the feta” and “That’s right, punk – I’ll slap the black off ya.” The beats are, as ever, exremely choice – Pitchfork bemoaned the fact that DOOM is the Nth rapper to sample Dilla’s “Lightworks,” but when you consider what he did with it, it’s extremely forgivable.

DOOM isn’t without a few new tricks on Born Like This either. For instance, he samples Charles Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” on “Cellz,” making that apocalyptically awesome track the title track for the album and cementing DOOM and Charles Bukowski as 2009′s outta-left-field rap collaboration of the year. I’m pretty sure Kanye West has no idea who Bukowski is – if you can prove me wrong, Kanye, I’ll let you buy me a sandwich. While I smash your autotuner.  Speaking of Autotune, DOOM mangles it to bits on “Supervillainz,” coming closer than anyone before to using it against the purpose for which it was designed. The damn thing still autotunes the vocals, but the song itself is pretty clearly DOOM lampooning the autotune school of rappers, all the while proving that no one can more adeptly turn a phrase. Born Like This features references to the Hadron Collider, rhyme-propelled grenades, and to the fact that DOOM’s rhymes often make scant sense (“don’t know what he sayin’ but the words be funny” he raps on “Cellz”).

The guests spots are not atypical – Ghostface stops by and is adequate. I’m not a huge fan of his solo work, but he can stop by a DOOM album on occasion. The star collaborator in my mind, however, is Empress Starhh Tha Femcee, who gets “Still Dope” all to herself and hits it out of the park.  Really, Born Like This could only be better if my other favorite MC, Atmosphere’s Slug, dropped by to kick a few rhymes.

But wait – he totally does on “Supervillainz.” Which means that Born Like This does everything I want a rap album to do, short of making Sage Francis no longer a whiny bitch. Yeah, there’s the needless intro and outro tracks, and the voicemail “song” (“Bumpy’s Message,” which I forgive DOOM for, based on a principle I established while listening to another answering machine song, Sonic Youth’s “Providence” on the otherwise unparalleled Daydream Nation. The principle is this – as regards answering machine/voicemail songs, everybody gets one. Provided, of course, the rest of the album is worth the effort. Born Like This most definitely is), but if you take those away, you’re left with 14 solid tracks of awesomeness, including a long overdue song about how Superman, Batman, and Robin are all gay. This is the kind of review you wrap up by saying “I hope DOOM doesn’t make me wait three more years,” but I say fuck it; if DOOM takes three years to make another album that is as good or better than Born Like This, put me on the waiting list.