The Major and the Minor

Ice Cube, who practically founded this game back in his N.W.A. days, has been coasting on his rep for quite a while now, and on The War Disc (the first half of a proposed opus that will be completed next year with the arrival of--you guessed it--The Peace Disc), he doesn't always rise to the occasion: I dare you to listen to him bark, "I'd rather eat piranha from Benihana/Smokin' marijuana in my sauna" (from "Ask About Me") without guffawing. Bluntly stated, there are simply too many moments when his attempts at steeliness seem just plain dumb--like the monster-movie noises that decorate "Dr. Frankenstein" and the opening passage of "Fuck Dying," in which Cube threatens to kick the crap out of the Angel of Death ("I ain't goin' nowhere with your ass, and if you put your hands on me, we're gettin' down right here," he says). The CD isn't a total washout: "3 Strikes You In" is a righteous attack on current sentencing practices, and "Ghetto Vet," in which Cube portrays a paralyzed Vietnam survivor fallen on tough times, finds him at his most incisive. But in an effort to give his songs a cinematic feel, Cube falls prey to overproduction that makes him sound as if he's trying too hard. When War was over, I can't say I was looking forward to giving Peace a chance.

Longtime R.E.M. drummer Bill Berry doesn't play on Up; he bowed out in the wake of a brain aneurysm, causing the first personnel shift in the band's eighteen years of life. But Up is so down that it makes most funerals seem like a rave full of ecstasy-heads by comparison. By the middle of the disc, I wanted to take Michael Stipe by the shoulders and shout, "Bill's not dead! He's doing just fine!"

Things don't start off badly. The opener, "Airportman," is a bit of a trial, what with its mopey atmosphere, overt drum machine and failed poesy ("Labored breathing and sallow skin/Recycled air"), but it's followed by "Lotus," an off-the-cuff quasi-glam workout probably inspired by Stipe's role as producer of the film Velvet Goldmine. Then the good times pretty much end. When heard outside the context of the disc, a few of the tracks are passable: "Suspicion," "Hope" and "At My Most Beautiful" (which sports Stipe's most treacly lyrics ever) are mournful but fairly effective pop, and "Parakeet," which sounds like the Beach Boys as portrayed by Procul Harum, doesn't wear out its welcome. But the decent ventures are bogged down by scads of draggy patience-testers. Stipe may see "The Apologist" as ironic, but that doesn't make his repetitions of "I'm sorry" any less irritating. Even more annoying is "Sad Professor," in which the all-knowing Michael takes on the sins of the world, and "Why Not Smile," a fake ode to cheerfulness that might well cause the residents at the terminal ward to contact Jack Kevorkian.

No one says the members of R.E.M. should keep strumming those twelve-strings until they wind up on the oldies circuit: Experimentation is to be applauded. But Up is hardly a bold step in a new direction. Monotonous and one-dimensional, the album strands the players in their own navels--and they seem too filled with ennui to bother trying to escape.

DJ Spooky
Riddim Warfare
(Outpost)

Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, received critical huzzahs for 1996's Endtroducing..., a far-reaching instrumental hip-hop collage that expanded the use of turntables and mixing decks as compositional tools. Certain tastemakers in the hip-hop community looked upon the project with suspicion, complaining that Shadow was trying to improve a genre that was wonderful the way it was. But Paul D. Miller, who goes by DJ Spooky, hasn't been scared off by this backward thinking (which, in the case of Shadow, a Caucasian, had a racial component). With Riddim Warfare, he has made a full-bodied extravaganza that picks up where Endtroducing... left off--and while the album doesn't skimp on theory, Spooky's willingness to pull others into his orbit makes the piece more accessible than Shadow's challenging opus.