Word: hops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the nominees for the 39th annual Grammy Awards were announced last week, a lot of familiar, if not shopworn, names were on the list, including Bryan Adams, Sheryl Crow and Journey. There were also, thankfully, some fresh, exciting names--the Haitian-American hip-hop band the Fugees certainly deserved their nomination in the Album of the Year category, as teenage country crooner LeAnn Rimes did hers for Best New Artist. But one name stood out from all the others. Or rather, kind of leaned against the wall, looking cooler than everyone else in the vicinity in a throwback...
With Odelay, his second CD on a major label, Beck proves he has more than one good song in him--in fact, he has a whole musical outlook. Odelay deftly mixes folky acoustic-guitar riffs with atmospheric lyrics and hip-hop samples and beats. One song, the hard-driving Devils Haircut, attacks America's culture of physical vanity as suffocating and inescapable; another, the smooth Where It's At, pays tribute to rap's roots by praising its resourceful spirit...
...Fugees The Score (Ruffhouse/Columbia). Tough but tuneful, ready to entertain but unwilling to compromise, this Haitian-American rap trio proved that positive, semipolitical hip-hop could outsell gangsta rap--and alternative rock too. Drawing from reggae and soul, the Fugees created a fresh bicultural sound as bright as the Caribbean and as blunt as New Jersey...
...Sublime Sublime (Gasoline Alley/MCA). A good-hearted street riot of punk rock, avant-garde hip-hop and ska (a faster, jerkier reggae precursor), Sublime's music is hard to categorize and harder still to resist. The band is already defunct (the lead singer and songwriter, the puckishly gifted Brad Nowell, died of a heroin overdose in May), but no rock album this year sounds more alive...
...DiFranco Dilate (Righteous Babe Records). Tart, topical songs from this 25-year-old genre-bending singer-guitarist, who blends folk, punk, trip-hop and whatever else strikes her fancy into insurgent and often arrestingly beautiful music. DiFranco hitches these tunes to scathing lyrical and deeply personal takes on romance and gender issues, then releases her records through her own record company...