The Disco Revival When LCD Soundsystem honcho James Murphy and drummer Pat Mahoney dropped their excellent entry in the Fabriclive DJ mix series late last year, it didn’t make much of a splash. Within a few months, though, it had become clear that their mix—mostly a strain of vintage underground disco much darker, more dangerous sounding, and more explicitly gay and black than anything the Village People ever did—had catalyzed a sea change in the hipster quadrant of clubland. It seemed like a couple years of getting pounded by bloghouse’s overblown synth noise had primed everyone to crave disco’s smooth thump instead. Now abetted by a network of crate-digging bloggers, Murphy and Mahoney are extending their archaeological expedition to uncover the slinky, hedonistic sounds that ruled influential New York clubs like the Paradise Garage in the late 70s but were basically unknown to the outside world. The success of their Special Disco Version DJ tours and the emergence of dozens of similarly themed club nights around the country—to say nothing of the enthusiasm that greeted the Hercules and Love Affair record—prove they’re onto something.
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Commercial Hip-Hop Getting Weird A decade of dominating the pop charts let mainstream hip-hop get lazy, content to recycle stale gangsterisms and the sounds of a handful of big-name producers. Now that the bottom’s dropping out of the music industry in general (and gangsta rap in particular), the genre is scrambling to catch the ears of lapsed fans. That’s led to some pretty wild experimentation, and the Top 40 has become a free-for-all. Beyonce and Kanye West made hits out of songs that take minimalism to a crazy extreme, slicing down to the bone and then through it—other than their vocal melodies, “Single Ladies” and “Love Lockdown” have barely any harmonic content at all—and reformed trap stars like Jay-Z and T.I. have been reaching across the aisle to enlist hipster favorites like M.I.A. and Santogold for collabos. Meanwhile Lil Wayne turned the hiccuping, amelodic “A Milli” into the biggest hip-hop song in the world, in between oddball stunts like quoting Green Day through Auto-Tune on a dark mix-tape track and abandoning his mike during an in-studio BET rendition of “Lollipop” to play a screeching guitar solo.
Portishead, Third The second most surprising thing about Portishead’s third studio disc was that it came out at all. The group’s late-90s implosion had all the hallmarks of a permanent split: an album put together in an atmosphere of sanity-breaking perfectionism, followed not by more studio work but by a live recording, and then solo records from some members and silence from others. The first most surprising thing was that the group ditched the swooningly romantic aesthetic and spy-movie noir of its 90s material for harsh, industrial tones and an overwhelming sense of paranoia and knife-edge unease. What’s not so surprising is that, like Portishead’s other albums, Third is pretty much flawless.
