Fighting crime in the streets together

It was really, really not easy getting the motivation up to finish this shit. I don’t know why, except I’ve been writing this thing for more than five goddam years and I still don’t know if anyone really cares enough to keep reading. But a couple of people on Twitter said they wanted to see it so here we go. This right here, obviously, is my favorite new songs from April to July 2010. If you’ve spent any time reading my shit since I started doing these, none of these choices will be very surprising, which is another reason I almost didn’t finish. And yet here we are.

1. Rick Ross: “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast) [ft. Styles P]”. The main takeaway from months of internet noise surrounding this song: You’ll never believe this, but it turns out Rick Ross is not Big Meech or Larry Hoover (or John Gotti) (or MC Hammer) (or Rick Ross). So yeah, the identity-play silliness of the chorus makes no sense at all; it’s like the whole tiresome rapper-as-mob-boss trope pushed way past its logical conclusion. But, I mean, it’s fun to yell. This whole song is fun to yell, which is why it’s the biggest rap song of the summer, and definitely why I love it. World-dominating rap anthems have that effect on me, and this is most definitely a world-dominating rap anthem. My dog probably knows all the words by now, if only because I have this bad habit of listening to it on my iPod and yelling along when I’m taking him on walks. The Lex Luger synth riffs could pass for Sabbath if you played them on detuned guitars, and the part where the beat drops away and Ross roars back in (“These motherfuckers MAD THAT I’M ICY!!!!!”) gets me punching the air like when the drums kick back in on “Whole Lotta Love”. Also, big points for using Styles P to his maximum hardhead potential. The money is, after all, like a chair.

2. Young Jeezy: “Lose My Mind [ft. Plies]”. Right now, Jeezy is mad at Ross because Jeezy thinks he should be Big Meech, or something. Jeezy should be mad at Ross because they both made ear-wrecking antisocial synth bangers at the exact same time but “B.M.F.” is just slightly better, and so now nobody talks about “Lose My Mind”. But “Lose My Mind” is great because it’s practically just noise, Jeezy massing his ad-libs over a beat that sounds like rhinos stomping on your face. I can’t remember the last time a major rap star released a single this fundamentally unfriendly. Maybe Jeezy just wanted to yell at the world? But Jeezy should probably also be mad at Plies, because Plies walks away with this thing, turning in a truly deranged crazy-old-man guest verse that kind of makes me question his real-life sanity. Al Shipley has brought up a good question about the Plies verse: Do the hoes call him fantastical or fantastico? I’m fine with either, really.

3. LCD Soundsystem: “I Can Change”. This one hasn’t been a single yet. It doesn’t seem to be very many people’s favorite song on the LCD album. I couldn’t care less. I deeply love the LCD Soundsystem, but there is one vaguely valid knock against it: It’s more of the same, another example of the precision-engineered ranty dance-rock they’ve been cranking out for almost a decade. As such, it didn’t really need to exist. I can understand that argument, but I can’t agree. That’s partly because they’re great at the thing that they do, and it’s partly because the new wrinkles are actually there, though they’re a bit subtle, like James Murphy’s increasingly bitchy/glammy diction. But “I Can Change” stands out partly because it’s a type of LCD Soundsystem song I haven’t heard before: A sad synthpop song. “All My Friends” was, like, sad krautrock. “Someone Great” was a sad rave ballad, like something from the back half of a prime-period Chemical Brothers album. But “I Can Change” fits in beautifully alongside the most reflective, doubt-racked moments from, say, Human League or Pet Shop Boys. And it does so by acknowledging a very serious adult emotion that I don’t hear any other songs attempting: That moment where you know you’re wrong and full of shit, and you know that full-of-shitness is seriously endangering your co-dependent and arguably toxic relationship with someone just as full of shit as you. That’s where you go all in to figure things out and do whatever you can to figure things out because you realize that you don’t care how messed up things are because this is something worth saving. You know, that emotion. And as far as I know, Depeche Mode never really tackled that one, you know?

4. Kanye West: “Power”. Goddam it feels good to hear Kanye finally kicking himself back into fuck-the-world mode after however long he had to spend in the wilderness, watching Avatar over and over and whispering to himself that he’s still a good person. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the office lately talking to Mark Richardson about Breaking Bad, since he’s just now catching up. Mark almost stopped watching for a little while because the decisions Walt kept making finally started to seem monstrous, and Mark couldn’t relate. But Mark kept watching, and he’s glad he did. Because Breaking Bad is, in a lot of ways, the story about someone who makes a monstrous and amoral decision to protect his family, then makes even more monstrous and amoral decisions to keep protecting that original one. So in a way, it’s a story about him growing into and accepting the fucked-up person he became when he first made that decision. (Sorry to be all vague, but I’m trying to avoid spoiling the show. Seriously, go watch that shit if you haven’t yet.) Walt decides that he’s the bad guy at a certain point, and he makes decisions accordingly. And on a much smaller cultural level, this sounds to me like the moment where Kanye figures out that the world at large does not see him as the “Jesus Walks” guy anymore, that they see him as a total pariah, which gives him the freedom to act like the asshole he’s always wanted to be. So: “How Ye doing? I’m surviving. I was drinking earlier. Now I’m driving.” Plus the drums knock and the King Crimson sample sounds badass enough that I briefly considered downloading some King Crimson and Kanye’s delivery throughout is pure attack and that “this could be a beautiful death” part at the end is pretty.

5. Beck and Bat for Lashes: “Let’s Get Lost”. I continue to not understand the whole Twilight phenomenon, though it’s not like I’m trying especially hard or I’m supposed to understand or whatever. And at some base level, I’m glad some grand, darkly romantic goth fantasy is popular with The Kids today. I mean, The Crow and The Craft and shit like that weren’t actually good movies, but they still made their impact on my high-school self. But even with the much-touted all-star indie squads handling the soundtracks of the last two movies, very few of the songs I’ve heard have any of the sweeping ridiculousness of, say, the best moments off that Crow soundtrack. (I loved that Crow soundtrack.) This song right here is the big exception, Beck and Natasha Khan sounding sad but horny cooing at each other, talking about leaving the world behind and keeping each other from the cold and all sorts of other things that basically give fucking the grandest and silliest context it can stand. The whole thing is sensuously pretty enough that it made me want to see the movie for about 14 seconds, but then I tried to watch that second movie and had to turn it off after 20 minutes because whoof.

6-10. Sleigh Bells: “Rill Rill”; French Montana: “So High [ft. Curren$y]”; Big Boi: “Shutterbugg”; Robyn: “Dancing on My Own”; Little Big Town: “Little White Church”