Missy Elliott - The Cookbook (2005)

 

Excepting Tinchy Stryder and those who came in sideways from either garage or hanging out with Calvin Harris, I've generally thought of rap-rave hybrids as an abomination based on Missy's reasonable but disappointing So Addictive and Puffy's rave album - which was ill-advised even by his standards. It feels like good ideas retooled for a shitty weekend in Blackpool, music for Jersey Shore-based ennatainment sponges, and so I picked this up out of a sense of loyalty more than anything because how bad could it be?

It seems I'd missed a couple of albums in the wake of So Addictive during which she apparently got her shit together with a few overdue reminders of where rap came from. So by the time we get to this one we're back in business against all my expectations, which is one hell of a relief. At first it sounds like an exercise in nostalgia with contemporary (as of twenty years ago) touches, but it spreads and grows and becomes very much its own thing. The old school affectations are upfront with guest spots from Slick Rick among other less obvious choices, borrowing Apache from the Incredible Bongo Band via Sugarhill, and backtracking the rave element to the bass music spawned by Planet Rock, saving ecstacy references from referring entirely to things other than the experience of being very, very, very happy about something; so the whole is more of an homage than doing a Showaddywaddy in rap terms. The production sparkles with feeling in keeping with the culinary metaphors for music as soul food with the usually ubiquitous Timbaland taking a back seat, leaving the left field squelch and crunk to the Neptunes and others, notably Rich Harrison who is still chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth*; a dynamic which is powerfully echoed on Bad Man, also featuring Vybez Cartel and which feels like getting caught in the world's worst hailstorm, but with timpanis and kettle drums instead of wee lumps of ice. Even with all this technological overload, much of The Cookbook excels in its simplicity, reminding us that rap can be just a rock hard beat with lyrics and the occasional hoot of a horn section.

The Cookbook is more or less a perfect album, one of those that feels like it does you good as you listen; and being as she hasn't released much since, maybe Missy thought so too, possibly realising she'd never be able to top this; also meaning I get to be down with the yoots dem by writing about the latest album from, even though it came out two decades ago. Missy always had a fantastic voice and things to be said, should that need stating, and here's where she said them best.

*: I say still because I've only just heard this album, although to be fair Rich Harrison spent much of 2005 chucking a drum kit down a fire escape and somehow turning it into the funkiest fucking thing on Earth.

Calvin Harris - I Created Disco (2007)

This stuff didn't make much of an impression on me when blasted out of a tinny speaker at work for the best part of a year, at least not beyond the fact that Calvin Harris at least wasn't the Killers, Kasabian, or the Arctic fucking Monkeys and was therefore already ahead of the game so far as I was concerned. More recently I happened to notice his having sat behind the desk on a couple of Dizzee Rascal albums, so here I am.

I Created Disco reminds me a little of LCD Soundsystem, although it may simply be parallel studio habits encouraging the comparison - dance music which harks back to the days before house came along to impose that ubiquitous hi-hat on everything, and a love of dry, punchy sounds which work well in large, crowded places, as distinct from the customary excess of reverb compensating for a lack of imagination and basic ignorance of the form, as is so often the case. Initial impressions foster a suspected love of kitsch and corn with Harris as a sort of dance equivalent of Look Around You, but the impression doesn't really stand up to repeated play. The music is too good, and there's too much love gone into its production for this to be some smirking exercise in reintroducing flares to the dance floor. Rather I suspect that Harris, having been born in 2012 and thus still a mere two years old, is too young to have been caught up in the spirit of nostalgia by which it's somehow okay to listen to ELO again; rather I suspect that he just loves making records and trying things out to see what will work. Thus on this debut we swing backwards and forwards between tracks invoking Kool & the Gang, or fat, squelchy bass numbers of the kind Snoop Dogg once favoured, Prince before he went tits up, and even mid-period Devo b-sides; none of which impinges on I Created Disco quite clearly being a new thing, at least as of six years ago, but new to me as I've only just heard it.

Nice work.