Jagged Edge - JE Heartbreak II

My earliest experiences listening to R&B have to with projects Jermaine Dupri was involved with. The first Jagged Edge song I heard was the "Where The Party At" remix on the Hardball soundtrack. Needless to say, I've been riding for JE for a while. Even as their career seemed to be winding down, Jagged Edge would come through with songs like "Good Luck Charm" and "Put A Little Umph In It." Those albums didn't make much noise, but that's how the game goes.

With all this said, I find it a huge cop out for older artists to complain about the state of R&B when they're really just mad they're not poppin' anymore. R&B is in a weird place. Every single needs a rap verse, and the genre as a whole doesn't seem to mean as much as it did even six or seven years ago when piracy was already a huge problem. But if you look at Billboard and radio, you'll see names like Jeremih, Miguel, Trey Songz, August Alsina, Drake, The Weeknd, Jhene Aiko. These are artists that — with rap features and without — have established themselves as new and relevant ambassadors of the genre, like them or not.

Jermaine Dupri is heavily involved with both the production on the album and its promotion. He, too, is on the we-must-save-R&B bandwagon. While there's no doubt Dupri is an amazing songwriting talent across multiple eras, he's had a quiet few recent years. Especially with Mariah's album flopping, he needs a win.

JE Heartbreak II is a logical step for both parties involved. Let's bring back R&B. Let's remind people what R&B really is. Let's make it a sequel and invoke as much nostalgia as we can. The songwriting is the main focus. It is focused on global topics – I see my "Future" in you; All I want to do is put her "Hope" back into a man. There's a crowd that probably appreciates this that'll cry, "This is it!" But great R&B isn't limited to slow love songs. In fact, the only criteria for truly great R&B are an inescapable melody and a groove. "Future" and "Hope" are fine, but "Things I Do For You" is it. You can try to prove to the world that "real R&B" is here to stay by making "Getting Over You" a single and including inspiring songs with no drums, or you can give the world songs like "Wanna Be" and "Ready."

The album is not only serviceable, it's pretty good. And there isn't much out like it. That in itself should be enough.

TV Recap: Marry Me, Black-ish, Mulaney

Black-ish
From the announcement of the show at the top of the year, nothing good seem to be coming from Black-ish. In retrospect, it's funny how a terrible name can make you second guess everything about a television show. Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross? On ABC? That's gonna crash and burn! My goodness, this is a terrific show. It's funny. It's topical. It puts people of color on primetime television. There's cute kids and funny parents. What more could you ask for? The best part of the show, I'll repeat, is that it is just plain funny. That's all you really want from a sitcom. Forget whether it's cable or network or single cam or multi-cam. The makers of this show pulled off something many of their contemporaries struggle to get even close to.

Marry Me
Having high hopes for a show based on its cast and creators can be dangerous. Happy Endings was amazing! Casey Wilson is awesome. Ken Marino has been great in so many things. Marry Me didn't take off quite like I had hoped. But it isn't bad. The pilot is a little too cute for its own good, but these later episodes seem like they're building towards something. The cast definitely isn't as strong as the one Happy Endings had, and I like how they fulfilled their gay and black characters quota with the same actress.

Mulaney
This show is just terrible. It's not even close to good. I consider myself a fan of John Mulaney's stand up. I only really started watching SNL a few years ago, so I can't say that's a part of his career I paid any attention to. But by the time the show had been picked up, I had enough confidence in him and Fox's then president Kevin Reilly to be okay with the multi-cam setup. Fox had New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. By good sitcom standards, they were on fire. This show is bad. The writing is not good. The premise is sort of stupid. You hope it gets better as sitcoms tend to do after a trial period.

Book Club: Nick Offerman's "Paddle Your Own Canoe"

Like many, I am an avid Parks & Recreation fan. So of course I love Ron Swanson. I've been reading a lot of biographies lately, especially in the comedy realm, so "Paddle Your Own Canoe" wasn't necessarily something I wanted to jump to. There were works of fiction that probably had higher priority on my list. But then I saw Nick Offerman promote the book on a re-run of Fallon and I saw him perform on Comedy Central's Meltdown show and just thought, "Why not?"

This book is Offerman's biography. It's not a Ron Swanson instructional manual. And while it's hard to believe, Offerman and Swanson are two different people. I love hearing about how people in the entertainment industry grew up and what pushed them into it. As someone who grew up in the suburbs of California, reading about Offerman's country Illinois upbringing was pretty interesting. He was an actor first and a serious one at that. He started off in the theatre. This isn't a world I'm all that familiar with and one that I wish I supported more. It's nice hearing about how he met his wife Megan Mullally.

He of course talks about interest in woodwork and physical activity and shit that I have no knowledge about. He suggests every human be able to, you know, build a chair or whatever, and I was almost inspired to do so for like a full 15 minutes or so. There's also plenty of parts of the book in which he speaks against intolerance, separation of church and state, a good diet and other such topics. It comes off a little preachy at first until you realize many people probably misconstrue the Ron Swanson character as very "America, fuck yeah!" and that both the character and the man behind the character must dispel that illusion.

Jessie Ware - Tough Love

Jessie Ware has a magnificent voice. Some of the music on her debut were a little too "big" for my taste, but it was refreshing to hear a white female (sorta?) media darling that wasn't some faux-modern R&B that people would compare to The Weeknd or an overrated mess like Lana Del Rey. While "Sweet Talk" is easily one my favorite songs of the last decade, that album as a whole didn't quite sell me on her as an artist.

"Tough Love" isn't perfect, but it is a vast improvement. Songs are tighter and more melody driven. The album is mostly produced by Benny Blanco (Katy Perry, Taio Cruz, Wiz Khalifa) but also employs Miguel and Dev Hynes. Her sound — a modern spin on alternative, with drum machines and reverbed vocals — is very much present. There's no pop standout like "Sweet Talk" — "All On You" is close — but that wasn't the song that garnered her attention anyway. This is an album literally full of love songs, like songs and lust songs, and that should really be celebrated.

Elijah Blake - Drift

Elijah Blake has a very capable voice. It's not super powerful, but it definitely has a range. You'll recognize his tendency to stay in the upper portion of that range in Usher's "Climax" which he wrote. Blake doesn't have an extensive writing history. Aside from "Climax," there's a couple credits for Keyshia Cole and a feature for Rick Ross. Even before then he was already signed to Def Jam (eventually through No I.D.'s imprint) as an artist and managed by RocNation. In 2012, he released his first real anything Bijoux 22, a free 8-song EP. It was incredible. Not in years had a male voice made R&B music that was so emotionally significant. The songs on Bijoux were miles ahead of any romance equation that makes up Chris Brown and Ne-Yo songs and whatever hip-hop trends Trey Songz was adopting. The one song that fell into those categories was of course the one Def Jam chose to go with as a single. Close to two years later, this EP has over 40 plays in my iTunes. I really, really like it.

Drift, the first official release from Blake, one that follows Def Jam's EP first until you prove you're hot and then an album unreasonably soon after, is not quite as good as Bijoux 22.  It's a similar structure — 8 songs, including an awful one with J. Cole that was the followup to the awful one with Common. It isn't too sonically impressive. There's a clear distinction between the songs No I.D. did and the ones he didn't. If the writing on Bijoux was an A, the writing here is a borderline B/B+. "Strange Fruit" turns a blown opportunity of a song title into a mediocre club record. The centerpiece is "6," a tale of being physically punished by his father and the effects it had on his life.

The bad news is that this EP isn't making him a star the way it worked for Jhene and August Alsina. The good news is that Def Jam may not care about the numbers. It probably wasn't ever meant for radio, but it's really cool that "6" was the first single. In a perfect world, we see more of the last three songs of Bijoux in the full-length.

Book Club: Matthew Berry & Prodigy

Book Club (September 2014)

Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports from the Guy Who's Lived It by Matthew Berry
I absolutely love fantasy football. Love it. I can't get enough of it. Ever since I started playing when I was 14 years old, I've truly enjoyed playing the game and being a part of a group of people that understood how great it was. At that point, there were all sorts of online options but Fantasy Football has undeniably exploded over the last nine years in terms of impact and popularity, and so much of that explosion can be attributed to Matthew Berry.
I don't remember what year I first saw Berry on TV, but it was on one of ESPN's flagship shows like Sportscenter or NFL Countdown. All I could think was, "Are you serious? A full time fantasy analyst? Is this really necessary? Like, that's his actual job?" I don't know where it came from, but I remember not really liking the guy. Not for any particular reason, and I was maybe too young to realize he was doing I'd love to do for a living. But, yeah, wasn't crazy about the guy. I never started paying to play Fantasy until my senior year of high school, but regardless, I was always very confident in my own opinions regarding my team. So, aside from weekly rankings, I didn't really read any columns from fantasy analysts.
Then I randomly read the column in which Berry talked about his past as TV writer, specifically for Married with Children. I was blown away at that. I had no idea. It's strange for me to not realize he could have had a life before his latest job, but TV writing is something I've always wanted to do. And, you know, generally it's pretty cool. I had a whole new outlook on Berry and was really excited to dive into his book.
He really has lived an interesting life. He wrote for TV, sold a couple movie scripts and finagled fantasy's presence into online print, radio and eventually primetime television. But it's more than that. There's his childhood and how after moving to several cities, it was difficult for him to fit in. There's his want to make fantasy sports bigger and the constant rejection. There's also a very touching chapter on his personal experience with bullying in the context of the Richie Incognito situation. It's stuff anyone can relate to.
Then of course, there's the fantasy aspect. The book is filled with fan's stories of crazy fantasy scenarios, unlikely draft parties, embarrassing loser stories and even ones involving cheating, death, firings and divorce. The stories get to be a bit much, but they're necessary. Because as much as it seems so ridiculous and unnecessary to those that don't play, it is special for all of us that do. (I remember when I discovered an early posting of the pilot episode of The League on Hulu before I even realized it was a real TV show on FX. Was this show made just for me?)

My Infamous Life by Prodigy (of Mobb Deep)
I'm a couple years late in reading this. I'm honestly a little young to really, really be a Mobb Deep fan. Such a big deal was made of the stories in this book in Breakfast Club interviews and the like that I really had to check it out.
The whole book is written like a series of journal entries. They're more or less in order, but not really once you get further in the book. For such a prolific rapper, it's unfortunate that the quality of the writing here is so subpar. Prodigy's family history is truly unbelievable. All the Queens street stories are remarkable, especially for someone like me that grew up in nice suburbs. Those dudes were wild. What's funny is that the N.O.R.E./Capone stories that got brought up so many times in the Breakfast Club are literally maybe two sentences in this book.
There isn't a single event that jumps out that makes the book worthy of reading, but there's a lot included that I'm glad I got to catch up on. Reasons for going label to label, meeting Alchemist, what it was like to be a successful musician in the 90s, the situation with Jay-Z, joining G-Unit, why he ended up going to prison.
There's an interesting story about 50 Cent calling a meeting to reprimand and essentially disband G-Unit as we knew it in 2006. Prodigy also talks about his dealings with members of the Supreme Team, and I had no idea that's where the 50 and Ja Rule Beef stems from. He obviously talks about dealing with sickle cell and how he keeps healthy. There's his issues with religion, conspiracy theories and the time he witnessed a UFO. There's also cool tidbits like how "I Love You Baby" was actually a Havoc beat that he accidentally left in Puff's studio.

Gotham - S1E1

The idea of Fox's Gotham as an origins story for the entire Batman universe in fully serialized television formed was intriguing at first. Most of us are still pretty fresh off the high that was the Nolan movies. Marvel gave S.H.I.E.L.D. a TV show. This didn't seem like a half bad idea in comparison. Now I enjoy comic book flicks. X2, Raimi's (first two) Spiderman films and of course Nolan's trilogy are literally some of my favorite movies. And I'm familiar with the different Batman villains generally. But as I started watching the first episode of Gotham, I realized I just don't care. 

The show at its core is the story of two detectives working in a crime-ridden city in a corrupt police force. That in itself should provide for solid episodes of network TV. You add the Batman characters, and things can get more interesting. The episode starts off with the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, and obviously we've seen this before. You very quickly meet the Penguin, a young Poison Ivy and what I thought was the Riddler, but I may be mistaken. It's just not all that satisfying. Gordon is played by Mischa Barton's boyfriend from The O.C. He's fine. His partner, played by Donal Logue (who I think is great), is your typical good guy (or is he?) with problems – drinking, probably infidelity, etc. 

If you're running the show, are you trying to appeal to Batman fanatics or the people that watch dramas on Fox? I don't really fall into either of these categories. The pilot is a bit overstuffed with appearances of famous characters. While it sets up Gotham as a bad place, the police force as untrustworthy and Alfred as kind of a bitch, I don't see the show being all that entertaining. But I'll stick around for now.