Every time I come across the phrase “return to form”
in an arts publication, my heart skips a beat. There are quite a
few other things a critic can say to get me excited ““ such as
“year’s best” and, my personal favorite
adjectival turn-on, “intoxicating” ““ but nothing
is as immediately loaded as those three magic words.
First of all, they automatically imply that an artist was once
so darn good that people still care enough to follow the
artist’s work, despite the fact that said artist has been
not-so-good for a long while. But in addition ““ and this is
the part to get excited about ““ we’ve got something on
our hands now that’s possibly, once more, worth paying
attention to.
Lately, the phrase has been bandied about at Cannes, where the
new Woody Allen film screened. The critics are fairly ecstatic, and
although Woody is one of my favorite directors, I wasn’t
around to follow his career when he was still making good flicks. I
had barely learned to read when he was wrestling with the meaning
of existence in “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Heck, I only
saw it about a month ago. Critics old enough to have appreciated
the prime of his career as it was hitting theaters care a lot more
than I do whether this new one is any good, because there’s
an emotional investment there.
With musicians, all that a once-great artist has to do to get
fawned over by the press again is release a record with a couple
flashes of brilliance. A lot of the time, the heralded
“return to form” is really just the result of wishful
thinking, like Prince’s last record, or, to an extent, U2.
(U2’s cool, but when you think about it, they’ve only
recorded a handful of great songs since “Achtung Baby.”
That was 1991.). These are artists with amazing legacies, but, as
with Woody, I’m not particularly attached to whether they
ever succeed again.
A few good years of college, on the other hand, usually means a
lot of the artists who helped you fall in love with music in the
first place ““ back in high school, probably ““
aren’t so relevant anymore. They are the ones you have that
investment with, that you grew up with and were actively following.
I have friends who swear by Dave Matthews Band, Ben Folds Five and
Weezer. Their disappointment in those artists is pretty palpable
these days. It’s past time to move on.
The situation is analogous to a relationship that’s
dragged on too long. First, your partner is the greatest thing
ever, then you hit a point where things get stale and his/ her
flaws are exposed, and finally, you stick around longer than you
should, hoping against hope for one of those magical
returns-to-form. Later, you look back and laugh at yourself for
being such an idiot. As Alvy in “Annie Hall” says,
“A relationship, I think, is like a shark … it has to
constantly move forward, or it dies.”
This describes my relationship with Black Star to a T, or more
accurately, my relationship with everything Rawkus Records ever
touched until circa 2000: the Mos Def solo, the Eternal Reflection
project, the first volume of Lyricist Lounge, the first two volumes
of Soundbombing, Company Flow, even Pharoahe Monch. Heck, throw in
half of that silly neo-soul movement too. The point is, I had a lot
of underground hip-hop heroes back in the day. They may not all
have been geniuses, but they got me to understand that there was
music at that very moment worth thinking of as art. It would be a
jumping-off point to bigger and better things.
I can pinpoint the precise moment when I had a dead shark on my
hands, and that was the second, stubbornly mediocre volume of
Lyricist Lounge. And then I hung around too long. I actually have a
purchased copy of the Hi-Tek solo. Then, after Rawkus folded, I
still bought Talib Kweli’s “Quality.” And I
bought the next Jurassic 5 album. I was getting burned, over and
over, and these guys didn’t seem to care.
The last straw was probably sometime last year, when both Mos
Def and Kweli dropped a pair of sub-par solos. These guys were to
me what Woody Allen was to the late Vincent Canby, but I was
officially done with them.
And so I’ve moved on, as we all should from our
once-favorite artists. But there’s nothing like a first love.
If Mos and Kweli drop the next Black Star album or, for you
Brit-rock fans, Oasis unleashes one more monster to send all the
Coldplays of the world scurrying back to college dorm rooms, and
people start throwing around those magic three words, I may just
come crawling back.
E-mail Lee at alee@media.ucla.edu.