→ August 12, 2011
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The Corrections.

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections made the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels published since the magazine began for its use of dark humor in an unstinting portrayal of both the modern American family and of our unending winter of discontent. It is a well-constructed novel with smart prose, one that challenges the reader often without becoming an arduous read, but ultimately suffers from its depressing outlook and the presence of only one really compelling storyline.

The Lambert family is in the final stages of full collapse as its patriarch, Alfred, approaches the end of his life, and his wife Enid seeks to bring all three of her adult children home to St. Jude, Ohio, for one final Christmas together. Alfred suffers from Parkinson’s disease that is ravaging body and mind, yet lives in partial denial of the loss of some of his faculties while living in full denial of what appears to be a lifelong battle with clinical depression. Enid herself fights a depression of her own, but one more the result of her own losing battle with a sullen, domineering husband, who clipped her wings and may have driven away all three children once they could leave the nest. Eldest son Gary is superficially successful, married with three children and a lucrative day job in banking, but is himself depressed; he’s aware of it, unlike Alfred, but tries desperately to fight it without resorting to therapy or antidepressants (although the cause of his aversion to those solutions is unclear; it may be related to his paranoia about his wife and children conspiring against him). Middle child Chip is a failed academic, a tourist of Marxism, and eventually an aide to a Lithuanian con man. If you like a single one of these characters, each of whom (except perhaps Enid, a product of her times) is at least partly responsible for his own mess, you’re a more empathetic reader than I am.

The star of the book for me is the youngest Lambert child, Denise, a talented chef with a second talent for romantic entanglements that sabotage her life and eventually leave her jobless and, coincidentally, available to clean up family messes. I’d argue that she’s the most together of any family member, certainly the most self-aware and most willing to think about what causes her bouts of self-destructive behavior, and the job loss was a little bit forced into the plot anyway. (The absence of any mention of a sexual harassment lawsuit bothered me.) Each character gets his or her own extended section, and Denise’s was by far the most interesting, both from sheer narrative greed and from my ability to empathize with her character, because she has a level of emotional depth absent from other members of her family, and less of the propensity to extinguish her own flame. And the lead-in to that section, giving us the back story on the family that ends up employing Denise in the husband’s restaurant start-up, is the single best passage in the entire book, even thought it doesn’t feature any of the Lamberts. Incidentally, Franzen, to his great credit, shows pretty strong understanding of food and food trends of ten years ago in describing Denise’s culinary exploits, including her gustatory tour of Europe that leads to, of course, some significant emotional development, particularly when she sees acquaintances from St. Jude living a wealthy yet stale life in Austria.

The book is funny and crude, sometimes at the same time, but other times the crudeness is simply offputting and pointless. Franzen can spin a phrase and make words dance in many directions, and it’s a shame to see how often he makes them tango in the gutter when he excels at wry, incisive observations. The strongest prose got me through the book despite a rather bleak outlook on life. The emotions generated by the book’s brief concluding section were very real, and yet I still felt cheated, like this final “correction” to the Lambert family dysfunction came too late – after 550 pages of downers, chemical and psychological, I wanted some small glimmer of hope for the Lamberts left standing, some argument that life, corrected, still had meaning, and Franzen just left it hanging. But if his point was to display our happiness paradox, where greater prosperity in the U.S. hasn’t led to greater happiness or satisfaction or reduced rates of clinical depression, then that open-ended conclusion serves his greater purpose. It just wasn’t the book I wanted to read.

Next up: I’m about ¾ of the way through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Orange Prize-winning book Half of a Yellow Sun, a historical novel set during the Nigerian-Biafran war of 1967-70.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ August 3, 2011
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The Secret of Kells.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning hand-drawn animated film that draws on the history of the Book of Kells and on Celtic mythology to create a mysterious and beautiful origin tale for that book, a work of religious, artistic, and cultural significance in Ireland. Nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2009, where it lost to Up (from Pixar, which has won six of the last eight such awards, including the last four), The Secret of Kells deserves a much wider audience than it’s received so far, and shows there is a place for old-fashioned animation alongside the technical marvels of CGI.

The story takes place at the Abbey of Kells, in Ireland’s County Meath, sometime between 900 and 1000 A.D., after the abbey at Iona had been sacked by Viking raiders. The Abbot of Kells, Abbot Cellach, oversees the construction of fortifications around the abbey in expectation of a similar Viking assault, yet also tries to protect his nephew, Brendan, but appears to have more than just a familial interest behind his strict treatment of the boy.

Brendan is fascinated by the work in the scriptorium and becomes fast friends with a refugee from Iona, Brother Aidan (who, like Cellach, is based on a true historical figure), an illuminator who is working on the Book of Kells, an illustrated book of the Gospels that is described in more vague terms in the movie (e.g., that it will “turn darkness into light”). Yet to help Aidan continue his work, Brendan must violate the orders of his uncle to stay within the walls of the abbey, and ends up heading twice into the forbidden forest to find materials for ink and a sacred lens*, meeting and befriending a childlike fairy named Aisling who helps him both by saving his life (several times, as she likes to remind him) and by building his confidence so that he can continue his work with Brother Aidan.

*The lens, called the Eye of Collum Cille in the movie, draws its name from the same saint for whom the church of St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts, is named – which I know primarily because I used to pass it every time I headed to a game at Boston College.

The star of the movie, despite an intriguing story and strong voicing (led by Brendan Gleeson as Abbot Cellach), is the animation, which draws heavily on ancient Celtic art while also showing more recent influences, from Miyazaki (especially our family favorite, My Neighbor Totoro) to Tim Burton to the exaggerated look of the animated humans in The Triplets of Belleville. The forest backgrounds are lush, while the winter scenes are stark and gothic – it reminded me of a classic Flash game, A Murder of Scarecrows – and Celtic images recognizable to viewers of almost any background abound in the film, including a dreamlike sequence where Brendan fights a snake in the form of an ornate Celtic knot.

Without any knowledge of the history of the Book of Kells, however, the plot is a little obtuse. What little is known of the book’s origins is incorporated into the film, but its religious and artistic significance are assumed rather than explained. (Of course, long explanations can be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so this is hardly a flaw.) The heavy of use elements of Irish mythology, from the Aislings to the pre-Christian Celtic deity Crom Cruach to the cat Pangur Bán, based on a cat in an ancient Irish poem of the same name, was less of an issue because the context of those characters filled in the blanks in our knowledge.

What The Secret of Kells is not, however, is a children’s movie. There’s plenty of implied violence in depictions of Viking raids, including the final sacking of Kells, and a flash of actual violence. Brendan’s quest for the eye of Collum Cille leads him into the battle with the snake and other dark sequences that would be scary for smaller children. It’s a wonderful movie for adults and older kids, however, replete with visual candy, outstanding Celtic-inspired music, and a story that veers from sweet to serious in just an hour and change.

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→ July 29, 2011
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The King’s Speech.

Lots of baseball content the last few days, including breakdowns of the Colby Rasmus trade, the Carlos Beltran trade, and the Kosuke Fukudome trade, plus my regular Klawchat yesterday.

—

I can’t say if The King’s Speech was truly the best picture of 2010, although it was honored with the Academy Award of that name, since I haven’t seen the other contenders. It is, however, a completely worthy recipient of the honor, one of the best-acted films I have ever seen, with a screenplay that takes some fairly dry subject matter and turns it into a rousing, emotional film even though the audience already knows how the film must end.

The King’s Speech dramatizes the relationship between the stammering Prince Albert, Duke of York, later King George VI, and an Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who used unconventional methods to help the Prince overcome both the stammer and his resultant fear of public speaking. The Prince avoids most public speaking duties until, in the movie at least, he is forced to surmount this obstacle when his brother Edward, Duke of Wales, abdicates the throne to marry an American divorcée. While not quite historically accurate in its chronology or its portrayals of certain secondary characters, the film avoids the less forgivable sins of lionizing (or demonizing) its central characters or crafting an excessively sentimental narrative.

Colin Firth, as the titular King, and Geoffrey Rush, as Logue, both deliver command performances. Firth won the Oscar for Best Actor with a tense portrayal that conveys a constant sense of anxiety whenever he’s asked to speak in any kind of difficult situation, often evoking that dread through slight changes in his facial expression or a sudden explosion of temper (where the rage is merely a cover for an inner fear). But while Rush was challenged less by his role, his performance seemed totally effortless, exuding a calm confidence when his character is at work that proves superficial in the handful of scenes when he’s outside that sphere. (Rush won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1996 for another brilliant performance as a musical prodigy who suffers a breakdown due to schizoaffective disorder in the marvelous film Shine.)

No other character receives close to the screen time of the two leads, although there’s talent in abundance. Derek Jacobi is somewhat wasted as the sycophantic Archbishop of Canterbury, while Helena Bonham Carter provides a cornucopia of pained, worried expressions as Albert’s confident wife Elizabeth. I didn’t even recognize Guy Pearce as the rakish yet vaguely effeminate Prince Edward. The film also reunites Firth with Jennifer Ehle, who plays Logue’s wife Myrtle here but is best known for playing Elizabeth Bennet to Firth’s Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s canonical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Where screenwriter David Seidler and director Tom Hooper succeed most is in the film’s pacing. The story requires scenes of struggle for Prince Albert, but aside from the first, which introduces the film’s main dramatic element to the audience, we are never forced to endure the embarrassment for long. And while they sacrificed some historical accuracy by condensing the time Logue and the Prince worked together and by delaying the benefits the Prince received from the therapy until the final speech, it gave the film the necessary tension to allow that final speech – after England’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939 – to become an emotional crescendo that closes the film.

The most touching scene, other than the King’s success and the applause he receives from his inner circle (after they all clearly doubted his ability to do it), was when he returns from his coronation and his two daughters see him in full regalia. The two young actresses playing Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II) are asked to do very little in this film, but their expressions are priceless: he left the house as “Daddy,” but returned as a king, and I doubt there’s a little girl in the world who wouldn’t be impressed to see her father in that costume.

Two interesting side notes on this film: The writer delayed pursuing production of the film at the request of King George VI’s widow Elizabeth (known to my generation as the Queen Mother or the “Queen Mum”), who asked him to wait until after her death because she found the memories of that period too painful; and (per Wikipedia) nine weeks before filming began, someone discovered several of Logue’s notebooks from that time period, allowing the writer to incorporate some of that material into the final version of the script.

Next film in the queue is True Grit. Several of your top suggestions, including Inception, The Lives of Others, and The Social Network, aren’t available for rental on iPad, so they’ll have to wait a bit.

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→ July 26, 2011
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Winnie the Pooh.

I’ve got a new column up on how relievers are overvalued in trades and I appeared on today’s edition of the ESPN Baseball Today podcast.

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We took our daughter to see the new Winnie the Pooh movie on Saturday, as the two original books (Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner) are among our favorites. The books are largely sweet and gentle as you might expect given Pooh’s reputation, but there’s a fair amount of dry wit sprinkled throughout the books, with somewhat sharper characters than you might expect if you’ve only seen earlier Pooh films, such as the supercilious Rabbit or the disdainful Eeyore. (Obvious disclaimer: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which is the studio behind this film.)

The movie, produced by Disney Animation Studios (which is, of course, run by two Pixar executives, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter), has the hand-drawn look and feel you’d expect from a Disney film with some nods to the drawing style of Ernest Shepard’s original illustrations. It draws from three stories from the two books – “In Which Eeyore Loses a Tail and Pooh Finds One,” “In Which Piglet Meets a Heffalump,” and “In Which Rabbit Has a Busy Day and We Learn What Christopher Robin Does in the Mornings” – although only the first one has its story survive the transition more or less intact. The three are intertwined with new elements, including the Jasper Ffordian construct of having the characters interact with the printed words and letters in multiple scenes, in a single story arc that sees Pooh in search of honey for his noisily empty tummy, Eeyore in search of his tail, and all of the animals in the forest setting a trap for a monster called the “Backson” that they presume has kidnapped Christopher Robin. That Backson stands in for the mysterious Heffalump – the “backson” bit in the book was just a misunderstanding of Christopher Robin’s sign, not a creature – but a hint of the grotesque in a song and animation sequence that seems to allude to the interludes like Salvador Dali’s segment in Hitchcock’s Spellbound … or the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski.

Much of the grown-up humor in Milne’s books is in the tone of the descriptive text – it always reminds me a bit of Wodehouse’s style – that might not translate well to the screen, or might leave the movie a bit too sedate if they tried, even with the narration from John Cleese*. To compensate, the movie contains far more physical comedy than the books, including Rabbit (probably the character most changed in appearance from the books) standing in front of a door that is about to be violently opened, with predictable results. But those scenes earned some pretty substantial laughs from the youngest audience members, so they served their purpose even if it occasionally did feel like Bugs Bunny was about to make a cameo.

*It amuses me no end that Cleese, the front man for the greatest and perhaps most subversive comedy troupe in history, has now become a beloved elder statesman, appearing here and as the lead sheep in Charlotte’s Web.

The great strength of the film, though, is the voices. Jim Cummings voices both Pooh and Tigger, giving the latter the same voice he uses for the Disney character Pete while adding Tigger’s trademark lisp, while the former is as good an approximation of the classic Pooh voice as you might find. (And tell me he doesn’t look like a certain GM currently working in Los Angeles.) Craig Ferguson’s Owl is haughty and imperious as Owl should be, but beyond those two Disney stuck with professional voice actors rather than bigger names, such as choosing Tom Kenny, the voice of Spongebob, for the underutilized Rabbit. The decision points to an emphasis on quality and even legacy over short-term commercial gain; these are iconic characters whom viewers expect to sound and act in certain ways, and it looks like the way to achieve that is to use professional voice actors over celebs.

They did bow to celebrity with the theme song, although if you’re looking for a cute voice you could do a lot worse than Zooey Deschanel, who does two other songs in addition to the classic “chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff” tune. The film also features seven original songs by Robert Lopez, co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, although I’d only call “The Backson Song” memorable.

The film runs a quick 69 minutes and is preceded by the short film The Ballad of Nessie, a very cute take on how the Loch Ness Monster came to be, animated in a distinctly Seussian style. Winnie the Pooh did bother the Milne purist in me for some of the modern flourishes, but judged on its own merits it’s a wonderful film for the preschool (or kindergarten, in our case) set, right up there with My Neighbor Totoro among our favorites.

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→ July 22, 2011
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One of Our Thursdays is Missing.

I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the novels of Jasper Fforde, whose primary series starring the literary detective Thursday Next taps Fforde’s boundless knowledge of classic literature and his talent for both high- and lowbrow humor. That series, which wrapped up a long story arc at the end of book four and started fresh in book five, reached its sixth book in a planned eight this spring with the release of One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, a slight departure from the first five books in the series in content and perspective.

Fforde steps a little out of the box in One of Our Thursdays is Missing by switching protagonists on us from the real Thursday Next to the written Thursday Next – that is, the fictional character of Thursday who appears in the Thursday Next novels that exist within the Thursday Next novels. If you’ve read anything in the series, you probably know what that means. If not: Within the Fforde universe, there is the physical plane and there is BookWorld, the plane of existence populated by the characters (and settings) of books, where Edward Rochester and Miss Havisham and Harry Potter are real (if not quite physical) characters who are merely playing the parts written for them by authors in our plane. It’s much less confusing if you read the Thursday Next series in sequence, though.

The change in protagonists necessitates something of a change in style from Fforde, with a plot that loosely parodies mysteries (including a fairly obvious sendup of Agatha Christie and her imitators towards the end) and conspiracy thrillers as the written Thursday traverses Fiction Island to try to figure out where the real Thursday is – and whether Racy Novel and its leader, Speedy Muffler, are trying to thwart the peace talks with Comedy and Women’s Fiction. This structure, essentially a meta-novel without the regular novel as a wrapper, gives Fforde copious opportunities to mock the cliches of various genres and even delve into matters literary, such as the way authors must warp reality to make it compact and readable, or philosophical, such as the BookWorld’s questions about its own creation and the reasons for its existence. He’s also relying more heavily than ever on puns, many provided by Mrs. Malaprop herself, and extends his satirical weaponry to cover more and more current fiction, with Potter and “Urban Vampires” getting their due alongside the classics of the western canon. (Example: the island of “Books Only Students Read,” which is where Pamela and Tristram Shandy reside.)

Fforde is one of a short list of authors who craft settings that are real enough to let me get lost in their books (something that quite literally happens to Thursday in book two, Lost in a Good Book), which is the main reason why I can’t seem to put his books down. They are funny and the plots are always interesting, but the main appeal I find in his books is how effortlessly he creates setting after setting, first devising BookWorld and then building it out from book to book. In One of Our Thursdays is Missing, he’s forced by his own story to build it out more than ever, discussing transportation (including a dubious taxi service) and even going more into BookWorld’s social structure. The disconnect from the real world is the book’s one drawback, although the written Thursday does get a quick sojourn into reality, with the book seeming less substantial because we are, in the end, dealing with characters who’ve been flattened twice by writing. But Fforde’s wit and imagination are still on full display from start to finish, including a brilliant play on the twist ending.

If you’re intrigued by my description of the series but have never read Fforde, I’ll offer two suggestions. You can start the Thursday Next series with book one, The Eyre Affair, but before delving into that you should at least familiarize yourself with the plot of Jane Eyre (you can watch the movie or just read a summary of the story), or else the key event in Fforde’s book won’t make much sense. Or, if you just want a taste of his writing style, check out The Big Over Easy the first of his two Nursery Crimes books, set in another part of BookWorld populated by characters from children’s books and, of course, nursery rhymes, where detectives Jack Spratt and Mary Mary attempt to answer the question of whether Humpty Dumpty fell … or was pushed.

Next up: John Le Carré’s The Russia House.

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→ July 21, 2011
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Man on Wire.

New post over on ESPN on Leonys Martin and a few other prospects, plus today’s Klawchat transcript and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

—

The documentary Man on Wire
 won the Oscar for the best long-form documentary in 2008 and has the honor of being just one of two films with at least 100 reviews to hold a perfect critics’ rating on rottentomatoes.com, the other being Toy Story 2. The film uses the narrative style of one of my favorite genres in fiction, the heist or con story, to describe the event that captured national headlines and launched its protagonist into global stardom.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and a few of his friends brought about a ton of equipment up to the unfinished roofs of the Twin Towers and strung a wire between them, after which Petit spent about 45 minutes walking, sitting, and lying down on that tightrope, about 450 meters above the ground, attracting a crowd of gawkers and, eventually, the authorities. (The film’s title comes from the police report on the incident, where the first three words under the heading “Complaint” are those of the title, written in capital letters.) It was an audacious, foolish, and incredibly wonderful achievement, and a beautiful memory of a time when those towers stood for something other than 9/11.

Petit’s history with the towers actually predates their construction; he relates first learning of the plans to build the towers and immediately realizing that conquering them was his life’s dream. Fortunately for us, he had a trove of archival footage, both still and video, which is incorporated into this documentary, which gives us a window into his preparations for the stunt, the relationships between members of the team, and the fact that fashion in the 1970s was awful even in France. (Men + overalls = regret.) The narrative jumps back to Petit’s first efforts as a tightrope walker, including his walks between the towers of Notre Dame and between two arches on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, before plunging into the long-planned caper in Manhattan, including how they got all that gear past security and how team members were nearly caught in both towers the evening before the walk.

The most impressive part of the movie for me wasn’t Petit’s exploits or the explanation of how his ragtag team managed to sneak all that equipment to the tops of the towers, but of the reactions of two of the NYPD officers on the scene. Both men, shown in interview clips from 1974, make it clear that they recognized right away that they weren’t just watching some criminal or mischief-maker, but were witnessing history, watching one man do something so amazing that people would still talk about it thirty-plus years later. To be able to remove oneself from the moment, and to subdue the natural indignation of the officer of the law towards one who would so flagrantly mock it, is a testament to both of these men and to the wonder that Petit’s endeavor inspired.

Although the effort ends in victory, as Petit completes his walk and ends up serving no jail time, the film ends with bittersweet notes due to Petit’s loss (or perhaps repudiation) of his devoted lover, Annie, and the apparent (and not well-explained) decline of his friendship with the one team member who stuck it out to the end. That friend, Jean-Louis Blondeau, breaks down in tears twice in the film’s final segments, but has had harsher words elsewhere for his former colleague, accusing Petit of fabricating various too-good-to-be-true anecdotes in the film. (Blondeau is professional photographer, and I imagine much of the archival footage was his.) The lover, the still-pretty Annie Allix, is gracious in accepting that Petit’s walk in the clouds altered his life forever, and perhaps realized through his betrayal of her that he would never be as committed to her as she was to him – or as he was to himself. Petit is charming, but beneath that charm lies a self-assured nature that might be megalomaniacal in other contexts, such as the sentiment that perhaps the towers were built specifically for him to climb and walk.

Man on Wire is exquisitely made and paced, never dragging, rarely wasting words or time (aside from the pointless “reenactment” of Petit’s post-walk “celebration” with a female admirer that looks more like an outtake from Benny Hill), giving everyone his or her say even while Petit is the star of the show. Most importantly, the directors allowed the event to speak for itself, rather than larding the film with opinions from people uninvolved in the preparation or execution of the walk. The images and Petit’s words will transport you to that foggy morning in August, 1974, but with the benefit of the backstory behind this amazing achievement.

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→ July 18, 2011
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The Big Knockover.

Dashiell Hammett is best known today for his signature detective Sam Spade (from The Maltese Falcon) and for the crime-solving duo Nick and Nora (from The Thin Man), but was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which haven’t been published since their original appearances in pulp magazines like Black Mask. The Big Knockover is one of three major collections of Hammett’s stories currently in print, including nine short stories (two of which together form a sort of two-part novella) and the beginning of an unfinished novel.

That unfinished novel, Tulip, is the star piece in the collection is the least Hammett-like and the least readable. In its fifty-ish pages, making it roughly the length of most of the stories in this book, Hammett speaks to the reader through a character who writes for a living but is caught in a post-midlife introspection that has him questioning his choices in his career, including what I take as a fear of historical obsolescence after the wave of post-modern/realist works that were all the critical rage during Hammett’s own heyday:

“But couldn’t you just write things down the way they happen and let your reader get what he wants out of ’em?”
“Sure, thats’ one way of writing, and if you’re careful enough in not committing yourself you can persuade different readers to see all sorts of different meanings in what you’ve written, since in the end almost anything can be symbolic of anything else, and I’ve read a lot of stuff of that sort and liked it, but it’s not my way of writing and there’s no use pretending it is.”
“You whittle everything down to too sharp a point,” Tulip said.” I didn’t say you ought to let your reader run hog-wild on you like that, though I can’t see any objections to letting them do your work for you if they want to, bu –”
“Not enough want to make it profitable,” I said, “though you’re likely to get nice reviews.”

I’m not sure if Hammett ever could have finished Tulip, although he wrote the last few paragraphs; the story has no plot at all, instead just relying on an extended, meandering dialogue between the writer, Pop, and the character Tulip, who wants more than anything to give Pop the material for some new story or book, even though Tulip’s stories themselves may be mostly fiction. Dialogue tends to read quickly, of course, but the lack of any narrative greed made Tulip slow going overall, and would be of interest only to Hammett completists or those who, like me, wished for more of a window into the writer’s soul.

The remaining stories in The Big Knockover are pulp detective stories, and in general lacked the austerity and tension of his best novels or even of the stories starring the same detective found in the collection The Continental Op, which I recommend very highly if you’re into detective fiction at all. In The Big Knockover, the plotting is mostly Hammett with familiar patterns and the usual double-crossing, but the language is gussied up for what I presume was the mass market. The long series of nicknames for crooks appearing in the title story was the last straw for me, names like “The Shivering Kid” and “Paddy the Mex” … that much egg salad just distracted me from what was going on underneath the silly language. And one story, “Dead Yellow Women,” is so full of racist language and stereotypes aimed at Asians that I nearly gave up in disgust. The strongest one in the collection is the opener, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” about a major heist on a wealthy island enclave reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s West and East Egg, where Hammett uses weather and a wide cast of characters to build and sustain tension until the end of the story.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, book six in the Thursday Next series, which is living up to expectations through the first third.

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→ July 17, 2011
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In Bruges.

You’ve probably seen my midseason prospect rankings update by now, but if not … there it is.

–

I’m a few weeks behind on this, but I watched the dark comedy In Bruges (currently just $4.69 on DVD at amazon) a few weeks ago on my last work flight. I’d seen positive reviews of the film when it was in theaters and kept it in my queue for years, but finally got back into watching movies regularly when I got an iPad last month and have a hell of a list to work through. As for In Bruges, it absolutely had its moments, driven mostly by a really strong performance by Colin Farrell, but by the end of the movie I was kind of wondering what the point of all the violence was – unless the point was that there is no point at all.

Farrell plays Ray, a young hit man who bungled his most recent job by accidentally killing a child who was hidden behind the man he was paid to assassinate. His boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), has sent him to Bruges along with the more experienced Ken to await instructions on their next job … which turns out to be for Ken to kill Ray over the death of the child. Ken wrestles with his conscience over the assignment now that he’s gotten to know Ray. Ray, meanwhile, is completely despondent over his mistake (but not over the death of the target) and contemplates suicide in between attempts to seduce the drug-dealing Chloe, an incompetent effort that leads to a confrontation with an American couple in a restaurant that, of course, ends up interfering with everyone’s plans. It is a screwball comedy at heart, except that in this one half the characters end up maimed or dead.

The strength of In Bruges is subtle, living in the layer beneath the obvious plot about contract killings and before the carnage at the end of the film. Ray isn’t cut out emotionally for his line of work, between his remorse and his short temper – and he absolutely hates Bruges, or as he calls it, “fookin’ Broozh.” Ken, meanwhile, wants to play the tourist, turning the trip (which was sold to them as an escape from the authorities) into a relaxing sojourn. Harry is a little bit of a stock character – the ruthless gangster/loving family man character has been around long enough that he’s totally expected – although his interactions with Ken when the latter refuses the assignment provide some of the film’s best dialogue.

When the shooting starts in earnest at the film’s end, though, we’re given a ten-minute stretch of action film where the plot is resolved through violence and a few funny coincidences, as well as a concluding meditation on the point of the violence that felt a little tacked-on. Within the span of those ten minutes, we go from that dark comedy to a chase-and-shoot (although, again, they do mix in a hilarious scene where Harry and Ray are standing off with a very angry and even more pregnant hotelier in between that) to light philosophy. Would the film have been better with a less violent climax? Or simply a more comic one? Shouldn’t the philosophizing have permeated more of the film (or did it, and I just missed it)? Most importantly, does it make any sense to say you enjoyed the first 90% of a film but not the ending when the ending was, in terms of plot, properly executed?

As for what’s next … I’ve got a long list of films to catch up on, but I’m open to suggestions. I’m particularly light on anything in the last five years – that is, since my daughter was born.

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→ July 7, 2011
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Top 100 old-school hip-hop songs.

I’m a huge fan of old-school hip-hop music and have wanted for some time to put down some kind of ranking of my favorite songs from that era. I’ve been working on this post since late February, but it’s finally done now that the draft crush and our summer east coast swing are over. It started out as a top 40, then a top 50, then 75, after which I figured I’d just push it to 100.

This is list is entirely my opinion, and maybe 90% of it is just about how much I personally like the songs, with the other 10% reserved for the song’s influence or importance in hip-hop history. And it’s about how the songs have held up over time, not which songs I liked when they first came out or how they fared on the charts.

I’ve limited the list to songs released, either as singles or on albums, prior to 1996. That cutoff means no Jay-Z or Eminem and virtually no Nas or Outkast, to pick a few examples, but with one exception (a song recorded before the deadline but released afterwards) I stuck to the deadline for all tracks. Enjoy.

100. “Check Yo Self” – Ice Cube

Samples an early hip-hop classic, “The Message,” that was already dated before the 1980s ended, with guest vocals by Das Efx on the chorus. Ice Cube’s lyrics often led to controversy – something I doubt he minded since even bad publicity sells records – but I don’t think the anti-gay lines in this song would fly today like they did in the early ’90s. (Corrected on 7/7 – added this song to remove an ineligible song from higher on the list.)

99. “Gotta Get Mine” – MC Breed featuring 2Pac

No disrespect to MC Breed, who died of kidney failure when he was 38, but 2Pac is the main attraction here, one of five appearances for him on this list. Snoop Dogg references this song at the beginning of the second verse of “Gin and Juice.”

98. “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” – Public Enemy

Perhaps the greatest opening lines in the history of hip hop: “I got a letter from the government/The other day/I opened, and read it/It said they were suckers/They wanted me for the army or whatever/Picture me givin’ a damn, I said never.”

97. “Fuck tha Police” – NWA

I always wondered if this was mostly a publicity stunt (that worked). I’m not doubting the anti-police sentiment behind it, but the title is so clownishly incendiary that it was a lock to get negative attention in the mainstream media, which would sell more records. In that sense, it’s brilliant. The song was surpassed by its own marketing.

96. “Walk This Way” – Run-DMC

More here for its importance than the quality of the rhymes. It’s hard to express their mainstream influence unless you lived through it; they had street credibility but were inoffensive enough to be marketed to white, suburban audiences. Unfortunately most of their catalog sounded dated within a decade of its release.

95. “The Humpty Dance” – Digital Underground

It was written as a novelty, it became a hit as a novelty, and like most novelty hits it wrecked the artist’s career when they couldn’t produce another song just like it. That’s too bad, because they were one of the most interesting acts of the late ’80s/early ’90s, but between this and the forgettable “Kiss You Back” their run was good for about an album and a half.

94. “Holy Intellect” – Poor Righteous Teachers

No shot of crossover success for a group that rapped almost entirely about their Islamic faith, but the speed and quality of the rhyming here is remarkable.

93. “Ain’t Sayin Nothin” – Divine Styler

Remember House of Pain’s line in “On Point” about how “I used to rap with the Divine Styler?” He was actually a hell of an MC, and just about anything from that first album is worth listening to. His second disc was a wildly experimental jazz/rap/ambient fusion that was way ahead of its time, and he took a long break before coming back with a late-90s disc after his conversion to Islam that had one standout track, “Make It Plain.”

92. “Chief Rocka” – Lords of the Underground

These guys came along a little too late, when the west coast scene was paramount and east coast groups had a harder time breaking through even if their sound was more overtly commercial.

91. “Express Yourself” – NWA

I love hearing Dr. Dre rap about how marijuana causes “brain damage/and brain damage on the mike can’t manage” about five years before creating his magnum opus and naming it after the drug.

90. “True Fu-Schnick” – Fu-Schnickens

Total novelty act, but I admit, I love hearing how quickly Chip-Fu can drop rhymes. For a one-trick act, it’s a good trick.

89. “Rock Box” – Run-DMC

Jam Master Jay really held this group together, as neither Run nor DMC were especially gifted rappers.

88. “Rock the Bells” – LL Cool J

The low production values on a lot of early hip-hop classics, including Audio Two’s “Top Billin” and BDP’s “Criminal Minded,” makes them relatively hard to listen to today. This one survives because of the strength and ferocity of LL’s rhymes, which soon gave way to the Smoove B-like persona that dominated his later work (and set him up well for a career in Hollywood).

87. “Hot Sex” – A Tribe Called Quest

“I heard she likes a two-on-one like my man John Ritter.” Never a big fan of Phife’s – Q-Tip carried all of the weight for the Tribe – but that’s among his best lines.

86. “Eric B. is President” – Eric B. & Rakim

“I came in the door/I said it before/I never let the mike magnetize me no more.” There’s something about a debut single that makes an announcement that the artist has arrived, and the entire genre is about to get a swift kick in the ass. Rap’s greatest MC with one of its greatest DJs combine for a track that remains memorable even though it sounds like it was recorded on a handheld cassette recorder.

85. “Ain’t No Half Steppin” – Big Daddy Kane

A poor cousin to his two real standout tracks, which are much further up the list.

84. “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturday” – De La Soul

Speaking of self-immolation, why did De La Soul fight to shed the alternative-rap label that brought them so much success? I never understand artists trying to be less commercial. If you want to make less commercial music for artistic reasons, but deliberately flipping off your audience by creating less interesting content is insane.

83. “Funkin’ Lesson” – X-Clan

The Afro-centric rap movement died a quick and probably justified death, but these guys were pioneers in their heavy use of P-Funk shortly before that became the foundation for most west coast rap and the “G-Funk” movement.

82. “Vapors” – Biz Markie

Biz Markie was a legitimate rapper before the novelty hit I won’t even deign to name here, and a pretty good beat-boxer as well.

81. “The Formula” – The D.O.C.

The DOC appears on this list three times from his incredible and somewhat overlooked debut album, after which a bad car accident wrecked his voice and ended his hip hop career. The whole disc stands up well against The Chronic and Doggystyle even though it came out three years earlier, with similarly funky beats, clever wordplay, and plenty of weapon-filled boasting.

80. “Rump Shaker” – Wreckx-n-Effect

Not Teddy Riley’s best track – that would be Blackstreet’s “No Diggity” – but a worthwhile novelty hit with the raunchiest use of state names in rap history.

79. “Nuttin But Love” – Heavy D

The Overweight Lover’s stuff hasn’t aged all that well either, although I admit a certain guilty pleasure in “We Got Our Own Thang;” this track has his best rhyming by far and one of the most memorable lines in any video from the 1990s – “Yo, that’s that Noxzema girl!” Heavy D was born in Jamaica but reggae was always a background note in his music before this album, where you could hear its influence more strongly.

78. “Quik is the Name” – DJ Quik

I remember seeing DJ Quik appear on the Billboard top 200 albums chart and being completely confused. How the hell did someone I’d never heard of end up with a top 20 album out of nowhere? I hadn’t heard of him because west coast rap got very little airplay or even word-of-mouth on the east coast at that point; his success was regional at a time when rap was never heard on pop radio.

77. “On Fire” – Stetsasonic

“And rock and roll could never hip hop like this.” The line that spawned an alternative classic from the 1990s by Handsome Boy Modeling School, one-half of which was Stetsasonic mastermind Prince Paul.

76. “Welcome to the Terrordome” – Public Enemy

This song seemed like a major disappointment when it came out, because it had all of the urgency of It Takes a Nation of Millions… without the same caliber of lyrics or music; it felt like PE had rushed the track (and album) out to capitalize on the late-blooming success of their previous album. But today the urgency of the track stands out, and it marked one of Chuck D’s last great lyrical achievements before the group faded into the hip-hop background.

75. “Nappy Heads” – Fugees

Did any rap act every do less with more than the Fugees? The talent involved was enormous, and yet their biggest hit was a straight-up soul remake of an adult contemporary classic. Lauryn Hill had her one amazing solo album before releasing Lauryn Hill: Unhinged, and Wyclef has had a strong solo career, but as the Fugees one plus one plus one (Pras) equaled something less than three.

74. “My Philosophy” – Boogie Down Productions

A six-minute rant by the literate if rather preachy KRS-ONE. I’ve wondered how BDP’s legacy would differ if DJ Scott La Rock had lived; would it be greater because their music would have been better, or would it have suffered because so much of their fame came from that tragedy?

73. “Hip Hop Hooray” – Naughty by Nature

Naughty by Nature pretended to be hardcore, but most of their singles were straight-up pop songs, designed to sell lots of records. I have no problem with that, but just be what you are, right?

72. “Check the Rhime” – A Tribe Called Quest

I’m going to run out of things to say about the Tribe soon enough.

71. “Droppin’ Rhymes On Drums” – Def Jef

Def Jef was better known as a producer and as the rapper behind the disgustingly misogynistic song “Give It Here,” but this track is stronger all around – better rhymes, faster pinpoint delivery, and intense backing music that makes the whole thing sound like a sprint.

70. “Do the Right Thing” – Redhead Kingpin & the FBI

Recognizable within a second for that opening sample, and led by Redhead Kingpin’s laconic delivery that eventually became the hallmark of Snoop Dogg, but one thing bothered me about this song: He never actually says what the right thing is.

69. “Flavor for the Non-Believes” – Mobb Deep

I didn’t realize how successful this duo had been until I researched them for this list – their best track for me came from their original demo, although I think most people would argue for “Peer Pressure” or the crude “Hit It From the Back.”

68. “Don’t Sweat the Technique” – Eric B. & Rakim

There’s something slightly off about this track; Eric B. dropped some of the fattest beats of his career, only to have Rakim deliver what was for him a subpar performance, with slower, less inspired rhymes, which in hindsight was a bad sign for his post-breakup future. “I made my debut in ’86” rapped at half-speed is just cringeworthy.

67. “O.P.P.” – Naughty by Nature

Ignore, for a moment, that this too was aimed squarely at mainstream pop audiences. The song is full of clever wordplay, from the disguising of the two p-words to “throw that skeleton bone right in the closet door” to “you’re now down with a discount” to the inscrutable “look you to the stair and to the stair window.” And it’s backed up by a sample from the Jackson 5. You can’t like old-school hip hop and dislike this song.

66. “What’s My Name” – Snoop Doggy Dogg

Yeah, Snoop, we got it. You only say your name twelve times in every song you record.

65. “U Don’t Hear Me Tho’” – Rodney-O and Joe Cooley

Released four or five years too soon, this was G-Funk before the term existed, layered on heavy samples of P-Funk music with the same gangster ethos that Dr. Dre would later mine for great profits. The lines “Time for me to kick another fly funky verse/and if I die, put a soundsystem in my hearse” is one of my favorite from the entire era.

64. “Let the Words Flow (a.k.a. The Power)” – Chill Rob G

This is the song that Snap! ripped off for their own version of “The Power,” featuring slightly better production and markedly inferior rapping by something called Turbo B. (Their original version contained Chill Rob G’s vocals, but he threatened to sue and they had to re-record them.) Hip hop has seen plenty of tracks saying “everyone else’s rhymes suck,” but this is one of the few that seems to actually argue that everyone else should get better, rather than just boosting the ego of the rapper making the statements.

63. “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik” – Outkast

One of the few hip-hop acts to hold my attention after the end of the Golden Era, Outkast just sneaked under the wire here with their first album, which came completely out of left field into a genre dominated by G-Funk at the time and that had never produced anything like the inventive music on their debut, a funky, sludgy sound that seemed to take the humidity of Atlanta summers and put it on wax.

62. “Shake Your Rump” – Beastie Boys

The second-best track on one of the greatest albums in the histories of hip-hop and of alternative music (Corrected 7/7).

61. “Passin’ Me By” – The Pharcyde

The record-buying public largely passed these guys by, a true alternative-rap act who didn’t have the commercial sound for major record sales but showed strong rhyming skills and a pervasive sense that they were having a great time laying down tracks.

60. “Changes” – 2Pac

Possibly cheating – this song was recorded in 1992, but wasn’t released as a single until 1998. But it belongs here, as it’s clearly of this era and genre and features some of 2Pac’s most intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Discussing the plight of the black American underclass in rap lyrics without sounding trite is a major achievement when you consider how few other artists managed to pull it off. And consider these lines, written nearly twenty years ago: “There’s war on the streets/And there’s war in the Middle East/Instead of wary on poverty/They got a War on Drugs so the police can bother me.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

59. “It’s Funky Enough” – The D.O.C.

The fact that the samples all seem to be written in minor keys gives this song a sinister air that set it apart from most mainstream and alternative rap of the time. In the lyrics, the D.O.C. spends more time boasting about Dr. Dre’s prowess as producer than he does about his own rhyming skills.

58. “Keep It Underground” – Lords of the Underground

Not quite as campy as Onyx, but not quite as polished as Naughty by Nature, so they fell through the cracks as I mentioned above. But both of their songs on this list would have fit in well with the rap scene of the late 1980s before everything shifted with the rise of the west coast.

57. “Straight Outta Compton” – NWA

NWA’s press completely outstripped the quality of their output; they had two tremendous rappers in the fold, but their limited catalog was never as good as the hype or the controversy would indicate. They chose controversial subjects, which sold records and frankly was an important addition to a scene that had grown somewhat stale due to the lack of regional diversity. But that doesn’t make me more likely to reach for one of their records today.

56. “Same Song” – Digital Underground

The last gasp for these guys and the wax debut for 2Pac. I always loved that they named this EP release This is an EP Release.

55. “Lucas with the Lid Off” – Lucas

I believe I have two white rap artists on the list, and Lucas is one of them, although he used a sepia-toned video to obscure his race. The jazz-rap thing never really took off; there were scattered successes, a few of which are on this ranking, but as a movement it couldn’t sell enough records, instead producing more one-hit wonders like this one. Weird fact: Lucas’ father, Paul Secon, was a co-founder of Pottery Barn.

54. “I Got a Man” – Positive K

“Are you a chef? Cause you keep feeding me soup.” “I’m not waiting, because I’m no waiter/So when I blow up, don’t try to kick it to me later.” “All confusion, you know I solve ’em/You got a what? How long you had that problem.” So many great lines, and yet never forced.

53. “Wild Wild West” – Kool Moe Dee

One of the first rap songs to cross over in New York and get some time on MTV. It’s not Kool Moe Dee’s best rapping work, but the beat and (for the time) production values elevated it, and it inspired a remake and a film that we’d best pretend never happened.

52. “They Want Efx” – Das EFX

The list of allusions in this song would make the Beastie Boys proud, and of course their “iggedy” style of rapping spawned a brief craze that died quickly, probably because few rappers could actually pull it off.

51. “Bop Gun” – Ice Cube

The best of all of the George Clinton-inspired rap songs, in part because he appears on the track. Always liked Ice Cube holding up four fingers in the video when saying “Nineteen-ninety-THREE” (since the video came out in ’94). Cube’s a better technical rapper than he gets credit for, but he was best known at the time for violent, hate-filled lyrics that once caused Billboard to question whether one of his albums went beyond the boundaries of free speech.

50. “The Mighty Hard Rocker” – Cash Money & Marvelous

Just a vintage mid/late-80s east coast hip hop track, overlooked perhaps because they were only the second most-popular MC/DJ combo in Philly (and unlike the other pair, in this case the DJ was the central figure rather than the MC). It also didn’t help that the record label decided to market the Fresh Prince-like “Find An Ugly Woman,” which didn’t showcase the skills of either member – and, worse, wasn’t funny, either.

49. “It Takes Two” – Rob Base & DJ EZ-Rock

Hearing this song triggers a Pavlovian response in me where everything smells like Drakkar Noir.

48. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” – ATCQ

The best example I know of a rap song that tells a single story from start to finish, with Tribe’s trademark humor and weirdness. I actually own a limited edition 12-inch of this track on clear green vinyl.

47. “I Get Around” – 2Pac

“And I don’t know why/Your girl keeps pagin’ me.” Shock G and Money B of Digital Underground appear, but 2Pac makes it clear he was the best MC in the DU posse. The way his death was paired with Notorious B.I.G.’s as equivalent musical losses always bothered me – there’s no comparison, with 2Pac a top-5 all-time MC … when he wanted to be. Maybe in another universe he lived to see his mid-30s, stopped the “Thug Life” front, and became hip-hop’s most literate MC. Or maybe not.

46. “Steppin’ to the A.M.” – 3rd Bass

These guys always felt like they were trying too hard to establish their street credibility, as if they couldn’t wreck a mic without thinking, “We’re white.” I mean, I heard P.W. Botha never recovered from getting the gas face from MC Serch.

45. “Let Me Ride” – Dr. Dre

“Bodies being found on Greenleaf/With their fuckin’ heads cut off/Motherfucker, I’m Dre.” Talk about making your impression felt. Love the Ice Cube cameo in the video.

44. “Can I Kick It?” – ATCQ

Answer: Yes, you can.

43. “I Got It Made” – Special Ed

A lot of early hip-hop tunes came in for criticism because most of their songs were about nothing more than how talented the MCs in question were, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t better boasts and worse ones. The best rappers could drop clever rhymes to make the point for them, even if the music and production weren’t anything special. The sequence of lines in “I Got It Made” that includes “When I got too hot, I found a spot in the shade/And when my dishes were dirty, I got Cascade” seemed like a challenge of how far Special Ed could take the same basic rhyme and structure before he ran out of things to rhyme about.

42. “Protect Ya Neck” – Wu-Tang Clan

Wu-Tang are one of a handful of acts that ushered me out of hip-hop fandom; their style is very loose and unmetered, unlike the tighter rap style of 1980s east coast rap. You could argue that it’s almost improvisational, like a lot of jazz, but I never got into jazz either. This one track from their debut album is transitional, resembling the more structured rap hits that probably influenced these guys but with hints at the explosion that their next album would cause in the genre. My favorite Wu-Tang solo track came from my favorite Wu-Tang member on Twitter – Ghostface Killah’s “Daytona 500.”

41. “Potholes in My Lawn” – De La Soul

Absolutely hated this song when it first came out because it was so different from what I knew and liked of hip-hop up to that point. The problem wasn’t with the song, which boasted bluesy music and the great imagery that showed up all over 3 Feet High and Rising, but with the closed mind of a 15-year-old.

40. “I Go to Work” – Kool Moe Dee

If I worked in an MLB marketing department and wanted to put together a four-and-a-half minute highlight clip for a star player, this would be the backing track. The music is very James Bond, and Kool Moe Dee’s rhymes are faster and better than on his better-known “Wild Wild West.”

39. “Dre Day” – Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Doggy Dogg

The consummate diss track, with a lowbrow comic video to match. But even better now is the shot at around the 3:52 mark of the video of the guy on his cell phone the size of a brick and the shape of a satellite phone. I guess that was cutting edge in 1993.

38. “I Ain’t No Joke” – Eric B. & Rakim

Pretty sure this is the origin of the phrase “as serious as cancer,” as well as the song to which Shaq was referring with his “slam it … and make sure it’s broke” line at the end of the regrettable “What’s Up Doc (Can We Rock?).” Vintage Rakim across the board.

37. “The World is Yours” – Nas

Recently tweeted “Whose world is this?” and got a slew of responses involving lines from this song, more reasons why I love my readers. Illmatic was another rulebreaking record that didn’t do it for me when it first came out, and even now I don’t reach for any Nas tracks when I’m in the mood for hip hop – I have to be in the mood for Nas.

36. “Strictly Business” – EPMD

A solid track in its own right, elevated for me by the twin samples (“Let a sucker slide once, then I break his neck” and “I control your body”) used in Styles of Beyond’s 1999 track “Killer Instinct.” And Ryu of Styles of Beyond is the rapper on Crystal Method’s “Name of the Game,” which has nothing to do with EPMD but doesn’t fit in any other comment here.

35. “Mama Said Knock You Out” – LL Cool J

I feel like LL’s stature as a rap icon has dimmed as he’s become a mainstream Hollywood star, but he was relevant for almost a solid decade in the rap scene. Not only was this a tremendous track in its own right (although it’s ironic that the guy who said “I think I’m gonna bomb a town!” is now part of a secret spy team in LA fighting bad guys … trying to bomb that town), but with this song he was the biggest rap artist to perform his tracks live, including on live TV, with a backing band rather than just a DJ.

34. “Strobelite Honey” – Black Sheep

“Thank you for your time honey but ho I gotta go.” These guys were considered part of the Native Tongues group, but didn’t have the alternative vibe of De La Soul or the Tribe. They were, however, two-hit wonders, with this the funnier but less enduring of the two.

33. “I Get the Job Done” – Big Daddy Kane

That whole New Jack Swing movement didn’t last long and barely made a dent in the hip-hop scene, but this one collaboration between Kane and producer Teddy Riley, the top dog in the New Jack Swing arena (and the brains behind Wreckx-n-Effect and Blackstreet), was its finest moment. And Kane gave us lines like “So when your main course ain’t doing nothin’ for ya/Just think of me as a tasty side order.”

32. “Runnin’” – The Pharcyde

I’ve wondered if there’s a timing effect in our favorite songs by certain artists – the track you hear first becomes a standard against which you compare all future tracks from that artist, so it becomes your favorite or among your favorites by default. Or is it that you’re more likely to hear a top track first, because that’s how our music industry is (or, at least, has been) structured? Anyway, this was the first Pharcyde track I heard, and I’m pretty sure it’s their best. I think.

31. “Fight the Power” – Public Enemy

Although this appeared on Fear of a Black Planet, it was much more along the lines of the best tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, angry, loaded with powerful allusions and strong rhetoric, backed by a funky sample-filled music track that was among their best. I wonder if Chuck D still supports Tawana Brawley, whose claims of a violent assault by white public officials and police officers were discredited before the grand jury, and who appeared in the “Fight the Power” video.

30. “Paid in Full” – Eric B. & Rakim

I use the opening drum loop as the alarm tone on my cell phone. Stick with the original rather than the Coldcut remix.

29. “Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me” – Geto Boys

Aside from some confusion over the meaning of “bastard,” it’s a surprisingly thoughtful effort from a group better known for rapping about violence against women.

28. “Dirty South” – Goodie Mob
Before Cee-Lo was dressing up as Big Bird and performing with Muppets, he was part of a pioneering Atlanta hip-hop act that gave the Dirty South subgenre its name. (And his departure spurred the greatest diss album title ever: One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show.) This song and album just sneaked in under the wire, coming out in November of 1995, but the extent of social commentary and criticism under all the drug references harkened back to PE’s or Native Tongues’ best work from the late ’80s.

27. “93 ‘Til Infinity” – Souls of Mischief

The failure of the Hieroglyphics collective, which included Souls of Mischief and the next artist on this list, to find a mainstream audiences is one of the great commercial tragedies of hip-hop. Souls’ MCs, who were barely out of their teens when the album came out, had an easy, natural flow, and the production by Main Source and Gang Starr gave the album a jazzy feel without making it as inaccessible or distinctly noncommercial as a lot of jazz-rap tracks. Allmusic.com compared the album favorably to A Tribe Called Quest, but I think it’s more like a West Coast version of Tribe, harder lyrically and musically but with the same laid-back vibe.

26. “Mistadobalina” – Del the Funkee Homosapien

Ice Cube’s cousin. And the rapper on Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood.” I’m still not entirely sure what “Mistadobalina” is about but it’s been stuck in my head on and off for about twenty years.

25. “Doowutchyalike” – Digital Underground

The album version, which runs about seven minutes, is like a playground for Shock G and his Humpty Hump alter ego, way too long for mainstream radio, but unlike most songs of that length, it varies enough to hold your interest right up to the end. This is the track for which they should be remembered, not “The Humpty Dance,” although it hasn’t worked out that way.

24. “Jump Around” – House of Pain

“I got more rhymes than the Bible’s got Psalms/And just like the Prodigal Son, I’ve returned.” Best use of a Biblical reference to boast about one’s rhyming prowess, bar none. Their follow-up single, “On Point,” couldn’t match this song’s pop appeal, but did have a great line from Danny Boy: “Well, it’s the D to the A, double-N Y B-O/Why? Cause I rock shit like Ronnie Dio.”

23. “Microphone Fiend” – Eric B. & Rakim

“I was a fiend/Before I became a teen/I melted microphones instead of cones or ice cream.” “E-f-f-e-c-t/A smooth operator, operatin’ correctly.” “Cool, cause I don’t get upset/I kick a hole in the speaker, pull the plug, then I eject.” And that’s all from the first verse. There was no one like Rakim before he came along, and there has been no one like him since.

22. “Night of the Living Baseheads” – Public Enemy

Chuck D knew how to grab the listener’s attention with his first line, didn’t he? “Here is/Bam/And you say God damn/This is a dope jam.” I had always thought the sample played during the chorus breaks was something about a knife, but courtesy of Wikipedia and The-Breaks.com finally figured out last year that it’s “Twas the Night” from Curtis Blow’s “Christmas Rappin’.”

21. “California Love” – Dr. Dre and 2Pac

The best combo – can’t really call it a “duet” – of otherwise unconnected two rap artists in history, released on December 28th, 1995, just days before the cutoff for this list. The song’s chorus was sung by Roger Troutman of the group Zapp (“More Bounce to the Ounce”) in his last major appearance before he was killed by his brother in a murder-suicide.

20. “Gin and Juice” – Snoop Doggy Dogg

We know what #whitewhines are, so what do we call “With so much drama in the LBC/It’s kinda hard being Snoop D-O double-G?”

19. “So Wat Cha Sayin’” – EPMD

These guys boasted about their rhyming skills well above their actual abilities, but this was both their best-performed track and their strongest musically, in part because the samples didn’t overwhelm the rhymes like they did on “You Gots to Chill.” I’d prefer not to hear Erick Sermon try to sing Luther Vandross again.

18. “The Choice is Yours” – Black Sheep

“Engine, engine, number 9/On the New York Transit Line/If my train goes off the track/Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!” It’s amazing that Black Sheep could put out two unbelievable tracks, and then never put out another song of value after that debut album.

17. “Ghetto Bastard” – Naughty by Nature

Of course, the one time NBN puts out a song of social commentary it doesn’t sell as well as the party tracks, so they went back to rapping about drinking and sleeping around. I can’t blame them, but there’s this barely contained rage in this song and a pretty strong argument in favor of nurture over nature.

16. “Going Back to Cali” – LL Cool J

The first alternative rap song to break through as a mainstream hit at a time when LL was veering dangerously into rap-balladeer territory. The structure is so unconventional at a time when nearly every hip-hop single followed the same pattern and subject matter that it probably only found airplay because of LL’s existing fan base, but that same break from the norm is what made it an instant classic.

15. “Streets of New York” – Kool G Rap & DJ Polo

One of two of my favorite tracks built off a sample of the Fatback Band’s “Gotta Learn How to Dance” along with Groove Armada’s “My Friend.” Kool G Rap’s mouthful-of-gold-teeth style can be a little offputting, like talking to someone with a giant plug of tobacco in his cheek, but like “Ghetto Bastard” this song has a serious point, and there’s a certain raw simplicity to it – he’s setting the scene, but offering no prescriptions – that gives it power even when the New York he’s describing has changed for the better.

14. “Award Tour “ – A Tribe Called Quest

Do dat, do dat, do do dat dat dat.

13. “Me, Myself And I” – De La Soul

So was the success of this song the worst thing to happen to De La Soul? They shied away from anything commercial on future albums, and what looked like a potential Hall of Fame career (because of their willingness to ignore the norms of hip-hop lyrics) ran off the rails after one album. Why didn’t they embrace their alternative-rap status and use it to move the genre forward? Or to at least just make themselves more money? Maybe they didn’t want to recreate 3 Feet High again, but they made it clear they wanted no part of mainstream success, and twenty years on I still don’t understand it.

12. “Player’s Ball” – Outkast

Apparently the Player’s Ball is a real thing, at least according to Wikipedia, which we know is never wrong. Fortunately, the song isn’t about that but about growing up in what was about to be called the Dirty South, with this staccato, off-beat delivery that sounds like you’re about to tumble down a flight of stairs.

11. “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” – Digable Planets

The best song to come out of the jazz-rap movement – not that that’s a high standard – built on a slowed-down riff from jazz pianist James Williams’ 1977 track “Stretchin’” and a drum loop from the Honeydrippers’ “Impeach the President.” The rhymes are surprisingly mundane, focusing again on the rappers’ skills, but the dark, descending bass line is the star of the show here.

10. “Raw” – Big Daddy Kane

See, if you’re going to dedicate the entire track to telling me about what a great MC you are, you need to back it up like this. Kane found commercial success with the Smooth Operator persona, but his legacy should start with this track, one of the best straight-up bragging songs in hip-hop history. “Cause I’m at my apex and others are below. Nothing but a milliliter, I’m a kilo.”

9. “T.R.O.Y.” – Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth

Dedicated to Trouble T-Roy, a member of Heavy D and the Boyz who died after falling from a balcony, the song is MC C.L. Smooth’s tribute to people who mattered in his life, including his single mother, an uncle who filled the role of father figure, and T-Roy. It’s smooth (he at least lives up to that part of his name) and soulful but never maudlin, and the sax sample from Tom Scott will be stuck in your head for weeks.

8. “No One Can Do It Better” – The D.O.C.

G-Funk before the term existed, and early evidence that Dr. Dre (who produced the album) was a force to be reckoned with beyond N.W.A. Twelve years after the accident that turned his powerful voice into a hoarse whisper, the D.O.C. is apparently headed for an experimental operation to restore much of what he lost, and in between his replies to friends you can see updates from him on his Twitter feed.

7. “Follow the Leader” – Eric B. & Rakim

I don’t think any single song got me into hip-hop more than this one; it is certainly the reason I’m a huge Rakim fan, and while it doesn’t have the same funky vibe as most of their other standout tracks, it has some absolutely vintage Rakim lines, including my favorite from him: “In this journey, you’re the journal, I’m the journalist/Am I eternal? Or an eternalist?” It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.

6. “Talkin All That Jazz” – Stetsasonic

A strong defense of rap from early criticism by (white) media members, most of whom probably didn’t realize their kids were listening to the same music they were attacking. Hip-hop has done more to elevate the status o the bass line than any other movement in music history, and this one, borrowed from Lonnie Smith’s “Expansions” (and slowed down), might be the best.

5. “Bring the Noise” – Public Enemy

Gil-Scott Heron’s influence on Chuck D was all over their early work but never more apparent than on this track, a not-that-subtle call to black power where D was at his height in both lyrical content and the quality of the rhymes themselves, putting him with Rakim in his ability to craft the inside rhyme. But we’re just going to pretend that Anthrax cover never happened, OK?

4. “Hey Ladies” – Beastie Boys

The best track off the sample-laden album Paul’s Boutique, which itself was a major landmark in hip-hop that will likely never be repeated because of restrictive laws on sampling passed in its wake. (Of course, with the rise of downloadable music, the law seems strangely out of date now, as sampling could bring more attention to older tracks and spur sales that weren’t possible when those old records were out of print.) This album, and this track in particular, didn’t meet commercial expectations but established the Beastie Boys’ critical bona fides, particularly for their ability to craft clever lyrical allusions, setting them up for their second career as alternative artists that used hip-hop as opposed to garden-variety rappers. (Corrected on 7/7. The album wasn’t produced by Prince Paul, but the title pays homage to him.)

3. “Nuthin’ But A ‘G’ Thang” – Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg

It’s funny that Snoop Dogg managed to upstage Dr. Dre, a strong MC in his own right, but that’s exactly what happened, with Dre shining more as a producer than a rapper. This song single-handedly elevated west coast rap over east coast and ushered in the G-Funk era, which was later hoisted on its own petard by Warren G’s regrettable “Regulate,” for better (stronger production values and a heavier emphasis on 1970s funk) and worse (a subsequent drop in lyrical quality from those who imitated the subject matter but couldn’t rhyme like Dre or Snoop).

2. “Scenario” – A Tribe Called Quest featuring Leaders of the New School

Busta Rhymes’ breakout track – unless you count “Case of the PTA,” which I don’t – was also Phife Dawg’s best work, with some of the best call-and-response lines (“Who’s that?” “Brown!”) in rap history. If there’s a flaw here, it’s that there’s not enough Q-Tip, but every other MC stepped up his game to fill the gap in a signature moment for east coast rap.

1. “I Know You Got Soul” – Eric B. & Rakim

The best MC in history has to be at the top of the list, right? Especially when his DJ paired him with one of its most memorable beats (based on Bobby Byrd’s song of the same name), and the MC in question brought his A-game in a track that has been referenced regularly for 20 years, including its opening lines: “It’s been a long time/I shouldn’t’ve left you/Without a strong rhyme to step to/Think of how many weak shows you slept through/Time’s up, I’m sorry I kept you.” Rakim’s line “pump up the volume” spawned a M/A/R/R/S song and a teen-angst movie (that I admit, I loved, and have seen at least three times), and Eric B.’s heavy use of James Brown is credited with spurring a revival of interest in Brown’s music through increased sampling in hip-hop tracks. Both guys were at the tops of their games – I like to think that the music pushed Rakim to deliver one of his two best performances – and it has proven both enduring and influential even as the artists themselves have faded from the scene. There’s no better track in old-school hip-hop than this one.

So what songs did I miss? What artists? I’ll admit up front I’m not a big B.I.G. fan, and many of the poppier acts of the 1980s (Kid ‘n Play, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince) never did much for me when they were current. But I look forward to your suggestions and comments.

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