November 16, 2003

A Cheat Sheet for Dancehall Beats

GGY POP Who needs maturity? All it took for Iggy Pop, 56, to make his best album in two decades was to regroup the surviving Stooges, his original late-1960's band, and reclaim his old reckless bluntness. "My life is dirty, my mind is loaded," he proclaims in the title song of "Skull Ring" (Virgin), and the music lives up to his raunch, spite and hard-headed punch lines. He leers, sneers and offers some self-analysis: "Supermarket" and "Til Wrong Feels Right" sum up his complicity and disgust with pop as product. "Skull Ring" is part reunion, part tribute; the pop-punk whippersnappers Green Day and Sum 41 also back him up, and Peaches raps some deadpan smut alongside him. The generational split is clear: the youngsters like clean-cut songs and the geezers prefer molten psychedelic mayhem.

TUPAC Everybody wants to record with Tupac Shakur now that he's dead. The most thoroughly exploited hip-hop casualty continues toward beatification in the film biography "Tupac: Resurrection," while its soundtrack album (on Amaru/Interscope) adds four newly concocted raps to Tupac's original tales of thug life and prophecies of his own death. Eminem, who produced three tracks, sees Tupac as a fellow rapper with problem parents; he assembled "Ghost" to start with Shakur's messed-up childhood and end with the rapper shot dead. "Runnin' (Dyin' to Live)" posthumously pairs Shakur with his bitter rival, the Notorious B.I.G., in a reverent memorial song that portrays both rappers as victims of their pasts and the media, while in "One Day at a Time," a Tupac plea for community responsibility segues into Eminem rapping his latest self-justification. Meanwhile, in "The Realist Killaz," 50 Cent praises Tupac as a rap messiah and volunteers to ride his coattails until he returns.

CABAS The Colombian rocker Andrés Cabas loves local traditions as much as he loves his electric guitar, and on his album "Contacto" (EMI Music USA Latin) he treats those traditions with complete familiarity and no deference at all. Afro-Colombian drumming, the bounce of the cumbia and the lilt of salsa are among the foundations of love songs that occasionally stay close to their sources, but more often transform themselves into unstoppable rock or funk. And who could resist a guy who sings, over brass-band oom-pahs, that "life is more beautiful with the problems you bring me"?

THE DIXIE HUMMINGBIRDS The Dixie Hummingbirds' album "Diamond Jubilation" (Treasure/Rounder) is this gospel institution's 75th-anniversary album, but it doesn't look back. Larry Campbell, the guitarist in Bob Dylan's band, produced the album and enlisted current and former Dylan collaborators, including Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of the Band. They give the Hummingbirds a rural, often acoustic twist, coming up with Cajun, country and ragtimey gospel. The Hummingbirds' longtime lead singer, Ira Tucker Sr., 78, who joined the group in 1938, still proselytizes in a hearty, stalwart baritone, and bluesy songs like "When I Go Away," "Nobody's Fault" and "Too Many Troubles" confront death with unshakable faith.

KILA Trying to update traditional music is always a matter of instinct and experiment; in music that survived decades and centuries, any added element can sound distracting or faddish. On its album "Luna Park" (World Village), the Irish band Kila holds on to the old-style tunes and Celtic lyrics, but dares to pile on a world of counterpoint: finger cymbals, electric guitars, sarangi (Indian bowed lute), hammered dulcimer, xylophone. The results ought to sound cluttered, but the ballads gain resonance and uptempo tunes become ecstatic whirlwinds.

`THE BIGGEST RHYTHMS' Here's the cheat sheet for the last year's bewildering profusion of dancehall beats. "The Biggest Rhythms" (Greensleeves) collects the backup tracks that dancehall toasters have rapped over and hip-hop producers have latched on to: stripped-down exotica, parched two-beats, less-is-more abstractions and twitchy, twangy, perforated funk. Just add rhymes, or dance as is.

MATTHEW DEAR Sample, repeat, manipulate, overlay, move on — that's the modus operandi for Matthew Dear and countless other laptop techno producers. But Mr. Dear isn't content to maintain a mechanical dance pulse. On "Leave Luck to Heaven" (Spectral/Ghostly International), his debut album under his own name (rather than aliases like False and Jabberjaw), he restricts his sonic vocabulary to coolly synthetic keyboard and percussion sounds and his own deadpan voice. What separates him from the electro revival is a peculiar combination of geeky introversion and an old-fashioned backbeat he borrowed from swing. He's creating his own claustrophobic jitterbug party.