Robert Christgau's Music Criticism Blog - Expert Witness - MSN Music

Homeboy Sandman

No, really

By Xgau Nov 9, 2012 5:59AM

Homeboy Sandman: Chimera EP (Stones Throw)

The beats on these six songs tend low and thrummy, less than catchy but they stick with you. The philosophical lyrics are braggier than usual, and in a touch I like, every damn one is reproduced on the cover of the vinyl version. First side, "I Do Whatever I Want" and especially "Cops Get Scared of Me" prove somewhat less than compelling. But the second begins with a a geopolitical analysis so much shrewder than the unpromising title "Illuminati" that the two excellent if lesser tracks that follow are, well, illuminated. B PLUS

 


Homeboy Sandman: First of a Living Breed (Stones Throw)

Between speed of delivery and brevity of line, Sandman's nonstop tunefulness here tends jingly no matter how gritty his flow. So listen up, Goya Foods‑-he's a Dominican vegan with an old rhyme called "Canned Goods," and if you're real nice maybe he'll let you attach it to a garbanzo commercial. As a sucker for babies, let me praise the sample that runs through the "Wear Clean Draws" variant "For the Kids"; as an elder, let me remind those who've forgotten (as I had) that the treated verbalese of "Cedar & Sedgwick" namechecks the birthplace of hip-hop. Sandman's rhymes are so unfailing I wish he'd tell stories as well as pile on rhetoric, because rhetoric is harder to sustain at the level of interest he deserves. I also wish his best album didn't recycle one standout each from his two 2012 EPs. But there aren't many rappers who can top a strong collection with a progress report on their careers which credibly reports that the nicest thing about earning money is having more to give away and transforms a diffidently childish "not really" into a dynamite hook. I mean, what a boast: "Not really." A MINUS

 

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178Comments
Damien Wilkins
Nov 13, 2012 12:52AM
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I want to say something about books but first need to say that Homeboy Sandman's The Good Sun is a firm favourite in our kitchen across all ages (14-49) and genders. I love his tone. 

Books: Having done my time in my 20s and 30s inside big, mostly American male books with looping multi & meta narratives where the point is a sort of bet - as in "I bet you won't finish this' - (see Coover, Gaddis, Gass), I thought I was finished with all that. I never renounced those guys a la Franzen but I was free. (Well, until Bolano came along.) So anyway I was surprised to discover this year that there was one to go, which beat them all. The Golden Notebook, published in 1962,
makes pygmies of the po-mo boys. I'd always thought it was a Women's Studies handbook. And that Lessing was a'bad' writer (like Dreiser). Turns out to be a rock falling on your head. It is a Great Book, mind-boggling in that you wonder how did one person hold this in her brain. That she wrote it in a couple of years and followed it up with story collections, more novels, series of novels etc etc is also remarkable. (Most of these I haven't read - which is as exciting as knowing you haven't been to Brazil yet.) Also, unlike a number of those blokes, there's no sense of 'I have been working on this mighty edifice for decades and now behold'. Lessing just gets on with it. 


Not. Milo. Miles.
Nov 13, 2012 12:05AM
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The Anders Nilsen sounds fascinating and I will have to check it out. Shows I've really slipped in keeping up with *Comics Journal* as well as *Drawn & Quarterly* that I'd never heard of him.
JY49NY
Nov 12, 2012 11:29PM
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helping my Mom move so i can't contribute to this excellent thread on books...damn....goin​g to see Madonna tomorrow night and then hopefully things ease up by the weekend...and i can submit a book list myself
bradluen
Nov 12, 2012 11:01PM
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oh yeah, Anders Nilsen's Big Questions, about (uhhhhh) a flock of finches struggling to deal with the incomprehensible, is one of the most tender and dramatic and eventually profound comics of the last whatever years
Michael Tatum
Nov 12, 2012 10:46PM
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I'm way suspicious of any book that takes you an hour to read.  But I'm in awe of Daniel Clowes, particularly his short story collection "Caricature."  It's the "Nine Stories" of graphic novels.
Rodney Taylor (rstay)
Nov 12, 2012 10:15PM
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Comics?  OK, now I have something to contribute.  More recent noteworthy comic runs:

 

Keiron Gillen just finished a long story (about 30 issues) on Loki in Journey into Mystery  that was outstanding.

 

Mike Carey and Peter Gross's The Unwritten is the finest ongoing imo (not superhero; about the way the worlds of fact and fiction grow into each other)

 

Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente had a nice run on Incredible Hercules

 

Mike Mignola's Hellboy universe rarely disappoints

 

Ditto on All-Star Superman.

 

Warren Ellis did a six-issue run on the otherwise forgettable Secret Avengers that shows why comics can be wonderful.

 

Not quite sure if Jonathan Hickman's Manhattan Projects (what those wacky scientists really did in New Mexico) will live up to its promising premise, but it's off to a good start.

 

 

 

Graham Ashmore née gdash
Nov 12, 2012 9:55PM
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Two science fiction novels that deserve mention, don't think they have been yet, are Alfred Bester's Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. 

Great to see The Getaway mentioned, my favourite Thompson, and the beautiful Once and Future King.

Has Mervyn Peake had a mention yet?
Allen B.
Nov 12, 2012 9:26PM
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Steve Gerber's Defenders (and, intermittently, Howard the Duck)
Steve Engelhart's Avengers

bradluen
Nov 12, 2012 9:22PM
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well now that some of us are really dorking out:

Fantastic Four #55-58 (DOOM!)
Morrison/Quietly's All-Star Superman 
The early Spirits (drawn by Eisner himself)
fine, Watchmen
fine, Sandman
Adams/O'Neil/Giordan​o's Batman
X-Men Dark Phoenix (don't have a problem with comics turning into All My Children for a decade or two)
Ditko's Spider-Man (yeah, "The Final Chapter" is unmesswithable)
Jaime Hernandez's Ti-Girls
Daredevil #7 (Sub-Mariner! Wally Wood!)

Carl Barks wins if you consider having way too much money to be a superpower. 
chriskellyart
Nov 12, 2012 9:18PM
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Maybe because of where I was raised but I found "Look Homeward Angel" more powerful than "Call it Sleep". 
Jerry Withrow
Nov 12, 2012 9:10PM
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The clankster has snatched my more long-winded efforts, so .... if you're talking crime , I gotta include Westlake, Willeford, Himes and Highsmith(warped indeed, but when she clicks I feel each twist of the blade). 
Jeff Hamilton (Ham340)
Nov 12, 2012 8:51PM
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Have to second the comment on Dog Soldiers. Superb action-novel technique, the scenes always framed and significant as scenes, yet each moving into the next as though one were not reading scenes at all.   I've read it twice, and probably the only novel I've read as lucid as it is, and if anything even more intelligent, is Coetzee's Disgrace. Two utterly superb novels.  
Graham Ashmore née gdash
Nov 12, 2012 8:43PM
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Carola, there's this writer, commonly known as "The Bard".  You can't know the whole of English literature until you've started on him. He wrote plays and poems, the latter mostly "sonnets". You have to get used to something called blank verse, written in a rhythm called "iambic pentameter". I won't explain the rhythm (hint: iambic from "iamb", pent from "five"); I'm sure if you google it you can find out for yourself.  Where to start? Gosh, that's hard. I'll get back to you on it.
Allen B.
Nov 12, 2012 8:38PM
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Phil, thanks for reminding me of Dog Soldiers - it was a similarly memorable read for me.  Was also made into the pretty good film  "Who'll Stop the Rain," with Nick Nolte.
Allen B.
Nov 12, 2012 8:23PM
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Late breaking comment, a bit of a tangent from the discussion about characters drawn to evil: Jim Emerson, a critic I've liked for a good long time, was recently trying to sell his readers on the new Sherlock Holmes TV series, but he lost me when he started going on about how in the show Holmes  often resorts to methods nearly as criminal as the people he's tracking down in the interest of getting the job done. He quoted a bit of a speech Holmes gives to Moriarty about how they're of the same breed and he'll shake his hand in Hell, and I just felt my interest drop like a stone.  Beyond the fact that it's been done a million times already, from every possible angle, for me characters who do nothing but cut the Gordian Knot were exciting when I was about 15 but have become more of a stone bore with each passing year.
PhilB220
Nov 12, 2012 8:23PM
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I've only read four novels more than once: Catch-22, Crying of Lot 49, Nostromo, and Dog Soldiers. I've also probably read The Long Goodbye more than once, but in a piecemeal fashion. Of all these I think the one that made more of an impression the 2nd time was, strangely enough, Dog Soldiers, probably because when I first read it the setting and circumstances were more or less contemporary but I wasn't aware enough of what was really happening to appreciate the relevance of the story and situations. When I reread it some years later the knowledge I had picked up in the meantime about the Vietnam War and the post-hippie California counterculture made it seem more meaningful, albeit in a pulpy sort of way. (It helped that I had moved to San Francisco in the interim) In a sense, I still think it's the best thing I've ever read about that particular milieu. 
Robert Christgau (Xgau)
Nov 12, 2012 8:17PM
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Oh, and as a point of information: Carola wrote her senior thesis at Harvard on Ulysses. Got an A, as I recall. She just didn't feel like rereading it. When you're 67, rereading 700 difficult pages is a big expenditure.


Alfred Soto
Nov 12, 2012 8:17PM
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I'd say the nastiest characters in the Joyce universe are Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power: intelligent people with grotesque sanctimonious streaks and not so hidden prejudices who pretend they're liberal. They're not evil but they come closest to being villains. Even The Citizen's jingoism is easy for Bloom to counter.
Robert Christgau (Xgau)
Nov 12, 2012 8:15PM
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From my 2000 list, genre top to bottom, although some writers are now considered so "literary" I've excluded them: Ambler, Dick, Cain, Tolkien

Hammett Maltese Falcon (det)
Sterling Holy Fire (sf)
Mosley A Little Yellow Dog (det)
Vassi Mind Blower (porn)
Le Carre Tinker, Tailor (spy)
Gibson Neuromancer (sf)
Chandler Long Goodbye (det)
Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (sf)
Thompson The Getaway (crime? horror?)
Stephenson The Diamond Age (sf)
Leonard Maximum Bob (det)
Ade Fables in Slang (humor)
White The Once and Future King (fantasy)
Delany Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (sf)
Clarke Childhood's End (sf)

Of course, just as I included Mumbo Jumbo and Naked Lunch because I think the novelistic tradition includes Candide as well as Lost Illusions, I include all these because Poe deserves to be mentioned along with Hawthorne (although in fact I much prefer Hawthorne). In my life, Mind Blower and A Little Yellow Dog have meant more than The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man (both of which I also like and admire, and both of which I've read more than once, as I have Mind Blower and A Little Yellow Dog). This isn't a greatness argument--I'm not experienced enough as a literary critic to go that far, don't have my concepts straight. But it might turn into one if I'm given two lifetimes.
For Carola at this point, Le Carre's best novels seem to be moving up there with her special favorite Lessing.
One more thing: Among the many novels I've never read is Delany's Dhalgren (sp?), which Carola swears by and many others known to me also love.

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about the blogger

Robert Christgau

Starting in 1967, Robert Christgau has covered popular music for The Village Voice, Esquire, Blender, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He teaches in New York University's Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, maintains a comprehensive website at robertchristgau.com, and has published five books based on his journalism. He has written for MSN Music since 2006.

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