Oh, Destructo.

cf. Matos and Maura and a cast of millions, my favorites of 2006’s first-half releases (or “releases,” as the case may be):

The Thermals, “A Pillar of Salt” (2:58)
Cassie, “Me & U” (3:12)
Juvenile, “Get Ya Hustle On” (3:58)
Prince, “Black Sweat” (3:11)
E-40, “Tell Me When To Go” (3:57)
Lily Allen, “LDN” (3:04)
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, “Young Shields” (3:04)
T.I., “What You Know” (4:34)
Too $hort, “Blow the Whistle” (2:45)
Spank Rock, “Rick Rubin” (3:33)
Cansei de Ser Sexy, “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” (3:31)
Project Pat, “Good Googly Moogly” (3:24)
5th Ward Weebie, “Fuck Katrina” (5:03)
BG ft. Mannie Fresh, “Move Around” (4:49)
Girl Talk, “Minute By Minute” (3:12)
DJ Khaled, “Holla At Me” (4:28)
Ne-Yo, “So Sick” (DJ Technics remix) (2:27)
The Knife, “Marble House” (Rex the Dog SK-1 remix) (3:09)
Khia, “Snatch the Cat Back” (4:32)
Lil’ Wayne, “Georgia Bush” (7:27)

78:26

Of note: this is heavy on summer jams and post-Katrina Southern rap, since that’s mostly what I’ve been listening to this summer, depending on my shifting mood and general disgust with the state of global affairs. “A Pillar of Salt” supposedly “[envisions] a United States governed by a fascist Christian state, and [focuses] on the need (and means) to escape”; that conceit seems a little farfetched, but tell that to the “people who died in that pool,” as Lil’ Wayne recounts with more angry, wounded confusion than DMX or Xiu Xiu or Cat Power or Fiona Apple or Stabbing Westward or whoever could ever muster. Wish it wasn’t buried at the end of an (excellent) mixtape, because we’re talking “Suicidal Thoughts”-level vulnerability in terms of that which it imparts to an already captivating and complicated character. More people ought to hear it.

“Black Sweat” feels like it might have existed in some vault for twenty years; “Good Googly Moogly” (”That thang is juicy!”) is way more fun than anything Project Pat’s ever done before, which bodes well for the future. “Young Shields” reveals itself to be absolutely sinister, eviscerating feckless indie kids - for a songwriter practically defined by his earnestness, Owen Ashworth is evidently nonplussed by his audience; “Got a letter from Mom and Dad/I swear to God they don’t get me at all,” he sneers, and they probably sing along.

“Tell Me When To Go,” “Rick Rubin,” and “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” still sound like invitations to a party you never knew existed. “Snatch the Cat Back,” like most of Khia’s oeuvre, still sounds like it’s specifically designed to address MESSAGE BOARD HATERS (to wit: anti-Trina response track “Hit Her Up”; Khia addressing actual message board haters; Jesus Christ I love Khia). “LDN” still sounds like Lindsay Lohan should have sung it over the closing credits of “Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” “What You Know” still sounds like fucking God.

The question I expect to be asked from today onwards is no longer, “Why is there a red-on-yellow mural of a naked chicken man in your bedroom?” The answer to this question is pretty good, but I suspect it will soon be surpassed by, “Why is there a five-foot-square Rasterbation of the album cover for Khia’s Gangstress in your hallway?”

The short answer is, “Because Khia is fucking amazing,” but I wouldn’t be a very good journalist if I left it at that. Let me try to enumerate the ways in which I love what basically amounts to a middling sex-rapper from Atlanta.

The way that most people likely know about Khia, if they do at all, is from the song “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” which was not the only single from her 2002 debut, Thug Misses, but it might as well have been; even if she had followed up “My Neck, My Back” with “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Hey Ya,” it seems reasonable to assume that what most people would be talking about when they talk about Khia is the fact that, finally, somebody had scored a hit single whose chorus was concerned with analingus. There is no subtext to this song; there is no narrative around which butt-licking is draped. It’s basically the Occam’s Razor of sex rap — any song that makes Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy?” seem coy can only have been honed and refined down to its bare essentials, much in the way that a diamond is really just a lump of coal without all the fucking around.

The song only hit #42 on the American Billboard charts, but it went to #4 in the UK. It’s not uncommon for this to happen; they’re different markets. However, in this case, there was an x-factor: The video made for the UK market did not actually show Khia. It showed, instead, a stable of women reenacting, for all intents and purposes, the good parts of The Bikini Car Wash Company; Khia was nowhere in sight. The American video, on the other hand, did feature her. It also featured what appears to be a typical Atlantean summer house party, making itself distinct from, say, MC Hammer’s “Pumps and a Bump” video¹ by having cost maybe sixty dollars and featuring what I am assuming is Khia’s own backyard.

There is a reason why she shot another video for this single, and why she did not participate in it: After the video’s release in the US, she was hit with a staggering amount of backlash for the video, both because, yes, it features a Slip ‘N Slide and an inflatable raft shaped like a dinosaur, rather than helicopters and gold-plated cellphones, but also because, to be honest, Khia is sort of weird-looking. This may be unfair — Khia is certainly no uglier than either Ying Yang Twin, for example — but in a field where one’s success as an artist is directly correlative to coaxing an audience to fuck them, anyone with a genetic makeup that is anything but flawless has their work cut out for them².

Khia did not, however, manage to secure a foothold steady enough to support her second single (possibly also because her second single is sort of crappy; “When I Meet My King” would have been a far smarter choice, considering it sounds like Seventeen Seconds-era Cure trying their hand at Miami bass). Not only did she drop off the charts, but she also became the target of the Internet’s rumor mills, with people claiming that she had been shot to death by her boyfriend, or had died of AIDS. It didn’t help her cause that Thug Misses was spotty (or that “My Neck” was sequenced first, probably negating the need for anyone to listen to the rest of it), and nobody was interested in throwing her a guest appearance, so it’s only recently that anyone’s seen anything of her.

What was really genius, it turns out, and what makes me love Khia so hard, was how she dealt with the criticism — all of which is only just now coming to light. Khia, as it turns out, doesn’t fuck around. When her video was razed and people started throwing fat jokes around, she simply made another one (and charted 38 slots higher in the UK as a result), and then promptly lost 50 pounds. When parodies of her single and its video started popping up, she took the most coherent one (Too $hort’s “My Dick, My Sack,” which is also exactly what it sounds like) and tossed it on her record as a bonus track. But, in what I consider her finest move, when someone found the 20-odd mugshots she’d racked up over the years, she made them her sophomore album’s cover.

This is a ballsy move, but I think it works in her favor for one salient reason: In every single one of these mugshots, Khia looks like she’s just had a really great time. These aren’t the sallow faces of someone who’s hit the bottom and is scooped off of the curbside by two cops, needles showering out of their pockets — these aren’t even the faces of someone who’s in a bad mood. Instead, you get the sense that Khia parties so hard, she needs to cool off in the drunk tank; that maybe she did twelve shooters at Sh-Boom’s, made a guy go down on her on the sink in the ladies’ room, then set fire to a mattress and dragged it out into the street — and then did it seventeen more times.

And this perfectly encapsulates what I suspect about Khia: That she is so awesome, that any complaint you could level at her can be countered with proof that she’s way more fun than anyone else, and does not give a shit about your problems. When you get down to it, she is almost preternaturally unconcerned with other people. When Khia declared herself “Queen of the South,” rapper Jacki-O pointed out that she herself had already appointed herself as such; Khia’s response was, basically, “Well, I’m more popular.” At one point on Thug Misses, Khia declares that she is “that platinum bitch,” which I can only view in light of Trina’s claim that she is herself “the diamond princess.” Of course Khia would nickname herself after a more precious metal than Trina. In an interview with Urbanfans.com, when asked why she had been so silent for the past four years, Khia claimed to hate taking feature positions on songs (which would explain why all she’s done in four years is appear on one Trick Daddy song), but three paragraphs later, hypes up her appearances with T.I. and Trick, and expresses desire to work with Lil’ Wayne. (But not, apparently, Slim Thug, even though “I’m A Queen” implies that we can certainly question him as to the relative worth of Khia’s vagina.)

She’s also savvy enough as a businesswoman to attempt to place herself in a better position to make money, which I suspect was the impetus behind moving away from Artemis Records — yes, the same Artemis records that feature Steve Earle, Warron Zevon, and Better Than Ezra — as well as behind her inexplicable retooling of her only hit single as a way to talk up the New Jersey Nets before the 2002 NBA finals.³ (Again: Khia lives in Atlanta, Georgia.) In fact, Khia appears to have started her own label and promotional company, even though her official website sort of belies this fact. The best part about all of this is the fact that what heading her own promo team seems to imply is, rather than starting a street team and having people flyer around town (or, if you’re Hawthorne Heights, to hide Ne-Yo’s album), that if you give Khia $24, she will record your cellphone’s voicemail message for you. Or, that if you’re going to be in NYC, you should come hang out with her. (Also, Khia responds to her own message board, something that I suspect Jay-Z does not do.) And you know what? Based on all of this information, I am one hundred percent positive that I would love to hang out with her. It’s pretty audacious that Trina implies that she will fuck you for the sum of $20,000, but if I showed up at Trina’s house with a suitcase full of unmarked 20s, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t go through with it. (I’m also pretty sure that Lil’ Wayne would shoot me in the stomach.) I am absolutely sure that after my next paycheck, Khia will be telling you that she is the platinum bitch, but that Stephen cannot come to the phone, but if you leave your name and number, he’ll snatch your message back. Holla.

So, yes: When I saw Gangstress’s album cover, you bet your ass I was excited; excited enough to plaster my wall with it. (We talked briefly about wheatpasting it to the side of a police station, but that seems like something that only Khia herself would actually have the balls to do.) And the thing of it is: Based on the unevenness of Thug Misses, I really have no reassurance that her new record will even be any good. Her website implies that you can stream it, but the Flash code is fucked up, and I’ve already heard “Snatch the Cat Back” fifty times on her Myspace profile. “Snatch the Cat Back,” for the record, is pretty great, and the video is even better; it seems to imply that Khia lives in Dark City, and that the way she expresses to people that she regrets fucking them is to show them that she is not wearing a bra. (At this point, after all this erstwhile research, I am fairly convinced that she doesn’t even own one.) The best part is that if Khia really did live in some cyberpunk futurescape, and if this video were not full of low-rent special effects, but were actually shot with a pair of DV cameras, this would basically be the same thing as the “My Neck” video. None of the places she’s gyrating in are very lush, or even really very cool; there’s the obligatory room full of fluorescent lights, of course, but she also appears…in the road? In an empty room? It’s like she managed to find a cheap place in an apartment complex where robots live. And I think that might be the best thing of all — that no matter the level of Khia’s fame or the girth of her bank account, she remains Khia, and she could give a shit if you care. Even in space.

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¹ Which was itself received poorly by the American public — and even banned from MTV — for featuring MC Hammer in a grotesquely small zebra-print Speedo, and was is itself ironic for featuring an opulent mansion and landscape which MC Hammer would be forced to pawn about two years later.

² This is where the recent resurgence in irony’s popularity came in very handy for Har Mar Superstar.

³ Not that this helped the Nets, who lost in a 4-0 sweep.

In a striking case of further commentary not being needed, note that this video of the Butthole Surfers playing a cable access TV show after the release of their first EP — after having dropped acid five minutes before being interviewed and playing a set — is virtually identical in many key aspects to this short film starring Gumby. It’s like watching two painters from different centuries paint the same sunset.

As far as I’m concerned, Youtube is currently the major justification for the internet, especially since I’m between temp jobs and my creative drive is withering and I have this lingering headache and it’s getting hot again and all I want to do is lie around in my underwear and wait for somebody to put food in my open mouth. What I discovered is that (1) not only does YouTube have about nine million amazing videos on it but that (2) I also still have dopey ninth-grade crushes on basically every female musician I admire. Maybe that’s just the summer haze talking though. That or the single talking. WHATEVER, LET’S TOTALLY WATCH SOME VIDEOS!!!!

The Birthday Party: “Release The Bats” (ca. 1982): I know Nick Cave has that little stick to conduct his drummer on the off-time snare hits (why couldn’t it have tassles???), but with that shirt and jacket he really just looks like a magician; a tired, homeless magician. Think about that: He is playing his best band’s best song, and he’s acting like somebody dragged him into a Charlotte Russe with a broken air conditioner. Some things I will never understand. Watch near the end when he starts fencing with the audience and somebody takes his wand and he does a dead-on impression of Will Ferrell doing an impression of Robert Goulet, which is sort of warping my brain into an n-dimensional Moebius Strip, e.g., How Did He Know. In a perfect world, this would be the new hilarious beaten-to-death catchphrase, right up there with “Who wants a body massage,” but considering the raw volume of people I know fervently and diametrically opposed to this song, this will never happen. Unrelatedly: Why do my friends hate fun so much.

Garbage: “Stupid Girl” (ca. 1996 on VH1’s Fashion Awards): Moving past the fact that this aired a decade ago, which just blows my fucking mind, I want to note two things. Thing the first is that Garbage’s first album was totally great, atmospheric in the singular way that having three A-list producers in your band will probably get you and just reminiscent of that The Crow vibe to appeal to me at the age of 14 without being too much like something that would actually appear on the soundtrack The Crow (see: Machines of Loving Grace, ouch), and that every single from that album stands the Alternative Rock test of time, and in fact probably the whole record does, which means I have to go dig it out from wherever I stuffed it to make sure. Thing the second is, of course, the fact that you can totally see her boob at one point in this performance, which, again, at the age of fourteen, booked up my nights for two weeks solid. If this had happened at the Superbowl instead of Janet Jackson’s plurpy debacle, all huge in HDTV or whatever, nobody would have complained to the FCC because everybody would have been beating off.

Bikini Kill: “Rebel Girl” (ca. 1992) : Obviously Kathleen Hanna is the major focal point in this clip, doing cheerleader jumps and pretty much embodying the Aristotlean ideal of the cliché of the super-hot unattainable woman¹, but what’s digging at the back of my brain is Tobi Vail, who’s wearing humongous sunglasses and bomping on some drums. Specifically, I want to know what’s up with that Nirvana t-shirt, because I can’t get the idea out of my head that it’s some sort of tender artifact from her Kurt-datin’ days, although Tobi Vail is probably a lot less nostalgic than I am and I should really stop projecting. Seriously though, can’t you just imagine her looking for something to wear before the big festival show and she’s digging through the bottom of her closet and suddenly she finds that shirt and it still sort of smells like him and she gets bummed out and angry and everything all over again, and pulls herself together really indignantly and goes, “Fuck that dude, I’m wearing his fucking shirt,” because who wears their own merch anyway??, and plays a huge festival in it wearing those huge reflective sunglasses like she doesn’t know precisely about whom “Drain You” and “Aneurysm” were written???? Oh man, I want to live in this little projection forever.

Kate Bush: “The Wedding List” (ca. 1979, from some BBC Christmas special): This more or less proves that Kate Bush would probably be the perfect girlfriend. Here is a sample imagined conversation from my relationship with Kate Bush:

Me: “Hey Kate what are you up to”
KB: “I was gonna go on television and perform my song about shooting my friend’s unfaithful husband. Which of these doofy period costumes do you think will best match the set from those BBC Shakespeare productions?”
Me: “That depends on whether or not you are going to strut around like a rusty droid.”
KB: “Of course I am Stephen.”
Me: “Then you had better wear the incomprehensible stomach-corset wedding dress.”

AND THEN SHE’D DO IT! My other proof is that when Fruitopia asked her to write a song for their commercial that was redolent of historic events, she wrote this song, which doesn’t bring to mind the fall of the Berlin Wall so much as it does a young Tatyana Ali eating a sandwich. I’m basically in love.

BONUS SECTION: TERRIBLE VIDEOS FOR TRANSCENDENT SONGS

Les Savy Fav: “We’ll Make A Lover Of You”
Why?: “Rubber Traits”

Both of these songs are really dear to me, since not many people are out there penning lyrics which read on paper like someone’s older brother psyching up either themself or their sibling, and that’s a class of sentiment I’d like expressed more often. Tim Harrington is, of course, more optimistic than Yoni, possibly because Elephant Eyelash was a breakup album and LSF are on perm-hiatus so that, in part, Tim can design pants with his wife. But, okay, look, the two areas of my own life I most often need bombast about are (1) healthy living and (2) renewed dedication to my craft, whatever it is. And these two songs are about that, precisely that! And like what are the odds that they would also both be perfect songs, the former like Tim is personally kneeling on your stomach and punching your ribcage and there’s spittle everywhere and he is yelling GET EXCITED, GET EXCITED at you, and the latter being huge and gorgeous and sounding exactly like the self-defeating dismay pants not fitting anymore feels, which is absolutely impressive.

So what I want to know is why video A looks like a high school junior’s first dry-run at Adobe Aftereffectsing the Zwan album art and video B is all just dogs with superimposed people mouths. Because these songs mean something to me, mean something personal and deep, and I am possessive of them.

¹ (e.g., you have statistical proof that you will never ever get to get with her, and even if you did, which you won’t, it would only last for thirty seconds anyway because you’d be so excited, after which she would probably beat you up)

When it all makes sense: you’re riding the 39 bus back from wherever, and you gradually become aware of a little kid, barely mustached, like 14 max, sitting in the back rapping along quietly to his “How We Do” ringtone - 45 seconds or so thereof, ringtone ends, press the green button and start it all over again, keep rapping, get the articulation down. He’s unable to do the “ES-CO-LADE” bit any different from 50, but that’s fine; meanwhile he’s trying to recast every other syllable in his own cadence, trying to outdo the Game at his own game.

So what’s the essential difference between the kid on the bus and Clipse’s “We Got It 4 Cheap, Vol. 2″? (Which is a mixtape in the most appealing sense of the word, really - the first half-dozen songs are the best ones, even the iffy production values have a meaning.) Clinton Sparks isn’t my favorite producer, but he knows how to work within this concept: mix the vocals way up to the point of saturation, stay out of the way, let Pharrell get a verse here and there, drop the “Get familiar!” sample at the beginning of every track. Being a serviceable producer isn’t exactly an insult when you’re mostly working with instrumentals that everybody knows.

Most of all, Sparks knows the art of sequencing - this mixtape flows ridiculously well start to finish, and the verses themselves are positioned for maximum effect - usually Pusha T or Ab-Liva starting off, Malice getting in near the end. (Along with Sandman, Ab-Liva, who used to be in the Major Figgas, is the other Clipse underling getting a verse on every song for some reason - Sandman is pretty terrible, but Liva has a nice flow and a talent for staccato imagery that complements some of Pusha’s more ridiculous punchlines.) The best posse cuts can be arranged like a batting order - RZA’s always understood this - but Clinton Sparks makes this record sound cohesive and natural. Given the roster of producers, it’s no small feat. “Zen” manages to stick out in part because of the production, which isn’t lean and spare the way “Lord Willin” was - instead, it’s all hand claps and gunshots and synth squawks, Liva sounding guttural and mean, the chorus brashly stealing the Afrika Bambaataa “zen-ze-zen-ze-zen” riff, the entire thing booming and ominous.

That being said, “Mr. Me Too,” the first single off the upcoming (though who knows when) “Hell Hath No Fury,” is a return to the sparse Neptunes minimalism of early-decade Clipse. Pharrell gets the first verse and his Ice Cream/skateboard bullshit is still embarassing and misguided like whatever mid-90’s Christmas it was when my grandmother gave me tape copies of “A Boy Named Goo,” “Cracked Rear View,” and Michael Bolton’s “The One Thing”, but he’s so quiet while he does it - breathy and hushed like he’s rehearsing in his bedroom and trying not to wake up the neighbors. Clipse love to talk about how angry “Hell Hath No Fury” is going to be, but on this song they manage to cast their arrogance in a bored, diffident light. Think of the place they’re in right now - beloved by a small cross-section of critics and rap fans, but several years removed, due to label squabbles, from a place in the hip-hop zeitgeist. And if the list of stations provided by whoever’s doing press for their label is any indication, nobody involved with “Mr. Me Too” has any idea how this is going to work within the context of club play or the radio. Is a Top 40 station like Kiss 108 in Boston (or worse, 93Q in Syracuse) really going to play a Clipse song? There’s covering your bases, and then there’s intentional difficulty, and the latter might be damning for this record if it all sounds squelchy like “Chinese New Year” or ostentatious and tacky like “Mr. Me Too.” Regarding Neptunes beats, Pusha T claims that “we’re not taking it if it ain’t something crazy out of the box,” and that makes me wonder. Then again, “Grindin’” and “What Happened To That Boy?” both managed to be successful - epochal, maybe - so who knows? This could all be irrelevant if hip-hop tastemakers continue to be openminded.

I’ve never actually cared much about (the?) Clipse before beyond the singles I’ve heard, but it’s impossible to ignore the way they’ve gone about responding to being shit on by the music industry. Over the course of its frantic, compact hour, “We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2″ basically states the following:

1. Our talents as rappers are eclipsed only by our talents as drug dealers.
2. Our profits from the latter are so incredibly lucrative that we hardly need to rap anymore, except out of sheer spite.
3. Accordingly, we are going to steal all your best beats and rap over them. Go ahead and sue us. We can afford better lawyers than you now.

That’s more or less always been Clipse’s shtick, of course, but it works better in this format than it ever has before, borne out largely by the fact that Clipse’s boasts sound even more extravagant when paired with these instrumentals. Pusha T, in particular, is learning how to use his voice, no longer limited to his nasal monotone - his verse on “1 Thing” is especially urgent and hungry. At the end of an album in which it’s made clear again and again that Clipse have nothing to lose, Pusha sounds like he has something to prove.

Man, after all the bullshit it mysteriously took to get this thing running, I better do something with it.