The Most Memorable 1999 Albums (Part 5) 

PopMatters turned 25 recently, and these memorable 1999 albums celebrate the popular music that defined the year of our birth. This is the final part.

Mos Def – Black on Both Sides [Rawkus] – 12 October 1999

As the cornerstone of the once-mighty underground hip-hop empire that was Rawkus Records, Mos Def‘s wildly diverse yet smoothly cohesive full-length debut truly lived up to the Brooklyn-born MC’s immense build-up in the hip-hop underground. Expectations ran high following his formidable cameos on tracks by Common, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest throughout the mid-1990s as a junior member of the legendary Native Tongues crew.

Released on the heels of his incredibly successful collaborative LP with longtime partner in rhyme Talib Kweli as Black Star, Black on Both Sides set out to prove not only Mos Def’s worth as one of the prolific and insightful MCs on the scene, but also as a top-notch producer who shows a depth of musical knowledge far beyond his own genre, and a talented multi-instrumentalist who can rock the bass, drums, congas, vibraphone, and keyboards as well as he does the microphone.

Elements of Roy Ayers-style soul jazz, Max Romeo-esque reggae, Maggot Brain-quoting funk, and even pummeling guitar licks a la Bad Brains are all factored into the sonic gumbo Mos Def cooked up, creating a masterpiece that signified the apex of hip-hop’s most productive and innovative decade, the 1990s. – Ron Hart

Handsome Boy Modeling School – So… How’s Your Girl? [Elektra] – 19 October 1999

Rock music, by which I mean all of the American pop music of the last half-century, including hip-hop, has always suffered from a severe case of self-seriousness. Both classic rock and hip-hop have fetishized authenticity, making it almost impossible for artists like Bruce Springsteen or Kanye West to demonstrate humor or play with the artistic pose of intelligent self-consciousness. Whimsy be damned.

Which is why De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising, hip hop that dared to be light, funny, tuneful, yet still artistically serious, made such a breezy impression in 1989. The producer, Prince Paul, would team up a decade later with producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura under the moniker Handsome Boy Modeling School to create a logical successor, So… How’s Your Girl?. This 1999 classic was outwardly nuts, loosely based on an episode of the short-lived Chris Elliott sitcom Get a Life in which Elliott’s idiot character gets duped into attending the bogus “Handsome Boy Modeling School”.

A first listen suggests that these two invincibly creative producers were out for a high-toned goof, sitting in the studio cooking up grooves from unlikely sources (jazz, drips of water, trumpeting elephants, new age), then interpolating opera, self-help tapes, and guest spots from across the musical spectrum (Mike D, DJ Shadow, Sean Lennon, even comedian Father Guido Sarducci). Paul and Dan “play” at being the owners of a modeling school, and their songs tell the story of this miraculous or fraudulent enterprise. There is even a track where Prince Paul calls up rapper Biz Markie and convinces him to “sing like the Bee Gees, ‘Night Fever’”; the whole thing is backed by old-timey organ music.

Now, So… How’s Your Girl? is more vital than ever. Hip-hop is more monochromatic today, having perfected a commercially successful (that is: endlessly repeatable) groove, and its sense of ebullient discovery, not to mention humor, is sagging. The “story” part of So… How’s Your Girl? never really mattered, but the ingenuity of its execution, the depth of its grooves, and its attitude of high-tone play remain triumphant.

Handsome Boy Modeling School comes off today as a collection of hugely varied grooves, but each one deep as a canyon. The glorious variety of the rapping is articulate and literary, but not precious, with Del the Funkee Homosapien, Grand Puba, Trugoy, Sensational, and others locking into the beats with such joy that there is virtually no need for cheap sing-along choruses or other obvious devices.

Paul and Dan are not being presumptuous when they sample Beethoven (as Chris Elliott shrieks, “I’m a male model, not a male prostitute!”). Hip-hop like this–dazzlingly assembled collages of sounds that resemble orchestral music in their complexity of texture, form, and reference, but with the sensuous groove of blues music–makes the case just as well as Pet Sounds or What’s Going On that American pop music is, for whatever it’s worth, its own kind of classicism. – Will Layman

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros – Rock Art and the X-Ray Style [Hellcat] – 19 October 1999

Joe Strummer, one of the most famous frontmen in the last 30 years of rock history, had disappeared from spotlights for ten years after his first solo album, Earthquake Weather, into a black hole of regret, self-doubt, and disgust with what he saw as the emptiness of rock ‘n’ roll fame. He called this period the “wilderness years”. He was not unproductive, writing for Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite, producing the Pogues, composing and contributing to film soundtracks, and DJing (“London Calling” was the show), but he nevertheless lacked sustained purpose. Then in the mid-1990s, Strummer assembled a backing band of poly-instrumentalists dubbed the Mescaleros.

Rock Art and the X-Ray Style was to be Strummer’s triumphal return from the wilderness. But return to what? In 1987’s Walker (a soundtrack to a film by the same name), everyone should’ve learned that Strummer had crossed the musical Rubicon beyond the Clash‘s roots-infused punk. Earthquake Weather demonstrated the direction even better: rock ‘n’ roll met world music. Of course, that was already happening in Sandanista, where the Clash moved farther into reggae and even flirted with the burgeoning rap genre (“The Magnificent Seven”, for example). Rock Art and the X-Ray Style continued this trajectory, distancing Strummer from his more famous past efforts even further.

The album’s lyrics are a smattering of forlorn, existential, and socially critical fragments. While it is a flawed album, at times forced and nearly baroque by spartan Clash comparisons, it also has a deeply human, even tender core that earns forgiveness for its transgressions. Some songs, such as “Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll”, are memorable, both lyrically and instrumentally; others, like “Nitcomb, “beg for a mnemonic device.

Some songs are also more “worldly” than others. “Sandpaper Blues” is bongo and maracas-heavy, peppered with soaring synth noises, like jets leaping off the runway, and the “boing boing” of synthetic Jew’s harps. It’s not unpleasant. Others, like “Yalla, Yalla”, have a rhythm closer to Big Audio Dynamite’s dance beats with hints of reggae and dub. They are far from the rock-heavy days of “I Fought the Law” and “London Calling”

The album’s soft-of title track, “X-Ray Style”, a medium tempo, slightly islands-infused number, is practically a metaphor for Strummer’s own gaze on the world: “Down on the border they crawl all the way / To get a clip of living with a clean-all spray / Can anybody feel the distance to the Nile / I wanna live and I wanna dance awhile.”

“Tony Adams”, the name of a famous British footballer and poster child for recovering alcoholics, is vintage Clash-like pop-reggae meets smooth jazz (the saxophone), for better or worse. “I’m waiting for the rays of the morning sun / Somebody tell me clearly, has the new world begun?” Strummer repeats in the chorus. “The whole city is a debris of broken heels and party hats / I’m standing on the corner that’s on a fold on the map / I lost my friends at the deportee station / I’ll take immigration into any nation”. It’s difficult not to take the metaphors of party debris and deportees as autobiography.

“Forbidden City” is another world-beat, bongo-heavy number (David Byrne, you trailblazer!). The song gets less world-ish in the middle, on the verge of really turning the rock on high. Actually, several songs (e.g. “Techno D-Day”) are on that verge. But they stop short, like a retired athlete returned to the field, too anxious to go full tilt for fear of pulling a muscle and embarrassing herself. To Strummer’s credit, rocking out was not his goal here.

Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is not a bad album, nor is it going to make the Top 100 albums of all time. While the album is required listening for Strummer-lovers, for many Clash fans, the worst part of this release is that it’s not much like the Clash. The best part of the album is that it gives an X-ray of Strummer’s songwriting, and perhaps his psyche in evolution — if you can somehow stop thinking about the Clash. – Jayson Harsin

Pharoahe Monch – Internal Affairs [Rawkus/Priority] – 19 October 1999

Rarely cited, but proving to be highly influential in the wake that followed, Internal Affairs bobs and weaves through a collection of tracks that are impossible to define out of context. Held together, they form a hellish mosaic, a complex testament to the avenues a rapper can explore given a blank slate and the space to run free.

“Rape”, the third track on the album, plays out like a courtroom investigation, with Monch as public enemy number one on the witness stand, playfully throwing out jabs left and right that he will “grab the drums by the waistline, snatch the kick, kick the snare, sodomize the baseline” or “turn on the 3000 stuck my dick where the disc go”.

“No Mercy”, which benefits in intensity from the constantly on-edge M.O.P., where Monch brags “they’ll bury me with my SP1200” is all high drama, leading right into the most downright scary track on the album, “Hell”, featuring Monch and Canibus as two damned sinners on a death race toward the fiery gates. The album suffers in the middle during a suite of solo tracks that stand out with a few key lines, but ultimately deflate in the shadow of the collaborations. This unique paradox has kept him respected, but he has never earned the commercial hits he surely deserves. His follow-up work has never achieved the hungry bite of Internal Affairs, which has caused it to become buried, destined to be rediscovered. – Craig Hubert

Incubus – Make Yourself [Sony] – 26 October 1999

The title of Incubus’s Make Yourself suggests the creation of a person, in essence, the blossoming and emergence of a complete self. Just as its title implies, this album was as much a creative forging as a personal one. This notion plays out in the band’s video for “Drive”, the song that broke them into mainstream radio and turned them into platinum-selling artists.

The video shows a meta-drawing of lead singer Brandon Boyd drawing himself, starting with the outline of his hand and then filling in his face. The juxtaposition between Boyd’s artistic self-rendering and his human self performing the song with the rest of the band perfectly captures the album’s theme of creating and manifesting the whole artistic self.

In the title track, Boyd sings, “If I hadn’t made me / I would’ve been made somehow / If I hadn’t assembled myself / I’d have fallen apart by now”. This seems particularly apt when applied to Incubus’s sound up to this point in their discography. Their previous full-length, S.C.I.E.N.C.E., was littered with sampled noises, cut-and-paste vocal sounds, abrupt tempo changes, and a generally unpolished finish. It was their first album with DJ Chris Kilmore, and the seams were still very raw where they tried to cut their tracks.

Each song sounded chaotic, as if on the verge of falling apart. With Make Yourself, Incubus became one of the first bands on modern rock radio to integrate a DJ into their sound effectively. Boyd discovered his singing voice, and the band reassembled itself around it. Tracks like “Stellar” and “The Warmth” encompassed all the elements of an Incubus song, from hauntingly beautiful melodies to atmospheric guitars.

I sometimes find myself digging out this album of my own volition just to hear some of my favorite tracks. While I now consider some of the lyrics cringeworthy (“It feels like trading brains with an imbecile / For real”? For real.), the fundamental struggle for identity in these songs still strikes me as relevant, and they never sound overproduced or self-indulgent. Make Yourself, then, is as much a command to the listener as it is the band’s manifesto. – Theresa Dougherty

Le Tigre – Le Tigre [Mr. Lady] – 26 October 1999

Finally, the punk rockers learned how to dance. Or is it the other way around; did the dancers become punks? Either way, it doesn’t matter. Le Tigre’s self-titled debut crossed all the right streams, and in the process reunited the realms of hardcore punk and electronic dance music.

It’s easy to forget that modern electronic dance music was created by a proverbial rainbow coalition of early 1980s urban cultures from New York, Chicago, and Detroit: black, white, Puerto Rican, straight, gay, punk, disco, salsa, and techno. This was especially hard to remember back in 1999, when the majority of dance music hitting the shelves during the “electronica” push was white (with some exceptions for jungle or trip-hop artists), British, and very heteronormative. Frankie Knuckles never hit the pop charts, so it’s easy to forget just how queer the whole dance thing actually was from the very beginning.

If “riot grrrl” punk was aimed at reminding girls and women that they had as much right to be angry, loud, and passionate as their male counterparts–and to play loud rock and roll with just as much abandon–Le Tigre (ostensibly fronted by Bikini Kill alumnus Kathleen Hanna) was formed with the express purpose of re-colonizing dance floors for grrrls everywhere and re-appropriating synthesizers from humorless white dudes. There was still a lot of punk in their swagger. It’s rough in places, but arguably that’s the point: punk at its purest was never about perfectly crafted artistic artifacts, and musical virtuosity (or lack thereof!) could never take precedence over purely felt emotional experience.

So, Le Tigre is kind of a mess; ramshackle, whip-lash inducing, but occasionally, absolutely brilliant. You’re not likely to find better examples of either punk or dance music than “Decepticon” or “Metro Card”. If left to its own devices, the patriarchy will move in and take over any old music scene that it happens to find unoccupied. Le Tigre stood up to remind all the superstar DJs that you don’t have to be a white, straight male to rock a party, and you certainly don’t need to check your politics at the door of the club. – Tim O’Neil

The Dismemberment Plan – Emergency & I [Desoto] – 26 October 1999

Emergency & I usually gives the impression of having been released in the 2000s. That isn’t just because the Dismemberment Plan didn’t break through until around 2002, when they floored concertgoers on a tour with Death Cab for Cutie, but also because the record seemed so far ahead of its era. It utilized the aesthetic of Weezer and the Breeders as a starter kit, but its Technicolor spazz-pop sounded like nothing else at the time and did more to move away from grunge clichés than any other rock record of the ‘190s.

It predated and, in a way, predicted monumental releases by Enon, Of Montreal, and Wolf Parade, easing many of us into those bands’ spasmodic tendencies, and offered us a fresh, forward-looking alternative to the nu-metal that was just beginning to dominate the airwaves. Though it may have only been in hindsight, Emergency & I painted a rosy picture of indie rock to come.

The songs rarely detoured from simple pop structures, but the Dismemberment Plan injected them with enough caffeine to knock out a bull elephant. Every instrument, from the guitar to the poor, demolished keyboard, was consistently cranked to 11 and thrown into overdrive, even when the tempos weren’t very fast, rendered all the more vivid by eye-bulgingly clear production. At times, Emergency & I could simply be too much, its flurry of melodies often nearing combustion or teetering on the brink of collapse.

The figurative and actual voice of the Dismemberment Plan was singer and guitarist Travis Morrison, whose sometimes quavering, sometimes shouted vocals mirrored what his band was kicking up around him. Half ingratiating party animal, half nervous wreck, Morrison perfectly encapsulated the twenty-something’s insecurity thinly veiled by extroversion.

We might say that he and the Plan were clairvoyant here too, in that they foresaw overactivity, not apathy, as the prevailing problem among 2000s youth. Yet their music was such damn fun that the heady subtext never repelled their listeners, and Emergency & I remains as bracing and immediate as the day it was released. – M. Newmark

Rage Against the Machine – The Battle of Los Angeles [Sony] – 2 November 1999

I bought The Battle of Los Angeles from the used bin at Tower Records when I was in high school. My local rock station (now defunct) played the album’s singles in hourly rotation, unfairly grouping them with contemporaries like Limp Bizkit and Korn in the nascent “rap-rock” movement. As anyone familiar with their earlier albums knew, Rage Against the Machine were an established entity altogether different from the rising nu-metal stars of the time.

They communicated a blatantly political message with ferocious guitars and provocative lyrics. The immediacy of their songs made me a believer then, and I anticipated feeling that same spark when revisiting them now.

Zack de la Rocha sang (or rapped) the words, “It has to start somewhere / It has to start some time / What better place than here? / What better time than now?” His words touched something deep in the American subconscious; this music was about more than nookie and Catholic school-girl uniforms. Shouting along with the chorus was not enough. Rage dared us to understand the words to their songs on a cerebral and emotional level, to research the causes they espoused, to form our own opinions and fight for what we believed was right.

An overwhelming sense of fatigue lingers when these songs play now. The world has been fighting for eight years. Between Iraq, Afghanistan, and major financial institutions, its supply of righteous anger is either spent or aimed in other directions. A Democrat is back in the White House, Mumia Abu-Jamal is still in jail, and the “vultures who thirst for blood and oil” have crushed the economy.

We are in the same place we were when The Battle of Los Angeles came out. While the world is certainly not the peaceful humanist utopia Rage Against the Machine envisioned, all the political messages bound inextricably to their music just seem exhausted. I still nod and sing along to “Calm Like a Bomb” and get chills from the opening to “Born of a Broken Man”. But as the last squeal of “War Within a Breath” dies against my bedroom walls, I cannot help feeling relieved. I am too tired to be angry anymore. – Theresa Dougherty

Fiona Apple – When the Pawn… [Clean Slate/Epic] – 9 November 1999

The title is the tip-off. Commonly reduced down to When the Pawn…, the full title weighs in at a hefty 90 words, a capriciously scrawled poem that is at once combative, ambitious, pretentious, and a little crazy, just like the album it represents. As a shot across the bow, a statement of intent, it is bold and brilliant, the perfect complement to what is contained within—and yet it still does not adequately prepare one for the stunning suite of songs that Fiona Apple unleashed on her audacious sophomore album.

A stuttered, muffled electronic beat throbs momentarily before the opening track, “On the Bound”, lurches to life, lumbering along on a harsh syncopated beat and pounded-out piano line like some sort of obscene monster dragged up from a grave. The brutal verses give way to jazzy, string-drenched lushness in the chorus (channeling the Lynchian cool of Angelo Badalamenti), the music paralleling and complementing the lyrical wavering between vengeful fury and needful desperation.

The song then trundles through its back end as an instrumental, weighed down by all sorts of ornate, extraneous instrumentation, before finally sputtering out in exhaustion. Pugilistic, desperate, paranoid, cocksure, and brawny, it is simply a stunning opener, and formally, it sets the stage for everything that follows.

Though Apple showed flashes of brilliance on her uneven debut album, Tidal, I don’t think anyone expected such a severe and sharp uptick in quality, both in terms of songwriting and lyricism, as she displays on the ten tracks of When the Pawn…. Disparate and even schizophrenic from song to song, and even within each track, there’s still a certain underlying uniformity to them all, a guiding intelligence that binds them all together, in exact sequence, by necessity. It all works perfectly and harmoniously when considered from a distance, even though at a ground level, it always sounds like the album will to fall apart.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the standout “Fast as You Can”, a frantic blur of a song in which Apple’s vocals and piano continuously threaten to trip over themselves and collapse in hopeless entanglement. Racing and careening along manically, the song pulls up for a breather somewhere in the middle before charging through to a whirling end. It might be the most exciting thing she has ever recorded, and ended up being, understandably, the most popular single from the album.

From there, the record somehow ascends to an even higher peak with its closing three songs. Soaring up in a howl of spite and rage, “The Way Things Are” and “Get Gone” channel the old confessional/adolescent wounded-girl-on-piano clichés of Tidal into something profound and proud, hooks and lyrics honed to an excruciating venomous point that lays waste to everything in its path. This makes the soothing closer, the smoky, jazzy torch song “I Know”, even more stunning when it drops. A tender ballad full of resignation and loss, it metes out acceptance without yielding to defeat, as defiant and strong as the fight put up in every other song on the album.

Special mention must be made here of Jon Brion’s brilliant production. He’s the centripetal yin to Apple’s centrifugal yang, holding the whole thing together even as it strains to pull itself apart. Weaving the songs together with musical embellishments, flourishes, and curlicues, directing the instrumentation to envelop and lift the songs to heights beyond what they were perhaps intended to reach, the rococo, carnivalesque soundscape that underpins everything is as much to his credit as it is to Apple’s. Not to discredit Apple at all, this is her album, defiantly so. However, Brion’s production is so essential and integral to When the Pawn…‘s success that the LP announced the arrival of his genius as much as it did Apple’s. – Jake Meaney

Ani DiFranco – To the Teeth [Righteous Babe] – 16 November 1999

Ani DiFranco‘s To the Teeth marked a time I now remember not as false innocence, but as false jadedness. Released the year I finished high school, To the Teeth was a challenge set forth for me and many others who’d come of age in the time of Righteous Babe. The idealism of my youth plus the spirit of potential fostered by the Clinton years paradoxically drew awareness to problems the United States faced, problems that now seem smaller in the face of recessions, secret prisons, torture, and the Patriot Act.

The album’s title track, with its orgiastic litany of gun-happy politicians, felt like a call to arms. “Hello Birmingham” had the same effect. I listened and vowed to change the reproductive-rights landscape of the places that seemed to be standing still while the rest of the country moved forward. At the time, I had no idea that five years later, I’d be living just south of Birmingham and know it as the most progressive place for miles. I also didn’t realize that these never-ending domestic issues would almost be luxury causes.

While “To the Teeth” has personal resonance for the paradoxical innocence it now evokes, it functions in DiFranco’s canon as a testament to her own loss of musical innocence. Her music didn’t need to retain its sparse, acoustic sound to be compelling — Little Plastic Castle proves that — but sacrificing vulnerability for experimentation did little to improve DiFranco’s career. Instead, songs like “Swing” (with Corey Parker’s silly rapping) and the carnivalesque, annoying, and bland “Freakshow” posited her as someone who could, yes, put aside her tears and her girl-with-guitar act, but also as someone who’d become famous for that music with good reason.

Fortunately, another unknown at the time was that DiFranco would be back to recording solo albums by 2004’s Educated Guess, and that her return to vulnerability would be strong medicine in a time of war. – Erin Lyndal Martin

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