Music

NAUGHTY: Bad cross-genre collaboration

by Richard Trapunski

In our annual festive Naughty and Nice feature, AUX compiles the best and worst of the year in music.

Two things that are great on their own will be even better if you put them together. It’s just common sense, right? Well, no. But try telling that to the music industry. In 2011, marquee musicians were pairing up left and right with the fallacious conception that their combined aesthetics would rise above the sum of their parts.

Just ask Lou Reed and Metallica how that went. Loutallica (a name they actually gave to themselves) released the collaborative album Lulu on Halloween and immediately sent every self-respecting music publication to reach for its lowest possible rating.

And with good reason! The 87-minute (!) conceptual album features Reed “performing” transgressive spoken word “poetry” in a crotchety old-man register over tedious Metallica riffs that sound like they might have been held over from St. Anger (you know, because they weren’t good enough for that tasteful thrash masterpiece).

It’s understandable from Lou Reed’s perspective. After all, one of his most famous albums, Metal Machine Music, is four sides of formless noise. But Metallica seem to have been attempting to redeem their metal cred every since the pop-friendly Black Album had fans shouting “Judas!” Maybe they thought teaming up with the former leader of the Velvet Underground would up their underground credentials, but instead it sent them further into Metalocalypse-style caricatures.

That same logic should apply to Korn, but their collaborations with dubstep producers like Skrillex and Noisia on their tenth studio album, The Path of Totality, actually kind of makes sense. That doesn’t mean it sounds good, but the descent of the once-progressive dubstep movement into the testosterone-filled aggression of “bro-step” matches the late-90’s descent from legitimate heavy music into the aggro adolescent angst of nu-metal. The newly-minted KornStep basically boils down to “wub wub wub AHHHH!!!”, but it fits.

That’s less than can be said for Skrillex’s other original 2011 collaboration, a track called “Breakin’ a Sweat” recorded with three-quarters of the original lineup of The Doors, audaciously billed as “the first new Doors track in the 21st century”. Jim Morrison spent the last year of his life slurring incoherently and exposing his rapidly-expanding body, but he’s still rolling in his grave.

For every peanut butter and chocolate there’s sardines and oatmeal, and for every Jay-Z and Kanye West there’s Insane Clown Posse and Jack White, Rihanna and Coldplay, or Mick Jagger, Damian Marley, Joss Stone and Dave Stewart. Let’s hope musicians can remember that in 2012.

Return to the Naughty and Nice master list.