JJ on Lil Wayne, Jumbling Towers on Kanye West

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JJ – “Ecstacy”
(from JJ No. 2)

I like this album. JJ are a nebulous Swedish group, shrouded in manufactured mystery and gauzy layers of shoegazer synth. They’re signed to The Tough Alliance’s Sincerely Yours imprint, which means they share TTA’s characteristic soft dance pop aesthetic, but they play it with a vaguely tropical vibe that carries just enough of a modernistic sheen to avoid being labeled New Age. In fact, I’d almost go as far as to call it “Balearic,” if I knew just what the hell Balearic House entailed exactly.¹

But rather than sit here and type about how the floodgates of “world” music tropes have been appropriated by indie rock in the wake of the Vampire Weekend controversy a few eons ago,² I do want to pay some consideration to JJ for muddying the genre waters even further with “Ecstacy,” a tropical-Swedish-pop interpretation of American hip-hop sensation Lil Wayne’s auto-tuned R&B smash hit “Lollipop.” Gone are the tawdry sexual innuendos, southern-drawled verses of glamorous promiscuity, and the so-bad-it’s-good guitar solo atop a limousine included in the video edit; all that’s left are distant, studio-processed vocals reflecting on drugs and club culture atop Wayne’s hypnotic electropop loops. It’s by no means better than the original, but it’s palatable, and I think the remarkable thing is how they were able to couch their own influences into the song to such a degree that “Ecstacy” becomes less of a cover than a song that uses “Lollipop” as a launching pad.³ If you lived in a world oblivious of Weezy, you might never know it’s source was in R&B.

Last week, though, St. Louisans Jumbling Towers released a cover of Kanye West’s “Heartless,” and the response from the RFT’s readers was less than kind. Mincing no words, they wondered what this white band was doing covering a rap song. This has to be a bad joke, they roffled, leave the gag tracks to Weird Al plz! They slapped each other on the back and (presumably) returned to troll the comments on the Post-Dispatch website, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe they were upset that this band that never ever fucking plays live⁴ somehow managed to eek out an exclusive distribution deal for a new 7” in the Queen’s homeland,⁵ maybe that’s it, but it’s not like white artists appropriating traditionally black forms of entertainment are somehow new and/or unusual in the history of rock and pop music,⁶ and the miscegenated mishmash of pop/R&B/hip-hop that’s been dominating the charts for years has a far wider impact on our collective cultural imagination than most any guitar/bass/drum bands down the street. Besides, I think this particular cover works in its own weird way. Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak was an unusually bleak and robotic post-genre leap past contemporary hip-hop, and the cover seems to exaggerate those features of the original in a way that compliments the Jumbling Towers’ own peculiar, insidious style. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take Mr. West’s version over this anyway, but it’s not terrible and they don’t seem to be taking themselves too seriously, so I’ll give ‘em credit for that.

Jumbling Towers: Heartless

^{1 – I’ve heard the term “Balearic Disco” used in reference to Sincerely Yours label mates Air France, and they seem to play on the same astral plane.
2 – I’ll save that for another essay.
3 – Also, maybe I’m smoking crack, but I kind of think they’re doing the same thing on the album’s final track “Me & Dean” with Taylor Dane’s “Tell It To My Heart,” which, if you haven’t bothered to rewatch the video for recently, you’re truly missing out.
4 – Save for next 9/11 at the Pontiac Firebird.
5 – If you haven’t done so already, head over to Catbird Seat to listen to the dirty slide bass and handclap funk of “Gilberta,” the B-side to “Kanetown City Rips.”
6 – Ahem.}