CREAM, Joe

Originality can look like anything. Best case scenario, it's something that no one has ever heard or seen or thought of before, something so new that it had been hitherto inconceivable. But that rarely happens, because the world has existed for a long time and so have humans and there are only a finite number of possibilities and we've run through so goddamn many of them already, accelerating the pace of discovery exponentially every year, every day, every minute. And so we look also to the originality that is taking existing ideas and combining them in new ways, or twisting them so that they look new even though they are not, at least not technically. That can be original too. American Gothic would be original again if you made a photo negative, or set the house on fire with neon orange paint, or allowed the grumpy old farmer to grow a gray mustache. Whether that's good art is a different story than whether it's original. It's original if it looks new and it says something new.

And, like, you know me, I'm a man who appreciates a good gimmick. But that doesn't mean I have to appreciate all gimmicks. Sometimes a gimmick doesn't go far enough. A gimmick has to say something about the art. It can't just exist to exist. Having a gimmick makes it original, but it occasionally doesn't go farther than that. Painting a mustache onto the old bald dude in American Gothic would, at first reaction at least, scan to me as a cheap gimmick, a change that makes it "original" in a technical sense and but probably only exists for the how do the formerly young kids say it for the LOLz. Is there a way to make a statement via a graffitied mustache on stoic Midwestern farmer guy? Probably. I could list a hundred reasons why, but that's just my fucked-ass brain working to create meaning, and not necessarily the intention of the artist. (The very idea of "album review structured around the hypothetical of 'American Gothic but with mustache'" is a great example of something that is original but might not have a payoff of any kind.)

I have decided that Kassa Overall's CREAM is a fine album and that the gimmick certainly exists and it is original, but that I don't necessarily think that Overall takes the gimmick far enough, and I don't necessarily find meaning in any of this beyond "ha ha jazz covers of rap songs." I like it because I think jazz is neat and not lame in most cases and catchy if you know where to find the catchiness. I like it despite, not because of, its gimmick. It's original in the same way that a billion AI-generated YouTube compilations of "THIS genre but except it's now in THAT genre's style" are original, and the thousands of "punk goes crunk!"-style compilation CDs before that were original. It is a mustache on the upper lip of the American Gothic grandpa—funny for three seconds, intriguing for six more, and then kinda shrug-worthy for every other second for the rest of eternity.

These songs are not originals because they are covers, but they are original in how the original songs are covered—if you've given CREAM even a cursory listen, this shouldn't have to be explained. I would describe an album of cover songs like this as "unnecessary." I think it's very much necessary for cover songs to change the original song in some fundamental way. The cover song I always use as an example of this is Sufjan's cover of "What Goes On" by the Beatles. It is a cover and it is original because in Sufjan's hands it becomes almost unrecognizable from the original original. Say what you want about whether Kassa Overall's new album is good art, but you cannot deny that his cover of "Back That Azz Up" by Juvenile sounds almost NOTHING like "Back That Azz Up" by Juvenile. It is not a new song, because it is "Back That Azz Up" by Juvenile, which came out in 1999, but it is ALSO a very new song, in that it is a jazz cover of "Back That Azz Up" by Juvenile.

It is new, it is original, and it is a gimmick that will sell a significant number of additional copies. Whether I enjoy it is another thing. "Original," which this album is, is not the end-all-be-all for music criticism. Since most things are original. Since it's easy to be original. There's gotta be a little more. And I don't find that on CREAM. All I see is a mustache, hastily scrawled. The practically-unrecognizable-covers gimmick actually might even work to its detriment. I know some of these songs, let's say for our purposes here the example is "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang," and if I heard "Nuthin' but a 'G' Thang" right now, I would recognize it. And then when I hear Kassa Overall's cover version, I don't get the same dopamine hit that I'd get from hearing a song that I know and love, but I do still recognize little snippets, blink-and-miss motifs that make this song a "cover" in a technical sense, and there's no dopamine there. It's more like mosquito buzzing around your ear—you hear it, but you can't place where it is or where it's from and thus you just end up swatting at the air. It's a distraction. "What is that song supposed to be a cover of?" I say as I take my eyes off the road and look at the title on my iPod and crash my car into a tractor trailer on Roosevelt Boulevard.

What would a better gimmick look like? Or, in other words, what would it take for CREAM to succeed as a gimmick? In which direction could it go, and go farther in that direction? I'm not the artist, so I can't say for sure. I am imagining an album that is comprised of "covers" but eschew all shared musical motifs whatsoever. I am imagining the artists covered actively participating in the covers (get that jazz music genius André 3000 onto the jazz piano, stat!!). I am imagining a collection of covers of "hip hop classics" but they are actually all deep cuts, i.e. do we really need to rehash "Big Poppa," a song that, in the years since Biggie's murder, has been forcibly recontextualized into a drunk white girl party anthem? These are just idle thoughts that I'm typing as I listen to the jazz album.

It's good as a jazz album, I'm just saying that it probably would've worked better if we didn't have to worry about whether this works with jazz as the gimmick. I appreciate the music itself, but there's no way to separate it from the gimmick. And you can't just pop a mustache on that pitchfork-wielding mofo and call it art. What does the mustache mean, man? Is Kassa Cream making a statement about the utilitarianism of the building blocks of music, how you can take a motif from one song and use it in a completely new way in a completely different genre? Is he trying to say that there is some light in the heart of music that remains present even when the rest of the organs decay and grow and restructure themselves? Or is he just fucking around and doing what he does and having fun with it? I am leaning toward the latter, which isn't a bad thing, but also probably not interesting enough for me. It's just a mustache.

GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5