I write to you in anticipation of your forthcoming knighthood for contributions to music. Your signature line “crankin’ out shit like a booty hole” clinches it, cementing your role-model status, and serves as an inspiration for turdsmiths the world over.

The Nobel prize for litterature and the Palme de Merde can’t be far behind.

Your message is a liberating one: too many younglings get caught up in the “authentic tortured artist” bullshit, and end up making miserable splatter paintings, when they could have had perfectly fulfilled and productive lives as bureaucrats or bus drivers. The world is filling up with this crud and it’s being taught in colleges as yet another form of mutual torture between professors and students. A dialogue of mirrors in a void.

On the other hand, I have to wonder if there isn’t something of the reactionary in you — a primal fear of authenticity, propelling you orgiastically ever-deeper into scatological realms of the self-consciously cheezy.

The fundamental inauthenticity of everything is a keystone of the post-modern esthetic. That alone should be enough to remind us that there’s something passe about it, just like “deconstruction”, “identity politics”, or “herstory.”

As a fan both of author James Joyce, and singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks (the “James Joyce of Jive”) I also hold the view that humor can have as great a depth as any other emotion or perspective, and can serve as a compliment to render greater depths of authentic horror, tragedy, and/or enlightenment.

But are sincerity and self-irony mutually exclusive? I think not. In the ivory tower they call it “negation of negation.”

From what I’ve seen so far, I’ve found your film and TV work most interesting. Next, musically, it’s Solo Piano, and some of the production and songs you wrote with/for Feist (“Mushaboom” is a brilliant piece of production, and the melody of “One Evening” is a stunner). Some of the rap is mildly amusing, but those looped 2 or 3 chord changes get old fast, as do the little decorative cheezy synth runs in the background, and you’re not breaking any new ground there as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe the future of rap isn’t rap, it’s “be hop”: the speed of vocal delivery and lyrical complexity of hip hop, but with the melodic and harmonic complexity of be bop. If no melody and no harmony can be accessible, perhaps any melody and any harmony can be made accessible. If not as music, then as atmosphere. It’s the layered historical consciousness of Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks, superposed over a Dylanesque lyrical transciption of the present apocalyptic mileiu. It’s all the unnotatable inflections of speech one finds in hip hop, but as a transposition of horns from free jazz into vocalese.

Pre-cursors of the genre:

Eddie Jefferson:

Filthy McNasty
Sister Sadie

Lambert Hendricks & Ross:

What Am I Here For?
Cottontail
Four
Avenue C

It’s a dance beat layered over a swing pulse in the manner of Quantic’s “Sound Of Everything”, but with infinite variations. It’s the transmogrified pop of The Bad Plus, and the eclectic fusion of Outkast. It’s the technical virtuosity combined with humor and inventiveness of Art Tatum, turned to the affectionate ridicule of the phony limitations of physical reality.

Maybe this social cataclysm is the harbinger of a creative rebirth, a musical revolution, a new synthesis of African rhythm and 3rd generation Western harmony.

By the way, at this rate your chess challenge is going to still be in the opening phase in 2012. You’re already losing on time…

Best wishes,

Solomon