Credit where it's due: Sam Spiegel and Zé Gonzales evidently have really next-level Rolodexes. Spiegel is Spike Jonze's brother, and Gonzales is a pro skateboarder, so it stands to reason that they'd both know some famous people. But the sheer number and scope of guests on The Spirit of Apollo is just absurd. As the sticker on the cover proudly trumpets, the album features "over 40 guest performances," and they come from all over the genre map. Plenty of the contributors here are the type who would show up to the studio if you promised them a half-empty bag of Doritos (looking at you, ca. 2009 David Byrne). But Spiegel and Gonzales have also corralled people like Tom Waits, Sizzla, Scarface: legends with uber-devoted core fanbases who don't have to guest on anyone's album, who only record collaborations when they feel like it. It's tough to calculate what combination of people skills, time management, and networking Spiegel and Gonzales must've put into this thing. They must have some really, really great Doritos.
But it would be nice if The Spirit of Apollo had a compelling reason to exist beyond just showing off these guys' Buddy Lists. Because this album is a mess. And worse than that, it's a directionless, vaguely condescending mess that wastes the talents of some people who really should've had better things to do. "Music and art have the tremendous power of bringing people together, and this is our goal: To show through these mediums that we are all one race of human beings," say the liner notes. Which, okay, fine. Noble goal, even if it is the sort of thing that 10th-graders say when they're trying to sound sensitive. But when your idea of creating community is to mush artists of different genres together into a character-free paste, all you're really doing is making a good argument for genre xenophobia.
Spiegel and Gonzales are producers, and their beats on this album are total washed-out dorm-room funk, the sort of things that Prince Paul would've tossed in the garbage even at his White People nadir. "The People Tree" is an excessively polite bloopy organ groove. "Way Down" is the reason acid jazz no longer exists. "Hip Hop" is a horribly boring attempt at ca. 1998 sunny smiley-face West Coast indie-rap. And on it goes. These guys were too busy making friends to figure out how to make a beat knock.
And if you were wondering how they'd even find room to cram all these guests in, the answer is that they didn't, really. Seu Jorge gets reduced to David Byrne's backup singer, which, I mean, that guy was in City of God. Lykke Li sort of chirps underneath Santogold (who is now called Santigold), and you have to be concentrating hard to even hear her. About half the tracks feature consequence-free wickety-wickety scratch solos from vaguely famous turntablists.
And even when the guests actually get to make their voices heard, in most case they shouldn't have bothered. N.A.S.A.'s lighter-than-air uptempo beats have the unfortunate effect of making half the guest-rappers sound exactly like Chali 2na of Jurassic 5. And all I can say about that: If Chuck D shows up and it takes you a minute to realize that he's not Chali 2na, you've got a problem on your hands.
Another damning example: "The Mayor", buried near the end of the album. The last time Ghostface and Scarface showed up on the same track, it was on one of those goofy Kay Slay official mix albums. And Slay, not exactly known for his great instincts, at least had the good sense to give them a banging low-budget NY rap beat and a gimmicky song title ("Face Off") and just let them rip. Spiegel and Gonzales give them a cluttered cartoon-funk beat and force them to share space with a DJ AM scratch-solo and the motherfucking Cool Kids. Even those of us who like the Cool Kids acknowledge that these guys don't have anything approaching the gravitas you need to share a mic with these two.
Look, it's not all terrible. On "N.A.S.A. Music", E-40 and Method Man manage to get a nice little back-and-forth going, and the beat, with its windy guitar and Afrobeat horn-stabs, stays out of the way. "Gifted" is a decent shot at glossy Richard X electro-pop, and Kanye West and Santigold handle it ably. M.I.A.'s chorus on "Whachadoin?" will not leave my head, ever. But I'm still planning on deleting the not-terrible tracks from my iTunes the second I turn this review in. Even the best of these songs are not worth the hard-drive real estate.
If anything, The Spirit of Apollo should serve as a cautionary tale. These clusterfuck all-the-cooks experiments, more often than not, add up to way, way less than the sum of their parts. It might look great on paper to get weirdo visionaries like Kool Keith and Tom Waits on the same track, but if you actually do it, you'll probably end up with Keith blathering non-sequiturs all over the beat while Waits makes sandpapery fart noises. And as for the impression of Donald Duck busting a nut that someone does at the end of "O Pato", I can't imagine that even looked good on paper.
