The chiffon synths and Nile Rodgers guitars and restless drums on “Here” are straight-up disco, but all that stuff has to come through layers of distance. The drum-ripples and flute-flutters that drive “Strongman,” for instance, could’ve come from some forgotten shelf in DJ Premier’s record library, but even a producer as calm and restrained as Premier or Pete Rock wouldn’t have muted the beat quite as sharply as Luscious Jackson did, burying it deep in the track and pushing Jill Cunniff’s thick, expressionless singsong to the forefront.
Luscious Jackson’s particular innovation was to take bits and pieces of disco and funk and rap and house collapse all those jagged corners into a warm, flat, soothing strain of mood-music, not all that tonally distant from dream-pop or bossa nova. Maybe someone at Capitol remembered something I’d completely forgotten: Luscious Jackson were really fucking great. As surprised as I was when the greatest-hits CD showed up on my desk, though, I was even more shocked when I actually got around to listening to it. If there’s some segment of the population that absolutely demanded a commercial reissue of the Thievery Corporation remix of “Nervous Breakthrough,” I haven’t heard anything about it. They’ve been broken up for seven years, and none of the band’s members has done anything particularly notable since then. They had exactly one hit (“Naked Eye,” #36, March 1997). Luscious Jackson released three albums, none of which sold particularly well as far as I know. I’d love to know who’s responsible for those The Essential Whoever albums that I always see clogging up discount bins when people put those things together, do they know they’re going straight to the discount bins, or do they just have no idea? Considering the music industry’s long history of releasing inexplicable and wildly inessential compilations like those, it maybe shouldn’t come as a massive surprise that someone at Capitol Records thought it would be a good idea to unleash a Luscious Jackson greatest hits album on the world, but the whole thing is still pretty mystifying. N.W.A also has a new greatest hits album, and they only released two albums and an EP. Here’s something I can never quite figure out: who decides which bands get to release greatest hits albums? Gang Starr has a new greatest hits album even though they already released a double-disc greatest hits album years ago and it’s one of only two Gang Starr albums that went gold. So Capitol Records can afford to release this album, but they can’t afford to spend more than five minutes on its graphic design? Seriously, WTF
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