Few experiences in music compare to The Headphone Masterpiece, the sprawling, 2-disc debut album from neo-soul musician Cody ChesnuTT. Recorded in his bedroom with a 4 track tape recorder, with ChesnuTT playing the majority of the instruments and handling almost all the vocals himself, the album defies classification. Calling it an album at all is a bit of a misconception.
The Headphone Masterpiece is more like taking a journey inside the mind of a songwriter than it is a coherent musical statement. Songs start and stop abruptly, sometimes in mid-note. There are many fragments of music, lasting less than a minute, where it seems ChenuTT had the germ of an idea, but didn’t let it gestate fully before laying it down on tape. Other songs are more fully realized, but even these never rise to the level of full-on hit because of the way it was recorded.
Make no mistake about it, The Headphone Masterpiece is a lo-fi album in every sense of the term. The album was recorded mostly solo in a basement and it sounds like it. ChesnuTT is often out of key and frequently out of tune, but amazingly enough, this actually adds to the albums charm. As ChesnuTT goes from genre to genre, combining soul, R&B, funk, rock, hip hop, even touches of country, sometimes all in one song, the listener is sucked into how his mind works. Sometimes offensively mysogonistic, sometimes heart breakingly tender, ChesnuTT delivers a riveting musical experience. He takes the listener on a journey of his musical influences.
“My Women, My Guitars” shows us his bluesy, R&B tinged, folk rock side. “Upstarts in a Blow Out” is guitar driven indie rock at it’s finest. Angry, testosterone fueled hip-hop comes through in “Bitch! I’m Broke.” “The Most Beautiful Shame” is 45 seconds of glorious, soul infused balladry that leaves you aching for more. “Michelle” is Stevie Wonder meets the Beatles backed with a funky drum machine. In another world, “Look Good in Leather,” the catchiest, hookiest, swingingest song on the album, would have been a massive hit. Dirty, funky, dance rhythms power through “The World Is Coming to My Party,” a song that in a more polished form would have been filling dance floors the world over. Perhaps the best song on the album is “Serve This Royalty,” the closest thing to a completely formed musical idea on the album. ChesnuTT’s soulful voice is at it’s best here, going from spoken word, to smooth vocals, to falsetto and back again.
When listening to The Headphone Masterpiece, one is hearing more ideas than songs, and this makes it a listening experience that requires some effort on the part of the audience. The tracks here sound like they should be demo versions and out takes, studio rehearsals released for the pleasure of rabid fans of a majorly successful, finished product. Instead, these raw, unedited, lo-fi selections are more like unpolished stones, waiting for the right time and energy to be spent to turn them into finished products.
If one wants to hear what a “finished” song from Cody ChesnuTT would have sounded like, the closest one can get is The Roots fantastic hit single “The Seed (2.0),” a cover song of ChesnuTT’s own “The Seed.” On “The Seed(2.0),” ChesnuTT joins forces with The Roots, providing guitar and vocals on this rap reworking of ChesnuTT’s original funky soul song. The result is nothing short of musical perfection. The song succeeds on every level.
This success makes the listener wonder what could have been if a major label had heard The Headphone Masterpiece and given Cody ChesnuTT the time, money, and facilities to work with a producer and fully realize the ideas expressed on this album. The songs, fragments and ideas that are spread out over this 2 CD, 36 song affair could have pared down and built up to be a classic album. But as it stands, The Headphone Masterpiece, listened to as either an album or as the half-finished, meandering thoughts of its creator, is not to be missed.
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