Tim Fite: Fair Ain't Fair Tim Fite's music is a pastiche of at least this: hip-hop, especially hip-hop; folk; Uncle Tupelo country; rock, calliope sing-song, and much of it is suffused with electronic scratch, whir, chirp, and beep. A few of his songs are eerily similar to Tom Waits' as in, say, the industrial shout of much of Bone Machine. His hip-hop voice and tendency toward the sarcastic is about as close to Eminem as you can get. His singing voice, on the other hand, is reminiscent of Randy Newman's—Fair Ain't Fair is heavy on Newman-like piano, too. And finally, his song writing is what you might get from collaboration between Beck and Joe Henry. That Fite is all of these, and yet coherent, is hard to believe, but true. It's also what makes Fite's music so broadly and breathtakingly original, yet accessible. Listening to Fite is not unlike looking at, say, the late collagist Robert Rauschenberg's work: a lot is going on and it's competing for your attention, but it's not distracting; in fact, its multiple stimulations focuses rather than distracts you. The nearest female analogy would have to be M.I.A, who bends genres as easily and often as Fite, the difference being that Fite will not only blend but break and reassemble diverse sounds; and yet, also like MIA, he does not abandon melody. Nor, though, is he a slave to it. As far as I can tell, he's a slave only to his unique (and likely demented) muse. Interviewed recently about his music, Fite credited hip-hop as being his prime influence, and it shows, especially in his previous release—but not as conspicuously as he might think. He clearly has hip-hop inclinations—obvious, but held at bay, on almost everything he does on Fair Ain't Fair. He's like early Eminem (same sense of humor, too) but with more musical influences banging around all over the place. In that same interview, he drew sharp distinctions between Fair Ain't Fair and his previous release, Over the Counter Culture, which, pre-Radiohead, was given away on the Web. That album, he said, was his angry shout-out against all the craziness he saw all around him: the war, poor people who just get poorer, government-sponsored thieves, the usual suspects. And that this one, Fair Ain't Fair, was not as angry or as harsh as Counter Culture. That may be, but I've listened extensively to both and he still has anger to burn on Fair Ain't Fair, yet another reason it is a compelling release because I think anger—an un-ironic righteous indignation—is his true muse. He's right about Over the Counter Culture: the opening song on that work, "Place Your Bets," kicks things off with plenty of angst: "One more dead/One more dead/Can I get a holler for one more head/One more head for one more hand/One more bet for one more man." There's more than a fair amount of ire on Fair Ain't Fair; but Fite's correct that it's a lighter piece of work than Counter Culture. To Fite's credit, it's not always easy to know whether there's glee lurking around the next phrase, or melancholy. The best way to describe Fair Ain't Fair, and Fite in general, may simply be to say his work is the musical equivalent of trying to find the seams in a jigsaw puzzle created by Dali. In one of the standout tracks on Fair Ain't Fair, "Big Mistake," he sings: "Show me the best that you got and I'll show you one better/Show me your reddest rose and I'll show you one redder…Everyone gets to make one big mistake/And if you're waiting on me I guess your gonna have to wait/Cause I'm saving all mine up for one special day/So I can fuck it all up in some spectacular way." None of Fair Ain't Fair is fucked up. It's a smorgasbord of an album, musically and lyrically. Including whimsy, too. In "Yesterday's Garden," over banjo—there aren't many instruments Fite won't use—he sings: "I guess you know that yesterday/I ran your garden over girl…I ran your garden over girl, just yesterday/Eight in the morning/Late for work again/Ain't looking where I'm going/Just wondering where I've been….How could a woman with a thumb so green/Be in love with a man who's become so mean?" What a fine musical kaleidoscope. I'd like to welcome you to the Tim Fite show.