By now, you’ve probably seen the interactive world map through which Johns Hopkins is charting the spread of COVID-19. It’s part video game UI, part stock report, and all alarming. The Hopkins tally reinforces something that’s been widely reported: the number of deaths in Italy now exceeds those in China, even though twice as many Chinese have caught the virus. While the European curve continues to spike upward, the Chinese curve has flattened out. This has been offered as evidence that the draconian approach of the Chinese authorities works, and the laxer attitudes in Bergamo are dangerous.
But wait a second: why would we believe that numbers provided by the Chinese Communist Party are accurate? We’re justifiably skeptical of our own officeholders. Why trust theirs? Even before the CCP pitched Western journalists out of the country, it was hard to know what was happening in China. In the closed-door days of mid-March ’20, it feels like it’s impossible.
And because it is, rates of mortality and serious illness can’t be properly calculated. The denominator keeps shifting around on us, and now we’ve been told that China may have underreported the number of young people who needed to be hospitalized after contracting the virus. Our most fundamental supposition about COVID-19 — that it affects old people disproportionately, and the young and hale are relatively safe — might be faulty. We’ve all watched the clip, one near-Soviet in its tone, of attractive young female nurses in Wuhan shedding their protective masks, one at a time. This is textbook propaganda, designed to speak to our wildest desires. It’s aimed straight at the global unconscious.
Did it strike the mark? I think it did. There’s a loud chorus singing denunciations of China to the applause of nationalists looking for an external enemy. That’s an ugly tune, and one we ought to ignore. But there’s a powerful counternarrative circulating, too — one that says that China did everything right and the West has done everything wrong. Given that we now know that the CCP stalled, obfuscated, and prioritized appearances over public health, just as our own government did, it’s probably wisest to abandon any faith that China knows best. We don’t want to do this; we hope that the Chinese have established a precedent for social distancing measures that will halt the pathogen in its tracks. I’m afraid we’re wishcasting.
I do it all the time. The more stressed out I am, the more enthusiastically I sign on to anything that dovetails with my own prejudices. For instance, I find myself nodding along with those who blame excessive meat-eating and habitat destruction for the spread of pathogens from animals to humans. Is that logical, or is it just convenient for me? I’m no epidemiologist; I’m a person eager to adopt explanations that ratify my worldview. That’s not unlike those who believe that Bill Gates created and spread the virus and who won’t be budged from that position, only (hopefully) a little more scientific and sane. Just like you, I want to be proven right.
It’s worth interrogating that desire. Why is it important to me to know things that others don’t? Is it because I’m neither swift nor strong, nor virtuous, nor particularly enchanting, and I need to press whatever comparative advantage over others I think I might have? Perhaps it’s our very ordinariness that makes it so hard for us to admit it when we’re wrong. Maybe the problem isn’t economic insecurity. Maybe the problem is intellectual insecurity.
Demagogues have figured out that the desire to be proven right has made us all credulous and ripe for manipulation. If we’ve cast our lot with them once, they figure that means they’ve got us for good. Otherwise, we risk admitting that we made a mistake. We’ve seen this dynamic in action all too often in the past few years — a political leader says that the sky is green, and his followers, refusing to accept the possibility that their faith was misplaced, contort themselves into pretzels in an effort to rationalize his ignorance. This is not a good psychological state for the nation to be in during a major crisis, and if we’re going to get through this, we’re going to have to unlearn some bad habits of mind that we’ve adopted during the dangerous days of the 21st Century.
Mind you, I am not encouraging radical skepticism. We don’t have that luxury. You’re going to have to pick somebody and something to believe in. But I think it would be salutary for all of us to cultivate some ambivalence, and entertain the notion that we could be wrong, very wrong, very often. If, in the back of your mind, you suspect there’s a five per cent chance that that thing that you’re sure of might not be true, double or triple that chance and proceed accordingly. We would have been better off if those who made jokes about the virus and waved it away had instead shown some humility. They might have apprehended the possible consequences of getting this one wrong. Intellectual flexibility is hard, especially these days: it’s hard to attain, and it’s even harder to keep. But we’re all going to need it.
I’ve never used Zoom before tonight. I’m not sure I ever want to do it again. But for forty-five minutes or so, I got to see my sister and her children, my brother-in-law, a pair of sibling cousins of mine who were central to my youth and remain important to me, my mother, and three other cousins who have been directly affected by the virus. One came down with symptoms after a business trip to Colorado and tested positive. Her sister, who hasn’t been tested, brought her to the clinic. This morning I learned that their mother has it, too. She’s running a fever and was visibly fearful about the possibility of being put on a ventilator. Everybody is frightened, and for legitimate reasons.
My sister reported that a neighbor insisted to her that the virus was a hoax. I don’t know whether that neighbor was aware that my sister has been fighting serious health conditions for more than a decade, and is immunocompromised. I do know that that neighbor lives in Cranford, New Jersey, a town with residents who make much of their affluence and education, and who are supposed to know better and act better than Internet trolls. I’m further aware that this neighbor is only one of many who continue to treat this epidemic as a joke. If my sister is taken to the hospital with virus symptoms, would this neighbor, and the hundreds of thousands like her, wave it away, blame it on her history of illness, and continue to behave like nothing is wrong? Would she do the same if it happened to Hilary?
Life is an underlying condition. Life is all too fragile. If you’ve made it to your forties with nothing major going wrong, bless you: you’ve been fortunate, and I hope you remain so. If you’ve developed a medical problem that makes you susceptible to the worst this virus can do, you are still worth preserving. Because this is no hoax and no drill, and tonight, the fog is closing in on my friends and family. The New York Times just ran a story about a 92 year old man in a nursing home, terrified and alone, begging his family to bring him home. The picture of the man looked familiar to me. I read further and realized to my horror that it was my high school drama coach. You, me, and everyone we know: the face of this crisis is mine and yours.
We woke up to the news that the University will remain online-only for the rest of the semester. We knew this was coming, but it’s still dispiriting. The original plan, which was sent last Wednesday, was to reconvene classes on March 30. That seemed optimistic to us, a real long-shot, but as long as it hadn’t been rescinded, we could entertain the possibility that they knew something we didn’t. They did not, and it’ll be distance learning for the duration.
We know this isn’t what students signed up for. They want face-to-face time with the Professor, and I can’t blame them. Hilary has always been reluctant to commit to online teaching, and for very good reason: her formidable powers are best encountered in person, and she hates to shortchange her students. But she’s doing her best. She’s got three classes this semester, and while wrangling freshmen has been a chore, the committed English majors are showing up in the chat rooms. The endless nature of the crisis is sure to test diligence, and I wonder if the University will eventually decide to scrap the semester and just give everybody an A.
Two days ago I got the news that my cousin had tested positive. This morning, I learned that her mother is sick, too. So far, their symptoms haven’t been severe. Nevertheless, I can’t help but worry about them. Another cousin from the other side of the family is also waiting for a test. News out of Lakewood is that at least forty people there are positive for the virus. The biggest cluster still seems to be near Teaneck and Englewood, but that could simply be where tests are getting administered. We’re not going to get a clear picture of anything for awhile, and until we do, all this virus mapping is probably more misleading than illuminating.
The Governor of New York has promised that the MTA will not be shut down. This was a change in tone from the near-military language he used a few days ago, which suggests to me that his crisis-management strategies have evolved to suit the moment. It’s probably wise. Talk of the National Guard is bound to make people feel more powerless than they already do. Meanwhile, Bergen County took the initiative and declared a state of emergency, and then rescinded it in deference to Governor Murphy. The White House continues to push the line that this is a Chinese virus, as if viruses pay taxes and salute flags, extending their strategy of pointing fingers at a perceived nonwhite threat at any sign of distress. By now, this ought to be transparent to everybody in the country, yet I still see people on the Internet recycling unhelpful language coming from the federal government. This is something I remember from the 9/11 period, too: the malleability of perception, and the rush to defend authorities by mimicking their behavior and ratifying their worldview. It’s natural in a crisis, I suppose, but that doesn’t make it easy to see.
I’d had a diagnostic appointment with my dentist scheduled for today. That’s been scrapped. I suppose I could call him and talk about the major work I’m supposed to have, but I’m not eager to do that. When I talked to the office about rescheduling, the tone was harried. Should the problem in my upper molar become an emergency, I hope he’ll find time for me. In the meantime, part of my consciousness continues to operate five days in the past — the typical gestation period for the virus — as I remember what I was doing at the moment when the pathogens might have been transmitted. On the 14th, I went to an art opening, and a very good one, at Drawing Rooms in Jersey City; this’ll probably be the last new show anybody mounts in many months, so I’m going to try to keep the memory fresh. Ironically, many of the images on display were paintings of hands. By municipal mandate, everybody in attendance had to sign in. My hope is that they never need to send that list to the city. We probably took a far greater risk when we picked up Hilary’s medication at a crowded Duane Reade. But that was six days ago. Are we in the clear?
I’ve put this off long enough. Everything I’ve done for a long time has been governed by superstition, so I must believe that journals bring bad luck. But I wish I’d kept a daily record in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers, and along with that collapse, the loss of the sense of security that I’d been taught was part of the American promise. I watched 9/11 unfold in real time, with one eye on the towers, until they weren’t there, and another on the clock, and the news on in the far room, providing reports that contradicted what I could glean through my senses. The slipperiness of the official story and the landslide of conspiracy theories that followed has left me with muddier memories of those days than I’d like. I don’t want to repeat that mistake. For the sake of my own sanity, and whatever small amount of alacrity I have left, I’m going to start taking notes.
After two days indoors, we left the house to put air in the tires of the bicycles. On my way to the basement, I passed our neighbors on the stairs — a young couple expecting a child. They’re very friendly, and they smiled at me, but they were keen to keep that state-suggested six feet between us. It’ll be that way for months. For those of us who are already prone towards feelings of social alienation, it’s going to be tough to manage the estrangement.
All of the tire shops in the neighborhood were closed, so we rode to 12th St. and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Very few cars were heading into the city. The gas stations were empty. The attendant sat in a chair on the tarmac by the pumps — it was a very nice day — and watched us as we filled up. Hilary told him to stay safe.
Many more pedestrians on Newark Avenue than we reckoned there’d be. The Van Hook specialty shop was preparing for its day, and one of the cheese-wallahs was crouched by the window with a magic marker, addressing boxes for curbside pickup. We found P&K Market open, stocked, and with few souls in the store. The crowds at the grocery and the pharmacy during the weekend had been terrifying; reminiscent of Sandy, but with a feeling of desperation and fatalism unusual for Jersey City. 7 p.m. curfew on both of these establishments. Get back from work quick, if you’re going to go to work, which you might not.
News on at home, which is probably a mistake. It’s tough to shut it off. If there’s a request for tanks or road closings or a general lockdown order brewing, it’ll probably be tipped by the networks before it appears on Twitter. Yesterday Mayor De Blasio told New Yorkers to prepare to shelter in place before the Governor contradicted him; it’s hard to tell if they’re just trying to get their stories straight before they seal the doors. I don’t know how they’d begin to enforce a shelter-in-place order, but I do notice that at least one military ship — a hospital ship, we’re told — is coming to New York City. Meanwhile, celebration in some busy Internet warrens (mainly QAnon) over vague reports that Oprah Winfrey has been arrested for child trafficking. This prompted Oprah to get on the social networks and proclaim her innocence. Rookie move, Oprah; it’s been years since anybody has been inclined to disconnect the dots. Apophenia, the psychiatrists tell us, is a warning sign for schizophrenia, and it’s quite possible that America has lost its marbles so far under the couch that they’ll never be retrieved.
But even the most ardent QAnon conspiracist will soon have to own up to the hard facts whistling in the wind all over the land. My cousin caught the virus in Colorado. She’s young and healthy and recovered pretty quickly; she told me over text that it wasn’t as rough as the flu. Brad’s neighbor across the hall has it. Non-elective surgeries have been postponed at Hackensack General, and they’ve been building tents in the parking lot. I’m mostly worried about getting Hilary sick: I can’t let that happen. We don’t know how immunocompromised she is, and I don’t want to find out the hard way. She’s been through too much to get hit with a superbug. I cannot and will not be a vector. For now, there’s no trouble staying home: I have plenty of assignments to do from here, though I’ll see how long that lasts. Mostly I feel smeared, like a computer screen smudged with thumbprints and indifferently wiped. It’s quiet outside — nobody on the road. I hope they keep the streetlights on.
At the risk of stating the obvious, 7 is by no means a good set. Then again, it’s not like the principals were trying to make one. If you were in Lil Nas X’s position, you probably wouldn’t sweat the details, either: you’d figure the sell-by date was coming at you like the Kamchatka meteor, so you’d better do your best to get something — anything — out before the milk curdles. Simple business practices to suit a simple business man.
That business used to be social media and reality television, and it surely will be again; cue J. Cole saying “in five years you gon be on Love And Hip-Hop.” But no matter what happens next, Lil Nas X can go back to the clickbait grind with his head held high. He’s made his contribution and he ought to be out looking for some nice laurels to lie on. His place in pop history is secure: the biggest streaming song ever, bigger than Drake, bigger than T. Swift, bigger than Oppan Gangnam Style, and never you mind that it came from a social media platform best left to Chinese incels. Straight outta Tik-Tok, (not so) crazy motherfucker named… whatever his name is. You don’t care, and doubtless he doesn’t, either. Artists did not make this technodystopia we’re inhabiting, and idea people with loud mouths will take any platform you give them. That Lil Nas X turned sixty seconds on the flimsiest platform of them all into the year’s biggest music story is not a testament to anybody’s genius, but it wasn’t just a bolt from the blue, either.
To recap: “Old Town Road” was essentially a salvo in the sort of meme game that gets played on social media a thousand times a day, only this one (and maybe just this one) didn’t have anything to do with the President. It was called the Yeehaw Challenge, and it required the participant to give himself a hick makeover and post the results to the site. Apparently most of the people who played around with the hashtag just donned a cowboy hat and acted like an idiot, which makes them no different from most senators from Western states. Lil Nas X took it farther and made a country song — sung through processing and matched to machine beats, of course, but Kacey Musgraves knows all about that. Before you could say Charley Pride, “Old Town Road” was number one on every chart imaginable, including the country chart.
Until it wasn’t. The story from Billboard was that there were elements of “Old Town Road” that were inconsistent with country music at its essence, and gosh, I can’t even imagine what those “elements” could be. Can you? Music City, to its credit, came to his defense, sort of: sniffing an opportunity, Billy Rae Cyrus put his zero credibility on the line with a slot on the remix, and Keith Urban, who knows a commercial C&W hook when he hears one, covered the song on a banjo and posted the results to the Internet. That sounded great, and you know why? Because “Old Town Road” is a great country song. Not a novelty, or a reinterpretation, or an exercise in condescension and appropriation; no, it’s a great song for the same reason that Kenny Chesney’s numbers are great when they’re great. It’s got a hook, and a boast, that Jason Aldean would kill for — a hook so good that it deserves a closer reading.
Lil Nas X says he’s got the horses in the back. That, to me, is utterly brilliant, and not just because it scans so well. The horses might represent the engine of a car: horsepower, junk in the trunk, revving up like all good rock and roll does. Or the horses could be the narrator’s goons, waiting in the back of the shack to administer a beatdown on fools who dare to violate. Then there’s the sexual connotation of horses, doing the pony, the horse as a traditional figure for a man’s dong, sliding in and out of somebody’s back, i.e., their buttcheeks. Then there is the crucial sense in which the horses represent horses, majestic things that gallop deep in the national psyche, beautiful animals that used to get celebrated in song all the time, but not so much anymore. Most of these country cats are so busy singing about their stupid trucks that they couldn’t tell a horse from a damned goldfish.
And why is that? It’s because everybody in Nashville is doing the Yeehaw Challenge. All day, every day. They’re all in costume, putting on accents, hemming and hawing and drawling like Hollywood caricatures of hillbillies. Even Dierks Bentley, who is the soul of sincerity, will tell you with a straight face that his role model is Bo Duke. None of these people are actual cowboys, and would you want them to be?, that’s not their job. The job is poetry. They’re here to animate certain powerful symbols and archetypes that resonate for people of a certain disposition. I can only hope that the curious case of Lil Nas X reminds everybody of that, even as it provides me Exhibit Z in my ongoing argument that says country and hip-hop are different expressions of the same basic American creative impulse. They’re the Bumgarner and Puig of musical genres. “Can’t nobody tell me nothing” applies in both cases, and equally snugly. And I think we would do well, for once, to defer to the wisdom of crowds, and understand that American listeners received “Old Town Road” as a country song in every way in which “country” is meaningful as an artistic descriptor — no matter what the industry says.
They can make their own rules and draw their own lines, but real fans of popular music understand. The institutional gatekeepers wouldn’t have Lil Nas X for the same reason that jerks always throw up walls. They can’t stand to see a black man beat them at their own game.
Single Of The Year
1. Vampire Weekend — “Harmony Hall”
2. Sego — “Neon Me Out”
3. Maren Morris — “The Bones”
4. Charly Bliss — “Hard To Believe”
5. Lana Del Rey — “The Greatest”
6. Julia Jacklin — “Head Alone”
7. Metronomy — “Salted Caramel Ice Cream”
8. Oso Oso — “Impossible Game”
9. White Reaper — “Might Be Right”
10. Better Oblivion Community Center — “Dylan Thomas”
“Shoot For The Sun”. I don’t know much about metal, but I do know what I like. This is it.
Most Romantic Song
Homeboy Sandman’s “Picture On The Wall”. I’m sappy like that. The whole Dusty album was a bit of a relief, to be honest. After Veins and “#neverusetheinternetagain”, (not that I didn’t dig both), I figured he was about an inch away from joining the militia. Dusty catches Homeboy Sandman in the best mood he’s been in for years, celebrating his love for his girlfriend and his move to Mello Music with music that’s, er, surprisingly mello. By his standards, I mean; in real terms it’s still spazzier than a bag of cats. But if you, like me, prefer Sandman when he’s relaxed and optimistic and rapping about sun-dried tomatoes, you may dig. Or maybe you won’t? For the first time in a long time, it seems like Sandman might not see that as a direct reflection on your intelligence and character. I must add: Pitchfork slagged this album on the absurd grounds that Homeboy Sandman is out of ideas. They couldn’t be more wrong. If there’s anybody with a case to sue Pitchfork for sustained defamation in reviews, Homeboy Sandman is that guy. I don’t know what’s going on there. He must have murdered Ryan Schreiber’s hamster or something.
Funniest Song
Danny Brown’s “Belly Of The Beast”, which isn’t to say it’s a wonderful song, or a particularly thrilling direction for the artist. Danny has likened his new set to stand-up comedy, and I think I see what he means. Like a stand-up comedian, Danny believes that his personality alone is sufficient: he can just appear in the spotlight and behave like the zany goof he is, and everybody will clap. Also, Danny is funny, pretty much always. The Roy Orbison gag gets me laughing every time. It’s all in the delivery — the way he says “Orbison” in a manner that highlights the sheer fun of saying such absurd words as “Orbison”. Yet we’re now nearly a decade removed from “Trap Or Die”, and it’s increasingly clear that that version of Danny isn’t coming back. So in honor of the departed, allow me to eulogize the emcee we’ve lost. That Danny was an extraordinary storyteller: he could set a scene, and animate characters, and drive home a point with distinctive amalgam of efficiency and empathy that was his alone. He also demonstrated that he didn’t need to sound like a freakazoid to hold your attention. After XXX, he decided that the only tale worth telling was the one about partying to forget the pain/suffering through the pain of partying. That just can’t compare to a thick description of a junk raid in abandoned houses in Detroit. Also, he’s not really from Detroit anymore. Where is he from? The Internet, I guess. Like all the rest of the comedians.
Most Frightening Song
Jenny Lewis’s “Little White Dove”. If you forget about Nice As Fuck (and you did), On The Line makes two smart ones in a row, smart as anything to come out since that last Pistol Annies set, whip-smart, even. To be fair to the rest of the field, you don’t have to be smart to make a good record. There are marks out there to hit and talented dummies can hit them fine. That’s the magic of pop music – its egalitarian essence. Sometimes it even helps the public profile to play it stoopid. What Jenny Lewis shares with, say, Scott Miller is a profound disinclination to do anything like that. Instead, she makes pop records that are crammed to their corners with ideas and associations – records that always have something new for us when we re-engage with them. Just as The Voyager used the three-way as a figure for social disengagement in the guise of sexual adventure, On The Line presents addiction not as a spiral into rock and roll debauchery, but another way of dealing with the pain of interpersonal contact. It’s the same line she’s been pushing since her days with Rilo Kiley, really: this wry, terrifying examination of the many many things we do to forestall or dodge closeness with other people. Forget the heroin you’re shooting or the cognac in the glass, aunt Jenny knows why you’re hooked on Candy Crush. It hurts to stop phubbing. You might have to connect with somebody. To drive the point home, she’s taken a big risk here – she’s mixed at least half of this album like it’s coming through an old transistor radio, or, to be more metaphorical, through an old phone that’s breaking up (are we breaking up/is there trouble between you and I, etc). To transcend the limitations she’s set herself, she needs to sing, and write, and play at a world-class level. How do you figure she did?
Most Inspiring Song
“Diamond” by Jimmy Eat World. Old emos never die; they just keep on emoing. Some don’t even need crutches to ease the walk down the backside of the hill: while newly stable guys like David Bazan raid their childhood memories for tearjerkers, Jim Adkins just goes right on squeezing all the emo out of his hair-dye bottle. Now that he’s done with his divorce, he’s back to uplifting various girls in the middle/ in the middle of their rides with impossibly straight-faced, earnest inspirational verses and exhortations to persevere. God, I do love this wide-eyed, passionate, ridiculous motherfucker. His tensile strength is legendary — he’s absolutely unbreakable. Neither the passage of time nor harsh reality can lay a glove on him. Twenty years after “Lucky Denver Mint”, I even begin to understand the secret wisdom of his inane band name. Because Jimmy really did eat world!, and he’s going to keep on eating it, pith and pits and all, until he’s tasted all the sweetness (whoah-oh-ee-oh-oh) he can taste. It’s arguable, I guess, that an artist this adolescent has nothing to add to a sociopolitical moment that requires some adulting. But if that sax ride on “All The Way (Stay)” doesn’t cure your millennial blues, Dr. Rock cannot help you. Go on and obey the backing singers: let those feelings show.
While We’re Emoing, Here Is, At Some Length, The Most Moving Song
“God And The Billboards”, by Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties. Yes, indeed, Soupy is back with some more crafty Aaron West stories for you. I guess that answers the question about whether Aaron kills himself at the end of We Don’t Have Each Other. In retrospect, though, Soupy wouldn’t use a symbol as broad and boring as the ocean to represent suicide, would he? He wouldn’t have used a symbol at all. That’s not how Aaron thinks, and Soupy is at one with the character. He would have sung something like: “Oh these crappy raaaaazor blades/are of such pooor manufaaaaaacture these days/they don’t even slash me right/someone call my mooooom toniiiiight.” Whether the world needed a continuation of Aaron West’s story is between Soupy, his audience, and his conscience. But even though I’m the guy who didn’t think Empire Strikes Back was necessary, I found myself compelled by this particular Chapter Two. In many ways, it’s richer, more thoughtful, and more literary than the first album, and I’m already looking forward to Chapter Three.
At the level of the plot, much of Routine Maintenance is a reiteration of the first album: Aaron stumbles around and gets drunk, runs away to Los Angeles, puts a band together, and is called back home by a crisis in which he finds Soupy-approved redemption over the carburetor of the family jalopy. Along the way he kvetches about everything, sometimes hilariously, sometimes curmudgeon-ly, but always with strict attention to the rules of poetic justice as they operate within the moral universe of working-class East Coast emo. You might think that it’s a bit of a cop-out, or just unimaginative, that Soupy briefly sticks Aaron in a Wonder Years-like touring band (the guys are even from Philly, sheesh), but Aaron’s rock and roll detour serves two important narrative purposes. First, it gives Soupy and co-conspirator Ace Enders an excuse to live out some Springsteen fantasies on “Running Toward The Light. Just like the Boss, Aaron sees Jersey as a dead end, which is a tougher case to make in 2019 than it was in 1973, but we’ll let that slide.
More importantly, it sets up the familiar drama you’ll remember from all those Wonder Years records: the protagonist must choose between artistic self-indulgence and family responsibility. “If I’m in an airport/and you’re in a hospital bed/what kind of man does that make me”, etcetera. Soupy promptly kills off Aaron’s brother in law so that the main character can become a father figure for his nephew, which is downright evil, when you think about it, and the kind of thing that gets an author in trouble on Quora and TV Tropes. If this was a kitchen sink drama on Lifetime Television For Women, we’d all be groaning under the weight of the plot mechanics, not to mention the narrative convenience.
Luckily for us, it’s a pop-rock record, and Soupy continues to be a steady hand at pop-rock set pieces: the brutal divorce scene in “Just Sign The Papers”, for instance, or the description of life in the flat in Reseda where Aaron, broke and on the run, squats with some Mexican immigrants, or “Bloodied Up In A Bar Fight”, which is funny, even though it isn’t. I’m sure I would have liked the story better if it had ended with Aaron’s return home; he really didn’t have to drag the nephew and the church and all the gruesome filial business into it. He could have left that implicit, and I still would have gotten it. But I’ve got to appreciate how he names all of the characters, and how nimbly he jumps between the many cross-references and Wonder Years callbacks into the lyrics, and the many easter eggs in the verses for those who he assumes are listening carefully. For instance, there’s the delightful moment where Aaron shows Colin – that’s the nephew – the chords to the hymn he’s playing at his father’s funeral, and they turn out to be the same chords to the Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties song that both characters are inhabiting. Does anybody else go for this kind of shit? I mean, it’s a little cheesy, but it’s cheese with complex taste notes; nothing fruity, more like spice, aged oaken barrels, the funk inside Soupy’s sneakers.
Meanest Song
In the long race to make records that sound like those of Richard and Linda Thompson, it sometimes helps to be the child of Richard and Linda Thompson. Sometimes it doesn’t; IMHO, Teddy has never had much success in that department. The Rails consists of Kami Thompson and her husband Mitchard Bompson, and… oh, wait, that’s not his name? Huh, it says here in the press release that he’s called James Walbourne, and, wisely, he doesn’t attempt to play guitar like his father-in-law. But when these two harmonize on their better folk-rock numbers, they do manage to generate a cool, lacerating Sunnyvista vibe. At other times, they suggest a more evil Crowded House. For instance, there’s the one that goes “save the planet/kill yourself”, and, um, I think Kami is kidding? It’s hard to say. Breaking the news about the void at the end of the rainbow is kind of the family business.
Sexiest Song(s)
Mikaela Straus, aka King Princess, possesses a tasty pop-R&B voice with sweet-and-sour tough-girl phrasing, so you might guess that it would be tough to get her lost in the dream pop mist. I’ll be damned if they don’t try, though. Nothing about last year’s swell EP suggested to me that she was about to drop a chill playlist on us, but that’s what Cheap Queen is, and funnily enough, I don’t mind at all. She pulls it off because she’s a good nuts-and-bolts pop songwriter (check out “Prophet”, mmmmm) and a better communicator, even if there’s nothing too unusual about anything she has to say. You’d think they would have run out of powdery eighties synthesizer patches by now. Regardless, this is a strong choice for those who deem Billie Eilish too spider-eaty and tonally restricted, or for those who don’t find Troye Sivan’s butthole all that fascinating.
Saddest Song
Everything on Julia Jacklin’s searing, well-titled Crushing. Look, Julia does not want to be touched. I believe her. Her plea for proxemic autonomy has been read as a feminist statement, and… sure, what the hell, if Cardi B in ass pants can be strip-mined for feminist significance, so can Julia Jacklin’s high-strung disposition. But what do I know, I’m not even a girl. Fans of Big Thief probably dig this, as Julia’s agitated warble is not dissimilar to Adrienne Lenker’s, but the storytelling on Crushing lands with the sort of straight-to- the-jaw roundhouse punch that Lenker, talented as she is, has either been unable or unwilling to pack. All of these narratives are trapped in that agonizing moment when a romantic relationship is over but neither partner will pull the rip cord and jump. The result is the year’s most harrowing album, and its most intense, even as Julia promises us she’s eventually going to come out of the funk, open a window, and air things out.
Most Notable Cover Version
Morrissey’s California Son, and — hey, where are you going?, hear me out here. I thought we were supposed to be friends. More to the point, I thought we were both friends with Morrissey. Shit hit the fan and you are no longer a fan? Well, you’re missing a…, well, certainly not a great one, or even a good one, but a remarkable one. Noteworthy, as Homeboy Sandman might put it.
Eye-popping as it is, the tracklist is only the third most notable thing about this crazed late career covers set. Whatever his faults – and we’ve lately been as busy enumerating them as we were ignoring them in the eighties and nineties – Morrissey has always had good taste. Why wouldn’t that extend to an appreciation of “Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow”? That leads us to the second most notable thing about the set: just how well he sings songs that you’d figure he has no business singing. Did you think Morrissey could handle Laura Nyro soul and make you present to every syllable and every inflection? Right, you didn’t think about it at all, and that’s because the very notion would have seemed ludicrous to you. But here we are, with Moz riding around on the melody like a fucking stunt pilot, and Billie Joe Armstrong in the background, contributing awed support vocals. Great players make great plays, as the philosopher Jeff Van Gundy used to like to say, and Morrissey is coasting down the lane, straight to the hoop, dribbling through an arm and a leg and slam dunking, over and over.
Reviewers are not appreciating this, and that is because of the single most notable thing about this album: it’s a world-class troll job. Morrissey raiding the vault for classic protest songs in 2019 – and singing them all with front-lines fist-in-the-air vigor – presents the critical listener with the sort of conundrum unusual in pop, where the political lines are usually broad and blatant, and done in fluorescent paint, and offset by traffic cones with arrows that say look right here folks. What do we make of the apparent contradiction between Phil Ochs liberation lyrics associated with the civil rights movement and Morrissey’s loud and visible support of odious white nationalist politicians?
In order to grok, we need a more subtle understanding of Morrissey’s project – which, mind you, is not an apology for it – and maybe a better take on the malicious politics of the dreaded 55+ demographic. Morrissey sees Islam as an affront to the sort of secular humanist values that are usually called progressive by those who have no problem throwing stones at the church. Never mind its ahistoricity; this belief is not incompatible with his support for gay rights and animal liberation and his longstanding condemnation of all forms of religious faith. Remember that Ann Marie Waters, the infamous politician Morrissey supports, does not view herself as a reactionary: she wants to keep Muslims out of the UK because she believes their worldview is incompatible with science and progress and feminism and buttsex and a whole bunch of other delightful stuff that isn’t in the Koran. She sees herself as a descendent of the suffragettes, fighting agents of ignorance and intolerance.
And it is a sad truth that many (though not all) of the people down with the Great Replacement theory feel just as she does. They hear “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, and they imagine that that pawn is the beleaguered working class white man, assaulted by a press corps in the pocket of national security agencies and billionaire corporations, all conspiring to rig the system against the little guy. And never mind that that’s not what Bob Dylan meant, because… look, what did Bob mean, anyway? That guy was always vague. Gauche populism was part of the marketing strategy from the outset. He was more than happy to be whatever you wanted him to be, as long as you believed that you, and he, were in the know.
So even if we haven’t learned anything new about Morrissey today, maybe we’ve learned something important about Bob Dylan. And maybe we’ve learned even more about certain members of the Baby Boom generation – those now turning to radically unpleasant solutions and voting for demagogues, former hippies who view their belligerent non-cooperation with orthodox liberal institutions (they’d call them neo-liberal) as an extension of a resistance culture they misremember from the sixties. Maybe the ugliness was always there. And maybe they told us not to trust anybody over 30 because they always knew, deep down, exactly where they were heading.
Worst Song On A Good Album And Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should’ve Known Better
Taylor Swift, “London Boy” and “ME”. Good news and bad news, people. Take the bitter with the sweet, as Carole King put it. I’m happy to say that the fetching version of Taylor is back, as it had largely been M.I.A. on the last two sets, rife as they were with stories of getting borracho at celebrity events plus the obligatory complaints about social media. Way beneath her talents, if you ask me. She’s also writing lyrics with the sort of observational specificity that’s awfully rare in pop, even if she’s still unwilling to observe anything that doesn’t affect her personally. However, she no longer has the patience or discipline for the sort of linear storytelling that she did so effortlessly on the first four records. Or maybe she doesn’t think synthpop can accommodate it? Who can know the mind of a Taylor Swift. Popularity at this level does lead to warped priorities and scrambled synapses.
The bigger problem is that she refuses to push her composition into new territory. Too many of these eighteen newies are straight-up reiterations of tracks from her back catalog, and only so much of this conservatism can be pinned on the rigid Mr. Antonoff, slave to the relative minor. Taylor Swift wrote so much so quickly that it was inevitable that she’d start repeating herself as her production outpaced her experience. But this is, as you’ve noticed by now, a very intelligent woman. If she cares about her art as much as she says she does, you’d figure she’d recognize the problem and take some evasive action. In all art forms, risk aversion plus attenuation of urgency equals mush, and some of the weaker tracks on Lover are the sonic equivalent of baby food. Even as her (pop) star continues to ascend, she’s been stuck in neutral as a writer and musician for three albums now. If she wants to be remembered as a writer and musician first, rather than as a (pop) star, she ought to plot a course correction.
Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat
Vampire Weekend’s “Sunflower”.
Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year
“Wasted Youth” by Jenny Lewis.
Worst Lyrics
“Redesigning Women”
Worst Song Of The Year
The Mountain Goats — “Doc Gooden”. In general, I do not think I hold, or value, idiosyncratic opinions. I like The Wizard Of Oz and Elizabeth Warren and Harry Potter books and Monet’s Water Lilies; that’s about where my tastes are. I do defend a lot of unpopular music, but that’s only because I like music in general. I pitch a pretty big tent. Similarly, there’s not a lot that I don’t like because everybody else likes it; we all know about me and Radiohead, but I’m happy to give credit when it’s due to Greenwood and Selway, who are outstanding musicians.
But the Mountain Goats are different. Not since Leonard Cohen has there been an act about which I’m at such sharp variance with critical opinion. For the life of me I cannot figure out what the attraction is: the band doesn’t rock, beauty is beyond them, Darnielle isn’t much of a singer, and his lyrics always strike me as the sort of stuff that Will Sheff might chuck into the wastebasket with some vehemence. Even the concept on In League With Dragons seems designed to piss me off: this is supposed to be an album about D&D, but there’s no D&D content here at all, and I resent having been made to sift through this tedious hunk of junk in order to look for it.
To make matters more insulting, the Doc Gooden song is a total embarrassment. For starters, the timeline is wrong: if you’re older than 35 and you were in the NYC metro, Gooden is still quite present to you; he’s not a lost or forgotten anything. The LL Cool J quote doesn’t fit no matter how hard the band forces it, and the reference to the “speedball” is so corny and on the nose that I think Harry Chapin just rose from the dead. Finally, he’s got the scene-setting detail wrong – Gooden didn’t pitch his no-hitter in Seattle, he threw it at Yankee Stadium. if Darnielle was a baseball fan rather than a dilettante mining baseball (and Dungeons & Dragons) for crummy metaphors, he’d know that. I imagine he would say that’s beside his point, which is something stupidly obvious about the ephemerality of magic, I guess. But you open yourself up to pedantic criticism when you make pedantic songs. Because you know what would be cool?, an actual song about Dwight Gooden. Not Gooden as a vehicle for your dumb observations about life. He doesn’t deserve that. He didn’t resurrect the Mets franchise so he could be pity-used by some strumming fakeademic from Indiana. Spare us.
Okay, sorry. I had to get that out of my system. Positivity next, I promise.
In my life, I’ve encountered people who are truly committed to social justice, equality, fairness, and a political program that might reasonably be called progressive. I’m always struck by how many of these people are Rush fans. Dedicated fans, too; fans who’d surely count the members of Rush among their favorite musicians, if not their personal heroes.
I can think of a few reasons why this might be. A commitment to social justice is, in my experience, a mark of intelligence, and Rush has always cultivated a smart fanbase. Rush wrote sci-fi at a time when not many rock bands did — songs designed to resonate with the same sort of kids who found Asimov and Bradbury provocative, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. There was a Solar Federation, and it was oppressive, and it was the moral responsibility of the thinking individual to stand against it. Rush taught its audience to see systems, and patterns, and encouraged listeners to dream of a better and purer way forward. Three of those dreamers were the members of Rush themselves, who, on and offstage, threw the weight of their celebrity behind the twin causes of mindfulness and compassion.
So it saddened me to see Ayn Rand’s name in many of the obituaries and appreciations of Neil Peart. Objectivism was part of Neil’s intellectual development, as it was for many young men, and because Peart always wrote about what he was reading, Ayn Rand’s ideas showed up in some of his lyrics. So did echoes 0f Samuel Coleridge, and Arthur C. Clarke, and, most famously, Mark Twain. Neil gave the impression that he never discarded an idea he encountered in a book. By the time he wrote the songs that made Rush world-famous, he’d already drawn what he needed from Objectivism and moved beyond it.
Nevertheless, Rand sticks to Rush like a rust stain. I’d like to put the blame on the Boomer generation of rock critics, who hated Ayn Rand almost as much as they hated Rush, and still miss no opportunity to beat Rush with the stick of Objectivism. I can’t, though, because Neil Peart really *did* write several early songs — good songs — that made his appreciation for and understanding of Anthem apparent. If Rand herself had heard those songs, she… well, she probably would have considered Rush degenerate. But she would have liked the lyric sheet. She’d have noticed her fingerprints all over them. Ayn Rand can’t, and shouldn’t, be written out of the Rush story, no matter how much fans of the band would like to recuperate Peart’s rep on behalf of genteel Canadian social democracy. The young Peart had a view of socialism and communism, and it wasn’t a favorable one. What’s important to remember, though, is that even at his most philosophically vulgar, Neil Peart had a pronounced moral sensibility miles beyond anything articulated in any of Ayn Rand’s writing. And Neil Peart wasn’t vulgar for long.
When Peart wrote “2112”, he was 23 years old. He was still pretty new to the band, and the band was pretty new to the airwaves. The record company gave Rush a tacit ultimatum before the album came out: write something that sells, or that’s that. It’s possible that Peart had a grievance against power structures — especially the sort of authority figures who weren’t demonstrating the imagination or courage necessary to appreciate a band like Rush. As a young man possessed with a world-class talent, he must have appreciated Rand’s condemnation of mediocrity. Peart replaced the Anthem lightbulb with a guitar, and positions rock as sedition against a totalitarian state — a theme that would soon become a trope, culminating in the near-parody of Styx’s Kilroy Was Here. In tone and temperament, it’s not all that far removed from Paul Kantner’s Blows Against The Empire, or, for that matter, Fahrenheit 451 or A Canticle For Leibowitz.
“2112” was an unexpected commercial triumph that established Rush as a band with a future. If Peart had been a true denizen of Galt’s Gulch, he would have seen this turn as a personal vindication and become insufferable. Instead, he pivoted, and penned his first set of mature lyrics. A Farewell To Kings is an album about the moral inadequacy of society — its wayward rulers in particular. The Cinderella Man is cast out and rejected not because he’s a misunderstood Übermensch, but because he carries a message of radical love that his peers and leaders aren’t ready for. Neil Peart was certainly no Christian, but there are overtones of caritas in his writing: he asks us to forge a new reality/closer to the heart, which is prog-rock speak for sympathetic identification. A Farewell To Kings couldn’t have been written if Peart hadn’t first grappled with Rand’s ideas on the prior album, and pushed past them. He wasn’t overwriting “2112.” He was complicating it.
Peart’s final flirtation with Objectivism makes this clearer. The members of Rush developed a tendency to laugh off “The Trees” or dismiss it as a fairy tale, and it’s easy to see why: the song’s political implications are obvious, and they’re delivered with the sort of bluntness that upsets the ideologically squeamish. Yet I believe that “The Trees” is an essential song in Rush’s catalog, and I don’t think it’s possible to apprehend the scope of Peart’s lyricism without grappling with it. The song, if you don’t know it, is about a revolt in a forest in which the shorter maples punish the taller oaks for hogging the sunlight. In the end, in a wonderfully brutal image, the trees are “all kept equal/by hatchet, axe, and saw.” The maples have not merely seized control and enforced equality in the most menacing way — they’ve also convinced themselves of the nobility of their violent act. It should be clear that Peart is writing about communism, and doing so in a way that draws on his absorption of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy.
But wait a minute: Peart doesn’t let the oaks off the hook, either. Their undoing is, at least partially, their own fault. Rush tells us that the bigger trees are self-satisfied, and describes their active refusal to understand the complaints of the maples. In “The Trees,” the oaks are worse than arrogant, at least from the perspective of a loud rock band: they’re deaf. It’s their inability to sympathize with their less fortunate neighbors that puts the forest in peril. And this, from Hemispheres on to the very end of the band, becomes a driving theme of all of Rush’s work. Human society, cruel as it is, can be salvaged if we listen to each other respectfully and allow our hearts to open. It’s an optimistic and deeply Canadian vision, and Rush, in spite of the occasional darkness in their music, was an optimistic (and deeply Canadian) band. Peart believed that gains was possible and disaster could be averted, and that people really could forge that new reality closer to the heart. And this is, I think, why so many self-identified progressives adopted Rush as a patron band: they were the rare rock conceptualists who actually believed in progress. Compare to Tony Banks’s near certainty that human beings were doomed to continue to make the same mistakes over and over, or Peter Gabriel’s dredging and plumbing of the destructive unconscious, or Roger Waters’s scalding fatalism about the failure of the postwar dream, or the Airplane’s last-ditch anti-authoritarianism, or Jon Anderson’s prophesies of ecological collapse and fears about life lived too close to the edge.
And while Neil Peart couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have written “The Trees” without a push from Anthem, the song reminds me just as much of a better story that libertarians also love: “Harrison Bergeron.” Vonnegut’s dystopian fantasy from 1961 is often read as a reaction to the excesses of Soviet-style socialism, but really, it confronts a human impulse native to no particular god or government. Harrison is a rebel against a society that has no tolerance for demonstrations of excellence that might make the talent-free feel bad about themselves. Those with innate ability accept their government-provided handicaps happily, in the name of the social order; for instance, one character with remarkable intelligence wears a special headset that buzzes, rings, and distracts him every time he formulates a coherent thought. The story makes clear that the character’s decision to wear the headset is, at least in part, voluntary: he’s internalized the egalitarian principle so thoroughly that he’s willing to punish himself for his own marks of distinction.
The first time I read this story, I thought Vonnegut was being hyperbolic. But the older I get, the more I realize that the world of “Harrison Bergeron” isn’t much different from the one we inhabit. We have indeed designed a device that broadcasts signals and static worldwide, and which rings, beeps, flashes, and generally discourages us from sustaining and developing thoughts beyond their most rudimentary form. You’re on it right now. If you’ve managed to read this far without clicking on a distraction or checking a feed for a jolt of novelty, well, you’re probably a Rush fan. Neil Peart dreamed of an Analog Kid whose natural purity granted him immunity from the normalizing tendencies of the techno-state: today’s Tom Sawyer, whose mean, mean stride contained reserves of integrity and self-possession. Straight through Clockwork Angels, Peart believed that resistance was possible, and that renegades were real, and that there existed a red Barchetta fast enough to outrun the heavy-handed enforcers of the Motor Law. Maybe that red Barchetta was you.
I’m not much of a progressive, and Rush was never my band. Yet their music is, for me, as it is for so many others, indelible: missives from a writer who was always too decent to mislead his audience. On MTV, many of my other favorites pushed me a fantasy of an adult world defined by adventure and transgressive behavior. Neil Peart couldn’t do that. He was the first I heard who was willing to describe my reality as it was, and as I experienced it – suburban sprawl as an expression of a imaginative deficiency, suspicion of anything out of the ordinary, a widespread longing that society seemed increasingly unable to satisfy. Peart’s nods toward Ayn Rand weren’t even the price we had to pay for a critique of conformity as blunt and beautiful as the one in “Subdivisions,” because by the time he got to Signals, that stuff was all in the rear view mirror. I’m just gratified that something worthwhile came of Objectivism, and it didn’t just resolve to Paul Ryan trying to take basic services away from poor people.
One last thing: while other great rock writers sang about harmony but behaved abominably to the people in their lives, Peart practiced what he preached. He was, by all accounts, a kind and generous person, one who would write thoughtful, caring letters to listeners and who treated everybody in Rush’s orbit with courtesy. His famous aversion to the limelight was real, but he never stopped trying to improve himself as a writer or as a performer. While other great rock bands fell apart because of the egos of the artists, Neil, Geddy, and Alex hung together, tight, until it became physically impossible for the group to continue. Anybody who has ever seen Rush in concert knows that the connection – and the friendship – between the bandmembers was a real and beautiful thing. Rush was a demonstration that Neil’s ideas about respect and openness and the courage to deviate from the norm weren’t bullshit – that people living by these principles really could function, and flourish, and achieve the greatness that they aspired to.
Oh, and Neil Peart could play the drums a little, too.
Best Singing
The Sunday Service Choir.
Best Rapping
Saba, who continues to make a strong case for himself in the Best Rapper Alive sweepstakes. This time around, he does it in the context of a posse project, and even if his Pivot Gang pals aren’t good enough to keep up (few would be), they do impart personality and pass him the rock so he can score with decorum. Joseph Chilliams – who, as it turns out, is Saba’s little brother – makes a decent ersatz Phife Dog, complete with references to small-time screen celebrities you forgot about and pro athletes and cartoon characters you didn’t. The other dudes acquit themselves well as color commentators too, even if “pull up with that Smith like Morrissey” is a few decades out of date. It all does make you wonder how Walt would have fit in had he not been, as you heard, killed for a coat. In a way, You Can’t Sit With Us drives home the tragedy of his death even more than Care For Me did.
Best Singing Voice
John Van Deusen. More emotionally charged music from an emotional young man playing his electric guitar and howling in an emotionally effulgent fashion. If there was only a shorthand way to refer to this style! In fairness, I doubt that the Emo Council would accept John Van Deusen into the brotherhood: for all the Gibbard in his sound, the echoes of Frightened Rabbit are louder. The psychic connection between the Pacific Northwest and Scotland run deeper than the fjords, so I have to believe that Van Deusen is acquainted with the same maritime despondency that took out Scott Hutchinson. Regardless, he’s come with the best batch of hooks I’ve heard on an, um, emotionally forthright guitar album in awhile, and he’s an outstanding singer, too, acrobatic without being showy, and nicely tethered to his well-wrought melodies even when he gets worked up. Moreover, I’ve heard he runs a boardgame store in Anacordes, Washington. so we’re probably simpatico. If you’re ever in Anacordes, drop by and pick up a copy of Agricola; I’m sure he stocks it.
Best Guitar Playing, Acoustic Division
Adrianne Lenker
Best Guitar Playing, Electric Division
The hot Sahel wind blows through the frets of Fenders and Gibsons. I’m never going to know what Tinariwen is singing about, so I’m glad those guys speak with their hands in the international language of Stratocaster. That goes for Fatoumata Diawara, too – the press stuff says she’s decrying female circumcision and the shoddy treatment of refugees, and yeah, I’m just going to take her word for it. Mdou Moctar is from Agadez in Niger, which is on the southern fringes of the Sahara and a major jumping-off point into the void for migrants fleeing Africa for cooler pastures. It’s a place, in other words, that’s stitched like a burr into the interwoven globe, and Mdou plays like a guy hip to every vibration on every string. I hear Fela and Hendrix, but also Black Sabbath and Jimmy Page, and especially Richard Thompson. Mdou can’t really sing, so he basically solos straight through the album, and if you’re hungry for guitar pyrotechnics, this is worth a spin. Drawing connections between Nigerian funk and heavy metal, Caledonia soul and soca, and folk music of the Celtic diaspora – Van the Man could tell you all about it, if he was in a chatty mood.
Best Bass Playing
Sego Sucks is a scruffy, sleazy, wordy rock record made by fans of Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, and (especially) the first two Beck albums. The frontman, who is occasionally desultory and always a little caustic but never, ever malicious, and often seems on the verge of flying into a tizzy, often puts me in mind of Jesse Hartman of Sammy. He’s got that same drowned rat/drowning ironist charisma. It works in a rock context, or it used to, anyway. You might see his constant slippage from bemusement to bewilderment as a defeatist dodge; he’s a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill him, etc. But I reckon you will appreciate his greatest asset: bassist Alyssa Davey, an absolute monster with a sound as meaty as a porterhouse from peter luger. Just like a good punk reprobate ought to, she bullies the strings with total depravity. Davey ought to be playing with the Stones or the Who or somebody, rather than a dirtball combo from Utah, but for now, they’ve got her, and as long as she’s handling the bottom end, they’re free to put fuck-all over the top and it’ll work: guitar squall and narcoleptic nyah-nyahs and USA chants and whatever else crosses their feedback-addled minds. Not all of these gutter jams merit close engagement – sometimes they’re just dragging you through the dirt to see how much muck you can take – but “Neon Me Out”, the kickoff, is one for the ages, and it’s probably already in a trillion car commercials. The chorus attaints that kaleidoscopic quality I associate with Kula Shaker circa “Govinda”: you really do think you’re catching a glimpse of God, or perhaps Jerry Garcia.
Best Drumming
I didn’t expect Wand to turn into Radiohead quite so soon. Guess I should have known from the general bendsiness of “Bee Karma” (note second word) from Plum, but silly me, I thought Cory Hanson was just dipping a toe into the pool. Laughing Matter goes on for ninety years or so, and parts of it are taxing, but to their credit, they never try to get over on texture alone. Or effrontery, for that matter, although they must exist in a constant state of temptation by the lure of their own machinery. Even when the music gets noisy or imitative of OK Computer, the next interesting harmonic or rhythmic idea is usually only a guitar squall away. After a year of too-brief projects, it’s downright nice of Wand to give us a sonic ocean to explore. I like the Galaxie 500-ish one that Sofia Arreguin sings about her plane ride, and the one in which Hanson takes too much Advil and urinates on himself, and especially “Wonder”, which could be the centerpiece of any old Uriah Heep or Blue Oyster Cult album and will remind you why wand is the psychedelic band of the moment, no matter how much they dig Thom Yorke (a lot, apparently.) Also, and this is critical: Evan Burrows, their stupid-good drummer hasn’t gone anywhere. He isn’t any less stupid-good than he was on Plum.
Best Synth Playing
I take it as a given that Americans do not and cannot understand Joe Mount’s sense of irony. But I’ve recently begun to suspect that Brits don’t get the joke either. For instance, there’s the slow and drumless one on the new Metronomy album on which Joe keeps singing, over and over, in his most mealy-mouthed voice, about how he was thrown out of his rock band for playing the drums too fast. Then, almost as an afterthought, he slips in a verse about a rejected proposal. This is a preoccupation on Metronomy Forever: there are wedding bells but they’re not for you, and when Joe raises his head to hit on the woman who is like salted caramel ice cream, you just know he’s going to screw it all up. The key, I think, is the very last song, which only seems slight if you aren’t paying attention to the words. Joe slips a mixtape to a girl at a dance, and she doesn’t call him back; he figures, well, that’s that. Ten years later, her brother tells him that he loved the tape, and the two blokes end up getting a drink together at a bar. This is music as compensation for something lost, a lubricant for missed connections and crossed wires, and it’s presented here without acrimony by a guy who has always been a better storyteller than the EDM crowd appreciates. As for the quality of the synth textures, well, you already know.
Best Piano Playing
Phil Cornish from Sunday Service. The first time I walked into New Hope Church in Newark, I didn’t understand why there were boxes of tissues on the ledges by the walls. Fifteen minutes into the service, I got it. There have been other great gospel albums released in the past few decades, but none approaches the transformational force of a real service like this one does. And no matter how much Kanye frustrates me, I’ve got to give him credit for making this happen — and reminding us again that everything we love about pop presentation comes directly from the African American church.
Best Vocal Harmonies
Harry Styles on Fine Line. Harry’s a classic rock fan, so I have to think that the sonic references to Yes, and The Zombies, and The Association, and The Mamas And The Papas are 100% intentional.
Best Drum And Instrument Programming
Igor. So Tyler is a full-blown queer now! Welcome to the club, Tyler. I think it’s a good look for him, and it’s salutary for the rest of us. It expands our notions of what a queer can be: not just fluttery aesthetes with paintbrushes, but also people who rap about band-aids, brown stains, and Smuckers products. Apparently it also means they’ll let him back in England, and it’s about time they realized that those verses about raping and killing Santa Claus were, um, hyperbole. I think. Anyway, behind the gloss and the old-school breakbeats and the radiant b-vox and synth pads and usual musical/arrangement excellence, Igor is a pretty straightforward story about a guy who gets in a relationship with another guy, but that other guy is in the closet, and he eventually ditches the main character for his ex-girlfriend. This is a believable predicament, and one dramatized on pansexual soap operas all the time. Maybe the male love object is indeed behind a mask, and unwilling to defy social expectations in our current climate of fear. Or maybe Tyler smells.
Best Production
FnZ on Denzel Curry’s Zuu. New adventures in bass music, or maybe it’s the same old adventure, only louder. South Florida is renowned for its bottom end, which is appropriate given its geographical position, but this album really takes the cake. Because Denzel is merciful, he doesn’t let FnZ drop it on you all at once. Instead, he boils you slowly like the frog, turning up the low frequency heat, song by song, until you’re absolutely stewing in bass by the end of the set. This is rich, thick, quicksand bass, slippery as Everglades mud. Because the emphasis is on ass, he keeps the rhymes lean and direct and no-frills, and the whole thing whizzes by your chin like a Chinese star, pointed and vicious and traveling with too much force to redirect. I can see this getting very popular, but for practical reasons I hope that it stays regional. A car with subwoofers bumping Zuu could take out every window on this block.
P.F. Rizzuto Award For Best Lyrics Over The Course Of An Album
Billy Woods is as adept at mashing words together as Homeboy Sandman – and that’s saying something – but unlike Sandy, his version of acrobatic wordplay is intentionally mirthless. He gives you punchline after punchline with a heavy emphasis on the punch; he’s sure not smiling when he says any of this. Much of the accompaniment on Hiding Places is as out of tune as a vinyl LP that has warped in a tenement closet, and the cover image is an abandoned house collapsing in on itself. Billy hates you so much he won’t bait a single hook, and over eleven tracks, his resolution becomes its own reward. His intelligence, on the other hand, isn’t something you’ll have to wait for: it’s there from the very first line. Certainly this is not a fun listen, but if you miss that old Definitive Jux doomsday hip-hop sound, Hiding Places is a project worth engaging with.
Best Songwriting and A P.F. Rizzuto Close Second Place
Richard Dawson’s 2020. There has to be something more to life than killing yourself to survive, says Richard Dawson’s narrator on “Fulfillment Center”, one in a set of brutal protest songs sung on behalf of the information age proletariat. The narrator urinates in a bottle because the company (Amazon, surely) won’t countenance breaks, and when a non-native speaker breaks down and starts raving on the factory floor, nobody flinches. They just wait for him to be carted away by corporate security. Then there’s the song about the U.F.O. sighting, and the one sung from the perspective of an anxiety-ridden jogger, and the tale told by the kid who screws up the soccer game to the disappointment of his overbearing dad. These brittle folk-rock productions do not cut corners: they just ramble around the Newcastle countryside getting muddy, following paths through the gorse to weird glades. Dawson sings like an alternate-reality Guy Garvey whose psyche and spirit have been broken to pieces by twenty years sans promotion in the accounts-receivable department. Obviously, this is getting understood as a Brexit statement album, but its messages have global applications, I’m afraid. 2020: nowhere to run.
Best Instrumental Solo
Benmont Tench’s classic organ ride on “Heads Gonna Roll”. Also, I’d like to thank the sax players who tried to summon the spirit of the Big Man: James King on “All The Way (Stay)” and Chiemena E. Ukazim on “Bury Me Anywhere Else”. A woozy E Street salute to both of you; get these guys a couple of cookies from Del Ponte’s in Bradley Beach.
Best Concert You Saw
Calliope Musicals at FM in Jersey City.
Album That Turned Out To Be A Heck Of A Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was
Duo Duo by Operator Music Band. Oops, I forgot to write about this one two days ago. Just like they forgot to write much original music, choosing instead to borrow it all from Talking Heads/Stereolab/LCD. But hey, James Murphy is a thief lord, too, and I don’t hear anybody grousing. When these pop Fagins pick a pocket or two, it’s all about the finesse, and more than half of this is really skilled – groovy, bouncy, good communication between pilot and co-pilot, quality signals transmitted over an extremely narrow band. So this is a situational play, tasty when applicable, like Uncle Boons or the squeeze bunt. Me, I like the one that goes ba da da da ba da da da for measure after static measure until the chord changes, at which point it still goes ba da da da ba da da da. Joe Mount would understand.
Also A Grower, But Let’s Not Get Carried Away Here
JPEGMafia’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs. Anything that could be said in defense of vaporwave – its social and conceptual significance, its intervention in the artifice of popular culture – can also be said about hip-hop. Vaporwave sounds like an adjunct professor chopping up elevator music and 8-bit video games to make a point about art; hip-hop is, you know, art. Given the continuity between the styles (if you want to so dignify vaporwave by calling it a style), it was inevitable that somebody like JPEGMafia would emerge from a cloud of pixel dust and start rhyming, and pretty damned well, about memes. I’ve seen this compared to Death Grips, but it’s really more like a bug-fixed Kid Cudi with a bigger chord vocabulary and a wider field of reference, or Childish Gambino plus actual musical talent. Like other projects that take the Internet as a subject, archness and emotional estrangement is part of the message. The heat, when it comes, is largely theoretical – metacommentary about expectations for African-American vocalists, anger as a type of performance, etc. And sometimes he just raps. Those, you’ll notice, are the best times.
Best Arrangements
The return of the Mick on Days Of The Bagnold Summer. And Mick Cooke isn’t just here to toot his horn and do arrangements – he’s back with the six-man (plus Sarah) crew to revive the wispy, twee spirit of the Storytelling era. 2000-02 is the blurriest part of the Belle & Sebastian timeline: that low-energy period when Isobel was getting ready to jump ship, and Stuart David was out, and Bobby wasn’t yet in. Everything was in flux, and you could hear that in the music, which sounded noncommittal, vague, and pretty, like a girl holding her breath, half-shutting her eyes, and groping her way through a grey day. Anyway, the new set is a big blast of nostalgia from a group that doesn’t take backward steps very often, and it puts Stuart Murdoch in an odd position: just when it seemed like he was settling into soporific, neatly-appointed, middle-aged domesticity, circumstances have conspired to make him sing “I Know Where The Summer Goes” and relive his dissipated youth. So does he, ah, still write them like he used to? Well, if by “used to” we mean Life Pursuit or God Help The Girl, which “Sister Buddha” coulda slotted into, the answer is yeah, sure, sometimes. But some of these tunes are dangerously unsupported by the chords. Consider the cheap bossa nova arrangement and overall compositional slackness of “This Letter”, and then consider “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”, with its impeccable circle-of-sharps-and-flats melody that just keeps twirling and twirling like an goddamned elf, skipping across the Clyde on polished footstones. The juxtaposition of the two is a little hard to deal with, even if it doesn’t seem to be hurting Stuart’s feelings or wounding his confidence. Regardless of the context, it’s nice to hear Mick blow his horn again.
Band Of The Year
Charly Bliss
Best Guest Appearance
Lyle Lovett on Rodney Crowell’s Texas. I brought up total depravity in the Sego paragraph, and since this is a concept some struggle with, I wanted to take this moment to stretch out and explain its salience to rock, and hip-hop, and R&B, and blues, and all other forms of art derived from the African American church.
Paul of Tarsus’s letter to the Romans contains the kernel of Christian theology and sociopolitical thought, and it goes like this: you are fucked up beyond recovery, and you require divine intercession. You cannot “good deed” your way out of this spiritual sickness of yours, because only through faith can a man be justified. In Paul’s view, god sends you the law precisely because he knows damn well you can’t live up to it, and he’d like you to come to consciousness of this so you’ll realize you need saving. The law consists of stuff that you know in your bones is right, but which you’re powerless not to do; i.e., you know it’s wrong to covet thy neighbor’s wife, but you’re still going to do it, that and a million other all-too-human things expressly or implicitly prohibited by scriptural codes.
The good news is that you don’t have to be punished for this: Jesus has paid the price for your sin on the cross, and taken a holy beating so that ye may live. All you have to do is believe. If you do believe, your heart will open, and you will receive the gift of grace, and through that gift you will be born a new person in Christ. Easy peasy, right? So simple that it only took the Western church fifteen hundred years to fathom the implications of Paul’s words, and when they did, what they came up with was so draconian that we still recoil from it.
Followers of John Calvin in Geneva (and sometimes John Calvin himself) took the theology of Romans to its logical conclusion, and declared that man was totally depraved — so much so that even if god were to tap him on the shoulder and offer him a gift of grace and a plate of cookies and milk, he’d be too far gone to accept it. There is absolutely nothing he can do to aid his salvation. God’s irresistible grace is his only hope. That grace does not fall on humanity evenly: some people (the elect) will get it, and others (the preterite, or less politely, the damned) will not, and that’s that. The die is cast; the decision on the fate of your disgusting heart and filthy soul was made before you were born.
Now you do not have to be Neil Peart to realize that this view of our spiritual condition is incompatible with egalitarian democracy. Luckily, not too far away in Holland, just as the modern subject was getting hammered out in the shadow of the stock exchange and the tall ships, and painted in all her interiority by Rembrandt and his frenemies, another theologian was coming up with another eirenicist approach. (Eirenicism is the technical term for the use of reason to reconcile mankind with God.) Jacob Arminius is not as famous as John Calvin, and… well, I wish I knew why. It’s probably because Arminian sounds like “Armenian”, which is a completely different thing.
Arminius – and this is crucially important for rock and rap and all the rest of it – completely accepted the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. He agreed: the human race was about as low as you could go. Where he differed from Calvin was his view of irresistible grace. As he saw it, God’s grace could be resisted: if you really wanted to clam up your ears and dance with the devil, that option was open to you, even if the big guy was calling your name. It followed that the inverse was also true. No matter how degraded your morals are, you’ve got an opportunity to open yourself up to God and let grace do its work on you. Divine grace, he believed, was so powerful that it punches through the total depravity of mankind and creates a kind of caesura in the celestial music. This force – which he called prevenient grace – was available to everybody, in perpetuity throughout the universe. There would be pivotal moments in a man’s life when he would either opt to humble himself before God and let the light in, or turn all the switches off and persist in sin. This was the arc of the cosmic drama: not great deeds, but the private struggle for salvation in which each soul was a separate battlefield.
Calvinists deemed this both illogical and an affront to the concept of divine omnipotence, and convened a synod to declare Arminian theology heretical. and so they did. The Remonstrants – that was Arminius’s party – were soon on the ropes. But while the idea of predestination has never been fully expunged from the Western Christian imagination, Arminius has gotten the last laugh and then some. Arminian theology underpinned the Baptist and Methodist movements in the UK, and, in turn, the African-American Baptist and Methodist congregations that catered to men and women in bondage. From these churches would come a great outpouring of gospel, and soul, and rhythm music indebted to Africa and the islands.
This became a gift to a society that didn’t exactly deserve it: art as an expression of prevenient grace, low-down people in touch with their depravity but with eyes on the sky, anguished cries for help and supernatural sympathy (the blues, brother), and a deep understanding that we’re all in this shitshow together. No elect, no good guys, just the same salvation tearing the fabric of dull reality for those who can get with the vibe. Sin and pain, dirt and redemption, holy fire and the flames of hell: it’s right there, in the way Aretha Franklin pounded the keys, and the way Elvis Costello hits those high notes on “Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head”, and the growl of James Jamerson’s bass and the firm crack of Charlie Watts’s snare, and Lauryn Hill’s rhymes and Angus Young’s leads and Nick Drake’s thrumming Martin. If I don’t hear total depravity in your song, buddy, you’re not just doing it wrong – you’re wasting the gift.
Rodney Crowell is an old dude – he’s probably well on the far side of sixty – and any innovations he had to contribute to Texas country music happened in the Eighties. Yet Rodney’s familiarity with total depravity gives him a leg up over younger Nashville artists who are more comfortable with platitudes and pat morality. He knows what’s deep in the heart of uncertain Texas, and maybe even what makes it so uncertain, and he can approach it with the wry irony that only those who’ve fathomed the depths of their own abjectitude can. Willie Nelson and Billy F Gibbons recognize; Lyle Lovett does, too. The song with Lyle is outstanding, so even if you’re going to ignore this one, you might want to drop the imaginary needle there and let it tarry awhile, or just add it to your non-chill playlist.
Whew, okay, that’s enough for today. Thank you for attending services. Theresa will be passing around the collection plate shortly.
The year’s best music video: Tierra Whack vs. the potatoes in “Unemployed”.
You Didn’t Think You Were Getting Away Without A Topical Essay, Did You?
America is twenty-two trillion dollars in debt. That this is a fiscal crisis should be obvious to everyone. It’s also a moral crisis. Regardless, the current administration continues to boast about the rude health of the national economy. The value of the stock market is up. Companies continue to post profits, and people still launch new businesses successfully. GDP keeps rising. The gears of enterprise keep turning.
But the part of the economy that’s actually under the control of the government is a royal mess. Last year, the treasury reported a deficit of 900 billion dollars. By 2022, the shortfall will break a trillion. This government isn’t merely spending a little more than it’s taking in and hoping to fudge the numbers a bit the way a stealthy embezzler might. They’re not just brazenly unbalancing the scales. They’ve taken the scale and thrown it out the window, and they’re whistling and looking as innocent as possible in the hope that you won’t notice the heist.
When they do talk about it, it’s mostly to justify their actions, or to announce another tax cut, or a government expansion guaranteed to shovel more I.O.U.s on the mountain of debt. Because why not?, things are already completely out of control. No one will notice, and even if somebody does, the malfeasance is so huge and the numbers so large that all the sprockets in the investigator’s mind are liable to blow.
Economists in the pay of the government will appear on cable shows and say with a straight face that deficit spending is healthy, carrying trillions of dollars of debt is wise fiscal policy, and failure to pay bills is acceptable. It is dispiriting to me to see so many grown-ups fail to grasp what every five-year-old knows: it’s far better to have money than it is to owe money, and owing 22 trillion dollars is exactly 22 trillion times worse than owing a buck to the lemonade stand.
I’m not going to argue macroeconomic minutia with professional obfuscators. I don’t want to hear it, and neither should you. Instead, I’ll begin with the premise that you have enough common sense to recognize a government snow job when you see one. Even deficit hawks tend to underplay the staggering moral hazard that’s been engendered by the irresponsible economic policy that the country has pursued for the past forty years. Spending and tax-cutting the country into insolvency was celebrated, as drunken sprees tend to be. That policy also has robbed young people, who had no vote and hence no say in how the budget would be apportioned, of their future. Each newborn owes $400,000 to our national creditors. This should fill all of us with shame. It should spur us into action.
Eating the young is a common characteristic of decadent empires. In American fashion, we’ve taken it to a crazed extreme. Nobody ever apologizes for the profound selfishness of American fiscal policy; our treasurers, executives, and lawmakers are too busy patting each other on the backs and taking credit for the success of businesspeople who’d probably be happiest if the government would just leave them alone. Policymakers, worried about their jobs, do like to stimulate the economy whenever there’s a sign of a slowdown, which usually means a big spending package or a tax cut or both. Whether any of these slash-and-burn tactics has any effect on the GDP or productivity is for others to debate.
Regardless, we grown-ups simply have no right to heap onerous debt on the shoulders of young people, who, in a representative republic, deserve an opportunity to guide the country according to their own wishes. What we’ve done isn’t simply unfair. It’s theft, plain and simple, and our willingness to countenance that theft, for decades, has stained all of our institutions. Taxation without representation split America from the British Empire, and if we don’t straighten out our act, the same damn thing is going to sink the country that bravely, and justly, stood against it.
And Furthermore
Citizenship implies responsibility. A republic as complex and powerful as ours can’t stand unless its members take that responsibility seriously. Lately, we’re not doing too well.
The President of the United States was lifted from bankruptcy and ruin by outside parties who decided that his public rehabilitation represented a worthy investment. Because the President has blocked any inquiry into his finances and refuses to release his tax returns, we don’t know who those creditors are. That’s a huge problem.
It is in the public interest to determine to whom our leaders owe favors and to deny executive authority to those who may be compromised. We can and must refuse to aid the ascent of politicians with tainted motivations who seek elected office for opaque reasons. If there is even a hint of impropriety around a potential officeholder, it’s our ethical duty as citizens to shut that politician down. The health of the republic we love depends on our vigilance.
In 2016, we didn’t do that. We didn’t vet a mendacious politician properly. Whether our failure to live up to our responsibility as citizens happened because of omission or complicity is immaterial now; what’s imperative is that we don’t repeat the mistake. The consequences of our laxity haunt us daily. We don’t know why the President makes the decisions he does. We don’t know if he’s acting on behalf of American interests, or the interests of his creditors, who may not be American at all.
A citizen is expected to behave morally: she’s a person with a sense of the polis, and she doesn’t put her own needs over those of her neighbors. Just as importantly, a citizen must have the wisdom to differentiate between statesmen and charlatans. A citizen is not credulous; she doesn’t act to reinforce the position, and the party line, of leaders whose ascendancy benefits her and those like her. When she’s confronted with a scam that an elementary school student could see through, she puts her partisanship aside and calls it what it is.
The American republic is strong. It can take a great deal of abuse before it topples. Nevertheless, we’re really pushing it.
Okay, back to the fun stuff.
Most Caustic Polemical Material
Agenda by The Pet Shop Boys. Uh oh, the angry Neil is back. Thought we’d left him on Elysium. The Agenda EP is four straight-up protest songs, heavier on bitter sarcasm than the playful irony that you probably associate with the Pet Shop Boys. There’s even a song called “Social Media”, which is definitely not not an old man complaining about social media. Yes, your very favorite genre. It’s funny, of course, but uncharacteristically flatfooted. See, also, this representative verse from “Give Stupidity A Chance”: “Instead of governing/with thoughtful sensitivity/let’s shock and awe the world/with idiotic bigotry”. Applies well transatlantically, does it not? In their defense, Tennant and Lowe are exactly the sort of gentle London cosmopolitans that Brexit was designed to enrage. So it speaks well of their courage and their pattern recognition, if not their artistry, that they’re kicking back in the only way they know how. Remember that the reason why the Civil War dragged on for four years is that the North was caught with their pants down: they didn’t realize how badly the South wanted to fight, and by the time they’d figured it out, Virginia and Tennessee were covered in blood. Neil is ready. Are you?
Also Surprisingly Pointed
Charly Bliss’s excellent Young Enough. Do you reckon “Chatroom” is about the Kavanaugh hearings? Or is it just that Professor Blasey-Ford’s experience is depressingly common? Regardless, it fits so snugly that it’s done the song a disservice: I can’t hear the second verse without visualizing Lindsey Graham. Yes, much has changed in Charlyland: in place of the stories of poolside parties and peeing on the trampoline are references to fights in the family planning aisle, cult leaders, and heavy allusions to sexual coercion and pain. Right in the middle of it all is Eva Hendricks, cracking wise in that apple-scented fine line marker of a voice of hers; holding on to her sense of humor, and sense of self, in spite of it all. It’s going to break her heart to see it blown to bits, she tells us, with absolute sincerity, right off the bat, and if you think the antecedent is unclear in the slightest, well, buddy, you haven’t been paying attention. The band backs her up with music that makes the connections between Weezer, Rilo Kiley, and Fountains of Wayne crystal-clear – music sturdy enough to stand up to the insane compositional demands of a lifelong Elvis Costello fan. Putting the power in power-pop: not (just) a matter of pre-amp distortion.
Maybe Not As Provocative As The Artist Thinks It Is
Marika Hackman’s Any Human Friend. The synth pads are new, but the songwriting structures aren’t: this is the same compositional architecture we got on the first two albums. Maybe it’s a bit more streamlined, and maybe not. No new tricks for us, but at least she isn’t giving anything back. As for the words, hm: it’s a little early for Marika to be making her Masseduction, don’t you think? Annie Clark had to do a whole season of preemptive penance with David Byrne before she laid that one on us. The queer component of her storytelling lends it some sociopolitical heft, I guess, although given the bumper crop of sapphic pop we’ve gotten over the past three years, positionality ain’t what it used to be. I understand the frustration with the straight-ish girl on “Conventional Ride, even if that’s the sort of thing that Sara Quin has been writing about for years. But the rest of this album feels oddly familiar, and not in a refreshing way. Marika’s kissing/fucking/eating/moaning isn’t all that much different from what you’d get out of Trippie Redd, or David Lee Roth. Much as i dig a good she bop, “Hand Solo” suggests that her orgasm addiction is getting out of control: I mean, she’s so horny that she can’t think up a better Star Wars joke than that? I mean, I get it, if anybody does. But marika’s distinguishing characteristic continues to be emotional remoteness that makes Laura Marling look like Marianne Williamson by comparison. Coupled with her sex drive, that pushes this album into find em/feel em/fuck em/and forget em territory mainly suitable for members of Alpha Beta Theta Gamma. She keeps this up, and she’s liable to get appointed to the cabinet.
Exactly As Provocative As The Artist Thinks It Is
Slowthai’s Nothing Great About Britain. Just what you asked for: rap songs about Brexit. To be fair to this goon, he’s also plenty interested in tawdry sex and booze and other football chav nonsense. But he’s also bugged by the way in which his country is committed to misrepresenting itself on the world stage, and as a confirmed reprobate with legit love for merry England as it is, he wants to set the record straight. For Slowthai, the great crime of Brexit is that it’s full of shit — its proponents, in his view, are nostalgic for a version of the country that nobody interesting or worthwhile would want to inhabit in the first place. He asks you to embrace instead the England he knows: abrasively multicultural, physically grotesque, filled with too-clever louts and acid-tongued chicks, scandal-ridden and fight-prone, heavy on mockery, unique on the globe but tied to the world by necessity. You might say that the current government in Westminster is, ironically, the best example of what he’s talking about. Their endless bickering seems a hell of a lot closer to Slowthai’s vision of essential Englishness than all the fascist hooey about hedgerows and the sceptered isle. As is generally the case with records like this, it’s at its best when it’s closest to punk rock. Which furthers a peculiar understanding of the British national character that i’ve arrived at myself: these limeys still can’t rap worth a damn. Slowthai tries his best. But when a real emcee like Skepta – a guy I don’t even like very much, mind you — comes by to drop a verse, he throws into relief Slowthai’s corner-pub croak, which, over eighteen tracks, will fry your eardrums like fish and chips. That said, it’s probably a decent reflection of the abrasive state of discourse in the UK, and Brexit dragged on forever, too. May Boris Johnson and Michael Gove be trapped in a room with this album on infinite repeat. Spare Theresa May, though. That woman has suffered enough.
A Somewhat Commendable Barricade-Stormer
Ezra Furman’s Twelve Nudes. I guess Ezra thought that the problem with Transangelic Exodus was that it didn’t hit hard enough. This is the most screaming Ezra has done since… I was going to say Day Of The Dog, but that had more than a few oases of melody amidst the clangor. Twelve Nudes doesn’t. It’s just banging pots and pans and Ezra behaving like he’s stubbed all his toes at once. He howls because it’s a punk rock thing to do, and because he believes it is the only rational response to the parlous state of the world, and he howls because it is an expression of the gender dysphoria that has overtaken him and threatens to subsume his other concerns. As this is an Ezra Furman project, it is thoughtfully written and designed to prompt dialogue. And because it is thoughtfully written and designed to prompt dialogue, it is incumbent upon we, the fans and admirers of this excellent artist, to take these decisions seriously and respond to them. So here we go.
1., it’s not particularly punk to yell. Many great punk rock records don’t have any yelling on them at all. 2., as a Salinger fan, I get his desire to change his name to Esme. As an Ezra Furman fan, I worry that literalism has begun to flatten his sexual imagination. Like any sane possessor of a Y chromosome, Ezra often wishes he wasn’t male. This is highly understandable, because girls are cute and smell nice, and boys are icky and smell like Doritos and gym socks. But he’s never going to write about gender instability any more persuasively than he did on “Wobbly” and “Body Was Made”, and repeat trips to the well are hauling up muddy water.
3., about the racket, Ezra may be right: screaming an alarm might indeed be the best way to call fellow dissidents to action. It is, however, not always the best way to make a musical album. I thought that Ezra was on to something special with the arrangements on Perpetual Motion People – that highly personal hybrid of doo-wop, new wave, Blobby Dylan, and Violent Femmes-style punk felt like it could be a carrying tool for him for a few album cycles. If he dispensed with it because he felt it was insufficiently urgent, it’s hard not to sympathize. He might have decided that an era of asylum seekers in cages and non-scientific thinking and white nationalist revanchism requires some abrasion. But Ezra’s music was already astringent. He didn’t need to blow the cones in the amplifiers to make his political points. He was making them fine.
Bravest Record
On Girl, Maren Morris has inverted Billy Ocean: she’s gotten out of her car and into her dreams. No longer is she rolling in her Eighties Mercedes and holding services to the dashboard radio. Instead, she’s floating in that great, specifics-free M.O.R. zone, inhabited by those to whom mass appeal is more important than the rock and roll verities. She’s doing this, no doubt, because she’d like a big fat crossover hit – and if you had pipes like hers, you’d chase one too. But Maren has another reason for swinging for the, er, middle: this is a not-so-subtly political album, from a broad-minded Texan who’s had enough of the bullshit. So we get a nice big bite from “Nine To Five, plus a full-throated rejection of showbiz chauvinism worthy of Angaleena Presley, plus a big fat nod to Beyoncé, right in the face of the dudes who’d like to run her out of the genre for her R&B overtures. Then there’s the plea for social tolerance, sung with Brandi Carlile, that turns on the line “if I’m being honest, I don’t know what God is” – the gutsiest thing I’ve heard in awhile from an artist who is still marketed, primarily, to hicks. Shut up and sing?, hell no, she won’t, she tells us on “Flavor”. As always, she makes up for the flatfooted lyrics by performing the heck out of everything. Oh, I notice some critics find the chorus to “Make Out With Me” insufficiently racy — as if a smooching session was a less legit subject for a pop song than, say, Lil Wayne’s testicles. I feel bad for their girlfriends.
Promising Reunion That, All Things Considered, Isn’t Going So Well
Somewhere along the line, somebody told Ride that they weren’t songwriters — that their contribution to the story of music was not “Twisterella” or “Walk On Water” or “I Don’t Know Where It Comes From”, but a sound-over-substance approach to pop-rock presentation heavy on numbing guitar effects. The sad part is that they seem to believe it. Much like the modern Feelies, they’re back together as living legends/reputation coasters/genre granddads rather than as artists with anything new to say. I can understand why Gardener and Bell want back in in 2019: they may indeed have something to teach the shoegaze movement, oversaturated with mediocrity as it is. They might even have a track or two to contribute to a chill playlist. But This Is Not A Safe Place, like all Ride records (and, to be honest, all shoegaze records), succeeds to the extent that the writing is good. And it is good, now and then, when you can access the body through all the gauze. Angels still come from time to time. But not nearly often enough.
Comeback Story
There’s no small satisfaction in witnessing an artist you’ve followed for a decade grasp that elusive thing he’s been groping for, even if he’s mainly been groping around in his pants in a, you know, masturbatory way. Hmm, that makes it seem like I want to watch Bryce from the Rocket Summer jerking the gherkin, and I so so do not. What I mean to say is that Sweet Shivers realizes the hybrid sound he’s been after for years: a bright sunny day amalgam of hi-sheen disney pop, mallpunk, arena prog, electrobullshit, and the sort of smiley face Christian hooey I associate with Adam Young. He swung for these oddly angled fences on Zoetic, and whiffed like Mighty Casey; instead of grabbing some pine, he’s hacked again and hit a… well, at least a ground-rule double, I’d say. He’s still not letting anybody else into the studio, which means he’s quadruple- and quintuple-tracking everything again, achieving that weird airless quality that all latter-day Rocket Summer projects have. Nevertheless, some of these productions are undeniable, particularly “Blankets”, the spazzy album closer “M&M”, and “Gardens”, which might be my favorite Radiohead fake ever. Seriously, “Gardens” sounds like what would happen if you gave a precocious choirboy the task of adapting OK Computer for use at sunday service. Heck, no “sounds like” about it; that’s exactly what it is. Bryce is that precocious choirboy and always will be. He remains a hypertalented Jesus freak whose idea of sociopolitical intervention is throwing peace signs/at these dark times, and you know what?, that’s a hell of a lot healthier than issuing subpoenas and ranting on chat shows. I think I’m going to take his advice. Can’t hurt. Might win me some points in heaven.
Religious Conversion That Was No Publicity Stunt
Jesus Is King. Noted Prefab Sprout fan Michael Grace called this all robe and no ghost. I know what he’s getting at: standard gospel platitudes do sound funny coming from an artist who has always traded, and traded hard, on revelation and surprise. But let’s not overstate. Jesus Is King is a distillation of ideas that have always been present in Kanye’s music, and as he always does, the auteur has crafted a distinctive and particular sound that reinforces the storytelling. Furthermore I see no reason to assume that this turn towards goody-two-shoes-ism is in any way insincere, just as I believed him when he said he was lost in the world of molly and ass. Artists take journeys, and the Christian in Christian Dior has, for better and for worse, always been a searcher. If this latest leg of the trip scores Kanye a bunch of white fans in the Bible Belt, that won’t be by cynical calculation or boardroom design.
But…. c’mon, that’s not going to happen. Interest in Kanye among the MAGA crowd has always been patronizing at best. At 40+, the artist is stuck with the same fanatics who’ve always flown his flag, so any preaching he does is going to have to be to the converted. And this time out, I fear he has really wrongfooted his supporters. We Kanye true believers are always ready to wave away all manner of dumb and offensive shit in the name of inspiration, but we’re not equipped to forgive dullness. Kanye has written loads of stoopid lyrics in the past, and somehow we’re okay with it all – but he’s never before been boring, and with that, we simply cannot hang.
So when noted Kanye West (and Bible) fan Tris McCall says that this is the least Christian album in the Kanye discography, understand that I’m not challenging the realness of anybody’s faith. I mean that effective Christian art – art that spreads the word and advances Christian concepts, from Titian to Narnia to Mahalia to Brooke Fraser to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and “Jesus Walks” – is always risky and electrifying and alive, full of the sort of invention that encounters with the leading edge of Christian theology and Christian iconography provide. That’s why the most helpful comparison is with Slow Train Coming and Saved — the albums that Dylan made when he chose to signify his devotion via indulgence in cliché. That didn’t work for Dylan, and it’s not really working for Kanye, either. All that aside, the guy I really feel for is Pusha T. Everybody in his immediate vicinity has joined the God Squad. Who is left to kick sadistic verses about Sesame Street characters with him? You know: “Ernie and Bert/those bullet holes burnin and hurt”, etc. Don’t let your pal down, Kanye. God wouldn’t appreciate that.
Most Regrettable Genre Shift
Let it be known that I still cherish my copy of Poppy.Computer. I won’t be selling that back to Tunes. And insofar as I pay attention to YouTube culture, if you even call that a culture, which I really, really, really, really do not, I still consider the Poppy satirical project the very best use of the medium. Especially the one where she sits there in the throne while the telephone rings. But there is a big difference between a YouTube satirist and a real musical artist, and the Poppy story mainly just throws a spotlight on the immense gulf between the very best comedienne and the very worst musician. Poppy and Titanic Sinclair were always stretched when they were making real-ish songs: they did the best they could do, which often wasn’t very good, but which worked when it seemed to be an expression of the same ideas from the YouTube spots. Which makes me wonder if Poppy has gone straight off the reservation by doing these death metal/digital distortion numbers, or if they’re just meant to further the interweb mind games. Regardless, Poppy doesn’t have the vocal skills to pull any of it off, and even the accompanying videos and costumes feel flat. I do believe Poppy, or Moriah Periera, when she says that she likes Limp Bizkit; I’ll admit that I like Limp Bizkit, too. I commend her for chasing her peculiar star. Don’t mind me, though, if I decide that I’ve gone as far down the rabbit hole as I’m going to go. Jenny Lewis told me not to.
Best Career Move That’s Still Paying Dividends
Everybody knocks Deadheads, but what fanbase would you rather have? Reckon the Ariana Grande audience would sit through “Drums > Space”? The beautiful thing about the Dead crowd is that they don’t demand innovation, or discern compositional development through their monocles while reclining in luxury boxes at Lincoln Center. No, these are people who are actively entertained by experimentation. They will hoot and holler when Bob Weir tries something goofy and breaks a string. Bruce Hornsby’s decision to hitch his wagon to this traveling circus was probably the shrewdest decision any rock star made in the 1980s. It guaranteed there would always be an audience for his departures from AAA radio convention. It also meant that young artists who always kindasorta appreciated Hornsby – Bon Iver, yes, but there are others – can have a little cover/cred while thumbing their noses at the tastemakers. Bruce is a willful guy and was always going to do exactly what he wanted to do, no more and no less, even if it meant subsisting on gruel and boiled basketballs. But there is no way he’d be in a position to make and release an album as ambitious as Absolute Zero, at the age of sixty-four(!), without a big assist from Jerry’s ghost.
Best Technical Skills On The Mic
It’s been three albums and several mixtapes now, and it’s safe to conclude that Little Simz has no imagination whatsoever. Her idea of a departure from hip-hop verities is a song rapped from the psychiatrist’s couch; it has “realism”, and by that I mean it’s about as predictable as you’d expect it would be if you were unfortunate enough to overhear a stranger’s grousy therapy session. A stranger she continues to be, despite the Jay-Z co-sign, despite her consensus elevation to the front ranks of British hip-hop, and despite her congenial disposition. She makes up for her lack of specifics by rapping circles around the competition, varying her flows and tempos, and maintaining her rhythmic balance with Swiss-watch perfection. See her hug those curves. She’s a high performance Porsche on a twisty, scenic road in the Alps, and never for a minute will you think she’s going over the cliff. It’s enough to excite any fan of hard rhyme, which has been in short supply in the drugged-out era of Lil Xan, Lil Peep, Lil Pump, et. al. Lord knows I’m the first to say that rap is not a skills contest. It’s still nice to hear an artist whose verbal dexterity is backed up by a commitment to clarity. I’ve got to think KRS would approve; Ms. Lauryn Hill, too.
Most Convincing Historical Recreation
I confess to a dereliction of prog duty: I never listened to Squackett, which was the project that Steve Hackett did with Chris Squire in 2012. Guess I was still feeling the burn from GTR, all these years later. Steve has been the keeper of the flame for a long time now – while the the rest of the Genesis guys just wanted to get with the times and score hits, he continues turning out multi-part tracks named after various Tarot cards. It’s Steve who dragged Anthony Phillips out of mothballs and cut album sides with Jonathan Mover, and sailed on the Prog Cruise and the rest of it. His relationship with Squire went back years. So I admit I got a little misty when I heard “Under The Eye Of The Sun”, which is one hundred per cent tribute to the big oak that used to stand right in the middle of the prog rock garden. Steve’s Jon Anderson impression is… enthusiastic, and that makes up for a lot. But the real hero of this story is bassist Jonas Reingold, who plays an extremely Squire-like part with the same sort of how-the-fuck-is-he-doing-this velocity that Squire used to achieve. A member of Genesis leading a letter-perfect Yes homage is like one of those Marvel adventures where Thor comes to rescue Superman from a radioactive Richard Nixon: larger-than-life grandeur packed into a comically small space. As a tip of the cap from one of the greats to one of the greats, it almost feels too personal to share: a parting note written in a language that many of us understand, but only a handful of people have the capacity to speak.
Best Intersection Of The Academic And Aesthetic
Jamila Woods’s Legacy! Legacy! Less loose, more rock, more modern, more pro, some nice production flourishes, some sweet choral moments, and generally improved performances by Jamila, who you still wouldn’t mistake for a competent R&B singer. It’s probably for the best that drifting pitch and a certain mealy-mouthedness are her vocal hallmarks, because if she ever acquired skills, she’d probably decide she was Billie Holliday, and that, my friends, would be that. She’s still a social studies teacher on the mic, and probably always will be, but if you don’t have any problem with that (I sure don’t), crack that book and stick your big nose in it. The lesson plan this semest… –er, album cycle is Great Blacks On Wax, as a certain Baltimore museum might put it. Each of these songs is named after/inspired by a visionary artist of color, and yeah, this is the most Jamila project imaginable. HEAVN got over on a twee and highly educated version of black power that was wide enough for alienated non-blacks to inhabit; this time around, she’s playing things a little tighter and a little more proprietary. There’s even a whiff of the elitism that her critics never quite had the heart to accuse her of, but was always lurking in the grooves: she implies that she’s got a particular susceptibility to the ghosts of these past greats that Jane on the street does not and could never. But I’m not gonna say she’s wrong. Not when she finds the swagger in epistemological uncertainty. Not when she comes with “collard greens and silver spoon/my weaponry is my energy/I tenderly/fill my enemies with white light”. If any part of her poetry curriculum helped her write statements of purpose as succinct and rich as that one, that was Brown University tuition well spent.
Album I Respect, But Don’t Like
Men I Trust’s Oncle Jazz. So it has come to this: eighty minutes of laid back, detuned lounge guitar, instruments running out of phase, girl singer cooing incomprehensibly in a manner suggestive of an animate pillow, misty vomitocious synthesizer patches, mom’s all-purpose powdery bullshit, Quebecois chillness, radiation sickness. This, people, this is what your lousy Spotify has wrought. Oncle Jazz might be the queasiest long-player ever made, and I emphasize the word “long”: this is an oceanic experience, one that can be likened to a voyage across a humid tropical basin choked with sargassum. This is the sort of album that feels like a lifetime to experience, and you look up, and you realize you still have fifty minutes to go. But much as I would like to call this the Seven Mary Three of the dream-pop era, I really can’t: the evil masterminds behind Men I Trust are too good at their instruments and too secure in their execution of groove for me to pretend that they’re simply running a formula on the verge of wearing out. I believe they’re achieving exactly the effects they want to achieve, and that makes this remarkable, interminable, strangely intemperate album a soap-slimy monument of sorts. As such, it belonged somewhere on the listening schedule, but in a year as good as 2019 was, I refused to bump anything of quality to fit it on. That feels dead wrong to do. I couldn’t put any of you people through this. Maybe drop the digital needle on YouTube at some point. You’ll catch the drift pretty quick.
And While We’re On The Subject Of Reveries…
Funny, isn’t it, to think back to the era when there was a big bad electric rhythm guitar run through the buzzsaw settings on the “Big Muff Pi” distortion pedal on every single pop song. And I hated that, and complained about it bitterly, and celebrated those few records (Cardinal?Gideon Gaye?) where the principals were brave enough to scoop all of the fuzz and abrasion out of their mixes. How the worm has turned. In 2019, it was permissible – nay, critically encouraged, even – to make schlocky throwback A.M. gold, glistening with Christopher Cross reverb and spitball-slick filters for the vocals and guitars, the sort of Englebert Humperdinck stuff your elderly aunt would listen to on the Victrola. That’s what’s hot. It strikes me that we may have overcompensated a wee bit. Weyes Blood aspires to sound like the Carpenters; “Rainy Days and Mondays” is what she’s shooting for. At least Karen Carpenter hit the drums with conviction and desperation; Weyes Blood is music with no motor whatsoever. I do appreciate that Natalie Mering bothers to develop her melodies, since that’s something in short supply these days. But without the rock beat, and the grit of hard experience – blues, brother, and gospel too — none of these plaintive songs to the heavens achieve the spiritual traction she’s going for.
Jessica Pratt, too, seems like she’s got a pretty good idea about how to structure a pop song, even if half the songs on Quiet Signs are munchkinland versions of “The Lights Are Always Bright On Broadway”. Her melodies do interesting things, and the notes scatter like spring seeds into rich harmonic soil that’s so thoroughly wetted out by reverb that everything ends up slurry in the gutter. Seriously, I cannot make out a word this fucking elf is singing, and while I suspect this is by design, it still strikes me as a bizarre choice to make in a folk medium. I mean, why write words at all? Why not just have a sheep bleating over echoed chords? Is it because we’re nostalgic for a time when words were carriers of meaning, and we generate a misty emotional impression of those days by suggesting the presence of language rather than creating language of our own? Or is it that dream-logic again, where you know you’re encountering some kind of meaning in your reverie, but you can’t quite piece it together, and if you get too specific you’ll wake up, and you’ll have to make some toast, shave, and go out and face your homicidal blackpilled neighbors? If so, I get it, sort of – but for me, pop music has always been the one tool that allows me to function in a hostile environment. In order for it to do the trick, I requires some straight talk, hard rhyme, occasional discomfort. Those are things Jessica won’t give you. She prefers a nice cushion. Not just her, I notice. Only trouble is, gee whiz, we’re dreaming our whole lives away.
…And In Conclusion
It is not Jessica’s fault that the dream-pop truck parked on my street this year, tilted the flatbed, tooted the horn, and sluiced ten shitloads of dream pop into my life. Seriously, I am drowning in this stuff, and the release schedule tells me that there are infinite variations to come. It does not speak too highly of the subgenre that it’s this easy to mimic, but it could be a hell of a lot worse: it could be fascist black metal, or grunge revival, or jazzy belles, or any number of styles that aren’t pop at all. I just can’t pretend that it’s interesting that one of these bands uses flanger on their guitar parts lifted from Jesus and Mary Chain while the other uses flanger plus phaser and the other uses the phaser with the middle knob set to five o’ clock. Maybe it is testament to the collective unconscious that all these dreams are the same: we’ve all had the one with the flying, and the one about the flood, and the one where we’re late to class and have to pull down our pants and get paddled by Ms. Crabtree. Those are universal, I tell you. I have taken refuge from the dream-pop mudslide behind a bulwark of high-quality awake-pop — Weezer Green, which is ultra-alert and sharp-cornered, Cake, who present their stories with remarkable alacrity, Motion City Soundtrack, whose music is the equivalent of mainlining coffee and skittles, and Fountains Of Wayne, who may have never slept in their lives. The common denominator here: nerds. Perhaps nerds do not dream. Or perhaps our dreams have been crushed by asshole tastemakers. That sounds more like it.
Album And Artist I Misjudged In 2018
Itotally whiffed on Sweetener last year. My bad. Ariana Grande #4 is state-of-the-art pop from a booze-infused cupcake whose early resemblance to Mariah Carey is far away in the rearview mirror. There are Max Martin numbers, and they do the nifty things that we’ve come to expect Max Martin numbers to do: arrive at the hook with ruthless efficiency and hard-sell it like Billy Mays with a bucket of Oxyclean. I’m not complaining, even if I’ve heard it before.
The six Pharrell tracks, though, are total revelations. The title tune recalls Scritti Politti, at least for me; “Successful” is like a Donald Fagen slink over a Clipse beat; “R.E.M.”, with its weird-ass chord changes, is like a power pop joker shuffled into a deck of Beyoncé face cards. Then there’s “The Light Is Coming”, which, in spite of its lascivious intentions, is pure prayer. These are some of the best and most illuminated productions Pharrell has ever done – an appropriate application of a megatalent that has not always been wisely directed – and they make up for some of the ghastly shit he’s hung on us ever since “Get Lucky convinced him that he was some sort of dancefloor maven.
So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Pharrell’s services had not been retained for Thank U, Next. Instead Ariana has snapped back to prior producers, who make this all sound “forward-looking”, which Pharrell, even at his worst, has never bothered worrying about. More problematically, Ariana is now writing lyrics, which ought only to interest you if you’re the sort of person who thumbs through Us magazine with passing interest while on an exercise bicycle. I’d also like to un-thank Ariana, and 2 Chainz, too!, for bringing “My Favorite Things” back into heavy rotation; always un-happy to see Richard Rodgers’s most annoying composition getting even more airtime than it’s already had. There are some neat numbers here, particulary “Nasa”, which is, um, not about the space program. But the critic who tells you that this one is better than Sweetener is, essentially, the guy who Lizzo called out. You know; the one who, before he writes that paragraph about music, really ought to learn how to play a chord.
Most Inappropriately Titled Album
Sarah Bareilles’s Amidst The Chaos is not quite the most middle manager-ish music out there — not as long as Ingrid Michaelson has a record deal. It’s still over-structured to the point of asphyxiation. Bareilles starts her songwriting sessions with a flowchart and ends them with a PowerPoint presentation, or at least it sounds that way. If there’s one thing she can’t stand, it’s chaos. That’s the diagnosis of the national predicament: we’re amidst the chaos, and if adult authorities were just to regain control and smooth out some of the perturbations, we could all return to the spa-like serenity that is, for bores, the ideal state of being. I kinda hate to break this to Sarah and co., but there’s not a heck of a lot of chaos in American public life at the moment. Chaos is not really the problem. Everything this government is doing is actually quite systematic. They’re just blunderers: they make unforced errors and muck their own plans up, and as people who don’t want to see them achieve their ghoulish objectives, we should receive every shoelace-trip as a blessing. Chaos implies randomness, and… yeah, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an administration or congressional leadership quite as predictable as this one. They always do exactly what you think they’re going to do. I’d welcome some chaos from these people, because that would open the possibility that they’d accidentally stumble into something productive. And it’d be nice to think we’re able to stop or reorient them, but in order for that to happen, we’ll have to show them that there are some electoral consequences to their actions. So far we haven’t done that. Imposition of order from some sort of extragovernmental big daddy – some independent or (gulp) international police force – is a fascist fantasy. In order to rid ourselves of this disease, the body politic, which is messy and sneezy on its best day, will have to get up and reince its priebus. We’re going to need a representative republic. That’s going to be pretty chaotic. To say the least.
And Finally
2019 was mainly phoney war, as they said in 1940. 2020 will be a different story altogether. I don’t think the networks are going to have to try so hard to drum up interest. For the first time in our adult lives, an incumbent president is going to be vulnerable, and voters may be able to do what the impeachment managers couldn’t. Most of the time, those in positions of authority assume that the chief is there for eight years; everybody in Washington was ready for the Obama takeover in 2007 and they planned and acted accordingly. Only the very gullible or the extraordinarily partisan believed that Mitt had any chance in 2012. Eight years and two elections later, it’s about to get dicy in the marbled halls of authority. Could a Democrat upend the apple cart?
I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible: 25%-35% possible, depending on who they nominate. Bets are going to have to be hedged. People in power are going to get nervous. And when the people in power get nervous, the people who aren’t in power tend to get hurt.
Now you may be one of those who believe that the fix is in, and some combination of oligarchs, global gangsters and wicked computer programmers have already guaranteed a victory for Republicans. You may be one of those who feel that machines in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were monkeyed with. And you may be right. But, hmm, I bet you aren’t. If the Republicans had any confidence that their dirty tricks would be effective (or even work any better than the compensatory dirty tricks of the Democrats) they wouldn’t be working as hard as they are to disenfranchise people. Republican legislators in dicey districts wouldn’t be throwing in the towel at a noteworthy clip. No, they’re more than a little spooked, these guys, because they realize that voters hold the hammer, and they hate that.
What this means, practically, is that we can all expect a propaganda campaign like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We’re going to be awash in a river of bullshit, and all manner of awful things are going to be justified as the in-party fights with claws out in an attempt to retain control. Collusion and foreign interference won’t be the half of it. My prediction is that you will barf, repeatedly. But as you are barfing, remember that the turbulence you encounter on flight 2020 is there because of the insecurity of the Republicans. Compare, always, to GWB’s smooth cruise to reelection — one that was never in doubt. Take a look, again, at the margins by which Trump won the states that he absolutely had to win in order to become president. Everything had to break his way. This time, he’ll have the power of incumbency and familiarity working for him, and yeah, that generally carries the day. But he’ll be entering the campaign with historically high negatives, and he’s not going to have Hillary Clinton as an opponent. His weakness is sometimes overblown by fantasists who imagine he’ll soon wake up in jail. But it’s real.
Consider also that Trump has never, ever had the consumer-cultural support that American strongmen generally do: under Bush, there was a cultural embargo that shut down all non-red-white-and-blue music for about four years. Trump doesn’t even have Nashville behind him. Instead they rush to praise Sturgill Simpson and the like for broadening the scope of music city sentiment and parodying masculinist imperatives, and, in general, acting like damn Democrats. They welcome weirdos into the sorority and make sages out of Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires for tweeting opprobrium in a Republican direction. With one exception that, as I see it, absolutely proves the rule, not a single artist of any significance has been willing to put on the red hat. That tells you nothing about Trump’s chances for re-election, but it does say plenty about the penetration of his ideas, such as they are, among younger people, some of whom may actually vote. We’ll see. In the meantime, don’t think I’m encouraging you to actually listen to the Sturgill Simpson album. Oh no, no, don’t… um, don’t do that.
Okay, as usual, I’ve got a last word for you. I’ll finish it as soon as I can. Thanks for rocking with me.
It’s about to get ugly — flow so mean, I just can’t be polite.
I have always loved music videos. I loved the first generation of grainy promotional spots for new wave bands, I loved Michael Jackson’s choreography and Russell Mulcahey’s cinematic interventions, I loved ZZ Top and their keychain and Prince humping the floor. It was all magic to me, and it continues to be a mystery why a director would ever shoot anything else. Movies, TV shows, documentaries: all of that seems like a wasted opportunity and a terrible misapplication of film stock. Year after year, music videos delivered for me in a way that no other filmed entertainment did.
So it is from my position as a dedicated and passionate follower of the form — a goof who knows all the dance steps in “Get Me Bodied” and Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” clip by heart, even if I can’t execute a single one — that I say 2018 was the best year ever for music videos. Old masters of aesthetic hyperactivity and condensed three-minute visual messages outdid themselves: Beyonce and Jay-Z hung in the Louvre, Janelle Monae draped her frames in the colors of the bi-pride flag, Drake gave away money and fired up the crowd and danced with the freaks in the French Quarter, and it all looked stunning. Youngartists who’ve shown some facility with the form took big steps forward, including Vince Staples, whose Google map-themed “Fun” clip was a distillation of everything he’s been trying to say about surveillance, voyeurism, and poverty porn, and Tyler and A$AP Rocky further sharpened their distinctive personalities in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, The 1975 nodded to Stop Making Sense and My Chemical Romance and Broadway theater; Mitski kept one-upping the arthouseflicks. Even musicians who don’t normally make good clips rose to the occasion in ’18. I’ve always thought music video was the weakest part of Kevin Barnes’s game, but his spot for “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia” captured his feelings of dislocation and outsiderdom (not to mention his seething aggression) better than all his other clips put together.
But the new video stars owned 2018, and — lucky us — it just so happened that the artists who made the best clips also made the best music. Rosalia took her place at the head of the class with three superb, interrelated clips for songs from El Mal Querer, and gave us the year’s most indelible images: the dance in the back of the moving truck, the bullfighter and the motorcycle, the robed cultist(?) takeover in the mansion, the girl frantically jumping on the bed. Kali Uchis wasn’t quite so arty, but she’s every bit as effective, and the long shot in the “Tyrant” clip through an infinite regress of car windows was my favorite special effect. Caroline Rose might be the funniest pop singer to emerge from the wilderness since Kate Miller-Heidke (and KMH isn’t too funny anymore); her clip for “Soul No. 5” was reminiscent of late ’70s Attractions videos. No matter how many times I see her drop that hula hoop, I still crack up.
And bouncing through contemporary music like unstoppable Evil Otto, shutting the boards down with a big grin and chasing us all around, was the incomparable Tierra Whack, the Rookie of the Year and some kind of off-the-wall North Philly visionary. The fifteen minute-long low-budget but oh-so-brilliant clips from Whack World are so good and so resourcefully made that I’m not sure people realize how great the songs are. Tierra Whack didn’t just demonstrate that she could bring developmental pop songs to a satisfying resolution in sixty seconds. She showed that she could do it straight across genre: that the conventions of power pop, trap music, smoky R&B and neo-soul, etc., were no obstacle to her. Then there were the lyrics, which were economical, quotable throughout, and exhibited deep understanding of hip-hop in its most elemental form.
Some critics have compared her to Missy Elliott. That’s not misleading. Missy would also boast in verse about how many vegetables she ate. But in practice, Whack World reminds me more of D. Boon, or those late ’60s Mothers of Invention albums where Frank Zappa kept jumping from fragment to fragment in a deliberate attempt to keep his listeners bewildered. Zappa had a wide open field on which to play. Tierra Whack is responding to the challenges of an era of constricted expressive opportunities. Music optimized for Instagram was bound to happen eventually, and if the platform exists, and it’s big and it’s wide, I can’t knock talented artists for jumping on up. In one quick stroke, she did what Kanye has been threatening to do since the beginning of the Pablo release cycle. She’s managed to reimagine what a pop album can be in the present media environment.
And yes, this is an album. Running length ain’t nothing but a number.
Album of the Year
Tierra Whack – Whack World
Natalie Prass – The Future And The Past
Boygenius – Boygenius
Rayland Baxter – Wide Awake
Janelle Monae – Dirty Computer
Pistol Annies – Interstate Gospel
Caroline Rose – Loner
Kali Uchis – Isolation
Rosalia – El Mal Querer
Elvis Costello & The Imposters – Look Now
Metric – Art Of Doubt
The Carters – Everything Is Love
Noname – Room 25
Teyana Taylor – K.T.S.E.
Earl Sweatshirt – Some Rap Songs
Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel
Saba – Care For Me
Francis And The Lights – Just For Us
Rubblebucket – Sun Machine
Black Milk – Fever
Best Album Title
The best title is probably TransangelicExodus, since it manages to nod to Ezra’s four obsessions — queerness, spirituality, Jewish identity, and escape — in two words and seven syllables. But my favorite is Lost In Beaucaire by a French band called Woody Murder Mystery. Their sound is mildly psychedelic, like a blunt filled with herbs de Provence. Beaucaire is actually close to Provence: not on the French Riviera but tucked into the countryside where cattle have more rights than people. My suspicion is that the cow on the cover of Atom Heart Mother had something to do with the making of this album because it reminds me of an early Floyd soundtrack: it’s lazy without being listless, melodic but not overly so, dotted with zone-out stretches and too-brief moments of accidental beauty, and decorated with combo organ that sounds as if it is drifting down the hall of an abandoned church. No instrumentalist in this group can hold a candle to Wright or Gilmour, or, for that matter, Sean O’Hagan or Marcus Holdaway. But what do you expect from cows? They don’t even have fingers. They just have to hoof the fretboard and hope they luck into some consonance.
Best Album Cover
Cardi B’s Invasion Of Privacy. The album is… it’s good, really. I like her; I think she’s a fun character. But let’s not go overboard here. Look, the worst thing about Whitey is how credulous he is. Whitey will swallow anything. The next time some wiseass economic determinist tries to tell you about how capitalism has been so much more “successful” in the West than it has in, say, darkest Africa, you might remind him that this is because the white man is so damn gullible that the wheels of commerce face no impediment here. Packaged properly, there is nothing he will not buy. I speak from experience. I myself am of the Caucasian persuasion, and I will shell out for whatever you’ve got and accept any bullshit line that flatters any object I fancy. Jay-Z as a statesman? Sure, I’ll buy it. Beyonce as an articulate spokeswoman for social justice? Yes, that sounds about right, he says, admiring that ass. Oprah as presidential timber? Sure, why not?, beats the alternative, yuk yuk. But there are bridges too far even for me, and Cardi B, feminist hero?, that’s too far on the distant shore. This Bronx loudmouth – who believes that face down ass up equals perfect posture – has made a solid corporate rap album, nothing more or less. Those hard consonants and trap beats you hear are the clinking and clanking of a capitalist tool. Believe me, I don’t begrudge her those money moves. This is showbiz, we all ride our gimmicks as far as we can take them, and Cardi appears to be built to ride hers reasonably far. What I can’t handle is the conviction among those who ought to know better that Cardi’s grueling sexploitation rhymes and her rote (if funny) power bottoming are salutary political statements. The next thing you people are going to tell me that some gross Louisiana stripper and her sleazeball attorney are some kind of freedom fighters, and put them on TV all the time. Oh, wait. Hm.
Best Liner Notes And Packaging
Twin Fantasy by Car Seat Headrest. Will “Holy” Toledo isn’t the thinker that Ezra Furman is, which keeps him free from certain writerly pitfalls, and the noisiness of his new set comes with a built-in excuse: its template version was cut in 2011 and released on MyHamper, or Bandspace, or whatever, when he was four years old or thereabouts. It gathered a passionate cult following, which means the fi of the redraft can’t be allowed to drift too hi. Which it doesn’t, but I’m sure the fans of tape hiss still complained bitterly. Just to make sure you’re getting what you want, Toledo has packaged the original in a double disc set with the new one, so those of you with a compare and contrast essay overdue can look no further for a subject. Once again, Toledo lets the songs run all day, long as the hut of Baba Yaga, and he doesn’t really have the musical or lyrical ideas to justify the excess. On Teens Of Denial, he whomped up stories about drug abuse and aimless youth into bracing but somewhat empty epics; here, his subject is the Namblafied relationship between the narrator and an older man. Since he’s interested in actual people and not anything as nebulous as a generation, these stories achieve a kind of narrative traction that’s absent in his other work. Go back to go forward, vol. 4080.
Most Welcome Surprise
The Future And The Past. The point of pop production is to create a sonic environment for the storyteller/main personality to inhabit. That’s it; that’s the whole job. Complicating the job, though, is the artist, who often wants her record to sound exactly like something else, and who hires the producer to make this happen. Make my record sound like Van Morrison in 1972, and never you mind that there is only one Van the Man. Natalie Prass has been working with Matthew E. Smith since she was a kid, and together they have ideas: on the self-titled set, they made like she was a blue-eyed soul singer akin to Dusty Springfield. It was a really well-appointed simulation they crafted over there at Spacebomb, even if it wasn’t exactly imaginative. The problem was that they were writing checks that Natalie Prass’s voice couldn’t cash. (Then there was “Christy”, and the less said about that the better). For album number two, they switched it up – which is something most AM gold fetishists never do – and I’ll be damned if they haven’t arrived at something new under the sun. The Future And The Past answers the following question that nobody has ever asked: what would the Kamakiriad have sounded like with Jenny Lewis in the driver’s seat and machine beats provided by, say, Pete Rock? Never mind worrying if the voice doesn’t fit with the style, because there won’t be any prior model to compare the music to. My feeling is that the ‘70s-loving fans of Natalie Prass are having a hard time warming up to this, which is a shame, since syncopation plus electrofunk grooves plus jazz piano plus hefty appropriation from black American music usually equals Steely Dan. Also getting lost in the shuffle is the political content: 80% of this album is fighting words aimed at the Prez and his followers. Because she is such a pipsqueak it can be hard to register her protest as such. But when she says “we’ll take you on/we can take you all” in “Hot For The Mountain, you can damn well feel that itch in her voting finger. Do I believe that a coalition of the twee is poised to bring down this charmless regime? No, but I’m a cynical old cuss who has lost too many elections, so don’t mind me. Do I believe that Natalie believes it? Well… I’ll tell you this much: “Sisters” slams as hard as any hip-hop I’ve heard this year. So don’t fuck with the Richmond kids. They’re tougher than they look and they’re loaded for bear. Also, Virginia’s not a swing state anymore. The Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of pop albums.
Biggest Disappointment
Daytona/Kids See Ghosts/Nasir. It’s possible to applaud Kanye for rethinking the release strategy for the modern age while still recognizing these for what they are. They’re EPs. i.e, extended play. There’s something you want to play for your listeners, and it contains more ideas than what you’d get on a single plus flip side, so you extend those ideas through a few more songs, and you leave it at that. There are many short sets that do the work of an album better than traditional LPs do – numbers one and three on the list above, just for starters. But not all artists are suited for the EP format, and Kanye’s insistence on a one-size-fits-all strategy doesn’t work for his current rap clients. Your modern Nas is generally just warming up by song seven, and it feels almost cruel to yank the platform away from him before he has a chance to hit his stride. He’s not an extended player: he wants to spin a wide web of associations before he turns his attention to fly-catching. Cudi, on the other hand, is going to give you the same thing in twenty seconds as he is in twenty hours. he peddles a certain sonic effervescence that stays frothy enough in a bottle of any size. On Kids See Ghosts, the EP length feels totally arbitrary: it’s more about Kanye’s numerological obsessions than what suits Cudi best. As for little brother Terrence, he’s a team player, and he’ll always work with what you give him. I do find it amusing, though, that certain Johnny-come-lately critics are treating Daytona like some kind of artistic breakthrough. Listen: Pusha T has always been great. Always. He was great in the Clipse, he was great on the Timbaland productions, and he was even great on those stupid Wrath Of Caine mixtapes that he probably made between bites of Arby’s. As a dedicated fan, I’d like more than seven tracks of that greatness, and I take Kanye’s parsimoniousness as a personal affront. Troll me with your MAGA hat if you must, but don’t short-pour me my Pusha T. All that registered, I do give Yeezy his props for bending all of these tough-guy characters to his will. Here’s the infamous cocaine slinger, the legendary street poet of the Queensbridge projects, and “the most influential vocalist of the past twenty years” (Kanye’s belief, not mine, but I understand where he’s coming from). Look at them all jump to the beat of the producer’s baton. Look at them indulge his dumbass whims. Not just any producer, either — a gay fish in a pink polo shirt. Lets you know who really holds the power in hip-hop.
Nicest Try
Brockhampton – Iridescence. Gotta hand it to these kids. While everybody else is making hip-hop smoothed out on the r&b tip with the pop feeeel appeeeel to it, they remain as annoying as a bag of bugs. Abrasive beats, throwback DAS EFX flows with hoobaly boobaly rimbally bimbally all up in your face, drum machines on the “broken typewriter” and “broken slot machine” settings, fax noises, Pathmark pickup on aisle 3 vocal filters, etcetera. They continue to refer to themselves as a boy band, and who am I to question their boyness? Four albums in, and Kevin Abstract remains the only recognizable voice. Other emcees in this cast of thousands range from mumbling Mafiosos to token white guys to would-be Eminems in matricide mode to dudes reminiscent of the guy on the old De La Soul albums who did the Guido impersonation. Oh, and there’s a power ballad with a children’s gospel choir on it. That’s the meaningful tune. Also, there’s a big finish. Big finish!
Album That Opens Most Strongly
Room 25. From the further adventures of Fatimah Warner: tenement floors scrubbed with Pine-Sol, tickets to Warriors-Cavs Game 5, reading Toni Morrison in a canoe, Sunny Delight, faded dungarees, giving a blowjob to a kid with Adidas on, inmate registries, opinions on Africa as a concept and the continuing career of Morgan Freeman even after getting #MeToo-ed, marijuana, biscotti, hot tamales. I mean, god bless hip-hop, right? Where else do they even bother?
Most Consistent Album
Just For Us. I could get used to this new level of productivity from the king of redaction. Twenty new songs in less than eighteen months?; that’s almost a normal pace. Maybe Francis has just gotten more confident, though confidence might just make him edit more rigorously. A new Francis project doesn’t get released – it just slips through the exhaust vents in his towering quality control firewall. That’s probably why he never publicizes them. He just leaves them on the internet and runs. Just For Us splits the difference between the trad. piano pop of It’ll Be Better and the vox-FX experimentation of Farewell, Starlite!, but it’s more of a mood piece than either one, and i suspect it contains fewer highlights. Time will tell, unless it doesn’t. One wag in the YouTube comments suggests that it tells its story in reverse, like undun or DAMN. I’d wager it’s so airtight that you could slice it up and reassemble it however you pleased, and it would provide the same experience. Francis’s music exists in stasis: there are really no directions to travel, it just spreads and fills the horizon until the record ends. That’s only one of the many weird effects produced by his chronomancy.
Most Unfairly Maligned Artist
J. Cole reminds me of The Economist in that he insists on talking to his audience as if it consists of adults. Why he persists (and why they persist) I have no idea. Because of this affront, rap listeners outside of the cult – a very large cult, mind you – call him dry. Readers who have come to expect jolly vindictiveness from journalists say the same thing about The Economist. They’re all wrong. Some critics have gotten on Cole because of the nullification-via-technological-revolution argument in “Brackets”, but would you people rather have him rap about capping the President? Wait, don’t answer that. Funny how J. Cole has been getting less corny as Kendrick’s corniness continues to spike, right there in public in front of the Pulitzer committee, but that’s not something I’d expect superficial listeners, or haters, to notice. I only wish they’d give Cole his props for a first-class trolling job. Releasing his anti-drug album on 4/20?, that’s like something Kanye would do. Kanye or Jerry Falwell, Jr.
Heading For The Cliff
For what it’s worth, I am not of the party that believes that Jack White has lost his marbles. Even during the heyday of the White Stripes, his motivation was never clear to me. Was he a dedicated traditionalist hiding his back-to-basics aims behind a patina of showbiz schtick, or was he a satirist sending up classic American pop styles? Or was he just frustrated that the lane for guitar heroes had gotten so narrow? Boarding House Reach suggests none of the above – instead, this is Jack as the mook, drunk and stumbling through the convenience store of American pop at 3 a.m., pawing all the merch, ripping the cover off of hip-hop, or country, with his teeth, and cramming the contents into his mouth without paying. When the clerk says hey, Jack, you do realize there’s a price tag on that there rapper, he’s like fuck youuuuuuu pal, I am Jack White, incipient Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, and I will do what I want. Angrily, with a sense of utter entitlement, right in the corner by the john and the washbucket and the security cameras, until the cops come and drag him away.
Album I Regret Giving The Time Of Day To
Poppy – Am I A Girl? I had Poppy as Rookie Of The Year last year and I don’t take it back. Moriah Pereira figured out a way to get the Internet to work for her rather than getting flattened by the rest of it like the rest of us have. But 2018 has hammered home the difference between a youtube satirist with limited, if charming, musical gifts, and a genuine revelatory pop talent such as Tierra Whack. Are you using new media to advance your writing, or are you defined by its constraints? On Poppy.Computer, Poppy played Poppy – it might not have been as creepy (or brilliant) as the video clips, but it was the same character with many of the same props and gags and in-jokes and whatnot. In a way, it was the soundtrack to an episodic film project, much like the score to the Muppet Movie. You don’t learn everything about the Muppets from “Movin Right Along”, but it is in all ways the same damn Kermit. On Am I A Girl?, Pereira takes some tentative steps away from the character she’s created, and when she tries to put her foot down, there’s nothing there to stand on. There to hold her arm as she stumbles is Diplo, who has gifted her with a good track but otherwise leeched out her idiosyncrasy and shattered the illusion in the name of what?, mainstream acceptance? Like that’s going to happen. The model here is Grimes, who can’t sing either, and look!, there she is on “Play Destroy”, sounding so much like Poppy (and Poppy like Grimes) that you’ll wonder why they bothered. The big departures here are two hard rock numbers indebted to a ridiculous degree to Babymetal. I have no doubt that Moriah Pereira enjoys death/thrash/doom as much as the next headbanger, and I’m also sure that she and Titanic Sinclair (and maybe even Diplo, between bong hits) consider this a provocative juxtaposition in keeping with the Poppy character as we’ve come to know it. But it’s not. Poppy stole plenty from Japanese pop on her debut, but she was never desperate enough to stoop to pastiche. She stood for a kind of disturbing, machine-processed seamlessness that is probably unrecoverable to her after this one. Unless everybody just forgets about this album. And hey, I already did.
Elvis Costello & The Imposters – “Suspect My Tears”
Of Montreal – “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia”
Teyana Taylor – “WTP”
Rosalia – “Piensa En Tu Mira”
Travis Scott & Drake – “Sicko Mode”
Bad Bad Hats – “Nothing Gets Me High”
Camila Cabello – “Never Be The Same”
The Aces – “Just Like That”
Caroline Rose – “Bikini”
Most Romantic Song
Eleanor Friedberger -“Make Me A Song”. Rebound: named for a dance club in Athens. That’s your first clue that something important has changed. Your second clue is everything else.
Most Moving Song
Andrew McMahon’s “House In The Trees”.
Funniest Song
Tierra Whack’s “Fruit Salad”. It’s all in the way she sings “vegetaboooools”.
Most Inspiring Song
“Django Jane”. Some of my pals accused Janelle Monae of retardating on the new one. Technically they’re right: she returns from Hollywood with the density and conceptual complexity of her recordings pruned back so far you can see the bark on the trunk. This happens to people who move out to L.A., right, Will Sheff? But Janelle was already so far ahead of the competition that I’m not surprised that true fans (i won’t say fandroids) aren’t noticing. Honestly, the futurespace/sci-fi robot/transhuman stuff was the only part of the Monae project that never worked for me – I’ve always preferred her in Girl James Brown mode – so I don’t mind that Dirty Computer isn’t set on the moon in the twenty-eighth century or whatever. (I do miss Deejay Crash Crash a little.) The style here is ’80s carnival music: not just the Prince, Janet Jackson, and Madonna nods you were expecting, but also a considerable amount of Kenny Loggins and Huey Lewis, too. Anything you might have heard on a fairground during the Reagan Administration, in other words. The man who pushes the big red START button on the Tilt-A-Whirl is Nate “Rocket” Wonder, who plays everything, brilliantly, and produced most of the album, too. He’s no spaceman – he’s a terrestrial boogie monster who is completely down with the day-glo motif. I am sure that in Janelle’s mind there’s some wigged-out Octavia Butler narrative underpinning the storytelling But there’s nothing on this set about computers, and despite such songs as “Let’s Get Screwed”, it’s not too dirty, either. Instead, the project is a straightforward Lemonade-ish reaction to black women getting run down, pretty much all day, in public, by assholes in power. This does not require nuanced, deeply metaphorical language involving Jupiter and spaceships. It may help to be as blunt as possible. It may also help to dispense with the transhumanity and embrace your plain-old-humanity. You might say: I have rights; I’m entitled to the same things you are. I’m entitled to my sexuality, my fantasies, and my fun. I am beautiful, no matter how you jerks rate me. The way you behave scares me. Your words hurt me, and unless you’re okay with that, you might think twice before saying them. Your actions are cruel, and unless you’re okay with that, you might think twice before doing them. I deserve – I demand – your respect. If all of that sounds obvious, and basic, but it still desperately needs to be said, well, whose fault is that?
Meanest Song
Pusha T, “The Story Of Adidon”. Making fun of Drake: that’s fair game, if it’s how you get your jollies. Making fun of Drake’s producer for having multiple sclerosis — that just makes you look like a jerk. Gratuitous cruelty is part of Pusha’s brand, I guess, but there’s no need to be so petty about it, or to drag innocents into the dumbest and most pointless of rap battles.
Saddest Song
Pretty much everything on Fred Thomas’s Aftering, especially “House Show, Late December”: eight-plus minutes of despondent poetry recited over scratchy midwest emo guitar-and-drums. With dead-eyed accuracy, he paints the picture of an unpleasantly inebriated party of miserable rockers pointlessly grinding it out in squalid surroundings. Also, unlike certain fingers-crossed complainers who are secretly enjoying the era of governtaiment, his reflections on current electoral outcomes feel genuinely pained. In between complaints about the aimlessness of life and protests-too-much about going sober, he does manage to indie-rock a little – in as dour a manner as possible, mind you. If you’re not exactly an “up” person either, you might find a kindred spirit here.
Sexiest Song
Probably Natalie Prass’s “Hot For The Mountain”. I find the idea of young women seizing political power sexy. I think I’d find the reality of it even sexier, so here’s hoping. Also, I feel the need to say that Noname’s new songs seem like they’re about sex between actual human beings, rather than bizarre archetypes, and that’s pretty refreshing in this pop environment.
Most Notable Cover Version
Somebody’s gonna tell you Anderson East has a voice like Van The Man. Really, it’s Bullet Bob all the way, right down to the ironworker clang of his consonants and the steam heat of his phrasing. I get such a manly, gristly, silver bullet feel from his rip-roarin’ cover of Ted Hawkins’s “Sorry You’re Sick” that I think I’ve just grown a beard. His version of R&B is built for opening shows, which is what makes it grabby; unfortch, those shows are in basketball arenas, which is what makes it dumb. Albums like his don’t tend to have any legs — the very point is that you’ve heard it all before, and with each listen, the maudlin elements of his storytelling further overwhelm the rest of the sentiment. But it sure is a blast to listen to him sing.
Best Guest Appearance
Saba and Smino on Room 25
Best Show I Saw In 2018
Jenny Lewis, White Eagle Hall. Honorable mentions: Lucy Rose at Le Poisson Rouge, and my old buddies in Belle & Sebastian at Forest Hills Stadium. How To Solve Our Human Problems isn’t a high point in the B&S discography or anything, but it’s got its nifty moments, and I, for one, am glad they keep padding out their story with extra chapters. It’s been, oh, fifteen years since Stuart Murdoch eloped with Miss Private, and although he continues to insist on hiring cute backing singers – oh, like you wouldn’t — there’s no evidence that he’s straying. Tigermilk-style revenge and wandering-bard fantasies still lurk in the dusty bagpipe of his heart, I am sure. But he’s got a kid now as well as a loving wife/photographer, and he doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who’d turn down a home and hearth combo package when it’s offered to him. He’s dealt with the challenge of domestic tranquility rather creatively, receding into new wave nostalgia and “songwriting excellence”, and leaning hard on the society of his band, which, in its mix of goofball personalities and its consistent flashes of gentle wit and ramshackle wisdom (not to mention the loose, sprawling feel-good shows), becomes more like the Grateful Dead with each passing year. For the first time, I feel the absence of Mick Cooke, who sure could have punched up the fake Northern Soul arrangements on Human Problems, and Stuart’s many nips away from the spotlight are not without their cost (“Cornflakes”, echchchchch). Sarah Martin continues to pick up the slack, though. Also, “I’ll Be Your Pilot” is a genuine rarity: a letter-to-my-child song that doesn’t play as a grotesque self-justification. Imagine this from the kid’s perspective – who would you rather have as a dad, Stuart, or Sturgill Simpson? Which one is going to take you out for ice cream, and which one will you discover drunk on the kitchen floor? Let’s not even drag Andrew McMahon into this. Stick with stuart. You’ll have a nice time at the fair.
Best Singing
Danielle Balbuena, a.k.a. 070 Shake. This is the Jersey girl who put her hand on the stove to see if she still bleeds. She defends that line, by the way, so you smartasses can stand down: she says that if you burn yourself badly enough, the wound will actually open. I don’t know if she’s speaking from experience; the point is that she is calling out her critics as unburnt softies — people who do not have the same experience with pain as she does. I doubt Kanye cares one way or another. You can see what prompted him to press-gang her into the G.O.O.D. music content farm: Glitter sounds a good bit more troubled than Kanye, who is merely insane, has allowed himself to be in the past few years. Kanye has been driven mad from nonstop exposure to fame and the news cycle; it’s the dullest story in California, and his insistence on rehashing it as if it’s news has been having a deleterious effect on his artistry. 070 Shake behaves like she’s got no idea there’s even such thing as fame, or an Internet, or electricity. Instead, she sings like a woman brooding over heartbreak in a cold room, maybe by a railroad trestle, who hasn’t eaten or had a bath or seen a bright light in days. It’s snowing and the sun isn’t up, and she made it to the stop only to see the Bergenline bus pulling away. She’s singing the blues, in other words — and that will never go out of style. The EP isn’t all aces, and in the future she’s going to have to vary the emotional tone somewhat. But there’s good reason to believe she’s more than the new Fetty Wap.
Best Singing Voice
Cristal Ramirez of The Aces. She’s from Utah, of all places, which might help to explain why the world didn’t exactly pick up on When My Heart Felt Volcanic. Imagine doing the rock up in those dry Mormon hills. But rock they do: to be precise, The Aces mimic the crisp, professional, ruthlessly efficient pop-rock of big-money female-fronted pop-rock acts with astonishing fidelity – Carly Rae Jepsen, post-Farro Paramore, Chvrches, straight-pop T. Swift, Lorde, that last Grimes album, Haim. Haim especially. And lookit, I didn’t think it was possible to be any more faceless than Haim, but The Aces have proven me wrong. Personalities may emerge as I listen to this more – and I sure will listen to this more – but I’m not betting on it; I mean, this band has included its business plan in the liner notes.
Best Rapping
Saba
Best Vocal Harmonies
Boygenius. Just call them the Pistol Elfies, with Ms. Dacus in the role of Miranda Lambert (the natural), Rappin’ Phoebe B as a West Coast Angaleena Presley (the wry, lyrical one), and Julien Baker as Monroe Suede (high voice, high strung, tendency to dance on the edge of emotional breakdown). Because they’re indie rockers and not trad. country singers, they’re under no pressure to write a hit; because they’re elves, they get +1 to INT and DEX and only a mild penalty applied to constitution. Also: combat bonuses with bow and arrow. I’m impressed by how they’ve reinforced each other strengths without accidentally amplifying any of their weaknesses: the way Phoebe’s er, unusual way of putting things manages to shake up Lucy Dacus’s writing, which was getting a little poker-faced on Historian, or how Lucy’s mahogany alto warms up Julien Baker’s wail-of-the-banshee act, or how Julien’s emo guitar punches up her pals’ usual stately classic rock arrangements. Lucy Dacus’s two songs here strike me as her best of the year, easily. As for Julien Baker, I’ve never thought she was best straight-up notes and chords songwriter: her diatonic, circular numbers rely on emotional crescendos to get over. Here she gets to sing in such tight harmony that she’s sometimes rendered a sound effect — she’s the teakettle whistling when things really come to a boil. It’s a good role for her, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the ballast that her partners provide. Nobody dominates: Boygenius really does give the impression that all three members are equal contributors less interested in jockeying for position than in making great music. Just like the Pistol Annies, in other words. I won’t say that more excellent artists ought to do the GTR thing and join forces, because I’d wager that it’s the rare frontperson who can put her ego in check long enough to sustain such a balanced collaboration. After all, has it not been said that when the heart rules the mind, one look, and love is blind. If you want the dream to last, call it a day after six songs. Plenty of cover for that decision in the year when everything was too damned short.
Best Bass Playing
Black Milk. And while I’m at it:
Best Production and Best Beat Programming
I don’t ask the universe for justice or the industry for fairness. I’m just saying that if Black Milk ever won a Grammy for what he does — pretty much every year — that’d be mighty nice. Honorable mention: Iman Omari for his work on the Cavalier album. Forget Mantovanni and Barry Manilow: this is some of the most beautiful music you’ll ever hear. That EZ listening sound. Your elevator oughta be so lucky. Black Milk is so self-effacing that he might have dropped off of your radar — he’s the Detroit cat who still must suffer constant comparisons to J. Dilla even though he stepped out of that shadow years ago. The sounds he produces are so winsome and so rusty-city cinematic that if his rapping is any good at all, his records shine. Unfortunately, in the past, he has often rapped like a pharma sales rep in the midst of a power point presentation. In 2018 he was motivated, and he kept Fever at a nice simmer. That’s probably as high as the burners on this reliable old stove go up; don’t twist them any harder, they’ll break. Cavalier is a New Orleans kid I’d never heard of. Turns out he is a fine, very thorough rapper from the Okayplayer school of verbal density and social conscience. Sometimes — well, rarely — he’s even funny, which gives him one on Black Milk. His ace in the hole is Iman Omari, whose peculiar sense of time and playful relationship to the beat remind me of… well, they remind me of Black Milk, to be honest. Also, these two emcees kick it on similar topics: police brutality, phonies, disloyalty among friends, how us menfolk oughta treat the wimmen better, phonies (aren’t they something), the struggle for black self-affirmation in a society determined to hold nonwhites in psychological bondage, ass (but respectfully), phonies (aren’t they awful). I only wish Cavalier would release his project on CD like Black Milk did. Fat chance of that happening in these plastic elastic days when only Olivia Newton John is allowed to get physical. These poor millennial schmucks better hope that the cloud really is as permanent as Zuckerberg says it is.
Best Live Drumming
Stephane St. John and Domenico Lancellotti on The Good Is A Big God. You’d figure that a record made by a curly-headed brazilian who has collaborated with Caetano and Moreno Veloso and produced, no less, by Sean O’Hagan would fit my sweet spot squarely. And it does, sort of, though this samba never achieves the sunburnt radiance I associate with Tropicalia. At its best it does indeed approach the rhythmic (though never the sexual) intensity of Transa and the curiously friction-free juxtapositions of Hawaii. Much of this is as soporific as the waves, though. Nifty late nite music in any case.
Best Synthesizer Playing
Mildlife. This was a Youtube discovery: it was posted to Provocative Educative!, the same channel that tipped me off to the Jazz Spastiks and the last Open Mike Eagle record. in ’18, a lot of the stuff they pushed on me was jazz, not hip-hop, and I’m beginning to hear the hoofbeats of a Trojan horse. But who among you is above a little saxophone in the evening? Mildlife doesn’t hip-hop at all — they’re a prog-jazz fusion act with extremely incidental vox, and if that sounds dreadful, remember that Air fits the description too. I’ve turned to Mildlife when I’ve had enough of Talkie Walkie and 10 000 Hz Legend, and even though these Aussie knob-twiddlers are very different animals from Godin and Dunckel, their music scratches a similar itch. Maybe not at the base of the spine; farther along the shoulder blade. What you’re getting here is a congenial relationship between the bassist, who is content to lay down those hypergroovy, mechanical “Femme D’Argent”-type parts, and the analog synth player, who is a flucking wizard. Once they get the jam where they want it, the whole band locks in and starts cooking, as the jazzbos like to say, and here I really do feel the force of the metaphor: it’s like the moment when the celery and carrots and starch sizzle into a roux at the bottom of a cast iron pan. Along the way some buttinsky or another sings something that might be words? In Australian? Dude may just be marking time. If it makes enough of an impression on you that you figure out what he’s on about, let me know.
Best Organ Playing
Thank you, Caroline Rose, for bringing back demented roller-rink combo organ. We expect male singer-songwriters of a certain type (funny looking) to affect a sarcastic outlook as a defense mechanism, but girls who do the same are banished to the Siberia of stand-up comedy — something I have no doubt Rose could do if she wanted to, so I hope to hell she doesn’t want to. It’d be a waste of the singular sneering-robot voice she’s developed. She applies it to great effect throughout an album that contains some of the best tawdry boardwalk-town Farfisa-centric arrangements since the heyday of Joe “King” Carrasco and the Crowns. I like it on the takedown of the music biz dickhead (“all you gotta do is put on this little bikini/and d-d-d-dance!”) and the one where they do it for the money (“they did it for the money”), and I like it even better when she plays it straight and admits that modern alienation is getting to her. But I like it best on the one where she jokes so hard about having soul that it soon becomes clear it’s no joke. I mean, what is soul but irreducible personality?, and doesn’t she have that in spades? Loner wasn’t my absolute favorite album of 2018, but there was no album I rooted any harder to sell. I’d hate to see her chuck it and start writing woke gags for Samantha Bee. What a loss for the good guys, as Jenny Lewis might put it.
Best Guitar Playing
Kerry Alexander of Bad Bad Hats. Lightning Round was made with an eye on the big time: it is slicker, more processed and pro, more to-the-moment, more synth-heavy, and frankly, less twee than anything BBH has done before. The guitar is still there, thank goodness, and while it doesn’t drive any of the songs the way it did on Psychic Reader, I dare say that Kerry Alexander is better than ever. In fact she is using the guitar exactly how I always want pop-rock musicians to use it: picking spots, teasing out lead lines that echo her melodies, amplifying the rhythm section at strategic moments, adding coloring and shading. It’s almost like… she knows what she’s doing. Imagine that.
Best Instrumental Solo
Francis’s weird-ass punch-card computer meltdown on “Tear It Up”. It’s about four notes, but they do the work of four hundred.
Best Arrangements
Rosalia’s album is short, and about a third of it feels like moody American R&B in the current Beyonce-derived style; nothing to kick out of bed, certainly, but also nothing you haven’t heard earlier today. But the balance of El Mal Querer consists of a flamenco-latin pop-trap music hybrid that may indeed mark Rosalia as some kind of crazed post-ethnic genius. It’s jam-packed with cubic inches of musical ideas, too, at a density that recalls the Tierra Whack project. Track number two, for instance, strikes me as blown-out prog flamenco, or maybe all flamenco is as mesmerizing as this? (I doubt it). All of it is sung in Spanish, naturally, so you MAGA hat wearers might not be feeling it. Yet it strikes me that unlike Natalia Lafourcade, who wraps up her dazzling Latinx indiepop and folklorico in the sharpest threads imaginable, Rosalia is so comfortable handling sleaze – just check out the fantastic videos – that El Mal Querer might just penetrate the American market. J/k, I’m sure this will be about as welcome as the immigrant caravan. Oh: straight from the With Friends Like These department, Rosalia’s achievement was greeted with a bouquet of articles accusing her of cultural appropriation. Apparently she’s not from the proper subdivision of Spain that would authorize her to make use of gypsy signifiers and seriously?, what the fuck is wrong with us? Has it really come to this? Of course Rosalia is a child of privilege – you could never make an album like this unless you had lessons and/or a big budget. Who the fuck cares? Would you rather Rosalia embrace an identity as a corporate raider and leave El Mal Querer unmade? Sometimes I think we don’t even deserve music.
Best Songwriting
Tierra Whack
G.O.A.T.
Let me begin by saying I don’t think Look Now is as good as Painted From Memory. No “God Give Me Strength” or “Tears At The Birthday Party” here. But it is a lot closer than you’d wager, and Painted From Memory – which was, you’ll recall, received upon release as a late-period high point and a possible last gasp – was twenty years ago. It is absolutely stupefying that Elvis Costello continues to write and sing and bandlead and concept-master at this level at sixty five years old. Great musicians way younger than he is have already entered the recursive period of their runs, or just hung them up. Compare Look Now, which has the creative restlessness and depth of vision of an artist in his prime, to something like Graham Parker’s Cloud Symbols, which is just a fun reiteration of what we all loved about the Rumor in the ’70s and early ’80s. Consider also that “Isabelle In Tears”, which would be a centerpiece of anybody else’s set, didn’t even make the album. If you want it, you’ve got to get the deluxe version. He’s in his seventh decade and he’s still sneezing out magnificent b-sides. It’s downright ridiculous how much water in this well: it defies everything we know about artistry, and aging, and energy, and human frailty. And I have to say that the spot atop the career value list isn’t open to debate anymore, if it ever was. I guess you could make a case for Dylan if you wanted to weight cultural significance heavily (I don’t), or Paul Simon, if you really dig theft. But with all respect to the forerunners, Dylan never wrote as crisply or with so much courage as Elvis Costello does, and Paul Simon wasn’t anywhere near as prolific. Absolutely nothing has deteriorated: not the pen, not the voice, not the sense of literary irony, certainly not the stakes. This is probably his most Broadway set ever, which, in the context of his long arc, strikes me as just another successful experiment. He’s singing from the point of view of women, and inhabiting those perspectives with a little more sensitivity than Woody Allen does, but he never handles it with so much care that the essential desperation that has always motivated him gets subsumed by his sense of social responsibility or fair play. It’s not that he doesn’t give a fuck, because I’m pretty sure he does, it’s that he knows damn well what’ll keep him running. I guess you could compare it to Sondheim, but Sondheim puts out a musical once in a blue moon. And Sondheim never could have written “The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes”. Maybe Richard Rodgers could have. That’s who Elvis Costello is: a rocking Richard Rodgers. We’ll never see the like again.
Best Lyrics Over The Course Of An Album
Every line on Whack World is a hip-hop quotable, but I’ve got to give this one to Saba, who may just turn out to be Chicago’s MVP now that Chance has entered politics, or a monastery, or something. If the Windy City ’18 sound isn’t quite as rapturous as it was a scant few moons ago, well, in retrospect that exuberance was probably unsustainable. You’re only the king of the after-school programme for a semester at best. Saba, to be fair, was never big man on campus: he’s always been the nerd at home neither in the streets nor in the halls of the academy. Care For Me is a My Bodyguard story about the Pivot Gang roughneck who serves as his tor/mentor and protector until he is, all too predictably, slain, “for a coat”, we’re told, right off the bat, in the same neighborhoods Saba love-hates. In the density and agility of the storytelling — not to mention the occasional greyness of the production — the album resembles J. Cole’s For Your Eyez Only. A lot.
Insistent on her derecho de nacimiento: Natalia Lafourcade.
Most Convincing Historical Re-creation
Father John Misty — God’s Favorite Customer. For once this guy served me an onion that doesn’t make me want to cry when I slice it. Of course he did it by abandoning the pretense that he’s a Randy Newman acolyte and mimicking Elton John instead. Elton, great as he is, we can do; Randy is inimitable. FJM is such a skilled singer that he really does approach the soapy, soupy, soppy quality of early ’70s records like Madman Over The Water. The lyrics are still too dumb to justify their pomposity, but at least for once, he’s being historically accurate: Bernie Taupin was pompous and dumb, too.
2018 Album That Wore Out Most Quickly
Tinashe’s Joyride. The latest from this still-young and talented artist is, like everything she’s done, a mixed bag: some Beyonce-ish piano balladry, some of that smoke-ring R&B she’s made her name with, some boilerplate sex-me-now pop that could have been singer-songwritten by any old chanteuse, and expensive guest verses from various Migos and their ilk, all of whom proceed with absolute indifference to the subject matter and emotional tenor of the songs. We’ve been here before with Tinashe: this ringmaster cannot control the circus held in her own name. Her mixtapes, uneven though they are, had sonic consistency to them because she produced them herself; Aquarius, her prior studio album, was as bumpy a ride as this is, but it had a couple of hits on it. This doesn’t. This’ll be the fourth time I write that Tinashe has everything you need to be a big star, which is about three times too many. It pleases me that she proceeds with an ingenue’s indifference to the politics of the biz, but in pop, you can only get away with that for so long. This was probably her shot, and her big-money backers aren’t going to be pleased with the outcome. Like another major-label misfit once found out, if you do not want what you haven’t got, it’s a sure thing you won’t be getting what you do not have. Capitalism: built to reward the hungry.
2018 Album You Listened To The Most
Isolation
Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should
Quelle Chris & Jean Grae
Thing You Feel Cheapest About Liking
K.T.S.E. Well, what do you know: the most complete statement out of Camp Kanye this Yeezy season turned out to be the afterthought. Some of his productions for Teyana Taylor are redolent of the “old Kanye” in that they do recall the era when he’d just speed up a soul sample and pinch some tinny drums from a MIDI bank and call it a completed work. But Taylor is such a miracle of a singer that it hardly matters, just like it’s never an issue that her lyrics are so stupid that she actually manages to make a three-way sound unappetizing. I didn’t think that was possible. “Hurry Hurry” is barely even a song: it’s just some sex groaning and a guitar loop that Otis Redding left on the dock of the bay overnight. But goddamn does it work. The theme of the song, just like the theme of all her songs, is that she is horny as hell and needs some genital stimulation ASAP. You can really see how this would appeal to Kanye. Where did he scrounge her up? Some reality show? This is what they promised me Ella Mai would be: an R&B sorcerer who squeezes the soul out of every syllable and never takes a moment off. It’s like Lauryn Hill after several icepick lobotomies. Also, I may not be the gayest fish in the tank, but if I was at a disco in Fire Island Pines and “WTP” came on, you’d best believe I’d vogue. Don’t sic Mike Pence on me, people. Allow Ms. Taylor to sing the blues.
Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Of Anyway
JB Dunckel’s H+. Air without Nicolas Godin’s bass lines?, That’s like jelly without peanut butter, like Becker without Fagen, like schools without teachers, like Kathy Lee without Regis, like Rasheed without Tonya Tamika. Like Paris without Texas. Dunckel’s moody music stays on brand, and his solo disc does indeed contain the lovably yawnsley themes of transhumanity we’ve come to expect from him, including a song called “Transhumanity” (chorus: “transhumanity/transhumanity”.) But if you’ve got a hankering for some Moon Safari action, Mildlife is the better move.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through
In The Rainbow Rain. A field of vision that was once wide enough to encompass both the My Lai Massacre and blue balls narrowed to the size of indie rock, and then to the size of his band van, and finally to the size of Will Sheff’s noggin. That’s not a problem, intrinsically: even if it does get stuffy in there, he makes up for it with “mystic” music that borrows from Van Morrison’s undersung ’80s albums. But never again are we getting “The President’s Dead” from this guy. Instead, we have the hallucinatory Will, probably for good. Honestly, I think he still has PTSD from the popular and critical reception of Silver Gymnasium, and he’s drowning his sorrows in magic mushrooms, etc. Either that, or Jonathan Meiburg has him Monarch-programmed.
Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make
When Rayland Baxter’s Wide Awake has been discussed at all, which it rarely has, it’s been called Beatlesque. Kiss of death, I know. You do have to give Rayland his props: he’s got his McCartney imitation down pat, especially his read on “Seventy-Nine Shiny Revolvers” (note last word). He’s even busted out the Hofner bass and achieved that Ringo backslap on the snare. In practice, though, Wide Awake is more like what The Shins would be if they were produced by Butch Walker: reverb rolled away, copious overdubs, emphasis on clarity, a piano player who definitely ate all his vegetaboools, etcetera. James Mercer is a better lyricist than Baxter is, and Butch’s, er… muscular treatment on the boards doesn’t leave the principal any room to hide. But Rayland is confident that his melodies are so strong and his hooks are so shiny that you won’t even notice the words, and for ten tracks and forty minutes he stands in the spotlight and gives it to you straight. Is his swag justified? Well. My guess is that if you didn’t mind the Webb Brothers yanking you back to the sixties with every onanistic move they made, you won’t be too mad at Rayland Baxter for chasing his ’60s daydreams, either. He really put the effort in; him, and Butch, too. This sounds great, if we can agree that by “great” we mean something that would have excited the groupies in the green room at Apple Studios. If you’re going to make a classic rock record in 2018, you may as well shoot the works. Go on, fulfill your Sgt. Pepper fantasies. I only wish Scott Miller was around to appreciate this.
Album That Sounded Like A Chore To Make
Lykke Li’s So Sad So Sexy. This might be the seven mary three of the synthpop revival: the moment where we recognize that we’ve simultaneously gone too far and too formulaic, and we must recognize that musical culture will shift and the party will soon be over. Scandinavian music is usually grueling — what with the monthlong nights and the rain and the freezing temperatures — but this manages to be utterly listless, too. If you’re going to tie the listener to the back of the van and drag him through the mud, the least you can do is step on the accelerator from time to time. Why prolong the agony, you lachrymose Swede? I can’t believe Jeff Bhasker was involved in this one; Rostam, too. They keep this up and they’re going to get booted out of the Illuminati.
Man, I Wish I Knew What This Album Was About
Fenfo. Six or so years ago, Fatoumata Diawara, Malian singer-songwriter, put out an amazing album called Fatou that even you xenophobes ought to appreciate. It was like a desert breeze through the souk, he wrote, cheesily, even though he’d never been to a souk, or, for that matter, a desert. Regardless, I recognize West African magic when I hear it, and if we’re going to sit around praising the likes of Paul Simon and Ezra Koenig, the very least we can do is give their robbery victims a few spins. Anyway, Fenfo isn’t nearly as good as Fatou, so my recommendation to you Doctor Livingstones is that you start with the old one and turn to the new joint if you get desert-thirsty for some more.
Most Consistent Album
Astroworld. Look, Future had to take a breather sometime. If you’re banging your knife and fork on the table, hungry for more of that steaming southern mush, Travis has you covered. Some of this is like latter period Kanye productions minus the classical cohesion. Some of it is just industrial byproduct. The wrinkle here is that he switches up the beat midway through the tracks, but unless you’re sitting there with the running order in front of you, you’ll never notice. It’s just a long float on a beautiful, sluggish bayou. Occasionally, landmarks are discernible. Is that the Weeknd or a rippling reflection off the brackish water? Is that a lump of swamp moss, or is it Drake?
Most Inconsistent Album
For all its faults — and just now I can’t remember what they were — Views never dragged. More Life, on the other hand, bogged down midway through the tracklisting with detours into Ja-fakin’ B.S. and various dreary guest shots from the bakalakarakalaka British rappers you didn’t want to hear. Scorpion cuts out the ethnopiracy and most of the features, too, so when the engine stalls — and stall it does — Aubrey has nobody to blame but himself. As this is a Drake set, there’s some magnificent music scattered about, but the connective tissue continues to weaken. He’ll make you scrounge for it. The principal’s disposition is as sour as ever, and this we’ve come to expect. But this is the first drake album that adds no new dimensions to his paranoia. There’s a lotta bad things they be wishing on him; that’s about it. I wonder what his momma is going to say on his answering machine this time around. Give him this: he still speaks about social media and Instagram culture with authority that no pundit or thinkpiece-writer ever comes close to matching. He’s fully attuned to the tragedy of the moment. Maybe that’s what makes him so damn grouchy. He needs a computer time-out he knows is no longer an available option for him. And not just for him.
Album That Turned Out To Be A Whole Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was
Be The Cowboy
Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To
Camila. I could go for more “esta cosa se prendio” and less “she loves control/she wants it her way”. (“All the things I want to do to you is infinite”, on the other hand, suits me fine.) But why quibble with this state-of-the-art pop star, fresh off the Cuban sandwich press? Hers is not the Latin pop album of my crossover dreams; hell, it isn’t even Gloria Estefan doing the conga. But the tropical breezes blowing through these grooves are brisker than a cursory listen might indicate. Even “Never Be The Same”, the mainstream blockbuster, opens with a barrage of bongo drums. Probably digital, much like the arrivals board at San Juan airport. Camila Cabello claims Taylor Swift as her big influence, and sometimes I even hear it. But most of the time, her music plays like Carly Rae plus strategically placed habaneros. Bite carefully. So open and curious is this cupcake that when she asks who I am in the dark, I don’t even hear the double entendre. And when she says she’s looking for some real friends, I honestly truly madly believe her.
Least Believable Perspective Over An Album
Boy howdy, things are getting slack around Chez Meloy. The last album felt like a showcase for the instrumentalists; this one doesn’t even have that. The ballyhooed move toward ’80s synthpop extends to, oh, about three and a half songs, and Jenny Conlee’s earnest imitation of New Order does not adequately compensate for the sudden lack of chord changes or interesting melodies. They do remain in step with the times, though. “Everything Is Awful” is not a good song, but no lyric suits the mood of 2018 any better. Meloy sings repetitively about how bad things are, but he won’t provide any specifics, and instead pantomimes exhaustion. Even as the words are despondent, the tone is giddy. All are having a jolly good time. By stanza number two, you can already feel the righteous rebuke to the question the song begs: what’s so awful, exactly? Everything, you insensitive fool! Must I enumerate? Don’t you watch the Steven Colbert show? The President’s latest tweet was factually inaccurate and contained two grammatical errors. Awful! La la la la. I expect NPR to take it up as their theme song any day. if they haven’t already.
Most Sympathetic Or Likeable Perspective Over An Album
Insofar as most know about Port Arthur they know it from UGK. Insofar as most of those people know UGK, they know UGK from the world famous Jay-Z collaboration. Big pimpin’ down in P.A.T. and all of that. So I think that a wrong impression has been generated. This is not Bun B’s fault: he just wanted to put on for his city, and he’s done plenty since to let people know that the scale of the pimpin’ in the P.A.T. may have been exaggerated. Port Arthur is an open sore of a city, stuck up a fissure between Texas and Louisiana, irritated by the most caustic oil refinery in the country. The slav-, er, workers who sluice the petroleum through Port Arthur live in neighborhoods abutting the plant that are as house field field field field house as anyplace in Danny Brown’s Detroit – but while Detroit has a glorious history that hipsters itch to claim for themselves, P.A.T. is just a national gutter. One American society, dependent as it is on oil, could not do without, mind you. That contradiction has always been felt in UGK’s music: that’s why they could get away with rapping from the crackhead’s perspective in “Stoned Junkee” without worrying about getting hit with a backpacker tag. It was always going to be jail or legendary status for these guys. Pimp C drew the short straw and got jail. Bun is the legend – so much so that everybody in the south queued up to rhyme on Return Of The Trill. Some of them even do okay; Lil Wayne, in particular, makes himself right at home in the swamp. Mostly this is Bun’s show, and he sounds about as weatherbeaten as you’d expect a resident of a poor city that has been flattened by four historic hurricanes (Katrina, Rita, Ike, Harvey) to sound. Of course this album runs on way too long, and the Ja-fakin number and the Run The Jewels guest appearance should probably have been excised. But Big K.R.I.T.’s reverent production does give this set some semblance of unity, even if it’s a little creepy when K.R.I.T. does his Pimp C imitation. (Cut that out.) Bun remains an underrated storyteller – one whose lived experience gives him the authority to inhabit characters that other emcees wouldn’t touch. For instance, there’s one here where he plays both the dude in the car late at night with the blunt and the policeman forced by circumstances to pull him over and investigate. He lets both voices be heard, and then he pulls the plug on the narrative. He won’t stoop to tell you how it ends. He knows you know how it ends.
Mighty Cut, Foul Out
David Byrne has probably put more herks and jerks and hiccups in the rock and roll canon than any other fella. Usually herks and jerks and hiccups get you a seat on the novelty bus next to Romeo Void. But Byrne had the Frantz-Weymouth rhythm section in his back pocket, so all the tics that made up his performances were just more fodder for the popcorn popper. A million years after True Stories, he’s still herking and jerking away – only neither Chris nor Tina nor Annie Clark are around to bail him out. This has been the story of his solo run, more or less. Rather than change his approach to accommodate 21st century human desires (not that he’d know anything about those), he’s stepped on the herk and jerk accelerator. The result is not the sort of album you’d expect to get out of a man in his mid-sixties, and American Utopia, in a way, inspiring: while most of his peers are wrapping up the circus tents, the klieg lights of the Byrne off-broadway theatre burn on. He’s still irritating; still squinting his eyes and jabbing his finger into your ribs and twisting it around, laughing his head off and making wry, whimsical comments. He’s your well-dressed uncle, a success in a line of work you’ve never heard of, greeting you at the door with a joy buzzer. He hasn’t given us a last will and testament album, and for that, I’ve got to thank him. He clearly believes he’s got miles to go and many tall tales to tell himself about dogs and monkeys and etc. He’s probably right. What god would have the audacity to interrupt such a peppy internal monologue?
Artist You Respect, But You Don’t Like
Kadhja Bonet. I admit to a certain fascination with Childqueen, given that it leads with its idiosyncrasies, it’s boldly (and somewhat disgustingly) anti-social, and there’s nothing out that sounds remotely like it. Over ten tracks, Bonet splits the difference between the Love Theme from Mahogany and the march of the Oompa Loompas. She’s taken the soundtracky bits that annoyed me on prior Janelle Monae albums, soaked them for awhile to bleed out the funk, and muted the backbeat to generate an oddly stationary feeling. It’s sort of like watching the overexposed frames of a wobbly film strip that keeps threatening to jump the frame. This doesn’t rock, it doesn’t soothe, you can’t dance to it, and good luck singing along. Too weird to be background music, too insular to be hallucinatory, and no fun in the slightest, Childqueen exists in a category unto itself. My understanding is that Kadhja Bonet, who is some sort of polymath, played all of this music herself, including the copious strings and woodwinds and fretless bass and warbling synthesizers. I suppose that’s impressive in a way, like one of those dudes on youtube who can juggle and recite the Declaration of Independence while his dick is in a blender. but next time around, she desperately, desperately needs to work with a real percussionist.
Best Line Or Rhyme
On “Tyrant”, Kali Uchis sings “Word on the street you got hoes/I disappear like El Chapo”. Gets me every time. Allow me explain why. She’s not just comparing herself to a Latin American badass. She’s also laying down her zero-tolerance policy. When she gets the word that her man is screwing around, no further discussion is necessary. She’s out of that jail cell before he knows what hits him: no traces left and no fucks given. In a year of welcome statements of female autonomy and self-respect, this was the most succinct, and, for me, the most satisfying.
Most In Need Of An Editor
Smino. Noir reminded me of Malibu by Anderson.Paak in that it’s hypermusical (good) and full of jazz chords (eh… sorta good) and remains focused until it catches an air current and drifts out of reach like a helium balloon. I absolutely get why Chance and Saba are down with this guy: he shares their Soulquarian proclivities. They’re Hippie Johnnies for the hip-hop era. But Chance knows how to structure a song, and how to weave those songs into an album, and how to leave the impress of his personality on everything he does. Saba is a born storyteller. With Smino, it’s all gentle and beautiful flows and gentle and beautiful accompaniment, spreading everywhere in a great undifferentiated mush of gentle and gooey beauty. Before you know it you’ve been staring at the lava lamp for an hour. I realize my experience of this set is meant to be, um, herbally enhanced. Slip me a few of those gummies and maybe I can get on this guy’s zonked wavelength. Or, you know, just throw on the Noname album instead.
Young Upstart Who Should Be Sent Down To The Minors For More Seasoning
Sunflower Bean. Here’s a rhetorical question for you: why are Fleetwood Mac imitators always inept? I don’t mean they’re bad at ripping off Fleetwood Mac; that they’re pretty brazen about. They steal with utter confidence and complete entitlement. I mean they’re bad at music. And that is the one thing you could never say about anyone in Fleetwood Mac. Zeppelin imitators?, they practice. Parliament imitators woodshed for years before they dare to get on a stage and do their copycat funk jams. Beatles imitators practice too much – their reverence gets in the way of their cribbing attempts, if you ask me. But Mac Copyists always sound like they picked up their instruments in a thrift shop a week before recording and learned to play from For Dummies books. There must be something about Fleetwood Mac that encourages duffers to think they can approximate the sound of Rumours without working very hard at it at all. And I think you know what that something is. {Whispers} There were girls in the band.
Hoary Old Bastard Who Should Spare Us All And Retire
Justin Timberlake
Indispensable Elder Who, Lord Willing, Will Never Hang Them Up
The great thing about sounding like a grouchy septuagenarian when you’re young is that when you actually become a grouchy septuagenarian, everybody is used to it already. If Graham Parker’s gripes didn’t piss you off in the late ’70s, no modern-day turn of the rusty crank of his is going to bother you very much. Thirty years ago I started calling this guy Grandpa Graham, and I wasn’t just making light of the irritability that suggested early-onset prostate issues. I was also acknowledging that I was his descendant — once I started writing songs, there was nobody out there whose compositional intentions and general disposition mirrored mine any better. Look at how excitably he jams un-singable words into his already overstuffed verses; I mean, this is fun for him. Check out how wistful he gets about Maida Hill — the place itself, not merely the romantic associations he has with it. How about the pure, irascible glee with which he sings “don’t be a scumbag!” Gotta love him, unless you don’t, and if you don’t, well, he probably doesn’t like you very much either. The new one is mellow, as a direction, but that really means he’s assembled a hotel-bar R&B combo with a horn section and a lighter touch than the Rumour ever had. There’s even a number about his preference for brushed drums, and it’s only partially a metaphor. So here we have an older dude playing music that would have been older dude’s music even when he was a younger dude. Howlin’ Wind, which this album evokes, was throwback music in 1976, so what do you call this? Also, do astringents lose their paint-peeling effectiveness when they’ve been stored in the basement too long? Pry open this dusty can of turpentine and find out.
Worst Song Of The Year, and Worst Rapping, Too
Kanye West, “I Thought About Killing You”.
And Furthermore…
A truth that seems to be eluding the music press: you can’t talk about Kanye + Trump without also discussing Jay-Z. The way I reckon, it’s the poisoned relationship with big brother Jay that’s driven Kanye’s political statements, such as they are, more than any other factor, though I’m sure the president’s misogyny appeals to him plenty. Remember (Mr. West sure does) that Obama called Kanye a jackass. Michelle Obama buddies around with Beyonce, who doesn’t like Kanye anymore, either. So if Jay-Z is going to make an album For Forty-Four, and if Jay and Beyonce are going to hit the trail, however half-heartedly, for Hillary Clinton, well, what’s bound to piss them off more than a big bear hug with the dickhead who humiliated their candidate? These days, Kanye is the man with the pal in the oval office, and Jay and Beyonce, members of the out-party, are stuck with, what?, true love or something? Note that when Kanye is pressed by interviewers to say what it is about Trump’s presidency that he likes, he’s flummoxed: he winds up spewing a whole lot of management-speak about “dragon energy” and creative disruption, and invariably it ends up morphing into a statement about the iconoclasm and nonconformity of Kanye West. Jay-Z and Beyonce, on the other hand, are much more responsible with the talking points, which, while less infuriating, is not exactly what we need out of pop musicians. By now their public politics have been firmly established, and they can speak upon black excellence/generational wealth/aspirational economics at least as well as the average pundit. Speak they do. As Kanye goes low, they keep going high, and higher and higher, until there’s no damn place in pop left to go. Which makes Everything Is Love feel more like a credits roll than a victory lap, to be honest, no matter how much blue-chip confidence the music radiates. Those expressing surprise at Beyonce’s flow, or sprechgesang, or whatever, must be inhabiting a different cultural universe than i do. I mean of course she can rap. She didn’t have to call herself Beeyzus, though. Gilding the lily like that is beneath her.
Worst Singing
I’m not exactly sure why Tracyanne felt she needed Danny, whose unctuous eardrum-murdering performance on “Jacqueline” gives me the willies just to think about it. But perhaps they’re buds, and perhaps she’s still disoriented from Carey Lander’s death. I know I am. You have to hand it to Danny: dude does not seem to mind getting murked on his own shit, as the rap fans used to put it. Then again, given the opportunity, who wouldn’t make a record with Tracyanne Campbell? She could show me up any time. She hasn’t been quite the same singer since “French Navy” and she’s never getting that Underachievers gleam back, but she remains the quintessential elfin indiepop frontwoman. Scotland in a box, like a tin of shortbread cookies from Walker’s.
Worst Instrumentalist
I like the 1975, but Adam Hann has the worst tone and worst instincts of any lead guitarist in pop, and that includes the dude you just heard playing “Eruption” at Sam Ash. That cat-mewling thing that he does?, that would have gotten him kicked out of ABC in 1985. Maybe Spandau Ballet would have found it acceptable, and maybe not.
Worst Lyrics
You heard “The Middle” way more times than you wanted to, I am sure, but I doubt you paid attention to the words. Believe it or not, the verses are a lament: apparently, the narrator has destroyed her house while trying to have sex. Anyway, that’s what I got out of it, and I’m sticking to it. She feels bad about it, but not for the right reasons. Then there’s a chorus that 1.) makes no sense, 2.) has nothing to do with the wreckage that Maren Morris has left while arguboning (badly, it seems). Tip for kids: if you cannot do sex without also doing property damage, there is probably a flaw in the code you’re using. Bring it up with your health teacher.
Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better
I Can Feel You Creep Into My Private Life. Sonos Audio pitchwoman and occasional pop star does record about her liberal guilt. That’s the headline, and if you can’t handle that, you’d best not proceed to the lede. There’s water in the water fountain, and she drank it, and now she feels bad about it. I am dumbfounded by her sincere conviction that I ought to care. Enjoy your licensing money, Garbus. Nobody begrudges you your big bankroll. Go buy some local artisanal fair trade shit. That blood-soaked dollar won’t rinse itself.
Most Unsexy Person In Pop
Post Malone
Most Overrated
I see that every blue-stater’s favorite cowgirl is swimming in her customary pool of positive notice for her xanaxy new album. Only this time, Kacey Musgraves has actually earned the praise, sort of: Golden Hour is recorded with a heaping helping of radiance and sung way better than anybody ever had reason to suspect she could sing. So: credit where it’s due. On the other hand, as she grows in confidence, her that lazy streak of hers becomes brighter and bolder, and I believe it’s become visible from space, cowboy; I mean, who’s going to tell her to rewrite that slack second verse? Perk up some of these $75 spa treatment melodies? Not these producers. They’re too busy screwing with vocoders and artfully muffling the banjos to care. And I think that what these non-country critics dabbling in country mean when they call this album coherent is that she’s found a sound and an approach that suits her laid-back, pot-hazy, sleepily democratic outlook. She’s against men on high horses and she’s for moms, and taking it sloooww, as if she’s got another gear. So what we have here is a rarity — a persuasive articulation of an inane worldview. There are many worse things, I guess. But we’re reminded again that the step down from Miranda Lambert to the rest of the field is a doozy. And if Taylor Swift is going to keep taking it on the chin for remaining apolitical, how the heck does Musgraves get away with this?
Most Underrated
After the straight-up U2 swipes on Black, how about some U2 swipes plus mandolin and quick-pickin’ banjo. The Mountain is bluegrass, Dierks Bentley style, just like Up On The Ridge was; Dierks seems to think that bluegrass is located at high elevations. I really don’t mean to complain: this may be Nashville machine music, but it’s absolutely earnest in its aspiration to be something more. And more than anything else, it’s that striving above station that gives Dierks the grace that distinguishes him among his peers. Given his unambivalent identification with the Duke boys, he could easily have been agglomerated into bro-country; instead, he’s made himself into a prime peddler of bro-related pathos. He’ll never do that any better than he did on Riser, with its aging playboy characters who’d failed to recognize that the party had stopped long before they’d finished their six-pack. Also, as this fucking cad matures, he slathers on the platitudes thicker and thicker. That the songs don’t quite suffocate under the blanket of warm pieties tells you something. It tells you he’s working, as he always does, from a sturdy compositional core. I recognize that when I hear it, and I remain a fan.
Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job
No doubt you recall how Ashley Monroe kicked off her solo career. She reminded us that she ain’t Dolly and her contemporaries ain’t Porter. Funny, then, that ever since, she has been retreating — and it has indeed been a retreat — into traditionalism. Not content with hauling Vince Gill out of mothballs, she’s actually cut the new one with historical recreation specialist Dave Cobb, the carpenter who has built those sturdy old barns full of sound for Sturgill Simpson et al. Since he’s a deep woods craftsman par excellence, he’s slathered the varnish all over the knotty pine; since he has absolutely no imagination (and since Monroe Suede is a girl) he’s decided to fit her with standard countrypolitan arrangements. Strings all over the place: they’re “nice”, all honeyed and shit. The problem is that she ain’t Patsy, either. She’s monroe suede, aka Hippie Annie — she’s got a pin-light beam of a voice, a delicate touch with the pen, and a good sense of humor, too. She wasn’t made to swim through syrup. Anyway, connoisseurs of Nashville pluck are digging this, I hear. They just love when a girl shows reverence for past models, as they themselves are past models. It makes them think that they have a snowball’s chance.
Neatest Reinvigoration
In the ’00s, Edan was a perennial contender for my Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should category. Then he stopped doing music, and I admit I completely spaced on him. Apparently he made a beat or two for Homeboy Sandman, and that went so well that they put together an EP. Seven songs; it’s all the rage. Humble Pi is hardly shorter than the last Homeboy Sandman full-length: Veins, which was what?, twenty-five minutes?, got knocked for its production, which was to say that there wasn’t any. There were beats, there was a little synthesizer, there was Homeboy Sandman in a bad mood. It was… well, “unalloyed” is one word for it. And Homeboy Sandman is one of the few modern emcees who merits this treatment, and not just because he loves masticating his words and extracting their sugary flavor and blowing big greasy bubbles from them as if they were so much Bubble Yum. It’s also because of the variance of his vocal tonality. All spoken words carry a note plus overtones; Homeboy Sandman just makes that more obvious than other more percussive speakers. Edan, it turns out, does something not too dissimilar with the beats: his mode is broadly psychedelic with loads of ear candy and MPC hijinx, but the feel is abrasive and smart-assy like old-school hip-hop. The busy-ness of these production shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a fan of, say, J Beez Wit Tha Remedy. As for homeboy sandman himself, he’s as ornery as ever, and his irritation at his lack of recognition runneth over. I prefer it when he directs his attacks at external targets, as he does on “Never Use The Internet Again”, which almost makes me believe he’s never going to use the Internet again. “Anything to get a fucking like/one day I decided I should get a fucking life”. The artlessness of the couplet amplifies the force of the message. Also, amen.
Worst Song On A Good Album
“Best Friend”, the last song on How To Solve Our Human Problems. Gives Danny a run for his money for Worst Singing, too.
Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat
“Karl Malone” by Joey Purp. I got dope, I got blow, smoke, I got coke, I got blow, I got coke, I got molly man, I got smoke, I got tabs, I got coke, I got ahahhaaaagagahahaghh.
Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year
Tierra Whack’s “Hungry Hippos”. “Open up and bite it” became my statement of purpose this autumn. It applies to so much. But at the level of the album’s plot, she’s talking about biting rhymes, style biting — she’s dealing with a man who lacks swag, and as a magnanimous sort, she’s going to allow him to cop some off of her. He likes her “diamonds and her pearls”, and by this, she means the art she’s making. She says “thank you, I designed it”, and she damn well did.
Good Artists Most In Need Of Some New Musical Ideas
I’m pretty sure “Graffiti” is about a school shooting. That’s why the characters are in the bathroom stall: they’re hiding out from a Dylan Klebold type. They’re writing “we were here” type stuff on the walls because they don’t think they’re getting out alive. Now they never will/ never will grow old because they’re about to meet a loon with an AR-15. Time to kill/time stood still, etc. Lest you think I am being too literal, corroborating evidence for my reading comes from the rest of Love Is Dead: Lauren Mayberry believes the bad guys won, and she’s determined to meet the challenge of widespread heartlessness with the sort of big-ass, repetitive choruses that have been her metier lately. I rather think it’s a better application of the thumping borderline-brotronica sound than it was on Every Open Eye, where the songs were about… what, exactly?, burying “it” and rising above? Don’t point the finger at Mayberry: she was all in with the protest music in 2018, and I’m pretty sure she’s realized exactly what she wanted to. No, if you have beef, it’s with Cook and Doherty, because what the fuck happened to those guys? The Bones Of What You Believe earned those Vince Clarke comparisons with some of the most creative synth arrangements ever waxed. To go from that to Greg Kurstin’s warmed-over bass drops is a long way to fall. Then again, Yaz only had enough ideas to fill an album and a third, too.
Running Out Of Gas
I like the song Adam Young wrote about his dad, really I do, at least as much as I like any latter-day Owl City. It’s corny, but it’s got the emotional specificity and uncool vulnerability that has always helped make this project go; see also the beautiful number about his sister on the Sky Sailing record. But too often on Cinematic, he’s made the X-tian filmed entertainment mistake of leading with the wholesomeness and filling in the details after the fact. Which leaves us with a version of humanity that does not intersect in any meaningful way with the one we’ve all got to experience on a day-to-day basis in 2019. It’s a strange, too-sunny diorama he’s asking us to inhabit: nothing moves, and there’s no reference to the real world outside the box of his increasingly constricted and formulaic imagination. So I guess Cinematic is a good name for this project, since Hollywood specializes in exactly that. The music has stubbornly refused to advance an inch since All Things Bright And Beautiful. The engine has stalled in the Minnesota snow — picturesque snow, sure, but cold all the same. As for Kenny Vasoli, I continue to find his Vacationer act the exemplary post-emo project in that it’s allowed him to be himself without jettisoning his entire Starting Line audience. Samples from obscure hula hula records plus trip-hop beats plus the usual lovelorn emo storytelling plus Chesneyish wistful summer’s-end nonsense: that was… well, it wasn’t revolutionary or anything, but it did provide Kenny his own lane. On Gone, Vacationer applied that sound to a fully motivated cycle of songs that benefited mightily from coherence of mood. August is over, and they were packing up the beach chairs, and there goes Kenny’s baby with someone new, etc. Mindset is just variations on a sonic formula, and as such, it mostly resolves to background music designed for beach bars. This record seems to exist because the Vacationer machine broke and kept spitting out copies of Vacationer songs, each one a little more faded than the last as the toner depletes. They should try pressing more buttons at once. Nobody wants to pull the plug.
Most In Need Of A Rescue Helicopter
You can create a spellbinding mood. You can get your beats in place. You can come up with cool synth textures that remind the listener of Marvin Gaye or “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” or whatever. You can dance around like you’ve got an iguana in your shorts, you can foreground your gender or racial fluidity, you can write tearjerkers about your experience of personal trauma. You can check all the boxes. In R&B, if you can’t sing your way out of a paper bag, none of that matters. On past Blood Orange records, Devonte Hynes has always muddled through with the help of his buddies; on Negro Swan, with no Carly Rae or Nelly Furtado in sight, he’s stranded and unarmed in the combat zone. Gulp.
Next Artist To Come Back From The Wilderness
Tracy Chapman
Best Stealth Political Statement
I usually have no truck with social utility arguments made by artists, and i don’t tend to see pop singers as heroes. I also doubt that Natalia Lafourcade, broad-minded though she is, views herself as a pan-Latin freedom fighter: she’s too committed to aesthetics for that. But I cannot help but notice her sub-rosa campaign for dignity and Mexican pride in the wake of… well, you know. Like all folk music projects helmed by urban sophisticates, the Musas albums make their political undercurrents rather manifest: usually the artist wants you to respect a people and a culture that you might not think much about at all. I know I hardly did, and I fancy myself a fan of all things Mexican. As a pop singer and writer (and arranger, and producer) Lafourcade once led with her exceptionalism, so much so that she wrote Hu Hu Hu while living in Ottawa of all places, an expat Joanna Newsom fan who just happened to sing in Spanish. And that, I think, was unsatisfying to her, even as it delighted the heck out of aesthetes like me. So she’s let Manos De Los Macorinos drag her back to the soil and the common people who she’s definitely not one of, and it’s been folklorico galore for the past three years. What Natalia Lafourcade shows me, and ought to show caudillos worldwide if they’d ever consent to listen to these sets, is that you don’t have to be a gauche populist to connect with the people. All you have to do is open your heart. This is a point that J.C. tried to make, up there on that mount, way way back in the day. In case you prefer a more secular gospel, in song Natalia insists on her derecho de nacimiento: her rights by birth. Only the ugliest of Americans would deny that to such a flora linda. Unfortunately… well, you know.
Worst Controversy
Imagine: Pinegrove dropping an album right in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings. Jesus H. Christmas and a gangbang on Bloomfield Avenue. If they were a Brooklyn band, I might suspect a little anti-marketing and hashtag-chasing. But as they’re a bunch of Jersey schmucks, I know damn well it was just terrible timing. Me, I have been known to release music now and then, and I admit that it’s flattering that those of us who do are now getting held to the same standards as Supreme Court nominees. I am willing to take the polygraph test and quote Dres of the Black Sheep under oath: don’t punch girls/and I don’t punch a clock. But c’mon, our missions are a little different. Judges are responsible for upholding the law. Rockers are responsible for… well, not for undermining it, exactly, but playing fast and loose with it in the name of entertainment. We’re supposed to provide vicarious thrills and make ourselves the outlet for a collective id. Time was — and it wasn’t too fucking long ago, trust me — when sexual misconduct was part of the job description. Guys like me who played it straight and smiley were criticized by rock bros for our inability to be properly predatory. Nikki Sixx is very disappointed in you, young man. My how the worm has turned, at least in the narrow realm of independent pop-rock. These days, a rumor of sexual misconduct can un-person a singer faster than you can say PWR BTTM. Evan Hall’s sex offender shit goes way beyond rumor — he confessed to it, sort of, in one of those posts that smacked of “getting in front of it”, as the spin doctors like to say. It was pretty nauseating, and tone deaf too, and the Internet being what it is, the pile-on was soon the size of Kingda Ka. if you’re among those who believe that Hall, and by extension, Pinegrove, ought to be ostracized, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you he deserves a second chance. At the very least he traumatized a young woman, and no, Lindsey Graham, that is not something that every red-blooded American boy does while “boofing”. But there is a class of people whose role it is to determine what constitutes criminal behavior and mete out punishment. Those people are called the police. Are you part of the police? Or are you, you know, music fans? Because Evan Hall’s particularly heinous sexually based offenses have nothing to do with whether his records are any good. Spinning those records — and happily singing along! — is not the same as supporting his rapey behavior. It is perfectly permissible for you, as a music listener, to pay attention to Pinegrove and even enjoy it without making yourself complicit in an assault. You can leave the investigations and prosecutions to the guys with the badges. Citizens’ arrests are for the Dukes Of Hazzard. There are critics who argue that the work of art cannot be separated from the actions of the man who makes it, and I dunno… I think that those have got to be the laziest critics in the world. Of course you can disaggregate the record from the biographical details; that’s the whole point of formal artistic evaluation. That’s why you throw away the PR copy before you press play and begin your review. I, too, would much prefer it if the members of the bands I like to cheer would be good Judeo-Islamo-Christians with a side of Buddhism. But c’mon, people, you’ve met guys in bands. They’re maladjusted and anti-social. That’s why they spend all night hitting things and swinging around vibrating sticks and screaming into microphones. I’d love to think they’re better than they used to be about grabbing ass, but they’re probably just as bad, if not worse, about a hundred and one other pernicious things. If you believe the answer is to leave Evan Hall, and white guys in general, over at a rest stop on the side of the highway for awhile and listen instead to records by women and African-Americans, and transsexuals, and Asian refugees, and half-lobsters from Pluto, allow me to heartily co-sign that program — and also point out that this is exactly what we’ve been doing lately, and that we’ll have to keep it up for, oh, at least a hundred years before we balance the scales. We don’t have to get the cops involved. We don’t have to become the cops. We can just pay attention to stories, and storytellers, whose voices we haven’t heard over and over again. Pinegrove deserves a smaller audience than, say, Japanese Breakfast not because Evan Hall assaulted his girlfriend, but because Pinegrove isn’t half as interesting as Japanese Breakfast is. They were never all that great, and now that they’ve grown out of quasi-emo and into standard-issue hickster country-rock, they’ve got very little to add to the musical conversation. If you disagree with me on that aesthetic assessment, and you’re denying yourself the pleasures of the Pinegrove album because you don’t want to be an enabler, you’re not hurting anybody but yourself. Well, I guess you’re hurting Evan Hall, too. Guess you have to decide if that’s worth it to you — whether the thrill of punishing an offender is more gratifying than the thrills of the music would have been. If it is, maybe you’re more of a cop fan than you are a music fan.
And While I’m At It, Rock Writers…
How far we’ve come. Not so long ago it was tough to get readers to put records in sociopolitical context. If in your review you teased out the electoral implications of some dumb pop lyric, people would call you a killjoy and tell you to stop overthinking things. Dance, you cocksucker. Well, [Tony Montana voice], lookit you now, rock criticism, lookit you now. These days, artists who express any discontent whatsoever are immediately assimilated into the political party of their sympathetic reviewer. Here’s the lede, and you’ve read it over and over: in these troubled days when [politician I don’t like] is, unfathomably, ascendant, and the rights of [affinity group the artist belongs to] are being trampled beneath the bootheel of oppression, [album] is a shout of rage, a rallying cry, a furious, unflinching summary of the times. Never mind that there might be deeper reasons for anxiety than the garbage tumbling around in the news cycle, and that musicians aren’t mouthpieces for an ideology workshopped in Westminster. This environment has benefited bands like Shopping – groups that, for one reason or another, are redolent of others with actual political significance and are thus easy targets for projection by the disaffected. Fifteen years ago, they would have been typical dance-punks with typical vague lyrics and typical young-adult axes to grind. In ’18, they were received as agitators. And hey, maybe they really were motivated by Theresa May and assorted backbenchers, but unlike Sleaford Mods, who’ll actually spend a song making fun of Boris Johnson’s haircut, they can’t be arsed to give you any specifics. Their angry Gang Of Four-ish chants (can’t really call them melodies) could be applied to Brexit, but they could also be complaints about the chanter’s girlfriend. The rejoinder to this is something about the personal being political, and yeah, sure, anything can be crammed into the narrow, airless hallway of party politics if you push hard enough. But that’s nowhere you want to hang for long. Democratic politics is a street-fight, and most musicians aren’t brawlers: very few of them, bless them, have given “the issues” a fraction of the attention they’ve paid to their kick-drum sound. When we graft political trenchancy on to these guys, we risk making Milkshake Ducks out of them. and that’s exactly what’s been happening, has it not?, mass disillusionment in the critical-discursive zone when it turns out that our favorite singers and rappers aren’t square with the platform as articulated by Bernie for America. I think we need to reopen ourselves to the possibility of discourse that has nothing to do with who or what is sitting in office. While we’re at it, we need to stop dragging musicians into the muck of our destructive obsessions. That hungry void where public culture ought to be is big and black and growing by the day. The edge is greased and slippery. You don’t want to take that tumble. The next thing you know, you’re red-faced on a talk show and ranting about some rider attached to an omnibus bill, and that, my friends, is the end of youth, the end of rock and roll, the end of hip-hop, the bitter end of everything.
…And Finally
Let me leave this here before I run out of records to rate: no protest song is going to spring us free from this mess. The FBI won’t either. No independent (?) prosecutor is going to fix our problems. The independent (???) judiciary won’t either. No member of law enforcement is going to ride to our rescue. No deep state is going to rise up and re-set the bowling pins. No comedian is going to sear this administration out of power with a sick burn. No renegade Republican is going to wake up and rediscover his set of misplaced ethics. No investigator will rake enough muck to affect the way the world is turning. There is only one way out, and that’s the way in. The American electorate made this happen. Once we decide we’re not having fun anymore — once we’re done with this experiment in governtainment – the American people will make it un-happen. Any old time now. Annnnnnyyyy time.
Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From
Richmond, VA
Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2028
Phoebe Bridgers seems built to last.
Best Album Of 2019
Um… Laura Marling will be back, won’t she? Please?
