This is a picture of a lemming. Kawaii, desu ne?
I am in a good mood because we are doing a show outside the PATH Train station on June 4. Folks from Grove Pointe will call City Hall to complain about the noise and this will ruin my good mood, but that is down the road. For now, I can be excited about participating in a Jersey City Fridays event. Overlord did it last year and it was lots of fun. It rained buckets and it still felt like a party. This time it will not rain buckets (fingers crossed). Come down to the tent! You are commuting home that way anyway! Show starts at 8pm; more details to follow.
Jay Braun made this video for “Sugar Nobody Wants”! We shot it around Downtown Jersey City and Midtown Bayonne. Two minutes and thirty-six seconds of Jersey. Can you take it?
It turns out there’s other Tris McCall stuff on YouTube. Unfortunately I appear in it. This appeals to Gena Fae Fillingham. The rest of you: you have been warned.
I enjoyed Andrew Hamlin’s review of Let The Night Fall in the San Diego Reader.
It is almost berry picking season! To celebrate, let us do a show.
Tris McCall & The Public Option
Pianos
158 Ludlow Street
Wednesday, April 14
9pm
Also on the bill: Sara Hallie Richardson. Sara sings all over Let The Night Fall, and she’s done the last few full-band shows with me. She has an album of her own called A Curious Paradox. (I don’t sing on it.) Be sure to come early to catch Sara’s set.
This will be the last full-band show in NYC for a little while because I am returning to the studio to make more cookies for you. Don’t miss it!
XO,
Tris
Does this man look high to you?
Later still, I would learn that Dock Ellis and Roberto Clemente had shared more than a uniform and a victory cigar. Ellis, like Clemente, was part of that first generation of post-segregation ballplayers who would not take any shit from Whitey. I reconstructed my image of Dock Ellis — not the soft-tosser getting thwacked around by the Yanks and Royals en route to an early shower, but a fallen ace with a golden, if erratic, right arm and attitude to burn; sort of the Baseball Gods’ dry run for that other Doc who was then all the rage in Gotham.
Old baseball obsessors collect anecdotes like young baseball fanatics collect picture cards. This is how we engage with ballplayers we were too young to watch on television, and, in a more roundabout manner, with the history of an ancient American game: we tell goofy tales about The Time When. Ellis hung up the spikes in 1980; Dock Ellis stories kept right on taking the field. Nothing unusual about that: folks like us will be rehashing Dizzy Dean fables as long as there are other boring seamheads to hear them. But then a truly curious thing happened — Dock Ellis became a site of interest for folks who couldn’t tell a curveball from a bowl of Cheerios. In recent years, Ellis has, as the kids like to say, blown up: musicians sing of him, rock bands are named for him, abstract painters have portrayed him in oil, news tickers clatter on about him, the Baseball Reliquary has enshrined him, hell, even those notorious bandwagon-chasers at NPR elbowed their way into the action. If you’re reading this, you probably know why. On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter on LSD. And four years after he retired, he told the world what he’d done.
It is fashionable, I suppose, to claim that the Acid No-No story is one that is bigger than baseball. It is certainly bigger than the baseball player named Dock Ellis. Ellis had an alcohol problem that swallowed his talent; his LSD problem has swallowed his image. You will never see an article about Ellis that doesn’t mention hallucinogens — in fact, most references to the pitcher will be nothing but silly gags. Some celebrate Ellis for his psychedelic experiment, others just make fun of him, but everybody has something clever to say about the Pittsburgh Pirate who was tripping balls while throwing strikes. See, I did it, too. It’s irresistible: Dock Ellis’s name has become a byword for pitching under the influence, and triumphantly, hilariously so. When Ellis died of liver failure a few years ago, Will Leitsch of Deadspin wasn’t the only one treating the Acid No-No as a monumental achievement (all while, you know, crackin’ jokes.) Mainstream press obituary writers sang the same hippie folk song. Right smack in the shadow of the Bonds trial and the Clemens mess, here was a player honest enough to admit that the peak (*giggle*) of his career, the true highpoint (*snicker*), had been chemically-assisted.
But was that really accurate? Not the LSD part; that’s Ellis’s own account of his habits, and there’s no reason to doubt that he really did drop acid and take the hill. Did the drug really help Ellis throw the no-no? Or was it, as some eulogists suggested, an obstacle to the pitcher’s performance, one surmounted against heavy odds? What did the intoxicant do to the athlete? Writers looking to enhance the craziness of the day often point to Ellis’s eight walks and one HBP: he must have been out of control and dangerous! But Dock Ellis always hit batters*; he plunked ten in thirty starts in 1970. And for a genuine staff ace, his walk-to-strikeout ratio was terrible. Ellis wasn’t an overpowering hurler — he relied on movement and deception to retire hitters. It is not unusual for pitchers with Ellis’s profile to have games — even good games — where they’ll issue a walk every inning. For years, we watched Al Leiter and Ron Darling do just that.
Dock Ellis threw the Acid No-No against the Padres at the old San Diego Stadium. When we were growing up, they called it Jack Murphy; after that, Qualcomm bought the naming rights. Whatever handle they slapped on it, it was always a wonderful place to pitch. In the thirty-four years that Jack Murphy Stadium hosted major league ball, there were only three seasons in which the park favored hitters. 1970 wasn’t one of them. That year, the Padres lost 99 games and finished dead last in the National League West. It was only their second season of existence post-expansion; in their inaugural, they’d dropped 110. In ’68, the Padres pulled an absolute rock at their expansion draft, saddling San Diego with a leaden roster that would languish in the cellar for six straight years. Still, there was a legitimate bright spot: Cito Gaston, who hit .318 with 29 home runs in 1970. Gaston was exactly the sort of hitter who’d give Ellis problems — a contact guy smart enough to wait out an inconsistent hurler and jump on a mistake.
Wait a minute, though: the June 12, 1970 game was part of a doubleheader. Cito Gaston didn’t play in the game that Ellis pitched. Nor did the starting shortstop or the regular third baseman. Remember that San Diego was an expansion team with no bench to draw upon; they barely squeaked together a corps of starters. Understaffed, the Padres batted Dave Campbell, who finished the season with a .219 average and a stomach-churning .268 OBP, at the top of their lineup. I repeat for emphasis: this was the leadoff man. Punchless Steve Huntz, whose lifetime BA barely cracked the Mendoza Line, hit behind Campbell. Throw in a journeyman centerfielder, a fill-in at short who’d promptly demonstrate he had no business in the majors, and a catcher with eighteen homers in fourteen seasons; dear Padres fan, you’re dead in the water.
So one of the National League’s best young hurlers takes the hill in a pitcher’s park and faces a last-place team running at half-strength. What do you suppose is going to happen? Baseball is a notoriously contrary game, and balls take funny bounces — but if Dock Ellis hadn’t handled the Padres with ease, that would have been a shocker. Zeroes on the scoreboard make a tidy story, but the Acid No-No wasn’t the pinnacle of anything — in fact, it wasn’t even one of the five best games Ellis pitched that year. Two weeks later at Forbes Field, he threw against a Cubs team muscled up with Billy Williams, Johnny Callison, Ron Santo, and Ernie Banks. Ellis went the distance and beat them 2-1. On August 6, he shut out the Phillies, and in the process bested future reactionary Jim Bunning. On July 9, he took the mound at Busch Stadium and fired a two-hitter against the St. Louis Cardinals, striking out ten batters. (There was the peak of his 1970 trip, folks.) In thirty starts, Dock Ellis completed nine games and tossed four shutouts. Nothing about the Acid No-No was even slightly out of line with the expectations he’d already set for baseball fans.
What about all the walks? Well, lousy as they were, the Padres did get their free passes that year: catcher, the leftfielder, and the godawful third base fill-in were exactly the sort of hitters who stepped to the plate looking to take four wide. With Gaston getting a blow, pure slugger Nate Colbert was probably the best hitter left in the San Diego lineup: he’d clouted 38 round-trippers that year. Ellis walked him twice. You might say that he saw the catcher’s target as a pizza pie and he was looking to avoid splashing the marinara sauce. More likely he’d identified the one guy in the Padres order who could hurt him, and he’d wisely pitched around the threat. Dock Ellis may have been in touch with the cosmos that day, but his strategic thinking was entirely terrestrial. He did not issue a leadoff pass, most of his walks came with two outs, and he had no qualms about handing over first base with a runner on second. No matter how high he was flying, he remembered to set up the force.
And this brings me back to my initial question, and the one that resonates with contemporary controversies — what effect did the drug have on the athlete? Ellis’s own anecdotal account of the day involves a sense of disassociation on the mound, falling down, diving out of the way of line drives, etcetera. It’s colorful; it’s also misleading. Dock Ellis had three chances — including the second-to-last out of the no-hitter — and he fielded them all flawlessly. By now you probably think I’m missing the point: acid is a mind-expanding chemical that undermines the subject’s ability to accomplish quotidian tasks like hurling the ol’ horsehide, and Ellis’s mastery of the Padres demonstrates his superhuman focus and restraint. Or maybe his dealer slipped him a dud; a blotter nowhere near as potent as the one you and your ex-girlfriend had in college. Me, I’m inclined toward a different interpretation. The pitcher may have been tripping his ass off; he may have been seeing swirly colors and talking back to the little buccaneer on his cap. He may have thought his manager was a salt shaker. But the drug didn’t change his approach. The drug didn’t alter his velocity, his movement, or his concentration. There is no evidence whatsoever in the linescore or boxscore that LSD either impaired or enhanced Dock Ellis’s ability to play baseball.
And what psychedelic explorer could, in his burnt-out heart of hearts, really be surprised? Trips feel like epic voyages while you’re in the midst of them, but the first thing you realize when you come down is that those around you barely noticed you were gone. Maybe they thought you were acting weird, or self-conscious; most likely, they chalked it up to your usual freakitude and went about their business. Those things you were investing with profound symbolic significance?, they were probably the same damn things you always do. The problem with drug tales is always the same: they’re told by a druggie. An intoxicated person is hardly the best judge of the profound effects of his own high. Of course he’s going to overstate the power of the substance. He’s the one under the influence.
Besides, more than just the placebo effect is working on him. When he swallows the pill, he swallows all the pharmaceutical hogwash along with it. This is because we live in a culture obsessed with self-medication through substance intake. We believe that which we put into our bodies will profoundly alter not merely what we feel, but who we are. One pill makes us larger and one pill makes us small; and the androstenedione on the shelves of the GNC can turn an ordinary Joe Jockstrap into a pace-setting superman. Right now, there are a shocking number of educated baseball writers who believe that we must rip up the last twenty years of the Encyclopedia because some players did drugs. There are those who will refuse to vote Roger Clemens — the winningest pitcher of our lifetime — into the Hall of Fame because of something they believe he injected.
This isn’t fanboy stuff; I hate Roger Clemens, too. But I also hate witch hunts. The same puritans who insist that the record books have been hopelessly skewed by drug use cannot begin to measure any concrete effects that the drugs have had on player performance. Look at the names listed in the Mitchell Report, and try to impose some kind of order or pattern on what you see. You’ll fail. There are guys who were scrubs before the drugs who got better, and guys who were stars before the drugs who got worse. There are players who flamed out of the league, guys who improved dramatically, guys who’d popped their heads up from the minors for an injection only to be sent right back down. There are pitchers whose endurances improved after HGH, and others whose arms fell off and are still rolling around in the dirt. There are superstar outfielders and pine-riders, slugging first basemen and journeyman relievers, banjo hitters and flamethrowers, household names and palookas anonymous even to their own mommas. In short, it is the full panoply of organized baseball, there in its chaotic and unmeasurable splendor. Attribute it all to the drugs if you must. But acknowledge that when you do — when you insist that there’s nothing the drugs can’t do — you’re essentially giving up on pinpointing what the drugs can do. The drug becomes an idol of the worst and most tribal kind: all-powerful and vague, explaining everything and nothing, stealing the agency from the real human actors who make actual history.
It is no great surprise to me that, struggling as we are at the intersection between pharmaceuticals and athletic performance, we’ve become fascinated by the Dock Ellis story. LSD was the scourge of the sixties, but compared to modern compounds made by boffins in secret laboratories, it feels positively innocuous. There’s humorous friction between an American establishment sport played between the lines and a psychedelic chemical taken by counterculture types who desperately wanted to blur them. The irrationalist in me wants to leave the myth alone, and instead sing the ballad of the rogue Pittsburgh Pirate whose abilities were accidentally elevated, or distressed, or scrambled, or something by a hallucinogen. But I can’t. Sick and beleaguered and overmedicated as I am — as we all are — I don’t want to pretend that evidence for chemical performance enhancement exists; not when it doesn’t. Dock Ellis didn’t need a drug to be a terrific pitcher. He didn’t need a drug to be a character. He didn’t need a drug to be a hothead. And he shouldn’t need a drug to be remembered.
Tris McCall, a San Francisco Giants fan, encourages you to take your asterisk and shove it.
*one last thing about Dock Ellis’s propensity to hit batters, and then I’ll leave you alone until opening day. Ellis is semi-famous among fans of criminal assault with a baseball (and there are many) for plunking three Reds in a row, and attempting to hit two more before getting yanked from the game by his manager. He did this on purpose — he didn’t like the Reds, and he was attempting to motivate his team via violence. This happened on May 1, 1974, just after the Pirates staggered through an awful April. Disturbingly, most discussions of this incident will give Ellis credit for inspiring his ballclub; the Baseball Reliquary says “the strategy worked, the Pirates snapped out of their lethargy to win a division title while the Reds failed to win their division for the first time in three years.” Left unsaid is that the East was weak that year and the West was very strong — the Pirates took their division with 88 wins, while the Reds won 98 and finished second to the Dodgers. More to the point, aggressive behavior did not light a fire under the Pirates: they were 6-13 when Ellis went on his beanball spree, and didn’t reach the .500 mark until three months later. In large part, this was because those same Cincinnati Reds beat their brains in for the remainder of the season. The Pirates finished 1974 with a 3-8 record against the Reds; if they’d played Cincinnati in the postseason, they would’ve been trounced. As for the offender, after getting yanked from the first inning of the May Day game, he did not pitch a single inning against the Reds for the rest of the year. He didn’t pitch a single inning against the Reds in 1975, either. The next time Dock Ellis took the hill against the Reds, he was wearing pinstripes and it was Game Three of the ’76 World Series. Long deferred, revenge could not have been sweeter for Cincinnati: the Big Red Machine sent Ellis to the showers in the fourth inning. Dan Dreissen, whom Dock had plunked in ’74, chased the pitcher from the game with a longball. See, the actual story doesn’t add to the tale of Ellis the triumphant acidhead, but it turns out to be a lot more literary. Unseemly petulance in ’74 was rudely punished in ’76, and right there on the sport’s biggest stage. Rarely is poetic justice delivered with more grace or conviction, and it is a terrible shame that the story has been mangled in order to serve Ellis’s myth. Unchecked hostility was what was bad about Dock Ellis; a thoughtful and intelligent person, he surely would have conceded that. There’s enough in the Ellis story to inspire us. We don’t have to go casting around for ugly anecdotes to retrofit and glorify — especially not when the punchlines are so perfectly tailored to expose Ellis’s faults.
The All-Music Guide review of Let The Night Fall is a positive one. It even leads with a warning shot at Sufjan Stevens. They said it so I don’t have to.
This review of my courthouse show on the JC Independent features a sensational shot of my big nose. There’s also some youtubic footage of me playing “The Ballad Of You And Me And Bret Schundler”. I only make about forty mistakes.
Finally, do not miss Jay’s latest flashterpiece.
I will be doing a 7pm showcase set at Rockwood Music Hall on the 30th of March. I intend to play their baby grand piano. Expect some brand new material.
Come down after work. Or if you don’t work, just come down before practice. They’ll pass the hat, but admission is free, and I won’t be counting the quarters in the collection plate.
Tris McCall
Tuesday, March 30
7pm
Rockwood Music Hall
184 Allen Street
NYC, NY
We will be returning to Maxwell’s on Friday, March 5. We’re bringing friends, too: Double-Breasted, Hey Tiger, Dave Patten, and (yay!) Prosolar Mechanics.
Tris McCall & The Housing Bubble
11pm
Maxwell’s
1039 Washington Street
Hoboken, NJ
This is a full band show. I hope to see you there.
They're out to get you; demons closing in on every side.
When Elvis went into Sun Studios to grab his crown — and for many years after — pop music was child’s play. Real stars didn’t make pop, and they sure as hell didn’t stay in Memphis. They went to California and starred in sorry entertainment with Gidget. We know this from Elvis’s own choices: he and Colonel Parker decided they’d rather do Fun In Acapulco than “Heartbreak Hotel”. Better to be a mediocre movie star than the world’s greatest rocker. These days it’s fashionable to blame Elvis and his management for shortsightedness, but it’s easy for us to say now. The pop charts weren’t a destination for an entertainer then. They were a means to an end.
By the time Thriller dropped, the industry had figured out how to make gazillions of dollars off of pop records. Consequently, “pop musician” became a respectable career path for the lucky few who made it to hit radio. Michael Jackson did appear in movies — he even managed to make The Wiz vaguely watchable. But movies were a sideline. Jackson made more impact as a music video star (the first, and still the greatest) than Elvis did in all of his feature films put together.
Since MTV has spaced on its mission, you can’t really be a music video star anymore. Beyonce and Lady Gaga qualify, just barely; they don’t do anything that Michael Jackson didn’t do better. In the years since Thriller, the industry seems to have forgotten how to make gazillions of dollars off of pop records. The starmaker machinery still groans away in Los Angeles, but it appears to be running short of toner. The suits like to blame the Internet and file-sharing. I believe it’s far more complicated than that; but that’s a discussion for another day. Michael Jackson’s early adulthood coincided with the zenith of pop music mass-marketing. Conditions had never been quite as favorable for pop blockbusters than they were in the early Eighties, and they’d never be as favorable as they were again. Jackson’s own talent had plenty to do with that, but probably not as much as I think it did, and I am a crazed, rabid, one-glove-wearing fan who nearly broke my neck trying to moonwalk too close to the staircase of our suburban house in Springfield, New Jersey. Because of the time during which he made his most famous records and the unparalleled hysteria that followed their release, it is next to impossible to compare Michael Jackson’s career to that of any other pop star.
Me, I like to compare Michael Jackson to Jackie Robinson.
Here’s something about Michael Jackson and Thriller that people forget: “The Girl Is Mine” was the lead single. They had “Billie Jean”, and “Beat It”, and “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”, and “Baby Be Mine” in the can, and they released “The Girl Is Mine” first. Paul McCartney shows up to do a not-quite-serious duet vocal that almost sinks the track, and it didn’t even matter to CBS. Those who felt at the time that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones were pandering to white MOR pop fans had all the ammunition they needed to make their argument. But I’d like to think that the real purpose of “The Girl Is Mine” was to sneak a fight between a black guy and a white guy onto mainstream radio, and to do so in advance of several singles that were, by their very nature, assaults on the color bar. Consider the possibility that they were more theorized than it seemed: McCartney’s limp insouciance might well be meant to stand in for white complacency. And as for Jackson, it’s pretty clear that he’s not singing about a woman.
And could you blame him for his frustration? In 1982, MTV would not air videos by black people. This was definitely part of the station’s brand launch; it was also nearly its undoing. Younger people sometimes don’t believe me when I mention this — they say things like “oh, you mean there were separate shows for ‘urban’ videos?” No, it wasn’t like that at all. If you mugged Nina Blackwood for an ‘81 MTV playlist, you wouldn’t find any black people on it, period. Music Television was a whites-only club as exclusive as any in Johannesburg, or Columbia, South Carolina. Jackson didn’t even bother making a video for “The Girl Is Mine”; even after he’d turned the station inside out with “Thriller”, he opted against spots for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”, “P.Y.T.”, and “Human Nature”.
Many of you know the tale of Walter Yetnikoff’s strongarm tactics against the network: he allegedly told MTV that if they refused to air Michael Jackson, he’d pull all of the other CBS clips from the channel. He could get away with that because Columbia Records was part of a gigantic corporate entity and MTV was still a start-up. The story is misleading because it suggests that MTV acted alone. As anybody with a cursory knowledge of Eighties mainstream radio can tell you, the video channel was by no means the only media outlet with a Blacks Keep Out sign on the fence.
It was just the most desperate. MTV may have been bankrolled by the majors, but there were plenty of folks certain that it wouldn’t catch on. We have a nice retrospective appreciation of roly-poly fish heads and Martha Quinn’s floral dresses, but early MTV aired quite a bit of not-ready-for-prime-time crapola. No matter how strategically segregationist your marketing strategy may be, there’s only so many times you can air the guy from A Flock Of Seagulls with his middle finger on the synthesizer before it starts getting ridiculous — especially when you’ve got the “Billie Jean” video collecting dust on your desk.
So it’s not surprising that MTV was the first to cave. Once they did air Michael Jackson, everything else on the channel looked sloppy and amateurish by comparison. Yes, we’re all lo-fi appreciators and communitarian punk rockers here, but even the most relentless egalitarian will lose his shit in the presence of glass-shattering talent. (And in case you haven’t noticed, most of America isn’t made up of relentless egalitarians.) After “Billie Jean”, the playlist had to change; otherwise, the station would have been hobbled by its incongruity. “Thriller” can’t be followed by “I Wanna Be Lifeguard” — it’s just unfair. Prince and Lionel Richie were in, Blotto and Dog Police were out. The station would continue to control its melanin level — it still does — but the whitewash was over for good.
If Yetnikoff tried the same trick with commercial radio, he didn’t get far; at least not at first. “Beat It” rocked harder than Billy Squier, but the heavy music deejays wouldn’t cooperate. We no longer think of Michael Jackson as lyrically provocative (although he always was), but in ‘82, he was a young and dangerously androgynous black man singing about unwanted pregnancy, gang violence, abuse, and miscegenation — and it scared the holy hell out of the MOR programmers. His blatant queerness was an issue for new wave stations that had no problem airing David Bowie and Human League. Top 40 is a self-defining institution, so at least we could count on Casey Kasem. But the best place to hear Michael Jackson was on MTV.
He used the videos to obliterate the barriers that separated black and non-black audiences. In 1980, the music that played on my block bore no resemblance to the songs that played on the African-American side of town; to me and my playmates, “urban” music meant the Billy Joel songs that explicitly addressed the city. By ‘83, we were all listening to Michael Jackson. Maybe his motivation was money; we all know how he drew his sales goals in condensation trails on the mirror every morning. He must have realized he needed to penetrate white America to stack that kind of bank. Certainly he made no political statements. Then again, he didn’t need to. No black nationalist ever did a better job of forcing mass American culture to confront an African-American face. That he obliterated that face beyond recognition almost underscores the point: Michael Jackson’s image became a symbol, and it can’t help but feel unreal to exist as a walking signifier.
Critics of Michael Jackson like to point to the brevity of his productive seasons: he doesn’t have Paul McCartney’s discography, let alone Van Morrison’s, so we’re not supposed to take him seriously as a songwriter or as an artist. I love Paul McCartney and Van the Man, but they never had to shoulder the burden that Michael Jackson did. They didn’t have to pry the padlocks off mass prejudice with nothing but force of personality. They weren’t up against a color bar. Jackie Robinson got a late start; he didn’t pile up the sort of career numbers that you’d expect from a typical Hall of Famer. But everybody who saw him play called him electrifying. Likewise, nobody who saw Michael Jackson in 1982 could ever dispute his utter mastery of pop music. Nobody has ever done it better. If you were there, you knew.
I first saw him perform on Soul Train; I also remember watching rebroadcasts of the Jackson 5 cartoon when I was very small. Normally I resented child stars for getting the attention that ought to be accruing to me. But here was a kid so stupefyingly talented that he transcended any petty resentments I might have had. Half a decade later, he worked the same magic on the entire country. The rappers who came in his wake — and, honestly, all rappers came in his wake — would invade suburban living rooms and set all the furniture on fire. It was fine; that furniture had to go. I’m grateful to every one of them. I’m more grateful to Michael Jackson for clearing the path.
Commercial radio resegregated in the early Nineties; I think they called it “alternative music”. Much of the work that Michael Jackson did was undone by faceless white guys wearing flannel. By then, Michael Jackson had lost his marbles, predictably, and in public, too. He became an easy target. I pulled for Dangerous to do the same thing to grunge that Thriller had to post-punk, but honestly, I knew it was too late. You can’t except the same guy to turn the world upside down twice — even George Washington only had one revolution to fight. Jackie Robinson died young, too; he was only 53. In 2010, we don’t focus on his endorsement of Richard Nixon or his cranky anti-drug crusading. We remember a ballplayer who made history for all the right reasons. Thankfully, now that he’s gone, the image of Michael Jackson the lunatic child molester and plastic-surgery disaster is already beginning to fade. It’ll never go away completely, and I can even accept that it’s a part of the story. But it’s a sidebar at best — and as all of the tawdry stuff recedes further into the haze of celebrity nonsense, it’s a sidebar that’ll grow smaller and smaller.
In conclusion, let me put it to you this way:
When I was in college, much effort was given by my progressive professors to debunk the “great man” theory. History, we were taught, was made not by single actors but by social movements. Valorize a long line of heroes and you tend to reduce history to a statue garden. Well, maybe. There’s good patricidal fun to be had in throwing stones at idols, but I never stopped thinking my progressive professors were wrong. My proof for this wasn’t Abraham Lincoln, or John F. Kennedy, or Bella Abzug, or Captain America. My proof was always Michael Jackson. In 1983, anybody who didn’t believe in the great man theory didn’t have a television set. Talent, grace, and charisma are all real, and magnificent, and historiography that doesn’t make room — lots of room — for these qualities feels curiously cold and impersonal. Michael Jackson had Columbia Records in his corner, and that’s certainly a sturdier platform than most charismatic artists get. But Columbia Records didn’t shake the globe. Michael Jackson did. Call Mr. West a bigmouth (he will surely agree) but he’s right about this: everybody in this pop game is trying to be like Michael Jackson. They’ve realized what Elvis and Colonel Parker didn’t; something we all learned in ‘82: a pop star is something like a magic bullet. They can fire you out of the biggest gun they’ve got, but once you’re out there, it’s still your own speed and force against gravity. If you’re fast enough, and strong enough, there’s no barrier you can’t penetrate.
Final words continue tomorrow.
Best Singer
Catherine Ireton.
Best Vocal Harmonies
Catherine Ireton. She’s a one-woman girl group on “Musician, Please Take Heed”, and she’s right there to spot the other GHTG acrobats when it’s their turn on the beam.
Best Rapper
Joell Ortiz. His verses on the Slaughterhouse album split the difference between Supreme Clientele-era Ghostface and Sir Mix-A-Lot. In other words, they go straight to my sweet spot.
Best Bassist
Jamie T.
Best Guitarist
Max Bemis.
Best Drummer
That kid from Passion Pit is crazy good, or his beat replacement software is. But I’m going to go with Tyler Minsberg of the Dangerous Summer. by a hair over Paramore’s Zach Farro. I gotta love these art-punk kids who make every part ten times more complicated than it needs to be. I mean that. Needless complication rocks.
Best Drum Fills
They’re all on the outro of “Lost At Sea”, the saddest song the Friedbergers have ever written. And they’ve written some sad ones.
Best Pianist/Organist
Yoni Wolf. But wait, I’ve got more to say about drummers. How about that immensely-entertaining fella from The Blackout? Everything he does is straight-up cliche, and he makes a damned good case for cliche.
Best Drum Programming
And while we’re on the subject of cliche, let’s give this one to Adam Young. Nothing he does on Ocean Eyes hasn’t been done a thousand times before, but it’s all so effective that it’s impossible to mind. Strip away the fey vocals and the lyrics about getting hugs from lightning bugs, and you’re left with a track that Prince Be might have rhymed on in 1992. You cannot say the same for any of those Postal Service hits.
Best Synth Playing
Kendrick Strauch of the Harlem Shakes. They’ll be missed.
Best Use Of A Non-Traditional Instrument
I’m partial to the electric didgeridoo on the Loney, Dear album, but it might just be a sample. The electronic tamboura that imparts the ghostly texture to the Clientele’s “Harvest Time”? — that was actually played by a human. With an electronic tamboura. Not too many folks have one.
Best Backing Vocals
Why?, “This Blackest Purse”. The funniest backing vocals were Matt Friedberger’s ultra-deadpan “what I would do”s on “Drive To Dallas”. I laugh every time, and it’s not otherwise a humorous song.
Best Instrumental Solo
More Matt Friedberger: pick a solo from I’m Going Away. They’re all great. You might be partial to those tentative telegraph signals on “Even In The Rain”, or the berzerk tickertape stutter of “Charmaine Champagne”, or the slack-string chaos on “Ray Bouvier”.
Best Instrumentalist
If she really did do all the bass and guitar on New Worlds (I don’t have liner notes, but I’m guessing she’s responsible for everything but the drums), the answer has to be Charlotte Hatherley.
Best Songwriting
Stuart Murdoch. Have we given him his lifetime achievement award yet? Where does Murdoch fit, I wonder, in the greatest-of-all-time discussions that we like to have around the hot stove? You can call him the songwriter of the decade, and I won’t fight; call him the songwriter of the past two decades, and I’ll put together a meek counter-argument with the words “Liz Phair” in there somewhere. But I don’t think he’s passed Ray Davies yet. He definitely hasn’t passed Townshend yet. Standards were higher in the Sixties and Seventies. Sorry, they just were.
Best Production
Lukas Burton claims to have co-written an album that even I won’t defend: James Blunt’s bazillion-selling debut. He’s got a lot to make up for. Luckily for Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy, she’s the current instrument of his penance. There are one or two Lilith Fair-style missteps on Bomb In A Birdcage, but for the most part, it’s the most arresting-sounding singer-songwriter album I’ve heard since… well, since Brooke Fraser’s set last year. But if you obey Satan and pretend Fraser doesn’t exist, you’d have to go back to Mitchell Froom’s mid-Nineties creative demolition of Suzanne Vega’s operating paradigm. My favorite production on a single song was done by the underrated Shondrae “Bangladesh” Crawford on Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade”. Pulling out the backbeat on the chorus was an outrageous choice.
Best Arrangements
Elizabeth & The Catapult. Also heavily indebted to the Vega-Froom albums. Folks were ambivalent about 99.9F and Nine Objects Of Desire when they were released, but they suggest a way forward for singer-songwriters tired of making wannabe iPod commercials.
Best Musical Moment Of 2009
On “Down And Dusky Blonde”, the last song on God Help The Girl, the operatic narrative conceit disappears completely: the story is ostensibly Eve’s, but just about every singer on the record gets a crack at a verse. They’re all pretty good, or at least game; some of the God Help The Girl singers do sound a little too thrilled to be there to do justice to Stuart Murdoch’s typically-ambivalent lyrics. After four different vocalists have taken their turn on the microphone (including two who he probably really did turn up on the Internet), Catherine Ireton ends amateur hour abruptly, clearing the bases with a grand slam. “It’s a drag that you’re getting old” is her first line, and of course she’s singing to Murdoch himself, and about the May-December love affair that they didn’t have to have because she’s on his record instead. For months, I wondered what Ireton’s performance reminded me of, and then it hit me. It’s exactly like Q-Tip’s entrance in the middle of “Scenario” — but exactly. The rest of the emcees on the posse cut are having a good time, engaging in friendly competition, trying to outdo each other. Then the voice for the ages comes in and makes them all sound like the secondary characters they are. It’s a Leader Quest mission, and she’s got the goods here.
Best Lyrics
The Roadside Graves, “My Son’s Home”. John Gleason is turning into Stephen Crane, right before our eyes. He’s got better tunes, too.
Best Lyrics Over A Full Album
Darren Russell Hayman, Pram Town. Nobody stateside picked up on the French, Hayman’s first post-Hefner band, which is a shame: Local Information, their first album, was a stupendously funny (and sad, of course; Hayman specializes in sad) examination of the London suburbs. He’s back to the satellite towns, and this time, he’s digging even deeper. If you don’t find urban design moving, you’ll probably be taken aback by Pram Town at first, but if you can’t get into “High Rise Towers In Medium Sized Towns”, you aren’t from New Jersey. Or any place like it.
Band Of The Year
Paramore by an eyelash over Metric. I go for the traditional stuff. Also, before we go any further, I’d like to say that Metric’s decision to leave “Waves” off of Fantasies was the most inexplicable thing anybody did in 2009, and quite possibly the most inexplicable thing any big league band has ever done. With “Waves”, that’s a five-star album, and at least number four on the year-end list. Fantastic melody, great performance, excellent lyric; sure, Emily, throw it in the crapper. Sometimes I think they’re taking too many cues from Elvis Costello.
Best Live Show I Saw In 2009
Roadside Graves @ Pianos.
Best Music Video
Mos Def, “Casa Bey”. The Ecstatic took awhile. Some of the world music experiments are brilliant, especially “The Embassy”; others struck me as gimmicky. For the first time, Mos Def seemed (intermittently) self-conscious. After I saw the “Casa Bey” clip, all was forgiven. It did everything a video is supposed to do: reinforce the star’s charisma and underscore what’s essential about his work (the rapping, dummy). Also, for the first time in decades, he flashes us a smile.
Sexiest Person In Pop Music
Valerie “Lights” Poxleitner. To paraphrase David Cone after he got a glimpse of Darryl Strawberry’s member, I’d like to look like that for a couple of days. I’d like to see how my life would change.
2009 Album You Listened To The Most
Fantasies.
2009 Album That Wore Out The Quickest
Wale, Attention Deficit. In retrospect, the warning signs were on the mixtapes. His faux-sympathetic songs about girls in the club are taxing on second listen and impossible on the third. I move we go back to the days when rappers pretended that women didn’t exist. We’ll make an exception for Kanye West, just so we don’t forget what the prohibition is there for.
Most Romantic Song
Say Anything, “Crush’d”. Never mind the cheesy pick-up lines — when was the last time you heard a boy this excited about a girl on record? Honorable mention: The Clientele’s “Never Anyone But You”.
Funniest Song
“Hardcore Gentlemen” is apparently funnier to Von Pea than it is to anybody else on earth, but give him this: the public access radio sketch on Brooklynati really is hilarious. That’s not a song, though. My vote goes to “Perfection As A Hipster” from God Help The Girl. Neil Hannon plays it deadpan — absurdly so — and Catherine Ireton’s backing vocals are seriously LOL.
Most Frightening Song
On Hospice, Peter Silberman of The Antlers falls for a dying girl while working in the cancer ward, watches her kick the bucket, and then gets chased around by her ghost. Some of it is chain-pulling, some of it is emotionally manipulative, and, considering the subject matter, it all sounds much more like “Streets Of Philadelphia” than it ought to. But when it works, boy, does it work. In the epilogue, he’s buried alive in the morgue, and the screaming face of his dead lover is pressed up against his. He sounds scared shitless. Listen to it in the dark and you will be, too.
Most Moving Song
“High Rise Towers In Medium Sized Towns”. Since community can’t be planned, planned communities are a tragedy in concrete.
Sexiest Song
“Electric Twist”, by A Fine Frenzy. A crazy-horny performance by a wordy young woman — an intellectual’s pinup — who is teased by her bad, bad boyfriend and told not to think or talk. By the end of the song, she wants it so bad that she can’t do either. She can only “uh uh uh uh” in a fetching sort of way. She may as well be pointing to her genitals and screaming. I reiterate: this is a wordy young woman and an intellectual’s pinup.
Meanest Song
Morrissey, “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore”. Even if you haven’t heard it, can’t you just imagine?
Most Inspiring Song
In “Do Better”, Max Bemis disses Scientologists, Will & Grace, Harvard, and athiesm in the first eight lines. He really knows how to get my Irish up. But I can’t imagine you have the same afflictions that I do, or Max does, so the answer is “Face Up”, by Lights. That is some first-rate self-actualization pop. Which leads us to my favorite category (now in its third year):
Song That Most Makes Me Wish I Was A Christian
Lights, “Lions”. Brooke Fraser she is not, but I am sure Hillsong would appreciate this ferocious chorus: “Lions make you brave/ giants give you faith/ death is a charade/ you don’t have to feel safe to feel unafraid.” Charles Martel notwithstanding, Christianity didn’t become a world-famous belief system by accident.
Most Inspiring Moment
Hayley Williams gets the feeling that if she sings it loud enough, you will sing it back to her. Then she sings it, loud enough. Did I sing it back to her? What do you think?
Rookie Of The Year
Drake. No, I don’t care that he was on DeGrassi. I don’t watch that junk, and I am pleased as hell that he’s not watching it anymore, either.
Best Cover
Bryce Avary’s solo YouTube version of “Maps”. He turns it into the Johnny Cougar heartland number it always begged to be. YYY fans, line up to smack me.
Most Unwelcome Cover
The lazy-ass iconoclast who did that wretched cut-time version of “All You Need Is Love” for the Blackberry ad.
Best Guest Appearance
Shara Worden as the Queen on Hazards Of Love. Holy crap, she sounds remarkably not unlike Grace Slick! If she’d ever sang like that on her My Brightest Diamond records, I wouldn’t have sold them back to Princeton Record Exchange. How did this happen, I wonder? Colin Meloy says to her “I think you ought to sing this one like Grace Slick”, and she says “okay!”? And then she leaves the studio and goes right back to the operatic hooey? How many hundreds of thousands of pop starlets have tried to sound like Grace Slick on “Mexico” or some other far-out Airplane number, and flopped? Don’t waste the gift, Worden.
Most Convincing Historical Recreation
More Lights. This time, it’s “Second Go”, which is ‘87 like the Debbie Gibson who never grew up and starred in Broadway schlock. Poxleitner wins extra points for playing a keytar with zero irony. Warms my dayglo heart. Don’t give me Jesus & Mary Chain, folks, give me Jesus and Taylor Dayne.
Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Anyway
Fever Ray.
Thing You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should
Love Vs. Money by The-Dream. Also, MUSE sounds right up my alley, as long as it is, as advertised, more Queen than Radiohead.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through And Enjoy
Working On A Dream. God forgive me.
Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make
Passion Pit, Manners. Proof positive that college rock doesn’t have to be joyless.
Album That Sounded Like It Was A Chore To Make
Honestly, Abnormally Attracted To Sin. Tori Amos’s bona fides as a concept-master can never be questioned; here, the concept seems to be her bizarre S&M fantasies. “To get off, he screams ’slutty goth’/ but I’m a brightly colored person!”, she complains on “Police Me”. Hoo boy. Part of her appeal is that she’s always been about a centimeter away from losing it altogether; these days, she’s posing for pictures with an iguana while wearing a leather bustier. I will always love her to death, and she is entitled to a mulligan and as many orgasms as Kevin Barnes has, at least. But I’m damned glad I’m not her manager.
Man, I Wish I Knew What This Song Was About
“Outlaw Pete”. Also, is “Queen Of The Supermarket” a joke?
Most Overrated
Lil Wayne. He’s a caricature now, totally displaced; he doesn’t even bother to talk about New Orleans anymore. He could be from the moon for all the average American pop listener knows. Sure, he’s a good rapper. So what? There are plenty of those. The task for Weezy now is coming up with something worth saying. Freddie Gibbs packs more meaning into an average couplet than Wayne has in his last two albums.
Song Or Album That Should Have Been Shorter
Every single track on the Diane Birch debut wears out its welcome, especially the interminable “Rewind”. The jam just goes on and on, even after the drummer falls down drunk on his snare (okay, maybe it just sounds that way.) She needs an editor, and a real producer.
Song Or Album That Should Have Been Longer
Farmer Dave Scher, Flash Forward To The Good Times. Also, after nine tracks of lyrical wheel-spinning, the Golden Bloom album concludes with a minute-long hidden track about Rod Blagojevic. It’s over far too soon, but it still makes the rest of the album seem indirect and limpid by comparison. Sing about stuff, people! It won’t make you cool or get you positive notice in Showpaper, but it will make your songs memorable.
Album That Turned Out To Be A Hell Of A Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was
Eskimo Snow.
Worst Song Of The Year
Lil Wayne & Chris Brown, “I Can Transform Ya”. “I can transform you/ like a transformer/ I can turn you from a human into a Carter.” See, he admitted it!, he has no interest in being a person anymore. I guess if there’s a place for Disco Duck on the pop charts, we can still make room for Weezy, but there was a time when I believed he was after something a little more significant than that. No longer.
Worst Video Of The Year
Pink, “Please Don’t Leave Me”. The pop star in an evil nurse uniform, torturing her boyfriend with a golf club. She really knows how to press all of the gauche buttons at once. This is a shame, because it’s a good song, and I don’t necessarily want to turn the channel when it comes on. The backing vocals reminded me of Trembling Blue Stars (no joking). Later, George Pasles told me “Please Don’t Leave Me” sounded like “Room Enough”, a song by George Pasles. So there you have it from two cupcake-pop makers: Pink is on some straight-up Sarah Records shit. Appearing at Cake Shop this Wednesday: Pink, with Hospitality and Metric Mile.
Worst Singing
Fuck it, I’ll say it: I like him a lot, but I’ve got to admit that Peter Silberman strangles the hell out of his own excellent writing from time to time. Antony Hegarty can get away with singing like that because he’s basically an art buffoon. Silberman wants to be a real reporter, but real reporters don’t ululate.
Worst Rapping
I was thrilled to hear Leighton Meester spit, because I didn’t want to have to vote for Ke$ha in this category. But the real answer is Bruce Hornsby’s ten-year-old kid on “Space Is The Place”. I know music is the family business, but that bordered on child abuse.
Worst Lyrics
Phoenix. At some point “we’re French” ceases to be an excuse.
Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better
Tracyanne Campbell, “French Navy”. It is intelligence-insulting and borderline racist for the author of “Teenager” to write a Motown fake containing the following refrain: “you make me go oooooh/ with the things that you do”. Also, “you with your dietary restriction/ you said you loved me with a lotta conviction” is the lamest couplet to come out of Glasgow since Stuart Murdoch rhymed “poet” with “you don’t even know it” in “Funny Little Frog”.
Worst Song On A Good Album
“In The City”, by Rahim Samad. Travel Properly represents Tampa well, but this one is a misstep. Detuning the sample during the verse in order to change key: a big, sick-sounding no-no. Not to mention that it speeds up and slows down the beat. Who knows?, maybe he thought it was avant garde.
Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job
All the college rock that came from the hipster centers in 2009. We’re going to look back on the past two years and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Now, you might live in some wholesome place like Franklin, Tennessee, or the Biosphere, so let me share with you what you’re missing. The fashion in Williamsburg and (especially) Bushwick is to get a crappy guitar, like a Danelectro or a weatherbeaten imitation Strat, put it on the shrillest pickup possible, and run it through a tube amp with the treble cranked to eleven. Then, just in case there’s somebody in the listening audience who can still make out the words, the vocals are smothered in reverb and distortion. This is then home-mastered by some kid with a laptop and thirty seconds of recording experience: he believes that pegging the VU meters into the red is intrinsically awesome. Oh, you’re looking for a scapegoat? You want me to name names? How about Vivian Girls?
Best Sounding Album Of 2009
Holly Williams, Here With Me.
Most Appropriately-Named Album or Artist
The Leftovers, Eager To Please. They sure are.
Most Inappropriately-Named Album or Artist
Forever The Sickest Kids.
Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat
Architecture In Helsinki, “That Beep”.
Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year
“Carry On Wayward Son”. I heard it in the grocery store in April, and didn’t stop singing it until October.
Thing You Feel Cheapest About Liking
Barack Obama.
Hoary Old Bastard Who Should Spare Us All And Retire
Sufjan Stevens, apparently. Everything you need to know about college rock in the ’00s: Stevens went from “I’m going to do an album about each of the fifty states!” to “there is no point in writing any more songs” in five years. It would be funny if it wasn’t sad, and sad if it wasn’t funny. Okay, I admit it’s a little funnier than it is sad.
Young Upstart Who Should Be Sent Down To The Minors For More Seasoning
It’s still Natasha Khan, and after the shapeless mess that was her last album, I think she’d better get some at-bats in the Arizona Fall League, too. Here’s a statement about contemporary college rock that’s sadder than it is funny: the obscenely-talented Charlotte Hatherley, who could not get her album released stateside, spent much of the the year touring as a sidewoman in Bat For Lashes. That’s like hiring Mario Batali to be a line cook at the Olive Garden.
Artist Most In Need Of Some Fresh Ideas
Rich Burlew. Maybe seven hundred stick figure comics is enough.
Most Unsexy Person In Pop
Jay-Z.
Best Line Or Rhyme
Slaughterhouse is nonstop vulgar witticisms, and of course I loved them all. But my favorite line on the album wasn’t clever or poetic, and doesn’t even scan very well. Joell Ortiz: “There’s no reason a musician should wanna watch a television/ instead of be listening to the radio”. Words to live by.
2009 Album You Feel You’ll Probably Re-evaluate in 2010
Eskimo Snow might be a bit low at #12.
Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From
Moneterrey, Mexico, if Todd Patrick has anything to say about it.
Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2019
Max Bemis. He’s over the suicide thing, and the drug overdose thing, and about to settle in for a long run as a loudmouth social observer/big brother.
Will Be A One Hit Wonder (Tinted Windows Doesn’t Count)
Ida Maria, but you’ll be hearing “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” for the rest of your life once it’s placed on the soundtrack to some screwy romantic comedy.
Forbidden Concepts For 2010
No rapper is allowed to write another song about hip-hop that rehashes Common’s dead-in-the-water “Used To Love Her” metaphor! No rapper is allowed to write a “love” song to his gun! 50 Cent, are you listening? You’re better than this, man.
Biggest Musical Trend Of 2010
Bands rediscovering — and then rehashing — Pavement and Guided By Voices.
Best Album Of 2010
Of Men And Angels.
You're gonna make mistakes; you're young.
So am I at it again?
The year’s most appealing album was also its most audacious: God Help The Girl, the imaginary soundtrack to an equally-imaginary film by Stuart Murdoch. If Sinister felt like a sudden, welcome break from the relentless midrange guitar nonsense that ruined pop in the ’90s, GHTG is even more of an outlier: an album loaded with ostentatious musicianship and boisterous personality, released to a college rock demimonde that has had little time for either lately. The college rock is now a druggy, underproduced, inarticulate mess; that’s part of its appeal. Murdoch’s new recordings are as tight and bright and crisply-illustrated as candy bar wrappers. In the early years of the decade — back when blueberry boats were still in vogue, I mean — its ornamentation and comprehensive storyboarding wouldn’t have been astonishing. In 2009, God Help The Girl sounded radical.
A surprising (to me) number of B&S diehards slept on this set. They might have been turned off by the devotional-sounding name, or the two recycled tracks from Life Pursuit, or prior bad experience with the band’s imaginary soundtrack to Todd Solondz’s not-so-imaginary Storytelling, or Murdoch’s insistence in interviews that this was something other than a Belle & Sebastian album with a female singer upfront. Only that’s Richard Colburn on drums, and the great Bobby Kildea on bass, and Chris “Beans” Geddes bouncing away on the electric piano. Stevie Jackson funks out on the guitar and contributes a fairly good song, just as he does on all the other Belle & Sebastian albums. Murdoch doesn’t sing, except for the songs where he does. The lyrics are about sexually-ambiguous and bookish students in the city (likely Glasgow) who struggle with romantic relationships, eating disorders, and the pains of being pure at heart — as they have been on every B&S set since Tigermilk. There’s even a soft-focus picture of a chick on the cover. So, yeah, it’s a Belle & Sebastian album.
And the female singer upfront isn’t just anybody. For reasons I don’t understand, Murdoch has attempted to obscure this, circulating the story that he’d assembled a girl group by anonymously placing “musician wanted” ads on the Internet. There are many voices on God Help The Girl, and I’m willing to believe that a few of them were waiver-wire pickups; you can pad out a championship team like that. However, the Girl herself is no stranger — astute B&S completists will recognize Catherine Ireton’s face from the front of the White Collar Boy EP. And upon close inspection, the “girl group” turns out to be a bit of a conceit: Ireton takes many of the songs herself, handling lead and backing vocals with equal confidence. Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy and Asya from Smoosh drop in to portray characters in Murdoch’s narrative, but Ireton steals those songs, too.
These Poll designations are all subjective, of course, and if you didn’t like Ireton’s vocals at all, I can’t say I’d be surprised. She has absolutely zero in common with any other singer on any other album released in muffled old 2009. She refuses to slur any of her syllables; instead, she articulates every consonant, pausing over her “r”s and “p”s and marking each glottal stop precisely. She sings chromatic runs, like she’s Jenny Lind or somebody from the last turn of the century. She carefully invests every word — right down to the conjunctions — with personality and meaning; throughout the album, she sounds almost unbearably awake. She gets all of Murdoch’s jokes. Were Henry Higgins a voter in Critics Poll 2009, I am confident he’d list Catherine Ireton as Best Singer.
This presents a problem for Murdoch’s storytelling: the more command Ireton demonstrates, the less she has in common with the typical aimless B&S narrators. This disjunction may torpedo the film project. But I’m not a moviegoer, so I don’t care. I’m just glad Murdoch finally found a foil who could jump him out of his routine — and maybe even make fun of him a bit in the process. Ireton may not be “Eve”, the hospitalized main character of the story that accompanies God Help The Girl, but she’s completely believable as a funny, literate ingenue with a desperate desire to get the hell out of a gray university town.
I placed the album third. Really, nobody had any chance against my #1 — that set went straight into my bloodstream. Max Bemis’s last set (which also topped my list) was meant to be an intervention in an age-old fight between establishmentarians and the kids whose lives they casually ruin; this one, I am convinced, was made especially for me. But I’ve also listed God Help The Girl behind the latest from a singer-songwriter whose debt to Belle & Sebastian is greater than Colin Meloy’s. The reasons feel familiar to me: like all B&S sets, God Help The Girl is uneven; it rehashes old ideas; some of the other girls aren’t too impressive. The jazz-orchestral instrumentals (especially “Unified Theory”) are time-killers. At times the project does feel like one of those Woody Allen vehicles where the director casts a bunch of nubile Hollywood starlets in leading roles so he can have a legal excuse to do nude scenes with them. We’ve always known that Stuart Murdoch likes to surround himself with pretty girls. Sometimes lightning strikes: one of those girls proves to be more than just a fantasy. If you’re very lucky, she might even show you that she’s the mack, and you’re just along for the ride.
As for Ireton herself, all bets are off. She might get shipped back to Cork, never to be heard from again. She might put out dazzling records of her own, or she might decide to front some sadly-generic folk-rock project. Murdoch might pull a Carl Newman and find a place for her in his band. Or maybe that movie will get made, and she’ll prove to be every bit as revelatory on the big screen as she is on compact disc. The story of Eve that accompanies God Help The Girl is, if you’ll forgive me, a comprehensive encapsulation of everything that’s bad about Belle & Sebastian: on the printed page, tales of young girls lost in the system start to feel very much like fodder for the Television for Women. Ireton saves Stuart Murdoch from his worst excesses. She may go right on saving him. One way or another, I hope to be hearing from her for a long, long time.
One last word about #6, and then it’s on to the list, I promise. Many believe that since Colin Meloy is never going to top the “Apology Song”, he may as well hang them up and go home. I prefer to say that since he’s never going to top the “Apology Song”, he may as well attempt to craft neo-prog epics about mystical beasts on the Scottish taiga. The Hazards Of Love ends like Titanic, and of course that’s not so good. But I love everything else about the album: the over-the-top ELP organ breaks, and Tull sludge guitar, the Strawbs-y harpsichord, the Annie Haslam art-folk melodies, the subcontracted performances from Shara Worden and Becky Stark, the absurd theatrical aspirations, the little kids who play the ghosts of the Rake’s victims. I don’t even mind that Meloy hogs all the good songs; unlike Murdoch, he didn’t change the name of the band on the sleeve of his concept set, so he knows he’s singing to the initiated. It doesn’t deserve the top spot, but it might deserve a laser show. In 2009, that’s enough.
Best Album of 2009:
1. Say Anything — Say Anything
2. Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern – Pram Town
3. God Help The Girl
4. Jamie T — Kings & Queens
5. Drake — So Far Gone
6. The Decemberists — The Hazards Of Love
7. Cruiserweight — Big Bold Letters
8. Ace Enders & A Million Different People — When I Hit The Ground
9. Metric — Fantasies
10. The Dangerous Summer — Reach For The Sun
11. The Roadside Graves — My Son’s Home
12. Why? — Eskimo Snow
13. Mos Def — The Ecstatic
14. Holly Williams — Here With Me
15. Tanya Morgan — Brooklynati
16. Paramore — Brand New Eyes
17. Lights — The Listening
18. A Fine Frenzy — Bomb In A Birdcage
19. Future Of The Left — Travels With Myself And Another
20. Slaughterhouse — Slaughterhouse
Album I didn’t know where to place:
Every Avenue’s Picture Perfect. Since critics are snobs, most do not bother with the corporate rock. Those of us who do will often glibly demand of our faceless favorites that they sprout personalities and shoehorn some specifics into their generic heartache numbers. Be careful what you wish for. David Ryan Strauchmann (now just David Ryan) used to be just another lonely masturbator, wanking himself asleep in his empty room. A year later, he has morphed into every woman’s nightmare: a glib, winking, self-entitled emo Lothario comfortable leading the gang vocals about the “trap” between his girlfriend’s legs. After the ‘08 release ofShh… Just Go With It (boy, does that title sound sinister in retrospect), I likened Strauchmann to Huey Lewis. With Picture Perfect, the comparison still holds — Huey was a smug motherfucker, too. The casual cruelty of “I Forgive You” and “Tell Me I’m A Wreck” — in which the singer deadpans the vicious breakup couplet “I guess we just want different things/I want space, you want a diamond ring” — make the romantic “don’t go” power ballads feel all the more emotionally manipulative. But I cannot front: I always ask artists to inscribe a specific time and place in their recordings, and Strauchmann really does get you right in the middle of a tawdry Midwestern pick-up scene. You can almost smell the onion rings coming from the Applebee’s kitchen. No, it isn’t a triumph, and it’s not better than Slaughterhouse or A Fine Frenzy, but Picture Perfect is a weirdly compelling album that does reflect genuine growth. He’s drawing characters and establishing settings. His knack for rafter-raising melodies hasn’t deserted him, either.
Most unfairly-maligned album:
Til The Casket Drops. The latest Clipse got body-slammed because it isn’t as good as Lord Willin’ or Hell Hath No Fury. I have to believe there is a double-standard operating here, or perhaps our expectations for rappers are higher than they are for college rockers. Those who came for verbal acrobatics from Pusha T and got nothing but intermittently-hot flossing anthems are pardoned their disappointment. But listen again: it’s Malice who makes this album indispensable. His Christian conversion — the first convincing one in rap music in a blue moon — makes his verses a fascinating counterpoint to his brother’s. Also, “Door Man” is off the hook.
Nicest try:
Elvis Costello’s Secret, Profane, And Sugarcane. With nothing left to prove, MacManus tries to pull off musical miracles. (Just for kicks, I mean.) Here, he gathers the detritus that washed up onshore when his musical about P.T. Barnum foundered on the rocks of its own (welcome) conceptual overreach, some outtakes from the pseudo-country set The Delivery Man, a quick revision of a not-so-good tune from All This Useless Beauty, and a few new originals about old obsessions. Noted accomplice T-Bone Burnett attempts to harmonize these show tunes, folk tunes, and standard-issue Costello tunes into something resembling an album. He does so by recording them all with a bluegrass band, coaxing a few stellar performances out of Costello’s whiskey-strangled throat, and I will be damned if he doesn’t almost turn the trick. Costello threatens to push into new territory, too, hinting in his lyrics at connections between prison, slavery, 19th century propriety, hidden shame, and the myth of the American West. If he’d started writing from scratch, he might’ve come up with another classic, or at least another Momofuku. As it is, it’s a frustrating set, and a compendium of interesting dead ends. As B-sides compilations go, it’s one of the bravest.
Best Single of 2009:
1. Metric — “Gimme Sympathy”
2. Owl City — “Fireflies”
3. The Blackout — “The Warning (S.O.S)”
4. All-Time Low — “Weightless”
5. Gucci Mane — “Lemonade”
6. The Dangerous Summer — “The Permanent Rain”
7. Big Boi & Gucci Mane — “Shine Blockas”
8. Camera Obscura — “Honey In The Sun”
9. Panic! At The Disco — “New Perspective”
10. Kid Cudi — “Day ‘N’ Nite”
11. Lady Gaga — “Bad Romance”
12. Micachu & The Shapes — “Golden Phone”
13. Ilyas — “Real Hip-Hop Don’t Die”
14. God Help The Girl — “Come Monday Night”
15. Brandi Carlile — “Dreams”
16. Ne-Yo — “Mad”
17. The Leftovers — “Telephone Operator”
18. Every Avenue — “Tell Me I’m A Wreck”
19. Pitbull — “I Know You Want Me”
20. New Boyz — “You’re A Jerk”
Best Album Title:
Mum — Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know
Best Album Cover:
The Best In Town, by the Blackout. Help me out, though: is it a human ascending from a hell town, or a straight-up evil exaltation? Works for me either way.
Best Liner Notes And Packaging:
Say Anything. The dumpy kid on the cover does battle with Max Bemis throughout the booklet. Max is the villain, see, and the kid is the superhero. They use as many toys from his bedroom as they can. (Yes, I have left the pronoun intentionally unclear.) My favorite band shot was the one on the back of I’m Going Away: the Friedberger siblings, sitting together on a sofa in a stark hi-rise living room decorated with African art.
Most Welcome Surprise:
The Hazards Of Love. I figured “The Island” was about as far into the prog-folk as those guys were willing to go; I mean, they’re crowd-pleasers at heart. I didn’t think Colin Meloy had the stomach to alienate his fraternity fanbase. Now I have to believe that they’re all in, and that we’ll eventually look at The Crane Wife as a transitional album. Welcome to the cabal, Colin.
Biggest Disappointment:
Before I Self-Destruct. I was the only person on the globe who expected it to be great. I was wrong, the world was right. Not for the first time, either.
Album that opens the strongest
Slaughterhouse. I don’t think any of the four emcees pause to catch their breaths until the second song. Then they just keep on passing the baton in a circle, running lap after lap at full speed. Eventually they hit the skits, the lactic acid catches up with them, and they all get cramps. Until then, it’s a hell of a race.
Album that ends the strongest
Eskimo Snow peaks with “Blackest Purse”, the penultimate song, and probably the best thing Why? has ever recorded. A thrillingly bitter digestif follows.
Song of the Year
After …Is A Real Boy dropped in 2004, some well-meaning grownup critic hung the “new Bob Dylan” tag on Max Bemis. I have come to see this as an insult to Max. The newly-converted Dylan stuck us with the flat and humorless Saved, which still plays as a pretty good advertisement for the Devil. Say Anything’s “Cemetery”, on the other hand, records a conversion experience that, from the sound of it, had to have been akin to getting thrown through a plate-glass window. Throughout the song, Bemis sounds absolutely astonished by his depth of feeling; like all the greatest Christian badasses from Augustine to C.S. Lewis to Brooke Fraser, he has come to realize that faith gives the ultimate middle finger to bureaucratic authority. He inhabits his belief as an act of defiance — and in so doing, he liberates himself. Christianity, as Chesterton points out, is the only world religious system with the guts to make God a rebel, an underdog, and a lifeline for reprobates, a leading light for inveterate punks, provocateurs and mischief-makers, and anybody angling against the establishment. Better still, his new wife (almost certainly the instrument of his conversion) sings backup on the choruses. Sherri DuPree is the “you” of the second verse, the true believer who convinces Bemis; later, stuck in the lake of fire, condemned but personality intact, it hardly matters if he’s shouting Jesus’s name or hers. God knows the important thing has already happened: he’s been reborn, flamethrower mouth intact, more himself than ever. Just like C.S. Lewis promised. Thanks, Max, for letting us in on it.
Okay, I have reached the strange word limit that this software system imposes. I’ll pick this up tomorrow.
