It is now abundantly, frighteningly clear that the CCP cooked the books. Many more Chinese have gotten sick from the coronavirus and died than the government is willing to admit. We now know that it took Chinese authorities about three weeks to tell the World Health Organization about what was happening in Wuhan. We will never know the precise reasons for the delay, but it’s probably safe to chalk it up to that toxic combination of greed, ignorance, and denialism that swept across the globe years before the coronavirus did. If China was distorting the numbers in December 2019, it’s virtually certain they’re still misrepresenting — especially since they’ve booted Western journalists out of the country. There is simply no reason to believe anything the CCP is telling us.
This matters, deeply, to the rest of the world. We’re trying to base our projections for the development of this disease on a denominator of cases, and we can’t do that without an accurate count. On January 5, the World Health Organization issued a risk assessment that, in retrospect, is terrifying: a month into the crisis, the government in China was still feeding blatant falsehoods to the international body that was specifically designed to handle this kind of thing. We now also know that the CCP has detained people who were trying to ring the alarm.
We can’t do much about the awful Chinese government. We can, and must, ask questions of our own lousy one. The current administration went out of its way to dismantle the State Department and gut the intelligence services: this was the prime objective of Mr. Bannon, whose desire to prune back the administrative state became the closest thing the White House has ever had to a coherent policy. Competent people at all levels were shown the door and replaced by cronies with no business handling portfolios. After more than three years of this, our own blindness — and our arrogance — made us sitting ducks.
In the absence of national leadership, fact-finding, like so much else, has devolved to state and local governments. Jersey City is not a place known for transparency, but the Mayor and other municipal spokespeople have been quick to communicate what they’ve learned about the virus. Some of the news out of City Hall has been encouraging — not ecstatically so, but reason to entertain some measured hope. The City set up a testing center a few days ago, and officials have been applying swabs to residents worried about their health. This has, as you’d imagine, led to a spike in reported cases, and it’s reddened the color of Hudson County on those online crisis maps that we’ve all been compulsively following.
But it’s also led to a corresponding spike in negative results. The Mayor reports that negatives have increased with each day of testing. Only 31% of people who showed up for a swab yesterday actually had the coronavirus. What they did have were symptoms — ones serious enough to demand a scan. More than two-thirds of those who brought their fevers, muscle aches, coughs, and shortness of breath to the testing center on Marin were, according to the test, suffering from something other than the coronavirus as we’ve come to know it. This suggests to me that the containment strategies that we’ve put in place in Jersey City are having two meaningful effects. They’re keeping a deadly communicative disease from spreading. They’re also intensifying the psychosomatic symptoms of people losing their minds indoors.
I don’t trust our municipal government all that much more than I trust the Chinese Communist Party. Like many 21st century administrations, ours has a ravenous and judgment-clouding desire for positive publicity. But our local leaders have never tried to soft-pedal this crisis, or make outsiders believe that Jersey City is safer than it is. They’ve recognized the seriousness of what we’re facing. Until they’re caught in a fib, I’m going to believe that City Hall is working with other municipal governments to provide the clear view of the parameters of the crisis that federal complacency has denied us. For all our faults, we are not a place where science is unwelcome. Two of our City Councilpeople — Rolando Lavarro and Michael Yun — have been down with virus symptoms. I have to imagine they’re possessed with a burning desire to cut the crap and get some answers.
Friends, we made it to the last day of March. We can turn the corner in April. I love New Jersey, I love New York, and I love you. Bless you all.
Overlooked amidst the noise, but still significant: New Jersey and New York visitors to Florida must now go through a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the state. This decision was made by the governor of Florida, who has been criticized for his refusal to close the beaches. Yesterday’s order felt like a compensatory move — a restriction on free travel that is probably going to require a state border control to enforce.
Closing the barn door once the horse is long gone seems like a very Trumpy thing to do, and Ron DeSantis is indeed among the Trumpiest of governors. So it’s noteworthy that DeSantis’s suspension of Schengen Americana came after the federal government opted not to put limitations on domestic travel. DeSantis did not take his cue from the White House. He acted on his own.
As the crisis worsens, governors and mayors have grabbed for the yoke. They’ve finally decided to drop the charade and treat the President like the bystander he is. This adjustment was a long time coming, and it took a worldwide lockdown to make it crystal clear. Now that it is, it’s hard to see how the White House will ever reclaim any of the authority or credibility it has thrown away. Every time Trump takes the podium and gives another one of his rambling press conferences, he delights his fans but digs himself, and the office of the Presidency, a deeper hole.
Much has been made of his regrettable suggestion that we reopen businesses, return to work, and throw the weakest among us into the volcano for the sake of the stock market. That is just the sort of attitude we’ve come to expect of him, and the outrage he’s engendered among those of us who aren’t greedy psychopaths is well-earned. But the open secret is that Trump isn’t going to re-launch anything — and that’s because Trump didn’t close anything. The governors of the states made those decisions. In the absence of intelligent national leadership, each state is going its own way.
Federal inaction may yet be the end of me. Governor Cuomo has made it clear that New York (and by extension New Jersey) needs tens of thousands of ventilators. The White House is either unable or unwilling to make a forceful move on behalf of Americans who need help. This, to me, is not just another expression of Trumpian cruelty. It’s also a tacit admission that the President has no idea how to put an idea into practice, and he’s exiled from his immediate circle anybody who does. He doesn’t know how to use the powers of his office. Governors have stepped into the leadership vacuum because they’ve been given no choice: either act with as much autonomy as possible, or suffer the brutal consequences of federal incompetence.
Americans tend to rally around the chief during times of crisis. In the middle of a disaster, it takes a special sort of leader to squander public goodwill. Unfortunately, we’ve got that sort of leader right now, and the public is adjusting accordingly. One of the astonishing things about the past few weeks is how quickly Cuomo, Newsom, Inslee, et. al. have been accepted by millions as de facto chief executives, and the President has been relegated to the role of a cranky, parsimonious uncle, without expertise or compassion, or statesmaship, nothing to recommend him other than control over a big fat wallet. Sentiment changes and the public is fickle, and it’s not hard to imagine Andrew Cuomo’s face dripping with egg in a week. For now, he appears to be acting — and in a crisis, action is everything.
Some version of America is going to struggle through this crisis. The country that emerges might not be the United States we recognize. Regardless of the outcome of the November elections, the virus has weakened the office of the Presidency, and made it clear to states and cities that when the sirens go off, they’ve got to take care of themselves. Revisionist history teaches us that there’s never a proper accounting of anything; I expect those with an interest in the maintenance of the regime to do whatever they can to make us forget about the weeks of inaction, and all the misinformation that came from the White House in February and early March. Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as they expect it will be. The dust is going to settle on a looser confederacy.
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.
Lit a match and saged my house down. It didn’t make a difference.
My very favorite album of 2019 contains the following stanza:
The day my daddy died/I was down the street/I lost my only friend/people don’t grow on trees.
This awkward, guileless verse was not artfully muffled, or hidden in an outro, or ‘verbed out and tucked into the mix. It is, like all of the other lyrics on A Real Good Kid, brutally comprehensible. The couplet is placed just before the climax of the last song on the album; and since the album is absolutely, unswervingly linear, it arrives at a pivotal moment in the narrative. Just before the band comes crashing in for the final time, this is what Mike Posner wants to tell us: he wants to reiterate the central theme, the reason for the album’s existence, in as flatfooted a manner as he can muster. People don’t grow on trees.
2019 was a year to huddle around the speaker and hear stories. As I still believe that the album is the best vehicle for storytelling, and fault books, essays, and paintings only for being insufficiently melodic, it was a swell year for the likes of me. Songwriters used the album form to make arguments, extend narratives, establish memorable characters, crack running jokes, and make the most of the thirty to sixty minutes the format allows them. Richard Dawson, Jenny Lewis, and Billy Woods, for instance, had a lot to say about the ravaged state of the first-world psyche, and fitted withering case-studies to music designed to reinforce the emotional tone of their suites of songs. From Julia Jacklin, David Bazan, Eva Hendricks and (accidentally, but absolutely) Aubrey Graham, we were shown snapshots of destabilized protagonists at transitional moments; by the time the music stopped, those narrators felt as real as the guys across the street. Others used a sequence of songs to tell a straightforward story: the inexhaustible Dan Campbell, for instance, returned with a continuation of the blue-collar saga of Aaron West, and Max Bemis and Tyler Okonma shared quasi-fictional — and strangely similar — set-length accounts of queer awakening. Elizabeth Nelson got specific, Ezra Furman got polemical, Ace Enders got rueful, Maxo Kream got confessional. These writers made albums that keep playing long after the last note fades; albums that pull you into their own neatly-fashioned universes and don’t let you go; albums that ask questions that are hard to answer comfortably.
Mike Posner didn’t exhibit the sort of facility with language that those other writers did. He was, however, up to something similar. He started at the top by establishing a narrator and a predicament, and then moved, song by song, to elaborate that predicament for the listener and grope toward an emotional resolution. And in spite of my own skepticism, and occasional bewilderment at his methods, I am forced to conclude that he did this better than any of those other writers, none of whom would ever attempt to get away with singing something as flatfooted as “the day my daddy died/I was down the street.” The artistic success of A Real Good Kid reminds me of two things I thought I learned long ago, although for some reason I always seem to be spacing on them. 1) When writing songs and making albums, both the words and the music are important, but neither thing in isolation is nearly as important as the way in which the words and music interact, and 2.) this isn’t a damned poetry contest.
On A Real Good Kid, Mike Posner struggles with the breakup of a relationship and the death of a parent. There’s searching, self-castigation and self-indulgence, and burning questions about how the narrator is going to reconstruct his life in the absence of his “only friend.” This probably sounds exactly like 808s & Heartbreak to you, and, well… I don’t think Mike is running from the comparison. “Wide Open”, the second song on the set, is basically “Welcome To Heartbreak”. Other songs borrow liberally from Graduation and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; there’s even a rant-like breakdown in the middle of “Drip” set to music that’s not miles removed from “Runaway”. Kanye is thanked in the liner notes, but that probably won’t be enough for listeners allergic to wholesale borrowing. If that’s you, you’re not going to hang with this, and you should skip ahead on the list below to Richard Dawson or Jamila Woods or something like that.
But here’s one of the many things that hip-hop teaches us: we’re all on the shoulders of giants. How we got up there is immaterial. It’s what we see and what we do from that vantage that matters. In the face of some stiff competition, Mike Posner has recorded the most focused album of 2019; in fact, it’s one of the most focused albums I’ve ever heard. After staring mortality in the face, he’s got something crucial he wants to report, and he refuses to allow anything to break his concentration, even for a second. Every choice made by Mike and his producers on A Real Good Kid — right down to the timbre of the instrument sounds and the placement of the beats — is designed to further the emotional arc of the story. This second-by-second arrangement diligence coupled with Mike’s casual, near-offhand approach to storytelling is, I think, something unique in the body of contemporary pop. It may not be an original approach to composition, but it’s an entirely original amalgam of messiness and meticulousness he’s giving us here; a casual amble on a rail-straight line. A Real Good Kid manages to feel utterly relaxed, even as the subject matter that Mike is handling is as heavy as it gets. The effect of this is, again, something singular and unprecedented, and I believe that it’s an expression of Mike’s approachable personality, and his peculiar brand of self-deprecation, which is quite unlike that of any other pop star, and makes him easy to like.
Mind you, the first time I met Mike Posner, I came away from the encounter thinking I’d just met the biggest jackass in the music business. Not that he was particularly mean to me; no, his conspiratorial will to draw me into the petty sexual politics and revenge positions of “Cooler Than Me” was part of what made the encounter so vulgar. Of course he was just treating me like a bro, and brotronica was what he was at the Bamboozle to peddle. The ladies sure loved it — they pelted him with undergarments and waited around after the show to get a body part signed. When “Cooler Than Me” hit on a national level a few months later, it reinforced my impression of Mike as a guy blinded by resentment — a young man so swept up in his own sense of entitlement that he was incapable of imagining that the weenie journalist sent to cover his show could do anything but commiserate.
The second time I talked to Mike Posner was a different story altogether. this one was a phone interview, and I clearly recall dreading the ring, thinking hoo boy, this guy again, I’m in for it today. “Cooler Than Me” had been on the charts for a few weeks and he was in Jersey to headline a show in Asbury Park. Here, I figured, was an opportunity for some self-congratulatory bluster. Instead, Mike was small-voiced and measured, and mostly wanted to talk about his dad. His father had told him: all of the musicians I like (classic rock dudes, in other words) are better live, and all the musicians you like (hip-hop and EDM artists) are worse. This offhand comment was obviously eating him alive. Mike told me he was determined to be a different kind of artist, and insisted that whatever context he found himself in, he was going to put the lyrics first.
I thought about that a few years later when he had his other hit. “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”, if you don’t remember, was a ’70s style confessional number in which Mike treats himself brutally; even by the standards of self-deprecating stories of minor-celebrity emptiness, this one is really hell on the narrator. It occurred to me then that Mike had always been willing to make himself look bad in the name of art, and in the age of the endlessly retouched selfie, this might be a quality worth celebrating. He followed “Ibiza” with a dreary spoken-word set. I listened to it so you don’t have to (you didn’t), and I’m sure I thought, well, that’s the end of Mike.
Instead we get this: a concept set about the death of his father by brain tumor. Mike’s reflections are alternately corny, clumsy, embarrassing, self-flagellating, and freighted with platitudes, and he’s matched with music that is, in part, shamelessly purloined from Kanye. Nevertheless, all of this sticks. And maybe it’s my own recent state of existential frailty that has made me susceptible to Mike’s latest round of storytelling, but also maybe not. Even on that debut album, straight from the darkest corners of the Duke University quad, he was always a sure hand at building narrative tension through compositional development and masterful sequencing of musical happenstance. There are moments on A Real Good Kid when Mike switches the beat, or brings in the choir, or gets strategically hoarse, or doubles a vocal line, or drops in a sample, and in so doing, he achieves the sort of emotional payoff that only happens when a songwriter puts the narrative meaning first, and arranges his sonic elements accordingly. Records like that do not, um, grow on trees.
Album of the Year
1. Mike Posner — A Real Good Kid
2. Jenny Lewis — On The Line
3. Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell
4. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal — Hiding Places
5. Richard Dawson — 2020
6. Charly Bliss — Young Enough
7. Sunday Service Choir — Jesus Is Born
8. Metronomy — Metronomy Forever
9. Wand — Laughing Matter
10. The Paranoid Style — A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life
11. Julia Jacklin — Crushing
12. Jamila Woods — LEGACY! LEGACY!
13. Tyler, The Creator — Igor
14. Drake — Care Package
15. Say Anything — Oliver Appropriate
16. Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties — Routine Maintenance
17. Bruce Hornsby — Absolute Zero
18. Denzel Curry — Zuu
19. Mon Laferte — Norma
20. John Van Deusen — I Am Origami Pt. 3 — A Catacomb Hymn
Gosh, those are wonderful albums. If you were involved in any of them, my Richmond Flying Squirrels hat is off to you. Thank you.
Best Album Title
The Weight Of Melted Snow by French For Rabbits
Best Album Cover
Caroline Polachek’s Pang. The composition of the photograph is impeccable: I like the twist in the ladder and the breeze that threatens to pull Caroline off to the left, I like her head-down determination as she grasps for the rung, I like the slash of blue in the otherwise grey sky, and of course I like the plastic pants. Where is Caroline heading, anyway? As usual, she doesn’t bother to explain herself – she figures that she’s so brilliant that you can just bask in her bent brain-waves and call it entertainment. And you know what?, for a brain-wave basker like me, it kindasorta works: there’s something so guileless and pure about Caroline’s gauche self-confidence that I’d almost call it sexy. Mainly, though, Pang reminds me of the things I liked about Caroline back when I bothered to think about her at all, which was… holy crap, that was 2012. Has she really been dithering around and making ch-ching noises and pitching songs to Beyoncé for seven years? Guess she has.
Best Liner Notes And Packaging
Oliver Appropriate. Puerile minds think alike, and just like Max Bemis, I also think of rancid bodily fluids whenever I hear about something “streaming all over the internet”. Unlike Max, I don’t think I have what it takes to build a promo campaign around my disgusting joke. I lack the taste for provocation, or the desire to crowd-please a bunch of reprobates, and that’s to my infinite discredit. Max gave up on you, sophisticated listener, about three album cycles ago: he figures he’s punk rock emeritus now, and he knows that it’s the rare member of the cognoscenti who has any time for that crap. Doubtless this bums out Sherri Dupree (and Lucy Dupree-Bemis), but they’re probably grateful that he has an outlet for his dirty jokes. If you don’t appreciate Bemis brand lyricism by now, there’s nothing I do to inure you to the taste of his suspicious homebrew.
So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll point out that his casual mastery of notes ‘n’ chords rock songwriting, refrain-building, and melodic development, all of which was generally in abeyance on the last few, is back in full force here. Every say anything set is a concept set, and the theme this time is Max’s homosexual urges, which are played as a revelation, but cannot be a surprise to anyone who has followed the artist for a millisecond. This is the co-author of the Gayest Album Ever Made™, a full-length set about sexual desire for Chris Conley that included groans and shrieks from Chris Conley plus enthusiastic and wholly complicit support vox from Sherri. Oliver Appropriate (the character) is an alternate-reality Max who freaks out and murders the young man he lusts after. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d do, but hush, just go with it. The story ends with the main character shackled to the corpse of his lover, but before we get there, there’s lots of wonderfully pithy and scathing observations about the New York independent rock demimonde. Altogether now: I know a lot of men in hardcore bands/collectively funding the Colom-biaaaaaans! Allll-together now! No? Just me? OK then. Just me. M
Album That Opens Most Strongly
Norman Fucking Rockwell
Album That Closes Most Strongly
Wildcard. Having taken the covered wagon as far as those wooden wheels would let her go, Miranda Lambert turns over the farmhands on the caravan: new sidemen, new producers, new arrangement sensibility, new sounds, etc. Natalie Hemby is still riding shotgun, but Miranda has convened an alternate songwriting crew with Lori McKenna and Liz Rose; they’re called the Love Junkies or the Ladies Who Lunch or the Pistol Bettys or something. This woman just loves to put together girl groups. You ever get the sense that Miranda is the key to the city of Nashville? I do. She’s still a fan of it/old shit, and she can cozy up to a traditionalist ballad like “Tequila Does” better than anybody in boots, but some of this record is borderline new wave in its sensibility. “Track Record” is practically a Taylor Swift song. Now, city slicker over here considers Brad Paisley’s Wheelhouse a bold and eclectic masterpiece, but the Music City crowd felt otherwise – they thought he was just horsing around, killing time before his next real record. It wouldn’t shock me if some old-time Miranda Lambert fans felt similarly about this one. There I part company with the old-time fans. I concede that a few of these good-timey numbers are so flimsy that they wouldn’t fly at all without a magnificent singer at the yoke. Well, lucky us. Look at what we’ve got here.
Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Anyway
Solange’s When I Get Home. Quality control at Knowles, Inc. slips dramatically. Look, I hate to knock this, because — as I keep reminding myself whenever I slog my way through this brief but strangely interminable set — Solange could otherwise be doing any number of stupid ass things with her famous handle. Reality TV, sneaker design, political office, you name it. Instead she makes highly experimental, scrupulously hook-free jazz pop with a pinch of hip-hop to ensure that the proceedings don’t bog down completely. It’s ballsy. It reeks of privilege, sure, and a fair bit of (further) coasting on her sister’s acclaim, but if Beyoncé is inspired by this, then maybe all the meandering is worthwhile. If you’ve ever sat in a dentist’s office with nothing to do but thumb through a glossy fashion mag, you might appreciate the resolution of the photographs and the weight of the paper and the opulent aroma of the little packets of perfume until you get to the end and realize there weren’t any articles in there. But whatever, you’re none the worse for it. Maybe your fingers smell funny.
Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make
Injury Reserve. Neither Groggs nor Ritchie With A T are much to speak about on the microphone. Moreover, when they kick topics, they’re always borderline brain-damaged, like the one about the magic Tesla that morphs on the go at the touch of an app, or the one where he and his girl are “Picasso-ing” their imaginary kids. Come to think of it, those are both the same fantasy: technowizardly creative control over things that are by nature uncontrollable. Regardless of their INT rolls, they do have talented friends, including Freddie Gibbs, whose crack-slinging boasts are so deftly delivered that it doesn’t even matter that they’re completely out of place on this album, Jersey’s own Cakes Da Killa, who does his peeved gay black man thing with extra hot sauce here, and Rico Nasty, who sets “Jawbreaker” on fire with one of the best guest verses of the year. They all get to rhyme over Parker Corey’s beats, and there’s the real reason to pay attention to this Arizona crew: he’s having so much fun screwing around with rap verities that he pulls everybody involved into a great gyre of goofiness. Hip-hop goofiness, mind you; the essential goofiness of the great three-man rap acts of the ‘80s. So when Phonte swings by to bless the last track with an old-school “bass for your face”, it feels very very well earned, and a nice alternative for rap fans who found the latest Brockhampton too somber.
Album That Sounded Like An Absolute Chore To Make
Chance The Rapper’s The Big Day. I don’t want to pile on, because I like it, and I regret that it got the living shit beaten out of it. For once, Pitchfork didn’t lead the backlash. Their faint praise was positively measured next to Anthony Fantano, who cruelly dropped a zero on Chance, kickstarting a cavalcade of YouTube assassination attempts, many of which drew blood. We’ll see if the target survives. Some of the collaborations found their way into the crosshairs, particularly the Ben Gibbard and Shaun Mendes features, and I do get that. But the main knock on Chance four is the subject matter. The emcee simply would not shut up about his wife, and this rubbed un-romantics the wrong way. Granted, Chance picked a funny year to record a seventy-seven minute tribute to matrimony and heterosexual monogamy. Yet I was fascinated by the way in which Chance’s overdriven attempts to generate excitement about his marriage paralleled his capitulation to entertainment industry conventions. From my view, The Big Day is a concept set about a former independent who was powerless to prevent himself from getting gummed up in a variety of restrictive institutions, presumably because he’s a nice guy who doesn’t want to let down the folks.
But unlike, say, Bill Cosby, he has no time for displays of ostentatious maturity – perhaps because (hopefully because?) he’s not mature in the slightest. I am pleased to report that most of what he says about his life choices is bratty as all get out. And when he realizes that fucking side chicks isn’t as satisfying as bringing his girl to his auntie’s house, his astonishment is equaled only by his gratitude to God for being right. So even if Chance is faking it somewhat, as his detractors not-unreasonably insist, I can still appreciate the man he wants to be enough to want to see him get there. If we can sit and smile through countless verses about Jeffery Williams’ enthusiasm for anal penetration, I think we can roll with an album that concerns a relationship designed to last longer than the time it takes for the rapper to get his nut. Those of us who are crazy about our girlfriends understand. And there are more of us than you’d think.
Another Chore, Although Not Without Rewards
Western Stars. Less love, more tunnel. This happens to certain cowboys as the manberries wither on the vine. Springsteen brings us the daredevil as coward, not because the daredevil is afraid of a little dustup, but because domesticity scares the bejeezus out of him. Even though the stuntman has that metal (ram)rod in his leg, and the old actor gobbles viagra with his morning coffee, there’s no sign that these virile codgers are satisfying any chicks. On the contrary, these characters are wandering in the dry gulley, remembering the flashing heads of hair of their long-lost beloveds, ruing the day they followed their own star, drunk on solitude. I believe Bruce would call this “depression”, a malady he knows firsthand, or so we are told by the hardworking publicists at Shore Fire Media. And what’s really striking about the songs here is how well they capture the mindset of the many men who’d vastly, and I mean vastly, prefer suicidal depression to actually having women around. It’s a whole subculture: men going their own way, or MGTOW, in Internet slang. Do aging incels really deserve string arrangements this syrupy? Guess the Boss thinks they do. He’s always been a generous employer. The benefits package is impressive.
Most Consistent Album
About Jade Lilitri of Oso Oso there will be no equivocation from the guys who run IsThisBandEmo dot com. He’s all the way in, and as such, he’s this year’s designated baton carrier in the great relay race that stretches back through the Hotelier and You Blew It! through American Football and Jimmy Eat World to The Promise Ring and Mineral, and, yeah, whoo, let’s not get into the stuff before that. It’s murky. On Basking In The Glow, Lilitri hits all of his marks, which is commendable in a way – that chorus on “Impossible Game” could have come from any emo classic of the last two decades – and in another way, it suggests that he’s not pushing at the barriers of the genre as vigorously as a youngster ought. We’ll see if it ever starts to bug me over the next, oh, ten thousand times I’m going to play this album.
Maybe Not As Consistent As Oso Oso, But In Many Ways A More Impressive Exhibition Of Sustained Vision And Tone
Care Package. With Aubrey, see, the conversation never stops. It’s a little one-sided, but that’s all right, as Stuart Murdoch said in a totally different context. The album ends, but the late-nite ruminations don’t; 40 has some sweet beats in the glitchy recesses of the hard drive. The velvet walls of the vocal booth beckon. There are always more chains to yank, and girls to confuse, smoke-rings to blow and metaphors to mix. Most of the stuff on this compilation fell in the murky interstitial area between Drake albums, although some of it was appended to sets as bonus tracks; if you heard these, they were on a playlist or tucked in a radio set, and you surely assimilated them to the forty million other drake tracks in circulation between the years 2010 and 2016.
Extracted, dusted off, and strung together in a sequence, these odds and sods tell a damned coherent tale. They’re testament to the formidable hypnotic powers of a word-weaver with a confessional style that simply can’t be mistaken for anybody else’s – a glib, quietly self-impressed delivery that conceals astonishing reserves of emotional manipulation. The Drake that emerges from Care Package is possessive, insatiably hungry, unapologetically deceitful, and dangerous precisely because sexual satisfaction isn’t all he’s after. No, Drake needs you to care, even as he knows that the care he’s going to return will be inadequate by his own standard. The character Drake is not amoral, but he’s given up on self-improvement as a sucker’s game, and his expectations for his own behavior are frighteningly low.
This is about as candid and honest a portrait of the modern North American subject as you’ll find anywhere, in any literature: the thinking fellow whose brain power serves only to dig him deeper holes, and the man of feeling who uses sentiment as a crowbar to pry open the unsuspecting. And if this accidental album hangs together far better than most rappers’ planned full-lengths, you can put that down to the star’s narrative discipline and swiss-watch consistency. No obligation here to shoot for the charts, no R&B hooks or music purloined from Afropop hitmakers, no passionfruit or hotlines blinging. No, nothing but Drake verses, unadulterated and uninterrupted, for better or for worse. Probably the purest drake experience you can have, so, um, be careful out there.
Most Inconsistent Album
Father Of The Bride. Hey, remember that Tribe Called Quest comeback set that was mostly a Q-Tip project plus various agenda-driven attempts to redefine what the Tribe was? Yeah, I barely do, too. But Father Of The Bride brings all of that rushing back, with Ariel Rechtshaid in the role of omnipresent Jarobi and Danielle Haim as inescapable Busta Rhymes. Nothing new about frontman quasi-solo projects with band names slapped on them — Port Of Morrow was a really good one — but there’s something downright creepy about the way Tomson and Baio have been locked out of the control room in favor of… Dave Longstreth, et. al.? I mean, really, Ezra. Some kind of friend you turned out to be, as your role model Barry Manilow once put it. As for Rostam, we were promised plenty of him. But he only makes his presence felt on the late Mates Of State-y “We Belong Together” and the stupendous “Harmony Hall”, which, to be fair, is worth the price of the album all by itself. As for the main main, his knack for melody sure hasn’t deserted him, even as he settles more frequently for mannered, middle of the road expressions of ideas mined from early ‘70s proto-indiepop. I remember when he used to spazz out instead. (Though that might have been Tomson and Baio.) Oh, and that Jenny Lewis “appearance” turns out to be a vocal sample. Buyer beware. Have fun but tread carefully; don’t fall for the Illuminati mind control tricks.
Also Inconsistent
2 Chainz’s Rap Or Go To The League. Reality lyrics from 6’5” small forward Tauheed Epps of Alabama State, now with a slower crossover step. I’m sure it would have been enjoyable to hear 2 Chainz rap about hoops while the memories of the Southwest Athletic Conference were still fresh in his mind. Nearly two decades after the last bucket, the sportscasting sorta blends in with his other old man reveries. Which is not to say that he isn’t funny, or sympathetic: I am a codger too, and I also don’t like pointless gangbanging or, um, paying taxes. He remembers his coaches fondly; I remember Mr. Glenn Brown, and it’s easy for both of us to say now that we’re no longer in ridiculous shorts on a painted line waiting to get a deadleg from some random jocko. Because this is a 2 Chainz project, the beats and rhymes are pretty fresh, and he continues to be a master of inflection, capable of saying vicious stuff in the most jovial, avuncular manner possible. But his disinclination to self-mythologize runs him into serious trouble. If a fortysomething guy is going to stand there and tell you the truth about his life and his feelings, that’s not pop entertainment as I understand it. Look at Pusha T. He’s older than dirt and richer than God, but he pretends he still wants to stand on a corner and sell drugs. He cares enough about the art to lie to you. He knows the alternative is unpalatable.
Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To
White Reaper. Omigosh, they’ve turned into Sloan. I guess it was inevitable. Good on Tony Esposito and Co. for going against the dream-pop trend and delivering You Deserve Love, the most awake-pop record of the year. No canned reverbs or machine psychedelia here, and, bless them, not a single moment of chill. Unlike Charly Bliss, their conceptual partners in power pop, there’s nothing political or even terribly emotional driving their urgency – they’re the same five Kentucky wiseguys they were when they named their debut album White Reaper Does It Again. They just love the verities: cars and girls and girls in cars, and a well-turned chord progression, and all the whoas and whoos in the right place. “Ring” even pre-empts the criticism – you talk too much for somebody with nothing to say, Little Ruby tells Tony. I imagine that the dirtbags and dead-leg givers at the 7-11 miss the sonic references to Van Halen and Cheap Trick. But those guys don’t buy contemporary records anyway. That’s because they’re not real. They only exist in our fevered memories.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through
The Highwomen. Further proof that Dave Cobb is a black hole at the heart of Nashville that sucks all objects of critical mass into his orbit. Aw, heck, that makes Dave sound worse than he is; his stately, oaken, historically reverential productions aren’t that bad, are they? So let’s try this again. The Highwomen is further proof that Dave Cobb is a toilet in which all weighty objects in Nashville swirl until they are sucked down into the depths of his porcelain-pure mixes. No better, huh? How about: Dave Cobb is the Pacific garbage patch of Nashville. No, try as I may, I can’t say anything nice about Dave Cobb, who has turned himself into a menace; maybe not at the level of Jack Antonoff, but with similar outcomes. I do suppose Dave was the natural guy to produce the Highwomen concept, considering that two of the principals (Carlile and Shires) have already had their commercial profiles elevated via the dignified, grown-up Cobb treatment, and another (Hemby) has been Cobb-adjacent for quite some time. The exception here is Maren, and I use the first name pointedly, because even Dave Cobb and his reverse Dorian Gray productions can’t prematurely age her. Alas, I believe she joined the group late, and she’s not much of a presence on this album: if she sings on the back half at all, I sure can’t make her out.
No, the star of the show here is Brandi Carlile, who is always worth hearing, but who has also been bordering on spinsterly sanctimony for a few album cycles. Some of this does feel like a victory lap for Carlile and Cobb after their Grammy recognition last year and her acceptance into the Nashville C&W family after years of knocking on the cabin door. Amanda Shires and Jason “Mr. Shires” Isbell, friends of the LGBTQ+ that they are, have even contributed a lesbian torch song for Brandi to oversing. Here’s another clue for you that this is a stealth Brandi Carlile album with recurring special guests – the Highwomen don’t even mine Natalie Hemby for material very often. I believe she only has four co-writes here, and two of them are with Carlile. Brandi has steered her away from “Brews And Boobs On The Pontoon” and the wistful geographical specificity of Puxico, and toward some commendable yet cruller dry sentiments about inclusivity and feminism. Good thing they can all sing, right?
There’s also a Hemby-Lambert number in the dreaded letter-to-my-child genre, and the cheeky radio single “redesigning women”, which will certainly not be a hit, but which is probably as close to the Pistol Annies as they’re capable of getting as long as Cobb is on the boards. The best songs, unsurprisingly, are the two Maren Morris numbers, and while they may get her back in the good graces of the purists who hated her R&B moves, they just sound like Maren Morris to me. So go ahead and like this album. I kinda do. But thank your lucky Southern stars that Miranda Lambert seems immune to Dave Cobb’s pull.
Most Sympathetic Or Likeable Perspective Over The Course Of An Album
The Paranoid Style – A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life. Elizabeth Nelson comes off like Paula Carino arguing with a record store clerk. Also, she sounds out every syllable she sings with all the subtlety of a slap in the face. So why can I not stop playing this? Well, for starters, the thirtysomething (fortysomething?) female perspective is not one that you get all that much in garage rock, and for continuers, this particular thirtysomething is a peculiar specimen. She’s obsessed with music criticism and rock history, American politics and economics, the Irish Republican experiment, and, apparently, chicken wings. It all comes at you in a mad flurry: specific calendar dates and castigations of Federal Reserve chairmen and judiciously selected quotes from classic pop songs and some very funny jokes. One track is about a Bar/None party in the early nineties – Katy McCarthy and Brian Dewan are both namechecked – while another recounts the story of the Who show where the kids were trampled to death. There’s even a bit where she sends up “Odorono”, which was itself satire. It all goes along swimmingly until she drops in a verse of “Ana Ng”, and you realize what you’ve been missing: sweetness, balance, poise, etc. But hey, the Paul McCartney records are right over there, waiting for you, and this brilliant scuzz bomb of an album won’t take up all that much of your time. There used to be… well, not a lot of albums like this, but a few every year – albums made by total originals, back during the days when autonomy and individuality were expected from college rockers. The Eighties, basically. If we can humor and even applaud countless capitulations to pop convention from intelligent schemers with naked commercial ambitions, we remaining fans of Camper Van Beethoven (and Bongwater) deserve a few albums like this.
Most Alienating Perspective Over The Course Of An Album
Weezer Black. I think it’s important to remember that Weezer was taking it on the chin, hard, even before Teal came out. Sketch comedians were doing bits. This unaccountable opprobrium directed toward Weezer must have baffled Rivers Cuomo, who is, above all, a student of pop-rock craft. He knows damn well he followed up the outstanding Everything Will Be Alright In The End with the very very good White and then with the reasonably worthwhile Pacific Daydream. So if he’s angry at his audience, I can’t really blame him. What I do blame him for: writing an entire album about his recent professional resentments and fitting those gripes to California sleaze-pop accompaniment. At the level of the plot, Black is basically De La Soul Is Dead minus the human compassion and the donuts. There’s even a song about how he doesn’t want your shitty demo tapes. I think he’s justified in likening many of his recent critics to zombies, but telling them to die does strike me as gauche, especially from a guy who has flirted with Unabomber-like antisocial tendencies in the past. The references to cheap online review culture (in a song that’s a dead ringer for “Distance”-era Cake, btw, right down to the trumpet), celebrity death cults, agoraphobia, and the fickleness and inattention of the listener all pile up and leave a pretty acrid taste. It is deeply telling that Weezer released the first four songs of Black on Fortnight. Music to shoot your “friends” to.
A Wee Bit Overexposed, Would You Not Say
Billie Eilish – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? This teenaged edgelord(e)’s hit debut has been widely compared to Pure Heroine. To me, it’s young Fiona Apple all the way, right down to the gothic showtunes, the jazzy nonsense, the verbosity and clumsy word choices, and the clickbaity provocation. Fiona flirted with body dysmorphia and underage sex; Billie, um, eats spiders. Also she’s got that Flowers in the Attic thing going on with her brother Finneas, who does impart a distinctive creepy spider-munching aural signature to the project that marks it as a different kind of pop proposition than what you’d get from the non-creepy likes of Grande/Swift/Rexha. You can really see this appealing to a certain type of teenage girl who feels inadequately represented by mainstream culture, but badly wants a ride on the mainstream tilt-a-whirl. As for me, I’ve kinda-sorta almost bought a copy, but I’m put off by the production inconsistency – not just the gimmicky shit like running the mix of “Xanny” through a bathroom fan (apparently), but also the blandburgers at the tail end of the set, and non-pop throwbacks like “Wish You Were Gay”, which is farther down the road to puppet theater vo-de-o-do than I’m willing to go.
Somewhat Underexposed, And Kinda Promising
Nilüfer Yanya’s Miss Universe isone of the odder ducks in the digital record store. It’s frontloaded with catchy, if fragmentary, guitar-rock numbers redolent of Britpop, degenerates fast into sub-Sade saxobeat smoothies, and then recovers for a tidy finish. There’s a vague sci-fi theme about a futuristic health care firm, and Nilüfer sings it all like she’s attempting to dislodge a peanut butter sandwich from the roof of her mouth. I hear milk helps with that. Like way too many 2019 releases, Miss Universe deepens my suspicion that psychedelia is what you do when you can’t think of a melody, but i do give Nilüfer Yanya credit for her ambition, and for writing about something other than herself. I also like that her version of techno-dystopia isn’t (necessarily) driven by phone addiction; I mean, there are plenty of other awful trends to be vigilant about, right, kids? 33.3% chance Nilüfer turns out to be more than just the UK answer to Japanese Breakfast, and worth a couple of spins in any case.
Album That Wore Out The Quickest
Frank Iero & The Future Violents – Barrier. Frank is sort of the Richie Sambora to Gerard Way’s Jon-Bon in that he’s considered an essential part of a landmark Jer-Z band, but if you break it down to the submolecular level, you find that he isn’t bringing much that a thousand and one other guitar players couldn’t contribute. Richie was known for his screechy “woooowh-nedd dead or aliiiive” backing vox; people said they were characteristic, I say they were characteristically bad. Frank didn’t sing much in MCR, and, um… I guess I see why. His estranged relationship to pitch isn’t so much of a problem on the brutal rockers meant to suggest Billy Corgan in the midst of a brain aneurysm, but the folkier numbers here are well beyond his abilities. He does know how to raise a middle finger artfully, and if you can handle a song called “Medicine Square Garden”, you’ll agree that he can sprawl out in front of you as belligerently as Patrick Stickles ever does. But mostly Barrier makes me hope they’ve gotten all of the horsing around out of their systems and they’re ready to put My Chemical Romance back together for good. There must be a color of hair dye that Gerard hasn’t doused himself in yet. He could go blue. Go on, Gerard, lead the band through a concept record about Brainy Smurf.
Album That Made Me Cry Uncle
Norah Jones – Begin Again. Hope springs eternal in the breast of Norah, from whom there is always morah. Not satisfied to forever be the bland blockbuster-maker behind “Don’t Know Why”, she turns the whole shebang upside down every year or so in an attempt to shake loose a spicier direction. And isn’t that all we can ever ask of mega-selling pop musicians?, that they refrain from reiteration and instead try some shit now and again? In that sense, Norah is a model superstar, if you could call her a superstar at all, which you really can’t, given how staggeringly effective her commercial self-sabotage has been. As you probably know, I’ve always sorta run Norah down, even as she’s made choice after choice tailored with uncanny precision to my taste: pushing the piano in the mix, writing chord substitutions and countermelodies into her songs, gospeling it up and hanging with Belle and Sebastian and singing Everly Brothers tunes with Billie Joe. Norah Jones has done everything but show up at my door with a plate of cookies, and… I give up. Seriously. I am now Norah Jones’s number one fan. I’m gonna go back and listen to all those old records of hers. Anything else would be downright cruel.
Okay, much more to come. Singles, individual achievements, blather, offensive comments, you name it. I’ll get to it all as soon as I can.
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.
Some years have great albums, some have great singles, some are dense with interesting recordings, some are loaded with powerful, individual musical personalities. 2019 had all of that.
Every year has a different character. For us, 2019 was something like a trip across a stormy ocean on a fast and narrow boat. There were many times when I believed we wouldn’t make it — times when I thought we were bound to capsize, and other times when there was nothing to do but trust in the wind and pray. We don’t know what’s coming over the horizon. But now that the far shores of the year are visible, I thought it would be salutary for us to play our annual game, even if listening to the music of 2019 brings back some awful memories.
We do this, in part, because many of the surrounding memories aren’t awful: being alone on a scary sea, is, we have learned, an experience that can fairly be described as hardcore. As you know, we’re not hardcore people in the slightest; we’re not rough or tough, and we don’t pride ourselves on our strength, or our courage, or our perseverance during trials. But circumstances may compel us to become something other than what we are. In 2019, we discovered that we could do things that I never would have dreamed we’d be able to do. That was, in a way, rewarding. Maybe the hat would have put us in Gryffindor after all.*
So while this was a frightening year, an brain-breaking year, a bewildering and disorienting year, a year filled with experiences I wouldn’t wish on anybody, I would not say it was a bad year. Because it wasn’t; not even a little. And we were helped along the way, as we always are, by the music, which was exceptional. Some years have great albums, some have great singles, some are dense with interesting recordings, some are loaded with powerful, individual musical personalities. 2019 had all of that. The decade is going out strong.
Real estate on this list is at a premium. I left out a few records that, ordinarily, would have made it, like Jessica Pratt’s Quiet Signs and Nilüfer Yanya’s Miss Universe; I couldn’t even find room for that Earl Sweatshirt EP (I’m sure I’ll squeeze in a few listens here and there.) What this means, practically, is that you’re going to encounter some extraordinary music, and very few of those obligatory albums that we put on the list out of respect for an artist’s prior work. I say with some emphasis: this year’s schedule is a joy. Should you like to experience that joy along with us, the game starts tomorrow.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10
Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties — Routine Maintenance
Solange — When I Get Home
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11
Miranda Lambert — Wildcard
Operator Music Band — Duo Duo
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12
Pivot Gang — You Can’t Sit With Us
Stella Donnelly — Beware Of The Dogs
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13
White Reaper — You Deserve Love
The Rails — Cancel The Sun
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14
Van Morrison — Three Chords & The Truth
Harry Styles — Fine Line
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15
Carly Rae Jepsen — Dedicated
Fontaines D.C. — Dogrel
MONDAY, DECEMBER 16
JPEGMafia — All My Heroes Are Cornballs
Tegan And Sara — Hey, I’m Just Like You
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17
Olden Yolk — Living Theatre
Denzel Curry — Zuu
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18
Julia Jacklin — Crushing
Pedro The Lion — Phoenix
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19
Oso Oso — Basking In The Glow
Little Simz — Grey Area
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20
Jenny Lewis — On The Line
Metronomy — Metronomy Forever
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21
Billy Woods & Kenny Segal — Hiding Places
The Japanese House — Good At Falling
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22
Wand — Laughing Matter
Vampire Weekend — Father Of The Bride
MONDAY, DECEMBER 23
Vanishing Twin — The Age Of Immunology
Sego — Sego Sucks
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24
Mon Laferte — Norma
John Van Deusen — (I Am) Origami, Pt. 3 — A Catacomb Hymn
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25
Morrissey — California Son
Rose Elinor Dougall — A New Illusion
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26
Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell
The Paranoid Style — A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27
Homeboy Sandman — Dusty
Elbow — Giants Of All Sizes
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28
Jamila Woods — LEGACY! LEGACY!
Calliope Musicals — Color/Sweat
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 29
Maren Morris — Girl
Andrew Bird — My Finest Work Yet
MONDAY, DECEMBER 30
Drake — Care Package
Ezra Furman — Twelve Nudes
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31
American Football — American Football (LP3)
Gang Starr — One Of The Best Yet
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1
Mike Posner — A Real Good Kid
Y La Bamba — Mujeres
THURSDAY, JANUARY 2
Taylor Swift — Lover
Nico Segal & Nate Fox — Intellexual
FRIDAY, JANUARY 3
Injury Reserve — Injury Reserve
Courtney Hartman — Ready Reckoner
SATURDAY, JANUARY 4
Better Oblivion Community Center — Better Oblivion Community Center
Somos — Prison On A Hill
SUNDAY, JANUARY 5
Frances Cone — Late Riser
King Princess — Cheap Queen
MONDAY, JANUARY 6
Say Anything — Oliver Appropriate
Blood Orange — Angel’s Pulse
TUESDAY, JANUARY 7
Pronoun — I’ll Show You Stronger
Billie Eilish — When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8
Charly Bliss — Young Enough
Richard Dawson — 2020
THURSDAY, JANUARY 9
2 Chainz — Rap Or Go To The League
Dori Freeman — Every Single Star
FRIDAY, JANUARY 10
The Rocket Summer — Sweet Shivers
Anemone — Beat My Distance
SATURDAY, JANUARY 11
Ximena Sariñana — ¿Dónde Bailarán Las Niñas?
Weezer — Black Album
SUNDAY, JANUARY 12
The Highwomen — The Highwomen
Kanye West — Jesus Is King
MONDAY, JANUARY 13
The New Pornographers — In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights
Suppose I wrote a review of your next recording that went like this:
“The new Dogslayer album is a standard set of pop songs of average quality, played competently but without distinction by the band. The guitarist and drummer zigzag between performances that are capable and others that feel merely adequate. The singer hits his marks, but imparts little personality to the songs. The lyrics are neither embarrassing nor illuminating. Fans of the genre’s conventions will enjoy their effective discharge here. The set is pleasant but forgettable, and will leave no lasting mark on the consciousness of its listeners.”
You wouldn’t much like that, huh? You might even hunt me down; beat me profusely about the mouth and cheeks. I wouldn’t blame you: a review like that, particularly if it was reprinted on a high-profile music website, could really harm a band’s career.
But wait a second: when was the last time you saw a review like that on a high-profile music website? I’m not talking about a bad review, now; those come with their own special cache. I’m talking about a review that says that a particular record is average. Not a disaster, not an affront to the senses, not even mediocre; but average.
Thousands of albums were released last year. I played on some of them, you played on some of them, they were duplicated or replicated, handed to a publicist or a go-fer, slipped into a padded envelope or encoded for digital transfer, and sent out to critics to evaluate. Almost all of those albums were average. This is indisputable; it’s a mathematical fact. This is no indie rock Lake Wobegon we inhabit here. On any qualitative scale, there’s a midpoint, and most everything is going to coalesce around that midpoint.
Artists are imitative people. For every musical visionary, there are a hundred other rockers who aspire to put out competent, wholly unremarkable reiterations of stuff they’ve already heard before. The entire musical-recommendation algorithm system is based on these imitative rockers: they are the datapoints in the web of association that’s supposed to anticipate consumer demand. If the Dogslayer album sounds disturbingly like MGMT, well, great!, MGMT has moved some albums; we’ll put a line in the press release that says RIYL: MGMT. Nobody who has logged time in the clubs will dispute that most bands play straight to audience expectation by presenting familiar sounds in familiar packages. They’re chasing success, sure, but they’re doing so by mimicking other artists who have resonated for listeners, not by breaking any new ground. In a very real sense, these bands are trying to be average.
This is perfectly fine. Entertainment does not, usually, require extraordinary measures; in fact, it’s often the case that extraordinary measures get in the way of entertainment. I find pop music immensely entertaining, which means that I’m probably going to find an average pop record amusing. I don’t need every album I play to be The Hissing Of Summer Lawns or even Prinzhorn Dance School. That would, frankly, drive me insane. I’m happy to spin a little Dogslayer now and then.
The trouble arrives when I am asked to assess the Dogslayer album. That’s because it is, like a good ninety per cent of what the critic gets, an average album, a nice little in-genre exercise. The members of the band are probably NYC music lifers who never gave critical response a second thought; they’re concerned with plugging in, cranking it up, and moving the crowd. But then they got popular and graduated to the Bowery stage — and with that came a manager, and an agent, and, inevitably, a publicist. The publicist’s job is, among other things, to attach to the album something that reads a little like this:
“You have in your hands the stunning debut release from the multi-talented, multi-ethnic, multi-orgasmic DOGSLAYER — the band that shook Brooklyn so hard they now call it Shooklyn. Chances are, you’ve heard the buzz about their sold-out performance with Horsefeeler at Bowery Ballroom, a show that Derek Stark of studioface.com called “heavy as a hammer, light as a rock and twice as solid”. But even if you were one of the lucky few to get in, nothing will prepare you for the sheer musical force of Bitterteeth. Recorded by Derek “Brick” Spank (first cousin to Dave Longstreth!) on the very same mixing board that Joy Division used to make the B-side to “Transmission”, the album envelops listeners in gossamer guitar, shimmering synthesizer, heavenly glockenspiel, delicately-struck drums, and the caramel voice of the incomparable Derek Bok III. Not since the heyday of MGMT has a band so effortlessly melded pop and rock to create sonic pop rocks. Shake it up, and feel your head explode…”
And so on. The first thing that the responsible critic does when receiving her copy of Bitterteeth in the mail is chuck this propaganda in the trash can. But even good critics aren’t responsible every day; some days, they’ll be tired and cranky and looking to make rent, and they’ll be cursing the day they agreed to take on another review. Just a quick peek at the PR materials couldn’t hurt, right? Two beers later, and Dave Longstreth and the Joy Division mixing board have found their way into the piece; one whisky, and the Bowery show has snuck in there too, as has the heavenly glockenspiel, the pull-quote from the website that the writer has never heard of before, and copious comparisons to MGMT.
At this point, it is the responsibility of the editor to say “hold it, now, you’re not evaluating, you’re rehashing press-release copy.” You’re chuckling bitterly now, but magazine editors used to do this; they didn’t always have the best taste, but they were decent watchdogs against rampant grade inflation. They may have been cokeheads and assholes, but they had some concept of journalistic integrity. Go back and look at Dave Marsh’s record-rating guides for Rolling Stone. Sure, he went over the top for some personal favorites (all critics should), but he was always willing to give the average record an average review. That didn’t mean he hated it — it meant it was willfully, purposefully anodyne, and he was calling a spade a spade.
Since then, the landscape has changed. Well, that’s an understatement: what I mean to say is that the landscape has been torn asunder by earthquakes registering 8.0 plus on the Richter scale. Web traffic is driven by posted premieres and exclusive streams, which means that any upstart capable of cultivating a tight relationship with an indie label’s marketing department can set himself up as an influencer. Many popular music sites are now in so tight with the big “indie” agents and publicists that it’s impossible to tell where the promotion ends and the journalism begins. Sometimes the journalism doesn’t begin: the site becomes a repository for commercial messages and label sales pitches.
Hyperbole tends to feed on itself. More disturbingly, it tends to encourage cliche repetition, and chase out oddball dissent. In 2013, the Internet looks like one gigantic PR Newswire. Almost all of the reviews I read on the Internet these days are unadulterated hype. Sometimes it’s hype rewritten by really good writers; they’ll figure out a way to re-word the main points of the press release in the graceful language they learned in seminars at the 92nd Street YMCA. More frequently, it’ll be hype rewritten by okay writers. They’ll try to disguise what they’re doing, but the dry bones always poke through the carcass.
In a climate like this, Dogslayer accumulates empty rave after empty rave. The band picks up so many interchangeable rave reviews, in fact, that they begin to think that they’re entitled to all the superlatives that their (paid) publicist has picked out for them. Without really noticing it, the members of Dogslayer have come to believe that the job of the critic is to ditto the positive notice they’ve already gotten. So many of the reviews say the exact same thing, cite the exact same influences — this must be how it works, right? Do you see what’s happened? The critic can no longer praise Dogslayer. All she can do is repeat what’s already been said or insult the band. Any deviation from the script written by the publicist will be taken as a weird affront to the myth that the label is building around the group. Should she trash the one-sheet and attempt to evaluate the record fairly, free from hyperbole, her review will be received as a pan. More than that, it’ll be received as an unwelcome deviation from consensus, a mar on the Metacritic score, bitter and contrarian.
Our hypothetical independent critic doesn’t like hurting people’s feelings, and despite my rep, neither do I. I hate it that it’s come to this — that bands and audiences now believe that the role of the critic is to be the publicist’s validator and attache. As music marketers have become increasingly precious guardians of the conventional wisdom surrounding their wards, bands have rarely had to cope with reviews that call them what most of them truly are: average.
Part of the problem is that as money has flowed in, careerism has overwhelmed the so-called “indie” music. Many prominent indie rockers are in their thirties: they’re not looking to rule the world with their music, they’re looking to make a respectable middle income. There is no shame in this, but it again confounds the critic. When you’re twenty years old, you tend to be surrounded by other twenty year olds with crazy dreams. They’re living in warehouses and eating rats, all so they can make art; it’s horrible, sure, but they’re young and healthy. You can poke holes in their pretensions, and they’re resilient enough to bounce back. Thirty year old musicians are different. They’ve got families to feed, bills to pay, and interpersonal responsibilities to attend to. That lukewarm review — that refusal to play minor-league ball with the starmaking apparatus designed by the publicist — is potentially taking the food out of the mouth of the guitar player’s newborn kid. That doesn’t feel quite so nifty to do. I don’t relish the prospect of undercutting the moneymaker-myths that musicians in their thirties rely on to get by. They’re dumb, but I understand why they’re essential.
In the 21st century, the critic is on the ropes. She no longer feels welcome to speak her mind about “indie” projects; every time she does, she bruises and bewilders some aging musician who is expecting not wild worship, but a boost to his career prospects. In the big musical clearing-houses that drive mass opinion, she’s been replaced by the marketer and the associative algorithm — and nobody really minds. PR copy takes the place of evaluative reviews, and that’s cool with readers. As databases continue to be refined and patterns of music consumption are further studied and tracked, it’ll be the algorithms that make recommendations, and the uploaded opinions of millions of listeners who define conventional wisdom. The critic is getting squeezed out.
What the critic needs to do is untether herself from the expectation that she’s there to make a recommendation to buyers. This will be hard to do — but it must be done if the critic is to survive. I once wrote in the Christmas Abstract that in America, every list is a shopping list. The critic needs to come up with a different kind of list: one that reflects her idiosyncratic and personal tastes. When the critic echoes conventional wisdom and the recommendations of the algorithm and the publicist, she needs to step back and ask herself what part of her singular God-given mind has gotten gummed up in the machine. Then she needs to about-face and march off in the other direction, and stake out narrative territory based on her own experiences, her own personality, and her own crazy whims.
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?
