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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.

Everybody fears semantics, and for good reason — there’s no quicker or more annoying way to bog down a discussion than by starting an argument over definitions. You might reckon that we’ve got enough fights going on right now, and we hardly need to start another one about words. Yet public discourse in America has gotten so scrambled that it’s become impossible to carry on a meaningful conversation about our government. It has become apparent to me that we’re never going to begin mending our politics until we clean up the language we use when we talk about ideology.

Over the past four decades, American society and American morality has gone through some vast and terrifying realignments. But because we insist on applying nineteenth century European terminology to our politics and ethics — terminology that doesn’t fit Europe very well anymore, either — we keep misinterpreting those changes. A complete overhaul of our political lexicon is probably in order. But that’s a big request, so to start, I want to ask for something simpler. I want us all to quit using the terms “liberal” and “conservative” for awhile. They’ve become crutches: trigger words that no longer correspond in the slightest with what they’re used to describe. They’re muddying the waters, and they need to be retired until their meanings can be recharged.

If that’s a habit you don’t believe we’ve got the will to break, maybe we can simply begin by remembering that “liberal” and “conservative” are adjectives, not nouns. No person is a liberal or a conservative. A person may have a predilection toward liberal ideas or conservative behavior; he may have both. But unless he’s a cartoon, his outlook will never fit under the umbrella of a single term. We know this, yet we go right on calling our friends and foes by category names that never really held water as descriptors of human beings*, and certainly don’t in 2018, when those terms have gone through a rhetorical shredder.

But if these terms are no good as nouns, they’re terrific adjectives. They describe ways of thinking and behaving that transcend policy and ideology, which is why their application to politics was initially helpful. They are not natural antonyms. Both describe approaches to a problem of scarcity that can be illustrated by imagining a wound and a bottle of healing ointment. A physician might liberally apply the ointment to the wound. He might look to conserve the amount of ointment in the tube for fear of wounds developing elsewhere. Whether to be liberal or conservative with the medicine is a judgment call specific to an instance. It isn’t necessarily predictive of what the doctor will do with his next patient. We don’t expect it will be: instinctively, we know that a doctor who treats each wound in the same way isn’t worthy of his caduceus.

A statesperson ought to think, and act, with similar flexibility. Policy knots usually require a combination of liberal and conservative approaches before they’re untangled. Consider a common land-use dispute: some businesspeople in a district want to log a forest to get at minerals underneath. Timber laborers looking for work support the initiative, but nearby homeowners don’t want to deal with construction noise, and environmentalists decry the destruction of a habitat for animals. A lawmaker might look to pass ordinances that force the timber company to proceed conservatively in the interest of environmentalism or the public peace, or they might look to mollify the homeowners with a liberal application of tax breaks. She might prioritize forest conservation, or she might prioritize the individual liberties of businesspeople looking to act in an ostensibly free-market economy. If she’s wise, if she’s worth anything as a leader, she’ll try to balance all of these competing claims. She’ll be behaving both liberally and conservatively, sometimes simultaneously.

It has become commonplace to refer to Republicans as “conservatives”. Sometimes the two terms — Republican and conservative — are used interchangeably, even though they’re incommensurate. One refers to a multi-million-dollar political institution that exists for the purposes of self-replication and power extension, and the other one is a fairly neutral adjective attached to cautious behavior. Do modern Republicans seem cautious to you? Circumspect in any way? Maybe they’re hesitant to embrace certain cultural changes (they’re more than fine with others), but by and large, that’s not what motivates them to go to Washington.

The main policy objective for Republican legislators is now, and has long been, tax cuts — even at the risk of major deficit spending. When they get power, that’s what they do.  A zealot will argue that these tax cuts are necessary to stimulate the economy, and it’s worth it to gamble, with fingers crossed, that future growth will compensate for any financial shortfall. You may find this absurd, or self-defeating, or you may applaud it as a bold move. What you cannot do is call it conservative. It’s the opposite of conservative: it’s an aggressive throw of the dice in the name of economic expansion. This latest Republican administration has also tried to undo regulations on corporate activity put in place to force those corporations to behave conservatively. They’ve also stood in the way of any restrictions on gun ownership or gun production and distribution, and they’ve based their argument on a reading of the Bill of Rights that privileges individual liberties over social responsibilities. So when I hear Democratic politicians complain with absolute conviction that their opponents are too conservative, I can only conclude that our discourse has gone into a shredder, and our understanding of the real-life ramifications of policy has followed.

Republicans often deride their opponents as liberals. When I was a kid in the eighties, this was used as a pejorative; George Bush Senior spoke, quite often, as if a liberal outlook was a hallmark of weak character. Abetted by talk radio hosts, Republicans really did manage to turn “liberal” into an insult — so much so that many Democrats ran like hell from the label. To fill the void, some Democrats began calling themselves “progressives” instead, reintroducing a meaningless term into a political arena already chock full of meaninglessness buzzwords. This was a nice bit of rhetorical gamesmanship by the Republicans, even of it was never too clear about what, exactly, they were accusing their opponents of. “Liberal” became a code-word for softness on crime, which few Democrats ever are or were, and willingness to challenge the need for tax cuts, which, depending on circumstances, can be quite a fiscally conservative position to take. But mostly, it meant opposition to Republicans and Republican-backed initiatives, and since many Democrats dislike Republicans for very good reasons, they accepted the Republican supposition that they were instinctively liberal — liberal by identity as well as ideology.

But are they really? Are Democrats any more liberal in their approach than Republicans are conservative in theirs? Some prominent Democrats have worked to reinforce and extend certain liberties, but that’s hardly been the party’s preoccupation. When in power, the Democratic party has accelerated the concentration of authority in the hands of a class of experts, pushed for government regulation of the private sector, and attempted to extend some healthcare benefits to those who aren’t lucky enough to have insurance. Depending on your outlook, you might call all of that commendable; you might even call it necessary. But you can’t call it liberal. Nearly everything advocated by the modern Democratic party infringes on the individual liberties of somebody or other; again, you may decide that certain people need their rights curtailed, but when you do, you’re taking an awfully illiberal position. In opposition to the current administration, Democrats have gotten cozy with law enforcement, and they’ve made heroes — and bedfellows — out of CIA and FBI operatives who are among the most illiberal people on the planet. The ease and speed with which Democrats get comfortable with spooks tells you all you need to know about the true state of liberalism within the party.

To confuse things further, another troublesome term has wormed its way into the rotten frame of the Overton window. Certain critics of the Democratic party — including Democrats — have taken to decrying something they call “neoliberalism”. (Don’t look for an advocate of neoliberalism; it is, like “emo”, a tag that nobody wears voluntarily.) According to critics, neoliberals want to grease the gears of global enterprise and make labor as flexible as possible, and, as a corollary, reduce oversight from regulatory bodies and governmental authorities. There is a much better, more elegant, and more historically accurate term for this belief, and that term is: liberalism. The free market is a liberal concept and always has been. Those who complain about neoliberalism may be loath to say it, but it’s liberalism that bothers them.

And that’s fine. It is absolutely okay for you to distrust certain liberal solutions to policy questions, just as it is absolutely valid to challenge this administration for its troubling incapacity for conservative behavior. It doesn’t make you liberal or conservative to do either, and it certainly doesn’t make you a liberal or a conservative, because such a thing doesn’t exist. Alas, politics has become wrapped up in individual personal identity, and we’ve all become more interested in what category we fit in than we are in understanding what the heck is happening. Because we’re all rather determined to signal what team we’re on, we gotten caught up in our placement on a left-right spectrum — another European import that’s not even slightly salient to the realities of American political life anymore, if it ever was.

So I’m asking you today to drop it. Ignore the hollow terminology for a little while. When you hear these words in action, ask yourself whether liberal and conservative behavior, or liberties, or conservation are even being discussed, or if you’re just listening to barkers and cheerleaders calling out team names. Remember that the people who work for the big political institutions try as hard as they can to sell you a total lifestyle package; that’s part of the marketing strategy, and the sorting has been so successful that America is now a mismatched pair of feuding single-party states. Even if you don’t agree with me that this is a terribly unhealthy thing to have happened to us, I hope you’ll concur that the language that politicians and their attaches in the press use has decayed to the point of incoherence. If we can’t talk about things, we can’t fix them — which means that those with an incentive to keep things as broken as possible will keep trying to confuse us. One day we may recall what “liberal” and “conservative” used to mean, but we’re going to need to do a lot of hard work before we get there: we need to strip them down and rinse them of their cultural associations. That won’t happen overnight. For now, they’re insubstantial at best and toxic at worst.  Don’t use them.  Start calling things what they are, and we may someday remember where we are — and maybe even who we are.

tris@trismccall.net

*Again we have borrowed this nasty habit from the Brits, who have, or have had, actual political parties called the Conservatives and the Liberals. One hundred years ago, a Westminster supporter of Asquith had legitimate strategic reason to call himself a Liberal, just as a delegate to a nominating convention on behalf of a Clinton is a Democrat. Then and now, that’s a party descriptor, and only a vague indication of ideology. Consider that the Conservatives count among their members some of the most intemperate men and women in the British Isles — people who haven’t acted conservatively in years.

In a little less than two weeks, the Democratic Party has a chance to win back control of the House of Representatives.  Should this happen, you can expect investigations on anything and everything related to the past activities of the slobs who presently govern us.  There will be grandstanding and grotesqueries.  There will be hot air.  There will be subcommittees on subcommittees for the examination of Jared Kushner’s underwear.   There will be pointless vengeance, and cops on the Hill, and there may, god help us, even be arrests.  It will be interminable, and it will be insufferable.  There is only one thing worse than the Democrats winning control of the House, and that is the Democrats *not* winning control of the House.

That would be a lot worse.  It would be so bad that I don’t even like to think about it.  But since there’s a decent chance that it will happen, I think we’ve got to stop what we’re doing (something to do with Gritty, I’m told) and take a good, honest look at what we’re up against, and the future we’re in for if the Republican Party maintains its House majority.  Because if you thought these past two years were a challenge to get through, they’d be a dainty prelude to the symphony of authoritarianism that would commence if the present direction of the country were to be ratified by voters on November 6.  We have one last chance to plot a course correction.  When you go into that ballot booth on the 6th — and buddy, you’d damn well better — you’ll have two options.  You can say, why yes, I approve of the policies that the regime in Washington is pursuing, and I wouldn’t mind one bit if they intensify.  Or you can help construct a bulwark against the tide.  It’s one or the other.

You wish there were more choices.  Me, too.  In a sane society, there surely would be.  There is a part of you — the noblest part, probably — that wants to reject my assessment altogether.  You don’t want to get in bed with institutional Democrats; you’ll back candidates who are unsullied by corporate money, or you’ll back nobody at all.  I understand the impulse.  But this time around, for the sake of national survival, you’re going to have to tell that voice to pipe down.  Allow me to explain why.

The American system of government was designed to prevent concentrations of power.  For every leader who thinks he had the right idea and won’t hear a counterargument, there are supposed to be two leaders in positions of equivalent authority whose role it is to throw cold water on the engine.  Ours is a complex society; that’s how we’ve been able to sustain human enterprise at the level and variety to which we’ve become accustomed.  The greatest threat to a country like ours is leadership that gallops off at top speed in a direction determined by a small group of like-minded executives.  That’s a sure way to keep half (and probably more) of the country pissed off and alienated all day.  Executives of both parties who’ve held the White House over the past sixty years have largely disregarded this, and they’ve looked to consolidate their power at the expense of those with the ability to keep it in check. In a way, you can’t blame them: expedience is an executive value.  Voters like men of action and expect their elected leaders to act decisively.  It’s the responsibility of the courts, the legislators, and the free press to say, nuh-uh, we need to build a broader consensus before we act.  This is government of the people, and that means all of the people; even those we find distasteful.

For the past two years, Republicans have held control of all three branches of government.  Unlike some, I don’t believe this outcome was engineered by wicked hackers overseas.  I see it as a considered decision made by voters.  That I also think it was an unwise decision is immaterial; American voters have made bad decisions before, and our right to choose wretched leaders if we want them is one of the cornerstones of civilian rule.  And many Americans do like to experiment: they threw the dice on a certain style of leadership in 2008, and threw them again eight years later on behalf of something quite different.  For reasons that I’ve outlined elsewhere, we’ve have come to demand governtainment, governtainment requires drama, and drama demands broad strokes and maybe even arch-villains to tilt against.  But even if you can’t resist a fireworks show, you must realize that concentrating power in the hands of any small group isn’t a risk worth taking.  The worry isn’t that you’re not going to get what you voted for.  The worry is you’re going to get far too much of it.

Unlike other single-party governments, this one didn’t take office with a head of steam.  This was because the vehicle of Republican ascension — its Presidential candidate — wasn’t trusted by the entire party.  Many Republicans had misgivings about their candidate’s priorities; others were plainly fine with them, but didn’t like his approach.  Some disliked his character on moral grounds, and some felt he wasn’t up to the job.  The new regime was loaded with people who didn’t know how Washington operated, and they stumbled out of the gate, making months worth of unforced errors.  What they could do with the blunt force of executive order, they did, but the rest of the plan took awhile to implement.  That bought us some time.

Unfortunately, time is up.  This administration has purged its internal enemies, straightened itself out, and is now talking in one awful voice.  The rest of the party has fallen in line behind the executive with the sort of unanimity that we all should hate to see in a pluralist society.  The Republicans in positions of legislative authority who tried to put the brakes on the White House won’t be around after this election: some are retiring in frustration, some are rightfully ashamed of what’s going on and are bowing out, some have capitulated, and a couple have actually bought the farm. The queasy, nose-holding party of 2016 has been transformed, emboldened, homogenized and pasteurized.  By 2019, there won’t be any anti-establishment Republicans left.  Those Republicans who’ll form the next Congress will go along with the executive branch no matter what it does.  They’ll cover for all ethical lapses, and gloss over the daily mendacity with a smile.  Should the Republicans maintain their legislative majority, they will move forcefully, and in unison, on an agenda that, in their view, will have been ratified by the electorate.  And if we fail to vote these guys out, this won’t be an unreasonable assumption.

What would that agenda be?  By now you know.  It combines nativism with regressive economics and a near-comical contempt for science.  Expect all of that in overdrive, plus an augmentation of the unearned swagger that makes this regime so infuriating to follow.  Some 2016 Republican voters reckoned that the bigotry was just fun and games on the campaign trail, and that once in office, these guys would drop the act and govern with sensitivity to the diversity of modern America.  That argument was always a weak one, and now it’s off the table.  They’re are dead serious.  They’re not open to persuasion; they’re ready to proceed, and if you happen to be in the way of the bulldozer, they will run you down without blinking.

In a healthy, balanced democracy, none of this would survive challenges in the courts, which are supposed to be staffed by sober-minded, deliberative people whose hands aren’t soiled from intra-party scuffles.  That safeguard has gone out the window, too.  Bush vs. Gore confirmed what we already suspected: the Supreme Court has become just another extension of party politics.  With every predictable 5-4 decision, the case for the Court’s autonomy gets harder and harder to defend.  What’s more, people like it this way — they support candidates who promise to deliver court seats to judges whose ideological positions mirror theirs.  In 2018, there is not much desire left for judicial independence.  We expect justices to rule (increasingly, we even say “vote”, which gives the game away) according to the priorities of the executives who appoint them, and when they don’t, we get mad.  We recently watched a Supreme Court nominee angrily denounce the opposition party on live television.  Naturally, the members of that party voted against him; the members of the other party loved him for it.  His talking points were interchangeable with those that Republican candidates use while campaigning.  In other words, the mystique is gone, the masks have fallen, and nobody expects a judge — even a Supreme Court judge — to be anything other than a political operative.  The nominee believed that the Democrats were trying to torpedo his candidacy on that basis.  The Democrats, just as clearly, felt that he was being put on the bench in order to run interference for members of the administration in legal hot water.  The terrifying thing is that they’re probably both right.

Republicans will maintain their majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.  Any challenges to extensions of executive authority will meet the same fate as the opposition to the travel ban: right down the tubes, by the score of five to four.  Discriminatory policies, ridiculous gerrymandering meant to retain legislative majorities, voter suppression, you name it, the highest court is going to find a justification for all of it.  That’s what they’re there for — that’s the job for which they were hired — and that’s why the Republican leadership resorted to dirty pool to keep Merrick Garland off of the Court.  For the next two years, minimum, the executive branch will be operating without meaningful judicial oversight.  They’ll be able to do whatever they want to do, to whomever they want to, and if you’re cool with this because you figure you’re not in the crosshairs, I remind you that today’s conciliator is often tomorrow’s target.

So forget the courts.  The House of Representatives is it; it’s the whole ballgame, the last line of defense between you and your friends and a regime that acts with entitlement but no sense of proportion.  If you’re concerned about what it would mean for this administration to operate without fetters, you must vote to deny the Republican Party a House majority.  That needs to be your sole objective on Election Day.  All others are secondary to the point of irrelevance.  We in the Jerz often complain, and justifiably so, that our votes aren’t as consequential as those in neighboring states. Usually that’s true.  Not this year, though.  The imprimatur can be taken from the Republicans in four or five districts — and all of those races are real ones, and they’ll be decided by thin margins. If the Republicans are stopped, Jersey will have had plenty to do with that; if they aren’t, that’ll mean that Jersey didn’t care.  Cry no tears for the regime: they’ll still be able to make plenty of trouble even if the Democrats do manage to win back a small amount of institutional power.  They just won’t be able to run the whole show without consequence — which, I remind you, is something nobody ought to be able to do in America anyway, and that nobody could do if our whole system wasn’t on the fritz.

Seats in the Senate are also up for grabs, but because of their apportionment, it’s not too realistic to imagine that the Democrats could take control of the chamber.  Normally, this wouldn’t be a disaster, but to say that the present Senate leadership is marching in lockstep with the administration is an understatement; on some days, I imagine that the Majority Leader is the main architect of this entire fiasco.  As for the press, I’m afraid we’re not the light to guide the country free from the thicket.  In this piece, I explained how the emphasis on search-engine and social-media optimization has created an environment that best suits demagogues and celebrity trainwrecks; that was written in late 2017, and I’m sad to say that nothing has changed.  But you shouldn’t need Politico to tell you that something is amiss.  You already know that the only way out of this is the way in.  Elections got us into this trouble, and only elections can steer us home.

Friends, your vote is not a mirror to your soul, or a binding promise, or sacred expression of your most cherished priorities.  A vote is just a tool — one of the few you have at your disposal.  Admittedly, it’s a meager one.  But if this tool was truly powerless, officials in Georgia and North Dakota wouldn’t be trying as hard as they could to take it away from people who might use it against them.  This November, you’ve got two ways to use that tool.  You can loosen the screws on the black iron gates that are swinging all over America, or you can let those gates slam shut.  That’s it; that’s the choice.  A Republican majority in the House will complete the assumption of absolute authority that began with the 2016 election.  The only way to avoid total Republican rule is to grant that majority to the Democrats. There is simply no other knight on the battlefield capable of joining the fight. Laugh at the rusty armor if you must; throw some stones if you have to.  But this year, vote smart.

A day may come — and hopefully it will come soon — when you will be able to relax and vote for the Green, or the Libertarian, or the Marijuana Freedom Party, or write in your Uncle Lou, or stay at home and play videogames while responsible grown-ups decide how the pie is sliced.  But when there are no reasonable adults in view, that means you have to be the wise one.  You have to put aside personal preferences and make a strategic decision that’s right for the country.  In order to make sure that the day comes when we can again afford to be creative with our votes, we need to recognize that our system of government is facing an existential threat.  That’s not hyperbole: the consolidation of power under one banner — any one banner — is always an overture to autocracy*.  Any time we give the same group of guys the ability to determine the rules, enforce the rules, and judge whether the rules are fair, there’s a possibility that they’ll rip up the current codes and replace them with ones that allow them to replicate their power.  The only thing that prevents them from doing just that is their consciences.  Look at our current leaders.  Do you trust their consciences?

Modern Republicans like to argue that any small bit of resistance they encounter constitutes obstructionism.  They will tell you that divided government frustrates the will of the people, who, they believe, demand prompt, friction-free customer service from elected officials.  It’s worth remembering that real American leaders have never required unanimity to make meaningful, positive changes. They’ve understood that, in a complicated country, opposition is inevitable and needs to be expressed, and attempts to iron it out or shut it up are unhealthy.  Compromise is frustrating, but it also forces people to see through the eyes of others, and take their concerns seriously.

Right now, the regime isn’t listening to you.  The members of this ignorant and remarkably intemperate administration are doing whatever the heck they want, whenever they want, just because they can.  They believe they can bully their critics into submission, and they’ll proceed accordingly, and with absolute arrogance, for as long as we let them.  Do not underestimate their ability, or their inclination, to rewrite the basic rules of American government in order to accommodate their desire for executive authority.  They got off to a shaky start, but lately, they’ve been consolidating their power with the sort of ruthlessness that ought to give any patriot the chills.  On election day, we’ve got one final opportunity to slow them down. I don’t say this lightly: should we miss this chance, we may never get another.

tris@trismccall.net

*I do also object, strongly, to ideological conformity among Democrats, but that’s not the trouble we’re facing in this election.  We’re not close to that.  We’ve got to fight the dragon in front of us, not the one that might trouble us down the road.

To some, I guess, they were a stoner band – they made songs ideal to light up to. That’s a fine approach to Pink Floyd, even if it wasn’t mine. For other fanatics, Pink Floyd were soundscapers in the prog tradition, immediately identifiable instrumentalists who made music that was effortlessly immersive. Put on a Floyd album and get lost for forty-five minutes; I certainly did plenty of that. Still others saw them as a band of might-have-beens: what if Syd hadn’t lost his mind, what if Rick and Dave had kept on singing, what if Roger hadn’t, to paraphrase James Mercer, grabbed the yoke and flown the whole mess into the sea?

Yet to me, Pink Floyd has always been a concept band. It was because of their mastery of concept – their ability to buttress a philosophical or political idea with flourishes and sonic coloring that reinforced its meaning – that Pink Floyd became, along with Yes, one of the pillars of the temple of rock where I knelt at night. Yes was the sound of heaven: the world that I wanted, an eco-utopia of perpetual change and elfin magic and the revealing science of God. Pink Floyd was the world as it was: the smokestacks and the ticking clocks, the pigs and dogs and sheep, and always some mad bugger throwing up a wall.

Roger Waters, for all his faults (and to his credit, he’s always worn them in plain view) was the concept-keeper for the Floyd. Without him, they would merely have been a great band; with him, they stayed on topic and theme better than any rock group ever did, or ever will, probably. It was Roger who told Syd’s story in diamond-hard imagery on Wish You Were Here, and laid out the breakdown of the postwar dream in The Final Cut, and on Animals, ushered you into the coldest shower you’ll ever take – a vision of society that, because of its ruthless accuracy, still rings like an alarm all these years later. Roger kept it going in his solo career, too; even if he didn’t have his former mates to back him up with music worthy of his ideas, he kept those big ideas coming.

While Pink Floyd kept those sets tidy, it was, by 1977, apparent that Roger was working on a grand concept that transcended single albums. He had something to say about war and the welfare state, greed and surveillance and state-sponsored distraction and the price of liberty, and our human obligation to take care of each other. Sometimes it took the shape of a personal story: a father he never knew, “buried like a mole in a foxhole” at Anzio, as Roger, who was desperate to make that sacrifice mean something, sang in “Free Four”. Sometimes it drew from classic dystopian literature, like the echoes of Orwell and Bradbury in Animals, and sometimes its inspiration came directly from headlines about miners’ strikes and trouble in the West Bank and Gaza. This was sanctimonious at times, and it sure could be strident, but it was never forced. It was all an expression of Roger’s soul, and in singing it with the passion that he did, he was playing according to the rules of his chosen style. He expanded the parameters of what rock could be. He was making progressive music, even though he thought he was.

His monomaniacal pursuit of his vision wrecked Pink Floyd. The other players in the band were way too good to be marginalized. In retrospect, it’s easy to blame Roger for the estrangement that followed The Wall; nobody likes a guy who puts his sociopolitical agenda ahead of his relationship with his mates. Yet Roger Waters was driven, as many great artists are, by a story he absolutely had to tell – and fifty(!) years after The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, that ambition is still paying artistic dividends. Is This The Life We Really Want? is the culmination of a through-line in Roger Waters’s writing that begins with Corporal Clegg’s wooden leg and threads through Obscured By Clouds and the stealth-socialism of The Dark Side Of The Moon, the despair of “Another Brick In The Wall, Part 1″ and the elegy for liberal democracy on “The Gunner’s Dream”, the quiet outrage of the When The Wind Blows soundtrack, and the unanswerable moral rage of “The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range” from Amused To Death. All of that is present and profoundly reinforced on the new album, which is the most succinct elaboration of Roger Waters’s worldview ever waxed, and the only rebuttal to the State Of The Union address you’ll ever need. With Is This The Life, Roger has done something that few artists, even great ones, ever manage to do. He’s stuck the landing.

It may remind you of Pink Floyd.  That’s intentional. Roger has always loved callbacks, and as it’s his catalog, he’s free to re-use it however he likes.  Nigel Godrich, who produced this set, is an obvious Floyd obsessor who knows the discography backward and forward, and he’s pulled off an impressive balancing act – he alludes to Roger’s past without overwhelming the listener, or the singer, with it.  The record that Is This The Life We Really Want? most closely resembles, in tone and theme, is The Final Cut, and if you’re one of those Floyd fans who can’t countenance that one because of the way Roger was treating his (soon-to-be-ex) bandmates, you might want to run these two back to back to remind yourself just what was at stake.

The Final Cut is a record about a missed opportunity: our chance, according to Roger, to refashion society according to egalitarian principles in the wake of World War II has slipped through our fingers, and now we’re living with the consequences. Just like his role model Jeremiah, he names names, howling his head off about Margaret Thatcher and Leonid Brezhnev and Galtieri, and you, First Worlder, who has put material comfort ahead of your responsibility to your neighbors. The threat of nuclear holocaust hangs over the whole set, but the proximate cause for all the shouting was the Falklands War, which Roger saw as grubby and intemperate backslide into pointless militarism. Confrontational as it is, the album contains some of the most beautiful poetry ever written by a rock band, including the second verse of “The Gunner’s Dream”, a distillation of the promise of social democracy that beats the stuffing out of any political speech I’ve ever heard. If pop music is, at its best, an attempt to fill up the infinite space between the people we are and the people we wish we could be, here was a reach farther than most artists dream, let alone attempt.

The band, however, was coming apart, and I can’t deny The Final Cut sounds fractious. Roger, who has always sung like a wailing revenant, is even more cracked and exhausted here than he usually is. Unfortunately for all of us – Roger included – the world has given him another chance to make many of the same points. Thirty-four years after The Final Cut, we’re right back to petty nuclear brinksmanship, authoritarianism, and near-psychotic disregard for the welfare of our fellow travelers on the planet. On Is This The Life We Really Want?, Roger illustrates our predicament with graphic images that would’ve seemed over-the-top if circumstances hadn’t proven them dead right: I like the description of life in 2017 as a seat on a windowless, doorless private plane manned by an insane crew, but you may be more moved by the dead child face down on the beach, or the woman killed by drone strike as she cooks rice for her family, or the tank crushing a student, or a home, or a pearl. This is ugly stuff he’s entertaining us with, no doubt, and it isn’t for the faint. Same as it ever was, Pink Floyd fan. Somebody has to preach, right?, and since the churches have abdicated their positions as moral arbiters, it’s down to the pop stars to bring the fire and brimstone.

While other members of his cohort – Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Ray Davies, etc. – have succumbed to various flavors of despair, Roger Waters continues to insist that we’ve got options.  What differentiates us from the bug on the wall is our capacity to act selflessly and open our hearts to the stranger and the refugee.  When we stand by, silent and indifferent, and allow the suffering of others to continue, we’re choosing to dehumanize ourselves – which, according to Roger, is exactly what we’ve been accomplishing. Note that the album title is a question: we’ve all got the option to choose humanity over anthood, so why don’t we?  Roger’s tone throughout is one of anguished disbelief – this can’t be the life we want, can it?  These choices we make, they serve no one, do they?  Yet we keep making them. This time around – and this hasn’t always been true on his solo records – he’s got a band who’s right there with him, illustrating his poems with performances that feel anguished, weary, accusatory, repentant, all the things that the music suggests. As for Roger himself, he’s still broken-hearted when he mumbles and properly astringent when he shouts.  He’s also revealed a heretofore dormant talent for playing the piano.  Nothing he does is flashy, mind you, he hits the keys slowly, and dolefully, like he’s knocking on your door to deliver the disastrous news.

Is some of this grumpy-old-man business, a litany of bellyaches about the parlous state of the world? Well, certainly, and if you want to argue that there’s no place for that in pop music, on certain dark days I’m willing to concede the point. But if anybody has earned the right to complain, it’s Roger Waters. Fifteen million copies of The Dark Side Of The Moon were sold in the United States. Songs bearing Roger’s heavy lyrics have been in rotation on classic rock stations for decades.  It’s not that he hasn’t been heard, it’s that he hasn’t been heeded. How many of those people who chanted at rallies about building the wall and keeping immigrants out have copies of Pink Floyd albums in their collections? How many of them attended a Pink Floyd concert, or sang along to a song on the radio?  Quite a few, I’d imagine. The generation that Roger Waters has been addressing, so eloquently and passionately, for sixty years?, those guys turned out to be real pieces of work. We’re not much better. For more than sixty million Americans (not to mention voters in the UK who’ve got their own problems) Roger’s poetic verses meant nothing. I’m not sure how any artist could try any harder, or believe in his causes any more fully, or make his case any more plainly. Honestly, it’s a minor miracle that Is This The Life We Really Want? is as even-handed as it is; if he’d gone straight off the rails and put out an album of fist-shaking rock, I wouldn’t have blamed him. Instead, he’s given us another perfectly balanced cycle of songs, rueful and gorgeous in all the right places, thoughtful, imploring, open-hearted. I’d like to think that Governor Kasich, self-proclaimed Pink Floyd fan, heard it, and let the lessons sink in. I’d like to think that it mattered to you. It couldn’t have mattered more to me.

Album Of The Year

• 1. Roger Waters — Is This The Life We Really Want?
• 2. Saint Etienne — Home Counties
• 3. Laura Marling — Semper Femina
• 4. LCD Soundsystem — American Dream
• 5. Tyler, The Creator — Scum Fuck Flower Boy
• 6. Randy Newman — Dark Matter
• 7. Elizabeth & The Catapult — Keepsake
• 8. GoldLink — At What Cost
• 9. Paramore — After Laughter
• 10. Susanne Sundfor — Music For People In Trouble
• 11.  Morrissey — Low In High School
• 12. Natalia Lafourcade — Musas
• 13. Marika Hackman — I’m Not Your Man
• 14. Lana Del Rey — Lust For Life
• 15. Elbow — Little Fictions
• 16. Lucy Rose — Something’s Changing
• 17. Jay-Z — 4:44
• 18. Wand — Plum
• 19. Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton — Choir Of The Mind
• 20. Drake — More Life

Nobody wants to look old and in the way.  This especially applies to critics, who need to keep up on trends or come off even more preposterous than they normally do, and musicians, who operate in an industry that puts a heavy premium on youth.  Usually this isn’t much of a problem for me at this time of the year: there’s some kid’s-stuff mall emo I’m waving the flag for, or a 20-year-old rapper out of the Midwest with a mouthful of slang meant to confound mom and dad, or an indiepop project from adorable twee Scots who sound and behave so much like twelve-year-olds that they might as well be lined up for the recess bell.  The world likes young people, the biz likes young people, I like young people, everything’s in bloom on the spring chicken farm.

But this year, my album list featured a septuagenarian coot in the top position, an even older grump at number six, and the grouchiest senior citizen in the entertainment industry at number eleven.  What’s going on here?  Have I finally capitulated to age and thrown in with the codgers? Or has the mask fallen, and am I now making my generational allegiances plain?  Damn millennials with your cellular phones and your bit coins.  Take those avocado toasts and shove ’em.

Probably not.  In 2016 and 2017, we got a bunch of mea culpas from Baby Boomers; things, if you’ll notice, didn’t exactly turn out the way they were supposed to during the Summer of Love.  They’re the Jerkiest Generation, and always have been, but at least they were kind enough to send their best poets to deliver the bad news.  Message received; next year’s album list is virtually certain to skew toward the whippersnappers.  But I’m glad things broke as they did, and not merely because I never miss an opportunity to tell the world what Roger Waters and Randy Newman (and, for that matter, Morrissey) have always meant to me.  It also gives me an opportunity to clear up a few things up about my priorities — and there’s no safer place to do that than on a personal page that you’re only reading because you like me.

About five years ago, I was caught up in a long-running rock-crit debate between two warring ideological camps. On one side were so-called poptimists: critics, mostly younger, who believed that marginalized forms of popular music were just as worthy of critical scrutiny as those moldy old records designated classics by first-generation rock writers. They defended ephemerality as a virtue, argued that commercial performance was a legitimate barometer of merit in a capitalist industry, lionized fun and entertainment, and criticized their opponents for their implicit racism and sexism and insistence on evaluating everything by the standards set by late-’60s Beatles albums.  Not everybody was trying to make Tommy, dammit, and it was unfair to demand a magnum opus out of every teenager with an MPC who probably just wanted to dance.  On the other side of the debate were the rockists, largely older and largely male, who felt it was preposterous to stack, say, Britney Spears up against Bruce Springsteen.  Any fool could see the difference in artistic merit between the two, and it was only doing readers a disservice to pretend that an equivalency existed.  Rock, and pop, for that matter, had peaked around 1973, and everything has gone to hell in a handbasket since.  Now I’m caricaturing the position, but not by very much.  I’m also using the past tense, because the debate is more or less settled: the dust has cleared, and the poptimists have won. Major pop releases are now received with the seriousness that used to be reserved for rock records by canonical artists.  It would be the rare critic indeed who’d argue that a new set from Rihanna, or Beyonce, didn’t deserve front-page treatment.

I love Beyonce, and Rihanna, and Katy Perry, and just about every other pop star you might like to name (hey, that new Camila Cabello album sounds pretty good…)  Because I’ve been pretty loud about my appreciation for what they do, many readers have assumed that I pitch my tent among the poptimists, and have said so, in angry letters to the editor that I still have.  Well, the nice ones called me a poptimist; the others used language that I won’t repeat here.  Let’s just say they impugned a masculinity that I don’t exactly value in the first place.  Many of these guys — and they were all guys, of course — were so vitriolic in their accusations that they were unable to see that I agreed with them far more than they thought I did.  I just don’t condemn modern pop stars; I think they’ve managed to make some classic albums too.  But my real, honest-to-god position is about as close to vulgar rockism as you’re likely to find from a critic who still cares, and very much, about contemporary music.  I believe the classic period for pop and rock albums ran from 1967 to around 1974, and just about everything of merit since then has been attempts to recapture the glories of that period.  The only difference between me and the worst of the rockists is that I’m still buying, and enjoying, new albums by the hundreds.

I do understand the sociopolitical problems with this, and I try to be sensitive to them.  But just because something is problematic doesn’t mean it’s wrong — especially when everything we’ve ever learned about the history of artistic movements suggests that it’s right. Heydays exist.  Those writing about other mediums aren’t shy about pointing them out.  Elizabethan drama, Flemish portrait painting, Abstract Expressionism, bebop, Japanese bamboo art; heck, there are literary critics who’ll tell you that the novel went into aesthetic eclipse for decades in the mid Eighteenth century. There is a short period of groundbreaking and standard-setting, and then a much longer era of stasis, institutionalization, and decline. There oughtn’t to be anything controversial about pointing this out, just as there’s nothing outrageous about noticing and celebrating the great stuff that continues to get made after the classic period is over.

Mind you, none of this is nostalgia.  I have no retrospective appreciation for the Vietnam era.  That must have been an awful time to have been a young person. Advances in recording technology must have been, in that context, a very small consolation. But more consequential, I’d wager, than the advent of gazillion-tracking and the studio as an instrument and the Wall of Sound and all the rest of it was that it was then possible to get that technology into the hands of the right people. The business was, by modern standards, pretty small-time — it hadn’t consolidated yet. Nobody knew what the kids wanted; there was no good outline or target marketing, or, God forbid, any algorithm to predict audience response. Instead it was entirely reasonable, and economically defensible, to give money and resources to the big-nosed likes of Van Morrison or Randy Newman. A fully mature industry — one that operates confidently and efficiently — has neither interest in nor room for guys like that.  They’re going to adhere to best practices, which will usually mean pleasing the crowd as expediently as possible.  Since there are now instant methods of ascertaining crowd desire, their jobs are done for them.

And if you still don’t believe me, consider that we all watched this exact thing happen in hip-hop. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the industry was shapeless, executives were tentative, and nobody had any idea what was going on or what was going to sell. This led to record deals and promotion for funny-looking, idiosyncratic, visionary artists who’d never, ever sniff major industry money if they were rhyming today: De La Soul, KRS-ONE, Rakim, you know the names as well as I do.  Public Enemy seemed like a dodgy proposition to the suits when they first came out, but the attitude was, what the hell, who knows with this crazy rap stuff, let’s throw it out there and see if anybody pays attention. By the late ’90s, that uncertainty was gone. This is not to say that there are no longer great hip-hop albums made, because great albums are released every year.  I merely point out that there is far less interest in the sort of protean personalities that exist during the classic phase of any style.  This is basic corporate theory: when the institution is in a nascent stage, big personalities tend to dominate.  Once an institution is mature, big personalities are no longer necessary; eventually, they’re no longer welcome.  The game runs by itself.  There’s no demand for wild cards in the deck.

The coterie of artists whose personalities defined the classic pop-rock period are now saying goodbye.  They’re making closing statements, pulling it together one final time to get their aesthetic estates in order.  Since they effectively wrote the rules of album-making, they’ve got certain advantages that younger artists can’t pretend to. Do these make up for the stigma of age — the feeling among some listeners that veteran rockers said their piece and had their turn, and it’s time to turn the floor over to the next generation?  Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t.  I’m enough of a softie that I don’t want to throw grandma out in the snow when she might have some wisdom left to impart, just as I’m still enough of a tyro to decry gerontocracy wherever I see it.  But I do think that the poptimist argument that it’s unfair to judge younger artists working in alternative styles by the standards of the early ’70s classics is undermined by the influences and models that those younger artists consistently cite. Zeppelin, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Nilsson, Pet Sounds, Motown and Stax-Volt, Dusty Springfield and P-Funk: the names dropped in the press releases I see these days are, pretty much, the same names I saw ten years ago. The album wasn’t supposed to have made it past Napster; here we are in the second decade since the millennium turned, and everybody doing pop, rock, and hip-hop still dreams of dropping a classic full-length.

My favorite single of 2017 was made by a woman born thirty years ago in the frozen fjords of Haugesund, Norway.  As far as I can tell, she’s never lived in the United States; I don’t know if she’s ever even toured here.  Yet this Scandinavian avant-garde art rocker has chosen, on her lead single, to emulate Dolly Parton circa 1971. Other songs on Music For People In Trouble chase Judy Collins, Grace Slick, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell circa For The Roses. She’s happy to own up to these sources, which were as far in the rear-view mirror for her when she was born as Doris Day and Perry Como were for me. She might be the rare artist who is able to stand up to her sources (Laura Marling is another), but her aspirations aren’t unusual. That’s because those artists and those albums are the benchmark, and they will always be.

Music is both the very best thing that people do and the thing that allows people to be at their best.  We are never more ourselves than we are when we are singing, or dancing, or making up songs, or deejaying, or just listening.   Music amplifies and broadcasts the strange, irreducible parts of our personalities, those elements that can’t be counterfeited; when you’re in the presence of a real musical artist, you immediately know it’s her, and you know there’s nobody else who can do what she does.  Around fifty years ago, rock, pop, and soul artists figured out how to get the album — the forty-minute sequence of songs and musical ideas — to be the ultimate conveyor of personality.  Ever since then, we’ve been scrambling to replicate the work they did.  We’ve gotten pretty good at it, too: we’re skilled at sound-matching, and song-sequencing, and singing and playing our instruments in a manner that makes our individualities manifest.  It’s no shame to admit that it’s never going to be quite as exciting as it was in the classic period; it never is.  The qualitative distance is real, but it’s also been exaggerated.  The very worst record that’ll be released tomorrow will still be more interesting to engage with than almost anything else you might have devoted your attention to in a year as deadening as 2017.  It shouldn’t depress us that we’ll never quite live up to our models.  We should celebrate that our models are as world-bending as they are. Thank goodness for them. Go right on copying them.

Single of the Year

• 1. Susanne Sundfor — “Undercover”
• 2. Paramore — “Fake Happy”
• 3. Phoebe Bridgers — “Motion Sickness”
• 4. Tyler, The Creator — “See You Again”
• 5. Vince Staples — “Big Fish”
• 6. Nelly Furtado — “Pipe Dreams”
• 7. Harry Styles — “Sign Of The Times”
• 8. Future — “Mask Off”
• 9. 2 Chainz — “Trap Check”
• 10. Cloud Nothings — “Internal World”
• 11. Drake — “Passionfruit”
• 12. Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee — “Despacito”
• 13. Charly Bliss — “Glitter”
• 14. Morrissey — “Jacky’s Only Happy When She’s Up On The Stage”
• 15. LCD Soundsystem — “Tonite”
• 16. Liam Gallagher — “For What It’s Worth”
• 17. Kendrick Lamar — “Humble”
• 18. Alvvays — “Plimsoll Punks”
• 19. Idles — “Well Done”
• 20. Poppy — “Moshi Moshi”

Best Album Title

Music For People In Trouble. Because we are, you know.

Best Album Cover

See above.

Best Liner Notes And Packaging

The Saint Etienne album came with a little map of the Home Counties, a made-up (and hilarious) police blotter, and an essay that namechecked Orwell and Virginia Woolf. So yes, Sarah Cracknell was speaking my language, and not for the first time. I’d also like to acknowledge Poppy and her evil overseers for a thank-you section that lists most major financial institutions in bold pink type, and instructions for folding the CD insert into a cult hat complete with Illuminati eyeballs.  She’s all in on the character, bless her.

Most Welcome Surprise

I was pleasantly surprised that Harry Styles and Nelly Furtado want to be alternarock stars; there’s not a lot of dough in it these days, but at least you get the opportunity to work with real racket-makers. Also, while I’ve always liked Lucy Rose, I didn’t think she had the capacity to make an album as good as Something’s Changing.  My real answer in this category, though, is Colin Meloy, who, via the Offa Rex album, proved to me he could do a genuine Martin Carthy imitation. Whatever you want to say about that guy, concede this much: he’s a talent.

Biggest Disappointment

I covered this in the Abstract, but I’ll say it again: it’s been years since an album has disappointed me as much as Melodrama did. Lorde let Jack Antonoff, he of the one chord progression (and an unimaginative one at that) run roughshod over her writing, which is not an outcome I thought was possible in 2013. But I also confess a certain disappointment that Taylor Swift is drinking as much as she seems to suggest that she is on Reputation, if you accept the dubious proposition that her narrators are proxies for her. This year, I sorta do.

Album That Opened Most Strongly

Natalia Lafourcade’s Musas.

Album That Closed Most Strongly

Semper Femina

Song Of The Year

“Nothing, Not Nearly”. Sometimes I think that the entire British folk-rock tradition — from Sandy Denny in Fairport and Jacquie McShee in the Pentangle through Nick Drake and Renaissance, Kate St. John and Beth Orton singing about that abandoned shopping trolley — was all just a buildup to 3:03 – 3:12 on this track.

Okay, page two soon.  Thanks for reading along.

On “I Wish You Lonely”, a musical curse hurled by Morrissey on his hand-grenade of a new album, the fussy old vegetarian compares himself to a humpback whale. Not any whale, mind you; he envisions himself as the last survivor, defiantly swimming through the seas with harpoon-boats in pursuit. Like so much about Morrissey, it’s simultaneously funny and not so funny. For thirty-five years now, it’s never been clear whether his listeners are supposed to laugh. I suspect he wants the authority to crack jokes, but also the prerogative to look down his nose at you if he thinks you’re approaching his lyrics with a surfeit of levity and an inappropriate amount of gravity.

If you know Morrissey at all, and you certainly do, it’ll be clear to you why he identifies with the whale. Humpbacks are intelligent (something he’s positive he is), free-roaming and grand, ugly-beautiful, hounded by bullies. Also, famously, humpbacks sing. Not everybody understands their song, and many, tone-deaf that they are, would deny that that whale is singing at all.  Nevertheless, it goes right on with the show.

Like many people who feel marginalized, Morrissey has always been acutely sensitive — both on and off record — to threats to his autonomy and his liberty to speak his mind.  Years after topping the UK charts, he still feels very much like an outsider, and he has never been willing to modify or even soften his positions for the sake of the pop game. If you ask Morrissey an opinion question, he’s not going to waffle. You’re going to get an actual answer.

In 2017, few of his fans liked the answers he gave. The nasty nativist streak that has always been present in his writing — from “Panic” through “Bengali In Platforms” and “National Front Disco” and the rest of it — grew too wide for his apologists to ignore. Morrissey made statements that were unambiguously xenophobic and blatantly Islamophobic, too, and went on the record in support of a politician who was odious even by the low standards of the UKIP.  In so doing, he appeared to be aligning himself with the ringleaders of the tormentors — the closed-minded thugs who most members of his following feel persecuted by. This all came to a climax in an interview with Der Spiegel which played like an audition for a Prison Planet talk radio gig.  Lamely, he claimed he’d been misquoted (nope, you’re on tape, pal). It was all too much, and certain nervous parishioners in the Church of Morrissey ran for the exits.  Martin Rossiter, for instance, who did practically nothing but pilfer from the Smiths on those early Gene records, took to the Quietus with a broadside headlined “Why Morrissey Is Dead To Me”. It was like a former Christian washing his hands Jesus; Jesus if he’d gone alt-right.

Me, I’ve got a very high threshold for perturbation.  Even back when I was a teenager, searching for all the friends on the pop charts I could find and singing along to “Cemetry Gates” in the back of a speeding car, I always considered the Smiths problematic.  I liked discos and the people inside; I always figured I’d be one of the people burned along with the deejay if Morrissey ever had his way with the kerosene. I never wanted that double-decker bus to ram into me. I suspected, very much, that he didn’t either: if he was dead, how would he run his mouth?  But Morrissey was a fully-formed character, and thus indispensable in a pop landscape where personality was in short supply.  He also wore his flaws in plain sight, which, I had come to recognize, was a hallmark of a legitimate artist.  He never tried to hide anything from his listener – it was all right out there, on the surface, gruesome in broad daylight.  So even though I never got into World Peace Is None Of Your Business, I figured I needed to give my cranky old uncle Morrissey a spin.  There were songs on the new one with such titles as “The Girl From Tel Aviv Who Wouldn’t Kneel” and “When You Open Your Legs”.  My rubbernecker’s impulse had been fully engaged.

Low In High School isn’t as good as Vauxhall or Your Arsenal, but it’s probably a stronger and more rewarding set than late-career high points like Years Of Refusal and You Are The Quarry.  Neither of those two very good albums made all that much of a splash, so it’s hard to blame this professional attention-getter for turning up the volume and amping up the rhetoric.  If that’s all there was to High School, it would still be worth cursory engagement from people whose lives were saved by the Smiths (or so they used to like to say), regardless of the principal’s position on Brexit.  But the latest Morrissey is more than that. Yes, it’s abrasive, bombastic, self-righteous/self-pitying, conspiracy-minded – everything the public Morrissey has become over the past decade. But it’s also very funny (as always), peculiarly romantic, lovelorn, properly astringent; acid squirted in the eye of some targets that really do need a good spritz.  Seventy per cent sympathetic, thirty per cent abominable – same as it ever was, according to my count.

While nothing on Low In High School contradicts Morrissey’s new identity as a volunteer UKIP spokesperson, it doesn’t lead with the distaste for multiculturalism that has marred so many of his recent interviews. This is, instead, an album about violent conflict: not merely battles between armies, but a war that the singer is convinced, and not without reason, is being waged on people like Morrissey.   This is why he opens with a berserk love letter to his fans – he assumes you, long time listener, are something of a humpback whale, too, solitary and hounded by men (always men) who are determined to put the harpoon through softer human specimens.  Low In High School argues that war is a choice made not by governments, but by individual male humans who cannot govern their own destructive impulses.  I, too, have looked around the country, and the globe, and you know what?, I believe him.

“I Bury The Living”, the stupendous centerpiece of this enraged, justifiably defensive disc, lays the blame at the foot of the Man With Gun: the anonymous grunt, “just doing his duty”, or so we’ve been assured. “Give me an order/I’ll blow up your daughter”, he says, succinct and hard-eyed, hungry to kill.  He doesn’t care what the war is about – he just wants an excuse to discharge his weapon. The song is the best rejoinder to mindless Support Our Troops rhetoric since Belle & Sebastian’s “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love”, and it works for the same reason – it isn’t afraid to be offensive.  Because war is offensive, people, a million times more offensive than anything a pop star might sing.  One song later, on “In Your Lap”, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Morrissey ducks and covers as combatants, righteous and fascist, get their jollies by burning, clubbing, and spraying each other. You aren’t responsible for what armies do, he tells us on “Israel”, they are not you. These are the songs that the Decemberists, great as they are, have been trying to write for twenty years; Colin Meloy’s politeness, balance, and sense of decency prevents him from going all the way with the arguments.  Morrissey, a goddamned problem, isn’t so burdened.

His remedy: all the young people, he tells us, must fall in love. A little hippy-ish, sure, especially from the guy who wrote “Shakespeare’s Sister”, but I don’t think I’ve heard anything better, or more practical, from the so-called authorities lately.  Also – and he is dead serious about this – he requests that you stop watching the news.  I think he’s right about that, too.  Broadcast journalism got caught in the rapids around 2013 and has since gone right over the waterfall, and it’s mostly been yelling and kicking up a dangerous froth ever since. They’ve mastered psychological techniques to keep you tuning in, waiting for the big revelation that never comes.  I appreciate Morrissey pointing the finger, and putting it to us as straight as he does, just as I commend him for what appears to be a legitimate concern for the mental state of those he counts as members of his tribe. On Low In High School, he really does sing like he’s worried about you, Morrissey listener, ostensibly fey individual who, for all he knows, may actually be a girl, clinging to passive resistance in the face of toxic masculinity.  All of his songs have always been pitched at you, of course – that’s why you scribbled the lyrics on your notebook.  But he’s never made the stakes quite as clear as he does here.

No matter what they tell you during election years, artists aren’t terribly interested in politics.  For the most part, an artist’s prime responsibility is to the art, which, in a capitalist society, means securing enough funding to do the next project.  That’s it; that’s the driver, and there’s no shame in it.  A real artist will make all kinds of horrid compromises and enter into relationships of complicity with any number of ghouls to make sure the next album comes out. I think we fans of popular music have come to accept this, just as we acknowledge that most “statement” records don’t really make statements at all: they say exactly what you’d expect them to say given conventional wisdom and the general liberalism of the pop audience.  Morrissey, though, is different.  He wants fame and fortune as badly as the rest of the pop stars do, but some ancient injury that won’t heal (I think I know what it is) makes him incapable of going along with bland consensus or playing to the crowd.  I heard hundreds of political records in 2017 – records from old artists immobilized by guilt for what their generation had done and young artists determined to be broadly inspirational and inclusive.  The only singer who convinced me that he’d actually stand up and fight for me – the only one willing to jeopardize his career in order to speak out on behalf of his audience as he imagines it – was Morrissey, for better and for worse.  It’s there in the high note he reaches on “Home Is A Question Mark”, and in the way his voice breaks at the climax of “Israel”, and in the gritted-teeth delivery of “I Bury The Living”, and in the very sharp words he aims right at your beleaguered eardrums.  If it’s all an act, it’s a heck of a good one.

You know what?, it’s not an act.

Best Singing

Steven Patrick Morrissey

Best Rapping

Kokamoe is an old guy who jumps on buses in D.C. and starts rapping.  He’s been doing it for decades, which means he’s been in town for quite a bit longer than Devin Nunes (R, CA-22). The “Kokamoe Freestyle” is the virtuosic peak of GoldLink’s At What Cost, the year’s best pure rap album, and a needle-drop directly into the groove of the nation’s maligned capital. It’s not so much a tribute to Kokamoe as it is a celebration of the local color of a city that, too often, is hated on by the rest of the country.  The real D.C. is right there, somewhere past the monuments and the National Mall. GoldLink wants to show you.

Best Vocal Harmonies

Tie between Harry Styles’ multi-tracked Southern Cali-voices on “Ever Since New York” and Lana Del Rey “singin’ with Sean” Lennon in awe and wonderment at the great spinning wheel of schlock that is showbiz. My favorite backing vocals were done by the Big Moon, the outfit that supported Marika Hackman on I’m Not Your Man. Their album has its moments, too.

Best Bass Playing

Much as I’d love to vote for the Dutch Uncles’ art-funky Robin Richards here, I’ve got to go with James Murphy for his successful Tina Weymouth impersonation. Thousands upon thousands have tried. Only a handful have survived to tell the tale.

Best Drumming

Evan Burrows of Wand is my man this year — his playing demonstrated a neat familiarity with punk and jazz and jam-band free-for-alls, not to mention proggy drama, and he jumped between the styles with more grace than genre-hoppers ever seem to manage. While I’m at it, I want to send a great big shout to the rhythm section on Lucy Rose’s Something’s Changing: they really did capture that Sirius XM The Bridge “mellow classic rock” sound that I thought had gone out of style with Phoebe Snow.

Best Drum Programming

Pop singers over trap beats: that’s become a horrendous cliche, and one we all wish would go away in 2018. But Lana Del Rey isn’t just any pop singer — she’s the Queen Midas of absurdity, and everything she touches is blown up to a ridiculously epic scale. She’s also so closely in tune with Rick Nowels that he can anticipate her emotional states and reflect it in their beatmaking. Those heart-flutters and tight-throat sobs, the sudden accelerations of thought and roller-coaster drops into melodrama are all present on Lust For Life. They’ve got this character down pat. The miniseries ought to be lots of fun.

Best Synth Playing/Programming

Bobby Sparks on Nelly Furtado’s The Ride.

Best Piano Or Organ Playing

If you like piano-playing singer-songwriters, 2017 was your year. Susanne Sundfor, Roger Waters, Tori Amos, Randy Newman, Lucy Rose, Steven Wilson — they all took to the eighty-eight with sensitivity and skill. Elizabeth Ziman of the Catapult was the flashiest (check out “Mea Culpa”) and that counts for plenty to this showoff over here. But the very best was Emily Haines.

Best Guitar Playing

Los Macorinos.

Best Instrumental Solo

Bobby Sparks’s organ ride at the end of “Pipe Dreams”. It’s the rare pop star willing to share space on her single with the organist. Think of that gesture of magnanimity the next time you’re tempted to make fun of Nelly Furtado’s name. Oh, wait, that’s not you who does that; that’s me. Sorry, Nelly.

Best Instrumentalist

It was a hell of a year for Greg Leisz. Not only did he add his slide guitar to records by the usual classic rock characters, he also made a significant incursion into alternative music. St. Vincent, Father John Misty, Susanne Sundfor, Haim, Phoebe Bridgers — Leisz decorated all of those albums. He plays on two of my three favorite singles of 2017. Despite all of that, he’s still a bit unsung. Call him what he is: one of the best and most versatile guitar players working today in any style.

Best Production

No I.D. for 4:44. He had Jay-Z’s consent to try to make a classic album, commercial aspirations be damned; he had to keep up with his wife, and couldn’t be bringing home any sub-standard bags of groceries. But Jay is such a brand that No I.D. was left with a difficult needle to thread: the music had to be cohesive, and allude to Hova past while never overwhelming the listener with nostalgia. Come to think of it, that’s the same challenge Nigel Goodrich overcame on Is This The Life We Really Want? Those two should get together, swap notes, trade stories about their crazy bosses.

Best Arrangements

I sat through years of look-at-me misogyny and press-baiting homophobia and kill people burn shit fuck school — a whole lot of nonsense, in other words — to get to the moment on “See You Again” when Tyler lets the brass pour all over the track like warm honey on a biscuit. Truth is, he was never convincing as a anti-social tough guy. I saw him as a would-be soft-rocker and maker of beautiful music, in the Englebert Humperdinck sense, from the outset. If you haven’t watched his tiny desk concert, it’s by far the best one I’ve seen. What a goof, what a clown, what a total, wonderful nerd. I still can’t believe the Moral Majority was ever scared of this guy.

Best Songwriting

Bill James, infamously, once called Don Mattingly “100% ballplayer, 0% bullshit”. That was it; that was his whole comment on Mattingly’s career. I watched Mattingly play, and I know what James meant — he never wasted one moment of his too-short run under the limelight indulging in extraneous nonsense. He had a talent, and he stayed true to it as long as he could. Anyway, I’d like to say that Natalia Lafourcade is 100% musician, 0% bullshit, but I can’t leave it at that: I’m too much of a blowhard. Sometimes marketed north of the border as Mexico’s answer to Norah Jones, she’s really more of an indiepop version of Lila Downs. Like Downs, she’s got an encyclopedic understanding of Latin American folk forms and the energy of an international pop star; unlike Downs, who’s a bit of a roughneck, Lafourcade possesses a voice from twee heaven and a light touch on the faders. When she puts the flowers in her hair and plays her ukulele, it’s like somebody opened the otter enclosure: it’s cuteness overload that the human eyeballs are not equipped to handle. I’m still scarred, and the scars are pink and taste like sugar dots. Hasta La Raiz, which was either the best or second-best album of 2015, played like a cross between Belle & Sebastian and Julieta Venegas that I thought existed only in my lucid dreams; Musas, the new set, is pure, patriotic engagement with the Mexican folk tradition from a Veracruzana linda with a not-so-subtle message for bigoted Americanos. Some of the songs are penned by trad., and some are Lafourcade originals, and I’ll bet you a plate of split-pea tlayocos that you’ll never be able to tell which are which. Here’s a hint: hers are the ones that sound even more like Latin jazz-folk standards than the actual jazz-folk standards. She is amazing; we’re not worthy; etcetera; etcetera; my favorite artist in the world at the peak of her powers. New album next week!, I am hyperventilating.

Best Lyrics On An Individual Song

Jay-Z’s “Marcy Me”. Dense, old-school rhyme about dense, old-school New York City.

P.F. Rizzuto Award For Lyrical Excellence Over The Course Of An Album

The songs on Dark Matter concern, in order: a hypothetical debate between smug fundamentalists and clueless scientists, the Bay of Pigs invasion reimagined as an effort to kidnap Celia Cruz, the psychology of Vladimir Putin, a woman berating her children from her deathbed, the theft of the identity of the bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson, the masturbatory thrills of the conspiratorial mindset, a funny-looking man’s disbelief in the face of his beautiful wife, a beach bum about to be drowned by rising sea levels, and a crushed old man who has lost his youngest son — probably to heroin addiction, but you can’t expect Randy to give you all the specifics, now, can you? He sets the pace. The rest of us jokers chase.

Band Of The Year

Elbow. Ssh, they don’t like calling attention to themselves.

Best Live Show Of 2017

St. Lenox at the Sidewalk Cafe.

Best Music Video

All the fabulous clips for Musas songs aside, I was knocked dead by this video for “Magpie Eyes”. New Jersey has its own Home Counties, and Union, where I grew up, is one of them.  I don’t recognize the architecture, not exactly, but I understand the sentiment: there’s a big city out there, and by many signs it isn’t that far away, but it may as well be on the other side of the moon for all it intersects with your life. Everything around you feels simultaneously functional and dated — you know it’s not going to be replaced, but you’re vaguely conscious of a standard by which it would all appear worn out and maybe even risible.  You can spend your teenage days dreaming, or you can appreciate the strange, eerie, subtly cosmopolitan beauty of what you’ve got. The tower blocks, the rail stations, the right angles in concrete, the longing faces of your friends.

Sun’s setting, that’s all for today.  I should probably proofread this, no?  Next essay will be the pseudo-political one. Sorry about that; the good news is that there are plenty of categories to come. Also, there’ll be a last word, and this one is long overdue.

For four and a half decades, I’ve been watching American society, closely and warily. Though I’ve sometimes written hard words about my country, I try not to be hyperbolic about it. So when I say that I believe that America is, in February 2018, more susceptible to fascism than it ever has been in my lifetime, I hope you don’t think I’m ringing alarm bells for the hell of it.

I also hope you won’t think that I’m saying that fascism is about to be imposed from above on an unwilling nation by the current government. Our leaders are amoral and brutal and prone to authoritarian action, but they are, like all governments in the West, expressions of desire, both conscious and unconscious, by citizens. The government is a symptom – and though symptoms can kill, I think the incoherence of our present regime is, ironically, one of the best safeguards against fascism we have left.

The other safeguards are crumbling away. Day by day, story by story, post by social media post, they face constant pressure from a public desperate for retribution. Americans want to see forceful action taken against their perceived enemies. Since those enemies in this cold civil war are other Americans, the justice system has become the designated instrument of vengeance. For the past few months, American politicians and bureaucrats have been wrangling over control of the FBI: all the combatants want to use the bureau as a cudgel to beat their adversaries, and to my dismay, the whole nation seems united in cheering on the fight. Lock them up, throw away the key, raid the DNC, raid the RNC, hooray for the special counsel, the special counsel is crooked; the circle gets more vicious by the week.  If you’re part of this chorus – if you spend any part of your day fantasizing about your political opponents behind bars – you may be more fascist than you think you are.

I have made my extreme distaste for the President and his henchmen plain.  That said, one of the very last things on earth I would like to see is anybody led away from the White House in handcuffs.  That might appeal to some primitive lizard-being inside me that wants to punish those I believe are up to no good, but it would be a disaster for this democracy, or whatever is left of it. It would set a precedent from which there’s no coming back.  It is illuminating to me that many, many people who consider themselves liberal and broad-minded would applaud this outcome, just as Trump’s popular stump line about jailing the Clintons made me realize we were descending farther into a tribal hellscape than I thought Americans would ever voluntarily go.  Cheering on the cops and throwing them handfuls of investigatory powers like Halloween candy used to be a Republican pastime, but now everybody does it, and that’s exactly why we’re in the trouble we’re in. No matter what superficial allegiance you claim, if you’re hungry to have the police solve your political problems, you’re in the ideal state of mind for a fascist ascendancy.

If and when it comes, it won’t look like what you think it will look like. Those dumbos in Charlottesville with the jackboots and their chants about Jews?; that’s not the vanguard, that’s the ass end. Fascism for the twenty-first century will be a polite, algorithm-driven thing, a crowd-pleasing thing, attenuation of privacy rights and erasure of personal boundaries by police organizations that have unprecedented invasive authority. Your life will be transparent to law enforcement, but law enforcement will be opaque to you. The searchlight that shines on the nation will become more searing than we can imagine.

Fascism will come with a blank face and a closed fist.  It’ll speak, when it does, in the language of legal procedure.  Obstruction, misconduct, conspiracy, transparency: interfering with the police will be the worst crime.  Every hard-drive will be digitally seized, every cache will be snooped through, every sheaf of correspondence will be subjected to inspection, and it’ll all be done in the name of truth and justice.  It’s happening already.  So desperate are Americans to see their enemies jailed — because that is, they’re convinced, the inevitable outcome of all this police  action —  that they are acquiescing to general surveillance as a way of life and a means of retribution.  When it all comes out, they say, then we’ll really nail the bastards; godspeed to the investigators, go faster and harder, bring the boot down.  If you’ve been hungry to see memos released, and classified documents aired, and tax returns made public, and personal e-mails stolen and posted to a leak website, you’re exactly where they want you.

Once in the whirlpool, it’s oh so difficult to swim free.  Whole institutions — education, tech, broadcast media — become part of the law enforcement apparatus, bound up in the task of social supervision, theoretically independent but forever ready to jump to the rhythm of the police baton. Journalism was, once, a kind of direct, to-the-moment division of storytelling; it still is in part, but that’s not what we’re demanding of our reporters.  Instead we want them to expose, dig up dirt, investigate; we want their pieces to assist the downfall of powerful people we believe to be wrongdoers. We want them, in other words, to do police work.  We want columnists who cheer on that police work, and who argue for its necessity in weaponized language we can reuse (and retweet).

America is an experiment in civilian control.  Through our regular elections, we’re asked to send ordinary representatives of Joe Schmoe to Washington to execute the general will. Never mind whether it actually functions that way or how imperfectly we’ve realized the aspirations of the Athenian philosophers; stop to think for a second how crazy it was, and is, to even dream of giving that kind of power to the public. That any version of this has ever been allowed to happen is astonishing.  Yet we did it, and because of our success (and probably no other reason) we’ve been emulated by other wealthy nations. As Americans we reserve the right to elect the very worst citizens in the land to represent us. We may have done just that. But when we fuck up, we cannot and should not call the cops to kick down the door and put things straight.  For one thing, they’re very unlikely to put things straight, not in the way we want them to: they’re cops, that’s not what they do. More saliently, they will trample on the rug and wreck the furniture and break all the windows while they’re at it. This is our house, dammit, not theirs, and we will have opportunities in 2018 and again in 2020 to atone for our mistakes in the way that grown-up citizens do, secure in the knowledge that police-assisted regime change has never worked in the developing world and it sure as heck won’t work here. Our current leaders aren’t going to help us out: through laws and executive orders and the language they use, they’ve made their preference for ruthlessly expeditious governance manifest. Luckily — and despite it all — it’s not up to them.  We can still keep the republic if we want to.  Boy, I hope we want to.

Rookie Of The Year

Perverse old 2017 — the year a YouTube satirist out-popped Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Haim, and Lorde.  Poppy’s album really isn’t half as mesmerizing or trenchant as her fifty second spots, but if it was, it would be Top 10 material.  As it is, it’s pretty promising, and with “Pop Music”, she came up with a statement of purpose that ought to carry her along until the next album, or the next video, or whatever Satanic Pee Wee’s Playhouse she chooses to inhabit next.  I’m glad she’s around.  Pop needs great characters, and she’s arrived fully formed.

Best Guest Appearance

2 Chainz on Drake’s “Sacrifices”.

2017 Album You Listened To The Most

Marika Hackman’s I’m Not Your Man.  I kept waking up with those songs in my head.  What can I say?, I guess I like being taunted for not being a girl.

2017 Album That Wore Out Most Quickly

Bedouine

Most Notable Cover Version

Phoebe Bridgers’s gorgeous, weirdly empathetic run through the murder/rape ballad “You Missed My Heart” made me re-evaluate Mark Kozelek a little. Maybe he’s good for something other than throwing dirtbombs at The War On Drugs.

Most Romantic Song

Brad Paisley’s “Go To Bed Early”. Much of Love And War was too corny for me, even, which is saying something. But if you like numbers about irresistible attraction to your wife (I do), Brad’s got you covered.

Funniest Song 

Partner’s “Everybody Knows”. The best number ever written about getting stoned in the grocery store and in front of your professor. College humor, to be sure, but still pretty amusing.

Most Frightening Song

The horrors of A Crow Looked At Me aside (and best left undiscussed), I admit I found the “numbers on your phone of the dead that you cannot delete” section of “Emotional Haircut” pretty terrifying. Because I got ’em. I bet you do, too. It’s something about the unsettling collision between physical mortality and a machine-world that has trouble letting our identities go.

Most Moving Song

Natalie Hemby’s “Cairo, Illinois”. Ghost towns give me the chills.

Sexiest Song

“Soledad Y El Mar” by Natalia Lafourcade. The mariachi version of “Mexicana Hermosa” qualifies, too.

Meanest Song

Marika Hackman’s “Boyfriend”. The target probably deserves to have his girlfriend pinched, but she didn’t have to sound so gleeful about it, did she? Guess she felt she was proving a point.

Saddest Song

Randy Newman’s “Wandering Boy”. First he introduces the character — an aging sad sack who can’t even get the rest of the family to come to the annual party. Then he wades into the reason they’re despondent: they’re crushed by the plight of their youngest son, who has crashed through all safety nets and is now lost on the streets. “I hope that he’ll come home”, Randy sings, and in his voice, you can hear that the hedge-maze between the wandering boy and his broken-hearted father is high and thick and dark and impossible to navigate. When he pauses before delivering the last line and tells the crowd to search him out and push him toward the light, the delivery is so distraught that I choke up every time; hell, I am tearing up just writing this. I don’t know why those barriers exist between us and those who love us, and I don’t know why people fall into addiction. Randy doesn’t either. His compassion is equalled only by his despair. This is one of the greatest songs in a catalog loaded with greatness, and demonstrates that at 74, his singular vision hasn’t blurred a bit.

Best Historical Re-creation

Guess this can’t really go to Liam Gallagher, now, can it?  That’s not fair. How about White Reaper and their album-equivalent of an ’80s Camaro doing donuts in the Sam Goody parking lot?

Best Sequenced Album

At What Cost

Crappy Album You Listened To A Lot Anyway

Rostam’s Half-Light.

Artist You Don’t Know, But You Know You Should

King Krule, again.  Should I?

Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through And Enjoy

Crack-Up by Fleet Foxes.

Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Enjoyable To Make

2 Chainz is at that great point in his career where he doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and he can relax and settle into a set of beats like a big man in a rocking chair on an Atlanta porch.  Pretty Girls Like Trap Music wasn’t the best rap album of 2017, but it might have been the most assured; he knew the audience was there, and he knew he had exactly what they wanted. No pressure, no sweat, no straining to impress, no energy wasted, nothing but tight rhymes from an elder statesman who learned long ago how to present a verse and tell a story.

Album That Sounded Like A Chore To Make

Eisley’s I’m Only Dreaming. Sherri DuPree did her best, but she couldn’t compensate for the departure of both of her sisters — or the loss of the signature vocal harmonies they provided. Those must have been some strange and strained sessions.

Man, I Wish I Knew What This Song, Or Album, Was About

I admit I could use a hand with some of the new Dutch Uncles stuff. I had a good sense of what the songs on O Shudder were getting at, or at least I thought I did. Big Balloon just mystified me.

Most Consistent Album

Near To The Wild Heart Of Life.  I don’t think that album ever ends, technically; somewhere down that magic highway, the Japandroids are still humping away on that same rudimentary chord progression. Good thing it’s a nifty one. The Who sure liked it.

Most Inconsistent Album

Pacific Daydream was, among other things, a weird stab at pop relevance from a bunch of guys who are far too long in the tooth to pull such stunts. When Rivers Cuomo and Butch Walker tried, instead, to forge some bizarre mecha-hybrid of the Beach Boys and Weezer on some of the less mersh tracks, the results were magnificent — and the rest has grown on me. I can’t hang with the crowd that claims Weezer is back to the bad old days of Raditude, no matter how much Pat has pruned his drum parts. The recent songwriting is simply too tuneful, and those tunes are developed too nicely. Cuomo has, in his old age, become one of the best bridge-builders since Roebling.

Album That Should Have Been Shorter

More Life, though I do love it.  I could have used a little less rakalakabakalaka and Batman jokes from the goofy British emcees, though. Steven Wilson’s To The Bone could have been tightened up, too.

Album That Should Have Been Longer

Puxico.  Nine songs is just not enough from the most prolific pen in Music City.  Throw in some of that Kelly Pickler filler, why don’t you, Hemby?

Album That Turned Out To Be A Hell Of A Lot Better Than You Originally Thought It Was

After Laughter.  What can I say?, I missed Jeremy Davis. Those kids ought to call off the lawyers.  I promise, they’ll be much happier without them.

Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To

Scratch & Sniff by the Jazz Spastiks.  Lotsa jokes about bananas, popcorn, oranges, toothpaste, marijuana, kids from old ’50s commercials spliced in with audio from Wall Street and a sexy health-food nut going on about her marshmallow elixir. Forget what I said about Partner; this was the real funniest stuff of the year.

Thing You Feel Cheapest About Liking

I was all set to answer PWR BTTM, but I didn’t get the opportunity.

Least Believable Perspective Over An Album

No, I don’t believe that Drake is going to kill me.

Most Alienating Perspective Over An Album

Sylvan Esso. God, I hate when would-be pop stars complain about the starmaker machinery. You’ll get no sympathy from me — not when scores of your more talented peers can’t even get slapped on a lousy Spotify playlist.  And while I’m at it, I can’t say I really care if Andrew McMahon is a family man. If he’s doing it all to bring home the bacon for his wife and child?, good for him, I’m sure he’ll make a fine Republican congressman someday. Seriously, pal, go on and party if you want to party. In pop-rock, the business which you have chosen, there’s a long tradition of this exact thing. You’ll fit right in.

Most Sympathetic Perspective Over An Album

Sarah Cracknell’s.

Artist You Respect, But Don’t Like

John Dwyer of OCS.

Album You Learned The Words To Most Quickly

Dark Matter

Album You Regret Giving The Time Of Day To

Lotta Sea Lice. Ruins Courtney Barnett for me, a little.

Young Upstart Who Should Be Sent Down To The Minors For More Seasoning

Alex Cameron

Hoary Old Bastard Who Should Spare Us All And Retire

Win Butler

Worst Song Of The Year

“Believer” by Imagine Dragons. It’s got everything I hate: an umalabumarumalabumala verse, an “inspiring” message, big, screechy falsetto vocals and martial drums that sound like they’re scoring a military demonstration in Pyongyang, and if that wasn’t bad enough, a video with Dolph Lundgren hitting people. Mercy.

Worst Singing

Chris Tomson of Dams Of The West. Youngish American actually has good, funny lyrics, but he sings in such an artless monotone that you’ll never make them out. He has no idea how to set up or deliver a joke, he doesn’t know when to shout or when to whisper, and he completely garbles the emotional climax of “Polo Grounds”, a song that’s so neatly written that it shouldn’t be possible for it to fail to connect. “Will I Be Known To Her?”, indeed; probably not, sad to say.

Worst Rapping

This really ought to go to Taylor Swift, but I’m afraid she’s spared the indignity by Vic Mensa, who is an excellent rapper when he gets going and gets good guidance. Unfortunately, somebody let him put an uplifting spoken-word disaster on the end of his album in a bid for, I dunno, Def Poetry Jam cred, and it’s probably the most excruciating four minutes of 2017. “Everybody wanna get free shit/but nobody wanna get free/Shit!” Ugggggggh.

Worst Lyrics

Ed Sheeran, “Supermarket Flowers”.  It manages, simultaneously, to be pulverizingly mawkish and make no sense at all.

Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better

Reputation, especially “Gorgeous”. “I can’t say anything to yo face/coz look at yo face”. Maybe go easy on the Stella Artois next time, Taylor.

Most Unsexy Person In Pop Music

Neil Portnow. How do you get that gig, anyway?

Most Overrated

Migos. Not to rehash what I wrote in the Abstract, but… aw, hell, let me go ahead and reprint it.  At least Lil Yachty has stupid hair and an unfashionably sunny outlook; these stylish ciphers won’t even give you that much. If you ever want to understand the political bankruptcy of music sites such as Pitchfork and etcetera, just cross-reference the rhetoric in their social-justice editorials with their assessments of the Migos. These folks who are oh-so super sensitive about gender nomenclature and the fragility of queer identity and the creation of safe space are awfully quick to rave about a group that never misses an opportunity to put on a sexual objectification clinic, and whose homophobia is very much on the record (and on their records.) And this exception, like many other exceptions of a similar complexion, is made because… well, why? Because the Migos are poor and underprivileged and therefore deserve Whitey’s sympathy? They’re from Gwinnett County in the Atlanta suburbs. Because Whitey lacks the positionality to lodge a moral objection against this particular expression of black culture? Lame, and chickenshit, too. Because Negroes are zany? Hey, I could give a fuck about the things Migos say, but then I’m a loudmouth and it’s hard to offend me. All I ever ask is that they come up with some original, or at least unusual, content. Because right now all they’ve got is catchy singles, and that’s just not enough. The Motley Crue of hip-hop.

Worst Song On A Good Album

Angaleena Presley’s “Country”. I get what she was trying to do there, and I understand her frustration. But she’s not anywhere near the vocalist she’d need to be to pull that off.

Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat

“Pills”

Good Artist Most In Need Of Some Fresh Ideas

Alisdair MacLean could stand to vary his songwriting approach a bit. Twenty years on, we’re still on that same rain-washed London side street, and there’s still eeriness approaching. You’d figure the phantom would have gotten him by now.

Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job

I’ve come to see Jack Antonoff as a menace — not because he’s a “good guy” around girls, as a lengthy but irrelevant hit piece recently suggested, but because he’s got one musical idea and he insists on sticking all of his clients with it.  Or maybe they’re more than happy to take it on; regardless, he’s the guy in the producer’s chair, so he gets the blame. Anyway, go over to your guitar. Strum a major chord — a C will do. Now, sing a cliche, something like “are we out of the woods are we out of the woods”, or anything from that crummy Lorde album, or just make one up, since it doesn’t really matter what you’re saying. Repeat it a few times. Now, on the third measure, without changing the melody of the phrase you’re singing, switch over to the relative minor (Am) while keeping the bass note the same. You’ll still be singing “are we out of the woods are we out of the woods”, but it will somehow sound more dramatic. On the fourth bar, resolve the phrase. Congratulations, you have made a Jack Antonoff production. Pick up your Grammy from Neil Portnow on your way out.

Will Kanye Be Back? 

Yes, but I expect a quality drop.

Is Taylor Swift In Premature Decline?

She’s got one more great album to give us, but it probably won’t be for awhile.

How Much Longer Does Drake’s Hitting Streak Continue?

Two more albums, or until he decides to start making movies in earnest.

Next Artist To Come Back From The (Metaphorical) Dead

Green Gartside. I hope.

Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From

Canadian wave — Montreal in particular. Canada-Caribbean collaborations, cutting the U.S. out.

Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2027

We’re all betting on Laura Marling.

Will Be A 1-Hit Wonder

Portugal. The Man, which is sad, but there you go.

Biggest Pop Music Trend Of 2018

Pop stars hopping on remixes of Latin hits. Let’s call it the Despacito Effect.

Best Album Of 2018

Chance IV

Okay, friends, I’ve got a Last Word, but I might not get around to it until Friday.  Good night.