Overlooked amidst the noise, but still significant: New Jersey and New York visitors to Florida must now go through a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the state. This decision was made by the governor of Florida, who has been criticized for his refusal to close the beaches. Yesterday’s order felt like a compensatory move — a restriction on free travel that is probably going to require a state border control to enforce.
Closing the barn door once the horse is long gone seems like a very Trumpy thing to do, and Ron DeSantis is indeed among the Trumpiest of governors. So it’s noteworthy that DeSantis’s suspension of Schengen Americana came after the federal government opted not to put limitations on domestic travel. DeSantis did not take his cue from the White House. He acted on his own.
As the crisis worsens, governors and mayors have grabbed for the yoke. They’ve finally decided to drop the charade and treat the President like the bystander he is. This adjustment was a long time coming, and it took a worldwide lockdown to make it crystal clear. Now that it is, it’s hard to see how the White House will ever reclaim any of the authority or credibility it has thrown away. Every time Trump takes the podium and gives another one of his rambling press conferences, he delights his fans but digs himself, and the office of the Presidency, a deeper hole.
Much has been made of his regrettable suggestion that we reopen businesses, return to work, and throw the weakest among us into the volcano for the sake of the stock market. That is just the sort of attitude we’ve come to expect of him, and the outrage he’s engendered among those of us who aren’t greedy psychopaths is well-earned. But the open secret is that Trump isn’t going to re-launch anything — and that’s because Trump didn’t close anything. The governors of the states made those decisions. In the absence of intelligent national leadership, each state is going its own way.
Federal inaction may yet be the end of me. Governor Cuomo has made it clear that New York (and by extension New Jersey) needs tens of thousands of ventilators. The White House is either unable or unwilling to make a forceful move on behalf of Americans who need help. This, to me, is not just another expression of Trumpian cruelty. It’s also a tacit admission that the President has no idea how to put an idea into practice, and he’s exiled from his immediate circle anybody who does. He doesn’t know how to use the powers of his office. Governors have stepped into the leadership vacuum because they’ve been given no choice: either act with as much autonomy as possible, or suffer the brutal consequences of federal incompetence.
Americans tend to rally around the chief during times of crisis. In the middle of a disaster, it takes a special sort of leader to squander public goodwill. Unfortunately, we’ve got that sort of leader right now, and the public is adjusting accordingly. One of the astonishing things about the past few weeks is how quickly Cuomo, Newsom, Inslee, et. al. have been accepted by millions as de facto chief executives, and the President has been relegated to the role of a cranky, parsimonious uncle, without expertise or compassion, or statesmaship, nothing to recommend him other than control over a big fat wallet. Sentiment changes and the public is fickle, and it’s not hard to imagine Andrew Cuomo’s face dripping with egg in a week. For now, he appears to be acting — and in a crisis, action is everything.
Some version of America is going to struggle through this crisis. The country that emerges might not be the United States we recognize. Regardless of the outcome of the November elections, the virus has weakened the office of the Presidency, and made it clear to states and cities that when the sirens go off, they’ve got to take care of themselves. Revisionist history teaches us that there’s never a proper accounting of anything; I expect those with an interest in the maintenance of the regime to do whatever they can to make us forget about the weeks of inaction, and all the misinformation that came from the White House in February and early March. Somehow, I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as they expect it will be. The dust is going to settle on a looser confederacy.
I’m afraid to go to the pharmacy. But we knew we had to do it: we had to get medicine for Hilary. She’d tried to get the doctor to mail it to us, but his office called in the prescription instead. I suppose if we’d really been paranoid, we could have asked the pharmacy to post it to us from a few blocks away. But who knows how long that would have taken?
Even in the early days of the epidemic when the emphasis was on panicked hand-sanitizer collection, I never wanted to go to the pharmacy — I felt like it was a great germ-amplification box. We braved it a few days before the curfews were announced, and did our business as quickly as we could. The energy on the floor was crazed, desperate, especially in the paper-products aisle. The line stretched from the registers to the middle of the store. Everybody, from the customers to the cashiers to the security guards, looked ready to snap.
Today’s mood was different. I found it far scarier. Only ten people were allowed in the store at the same time, which meant that the pharmacy had only a fraction of the clientele it usually does. There was an eerie, half-awake feel to the place: you could, theoretically, still buy chocolates and cereal and batteries, but nobody was doing any of the sort. The only line was the one leading to the prescription desk. They’d taped standing stations to the floor, six feet apart, to accommodate customers.
Out on the avenue, nobody had a mask on, not even the grocery shoppers; in the pharmacy, all the visitors did. The pharmacists kept their faces uncovered — perhaps to avoid frightening the customers? I was happy to see that they were wearing gloves. Interns had been thrown to the wolves at the cash registers. All the pharmacists I recognized from those agonizing months of cancer treatment were clustered in the back, keeping a strategic distance from those of us there to pick up drugs. The line moved slowly. Through a face mask, his voice muffled, a man ahead of me argued with the register-runner about insurance; this went on for many painful minutes. I didn’t see whether he got what he came for. I hope he did.
I don’t have a mask. Instead, I tried, with only occasional success, to keep a purple and red bandana over my face. (Hilary felt that I looked a bit like a crossdresser, which raised my spirits, although she wouldn’t say whether I was passable.) The intern running the checkout counter thrust a credit card reader at me across a makeshift divider that had been set up, but when I tried to use it, it wouldn’t work. He voided the transaction and tried again. When it became clear that the problem was with the credit card machine, a team of store managers descended on the register. Their social distancing was iffy. I tried to hand them the co-pay in cash, but they couldn’t accept it: the transaction needed to be digitally logged in a system that could only be accessed by credit card. Finally, after switching to a different register, the purchase went through. I applied sanitizer liberally and bicycled home through the rain.
It’s four hours later, and I am still shook. My hope is that I won’t be going back to the pharmacy anytime soon. My fear is that circumstances will make a return visit mandatory. Those interns deserve combat pay that I know damn well they aren’t getting. They’re probably just relieved to have jobs. I need to clear my head, assure myself I’m okay, and call it a successful procurement of essentials in what has become a strange, defamiliarized, hostile zone. I got the goods for my girl. I’m back.
A guy, outside the liquor store at the intersection of 4th Street and Newark Ave.: “they’re not going to put you in jail for being outside.” Policemen would have their hands full. Lots of foot traffic on Jersey and Newark yesterday — people getting provisions, walking dogs, talking to friends from the safety of the tops of stoops. Downtowners have learned the steps to the social distancing dance quickly: pedestrians cross the street or stand aside as others approach. Blind corners with high hedges cause anxiety. You can find yourself on top of a neighbor in a hurry. Such encounters prompt embarrassment, flinches, looks of guilt, brief exchanges of cordialities before doing the dash. We’re all shy and awkward tweepop caricatures now.
New sign in the window of the laundromat: NO FOLDING, in black marker on fuschia paper. You’ve got to get your clothes and run. I’ve seen anecdotal reports of big weekend gatherings in Williamsburg and Bushwick, all in defiance of the government proscriptions. Maybe those are accurate. I can say there wasn’t anything happening in our part of Downtown Jersey City. It was darker and quieter than it’s been on any night since we moved to 4th street in 2007. No roof parties, no house parties, no loud conversations at 3 a.m., no car alarms, no cars, really.
My father reminds me that I once wrote a play set during a pandemic. He wonders if this is the right time to revive it. That doesn’t seem like a good idea at all, but I do notice that many of popular movies on streaming services are all about contagions, diseases, doctors, heroic medicine, etcetera. I’d have guessed that we’d all be immersed in space operas and other pure escapist fluff, but perhaps the collective imagination doesn’t move that way. Maybe it only leaps to the nearest narrative footstone. In the play, the pandemic was a metaphor for fears about immigration and the terrible damage that AIDS had done to interpersonal intimacy and sexual expression. This virus is a figure for all kinds of things, and as non-scientists, we can’t talk about it without using metaphor. But in an all-too-real sense, it’s no metaphor at all. It’s an actual pathogen, one that will mess you up if it crosses your path. I don’t want to distract people from that.
With everything closed and pertinent warnings given, the podium space that has been hogged by elected officials can, in theory, now be given to doctors and scientists. I know I have very little interest in hearing a press conference from anybody who doesn’t have a Ph.D. or M.D. In late March, addresses from politicians feel like posturing at best. At worst, they’re more misinformation. The President has been playing amateur physician, prescribing a miracle drug that his own medical advisers are visibly skeptical about. It’s possible that he really believes he knows better, and even more possible that he just wants to be on TV as much as he can. Meanwhile, Politico reports that the executive branch is pressing for new emergency powers that would allow judges to detain the arrested indefinitely. These threats to habeas corpus are as scary as the virus. The consensus on the Internet is that Congress will never let this happen, but I’m not so certain. Two weeks ago, nobody thought they’d close the parks. Events move fast. The guy on the corner by the liquor store should get his sunshine while he can.
At 1 p.m. the Governor delivers the order we all knew was coming. All businesses defined by the state as nonessential must close for the duration at 9 p.m. tonight. How many of those businesses will reopen is anybody’s guess. Sit-down restaurants will still be allowed to do takeout and delivery, but realistically, that’s no business model: unless they can come up with money and a sturdy supply chain, they’ll join the nonessentials on the sidelines until the curfews are lifted. Liquor stores may remain open. Local mechanics are allowed to stay open, but ours has been shut, gone from the neighborhood for days with no note on the door. It’s been awhile since anybody on the block has moved a car.
Even indoors, I am struck by the forceful arrival of spring. Mid-march used to mean blizzards and fog. This year, it’s been positively balmy. Temperatures reached 75 degrees in Jersey City yesterday. If it wasn’t for the virus, I think we’d all be wondering what’s going on. We took advantage of the weather and walked up to the Heights yesterday. Laundromats, we noticed, were still open, but they were limiting the number of people who could be in the store at the same time. The pizza spot on Baldwin still seemed to be doing a decent business. Shut us down, superstorm us, cut the lights and stuff the sewers, but as long as there’s pizza, it’s still Jersey.
The warmth makes me worry about the summer. Many people are proceeding on the assumption that hotter weather will slow the virus; that could be true, but there’s no way to know for sure. The Governor has discouraged people from fleeing to the shore, which is probably wise — they don’t have the capacity to care for a wave of sick people. But the warmer it gets, the harder it’ll be to resist the urge to go outside. Summers have gotten increasingly hotter, and harder, in the city. Not everybody here has air conditioning.
With most of us looking, longingly, at the trees from behind plate glass, it’s not surprising that impossible stories about nature have spread on the social networks. You may have heard about the returns of the swans of Venice, or the rogue elephants drinking corn wine and passing out in the fields. National Geographic threw cold water on all of that. Those, it turns out, are just fantasies. As usual, confined people (we’re the confined people) are imaginatively inhabiting the forms of animals, who, we’re assured, are immune to the virus and running free. The world of “Nothing But Flowers” may still come to pass: nature may mobilize to reclaim what we aren’t using. But for now, the world outside is the same as it was when we left it, a few very long days ago.
By now, you’ve probably seen the interactive world map through which Johns Hopkins is charting the spread of COVID-19. It’s part video game UI, part stock report, and all alarming. The Hopkins tally reinforces something that’s been widely reported: the number of deaths in Italy now exceeds those in China, even though twice as many Chinese have caught the virus. While the European curve continues to spike upward, the Chinese curve has flattened out. This has been offered as evidence that the draconian approach of the Chinese authorities works, and the laxer attitudes in Bergamo are dangerous.
But wait a second: why would we believe that numbers provided by the Chinese Communist Party are accurate? We’re justifiably skeptical of our own officeholders. Why trust theirs? Even before the CCP pitched Western journalists out of the country, it was hard to know what was happening in China. In the closed-door days of mid-March ’20, it feels like it’s impossible.
And because it is, rates of mortality and serious illness can’t be properly calculated. The denominator keeps shifting around on us, and now we’ve been told that China may have underreported the number of young people who needed to be hospitalized after contracting the virus. Our most fundamental supposition about COVID-19 — that it affects old people disproportionately, and the young and hale are relatively safe — might be faulty. We’ve all watched the clip, one near-Soviet in its tone, of attractive young female nurses in Wuhan shedding their protective masks, one at a time. This is textbook propaganda, designed to speak to our wildest desires. It’s aimed straight at the global unconscious.
Did it strike the mark? I think it did. There’s a loud chorus singing denunciations of China to the applause of nationalists looking for an external enemy. That’s an ugly tune, and one we ought to ignore. But there’s a powerful counternarrative circulating, too — one that says that China did everything right and the West has done everything wrong. Given that we now know that the CCP stalled, obfuscated, and prioritized appearances over public health, just as our own government did, it’s probably wisest to abandon any faith that China knows best. We don’t want to do this; we hope that the Chinese have established a precedent for social distancing measures that will halt the pathogen in its tracks. I’m afraid we’re wishcasting.
I do it all the time. The more stressed out I am, the more enthusiastically I sign on to anything that dovetails with my own prejudices. For instance, I find myself nodding along with those who blame excessive meat-eating and habitat destruction for the spread of pathogens from animals to humans. Is that logical, or is it just convenient for me? I’m no epidemiologist; I’m a person eager to adopt explanations that ratify my worldview. That’s not unlike those who believe that Bill Gates created and spread the virus and who won’t be budged from that position, only (hopefully) a little more scientific and sane. Just like you, I want to be proven right.
It’s worth interrogating that desire. Why is it important to me to know things that others don’t? Is it because I’m neither swift nor strong, nor virtuous, nor particularly enchanting, and I need to press whatever comparative advantage over others I think I might have? Perhaps it’s our very ordinariness that makes it so hard for us to admit it when we’re wrong. Maybe the problem isn’t economic insecurity. Maybe the problem is intellectual insecurity.
Demagogues have figured out that the desire to be proven right has made us all credulous and ripe for manipulation. If we’ve cast our lot with them once, they figure that means they’ve got us for good. Otherwise, we risk admitting that we made a mistake. We’ve seen this dynamic in action all too often in the past few years — a political leader says that the sky is green, and his followers, refusing to accept the possibility that their faith was misplaced, contort themselves into pretzels in an effort to rationalize his ignorance. This is not a good psychological state for the nation to be in during a major crisis, and if we’re going to get through this, we’re going to have to unlearn some bad habits of mind that we’ve adopted during the dangerous days of the 21st Century.
Mind you, I am not encouraging radical skepticism. We don’t have that luxury. You’re going to have to pick somebody and something to believe in. But I think it would be salutary for all of us to cultivate some ambivalence, and entertain the notion that we could be wrong, very wrong, very often. If, in the back of your mind, you suspect there’s a five per cent chance that that thing that you’re sure of might not be true, double or triple that chance and proceed accordingly. We would have been better off if those who made jokes about the virus and waved it away had instead shown some humility. They might have apprehended the possible consequences of getting this one wrong. Intellectual flexibility is hard, especially these days: it’s hard to attain, and it’s even harder to keep. But we’re all going to need it.
I’ve never used Zoom before tonight. I’m not sure I ever want to do it again. But for forty-five minutes or so, I got to see my sister and her children, my brother-in-law, a pair of sibling cousins of mine who were central to my youth and remain important to me, my mother, and three other cousins who have been directly affected by the virus. One came down with symptoms after a business trip to Colorado and tested positive. Her sister, who hasn’t been tested, brought her to the clinic. This morning I learned that their mother has it, too. She’s running a fever and was visibly fearful about the possibility of being put on a ventilator. Everybody is frightened, and for legitimate reasons.
My sister reported that a neighbor insisted to her that the virus was a hoax. I don’t know whether that neighbor was aware that my sister has been fighting serious health conditions for more than a decade, and is immunocompromised. I do know that that neighbor lives in Cranford, New Jersey, a town with residents who make much of their affluence and education, and who are supposed to know better and act better than Internet trolls. I’m further aware that this neighbor is only one of many who continue to treat this epidemic as a joke. If my sister is taken to the hospital with virus symptoms, would this neighbor, and the hundreds of thousands like her, wave it away, blame it on her history of illness, and continue to behave like nothing is wrong? Would she do the same if it happened to Hilary?
Life is an underlying condition. Life is all too fragile. If you’ve made it to your forties with nothing major going wrong, bless you: you’ve been fortunate, and I hope you remain so. If you’ve developed a medical problem that makes you susceptible to the worst this virus can do, you are still worth preserving. Because this is no hoax and no drill, and tonight, the fog is closing in on my friends and family. The New York Times just ran a story about a 92 year old man in a nursing home, terrified and alone, begging his family to bring him home. The picture of the man looked familiar to me. I read further and realized to my horror that it was my high school drama coach. You, me, and everyone we know: the face of this crisis is mine and yours.
We woke up to the news that the University will remain online-only for the rest of the semester. We knew this was coming, but it’s still dispiriting. The original plan, which was sent last Wednesday, was to reconvene classes on March 30. That seemed optimistic to us, a real long-shot, but as long as it hadn’t been rescinded, we could entertain the possibility that they knew something we didn’t. They did not, and it’ll be distance learning for the duration.
We know this isn’t what students signed up for. They want face-to-face time with the Professor, and I can’t blame them. Hilary has always been reluctant to commit to online teaching, and for very good reason: her formidable powers are best encountered in person, and she hates to shortchange her students. But she’s doing her best. She’s got three classes this semester, and while wrangling freshmen has been a chore, the committed English majors are showing up in the chat rooms. The endless nature of the crisis is sure to test diligence, and I wonder if the University will eventually decide to scrap the semester and just give everybody an A.
Two days ago I got the news that my cousin had tested positive. This morning, I learned that her mother is sick, too. So far, their symptoms haven’t been severe. Nevertheless, I can’t help but worry about them. Another cousin from the other side of the family is also waiting for a test. News out of Lakewood is that at least forty people there are positive for the virus. The biggest cluster still seems to be near Teaneck and Englewood, but that could simply be where tests are getting administered. We’re not going to get a clear picture of anything for awhile, and until we do, all this virus mapping is probably more misleading than illuminating.
The Governor of New York has promised that the MTA will not be shut down. This was a change in tone from the near-military language he used a few days ago, which suggests to me that his crisis-management strategies have evolved to suit the moment. It’s probably wise. Talk of the National Guard is bound to make people feel more powerless than they already do. Meanwhile, Bergen County took the initiative and declared a state of emergency, and then rescinded it in deference to Governor Murphy. The White House continues to push the line that this is a Chinese virus, as if viruses pay taxes and salute flags, extending their strategy of pointing fingers at a perceived nonwhite threat at any sign of distress. By now, this ought to be transparent to everybody in the country, yet I still see people on the Internet recycling unhelpful language coming from the federal government. This is something I remember from the 9/11 period, too: the malleability of perception, and the rush to defend authorities by mimicking their behavior and ratifying their worldview. It’s natural in a crisis, I suppose, but that doesn’t make it easy to see.
I’d had a diagnostic appointment with my dentist scheduled for today. That’s been scrapped. I suppose I could call him and talk about the major work I’m supposed to have, but I’m not eager to do that. When I talked to the office about rescheduling, the tone was harried. Should the problem in my upper molar become an emergency, I hope he’ll find time for me. In the meantime, part of my consciousness continues to operate five days in the past — the typical gestation period for the virus — as I remember what I was doing at the moment when the pathogens might have been transmitted. On the 14th, I went to an art opening, and a very good one, at Drawing Rooms in Jersey City; this’ll probably be the last new show anybody mounts in many months, so I’m going to try to keep the memory fresh. Ironically, many of the images on display were paintings of hands. By municipal mandate, everybody in attendance had to sign in. My hope is that they never need to send that list to the city. We probably took a far greater risk when we picked up Hilary’s medication at a crowded Duane Reade. But that was six days ago. Are we in the clear?
I’ve put this off long enough. Everything I’ve done for a long time has been governed by superstition, so I must believe that journals bring bad luck. But I wish I’d kept a daily record in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers, and along with that collapse, the loss of the sense of security that I’d been taught was part of the American promise. I watched 9/11 unfold in real time, with one eye on the towers, until they weren’t there, and another on the clock, and the news on in the far room, providing reports that contradicted what I could glean through my senses. The slipperiness of the official story and the landslide of conspiracy theories that followed has left me with muddier memories of those days than I’d like. I don’t want to repeat that mistake. For the sake of my own sanity, and whatever small amount of alacrity I have left, I’m going to start taking notes.
After two days indoors, we left the house to put air in the tires of the bicycles. On my way to the basement, I passed our neighbors on the stairs — a young couple expecting a child. They’re very friendly, and they smiled at me, but they were keen to keep that state-suggested six feet between us. It’ll be that way for months. For those of us who are already prone towards feelings of social alienation, it’s going to be tough to manage the estrangement.
All of the tire shops in the neighborhood were closed, so we rode to 12th St. and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Very few cars were heading into the city. The gas stations were empty. The attendant sat in a chair on the tarmac by the pumps — it was a very nice day — and watched us as we filled up. Hilary told him to stay safe.
Many more pedestrians on Newark Avenue than we reckoned there’d be. The Van Hook specialty shop was preparing for its day, and one of the cheese-wallahs was crouched by the window with a magic marker, addressing boxes for curbside pickup. We found P&K Market open, stocked, and with few souls in the store. The crowds at the grocery and the pharmacy during the weekend had been terrifying; reminiscent of Sandy, but with a feeling of desperation and fatalism unusual for Jersey City. 7 p.m. curfew on both of these establishments. Get back from work quick, if you’re going to go to work, which you might not.
News on at home, which is probably a mistake. It’s tough to shut it off. If there’s a request for tanks or road closings or a general lockdown order brewing, it’ll probably be tipped by the networks before it appears on Twitter. Yesterday Mayor De Blasio told New Yorkers to prepare to shelter in place before the Governor contradicted him; it’s hard to tell if they’re just trying to get their stories straight before they seal the doors. I don’t know how they’d begin to enforce a shelter-in-place order, but I do notice that at least one military ship — a hospital ship, we’re told — is coming to New York City. Meanwhile, celebration in some busy Internet warrens (mainly QAnon) over vague reports that Oprah Winfrey has been arrested for child trafficking. This prompted Oprah to get on the social networks and proclaim her innocence. Rookie move, Oprah; it’s been years since anybody has been inclined to disconnect the dots. Apophenia, the psychiatrists tell us, is a warning sign for schizophrenia, and it’s quite possible that America has lost its marbles so far under the couch that they’ll never be retrieved.
But even the most ardent QAnon conspiracist will soon have to own up to the hard facts whistling in the wind all over the land. My cousin caught the virus in Colorado. She’s young and healthy and recovered pretty quickly; she told me over text that it wasn’t as rough as the flu. Brad’s neighbor across the hall has it. Non-elective surgeries have been postponed at Hackensack General, and they’ve been building tents in the parking lot. I’m mostly worried about getting Hilary sick: I can’t let that happen. We don’t know how immunocompromised she is, and I don’t want to find out the hard way. She’s been through too much to get hit with a superbug. I cannot and will not be a vector. For now, there’s no trouble staying home: I have plenty of assignments to do from here, though I’ll see how long that lasts. Mostly I feel smeared, like a computer screen smudged with thumbprints and indifferently wiped. It’s quiet outside — nobody on the road. I hope they keep the streetlights on.
Lit a match and saged my house down. It didn’t make a difference.
My very favorite album of 2019 contains the following stanza:
The day my daddy died/I was down the street/I lost my only friend/people don’t grow on trees.
This awkward, guileless verse was not artfully muffled, or hidden in an outro, or ‘verbed out and tucked into the mix. It is, like all of the other lyrics on A Real Good Kid, brutally comprehensible. The couplet is placed just before the climax of the last song on the album; and since the album is absolutely, unswervingly linear, it arrives at a pivotal moment in the narrative. Just before the band comes crashing in for the final time, this is what Mike Posner wants to tell us: he wants to reiterate the central theme, the reason for the album’s existence, in as flatfooted a manner as he can muster. People don’t grow on trees.
2019 was a year to huddle around the speaker and hear stories. As I still believe that the album is the best vehicle for storytelling, and fault books, essays, and paintings only for being insufficiently melodic, it was a swell year for the likes of me. Songwriters used the album form to make arguments, extend narratives, establish memorable characters, crack running jokes, and make the most of the thirty to sixty minutes the format allows them. Richard Dawson, Jenny Lewis, and Billy Woods, for instance, had a lot to say about the ravaged state of the first-world psyche, and fitted withering case-studies to music designed to reinforce the emotional tone of their suites of songs. From Julia Jacklin, David Bazan, Eva Hendricks and (accidentally, but absolutely) Aubrey Graham, we were shown snapshots of destabilized protagonists at transitional moments; by the time the music stopped, those narrators felt as real as the guys across the street. Others used a sequence of songs to tell a straightforward story: the inexhaustible Dan Campbell, for instance, returned with a continuation of the blue-collar saga of Aaron West, and Max Bemis and Tyler Okonma shared quasi-fictional — and strangely similar — set-length accounts of queer awakening. Elizabeth Nelson got specific, Ezra Furman got polemical, Ace Enders got rueful, Maxo Kream got confessional. These writers made albums that keep playing long after the last note fades; albums that pull you into their own neatly-fashioned universes and don’t let you go; albums that ask questions that are hard to answer comfortably.
Mike Posner didn’t exhibit the sort of facility with language that those other writers did. He was, however, up to something similar. He started at the top by establishing a narrator and a predicament, and then moved, song by song, to elaborate that predicament for the listener and grope toward an emotional resolution. And in spite of my own skepticism, and occasional bewilderment at his methods, I am forced to conclude that he did this better than any of those other writers, none of whom would ever attempt to get away with singing something as flatfooted as “the day my daddy died/I was down the street.” The artistic success of A Real Good Kid reminds me of two things I thought I learned long ago, although for some reason I always seem to be spacing on them. 1) When writing songs and making albums, both the words and the music are important, but neither thing in isolation is nearly as important as the way in which the words and music interact, and 2.) this isn’t a damned poetry contest.
On A Real Good Kid, Mike Posner struggles with the breakup of a relationship and the death of a parent. There’s searching, self-castigation and self-indulgence, and burning questions about how the narrator is going to reconstruct his life in the absence of his “only friend.” This probably sounds exactly like 808s & Heartbreak to you, and, well… I don’t think Mike is running from the comparison. “Wide Open”, the second song on the set, is basically “Welcome To Heartbreak”. Other songs borrow liberally from Graduation and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; there’s even a rant-like breakdown in the middle of “Drip” set to music that’s not miles removed from “Runaway”. Kanye is thanked in the liner notes, but that probably won’t be enough for listeners allergic to wholesale borrowing. If that’s you, you’re not going to hang with this, and you should skip ahead on the list below to Richard Dawson or Jamila Woods or something like that.
But here’s one of the many things that hip-hop teaches us: we’re all on the shoulders of giants. How we got up there is immaterial. It’s what we see and what we do from that vantage that matters. In the face of some stiff competition, Mike Posner has recorded the most focused album of 2019; in fact, it’s one of the most focused albums I’ve ever heard. After staring mortality in the face, he’s got something crucial he wants to report, and he refuses to allow anything to break his concentration, even for a second. Every choice made by Mike and his producers on A Real Good Kid — right down to the timbre of the instrument sounds and the placement of the beats — is designed to further the emotional arc of the story. This second-by-second arrangement diligence coupled with Mike’s casual, near-offhand approach to storytelling is, I think, something unique in the body of contemporary pop. It may not be an original approach to composition, but it’s an entirely original amalgam of messiness and meticulousness he’s giving us here; a casual amble on a rail-straight line. A Real Good Kid manages to feel utterly relaxed, even as the subject matter that Mike is handling is as heavy as it gets. The effect of this is, again, something singular and unprecedented, and I believe that it’s an expression of Mike’s approachable personality, and his peculiar brand of self-deprecation, which is quite unlike that of any other pop star, and makes him easy to like.
Mind you, the first time I met Mike Posner, I came away from the encounter thinking I’d just met the biggest jackass in the music business. Not that he was particularly mean to me; no, his conspiratorial will to draw me into the petty sexual politics and revenge positions of “Cooler Than Me” was part of what made the encounter so vulgar. Of course he was just treating me like a bro, and brotronica was what he was at the Bamboozle to peddle. The ladies sure loved it — they pelted him with undergarments and waited around after the show to get a body part signed. When “Cooler Than Me” hit on a national level a few months later, it reinforced my impression of Mike as a guy blinded by resentment — a young man so swept up in his own sense of entitlement that he was incapable of imagining that the weenie journalist sent to cover his show could do anything but commiserate.
The second time I talked to Mike Posner was a different story altogether. this one was a phone interview, and I clearly recall dreading the ring, thinking hoo boy, this guy again, I’m in for it today. “Cooler Than Me” had been on the charts for a few weeks and he was in Jersey to headline a show in Asbury Park. Here, I figured, was an opportunity for some self-congratulatory bluster. Instead, Mike was small-voiced and measured, and mostly wanted to talk about his dad. His father had told him: all of the musicians I like (classic rock dudes, in other words) are better live, and all the musicians you like (hip-hop and EDM artists) are worse. This offhand comment was obviously eating him alive. Mike told me he was determined to be a different kind of artist, and insisted that whatever context he found himself in, he was going to put the lyrics first.
I thought about that a few years later when he had his other hit. “I Took A Pill In Ibiza”, if you don’t remember, was a ’70s style confessional number in which Mike treats himself brutally; even by the standards of self-deprecating stories of minor-celebrity emptiness, this one is really hell on the narrator. It occurred to me then that Mike had always been willing to make himself look bad in the name of art, and in the age of the endlessly retouched selfie, this might be a quality worth celebrating. He followed “Ibiza” with a dreary spoken-word set. I listened to it so you don’t have to (you didn’t), and I’m sure I thought, well, that’s the end of Mike.
Instead we get this: a concept set about the death of his father by brain tumor. Mike’s reflections are alternately corny, clumsy, embarrassing, self-flagellating, and freighted with platitudes, and he’s matched with music that is, in part, shamelessly purloined from Kanye. Nevertheless, all of this sticks. And maybe it’s my own recent state of existential frailty that has made me susceptible to Mike’s latest round of storytelling, but also maybe not. Even on that debut album, straight from the darkest corners of the Duke University quad, he was always a sure hand at building narrative tension through compositional development and masterful sequencing of musical happenstance. There are moments on A Real Good Kid when Mike switches the beat, or brings in the choir, or gets strategically hoarse, or doubles a vocal line, or drops in a sample, and in so doing, he achieves the sort of emotional payoff that only happens when a songwriter puts the narrative meaning first, and arranges his sonic elements accordingly. Records like that do not, um, grow on trees.
Album of the Year
1. Mike Posner — A Real Good Kid
2. Jenny Lewis — On The Line
3. Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell
4. Billy Woods & Kenny Segal — Hiding Places
5. Richard Dawson — 2020
6. Charly Bliss — Young Enough
7. Sunday Service Choir — Jesus Is Born
8. Metronomy — Metronomy Forever
9. Wand — Laughing Matter
10. The Paranoid Style — A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life
11. Julia Jacklin — Crushing
12. Jamila Woods — LEGACY! LEGACY!
13. Tyler, The Creator — Igor
14. Drake — Care Package
15. Say Anything — Oliver Appropriate
16. Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties — Routine Maintenance
17. Bruce Hornsby — Absolute Zero
18. Denzel Curry — Zuu
19. Mon Laferte — Norma
20. John Van Deusen — I Am Origami Pt. 3 — A Catacomb Hymn
Gosh, those are wonderful albums. If you were involved in any of them, my Richmond Flying Squirrels hat is off to you. Thank you.
Best Album Title
The Weight Of Melted Snow by French For Rabbits
Best Album Cover
Caroline Polachek’s Pang. The composition of the photograph is impeccable: I like the twist in the ladder and the breeze that threatens to pull Caroline off to the left, I like her head-down determination as she grasps for the rung, I like the slash of blue in the otherwise grey sky, and of course I like the plastic pants. Where is Caroline heading, anyway? As usual, she doesn’t bother to explain herself – she figures that she’s so brilliant that you can just bask in her bent brain-waves and call it entertainment. And you know what?, for a brain-wave basker like me, it kindasorta works: there’s something so guileless and pure about Caroline’s gauche self-confidence that I’d almost call it sexy. Mainly, though, Pang reminds me of the things I liked about Caroline back when I bothered to think about her at all, which was… holy crap, that was 2012. Has she really been dithering around and making ch-ching noises and pitching songs to Beyoncé for seven years? Guess she has.
Best Liner Notes And Packaging
Oliver Appropriate. Puerile minds think alike, and just like Max Bemis, I also think of rancid bodily fluids whenever I hear about something “streaming all over the internet”. Unlike Max, I don’t think I have what it takes to build a promo campaign around my disgusting joke. I lack the taste for provocation, or the desire to crowd-please a bunch of reprobates, and that’s to my infinite discredit. Max gave up on you, sophisticated listener, about three album cycles ago: he figures he’s punk rock emeritus now, and he knows that it’s the rare member of the cognoscenti who has any time for that crap. Doubtless this bums out Sherri Dupree (and Lucy Dupree-Bemis), but they’re probably grateful that he has an outlet for his dirty jokes. If you don’t appreciate Bemis brand lyricism by now, there’s nothing I do to inure you to the taste of his suspicious homebrew.
So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll point out that his casual mastery of notes ‘n’ chords rock songwriting, refrain-building, and melodic development, all of which was generally in abeyance on the last few, is back in full force here. Every say anything set is a concept set, and the theme this time is Max’s homosexual urges, which are played as a revelation, but cannot be a surprise to anyone who has followed the artist for a millisecond. This is the co-author of the Gayest Album Ever Made™, a full-length set about sexual desire for Chris Conley that included groans and shrieks from Chris Conley plus enthusiastic and wholly complicit support vox from Sherri. Oliver Appropriate (the character) is an alternate-reality Max who freaks out and murders the young man he lusts after. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d do, but hush, just go with it. The story ends with the main character shackled to the corpse of his lover, but before we get there, there’s lots of wonderfully pithy and scathing observations about the New York independent rock demimonde. Altogether now: I know a lot of men in hardcore bands/collectively funding the Colom-biaaaaaans! Allll-together now! No? Just me? OK then. Just me. M
Album That Opens Most Strongly
Norman Fucking Rockwell
Album That Closes Most Strongly
Wildcard. Having taken the covered wagon as far as those wooden wheels would let her go, Miranda Lambert turns over the farmhands on the caravan: new sidemen, new producers, new arrangement sensibility, new sounds, etc. Natalie Hemby is still riding shotgun, but Miranda has convened an alternate songwriting crew with Lori McKenna and Liz Rose; they’re called the Love Junkies or the Ladies Who Lunch or the Pistol Bettys or something. This woman just loves to put together girl groups. You ever get the sense that Miranda is the key to the city of Nashville? I do. She’s still a fan of it/old shit, and she can cozy up to a traditionalist ballad like “Tequila Does” better than anybody in boots, but some of this record is borderline new wave in its sensibility. “Track Record” is practically a Taylor Swift song. Now, city slicker over here considers Brad Paisley’s Wheelhouse a bold and eclectic masterpiece, but the Music City crowd felt otherwise – they thought he was just horsing around, killing time before his next real record. It wouldn’t shock me if some old-time Miranda Lambert fans felt similarly about this one. There I part company with the old-time fans. I concede that a few of these good-timey numbers are so flimsy that they wouldn’t fly at all without a magnificent singer at the yoke. Well, lucky us. Look at what we’ve got here.
Crummy Album You Listened To A Lot Anyway
Solange’s When I Get Home. Quality control at Knowles, Inc. slips dramatically. Look, I hate to knock this, because — as I keep reminding myself whenever I slog my way through this brief but strangely interminable set — Solange could otherwise be doing any number of stupid ass things with her famous handle. Reality TV, sneaker design, political office, you name it. Instead she makes highly experimental, scrupulously hook-free jazz pop with a pinch of hip-hop to ensure that the proceedings don’t bog down completely. It’s ballsy. It reeks of privilege, sure, and a fair bit of (further) coasting on her sister’s acclaim, but if Beyoncé is inspired by this, then maybe all the meandering is worthwhile. If you’ve ever sat in a dentist’s office with nothing to do but thumb through a glossy fashion mag, you might appreciate the resolution of the photographs and the weight of the paper and the opulent aroma of the little packets of perfume until you get to the end and realize there weren’t any articles in there. But whatever, you’re none the worse for it. Maybe your fingers smell funny.
Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make
Injury Reserve. Neither Groggs nor Ritchie With A T are much to speak about on the microphone. Moreover, when they kick topics, they’re always borderline brain-damaged, like the one about the magic Tesla that morphs on the go at the touch of an app, or the one where he and his girl are “Picasso-ing” their imaginary kids. Come to think of it, those are both the same fantasy: technowizardly creative control over things that are by nature uncontrollable. Regardless of their INT rolls, they do have talented friends, including Freddie Gibbs, whose crack-slinging boasts are so deftly delivered that it doesn’t even matter that they’re completely out of place on this album, Jersey’s own Cakes Da Killa, who does his peeved gay black man thing with extra hot sauce here, and Rico Nasty, who sets “Jawbreaker” on fire with one of the best guest verses of the year. They all get to rhyme over Parker Corey’s beats, and there’s the real reason to pay attention to this Arizona crew: he’s having so much fun screwing around with rap verities that he pulls everybody involved into a great gyre of goofiness. Hip-hop goofiness, mind you; the essential goofiness of the great three-man rap acts of the ‘80s. So when Phonte swings by to bless the last track with an old-school “bass for your face”, it feels very very well earned, and a nice alternative for rap fans who found the latest Brockhampton too somber.
Album That Sounded Like An Absolute Chore To Make
Chance The Rapper’s The Big Day. I don’t want to pile on, because I like it, and I regret that it got the living shit beaten out of it. For once, Pitchfork didn’t lead the backlash. Their faint praise was positively measured next to Anthony Fantano, who cruelly dropped a zero on Chance, kickstarting a cavalcade of YouTube assassination attempts, many of which drew blood. We’ll see if the target survives. Some of the collaborations found their way into the crosshairs, particularly the Ben Gibbard and Shaun Mendes features, and I do get that. But the main knock on Chance four is the subject matter. The emcee simply would not shut up about his wife, and this rubbed un-romantics the wrong way. Granted, Chance picked a funny year to record a seventy-seven minute tribute to matrimony and heterosexual monogamy. Yet I was fascinated by the way in which Chance’s overdriven attempts to generate excitement about his marriage paralleled his capitulation to entertainment industry conventions. From my view, The Big Day is a concept set about a former independent who was powerless to prevent himself from getting gummed up in a variety of restrictive institutions, presumably because he’s a nice guy who doesn’t want to let down the folks.
But unlike, say, Bill Cosby, he has no time for displays of ostentatious maturity – perhaps because (hopefully because?) he’s not mature in the slightest. I am pleased to report that most of what he says about his life choices is bratty as all get out. And when he realizes that fucking side chicks isn’t as satisfying as bringing his girl to his auntie’s house, his astonishment is equaled only by his gratitude to God for being right. So even if Chance is faking it somewhat, as his detractors not-unreasonably insist, I can still appreciate the man he wants to be enough to want to see him get there. If we can sit and smile through countless verses about Jeffery Williams’ enthusiasm for anal penetration, I think we can roll with an album that concerns a relationship designed to last longer than the time it takes for the rapper to get his nut. Those of us who are crazy about our girlfriends understand. And there are more of us than you’d think.
Another Chore, Although Not Without Rewards
Western Stars. Less love, more tunnel. This happens to certain cowboys as the manberries wither on the vine. Springsteen brings us the daredevil as coward, not because the daredevil is afraid of a little dustup, but because domesticity scares the bejeezus out of him. Even though the stuntman has that metal (ram)rod in his leg, and the old actor gobbles viagra with his morning coffee, there’s no sign that these virile codgers are satisfying any chicks. On the contrary, these characters are wandering in the dry gulley, remembering the flashing heads of hair of their long-lost beloveds, ruing the day they followed their own star, drunk on solitude. I believe Bruce would call this “depression”, a malady he knows firsthand, or so we are told by the hardworking publicists at Shore Fire Media. And what’s really striking about the songs here is how well they capture the mindset of the many men who’d vastly, and I mean vastly, prefer suicidal depression to actually having women around. It’s a whole subculture: men going their own way, or MGTOW, in Internet slang. Do aging incels really deserve string arrangements this syrupy? Guess the Boss thinks they do. He’s always been a generous employer. The benefits package is impressive.
Most Consistent Album
About Jade Lilitri of Oso Oso there will be no equivocation from the guys who run IsThisBandEmo dot com. He’s all the way in, and as such, he’s this year’s designated baton carrier in the great relay race that stretches back through the Hotelier and You Blew It! through American Football and Jimmy Eat World to The Promise Ring and Mineral, and, yeah, whoo, let’s not get into the stuff before that. It’s murky. On Basking In The Glow, Lilitri hits all of his marks, which is commendable in a way – that chorus on “Impossible Game” could have come from any emo classic of the last two decades – and in another way, it suggests that he’s not pushing at the barriers of the genre as vigorously as a youngster ought. We’ll see if it ever starts to bug me over the next, oh, ten thousand times I’m going to play this album.
Maybe Not As Consistent As Oso Oso, But In Many Ways A More Impressive Exhibition Of Sustained Vision And Tone
Care Package. With Aubrey, see, the conversation never stops. It’s a little one-sided, but that’s all right, as Stuart Murdoch said in a totally different context. The album ends, but the late-nite ruminations don’t; 40 has some sweet beats in the glitchy recesses of the hard drive. The velvet walls of the vocal booth beckon. There are always more chains to yank, and girls to confuse, smoke-rings to blow and metaphors to mix. Most of the stuff on this compilation fell in the murky interstitial area between Drake albums, although some of it was appended to sets as bonus tracks; if you heard these, they were on a playlist or tucked in a radio set, and you surely assimilated them to the forty million other drake tracks in circulation between the years 2010 and 2016.
Extracted, dusted off, and strung together in a sequence, these odds and sods tell a damned coherent tale. They’re testament to the formidable hypnotic powers of a word-weaver with a confessional style that simply can’t be mistaken for anybody else’s – a glib, quietly self-impressed delivery that conceals astonishing reserves of emotional manipulation. The Drake that emerges from Care Package is possessive, insatiably hungry, unapologetically deceitful, and dangerous precisely because sexual satisfaction isn’t all he’s after. No, Drake needs you to care, even as he knows that the care he’s going to return will be inadequate by his own standard. The character Drake is not amoral, but he’s given up on self-improvement as a sucker’s game, and his expectations for his own behavior are frighteningly low.
This is about as candid and honest a portrait of the modern North American subject as you’ll find anywhere, in any literature: the thinking fellow whose brain power serves only to dig him deeper holes, and the man of feeling who uses sentiment as a crowbar to pry open the unsuspecting. And if this accidental album hangs together far better than most rappers’ planned full-lengths, you can put that down to the star’s narrative discipline and swiss-watch consistency. No obligation here to shoot for the charts, no R&B hooks or music purloined from Afropop hitmakers, no passionfruit or hotlines blinging. No, nothing but Drake verses, unadulterated and uninterrupted, for better or for worse. Probably the purest drake experience you can have, so, um, be careful out there.
Most Inconsistent Album
Father Of The Bride. Hey, remember that Tribe Called Quest comeback set that was mostly a Q-Tip project plus various agenda-driven attempts to redefine what the Tribe was? Yeah, I barely do, too. But Father Of The Bride brings all of that rushing back, with Ariel Rechtshaid in the role of omnipresent Jarobi and Danielle Haim as inescapable Busta Rhymes. Nothing new about frontman quasi-solo projects with band names slapped on them — Port Of Morrow was a really good one — but there’s something downright creepy about the way Tomson and Baio have been locked out of the control room in favor of… Dave Longstreth, et. al.? I mean, really, Ezra. Some kind of friend you turned out to be, as your role model Barry Manilow once put it. As for Rostam, we were promised plenty of him. But he only makes his presence felt on the late Mates Of State-y “We Belong Together” and the stupendous “Harmony Hall”, which, to be fair, is worth the price of the album all by itself. As for the main main, his knack for melody sure hasn’t deserted him, even as he settles more frequently for mannered, middle of the road expressions of ideas mined from early ‘70s proto-indiepop. I remember when he used to spazz out instead. (Though that might have been Tomson and Baio.) Oh, and that Jenny Lewis “appearance” turns out to be a vocal sample. Buyer beware. Have fun but tread carefully; don’t fall for the Illuminati mind control tricks.
Also Inconsistent
2 Chainz’s Rap Or Go To The League. Reality lyrics from 6’5” small forward Tauheed Epps of Alabama State, now with a slower crossover step. I’m sure it would have been enjoyable to hear 2 Chainz rap about hoops while the memories of the Southwest Athletic Conference were still fresh in his mind. Nearly two decades after the last bucket, the sportscasting sorta blends in with his other old man reveries. Which is not to say that he isn’t funny, or sympathetic: I am a codger too, and I also don’t like pointless gangbanging or, um, paying taxes. He remembers his coaches fondly; I remember Mr. Glenn Brown, and it’s easy for both of us to say now that we’re no longer in ridiculous shorts on a painted line waiting to get a deadleg from some random jocko. Because this is a 2 Chainz project, the beats and rhymes are pretty fresh, and he continues to be a master of inflection, capable of saying vicious stuff in the most jovial, avuncular manner possible. But his disinclination to self-mythologize runs him into serious trouble. If a fortysomething guy is going to stand there and tell you the truth about his life and his feelings, that’s not pop entertainment as I understand it. Look at Pusha T. He’s older than dirt and richer than God, but he pretends he still wants to stand on a corner and sell drugs. He cares enough about the art to lie to you. He knows the alternative is unpalatable.
Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To
White Reaper. Omigosh, they’ve turned into Sloan. I guess it was inevitable. Good on Tony Esposito and Co. for going against the dream-pop trend and delivering You Deserve Love, the most awake-pop record of the year. No canned reverbs or machine psychedelia here, and, bless them, not a single moment of chill. Unlike Charly Bliss, their conceptual partners in power pop, there’s nothing political or even terribly emotional driving their urgency – they’re the same five Kentucky wiseguys they were when they named their debut album White Reaper Does It Again. They just love the verities: cars and girls and girls in cars, and a well-turned chord progression, and all the whoas and whoos in the right place. “Ring” even pre-empts the criticism – you talk too much for somebody with nothing to say, Little Ruby tells Tony. I imagine that the dirtbags and dead-leg givers at the 7-11 miss the sonic references to Van Halen and Cheap Trick. But those guys don’t buy contemporary records anyway. That’s because they’re not real. They only exist in our fevered memories.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through
The Highwomen. Further proof that Dave Cobb is a black hole at the heart of Nashville that sucks all objects of critical mass into his orbit. Aw, heck, that makes Dave sound worse than he is; his stately, oaken, historically reverential productions aren’t that bad, are they? So let’s try this again. The Highwomen is further proof that Dave Cobb is a toilet in which all weighty objects in Nashville swirl until they are sucked down into the depths of his porcelain-pure mixes. No better, huh? How about: Dave Cobb is the Pacific garbage patch of Nashville. No, try as I may, I can’t say anything nice about Dave Cobb, who has turned himself into a menace; maybe not at the level of Jack Antonoff, but with similar outcomes. I do suppose Dave was the natural guy to produce the Highwomen concept, considering that two of the principals (Carlile and Shires) have already had their commercial profiles elevated via the dignified, grown-up Cobb treatment, and another (Hemby) has been Cobb-adjacent for quite some time. The exception here is Maren, and I use the first name pointedly, because even Dave Cobb and his reverse Dorian Gray productions can’t prematurely age her. Alas, I believe she joined the group late, and she’s not much of a presence on this album: if she sings on the back half at all, I sure can’t make her out.
No, the star of the show here is Brandi Carlile, who is always worth hearing, but who has also been bordering on spinsterly sanctimony for a few album cycles. Some of this does feel like a victory lap for Carlile and Cobb after their Grammy recognition last year and her acceptance into the Nashville C&W family after years of knocking on the cabin door. Amanda Shires and Jason “Mr. Shires” Isbell, friends of the LGBTQ+ that they are, have even contributed a lesbian torch song for Brandi to oversing. Here’s another clue for you that this is a stealth Brandi Carlile album with recurring special guests – the Highwomen don’t even mine Natalie Hemby for material very often. I believe she only has four co-writes here, and two of them are with Carlile. Brandi has steered her away from “Brews And Boobs On The Pontoon” and the wistful geographical specificity of Puxico, and toward some commendable yet cruller dry sentiments about inclusivity and feminism. Good thing they can all sing, right?
There’s also a Hemby-Lambert number in the dreaded letter-to-my-child genre, and the cheeky radio single “redesigning women”, which will certainly not be a hit, but which is probably as close to the Pistol Annies as they’re capable of getting as long as Cobb is on the boards. The best songs, unsurprisingly, are the two Maren Morris numbers, and while they may get her back in the good graces of the purists who hated her R&B moves, they just sound like Maren Morris to me. So go ahead and like this album. I kinda do. But thank your lucky Southern stars that Miranda Lambert seems immune to Dave Cobb’s pull.
Most Sympathetic Or Likeable Perspective Over The Course Of An Album
The Paranoid Style – A Goddamn Impossible Way Of Life. Elizabeth Nelson comes off like Paula Carino arguing with a record store clerk. Also, she sounds out every syllable she sings with all the subtlety of a slap in the face. So why can I not stop playing this? Well, for starters, the thirtysomething (fortysomething?) female perspective is not one that you get all that much in garage rock, and for continuers, this particular thirtysomething is a peculiar specimen. She’s obsessed with music criticism and rock history, American politics and economics, the Irish Republican experiment, and, apparently, chicken wings. It all comes at you in a mad flurry: specific calendar dates and castigations of Federal Reserve chairmen and judiciously selected quotes from classic pop songs and some very funny jokes. One track is about a Bar/None party in the early nineties – Katy McCarthy and Brian Dewan are both namechecked – while another recounts the story of the Who show where the kids were trampled to death. There’s even a bit where she sends up “Odorono”, which was itself satire. It all goes along swimmingly until she drops in a verse of “Ana Ng”, and you realize what you’ve been missing: sweetness, balance, poise, etc. But hey, the Paul McCartney records are right over there, waiting for you, and this brilliant scuzz bomb of an album won’t take up all that much of your time. There used to be… well, not a lot of albums like this, but a few every year – albums made by total originals, back during the days when autonomy and individuality were expected from college rockers. The Eighties, basically. If we can humor and even applaud countless capitulations to pop convention from intelligent schemers with naked commercial ambitions, we remaining fans of Camper Van Beethoven (and Bongwater) deserve a few albums like this.
Most Alienating Perspective Over The Course Of An Album
Weezer Black. I think it’s important to remember that Weezer was taking it on the chin, hard, even before Teal came out. Sketch comedians were doing bits. This unaccountable opprobrium directed toward Weezer must have baffled Rivers Cuomo, who is, above all, a student of pop-rock craft. He knows damn well he followed up the outstanding Everything Will Be Alright In The End with the very very good White and then with the reasonably worthwhile Pacific Daydream. So if he’s angry at his audience, I can’t really blame him. What I do blame him for: writing an entire album about his recent professional resentments and fitting those gripes to California sleaze-pop accompaniment. At the level of the plot, Black is basically De La Soul Is Dead minus the human compassion and the donuts. There’s even a song about how he doesn’t want your shitty demo tapes. I think he’s justified in likening many of his recent critics to zombies, but telling them to die does strike me as gauche, especially from a guy who has flirted with Unabomber-like antisocial tendencies in the past. The references to cheap online review culture (in a song that’s a dead ringer for “Distance”-era Cake, btw, right down to the trumpet), celebrity death cults, agoraphobia, and the fickleness and inattention of the listener all pile up and leave a pretty acrid taste. It is deeply telling that Weezer released the first four songs of Black on Fortnight. Music to shoot your “friends” to.
A Wee Bit Overexposed, Would You Not Say
Billie Eilish – When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? This teenaged edgelord(e)’s hit debut has been widely compared to Pure Heroine. To me, it’s young Fiona Apple all the way, right down to the gothic showtunes, the jazzy nonsense, the verbosity and clumsy word choices, and the clickbaity provocation. Fiona flirted with body dysmorphia and underage sex; Billie, um, eats spiders. Also she’s got that Flowers in the Attic thing going on with her brother Finneas, who does impart a distinctive creepy spider-munching aural signature to the project that marks it as a different kind of pop proposition than what you’d get from the non-creepy likes of Grande/Swift/Rexha. You can really see this appealing to a certain type of teenage girl who feels inadequately represented by mainstream culture, but badly wants a ride on the mainstream tilt-a-whirl. As for me, I’ve kinda-sorta almost bought a copy, but I’m put off by the production inconsistency – not just the gimmicky shit like running the mix of “Xanny” through a bathroom fan (apparently), but also the blandburgers at the tail end of the set, and non-pop throwbacks like “Wish You Were Gay”, which is farther down the road to puppet theater vo-de-o-do than I’m willing to go.
Somewhat Underexposed, And Kinda Promising
Nilüfer Yanya’s Miss Universe isone of the odder ducks in the digital record store. It’s frontloaded with catchy, if fragmentary, guitar-rock numbers redolent of Britpop, degenerates fast into sub-Sade saxobeat smoothies, and then recovers for a tidy finish. There’s a vague sci-fi theme about a futuristic health care firm, and Nilüfer sings it all like she’s attempting to dislodge a peanut butter sandwich from the roof of her mouth. I hear milk helps with that. Like way too many 2019 releases, Miss Universe deepens my suspicion that psychedelia is what you do when you can’t think of a melody, but i do give Nilüfer Yanya credit for her ambition, and for writing about something other than herself. I also like that her version of techno-dystopia isn’t (necessarily) driven by phone addiction; I mean, there are plenty of other awful trends to be vigilant about, right, kids? 33.3% chance Nilüfer turns out to be more than just the UK answer to Japanese Breakfast, and worth a couple of spins in any case.
Album That Wore Out The Quickest
Frank Iero & The Future Violents – Barrier. Frank is sort of the Richie Sambora to Gerard Way’s Jon-Bon in that he’s considered an essential part of a landmark Jer-Z band, but if you break it down to the submolecular level, you find that he isn’t bringing much that a thousand and one other guitar players couldn’t contribute. Richie was known for his screechy “woooowh-nedd dead or aliiiive” backing vox; people said they were characteristic, I say they were characteristically bad. Frank didn’t sing much in MCR, and, um… I guess I see why. His estranged relationship to pitch isn’t so much of a problem on the brutal rockers meant to suggest Billy Corgan in the midst of a brain aneurysm, but the folkier numbers here are well beyond his abilities. He does know how to raise a middle finger artfully, and if you can handle a song called “Medicine Square Garden”, you’ll agree that he can sprawl out in front of you as belligerently as Patrick Stickles ever does. But mostly Barrier makes me hope they’ve gotten all of the horsing around out of their systems and they’re ready to put My Chemical Romance back together for good. There must be a color of hair dye that Gerard hasn’t doused himself in yet. He could go blue. Go on, Gerard, lead the band through a concept record about Brainy Smurf.
Album That Made Me Cry Uncle
Norah Jones – Begin Again. Hope springs eternal in the breast of Norah, from whom there is always morah. Not satisfied to forever be the bland blockbuster-maker behind “Don’t Know Why”, she turns the whole shebang upside down every year or so in an attempt to shake loose a spicier direction. And isn’t that all we can ever ask of mega-selling pop musicians?, that they refrain from reiteration and instead try some shit now and again? In that sense, Norah is a model superstar, if you could call her a superstar at all, which you really can’t, given how staggeringly effective her commercial self-sabotage has been. As you probably know, I’ve always sorta run Norah down, even as she’s made choice after choice tailored with uncanny precision to my taste: pushing the piano in the mix, writing chord substitutions and countermelodies into her songs, gospeling it up and hanging with Belle and Sebastian and singing Everly Brothers tunes with Billie Joe. Norah Jones has done everything but show up at my door with a plate of cookies, and… I give up. Seriously. I am now Norah Jones’s number one fan. I’m gonna go back and listen to all those old records of hers. Anything else would be downright cruel.
Okay, much more to come. Singles, individual achievements, blather, offensive comments, you name it. I’ll get to it all as soon as I can.
At the risk of stating the obvious, 7 is by no means a good set. Then again, it’s not like the principals were trying to make one. If you were in Lil Nas X’s position, you probably wouldn’t sweat the details, either: you’d figure the sell-by date was coming at you like the Kamchatka meteor, so you’d better do your best to get something — anything — out before the milk curdles. Simple business practices to suit a simple business man.
That business used to be social media and reality television, and it surely will be again; cue J. Cole saying “in five years you gon be on Love And Hip-Hop.” But no matter what happens next, Lil Nas X can go back to the clickbait grind with his head held high. He’s made his contribution and he ought to be out looking for some nice laurels to lie on. His place in pop history is secure: the biggest streaming song ever, bigger than Drake, bigger than T. Swift, bigger than Oppan Gangnam Style, and never you mind that it came from a social media platform best left to Chinese incels. Straight outta Tik-Tok, (not so) crazy motherfucker named… whatever his name is. You don’t care, and doubtless he doesn’t, either. Artists did not make this technodystopia we’re inhabiting, and idea people with loud mouths will take any platform you give them. That Lil Nas X turned sixty seconds on the flimsiest platform of them all into the year’s biggest music story is not a testament to anybody’s genius, but it wasn’t just a bolt from the blue, either.
To recap: “Old Town Road” was essentially a salvo in the sort of meme game that gets played on social media a thousand times a day, only this one (and maybe just this one) didn’t have anything to do with the President. It was called the Yeehaw Challenge, and it required the participant to give himself a hick makeover and post the results to the site. Apparently most of the people who played around with the hashtag just donned a cowboy hat and acted like an idiot, which makes them no different from most senators from Western states. Lil Nas X took it farther and made a country song — sung through processing and matched to machine beats, of course, but Kacey Musgraves knows all about that. Before you could say Charley Pride, “Old Town Road” was number one on every chart imaginable, including the country chart.
Until it wasn’t. The story from Billboard was that there were elements of “Old Town Road” that were inconsistent with country music at its essence, and gosh, I can’t even imagine what those “elements” could be. Can you? Music City, to its credit, came to his defense, sort of: sniffing an opportunity, Billy Rae Cyrus put his zero credibility on the line with a slot on the remix, and Keith Urban, who knows a commercial C&W hook when he hears one, covered the song on a banjo and posted the results to the Internet. That sounded great, and you know why? Because “Old Town Road” is a great country song. Not a novelty, or a reinterpretation, or an exercise in condescension and appropriation; no, it’s a great song for the same reason that Kenny Chesney’s numbers are great when they’re great. It’s got a hook, and a boast, that Jason Aldean would kill for — a hook so good that it deserves a closer reading.
Lil Nas X says he’s got the horses in the back. That, to me, is utterly brilliant, and not just because it scans so well. The horses might represent the engine of a car: horsepower, junk in the trunk, revving up like all good rock and roll does. Or the horses could be the narrator’s goons, waiting in the back of the shack to administer a beatdown on fools who dare to violate. Then there’s the sexual connotation of horses, doing the pony, the horse as a traditional figure for a man’s dong, sliding in and out of somebody’s back, i.e., their buttcheeks. Then there is the crucial sense in which the horses represent horses, majestic things that gallop deep in the national psyche, beautiful animals that used to get celebrated in song all the time, but not so much anymore. Most of these country cats are so busy singing about their stupid trucks that they couldn’t tell a horse from a damned goldfish.
And why is that? It’s because everybody in Nashville is doing the Yeehaw Challenge. All day, every day. They’re all in costume, putting on accents, hemming and hawing and drawling like Hollywood caricatures of hillbillies. Even Dierks Bentley, who is the soul of sincerity, will tell you with a straight face that his role model is Bo Duke. None of these people are actual cowboys, and would you want them to be?, that’s not their job. The job is poetry. They’re here to animate certain powerful symbols and archetypes that resonate for people of a certain disposition. I can only hope that the curious case of Lil Nas X reminds everybody of that, even as it provides me Exhibit Z in my ongoing argument that says country and hip-hop are different expressions of the same basic American creative impulse. They’re the Bumgarner and Puig of musical genres. “Can’t nobody tell me nothing” applies in both cases, and equally snugly. And I think we would do well, for once, to defer to the wisdom of crowds, and understand that American listeners received “Old Town Road” as a country song in every way in which “country” is meaningful as an artistic descriptor — no matter what the industry says.
They can make their own rules and draw their own lines, but real fans of popular music understand. The institutional gatekeepers wouldn’t have Lil Nas X for the same reason that jerks always throw up walls. They can’t stand to see a black man beat them at their own game.
Single Of The Year
1. Vampire Weekend — “Harmony Hall”
2. Sego — “Neon Me Out”
3. Maren Morris — “The Bones”
4. Charly Bliss — “Hard To Believe”
5. Lana Del Rey — “The Greatest”
6. Julia Jacklin — “Head Alone”
7. Metronomy — “Salted Caramel Ice Cream”
8. Oso Oso — “Impossible Game”
9. White Reaper — “Might Be Right”
10. Better Oblivion Community Center — “Dylan Thomas”
“Shoot For The Sun”. I don’t know much about metal, but I do know what I like. This is it.
Most Romantic Song
Homeboy Sandman’s “Picture On The Wall”. I’m sappy like that. The whole Dusty album was a bit of a relief, to be honest. After Veins and “#neverusetheinternetagain”, (not that I didn’t dig both), I figured he was about an inch away from joining the militia. Dusty catches Homeboy Sandman in the best mood he’s been in for years, celebrating his love for his girlfriend and his move to Mello Music with music that’s, er, surprisingly mello. By his standards, I mean; in real terms it’s still spazzier than a bag of cats. But if you, like me, prefer Sandman when he’s relaxed and optimistic and rapping about sun-dried tomatoes, you may dig. Or maybe you won’t? For the first time in a long time, it seems like Sandman might not see that as a direct reflection on your intelligence and character. I must add: Pitchfork slagged this album on the absurd grounds that Homeboy Sandman is out of ideas. They couldn’t be more wrong. If there’s anybody with a case to sue Pitchfork for sustained defamation in reviews, Homeboy Sandman is that guy. I don’t know what’s going on there. He must have murdered Ryan Schreiber’s hamster or something.
Funniest Song
Danny Brown’s “Belly Of The Beast”, which isn’t to say it’s a wonderful song, or a particularly thrilling direction for the artist. Danny has likened his new set to stand-up comedy, and I think I see what he means. Like a stand-up comedian, Danny believes that his personality alone is sufficient: he can just appear in the spotlight and behave like the zany goof he is, and everybody will clap. Also, Danny is funny, pretty much always. The Roy Orbison gag gets me laughing every time. It’s all in the delivery — the way he says “Orbison” in a manner that highlights the sheer fun of saying such absurd words as “Orbison”. Yet we’re now nearly a decade removed from “Trap Or Die”, and it’s increasingly clear that that version of Danny isn’t coming back. So in honor of the departed, allow me to eulogize the emcee we’ve lost. That Danny was an extraordinary storyteller: he could set a scene, and animate characters, and drive home a point with distinctive amalgam of efficiency and empathy that was his alone. He also demonstrated that he didn’t need to sound like a freakazoid to hold your attention. After XXX, he decided that the only tale worth telling was the one about partying to forget the pain/suffering through the pain of partying. That just can’t compare to a thick description of a junk raid in abandoned houses in Detroit. Also, he’s not really from Detroit anymore. Where is he from? The Internet, I guess. Like all the rest of the comedians.
Most Frightening Song
Jenny Lewis’s “Little White Dove”. If you forget about Nice As Fuck (and you did), On The Line makes two smart ones in a row, smart as anything to come out since that last Pistol Annies set, whip-smart, even. To be fair to the rest of the field, you don’t have to be smart to make a good record. There are marks out there to hit and talented dummies can hit them fine. That’s the magic of pop music – its egalitarian essence. Sometimes it even helps the public profile to play it stoopid. What Jenny Lewis shares with, say, Scott Miller is a profound disinclination to do anything like that. Instead, she makes pop records that are crammed to their corners with ideas and associations – records that always have something new for us when we re-engage with them. Just as The Voyager used the three-way as a figure for social disengagement in the guise of sexual adventure, On The Line presents addiction not as a spiral into rock and roll debauchery, but another way of dealing with the pain of interpersonal contact. It’s the same line she’s been pushing since her days with Rilo Kiley, really: this wry, terrifying examination of the many many things we do to forestall or dodge closeness with other people. Forget the heroin you’re shooting or the cognac in the glass, aunt Jenny knows why you’re hooked on Candy Crush. It hurts to stop phubbing. You might have to connect with somebody. To drive the point home, she’s taken a big risk here – she’s mixed at least half of this album like it’s coming through an old transistor radio, or, to be more metaphorical, through an old phone that’s breaking up (are we breaking up/is there trouble between you and I, etc). To transcend the limitations she’s set herself, she needs to sing, and write, and play at a world-class level. How do you figure she did?
Most Inspiring Song
“Diamond” by Jimmy Eat World. Old emos never die; they just keep on emoing. Some don’t even need crutches to ease the walk down the backside of the hill: while newly stable guys like David Bazan raid their childhood memories for tearjerkers, Jim Adkins just goes right on squeezing all the emo out of his hair-dye bottle. Now that he’s done with his divorce, he’s back to uplifting various girls in the middle/ in the middle of their rides with impossibly straight-faced, earnest inspirational verses and exhortations to persevere. God, I do love this wide-eyed, passionate, ridiculous motherfucker. His tensile strength is legendary — he’s absolutely unbreakable. Neither the passage of time nor harsh reality can lay a glove on him. Twenty years after “Lucky Denver Mint”, I even begin to understand the secret wisdom of his inane band name. Because Jimmy really did eat world!, and he’s going to keep on eating it, pith and pits and all, until he’s tasted all the sweetness (whoah-oh-ee-oh-oh) he can taste. It’s arguable, I guess, that an artist this adolescent has nothing to add to a sociopolitical moment that requires some adulting. But if that sax ride on “All The Way (Stay)” doesn’t cure your millennial blues, Dr. Rock cannot help you. Go on and obey the backing singers: let those feelings show.
While We’re Emoing, Here Is, At Some Length, The Most Moving Song
“God And The Billboards”, by Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties. Yes, indeed, Soupy is back with some more crafty Aaron West stories for you. I guess that answers the question about whether Aaron kills himself at the end of We Don’t Have Each Other. In retrospect, though, Soupy wouldn’t use a symbol as broad and boring as the ocean to represent suicide, would he? He wouldn’t have used a symbol at all. That’s not how Aaron thinks, and Soupy is at one with the character. He would have sung something like: “Oh these crappy raaaaazor blades/are of such pooor manufaaaaaacture these days/they don’t even slash me right/someone call my mooooom toniiiiight.” Whether the world needed a continuation of Aaron West’s story is between Soupy, his audience, and his conscience. But even though I’m the guy who didn’t think Empire Strikes Back was necessary, I found myself compelled by this particular Chapter Two. In many ways, it’s richer, more thoughtful, and more literary than the first album, and I’m already looking forward to Chapter Three.
At the level of the plot, much of Routine Maintenance is a reiteration of the first album: Aaron stumbles around and gets drunk, runs away to Los Angeles, puts a band together, and is called back home by a crisis in which he finds Soupy-approved redemption over the carburetor of the family jalopy. Along the way he kvetches about everything, sometimes hilariously, sometimes curmudgeon-ly, but always with strict attention to the rules of poetic justice as they operate within the moral universe of working-class East Coast emo. You might think that it’s a bit of a cop-out, or just unimaginative, that Soupy briefly sticks Aaron in a Wonder Years-like touring band (the guys are even from Philly, sheesh), but Aaron’s rock and roll detour serves two important narrative purposes. First, it gives Soupy and co-conspirator Ace Enders an excuse to live out some Springsteen fantasies on “Running Toward The Light. Just like the Boss, Aaron sees Jersey as a dead end, which is a tougher case to make in 2019 than it was in 1973, but we’ll let that slide.
More importantly, it sets up the familiar drama you’ll remember from all those Wonder Years records: the protagonist must choose between artistic self-indulgence and family responsibility. “If I’m in an airport/and you’re in a hospital bed/what kind of man does that make me”, etcetera. Soupy promptly kills off Aaron’s brother in law so that the main character can become a father figure for his nephew, which is downright evil, when you think about it, and the kind of thing that gets an author in trouble on Quora and TV Tropes. If this was a kitchen sink drama on Lifetime Television For Women, we’d all be groaning under the weight of the plot mechanics, not to mention the narrative convenience.
Luckily for us, it’s a pop-rock record, and Soupy continues to be a steady hand at pop-rock set pieces: the brutal divorce scene in “Just Sign The Papers”, for instance, or the description of life in the flat in Reseda where Aaron, broke and on the run, squats with some Mexican immigrants, or “Bloodied Up In A Bar Fight”, which is funny, even though it isn’t. I’m sure I would have liked the story better if it had ended with Aaron’s return home; he really didn’t have to drag the nephew and the church and all the gruesome filial business into it. He could have left that implicit, and I still would have gotten it. But I’ve got to appreciate how he names all of the characters, and how nimbly he jumps between the many cross-references and Wonder Years callbacks into the lyrics, and the many easter eggs in the verses for those who he assumes are listening carefully. For instance, there’s the delightful moment where Aaron shows Colin – that’s the nephew – the chords to the hymn he’s playing at his father’s funeral, and they turn out to be the same chords to the Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties song that both characters are inhabiting. Does anybody else go for this kind of shit? I mean, it’s a little cheesy, but it’s cheese with complex taste notes; nothing fruity, more like spice, aged oaken barrels, the funk inside Soupy’s sneakers.
Meanest Song
In the long race to make records that sound like those of Richard and Linda Thompson, it sometimes helps to be the child of Richard and Linda Thompson. Sometimes it doesn’t; IMHO, Teddy has never had much success in that department. The Rails consists of Kami Thompson and her husband Mitchard Bompson, and… oh, wait, that’s not his name? Huh, it says here in the press release that he’s called James Walbourne, and, wisely, he doesn’t attempt to play guitar like his father-in-law. But when these two harmonize on their better folk-rock numbers, they do manage to generate a cool, lacerating Sunnyvista vibe. At other times, they suggest a more evil Crowded House. For instance, there’s the one that goes “save the planet/kill yourself”, and, um, I think Kami is kidding? It’s hard to say. Breaking the news about the void at the end of the rainbow is kind of the family business.
Sexiest Song(s)
Mikaela Straus, aka King Princess, possesses a tasty pop-R&B voice with sweet-and-sour tough-girl phrasing, so you might guess that it would be tough to get her lost in the dream pop mist. I’ll be damned if they don’t try, though. Nothing about last year’s swell EP suggested to me that she was about to drop a chill playlist on us, but that’s what Cheap Queen is, and funnily enough, I don’t mind at all. She pulls it off because she’s a good nuts-and-bolts pop songwriter (check out “Prophet”, mmmmm) and a better communicator, even if there’s nothing too unusual about anything she has to say. You’d think they would have run out of powdery eighties synthesizer patches by now. Regardless, this is a strong choice for those who deem Billie Eilish too spider-eaty and tonally restricted, or for those who don’t find Troye Sivan’s butthole all that fascinating.
Saddest Song
Everything on Julia Jacklin’s searing, well-titled Crushing. Look, Julia does not want to be touched. I believe her. Her plea for proxemic autonomy has been read as a feminist statement, and… sure, what the hell, if Cardi B in ass pants can be strip-mined for feminist significance, so can Julia Jacklin’s high-strung disposition. But what do I know, I’m not even a girl. Fans of Big Thief probably dig this, as Julia’s agitated warble is not dissimilar to Adrienne Lenker’s, but the storytelling on Crushing lands with the sort of straight-to- the-jaw roundhouse punch that Lenker, talented as she is, has either been unable or unwilling to pack. All of these narratives are trapped in that agonizing moment when a romantic relationship is over but neither partner will pull the rip cord and jump. The result is the year’s most harrowing album, and its most intense, even as Julia promises us she’s eventually going to come out of the funk, open a window, and air things out.
Most Notable Cover Version
Morrissey’s California Son, and — hey, where are you going?, hear me out here. I thought we were supposed to be friends. More to the point, I thought we were both friends with Morrissey. Shit hit the fan and you are no longer a fan? Well, you’re missing a…, well, certainly not a great one, or even a good one, but a remarkable one. Noteworthy, as Homeboy Sandman might put it.
Eye-popping as it is, the tracklist is only the third most notable thing about this crazed late career covers set. Whatever his faults – and we’ve lately been as busy enumerating them as we were ignoring them in the eighties and nineties – Morrissey has always had good taste. Why wouldn’t that extend to an appreciation of “Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow”? That leads us to the second most notable thing about the set: just how well he sings songs that you’d figure he has no business singing. Did you think Morrissey could handle Laura Nyro soul and make you present to every syllable and every inflection? Right, you didn’t think about it at all, and that’s because the very notion would have seemed ludicrous to you. But here we are, with Moz riding around on the melody like a fucking stunt pilot, and Billie Joe Armstrong in the background, contributing awed support vocals. Great players make great plays, as the philosopher Jeff Van Gundy used to like to say, and Morrissey is coasting down the lane, straight to the hoop, dribbling through an arm and a leg and slam dunking, over and over.
Reviewers are not appreciating this, and that is because of the single most notable thing about this album: it’s a world-class troll job. Morrissey raiding the vault for classic protest songs in 2019 – and singing them all with front-lines fist-in-the-air vigor – presents the critical listener with the sort of conundrum unusual in pop, where the political lines are usually broad and blatant, and done in fluorescent paint, and offset by traffic cones with arrows that say look right here folks. What do we make of the apparent contradiction between Phil Ochs liberation lyrics associated with the civil rights movement and Morrissey’s loud and visible support of odious white nationalist politicians?
In order to grok, we need a more subtle understanding of Morrissey’s project – which, mind you, is not an apology for it – and maybe a better take on the malicious politics of the dreaded 55+ demographic. Morrissey sees Islam as an affront to the sort of secular humanist values that are usually called progressive by those who have no problem throwing stones at the church. Never mind its ahistoricity; this belief is not incompatible with his support for gay rights and animal liberation and his longstanding condemnation of all forms of religious faith. Remember that Ann Marie Waters, the infamous politician Morrissey supports, does not view herself as a reactionary: she wants to keep Muslims out of the UK because she believes their worldview is incompatible with science and progress and feminism and buttsex and a whole bunch of other delightful stuff that isn’t in the Koran. She sees herself as a descendent of the suffragettes, fighting agents of ignorance and intolerance.
And it is a sad truth that many (though not all) of the people down with the Great Replacement theory feel just as she does. They hear “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, and they imagine that that pawn is the beleaguered working class white man, assaulted by a press corps in the pocket of national security agencies and billionaire corporations, all conspiring to rig the system against the little guy. And never mind that that’s not what Bob Dylan meant, because… look, what did Bob mean, anyway? That guy was always vague. Gauche populism was part of the marketing strategy from the outset. He was more than happy to be whatever you wanted him to be, as long as you believed that you, and he, were in the know.
So even if we haven’t learned anything new about Morrissey today, maybe we’ve learned something important about Bob Dylan. And maybe we’ve learned even more about certain members of the Baby Boom generation – those now turning to radically unpleasant solutions and voting for demagogues, former hippies who view their belligerent non-cooperation with orthodox liberal institutions (they’d call them neo-liberal) as an extension of a resistance culture they misremember from the sixties. Maybe the ugliness was always there. And maybe they told us not to trust anybody over 30 because they always knew, deep down, exactly where they were heading.
Worst Song On A Good Album And Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should’ve Known Better
Taylor Swift, “London Boy” and “ME”. Good news and bad news, people. Take the bitter with the sweet, as Carole King put it. I’m happy to say that the fetching version of Taylor is back, as it had largely been M.I.A. on the last two sets, rife as they were with stories of getting borracho at celebrity events plus the obligatory complaints about social media. Way beneath her talents, if you ask me. She’s also writing lyrics with the sort of observational specificity that’s awfully rare in pop, even if she’s still unwilling to observe anything that doesn’t affect her personally. However, she no longer has the patience or discipline for the sort of linear storytelling that she did so effortlessly on the first four records. Or maybe she doesn’t think synthpop can accommodate it? Who can know the mind of a Taylor Swift. Popularity at this level does lead to warped priorities and scrambled synapses.
The bigger problem is that she refuses to push her composition into new territory. Too many of these eighteen newies are straight-up reiterations of tracks from her back catalog, and only so much of this conservatism can be pinned on the rigid Mr. Antonoff, slave to the relative minor. Taylor Swift wrote so much so quickly that it was inevitable that she’d start repeating herself as her production outpaced her experience. But this is, as you’ve noticed by now, a very intelligent woman. If she cares about her art as much as she says she does, you’d figure she’d recognize the problem and take some evasive action. In all art forms, risk aversion plus attenuation of urgency equals mush, and some of the weaker tracks on Lover are the sonic equivalent of baby food. Even as her (pop) star continues to ascend, she’s been stuck in neutral as a writer and musician for three albums now. If she wants to be remembered as a writer and musician first, rather than as a (pop) star, she ought to plot a course correction.
Song That Would Drive You Craziest On Infinite Repeat
Vampire Weekend’s “Sunflower”.
Song That Got Stuck In Your Head The Most This Year
“Wasted Youth” by Jenny Lewis.
Worst Lyrics
“Redesigning Women”
Worst Song Of The Year
The Mountain Goats — “Doc Gooden”. In general, I do not think I hold, or value, idiosyncratic opinions. I like The Wizard Of Oz and Elizabeth Warren and Harry Potter books and Monet’s Water Lilies; that’s about where my tastes are. I do defend a lot of unpopular music, but that’s only because I like music in general. I pitch a pretty big tent. Similarly, there’s not a lot that I don’t like because everybody else likes it; we all know about me and Radiohead, but I’m happy to give credit when it’s due to Greenwood and Selway, who are outstanding musicians.
But the Mountain Goats are different. Not since Leonard Cohen has there been an act about which I’m at such sharp variance with critical opinion. For the life of me I cannot figure out what the attraction is: the band doesn’t rock, beauty is beyond them, Darnielle isn’t much of a singer, and his lyrics always strike me as the sort of stuff that Will Sheff might chuck into the wastebasket with some vehemence. Even the concept on In League With Dragons seems designed to piss me off: this is supposed to be an album about D&D, but there’s no D&D content here at all, and I resent having been made to sift through this tedious hunk of junk in order to look for it.
To make matters more insulting, the Doc Gooden song is a total embarrassment. For starters, the timeline is wrong: if you’re older than 35 and you were in the NYC metro, Gooden is still quite present to you; he’s not a lost or forgotten anything. The LL Cool J quote doesn’t fit no matter how hard the band forces it, and the reference to the “speedball” is so corny and on the nose that I think Harry Chapin just rose from the dead. Finally, he’s got the scene-setting detail wrong – Gooden didn’t pitch his no-hitter in Seattle, he threw it at Yankee Stadium. if Darnielle was a baseball fan rather than a dilettante mining baseball (and Dungeons & Dragons) for crummy metaphors, he’d know that. I imagine he would say that’s beside his point, which is something stupidly obvious about the ephemerality of magic, I guess. But you open yourself up to pedantic criticism when you make pedantic songs. Because you know what would be cool?, an actual song about Dwight Gooden. Not Gooden as a vehicle for your dumb observations about life. He doesn’t deserve that. He didn’t resurrect the Mets franchise so he could be pity-used by some strumming fakeademic from Indiana. Spare us.
Okay, sorry. I had to get that out of my system. Positivity next, I promise.
