(That’s What I Like About) Baltimore

They all play like no one’s keeping score.

You might recognize this one. Unlike most of the rest of the songs in this Almanac, it wasn’t written in 2015 or 2016. “(That’s What I Like About) Baltimore” dates back to late 2008, and it’s been performed a few times by a couple of different combos.It’s possible you heard it at a show and, given its simplicity, you might even be able to sing along to it. I posted the original bedroom demo of this song to this website years ago, and I think that recording was downloaded by a bunch of my pals. Maybe even you, reader.

It was never recorded for real, by a band, though — and, given its subject matter, it seemed like it was a good fit for this Almanac. A person who appreciated the original demo (or at least the silly doo-wop backing vocals) said to me, cleverly, that she felt it had more to do with Jersey City than it did with Baltimore. In 2008, my writing wastrending toward autobiography — this was the time of Let The Night Fall— so I guess it was only natural to assume that the criticism of what went on in “my town” was actual criticism of my town. But this isn’t supposed to be my voice. “Baltimore” was always meant to be a character song: one narrated by a guy whose perspective is, to say the least, problematic. I was thinking of Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” and stuff from Good Old Boys like “Birmingham” — songs where the narrator’s superficial engagement with a place hints at some of the deep troubles beneath the sunny-day exterior. So “my town” could really be anywhere: just a place that the main character deems inauthentic by comparison with Baltimore as he imagines it.

Still, I entertained writing a different song about Baltimore and leaving this one out of the Almanac. Richmond comes close, and San Francisco is great for baseball (sometimes), but Baltimore is my favorite American city that isn’t in New Jersey. It’s already taken a beating in the popular imagination — which is kinda what motivated this song in the first place — and I didn’t want to pile on. I’ve never seen The Wire or Homicide, but whenever I’d go to Baltimore, people felt the need to bring them up and mention the desolation that inspired them. Songs about Baltimore do tend to be bleak: not just Randy Newman’s, but Lyle Lovett’s, and Gram Parsons via Bobby Bare, and “Hungry Heart” and etcetera throughout the pop catalog. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want a casual listener to think that I thought that Baltimore was just crab cakes and Berger cookies; a kitchy pit stop on I-95 where I can grab some stuff to eat and enjoy some local color as I joyride home. That would make me cry.

Ultimately, I decided that this song belonged in the Almanac — or belonged somewhere, so why not here? “Baltimore” is the rare Tris McCall number that I have good reason to believe that people like, and that I’ve actually market-tested a little before I tried to foist it on anybody. It’s about two minutes long, and I still think that’s the optimal length for a pop song. As for the accompanying story, it’s a sad one, and it trades in the same complex, ambivalent emotions that (I hope) peek through the spaces between the big, bouncy major chords. Liberal guilt is one of the debilitatingforces in American life at the moment, but risible as it is, I don’t think it’s all that pernicious. We’re dealing with worse. While I question Philip’s motivations and some of his methods, too, the poor schmuck certainly has my sympathy.

Kate Beaton

Back to the wall, nowhere to run.

The decision to do the Almanac was mainly driven by webcomic envy. It feels like the ideal way to tell a story: episodically, a page a day, on a regular update schedule. The Pittsburgh song I’m posting today doesn’t have anything to do with Kate Beaton, but I’m dropping her name here in tribute, and as an acknowledgment of one of my biggest inspirations for the project. You might know Kate Beaton — she’s such an amazing caricaturist and storyteller that her fame has spread far past the still-small world of webcomics. There’s an archive ofher history and literature cartoons at Hark, A Vagrant (that’s her site); it’s about as lively as visual art gets.

My favorites, though, are a couple of artists who you probably wouldn’t know unless you know webcomics. Meredith Gran draws Octopus Pie, which has been running for ten years now — and is coming in for a landing — has evolved from a goofy slice-of-life comic about a couple of young women in New York City to a work of sublime narrative poetry. It’s simultaneously the best reporting on life in Brooklyn and the finest epic novel I’ve ever read a page at a time. I’m going to be so sad to see it go, but it’s going out on top. Unsounded, a wild ride created by a Floridian named Ashley Cope, features a fully realized fantasy world (and magic system loosely based on computer programming) of her own invention. She’s great at drawing action scenes and trippy, otherworldly landscapes. But what she really excels at is the character stuff. The comic is, at base, an on-the-road buddy story starring a young girl with a tail and a compromised set of morals and a deeply religious zombie wizard (she says wright) whose prose is even more purple than mine. At times it reminds me of Fritz Leiber, and other times of Dr. Seuss, but mostly it’s just Ashley Cope, the great fantasist of the moment.

Anyway, there’s nothing comic about today’s song, which is my attempt to rock a little (as Stevie Nicks once said) — with plenty of bass synthesizers, of course. The riff is lifted from a thousand different new wave numbers, but the tale is my own invention. Here’s one time when the short story on the city page is a retelling — actually an elaboration — of the song lyric. It’s all pretty coherent. Next week, I’ll be more mysterious.

Route 52

Out of range at the end of the line.

In Ecology Of Fear, Mike Davis writes about our national obsession with West Coast apocalypse. Filmed depictions of Pacific disaster are big entertainment for the whole country. If the earthquakes don’t get Southern California, it’ll be the landslides, or the tornadoes (Los Angeles is weirdly prone to them, he suggests), or a tsunami, or a megadrought that will leave millions of beautiful and formerly well-hydrated people gasping for a drink of water.

In part, we’re fixated on Californian disaster stories because we know that the planners are throwing dice with death, taking major chances by overdeveloping a region that isn’t exactly geologically sound. But if we’re honest, we ought to concede that we’re also rubberneckers, and little Savonarolas who believe that vanity will, in due time, be punished by the universe. We’re pieces of work, we are. When the cataclysm comes, we expect Californians to stop tanning and turn on each other; this is the theme of, among other songs, Jamey Johnson’s excellent-repugnant “California Riots”. While the liberals will be killing each other over scarce resources, Jamey will be in his pickup truck and headed back to Macon. I hope he’s not laughing.

But just as the secret of eschatology is in understanding that every day on earth contains its own little acts of genesis and tribulation, the awful truth of California — especially Southern California — is that apocalypse happens in slow motion all the time. The burdens of apocalypse fall disproportionately on the damned, which, in a country that worships money, mostly means the folks who haven’t got any. California is the Garden of Eden, but you won’t find this place too hot if you ain’t got the dough-re-mi; it’s as true today as it was when Woody Guthrie first sang that chorus oh so many moons ago. Right now, a regime in Washington that appears to hate the whole West Coast is making life hard for the immigrants and illegals and asylum-seekers who are huddled at the bottom rung; this puts extra pressure on folks who are already the most vulnerable to droughts and mudslides and all the other dangers of a land that has never wholly been tamed. That gorgeous, flower-dotted country between San Diego and the Mexican border is home to many of the wealthiest Americans, living in beautiful houses. It’s also a transition zone populated by poor workers whose hold on American life is getting more precarious by the day. When disaster comes, guess who’s going to ride it out okay, and who is going to fall into the fault line?

You may have noticed that many Californians are sick of this treatment — sick enough that they’re contemplating taking their beach ball and going away. A #Calexit, if it were to happen, really would be a disaster, a comet-strike to the political world: a huge percentage of America’s gross domestic product would be wiped off the books, probably for good. There were similar rejectionist movements in Texas and other Southern states when Obama reached the White House, so it’s tempting to think that Californian separatism will also come to nothing. But I hope that the success of the Brexit campaign and the rise of the SNP has taught us to take secession movements seriously. A year ago, nobody thought that the MPs in Westminster were really going to turn away from the EU. Well, hell, they’re really going to do it.

Would Sacramento really kiss the rest of us ingrates off? Well, honestly, why wouldn’t Californians at least consider it? They have no voice in the electoral college — Presidential elections are usually decided even before their polls close. They are taxed to pay for an aggressive foreign policy that doesn’t serve their interests. Now they’re at the mercy of federal immigration officers whose brutal practices undermine municipal police departments and erode trust in authorities of all kinds. The state that has been a tremendous driver of innovation ever since it first consented to be part of the Union has to watch, voiceless, as a bunch of know-nothings in office deny scientific consensus. Climate’s heating up; cool heads aren’t likely to prevail.

The action-adventure-y “Route 52” is set at a not-so-distant future moment when California is in the teeth of a drought and readying for the big divorce. None of that is spelled out explicitly in the song’s lyric, but it’s all hinted at, and one of the things I’m enjoying about this Almanac is that I can fill in the narrative blanks with the story and the essay. This particular story is a little gonzo, I admit. I’m not going to make a habit of that, hopefully, but I felt that “Route 52” required me to take a few liberties. As a hokey person I went for a Californian sound: a little Game Theory, and Allen Clapp, and Aislers Set, and CVB. I realize those are all Northern Californian acts. Beach Boys mimicry is beyond my capacities.

I feel the need to say that I love California as much as any damned Yankee can. I do not, ever, want to be part of a Golden Stateless nation; that would horrify me, and I wish Washington would stop pushing California toward the door. It would really feel like we were shooting the popular kid as an idiotic act of defiance. My fear is that unscrupulous politicians who have no great love of the Union and a great deal of love for power will determine that they’ve got a better chance of imposing their will on the rump of the nation if California goes. You may find that far-fetched or legally dubious; I think it’s frighteningly plausible, and I’ve noticed that laws — even constitutional laws — have a habit of giving way when people in power deem them inconvenient. Consider: right now, most Americans’ primary enemy isn’t Russians, or Arabs, or Mexicans. It’s other Americans — Americans on the other side of the political divide. Once the cookie starts to crumble, the whole thing could fall to pieces fast. Don’t make me pull for #NJexit. You know we’d be fine. We’ve got the Garden.

The Prince Of Daylight

Could you still want me now?

When I was a young music fan learning about rock history, most of what I loved was called pretentious by the music press. This bothered me. Close To The Edge?, that had to have been received as a masterpiece, no? The consensus said it hadn’t, and wasn’t. According to the Rolling Stone Record Guide, it was about the same quality as Steve Forbert’s second album and nowhere near as good as Willie Nile. Way worse, even, since nobody ever said that Forbert or Nile were pretentious. Their reach did not exceed their grasp. This was the tenor of the time: terror that bands would pretend to qualities or abilities or concepts that were beyond their ability to fully realize. Why rock critics were so intent on policing ambition was never 100% clear to me. It might have had something to do with radical democracy, or a belief that Shake, Rattle and Roll was what rock music was all about and any departure from youthful simplicity was a violation of the sacred code.

I love Shake, Rattle and Roll. Most of the time I can hear the argument that rock music is about cars and sexual frustration and that a songwriter complicates that formula at her great peril. Popular music is kid’s stuff in the best possible way, and that’s because the kids are alright. Through the lens of that understanding I can sorta see progressive rock as an affront to the verities, or to simple common sense, and I begin to understand why critics deemed the moondog and the march hare inappropriate to the enterprise. But I can’t help noticing that the writers who ran down Genesis and Rush and Marillion and Van Der Graaf Generator and the other groups that excited me were the same guys (and it was always guys) who insisted on canonizing their favorites in a Hall of Fame. Surely museum ossification was a greater affront to the very concept of youth music than Jon Anderson singing about Eastern religion, no? Couldn’t rock, generous as it is, accommodate some wondrous stories, too?

Besides, it never felt like pretentiousness was the issue with Yes, if there was any issue at all, which I’m telling you pal there wasn’t. Any group that would choose its moment of commercial ascendancy to record a double album with a single song on each of its four sides is going to get knocked for impracticality, and I can see how that would look very much like entitlement to blue collar heroes in the press. But the swell thing about Jon, as I understand him, is that for him, there was never any other possibility — he was going to sing about what moved him, and that was that. He wasn’t ever trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of the shastras, or of shining flying purple wolfhounds; he wasn’t a damned pseud. He read some holy books and was deeply moved, and this was the music that poured out of him. To me, that’s the very definition of soul. Obviously he wanted to sell records, too — his approach to showbiz was never all that esoteric. It just wouldn’t have dawned on Jon that the average man wouldn’t have been excited by the cosmic encounters he was having. Knock him for his taste, or his hippy-dippyness, but his pretenses weren’t the problem.

As for the rest of the musicians in the band, well, sure, they showed off. It was the era; guys in basic blooze bands showed off, too. But more often than not, they took a hokey, community-theatre approach to Jon Anderson’s storytelling. He’d sing “lost in the city”, and they’d drop in a few bars of wandering, rootless, lost-in-the-city music, or they’d knock over a big pile of automobile parts in the studio to simulate the “war” section of “Gates Of Delirium”. Squire may have felt that his frontman’s lyrics were googly-eyed, but he did his best to reinforce their dramatic significance. It was this absolute faith in the communicative power of the grand sonic gesture that really distinguished Yes; not just among progressive rock bands, but among Seventies acts in general. My feeling is that Jon, innocent Lancashire farmboy that he was, drove most of this cheese to market. But I rather think Howe and Wakeman and even Bill Bruford were predisposed toward illustrative playing, too. Sometimes they tried to get over on complicated bullshit, but it was rarely subtle and mysterious bullshit. They just wanted to take you high and blow your mind and leave you agog like any other bunch of shamen; they’d shake that medicine rattle right in your face.

Yes remains my very favorite band. I’m as big a fan as I was when I was 14; maybe even bigger, since I dig parts of the catalog that I used to find compromised by the endless lineup changes, or commercial considerations. I still consider Close To The Edge a masterpiece, and while critical consensus hasn’t exactly come around, I’m happy to say I’m not alone. Most of the pro musicians you’ll meet will confess to an appetite for prog; Scott Miller, to give you one example, could quote you Jon Anderson chapter and verse, and even appreciated records like Relayer and Going For The One that critics still like to slam for density and pretension. Echoes of Yes are intended to be heard straight across all the music I’ve ever made in every group I’ve ever played with, and I think the only reason why I’m never called pretentious is because I’m not good enough at my instruments to make anybody think of prog-rock. But all of my projects wear their pretensions pretty boldly, and of course they do, because how am I ever going to make myself into something dazzling if I can’t pretend, unconscionably I’m sure, to be dazzling first? Even if I never get there, I would like people to remember that I tried.

Much as I’d love it to be, “The Prince Of Daylight” isn’t really a prog-rock song; there’s no widdly-widdly Moog solo, it’s not in a tricky time signature, it isn’t a multi-part epic, there’s no Roger Dean drawing that would suit it well. It takes place right here on earth — in New York City, where a kid is wondering if he’s permanently estranged himself from a God who might not be listening, anyway. That’s a pretty far cry from cars and sexual frustration and I can’t get no satisfaction. But I don’t drive, and I don’t flatter myself that anybody would be interested in my adventures in romance. And sometimes I *do* get satisfaction; certainly not every day, but often enough that if I’m being honest when I’m writing, I’m bound to inscribe those moments when the combination lock to reality suddenly clicks into place and snaps open. That’s what we’ve got here, and all references to Yes, and Pink Floyd, and Fish-era Marillion are absolutely intentional. Alex Lifeson, too, I mean, Jay Braun plays guitar on this number.

Take Me To The Waterfall

Pour it on.

Like many Americans with a taste for eschatology, I read Kathryn Schulz’s article on the Very Big One with interest. Schulz wrote the story of the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake like a mystery thriller, which, in a way, it is, even if nobody ever really believed in Seattle’s geological stability. Naturally, seismologists, public health officials, and cooler heads who dislike mass panic were quick with temperate responses to the piece: there’s no meaningful way in which it can be said that a region is overdue for a cataclysm, and the Pacific Northwest is not as unprepared as Schulz implies that it is, and protected as it is by the Puget Sound, Seattle is unlikely to be inundated anyway. But as we’ve learned over and over, in modern America, rational argument is no match for fear porn. Seattle now has a bullseye on its back. I know the next time I get off the plane at Sea-Tac, I won’t be hearing those tempered voices. I’ll be thinking: “when the earthquake comes, everything west of 1-5 will be toast.”

That’s an awful lot of toast with your breakfast. But Americans have developed quite an appetite for toast, what with our endless zombie shows and post-apocalyptic dramas and Mad Max scenarios and fantasies about total societal collapse. Bring it all down, I keep hearing people say. Hollywood keeps serving us celluloid representations of NYC demolished: by falling rocks and thuggers and great waves and whatnot. In the New York metro, we’ve already lived through a real cataclysm and its aftermath, and while I won’t hazard a guess about how much out-of-state spectators enjoyed the show, I do know that it permanently altered the tone of the drums along the Hudson. I also recall the psychosexual effects of 9/11: with sudden horrible death staring us in the face, people all over the city became susceptible to (and acted on) crazed urges they hadn’t felt before. This is where, I feel, both the Book of Revelation and those awful last-days books by Tim LaHaye really depart from probability. After the rapture and the tribulations, there really ought to be wild orgies, shouldn’t there?

For “Take Me To The Waterfall”, I imagined the effect of the threat of the subduction zone quake on a guy who’d otherwise been repressed about his physical desires. The threat of disaster pops his lid open, basically. The waterfall in the song is Snoqualmie, which is spectacular and thunderous, and not a little terrifying, and only a short drive east of Seattle. I couldn’t think of a better metaphor for the mercilessness of nature; Mother Nature, human nature, you call it yourself. If you do go chasing waterfalls (I do), I strongly recommend making the trip.

Apocalyptic-themed rock music usually means Jackson Browne to me, but apocalypse plus sexual compulsion will always equal Peter Gabriel. Even as a young singer, PG always sounded like a veteran of a thousand psychic wars; I um, do not. But we tried to bathe this song in a little red rain, if you know what I mean, and I made like Larry Fast on the Moog.I had the great pleasure of interviewing Larry Fast, who is a Jersey guy, a few years ago.That article was pulled away from me in a last minute editorial switcheroo and run before I had a chance to polish it or frame it.Of the million and one writing assignments I’ve taken on over the last two decades, that may be the one I’d most like to have back.I have pilfered so many ideas from that guy.It seemed like the least I could do was write up a good piece on him.Your man dropped the ball.Sorry.

Conspiracy Theory

It’s all connected, unless it is not.

So I came up with this song — the Denver number — around the same time I wrote this essay. Sometimes I’ll write something and it’ll get love and affection; other times, even my friends just pass it by. I figured that the Conspiracy! essay would be a popular one. For whatever reason, I was dead wrong about that. My conclusions might not have been too satisfying, or maybe the writing wasn’t engaging enough to justify the density of the paragraphs. There’s nothing about it I’d take back, though; in fact, if you read it all the way through, I think you might agree that it was one of the few times in my life when I was actually prophetic.

That makes good sense because I am obsessed with conspiracy theory. Seriously: chemtrails, faked moon landings, Pizzagate, aliens, fluoridation, Paul is Dead, whatever you’ve got, bring it on, I’ll stay up reading about it. I am very interested in the way that American consciousness has been reformatted by protracted exposure to the associative logic of the Internet. I also think that conspiracy theory is a natural byproduct of authoritarianism: as rulers get more and more secretive and remote, we’d have to be pretty credulous to accept their word on things. Since we all have some limited investigative resources at our disposal now, and time on our hands, we’re bound to sit in front of the computer and connect the dots into all kinds of crazy constellations. It’s the modern sentence.

The direct inspiration for “Conspiracy Theory” was Camper Van Beethoven and David Lowery, who has authored some fearsome conspiracy theory numbers. I was trying to capture that slightly daft repetitiveness that I associate with the early Camper albums; Elvis Presley died and no one knows why, etc. I don’t think that Camper would have used a Sub 37 necessarily, or played a Wakemanesque line over the chord progression, but that’s my weakness, not theirs.

Anyway, this is where we start with America 2017: a small apartment in Colorado, and an alienated male subject, worried about his money and his health and with no good reason to trust anybody around him. Like a homemade computer (or bomb), his lament is designed to be modular, and I may hop on and change the fifth verse as events overtake me. I hadn’t heard of Vitaly Churkin until a couple of weeks ago; when he turned up dead and the Internet started brimming over with theories, I knew I had to put him on the song. (Also, his name scanned very well.) Prior to that, I’d been singing Jacqueline Sutton/and Serena Shim — Google those names if you’d like to take a trip down the rabbit hole. Given how much conspiracy theory there is in circulation, I doubt I’ll ever sing that verse the same way twice.

An Almanac opens

It’s yours. It’s mine. Wave it around in an infinity sign.

Hi, I’m Tris McCall. For the past two years, I’ve been discovering America. Today I’m ready to begin sharing what I’ve found there. And since all American projects deserve a nice gonzo American user interface, we’ve designed a website called McCall’s Almanac that will work asa conduit for my reflections. Imagine something not unlike the Old Farmer’s Almanac, but with fewer soybeans and more synthesizers.

Go on, click on it; it’s pretty. See that map of the United States? Every Tuesday at noon, from now until I run out of content to provide, I intend to add another page to it. Each page will represent a different American city. On that page will be:

  • A song set in that city,
  • A cartoon drawing of the narrator,
  • A short story directly (or sometimes indirectly) related to the song,
  • The lyrics to the song and maybe a photograph or two,
  • A few tour-guide type recommendations divided into three categories: House of Worship, A Bike Ride, and a Vegetarian Option.

We’re kicking off the Almanac with three city pages and three new songs and stories: Seattle, Denver, and New York. Exactly one week from now, we’ll add a page for San Diego. After that, the road gets a little murkier — it depends on what I finish and when — but I’m determined to crash across the country as irresponsibly as I can. Ride shotgun if you like; I’m a good conversationalist. Much, much friendlier than I seem on the Internet.

The Almanac site was designed by Chris Littler, who fronts the Chamber Band. Ingrid K. Richter, George the Monkey, and Professor H.J. Englert helped me develop and refine the idea. The illustrations currently on the site were drawn by Una Bloom; there’ll be another artist too, but we haven’t gotten to those songs and stories yet.

Most importantly, I owe an enormous debt, both emotional and practical, to the musicians and producers who helped me recover my songwriting voice after I’d put it in drydock in 2009. That means Michael Flannery, who helped me cut many of these tracks at the Farm in West Chester, Pennsylvania and Bass Hit Studio, and Jay Braun, who oversaw the sessions at Water Music in Hoboken and Sunnyside Guitars. There’s a full credits page on the site, but today I’d like to take the time to acknowledge and thank drummers Eric Tait (who runs the Farm) and Brett Whitmoyer, bassist Justin Braun, synth player Dan Flannery, singer Ronni J. Reich, and Rachel Drehmann, who graced “Conspiracy Theory” with her French horn.

The songs I’m doing with Mike will be released later in 2017 on an album called American Almanac. The Jay Braun-produced album will be called You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby, or maybe The Unmapped Man; I keep going back and forth. These are separate projects with different sounds; Jay and Mike leave very personal aesthetic imprints on everything they do, which is part of why it’s fun working with these guys. But all of these songs were similarly motivated: I felt something had gone awry in America, and I wanted to figure out what it was before our country had defamiliarized itself completely to me. So this Almanac is instant historical fiction — a to-the-minute record of my encounter with the smoking beakers and suspicious-looking test tubes of the ongoing American experiment. That makes it sound like all the songs and stories are serious; they aren’t. Some of them are downright silly. This is a Tris McCall project, after all — I’m the guy who gave you Brandy Balls. Remember that number? No? Well… maybe that’s for the best. Let’s make this a fresh start for everybody.

In order to provide some context for the Almanac and to remind you to check in each Tuesday, I’ll also post a little background on each song and story on this site. Since we’re launching with three numbers, I’ll space it out this week, and discuss each separately, but here’s the capsule version: the Denver song is called “Conspiracy Theory”, the Seattle song is “Take Me To The Waterfall”, and the New York song is a prog-out called “The Prince Of Daylight.” Each of the stories is about three to four thousand words and designed to be read with the songs playing in the background. Check them all out, and remember: there’ll be another next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, just the way it works on the webcomics that inspired me to do this in the first place. Much love and respect to Meredith Gran and Ashley Cope; this wouldn’t have happened without them.

Should you appreciate what we’re doing, tell a friend via the news-spreading mechanism of your choice. Digital network, major media outlet, bullhorn, whatever you like. Make a racket. Happy travels.

tris@trismccall.net

 

Critics Poll 27 — One final bit

Rock star. And I like rock stars, don’t you?

Hey, rocker, remember the Summer of Love? Well, this sure ain’t it. That Age of Aquarius that was supposed to be coming?, that needs a jump-start. Today you may feel more like Neil Tennant in “Dreaming Of The Queen” — no lovers left alive, and no one with any humanity in a position of ultimate political power.

Fascists are on the march all over the globe. They’re poised to elect collaborationist governments in places (like America) where people are supposed to be too smart and too cultured to let that happen. The National Front stands a very good chance of winning the next election in France. The Philippines are now run by the sort of guy who’d trip you in an alley for no reason and laugh. The prime minister of Hungary wants to stuff refugees into shipping containers, and it looks like this charmer is going to get his sadistic wish. Russia really did just decriminalize domestic abuse; that’s not a joke or even hyperbole. I’m sure you’re painfully familiar with ISIS, a fascist-bro purification movement of the most overt, blow-your-deviant-face-off kind. All over the world, it is springtime for jerks and thugs. This, I am afraid, is what democracy looks like — maybe not every time an electorate speaks, but increasingly often, often enough to elect and empower cruel regimes that do awful things to the weakest among us. Call it temporary if it makes you feel better and keep your faith in populism if it’ll help you sleep, but do not deny that something terrible has happened to the people.

Or maybe we were always this way. Maybe it’s just easier now to take the measurement of our deepest desires and cater to our darkest demands. I always feared that this is where direct democracy would take us: mob rule driven by sectarian hatred and ancient grievances, ugly people doing ugly things to teachers and scientists and religious folks whose faiths were outvoted. The Cultural Revolution, basically, or Animal Farm once Napoleon became entrenched. I’m always taken aback when someone talks glowingly about people power because… well, I’ve met people. I myself am one of them. I know rather intimately what people are like, and I assure you they’ve got quite enough power already, thank you.

As it turns out, there is a large institution that has always been consistent and forthright about its belief in human depravity. That institution is the Church, and I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that its head is the one remaining world leader who agrees with you. The Pope agrees with you about your civic requirement to treat refugees and immigrants with compassion. He agrees with you that the world’s wealth ought never to be concentrated in the hands of a tiny group of people. He agrees with you that we need to be better stewards of the planet and that we have a serious responsibility to care for the Earth before we turn it over to the next bunch of occupants. He agrees that ethnic and religious prejudice — which I guess is back in vogue now — is both idiotic and unethical. About social issues I don’t guess he agrees with you much, at least not publicly. But since he’s taken over the Vatican, he’s tried to do what he can to reorient the Church’s attention away from your pants and back on to Matthew 25:35-40 where it belongs.

You are leery about the Church and you have reason to be. The child sex-abuse scandal discredited clergy worldwide; straight-up obliterated their status as moral referees. This was a far bigger factor in the elections than people realize. Catholics did not follow the guidance of their priests or their Pope, and that’s at least in part because they don’t see paragons in the pulpit. They see pederasts. Beyond that, the office of the Pope has not always been, to put it mildly, a force for good. The Vatican is chock full of old guys who are fixated on the preservation of the nastiest elements of Christianity as it is practiced by imperfect humans. The New York Times recently reported that Steve Bannon has been in close touch with the reactionary Cardinals who’d like to undermine Pope Francis’s liberalization effort. He’d like to help them along. That he recognizes the Pontiff as a powerful foe ought to tell you what you need to know: you and the Church are presently in the same corner. Welcome home, heathen.

This could all change overnight. The same cruel tide that has inundated governments worldwide could swamp the Vatican, too. Pope Francis is 80 years old, and physics suggests that his successor will ride the pendulum back in the other direction. But right now he’s hale and reasonably jolly and unafraid to speak out, and he’s been generous enough to take many giant steps in your direction. Yes, you. He’s been dragging the Church toward you. There he is, right on the corner, with his arms open and his cross out, representing every single thing that the current vile regime in Washington isn’t. Don’t be shy; he’s already done most of the hard work. All you’ve got to do is open your window and say hello.

You don’t want to do this. When you were growing up, the Church made you feel lousy about yourself. Me too, buddy. Me too. Our local churches did not treat young me fairly. But Pope Francis is attempting to push open some heavy temple doors for us — doors many of us believed had rusted shut. We can’t afford to sneer at the olive branch he’s shaking in our direction. As Animal Mother memorably said to Jokerman in Full Metal Jacket, we’re fresh out of friends.

Because what better options for leadership do we have? The Democratic Party? Please. We’ve seen where that gets us. The comedians? Laugh the blues away if you can, but do recognize that pithy one-liners and 140 character witticisms are not going to get us out of this one. The social scientists? Bless them all; they’re working hard to demonstrate exactly how and why that we’ve gone off the rails. You and I believe them. Sometimes we even love them. But because they tend to be indirect, and because they present their evidence without the force of moral authority, they’re all too easy to dismiss. The Church, at its best, relies on two thousandyears of ethical precedent and hard-won wisdom, and its most effective operatives don’t tend to mince words. Your neighbor came to you in need and you spurned him? He was hungry and you didn’t feed him? That’s a sin. You’re a wealthy person who won’t share with those less fortunate? That’s a sin. Envy has hold of your heart; you’re treating God’s earth like your personal trash disposal unit; when you should have opened your heart, you built a wall instead. Those are sins — some of them mortal sins.

Do you see how elegant that is? How delightfully direct and economical, how powerful, how balls-out unequivocal in its condemnation of bad actors, whether peasants or kings? Calling out evil is what the Church does best, and when it speaks, it does so with all the cathedral bells ringing in the cloister. Talk from the Church floor and you’ve got centuries of history — not to mention volumes of scripture — backing you up. Yes, churches of all denominations are now larded down with bad readers who want to use the Word to punish their enemies, but that’s only been allowed to happen because we’ve abandoned our pews and ceded the floor to jerks. They’ve been so loud and so offensive in the name of God that they’ve convinced us that the Church is lost to us forever.

I have come to believe, strongly, that this is wrong. We could take the Church back if we put our minds to it. I think it would be quite a bit easier than reclaiming the legislatures, which have been gerrymandered to the point of illegibility and permanent disfunction, or the mass media, which currently has eyes only for clown shows and celebrity trainwreck stories. The Church is our natural ally because the monotheistic religions, when practiced the right way, are absolutely 100% anti-fascist. Real Judaism, Islam, Christianity?, the real articleis as anti-fascist as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, or Mr. Michael Render, or kissing your girlfriend. That’s what those religions are there for. They’re designed, on part, to knock a little humility into recalcitrant humanity, and to check our tendency toward selfish, beastly behavior.

I suppose it is arguable that there’s so much toxic waste in the pool that the unsearchable riches of the monotheistic religions are now irretrievable. Maybe so. Should we take on this clean-up job, we’re going to have a lot of work to do. But if we don’t do that work, we’re giving the power of the Church — the bells of the cathedral and the scriptures and all the authority that goes along with them — to a bunch of angry dopes who don’t know the first thing about religion. And they don’t deserve it. There are pundits who have never read a word of the Koran or the Muslim philosophers who’ll get on TV and make sweeping statements about Islam anyway. The Devil couldn’t ask for better helpers.

But you can be different. Here’s what I ask you to do in 2017: set your preconceptions aside, pick up the Holy Bible, start at Page 1 of Genesis, and keep going until you get to the end of the Book of Revelations. I promise you it will be the greatest ride you’ll ever take. I’d wager that you will be surprised by what you find there: not a conduct manual, or a self-help book, or a how-to, but a tale of mankind’s encounter with and brutal struggle against God, or ultimate reality, personified in these pages as Yahweh and Jesus Christ. It is the bedrock of Western literature, the skeleton key to history and culture, and a set of profound statements on the nature of existence. Right now, this towering literary artifact is in the hands of fundamentalists who don’t understand how reading and representation works. We’re all suffering from that. Pry the Bible away from these people. You wouldn’t let them ruin Herman Melville, would you?

I was 21 years old when I first read the Bible. I did it for a selfish, superstitious, and fundamentally irreligious reason: I was about to get on a plane to Washington State, and if we plowed into a mountain like I expected us to, I didn’t want to go to my grave without learning what the Bible said about the other side. I figured I’d get something like a Westernized version of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, which I also hadn’t read, but which had been badly summarized to me by a hippie in Northampton. What I got was nothing at all like what I was told to expect; instead, I found a much deeper and more vivid engagement with the same philosophical questions my political science professors were asking me to entertain. Who governs?, the Bible asks, over and over, and by what authority? What gives a man, or even a God, the right to tell another man what to do? Is it just pure, earth-shaking, locust-swarming power? If so, how can morality ever develop? Who has the prerogative to create, or destroy?

The Bible was composed over many centuries by many authors with different agendas and worldviews, and it contains many wild guesses and outright contradictions. But from time to time, the smoke from the burning bush clears, it comes to an enduring punchline that reverberates through the centuries. King David, one of the Bible’s great characters, after years of triumphs and horrifying screw-ups delivers his weary farewell in the Second Book of Samuel. And wouldn’t you know it?, he says the same damn thing Pope Francis has been trying to say for the past few years. He that ruleth over men must be just; ruling in the fear of God. On justice and humility all governing authority rests; anything else is just a bully move. More than that: it’s sinful. Let’s never be afraid to say so. We’ve got the big guy behind us.

Critics Poll 27 — My ballot, part 1

Rosa was a freedom fighter and she taught us how to fight: you, me, Jamila, everybody.

The news has been so awful lately, and the task of reporting it so joyless (not to mention thankless), that I have hesitated to add my voice to the chorus that has been singing such a sad song. Surely even in a time of crisis there are more rewarding things to discuss. But there is a difference between writing about politics, which you’re no doubt sick of hearing about, and writing about American popular culture and society, which will be around as long as America persists.

Four months ago I was assuming, much as the rest of the country was, that we were going to avert the worst and merely be saddled with the very bad. It was then I decided that I’d take the time to do the Poll again — not really to twist anyone’s arm, but just to get my preferences down, and park them here on a personal page that I’ve tried not to connect to any of the big networks. I understand why you might have cultivated a principled aversion to ranking artifacts, which, fun as it is, does feel like an exercise in self-absorption, and about electoral democracy in general, which always promises more than it delivers. If you didn’t feel like voting in the Poll this year, I can’t blame you: it’s been awhile since voting has been a rewarding thing to do.

Now that we know that our very modest wishes for the immediate political future won’t be coming true — and that the reins of power have been turned over to a gang of ghouls — the sanest course for critics might be to hold our breaths until the winds change.Not the most responsible, mind you, or the most courageous, but the one best designed to avoid reinforcing a regime that feeds on obsessive discussion and controversy. It seemed inevitable that any essay I’d write about music would drift into political territory, and soon enough I’d be rehashing all of the leftish talking points that did nothing to stave off disaster. I considered canceling the Poll, or doing it in private and not calling any attention to it.

Yet in a society as wobbly as this one currently is, I know politics will, sooner or later, come knocking on my door. It might be the tax collector, or the border-control agent, or the swastika spray-painter, or the public official here to tell us that the river has risen to a threatening level, or something even scarier. The things I’d like may be the same things you would: I’d like to see our criminal justice and penal systems reformed, and greater local autonomy, and an investment made in parks and mass transit, and a serious commitment made to preventing ecological catastrophe, real engagement with the heavy residue of centuries of racial inequality, and many other things that fall under the broad umbrella of egalitarian republicanism as I understand it. If I’m honest, I’d have to say that I want all of that pretty desperately– and that everything I’ve written, even the goofy stuff, contains within it an attempt to address the problems we’ve identified. If I’m attempting to raise consciousness through my purple prose, I’m not doing it very well. But I suppose I’m never going to stop trying.

So in the spirit of optimism and puerile divertisement, and in a limited sort of faith that sunny days will return to these shores, I offer you my list for 2016 and the usual rude capsule essays that accompany my picks. I’ve come to see comedy as a destructive cul-de-sac, but I find I lack the wisdom to stop cracking wise. It’s the writer’s disease — the conviction that the right 140 characters delivered to the right audience will make the world spin backward through the sheer force of cleverness. Gallows humor is a pretty cheap commodity these days, and pithy remarks are mainly good for tombstones. No SNL joke is going to bring the administration down, and no Beyonce video proclamation will prompt a new Enlightenment. Never once in my life has the pen proved more powerful than the sword. I’m not much of a fencer. The pen is what I’ve got, so I might as well swing it around and look as formidable as I can manage.

You’ll notice that many of the artists I loved in 2016 felt the same way. Albums number three and nine contain legit, uncut protest music; most of the rest of this stuff points in that direction. Yet my album of the year is nothing but a landslide of first-rate musical craftsmanship. I have no idea who its principal voted for, although I certainly have my suspicions. She’s shrewdly mum about that kind of thing, which proves there are still a few artists out there who haven’t been drawn into the cold civil war we’re currently waging. I can’t walk a tightrope like that. My terrible disappointment with the results of the election and what it reveals about the disposition of the country is bound to creep into the words — and assessments — that follow. Amidst the usual rude remarks and poop jokes, there’ll be observations about the emergency state, gerontocracy, and the cratering of American moral authority. I know: you wish it was just the poop jokes. Me too, pal. Me, too.

Album Of The Year

  • 1. Miranda Lambert — The Weight Of These Wings
  • 2. Beyonce — Lemonade
  • 3. Jamila Woods — HEAVN
  • 4. Francis AndThe Lights — Farewell, Starlite!
  • 5. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
  • 6. Drake — Views
  • 7. Noname — Telefone
  • 8. Chance The Rapper — Coloring Book
  • 9. YG — Still Brazy
  • 10. Kanye West — The Life Of Pablo
  • 11. Look Park — Look Park
  • 12. J. Cole — 4 Your Eyez Only
  • 13. Say Anything — I Don’t Think It Is
  • 14. Car Seat Headrest — Teens Of Denial
  • 15. Vanishing Twin — Choose Your Own Adventure
  • 16. Jimmy Eat World — Integrity Blues
  • 17. Saba — Bucket List Project
  • 18. De La Soul — And The Anonymous Nobody…
  • 19. Lucy Dacus — No Burden
  • 20. Paul Simon — Stranger To Stranger

Best Album Title

Coloring Book. At this rate he’s going to close the churches right the hell down. Because who needs to sit in a pew and listen to a homily when you can catch the same spirit from a rap record? And this is a rap record, even if Chance makes you sit through the choir sections, and Francis Farewell Starlight’s vocal-diffusing dial-twisting thingamabob, and the Biebs, too. It’s just one with its drum and instrument sounds lifted from gospel, and messages inspired by the gospels. Poor Hezekiah Walker never stood a chance.

Best Album Cover

Freetown Sound. Devonte Hynes’ music continues to sound like it’s 1985, and you’re listening to it through a transistor radio somewhere down the hall, or through a partially closed door to an older sibling’s room. Maybe she’s crying in there. Maybe she’s under the covers with a porno. Hynes still cannot sing worth shit but as he grows in juice and cash flow, he can afford to maintain some expensive contacts among the theatre people, including Nelly Furtado, who appearson a song that is named after the Hadron Collider for no discernible reason. (I am sure there’s a connection, and no, I don’t want to hear the tortured explanation.) 90% chance of scoring some off-Broadway semi-ballet nonsense. But that’s no reason to hate on it. It’s a free country, sort of. Nobody is making you go to that ballet.

Best Liner Notes And Packaging

Lemonade, including the videos.Part III of a remarkable trilogy of albums concerning, respectively, 1.) the thrills of monogamous dedication in a world that insists on impermanence, 2.) the dangers of monogamous dedication in a world that values entropy, and now 3.) what to do when the partner with whom you are sharing monogamous dedication turns out to be something of a slutdog. Unless it’s the third leg of a four-sided table, in which case 4.) might be about shopping for a split-level in Morristown. (Leave Sasha Fierce out of this.) The frontwoman is one Beyonce Knowles, an artist of some repute. In her playing prime she has become a specialist in realist pop — her songs are not about teenage fornication or the lack thereof, but about grown-ass lovers trying to keep the flame burning through the windstorm of adulthood. An old journalist I, I am pleased to report that the star remains as careful to ground her storytelling in sociohistory as any other op-ed writer. Her Texas address means she has as much right to sing a country shoot-em-up as any of the hacks in Nashville — or the North Carolinian Tori Amos, whose own righteous album-length tirades Lemonade reminds me of. I can understand if a skeptic finds Beyonce’s need to meticulously cover each style of Southern American music tedious, or overdetermined, especially on an album that is supposed to conjure and communicate bizzerk rage and jealousy. But when the Spodeeodeedopalicious horns come in on “All Night”, I dare you to call it anything less than a fucking triumph. Because it is. And on those moments of bizzerk rage and jealousy?, I’d say she acquits herself rather well.

Most Welcome Surprise

New albums from De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. Also, Anderson.Paak’s very good Malibu. I’ve seen him likened him to Frank Ocean. But the breakout star of Dr. Dre’s last album is not really an auteur — he’s more of a post-Kendrick version of Maxwell, complete with social consciousness and a big boner (there’s a track here subtitled “Interluuube”, which is, like a lot of his pillow talk, more clumsy than effective.) Though Malibu is overlong and chock full o nuts, Paak does not prefer to poke along the meandering back roads that Frank likes; “I never wanna waste your time”, no matter how deep into the music store he goes, that’s his mission statement. He loves his fam (naturally), communicates poorly with women, raps iffily, and skirts Cee-Lo territory with soul throwback “Celebrate”. And he sure has some talented friends: Pino Palladino, Robert Glasper, 9th Wonder, Talib Kweli, etc. Someone spent a lot of money to make this sprawling, polyglot music sound like the hit it certainly won’t be. I hope nobody threatens to cut off his funding, because that’ll force him to “focus”, and that will be the end of that.

Biggest Disappointment

Metronomy’s surprisingly easygoing Summer 08. That album didn’t annoy me at all, and thatwas the problem. Summer makes me think of Tina Weymouth a bunch; not just Tina Weymouth but also the myth of Tina Weymouth, because a myth I think it is. Out of necessity, Chris Frantz hands his girlfriend a bass guitar and puts her in the band before she knows what she is doing; she learns to play on the job and the rest is history. So what if her boyfriend had been a sculptor? Would one of the greatest instrumentalists in the history of rock music have gone to her grave unaware of her talents? What if Frantz already had a bass player? Are we to believe she would have tagged along and sold merch or something? I recognize that people sometimes have latent abilities that only emerge because the stars align, and I also know that women in this nasty man’s world often need a push. But I refuse to believe that Weymouth didn’t have an inkling that she could kick ass, or that, prompted by ambition, she didn’t angle like fuck to get in the game. Because the alternative gives all the agency to the boys around her, when anybody who has ever heard Talking Heads knows that without its bass player that band would have had no agency at all. Without Weymouth, Talking Heads would have just been David Byrne and his whimsical and counterintuitive reflections. This also is why Talking Heads is deceptively difficult to imitate, and why bands who try to mimic Remain In Light or Speaking In Tongues always sound like they’re engaged in some airless, C-plus art project. To electrofunk out, it is important to have a monster on the bottom, and to have that beast’s power feel like an inevitability. A Tina Weymouth bass part is a rude fact, like the number of electrons in a hydrogen atom, or the sewer system that keeps the city livable, or your momma. Oh, right, the Metronomy album. Joe Mount loves Talking Heads. He handles the bass himself. Maybe he doesn’t love them enough.

Album That Opens Most Strongly

No Burden. The first three songs are just soooo good that you may think you’re listening to a stone classic. After that, Lucy Dacus spends the rest of the set repeating herself, recycling jokes, and dithering on the cusp of rock without actually rocking. She never stops being witty though, she knows how to tell a story, and the aching wanderlust she sings about on “Map On The Wall” animates all of her songs. The last young artist who showed up so complete and ready to roll was Laura Marling, and you know I don’t bandy that comparison around.

Album That Closes Most Strongly

Still Brazy.I’m going to try to discipline myself here, but I have a lot to say about this state-of-the-art West Coast g-rap album. I will always be grateful to YG for “FDT”, which is, as far as I am concerned, the only thing that ever needed to be said about this alleged election. Not a well argued thinkpiece that treats Donald Trump’s “ideas” as worthy of careful, point-by-point engagement and rebuttal, and, in the process, dignifies him as something other than a subhuman scumbag, but fuck Donald Trump/fuck Donald Trump, over and over, just in case you missed the main thread. Which you didn’t. Because if you really need an detailed explanation for why Donald Trump can fuck off, well, I don’t know about you, buddy. We’re not going to be friends. I also think it’s telling that it was this album, and not the superartistic and supertheorized struggle-musik by Kendrick and Lupe and Jamila Woods, that caught the earsofthe censors. See, intellectuals like us don’t scare the establishment, sad to say. But gangsters, as Ice Cube understood, sure do — especially when YG and Sad Boy Loko suggest a team-up between Black and Mexican sets. What makes the criticism sting is that YG is naturally conservative — not just in the musical choices he makes, all of which were given the Southern Cali seal of approval in 1993, but in his core ideology, too. “Gimmie Got Shot”, for instance, is practically Reaganite in its disdain for handouts, and “She Wish She Was” is a Phyllis Schafly speech reverse-translated via RapGenius. The storytelling climaxes when YG attempts to convince awhite judge that he, too, has a fundamental and overriding obligation to protect his family. He’s not tripped up by questions of positionality: he believes that they’re united by their masculine prerogatives, that it’s only the judge’s prejudice that gets in the way of his sympathy for his compadre in manly, by-all-means-necessary action. Still Brazy opens with a question — who shot me? — and closes with YG hollering through a filter about real-life black men, killed by the police, who share his name and his burf day. We never get an answer: just thickening paranoia as the circumstantial details pile up. Should I ever take a bullet in my daily travels, I hope my revenge on a society that had no use for me is as wickedly sweet as this.

Crummy Album I Listened To A Lot Anyway

untitled unmastered. Don’t let the plain dark green cover fool you. This is no austerity effort. It is corny Kendrick in full effect, including a widescreen rendering of his interpretation of Revelations, the Bible’s cheesiest book. Also, the one where the Asian man wants peace and balance and the white man wants $$$$ and the black man wants a piece of poosay is the most racist thing I heard all year, and I paid attention to the presidential campaign. The rapping is aces, of course, and it’s always great to hear Thundercat.

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

Goodness, which felt like a tiptoe back from the brink. In emo music this is not generally a good thing. Case in point: in 2014, there were long stretches when I thought of nothing but Home, Like Noplace Is There. Who are these characters, what are these scenarios, what can I, a humble tunesmith, do to ease their pain? But this year’s Hotelier album?, for some reason I keep having to remind myself it exists. I think there’s a part of me that wants to deny the existence of Goodness— as if I believe the band that made Home ought to have burned itself out like a charred filament from its own intensity, and anything else dishonors its fatalism. This is crazy unfair of me, especially since I suspect Goodness is a pretty worthy sequel, albeit one with music that’s emo pro forma.

Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To

Hero. Craig Manning, a rock critic I always enjoy reading, called this one of the year’s best pop albums, and he wasn’t alone. Funny, coz this pile of would-be platinum hooks is at least nominally country. That’s about where we are in this big ol rootsy nation, though it remains to be seen whether Morrisconnects with alienated Northerners who may just have lost their appetites for Dixie cooking for the next 8 years. Whether this damn Yankee agrees with Craig remains to be determined, as I am still ruminating on my cud over here in the critical cowshed. But I do think this is probably the year’s purest pop-rock set: 1-4-5 progressions leading, with ruthless economy to shoutalong choruses, millenial whoahs and wordless uh huh and la la refrains, lyrics about cars and sexual frustration, cheap thrills in the midrange, drums and vox way on top. No trace of generic-girl-voice here — just taste notes of Rihanna and Tracy Bonham alongside the expected Hillary Scott/Carrie Underwood references. It’s a big voice and she can whip up a storm with it. I do get the strong sense she’s the type who’d blow out that flame her friend and supporter M. Lambert has been keeping and not even apologize about it.

Album That Sounded Like It Was The Most Fun To Make

Rehab Reunion. Even Justin Vernon sounds like he’s having a good time. More new music from Bruce Hornsby; exactly what you didn’t ask for. But scout’s honor, this is a good, zany, well-appointed project, right down to the Hornsby-specific crossword puzzle he’s included in the liner notes andthe unauthorized Franz Kafka lit-bio. (“In the day he worked for an insurance firm/by night his prose made his audience squirrrrm!”) This year’s look-ma-no-hands trick: Hornsby limits himself to the dulcimer, which feels a little like those authors who try to write entire novels without using the letter e. The restriction forces him to bluegrass it up, and a bluegrassy Bruce is a happy Bruce. My favorite song is the one where he admits he’s a skinflint who stiffs waiters. As if we didn’t know.

Album That Sounded Like It Was A Chore To Make

Farro. Ancient grain; similar to bulgur wheat and an excellent source of magnesium and iron. J/k, it’s the former guitar player from Paramore, out of the witness protection program at last. As the co-author of some seriously enduring spazz-out pop-rock, Josh Farro absolutely deserves your attention. Alas, he is not quite the hellion that he was when he was ascribing to the Christian God powersthat would have been more properly attributedto his frontwoman. Without Hayley Williams’s performances, even his best Paramore songs would have sounded like… Thrice, I guess? Anyway, this is no way to run the numbers that hypothetical, because Farro has aged, and Walkways, his solo album sounds like a bunch of rejected Adam Young demos — stuff Young wouldn’t bother to pitch to Nabisco for Oreo commercials, let alone use for Owl City or Sky Sailing. I wanted to believe that Josh’s brother Zac, bringer of thunder and breaker of a trillion snare heads, could have had nothing to do with a project this tepid. But there he is, right in the liner notes. The Uday and Qusay of mallpunk, back together, but no longer storming around the desert.

Most Consistent Album

Views. Awful line immortal: “Got so many chains/they call me Chaining Tatum.” To me, this is Jewish humor straight up. It’s a kind of misdirection that goes over the heads, or through the legs, of more goyische critics — like when Max Bemis sings “Did it hurt when you feel from heaven babe?” on “Crush’d.” It’s a little piece of knowing dumbness meant to offset the well-wrought wiseassery –a poop brown streak in the tapestries red. Bob Dylan used to get away with it all the time. And on an album that extends its somber tone over twenty not-short tracks, Drake and his kemosabe Noah Shebib do need to pull out all the stops to avoid monotony. But inasmuch as a consensus has developed thatViewsis a slog, I must say that I cannot remember a twenty song album that feels quite as effortless an experience as this one. True, a ten song album would have been more effortless. But what’s wrong with a little effort?

* * * * * * * *

Okay, that’s enough for today — individual awards and singles and the rest tomorrow. Those intro paragraphs got me down. I actually have another political essay for you, but I’m saving it for the very end. Just one more, I swear; after that I’ll quit!, he said, hands shaking and pupils dilated. I’m in control of my commentary — I can stop whenever I want to. At least I’m not as bad as that Wolf Blitzer character. Now there’s a junkie if I’ve ever seen one.

Critics Poll 27 — My ballot, part 2

Is there room in the band?, I don’t need to be the frontman. If not, then I’ll be the biggest fan.

Song Of The Year

Since William Godwin, the social-problem novel has had several periods of vogue: the early Industrial Revolution, World War I and its aftermath, the White Shadow 1970s, etc. Its central premise — that a reader can emerge from her encounter with a work of art with her compassion for the downtrodden enhanced — has always been a dodgy one, but I do give points for trying. Gotta do something, right?, and pie in the sky tastes so sweet. Lately, hip-hop has taken up the social-problem torch and carried it with gusto. Kendrick may be the man with the Dickensian narrative strategies in his back pocket, but nobody is quite as sincere as J. Cole — and as a storyteller, Cole is no slouch. A cynic might call 4 Your Eyes Only pure socially-conscious schtick: the tale of two similar young men whose paths diverge in the back alleys of Fayetteville, North Carolina. One, “James”, much like Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets, falls prey to the dark forces of his environment and is killed by his drug-dealing compadres at 22. The other, the rapper “J. Cole”, becomes an upstanding family man and wholesome almond-milk drinker who finds fulfillment as he helps his wife fold laundry. This is corny as hell, of course, as is everything else Cole does. But by now he’s got the technique down pat, and on the title track, his timeworn there-but-for-fortune story hits intellectual and emotional paydirt. Over nine unbroken minutes of top-flight lyricism, Cole draws the parallels between the characters, shifts moods and jumps deftly between characters, and lays the plot mechanics of the album bare. He also makes manifest a motivation that would have coaxed a tear from any sentimental novelist — Cole, the scarred survivor who has risen above, is delivering James’s life story to his uncomprehending daughter. He’s the bottle; this is the message. “This perspective is a real one, another lost ‘Ville son”, he raps, “I dedicate these words to you and all the other children/Affected by the mass incarceration in this nation/That sent your pops to prison when he needed education.” Emphasis on the second to last word, voice heavy with desperation, pleading to the child to forgive her pops just as he asks the world to cultivate some concern for those left behind. Does he succeed? Well, Oliver Twist didn’t stop Robert Peel from becoming Prime Minister of England, and hey!, look who the Senate just confirmed yesterday. We’ve got miles to go. The struggle never ends. Give Cole this, you tough guys and nonbelievers — this time, he sure as hell didn’t let Nas down.

Single Of The Year

  • 1. Lucy Dacus — “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore”
  • 2. Basia Bulat — “Infamous”
  • 3. Xenia Rubinos — “Mexican Chef”
  • 4. Jamila Woods — “Blk Girl Soldier”
  • 5. Mitski — “Your Best American Girl”
  • 6. Kamaiyah — “How Does It Feel”
  • 7. Joey Purp — “Photobooth”
  • 8. Metronomy — “Night Owl”
  • 9. Beyonce — “All Night”
  • 10. Car Seat Headrest — “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales”
  • 11. Haley Bonar — “Kismet Kill”
  • 12. Maren Morris — “80’s Mercedes”
  • 13. Kanye West — “Famous”
  • 14. Quilt — “Roller”
  • 15. Drake & Rihanna — “Too Good”
  • 16. Tegan And Sara — “Stop Desire”
  • 17. Calvin Harris & Rihanna (with an assist from “Nils Sjoberg”) — “This Is What You Came For”
  • 18. Martha — “Precarious (Supermarket Song)”
  • 19. How To Dress Well — “Lost Youth/Lost You”
  • 20. Cousin Stizz — “Gain Green”

Best Singing

Miranda Lambert — The Weight Of These Wings. Your favorite cowgirl unloads the whole flatbed truck. Handle with care: there’s songwritin’ in them crates. Some of comes courtesy of the star herself with her peculiar melodic signature, some provided by her besties Natalie Hemby and Monroe Suede, and some straight from the big money Tennessee grist mill. Funnily enough, they all go out of their way to make sure this sounds nothing like a Music City release, perhaps figuring that they covered that ground well enough on Platinum and it was safe to try something a little less pants-afire immediate. It doesn’t sound like alt-country, either, thank goodness; the closest she came to that tar pit was Four The Record, and she’s got no interest in sinking there and emerging, fossilized, at City Winery perhaps. Most of the time ace performers shoot their wads on double albums — think of All Things Must Pass, or Songs In The Key Of Life, or Physical Graffiti, or, heck I’ll say it, Blonde On Blonde— and that concludes the fertile period of their public ministries. Something tells me that’s not the case here, and we’ve still got some twists and turns through the sagebrush to navigate with Nashville’s best. And there’s nobody remotely close.

Best Singing Voice

So Stina Marie Claire Tweeddale can’t be a real handle, can it? That’s got to have come from an online Scottish band name generator. “Tweeddale”, if that is indeed her name, is now the only original member left in Honeyblood, a Glaswegian outfit that had previously released a set of sub-Donnette Thayer guitar pop. I enjoyed it for a couple of weeks and then sold it back to Tunes. Tweeddale continues to be a crafty if shallow songwriter with a terrific, gutsy rock singing voice and a fetching accent, and Babes Never Die feels like a real improvement over the debut. Which might mean maybe that I hold this for a month and a half before selling it. Or maybe it keeps growing on me. I do appreciate the extensive borrowings from Elastica and Charlotte Hatherley. Like Lauren “Mayberry”, “Tweeddale” does not consider the Cheviot Hills any obstacle for highway robbery. Long Scottish tradition of that, right?

Best Rapping

Kanye West on “No More Parties In L.A.” That may be the best I’ve ever heard him rap; it’s certainly one of his most sustained performances. I’m not 100% sure why I expected Don Juan’s Reckless Kanye. Turns out The Life Of Pablo isn’t unfocused at all, even if Mr. West’s reluctance to rap about anything other than himself and the perils of his stupid celebrity lifestyle makes him an outlier in a Black Lives Matter year. I shouldn’t be surprised: he always puts in the work.

Best Vocal Harmonies

Beyonce on “Sandcastles”, especially that last groop swoop in the final verse. Jamila Woods on “LSD”.

Best Bass Playing

Keven Lareau of Boston’s undersung Quilt. Your new Essex Green, bolder, brighter, and even better at their instruments. I dunno about sexier, though; it’s hard to beat Sasha Bell in that department.

Best Live Drumming

Valentina Magaletti of Vanishing Twin by a nose over Xenia Rubinos’s man Marco Buccelli. Almost all of the music marketed as psychedelic doesn’t deserve the name. There’s nothing mind-expanding about overdriven guitar solos, or feedback, or loose arrangements; that shit is just lazy and unimaginative. These bands invite you to do the work, which is to say that they want you zonked out of your mind on some substance or another so that their meandering will sound purposed. Agenuine psychedelic band — a group that warps the perception of the stone cold sober with sound alone — is a rare commodity. Vanishing Twin is one of them. The elevator pitch is Stereolab minus the French people and the vaguely leftish goofball lyrics, but that shortsells their adept handling of weird noises, the raw, wet-socket quality of their analog synthesizer, and singer Cathy Lucas’s hypnotist deadpan. It is recommended to submit, if you don’t mind getting hyp-mo-tized. You are getting seeeeeeepy.

Best Drum Programming

The great Noah “40” Shebib, all over Views.

Best Synthesizer Playing

Francis And The Lights. Farewell, Starlite is actually a very similar album to 22, A Million (the new James Vincent McMorrow, too): brief experience, ten songs apiece, loads of post-808s vocal effects, analog modeling synthesizer, Tom Krell-style pop-n-soul, sleek Audi commercial beats, au courant music made by guys who began by pushing timelessness. Or at least the early-to-mid ’70s version of it. Naturally, I prefer the one I understand to the one I can’t make heads or tails of, but that’s me, and I can’t imagine that the world is going to pick right now to start ratifying my judgments. Justin Vernon is way more famous than Francis is, so my fear is that Farewell, Starlite! is going to be received, if it’s received at all, as a ride on the Bon Iver coattails. I know, you can’t protect these guys from themselves, let alone the monster of public reception. Or even my own monstrous reception; I mean, some nights I believe Farewell, Starlite! is another masterstroke, and on others, I fear it’s all been downhill for this particular sophisti-style since Baby Dayliner.

Best Piano, Organ, Or Electric Piano Playing

Cam O’Bi and/or Peter Cottontale on the Noname and Jamila Woods albums. I don’t know who that is on “Emerald Street”, but it’s dazzling. I’ve also got to give it up to Brian Hamilton of Cymbals Eat Guitars, who gives a master class in the successful integration of synths in a rock band context on Pretty Years. I’m enrolling next semester. CEG didn’t make my Top 20, but they probably should have. No matter what they do or how loud Joe D’Agostino shouts, they seem to cruise under the radar. I imagine they’ll get their due eventually. They’re too good not to.

Best Guitar Playing

I’m not sure Ilike Margaret Glaspy’s singing at all: at times she’s a vocal dead ringer for Missy Higgins, who had her Australian heritage to excuse her bizarre vowels. But Glaspy’ssongwriting on the usual lovelorn topics is A-OK, and the Stratocaster on Emotions And Math knocks me out. In fact Ia m ready to call glaspy the best new guitarist I’ve heard since… well, since Laura Marling. Who has become my benchmark for quality in all things, I now realize. Like: how good is that piece of grouper you are eating with such gusto?, damn bro, it’s Laura Marling good. My contractor came and cut these I-beams with Laura Marling-like precision. I award him two and a half Marlings.

Best Instrumental Solo

The synth ride on Vanishing Twin’s “Telescope”.

Best Instrumentalists, Honest Injun Division

Mind you people, I could have tapped the members of Miranda Lambert’s combo in all these categories. I just don’t want this exercise to be as monotonous as it was two years ago.

Best Arrangements

The Weight Of These Wings

Best Songwriting

Chris Collingwood of Look Park. This album ought to be of interest to you, even if you refuse to entertain the altogether reasonable proposition that Stacy’s mom has got it going on. Chris C. promised that Look Park wouldn’t sound like Fountains Of Wayne, which is true to a point: the song architecture is more or less indistinguishable from the moodier stuff on Sky Full Of Holes, but Mitchell Froom’sproduction seems to have been imported directly from Woodface and/or Nine Objects Of Desire,right down to the synth sounds and the vocal reverb. Either the old trashcan-banger hasn’t come up with any new tricks in twenty years, or Collingwood paid out for some of that old Mitchell Froom. Either way, it’s a joy to hear, especially on the last two songs and “You Can Come Round If You Want To”.

Best Lyrics On An Individual Song

“The Dictator Decides” by Pet Shop Boys. Who do you suppose it’s about? could be Bashar Assad, but I’m inclined to think it’s a humanized Kim Jong Un. Kind of Neil Tennant to gift these two-bit thugs with self-awareness they probably didn’t have on their best day. But then his overwhelming generosity has always been his cross to bear.

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

Jamila Woods. HEAVN often sounds and feels like Carole King’s Fantasy, right down to the vaguely theatrical interludes, the sociopolitics, the major seventh chords, the music that’s either headline-invigorated and thus inspired or limp enough to induce a grimace, and the creeping feeling that the album could double for an elementary school social studies primer. Rosa was a freedom fighter and she taught us how to fight indeed: sit at the frontof the bus and refuse to budge with Jamila-like or Carole-like dignity. Introverted, smart black/Jewish girl in a bubble/up on the roof, surrounded by various social injustices, autodidacting her way toward compassionate citizenship and maybe some fist-in-the-air action (but gently!). Learns to love herself! I cried, I really did. A tree still grows in Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Brown University, which is where Jamila Woods attended African Studies classes before bringing her degree, and her moral authority, back to the South Side. And there is something to be said for the Ivy-educated (or plain old educated) popular artist; the average Jane pop star, incisive as she can be, would not have been able to bring the weight of history’s outrages to a dead-grandfather couplet like “you are the library burned/but they can’t take the lessons I’ve learned.” Pardon me, I just got a chill. Steven points out that some of the melodies on HEAVN are awfully slack, and he’s not wrong. But Woodsmakes up for it by jampacking HEAVN with hip-hop quotables, not to mention nineties-kid points of reference such as clapping games, Dawson’s Creek, and leaving your horny little friend on the Huffy with blue balls. My favorite is the one where she tells a suitor that if he wants her, he’d better be ready to embrace Chicago — and then invites Chance by to take some shots at the whole stupid Chi-raq thing.

Best Production

On Telefone, Cam O’bi has gifted Noname with fey, warbly-ass backdrops — music that sounds like nothing else — to match her delicate probing index finger of a voice. The rapperhits upon every sensitive bildungsroman subject she can find, and never awkwardly; same thing goes for Saba on Bucket List Project, and again it’s O’bi with the assist. The dividends from Chicago’s after-school arts programs just keep raining down on the rest of an unworthy nation.

Band Of The Year

Jimmy Eat World are purveyors of wheat gluten. But like all good vegan chefs they remember to switch up the presentation each time they slop another slab onto your plate. Each album has its distinctive flavor profile, and that includes the recent ones that nobody outside of Tempe would call landmarks. Jim Adkins says that Invented was based on Cindy Sherman photographs, and with a haircut as sincere as his is, who are we to doubt his words? Damage, which came out in 2013, gave you the wheat gluten indigestibly dense and perhapsraw in the middle. For Integrity Blues, they’ve hired Justin Meldal-Johnsen, the cheeseball who oversaw Paramore’s power-pop move and a musician with no apparent reverence for the emo canon. He has, I am glad to say, produced this whole thing to fuck and back, and allowed Adkins and friends to indulge all of their crowd-pleasing fantasies. That means tinkly synthesizers and Oasis mellotrons all over the place, echoes of Yes (absolutely intentional) in the bass and backing vocals, and Trembling Blue Stars (probably unintentional, but who knows?) in the guitorchestral arrangements. The first side of Integrity contains the alleged radio singles, and it’s fairly fun in an are-we-too-old-for-this? kind of way, but the back half, on which the bandmembers and their producer run wild, is a total joy. If you don’t like “Through”, and you call yourself a rock fan, you’d better have a signed permission slip, pal. Also, I’ve got to say it: “Pol Roger” really does sound like Asia. So do what you want, but little darlin please don’t cry.

Best Show I Saw In 2016

The Moles at Pianos. No, I don’t care at all that Richard Davies forgot the words.

Live Show I’m Kicking Myself For Missing

Jamila Woods was at the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark this year. I don’t know if she read or sang or both; in any case, I really should have been there. Honestly, I should have covered it — that way I could have asked her what I really want to know, which is: how do you play Popsicle?

Best Music Video

“Formation”, of course. As a big fan of Knowles family entertainment, I hasten to add that the “Cranes In The Sky” video is mandatory viewing for the sets alone. But you already knew that; in fact I notice some of you are seriously arguing that A Seat At The Table is as good as or better than Lemonade.I think y’all are nuts, but that’s what makes the world go round. Nuts, I mean. I hoped that if I put the time in, I would cease to find A Seat At The Table to be Jamila-lite, and Idid put the time in, and Iwas rewarded. For one thing, Solange can sing circles around Jamila Woods, and for another, her broad range of instrumental collaborators (and a big ass bankroll) gives her version of alt-r&b/ecriture feminine/black girl magic a glistening mahogany sheen that the cash-strapped Chicago public school crowd cannot pretend to. Budget cuts and all; see Jonathan Kozol for details. Still, I wish this mistress of the oblique could, every now and then, come as hard and direct as Woods does on every fucking line. I realize it’s got to be tricky to maintain the brand as the “arty” Knowles sister, given that big sis is no slouch in that department. Right, like millions aren’t going to hang on Solange’s every note, no matter how outre she gets and how many choruses she wants to chuck in the bucket. Royalty has its privileges, and those perks will always make certain commoners want to barf. But there were a thousand ways that Solange could have cashed in on her famous name if she’d wanted to be lazy. I am pleased she chose the one way that proves she’s anything but.

Best Choreography In A Video

Tinashe’s “Company”. Some Ciara-style Gumby dancing, some co-co-cold-hearted snake action, some giddy masturbation for the camera; nothing not to love here if you love pop video. Yes indeed we needed another blurry r&b smoke-music album like we needed a hole in the head — a process known as “trepanation”, i.e., actual drilling into the skull, done to open up the subject to the influence of cosmic rays. Most Americans get on fine without trepanning their brains, and you could certainly wrap up your year without engaging too closely with the Nightride mixtape. But that’d be a minor mistake. Contrary to what you’d have forecasted, Tinashe did not get washed away by the dam-break of similar albums and into the Jhene Aiko zone — her gamine personality pokes through the haze more often than it doesn’t. Most of this fog rolls thick straight out of the humidifier, but she does occasionally serve herself up with some straight up tasty soda pop (“Ride Of Your Life”, “Ghetto Boy”, “Soul Glitch”) which, while not entirely effervescent, reminds me that Tinashe has everything it takes to be a major star if she cared to be one. Maybe in 2017 if she ever puts the Playstation controller down.

Most Romantic Song

Francis And The Lights — “May I Have This Dance”.

Funniest Song

“Talkin’ Bleep”. Here we have the cantankerous version of Homeboy Sandman. Yes he exists. Sand is in a bad mood throughout Kindness For Weakness and has decided he will not suffer fools. Gone are the friendly humblebrags of “Not Really”, the fingers-on-the-chin reflections of Hallways and the relaxed descriptive generosity of “Big Fat Belly.” Instead he rails against presumptuous fans who make suggestions, people who assume authority for no reason, those afraid of hard troof-telling, and Huffington Post to boot. He remains the wittiest guy around, and indeed you don’t wanna battle with a cat of his catalog, digital or analog, cannonball or cattle prod. But up until KindnessFor Weakness, I always felt that he’d managed to dodge the high intelligence/low wisdom problem that has wrecked so many alt-rap projects. He always seemed to have things in perspective and a ruminative, temperate tone he shared with no other rapper. He remains inimitable, but this year, he’s just another clever cuss off the rails. Still a regular cut-up, though.

Most Frightening Song

Paul Simon’s Stranger To Stranger. The whole thing. I tried to listen to it shortly before the election, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like what he was telling me, even though I knew from long experience to take my Paulie medicine. The more nonchalant he seems, the harder I need to listen. He never set himself up as a sage: he just is one.”It’s not my job to worry or to think”, or so he sings, and I guess in a sense it’s true. A half century ago he was thrust into the role of the sensitive intellectual entertainer — mostly because of his height, and his breadth of allusion, and his Jewishness — but it is unclear that he ever sought that for himself. Tom and Jerry wanted to be the Everly Brothers, right?; Simon wanted to write dream dream dream and croon it to Kathy like an earth angel. His last three albums, which for my money have got to be the weirdest and sharpest ever released by an artist in his or her late sixties/early seventies, Dylan be damned, do have the character of dream-work. If Simon’s latest writing happens to coincide with national neuroses, that’s just because the trouble one sees on the news, or on the street, does have a way of trickling into the unconscious. These latest eyelid movies are about sublimated violence and social division, like in “Wristband”, a story that starts out with a musician locked out of his own club and soon becomes a confrontation with a bouncer as autocrat, and then takes on the apocalyptic whiff of violence in the hinterland. There’s the street angel: a schizophrenic writer who rides an ambulance through two different songs, and who mistakes the clatter of the emergency room for a parade. Speaketh the poet: “They say all roads lead to a river/then one day the river comes up to your door/how will the builder of bridges deliver/us all to that faraway shore”? This asked one track after a narrator — that same one who doesn’t want to worry or think — reports the discovery of heaven six million light years away, and makes it clear you’ll only get there if you’re among the beautiful. The rest of us are condemned to hover here and forever confront our misdeeds. Life is a lottery a lotta people lose, Simon tells us on the very first number. So my question for you is: now that the greatest living boy in New Yorkis getting set to check out of the grand hotel, do you think he thinks he’s a winner or a loser? Paul Simon, I had to ask.

Most Moving Song

Jamila Woods, “Holy”. A self-affirmation chorusfor introverted African American girls built on a Civil Rights anthem built on a gospel tune. Everything on HEAVN is like that; it’s all deep soil.

Sexiest Song

Eleanor Friedberger’s “Because I Asked You”. New View, by the way, is an outstanding album that would have easily made the Top 20 in a weaker year.

Most Inspiring Song

Chance The Rapper, “Finish Line”.

Meanest Song

“Def Pacts” by Of Montreal. The Barnes Collection continues to tack on new wings. This one, like many of the other recent additions, mostly contains glowering portraits of his exes. After eleventy albums of unrequited castigation, no judge on the planet would deny them a restraining order. The twist on Innocence Reachesis the electronic textures, but he covered some of this ground better on Aureate Gloom. The old gremlin may have finally juiced all of the blood out of the stone.

Saddest Song

J. Cole’s “Neighbors”. A good-hearted guy gives up on the promise of integration. Crushing, painful, all too believable, happens every day right here in JC.

Rookie Of The Year

Kamaiyah. Initially I was going to be the male asshole rock critic and say that the party hearty adventures of a young female emcee aren’t any more illuminating than those of the boys. And I would’ve been dead wrong. Kamaiyah reserves the right to sleep around in the exact way that YG says a young lady shouldn’t, and furthermore she likes to joyride around the East Bay and drink champagne straight out the bottle until she blacks out. But she also wants a boyfriend she can count on, and by the end of the album she acknowledges that the drunken nights have cost her more than brain cells. The flossing on this album is strictly conventional and intentionally low key: the thing Kamaiyah brags most about is her throwback telephone. “I was born in the slums/wasn’t raised up in a mansion”; that’s how she introduces herself, and given that the storytelling never goes beyond the Oakland city limits, it’s assumed that she hasn’t gotten far from her origins. (If you couldn’t already tell from the aspirational internet-hit single, which is as hopeless at its bottom as Tracy Chapman was on “Mountains O’ Things”). I like how Kamaiyah plays den mother for pals confronting male bad behavior, and how endearingly she navigates the usual street perils. Honestly, she’s a distaff version of Danny Brown on XXX— a likeable poor kid who understands that overindulgence is at best a partial escape from unpleasant realities. And who’s going to do it anyway, and who is generous enough to allow us to watch her become the object lesson of her own stories. Don’t let the chintzy late-’80s throwback production or your own hip-hop sexism fool you: Good Night is a surprisingly deep album.

Best Guest Appearance Or Feature

Chance The Rapper on “Girls@”, the second song from Joey Purp’s iiiDrops. One of the standout emcees from Surf (check his great verse on “Go”) Joey is just not as unusual as his formidable mic skills make me wish he was. When he’s not bragging in a manner you’ve heard many times before, or using familiar metaphors to tell street stories you’ve heard many times before, or running down girls for no particular reason, he’s getting upstaged by his guests: Chance, whose playfulness and flexibility throws his straight shooting in relief, and Saba, whose compassion makes Joey seem emotionally ironclad by comparison. But damn skippy does he have some jams. Especially “Photobooth,” in which he tries to fuck everybody everywhere, and “Say You Do”, in which he realizes that even if he does, the girlies still aren’t going to like him all that much.

2016 Album You Listened To The Most

Look Park

2016 Album That Wore Out Most Quickly

Zoetic by The Rocket Summer. Nice try, Bryce. I’d say close but no cigar, but it wasn’t too close, and I doubt Bryce smokes. To his credit, he recognized that the hermetic quality he’d achieved on the last few Rocket Summer releases wasn’t serving his songwriting. But instead of the obvious solution — actually inviting other human beings to participate into the process — he’s retreated all the way into the computer. Zoeticis The Rocket Summer chopped up and restacked and machine processed, with every signal pushed into the red and Bryce screaming his buns off. It’s a departure; I’ll give him that. It doesn’t sound like anything else; I’ll give him that, too. But it’s some of the most exhausting music I’ve ever heard in my life. This pop enterprise doesn’t go anywhere without strong authorial voices, and Bryce Avary has that part covered. But there’s a reason why there are 900 people credited on The Life Of Pablo. Making records: it’s a team sport. Artists, do not get lost in the dark cul-de-sac of your own bellybutton, or the electronic bellybutton that computers have become.

Most Convincing Historical Re-creation

Up To Anything by the Goon Sax. Australian indiepop outfit, fronted by a son of one of the Go-Betweens. Boy has he ever inherited the family business. He hasn’t even changed the fucking drapes.

Best Sequenced Album

Telefone. Noname kicks her usual tightly circumscribed amount of buttand then clears out, as she seems to do on every Chicago release. You might fearthat her open-mic poetry jam flow would get mighty tiresome over a full album; shrewdly, Telefone is only thirty-three minutes. And it’s impeccably paced — so much so that nobody seems to realize that with “Bye Bye Baby”, she’s given hip-hop its very own “You Can’t Be Too Strong”. Hey, some armchair moralist was going to do it eventually, and better Noname than an earnest rappin’ gentleman like Common.

Thing You Don’t Know But You Know You Should

I missed this year’s High Llamas album somehow. Unaccountable.I was listening to Snowbug a bunch in March.

Most Inconsistent Album

Anti. She makes claims. Sex with her, she tells us, is amazing. You know what? I’ve listened to her whole new album — exhibit A, so to speak — and I don’t believe her. It’s not the grody tattoos, although those don’t help her case. It isn’t even that she continues to confuse sexual desire with violence and coercion, and therefore her eros is redolent of the same capitalist power dynamics that make modern romances so boring. (Let me know when you’re ready to bleed, indeed.) It’s that the beats on this, her personal-statement album, are stiffer than a surfbort. Anti has its many thrilling moments, including a late-set dip into adult soul that allows her to showcase her not-inconsiderable vocal chops. But even there, allure is never a given: for instance, I find her impersonation of a sloppy drunk on higher to be pretty damn authentic and therefore pretty damn disgusting. A mid-album slog hits a trench on “Woo”, which is the sort of near-atonal art-rock that made Lydia Lunch anathema north of Fourteenth Street during the no-wave era. Worse still is Rihanna’s attempt to burnish some psych-rock cred through a karaoke run through Tame Impala’s “Same Old Mistakes”, which is exactly the embarrassment you’d think it would be. Like KRS-ONE, I am ordering her to put back on her drawers.

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

Say Anything — IDon’t Think It Is First thing to know: Max is a rapper now. Not a slick flow-first emcee like Lupe, mind you; more like Yoni Wolf if he jammed his nuts into a pasta roller and cranked. I tend to prefer the poppier Max (s/tis still my fave) and so do Joe and Jane Say Anything Fan, who are treating the new one like it has zika virus on it. Why, then, do I find myself enjoying IDon’t Think It Is as much as I do? I suppose it’s for the same reason that I like rap records when I like them: Bemis has created the ideal sonic habitat for his own peculiar narrators. Since those narrators tend to be disgusted, self-loathing poopchuckers, it actually helps the cause that IDon’t Think It Is sounds as if it was recorded in somebody’s armpit. Getting the sound to match the sentiment; that’s half the battle. When he’s not spanking himself for his hubris, Max aims his invective at various phonies, the gov’t, and the “virus that made him a showman.” Right, like he was ever going to do anything else. Most artists stand for nothing and still get rejected anyway; Bemis is taking his rejection howling, and with his integrity intact. Good for him. I’ll keep listening.

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

A lot of Blonde, actually.

Least Believable Perspective Over An Album

Chairlift’s Moth.I am aware of the problems, as they have all been heavily foregrounded, and I have to respect a record that wears its flaws so boldly. And hey, what wouldyoudo if you sold a song to Beyonce? You’d try as hard as you could to pitch her some more, right? And you’d swag out a little, even if your identity as a wealthy white woman makes that ch-ching move preposterous and maybe borderline racist. Cut her some slack, people; she’s human. Here she swags, she can do no other.

Most Alienating Perspective Over An Album

Schoolboy Q and Kevin Gates. What a grim pair. Islah‘s platinum certification proves there is still a large market for New Orleans bust you in the face music. That I get. Some of the critical acclaim mystifies me, though; what is he saying that a thousand other crack-slinging rappers haven’t? He drops the usual brand names, threatens the usual punks, sells the usual coke, and disrespects the usual hos, and in a year as unusual as 2016, that’s not gonna cut it. I do feel him when he says he loves making love to the pussy. Though that doesn’t distinguish him either. Schoolboy Q is a tougher case: he’s gotten super serious in his old age, and he’s brought in some ace producers to toss a little spice in the sauce. He’s a bruiser on the mic when he gets going, and his bleak vision pays off on “The John Muir” and “THaT Part.” You might drop the needle and be impressed. But at 72 joyless minutes, Blank Face is a chore. When I’ve sat through it from front to back, I’ve ended up feeling like I’ve been in a street fight with a nut punching asshole. Mercy.

Also As Grueling As Everybody Says It Is

The Hope Six Demolition Project. Honestly, I’m just bummed that she had a bad time on her trip to D.C. She should have hit me up. I’d have told her where she could get a really good pizza.

Most Sympathetic Of Likeable Perspective Over An Album

Weezer. The biggest resurrection story since Lazarus continues. Consider: at the time of the publication of the worthless Raditude,Rivers Cuomo was 40 years old and, seemingly, at the tail end of a wholly predictable decline phase. Moreover he was writing stuff like “Pork And Beans”, which, in addition to not being a very good song, wore its disgust with showbiz like a sweaty headband. Here we had a pitcher signaling to the bench that he was done and needed to be lifted from the game. There was no older dude in America who seemed less likely, or even less inclined, to return to making quality pop music. Surely he was going to set up a lawn chair and get grumpier and wait to die. But even at his most infuriating — and he was down there for a long time — he always understood the mechanics of songwriting, and you can never count those guys out. Oh what am I saying?, I totally counted him out. I voted for him for hoary old bastard at least once and considered him for the honor at least two other times. Anyway, as good as Everything Will Be Alright In The End was, it’s really Weezer White that cements the comeback and makes it virtually certain that we’ll be dealing with Rivers Cuomo, warts ‘n’ all, for the next ten years at least. All of these new songs are set in California, a place he’s always been very amusing about, which in practice means that there’s a bunch of Beach Boys and Bacharach (who is namechecked) added to the Costello-KISS hybrid. Consequently you can expect some of the most sensational bridges since the heyday of Liz Phair. Also the enthusiastic/insecure nerd narrator is back, which beats the hell out of the petulant/borderline Kaczynski nerd he’s been playing (I hope) for awhile. The general subject is the extraordinary pathos of the male human when confronted by girls he’d desperately like to screw but cannot identify a point of entry. Rock and roll, in other words. Confessional verse: “I’m like an Indian fakir trying to meditate on a bed of nails with my pants pulled down”. Two songs later there is a graphic depiction of constipation. So welcome back. Welcome all the way back. You fucking clown.

Artist I Root For No Matter What

I am told that Alicia Keys shares a practice space with Beyonce. Maybe not the best decision by an artist who has always been dangerously prone to me-tooism. Indisputably she wants her own glass of lemonade, even as her unfamiliarity with red state psychodrama makes her an inferior carrier of the message of the moment. (Compare and contrast “Daddy Lessons”, which outgunned the country singers, with the social-problem broadway schick of “The Gospel”.) Keys is a big believer in the political efficacy of compassion’n’tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding, and a bunch of other stuff that plays great on the island and dies on the vine when transplanted to continental soil. But she does have her many talents to bring to the table, including a voice undiminished by the ravages of network TV, and her trusty piano, which, I am pleased to say, is mixed pretty damn loud on Here. She’s welcome to her ride on the black girl magic bandwagon. They were probably keeping a seat warm for her.

Artist You Respect, But Don’t Like

Sia Furler

Artist With The Most Legitimate Grievance

How To Dress Well. This poor schmuck has had his style bitten twelve ways from Thursday. Out for frustration or whatever, Tom Krell has responded to this by taking a few tentative steps in the direction of Ed Sheeran pop-funk. Seems more than justifiable to this fruitcake over here, but Iguess the PBR&B gatekeepers think otherwise. Now he gets called a sellout by the same people who consider the new Bon Iver a postmodern masterpiece. No justice in showbiz, chapter 4080.

ThingYou Feel Cheapest About Liking

Jeffery. Not all that much has changed here, either: “Lil mama she ready for war/she ready for dick in her ass and her throat” is still about the size of it. Young Thug will either shoot you or do some drugs in front of you or demand anal sex; those are the three settings on the Jeffery Williams machine. Toggle between them if you like, but that’s all you’re getting. He remains pure id — so howlingly horny that words fall away and he is left barking like a seal. Like er er er er er er er (that’s a hook). The music on Jeffery, however, is amazing, and I mean that literally: like I can sit here amazed by the texture of a particular backing vocal part, or how the drums smack in like a breaker on the “Harambe” chorus, or the interplay between the synthesizers and the vocals on “Pick Up The Phone.” Young Thug, who has a knack for catchy melody and dirty southern blooze, is very much a part of that music. When he sounds this sensational, it is (almost) immaterial that he is singing “get behind her/put it in her butt.” I don’t really have a problem with the crassness, since drive fast/live hard/get laid is the depraved heart of rock and roll. But I do think he needs to broaden his subject matter. Unless he really does want to be counted among the idiot savants.

Album You Learned The Words/Music To Most Quickly

Lemonade

Album You Regret Giving The Time Of Day To

NXWorries —Yes Lawd Here’s a rarity (thank goodness): an album that actually wrecks the experience of another album released earlier in the same year. Straight up demolishes it. On Malibu, Anderson.Paak was an ambivalent family man of not-inconsiderable intelligence whose chase after girls, fame, and Hollywood glitz was conducted with identifiable leeriness. with NXWorries, he’s just a dumb asshole — a boringly swaggering sexist asshole to boot. For sure there is no shortage of those in hip-hop, and I guess Paak thinks that since he raps more and sings less on this project he’s got to get with the program, which makes me think that he’s more of a tofu cube than he initially seemed to be. My appreciation of Paak never had much to do with his nonconformity. But for Malibu’s sake, I’m still going to have to press play and record at the same time and wipe this dreadful album from my memory.

Best Sounding Album Of 2016

Saba’s Bucket List Project. Since it cameon the heels of the trillion other free releases from Chicago rappers this year, this feelsa little like a victory lap for the entire citywide enterprise. Sucks for Saba, who has his very own distinctive voice/sound/axe to grind. His position in the uprising, so to speak, is nothing we haven’t encountered before: he’s the tweener pulled out of the hood by his scholastic achievement and now feels at home neither in the projects nor the academy. In fact he told this story so well on his Joey Purp guest spot that parts of the Bucket List Project do feel a wee bit redundant. But this is a quirk of the calendar, and not the fault of poor Sabahimself, and I feel the need to say that I, for one, have *not* had enough of Chicago youngster-rap. Not even close. And inasmuch as I have come to know and dig these characters, it is impossible for me to resist a set on which they all swing by to tell you what’s on their bucket lists. So we get cheerful Chance, glib as ever, angling to learn the drums because drummers get the girls, scene elder Lupe announcing his intention to win a Nobel Prize, and a more equivocal Jean Deaux who wants world peace and de-gentrification and the opportunity to smoke a blunt with Beyonce. Then there are the familiar Chi collaborators who don’t state their goals but let their fingers on the faders do the talking, like Cam O’Bi, who imports some of that warbly magic from his productions on Telefone. My favorite contributor has got to be a guy we’ve never heard before and may never hear again — a friend of the rapper who aspires to drop a project, and who doesn’t care if nobody listens to it. He just wants to be able to say he did it. He could be speaking for all of the new voices in Chicago. In fact, while there weremore accomplished albums made in the Second City in 2016, none captured the aesthetic of the movement better than this very beautiful, very moving set does. Gotta love it like you love the lake.

Most Overrated

Sturgill Simpson.The most painful four minutes of the year might be Sturgill’s version of “In Bloom,” which gets not only the sentiment but the world-famous words wrong. It extends his habit of sticking a turgid cover in the middle of his albums, which purist critics of Nashville country are determined to overvalue as if his name was Kacey Musgraves. Elsewhere on the set, the music has apparently been provided by the Blues Brothers. Simpson has a convincing backwoods growl, his arrangements are punchy, and I do admire the conceptual unity of A Sailor’s Guide To Earth — even if it uses the epistolary conceit of letters to the singer’s infant son as a pretext to drop a bunch of platitudes and overwrought sea metaphors on the listener. I am not taking life advice from a man whose only reflections about fifteen different Asian cities is that they’ve got similar bars–or one who thinks “don’t sweat the small stuff” is an acceptable chorus.

Worst Song Of The Year

Was “Cake By The Ocean” a 2015 single? It sure left a slime trail across the summer of 2016.

Song That’s Technically Not Terrible, But Which Pissed Me Off Every Time I Heard It

“Can’t Stop The Feeling”. “‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ was a Number One jam/Damn if I say it you can slap me right here.”

Worst Singing

Panic! At The Disco. Great.Nowthis fucking harlequin thinks he’s Frank Sinatra. His imitations are absolutely gruesome, of course, but so is everything else he’s ever done. His whole life has been a metaphorical slasher film, right down to all the former bandmates he’s knifed out of the group. Your latest version of Panic! is down to Brendan Urie, who seems hell bent on fashioning a Frankenstinian fusion of glam-metal and lounge jazz. Who else would even try? In 2016, there’s actually a musician on a major label making recordings that sound like Sparks fronted by Harry Connick Jr., or, to be cruelly accurate, the Cherry Popping Daddies. If you can’t applaud his chutzpah, maybe you deserve that sleepy-ass Whitney album.

Worst Rapping

Desiigner. Also, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I kind of hated all of of Andre Benjamin’s guest spots this year. Hence…

Rapping That Wasn’t Exactly Terrible, But Can’t Be Entirely Pardoned, Either, No Matter How Much I Want To

Everybody on the ATCQ album who is not actually part of the ATCQ lineup I remember from my misspent youth. I am not here to throw cold water on anybody’s happy reunion story, or farewell story, depending on how you spin it. I am just going to point out a few things I noticed while listening to this new set by Kanye West’s favorite rap act. For starters, this was by no means “produced and arranged by the four man crew”, to quote a dearly departed emcee: Q-Tip appears to have overseen the recording, played most of the live instruments and programmed the drums, and called the shots. This was, if you remember from the Beats, Rhymes & Life documentary, the crux of the conflict in the group — Q-Tip’s maddening control-freakdom, hilariously illustrated by the late Chris Lighty in an anecdote about his unwillingness to hand over the Midnight Marauders masters. Now, some control freaks make perfectionist jazz-rap, and others end up spending the holidays at the UCLA psych ward. But I feel for all of them, because without them, more than half of the albums on my year-end list wouldn’t have gotten finished. What I can’t handle, though, is the control-freak’s tendency to rewire history on the fly, like the present conceit that Jarobi, who is neither a good rapper nor a good lyricist (“into new ass we tear”?) nor the genial presence he thinks he is, was ever an integral part of the band. Because he wasn’t; not even on People’s Instinctive Travels. Also, correct me if i’m wrong here, but Busta Rhymes was never actually in the Tribe, was he? His role was to raow raow like a dungeon dragon, get the hell out, and leave the real stuff to the professionals. Here’s the most grievous continuity error of all: the strange case of Ali Shaheed Mohammed, who appears to have been non-personed as thoroughly as that third balaclava chick who was sent to Siberia by the rest of Pussy Riot. This might have been Ali’s own decision: maybe he had hot dinner dates. He’s missed. his contribution to the crew was always his preternatural grace. Q-Tip, multi-talented as he is, is only graceful on the mic.

Worst Instrumentalist

Martha, an oddly named spazz-pop guitar band from North England, has a lot going for it. The singers hit the tape with great energy, their songs are funny and sharp and loaded with singalong tags, and they’re fans of the Replacements, so they’re shooting in the right direction. Unfortunately, they’re let down by their drummer, who is neither imaginative nor particularly proficient. He drops stitches, he fails to hold tempo, he gets timid when he needs to take charge; and more than once on Blisters In The Pit Of My Heart, it sounds like he falls down face first on the kit. Bands like this improve all the time; I imagine they’re on tour right now, playing in somebody’s cupboard and getting better and tighter. Hope so — music like this requires a confident rhythm section. Without one, they’ll never be more than a UK version of the Candy Hearts.

Worst Lyrics

The results are in and Ahnoni is *against* the destruction of the environment. Holy shit bold stand there pal. Ahnoni also dislikes poverty, drone warfare, and the surveillance state, unlike the rest of us squares. I would have thought that such a fragile character would be more into tank battles and malfeasance, but that just goes to show what I know. Funny that this hipster saint resorts to the exact same quasi-ironic joke that the allegedly uncool Bruce Hornsby does on “TSA Man”: he pretends to derive sexual excitement from blatant authoritarian overreach. Only Hornsby is actually funny, and too crass to torture his audience with dirges. Ahnoni’s dreary “Obama” would be a contender for the year’s worst song even without the fourth grade politics. I, too, wish that the President had been an eighteenth level wizard with hypnotic powers rather than a cautious Chicago machine politician. Now that he’s out the door, Hegarty, how do you like the alternative?

Worst Lyrics By A Good Lyricist Who Should Have Known Better

“If Whiskey Were A Woman” by Lori McKenna. But all of her other stuff is good!, for real. Just stop before you hit the last song.

Most Unsexy People In Pop

The Chainsmokers

Most Thoroughly Botched Production Job

Little Big Town’s Wanderlust. The abomination crawls forth. Little Big Town with cartoon dollar signs popping out of their irises plus Pharrell Williams, who continues to flail around in all genres in a desperate attempt to reconnect with his muse. She’s a-not coming back, Pharrell, at least not right away. She’s still pissed about that groper anthem you did with Robin Thicke. This is the rare case where the producer manages to amplify everything annoying about his client — their blithe, too-pristine harmonies, their automaton-like delivery of theoretically emotional lyrics — and the client convinces the producer to indulge his most craven, crowd-pleasing tendencies. This was essentially disowned upon release: both sides took a listen to the masters and effectively abandoned them. They were right to.

Also Might Consider A Different Approach Next Time

Pup’s “breakthrough” album kicks off with a song called “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will” (“Everything you do makes me wanna vomit/and if this tour doesn’t kill you, buddy, I’m on it”). This number is such a convincing portrayal of the specific brand of log cabin fever that develops in a band vanthat if you’ve ever been in a band van yourself, listening to this will definitely trigger PTSD. The album only gets more aggressive from there, which is sort of a shame, even if the subject matter calls for it. There’s one about accidentally murdering a pet via neglect and/or incompetence, and another about a girl who falls through the cracks in the ice on a frozen lake, and another about accidentally jerking off in front of a friend. So they’ve got the topics. They just need to cool it with the distortion.

Good Artist Most In Need Of Some Fresh Ideas

Abel Tesfaye. Remember when he was scary? Neither do I.

Decent Artist Losing Altitude

Bruno Mars —24k Magic Bruno is too good a student of pop history not to realize that this is where it gets dicey for mimics and pure craftspeople: the “difficult third album” on which fans, and maybe bandmates, demand artistic progression. In the past, he’s coped with his interiority deficiency by importing some from classic soul artists; now, perhaps realizing this wouldn’t fly a third time, he’s decided to cannibalize early-nineties pop-funk instead. As 24k Magic is a Bruno Mars album, the imitations are all letter-perfect. But weirdly, it turns out that Bruno is better at faking Sam Cooke than Ralph Tresvant. Go figure. Or maybe, obscenely wealthy and comfy and fattened up with pork from the luau, he’s just not singing as well as he used to, period. Regardless, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this endeth the winning streak.

Supposed Former Pop Master Running On Fumes

Lady Gaga. Oh, dear. To call Joanne an improvement on Artpop tells you nothing, as that was a flailing, sub-replacement-level effort from a popular artist in mid-meltdown over the loss of her relevance. Since Iam not a rubbernecker, I hope I never have to hear that album again. It will remain a data point in the Gaga trajectory, though, even if it’s one that falls off the graph of acceptability. By that extremely limited standard, Joanne is a rebound. but the problem this time out — one that was telegraphed on Born This Way — is that she’s completely forgotten how to sing pop. She bellows into the microphone like she’s trying to shatter the filament. The result is way too abrasive (she probably calls it “brassy”, bless her drag-club heart) for mainstream consumption, and the gruesome singles herein are stiffing despite the multimillon dollar push. Did she learn nothing from her time with Tony Bennett, or was she just there for the butt pinchings?

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

Roosevelt. Or what Passion Pit might sound like if Michael Angelikos couldn’t write. Stylish nonsense and suffocating gloss. An empty disco in an unfashionable suburb.

Top Prospect Number One

Pinegrove. As an Essex County loyalist I am obligated to spread the world about this young Montclair emo(-ish) band. I don’t really expect you sophisticates to grok, necessarily, but if you do take the time to listen, I think you’ll agree that there’s some real promise here. Evan Hall, the main main, has the heartrending Mangum-y delivery down pat, and even when he gets lost in the guitar thicket, his winsome little folk melodies poke their faces out like so many weasels in the underbrush (note: weasels are really cute.) “Aphasia” is the choice cut, the whole thing is pretty enjoyable. If you understood the Roadside Graves, this will make perfect sense to you. And damn right I pump my fist when he sings “Montclair and elsewhere”. I have my brand to protect.

Top Prospect Number Two

CupcakKe. Absolutely, positively, disgustingly obscene hip-hop from — where else — Chicago. Strictly speaking we didn’t need a girl version of Akinyele, but I for one welcome her blowjob braggadocio with open… er… okay, legs, I guess? Truth is that CupcakKe is a fine writer, quick with a novel cock metaphor, clever and wordy-playful as, say, Colin Meloy. So tell the censorious that there are a few cuts on Cum Cakethat don’t address sex very much, or just use sex as a springboard for a different topic. Like “Pedophile”, for instance, a convincing description of a pedophile; okay, scratch that, bad example. They’re there somewhere. I know it. My mind just got wiped by the really filthy ones, which, if you’re skipping around, are “Vagina”, “Deepthroat”, and the wonderfully vile “Juicy Coochie”, which comes complete with orgasm noises and slurping sounds. Important, possibly racist instructions for fucking her: “To make my thighs shake like Jello/I need a dick longer than an egg roll.” This isn’t going to be anybody’s top 1 or anything. But I don’t consider your year complete until you’ve had the experience.

Hoary Old Bastards Who Should Spare Us All And Retire

Metallica

Also Probably Ready For That Time Share In Boca Raton

ABC.The only thing worse than a sequel is a sequel that comes thirty years after the original at a moment when the artist is clean out of ideas and looking to generate interest in a new project that just ain’t that interesting and does not deserve to be associated with one of the best new wave albums ever made. Martin Fry, I love you, but you’re pissing me off.

Probably Too Far Gone To Retire At This Point, But It Can’t Hurt To Ask If It Wouldn’t Be A Good Idea For Everybody

David Crosby. Look, Croz only worked because caregivers bathed the old coot in warm jazz-pop arrangements. Which was nice of them, because he sure as hell needed the bath. Lighthouse is nothing but Crosby and his acoustic guitar, and if you listen closely, you can hear the crust falling off of him and tinkling on the studio floor. No thanks.

Prog-Rock Heroes Deep Into Diminishing Returns

Marillion and Anderson/Stolt. The letters of F.E.A.R., the new Marillion set,stand for fuck everything and run, which sounds unmarilliony until you realize that Steve Hogarth is talking about the surveillance state (he’s against it) and not the band’s nonexistent groupies. Jon Anderson’s new album is about… heck, your guess is as good as mine. I imagine there’s a convergence out there harmonizing away, somewhere in the universe. For awhile it didn’t look like he was going to outlive his frenemy Chris Squire; now that he has, I’m just happy he’s hanging in there. Both of these albums have their moments, although they’re mostly long rearview-mirror reflections of better times. Steve Rothery gets off some tasty guitar solos. It’s like having an old friend over to the house. One who kicks off his shoes, plops down on the sofa, and acts content. Maybe smells a little funny.

Young Artists Who Are, For Some Inexplicable Reason, Making The Kind Of Passive Music I Associate With Hoary Old Bastards

Shura, Katy B, and Lapsley. I suspect that these three have interesting musical ideas. Unfortunately, the sonic processing, thick as it is with turtle wax and varnish and additives and preservatives, prohibits me from finding out. This is particularly galling in the sad case of Katy B, who demonstrated on her debut that she was the only singer around who could stand up to the jacktastic dubstep beats. Those jacktastic beats are mostly gone now, butthe same can be said about Katy B. Girls — do not become background noise on your own tracks! Your producer is not that great. Moreover, he is your cot damn employee. Look in the mirror every morning and say it:Iam the talent.

Hoary Old Bastard Who Cagily Enlisted A Couple Of Vaguely Younger Artists To Camouflage Her Overwhelming Hoary Old Bastardness

k.d. lang. case/lang/veirs is another data point in my argument that Neko Case is at her best when she’s in rotation with other singers. Case spins out her usual not-too-mysterious riddles, k.d. lang’s countrypolitan numbers are tired like a mareready for the glue factory, and Tucker Martine’s delicate production feather-dusts the whole shebang with grandma’s Gold Bond foot powder. The MVP and savior is Laura Veirs, who, despite her guileless lyrics and unathletic voice, gets off some keepers: “Song For Judee”, a folk-rock hagiography, “Greens Of June”, about the redemptive hippie powers of nature, and “The Best Kept Secret In Silverlake”, which sucks up fetchingly to the outfit’s guitar player. These three codgers harmonize like a dream — not a sex dream, necessarily, but one where you find some long lost socks.

Not Dull, But Not Too Fascinating, Either

Z-Ro —Drinkin’ & Drivin’/Future —EVOL/Cousin Stizz —Monda/Lil Yachty —Lil Boat. Not for me is the argument that the ascendancy of Lil Yachty represents the fall of Western civ. or even Western hip-hop. Remember they said the same about Young Thug, and Tyler, and Soulja Boy, and N.W.A., and, um, hip-hop itself.It is proof, though, that sooner rather than later, rap will be elevator music. Not that any of these are empty, meaningless albums — on the contrary, they’re all pretty memorable. It’s that they all prioritize their smooooothed out, sing-song summertime vibe to the exclusion of all else. The sun is setting in the park and the ice cream truck is here, and here come various molesters and drug peddlers to getcha. Dorchester’s Cousin Stizz is the August streetcorner master — the whole Monda LP bops by slowly and relentlessly; there’s nothing arresting about it, it just insinuates itself into your consciousness. Same goes for Future, who has settled into autopilot and has no real incentive to take back manual control. Choice cuts for the snippers and splicers: Z-Ro’s rapey “Hostage”, Stizz’s super-hi “Gang Green”, and Yachty’s irresistible, utterly weetodded “Broccoli”, which makes Thugger’s lyrics look like Edna St. Vincent Millay by comparison.

Worst Song On A Good Album

Rihanna’s “Woo”. I think we covered this already. It’s late and I’m punchy.

Song That Would Drive Me Craziest On Infinite Repeat

Jeff Rosenstock’s “Hell Hole”

Song That Got Stuck In My Head The Most This Year

Probably Xenia Rubinos’s “Mexican Chef”, but “80s Mercedes” sure did make a late move.

If I Could Join Any Band Or Musical Project, I’d Pick This One

You think Noname or Jamila could use a tambourine shaker who can’t really shake a tambourine in time? No?

Place The Next Pop Music Boom Will Come From

We’re sticking with Chicago for another year at least.

Will Still Be Making Good Records In 2026

Jermaine Cole

Will Be A 1-Hit Wonder

Post Malone

Will Be A 1-Hyped Album Wonder (I Hope)

Whitney. 2016 wasthe year of hard lessons, and here’s a big one that I hope we’ve all internalized: stay the hell away from the woods. It’s pretty and the otters are cute, but the people there don’t like you. Oh, they might pretend to for a time, for strategic reasons, but the weight of their resentment is crushing whatever identification they ever had with city slickers like us. That light upon the lake might be the moon’s reflection, but it’s probably the torches at the Make America Great Again rally. These people believe they’ve been given a raw deal, and they’re not wrong. Ican identify, sort of, as long as I am at a great distance. But what I can no longer handle is hicksters who frame rural america as some kind of idyllic retreat. Any white singer pining for “Golden Days” — in a year when we learned, conclusively, that “conservative” is just another identity category — is speaking language with which we’ve all become dead familiar. This elitist scumbag says: no more.

Biggest Musical Trends Of 2017

Hyper-articulateness. Unconvincing patriotism.

Best Album Of 2017

Semper Femina. I expect it to be Laura Marling good.