the tris mccall report

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.

Ben Krieger asked some questions that I felt I should stop and think about. This is my attempt to answer him.

Why do family and friends always instinctively frame our talents potential within the confines of a capitalist model?

I know what you’re getting at, and I sympathize — the arts aren’t a business enterprise, and artists shouldn’t be evaluated reflexively on the basis of a bottom line or a place on a corporate ladder. But I often wish that those family and friends would come to a clearer understanding of capitalism and what it asks of its subjects. Because if they did, I expect they’d realize that people in the arts, and specifically people in bands bands are actually way better at entrepreneurial action than people who just went straight to business school and did what they were told. I’m not talking about me, of course — I’ve got no business sense at all, and that’s not something I’m proud of. I mean somebody like Oliver from A Place To Bury Strangers. Not only has he held together a noise-rock band for many years, made the kind of music he wants to make without compromise and toured all over the world, he’s also run a homemade guitar-effects company. That’s impressive, and it was all done through his own initiative. Capitalism, at its Adam Smith-y best, is supposed to make that kind of thing possible: it’s supposed to be designed to reward risk-takers who are willing to go play in Lithuania (which A Place To Bury Strangers actually went and did this year, God bless them) to spread their ideas.

Do I believe in this notion of capitalism? Well, no; I have major theoretical problems with it. I’m one of those hippies who believe that there are deep contradictions within capitalism that create economic and psychological difficulties for everybody saddled with this mode of production. I think we can do better. I don’t expect others to agree, but I do insist that they be consistent. You want a system dependent on individual actors who take chances and don’t ask to have their hands held? That’s what artists do, and that is why real capitalists have always sought them out.

The problem is that those friends and family members aren’t being honest. They’re not fans of capitalism — or at least, they’re not bringing that fandom to those conversations in which they knock Guitar Joe for his decision not to helm Johnson and Johnson. What I’ve come to realize is that they’re just mad at him for exercising his freedom to do what he wants — freedom that, for whatever reason, they don’t feel they have. So they hit him over the head with the expectations stick: you’re not supposed to be painting squiggles, you’re supposed to be working toward your MBA! That’s what responsible people do! Whenever I hear such nonsense, I am always reminded of something that a talented experimental photographer once told me. We were driving through Jersey City and he asked me to look around. Everything you see, he told me, was designed by an artist. People don’t realize that, he said, but it’s true. Unless you’re in the wilderness, the appearance and function of everything in your environment was developed in a studio by an aesthetician who had to figure out how it fit into your life. For the arts to work, there needs to be a constant supply of crazy visionaries who are willing to live in a garret and try out bizarre things all day. Again, this is something real capitalists know, and why you’ll never see one of those guys knocking artists — no matter how difficult or temperamental they are. It is only the people who feel trapped and used who run artists down and attempt to make them feel terrible for doing, if you’ll pardon my poetic language, what God has asked them to do.

Has the allure of success and exposure that a capitalist hub like New York City promises pulled artists away from vital local scenes?

New York City, as you’ve probably noticed, is the land of hierarchy. Everything is measured, life is a constant performance review, and people have a tendency to treat strangers according to their level of professional achievement. It’s all a game, but it’s one that’s taken very seriously by its players, because if it were ever to be destroyed by hippie powers, nobody on the island(s) trusts what would come next. I think we’ve recently seen that they have good reason to be protective, and suspicious of the outsiders who are ever-so-suspicious of them. In my opinion, people who survive and thrive in New York City deserve respect: if you can be the rare lumberjack who stays on the log as it spins faster and faster, go on and pat yourself on the back for your persistence and agility. The trouble is that it’s possible to spin on the log so long that you get disoriented and assume that that’s the way that the earth moves. Some New Yorkers find the motivations of non-New York artists inscrutable: what, you don’t want to be on MTV? You’re not on social media? You have qualms about selling your writing to a reality TV show? Huh. You must be a rare bird indeed.

But in fact the nonprofessionalizing non-NYC artist is not a rare bird at all. She does not necessarily want to spend her time making career moves. Maybe she wants wider exposure for her work; maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she just wants to play in the mud. If she’s the sort of artist who digs the hierarchy game — the kind who frets about how many Instagram followers she has, or whether her name is in bigger type on the bill than her rival’s is — she’s going to gravitate toward New York City. We’ve seen a lot of that, and I’m of the opinion that it’s had a dulling effect on Big Apple art. (You may think I’m just being a Jersey chauvinist, and maybe you’re right.) As for the scenes they’ve left behind, well, the engine goes on, albeit at a somewhat lower RPM. The locals who don’t share her sense of enterprise might feel like it’s good riddance: she was a sellout anyway, she was a name-dropper and social climber first and an artist only after that. They may feel so much better off without her that they might not notice the distinct attenuation of energy during the next local arts festival. As I see it, it would be healthier for everybody if she stayed in rural Rockville and used her drive to turn it into a regional hub with its own distinct artistic personality. But she’s not going to do that, and her decision is part of a much wider trend of the provinces emptying out as socially alienated young people try their luck in the showbiz centers. Which is making for a monochromatic countryside.

What role has journalism played in the reinforcing certain models of artistic success over others?

Journalists have been sucked into the whirlpool by those same centralizing forces, and as a consequence they tend to reward the artists who are immersed in the big city game and treat those who aren’t as quaint curios from the fifteenth century. I’ll give you an example from my own experience: when I first started playing music, there were many, many newspapers and zines in New Jersey. Some of them were statewide, but most had a regional focus: the Bloom Beacon might not have had distribution far beyond the Meadow, but Milo and Opus and Editor Overbeek, or their Jersey counterparts, did attempt to cover its territory comprehensively. Since the Internet has accommodated the launch of a thousand personal pages, we’re told not to mourn the loss of the Bloom Beacon too much — surely there are many more outlets for publicity than there were before? The truth is more complicated: yes, Bob’s Kickin Rock Blog does exist, sort of, but to get the publicity benefits sort of attention that local journalism used to provide, you’ve got to play ball with the big operations, most of which are located in those showbiz centers. That probably means being on the scene in New York, especially since media consolidation and shrinkage in New Jersey has effectively left us without a voice.

At the same time that’s all happening, we’ve been handcuffed by the rise of click-driven journalism. It used to be difficult to convince skeptical editors that Vanishing Twin merits coverage when Bon Jovi is in town, but it wasn’t impossible. The writer could make a passionate (albeit largely bullshit) case that the artistic significance of the former was something that the readers needed to learn about, and everybody was sick of the latter anyway, and c’mon, are we men or mice here; let’s throw the dice already. We can’t do that anymore. The proof is in the count, now visible for all to see, and those numbers will always be less interesting than our fantasies. Local coverage has always depended on those fantasies and the willingness of editors to take an occasional ratings hit. Everybody’s belts have tightened. Let’s get some celebrity stories up, right this minute!; those quotas ain’t going to make themselves. Like Editor Overbeek used to say: run that baby.

Why haven’t scenes like the one Michael Azerrad documented sprung up again? Or have they? Whats going on outside of New York, anyway?

The old college-rock circuit was a beautiful thing: it sustained clubs and zones and record shops and independent bookstores, regional radio stations, cheap restaurants, copy-shop poster duplicators, and so on. But I don’t want to get too nostalgic for it. For one thing, at least in the Northeast, it was a white man’s underworld. It was not a place for hip-hop, and hip-hop has been the tailwind of culture for at least a quarter-century. And even if the college rock scene ain’t what it used to be, it’s worth noting that something not dissimilar to it has been happening in urban areas — spoken-word events and open mics for poets and locally-focused websites meant to support budding rappers and producers. Much of the best music released in 2016 came from a group of Chicago artists who’d connected through after-school programs and the library and promoted by Fake Shore Drive. I don’t know what kind of book Michael Azerrad would write about contemporary hip-hop, but I’ll bet he’d hear echoes of SST in outfits like Royal Rap and Wondering Sounds, and see Chance and Jamila and Fatimah Warner as good scene citizens.

The difference is that this is a city phenomenon. So far at least; there are probably hip-hop scenes in small towns, too, but we haven’t heard much about them yet. And this exposes the common thread shared by all of these questions — are country mice and city mice going to find some common ground or are we destined to be at each others’ throats? Can artists do something about the cold civil war we’re presently engaged in? Can artists stand aside and be observers, or are they destined to be partisans arguing (or even fighting) on behalf of urban values? I like to reserve for the arts a role nobler than political commentary, and I’m corny enough to think that during good times, every guitar strum is balm for our national wounds. But these sure aren’t good times. If artists want to get the hell out of the sticks, I can’t say that I blame them. Most of the nuance of modern politics has fallen away, and we’ve been left with a ferocious elemental struggle between people who want to open things up and people who want to close things down. Artists tend to be open by disposition. They’re not going to want to be where the wall-builders and border shutters are, and they’re under no obligation to sacrifice time or sanity by singing to those who won’t listen. Until we get a little glasnost around here, that’s the way it has to stay.

What’s going on *inside* New York, for that matter?

The irony is that while New York symbolizes openness and does so for very good reasons, the actual experience of living in New York is often anything but. Manhattan, in particular, feels like it’s on 24-7 lockdown: black helicopters in the sky and heavily armed police in the train stations and at major intersections. A staggering amount of wealth has been concentrated in New York City, and the town is preoccupied with guarding the safe. It has surely not escaped your notice that many of the city’s most visible artists and arts institutions either 1.) celebrate big money, 2.) sheepishly apologize for big money, or 3.) gingerly poke fun at big money in a manner that suggests no real harm is meant. Like I said above, if you’re the kind of artist who digs hierarchy and loves keeping score — and there are great ones who do — New York might be the place for you. Otherwise, I’d advise you to head for smaller cities: places like Baltimore, Detroit, Richmond, Providence, etc. Rents are cheaper, studio space is easier to come by, and there’s more room to build something of your own that won’t immediately be sucked into the orbit of global commerce.

What exactly are the criteria that Pitchfork uses when rating those records and can we discuss them?

Probably not. I don’t know exactly how Pitchfork assigns its ratings, but I have to imagine that they’re developed in committee, and that plenty of extramusical factors go into that number grade. There’s nothing new about that, though — it’s just basic showbiz. Artists with good connections and good backstories are going to get prioritized. Fairness is for soccer matches, right? That said, I think it’s been a long time since Pitchfork was a leading indicator: the records that they tend to like are the same ones that everybody else does. Their Top 10 of 2016 is loaded with celebrities and major-label moneymakers. Like many other middle aged Internet music sites, it gives the visitor the sense that it’s struggling to catch up with current trends. I felt like I was being hyperbolic when I called it People Magazine plus bad cultural studies jargon last year, but I look at Pitchfork now and see Beyonce Releases More Amazing Pregnancy Photos and Frank Ocean Sued By His Father and other such monkey business and wonder if I went far enough. Most brand-name Internet websites have been pulled toward the gossip column over the past five years; Pitchfork has made its transition with more enthusiasm than most. Whether this trend will ultimately discredit the ratings number remains to be seen — I think it’s already happened somewhat. But we’re in an intermediary period where the Pitchfork assessment is still consequential to musicians while it probably isn’t that consequential to Pitchfork itself.

There’s a damned good case to be made that I shouldn’t be doing this at all. In a time of national crisis, squawking about the wonders of the Knowles sisters and various college rock bands is at best uncouth and at worst a conciliatory distraction. I ought to be devoting my attention and my talents, such as they are, to the emerging resistance movement. I’m not being sarcastic here — I get it. This isn’t a drill: things really are as bad as your paranoid uncle always feared they’d get. (I’m your paranoid uncle.) But I also felt that to *not* do the Poll and write it up as I have for the past 26 years, well, that’d be letting the terrorists win. Moreover, to quote my hero Rodney in Back To School — just imagine me now with the same look of dawning horror on my face as he had in the Sam Kinison scene — I’m not a fighter, I’m a lover.

So I figured the Poll and its writeup could be a much-needed break in the parade of bad news that has likely been your life for the past few months at least. Then I read your responses. Turns out you had a few things to say. And since you couldn’t help but write about politics, and I am a graduate of a bossy political science program, allow me to join the party here. I’ve got a longer essay that I’ll post sometime after the Poll is over; for today, I’ll limit myself to a few reflections and then turn the floor over to you. I doubt you’re going to agree, but what the heck; it’s my website, and I’m free to express myself however I’d like. For now.

* * * * * * * * *

This spring, I read something serious in an otherwise blithe book about Amsterdam — something that stayed with me. The author made a claim about the Holocaust that I’d never encountered before. He reported that the death rate among Jews living in metropolitan Holland was higher than anywhere else in Western Europe — higher, even, than in Germany. The reason for this was not that the Dutch were particularly cruel, or even particularly fascist. On the contrary — they’d long maintained one of the most open societies on the globe. One of the characteristic byproducts of this open society, however, was a meticulous system of records on the country’s residents. These were kept to help the government better understand the people living under their authority, and the Dutch, being scrupulous chroniclers and attempt-to-understanders, put this paper database together for many reasons, some of which were undoubtably virtuous. They meant well. Yet when the Nazis took over the country, all of that information fell into their hands. They knew exactly where all the Jews were. They had an authoritarian’s most valuable tool — one more valuable even than a gun. They had a map.

In 2017, the entire social world is mapped. Chances are, you participated in the mapping. You’ve turned over lists of your friends and associates, your employment history, your political views, your health status and sexual preferences and, sometimes, your exact position on the globe to corporate social-networking sites. You may have done that for good reasons: you might have wanted to reconnect with old buddies, or share pictures of your newborn baby with your family, or spread the word about your band. We now know for certain that those services are all too ready to hand over their databases to the intelligence services and the police. Domestic surveillance has accelerated under every administration since World War II, including the one that just left office. Federal officers now have unprecedented powers to prosecute people who are deemed enemies of the state. We don’t know quite yet exactly what sort of Justice Department the new administration is going to put together under Jeff Sessions, but c’mon, the last few days ought to have given you a pretty good indication of their aims, and their scruples. They’re not going to hesitate to use the map they’ve inherited.

In an environment like the one we’re entering, it becomes incumbent upon all of us to attempt to scramble the lines on that map a little and make it harder for authoritarians to pin us down. Employ phony names, lie on surveys, refuse to sign things and hesitate before giving personal information to companies, confound the algorithm and make stuff up; do what you have to do to confuse the compiler of the dossier. Mostly, if you haven’t already, I urge you to severely curtail or discontinue your use of those corporate social-media sites. For most of us, the damage is already done — we’ve already created an easily-searchable online double of ourselves and the lives we lead, and we’re now completely open to inspection and exploitation, and, possibly, repression and punishment for who we are and what we believe. But there are millions of younger Americans who haven’t been absorbed into the system, and we need to stop tagging them, and classifying them, and entangling them in a network of associations that could, in some perhaps-not-so-distant fascist future, get them chucked in jail or worse.

You’re looking for something to do; you want to kick back against a government that’s repulsive to you? One that’s already shown pronounced sadistic tendencies? By all means, march, and shout, and organize, and above all, stick together. But the most powerful thing you can do right now to resist the drift toward authoritarianism is: leave Facebook and never come back. Get lost. Remember always that this regime wouldn’t be in place were it not for the specific targeting and voter modeling that could only have been accomplished through use of the personal data we’ve made available on the corporate social networks. The Trump campaign flooded Facebook users in the Midwest with Pizzagate horror stories and the like; you probably laugh when you hear this stuff, but campaign managers were able to take the measure of the susceptibility of voters and tailor their propaganda to suit what they’d discovered. A network designed to facilitate the frenzied sharing of incendiary clickbait headlines led, inevitably, to the triumph of a human piece of clickbait.

There are many among you who felt, strongly, that all the Democrats would have had to have done to beat Trump was nominate Bernie Sanders. I was a Sanders voter, too — I wrote the pieces and played the benefits and spread the good news (I didn’t wear the hat, though; I left that to Brad.) But if you think for a moment that Bernie wouldn’t have been vulnerable to the same sort of devastating social-network-driven assault that convinced thousands of Republicans that Hillary Clinton was sacrificing Haitian babies to Moloch in the basement of Roberta’s or wherever, you don’t understand how precisely we’ve all been psychographically pigeonholed and how thoroughly complicit we’ve been in weaving our own puppet-strings.

Nas wasn’t the first to say it, but say it he did, from a small stage at the iHeartRadio studio right after the release of “Life Is Good”. Social media, he told us, over and over, is the Devil. Not a plaything of the Devil meant for idle hans, or a tool of the Devil, or a means by which the Devil can drag you under by the sharp lapels of your checkered coat; no, the Devil himself. I didn’t really get it that night, although I should have, because it at base was similar to an argument made by my other favorite writer. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis warns us that the Devil will convince us to do neither what we want nor what we ought — that his aim for human beings is to drive us into the trough of dullness where we repeat, with mounting joylessness, the same dreary, self-destructive activities every day. How many people do you know who were first enticed on to the corporate social-networks by the low-wattage ego strokes that they provide, and now must check in regularly, all day, and with increasing desperation, to learn if they’re still liked? How many hours have we thrown down that computer-blue sinkhole? How have you been compensated for your long labor on the map we’ve made? How do you suppose that map is going to be used?

Life is too precious to be spent in a spiderweb. As a cold February begins, I ask you again to turn your backs on these evil services. Discredit them by walking away. Admit to yourself what I know you already know: President Donald Trump could never have happened without them. That ought to be all the motivation you’d ever need to say goodbye.

* * * * * * * * *

Okay, all you Tommy Shaws and Dennis DeYoungs out there: it’s music time.

Best rapping: Chancellor Bennett takes this by a small plurality over Kanye. I was happy to see a few votes for Noname.

Best lyrics: Paul Simon. He sure did see things — and say things — that others were unwilling to say they saw. Forget Nate Silver; this year Rhymin’ Simon was the man with the long view.

Best album cover: Lots of votes for Lemonade. I get it: you people like it when Beyonce hides in her coat.

Best album title: Nothing close to a majority, but scattered votes for A Seat At The Table.

Biggest disappointment: This was one of the many negative categories won, or lost, by Kanye West. I’m pretty sure you weren’t talking about The Life Of Pablo, which, as far as I can tell, you all liked — even the passionate Taylor Swift fans among you. Sometimes I wonder how Kanye feels now in the wake of the recent executive orders and reports of Iranian babies who can’t get to the United States for surgery. Mostly I’ve just stopped wondering.

Best production: See, Kanye took this, too. It’s not The Life Of Pablo that’s bugging you.

2016 album that wore out most quickly: Some of you felt that Tegan and Sara’s latest was pretty thin. This wasn’t my vote — I like it, even as I admit it’s… well, it’s pretty thin. Steven thought I was dissing the Quins when I told him they’d made their Big Generator. I had to remind him that Big Generator is pretty darn good. “Love Will Find A Way” = mmmmm. But Big Generator marked the moment when the retooled, chart-friendly version of Yes went from “we will use the rudiments of modern production to fashion a subversive and incisive commentary on contemporary culture cleverly disguised as synthpop” to “hits hits hits yum we need more hits in our mouf.” To be fair, Sara, if not Tegan, would probably say that she’s getting some seriously homofriendly content into heavy rotation, which would be politically justifiable if she really was in heavy rotation, which she most certainly is not. She can commiserate with Carly Rae Jepsen, who continues to adhere to formula on behalf of, who?, male rock critics in their late twenties? As tasty as these confections are, the kids aren’t gobbling them up. Shoot high, aim low, people.

Most overrated: Three-way tie between Frank Ocean, Bon Iver, and Blackstar. Mind you, nobody said David Bowie was himself overrated. They picked on the album, not the legend.

Album that felt most like an obligation to get through and enjoy: Some longtime Okkervil River fans confessed that they found Away a chore. I don’t agree in the slightest, but I do understand if “Call Yourself Renee” stopped you cold. Van Morrison he ain’t. Nobody is.

Thing you feel cheapest about liking: A few parting votes for Barack Obama here. He gets some every year. Oh!, music, right. Young Thug took this one, which surprised me. Given all the critical fawning, I thought he’d made it safely beyond reproach. Was it “get behind her/put it in her butt”? Because that seems altogether consistent with pop as we’ve come to know and love it.

Most alienating perspective: Kanye West in a landslide. Again, you weren’t talking about “Famous”. Not to defend the indefensible — although I do always seem to be doing that on his behalf, don’t I? — but it does seem in retrospect that the stupid Trump stuff had more to do with his rivalry with Jay-Z, who was a vocal Clinton supporter, than it did with anything political. Also I am sure the misogyny really appealed to him.

Worst song of the year: Any of the three hit Chainsmokers tracks. They really did make themselves supervillains in record time. Normally I’d admire that, but we’re facing no shortage of supervillains at the moment.

Young upstart who should be sent down to the minors for more seasoning:Car Seat Headrest. Teens Of Denial and Blonde were the year’s two most polarizing albums.

Hoary old bastard who should spare us all and retire: It pains me to report that Paul Simon got a few votes here, although not anywhere near as many as Neil Young. Or PJ Harvey, for that matter; guess you didn’t find her DC travelogue worthy of TripAdvisor. Incredibly, people still choose not to vote for me. I just think you’re being polite. You don’t have to be. I’m from Jersey and I write for newspapers and such; I can’t be insulted.

Good artist most in need of fresh ideas: Frightened Rabbit. Ten years ago, they won this poll. Painting Of A Panic Attack barely scraped together 20 points.

Will still be making good records in 2016: You’re betting on Chance The Rapper. I feel like I have to play the Bob Gibson role here. In 1985, Gibson watched Dwight Gooden and said “he will never again be as good as he is right now.” That Chicago crew was the brightest spot of a dark year, and they’ve absolutely positively got it going on. It feels like there’s nothing they can’t do. Enjoy it, because it’s not going to last forever.

Floor’s yours now. It ain’t pretty. Friends, I feel your pain.

Coming trend for 2017:

Shairi Turner: The muthafuckin’ struggle.

George Pasles: It’s going to be hard to pay attention to music in 2017.

Zachary Lipez: Biggest trend of 2016 — Using “these dark times” to push your music. Super great. Biggest trend of 2017 — The actual dark times.

Marisol Fuentes: Difficulty sleeping.

Stephen Mejias:Doom pop? Can that exist? Is that what the Weeknd is?

Brad Krumholz: Online album development, a la The Life Of Pablo.

Brian Block:Facebook directly taking over our computers and playing the songs it has calculated we want to hear at all times.

Steven Matrick: Political screeds (lord help us.)

Andrea Weiss: Everyone continues to get political and write lots of protest songs, most of them wonderful.

Hilary Jane Englert: Protest music.

Jim Testa: Protest songs will make a big comeback.

Jer Fairall: Protest and pants-shitting.

Adam Copeland: Braindead people still saying that Trump as president is good for art. A lot of misguided white people suddenly trying to make ineffective protest music, even though people of color have been doing it constantly since, well, since they’ve been in this country.

Steve Carlson: Endless paranoia – music about how we’re all trying not to die at any moment.

Oliver Lyons: Trap music. And by that I mean, “we are trapped in this government camp”, music.

Tom Snow: Global thermonuclear war.

Miscellaneous commentary:

Steve Carlson: Prevailing theme or trend of 2016 –Death. Just, death. Everywhere. And who knew the worst was yet to come.

Jer Fairall: The best art of 2016 was the video for Shura’s “What’s It Gonna Be?” An uplifting mix of pop-culture reverence, high school comedy and winsome queer romance, my endless refreshings of it on YouTube were the only thing that made me feel consistently good about popular culture in this most miserable of years.

Adam Copeland: Most alienating perspective –Kanye West thinking he should run for president.

Oliver Lyons: Most alienating perspective –At this point, Kanye. I know we shouldn’t expect musicians to be role models since 99% of them are grade school dropouts with crippling drug dependencies, but to keep praising every action this clownshoes does as an act of genius has become tiresome and just wrong. He’s a doofus who makes great music. I can live with that.

Brian Block: Best live show I saw this year —I’m tempted to say Le Vent du Nord at the National Folk Festival in Greensboro in October. Sociopolitical Quebecois folk songs, in French, are not an easy thing to make a North Carolinian general audience enjoy, understand, and sing along (in a foreign tongue) with, and Le Vent have some seriously impressive tricks to make it happen.But I’m gonna pick Shearwater, the Cat’s Cradle, December 14. Their singer’s public presentation is like mine — a somewhat sheepish but agreeable storytelling voice, explaining cryptic lyrics, telling little jokes that sometimes go somewhere, and willing to make carefully-worded exploratory leaps. For example, I didn’t know “Backchannels” was about “This little voice I sometimes get in the back of my head — hopefully it’s just me — that says ‘Hey, Jonathan, you’ve had a really nice run, and maybe now you should kill yourself”. But it takes a lot of grace to tell that in a friendly, non-worrisome way and make it about “the last taboo, something we’re not allowed to talk about in polite society, and maybe we should be. I suspect it’s gotten pretty common since November, like I could bring it up and strangers would say ‘Yeah! Me too!’. Like we should bring it into the open and reveal for the tiny, impotent thing it really is”.

No, I never feel that way. But what a useful speech, and what a tremendously fond, chatty concert it all was. The covers of David Bowie’s ‘Lodger’ era — and of “the national anthem”, by which Meiburg mean “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” — were odd and utterly inspired as well.

Jonathan Andrew: 2016 was the year I finally got into Warren Zevon. Those first two albums are phenomenal. I continue to listen to more catalog releases than new works. Increasingly, music is used to soothe and to activate the pure pleasure centers of my brain/soul. Am I disappointed that I am no longer actively seeking out challenging contemporary sounds as much as I once did? Yes. Do the Prine, Petty, and Floyd back catalogs and myriad Grateful Dead live recordings bring me much needed joy? Absolutely. Also, seeing music live be it at larger concert venues or the local bar where my friends are jamming has become even more of an essential way of life. Stand in a room and listen to people create. Not sure how else I’m going to get through the next year, never mind the subsequent three. Never mind next week. Music is what we have.

Oliver Lyons: Best live show — My wife dancing to “Return of the Mack” at our wedding despite having torn her ACL earlier. “Dancing” involved being spun around in an office chair. She’s a trooper.

Tom Snow — Many winning guest appearances this year, notably Busta on the Tribe album, and 2 Chainz on the De La album. For some reason, I like Chance as a guest rapper better than on his own album. He may be following the Ludacris career trajectory for me. Ah, wait, there he is on television, hawking Kit Kats and proving my point.

Bradley Skaught: I can’t believe that anyone truly thought the Tribe Called Quest comeback would be as brilliant as it is. Even the most die hard fan.

Brian Block: A Tribe Called Quest were a surprise for me, as I don’t recall liking their original albums (granting I only a college kid back then), and unlike a lot of my favorite hip-hop, they cant in any sensible way be re-interpreted as an offshoot of rock. The bit where they’re an offshoot of Gene Wilder’s turn as Willy Wonka is damn hard to resist, though. Aesop Rock’s excellence is the opposite of a surprise, except that it’s nice to learn he doesn’t lose any of his poetic power by scaling back the density of his references.I have no idea why Saul Williams keeps getting overlooked in critic polls, though: powerful deep voice, inventively urgent rhythms, cogent political lyrics that leave room for him to emerge as a character (I love his own casual drag-wear in the lyrics of the pro-transgender anthem Think Like They Book Say). Is it a problem that he’s worked so much with Nine Inch Nails? Aesop and Kanye haven’t been hurt by sampling Emerson-Lake-Palmer or King Crimson. I don’t get it.

Oliver Lyons: Best song of the year — It’s obviously Vic Mensa’s “16 Shots.” But in a better world, one where we didn’t elect a bright orange fascist who values money over people’s lives, song of the year is Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles.” The best thing to ever have “Beatles” attached to it.

Anna Howe: Least believable perspective over an album — Young Thug, because nobody could be that retarded. Also, there’s something suspiciously insincere about Maren Morris.

Bobby Olivier: Prevailing trend of 2016 — The return of the choker necklace! And the pop-drop. Damn Chainsmokers…

Adam Copeland: Biggest disappointment — Bruno Mars miscalculating that New Jack Swing would be back in style.

Shairi Turner: Nicki and Kim get their shit together and drop a secret album produced by Missy featuring Foxy, Salt and Pepa, Monica, Brandy, and the original Destiny’s Child some fresh bars Tupac made from his private island.

Brian Block:As for David Bowie, well, in 2014, my mom died of cancer. She’d moved into a grandmother apartment attached to our house, and it devastated me watching her decline: first losing the ability to garden, then to take her several-mile walks in the morning, then to concentrate on any book that wasn’t a light romance novel, finally to even utter sentences related to reality instead of hallucination. My mom was one of the smartest, funniest, kindest people I ever knew: I trust the nurses when they tell me she handled her decline with unusual grace and panache. David Bowie handled his by releasing the most daring, inventive, sui-generis, BEST album of his career. I do not understand, and I’m sad he died, but holy crap what a way to go.

George Pasles: I was listening to WMFU late last January when they announced Bowie’s death. I was never really a big fan – Sure, I admired the guy, but who didn’t? – though when I’d watched the video for Lazarus a week or two before, I thought: Geez, this guy is still operating at the highest level. I listened to WFMU’s all night on-the-fly retrospective, and was amazed. Maybe it takes someone’s career being over for me to really assess it. Whatever it is that so many of us are trying to do for even one moment, he did it for almost fifty years, and far, far better than we can comprehend.

We construct narratives to frame events, so we can say now that his death was some kind of sign, however you define it, about the year ahead. I mean, Prince? There were losses beyond comprehension. Losses of all kinds. I was wondering in the fall: even when Hillary wins, many of the delusions that we share about this country are irrevocably compromised. I was not optimistic about President Clinton’s ability to get anything done.

But you’re asking about music. To find what I listened to last year, I looked through the youtube links in my browser history. It was mostly movie clips after celebrities died over the year, though a detective would note that there was a series of self-defense videos I watched on Nov 10th. As usual, I almost exclusively listened to old stuff. Mostly, it was the baroque pop and blue eyed soul of the early Bee Gees. I’m completely burned out on the brothers Gibb now. Those songs are depressing as hell, and I’m very suggestible. Other old stuff revisited or discovered in 2016: Monkees, Black Sabbath, T Rex, B-52s, REM’s Green, Hidden Cameras, Wings, Led Zeppelin, Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27, No. 2 (really), The Equals “Police On My Back, Forever by Pete Drake, Her Mothers Daughter by Dory Previn, and most recently The Go-Betweens’ Tallulah. Beautiful stuff. I was sad to find that my old stand-bys New Pornographers, early Giorgio Moroder, and TMF didn’t work for me anymore. It was disappointing, as they’d brought me such reassurance in the past. About what, I’m not sure. Maybe they will work again sometime. I hope.

I remember protesting W’s inauguration in DC in January 2001 shouting about what a disaster his presidency was going to be. Oh, we had no idea. Comparing then to now, I’m re-shadowed by an apocalyptic dread from my childhood that had vanished with the Cold War. I’d made and accepted certain conclusions about my own life over the last few decades, but I expected humanity at large and America in particular to continue with at least a barely net positive first derivative after I left the scene. Now, I’m reminded of an afternoon two and half years ago, watching coverage of post-Ferguson protests along with commentators’ despicable reactions. I thought for the first time what many others concluded long before: maybe this country just can’t go on. Maybe it cannot overcome its history. It needs a real reset, a civil war level reset, to survive, if it was to survive at all. But the thought passed. Surely, the economic and power structures were too firmly entrenched for such change to ever be possible or even desirable for enough people. Now it seems not only possible and desirable, but probable. Terrifyingly, I cannot see a way for the side I’d prefer to emerge victorious to do so. And the bloodshed. And what comes after. The wheels have come off. We (that is, you and I and likely anyone who will ever read this) have lived in a time of almost unequalled prosperity and safety in the long history of the planet. Our time has been the aberration.

A madman is in power and that power is near absolute. I am concerned for the future of the world.

Zachary Lipez: As with last year, since I’ve become entirely sucked into the music industry my EOY poll has suffered. I am both so angry and entirely compromised. I just want to say something positive and with total certainty… Bargou 08, from Tunisia, are putting out the best heavy album of 2017. Get into them early. Also, the 2017 Uniform album. See? I like music. Just not Porches and Frankie Cosmos and whatever. Jeez.

Tom Snow: MBA Corner: the freemium go-to-market strategy seems to have worked out quite nicely for Abel Tesfaye.

Tom Snow:Speaking of go-to-market strategies, I started subscribing to Apple Music this year, which gave me the opportunity to listen to a lot more new music that I had in years past, and to see how I felt about unfamiliar acts before plunking down $9.99-$12.99 for their album based only on faith or a suspiciously high Metacritic score. I did end up actually buying a few of my favorite albums of the year, mainly because I spend a lot of time on airplanes and I wanted to be able to listen to them while offline. But for most of the music I listened to this year (old and new), I used the service as it was designed, streaming the songs via an Internet connection. While like I said I got exposed to more new acts that I typically would have, I’m not sure how comfortable I feel about this whole thing. Does renting rather than owning music change my relationship to it? Don’t get me wrong: I’m a proud holder of the Biblioteque Municipale de Genve library card, for instance, but there’s still something significant about the books that you buy and put on your bookshelf, no? To what extent do I want to define myself by my record collection? And what happens when my record collection begins to dissolve into various server farms in God-knows-where, only accessible to me for as long as I keep sending money every month to Cupertino, CA? To what extent does a third-party mediator influence my relationship with music, and the artist responsible for it? Maybe I’m making something out of nothing here: after all, all the recorded music I’ve listened to my entire life has been delivered via some kind of mediator, whether its a record label or a radio station or Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank. Still, when the artist/listener relationship starts to drift towards the transient / transactional / conditional, I’m not sure that takes us in a good direction. But I suppose at this moment we all have bigger fish to fry, don’t we?

Brad Krumholz: Biggest disappointment — Kanye’s alignment with evil politics.

Zachary Lipez: Biggest disappointment — That young men still confuse being Angel Olsen fans for depth.

Brad Krumholz: Worst lyrics by a good lyricist who should have known better –“Muslims and gays/boy we hate your ways” is simultaneously great and really bad.

Brian Block:Regina Spektor emerged this year as one of our great protest songwriters. The protest is surprising. Great shouldn’t be, yet I think she gets overlooked, because her whimsy and quirkiness are an easy excuse to dismiss her as childish, as Tori Amos likely would be if she hadn’t gotten “You can make me cum, that don’t make you Jesus” on record first.

Spektor’s Trapper and the Furrier, Small Bills, and Sellers of Flowers, each with varying doses of playfulness or myth, correctly diagnose our country as under internal attack from the forces of wealth addiction. Unlike how we regard too much cocaine or too much alcohol, or even too much sex (whatever that might mean), we shower those with a bottomless craving for personal wealth with respect, power, and the keys to our electoral system.

For thousands and thousands of years, we’ve treated animals as pinatas that we whack and food/ fur/ blubber comes out; trees as something we demolish so that houses and heat leap out for us; the earth as something we slice into and coal or diamonds emerge. Our overlords, sharing the same convenience-loving DNA we have but with an extra heaping of power, instinctively treat the rest of us humans the same way. Democracy was an experiment in collective resistance, in saying No, thats not acceptable; the 1980s and beyond have been an experiment in Never mind, we are in fact Human Resources, and gosh we are kind of expensive and whiny compared to those other kinds.

The Republican elite opposes spending on the hoi polloi’s health care, education, and food because its spending: it costs them money, it reduces their score in the game, and there’s nothing more important than the next score. Their voting public opposes it, as best I can tell, from the wounded pride of no longer being treated as the *best* exploitable resources, and from the eagerness to grasp promises that soon, the foreign barbarians will be sent away, and they can resume their pride-of-utility again. All the while, those who got, get given more, more, more, more.

Jens Carstensen: Looking back on it, the Democrats flopped for the same reason the new Ghostbusters movie did: not because of females in starring roles, but because of terrible scripts.

Zachary Lipez: Good artist most in need of some fresh ideas — I wouldn’t presume to tell a good artist shit.

Jim Testa: I am used to inanity masquerading as pop music, but every time I see DNCE, I feel like my intelligence is being personally insulted.

Tatiana Reyes: Bring trip-hop back!

Tom Snow: Theme of 2016 — Creative renaissances through crowdfunding (see De La, Future of the Left)

Andrea Weiss: (listing Lolita Nation and Big Shot Chronicles reissues in her Top 10) — The Game Theory songs and albums are in the main lists as they stack up favorably now, just they did when they were originally out in the 80s.

Paula Marie Carino: Theme of 2016 –I think I said this last year, too: old people rocking out credibly and unembarrassingly.

Jonathan Andrew: Best lyrics –Paul Simon does what only about 5 people on earth are capable of. Still.

Stephen Mejias: More times this year than in any other I can recall, new music completely startled and confounded me. I love that and I’m looking forward to more strange, powerful, inspiring music in 2017.

Jason Paul: Just as Alt-media is eating the lunch of the corporate media, so it will be for music. Real Alt-Music is coming… if the fans wake up.

Sarah Andrew: I’m plumb out of wiseguy questions these days, but thank you for keeping the Critics Poll going.

* * * * * *

You’re welcome. My ballot’ll be up soon.

Finally, Poll cornerstone Ben Krieger has a message for everybody reading; honestly, it’s more of a challenge. I’m going to try to answer him as best as I can, but I need a day to meditate upon it. Take it away, Ben:

Somewhere out there on the internet is a video of Prince talking to Arsenio Hall about how, as a teenager, he went through the classifieds looking for work, realized that there was no job out there that he loved as much as music, and so that is what he decided to do. For someone with his mind-boggling talent and focus, that decision was a no-brainer. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have more artists like Prince in our lives, or that people should stop aiming their careers at Madison Square Garden, but…for many of us artists who reside in a thicker section of the talent bell curve, whose talent is spread across several areas, or who *haven’t* always felt that art was the *only* thing we could do, there have always been questions, big and small that, seem even more relevant now in the wake of the 2016 election:

Why do family and friends always instinctively frame our talent’s potential within the confines of a capitalist model?

Has the allure of success and exposure that a capitalist hub like New York City promises pulled artists away from vital local scenes?

What role has journalism played in the reinforcing certain models of artistic success over others?

Why haven’t scenes like the one Michael Azerrad documented sprung up again?

Or have they? What’s going on outside of New York, anyway?

What’s going on *inside* New York, for that matter?

What exactly are the criteria that Pitchfork uses when rating those records and can we discuss them?

There are a million different questions along this line that have been asked and answered. Prince actually possessed a lot of anti-establishment qualities that star artists can emulate. He as always fought against dignity-robbing aspects of the music industry; he remained in and championed his hometown scene; he aggressively employed a wide variety of talented artists regardless of race, gender and sexual orientation.

But Prince was a star. He belonged in the stars. And for those of us who can’t or simply don’t want to be stars, and/or who want to give ourselves more completely to an organized, underground political movement, the worn-out conversations, revenue streams, concert models, touring networks, business plans and journalism formats that neoliberal capitalism champions have strangled out viable, counterculture alternatives that allow us to successfully create art *and* do meaningful work as citizens. I don’t have the answers, but by this time in 2018, I’d really like to have some, because we need a genuine underground political movement where arts and social justice effectively complement and propel each other. We need to develop and rekindle the conversations and institutions to support this. WHO’S WITH ME?

Rock is fine.

That’s not the present consensus. Nostalgic music fans often treat rock as if it’s on the ropes, or imperiled by inattention in the age of 140 characters, or the exclusive possession of an older generation that won’t share it with newer ones that wouldn’t understand its glories anyway. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, that self-appointed bunch of prison guards, behaves like rock is a museum artifact, a relic of the Seventies, and little that happened after the C-86 is worth considering. Each December, articles get written in newspapers and major industry magazines about rock’s tumble from the pinnacle — this year, among other pieces, we had Billboard asking whether rock was still relevant (conclusion: not really.) Bill Flanagan, a critic and interviewer I’ve always respected, asked in the pages of the New York Times if rock was dead. He concluded that it was just geriatric; maybe a little addled, too.

This handwringing has been happening forat least as long ago as the “Heart Of Rock And Roll”, which was a hit in, what, 1984? Don’t make me check. Huey, if you recall, reported that the old boy was barely breathing. All of this concern is testament to rock’s enduring value: if we didn’t like it so much, we wouldn’t be worried that it’s going away.

Luckily, it isn’t; not even a little. The present fears about rock imperiled are largely caused by cultural fissures and nomenclature problems. Some personal prejudices, too, and maybe a collective failure of imagination. But all of that can be corrected, quickly, if we dispense with the arbitrary categories presented to us by industry marketing people, and take a look at music as it actually is.

For instance, the best-selling musician on the planet is a pop-rock artist. Taylor Swift, as anybody who has ever seen her strike a pose and swing her red guitar around in concert can tell you, is 100% rock star. She may not play the sort of rock that Bill Flanagan, or David Fricke, or you, like best, but her connections to the classic writing traditions of the Seventies and early Eighties are impossible to miss. Her first four albums featured four-square pop-rock with folk flourishes; her fifth album was throwback new wave and dances with the white winged dove. In order to argue that Taylor Swift doesn’t rock, you’d also have to say that Fleetwood Mac and Carole King don’t rock, either. And of course they do.

Why don’t we recognize this? Well, Taylor Swift was initially marketed as a country artist. Never mind that some purists in Nashville saw her as a wealthy Pennsylvania carpetbagger — she rose to massive fame on the country circuit first, and then ate the rest of the world for dessert. Rather than an industry classification for salespeople, country is usually discussed as if it’s a distinct musical style. But almost all of the music presently sold by Nashville is rock, plain and simple, and it’s borderline insulting to its antecedents that we ever pretend that it’s anything else. In 2016, the “country” designation has more to do with the American political divide than it does with anything the musicians are doing; a mainstream country show is just a rock concert where you’re liable to see somebody with a Confederate battle flag. Its purported opposite (although they’re actually two sides of the same U.S. mint, but that’s another essay) is not rock but hip-hop — the music of the cities, ethnic and racial minorities, and their sympathizers. The occasional pedal steel and banjo heard on Nashville albums are sonic signifiers meant to align the record with a certain folk tradition rooted in American soil. That drummer, though? — chances are, he’s playing a rock beat.

Lately, artists marketed to the country audience aren’t even bothering to uphold the masquerade. Consider Maren Morris: Texan, alleged country singer, Best New Artist Grammy nominee, and 100% rock star. Hero, her album, consists of cheap-thrills arena rock (and I mean that as a compliment) sung in a bombastic style that sails far closer to Rihanna than Loretta Lynn. Gone are the folk instruments and any pretense to rustic authenticity; instead, the music is burnished to the same reflective, skyscraper-window sheen that coats all the other contemporary chart-busters. Again, this might not be the kind of rock you like. But in order to argue that Maren Morris doesn’t rock, you’d also have to say that Heart and Pat Benatar don’t rock, either. And of course they do.

That rock resonates better in the countryside than it does in the city is something that a student of the style ought to expect. Members of the country audience drive more motor vehicles. Rock was born alongside the mass-marketed automobile and the Eisenhower Interstate system, and it’s still mixed and arranged for the highway. Some hip-hop is made for automobiles — especially the syrupy Southern stuff — but lots of rap records are designed to be heard on headphones and marketed to pedestrians and subway riders. Our feelings about the car have shifted around since 1955, but it remains central to American culture and the American ideal, and rock songwriters have, from the beginning, treated the vehicle and the road as both subject and metaphor. The theoretical building blocks for rock music have always been cars and sexual frustration, with one often substituting for the other — and as ambitious as rock lyricists have gotten, none of the greats have ever forgotten the basics. We’ve seen Chuck Berry fiddling, irate and inflamed, with the seatbelt in “No Particular Place To Go”, “Fire” Springsteen driving in his car with the girl who says no, Joe Strummer groveling before the womanin the brand new Cadillac, repressed Gary Numan and Lennon with the starlet and Prince and a pocket full of used condoms in the little red corvette and etcetera, all rolled up by the dashboard light into a big horny, greasy, automotive mess, and ain’t that America.

Swift and Morris pick right up where their forerunners left off. The key songs on Hero are all about her ride and the men who can’t satisfy her. The central metaphor on 1989 was the car wreck (“hit the breaks too soon/twenty stitches in the hospital room”): the crash as a symbol of desire out of the control of its possessor. Nearly everybody in a Nashville song seems to be on a dirt road in a pick-up truck with a girl or boy who will or won’t; knock the operators of the music machine for predictability if you must be ungrateful, but never claim that they don’t grasp the rudiments.

This extends to the few mainstream country artists who do occasionally generate the kind of honky tonk music that Hank Williams might have found familiar. Foremost among them is Miranda Lambert, who, not unjustifiably, calls herself the Keeper of the Flame. But despite such throwbacks as “To Learn Her”, Miranda Lambert is 100% rock star, an old-fashioned traveling bandleader who opens and closes her highway-crazed double album in her car, and who writes nail-chomping stories of desires unfulfilled. Women in rock express sexual frustration differently from the way the boys do; it’s more “dreaming of the day that you wake up and find/what you’re looking for has been here the whole time” than”get your rocks off get your rocks off”. But the urge is exactly the same, and in order to argue that Miranda Lambert doesn’t rock, you’d also have to say that Creedence and Bonnie Raitt don’t rock, either. And of course they do.

Rock persists because it works: it expresses basic desires for release and personal expression in the urgent, loud sound and direct language that is specific to the American experience. Many other styles have been tried out by pop musicians, but they fall short. The only major form of popular music that is both distinct from rock and aesthetically satisfying is hip-hop — and hip-hop borrows plenty from rock. Hip-hop succeeds on its own merits not merely because it has developed its own sound and its own history. It also has its own symbology, and its own ideological inspirations: telecommunications, connectivity, and social mobility. That said, the hip-hop enterprise has modeled itself on the rock biz, right down to the emphasis on the frontman and his loyal beatmaker, the single as handshake-hello and the classic album as the unit of enduring value, the spectacle concert as the main public interface, and the star’s assumption of godlike powers. Many pop bestsellers draw equally from rock and hip-hop: Lemonade, for instance, is split right down the middle between guitar-n-drums numbers and others that rely on synths and digital beats. That doesn’t make Beyonce one hundred per cent rock star. But in order to argue that she never rocks, you’d also have to say that Tina Turner and Donnie Hathaway (and Tori Amos) never rocked, either. And of course they did.

Billboard’s piece quotes Steven Hyden — another critic I like. He suggests that most people possess an image in their heads of what a rock band is: a bunch of tattooed, bad-attitude dudes in leather jackets who team up and take over the planet. I think he’s right about that, and I do think that we, citizens of a visual culture, tend to concentrate more on what musicians look like than what they actually do. (There are, undoubtedly, others who refuse to grant women the right to sexual frustration, or the steering wheel, but they’re best left to their own private Talibans.)

Here’s what strikes me funny about that stereotype, though: in the long history of rock music, there haven’t been many times when the style was dominated by ruffian white-boy groups. More often, rockers were shooting-star solo artists like Elvis or Little Richard, or large ensemble funkmasters like Prince and Sly Stone, or blatant art school kids on a spree like Talking Heads or Genesis, or machine-tinkerers like Eno or New Order. There will always be a vocal segment among fans of popular music who will not accept that an artist is a rocker unless he — and it is always a he — sounds and behaves like G.G. Allin. But even in the Eighties, G.G. Allin was never much of an attraction beyond his niche. An oppressive world like ours allows for a million and one ways to rebel, and rockers haven’t begun to exhaust the possibilities. This story has many chapters to go, and it’s on us to make sure we’re telling it right — and never to deny club membership to the many who are, plain as day!, carrying on tradition.

Even if they don’t look, or act, like Keith Richards. C’mon, rock writers, admit the club is much bigger than you say it is. You’ll feel better with the gates open. There’s nothing wrong here that a little ventilation can’t fix.

Single tracks, and points:

• 1. Mitski — “Your Best American Girl” (165)
• 2. Solange — “Cranes In The Sky” (146)
• 3. David Bowie — “Lazarus” (145)
• 4. A Tribe Called Quest — “We The People” (142)
• 4. Kanye West — “Ultralight Beam” (142)
• 6. Adele — “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” (122)
• 7. Beyonce — “Formation” (117)
• 8. Xenia Rubinos — “Mexican Chef” (111)
• 9. Car Seat Headrest — “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” (100)
• 10. David Bowie — “I Can’t Give Everything Away” (98)
• 11. Drake — “One Dance” (97)
• 12. Shearwater — “Quiet Americans” (92)
• 13. The Weeknd — “Starboy” (88)
• 13. Aesop Rock — “Kirby” (78)
• 15. Chance The Rapper — “No Problem” (76)
• 16. Drive-By Truckers — “What It Means” (75)
• 16. Paul Simon — “Wristband” (75)
• 18. Bon Iver — “22 (Over Soon)” (73)
• 19. Solange — “Don’t Touch My Hair” (70)
• 19. Tegan And Sara — “U-Turn” (70)
• 19. Rae Sremmurd — “Black Beatles” (70)

This was originally written on November 16, 2015. I’m re-posting it here today because… well, you know why. Travel safe, everybody.

Grief, as C.S Lewis explained, can prompt a rational man to do foolish things.  For instance, just last night, I read the comments.  Not just the comments — I read several articles in famous publications that may as well have been comments, and I listened to the words of politicians who seem determined to be YouTube comments made flesh.  When you’re attacked, it’s logical and healthy to want to kick back as hard as you can.  I get that.  But everybody with access to a working modem (or a working political party) needs to take a moment and get serious. Because when we act like ISIS is, in any way, representative of Islam, we’re doing exactly what these jerks want us to do.  We’re stepping directly into their trap.

The entire business model for groups like ISIS depends on widespread Western failure to appreciate the distinction between devout Muslims and crazed nightclub shooters.  ISIS wants you to treat the Muslim on your block as if he’s packing heat in the name of Allah.  That way, you will support nativist politicians who aim to make life uncomfortable for outsiders, and those who practice Islam will become angry and (they hope) susceptible to their hate propaganda.  Life in the West gets harder for Muslims, suspicion builds, politically convenient battle lines develop, and ISIS’s grotesque parody of a caliphate begins, in theory, to look like a valid alternative to Western inhospitality.  They’re begging for us to seal the borders and treat Muslims like prospective criminals.  That’s their aim.  Let’s not take the bait.

Islam is a religion about submission to God’s will.  A real believer walks a path of humility and nonviolence and spends his life in the pursuit of holiness.  The moment he considers blowing up a theater or a cafe, he’s no longer a Muslim — he’s a murderer.  There is no resemblance between true Islam and the idiotic beliefs of ISIS, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise needs to go read the Koran. Miley Cyrus occasionally raps; you don’t mistake her for a genuine emcee, right? Just because this al-Qaeda spinoff operation calls themselves Islamic State doesn’t mean they know thing #1 about the religion they purport to represent.

Luckily, there is a word for what the members of ISIS are, and it’s a word we don’t use nearly enough.  These people are fascists. Their movement conforms to everything we’ve learned — mostly the hard way — about international fascism: their thirst for purity, their fear of human sexuality, their faith in strength through violence, their intolerance and illiberalism, and their antisemitism, too; all of that stuff is straight from the fascist playbook. Their appeal to disaffected young people with a belligerent streak and a desire to lash out against modernity is the same one used by the Brownshirts — with remarkably little altered in translation.

Fascism needs to be opposed, hard, at all times and in all places.  Sometimes that means physical fighting.  More often, it needs to be dismantled ideologically. We have to make it clear, and convincing, that a culture of Yes is always preferable to a culture of No, and we have to stay true to that idea.  We can’t be hypocritical; we can’t allow ourselves to be dragged toward the fascist murk by people who’d like nothing better than to see an authoritarian clampdown across the Western world. The Syrian refugee crisis was a source of immense embarrassment for ISIS — not because they give a damn about the fate of the people displaced by sectarian violence, but because the millions seeking asylum made it clear, with their own two feet, that they’d sooner wander around Europe than support the imaginary caliphate. ISIS had to watch while the leaders of the Western world — the world they need to demonize in order to keep their campaign going — opened their doors to Muslims in need, and made them welcome.

Sometimes we call ISIS “radical”, or “radicalized;” this, too, is totally unearned.  There’s nothing radical about shooting the poor merch guy at a rock concert; that kind of brutality and mindlessness has, sadly, accompanied the human race for centuries.  What Angela Merkel did was radical in its courage. Openness is radical precisely because people who can’t manage it can never imagine that other people are capable of it; thus, it stands as a challenge to jerks everywhere. Radical compassion jeopardizes their mission, their narrow worldview, their entire reason to be.

I read today that France wants to suspend the Schengen agreement that has, for decades now, insured that national borders within the EU remain open. Several U.S. states have decided to refuse Syrian refugees. Mr. Trump is angling for surveillance of mosques. ISIS could not have scripted this any tighter. Don’t take my word for it; take theirs. Since their emergence as a blot on the world map, they’ve made it theiraim to drive wedges between Western governments and ordinary Muslims. Our prejudice is their best propaganda. When we act like the actions of ISIS somehow follow from the precepts and tenets of Islam, it is a monumental insult to centuries of Islamic scholars, statesmen, scientists, artists, craftspeople, and everyday believers.

Don’t mistake this for a pacifist appeal, or an understatement of a genuine threat.  There are indeed people out there who want to blow you up, not all of whom live in the Middle East. The success of the anti-fascist movement — and if you are a rocker, or a writer, a lover, a real Christian or a real Muslim, you’re part of it — depends on you keeping your head.  Violent provocation can’t go unanswered. This is, however, not a predicament we can bomb our way out of. If it was as easy as leveling Raqqa, the battle would have been over long ago.

Many factual questions remain unanswered: for instance, Mr. Hollande needs to explain to people how it was that eight maniacs on the loose in Paris had access to giant arsenal. Before any sweeping geopolitical conclusions are reached, the exact link between the shooters and the landlocked gunmen in Syria who call themselves the Islamic State has got to be established, and firmly. But all of that is the easy part (or it ought to be if our governments are honest.) The hard part: convincing bewildered and frightened Westerners that Islam isn’t the enemy. No civilizations need to clash. Allow me to lend my hand, small as it is: I, an American Bible-thumper, stand today with millions of my Muslim brothers and sisters in abhorrence of the violence in France and elsewhere. Better than the secular can, we recognize that these were not the acts of God-fearing people. God-fearing people know that judgment will come, in ways sublime and profound — and that that judgment does not begin on some mystic day of reckoning. It begins right now.

tris@trismccall.net

Croquet is satisfying, and video games are addictive, and political scheming has its time and place. But the older I get, the more fun I require, and the more fiercely I cling to my first love: boardgames. Not just any board games, either, but meticulously designed and beautifully illustrated ones that have been coming at us in waves from across the North Atlantic for the past two decades or so. This has been a golden age for boardgaming fans, and those of us who like to play them have had an embarrassment of options. For instance, a cousin of mine recently told me he has 500 boardgames of recent vintage in his basement. He lives in semi-rural Mercer County, so he’s got the room to indulge his fixation. Our narrow little place in Downtown Jersey City can’t accommodate any more than the 30 or so games we have, but all 30 hit the table pretty regularly, and I’m always angling to appropriate another closet and expand our collection. Who needs shoes anyway?

The games we like over here are called Euros to differentiate them from the faster-paced, more aggressive American style of design. There are hundreds of Euros of various length and complexity representing different themes and tailored to gratify different playing styles, but these games have a few elements in common. Where American-style boardgames are generally representational — they’ll often let you play with tiny replicas of boats and spaceships and army men or whatever the game’s base commodity happens to be — Euros are a little more abstract. They emphasize balanced game mechanics that are so fine-tuned and mathematically precise that it’s tough for experienced players to fall too far behind the leader. Nobody gets knocked out early and relegated to the sofa. Also, the design of Eurostyle games tends to discourage direct conflict: you and your playmate will often be competing for resources in an economy of scarcity, but the game usually won’t give you tools to demolish what she’s already built. You might be tempted to outpace her by taking the stuff she wants or by blocking her moves, but most of the time, you’ll be so absorbed in plotting your own meticulous strategy that you won’t even bother.

Because of this, fans of the American style boardgames accuse the Euro designers of encouraging multiplayer solitaire. They prefer the clash of armies and big battles to farming or castle construction or village building. Me, I’m not a competitive person, so the peaceable vibe of the Euros suits me just fine. Since I really don’t like beating other players into oblivion, wargaming has never exactly been my thing. I play to win because it’s more dramatic that way, but I never mind losing, especially if I’ve managed to overcome obstacles, slip into the designer’s logic, and make something gratifying happen. When I’m in the middle of a great Euro like Terra Mystica, I’m barely even keeping track of the score: each turn is a puzzle with a set of challenges, imposed by the game, to overcome through clever placement. By the end of the game, I expect to have built a city on the board that’s pretty enough to photograph, and I’m more than hoping that my opponents have done the same.

Because I like to keep track of things, I counted every boardgame we played in 2016.  Here’s the Top Ten list, in ascending order.

#10 Tzolk’in.  This is a Mayan-themed civilization-building game, the currency is represented by tiny disks with illustrations of corn on them, and the play area is decorated with pictures of ancient temples.  All of that looks sharp. But the first thing you’ll notice about Tzolk’in is the large interlocking plastic gears on the gameboard. Each turn, the players load the wheels with cylindrical pawns (there are circular grooves on the wheels that allow your little guys to ride around) and twist the whole apparatus to the right. The longer you’re able to keep your pawns on the gears, the bigger the payoff when you remove them. Like many Euros, Tzolk’in is a “worker placement” game; i.e., there are spaces on the board that are activated when you put a pawn on them. The presence of the gears in Tzolk’in means that the value and significance of those placements keeps changing. That probably sounds confusing, and it *can* be: this isn’t a light game, and it can sometimes feel like you’re riding the cogs to nowhere. But it’s not quite as long or as complex as it seems like it’s going to be, and the tactile pleasure of fitting the wooden pegs into the slots and turning the gears is hard for me to resist.

#9 Castles Of Burgundy.  Hilary’s favorite game. Stefan Feld, its designer, frustrates some purist fans of Eurogames because of his love of dice. Many of the best-known Euros — Puerto Rico, Caylus, Power Grid — barely have any random elements at all, which is supposed to make a game a true contest of skill and inventiveness rather than a chance-fest. But eliminate all the luck from a game and you’re left with something like chess, or Hive, or an idealized Eurosocialist state. I don’t like the feeling that there’s a right answer: I want to hold out the possibility that a newcomer, or just a bad player, or an American, could blunder into a win. Anyway, Castles Of Burgundy isn’t like that at all; dice there are, but they’re mostly there to limit the player’s options and force her to improvise. Each round, tiles are laid out in a common area, and the numbers thrown determine which tiles can be taken by the player and added to her little principality. Some tiles allow her to take other tiles, or place down other tiles next to them, and once you get going, those placements often prompt clever chain reactions that are incredibly satisfying to trigger. This game draws some flak because of the flimsiness of its components and the dull-brownness of its art, and I kind of understand where the criticism comes from. But it doesn’t stop us from playing it all the time.

#8 Ora Et Labora.  Though we didn’t play it very much in 2016, one of my absolute favorite games is a medieval farming simulation called Agricola. I use “simulation” loosely; I don’t think anything about Agricola is historically or botanically accurate. But it *does* force the player to feel some of the crazed desperation of the pre-industrial farmer on the heath: is there any time to build improvements to my meager, drafty house? Are my neighbors going to take all of the goods? Do I own enough land to do any of the things I want to do? If I have a baby, will we all starve? How the hell am I supposed to feed my family, anyway? Even by the notoriously tense standard of Eurogames, Agricola is a stressful experience, which is why we frazzled characters over here love it so much. Last Christmas, Hilary went and bought a bunch of other games by Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Agricola. Ora Et Labora is one of them. Superficially, it’s a lot like Agricola (it’s even more like Le Havre, another Rosenberg game), but the economy is totally different: instead of having very few good paths and many ways to go wrong, the player is presented with a multiplicity of useful options. It’s still medieval-themed, but instead of running a farm, you’re in charge of a monastery. On your turn, you’ll usually be confronted by a choice between adding a building to your diocese or enjoying the benefits of a building you’ve already built. Those buildings produce a wide variety of different goods, and since almost everything you do generates points, the little world you’re creating feels beautifully open-ended and maybe even relaxing. As in just about every other Rosenberg games, you *will* end up feeling that you wanted another few turns to bring  your plan to fruition, but there are so many turns in Ora Et Labora that it’s downright greedy to ask for any more. This is a loooong game; a rainy day game; longer than anything else on this list. Uwe Rosenberg believes you’ve got nothing better to do than to play his games. Maybe he’s right.

#7 Robinson Crusoe: Adventures On The Cursed Island.  This one is a co-op, which means that all the players take on different roles and team up to defeat a threat established by the designer. Everybody wins or everybody loses; there’s no in-between. We don’t have any other co-ops — I think Hilary was only compelled to get this one because of the 18c literary theme. That’s her biz. I’m glad she did: even though this isn’t really my style, it’s a heck of a lot of fun in a Kobayashi-Maru no-win scenario kind of way. If I remember my Defoe correctly, though, Crusoe was on the island by himself — in this game, you and your friends are a team of Crusoes, racing against time and fighting the elements to get rescued or save a damsel or achieve the victory conditions of some other shipwreck scenario. Only you won’t, because this game is hell-bent on humiliating you. Thanks to a truly evil deck of event cards and dice that are effectively loaded against the shooter, any step you take on the island is liable to get you injured or killed outright or invite killer bees into your camp or otherwise destroy your survivalist ambitions. Even if you’re inches from your goal, one bad break (and it’ll come) will wash away everything you’ve built on the island. There’s a sick, masochistic sort of satisfaction I take in watching the master plan undermined by cruel fate: the oncoming storm that’ll surely wreck the flimsy shelter, the food resources drying up, the wild animal that comes and eats all your reserves, you name it. We played Robinson Crusoe more than a few times, and I still don’t think I’ve begun to exhaust the many techniques this game uses to screw you utterly. I’m not sure we’ll return to it too often in the future, but it’s a nicely wicked addition to a games collection, especially if you’re a fan of TV Survivor or hard-luck stories.

#6 Settlers Of Catan.  Of all the games on this list, Settlers Of Catan is the one that you’ve probably heard of and perhaps even tried. It’ll be there at any mall board game kiosk during the holidays, right next to Pictionary and Monopoly. Dedicated fans of Euros consider Settlers a gateway game — something designed to introduce newcomers to the style — and tend to talk down on it. It was our first Eurogame, too, but we’ve never outgrown it; on the contrary, we continue to consider it one of the best games on our shelf. Settlers Of Catan gets knocked because the basic mechanic isn’t too sophisticated and the outcome is influenced highly by the constant dice-throws. Here’s another game that is almost entirely dice-dependent: craps. Now, before I had a board game collection, I was a crapshooter, and I recognize the logic of craps beneath the vague theme of colonization. During a game of Settlers, there’ll be lots of talk of laying roads and gathering resources to build cities, but what you’ll really be doing won’t be all that different from what you do at a craps table: you’ll be placing numbers on a board and hoping they hit before the seven comes up. Because all players are in on every roll and trading happens after every turn, there’s not a lot of downtime, and the action is often very tense and exciting, and the game often comes down to a final climactic roll. That’s unusual in Eurogames, many of which end, like a soccer match, with the players standing around and wondering if time’s up. Inevitably the outcome is affected by the fabled perversity of dice. But who among you is above a little perversion?   

#5 Caverna.  This is Uwe Rosenberg’s ruby-mining remix of Agricola: similar mechanics and rules, but with expanded capabilities for the player and a very different theme. No more are you a medieval farmer; now you’re a Tolkeinesque dwarf living in a cave. You can still develop a plot of land, but you can also tunnel into the mountain for ore and gems. And that’s the best way to sum up the difference between Caverna and its older sibling — here, you’re awash in precious stones with amazing game-altering abilities; there, you’re lucky if you’ve got a stick to dig potatoes with. Caverna is different enough (particularly in feel) that it does seem like a separate experience, but I admit I miss the precariousness and sheer high anxiety of Agricola.  Also, I was never drawn to dwarves in Dungeons & Dragons — the elves didn’t really get on with them, and I am always eager to ratify elven choices.

#4 Keyflower.  My favorite game, at least for now. Keyflower contains modified versions of many of the elements that are standard across different Eurogames: there’s an auction phase in which players bid on buildings to add to their New World colony, a worker-placement phase for gathering resources, a tile-laying segment that doubles as an exercise in town construction, and one (or more) hidden objectives revealed only during the home stretch. Any one of these could be — and in many cases, has been — the core of a really good Eurogame. Keyflower manages to stitch it all together seamlessly, which is an impressive feat. Never will you fail to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, or why the designers chose the metaphors they did. But what I really dig about Keyflower is the same thing I love about many of my favorite restaurants: seasonality. The action happens over a single year, and options constrict, quite realistically, I think, as the calendar pages turn. In spring, you haven’t got much but hope and a bunch of enthusiastic colonists, but the field is wide open and it seems like things are ready to grow; in summer, there’s a bounty of options, boats sail in to the harbor, and it’s easy to get lulled into the misapprehension that everything about your little town is ideal. Then the chill wind starts to blow in autumn, and players are forced to make preparation for winter, a time of scarcity when everything can fall apart on you fast if you haven’t planned properly. There’s some pretty pastel art — cartoon style, but not too whimsical — that reinforces the theme, and a vague, thrilling sense of impending doom that undergirds the whole experience. It can be chew-your-hand-off tense. But it’s never less than amazing.

#3 Concordia.  It’s very difficult to explain the appeal of this game. Everything about it seems old hat; dull and Euro-pro-forma: house-shaped tokens go down on a map/board representing the various regions of the Roman Empire and entitle the player to resources which are then used to facilitate the placement of more house-shaped tokens. If a Euro-hater wanted to create a parody of dry Euro conventions, I’ll bet it would look a lot like Concordia. That the map/board is beautiful in a staid, social studies-y kind of way only reinforces the problem. Yet in action, Concordia is fantastic fun; in fact, it might offer the most enjoyable playing experience of any boardgame, in any style, that I’ve ever played.  Not at all is this a history teacher’s classroom aid: anything you might happen to pick up about the Rome during a run-through of Concordia will be purely accidental. That’s because the real action doesn’t take place on the board — it’s driven by a small deck of cards that you’re given at the beginning of the game and which you’ll add to as you go. The cards both affect and exploit the layout of the board, and the sequence in which you play them will determine how well you do. The game requires you to collect sets of cards in various suits (there’s a conceit that each color is dedicated to a different Roman god or goddess, but trust me, in practice, it’s an abstract element of an abstract game) and because play goes so quickly and the cards need to be used fast it can be tough to tell how you’re doing. And that’s part of the beautiful bewilderment of Concordia — nobody has any idea who is winning until the very end.  The final scoring feels like a revelation, and players will be on edge as the points are tallied up. This addresses my own biggest gripe with Euros, and one I alluded to in the Settlers comment: too many of these games end on a flat note. Often there’ll be a final round that’s insufficiently distinguished from prior rounds, and/or one token will be so far ahead on a victory point track that the tally barely seems necessary. I’m math-minded enough to respond well to the accountability and measurability of Eurogaming, but I do require some drama, randomness and surprise, too. That’s the ugly American in me, and it’s not budging.

#2 Bora Bora.  Games about settlement and colonization — or, for that matter, city-building — do not tend to lead with cultural sensitivity. If my old anthropology professors ever caught me playing Bora Bora, I think they’d probably rescind my degree. Half-naked primitives recruit men and women to their tribes, get ritual tattoos for status, collect shells for currency, dedicate fire ceremonies to mysterious totem-gods who intervene in the game restrictions, and… yeah, I can feel that retrospective F coming. I’d repudiate Bora Bora, and Stefan Feld too, if this wasn’t such a hoot. Ironically, the theme of this game is actually stronger than that of many of the more anodyne concepts above: Feld really seems to have gotten into South Pacific life, or his weird conception of it, anyway. Any game that allows me to work my way up a temple hierarchy (Tzolk’in and Terra Mystica have this element, too) will always draw interest from this wannabe vicar over here.

#1 Jaipur.  This straightforward, Indian-themed cards ‘n’ chips game was highly recommended in a column by the baseball writer Keith Law. Like many baseball obsessors, Law also likes boardgames a lot — I think his favorite is Carcassonne, but I could be wrong. Anyway, he described Jaipur as a fast, portable, and extremely enjoyable two-player experience, and he was absolutely correct about all of that. Once we got our copy, we took it on trips with us; we even played it in light turbulence on an airplane and managed to prevent most of the chips from becoming lethal projectiles. It’s easy to keep Jaipur compact because all you’re ever doing is swapping goods, represented by cards in several suits, from a souk of five face-up n the middle of the table. Once you’ve got a set, you trade it in for points in chips — usually the bigger the set, the higher the score, but the player who strikes first can often outscore an opponent who waits. If we’re quick about it, we can usually complete a game in twenty minutes. Setup, too, is a total breeze. So: not the best game of all, but the easiest to make happen, and perfect for short stretches of time that demand to be filled with something engaging, and would otherwise just sit there forlorn, begging to be played with. I can’t handle that — I get too guilty. Come on over here, time. We’ll do something fun.

They call me the count because I love to count, and also because of my irritating habit of turning into a bat at night. By day I continue my obsessive-compulsive behavior: list-making, hand-washing, piano practicing, songwriting, etc. Inspired by my role model On Kawara, who seemed like a real g-d head case, I’ve gotten into various forms of record keeping on navel-gazing subjects that couldn’t possibly interest anyone but me: what did I eat today? what did I spend money on? who did I meet socially? what board game did I play? What my obsessive-compulsive behavior has taught me — other than the fact that obsessive-compulsive behavior is serious fun — is that the more I list something, the more I want to do it. Therefore, I skate free of New Year’s Resolutions: if there’s a thing I want or need more of in my life, all I need to do is begin keeping track of how often it happens. Works like a charm. A neurotic type of charm, but why quibble with success?

Since I started keeping track of every album I listened to, the number of albums I’ve listened to has increased each year. At some point, I’m going to run out of hours and completely tax the patience of the people around me. But I haven’t reached it yet, and 2016 was another landslide of music new and old (but mainly new). Since my recent liberation from the trash compactor called 2016 has put me in a magnanimous oversharey mood, I’m going to reveal some of my findings with you. There’s actually very little correspondence between the big list of artists and records I’ve listened to most frequently in a given year and the best-of ballot I put together with my friends at the end of January — some albums and some artists are just easier to listen to than others. Tegan & Sara’s most recent albums play well in most contexts. I don’t think I could make the same claim on behalf of Steven Wilson, or Van Der Graaf Generator’s Pawn Hearts. No knock on those meant, believe me.

I look forward to this particular count all year, and go out of my way not to hazard guesses about what’ll come out tops. Part of the fun of the project is to preserve the surprise: I add it all up and discover that my speculations about what I’ve been spinning have been totally wrong. A year is a long time — looking back, it’s hard to imagine that events that took place in January could have happened during the same swing around the sun as this just-passed holiday season. If you’re self-absorbed enough, and fruitfully forgetful enough, and committed enough to writing everything down, you don’t have to wait for an eon to pass for the archaeology to begin. The filthy facts of your life are shovel-ready.

If you’d asked me in mid-December what artist or album I’d listened to the most in 2016, I think I probably would have said Kamaiyah. That was my short-haul bicycling music this summer, and I found A Good Night In The Ghetto so vivid and so entertaining that it seemed like its primary colors extended to every corner of the canvas. Was I right? Let’s see:

Album artists most frequently played, 1/1/16-12/31/16

1. Drake
2. Paul Simon
3. Laura Marling
4. Chance The Rapper
5. Natalia Lafourcade
6. Kanye West
7. Beth Orton
8. Look Park
9. Pusha T
10. Lucy Dacus
11. Young Thug
12. Tegan & Sara
13. Okkervil River
14. Noname
15. Basia Bulat
16. Jenny Lewis
17. Kamaiyah
18. Jamila Woods
19. Francis & The Lights
20. Pet Shop Boys

Drake had a bit of an unfair advantage this year; both If You’re Reading This and What A Time To Be Alive felt fresh at the time of the release of Views. We have a tradition of listening to Drake on the Fourth Of July and when we’re decorating the Christmas tree, too. So while the rest of the world was getting really, really sick of his nonsense, I was playing his records over and over and singing along in my Drake voice. (Maybe doing the Hotline Bling dance, too?) It’s worth noting that Drake was also my second-most played artist last year behind Belle & Sebastian. What can I say?; Drake is like a bag of breadsticks that I can’t stop myself from raiding.

Speaking of raiding: as you’re about to hear firsthand, I may have borrowed a bit from Paul Simon while writing songs this year. Stranger To Stranger was heavy summer listening until it scared me so much that I had to put it away. Turns out he was the only election forecaster who had it right, and for the right reasons, and much as I tried to pretend that wasn’t what he was singing about, in retrospect it’s all horrifyingly clear. May has been a Paul Simon month for me for the last few years; something about the first warm days always makes me want to put on Graceland or Rhythm Of The Saints and go appropriate some poor sucker’s culture.

Other things of interest: I was under the strange impression that I’d broken my shameless dependency on Laura Marling’s music this year, or at least that I was giving it a rest until her new one comes out this spring. That… was an inaccurate assumption. In fact I listened to Laura Marling so much that she dragged Beth Orton into the Top Ten of this list by sheer association; once it became an insane and untenable proposition to play Once I Was An Eagle another time, and I had no choice but to turn to Sugaring Season and Trailer Park and the like for my austere, Bert Jansch-y British trad. fix. A mid-year Audit/reassessment of Critics Poll years 2003-2008 (we really did do this, complete with a listening schedule and a Poll day!) was a boon for Kanye and Okkervil River. Verdict: those guys are pretty good.

For xtra thrills, spills, and chill pills, let’s go month by month.

JANUARY

1. Natalia Lafourcade
2. Pusha T
3. Laura Stevenson
4. Erykah Badu
5. Julien Baker
6. Tame Impala
7. Joanna Newsom

FEBRUARY

1. Joanna Newsom
2. Natalia Lafourcade
3. The High Llamas
4. New Order
5. Air
6. Pusha T
7. Richard Thompson

MARCH

1. Laura Marling
2. Natalia Lafourcade
3. Joanna Newsom
4. Eleanor Friedberger
5. Julieta Venegas
6. Allan Kingdom
7. Kendrick Lamar

APRIL

1. The High Llamas
2. Pet Shop Boys
3. The Shins
4. Kanye West
5. Pusha T
6. Natalia Lafourcade
7. Kamaiyah

MAY

1. Paul Simon
2. Lucy Dacus
3. Kanye West
4. Kamaiyah
5. Quilt
6. Sandy Denny
7. Frightened Rabbit

JUNE

1. Drake
2. Beyonce
3. Kanye West
4. Weezer
5. Laura Marling
6. Lucy Dacus
7. Paul Simon

JULY

1. Chance The Rapper
2. Drake
3. Beyonce
4. YG
5. Kanye West
6. Tegan & Sara
7. Kamaiyah

AUGUST

1. Xenia Rubinos
2. Paul Simon
3. Jamila Woods
4. Chance The Rapper
5. Noname
6. Jenny Lewis
7. Say Anything

SEPTEMBER

1. Homeboy Sandman
2. De La Soul
3. Beth Orton
4. Noname
5. Jamila Woods
6. Bruce Hornsby
7. Look Park

OCTOBER

1. Francis & The Lights
2. Okkervil River
3. Look Park
4. Bruce Hornsby
5. Margaret Glaspy
6. The Hotelier
7. Frank Ocean

NOVEMBER

1. Jimmy Eat World
2. Look Park
3. Car Seat Headrest
4. Vanishing Twin
5. Alicia Keys
6. Butch Walker
7. Tinashe

DECEMBER

1. Miranda Lambert
2. A Tribe Called Quest
3. Vanishing Twin
4. Martha
5. Jimmy Eat World
6. Saba
7. J. Cole

As a boring individual, I’ve fallen into many familiar annual patterns, and I see I didn’t really deviate from any of them this year: British folk in the early spring, a hip-hop midsummer, a blanket of guitar rock when the weather gets chilly in mid-autumn, and a hodgepodge of styles once the listening schedule starts and the December landslide of recommendations begin. My Laura Marling fixation forced me a little deeper into the fens than I usually go, which partially accounts for the presence of good ol’ Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson on these lists (not that there’s ever a bad reason to listen to those two.) As usual, my year in music started to take shape in June when I turned off the oldies station and began engaging in earnest with what the new stuff. In ’16, the big moment for me was when the Soundcloud broke over the Great Lakes and all that free Chicago music started raining down — but if that hadn’t happened, something similar would have.

Yet there was one major difference between 2016 and prior years. Usually the very last thing I want to listen to after the calendar turns in February is music from the year gone by. I’ve played it out and I’m ready to stop thinking about it. This year that didn’t happen. It’s a testament to the depth of 2015 — possibly my favorite year in music ever — that I continued, habitually, to play last season’s albums even when it was no longer last season. Natalia Lafourcade’s Hasta La Raiz dominated the first three months of ’16, and I went back and picked up her other albums, which weren’t quite as fantastic but still had plenty to offer. Hasta (and a really good video for “Suavecito”) led me to reconsider Julieta Venegas’s Spanish-language Algo Sucede, which I fell in love with in February, and Ximena Sarinana’s No Todo Lo Puedes Dar, an album I never gave a fair shake to since I was intimidated by the language barrier. I kept listening to New Order’s Music Complete and Joanna Newsom’s Divers — albums that got a bit crowded out by the glut of fantastic stuff released in ’15 — well into the new year, and I kinda think they still haven’t stopped growing on me.

Most of all, I couldn’t quit Pusha T. That was my psych-up music during the winter, or my ride-my-bike-through-the-freezing-cold music, or my miffed at power structures music, or just my bunch of betting on a sleeper anthems. Then I spent the rest of 2016 waiting in vain for him to put out the follow-up he promised. I should have worried when he subtitled his album The Prelude. Elzhi gave us The Preface in 2008 and it’s taken him years to get to the rest of the book. Well, what the heck, it’s not like there weren’t dozens of other great albums to listen to in 2016; I’m just greedy. Let’s list some of them:

Albums most frequently played, 1/1/16-12/31/16

1. Look Park — Look Park
2. Drake — Views
3. Lucy Dacus — No Burden
4. Chance The Rapper — Coloring Book
5. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
6. Noname — Telefone
7. Tegan & Sara — Love You To Death
8. Jamila Woods — HEAVN
9. Basia Bulat — Good Advice
10. Natalia Lafourcade — Hasta La Raiz
11. Mitski — Puberty 2
12. Francis & The Lights — Farewell, Starlite!
13. Pusha T — King Push: Darkest Before Dawn — The Prelude
14. Kanye West — The Life Of Pablo
15. Paul Simon — Stranger To Stranger
16. Xenia Rubinos — Black Terry Cat
17. YG — Still Brazy
18. Homeboy Sandman — Kindness For Weakness
19. Margaret Glaspy — Emotions And Math
20. Quilt — Plaza

Huh. That’s not what I was expecting. I knew I liked the Look Park album, but I absolutely did not realize I was listening to it more than any other album this year. I’m not entirely sure how to process that, but it seems weirdly anti-social of me. I’m not even sure I know anybody else besides Hilary who has even given it a spin. (Tom Snow, are you out there? I think you’d enjoy the wry perspective.) Most big 2016 albums existed in communal space: even and especially before their release, they were discussed to fuck and back on the Internet. It would be just like me, or my belligerent unconscious, to resist cooperation. Or maybe it was, you know, the melodies.

As for Drake, what can I say?, besides that all of y’all are butt wrong. I dig the production, the performances, the arrangements, the choruses, even the dumb jokes. I know you’re sick of his nonsense, and he’s to blame for his own overexposure, but trust me, this is not the time to press the strip and get off of the Drake bus. If you’re looking for Lemonade, it was at #21. Funny thing: I kept meaning to set aside some time to watch the visual album, but I never did. I oughta do that tonight.

Month by month:

JANUARY

1. Natalia Lafourcade — Hasta La Raiz
2. Pusha T — King Push: Darkest Before Dawn — The Prelude
3. Erykah Badu — But You Cain’t Use My Phone
4. Julien Baker — Sprained Ankle
5. Joanna Newsom — Divers
6. Laura Stevenson — Cocksure
7. Trey Anastasio — Paper Wheels

FEBRUARY

1. Natalia Lafourcade — Hasta La Raiz
2. Joanna Newsom — Divers
3. New Order — Music Complete
4. Pusha T — King Push: Darkest Before Dawn — The Prelude
5. Julieta Venegas — Algo Sucede
6. Allan Kingdom — Northern Lights
7. Trey Anastasio — Paper Wheels

MARCH

1. Natalia Lafourcade — Hasta La Raiz
2. Eleanor Friedberger — New View
3. Allan Kingdom — Northern Lights
4. Kendrick Lamar — untitled unmastered
5. Laura Marling — Laura Marling
6. Lucy Dacus — No Burden
7. Julieta Venegas — Algo Sucede

APRIL

1. The High Llamas — Snowbug
2. Pet Shop Boys — Super
3. Kanye West — The Life Of Pablo
4. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
5. Eleanor Friedberger — New View
6. Basia Bulat — Good Advice
7. Weezer — Weezer (White Album)

MAY

1. Lucy Dacus — No Burden
2. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
3. Quilt — Plaza
4. Kanye West — The Life Of Pablo
5. Sandy Denny — The North Star Grassman And The Ravens
6. Lucius — Good Grief
7. Frightened Rabbit — Painting Of A Panic Attack

JUNE

1. Drake — Views
2. Beyonce — Lemonade
3. Weezer — Weezer (White Album)
4. Kanye West — The Life Of Pablo
5. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
6. Lucy Dacus — No Burden
7. Anderson.Paak — Malibu

JULY

1. Chance The Rapper — Coloring Book
2. Drake — Views
3. Beyonce — Lemonade
4. YG — Still Brazy
5. Kamaiyah — A Good Night In The Ghetto
6. Tegan & Sara — Love You To Death
7. Esperanza Spalding — Emily’s D+Evolution

AUGUST

1. Xenia Rubinos — Black Terry Cat
2. Paul Simon — Stranger To Stranger
3. Jamila Woods — HEAVN
4. Noname — Telefone
5. Say Anything — I Don’t Think It Is
6. Chance The Rapper — Coloring Book
7. Mitski — Puberty 2

SEPTEMBER

1. De La Soul — And The Anonymous Nobody…
2. Noname — Telefone
3. Jamila Woods — HEAVN
4. Homeboy Sandman — Kindness For Weakness
5. Look Park — Look Park
6. Young Thug — Jeffery
7. Joey Purp — iiiDrops

OCTOBER

1. Francis & The Lights — Farewell, Starlight!
2. Okkervil River — Away
3. Look Park — Look Park
4. Margaret Glaspy — Emotions And Math
5. The Hotelier — Goodness
6. Frank Ocean — Blonde
7. Solange — A Seat At The Table

NOVEMBER

1. Look Park — Look Park
2. Jimmy Eat World — Integrity Blues
3. Car Seat Headrest — Teens Of Denial
4. Vanishing Twin — Choose Your Own Adventure
5. Alicia Keys — Here
6. Cymbals Eat Guitars — Pretty Eyes
7. Danny Brown — Atrocity Exhibition

DECEMBER

1. Miranda Lambert — The Weight Of These Wings
2. A Tribe Called Quest — We Got It From Here… Thank You 4 Your Service
3. Vanishing Twin — Choose Your Own Adventure
4. Martha — Blisters In The Pit Of My Heart
5. Jimmy Eat World — Integrity Blues
6. Saba — Bucket List Project
7. J. Cole — 4 Your Eyez Only

See, wasn’t that fun? For me, I mean. It was fun for me. Thucydides, or somebody who resembled him, said “know thyself”, and what better way to do that than by scrupulously logging irrelevant stuff? Get out of here with that soul searching, pal; this isn’t the 19th century. Internal investigations are messy, and expensive if you hire a shrink. As for you, the reader, well, I’m glad you came along for the ride. I promise to keep up this practice, and I’m going to post some of my year-end lists for your general examination. Because it could always be worse: you could be paying attention to the news. Nothing good for you there, I promise.

Couldn’t exactly call it popular demand. But a few people I like very much have asked whether we’re bringing the Critics Poll back for its twenty-seventh year. Since I worry what you say about me when my back is turned, I’m obliging.  The rules are the same as always: fill out as much or as little as you like. No wrong answers. A certain voter used to stuff his form, annually, with twenty-year-old Rush albums. I always looked forward to that ballot.

I always look forward to yours, too.

The deadline for voting this year is January 26.  I’ll start posting results immediately thereafter.