50 Subjective and Mostly-Disconnected Thoughts on A Pretty Good 2010

As far as sheer quantity of entertaining music goes, this year was somewhere between great and ridiculous. I haven’t been rewarded this regularly for my enthusiastic gluttony since the mid ‘90s — and keep in mind that this was when I was in high school, when my record collection and sum total of music knowledge were both a lot more limited, and therefore presumably more open to new experiences than they should be now. The general idea is to be jaded once your age hits its thirties and your MP3 collection approaches a terabyte, but if a week went by where I didn’t hear at least one excellent new song or album, it was inevitably a week where I heard about five excellent old ones instead. And the latter weeks were significantly outnumbered by the former.

Yet while it seems like an unusual stroke of entropy-diverting good luck that I managed not to be jaded and disillusioned by music this year, that corroded sense of fuck-this retreat did rear its garbage-filled skull in reaction to something else – namely music criticism. I continued to write, put together some stuff I’m unreservedly happy with, hung out with a few sharp and likeable cohorts in the field and parlayed on the internet with a sizeable amount more. But engaging in argumentative internet cred-fights with people who think they can deduce your entire socioeconomic background and personal philosophy from your record collection and your byline? Waking up one day to realize that you harbor some nagging grudge against complete strangers – or other critics — because they have some misshapen, spiteful idea of what kind of person you are based on a piece you wrote? I didn’t much enjoy it when I was in my early twenties, and now that I’m old enough to worry about shit like property taxes and cholesterol it seems like an unnecessary but inescapable headache. I wonder how many other writers out there are rubbing their temples right now, too.

This unhealthy introspection has dredged up a pretty serious disconnect that I can’t stop worrying about. When I write, I stop and think too much, mull too many ideas over, try to approach things rationally instead of emotionally – the kind of approach that’s long since been outpaced by dashed-off, snarky, unfiltered Sent via Blackberry from T-Mobile spontaneity. And my ability to take how I feel when I listen to music and translate that gut reaction into words feels like it keeps getting more strained and stifled with my own second guesses every day. But I admit I do feel a bit freer when I’m on Twitter, where the limited space easily accommodates jokes and quick conversation and doesn’t leave much expectation for deep thought. So that’s the approach I’m going to take in my year-end roundup here – dialing down the whole Giving a Fuck quotient and dashing off whatever comes to mind, albeit without the 140-character limitation. Just as a warning: this could get kind of stupid. Or frank. Same thing.

 

  1. I feel like I’ve already said most of what I wanted to say about Big Boi in my Pitchfork blurb of Sir Lucious Leftfoot — lyricism and presence definitely proving he never was Dre’s second banana, instantly-appealing and eclectic retro-future funk beats, Exhibit Z of how record labels don’t know what the fuck they’re doing – but it should also be noted that as the idea of what “Southern rap” is has started to crack after getting ossified, this album draws all the old and new ideas together into a cohesive overview – Gucci and Khujo, T.I. and B.o.B., Yelawolf and Bun B, they’re all invited and they all fit.

 

  1. I’m impressed enough with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to put it in my top ten, even though I still feel like I need to listen to it another half-dozen times before it becomes the kind of album I can call up from memory Rolodex-style and really wrap my head around. Still, during my listens to it, it never feels like anything less than a refined magnum opus – it’s amazing the things a pop star can do when he finally admits that he’ll never get people to stop seeing him as a total dickhead and wonders what he’s capable of when he actively comes to terms with the idea of making dickhead music. Attitude-wise it’s sort of like how The Wall would feel if Roger Waters had to mull over the consequences of spitting on Linda Ronstadt instead of some Montreal concertgoer.

 

  1. The sooner hip-hop loses the intolerable burden of living up to some bullshit simulacrum of “realness,” the better – I’m sick of reading white folks dismissing weirder-than-usual rap for not fitting their fetishistic version of what ”street” is supposed to mean. And maybe Rick Ross’s evolutionary success is a good first step: just crank up the unattainable opulence and the struggling hustler/billion-dollar-man dichotomy to levels where it seems so transparent that it’s hard to care about boring shit like verisimilitude. He knows he’s selling a Hollywood bill of goods, so why the hell not wink at the camera – especially when it’s what’s turned him from a joke into an A-lister. And now that he’s actually playing to his strengths as a rapper – that bellow as a rib-nudging sales pitch, all outlandish comparisons and signifying brand-name drops – he’s rendered all speculation over who-cares gossip and counterfeit Louis Vuitton shades into an obsolete joke. Hell, everybody’s fake in the eyes of the internet anyways.

 

  1. Maybe I’m too invested in the idea that tear-the-club-up rappers should belt like top-volume M.O.P. to get fully on board with Waka Flocka Flame. Dude has hooks for days, and he can write aggro without being dumb (“fuck this industry/bitch, I’m in the streets” – that’s some Clio-winning phraseology right there). But unless he’s doing that thing where he’s screaming out his own name like blunt-force trauma onomatopoeia, he also seems to let the beats do most of the heavy lifting, the kicks and bass providing all the force as Flocka just cockily drawls his way to the point in the hook where he can yell a bit. It’s easy to go hard in the paint if you’re a lumbering Shaq-sized dude and you’ve got Lex Luger as Garnett next to you on your frontcourt. And, like modern-day Shaq, this shit gets tired after about 20 minutes.

 

  1. I don’t know how many people see Yelawolf as Bubba Sparxxx redux, a legit-spitting white rapper playing up integrated redneckism as a true-to-self but forward-looking New South. But unless Yela follows Bubba into strip-club turf and loses the plot, he could actually blow up to a more ridiculous extent than “Ugly” ever could – it helps his pop-appeal case that as an MC he’s a bit meaner, a bit sharper, and a lot slicker. As an elevator pitch, “hillbilly Eminem” would’ve turned more heads in 2002, but as a style it straight up sounds ideal right now, especially since it comes from someone who can play both the indie-virtuosity and mainstream-swagger angles without alienating either camp.

 

  1. Kingpins and thugs can grab the imagination, but a lot of the MCs that have resonated with me over the years take more attainable, relatable interests — cars, weed, liquor, women — and channel them through a true-to-scale charisma. Curren$y dropped two Pilot Talks that slot neatly between Snoop’s laidback, badass hedonist and Devin the dude’s hardworking, casually-partying everyman — or right next to Wiz Khalifa’s Wake-and-bake brashness, at its best on his Kush and Orange Juice mixtape.

 

  1. “Chasin’ venture paper, like what Twitter get/sick of arguing with white dudes on the internet” – one line in “You Oughta Know,” and Das Racist were pretty much guaranteed to make my year-end list somewhere. And the line from “hahahaha jk?” that countered/augmented/expanded on that sentiment – “we’re not racist, we love white people/Ford trucks, apple pies, bald eagles” – is acerbic enough to represent their m.o. alongside it, some kind of Br_wn B_st_rds in a Cheech and Chong’s Boutique Trojan horse. Christian Lander should fold up his iBook and go home.

 

  1. My interest in/knowledge of Bay Area hip hop has plummeted since the days a few years back where I was copping tracks by dudes like The Team on a regular basis (NOTE: “Top of the World” still slays), and I think that makes me Part of the Problem, whatever that Problem is. I’ve tried to make up for that by listening to E-40’s Revenue Retrievin’ when I can, and even if that doesn’t compensate entirely, I’m happy enough with “The Art of Story Tellin’” and “Ahhhhh Shit” to worry a bit less about being on top of everything.

 

  1. All the mixtape buzz, murder-you-on-your-own-shit guest verses, multiple-personality mythos and smartly cultivated, creative freedom-promoting industry connections, and Nicki Minaj still dropped an official debut that smacks of compromise and committee meddling, whether or not it was all her own idea (and word says it is). We have quasi-edgy R&B singers toying with hip hop swagger – that’s what Rihanna’s for – so a legit-edgy MC leaning towards R&B pathos seems kind of redundant and unnecessary. It’d probably be better for the industry and for hip hop on the whole if there was someone who did for mainstream rap what Jean Grae did for the underground, and bring the idea of no-bullshit lyrical skills so prominently to the forefront that chauvinist heads can’t help but omit the “…for a woman” from their acknowledgements. But at this rate, I’m back to crossing my fingers for Cake or Death again.

 

  1. I was seven and living in Minneapolis when Purple Rain came out, so do you will with that knowledge when I say that The-Dream is not Prince 1984. Any insinuations otherwise will be duly noted but firmly disagreed with. Not mad at “Yamaha,” though, which at least beats “Oh Sheila.”

 

  1. I used to shrug at Lady Gaga for not being as exotic as Goldfrapp or Roisin Murphy. Now I thank her for not being as aggressively vapid as Ke$ha or Katy Perry. I think this is progress?

 

  1. On the other hand, I think my beef with most chart pop these days comes from it not being sung by Robyn. Maybe this could be generational solidarity – oh, that’s right, you can be relevant in your thirties, thanks for the reminder – and the fact that she doesn’t seem self-consciously filtered, at least not in a way that seems pandering or knowingly viral, hits on the stifled subconscious demi-rockist value judgments I’ve spent the last several years trying to stymie in favor of “yeah but does it sound good”. I’m still trying to figure out how most American pop singers could’ve made “Dancing on My Own” look morbidly solipsistic, but thinking too much about that would just about ruin it. So I think the easy answer here is to recognize that “none of them get my sex/none of them move my intellect” is a much-needed dichotomy and that it is important to be unafraid to sing goofily enough to take the tedious contempt out of those familiar cooler-than-you sentiments.

 

  1. For the record, Gorillaz’s (I hate trying to figure out the possessive for that name) Plastic Beach was a boring, aggravating disappointment on my first listen, exiled from my library for a month, reintroduced at the behest of fellow writers, rediscovered to be an intriguing bummer and now sits up there in my top ten as my favorite melancholy pop album in a good long while. So I guess critics aren’t entirely useless yet? OK. I like the idea that this record was inspired by Damon Albarn visiting a landfill and watching the local wildlife casually adapt to an existence amongst garbage as though nothing was wrong, and talk about the right sentiment at the right time. The best getting-by-in-a-shrinking-world piece Mos Def has appeared on since The Ecstatic, Bobby Womack’s finest efforts at punching through the entropy since “There’s One Thing That Beats Failing,” De La at their most absurd since …Is Dead, Jones and Simonon working a perfectly somber (if hooky) sequel to “Charlie Don’t Surf”, and Albarn sounding… enh, I’ll have to find a good precedent for how amazingly dolorous his voice is here, but I can’t guarantee anything.

 

  1. This year I turned 33, a year older than James Murphy was when he released “Losing My Edge,” so I’m kind of worried. But LCD Soundsystem’s set at the Pitchfork Festival was a fine statement against encroaching middle-aged malaise, and is as fortunate a side effect as any of our otherwise dumbshit trend towards denying the immutable reality of maturing. As meditations on that particular subject go, Sound of Silver still bests This Is Happening; speaking in the jargon of my highest-profile byline provider, that record’s one of the two from the last five years I’d unreservedly call a definite 10.0. (The other one – J Dilla’s Donuts – was made by an artist who wouldn’t see 33, and likely knew it at the time.) But Murphy’s Byrne-does-standup delivery mutters forth some great lines on this one – “talking like a jerk/except you are an actual jerk”; “oh eat it Michael Musto/you’re no Bruce Vilanch”; the entirety of “Drunk Girls” (which is pop genius, fuck what you heard) – and then drops punchlines of the ha-ha…oh variety: “…and living proof that sometimes friends are mean,” say, or “be honest with yourself, how much time do you waste?” I don’t know if us born-in-the-‘70s types really need a direct Springsteen analogue to invoke deeper variations of half-remembered sounds from our youth and use them to get at the roots of our restlessness, but I like the possibility that Murphy could, in some tenuous way, be just that.

 

  1. M.I.A.’s only real crime this year was making a stylistically hinky record – and even that has its credible defenders, despite the fact that “it’s totally punk rock” isn’t always the yardstick I reach for myself. Fuck, if I made a few dollars off “Paper Planes” I’d order the truffle fries, too, and I say this under the full disclosure that I am writing this after drinking a bottle of Belgian-style ale that costs $11 for a six-pack. So bourgie. I’m probably better off revisiting her album with a bit more chronological and professional distance, but for now I’ll let “XXXO” stand in for everything I was hoping /\/\/\Y/\ would be, even if the chorus tells me that’s a bad idea.

 

  1. Critics were ready to toss the Chemical Brothers on top of the electronica-casualty trash-heap as early as 2002, and after We Are the Night, I was right there with them. I’m the kind of zealot who will go off on anyone who thinks that a po-faced cred-grab like Moby’s Play is even 1/6 the album Dig Your Own Hole is, so that kind of giving-up impulse didn’t come easy. Then again, it shouldn’t have come at all, because Further is easily their best album since the heady days of Amp and Wipeout 2097. It transitions their sound smartly into subtler, gradual-build variations on the Krautrock/psych drones that were always there beneath their Hawkwind-as-Bomb-Squad beats; the first real big beat drop doesn’t even happen until seven whole minutes into the album. It’s not all mellow – “Horse Power” is crassly raucous as Justice (who I miss) with twice the goofiness, and “Dissolve” does their late-Beatles-homunculus tendencies some good by dispensing with the whole vocal-track side of things – but it’s good to hear some ‘90s post-rave vets easing into something more grown-up without congealing completely into hardened-artery stasis.

 

  1. As of 1/1/11 there are 2,165 songs in my iTunes library from the year 2010. The number of them that are labeled with the “House” genre tag: 75. Compared to over 500 of the 9000+ tracks I have from the ‘00s, that’s a pretty steep dropoff, one that’s enough to make me wonder if it’s a matter of me losing interest or if house just had a substandard year. It could also be that I’ve just been too swamped with other areas of interest (dubstep, hip hop, early ‘70s detritus) to stay in touch with the genre that produced two of my favorite albums of 2001. Granted, Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy score was a disappointment (yes, it disappointed someone who listens to the scores from Thief and Blade Runner for recreational purposes), and last year’s Scars was so workmanlike that the idea of a new Basement Jaxx single didn’t grab my attention at all. (I will pause for a moment in the realization that I still haven’t heard “Dracula,” a situation I will correct immediately.) (OK, I’m back — man, I thought everyone got schaffel out of their system already.) But neither the down-year or genre-disillusionment theories make much sense when I’ve still heard plenty to like: a handful of excellent singles from Lindstrøm & Christabelle’s Real Life is No Cool, the four excellent cuts on Holy Ghost!’s Static on the Wire (“Say My Name”’s immaculate gloss chief amongst them), Prins Thomas’s underrated full-length solo debut bringing the kraut-disco excellence, Thomas Fehlmann and Pantha du Prince making me love minimal all over again, Simian Mobile Disco’s grotesque tech on Delicacies, Cosmin TRG and Egyptrixx pushing UK funky ahead three years in the space of twelve months – OK, and “Derezzed,” which I still wish was longer than “Nightvision.”

 

  1. I wish I had a better way to express my appreciation of Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here with less dilletanteish thoughts than “hey, it’s kind of like Tangerine Dream” or “there’s no drum sounds but I don’t care” or “it sounds exactly like the cover looks”. All I know is, I know what I’m going to listen to the next time I read Frank Miller’s Ronin.

 

  1. Night Ripper: “Eminem wrecks my pig, Smokey Robinson steals my orchestra, and Sonic Youth’s in my cooler!” Feed the Animals: “Jeez, Lois! This is like the time I got drunk with with Big Country and Tag Team!” All Day: shabbily-animated stop-motion Beastie Boys action figures kicking a shabbily-animated stop-motion Iggy Pop action figure in the balls.

 

  1. It’s probably a good sign that giving an overview of dubstep now requires detailing a bunch of branched-off splinter factions that, while compatible in some way or another, all deliver explicitly specific and different thrills. James Blake works the stripped-down R&B/pop angle spectacularly, with his EPs acting as the gold standard of evocative isolation in the same way that Burial did at his early peak – only it’s all coldly sunny, snow-covered park space instead of damp, brutalist and fluorescent concrete. Digital Mystikz (“Pop Pop Epic”; “Mountain Dread March”), Scuba (“Three Sided Shape”; “Lights Out”) and Mount Kimbie (“Would Know”; “Ruby”) led their own variations on that more familiar recent-vintage style, but they brought it into the light, let the foliage grow through the cracks, warmed up the reverb and made sure you could still dance to it. Turns to crowd-pleasing unsubtlety gave us the encroaching problem of “brostep” – the kind of stuff that sits next to the great Hyperdub sides about as awkwardly as Deadmau5 does alongside Kompakt – but other pop moves worked better: Skream’s post-La Roux hitmaker aspirations were offset by a healthy love of his roots, the likes of Starkey and Guido focused on using their massiveness for euphoria instead of fratty 4Loko wild-outs, and Lorn’s 16-bit boss-level electro was twitchy and nervy enough to sound better in lofts than arenas. Way too many great outliers, too – the stammering mania of Addison Groove’s “Footcrab”; Pariah’s restless cut-up soul meditation “Detroit Falls”; LV’s mini-opera 38 EP, where spoken-word artist Josh Idehen hits on Original Pirate Material-caliber world-building with 1/100th the attention that Mike Skinner got. And then, the two dubstep singles of the year (well, mine, at least): Joker’s elephantine “Tron,” the best death-by-bassline of the year, and Girl Unit’s “Wut,” the apotheosis of the young Night Slugs aesthetic that drops their stuff in the same continuum as classic rave and Southern bounce. Jungle didn’t sound this full of possibilities five years after “Inner City Life,” so how could our internet-accelerated disposal process have spared dubstep five years after “Midnight Request Line”?

 

  1. Flying Lotus’s music still shows an ear for billowy funk, corroded beauty, rhythmic inventiveness (“Table Tennis”, holy shit) and appealingly abrasive surface noise. But with Cosmogramma his compositional breadth feels even more full-to-bursting, often because he draws his ideas down into miniature – condensed, abbreviated, accelerated, crowded, shrunk down, fused to several other pieces just like it and unspooled into rapid-flashing vignettes. That Thom Yorke feature “…And the World Laughs With You” is a monster of a piece – after hearing what it does to keyboard sounds, I’m not sure whether to call it our decade’s IDM “Ghost Rider” or its art-house “Flash Light” — but it’s the first on the album to breach the 2-minutes-and-change mark, and the runup to it consists of six tracks totaling slightly over nine minutes total, all of which sound like exclamation points when they pop up in shuffle. The L.A. disciples who hope to match that scope are countless; the ones who seem like they really can are a bit less so. But Teebs’ Ardour is a great post-hip-hop companion piece – not quite as chaotic and bracing as FlyLo’s best, yet just about as beautiful and assured in its ability to create sturdy beats out of fragile sounds. It’s also a bit inexplicable in that someone who put together this music in California somehow wound up creating the year’s best cold-winter soundtrack (even if it sounded like spring the first time I heard it, weeks before the snow started falling).

 

  1. DJ Shadow put out a single – “Def Surrounds Us” (aging b-boy goes berserk with modern bass music; proves unsurprisingly adept) b/w “I’ve Been Trying” (credibly reconstructed, sincerely elegaic psych-folk with a minimum of production trickery) – that has me more excited for whatever’s coming up on his horizon than anything since “Rabbit in Your Headlights”. Absence makes the heart etcetera etcetera – we haven’t had a new, original album from him since The Outsider in ’06, and at least half his fans don’t even consider that a “real” Shadow album anyways (me being in the half that likes the hyphy stuff). But the way the instrumental, avant-garde Left Coast hip hop production he helped popularize 15 years ago has exploded in the past few years, his rapport with and response to its evolution is something I’m anxious to hear.

 

  1. There’s no danger to the Roots, no hyperactive fantasy or larger-than-life luxury, and what swagger there is feels like grown-man confidence instead of youthful invincibility. So maybe How I Got Over is going to get a raw deal. Their reliability and longevity means that there’s not much shock of the new about them, even when they’re doing things that are rare and largely unprecedented: continuing to evolve their live-band dynamics; maintaining their audience’s attention over a period that spans three decades; incorporating the idea of hip hop as the sort of music you can fit into a talk-show house-band format without compromising it. But an album like this that goes all in on the theme of stressing out, then pushing through and remembering how to survive and be – well, not happy, necessarily, but resilient and resistant to fatalism, in the kind of seen-shit voice that makes Black Thought vital? That’s 2010 as fuck. And as someone who never gave so much as a shrug towards Joanna Newsom or Monsters of Folk, their interpolations work so well here I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything ?uestlove can’t alchemize.

 

  1. Between what Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae did this year, I’m happy enough with the idea that R&B not only still has room for unconventionally creative women, but can produce two artists who go about it in near-opposite ways – Return of the Ankh’s deep-rooted bohemian love-song realism and The ArchAndroid’s escapist, fantastical misfit allegory. The latter album caught my attention a bit more immediately; five years after hearing the starter-kit version of Monae’s outsider-diva persona on the club-soul throwback “Lettin’ Go,” it was a revelation to hear her extend that Dungeon Fam cultivation into a theatrical (over)production that hits most of its once-unrealistic ambitions. It’s one of those albums that invokes a certain specific Spirit of ’76 (Out of the Blue; Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band; Songs in the Key of Life; Mothership Connection, even Station to Station) at the same time it blurs seven centuries of pop music into a chronology-ignoring repertoire. I’ve been told she sings too flatly; I think she sounds exactly as awestruck or coquettish or wounded as she needs to – the sequence from “Tightrope” to “Oh Maker” to “Come Alive (The War of the Roses)” is evidence enough. Badu, meanwhile, stuck to her ideal sweet spot – the most startling thing she did all year was show up on “Maybach Music III” – but Ankh is the love album she always had in her, even after all that time of getting unfairly tagged as more than one rapper’s Yoko. Not to give her short shrift, but I’ll make a long plaudit short: it’s her Voodoo.

 

  1. I don’t even know if I like “Fuck You” anymore. I understand the sentiment, even if it’s better redirected to a nebulous class resentment instead of focused on some trifling woman who thinks she’s too good for a low-dollar “nice” guy. I enjoy the retro pastiche, even if it falls apart like submerged tissue paper next to the woodshedding mastery of the Dap-Kings or the Budos Band. And I can let the appeal hit me broadside if I listen to it sparingly, like I managed to somehow luck into since it hit its immediate, otherwise-inescapable ubiquity. But I’m another one of those people that misses the Cee-Lo that gave us those heart-rending verses on “Guess Who” and “Distant Wilderness,” and if that’s the Cee-Lo people forget about, it’ll be the biggest farce since I read an obit that said “Isaac Hayes, perhaps best known for his role as ‘Chef’…”

 

  1. I saw Gil Scott-Heron live earlier this year in a context that made me feel exceptionally self-aware in retrospect. He was performing at this fancy jazz venue/supper club in Minneapolis, making up for a date that he had previously cancelled due to (this was the story) “flight problems”. I ate a $20 entrée and watched him spend 20 minutes in wiseass rap-session mode, half Richard Pryor and half sociology professor, and when he finally sat down to play he didn’t perform a single song from I’m New Here – instead, he stuck to a decent cross-section of his prime era material, including the more-relevant-than-in-’80 migrant ballad “Alien (Hold on to Your Dreams)” and the increasingly personal likes of “The Bottle” and “Home is Where the Hatred Is.” The postponement and the rambling and the increased rasp to his still-resonant voice didn’t damage my impression of him any, or of the album he released this year — which, despite its brevity and its relative shortage of new original material, holds a certain emotional world-weary power that can’t really be broken down into its component parts. (His version of “I’ll Take Care of You” alone is devastation enough.) But the New Yorker profile of him that I read a month later, the one that outlined the full extent of his drug problem and what seemed to be a pretty stark isolation — that made me wonder what he was dealing with, how he saw himself, what he would spend his share of the $40-a-ticket gate on and whether he’d ever come to terms with it. 34 years took him from “New York City, I don’t know why I love you/could be you remind me of myself” to “New York is killing me” – it’s not the kind of process you want to realize an artist is going through.

 

  1. Captain Beefheart’s recent passing led me to revisit a lot of things — mostly the stuff he sang on, still joyously disconcerting in a way nobody else will ever be — but it also brought me to look back at an observation I made during a review that Gonjasufi kind of sounds like him. That’s the sort of statement that could use a few more careful, tentative qualifiers, but I still stand by the feeling I get that A Sufi and a Killer has a definite stylistic kinship with Safe As Milk – in part because of his voice’s range, raspiness and unpredictability, and in part because majority-producer Gaslamp Killer is second only to Madlib (if anybody) in ability to transmutate acid rock’s tropes into a hip hop structure without letting one genre’s characteristics overwhelm the other’s. As this particular entity goes, it’s still nowhere near the singular fucked-upedness of Trout Mask Replica – see also: everybody else — but I wouldn’t mind hearing their Clear Spot.

 

  1. So, uh, speaking of Madlib, you all knew that he released a shit-ton of great albums this year, right? A bunch of mixtapes, a bunch of beat-tapes, a bunch of original productions, some of that one-man jazz stuff he does, a new Madvillain single — enough material that one could conceivably spend an entire month listening to nothing but this output and come away from it still trying to parse it all? It’s a pretty ridiculous move when the main complaint amongst music-devouring hordes is that there’s just too damn much of the stuff, but if there’s not at least three things he’s done this year that you’ve given a due listen, I’d call that unfair neglect.

 

  1. Too much Odd Future press reminds me of that Mr. Show bit where an experimental solution to prison overcrowding and expenses involved a man attempting to continue his daily life while constantly informing people that he’s a rapist and another man with an “I’M WITH A RAPIST” sandwich board followed him around. I’m not sure why the purported shock tactics of OFWGKTA are what’s grown to define them so prominently in the media – I’ve heard crueler and/or more outlandish shit from Necro (not a fan) and Jedi Mind Tricks (ditto) and R.A. the Rugged Man (“Cunt Renaissance,” featuring the Notorious B.I.G.! And the line “Big rip the twat/I rip your cunts out with spoons”! That was the hook!). Not to mention, uh, Eminem, who somehow gets obligatory namedrops and comparisons in the same articles that seem to make a huge-ass deal about a bunch of teenagers making jokes about rape and not liking gay dudes like it’s unprecedented. It’s never the kind of thing that should get casually shrugged off as part of the game, and if you relate to violate-bitches/fuck-you-faggot rhetoric with anything more sympathetic than a startled, oh-no-they-didn’t snort, go sit with the Tucker Max crowd and see how you like it. But playing that angle up like it’s some kind of fascinating rebellious act of last-frontier transgression seems pretty ridiculous when it’s actually the least-interesting part of a more nihilistic, often sincerely alienated and pissed-off whole. To put it into terms that their indie-rock champions who glaze over at circa-2000 underground rap namedrops can understand: when you think of Never Mind the Bollocks, how often do “Bodies” and “New York” come to mind? (An aside on actual music-based merits: Tyler the Creator’s Bastard might’ve been a top-ten-favorite album when I was 22 and mad at everything, though even now, when I’m old and resigned, it’s got its own gravitational pull on me.)

 

  1. There wasn’t a shortage of straight-up filthiness in hip hop, in any case – this was a good year for space-graveyard shit, a certain diseased strain of rusted, decayed crud-rap. El-P’s soundtrack to an imaginary full-length animated movie adaptation of Brandon Graham’s graffiti-comix fever dream King City, Tobacco murdering synthesizers in the woods and using the viscera to build beats for jeeps with corroded powertrains, Gangrene sloshing through Toilet Stool Rap that makes the CBGB’s johns look like the facilities at a Tokyo five-star hotel. This is what everything’s going to sound like when everyone’s broke and pissed off, so I’m glad there’s at least one positive side effect of a potential global financial apocalypse.

 

  1. Quick-n-dirty solo Shaolin roundup: Raekwon’s not-good-enough-for-Cuban Linx II-still-beats-your-best Cocainism Vol. 2 > Ghostface’s hot beats/OK lyrics/holding-pattern flow Apollo Kids »> Meth/Rae/Ghost tossed-off clusterfuck Wu-Massacre »»»»»> […] »»> Return of the Wu and Friends with “and Friends” in super-tiny type on the cover and nothing without the words “ft. Raekwon & Ghostface Killah” on it worth preserving

 

  1. The idea of success seems more and more arbitrary when it comes to hip hop these days, though maybe I just can’t comprehend the idea that raw East Coast stuff is growing increasingly niche. Roc Marciano’s situation is one I can understand, at least – dude went from a relatively high profile in Busta’s Flipmode Squad to underground cred in the UN, so he seems like the type of artist who can just do whatever he feels like for an indie label that’ll let him. What he felt like was Marcberg — lo-fi tape-deck shit like they used to make, defined as much by its hissy treble and muddy bass as by the post-RZA cinema soul intensity of the production itself, and filled with lines that value menace and virtuosity alike without being grandiose about either. Freeway’s career path from Roc-A-Fella to Rhymesayers seems like the kind of transition traditional narratives would plot on a downward arc, but The Stimulus Package is his best album, his best-received, and an interesting step in defining where he stands in mid-ground hip hop — somewhere in the same sphere as Raekwon and Brother Ali.

 

  1. What else in underground/indie/backpacker/car-trunk/regional/.rar-file/underexposed hip hop did I like this year? Shad’s TSOL, Black Milk’s Album of the Year, Reflection Eternal’s Revolutions Per Minute, Mux Mool’s Skulltaste, Mike Swoop’s New Love, Roach Gigz’s Roachy Balboa, Big K.R.I.T.’s K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, Muja Messiah’s M-16’s, 5 O’Clock Shadowboxers’ Broken Clocks EP, Freddie Gibbs’ Str8 Killa, Nocando’s Jimmy the Lock, Blu & Mainframe’s “Disco D.Y.N.A.M.I.T.E.,” The Infesticons’ “Bombs Anthem,” B. Dolan’s “Leaving New York,” Ski Beatz’s Jean Grae/Jay Electronica/Joell Ortiz feature “Prowler 2,” the Dr. Who Dat remix of DOOM’s “Gazzillion Ear” – yeah, that’s just about it.

 

  1. Well, OK, there’s one track that needs special attention: Skipp Coon & Mr. Nick’s “4-28-1967 pt. 2”. This track made my top ten after coming to my attention via what I can only really chalk up to as lucky chance. And I don’t even remember where it originated: I could’ve sworn this one messageboard I hang out around pointed it out, but I can’t find any evidence of it being discussed there, or maybe I got it from some random Tumblr I’ve since unfollowed, or it could’ve been one of the few things a PR company has sent me that I’ve had the time and patience to actually consider downloading. (Googling these dudes did lead me to The Smoking Section, so I’ll give them their due in lieu of any concrete evidence I discovered it somewhere else.) In any case, it’s one track from a Bandcamp release put together by a producer-rapper team who don’t even have entries on Discogs or Rate Your Music, the one nod to national recognizability is the presence of fellow Mississippi native David Banner, and I am pretty sure I am the only person in Pazz & Jop who is voting for this, though if it shows up on anyone else’s ballot I will buy them a beer (or a sandwich if they’re a teetotaler). Here is why I’m voting for it: it’s the most intense political track I’ve heard all year, slow-burn organ drones and nervous tapping snares and hi hats, righteous-fury verses spit by Skipp and Banner and this dude named Luca Brasi who all just completely stab at the heart of the post-Reagan machine and the distracted consumers complicit in keeping it running. I listened to this a ton on November 3rd.

 

  1. I remember being super-excited about Sleigh Bells at some point – I was probably even listening to them at the time. I really wish I could diagnose what it was that led me down the line of critical thinking from “TEENPOP PLUS NOISY GUITARS, THANK YOU THAT IS GREAT” to “wait, someone thought they could improve on the Go! Team just by making them louder?” I guess I can still thank them for reminding me of how great “Can You Get to That” is, though that’s not exactly the sort of sentiment that needs a big epiphany anyways, and besides, James Blake’s “I’ll Stay” was a better Funkadelic tweak by far. Watch, in six months I’ll love this again.

 

  1. I’m pretty sure I have the chronology right when I track my listening progression from Sleigh Bells to Free Energy to Fang Island – all of these artists pulling out simple, obvious, hooky and somewhat naively youthful variations on some idea of big rockin’ out moves, though only the latter two have stuck. Free Energy caught me because they sprung off this Minnesota band called the Hockey Night, who I vaguely remember as being sort of jokey-twerpy and tweeish (song titles from 2002’s Rad Zapping: “Battlestar Scholastica;” “Princess Starcrystal;” “R.E.B.E.L. System” – still want to gripe about witch house?). Stuck on Nothing still sounds a bit precious in the vocal department but now it’s to more straightforward power-pop ends (with better titles) and it sounds uncannily like Sweet circa Desolation Boulevard. The part of my brain that enjoys Desolation Boulevard is controlled by thoughts and impulses that are not any good at justifying this enthusiasm so I’ll have to take the fifth. Fang Island is in similar straits, only they have a sort of proggy, tweaky angle on Thin Lizzy and maybe a bit of Boston in there, too, which, yeah, same brain-part explain-not-good. Sorry.

 

  1. I admit that I’ve name-dropped way too many ‘70s band names, and I swear it’s not out of some subconscious desire to spite Mike Watt or anything, even if I failed in my mid-‘90s Kids of Today defense duties. (OK, maybe I want to spite Eddie Vedder a little.) But it is a pretty good time to feel all right about liking Electric Light Orchestra (of Montreal; Apples in Stereo) or the earlier, Abandoned Luncheonette/War Babies Hall & Oates (Ariel Pink; Gayngs). The problem is that a lot of people still can’t get over the suspicion that this appreciation is an ironic con or some sort of Stockholm syndrome or a misguided fandom of that Yacht Rock web series, and even those of us who really do like that once-maligned FM material get that suspicion suggested into our brains somehow. I think the possibility that appeals to me the most is that our idea of oppositional creativity has been freed from the need to be abrasive or angry or loud, since that’s been the default mode (PUNK FUCKIN’ ROCK, DUDE) for the last three-plus decades and it’s become familiar enough to lose its weight somehow. And yet there are still Melvins albums, so I wouldn’t worry too much if you still like bludgeon-rock.

 

  1. Chillwave’s main benefit to the critical community seems to be as an addition to a bitter lexicon, neatly filed alongside such decreasingly impactful slurs like “skinny jeans” and “fixies” and “PBR” so it can shoot new life into an old aggravation. Right — because when I think of what’s worth getting pissed off about in music, I think of kids making DIY tape-deck debris for a worldwide audience of 3,000. Some of the received-wisdom complaints about the genre as a whole (or genres, plural – I gave up keeping track of whether chillwave and witch house were different things when it meant I’d have to read about it) mostly served to obscure the fact that there are interesting ideas amidst all the crap, and not always hidden ones, either. Mining hazily-recalled VHS-aesthetic ‘80s debris is at least understandable once you realize that an entire generation is looking for something that the internet hasn’t yet ruined the meaning of by making it instantly bountiful. And when that impulse falls into the hands of people who can actually put some feeling into their music – like Toro Y Moi, who seems more intent on making decaying ‘80s R&B and synthpop into something heartfelt instead of just holding a séance for it – all I can think of is that old Sun Ra retort to a bandmate’s complaints about a “hokey” disco-funk song: “This hokey shit is somebody’s hopes and dreams. Don’t be so hip.”

 

  1. Vampire Weekend released a really good Kinks album. I also heard they wear certain types of shirts, but I haven’t looked at any pictures of them lately so it doesn’t matter too much.

 

  1. I have a lot of reasons to root for Ted Leo. He’s a legitimately fan-friendly artist, he’s in that Best Show on WFMU sphere of influence that tends to champion what Tom Scharpling would probably call “good guy stuff,” and disillusionment notwithstanding I’ve had enough happiness listening to punk rock in years gone by that I could always use a reminder that it’s not always music for jerks being snots about junk. So yeah, maybe The Brutalist Bricks sticks with me for reasons that don’t necessarily have to do with objective musical qualities, many of which have been questioned by types who roll out stock terms like “more of the same” and “overproduced” and “underproduced” and other general indicators of fatigue and/or disillusionment. I suppose the thing to do in response here is start with the lyrics, which have always been an easy gauge of Leo’s spirit: finding fleeting beauty in an abrupt café explosion (“The Mighty Sparrow”), striving to be a decent American abroad when the world still thinks the worst of your home country (“Bottled in Cork”), evoking the ghosts of ceaseless generations of right-wing backlash (“Mourning in America”) – political in human terms (and vice-versa), coming from someone who knows and admits he doesn’t have all the concrete answers (“Where Was My Brain?”). And if you can get on board from there – I was fully at the first line of “Woke Up Near Chelsea,” “Well we’ve all got a job to do, and we all hate God” – then Leo’s voice leads you through, bright and intense in its melodic qualities as always, and the powerful simplicity of the music falls into place that much more easily.

 

  1. Tame Impala: finally, a Dungen I can understand the words to.

 

  1. I’ve never spent enough appreciable time in the suburbs to sincerely comprehend what Arcade Fire are trying to get at in their album – at least, not on a legitimately personal level. But what I do remember is that living in the old pre-war heart of the city as a kid, when almost everybody in the movies and on TV occupied nice, clean suburban neighborhoods that revolved around shopping malls and high school parking lots, made me suspect that I was disconnected from something bigger and more supposedly universal than what I was living through. So maybe that’s why I can’t entirely connect with the themes of The Suburbs – that, and “Rococo” acting as further evidence that anti-hipster contempt is the last refuge of the self-righteous/self-conscious – but it sounds good enough as oversized anthemic rock that I wouldn’t mind this replacing John Hughes as the go-to fantasy of teenage angst in the sprawl.

 

  1. I didn’t much care about (or for) the Pavement reunion, but I guess “Fillmore Jive” is all right. I still haven’t gotten around to flipping out over Majesty Shredding like the rest of my friends, but I’ve heard every call Jon Wurster’s made to The Best Show on WFMU this year. I didn’t envy the people I knew who made it to Matador 21, but I didn’t begrudge them their fandom, either. I’m open enough to belatedly appreciate some of that key ‘90s indie rock nowadays, even though I felt like most of it just wasn’t for me back when it was lingering around the periphery of my teenage years. It’s weird that I understand nostalgia and reverence for previous generations’ music – as mentioned before, I’ve happily bought into some of it myself – but the same attitude brought out for the music of my own generation either makes me feel inert or informs me in a way that has me thinking about the future instead of the past.

 

  1. I’ve been on-and-off stupid for garage rock, and if I’ve lapsed enough to fall behind on every little thing that’s happening on Goner or In the Red, I at least get the feeling that what I have caught up with gives me the notion that it’s been a good year for it: Dum Dum Girls, Ty Segall, Bare Wires, Mark Sultan, Nice Face. And Kurt Vile, while I’m at it — he doesn’t entirely hew to the garage blueprint but seems to fit somehow; a man who says more with a distant voice, an acoustic guitar and some reverb than a lot of fuzztone Troglodytes in eardrum-rupturing, Mummies-aping full throttle could accomplish at top volume. Still, having to redefine the parameters of what makes for a good year in garage punk without a Jay Reatard single to hold everything else up to? That’s going to take some getting used to.

 

  1. My story about the Black Keys’ Brothers: Listened to it when it came out. Thought it was overwrought and dopey and trying too hard. Spent a while cratedigging for late ‘60s/early ‘70s hard rock. Experienced a lot of turgid bellowing bloozery that made Iron Butterfly sound like a T-Bone Walker 78. Went back to Brothers a few months later. Felt a lot more charitable.

 

  1. The good thing about having friends who are into things you never thought you’d previously like is that the impression of the friend replaces the impression of the people you used to associate the previously unliked thing with. This is a convoluted way of saying I learned to appreciate metal a lot more when it was being touted by people who were nothing like the cat-piss-smelling dude in TV productions class who always liked to yell anti-Semitic remarks at me. Being a relative latecomer means some things are going to take a lot more work to click – I know Opeth’s good, I just don’t know Opeth’s good yet – but between Shining’s avant/prog Blackjazz, Kylesa’s indie-heavy mood-swing concoction Spiral Shadow and the pummeling stoner-gone-thrash of High on Fire’s Snakes for the Divine, I at least got a decent cross-section of stuff to ease into. I don’t feel like any less of a poser, but it’s never too late for gateway drugs.

 

  1. I am going to just cop to the fact that my gold standard for Heavy Shit is pretty much just going to be Black Sabbath, long-established in the past and applicable for the foreseeable future. The key album in that wheelhouse this year is Electric Wizard’s Black Masses – not quite the asphyxiatingly sludgy succession of headpunches that the relentlessly lumbering Witchcult Today was, but damn near as good and just about as smartassed (“There’s already a song called ‘Venus in Furs’? Who gives a shit?” eeeeeeeeeeeeee THUD THUD BREARRRARRARGHHHHMMMMMM). But as far as singles go, gimme Black Mountain’s “Let Spirits Ride,” a double-XL ultrabastard of a “Symptom of the Universe” rewrite that actually found a way to make lines like “the rudimentary force of life is shining at the gates of Heaven’s door” sound like the lord’s honest truth.

 

  1. An obligatory link to my favorite thing I wrote all year.

 

  1. I think by now it’s hitting me just how many of these smushed-together streams of tics and reactions I’ve written here are in the context of aging, about where I was in my formative years and how I listened to music then compared to now, and it does seem pretty overanxious of me. But I can either flail around trying to play catch-up to make up for a youth spent stumbling through music-fan trial-and-error, or I can look forward, on to something new that could surprise me in a way that has something to do with what’s happening now, or I could refamiliarize myself with something recent that I just haven’t spent enough time with but know I’ve appreciated at least a bit. That there doesn’t seem to be room or time enough for all of these things is enough of a burden that I kind of wish there wasn’t so much music I liked this year. I guess there’s always something I haven’t heard, or haven’t heard enough, and there always will be.

 

  1. Taylor Swift – ah, to hell with it.