The Year Everything Stayed the Same
Sameless (YAY)
Escort - s/t
Rick Ross - Rich Forever mixtape
Samey (OK+)
Yo Gotti - Live from the Kitchen
T-Pain - rEVOLVEr
Same (OK)
Unsamely (BOO)
Unequaled
Cassie - Ventura Blvd.
The Beaties - SHGR N UR SYSTM
Blue Ivy Carter - Pampered
Rihanna - Another Album She Made in a Weekend
Taylor Swift - Vampires and Shit
Willow Smith - Will2k12ow
Hilary Duff - Metropolis, Bitch
Keke Palmer - Cool 'Un
Friday, January 13, 2012
Saturday, August 06, 2011
2005: The Year I Broke
Nothing like going off to England and taking two classes that each met once a week (on the same day!) to clear your head, right? So I took off, threw the shackles of dormdom and music criticdom and other -doms aside and shared a dingy flat in Bayswater with friends of friends (who became just friends) and drank a bunch of tea from an electric kettle and went to Fopp a lot. Five pounds, in retrospect, wasn't great given the conversion rates (round about $9.99 a pop), but it felt nice, and I eventually paid my parents back for the staggering debt I accrued. Sorry, Dad!
Emily was in Italy via a Jesuit program in Rome, and we were in closer proximity in Europe than we ever were in the States. EasyJet was usually cheaper than Amtrak fare. We met on weekends, taking lightning tours through Rome and eating at the Via Doria market and navigating Trastevere and sipping under- and overpriced cappuccino indiscriminately I wrote about our misadventures here (fluffy) and here (emo).
It was a blast! I was a wreck! I hate traveling, but was able to do more of it in that brief period than I may have done since, purely out of necessity and buoyed by the novelty of the sights. Drinking age had been lowered, so my 21st birthday was a bit of a non-starter. I attempted to kick some deep-seated paranoia, occasionally relapsing to peek at old online music haunts or self-Google, listening to drips and drops of new music but (for the most part) relegating listening habits to (on one hand) a kind of austere repetition, listening to the same songs and albums over and over, ten times, twenty times ("Billy S." and Billy Bragg, Basement Jaxx and Alan Braxe); or (on the other) I'd just put my old 30 gig iPod on shuffle and go for a long walk. I put together three "iGod mixes" culled from these shuffle sessions (rules: could re-order the songs minimally for flow and could only delete one song in twenty consecutive plays) and lost all of them before giving them to their intended recipients (sorry Becki, Matt, and Emily G.). Fooled around with some DJ software and made my first continuous mix (of sorts) for Emily, the "Robot Mix," which I've also since lost: Max Tundra, Wagonchrist, Out Hud...who else?
Names that flutter into mind from that period seem arbitrary and frequently obscure: What does Cass McCombs sound like again? Have I listened to Busdriver since then (I almost don't want to)? Was Datarock really that good (yes)? Who the hell is Gustav?
I read a lot of old I Love Music threads absentmindedly as my insomnia grew to absurd proportions. I was better able to keep up with my US friends' evening schedules to chat than my London friends' daytime schedules. My flatmates and I rearranged "Happy Birthday" letters again and again to spell cryptic phrases. I had what I now recognize as my first anxiety attacks walking through Piccadilly Circus. Vividly remember seeing The Sea Inside, though I don't remember if I liked it (I was moved by it, anyway). Was chided by a film appreciation professor when I kept wanting to jump to the ending of the films we watched: "Always going right to the end -- I wonder what your girlfriend must think!" Imported pseudo-kosher foods from various shops to put on a rag-tag Passover seder with Emily and my generous, curious roommate (we slept about a foot and a half apart, which for some reason didn't strike me as a big deal at the time). Drank too much port (not a good substitute for Manischewitz, it turns out) and lied to Emily about how long she'd been throwing up.
And then we were in Paris and Prague and Berlin, getting bedbugs somewhere -- pretty sure it was the $5 Hostel in Prague, where we saw a little pest scurrying across our dinosaur sheets on the mattress on the ground -- trying to enjoy ourselves but being acutely aware of how much it was all costing, now that it was coming to an end. Tourist sites, little nooks and corners, beige flats, creating a well-trodden path in a new place over the course of a few months. Enjoying the gray weather.
I'd resigned from writing for Pitchfork on Christmas eve after doing my first and last interview with whatshisname from Bloc Party. Just a brief email exchange: I asked stupid questions, he provided snappy answers. I figured I could go back to writing on the website I'd started with friends, but that wasn't in the cards.
I got back and I'd started thinking about sorting things out more personal-like. I'd referenced my music career for the first time in a bizarre essay I filed from abroad on Skye Sweetnam, which reads as incoherent to me now. When I returned, I got into the habit of compulsively buying CDs for .99 or less (usually a penny plus the $3 shipping and handling) from various online stores. I went to libraries and ripped their Jessica Simpson albums. I read Metal Mike Saunders on Radio Disney and B*Witched and Lindsay Lohan (prior to her debut album, when her stuff was appearing on soundtracks) and Ruby Blue. I lurked on ILM threads about Ashlee Simpson (Emo or Oh No!) and read the essays in the Voice that emerged from some strands of those conversations. I had the odd desire to pitch something to the Voice just to be a part of that conversation, though I hadn't really written much about music yet. Maybe I could do a Radio Disney update or something?
Oh man, that Ashlee album (I Am Me; hadn't yet heard Autobiography) was awesome! It was like actually good! A wrongheaded approach as I started to figure this stuff out -- I felt the need to qualify the "actually," the implicit message being "despite what I should think," even though I couldn't very well articulate what exactly it was I was supposed to be thinking. All I knew of Ashlee was that she got "caught" lip syncing on Saturday Night Live. But I'd never consciously listened to her before.
Now I'm living with Emily in Boston for the summer working for a documentary production company, and my listening takes a turn for the spare. I listen to one of three albums every day on a long walk to and from work -- Discovery by Daft Punk, The Upper Cuts by Alan Braxe and "Friends," or Minimum-Maximum, the live Kraftwerk album. Later the Mountain Goats album, which ended up on top of my first of six Pazz and Jop ballots as an out-of-work music critic. That's all I can remember from the summer, anyway, needing a way to yoke my body's energy to a beat (or, with MG and I think the Hold Steady album, a story) but not wanting anything too outside of a comfort zone (again my anxiety is rumbling without me realizing it -- at its peak, I would listen to Pantha du Prince's This Bliss every day to try to stop panic attacks walking four blocks to and from work each way).
There was something unsettling bubbling up from the depths, a kind of restlessness that doesn't strike me as entirely healthy (I'd attributed it to some basic creative drive or something -- c'mon, I was in art school!). Insomnia, acute chest pains. Awful blood sugars. An utter refusal to drive anywhere, ever, for any reason. "I don't feel comfortable driving in Boston -- the drivers here are crazy!" Yeah. I figured my time abroad would be something like convalescence from a world out to get me, but it turns out that the paranoia and discomfort I'd been attributing to this thing or that person or anything but me was, probably the whole time, just me and a bundle of nerves. (There was that one nightmare about an unruly mob murdering me after an Arcade Fire concert -- but I wouldn't read too much into it.)
Top Ten+ of 2005
Emily was in Italy via a Jesuit program in Rome, and we were in closer proximity in Europe than we ever were in the States. EasyJet was usually cheaper than Amtrak fare. We met on weekends, taking lightning tours through Rome and eating at the Via Doria market and navigating Trastevere and sipping under- and overpriced cappuccino indiscriminately I wrote about our misadventures here (fluffy) and here (emo).
It was a blast! I was a wreck! I hate traveling, but was able to do more of it in that brief period than I may have done since, purely out of necessity and buoyed by the novelty of the sights. Drinking age had been lowered, so my 21st birthday was a bit of a non-starter. I attempted to kick some deep-seated paranoia, occasionally relapsing to peek at old online music haunts or self-Google, listening to drips and drops of new music but (for the most part) relegating listening habits to (on one hand) a kind of austere repetition, listening to the same songs and albums over and over, ten times, twenty times ("Billy S." and Billy Bragg, Basement Jaxx and Alan Braxe); or (on the other) I'd just put my old 30 gig iPod on shuffle and go for a long walk. I put together three "iGod mixes" culled from these shuffle sessions (rules: could re-order the songs minimally for flow and could only delete one song in twenty consecutive plays) and lost all of them before giving them to their intended recipients (sorry Becki, Matt, and Emily G.). Fooled around with some DJ software and made my first continuous mix (of sorts) for Emily, the "Robot Mix," which I've also since lost: Max Tundra, Wagonchrist, Out Hud...who else?
Names that flutter into mind from that period seem arbitrary and frequently obscure: What does Cass McCombs sound like again? Have I listened to Busdriver since then (I almost don't want to)? Was Datarock really that good (yes)? Who the hell is Gustav?
I read a lot of old I Love Music threads absentmindedly as my insomnia grew to absurd proportions. I was better able to keep up with my US friends' evening schedules to chat than my London friends' daytime schedules. My flatmates and I rearranged "Happy Birthday" letters again and again to spell cryptic phrases. I had what I now recognize as my first anxiety attacks walking through Piccadilly Circus. Vividly remember seeing The Sea Inside, though I don't remember if I liked it (I was moved by it, anyway). Was chided by a film appreciation professor when I kept wanting to jump to the ending of the films we watched: "Always going right to the end -- I wonder what your girlfriend must think!" Imported pseudo-kosher foods from various shops to put on a rag-tag Passover seder with Emily and my generous, curious roommate (we slept about a foot and a half apart, which for some reason didn't strike me as a big deal at the time). Drank too much port (not a good substitute for Manischewitz, it turns out) and lied to Emily about how long she'd been throwing up.
And then we were in Paris and Prague and Berlin, getting bedbugs somewhere -- pretty sure it was the $5 Hostel in Prague, where we saw a little pest scurrying across our dinosaur sheets on the mattress on the ground -- trying to enjoy ourselves but being acutely aware of how much it was all costing, now that it was coming to an end. Tourist sites, little nooks and corners, beige flats, creating a well-trodden path in a new place over the course of a few months. Enjoying the gray weather.
I'd resigned from writing for Pitchfork on Christmas eve after doing my first and last interview with whatshisname from Bloc Party. Just a brief email exchange: I asked stupid questions, he provided snappy answers. I figured I could go back to writing on the website I'd started with friends, but that wasn't in the cards.
I got back and I'd started thinking about sorting things out more personal-like. I'd referenced my music career for the first time in a bizarre essay I filed from abroad on Skye Sweetnam, which reads as incoherent to me now. When I returned, I got into the habit of compulsively buying CDs for .99 or less (usually a penny plus the $3 shipping and handling) from various online stores. I went to libraries and ripped their Jessica Simpson albums. I read Metal Mike Saunders on Radio Disney and B*Witched and Lindsay Lohan (prior to her debut album, when her stuff was appearing on soundtracks) and Ruby Blue. I lurked on ILM threads about Ashlee Simpson (Emo or Oh No!) and read the essays in the Voice that emerged from some strands of those conversations. I had the odd desire to pitch something to the Voice just to be a part of that conversation, though I hadn't really written much about music yet. Maybe I could do a Radio Disney update or something?
Oh man, that Ashlee album (I Am Me; hadn't yet heard Autobiography) was awesome! It was like actually good! A wrongheaded approach as I started to figure this stuff out -- I felt the need to qualify the "actually," the implicit message being "despite what I should think," even though I couldn't very well articulate what exactly it was I was supposed to be thinking. All I knew of Ashlee was that she got "caught" lip syncing on Saturday Night Live. But I'd never consciously listened to her before.
Now I'm living with Emily in Boston for the summer working for a documentary production company, and my listening takes a turn for the spare. I listen to one of three albums every day on a long walk to and from work -- Discovery by Daft Punk, The Upper Cuts by Alan Braxe and "Friends," or Minimum-Maximum, the live Kraftwerk album. Later the Mountain Goats album, which ended up on top of my first of six Pazz and Jop ballots as an out-of-work music critic. That's all I can remember from the summer, anyway, needing a way to yoke my body's energy to a beat (or, with MG and I think the Hold Steady album, a story) but not wanting anything too outside of a comfort zone (again my anxiety is rumbling without me realizing it -- at its peak, I would listen to Pantha du Prince's This Bliss every day to try to stop panic attacks walking four blocks to and from work each way).
There was something unsettling bubbling up from the depths, a kind of restlessness that doesn't strike me as entirely healthy (I'd attributed it to some basic creative drive or something -- c'mon, I was in art school!). Insomnia, acute chest pains. Awful blood sugars. An utter refusal to drive anywhere, ever, for any reason. "I don't feel comfortable driving in Boston -- the drivers here are crazy!" Yeah. I figured my time abroad would be something like convalescence from a world out to get me, but it turns out that the paranoia and discomfort I'd been attributing to this thing or that person or anything but me was, probably the whole time, just me and a bundle of nerves. (There was that one nightmare about an unruly mob murdering me after an Arcade Fire concert -- but I wouldn't read too much into it.)
Top Ten+ of 2005
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Teenpop Lock and Drop Vol. 1
Thanks so much to Flavorpill's Tumblr, Vulture, VH1, MTV's Tumblr, Buzzfeed, and the Stranger's LineOut for reblogging my first eva full mixtape-type-thingy, the high/low-concept "Teenpop Lock and Drop."
Wrote a bit of context here and stream it here on Tumblr.
For anyone who finds this blog through the mix, I'll just note that the non-Tumblr Cure for Bedbugs blog, now rarely updated, focuses almost exclusively on teenpop from 1998 thru c. 2007 or so (post-Spice Girls, pre-Bieber). I've written about this stuff a lot for the (sadly) retired Stylus Magazine in my Sugar Shock columns. My most extensive write-up was in their Bluffer's Guide to post-2000 teenpop.
And for the best day-to-day coverage/criticism of current pop (the place I go to find a lot of the contemporary stuff I used), check out the Singles Jukebox.
Here's the official tracklist:
01. An Introduction from Britney Spears
Britney Spears, "The Beat Goes On" + "bonus track" from ...One More Time (1999)
vs. Huey, "Pop Lock and Drop It" from Notebook Paper (2006)
02. No Chains
Dream, "He Loves U Not" from It Was All a Dream (2001)
vs. Waka Flocka Flame f. Wale and Roscoe Dash, "No Hands" from Flockaveli (2010)
03. Black Genie in a Yellow Bottle
Christina Aguilera, "Genie in a Bottle" from Christina Aguilera (1999)
vs. Wiz Khalifa f. Snoop Dogg, Juicy J, and T-Pain, "Black and Yellow (remix)," original from Rolling Papers (2011)
04. Light Up When the Lights Go Out
5ive, "When the Lights Go Out" from 5ive (1998)
vs. Method Man and Redman, "Part II" from How High (2001)
05. Twerk That Max
Britney Spears, "Lucky" from Oops! ...I Did It Again (2000)
vs. Juicy J f. Project Pat, "Twerk That" (2009)
06. Backstreet Boy Wasted
Backstreet Boys, "Larger than Life" from Millenium (1999)
vs. Yung Gwapa f. Waka Flocka Flame, "White Boy Wasted" (2010)
07. Can the Robyn Get Some
Robyn, "Do You Know (What It Takes)" from Robyn (1995, single released in U.S. 1997)
vs. Travis Barker f. Swizz Beatz, Game, Lil' Wayne, and Rick Ross, "Can the Drummer Get Some" from Give the Drummer Some (2011)
08. Did It On *N
*NSync, "It's Gonna Be Me" from No Strings Attached (2000)
vs. Nicki Minaj, "Did It On Em" from Pink Friday (2010)
09. Case of the Maxi Pad
Mya, "Case of the Ex" from Fear of Flying (2000)
vs. Keak da Sneak, "Maxi Pads" from The Tonite Show (2011)
10. Steal That Tree
Len, "Steal My Sunshine" from Len (1999)
vs. Snoop Dogg f. Kid Cudi, "That Tree" from More Malice (2010)
11. Candybugg
Mandy Moore, "Candy" from So Real (1999)
vs. Big Boi f. Cutty, "Shutterbugg" from Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty (2010)
12. The Boy Is Feeling Himself
Monica f. Brandy, "The Boy Is Mine" from The Boy Is Mine (1998)
vs. Nipsey Hussle, "Feelin' Myself" from South Central State of Mind (2010)
13. Some People Say I Look Like Me Dev
B*Witched, "C'est La Vie" from B*Witched (1998)
vs. Dev f. Cataracs, "Bass Down Low" from The Night the Sun Came Up (2011)
14. Over the World
ATC, "Around the World (La La La La La)" from Planet Pop (2000)
vs. Drake, "Over" from Thank Me Later (2010)
15. ...To the Booty
A*Teens, "...To the Music" from Teen Spirit (2000)
vs. Jamie Drastik f. Fabolous, "B.O.B." (2009)
16. Gotta Get Thru This Trap
Daniel Bedingfield, "Gotta Get Thru This" from Gotta Get Thru This (2002)
vs. OJ Da Juiceman f. Gucci Mane, "Make the Trap Say Aye" from The Otha Side of the Trap (2009)
17. Young Money Cash Minogue
Kylie Minogue, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" from Fever (2000)
vs. Birdman f. Kevin Rudolf and Lil' Wayne, "I Want It All" from Priceless (2009)
18. Smile, Chalie
Vitamin C, "Smile" from Vitamin C (1999)
vs. Chalie Boy, "Look Like Money (Smell Like Dollaz)" from I'm Here (2009)
19. Swagger Girls
LFO, "Summer Girls" from LFO (1999)
vs. Soulja Boy, "Pretty Boy Swag" from The DeAndre Way (2010)
Thanks for listening!
Sunday, February 20, 2011
2004: The Year Everything Broke
I suppose, what with the Arcade Fire winning a Grammy for Best Album (and a hearty whatevs to all y'all contrarian-types who claim this isn't important or "important" or Important -- have you looked at the history of previous best album Grammy winners lately?), I should resume my long-gestating, unsatisfying 2004 recap so I can move on with my life (to 2005).
I wrote a sarcastic acrostic to Mike Barthel in response to the Grammy news: "No, I'm Not Even Pontificating On It. Not Totally Surprised. Engages Vanity -- Ever the Narcissist!" But actually, my reaction, in skimming the history of the Grammys, is just to note without further elaboration that the one-two punch of Taylor Swift in 2010 and the Arcade Fire in 2011 does seem to mean something to me in a way that the last 10 years worth of Grammy wins haven't, regardless of whether or not I liked them. Compare to the hoary and/or polite picks of the previous decade -- Alison Krauss joining forces with Robert Plant, Herbie Hancock honoring Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles and the Superfriends. Dixie Chicks, Outkast, and U2 honored too late for just-OK albums (U2 won for Joshua Tree anyway, so really it just signals that U2 is closer to Robert Plant than...y'know, Dixie Chicks or Outkast). And then there's boomery Steely Dan and Santana, and something like neo-boomer wins for the O Brother soundtrack and Norah Jones. What a boring list for an exciting decade! The last relevant win was Lauryn Hill all the way back in 1999 -- and I don't mean "relevant for my small little circle of internet cultural commentary," I mean relevant, the kind of thing that makes you, whoever you are, wanna say something about something, even if it's just "WHO IS [INSERT BAND]?"
You know my development through the early 00's -- spark of curiosity begets obsession, obsession begets deeper obsession, deeper obsession begets a few poses I hadn't tried out yet (I was posing and a poseur, but one wasn't necessarily synonymous with the other). For the most part I was having fun, not really making "my story" fit to any particular zeitgeist or Narrative of Now -- I was working out the Narrative of Then, c. 1950-2000.
2004 was the year that, in hindsight, everything sort of "happened" for me in a way that does have an impact on the current moment (mine, anyway). The most significant thing about it was the narrative that it established for me, one that would repeat itself, in some variation, several times over, year after year, and as we speak has followed me into a new career path (I'm disconcerted, if excited, to find myself at square one all over again). The narrative starts with promise and confidence, turns, usually through a combination of luck and initiative (but mostly luck) into an opportunity, gets bigger, goes slightly awry (real or imagined, sometimes imagined -- paranoid -- sometimes real -- disappointment), and I retreat, regroup, think of the next move.
To some extent this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; success itself is what leads me to suspect there's something awry -- maybe a variation on "I don't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member," but really more like "I don't want to assume that a club's having me as a member means it's a club worth being in [the problem is the world], or that my involvement in a club necessarily improves it [the problem is me]."
So it's January 2004, I'm in my second semester as a sophomore in college. I've just gotten through a difficult first semester in which my isolation was starting to drive me nuts -- so I move on, get a roommate (my friend Ian, who was in this period like Nic Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, suffering pretentious innernet-music-speak and frightening diabetic episodes) surround myself with friends, start writing about music on a small blog a few friends read occasionally, start lurking on message boards. Emily and I are long distance and at the beginning of our relationship; I talk to her just about every day but we're both going through our own separate issues, figuring out how to console and compromise over the phone (which is a bad way to console or compromise). I'm taking a Marxist-bent film class in which the primary text is a Foucault reader; I'm doing some personal and documentary film work that seems to be an improvement from the adolescent stylistic exercises that I was disappointed with (but had a blast making) so far. I'm immersed in politics in the run up to the 2004 election and have an unorthodox teaching assistant job for a few intro politics classes, a fringe benefit of being on the Model United Nations team (whut).
By the spring of 2004, I've endeared and cajoled and otherwise forced my way into some campus writing gigs -- expanding on the school alternative magazine's entertainment section, I start Basshead Media, a sticks-and-twine website where my friends and I have more space to write about music, hence can get more promos out of my growing list of record label contacts. My first promo was Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days, which, as was the style at the time, I predicted would get an 8.4 on Pitchfork. (It got an 8.6.)
At some point a friend of mine posts to the I Love Music message board a rant I have about dance-punk, in reaction to a middling review on Pitchfork of the second !!! album (which my friends and I love). I'm totally mortified and respond (I think) -- luckily the thread's big enough that any involvement I have in it is quickly swallowed. I don't venture back there for a while. But it's enough for Dominique Leone to leave a comment (since eaten by blogspot) on the post, and we have a two- or three-post back and forth.
Summertime -- things are going well with Emily now that we can see each other more frequently. I've got an internship on a PBS documentary and am living in New York. I'm still getting promos and I'm going out to some shows and otherwise soaking in a summer in the city. Pitchfork is hiring, so I apply for the second time (the first was in January with a "sample review" in which I mindlessly snark at John Mayer -- opinion since revised). I link a couple of college reviews and Pfork contacts me saying that they "know" me from the mild spat with Leone back in the spring. I get a five-review trial, at which point they'll decide whether or not I'm fit to join the staff.
At this point in their history, Pitchfork was rapidly getting their shit together. When I joined them in August of 2004, they were in the process of getting some real advertising money and remodeling the website -- they didn't yet have a particularly regular way of paying anyone. Trial reviewers were unpaid until they'd written for six months, which was a practice they stopped soon after I left; the turnover rate in 2004 was insane and they were getting by on an odd patchwork of regular contributors and newbies like myself, also Marc Hogan and a few others I can't remember now. When I left, I think they were already planning for their first festival, another big business leap forward.
So I got in somewhat under the radar, through basically the same systems people had gotten gigs there since c. 2000 -- relatively informal ones. Ryan Schreiber liked my reviews, though I thought I was trying too hard, and I was reacting with acute paranoia to any and all hate mail. I fed trolls and shut down constructive criticism. School started back up and I made writing reviews a priority over my work; I stayed up too late and missed classes and started off the semester poorly even considering I'd consciously lightened my course load for junior year. I was having interminably long, simpering conversations with Emily on the phone in which I'd express my paranoia and second-guess my qualifications for the job, to which she'd eventually reply, exasperated and past the point of feeling listened to (she wasn't being listened to) "why don't you just quit then?" (this was impossible, for reasons I did not fully understand except that it felt like...admitting defeat?). I followed quasi-religiously the worst (and often dumbest) criticism of the site online -- of which there was a ton, several sites devoted exclusively to tearing apart daily reviews. I googled myself constantly looking for the next take-down. And through it all I kept writing reviews, some bad, some inconsequential, some actually pretty good (I tended to write better about albums no one was likely to care or read about).
Around the time I began reviewing, and upon returning to school, my friend Steve asked me whether or not I'd heard the new Arcade Fire album. The name didn't inspire confidence and knowing Steve's taste I figured it was some math-rock band I wouldn't like much. So I requested the promo from Merge and received it in a small cardboard sleeve, no artwork or liner notes, with a press sheet that compared the band to a bunch of animals but provided no particularly useful information. Exclaim magazine had done an extensive profile on the band that for some reason I didn't read, or didn't read carefully enough. Which is also to say, I was a guy who liked writing about music and didn't fact-check my shit -- a recurrent problem that I'm constantly re-confronting. This, incidentally, is how I got the band's "hometown" wrong (months later it was quietly edited to say "adopted hometown" at my repeated, embarrassed insistence) and made more than one leap of the imagination into ascribing intentions to the band out of a sense of needing to either buy in to or spin an appropriately sobering origin story. (I don't regret that impulse; mythologizing is fun and occasionally useful -- see The Social Network, also a 2004 origin story. I just regret what it looked like in practice.)
I'm surprised in hindsight that I even got the review, but I pretty much begged for it, and Pitchfork then (and presumably now) basically worked on a "dibs" system. There was steam building for the album on the editorial end -- as I recall at the start of September the editorial favorites were Arcade Fire, Annie, and the Go! Team. I was assigned the review very late, the Thursday or Friday before the Monday the review was slated to run (a day prior to the album's release). I can sort of remember writing it over the course of two late nights, biting my nails and chugging diet soda and playing the record over and over and over again. Ten times, twenty times. And yet I had no lyrics sheet and was totally winging the background. I didn't know where to get the stuff -- they had album art in Chicago but I had a piece of cardboard. I felt it was my duty to somehow find everything I needed from the music alone, including biographies. I got lyrics wrong, I got facts wrong.
I think I had an idea from reading the site for a year or so of what a Big Review That Is Published on Pitchfork is supposed to read like, what emotions it's supposed to trigger: a sense of importance, of wiping the slate blank and starting boldly again. A sense of weight, a sense of capital-M meaning to a particular audience, a particular "we," which I used liberally despite being forbidden to do so in my academic writing. A sense of innovation -- which I wasn't finding in the music, mind (damn that music was hard to describe -- most music is, but I wasn't finding the right RIYLs. I do maintain that I was one of the few people who correctly identified their mallet instrument as a glockenspiel (metal) and not a xylophone (wood) -- small consolation, I guess). A sense of breathlessness.
This thing was a 10! The editor said so, my friends were saying so, my gut was saying so. The review was saying so. Some time later someone wrote a blog post, I can't find it now (the site may have been deleted) that compared my prose to "religious oratory." That was appropriate -- there was a hint of church in the thing. I was quoted sarcastically, random internet people (RIP?) claimed the band hated the review, the score -- a 9.7 -- became its own punchline. I was told stories about audiences chanting the score before the band took the stage. A few months later, as my diabetes control spiraled to its worst in my life, my doctor informed me my A1C level was a 9.7 (bad enough for him to threaten that I wasn't exhibiting enough control on my insulin pump, which I gave up voluntarily three years later anyway), and I laughed and laughed. My explanation garnered a quizzical look ("who is the Arcade Fire?") and then we changed the subject.
Toward the end of the year, NPR called and arranged an interview about the band; they wanted a quote from me. So I took a cab to a dinky recording studio in Ithaca and spilled my guts to a complete stranger, half therapy and half interview. I told him about Canadian collectives and the science behind numerical values, but what's in a numerical value, life's not a numerical value, is it? He pulled the one even-handed thing I said; in the end I thankfully didn't sound like that much of a self-obsessed idiot. I was convinced that everyone was out to make fun of me (even though I was also convinced that no one knew or cared who I was).
I was given the review of the second Interpol album, and I managed my oddest metaphor in print to date -- at the end the band takes a dive from a great height and lands gently several stories below. Because that happens.
I went to a sold-out Arcade Fire show a month or so later at Cornell, set to do an interview with the band for the school paper (or something), paranoid and uncomfortable as my friends teased me about the review. After the show I went backstage to find Richard Perry in his underwear ("turn around for a sec") and we awkwardly exchanged hellos. I'd brought a digital video camera with me, my only recording equipment, and I'd forgotten somehow that the thing hadn't worked in about two years. But the band didn't have time for the interview anyway. I seem to recall briefly trying to help them find a place to sleep that night but they made other plans. I saw them at an after party at Cornell -- they came into the house stomping in unison, marching through the crowd to the back. I had a nervous conversation with Win Butler about topics I've forgotten.
Three months or so later at Christmas an old recording by the band surfaced, a collection of Christmas novelties they'd recorded as a joke. I was asked to "review" it, and I did. The band posted a response that basically noted that it was a joke (and that the band members were incorrectly identified), and we had a brief but not unpleasant email back and forth. And that was the last contact I ever really had with them; it was pretty much the last contact I had with any musicians, or regular music reviewing, ever -- just before the new year.
Recalling this story gives me a certain fondness for the smallness of it all, and noticing (again) what an obvious blip it was on whatever radar screen it appeared on. My part of it was mostly coincidental, and if I hadn't written what I'd written, I imagine some other review in its place would have accomplished the same thing (though it probably wouldn't have reached my level of religious oratory -- but other reviews were about as fawning, and as strange, in other venues). As I write this, 2004 is receding from the intense scrutiny of Taylor Time goggles and I can laugh about how absurd it was to go from having no writing experience whatsoever to being part of the hype cycle (from sermon to tabloid-blogging) that, I guess, culminated with a Grammy.
But I think it's more accurate to say that 2011 isn't exactly a culmination of what was happening in 2004 -- what happened that year was its own culmination, the emergence of a certain kind of institution and a certain kind of music as having power in a certain kind of space. In the next three or four years, the ground continued shifting remarkably quickly in industry, in distribution, in internet culture -- so that whatever the Arcade Fire represents in 2011 isn't exactly what they meant in 2004; the institutions and spaces mutated and don't really resemble what they did (to me, at least) then. At some point the band and the site uprooted from the zeitgeist that launched both of them, to some extent yoked together, from a smaller corner of the world to a bigger corner, and the story of the next zeitgeist -- one that has no easy personal entry point and no "corners," or all corners, depending on your point of view -- is the one that I'm more interested in talking about.
EDIT: I posted a few other random observations from the year here. A few months ago Robert Christgau interviewed me briefly for some context re: a piece he was writing about The Suburbs; that appeared here. As I told him at the time, I forget whose actual final decision it was to go with 9.7, but I supplied the compromise, i.e. it wasn't "rated for me" by the editors, nor did they prime me to review the album. In fact, I recently found on a presumed-dead hard drive the I.M. chat from 2004 in which I was assigned the review. I can pull one sentence to illustrate/indulge some decimal-point nerdery: "10's need to be reserved for retrospective analysis in my book. Even conservatively it could make a 9.2 or a 9.3. I would knock it up to 9.5...9.4 is the standard "essential of the year" rating. A notch above means something a bit loftier." So there you have it -- loft.
I wrote a sarcastic acrostic to Mike Barthel in response to the Grammy news: "No, I'm Not Even Pontificating On It. Not Totally Surprised. Engages Vanity -- Ever the Narcissist!" But actually, my reaction, in skimming the history of the Grammys, is just to note without further elaboration that the one-two punch of Taylor Swift in 2010 and the Arcade Fire in 2011 does seem to mean something to me in a way that the last 10 years worth of Grammy wins haven't, regardless of whether or not I liked them. Compare to the hoary and/or polite picks of the previous decade -- Alison Krauss joining forces with Robert Plant, Herbie Hancock honoring Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles and the Superfriends. Dixie Chicks, Outkast, and U2 honored too late for just-OK albums (U2 won for Joshua Tree anyway, so really it just signals that U2 is closer to Robert Plant than...y'know, Dixie Chicks or Outkast). And then there's boomery Steely Dan and Santana, and something like neo-boomer wins for the O Brother soundtrack and Norah Jones. What a boring list for an exciting decade! The last relevant win was Lauryn Hill all the way back in 1999 -- and I don't mean "relevant for my small little circle of internet cultural commentary," I mean relevant, the kind of thing that makes you, whoever you are, wanna say something about something, even if it's just "WHO IS [INSERT BAND]?"
You know my development through the early 00's -- spark of curiosity begets obsession, obsession begets deeper obsession, deeper obsession begets a few poses I hadn't tried out yet (I was posing and a poseur, but one wasn't necessarily synonymous with the other). For the most part I was having fun, not really making "my story" fit to any particular zeitgeist or Narrative of Now -- I was working out the Narrative of Then, c. 1950-2000.
2004 was the year that, in hindsight, everything sort of "happened" for me in a way that does have an impact on the current moment (mine, anyway). The most significant thing about it was the narrative that it established for me, one that would repeat itself, in some variation, several times over, year after year, and as we speak has followed me into a new career path (I'm disconcerted, if excited, to find myself at square one all over again). The narrative starts with promise and confidence, turns, usually through a combination of luck and initiative (but mostly luck) into an opportunity, gets bigger, goes slightly awry (real or imagined, sometimes imagined -- paranoid -- sometimes real -- disappointment), and I retreat, regroup, think of the next move.
To some extent this is a self-fulfilling prophecy; success itself is what leads me to suspect there's something awry -- maybe a variation on "I don't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member," but really more like "I don't want to assume that a club's having me as a member means it's a club worth being in [the problem is the world], or that my involvement in a club necessarily improves it [the problem is me]."
So it's January 2004, I'm in my second semester as a sophomore in college. I've just gotten through a difficult first semester in which my isolation was starting to drive me nuts -- so I move on, get a roommate (my friend Ian, who was in this period like Nic Cage in Bringing Out the Dead, suffering pretentious innernet-music-speak and frightening diabetic episodes) surround myself with friends, start writing about music on a small blog a few friends read occasionally, start lurking on message boards. Emily and I are long distance and at the beginning of our relationship; I talk to her just about every day but we're both going through our own separate issues, figuring out how to console and compromise over the phone (which is a bad way to console or compromise). I'm taking a Marxist-bent film class in which the primary text is a Foucault reader; I'm doing some personal and documentary film work that seems to be an improvement from the adolescent stylistic exercises that I was disappointed with (but had a blast making) so far. I'm immersed in politics in the run up to the 2004 election and have an unorthodox teaching assistant job for a few intro politics classes, a fringe benefit of being on the Model United Nations team (whut).
By the spring of 2004, I've endeared and cajoled and otherwise forced my way into some campus writing gigs -- expanding on the school alternative magazine's entertainment section, I start Basshead Media, a sticks-and-twine website where my friends and I have more space to write about music, hence can get more promos out of my growing list of record label contacts. My first promo was Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days, which, as was the style at the time, I predicted would get an 8.4 on Pitchfork. (It got an 8.6.)
At some point a friend of mine posts to the I Love Music message board a rant I have about dance-punk, in reaction to a middling review on Pitchfork of the second !!! album (which my friends and I love). I'm totally mortified and respond (I think) -- luckily the thread's big enough that any involvement I have in it is quickly swallowed. I don't venture back there for a while. But it's enough for Dominique Leone to leave a comment (since eaten by blogspot) on the post, and we have a two- or three-post back and forth.
Summertime -- things are going well with Emily now that we can see each other more frequently. I've got an internship on a PBS documentary and am living in New York. I'm still getting promos and I'm going out to some shows and otherwise soaking in a summer in the city. Pitchfork is hiring, so I apply for the second time (the first was in January with a "sample review" in which I mindlessly snark at John Mayer -- opinion since revised). I link a couple of college reviews and Pfork contacts me saying that they "know" me from the mild spat with Leone back in the spring. I get a five-review trial, at which point they'll decide whether or not I'm fit to join the staff.
At this point in their history, Pitchfork was rapidly getting their shit together. When I joined them in August of 2004, they were in the process of getting some real advertising money and remodeling the website -- they didn't yet have a particularly regular way of paying anyone. Trial reviewers were unpaid until they'd written for six months, which was a practice they stopped soon after I left; the turnover rate in 2004 was insane and they were getting by on an odd patchwork of regular contributors and newbies like myself, also Marc Hogan and a few others I can't remember now. When I left, I think they were already planning for their first festival, another big business leap forward.
So I got in somewhat under the radar, through basically the same systems people had gotten gigs there since c. 2000 -- relatively informal ones. Ryan Schreiber liked my reviews, though I thought I was trying too hard, and I was reacting with acute paranoia to any and all hate mail. I fed trolls and shut down constructive criticism. School started back up and I made writing reviews a priority over my work; I stayed up too late and missed classes and started off the semester poorly even considering I'd consciously lightened my course load for junior year. I was having interminably long, simpering conversations with Emily on the phone in which I'd express my paranoia and second-guess my qualifications for the job, to which she'd eventually reply, exasperated and past the point of feeling listened to (she wasn't being listened to) "why don't you just quit then?" (this was impossible, for reasons I did not fully understand except that it felt like...admitting defeat?). I followed quasi-religiously the worst (and often dumbest) criticism of the site online -- of which there was a ton, several sites devoted exclusively to tearing apart daily reviews. I googled myself constantly looking for the next take-down. And through it all I kept writing reviews, some bad, some inconsequential, some actually pretty good (I tended to write better about albums no one was likely to care or read about).
Around the time I began reviewing, and upon returning to school, my friend Steve asked me whether or not I'd heard the new Arcade Fire album. The name didn't inspire confidence and knowing Steve's taste I figured it was some math-rock band I wouldn't like much. So I requested the promo from Merge and received it in a small cardboard sleeve, no artwork or liner notes, with a press sheet that compared the band to a bunch of animals but provided no particularly useful information. Exclaim magazine had done an extensive profile on the band that for some reason I didn't read, or didn't read carefully enough. Which is also to say, I was a guy who liked writing about music and didn't fact-check my shit -- a recurrent problem that I'm constantly re-confronting. This, incidentally, is how I got the band's "hometown" wrong (months later it was quietly edited to say "adopted hometown" at my repeated, embarrassed insistence) and made more than one leap of the imagination into ascribing intentions to the band out of a sense of needing to either buy in to or spin an appropriately sobering origin story. (I don't regret that impulse; mythologizing is fun and occasionally useful -- see The Social Network, also a 2004 origin story. I just regret what it looked like in practice.)
I'm surprised in hindsight that I even got the review, but I pretty much begged for it, and Pitchfork then (and presumably now) basically worked on a "dibs" system. There was steam building for the album on the editorial end -- as I recall at the start of September the editorial favorites were Arcade Fire, Annie, and the Go! Team. I was assigned the review very late, the Thursday or Friday before the Monday the review was slated to run (a day prior to the album's release). I can sort of remember writing it over the course of two late nights, biting my nails and chugging diet soda and playing the record over and over and over again. Ten times, twenty times. And yet I had no lyrics sheet and was totally winging the background. I didn't know where to get the stuff -- they had album art in Chicago but I had a piece of cardboard. I felt it was my duty to somehow find everything I needed from the music alone, including biographies. I got lyrics wrong, I got facts wrong.
I think I had an idea from reading the site for a year or so of what a Big Review That Is Published on Pitchfork is supposed to read like, what emotions it's supposed to trigger: a sense of importance, of wiping the slate blank and starting boldly again. A sense of weight, a sense of capital-M meaning to a particular audience, a particular "we," which I used liberally despite being forbidden to do so in my academic writing. A sense of innovation -- which I wasn't finding in the music, mind (damn that music was hard to describe -- most music is, but I wasn't finding the right RIYLs. I do maintain that I was one of the few people who correctly identified their mallet instrument as a glockenspiel (metal) and not a xylophone (wood) -- small consolation, I guess). A sense of breathlessness.
This thing was a 10! The editor said so, my friends were saying so, my gut was saying so. The review was saying so. Some time later someone wrote a blog post, I can't find it now (the site may have been deleted) that compared my prose to "religious oratory." That was appropriate -- there was a hint of church in the thing. I was quoted sarcastically, random internet people (RIP?) claimed the band hated the review, the score -- a 9.7 -- became its own punchline. I was told stories about audiences chanting the score before the band took the stage. A few months later, as my diabetes control spiraled to its worst in my life, my doctor informed me my A1C level was a 9.7 (bad enough for him to threaten that I wasn't exhibiting enough control on my insulin pump, which I gave up voluntarily three years later anyway), and I laughed and laughed. My explanation garnered a quizzical look ("who is the Arcade Fire?") and then we changed the subject.
Toward the end of the year, NPR called and arranged an interview about the band; they wanted a quote from me. So I took a cab to a dinky recording studio in Ithaca and spilled my guts to a complete stranger, half therapy and half interview. I told him about Canadian collectives and the science behind numerical values, but what's in a numerical value, life's not a numerical value, is it? He pulled the one even-handed thing I said; in the end I thankfully didn't sound like that much of a self-obsessed idiot. I was convinced that everyone was out to make fun of me (even though I was also convinced that no one knew or cared who I was).
I was given the review of the second Interpol album, and I managed my oddest metaphor in print to date -- at the end the band takes a dive from a great height and lands gently several stories below. Because that happens.
I went to a sold-out Arcade Fire show a month or so later at Cornell, set to do an interview with the band for the school paper (or something), paranoid and uncomfortable as my friends teased me about the review. After the show I went backstage to find Richard Perry in his underwear ("turn around for a sec") and we awkwardly exchanged hellos. I'd brought a digital video camera with me, my only recording equipment, and I'd forgotten somehow that the thing hadn't worked in about two years. But the band didn't have time for the interview anyway. I seem to recall briefly trying to help them find a place to sleep that night but they made other plans. I saw them at an after party at Cornell -- they came into the house stomping in unison, marching through the crowd to the back. I had a nervous conversation with Win Butler about topics I've forgotten.
Three months or so later at Christmas an old recording by the band surfaced, a collection of Christmas novelties they'd recorded as a joke. I was asked to "review" it, and I did. The band posted a response that basically noted that it was a joke (and that the band members were incorrectly identified), and we had a brief but not unpleasant email back and forth. And that was the last contact I ever really had with them; it was pretty much the last contact I had with any musicians, or regular music reviewing, ever -- just before the new year.
Recalling this story gives me a certain fondness for the smallness of it all, and noticing (again) what an obvious blip it was on whatever radar screen it appeared on. My part of it was mostly coincidental, and if I hadn't written what I'd written, I imagine some other review in its place would have accomplished the same thing (though it probably wouldn't have reached my level of religious oratory -- but other reviews were about as fawning, and as strange, in other venues). As I write this, 2004 is receding from the intense scrutiny of Taylor Time goggles and I can laugh about how absurd it was to go from having no writing experience whatsoever to being part of the hype cycle (from sermon to tabloid-blogging) that, I guess, culminated with a Grammy.
But I think it's more accurate to say that 2011 isn't exactly a culmination of what was happening in 2004 -- what happened that year was its own culmination, the emergence of a certain kind of institution and a certain kind of music as having power in a certain kind of space. In the next three or four years, the ground continued shifting remarkably quickly in industry, in distribution, in internet culture -- so that whatever the Arcade Fire represents in 2011 isn't exactly what they meant in 2004; the institutions and spaces mutated and don't really resemble what they did (to me, at least) then. At some point the band and the site uprooted from the zeitgeist that launched both of them, to some extent yoked together, from a smaller corner of the world to a bigger corner, and the story of the next zeitgeist -- one that has no easy personal entry point and no "corners," or all corners, depending on your point of view -- is the one that I'm more interested in talking about.
EDIT: I posted a few other random observations from the year here. A few months ago Robert Christgau interviewed me briefly for some context re: a piece he was writing about The Suburbs; that appeared here. As I told him at the time, I forget whose actual final decision it was to go with 9.7, but I supplied the compromise, i.e. it wasn't "rated for me" by the editors, nor did they prime me to review the album. In fact, I recently found on a presumed-dead hard drive the I.M. chat from 2004 in which I was assigned the review. I can pull one sentence to illustrate/indulge some decimal-point nerdery: "10's need to be reserved for retrospective analysis in my book. Even conservatively it could make a 9.2 or a 9.3. I would knock it up to 9.5...9.4 is the standard "essential of the year" rating. A notch above means something a bit loftier." So there you have it -- loft.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
I Think UR a Contrarian: The 21 Most Controversial Songs of 2010
I Think UR a Contrarian by cureforbedbugs
DOWNLOAD
I've been plastering this thing all over the interweb, so I figured I should actually explain what it is to you non-Jukebox people (all two of you).
Basically, I've become obsessed with tracking the most controversial tracks -- those with the most polarized scores -- on The Singles Jukebox. It's a simple average deviation formula that tweaks for number of contributors (twenty people violently disagreeing is obviously more controversial than six people violently disagreeing).
So I thought, what would do justice to these tracks? Just sticking them on a CD compilation is no good -- yer guaranteed to hate half! So instead I made sure you could really hate everything, by mixing it all together in a big controversy stew. I'm not much of a DJ -- I do this stuff intuitively using a manual BPM counter and a math formula I teach to students to get 'em jazzed about cross-multiply-and-divide (that's basically all beat-matching is), and then chop it together on Final Cut, the only editing software I really know how to use.
Accordingly, this is a pretty cerebral mix, though I don't think it's particularly unlistenable. But definitely fits the genre category "Music to Blog By."
Here is the Controversy List in its entirety. In the future I'll update these in a Google spreadsheet.
Why does this list go to 21, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. There was not a single country song in the Top Twenty! That is a travesty. Also, I got to the last part of the mix ("Toot It and Boot It") and had nothing that fit. That's when Jesus took the wheel and, via Jonathan Bogart's 2010 mix, tossed Carrie Underwood into my lap. Er, figuratively speaking. The result is one of my favorites on here, "Toot It and Undo It," an answer track to YG -- "You stole my happy! You made me cry! Took the lonely, and took me for a ride!" ("And you love the way I ride it!").
Also on this mix: The Ke$ha 0pera, the only usable five seconds of Everything Everything's "MY KZ, UR BF" (when the remixes of your song are successful mostly to the extent that they completely scrape away every existing element of the original, you should rethink your band strategy).
As soon as I uploaded this thing I noticed all kinds of little errors, but true to the nature of this project, I will not actually fix them.
And now! COMMENTARY! Please note that a lot of the original Jukebox entries have great comment threads. In fact, the only piece from the Jukebox to be published elsewhere is a comment by Erika Villani on "Empire State of Mind"!
1. Cannibalizing of Pigeons (Ke$ha, The Knife, and M.I.A.)
Ke$ha: The 0p Opera will one day be truly glorious. I have the sense that Ke$ha has no long-term future whatsoever in the music industry (and I really like Ke$ha) which means that the time for revisionist high-art reconsideration is nigh. I also stuck M.I.A. on here because fuuuuuuuck "Born Free" is hard to mix with anything else. I'm still not sure whether I like the song (my blurb was a cop out) but it's one of the few 2010 albums I've kept in my iTunes to digest.
Ke$ha (#1):
"I’m puzzled, though not the least bit entertained." (Jer Fairall)
"I’m amazed." (Frank Kogan)
The Knife (#5):
"The part of me that thinks of the Jukebox as a proving ground for pop suggests that this doesn’t deserve a good mark for violating those tenets, no matter how good it is, but you know what? Screw it." (Ian Mathers)
"This evokes grown men and women wearing contorted masks and squeezing strange noises out of their throats, to the accompaniment of exotic gewgaws. Not terrible." (Alfred Soto)
M.I.A. (#6):
"But provocation is her gift, and that’s what she spends most of the song doing: I just wonder if 'All those imitators, stick it' is aimed at Santigold." (Michelangelo Matos)
"Provocateur? Commentator? Even remotely coherent? No, jumped-up art student throwing signifiers together without any skill, who has ideas above her station and songs beneath listenability. Telling imitators to stick it is pretty big for someone who hasn’t had an original musical idea in her life, frankly." (Edward Oculicz)
2. Go Do Yourself (Cee-Lo Green, Jonsi)
There's something perversely satisfying about stretching the Cee-Lo vocal out like taffy -- and using a tinny DIY acapella (thanks, anonymous internet person!). The pop-cultural baggage of "Fuck You" neither excites nor enrages me, but there's something about the song's solidness that bothers me a little -- its meticulousness suggests a big ol' stick up its butt (hmmm, does Cee-Lo ever turn around in the video? He certainly looks uncomfortable in his pimp suit). Meanwhile Jonsi is a very different sort of meticulous -- the kind that you have to peck apart and stitch together in little snippets. He's like what Owl City would sound like if it were actually fronted by owls (i.e., much better).
Cee-Lo Green (#13):
"How much fun is this song?" (Rebecca Toennessen)
"I think the adjective you really want to use is ‘virulent’.” (Al Shipley, quoting David Raposa discussing Neon Trees)
Jonsi (#16):
"Olivier Messiaen’s music was always marred by his assumption that an audience could find God passively, just by sitting back and opening itself up to various sounds. Like Messiaen, Jónsi uses elements of birdsong (echoed in the video treatment) and unconventional rhythms to blur the distinction between the mundane and the spiritual. Yet 'Go Do' strikes me as anti-Messiaen in the most important respects." (Martin Kavka)
"Kind of crazy how singers like this so often tend to make my jaw and fists clench as soon as they begin. Totally involuntary reflex, too, I think; I promise to get it checked sometime. Anyway, here it’s a shame, since those electronic noises at the start were rather nifty for five seconds." (Chuck Eddy)
3. Your Motherfucking Lovebot (Nicki Minaj, Robyn)
Two ladies about whom I had stronger feelings yesteryear. I guess I can go ahead and partake in some convenient revisionism about how much enthusiasm I really had for Robyn's first ("indie") album -- looking at year-ends, my favorite song was good for 8th best of 2005 and the album never placed on one of my lists. But I never took to anything off of Body Talk; especially not "Fembot," which I actively loathed in real time (here I semi-lazily swiped the most recognizable bit, canned the embarrassing rapping, and called it a hook). As for Nicki, I get why someone might love or hate Pink Friday depending on what you like in her -- I like her in both her R&B and hip-hop incarnation (it's not like there's a huge glut of great female R&B vocalists on the charts these days, and Nicki is doing things backwards, using hip-hop to break into R&B rather than vice versa, which I kinda dig on principle) I just don't like the experience of turning that switch back and forth. Missy Elliott's Under Construction does a similar trick, but it's much more "business up front party in the back" (yes, I just compared Missy Elliott to a mullet; and no, I'm not sure if actually that phrase should be reversed -- "Work It" is certainly fun, but it's also not fooling around about tomfoolery; it's an unstoppable single [maybe "block party" in the back is the phrase?]). I cheated here and swapped Nicki's "Monster" verse in for the weak if serviceable "Your Love" rap.
Nicki Minaj (#2):
"You get into a stage in relationships where the other person can do no wrong, and you love everything they do. I suspect I’m in that with Nicki Minaj." (Martin Skidmore)
"As little use as I have for Nicki’s schtick, I do on some level respect her for sticking to her guns with relentlessly schticky stuff like 'Massive Attack' and many of her hit collaborations. This song proves she’s as willing as anyone to sand down whatever rough edges she does have for the most insipid possible radio jam, though." (Al Shipley)
Robyn - Fembot (#14):
"It’s a cliché of a meme that was dull to begin with atop a beat that sets new lows in weediness." (Alex Macpherson)
"Man, the future sounds amazing." (Doug Robertson)
4. Infinity Guitar Paving Company (Sleigh Bells, Joanna Newsom)
Two albums I never really "made it through" for opposite reasons -- the Sleigh Bells album is over before I've figured out how I feel about it, all eight or nine times I listened to it. Joanna I can't get past c. track three. Both have a lead singer problem -- I have a nagging feeling that I'm listening to their music in "theory," which is how I imagine some people think I probably listen to the music they can't stand. But no, to really enjoy something thoughtfully-not-viscerally I need to be closer to its thoughts, and I imagine that Joanna Newsom and Alexis Krauss think more similarly to me than Ke$ha. But I'd still rather be listening to the latter. I separate out what the two of them get really, really right -- STOMP STOMP CLAP (the consciously blown-out aesthetic feels a little wax museum-ish to me; I appreciate this song's more transparent approach to bleacher-stomping) and a pleasant melody. So no guitars for Sleigh Bells (save the trademark rhythmic doodly-doo at the end of the phrase) and no words for Joanna -- they have infinity of these things but they're not what I was looking for.
Sleigh Bells (#8):
"We’re at a time when children’s culture, and girl culture specifically, is hyper-marketed. Hannah Montana’s its own institution, flanked by the Bratz and Cliques and Gossip Girls and whatever else finances people’s solid gold Ferraris. But there’s also an incredible amount of nostalgia for what preceded it, for the stuff and milieu girls grew up with and loved. Sleigh Bells tap right into that vein; they’re up there with Tuscadero and Shampoo and the whole poppified post-riot-grrl lot. I’m shouting right along with them." (Katherine St. Asaph)
"Sleigh Bells use pointless abrasion to cover up the fact that no actual musical event will occur during the course of your listening experience." (Mallory O'Donnell)
Joanna Newsom (#4):
"Every layer of this has contours to delve into – Joanna twists and winds her way around the instruments, around your ears and your brain and your heart. At seven minutes in length, I’ve probably spent a couple of hours of my life in 2010 listening to this, and I pick up on more nuances every single time." (Alex Ostroff)
"The lyrics are new age twaddle, her voice is the helium bunny gone weird, and the production is filled to the gills with sheer pretension. Can she go away soon?" (Anthony Easton)
5. King of Drunk Girls (LCD Soundsystem, The Tallest Man on Earth)
The music in "Drunk Girls" has grown on me, though I still think the lyrics are reaching for more off-the-wall wackiness than they get and that it gets old after a minute. "King of Spain," on the other hand, gets old in about twenty seconds. So the obvious choice here was to gut the LCD song and childishly mock The Tallest Man on Earth w/ chipmunkery. I think that "I never knew I was a lover / And I wear my boots of Spanish leather" might be the beginning of an OK Velvet Underground homage.
LCD Soundsystem (#15):
"James Murphy clearly thinks that bellowing the title in the manner of a football fan vomiting over our shoes isn’t enough for us to get it, so the music mimics the clumsy, graceless motion of a beer-sodden tramp lurching along the pavement." (Alex Macpherson)
"Admittedly, this is somewhat awkward and kind of obnoxious. But so is being incredibly drunk. And much like being incredibly drunk, this song is also a great deal of fun, and compels you to dance in an uncoordinated and unself-conscious manner, regardless of who might see you." (Alex Ostroff)
The Tallest Man on Earth (#3):
"Kristian Matsson’s Dylanisms are not about affecting a nasal rasp or perfecting a troubadour posture, but rather — like the year’s wisest and most resonant pop homages, from “Fuck You” to “Tightrope” — about taking what you’ve learned from history to tell your own stories with that much more evocative force." (Jer Fairall)
"I thought only that douche from Counting Crows wanted to be Bob Dylan." (Tal Rosenberg)
6. Statistics (Peer-Reviewed) (Lyfe Jennings)
Am I alone in thinking that computer-speak voices are really funny? (Crickets.) Uh, OK. Anyway, I had a lot of fun taking apart "Statistics" for its accuracy this year. To recap: if 80% of men are undateable, as Lyfe suggests, and 10% of the remaining 20% are gay, then that means that a remaining 2% are undateable, hence 18% are still OK. And that doesn't even account for overlapping qualities -- are we really to believe that a separate 25% of men who can't be faithful have zero overlap with the 25% of men that are unstable? Isn't infidelity, in Lyfe's view here, a kind of instability? Anyway. I decided that someone should follow up Anthony Easton's question of whether or not these statistics were peer-reviewed. I give Lyfe a C- in Applied Statistics, since you have to give some credit for the novelty of his experiment.
Lyfe Jennings (#20):
"I’m not really sure what to make of this lecture on the fickleness of males and the necessity of not taking your clothes off unless (and I suspect this is key) the man you’re taking them off in front of is Lyfe Jennings."(Hazel Robinson)
"Shit, can I marry him?" (Michelangelo Matos)
7. Sex Is a Standard Deviation (Lyfe Jennings, Ciara f. Ludacris)
Now we reach the point of the mix where I accidentally find two songs that work pretty well together and, accordingly, let Ciara ride the beat a while. I'm a firm "6" on the Ciara track with its original backing but the smoother beat here makes me like it a lot more, and I now find myself relistening to the original a lot. I like that Ludacris is still technically featured in his screwed intro but doesn't get a chance to hashtag it up.
Ciara f. Ludacris (#10):
"Ciara commandeers a beat that creeps and stomps in a manner so tightly coiled that it feels one second away from busting, while singing about doing exactly that." (Jordan Sargeant)
"Her personality is as blank and paper-thin as her voice, and the chest-thumping bravado strains credulity worse than that attempt at a melismatic vamp at the end." (Al Shipley)
8. Fuck, "Flash Delirium" Is, Like, the Coolest Song I've Ever Heard in My Whole Life (Die Antwoord, MGMT)
Never got around to listening to $0$ -- it didn't strike me as particularly interesting or particularly WTF at the time (it seemed too obviously an "avant" semi-parody) and I didn't care to get into the speculation game. That said, "Enter the Ninja" is certainly memorable, and not bad as a song (the trick is to realize how close to credible the female vocals in it are -- here I've slowed/pitched it down slightly and it's not too far from icy indie bliss-out). MGMT on the other hand I just couldn't get a handle on -- too disjointed, too incompetent, too much like a third-rate Super Furry Animals trying to soundtrack an iPod commercial (on "Flash Delirium" anyway). And yet the sample from "Kids" helped me kinda sorta like a Chiddy Bang song! I took what I thought was the dumbest part of "Flash Delirium" (also the part I liked the best, go fig -- Kat Stevens refers to it as the "shambolic flute break") and paired it with Ninja expounding on its coolness. MGMT are nothing if not all up in the interweb.
Die Antwoord (#17):
"You’d think by now I would have stopped finding joy in the moment when everydork W.T. Jones stops the song to bask and preen with his now notorious pronouncement 'this is like… the coolest song I ever heard in my whole life,' but the truth is that I still pretty much agree with him." (John Seroff)
"Perhaps the worst record that will ever be made by anyone, ever." (Edward Oculicz)
MGMT (#11):
"What a dreadful mess. It veers between a mixed-bag of 60’s garage sounds (less Phil Spector, more Primal Scream aping the Stones) and a soggy, meandering attempt at psychedelia, like if the The Byrds had grown up in a commune made out of Weetabix on the outskirts of Luton. That shambolic flute break is one of the most half-arsed things I’ve heard this year." (Kat Stevens)
"It’s a great song, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go; and, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go, it went. Man, if MGMT keeps coming up with stuff like this I’m going to have to start paying attention to them." (Matt Cibula)
9. MY FN, YR STYL (Liz Phair, Everything Everything)
Two tough ones to mix -- Everything Everything's track hops over the place so fast that I had to edit in a single bass note to make the outro loop work, and even then it starts a little wonky. So I copped out with ethereal lyrics, which coincidentally matched the key and rhythm (more or less) of Liz Phair's prettier section of the "Bollywood" beat. I liked Liz Phair's album as a confusing mass of stuff but excerpting it doesn't really do that experience justice. So I ripped some context from NPR and let the beat rock.
Liz Phair (#8):
"What this reminds me of most is the kind of unfiltered, anything-at-the-wall approach that Christian contemporary singers, especially those who considered themselves entertainers, were taking in the late 80s and early 90s, when record labels were generous but no one had any clue what might catch on, and cool wasn’t an option in the first place." (Jonathan Bogart)
"It’s such a car crash of a record that there was clearly no expectation of it being a single, it’s like Liz wanted to make a Laurie Anderson B-Side but only had three samples and one terrible actor available." (Pete Baran)
MY KZ, UR BF (#9):
"It’s a song I quite like but haven’t managed to figure out why!" (William B. Swygart)
"You know when a song has so many things wrong with it but you LOVE it anyway? This is the opposite of that. Sorry dudes." (Kat Stevens)
10. Toot It and Undo It (YG, Carrie Underwood)
Two unexpected faves on this one -- already mentioned why I think it works conceptually above. "Toot It and Boot It" has been begging for someone to excerpt the "whoa" section (which they stupidly only let play through once before going to the next verse) and put it in a better song. This isn't that song, but it does give you a sense of what the song might have been if they'd figured out that the heart of the song is the group singing, not the chorus. Meanwhile I fell in love with "Undo It" after not paying much attention to it. I sort of like pitching Carrie down, though I think to make the keys match I fucked with it a bit too much. But I didn't want to touch the YG part.
YG (#12):
"Two things make this: the dusty turntable snippet you don’t really otherwise hear on the radio in all-electro-everything 2010, and the everyone-join-in 'whoa-oh-oh-oh' chants that, even though put to better context here, might as well come from a damned Arrested Development record. Shame about the rapping, which is at best unmemorable, charmless at worst." (Rodney J. Greene)
"As laid-back a hip hop number as I’ve heard in a while, drawled lyrics over a lazily fingersnapping backing, sounding totally stoned and fuzzily happy. Thing is, it’s about fucking a woman then throwing her out, awareness of which rather kills the relaxed, contented feeling the sound creates, for me." (Martin Skidmore)
Carrie Underwood (#21):
"This doesn’t hang together at all: no natural emotional development; feels like successive effects just thrown in our face. It does seem at one with the desperate dance-pop mess of 2010, however, and I’m hoping that crossover radio play will make this song make more sense." (Frank Kogan)
"The chorus is basically Kelly Clarkson’s 'Miss Independent' dressed in country flannel and fast-forwarded to the end of the relationship. I happen to love 'Miss Independent.'" (Katherine St. Asaph)
11. When a Woman Gives Up the Gun (Vampire Weekend, R. Kelly)
Whew, the end o' the mix -- this was an easy one; take the propulsive guitar backing and glockenspiel from Vampire Weekend and let R. Kelly do the singing. These are both albums I'm pretty lukewarm about, erring on the side of warm not luke -- a fitting spectacle from two meh-plus sources. I get a little too cheeky on this one, wobbling Kells's syllables even longer than he does (though not as much longer as you might think!), but fuck it, gotta end on a bang. I don't think I can sit through the entirety of "When a Woman Loves" if it's not a live version (ugh, canned orchestra must die) but the breakdown and ending are worth preserving.
Vampire Weekend (#18):
"The evocation of a life unlived and the pervasive sense of approaching obsolescence are masterful and affecting, like a less explicit take on LCD Soundsystem’s 'All My Friends.'" (Alex Ostroff)
"Limp US college indie, with a simpleminded tune, fussy instrumentation and terrible singing. I am entirely mystified at their success -- I can’t hear anything in them that I can imagine anyone liking at all. This seemed to drag on for hours." (Martin Skidmore)
R. Kelly (#19):
"I’m not sure anyone thought that what pop needed in 2010 was a response song to Percy Sledge’s 1966 'When A Man Loves A Woman,' sung in a variety of early-soul voices with cheap bombast and the merest hint of Autotune, but that’s R. Kelly. Identifying needs no one has and then filling them with such confidence and brio that it’s impossible not to shout thank you! right back at him." (Jonathan Bogart)
"Kells, you have money. Hire real musicians." (Katie Lewis)
That's all, folks. See you next year -- same controversial time, same controversial station!
DOWNLOAD
I've been plastering this thing all over the interweb, so I figured I should actually explain what it is to you non-Jukebox people (all two of you).
Basically, I've become obsessed with tracking the most controversial tracks -- those with the most polarized scores -- on The Singles Jukebox. It's a simple average deviation formula that tweaks for number of contributors (twenty people violently disagreeing is obviously more controversial than six people violently disagreeing).
So I thought, what would do justice to these tracks? Just sticking them on a CD compilation is no good -- yer guaranteed to hate half! So instead I made sure you could really hate everything, by mixing it all together in a big controversy stew. I'm not much of a DJ -- I do this stuff intuitively using a manual BPM counter and a math formula I teach to students to get 'em jazzed about cross-multiply-and-divide (that's basically all beat-matching is), and then chop it together on Final Cut, the only editing software I really know how to use.
Accordingly, this is a pretty cerebral mix, though I don't think it's particularly unlistenable. But definitely fits the genre category "Music to Blog By."
Here is the Controversy List in its entirety. In the future I'll update these in a Google spreadsheet.
Why does this list go to 21, you might ask? Well, I'll tell you. There was not a single country song in the Top Twenty! That is a travesty. Also, I got to the last part of the mix ("Toot It and Boot It") and had nothing that fit. That's when Jesus took the wheel and, via Jonathan Bogart's 2010 mix, tossed Carrie Underwood into my lap. Er, figuratively speaking. The result is one of my favorites on here, "Toot It and Undo It," an answer track to YG -- "You stole my happy! You made me cry! Took the lonely, and took me for a ride!" ("And you love the way I ride it!").
Also on this mix: The Ke$ha 0pera, the only usable five seconds of Everything Everything's "MY KZ, UR BF" (when the remixes of your song are successful mostly to the extent that they completely scrape away every existing element of the original, you should rethink your band strategy).
As soon as I uploaded this thing I noticed all kinds of little errors, but true to the nature of this project, I will not actually fix them.
And now! COMMENTARY! Please note that a lot of the original Jukebox entries have great comment threads. In fact, the only piece from the Jukebox to be published elsewhere is a comment by Erika Villani on "Empire State of Mind"!
1. Cannibalizing of Pigeons (Ke$ha, The Knife, and M.I.A.)
Ke$ha: The 0p Opera will one day be truly glorious. I have the sense that Ke$ha has no long-term future whatsoever in the music industry (and I really like Ke$ha) which means that the time for revisionist high-art reconsideration is nigh. I also stuck M.I.A. on here because fuuuuuuuck "Born Free" is hard to mix with anything else. I'm still not sure whether I like the song (my blurb was a cop out) but it's one of the few 2010 albums I've kept in my iTunes to digest.
Ke$ha (#1):
"I’m puzzled, though not the least bit entertained." (Jer Fairall)
"I’m amazed." (Frank Kogan)
The Knife (#5):
"The part of me that thinks of the Jukebox as a proving ground for pop suggests that this doesn’t deserve a good mark for violating those tenets, no matter how good it is, but you know what? Screw it." (Ian Mathers)
"This evokes grown men and women wearing contorted masks and squeezing strange noises out of their throats, to the accompaniment of exotic gewgaws. Not terrible." (Alfred Soto)
M.I.A. (#6):
"But provocation is her gift, and that’s what she spends most of the song doing: I just wonder if 'All those imitators, stick it' is aimed at Santigold." (Michelangelo Matos)
"Provocateur? Commentator? Even remotely coherent? No, jumped-up art student throwing signifiers together without any skill, who has ideas above her station and songs beneath listenability. Telling imitators to stick it is pretty big for someone who hasn’t had an original musical idea in her life, frankly." (Edward Oculicz)
2. Go Do Yourself (Cee-Lo Green, Jonsi)
There's something perversely satisfying about stretching the Cee-Lo vocal out like taffy -- and using a tinny DIY acapella (thanks, anonymous internet person!). The pop-cultural baggage of "Fuck You" neither excites nor enrages me, but there's something about the song's solidness that bothers me a little -- its meticulousness suggests a big ol' stick up its butt (hmmm, does Cee-Lo ever turn around in the video? He certainly looks uncomfortable in his pimp suit). Meanwhile Jonsi is a very different sort of meticulous -- the kind that you have to peck apart and stitch together in little snippets. He's like what Owl City would sound like if it were actually fronted by owls (i.e., much better).
Cee-Lo Green (#13):
"How much fun is this song?" (Rebecca Toennessen)
"I think the adjective you really want to use is ‘virulent’.” (Al Shipley, quoting David Raposa discussing Neon Trees)
Jonsi (#16):
"Olivier Messiaen’s music was always marred by his assumption that an audience could find God passively, just by sitting back and opening itself up to various sounds. Like Messiaen, Jónsi uses elements of birdsong (echoed in the video treatment) and unconventional rhythms to blur the distinction between the mundane and the spiritual. Yet 'Go Do' strikes me as anti-Messiaen in the most important respects." (Martin Kavka)
"Kind of crazy how singers like this so often tend to make my jaw and fists clench as soon as they begin. Totally involuntary reflex, too, I think; I promise to get it checked sometime. Anyway, here it’s a shame, since those electronic noises at the start were rather nifty for five seconds." (Chuck Eddy)
3. Your Motherfucking Lovebot (Nicki Minaj, Robyn)
Two ladies about whom I had stronger feelings yesteryear. I guess I can go ahead and partake in some convenient revisionism about how much enthusiasm I really had for Robyn's first ("indie") album -- looking at year-ends, my favorite song was good for 8th best of 2005 and the album never placed on one of my lists. But I never took to anything off of Body Talk; especially not "Fembot," which I actively loathed in real time (here I semi-lazily swiped the most recognizable bit, canned the embarrassing rapping, and called it a hook). As for Nicki, I get why someone might love or hate Pink Friday depending on what you like in her -- I like her in both her R&B and hip-hop incarnation (it's not like there's a huge glut of great female R&B vocalists on the charts these days, and Nicki is doing things backwards, using hip-hop to break into R&B rather than vice versa, which I kinda dig on principle) I just don't like the experience of turning that switch back and forth. Missy Elliott's Under Construction does a similar trick, but it's much more "business up front party in the back" (yes, I just compared Missy Elliott to a mullet; and no, I'm not sure if actually that phrase should be reversed -- "Work It" is certainly fun, but it's also not fooling around about tomfoolery; it's an unstoppable single [maybe "block party" in the back is the phrase?]). I cheated here and swapped Nicki's "Monster" verse in for the weak if serviceable "Your Love" rap.
Nicki Minaj (#2):
"You get into a stage in relationships where the other person can do no wrong, and you love everything they do. I suspect I’m in that with Nicki Minaj." (Martin Skidmore)
"As little use as I have for Nicki’s schtick, I do on some level respect her for sticking to her guns with relentlessly schticky stuff like 'Massive Attack' and many of her hit collaborations. This song proves she’s as willing as anyone to sand down whatever rough edges she does have for the most insipid possible radio jam, though." (Al Shipley)
Robyn - Fembot (#14):
"It’s a cliché of a meme that was dull to begin with atop a beat that sets new lows in weediness." (Alex Macpherson)
"Man, the future sounds amazing." (Doug Robertson)
4. Infinity Guitar Paving Company (Sleigh Bells, Joanna Newsom)
Two albums I never really "made it through" for opposite reasons -- the Sleigh Bells album is over before I've figured out how I feel about it, all eight or nine times I listened to it. Joanna I can't get past c. track three. Both have a lead singer problem -- I have a nagging feeling that I'm listening to their music in "theory," which is how I imagine some people think I probably listen to the music they can't stand. But no, to really enjoy something thoughtfully-not-viscerally I need to be closer to its thoughts, and I imagine that Joanna Newsom and Alexis Krauss think more similarly to me than Ke$ha. But I'd still rather be listening to the latter. I separate out what the two of them get really, really right -- STOMP STOMP CLAP (the consciously blown-out aesthetic feels a little wax museum-ish to me; I appreciate this song's more transparent approach to bleacher-stomping) and a pleasant melody. So no guitars for Sleigh Bells (save the trademark rhythmic doodly-doo at the end of the phrase) and no words for Joanna -- they have infinity of these things but they're not what I was looking for.
Sleigh Bells (#8):
"We’re at a time when children’s culture, and girl culture specifically, is hyper-marketed. Hannah Montana’s its own institution, flanked by the Bratz and Cliques and Gossip Girls and whatever else finances people’s solid gold Ferraris. But there’s also an incredible amount of nostalgia for what preceded it, for the stuff and milieu girls grew up with and loved. Sleigh Bells tap right into that vein; they’re up there with Tuscadero and Shampoo and the whole poppified post-riot-grrl lot. I’m shouting right along with them." (Katherine St. Asaph)
"Sleigh Bells use pointless abrasion to cover up the fact that no actual musical event will occur during the course of your listening experience." (Mallory O'Donnell)
Joanna Newsom (#4):
"Every layer of this has contours to delve into – Joanna twists and winds her way around the instruments, around your ears and your brain and your heart. At seven minutes in length, I’ve probably spent a couple of hours of my life in 2010 listening to this, and I pick up on more nuances every single time." (Alex Ostroff)
"The lyrics are new age twaddle, her voice is the helium bunny gone weird, and the production is filled to the gills with sheer pretension. Can she go away soon?" (Anthony Easton)
5. King of Drunk Girls (LCD Soundsystem, The Tallest Man on Earth)
The music in "Drunk Girls" has grown on me, though I still think the lyrics are reaching for more off-the-wall wackiness than they get and that it gets old after a minute. "King of Spain," on the other hand, gets old in about twenty seconds. So the obvious choice here was to gut the LCD song and childishly mock The Tallest Man on Earth w/ chipmunkery. I think that "I never knew I was a lover / And I wear my boots of Spanish leather" might be the beginning of an OK Velvet Underground homage.
LCD Soundsystem (#15):
"James Murphy clearly thinks that bellowing the title in the manner of a football fan vomiting over our shoes isn’t enough for us to get it, so the music mimics the clumsy, graceless motion of a beer-sodden tramp lurching along the pavement." (Alex Macpherson)
"Admittedly, this is somewhat awkward and kind of obnoxious. But so is being incredibly drunk. And much like being incredibly drunk, this song is also a great deal of fun, and compels you to dance in an uncoordinated and unself-conscious manner, regardless of who might see you." (Alex Ostroff)
The Tallest Man on Earth (#3):
"Kristian Matsson’s Dylanisms are not about affecting a nasal rasp or perfecting a troubadour posture, but rather — like the year’s wisest and most resonant pop homages, from “Fuck You” to “Tightrope” — about taking what you’ve learned from history to tell your own stories with that much more evocative force." (Jer Fairall)
"I thought only that douche from Counting Crows wanted to be Bob Dylan." (Tal Rosenberg)
6. Statistics (Peer-Reviewed) (Lyfe Jennings)
Am I alone in thinking that computer-speak voices are really funny? (Crickets.) Uh, OK. Anyway, I had a lot of fun taking apart "Statistics" for its accuracy this year. To recap: if 80% of men are undateable, as Lyfe suggests, and 10% of the remaining 20% are gay, then that means that a remaining 2% are undateable, hence 18% are still OK. And that doesn't even account for overlapping qualities -- are we really to believe that a separate 25% of men who can't be faithful have zero overlap with the 25% of men that are unstable? Isn't infidelity, in Lyfe's view here, a kind of instability? Anyway. I decided that someone should follow up Anthony Easton's question of whether or not these statistics were peer-reviewed. I give Lyfe a C- in Applied Statistics, since you have to give some credit for the novelty of his experiment.
Lyfe Jennings (#20):
"I’m not really sure what to make of this lecture on the fickleness of males and the necessity of not taking your clothes off unless (and I suspect this is key) the man you’re taking them off in front of is Lyfe Jennings."(Hazel Robinson)
"Shit, can I marry him?" (Michelangelo Matos)
7. Sex Is a Standard Deviation (Lyfe Jennings, Ciara f. Ludacris)
Now we reach the point of the mix where I accidentally find two songs that work pretty well together and, accordingly, let Ciara ride the beat a while. I'm a firm "6" on the Ciara track with its original backing but the smoother beat here makes me like it a lot more, and I now find myself relistening to the original a lot. I like that Ludacris is still technically featured in his screwed intro but doesn't get a chance to hashtag it up.
Ciara f. Ludacris (#10):
"Ciara commandeers a beat that creeps and stomps in a manner so tightly coiled that it feels one second away from busting, while singing about doing exactly that." (Jordan Sargeant)
"Her personality is as blank and paper-thin as her voice, and the chest-thumping bravado strains credulity worse than that attempt at a melismatic vamp at the end." (Al Shipley)
8. Fuck, "Flash Delirium" Is, Like, the Coolest Song I've Ever Heard in My Whole Life (Die Antwoord, MGMT)
Never got around to listening to $0$ -- it didn't strike me as particularly interesting or particularly WTF at the time (it seemed too obviously an "avant" semi-parody) and I didn't care to get into the speculation game. That said, "Enter the Ninja" is certainly memorable, and not bad as a song (the trick is to realize how close to credible the female vocals in it are -- here I've slowed/pitched it down slightly and it's not too far from icy indie bliss-out). MGMT on the other hand I just couldn't get a handle on -- too disjointed, too incompetent, too much like a third-rate Super Furry Animals trying to soundtrack an iPod commercial (on "Flash Delirium" anyway). And yet the sample from "Kids" helped me kinda sorta like a Chiddy Bang song! I took what I thought was the dumbest part of "Flash Delirium" (also the part I liked the best, go fig -- Kat Stevens refers to it as the "shambolic flute break") and paired it with Ninja expounding on its coolness. MGMT are nothing if not all up in the interweb.
Die Antwoord (#17):
"You’d think by now I would have stopped finding joy in the moment when everydork W.T. Jones stops the song to bask and preen with his now notorious pronouncement 'this is like… the coolest song I ever heard in my whole life,' but the truth is that I still pretty much agree with him." (John Seroff)
"Perhaps the worst record that will ever be made by anyone, ever." (Edward Oculicz)
MGMT (#11):
"What a dreadful mess. It veers between a mixed-bag of 60’s garage sounds (less Phil Spector, more Primal Scream aping the Stones) and a soggy, meandering attempt at psychedelia, like if the The Byrds had grown up in a commune made out of Weetabix on the outskirts of Luton. That shambolic flute break is one of the most half-arsed things I’ve heard this year." (Kat Stevens)
"It’s a great song, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go; and, as copies of the Of Montreal sound go, it went. Man, if MGMT keeps coming up with stuff like this I’m going to have to start paying attention to them." (Matt Cibula)
9. MY FN, YR STYL (Liz Phair, Everything Everything)
Two tough ones to mix -- Everything Everything's track hops over the place so fast that I had to edit in a single bass note to make the outro loop work, and even then it starts a little wonky. So I copped out with ethereal lyrics, which coincidentally matched the key and rhythm (more or less) of Liz Phair's prettier section of the "Bollywood" beat. I liked Liz Phair's album as a confusing mass of stuff but excerpting it doesn't really do that experience justice. So I ripped some context from NPR and let the beat rock.
Liz Phair (#8):
"What this reminds me of most is the kind of unfiltered, anything-at-the-wall approach that Christian contemporary singers, especially those who considered themselves entertainers, were taking in the late 80s and early 90s, when record labels were generous but no one had any clue what might catch on, and cool wasn’t an option in the first place." (Jonathan Bogart)
"It’s such a car crash of a record that there was clearly no expectation of it being a single, it’s like Liz wanted to make a Laurie Anderson B-Side but only had three samples and one terrible actor available." (Pete Baran)
MY KZ, UR BF (#9):
"It’s a song I quite like but haven’t managed to figure out why!" (William B. Swygart)
"You know when a song has so many things wrong with it but you LOVE it anyway? This is the opposite of that. Sorry dudes." (Kat Stevens)
10. Toot It and Undo It (YG, Carrie Underwood)
Two unexpected faves on this one -- already mentioned why I think it works conceptually above. "Toot It and Boot It" has been begging for someone to excerpt the "whoa" section (which they stupidly only let play through once before going to the next verse) and put it in a better song. This isn't that song, but it does give you a sense of what the song might have been if they'd figured out that the heart of the song is the group singing, not the chorus. Meanwhile I fell in love with "Undo It" after not paying much attention to it. I sort of like pitching Carrie down, though I think to make the keys match I fucked with it a bit too much. But I didn't want to touch the YG part.
YG (#12):
"Two things make this: the dusty turntable snippet you don’t really otherwise hear on the radio in all-electro-everything 2010, and the everyone-join-in 'whoa-oh-oh-oh' chants that, even though put to better context here, might as well come from a damned Arrested Development record. Shame about the rapping, which is at best unmemorable, charmless at worst." (Rodney J. Greene)
"As laid-back a hip hop number as I’ve heard in a while, drawled lyrics over a lazily fingersnapping backing, sounding totally stoned and fuzzily happy. Thing is, it’s about fucking a woman then throwing her out, awareness of which rather kills the relaxed, contented feeling the sound creates, for me." (Martin Skidmore)
Carrie Underwood (#21):
"This doesn’t hang together at all: no natural emotional development; feels like successive effects just thrown in our face. It does seem at one with the desperate dance-pop mess of 2010, however, and I’m hoping that crossover radio play will make this song make more sense." (Frank Kogan)
"The chorus is basically Kelly Clarkson’s 'Miss Independent' dressed in country flannel and fast-forwarded to the end of the relationship. I happen to love 'Miss Independent.'" (Katherine St. Asaph)
11. When a Woman Gives Up the Gun (Vampire Weekend, R. Kelly)
Whew, the end o' the mix -- this was an easy one; take the propulsive guitar backing and glockenspiel from Vampire Weekend and let R. Kelly do the singing. These are both albums I'm pretty lukewarm about, erring on the side of warm not luke -- a fitting spectacle from two meh-plus sources. I get a little too cheeky on this one, wobbling Kells's syllables even longer than he does (though not as much longer as you might think!), but fuck it, gotta end on a bang. I don't think I can sit through the entirety of "When a Woman Loves" if it's not a live version (ugh, canned orchestra must die) but the breakdown and ending are worth preserving.
Vampire Weekend (#18):
"The evocation of a life unlived and the pervasive sense of approaching obsolescence are masterful and affecting, like a less explicit take on LCD Soundsystem’s 'All My Friends.'" (Alex Ostroff)
"Limp US college indie, with a simpleminded tune, fussy instrumentation and terrible singing. I am entirely mystified at their success -- I can’t hear anything in them that I can imagine anyone liking at all. This seemed to drag on for hours." (Martin Skidmore)
R. Kelly (#19):
"I’m not sure anyone thought that what pop needed in 2010 was a response song to Percy Sledge’s 1966 'When A Man Loves A Woman,' sung in a variety of early-soul voices with cheap bombast and the merest hint of Autotune, but that’s R. Kelly. Identifying needs no one has and then filling them with such confidence and brio that it’s impossible not to shout thank you! right back at him." (Jonathan Bogart)
"Kells, you have money. Hire real musicians." (Katie Lewis)
That's all, folks. See you next year -- same controversial time, same controversial station!
Sunday, January 02, 2011
2011
2011: The Year Everyone Came Back for More
S'Mores
1. Dev - The Night the Sun Came Up
2. Sunny Sweeney - Concrete
3. Nadia Oh - Colours
4. Anthony Hamilton - Back to Love
5. Cher Lloyd - Sticks & Stones
6. V/A - Mr. Collipark Presents Can I Have the Club Back Please? mixtape
7. Miranda Lambert - Four the Record
8. Alexandra Stan - Saxobeats
9. Justin Bieber - Under the Mistletoe
10. Grace Jones - Hurricane
11. Teddybears - Devil's Music
12. Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels
13. Pitbull - Planet Pit
14. Selena Gomez and the Scene - When the Sun Goes Down
15. Emily Osment - Fight or Flight (2010)
16. Katy B - On a Mission
17. Feist - Metals
18. Britney Spears - Femme Fatale
19. Nicola Roberts - Cinderella's Eyes
20. Low - C'mon
Mores [7]
Adele - Rolling in the Deep
Araabmuzik - Electronic Dream
Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See
Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2
Bedroom Problems - Six Songs EP
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
CocknBullKid - Adulthood
Das Racist - Relax
Dirtbombs - Party Store
DJ Quik - Book of David
DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, the Better
The Dø - Slippery Slope
Sky Ferriera - As If! EP
Foster the People - Torches
Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Holy Ghost! - s/t
Wanda Jackson - The Party Ain't Over
Joker - The Vision
Keak da Sneak - Tonite Show
Lil' Wayne - The Carter IV
Little Dragon - Ritual Union
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
M.I.A. - Vicki Leekx mixtape
Metronomy - The English Riviera
Panic! At the Disco - Vices & Virtues
R.E.M. - Collapse into Now
Omar S - High School Graffiti
Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'
Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What
Soulja Boy - 1Up mixtape
TMBG - Join Us
Poly Styrene - Generation Indigo
tUnEyArDs - wHoKiLl
Widowspeak - s/t
Wild Flag - s/t
Wiz Khalifa - Rolling Papers
Yelle - Safari Disco Club
Mo' Nuff [6]
Battles - Gloss Drop
Beyonce - 4
Cut Copy - Zonoscope
Destroyer - Kaputt
Digitalism - I Love You, Dude
The Feelies - Here Before
David Guetta - Nothing but the Beat
Junior Boys - It's All True
Kreayshawn - Kittys and Choppas mixtape
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
Lloyd - King of Hearts
Demi Lovato - Unbroken
Frank Ocean - Nostalgia/Ultra
Parallel Dance Ensemble - Possessions and Obsessions
Radiohead - King of Limbs
The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love
The Strokes - Angles
Robin Thicke - Love After War
Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs
Mo-Hum [5]
B.o.B - No Genre mixtape
Cake - Showroom of Compassion
Chipmunk - Transition
Cults - s/t
Danger Mouse and Daniele Lippi - Rome
Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
LMFAO - Sorry for Party Rocking
Jennifer Lopez - Love?
Natalia Kills - Perfectionist
Nicole Scherzinger - Killer Love
TVOTR - 9 Varieties of Worms
Wiley - 100% Publishing
Jamie Woon - Night Moves
Less
Avril Lavigne - Goodbye Lullaby
Gorillaz - The Fall
Not comparable, relatively speaking [disqualified]
Neil Diamond - The Bang Years 1966 - 1968
Diddy Dirty Money - Love Love vs. Hate Love mixtape
Emily Osment - Captain EO: The Best of Emily Osment
Unmoored
Cassie - Fearless
Yo Gotti - Live from the Kitchen
Moh No! Overlooked in 2010
Daddy Yankee - Mundial
Care Bears on Fire - Girls Like It Loud EP
S'Mores
1. Dev - The Night the Sun Came Up
2. Sunny Sweeney - Concrete
3. Nadia Oh - Colours
4. Anthony Hamilton - Back to Love
5. Cher Lloyd - Sticks & Stones
6. V/A - Mr. Collipark Presents Can I Have the Club Back Please? mixtape
7. Miranda Lambert - Four the Record
8. Alexandra Stan - Saxobeats
9. Justin Bieber - Under the Mistletoe
10. Grace Jones - Hurricane
11. Teddybears - Devil's Music
12. Pistol Annies - Hell on Heels
13. Pitbull - Planet Pit
14. Selena Gomez and the Scene - When the Sun Goes Down
15. Emily Osment - Fight or Flight (2010)
16. Katy B - On a Mission
17. Feist - Metals
18. Britney Spears - Femme Fatale
19. Nicola Roberts - Cinderella's Eyes
20. Low - C'mon
Mores [7]
Adele - Rolling in the Deep
Araabmuzik - Electronic Dream
Arctic Monkeys - Suck It and See
Beastie Boys - Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2
Bedroom Problems - Six Songs EP
Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
CocknBullKid - Adulthood
Das Racist - Relax
Dirtbombs - Party Store
DJ Quik - Book of David
DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, the Better
The Dø - Slippery Slope
Sky Ferriera - As If! EP
Foster the People - Torches
Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Holy Ghost! - s/t
Wanda Jackson - The Party Ain't Over
Joker - The Vision
Keak da Sneak - Tonite Show
Lil' Wayne - The Carter IV
Little Dragon - Ritual Union
David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
M.I.A. - Vicki Leekx mixtape
Metronomy - The English Riviera
Panic! At the Disco - Vices & Virtues
R.E.M. - Collapse into Now
Omar S - High School Graffiti
Raphael Saadiq - Stone Rollin'
Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What
Soulja Boy - 1Up mixtape
TMBG - Join Us
Poly Styrene - Generation Indigo
tUnEyArDs - wHoKiLl
Widowspeak - s/t
Wild Flag - s/t
Wiz Khalifa - Rolling Papers
Yelle - Safari Disco Club
Mo' Nuff [6]
Battles - Gloss Drop
Beyonce - 4
Cut Copy - Zonoscope
Destroyer - Kaputt
Digitalism - I Love You, Dude
The Feelies - Here Before
David Guetta - Nothing but the Beat
Junior Boys - It's All True
Kreayshawn - Kittys and Choppas mixtape
Lady Gaga - Born This Way
Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
Lloyd - King of Hearts
Demi Lovato - Unbroken
Frank Ocean - Nostalgia/Ultra
Parallel Dance Ensemble - Possessions and Obsessions
Radiohead - King of Limbs
The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love
The Strokes - Angles
Robin Thicke - Love After War
Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs
Mo-Hum [5]
B.o.B - No Genre mixtape
Cake - Showroom of Compassion
Chipmunk - Transition
Cults - s/t
Danger Mouse and Daniele Lippi - Rome
Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
LMFAO - Sorry for Party Rocking
Jennifer Lopez - Love?
Natalia Kills - Perfectionist
Nicole Scherzinger - Killer Love
TVOTR - 9 Varieties of Worms
Wiley - 100% Publishing
Jamie Woon - Night Moves
Less
Avril Lavigne - Goodbye Lullaby
Gorillaz - The Fall
Not comparable, relatively speaking [disqualified]
Neil Diamond - The Bang Years 1966 - 1968
Diddy Dirty Money - Love Love vs. Hate Love mixtape
Emily Osment - Captain EO: The Best of Emily Osment
Unmoored
Cassie - Fearless
Yo Gotti - Live from the Kitchen
Moh No! Overlooked in 2010
Daddy Yankee - Mundial
Care Bears on Fire - Girls Like It Loud EP
Monday, December 13, 2010
I Think UR a Contrarian
I'm getting pretty comfortable with my Top Twenty list for the year, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to offer some CHALLENGING OPINIONS about some of the year's best music.
KANYE v. DIDDY IN THE BATTLE FOR MEGA-LOL-MANIAC OF THE YEAR
Lex also mentioned this on ILM, but Diddy Dirty Money's Last Train to Paris is about as kaleidoscopic (and as dark) as Kanye's album and boasts a pretty impressive guest list. The difference in a nutshell is that Diddy aims for mildly eclectic competence and exceeds it, while Kanye aims for mad scientist greatness and misses it. Kanye wanted Who Framed Roger Rabbit and he got Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. This is Space Jam -- not aiming too high, but better than it has any right to be. Diddy Dirty Money hasn't impressed me much with live appearances or former glimpses, but like MBDTF this album is a little sprawling and a little "difficult." But DDM beats Kanye in the "motherfucker" contest on "Ass on the Floor," beats him in the overlong/overstuffed contest (Lil' Wayne does a VHS porno parody of Gil Scott Heron while Justin Timberlake, acting the Drake, does the hashtag-rapping on ponderous "Shades"), beats him in the robo-emo contest (which, admittedly, Kanye's basically over by now) on "Strobe Lights." And it's ten minutes shorter! And Grace Jones is on it, though I'm pretty sure she's a back-up singer! And Chris Brown and Drake's presences aren't actively offensive (in their own respective ways). Did I mention that, unlike some egomaniacs, Diddy often lets himself be a featured artist on his own album? Still, jury's out on which one I actually like more.
KELIS, KE$HA, AND MARINA VERSUS OTHER WOMEN WITH "THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THINGS"
By sheer virtue of over-saturation, my tolerance for semi-clever female singer-songwriter material with kitchen sink production was pretty low this year. Marina and the Diamonds' tactic of creating a slightly absurd but generally tasteful frame for Marina's obtuseness puts her inanity at a certain distance -- "LOOK AT YOU GURLS EATING YOUR YOGURT WHILE I EAT PIE THPTH THPTH THPTH" is pretty grating as genuine sentiment, but the band's cheesy sci-fi oompah-pah turns her into a cartoon -- as earnest as I suspect Marina is, she's drawn without nuance and our attention turns to the setting as much as the words.
She's not unlike Ke$ha in that respect, serving as trashy superhero/ringleader to a very different style of swirling production. And this sense that the cacophony is as, if not more, important in the end takes the focus off of Marina herself; her voice and her words are part of the set. Lily Allen's last album did something like this, but Lily Allen actually has a few smart things to say, and the album's unevenness was in part due to the fact that when she did say smart things (on "Chinese" and "Not Fair" and "22"), she set the bar higher for herself than for the production (better than on her first album, which is more of a set piece, having finally listened to it a few times belatedly). But Marina sets the bar low low low, so low it's just sitting there on the stage with everything else.
The trick of Kelis's album -- my #1, two spots ahead of Marina and one ahead of Ke$ha -- is that she's set the bar much higher than it appears. If you do enjoy the setting, those zeitgeisty Guettascapes and super-obvious house tracks -- which I'll admit a certain fondness for whether it's via Black Eyed Peas or the Guetta sound board for "Sexy Bitch," possibly because of how uninformed I am about dance music generally -- you slowly start to discover how sweet and thoughtful much of the album is. The secret to clicking for me, as it appeared to be for Jessica Hopper, who also votes Kelis #1, was "Song for the Baby."
DREAM IMITATORS VERSUS THE-DREAM
I was disappointed by The-Dream's third album only to the extent that my expectations for it followed loving Love vs. Money and finally "getting" Love/Hate, which I now consider to be almost as good as LvM. Love King has the same scattered genius feel of Love/Hate, but it also wants to thrill us with occasional cohesion; it's also stretched thinner, and he's done a lot of this stuff better before ("Love King" vs. "Shawty Is the Shit"; "Abyss" suite versus "Love vs. Money" suite), which isn't to say that the new stuff isn't good. Just that it's not what I needed from The-Dream this year, since I still listen to his first two albums pretty regularly.
Enter Trey Songz, who probably has his own R. Kelly fetish (eek, WORD CHOICE) but also expresses it through what The-Dream has done with his. He never really peaks on Passion, Pleasure, Pain, so he's not in the same company as The-Dream. But seen as a transparent derivative, he delivers the generic (in the genre, not pejorative, sense) goods. He rips directly -- on "Love Faces," it's the descending trademark Dream first-inversion major chord ("take 'em off, take 'em off, take 'em off"), the multitracked passion swarm ("hands around ya! hands around ya!") then imagining sweating out his lover's hair. But Trey also has a more traditional R&B crooner voice -- no other tricks than an occasional (weak) falsetto and effective vibrato. He even pays lip service to the idea of a song suite without making it explicit in content or transitions -- first four tracks go from imagined love-making to the ride home, into the garage, then (woops) "Bottoms Up," which throws the seduction totally off-track -- Trey spends the next three songs apologizing. "I know you're angry -- no, no, better yet, disappointed." And then the album gets more diffuse, with a particularly hilarious sub-Dream number, "Red Lipstick" (I guess he thought "Purple Kisses" wasn't direct enough?) and vagues out by the last couple tracks as a solid genre album should.
What I like about it is that it's not so much warts-and-all (as Love King is) as it is a couple of blemishes here and there that you could complain about but why bother? Which would explain the weird "rain on the windshield" effect on the album art, too, the closest an R&B male can get to soft focus, I guess. Some anticipated albums were a little too generic -- Jazmine Sullivan's range seems oddly limited on her new one; R. Kelly could sing the phone book reasonably well, but that doesn't mean that he should; Sharon Jones and Aloe Blacc put out dependable retro-fetishist albums that I'll listen to more frequently than their ranking on a 2010 list would suggest. Ciara's new look (with The-Dream) seems a little incongruous and I'm reminded of Mariah Carey's work with him, which wasn't bad technically speaking but something just seemed a little off. Meanwhile, Mariah's doing her best work (or at least most consistent and fitting work) by slathering on some kitsch on a Christmas album, which I bought impulsively full price at Whole Foods for some bizarre reason. In some ways Nicki Minaj's album is half of a pretty solid R&B effort, but I don't like the whiplash.
CAST OF THOUSANDS, BUT EVERYONE IS JUST KINDA STANDING AROUND
There were a ton of low-key "Producer and Friends" albums that came out this year with relatively little fanfare -- Dave Sitek's Maximum Balloon, UNKLE's Where Did the Night Fall, Massive Attack's Heligoland. Any of these would easily take a c. 15-20 spot on my list this year, and the winner goes (somewhat arbitrarily) to Maximum Balloon, probably because it's the one I'm currently listening to the most. I listened to Heligoland quite a bit at the beginning of the year and UNKLE's album quite a bit until recently. But none of these albums really stay in the memory very long -- they've got guests upon guests, some high profile. Katrina Ford appears on good tracks on two of them (MB's "Young Love" and UNKLE's "Caged Bird"). I include all of them here because I doubt anyone will remember any of them after too long.
GIRLICIOUS VERSUS RIHANNA
And finally, hoar-pop's doe-eyed Stupid Shits have recorded their second album before overseer Nicole Scherzinger has finished her first one ("Poison" is pretty great, though). And, unexpectedly, it's mostly dance melancholia in the post-Blackout vein, most obviously indebted to Rihanna. It's basically the halfway point between Rated R and Loud, in which Girlicious keep a little of the introspection while opting for dance-into-oblivion hooks. And they do some interesting stuff here, like interpolating ATC's "Around the World" (that would make them the second group I'm aware of to do it this year, after jj did it on Game/Lil Wayne semi-cover "My Life") and then basically admitting that that song's hook is better than any of theirs (something Flo Rida should have learned last year).
Anyway, it was a weird year. But I'm pretty comfortable with these 20 albums, which some last-minute attention going to These New Puritans and some reconsideration for a few "bubbling under" albums. Feel free to inquire for more opinions on other records I didn't mention here below.
1. Kelis - Flesh Tone
2. Ke$ha - Animal + Cannibal
3. Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels
4. Jamey Johnson - The Guitar Song
5. Rick Ross - Teflon Don
6. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. Goldfrapp - Head First
8. Trey Songz - Passion, Pain, and Pleasure
9. Mose Allison - The Way of the World
=10. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
=10. Diddy Dirty Money - Last Train to Paris
12. Far East Movement - Free Wired
13. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh
14. The-Dream - Love King
15. I Blame Coco - The Constant
16. Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli
17. Warpaint - The Fool
18. Yelawolf- Trunk Muzik 0-60
19. Spoon - Transference
20. Maximum Balloon - s/t
Bubbling Under
Laurie Anderson - Homeland
Aloe Blacc - Good Things
Big Boi - Sir Lucious Leftfoot, Son of Chico Dusty
Delorean - Subiza
Fefe Dobson - Joy
E-40 - Revenue Retrievin' - Day Shift
E.via - Via Polar EP
Girlicious - Rebuilt
Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
HEALTH - DISCO2
Hole - Nobody's Daughter
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - I Learned the Hard Way
Lil' Wayne - I Am Not a Human Being
Lil' Wayne - Rebirth
M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\
Massive Attack - Heligoland
Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite
Liz Phair - Funstyle
Princesa - Mas Fuego
Sade - Soldier of Love
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
UNKLE - Where Did the Night Fall
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Wallpaper. - Doodoo Face
KANYE v. DIDDY IN THE BATTLE FOR MEGA-LOL-MANIAC OF THE YEAR
Lex also mentioned this on ILM, but Diddy Dirty Money's Last Train to Paris is about as kaleidoscopic (and as dark) as Kanye's album and boasts a pretty impressive guest list. The difference in a nutshell is that Diddy aims for mildly eclectic competence and exceeds it, while Kanye aims for mad scientist greatness and misses it. Kanye wanted Who Framed Roger Rabbit and he got Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. This is Space Jam -- not aiming too high, but better than it has any right to be. Diddy Dirty Money hasn't impressed me much with live appearances or former glimpses, but like MBDTF this album is a little sprawling and a little "difficult." But DDM beats Kanye in the "motherfucker" contest on "Ass on the Floor," beats him in the overlong/overstuffed contest (Lil' Wayne does a VHS porno parody of Gil Scott Heron while Justin Timberlake, acting the Drake, does the hashtag-rapping on ponderous "Shades"), beats him in the robo-emo contest (which, admittedly, Kanye's basically over by now) on "Strobe Lights." And it's ten minutes shorter! And Grace Jones is on it, though I'm pretty sure she's a back-up singer! And Chris Brown and Drake's presences aren't actively offensive (in their own respective ways). Did I mention that, unlike some egomaniacs, Diddy often lets himself be a featured artist on his own album? Still, jury's out on which one I actually like more.
KELIS, KE$HA, AND MARINA VERSUS OTHER WOMEN WITH "THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THINGS"
By sheer virtue of over-saturation, my tolerance for semi-clever female singer-songwriter material with kitchen sink production was pretty low this year. Marina and the Diamonds' tactic of creating a slightly absurd but generally tasteful frame for Marina's obtuseness puts her inanity at a certain distance -- "LOOK AT YOU GURLS EATING YOUR YOGURT WHILE I EAT PIE THPTH THPTH THPTH" is pretty grating as genuine sentiment, but the band's cheesy sci-fi oompah-pah turns her into a cartoon -- as earnest as I suspect Marina is, she's drawn without nuance and our attention turns to the setting as much as the words.
She's not unlike Ke$ha in that respect, serving as trashy superhero/ringleader to a very different style of swirling production. And this sense that the cacophony is as, if not more, important in the end takes the focus off of Marina herself; her voice and her words are part of the set. Lily Allen's last album did something like this, but Lily Allen actually has a few smart things to say, and the album's unevenness was in part due to the fact that when she did say smart things (on "Chinese" and "Not Fair" and "22"), she set the bar higher for herself than for the production (better than on her first album, which is more of a set piece, having finally listened to it a few times belatedly). But Marina sets the bar low low low, so low it's just sitting there on the stage with everything else.
The trick of Kelis's album -- my #1, two spots ahead of Marina and one ahead of Ke$ha -- is that she's set the bar much higher than it appears. If you do enjoy the setting, those zeitgeisty Guettascapes and super-obvious house tracks -- which I'll admit a certain fondness for whether it's via Black Eyed Peas or the Guetta sound board for "Sexy Bitch," possibly because of how uninformed I am about dance music generally -- you slowly start to discover how sweet and thoughtful much of the album is. The secret to clicking for me, as it appeared to be for Jessica Hopper, who also votes Kelis #1, was "Song for the Baby."
DREAM IMITATORS VERSUS THE-DREAM
I was disappointed by The-Dream's third album only to the extent that my expectations for it followed loving Love vs. Money and finally "getting" Love/Hate, which I now consider to be almost as good as LvM. Love King has the same scattered genius feel of Love/Hate, but it also wants to thrill us with occasional cohesion; it's also stretched thinner, and he's done a lot of this stuff better before ("Love King" vs. "Shawty Is the Shit"; "Abyss" suite versus "Love vs. Money" suite), which isn't to say that the new stuff isn't good. Just that it's not what I needed from The-Dream this year, since I still listen to his first two albums pretty regularly.
Enter Trey Songz, who probably has his own R. Kelly fetish (eek, WORD CHOICE) but also expresses it through what The-Dream has done with his. He never really peaks on Passion, Pleasure, Pain, so he's not in the same company as The-Dream. But seen as a transparent derivative, he delivers the generic (in the genre, not pejorative, sense) goods. He rips directly -- on "Love Faces," it's the descending trademark Dream first-inversion major chord ("take 'em off, take 'em off, take 'em off"), the multitracked passion swarm ("hands around ya! hands around ya!") then imagining sweating out his lover's hair. But Trey also has a more traditional R&B crooner voice -- no other tricks than an occasional (weak) falsetto and effective vibrato. He even pays lip service to the idea of a song suite without making it explicit in content or transitions -- first four tracks go from imagined love-making to the ride home, into the garage, then (woops) "Bottoms Up," which throws the seduction totally off-track -- Trey spends the next three songs apologizing. "I know you're angry -- no, no, better yet, disappointed." And then the album gets more diffuse, with a particularly hilarious sub-Dream number, "Red Lipstick" (I guess he thought "Purple Kisses" wasn't direct enough?) and vagues out by the last couple tracks as a solid genre album should.
What I like about it is that it's not so much warts-and-all (as Love King is) as it is a couple of blemishes here and there that you could complain about but why bother? Which would explain the weird "rain on the windshield" effect on the album art, too, the closest an R&B male can get to soft focus, I guess. Some anticipated albums were a little too generic -- Jazmine Sullivan's range seems oddly limited on her new one; R. Kelly could sing the phone book reasonably well, but that doesn't mean that he should; Sharon Jones and Aloe Blacc put out dependable retro-fetishist albums that I'll listen to more frequently than their ranking on a 2010 list would suggest. Ciara's new look (with The-Dream) seems a little incongruous and I'm reminded of Mariah Carey's work with him, which wasn't bad technically speaking but something just seemed a little off. Meanwhile, Mariah's doing her best work (or at least most consistent and fitting work) by slathering on some kitsch on a Christmas album, which I bought impulsively full price at Whole Foods for some bizarre reason. In some ways Nicki Minaj's album is half of a pretty solid R&B effort, but I don't like the whiplash.
CAST OF THOUSANDS, BUT EVERYONE IS JUST KINDA STANDING AROUND
There were a ton of low-key "Producer and Friends" albums that came out this year with relatively little fanfare -- Dave Sitek's Maximum Balloon, UNKLE's Where Did the Night Fall, Massive Attack's Heligoland. Any of these would easily take a c. 15-20 spot on my list this year, and the winner goes (somewhat arbitrarily) to Maximum Balloon, probably because it's the one I'm currently listening to the most. I listened to Heligoland quite a bit at the beginning of the year and UNKLE's album quite a bit until recently. But none of these albums really stay in the memory very long -- they've got guests upon guests, some high profile. Katrina Ford appears on good tracks on two of them (MB's "Young Love" and UNKLE's "Caged Bird"). I include all of them here because I doubt anyone will remember any of them after too long.
GIRLICIOUS VERSUS RIHANNA
And finally, hoar-pop's doe-eyed Stupid Shits have recorded their second album before overseer Nicole Scherzinger has finished her first one ("Poison" is pretty great, though). And, unexpectedly, it's mostly dance melancholia in the post-Blackout vein, most obviously indebted to Rihanna. It's basically the halfway point between Rated R and Loud, in which Girlicious keep a little of the introspection while opting for dance-into-oblivion hooks. And they do some interesting stuff here, like interpolating ATC's "Around the World" (that would make them the second group I'm aware of to do it this year, after jj did it on Game/Lil Wayne semi-cover "My Life") and then basically admitting that that song's hook is better than any of theirs (something Flo Rida should have learned last year).
Anyway, it was a weird year. But I'm pretty comfortable with these 20 albums, which some last-minute attention going to These New Puritans and some reconsideration for a few "bubbling under" albums. Feel free to inquire for more opinions on other records I didn't mention here below.
1. Kelis - Flesh Tone
2. Ke$ha - Animal + Cannibal
3. Marina and the Diamonds - The Family Jewels
4. Jamey Johnson - The Guitar Song
5. Rick Ross - Teflon Don
6. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. Goldfrapp - Head First
8. Trey Songz - Passion, Pain, and Pleasure
9. Mose Allison - The Way of the World
=10. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
=10. Diddy Dirty Money - Last Train to Paris
12. Far East Movement - Free Wired
13. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Pt. 2: Return of the Ankh
14. The-Dream - Love King
15. I Blame Coco - The Constant
16. Waka Flocka Flame - Flockaveli
17. Warpaint - The Fool
18. Yelawolf- Trunk Muzik 0-60
19. Spoon - Transference
20. Maximum Balloon - s/t
Bubbling Under
Laurie Anderson - Homeland
Aloe Blacc - Good Things
Big Boi - Sir Lucious Leftfoot, Son of Chico Dusty
Delorean - Subiza
Fefe Dobson - Joy
E-40 - Revenue Retrievin' - Day Shift
E.via - Via Polar EP
Girlicious - Rebuilt
Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
HEALTH - DISCO2
Hole - Nobody's Daughter
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings - I Learned the Hard Way
Lil' Wayne - I Am Not a Human Being
Lil' Wayne - Rebirth
M.I.A. - /\/\/\Y/\
Massive Attack - Heligoland
Kylie Minogue - Aphrodite
Liz Phair - Funstyle
Princesa - Mas Fuego
Sade - Soldier of Love
Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
UNKLE - Where Did the Night Fall
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Wallpaper. - Doodoo Face
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