I Cannot Hear You Because I Am in My Yacht.

Two observations I will salvage from my previous night's curious EPIC FLAIL (h/t Kat and cat!):

Robin Thicke is yacht rock for poptimists.

Kanye West's thesis in 808s and Heartbreak is a standard break-up line, "how could you do this to me," but he eschews typical pronunciation ("how could you DO this to me?") for his own megalo version: "how could you do this to ME?"

I was gonna make a year in confessional mix, but instead I might just make a YEAR IN YACHT disc. And now, the top ten list you will not find here:

The Top Ten on My Yacht
1. Robin Thicke - Something Else
2. Studio - Yearbook 2
3. The Very Best - Very Best Mixtape
4. Solange - Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams
5. Anthony Hamilton - The Point of It All
6. Al Green - Lay It Down
7. Beyonce - I Am...Sasha Fierce
8. Taio Cruz - Departure
9. Rex the Dog - The Rex the Dog Show
10. Supergrass - Diamond Hoo Ha

BLARGH (Mother Goose Edition)

It is late and I have deleted a large post about THE YEAR AND WHAT IT IS MEANS. Because it was stupid.

Instead, here is "Shelley Duvall's Rock 'n' Rhymeland" in its entirety, courtesy Youtube. I thought that "Gordon Never Really Learned to Play" in the dungeon was actually "Sister Christian," but only the first two notes of the chorus sound like that. The rest is new jack swing!

I must have the tickler scene that follows memorized to the frame in some deep dank crevice of my brain. Still frightens me.

Also, Little Richard: hoot. Also, Brian Setzer as lead in an alley cat house band YEARS before neoswing! Edith effing Bunker! Gary Shandling and Terri Garr as Jack and Jill! A completely unrecognizable Woody Harrelson! That guy from "Dave's World"! Remember "Dave's World"?! Also, also, also. You can list your own favorites. I'm still trying to figure out who Dweezil Zappa played.

The message of the film is simple: when you take the characters you love out of your storybooks, they come to life in the real world temporarily, and quickly die because the world they live in is a flimsy simulacrum world built on the delusions and ramblings of an elderly rhyming woman. Like Baudrillard writing a really bad episode of "Pete and Pete." Which he would, naturally. ("Pete and Pete" is the show where I heard, for the first and probably only time, the phrase "milk makes me phlegmy," which to date is somehow grosser than most things I can possibly imagine. Almost ruined milk for me for life, but milk is pretty good.)

'08 Heartbreak

I want to float the idea that '08 in some ways was a, not "the" by any means, year confessional broke, but I'm not sure how well I can actually support my argument. So consider yerself MUSED.

Anyway, there was a lot of low-level pleasure happening this year; arguably more albums I enjoyed than last year or the year before, but definitely fewer albums I wanted to take to the grave. I'm not even sure my tentative #1, Erykah Badu, qualifies for grave-taking.

But one thing that seems to jump out when I think over some of my favorites is the total ingrainedness of the confessional impulse -- reductively, the idea that (your) life is a mess but you try to do your best. (Except usually that isn't good enough.) I'm finding it in the expected places, a Demi Lovato song here and a Jonas Brothers ballad there, but it seems also to have crossed into hip-hop and R&B in somewhat subtler ways.

Ne-Yo and Kanye both have what basically amount to confessional jamz albums -- Kanye's more obviously, Ne-Yo's more...confessionally, I guess. Ne-Yo's brand of confessionalism is closer to what happened to teenpop over the course of the decade; a kind of creeping in of self-doubt and in some cases self-pity that sounds, if not like an afterthought, at least like something that doesn't deserve the kind of spotlight that someone like Avril would stick on it.

Jazmine Sullivan's album connects as attempted empathy, so says Tom Ewing, and the most meta example -- "Fear" -- is also weirdly confessional, in that the universalism of the song's message sounds strikingly, maybe suspiciously, unique to Jazmine. Surely all of the fears she mentions are common ones (every artist worries about his/her album flopping, plenty of people are afraid of sex because they're afraid to touch) but when you stick 'em all together, you get a strangely specific picture of fear. You get an Amy Diamond-esque mixing of cliches in a certain specific string that sets up a foundation that other "universal" songs don't have (a bit like my point in a previous post about the differences between Amy Diamond's strings of cliches and Hannah Montana's).

Lil' Mama and Karina Pasian follow Keke Palmer's own foray into ghetto lament with "L.I.F.E." and "Sixteen at War," respectively, along with about half of a surprisingly heavy Lil' Mama album, wiped clean (after track three) of any evidence of lip gloss. Karina's has some of Tiffany Evans's confessionalish setting of terms for romance in "Baby, Baby," and there may or may not be more confessional happening in some of the ballads, but frankly I haven't listened enough to remember.

Christian pop is pretty hit or miss with the sound of other people's (notably Kelly Clarkson) confessions, but Krystal Meyers has one song, "Beautiful Tonight," that actually reaches the kind of conflict between sin and pleasure that Aly and AJ have dealt with more consistently -- no idea what it is Krystal did that night, but it must have been a doozy. Very interesting that there isn't really the obligatory escape hatch of redemption, although it's implied -- "does that make me beautiful tonight?" is asked with a nice dose of acid under the tongue, blanketed in druggy minor-key synthpop backing.

And my unexpected confessional track of the year takes me way back to Demento Confessional, like Nancy Tucker's literal confessional classic "Everything Reminds Me of My Therapist": Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse (of "Connecticut's for Fucking" semi-fame) lounging through "I Miss Your Arm," in which the singer lists parts of her ex she still loves. It's precious, sure, but there's something weirdly affecting about it, too. I'm a sucker for oh-so-clever songs that unexpectedly display genuineness -- the former can be enough (Tom Lehrer -- though he gets me sometimes, too: "sliding down the razor blade of life"), the latter is a hallmark of confessional, but the combination is really something special (and rare), I think.

Anyway, I'm putting together an '08 Heartbreak mix after I do a little more of the ol' yearly ketchup.

Jesus H. Christ - I Miss Your Arm