Welcome back to part 2 of my year-end roundup. Though it’s passed January First and technically the new year has started, it should be noted that this is also just the second day after my birthday, which means that I’ve only been alive for two days into the new year, sort of? Whatever.
And aside from Gerry Rafferty’s death hitting the airwaves, nothing else much of note has happened today or yesterday, so I’m not worried. (Note: I have downloaded four different albums by three different acts today. By the time this post, or day, is over, I may have listened to one or more of them and decided they’re the second aural coming of the musical Messiah. So, okay, whatever.)
2010: The Best Continued, The Rest Revisited
1. Hip-Hop Round-up: Kanye West and Dessa, or, Two Artists Worth All The Hype
Hip-hop, like any other popular musical field, had its fair share of heavy hitters this year, both in current releases and in new discoveries. And, like any other popular musical field, I couldn’t with much authority say what 2010′s hip-hop would “mean” on a cultural or artistic level. What I can say is that I’ve heard two albums that received across-the-board positive reviews, and, upon listening to them, I can say that whoever those reviewers were, they were right.
: 
Enough has been written about Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? Possibly. Catharsis, opulence, extravagance, resonance, lots of words that mean a lot of general things that really won’t do until you actually hear the album. I can say this; it fuses the hot-wire intensity of rock and roll, the bombast of arena metal, the sneering cocksureness of hip-hop, and wraps it in a meticulous musical cross-genre snatch-and-grab production that sounds gorgeous as it rumbles through my headphones, or across a party, or backscoring a slow-motion explosion. The weirdness of it, too, seems like it should be kneecapping his success, but it doesn’t. Consider that the album’s leadoff single was, on the full album, expanded into a nine-minute multi-part song, part rant/lament about Kanye’s inability to be a good boyfriend due to self-destructive and selfish urges, which then turns into a cello-backed Vocoder solo, and was accompanied by a 30 minute music video. Michael Jackson had his legend, and it’s the kind of legend that Kanye’s got in his sights. While I can’t say what the implications are of that, I’d like to think of Kanye West as a nexus of enough talent, enough acclaim, enough humor, enough emotion, enough pull, enough money, and enough energy to take hip-hop’s capabilities, not just as an art form but as a popular cultural form, to the next level. Where’s that? Dunno yet. Favorite track off it.
Dessa, meanwhile, is not a massive popular success. She doesn’t melt down on national TV, sell our arenas, or go multi-platinum. Instead of pure ego, she’s just a dervish of talent who looks like your camp counselor, she can sing the hook sweetly (without auto-tune) and rap twisty intricate rhymes about heartbreak, family, childhood, and any other number of heavy subjects in between. Her debut album, A Badly Broken Code, has nine reviews on Amazon, all 5 out of 5 stars. I would say more, but to be honest I don’t know much. All I know is that this album made me want desperately to write poetry, and I know how bad I am at that. One of my favorites off it, impossible to pick just one, really.
2. Hardwired To A New Crop Of Memories: The Band
Manuel, Hudson, Helm, Robertson, Danko.
My former roommate played them on a near-constant loop, along with a few other albums and songs, and as such they sunk into the background. They were songs I heard as he went to sleep, songs I heard as he got ready in the morning, songs we played when company was over. But then, on a particularly challenging night, we sat down to watch Scorcese’s concert film of the Band (in its original incarnation)’s final gig, The Last Waltz. I sat there and watched this.
Two hours later I sat there, floored. It was like the best kind of dramatic twist. What a show. What musicians. What songs. What the fuck. E.A., you were there, you remember. And then, naturally, came the deluge; the whole discography, the solo albums, the memories of that night and the shared reminiscence as my roommate moved away, and we could only talk over the Internet if we wanted eye contact. I moved into my Sublet of Shame, and when my roommate disappeared to Europe for ten days, I lay on her too-small couch and listened to Band guitarist Robbie Robertson’s solo album. Not too shabby for a guy who can’t sing too well but who can play the crap out of a guitar. I put on the vinyl of The Band’s records while I made cookies this Christmas. I read their biography, “Across The Great Divide”. I recorded the tone-deaf three-part harmonies me, my former roommate, and E.A. could scream out into my tiny Ipod recorder. Yeah, I’d say The Band was a very significant layer of the 2010 cake. One more clip plz?
3. Best Songs To Listen To While Driving Toward A New Apartment
“Have you heard the new Big Boi?” “Yeah man, Shutterbugg…buhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuh, buhbuhbuhbuh. And I put Shine Blockas on my Facebook.” “Listen to THIS.” “Wait, what exit is it?” “We’re only at 110th street, man, we’ve got like 40 more blocks.”
And this, too, on another trip, after having gotten stuck behind a young man on a stalled dirt bike, blocking the onramp, with a helpful cabbie trying to help him lift the bike into the back of the cab, but burning his arm on the hot engine, and finally passing the young man and the now-begrudging cabbie, and bursting out onto the bridge…thanks MissBleecker.
4. I Knew It!
Eight or so years ago I met a friend who was several years older than me, and she was therefore much cooler. She loved all sorts of bands of which I’d never heard, and upon finding that I was learning to pirate music, she conscripted me into burning a CD for her, one with her favorite songs she currently didn’t have. Unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly the Pirate Slut I am today, and couldn’t find the lion’s share of them. But I kept that blank cd and I’ve had it ever since, and I’m waiting for some opportunity, maybe her wedding, to give it back, loaded with something glorious and affirming. She loved a band called Built To Spill, this song in particular. Years later I start reading about how “Built To Spill’s fronted by a guitar hero who writes awesome lyrics! Every album of theirs is critically acclaimed!” On a recent train ride home, I finally got around to listening to them. It was like they would be the perfect match for me, what someone means when they say “I think you two will hit it off just great.”
And we have. Thanks, R.C.
5. NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!!
The only way to best describe South African rap group “Die Antwoord” is to say that they’re the acid test for even trace amounts of prudery. Example: this video, or as I think of it, the “complete opposite of Invictus”. And this song. Seriously, not safe for work, (or home possibly), unless you work where I work. And it’s Sunday.
Sense of humor and lyric sheet (possibly) required. Read about them if you’re interested; there’s no shortage of media whatthefuckery about ‘em.
6. Best Cover Song Off A Shockingly Dated Tribute Album – “Straight To Hell” by Moby ft. Heather Nova.
Joe Strummer was already spinning in his grave when they put this out.
“Burning London”, featuring covers of songs by the band The Clash by such 1990s luminaries as No Doubt, Indigo Girls, 311, Third Eye Blind, Ice Cube (?!), and yeah, more and more. It’s pretty hilarious(ly bad?) At your own risk.
7. Best Simultaneously Depressing And Inspiring Song To Underscore A Morning Commute.
I heard it for the first time in March. But I listened to it for the first time in May. Oh, Drive By Truckers, don’t ever stop, don’t you ever stop.
8. Breakup Album Of The Year
As one of the very first albums I reviewed for this blog this year, Hall And Oates’ “Abandoned Luncheonette” didn’t seem like it would be much more than a steppingstone in my somewhat misguided attempt to listen to all of my music in alphabetical album order.
See? Charming!
But on the same night I watched The Last Waltz, or possibly one soon before or after it, I and my former roommate listened to this album for its breakup-therapy qualities, which we had no idea we were doing. Hell, all we knew is that it had this song, H&O’s first notable hit and a gorgeous breakup song in its own right. But from the album’s first track that assures “it’ll be all right/when the morning comes”, to the weird bluegrass breakdown that closes the album out, it retains the awesome power to turn a breakup rockbottoming into feet-on-the-ground muted optimism. And I know this, because I’ve used the album myself, and lemme tell you: like AA, like fewer Americans, and unlike Airborne, Abandoned Luncheonette WORKS.
9. Low Fidelity, High Impact: The Mountain Goats, and their album “All Hail West Texas”
On the earnest recommendation of S.S., I walked out of my Sublet of Shame and boarded a bus that jounced down a hill toward the D train. I’d heard 1 song by the Mountain Goats before that day. The album “All Hail West Texas” is all lyrical storytelling based over acoustic guitar recorded on a boombox in an empty room somewhere, what people call “lo-fi” music. The reason I remember where I was when I heard it is because I usually think about how much riding the subway sucks in the morning when I’m riding the subway in the morning. But instead, I was taken out of that with gentle force and set down in Goats central figure John Darnielle’s world, and I didn’t leave until I clocked in that day. And for that, one reserves a memory corner of the brain. A taste from it.
9 continued – Lo-Fi Roundup, Wavves and Dum Dum Girls
Dum Dum Girls!
Wavves!
It would feel wrong to not mention, in the context of the Mountain Goats, a pair of “lo-fi” bands that really earwormed me and my current roommate this year. Wavves is straight-up noise-clatter-surf-rock-pop-noise. At first it was just frontman Nathan Williams noodling on his laptop to overdub blown-out layers of guitar, drums, and vocals into nuggets of it’s-sunny-and-i’m-stoned-and-i’m-in-the-bed-of-a-pickup-truck-on-the-way-to-a-beach-party-style rock and roll. But by their latest album, this year’s “King Of The Beach”, Williams hired a few sidemen, let ‘em write a few songs, and went for a cleaner production style, and out came this!
Dum Dum Girls, meanwhile, are fuzzed-out girl-group pop that is usually called “indie pop” because that’s a shorter way to say “pop music you couldn’t play on the radio but that you could play in a Lower East Side bar, or at a party where there are people who can say they like ‘indie pop’”, which is to say, it means pop with a twist. In this case, it sounds like it was recorded through a layer of dust and tomfoolery. See what I mean?
10. The Rest
It sucks, you know. I talk about how one should listen to as much as possible, to be open to all musical styles and tastes and impacts. And I try my damndest to practice what I preach. But in a year-end round-up of all the music that meant something to me this year, it’s not reasonable to write about every single song or every album or even every riff that tumbled out of my humming lips when I’m deep in the monotony of my job (usually, “War Pigs” or “Tom Sawyer”). You’d get bored. I’d get bored. And as I’ve said, boredom, antipathy, blankness, are all the worst-case-scenario for those who love music. To not care is to not feel is to not live is to switch off. So I’m left with the rest of the memories that I can’t write up or record in a way that could ever do them justice. How can I forget every time I put on “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo, at that party with MissBleecker, on two separate car rides to my new apartment? Listening to the Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead” after wandering home after delivering a five-minute speech about my writerly talents and process to a group of professors, my roommate, and a girl I never thought I’d see again? Being half-forced into full-loving Katy Perry? Listening to Traffic as I strolled in the sun to deliver my former roommate’s BlackBerry? Listening to LCD Soundsystem with S.M? The very first time I ever heard the album “Bridge Over Troubled Water” in its entirety? Ditto “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”? The smooth sounds of Walter Becker, and furthermore, every single one of 2010′s wakeup playlists that roused me to class or work or simply to the awake awareness that I’m alive and happy to be so? The endless repetitions of The Honey Infants? Planning over meatloaf to play for each other only songs we’d never heard, Fashionable Frowns included? Stop Making Sense with E.A. in my tiny hot room over cheap beer? Baraka Flocka Flame? American Idiot performed in all its misguided Broadway glory? Omnipresent Josh Ritter?
The answer, is of course, that I can’t.
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