Music of 2010 (so far)
We interrupt "Brendon Recounts Talking Points About Some Short Films He's Seen" to bring you a listicle:
ALBUMS I'VE LIKED SO FAR THIS YEAR IN NO REAL ORDER
In keeping with my decision last year to stop ranking, here are the albums I've really been digging, now that we're at the halfway point of 2010:
The Tallest Man on Earth - The Wild Hunt
An album which represents not a lick of advancement, sonically or lyrically, for its artist, and is all the better for that. When you've got a system as perfect as this, there's no reason to change: despairing banjo licks, nasal-pitched howling about storm fronts and the migration of birds, intricate fingerpicking-style guitar licks. But "Kids on the Run," the last track and least characteristic, gives you some idea of just how far Kristian Matsson may go in his career: a reverb-heavy piano ballad with an epic scale and Mythology of Youth lyrics. Fucking phenomenal:
* * *
Robyn - Body Talk pt. 1
Again, Robyn isn't actually doing all that much here she didn't do on Robyn, but she's doing it more: bigger (the epic "Dancing On My Own," this album's "Be Mine!"), better ("Fembot" eclipses the lyrical wordplay of "Konichiwa Bitches") and with a greater range of style, from the reggae-pop of "Dancehall Queen" to the old-fashioned balladry of "Handle Me" (with the most beautifully baroque string arrangement imaginable) to the haunting lullabye "Jag Vet En Dejlig Rosa." Here's "Dancing On My Own," which would be a viable candidate for best song of the year so far...
* * *
Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III
...if not for "Tightrope," which is about as perfect as pop music gets. The ArchAndroid is a masterpiece, not because it's all brilliant (a few weaker tracks are scattered here and there), but because it's clearly the work of a master of pop style, someone with such a forward-looking perspective that it can only be compared to some of the most ambitious albums ever recorded: The White Album, Songs in the Key of Life, Sign O' The Times, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Monae flits between genres quickly, with a mastery of each one, and never deviates from her bizarre narrative voice, telling the story of an android pursued by authorities in a futuristic dystopia for falling in love with a human. Here's the album's second single, "Cold War":
More after the jump...
Stevie Wonder!
I just got a haircut. At my barbershop, Stevie Wonder's "Happy Birthday" was playing. You know what that means?
It's Stevie Wonder's sixtieth birthday!
Stevie Wonder is one of the best things about music. Period. And I doubt you could find anyone but the most dire contrarian who would disagree. Even the Beatles have more detractors than Stevie Wonder. Part of what makes his enduring popularity so remarkable is that when you sit down and listen to a Stevie Wonder record, you can't help but think how weird it is. Wonder's music, rooted in the American soul tradition, nonetheless is such a bizarre mishmash of influences that only a few musicians can truly claim to be his heirs: Prince, maybe Andre 3000 if you're being really generous.
Notable: next year, when Wonder turns 61, he will have been recording music professionally for fifty years, which is UNREAL.
I've been listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder this past year - especially Fulfillingness' First Finale, which is an album I love. Here are two of that album's best tracks, the undeniable butt-shaker "Boogie On Reggae Woman" and the cosmic funk-gospel of "Heaven is 10 Zillion Light Years Away." Happy Birthday, Stevie!
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Music I Recommend (5/3)
Here's some stuff I've been listening to lately:
The Avett Brothers - I and Love and You
There are a few songs here I'm not comfortable with, because they sound like the sort of thing that'd be sandwiched between Fastball and Matchbox 20 (Twenty?) on late '90s radio, but overall, I'm really liking this album, which got insanely overeffusive praise from Paste last year. This band has been around a lot longer than I had first guessed, but it's good to see they're getting some mainstream acknowledgment - this album was released by Rick Rubin's American Recordings label, and it reached #16 on Billboard, which is something I suppose.
Here's one of my favorite tracks:
Nina Simone - Anthology
Do I really need to tell you how good Nina Simone is? Of course she's great. It's gotten annoying hearing that piano line from "Sinnerman" in (I think) a phone commercial every commercial break, but there are so many great songs on this collection - right now I'm really into her barn-burning "Mississippi Goddam," which continues to be one of the best emblems of the civil rights era, a burst of anger as relevant now as it was forty-odd years ago. Listen to it and try not to think about Constance McMillen:
Sibylle Baier - Colour Green
RIYL melancholy sunsets over rural landscapes. Baier is a German songstress who recorded a collection of songs on reel-to-reel in the early '70s. With the help of Dinosaur Jr's J. Mascis, the recordings were released as a proper album about four years ago, and they're great. If not a lifechanging revelation (see: Vashti Bunyan - Just Another Diamond Day), Baier's Colour Green is nonetheless a striking and gorgeous collection of Eurofolk.
Dead Man's Bones - s/t
This album came out last year, but I only started listening to it recently, and you know what? I like this. It sounds like what I wished Neon Bible had sounded like - macabre, sublime, and emotionally gripping.
And you know what? I'll throw this out there: Ryan Gosling making this album pretty much justifies every awful vanity project any actor has ever recorded.
Even this:
Well, maybe not this, Joe Pesci's album performed as his character from My Cousin Vinny and released an astonishing six years after the film:
If you don't want to listen to Dead Man's Bones because it has a children's choir on it, I'm not sure what to do with you.
This is the most obviously great song on a really terrific album:
I'll make a special post about my favorite album (so far) of 2010 at some point soon...
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Billy Currington – “People Are Crazy”
My brother Chris and I heard this song while getting a replacement for his car battery at a Napa Auto Parts in San Antonio while I was down there over Christmas.
Tonight it was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Country Song.
I want you to listen to this song.
Pay attention to the lyrics. To every word.
This is the single stupidest piece of music you will ever hear in your life.
It all goes up from here.
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Dear Store Managers,
If you insist on playing holiday music in your stores during the Christmas season, please don't set the computerized playlists to 'Alphabetical by Song.'
I just spent 20 minutes in a store listening to six different version of 'Jingle Bells.'
What a nightmare.
Here's a really good Christmas song, though, since we're on that subject:
The Harlem Children's Choir - "Black Christmas"
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You talk about DORF like it’s a bad thing.
Kelvin at Racialicious discusses one of the things I hated about Jody Rosen's awful explication of what she terms the "DORF" phenomenon at Slate - namely, Rosen's gross typing of what "actual living African Americans" listen to. Rosen's piece, which excoriates Stuff White People Like Media like NPR, The NY Times Magazine, and Starbucks, for only playing or discussing music made by black people who are either Dead, Old, Retro, or Foreign, props up the Billboard Hot 100 list as a) more representative of what 'actual living African Americans' listen to and b) more progressive than the beard-rock of All Songs Considered by sheer virtue of Having Been Made By Black People.
Kelvin rightly points out that ascribing certain listening habits to 'real' African Americans (as opposed to those bullshit Oreos, am I right guys?) is a way of denying the tremendous diversity within the African American community and pigeonholing African Americans as belonging to one unified cultural movement. In it's own way, it's as stupid a statement as conservative takes on what constitutes 'real America' - as opposed to those commie-athei-fascist ACORN volunteers on the Left Coast.
I'd go a bit further in taking exception to Rosen's argument: what Rosen doesn't come to terms with is that the music that tops the Hot 100 list is not only routinely retrograde/anti-progressive in its aims and intentions (Eminem's "Crack a Bottle", Britney's "3", Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You," - terribly catchy, but at the end of the day, it's her "Stand By Your Man") but many times is pitched at an audience averaging age 12, which explains why a pair of inane party anthems by the Black Eyed Peas spent a collective 26 weeks at the #1 spot this year. Twelve-year-olds - the least discriminating music buyers - are the target audience for Top 40 radio, which is why their tastes fuel the Hot 100 list. Aimed at adults who don't want to listen to their era's equivalent of The Archies or NKOTB, All Songs Considered isn't interested in telling us about how interesting "Boom Boom Pow" is. And since this, in Rosen's warped, infantalizing view of African American culture, is what is popular with "actual living African Americans," this makes the (again, admittedly) beardy list produced (let's be clear) not by NPR, but by NPR listeners suspect and not representative of All The Music That's Out There.
Me? Yeah, I'm an adult white dude who listens to a shitload of DORFy music: Otis Redding, Fela Kuti, TV on the Radio. Right now I'm listening to the phenomenal new album by The Very Best, which consists of two European DJs and a Malawian-British singer, Esau Mwamwaya. It's a fantastic new take on the Afro-pop/high-life sound and I would bet any song on it against "Boom Boom Pow" or "Crack a Bottle" or "Right Round."
As evidence, here's one of the songs on that album, the fantastic title track "Warm Heart of Africa," featuring guest vocals by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend.
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Dirty Projectors on Jimmy Fallon
Cheers me up mildly, but what a depressing last few hours I've had:
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Friday Song Download! Sarah Dougher – “Everywhere West”
Is there a singer-songwriter more deserving of finally getting her dues than Sarah Dougher? The Portland based singer-songwriter is one of the most intelligent and literate songwriters working today, producing songs that belie traditional dichotomies between the personal and the political. An accomplished historian (who has written on Sinophobia in the American West) and literature professor (at Portland State University, where she teaches classes on ancient literature), Dougher has never broken through the way she should have, and though she has a new album based on the Oresteia, I want to focus on the second song on her first album, 1999's Day One.
"Everywhere West" is a song about womanhood in the Old West that brings to mind the remarkable sequence in Angels in America where Harper interacts with the animatronic Mormon woman brought west by her husband at the display at the LDS Visitors Center in New York. Like that sequence, the song critiques and reevaluates the mythology of the Pioneer Woman by engaging with the realities of life for women isolated by geography and a social order that makes them second-class citizens:
There you'll see a miner's daughter crouching by a stream
There you'll see a logger's daughter cutting down her dream
There you'll see her in a kitchen drinking gasoline
Dougher compares the experiences of a modern woman moving to the Pacific Northwest with these historical women, arguing against the romanticization of an oppressive past and the embrace of a present:
Nobody, no home, finally alone
She went where she thought best
Everywhere west
It's all accompanied by intelligently spare instrumentation: a bouncy piano line, unexpected chord progressions. Really just a wonderful song. This is someone who should be a lot more famous than she is.
Available for download here.
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Wednesday(!?) Song Download! Action Painting! – “These Things Happen”
Didn't get a chance to post one on Friday, but here's a great song by the Sarah Records band Action Painting!. This band just doesn't get enough love: given the opportunity to release an LP, and I think we would've had an And Don't the Kids Just Love It level twee masterpiece. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Action Painting! never got the (relative) fame that other Sarah bands like St. Christopher, The Field Mice, or The Orchids achieved. The vocalist sounds a lot like Robert Smith's younger brother on this track, which is probably why I like it. One of the great underrated songs of the 1990s here.
Anyway, enjoy!
Song available for download here.
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Friday Song Download! Elvis Costello – “Oliver’s Army”
Elvis Costello has made a lot of great albums, but as we all know, there are great albums, and then there are GREAT albums. "Oliver's Army" is the centerpiece track of Armed Forces, one of Costello's GREAT albums, and it's a showcase for Costello's incredibly literate approach to the punk/new wave/pub rock sound emerging out of late '70s Britain.
After all, what's more punk than Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal?" It's clearly Costello's precedent here. A song about The Troubles in Northern Ireland filtered through a central metaphor of Cromwell's Irish Campaign, Costello proposes a novel solution to the twin problems of unemployment and intranecine religious conflict: rather than allowing tensions to keep boiling up, enlist 'em all in the army and send them to fight Other people over there! In doing so, Costello presents a radical history of British colonialism as a series of stop-gap solutions to national social problems:
Hong Kong is up for grabs
London is full of Arabs
We could be in Palestine
Overrun by a Chinese line
With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne
All of which is set above lilting, baroque piano trills that bring to mind the chipper, blithely escapist pop Costello was rebelling against. And a stunning bass performance by Bruce Thomas, one of the great underrated bassists in rock history. Costello's song is a deeply felt rebuke to a nation that would seek easy solutions to a difficult problem.
"Oliver's Army" is available here.
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Friday Song Download! Sleater-Kinney – “Far Away”
I've been thinking lately about the passing decade, and the weird need I have to articulate, by means of lists, what media I most enjoyed over the course of the decade. We all define ourselves by what movies we watch and what books we read and what music we listen to, and so often these lists are a desperate attempt to define ourselves in relation to short-hand signifiers. It's pathetic, really, but I've got an Excel file already with a list of albums and movies from the 2000s that I'm trying to sort into what I can consider a 'proper order.'
The frustrating part of this sort of thing is wanting to recommend everything you love and realizing how overly indulgent simply listing and expounding upon everything you listened to over the course of a decade is. But the great part is getting to relisten to albums you grew tired of at one point and rediscover. Hence this week's download, a song I can safely describe as not only 'kickass' but also 'era-defining.'
Sleater-Kinney is perpetually cited as one of the great bands of their era, and they are, and One Beat is one of their better albums (I'm partial to The Hot Rock and Dig Me Out too). "Far Away" is the band's visceral response to the attacks of September 11th, one of the first great works of art to respond to that tragedy. In it, Corin Tucker relates the experience of watching news coverage on the attacks on her television:
And the sky overhead
is silent, waiting
Clear blue holds its breath
And the heart is hit
in a city far away
but it feels so close
Tucker's incredible vocal talent never gets enough credit - her trembling wails are perfect for this cry of grief. But it's also a cry of anger, a betrayal of the early suspicion in post-September 11th America of the Bush administration and its actions:
And the president hides
while working men rush in
To give their lives
Suffice it to say, One Beat will likely appear on my Top 25 - every listen reaffirms its strength.
"Far Away" available here.
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Comedy Moratorium Declared
Re: this, and lots of other people who think they're clever.
Just stop it already with the "Dueling Banjos" shit. It's deadly unfunny and absolutely ancient - the "I Drink Your Milkshake" joke of 1972. And you don't even realize how hateful you're being when you use it.
Deliverance is, among other things, a movie about how middle and upper class urban folks need to be terrified of the white rural poor, who engage in all manner of perverse sadism when left to their own devices. That it's an expertly crafted thriller is pretty inarguable, but it's also a primary document of the hateful middle class backlash in the 1970s against Johnson's War on Poverty. It takes as premise that Appalachians are cretinous, villainous subhumans and goes from there to argue that we should avoid rural America and its people at all costs.
The one thing that the movie gets right in its distorted-funhouse-mirror portrait of southern Appalachia is the region's beautiful musical tradition, as evinced in the well-known 'dueling banjos' scene - in which Ronny Cox's character engages in an awesomely complex impromptu jam session with a young boy implied to be autistic or in some other way 'different.' It kills me that this scene, the one moment in the film where you get a sense that there's a rich cultural life in Appalachia that two centuries of prejudice and continued economic hardship have obscured, has become shorthand for 'dangerous/stupid hicks/white trash/hillbillies here.'
And in this case it obscures the truth about Sarah Palin: Palin is not dangerous because she's from a rural area, or because she hunts, or because she 'talks funny.' She's dangerous because her ideas about governance and the role of the government in people's lives and on the international stage are very, very wrong, and those ideas aren't endemic to rural America. Lampooning Sarah Palin as a 'dumb hick' is a grotesque of political engagement, and the makers of the above parody are just being lazy.