I’m quite excited about this year’s list because it’s probably the least random yet. This year – and brace yourselves for what I’m about to say here – I’m actually going to list my favorite albums of the year. Like, released this year. Between January and December 2011. Not released locally, like in Astroplus or whatever the hell else is left to sell CDs in this country – released in wherever country the artist is from. These albums did not exist prior to January 1, 2011. New stuff. Yes. I’m not kidding.
Now that we’ve got that cleared up, here now, in ascending order, are my Top 5 Albums of the Year. The year being 2011. I’ve mentioned that these are all new albums, right? Okay. You believe me, don’t you? Go look it up yourselves, for fuck’s sake! These are new! I listen to new music! I’m not stuck in the 90s!
Oh, crap…yes, the list.
5. “Modern Art” by Matthew Sweet
Oh boy. Okay, I know Matthew Sweet is from the 90s, but I swear to God and to everything that is holy that he released a new album this year. And he’s not on my top 5 just because he’s one of my favorite singer-songwriters from the 90s and that “We’re The Same” is one of the most underrated songs of all time. Or that he’s the great power pop revivalist that almost no one mentions, because Teenage Fanclub (don’t get me wrong, they’re my second all-time favorite band after The Sundays) is the critics’ favorite when it comes to that. Or that “You Don’t Love Me” got me through some tough times, man.
I’m not rambling. I’m just saying: Matthew Sweet released a new collection of songs with titles I can’t even remember that’s pretty neat. So I’m putting it on this list, if you don’t mind.
4. “Take Care, Take Care, Take Care” by Explosions in the Sky
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with song lyrics. I felt compelled to understand every line from every song that I liked or else I was still just a little kid who never really grew up. It was my own weird self-imposed rite of passage. It was my smoking-cigarettes-after-school-and-pretending-it-didn’t-taste-like-death phase, my “let’s go out tonight, I’m taking my dad’s car”, my “dude, you won’t believe this but my girlfriend and I had sex yesterday!”
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), my adolescence happened in the early 90s. That meant having to decipher things like “bit the recess lady’s breast”, or “a mulatto/an albino/a mosquito/my libido” or “mmm mmm mmm mmm”. And since I had an irrationally intense crush on Tori Amos and was convinced that she was the greatest thing that ever happened ever, or was God – either of the two – I had to sit through lines like “just peel out the watchword” and “Lemon Pie/he’s coming through/our commander still/space dog” as if they were termination codes that could save the world from nuclear holocaust.
Now that I’m an adult (I guess), I've come to believe that the music is the message. Explosions in the Sky apparently agrees with me because they’ve totally taken out the lyrics, the vocals, and the vocalist. What you get is pure poetry, as opposed to the confusing and stilted poetry I grew up trying to understand. Now when I want to read poetry I actually read poetry.
3. “Oh Land” by Oh Land
Speaking of irrationally intense crushes…
If you don’t find that “absolutely fantastic” or at the very least “nice”, then there’s something completely wrong with you as a human being.
Oh Land stirs up this conundrum to which there seems to be no clear answer: will I like a hot girl’s music as much if the girl wasn’t hot? I call this the Marié Digby Syndrome, named after the singer whose countless versions of “Say It Again” on youtube mesmerize me to this day.
Would I have liked “Say it Again” as much if I just heard it on the radio, if the song remained faceless? What if it was sung by someone who looked like Grace Jones? Would I have appreciated Oh Land’s delightfully weird mix of dance-pop, hip-hop, Björkian ambient, trip-hop, and jazz if she didn’t look like an artsy supermodel? Would I have just said “weird”, without the “delightful” bullshit?
You see, there are a lot of questions in life that really have no answer, like the one about the chicken and the egg. We just have to accept it. If modern science eventually proves that Oh Land blinded me with her hotness, then so be it: my number 3 album of 2011 is Oh Land’s face.
2. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes
Like many artists, or people who would like to think of themselves as artists, or are aspiring artists, or just people who have an inordinate amount of free time, I often fantasize about being very successful or famous or both. Would I be happy? Would I have less insecurities? Would I have more? Would I become an asshole?
I wonder about these things because of people like Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Wolf, and J.D. Salinger. I believe that everyone – and I mean everyone – who has never tasted supreme success or fame cannot possibly form any valid opinion on its effect to the psyche. Noel Gallagher has, so his take on this is infinitely interesting:
“I've never understood musicians who don't enjoy doing promotional interviews. I always think, 'Your life must have been so brilliant before you were in a band.' Because my life was shit, and this is great.”
He said this upon the release of his first solo effort, “Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds”, which was such a huge disappointment that you shouldn’t even bother waiting for it on this list. The Fleet Foxes are at number two, though, so maybe we should take the opening lines to the title track of their “Helplessness Blues” album more seriously:
“I was raised up believing I was somehow unique, like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see. And now after some thinking, I'd say I'd rather be a functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me.”
As a regular dude, I’m inclined to believe Noel Gallagher more. I would like to say that I liked Fleet Foxes more when they were singing about mountains and forests and ancient castles and not frontman Robin Pecknold’s unrelatable personal angst, but “Hopelessness Blues” is better than their “Sun Giant” EP and every bit as good as their self-titled debut album.
I guess the lesson is and always will be: great art can only be made by unfathomable people.
1. “Yuck” by Yuck
As previously covered in this blog, Yuck reminds me of the 90s of my romanticized youth – the years when bands like Dinosaur Jr., Teenage Fanclub, and Sonic Youth were the benchmarks of rock excellence. But apparently – as a lot of intelligent critics would tell you – this is bad. Sounding like someone from two decades ago is not cool. It signifies the end of originality, of innovation, of pop music itself.
The fact that we put this much stock in pop music proves how far it has gone in the last half century. We don’t thrust this sort of expectation on film, which is an older art form, nor with literature, which has, by far, the snottiest critics around. Nobody criticizes Jonathan Franzen on the basis that family epics are “sooooo Ancient Greek”.
The only reason we look at pop music this way is that, not only is it so new, but we also take for granted how new it is. It’s only been over 70 years, give or take, that the concept of music for mass consumption existed. Film has been around since the 19th century. Paintings have been around since people believed the sun revolved around the Earth. Literature has been around since Jesus Christ, minus two thousand freaking years.
The idea that pop or rock ‘n’ roll should be in a constant state of newness is an illusion. Newness is not a requisite characteristic of pop music, it’s an incidental characteristic of any new art. All we remember about pop music is how new and exciting it was when the Beatles showed up or when punk broke out or when Nirvana changed the recording industry for a few short years in the 1990s. That’s all we remember because that’s all that’s happened so far. Imagine if some lazy asshole from the 17th century complained that art always looks like the real thing and declared “art is dead” in total smugness. You would be like: “dude, settle down, I don’t think Van Gogh will be born for another couple of centuries, so just chill out.”
So, critics living in the 21st century: no, pop music shouldn’t be judged based on fake criteria such as novelty; it should be judged based on something that might be totally alien to you but it’s an actual thing and not something made-up and it’s called merit.
And based on pure merit, Yuck’s debut album was the best of this year because it kicked serious timeless ass. It’s good in whatever year I listen to it. And because it happens to be 2011, it’s new music, which I listen to a lot these days. I’ve mentioned that I listen to new music, right?
0 comments :
Post a Comment