Sausage Mahoney.

Smooth Criminal

In the 1980s, DC Comics introduced an antihero character called Deathstroke the Terminator.  He was an ex-soldier whose prior career as an unwitting military guinea pig had gifted him with fabulous powers.  Deathstroke had a killer gimmick, built on a pop-psychology factoid in heavy circulation at the time—that, at any given time, a human being uses only a limited percentage of her brain.  Some said 5%, some said 10%, but everybody agreed there was a lot of brain out there going untapped.  Deathstroke, as a result of being dosed with various sera by unscrupulous medical personnel, could use 90% of his brain, which enabled him to be a thoroughly badass assassin and a robotics genius and essentially unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat.  From my vantage point as a geeky 12-year-old with arms the circumference of Pixi Stix, he was stylish, extremely well-costumed, and indomitable.  I was never the sort of kid who felt comfortable rooting for the bad guy, but with Deathstroke I was tempted to make an exception.  His main foils, the Teen Titans, were by and large lame, acnelescent drama queens.  The Titans were probably invented to appeal to my age cohort by reflecting the gravity of the issues we all faced as post-pubescent losers, but who wanted that from a comic book?

Deathstroke was a psychopath and murderer, but his life had seen its share of tragedy.  When we first met him, an association of hooded criminal masterminds called the H.I.V.E. (which acronym hilariously stood for "The Hierarchy for International Vengeance and Extermination"—no mistaking where they were coming from) had done some voodoo on his oldest son Grant, who for years had been laboring in vain to win Deathstroke's approval.  Playing on Grant's insecurities, the H.I.V.E. turned him into a new-and-improved Deathstroke called The Ravager by altering his brain chemistry so he could use the full 100% of his brain, every last single cell.  You'd think we should all be so lucky, but no.  Full deployment of Grant's mental faculties literally sucked the life from his body.  After burning very brightly for a very short time, he expired a withered shell in his father's arms.

This concept—magnificent powers that, when used, inevitably destroyed the user from within—was not new to comic-book land.  In the mid-60s, the legendary Wally Wood created a group of superpowered cold-war cops called T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents for the declasse (and rapidly defunct) Tower Comics.  (Since you're undoubtedly dying to know, "T.H.U.N.D.E.R." abbreviated "The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves," which is syntactically incoherent but was the best they could do.)  One of the agents was code-named Lightning; he wore a suit that allowed him to move incredibly fast, but, every time he triggered his super-speed, the suit aged every cell in his body.  By the time T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents enjoyed a brief comeback in the mid-80s, Lightning was decrepit, shriveled like a raisin inside his costume, and could barely cross the room without collapsing.

Michael Jackson died this week, and for me he was basically a real-world Ravager, a Lightning without the goofy outfit.  (I concede Jackson had plenty of goofy outfits of his own.)  No question he had superpowers of the highest order.  His singing voice was the equal of anything we've ever heard—supple, powerful, emotive, equally comfortable growling down low or yelping up high.  On the mic he was a literal force of nature—uncontrollable, even by himself.  His sense of rhythm was unimpeachable; even his casual, grunted asides were like rocket fuel to the songs he sang.  He was not a prolific songwriter—he made a record only every half-decade or so, and most of his hits were written or co-written by other people—but the man did write "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It."  I have never particularly been a Jackson fanatic, but I'd like you to name anybody else responsible for any three songs that impossibly great.  Maybe even greater were his non-musical contributions—the exuberant showmanship, the choreography, the meticulous way he presented himself visually, the larger-than-life and unknowable personality.  His musical talent was so singular that he was hard to copy persuasively, but visually he is everywhere in modern popular music.  If you're a young performer bent on world domination, whatever your genre, Jackson wrote the textbook you study.  It was no wonder that, for a few years there in the 80s, the Earth basically orbited Michael Jackson.  His raw power compelled the planet to pay attention.

The flip side of all this was that the guy's life was almost certainly torture.  From basically infancy his father pressed him to sing and dance and perform and be on his toes at all hours of the day and do it all perfectly and in time under threat of the lash.  He was never a child, which maybe accounts for his endless efforts to make himself into one once he hit adulthood.  He went solo, distancing himself from his family and proving once and for all that he was the special one, the straw that stirred the drink—and wound up with no one to turn to.  He surgically replaced basically his entire head, blew through kazillions of dollars.  He married Elvis's daughter; no one is sure why.  He wasted the GNP of Sweden at a cheesy antique store at Caesar's Palace in that famous BBC special.  Four years later all that stuff was auctioned away to repay his mushrooming debts.  Most notably, he lured other people's children to his secluded estate for go-kart races and sleepovers, with well-known and totally predictable consequences.  Joe Jackson got what he wanted from Michael—he got rich, his kids got world-famous.  Most importantly, to hear him tell it, his family escaped from Gary, Indiana.  But what did Michael get?  The more he used his powers, the weirder and sicker he became.  And eventually the powers were no longer so powerful, and they could no longer distract from the sickness and despair, and the gossip drowned out and poisoned the music.

Now we're all free.  Michael is free from a life I can't imagine he enjoyed, to the extent he was aware of it.  The rest of us are free to remember the dark-skinned Michael of Thriller—or, better yet, the dark-skinned and broad-nosed Michael of Off the Wall.  We're free to watch him on Motown 25 make the entire crowd flip their wigs so profoundly they would never come unflipped in all the decades since.  We're free to enjoy a national treasure who left us a long time ago.  Personally I am happy to have him back.

My Name Is Fred

Do you like the hip-hop music?  I have to say that I haven't been this excited in years about a new emcee as I am about this individual Freddie Gibbs.  At one point, Gibbs was signed to Interscope Records, but his major-label release was aborted in this tough economic climate (join the club).  Temporary setback only, I hope; it sounds like most of the tracks on his excellent mixtape The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs are salvaged from the Interscope project.  For one thing, most every song sounds finished and is cleanly mixed.  For another, he works with a bunch of quality heavy-hitter producers; the first two tunes come courtesy of Just Blaze and Polow da Don.  I have to imagine Gibbs will pop up somewhere soon getting paid for an official release.

Anyway, he's too good not to.  Gibbs is from Gary, Indiana, ancestral home of the Jackson 5, and part of why I dig him so much is how much love he shows for his home town—even if, like he says, it don't love him back.  Regional specificity aside, he is also raw as hell on the mic.  His baritone sometimes sounds a little like Z-Ro, sometimes a little like Pac, but it's always pretty authoritative.  His flow is definitely heavily influenced by H-Town, but he's equally comfortable spitting fast over a quick tempo, going from single- to double-time over mid-tempo, and riding behind the beat on slower and funkier stuff.  Content-wise, he comes awfully hard but is also highly lyrical.  On the incredibly effective "Flamboyant," he disavows meta battle rhyming ("My only interest is pimpin and panderin, pistol packin, so fuck rap/I ain't a nigga that be rappin bout rappin"), but no question he has the wit and dexterity to go that route if he wants.  (Toward the end of the song he does indulge a little: "Freddie Gibbs run up in cribs like Kris Kringle/Touch down and talk more shit than Ocho Cinco.")  Most of the subject matter is gangsta shit, but, similar to how Scarface used to do it, the moral dimension and personal consequences of that life are always lurking, sometimes in the background but more often right up front.  Gibbs never oversells the drama and falls into emo character acting; his lyrics are journalistic and matter-of-fact.  Most of Miseducation is highlights, but maybe the most effective of all is the leadoff track "GI Pride," with Freddie delivering moving verses and a big, fatalist singalong chorus about living and dying where he came up in Gary, being who he is because of the place he was raised, all over the opening synth washes of "Flashdance ... What a Feeling."  Believe me, it works.  Then again, the probation-violating narrator of "Never Ending Cycle" also speaks pretty clearly.  So does the dude in "Goodies," running down his extensive menu of controlled substances for sale, and then also there's the Ozzy-sampling nightmare catalog "Close Your Eyes," and—well, like I said, pretty much the whole record is the truth.

Not all of it, of course; this is 2009 and hip-hop is basically still a boys' club, so you get the usual casual degradation of women.  The catchy "Stray" features Devin the Dude moaning the typical Copeland chorus "I cain't staand ... stupid bitches," and Gibbs's verses are not a whole lot more feminist.  Likewise, the tightness of the rhyming cannot obscure the fact that murder ballad "Queen (Luv U 2 Death)" (Fred means the shit literally) and the extremely bumping casual-sex advocacy piece "How We Do" regard females as fundamentally subhuman.  I can't dismiss how annoying this shit is, or complain if you'd rather not have it in your life.

Still, you know, if you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride, even the rough parts.  Unlike some other recent efforts, there is a ton here that's substantively worth engaging apart from the retrograde gender nonsense.  And while I'm not trying to defend the indefensible, this sort of gross knuckleheadedness also reminds us that the person talking at us through our speakers is a definable individual with a point of view, obvious flaws, and irrational passions, just like the rest of us.  Comparing Gibbs to the threemcees of Tanya Morgan on their fine new album Brooklynati, I can't help but thinking Gibbs wins by a mile.  For sure, Donwill and Ilyas and even Von Pea are terrific rappers, but they go out of their way to avoid degrading anybody, except in the most playful manner imaginable.  I wouldn't exactly call this a problem.  By no means do I want to shit on the idea of elevating the discourse.  It's just that, particularly after listening to an entire LP of the stuff, the end product feels safe and denatured, certainly never dangerous.  Like Gibbs said, it's rappin bout rappin.  And rappin bout the history of rap, to boot.*  There's such a thing as too much Native Tongues nostalgia; Brooklynati sort of seals its fate when it kicks off with a half-second snippet from "Pass the Plugs."  (The production on Brooklynati suffers from the same weakness.  It's always musical and generally quite funky, but it doesn't have a ton of edge and is more often familiar than forward-thinking.)

No doubt, hip-hop is more than flexible enough to accommodate Tanya Morgan, Freddie Gibbs, and more.  It's not a matter of choosing approach one over the other.  Hip-hop can accommodate anything you throw at it.  That's why we love it.  But hip-hop culture also feeds and thrives on conflict, on beef, on brutally dissing people for no good reason except you feel like it.  It may be petty, and it's certainly problematic, but it gives the whole enterprise some juice and the listener something to grab onto.  Lyrical skills don't cut it by themselves.  Brooklynati is a little too smooth for me.  The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs is anything but, which is why it's the best rap record I've heard this year.

* In case you think I'm unfairly down on Tanya, I should admit that Ilyas comes across much more like a human being, and much less a 92-era animatronic amusement park ride, on The Prelude, his solo record from the very beginning of this year.  He even drops some genuinely crude sex rhymes on "L.S.D."  In case you're wondering, that stands for "long stiff dick."  Sadly, the song will never get an official release, because it's built on an uncleared sample from Pink Floyd's "Any Colour You Like" and Roger Waters don't play.  Even better, the absurdly good single "Real Hip-Hop Don't Die" has 1000 times more raw life to it than anything on Brooklynati.  If you want to check that out, you can download The Prelude here.

Drink Like a Champion Today

First, the pants.  Second, the leathery leathery skin.  Third, the inebriated crotchetude.  Eventually, this is what happens to all of us, even boyhood heroes.

Instant Results

Well, that didn't take long.  Despite Tyler Kepner's admirably outside-the-box pick of the Royals to win the AL Central, most of us who actually follow and think about the team for more than the eight minutes it takes to make preseason predictions were less optimistic.  We have the usual concerns about the offense.  We were not uber-thrilled by Dayton Moore's big offseason acquisition: ex-Marlin Mike Jacobs, a first baseman with some power but a lifetime OBP of .318.  Even at the relatively low cost of a decent young bullpen arm in Leo Nunez, this was an underwhelming roster move.  Moore had given lip service to understanding that on-base percentage is the foundation of everything offensively in baseball, but actions speak louder, etc.  Jacobs might increase the tepid slugging power of last year's flaccid lineup, but if the Royals are going anywhere we're going to need Alex Gordon and Billy Butler to become legit three-outcome mashers.  Gordon at least got off to a good start today, with two hits, including a tater off the orthographically-daunting Mark Buehrle.

Still, for me personally, and for other professional Internet Royals fans, the Jacobs trade paled in pure stupidity, if not necessarily in significance, to Moore's decision to shovel $4.625 million at KYLE FARNSWORTH to join our bullpen.  That was, no foolin', the single worst signing of the offseason, by any team.  Then, just yesterday, KC's braintrust compounded the fracture when our highly limited manager Trey Hillman announced Farnsworth would be the primary setup guy in front of lights-out closer Joakim Soria, instead of Juan Cruz or Ron Mahay.  Or, you know, Amanda Whurlitzer or Kenny Powers, whom I believe were available.

How do I put this graciously?  Kyle Farnsworth is an aging reliever who throws a very straight fastball, is extremely susceptible to the home run, and has no sense of craft whatsoever.  Managers like him because he "competes" and "shows toughness" and is "a proven veteran" who "establishes the fastball."  But as an actual pitcher he's been terrible for much of his career, and in the eighth inning this afternoon, after Gil Meche had spun seven strong frames and left with a 2-1 lead, Jim Thome established a Farnsworth fastball about 420 feet into the center-field seats for a three-run homer.  Farnsworth set up Soria mostly for a nice hot shower and a restful evening.  I realize it's only one game out of a long season, we've got Greinke going tomorrow, we never beat the Sox in Chicago anyway, yadda yadda.  Farnsworth will probably pitch better than that at some point during the year.  But why is it, when it comes to the Royals, that the only people in the world who don't see the train coming down the track are the ones getting paid to watch for it?

My Back Issues

Every year since 1989 I have made a list of my favorite albums and singles.  I sometimes sent these out to friends in year-end update letters.  Mostly I kept them to myself, since who really wants to get a random top-ten list from some gibbering person?

Here are those lists, if you're interested.  (I know: TL; DR.)  I still agree with most of my choices, which I guess is good.  Either that or it proves how little I've grown over the years.  To come clean about one thing: in 1989, when I started, I also retroactively made lists of my favorite records from 1987 and 1988.  And those two lists are cheats, since I included records I hadn't known at the time but had discovered since.  If I were going to bother to make the list in the first place, it seemed pointless to ignore that additional history.  That would be like, for example, feeling constrained by the nature of state-sponsored punishment in 1789 when interpreting the text of the Eighth Amendment for a modern society.  Why would anyone think that was a good idea?  Now, away we go:

1987

Albums
1.  Game Theory Lolita Nation
2.  Tom Waits Franks Wild Years
3.  The Replacements Pleased to Meet Me
4.  R.E.M. Document
5.  Prince Sign o’ the Times
6.  Squirrel Bait Skag Heaven
7.  Husker Du Warehouse: Songs and Stories
8.  Camper Van Beethoven Camper Van Beethoven
9.  Public Enemy Yo! Bum Rush the Show
10. Jesus & Mary Chain Darklands

People I know (and they know who they are) ridicule and belittle me for my constant praise of Lolita Nation, but it's clearly the best record of 1987, if not what we call the "rock and roll era."  It's out of print, but if you want to hear the absolute peak of a ferociously intelligent, articulate, romantic (if unfunky) pop songwriter, you could do worse than to dig a copy up on eBay for $50.  It suffers from 1987-stylee tin-can production, but so does Pleased to Meet Me, and I don't hear you complainin' about that sacred cow.  Plus, Scott Miller's magnum opus started that whole "X Nation" thing we see so much of today.  See, if your teeth grind involuntarily each time some ESPN hack refers to "Red Sox Nation," you can blame Game Theory.  I didn't hear Nation until the fall of '88, when I got to college, so if you'd have polled me on December 31, 1987, I would have given my vote to Franks Wild Years.  "Yesterday Is Here" is still about the saddest song I know.  I also had never heard Yo! Bum Rush the Show at the end of '87, so if this were contemporaneous the Smiths probably would've snuck onto the list with Strangeways, Here We Come.  I think I'm the only person who thinks Warehouse: Songs and Stories is a better record than New Day Rising.  My thinking: it has better songs.

Singles
1.  Prince “U Got the Look”
2.  The Bangles “Hazy Shade of Winter”
3.  John Mellencamp “Paper in Fire”
4.  Bruce Springsteen “Brilliant Disguise”
5.  M/A/R/R/S “Pump Up the Volume”
6.  AC/DC “Who Made Who”
7.  Prince “Sign o’ the Times”
8.  The Descendents “Clean Sheets”
9.  R.E.M. “The One I Love”
10. The Cure “Why Can’t I Be You?”

As you'll see, Prince during his heyday habitually lit the lamp for me in the singles category.  "Boy versus girl in the World Series of Love" is maybe not the most progressive prescription for heterosexual dating, but it always has struck me as a pretty accurate description of actual behavior among young adults.  This list is the soundtrack to my senior year in high school—all the highs ("Paper in Fire"), lows ("Hazy Shade of Winter"), and in-betweens.

Song of the year
The Replacements, “Alex Chilton.”  I bought Pleased to Meet Me in the glorious summer of 1987, three months or so after picking up the reissue of Big Star's Sister Lovers.  On cassette, motherfucker.  Hearing Alex Chilton's mordant, druggy, undone performance on Sister Lovers, the chorus of "Alex Chilton" made no sense to me—why would children by the millions sing for this guy to come around?  He's much too fucked up, and not in a good way, not at all.  Then, next spring break, visiting my father in New York, I stumbled across a copy of Radio City at the Tower Records at 4th and Broadway, and I bought it, and I understood.  This song describes an alternate universe, maybe one in which Alex was different, willing to shoulder the burden of being the Pied Piper his talent sometimes suggested he could be, instead of who he was—a guy who very deliberately chose journeyman status over pop-star careerism.  Or maybe it was the kids themselves who were different in the "Alex Chilton" dimension, seeking out weird and obscure anachronisms instead of standing in the middle of the road waiting to get hit by the Richard Marx truck.  Either way, the song didn't describe reality.  As a marketing plan, it sort of explains why Paul Westerberg never had that hit single he wanted so desperately.

1988

Albums
1.  Pixies Surfer Rosa
2.  Sonic Youth Daydream Nation
3.  Game Theory Two Steps from the Middle Ages
4.  Camper Van Beethoven Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
5.  Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
6.  Kix Blow My Fuse
7.  Sir Mix-a-Lot Swass
8.  For Against December
9.  Stump A Fierce Pancake
10. The Coolies Doug

Surfer Rosa terrified me—the crazy, on-off screech of "Bone Machine," with its priests trying to molest you in the parking lot; the request to some long-distance lover to cut herself open, bleeeeed on her nightgown and send you the results; themes for imaginary superheroes; and that near-unbearably intense sequence at the end of side one (these, you gotta remember, were the days of cassettes, which you had to flip over, or at least wait for auto-reverse to deploy) where your blood pressure surged and you felt like you might die.  Maybe Daydream Nation seems like a grander accomplishment in retrospect, but it was never that scary, even though it was so much more self-consciously atmospheric and tried so much harder.  Blessedly, '88 also marked my introduction to hip-hop; I remember sitting in my friend Sam's dorm room freshman year in college, listening to Sir Mix-a-Lot doing "Attack on the Stars."  I was an ignorant fool about hip-hop growing up, but mostly because I hadn't listened too closely, and when Mix busted out with "Nuclear wo'head/Aimed at yo' fo'head/Yo' girl calls my name in yo' bed," I straight fell off my chair.  As epiphanies go, that's pretty crude, I know; it's not as refined an image as a comet streaking across the sky or the sun rising crimson over the desert.  But I'm pretty crude, there's no point putting on airs.  And hip-hop is often at its best with the bathroom humor and the sex talk and the grime and filth slime slime filth, as Bill Cosby will gladly tell you.  Anyway, some things demand to be taken seriously, and you ignore them at your peril.

Singles
1.  Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock “It Takes Two”
2.  Prince “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”
3.  Kix “Cold Blood”
4.  Public Enemy “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”
5.  Sir Mix-a-Lot “Posse on Broadway”
6.  The Sugarcubes “Birthday”
7.  Soul Asylum “Sometime to Return”
8.  Salt-n-Pepa “Push It”
9.  LL Cool J “Goin’ Back to Cali”
10. Bobby Brown “My Prerogative”

Kix were basically a bar band from Hagerstown, Maryland, near Baltimore.  They were nominally tagged as hair-metal, and fair enough, but they were as hooky as any rock band in the 80s.  Every song on Blow My Fuse, by far their best record, had an interesting riff, a distinct and catchy chorus, usually a distinct and catchy bridge, often a prechorus, playful and melodic dual-guitar interplay, and a much more assertive bottom end than you'd expect from commercial music in 1988.  "Cold Blood" tanked on the charts and was quickly overwhelmed by the majestic cheese of the power-ballad B-side "Don't Close Your Eyes."  Am I seriously asserting it's a better song than the sainted kill-whitey anthem "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos"?  Well, make no mistake, I'm not denying whitey needs killing.  And for sure I won't fight you if you say "Black Steel" is the greater achievement posterity-wise, and maybe even the greatest lyrical achievement in all of hip-hop.  It certainly set a tone that governs the hip-hop aesthetic even today.  "Cold Blood" is still the better radio single.

Song of the year
The Pixies, “Where Is My Mind?”  A production snafu at 4AD headquarters left me with a cassette copy of Surfer Rosa that was dubbed backwards.  What's labeled as side one is actually side two, so the first time I played it, instead of "Bone Machine" I got "Where Is My Mind?"  My roommate, who already knew the record and wanted to preserve the band's intended sequencing, shouted "No!" and hit eject.  Bless his heart.  Charles Thompson has used this same E-C#m-G#-A chord progression, or variants of it, about 10,000 times during his career, but you always remember your first time.  Kim Deal's backing vocal and willfully simplistic bass line had a lot to do with it.  This song launched a thousand ships, not all of which were seaworthy.

1989

Albums
1.  De La Soul 3 Feet High and Rising
2.  Camper Van Beethoven Key Lime Pie
3.  Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique
4.  Elvis Costello Spike
5.  Bob Mould Workbook
6.  Boogie Down Productions Ghetto Music: The Blueprint of Hip-Hop
7.  Glass Eye Hello Young Lovers
8.  Eleventh Dream Day Beet
9.  Jungle Brothers Done by the Forces of Nature
10. N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton

3 Feet High and Rising and Paul's Boutique shot the bird at the very idea of copyright law, and Gilbert O'Sullivan and the Turtles crawled instantly from under their stones and ruined it for everybody.  Early in 1989 I was all agog about Elvis Costello's admittedly fantastic, if a bit overwhelmingly baroque, Spike, and was holding forth on its brilliance when my friend Kenny told me "the new De La Soul record is as good as Spike."  I think I threw my shoe at him.  Kenny, I don't know if I ever formally apologized, but please consider this my mea culpa.  This is a pretty strong top 10, and the first one I compiled contemporaneously; there's no room for Slick Rick's The Great Adventures of... or Galaxie 500's On Fire.

Singles
1.  The Pixies “Debaser”
2.  Paula Abdul “Straight Up”
3.  Eleventh Dream Day “Between Here and There”
4.  Neneh Cherry “Buffalo Stance”
5.  Neil Young "Rockin' in the Free World"
6.  Slick Rick “A Children’s Story”
7.  The Mekons “Memphis, Egypt”
8.  Bobby Brown “Every Little Step”
9.  3rd Bass “The Gas Face”
10. Ice-T “The Girl Tried to Kill Me”

Doolittle didn't make the top 10 and didn't deserve to, but "Debaser" easily outpaced the field here.  You may think Paula Abdul is funny these days as the pilled-out-of-her-skull enabler of pop-star fantasia on American Idol, but back in the day she could throw down.  This was a great year for dancefloor singles.  Eleventh Dream Day's "Between Here and There" is not a dancefloor single, and you can dock it points if you think it bids too crassly for anthem status with its MC5-referencing chorus.  But I grew up in the Midwest, and if "Between Here and There" gives you the feeling of driving down the Interstate on a warm, humid summer night, car full of fellow-traveling knuckleheads, windows open, giving a shit only about the moment as foolish as you might look in retrospect, so I gotta tip my cap.  Come to think of it, "Rockin' in the Free World" is no dancefloor single either.  Neil Young is not a subtle lyricist, but who needs subtlety when he gets to those lines about the dead baby in the garbage can who's "one more kid that'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool."  I once played the dirty version of "The Girl Tried to Kill Me" on my college radio show, but fortunately it was 2:45 am and I attracted no attention from the FCC (or anyone else).

Song of the year
Camper Van Beethoven, “When I Win the Lottery.”  Exhibit A supporting my periodic assertions of David Lowery's songwriting greatness, this is the story of an aging sociopath with unrelenting contempt for polite American society, who runs a tow-truck business out of his shack in an undefined rural area, spends all his dolo on Scratch n' Win tickets and wastes his down time fantasizing about messily thrusting a shiv between the ribs of local Rotary Club members who give him the high hat.  He announces to anyone who will listen, a category he safely assumes includes nobody, that when he finally hits his payday, he will treat the ladies at his local bar to firearms and Scotch and buy the local American Legion hall so he can paint it red with five gold stars.  Remember, this was 1989, the jumpoff of Reagan's third term.  This was a somewhat radical sentiment for a major-label artist, or anybody.  I mean, there's no question Lowery thinks this guy is the hero of the song.

1990

Albums
1.  Robyn Hitchcock Eye
2.  Boogie Down Productions Edutainment
3.  Public Enemy Fear of a Black Planet
4.  Poor Righteous Teachers Holy Intellect
5.  Fugazi Repeater
6.  Digital Underground Sex Packets
7.  The Breeders Pod
8.  Neil Young & Crazy Horse Ragged Glory
9.  Ultra Vivid Scene Joy 1967-1990
10. Primus Frizzle Fry

At the time, voting Eye the best album of 1990 seemed like the easiest possible call; now, I admit it has its share of filler.  But so do most of the other contenders.  The first half of Fear of a Black Planet is unimpeachable, but the second half draaaaags.  Sex Packets has a flawless second side, but that only delouses your mind after the overlong party raps over Parliament samples on the first side.  Guy Picciotto displays an outrageously high slugging percentage on Repeater, but I just want to tell Ian MacKaye, "Okay, buddy, seriously, I get it."  I defend Ian's didacticism all the time—I know he means well—but "Merchandise" and "Styrofoam," which are, you know, true, still really test my patience.  Ragged Glory accumulates a ton of goodwill with its righteous first half before winding down with too much hippie bleeeugh.  Edutainment doesn't have much slack—it's a really consistent record—but the title is pretty accurate: it feels like you're taking an American Intellectual History class taught by the "cool" professor.  It's not like I don't find the experience rewarding, but when it comes to art I'm always gonna prefer the transformative to the descriptive.  Even so, Kris Parker is always good for one jolly, bouncy singalong per record about kneecapping cops with shotguns; this year's entry in that category, "100 Guns," is probably the best thing on the album.

Singles
1.  Public Enemy “Welcome to the Terrordome”
2.  Paula Abdul “Cold Hearted”
3.  Digital Underground “The Humpty Dance”
4.  Sinead O’Connor “Nothing Compares 2 U”
5.  Technotronic f. Felly “Pump Up the Jam”
6.  Digital Underground “Packet Man”
7.  Poor Righteous Teachers “Style Dropped/Lessons Taught”
8.  The Sundays “Here’s Where the Story Ends”
9.  Love/Hate “Blackout in the Red Room”
10. X Clan “Tribal Jam”

Operation Lockdown (not to be confused with Operation Shutdown): the rich stay rich.  More PE, more Paula.  I never need to hear "The Humpty Dance" or "Nothing Compares 2 U" again.  "Tribal Jam," even despite the late Professor X's dumbass detour into Egyptian cosmology and homophobia—for those of you who forgot or never knew, he popped up near the end of every X Clan song and SAID THE EXACT SAME SHIT EVERY TIME—still features an insanely authoritative performance by Brother J, an underrated and forgotten emcee (yo, Nasir, where was he in "Where Are They Now"?) delivering the most profoundly dismissive couplet of the year, comparing himself to fucking Hannibal, yet: "Comin' through the gap in the mountain on an elephant/The world jes shiver, I'm the earthquake president!"  Sir, step off—you cannot fade that.  Love/Hate was another LA nerf-metal band who sang exclusively about drinking, doing cocaine, fucking, and the periodic inability to fuck brought on by too much booze and cocaine.  As Chuck Eddy once pointed out, they were sort of the second-string Guns n' Roses; instead of a guitarist named Izzy, they had a singer named Jizzy.  Instead of a guitarist named Slash, they had a bassist named Skid.  Pick up Blackout in the Red Room if you ever see it in the dollar bin.  Chances are it will drive you nuts with its juvenilia and retrograde misogyny, and if so fair play to you, but it's totally clear-headed about its nihilism and very, very tuneful.  I can't believe I couldn't find a spot for Tony! Toni! Toné!'s "Feels Good," but what would it replace?

Song of the year
Public Enemy, “Welcome to the Terrordome.”  During my first two years in college, Public Enemy were the most inescapable topic of conversation among my peer group, which is no surprise, since they were far and away the most notorious and exciting act in popular music.  Well, maybe N.W.A. was close.  Possibly I'm just inflating the importance of this in retrospect because of the wall-to-wall PE coverage in The Village Voice, but it seemed like every week the crew provoked some new media firestorm; Professor Griff dissed the Jews, Chuck fired Griff, they supposedly broke up, Chuck threatened a journalist, their label was dropping them, no it wasn't, the new record got delayed, it got delayed again, etc.  Meanwhile, white people were legitimately terrified of them.  Not like today, when crackers spout off pro forma about the baggy pants and the white Ts and grills and lyrics with no redeeming social value, but nobody is genuinely worried Ludacris will jeopardize his movie career by menacing you at the Vanity Fair shindig after the Oscars.  Back in the day, Flav was not about to host Saturday Night Live, and you couldn't toss a rock without smiting some pale individual convinced that Carlton Ridenhour and his crew of paramilitaries was planning to storm the city center with automatic weapons and grenades, impose martial law, and begin a vicious campaign of wife-fucking the likes of which honky society had never seen.  "Terrordome" is a Hall of Fame emcee at the absolute peak of his powers, and he certainly wasn't backing down from anybody.  For density of ideas and imagery, tongue-throttling internal rhymes, alliteration, assonance, audacity, no one ever did it better than Chuck.

1991

Albums
1.  Sonny Sharrock Ask the Ages
2.  A Tribe Called Quest The Low-End Theory
3.  Ice Cube Death Certificate
4.  Black Sheep A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
5.  De La Soul De La Soul Is Dead
6.  Mr. Bungle Mr. Bungle
7.  Slint Spiderland
8.  Nation of Ulysses 13-Point Program to Destroy America
9.  Ween The Pod
10. House of Freaks Cakewalk

What do you mean, "Where's Nevermind?"  Lemme tell you, buddy, it ain't number 11, either.  That'd probably be Fishbone's The Reality of My Surroundings or fIREHOSE's Flyin' the Flannel.  Anyway, I'd rather talk about my number-one album, which is sort of obscure.  Sonny Sharrock was a free-jazz guitar prodigy in the late 60s and early 70s; he wailed away, uncredited, on Miles Davis's A Tribute to Jack Johnson.  Then he disappeared for more than a decade, giving up music altogether to work with developmentally-disabled kids.  In the mid-80s he reemerged on a series of compelling solo joints and with the art-skronk supergroup Last Exit.  For Ask the Ages he wrote six simple chord progressions, enlisted Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones to help him out.  Almost immediately after getting it in the can he dropped dead trying to be heart-smart, jogging on a treadmill.  Ask the Ages is a wholly instrumental record of what I guess most folks would call jazz but is equally correctly described as blues and is really just music.  It's astoundingly intense music, deeply mournful and profoundly thrilling and effectively a grand tour of the most significant African American musical achievements of the 20th century.  Not only do think it's better than The Low-End Theory, I don't think it's a close question.  Looking back on this list, I have to say that Death Certificate has not aged all that well; if I had to re-rank, I might flip it with De La Soul Is Dead, which confused me back in May '91 'cause it was so different from 3 Feet High and Rising.  The Pod is the single funniest rock record of all time, but I cannot guarantee most people will find "Pollo Asado"—three full minutes, and to be honest it feels much longer, which is kind of the point, of two stoned fellows ordering much more Mexican food than they could possibly eat—even 10% as hilarious as I do.  You could hardly name a more obvious case of self-sabotage; the songs are either jokes or fantastic, melodic pop-rock songs performed like they're jokes, in a manner calculated to induce maximum legal levels of annoyance.  If that doesn't sound like a good time to you, you're not alone.

Singles
1.  Geto Boys “Mind Playin’ Tricks on Me”
2.  Public Enemy “By the Time I Get to Arizona”
3.  LL Cool J “Mama Said Knock You Out”
4.  Uncle Tupelo “Gun”
5.  Ice Cube “Dead Homiez”
6.  Nirvana “Aneurysm”
7.  Naughty by Nature “O.P.P.”
8.  Prince “Gett Off”
9.  Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
10. Black Sheep “The Choice Is Yours”

You have to remember, the first Geto Boys record was a big cause celebre in 1990.  The mass-media scuttlebutt was it was even ruder and more intolerable than N.W.A. shouting about fucking the po-lice and life ain't nothin' but bitches and money.  Most of the anti-buzz centered on "Mind of a Lunatic," with its slasher-movie rape-and-murder scenarios.  Anyway, the chorus of disapproval carpet-bombed the popular imagination to the point that my father, not normally too tied-in to youth culture, asked me to pick up a copy of the record for him.  I duly did so, and after listening to the first side, from the Profanity 101 primer "Fuck 'Em" through "Mind of a Lunatic" (dig it: "I'll blow your motherfuckin' house up/And if your wife and kids still inside/(Beat)/THEY FUCKED!") I promptly informed Pops that America had nothing to worry about.  On that first record at least, Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill were more out to rattle cages than anything else, not that you could blame them.  Which is why "Mind Playin' Tricks on Me" was such a blow to the gut when it dropped the next summer.  With its spooky, grimy Isaac Hayes sample and morbid, self-despising rhymes, it was a whole new thing, and definitely a groundbreaking moment in hip-hop, as if the entire genre, coked out of its mind, saw its reflection and recoiled.  Certainly the trunk of the emo Deep South crack-rap tree that towers over our heads today.  No shock value at all, either; "Mind Playin' Tricks on Me" is the rare song where the clean version is actually an improvement over the dirty joint.  By all rights, Bushwick's final verse should descend into cheese, ending with him beating his hands bloody against the concrete flailing at his hallucinations.  But it never does.  I'm not sure there's another emcee that could've pulled it off.  Like Crash Davis said to Sandy Grimes, that's a career, in any league.

Song of the year
Sonny Sharrock, “Many Mansions.”  The most profound achievement on Ask the Ages, if not of the 20th century.  Elvin Jones, about the baddest man in the rhythm business, rolls around his kit for a little while before Charnett Moffett joins and they lock into a bluesy groove.  Then the whole quartet plays the head, Pharoah Sanders blows flames out his face for about four minutes, and then Sonny, heretofore nearly invisible, throws out a snaky rope of guitar that gradually builds into an abusive, incapacitating wail.  The overall effect is literally paralyzing, at least for me.  The best thing about Ask the Ages is not just that it's a session with three of the 20th century's finest, and most adventurous and receptive, musicians, it's that those three guys play together without manifesting any ego whatever.  There were a lot of great, great songs from this year besides "Many Mansions": Spiderland's brain-melting closer (and now children's book) “Good Morning Captain,” with its terrifying whispered climax; Nation of Ulysses' "Aspirin Kid" (the D.C. punk scene's single greatest individual achievement, if you ask me, not that you did); Tribe Called Quest's "Buggin' Out" (I know I'm supposed to say that "Scenario" is my favorite song off The Low-End Theory, not having it); and the number that might turn out to be Richard Thompson's deepest imprint on the musical canon, “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” throughout which Thompson's acoustic is like some gigantic circulatory system coursing energy and beauty across the universe.  I'll put those up against any five songs from any year of my life.

1992

Albums
1.  Guided by Voices Propeller
2.  Beastie Boys Check Your Head
3.  Pavement Slanted and Enchanted
4.  Faith No More Angel Dust
5.  The Pharcyde Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde
6.  Sugar Copper Blue
7.  The Lemonheads It’s a Shame About Ray
8.  Buffalo Tom Let Me Come Over
9.  Showbiz & AG Runaway Slave
10. Flop & the Fall of the Mopsqueezer

By the time 1992 rolled around, Robert Pollard and his band of basement-dwelling drunks had made five records and never played outside Dayton, Ohio.  They made the records themselves, and the records mostly sounded pretty terrible, although the crap fidelity always seemed like a willful choice.  Bob figured, fuck, I'm pushing 35, I've got a wife and two kids, what am I doing, anyhow?  He decided to quit, or at least he said he was quitting, and for a final blowout he wrote about six immortal songs and five other very good ones.  They threw in a handful of band-written joke tunes and a montage of snippets from rejected tracks, and Tobin Sprout contributed the most purely beautiful thing Guided by Voices ever released.  Because it was their swansong, they emptied the change from the ashtray, splurged on a little studio time, did a few overdubs.  They pressed 500 copies of the record, each one with a unique, hand-designed sleeve.  The resulting album was so good that, even though it dropped as the tiniest leaf ruffling the surface of the most boundless ocean, it not only pulled Bob back from his recliner and backyard barbeque but spurred the guy on to one of the most unlikely careers in rock history.  If they ever bring back those Saturday midnight laser light shows choreographed to rock albums at the Museum of Natural History in New York, Propeller is totally the album they should use.  I have to think Bob Pollard would consider that a pretty big honor.  I certainly would.

Singles
1.  Prince “Sexy MF”
2.  Pete Rock & CL Smooth “If It Ain’t Rough, It Ain’t Right”
3.  Ultramagnetic MC’s “Poppa Large”
4.  Beastie Boys “So Whatcha Want”
5.  Dr. Dre f. Snoop Doggy Dogg “Deep Cover”
6.  The Lemonheads “It’s a Shame About Ray”
7.  Pete Rock & CL Smooth “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)”
8.  Cypress Hill “How I Could Just Kill a Man”
9.  Das EFX “They Want EFX”
10. Ice Cube “Wicked”

My friend Dylan used to insist, often upon being introduced to complete strangers, that Prince had written "Sexy MF" about Hillary Clinton.  He did not seriously believe that, but I have to give it to him, it's not as crazy as it sounds at first.  Pete Rock and CL Smooth nab two spots in the top ten; the think piece "They Reminisce Over You" is the one everyone remembers, but I much prefer the "Once in a Lifetime"-sampling party rhymes of "If It Ain't Rough."  Never fails to get me to steppin'.

Song of the year
Guided by Voices, “Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox.”  This song does not rock.  Dig the proggy chromatic bridge.  Wins by a nose over the most bananas posse cut of all time: "Represent," by Showbiz & AG, with help from the late Big L, the flow-free DeShawn (DeShawn is NICE!), and Lord Finesse.  It’s hard to fathom these days, but this was the era where New York crews would save the choicest beat on their record for the posse cut, like with “Scenario” or “Fanatic of the B Word” or “Buddy.”  You don’t see it so much anymore, because sometimes one of the posse jumps up and steals the spotlight, like Dres on “B Word” or Busta Rhymes on “Scenario.”  On "Represent," at least, the rising tide lifts all boats. 

1993

Albums
1.  Fugazi In on the Kill Taker
2.  Liz Phair Exile in Guyville
3.  The Loud Family Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things
4.  Sugar Beaster
5.  De La Soul Buhloone Mindstate
6.  Martin Newell The Greatest Living Englishman
7.  Wu-Tang Clan Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers
8.  Afghan Whigs Gentlemen
9.  Uncle Tupelo Anodyne
10. Cracker Kerosene Hat

People, that is a strong top five.  Truthfully, I have no idea whether I prefer In on the Kill Taker to Exile in Guyville.  They are both indelibly imprinted on the summer of 1993.  Every other Friday night that summer I would hop in my electric-blue Toyota Tercel two-door and drive from St. Louis (where I lived) to Columbia (where I grew up).  I would roll down the windows in the 90-degree murk, turn my feeble stereo up as loud as it could go, and I and the four mild-mannered gentlemen of Fugazi would assault the unsuspecting prairie with speed and fury.  The band, periodically, would slow down; I would not.  Luckily, the car maxed out at about 85 mph. 

11.  The Breeders Last Splash
12.  Yo La Tengo Painful!
13.  Jungle Brothers J. Beez wit the Remedy
14.  PJ Harvey 4-Track Demos
15.  Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream
16.  Superchunk On the Mouth
17.  A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders
18.  Elvis Costello & the Brodsky Quartet The Juliet Letters
19.  Freestyle Fellowship Inner City Griots
20.  Das EFX Straight Up Sewaside

The first year I ranked 20 albums, and rightly so.  Good God, I still love all these records—even Siamese Dream, which I would actively resist hearing ever again.  You can thank The Point, FM 105.7 in St. Louis, MO for that; they played "Disarm" every 15 minutes, and if it wasn't "Disarm" it was "Today," and if it wasn't "Disarm" or "Today" it was "Cherub Rock."  Aaaiiieeee!  Well, maybe I don't really love Midnight Marauders anymore.  Disappointing at the time, it is now almost unlistenably boring.  What are they talking about for 50 minutes?  Full points if you said, "Uh, nothing?"

Singles
1.  Jungle Brothers “40 Below Trooper”
2.  Smashing Pumpkins “Cherub Rock”
3.  Liz Phair “Stratford-on-Guy”
4.  Cypress Hill “Insane in the Brain”
5.  Wu-Tang Clan “C.R.E.A.M.”
6.  Archers of Loaf “Web in Front”
7.  Drive Like Jehu “Hand Over Fist”
8.  Urge Overkill “Sister Havana”
9.  Yo La Tengo “From a Motel 6”
10. Ice Cube f. Das EFX “Check Yo Self”

As a full-length, J. Beez wit the Remedy succumbed just a tad too much to the siren song of the water bong.  At the time, this was kind of a new thing in hip-hop.  In the mid-80s it was more common to hear emcees decrying marijuana use.  A few years later, Eazy proclaimed his love of being fucked up on Olde English 800, but a couple tracks later the pre-Chronic Dre insisted he smoked no reefer because brain damage on the mic don't manage.  The Beasties sampled a bonghit on "Shake Your Rump," but they were white guys, so nobody really jumped aboard that particular train.  It was 1992 when things shifted: Cube smoked out with a lady after the Lakers beat the SuperSonics, Slimkid Tre got his girlfriend's toddler stoned on the first Pharcyde record, and Cypress Hill took the bold step of making enjoyment of the devil weed the primary focal point of their art.  Then at the end of the year The Chronic dropped, and that was the end of that.  I could also cite Divine Styler's Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light, but that was recorded under the influence of something much more severe than mere herb.  Horse tranquilizers, possibly.  Boy, this makes me feel old.  Anyway, the sometimes diffuse production on the third Jungle Brothers record could not suppress the wholeheartedly slamming leadoff track and first single.  How could it?  Try to step to them and you will get stomped, Pac-Man comin' and you gonna get chomped.  Lagging behind, as noted above, I heard "Cherub Rock" way too many times on the radio, and it's not very tuneful even for a Smashing Pumpkins single, but what can I say?  At the time, when Billy Corgan howled "Let me out!" he seemed like he really needed out.

Song of the year
Liz Phair, “Explain It to Me.”  I could've just as easily picked the transcendent short story "Divorce Song" or "Fuck and Run," which left thousands of schlubby fanboys awestruck, empathetic, and painfully engorged.  I mean no disparagement of Exile by ranking it second on the year; its high points are as dizzying as anything I've ever heard.  Liz Phair was a lyrical and compositional autodidact so idiosyncratic she was able to have a career only by allowing the industry to break her.  Whatever you think of her post-Exile work—and it ain't nearly as bad as you've been told—there's no denying the standard deviation between her and the average pop songwriter has shrunk tremendously over the years.  You couldn't expect otherwise; that's what always happens when a someone like Liz engages with the broader public.  The composer who came up with the really fucking clever chromatic progression that drove "Stratford-on-Guy," or the disturbed piano figure of "Canary," or the never-before-or-again-seen melody of "Dance of the Seven Veils"—she's gone for good.  "Explain It to Me" was the song she dedicated to Kurt Cobain at a show in New York the night after the Nirvana guitarist's body was found; presumably she didn't write, couldn't have written it for him, although, given Liz's supernatural abilities, you can't be sure.  In any event, it is distilled ethereal grief.

1994

Albums
1.  Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
2.  Drive Like Jehu Yank Crime
3.  Nas Illmatic
4.  Guided by Voices Bee Thousand
5.  Built to Spill There’s Nothing Wrong with Love
6.  Elvis Costello & the Attractions Brutal Youth
7.  Richard Thompson Mirror Blue
8.  Cardinal Cardinal
9.  Outkast Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
10. The Loud Family The Tape of Only Linda

Still living in St. Louis in the spring of 1994, working a job that frustrated me, biding my time before I decamped for the west coast, I spent a shitload of waking hours in my car—working hard not getting pinned down, driving around town, traveling to outlying areas, listening most of the time to Crooked Rain.  Maybe it's not really the best record of 1994.  It has that slack stretch on side two between "Range Life" and "Fillmore Jive," and these days I have to admit that even some of the first half—I'm thinking "Elevate Me Later" and "Newark Wilder"—are not among Stevie Malkmus's best work.  In the final analysis, Yank Crime is probably the better record.  Where Crooked Rain entranced every indie band and its mother for several years, Yank Crime was so uncompromisingly fierce no one ever ever tried to imitate it.  And then there's Illmatic.  Come to think of it, this year's top five may be even stronger than 1993's.  Brutal Youth and Mirror Blue couldn't even crack it, and those are great, great records I still listen to today.  One year later (see below), either might've been number one.

11.  Liz Phair Whip-Smart
12.  Jawbox For Your Own Special Sweetheart
13.  Frank Black Teenager of the Year
14.  Beck One Foot in the Grave
15.  Keith Murray The Most Beautifullest Thing in This World
16.  Notorious B.I.G. Ready to Die
17.  Ween Chocolate & Cheese
18.  Neil Young & Crazy Horse Sleeps with Angels
19.  Mekons Retreat from Memphis
20.  Scarface The Diary

To use a gastronomic metaphor, Exile in Guyville was the challenging, experimental, austere, but fairly tasty and rewarding multi-course tasting menu, and Whip-Smart is the giant mound of key lime pie you get afterward.  Whipped cream and everything.  Random note: when I loaded Scarface's The Diary onto iTunes, the all-knowing all-media database identified it as The Dairy.

Singles
1.  Craig Mack “Flava in Ya Ear”
2.  Lilys “Ginger”
3.  Guided by Voices “I Am a Scientist”
4.  Whale “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe”
5.  Outkast “Player’s Ball”
6.  Nas “Halftime”
7.  Pavement “Cut Your Hair”
8.  Blur “Girls and Boys”
9.  Ini Kamoze “Here Comes the Hotstepper”
10. Scarface "I Seen a Man Die”

Does Craig Mack really deserve to top this list?  It depends on what you're looking for from a single.  Me, I don't need permanence, or genius, or anything like that.  I just want a moment and a smile, really.  "Flava in Ya Ear" delivers both of those in spades, from the dumb, two-note synth ostinato to the nonsensical Sizzlean reference in the first verse.  Really, this list doesn't slow down much until you get to Ini Kamoze; you could agitate for any of the top eight and I wouldn't fight you.  Lilys take a futile stab at alt-rock radio with a song about my people; Bob Pollard delivers his mission statement and manages to earn the affection even of people who mostly think he's shite; some Swedish loons scream some totally inappropriate baloney about a beat-up homeless prostitute; Outkast and Nas each say hello, America, and it's no surprise we're still listening 15 years later; Pavement willfully abdicate their shot at becoming the voice of a generation; Blur puke up lager on the shores of Ibiza.

Song of the year
Drive Like Jehu, “Luau.”  If you buy only one nine-minute punk-metal waltz about the mass slaughter of haole interlopers by the indigenous people of the Hawai'ian islands this year, be sure and make it "Luau."  You don't get guitar interplay like this off the rack, people; it must be carefully assembled stitch-by-stitch.  John Reis makes like Albert Ayler or somebody on the solo.  And the chorus teaches a valuable lesson: you don't need a melody to be hell of catchy.  Aloha (aloha!), suit up.

1995

Albums
1.  Mobb Deep The Infamous
2.  Pavement Wowee Zowee
3.  The Pharcyde Labcabincalifornia
4.  Fugazi Red Medicine
5.  Palace Music Viva Last Blues
6.  Bjork Post
7.  Ben Folds Five Ben Folds Five
8.  Raekwon Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
9.  Aceyalone All Balls Don’t Bounce
10. Sonic Youth Washing Machine

Y'all know what I think about The Infamous.  Pavement holds down the number-two spot with their third straight meisterwerk, narrowly edging out the Pharcyde's just-slightly-overlong swansong.  Throughout Labcabincalifornia, Fatlip woozily moves in and out of focus like a ghost.  Registering as much by his absence as his presence, he startles you right as you start to forget him.  He correctly described the phenomenon: his style is more unknown than what happens after death.

11.  Archers of Loaf Vee Vee
12.  Yo La Tengo Electr-o-Pura
13.  King Crimson Thrak
14.  The Flaming Lips Clouds Taste Metallic
15.  The Dismemberment Plan !
16.  Neil Young Mirror Ball
17.  Stereolab Emperor Tomato Ketchup
18.  Elastica Elastica
19.  Spiritulalized Pure Phase
20.  Rocket from the Crypt Scream, Dracula, Scream!

I don't listen to any of these records that much these days.  This was the beginning of my alienation from pop music.  What can I say, I was in graduate school and running with a bad crowd.

Singles
1.  Archers of Loaf “Harnessed in Slums”
2.  Bjork “Army of Me”
3.  The Pharcyde “Runnin’”
4.  Guided by Voices “Motor Away”
5.  Rocket from the Crypt “On a Rope”
6.  Beastie Boys “Sure Shot”
7.  King Crimson “One Time”
8.  Yo La Tengo “Tom Courtenay”
9.  Shaggy “Boombastic”
10. Foo Fighters “I’ll Stick Around”

Take a quick look at the video for "Harnessed in Slums"—could anything be more 1995 than that?  The last gasp of the punk-rock insurgency, the determined ordinary-guy sensibility, the cheaply ironic embrace of the uncool.  But don't hold it against the song, which, rumor had it, nearly got them signed to Maverick Records by Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone Penn Ritchie.  The chorus messily slew me back then and continues to slay me today.  Especially the part about the thugs and scum and punks and freaks who are harnessed in slums but they wanna be free.  Anyone who's ever felt shat upon (i.e., everybody) can identify.  I defy you to find me a pricklier guitar tone.

Song of the year
Mobb Deep f. Ghostface Killah, Raekwon & Big Noyd, “Right Back at You.”  P's first eight bars—"Run for your life/Boy, you wanna get your heat?/Whatever/We could die together/As long as I send your maggot ass to the essence/I don't give a fuck about my presence"—are really legitimately chilling.  Come back in 50 years, when hip-hop has gone through God knows what all manner of expansion, contraction, inversion, etc. and we're all even more jaded than we are today, and they'll still be really legitimately chilling.  They transcend mere bravado, machismo, and blood-and-guts horror; they're on some Dante Alighieri type shit.

1996

Albums
1.  De La Soul Stakes Is High
2.  Scud Mountain Boys Massachusetts
3.  The Loud Family Interbabe Concern
4.  Sleater-Kinney Call the Doctor
5.  Idaho Three Sheets to the Wind
6.  Nas It Was Written
7.  Maxwell Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite
8.  Archers of Loaf All the Nations Airports
9.  Grifters Ain’t My Lookout
10. Olivia Tremor Control Music from the Unrealized Film Script “Dusk at Cubist Castle”

Stakes Is High is my favorite hip-hop album ever and almost certainly my favorite record of the 90s.  Everything about it is basically flawless, except maybe the dismissals of bling-rap that metastasized into the underground vs. commercial rap fracture that hasn't healed yet.  They even drag a solid guest shot out of Lonnie "Common Sense" Lynn, despite the gratuitous "taking dives like Greg Louganis and his gay ass."  (It's easy to forget these days that Com once was not entirely terrible, but he was always at least intermittently weak.)  The record had everything.  Not just, but especially, the lyrics ("while others represent, I present my rep"), and the production, and the flow from track to track.  A third consecutive reinvention and fourth straight killer from the genre's greatest artists.  I probably overrated Massachusetts, a lot of which now sounds like a dreary genre exercise.  It Was Written is reflexively disrespected because of the pop moves of the singles and the long shadow of Illmatic, but listen again and you might hear the sound of a great young emcee expanding his reach while sacrificing nothing.  The beats aren't as good as on the debut, but they never would be again.  All the Nations Airports stands so tall because of Eric Bachmann, a phenomenal singer and the finest lyricist ("Strangled by the Stereowire"!) in 90s U.S. indie music.  It's not the Archers' best record, but it's Bachmann's best performance.  Two years later, on White Trash Heroes, with his band starting to peak now Al, he smothered his rage in vocal treatments before breaking up the group and dedicating himself to a life of folk music.  Nobody remembers the Grifters, but they were a tremendous combo in their day.  Sorry to use an analogy so pompous, but in this case I think it makes sense: If Guided By Voices were the Beatles of drunk Midwestern 90s four-track bands, the Grifters were the Stones.

11.  Sammy Tales of Great Neck Glory
12.  Outkast ATLiens
13.  Tori Amos Boys for Pele
14.  Dr. Octagon Dr. Octagonecologyst
15.  DJ Shadow Endtroducing …
16.  Ghostface Killah Ironman
17.  Neil Young & Crazy Horse Broken Arrow
18.  Robyn Hitchcock Moss Elixir
19.  Pulp Different Class
20.  Wrens Secaucus

Strong year—no room for Lilys' Better Can't Make Your Life Better or GBV's final stab at rawk greatness Under the Bushes Under the Stars.  Why is that Sammy record so memorable, even now?  They were slagged so hard as derivative, and sonically I would agree with you, but their lyrics really set you down in a specific, sharply-drawn time and place, way more than Pavement's ever did.  That matters.  UGK's colossal Ridin' Dirty would have made this list somewhere, maybe the top five, if I'd heard it in 1996.  I'm not sure many people outside of the Houston metro area did.

Singles
1.  Smashing Pumpkins “1979”
2.  Pulp “Common People”
3.  Outkast “Elevators (Me n’ You)”
4.  De La Soul “Stakes Is High”
5.  Maxwell “’Til the Cops Come Knocking”
6.  Sammy "Neptune Ave. (Ortho Hi Rise)"
7.  Morcheeba “Tape Loop”
8.  Quad City DJs “Come n’ Ride It (The Train)”
9.  Underworld “Born Slippy”
10. Jeru the Damaja “Ya Playin’ Yaself"

The Pumpkins are not everybody's cup of meat, but who doesn't love "1979"?  It's that first afternoon you ever got high behind the hedge, the first night exploring beyond the boundaries at your local club, and all the subsequent nights after you figure out the boundaries were never really there to begin with.  It's the lights of your hometown fading in the distance as you leave for greener pastures.  It's the first time you saw that band and felt your life change as the sweat rolled down the small of your back and then the moment, somewhat later but maybe not too much, when the same band no longer meant quite so much anymore and it felt like a friend or relative had died.  It's the kiss in an uncomfortable position in the car seat, vinyl stuck to your bare thigh.  It's the first day of school and the junior prom.  It's the beginning, middle, and end of your youth, all at once.  Only pop music can accomplish that sort of fusion of moments.

Song of the year
Scud Mountain Boys, “Knievel.”  As Max Bemis would tell you, "It's a metaphor, fool."  The bridge of this song is like facing the sunrise with your eyes sewn open: it couldn't be simpler, and it knocks me on my ass every time.  "Brakes" by De La and "Anonymous" by Sleater-Kinney and the stunning "A Sound Awake" by Idaho are in the running as well.

1997

Albums
1.  Yo La Tengo I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One
2.  Spiritualized Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
3.  Modest Mouse The Lonesome Crowded West
4.  Ween The Mollusk
5.  Built to Spill Perfect from Now On
6.  Stereolab Dots and Loops
7.  Belle & Sebastian If You’re Feeling Sinister
8.  The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified
9.  Elliott Smith Either/Or
10. Tobin Sprout Moonflower Plastic (Welcome to My Wigwam)

1997 being the height of my late-20s jam-band-inspired alienation from pop music, I only bothered to list ten records.  At the time at least, trying to sort through the merits of When I Was Born for the 7th Time vs. Baduizm vs. Dig Me Out didn't seem worth it.  I would've been happy to give you a comparative analysis of numerous recent live performances of "Tweezer."  (December 6 at the Palace of Auburn Hills was especially strong.)  You probably notice the list I did compile is pretty heavily weighted toward big-statement guitar rock.  No black folks whatsoever, embarrassingly.  Pretty sure I'm the only person in the world who liked Dots and Loops this much.

Singles
1.  Missy Elliott “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
2.  Mark Morrison “Return of the Mack”
3.  Chumbawamba “Tubthumping”
4.  The Mighty Mighty Bosstones “The Impression That I Get”
5.  Notorious B.I.G. “Hypnotize”
6.  Belle & Sebastian “Lazy Line Painter Jane”
7.  Blackstreet “No Diggity”
8.  Daft Punk “Da Funk”
9.  Radiohead “Paranoid Android”
10. Cornershop “Brimful of Asha”

The fact that, within one four-year period, I gave my best-single vote to both "Flava in Ya Ear" and "The Rain" suggests I enjoy a certain type of abrasively catchy pop single.  On the other tine of the fork, "Return of the Mack" is not abrasive at all, but it still makes me about as happy as any song I've ever heard.  It comes on the radio, I will be singin' and dancin' in no time.  You've been warned.

Song of the year
Spiritualized, “Cop Shoot Cop.”  It's 17 minutes long, half of it a self-obliterating blizzard of guitar squawk and howl.  The biggest miracle is that it's not just listenable all the way through but compelling.  Its swampy groove conjures the fatalist menace at the ruptured heart of blues-based music.  Dr. John sits in on piano, the lyrics bite John Prine, and I assume the title was inspired by the New York clang-jazz band of the same name, which, if so, is that particular band's greatest contribution to music.  That's not even a dis; like I may have mentioned, I think this song is great.  Yo La Tengo kept Jason Pierce from claiming the best-album crown this year (and was he ever pissed at the ceremony, he rented a tux and everything), but paid back the pride of Hoboken in this category—I Can Hear the Heart's squalling closer "We're an American Band" is my runner-up.

1998

Albums
1.  Pulp This Is Hardcore
2.  Archers of Loaf White Trash Heroes
3.  Pernice Brothers Overcome by Happiness
4.  The Loud Family Days for Days
5.  Outkast Aquemini
6.  Fugazi End Hits
7.  Drive-By Truckers Gangstabilly
8.  Oranger Doorway to Norway
9.  Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos The Prosthetic Cubans
10. The Coup Steal This Album

I guess you could convince me that Doorway to Norway is not the greatest rock-roll album title of all time.  I'm willing to listen to alternative arguments, but you'll be playing from behind.  Like most Americans, I'd never thought a whole lot about Pulp, and even after "Common People" I wasn't expecting any kind of album-length masterpiece from the pride of Sheffield, England, but This Is Hardcore lapped the field on my ballot.  It's chock-full of that sweet-hearted, overemotive, oppressive desolation I love so much.  We said goodbye to the Archers, who started off as one-note bent-string Pavement fans and left the stage as the most exciting and adventurous rock band in America.  White Trash Heroes shows you more release points than David Cone, hopscotching between straight-on rockers, slinky vocoder-dappled pseudo-funk, alienating howl and thrash, pub singalongs—ample artistry, prodigous power, not always so much control.  We said hello to Drive-By Truckers, who only showed about half the repertoire but did it with such panache that who cares, and the Pernice Brothers, who were never as disarmingly wrist-slitting as on their debut.  It took me a long time to get into Days for Days, with its arty link tracks and Scott Miller overcollaborating with his slightly less talented bandmates.  Even now, I nearly never listen to it, but that doesn't mean it's not a great album.

Singles
1.  Pulp “This Is Hardcore”
2.  Noreaga “Superthug”
3.  Robert Pollard “Subspace Biographies”
4.  The Coup “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night”
5.  Public Enemy “He Got Game”
6.  Outkast “Rosa Parks”
7.  Aaliyah “Are You That Somebody”
8.  Fatboy Slim “The Rockafeller Skank”
9.  Bran Van 3000 “Drinking in L.A.”
10. Propellerheads f. Shirley Bassey “History Repeating”

This list is okay, but sure tails off toward the end.  I was not really engaged with pop music in 1998; maybe you can tell.  "Superthug" has a young and hungry Neptunes beat, but more importantly Nore is his usual crazy self, hip-hop's own Norm Crosby.  He opens up with "I light a candle/Run laps around the English Channel."  Later he compares and contrasts: "All our whips got navigation/While your whips is just garbation."  As far as I can tell, this neologism has never caught on among the American professional class; whenever I tell somebody at my office that their ideas are just garbation, they look at me like I have sprouted a third eye in the center of my forehead.  Maybe they just think I'm a jackass.

Song of the year
Pulp, “This Is Hardcore.”  The Archers' stress nightmare "Slick Tricks and Bright Lights" was a close second, but this was Jarvis Cocker's year.  Also the year of El Nino, blanketing my entire life with a constant, dismal, narcotic rain.

1999

Albums
1.  Mos Def Black on Both Sides
2.  Hefner The Fidelity Wars
3.  Randy Newman Bad Love
4.  Lilys The 3 Way
5.  My Morning Jacket The Tennessee Fire
6.  Prince Paul A Prince Among Thieves
7.  Built to Spill Keep It Like a Secret
8.  Wilco Summerteeth
9.  Beth Orton Central Reservation
10. Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department

Incredibly strong year.  Look at that top 10.  This is right up there with 1993 or 1994 or 1989 or 2002 (see below).  I know "Ms. Fat Booty" has become a cancer propagated by piss-poor DJs at piss-poor clubs, but Dante Smith's performance on Black on Both Sides is still bewitchingly self-confident ten years later.  You could make an equally compelling argument for Darren Hayman of Hefner, squeaky, nasal, pubescent, pitch-averse voice and all.  I'm not sure anybody in rock has written about heterosexual relationships with as little pretense and as much empathy and clarity and avoidance of cliches.  Bad Love and The 3 Way are a step down but still five-star efforts in their own right.  Randy Newman hadn't been this good since the underestimated Little Criminals, and Kurt Heasley had never been anywhere near this good before.  The Tennessee Fire, a prodigal effort from a genuinely guileless artist with an angel's voice drenched in gallons of reverb, barely hangs on for the number-five slot.  Incredibly strong year.  I also should mention Terry Allen's Salivation, which I didn't hear until 2006 or so but would've contended for (and quite possibly taken) the top spot if I'd had a chance to rank it.

11.  Olivia Tremor Control Black Foliage: Animation Music
12.  Tom Waits Mule Variations
13.  Drive-By Truckers Pizza Deliverance
14.  Mr. Bungle California
15.  The Dismemberment Plan Emergency & I
16.  Les Savy Fav The Cat and the Cobra
17.  Bonnie “Prince” Billy I See a Darkness
18.  MF Doom Operation: Doomsday!
19.  The Negro Problem Joys & Concerns
20.  Gomez Liquid Skin

Mr. Bungle, a lot of people did not take them seriously.  I would contend that was a mistake.  You might know them from their All-World vocal presence, Mike Patton.  But everyone in the band wrote and contributed.  They did about everything a six-piece could do musically, often at once, as a result of which they were a hard taste to acquire.  It wasn't just the musical chaos; the debut was steeped in pornsick scatology and was not a safe space for women.  Still, it was just musically bananas, for which I guess you have to credit John Zorn, 1991's Best Producer, but not entirely; Disco Volante (1995), recorded without Zorn, is just as musically peripatetic, only without repeating a single move from the first record.  Sure, a lot of it is completely unlistenable, as deliberately grating as U.S. Maple or The Ex or bands like that who hate their audience.  I have no doubt the suits at Warner Bros. were furious.  California, their third and final effort, is much more linear, basically just ten pop songs.  But most of them are outstanding.  I wish they hadn't split up.  You can't just replace a combo like that.  Does the fact that 69 Love Songs didn't make my top 20 mean I don't know anything about music?  Honestly, I felt it reached a point of significantly diminishing returns.

Singles
1.  Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way”
2.  Les Savy Fav “Our Coastal Hymn”
3.  Pharoahe Monch “Simon Says”
4.  Len “Steal My Sunshine”
5.  Macy Gray “I Try”
6.  Mos Def “Umi Says”
7.  Fatboy Slim “Praise You”
8.  Gang Starr “Discipline”
9.  The Flaming Lips “Race for the Prize”
10. Lo-Fidelity All-Stars f. Pigeonhead “Battleflag”

I'm trying to remember why I chose "I Want It That Way" as the best single of 1999 and I'm drawing a blank.  It's not a terrible pick; I still really like the song.  But I think I got my top four exactly backwards.

Song of the year
Hefner, “I Love Only You.”  I know we all make fun of that scene from Say Anything with John Cusack and his boombox and "In Your Eyes," since it's so pre-irony 80s, but we all want to believe in the power of such gestures.  I suspect it's those willing to show ass from time to time, and willing to do so even after previous forays into ass-showing have turned out badly, who have created the lion's share the truly great art this planet has ever seen, as opposed to cynical wallflowers like you and me.  Here, Darren Hayman takes you on a guided tour of his scarred romantic psyche from pre-adolescence to the present day, all in service of winning back the girl who no longer loves him and he knows it.  On the right day, if everything breaks just right, you could even see it working.  If you don't sit up a little straighter when D jumps an octave in that last chorus, you must be German.  Runner-up: Randy Newman's "Shame," the single funniest track of the guy's long career.

2000

Albums
1.  Ryan Adams Heartbreaker
2.  Hot Snakes Automatic Midnight
3.  D'Angelo Voodoo
4.  Marah Kids in Philly
5.  Scritti Politti Anomie & Bonhomie
6.  Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele
7.  Outkast Stankonia
8.  Hefner We Love the City
9.  Lil Wayne Lights Out
10. Silkworm Lifestyle

Right.  If I hadn't lost my credibility already, I'm sure I have now.  I will bet you think, not unreasonably, that Ryan Adams is ridiculous, a peripatetic and formalistic craftsman ungrounded in anything substantive.  You know: the white Lenny Kravitz.  Form for miles, no substance whatsoever.  I'm not gonna sit here and defend anything that came after Heartbreaker, and the past eight years have made even Heartbreaker seem mannered.  All I can say is it didn't register that way at the time.  The simple, compelling power of the melody and arrangement of "My Winding Wheel": anyone in the history of recorded music would envy that.  There's not too much of the post-Gold Adams and his schlocky choruses ("Come Pick Me Up" and "Why Do They Leave?," maybe).  Most of the record is lonesome and despairing, but so uncluttered it never feels heavy-handed.  There's also odd moments of real, beautiful poetry, like the weird little Dylanesque mumble "Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains)" and the Rubber Soul-era McCartney number "Amy."  I don't listen to the album that much these days, but I think it's Ryan's subsequent work that's retired it from my rotation.  He's kept re-writing the same songs for a while now, but each copy owns less and less soul, like the degradation of an analog signal over generations of reel-to-reel tape.  The more the signal decays, the harder it is to tell whether there was anything there to begin with.

11.  Richard Davies Barbarians
12.  Belle & Sebastian Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
13.  Warren Zevon Life'll Kill Ya
14.  Modest Mouse The Moon and Antarctica
15.  Joe Pernice Big Tobacco
16.  Lambchop Nixon
17.  The Fucking Champs IV
18.  Dead Prez Let’s Get Free
19.  Blonde Redhead Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons
20.  The White Stripes De Stijl

Maybe the New Pornographers' debut, Mass Romantic, belongs on this list, but what would I get rid of?  To be honest that record never really grabbed me, as nice as it was melodically.  The production on Electric Version is so much more interesting, not nearly as tethered to guitar-centric power-pop. 

Singles
1.  Outkast “Ms. Jackson”
2.  Fatboy Slim f. Macy Gray “Demons”
3.  Dead Prez “Hip-Hop”
4.  Sleater-Kinney “All Hands on the Bad One”
5.  Britney Spears “Oops! … I Did It Again”
6.  The New Pornographers “Letter from an Occupant”
7.  At the Drive-In “One-Armed Scissor”
8.  Outkast “B.O.B.”
9.  Radiohead “Optimistic”
10. D’Angelo “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”

If you doubt the merits of my number-five single, just check out how well it holds up in a different context.  And try to ignore the snarkily self-amused audience.  It's no joke.

Song of the year
The Loud Family, “One Will Be the Highway.”  The uneven Attractive Nuisance was not Scott Miller's best work, but lookit—many of us, me included, have given up on the dream of being a rock star and the voice of a generation and felt somewhat the worse for it.  Scott Miller, unlike me and many others, had at least some of the qualities necessary to become a rock star: a wonderful gift for melody, a brilliant ability to turn a phrase, a true craftsman's desire to hone each song to jewel-like perfection.  The fact that he never made it despite his gifts might offer some solace to the rest of us, but not much to Scott; "One Will Be the Highway" is his good-bye to all that, watching from the wings as Aimee Mann or somebody and her backup band scurry off to the afterparty and the tour bus and the next show, and knowing he's due at work the next day to do some software coding and then home for dinner with the family.  I hope Scott is not, at the end of the day, too disappointed.  He has given me much more than Steven Tyler or Michael Stipe or any of those clowns.  He's a Hall of Famer in my book, all day long and twice on Sunday.  The runner-up to "Highway" is probably D'Angelo's "The Root."  Voodoo can get a little samey when you listen to it all at once, but the backing track on "The Root" stands out for its funky plod, all gelatinous and narcotic, while the vocal reaches new heights of wronged-lover despair.  And let's not forget Green Gartside's semi-coherent (but astonishingly beautiful) album-closing murder mystery, "Brushed with Oil, Dusted with Powder."  In the back of a squad car, the cops ask him how it started; Green answers "I wish I knew."  He's not being evasive or smartass, it's the best answer he can give.  Several songs from the flawless first side of Kids in Philly also deserve consideration.  At his best, Dave Bielanko can really write a fucking lyric.  "It's Only Money, Tyrone," with its huge chorus and long catalog of items lost, abandoned, or buried in the Schuylkill River, is probably the best, but I have a real soft spot for "The Catfisherman," both because no acoustic guitar has ever rocked harder and on account of the sharpness of the lyrical characterization: a middle-aged guy is taking his life in his hands fishing in the river among derelicts and junkies, he's got a cooler with a couple beers, a joint in his pocket, he's not afraid of you, you should be afraid of him.  You, middle-class whitey consumer of Marah's music, might in real life look at such a person and think he's had a rough go of it and you wouldn't trade places with him for a second, but fuck you, college boy, he feels the same about you.  He says as much, in one of my favorite single lines from any song: "I got a radio playing blues, soul, and funk/I only get one station, it's the one I want."

2001

Albums
1.  Spoon Girls Can Tell
2.  Ian Hunter Rant
3.  My Morning Jacket At Dawn
4.  Love As Laughter Sea to Shining Sea
5.  Pernice Brothers The World Won’t End
6.  Fugazi The Argument
7.  Spiritualized Let It Come Down
8.  Nas Stillmatic
9.  The Avalanches Since I Left You
10. The Constantines The Constantines

Britt Daniel's perfect little jewel of a breakup record took the trophy, but I think maybe I should've given the nod to Rant.  Ian Hunter did not make his name writing happy songs, but Rant truly was the most-appropriately named album of 2001.  Ignore the tacked-on opening "rocker" "Still Love Rock & Roll"; start with track two.  For the next 50 minutes, you will listen as Ian struggles with the reality that he is 60 and no longer a musical celebrity of any consequence; he hasn't lived in England in decades and when he goes back to visit it doesn't feel like home; he barely recognizes it and the natives—his people!—eye him warily; all he sees is council-flat squalor and crime and no place for working people.  He is adrift and believes he will die that way.  I like comparing Ian to Roger Waters; both are cranky and obsessed with the decay of post-war England and the cheap stupidity of human beings.  The difference is Ian is not an asshole.  While Roger pontificates about world leaders in thrall to the corrupting sway of power and suggests he would've done much better and why doesn't anybody listen to him, Ian sees everybody and everything on a personal, human level, and in the end leaves himself in the worst shape of all.  Rant is probably the best record he's ever made.

11.  The Coup Party Music
12.  The Dismemberment Plan Change
13.  Bran Van 3000 Discosis
14.  The Strokes Is This It
15.  Jay-Z The Blueprint
16.  Palomar Palomar II
17.  Hefner Dead Media
18.  De La Soul AOI: Bionix
19.  Ted Leo/Pharmacists The Tyranny of Distance
20.  Aesop Rock Labor Days

I never understood why everybody hated the Strokes so much.  Well, sure I did.  They were rich kids who got famous without paying their dues.  Everybody hates those sorts of people.  But Is This It was a good record, right?  That's the most important thing still, isn't it?

Singles
1.  The Avalanches “Frontier Psychiatrist”
2.  The Coup “Wear Clean Draws”
3.  The White Stripes “Hotel Yorba”
4.  Missy Elliott “Get Ur Freak On”
5.  Nas “One Mic”
6.  Spoon “Everything Hits at Once”
7.  Bran Van 3000 f. Curtis Mayfield “Astounded”
8.  Aesop Rock “Daylight”
9.  PJ Harvey “This Is Love”
10. Basement Jaxx “Where’s Your Head At”

Song of the year
My Morning Jacket, “Phone Went West.”  For sure, At Dawn was the 2001 album that ended the strongest, with "Phone Went West" and then the doom-folk lead balloon "Strangulation!"  If they gave out Nobel Prizes for lilting reggaeish numbers specifically crafted for play at outdoor summer concerts under the stars for audiences high on marijuana, "Phone Went West" would win that specific Nobel Prize.  Maybe that doesn't sound so appealing, I dunno.  If you want the poetic take, you could say it starts off like tree-splintered moonlight drifting across the porch of a woodland cabin and ends up as brilliant yellow morning sunlight poured through the window of the same cabin.  If you want the crass approach, it's a song you could fuck to.  If that's your bag, I mean.

2002

Albums
1.  Drive-By Truckers Southern Rock Opera
2.  Mclusky Mclusky Do Dallas
3.  Gomez In Our Gun
4.  Nas God’s Son
5.  Tori Amos Scarlet’s Walk
6.  Pulp We Love Life
7.  For Against Coalesced
8.  DJ Shadow The Private Press
9.  The Decemberists Castaways & Cutouts
10. Edan Primitive Plus

Despite its flaws, Southern Rock Opera is an undeniable record.  Yes, the concept is shaky; sure, the first disc doesn't hang together at all; you are correct that there are a couple of truly bad songs.  It still has more life than most artists generate over the course of a whole career.  But really, you could give the belt to anything in the top five and I would understand.  The Mclusky record is so fierce and funny and assaultive, Steve Albini's best production job since Surfer Rosa.  Maybe Woody Guthrie's guitar could kill fascists, but Andy Falkous's guitar can and will kill everyone.  Gomez wrote the year's best batch of songs—smart, tuneful, diverse, brilliantly arranged.  As for Nas, even coming off the strong Stillmatic and the definitive beef-ending haymaker of all time, there was a genuine sense in '02 that he had one foot in the grave creatively.  God's Son explained that this was not the case; each of the immortal first four songs showcases a different aspect of the emcee's greatness.  Then there's Scarlet's Walk, infinitely tighter conceptually than Southern Rock Opera, and probably the only artistic statement about September 11 that's not even a little bit bogus.  Then again, it doesn't contain many tunes you'd play before faceoffs at Rangers games.

11.  The Streets Original Pirate Material
12.  Spoon Kill the Moonlight
13.  RJD2 Deadringer
14.  Neko Case Blacklisted
15.  Interpol Turn on the Bright Lights
16.  Hot Snakes Suicide Invoice
17.  Lambchop Is a Woman
18.  Iron & Wine The Creek Drank the Cradle
19.  Blackalicious Blazing Arrow
20.  The Bevis Frond What Did for the Dinosaurs

Did I really like the Iron & Wine record that much?  I guess I did.

Singles
1.  Nas “Made You Look”
2.  Mclusky “To Hell with Good Intentions”
3.  Blackalicious “Make You Feel That Way”
4.  The Rapture “House of Jealous Lovers”
5.  DJ Shadow “Six Days”
6.  Interpol “PDA”
7.  Jadakiss "Knock Yourself Out"
8.  Electric Six “Danger! High Voltage”
9.  LCD Soundsystem “Losing My Edge"
10. The White Stripes “Fell in Love with a Girl”

"To Hell with Good Intentions" has a Hall of Fame boast, right up there with the crawling kingsnake and the black cat bone and the rest: "My dad is bigger than your dad!/He's got eight cars and a HOUSE IN IRELAND!"  Seriously, can you top that?  (You cannot top that.  He is your mom and he just took you to school in the car of pain.)  Some people think "We take more droooooogs than a to-u-ring funk band!" is better, but c'mon, they stole that line from Bill Hicks.  Much like Denis Leary's whole career.

Song of the year
Drive-By Truckers, “Shut Up and Get on the Plane.”  Call me a redneck if you must, but the awesome chorus ("When it comes your time to go, ain't no good way to go about it/Ain't no use in thinkin' 'bout it, you'll just drive yourself insane/Comes a time for everything, and the time has come for you/To shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane") communicates a sense of bemused resignation and honor and responsibility that I feel deep in my bones.  Context might help; since the Truckers spend more than half of Southern Rock Opera overtly expounding on or at least indirectly referencing Lynyrd Skynyrd, you know the plane's going to crash in the fucking swamp, and the soon-to-be-obsolete Betamax videocassette player will slip from underneath the TV, fly through the cabin, and decapitate the lead singer.  Mike Cooley sings these lyrics in the face of that.  But this was not an easy call; the competition was stiff this year.  We also enjoyed John Darnielle's acme, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," which you may feel verges too close to After-School Special territory, but for me its heart is bigger than the west Texas sky.  And if "Shut Up" is a motivational speech for non-assholes, the best way to get fired up in a moment of need, "Made You Look" is the jam you play when everything's already going your way; it's like distilled self-assurance.  Briefly shaken from his reverie, Nasir casually offers his antagonist peace: "No reason for your mans to panic," he says assuringly, "you don't wanna see no am-ba-lances."

2003

Albums
1.  My Morning Jacket It Still Moves
2.  Okkervil River Down the River of Golden Dreams
3.  The Exploding Hearts Guitar Romantic
4.  The Clientele The Violet Hour
5.  Belle & Sebastian Dear Catastrophe Waitress
6.  The New Pornographers Electric Version
7.  Lilys Precollection
8.  The Decemberists Her Majesty the Decemberists
9.  Viktor Vaughn Vaudeville Villain
10. The Constantines Shine a Light

I rip on a lot of bands for writing bad lyrics, but I still love My Morning Jacket.  Not all of Jim James's lyrics are bad.  "Golden" captures how it must feel to have no choice but to present your art late at night in bars to a bunch of drunks who aren't really paying attention.  But even when they're good, James's lyrics are more about moods and images than narratives or arguments.  And even when they're not good, well, it's still Jim James on the mic, and even his nonsense syllables give me chills.  For sure, he deserves his share of blame for the overabundance of vocal reverb in modern critic-rock, just like you could fault Bob Mould for the fact that all you could hear on most 90s rock records was the rhythm guitar.  But Zen Arcade and Flip Your Wig are still pretty awesome albums.  Elsewhere, D.P. Dumile rips "The Drop" as comprehensively as any emcee ever ripped en-ny-thing.  I thought about featuring some lyrics here in a pull quote, but I know I'd end up quoting the entire song, and even that wouldn't get the awesomeosity across.  Truly, it's all in the delivery.  Vaudeville Villain, hoo man that record starts off strong.  (Falls apart substantially too.) 

11.  The Majesticons Beauty Party
12.  M. Ward Transfiguration of Vincent
13.  The White Stripes Elephant
14.  Metric Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?
15.  Outkast Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
16.  Drive-By Truckers Decoration Day
17.  Ted Leo/Pharmacists Hearts of Oak
18.  Gillian Welch Time (The Revelator)
19.  Non-Prophets Hope
20.  Elvis Costello North

I would've positively made a place on this list for the Fiery Furnaces' debut, Gallowsbird's Bark—closer "We Got Back the Plague" belongs with "Campaigner" and "Sweethearts" in the Presidential Rock Portrait Hall of Fame—but I didn't know that record in 2003, and didn't discover the Furnaces until Blueberry Boat, which persists in annoying the shit out of me to this day.  No big shock, really, that Gallowbird's Bark and Widow City are my two favorite Friedberger products: they're the bluesiest, most aggressive, most guitar-based, and as we know I am Mr. Aggro.

Singles
1.  Dizzee Rascal “Fix Up Look Sharp”
2.  Lyrics Born “Callin’ Out”
3.  Ween “Transdermal Celebration”
4.  Young Gunz “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop”
5.  The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”
6.  Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz “Get Low”
7.  Jay-Z “99 Problems”
8.  Outkast f. Sleepy Brown “The Way You Move”
9.  Basement Jaxx f. Lisa Kekaula “Good Luck”
10. Kelis “Milkshake”

I'm not the type of cracka to tolerate a whole record of Dizzee Rascal.  I tried, tried again, then I stopped.  But often that which massively grates in large doses is startling and irresistible in moderation.  You probably know "Fix Up Look Sharp" is sampled from Billy Squier's breakthrough single "The Big Beat," like so many rap tunes before it.  While we're at it, let's pour a little on the curb for Billy and point out how thoroughly the guy ruled from 1978-81, with "Big Beat" and "Everybody Wants You" and "In the Dark" and "The Stroke."  That customer could write a radio single.

Song of the year
Drive-By Truckers, “My Sweet Annette.”  Yes, two in a row for the Truckers—one for Cooley last time, now one for Patterson Hood.  Supposedly a true story about Hood's grandfather accidentally falling in love with his fiancee's maid-of-honor at his rehearsal dinner and leaving his sweet Annette standing at the altar.  My family doesn't have stories like that in its past, or if it did it repressed and discarded them.  We Irish are too best by guilt and duty and emphysema to manage that sort of heedless Romanticism.  I'd like to think Hood's family has a tradition of choosing to look on the bright side, forgiving and move on, focusing on the creation that comes from conflict and not the destruction.  I'd like to think he and his family are the better for it.  I'd like to think there are families out there who treasure as intimate narratives the sorts of things others would suppress as unforgivable transgressions.  "My Sweet Annette" tells a story that's equally sad and ecstatic; it conveys profound empathy and a total absence of regret, each in its proper place.

2004

Albums
1.  Madvillain Madvillainy
2.  The Streets A Grand Don’t Come for Free
3.  Joanna Newsom The Milk-Eyed Mender
4.  Kanye West The College Dropout
5.  Rilo Kiley More Adventurous
6.  Nas Street’s Disciple
7.  The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me
8.  Mos Def The New Danger
9.  Camper Van Beethoven New Roman Times
10. Mannie Fresh The Mind of Mannie Fresh

More Adventurous came out of nowhere for me—I had never thought too much about Rilo Kiley before I heard it.  I probably dismissed them reflexively, like an asshole, since they were child stars singing for Saddle Creek.  But if I had to do these rankings over, it might be my number-one record of 2004.  I'd at least bump it up to third, above Joanna Newsom and Kanye West.  Jenny Lewis is underestimated because she's pretty and flirty and all that, but she's actually one of our foremost lyrical talents.  You don't need to engage with the lyric of "Does He Love You?" to love the song; there's more than enough to appreciate in the lolling backing track, the tormented vocal, and that circular melody that builds to a heart-in-the-throat climax with Lewis singing through a Leslie speaker or something.  But the way Lewis wends her circuitous way to the oh-of-course lyrical punchline, trivial detail by trivial detail, until the non-trivial picture emerges, is fairly remarkable.  In "A Man/Me/Then Jim," Lewis begins singing as a guy talking to his first love about a mutual friend from high school who's just killed himself, interrupts to tell us about her own conversation with a despondent telemarketer, then jumps back to let the suicide himself describe the straw that broke his back.  The shifting perspectives are ike a Robert Altman thing, all cross-talk and despair at the vast disappointments of American adulthood.  If you prefer traditional linearity, Lewis can do that too: see the title track's tender humanism.  She's very softhearted; she stays with a lover who brings her down.  "You're not happy," she explains to him, "but you're funny."  Don't believe the hype, or the fact that Lewis took it easy for most of Under the Blacklight and then fell asleep altogether on Acid Tongue; I still think she is a major songwriting talent.

11.  Mastodon Leviathan
12.  Murs 3:16 the 9th Edition
13.  Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter Oh, My Girl
14.  De La Soul The Grind Date
15.  Mission of Burma ONoffON
16.  Comets on Fire Blue Cathedral
17.  Espers Espers
18.  Dungen Ta Det Lugnt
19.  The Futureheads The Futureheads
20.  A.C. Newman The Slow Wonder

I wasn't sure how high to rank Leviathan, which is not the sort of record you want to listen to all that often.  It's pretty unrelenting, and I am no longer 16 years old.  These days I like things that relent.

Singles
1.  Death from Above 1979 “You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine”
2.  The Hold Steady “The Swish”
3.  Mannie Fresh “Real Big”
4.  Les Savy Fav “The Sweat Descends”
5.  Bloc Party “Banquet”
6.  The Futureheads “Decent Days and Nights”
7.  The Streets “Fit But You Know It”
8.  Kanye West f. Twista & Jamie Foxx “Slow Jamz”
9.  The Black Keys “10 A.M. Automatic”
10. The Knife “Heartbeats”

It bears repeating just what these singles lists prove: it takes almost nothing to make me happy.  "You're a Woman, I'm a Machine" is Exhibit 3,052 in support of this particular theorem.  Death from Above were two longhairs from Montreal; one played bass through a fuzzbox and the other played drums and sang.  (One was named Cyrus and the other was Jeff and they practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom.)  Anyway, before their first record came out James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy threatened litigation, so they added the "1979" to their name.  I guess that was the year they were born, but it turned an awesome band name into a terrible one, which sounded like Trevor0894 had just registered on gamebattles.com.  Few bands could survive that sort of trauma; DFA79 were not one of them.  The debut was nothing special, but the lead single—two quick verses and choruses at 200 mph, screamed lyrics like NOW THAT IT'S OVER THIS WEIGHT IS OFF MY SHOULDER!!, a somewhat artier, mathy coda—exploded all over the summer of 2004 like a can of Mountain Dew after ten minutes in a paint mixer.  (Hey-yo!)  In local news, Craig Finn rhymes "Neil Schon" with "Nina Simone" and then "Andre Cymone," before reminding us "I survived the 80s one time already/And I don't recall them all that fondly."  You spit your hot fire, Craig.  For what it's worth, Arcade Fire probably would have come in at number 11 with "Rebellion (Lies)."  Much as I make fun of them, I do think that's a terrific single.

Song of the year
Joanna Newsom, “Sadie.”  Newsom has a reputation for artiness, but how do you like these apples?  She will never write a simpler series of chord progessions or a more gorgeous, heartstoppingly direct melody.  Not just that: to go with them she's crafted a poetic but fully intelligible lyric about how much she loves her dog.  Every time she gets to that wonderful valedictory—"so dig up your bone, exhume your pinecone, Sadie"—I mean, gimme a break, buddy.  There is not a dry eye in my house.

2005

Albums
1.  Okkervil River Black Sheep Boy
2.  Edan Beauty and the Beat
3.  The Hold Steady Separation Sunday
4.  Against Me! Searching for a Former Clarity
5.  The White Stripes Get Behind Me Satan
6.  The Clientele Strange Geometry
7.  The Heavenly States Black Comet
8.  Spoon Gimme Fiction
9.  Marah If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry
10. Art Brut Bang Bang Rock & Roll

On his 2002 debut Primitive Plus, Edan challenged fellow hip-hop heads who doubted his admittedly modest rapping skills to what he called "the triathlon."  Maybe you can rock the mic, possibly you can produce or work the wheels of steel, but can you do all three?  In retrospect, I may have overvalued it a little, but Beauty and the Beat is incredibly sonically engrossing, psychedelic but still funky, a seamless fusion of the most disorienting features of the past 40 years of white and black music.  Edan's theory is that when you mix black and white you get some crazy neon rainbow paisley explosion; you wouldn't think so, but turns out he's right.

11.  Lil Wayne Tha Carter II
12.  Maximo Park A Certain Trigger
13.  Why? Elephant Eyelash
14.  Gravenhurst Fires in Distant Buildings
15.  Bart Davenport Maroon Cocoon
16.  Casual Presents Smash Rockwell
17.  Kanye West Late Registration
18.  The New Pornographers Twin Cinema
19.  Bun B Trill
20.  Tom Vek We Have Sound

Too bad Tha Carter II is so uneven.  The singles were all strong; "Shooter" probably should have made the next list.  "Oh No" is even better.  Why?'s Elephant Eyelash was distasteful to me the first time I heard it until I listened a little closer.  The title of "Act Five" refers to the ass end of all those Shakespeare tragedies, when all the bad shit goes down; it's about Yoni Wolf visiting his grandfather in an assisted-living facility.  "All the people who taught me card tricks are dying," the chorus goes.  Existential despair in popular art is somewhat of a cliche these days, but it continues to be effective when approached from new angles.  Wolf is like John McEnroe; he sees angles other people never will.

Singles
1.  Three 6 Mafia “Stay High”
2.  The White Stripes “My Doorbell”
3.  Amerie “1 Thing”
4.  The Game f. 50 Cent “Hate It or Love It”
5.  Against Me! “Don’t Lose Touch”
6.  Bun B f. Young Jeezy & Scarface “Pushin’”
7.  Maximo Park “Going Missing”
8.  Doves “Black and White Town”
9.  LCD Soundsystem “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House”
10. The Clientele “Since K Got Over Me”

It's not really called "Stay High," to be fair.  It was released to radio as "Stay Fly," and labeled the same on Most Known Unknown, since that did not imply use of Schedule I drugs and you couldn't understand what the fuck they were saying on that infectuous, stuttering chorus anyway.  This, come to think of it, as about as strong a top 10 as any of the others above, which makes me happy about myself as well as the state of pop music.  As long as I can find music that moves me on the radio, I feel at home in the world.

Song of the year
Okkervil River, “So Come Back, I Am Waiting.”  Move over, Lord Byron.  This big-r Romantic exclamation might not be my favorite song of all time.  But then again it might be.  You know how it is with Will Sheff; to this day I still believe that no emcee can serve him.  Also sports the most effective key change this side of "Bolero."

*****

That's it for me.  How about y'all?

Unacceptable

Charles "88 Keys" Njapa is a mid-level hip-hop producer and occasional emcee.  He's pretty obscure, but not because he lacks talent.  He's been making records for over a decade, since he donated "Thieves in the Night" to the Black Star record.  Since then, he's worked with Macy Gray and Musiq, among others.  More recently, maybe you dug his beat on Tanya Morgan's "Threemcees," from last year's The Bridge.  I did, anyway, even if it was hardly a standout on that excellent effort.  I'm just speculating, but I'd bet the guy is a hip-hop lifer struggling to get by in what is certainly a very and increasingly competitive marketplace.  So I would like to celebrate the fact that 88 finally has a record of his own out—The Death of Adam, released late last year.

But I can't, no way, because it is fucking terrible.  I'm not quarreling with the execution; the beats are interesting enough and the emceeing is non-embarrassing.  The lead single, "Stay Up! (Viagra)," features an unusually sprightly, non-synthesized Kanye West; maybe you've heard it.  88 is clearly influenced by Kanye, maybe a little too much.  But all that stuff is okay.  What is not okay, and what to the contrary merits a giant middle finger of derision, is the record's concept.  I mean, good on 88 for making a concept record, and a coherent one to boot.  But did he have to be such a colossal asshole about it?  If you wanted to make the case that men, in their hearts, despise women profoundly, The Death of Adam would make a pretty decent Exhibit A.

The Death of Adam is the ignorant story of the fall from grace of a random douchebag with whom we (the target audience comprised exclusively of young dudes) are supposed to identify.  Adam is a complete zero; he has no personality or distinguishing charateristics.  The only thing that defines him is that he's preyed upon, victimized, and destroyed by this grotesquely evil woman.  In case you don't get where he's coming from with the storyline, the woman's name is "Pussy."  First Adam wants to fuck Pussy, but she withholds, saying she just wants to be friends.  (We all know how infuriating that is; am I right, guys?)  When she finally submits, he's so nervous he has erection problems.  Somehow that's her fault too; she's too demanding, not sensitive enough to his sense of entitlement.  He gets through it, but no sooner has he shot his wad than she demands he fuck her again, which is clearly unreasonable because (am I right, guys?) he needs a reasonable amount of time to replenish himself.  She doesn't care, because she's just out for her own selfish pleasure.  Also she's crazy.  And evil.  She verbally abuses him and forces him to fuck her again and again.  Adam only has three condoms, but she assures him she's on birth control so it's okay to go bareback.  In the morning, when he tries to sneak away, she freaks out and accuses him of rape.  He leaves anyway, but shortly thereafter figures out she gave him the clap.  It's really painful!  And she shoulda told him!  How terrible is that?  (Am I right, guys?)  After he gets it treated, stopping only briefly to cusses her out as the trifling ho she is, she comes back a month or so later and tells him—get this!—she's pregnant.  See, she was lying about the birth control too!  Now he really loses it, but what can he do?  She's got his hooks in him for good now!  She gets his wages garnisheed and he is taken to the fucking cleaners.  The end.

See, "death" is just a metaphor here.  Adam doesn't actually die, but he loses his pride and freedom to a woman and a baby, against his will, and that's certainly the equivalent of death, if not much worse: Sundays at Bed, Bath & Beyond, pushing around a stroller, looking for a pepper mill or some shit, no money at all to spend on weed.  Seriously, who wouldn't want to self-disembowel in such a circumstance?  And what man would possibly voluntarily enter into that situation?  DON'T DO IT IT'S A TRAP.  That's basically the dumbass, retrograde message we're dealing with here.  Worst of all, because the songs don't really convey the plot, 88 cheats and ties the tracks together with voiceover from a female narrator, which lady is properly aghast at the horrible connivances of vile-ass Pussy and her systematic depredation of poor Adam's soul and 401(k).  This is a transparent device to mask the record's misogyny, but it's basically like treating a grand mal seizure with topical cream.  Sure, the storyline traffics in every pitiful cliche imaginable about the awful shit women willfully pull to deprive men of their metaphorical and actual testicles, but it's A WOMAN TELLING THE STORY, so it's cool.

It's no coincidence that the protagonist is named "Adam"—you remember the guy from Genesis and the Garden of Eden and the apple and all that.  88 is trying a "humorous" take on Man's eternal struggle to escape the grasp of female genitalia.  I know that most artists have a limited number of stories to tell, but how boring and simple-minded and un-self-critical do you have to be to tell this particular story?  You're better off keeping your mouth shut.

Does Not Compute

I am not predicting playoffs, let alone a march to Super Bowl glory.  More than likely, Matt Cassel will be about a league-average quarterback for the Chiefs.  But after a whole season watching Tyler Thigpen throw every other pass eight feet over the head of his intended receiver and omit ever to notice the end rusher bearing down on him before getting crushed into human butter, even at league average Cassel would be a significant upgrade.  And believe me, I am well aware Mike Vrabel is 443 years old.  (I guess this means Pioli is determined to install the 3-4, even if we don't have a single player on our roster who's really suited to playing on a three-man D-line.)  But here's the part that's really important, and maybe the only important part: to get Cassel and Vrabel, the Chiefs gave up just a second-round pick.  That's the part I really don't get.  Are the Pats just doing their homie Pioli a solid on the way out the door?  There's no shortage of teams with a desperate need at quarterback.  Do you think Vikings fans, having spent a fourth-rounder on the highly dubious Sage Rosenfels, are feelin' good right now?  That team could've gone to the Super Bowl but for horrible QB play.  Then we have the Lions, who recently restructured the contract of cement-footed autopsy recipient Daunte Culpepper, and I should remind you this is a team that DID NOT WIN A GAME last year.  Out here in Northern Cali, the Niners' depth chart is still headed by something named "Shaun Hill."  I do not believe Tampa Bay currently has a quarterback on its roster, although they still have the rights to Jake Plummer, which is nice.  And in this climate, the Pats gave up Cassel and an elderly but still useful coach-on-the-field-type linebacker for just a second-rounder?

It's obviously possible this deal won't work out for the Chiefs.  A pessimist like me couldn't possibly think otherwise.  But I don't think there's any doubt that, on these terms, it was a deal they had to make.

Fish in a Barrel

This is from the folks at that LOLcat site, but I adopt it as my final comment on the music of this past year (hell, every year, really).

Fair Use and Errata

Wonders never cease: my annual 300,000-word bloviation re my most beloved and/or despised music of the year has actually inspired this dialogue, and with a guy I don't personally know, even.  The jumping-off point was my comments about my number-five album of last year, The Gaslight Anthem's The '59 Sound.  When I was younger, I used to front obnoxiously about this, but these days I don't pretend to know definitively which albums are better than others, or even what I personally think about a given album.  So I willingly concede I may have overrated The '59 Sound significantly.  I have gone on at some length about the record's flaws, most obviously its relentless derivativeness and occasional outright lyrical plagiarism.  Like I've said, if you listen to the record and that stuff turns you off to the point where you fling the CD out a window, I understand.  But there's no point in flagellating myself for liking it; we're all entitled to our opinions.

In the year-end review, looking for a middle ground among the three appeals of argument, I defended the album mostly on poetic-artistic grounds.  I'm not sure I articulated myself all that well.  Basically my point was that the record's reliance on shopworn rock and roll tropes and other people's poetry was not just forgivable but compelling because it posited an existence where people have given up on the color and possibility of making their own futures and instead subsist drably in a black-and-white world formed by entertainment-industry clichés.  It struck me that there's some truth to that.

But here's another way to think about why the record's derivativeness isn't a big deal.  Many of you have probably heard about the copyright-law notion of "fair use."  (This is not The Bob Loblaw Law Blog, but bear with me a minute.)  The fair-use doctrine is why critics can quote a line from a song lyric or poem or novel in a review without getting the author's permission.  It's why an artist can parody famous copyrighted works even if the creator of the original work doesn't want them to.  If you believe, as I do, that humans in any creative endavor—not just art, but science and war and religion and everything else—have only proved capable of moving forward by standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, adding rungs of their own making to the great endless ladder of expression, then fair use is an incredibly important concept.

The way U.S. law is written, whether a particular use of a copyrighted work is fair is governed by a four-part standard.  First, you look at the purpose and character of the use.  Are you reproducing copyrighted material in its original form, or are you reimaging it, augmenting it with your own creativity?  Are you trying to make money off it or not?  Second, you examine the nature of the work.  Is it a purely fictional story or a retelling of confirmable historical fact?  Is it a work whose free distribution is unusually socially useful?  Third, you look at how much of the copyrighted work you're using relative to the whole work.  As I said above, if it's just a snippet, you're on better footing than if you're lifting the whole thing.  But even the use of a snippet can get you in hot water if it's sufficiently distinctive.  Fourth, you analyze the effect of the use on the original artist's ability to commercially exploit the original work.  If you're depriving the originator of a livelihood, that will weigh against you.

Now, one of the most important questions under this analysis—sometimes it's dispositive by itself—is whether the new work sufficiently transforms the original work to create something that's worthy of protection by itself.  A good test case is the current dust-up between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over Fairey's ubiquitous Obama poster.  Is this a transformation by a skilled artist—an ordinary wire-service photo turned into an iconic red-white-and-blue painting—or is it just a cheap Photoshop job anyone could slap together?  I come down on the transformation side of the line, but we'll see if the AP wants to fight about it in court.  (Aesthetically, I prefer this remix, in which fair use builds on fair use.)

Looking at The '59 Sound through this lens, I forgive The Gaslight Anthem record its constant anschluss of Springsteen and Bob Seger references, even though they sometimes take you out of the experience of listening to the music, because the overall effect is fundamentally transformative.  The chord progressions and melodies break no new ground, but neither are they directly ripped off from anyone; and while the lyrics sometimes are ripped off, the barrage of traditionalist imagery is so overwhelming that it creates a world of its own, which world swallows you whole.  Put another way, it doesn't steal from prior works; it aggregates fleeting snatches of rock music's greatest hits into a brand-new mosaic of America through the lens of late-20th century popular entertainment.  It concedes how alluring that world can be while admitting it's pre-scripted and ultimately offers mostly limitations and heartbreak.

I know: that might mean it's not copyright infringement, but it doesn't mean it's a great record.  You can decide that for yourself.  (Like I said in the comments, this is the sort of trick that only works once; if the follow-up is equally grabby of other people's poetry, the jig will be up.)  Really, there's not much correlation between the absence of copyright infringement and greatness.  Some of the greatest records in history infringe the hell out of numerous copyrights.  I find them immensely transformative, boundlessly creative, and infinitely more worthy of protection than their source material, but the federal courts would disagree.  Greatness is where you find it.

*****

Now for the errata.  When you write 300,000 (or 3 million, or in any event many too many) words about a year's worth of music, you're bound to leave some stuff out and get other stuff wrong.  My biggest problem, every year, is pigeonholing a certain record too early as being, say, a B+, and then failing to give it the proper reconsideration as the year goes on.  In reality, sometimes that B+ record is actually a slow-growing A; other times, of course, it actually sucks mightily underneath its veneer of respectable acceptability.  I know these things can't be evaluated with mathematical precision, and the older I get the less time I have to mull over fine distinctions between roughly equivalent records.  But some oversights are obvious enough to demand correction.

I overrated The Hold Steady's Stay Positive at number 25.  You know, I love those guys and wanted to love the record.  But really, it was not one of the 25 best records of last year, and probably not one of the top 40.  There's plenty of stuff to like about it, but I still cringe every time Craig Finn sings that line in "Constructive Summer" about working at the mill until you die.  Then the next two songs are rejected Quincy teleplays.

I underrated Q-Tip's The Renaissance at number 40.  I think I mistrusted how blissfully smooth the beats were.  Not to mention Tip's typically laid-back and non-confrontational rhyming.  How can a record be meaningful without any rough edges?  It sort of languidly settled at the bottom of my list; it didn't raise much complaint.  But it's better than that.  And suggesting it's inferior to Young Jeezy's The Recession?  That's nuts.

I mysteriously forgot to recognize the lyrics on Nas's Untitled album.  Complete sleepage on my part.  I still give the gold medal to Will Sheff, but Nasir takes the silver, and it was close.  A virtuoso performance by a guy everybody seems to have given up on.  To paraphrase Dennis Coles, I've been heartily chuckling at Randy Newman since long before Nas dropped the Nasty, but, still, it was wrong of me to rate the guy who wrote "Korean Parents" over the author of popular music's most clear-headed and wide-ranging examination of the modern African American experience.

Yeah, that Frightened Rabbit record that I hadn't heard but everybody seems to love is pretty good.  I would probably find it more accessible if Scott Hutchinson didn't sing like a Scottish Adam Duritz, but everything goes down smoother with a spoonful of brogue.  Even a guy whose main lyrical themes are amputation and contagious diseases.  I'm staying with it.

OK, I'll stop there.  For the next eleven months, I'll try to go back to just enjoying music, without worrying so much about ranking it.

2008: Good Riddance

I can't remember any other year I was so glad to see come to and end.  Maybe 1992, but that had more to do with my own post-adolescent angst, and nobody wants to hear about that.  The problems with 2008 ran much deeper than that, and I'm sure we're tired of hearing about them.  It naturally follows that most of the music I loved this year was deeply pessimistic or downright furious.  Really, how could you not be?  There are things in the world to embrace and praise, for sure; there always are.  But us human beings have dug a mighty big hole for ourselves, and it's not clear we'll be able to turn off the metaphorical backhoe.  Then again, who am I kidding?  I can link to depressing commentary all day long—we're all professionals here, we all know how to use a search engine—but I am probably disposed to like pessimistic and furious music no matter what.

Enough preliminaries.  As always, the necessary attribution: this ballot and many of its smartass categories were inspired by Tris McCall and his annual Critics Poll.  If you have any appreciation for contemporary music, and you haven't checked out Tris's site, you really ought to.  The guy is the hardest-working pop-chart documentarian I know—thoughtful, compulsive, and omnivorous.  Certainly he inspires me to listen to music more closely and pay attention to artists I otherwise might unfairly dismiss.  Now, you might think (after reading what follows, if you get that far, you probably will) I should spend less time listening to music, but, really, what else is there?  Do you seriously expect me to commit two hours of my life to that movie where Tom Cruise plays the good Nazi?  Anyway, away we go:

Best album
1.  Erykah Badu New Amerykah: Part I (4th World War)
So 2008 was a lousy year.  Most significant issue: the world economy collapsed.  You may be happy we elected a Democrat, but what does he have to work with?  The complete failure of the United States to do anything constructive on the world stage for eight solid years was made manifest a couple months ago when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at our President at a press conference.  I’m not disposed to believe the common assertion that even the people of countries aggrieved by our foreign policy secretly love the idea of America the Nation—I’m sure some do and some don’t.  Probably fewer than used to.  But: I don’t recall anyone throwing a shoe at Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or Ike or LBJ or George H.W. Bush.  Or Reagan or Kennedy or FDR or, fuck, let’s run it back—any U.S. President in U.S. President history.  This country is now both so despised that the mainstream of world society is willing to dismantle every façade of politeness and so weakened we can’t shield our great leader from such flagrancies of disrespect.  When Badu talks about the American Promise, that’s what she’s talking about—a bunch of bluff and bullshit fast approaching its expiration date.  The intro updates Randy Newman’s “Sail Away”; it’s selling neon capitalism rather than agrarian paradise, but it’s the same fundamental sales pitch.  “Me” effortlessly integrates the personal and political and is as messy and insane as Erica Wright probably genuinely is in person.  The songwriting is excellent; check out the way “That Hump” moves in and out of the bridge.  The beats are uniformly stellar; “The Cell” especially is the most vicious funk deal I’ve heard in forever.  Elsewhere, an authorial voice recites Howard Beale’s speech from Network, and that’s the most depressing moment of the year.  In 1976, Beale’s oratory had the power to thrill because it gave voice to something people were thinking but wasn’t yet part of our public discourse.  Thirty years on the speech is a hoary cliché from a bygone age of impossible naivete.  In today’s America, we know that Howard Beale, assuming he was not an imaginary species to begin with, would never be allowed access to the airwaves.  You may be skeptical that Badu has the gift of prophecy, but she’s not.  On this record, you can have your pick of Biblical or classical allusions—Lot, Cassandra, Diogenes, Dale Carnegie.  Badu gives you her version of all of them.  In another year, it might not have meant as much, but, like I said, 2008 was nobody’s sweetheart.

2.  Okkervil River The Stand Ins
Three years back, Will Sheff and his electric-folk outfit coughed up Black Sheep Boy, which got a fair bit of critical praise but didn’t quite break through to the popular consciousness.  Last year’s follow-up, The Stage Names, arrived with a ton of hype, but it was probably the worst record of Sheff’s whole career.  Even critics who wanted to give it the five-star sendoff couldn’t quite manage it; in the end the record was distractingly formal and ponderous.  A year later, maybe because they felt burned, everybody ignored its looser, more diverse, angrier, far superior companion piece.  I’ll talk more about “Singer Songwriter” later, but it is one of the more pissed-off tunes you will ever hear.  The rest of the record is less brutal but equally fully realized.  “(Shannon Wilsey on the) Starry Stairs,” with its sparkling, bristly rhythm guitar, is a post-suicide note from the pornstar Savannah ascending to heaven.  “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” is the most bighearted letter never sent to a former lover that you’re likely to encounter.  Its warmth derives partly from the fact that it’s arranged like a Darlene Love holiday number; it’s even got sleighbells (sleighbells!).  The alternate-universe A-side smash “Pop Lie” surges along tunefully, but Sheff has miscalculated by ripping off Game Theory, a great 80s band that tried like crazy to sell out but just couldn’t sell.  If you want to slow it down a little (you know, for the ladies), the women in the backstage area get their turn on the mic in “On Tour with Zykos,” and “Blue Tulip” is the heartstopping slow-dance number with the big climax.  “Lost Coastlines” is straight-up Motown; it’s even got the “You Can’t Hurry Love” bassline burbling along under there.  At the end, our first out gay rock singer, now doing two nightly cabaret shows far from the spotlight, stands on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel at the turn of the 1980s and in the face of a very ill wind indeed throws down nonetheless.  I don’t mean to oversell this record, but as you can see I’m somewhat enthusiastic about it.

3.  Nas Untitled
I wrote a long ponderous thing about this a few months back and don’t have a ton to add to it.  I am not going to make the audacious claim that it’s better than Illmatic, because that would just be cheap bait on a rusty hook in an ocean of disputatious Internet people.  I will say that, for my nickel, it stands with Illmatic and God’s Son as the emcee’s best albums.

4.  Randy Newman Harps and Angels
He rolled into town for the San Francisco Jazz Festival and played two sets at Davies Hall, an acoustic marvel of a venue.  His walk onstage was a little stiff.  He listed to one side, like his left hip was killing him.  Then he opened with “It’s Money That I Love” and its berserko piano squalls that made me shout until I remembered I was in a staid orchestral environment and not some cluuuub.  He played “Rednecks” and thanked the crowd for not thinking he’s racist.  He made fun of himself for getting so rich writing music for soundtracks.  He did “In Germany Before the War” and “Bad News from Home” and “I Miss You” and closed with “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.”  He didn’t do anything from 12 Songs, but he drew material from every other record he’s put out.  After two hours, he walked offstage for the last time, still stiff.  I don’t think there is a greater living American songwriter.

5.  The Gaslight Anthem The ’59 Sound
Do I love this or do I kinda hate it?  I guess, ranking it where I am, I must love it.  But I had a hard time getting there.  And it wasn’t that it disgusted me the first time I heard it.  No, my first impression was of a better-than-average record in the genre we for some reason still call “punk” but has more in common with traditional folk music than it does the Ramones or Stiff Little Fingers or Minor Threat.  A handful of maybe-great songs, as well.  But the lyrics kept eating at me, and after a couple of weeks I’d decided it sucked and deserved scorn and bile.  I forget who said this first, about Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” but I’ve borrowed it frequently: a list is not a song.  Added up throughout the length of this record, Brian Fallon’s lyrics seem awfully like a list.  They are, for sure, a constant avalanche of the most hackneyed “rock” signifiers you can imagine—sweat and cars, radios and guitars, high-top sneakers and sailor tattoos and the fucking boardwalk, even.  They’re equally full of references to rock music itself: the aging party girl in one song knows she’s young because she still loves Tom Petty.  Tom Waits’s ol’ 55 crops up in “Old White Lincoln,” and before you know it Fallon is mumbling the chorus from “Cold Cold Ground” for good measure.  For “Miles Davis & the Cool,” Fallon even stretches back in time to name-check a jazz musician who informed rock attitudes and lost much of his audience when he went electric.  This world is equally heavily Hollywoodized, so the movie industry gets its due too.  One song borrows Humphrey Bogart’s second most famous punchline; another is called “Film Noir.”  In “High Lonesome” (Bill Monroe reference!), Fallon even admires the ultimate intersection between rock and Hollywood, Elvis the King Presley himself.  And then there’s the Springsteen issue.  “Here’s Looking at You, Kid” is a very nice, gentle ballad full of Fallon’s reflective wiseacre would-be text messages to all the girls who didn’t dig him back in the day.  But it’s rendered in that tenderly seductive Brucie mumble—the one you’ve heard a million times, from “Mary, Queen of Arkansas” and “I’m on Fire” and is scratched into your memory—and that makes it hard work to judge the song on its merits.  One song before, he busts out for no real reason with “No surrender, my Bobby Jean,” as if he’s reading off the back cover of Born in the U.S.A.  It won’t surprise you to hear that song is called “Meet Me by the River’s Edge.”  (That’s not even the low point; another song deploys the embarrassing couplet “At night I wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet/It’s a pretty good song, baby, you know the rest.”)  I’m sure these persistent allusions are obnoxious even to non-Springsteen geeks.  You’re within your rights if you hate this like Darius Rucker borrowing a whole verse of “Idiot Wind” for that one Hootie song.  The Anthem’s Jersey roots don’t excuse laying it on this thick, I’m pretty sure.  So for a while I got hung up on all that.  But I kept thinking about the fact that much of The ’59 Sound is really slamming rock music, and I couldn’t help but notice that Fallon’s Joe Rock America act seemed incredibly sincere.  So what I think is going on that rescues the project is that Fallon is not really making any pretense to be talking about the real world; his characters, like most of us to some degree, are living in a different place, a patchwork quilt of pop-culture images and soundbites—the sort of place where it’s not disorienting to put Bogart next to Benmont Tench.  Fallon doesn’t make it explicit; he’s not preaching about it, but it’s no coincidence that most of these songs are bittersweet if not profoundly sad.  In the chorus of “High Lonesome,” the singer’s “kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” dissolves into “kinda sorta wished I was someone else.”  Fallon is telling us that our reliance on dead memories and iconic images has slashed our options and frozen our future; his characters recognize those boundaries implicitly, but they dream anyway.  Whether you think this is a commendably brave manifesto or an unfortunate acceptance of arbitrary limitations will probably dictate how much you like the record.  Even if the copycat tendencies bug you, Fallon’s words are occasionally magnificently put and/or ferociously appropriate.  And it really helps that the band’s three least derivative songs also happen to be their best: (1) the title joint, that furious Irish wake; (2) the kids-don’t follow closer “The Backseat” (where the kids just try to find space for their knees and room to breathe); and especially (3) “The Patient Ferris Wheel,” with that tension that builds then builds then explodes into that hook that hook that hook.

6.  Why? Alopecia
An uncensored internal monologue of self-mutiliation, disease, decay, sheets stained with God knows what awful human residue.  The songs take place in deserted back alleys, water-damaged basements, culverts, chain-restaurant bathrooms—nowhere you want to visit, really.  Because of his connection with the frequently insufferable Anticon label, Yoni Wolf has been marketed as a rapper, but this is not your father's hippity-hop music.  Sure, the drums are sometimes funky.  Even so, Wolf's idea of braggadocio is “As a kid, I did not shit my pants much.”  His forays into macking on the ladies (“I never said I didn't have syphilis, Miss Listless”) don't fare much better.  Admittedly, he ain't singing, but let's not force this highly square peg into a round hole.  It seems more like folk music to me; Wolf calls it "a new kind of blues."  In "Good Friday," he name-checks both Eric B. & Rakim and the Silver Jews, which is about right.  (On allmusic.com, they list Rilo Kiley and Guillemots as “similar artists,” and that's just straight-up racist.)  Subject matter aside, I don't mean to suggest the record is a drag or a difficult listen.  Certainly it's not by comparison to Wolf's previous releases.  This one even comes complete with an honest-to-gosh single: the captivating “Fatalist Palmistry” and its shiny, happy Byrds/DBs guitar riff.  Oaktown in the house, people; we have our share of interesting weirdos too.

7.  Kevin Ayers The Unfairground
Along with explanations of why a $5,500 cashmere overcoat is the right purchase for you and some Tom Junod piece about how he got a hard-on while interviewing Nicole Kidman in her hotel room, Esquire magazine used to have a feature called “What I’ve Learned,” where generally old guys would expound on the lessons life had taught them.  Anyway, this is basically what Ayers does here, musing about how friends grow distant and the forces that create that distance.  He talks about love, sickness, disorientation, fighting through storms, using your sense of humor to overcome life’s injustices.  Assuming you can get acclimated to Ayers’s weathered baritone croak, this is about the most accessible and pleasant pop record of the year.

8.  Z-Ro Crack
Really wanted to vote him Best Rapper, even if he spends half the record singing.  There is less bullshit here than on pretty much any rap LP since Stakes Is High.  Not even a little bullshit.  Hey, hip-hop heads, you value “realness”—who’s more real than this motherfucker?  Well?  If you don’t know, Z-Ro is from Houston, and H-Town emcees frequently lead the league in mordant despair.  I mean, did you hear the new Scarface record where he advises his girlfriend to abort his baby so it won’t have to grow up poor and black in this country?  Even in that company, Z-Ro stands out for pure get-off-my-lawn crankiness.  He has only three friends; he tells you their names.  He isn’t looking to meet new people, either.  He can do bad on his own, and he’s pretty sure you’re just another self-righteous hypocrite anyway.  Even if you manage to pry him away from his Xbox, don’t expect him to throw down in the club.  You can hit the dance floor if you want; he’ll just hug the wall sipping codeine over ice.  His “body don’t move like that” anyway.  He never even boasts, really; he just complains (e.g., “98% from the field but they won’t pass the rock!”).  In 2008, while guitar bands suffocate their lights under bushels of genre conventions, irony, and reverb, hip-hop still demands its artists display identifiable personalities with maximum force.  And the result is records like Crack.

9.  Black Milk Tronic
Detroit’s next big thing is not the strongest emcee on the block, but he’s pretty solid, and he puts on for his city at every opportunity.  (“Day-twaah,” he calls it.)  His delivery has improved, but sometimes his battle rhymes depart from the realm of legitimate braggadocio (e.g., all other rappers are nasty like a bag on your hip) and alight in ’88 nostalgia-land (e.g., these kids today are inferior to Rakim).  Cool your jets, fella—I traded in my Jurassic 5 records for a reason.  Anyway, Milk’s real strength is as a producer, and he is a fantastic one.  He is not remotely grimy and has little pop-chart potential.  His beats are basically 80s electro-bounce, although he works in a couple of sped-up soul samples.  The total picture is a bunch of discrete parts cohering precisely, but it would be wrong to say the record’s songs “form like Voltron.”  The sound does not suggest Voltron, really—more like Thomas Dolby.  So it goes these days.

10.  For Against Shade Side Sunny Side
I think Jack Rabid and I are the only ones who give a shit, but here comes the best ever (death metal) band out of Lincoln, Nebraska with another winner.  The big news this time was the return of original guitarist Harry Dingman III after 20 years (fuck I’m old).  They are a totally different band as a result.  Not even saying they’re necessarily better, but the extent of the transformation is striking.  No more long, surging, blissed-out codas with sturdy basslines trotting under chimey guitars.  With Dingman they’re much more open and angular, and the songs take on strange forms, start and stop, flex and release.  They’re not really songwriters, so if you’re looking for concision or hummable melodies or, uh, good lyrics, well, you just keep walkin’, buddy.  But they are (and for 23 years have been) a great band.

11.  Tift Merritt Another Country
12.  Panic at the Disco Pretty. Odd.
13.  Kanye West 808s & Heartbreak
14.  The Streets Everything Is Borrowed
15.  Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping
16.  Drive-By Truckers Brighter Than Creation’s Dark
17.  Ray Davies Working Man’s Café
18.  Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It
19.  Black Mountain In the Future
20.  The Heavenly States Delayer

21.  Killer Mike I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind II
22.  Spiraling Time Travel Made Easy
23.  Paul Weller 22 Dreams
24.  Elvis Costello and the Imposters Momofuku
25.  The Hold Steady Stay Positive
26.  Blood on the Wall Liferz
27.  David Banner The Greatest Story Ever Told
28.  Blitzen Trapper Furr
29.  The Long Blondes “Couples”
30.  Los Campesinos! Hold on Now, Youngster…

31.  Prodigy H.N.I.C. Pt. 2
32.  Scarface Emeritus
33.  Young Jeezy The Recession
34.  Future of the Left Curses!
35.  Tim Fite Fair Ain’t Fair
36.  Spiritualized Songs in A & E
37.  Port O’Brien All We Could Do Was Sing
38.  Fleet Foxes Fleet Foxes
39.  Magnetic Fields Distortion
40.  Q-Tip The Renaissance

Best EP release
Tanya Morgan’s The Bridge.  It may surprise you to learn that “Tanya Morgan” is not Missy Elliott’s latest girlfr—uh, protegée.  Neither is she some blonde Carrie Underwood-type Nashville cowboy lady with a Stetson.  She’s not even a she; Tanya Morgan is two emcees from Cincinnati and one deejay from Brooklyn.  Two of them are skilled and stylish on the mic; the third is a little flow-challenged, but that’s no big deal.  All three have personality to burn.  Really, given all the tasty ingredients they have to work with, it’s a little surprising their songs aren’t even more memorable.  (Well, “Hip Hop Is Dead II” is pretty memorable.)  The new breed of reverent hipster rappers (Cool Kids, The Knux, Kidz in the Hall, etc.) often cite Native Tongues acts as forefathers, as they should, but I generally don’t hear it in their music.  But Tanya Morgan has at least a little of the wordy agility and unselfconscious playfulness of De La and the JBs.  On the bonus track “How Low,” they even deliver a rough approximation of “I’ll House You.”  Not that anyone was pushing for that.

Best opener
“Queens Get the Money,” from Untitled.  Before setting out on his his block-by-block survey of contemporary Black America, my favorite rapper presents his credentials by way of two minutes of the hottest, most credent rhyming of his career.  He’s going to spend the rest of the record shooting his mouth off, so he wants to establish once and for all from where he gets the right.

Album that started the strongest
David Banner, The Greatest Story Ever Told.  Lavell Crump is the most dynamic live performer in all of hip-hop and probably also mainstream rap’s most radical political voice.  He talks a lot about being an artist and a visionary; I really think he has it in him to make a great album.  His latest started off at maximum intensity, with his middle-finger call-to-arms “So Long,” then the funky album intro, then the primordial ooze of the UGK collabo club track “Suicide Doors,” with Pimp C’s ridiculous posthumous comment, “Miuzi weigh a ton, I bought a necklace for my dick.”  Then Akon shows up and the engine stalls in a lagoon of smarm.

Album that finished the strongest
New Amerykah: Part I (4th World War).  (That’s the last time I’m typing that whole thing.)  Badu spends most of the record stretching her incredibly versatile vocal instrument in all directions—she chants, she chirps, she howls.  Then, on the last three songs, she plays it straight and just sings.  The effect is thrilling and a little spooky, like a hologram come to life.

Best closer
Mike Skinner, walking the length of England on “The Escapist” without ever leaving his recliner.

Album I listened to the most this year
The Unfairground.  Probably because it came out in January; that’s usually the way it works with this question.

Worst album I bought this year
Probably Are Men by The Weight.  Or The Weight Are Men, if you prefer.  It’s not really worth worrying about.  What we have here is a document of several boring gentlemen giving country music a try from their loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  To assist in the process, they have grown beards.   (Lush beards, and full, not scrawny hipster chin-dirt.)  They wear flannel and doubleknit, from the vintage store, fabrics caked with the salty sweat of other men—men of the west and south who work with their hands.

Crappy record I listened to a lot anyway
Darker My Love’s 2, which is not actual psychedelic music but plays some at SXSW.  I’m sure DML take their share of drugs and all, but this is one safe-ass record.  Still a completely pleasurable thing to listen to on your couch on a Sunday afternoon.

Great song from a crappy record
“Get Cha Issue,” by Bun B.  II Trill was more disappointing than crappy, but of course Bun was going to use most of the run time eulogizing Pimp C.  He’s earned the right.  As for “Get Cha Issue,” Bun is the least introspective rapper alive, but he is always willing to find fault with others, and thank God for that.  Second place: “A Thousand Eyes,” the only standout (but what a standout) on Crystal Antlers’ self-titled EP.

Lousy song from a good record
“Lisa’s Birthday,” from Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.  Hearing Mike Cooley drawl about “the bed we maake luuvve oonnn” caused me to take an immediate vow of celibacy.  Which I broke equally immediately, although that was to be expected.

Album that should have been longer
The Stand Ins.  Just eight songs, y’know.  Last year, The Stage Names was just nine songs.  Will Sheff has talked about how he didn’t want to make a double album because they tend to end up too long, stuffed with filler, and accordingly difficult to listen to in one sitting.  I don’t blame Sheff if he still thinks of albums in terms of vinyl LPs, because I do too.  But surely he’s heard you can fit 80 minutes of music on a compact disc, right?  Hip-hop artists have been filling CDs to the brim for years now, with mixed results.  I dunno, maybe I shouldn’t complain that Sheff isn’t disposed to join them.  Would I really rather have a 60- or 70-minute record combining The Stand Ins with the four or five best songs from The Stage Names?  Anyway, I guess the point, which is obvious, is that the shape of the frame imposes limits on the content of the picture.

Album that should have been shorter
Three 6 Mafia’s Last 2 Walk.  Then again, it also should’ve had better songs.

Most up-and-down record
Love as Laughter’s Holy.  I think Sam Jayne’s songwriting process is smoking a bowl, picking up his guitar, playing a chord progression for ten minutes straight and singing over top of it.  If that turns into a song, great.  If not, video games!  Maybe add a chorus later, maybe not.  This record has about four really good tunes (“Konny & Jim” and “Coconut Flakes” especially) and then a bunch of stuff that just feels borrowed and half-thought-out.

Least up-and-down record
Tift Merritt, Another Country.  None of the songs is less than very good; each of them is either midtempo or a ballad.  Several might remind you of John Denver.  It will not get you fired up, if that’s what you’re looking for.  It’s not Dokken.

Album that wore out its welcome the fastest
Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue.  As Lunch Lady Doris would say, “There’s very little meat in these gym mats.”  The first two songs are wafer-thin, and then we get a nine-minute country-prog epic that goes way too far in the opposite direction.  Jenny sounds great as usual, but her powers are largely wasted.  She doles out a couple decent genre exercises (soul smolderer “Bad Man’s World,” Tapestry-era Carole King rewrite “Trying My Best to Love You”), but also too many anonymous attempts to rock out.  She does come up with one stone classic, the tremulous title song, which begins with a lyric that only Lewis could, or would, write: “I went to a cobbler to fix a hole in my shoe/He took one look at my face and said, I can fix that hole in you.”  Lewis’s best lyrics are full of weirdly sexualized asides and dress-up games; she has quite a bit to say about the casual way our society molds, channels, and crushes the souls of women.  If you’re not really paying attention, you might not even notice she’s doing it.  Sometimes art holds up a mirror to the world, yes?  Anyway, more of that next time, please.

Album that turned out to be better than I initially thought it was
Harps and Angels.  You wait nine years and the guy gives you just ten songs, two of which aren’t really new because they appeared in demo form six or seven years ago on the Guilty box set.  You get annoyed.  You resist the new record’s charms, comparing it unfavorably to the titanic achievements of the artist’s back catalog.  Eventually you get over it.

Album that felt most like an obligation to get through
SM & Jicks’ Real Emotional Trash.  I love the jams, Steve—really I do.  They are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.  But the record would’ve been even better if also you’d written some fucking songs.

Most welcome surprise
Pretty. Odd.  You can call them emo, pop, or punk; it doesn’t matter.  Really, the kids from the drama department just love the Beatles.  This is a young band’s attempt to make its own Sgt. Pepper, like XTC and Tears for Fears and Olivia Tremor Control and so many others have done before.  It’s more than a little gimmicky, with the Dixieland number and the Gram Parsons hayseed tune and the song about the acid trip.  But they’re young, remember, so I don’t sweat it, especially since their grasp nearly equals their reach.  “When the Day Met the Night” is 70% XTC, 30% Chicago, 100% awesome.  “She’s a Handsome Woman” sounds like the Smithereens’ lost followup to “Blood and Roses”; next up, “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” is jaunty cabaret with a big chorus that beats Morrissey at his own game.  Brendon Urie’s flat vocal affect has always reminded me of Stephin Merritt, and other singer Ryan Ross sounds exactly like Brendan Benson, so they’re perfectly positioned to embrace pop classicism.  What’s that you want to know?  The lyrics?  Well, uh, yeah.

Rookie of the year
Los Campesinos!  I am a shallow guy, so for months I refused to listen to these people not only because of the exclamation point in the band name, but because all the band members use the last name “Campesinos.”  (And their singer’s first name is “Gareth,” which means he goes by the name “Gareth Campesinos,” which is so much lousier a fake name than “John Cougar Mellencamp” it’s not even funny.)  Anyway, they’re good.  Not fully developed or anything, and maybe they won’t ever get there.  But only the rawest of kids could get this much mileage (two albums released this year) out of the misery of young-heterosexual romantic relations.  ‘Twixt fifteen and twenty-one, it’s all boy vs. girl in the World Series of Love, and that’s what LC! give us: song after song about bad sex, drunk dialing, occasional outbursts of joy.  (Also casual pop-culture shout-outs—my favorite was to cloddish former Republic of Ireland striker Tony Cascarino.)  I get this way more than Arctic Monkeys or somebody—mannered, sure, but also full of piss, vinegar, despair, female harmonies, violin, all that good stuff.  Neither of their records is a classic or anything, but combine the best of both and you have quite the iTunes playlist, if you swing that way.  P.S. Tris is wrong: “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” is clearly their best song.

Comeback player of the year
They’re not booing, they’re just yelling “Badu.”  She has taken her share of guff, much of it redolent of sexist bullshit, but I really fail to see how you can question her bonafides after this one.

Bust of the year
Lyrics Born’s Everywhere at Once.  I bumped “Callin’ Out” unreservedly throughout the summer of ’03 and well into ’04.  Plenty of other folks did too, including various Fortune 500 corporations, and that was not lost on the emcee.  I understand artists sometimes must bow to the logic of the market, but did we really need an entire record of exactly that same type of song?

Record from which I expected too much
It’s the Hold Steady record again, innit?  I didn’t expect Stay Positive to be a return to the form of the first two, but I did expect it would bounce back from the pop feel appeal of Boys and Girls.  Well, it rocks more and is way more angsty, if that counts.  But I don’t think Craig Finn and the fellows are looking to bounce back; I think they’re moving in exactly the direction they’ve charted.  The last words you hear on Stay Positive, as “Slapped Actress” fades out, are “Man, we make our own movies,” and that’s the band’s new mission statement.  “Lord, I’m Discouraged” signifies John Cusack soaked to the bone, running through the rain to a phone booth under a street lamp.  When you hear “Constructive Summer” you may also see four high-school students in a Bondo-slathered Camaro coming fast down a gravel road, cresting the hill by the water tower.  The band is making a play for the universal, as you can tell from the repeated claim that their songs are sing-along songs.  But where Finn’s tall tales of Minneapolitan dirtbags and angels-in-exile sounded like pointed accounts of actual people you knew, these new songs sound like screenplay pitches.  You know: “It’s The Fugitive meets Very Bad Things meets Memento!  Guy goes away on business, does some coke, has a little fun in a bathroom stall—wakes up the next day and boom, he’s wanted for murder.  Didn’t do it, but can’t remember anything!  The cops don’t buy his story, so he escapes from custody and he has to piece together what happened as he’s being hunted—by both the cops and the real killer!  It will FUCKING KILL.”  Maybe someday they’ll go back to writing rock songs.

Best reissue
Roy Harper’s Stormcock got the full-on gold-standard re-release treatment this year.  Stormcock is probably my favorite record of all time, so I guess I vote for that.

Best various-artists compilation
Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk in 1970s Nigeria, another winner from the ethnographers at the Soundway label.  Bully Records’s collection of international psych remnants, Obsession, was pretty choice as well.

Best album title
Torche, Meanderthal.

Good album with a bad title
Lots of contenders this year.  New Amerykah: Part I (4th World War)—seriously, this really is the last time I’m typing that—made me think of how I used to insist in high school that Rambo III really should’ve been called Rambo II: First Blood Part III.  But it’s not such a bad title, really; it fits with the set’s numerological conspiracy-theory vibe.  Much worse was Panic at the Disco’s Pretty. Odd.  They took the exclamation point out of their name (thereby freeing me to listen to their record), then promptly regressed by including those unnecessary periods in their already-lousy album title.  One step forward, two steps back, I guess.  Anyway, my vote goes to Blitzen Trapper’s Furr.  Your whimsy is undermining your chops, guy.

Album title that most accurately reflects the spirit of the music
Darker My Love’s 2, since it is in fact their second record, and the spirit of the record is, “Hey, man, this is our second record.”  Do you want a real answer?  If so, I vote for Falling Off the Lavender Bridge, the gorgeously posh, pansexual, kinda dumb title of Dev “Lightspeed Champion” Hynes’s collection of gorgeously posh, pansexual, kinda dumb songs.

Best album cover
The Death Set, Worldwide.  They’re “the motherfucking Death Set.”  Okay, sure, we can do that.  Where did these people come from?  Did the government have a secret program to treat hyperactivity with lessons in synthesizer programming?

Good album with a bad cover
I just keep inventing new categories.  This one was inspired by the POT-80 3-D diagram on the cover of Spiraling’s Time Travel Made Easy.  Hey, I’m sure they were working on a budget.

Worst album cover
This comes down to a coin flip between Megapuss, which features Devendra Banhart engaged in the hairy naked knife fight that might be our only hope of discouraging him from making more records, and Dodos’ Visiter, which was drawn in crayon by a special-needs four-year-old.  I guess I pick Dodos, since they add insult to injury by including their shitty-ass band logo on the cover too.  DIY graphic design is all well and good in theory, but what if you just suck at it?

Best liner notes
Liner notes?

Best packaging
The 64-page, full-color booklet inside No Age’s Nouns tells you everything you need to know about where these guys are coming from.  The package also contains a CD.

Best single
1.  Black Milk “Give the Drummer Sum”
Since I’m such a jaded asshole, I always enjoy stumbling across a new song that makes me go “Wait … whuuuuuut?”  With “Give the Drummer Sum,” I didn’t initally understand why somebody would want to rhyme over that beat, with its long, pronounced stutter and organ blurt; it was like trying to play golf on a sand dune.  It turns out that the degree of difficulty was the entire point.  When I said earlier that Curtis Cross wasn’t the strongest emcee, I’m not denying he’s pretty good.  For sure, he can flow very naturally over tricky drum patterns—not just on this song, but all over Tronic.  Still, the secret ingredient here is the sped-up vocal on the chorus.  It’s like if Alvin of the Chipmunks had a kid who played the synthesizer in an early 80s New Romantic band, and then that kid had a kid who turned out to be a rapper, if that makes any sense.  Maybe you need to listen to the song.

2.  Gorilla Zoe “Lost”
I didn’t know this underdog Atlanta rapper until 2007's “Hood Nigga” single, an avuncular roughneck number with a friendly sing-songy hook.  “Lost” is a completely different animal, a waking nightmare that’s entirely sung.  Sure, Zoe uses the pitch-correction software that’s so ubiquitous in contemporary commercial hip-hop, and maybe that’s a deal-breaker for some of you, but I think the disembodied, robotic vocal is what makes the song.  Zoe is deep in the emotional penalty box, crooning forlornly about his spiritual alienation chasing dollars by day and getting ass-out wasted at strip clubs at night.  The better-known version is probably the one with the Lil Wayne phone-in, but I prefer the one where Zoe takes the second verse himself.  There’s no artifice; the lyrics are matter-of-factly despondent shit like, “Throwing my ones up/Like I’m paying ransom/She told me I looked good/She said I was handsome/So I believed her/’Cause I am lonely.”  It’s not explicitly religious, but its essence is devotional.  Warnings about the wages of sin are always more compelling coming from those who have been there.  Zoe is in the middle of it and he’s miserable; maybe we should listen to him.

3.  Lil Wayne “A Milli”
I considered voting Tha Carter III the Record That Wore Out Its Welcome the Fastest, but that wouldn’t have been fair.  Really it slowly slid from contention over the entire second half of the year.  I still enjoy listening to it, some parts of it much more than others.  I don’t know that I love “A Milli” unreservedly, but there’s no way I’ll ever forget it.

4.  Erykah Badu “The Healer”
She’s talking about hip-hop music here.  Erykah casually asserts it’s bigger than religion, bigger than the government.  It will succeed where those other forces failed; it will repair our nation’s race-based wounds and mend its fractured heart.  I believe it.

5.  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds “Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!!”
In the tradition of such legendary white emcees as John Cale, Jim Carroll, and Murray Head on “One Night in Bangkok.”  Nick Cave has been doing his thing for over 30 years now and has thousands of devoted fans who wait impatiently for his next release.  When he tours, he reliably sells out theaters, and he will never lack for a label willing to put out his new material.  In addition to the music, he writes novels and poetry, makes movies.  Can you picture Noah Lennox or Dan Deacon or the guy from Girl Talk making that sort of contribution to our culture over that length of time?  I mean, I hope they do; I wish them well.  But I wonder.

6.  Young Jeezy f. Kanye West “Put On”
Regional pride is hip-hop’s adrenal gland; nothing gets a flagging artist, audience, or scene going faster and more surely than some outsider disrespecting your block.  It was true long before the Bridge Wars and remains one of the form’s defining characteristics.  It’s a big part of what makes the music so charming, too.  Jeezy is not the most agile lyricist, but he’s not really trying to tell you anything about Atlanta specifically; this is a universalist radio song about the importance of standing up for your place of origin, however random it might be.  It’s something everyone can understand, even if you don’t dig rap music.  As usual, Kanye didn’t get (or chose not to read) the memo, hogging the mic and spitting his usual laments about how nobody loves him but they all want his money.  Thankfully Jeezy is able to put a big paw around Ye’s shoulder and bring the focus back where it belongs, to that big singalong chorus.

7.  D.Willz “Licka Sto”
You have to remember that East Bay emcees have always been students of microeconomics.  Too $hort the father spent more time revising and explaining his pimping business plan than anything else.  Boots Riley is an old-school pinko, always talking about budgetary shortfalls, dodging the repo man and murdering your landlord, terrible shit that happens when you end up in the hospital without insurance.  Two years ago, in “I Love Boosters!” he sang the praises of the modern day Robin Hoods who shoplift and resell designer merchandise.  Even the up-and-comers think this way; The Pack loved their Vans not just because they were fly but because you could get them in a wide array of colors for $36 per pair.  On this outstanding effort, D.Willz brings you down to his local corner store, where there’s not much on the shelves but all type of shit in the back.  Sure, some of it just fell off the back of a truck, and some of it is actually contraband, but it’s all good; the emcee would rather keep his money in the neighborhood.  He doesn’t run down the full inventory; his shopping list consists of a) new kicks; b) a cold beverage; c) Swisher Sweets; and d) a bag of hydroponic weed.  Maybe it bites “Vans” a little hard, but I have no quarrel with the ideology.

8.  Ying Yang Twins “Drop”
I can’t believe this ended up missing the top five.  The first six months of the year, I was telling anybody who would listen (i.e., nobody) that “Drop” was my new favorite song.  Nominally a strip-club number (“I wanna see ya gy-rate on the flo”), I was able to rationalize giving it a pass because the “Drop that motherfucker” refrain is so easily applied to contexts besides vagina auction.  Sometimes I do this thing where I repeat a particular phrase over and over to Heather, David Letterman-style, attempting to mine comedy gold from a painfully unfunny premise through sheer repetition.  Years ago I would do my version of Rupert Jee, saying to her over and over again, “Hello, my name is Jimmy.  Are you Jimmy?”  One can only imagine how tedious it has been for her to live in the same house with me.  Anyway, this year “Drop that motherfucker” was Heather’s cross to bear.

9.  TV on the Radio “Golden Age”
I spent Election Day (and Night) in Las Vegas, in a cubicle deep in the bowels of a rented office in a sleepy strip mall a couple miles east of the Strip.  Pretty much the middle of nowhere.  On a normal day it surely would have been depressing.  My cubicle was empty, not even a phone.  Someone strung a cable across the top of the partition so I could get Internet access, but even that was awfully slow.  I was there to do something that ultimately turned out not to be necessary, so I had a ton of time to kill.  I walked around and met a couple of people, but everybody seemed very busy and extremely motivated about the job at hand, so I gave up on small talk and kept to myself.  I noticed there was no TV, presumably so everybody would stay on task and not worry so much about the exit polls in Virginia.  In the early afternoon, after what seemed like forever, the results started coming in.  Without a TV I had to sit there and hit Refresh on my browser every thirty seconds like a chimp.  Things unfolded pretty much as I expected, but my back and neck unclenched a little bit with every new state that reported.  When the TV spokesmodels called Ohio I immediately got on the horn to my father and announced it was over.  The math had spoken.  Then I phoned my mother to tell her how thankful I am that, when I was a kid, she always took me into the voting booth and had me read the slates of candidates to her, as if she needed it.  I made repeated calls to Heather, hanging with nervous friends back in Oakland.  When it got close to 8 pm, with the polls about to close both locally and more importantly in California, I knew they were about to call the election for Barack Obama.  But still no TV, and when I tried to stream MSNBC and CNN on my laptop, the connection was too slow.  I went into the next room and, right as the graphic announcing the end of our age of moral obloquy flashed on the screen, found the one laptop with a working video feed.  The guy with the laptop and I took the computer into the main room, full of people waiting to hear the good news, and that was it.  Dozens of people clustered around an 18-inch screen watching people all around the nation crying and hugging and slapping five, and all around me everyone not watching the celebration on the screen was crying and hugging and slapping five, too.  A couple hours later, with the place emptying out and no cabs in sight, I bummed a ride back to my hotel with a couple kids from Los Angeles.  We listened to McCain’s concession on the radio.  I changed clothes and took a taxi over to the Hard Rock to lose money playing dice; when I climbed in, my cabbie didn’t know who had won.  He was unsurprised when I told him, and sanguine too, even though, he confessed, he was a Ron Paul man.  He started telling me how the Internal Revenue Service was not properly authorized under our Constitution.  I started to argue with him, but by that point I really wasn’t in the mood to fight with anyone.

10.  Kanye West “Heartless”
This is the closest Kanye comes to rapping on 808s & Heartbreak.  Everybody and her brother has pointed out West can’t sing, and no real quarrel here, but too few have given him credit for his handy way with melodies.  Pretty much every song on 808s (except the beyond-hilarious “Pinocchio Story”) is highly singable, and “Heartless” is compulsively so.

11.  Ne-Yo “Closer”
12.  Why? “Fatalist Palmistry”
13.  The Gaslight Anthem “The ’59 Sound”
14.  Lil Wayne “Mrs. Officer”
15.  Blitzen Trapper “Furr”
16.  Rihanna “Take a Bow”
17.  The-Dream “Falsetto”
18.  Paramore “That’s What You Get”
19.  Hotstylz f. Yung Joc “Lookin Boy”
20.  Shawty Lo “Dey Know”

Song of the year
1.  Okkervil River “Singer Songwriter”
Don’t make Will Sheff angry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.  This is a comprehensive ethering not of any particular artist but of modern indie rock in its entirety.  It is a response to room after airless room full of artists and audiences who confuse ownership of awesome record collections with heart and soul and fire, who see the world’s wonders not as the accumulation of millenia of human wisdom or manifestations of the divine but as a checklist to work through, items in a scavenger hunt.  Sheff may not be talking directly to himself (although for a couple verses it’s not so clear), but really the distinction is moot.  He is certainly implicating and dismissing without qualification the culture he inhabits.  Bohemians playing guitars will change nothing; they make their coin catering to educated, comfortable people with little incentive to fight hard for strutural changes in society.  One of Sheff’s obsessions on The Stand Ins is artifice posing as art, and rarely has anyone diagnosed that disease so acutely.

2.  Randy Newman “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country”
The joke is that the only nice thing Randy is able to say about Bush-Cheney is they were not as bad as Hitler.  Haw haw haw, for sure.  Then you read the Interweb and see that people are actually defending our recently departed leaders on this basis.

3.  Drive-By Truckers “Daddy Needs a Drink”
Honestly I enjoy a cocktail from time to time.  I work in a relatively high-stress job, in a line of work that, statistically speaking, breeds self-medication.  Some people I know can really put it away.  This song is explicitly about booze but really deals with the universal human condition of needing to create a diversion so you can avoid dwelling on the bullshit served up by life.

4.  Los Campesinos! “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks”
The year’s best shout-along chorus, with lyrics that describe its own impact: hard, like a blow to the head or a smash to the skull or a knee to your chest.

Best songwriting
Ray Davies.  He kicks it old school, always bringing a riff, three verses, a chorus, a middle eight, a solo, a conceptually coherent lyric with rhymes and everything.  (YOU KNOW, THE GUY FUCKING WROTE “YOU REALLY GOT ME” AND “WATERLOO SUNSET”)

Hook of the year
The faux siren on “Mrs. Officer.”

Worst song of the year
1.  Dan Le Sac & Scroobius Pip “Thou Shalt Always Kill”
Talk about a song that essentially has the hantavirus.  Sometimes life compels you to take sides, and I want to be on record as saying fuck and no to these English crusties and this unrepentant destroyer of four minutes of my life.  You’ll be happy to know there’s no need to hate on the fact that this grown man is using the name “Scroobius,” ‘cos you can detest him on the substance.  Scroob has made it his mission to document and correct the perversion of hip-hop by materialism; he (sort of) raps that “Guns, bitches, and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be.”  Is it jingo of me that my immediate response to this is, “Fuck you, limey”?  I mean, I’m not lecturing you on the offside trap or the proper temperature at which to serve bitter.  Anyway, it’s not just the unearned Keepers of the Flame schtick, it’s everything.  Early in the song Scroobius enumerates several commandments, including “Thou shalt not buy Coca-Cola products” and “Thou shalt not use poetry, art, or music to get into girls’ pants/Use it to get into their heads.”  The initial point to be made is that these are hippie platitudes and not ideas.  But it gets worse.  S. Pip forbids you to take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Dekker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, or Syd Barrett in vain.  BUT JUST A COUPLE SECONDS LATER he lists basically every canonical Anglo guitar combo from the Beatles to Bloc Party (!!!!) before dismissing each with “Just a band!”  Even beyond the shallowness and incoherent sloganeering, the rockist context makes clear that, when this jiveass whiteboy donkeyfucker is clucking disapproval about Puffy distorting the true nature of the game, he’s talking to other white yobs.  Please do get back to us when you’ve drafted your ten-point Contract with Rap, fellas. 

2.   Kid Rock “All Summer Long”
In case you never bothered to learn its name, this was the one that sequentially ripped off “Werewolves of London” and “Sweet Home Alabama.”  Few have achieved more with less than Bob Ritchie.

3.  Beyonce “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”
Hey, we’ve all heard the essentialist evo-psych party line about marriage: women want security, men want sex, it’s the natural order, thus it always has been and forever will be.  This is the major premise of most of our national discourse on gender relations, to the extent we have such a discourse.  But even in the context of that cliché I find this song ideologically gross.  When B. upbraids her man by telling him, “If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it,” it’s the third-person pronoun that gives away the game.  She’s asserting her existence as an object of value to be acquired and bejeweled; using the first person would ring false to her, because she doesn’t see herself as capable of agency.  If you want to dispute that, and argue the song is empowering because she’s dismissing some scrub who can’t commit to a good woman, sorry—the bridge makes clear that’s not what’s going on.  She’s not really declaring independence and going on the prowl to get hers; she’s just play-acting in a desperate attempt to make the douchebag jealous.  You know, I would suggest that importing capitalism into the home is not really the best way to build a stable relationship.  But hey, I still tap my foot to the beat.  Never said it wasn’t hella catchy.

4.  Plies “Please Excuse My Hands”
Thank Christ somebody out there is sticking up for all the rush-hour mass-transit frottage enthusiasts and lapdance terms-of-service violators out there.  Basic message: “Hey, sorry about that rape, lady!”

Most annoying song of the year
Maino, “Hi Hater.”  Basically what we have here is a smug, dumb guy who spends all day at the gym, and he’s stumbling over some rudimentary “rhymes” about how lame you are for resenting the hell out of him like you do.  But honestly you’ve never spent ten seconds thinking about him.  Why would you?

Most overplayed song
That Katy Perry thing, “I Pandered to Male Pornographic Fantasies in Order to Titillate and/or Terrify (Same Difference) My Gender-Convention-Bound Boyfriend Who Otherwise Has Problems Sustaining an Erection.”

Song that would drive me craziest on infinite repeat
Black Mountain’s 18 minute patience-tester “Bright Lights.”  It wouldn’t even need to be infinite repeat.  The over-under says I would crack on consecutive play number four.

Most egregiously derivative song of the year
“Here’s Looking at You, Kid” by the Gaslight Anthem.  It’s a pretty good song, too, and really sums up everything that’s simultaneously charming and exasperating about The ’59 Sound.

Song I feel cheapest about liking
Flo Rida and T-Pain’s “Low.”  I know I promised: no more strip-club songs.  That’s some dumb, degrading shit.  I’ll try to do better.  I also feel pretty cheap about how much I enjoy the Virgins record.  Possibly I’m just reacting to the NYC Vice magazine American Apparel dirtbag thing.  You could say I should forgive them for that, but that’s pretty much both the medium and the message, isn’t it?  And that video: fellas, ripping off Robin Byrd is so 1987.  Oh wait, that’s the whole idea.

Song I don’t feel at all cheap about liking
Shawty Lo, “Dey Know.”  You can’t say he’s a bad rapper ‘cause how would you know?  He’s not even trying to rap.  He’s like some guy in a parking lot.  But that synth horn line was this year’s version of the kalimba from “Freaky Gurl,” the sort of dumbly insistent earworm that eats clear through your brain and you will never be able to stop humming it so don’t try.

Song I like better than I ought to
Fleet Foxes’ “Blue Ridge Mountains.”  Somehow it seems a little more substantial than the rest of the record, but I’m still not convinced.  It does have a great tune.

Song that got stuck in my head the most this year
“A Milli.”  No big shock there.

Funniest song
“Acid Fight,” by Blood on the Wall.  It’s the downtown junkie-rock answer to “Eye Jammie” by 3rd Bass.  “Pinocchio Story” comes in second.

Best anachronism
Raphael Saadiq’s The Way I See It.  Mostly Saadiq does Smokey Robinson, but he also works in a little Marvin Gaye from time to time.  I was also terribly spooked by Donald Cumming’s Elvis Costello impression on “She’s Expensive,” the opening track of The Virgins.

Best purist rock and roll song
“Lost in the Light,” by the Heavenly States.  “All the children are dancing all night,” man; it’s like the Doobie Brothers or somebody.  Another strong contender, surprisingly, was For Against, with “Aftertaste.”  They don’t usually get after it like that.  (And check out Jeffrey Runnings correctly using the subjunctive in the chorus; somewhere David Foster Wallace is smiling.)  "Aftertaste" was like a college-rock staple from 1982, the sort of song John Hughes woulda cut from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack because it would’ve scared away the tweens.

Most enjoyable musical moment of the year
The helium-gulping gremlin that chirps the chorus of “Give the Drummer Sum.”  I know that’s just a vocal effect, but I really wish there was a real guy who talked like that, ‘cause I would want to hang out with that guy.

Best singing
Erykah Badu is kind of playing on her own level right now.

Best rapping
Nas.  Man, these picks are making me feel ancient.  I’m gonna try to find something positive to say about somebody who was not active in the mid-90s.

Worst rapping
Well, not yet.  I vote for Plies, who is just like kryptonite to me.  He’s a complete dick and super-boring on the mic.  He also dresses like a fucking moron.  When he first came out I thought his name was “Piles,” as in hemorrhoids, which made sense.  Rolling Scone comes to my house these days because I bought tickets from Ticketmaster, and Christian Hoard got off a good one in his RS review of Da Realist, describing Plies’ target demographic: “Do you like Young Jeezy but think he’s a little soft?”  That’s about the size of it.  Runner-up is Scroobius Pip.  Hey, he wants to think of himself as an emcee, so we should treat him like one.

Best band
The Truckers.  If your car got stuck in the mud outside the club, they would totally help you push it out, even though it might ruin their stage duds.  This is a band that really connects with its audience, and that’s no small achievement these days.

Best full-band jam
For Against’s white-guy mood piece “Game Over.”  Second place goes to the Jicks, hanging tough on the title track of Real Emotional Trash.

Best instrumental solo
Charlie Sexton (I assume) on Another Country’s opener, “Something to Me.”

Best synth player
Tom Brislin of Spiraling was a pretty easy call.  I also have to hand it to Alchemist on H.N.I.C. 2 for trying to recreate the griminess of The Infamous using SoftSynths.  It works better than you might think.

Best piano/organ player
Spooner Oldham, sitting in with the Truckers on Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.  You may have heard of Spooner, who wrote “Cry Like a Baby” for the Box Tops and “I’m Your Puppet” for James & Bobby Purify.  He didn’t get a lot of room to shine on BTCD (as the fans call it), but his electric piano on “Daddy Needs a Drink” was the finest musical achievement of the year.  (The Truckers are too egalitarian to let anybody shine too much.  “Team,” like “Truckers,” begins with the letter T.  Remember in the late 80s when Whitesnake hired Steve Vai and David Coverdale did that interview on MTV where he said, head deep in own ass with confidence, “STEVE VAI … was the only guitarist … we considered FOR WHITE SNAKE”?  Vai would not have fit in with the Truckers.)

Best guitarist
Harry Dingman III could’ve taken Comeback Player of the Year for his return to For Against 20 years after he left, but he’ll have to settle for this one.  Will Sheff had the best guitar tone I heard this year, on “Starry Stairs.”  Andy Falkous of Future of the Left was probably the best pure rhythm player this year, as he usually is.

Best bassist
Kevin Barnes.  Whatever else you might say about the guy, he aims to leave ‘em dancing.  The runner-up is Tom Blankenship of My Morning Jacket.  That guy is like Mariano Rivera—he keeps doing the same thing, over and over again, and it keeps working.  Props also to Reenie Hollis of The Long Blondes; her band very sadly dissolved after Dorian Cox had a stroke, but I hope we hear from her again.  (Needless to say, I also hope we hear from Dorian Cox again.)

Best drummer
Benny Horowitz of the Gaslight Anthem was outstanding on The ’59 Sound, helping his band’s overwrought songs onto solid ground.  The Anthem writes songs in discrete sections, verse and prechorus and chorus and bridge and breakdown and climax; in each song, with every new section, Horowitz has a coherent new idea to present.  Listen to what he does on “The Patient Ferris Wheel”—the casual switch to the ride cymbal in the opening, the Burundi beat on the prechorus, those three off-beat snare hits when the chorus hits the payoff, the bass drum always ba-bump ba-bump like a heartbeat, everything precisely calibrated to the beat in your head.  Paul Engelhard of For Against is just a beast and comes in second.

Best backing vocals
Eric Earley’s bandmates in Blitzen Trapper add a layer of substance to the band’s performance.  Sometimes I listen to Earley singing by himself and say “What the fuck is this guy talking about?”  Then the other guys join in and it’s like, “Well, they seem to understand—I guess it must mean something.”  For a band with so much skill at assembling the musical components of a song but just average lyrical abilities, that’s serious value added.

Best use of a non-traditional instrument
The ventilator on Spiritualized’s “Death Take Your Fiddle.”

Best producer
Black Milk for Tronic.  Drumma Boy gets the silver for cooking up summer’s two nicest singles, “Lost” and “Put On.”  And let’s not forget T.I.’s  “What Up, What’s Haapnin’.”  I mean, I was never persuaded I should care about T.I.’s beef with Shawty Lo, but it’s a great beat.  The best production on a rock record was Rob Mathes’s kitchen-sink job on PATD’s Pretty. Odd.

Worst producer
There’s no producer credited, because who the fuck did anything worth the credit, but I vote for whoever is responsible for the gear-grinding suicide inducement that was Times New Viking’s Rip It Off.  It’s not that some of their songs aren’t tuneful.  Maybe a little too GBVish, but there are discernible melodies.  And I hear they’re fun to see live.  But you can’t possibly listen to this record.  If you sit through it, you won’t enjoy it.  It’s mixed farther into the red than anything I’ve ever heard.  They demand you “play it loud” on the back cover—of course they do!—but even with the volume turned down to ant-lullaby levels nothing is audible except the stupid distorto guitar.  (The guy who helped the band mix it calls himself “Matt Horseshit”; I’m gonna leave that one alone.)  Also fucking up was Erol Alkan, with his Depeche Mode production on the Long Blondes’ sophomore slump, “Couples.”  These guys were alienated enough already; with that echoey morgue-slab ambiance, Alkan made them sound like not just robots but German robots.

Best arranging
The Unfairground.  It really is a beautifully executed record.

Best lyrics
Will Sheff is a perennial contender in this category, and this year he brought the goods on The Stand Ins.  On one song he’s writing from the perspective of a porn actress who just shot herself in the temple with a 9mm handgun.  She’s thinking about all the men she encounters during the course of an average day—fans, pimps, fellow sex professionals. “They ask for more,” she sighs, “What do they think this fan club is for?”  Then there’s “Singer Songwriter,” which we’ve already discussed.  Outside the Okkervil River record, I also especially dug Randy Newman’s typically strong effort on Harps and Angels, no big surprise there, and Patterson Hood’s fine work on Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.  Z-Ro also moved me with his extreme pessimism on Crack.  Yoni Wolf of Why? was also great, if occasionally too obscure, but he probably had the best line of the year on “Song of the Sad Assassin”: “I feel like a loop of the last eight frames of film/Before a slow-motion Lee Harvey Oswald gets shot in the gut and killed.”  I mean, I sometimes feel pretty bad, but I almost never feel that bad.  Randy Newman had the funniest line, from “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” grasping around for historical world leaders worse than Dick Cheney and learning something about himself in the process: “Take the Spanish Inquisition!/Put people in a terrible position/I don’t even like to think about it/Well, sometimes I like to think about it.”

Worst lyric of the year
If you want to say worst of the decade, I won’t fight too hard: “Let’s dance to Joy Division/And celebrate the irony,” from the Wombats’ “Let’s Dance to Joy Division.”  Congratulations, Wombats: you are the first ones to notice that incongruity, how did we ever miss it.  Your prize is a steaming bag of ass.  “Are we human/Or are we dancer?” annoys me less, but my sweet lord its inanity is unmatched.  Brandon Flowers is what happens when dumb guys try to be deep.

Best beard
Lemme go off topic for a second.  I have never gone in much for Rick Ross, but I really love his giant gold Rick Ross pendant with the giant gold Rick Ross head sporting the giant gold Rick Ross shades and giant gold Rick Ross beard.  To me, it seems like a detail out of a video game.  As in, Rick Ross would be a low-level boss you’d have to defeat in some specialized martial-art form, and once you defeated him you’d have to grab his pendant, which turned out to be the key to the next level and the next boss.  Because Ross is not slim, maybe his martial-art would be sumo, or a hybridized Ray from Bloodsport North Woods style, with a lot of bearhugs and a general focus on physically crushing the opponent’s entire skeleton.  Regardless, after you knock him cold, you take the giant gold pendant, lift up the rug, and fit the pendant into a concavity underneath it.  Then the wall slides open, revealing a gently curving staircase that takes you to the next level, where Eazy-E awaits.  (You defeat Eazy by grabbing and draining his 40-ounce Olde English 800.)  Ross would not be the first boss in the game; he’s not quite that shite on the mic.  He’s more the Piston Hurricane type; we can save Glass Joe for Ma$e or somebody.  (Ma$e would have real problems defending his diamond scepter against even the novice player.)  Anyway, the video game would have like 15 levels.  Later you’d get to LL Cool J and his AM-FM radio/dual-deck cassette player.  As for who would be the final boss—well, there are so many ways you could go.  I am torn about it.  KRS-ONE and his teacher’s edition of The Four Elements?  Shawn Carter and his bottomless flute of Cristal?  Chuck D and his Pirates hat (none of that figurative bullshit for Chuck)?  Someone smarter than me should take this idea and run with it.  The winner in this category is perennial contender Patrick Hallahan.  His beard gently whispers to you, ain’t nobody gonna get hurt on this deal.

Thing I don’t know but I should
Frightened Rabbit.  They called their record The Midnight Organ Fight, which actually might be the best album title of the year.  Lord knows we need some new euphemisms for sex.

Most overrated artist
Lil Wayne.  I don’t want to come off like the curmudgeon brandishing his copy of Tha Block Is Hot in your face, but Tha Carter III is not even a particularly good Lil Wayne record.  I understand why it was an enormous hit, don’t get me wrong.  Weezy’s vocal ID is unmatched at this point—his scratchy, desperate, lecherous wheeze orients you immediately to where you’re at and what’s in store.  His concepts (e.g., hip-hop ER doctor, thug in love with female police officer, Steven Q. Urkel) are better-defined than most.  And the record is full of candidates for radio play, showy beats from all corners of the rap world.  As an album, though, it sure doesn’t hold together.  The producers work hard for the money, but listening to the full record is like walking into a room painted with every color visible to the human eye.  Then there’s the major problem, that Wayne has been talking non-stop for four years now, every damn thing he says ending up on a mixtape or guest shot someplace.  It’s only natural that he would have stopped paying attention to the shit he’s saying.  Sometimes he’ll give you eight bars that are kind of coherent, I guess, and he still has a way with a doodie joke.  The above-mentioned ER song, “Dr. Carter,” features Weezy purporting to try to revive wack emcees who have flatlined from lameness, but his rhymes are definitely on the half-assed side.  Not a defibrillator, more like a 20-ounce Mountain Dew.  Tellingly, two of the three patients he treats die on the table.

Most overrated song
“Paper Planes” is the answer.  Now she’s even ruined “Straight to Hell” for me.  That was the best song on Combat Rock, man.

Artist that has absolutely no reason for existing
Flight of the Conchords.  I enjoy deadpan humor and funny accents as much as the next guy, or maybe even more.  Still, I am under the impression people actually bought the Flight of the Conchords record and listened to it in their homes, as if it were music.

Band that is no longer getting it done and should break up
Metallica, which I know has been obvious for a decade or so.  Everybody has acknowledged that their last three, if not four, records were terrible, so no one gave them too much shit for overtly trying to rewrite Master of Puppets, even when they fessed up to it in interviews.  But admitting it doesn’t make it kosher, does it?

Geezer who should give it up altogether
Samuel L. Jackson.  If you want a pop-music-type answer, Beck.  In ten years, I’m not sure people will understand why the guy was so big in the 90s.

Most undeservedly hyped debut
Bon Iver.  I don’t mean to harsh everyone’s mellow; For Emma, Forever Ago is a perfectly nice listen.  If you ever have the misfortune of having me over at your house, you have total license to put it on the hi-fi.  But when you peel away the multitracked falsetto and the sparkly, rustic acoustic guitar, one basic question remains.  In the immortal words of Hemroid from De La Soul Is Dead, “Tell me, what are they saying, man?”  Justin Vernon’s lyrics don’t hold up, so he uses abstraction and technology to give the music a cheap sheen of mysticism.  Truth to tell, I have the same concern with Fleet Foxes, even though Robin Pecknold gets a pass for now on account of his terrifically spooky melodies and creative song structures.  These records have at least a faint odor of the stuff Will Sheff called out in “Singer Songwriter”; the things Vernon said really did disappear from my head in the time that it took to be amazed (not even amazed, really).  Now, if you was to flip it on 45 so I can dance to it, you might have something.

Also shit
Titus Andronicus.

Unsexiest person in pop music
Cisco Adler.  Seriously, do not click that link.

Best live show
The Fiery Furnaces at the Great American Music Hall, 5/29/08.  They still need more guitar in the mix.  Also worth mentioning was the Rock n’ Roll Means Well Tour, with Drive-By Truckers and the Hold Steady, which hit the Fillmore the Sunday before Thanksgiving—mainly for Patterson Hood’s encore applause line, “Rock n’ roll doesn’t mean well; it means to FUCK YOU UP.”  Only when done right, Patterson.  I mean, go tell that to Animal Collective and see how far you get.

Best video
Kanye’s “Flashing Lights.”  I’m talking about the version where he’s gagged and bound in the trunk of a car and then a supermodel in a matching bra-and-panty set and stiletto heels decapitates him with a shovel.  See, I think Ye actually thinks this could happen to him any day now.  Everywhere he looks his enemies are aligning against him.

Best dancing in a video
The quartet of neon-clad slo-mo steppers in Missy’s “Ching-a-Ling.”  Runner-up are the girls in Lil Josh & Ernest’s “Jigga Juice,” which they played like never on my local radio.

Video they should have made
Okkervil River’s closer, “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979.”

2007 record I ignorantly slept on
Say Anything’s In Defense of the Genre.  Why did no one tell me about these guys?  I don’t like this as well as their previous record, 2004’s …Is a Real Boy, but it overflows with ambition and songwriting intelligence.  Remember what I said earlier about hip-hop encouraging emcees to bring their personalities to the forefront, while critic-rock doesn’t make the same demands on its frontpeople?  That’s the best thing about Say Anything; Max Bemis is unafraid to let you inside his head, even though it’s always a real mess in there.  Then again, they are not really a critic’s band, nor are they trying to be.

2007 record I unaccountably forgot to rank
Our old pal Jarvis Cocker’s Jarvis, which I really liked.  I generally follow the arbitrary rule of ranking records in the year of their US release, even if they dropped overseas prior to that.  Jarvis came out in the UK in late 2006, but didn’t get its US release until early ’07.  Since I was jonesing hard for new Cocker, I bought the import early, high-mindedly decided not to rank it in ‘06, then forgot about it by the time I compiled my ’07 rankings.  Foolish consistency, you truly are the hobgoblin of small minds.  Anyway, I retroactively place Jarvis on last year’s list, somewhere.  (Much love especially to “Black Magic,” which murders “Crimson & Clover” then wears its skin around the house like a brand new suit.)

2008 record I will probably reevaluate a year from now
Skeletal Lamping.  I’ve already reevaluated it like sixteen times.  The main thing I have come to understand is that Kevin Barnes (or, as I like to call him, “Magick Johnson”) likes his penis.  Also, he wants you to touch his penis.  Will you touch it?  Slowly at first.  Then a little bit faster.  Now STOP!  Now—cut him with that linoleum knife.  Now feed him some mescaline!  Now back to the penis!  This album is really musically remarkable, an ideological repudiation of verse-chorus-verse song form with the usual great synth and bass playing and weirdass but insistent melodies.  To me, that’s the most important thing.  You haven’t heard anything like it, for sure.  But then there’s the singer, who keeps ineptly trying to affect soul inflections and oversharing about how he likes butter in his ass and a lollipop in his mouth, that’s just him, that’s something he enjoys.  It’s cool, his balls just feel cleaner when he gets them waxed.  After 50-some minutes of this nonstop monologue seguing into itself, you lose the capacity to relate and it becomes theater.

2008 record I will probably like more a year from now
Portishead’s Third.  The production is fantastic, but I never managed to enjoy listening to it, at least not all at once.  I’ll keep trying.

Stephan Jenkins Memorial Award for colostomy bag of the year
Rivers Cuomo.  Girl, don’t go away mad; girl, just go away.  We’re even more bored with you than you are with us.

Comment on Vampire Weekend
The highly coordinated PR blitz that accompanied their debut release made the September 11 attacks look like the work of rank amateurs.  It’s soothing to know the music industry is still capable of pulling off that kind of thing, even if the returns no longer justify the investment.  Vampire Weekend went on sale at my local independent store for $8.98.  A week later there were already a half-dozen copies in the recent-returns bin.  Nearly a year on, I get the sense the cool kids have already given up on them, so I’m not piling on.

Comment on “The Nun’s Litany,” by Magnetic Fields
I think Stephin Merritt has confused nuns with priests.

Honorable mention
I never know where to rank comedy albums, but I was glad to get Mitch Hedberg’s posthumous Do You Believe in Gosh?, even if he was still honing the material when he died.  He’s drinking NyQuil on the rocks, “for when you’re feeling sick but sociable.”  It goes on like that.  “Imagine if the Headless Horseman had a headless horse,” he offers.  “That would be fucking chaos.”

Will still be making good records in 2018
Kevin Barnes.  I believe it.  He’s turning into Frank Zappa, a compulsively prolific composer completely preoccupied with groin issues.

Best record of 2009
I’m rooting for the mighty Mos Def, with The Ecstatic.

*****

Finally, in the interest of providing a counterpoint, however brief, here are Heather's top ten records of 2008.  In no particular order, as usual.  Some people just don't feel compelled to rank everything under the sun, go figure.

Erykah Badu New Amerykah: Part I (4th World War)
Santogold Santogold
Ladytron Velocifero
Goldfrapp Seventh Tree
Raphael Saadiq The Way I See It
Portishead Third
James Pants Welcome
Q-Tip The Renaissance
The Long Blondes "Couples"
Flying Lotus Los Angeles

As you'd expect, she's most eagerly anticipating the new Ruben Studdard.