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—it's not 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.  Raekwon Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ...
7.  Bjork Post
8.  Ben Folds Five Ben Folds Five
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”

That minimalist space-alien beat from "The Rain" was a whole new thing.  It also had that crazy video clip with Missy in the Hefty bag.  But I probably should've given first prize to "Tubthumping"; no song was ever more persistent.  It stalked me all over Ireland that summer—in pubs, public lavatories, gift shops, gifte shoppes, and especially in the car.  It was like "When Doves Cry" in the summer of '84.  "Return of the Mack" has the untrivial virtue of making me happy.  It comes on the radio, I will try out my harmony vocals and Pip-type pivots on the dance floor.  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?

Comments

[tris mccall]

i am continually amazed by how many people i meet through music love and i mean *love* scott miller. not just pop musicians, either. you meet some classically-trained violinist who plays in a chamber group, and she doesn't know all that much about popular music, but get her started about *two steps* or something and she will go on all night. if you ask him he will tell you something about how his writing didn't connect with a mass audience, but all evidence suggests to me that his music took with so many disparate *individuals* who care deeply about records, and that is a much cooler outcome anyway. and i meet plenty of young people -- college-age people -- who don't know thing one about big star but who've discovered game theory. *lolita nation* hung on the wall at cake shop for a reason. it is and will continue to be a guiding light for all these young fuzzed-out pop practitioners.

our '99s are extremely similar. lots of our lists are similar, but ‘99 is uncanny. *69 love songs* didn't make my list, either, even though i love so many of them. there's just way too much garbage on that collection.

if you look at my paper critics poll ballot for '98, it says next to *this is hardcore* "the most dan purcelliest album ever made". i am glad to see i was right!

the sammy album is absolutely indelible. there was some resentment about it when it dropped because luke wood was, at the time, working for geffen. in (quick) retrospect, who cares? it's not luke wood's project anyway.

[Jonathan]

I greatly enjoyed this conprehensive overview of your musical tastes over the last 19 years. Thanks for posting! My first question: how in the hell did you discover Propeller back in '92 when it was only available as a small-run LP?

It wasn't until fall semester '95 that I stumbled upon the majesty of Pollard, Sprout, and co., and that was via a second-generation mixtape of material from Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes, Propeller, and various concurrent seven inches - which I still contend to be the greatest GbV album of all time. Crooked Rain and No Depression were recent favorite records, so I was primed for an alternative to the Springsteen/Who/Simon classics I had been rocking all through high school.

Echos Myron, Games of Pricks, Weed King, etc. blew my mind and opened me up to a whole new way of thinking about/doing rock music: it's the ideas that count - the melodies and the lyrics above all else - not their execution/fidelity. In this respect, GbV is still fundamentally influential to me as both listener and music-maker even a decade and a half later, though I rarely spin their records these days.

Did you get a chance to see them live? What did you think?

[S.M.]

Jonathan, I heard *Propeller* in 92 through blind luck. When I was visiting my girlfriend in St. Louis in fall 92, I used to go to this record store called West End Wax (d.). I used to shoot the shit with a clerk there named Dean, who grew up in Vandalia, OH or some other town near Dayton. He had heard GbV play live and had a cassette copy of *Propeller* and *Same Place the Fly Got Smashed*, which was the record before *Propeller*. One day he was playing *Propeller* when I was in the store, and as I walked around shopping, I kept thinking, "Man, this song is really great" about every track. I kept expecting the next song to be non-great, but no dice. Dean was sort of -- not a dick, exactly, but he was excited to have this treasure no one else knew about, and it took a lot of browbeating before he would even tell me who it was and where they came from. Eventually I got him to promise to make me a copy, which promise he thankfully kept. In 93, I missed out on *Vampire on Titus* -- didn't even know it came out -- but was happy when Matador signed them and re-released *Bee Thousand* in the summer of 94.

I got to see GbV live a half-dozen times -- the first time at the Great American Music Hall in SF in spring 95. The next time they came through town, I brought a friend along who was a Deadhead. He was always taking me to unlistenable jam-band shows, so I thought I would do the opposite. He liked Pollard's high kicks and (accurately) noted the similarity between his voice and Peter Gabriel's. But he wasn't much for the band. He spent a lot of time sardonically comparing "the rhythm guitar player" with "the other rhythm guitar player."

I don't listen to them much these days, either. I liked it when Pollard put out the stage-patter record called *Relaxation of the Asshole*. I'm sure he realizes that title is a metaphor for the fact he puts out 17 records every year and has no quality-control mechanism. But boy can he write a melody, and his lyrics are way better than is generally believed.

[Jonathan]

Quite an unlikely story. You are a lucky rocker for sure.

I first caught GbV on the "Under the Bushes" tour, the last hurrah for the classic lineup: Toby, Mitch Mitchell, and Kevin Fennel making like Irving Plaza was Bob's basement or wherever they used to get loaded and record sheer brilliance to 4-track. I was blown away by the setlist - Wished I Was a Giant, Smothered in Hugs, Lethargy for christsakes! - and the performance, highlighted by Bob's high kicks and droll song intros: "This is Striped White Jets. 1-2-3-4..."

However, every time I saw the band since that initial salvo, I was more than a little disappointed. Although Bob shat out plenty of good songs post-'96, I could never get fully behind the Doug Gillard era. While the subsequent versions of the band were probably tighter, they just didn't move me like the Under Bushes lineup.

[S.M.]

Dean was a handy guy to know. A year or so later, right after *Exile in Guyville* came out, he also dubbed a copy of the *Girlysound* tape for me. I'm sure he's still out there somewhere, listening to the leak of the new Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear records.

I agree with you that the original group of alcoholic Dayton homies was the best GbV, at least in the live setting. They were an actual band. Then again, they also had better songs to work with. After *Under the Bushes* the really great songs were exceptions, and after *Isolation Drills* the exceptions became very exceptional.

[voxpoptart]

Random notes from throughout your piece, numbered for no good reason:

1) I prefer Warehouse to Zen Arcade, but this would be more impressive if I really cared about Husker Du. I mean, they're pretty good, but I'd trade their entire discography for the one song by Bicycle with the line "Everyone in town loves Husker Du/ maybe I'm afraid what it does to you". (You'd love Bicycle at least as much as I do, I think: one self-titled album, 1999.)

2) I love *Lolita Nation* too, but it's about my 5th-favorite Scott album. (We differ strongly on the merits of *Attractive Nuisance*, and *Days for Days* was the first album for which I overcame years of crippling shyness to walk around singing on the streets of Boston.)

3) You and glenn mcdonald write about *Surfer Rosa* almost identically. It makes me jealous, wishing I'd heard it before the grunge-punk revolution it did so much to inspire; it just doesn't sound like anything special to me, though I enjoy it.

4) Bon Jovi's *New Jersey*, by far their best album, is high on my Best of '88 list for exactly the reasons with which you defend Kix. I'll check Kix out.

5) "When I Win the Lottery" may indeed be my own choice of best song of 1989. ("Sadie" wouldn't be my pick for 2004, but it's another awesome choice.)

6) I love *Exile in Guyville*'s weirdness too. I think it was so weird that her fans miss how weird Ms. Phair has remained. *Whip-Smart* is bizarre, dang it, trailing off in unexpected chords, directions, and production choices all over the place, some of which work.

7) I have at least two friends who love *Dots and Loops* even more than you seem to.

8) Also, my friends are more likely to love than mock the boombox scene in _Say Anything_. The majority of my friends are female, which may explain that. I would have found the entire movie about 20 times as romantic and affecting if there'd been the slightest evidence that the superbrain Skye character actually ever thought about anything, particularly in Cusack's presence, particularly if that's why Cusack loved her.

9) I downloaded some Drive Like Jehu, Marah, and Hunter songs from Emusic while reading this. Liking them on first impression.

10) McLusky, Tori, and Gomez high on your 2002 list is the closest we come to think-alike agreement. It's close.

11) While preferring *Electric Version* to *Mass Romantic* is indubitably correct, I don't think it fits well with your claim that you like your music "relenting". It and Bryan Scary's *Flight of the Knife* are the two greatest pop albums to ever take half-a-dozen listens just to stop overwhelming and exhausting me.

12) Is the magic number, squared, plus itself.