Sausage Mahoney.

Elbows Unique Now, Meet the New Me

So those of you whose Venn diagrams include an overlap between a) hip-hop and b) comedy should go here immediately and read the simile-heavy ravings of some guy credibly pretending to be Ghostface Killah.  He spends a lot of time brutally ripping on soft-ass rappers (most of whom I have to admit I like despite their conceded soft-ass-ness, sorry fake Ghost).  Highlights include:

• Several posts expressing intense disdain for Aubrey Drake Graham, whom he asserts "be havin Grey Poupon milkshakes namsayin."  Also "you stab that nigga n you gon get yogurt on ya blade n shit."
• A list of suggested song titles, including the U-God/Snoop Dogg collabo "Porcupine Hurricanes" and "Kill Yallz (f. Paula Abdul)."
• And, of course, the long-awaited Tony Starks Interview with Barack Obama.

Trust me, it's much more rewarding than that faux Chris Walken Twitter feed.

2010: So Tired Most Nights

Scott Miller sat in with Rubberband Girl on Berkeley's venerable KALX 90.7 FM this afternoon.  Really this was just an excuse for Miller to talk about music, but obstensibly he was promoting his new book, based on a series of CDs he made, then wrote liner notes for, each one comprising a single year from 1957 to 2010.  This is so fantastically geeky—many of us have thought about doing things like this, but few of us have the time or patience or discipline to actually do it.  Miller's own music has always made clear that he loves other people's records immensely.  He thinks about, and is able to distinguish, every minute detail of what he likes about it, from the songwriting to the playing, from the production to its net impact as a snapshot of a place and time.  Scott is as far over into the left brain as any pop songwriter ever has been, which accounts for both the astonishing quality of his music, both in the 80s with Game Theory and in the 90s with the Loud Family, and his total lack of commercial success; it's a shame he couldn't have one without the other.  I haven't read the book yet but will buy it, but I did read the blog entries the book is based on, and Miller is as good a writer about music as he is a writer of music.

As I understand it, Miller's process was taking 20 tracks from each year—not necessarily all his favorites, but all stuff that evokes that year in his mind, that inspires some powerful emotion.  Some of the tracks (like the 18-minute "Dogs" from Pink Floyd's Animals) he would edit, since another thing about Miller that comes across in his music is his impatience.  There's no Krautrock or dub or hippie jamming on his list.  Miller limited each artist except the Beatles to a single song on each year's CD.  For the Beatles he allowed up to three per year, one for each of their major songwriters.  Once he had 20 tracks that could fit on an 80-minute CD, he would sequence them in order of increasing quality, with the first song usually something that Miller felt captured the gestalt of the year (even if it wasn't necessarily something he was crazy about) and the last song his pick for best of the year.  Finally, once he had the sequence down, he would write little paragraphs about each of the songs and what he liked about them.*

* On the radio today, he was talking about how, after he made the CDs, he refused to let himself listen to them while he wrote about the lists.  It's funny; that's how I do it too, though I don't consider it a rule.  Each year as I write this year-in-music wrap-up, or before I wrote it when I was just compiling lists of my favorite music, sometimes with more notes and often with fewer, there will times when I listen to a song I'm writing about, to check a lyric, to more precisely understand a bit of music I want to describe.  But generally I listen to other music, or sometimes even nothing, when I'm writing. 

He had three hours, and most of the stuff he played was stuff he'd written about in the book.  Rubberband Girl slipped in a few of her own selections, some of which Miller also had written about.  Everything they played was terrific, even if some of it is stuff I admire and respect more than outright love.  As you'd think given their exception-to-the-rule status, his lists are full of Beatles songs, but he didn't play anything so obvious as that.  A few pretty big hits and well-known songs, but mostly numbers he sees as historical turning points—he played "Carrie-Anne" because he considers it the prototypical power-pop song.  He talked about how the Beatles, as great as they were, became so much the template for what came after them that they killed a lot of the styles of music that existed before them, even styles the Beatles themselves loved and imitated.  Obviously, as a music nerd who occasionally (ever more occasionally recently) writes long prose pieces about toonage, this could not have been more directly up my alley.*  Unsurprisingly, it made me think a lot about the process of writing about music and why it's so meaningful to me.

* Scott is not planning to put out a new album.  He's sort of entered the state of private contentment described at the end of this classic tune.

One of the best-known songs he played was Smokey Robinson's "You Really Got a Hold on Me," which for me has the greatest single pop lyric of all time, or certainly the one that packs the biggest word-for-word punch: its great first line, "I don't like you but I love you."  Those seven words—instantly memorable, expressing precisely a complex and universal phenomenon anyone's who ever been in a romantic relationship can understand immediately.  Dave Marsh famously said that, growing up in segregated and racially tense metro Detroit in the 60s, he heard the complex human emotion that line captures as the definitive refutation of white supremacy.  How could the people around him say black people were inferior to whites when William Robinson, Jr. is capable of having and expressing a feeling like that?  I actually think breaking apart and analyzing music obsessively, while it's not for everybody, is not so different from but is complementary to actually creating music.  Both are about deciding what you like and what you don't.  I wouldn't say reading music journalism gives me as much enjoyment as listening to actual music, just like reading about sex isn't as much fun as actual sex.  But exposure to other people's thoughts and beliefs and orthdoxies and uncertainties about music often brings great rewards.  If nothing else, there's always stuff out there I don't know about.

So: this is for all the people out there who write about music.  Thanks.  As always, this ballot is based on the tried-and-true Tris McCall Critics Poll format, with various additional smartass categories.

Away we go:

Best album
1.  Drake Thank Me Later
The rise of the middle-class rap superstar is a funny thing.  Most every art form, and certainly every pop-music genre you can name, from jazz to British Invasion blues-rock to D.C. punk, has straitjacketed itself with rigid standards of authenticity.  But none has fetishized “realness” and ostracized the phony like hip-hop.  Sometimes  “realness” has been about preserving the form, keeping its unique properties separate from R&B or pop or whatever.  But that’s proved next to impossible, because musically hip-hop is so omnivorous it has successfully assimilated every other genre of music under the sun except maybe bluegrass.  (They’re working on it.)  So as often as not “realness” isn’t about music but about a particular economic and cultural experience, a specific type of class consciousness.  “Realness” is more elusive than crime or extreme poverty or machismo, but that’s the shorthand in which more complex ideas get expressed, the blunt instrument some emcees use to smash open the can of worms.  Well, anyway: the biggest rapper out now is a Canadian ex-child actor who’s never had to sling a rock in his life and whose given name is “Aubrey.”  It shouldn’t surprise anybody.  Poor people are invisible in American society; our African American Democratic president may well be presiding over the slow-motion destruction of our social safety net, and with it his own party.  You might think hip-hop would be an exception to this trend, but maybe not.  The genre’s biggest stars have long striven to transcend their narrow creation myths by pitching Ciroc vodka or clubbing with Anne Hathaway, to the point where even broke-ass newcomers defensively boast about their chains.  So the audience has had plenty of time to get used to the idea of the bourgeois rapper, or at least stop administering purity tests.  At least in this case I am not complaining, because Drake is a highly skilled performer.  He’s a five-tool emcee: he has lyrical skills, vocal ID, a recognizable personality, and superior flow; he can even sing.  Maybe he’s not truly world-class in any of these respects, but he’s very, very good in all of them, which means he’s world-class on the whole.  He’s one of the few rappers who can express a coherent and evolving conversational through-line, with ebbs and flows and ideas building one on the other, over the course of a full 16 or 24 bars.  He rarely breaks momentum or resorts to randomness; everything he says is on purpose.  He has a little of the hashtag-rap tendency to compress his language in an effort to communicate more information in less space.  His big formal innovation is to drop the word “like” from his similes, since we know what he’s saying anyway, as in “Presidential suite, girl, Barack Hussein” or “Gotta set it off in this bitch, Jada Pinkett.”  Over the whole record, this sort of becomes a tic, but what’s interesting is how he uses the device.  With one fewer syllable to each idea, he can either speed up (by combining two ideas where before there would have been room for only one) or slow down (stretching out the remaining syllables to cover the additional space). His beats are clean, relaxing, often gorgeous; they are a perfect attitudinal match for the emcee and end up reflecting and magnifying his strengths.  Drake is about the most non-confrontational, conciliatory, accommodationist rapper of all time.  He doesn’t fuck with battle rhymes, doesn’t dis anybody, even anonymously.  Instead, he raps almost exclusively about how weird it is to be so famous and desirable, sort of like you or I would.  He wants to enjoy that but wonders if he can without destroying himself.  He’s not particularly tortured; he’s just clear-headed about the unreality of his life.  The whole thing is deeply human.

2.  The Wonder Years The Upsides
Wordy, self-righteous, and morally correct early-20s Philadelphian Dan “Soupy” Campbell battles through a miserable, half-drunk, post-collegiate year by huddling together with his bandmates for heat in the backs of vans.  Campbell is an inveterate smartass; the toons on his last record sported handles like “Bout to Get Fruit Punched, Homie” and the immortal “Buzz Aldrin: Poster Boy for Second Place.”  But this time he’s too sad and wretched for that kind of callow japery.  The most he can lift his tired head to muster is a snarky, pained aside.  He’s getting older every second, just like the rest of us.  The Wonder Years play the sort of music people I think still call “emo,” third-generation punk rock that is glossy and overwrought and adenoidal and accordingly unacceptable to Belle & Sebastian fans.  They have a lot going for them: the band is tight, useful riffs appear fairly often, and the guitar players understand how to complement each other.  If they don’t yet understand how to write catchy melodies on a consistent basis they still come up with sturdy ones.  But of course the band’s meal ticket is their logorrheic frontman.  His concerns are probably familiar to you, but you’re not nearly this articulate or consistently amusing.  All Campbell remembers from college is a bunch of dudes punching each other on the shoulder and calling each other “faggot”; he only comes out of hibernation after a dismal winter when the Philly public-works people turn on the Logan Circle fountain.  The “Girls Gone Wild B-team” and the future date rapists down at the bar don’t appeal; as he explains, “I don’t need to pump my fist or look ‘sweet.’” He has a very bad experience in the Bible Belt and loses his shit completely, making terrorist threats.  At the end, he ticks off the names of all his friends bunking in dank sublets or with their tolerant, employed girlfriends, wishing them nothing but the best.  Back in the 1960s, 23-year-olds made records like Astral Weeks and Piper at the Gates of Dawn, but the best minds of Campbell’s generation value literal reportage and self-diagnosis over mysticism and substance abuse.

3.  Jamey Johnson The Guitar Song
One hates to agree with those guys at the New York Times, but sometimes they have good ideas too.  They and every other critic were right about how great this record is.  Maybe it goes on too long, a couple of songs near the end are sorta marginal, but these are quibbles.  It's a double CD of fundamentalist outlaw country, like Waylon used to make and Willie sometimes still does.  Supposedly it's divided into yin and yang, a drunken, wrathful first disc and sober, hopeful second disc, though the distinction isn't rigid; the best song on the second half is the one where Jamey flees California before it explodes into riots, and possibly slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will.  If form holds and most Times readers are liberals, it’s good the paper flogged The Guitar Song so aggressively; maybe its readers will buy it.  Because Johnson doesn’t seem like a liberal to me.  Neither does he seem all that conservative, though he does nod to Bible-believin’ folk in “I Remember You,” wherein he narrates the birth of a baby in the voice of God, and no—that’s not one of the record’s better moments.  Mostly Jamey gives the impression of being an empathetic fellow with a depressive streak who despises phonies.  He makes a point of speaking for people forced into compromises or outright lawbreaking just to stay on the margins of society.  He directs explosive contempt toward the greedy and powerful who are forever trying to draw the margins of society inward, leaving more people outside the boundary.  He understands the sins of greed and pride and avarice are also in him; he is most merciless toward himself for seeking fame on a reality TV show.  If you want to read a much better writeup than this, which this record certainly deserves, go here.  There are a ton of great songs on this album.  Both kinds: songs for leaving your sweetheart, and songs for when your sweetheart left you.

4.  Big K.R.I.T. Krit Wuz Here
This list is heavy on rappers who make their own beats, like Curtis Cross and Mr. Kanye West down the list, but I like Justin Scott’s record most of all of them.  His beats are nothing like Black Milk’s forward-thinking electro-glitch, with its weird, syncopated drum breaks and analog synth squiggles.  Krit is much more conventional, using mostly sped-up soul samples like Kanye before him and the RZA before Kanye.  But like Kanye, he puts his own stamp on the technique.  By which I mean you wouldn’t say Krit Wuz Here is a similar record beat-wise to 36 Chambers or The College Dropout, much less lyrically or emotionally.  Krit is a better rapper than Black Milk, and certainly more technically accomplished than Yeezy, though you may feel Yeeze is a more distinctive monomaniacal nutjob.  We live in an age of market testing, so it’s unsurprising that Krit has calibrated his niche appeal precisely; he tells you right off on the intro to “Viktorious,” “I’m countrier than a motherfucker but my lyrical content is crazy.”  Well, he knew this collection of songs was excellent, insisting on a low-budget physical release so ign’ant fools wouldn’t call his album a mixtape.  I am not fully convinced the “album” will really exist in 20 years; the “novel” barely exists today.  But I love to see the kids fighting for the form.  It’s still the best way for a person to impose his worldview on the masses.

5.  Elvis Costello National Ransom
Especially over the past two decades, Elvis has mainly released records with defined and discrete musical concepts.  There was the string quartet record, the one with the opera singer, the Burt Bacharach collaboration, the Allen Toussaint Crescent City homage, and last year’s sophisticated-hillbilly effort.  Even of some of the early, funny ones can be summed up this way: we all recall the Stax/Volt Ray Charles apology (Get Happy!!) and the attempt to beat the Beatles at their own game (Imperial Bedroom).  But he’s always been equally capable of showcasing his entire range across a single LP, starting with his ‘77 debut My Aim Is True.  These smorgasbord albums are some of his most enduring works: Trust and Spike and Brutal Youth come to mind.  And don’t be fooled that so much of the personnel are held over from Secret, Profane & Sugarcane; National Ransom is pure smorgasbord.  You must know by now that Mr. MacManus can do anything under the sun with precision any academic would envy, even if I sometimes wish he’d go ahead and risk the F rather than settling for the A-minus.  Lyrically, it’s fascinating to me that the loudest coherent voices in pop music objecting to our current state of perpetual warfare and the looting of our national treasury by the wealthy and powerful are English guys in their 50s and 60s.  National Ransom has a lot in common with Richard Thompson’s dreary Dream Attic; both are rogue’s galleries wherein men with bad intentions viciously exploit the unwary.  And we’ll get to Roger Waters a little later.  The fact that American pop artists aren’t standing up any taller on these issues suggests we’ve entered the stage of nationhood where our prime directive is “Fuck it.”

6.  Janelle Monàe The ArchAndroid
It’s an incredibly impressive formal accomplishment, all over the place in the best possible way.  Monàe has a sense of adventure and a willingness to be weird and most of all the voice to execute whatever nutbar new thing she tries out, all of which goes a long way.  For those who didn’t read the million or so reviews of the record talking about this, The ArchAndroid is a concept album about a half-robot lady deathlessly pursued by paramilitary assassins for her crime of falling in love with a full-blooded human.  It’s half Romeo and Juliet, half Logan’s Run.  Since anyone who buys this premise has already given you the benefit of the doubt, this is a great platform to do whatever the fuck you want, which the artist proceeds to do.  The thing that keeps me from rating it higher is just that it’s a little distant.  I know that’s part of the idea, the outcast on the run from a hateful society.  But as an emotional experience the record is out in the ether with 2112 or A Farewell to Kings.  She really is an arch android, you see.

7.  Owen Pallett Heartland
This is a Borges-type deal wherein an author puts his protagonist through a gantlet of miseries—loss of wife and children, exiled from society, doomed to wander unloved and all that.  In response, the character does the only reasonable thing; he decides to hunt down and kill the author who inflicted this bullshit on him.  Tracking his tormentor to a remote mountain citadel (really probably a walk-up apartment where the guy is eating Apple Jacks and watching daytime TV, no idea what’s about to happen), the creation murders the creator.  After which the character has an existential moment, the unsettling realization that for the first time he has free will and must make his own decisions.  The text is so rich it conveys many sophisticated messages with equal force, whether or not Pallett expressly intended them.  You have to break harshly with your mothers and fathers and influences to ever understand yourself.  The artist loses control of her work the moment the work becomes public, and sometimes the results are not good.  There is no God.  Sharing too much of your soul through your art can leave you empty.  It’s an answer to the Book of Job, who really should have told the Almighty to go fuck himself sideways.  The music is light and airy chamber-pop, lots of beautiful and meticulous strings and woodwinds.  I know this is a great sales pitch for the product.

8.  Joanna Newsom Have One on Me
The announcement that Newsom was putting out a triple album was straight out of The Onion.  She was already the wordiest and most ornate young artist going, and those tendencies already sort of torpedoed her last outing, the inarguably lovingly rendered Ys.  I enjoyed Ys but there’s no denying it was a record you had to wrestle with, and people aren’t always in the mood for wrestling.  I’m not sure I’ve listened to it even twice since the end of 2006.  I would imagine Newsom wants to be the sort of artist whose music people actually listen to, as opposed to an artist whose work people own.  But she also contains multitudes and has to let them out somehow.  As compared to The Milk-Eyed Mender, which had songs about all manner of weird stuff, or even Ys, mostly about basic human relationships but using very elliptical language, the story behind Have One on Me is simple.  A woman falls in love and moves across the country with her man; he makes her life so miserable that eventually she’s forced to concede defeat and slink off.  Naturally Newsom renders it with the usual overkill, meticulously arranged numbers with multiple sections, her thesaurus and rhyming dictionary open on the standing desk.  The prevailing vibe is a little girl lost in the woods, at the mercy of all of nature’s horrors and fighting a losing battle to remain in one piece.  Before making the record, Newsom apparently had surgery to remove nodules from her vocal cords, which must explain why her vocals are now so breathy, so much less surefooted.  There’s no sign of that assertive “Inflammatory Writ” chirp anymore.  Of couse, the narrator has also gone wobbly.  Six years ago Newsom arrived on the scene awfully sure of herself in dealings with the fellas (see, e.g., “The Book of Right-On”), but that’s gone with the wind now too.  Have One on Me is two hours of a great artist licking her wounds.  The camera never blinks the whole painful time.

9.  Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The biggest hipster consensus pick since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, MBDTF has obvious qualities.  You certainly can’t front on the beats, whose each detail is so well-considered and flawlessly executed that stuble knocks, pings, and mumbles continue to reveal themselves to me even after several dozen listens.  Kanye can get anyone he wants to do anything he wants, at least on record, so there are a ton of guest shots.  Nearly all of them are all first-rate, even when the actual guest artists are marginal.  Nicki Minaj basically makes her career with her 16 on “Monster.”  She can talk nothing but shit for the next twenty years, and may intend to do just that, but whenever someone calls her on it all she’ll need to do is play “Monster” and that’ll be the end of it.  Most critiques of this record have focused on Kanye’s immense misogynist douchebaggery, the way he insists white women give better head before virtually mass-murdering dozens of them in the “Monster” video.  It’s not really a complete answer to say that he’s calling himself a monster, telling the ladies to run away from him as fast as they can.  Kanye’s iconography is stupid and provocative, and hard to separate from his real-life misbehavior.  He really puts the b in subtle. But for me, the biggest problem with MBDTF was that, for all its bluster, there really wasn’t a lot of genuine vulnerability on display.  808s and Heartbreak, which I underrated two years ago, now seems like one of the better records of the aughts; it had all the crazy nuance and multiplicity of this one, plus a consistent sonic landscape that really worked, but most importantly Kanye really was walking naked into high school.  He showed us how he felt, whereas this time he just told us, and it didn’t hit nearly as hard.

10.  Erykah Badu New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh
Her last record was my favorite album of the aughts.  This one isn’t as good, but it doesn’t give a fuck, which is its own virtue.  You know the story: the last one was political, with a red-and-black cover spotlighting Badu’s clenched fist; this one is personal, with Erica’s blissed-out mug against a deep-purple background.  You could say to Badu that this is really not such an original concept, the musical McDLT, where the hot side stays hot while the cool side stays cool.  But it’s not so easy to execute and in the end both LPs went down exactly how the artist intended.  Nobody but Badu could have made either one of them, because they are her.

11.  Drive-By Truckers The Big To-Do
12.  Against Me! White Crosses
13.  Francis and the Lights It’ll Be Better
14.  Big Boi Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
15.  Brooke Fraser Flags
16.  Freddie Gibbs Str8 Killa No Filla
17.  Screaming Females Castle Talk
18.  Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti Before Today
19.  Black Milk Album of the Year
20.  B.o.B. The Adventures of Bobby Ray

21.  Starlito Renaissance Gangster
22.  Belle and Sebastian Write About Love
23.  The Like Release Me
24.  Darren Hayman & The Secondary Modern Essex Arms
25.  Yelawolf Trunk Muzik 0-60
26.  Ted Leo and the Pharmacists The Brutalist Bricks
27.  Laura Marling I Speak Because I Can
28.  Curren$y Pilot Talk
29.  Trembling Bells Abandoned Love
30.  Eddy Current Suppression Ring Rush to Relax

31.  Danny Brown The Hybrid
32.  Of Montreal False Priest
33.  Kate Miller-Heidke Curiouser
34.  Superchunk Majesty Shredding
35.  Richard Thompson Dream Attic
36.  Ghostface Killah Apollo Kids
37.  Gil Scott-Heron I’m New Here
38.  The Roots How I Got Over
39.  Magic Bullets Magic Bullets
40.  Phantom Band The Wants

Best EP
Safe House by the Grisly Hand.  KC-MO, represent!  Your football team is back from the dead, too.  What do you mean, “Todd Haley is a dick”?  Moving westward, I was a big fan of Girls’ debut Album last year but wasn’t sure how much staying power Christopher Owens would have.  Happily Broken Dreams Club suggests he will have some.

Best opener
The Hold Steady missed my albums list for the first time in their history, but “The Sweet Part of the City” was a truly great song, as undeniable as anything they’ve ever done.  It’s a great, precise (if kinda mythical) portrait of hesitant and fatalist young urban adulthood, but because Craig Finn is such a walking rock encyclopedia, by the end he’s abandoned the narrative, which was thin anyway, and started talking about his band like he always does.  First he riffs on “Saint Dominic’s Preview,” which is more than enough to win my heart, before busting through the fourth wall altogether with “We were bored so we started a band/We’d like to play for you.”  Bands fancy themselves corporations these days, so there’s no reason they shouldn’t have mission statements.

Album that started the strongest
Krit Wuz Here.

Album that finished the strongest
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.  Maybe the mid-record posse cuts go on a little long, but he makes up for it.

Best closer
Francis Farewell Starlite’s “Get in the Car,” the sort of character study people used to write all the time in the 1970s but really don’t anymore.  Francis sings like Richard Manuel, but this song’s greasy heart is pure Randy Newman.  The lyrics draw an explicit parallel between entertainment-industry exploiters luring sweet young things into exclusive management contracts with promises of stardom and pedophiles cruising the mall parking lot in rape vans, intimating that candy is available inside.  The particular guy in the song starts with flattery, but it’s ham-handed: “You could be bigger than Madonna/Come on, you know you wanna.”  By the end he’s terrified his quarry is slipping the net, and he lets loose with the cruel taunt, “Don’t let the world find out what a coward you are.”  That’s where the song ends; you never find out if she gets in the car or not.  Part of the point of the song is that sometimes she does.

Album I listened to the most this year
Probably The ArchAndroid, and as usual it was mostly due to the fact that it came out early in the year.

Worst album I bought this year
Fight Softly by The Ruby Suns.

Crappy record I listened to a lot anyway
Gorilla Manor by Local Natives.  They do a Talking Heads cover!  Talking Heads were a seminal 70s and 80s band from New York!  Their singer was David Byrne!

Record I couldn’t listen to more than once
Lil B’s Rain in England.  Well, did anyone?

Great song from a crappy record
Le Noise lost its flavor like Fruit Stripe gum (sorry, Uncle Neil), but “Hitchhiker” was unforgettable (and more on it farther down the page).

Lousy song from a good record
“Magic,” the Rivers Cuomo guest shot on The Adventures of Bobby Ray.  Hey, you got your puke in my peanut butter!  Hey, this tastes fucking horrible!

Album that should have been longer
Have One on Me!  I HAVE BEEN WAITING ALL YEAR TO MAKE THAT CALL!  That is a grade-A quality ZINGER!  Seriouser: I assume It’ll Be Better would’ve had more songs on it if Francis Farewell Starlite had written any more songs.  But as much as I could’ve stood it to be longer, it didn’t feel all that short—just felt like one of those 33-minute 70s LPs this genre was built on.  What felt short was White Crosses.  Tom Gabel, if you want to maximize the Elvis Costello-Ian MacKaye hybrid you’re toying with, you need to stretch a little.  At least give us 45 minutes.

Album that should have been shorter
If Jamey Johnson had dropped the curtain on The Guitar Song after “Good Morning Sunrise,” it would’ve been near-perfect and hard to deny album of the year.  Krit Wuz Here sort of had the same problem; everything after “2000 & Beyond” was perfectly fine but not essential.

Most up-and-down record
Kathryn Calder’s Are You My Mother?  “Castor and Pollux” and “If You Only Knew” are two superb pop songs, but some of the others were pretty drowsy. 

Least up-and-down record
The Upsides.  One of its great virtues is how it captures the sheer speed of life at age 22, when things are largely out of control and every second counts.

Album that wore out its welcome the fastest
Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast, by Cornershop.  That first listen was awesome tho.

Album that turned out to be better than I initially thought it was
That new Belle & Seabass joint.   Their weakest in a while, but it’s still a lovely and mature and tuneful pop record with a handful of great songs.

Album that felt most like an obligation to get through
This shouldn’t be the case so early in their career, but I vote for Frightened Rabbit’s Winter of Mixed Drinks.

Most welcome surprise
Elvis Costello has almost certainly given me more hours of listening pleasure than any other musician, so it seems inhospitable to demand further greatness from him.   But when you get it, it’s still awfully cool.  National Ransom was his best record since Brutal Youth, if not Spike, if not Blood & Chocolate.  (It’s not anywhere near as good as Blood & Chocolate; I’m not nuts.)

Rookie of the year
I guess we have to DQ Monàe on account of the earlier EP and zing Pallett because of the Final Fantasy records.  That leaves us with Francis Farewell Starlite, whose hilarious name is giving Waka Flocka Flame a run for his money.

Comeback player of the year
Ted Leo. The Brutalist Bricks was so much fun, especially given that it was a Ted Leo record.  Hardcore legend Keith Morris also deserves a mention.  OFF!’s First Four EPs is not quite up there with Group Sex or anything, but Keith is still doing his thing credibly three decades out.

Bust of the year
The Gaslight Anthem’s American Slang.  Their last release The ’59 Sound was a half-ecstatic, half-despondent amusement-park ride through the entire history of post-war American hipster music, a Ken Burns film for Ritalin users.  But they couldn’t really repeat that particular approach without leaving everyone with the impression that they had nothing to say for themselves.  On the new one, Brian Fallon finally drops the artifice and talks about himself and his traumas explicitly on the closer “We Did It When We Were Young.”  That’s a hopeful sign for the long term, but the great rock songs that elevated The ’59 Sound were missing from American Slang.  In the end it was just a little too limp and conveying the impression that you’ve heard this shit before so just move along, nothing to see here. 

Album from which I expected too much
Abandoned Love by Trembling Bells, whose debut Carbeth was my favorite record of ’09.  I couldn’t believe my luck, that they had a second album out so fast.  It’s not that they made it too quickly, because there are a lot of ideas and melodies here.  I just think they got a little conventional.  What made Carbeth so thrilling was its frequent and inexplicable weirdness; when the band snapped back to conventionalism it hit like a cannonball.  There’s no question Alex Neilson and Lavinia Blackwall intended Abandoned Love as a big step toward the middle of the road.  After a first record characterized by folky, sometimes twisted British Isles mysticism, they kick off the follow-up with a song called “Adieu, England,” which is not that weird but still the weirdest song on the set.

Album that should have been better
Nas and Damian Marley’s Distant Relatives was still good, but what was the point of teaming these guys up if Nasir is just going to rap the verses while Jr. Gong sits on his hands waiting to sing the hook?  The record’s one great song is the single, “As We Enter,” specifically because the vocalists trade lines, interrupt each other, have a conversation.

Best album title
This was a very competitive category in the ‘010.  I give my nod to Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding.  For what it’s worth, which is $0.00, I also gave serious consideration to DOM’s Sun Bronzed Greek Gods, Broken Social Scene’s Forgiveness Rock Record, and Fear of a Black Tangent by Busdriver.

Good album with a bad title
Richard Thompson’s Dream Attic.  That’s a pun on “dramatic,” right?  That’s terrible.  All my life my father has tormented me with one bad pun after another, but that’s well below even his standards.  It’s no big surprise—Richard is an enduring artist who still makes good records every time out, but he’s not the go-to guy for wacky or inspirational record titles.  He might as well call his next release Album of Songs. 

Album title that most accurately reflects the spirit of the music
The Okkervil River/Roky Erickson collaboration True Love Cast Out All Evil.  If only.

Worst album title
The Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens.  Rejected alternate titles included Straight Outta Church Camp and (I Know) I Got Harmoniumz.

Best album cover
Grinderman 2.  It’s a photo of a suspicious-looking wolf (or dog, who knows) standing in a pristine white marble bathoom, white shag rug in front of the large circular bathtub against the back wall, and the wolf is unduly salivating and all planning to ruin your white-wine soiree with cocaine and vomit and unprotected sex in the lavatory, not necessarily in that order.  Also there's the possibility he will kill you.  This is the persona Nick Cave inhabits on the Grinderman records, but it’s always clear he’s playing.  The wolf is not playing, because he’s a fucking wolf.

Good album with a bad cover
What was going on w/the cover of The Guitar Song?  Did they just run out of time?  Did Mercury move the release date up a couple months and they panicked?

Worst album cover
MGMT’s Congratulations.  Oof.  I guess this is some sort of R. Crumb/M.C. Escher hybrid?  Also, I have nothing but respect for Mike Watt's long and distinguished career, but the already awful cover of Hyphenated-Man also employed Comic Sans, and some things I just can't forgive.

Best song title
Gucci Mane’s “Shining for No Apparent Reason” is just so pure that it walks away with this category.  But I want to say a word for “Flat of the Blade” by Massive Attack, not because it’s so great but because I am amazed no New Wave of British Metal band ever made a record called Flat of the Blade.   Can’t you just see the cover in your head?

Song title that most accurately reflects the spirit of the artist
Busdriver again, with “Unemployed Black Astronaut.”

Best liner notes
The fake TV Guide in Graham Parker’s Imaginary Television.

Best packaging
Naturally I did not pony up the $3 million it apparently cost, but the deluxe version of Springsteen’s The Promise was at least major-label money well spent.  The best packaging of a record I did buy was the solid Freeway/Jake One collab The Stimulus Package, which came in the form of a wad of bills, Freeway’s face taking the place of Benjamin Franklin.

Best single
1.  Rick Ross f. Styles P “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)”
The portly buffoon who fronts like he’s some sort of drug kingpin, but whenever I see him I always picture him eating waffles, has actually turned into a reliable source of quality mainstream hip-hop.  Album oriented, too.  I liked last year’s Bigger Than Rap, and Teflon Don was even better, enjoyable all the way through.  Rather than conceding weakness and inauthenticity after the world learned he’d been a corrections officer in a former life, Ross doubles down on the chorus of this slamming tune by assuming the identity of incarcerated gang leaders.  The alchemical melding of the beat and vocal on said chorus is like a great slice of New York style pizza where the cheese and sauce have merged into one single thing.  It doesn’t even matter that after four records Rawse still has no style other than honking through his nasal cavity, which by now, like, stop doing that already.  If you want actual good rapping, here comes David Styles on the third verse to kick your ass into next week.  On the radio edit his entire monologue is basically one long bleep.  This is quality American entertainment, like biscuits and gravy with a cool glass of lemonade.  I realize I’ve been using a lot of food imagery talking about this song.  But listen to the chorus and the parody writes itself.  I think I’m big meat/Whopper Jr./Apple pies!/Hallelujah.

2.  Kanye West “Power”
This beat is so arresting that it’s reason enough to rank “Power” highly.  But the big take-away here is how it exemplifies our continuing descent into the sort of meta-discourse where words are irrelevant in the face of pop-culture signifiers.  Kanye writes a song about how he’s a crazy person living in this here year 2010 and sets it to Greg Lake screeching “21st Century Schizoid Man.”  And just when you thought the reality-TV zoom lens couldn’t bring us any closer to our celebrity targets, this is arguably a whole new level of self-awareness.  On the other hand, since the diagnosis is really just a King Crimson sample, it’s unclear our hero is self-aware so much as self-mythologizing.  But our culture loves idiosyncractic expression by unreliable narrators, so Kanye is the superstar we’ve been begging for and deserve.

3.  J. Cole “Who Dat”
The closest thing to “Made You Look” since “Made You Look.”  Cole got that flame, so don’t worry about his motherfucking name.  Though I suspect he actually wants you to know his name.

4.  Neil Young “Hitchhiker”
For decades now, Neil has been arresting his (gradual, but still) artistic decline by scavenging the remnants of his mid-70s salad days.  In 1990 he won Pazz & Jop and revived his career with Ragged Glory, which opened very strongly with “Country Home“ and “White Line,” both written in 1975.  Before this year, “Hitchhiker” was sort of the white whale of unreleased Neil epics, much coveted by the sort of completists who are still circulating Internet petitions for a CD release of Time Fades Away.  Neil wrote it 35 years ago, and performed it live numerous times, but never officially shared it on wax, unless “Like an Inca” from Trans counts, which it really doesn’t, with Neil chanting heavily revised lyrics through his vocoder.  Like the rest of Le Noise, the accompaniment is just Neil, or several Neils, each hammering away at his Les Paul, breaking apart from one another through reverb and echo and then slamming back together with the force of a Buick Roadmaster hitting a retaining wall.  You can tell “Hitchhiker” is of a very different vintage from the rest of Le Noise because the lyrics are not the least bit preachy or generic.  The song is Neil’s autobiography of substance abuse, starting out in Toronto coffeehouses smoking hash through a pen, driving cross-country so wired on whites he’s unable to separate his heartbeat from the hum of his V-8, hitting the big time after Harvest with bags and bags of high-quality weed, abjuring superstardom and instead drowning his grief in tequila and cocaine.  I liked the song better before he added the last verse, wherein present-day Neil looks back down the long road at the unreality of his life, but it wouldn’t be honest to pretend the story has the same ending he thought it did or would in 1978.  Maybe he never liked that ending and needed to wait until life provided him a different one. 

5.  Drake “Fancy”
When everyone in the country is repeating the chorus of your single on the corner, in high-school hallways, in bars and airport lounges and bedrooms, you’re doing something right.

6.  Kanye West f. Pusha T “Runaway”
Even if you forgive Kanye’s myriad difficulties you might sometimes resent the way he dominates the conversation to the point there’s no oxygen left in the room for anybody else.  But he so brutally and furiously hates himself.  When you combine that with his compositional skills, you’re almost guaranteed some compelling shit.  It’s even harder than usual to put Taylor Swift et al. out of your mind listening to this one because the chorus is sort of a self-justification, but when Kanye offers a toast to the douchebags I have the sinking feeling he’s the only one in the room.  Again, I direct you toward the airy, spacious, sonically breathtaking beat and the wonderful, singable melody.  There isn’t much discussion of the purely musical aspects of Kanye’s work, but for me it’s the major point in mitigation of his flaws.  I think the last artist to place two singles in my top 10 was Pete Rock & CL Smooth back in ’92, with “If It Ain’t Rough, It Ain’t Right” and “They Reminisce Over You.”

7.  Ariel Pink “Round and Round”
Baseball obsessives love to point out that every time you go to the ballpark you’re liable to see something that’s never happened before in the game’s long history, some unique chain of actions, some improbable event.  I know that’s true of pop music.  It’s been a century since popular song, in the catchy three-minute form we recognize today, started to transform the world.  One could spend hundreds of lifetimes cataloguing its many wonders.  “Round and Round” is not the best pop single ever, but before its release nobody had ever precisely captured the aural equivalent of a 16-year-old blonde girl roller-skating around an in-ground municipal pool while fireworks erupt overhead and also I’m eating a hot dog.  Well played.

8.  B.o.B. f. Hayley Williams “Airplanes”
When it comes to pop music these days, all borders are porous and everything is on the table.  That doesn’t mean any particular confluence of genres or combination of artists is going to work.  But it might.

9.  Starlito “Alright”
Wait, what?  Lito is awfully high on this one.  Fortunately the beat has smoked even more weed than he has.  My favorite digression in a lyric comprised of nothing else is where he explains that, since he’s not supposed to get high on his own supply, he had to stop selling marijuana.  That’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with here.

10.  Red Café f. Fabolous “I’m Ill”
Who knew Fabolous could actually be sort of distinctive?  I’ve heard the guy rap on dozens of tracks over the last decade, but basically I don’t remember anything he’s ever said.  Whatever, it’s nice to see New York lace up the gloves and fight back a little.  Guys, you’ve been getting your asses kicked.  Anyway, inspirational lyric: “Errbody eatin’/No Cup-a-Soups.”

11.  Nas & Damian Marley “As We Enter”
12.  Big Boi f. Yelawolf “You Ain’t No DJ”
13.  Belle and Sebastian “I Didn’t See It Coming”
14.  Janelle Monàe f. Big Boi “Tightrope”
15.  Yelawolf “Pop the Trunk”
16.  Curren$y “King Kong”
17.  Erykah Badu “Window Seat”
18.  Phantogram “Mouthful of Diamonds”
19.  Gucci Mane “Long Money”
20.  Superchunk “Digging for Something”

Song of the year
Kanye’s “Blame Game.”  Start with the beat: that lone rattling tambourine, the stately piano, the periodic interjections by a moaning cello.  Kanye remains one of the great melody writers in popular music; the hook is instantly memorable.  The lyrics are a perfect, woundedly self-contradictory catalog of sexual jealousy.  The second verse, where Ye uses the pitch-shifter to summon all the distinct voices of the chorus in his head, chirping and bellowing at himself, is the sort of formal achievement no one else even thinks to try.  Then, as everybody knows, after all the moody, torturous jibber-jabber Ye brings out Chris Rock to deliver a monologue in the voice of a guy who is having some deeply grateful intercourse with the woman who broke Ye’s heart.  By sending in a clown to play him offstage, Kanye is acknowledging his jealousy is pitiful and worthy of mockery.  As always, the politics suck; the woman is present only as an idea and punchline but absent as an actual person.  But in a way that just makes the whole deal sadder.  You know the narrator is never going to get better; he can’t even see what’s right in front of his face.  The Wonder Years’ “Logan Circle” was my runner-up, the sort of song that can help you get out of bed when things are really grim.

Bridge of the year
DBT’s “Birthday Boy.”  This is just a plausible, empathetic hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold number until Mike Cooley hits you with his radical-feminist statement on the middle eight.  The protagonist, thinking back to her younger days, comments offhandedly that “the prettiest girls from the smallest towns get remembered like storms and droughts that old men talk about for years to come.”  Which is a fine and rueful lyric, but then Cooley drops the hammer with “I guess that’s why they give us names, so a few old men can say they saw us rain (reign) when we were young.”  What Cooley is literally saying is men allow women the dignity of individual names only because it helps them remember which ones are most fuckable.  Playing this song at a strip club would be exactly as appropriate as Ronald Reagan bumping “Born in the U.S.A.” during his reelection campaign.

Best songwriting
Elvis Costello.  Even in his pupal stage he was an astonishing songwriter, but after 35-plus years, with the sheer compositional chops and range he has on offer, nobody else is even in the same zip code.  He’s like a one-man Brill Building.  Except for, you know, the hit singles.

Hook of the year
Sorry, the chorus of “Whip My Hair” is indisputable.

Worst song of the year
“Teach Me How to Scream” by brokeNCYDE.  These guys want to “party,” by which they mean “rape you.”  Also, their name makes me think of ‘NSYNC.

Most annoying song of the year
Travie McCoy’s “Billionaire.”  First, homie goes by “Travie.”  Really?  That’s the name he gives the barista when he orders his mocha?  McCoy is the exact opposite of Kanye West: happy, dumb, straight down the middle.  His band needs to go back to reggae school.

Most overplayed song
Cee-Lo always wins in this category.  Most people I know, or at least people I know well and like, use the word “fuck” all the time.  So it’s amazing to me that an obscenity each of us hears and says a dozen times a day still has enough power to morph a generic neo-soul tune into an iconic single.

Song that would drive me craziest on infinite repeat
Katy Perry’s “Peacock.”  The story in this song is that she bullies a guy into showing her his dick (and balls, presumably—don’t forget the balls) by telling him if he doesn’t he must be half a fag.  It’s a solid, progressive message.  I know, she’s turning the tables on the patriarchy and undermining gender-based expectations.  I’m not crazy about Wiz Khalifa’s ready-made Pittsburgh sports anthem “Black and Yellow,” either.  Possibly I’m just tired of the yinzer diaspora and their sense of entitlement, particularly during football season.  (No one cares about hockey.)  I love french fries on my sandwich, but still.  You notice you never hear them talk about the Pirates.

Song I feel cheapest about liking
I know I’m supposed to boycott reality TV, but Countess Luann’s “Money Can’t Buy You Class” crashes through the terrible wall and comes out hilarious.  I’m pretty sure the main reason this song got made was in hopes it would become a drag-bar karaoke standard.  She totally sounds like a dude on the verses, and the AutoTuned chorus is singable by literally anyone.  There’s also ICP’s “Miracles” (“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”).  I especially like the part where a pelican eats Violent J’s cell phone.  We’ve all been there.

Song I don’t feel at all cheap about liking
Surfer Blood’s “Floating Vibes.”  I like those guys.  I miss the 90s sometimes too.

Song I like better than I ought to
“Water in Hell,” the great tuneful rock number on Broken Social Scene’s Forgiveness Rock Record.  They’ve never held my attention over the course of a full-length, but they’ve always been good for at least one great tuneful rock number per release, first “Cause = Time” and then “Fire Eye’d Boy” and now this one.

Song that got stuck in my head the most this year
“Fancy,” mostly because everybody keeps using the hook in casual conversation.  It’s sort of an all-purpose retort.  “Oh you fancy huh?” is the new black.

Funniest song
Freddie Gibbs closes Str8 Killa No Filla with “Slangin’ Rocks,” a really stoopid sing-along over the beat from the Whispers’ classic “Rock Steady,” and then closes “Slangin’ Rocks” with a fembot record exec trying to sign Gibbs by reciting her resume (she was in the studio with Dre back in the day, Lil’ ½ Dead put his dick on her head).  I really think Gibbs will make great records before he’s done.

Best anachronism
Ariel Pink’s “Can’t Hear My Eyes” was the bastard child of “Eye in the Sky” and “Abracadabra” and that’s pretty good.  Over the course of a full album it’s hard to ignore Kristian Matsson, The Tallest Man on Earth, who bites Bob Dylan even harder than some of those songs from the last Helio Sequence record.  Generally, The Wild Hunt does pretty well by Dylan.  Matsson is letting it come naturally, not forcing it.  And he’s nothing like Dylan from a persona standpoint.  There’s no cultivation of some vague enigma, just a happy guy with a beard.  Maybe that sounds like a putdown, but Dylan was always at his best when he allowed himself to have fun and be funny.  Others: The Like updated 60s girl-groupery with sharply observational lyrics; Oaktown’s own Magic Bullets aimed for The Smiths but delivered The Housemartins, and that was still perfectly enjoyable.

Most egregiously derivative song of the year
Robyn’s “Cry When You Get Older” is a good pop song, but it’s really just “Manic Monday.”  I don’t know why Prince hasn’t sued her; that guy sues everybody.

Best purist rock and roll song
Ted Leo’s “Gimme the Wire.”

Most enjoyable musical moment of the year
A few seconds into “Who Dat,” when the drums and bass kick in after the Mardi Gras synth-horn lick.

Best singing
Jamey Johnson.  Just listen to “Set ‘Em Up Joe,” where dude is not really even trying, and tell me you could fucking do that, which you most fucking certainly could not.

Best rapping
Freddie Gibbs deserved this honor last year, when I snubbed him.  He didn’t fall off too much this year.  This seems like as good a point as any to mention that Fred’s manager is named “Archie Bonkers.”

Best band
It’s still the Truckers.  The Big To-Do was a self-conscious return to riff and melody, neither of which are usually these guys’ strong suits.  But it worked; this was the best they’ve sounded since the second half of Southern Rock Opera.  And they're as productive as Irish Catholic parents—their new one Go-Go Boots is coming out in two weeks, less than a year after the last one.

Best musicianship on a record
The Nashville pros on The Guitar Song, who are just a wiggle left of center, maybe ten degrees off plumb.  First it was the drums that caught my ear.  They really are a marvel of subtlety and groove.  But the steel guitar player is wailing his ass off for the entire hour and 45 minute run time.  Basically every single part on every single song is great.  Do all major-label country records feature playing this good?  You don’t need to tell me I’m old because I prefer listening to this stuff instead of some Oxycontin abuser from Williamsburg punching his guitar.

Best instrumental solo
These results are getting a little monotonous, but the clear answer here is Cowboy Eddie Long’s steel-guitar tumbling run on Jamey Johnson’s unforgettable “Macon.”  Wayd Battle’s closing six-string solo on the same song is also fairly choice.  But like I said, you could put the needle down anywhere on the record and hit a winner.

Best synth player
Ariel Pink.  His synths are almost as funny as his songs.

Best piano/organ player
Francis Farewell Starlite.  Every time I type that name I feel silly.

Best guitarist
Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females.  Fucking powerhouse, she is.  Neil Young gets honorable mention for “Hitchhiker” alone.  We’ll never see his like again.

Best bassist
Kevin Barnes.  False Priest felt like a retreat after the last three Of Montreal albums, but I don’t really have a problem with that.  First Kev made the record where he reinvented his sound and broke through to the indie masses, then the one where he was literally going crazy, then one where he pretended to be crazy and protested too much about how you best believe he will get freakay in the no-pants club.  It had to be a bit of a relief to him just to put out a bunch of pop songs.

Best drummer
Mike Kennedy of The Wonder Years.  These punk-pop bands always have the best drumming, or at least the most frenetic.  Kennedy is sort of Keith Moon, sort of Phil Collins.  Honorable mention to Pete Thomas, still doing it 32 years after This Year’s Model.

Best drum programming
Black Milk, who is the most distinctive drum programmer working today.  He’s got to be himself; he can’t be no one else. 

Best backing vocals
Erykah Badu.  On Warren Zevon’s self-titled 1975 album the backing vocalists included Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Glenn Frey, and Bonnie Raitt.  Every Badu record is like that, except Badu does all the parts herself.

Best use of a non-traditional instrument
Joanna Newsom was determined to deemphasize her harp this time around in favor of the piano, so I’m not going to vote for her.  I’ll go with Kian Byrne, fiddler for The Grisly Hand.

Best producer
Kanye.

Worst producer
Dave Bielanko and Christine Smith are all that’s left of Marah, so they self-produced Life Is a Problem.  I guess they meant it to sound like it was a blast to make, but mostly it just sounds drunk.  I don’t blame Dave for tying one on, since shortly before he hit the studio his rhythm section abandoned him and even his brother and longtime collaborator Serge decided to sit this one out.  That means we’re spared the couple-three songs where Serge sings, never to great effect, but the band really misses the substantial added dimension provided by Serge’s writing.  That Dave was hammered to bejesus is further corroborated by his decision to release the record on MP3, vinyl, and CASSETTE TAPE.  There are good songs here, and a little more experimentation than usual, so I’m not giving up.

Best arranging
Owen Pallett!  Pork chop, pork chop, greasy, greasy; he takes this one easy, easy.

Best lyrics
Over a full album I’m going with Soupy Campbell of The Wonder Years.  It’s a narrow decision over Big K.R.I.T., who indeed has crazy lyrical content despite being countrier than a motherfucker.  Darren Hayman turned in his usual quality performance on Essex Arms.  Mike Cooley of DBT got in just three vocal spotlights on The Big To-Do, and one of them is sort of The Honeymooners set in the current economic downturn, but “Birthday Boy” is maybe my favorite lyric of the year and “Eyes Like Glue” is not far behind, a father’s brutally clear-headed preemptive apology to his son for all the pain he’ll never prevent the kid from feeling.  I am intrigued by Odd Future and want to subscribe to their newsletter, but I have mixed feelings about Tyler, the Creator’s Bastard.  (Too much Sage Francis in the mix; I’m more excited by Earl Sweatshirt.)  Still, imperatives like “I’m bad milk/drink it” suggest we might have something here.  Other individual songs with lyrics I love include “Blame Game,” Francis and the Lights’ “Get in the Car” and “Darling, It’s Alright,” Drake’s “Fireworks,” Tom Gabel’s self-actualization anthem “Spanish Moss” and his grief-battered “Because of the Shame,” and Joanna Newsom’s soul-crushing farewell transmission “Does Not Suffice.”

Worst lyric of the year
From Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice’s “Committed”: “You have to be patient/This new administration/Is doing the very best it can/But there’s armies in the banks/Who tried all of the skanks/Attorneys for the Ku Klux Klan.”  That’s some astute political analysis.  It manages both to kiss ass and make no sense whatsoever.   When reactionary politicians take their cheap shots at know-nothing Hollywood liberals, this is exactly the sort of thing they mean.

Best beard
Freeway, baby.

Thing I don’t know but I should
Das Racist.  Was the idea that they put out “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” in order to see who would ride with them and who would write them off as a joke act?  Before they hit us with their real shit?  Seems counterproductive.  I didn’t write them off and am happy to check up on them from time to time, but I haven’t really bothered, so feel free to tell me if they’re actually good.  I dig raps about saag paneer as much as the next guy, but the Pitchfork rave didn’t diminish my skepticism.

Most overrated artist
The Black Keys.  I like them too, but really, you think they’re a great band?  Not a fun band, or a cool band, or a band you enjoy listening to while driving fast in your car, but a Great Band?  Do you think they play “authentic rock ‘n roll”?  Okay, let me guess—you were in a fraternity?  No?  Did you attend prep school?  Also in the running are The National.  If you’re into indie rock and also in a diabetic coma, High Violet just might be the record for you.

Don’t believe the hype
Titus Andronicus.  Drunk and stupid in skinny jeans is no way to go through life, son.  You can’t just fake your way through a concept album about the Civil War and hope no one will notice.  Sure, you can bribe Craig Finn with a couple growlers of tasty microbrew to recite opaque narration through an olde-tyme amplification device, but diversionary indie-cred grenades like that only get you so far.  Singer Patrick Stickles has all of Conor Oberst’s irritating tics but none of his personality or competence.  More specifically, he shares Oberst’s love of and commitment to shouting but has a really shitty voice that can’t execute even the simplest melodic concept.  Listening to him try to sing whole songs is like watching a drunk fall repeatedly off a balance beam.  Speaking of which, can we take a break from writing songs about being wasted and pissed and fucked up and piss-wasted and ass-fucked by life and then the punchline is the guy is this hideous way because he is from suburbia?  Jack Kerouac might have damaged even more young minds than Ayn Rand, though in Jack’s defense one could rightly point out that Dharma Bums devotees have done much less harm to our nation than the Cato Institute.

My bad
Gave Sufjan Stevens another shot this year.

Artist that has absolutely no reason for existing
People in England sometimes get on their high horse, but we’d never let something like Jedward happen in this country.

Band that is no longer getting it done and should break up
Blonde Redhead.  Penny Sparkle was the sound of the needle hitting E.

Geezer who should give it up altogether
This category is harder than it used to be, with so many oldsters coming around to the realization that they are still allowed to make good music.  I’ll go with Bret Michaels and his weave.

Most undeservedly hyped debut
Best Coast’s Crazy for You.  Eight years ago, every rock critic and indie person in the continental US savagely killed Liz Phair for writing sing-song pop tunes, some of which had somewhat dumb lyrics.  I know Liz had a track record that made her new material about blowing a 22-year-old with chiseled abs while he plays Xbox seem like a betrayal of Dylan-goes-electric magnitude, but even at their dumbest Liz’s music was still less simple and her lyrics a billion times better than Bethany Cosentino’s.  I guess if you produce the record so nobody can hear anything except major-chord fuzztone guitar you can get away with it.

Unsexiest person in pop music
Lil Wayne.

Best live show
I saw Roger Waters do The Wall in Oakland in early December.  I don’t usually go in for that sort of deal.  If you discount Phish, with whom I have a diagnosed but untreated problem, I never see arena shows.  But second semester of sophomore year in high school, I listened to The Wall every day, usually more than once, and ironically this was the period of time where I figured out how to exist in society without being a social outcast.  The record means a lot to me and always will.  I haven’t listened to it more than three times in the past ten years, but of course I still know every word and note by heart.  And I must say Roger did the work credit.  He talked to the audience before “Mother” and after “In the Flesh,” the latter of which banter seemed like his nervous confirmation that he is not actually, or at least does not intend to be, an eliminationist fascist cult leader.  He talked again at the end, and all three times he made comments designed to persuade the audience that he’s a much happier guy than he was in 1979.  I hope he’s telling the truth and not just either trying to convince himself or coming to Jesus for the sake of his legacy.  I have to believe he worries his music will be undermined in a historical sense by everyone’s apparent belief that he is a huge asshole.  But Roger has always had a furious, universalist pacifist streak too, from as far back as “Corporal Clegg.”  Given his advancing years and purported mellowing, it was no wonder that on this tour, which could be his last, he dwelled on and updated the anti-war and anti-commercialist themes in The Wall while giving less weight to the original rock-star douchebag narrative.  (It was equally interesting to watch the Bay Area crowd, presumably liberal but almost certainly somewhat prosperous given the ticket prices, react to Roger’s agitprop.  On all three parts of “Another Brick in the Wall,” the band strolled into extended jams, mostly for functional reasons.  They needed to give the crew time to assemble the wall, so they could use all those fancy laser-light projections.  During “Part 1” an animated bomber dropped massive payloads, first of crosses, crescents, Stars of David, and Chinese flags.  The crowd murmured faintly but showed no real disdain for these religious or national logos; these are differences we’ve been taught to respect.  But then the bomber started dropping clusters of Nike swooshes and Shell Oil scallops, and the crowd exploded into opprobrium.)  Roger kept enough of the tricks from the original Floyd performance and the Alan Parker movie—the giant schoolmaster marionette, the flower-coitus animation during “Empty Spaces”—to keep the older fans happy, but his real agenda is his disgust with the turn our world has taken into normalized and permanent warmaking and cameras everyplace and random death from the skies and wealth concentrated in the hands of five corporations.  Who can blame him?  Maybe you’re unhappy about that stuff too.  Of course, this was the highest face-value rock concert ticket I’ve ever bought, and the price tag made me feel faintly gross, leftist politics or not.  I actually don’t know if it was the best show I saw this year, but it was a first-rate performance and certainly a spectacle without equal in my experience.

Best video
I don’t know.  I watch so few videos.  I’ll just list a few that I liked.  First up is Janelle Monàe’s “Tightrope,” which I guess would be my pick if I had to make one.  She’s stuck in an insane asylum patrolled by affectless hooded figures with mirrored faces; she’s wearing a bowtie as big as her head and a high-top fade exceeding Christopher “Kid” Reid’s wildest dreams.  And she can really dance.  There was also Holy Fuck’s “Red Lights.”  It’s got cats driving cars, just like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.  It’s also got cats playing analog synths, like some guy you might be in a band with.  No idea what one has to do with the other, but, hey, cuteness.  Also, I lied a little: I have seen Das Racist’s video for “Who’s That? Brooown!”  Who doesn’t want their own video game?  Maybe if I actually lived in New York I would find the insider humor played out, but to me it’s just goofy, and the world needs goofy.  This year also saw the venerable rock-comedy team Scharpling & Wurster branch out into music videos, with Ted Leo’s (sort of amusing) “Bottled in Cork” and Superchunk’s (actually amusing) “Digging for Something.” In terms of the Rock Video Self-Referentiality Hall of Fame, these clips don’t quite meet the standard set by Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” (wherein YLT are sent to remedial rock school) or “Tom Courtenay” (wherein YLT open for the Beatles on their reunion tour).  But I love the guy hitting on Laura Ballance at the craft fair by boasting about his kiln, and even better is the way Ballance lures her replacement hipster bassist offstage with a copy of Hall & Oates’ Beauty on a Back Street.

Video they should have made
“In California,” the centerpiece of Have One on Me.

2009 record I ignorantly slept on
Darren Hayman’s Pram Town.  I need to check the guy’s website more often, I guess.  The second part of his trilogy set in the sprawl east of London, this year’s Essex Arms, was also pretty terrific, just not as conceptually coherent and with lower high points.  Nobody knows Darren, possibly because he’s the most unassuming man in rock, but he’s a consistent artist of superior quality.

Deserving 2010 record I bought too late to meaningfully evaluate
Marcberg by Roc Marciano.  Just got it this week, and it’s great, probably worthy of the top 20.  Rakheim Meyer is another rapper who makes his own beats.  It’s the new thing.  Peter Gabriel said it many years ago: DIY.  Nobody else is going to bust open those heads for you.

2010 record I will probably reevaluate a year from now
Brooke Fraser’s Flags.  It’s great, but sometimes it floats by a little too easily.  I’m not sure I trust it.  With “Coachella” she tried to write her own version of “Woodstock,” and that turned out a little embarassing.  (She should’ve used the chorus “we’ve got to get some wristbands/for the beer gaaaaar-den.”)

Comment on Bruce Springsteen’s The Promise
I enjoyed the hell out of it.  Of course I also understand fully why he made the record he did when he made Darkness and why these songs weren’t on it.  There is not a single song here I would add to Darkness; certainly I wouldn’t replace anything on Darkness, not even “Prove It All Night,” for anything on The Promise.  But as other people have pointed out, there is at least a full vinyl LP of amazing pop music here—not just “Fire” and “Because the Night,” which everyody knows, but the pure, angelic “Save My Love,” which would’ve done Roy Orbison proud, or the girl-group classic “Someday” or the brooding/soaring “Breakaway” or the way “Ain’t Good Enough for You” predicts the fast songs on The River and “The Brokenhearted” predicts the slow ones, or “City of Night,” which would’ve fit in great on Born to Run.  It’s too bad it was never the right time for Bruce to release it, but you wouldn’t really change that if you could, would you?

Rod Stewart Memorial Award for falling the fuck off
Given to the great young artist who does remarkable early work then spends many long years failing to approach her initial standards, if not outright sucking.  Besides Rod (he never really did blow all those sailors, you know), other examples would be Cheap Trick, Liz Phair, Cesar Cedeno.  It pains me to say it, but I’m looking at you, Jenny Lewis.  Come on, now.  This is what you want to do with your life?  Smoking weed and making records with your boyfriend?  The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous are no longer visible in the rear-view mirror.  I am not a mindreader or resident of Silver Lake, so I have no idea how hard you’re trying, but from the music, which is all I have to go by, it doesn’t sound like you’re trying all that hard.

Stephan Jenkins Memorial Award for colostomy bag of the year
John Mayer.  White people can get away with anything.

Honorable mention
Liz Phair’s Funstyle.  I’m sorry she ruined your masturbation fantasy when she tried to become a pop star, but you really need to let that go.  Funstyle was not a major work and wasn’t intended to be, but if you don’t get the jokes, it’s not Liz’s fault.  Go jerk off to Sleigh Bells or something where the words don’t matter.

Will still be making good records in 2020
Elvis Costello, especially now that he’s lost the weight.  Kanye West faces somewhat longer odds, but I believe.

Best record of 2011
The first great record of the year came out on New Year’s Day—The One … Cohesive by Huntsvegas, Alabama’s awesome G-Side.  I had to put it on probation so I could concentrate on 2010 music and finish writing this monstrosity.  I’ll be getting back to it presently.  See you this time next year (maybe even before then).

Holder of a Boulder, Money Folder

It's a USB drive.  I don't really get it; what's the market for this?  White people, I guess.  They'll buy anything.

Nightly Profundity

Here's an SAT analogy for you: New York is to hip-hop as England is to soccer.

Discuss.

ANSWER KEY (3/12/10):  Okay, since none of my vast readership took the bait, here's what I meant, which was probably obvious, which now that I think about it was probably why no one took the bait.  The English invented soccer and New York was the birthplace of hip-hop.  Both thereafter enjoyed many years as the industry standard in their respective fields.  Rivals were afraid to challenge them, and they felt it beneath their dignity to compete, as if they were playing a different game than everyone else.  Both started believing all they had to do to stay on top was continue to exist.  As a result, both became insular and inbred and stopped evolving; by the time they woke up and tentatively engaged with the larger world many upstarts had borrowed their tools, built much faster vehicles, and raced past them.  England was upended by Germany and then lapped by Brazil, Argentina, and even (horror of horrors) France; NY lost its primacy first to LA and then to Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston.  Yet English fans still irrationally insist their team ought to win the World Cup despite having demonstrably less talent than other teams, maybe because their top-flight league is the most well-capitalized and promoted in the world.  Likewise, Zoo York partisans sneer down their noses, although less than they used to, at the dumb crackers who are artistically wheeling circles around their increasingly pedantic and crabby emcees.  Possibly they feel entitled because their town is still the nation's media center.

These days, both the Three Lions and the Five Boroughs are most noted for spitting the bit in much-hyped showdowns.  David Beckham boots his spot kick clear out of the Estadio da Luz; in the rematch, Wayne Rooney is sent off for cleating Cristiano Ronaldo in the nuts.  Meanwhile, Curtis Jackson publicly challenges Kanye West to a Loser Must Retire cage match; when he loses decisively, he fails to retire but most of us wish he had.  But hey!  England could surprise this summer in South Africa if Rooney can only manage at least two goals every game and they can find a left back.  And that Nas-Damian Marley record might be pretty good.  You never know.

2009: Back by Popular Demaaaand

Because of the commercial importance of the holiday season, every publication under the sun releases its list of the year's top albums no later than mid-December.  Every year that means that records that dropped late in the year get ignored or underrated.  This year it was even worse, because since it was 2009 every publication under the sun also had to release lists of the best records of the entire decade.  I got the impression that, by mid-October, people were too busy with their rankings to listen to music.  My number-seven record came out in early November, and nobody rated it on their year-end lists, though that's no surprise because that band never gets any respect.  My number-four record came out on December 22, by which point everybody's lists had long gone to press.  Maybe it's pointless to submit a best-of list at the end of January, but then again I'm slow.  This stuff is hard to figure out for me.  How can you really compare Veckatimest to The Blueprint 3, or Crack the Skye with Brand New Eyes?  These records are very different not just in terms of genre, instrumentation, attitude, and production, but with respect to the artists' abilities and intentions, and the method and content of their communication.  Every year brings so much new, challenging, and divergent music that I figure woodshedding for a month about what moved me and what didn't and why is the least I can do, even if the result is that the conversation has already moved on by the time I get around to weighing in.  It's not like people really care; I'm not Tom Breihan or anybody important.

Speaking of the ubiquitous best-of-the-decade lists, a couple people have asked me to put together a ranking of my favorite records of the aughts.  I'll try to get around to it soon, but I didn't see how I could tackle that project until I'd figured out 2009.  With my glacial pace these days, the overview-of-the-00s post is sure to arrive some time in 2014.  In the meantime, you'll have to be content with this discussion of the immediate past.  As usual, much of the form of my ballot was taken from Tris McCall's annual Critics Poll, which is still going strong over at Tris's spiffily redesigned website.  (To be honest I sort of miss the green-and-black Commodore 64 visuals of the old site, but everybody's gotta grow up sometime.)

Okay—away we go:

Best album

1.  Trembling Bells Carbeth
My favorite elpee of the year is easy to describe but hard to do justice to.  It’s a folk album made by a bunch of Scots; if you want to compare it to Fairport, you wouldn’t be too far off.  But Fairport was rarely this weird.  Not even the Incredible String Band was usually this weird.  It’s a breakup record; as I read them, seven of the nine songs are lost-love complaints, one is an inspirational shout of defiance, and the other is acid philosophy.  But even singing about heartbreak they refuse to play it straight.  The lyrics are ornate and peculiar and full of metaphorical surprises.  They have two singers: a warbly soprano who sometimes overstays her welcome, and a tenor whose total commitment to the task more than overcomes his thin and technically mediocre pipes.  Their melodies seem like traditional folk, but they’re off kilter and hard to sing.  The harmonies find intervals most sensible people shun.  Despite that, each of the songs is beautiful, but each is beautiful in a way that’s distinct from the others.  Sometimes they rock; more often they purr along quietly; occasionally they careen down the road like a jalopy shedding its quarter panels, deliberately steering for the ditch.

2.  Neko Case Middle Cyclone
Neko is perpetually disappointed by the lameness and inanity of the men around her; she can’t live with them, and she knows she shouldn’t shoot them, though sometimes she feels she has to.  Her bloodlust is so acute it leads to overkill (and mixed metaphors): see the poor bastard in “Polar Nettles” whose “smoking remains” are found “filleted on the marble stairs.”  When a nervous suitor steps up to the plate with a vow of commitment, her response is “the next time you say ‘forever’ I will punch you in your face.”  She has a weakness for dissolute machismo, dudes who woo her with lines like “I love girls in white leather jackets.”  But they can’t stay the pace either.  Her frustration and melancholy are so powerful that she can frame them only in world-historical terms.  “I want the pharoahs,” she confides, “but there’s only men.”  Even in the throes of passion all she can muster is “I love you this hour, this hour today, and heaven will smell like the airport,” which does not really constitute letting her guard down.  But you know she’s just as disappointed in herself and hardly blind to her blind spots.  “I do my best,” she admits, “but I’m made of mistakes.”  On the title song she sort of apologizes: “Can’t give up acting tough/It’s all that I’m made of/Can’t scrape together quite enough/To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.”  In case that didn’t make the point quite finely enough, this confession is followed by a spiraling melody from a child’s music box.  If you dive in headfirst, the wordy and beautiful poetry and the constant barrage of circular emotional artillery fire is disorienting.  But even if lyrics aren’t your bag, there’s also the well-established vocal chops; and beyond that, Neko’s songwriting is sharper than ever.  She’s long since thrown off the alt-country tag; while some of these songs are rootsy, they really don’t sound like anybody else.  She doesn’t repeat herself; each song is distinct.  She doesn’t do verse-chorus-verse, and she isn’t afraid to abort a tune quickly once she’s made her essential point.  This a tremendously accomplished pop record from a compelling and idiosyncratic voice in contemporary music.

3.  Freddie Gibbs The Miseducation of Freddie Gibbs
Hip-hop has always been about local scenes.   Virtually every prominent rapper ever first grabbed our attention by telling us about specific shit happening on his particular block, and every locality that’s ever dominated the national hip-hop conversation—New York, LA, Miami, Atlanta, Houston—has done so by revealing its streets and bricks and barbed wire to the country through its lyrics, sometimes in more detail than the country wants to see.  There are more local scenes than ever these days; it turns out everybody has a story to tell.  Gibbs is from Gary, Indiana, and I think his album opener “GI Pride” is the best song about a city since, what, “New York, New York”?  It’s not a showtune, but its beat borrows “Flashdance (What a Feeling!)” and its chorus references The Music Man, so it strolls with confidence right down the main drag of American popular music.  In three verses, the emcee describes his city, clues you in to its history, detours into his family and personal background, generations of people making it in hard times but mostly not making it in hard times.  He tutors you about the different characteristics of Gary’s various neighborhoods.  The chorus is gigantic and catchy and will haunt your dreams.  Miseducation is notionally a mixtape because it’s independent and basically given away for free, but there is no reason to classify this differently from an official “album.”  Only a few of the beats are jacked, and anyway who cares—the important thing is it all feels deliberate and considered and of one piece.  Rock musicians cover each other all the time, or at least steal entire chord structures, so why can’t an emcee freestyle over a much beloved backing track?  When you have Freddie’s dexterity on the mic, you want to measure yourself against the best history has to offer.  He certainly doesn’t disgrace himself.  Granted, he has the advantage of 15 additional years of technique to deploy, but Gibbs destroys the “Flamboyant” beat with a ferocity I can’t really see Big L approaching.  To me, the most impressive thing about him is how effortlessly he balances street-rap credibility with lyricism.  It’s not an easy thing to do and even if you can pull it off people will hate you for it and say you’re pandering to bloggers or backpackers or some other derided fan constituency.  I just figure the guy has range.

4.  Lil B 6 Kiss
If you’re one of those people who thinks Twitter is making idiots of the world, you'll want nothing to do with Brandon McCartney.  But it was always inevitable that our prevailing social media, which are used disproportionately by the young, who in turn are the ones who make and listen to pop music, would insinuate themselves into the form and content of that music.  Of course these new forms are infecting the old ones.  That's always been the way it works.  Songwriting often aspires to replicate the conventions of poetry; sometimes a song can be so sufficiently vivid and fully realized that you could compare it to a great short story.  Rock critics describe a well-observed internal-monologue lyric as “novelistic” or an imagistic one as “cinematic.”  People even used to make rock operas, or so they called them.  Well, 6 Kiss is impossible to imagine or understand without taking into account how the Internet shapes modern communication.  When B takes his time—writing his rhymes before he gets in the booth, working out a hook or chorus, maybe adding a sped-up, highly-EQ’d sample to the beat—that’s like a blog post.  Sometimes he has one or two ideas but nothing concrete and mostly is just spitting the first thing to come into his mind, which as often as not is half-nonsense, and the beat is basically just a cloud of synthesizer symbolizing the foam emanating from B’s brain.  That’s like a Twitter feed.  But sometimes he comes to the mic completely cold, and it’s like a yet-to-be-invented but theoretically perfect social media, one that relays your thoughts directly onto a global billboard the second you think them.  On those songs, B is in sort of a brain-emesis Tourette’s fugue state, repeating jabbered macho unpleasantries over beats even uglier than the MySpace user interface.  These are totally not the best songs on the record, but they’re still thrilling because the emcee is willing to risk being so completely off-putting.  It’s all first-thought-best-thought, and once he hits the send button it’s gone and forgotten, and he’s on to the next one.  It’s a remarkable thing to rummage around inside another person’s head.

5.  Why? Eskimo Snow
The best-sequenced record of the year.  It starts softly and modestly before lurching into gear, and finishes by floating to earth like a feather in still air.  Inside are some real fireworks.  Because it’s structured as a true arc, when you’re done with it you really feel it’s taken you from Point A to Point B, even though it’s just ten songs and 35 minutes.  You could bitch about how short it is, and it is short, but that’s not very productive; why don’t you just press play and listen to it again?

6.  Girls Album
You can’t argue too hard against a record with this many memorable songs on it.  It’s all very basic stuff—chord progressions excavated from the Chess Records catalog and early SoCal surf-pop—but it’s executed so well and distinctively.  “Hellhole Ratrace,” the advance track, is utterly elemental and heartbroken and charming and we’ll discuss it more later.  “Lauren Marie” is maybe even better, a heart-slaughtering lost-love slow burn; “Morning Light,” an actual rock and roll song and a total anomaly on the record, is orthodox shoegaze (i.e., the first Lush EP).  “Summertime” is an ear worm worthy of sleepaway-camp campfires; “Headache” is a delicate little egg of a song.  “Lust for Life” was the song all the sensitive kids were making out to this year; “Darling” rests your head on the pillow as gently as any album-closer could.  Some of the other numbers may feel like throwaways, but they’re all memorably weird and different from one another and fully committed to their purpose.  Christopher Owens’s songs have no narrative thrust or descriptive specificity; they aim for the urgent and the universal, which in some ways is harder.  Although Owens is always present in his tunes, sometimes excessively emoting all over the place, he understands that you write anthems by leaving space in the song for the audience to climb inside.  If you can’t stand his vocal tone, the inspiration for which must be the high-lonesome adenoidal chirp of the Nic Cage character in Peggy Sue Got Married, fair enough.  I find it pretty adorable.  The production matches it beautifully: everything is reverbed out the wazoo, and the mix is trebly—like really trebly, like approaching Raw Power levels of trebly.  I was awfully tempted to rank this even higher.

7.  Say Anything Say Anything
Max Bemis has become a Christian—a real Christian, the kind that believes in Satan and Hell.  If you’ve ever listened to the boy’s lyrics, his conversion was about as surprising as Tim Lincecum getting caught with reefer.  My Irish Catholic grandmother always used to say that the converts were the worst—the most enthusiastic, rule-bound, and judgmental, they made everyone else feel lousy.  But I think Bemis, for all the Jack Chickery he displays in screaming about lakes of fire and “the end of your test” and being “down with J.C.,” has turned to Christianity because he genuinely hopes, and maybe even believes, it will help him be a better and happier person.  I’m certainly in no position to tell him he’s wrong.  His need for salvation has been plain for years; the first three Say Anything albums were primarily about how his certainty that he’s terrible and unworthy of love makes him sad and crazy.  His newfound Christianity fits like a glove, because the premise of most devotional music is that humans are worthless anyway.  I’m really not trying to make fun here.  I don’t know if “Cemetery” is the best Christian-rock song of all time, but it’s the best one I’ve ever heard, a spiritual testimony sincere and powerful enough that even a philistine such as I must respect it.  What’s most entertaining is watching how Bemis uses his full arsenal of songwriting and arranging tricks in service of his faith.  Say Anything’s music has always been full of oversexed desperation, but when Bemis croaks “meet me in the back room!” on "She Won't Follow You" and promises once you get there to tell you everything, everything, it turns out he just wants to share the Good News.   Max has always loved to judge others—you can’t blame that one on the old-time religion—so at first “Do Better,” with its cute little pizzicato strings, sounds like “Admit It!!!” or “No Soul,” another attack on some douchebag third party.  Only it turns out Max is giving himself a little motivational speech and meticulously outlining all his flaws in the process.  The opener “Fed to Death” is just a minute-and-a-half long, but it’s as skillfully constructed as anything you’ll hear.  The first verse is a parable about “a man from Allentown who fed his son to death.”  It's a little secular allegory, or so you think.  The lyrics concern familiar Bemis obsessions: the abandonment of the young by the old, the bombardment of young minds and bodies with emotional garbage and unhealthy temptations, the way the overconsumption of that garbage and overindulgence in those temptations makes us break down physically and mentally.  This is Bemis describing the problem as he sees it.  But the second and last verse makes clear that this is testimony, not just a song; it’s a polemic about “a man from Nazareth,” and obviously Max is not talking about towns in Pennsylvania anymore.  He’s showing his hole card on the record’s very first song, summoning the angry, righteous Jesus, the one who interceded in stonings and battled usury with moral and physical force.  This is Bemis describing the solution, at least as he sees it today.  Maybe he’ll stick with the Christianity, maybe not.  Bob Dylan didn’t, but then again who knows what’s up with that guy.

8.  Jamie T. Kings & Queens
English smartass whose dance-rock is effortlessly informed by hip-hop in a way that white American songwriters lack the critical distance to attempt, Jamie Treays mainly writes about penurious and grimy UK council-flat dystopia and his unsuccessful efforts to make time with the young ladies who live there.  He’s probably not actually as much of a yobbo as he makes himself out to be, but he is a very talented kid.  I just got this record in mid-January, so forgive me if I just express my appreciation in generalities by noting that I really like all eleven of these songs.

9.  Baroness Blue Record
They’re from Savannah, but they grew up in Virginia, and that explains a lot; they’re known and marketed as a metal outfit, but half the time to me they sound like a D.C. punk band.  A really good one, too, with two superior guitar players and much focused aggression and a tremendous ear for odd and compelling melodies.  “Jake Leg” ends with the band cranking up the guitar harmonies and plunging head-first into a maze of interlocking riffs, but the actual song part of the song sounds just like Jawbox.  The fucking pounding “Swollen and Halo” represents an alternate universe where Fugazi were huge potheads.  Much of the D.C. vibe is brung by drummer Allen Blickle (his real name!), who sounds an awful lot like Brendan Canty, with his snare sound that is literally “meaty”—it sounds like a guy thwacking a ribeye with a pool cue.  Like Fugazi or Soulside or Rites of Spring, they have an ear for and a real commitment to dynamics.  Blue Record is full of mood swings, instrumental bridges that work as emotional transitions, starting off pretty and acoustic and over time clenching into an angry fist.  Truly this is the sort of record the shaveheads and the longhairs can get behind equally; the songwriting may be punk, but the ornamentation is entirely metal.  They thrash; there’s even a little, but not much, of the contemporary Headbanger's Ball Cookie Monster vocal style; they ease between time signatures; I already mentioned the guitar harmonies.  Maybe best of all, since they’re southern, they have no fear of boogie—dig the reinforced .38 Special gallop “The Gnashing.”  Are you going to ask about the lyrics?  Well, metal is different, you know.  I can’t make heads or tails of them as narrative or position paper or even poetry, but as a collection of impressions rolled at you like boulders from the lip of a cliff, they get the job done.

10.  The Fiery Furnaces I’m Going Away
We take them for granted.  I’m Going Away was their least showy record ever, but still it was another step forward.  Every time out they successfully execute the new tricks they’ve been practicing.  On Widow City they learned to rock; here, especially on “Lost at Sea,” they offer a gorgeous contentment that used to be beyond their reach.

11.  G-Side Huntsville International
12.  The Pains of Being Pure at Heart The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
13.  Ghostface Killah Ghostdini Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City
14.  Mastodon Crack the Skye
15.  Paramore Brand New Eyes
16.  Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca
17.  DJ Quik & Kurupt BlaQKout
18.  Metric Fantasies
19.  Myka 9 1969
20.  Willie Isz Georgiavania

21.  i-EL The Prelude
22.  UGK UGK 4 Life
23.  Future of the Left Travels with Myself and Another
24.  Blaq Poet Tha Blaqprint
25.  YACHT See Mystery Lights
26.  Doom Born Like This
27.  Kid Cudi Man on the Moon: The End of Day
28.  Two Tongues Two Tongues
29.  Z-Ro Cocaine
30.  Espers III

31.  Camera Obscura My Maudlin Career
32.  The High Strung Ode to the Inverse of the Dude
33.  Tris McCall Let the Night Fall
34.  Grizzly Bear Veckatimest
35.  Wild Beasts Two Dancers
36.  A.C. Newman Get Guilty
37.  God Help the Girl God Help the Girl
38.  Sam Roberts Love at the End of the World
39.  Gucci Mane Murder Was the Case
40.  Tori Amos Abnormally Attracted to Sin

Best opener
“GI Pride.”  No contest.

Album that started the strongest
6 Kiss.  Really the entire first half, all the way through “Myspace,” is tremendous.  While I’m on the subject, “Myspace” also contains my favorite throwaway boast of the year: “fell asleep in first class, eatin’ chicken on planes.”  Jamie T.’s Kings & Queens was no slouch in this category either.  The first four songs are little powder kegs.

Album that finished the strongest
G-Side’s Huntsville International, with the awesomely moving “Rising Sun” followed by the chill piece “So Wonderful.”  Am I crazy or is there more great hip-hop coming out of Alabama these days than all five boroughs combined?  Block Beataz have a legit claim on Producer of the Year honors, and ST and Yung Clova are two of the least cliché-bound and most album-oriented young emcees working.  They rap some about selling drugs, but for the most part they reject, sometimes overtly, the pretense that they’re crack kingpins who rap only to kill time while they wait for the re-up.  Why shouldn’t rappers be proud to be rappers?  Second place goes to I’m Going Away.

Best closer
“The Last Baron,” Mastodon’s thirteen-minute prog metal arc.  It starts off slow and spooky, borrowing and improving on the melody from the Gabriel-era Genesis chestnut “The Return of the Giant Hogweed.”  By itself, that was enough to captivate a prog-nerd like me.  But this is not your father’s Mastodon; even when they bring a shit-ton of thrash throughout the long middle section, the melody is always front and center and compulsively shoutable.  Elsewhere, I thought Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career was a little predictable and indistinct, but a lot of the tunes were awfully good, and closer “Honey in the Sun” was the best of the bunch.  Tracyanne Campbell is not entirely comfortable turning that frown upside down—the song is basically about being dragged kicking and screaming into happiness, wishing all the while that her heart was “as cold as the morning dew”—but the rest of us will find it hard not to smile.

Album I listened to the most this year
Middle Cyclone or Miseducation, take your pick.  Probably Middle Cyclone only because it came out so early in the year.

Worst album I bought this year
Working on a Dream.  More on this in a minute, but Bruce is just operating on muscle memory here; this record has the same ersatz spirit as his Super Bowl halftime show, which was the most insincere expropriation of rock-god mythology in service of commerce I’ve ever seen.  It was like Jon Bon Jovi had killed and skinned the Boss and was wearing his face as a mask.  This would never have happened if Clarence Clemons was still alive.  I don’t expect Springsteen to muster the lyrical particularity of, say, Darkness on the Edge of Town anymore.  Bruce doesn’t live in that town these days; I’m not sure he even visits over the holidays.  But this record was almost written in an entirely different language.

Crappy record I listened to a lot anyway
Cursive’s Mama, I’m Swollen.  It’s not like I doubt Tim Kasher’s sincerity.  I’m sure he means every needy and despondent moan.  Still, it always feels like he’s making a meal of it, like a fouled soccer player flopping around trying to draw a yellow card.  Or in this case some pity sex from the brunette near the soundboard working on her fourth Long Island Iced Tea.

Great song from a crappy record
“Should Have Taken Acid with You” is a pretty little slice of ambient nostalgia and about the only sign of life on Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms.  Thomas Dolby is cool and all, but I am not sure he should be exerting this much influence over contemporary music.  I am too much of a fanboy to call Ian Hunter’s Man Overboard “crappy,” but it was definitely uneven.  Whatever—the title track is still grade-A romantic-tragic Hunter and worth the price of admission by itself.  It’s a love letter to alcoholism, and although you don’t necessarily need to be a 70-year-old English guy with 40+ years in the business to pull that sort of thing off, it lends a certain credibility.  “Reality this, reality that,” he moans, “I been there once and I ain’t goin’ back.”  What makes Ian drink?  Well, he’s pretty vague about it, and anyway the explanation is probably not that interesting.  At the very end, Ian appears to claim that there’s a woman to blame, but honestly one senses he knows it’s his own damn fault.

Lousy song from a good record
“Hard As Hell,” the Akon spotlight joint on UGK 4 Life.  What’s worse than Akon?  If you said “nothing,” nice effort, but no.  The answer is “Akon singing about his dong.”  Admittedly that’s sort of a trick question, since Akon hardly ever sings about anything else.  The guy is just death every time he comes on my radio.

Album that should have been longer
I just made fun of this viewpoint, but the answer really is Eskimo Snow.  It’s just hard not to want a couple more tunes, or maybe just one additional epic down the stretch, as a counterweight to the first half’s one-two of “Against Me” and “Even the Good Wood Gone.”  But it’s still all good; even if the man on the mic is maybe starting to repeat himself a little, the band continues to expand its musical horizons with great success.  “Against Me” has the poppiest chorus they’ve ever shown us, even moreso than “Fatalist Palmistry.”  It’s odd-boy pop, so we’re not talking about hit singles here, but as odd-boy pop goes it approaches the level of excellence achieved by Wire’s “Outdoor Miner” or “Map Ref. 41° N 93° W.”  Then on the chorus of “Good Wood” they turn into Drive-By Truckers, with a smoky electric piano and a dewy, weeping steel guitar.  Yoni Wolf is singing “No flash photography,” which implies that, for all his demonstrable strangeness, he is, in fact, preparing himself for imminent pop stardom.  This was a very good year for the concise pop record—besides Eskimo Snow, you had your Kings & Queens, your Bitte Orca, your Pains of Being Pure at Heart, your BlaQKout, your Brand New Eyes.  Even the good records that had a little more sprawl, like most of my top ten, didn’t really feel long.

Album that should have been shorter
Richard Hawley’s Truelove’s Gutter, which is the longest eight-song record of all time.  Well, okay, I haven’t verified that claim empirically, but it feels like the longest eight-song record of all time.  I do feel Rich could have varied the tempos just a touch; each track is about 35 bpm and may cause a dangerous drop in blood pressure.  You definitely want a defibrillator, or at least some insulin, nearby before spinning the set-closing “Don’t You Cry.”  Another record that was really too long was Only Built for Cuban Linx … Part II by Raekwon.  You have to understand, he’d been living with some of those beats and verses for like seven years—he wasn’t about to leave them off.

Most up-and-down record
Kid Cudi’s debut.  But it wasn’t like some songs were bad and some were good.  It’s that all the songs, or nearly all of them, had cool production and neat melodies but this callow douchebag on the mic, babbling about weed and mushrooms.  Either that or letting you know how much he likes to get his dick sucked.  (Newsflash, pal: that distinguishes you from basically nobody.)  Cudi is probably his patron Kanye West minus the vision, but there’s enough excitingly left-field shit on Man on the Moon that he certainly deserves another chance.

Least up-and-down record
Middle Cyclone, easily.  Each song ranks with the artist’s best work.  Another contender was Blaq Poet’s Blaqprint.  Like Andrew Nosnitsky said, he’s a one-trick pony, but that’s okay because his one trick is busting heads open.

Album that wore out its welcome the fastest
Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ It’s Blitz.  The singles were good, but for some reason I just didn’t have any patience for the schtick this time.

Album that turned out to be better than I initially thought it was
Ghostdini Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City.  It didn’t hit me until like three weeks ago that it’s actually really, really good.  It’s marketed as Ghost’s R&B album, but who's kidding whom here?  Tony Starks takes pains to explain that “this ain’t no R&B dick, this hood.”  It’s really Ghost using hip-hop to draw out all the implications of his favorite R&B songs.  Those smooth 70s classics were full of straight-up fucking, cheating, getting cheated on, but they were never actually explicit.  Back then there were lines that just weren’t crossed.  Well, that ship sailed long ago, and Ghost’s whole deal is explicitness.  No detail is too subtle to examine from multiple angles.  “Stapleton Sex” may be ridiculous, but it has the courage and utter lack of shame to narrate what actually happened in the room after Marvin persuaded his lady to get it on.  That may not be your cup of tea, but we ought to recognize: Ghost is the rare major-label rapper who actually gets records released on the semi-regular, and he is never afraid to do weird, alienating shit.  He has a much better-developed sense of craft, of course, but his brain-to-mouth flow is just as pure as Lil B’s.  Another excellent album I wasn’t sure about at first was The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.  It took me a few weeks to machete my way through the production.

Album that felt most like an obligation to get through
The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love.  Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll buy Colin Meloy’s next album.  Then again, I think I said that after The Crane Wife.   But what’s the upside at this point?  The Hazards of Love is a genuine, Board-certified rock opera, and Meloy gets an E for “effort” and T for “nice try,” but his undeniable thoughtfulness does not translate into compelling entertainment.  It hasn’t for three records now.  Another contender in this category was the xx’s debut, which a ton of people whose musical taste I respect told me was really good.  I don’t dislike them at all, but I do find them fairly boring.  It’s not like they’re bad in any particular respect, but I can’t figure out what they do well.  Their songs aren’t notably well-constructed or memorable.  Their melodies don’t stick in your head.  The riffs don’t make you shake your ass.  The arrangements are minimalist but flat; the instrumentalists don’t overwhelm with creativity.  They are skilled at setting a particular mood, I will give you that.

Most welcome surprise
The development of Lil B.  It’s not that everything he does is excellent, or even tolerable.  A lot of his act willfully pushes the reasonable bounds of human patience.  But he’s a real artist, and how many rappers even consider allowing themselves that type of freedom?

Rookie of the year
Trembling Bells.  Carbeth came with a promo sticker on the cover with blurbs from various semi-prominent indie musicians.  I ordered it online, so by the time I saw the sticker I already owned it and didn’t need to be sold.  But I still enjoyed the quote from Will Oldham that said “Trembling Bells?  More like Trembling Balls!”  I can dig it.

Comeback player of the year
Khujo Goodie.  In some senses, the obvious comparison to Willie Isz is Gnarls Barkley; both are duos consisting of a youngish producer and a former member of Goodie Mob who likes to sing.  But Willie Isz doesn’t really sound anything like Gnarls Barkley, with the forced pop feel appeal and Danger Mouse’s Technicolor soul samples and Cee-Lo’s too-much-Jif-on-the-roof-of-my-mouth vocal tone.  Producer Jneiro Jarel shoots his movies in grainy black-and-white, and then there’s Khujo, spitting and growling and moaning all over the tracks like his canine namesake.  The guy was always my favorite Goodie Mob member, and I’m happy to see him enjoying the patronage of talented youngsters.

Bust of the year
Mission of Burma’s The Sound the Speed the Light.  They really didn’t have it this time out.  I’m hoping they rebound, but most of the record reminds me of Trent Green at the bitter end in Miami: stumbling around the backfield all flinchy, waiting for the killing blow.

Record from which I expected too much
For Against’s Never Been.  It’s a transitional record and fine on its own merits.  Not enough riffs, not enough melodies, but I’m still glad to have it.  Usually they take about six years between records, so maybe they rushed into this one.

Best reissue
Ill Wind’s Flashes, which I’ve never owned before because I’m not a cratedigger or willing to pony up $80 on eBay for the vinyl.  Not to give any succor to Sox and Pats fans who have finally gotten their comeuppance after ruling the roost for the past decade, but I think Boston might be the most underrated American rock city.  Apart from the outstanding punk and indie stuff from the late 70s and early 80s, the town also gave us a ton of great psych in the late 60s—Ill Wind and the Beacon Street Union especially.  It’s also nice to have the first two Feelies records back in print, and Jawbox’s great For Your Own Special Sweetheart, but I already had those on CD.  The Ill Wind record had never seen a digital release before.

Best album title
Future of the Left’s Travels with Myself and Another.

Good album with a bad title
Tori Amos’s Abnormally Attracted to Sin.  Do you ever get the feeling it would be hard to be Tori’s friend?

Album title that most accurately reflects the spirit of the music
Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin Career, but not in a good way.  I’m just guessing here, but it seems like Tracyanne Campbell is a little bit at war with herself.  She knows she has a certain act; people have come to expect her to bring the sad.  She admits she’s fighting it on the title song.  She doesn’t want to feel compelled to be melancholy for a living; she knows it’s an unhelpful limitation.

Worst album title
Working on a Dream.  You know those Internet apps that tell you what your name would be if you were in the Wu-Tang Clan or if Sarah Palin was your mom?  I know; they’re a lot of fun.  If there were a Bruce Springsteen Title Generator app on a website somewhere—who knows, maybe there is one—it couldn’t generate a more perfectly vacuous title than Working on a Dream.  I guess it’s nice that Bruce finally rediscovered the importance of pop melodies and radio hits, but this record suggests he thinks the defining characteristic of pop songs is simple-mindedness.  I don’t know why he holds this belief; he himself has contributed many counterexamples over his career.  Not too long ago, Bruce completed a solid decade without writing a single melody, but as boring as his 90s output might have been at least it was never simple-minded.  Most of Working on a Dream—and here I mean the title song, “My Lucky Day,” “This Life,” and other, similar bullshit—is like freeze-dried Bruce, high-fructose corn Bruce, Bruce with all the valuable nutrients removed.  And when he tries a little harder, it gets even worse.  “Outlaw Pete” was billed as Springsteen’s attempt to recapture the spirit of “Incident on 57th Street” and all those other early, epic romantic compositions, but those songs sidestepped schlock and bathos only because their lyrics situated them in a specific and identifiable place (even if that place was imaginary).  Those songs were informed by history and tradition and other songwriters, Dylan for sure, but they were unburdened by cliché.  “Outlaw Pete” is like a cliché hoagie—shopworn imagery piled sky-high and slathered in vinegar.  You could excuse it by saying the artist is a victim of his own success, that his innovations have become industry standards over time, but come on; the truth is the song doesn't work on any level.  Then there’s the song about the hot checkout girl at the supermarket whom Bruce can’t (or at least shouldn’t) fuck because he’s a world-famous 60-year-old rock superstar and she’s not.  The narrator’s riveting yearning is paired with a sub-Spector kitchen sink arrangement that erupts all over your face like a cheese fountain.  I sort of like the minimalist blues “Good Eye,” but not that much, and anyway that’s just one song.

Best album cover
Twice in her career, on Furnace Room Lullaby and then Blacklisted, Neko Case was pictured on her album covers having been run over by a truck.  On the front of Middle Cyclone, she’s crouched on the hood of a muscle car wielding a sword.  Maybe that signifies that she’s finally taken control, though the record’s contents would suggest otherwise.  The cover of 6 Kiss, with its garish and hilarious day-glo graffiti cartoon, is pretty fantastic as well.  This is Glam Rap, a kid from El Cerrito letting loose his inner Marc Bolan.  He knows he’s “the only goon nigga in these tiny pants,” but that’s just B; it’s not his problem if you can’t deal.

Good album with a bad cover
I don’t like The Pains’ black-and-white mimeograph cover, but it complements the music so obviously that I can’t really slam it.  I’ll vote for the High Strung’s Ode to the Inverse of the Dude.  Doesn’t really seem like they tried very hard with that one.

Worst album cover
Working on a Dream achieves big-time wretchedness in this category too, with poor Bruce’s version of the Christie Brinkley painting from the front of River of Dreams.  Another old-school major-label vanity case who always has to be on her album covers, Tori Amos, made me guffaw with the jacket of Midwinter Graces, which pictures Amos as an avenging faerie-angel who swoops down from the icy night sky with a hymnal full of Christmas carols inspired by feminist and queer theory and high-end weed.  But nothing could have prepared me for Mannie Fresh’s Return of the Ballin, which is basically visual Ipecac.  Remember, this fellow is one of the five top hip-hop producers of the post-Dre era.  He wrote and played basically every note of music on everything Cash Money Records released for a decade or thereabouts, and it’s no coincidence the label came to dominate the game during that stretch.  Half a decade ago, on his way out the door after his falling-out with Bryan Williams, the Label Owner Who Raps, Mannie made a really awesome, visionary, genuinely funny solo album aptly titled The Mind of Mannie Fresh.  He has never really followed that up, or even tried to, and now in 2009 we finally get a new record put out under his name.  It consists of twelve tracks, of which Mannie had no involvement in six.  The sleeve evinces the same kind of quarter-assed effort.  The bad PhotoShop of a plaintive Mannie flanked by muscle cars recalls the sort of shit the heschers at my high school drew on the backs of their notebooks during chem lab when they weren’t sketching dudes in plate armor brawling with fire swords.  It really looks like an ad for a fire sale at the local used-car lot.  Mannie is pricing those cars to move, Jack.  What can he do to put you in his lazy-ass hip-hop product today?

Best song title
I can’t break the tie between Joe Pernice’s instrumental throwaway “Black Smoke (No Pope)” and Richard Hawley’s “Remorse Code,” which took me a little by surprise.  Rich is not an ironist; his sensibility is usually 100% pre-Holden Caulfield.  There was also “Suburban Beverage” by Real Estate.  If somebody made a movie about my high school in the late 80s, Suburban Beverage would be a pretty good title.

Best liner notes
I don’t think any of the records I bought this year had liner notes, unless you count comps of previously-released music, which I kinda don’t.

Best packaging
The yellow-and-teal day-glo booklet that came with Soundway Records’ Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Ghanaian Blues—1968-81.

Best art
Ms. Indigo Sweats’s drawings in the booklet of Eskimo Snow, in particular the poster for Szmyler’s Fuckhause.  I’ve never been to a fuckhause—I’m way too square for that type of scene—but I’ve heard Szmyler’s is a good one.

Best single
1.  Girls “Hellhole Ratrace”
It’s a profoundly traditional song: just voice and guitar, four Beach Boys chords, a lot a lot of reverb, and a plaintive lyric so innocent it could’ve made the radio in 1962.  But we can tell it’s modern because it deliberately undermines itself at critical points.  It’s got the crescendo and repetition we all remember from the rock anthems of our youth, but the beat refuses to come over the top in triumph, staying sluggish and portly throughout all seven minutes.  All of which combines to makes it timeless, and it’s really hard 40 years after Abbey Road to write something timeless in a rock motif.

2.  Pill “Trap Goin Ham”
Like most quality art, this song works on different levels.  One is the hip-hop version of a workplace comedy, which means it takes place in a wacky crack dealership instead of a nutty small-claims court or a zany modeling agency.  Another is as a good-humored but ultimately defiant story of upward social mobility through illegal acts, the North Georgia Crack Slangers Local No. 255 Rally and Fight Song.  Or maybe you just dig the beat, with that plucked violin sample neatly dividing each bar into eight identical segments.

3.  Esser “Headlock”
Heather was the one who discovered Esser and this song in particular.  She played it constantly for about a month.  It would be two-thirty in the morning and I would be getting ready for bed and she’d be sitting at the computer watching the “Headlock” video on YouTube.  Later, when the video was removed from YouTube after the label asserted its copyright, she’d be watching the “Headlock” video on the official Esser website.  At some point it gained a stranglehold on my consciousness.  This would be my karaoke go-to if any karaoke bar could be counted on to have it available and if I ever did karaoke.  The languid Essex accent and behind-the-beat flow could not possibly summon a greater quantity of ennui.  Reportedly, the song does not represent the submissive end of an abusive relationship; it's a complaint about how miserable and stultifying it is to be stuck in a small provincial town when it’s all happening in the big city.   But it works either way, and either way Ben Esser needs a helping hand to bring him to the fainting couch.  “I’ve got a problem,” he moans, “it’s called living.”  The whole song is like that.  The first verse starts with “Stamp me in the carpet like a piece of dirt,” and the second ups the ante with “Bury me in sand like a knackered stallion,” which is probably simile of the year.  But that groove!  Usually pure hopelessness is not this invigorating.  This is the music the gods loaded on Sisyphus’s iPod just before they issued him his boulder and sent him to the mountain.

4.  Lil B “I’m God”
I doubt anyone saw this coming when they first encountered Lil B leading off “Vans” by barely articulating rhymes about the dope boys and girls on his block.  I am too old to work hard to figure out what B is talking about with his concept of the “based lifestyle”—to me it sounds like a marijuana-focused self-actualization program, like Scientology but with high-end cannabis vaporizers instead of e-meters.  You probably know that Scientology promotes this concept of being “clear,” and if you pay them thousands of dollars you can take various tests using their proprietary machines that eventually proclaim you “clear.”  Of course, in Scientology, “clear” means “free of the influences of the tormented lost souls of aliens kidnapped to our galaxy, brought to movie theaters located in active volcanoes, then blown up with atomic bombs.”  Lil B is much less contrived; to him, “based” just means the elimination of the brain-mouth barrier.  This is the best sort of casual, the most inspired flavor of off-the-cuff.  That climax—“Somebody tell the earth I’m the best now/Somebody tell the ocean I’m the best out/Somebody tell the trees I’m here now”—is genuinely energizing.  It reminds me of Neil Young’s “Motion Pictures,” with that dismissive lyric, “I hear the mountains are doing fine.”  It’s the sound of a young person glorying in the power of his own mind.

5.  i-EL f. Von Pea & Donwill “Real Hip-Hop Don’t Die”
Tanya Morgan’s Brooklynati was pretty boring, but you should still pay attention to these guys.  They have a shitload of talent; if they can just abandon the pretense of being the conscience of the rap game, I really believe they can make great records.  No one paid this single or Ilyas’s outstanding The Prelude LP any attention because they assume the Tanyas are just humorless revivalists, but this was my jam, and about the most fun I had all year.

6.  Clipse f. Cam’ron & Pharrell “Popular Demand (Popeyes)”
This beat and hook are so incredible that the rest of it is 1000% beside the point.  They could loop a dude puking over this track and it would still rule.

7.  Bon Iver “Blood Bank”
This is more like it.  It’s got a little urgency; it actually seems to be about something.  Admittedly, not sure what, but it seems like something important; taking your girlfriend to terminate a pregnancy, maybe?  It’s not just the songwriting that’s cranked up compared to For Emma, Forever Ago, it’s also the aggression.  For starters, there’s a, whattayacall, drumbeat.  Also the Neil Young imitation on the fadeout.  The other songs on the EP are nothing special, but this is good enough that it makes me wonder if maybe everyone had Justin Vernon pegged wrong.  Maybe he’s just not an album artist; maybe he’s a singles artist.

8.  Big Boi f. George Clinton & Too $hort “Fo Yo Sorrows”
We all know the contemporary music industry is a flaming 58-car failure pileup, but if you’re looking for objective proof consider the fact Antwan Patton cannot get Sir Luscious Left Foot released.  I am no historian, but I seem to recall the guy being a part of a rap duo that sold tens of millions of records, won multiple Grammies, etc.  You’d think there’d be a market in place to appreciate a solo project from the guy.  And I am no hip-hop blogger up on the latest extracurriculars from “the game,” but even I haven’t been able to avoid stumbling into multiple tracks from Sir Luscious Left Foot over the past two years.  And everything I’ve heard has been very good or great.  “Fo Yo Sorrows” wasn’t even the most notable and popular Big Boi track of the year—that would be “Shine Blockas,” his duet with Gucci.  Just release the fucking thing already.  People will buy it.  “Sorrows” starts with George Clinton’s terrifying—like, seriously terrifying—old-basehead croak, so dissapated that you want to call him an ambulance.  He vomits some baloney about dope before ruefully letting you know that later on your girlie will be giving him head.  That’s the chorus, you understand, so obviously the tune was destined for the Hot 100.  Short Dogg turns in the shortest guest shot of the year, almost as Usain Bolt-fast as ODB on “9 Milli Bros,” but ODB had been dead a couple years by that point.  None of that matters, anyway; it’s Patton’s show, and he remains the most effortlessly likable, personally credible emcee in the bidness.

9.  Waka Flocka Flame “O Let’s Do It”
Weed carriers need love too.  They’re just like the rest of us whores; they want their fifteen minutes of fame, as long as they don’t have to work too hard for it.  Waka is here mainly because of his thoughtful and generous patron Radric Davis, who has much juice with tastemaking bloggers, if not the Georgia Department of Corrections.  Waka also has the most ridiculous handle in pop music since Engelbert Humperdinck, but full marks to him for making the most of his opportunity.  My brain throws a rod every time he announces his presence at the beginning of a song—“Waka!  Flocka!  Waka!  Flocka!  Wakaflockaflaaaaaaame!”  But that’s kind of the point.  This rivals “Real Hip-Hop Don’t Die” for sheer dumb singability.

10.  YACHT “The Afterlife”
Desmond Dekker’s rotting corpse called; he wants his hook back.  Sorry, that was disrespectful.  This is a terrific song.  I’m not making an argument for it as sophisticated political discourse—the New Situationism—or anything.  Maybe in this day and age it does no good even to have songs with lyrics like “All that you have is not what you own,” when the only reaction is well-meaning people nodding in solemn agreement before hopping in their Volkswagen Touareg and heading over to Sur La Table to pick up a Le Creuset 5½ quart cast-iron oven, then grabbing the new Harper’s at Borders, before finishing up by swinging by Whole Foods for some seven-dollar potatoes.

11.  The Pains of Being Pure at Heart “Young Adult Friction”
12.  UGK “Da Game Been Good to Me”
13.  Big Boi f. Gucci Mane “Shine Blockas”
14.  Lil Boosie f. Pimp C “Life of Crime”
15.  Dirty Projectors “Stillness Is the Move”
16.  Phish “Backwards Down the Number Line”
17.  Lady Gaga “Bad Romance”
18.  Metric “Help I’m Alive”
19.  Z-Ro “Doing Just Fine”
20.  The Leftovers “Telephone Operator”

Song of the year
“Willows of Carbeth” by Trembling Bells.  Nothing else was close.  Lavinia Blackwall’s voice can be tough to take sometimes, but on the straightest and by far best song on Carbeth, she puts you in the ground.  Her lover has left her for someone else and she couldn’t feel lousier.  “All the songs I knew couldn’t help me now,” she sings.  She is telling you she is inconsolable even by music.  If you’re the sort of person who thinks of certain songs as your dearest friends, if music has dragged you through your most wretched moments to the tentative sun on the other side, then you can understand the magnitude of her loss.  “No more singing love songs, they’re strangers to me now”: that’s as chilling a statement of pure despair as I can imagine.

Best songwriting
Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells.  He writes brilliantly in the folk-rock idiom, but it’s more than that; his weird, adventurous melodic sensibilities allow him to explore the full range of that idiom effortlessly.  He can make traditional music that sounds like Sandy Denny or Karen Dalton or the Incredible String Band or Robert Wyatt, only really it’s so torqued-up and modernized that it mostly sounds like Alex Neilson.  And Neilson is a drummer, and a very good one, so he’s as playful rhythmically as he is melodically.  There are other contenders too.  Max Bemis from Say Anything mostly kept his election-year pledge to put at least one and often more than one bridge in every song he writes.  I don’t know how the boys in Why? write their songs, but they also deserve a mention.  I always enjoy it when someone writes a song that hasn’t been written before, and if you feel the same you’ll probably dig Why? okay.

Hook of the year
The hook of the year every year is the saxophone from Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”  But the least resistible hook of these particular past twelve months was the chorus of “Popular Demand.”

Worst song of the year
Eminem’s “We Made You.”  First, Em, who is already the most consistently annoying emcee of all time, hits you with his most creatively awful style yet—half Rasta, half Apu Nahasapeemapetilon.  Second, his mighty flow is unleashed in service of a series of cruel and unclever swipes at low-hanging celebrity fruit like Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, and Sarah Palin, all of whom I’m not sure Em realizes he’s got much more in common with than he does any of us.  Third, whoever came up with the vocal hook needs to go back to drawing board.  It’s sad, it’s mean-spirited; there’s nothing good about it.  I also want to say a word to Bon Jovi, for their “We Weren’t Born to Follow,” which at first I thought was a grammatical correction of the old Goffin/King song from The Notorious Byrd Brothers.  Sadly, no.  Anyway, the song is harmless geezer music; it’s the title that kills me.  Guys, you’re not fooling anybody.  You were totally born to follow.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that.  You still sold a lot of records.  You had a pistol for action; you went in and out of love; on a steel horse you rode; now you have boats and wine cellars.  You don’t need to pretend you were innovators.

Most annoying song of the year
Anything by that smug jerkweed on the FreeCreditReport.com ads.  Man, I hate that guy.

Most overplayed song
“Best I Ever Had” was the most overplayed song released in 2009, but fucking “Don’t Stop Believin’” continues to drag its suppurating corpse onto soundtracks and TV shows and karaoke machines and Rock Band and it has to fucking stop.  I don’t get the Journey revisionism.  “Wheel in the Sky” is okay and I have grown to appreciate “Lights” since moving to the Bay Area, but that’s as far as I’ll go.  Okay, fine—“Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” also makes the cut; don’t tell anybody I said that.

Song that would drive me craziest on infinite repeat
Das Racist, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”

Song I feel cheapest about liking
Cam’ron’s “I Hate My Job.”

Song I don’t feel at all cheap about liking
I like all the Lady Gaga singles at least a little.  I understand the Madonna comparisons, but Gaga actually has a sense of humor.  She seems more like the new Bette Midler.

Song I like better than I ought to
BG’s “My Hood.”  There’s not much to it, but I still had to talk myself out of putting it in my top 20 singles.

Song that got stuck in my head the most this year
The chorus of “Headlock.”  Slick Rick’s hook on “We Will Rob You,” from Cuban Linx II, spent a lot of time there as well.

Funniest song
Ghostface Killah’s “Guest House.”  Ghost, who is the victim of infidelity more often than anyone in hip-hop, again suffers the misfortune of his trifling woman screwing around behind his back.  As always with this most precise emcee, the devil is in the details.  He’s pacing in his mansion in his paisley robes; his girl won’t answer her cell; he has glass pianos in his living room and Portuguese drapes hanging from the ceiling; Raekwon the Chef is chilling on the couch, watching BBC and eating a salad.  As cuckold-rock goes, this is even better than “The Rain” by Oran “Juice” Jones.

Best anachronism
Probably “Telephone Operator” by the Leftovers, which is like Elvis Costello without quite so many brains.  They can’t quite mimic “No Action” because they have a minimal capacity for angst and no literary pretensions, but they do attempt a telecommunications metaphor.

Best purist rock and roll song
Girls’ “Morning Light.”

Most enjoyable musical moment of the year
The interjected “For reaalll?” on the chorus of “Trap Goin Ham,” narrowly beating out the “Woo-hahh!” on the chorus of “Real Hip-Hop Don’t Die.”  I’m a simple guy who enjoys repetition.

Best singing
Neko, naturally.

Best rapping
It’s a two-man conversation between the hyper-orthodox Freddie Gibbs, a tremendously skillful emcee who has wriggled into the lyricism/street cred sweet spot, and Lil B, who is fucking crazy.  You surely remember the Boyz II Men debut single “Motownphilly.”  A terrific song, with the hook “Boyz II Men are goin’ off/Not too hard and not too soft.”  My friend Tom Snow used to point out that Boyz II Men were the first act he was aware of to precisely describe their marketing strategy in the chorus of their debut single.  Not too hard, like Bell Biv Devoe (who were not remotely hard), but also not too soft, like Another Bad Creation (who, being eight years old, could be excused for being soft).  Gibbs isn’t quite that studied, but he comes hard enough to have persona-based street-rap credibility, while also displaying enough rhythmic agility and lyrical versatility to appeal to intellectuals (who normally only half-listen).  I am a big Gibbs fan, but for all his unimpeachable technique I’m not sure we know who he is yet.  Lil B, on the other hand, has crafted probably the most definable (and polarizing) personality of anyone in hip-hop.  If I have to choose, I pick B, but I admit my bias is always for the fuck-it-we’re-making-art-here guys, the ones who actively open themselves to ridicule.  B brought the world a lot of garbage this year, but when your goal is releasing new music at the speed of a Twitter feed, you will produce your fair share of bullshit.  The significant thing is that even the bullshit reveals a definable point of view.  Best-case scenario: a whole new thing.  Worst case: Kool Keith, and Kool Keith made several very good records.  Elsewhere, I think we need to admit that Clipse’s new one suffered from a pretty lightweight performance from Pusha.  Malice is doing the heavy lifting on that record.  What else?  Well, the most ubiquitous rappers of 2009 were Boosie and Gucci; they were also, besides Gibbs, the emcees who received the most Internets-based love.  Both of them, particularly Gucci, spread themselves pretty thin, which I guess is inevitable in a day and age where your every audible comment can be recorded and released worldwide within minutes if that's how you want to play it.  Quality control often suffers; Boosie’s official Superbad release was okay, but his Thug Passion mixtape was plainly better.  There aren't enough hours in my day to keep up with everything Gucci puts out, but I thought his Murder Was the Case mixtape was tighter and more consistent than his official release The State vs. Radric Davis, though Radric Davis was pretty good with great moments (e.g., “Classical,” Gucci’s final answer to anyone who still considers him a stupid or sloppy or non-lyrical emcee).  I don’t know what this means, other than we really should abandon once and for all the mixtape-label release dichotomy.  I never understood the logic of segregating one from the other; if I can’t rank mixtapes in my top ten, that’s giving an inefficient capitalist construct veto power over a shit-ton of art that’s out there waiting to be appreciated, or at least ranked—both, I hope.  Sometimes artists make art for themselves and their friends; sometimes they work on spec for a patron.  But it’s the end product that counts.

Best band
Mastodon.  Those guys are the truth.

Best instrumental solo
Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, on Bitte Orca’s high point “Temecula Sunrise.”

Best synth player
Emily Haines of Metric.

Best piano/organ player
Tori Amos returned to the piano, more or less, after yielding most of American Doll Posse to glammed-up six-strings, and she’s still the most striking and assertive pianist working in popular music today.  Well, I guess her music isn’t actually all that popular, at least not in the Lady Antebellum sense, but you know what I mean.

Best guitarist
My favorite lead player was Greg Weeks of Espers.  That buzzy, live-wire sound brings the mystery and ominousness and helps you forgive the band’s sometimes vague and obscure songwriting.  John Baizley and Pete Adams of Baroness were my favorite guitar tandem.

Best bassist
Jamie T.

Best drummer
Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells.  The reason why, more or less, is jazz.  Neilson is extremely loose, swinging like a madman even on the folkiest numbers.  He frequently tries and executes thrillingly freaky rhythmic concepts and is never afraid to sacrifice himself for the sake of the song.  I usually vote for Mastodon's Brann Dailor in this category, and he was great again this year.  So was Allen Blickle from Baroness.

Best backing vocals
Whoever’s not singing lead for Dirty Projectors on any given song, usually Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian.

Best use of a non-traditional instrument
Once again I got nothing in this category.

Best producer
John Congleton, for Blue Record and St. Vincent’s Actor, which I thought was only okay but still sonically gorgeous.  The guy has been on a hot streak; last year he also helmed Black Mountain’s rock leviathan In the Future.  My favorite hip-hop producer was the evergreen DJ Quik, whose BlaQKout could not really have been any more fun.  The greatest delta between an awesome beat and a useless vocal was “On to the Next One” from The Blueprint 3, which wasted Swizz Beatz’s captivating work on Jay-Z, who has entered the Get Off My Lawn phase of his career.

Worst producer
The guys from Woodsist Records.  I’m no audiophile, but “Hey, what if we made the entire studio into a bong?" is not what I’m looking for.

Best arranging
Why?  (That’s the answer, not an ontological inquiry.)

Best lyrics
Over the course of a full album, Neko Case, who is a poet and knows it.  “You know,” Neko explains patiently, “they call them killer whales.  But you seemed surprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank.”  Obama Administration, are you listening?  BREAKING: YOU CANNOT TRUST MITCH MCCONNELL.  MUST CREDIT SAUSAGE MAHONEY.  One of my favorite lines of the year was Case’s too: her description of how the most important things get taken for granted, or maybe how thoughtless certainty can inhibit the solving of obvious problems: “It was so clear to me that it was almost invisible.”  I wish my other favorite line of the year didn’t appeal to me so much.  G-Side opened their closer “So Wonderful” with “My president is black/But we still in Iraq,” and if that doesn’t sum up the great Obama comedown of 2009 I don’t know what could.

Worst lyric of the year
Eugene McGuinness is really not trying very hard on “Fonz” when he says “We said farewell and we synchronized our watches/Arranged for the meeting of our crotches.”  He might think he’s trying hard, but he’s not.   That line is so much skeevier than the skeeviest R&B come-on.  Skeevier even than a Robin Thicke video.  Not even Lloyd is that skeevy, even with his shades off.  Fuck, even Jeremih’s “Birthday Sex” is less skeevy than that.

Best beard
I don’t know Ray LaMontagne’s music, but the beard is good to go.

Thing I don’t know but I should
The Phenomenal Handclap Band.  I’ve only heard that single a couple of times but it sounds pretty decent.

Most overrated artist
Animal Collective.  There’s just nothing there for me to respond to.

Most overrated song
“Lust for Life.”  Good tune with a nice humanist lyric, but still like the seventh best song on Album.

Artist that has absolutely no reason for existing
It’s still Har Mar Superstar.

Band that is no longer getting it done and should break up
It’s not Wilco, despite what you might think.  Their records are just fine.  They’re enjoyable.  Sure, maybe you don’t want to listen to them more than three or four times, but what the hell—how many songs do you hear that you want hear again?  I’m not here to hate on the artists who deliver the solid B/B+ every time out.  The rest of us should do so well.  Three years ago I voted for Gomez in this category.  Well, they didn’t break up, and in fact released a new record this year.  It wasn’t any good, really, but it was better than their previous one, so maybe that gets them a reprieve.  Built to Spill, sad to say, is plowing no new ground, but they’re not really a band, exactly, so what would it matter if Doug Martsch started playing with a different rhythm section?  Let’s say 30 Seconds from Mars, who should’ve broken up after their first practice session.

Geezer who should give it up altogether
Rakim’s comeback album was pretty pointless.

Most undeservedly hyped debut
I feel bad dumping on them repeatedly, because I really don’t have a particular beef with their record, but given the attention they got I guess it’s the xx again.

Unsexiest person in pop music
Have you seen Nature Boy Ric Flair recently?  Sorry, off topic I know, but I wanted to get that in there.  The answer is Mariah Carey.  I’m not sure what’s going on with her torso, but I want no part of it.

Best live show
I can’t front, it was our old friends Phish at Red Rocks on 7/31/09.  It started raining fairly heavily about halfway into the first set, as we’d been warned it might.  The band immediately loped into “Water in the Sky.”  (Do you get it?)  It only got worse from there; by the set-closing “Split Open and Melt,” it was coming down in sheets.  The band gets credit for not half-assing the improvisational segment; all around them the crew was sealing the amps and monitors with polyurethane and building small plastic yurts around each of the band members.  Eventually they finished up, bowed, and jogged off, leaving all of us to fend for ourselves in the monsoon.  It got steadily worse for about twenty minutes; we had to pull up the tarp that our friends had used four hours earlier to save seats in the general-admission craziness, to use for shelter.  I was stationed on the front of the tarp, working to hold on when the wind surging up the mountain dipped under it and tried to tear it away into the sky.  It wasn’t very much fun.  But the rain did slow and then finally stopped about 45 minutes after the band had gone off.  The crew came out and dismantled the yurts.  The band emerged a few minutes later and were highly motivated.  Predictably opening with "Drowned," the Who song, they speedily downshifted into a funky little polyrhythm that segued as if composed into Talking Heads’ “Crosseyed and Painless.”  That shot off into a clever and pleasant little jam before spiraling downward into “Joy,” the set’s first Phish original, which Trey Anastasio wrote after his older sister died from cancer.  “Joy” has a chorus that by rights should be too cheesy to tolerate but is so fundamental to the band’s appeal to its audience that you have to give them a pass: “We want you to be happy/’Cause this is your song too.”  Hate if you must, but hate at your peril.  Anyway, the “Joy” breather led into one of the two or three best versions of “Tweezer” that Phish gave us in 2009, not to overstate the significance of that, since 2009 was their first year back from a long time off and obviously they were spending most of their effort finding their footing and working on the fundamentals.  As with most ’09 jams, there were only three minutes or so that were really on point, but they were bewitching.  The closing sequence was a blizzard of energy: first (a) “Fluffhead,” historically a special treat but all up in the ’09 rotation; into (b) the perpetual-motion machine of “Piper,” into a piano coda that morphed into (c) their cover of “A Day in the Life,” which also had the nostalgia factor for me since I saw the band debut it at the same venue back in 1995.  The drenching was no price to pay for 75 minutes of that degree of wall-to-wall heat.

Best video
Pill’s “Trap Goin Ham.”  Americans almost never have to suffer the indignity of seeing actual poor people on TV.  Certainly images of extreme American poverty are basically verboten.  I remember how jarring Juvenile’s “Ha” video was back in ’99.  While New York, cradle of hip-hop, was wasting its time with Puff and Ma$e, Juve introduced you to his friends inside the ‘Nolia projects.   The “Trap Goin Ham” video consists of actual, improvised footage of folks on the streets of Atlanta’s 4th Ward and is a step beyond “Ha,” since it’s not just poor folks dancing around a camera but poor folks waving in polite society’s face what polite society likes to think of as their pathologies.  Maybe you find some of the images problematic, but they’re not half as problematic as fucking poverty.

Video they should have made
The Fiery Furnaces’ “Ray Bouvier.”  They could shoot it like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past.  Eleanor Friedberger is much sexier than Barbara Stanwyck.

2008 record I ignorantly slept on
Too many to count.  Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight deserved basically every awkward white-boy high-five it got and probably would have made my top ten.  Lindsey Buckingham’s Gift of Screws was short (just ten songs) but essentially perfect (ten good and memorable songs) and might’ve made the top ten too.  Jack’s Mannequin made a really good piano-pop record called The Glass Passenger that’s probably better than Gift of Screws.  On the local tip, I failed to notice the self-titled Dizzy Balloon joint and Talking Through Tin Cans by the Morning Benders—both excellent, supremely tuneful pop records.  Every year I try so hard and every year I miss so many.

2008 record I unaccountably forgot to rank
Averkiou’s Throwing Sparks.  I guess at eight songs and 25 minutes it was just an EP, so I have that excuse.  But even so it rated as one of the couple-three best EPs of last year, so one way or another I blew it.  This Gainesville, Florida quartet’s sound is awfully 1989: heavy on the fuzzy, melodic rhythm guitar, vocals and bass shoved into the upper register, largely inaccessible drums.  The songs are still really memorable, and anyway I come by my love of this stuff honestly.  I especially like the song where the band sends its regrets about not moving to Brooklyn like every other bunch of callow young careerists out there.  We might never hear from them again as a result; would that the same were true of all those bands from Brooklyn.

2009 record you will probably reevaluate a year from now
Kings & Queens.  Like I said, I just picked it up in mid-January.  I think if I’d had it for longer I’d probably rank it higher, but of course one never can tell.

Stephan Jenkins Memorial Award for colostomy bag of the year
I guess I have to give it to Chris Brown.

Honorable mention
What was up with that Jamie Foxx video where he took Ron Howard with him to the club?

Will still be making good records in 2019
Neko Case.  I’m not being cute when I say it seems like she’s really committed to the work.

Best record of 2010
If the shit-hot single “The Server” is any indication, it’ll be E-40’s Revenue Retrievin.  We’ll have to wait and see about Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One on Me; one thing life has taught us is sometimes excessive girth can preclude mobility.

Coming Attractions

I know this page has been dormant for basically half a year, as a result of which my loyal readership has dropped from seven people to three.  But the three of you (you know who you are) have been clamoring for more content.  So I just want to assure you that this weekend I''m going to post my annual monolith discussing the best and worst music of 2009.  (What do you mean, "that's so last year"?)  Look, even if I post only once a year, which I have to admit is a possibility, you can be sure that one post will be the yearly music review.

In the words of Bart Simpson, I can't promise I'll try to post more in the '010, but I'll try to try.  It's not always the best thing for my mental health to think, let alone write, about the Royals' most recent signing of the non-ambulatory corpse of a once-mediocre player to a multi-year contract.  (As we speak, Dayton Moore is in heavy talks with representatives of Snuffy Stirnweiss.)

In the meantime, while you're waiting with bated breath, watch this.

Barn Door Open, Horse Long Gone

Somehow I doubt this would have persuaded the kids even if it weren't largely a strawman argument.  

I'm not sure who Nasir is talking about here, specifically.  Hip-hop actually does a pretty good job steering clear of minstrelsy.  Admittedly, one always has to be careful with this stuff.  History is a bitch; no matter how hard you try, no amount of self-awareness and winking can erase the power of centuries-old racist tropes.  Still, I most definitely admire Nas's commitment to curmudgeonliness, and it's both startling and refreshing to hear this sort of old-school racial dialogue today, with zero tolerance for purported irony and repurposing and reclaiming and all the other buzzwords we know so well.  The old-school approach is good by me, even if it sometimes overshoots the mark.  I am beyond tired of the insistence of willful and ignorant persons alike that race is no longer a subject fit for consideration in modern life, that it's become irrelevant to the daily experience of humans, like alchemy or the Seattle Pilots.  Truly, it's hard to see how anyone could make this argument without being willful about it.  Maybe they want to put their troubled consciences to bed; possibly they are sick of watching what they say and looking for the chance to try out some killer new material.  We have a substantial segment of Americans convinced that the guy we just elected President with a substantial majority of votes was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, because—well, he just seems different.  They're not sure why, they can't put their finger on it, but the fellow just doesn't seem like one of us.  It is an obvious fact that millions of our citizens actively and conciously believe in white supremacy.  Their numbers are shrinking, percentage-wise, as the country gets browner, but they're not going to go down without a fight.  They are getting louder and louder.  We desperately need to talk about race.

Also, if you're really feeling mean, you might point out that this beat is better than some of the lesser efforts on Hip Hop Is Dead and Untitled.

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.

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 "Between Here and There" gives me 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 party rhymes of "If It Ain't Rough," with that "Once in a Lifetime" bassline.  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 like 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?