I’ve been absent from this blog recently, and that’s probably not going to change. Another month is about to slip away, so this post is only a placeholder until I have time to write some paragraphs on important topics (life after Ebert, approaches to music, awe of musicians and even halfway decent karaoke singers, ideas for stories, the inherent evil of realizing them, the recurrent objects of town photography, more). Check back for that long addendum soon, I promise (as I’ve promised before to varying degrees of credibility). As soon as this blog hits the five-year mark (in June!; I’ll commemorate the occasion somehow), I’m happy to let it become whatever it becomes and use it only as needed, but until then, a couple more times, I’m adamant that something appears here every month.
Also in May
New music: Deerhunter, John Grant, Daft Punk
Live music: Handsome Family and Sad Baby Wolf album release shows, Built To Spill, Big Boi
Movies: Star Trek, Great Gatsby, Upstream Color, The General (to be my first Keaton in a theater!)
Out of town: Tucson/Phoenix
Photos: plants and houses, etc.
Sun: hot
4/28/13: Rock ‘13 3/31/13: From A Hot Tub Near The Mountains 3/17/13: South by Fair West 3/10/13: Last Ten Mixtapes 3/3/13: Last Ten Purchases 1/20/13: Joyful Noise + 3 1/13/13: Notes for a Mixtape 12/30/12: 10 Favorite Albums of 2012 12/16/12: The Ten Best Albums of … 1982 and 1992 – BLENDER!! 12/2/12: Top Ten Addendum, Pt. 2 (2009-2011) 11/25/12: The Music of Being Young and Dumb 11/18/12: Top Ten Addendum, Pt. 1 (2006-2008) 10/14/12: Your Tax Dollar At Work 9/16/12: American Weekend 8/26/12: Crucify Your Mind 7/1/12: Travel By Foot 6/10/12: Shows + 5 5/27/12: When the Gravity Shackles Were Wild 4/22/12: We All Try: Blind Spots, The Ground Floor, and more… 3/25/12: The Joys of Being Filthy Poor in the Country 3/11/12: Strange and Unproductive Listening 2/12/12: By Two’s 1/8/12: 10 Favorite Albums of 2011 12/25/11: 20 Favorite Songs of 2011, #1-10 12/18/11: 20 Favorite Songs of 2011, #11-20 12/11/11: The Ten Best Albums of … 1991 11/20/11: Blue Turns To Pink (The Evening Sky) 10/30/11: Cleaning House 10/16/11: Passing Time In Fifty-Five Degrees 9/25/11: The Summer That Returns… ONE WEEKEND ONLY! 9/4/11: The Summer That Ends 8/7/11: Playlist: Punk Summer 7/31/11: Too Late… Too Soon… Right On Time 7/3/11: The Summer That Never Ends (Until It Does) 6/19/11: American Music (Gagauthier) 5/15/11: Dudes 4/10/11: Springtime Mixtape: The First Ten Songs (Rough Draft) 3/20/11: Initial Forays Into 2011 2/13/11: Latest Entries In My Musical Brain-Diary 1/2/11: 10 Favorite Albums of 2010 12/26/10: 20 Favorite Songs of 2010, #1-10 12/19/10: 20 Favorite Songs of 2010, #11-20 11/21/10: Heavy Rotation: Half "Old," Half New 10/24/10: The Late, Great Songs of 2010 9/5/10: The Ten Best Songs of the 1990s 8/8/10: Ten Great Shoegazer Jams of the 21st Century 7/25/10: The Songs of Summer 2010
There's not much mystery about who's going to win, but here are my personal Oscar favorites, ballot mostly split between the two really superior movies in the running. Noted also that DDL and Christoph Waltz delivered another perfect performance apiece.
Picture: Lincoln
Director: Michael Haneke
Actress: Emmanuelle Riva
Actor: Joaquin Phoenix
Supporting Actress: Sally Field
Supporting Actor: Tommy Lee Jones
Adapted Screenplay: Lincoln
Original Screenplay: Amour
Animated: ParaNorman (For the rendering of streets and sidewalks, primarily. On story alone, Wreck-It Ralph takes it.)
images: yellow lamp, BBC's The Hour / Shimizu-kun, La corda d'oro
A couple mix CDs, for in between times weather, for the van or wherever, containing songs I’ve been enjoying in the past six months that new music mania mostly hasn’t touched, plus a few really old favorites (#3, 10, 16 on the first collection, in particular).
A.
1. The Notorious B.I.G. – “Juicy”
2. The Roches – “I Love My Mom”
3. Paul Westerberg – “Let’s Not Belong”
4. Joni Mitchell – “Raised On Robbery”
5. Fleetwood Mac – “Mystified”
6. Van Dyke Parks – “Donovan’s Colours”
7. Kishi Bashi – “It All Began With A Burst”
8. En Vogue – “Yesterday”
9. Alison Moyet – “It Won’t Be Long”
10. Unrest – “I Do Believe You Are Blushing”
11. Vivian Girls – “The End”
12. Neil Young – “The Losing End”
13. Sir Douglas Quintet – “Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day”
14. Bill Withers – “You Just Can’t Smile It Away”
15. Big K.R.I.T. – “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”
16. Built To Spill – “Sidewalk”
17. The Blue Nile – “Automobile Noise”
18. Rick Ross – “Keys To The Crib”
A re-imagining of AM radio. Songs of popular appeal and songs of personal shit. Music by adults, for adults. How they love, deal with ghosts, become ghosts. We end with a three-song ode to walking in town.
B.
1. Yo La Tengo – “Cornelia and Jane”
2. Rodriguez – “Crucify Your Mind”
3. Kool A.D. – “La Pinata”
4. Sleeping Bag – “Another Time”
5. The Fresh and Onlys – “Long Slow Dance”
6. Moose – “Everybody’s Talking”
7. The Reivers – “Cowboys”
8. Whiskeytown – “Yesterday’s News”
9. Moving Targets – “Right Way”
10. Half String – “Pelican”
11. Tamaryn – “The Garden”
12. Lisa Germano – “Energy”
13. Here We Go Magic – “How Do I Know”
14. Sloan – “Fade Away”
15. Heems – “Killing Time”
50 minutes, approx.
Leftovers, enjoyed in springtime. AM dreams become FM realities, or at least I’ve had quite a few FM hours in my life similar to this one. A thought: If I was in a band, now is the time in my life when I might start questioning the endeavor, wondering how long to carry on. Then I’d drink the drink of the poor and dissolve my doubt.
I went to the movies 85 times last year. Chronologically:
January
War Horse
The Artist
Weekend
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
A Dangerous Method
February
Chronicle
The Secret World of Arrietty
Pina (3D)
March
A Separation
My Week With Marilyn
Rampart
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
Haywire
The Hunger Games
The FP
April
Mirror Mirror
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
The Kid with a Bike
Footnote
Keyhole
May
Damsels in Distress
The Avengers
21 Jump Street
Frankenstein (1931)
The Pirates! Band of Misfits
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Jeff, Who Lives at Home
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
Dark Shadows
The Dictator
Dracula (1931)
Men in Black 3
June
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Bernie
Prometheus
Snow White and the Huntsman
Stray Dog (1949)
Lonely are the Brave (1962)
Moonrise Kingdom
The Color Wheel
Brave
Safety Not Guaranteed
July
The Cabin in the Woods
Magic Mike
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
Your Sister’s Sister
To Rome With Love
August
Beasts of the Southern Wild
The Dark Knight Rises
The Campaign
Neil Young Journeys
ParaNorman
September
Premium Rush
Dark Horse
Finding Nemo (2003)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
It’s Such A Beautiful Day
The Amazing Spider-Man
The Master
October
Sexual Tension
Keep the Lights On
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
BearCity 2: The Proposal
Gayby
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Looper
Searching for Sugar Man
Samsara
Argo
November
Wreck-It Ralph
Cloud Atlas
The Man with the Iron Fists
Skyfall
Lincoln
Life of Pi
Flight
The Comedy
December
Smashed
Detropia
Silver Linings Playbook
Pitch Perfect
The Sessions
Django Unchained
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Notes
Life is just adventures in physics, and while you’re watching Wreck-It Ralph, it’s hard to remember if it can be anything else. Adventures in chemistry, maybe, but the creatures of computer animation tend to be irreducible.
Best storyline in Cloud Atlas? The filmmakers’(/novelist’s?) storytelling ambition really starts to mean something during the ghastly ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, with their clear willingness to import heavy themes into just about anything, even something totally silly, but also, you know, a depiction of the type of imprisonment we all really fear most.
It’s hard to put into words, but the juxtaposition of those two scenes in Take This Waltz in which The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” plays, different in two key particulars, says something about pop music, solitude, romantic love and happiness that I’ve never seen articulated in a movie before, but that I felt all through my lonely, happy years of listening to the 80s. Let’s see: Until you’ve fallen in love with being alone, and learned that the soaring feeling in The Buggles, etc., refers only to the act of holding yourself, not the act of looking into the eyes of another, you’ll go crazy trying to fill that gap like some lunatic.
“The whole movie is a ‘share,’” someone said about Flight, and it’s a statement that makes a lot of sense after you also see Smashed and realize it’s the same movie, but different in all the small ways that makes a person need to share in the first place.
The Comedy is about the endless, pointless search for a response, and if not a single funny comedian numbers among its characters, well, at least some very committed ones do. Thus, its least funny scenes (that sickening feigned seizure, for one, or is it just feigned indifference to a real seizure?) are also, of course, the apex of its comedy.
“There’s room in this world for waste. Not everything can have meaning. You’d choke.” So says the idle musician father in I Wish, the first movie by Kore-Eda Hirokazu that has room for waste. But a filmmaker this good can’t help but make everything have meaning, even when the quaint soundtrack tries to sell a kind of modest, charming inefficiency.
“It’s a feeling.” –Ishmael Butler
“I can feel it.” –Hal 9000
“That’s a feeling.” –Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook …and she’s not wrong.
Did I miss something? Doesn’t all the violence in Django Unchained take place in the context of law and order and self-defense, until that queasy, giddy moment in the parlor when one character shoots another simply because he can’t resist? I’m not saying the movie doesn’t, at that point, become a revenge fantasy, but I love the way it contains, or implies, another complete movie, one in which the characters, forced to swallow their anger, achieve their goals entirely while operating under the laws of their world. Inglourious Basterds it’s not; that movie was all setup for its bloody finale. Django needs its own dreamy, violent coda, of course, so that Django can become the hero. Waltz, Tarantino’s mouthpiece, can’t resist and makes it happen. And that’s the movie people are talking, arguing about, but that wasn’t the movie I saw. I prefer the more painful one in which the righteous do resist, and walk away because they can. And that’s the movie Django would’ve chosen, if a tiny circumstance didn’t decide otherwise.
Hey, I love both “Take On Me” and “Debaser,” two of the best songs of the 80s! The biggest Alice In Chains fan I know is female! That girl can’t think her dad is uncool if she deigns to wear his Yo La Tengo t-shirt! Those are some of the things I wanted to shout at This Is 40, but at the same time I recognized that it has to partake in the either/or construction that so many people use for their dumb arguments, if it’s to be an effective “family vent” picture. And it is.
Something weird happens in Red Hook Summer, not in the story but in its enactment. Flik finds a dead rat in the church basement and teases his girl-friend with it, and not once does it look like anything but a big plushy toy. Was I seeing wrong? I hope not. Not long after, I saw the amazing Thief of Bagdad, a movie that begs the question, wouldn’t you rather see the cut, the dissolve, the fake dead rat, the special effect whose momentary dissonance only reinforces what it aims to achieve, than the more seamless effect whose dissonance is eternal? In an era when “fantasy” movies must look more real than reality (The Hobbit), it’s nice to see that Spike Lee’s movies are still so rich with theater (in more ways than that one possibly imagined example).
I’d never know how to end a movie like Oslo, August 31st. Who can say for sure what happens to a person like that? Chalk it up to the writer’s omniscience that the movie’s ending doesn’t feel like one of many possible.
Cosmopolis, like a lot of things that would be intolerable otherwise, works pretty well as science fiction. And the world of money is pure science fiction, so why should the context be otherwise?
I really liked Zero Dark Thirty, but wonder about the decision to use audio of 9/11 victims, and a black screen, as its dramatic impetus. Isn’t this the same tactic used in Fahrenheit 9/11 nearly a decade ago? Now it only feels like a reflexive artistic response to tragedy, consumed by the need to be sensitive but ending up less-than-sensitive. Are their voices, separate from their images, somehow fair game, containing no horror or vulnerability that might exist to be exploited? I thought in our voices is where we keep the really awful, personal stuff. The movie’s opening is a parade of sound, but still a parade.
Ten favorites, 2012:Searching for Sugar Man, Lincoln, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, It’s Such A Beautiful Day, The Secret World of Arrietty, Life of Pi, The Kid With A Bike, Take This Waltz, Oslo August 31st, Red Hook Summer
Ten more favorites:Damsels In Distress, ParaNorman, Keyhole, Dark Horse, Bernie, The Master, Keep the Lights On, Moonrise Kingdom, Detropia, Neil Young Journeys
TV, I will not be party to you.
While in Colorado last month, I had the opportunity to watch some cable TV, an occasion that reminded me why so many people despair for humanity – a sentiment that sometimes eludes me at moments in my life when I’m not inundated with media. My cable marathon culminated in the single worst hour of cultural product I have ever endured, an episode of the new show Catfish, a spin-off of the slightly less awful, but still awful, movie of the same name. This hour was a total void of meaning, except what is suggested by a ceaseless exploitation of the emotionally vulnerable by the emotionally undeveloped, which is probably considerable if you choose to pursue it, but who possibly could? Our tour guide through the lives of some sad people in Atlanta and the boring world of social media (oh, such exciting possibilities of identity subterfuge!) is Nev, a hirsute man who is often found shirtless for no reason and who plays the parts of interviewer and social worker when he has no natural or acquired talents for either. See the way he forces two women into an argument in front of an Atlanta apartment complex when one very much wants to leave the scene, and later, because the episode is reaching its final minutes, the way he cues a redemptive narrative (the soundtrack agrees) for one of these women, when no such thing has been earned, or even remotely suggested. It was bad, folks, enough to make you wonder if anything matters anymore.
I escape into strange culture dreams.
a. I don’t recall in what context, but the name Elaine Stritch occurs in my dream. A few days later, in real life, a group of guys sits at a neighboring table in a gay bar and one of them speaks the name Elaine Stritch. Why do I specify it as a gay bar? I don’t know, do they talk about Elaine Stritch anywhere else, or mysteriously rescue such trivial data from my dreams?
b. Even in my dreams I feel a strong need to capture images. I’m dream-watching Girls and there’s a shot I really wanna grab, an over-the-shoulder shot from Hannah’s POV, just her blurry profile and beyond her a sort of lens flare on a field of black, except it’s too geometric, a point of light with discrete colorful triangles extending from it.
c. I’m playing an 8-bit video game that’s intended as a corrective to the glossed-over American history usually shown in video games (like, this is a commonly known shortcoming of video games). And then the punch line, a new character appears, a little digital lump of irreducible humanity, and a word box indicates that his name is the N-word. I feel ill with the weight of this word, its strange physical reality in such an unusual space. Is this Django The Video Game, my subconscious critique of Tarantino’s screenwriting, um, tics? Either way, its gut-punch intentions are realized.
d. I’m riding through an imagined video for The Beatles’ “Good Morning, Good Morning,” a song I have probably not listened to in years, on a bicycle, possibly one with a big front wheel (because it’s all my POV, and I seem to have a commanding view), through a colorful department store.
e. Don Draper is sitting on a toilet shouting the lyrics to some punk song and I, Roger Sterling, am pissing on him.
Epilogue
Some lines from the work of Henry Darger, as seen in In the Realms of the Unreal. Sometimes a screen capture of a Word document is the easiest way to take notes:
[1] Frida Hyvönen – To The Soul
[2] Perfume Genius – Put Your Back N 2 It
[3] Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city
[4] Frankie Rose – Interstellar
[5] Ken Stringfellow – Danzig in the Moonlight
[6] Chromatics – Kill For Love
[7] Grimes – Visions
[8] Julia Holter – Ekstasis
[9] Himanshu – Nehru Jackets
[10] Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel…
[1-3]
The mystery of life and death; radical honesty.
1. “Earthling, earthling, when you die part of you goes like the fruit on the ground. Part of you live on through memory or blood but what happens to the soul?” One of the greatest pop songwriters since her countrymen Andersson and Ulvaeus, but less indebted to a disco beat.
2. “I am done with it.” The album that scared me most, so beautiful I could sometimes hardly bear to listen to it, as if to look away was to preserve it.
3. “I’m not sure why I’m infatuated with death.” Someone my age is thinking about his own, but not in any way that’s tragic, self-fulfilling, depressed, or anything. Instead he’s imaginative, expansive when he holds his dream of death and wonders how he’ll perceive himself at the moment it finally already comes. “Am I worth it? Did I put enough work in?”
[4]
Only in music and animation do humans create the laws of physics. Behold a gleaming, weightless city, one that never had to be built, that never crushed anyone, as perfect as a drawing of itself. How else to explain such a serene album being made in Brooklyn? And playing so well in Albuquerque?
[5]
How is this possible? Except for maybe Frosting on the Beater, a Posies album is never perfect, trading consistency of inspiration for consistency of sound, but every time one of these guys makes a solo album, they trade back and produce a masterpiece. Danzig is Stringfellow’s third great solo venture, even more stylistically varied than 2004’s Soft Commands, but shot through with a beautiful somberness that holds it together.
[6]
If x-, y-, and z-axis correspond to time, “the album,” and solitude, then the coordinates of Kill For Love are (0,0,0). It pushes me back to important primordial experiences of committed music listening, in a way I never expected might happen again. I’m lying in a bed, alone in a dark room, with headphones on. The only time I know is the album’s time, and there’s no other version of time I’d rather surrender to. Zen Arcade exists near these coordinates.
[7]
Triumph of the non-musician. She’s probably worked out a solution by now, but I read a while back about Grimes’ GarageBand origins, and the difficulty she had in replicating live songs that had been built in private. I’m happy to add her to the small list of people who, by painstaking, backwards, impractical means, can produce something so accomplished. There’s a type of creative process that can’t be looked at until its work is complete.
7b. Most should never mean best, but that Visions had the most melody of any album this year is some major part of its achievement, I think, and the major part of its fun.
[8]
Triumph of the musician.
[9]
a. I ignored the law of comparisons (in which two things don’t merit comparison just because they both exist) when I pulled Nehru Jackets and Ekstasis together into a malformed idea about space, simply because they were the two albums at the forefront of my mind at one point this summer. But I still think there was something there. Nowhere else this year but in Ekstasis and the best rap mixtapes did I encounter a sense of space that might be said to bear some relation to reality, with the artist surrendering part of his wide ambient world and allowing foreign parties, elements, humidity to infringe on something that’s usually supposed to be just between himself and the listener. The year’s two best live albums.
b. It starts with a bad remembrance of Paula Cole, but the density of inspiration across 25 tracks obscures and eventually elevates any lesser moments. Among the great moments are Ravi Shankar talking about the elixir of life, followed by a song about drugs, and, per the juxtaposition, ambivalence or guilt?; the rattling intensity that keeps increasing from “Swate” through “NYC Cops” to “You Have to Ride the Wave,” the latter featuring one of Danny Brown’s greatest entrances. Also, Heems says more great things, on average, than anyone else in music today, than “Gold Soundz,” maybe. “If you wear a turban you can’t be a cop, but you can shoot one.”
c. I don’t often look to Sasha Frere-Jones for guidance in my listening, but he said something about Nehru Jackets earlier this year that I think qualifies as important criticism. It was simple enough, when he called the album angrier even than Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music and El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure, but the statement had a way of cutting through the fun confusion I always feel when trying to parse Heems’ sense of humor, grounding the music in an unambiguous emotion.
[10]
An album about feelings of futility and frustration that’s also an endorsement of hard work. Fuck anyone who takes anything for granted: Idler Wheel’s best qualities are also signs that it could so easily never have been made. But it was made, and then, we imagine, the feelings returned and the sense of relief was small and quick, but at least we got a small, quiet classic out of seven years’ worth of all that shit that builds up that either you have to tell, or do nothing.
almost but not quite
Beach House – Bloom
Killer Mike – R.A.P. Music
Lotus Plaza – Spooky Action at a Distance
Frank Ocean – Channel Orange
Wild Nothing – Nocturne
almost “almost but not quite” but not quite
Bat for Lashes – The Haunted Mana
Best Coast – The Only Placeb
Big Boi – Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors *
Big K.R.I.T. – Live from the Underground *
Death Grips – NO LOVE DEEP WEBc
El Perro Del Mar – Pale Fire
Kishi Bashi – 151a *
Le1f – Dark York
Lightships – Electric Cables
Lower Dens – Nootropics
Sinéad O’Connor – How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?
Orbital – Wonky
Ty Segall and White Fence – Hair *
The Shins – Port of Morrow
Rufus Wainwright – Out of the Game
a Please don’t suppose that my not-quite-love for Haunted Man devalues my love for Two Suns, which is still absolute. It was the same thing last year with M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which was greeted by many as a purer expression of… something, as if the different features of Saturdays = Youth had suddenly been revealed as mere noise and distraction. I love the impurities of Saturdays and Suns, because they sound like essences.
b The album I most feel the need to defend, because however good or bad her lyrics, however intentional or not, who can’t see that they add up to such a generous portrait of a personality type? Nothing on Only Place is as good as the title track, but it’s enough for me that one of the year’s greatest, easiest songs is followed by ten admissions that nature is no absolute buffer to your mental health, not when your favorite pastime is staring into space and not seeing the mountains for the blurred middle distance. And what other songwriter besides Cosentino dares to imagine her own imminent irrelevance and poverty?
c Nothing’s very scary in the age of the Internet, because nothing has a physical reality, so I hope I can be forgiven for finding the Death Grips experience more purely entertaining than abrasive. NO LOVE puts me in the nicest of headspaces, in keeping with the way rap music has almost totally replaced my need for wordless electronic music. But I want to let it shake me, because only then does the real learning begin, right?
* Among my recent listening (while on break in Montana) are some late additions to the year’s surplus of very good albums: Hair is a crazy weird rock ‘n’ roll album just when I needed it most (see below); Vicious Lies is as surprising and exciting as you allow it to be; Live from the Underground is the new standard for a successful major label debut, so well does it consolidate the strength of previous mixtapes; and 151a is another musician’s triumph, this one more in the manner of Owen Pallett. I’m tempted to pillage these four records for yet another addendum to last week’s post on the year’s best songs, but I’ll restrain myself and note only that K.R.I.T.’s stunning “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” might’ve been on Macromix 12. He always brings it home in the final songs.
(Speaking of, if you want a physical copy of Macromix 12, just comment here within the next three days and I’ll mail you a cassette. It’s true.)
Rock music
Rock ‘n’ roll, if you want to call it something so general, has been my favorite music for most of my life, which you probably won’t believe after glancing at the lists above. I had a hard time finding much of it I even wanted to hear this year, but I’m hoping this was an anomaly.
Past In earlier years, the little new music I cared about was usually made by still-active 80s punk veterans and four- or five-piece British imports. That kind of thing has been harder than ever to find this year. In the former group, Lee Ranaldo’s album was quite good, and Bob Mould’s very exciting but by far the least interesting of his nine solo albums, unless you judge it only on its attack, which maybe I ought to have done. In the latter group, Maxïmo Park still hit pretty hard, weirdly and suddenly peerless for a band that’s still somewhat new.
Present The rock albums I liked best this year (Chromatics, Lower Dens) were rock albums only in theory, I guess. I enjoyed both of Neil Young’s new records with Crazy Horse, if only because these guys have given up on the idea (not that they’ve ever held it in any kind of vain way) that their music makes any difference to anyone but themselves, which is where the important letting go really begins.
Future I heard a little or a lot by all of the newer rock bands that got the most attention this year, most arriving via hardcore or psychedelic impulses: The Men, Screaming Females, Ceremony, Royal Headache, Tame Impala, Ty Segall, Cloud Nothings, Japandroids. I tolerate to really enjoy all of these people, but none have yet secured a vested interest, with the possible exception of Ty Segall, whose album with White Fence, Hair, is gaining some traction. It’s only when we come to Japandroids that I start to grow a little bit exasperated with the state of things. I just don’t get it: Rap music still gives us all the words, all the feelings, all the sounds its artists know. Japandroids give us one word, one feeling, one sound – alive – and then sell it as a kind of generosity. But isn’t this the ultimate form of stinginess? Perhaps my real problem is with those people who continue to compare Japandroids to Hüsker Dü and The Replacements, bands that, you know, wrote great songs documenting a wide range of human experience and feeling. Every time I listen to Japandroids I remember that they have no interest in doing anything like that, which is not their fault, of course, because like anything else they are what they are. But I was never one to be taken by a high that has no knowledge of a low, and I can't help but question the desperate energy of people who are.
On a related note, I’ve seen the Pitchfork review of a reissue of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness held up as an example of excellent music criticism (perhaps ironically), but I don’t remember reading anything more aggravating this year. Who are these teenagers, and why can’t they feel anything that isn’t written in bold? I remember being able to interpret subtlety when I was younger, and loving it.
Methods of listening
A lot of commentators, in wrapping up the year in music, have also offered their insights about how we listen to music in 2012. As a person without Internet (sort of like a person with disability) who has nonetheless listened to a wide variety of new music this year, I’ve found these accounts to describe an alien way of living (example). So I thought I’d provide a brief overview of how I heard new music in 2012, with horribly inaccurate and misleading percentages.
Discovery
60% – Music magazines (Big Takeover, Under the Radar, SPIN R.I.P., Magnet)
40% – Pitchfork.com items tagged “new releases”
Some acts of discovery were motivated online, but not many fully took place there.
Audio
33% – CDs, on the stereo or in the van – Still the cheapest and most convenient way of hearing new music, due to circumstances. Often purchased at a discount or checked out from the library.
33% – iTunes – For example, I’ll download free rap mixtapes and then listen to them upon returning home.
33% – iPod – On the walk to and from work, or to and from the bus stop. I’m back at the edge of downtown Albuquerque anytime I hear Frankie Rose, on Copper near San Mateo anytime I hear Kendrick Lamar.
1% – Other – Concerts (too few). Friends’ music. Crap that imposes itself outside the home. Also, earlier in the year, I joined Spotify so I could hear Rufus Wainwright’s Out of the Game and Neil Young’s Americana, then ceased using my account when I found both albums at the library.
Video
90% – The Cool TV – An unaccountably extant music video platform available in a number of large markets.
10% – Other TV – But I missed Frank Ocean on Fallon, and haven’t sought it out since, because my imagination of it is no doubt better than a video viewed seconds at a time on my crappy computer, or even if it played more smoothly than that, my dread of that kind of experience is a pretty major psychic determent.
0% – Internet videos
A friend recently confessed to his love of watching older movies on VHS, because it gives him a better sense of how old they are. I bought a lot of new CDs this year, most of which are currently collecting dust upon a worn copy of a box set that Rolling Stone once called the cornerstone of any music collection. Can a stone exist in a cloud, and if so, what keeps it afloat? Does it age in any meaningful way?
There’s no intended value judgment in any of this. I just wanted to point out another way that the past is not even past, because it will always persist into and embarrass a present that supposedly has no use for it. Long live the CD.
A 76-minute mix CD of my favorite songs of the year. It flows (per its guiding principle). Check out the eloquent Blip Plimpton for brief commentary on each track.
Track/ Rank
1/ 20 Tennis, “It All Feels The Same”
2/ 19 Trailer Trash Tracys, “Los Angered”
3/ 18 Killer Mike, “Untitled”
4/ 17 Sharon Van Etten, “Leonard”
5/ 16 Ken Stringfellow, “Pray”
6/ 15 Laura Gibson, “Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed”
7/ 14 Twin Shadow, “Beg For The Night”
8/ 13 Le1f, “Wut”
9/ 12 Beach House, “Wishes”
10/ 11 Frank Ocean, “Thinkin Bout You”
11/ 10 Chromatics, “Into The Black”
12/ 9 Lower Dens, “Brains”
13/ 8 Fiona Apple, “Anything We Want”
14/ 7 The Shins, “Simple Song”
15/ 6 The Men, “Candy”
16/ 5 Best Coast, “The Only Place”
17/ 4 Orbital, “Never”
18/ 3 Lotus Plaza, “Eveningness”
19/ 2 Perfume Genius, “Take Me Home”
20/ 1 Frankie Rose, “Gospel/Grace”
But the list doesn’t end there. First: A special salute to Wild Nothing, who created three really great (and no bad) songs this year, “Nowhere,” “Through The Grass,” and “Counting Days,” none of which quite made the cut.
Also: Patti Smith’s “This Is The Girl” (perfect gauze of poetry on a celebrity life, tender but not morbid, specific but not obvious), Rufus Wainwright’s “Montauk,” Bat For Lashes’ “Laura,” Angel Haze’s “Cleaning Out My Closet,” Ice Choir’s “Bounding,” Sinead O’Connor’s “Queen Of Denmark,” Ceremony’s “Repeating The Circle,” Cate Le Bon’s “Ploughing Out” (both parts), and El Perro Del Mar’s “Hold Off The Dawn.”
And: Songs called “Daylight Sky” and “Floating Spit” would occupy my top two spots if their respective artists didn’t already.
My still unwritten reflection on the year’s albums arrives next week. Five-tenths of its selections (as I currently have them arranged) are represented on the Macromix. The other five-tenths contains a wealth of great moments, but I’d be lying if I said I left those moments off the Macromix because I didn’t know what the very best ones were. Not to spoil a future post (well, to spoil, yes, to), but they’re called “In The Same Room,” “Gas Station,” “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” “NYC Cops,” and “Oblivion.” Those songs should’ve made the cut. To explain the vague reasons why they didn’t would collapse an already flimsy, meager project to organize the world’s crazy creative wealth.
