Useful Mix

[UPDATE 7/17: Useful Mix is ready for use.]

A work in progress. I’m not still meditating on a theme, just trying to organize a two-hour playlist for one or two discs that I’ll be happy to hear while driving around Albuquerque later this week. (Above image: turning onto Lead from my old apartment.) Upon my return to Minneapolis, check back for the final cut and listening options. Until then, tell me what should stay and what can go. Alphabetically:


Alvvays, “Next of Kin” — Haven’t nearly worn it out, and can’t imagine vacationing without it.

Azealia Banks, “Soda” — Still haven’t figured out if she’s talking about drugs or guys or actually just soda, but whatever the case it’s the musical high point of an album that thrills front to back.

Bedhead, “Half-Thought”

Best Coast, “My Life” — There was a misunderstanding for a while that Best Coast’s lyrics were a weakness, and not a defining feature. So while the new album gets good press here’s my own favorite example from the previous one. If my vacation discs end up with a theme, it starts here.

Broadcast, “Goodbye Girls”

Built To Spill, “Some Other Song” — “Never Be The Same” might have the jaunty Real Estate / The Men (when they’re jaunty) vibe I’d rather hear but I love the way this one’s heavy intro gives way to a dreamy “I can’t wait to get back home to you.”

The Chambermaids, “China Blue” — Not sure how high the bar is but here’s the best song out of Minnesota this decade.

Clarence Carter, “I Can’t Leave Your Love Alone” — Foretold.

Cornershop, “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere” — Foretold.

David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights, “A Break in the Weather”

Dawn Richard feat. Aundrea Fimbres, “Phoenix” — Zac likes it.

DJ Quik, “Puffin the Dragon” — From rockcast to real life.

DJ Rashad feat. Spinn, “Show U How”

Dwight Yoakam, “Sad, Sad Music” — I’ve recently had the chance to explore his early albums and of course the song containing the line “there should be music” was an easy point of entry.

Gang Starr, “As I Read My S-A” — When I started snatching up used Gang Starr discs I hoped for such good songs sequenced past track 15.

Girlpool, “Chinatown” — Luna did it, Destroyer did it, and now Girlpool have done it, written a great song called “Chinatown.” If their live show is any indication, forthcoming Before the World Was Big is gonna be wonderful. Intertwining guitars recall the city at dawn that Television also carved lines into.

Idlewild, “Radium Girl” — Zac likes it.

ILoveMakonnen feat. Rome Fortune & Ceej, “trUe thang”

Jazmine Sullivan, “Silver Lining”

Jenny Lewis, “Aloha & The Three Johns” — Requisite vacation tune.

Jessica Lea Mayfield, “Standing in the Sun” — I blame everyone who didn’t tell me this song existed last year. Surely you knew I’d like it?

The Kinks, “Some Mother’s Son” — Life is sweet.

The Mekons, “Hello Cruel World”

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, “Lots of Lovin”

Prince & The New Power Generation, “Diamonds & Pearls” — Foretold.

Scrawl, “Enough” — Or “Hymn,” or “Begin.” From Smallmouth, not highly regarded but the kind of 27-minute album full of distinct guitar parts and measured vocals I end up playing more than most of my other buys.

Springtime Carnivore, “Foxtrot Freak (Something in the Atmosphere)” — Disc one, track one.

Supergrass, “Low C” — Knew the day I heard it that this song would one day be ten years old.

Swervedriver, “For A Day Like Tomorrow” — The beauty of their new album still seems impossible to me.

Tinashe, “Wrong” — The second song from Amethyst, not Walking Wounded, but it all comes out the same.

Tori Amos, “Jackie’s Strength” — Foretold.

Warren G, “Super Soul Sis” — Maybe it’s a more common practice than I realize but it seems remarkable to me that a major album by a male MC gives over an entire track to a female MC (though I had to look elsewhere but the liner notes for her name). Also remarkable, the beat. If it’s not the album’s best, it’s at least the quickest to recall a summer ’95 four or five pm vibe, the time of day when Oprah and Hard Copy aired.

We All Together, “Little Boy” — Lifts the opening of “Imagine” but the words go to a different place: “Think of your mother and all the things she did just for you.”

YG, “I Just Wanna Party” — It’s almost time to celebrate the one year anniversary of listening to this a lot on the bus to summer school.

Young Guv, “Kelly, I’m Not A Creep” — Best power pop I’ve heard in ages, not that I’ve tried very hard. So big.

Songs 2010-2014

My list won’t have much in common with Soto’s, and figuring out what’s a single is the kind of research I only have time to undertake during Pazz & Jop season, but his list inspired me to throw together my own. These songs are all on my iPod and I’ve reflexively dialed them up many times while out walking, so play count (imagined, not verified) was a major factor in hasty ranking. I choose 20 songs every year for my Macromix but I always seem to mess it up, underestimating what I actually enjoy most, so here’s a sort of corrective.


1. Himanshu – “You Have To Ride The Wave” – Still not sure what this is about except three rappers interpreting an Arundhati Roy quote as “make every syllable count.”
2. PJ Harvey – “The Last Living Rose”
3. Danny Brown – “25 Bucks”
4. Patrick Wolf – “Together”
5. Beach House – “Myth” – For that one very high note, never sure exactly which one, the guitar reaches at the end.
6. Deerhunter – “Memory Boy”
7. Frankie Rose – “Daylight Sky”
8. Perfume Genius – “Take Me Home”
9. Ken Stringfellow – “Pray”
10. Kendrick Lamar – “Money Trees” – Looking back, this sounds best. Aaron called it.
11. Dum Dum Girls – “Wasted Away” – To be honest “Caught In One” was always more my jam, but this one has the line “I’d rather waste away than see you only in dreams.” Love you, Mom.
12. D’Angelo & The Vanguard – “Another Life”
13. Lykke Li – “Sadness Is A Blessing”
14. Veronica Falls – “Stephen”
15. Janelle Monáe – “Oh, Maker”
16. Joanna Newsom – “On A Good Day”
17. Laura Veirs – “That Alice” – As great as “Alex Chilton.”
18. Marnie Stern – “Year Of The Glad”
19. Twin Shadow – “Beg For The Night” – Eternally misunderstood.
20. John Grant – “GMF”

effects of ageing

(I lied. I’m back. Tumblr provokes, in me, too much anxiety about digital clutter and my online popularity and other things I don’t really need to be spending time caring about, and I don’t understand their music posting rules, so I’ll keep it here until external forces dictate otherwise, which they certainly won’t.)

So.



Hear it is, a collection of songs for early spring. Of course any mix containing an eight-minute Kitchens of Distinction song is intended primarily for myself, but if you’d like to hear it, click your choice of download or streaming. I was originally going to call it Hair and Hearing Loss or something like that, but once “New York Crown” became an obvious choice for lead-in track, I scoured the artwork of its parent album, Mel, for phrases, and found the synonymous EFFECTS OF AGEING among the words crowding the outline of the title guy’s head. So that made a neat substitute. And then because I love East River Pipe so much, I further promoted him to bookends. The rest:

1. East River Pipe – “New York Crown”
2. New Order – “All Day Long”
3. Aaliyah – “Rock The Boat”
4. Kraftwerk – “Computer Love”
5. Björk – “History of Touches”
6. Shabazz Palaces – “Motion Sickness”
7. Kitchens of Distinction – “Gone World Gone”
8. OMD – “VCL XI”
9. The Boo Radleys – “Thinking of Ways”
10. The Isley Brothers – “You Walk Your Way”
11. Cranes – “Jewel”
12. The Bats – “Mastery”
13. Don Covay – “Can’t Fight It Baby”
14. Disco Inferno – “Even The Sea Sides Against Us”
15. Basehead – “Play With Toys”
16. The Chameleons – “Home Is Where The Heart Is”
17. Little Anthony & The Imperials – “Over The Rainbow”
18. East River Pipe – “Three Ships”

75 minutes

Topics include undying love, breakups, loneliness, sexual positions, joy, defeat, dreams of other lives and worlds, the end of all things. The usual disclaimer applies, i.e. assume no autobiographical intention in any lyrical themes represented herein. Sequencing 18 unrelated songs is simply a process, much better than writing, of thinking about music and its great well of sounds. The seeds of this current process (#2, 4, 16) go back some 12-14 years, while most of the rest have made their mark on me since last summer.


Notes:

1. Being every age you’ve ever been, simultaneously.
2-6. An inventory that’s been accumulating since long before you or I ever knew. A history of transcendent electronic sounds, perhaps. If you listen on Mixcloud, a great tremor will enter you when “Rock The Boat,” new millennium in repose, crossfades with “Computer Love,” the ur-melody of the 1980s. Both can be abstracted out of all musical texts which have ever existed or which will ever exist, I think.
7. Fell asleep to this long before I read the lyrics.
8-10. A kind of brightening. Thanks to Rockaliser for all the Isleys love.
11-12. Strum block.
13. R.I.P.
14. Strum decay.
15. Lou Barlow? No, Michael Ivey. (My confusion would have been boring as long ago as Floundering.) Album’s denouement becomes prelude to another climactic symphony of washes and textures…
16-18. Exactly as intentional as you might suspect. Further listening: D’Angelo’s “Another Life.”


Expect another one before too long, because I ran out of space for Tori Amos’ “Jackie’s Strength” and Prince’s “Diamonds and Pearls” (crucial, to figure out ways to include super-popular and overplayed songs, a.k.a. ancient hits, on personal mixtapes); Clarence Carter’s “I Can’t Leave Your Love Alone” (a joyous ode to infidelity, and though it’s helped me through winter I’d rather anchor it to summer); and Cornershop’s “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere” (so enormous I’ll need to formulate a mix with it as the inciting thought, not an afterthought).

Albums of the Year 1997-2005

My year-end music lists are public record, going back to 2006, but that was hardly the first time I reflected on the year in music as I knew it. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct, without revision, my albums of the year for the preceding nine years of music. Of course it’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight and decades-long bombardment from a hundred canons, to go back to any year of my choosing and come up with a flawless personal list, and that’s an entertaining exercise but not a very meaningful one. Well, duh, there’s also not much that’s meaningful in the entertaining exercise below, but, for the time capsule, here’s what I thought was good in my pre-teens and teens.


1997: Radiohead - OK Computer

The first year it occurred to me that I, too, could make a list of my favorite stuff. It has to start sometime. I dimly recall drafting a list on notebook paper, with this obvious #1, The Chemical Brothers just below, and the rest a blur. I’m optimistic that it’s still sitting in a drawer or box somewhere.

1998: Spacehog - The Chinese Album; Possum Dixon - New Sheets

On the ballot I mailed to Rolling Stone naming my favorite stuff of the year, I’m sure I listed one of these, but I don’t remember which one. Later, when I saw Spin’s year end list, I immediately decried the absence of both. I was so superior! These are good albums so I’m not gonna say I was duped, but putting them above the still unheard likes of Elliott Smith and OutKast (my sisters were spinning the Ls, Williams and Hill, which I enjoyed but didn’t totally claim) is the kind of thing that only an 11-year old could come up with.

1999: Pavement - Terror Twilight; The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin (???)

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that I didn’t hear The Soft Bulletin until the following year (with headphones on the family stereo behind the couch, where my sisters sat watching one of a handful of movies, any of which couldn’t have been on video until early 2000), which leaves Pavement as the only real contenders.

2000: Radiohead - Kid A

“This is my favorite album from this year.” I might’ve said it exactly like that, to my mom, while she drove us out to my friend’s Christmas party and we listened to my taped copy. A few months later, and for many years to come, my default favorite became Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows.

2001: Daft Punk - Discovery

Could not have been anything else, though I don’t remember making any declarations this year.

2002: Sonic Youth - Murray Street

The point at which my teenage interests reveal themselves as hopelessly old. Only decades-running bands, for me!

2003: Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Pig Lib

Malkmus was still totally my guy at this point. Here’s the album that established his even-numbered solo works as jam-prone, so you wouldn’t think this would still be going strong as my favorite. But there’s also a lot of pop sense in the mix, and I latched onto all of it pretty quickly, and with intensity.

2004: Ken Stringfellow - Soft Commands

I’d gotten into The Posies, and Stringfellow’s Touched, the year before, but I wasn’t fanatical or anything so it’s hard to remember why I had to hear this album immediately. But I’m glad I did. A pop universe traversing set for the almost-adult.

2005: Sleater-Kinney - The Woods

A curious situation: They’d been my sisters’ band, or my sister’s band (will have to check on that), but had been abandoned, leaving me to pick them up again, as if brand new, a few albums later. I didn’t get that E’s discontinued interest was the kind of momentary lull or shift that any listener is bound to experience later in life for many and complicated reasons (need, passion, attention, and also time, money), but I was perhaps a bit self-conscious about suddenly being the one responding to what the somewhat changed S-K had to give. Shouting my love for this album would’ve been tacky, even disrespectful, but I was glad to be of age at last.

Pazz & Jop 2014

I voted in Pazz & Jop this year! As a former student of the old polls I took it pretty seriously, and in particular did my best to vote for actual singles, whatever that means anymore. (Sort of like Raymond Carver, I kept asking, “Are These Actual Singles?”) I was certain that “25 Bucks,” released as a single in April, would make a big splash in the singles poll, but was quite wrong.

Village Voice also published one of the comments I sent them, about Perfume Genius, and I immediately wanted to retract it, as I played it back in my head and worried that I’d misrepresented a personal definition of the word “powerful,” or that I might seem to be telling Mike Hadreas what kind of artist he should be or mocking the people who responded in a major way to Too Bright, etc., but looking back it’s not so bad.

Here’s another one I sent, unprinted, referencing an album I was happy to see ended up with a few votes (it might’ve been my #11), including from Das Racist superfan Xgau.

As usual rappers were the only musicians routinely criticized for not offering solutions to the problems they addressed and the ones they didn’t, in a year when even Kool A.D., known for associative wordplay and prone to confessing that he “ain’t got shit to say,” had a moment on his excellent Word O.K., when he sees people starving on the street, asks, “What can one man do?” and answers, “I don’t know, probably a lot,” that was already 50% closer to a solution, to food in someone’s stomach, than anything I heard outside of rap music.

Right? But Craig Jenkins’s protest playlist probably got the point across better.

The heading for the poll’s main site refers to it as “The Last Word on the Year in Music.” It’s also the first word, obviously, as no other group waited long enough to include Black Messiah (by D'Angelo & THE VANGUARD), which was released 11 days before voting closed and got the top spot (Oscar voters really have no excuse when it comes to late releases).

I like to see such evidence of responsive (opposite of responsible: the album is undeniable) consensus, but even more than that it’s the breadth of the poll that reinforces why music writing, above all other arts writing, continues to appeal to me. Once again, a list of nearly 2,000 albums only begins to suggest the meaningful interactions a person could’ve had with music last year. That’s appropriate, and amazing. Often I feel like any movie’s context has settled long before I’ve had a chance to see it, but it’s very easy to be the only person writing about an album.

Thus, in what I hope to make an annual tradition, a list of albums I enjoyed last year that received no votes in the poll. I’m not suggesting we, or anyone, failed, quite the opposite actually.

• Sleeping Bag, Deep Sleep
• The Fresh & Onlys, House of Spirits
• La Sera, Hour of the Dawn
• Maximo Park, Too Much Information
• Death Vessel, Island Intervals
• Busdriver, Perfect Hair
• Mykki Blanco, Gay Dog Food
• Martin Carr, The Breaks
• She Sir, Go Guitars
• Should, The Great Pretend
• Busman’s Holiday, A Long Goodbye
• Slowness, How to Keep from Falling Off a Mountain
• Tink, Winter’s Diary 2
• The Hidden Cameras, Age
• Jeremy Jay, Abandoned Apartments
• PS I Love You, For Those Who Stay
• School of Language, Old Fears
• De La Soul, Smell the DA.I.S.Y.
• The Primitives, Spin-O-Rama
• Ex Cops, Daggers
• Terry Malts, Insides EP
• The Mary Onettes, Portico: EP
• Swet Shop Boys, Swet Shop EP

Language

Be proud: I’ve been peppered with little reminders lately that I live in a straight world. The most recent example: I told some of our co-op students today that I grappled with learning French last year and found it really difficult. This was met with a pretty predictable response: “You just need to find a French girlfriend!” And I laughed it off, I said something like, “Haha, well, hey!” I need to do more. I’m a proud gay man and I don’t want to be afraid to share the fact that I’m in a relationship with a wonderful guy, especially somewhere like the office where I feel comfortable and safe. Taking this small step for myself is going to make a tiny impact on the world around me and will help to make other gay men safer and more comfortable too, I hope. Small steps.

I appreciate it. Reading Jamieson’s goals for the new year, I’m reminded that as a gay white cis male (often cast as N. America’s lone politically ascendant minority of the 2010s), I too still live a double life and feel this most strongly as a linguistic burden. I work at a public school, and while on one level I’ve never felt so comfortable and safe at a workplace, I guess I really don’t feel comfortable and safe, because almost daily I find myself readjusting my language to avoid using the words “my boyfriend” (of six years! and a close friend for a decade! and intertwined with my life in such basic ways–money, transportation, meals, free time–that to not mention him must make me appear as some kind of phantom, with no physical existence in the outside world). And I feel I’m betraying him much more than I’m betraying myself. Even outside of work I’ve never found a way to use the words casually, so every time someone asks me if I have a girlfriend and I simply say “no” and change the subject, I burrow a little deeper inside myself. If gay men become talented writers, I sometimes feel it’s partly thanks to the constant syntactical work demanded by our deflections every time we leave home, and to the particular kind of interiority and introspective nature this creates. Aside: I’ve tended to prefer Perfume Genius when he’s challenging the kinds of sounds and sentiments that the listener typically equates with power, but maybe right now I need “Queen” more than I need “Take Me Home,” if you know what I mean.

My Brother

To say that he was gay or homosexual was something he said about himself; to say that he was an auntie-man was something people said about him. She understood him better when he was the person people said something about, not when he was the person who said something about himself.

— Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (p. 147)


I read this book over a year ago and just remembered having copied down these lines. The book, a record of what Kincaid remembers, knows, thinks, believes and wonders about her subject, and always explicit about the thought process responsible for her words, makes me think that if everyone wrote and spoke like this, the unprecedented clarity of conversations would slowly erode all pathologies. So too when she writes of “the people who should have made me feel that the love of people other than them was suspect” (p. 162).

When approached with the momentum of the page her best lines create an empathy so sudden and sharp that it can’t help but fade a degree upon closer scrutiny. The writing, dissociated from time and consciousness, breaks down into clauses and punctuation. Where did she go? But all that’s needed is one more steady pass through the text, to return to the moment that startled me the first time.